Arc 5: Chapter 20: Wars of Old, Wars of Today

    Morning came to the Manse Laertes with a dull yellow glow at the windows. It did not provide the same sense of renewal an ordinary dawn would have, only a creeping impression of dread.

    I dressed quietly, not hurrying despite everything I needed to attend to. I’d put a whole night into this endeavor, and I needed to get back to the city, figure out what had become of the group I’d sent investigating.

    But I knew what came before that, and I didn’t feel eager to leap into it.

    I heard rustling behind me. Turning around, I saw Catrin slipping into her dress, her movements composed and languid as mine.

    I watched her a time. Her skin had more color now, that ghostly paleness mostly gone from it. Her hair had returned to its usual chestnut shade, and she seemed to fill the dress in more, the shape of her lean muscles more pronounced.

    “I can feel you staring.”

    “Sorry,” I said, returning to my tunic’s laces.

    “I don’t mind.”

    More rustling and bare feet padding against the carpet told me she approached. I felt her arms wrap around my waist, her forehead rest against my back.

    “Let me see?”

    “It’s nothing,” I said.

    “Please?”

    I turned slowly. Catrin pulled my half laced shirt open, inspecting the bandages there with a critical eye. There were more around my left arm, and those on my chest wrapped around my shoulder too.

    “I really messed you up,” Catrin said in a voice full of apology.

    She’d practically mauled me. It didn’t stop me from tilting her chin up and planting a kiss on the corner of her mouth. “I told you I’m fine. You stopped.”

    “Barely. That was stupid. We shouldn’t have—”

    “Shouldn’t have what?” I asked in a stern voice. “Shouldn’t have taken care of this before you got back to the city? Let someone else help you?”

    “Someone without your muscles, you mean?” Catrin quirked an eyebrow.

    By the end, I’d had to pry her off me. She’d taken flesh for it, hence the bandages, but I would heal.

    I could tell she was still bothered. “What is it?” I asked.

    Catrin pursed her lips. “I said some things last night.”

    “You called me a bad knight,” I remembered.

    “Yeah.” She grimaced. “Listen, I didn’t mean any of it. I was just sort of in the moment, and started saying things...”

    “I am a bad knight,” I admitted. “Don’t worry about it.”

    She nodded, clearly still dissatisfied. “Alright.”

    We finished dressing in silence. I put on my hauberk. Catrin laced on her sandals and some bits of jewelry she’d been wearing from the inn.

    “You seemed to sleep alright,” she said.

    I’d barely slept at all. “Did I?”

    “No,” she sighed. “When we get back to the city, you really need to get some rest.”

    “I just haven’t had any time. There was that hunt for the chorn, then this mess started up...”

    “You’re still having those dreams?” Catrin asked quietly, her voice full of concern. “The one about the forest, and... the rest of it?”

    She knew about the ghosts who haunted my sleeping hours. “I’ve been trying some new things,” I said as I adjusted my cloak. “Charms, wards, meditation. It’s helped a bit, but nothing works as well as my ring did.”

    When I started putting my belt on, Catrin stepped forward to help me with it. With deft, assured movements, she tightened the straps and got it into the correct position.

    I didn’t want to distract her in the middle of everything else, and had almost forgotten with the mess around the vampire lord, but I knew it needed to be said.

    “The Keeper knows you’ve been helping me.” I took her by the wrist. “He knows you’ve been lying to him.”

    Catrin stiffened. A moment later, her face twisted into a furious expression. “Shit.”

    “I’m worried,” I said. “Is he going to come down on you? That girl of his, Saska, will she—”

    Catrin put her hand over mine. “I’ll be fine. The Keeper might not trust me with as many sensitive jobs, but he’s not going to send his pet after my neck. You have to piss him off pretty bad for that. I’m talking about things like hurting one of us, or...”

    “Or what?” I asked when she trailed off.

    She gave me a reassuring smile. “I’ll be okay. It’s not the first time I’ve gotten on his bad side.”

    She seemed certain, but I couldn’t shake my uneasy feelings. When I took my axe to slip it into its ring, she stopped me with a hand on my wrist. I gave her a questioning look, but her eyes were distant and distracted.

    “There’s something I want to try,” she told me. “It might help you.”

    Curious, I waited for an explanation.

    “You know I can pull things into my shadows, right?” She asked.

    I nodded, remembering her comment about being naked all the time if she couldn’t. Catrin heard the thought and giggled, almost girlishly.

    “This is a trick I’ve been thinking about for a while,” she told me. “I wasn’t sure how it would work, but I’ve picked up some things about your axe. It’s like me, right? It drinks your blood?”

    I nodded, still not sure where this was going. “That’s right.”

    “You and vampires,” Catrin said with mock severity. “Well, I’ve got a lot of your blood in me right now, so I think this might work.”

    She started pulling the axe out of my hand. In a flash of panic, I tugged it away.

    “Catrin, this thing is cursed. If anyone else touches it—”

    “It’s fine,” she said. “See?”

    Her hands curled around the weapon’s rough hewn branch. To my surprise, it didn’t cut her. That is, until she squeezed. The little barbs along the handle’s surface bit her palms, letting a rivulet of blood spill down its length.

    My blood, I realized.

    The branch shuddered in our hands, threatening to grow. When Catrin pulled at it, I let her take it from me.

    “My shadows aren’t too different from how this works,” Catrin explained. “They let me in because they know me. Anyone else, they’re not quite so nice to.”

    “Like that puppeteer,” I remembered.

    She nodded. “They’re not really nice to anything alive, but this thing is vampiric. Like me. I think...”

    She stepped over to the deeper shadows still clinging between the bed and the wall across from the window. She hesitated a moment, then stepped into them.

    “Like the gratitude you have shown to him, leech?” The ogre asked Catrin, amused. “Yes, I can tell by the blush on your cheeks that you are quite grateful. How kind of you, to leave him enough of his life to share this meal with us.”

    The whole table jumped, all the items on it clattering in a brief, piercing racket. Hendry, seated next to me, flinched at the noise. Emma’s lips formed a tight line. Karog turned to look at me, alertness replacing his derision.

    Catrin’s face had drained of color, her anger given way to shame.

    I had struck the table with my fist. I took a moment to get control of myself, inhaled deeply, then looked at Karog. He returned my stare with stoic neutrality.

    “She has a name,” I told him calmly. “If you call her leech one more time, I will take grievance with it.”

    A long, tense silence followed my words. Karog had propped his knuckles down on the floor, his posture hunching. I recognized the threat in that stance. The others remained perfectly still and quiet. Some wine spilled down onto the checkered floor from an upturned glass.

    “Well spoken.”

    “Such gallantry suits a True Knight.”

    Hendry drew in a sharp breath next to me. Catrin bared her fangs in a hiss, and Emma lowered a hand to her sword.

    Laertes made no sound when he appeared. He was just there, pacing along the edge of the table behind the two women seated across from me like a tall, stooped shadow.

    It was the first time I’d gotten a good look at him. The unnatural veil of gloom which had obscured his features the previous night had vanished, revealing the Count in all his glory.

    As I’d thought, he stood taller than any human I’d seen besides the Royal Steward. He dressed like an ancient king, in a trailing black coat lined in silver fur with burgundy robes beneath. In his clawed fingers, he supported himself on a cane of black wood ornamented in brass.

    He had gray hair, long and badly kept so it hung over his face in uneven strands to meld with a heavy beard. And the face beneath that hair...

    A dead face, gray and pitted, with filmy eyes sunken deep into the skull and flesh like dry parchment clinging tight to bone.

    The Count’s hunched posture did little to make him seem less like the giant he was. Every pair of eyes in the room followed his path as he navigated to the chair at the very end of the table, the one furthest from the door. His cane, large enough to be a staff in an ordinary man’s hand, struck the floor with thuds heavy as an iron door knocker with each step.

    Catrin seemed to shrink in on herself, almost sinking into her chair. I wished then I’d had her sit next to me instead of Emma. I’d at least have been able to take her hand.

    Maybe I couldn’t physically, but we were still connected. I tried to project reassurance to her, to keep my own thoughts calm and my tension in check. I will get us back home, I promised within my thoughts.

    Her eyes flicked to me, and a small, grateful smile tugged at the corner of her lip.

    Laertes seated himself, looming over us even lowered into a chair. He propped his brass-headed cane against the table, pressed the tips of his twisted fingers together, and fixed us all in his dead-eyed regard.

    “You have a request to make of me,” he said aloud in his slow, guttural cadence. “But first, you have questions. About this, and about the contender I have placed into the Emperor’s festival of war.”

    I nodded. “Why do you want Karog in the tournament? What does it gain you, my lord?”

    I wasn’t certain he’d answer me, but Laertes barely hesitated.

    “I have involved myself in these matters for one simple reason, ser knight. Old powers have placed their own pieces onto this board, and I move to check them.”

    “Old powers?” I asked.

    “You are aware of some small part of this game,” Laertes told me. “As a champion of the Seydii, you were given the tools to hold your own.”

    “You’re talking about demons,” I said. “The Abgru?dai.”

    To my surprise, Laertes scoffed. “The spawn of the Abyss are as they have always been. They have no great purpose, no investment in our struggles. They simply wish to feast. Demons have ever been merely a dangerous tool used by those with the knowledge to bind them.”

    “The Church teaches us that demons lay siege to Heaven,” Hendry said in a quiet, nervous voice. “That they are the reason it is lost to us. They are the Adversary, the greatest threat to our souls.”

    When Laertes turned his cold gaze on the boy, Hendry swallowed and hastily added, “That is what I have been taught, your lordship.”

    “There is truth to your theology,” Laertes said. “And there is, as ever, far more than the Church knows or is willing to reveal. Demonkind is a ravening chaos which may be directed toward certain aims. More often than not, it lashes back at the hand which feeds it and does as it will.”

    I frowned. “You’re saying... they were used?”

    I tried to put aside that the Count casually referred to events of distant, mythic legend. It was too much to wrap my head around. Like anyone brought up within, or even on the periphery of the Faith I had been taught about the Sack of Heaven and the events which had led the Onsolain to our shores. If I’d had this conversation a decade before, or even five years before, I’d have dismissed it like I would any theological debate between clericons.

    But I couldn’t help but remember a line I’d read in the book Lias had given me.

    Note that this last name is shared among many of the Abgru?dai who participated in the Sack of Onsolem. This would indicate the subject has been active in our histories for at least eleven centuries.

    And I knew both Shyora and Yith shared a name — One Who Beheld The Burning.

    I had known beings involved in those events. I had watched demigods debate about it the day I’d fought for Emma’s future against a crowfriar devil.

    The realization made me feel small, and insignificant.

    Almost as though reading my thoughts like Catrin did, Laertes addressed me again. “The Knight of Seydis knows of what I speak. He witnessed a microcosm of this war.”

    “A microcosm?” I asked. Then, realizing what he must mean I sat up straighter. “You’re saying the Fall was just a, what? A skirmish of some much bigger conflict?”

    “This should not surprise you,” Laertes said in a dispassionate voice. His eyes hadn’t blinked once throughout the conversation. “Your own priests teach you as much.”

    They spoke of salvation and damnation, sure. Of the Heir of Heaven’s return following some promised victory in faraway realms, of the exodus of our languishing dead to a brighter kingdom.

    They’d never said that it was all just part of some secret contest between ancient, hidden powers. And if the hordes of darkness were just tools, then who...

    No. I clamped a lid down on that dangerous, terrifying thought. It was all too big, and not relevant. I needed to shrink my problems down to the here and now, into something I could actually effect.

    “I know the Traitor Magi orchestrated that war alongside the Recusant Lords,” I said. “He bound the eight demons who laid waste to Seydis, brought together the rebel factions, and suborned the Alder Knights.”

    “Reynard sought to become a player in the Great Game,” Laertes said. “He failed to understand the scope of the board, or the distance he must climb to even reach its surface. He bound eight demons, but there were near half a million children of the Abyss who besieged Onsolem over a thousand years ago. Six hundred and sixty-six, times six hundred and sixty-six again.”

    Hendry’s face drained of color. Even Catrin, who had no interest in myth or cosmology on the best of days, let out a long whistle.

    Emma’s eyes were wide and intent, her imagination caught.

    Laertes laced his monstrous fingers together and leaned forward, his voice eerily calm. “And young Reynard failed to take into account the ambitions of his allies.”

    “Hasur Vyke,” I said with a low growl. I was getting very sick of hearing that old man’s name.

    “The King of Talsyn would make himself high lord of all Urn,” Laertes intoned. “Even if he should make it into a wasteland. Like Reynard, he has seen beyond the veil. Rather than filling him with a fervor for escape, it has filled him instead with delusions of dire godhood. A Vulture King, to sit upon a throne of bones rising high as mountains.”

    While the rest of us absorbed that disturbing prophecy, Emma narrowed her eyes at the Count.

    “And who are you to know so much about these grand affairs?” She asked the wizard. “How do you know about the infamous Reynard’s ambitions, and about the goals of the King of Talsyn?”

    I looked at Emma, frowning, then to the Count. It was a good question, one I shouldn’t have missed in all the rest.

    Laertes leaned back in his chair, his posture almost straightening. “Whether tied by blood or not, a father knows his son.”

    “Son?” Hendry asked, his eyes widening.

    The vampire’s cracked lips split in a fanged grin. “Close enough. Reynard was my apprentice.”