by Joe Jackson
At last Kari’s measured gaze fell over Katarina. The nimbus of protective light she’d projected to keep BlackWing at bay was impressive, and Kari could only conclude that it had been the paladin that had lit up the entire district like the rising sun. Katarina was already impressively powerful, which was unusual for one so young. Like demonhunters, paladins were the type of crusaders that typically took many years to reach the apex of divine power that was their potential as champions of the gods. For Katarina to show such promise at barely more than twenty years was simply amazing, doubly so since she had only begun training a mere three years earlier. Kari suspected that it wouldn’t be long before the young woman’s name was well-known amongst the demons, both serilian and those of the underworld.
Marshal Saracht arrived at last, and even in his normally unreadable expression, Kari could see he was perturbed by what had happened at the graveyard. He took his hat off respectfully and wiped his boots on the mat inside the door before he approached Kari and nodded to her. Kari returned the gesture, and the marshal took a couple of minutes to study each of the people before him. He seemed ready to ask a bevy of questions, but instead he sighed quietly and took a seat near Kari. He proceeded to spin his hat in his hands while he waited for one of the companions to explain what had happened. Katarina started to speak, but held her tongue and glanced to Kari.
“Well, it turns out some of our suspicions are correct,” Kari said at last, rising to her feet. Her legs were finally starting to feel normal again, and she paced around a bit to get full feeling back in them. The cool stone floor of the temple seemed to help as well. “Emma and this succubus – Turillia, I guess – are indeed trying to kill each other. I still don’t know exactly why, but I guess that’s not really our concern. Gods, but what we saw in that graveyard…”
“The entire grounds are a mess; what transpired there?” Saracht asked when Kari paused.
“From what we saw, Turillia was raising a few corpses to attack Emma. And then Emma…raised pretty much the entire graveyard at once in answer, including your two slain guards,” Kari explained. The many sets of wide eyes that greeted her said that everyone else found it as unbelievable as she did – and she’d witnessed it. “That was when the werewolves showed up. They were more intent on destroying the undead and the demons, just like Sharyn said, but they weren’t able to lay a claw on either Turillia or Emma.”
“Did this Emma or Turillia manage to wound one another?” the marshal prompted.
“No,” Kari answered, and she shook her head with a sigh. “No, mostly they seemed content to just attack each other indirectly – with the undead, by provoking the werewolves, and I guess by provoking me and Sharyn, too. Emma kept hitting the werewolves – and us, once – with lightning spells, but she didn’t seem to be trying to kill them, just get them really mad so they’d tear Turillia apart. She destroyed most of the undead in the process, so I’m not sure why she bothered raising them in the first place. Then she just left, expecting the werewolves to kill us and the succubus.”
“Obviously, they didn’t,” Sharyn muttered.
“The werewolves didn’t attack you?” Eli asked.
“No; in fact, they helped Sharyn try to kill Turillia,” the demonhunter explained. “I guess what Sharyn said about studying them and keeping tabs on them was being rather modest; they seemed to know her, and trust her. One of them even stopped her from charging at Turillia. Another died fighting the succubus, I think, but they drove her off, and smashed the rest of the undead. Then they started to come for me, but Sharyn…got between us and convinced them to leave. Thank you for that, Sharyn.”
The ranger woman waved off the comment, but Kari noted that Eli gave her a nod of respect. “Our fight with BlackWing was just as odd,” Eli said to Kari. “I don’t think we need to go into too much detail, but…well, I’ll let Katarina explain what he was.”
Kari turned her attention to her young friend, and Katarina shrugged slightly, as though she wasn’t sure exactly what to say. “Do you know of any demons that are just shadowy forms?” the paladin asked.
“A shadow demon?” Kari asked, and she thought about it for a minute. While most of her studies at the Academy had revolved around serilian demons and what the Order knew of the underworld breeds, there were other types of demons that were much rarer. Encounters with shadow demons were few and far between over the history of Citaria, and though the Order knew of them, not much was known about where they came from or what their motivations were, outside of death and destruction. If she remembered her studies correctly, there hadn’t been a recorded case of an encounter with a shadow demon in almost a thousand years. “Yes, they teach about them a little at the Academy, but there hasn’t been a report of one in…a long time.”
“Piotyr drove it out of BlackWing’s body,” Katarina said, and she smiled as her eyes met those of the half-elite priest. Kari could already see there was a sense of kinship there, and she was glad to see that Katarina’s first adventure having been with many serilian-rir had kept her mind more open than a paladin’s might normally be. “Once it was forced out, BlackWing turned to dust, but the shadow demon hardly seemed to care. It told us that all we’d managed to do is delay our own deaths.”
“BlackWing was possessed?” Kari asked, and she shook her head. She tried to get the bigger picture as she thought about what she’d seen in the graveyard, and what had happened when her friends fought BlackWing. The puzzle was so convoluted, and for a few minutes, while her friends shared details of their respective battles, she thought perhaps that the entire situation was just a set of unrelated coincidences. There was something missing; BlackWing had spoken of a ritual, but had he simply meant raising the undead in the cemetery? Or was there a portal, or altar, or some other dark magic that was being fed by the murders, the corpse raisings, and the mayhem around the city? And how did a shadow demon fit into all of it?
“…and he had ridiculously potent poison in his fangs,” she overheard Eli say. “I think I felt the same thing when the succubus bit me.”
“Of course,” Kari said, and the conversation among her friends came to a quick halt. Kari looked around at her friends, and replayed the events of the past couple of weeks in her head. She suddenly wished Dominick was with them, but she shrugged it off: she would much rather he stayed safe at home until the situation was dealt with. Kari let out a long but quiet sigh while she went through her own theory in her mind, and her friends waited anxiously for her to explain what she was thinking.
Marshal Saracht was the first to run out of patience. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“BlackWing said the pattern has been right in front of us the whole time, and we just weren’t seeing it,” she began slowly, and she turned partially to meet the marshal’s eyes. “What have we been doing all this time? We’ve tried to find connections between the victims, some pattern to the murders, some reason beyond simple death and destruction for Turillia to have killed all of these people. We’ve looked into dark portals, altars, sacrificial ceremonies, all of the things a demon might use to break the barriers between our worlds. But what if that’s not it at all? What if we’ve been looking for the wrong thing?”
“What do you mean? You think it’s just about death and destruction, and the talk of a ritual is just to throw us off the trail?” Eli asked.
“No, no, much more obvious than even that…or I guess not so obvious to us, but maybe it should’ve been,” Kari returned with a shake of her head. “During our fight in the graveyard, Emma tried to burn Turillia to a crisp with a torrent of fire, but Turillia just shrugged it off and said, ‘If you think arcane power is all I’ve taken from these men, then you’re a terrible fool.’ It’s not a portal, or altar, or dark ceremony; she’s not trying to get Sekassus onto our world. She’s feeding this shadow demon by murdering people for him, and she’s sucking some of that power out of him in return.”
“Like Sheila Darkstorm…,” said Master Vlad, the priest of Amberg
aust, and though everyone else’s eyes were fixed on Kari, she looked to the priest for further explanation. Soon the others followed her stare, and the priest continued, “Sheila was not always a goddess. Indeed, she was not always a demon king. She was a succubus at one point, one who amassed enough power to become a noble among the demons, and then a king. And with that power and influence, she began to sway the evil people of Koryon, the enemies of my master Ambergaust and his wife Carsius, to bend knee to her until she became as a goddess to the world of Koryon.”
“You think this is what Turillia attempts? To become a goddess as Sheila did?” Katarina asked both the priest and her demonhunter friend.
“This is bad,” Eli said, and he stood up. “I mean, it was bad enough when she was just a sorcerous, necromantic succubus assassin we were up against, but this may be beyond us.”
“Not necessarily,” Kari said, gesturing for everyone to remain calm. “While I could kick myself for not bringing more of my fellow hunters and a few members of my family, bringing Sherman and Katarina did turn out to be a wise decision. Even if we can’t kill it, Katarina can hold the shadow demon at bay, which I assume means Lord Garant can as well, and probably Sherman, too.”
“I have to say, my sister’s display surprised even me,” Sherman admitted, but Katarina approached and laid her hand on his shoulder with a smile.
“There’s something else, too: Turillia’s power is fleeting,” Kari said before her brow furrowed. “I think that’s the right word. I mean, it’s not permanent…she’s losing the power she’s been drawing from the demon. When we fought her in the graveyard, she tried to teleport away when she thought the werewolves would attack Sharyn and me, but she couldn’t. I’ve seen that look of frustration before on my sister-in-law. Whatever happened, the magic refused to come to her call, and I think it’s because the demon’s power doesn’t last very long.”
“No. As you probably well know, a succubus can draw some of its victims’ power and use it herself, but the power is not permanent. They must continually renew that power to keep it as their own,” Vlad said. “This is why succubi rarely kill their victims: so they may keep their power readily available when they want it again.”
“But Turillia is drawing power from a demon, and that demon is drawing power from her murders,” Kari finished. “I can beat Turillia in a fight; I’m sure of that. She has a style similar to my own, but she is not Suler Tumureldi, and if I could handle him in combat, I can handle her.” There were several sets of raised brows at that statement, but Kari didn’t dwell on the point. “The issue isn’t so much whether or not I can beat her in a sword-fight, though: it’s whether or not she raises a small army of undead to aid her, what other powers she may have drawn from the shadow demon, and whether or not I have to deal with Emma at the same time.”
“So why does she want to kill Emma, then?” Eli asked. “Is that maybe why she was sent here in the first place, and taking power from the demon was just a convenient opportunity?”
“I think that’s what we have to assume for now,” Kari answered, glancing from face to face to see if anyone else had any other ideas. They all seemed impressed with her theory, but though it was helpful to actually have a theory as to what was going on, it didn’t help Kari organize her thoughts or her friends. It was far from the first time since she’d arrived in Barcon that Kari wished Aeligos was there; she could use his tactics and planning about now. Since he wasn’t, though, she tried to plan things the way she assumed he would. “Master Vlad, can you do some research on Sheila, or pray to Ambergaust for some insight into how Sheila managed to keep her power?”
“I’d be happy to. Give me until morning, and I will try to find some answers for you.”
“Much appreciated,” Kari said, and then she turned to Piotyr and Deirdre. “I’m not sure how you two will feel come the morning, but I think I should go back to the graveyard and do something – anything – to make sure we’re not overrun by an army of undead the next time Turillia and Emma fight.”
“At the very least, you will have my aid in that,” Piotyr said.
“And mine as well,” Deirdre said weakly. She fought to get herself to a sitting position. Piotyr gave her his support, and though she was weak from the poisoning, there was fire in the half-elite woman’s eyes that said she’d be ready by morning, one way or another.
“We will help you as well,” Katarina offered, her words echoed by the nods of Sherman and Sharyn.
Kari shook her head. “No, I need you three to take care of some other things. Look, as much as it shames me to say this, I’m not much of a fast reader,” she said sheepishly. “What would really help is if you three could do some research for me in the morning. If you go to the church of the Unyielding, they should have some books about underworld demons. What I need to know is if there’s something about Emma we don’t know: something basic, like how a mallasti might fit into Turillia’s plans. If nothing turns up, we can go on the assumption that Emma is Turillia’s ‘official’ target for Sekassus, or whoever it is she works for.”
“I have some books that may also be of aid in that,” Vlad added.
“Perfect. Maybe the three of you can split up to save some time,” Kari said. She drew forth the platinum disk from her coin pouch and flipped it to Eli. “Eli, I have an important task for you: I need you to see if you can track down Emma. Dominick said she was in the old city hall, so that’s probably a good place to look. You’ve met her before, so she may trust you to some degree. See if you can get her to talk, and give her that disk if it helps. I feel ridiculous even suggesting this, but I’ll take a stalemate where Emma is concerned if she’ll help us kill or capture Turillia.”
“I’ll do what I can,” the half-corlyps answered.
“I know, that’s why I asked,” Kari returned, which drew a curious reaction from him, but Kari was more interested in what Sharyn thought of the request. “Don’t put yourself in any danger, but if she’ll talk to you, just try to get us something. But don’t tell her anything that might let her know what we’re up to.”
“And how may I aid you in this?” the marshal asked as he rose to his feet. “It’s obvious you don’t want me to send my men to storm the old city hall to root out this mallasti.”
“No, you definitely don’t want to do that. Right now, I need you to get me in to see Lord Black,” the demonhunter said, turning to face him squarely. “In the morning, I need a good-sized squad of your best men to secure the graveyard, so our half-elite friends can consecrate the ground or do whatever it takes to keep the dead where they belong. Other than that, I just need you to keep doing what you’ve been doing: making it as difficult as possible for Turillia to murder anyone for BlackWing’s, or rather, that demon’s benefit.”
“Are you satisfied, then, that Lord Black is not involved in this plot?” the marshal asked.
Kari nodded. “I am,” she said sincerely. “Now we need to shift our focus to protecting him, in case he’s still a target.” Marshal Saracht nodded, and Kari turned back to the rest of the gathering. “For tonight, though, I just want you all to get a good night’s sleep; you’re no good to me exhausted or injured. That’s all for now. Tomorrow night, I’d like all of you – including Master Vlad and Marshal Saracht – to meet me at the inn at the end of this street, called One Small Favor, for dinner. By then, we’ll hopefully have the information we need to bring this situation to a head.”
Everyone agreed either with Yes ma’ams or nods. Katarina approached, and though Kari expected the paladin to offer a suggestion or ask a question, the young woman simply wrapped her in a hug. Kari returned the embrace in full, and after a few moments, Katarina separated enough to look her friend in the eyes. “You probably look at me and think I’ve grown a lot over these last few years,” Katarina said. “But you have, too. I just wanted to make sure you know it. It’s sometimes hard to see it in ourselves, but you just become more and more amazing as the years go by, Kari. You are truly an inspiration.
”
Kari bit her lower lip but then smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re an inspiration to me, too; you and your brother.”
Sherman smiled and approached with Sharyn by his side. “You seemed concerned when you came to see us earlier in the evening, my friend,” he said to Kari. “If you have something to say or ask, please don’t hesitate. I value your counsel.”
Kari looked to Sharyn before her eyes settled back on Sherman. “I don’t,” she said. “I trust you…both of you. I was concerned that you might get distracted, but from what I saw this night…I had nothing to worry about. So I won’t worry about it.” Sherman laid his hand on Kari’s shoulder and gave her a half-hug, and soon each of the gathered companions departed to go get some rest as ordered.
*****
Lord Black’s ebon tower was quiet in the deepening night, and the sound of the marshal’s booted footsteps as they climbed the stairs was the only break in the silence. Kari half-expected that she might be shown to a different room than the one she’d initially met Lord Black in, but Marshal Saracht led her to the tower’s top-most floor once again. He knocked briefly on the door before the Earl’s voice told him to enter, and Kari wondered what Black could be doing in his study so late at night. She hoped perhaps he was meeting with Lord Garant: it would be good to get Markus up to speed on everything going on. She wasn’t sure Lord Black would do so, even if it was in his own best interest.
The marshal opened the door for Kari, but was dismissed before he entered the room himself. He closed the door behind Kari, and the terra-dracon woman was disappointed to find that Kaelin Black was alone. The Earl gestured toward one of the chairs before his desk, and Kari wondered what was occupying his time. She supposed it was possible he didn’t sleep most nights, since half-guardians could go extended periods without food, water, or sleep. Such might have explained his normally dour demeanor, his short temper, and the look of fatigue that only slightly framed his otherwise handsome features. Then again, it was possible the situation here in his city was keeping him from sleeping; Kari found it difficult to get any rest herself.
