by Annie Bellet
Dead of Knight
A Gryphonpike Chronicles Novella by Annie Bellet
Copyright 2013, Annie Bellet
All rights reserved. Published by Doomed Muse Press.
This story is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to [email protected].
Cover designed by Greg Jensen with art by Tom Edwards.
Electronic edition, 2013
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We all know this tale. There once was a beautiful elven princess who lived in a crystal forest in a hidden kingdom far beyond the common worlds. Her voice was unparalleled among the World-singers and her power brought her all she desired.
Until Wrath and Pride wound their way around her heart, turning songs of beauty and creation into songs of death and violence. For her crimes, she was cast out and cursed to live among the lesser creatures, among the elves and men who had forgotten those who sang into existence the earth they squabbled over. Her voice was stolen; her words taken like ember-waves melt footprints from the glowing sands.
Her banishment and silence will end when she has purged her crime by doing one thousand good deeds. So she joined with a ragtag band of adventurers who call themselves the Gryphonpike Companions.
I am that foolish Singer. These are the chronicles of my path home.
* * *
Dead of Knight
The road leading from Ghost Lake toward Fallbarrow was more of a dirt track slicing through the curving grassy hills than a true road. I moved ahead of my companions, taking the opportunity to stretch my legs after the boat ride across the lake from Clearbarrow. We were moving with speed as the daylight faded to dark gold on the blue horizon, hoping to reach the village of Fallbarrow before night closed over us.
Tiny yellow and green birds flitted among the long summer grasses, and the air carried the scent of cattle and ripening grain. I had seen a few distant farmhouses with their tall pyramid barns from the road, the land boundaries marked by rough-hewn stones stacked into precarious pillars. My companions had debated not pushing through to the village and instead trying to seek shelter and purchase a hot meal at one of the farms, but both Rahiel, our pixie-goblin sorceress, and Drake, our roguish human swordsman, didn’t fancy sharing bedding with farm animals. It was probably the first thing they had agreed on in months. So they got their way and we now covered the miles at a brisk march, our breathing and the creaking of armor and fastenings keeping time to our footfalls on the packed dirt track.
The birds warned me first. I had been jogging along, Thorn, my bow, in one hand, my eyes lazily scanning the monotonous golden hills for trouble, when the grass went silent. No birds danced away from the roadside and no yellow and green flickers showed in the grass anymore. The drone of insects dropped away, leaving the world around us filled with unnatural quiet.
Fade, my mist-lynx companion, materialized at my side, coalescing from a cloud of vapor. I stopped moving, glancing back at my companions who had slowed as they, too seemed to notice the sudden stillness. Fade dropped low to the ground, his black-tipped silver ears flat against his head and a low, unhappy growl rumbling in his throat.
“What doofankle pissdip is it now?” Makha asked as she moved up near me. The big human had her shield unslung and her hand on her sword, her dark blue scale mail gleaming in the dying sunlight. The hood on her mail was off her head, leaving her red braids hanging down her back and her blue eyes searching for whatever threatened.
She didn’t expect me to answer, as my curse would never allow even a shrug of speculation, so I assumed the question was directed at the others, or perhaps just to her gods. No one else had a chance to answer her, however.
The ground started to shake, the hills now actually rolling as earth buckled and grasses trembled and broke. Scores of birds and insects took off from the grasses, blotting the sky like low clouds. I dropped to my knees, trying to stay aware of the roiling landscape in case this was some magical precedent of an attack. The very ground seemed to boil like a pot of water left too long on a fire.
Makha dropped down as well, leaning heavily on her shield with a grunted string of curses. Behind us, I heard Azyrin, our half-winter-orc cleric, grunting as he, I assumed, also got low to the shivering ground. Drake cursed far more loudly than any as he crouched beside the cleric. Overhead I saw Rahiel and her mini-unicorn take to the sky, a wand clutched in each of her tiny green fists.
The world roiled and boiled and shivered and shook. I swallowed bile, annoyed with myself for just kneeling here and wishing it would stop instead of taking some action. If something attacked, we were down and sickened with the motion. I could only hope anything else would be similarly disabled.
Then the shaking ceased. For a long breath I stayed low, my muscles still vibrating a little, waiting for the shaking to resume, not yet trusting the cracked earth beneath my feet.
Screaming broke us from our hushed shock. Multiple voices raised in terrified screams and wails, drowned out for a moment by a deep groaning crack like breaking wood. I rose and took off over the hill to my right, running toward the sounds, as much out of concern as out of desire to do something, anything, after the frozen weakness I’d just displayed during the quake.
My companions were on my heels as we crested the second hill. The plumes of dark smoke warned us before we saw the farmhouse. It was the same low wood and stone and earthen structure as those we had passed earlier. Or it would have been, if the quake hadn’t warped and twisted and broken it. The central beam jutted out of the collapsed roof like a snapped bone and flames licked what would burn around the wreckage.
A young human girl, no more than a hand of years old, stood screaming outside the broken home. Two girls barely older than the little one were trying to beat down the rising flames threatening to catch the grasses outside the home. Three older children, none over fifteen, were trying to free something, or someone from under the broken door.
I ran to them. A boy, his dark brown hair matted with soot and sweat to his forehead, turned and yelled something at me as I dropped my bow and leapt over broken stones to help. If he was surprised to see an armored elf springing into the wreckage of his home, the child gave no sign.
“Our da is trapped,” he yelled over the crackling flames.
The door was thick oak and iron. The quake had twisted it inward, the hinges bending and cracking under the strain. I imagined the father had tried to get his children out of the home and found himself trapped as he went through the door last. All I could see of him in the stinging haze and debris was a thick tanned arm and part of what might have been a thigh.
Makha came up beside me as I climbed around the door, looking for a good angle to lift it from.
“Get back, childrens,” she barked at them.
Startled, desperate, they listened, backing off with hope on their tear and soot-stained faces.
Makha and I bent, gripping the door as best we could. I raised my eyes to meet hers, blinking in the smoky air. The heat of the fire ran sweat down under my armor. The blaze would soon find us. Time was running out for the
farmer.
“One, two, lift!” yelled Makha.
Muscles straining, we heaved the door off the broken man beneath and threw it away from us, into the burning remains of the farmhouse. I bent, trying not to see the closed eyes and bent limbs of the big man we’d uncovered, and lifted his shoulders as Makha grabbed his legs. Between us we carried him free of the house and out into the cleared area between house and barn.
The farmer’s eyes snapped open and he reached up with his unmangled arm to grab my wrist in a surprisingly strong hold.
“Please,” his bloody and cracked lips whispered, “keep. . . them safe. Promise… me.”
Though it caused my head to spin and nausea to rise like smoke in my belly, I nodded, risking the wrath of my curse to ease the mind of a dying man.
The breath that sighed from his bleeding body was hot on my face. He did not draw another.
* * *
We got the fire under control by hauling water from the well behind the house. The well was choked with silt and debris where its cover had cracked and fallen in, but we were able to pull buckets of water from it with Rahiel’s help. Azyrin’s healing magic took care of the six children’s minor burns and scrapes, but could do nothing about the stunned grief that reduced the littler ones to shivering, inconsolable sobs and the older three to blank-eyed numbness.
“We need to bury Da,” said the oldest, a boy of fifteen, who had given his name as Alew.
“We will lay him out in the barn tonight, keep him safe from animals,” Azyrin said gently. “Is dark and we are all tired.”
“We best stay in the barn tonight, Alew,” Drake, who had Perl, the youngest girl, in his arms, agreed with Azy. “No telling what the quake might have stirred or if it might happen again.”
The barn was a solid stone and sod pyramid that hadn’t shifted during the quake. We penned off the white cow and two spotted sheep inside and cleared a place to bed down. The musk from the animals and the dusty scent of dried grain and hay was a relief after the wet mush of ash and cloying soot I had been breathing for the last few hours. The animals shifted and lowed as Azyrin and Makha brought the dead farmer into the barn, but Azyrin was right, we couldn’t leave him outside.
We ate a cold supper of hard bread and dried meat and Alew introduced his siblings in the same numb tone. Iera was ten, a plump girl who might have been cheery in more normal times. Her younger sisters were Neth, eight, and tiny Perl, the baby of the family who still refused to let go of Drake once he’d picked her up. She had fallen asleep, wrapped in his cloak, still tucked into his lap. To Drake’s credit, he held her gently, not protesting the damage this must be doing to his gods-may-care attitude.
Alew, at fifteen was the oldest. Cher, at thirteen, had apparently taken over the duties of mother to her siblings when their own died after Perl was born and carried a maturity in her brown eyes beyond what even the grave events of the afternoon had wrought. The final child was Enil, a sour-faced boy of twelve, who reacted to sorrow with anger instead of grief. He had more than once tried to berate Makha and I for not saving their father, but Alew’s hissed warnings and Makha’s hard gaze had finally shut him up. Even now he glared from his spot near the sheep, refusing to stay near the group.
“What sort of a name is Killer?” Alew asked, looking at me with weak curiosity.
“That’s what the beastie calls her, so we do, too,” Makha said with a shrug.
“Will she kill us?” whispered one of the littler girls, Neth, I think.
“No. She’s an adventurer, like us. Killer only kills evil things.” Drake’s voice was soothing and once again I found myself surprised by his kinder side.
I rose from my spot and took my bow and cloak. I need less sleep than humans and still felt strange and edgy from the quake and the subsequent events. Wanting to be alone with my thoughts, I slipped out of the barn’s half-open door into the night.
I found an old portion of stone wall a handful of paces from the barn and settled on it, pulling my cloak around me even though the summer night was mild. What had I promised the dying man? I was not one to break an oath, but did this count as a true one? The children had an aunt in Fallbarrow and my companions had promised to take them with us after we buried the farmer. I hoped that seeing them safely to the village and into the arms of their mother’s family would be enough to fulfill the promise I’d unwittingly made.
That line of thinking satisfied, I turned my thoughts to the quake. There were many places where such things were normal. The Barrows was not such a place, to my knowledge. This land was half swamp, half sod-covered rocky hills, and buried deep beneath all of it were the remains of the dead of an empire terrifying and vast, the Saliidruin.
Centuries of watching the mortal lands in the Hall of Windows, and another decade adventuring through them as I sought to fulfill my one thousand heroic deeds and break my curse, had taught me that nothing good came of strange events like this quake. Not when the land was already riddled with monsters and undead and even worse lurked somewhere beneath.
The sky at least was clear. I stared upward at the myriad of stars, the name of each flickering through my mind as sleep weighed on me heavier than my worries.
Again it was the silence that warned me. Fade appeared in the grass to my left, his head turned toward the dark curve of the hills around us. The crickets and buzzerwings ceased their night songs. My green cat-slit eyes, as sharp at night as Fade’s, picked up movement in the long grass. Something big and quiet slunk toward us.
The wind shifted and the night scents changed from soot and churned earth to the thick smell of old rot and decay, dry yet biting, like a tomb freshly open to the air. The shushing sound of the large body sliding across the ground was soon replaced by a rattle and hiss as the grey shape appeared, winding its way down the nearest hillside.
It was a snake, eight or nine horse lengths in size, with scales like pocked stone and eyes that glinted white-hot like fallen stars. Teeth dripping sharp-smelling ichor caught the starlight as it reared a wide, flat nose, and seemed to scent the air with its flicking forked tongue.
Moving more quietly than I ever had in my life, I slipped off the stone wall and drew an arrow, walking carefully backward toward the barn. The giant snake swung its head in my direction and I drew my bow, planting my feet and taking aim at one of its burning eyes.
Fade sprang as I loosed my shot. The snake flipped its head around toward the leaping mist-lynx, foiling my shot on the bony, or perhaps stony, hide. My arrow would have done more damage if I had turned and shot the sod and stone barn. Fade tried to latch onto one of the coils with his claws and teeth, but had no more luck than my arrow. The snake’s body curled, seeking to trap and crush the big cat between its coils. I tried to cry out as Fade yelped in pain, not quite leaping free of the body before it closed around him.
My curse prevented even a tiny squeak from escaping me and nausea staggered me. I spat bile and nocked another arrow. If this thing had killed my friend, I would tear it scale from disgusting scale and burn whatever was left until it was erased from this world.
Mist rose in a shimmering cloud from between the stone snake’s coils and relief lent strength to my arms as I realized that Fade had managed to vaporize before he was crushed to death. My second arrow fared no better than the first, however, clacking and spinning off into the dark as it was deflected by the bony ridges around the snake’s eyes.
Behind me, I heard movement as my companions, warned by Fade’s yelp of pain, armed up and emerged.
“Stormlord’s eight balls,” Makha shouted. “The hells is that?”
“Deathwyrm,” Azyrin told her as the creature swung its head toward the new sounds.
My worst fears confirmed, I resumed backing up. Deathwyrms were one of the most awful among the undead, pulling souls from bodies with their venom and trapping them within their dark hearts forever. They were very rare, taking the most powerful of necromancy to construct. They didn’t just happen. This thing wa
s created by something far more powerful than it.
Not good news for us. The best way to deal with a deathwyrm was to run from it and hope whoever had built it tired of feeding it power before it killed you.
A high wail rose from the barn as two small human faces poked out and I remembered the six grief-shocked children.
“We have to get them out of here,” Rahiel said as she leapt onto Bill’s back. “I will distract it. We need to get to the town.” The mini-unicorn took to the air, starlight glinting on his golden horn and hooves, his light pink coat almost silvery in the darkness.
The sorceress and the unicorn flew high into the sky, bolts of blue fire springing from the pixie-goblins hands and sizzling into the fetid scales of the deathwyrm. Her bolts had no more effect than my arrows, from what I could see, but the magic did distract and annoy the snake and it turned from us. The deathwyrm coiled high into the air and snapped at Rahiel, but she and Bill were too quick, sliding sideways in the air away from its huge jaws.
“I’ve got Perl,” Drake said, emerging with Alew and the other children. The little girl clung to his arms, her eyes open and a tiny repeated whimper coming from her mouth.
“Cher, take Neth. Iera, Enil, you will follow and take turns carrying Neth.” The shock was gone from Alew’s face, replaced with stubborn determination. His calmness impressed me.
“Rahiel won’t distract it forever,” Drake said. “Go.”
I brought up the rear as we took off away from the barn and burned out farmhouse, keeping an eye on the snake as it danced with Rahiel. The pixie-goblin and mini-unicorn were a darting glint that occasionally burst into bright magics, sometimes visible, sometimes hidden behind the impervious coils of the deathwyrm.
“Killer,” Azyrin fell back and jogged beside me, glancing over his shoulder to take in the fight behind us as well. “Hand me your arrows.”
