by Dylan Doose
Before dawn, or before his death, he would know hell.
He would know hell, for there was no question that their meager band of exhausted warriors could not hold against the new threat. There was no hope of saving those women and children they had sworn to protect. Despite all the brave fallen lads who had fought as they pissed themselves in terror, Dentin would fall as Norburg had fallen. The rats would feed.
And Ken’s last hope at salvation would drown in the blood-soaked mud.
The thing before them now, the Emerald Witch and those dooming, black iron knights, had Ken believing the whole struggle was for naught.
“Are you afraid, Kendrick?” It was Chayse who asked the question as the final clash neared .
“Yes.” He turned to her, expecting to see a sneer and finding only compassion.
“It’s all right. I think I have been afraid every day of my life since my parents left us. Use it to fight.”
“It was an honor and a privilege knowing you, fighting with you, Lady Chayse,” Ken whispered to her.
“And you, Kendrick of Wardbrook,” she answered.
The Emerald Witch was a few hundred feet away, smiling.
“Enough,” barked Theron. “Don’t you two get fucking sentimental, not yet. We kill them like we killed the rest.”
Ken turned to Theron. The man was shaking, likely more from exhaustion than anything else, for he alone must have killed over a hundred of the rats. The hunter turned to the remaining men. They stood with their backs pressed up against the keep. Ken thought some of them stayed on their feet only because of those cold stones at their backs.
“Hear me now, men of Dentin. Champions of Dentin, we will win this fight. On this hill, in this courtyard, let us butcher the rest of our nation’s enemies.” The men stared at him. Theron lifted his claymore, and Ken wondered where he got the strength to raise the thing above his head. “Raise your swords! Raise them! Fear not death, for it has already taken us. Fear not pain, for it has already been suffered! Those are your wives behind us in that keep. Those are your children!” Theron roared. “Let us be the devils before dawn. Let us be savage. Let us be demons.”
The men roared a great cry, as mad a sound as the rats. It was fevered and it was deranged, it was the rallying cry of dead men, and it built a magnificent rage in Ken. The bestial screams of Dentin’s demons grew, and a thing, years dormant in Ken’s breast, began to truly wake. He felt the chill; his spine was frost and his veins were ice.
“Charge!” Ken shouted.
And they charged. They raced one another to the foe. Strategy was gone. This was pack against pack; animal against animal; fangs of iron and steel biting against the plague and the Emerald Witch.
And Kendrick Solomon Kelmoor felt cold once more .
At a hundred paces, Ken watched as the Emerald Witch’s eyes rolled back into her skull and her colossus came rushing forward, the remaining rats, the black knights, and the seekers close behind.
A rat leapt through the air at Theron, who was at the head of the charge. He batted it down with his claymore, splitting its chest apart right to the mid-belly, and it hit the ground and added to the thousands of dead on Dentin’s earth. With a low-throated growl, the colossus swung a tree-sized arm at Theron. The hunter ducked and rolled, rising—sword outstretched—to impale another rat. Ken pirouetted around the hunter and went head-on at the colossus.
After the mighty beast missed Theron it turned its focus on the others. It brought a fist down on a man, snapping his neck and pulverizing his skull. Ken assessed the beast with a warrior’s eye. The head was too high, even the chest was too high, the belly too protected. The tendons at the back of its knee and the unstable joint were less so. So he attacked the beast’s knee; he struck the side of the joint hard with his mace. The bone was so dense it was like hitting an iron deposit, and the strike rocked Ken to his core. The mountain of a rat screamed and tried to whirl around to deal with Ken, but his mace had done some damage and the thing was slow.
A blast of fire hit the fiend in the chest, and then Ken saw a blue blast and Aldous was screaming somewhere in the courtyard.
Dammit.
The giant rat screamed as it slapped at the flames on its chest.
Finish it.
It would not be so easy.
Ken sensed movement and turned just in time to deflect an incoming blow from a great sword-wielding, black-armored foe. The enemy swung again, hazy green eyes glowing through the eye slot in his faceplate. Ken blocked, then locked the blade in the beard of his axe and pulled it to his left side. He brought the mace down on the bastard’s helm with everything he had. The black iron dented beneath the blow and the knight fell to his knees. Three more quick and powerful blows caved the helm in completely as blood and brain leaked out of the eye slot .
Ken turned to see the colossus put out the fire, swiping at it and shrieking until only a boiling, pulsating burn the size of a man remained on its chest and abdomen. It re-entered the fray, mulching men into sprays of gore and stains on the earth. Ken saw the old knight Sir Crowle then, his white mustache stained black-red with the blood of the blighted fiends. His eyes were mad and he swept a mighty war hammer into one of the black iron knights, knocking him to ground, where a man-at-arms pulled off the enemy’s helm and set to repeatedly stabbing him in the mouth and neck with a dagger.
Ken looked around the field for Aldous, and he saw him. The wizard was on his knees, the seekers approaching. The seekers had gained some measure of control over the boy. He went for the seekers surrounding the wizard, but one stepped into his path.
The man was outlandishly tall and lean, with a long face, his eyes an unblinking blue glow. His blade was an eastern-style saber, his movements like a viper as he attacked. Ken deflected two strokes then was bitten by a third. The weapon opened a gash on his chest and he leapt back to create some distance. Ken had seen the seekers fight at Kallibar, and he thought even then that he wished to never do battle with those snakelike warriors. But wishes meant as much as prayers.
Theron, back to back with Sir Crowle, took the heads of the foes the old knight had bludgeoned to the ground with his hammer. All but one of the black iron knights were dead. The last one was weaving his way through the rat colossus’ legs, slaughtering the men that tried to kill the beast with their pikes.
“You do in the beast hunter, I’ll deal with that last swordsman,” Sir Crowle yelled to Theron, as he snapped apart the spine of a crawling rat with his hammer.
Theron simply nodded, and together they charged. Theron could hear Aldous yelling. He turned for a moment and caught a glimpse of two seekers holding the boy in place with blue beams of arcane chain extending from their arms. Chayse battled to get to him, her short swords working hard against the attacks of two more seekers.
He took a step toward his sister, but a bloodcurdling scream stopped him in his tracks as the colossus ripped a man in two and spilt the leaking organs into his mouth. He could not ignore his duty, not even to go to his sister. He was Theron Ward, monster hunter, and there was a monster to be killed.
The last of the black iron knights turned and saw Theron and Crowle advancing. He threw off his helm. Hair, snow white, skin pale like the seekers, but he was not a seeker. He was a greater Upir.
He smiled.
No.
Crowle roared as he swung his hammer at the Upir. The fiend dodged the old knight with ease.
Dammit all, damn them all. I’ll kill them all.
Theron knew he would not have long, so he made sure he acted quickly. The colossus swung, Theron dodged, ran through the thing’s legs, and with a broad sweep of his claymore he swung at the tendons in the back of the creature’s ankle from behind. They sounded like roots ripping from the ground as they tore apart. The great rat screamed and fell to a kneel.
Theron planted his claymore in the earth. He pulled his daggers and leapt onto the screaming monster’s back. He sank the first dagger deep, then reached up and sank the secon
d, using them to pull himself up as the creature writhed and shrieked.
The colossus reached back with one arm then the other, flapping ineffectually, trying to grab at Theron, but he evaded the monstrous groping claw. He made his way up until he clung to the dagger he had thrust in to the muscle that covered the top of the creature’s skull.
Sir Crowle screamed out from below, the sound abruptly going silent.
Out of time.
Theron plunged his knife into the massive creature’s eye. It burst apart and sprayed Theron as he stabbed it again and again.
Ken was bleeding badly, a slash across his torso, and one on his arm, another on his leg. The bastard was too fast.
The rat colossus roared in agony behind Ken, a sound that could part clouds and shatter mountains.
Chayse screamed, a sound of pain.
Blue streams of light glowed all around the seekers who stood over Aldous.
Finish it now.
The seeker lunged with a stab. Ken dropped his weapons and caught the saber in his gauntlets. They took most of the edge, but his hands still bled. It didn’t matter; he pulled the fucker close, and like a beast, like a thing not human at all, Ken sank his teeth into his enemy’s throat.
He felt the cartilage crunch. The seeker tried to pull away, and the skin started to rip, the taste of blood filling Ken’s mouth. So he kept biting. The hands on the saber released. So he kept biting.
He bit down until teeth hit teeth, and, with his mouth full of human throat, he pulled away. He spat the hunk of flesh to the floor and the seeker fell next to it, convulsing, the blue glow gone from his eyes. Ken picked up the viper’s saber and pinned his skull to the ground with it.
He picked up his mace and his axe, and he ran to Chayse and Aldous.
A better world? Peace? Green pastures and food and land for all? Everyone free to do as they desire, as long as no one else is harmed? Please. Don’t make me laugh. This world is as it is. We are all but the same scum in the same pond whirled into a chaotic mist by the edge of a child god’s stick.
Words of a drunk overheard by another drunk at the Scathing Skeemer.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Taste of Victory
T heron stabbed the monster in its second eye, the Upir climbing the colossus back behind him, hand over hand, clawed gauntlets digging in the way Theron had used his daggers. All around them smoke and orange flame rose from the corpses, tainting the air.
“The son and daughter of Diana Ward,” said the white-haired fiend with a macabre smile, “handed to us along with Dentin. We did not expect this. None of us did,””
Theron twisted his hand in the stinking, matted fur and held on as the monster screamed and tried to get back to its feet beneath him.
“Nothing has been handed to you,” he snarled at the Upir, “and when I have you pinned beneath the point of my blade, you will explain how you dare say my mother’s name.”
The Upir came at him, fast, faster than anything Theron had ever faced, faster than the Upir they had faced at the windmill. But in the fight, Theron no longer knew fear. He felt possessed by the night’s violence; he felt a god of the hunt, and the creature before him was nothing but another trophy.
The Upir slashed. Theron dodged left and lost his footing, his hand ripping away with a clump of bloody fur clutched in his fist. He fell from the beast’s back, but managed to land on his feet and roll away from the Upir’s clawed gauntlets. He got to his feet and lashed out with his daggers, a whirlwind of combinations, but the fiend was too fast. He deflected and evaded like fog as he drew his own stiletto.
This was a greater Upir, in truth, the predator at the top of the chain, likely alive for centuries. It looked like a cold marble version of a human, but with the fangs of a monster. It bared them now and came at Theron again.
By the time Ken got to Chayse, she was cornered, her back pressed against the keep, her face gashed open, her abdomen stained red and wet. She held her short swords, parried and deflected the two seekers that pressed her. She was as pale as they from loss of blood.
Ken hooked his axe on one of the blue-hatted bastard’s shoulders and pulled him in to strike with the mace, four repeated blows into the spine leaving the man twitching and convulsing on the ground—a bit of luck Ken needed badly.
Chayse nodded to him as if it were just another day at Wardbrook, as if they were just strolling through the halls, then she locked her short swords in an X as she stopped a downward swing of the seeker’s blade.
Ken forced a smile. “Let’s kill this bastard.”
The seeker blocked Chayse’s feint, and Ken flanked him, wrapping his arms in a bear hug from the back, pinning him. He swung back with his left foot, trying to take Ken out at the ankle, but Ken lifted him from the ground and pressed his forehead against the back of the man’s skull so he could not head-butt backward. Chayse grabbed her chance and slit open the man’s belly, shoveling out his intestines with her second sword. Ken dropped the twitching body like a sack of refuse.
Chayse doubled over, teeth clenched. She raised her head and met Ken’s gaze, her eyes bloodshot, and she gritted out the order, “Help my brother. I will release Aldous from the last two seekers and the wizard will finish this fight.” And when Ken hesitated, she said, “I have this under control.”
He turned to Theron. A black iron knight was on top of him, snow-white hair protruding from his head like spikes. He was pressing his stiletto down as Theron held his own forearms locked at an angle, pushing against the knight’s weight.
Theron was losing.
A shriek grabbed Ken’s attention, and he glanced over his shoulder to find the Emerald Witch standing by the colossus, her eyes rolled back in her skull, arms upraised, lips moving in a silent chant as the wounded beast responded to its maker’s spell and began to rise.
Kill the witch. Kill the fucking witch and this is over.
Ken looked back at Theron, at the point of the blade mere inches from the eye slit of his helm.
“Kill the witch,” Theron snarled.
Ken ran at her. Under a hundred paces. A rat got in the way. Ken gave it the axe. Theron roared in defiance off to Ken’s left.
Hurry, kill her. My friends are dying. Kill her and I can save them. I still have time.
Another rat came at him; its brains shot from its ears as the mace came down. He was feet away now.
Her emerald dress was still clean.
He could taste her fucking blood.
Then it grabbed him, and he was leaving the ground; he was being pulled away.
It turned him around and he faced it, looking into the missing eyes of the colossus, the witch guiding its every movement, for she was its eyes and it was her hands. It engulfed each of Ken’s hands in its own and began to pull in opposite directions. Ken felt as if his shoulders were being ripped from the sockets.
His weapons fell. He fought, but the creature was too strong, and the pain of being torn apart was surreal. The bones in his left hand cracked and shattered, and Ken screamed.
The east flashed before him. The bodies on crosses flashed before him, and Ken kept fighting, the muscles of his back screaming .
This is the hell I deserve. The hell I have deserved for a long, long while.
He pulled with everything he had, and he felt a pop in his left wrist. Then he felt the bones snap. Sharp under his flesh. So he began to squirm as he pulled, and the rat kept heaving the other way.
The bone ripped through flesh, dagger sharp. Ken gave one last tremendous tug and his left hand came off. He could no longer feel the pain; he was beyond it; he was burning in hell, but somehow he managed to stay cold. He swung from his still trapped right arm and plunged the jagged bone of his mutilated limb into the creature’s already eviscerated eye socket.
Aldous’ brain was going to explode. The first time he had been brought to his knees and drained by the seekers at the chapel, there had been no pain. That was because the first time he had not fought. Now he foug
ht, and it hurt.
The noise was the worst of it, a deafening screech, the sound of mountains splintering apart, of a dragon dragging its claws across marble as it roared. Aldous fought on, for he could see in the faces of the two seekers that had him pinned that they were in the same pain as he. And he would not break.
I am stronger. I am stronger than them.
That singular sensation, the one he had felt when he first took hold of the staff of the ravens and wolves, filled him, and he opened to it, welcoming it.
The pain left him, and he left himself, and he flew above, watching. He saw himself kneeling in the blood-soaked mud, one seeker’s blue arcane tether ensnaring him. He saw Chayse as she fought the second remaining seeker. She was hurt; a deep gash in her left shoulder poured blood down her arm, and there was a slash across her cheek, exposing teeth. Her stomach was stabbed deep and oozing blood as she moved to keep up with her enemy. She kept fighting. Somewhere Aldous knew he should feel heartbreak to see her thus, but in truth, he felt nothing .
Theron was screaming. A white-haired, ghostly pale, helmless knight was on top of him. Theron was unarmed. His hands bled as he gripped the descending blade of his pale foe. Slowly it slid through Theron’s hands, his gauntlets cut through.
What would you do to save them? a voice asked from within, but it was not his own.
Theron tried to turn his head away, but the horns on his helm allowed him little room to squirm. The blade slid and Theron screamed.
Ken. The scarred man was leaning against a shattered fragment of the wall, the blinded rat colossus close by, writhing in pain. Kendrick was calm. He sat there, the stump of his wrist bleeding as he held the blade of a dagger in the flames of a nearby blazing rat corpse. When it was near red-hot, Ken stuck it to his stump, and he opened his mouth and howled, but still he held it there. The wound steamed; he closed his eyes and dropped the blade.
