The Essence Gate War: Book 01 - Adept

by Michael Arnquist

  “Do not stare!” Amric commanded in a harsh whisper. “They seem content to pace us while we do not focus on them. I think like most night hunters, they are loath to reveal their presence until ready to close the trap, or risk losing their greatest advantage.”

  “Then they are not the same black things we faced this morning,” Halthak said, unsure whether to feel relief or fear at the conclusion. Could the unknown be worse than this morning’s horror? It was a question he was very reluctant to answer.

  “No, these are something different, and they hunt like a silent pack of wolves. I have my suspicions as to what they might be, but the failing light has kept me from being certain, and they are canny hunters. Ah, there we are, up ahead.”

  Halthak followed the swordsman’s gaze through a cleft in the trees to see a massive square bluff shouldering its way above the forest. Like an anvil of bleached bone surrounded by a mantle of smaller crags and boulders, the monolith reared skyward to be painted crimson by the last sliver of the dying sun.

  “When you said we meant to stop, you did not mean to camp,” Halthak said.

  That steel grey gaze slid across him before returning to monitor their pursuers, but in that brief moment Halthak was taken aback by the fierce, wintry expression on the warrior’s visage. The man had entered the void of war, he realized, and was prepared to deal death at any moment.

  “We need a good place to make our stand,” Amric said. “The day is not yet done, healer.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Eskaras strolled along the battlement atop the eastern city wall of Keldrin’s Landing, tapping the butt of his crossbow upon each crenellation as he passed. The night was humid and pressed in close about him, and inwardly, where there was no risk that a superior officer would overhear him, he cursed his patrol assignment.

  On the northern wall, he would be enjoying the cooling breeze drifting over the city from the Vellayen Sea. The western wall boasted breathtaking views of the homes of the city’s wealthiest residents. Those sprawling, luxurious estates were lit well enough, even at night, to fuel the unlikely dreams of one scraping out a meager existence on the pay of a city guard. His assignment tonight was the southernmost stretch of the eastern wall, however, and it had little to recommend it these days. To be sure, the broad vistas were scenic in the light of day, but they palled to tedium with enough viewings, and after nightfall they dissolved into broad gulfs of impenetrable darkness.

  Eskaras dropped his gaze to the flagstone path stretching away before him, fancying he could see a shallow furrow worn into the herringbone pattern from the countless booted feet that had trod this path before him. He wondered how many times he himself had walked this lonely circuit, and his mood darkened. Wall-watch was a duty desired by very few; it was monotonous, too secure to draw additional hazard pay, and too remote to catch the eye of a more generous private employer. Eskaras rapped the next crenellation harder with his crossbow as he wondered what he had done to merit selection for this duty yet again; he had his suspicions that it was guilt by association.

  He stopped and peered over the edge to see the stone recede downward into darkness. He could not see to the ground, over one hundred feet below, but he glimpsed the periodic torches in wall sconces, each a tiny nimbus striving to hold back the gloom. There were tales among the city watch of strange and terrible things reaching the walls from time to time, and it seemed every morning a few of the sconces were found torn from their moorings and had to be replaced, but Eskaras had never witnessed such events himself. Even if something did reach the city’s perimeter, what primitive forces could dream of scaling or penetrating this sheer stone giant? It was far too high and impregnable to even require a patrol, in his opinion; even one as thin as a mere two guards per wall.

  One of the squat bastions punctuating the battlement loomed ahead. He stepped inside, leaning his crossbow against the interior wall to check the oil supply in its hanging lamp. He glanced over the large brass alarm bell hanging from the aperture that overlooked the city. Satisfied, he was reaching for his crossbow when a stealthy shuffling sound upon the flagstones outside the bastion brought him about with a sharp oath. His fingers curled about the solid wooden stock and he lifted the weapon against him, drawing the string back and latching it into place. He was fumbling for a bolt when a helmed head peered around the edge of the stone doorway. A roguish grin split the bearded face. Eskaras sagged against the bastion wall, exhaling in relief even as he glared at the newcomer.

  “Brek, you thick-skulled lummox!” he said. “You could be sucking breath through a new hole right now.”

  “I have seen you shoot. I had little to fear,” the other laughed, stepping forward into full view. “You are as likely to castrate yourself with that thing as you are to hit your target.”

  “It is you I should castrate,” Eskaras said with a scowl. Pointing his weapon at Brek’s groin, he pulled the trigger. The unloaded crossbow string snapped to with a sharp report, and he took great pleasure in the height of the man’s startled jump.

  “Do not even jest so,” Brek said in mock horror. “Can you imagine the grief-stricken maidens across our fair city, faced with such a cruel twist of fate?”

  Eskaras snorted. “I can imagine how many husbands across our fair city would shake my hand in thanks for the deed, not to mention the legions of maidens you’ve not yet met whose virtue I would be defending.”

  Brek’s grin drooped into his reddish beard, and he hung his head in a passable imitation of injury. “You wound me, my friend, you really do.”

  Eskaras arched an eyebrow at the other man, and the impish grin emerged once more. Wall duty seemed a perpetual assignment for Brek; he was always getting caught at one mischief or another, and Eskaras knew quite well that for every ill-advised endeavor at which the scoundrel was caught, a dozen more went undiscovered. The rogue’s charm was undeniable, however, and his golden tongue had deflected severe punishment and even termination on more than a few occasions. And, Eskaras was forced to admit, he was a fair hand at arms and a competent guard, when he was not distracted by his most recent scheme.

  “What are you doing here, Brek? This is my patrol route tonight, may the sergeant’s eyes be blasted from his head.”

  “Can a man not keep his friend company on this dreadfully dull stretch of night?” Brek asked. “By the heavens, there is nothing else going on up here to keep one awake.”

  Eskaras chuckled and resumed walking along the battlement, and his friend fell into step beside him. He watched Brek from the corner of his eye, feeling a mix of envy and annoyance at the man’s jaunty, carefree gait with his own crossbow resting upon his shoulder. Brek somehow seemed utterly at home no matter where he was, and was at ease talking with anyone, regardless of station or appearance. Eskaras had never enjoyed that talent, finding all too often that his tongue became thick and clumsy when he tried to converse with superior officers or attractive women.

  They walked together, and though Brek evinced no urge to break his affable silence, Eskaras grew ever more agitated. He could count on his friend for any favor, no matter the size or risk, but Brek was just as quick to make requests of his own, and helping the man seldom came without consequence. And just as old scars sometimes itched before a coming battle, he knew that Brek was after something. At last, Eskaras could take it no more.

  “Out with it,” he said. “What are you after?”

  Brek blinked at him with wide, ice-blue eyes that had unlocked more than a few bedroom doors. “Whatever do you mean, Eskaras?”

  “Save your honeyed words for those who do not know you as well. You risk punishment for us both by abandoning your patrol route to join mine.”

  “Bah,” said Brek, lifting his hand from his sword hilt to give a dismissive wave. “Our beloved sergeant favors the guard house by the northeastern corner, since it is nearest the refectory. With his great girth, he can only climb the long stairs to the wall-walk once or twice per night or risk heart failure, and he has alrea
dy been up to glower at me once tonight. If he achieves the battlement again tonight, he will surely lack the wind to come within sight of your route.”

  “But if he does, it will put him at the end of your route,” Eskaras said. “And you can scarcely afford to incur his wrath yet again, just as I would prefer not to share it for knowing you.”

  “You raise an excellent point, Eskaras,” Brek said with sudden gravity. “I am a poor friend indeed for not having considered the reflection upon you should my plans tonight go awry.”

  “What plans?” Eskaras asked as a sinking sensation developed in the pit of his stomach.

  “Well, I had no wish to make you complicit in my own tangled affairs,” Brek said, lowering his voice and glancing about as if fearing to be overheard. “There is a certain merchant’s wife, forlorn in her plump, sweaty husband’s absence only slightly more so than when he is in town…”

  Eskaras rolled his eyes. “I should have known.”

  “I find I cannot be so callous as to abandon her to her plight,” Brek said.

  “To be sure,” Eskaras said, wringing sarcasm from each word.

  “So I must slip away from my pointless post this evening for a time, that I might console her,” Brek continued, as if his friend had not spoken. Eskaras snorted, and the other ignored that as well.

  “As I said, however, I had not considered the potential impact on you, my closest friend, were my absence to be noted. I am resolved to take the compassionate path over treading an empty wall all night, but I could not ask you to cover for me on the lovely lady’s behalf.”

  The man lapsed into silence, furrowing his brow and chewing on his reddish beard as he sought a solution. Eskaras glared at him through narrowed eyes, but Brek was as incapable of shame as ever and continued with his pensive display, seeming unaware of his friend’s eyes boring into him as they walked. At long last they reached the point on the wall where their respective patrol routes met. Eskaras sighed and cleared his throat, shrugging aside the familiar feeling of having been maneuvered.

  “If we put aside the only sane choice, the one where you do not leave your post,” Eskaras said with a pointed look that met only an intent and innocent expression on Brek’s part, “I suppose I could walk the full eastern wall tonight. If I encounter the sergeant on your route, I can tell him that we switched routes because you owed me some obscure favor and I preferred the breeze off the sea at the northern edge of each loop.”

  This last part was true, of course, and Eskaras found himself looking forward to the salty tang of that cooling breath. Brek broke into a broad, triumphant grin.

  “I can mention that I saw you quite recently, but I will lie no further if he goes searching for you in earnest,” Eskaras warned.

  “A sound plan,” Brek said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I could ask for no more, and I thank you, Eskaras.”

  Eskaras waved a hand, dismissing the man and his gratitude at once. “Be gone, you greased eel, before I reconsider.”

  His friend set off at a jog back the way they had come, heading for the southeastern stairwell. Eskaras sighed again, watching him recede into the distance. Then he shouldered his crossbow and continued the longer route to which he had just agreed. Searching for stars in the hazy night sky, he wondered if Brek’s escapades would this time cost them both more than poor watch assignments.

  A cool breeze played along his back, carrying with it a strange medley of sounds, and Eskaras halted. He squinted along the battlement in the direction Brek had gone, but he could make out nothing except the distant glow of the lamp in the last bastion. He moved to the interior wall of the battlement and peered down into the city. Even at this late hour, the cobbled city streets in this section were well lit and people moved in miniature along them. He frowned. The wall played tricks with sound, often carrying the faintest of sounds to the heights of the wall-walk, or allowing one guard to overhear another’s words over great distance. Eskaras thought he had heard a man’s cry and the clang of metal upon stone, but he could see no sign of conflict below. It could have been some shady dealings in an alley below that was screened to his view, but he had an uneasy feeling. It had sounded like his friend Brek, and the draft that carried the sound had come from that direction, when the winds up here tended to run firmly the opposite direction. Most puzzling of all, the breeze had been almost frigid in an otherwise hot and humid night.

  Eskaras braced his crossbow, drawing the string back and fitting a bolt into the channel. He held the weapon ready as he stalked back along the battlement in the direction Brek had gone and from whence the sound had seemed to emanate. If it was another of Brek’s pranks and he received a bolt in the leg for his efforts, it would serve him right.

  The evening hung still and stifling once more. The sound did not repeat, and Eskaras began to think he had imagined it all. Then, as he approached the nearest lamp-lit bastion, the air grew colder with each step, and he noticed a blue tinge mingling with the amber glow spilling through the doorway. Through that arch he saw a crossbow lying in the middle of the floor on its back, as if cast aside. Eskaras hesitated, his breath hanging in a mist before him, when a gurgling moan from ahead galvanized him into action. Uttering a cry meant as much to bolster his own courage as to startle whatever he found within, he plunged through the entry and into the bastion.

  Inside was a sight that froze the blood in his veins.

  Brek was lying supine in a corner, his sword in one outstretched hand while his other arm was flung up before his averted face, trying in vain to fend off his attacker. He must have been trying to reach the alarm bell, Eskaras thought, as he was but a few feet from it.

  Hunched atop Brek was a creature out of nightmare. It was larger than a man but translucent, and its blue radiance filled the small room. It seemed to waver before his eyes, and its lack of definition made it challenging to ascertain its true features, but Eskaras had the impression of a skeletal form swathed in some billowing, gossamer substance. He could not tell if it crouched or floated over the thrashing guard. Its elongated head hung low between bony shoulders, leering close to Brek, and tapered talons seemed to sink into the man’s flesh without drawing blood.

  At Eskaras’s cry, the monstrosity swung its head to face him, and he found himself staring into bottomless eye sockets above a wide, gaping grin that bristled with crooked fangs. It showed no concern at his presence, but instead regarded him with a savage anticipation that made his flesh crawl. It’s a coldwraith, he thought in shock. His grandmother had scared him with tales of such things when he was a lad, and he had always thought her daft.

  Eskaras leveled his crossbow and fired. He felt a surge of satisfaction as the bolt flew true to strike the coldwraith between the eyes, but then he quailed as it passed harmlessly through to shatter on the stone wall beyond. He recalled his grandmother’s assertion that iron would discomfit a coldwraith, but only a magical weapon could slay one.

  The creature’s eyes––or rather the depthless hollows where its eyes should have been––narrowed in anger, and it whirled and swept toward him in one fluid motion. He stumbled back from it as a gaunt arm lashed out at him, trailing that swirling, diaphanous material. He tried to block the strike with his raised arms, but the talons passed through leather, chain and flesh alike without leaving a mark, and left a biting cold behind. His crossbow tumbled from nerveless fingers, his unwilling muscles convulsing as he fell back. The creature flowed over him to perch weightless upon his chest, and its horrid face filled his vision. The aching cold pierced him like daggers of ice, and he went rigid in agony. The wraith inhaled deeply as if savoring the scent of a rich meal. Eskaras’s limbs grew heavier, and he watched in horror as the life force was drawn from his body in vaporous strands and wafted into the toothy maw above him.

  From the corner of his rolling eyes, Eskaras saw an unsteady Brek regain his feet, his sword still in knotted fist. Run, you thick-headed lummox, Eskaras thought fiercely, but he could not force a word past his clenche
d jaws. Brek lurched forward and sent his sword in a whistling arc through the creature, but as with the crossbow bolt, it passed through without resistance. Eskaras felt the flow of life from him cease as the thing turned its head toward the other man. Brek spun on his heel and left the bastion at an awkward run.

  “I will draw it off!” Brek shouted over his shoulder. “Ring the bell, sound the alarm!”

  The coldwraith glided after his friend, sinuous and swift, its unnatural grace a mockery of the cold-stiffened movements of its prey. The creature’s eerie blue glow went with it, and some of the chill faded from the room. Shivering, Eskaras rolled over and pushed himself to his hands and knees. He tried to rise, but his jerking muscles betrayed him and he fell to the flagstones again. He heaved himself up with curse. He braced himself against the bastion’s doorway, and by the time he reached a standing position, he was mastering his wayward limbs once more.

  Too long, he thought, frantic. It is taking much too long! And, as he raised his eyes, his fears were confirmed.

  The coldwraith returned, flowing into the bastion and blocking his path to the alarm bell. A quick glance out onto the battlement showed Brek, fallen not half a dozen paces past the arch, lifeless eyes staring in mute apology.

  Eskaras drew his sword and faced the creature. He had seen the awful speed of the thing firsthand; if he tried to escape, it would run him down as it had Brek, and he could not bypass it to reach the bell in this confined space. He set his jaw and tightened his grip on his weapon. It was time to prove Brek wrong about his aim for the second time tonight. In a sudden movement, he twisted and then uncoiled, hurling the sword with all his strength. It spun through the creature without contact and without altering its trajectory, whirling through the air, the polished steel flashing blue and gold fire in turn. The weapon flew true, and it struck the brass bell with a resounding clang, setting up further clamor as the bell rocked and the clapper inside rang against its sides.