The Pagan Night

by Tim Akers

  “Gods damn them,” Malcolm growled. Sir Baird and Sir Dugan stood warily at his side, watching the chaos unfold. “Halverdt won’t even have to excuse his monster’s actions. They’ll have a war by dawn.”

  “They already have it,” the man from the Fen Gate said, lurking in Malcolm’s shadow. They turned to him. “The Deadface declared it, with or without his master’s word.”

  “What’s this I hear about Gwendolyn Adair ambushing Volent’s men by the Tallow?” Malcolm asked.

  The man shrugged. “She did what she felt was best, to save the lives of the innocent.”

  “The lives of the innocent?” Malcolm loomed over the man, veins standing out on his neck and forehead. “Do you know how many innocent lives will be lost if there’s war? The harvest is nearly upon us! What happens to the crops if we pluck the farmers from their fields? If Halverdt’s armies burn their way through our wheat and slaughter the cows to feed their fighters? How many children will starve under Cinder’s judgment this winter?”

  “A tragedy,” the knight said, “but their blood will be on Halverdt’s head, not Adair’s.”

  Malcolm peered silently at the man for a long moment, fist clenched, and it appeared as if he might strike him.

  “Get out of my sight!” he yelled. “Return to the Fen Gate, and pray that we can make peace before the season turns.”

  “My lord, sending this man out into the tournament grounds will be his death,” Sir Dugan said. “He has ridden day and night to reach us, his horse is spent. He doesn’t have the luxury of flight. His face is known to Halverdt’s men. They will kill him before night falls.”

  Malcolm paused, glaring.

  “What is your name?”

  “Sir Alliet Merret,” the man said.

  “A Suhdrin name.”

  “I am sworn to Colm Adair. I rode with his daughter into the fight at the Tallow.”

  “Then we have you to thank for this mess,” Malcolm said.

  “He was slaughtering them like pigs… women and children! Would you have done less?”

  “We will discuss that later,” Malcolm said. “Take off your tabard and cover your head. You will ride north with us.”

  “I will not hide my colors,” Merret said.

  “Then die here, for no reason,” Malcolm replied. He strode off, marching straight for the stables. “Baird, Dugan, with me.” The two knights hesitated, then rushed after their master. Ian was left alone on the field with Sir Merret.

  “Your father is a hard man,” Merret said.

  “Did you expect something less from the Reaverbane?”

  “No, I suppose not,” Merret said. He looked out at the roiling crowd. The paths cut by the Tenerran soldiers closed and were replaced with Suhdrin blades and Suhdrin faces. “This is not how I planned to die.”

  “Then come with us,” Ian said. “You can’t serve Gwen Adair with your blood feeding this field.”

  “Aye,” Merret said sadly. “I suppose.”

  He pulled his tabard free and dropped it to the ground, then the two of them hurried after the duke. Malcolm huffed at his son.

  “Gathered enough glory?” he snapped.

  “There was nothing glorious about that,” Ian said.

  “No, there wasn’t,” Malcolm said. Then he hurried on, blade in hand, loyal knights on either side and the ring of battle in the air.

  The city fell into madness around them.

  2

  BLOOD AND IRON

  18

  THE GHEIST WAS perched among the ruins of the village, its stony head alert to any sound. It stood like a statue in the square. All around, the many bodies of the dead were cloaked with flies and decay. The fires had long since burned out. Of the buildings and walls, only ashes remained. Here and there portions of the wall remained standing.

  “So this is what remains of Tallownere,” Elsa murmured grimly. She stood shielded by a tree several feet behind Frair Lucas, only her head peeking out. The frair crouched much closer to the river’s bank. The shadows of the forest clung to him like spider webs, bending and stretching to cloak his physical form. If Elsa hadn’t known where the older man was, she could easily have looked past him.

  “That is what she called it, our huntress of Adair.” She heard Lucas’s knees creak as he stood. “Let’s have a closer look.”

  “What of the gheist?”

  “We’ll have a look at it, too.”

  Some portion of the bridge remained. Lucas ghosted across it, his body tucked securely into the naetherealm from which the faithful of Cinder drew their power. His toes raised puffs of dust each time they touched the charred wood of the bridge. The dappled light of the road passed through him like sunbeams in a dusty church.

  The gheist saw him approach. When his heels settled into the mud beyond the bridge, the demon let out a growl and moved to the entrance to the village.

  “So much for the silent approach,” Lucas said. “You may find your way across, Sir LaFey.”

  Elsa stepped from the tree and walked down the road. Her divine armor clanked and rattled, her sword slapping against the meat of her thigh. She stopped at the edge of the broken bridge, staring down the gheist.

  “Glad to have that done,” she said. “Not sure I could have managed quiet, anyway.” Elsa lifted her sword and drew a line in front of her. A beam of light as bright and golden as the sun split the air at her feet. She stepped into it and, with a flicker, blinked over the slowly rolling Tallow. Her form stretched thin, snapping forward like a whip, leaving a dazzle of sparks in her wake. When she landed next to Lucas it was with a crack as the air cooked off. A wave of heat and the smell of burning dust rolled off her sizzling armor.

  “Why isn’t it running?” she asked. The gheist awaited them, pacing back and forth, hackles of bark and stone bristling as the priests and the vow knight approached.

  “That is one of many questions, Sir LaFey.” With the butt of his staff Lucas dug a divot in the hard soil of the road. “There’s no hint of pagan sanctity here: nothing to draw a gheist of this size, and certainly nothing that would keep it around. So why has it remained, rather than dissipating once the residents were gone? If they were pagans, as this duke, Halverdt, would have us believe, then their deaths would end their worship. Thus, no gheist.”

  “Then rather than being summoned,” Elsa said, “it came to be here naturally.”

  “As do most gheists,” Lucas said, nodding his head. “Drawn to ancient sites by the memory of worship, or following the patterns of nature that led to their birth.” He drew his staff along the ground. “Ley lines, the scryers call them. The original pagans built their altars where the gods already were, after all. Yet there’s nothing particularly holy about this place.”

  Elsa sniffed, twisting her hand around the grip of her sword.

  “So what, then?” she asked.

  “Perhaps this is a new god, or an ancient one that even the pagans never knew.” He frowned.

  Elsa grunted.

  “Why are we wasting time talking about this?” she asked. “Our duty is to the church. To kill this demon and free the land from its murderous blight.”

  “Because there is more happening here, sir, than is apparent,” Lucas answered. “This gheist could have killed Gwen Adair, but did not strike the blow.” He gestured around them. “And the destruction you see here was not delivered by its hand.” Bones and broken wood stuck through the grim layer of ash. He turned his attention back to the demon. “Why did you bring us here, young hound? What drew you? What birthed you?”

  The gheist’s pacing took it back to the scorched stone ring of the village well. It kept one stone-dark eye on Lucas and Elsa. Its back rippled muscularly with each step, the jagged claws of its feet tearing up the ground. The stone and bark that made up its skin flexed like scales.

  “This is not the gheist from Gardengerry,” Elsa said.

  “No,” the frair agreed. “Which is disturbing. The god I was tracking crossed paths with this one
, but did not spawn it. Yet even one gheist on the Allfire is unprecedented. Two is unthinkable.” Lucas drew a silver chain from his robes, the links hung with icons of the winter faith, and started the slow invocation of discernment. “How many more might be waiting in the forests of the north?”

  “Why did the huntress of Adair fail to kill this one?” LaFey said.

  “She was otherwise occupied,” Lucas offered, then he pointed. “Someone else has been here, don’t you think?” He gestured to the borders of the village. “There are fresh invocations around the wreckage.”

  “Pagan?”

  He hesitated. The taste of the lines of power was unusual. Familiar, but twisted. They had the taint of pagan power—the organic, musty funk of earthen forces—but their construction was different. Clearer. He thought of the corruption that erupted from the bear spirit.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps.”

  “Then let’s make the kill, and move on,” Elsa said.

  “No,” Lucas said. “Engage it, but don’t destroy.” He finished his invocation and conjured a circular rune of naetheric energy into the air. It hung before him like a reflection in clear water, the twisting shadows of its power barely visible. “In conflict, let’s see what we can learn of it.”

  “With joy in my heart,” Elsa said. She stepped forward, drawing the invocation of Strife in the air before her with the bloodwrought tip of her sword. Each line of the invocation drifted away, shimmering with sparks of lumairien power before dissipating as it reached the ground.

  The light in the ashen village changed, spots of sun becoming amber-thick and bright. Elsa drew it toward her. Lines of light and power stretched like tar to tangle in her sword, the runes of her armor, and the glowing veins in her face and arms. A crackling pattern of golden lightning formed across her cheeks, growing from her eyes in jagged barbs of copper light.

  “The lady will rise!” she yelled as she charged into combat. The gheist’s reaction was sharp and fierce. It stopped pacing and planted its massive paws in the ground, facing its attacker with its broad shoulders. The rumble of its growl died.

  Elsa’s assault burned a furrow into the earth. She barely touched the ground as she plowed forward, the heat and fury of Strife glowing off her, like a drop of sun visiting earth—a furnace bright with will and power and hatred. The air tore behind her, the heat of her passage ripping the oxygen into thunder.

  When the gheist struck, Lucas never saw it move.

  It reached out and batted her aside. Its movement was so fast as to be invisible, the strike of claw, the swiftness of shoulder and leg and paw. Sir LaFey crumpled as though struck by a siege stone. She rolled through the ash and back onto her feet, straight into an easy guard position.

  “It’s fast,” she said breathlessly.

  “Observed,” Lucas said. “Be careful.”

  “Yes,” Elsa said. She circled the gheist warily. It held its ground beside the well, turning slowly to face the vow knight. “It looks like it’s guarding something.”

  “Maybe it is,” Lucas said. “If you can get on the other side, I might be able to hit it from behind.”

  “Stay out of this, frair. This isn’t a battle of wits.”

  “Thank the gods,” Lucas said lightly. “If it were, I wouldn’t like your chances against a dog.”

  “Later, old man,” she replied with a grimace. “You’ll pay for that later.” She took another half-step around her opponent, then lunged forward, launching a feint that turned into a guard when the gheist lashed out. A quick series of claw strikes batted Elsa’s blade aside and scythed across her chest. The metal of her armor sang with the attack, long gashes left behind revealing bright metal under the crimson enamel.

  Elsa wheeled and struck again, this time gathering the heat of the sun into her blade. She had no hope of landing a strike, but with each stroke the gheist was forced to edge away. It skittered back, heavy paws dragging through the ash. Soon she stood nearly at the side of the well.

  “Is there anything in there?” Lucas asked. He began to gesture again.

  “I’d love to tell you,” Elsa said, “but I’ve got better things to do with my eyes at the moment. Have you discovered anything?”

  “Not yet… not just yet,” Lucas said. His hands danced around a naetheric construct hanging in the air. The shadow-tinged runes whirled and focused.

  “Well—” Elsa started, but the gheist interrupted. It lunged forward, pouncing off the tiny stone wall of the well and leaping over her. She swung at it, the air whining as the forge-hot blade passed by, but the beast was too high. Landing nimbly, it ran to the far side of the tiny village and started to do a circuit, loping along the perimeter of ash that marked the boundary of the devastation.

  “Coming your way,” Elsa said.

  “Yes, yes,” Lucas answered. He clutched the shimmering ghost of divination to his chest, twisting it small between his hands, then knelt on the ground. He watched the gheist come, loping slowly in his direction, fangs bared. “Come on, pretty one,” he said. “Come closer.”

  At the last moment the demon charged, splitting the air with a sound like thunder, its jaws and claws flashing in the weirdly attenuated light. Even though he had watched Elsa fight the beast, it moved faster than Lucas expected.

  As the gheist pounced, Frair Lucas dipped his heart into the naether. With a flicker of shadowy light he dissipated, his form falling into ribbons of twisting, purple light that broke apart as the creature passed through him.

  Lucas fell into the naetherealm. Ice gripped his chest, his lungs, the pure fury of winter scouring the thin bones of his face like sleet. He took one startled breath and pushed back into the mortal world.

  Where he reappeared, an icy blossom of frost burst out across the ground, lightning as white as snow and just as cold dancing through the ash—a brief, brilliant flower of cold that immediately began to melt in the summer heat. The air around his body shivered with the vacuum, his clothes were stiff with rime, and his breath was sharp with fog.

  Continuing its momentum, the beast ran smoothly across the summoned ice, then turned sharply back toward Elsa.

  “Are you all right?” she yelled, her eyes on the demon. The sword in her hand still shimmered with heat, the blade the color of molten iron.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Lucas answered weakly. The air in his lungs was still cold, his words barbed with frost, and he shivered. “Gods, but I hate that place.”

  “Your god, not mine,” Elsa yelled as the gheist launched a new attack. While she and the creature continued their circling dance of feint and strike and guard, Lucas summoned an icon that irised open, then flexed and bent, turning Cinder’s discerning eye to the whole village. There had to be a reason the gheist had been drawn to this place.

  His search found something strange. All around the village, he could see huddled forms, but these weren’t the bodies of the dead. They shimmered with the purplish light of naether, their forms little more than grim outlines of human beings, head and arms and legs sketched in scribbled lines of light. They flickered like torches caught in a harsh wind as they stood around the village, moving slowly from place to place.

  “Souls,” Lucas whispered to himself. “The dead villagers, unless I miss my mark.” Then his investigation was interrupted by a piercing scream. He was so startled by it that he banished the icon in his hands, its form dissipating like fog.

  Elsa stood beside the well, one hand on the wall, the other holding the sword at an awkward angle. The gheist was on the other side, resting on its haunches. The sword looked strange, as though the tip had melted into a pulsing blob of metal. In several places around them the ash was spattered with small pools of bright light, steam hissing upward.

  “What happened?” Lucas asked, rushing forward, drawing on his limited array of battle summonings. As he ran, shadowy armor appeared across his shoulders like a cowl. “Are you hurt?”

  “Molten iron,” Elsa gasped. She shook her sword and the
strange blob spattered to the ground. The ash puffed and disintegrated at its touch. “The damn thing bleeds iron.”

  Lucas looked at the gheist. It was wounded, a broad gash across its shoulder that glowed with forge-light. The blood that leaked to the ground was, indeed, molten iron. As the frair watched a scab of throbbing red metal formed around the wound, its crust brittle and hot.

  “That complicates things,” Lucas said. “How do we kill it, when its very blood could kill us?”

  “It’s my mistake,” Elsa said. “Trying to ease my way into the lady’s graces. I should have burned bright, right from the start. Put an end to that thing.”

  “But you’re still recovering from the attack on Greenhall.”

  “Aye,” she acknowledged. “You’ll have to carry me, when this is through.” She waved him back, and began the summoning. “Get clear. Run.”

  “Elsa, wait,” he said quickly. “It’s holding the souls of the dead in the village…”

  “I said RUN!” Elsa shouted.

  There was no stopping her.

  Lucas ran, moving as quickly as he could across the village, skidding past the bridge and down the river’s shallow bank. Above him, a ring of fiery light washed over everything. When it had passed, he crept up the bank to watch.

  Elsa was a splinter of the goddess in the center of the village. If the ground hadn’t already been ash, if the trees around the village weren’t charred and the buildings destroyed by Sir Volent two weeks past, then all of those things would have been devastated. Forge-bright and swinging a sword that looked like a shard of the sun, she threw herself into the fight. The lightning-red scars on her face were the brightest of all, pulsing with each blow, each attack, each ground-shuddering strike of that terrible blade.

  The gheist fell into a strategy of survival. Wounded, it limped away from the vow knight’s assault. It fought back only to put Elsa off her stride, battering her with claws forged of earth, then jumping away when she tried to return the attack. With every movement Elsa gouged great ruts in the earth, throwing up plumes of ash and gravel that clattered away into the forest. The sun waned beneath the cloud until it was nothing but an angry red wound in the sky.