Swords of Steel Omnibus

by Howie K Bentley et al.

  “That was the sacrificial altar to Styne,” said Huethys. “Once a month and before every battle the people of Stynar Vort used to sacrifice a willing victim to propitiate good fortune.”

  “That is horrendous.”

  “Yes it is… was… but prayers were answered. Styne was our god, our benevolent protector.”

  “So where is Gaetys?” Thruen asked, changing topics to a more relevant one.

  “I do not know… but he is guarding the fortress, of that I am sure.”

  The two quickly made their way to the courtyard, and gained a deeper, more traumatising appreciation of the lake of blood and its bone-dressed shores. The skulls had expressions of horror and desperation, and the cries of torment and pain could still be heard echoing.

  Huethys noticed that the rock of the altar was accessible from a bridge made of more bones and human remains arranged to form an isthmus, like what you would see only in the inner seas of Hel.

  Thruen followed Huethys to the bony bridge, then took a step on it. As he did so, a deep, raspy grunt reverberated in Stynar Vort.

  A figure slowly stood up from behind the altar at the top of the rock, and revealed itself in all its magnificent abhorrence: King Gaetys, now the Slayer King Kruhd’asra, the Undead Blood Fury, clad in an armour that was fused to his own muscles, deprived of all skin. He took a small and precise jump onto the altar, then stood in an animalistic crouch ready to leap on his prey

  From this position he uttered one word: “Hueeeeethyyyyyyyys…”

  Huethys answered with a voice broken by the swirling emotions inside of him: “I am here, my friend. I am here to atone, to pay for my sins, to give you freedom…”

  “I am in no need of freedom, this is paradise to me,” answered the demon that was once Gaetys. “Styne, the God Demon, left this world, and his parting gift was turning me into Kruhd’asra. Now I rejoice in immortality, in the ecstasy of murder, in the pleasure to kill… I shall gladly take your life and that of your friend.”

  “You are a blasphemer! This can’t…” said Huethys, but as he cried his indignation out to the world, Kruhd’asra leaped into the air and landed a few feet away from Thruen, who unsheathed his sword and assumed his fight-ready crouched pose.

  Kruhd’asra unceremoniously assaulted Thruen with a barrage of lightning-fast thrusts and swings, slashing and ripping at every move with blade-sharp bone barbs that protruded through his muscles and the bracers on his forearms. Thruen barely kept on his feet parrying the whirlwind of strikes, all the while trying to shield Huethys from the demon guardian.

  “Gaetys, you were my friend, I have come to free you!” shouted a desperate Huethys, but the demon was completely taken over by his lust for killing.

  Thruen gradually overcame the shock of the assault and regained his concentration, reacting more and more swiftly to the demon’s attacks. By invoking his ancestral strength, he grew feral and brought powerful blows to the demon’s body. But Krudh’asra’s strikes were furiously fast, and deep cuts from the demon’s bone blades and weapon opened on Thruen’s body, as if the air itself had claws wrought of steel.

  With infernal precision, Kruhd’asra’s sword pierced Thruen in the same shoulder that only a few moments earlier Bedar had struck with his icy magic grasp. The blade’s tip stuck out of Thruen’s back.

  Thruen grabbed the corner of his cloak and wrapped his palm with it before grabbing the demon’s bladed forearm, then pulled him closer, causing Kruhd’asra’s sword to transfix his flesh even further. With the calculated rage that characterised him, Thruen pounded the undead’s face with his bare fist, surprising the demon who also seemed strangely inebriated by the blood that sprayed from Thruen’s shoulder onto his face. Thruen’s sanity left his eyes and they turned into glazed vitreous spheres of pure hatred. He shouted and cursed in a language unknown and unguessed even to himself as he hit everything in his vicinity at an inhuman speed. Huethys knew that when this beast that lived inside Thruen was unleashed, there was no chance of survival for mortal and immortal beings alike. The ferocious struggle continued as the two combatants, locked in a mortal grapple, rolled down the side of the mound of bones that formed the bridge to the altar and plunged into the lake of blood.

  After a few moments, Kruhd’asra emerged from the blood in a frenzy, shaking and screaming as if on fire.

  The top of Thruen’s head emerged from the lake. Back in full possession of his faculties, he noticed that Kruhd’asra was too distracted to focus on him. He moved closer, sword in hand but kept under the surface, ready to strike.

  Entirely covered in thick blood that was kept liquid for twenty-five years by the most unthinkable demonic sorcery, Thruen advanced close enough to attack, his lips retracted in a feral snarl. But as he bent his legs ready to deal a death blow, the tip of the althame suddenly pierced Kruhd’asra’s chest, having been pushed all the way from his back through his heart by Huethys, who at his old age still retained his ability to move as stealthily as a cat. Kruhd’asra stopped his shaking, with a frozen expression of terror on his face.

  “I am saving you, my friend…” said Huethys as he thrust Seyden’s Tooth deeper into the demon’s back and further out his chest.

  “I do not… want… your salvation…” grunted the dying demon. He turned his sword toward himself and thrust it hilt-deep into his own heart, skewering both Huethys’ and his own body. He grinned with the maniacal satisfaction of a last killing.

  The two fell into the blood. Thruen walked incredulous toward Huethys, dragging him out of the lake, but fully aware that Huethys’ life had already abandoned his body.

  Thruen loomed precariously over Huethys’ corpse and spoke with a very uncharacteristic and soft tone, for he was overwhelmed by sorrow of the death of his long-time friend, father-like figure and king, and dazed by the wounds and blood loss. “Huethys… what nonsense it was… to spend a life in the rotting stench of guilt, feeling like a sinner in the eyes of a god that does not exist… To decide for others what mercy and salvation are, and to impose it on those who had no desire for them… and to give purpose to a damned child’s life, only to take that purpose away. Nine times nine words, and perhaps I shall see you soon at the Ramparts of Eternity…”

  Thruen dropped to one knee and loosened the grip on the sword’s handle, letting it slowly fall to the ground. He surrendered to the exhaustion and fell on his back, staring at the sunset-tinted snow falling on Stynar Vort.

  Masters of Magic

  Journey in Somnamblia

  By Jean-Pierre Abboud

  Beyond the alchemical order of the city Weydan, a bleak wood stretched across a long, dismal valley. The lifelike mouth of the forest enveloped the land with a winding, monstrous tongue; a yawning road in disrepair. Towering in the distance monolithically, the city endured another day like any; uninterrupted commerce from its fixed populace swelled and contracted. The road leading out, usually vacant, unfurled an abnormality as four sojourners came into view from the city’s horizon. Scuttling along the earth in secret, the group took care to not leave a trail. Seeking encampment, their eyes fell upon an under hill pass one hundred meters ahead. Under a pallid blaze, childhood fears of the wood gripped Merik. “These trees... I’ve never felt so uneasy,” he quietly complained. An orphan gypsy of age twenty, urban stories of taboo and the forbidden filled his mind; Merik’s prior band of thieves spoke of trees and flora which sup their energy from unknown sources, eschewing sunlight. Coming closer to the arching foothill, the four travelers moved towards safety.

  “Before we begin the second phase of this journey, I want to thank the three of you for all your bravery thus far!” Mataera Nom’s voice carried from the top of the hill, echoing with a fatigued defiance under the shadow of monstrous limbs and branches. They knew escape from the city, however painstaking, was of the simplistic and familiar; the unknown lay beyond the borderline. Mataera, studying their surroundings, eyed the terrible wood with a knowing consignment. Her tall frame, wild lavender hair
and pitch black skin stood at the forest entrance like an apparition; a silhouette in traveler’s garb. Merik’s meek, pale-white and wide-eyed visage under an oversized brown cloak projected the illusion of a familiar. Feeling comforted, he threw up a visible smirk under his large hood. “Remember how swiftly I burgled the 6th gate key? I could have returned it in gift wrap if Abon weren’t so slow!”

  Abon and his partner Risten ambled close behind the two before setting up camp under the hill. Red and sun-beaten, they spent their formative years in Weydan learning the trade of street performance. With Risten’s small, wiry build a common type opposite Abon’s oversize brawn, they also performed spells on the black market (mostly mild sick-healing, divination, and of course binding). Fingered as fringe sorcerers by the 5th Magister, they had arranged a meeting with Mataera through various confidants, preempting their flight. “If we all moved like you, our blood pressure would keep us from magick!” cackled Risten, her body leaping about, imitating Merik’s frantic, wide-eyed movements. “All your undisciplined pacing about,” Abon interjected gravely, “will get us killed in this place.”

  Forbidden as it was to leave, Merik understood beyond his years the futility of a thief’s life in Weydan. A bellicose fool’s paradise of retrograde spell-scrolls and potions, dilapidated talismans and stones, lay before any quick-handed chaser; food and drink, while sparse for orphan children, still flows in green-grey and crystal abundance. “I started stealing to feed myself, that is, until I learned to be smart about it,” Merik recalled his words before his thief’s initiation rite. Mataera led his former band, prior to his entrance. He remembered when it was all he wanted, but then tugged at his brown cloak in a feeling of shame; he knew Mataera understood realms beyond the corridors of the city, beyond the engineered confines of the lotus field.

  “We cannot travel through the forest without a spell of concealment,” she disclosed. “The entire forest is under surveillance, all entrance and exit anticipated.”

  Abon dreaded the thought. He and Risten never attempted a spell of concealment. Although both were adept hobbyists at advanced spells and master practitioners of general magick, the physical and mental requirements for such a spell were excruciating. “More secrets withheld, I suppose,” whispered Risten to Abon. “I wonder if she had the kid get them.” “Them”—referring to the various herbal and liquid elements required to disapparate, foremost a volatile concoction of trefoil, rue, and molten lapis lazuli (requiring its own spell).

  “Our destination is to the northwest,” Mataera continued. “It will be three days of travel on foot with no sleep, keeping the spell intact. This will require all our power; Abon, you will need to cover us all with the concealment cloak for the entire journey. Risten, I need you to hold concentration with me to power the spell. Merik, you will be our lookout and help to orient our direction; our roles in the spell cannot be interrupted.”

  “Of course!” replied Merik, preparing a cauldron with a small kindling.

  “Where does one find lapis lazuli of purity entailing magickal properties,” wondered Risten. “I can see why she’s kept so quiet up to now…”

  “Do you need me to melt the stone?” asked Abon, bluffing.

  “There’s a special alchemistic consecration we can perform to melt the stone, you may know of it. We broke out two nights ago for the moon. Tonight, our blue stones will run like water beneath black candles. While Risten and I cast this spell, you can get some stones as well. But make them red, and let’s enjoy our last meal before we toil in the unknown.”

  * * *

  Under the full moon’s eyes, the party did their best to conceal the encampment. Escape through the city walls had slowed no one’s pace, as eluding the magistrates’ forces unseen and unheard could only propel them further onward. Mataera, uttering incantations, fixed her onyx eyes on the stone, now levitating above the cauldron brew. Her right arm, shaking with unnatural force unfurled a long slender finger scornfully pointed at the floating rock. Exploding in a flash of royal blue, which would threaten their position had not Mataera known this particular moon would yield no passers-through, ribbons of molten lapis lazuli slowly trickled down. Supping blue lava beneath, the cauldron began to heap and gasp as Mataera collapsed in agony. Merik prepared a make-shift bed, having anticipated such recoil. A spell of this sort can wreak considerable damage on the caster’s liver; with the moon’s power and a complex series of summonses pertaining to the organ’s ability to break down matter, the organ itself comes away several years on. Though one-hundred-percent accuracy must be held with such advanced magick under risk of death, considerable physical damage remains. Mataera had planned for this, as her weakened state after such a consecration necessitated a party for the following spell.

  Fearful visions ran through Risten’s troubled brow, those that only scarce whispered tales from Weydan’s ravages could conjure; savage highwaymen wielding powerful weapons and even stronger sorcery. Placing her tiny hand on Mataera’s marble bound lackyre shoulders, she observed her eyes—within the oft-jet black pupils raged a pale blaze of emerald. In her face, Risten sensed a knowing born of her current weakness, reflected in a glance back to Abon.

  “Are we coming to? I have salves and herbs for you,” Merik eagerly cooed, relieved Mataera’s color had returned.

  “We can use the compound to attempt the spell now,” she replied with a lucid sense of purpose.

  “I only meant to ask if you felt better!”

  “No time.”

  “All right, then!” bellowed Abon, hungry for the challenge, worried the others sensed his ambivalence. Risten nodded as the four gathered ’round the cauldron. Deeply fatigued, Mataera began to chant, beckoning a call and response. Merik’s involvement with the circle served a perfunctory purpose. Mataera’s power amounted enough for three bodies; his knowledge of this lesser burden drove him to silent curses. Another tug of shame, knowing the severity of his companions’ burden compared to his own.

  A terrifying light crackled above the cauldron as Abon and Risten chanted with Mataera’s throaty invocation. The time of the Magister’s return, as she knew it, had not come to pass, with the distance from the darkened wood shielding spectral bursts of royal blue. Mataera’s back arched upward in painful immediacy, consciously feeding blaque energies through Abon and Risten’s now-vessel-bodies. Merik, enthralled with the imposing might of Mataera’s magick power, felt relieved by waves of hardened contentment.

  * * *

  Abon’s strength seeming a match, the party adeptly strode forward over the last two days, cloaked in a viscous star-shine band, unseeable by outsiders or the forest’s infected flora. Risten squinted hard under tremendous migraine pain previously unfathomed in her small time sorcery. Mataera knew this pain well, and derived a sort of polymorphously perverse pleasure familiarly offsetting the quick unpleasant pain below. Her darkly slender side, still reeling from the previous alchemistic spell, stayed strong as her concentration kept the band intact. Risten slowly began to realize her lack of control in her own motions, feeling as though her body traded sight for all other faculties. “The thief moves as though there is no magick binding him… Abon ambles behind like a golem now… I cannot break concentration… I want to… but I cannot…” Paranoia began to overtake her thoughts, as Mataera’s manipulation kept their bodies moving, working, powering the spell.

  “i am walking death”

  “i am living excrement”

  “no more than a blank vessel”

  “i own nothing”

  “i am nothing.”

  Risten’s struggle to control her now-eggshell mind bled into the star-shine, difficultly traipsing through the second half of the woods’ northwest passage. Merik, sensing movement ahead, slowed the pace of the group as its eyes, ears and front. Shaking in terror from the burdensome mental storm the spell wrought on his companions, he spotted a caravan ahead.

  “Magisters...?” he whispered to himself.

  Chained in single file, t
welve horrified, pathetic bodies seeming only alive in movement shuffled down the path. Covered head to toe in scars and lesions, driving them forward were the distant figures of two magisters. Hardened albino nobles draped in crimson red, they seemed to Merik ironically featureless compared to the suffering chain of broken mages. “Mages…”

  Supping the deep concentration of magick aura from the slaved, the two magisters conversed loudly and boisterously on the subject of water. Irrigation kept Weydan running as an insular dominion, where its citizens could drink deep of a perpetuating well and enjoy its abundance. Laughing at the feeble waifs in subjugation, the magister highwaymen beat their caravan of emaciated male and female bodies forward. The party, ambling as quietly as they could within concealment, still strode on with the visibly daunted Merik. Terror undertook the young thief, gazing at a catatonic Risten, realizing her body would not survive the spell. Unerring doom seemed inevitable, no longer lying in wait.

  “Taken as slaves…” Already burdened with turmoil wrought from the concealment spell, Merik’s mind ran wild projecting violent flashes of primary reds and blacks. Irrational rage married his continuous worry, channeling visions of dread begetting a furious anger.

  “DIE, pig slavers!”

  Merik rushed as the spell broke, the band shooting off in all directions into the sky. Risten’s lifeless body collapsed on the ground. Like a berserker, Merik’s young slender hands attacked with an acute fierceness befitting a hardened street fighter. As he battered the brutish form of the first magister, it was already too late. The second magister, reaching out his chalk-white hand began to hold sway over an enslaved female on the chain. Weaving synchronous energies through her skeletal frame, he concentrated a flash of material breakdown. Her stomach visibly pulsating, a voiceless, sickened cry echoed through a series of contortions. Merik looked up and suddenly felt a million needles of pain spark through his body as his skull began to cave in. Mataera, fallen and confused from the break, watched in disbelief, locking eyes with Merik’s. Triggering such a deep sensation of pain, all that could be heard was horrific laughter as his head crumbled into putty. Weak and battered, gazing round in utter defeat, Mataera observed the slaved and the mage-slavers. She stared as they slaughtered now-mindless Abon like cattle, her lamenting eyes resigning themselves to death.