Guild Mage: Apprentice

38. A Day of Blood

Inkeris lifted his hand silently, first two fingers raised, while he checked to be certain that everyone was in position. Sohvis and Rika each had two men with them, while Keri had three, all of them armored in enchanted steel. They’d never cracked a cell of the cult that had more than a dozen, and the Unconquered House of Bælris held a threefold advantage: in training, magic, and equipment. He was confident that he’d brought more than enough people to handle things.

Sohvis and his men were lined up opposite Keri, on the right side of the entryway, while Rika and her guards hung back as a reserve. That had been part of their deal: there was no way he would risk her not coming home to their son when this was over. After making eye contact with each of them in turn, Keri chopped his hand down and forward, toward the dark tunnel into the earth, giving his cousin Sohvis the signal to move in.

The cult’s cells made their shrines in out of the way places where they hoped to pass unnoticed. Over years of hunting across the north, Keri had broken down the doors of abandoned barns, and ripped up the floors of modest homes. He’d dug through a mess of frozen fish to find a secret hatch, and climbed above the tree line to where blood-spattered shrines clung to rocky crags. Today, they’d tracked their targets to a stretch of forested hills northwest of Al’Fenthia.

This particular hill had been excavated and braced, with a stone doorway built into the earth itself, leading down into darkness. It would be cramped, dim and dangerous to follow their prey into this particular rat hole. At least the word of Bælris could deal with one of those problems.

Sohvis and his men moved as soon as the signal was given, Keri’s cousin darting down into the tunnel with a muttered invocation. Light burst out of the doorway: with any luck, the sudden glare would catch the cultists by surprise and blind them. Keri counted to ten slowly, then took his men and followed.

The tunnel was just as tight as he’d feared it would be, and Keri grimaced. His spear was a better weapon for this sort of thing than Sohvis’ blade, but his cousin had insisted on going first. Up ahead, the ring of metal on metal told Keri that their forward team had made contact.

Keri picked up his pace, dashing out of the tunnel into an open chamber no more than thirty feet across, and perhaps ten high. A full third of the place was taken up by the grotesque altar built into the far wall: the figure of a nude woman, sculpted from clay, holding her swollen belly with both hands. Her head was adorned with braided and knotted cords of yarn, in a dozen or more shades of red, and her eyes had been set with pale stones. Beneath her, a shallow pit had been dug into the earth and lined with tightly packed and mortared stones. Oil lamps lined the irregular walls of the chamber, illuminating the pile of bones heaped around the feet of the icon.

The stench was horrible: blood, offal and rot, the air so thick with it that Keri nearly choked. They’d waited until the cult had come to perform their dark rites, in an attempt to catch them all at once, and as a result there was a freshly killed chicken in the sacrificial basin at the base of the statue, still leaking blood.

It also meant the room was filled with people. Keri caught a glimpse of Sohvis spinning his blade through the neck of a middle-aged man, decapitating him with a single cut. Keri’s three men piled into the chamber, and he saw a young woman in the simple garb of a merchant or shopkeeper make a run to get past him. He thrust forward with his Næv’bel, taking her in the thigh, and she screamed, clutching the wound. Instead of pulling the blade of the spear out, Keri muttered the invocation to a spell.

"Savelet Aisarg Æ’Næv’bel." The words carried his mana up from inside, down through his arms, and out into his spear. The blade, still buried inside the woman’s thigh, flashed with light and heat, causing her to cry aloud in pain once again before he drew it forth. Smoke wafted up from her charred flesh, but she would not bleed to death before he was able to question her.

"Keri!" The cry came from behind him, and Rika charged out of the tunnel into the subterranean shrine. "Something’s happening," she said, drawing herself up short at his side. "The sky-"

"Blood and shadows," Sohvis cursed, and Keri spun away from his kwenim to see his cousin scrambling back. Above the sacrifice, a swirling vortex of blood was sucking in every bit of viscera and gore that had been spilled during the raid. The pulsing orb consumed the blood of the dead chicken, but also that of the man Sohvis had beheaded, and seemed to feed from the very wounds of the defeated cultists.

Before anyone had wrapped their minds around what was happening, a lash of blood whipped out, taking one of Sohvis’ men around the neck and jerking him up into the air. The man dropped his blade, trying to pry the tendril of gore away from his neck with his own fingers. The horror spawned in front of the altar gave him no time: instead, it swung the man, headfirst, into the mortared stones of the sacrificial basin. When it jerked him back up again, limp, Keri watched the blood leaking from his split scalp drawn inexorably into the hovering orb.

"Burn it!" Keri shouted. He repeated his spell, and the blade of his spear erupted into blazing, hot sunlight. Then, he charged.

☙

Jurian of Carinthia had still not quite gotten used to the life of a professor at Coral Bay. In the time since he’d walked the halls of the College of Vædic Grammar as a student, little had changed with the school itself. No, he was the one who had changed. He’d gotten old, for one thing.

"Father!" Wren screamed. The shrine had been obliterated in the first explosion, when a column of light had linked the peak with the ring in the sky above, and shards of black rock had shot down the mountain. Everyone else who could fly had already left, darting between burning cinders on black wings, heading down toward the river. Those who were too young or old had been sent away days before, and would be waiting there. But her father had been inside the rift, and he still hadn’t come out.

It had taken them years to fight their way through the shoals to the depths, clearing the mana-beasts as they went, bleeding for each precious foot of ground. Wren had been a vital part of it, which was the only thing that helped her find the entrance to the rift now, when the entire mountain had been so altered. Everything green was gone, leaving only a burning nightmare.

The doorway was of obsidian, sharp and polished to a glossy finish, and it was a miracle that it still stood. Wren murmured a thanks to the goddess, ducked inside, and hoped that the eruption had not collapsed any of the tunnels. A part of her knew that was the least of her worries: it would be far worse to rush around a corner and find the entire passage obliterated by a river of molten lava.

It had been nearly twenty years of work, first to take the heart of the rift, and then to hold it against every creature that absorbed enough mana to grow mad and dangerous. Wren couldn’t count how many warriors they’d lost, waiting for the next eruption to come. When the blood-letters had finally announced the signs, her father had declared he would wait at the heart of the rift himself, standing vigil until the appointed time. She’d begged him to let her stay at his side, but Nighthawk, Chief of the Red Shield Tribe, had refused.

"If something should happen to me," he’d said, putting his massive hand on her shoulder, "you must lead our people. Succeed or fail, do not let our memory pass away from this world. Survive."

Wren slid around the corner which marked the transition from the shoals to the depths, skidding on the stone, then found her balance and kept running. Something was wrong: when they’d first made it this far, even she had been able to feel the heaviness of the mana in the air. Now, there was absolute emptiness, instead. There was nothing to do but keep going, so she pressed on to the tomb itself.

Even the blood-letters had not been confident the old stories were true, but her father had never lost faith. And there, at the very depths of the rift, they’d found it. The chamber where, a thousand years before, the goddess’ last, faithful servants had taken her body, after the day the sky fell.

Now, the massive doors of stone were cracked open. It had taken weeks of work, with chisels and hammers, while warriors stood guard all the while. Wren slipped through, into the tomb itself. "Father?" she called into the darkness.

The faintest sound, of something shuffling on stone, and two red eyes, shining like hot steel in a forge, turned to Wren. A great weight pressed down on her, and she could not help but fall to the floor of the tomb, first onto her hands and knees, and then finally flat on her belly, cheek to the stone, hair in her face.

Something assaulted Wren’s mind, and she heard herself screaming as if from a great distance. Memories flickered: her mother, before she’d died coughing up blood. Her father, showing her how to fletch an arrow. Faster and faster, the memories came, flickering like the wings of a moth, until Wren couldn’t keep track of them any longer.

The last, however, slowed. She paused in the window of Castle Whitehill, the white statue of the goddess in her hand, the girl with the pointed ears staring at her in the moonlight. "It doesn’t belong to your baron, either," Wren said, in her memories. "It was stolen, and brought here from Varuna, across the sea. I’m just taking it back. I’m sorry you woke up tonight, girl. They’re going to blame you for this, and you don’t deserve it."

"Rise, child," a woman’s voice said, filling the chamber. The memories slipped away, and the pressure eased. Wren sucked in a breath, got her hands under her, and pushed herself up from the floor, onto her knees.

"Goddess?" Wren gasped. "My father-"

A great bulk moved in the darkness, a shadow. A woman’s hand, delicate and pale, rose up, bringing a dim, red light into the chamber. Ractia’s dark hair hung loose past her shoulders, and it was the only thing she wore. Her eyes were shaped oddly, and the features of her face as well, though Wren couldn’t have put into words how. Her hips were wide, her belly gently curved, and her breasts full and heavy. Like the idol Wren had stolen near twenty years before, the Lady of Blood was no young woman, but a mother goddess.

"Be at peace, my daughter," Ractia murmured. "Now that I am returned, there are a great many wrongs to be set right. You and your father will stand at my side for all of it."

The shadow at Ractia’s shoulder stepped forward, revealed by the ruddy light, and Wren looked upon the face of the chief. Nighthawk Wind Dancer’s visage was grim, set as stone, and he showed no expression at the sight of his own daughter on her knees.

There was nothing left of Wren’s father in his red eyes.