ARC 7: CHAPTER 36: REBUKE

The River Os forms a wall that cuts the northern realms of Urn from the southern. It spills out from falls across the Amberhorns and winds its way east, embracing the northern facade of the Tempering Hills before turning sharply and racing north towards the Bridge of Bells. It is a wide river, and bountiful. It has many tributaries, its deep waters fed by veins from the scattered mountains to the south, which include vassals to the Pinnacle of Karledale.

It is also not as fast or as prone to flooding as the Vin, which had carried me broken and half dead from my clumsy execution of Bishop Leonis nearly two years before. And instead of using it to escape, this time I let it carry me into the maw of danger.

We used a merchanter raft and the Os’s current to carry us into the city. The depth of the river and its flow kept it from freezing over even in midwinter, though the plow on the raft’s front broke the occasional floating patch of ice. The river cut through the middle of Baille Os, dividing the ancient settlement north and south like a blade through the long section of a loaf, with the city’s older districts and its high hill on the northern bank. That north bank would be my destination.

On the raft with me was Jean-Luc, Caleb, and Tam. We’d split into three teams, with Delphine in the care of the vampires and the lamia, then Sans working his skills alongside Dead Casimir. As promised, the necromancer gave me fog. A thick veil of it hung over the land, blending with the most recent snows to turn the world a purgatorial white. The winter fog reduced visibility down to less than thirty feet, and it almost shocked me when the corners of the first buildings began to emerge from the brume.

“We’re already inside the city?” I asked.

“Aye,” Caleb confirmed with a grunt as he gave his oar a push. “Say what you will about him, but Sans knows his business. He put shades in this mist to turn the guards’ eyes away.”

The raft carried goods, and we’d agreed to play at being merchants come with supplies for the armies gathering beyond Baille Os’s walls if needed. It would have been a thin facade, with the fine armor underneath my red cloak and my unconventional sword. Tam had pulled his glamour on. As a human he looked to be in his late forties, a large-bellied man with sad, thoughtful eyes. He worked an oar through the cold water in time with Caleb.

Jean-Luc reclined against a stack of crates, his relaxed features roaming across the fog as though he could see through it where even my golden eyes could not. A sword rested on his shoulder, a two-hander of continental design with an extended grip and second guard. The lumpy edge of his toadstool hat shadowed his eyes. I still hadn’t figured out what he was, but he didn’t read as undead to my senses.

Still trying to figure out what kind of monster everyone is, I chastised myself. That paranoia might have served you once, but you’ve got plenty of enemies today as it is.

“Wish I had my wheellock,” Jean-Luc muttered. “Too many places to get shot from.”

“It would break the God-Queen’s law,” Tam told him. “Best not take any chances. There might be seraphs here watching.”

“I can feel something watching,” Jean-Luc groused. “This place gives me the creeps. Thirty-thousand residents and who knows how many here for the war, and it’s quiet as graveyards.”

He was right. If I didn’t know better, the city spanning out around us would seem empty.

“So I’ve been meaning to ask you…” Caleb started to say. Tam winced.

I didn’t take my eyes off the fog ahead of us. “Yes?”

“Don’t,” Tam warned.

Caleb ignored him. “I hear rumors that you were at Caelfall when the baron there died. Some say you’re even the one who did Falconer in.”

I shrugged. “Lots of rumors about me.”

“True enough, true enough.” Caleb chuckled, though the laugh was brief and died quickly. “Thing is, I was wondering — if you were there, mind — if perhaps you saw someone. A pretentious lad with a chip on his shoulder, went by William.”

I kept my voice light. “Why?”

“He was my little brother. Word is he died at Cael.”

I blinked against a flash of memory. A scared boy bleeding out inside a church, his eyes full of disbelief and confusion while he tried to hold his stomach closed. My axe coming down to finish the job, the noise the impact had made, the feel of it in my arms.

“Lot of people died at Caelfall,” I said quietly.

“And my brother?” Caleb asked. His voice had hardened.

“There isn’t time for this,” Tam warned. Jean-Luc had gone very still where he rested against the crates. I could feel his eyes on me.

Tell him the truth. Don’t be a coward.

This isn’t the time. Just lie, deal with it later.

How many lies had I told lately? Could I even, with my powers restored?

“Cat was there. She never mentioned anything?”

Caleb kept rowing, his jaw clenching and unclenching. “She told me he didn’t like what Orson and the others were doing, and that it got him killed.”

Catrin was too kind, but I didn’t say so. “She told you the truth.”

Half of it, anyway.

Caleb laughed softly. “Cat’s a liar and always has been. But Tam’s right, this isn’t the time. Maybe later, eh?” He let out an exasperated sigh and took on a lighter tone. “Damn, but I wish I’d gotten to go with the women! Can’t believe I’ve missed my chance to see Flora in a habit…”

“Might still get the chance,” Tam said with forced lightness. Jean-Luc relaxed and returned his attention to the river’s shoreline.

It was a reminder, one I took to heart. This alliance with the Keeper wasn’t friendship or unity with the nightborn community. They had reason to distrust me, even to hate me, and I couldn’t forget that.

“We’re here,” Jean-Luc said. We’d come up to a small dock. There were no guards, as Eilidh had promised us. The Keeper’s web worked fast, it seemed.

I jumped off the raft, then turned back to Tam. The changeling gave me a nod. “We’ll meet up with Sans,” he told me. “We’ll be ready for the next part. Good luck, Hewer.”

Jean-Luc tipped his hat, but Caleb just watched me with a thoughtful expression and said nothing.

I turned away from them and started marching into the city, navigating the ordered streets and watching the thick veil of mist hanging over the rooftops. Somewhere ahead and above, hidden in the fog, a bell tolled three times. It wasn’t a warning bell. No, it came from the cathedral. It was just ahead, and instinct told me that it rang because it had started.

I quickened my step.

My allies from the Backroad had a convoluted role, involving careful timing and positioning, calling in favors with contacts in the city and sneaking about. Sans used his sorcerous mist to make the eyes of sentries bleary while Dead Casimir protected him from retaliation once the crowfriars caught on. Tam, Caleb, and Jean-Luc had our escape ready, and Delphine was with the other women and preparing to infiltrate the cathedral, probably the most dangerous of every part.

Even Morgause had a role, though it wouldn’t come into play until later. One of the packs I’d taken from her saddlebags rested in the crook of my left arm.

My role? It was simple. I did what I did best.

I was the tip of the spear.

Baille Os’s Grand Basilica of the Blessed Saints was the oldest standing cathedral in the subcontinent, and possibly the largest in the world. It had rivals, but its highest belfry stood taller than the Urcheon in Kell and it defeated Myrr Arthor in volume. It contained sixty chapels in addition to its main nave, and on that day each was full of congregants hearing the sermons of a battalion of preosters, their words recorded by a veritable army of clericons. They all parroted the words of the Corpse Cardinal, who spoke of retribution against the recusant, the witch, the apostate, the faerie and its bastard offspring, and against the Dark Lord of Elfgrave. My allies in the Backroad Inn had told me what Saint Perseus was prone to say to his congregations.

I could feel them. In every toll of that bell, in the shifts of air, in the warmth on my skin that came and went like a rhythmic current despite the freezing temperature, I could feel the aura of hundreds, perhaps thousands who prayed inside those walls. Even that, I knew, Vicar and his allies were using.

I let the sackcloth fall from the object in my left arm and raised the helm it had hidden to eye level. I’d had it fashioned in Garihelm along with the rest of my new plate. It had a similar design to the tourney helmet I’d worn in the early summer, a great-helm with a cylindrical shape and narrow eye slits. This one was blackened and made to match my new armor, both brutal and grimly beautiful at once.

Some dark whim had compelled me to ask the smith to include the trident crest of Faisa’s loaned mask. He’d misunderstood my instruction, and the result looked more like a stylized tree with barbed branches, each point forming the God-Queen’s sacred mark. The brass-hued crest just stood out from the black metal.

The church bells tolled again, the fog shifted, and high above me the cathedral’s pinnacles pierced the winter sky. Flecks of snow began to spin down as the mist cleared. It had covered our entrance into the city, but Sans needed to save his aura for another task and now it fled to reveal the Basilica of the Blessed Saints in all its towering glory.

I lowered the helm over my head, adjusted the aventail, then pulled my red cowl over it before sweeping the cloak to one side to clear it from my sword.

Vicar was in there. Time to finish this.

Ninety-seven steps separated the southern facade of the cathedral from the city, one for each knight who defended the God-Queen against Her naysayers during the journey over the Fences of Urn, and only when I reached the first of these did someone try to stop me. There were guards, all of them wearing the amber leaf of Osheim’s king. Living garlands clung to their helms, making them look like particularly lethal flowers in bloom. Their captain was a knight in a green-and-silver surcoat, his gauntleted hand wrapped around a tall halberd decorated with white feathers.

“Stop there!” The captain called. “The Cathedral is already closed, Aureate. You are too late to join the mass.”

I paused as the group spread out, their faces weary but not yet hostile. They’d taken me for a latecomer to the Cardinal’s gathering, but saw how well armed I was and were ready for trouble. The eye-slits of my helm, while narrow, were wide enough for me to keep all of them in my peripheral vision.

When I said nothing, the captain frowned beneath his raised visor. “Did you hear me? The doors are shut, they will not open until the ceremonies are done, by order of the king.”

The captain is a devil. My right hand began to move. The rest are human.

One of the guards, a pinch-mouthed woman with wise eyes, suddenly shouted. “He’s going for a weapon!”

Too late. I drew my crossbow from within my cloak, aimed, and pulled the trigger all in the same motion. It would look to them like it’d just been hidden, unless they caught a glimpse of the miasma still clinging to it. The golden bolt streaked through the air with a musical note and caught the captain in the skull, the dart punching through the steel dome of his helm with a sound not unlike that of a body striking water badly.

Shouts. Drawn weapons. The knight fell to the stairs while the aura-infused bolt cooked his armor and set its circle of impact glowing. I spoke into the noise.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Stop. Look.”

The command struck them like a hammer blow, and the guards all froze. The nearest of them, the one who’d warned the others, twitched and fought against my compulsion, but her neck turned and when she saw her captain her eyes widened.

The knight spasmed on the stone stairs, his limbs contorting so violently it deformed his armor. His arms and legs stretched with a series of gut-wrenching cracks, his neck distended, and the sulfurous smell of brimstone and badly tanned leather filled the air. When the thing’s back arched and the helmet split down the center and fell away, he had a face more like a bat’s than a man’s, his eyes scorched shut and his jaws crammed with yellow teeth long as my fingers. The body now filling the armor looked like nothing human.

There were exclamations of shock and horror from the soldiers. “What the fuck is that!?” One of them squealed, his voice rising higher in pitch with every syllable.

“Crowfriar,” I said as I loaded another bolt. “There are more inside the cathedral. Will you bar my way?”

Aura still laced my breath, so rather than emerging from the greathelm muffled my words instead carried with a deep, hollow tenor. Several of the soldiers went sheet white.

The guardswoman who’d almost fought off my command shook herself and stepped out of my way. “Should we warn His Majesty, Ser Headsman?”

I tilted my head at her. “You know me?”

She nodded, her expression grim. I took her to be this group’s sergeant by the spike on her helmet and a white feather pinned to her shoulder. Every realm had its own system for marking rank. “Heard of you, Ser. There was word you were at Tol, and the red cloak gave it away.”

“That’s Bloody Al?” One of the guards asked, but a hard look from the sergeant silenced him.

I considered it. Vicar would already know something had gone wrong. He’d be suspicious of the strange weather, and no doubt realize one of his sentries wasn’t reporting back soon enough. He wasn’t stupid, and he’d be expecting me.

“Start evacuating everyone from inside, if you can. Make sure your comrades know I don’t mean their king harm.” Hopefully that would start getting people out of my way, and perhaps give Delphine more cover. “Where is the Cardinal?”

“In the undercroft,” the sergeant said. “His Holiness’s own tomb was converted into a chapel.”

“The king is with him,” one of the others said, then winced. He seemed torn as to whether I was an enemy or not.

“I’ll do what I can to protect your king, but I need the people in that cathedral out of my way. Anyone who stands in front of my sword will die, do you understand?”

I didn’t wait for affirmation. Moving forward, I let the crossbow sink back into the darkness beneath my cloak and loosened the sword from its ring.

I paused only when the devil coughed and spoke. “Vicar knew you would come, Alken Hewer. We were ready for you. I will see you again soon enough…”

It began to laugh as its body burned and whatever passed for its soul was dragged back to Hell.

At the top of those ninety-seven steps stood a tall arch at the union of two high walls. Angels with wings fashioned from joined bucklers guarded its sides, and the images of mortal saints conversed in the alcoves at its top. When I caught the glint of shining eyes in those windows, I knew devils guarded this place too.

No more stealth. Fine enough.

Beyond the arch lay a small wood. The Garden of the Basilica of the Blessed Saints was a wonder of the region all on its own, as it was one of the last remaining copses of eardetrees in the subcontinent since the burning of Seydis.

Or it had been. As I stepped through the arch, I did not feel the wash of auratic warmth I’d expected. Even in winter the earde should have been vibrant with life, but no longer. The neat rows of tall trees were dim, only the occasional dim amber glow shining from gaps in their flaking bark. They looked sick, their branches drooping from the weight of fangs of ice, and the smell of decay hung heavy in the air.

They were not all dead. As I stepped from clear daylight into the irregular shadows of the Garden’s canopy, the attention of the sick elf-trees snapped to me with a jarring suddenness. I could feel their pain, and their anger. More of those things that’d been lurking at the top of the arch were here, squatting in the hollows and in the branches in a mocking resemblance to owls or squirrels.

They whispered as I moved through them. Their voices were a mingling of hissing whispers and guttural, toad-like grunts. Though I’d never encountered them, I knew immediately what they must be. Imps. Carreon feeders and messengers for the Zosite, much as lesser seraphim were for the Onsolain. I could smell them, smell the mucus and feces they’d covered the holy wood with.

I spoke into the whispers. “Your masters want the people of this city to believe this garden got sick because of what’s happening in the east, don’t they?”

The whispering grew more excited. I didn’t understand them, didn’t want to. Even the hint of the Tongue of Orkael made my ears itch unpleasantly.

“Because of their own sins!” One of the devils said in my own language.

”Their sloth.”

“Because they have not burned the heretic.”

“Stoned the witch!”

“Culled the changeling.”

I fully unhitched the executioner’s sword from its catch and swept it out to one side, so air hummed around it. “I won’t let you turn us into that.”

The imps were gathering in more numbers now. Branches groaned from their weight as they perched on them like flocks of hunched, ugly birds. Their eyes were like tiny pits of flame in the gloom, though wherever the golden light of my own gaze fell on them they cringed away so I never got a full look at one. These were not like the crowfriars, judging from the sensation in my powers, but true infernals. They were Zosite, albeit the least of them. That meant they’d already started opening the way, made lesser cracks between dimensions in preparation for the larger one as Delphine had guessed. I didn’t have much more time.

“Oh, you won’t fight us, Headsman!”

“We are just here to watch you die.”

Snow crunched amid the eardetrees as more shapes began to move forward. They stumbled and twitched, their ungainly movements making it hard to ascertain their true shape at first. But as they drew closer and I heard the clink of roughly shaped iron, I understood.

The first Knight Penitent charged at me without warning, their arms pumping and legs forming long tracks in the snow as they unloosed themselves in a maniac sprint. Despite the energy of that motion, they were disturbingly silent save for the clicking of their armor and the muffled grunts of breath through the helm they’d been sealed in.

He — if it was a he under the torture device that passed for protection — wielded a spiked hammer in one hand and a long dagger in the other, a “mail breaker” with a wide guard and long blade made to kill knights. He leapt into a berserk swing with the hammer, while two of his comrades came from either side. Wolf tactics, making me focus on one while two more went in for the kill.

My lips peeled back from clenched teeth as I let out a long hiss of breath. There was aura in that breath, mixing with the frozen air and forming a lambent plume in front of my face. I slide one steel shoe through the snow, lowering my body and levering my sword back on my shoulder.

Since the tournament in Garihelm, I’d practiced with the blade as well as my axe. I’d known I might need to use those old skills again in a pinch, and wanted to purge the chance of more fits stalling my hand, as had happened previous times I’d touched the hilt of a proper sword. I’d sparred with Emma, with Hendry, even with Lisette sometimes so she could practice using her Art in combat.

And now I held a weapon so similar to my trusted companion from my time as Rosanna’s champion. The balance, the weight, the feel of it against my palms… it felt like stepping back in time.

But the roiling heat of Alder fire in my limbs, that was fresh, and I channeled both sensations into a single mighty swing.

Frozen wind howled and exploded into steam as aureflame flash heated the air. I let out a hoarse shout lost in the roar of fire, swinging the executioner’s blade in a full arc that began over my head and terminated somewhere behind my ankles, pale golden light tracing the blade’s path. It caught the first Penitent in the side of the head, bisecting the top half of his skull, sliced the throat of the one to my right, and blinded the third coming at the back of my left shoulder with the flash of light.

Only, being blinded did not stop these. Even injuries that would send a strong, brave man into a state of shock did not slow them. The first died instantly, but the other two kept moving. The one on my right slammed into me, which saved me from the one behind as they swung blindly with their flail and caught me in the shoulder rather than the back of my skull. The spiked ball dented my pauldron and sent a dull throb of impact through chainmail and muscle beneath, one I knew would soon grow into an agonizing bruise.

I twisted and used my left hand to shove the nearly decapitated Penitent to the snow, where they weakly flopped as blood loss finally took its toll on their unnatural vitality. The blind one swung again, tracking me by the movement of my legs through the snow and the rattle of my armor. I rotated the sword’s grip in my hands, severing the flail’s chain with an upward swing before following with a low swipe that took the Penitent’s legs out from under him. He slammed into the ground.

I wasn’t given time to finish that one. More of the Penitents were closing in, all clad in black armor fused to their bodies with screws and bolts, each imprisoned in masks fashioned into strange and sinister shapes. Imps rode them, clinging to helmets and shoulders like stunted gargoyles. Darkness clung to the small devils, obscuring their true shapes but providing an impression of forms that shifted with every movement of the soldiers they burdened. Sometimes they looked like human children with eerily bright eyes and cherubic faces, sometimes like burnt monkeys or reptiles.

They were here to stall me. To give Vicar and the rest time to complete their ceremony. A force pulled me past the Penitents, a gravity I knew must originate beneath the cathedral.

I needed to get past them. I couldn’t waste time. But even if I did, they would hound me every step. Unlike normal guards, these wouldn’t tire or balk if I smote through them. Vicar had chosen his trap well.

One of the imps giggled, very much like a young child, and smacked the side of a Penitent’s mask. This one held a pickaxe in either hand, simple and effective weapons for punching through armor. They started to walk forward.

I got an idea, and started to reshape my aura even as I took a guard, angling my sword so the grip was parallel with my jaw and the blade aimed down and forward. Basilisk At The Door, one of the sword forms I’d learned in Karles when Rosanna insisted I take proper tutorship. I’d retained some of it, more than I’d ever admit to her.

The Penitent paused, which surprised me. Had he sensed the trap? The imp growled and pulled on the faux-knight’s pauldron, urging him on, but he ignored it. This one had a helmet shaped like a sea urchin, a sphere covered in long, thin needles of black metal. I couldn’t see his expression through the two small holes in that prisoner’s mask, one over his left eye and the other just to the side of where the mouth should be.

It struck me then that these weren’t mindless automatons, not zombies driven by bloodlust and instinct. They were human, and some might be experienced fighters in whatever lives they’d lived before being sealed in that armor. The guard I’d taken was a deceitful, versatile one, but my sword’s lack of a stabbing tip severely limited the effective motions I could take with it. Had they sensed something off?

The imp certainly didn’t. It slapped at the side of its steed’s mask, hissing and spitting at it like an angry cat. It looked like a cat now, its form turning sharper and more feral with its anger. The rest of the Penitents remained back, as though waiting for this one to make the first move.

I decided to trust my hunch. These weren’t just dumb brutes who didn’t die easy. I adjusted my guard, sweeping my sword up and back over my right shoulder and shifting my right leg back further. The Dragon’s Jaw Unhinges, Rose’s blademaster had called this stance. Pretentious man, but he’d known his business.

Would this work? Urddha had warned that some of my old techniques might be lost forever.

I had to try. There wasn’t time to fight this out.

Seeing my guard open, the Penitent moved forward. He flicked his twin war picks as he advanced, striking them together so they made sparks. The others started to move as well, following this one’s lead. A captain of some kind, maybe, or did they follow based on something else? Pack instinct, perhaps.

I waited until the instant before he entered my reach to act. Gathering and focusing the power I’d been quietly shaping with murmured words and silent effort, I stepped to one side and swung — not at the Knight Penitent, but at the thing on his shoulder.

The imp screeched as the greatsword took it. The blow pulverized the small creature more than cut it, and its remains scattered in a puff of reeking blood and toxic scraps of scaly flesh. The Penitent, having misjudged the angle of my swing, fouled his counter and caught a shoulder check that rammed him to the ground with sheer weight and force. He went down on his back into the snow.

But that had just been a cover for my next act. My eyes narrowed to slits behind the window in my helm as I tasted the imp’s essence, which still lingered in the air. That is the best way to describe it — I knew demons, and this wasn’t far afield, but it was more cousin to angels than the spawn of the Abyss and I needed a sense of it. I grasped that sense, a feeling not unlike cupping my hand around a new species of moth and feeling the texture of its wingbeats against my palm.

It was more like a seraphim than an abgrüdai. Unclean, sharp and vicious, but still cousin to divinity. I adjusted the Art on the fly, shocked by how easy it was. It was like the magic sensed my intent and altered itself to match.

I let my left hand fall off the sword’s grip and thrust it outward, palm facing forward, a sign of rebuke. It was that, a repudiation against those who transgressed on holy ground. And though tarnished, the copse of eardetrees was hallowed still. I could feel it in the roots beneath me, which woke to my will — to the Alder’s will, which flowed fresh through me. The sick garden added its own strength, its own anger at these intruders, and all the conditions became right to create a new magic.

A blast of golden light and ghostly amber leaves exploded out from me. That light formed itself into a phalanx of stabbing roots and branches that zig-zagged through the trees, stabbing and slicing through the devils where they clung to the earde or to the Penitents. They erupted from my back, my chest, my outstretched arm, from the ground around my sabatons, each blazing like a beam of bright sunlight. A deep, resonant hum filled the air, and in its warbling I could hear the groaning of tortured wood, the whistle of angry wind through a restless canopy.

I’d modified the spell from an Alder technique for breaking hostile enchantments, and a name flitted through my thoughts in the moment I cast it — that name etched itself into the Art, becoming part of it. Rebuke The Iron Angels.

Those imps who weren’t caught in the Art screeched and shrieked like a horde of furious primates or birds, no two voices quite alike. They took to their air in bird or bat shape, wings flapping and furious voices chastising me as the web of glowing glass I’d created broke apart and scattered. But none dared draw close, and they took to the air high above the garden.

The reaction from the Penitents was just as dramatic. All at once they began to contort, strange and distorted howls emerging from their masks that were made more disturbing by how muffled they were. Many fell to the ground, limbs locking as they began to spasm and crumple.

As I’d gambled they would. Or, more accurately, hoped. Chamael had been the lynchpin around which the Knights Penitent functioned. These were human beings, and though some might have been evil men, they were flesh and blood. Mortal. The seraph who’d led them kept the iron maidens they’d been locked inside from simply incapacitating them with pain, acting as both healer and focus along with whatever conditioning they’d undergone to endure the process. Without the Saint, they’d needed something else to remain functional.

Those imps were angels too, albeit small and cruel ones. They’d focused the Knights Penitent into the weapons they were meant to be.

But the imps could come back and reassert control. They would bring other, stronger devils with them. The crowfriars, and perhaps even that Scorchknight from Lias’s hideaway. I needed to move.

As I walked through the contorted shapes of the Penitents, my magic shifted. Pulled towards the convict soldiers, just like at the Backroad that night Vicar had first appeared. I felt I understood why, now. Just like the ghosts I’d offered the Alder’s fire to as a means to soothe their hostility and replenish my own strength, these were damned souls. The Alder called to them. They longed for it.

But I had none left to spare. I left them behind as I pressed forward.