by Joe Jackson
He cut off the priests even as they tried to speak, waving a hand dismissively. “This is not the issue at hand. Your Order is sworn to help those being attacked by demons, and my city is being attacked by demons. Your feelings about me aside, this is something you are sworn to help with. Refuse me your help and I will take my issue before the Dukes of both Brunswick and Sutherland; I am certain they will be less than impressed with your hesitation.” Kaelin folded his wings tight to his back and draped his cloak over his shoulders as he prepared to leave. “I will be in the city until tomorrow. It should take at least that long for the Blood Order – the assassin’s guild you allow to work right under your noses – to find me. Until then.”
Kari turned and watched his egress, and she marked the incredulous stare on Albrecht’s face for a moment before she turned back to the Council. “Does the Council want my help in determining who to send to Barcon?” she asked the humans.
Master Bennet glanced to each of the other human males at the table before he met Kari’s gaze once more. “No. We were considering sending you personally,” he said, which surprised Kari. “We have other hunters closer to Barcon, stationed in Gnarr and Sarchelete, however, we have reason to believe there is far more to this situation than is immediately apparent. How many of Bosimar’s records have you managed to sort through thus far?”
Kari squared her jaw and shrugged sheepishly. “Not many, I’m afraid,” she admitted. “At least, not much that’s been all that useful. He kept a lot of records, and I’ve really only just come across something interesting today. But it involves snakes, so I don’t see how it would have anything to do with Barcon or Kae…Lord Black.”
“But you yourself said that there was a church to Achirun right near Lord Black’s tower,” said Master Arinotte, the youngest priest on the Council. Arinotte was a dark-skinned human who was also in charge of an arm of Zalkar’s church that dealt with countering the schemes of certain unscrupulous deities from Koryon. Though those deities were not officially part of the merged pantheon, they took a great deal of pleasure in harassing their Koryonite fellows and, consequently, the people of Citaria. “What concerns us is not just that Lord Black’s city is under attack or being subverted by the underworld, but that Lord Black himself may either be an agent of Achirun or some other underworld lord, or else may be being subverted by one.”
“Lord Black is correct in one regard: the Order does have a duty to aid his citizens, regardless of our feelings toward him,” Master Perez said. Perez was one of the oldest ranking priests of Zalkar, and had only joined the Council after retiring from active military service in the Duke’s army. He was a decorated officer who’d served with particular distinction in the Apocalypse and countering the siege of DarkWind during that Great War, and was one of the most respected members of the entire Order. “It would also not serve our Order well to refuse an Earl and possibly anger the Duke of Sutherland. Are you open to field duty, Lady Vanador?”
Kari considered the question and the prospect of being away from her mate and child for several months, and she bit her lower lip for a moment. She couldn’t deny that she missed field work after three years of administrative duties, but her motherly instincts fought staunchly against those of a veteran demonhunter. “Would I be working alone on this?” she asked. She briefly considered bringing her mate and child with her, but dismissed it out of hand. She couldn’t risk putting them in danger to mitigate her own potential heartache.
“We would leave that up to you,” Master Bennet answered. “The Council does not recommend that you hunt a serial killer alone, but you may decide to take an outside group – such as some of your mate’s siblings – if you prefer. Take the evening and reach a decision. As it stands, we need not give Lord Black our answer until he returns tomorrow. If you choose not to go, we will respect that decision. We only ask that you tell us which of our closer-stationed hunters you think would best handle this mission for the Order.”
Kari regarded Albrecht, who nodded to her, and the two saluted their superiors. “I’ll have my answer for you by morning, Master,” she told Master Bennet. “In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find anything in Bosimar’s records that might tell us why demons are interested in Barcon.”
Kari left the temple with Albrecht, and she could see that the stares of most of the cadets and even many of the veteran demonhunters followed her toward the administrative building. It was clear that while some of them were still simply awestruck by her fame, most were curious as to why Kaelin Black had visited the campus. Black was well known to the Demonhunter Order: he was one of the most prominent “mortal problems” recruits were taught about and veterans were kept aware of. Since the Demonhunter Order was also considered a world-wide law enforcement agency under the control of the god of law, demons were far from the only problems they kept track of. To have one of their biggest targets show up on their doorstep was quite a surprise.
Kari returned to her office and retrieved the box she’d been going through, and after she bid her coworkers farewell, she walked home. She and Grakin lived with Grakin’s mother, Kyrie Kyleah, who had welcomed the couple and their coming child into her home when they returned from Tsalbrin. Their home was close to the temple of Kaelariel, since Kyrie was the deity’s high priestess and Grakin served in the temple as a healer. It was a large, spacious house: Kyrie had planned for her children to all come live with her one day, but the animosity that caused her to separate from her mate had also kept her away from her children for many years. Since the group’s return from Tsalbrin, though, they all lived with their mother while they sought mates and homes of their own in DarkWind.
The northern district of DarkWind, where many of the temples were, was also comprised of the larger and more luxurious homes belonging to the wealthy and powerful. It had been well protected during the Great War, and so what minimal damage it had sustained was easily repaired over the previous three years. Other parts of the city were still being fixed, and the population was leveling out again as laborers and other craftsmen from the southern and western counties relocated to aid in the reconstruction. There was even talk that the Duke might have the mighty Fortress of DarkWind restored after centuries of neglect, once the city was back to normal. Three years after its end, the effects of the Great War were still visible, though, and many still felt its effects. The Order was no exception: while they had a significant influx of recruits since the War, they had lost many of their best and brightest hunters in the conflict.
Located close to Kaelariel’s temple, Kyrie’s house was modest for its neighborhood, for though it had many bedrooms, it was neither overly luxurious nor did it have a lot of property. It was important for the people to see that the high priestess of the god of freedom did not live in splendor while the commoners suffered, even though it was well-known that Kaelariel’s temple was one of the foremost in caring for orphans and widows. Kyrie maintained several gardens and a few small fruit trees when she was not tending to Kaelariel’s temple, so the house was quaint and had an almost country feel to it despite its urban location. Around its exterior on two sides was a long, wide porch with several rocking chairs and a swing. As Kari approached her home, she could see her mate was seated in one of the rockers.
“Mama!”
Kari carefully put the box she was carrying on the porch and ascended the steps, and her son ran into her arms. She picked him up and cradled him tight, and then she rubbed the end of her snout against his, which caused him to giggle. Grakin junior – or Little Gray as Aeligos had nicknamed him – was a spitting image of his parents, a handsome boy with solid ebon coloration. He had black teeth and blood rather than the white and silver of a rir, respectively, since the serilian-rir genes of his father were dominant, but his wings were still a few years away from growing in, so to most he didn’t appear to be a serilian-rir yet. When he was an infant, Kari and Grakin had been concerned that Little Gray might have also received the Dracon’s Bane disorder that both of his parents ha
d. Since everyone now knew that was what Kari had died from in her prior life, they were able to voice their concern without revealing that Grakin, too, had the disorder. Thankfully, testing by Kyrie and the priests of Kaelariel had eliminated the possibility. Little Gray snuggled close to his mother’s neck and she strode up the stairs to the porch to stand before her mate.
Grakin hadn’t lost much weight in the previous few years, which Kari found somewhat comforting. He was handsome, with an aura of calm that surrounded him and gave strength to his mate and his siblings. His eyes and hair were ebon like Kari’s, and he kept his hair a uniform shoulder-length. There was no sign that Grakin had overcome Dracon’s Bane, but neither was it accelerating, even given his age. Dracon’s Bane normally killed its victims before puberty, but there were exceptions: Kari had managed to survive to the age of twenty-seven in her previous life. Grakin, the third eldest of the Tesconis children, was thirty-six, two years Kari’s junior, but what damage the disease had done to him already made him appear older, even as one of the long-lived serilian-rir. He was still handsome in a somewhat worn and rugged sense, but which only made Kari appreciate him that much more.
“Hello, my love,” he said to her in his soothing, quiet voice, though he didn’t rise from the rocking chair he occupied. “What brings you home so early?”
“We need to talk,” Kari said, and she took in a deep breath and let it forth in a long, subdued sigh. “The Order has something they want me to look into down in Barcon, but I’m not being ordered there; the choice is mine. But Barcon’s a few weeks away, so I’d be gone for at least a couple of months.”
“Could we accompany you?” Grakin queried.
Kari shook her head. “No,” she said, and she held her son high up over her head and smiled to keep him from worrying. “We’ll talk more about it later. For now, I have some of Jason’s things I need to go through and see if they might be connected with what’s going on in Barcon. If you want to head to the temple and work with Kyrie for a while, I’ll put Little Gray down for a nap and stay home the rest of the day.”
Grakin rose from his seat with a smile and kissed his mate before they shared a tight embrace. He bid Kari and their child farewell, descended from the porch, and began walking toward the temple. Kari took her son upstairs and let him lie down for a nap. Fortunately, Little Gray wasn’t exceptionally fussy for his age and he went to sleep easily after she put him to bed. Soon Kari was seated at the large dining table next to the kitchen, with the bright sunlight streaming across the contents of the box she had laid out before her. With Grakin’s mother and siblings out, the house was calm and quiet. It still smelled of spiced bread and the herb-baked chicken they’d had for supper the previous night, and the comforting scent put Kari at ease.
Kari started with the ledger once more, but she noted that Jori-an and her companions’ names were almost always accompanied by the description ‘snakes,’ so she put the ledger down and decided to see if it was, in fact, cross-referenced to the oddly-titled journal. She turned around as a creaking in the house drew her attention, but she pursed her lips and blew out a calming sigh. For months, Little Gray had been talking about an imaginary friend he called “the Fuzzy Man,” and Kari’s first instinct had been to believe that something was following her after her mission on Tsalbrin. Kyrie had used several divinations to try to root out anything insidious, but had detected nothing. Even still, she had put a ward around the house to keep out intrusive people or even spirits, and so far nothing had attempted entry. Kari turned back to her reading.
The journal was worn and stained in all the appropriate places to tell Kari that it had been read and re-read many, many times. She wondered if even Bosimar himself had a hard time deciphering the things that happened during his tenure as Avatar, and she casually flipped through the book and could see that there were notations in the margin of almost every page. Bosimar’s writing was clear and meticulous, written in the rir language which was comprised of symbols and flowed top to bottom like that of many of the ancient human cultures. Jason wasted little time getting to the point of the journal, and Kari read with great interest:
As I expected, the Beast was silent for a reason. Apparently there were troubles spreading down into the jungle from the mountains, where the hill people were wrapped up in some altercation with dark elves. I sent the gnoll, Tormaar, and his companions to make an innocuous delivery to the Beast, and he in turn sent them to investigate the disturbance in the northern hills. What they came back with was completely unexpected.
I still have heard nothing from the Beast or the hill peoples as to what prompted the dark elves to attack them, but curiously, Tormaar and his group, upon killing a band of dark elven marauders, came upon a surprising hostage: a syrinthian woman named Ciceria. This is alarming for many reasons: the invasion of Terrassia by the snake-people and their demigod priest-king during the Third Demon War was well-documented, and I imagine that was not the end of their interests in our world. They are well-known as servants of the demon king Sekassus the Calculating, but unlike many of their other underworld ilk, they represent a multitude of different possibilities when dealing with them. While some of them are priests and sorcerers and even assassins, when encountered in the past, many of them have simply been homemakers and laborers. The presence of this woman leads me to wonder: are they trying to invade Citaria, or are they trying to escape Sekassus?
Her features are angular and her eyes were unnerving when I met her gaze, but Ciceria is a fine-looking syrinthian woman who holds herself with a great deal of dignity and poise. She is soft-spoken yet curt; she answered my questions with little thought, which leads me to believe she was frank in her responses. Not surprisingly, she was unwilling to reveal the location of her people here on Citaria or disclose what they were doing, but she gave me her word that her people meant no harm
Naturally, I don’t believe her. I will set Tormaar and his group to watching her from a distance. I understand this is a great risk I am taking, but to kill her or hold her prisoner would reveal our hand too early. I believe setting her free and allowing whoever it is she works for to overbalance their own hand would serve the Order better.
I have ordered Ciceria’s release and even assigned two of my hunters to escort her safely to the mountains, where I assume her people are hiding, as a show of courtesy and to give her the impression that I have taken her at her word. In the meantime, I have assigned Tormaar and his group to investigating a local robbery of sorts. I must give Ciceria time to return to her people and get the impression she is not being watched before I send Tor and his people to find her. Until such time, I will work to find out if Ciceria is connected to the work of this “Emma” who keeps showing up in my hunters’ reports.
“Damnit,” Kari muttered, and she closed the journal and tossed it casually onto the table. She had hoped that the lack of activity from the mallasti – or hyena demon, as they were more casually called – named Emma meant that the issue on Tsalbrin was an isolated case, but as she saw that Emma was active even before the Apocalypse, Kari knew that it all tied into something much larger. From everything Kari and her companions had learned during their mission on Tsalbrin, Emma was searching for something – or rather someone – called Salvation’s Dawn, which related to opening the mystical Temple of Archons on the Isle of Morikk. No one knew what was inside the Temple, but Kari and her superiors were quite certain that a demon taking a sudden interest in it after Gori Sensullu’s death was extremely alarming.
After they’d returned from Tsalbrin and given a full report to the Council of the Order, Kari and Erik had suggested sending a defense force to keep watch over the Temple. Since the Council was made up of clerics, many of them were familiar with Salvation’s Dawn and the myths and stories surrounding the Temple. They conferred with Grakin and Kyrie, and the priests all together came to agree with Kari and Erik’s suggestion. An entire regiment of the ducal army was sent to the Isle of Morikk to safeguard the Temple, and the Orde
r assigned a rotating schedule of pairs of demonhunters to stand watch with the soldiers. Thus far there had been no disturbances at the Temple and no sightings of Emma or any other underworld demons, but the mallasti’s absence only made Kari that much more suspicious.
What muddied the waters now was the fact that Bosimar had gambled with peoples’ lives by setting a syrinthis free: the snake-people were servants of Sekassus and known enemies to the people of Citaria. For Bosimar to have set one free – a priestess, no less – meant that he had potentially exposed the world to another invasion akin to the one during the Third Demon War that had resulted in a good portion of Terrassia being incinerated. Kari wondered why Bosimar didn’t just force Ciceria to take him to her people and find out the reason for their presence himself. Had he done that, Kari was sure he could’ve taken an ample force to exterminate them if it was trouble they were about – something Kari was pretty sure was the case.
Kari picked up the journal and walked upstairs to her son’s room. She smiled at his curled up, sleeping form, and she absently pushed the reading chair back into its correct place before she sat down in it. The house creaked once more and she glanced around casually, and she opened the journal and continued reading.
Chapter II – First Blood
“Something about this just doesn’t make sense,” Aeligos said, waving Bosimar’s journal around for emphasis. Aeligos was the younger of the Tesconis family’s middle children, nearly three years Grakin’s junior. At first glance he appeared to be Grakin’s twin: they had nearly identical features and the same coloration, though Grakin’s worn look resulting from his illness, and Aeligos’ stylized hair, made it easy to tell them apart. Aeligos was incredibly intelligent and had worked for years as an infiltrator, with a nose for tactics and a survival instinct that left even his demonhunter sister-in-law in awe at times. Kari was very glad to have his help in combing through Bosimar’s records, since with his keen intellect and education, he was much more likely to find things of use.
