Grimbald hissed something over his shoulder, but the words were meaningless. Grim looked at him with mounting concern, but Walter waved him off. He struggled to keep himself upright, staggering on behind. The hallway filled with the heat of a smith’s furnace and the burning stench of sulfur. He almost walked into Grimbald, but he’d moved on and Walter thudded into the wall. He snorted in air that felt all too warm. Grimbald’s powerful arms raised him up from the ground. He turned to look inside the cavern.
The world snapped into focus for a brief moment. The cavern beyond was a massive demon’s mouth with stalactites for teeth. Six black columns converged up the center, high into the swirling shadows above. At the bottoms of the columns, blood-red fires burned. The fires crackled and popped, burning their images into Walter’s watery eyes. Black smoke and exploding sparks spilled from the gaping mouths of six furnaces. Clumps of sticky iron dripped from ceramic containers, speckling the ground with hot embers. Smelted metal rolled through narrow channels on the dark stone floor.
The demon’s mouth was filled with flitting shadows. Fires winked and clawed feet scraped along the floor’s polished stone. The air was hot, humid, and doubled in weight. The beasts worked tirelessly at the furnaces, unaware of their intrusion. Chisels clanged on iron, hammers beat into shields, swords hissed on barrels of water. Walter caught the face of a Cerumal examining a sword, looking it up and down like a prized possession. The gibbering and squawking of Cerumal in the darkness beyond penetrated his mental haze.
“Fuck. Fuck. Shit,” Grimbald whispered beside him. He went on, saying more Walter couldn’t comprehend.
On one side of the room were at least fifty weapon racks, overfilled with gleaming instruments of death, reflecting the anger of the fires. Walter’s jaw hung slack and he blinked and blinked, trying to clear the water from his eyes.
Grimbald said something, but all Walter heard was the clanging of steel. He felt as if he’d slipped back into the Shadow Realm, maybe catching a glimpse of the closest thing to it in this realm. His breath came in ragged gasps and his sinuses burned with smoke. He wasn’t sure when he’d tugged on the Dragon, but welcomed its violence like an old lover. He took a sure step forward, staring at them, his eye pulsing with fire. Veins and tendons leaped from his forearms and muscles tightened.
“Stay,” he managed to croak to Grimbald in a second of clarity. A second in which he likely saved the man’s life for a second time.
His eye bulged and his jaw clamped down. His teeth felt as if they were on the verge of cracking. He wasn’t sure when he started moving. The mouth of a furnace yawned open and his flaming hand rose up, clawing around the back of a leathery skinned neck. The Cerumal shrieked, its eyes going wide. A mad grin touched Walter’s lips. His arm hammered down, smashing the Cerumal’s maw onto an anvil. Blood sprayed from its nose and hissed on the molten iron in the channel below. Walter flicked his fingers and a telekinetic push of the Phoenix sent the beast inside the furnace, shrieking as it cooked.
Shapes turned, squawked and shrieked to each other in their hideous language. A few wisely went for the weapon racks, unaware of who their foe was. Their names were already spoken for. Their blood was his for the releasing. A shape ran for him, something gleaming in its hand. A sword of fire sprang to life from Walter’s stump. He lunged forward, rammed it through its gut and jerked the sword up, splitting the creature in half from stomach to gray tufts of hair. Its blood sprayed over Walter’s face, bathing him in fresh warpaint.
He laughed and laughed, dousing the few that had gone for weapons in an angry conflagration. They would pay for what they did to him. They would know the taste of pain. Something jumped on his back, ramming steel in and out of his ribs, pulsing with blue light. He reached around his back with a new found strength, wound his fingers into its leather apron and hoisted the beast onto his shoulder. Its dagger clattered onto the stone below. Its legs squirmed and its claws raked his face, spilling blood into his mouth. He walked it over to a barrel and dashed its head against the iron reinforced side. Its head cracked apart with a pop, spilling brain matter onto the ground.
He heard a gibbering from behind a crate and waited, a fireball burning the air at his side. The Cerumal finally found its courage and leaped over from the other side, its heavy maul raised up in two hands. Walter blinked and the fireball collided with its face, turning its head into charring flesh and sending its body flopping like a doll onto the hot floor. He gasped as pain lanced through his side. He’d been run through with a spear, the end poking out.
He grinned and the Cerumal’s scowling lip twitched. He hacked through the wooden haft and his fist hammered into the beast’s jaw. He moaned and let the sword puff away. He pulled the end of the spear out the way it had gone in, sticky with his blood. He growled, hurled the broken spear and it thudded into the Cerumal’s chest. The Cerumal squawked, stumbled back a few steps, then screamed when it fell into a container of molten iron.
How long had they lived here? Were these the beasts that had raided Breden? They were so close to his home, too close. What were they doing here? Why would they do this? Questions came and would be answered with blood. A gleaming porcupine of blades surrounded him, jabbing the air and working to contain him. He let them circle him, for it would make the killing easier. He let them think they had the upper hand now, but they didn’t know who he was, what he could do, what he had seen. The madness fueling him.
They squawked with a mad fervor at their mock victory. Walter couldn’t help but let his mad grin spread across his face, showing all his teeth. Stormcaller sparked to life and reflected from its polished finish the flickering of the fires. Its fiery tendrils slapped at the stone floor, each tendril eager to deliver death. Walter held his arm up and Stormcaller’s lashes whirled through the smoking air. At his stump came his sword of fire, almost as long as a man. At its edge, he saw fading Dragons within the flames, snapping at the air with vicious mouths.
The beasts came together. Spears stabbed at him, blades cut, and hammers raised up to flatten his bones. He worked through them in graceful arcs, felt their cuts and introduced them to the Dragon’s touch. The Phoenix flashed in his body, knitted his wounds and made him calm as the eye of the storm. Dark streaks flashed through the air, splashed onto walls and spread across the floor. He ducked to avoid a spear thrust, whirled with Stormcaller. A leg and an arm floated in the air, slow as a dandelion seed on a summer’s breeze. Then came a wrist, a spinning sword, then a split shield.
The shadows of the great forges were dispelled by the trails left by Stormcaller and the Dragon sword. He twisted to avoid a gleaming point and felt another enter through his back. A Cerumal’s ashen head spun around in the air, spraying out with spurts of blood. Another head hung in the air as the body below it crumbled to the floor. He slowly exhaled and sliced through a midsection, dumping a Cerumal’s innards onto the body of his dead brethren. He closed his eye when the blood came spraying onto his face. His throat cracked with his booming laughter, reminding him of a demon in the Shadow Realm. The absurdity of that place sent his laughter up an octave, a madman’s shrieking in his ears.
A lash snared his arm and jerked his stump towards a pair of glowing eyes. He sniffed and a Phoenix portal, bright as the sun, tore the creature into clean sections from shoulder to hip. When the portal faded, the halves squelched apart, the lash going as limp as a noodle. He cracked Stormcaller and waited for the next glint of a blade. Disappointingly, none came.
“Done already?” he muttered and pressed a hand to his beating temples. No, there were more cowering in the Shadows. He sniffed and staggered to them. He could feel their fear, sense their putrid horror in the air. He felt a warm wetness trail around his jaw. Blood. His or theirs? He wasn’t sure whether or to laugh or cry. He’d been doing a mix of both, he reckoned.
“Walter?” He heard Grimbald’s voice echo from behind, as if from underwater.
Fireballs sprung up around his head and illuminated his path. A stocky
Cerumal sprinted out from the dark, screaming and armed with a smith’s hammer. He sent the fireballs for its legs, blowing them apart at the knees. The beast shrieked and stumbled onto broken legs. It collapsed into a molten channel and rolled over, roaring with agony.
He sucked in the iron air, letting it burn every part of him. Burning and healing, burning and healing. This is why he lived. His boot rose up and slammed down onto the Cerumal’s head, cutting the air with a crack.
He narrowed his eye at the shallow breathing hiding in the shadows. “Come now, make this quick for the both of us. Only one of us will be leaving here… think we know who it’s going to be at this point,” Walter snorted. The Cerumal barked and skittered along the back wall, talons rasping on stone. Walter saw it and opened a portal in front of it and putting the exit before him. The creature stumbled out of the portal and bounced off his chest with a scream, eyes wide with terror. Walter’s laughter was thunder. He rammed his stump into its neck and wrapped his hand around its muscular throat. He put one leg behind its ankle and swept its feet out, smashing it to the ground. It thudded and landed on its back.
He followed the Cerumal’s treacherous path to the ground. His fingers dug into its neck, fingernails welling out with ellipses of blood. Its legs flailed and gray teeth clacked on the air as it tried to bite him. “Die!” he spat and grinned back. He raised its neck up and smashed it into the stone floor. The Cerumal wheezed and black veins sprouted from its cheeks. Walter smashed its head again and again. He smashed until its head was wet and slapping against the hot stone.
His arms were flaring with the healing light of the Phoenix. It had apparently cut his forearm into ribbons while he beat its skull. If he hadn’t had the Phoenix, he’d have been forced to let go due to the non-functioning tissue. The Cerumal stopped moving and Walter released his grip, fingers sore. He heaved a breath and slid a fiery dagger from his stump through its chest, just to be sure. The creature’s blood sizzled on the tireless flames when he withdrew it. He blinked at his destruction. It lay there motionless. Its neck was crushed flat on one side, blood pooled under its head, and a charred hole smoked on its chest.
They had to learn to fear him, he told himself.
He started to stand and the world swayed. He plopped back onto the ground, dizzy, sweaty and once again covered in the blood of demons. “Shit,” he breathed and sloughed globs of blood from his brow. A congealing strand clung to his fingers and he flicked it off with disgust. He shook his head, laughed at himself. How had he gone from farmer to mass murder? Would he become a demon when he died?
“Life is strange. Unpredictable,” he whispered to himself.
“You still with me?” Grimbald came up to him, his axe dripping with dark liquid. His burnished armor was streaked from shoulders to legs. “What the hell happened?” He grabbed an oily rag from the edge of an anvil and used it to wipe down Corpsemaker.
Walter nodded and caught a second rag Grimbald tossed him. “I think so. When we fight them I… I tend to lose myself sometimes.” He wiped his face with the rag reeking of Death Spawn. “This anger, terrible rage takes me over. Just wanted to make sure I didn’t hurt anyone. Didn’t have any more accidents.”
“Well. I appreciate the concern, but couldn’t let you have all the fun. That’s all of them I think,” Grimbald peered around. The furnaces softly hissed. A few loose stones dislodged from the ceiling above, tinkling against the iron piping trailing up into eternity. “Can’t believe this was down here. Smart bastards.”
“Me either. Makes sense, though. They’d have to hide this sort of operation somewhere. What better place than underground?”
Grimbald looked down at him, his blue eyes shining with fire. He offered his hand and Walter took it, springing to his feet with the force of Grimbald’s pull. Walter swallowed at all the gore. Not because it bothered him, but because his throat was dry. The part of him that should’ve felt something was gone. Cut out of him. Left to rot in the Shadow Realm.
Grimbald’s eyes grew hard at the mess. “Dirty work.”
“Mhm.” Walter did his best to brush off some of the clumping mix of soot and blood from his shirt and cloak. “Dark work.”
“Let’s have a look around. We — er, you — should destroy these when we’re ready to leave. Make it harder for them to rebuild.” Grimbald gestured at the columns winding up into the shadows above.
“You read my mind. This smoke is killing me; let’s make it quick.” Walter balled up his cloak and pressed it against his face to filter out some of the smoke. He started for the back of the chamber and Grimbald followed beside him. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, just a few scratches. Got five of them. Heh, not so tough without their armor.”
Walter nodded, reached out with his stump and gave Grimbald a friendly nudge. “Good, good. Their armor gives them strength, maybe they lose it when they’re not wearing it.”
Grimbald grunted. “Must be… look another tunnel at the back.”
“I see it,” Walter said. A pit of darkness spread open at the back of the cavern, swallowing the dim light of the furnaces. Walter sparked balls of fire to life as they drew closer. The path seemed to trail deeper into the earth and muddy boot prints lined the floor into the expansive cavern.
“Lot of footprints,” Grimbald grunted.
Realization struck him like waking to a bucket of cold water in the face. “This… this was how the Death Spawn traveled the realm without being noticed! How else could they have gone from the Silver Tower to here without anyone knowing? This tunnel must run under the whole of the damned realm.”
“Wait! Didn’t you, or was it Nyset?” His eyebrows furrowed in concentration. “Anyway, didn’t you say you thought Asebor or the Wretched were using portals to move ‘em?”
“That was just a theory. But this makes more sense. It would take an incredible amount of power, not to mention risk, to transport that many soldiers through portals.”
“Mm. Not following you,” Grimbald frowned.
Walter squatted down, brushing a boot print with his fingers. “Looks fresh. When a living being moves through a Phoenix portal, it’s relatively safe in short distances, according to Baylan.” They shared sideways smiles at the mention of his name. Walter exhaled heavily and continued. “As the distance increases, so does the risk of disfigurement on the other side, and it increases exponentially. My guess would be… even with Asebor’s level of power, it wouldn’t be a safe method to move his troops.”
“So this might not be the only one. Maybe there’s a whole group of tunnels with caves for exits.” Grimbald scratched at the beginnings of a beard. Flecks of blood fell onto his chest plate.
“Shit, that’s very possible. I hadn’t thought of that.” Walter rose up.
“Wait.” Grimbald shook his head and raised his palms. “Didn’t the Falcon fight the Death Spawn in this part of the realm? We were there when they returned to Midgaard. They came back with almost half the battalion. So, they had to have won, right?”
Walter nodded, itchy to get out of this shit hole. “They did. The raid on Breden was recent, only a week or so ago given the state of decay of the bodies.”
Grimbald twisted his torso around from side to side and winced. “Right… sorry, but how in the Phoenix do you know so much about dead bodies?”
Walter swallowed. “My mother. She was a surgeon before she met my father. Filled in for the Breden surgeon when he traveled. She used to take me with her and I wanted to learn. Seemed like a useful thing to know.”
“Ah, I knew that. That’s how you knew how to fix my shoulder after the battle of Dressna.”
“Mhm,” Walter nodded, uncorked his waterskin with his teeth and took a mighty glug. It was incredible how easy it was to take water for granted when you didn’t have any. He, fortunately, had been prepared. He offered it to Grimbald, who accepted. “The Death Spawn must’ve re-grouped in the Tower… marched through this fucking tunnel here, now making their way to the Great Retr
eat.”
“We should follow it, see where it goes,” Grimbald said.
“We should, but we don’t have time. Need to intercept them at the Great Retreat, and we’ve already lost too much time.”
Grimbald grunted with displeasure. “Alright. Now what? Can you close this tunnel up, at least?” Grimbald looked up at the archway and brushed dust from his bald head.
“I think so. Why don’t you start heading back? If this buries me, it’ll only be one of us.”
Grimbald sighed. “I’ll wait over here, in the middle of the furnaces where it’s warm. I would say I’d start destroying weapons too, but think you’d be better at that than me. Don’t die on me again; don’t want to wait two weeks for you to return.” He grinned.
Tendrils of ice speared up Walter’s back at the thought of returning to the Shadow Realm. Grimbald’s boots scraped as he strode away to safety. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to survive it again.
The Shadow god wanted him back. He was never supposed to escape in the first place. Was his mother still alive there? Had he killed Asebor then? Doubtful. What was to come of the Shadow princess? He gritted his teeth at the memory of the demons defiling his mother. He remembered her eyes, pleading for mercy. Why was the Shadow princess so important? There were so many unanswered questions.
He snorted and embraced the Dragon, staring up at the archway over the tunnel. He narrowed his eye and imagined a fireball as big as a hay bale. When he opened his eye, he gasped.
There was a burning meteor of fire hissing in the air, waiting to unleash its infernal chaos. He pushed with his arms and conjured a Phoenix shield around himself. The meteor collided with the top of the archway and released a deafening roar. Dust, stone shards, and fragments filled the air, blotting out the light of the furnaces. Walter held his breath and braced himself against the stones thumping against the shield. His ears were lanced with pain from the crushing noise. It felt like someone had stuck a nail inside his eardrums. Grimbald, had he protected his ears? The light the Phoenix worked to restore his hearing and seal up his ruptured eardrums. He should have thought this through a bit more.
A New Light (The Age of Dawn Book 5) Page 13
