Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1)

by Michael Watson

  Tyrissa kept a few steps away from the corpse, unsure of what to do. She looked around for anything that would shed further light on what happened here. The giant pile of rubble at the base of the spire wasn’t made of stones fallen in from the hilltop, but held shapes. Judging by the many stone limbs and faces among the rubble, it looked to be the collapsed statue of some monstrous creature. A neatly arranged circle of stones sat nearby and around that was a ring of runes sketched onto the floor with white chalk. Three human skulls, picked clean to a bright white sat evenly spaced atop the stones, staring inward at the center. It was a ritual circle, straight from the stories. Tyrissa moved closer and saw that the three skulls gazed at a pointed, pyramidal gem in the middle of the macabre arrangement. It shone with gentle silver light and beckoned with a slight tug in her heart that begged for Tyrissa to take it away from this terrible place. Just as she moved to do so, the shadows at the base of the ruined statue began to boil, bubbles and coils of animate darkness leaping among the rubble.

  “I wouldn’t disturb that, were I you,” said a chorus of voices that came from all directions. Tyrissa raised her staff to a defensive pose on pure reflex, only to lose focus as a patch of shadow detached itself from the rubble and flowed towards the gem. It stopped on the opposite side of the stone ring and grew upward. From the moving shadows emerged a black outline, a silhouette. It grew in mass and paled to an ashen gray humanoid form. Tyrissa found herself backing away with eyes fixed on the shifting shape and fear rising ever higher in her gut.

  It came into focus as an approximation of a human figure, hairless and naked, but utterly androgynous, like a template that needed severe refinement. Its face was dominated by a wide, gaping mouth lined with too many narrow, white teeth. Behind the teeth lay only a black void. Its eyes were a milky white and without pupils, but Tyrissa could feel that it was looking right at her. Or perhaps through her. It flexed its overly large hands, the fingers ending in curved black talons.

  “Daemon,” Tyrissa said, her throat tightening in dread. A creature of mythology, of fiction stood before her. No, not fiction. They were the very real puppet masters of the Cleanse, the whisperers that turned men into savage, depraved beasts.

  Its face split into a broad, feral smile.

  “A sharp girl. My name is Xivo. Will you tell me yours?”

  “No.” Daemons were featured in many of her favorite epics and half the time a daemon that knew your name was stronger than one that did not. In the other half it made no difference. Her mind raced to remember anything that might be useful, but came up blank. She knew to be afraid. That much was easy.

  The daemon moved toward her with an unnerving, sensual grace. It did not walk so much as glide across the floor. As it came closer an overpowering scent churned her stomach, vile and sweet, the rot of an unkempt slaughterhouse masked by lavender. The sun’s warmth washed over her as she back peddled into a pool of light from above. Somehow, she found the nerve to stand her ground.

  How much of the stories are true?

  Xivo reached out a hand as if to stroke Tyrissa’s cheek. It began to smolder as it crossed into the sunlight. The daemon drew back, but looked unconcerned. It tilted its head to one side and regarded her with narrowed eyes, as if reassessing a piece of meat at the market.

  “Clever indeed. I am so happy that you arrived, child. The boredom of being bound here was becoming unbearable. I wish to make a simple deal with you. Then I’ll let you leave with your fragile all-too-mortal life.”

  “No.” The answer is always no. Never agree to a daemon’s requests. She wanted to run, but Xivo’s unearthly stare kept frozen in place. Nor did she want to leave the apparent safety of the sunlight.

  “Come now, don’t be difficult. You are weak, you are nothing,” it waved a hand at Tsellien’s body. “That one, she was strong, beyond corruption, and,” it growled, “victorious, after a fashion. Her companions were less so, weak points in the armor. Not so… blessed.”

  “No,” she said again. This time it was a meek whisper, that of a field mouse protesting against the will of a falcon. The daemon ignored her and continued.

  “All I need is a donation of human blood. Our magick of blood and souls is complicated, you wouldn’t understand the details. I would need a considerable amount, to be sure, but you appear sturdy in body and should live through the process. Do this and I shall let you leave. Once you have the strength to walk, that is. What do you say?”

  In a single motion, Tyrissa raised her staff and spun in a tight arc, smashing one end into the side of the daemon’s head with as much force as she could muster. A sickening snap echoed in the great hall and the daemon fell to the floor with its neck bent at a freakish angle. Not waiting to see if it was dead, Tyrissa turned and ran into the long streak of sunlight that led to the entrance. It said that it was bound here, if she could make it out of the chamber…

  A roiling patch of shadow flashed along the ground beside her. It overtook her and stopped between the end of the streak of sunlight and the broken grand doorway. Tyrissa stopped at the end of the sunlit channel and watched in horror as Xivo reformed, rising from the patch of shadow like a melting wax statue in reverse. When fully rebuilt it appeared slightly smaller. One clawed hand massaged its neck as it walked towards her, seductive and lethal. Tyrissa glanced down at the pool of sunlight and stepped into the very center, staff held up in defense, quivering in her hands.

  “I see I must take what I want,” the daemon’s all-surrounding voices said.

  “Come on then, monster,” she said, her trembling voice betraying away any feigned confidence.

  “Child, I have all the time in the netherworld,” its head tilted upward at the afternoon sunlight pouring through the roof. “I can wait until nightfall.”

  A cloud passed over the sun. Xivo grinned.

  “Or that.”

  The daemon’s body thinned to a near-skeletal state and its right hand bulged, contorting and reshaping itself. In a blink, foot-long talons burst from the fingertips its hand. Xivo leapt forward with shocking speed, talons whistling through the air. Tyrissa took a step back and managed to deflect the blow but the weight behind it sent her stumbling backward. The daemon’s thin hand darted out and punched the center of her chest, knocking her to the floor and the breath out of her lungs. Tyrissa sat up, gasping for air, and swept her staff into the daemon’s legs. Its knees buckled but it did not fall, and it merely raised its talons to strike in reprisal, face a mask of eerie calm. Tyrissa tried to roll out of the way but was a fraction of a second to slow. There was a razor flash of pain as one talon struck true and opened a deep gash across her right shoulder. The others gouged small scratches in the ancient temple floor.

  Tyrissa pressed a hand to her shoulder as she stood. The wound bled heavily, bright red streams running down her arm, but the shoulder was unbroken. She gripped her staff tighter and swung at the daemon. Again it dodged, flowing away from her attacks with infernal grace. Xivo’s strikes came slower now, each getting blocked but always managing to slip a single light cut past her defenses. They repeated the sequence many times, a strike, a block, a fresh cut in a new place, and a step backward to recover. The grim dance pushed Tyrissa to ruin, her clothes and skin gradually cut to bloody tatters. The daemon was toying with her, draining out her energy and enjoying every moment of it.

  The sun had returned, but their melee had pulled them away from the refuge of light. The pools of safety lay too far away, were too fleeting, and were too late.

  There’s no way out. No escape.

  The thought vanquished the splintered remains of her spirit. She was going to die here.

  As if sensing her despair, Xivo stopped and stretched a smile around the sides of its head. Its small, withered hand snapped out and ripped the staff from Tyrissa’s hands with ease. The daemon’s talons merged back into its body, its arms expanded with grotesque muscles, and it swung the staff in a vicious underhand. Tyrissa felt ribs shatter beneath the blow’s unreal
force as she was knocked into the air, thrown about like a doll. A second hard blow greeted her when she hit the floor and slid to a stop against Tsellien’s corpse.

  Every inch of her body ached, bleed, or was simply too weak to go on. Each breath was forced through a filter of pain, and when she coughed, she tasted blood. Tyrissa looked back at Xivo through agony-blurred eyes. It was trying to snap her staff in half, but the steeloak resisted, bending but not breaking. Its smile narrowed in frustration and the daemon tossed the weapon aside with a shrug. The smile vanished when it turned its attention back to her.

  “Aw Hell,” it said as its body morphed back into a well-balanced, if still inhuman, shape. It sauntered over, stopping well short of her. Extending a single finger, Xivo reached toward Tyrissa. The air shimmered all around her and the daemon’s finger melted into a black slag that pooled and hissed on the floor.

  Xivo growled like a pack of furious hounds and said, “Even three weeks dead the aura is still active. Troublesome.” It started to pace around Tyrissa in a wide circle, shaking its wounded hand and muttering to itself in an infernal language that twisted around in Tyrissa ears like a parasite. It ignored her, debating with itself at length.

  After a few minutes of respite, Tyrissa found the strength to sit up and tried to think through the pain. Tsellien was well preserved, as if the processes of decay and scavengers and flies were kept at bay. She was also armored in silver chainmail and thus heavy. Tyrissa considered dragging the body with her to the exit, but knew she didn’t have the energy for it. Even if she could get out of the temple, at this point she was so badly wounded and beaten that the forest would finish her off.

  She looked around for other options, for anything that would help her. The warrior’s sword and shield lay nearby, both broken. There was the knife embedded in her back of Tsellien’s neck, an elegant thing, its grip shaped like a cyclone, but no better than Tyrissa’s own knife and inadequate. She rolled the corpse onto its back, doing her best to avoid looking into the dead woman’s face. Tyrissa found a scabbard tied to Tsellien’s waist, a short sword with a glinting silver hilt contained within. Laying a hand upon it, she found that it was warm to the touch.

  “Fine,” Xivo declared from behind her, finishing his internal debate. Tyrissa shot a glance over her shoulder. The daemon was funneling almost his entire body into a massive, growing hand. Its face was stretched thin over its head, and every other limb was a narrow core of ashen flesh. She watched, transfixed. The horror stories of the Cleanse flashed through her mind, all the whispers of monsters and tales of twisted men and women. This foul place was a remnant of those times and she had blundered right into it.

  The daemon, more hand than anything else, reached into the shimmering air, pushing through unseen resistance. Layers of flesh sloughed off the giant hand into a growing, smoking puddle. The daemon intended to pull her out despite the annihilating aura. Tyrissa tore herself away from the approaching fist and drew the Tsellien’s short sword. It sang a sweet, metallic note as it came loose. She felt calm, reassured, even as an immense grip took hold of one of her feet and a powerful, acidic heat ate through her boot and seared her foot. She tried to twist around to strike at the daemon, but she was yanked away from Tsellien’s body, once again lifted into the air like a plaything. Xivo spun and threw Tyrissa along the floor towards the trio of cleaned skulls and the shining silver gem. She cried out as she tumbled away from the daemon, wounds screaming in fresh agony, but she kept her grip on the sword. She rolled into the stone circle, scattering the three skulls and smearing the white runes chalked onto the stones.

  Stand up. I will take this monster down with me.

  She could finish this. She could do that much.

  Tyrissa pushed herself to her hands and knees and then stood, each motion causing her wounds to cry out. She ignored them. She stared down the daemon, her eyes two sapphires burning in defiance. The blade turned hot, as if she held molten silver in her hand. Xivo gave its arm a quick shake and morphed it into a long, cruel spike. Once again, it smiled.

  The daemon charged without any of its earlier sensual grace, only brutal, inhuman speed. Tyrissa waited a single heartbeat and swung the sword. She was too slow. The spike gored though her abdomen with a horrifying, wet burst. She screamed. It was beyond pain. It was simply death.

  She felt Xivo lift her into the air over the center of the daemonic circle where the shining silver gem still sat. It focused on pooling her freely flowing blood around the gem, whispering in that same mind-warping language from the halls above. The white symbols etched onto the floor started to glow with a fiery light.

  Tyrissa couldn’t feel her legs and her arms hung limp at her sides. Her vision was darkened and blurred, her heartbeat frantic and weakening. But her right hand burned with fury. She still held the sword, a beacon of stability in dreadful, bloody chaos. Somewhere, she found the strength to lift her arm and drive the blade into the side of the daemon’s head. It went clean through, the point bursting out the other side, shining with radiant silver light. Xivo’s eyes widened in surprise and looked up at her. Tyrissa gave it a weak, blood flecked smile.

  The sword started to melt and merge into the daemon’s flesh and molten rivulets of metal ran down the sides of its head. Silver light coursed through Xivo like arteries and the daemon flickered.

  “A poor trade, human. We’ll still have you.” Xivo said. The daemon then dissolved into a cloud of the black ash that coated the hallway, the floor, and the hilltop above. Tyrissa fell to the floor into the pool of her own blood. The wetness soaking into her back felt distant, and the sound of ragged, shallow breathing belonged to someone else. In the corner of her vision she saw a shining light. The gem shone brightly through a coating of blood and flecks of ash. Unthinking and unfeeling, Tyrissa inched her hand over toward the gem and through the growing puddle of her own life seeping away.

  She curled a finger around the gem and flipped it into her palm. It was a small, fragile thing that radiated warmth and comfort. Tyrissa wrapped her fist around it and felt the gem shatter in her feeble, dying grip. Somehow, it seemed like the right thing to do, the completion of a task left unfinished.

  Tyrissa then closed her eyes and died.

  Chapter Seven

  The poets had it all wrong. No shining beacon of godly white light greeted her. Nor was there an endless void of utter darkness. Death, it would appear, was shades of gray. Dense, pallid mists interlaced with veins of sparkling silver coiled around her. She drifted through them, carried on the languid current of an invisible river toward an unseen destination. She could still sense her body, but it was a detached feeling, empty and uncaring. In death, her form had but a tenuous resemblance to what it was in life, a reflection in a wind-rippled pond, its surface distorted and its depths murky. A chill ran through her, a pure polar shock. Cold. Death was indeed cold. The bards were correct on that account.

  Inky black motes swirled in the infinite mists, coalescing in and out of view like inverted fireflies. They watched from the banks of this eternal river like eyes of an infinite night. They brought the chill, frigid daggers stabbed into her from those watchful black specks. She didn’t care, couldn’t care. Solid thoughts were elusive and memories simmered just beyond her grasp, unreachable glimpses of a lost life. The dark motes increased in number, a growing swarm of corruption marring the mists. Scraps of instinct and intuition remained, both urging flight but lacking in the means and will. Somehow, she knew something wasn’t quite right.

  Tyrissa.

  That word remained as a half-thought. It meant nothing to her. It meant everything to her. She held to it like life itself as death drained her away.

  Arms of heavenly warmth embraced her. The cold melted away, any shred of fear banished in the face of an overpowering sense of safety, like an infant cradled in her mother’s arms. A force lifted her up and away from the river, the mists streaking into a brightening blur as deathly gray turned to radiant silver. When they came to a halt, t
he mists were a brilliant, argent fog, peaceful in a way she never thought possible. Glorious. Divine. A slow and scattered awareness returned to her mind, the clarity stunning after the impenetrable haze of a dying soul. Voices spoke, the languages unknown yet understandable. Bathed in the magnificent light of this place, Tyrissa could only listen.

  “Daughter. Latest of the North. Be welcome.” The first voice spoke across the gulfs of time, ancient and distant. It came as the crash of waves upon the rock-strewn coast of an abandoned land. “You bear another. Strange. We share in their name. We share their Fields. Not their function. What soul is this?”

  “Honored First, I submit this one as my heir. Grant her the Essence of our line as my successor.” Tyrissa knew that one. She spoke in an airy, buzzing language. It was Tsellien, sounding even more ethereal than before.

  The reply came as the crackling of a wildfire as it guttered out on a charred plain. “Choice belongs to the living. This time, we shall sleep. No Succession. Rebirth.”

  “We don’t have time for that.” From reverence to defiance in a blink.

  A rockslide answered: “Time. Time is another concern of the living. Release yourself from it. Your role in their world is complete, the burden no longer yours. Rest, daughter. Watch. Sleep. It is our reward.”

  “Watching the world burn is no reward.” Tsellien’s voice was gradually losing its vitality, becoming as hollow and detached as the First. “The East is fractured and tainted by her own hand. The West is but a child, unready and vulnerable. We’re nearly broken when we must be stronger than ever. The North cannot sleep. Not now.”