by Dylan Doose
The decay of the whale accelerated, and the fish and eels, and black, red-eyed sharks that lurked on the ocean’s bottom, swam around and fed on the aquatic carrion. Too fast to be real. As though time went too fast. Theron was dizzy with the speed of it.
There was no sound but for the distant echo of moaning souls in the recesses of Theron’s disembodied mind as he watched these peculiar events unfold in that remotest and most impossible of places to reach. The significance of any of it—including the blinking celestial orb that remained untouched as time spun—was not yet apparent to Theron, and so the viewing of it, the absurdity of it, was maddening, a strange nightmare that was not his own, but one of man’s as a whole.
Why do you show me this? What do you want of me, Dammar?
But somewhere in the recesses of his mind, his ancestral memory, he knew. And that knowledge was filled with dread.
The glowing purple orb split apart, and from the hollow shell squirmed free a creature that appeared strange, even in its current company of abyssal things that bent the very limits of possibility. It was somewhat like a squid in shape, but with a far longer body and hundreds of thin tentacles. At the end of each there was a serpent’s head.
The thing was a glowing white, tinged green, a glow that illuminated the ocean floor in all directions, and forced an unseen number of scaled horrors to retreat from this unnatural light back to their shadows. It was already growing before its last whip of a tendril was free of the shell.
At the end of its lengthening body was an infantile human face with two solid black orbs for eyes.
It burst free from what remained of the whale’s carcass, and Theron understood the very essence of dread and the nature of doom as he watched, helpless, stranded within the stretched fabric of space and time, as the thing swam, its hundreds of tendrils whipping back and forth beneath it, propelling it upward toward the surface, toward the light and the world of man.
Although distorted by the water, Theron could hear the sound it made: the wailing of a newborn babe.
Kendrick and Aldous had carved themselves another space, and a moment’s rest, for they had killed every foe in their immediate vicinity, and every mortal and monster had ample other targets to kill.
The moment’s rest was a short one.
She came through the very same corridor that the wizard had emerged, crying out, “Father, oh Father, I have returned for you!”
The torso and head were human, that of a lean woman, her skin glowing purple, her eyes blazing with black as dark as space. Still human, though.
It wasn’t the torso that was going to be the challenge.
Beneath her was a writhing mass of hundreds of the moaning blood phantoms, all warped now into the form of a monumental sort of arachnid, but with too many legs, some of which retracted entirely back into its body with each scurrying step, then shot back out to help propel this new monstrous player onto the stage.
Ken looked to his iron hand, soaked in blood, the fingers moving freely. He turned to Aldous. The wizard stared at the demoness with a great deal more than fear.
Recognition. Regret. Rage.
“What did you do, lad?” Ken called out over the din. Enchanted arrows flew into the herd. The Patriarch cast whips of lightning from his golden mace, and his soldiers’ shield wall pressed the pagans back.
“I’ll tell you everything, Kendrick. I swear it,” Aldous said, and then once again his near-shoulder-length mop of black hair gusted upward as if he were falling and ignited into orange and red flame. His eyes burned with fire, and magma seeped from his lips.
Ken thought of the liquid in the bowl, and as his gaze slid back to the demoness, he wasn’t liking where his thoughts were taking him.
Aldous raised his blazing sword toward the chapel brimming with foes sloshing and killing through the pool of blood. “I will tell you, Ken. But first let us show the demons our fire!”
Kendrick could not help but smile at the wizard’s “but first” proposition.
“You might be telling me the truth of it in hell,” Ken said, switched Chayse’s sword to his iron hand, and with his other hefted a wood axe buried in a skull. Splitting wood, splitting skulls—the difference is hardly there at all.
Aldous gulped, but his voice was surprisingly firm when he replied, “No. I’ll be telling you here, in this world. You and Theron both.”
Ken took his time walking over the mounds of corpses, toward the Patriarch. If I have to die here, I’ll see him dead first. I’ll show him that his god doesn’t love him. I’ll show him that his god can only hate.
“Here we diverge,” Aldous said, and turned toward the demoness.
One for each of us.
There were still four solid lines of armored soldiers between him and the Patriarch.
Just need to get past that.
Ken slogged forward, wondering what about this was a beast hunt. Just like Dentin, like Norburg, like Wardbrook…all just battles in a war. Endless battles with too many sides, too many warped morals, too many rosy fucking lies to cover the shit smell of it. The truth was that the things here on this world, man and animal, were like the gods they were sacrificed to: hopelessly in love with killing, with war, with death.
“An ugly necessity,” Ken mumbled, and used those three words as a mantra, saying them over and over as he stared at the ones that would be next to face the flaming sword in his iron grip and the woodcutter’s axe in the other hand.
A group of seven soldiers had broken from the body of the Patriarch’s forces and were doing as Ken was, trudging over the corpses to fight him. Their slumped shoulders and weary steps told him they were exhausted from the killing, the horror, the loss of friends and their homes. Beneath those smiling gold and bronze masks were men, many of them young.
Young men crawling over hills of corpses to face their deaths.
Tragic, yes, but Ken wasn’t about to have a drink with them. He was about to kill them, so he removed such thoughts of their youth, their potential and all that, and returned to his mantra.
“An ugly necessity…an ugly necessity.”
And that was how it went every bloody time it had come to killing folk. It had become harder over the years, even more so after meeting the Wards, and seeing Chayse die. If a warrior didn’t have it right and balanced before the killing, he would be the one to die. If neither had it balanced, well, that’s just a sad, ugly thing to watch.
“Kendrick Solomon Kelmoore!”
The sound of his name made him turn. The accent—Kehldeshi—and the pitch of the female voice was familiar, intimately so.
“There is no escaping justice, Dahkah,” Nephite called out.
And as Ken planted his sword and wood axe in the mound of flesh and lifted from it a single corpse to shield himself from a downpour of arrows, he turned and stared into the sorceress’s dark eyes.
It seemed like only yesterday since Ken saw her last. She was still tall, muscled, fierce, her dark skin smooth, her hair cropped nearly to the skull. She was still beautiful.
Ken wondered what the hell she was doing here. But he had a sneaking suspicion that he knew. His sins had finally found him.
Still, it was good to see her. Some good memories there. And some bad.
Beasts surrounded Nephite and her makeshift regiment, making her disappear from view. Ken did not linger to watch her rip the foes apart. Instead he tossed the arrow-riddled meat shield back into the pile and took up his arms.
“Aldous! Kill those fucking archers. Kill them!”
The Patriarch’s soldiers were getting closer, not even a hundred corpses away now. The archers that had loosed on Ken strung their next volley as the rest continued to rain heaven’s wrath on the horde that was rallying to the spider demoness below. The Patriarch marched to the front line of his force to battle his enemy, monster to monster.
The archers pulled back their bowstrings, and just as Ken was about to once again throw down his weapons and hoist up another meat shield, the ar
chers dropped their bows and went scurrying in every direction, some even jumping from the balcony in a frenzy to escape the fire. Aldous’s fire.
Good lad.
Over twenty other Golden Sons were having their shining masks boil and melt into their faces as they burned alive. Some collapsed, others ran aimlessly, and the rest leapt headfirst into the ever-tightening press below.
Smile now, you bastards. Ken swung his axe at the head of the first man to reach him. The soldier was skilled enough to raise his shield to block the axe, but not quick enough to beat Ken to the stab. He was stuck through before he could get the elbow of his sword arm past his body. Ken pulled the blazing sword free, taking with it boiling blood and steaming guts as he turned to face another.
The foe didn’t reach him. He was felled by magic as he charged, and it wasn’t fire. It looked as if the golden spearman was cut in half at the waist by an invisible blade wielded by an invisible swordsman.
Kendrick was wise to the illusion, though. It was simply air that diced the man in two, and it was air that sliced and slashed off the limbs and heads of the five still advancing.
“You’ve improved, Nephite,” Ken said as he turned to face her. Her robes were soaked through with blood. It was not her own. Nephite and her three guards remained standing among the dashed-apart bodies of the guests, of the beasts, of the envoys. Of everyone and everything that had stood between her and Ken a moment past.
She swiped her hand through the air before her, and Kendrick lunged and rolled to his left, then sprang back to his feet, avoiding the gust that lifted corpses from the floor and tossed them in all directions. Dammit, she doesn’t even use a catalyst anymore.
“It appears you, too, have improved, Dahkah. But it is no matter. The master will have you. Justice will be done.” Nephite hurled another gust at Ken. It was not nearly as fast as the spells that had killed the soldiers and the beasts. Because it wasn’t meant to kill him.
She meant to stun him. Take him. And kill him later.
Aldous focused on the remaining archers and summoned another fireball. But they were not focused on Ken anymore. They had turned their focus to Dalia. She screamed as their arrows tore into her spidery limbs that she lifted to protect her body. Aldous knew that she had to die, but not yet. Too much of the Patriarch’s force remained on the ground, and with Dammar gone, Dalia was the best chance of cutting it down.
He let the fireball in his hand die.
Then he ran his hand over his carved staff and his eyes rolled back into his head. He saw all from high above, near the chapel ceiling. A single raven as large as he grew from his chest. It flapped its flaming wings as it ascended, before diving into the balcony and engulfing it entirely in fire. The archers burst from heat before they could scream.
Aldous returned to himself and fell to a knee, depleted.
The pagans had regrouped around Dalia, and the Patriarch and his men were again being pushed back. With the archers decimated and the balcony in flames, they were losing.
I need to help Kendrick.
Aldous turned back. Between the bodies and the couples engaged in a dance of death, he spotted Kendrick facing the dark-skinned Kehldeshi princess and her men. Princess she might be, or queen, but she was also a sorceress. He had sensed her magic when she cast her first spell.
People shifted. His view was lost.
And when they shifted again, Kendrick the Cold was no longer where he had been. He was nowhere at all. All that remained was Chayse’s flaming sword sticking from the abdomen of one of the dead giant Kehldeshi guards in front of a closing portal. Through it, Aldous saw sand lit by torches, the moon in a dark sky, and crosses. Crosses as far as the eye could see.
* * *
It was as silent as the grave in the great hall. Jarl Therick and the strongest sixty-three huscarls he could find, and have armed and ready on such short notice, stood watching the mighty druid Stiggis Halfjotun. He sat on his heels, eyes closed, hands and fingers bending to form rune symbols in the air. His blond beard swayed as he tossed his head side to side, entering his trance, and the silence broke when he started the chant. His words were those of the ancestors, hardly words at all, more breaths and grunting than anything else. The spells of the ancients.
Thunder cracked the sky. Bodan, the axe father, the war god, was answering the druid’s call. The wind howled through the trees in the valley beneath the cloud-cutter mountains. Branches whipped against the great hall’s roof, and Therick felt the presence of Skjilla the air goddess. She, too, was giving her blessing.
Therick’s hands were numb from gripping his axe so tightly, his leg was shaking like a dog in a storm, and the sweat forming on his brow and dripping into his eyes was nearly enough to send him into one of his berserker fits. He would hold it off, though. He would contain his fury until they were on the other side.
Stiggis bellowed. The hearth fire went out.
The portal opened.
Thousands of unblinking eyes in the dark, spanning an antlered skull the size of a longship. The pale hint of columns. A thousand screaming faces. And in the center of it all stood a lone man.
Teeth bared, axes and swords hammering on shields, the northmen charged into hell.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-One
Northmen
Theron bobbed on the surface of the water, black beneath the night sky. It stirred and swelled, the edges of waves glinting lines of silver from the moon’s reflection. The stirring intensified and Theron heard it now, the lapping of the waves, then the crashing as they rose and fell and reeled into an ever-maddening maelstrom. Just when the whirlpool seemed large and deep enough to drink the sea, the thing that caused the swirl emerged.
It was horror and it had grown. How it had grown in its journey from the abyss to the surface. The water roared as it poured back down in a torrent from the glowing white-green beast, the greatest beast on which Theron had ever set eyes, even if it were just in an illusion, a spell cast by Dammar.
The leviathan was the size of a mountain, hundreds of tentacles whipping out and smashing the displaced rivers of water so they fell back to the ocean. The roar was deafening, but even that was silenced when, from its human mouth, the thing wailed once again, wailed like an infant born to abandonment.
So the leviathan was a creature of the coldest depths, not merely a name that the darkest witches and wizards and demons had adopted in their tentacled network that spanned beyond Brynth, beyond the north, beyond Romaria, beyond this world.
Leviathan was real. A monster greater and older even than Dammar.
Theron had never felt smaller, weaker, less up to the task he had set himself. He was not afraid of death. He was afraid of failure and the insignificance that came with it. He was Theron Ward, monster hunter, but for the first time, he truly believed that the monsters were greater than he.
“What is this?” Dammar’s voice echoed through the sky and the clouds, and when he spoke the vision began to blur. His tone was one of annoyance.
In a blink the living monolith born of the abyss was gone, the purple mist was gone, and Theron was again in darkness, back in the cursed cathedral, back from that obscure nightmare into one as vague and dreadful, but this one was his reality.
The familiar weight of his sword was on his back.
“Why did the vision stop?” He needed to go back there. He dreaded going back there. But he needed to see, to watch, to learn, so that he could hunt Leviathan.
“We have unexpected visitors,” Dammar said.
Visitors. Here?
Ken? Aldous?
The orange glow of torches flared and lit the hellish place for near fifty feet. Dammar was right there; he had been hiding in the dark right ahead, his nearest eye but two arm’s lengths away.
That eye focused on a point behind Theron’s back. The strange white pupil at the center opened. The monster was startled. Dammar reeled away, scurrying, if something that large could scurry, the nails of his many hands cl
icking on the floor.
“Rally to Ward. We don’t leave without the hunter!”
That was a voice Theron thought he’d never be thankful to hear. He hardly believed he was hearing it. He turned round and saw Therick, bare-chested, his blue dragon tattoos gleaming like the blue steel of his claymore in the torchlight, a throng of his deadly raiders at his back. The near ten-foot-tall druid, Stiggis Halfjotun, with his axe that befitted only a man of his size, charged with them from a portal fifty strides away.
Another hallucination.
Except Theron’s hallucination would not send Dammar skittering to the shadows.
So they were real. They were here.
He shook his head. Magic was far more costly for mortal men and human wizards than for a demon. Their arrival was no small feat.
Every question under the sun ran through his mind, but one thought prevailed: destiny.
His destiny had come, and the demon who names himself a god will die like any beast.
He would have to leave the thinking, the understanding, and the taking responsibility for after the killing.
He turned back to face Dammar, but somehow the massive demon had managed to disappear once again. In the place where he had stood, the living carpet rose and twisted and warped until the faces became moaning things in the shapes of clammy, gray-fleshed men and women with swords of sharpened bone in their hands. They took form and advanced.
Of Dammar, there was no sign. He had gone into the shadows. Become the shadows.
The way to Therick and his men was blocked by the summoned undead dregs.
Such a day. Blood in the breaking square. The swine’s prophecy. Yegarov’s corpse. A kidnapping. A murder or two. Or perhaps three. More death and blood at the end of my sword than I could ever quantify. And still the day, the battle, is not done.
Theron pulled his claymore from his back as Therick and his men moved forward.
