by K L Reinhart
The figure that the magical, cursed blood was forming the body of was a vast humanoid figure, silent and motionless for now, but soon, it would start to move.
The blood-borne figure towered easily ten or twelve feet tall, with powerful limbs that were thick and corded with sinews and muscles.
And from the top of its head, there spread two large, backwards-curving horns.
“Gatekeeper.” The Hexan welcomed the being who was also the Fifth and final Baleful Sign, and the herald of the armies of the Ungol invasion.
“Gatekeeper!” The Hexan repeated, holding the Ungol Blade higher toward it. This was why he had needed the Ungol Blade. He had managed to do something that no other human had dared to do. He had outwitted Ung’olut, the Queen of a Thousand Tears.
“Gatekeeper!” the Hexan shouted a third and final time. Twin orbs of flame to suddenly opened in the monstrous thing. It blinked as it looked around to see who had woke him.
“I hold the Ungol Blade, which released you. I have freed you. I am the Hexan. Whom do you serve?” the human sorcerer announced the final question that he had to ask before the world ended. The Hexan had found a way to use the Ungol Blade’s powers in the very opening of the Blood Gate, and the creation of the Gatekeeper. So that meant that the Gatekeeper should be irrevocably tied to his will, not Ung’olut’s.
“Whom do you serve?!” the Hexan demanded once again.
The flaming demon-orbs of the thing’s eyes flared brightly.
“YOU. I SERVE YOU.” the Gatekeeper finally spoke.
Blood Gate
Dagger of the World, Book 6
Prologue: In the Dark, Running
The man’s boots of padded canvas crunched, kicking sprays of snow behind him as he ran.
His route ahead should have been simple. Brother Rendall had, after all, been running this path of rock and ice many times in the sixteen years that he had been a member of the frozen community at the top of the world—the order of austere monks known only as the Enclave to the rest of the races of the world. Up here, the Black Keep that was their home clutched to the Cliffs of Mourn at the foot of the overbearing Tartaruk Mountains, and here they had studied, they had prepared, and they had waited.
But now the time had come, hadn’t it? Brother Rendall paused in his fast pace only to unhook the safety-strap that secured the blade and scabbard of his short sword. He was close; he could feel it in the air.
Brother Rendall’s path should have been simple, but one thing complicated it—the dark.
The wall of night spread out around his steps like an inky fog. It wasn’t natural, and it wasn’t night-time in the foothills of the Tartaruks. Instead, this darkness was seeping into the world from between the arms of the mountains like a wave. Not only that, but the night was also misty, so the Brother was capable of seeing a few feet around himself in all directions, but anything further was quickly swallowed by this shade.
It was the Fourth Baleful Sign, Rendall knew. Despite the fact that he had studied the Enclave’s holy script, the Book of Corrections, extensively and had devoted his life to the Path of Pain that it contained—the young man still shivered in trepidation.
The Baleful Signs were the heralds of the opening of the Blood Gate, the cosmic portal created two millennia ago by the sorcerer-kings of the Elves. Every five hundred years or so, the Blood Gate opened.
Which means, the part of Rendall’s mind which was cold, calm, and stern thought, that every five hundred years or so, the civilizations of the world of Midhara have to fight for their lives. Whole histories and peoples were wiped out during these times. Whole cultures extinguished under the hordes of hellish creatures, mutant things, and demon armies that came crawling and marching through the Blood Gate.
And every time that the Blood Gate was about to open—when this world of Midhara and the demon-world of the Ungol aligned—it was preceded by the Five Baleful Signs.
The Ungol-light. Brother Rendall listed the number of signs in his head as his steps slowed in the dark. Perhaps he was attempting to recalculate them, hoping to be proved wrong.
“Can’t even see it—” He flickered his brown eyes upwards to where the skies would be bruised with the sickly purple-and-red that spread from the Blood Gate itself.
The Plague of Monsters. There was no denying that one. Brother Rendall had stood on the walls of the Black Keep, forcing his arms to rise and fall against the winged serpents that had shot out of the North.
The Plague of the Blood Sickness. Again, Rendall couldn’t deny that foul, shivering, and blood-coughing illness that had seized the North. He had seen too many of his colleagues die to ignore it.
“And now this—” Rendall let out a low groan. The Plague of Darkness. The Fourth Baleful Sign, leaving just one left: the Arrival of the Gatekeeper, which signaled the opening of the Blood Gate itself.
For a brief moment, Rendall’s forward steps hesitated. He wondered what the use was of his mission, to travel northwards to the interior of the Tartaruk expanse, and there to gather what clues he could about when the Blood Gate would open.
“And what under the stars am I supposed to do if it has already opened?” Rendall felt not a little frustration. It wasn’t precisely fear—although he would be an idiot to deny that feeling in the bottom of his belly—as the Path of Pain taught that every hardship was a lesson. Fear was not something to be avoided, then, but instead greeted as a friend.
“Ixcht . . .” Rendall swore. He didn’t feel very friendly to the rising awareness that he was one, lone human, about to walk into what could be an army from hell itself.
“Hsst!” A sound came from the darkness. A sound that was not the usual skitter of mountain hare or fall of a snow-ledge.
A change came over the Brother of the Enclave as his decades of training kicked in. One booted foot slid backwards, ready to steady his weight or kick out in the event of any attack. His leading hand drew the short sword in a smooth flourish as the other moved to one of his leather pouches, knowing that it contained smaller wraps of Blind-Eye and Choke-Powder.
Not that it’ll do much good against an Ungolian demon horde, the Brother Rendall had a second to think. A lighter patch of darkness moved, off to one side.
Rendall drew back his blade—
“Fool of a human!” an imperious voice hissed out of the dark as a tall lithe shape landed gracefully on the balls of two feet.
It was an elf.
The Brother of the Enclave blinked but made no move. Although the Elves of the nearby wild and deep Everdell Forest—the Second Family of the Elves, according to lore—were technically not enemies to the Black Keep, Rendall didn’t think they had ever particularly been allies, either.
“If I had wanted to kill you, Brother, I would have done so a quarter of a league ago, when I first heard your huffing and wheezing on the Ice Path!” the elf said piously. She had hair that was like pale moonlight, bound into a fierce knot on the back of her head. Her skin was so pale as to be almost ethereal, and her eyes were wide and seemed to glimmer with their own radiance.
Pointies, Rendall thought with another internal shudder. Elves gave him the creeps. As if they were more creatures of the distant Upper World of the Aesther, made of dream-stuff and starlight, rather than the rocks and clay of the Midhara.
But, for all of her strangeness, this elf was clearly of this world. She wore dull tans and browns in the wrapping-like weaves of the jerkin and trews of her kind. At her belt were her own assorted pouches and small blades and a coil of rope. She wore no cloak, and Rendall wondered if her kind felt the cold at all.
“Oh. Taken a vow of silence as well, have you?” The elf warrior slowly straightened up, one hand easing the string of her short bow—but keeping the long, Silverwood arrow in place, Rendall noticed.
“What are you doing here?” Rendall asked, as his mind raced. Is she a spy? Why is she out of the Everdell? Could she be working for the Hexan—the rumored sorcerer who was helping to open the Blood Gate f
or their own diabolical schemes?
“No one owns the Ice Path,” the elf warrior scoffed, calling the track that crossed the foothills and the arms of the sharp mountains by a different name than the one that Rendall knew it by. “Just as no one owns the Tartaruks, either,” the warrior said with a raised proud chin. “But we all have something to lose when the Blood Gate opens.”
“So, the Second Family sent you as a scout, then?” Rendall said, still not lowering his drawn-back blade, or the hand near his belt-pouch, fingers clutching a sachet of Blind-Eye.
“Ugh.” The elf warrior seemed to lose interest in him, shaking her head. “I have no time for these games. The Plague of Darkness is upon us, and we stand here wondering who to trust in a world that is about to fall to fire and ruin!”
That, at least, was something that Rendall could believe, and his hand started to lower as he stood up a little straighter—
“Hyurk!” The elf warrior was lifted bodily into the air, suddenly and without warning. She just had enough time to gasp before she was flung into the darkness by thin tendrils of glistening red.
What!? Rendall had time to seize the sachet of Blind-Eye, bringing it back to hurl forwards—just as he saw what was at the end of those tendrils that looked the color of clotting blood.
The rest of the creature that stepped out of the darkness on legs like tree-limbs was colored the same dark ruby. Rendall’s body moved instinctively to complete his overhand throw, even as his mind finally caught up with the rest of him.
The creature was huge. Too big for any weapon that he could use against it.
It stood easily ten feet tall and was humanoid, with armor and sinew and muscle all fashioned out of the same ruddy black substance. The tendrils that it had used to seize and fling the elf warrior into the night wriggled and snapped back into the talons at the end of the thing’s giant clawed hands.
It was a demon. It had two huge backward-curling horns, a face like a knot of teeth, and two tiny eyes like burning coals.
“Oh—” Rendall had a chance to say, just as the sachet of flung Blind-Eye struck across the thing’s chest, releasing a cloud of the peppery white substance. The creature swiped with its other arm, as more tendrils shot outwards from its talons toward the Brother of the Enclave.
“Skkzzkt!” The thing convulsed and roared, as some of the Blind-Eye caught the creature’s face. It shook its shoulders and head at the same time as its tentacles hit Brother Rendall.
“Ach!” The Brother felt a biting sensation as the tentacles found purchase, the crimson hardened barbs on the end catching at his body and spinning him to the ground.
The creature roared in frustration at the scratching burning annoyance that Rendall had thrown at him. It took out its vengeance quickly and deliberately, jumping forward to slam a great, clawed foot onto the prone form of the struggling human.
And that, sadly, was the sudden and painful end of Brother Rendall of the Enclave. Although his mission had ended with his life, he had the dubious honor of being the first human in all of the Middle World of Midhara to see, fight, and die facing the Gatekeeper of the Blood Gate.
Perhaps, if Brother Rendall had known what was about to come next, he might have considered himself lucky. The Fifth Baleful Sign had arrived, and with it, the end of the world.
1
The Sending
“Bad,” said the thunderous voice of Vorg the Unwanted, the large orc beside Terak.
Both Vorg and Terak were crouched on a mountainous outcrop that overlooked the Plains of Ara, having climbed the torturous paths up from Grom’s lair with the others of their company, the young human Lord Falan of Brecha and the sole-remaining guard of Falan’s retinue.
It was nighttime over the Southlands of the world, but that did not mean that it was entirely dark. The Second Moon was high in the starlit skies, turning the baked sands and stunted trees of the plains into a surreal, gray-silver landscape.
Like the Tartaruk snow-plains, the elf thought briefly, remembering the only place that he had ever called home, after being handed over to the Enclave of the Black Keep as a babe. Terak had been one of the slightest of his peers, and the only elf ever to be trained in the ways of Pain.
His sharp eyes were drawn to the distant red glows on the horizon, however. They were ruddy coals in the night that were far too large to be the campfires of the aggressive tribes who lived out here.
“Araxia?” Terak breathed, thinking of the southern city that he had seen fall to fire and sorcery—and to Vorg’s brethren.
The Unwanted harrumphed and looked askance at the strange southern stars that Terak could not read.
“No.” Vorg was never an orc of many words, and Terak thought that was all that he was going to get out of him, until Vorg pointed at a spot on the eastern horizon that was still blank. “That would be Araxia. She’s dark now.”
Now that the orcs and their floating island—the War Burg—had their fill of chaos and pillage, they had probably moved on to continue their bloody crusade.
“Too bad for these.” Vorg shrugged at the distant fires of burning southern cities or towns—presumably the latest targets for Vorg’s kin, who had swept out of the South just this summer, fanatically following their human-sorcerer leader, the Hexan.
“Grom thinks it’s bad,” Vorg said, turning toward the side of their outcrop that was as yet untouched by the light of the Second Moon. Even Terak’s sharp eyes couldn’t make out which of the rocky shadows was in fact the crouched body of the First Creature that they had encountered, far below.
But Terak knew he was there, all the same. Some animal sense perhaps, or some elvish trick that his native family had never taught him but was inherent in his blood, warned him of the nearness of a massive, impossibly large beast.
“Grom speaks to you?” Falan breathed, emerging from the shadows with a face that was almost as pale as Terak’s anemic hue. The young Lord King of the Northern Kingdom of Brecha had changed, Terak saw. He had changed a lot since the time that Terak had saved the cobbled streets of his inherited city. The man had also changed since he had flown here to the South, ostensibly on a mission to ask for aid from the Araxians against the opening of the distant Blood Gate.
Only to find Araxia burning, Terak thought, seeing how Falan’s cheeks and eyes looked a little sunken, though his eyes burned with a fierce intensity. The elf wondered what these trials had meant to the man, a newly minted king on a quest to beg and barter for aid, only to find that everywhere else in the world was doomed—and his people would be the first to fall.
“Grom can speak to anyone,” Vorg answered Falan’s question in a tone that said it was unimportant. “But me and Grom, we have an understanding . . .”
Of that, I am very glad, Terak thought fervently. At least someone in their party had got the ear of the First Creature, perhaps the last of his mighty kind.
“Grom says it’s almost here. The other world. The Ungol,” Vorg said dourly, turning to look directly toward the northern stars.
Or, where the northern stars should be, Terak thought. The northern hemisphere had a thick line of shadow, like a cloud, obscuring their vision. Does the North always look like that from here? Terak wondered, just as his concentration was broken by a sudden, bright, rising plume of pink-white fire from further down in the wooded foothills of Grom’s Lair.
“What is that!?” Terak shot to his feet, standing on the very edge of the outcrop. The plume continued to burn, and he thought it must easily be ten or twenty times his height.
“That’s a Sending!” Lord Falan said, his bright eyes catching Terak for a moment in a look that remembered what Terak was. Not just the only elf to be trained at the frozen Enclave community as an assassin—but also a null, a misfit accident that shouldn’t even exist in this world. He had no natural magic, nor the cantrips or enchantments that every other human, elf, orc, and even dwarf had in Midhara.
“It’s a type of alarm call. A magical call for help,” Falan sai
d, balling his fists in agitation. Despite everything that was going wrong for the young lord and despite the fact that he was so far from his home, Terak saw that it was in his nature to help.
“Then we answer it,” Terak said, already lightly jumping to the slope that led down the outcrop.
I might be a null. I might never have been taught the ways of magic, Terak thought glumly. But I can still help.
2
Rescue
Terak’s sure-footed step took him down the stony ridge, scattering pebbles and gravel to either side in his haste. The strange scaly trees with their thick waxy leaves rose around him as he neared the base of the Sending ahead.
“Terak—careful!” Falan was behind him, his broken sword already in hand. He had smashed it into the face of an animate statue, shattering the once razor-sharp blade. He made considerably more noise as he huffed and puffed after the elf. “We don’t know what danger they are facing—” Falan gasped, just as Terak leapt from the last tumbles of boulders to the softer earth below. There was a fast-flowing stream surging beside his tread, and a thick stand of trees obscuring his vision, with their long and thin, arm-like trunks—
“Aii!”
But Terak didn’t have to guess the way forward, as a high-pitched scream rose through the night, and the pink-white alarm flame winked out suddenly.
The elvish assassin of the Enclave ran low through the trees, his own short blade whispering into his hands as he came to a clearing.
“Rakh!”
He saw three large shapes, terrible and glinting with metal as the light of the Second Moon caught their armor, battle-cleavers, and fangs.
Orcs! They were a war-party, Terak realized immediately, probably sent out ahead of the same enormous army that had attacked Araxia. And they had cornered a trio of people—elves—and he even recognized one of them as well. Sister Denaal of the Fifth Family, the very same one who had tried to warn Terak and Falan about awakening Grom.
