by Dylan Doose
I dropped the blade and held my nose, the pain setting my heartbeat hammering again, the blood prickling to my numb legs. I got to my knees, blood rushing from my nose. I reached out to pick up the sword again, but Dalia had lifted her small war pick first, and she stuck it through the back of my reaching hand. The point came out of my palm.
She pulled it free.
Blood spurted from the hole in my hand, and Dalia keeled over again from the pain of the thing inside. I could see every vein in her abdominal wall throbbing against the strain of the demon as she struggled to her feet.
A newfound will to survive stirred in me. I was Aldous Weaver, monster hunter. Well, monster hunter apprentice. And before me was one hell of a monster.
I would not surrender until my skull was dashed and my guts were spilt. I commanded my weary body to its feet, and stood in front of her, swaying. My gaze darted to my sword. I just needed a moment, one more moment, to still the swaying room.
We were almost eye to eye, for though she was taller, she was hunched in pain, one hand clutching her belly.
“Step…aside,” she managed to say as the imprint of a claw became visible pressing against her insides.
“I can’t let you free that thing,” I said.
“You don’t choose that, monk! He has already chosen you!” She lifted her pick high and swung it at me again. I caught her wrist with my wounded hand, and the pain of the impact blurred my vision and nearly made me drop to my knees.
I saw things from the corners of my eyes: my father burning. Chayse’s head rolling across the ground.
But I took the burden of that agony so I could wrap my other hand round her throat. Theron, Ken, and especially Chayse, in her final lesson, taught me that those who understand sacrifice win conflict. To destroy one’s foes, one must flirt with one’s own destruction, must give up parts of oneself to the cause.
With her free hand, she tried to pull my fingers from her throat, but my grip was getting stronger every second, and I was willing all my strength to my hands. My trousers were still undone and halfway down my ass. She tried to thrust a knee at my stones, but I twisted so my buttock took the blow.
My hands were getting hotter, and that familiar scent crept into my nostrils. I was burning her, slowly cooking her throat and her wrist. I knew she had drained me. I didn’t know if I was drawing this power from her, from the thing inside her, or from my will alone. I was weeping, and my body would have been racked with sobs if all my muscles had not been tensed in that horrific and tragic struggle for life.
A whirling maelstrom of fear, self-loathing, and disgust consumed me as my eyes once again caught sight of a clawed hand pressed up against the inside of Dalia’s stomach. I was certain I had to end her, for Dammar was soon to be born again into the world.
However committed I was to killing her, to stopping the demon, she was more committed to seeing that demon born, to unleashing complete and utter devastation onto Brasov and all within. She found a grip on my index finger and pulled it in such a direction that it had no business going. The bone snapped, and the hurt that followed caused me to release my hand from her neck.
Her molten flesh stuck to my palm in strands, and my snapped finger dangled backward toward my wrist. I kept a grip on the wrist of the hand that held her weapon as she rained punches into my face. She was in too weakened a state to batter me off with her fists, so she quickly changed her tactic, and right as red flames took form where I gripped onto her arm, she kicked straight out into my knee.
I heard a snap. It did not hurt right away. At first I thought only of the times I had seen Theron drop a foe with that same brutal technique. And still I did not feel it until I was once again on my back, one hand above me, protecting my skull from the pick Dalia had reclaimed and was using to rain blows down upon me. The pain that erupted was such that had I not seen from the corner of my eye that my limb was still attached, I would have sworn that someone had hacked the thing off at the knee with a jagged blade.
My other hand searched desperately for Chayse’s short sword. I found it when Dalia’s third strike broke through my guard and clipped me just below the eye. My cheekbone burst. My eye instantly swelled shut. But like the knee, the pain was delayed.
I gripped the hilt of the blade as Dalia positioned herself to deliver the blow that would finally end me. Her belly undulated with a mixture of the demon’s movements and her own body’s contractions, efforts to expel it.
I was quicker than her this time, and before she could dash my brains onto the stone floor, I hacked my sword inward and cut into her leg just above her knee until the sword was lodged in bone. She went down instantly, collapsing onto my legs, and the agony of the knee she had kicked in grew tenfold. I screamed with such force that my voice left me entirely as the final note did. I struggled to push her off, but failed, my limited resources exhausted.
Dalia screamed no longer. She just stared down as torrents of blood began to flow from her womb, and a clawed black hand reached out and found grip on my dropped trousers. Tiny claws tore my pants and cut my flesh. The purple glow was fading from Dalia’s skin as she convulsed on top of me; dark blood cascaded from her as the fingers of the demon’s hand twisted and warped into the shape of a dead branch.
And it grew.
Like vines, the fingers extended over my body. Then the fiend’s head emerged, growing as it did, all of its hundreds of lidless eyes peering at me, placental ooze seeping over the pink orbs.
It opened its maw and it spoke in a voice like thunder. “Change has come. The god of change has come.”
And so it had. I had just conceived truest destruction.
I can think no further on that night. Some memories are best left alone, the details blurring with dust in the sepulchers of the mind, buried deep, deep beneath the catacombs of time.
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
The Balance
Ken and Chevic hacked , shot, and bludgeoned their way through two separate droves of masked and mutating pagans. Chevic sustained a deep cut on his thigh. Ken came through without any additional damage, but the hole in his ass created by the slave boy’s arrow radiated pain through the back of his leg right down to his heel with every step.
They had half a mile of white stone streets to traverse before they were back at the Basilica, streets wriggling with the cursed guilty and the innocent alike. They would almost all meet an unspeakable end this night.
In war, in battle, as in all things, there exists a hidden balance.
Kendrick had not thought of those words for many years, an old man’s words, a father to a prince. Ken and the old man had been looking at two battling colonies of blood ants in the desert.
To Kendrick’s eyes, all the ants looked exactly the same but for the difference in the size of their heads and biters. The ants, though, they saw the difference. They knew who to slaughter. Right to the last larva. They knew whom to kill. The fact that to an outsider they looked the same, that to an outsider they were all ants, didn’t mean shit to them. They had a balance to maintain. Life and death. Victory and loss. Each side must take a place.
The memory of the old man’s voice and the images of the ants in the sand under a hot southern sun setting into a brown sea of dirt lingered in his mind like morning frost on a cloudy day. It kept him calm and focused as he set about his gruesome work, as he walked the fine balance between the ants in these streets. Funny…to him, all the ants still looked the same.
“Look there,” Chevic said, pointing to the sun tower, and Ken shifted his gaze from where an old woman was being ripped in two by a humanoid form with a squid-shaped head and four purple tentacles that grasped her by the arms and legs. There was no sense trying to help her. She was already dead.
As he looked where Chevic pointed, a bolt of lightning struck down from the sky and cracked into the golden dome of the sun tower. They saw the flash before they heard the boom. When it sounded there was an instant that the massacre in the stre
ets seemed to lull.
“The Patriarch is entreating the Luminescent for aid!” Chevic yelled, and as he did, the pause ended, the storm continued, and the tides of blood again splashed and whirled.
“Keep moving,” Ken ordered.
They came upon a decimated squad of infantry in chain mail and bronze masks, cornered by a mob of naked, bone-masked pagans with crude spears made of knives and sharp shards of white stone tied to wooden shafts. The front rank grappled the infantry and clutched them firmly as the screaming slaves in the back ranks stabbed wildly with their spikes.
“Ants,” said Kendrick the Cold, and the image of the old man’s face flashed in his mind as he swung his iron fist into the back of the first skull he could reach.
Ken’s fist retracted; the pagan went down, skull caved.
He took a short breath through his nose.
His axe extended as the next foe turned round, a monster of a man wearing the skull of a bear, a craftsman’s hammer in a mighty, hairy fist. He died like the first, from a single strike. The axe blade ripped through his thick neck just as it would a thin one.
The balance between the beast and the man. I saw it in you. I know what you are, Dahkah.
Dahkah. Demon. That was what the old man had called him. That was what those Ken had slaughtered in the south had called him, on those blood-drenched streets that had been so much like these blood-drenched streets. He had been doing this for over half his life, killing in a foreign land, in a war that was not his, for the glory of gods to whom he did not pray.
But then, who else fights for the divinities but demons? Ken thought as he smashed yet another skull. The difference tonight is that the divine, too, will face death.
Around him, the golden glass spheres that rested on top of the white stone pillars lining both sides of the street began to birth a blue-white glow.
“Lie flat, comrade!” Chevic cried, and pulled Ken to the ground. The orbs made a shrill sound and then discharged bolts of lightning in every direction, hitting both the pagans and Enlightened alike, frying them where they stood. The smell of burning flesh filled the air. Kendrick could not decipher the difference between the screams of humans and those of the beasts.
When the bolts stopped flashing and the orbs lost their glow, the thrashing meat pile that they would have otherwise needed to fight their way through was considerably diminished. Chunks of pink flesh and bodiless, flopping tentacles remained smoking on the ground where the mutated creature had been ripping the old woman asunder moments ago.
Ken bit down hard as he sprawled back to his feet, and the arrow wound gave a squirt of blood that trickled down the back of his thigh. The ripped tissue burned and ached a moment then settled back to a cold throb as he and Chevic picked up their pace.
“You saved my neck back there,” Chevic said. “When you crushed that pagan’s skull.”
Ken grunted. He didn’t ask which pagan; he’d crushed several skulls. And he didn’t tell Chevic that when you are in a sea of enemies, you take hold of whatever flotsam floats by. But when Ken was out of the water, he intended to snap that fucker in two.
“May the sun save…” came a gurgled cry from a second-story window as a white-robed civilian was hurled from the sill, a bladed noose round his neck.
From an alley to Kendrick and Chevic’s left a woman and her child ran forward, their white skin and robes painted black and red, ash and blood. Dual lines traced down their cheeks where their tears had washed the filth away. Pursuing them were four monstrosities with bodies much like the apes Ken had seen kept as pets by princes and sultans in Kehldesh. Their heads were those of the most rotten-looking goats he had ever seen. Nearly a score of horns grew like wild fungus from their skulls, their round, crusted eyes looking off in different directions. Dark froth gathered at their mouths.
“They show themselves as they truly are,” said Chevic as he strung one of his last three arrows. “Come, comrade. Let us spill heathen blood once again.” He let fly his arrow, and it found its mark through the eye of one of the creatures. Its body went limp, crumpling to the white stone. The remaining three were uncaring of the threat and continued their pursuit of the mother and her child as they ran toward one of the white pillars.
In the distance, a second bolt of lightning struck the sun tower’s dome.
Ken heard chimes and distant drums.
Chevic loosed another arrow, this time missing the target, who, with the agility of an assassin, avoided the projectile.
The orb atop the white pillar that the woman and her child ran to began to glow.
She must have known what the orb on that pillar would do to her. But she also knew that the things pursuing her would bring her and her child a death more gruesome than being turned to cinders and red mist by one of those holy bolts.
Kendrick was but six paces from them. He wanted to help them. He wanted to save them. These many months with Theron and Chayse and Aldous had rekindled empathy in him, an emotion he thought had died in the desert.
The creatures were an equal distance behind. The woman’s arm extended, reaching for intervention, the pillar just a breath away.
The shrill sound of the orbs hummed with horrible volume in Ken’s skull. Too late. He was too late. He stopped dead and dropped flat. They didn’t scream. He told himself they didn’t feel it. The mist of their hot blood splashed over his back as he surged up to his feet.
This time there was no pain from his wound, just cold.
He faced the two remaining creatures; the third, the nimble one that had avoided Chevic’s arrow, had been blasted to bits by one of the pillar’s bolts. The first goat-headed abomination bleated, frothing from the mouth, crazed eyes staring out from the bloody, mutated skull.
Ken’s axe cleaved and his iron fist made contact over and over. He thought of Aldous, facing these abominations alone. He thought of Theron doing the same. He did not like the fact that they were each facing the night’s event alone and not as a circle of three.
Hold fast, Ken thought. I’m on my way.
Chevic stabbed the remaining creature through the neck just as Ken finished with his own foe. All around them, surviving bodies regrouped to their respective sides as they recovered from the blasts of the lightning pillars, and the skirmishing started again. The storm drains were clogged with chunks and pieces of human and beast. Blood pooled and the combatants splashed about as they bludgeoned, stabbed, and hacked each other open, pouring each other out into the rising river.
“Onward now, dear comrade! We are nearly there, and what a gracious glory it is to bask in the splendor of the sun with you, to bathe in the blood of the heathens!” Chevic looked up to the night sky filled with inky clouds and the smoke from growing fires joining the darkness, but in this darkness the sun tower’s dome still beamed with incandescent light, along with the glimmering of the orbs atop the lightning pillars.
More mailed, brass-masked infantry came from the direction of the Basilica. At the head was a gold-armored knight on an armored steed.
“Chevic!” the knight cried, spurred his horse into a gallop, and lowered his lance. “You and the hunter are needed at the— Hah!” The knight skewered another of the goat men as the creature leapt from a house’s roof into the street, a pitchfork in its grotesquely large fists. “—Basilica. Dammar has risen. He must not reach the Patriarch in the sun tower!” He kept charging after skewering his first enemy, and ripped the lance free of the thrashing body, tossing it under his horse’s tremendous hooves.
Ken took a step back as the armored stallion now reared before him. Blood flecked from its feet as it whinnied and kicked out.
The chimes and the drums rang and pounded.
As if forming from the black clouds of smoke above the houses, another wave of slaves and mutated foes descended into the street to combat the reinforcements from the Basilica. The infantry were armed with ten-foot pikes, and they impaled the wild-eyed, bleating, goat-faced devils as they bounded down on them. They cut down
the birds, the tentacled fiends, the apes and the dogs, and the bears.
Ken hobbled toward the pikemen’s line as fast as his wounded ass would mechanically allow. Keep breathing, keep balance, keep cold. He shouldered past, punched, and cut into any living thing that got in his way now as he got closer to a moment’s respite.
“Comrade!” It was Chevic’s voice, no cheer in it, just agony. Ken turned back a moment and wished he hadn’t. It was not more goat men or a tentacled beast that had Chevic. In fact, at first Ken was not sure what it was that was killing Chevic.
The Golden Son had fallen to his knees and was desperately struggling to remove his mask. Behind him the knight that had come to their aid was stabbing wildly as his horse kicked into the throng of naked weapon-wielding slaves and beasts who were funneling from the alleys into the central street where the battle raged.
Ken continued to back away, but he could not take his eyes from Chevic. He had meant to kill the bastard himself, but something about this death made him uneasy.
All around Chevic the corpses of the infantry and butchered citizens twitched, their pools of blood stirring and taking form. The forms of human faces. They moaned as their organs and bones ripped from their bodies and twisted, fusing together, like snakes of gore. They slithered and crawled to Chevic. He finally peeled his mask from his face, and all his skin came with it. It hung like tree sap as it melted off his skull.
No stranger than the rest of it, no worse than the rest of it.
“Comrade!” Chevic screamed once more before his ribs warped and stabbed out from his body like spears, his intestines tearing from his belly as they formed the shape of an arm that began dragging the cheerful ranger forward with the rest of the cursed monstrosities in tow. Their blood mingled together and formed a stream that ran toward the Basilica.
“Make way!” shouted one of the infantry officers, and the line spread open enough for Ken to shoulder his way into the allied ranks before they closed again to resist the horrors that pressed forward.
