Cloak Games: Truth Chain

by Jonathan Moeller

  Well, it wasn’t like a computer could get me out of here.

  I backed out of the parking spot and eased up the main street, looking for wraithwolves. The car wasn’t that loud, but the town was so silent that the engine noise would be audible through the entire valley. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. I eased forward until I reached the street leading to the cathedral, then brought the car to a stop and looked out the driver’s side window.

  There was no sign of the wraithwolves I had killed.

  I supposed they could have dissolved into mist or something after death, but I had been bleeding a lot, and I didn’t see any sign of my blood trail. Granted, I was far away, but that blue house was still there, and the wraithwolves had smashed through the windows and the front door before they killed me.

  Both the windows and the doors were now intact.

  It was like the house had…reset itself or something. Like a video game.

  Was that what this place was? The magical Elven equivalent of some kind of hellish video game?

  Of course, in video games, you didn’t die for real, and those wraithwolves had killed me.

  A flicker of movement caught my eye, and a finger of white mist flowed around a house seven doors down. I cursed, put the car into reverse, and drove back to its parking spot on the main street. I waited, half-expecting to see an army of wraithwolves racing after me.

  But nothing moved.

  After a while, I turned off the engine and thought about what to do.

  The street with the wraithwolves wasn’t an option. I couldn’t fight my way past them, and I couldn’t sneak my way past. I suppose I could try to drive through them, but I wasn’t sure if that would work. The wraithwolves might smash through the windshield, or turn to mist and flow through the cracks between the doors.

  That meant it was time to try another route to the cathedral.

  I got out of the car, putting the key back behind the visor, and headed towards the grain silos and the bronze clock. When I got there, I turned right, keeping a wary eye around me. This street had the look of a county highway with a double yellow stripe running the center. There were businesses on either side, mostly devoted to agricultural concerns – tractor repair & rental, a fertilizer store, a place that sold riding lawn mowers, and so forth. I headed down the street, counting down the blocks in my head. After eight blocks, I turned right again and walked down a residential street towards the dark shape of the cathedral against the hill. That would take me past the street where I had encountered the wraithwolves, and if I was lucky, I could stroll right up to the cathedral’s door.

  Of course, if I was lucky, I wouldn’t have been here.

  I kept trying to look in all directions, my right hand flexing as I held my magic ready. Nothing moved amidst the houses, and I passed an elementary school on the left, a grim-looking one-story building of brown brick. The playground equipment was empty, and the swings hanging from the metal bar swayed in the breeze.

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “Deserted swings swaying in an empty park. That’s not creepy or anything. Way to reach for cliché, Arvalaeon.”

  I started to look away from the swings and then froze.

  For just a moment, I had glimpsed a trio of human forms watching me from a classroom window, but they vanished the moment I tried to focus on them. I stared at the window for a while, my heart racing. There was no way I was going into that school. The narrow corridors and classrooms would provide a dozen different places for someone to ambush me.

  But what were those human shapes?

  I wondered if Arvalaeon was following me. I knew he could cast the Cloaking spell, and if he used it, there was no way I could detect him. Had he been following me around the entire time? Maybe he had been standing there watching as the wraithwolves tore me apart.

  If Arvalaeon was here, there was nothing I could do about him, and no way I could detect him beneath a Cloak spell. It would be smarter to focus on any threats that I could see, like the wraithwolves.

  On the other hand, an invisible threat was often the deadliest.

  I stopped about half a block from the street where the wraithwolves had killed me. I hadn’t seen any wraithwolves, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. I needed something to draw their attention so I could get past them and reach the cathedral. But what? For a minute, I wrestled with the idea of starting a car and holding down the accelerator with a brick or something, and then a simpler idea came to me.

  Thanks to Arvalaeon, I had a far easier way of setting fires at a distance.

  I focused on a white house with a broad front porch, drew together my will and magic, and cast the fire sphere spell.

  The first sphere splashed against the porch railing, and set it aflame. Three more spheres later, I had the entire porch burning merrily. I threw a few spheres into the walls and the roof and caught my breath as my head buzzed a little from casting so many spells at once. These old pre-Conquest frame houses were pretty, but they tended to burn quickly, and soon the house had turned into a torch.

  As I had hoped, that drew the attention of the wraithwolves.

  Fingers of mist flowed across the street, gathering in front of the burning house, and solidified into a half-dozen wraithwolves. They began circling around the house, looking for whatever had caused the fire, and none of them looked in my direction. I gathered my courage and sprinted across the street as fast as I could. I had been afraid that the sound of my footfalls would draw their attention, but they likely could not hear me over the roar of the flames.

  I kept running, watching the streets for any creatures, but nothing moved, though soon a black plume of smoke rose in into the alien sky. If there were any other creatures in the town, the smoke would draw their attention.

  Hopefully, I would be long gone before then.

  The cathedral towered above me, stark against the burning sky. I dashed across the little concrete square, ran up the shallow steps, and yanked open the front doors. Just a short run down the nave to the rose window, a levitation spell, and I would be out of here.

  The fiery light fell into the cathedral as I opened the door, and I froze in horror.

  I suddenly knew what had made those human-shaped outlines I had seen in the windows.

  Anthrophages stood in the cathedral’s narthex, dozens and dozens of anthrophages.

  Right now, they wore their human forms, black-haired, gaunt-faced men in tight black suits. All the creatures looked at me at once, and as they did, they abandoned their human forms and took their true shapes of gaunt, yellow-eyed monsters, their noses like black craters, their mouths filled with fangs, black claws jutting from their fingers and toes like knives and black spikes rising from their spines.

  I had fled across the Shadowlands from a pack of anthrophages, and I had suffered nightmares about that day, nightmares where the anthrophages caught up to me and dragged me into their lightless lairs. I took a frantic step back, pulling together power for a spell, but the anthrophages moved in a rush of gray hides and black fangs, and they slammed into me like a wave, sending me tumbling down the shallow stairs and to the ground, burying me beneath a dogpile.

  I screamed as claws and fangs ripped across me like a bladed net, and blood splashed on the concrete. The anthrophages felt cold, desperately cold, and there were so many of them that I could not fight.

  They tore open the back of my jacket and shirt and jeans and started ripping away mouthfuls of my flesh, dozens of them at once, and the world melted into agony.

  It took me a long time to die.

  ###

  I woke up screaming and thrashing, kicking and clawing and trying to get away from the anthrophages and their snapping mouths that tore at me.

  But they were gone.

  I heaved to my feet, calling magic to my hand and getting ready to fling lightning globes in all directions, but there were no anthrophages in sight. I backed away, and I stumbled into something cold and hard and metallic.

  It was
the bronze monolith of a clock, and the dials were spinning again.

  A clanging came from the device, and the numbers below the dial now read DAY 3.

  I whirled, my heart hammering against my ribs.

  I was back in the parking lot between the gas station and the grain silos, the main street stretching away before me. I reached under my shirt and felt my back, certain I could feel the bite wounds the anthrophages had inflicted.

  But I didn’t feel anything. Only skin, smooth and unbroken.

  I sprinted down the county highway, running past the various agricultural businesses, and stopped at the street leading up to the cathedral. It was a long distance off, but the anthrophages had torn me to pieces and there ought to be massive bloodstains and cracked bones lying on the steps. You couldn’t rip apart someone without making a mess.

  Nothing. The concrete was unmarked. The cathedral doors were closed.

  It was like the whole town had just…reset.

  I stared at the cathedral, breathing hard, trying to think through the fear. It was easy to be afraid because I could remember the anthrophages and the wraithwolves ripping me apart. Granted, both times I had been healed after as if it had never happened.

  But I remembered it. I remembered it with horrible, crystalline clarity. I remembered it so well that thinking about it made me want to scream and run and hide someplace.

  Because it had happened. It wasn’t a dream. It had happened…and thinking about it made panic flutter through me. I had never been in that much pain in my life, and I would do anything to avoid it again.

  But if it happened again, if I was killed again, the whole town would reset. This nasty little domain of Arvalaeon’s would reboot, and the process would begin again. I closed my eyes, my hands curling into fists. I had thought Arvalaeon’s test too simple, and I was right. Evidently, once I escaped from this place, I would be ready to kill Castomyr.

  But how long did I have?

  The clock had said that three days had passed. I supposed that whenever I was killed, the magic powering this place took the rest of the day to reset itself. When it was done, I woke up in the exact place where I had first come here, in the exact position had been lying, and everything I had done within the town had reset.

  That meant I had twenty-seven days left.

  In twenty-seven days, Morvilind would figure out that I had gone missing, and he would stop casting his cure spells on Russell. Which wouldn’t matter, because Castomyr’s ill-advised summoning would have killed Russell and everyone else for hundreds of miles. I wondered if the explosion would kill Morvilind, or if he would see it coming and take himself to safety.

  If we were all going to die, I hoped he would get killed with us.

  But I could indulge in spite later. I pushed aside the acid storm of my emotions and tried to think. I suppose taking a car and driving to the cathedral would be the best way to avoid the wraithwolves, but then I had the problem of the anthrophages in the narthex.

  Could I ram a car through the doors and plow through the anthrophages that way? The doors were big enough that I could get a car through them, and maybe even a truck. But the doors were thick, and driving a car into them might be like driving a car into a bridge support column. If I hit the doors with enough speed, I might punch right through and into the nave of the cathedral proper.

  Or I might get killed. I wasn’t sure if dying in a car crash would be more or less painful than getting torn apart, and I didn’t want to find out. I supposed if I was lucky, I would be only badly injured, and then the anthrophages could rip me apart at their leisure.

  Then another thought occurred to me.

  Windows had two sides.

  What if I circled around the rear of the cathedral and broke the rose window from the back? If the anthrophages were waiting for me inside the narthex, that would let me bypass them entirely. In fact, what if I circled the town and went through the wooded hills? That might let me avoid the wraithwolves and whatever other nasty creatures Arvalaeon had stashed away in the town.

  It would also lead me to whatever nasty creatures he had stashed away in the woods.

  But it wasn’t like I had a lot of choices. I had to do something, and hiding and waiting for someone to rescue me wasn’t an option.

  I started forward, heading further down the county road. Ahead the road led into a gap in the hills, but the little valley vanished behind a wall of rippling gray mist. I wondered what would happen if I walked into the mist and decided I didn’t want to find out.

  Instead, I turned towards the hills encircling the town.

  It was slow going. Trees covered the slopes of the hills, and the angle was steep and the footing uneven. I don’t know a lot about forests, but the trees looked old, and here and there fallen trees lay on the ground, their sides mantled in gray lichen. I made my way along step by step, my ears straining for the sound of anyone approaching, my eyes sweeping the trees and the town below. Walking through the forest was an unsettling experience. Some of it was the alien sky, obviously, and the silent town and the wall of rippling mist I could sometimes see above the trees. The dim, fiery light threw tangled shadows everywhere, making it look as if the forest was about to burn, even though the trees seemed healthy.

  I realized the rest of it a moment later.

  The forest was too quiet. I was a city girl. I didn’t know anything about nature. But whenever I had been out in the wilderness, I had been able to see and hear birds and animals. There had been the constant buzz of insects in the summer. Maybe that was a small mercy. Arvalaeon’s twisted little training ground didn’t have mosquitoes, at least. I wondered if there had ever been animals here.

  Maybe the wraithwolves had eaten them all.

  It took me longer to make my way along the hillside than it had walking through the town’s streets. My heart sped up when I passed the street where the wraithwolves had killed me, but I saw no sign of movement in the houses.

  I circled through the hills behind the cathedral. The stained-glass windows in the sides of the huge building had changed yet again. This time they showed scenes of me with Riordan, of our first kiss at Paul McCade’s banquet, or the first time I had kissed him in earnest at my apartment. Other windows showed the various dates we had gone on together. I had never seen a gun range portrayed in stained glass, but I had to admit that both Riordan and I looked pretty good when stylized.

  I stared at Riordan’s image for a moment, heartsick.

  If I failed, he might die, too.

  He traveled around the world doing the work of the Family of the Shadow Hunters, and it was possible he would be within the range of Castomyr’s folly. I desperately wanted to see Riordan again. I wanted him to burst out from behind a tree and save me. He had done that several times during that mess with the Nihlus Stone and Venomhold.

  But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. If I was going to get out of here, I would have to do it myself.

  At that moment, though…I really, really wished that I had slept with Riordan when I had the chance. I had been too guarded, too paranoid, too frightened of getting hurt.

  I didn’t want to die with my only lover having been a wannabe mass murderer like Nicholas freaking Connor.

  I eased my way down the slope, moving closer to the cathedral. I considered levitating up and breaking into the cathedral through the stained-glass windows, but I discarded the idea. For one, the windows were obviously magical, and if I tried to break them, they might explode or something. For that matter, I knew there were dozens of anthrophages in the cathedral’s narthex, and I couldn’t think of a quiet way to break the window. If I broke through one of the windows, they would hear the falling glass, and they would come for me. If they came fast enough, I would be trapped in the window like a cat chased up a tree by a pack of wild dogs, and they would need only wait until hunger and thirst made me fall.

  Yeah. I didn’t like that plan.

  At last, I circled to the back of the cathedral and stopped i
n surprise.

  I swore several times.

  The back wall of the cathedral was blank.

  Like, it wasn’t completely blank. There were gargoyles and buttresses and arches and all the other architectural stuff you see on cathedrals. But the spot where the rose window should have been was blank stone. That meant the window was visible from within the cathedral, but I couldn’t access it from this side.

  That, in turn, meant I was going to need to find a way past those anthrophages.

  I stepped back, neck craned as I gazed at the cathedral. I wondered if I could levitate up to the roof and find a way into the interior from there. Maybe there was a trapdoor or something in one of the towers.

  A chittering noise caught my attention.

  I cursed, turned, and scanned the trees. I didn’t see anything moving, but again I heard the chittering sound, accompanied by the rustle of something moving through the undergrowth.

  The noises were coming right at me.

  I focused my will, summoned magical power, and cast the Cloak spell.

  I vanished from sight, from all senses physical or magical save for touch. I could hold a Cloak spell in place for several moments before reaching exhaustion, though I could not move while Cloaked. I could move my arms a bit while Cloaked, an ability gained only after years of practice, but I could not move my legs or feet.

  Maybe it would have been a better to run for it. But I didn’t know what was making that noise. It was possible it was some horror from the Shadowlands, and it was just as likely that it would be faster than me. Better to wait it out behind the Cloak spell and hope that it moved on without noticing me, and then to ease my way back to the town and think of a better plan.

  A few seconds later the source of the sound came into sight.

  It was one of the ugliest damned things I had ever seen.