“What the…” he muttered, his eyes locked on two corpses propped against the side of a huge stone disc he assumed led to the tomb.
Holte caught a glimpse of a flanged mace heading right for the side of his head, breaking his momentary confusion and forcing him to fall to the ground to avoid being killed in a single blow. The edge of the mace caught his helmet with a loud crash, instantly disorienting him and replacing all the sounds of battle with a harsh, screeching ring in his ears.
Luckily, his attacker was overbalanced from the assault, so Holte wasn’t simply obliterated by a second blow from the fearsome weapon. Clutching his stolen axe like a cane, Holte pulled himself to his feet and tried to steady the spinning world. He felt drunk, overwhelmingly drunk, and a wave of nausea crept into the back of his throat as he failed to right his bearings.
The mace-wielder turned back, a wide grin splayed across his unarmored face. He slapped the head of his weapon in his open palm, and Holte saw a few streaks of blood rub off on the man’s skin.
The captain tore his helm from his head and tossed it aside. The fresh air seemed to calm his roiling stomach, but only by a fraction. When he looked ahead, he could barely focus. Everything was blurry around the edges. The man came forward again, swinging his heavy mace from left to right. Holte raised his axe to block, and the mace head shattered his weapon’s shaft into a hundred splinters.
Holte’s attacker bellowed some incoherent war cry, lifting his weapon far above his head. The man’s teeth were yellow and jagged, and his breath smelled like vomit.
Holte stifled a chuckle when he realized it was his breath that carried the pungent stench of stomach acid, not his attacker’s. His vision still spinning helplessly within his own mind, he tumbled back to the ground unarmed, heaving the contents of his gut across the stones at his feet.
The captain fell onto his side with a sullen whimper, waiting for the killing blow to quickly bring an end to his scrambled senses. After a few seconds, he realized he was still somehow alive.
He wanted to open his eyes, to see what fate had befallen his attacker, but he knew it would be useless. Even with his eyes shut, all he saw was a shifting field of slowly spinning blotches of color that made him scream in agony. The screaming brought on another round of painful vomiting, and then everything finally, mercifully, went black.
At the top of the valley, Palos wore a smug expression. “We’ve sustained heavy casualties, but we’re winning,” he said to his officers. He tried to find his trusted captain in the wild fray, but it was no use. “I should have made him wear a flag,” he mused.
One of the lower officers had retrieved Holte’s horse, and the creature absentmindedly chewed on a nub of wild grass where it stood, completely oblivious to the slaughter.
Slowly, Palos and his officers continued to descend into the valley, getting closer to the tomb as the short battle neared its bloody conclusion.
“Mercy!” a man called from his knees, his voice amplified by the narrow valley. Palos watched with morbid curiosity as one of his men cut the coward down with a sword. Less than twenty enemies still stood, and Palos figured he had them outnumbered two to one.
He watched for a few moments longer as the rest of his soldiers closed in around the remnants of Hademar’s force. “Give the signal for retreat,” he said to one of his officers. The man blew a sharp series of four blasts on his warhorn.
A few heartbeats later, Palos’ force began to disengage from the enemy, moving slowly backward with measured steps. He counted the men left on the other side. There were only eleven, and most of them looked injured, some mortally.
“Hold them,” Palos ordered. The officer to his right blew a shrill note. Almost at once, the soldiers halted their retreat, casting the battlefield in eerie silence. A few men lay groaning on the ground, but Palos didn’t pay them any heed.
Palos kicked his horse into an easy trot until he reached the back of his line. “Where is your leader?” he demanded of the surviving enemy soldiers.
One of them shot a sidelong glance at a body, a glance Palos followed immediately. “Oh, he’s dead?” he mocked. A few of the enemies let their weapons fall from their hands. One man collapsed to the ground, stifling a scream as a heavy splatter of blood shot from a gaping wound in his side.
“It was a valiant effort,” Palos told the ten enemies still standing. “Sort of.”
“Sir,” one of Palos’ soldiers said from his side. He was dragging a body away from the lines by its arms. It was Captain Holte.
“Is he dead?” the lord asked. A grimace flashed across Palos’ face, but he hid it almost as soon as it had appeared.
The soldier bent down to inspect the captain more clearly. “No, sir,” the man said. “He still breathes.”
“Good,” Palos replied, his smile returning once more. He dismounted from his horse with a jangle of polished armor. The ground beneath his boots was clay and stone, and several inches of it had turned to sloppy, bloody mud. He walked around a dead horse to stand shoulder to shoulder with his army.
“Now show me to your leader,” he demanded, taking a single step forward into the makeshift no man’s land.
Two of the soldiers backed toward the body they had indicated as their superior. “He isn’t dead,” one of them spat. The man was old and sported a huge beard down to his waist. In fact, Palos noticed that almost every soldier on the other side of the battle, living or dead, wore a similar beard.
“Is that so?” Palos asked curiously. “And would his name be Hademar? Judging by the looks of it, you’ve been gone a long while. I suppose you left with King Gottfried’s brother quite some time ago, yes? Did you really expect Gottfried to simply let your little adventure come to such a tidy conclusion?”
The men standing in front of Hademar crossed their arms over their chests.
“One final display of defiance, I suppose,” Palos said with an almost cheerful countenance.
The men’s expressions hardened.
Curiously, Palos spotted what he thought to be a young woman’s corpse next to the still form of the king’s brother, and he felt a flash of recognition for the briefest of moments. “That girl,” he began. “What is her name?”
One of the self-proclaimed guards shrugged. “What’s it to you?” the man replied.
Palos took another step forward, and he heard some of his own men doing the same behind him. He kept his left hand firmly wrapped around the hilt of his sword, but he did not unsheathe it, instead content that his temporary display of mercy would keep him safe enough.
“She’s a bit young for a camp follower, don’t you think?” Palos asked, slowly edging forward and trying to get a look at Hademar.
“She was a friend to the king,” one of the guards replied. His voice was low and strained, like he was having trouble breathing.
“Either you’re going to die,” Palos said sternly, leveling his gaze at the two soldiers, “or you are going to turn over Hademar and submit. There is no third option.” He tried to catch a sight of Hademar’s face behind the guards, but he knew he wouldn’t recognize the king even if he did.
The man with the strained breathing took a bold step forward. “It’s easy to be brave with a score of men at your back, isn’t it?” he challenged. “If you really want the king, fight me for him.”
Somewhere in the pit of Palos’ stomach, a knot of fear began to form. He knew he wasn’t a fighter. Trying to kill shades at the Rift had made that abundantly clear. Yet another part of him hated the idea of his honor being challenged, and he hated the thought of avoiding that challenge even more. He pulled his sword from its ornate sheath, but a violent rumble beneath his feet stopped him.
Everyone, even the dying men struggling for life, fell silent.
A second rumble, somewhat stronger than the first, shook them again. Palos widened his stance to keep his balance in the muddy clay. Behind him, he heard a sucking sound that made his head turn.
Some of the blood-soaked clay ha
d moved, but not because of the tremors. There was a corpse face down in the mud, one of Palos’ men, and it twitched. Then its twitching became a spasm. Before long, the corpse was ambling to its bloody feet, a garish wound on the back of its bald head slowly knitting together.
A shout of alarm rose up from somewhere in Palos’ line, and it was quickly followed by a dozen more. All over the battlefield, the slain men began to rise.
Much faster than the first time he had taken a swim in the superheated liquid, Alster pushed himself back to the surface. He knew he had lost consciousness for a moment, but he hadn’t fully blacked out like the first time. Still, his insides burned with wild pain.
As he wrenched himself onto the side of the pool, he spat out a mouthful of the liquid in disgust. It tasted like a roaring fire. “Help me,” he muttered, feeling the meager strength in his legs failing to propel him out of the pool.
Before he saw what was happening, he was pulled free of the murky liquid and unceremoniously tossed several feet across the tomb. His back hit the wall first, then he landed on his hands, his gauntlets absorbing the brunt of the impact with a brilliant red flash.
“You lived,” the towering shade said. Alster couldn’t tell if it was surprise or disappointment lacing the creature’s voice.
“You threw me,” Alster responded weakly. “It hurt.” In truth, his collision with the rock wall should have been devastating. He shook his head as he regained his shaky footing.
Elsey’s shade stood nearby. She paced from side to side in the dim light. “What are we doing here?” she asked.
Alster looked back to Hademar’s hazy form. The mad king was hunched over the pedestal, and his shadowy fingers turned page after page of the book he once could not even touch. None of it made much sense.
“Can I…” Alster asked hesitantly. His eyes searched the room for the rest of Alistair the Fourth’s legendary raiment. “Can I take your armor?” he finally said, deciding that blunt honesty was the best approach.
The shade stared at him, its red eyes narrowing. “You lived,” it said once more. “You are a Lightbridge indeed.” Alistair’s shade turned toward the treasure trove in the corner, and Alster followed.
Next to a stack of half a dozen faded oil paintings, an ornate wooden chest sat under a pile of other odds and ends Alster did not recognize. “What is all of this?” he asked, putting his clothes back on as he spoke. “Why is it here?”
The shade reached out a hand, spoke an unfamiliar word, and everything covering the chest slid off its sides. “The terms of my surrender,” the shade answered. With a wave of his hand, the chest sprang open. A thin cloth embroidered with Alistair’s symbol, a riderless horse before a field of raging fire, covered the contents within.
Alster pulled the cloth covering aside. Underneath, the rest of Alistair’s armor had been carefully organized and packed. Alster pulled forth the breastplate with a sense of wonder washing all the fear from his mind. It was heavier than he had expected, and it gleamed with brilliance as though the hundreds of years it had spent in the cave meant nothing.
“Rai said reassembling the armor would be something worth seeing,” Alster muttered.
“Rai was a liar,” Elsey reminded him. Her shade had hovered to stand near the milky pool of burning liquid.
Without waiting for more instruction, Alster began to pull the rest of the armor from the chest. He laid it out on the cavern floor, running his glowing hands over every piece as he went. Just as he expected, the gauntlets were missing.
“Go on, Lightbridge,” Alistair’s shade beckoned with a powerful voice. “Your inheritance awaits you.”
“What will happen to him?” Elsey asked.
“He will become what I once was,” Alistair answered cryptically.
“What were you?” she wondered quietly.
The shade turned to her, leaning its shadowy head to the side and spreading out its arms. “I was human once, but that was before the armor. I had flesh and bones. I had blood running through my veins. And then my brother made a pact with a monk from Xathrin. Together, they stole my humanity. They took my skin and bones. They took my blood.” Alistair’s voice thundered once more against the walls, shaking dust and dirt from the rock.
Alster felt the persistent, throbbing pain in his leg, and an idea settled in his mind. He began strapping Alistair’s ancient greaves to his legs, tightening their leather straps as best he could around his calves. “I don’t want my flesh and bones,” he said with determination.
“It is a heavy price to pay,” Alistair told him at once. “You will become your shade— a living shadow held inside a suit of armor for eternity.”
“You got out,” Elsey said. “It can’t be forever.”
The shade laughed, a strange, cackling sound that set Alster’s hair on end. “Yes,” he said. “There are ways to undo the contract, though you would not enjoy them.”
Alster finished putting on the suit of armor in awkward silence. Everything looked far too large for his smaller frame, but like his gauntlets, the pieces fit themselves to his body. Every section he put on filled him with another measure of hope, and a smile broke out on his face. He wasn’t sure he knew how to fasten anything correctly, but finally, after much struggling, he wore the entire suit with pride. In the center of the armor, an enameled bit of red filigree shone brilliantly just like his hands, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
“Make your decision wisely, Lightbridge,” Alistair warned the boy.
Alster was so focused on getting back to the magical pool that he barely heard the shade, nor did he care what it had to say. One heavy foot after the other, he clanked his way to the burning liquid. The helmet he wore blocked most of his vision, only allowing him a narrow vertical slit for his a nose and a similar horizontal opening across his eyes. The front of the helmet had a detailed wing inlaid in white gold over the right eye, and a sharp ridge ran from the center of his forehead to the back of his neck.
Standing once more before the pool, Alster did not feel fear. He knew the pain of the fusion would be immense, leagues beyond what he had felt when he merged with the gauntlets, but he did not care. “I want to be rid of this body,” he growled.
“Then go,” the shade commanded. Alistair’s shadowy arms enveloped him, wrapping around his armored torso with strength Alster would not have thought possible. “Be rid of your mortal trappings, Lightbridge,” the shade hissed. “Shed your weakness!”
The shadow tentacles shoved Alster forward, slamming him into the boiling water and pushing him fully under.
Alster screamed once more, but his screams were not exclusively wrought from pain. Instead, he felt an undeniable sensation of strength filling his limbs. He welcomed the heat, begged it to enter his limbs, and relished the thought of his body being consumed by it. He felt the greaves around his legs melt into his flesh, followed quickly by the tassets of Alistair’s breastplate.
When the breastplate itself began to sink into his skin, he found it getting harder and harder to breathe. His lungs were crushed by the weight of the enchanted metal until Alster thought he felt the organs crumble within his chest. The pauldrons quickly melded into his shoulders, creating a sharp pain in his collarbone, but otherwise not adding to the already excruciating pain he endured from the heat.
Before long, the entire suit of armor had sunk through Alster’s body. Every part of his skin glowed with red light. He reached a hand through the water, grabbed onto the side of the cave floor, and pulled himself out. A smile broke out on his face when he realized he had extricated himself with only one hand. As he stood up next to the pool, he felt taller, though he knew it was just his confidence puffing out his chest.
“You said he would be trapped in the armor,” Elsey said skeptically.
Alistair’s shade moved closer. “Reach within yourself, Lightbridge,” he commanded. “The armor is there. It has become you.”
Alster’s face scrunched up in confusion. “I don’t know what to do,�
� he said. His flesh steamed, but he was still made of just flesh.
With a whirl of shadowy limbs, Alistair swung his left arm into the boy’s chest with a tremendous, otherworldly force. Instead of being knocked to the ground, Alster’s body flashed with red light at the site of the impact, and the force was absorbed entirely. “You can call it forth when you need to,” Alistair explained. “You just need to figure out how.”
“You could do it?” Alster asked, wondering why he had never heard of such stories from his tutor or anyone else.
“Yes,” the shade replied.
“And the-”
“I found it!” Hademar’s shade yelled, catching everyone by surprise. He had his strange book open to a page near the end, and he frantically read aloud a series of strange words.
“No!” Alistair shouted. “You must stop!”
Alster and his ancestral shade both raced for the mad king, but it was too late. The magical phrase Hademar uttered was only a few words long, yet it held immeasurable power.
“You fool!” Alistair screeched. His voice was like an entire summer storm unleashed in a single moment.
In front of the king’s shade, the sarcophagus in the center of the three vessels began to tremble. It shook violently, its lid sliding from the force. The tremor began to grow, spreading out in a circular pattern with such strength that Alster had to brace himself on the nearest wall. All the while, the crazed shade just laughed with glee.
“What has he done?” Elsey yelled through her shade. The tremor subsided, but was quickly followed by an aftershock almost stronger than the initial blast.
When the tomb was finally still once more, the lid of the center sarcophagus had fallen to the ground, and a black trail of smoke wafted up from it as though a candle had been burning in its center.
Alistair’s shade collapsed to the ground. “Brother…” he spat with malice.
Fingers curled around the edge of the vessel.
Shadowlith (Umbral Blade Book 1) Page 22
