by Dylan Doose
He swung through two of the gray creatures at once as they sprinted for him. They spurted a thick blue blood. Up close Theron could see that they were blind, their eyes sewn shut by what appeared to be matted human hair.
Something clutched Theron’s ankle. He looked down to see a gray hand at the end of an arm sticking from the ground, grasping him. He cut off the hand and edged toward his saviors.
More likely my next captors, but to be a captive is to be alive.
There were already more of the things in front of him, with still more growing out of the walls and pillars.
Theron swung through gray meat. Stiggis roared, and Theron saw the giant of man over the tops of the heads of the living corpses and the northmen, swinging his axe, its head encased in ice. Falling snow followed the arc of the swing. It froze and shattered all the foes it touched, and it touched many.
“Where are you, Theron?” Therick yelled, somewhere off to Theron’s left and in front of him, but there were too many of the living corpses to see the man. He saw the banner bearer, though, waving the black dragon skull on the red field. “To my banner, hunter. To my banner!” Therick followed the command with a cry of effort as he cut into the monsters.
“Why are you here?” Theron yelled. “Come to take me back in chains or paternal embrace?”
“I see you still are the ungrateful, spoiled child you always were, hunter. Is coming to save you not enough? Must you question my motives?”
As Theron hacked his way through a handful more of the gray things, he made out Therick’s red beard and the blue steel of his claymore once again.
He tried to move in that direction. Too many hands grasped his legs and the fiends closed in all around him, slack-jawed, eyes sewn shut, bone blades in hand. He swung, and more replaced the ones that fell. They clutched his arms from behind, and he pulled his head forward as they grabbed hold of his hair.
“Therick!” Theron roared, and tried to call out again, but the hands were closing his jaw, and the first of the gray dead before him began pressing her bone blade into his mailed belly.
Everything slowed to a crawl. His thoughts. His heartbeat. The action around him. And yet he could do nothing. He had heightened awareness as the links in his mail split and the bone blade pressed in, as his head was yanked back and something sharp pressed at the base of his throat.
No…
The blade started its line across Theron’s neck.
No, no… No!
He struggled and wriggled and raged.
Theron.
Flesh glowing, levitating on black wings above the northmen battling the dead, was Chayse. She reached out to him.
Perhaps it was time to go. Time to die fighting, as she had. He would be with her again. He would get to apologize. No doubt he would get to apologize to Kendrick and Aldous, too. Kendrick and Aldous, whom he had left behind in Brasov fighting a horde they could not beat.
He had done this to himself. He had done this to all of them.
Chayse.
“Get up and fight, brother. Survive so you may yet become righteous,” she said, and was gone, her black wings melding into the dark and taking her away.
The blade did not cross his neck.
He felt ice cold behind him, and the undead fingers released, all of them.
He was free. He did not pause to think. He only took advantage of the unexpected gift.
Theron once again gripped his sword in both his hands, and he stuck it through the gray woman before him to the hilt. It thrust her back and she dropped her bone blade. Her head bobbled side to side as Theron charged forward, keeping her on the blade, skewering two more bodies onto his sword and smashing many more aside as he broke the undead line and then stopped.
Before him was Therick. He stared into the eyes of the Jarl, the man who had taken him as a son, the man whom he had adopted as a father when he married Therick’s daughter, a girl he had loved.
He had betrayed them both.
Dark blood covered Therick’s face, his red beard, and the red stripe of hair that ran down the center of his skull. His dragon tattoos glistened on the sides of his head in the light of the torches held by the shield bearers that guarded his sides.
Therick hurled his sword to one of his men, and he burst out of the shield wall to grab Theron and pull him to the embrace of oak, axes, and great steel swords, of forgiving brothers, come to his aid in his time of need. When he had abandoned them in theirs.
“Stiggis! Clear us a way. We must get back to the portal. Let none of those things through!” the Jarl called to the druid, who was in the midst of the swarm swinging his frozen axe. Like the great white dragons of northern myth, Stiggis opened his mouth and breathed a blue frost upon his foes, turning scores of them to ice just before he dashed them into thousands of shards with a swing of his mighty weapon.
Theron had not known the extent of the giant man’s power, but he knew then that the tales he had heard of him during the years he spent on the northern isles were all warranted.
Theron put a hand to his neck and looked at it when he pulled it away.
Blood, far too much. I ought to be near dead. But the demonic ichor I drank still bears its effect. For how long?
“Therick, we must kill the demon. We cannot leave while it yet lives,” Theron said.
“Look at you. You are bleeding out like a stuck boar. I care not for the demon. It is not my concern.” Therick roared in Theron’s face, as he gripped him tightly on the arms. Then to his men he ordered, “Tighten the shield wall! Claymores and long axes in the center to hack down any that make it through. Back to the portal! Back to the north!” The huscarls roared and howled and banged axe heads on shield bosses as the formation began to slowly push through fifty paces densely packed with cursed foes back to the portal.
“You will not leave here,” Dammar said.
Whirling coils of black mist flowed inward from all directions, gusting into a hulking black mass just above the square of the huscarls’ formation. The mass formed into Dammar, and he fell directly upon the center of them in a frenzy of claw, tooth, and antler.
“You. Shall. Not. Leave. Here.” Each of the demon’s words was emphasized by some sort of attack: a closed giant fist battering a man down, a ripping claw taking off a head, a kicking hoof caving a skull.
“Down, hunter!” Therick’s spit went into Theron’s eyes. Theron would have dived to the floor, had he had any room. But there was no floor, only a writhing gray mass.
Dammar’s antler came swinging straight for both of them, white maggots flinging from the gaping, festering sores around the pink eyes that covered the antler. The huscarls were trying to escape Dammar, pressing on one side while the others being pressed on the opposite side by the horde of undead were pushing up against him, locking him in place. Therick was far shorter than Theron, and so the antler missed him by a good span. It missed Theron by a hair.
The press on either side loosened for a moment, and then Theron was being weighed down by the headless corpses of four, maybe more, massive men. Their blood poured over him, into his mouth, his eyes. He dropped his sword and tried to press them away.
It could not be done. He would drown in a river of blood, buried in corpses, feet away from salvation. A river of blood, just as the swine had prophesied.
Perhaps this is fitting, for my hubris, for my lies…for not being better than my father.
Through a small hole in the closing mound of bodies that was smothering him, through rising red in his eyes, he watched as a blue glow began to illuminate the cursed cathedral all the way to its towering ceiling and the painting upon it. A horde of goat-headed demons, raping and slaughtering man and woman alike, hacking apart children and drinking their blood. The counterpart of the painting on the ceiling of the Basilica.
Snow began to fall, and ice formed up the pillars and the walls.
Something took hold of him, something with inhuman strength, and it heaved Theron from the mound of bodies burying him. From the river
of blood he was drowning in.
* * *
When the clamoring percussion of iron and oak settles.
When the echoing chants of war and the cries of battle fade.
When the moans of the dying fall quiet to become the silence of the dead.
When all that stirs is the flowing of blood, on black wings they descend.
His warrior maidens, fierce in life, still so in death.
The choosers of the slain take hold o’ those souls that are worthy.
Worthy to live, die and live again,
In glorious battle eternal, in Bodan’s hall.
—The Sagas
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Two
What is Owed
“ Hunter. Get up and fight, brother,” Stiggis roared in Theron’s face, loud enough for him to hear the words through the blood clogging his ears. The druid was soaked in the thick blue ichor of the undead dregs, and icicles clung to his hair and beard.
Theron had no sword. He had lost his blade in the mound, and when he turned back it was nowhere to be seen. If he survived, he would mourn its loss.
He reached down and lifted what looked like a human leg bone sharpened into a blade.
This will have to do.
Beside him, Therick was pulled by two raiders from a heap of the dead.
“We kill the demon,” Theron said.
“We kill the demon,” Therick agreed. “Bodan will reward us in the axe hall for such a prize. Stiggis…”
The druid began his chanting once again, and the blizzard within the cathedral intensified.
Dammar roared, and Theron turned just in time to see the demon form from slithering darkness and hurl a living raider at him. Theron ducked. The flailing projectile crashed and fell still against a pillar behind him.
“Enough tricks, Dammar. Stand and fight!” Theron snarled, and charged, Therick, a rallied band of raiders, and Stiggis in full flight next to him. The undead crumbled before them.
Blood flowed from what felt like a hundred wounds, but Theron did not slow. He felt no fear as step by step they closed in on Dammar, his quarry, his destiny.
They were upon him.
The ten arms that ended in razored claws as long as short swords. The fanged maw. The heavy hooves. The pink-eyed antlers the length of a longship.
Therick was the first to board.
He burst free of the dregs, swinging two axes when he leapt upward as Dammar swiped his antlers low.
Therick hooked one axe around a prong of an antler and began hacking at the eyes with his second axe.
All Dammar’s hands swiped at the northman, but he hacked back at them with one axe and dipped and dodged the fast claws, refusing to let go of the antler.
Theron plunged the bone sword through one more dreg, and then he was free and upon Dammar. He went for the legs. High on the insides of the thighs.
Even Dammar has arteries to pump his blood.
Dammar roared as Theron managed three stabs with his crude weapon. The demon stumbled back and fell to its haunches.
Theron raised the bone sword and prepared to plunge it into Dammar’s belly, to open him up and yank out the devil’s heart, but Dammar rallied and kicked out with a massive hoofed foot.
Theron stumbled back. Therick crashed to the ground, a piece of antler in one hand, an axe in the other. The second was lodged in Dammar’s head.
Dammar swayed as he pushed back to his feet, lips peeled back in a feral snarl. Breathing hard, Theron and Therick backed away.
With his many claws, Dammar traced a circle into the floor of his black cathedral. The demon uttered an incantation, and the circle opened to reveal a sucking black void that pulled at everything around it. The air itself screamed. The corpses of the raiders and gray dregs slid across the floor to be engulfed by the hole.
Theron and Therick grabbed hold of one another around the shoulders. Theron’s cloak billowed as he dragged himself away, Therick next to him, step by agonizing step. Around them, their brothers in arms did the same.
“Give up, hunter. Let it take you! Fall into infinity to return nevermore. There is no way back for you from where this portal leads.” Dammar’s words echoed at his back.
Dregs both walking and fallen lifted from the floor and soared backward into the void.
Therick looped an arm around a pew made of bone and flesh, the pull behind them deafening. And as they resisted the pull, as the gray undead were sucked into the star-speckled darkness, as the raiders braced against each other and held fast, Stiggis marched toward Dammar and the void.
The giant druid’s gait was steady, his balance sure. His face was as calm and at peace as the breath of the mountains from whence he came.
“I will return,” he said. Then, lifting his axe, he leapt, and because of the whirlwind caused by the void, he took flight and soared toward Dammar.
Dammar leapt into the air, his body lengthening and melding into a living shadow as he met Stiggis above the void in a final clash. The frozen axe swung down and met claws of shadow. There was an explosion of darkness and ice that swirled in a black and blue tornado, before fading into the void.
It was shut.
Dammar was gone.
Stiggis was gone.
Theron collapsed to his knees. There is no way back for you from where this portal leads.
Another good man dead. And I am to blame.
Aldous. Ken. He needed to get back to them.
But the day was done, the sun would rise, and the hunter needed rest. He needed sleep.
He shut his eyes.
And death crept so very close.
Theron was gone .
Ken was gone.
He was alone. But for Dalia and the Patriarch and the all the things yet to die.
The fire around Aldous was still growing, but he could feel it draining him, sucking him dry. It was going to kill him.
But it is going to kill everything else as well. I’ll not go quietly into the morning. And more than the pyres will burn.
The Basilica was crumbling around him, great heaps of stone and masonry falling, crushing the pitiful, weak things scurrying below. The auxiliaries of war, the pounds of meat thrown in the grinder and the furnace, so the great ones can be etched into the annals of history.
The Patriarch called down a wall of lightning that burst through the painted domed ceiling, and it, along with the descending stonework, blasted into Aldous’s firestorm.
Aldous’s knees wobbled. His staff cracked, leaving a thin line through its center. Growling, biting down so hard his gums bled and the blood boiled and steamed in his mouth, he dug within himself. He thought of his father. He made himself hear the sound of his papa’s screams on the pyre.
He saw the faces of the crowd, the smile of the priest that ordered the torch to be put to Darcy Weaver.
That was why Aldous was here in this place. Because of them. Because of those monsters—the Enlightened, the Luminescent.
He was here for them.
The wolves howled in his soul and the ravens screamed. He willed his storm of flame to grow, and so it did, and the invisible weight on his shoulders grew ever heavier and his knees felt soon to burst.
The Patriarch’s falling wall of lightning was pushed back, stray bolts mingling with flame. Magical fragments from the collision of spells shot every which way into the fleeing mortals and beasts. All of them afraid now, finally broken by the horror of the night. They exploded in geysers of blood.
But the red did not fall. It swirled into whirling mist that floated to Dalia. She moaned in ecstasy as it rained over her, and her two front giant arachnid limbs formed of the dead warped and bent until they were two spikes of bone that she plunged through shield and armor, helms and skulls, as she closed the distance to the Patriarch.
Aldous had been forced to watch his father burn. Dalia had been forced to watched her love burn. Aldous envied her this moment. How many times had he dreamed of killing all those who killed his fat
her, of ripping them limb from limb and feeding them to a fire of his making.
In the end, he would kill her, but for now he would help her find her vengeance before she found death.
He let his fire roar high as the Patriarch turned to face Dalia. She used one spiked limb to slide a squirming, skewered man from the other. His armor screeched. Dalia tossed the corpse to the Patriarch’s feet.
He looked up, his golden mace sparking, his glimmering armor drenched red. Droplets of blood fell from the spikes on his cagelike helmet.
Aldous pulled the fire back, pulled it into himself, and pulled himself a bit closer to the looming clash.
I’ll get nice and close. I’ll feel the heat coming off your burning bodies.
Aldous dragged himself forward through the mounds and slops of blended and boiled bodies, pulled himself with his staff, his teeth chattering, his hands shaking.
“Do you recognize me, Father?” Dalia asked as she plunged a spiked limb at the Patriarch. He batted it away with his mace, and with his other hand blasted a bolt at her head. It was weak, and she called down a wall of blood from the hovering cloud of it above to defend herself. It burst, sizzling and popping, but she was unharmed.
“I know not of what you speak, demon!” the Patriarch yelled, the words lacking the authority he had demonstrated since first he and Aldous met. Even if he did not recognize the thing before him, Aldous was certain the bastard knew that his sins were staring him in the eyes right then. They would stare him in the eyes before he closed them and went to the hell he dug his way to.
Whatever form she took, Dalia was his progeny, his blood. And the Patriarch was afraid.
“Liar!” She stabbed once more. The Patriarch summoned a shield of lightning that caused the attack to bounce back, but the force of the blow shattered the shield.
Something stirred in the mound of bodies and rubble to Aldous’s right. He turned to see a decapitated head in a golden-masked helmet roll down from the top. Then a blade—a claymore—burst out in a gauntleted fist.
