Unchosen

by Jeffrey Cook

  “Contra nequitiam et insidias...” she prayed, and the blessings, along with whatever protections Nils had been able to provide, held. The undead parted around them and kept on running.

  "What are they doing?" Noriko asked.

  "Going after Hobie," Nils said. "We made sure he’d kind of stand out from the rest of us."

  That, indeed, seemed to be the case. Though they couldn't touch him, the draugar continued trying to reach Hobie, and as he passed, the ranks moved to pursue. They might be intelligent, but their madness and hunger seemed to be overwhelming whatever reason they had. Or, perhaps, they were just hoping that enough of them or enough attempts would break down the protections on him. It was possible they were right.

  If Hobie was concerned about any of that, it never showed. He kept picking up his pace, until Noriko was having to practically carry Nils to have any hope of the rest keeping him in sight. The draugar continued to split around him, and, as he passed, closed ranks in pursuit. Celeste hated to admit it—she really, genuinely hated it—but as she got a better view at the high point of the bridge, as Hobie charged downhill, it did sort of look like he had his own army following in his wake, with more arriving by the moment.

  "Well, that much worked. With one problem remaining," Dagny said.

  Nils glanced at her. "Only one?"

  "Aside from Matvei, of course," Dagny said. "He did arrive with an army of his own.”

  19

  Dawn of the Dead

  Nils Bjornsson

  There was something so terribly something about facing overwhelming odds from people one was so much better than. Nils knew he was among the top occultists on the planet. He had, bitter though it was to think now, he'd learned from the best. And whatever terms she might use for it herself, Celeste was one of the most gifted seidr-women ever to call on an ancestral spirit or six. There wasn't a single Othercultist here who could match the protective effects of her muttering in French and Latin with such sincerity. There wasn't a single Othercultist here that Nils couldn't bring down.

  Unfortunately, thanks to the Otherrealm's tendency to ally evil with stupidity, there were a ton of Othercultists here. They'd collaborated. Nils would need some structural resources to deal with them all at once, while not getting killed by them, the draugar, or the daemons.

  Right now, that meant keeping all possible tricks for concealment on the four of them, while letting Hobie draw the draugar.

  The fleece had clearly been as good as the reputation Kirke assigned to it. The daemons and handful of cultists stationed on and just beyond the bridge, trying to figure out what the commotion was, never knew what hit them. As far as Nils could tell, they perhaps didn't even quite realize Hobie wasn't just a draugr rushing over the bridge. They were in the midst of beginning what Nils guessed was a group effort to reassert control over the undead when Hobie crashed into their ranks.

  Nils smiled when he noted that his brother still had enough presence of mind for some tactics. The thought of taking out the cultists, especially the actual spell-users, would probably soon be submerged completely in the raw impulse to kill bad guys. At the moment, though, Hobie was running two managerial occultists through with one thrust of his spear.

  The hunger-maddened draugar behind Hobie continued their rush, some still trying to close the gap and reach Hobie, without success. Others simply lashed out at anything within reach. The cultists proved indeed protected, the draugar unable to reach them, but they clearly hadn't bothered to manage this for the daemons. Nils had to guess that, normally, the daemons just didn't draw the attention of the draugar. Protected from the undead themselves, those cultists Hobie couldn't reach started chanting, combining their efforts. Protecting themselves from the undead was one thing, but active control, especially of those in the hunger-maddened state of the bear-sark draugar, took more active effort.

  The start of the fight, with the rush of the undead army, was causing a great deal of commotion inside the Gisting. A few winged daemons emerged from the towers, and sentries took to the walls. There were a few shots into the ranks of the draugar from the walls, but nothing that showed any great effectiveness. The gates opened, allowing larger daemons to emerge onto the field and rush into the fray.

  "How long do you think he'll hold out?" Dagny said.

  "I should try to help," Noriko said.

  "Right now, he just looks like a small draugr," Nils said, shaking his head. "Any of us will stand out. And right now, he has to do all of the standing out. Let's hope he'll keep it going long enough for us to do our job."

  "So, the gates, then?" Dagny said.

  "Through all of those enemies? One does not simply walk into Mordor."

  Celeste raised a brow, but kept up her chanting. Nils smiled and hoped she could see his eyes well enough. It had seemed to fit.

  "Come on and help me, before they get a rein on the draugar." It was tough enough not to rush in to offer his brother more magical support, start trying to interfere with their efforts to reassert their control over the undead, or to watch to make sure Hobie was still up and fighting. Nils gestured, and Noriko assisted him towards a watchtower at the corner of the outer wall.

  He did his best to maintain some of the spells to help in getting the daemons to overlook them, while he trusted in the fleece to hide them from magical notice. Dagny assisted as best she could on the move.

  "So how do we get in?" Dagny asked, looking up the side of the watchtower. "Keeping people out is part of the whole point here. And it'll be guarded."

  "He's trusting me to handle those things," Noriko said. "But we'll need you to protect Celeste and keep people's attention off of us."

  Dagny nodded. "I'll keep her alive and keep their attention away as long as I can. But hurry. We'll find as good a hiding spot as we can."

  Celeste nodded, and the two dashed away, out of the radius of Nil's protective spells. Dagny's illusions managed to keep them covered until they found a point to hide amidst rocks at the base of the fortress wall. Not long after, Dagny's illusions provided flickers of movement out in the field that drew attention away from the watchtower.

  "Hold on," Noriko told him, helping Nils to wrap his arms around her neck as she got a running start towards the frosted-stone watchtower while they had their momentary distraction. Then she jumped, rising well over the heads of even the largest daemons. Nils closed his eyes, expecting a collision and a long fall. There was, indeed, a brief impact, but no fall. Noriko grunted with effort, and they began to rise.

  Nils opened his eyes, to get a close-up look of her driving her bleeding fingers into narrow cracks and gaps in the icy brickwork, climbing up the side of the watchtower. Even with her strength in her battle form, the effort was obvious in her labored breathing.

  "Noriko—" he said.

  "Shut up and hold on," she said, as they rose unsteadily higher.

  He did so as she carefully scaled her way up, cracking the ice enough to jam her fingers into more gaps as needed. Noriko hugged the wall tight, doing everything she could to not draw notice. Nils felt like literal deadweight. One spell from above, and we're finished.

  The trickiest part was the last ten feet, not only because of fatigue, but because the wall jutted outward at the parapet, forcing her to readjust and grope for a handhold she couldn't see. She finally found one, and, for a few precarious moments, they were left swinging freely, Noriko holding onto the wall with one hand, fingertips worked into a small crevice. She caught on with her other hand just as they started to slip. As she worked upwards, hand over hand, feet dangling, Nils did his best to find the very narrow point of compromise between holding on tight and not choking his girlfriend.

  Blindly, Noriko grabbed for the top of the wall, pulling herself up as fast as she could. However, instead of being able to pull them up and over, she immediately met resistance from a cultist.

  Nils figured someone had noticed the movement of a hand over the wall and come to investigate. The deduction wasn't satisfyin
g. Handling the jackass with a few pain-words would have been, but unfortunately, in that moment, pain was not an intellectual exercise for Nils.

  Noriko supported herself with one hand, freeing the other long enough to strike the cultist in the throat before he could cry out. She was still holding both herself and Nils up by one hand when she grabbed the cultist by the collar and hauled him off the edge. As the cultist flew headfirst, Nils saw his face, mouth opened as if to scream, but only managing a choked noise as he disappeared.

  The force of the toss nearly led to their falling as well, but Noriko kept her fingertip grip long enough to get the other hand back over the wall to pull them up and over.

  Despite obvious fatigue—and bloody handprints left on the top of the wall—she sprang into action the moment she'd pulled them over. Nils let go, dropping off her back onto the stone at the top of the watchtower, and Noriko launched herself at the three surprised cultists who remained there. He wanted desperately to help, but was still struggling to catch his breath. After the climb, sharp pains were shooting through his arms. Gestures and words eluded him for a moment more.

  Thankfully, between surprise, the katana, and Noriko's speed, she was able to dispatch all three without need for his aid, and even managed to keep them silent in the process. Then she dropped next to him to lie, gasping for breath, at the edge of the parapet. Even still, she had recovered enough to sit up and start wrapping her hands before he was quite ready to move.

  “Should've...paired you with...Dagny,” he said, the hiss of the mask echoing more than normal with heavier breathing. “That needed a poet.”

  "This job needs you,” Noriko said. “Where to now?"

  "There'll be a hidden trap door up here. We need to go one room down, into the top room of the watchtower. They know they're under assault, so there'll be at least one daemon there, I'd bet."

  "Fighting a daemon in confined spaces. Lovely."

  Nils nodded. "Find the trap door while I just... just catch my breath a moment more. They'll never know what hit them."

  Nils was sure enough of his prediction that he was already breathing the words to his incantation and drawing the rune in the air when Noriko located the trap door. She started a silent countdown on her fingers once she ascertained he was ready. He even knew her well enough to finish his incantation on two.

  There was, in fact, a trio of daemons in the room, along with three cultists, one of whom was polite enough to wear some gaudy jewelry and more brightly colored robes. Nils loved it when enemy leaders color-coded themselves.

  The group was alerted by the sudden influx of light from over their heads, but it wasn't fast enough. Nils's spell seized the mind of the first daemon he saw. Shifting his hands like performing puppetry, he watched the hideous thing kick at the cult officer, or whatever rank he called himself. The man smashed against the wall, and the puppet grabbed one of the other daemons by the head from behind and gave its neck a brutal twist.

  Noriko dropped into the room, already swinging. Her blade cut deep into one daemon, even as the fan flashed with light, blocking some magical effort from one of the standing cultists. Nils continued to puppet his captive daemon against the wounded daemon, allowing Noriko to focus her efforts on the cultists, and finishing off their leader. In the midst of the chaos, he almost failed to notice the daemon with the broken neck starting to rise, head on backwards and all, lurching clumsily, but still moving. He called out a warning, with his own control-victim still locked up with the daemon Noriko had stabbed, but not severely enough to put it down.

  Thankfully, Noriko had an answer to the near-surprise assault, as she sheathed her blade long enough to grapple a cultist, whirling him around as a human shield. The man's scream cut off abruptly, and Noriko left the body in the daemon's hands, occupying them long enough for her to iaijutsu-draw the katana in a single rapid swipe that took the creature's head off. This time it didn't rise.

  Nils's captive daemon gained more and more advantage as its fellow weakened, leaking ichor. Noriko blocked one more spell effort by the injured cult officer before cutting him down, and seeing to aiding her unwilling ally. Then she helped Nils down into the room.

  He looked to the last standing daemon, and gestured to the door. The Othertongue word for 'Hold' circled his tongue. The 'No Matter What' would have curdled the air in Nils's mouth if it wasn't already so. He reinforced the command by repeating it several times before he had to turn his attention elsewhere.

  "Watch him," he said to Noriko. "I need to focus on the defenses here, and I'm not sure he's going to stay controlled."

  Noriko nodded as Nils got to work, keeping a wary eye on the daemon while she saw to the minor injuries she'd incurred in the fight, and checked the inexpert bandaging on her hands. Nils dug a knife out of his pack, and started to... edit...the runes carved into the walls. Each of the Gisting’s watchtowers had them, even if the majority of the protective enchantments were in the main fortress-tower past the courtyard. This one would do for his purposes, though.

  As soon as he'd managed to mar the wall just enough to let it become an alternate magical channel, he set to casting his own enchantment, burning new shapes and dimensions to the runes with a fingertip. Pain shot through his arm as he fought with keeping control of the powerful magics of the tower, and tried to bend them to his own control. The smell of burnt flesh filled the small room, overpowering the scent of daemonic ichor as he continued to burn his own markings in, and the sheer power source he was working with burnt his hands right back.

  Thankfully, his previous command held, and the daemon remained barring the door, even as Noriko hissed a warning that people were coming.

  "Done," he said, wincing. "Help me back up to the roof?"

  She did exactly that, and he assessed the situation.

  Below, the mass of draugar that had followed Hobie was dwindling, some fallen before the daemons—for a second time. Others had frozen in place as the cultists had used their previous collaboration to retake control of their warped minds. A few draugar had even been reined in enough to turn back on the others. The small gap in the ranks and a number of fallen bodies told him that Hobie was still alive and fighting, but with his forces, however unintentional their aid, shrinking by the moment, he couldn't be sure that would last.

  Nils began to cast, channeling the power of the Gisting's watchtower runes into his spell. Alone, he wasn't nearly powerful enough to touch the mass rituals of the cultists of Xharomor. Channeling the power of corrupted runes was covering for that—temporarily. The drop off is going to hurt real bad later, he thought. For the moment, though, it felt right, turning the Othermagic against the ritual, tearing apart both the protections the cultists had placed on themselves and their control over the undead.

  The draugar who had moments before been ensorcelled into obedience were the first to turn on the ranks of the humans, followed by those who'd been frozen into inaction. There was a new surge forward into the screaming ranks, and renewed chaos just as it had looked as if Matvei's forces were about to handle the situation.

  A hulking daemon tumbled backwards under a spear-strike, and Hobie raced over the fallen body to get to his next victim. There were no more signs of Hobie’s tactical thought or restraint now. Even from the great height, Nils could hear his little brother's echoing howl of joy as he sprang onto the next target in his way, and a wall of undead warriors fell in behind their king.

  A few cultists demanded the daemons hold the line, and went racing for the gates and the tower, calling for the gates to be closed as they ran. Nils continued casting, doing all he could to collapse protections and Othermagic from his perch, until Noriko grabbed his shoulder. "We need to go,” she said. “They're breaking down the door, and your pet won't hold them long."

  Hobie and his screaming horde of dead-things reached the gates, surging through and fighting the attempts to close them through sheer force of numbers and berserk strength. Nils was just getting ready to hang on to Noriko again wh
en a new noise from the central tower past the courtyard caught their attention. New forces began pouring out of the double doors, unmistakably led by Matvei, apparently finally convinced he needed to take a personal hand in the matter.

  Even in his current state, Hobie seemed to recognize Matvei, or at least recognized the biggest threat in the field, and that it wasn't any of the daemonic hulks. He howled again in challenge as Nils recalled the confrontation at the Academy, and his brother, lying broken.

  Matvei was only too willing to meet the challenge, and with an army at each of their backs, the two would-be Kings-of-the-Monsters rushed at one another.

  "Come on," Noriko said, pulling him in before she jumped from the tower.

  20

  To Fit Right In

  Hrobjart Bjornsson

  The entire world was a field of red. There was pain, or a vague awareness of something like it, but each wound he took just drove him to hurt whoever or whatever had caused it. Somewhere in the thick of things, his spear broke off inside one of the things that he vaguely remembered were called daemons. A new surge of pain washed over him at an impact from another of them, driving him to the ground.

  His hand closed around a weapon one of the other things behind him had dropped. The metal felt right in his hand, and the axe worked just fine to kill the daemon as it lunged, trying to finish him off. More of the viscous black ichor washed over him as it died with an axe through its ribs.

  The cracking of bone felt right, sounded right, as Hobie shoved the heavy body off of himself and wrenched the axe free. There was more ichor, and, before the nearest human could finish pronouncing more of those twisted words, there was more blood, too. He remembered the twisted words. Someone else had spoken them recently. Those ones made him stronger, protected him from the things these humans were trying to do. They kept trying, anyway. More and more of the people fighting around him stopped fighting at their words. Sometimes, when he drew more blood, and stopped the words, the people—the things—that followed in his wake started fighting again. Sometimes they didn't.