Arc 5: Chapter 16: Fang and Phalanx

    We stepped into the hall of Count Laertes. The foyer was spacious and lavish, with white statues set on plinths around the mouths of side halls and the bottom of a spiral stair at the far end. Chandeliers crafted into interlocking circles hung from the ceiling, and tall windows let the muted yellow light of the dusky woods in.

    The floor was checkered. Most everything else was white or brown wood, but brass was dominant. It gilded the railings of the balcony and stairs, crowned the marble statues, and framed the ornate clock set on one wall.

    And it fashioned the enormous pipe organ. It had been constructed within the curved inner line of the stairway, its pipes forming a zig-zagging pattern over the wall to erupt like a broken sunburst above the balcony.

    The room was large enough to hold a ball in. I stepped over the white-and-black squares of the floor, my boots clicking in arhythmic tones with the steps of my companions.

    The door swung closed at our backs. Hendry jumped, moving for his sword. Even Emma bared her teeth and tensed.

    I held out a hand to stall them, having expected these kinds of theatrics. “Hold,” I said. “Follow my lead.”

    Catrin wasn’t any more impressed than me. “This guy is really playing to the classics, isn’t he?”

    I moved ahead to stand in the center of the cavernous foyer, searching the room. Without using magic this time, I called out. “I submit my group as guests in your hall, o’ lord. We bring no harm to you that isn’t invited, and shall stay no longer than we are welcome, or wish to remain.”

    Best to play to tradition. I didn’t want to get us trapped here for a century to indulge some faerie noble’s sense of whimsy. Neither did I want to put an aggressive face forward. I was here in an official capacity.

    The shadows clung tight where the faint light didn’t touch. The shuffling steps and nervous breaths of my group seemed overloud in the silence.

    It lingered long, like a slow building pressure in the air. A wire of steel stretching. Then...

    “You speak the old words well, Alder Knight.”

    Someone behind me drew in a sharp breath. I couldn’t tell who. The room remained empty so far as I could tell, but I felt...

    A great heart beating out of rhythm deep beneath the world. Much further away than usual, as though I only caught the faintest after-echoes of its vibration.

    I was very far away from familiar lands.

    “Show yourself,” I demanded.

    “Making demands of me?”

    “...In my house?”

    “Where is that chivalrous mien, ser knight..."

    The voice kept emanating from different directions. I couldn’t pinpoint its source. It had an odd cadence, perhaps an accent, each syllable pronounced with deep, deliberate clarity.

    This place was like Lias’s sanctum. The Count was everywhere. We may as well be in the palm of his hand. Or, more accurately, at the crest of his throat as he waited to swallow.

    I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, even as I began to stoke the aureflame to life. It went from dull embers to a flare, like cooling firewood catching a breeze.

    “You know what I am,” I said to the empty room.

    “Indeed.”

    “And who you are.”

    “Strange, though...”

    “...Are you not here to claim my head, executioner?”

    After my encounter with the Keeper, my patience for games had run very thin. “I’m here for help,” I said in a hard voice. “There are demons and traitors at work in the capital city of the Accorded Realms, and I intend to hunt them down. The Keeper sent me here. He told me you could help me find where my enemy hides.”

    Catrin spoke up. “That’s right. I’m one of the Keeper’s staff, I can vouch for him.”

    A long pause followed her words. I felt a spike of tension, one I couldn’t name, in that silence.

    “Interesting.”

    “...Falstaff knows me well.”

    “Not only does he send me one of Tuvon’s knights...”

    “But a child of Ergoth as well.”

    I spun around to face the door, and the three people I’d brought into this place with me. Into this trap.

    Catrin stood at the back of the group, closest to the door. Something else loomed behind her. A towering shape, utterly black and featureless as though all the shadows in the room clung to it.

    “Catrin!” I shouted, already drawing my axe.

    Her eyes went wide. She started to turn, but didn’t do much more than twist her head a bit to the left before the shadow enveloped her.

    Then...

    Vanished. Gone in the blink of an eye, as though it had never been there.

    It took Catrin with it.

    In a blaze of amber light, I erupted with aureflame. It flared up from my shoulders, caught at the ends of my hair, framed my red cloak in a sudden writhing, twisting conflagration. The darkness of the room receded, and where my blazing golden eyes went I cut through it with a mere glance.

    The golden fire burned me, but I was long used to the pain. I ignored it, searching for the thing that’d taken Catrin.

    Hendry and Emma both drew their swords at once. Emma’s, a long keen saber of rare design, looked like a white sliver in the air, the horned hawk on its hilt a bloody crimson. Hendry’s sword was humbler of design, longer and broader, with the silver stag of House Hunting worked into the hilt, entwined antlers framing the base of the blade.

    “Form up!” I barked. “The fire won’t burn you.”

    It scorched me only because I’d failed it so badly.

    “Emma!” Hendry shouted, turning. One of the wolves leapt onto his back, trying to knock him over. He stumbled, but somehow kept upright. Gritting his teeth, the boy grabbed the wolf by its scruff and hurled it away with shocking strength.

    He stepped forward, brought up a limb, and caught the snapping jaws of a phantom wolf on his forearm. It clamped down hard. Hendry grit his teeth, ignoring it as he swung one-handed with his sword to cut down a beast darting in for Emma.

    Hendry barreled into the mass, a boy-faced titan, no fear in his eyes as he stood between the monsters and my squire. He shook the wolf on his arm off with a savage jerk, losing most of his sleeve in the process. His arm was bloody, but he didn’t seem to register the injury.

    A wolf slammed into him, a shoulder charge, and he stumbled. Another caught him the same way, while a third went for his leg just as they had to Emma. He stumbled.

    It all happened so fast. I moved to help him, but two wolves got in my way. They’d broken into our circle. I slashed at one, using a lesser Art to extend the length of the dagger into a burning gold sickle of pure aura perhaps three feet long, slashing it down in a blur of light.

    I followed into another Art, one of my preferred moves. Curved horns of shining amber glass burst from my shoulders, back, and arms, very much like the proud antlers of a great sunlit stag. I crouched, feeling the ensuing tug of ethereal wind that would hurl me through the enemy like a battering ram.

    But I wasn’t just fighting dumb beasts. The Count puppeted these, using them like his own fingers. Even as I manifested my phantasm, the wolves piled in on me. Heedless of the sharp horns, they impaled themselves one after the other, weighing me down.

    The wind tugged at me, but I didn’t go far enough. First two wolves, then four, then seven. I collapsed under a growing mound of their bodies.

    And I watched helplessly as the horde closed in on Hendry and Emma.

    No. It couldn’t end like this.

    Hendry had lost his sword, leaving him defenseless. Emma, recovering herself, grit her teeth and let out a howl of rage. Scarlet light burst to life around her, and all the drops of blood scattered by her own intent or the fangs and claws of the wolves sprouted shrieking spikes. These seemed cruder, lacking the artistic shapes they usually did, but cut just as well.

    Emma’s Shrike Forest formed a cage around her and Hendry, coming barely short of stabbing through the big knight. He seemed heedless of them, still grappling with two of the wolves. It kept most of the beasts at bay, leaving them to snap and bark around the barrier.

    One of them dislodged itself, turned, and went directly for the back of Emma’s neck.

    Hendry let out a shout of terror and denial, lunged forward, and brought his bare fist down on the back of the wolf’s head.

    I expected a meaty thump, perhaps for him to distract the thing for a moment. I did not expect him to hit it with all the fury of an iron portcullis slamming down as its hinges were cut.

    A metallic clang! filled the air, melding with the noise of the wolf’s skull breaking. It fell to the ground, instantly dead, and I realized he’d probably snapped its neck too. He turned, lifted the other wolf by its neck as it twisted and bit at him, but his grip was a steel vice.

    He slammed his forehead against the monster’s snout. It crumpled in a spray of blood and broken teeth. Hendry dropped it, his expression terrible. Blood poured down over his nose, much of it his own, but he barely seemed to notice.

    Emma stared up at the young man, as shocked as I was.

    But there was no time to be surprised. I grit my teeth, forced calm over myself when I realized we were not all dead, and got a boot under me. The piling bodies, some of them still writhing and trying to kill me, were an impossible weight.

    I refused it. Refused that impossibility. The golden fire of the Alder crackled within me, full of the echoing words and wills of older paladins. It had been maimed, misused, turned fitful and volatile, but it hadn’t burned out.

    I reached into it. The fire lashed out, scorching me from within. My physical body spat out a growl, along with some unintelligible curse, and I thrust a mental arm back into the flame.

    It hurt. My real flesh blistered and cracked from a sudden heat that came from within, manifesting as flickering amber light across my frame. The wolves let out pitiful howls as it hurt them too, causing some to slough away into phantasmal muck, unmade by that sacred fire.

    The weight on me lessened, but I wasn’t going to outlast the Count. I needed to break his power completely.

    It doesn’t matter how mighty an Art is. When Lias had tried to pull me into a burning red sun, all it had taken was a brief lapse in his concentration to shatter that image and correct reality.

    Art is just the manifestation of a dream, and dreams are fragile.

    The words of the oaths I’d sworn to the Table thrummed within my soul as I reached deeper into that power than I had since before Alicia Wake had driven her sword through Tuvon’s back.

    I hold the door against the shadow. I guard the ways and walk the paths.

    I am gold and iron. I am the sentinel flame.

    I am the bough from which the Alder’s shoots become a phalanx.

    The molten fire around me changed. It became brighter, cleaner, more like sunlight than melting metal. The horns of the Eardeking’s Lance grew, twisting, branching.

    A bright golden tree erupted from me, shining, twenty feet tall and nearly opaque, just transparent enough so I blazed at its center. The wolves atop and directly around me scattered, breaking into unreality. Its branches and roots were like golden glass, sharp and hard as steel. They shot out, punching through more of the wolves, impaling them.

    But it wasn’t just to clear more of that infinite horde that I’d summoned the Phalanx Oak. My eyes searched the scattering gloom...

    And there, atop the balcony, I saw him. My axe had been freed when the wolf I’d stuck it in had died. I grabbed my it, brought it above my head, and hurled it.

    Blazing with sacred fire, no Thing Of Darkness should have been able to endure the touch of that blessed, cursed weapon. It formed a molten star as it seemed to hang in the air a moment, just an afterimage of its path.

    Count Laertes swiped his hand, and batted it aside.

    I stared, at first not understanding what I’d just seen. Impossible. What he’d just done was impossible.

    Unless...

    Faen Orgis whirled through the air, struck the towering pipes of the organ, and embedded there. Even as it began to cool, a dolorous boom engulfed the room.

    “Well done.”

    Once again, that mocking rumble filled the room. I blinked, and when my eyes were open again the Count no longer stood on the balcony.

    On instinct I turned. Most of the wolves were gone, along with the stew of darkness they’d been emerging from. Something worse had replaced them.

    The towering shape that’d taken Catrin stood over Emma now. Even as I watched, a fanged smile split its face.

    “But how shall you counter my other Arts, ser knight?”

    A terrible suspicion had already taken root in me, but those words confirmed it. We weren’t facing some petty sorcerer or wicked elf.

    Count Laertes was Magi.