While Wren was used to working on her own, or at least in small teams of scouts, she had to admit that Duke Thomas Falkenrath got things moving quickly and efficiently. He gathered a knot of knights about him with hardly more than a glance as they stormed through the crowded reception, Wren and Ghveris following just behind him. Footmen carrying trays of wine or oysters on ice dove out of their path just as quickly as young noblewomen in their gowns, or the effete sons of barons who’d come to the capital only to curry favor.
By the time they made it down the steps, they were joined by royal guards leading mounts, and a contingent of priests of the Trinity. Wren wasn’t certain just how many horses the stables behind the palace maintained, but she doubted that it was enough to mount fifty armed men and women at a moment’s notice. From the size of some of them, she suspected that saddles were being thrown onto draft horses who would normally have pulled carriages or wagons.
“I’ll meet you there,” Wren said, and shifted into bat form. She was up in the air, soaring over the rooftops of Freeport, before Duke Falkenrath’s party had broken out past the gates and made it onto the streets of the capital city. She was confident that she hadn’t been heard or seen, and she’d slipped under the bottom of the door which led out of the meat cellar by dissolving herself into blood and reforming on the other side, but she also wasn’t certain how long the cult would remain gathered in one place. Now, despite how quickly she’d made her way back to the palace, she couldn’t shake the worry that the cultists would have already departed by the time she got back with reinforcements.
It was enough to make her wish she’d simply killed them all herself – but if she had, it would have made things a lot more complicated. No doubt the hanging human corpses and blood-stained altar would have been convincing proof of the cultists’ allegiances, but there could still have been arguments about just who was guilty, and who was a victim. On top of that, she’d have had to give up any chance of questioning living captives about what, precisely, they were doing in Freeport.
Wren felt a rush of relief when she reached the section of the city where the guildhalls were located, and found no sign of horses racing away or carriages thundering over cobblestone streets toward the waystone. She occupied herself by circling high above the guildhall of the Merciful Society of Butchers and Drovers until Duke Falkenrath and all the soldiers he’d brought came galloping up the hill.
With only a few shouted commands, Falkenrath directed the knights and royal guards to surround the building. Wren swooped down and landed next to Ghveris, shifting into her human form. She pulled an enchanted vial of preserved blood from one of the leather loops on her belt, popped the cork, and brought it to her lips, swallowing the entire contents in a single gulp.
“Lead the way,” the duke commanded, drawing a rapier from the sheath at his belt.
Wren turned and made straight for the door she’d seen the palace servant use; she’d left it unlocked when she made her escape, and she was pleased to find that no one had discovered that in the half a bell which had passed since. Still, the tromp of a dozen boots on the floorboards of the guildhall would no doubt be heard by the cultists below - especially with the way that Ghveris’s heavy tread shook the building.
The group hurried to the stairs which led down to the meat cellars, with Wren, Ghveris, Thomas Falkenrath and Sir Lane, Tephania’s father, all clumped together, spilling out into the long hallway just as the door at the end opened.
A merchant in a fine gray doublet, lined with silk just as ostentatious as anything a noble might wear, stepped out into the hallway with his arms spread wide and a broad smile on his face. “Duke Thomas, what a surprise! I was just inspecting one of our faulty enchantments. How can I be of service to you, this evening?” The bead of nervous sweat that rolled down the man’s high forehead gave a lie to his easy manner.
“Take him alive,” Thomas Falkenrath commanded, his stride not slowing or pausing for even an instant.
Elias Lane rushed past his liege on the right, arming sword raised. “Surrender or be cut down,” the aging knight shouted.
The merchant raised his open hands, to show that he carried no weapon; but as he opened his left hand, something fell out of his palm, and Wren heard the sound of glass shattering against the stones of the floor. A sort of red vapor, smoke-like, rose in twisting tendrils from the point of impact.
Sir Lane extended his blade in a lunge in an attempt to attack directly through the smoke, but before he could skewer the man, the red vapor solidified into a hovering orb of blood and viscera, the same sort of monster that Ractia and her blood-letters had summoned in the past. It lashed out with a whipping tendril of blood, which wrapped around the knight’s throat, holding him at a distance and squeezing.
Wren had her enchanted knives in hand, but she waited just long enough for Ghveris to let loose.
A staccato bark erupted from the war-machine’s shoulder mounted weapon, and half a dozen splatters of blood stitched their way up the merchant’s chest. The man’s body jerked, then fell to the ground, leaving only the summoned monstrosity.
The moment her companion had finished firing, Wren activated her enchanted boots. She trusted that, out of the dozen warriors in the corridor, someone would save Tephania’s father before he choked to death. She dashed past the lashing orb, ducking easily under the swing of one tentacle, and hit the door with her shoulder at full speed.
Splinters flew, and she nearly tore the door off its hinges, so that it banged against the inside wall of the meat cellar with an audible crack. Wren wove between the hanging slabs of meat at full speed, making for the altar that she’d seen before. She skidded to a halt on the frost-slicked stones, coming out from between two hanging corpses, one of a man and one of a woman.
In front of the altar, a great pool of blood had been spilled on the ground. The source was immediately obvious: one of the robed and cowled figures held the head of the palace servant back while his slit throat spurted blood with every pump of a weakening heart.
Wren had lived with blood-letters nearly her entire life, up until the last few years when she’d left Varuna and her tribe to protect Liv. She’d thought that she had a fairly good idea of what their rituals were capable of, but she’d never seen anything like this. The pool of gore was perfectly round, making an exact circle, with V?dic glyphs running around the rim. It was disturbingly familiar - in fact, the entire thing looked like nothing so much as a waystone.
One of the other figures reached down to place a hand on one of the glyphs, and Wren threw the dagger in her right hand. It flew true, end over end, and took the man in the center of his forehead, the enchanted blade punching right through the bone of his skull and sinking up to the hilt. He immediately fell backward, as if he’d been punched. Activating a waystone took a lot of mana; while Liv could handle that sort of load by herself, hardly anyone else was capable of meeting that threshold. Out of all her personal guards, only Kaija and two others were capable of powering a medium sized waystone by themselves. These were cultists, not trained mages - if Wren could kill enough of them, they wouldn’t be able to work together to activate the sigil.
A woman on the other side of the bloodstone raised a crossbow and loosed a bolt at Wren. She allowed herself to dissolve into blood, and once the shot had lodged in one of the carcasses hanging from meathooks, Wren reformed in her cougar form and pounced, covering the distance in a single leap to sink her teeth in the woman’s throat and carry her down to the ground.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
From the sound of it, knights were pouring into the meat cellar, setting the chains on which the meathooks hung rattling and creaking as they shoved aside sides of beef. Wren could hear when they reached the human corpses by the swearing and the cries of disgust.
With a grinding roar, Ghveris forced his way through the doorway, shaking the ceiling overhead and sending sawdust falling down. Wren wouldn’t be surprised if he’d taken out half the wall on his way through.
Wren yanked up, sending a spray of blood out to splatter against the wall and ceiling as she finished the woman beneath her. She only counted three cultists left standing, but before she could pounce on the next, he shouted out a prayer to Ractia.
“Great Mother, protect us! Shield your servants with your vessels!”
Sigils the color of bright, glowing coals lit on the chests of the human corpses that swayed on chains around the bloodstone. All at once, they opened their eyes and reached out with whatever limbs they still possessed, fingers hooked into claws. The corpses grabbed at the knights, seizing fistfulls of hair, choking exposed necks, wrestling for the hilts of raised swords.
Having been at a reception and dressed more for dancing than for battle, Falkenrath’s men had no gorgets or helms to protect them from the pallid, ghastly fingers. Yellowed and cracked nails drew blood, scratching furrows in exposed skin; heads pierced by steel hooks gnashed their teeth, snapping at anyone within reach.
And worse yet, Wren’s sensitive nose caught the scent of wood-smoke from the guildhall above.
Wren leaped at the cultist whose prayer had been answered; he raised his arm, getting it between her jaws and his throat, so that her teeth sunk into the meat of his forearm instead of immediately ending his life. Still, she bore him down to the ground, and with her rear legs, used her claws to rip his belly open. By the time he’d fainted from blood loss, and Wren was able to look up, she saw that Ghveris was in among the dangling corpses.
With brutal slices of his mana-edged blade, her friend sliced limbs off the animated corpses with every swing. He grasped a chain in his left gauntlet and yanked, tearing the anchor out of the overhead beam, and then ground his enormous foot down on the skull of the fallen corpse until it squished flat like a rotted melon.
“Take all the corpses!” Duke Falkenrath shouted, pushing his way through the chains and carcasses until he came in view. “Leave nothing behind!” When he finally came in sight of the pool of blood, his face grew pale. “By the Trinity…”
Wren took her human form, but kept one knee on the chest of her bleeding captive. “It’s something like a waystone,” she shouted. “Look at the sigils.”
Thomas Falkenrath visibly swallowed. “There’s no way to bring it, and someone’s set fire to the hall above us. Can you draw the sigils?”
“Maybe,” Wren said. “Some of them.”
“Good enough.” The Duke nodded. “Whatever you don’t remember, I’ll pull from the minds of the corpses. Move!” he called, raising his voice. “Take everything you can! Hurry!”
Ghveris was at Wren’s side, and she stood and took a step back so that he could sling the wounded cultist over his enormous shoulder.
“Did someone save Teph’s father?” Wren asked, as they pushed their way back across the cellar, through the thickening smoke.
“He will live,” Ghveris said. “Stay low, and grab hold of me.”
Wren took hold of the enchanted steel skirting that descended from her friend’s waist, and covered her mouth with her other forearm. As they made their way out into the corridor and then up the stairs, great, roiling billows of smoke blocked her vision and stung at her eyes. For a moment, she considered changing forms: as a bat, she wouldn’t be dependent on her eyes - but flying was the opposite of staying low, and it would have taken her up into the worst of the smoke and the heat.
Instead, Wren trusted Ghveris to get her through, secure in the knowledge that he would never let her be hurt if he could do anything to stop it. She’d known that since she woke up cradled in his arms, wrapped in furs, after the ambush in the mountains around Whitehill.
The ground floor of the guildhall was a mass of bright fire: walls, doors, and rafters burned in every direction, and Wren felt her mouth go dry. She felt like she was sweating, but the incredible heat wicked the moisture away and scorched her with every breath. The shapes of the knights and guards who had come with them stumbled, huddled together against the heat.
“Hold on!” Ghveris shouted, and ran forward. Once his armored bulk was moving, he was like a runaway wagon, speeding downhill until it crashed through everything in its path. Burning walls splintered around him – rather than waste time finding the way they’d come in, the Antrian simply barrelled through everything in his path until they broke out into clean, cool air. Duke Falkenrath and the others threw themselves onto the ground, gasping and rolling away from the burning building.
It was all Wren could do to keep up with him, hacking and coughing, and she felt his scalding, articulated fingers grasp her belt, haul her up off her feet, and carry her away from the blaze. If she could have breathed, she would have screamed from the pain in her back. When Ghveris finally set her down, Wren could see that pieces of his armor plating, particularly at the front where he’d forced his way through burning walls, had been heated to the point of glowing, like an ingot of steel in a forge.
“Are you going to be alright?” Wren asked. Ghveris had, at the very least, a living brain somewhere under all of that armor. Even the fever from a normal sickness could kill, if it wasn’t treated.
Ghveris staggered. “Keep back,” he warned her. Great billows of steam rose from his armor, where the heated metal made contact with the cool air of an autumn evening.
He needed to be in the water, Wren realized. If she could get him down to the harbor, get him into the sea, that would cool him down quickly enough. But that was halfway across the city.
There were bells ringing, warning the citizens of Freeport that fire had come to their city. Wren saw groups of men and women, half dressed, wheeling what looked like siege engines into the yard surrounding the burning guildhall. V?dic sigils flared to life on the surface of immense pipes, and great jets of water sprayed out into the inferno.
Wren rushed for the nearest group. “Give me that!” she shouted, knocking people out of the way until she could grasp the handles and spin the mechanism about on its wheels. They cursed her and tried to fight back, but, ignoring the protests, she turned the jet of water on Ghveris, filling the area with a cloud of steam through which the Antrian’s enormous shape could barely even be seen.
She kept the water coming until the steam dwindled, only then allowing the people who’d brought the mechanism back at its handles. Wren rushed back through the dissipating fog, unable to think about the captives, what the cult had been doing, or anything but whether Ghveris had survived the heat.
There - the shadow of an immense, armored form. Wren waved a hand, trying to force the steam aside so that she could see better. Ghveris had fallen to one knee, and the plates of armor at the front of his body had been warped and cracked, made brittle by the sudden heating and cooling.
Kneeling, his helm was nearly level with Wren’s face. She put her hands to either side of the darkness, and only felt relief that the steel had cooled enough not to burn her skin after she’d done it. Wren turned his helm, and lowered herself to look up into the slit between the armored structure of the helm. There should be two blue fires, not quite eyes, but the closest he had.
For a long moment, Wren had to imagine what it would be like if he was gone: if there was no one to hunt with her, from waystone to waystone; no one to watch over her while she slept, tucked up against that solid, comforting, armored form.
Blue light sparked in the darkness.
“I am well,” Ghveris said, his rumbling voice more exhausted than Wren had ever heard it before.
Wren threw herself forward and wrapped her arms around Ghveris’s thick neck, pressing herself against his ruined breastplate. She knew that he couldn’t really feel her, and she’d never hated the presence of his armor more than she did at that moment, but in that moment she had to hold him.
“I don’t ever want you to sacrifice yourself for me,” she told him. “Do you understand?”
“It is a small price to pay,” the man inside the armor told her. “There is so little of me left; I do not matter.”
“You do.” Wren screwed her eyes shut, and tried to blink away her tears. She was not someone who cried often.
Gently, so very gently, Ghveris placed one of his armored gauntlets on her back.
here. I am more available there than I am here.
Syl: Synthesis releases today on Amazon!
Dramatis Personae
Elias Lane - Knight in service to Thomas Falkenrath, Duke of Courland. Father of Tephania. Has been let off his leash.
Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath - Formerly a Great Bat in service to Ractia, now the remains of his body form the heart of an Antrian juggernaut. "I am the Brute Squad." [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]
Thomas Falkenrath, Duke of Courland - Council of Regents. "Assemble a Brute Squad!" [17 Rings of Mana]
Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Had a bit of a panic at the end, there.
