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Arc 4: Chapter 2: Stormclouds Over Garihelm

Arc 4: Chapter 2: Stormclouds Over Garihelm

“Move!” I barked, swinging myself up onto the bench.

Emma snapped the reins and started the chimera forward without hesitation. The creatures, the scadumares, moved like liquid night. They looked thin and elegant, but they had the power of ancient destriers.

The coach began to move, quickly picking up speed.

It wouldn’t be enough. Good as Rosanna’s beasts were, we’d been at a dead stop and the war carriage had momentum. The bulky creatures pulling it, closer to huge front-heavy bovines than horses, lacked the grace of the scadumares but more than made up for it with sheer brawn and stamina.

Emma saw the same thing I did. She spat out an angry curse, then jerked on the reins. I nearly lost my seat on the rain-slicked bench as the black mares took a sharp left down a narrow side street, acting without hesitation. They were well trained, and didn’t so much as nicker in protest.

Our passengers were in for a bumpy ride.

Behind us, the trihorns let out angry bellows as the target of their goring rush eluded them. They wouldn’t be able to make that sharp a turn, not with their mass and the huge armored carriage they pulled.

Crossbow bolts cracked through the rain. One embedded itself in the coach’s burgundy wood less than a foot from my head, a second vanished into the rain, and a third splintered against the side of a building.

The coach almost tilted onto its side with the turn. I grit my teeth, holding on for dear life, then we righted and were on.

Then the priorguards vanished down the street we’d just turned off, lost behind the buildings.

“They’ll find a way around,” I said, raising my voice over a rumble of thunder. “And I doubt that’s the only one. You have our dropoff?”

“I’ll get us there!” Emma said, voice high with adrenaline from the perilous turn she’d made. “You were right about the Priory — they really want this cadaver.”

“He’s the only one who might be able to give us a lead on Yith,” I said. “We let the clerics put him to rest, it’s another cold trail.”

For weeks, I’d been scouring the city for clues that might lead me to the Carmine Killer, who I knew to be the demon Yith. The string of murders in the city had grown worse, and the fear broiling in the streets had granted the Priory and its puppet, the Inquisition, even more influence.

The demon lurked somewhere in the city, and there was a chance his enigmatic masters did too. They were planning something, and I intended to stop it.

The Inquisition had the same goal, so far as I knew, but very different means of going about it. They didn’t just want to stop a murderer, but root out all opposition to their growing influence and dogmatic ideals. To them, Kieran wasn’t just a lead to discovering how Yith was choosing his targets, but also a tool to neuter the Empress and her allies. House Greengood was a staunch ally to the Empress, and the Grand Prior could exploit the young lady’s connection to the profane fate of her lowborn lover.

They could spin whatever narrative they wanted, once they had her in custody. They had various and gruesome means of obtaining a “confession.” They could label young Lady Laessa as a necromancer, a cultist, or any sordid title they fancied, and that would put a shadow over all the nobility.

We knew this because Lisette had recently become an aide to the Grand Prior himself, and had listened to his private councils. I hadn’t just brought Laessa Greengood along due to a fit of altruism.

We were in one of the more elevated districts of the city, near the river. Neighborhoods full of guild workshops and housing for the gentry dominated, with the occasional church or tavern. Alchemical lanterns burned in surreal colors through the haze of rain, lighting our path like the Wil-O’ Wisps so common in the woods and moors across the land.

In a storm this bad, few dared brave the streets. The city seemed a hazy dream, blanketed in a veil of late spring storm and mist.

Too quiet. Too easy. My hand clenched and unclenched on my axe, waiting for the next hat to drop.

We turned onto a wider street, a thoroughfare to channel crowds and vehicles through the bustling heart of the city during the day. High buildings with sleek towers and decorative pillars loomed over the street. Ahead, the avenue dropped into one of the city’s deep canals.

Emma had slowed the coach, her avian eyes squinting into the gloom. She had good sight, the product of old alchemy in her bloodline, a match even for my auratically enhanced gaze in some circumstances.

I heard the faint clattering of iron wheels, a distant, ethereal snort.

“They’re close,” Emma said, her voice almost lost in the downpour. The rain plastered her dark hair to her neck and forehead, forming reverse question marks around her face.

I tried to focus. My magically enhanced senses, particularly my ability to sense the emanations of other spirits around me, could be incredibly useful for determining whether a supernatural being lurked nearby. It’s what my powers had been meant for.

Human souls are more difficult. Unless someone had awakened their aura, giving it a tangible presence in the world, I was more or less left with my natural senses.

I felt Emma next to me, like a boiling concentration of superheated blood. Her magic was an angry thing, a locus of churning power ready to erupt into sharp violence in an instant. I felt the dyghoul in the coach at my back, a more hollow presence, like a cold spot in the world.

And something else. High above in the storm, something big crackled with hostility and rage. It felt like the sky itself pressed down on me, heavy as a great sea. I’d felt it earlier, and still couldn’t place it.

I shut my magical senses out. Useless now. Just noise.

The distant noise of the war carriage came again, fainter.

A trick of the city’s layout and the storm. I lifted my axe.

They were close.

“Go,” I said, urgent. “Now!”

Emma didn’t question. With a shout, she slapped the reins. The scadumares broke into a gallop, letting out their eerie trilling cries, more bird than equine.

The war carriage smashed through a rolling curtain of rain behind us. The trihorns let out angry bellows as they caught sight of us. Bred for war, they were eager to close in and smash our smaller vehicle to splinters. The priorguard clung to the iron-plated vehicle like shadowy spiders, cruel tools of capture ready.

This time, we didn’t have narrow side streets to our advantage. The wide avenue provided plenty of room for the Inquisition carriage to maneuver, and it gained. Fast as Rosanna’s rare chimera were, they struggled more on the slick stone of Garihelm than the war-beasts did.

I heard their booming steps grow louder as they gained. Crossbow bolts buzzed through the rain like angry wasps, most missing. Some struck the coach, embedding into its wooden frame. I heard a muffled cry of alarm from one of our passengers.

“Emma,” I said. “Give me the reins.”

My squire’s eyes flicked to me.

“This one’s yours,” I said.

“You’re sure?” She asked.

A bolt zipped right over my head. I grimaced. “Do it.”

She nodded and handed me the reins. I swung Faen Orgis down, embedding it into the wood of the bench to keep it secure and free my hands. I took control of the coach just in time to turn the mares and avoid going into the canal. Emma climbed up on top of the coach, clinging to a rail on its side.

I glanced back, seeing that she’d stretched one arm out, her posture stiff. Another bolt missed her by mere feet, breaking against a fountain statue.

I felt invisible power shift, like a sudden tension in the world. It’s difficult to describe, magic — there’s no truly physical sensation, just an impression of something fundamental in the world moving out of place, or perhaps into place.

Like all the cosmos twists on your axis for a moment, Lias had once said.

Emma’s inner core of boiling red power pulsed once, like a heartbeat.

The war carriage gained. I felt it as much as I heard it now, a rumbling pressure on the street. Ahead, the avenue narrowed into a residential. Austere governmental buildings gave way to humbler shops and multi-storied tenements.

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Emma had cut her own palm, using one of the sharp decorative barbs of the carriage’s brass-and-silver frame. Her blood dripped down onto the stone. It raced through the seams of the cobblestone below like hungry serpents, a living thing undiluted by rainwater.

The priorguard drew very close to our coach. Glancing back, I saw several of them preparing to leap and board us.

One veiled figure crouched atop the carriage lifted one hand high, as though to deliver some melodramatic proclamation. I saw a flash of dull coppery light, and a lambent gold-red auremark with upward bending wings and many curling spikes on each point appeared above their hand.

They had an adept too. With another flash, the Red Trident of Inquisition grew larger, forming a sort of banner above the iron carriage.

Emma let out a sudden gasp of breath, and the sound rippled through the city like a disturbance in a pond.

With a chorus of piercing shrieks, a score or more of scarlet iron pikes burst from the street in a zigzagging line. They emerged in sequence, like a deadly forest growing in mere moments, each as tall as one of the light posts holding the alchemical lamps.

No less than four speared through one of the tri-horn chimera. Several sliced through iron-plated wheels and into the belly of the carriage. One of the priorguard on the bench suddenly spasmed as one took him in the side at an angle, dragging him from his seat. The heavy back wheel of the vehicle crushed him an instant later. I heard the noise of his bones breaking.

The mortally wounded chimera let out a low bellow, then slumped into a bad fall at full momentum. The yoke holding it to the carriage and the second beast cracked. The other beast stumbled, the vehicle tilted, and the whole thing crashed in a thunderous cacophony, breaking and splitting, iron screaming as it bent.

A moment later, the faintly gleaming spikes of the Shrike Forest scattered back into incorporeality.

“Good job,” I said, though my praise was lost in a sudden growl of thunder. I fixed my attention forward, and immediately let out a bitter curse.

Emma turned belatedly, having been appreciating her handiwork, and cried out in alarm.

A row of priorguard stood in the street ahead of us, their shadowy visages almost lost in the gloom. They held lanterns burning with angry red light, and man catchers and hooked chains, and those evil little crossbows.

At their forefront stood a huge man with a mantle over his black robe and a pointed hood very reminiscent of an executioner’s cowl. On his shoulder he held a huge wooden breaking wheel plated with iron.

The Art the priorguard on the carriage had used wasn’t meant to attack us — it had been a signal.

Three priorguard stepped out of the line, and each of them brought a single hand above their heads, fingers curled. Three gleaming copper tridents burst to life above their hands, scarring the night.

I reached for my axe.

Too late.

They swept their hands down in a chopping motion, and the barbed auremarks all split simultaneously.

I tugged sharply on the reins, trying to get the scadumares to turn. They did, with incredible speed and dexterity, but it was too late.

Three arcs of gilt copper, like coiling fragments of dusk light, sliced down the street. It was a simple technique — phantasmal blades, sharp and short-lived. They produced musical wails as they flew.

We were too close. One blade missed us, cutting a thin, deep line right into the street as it swept past. The second went into the shoulder of the rightmost scadumare. Blood fountained into the air, splattering me and the front of the coach. The third had been expertly aimed, and sliced through both left wheels, cleanly severing them from the coach.

We tilted. The metal frame sent up a shower of sparks as it slid, emitting an ear-splitting shriek, and then we were rolling in an ironic repeat of what Emma had done to our pursuit.

Everything became a whirl of sound, a blur of movement and chaos and dizzying confusion. I hit the street hard, rolled, struck something. A post, or maybe the edge of one of the city’s clever system of gutters. All the air went out of me.

Once I’d stopped, it took me a terrifying long moment to get myself to breathe. I stood, mostly on reflex — staying down in a battle is a good way to get a pike into your gut.

When the world righted itself, I gathered three facts immediately. One, I’d torn my flesh raw rolling on the street, and it was a miracle my bones were intact. Two, the coach was ruined — one mare lay dead, and the other had been pulled down by the falling vehicle, possibly also maimed.

Three, I didn’t see Emma. A spike of terror went through me. Had she gone under the coach?

Heavy steps plodded through the rain. I turned, and whipped my head back an instant before an enormous object would have pulped my skull. A truly massive man stood before me, taller than I and bulkier too, his priorguard robes a veritable tent of black fabric.

It was the one in the heavy mantle. He wielded an enormous iron-plated wheel as a weapon, his hairy fingers clutching handholds built into the outer frame. He let out a guttural breath, brought the wheel up over his head, and then swung it one handed.

The object could have been used to carry the coach I’d just lost. It parted a curtain of rain as it cut the air, splashing me. I dodged again, stumbling back, and felt a prickling sensation against my skin.

Wonderful. The wheel had been consecrated, too. A blessing of power, I guessed, so it could strike like a minor thunderclap.

The huge man hardly seemed to need the help. To make matters worse, I’d lost my axe in the fall.

Seeing I was unarmed, the priorguard stepped forward into a ruthless assault, bringing his enormous wheel high up over his head and grasping its handholds in both meaty fists. He slammed it down. I jumped back a heartbeat before it would have flattened me against the street.

The ground shuddered at the impact. Stone split in a meter wide radius around the wheel. The priorguard’s breath misted out from within his rectangular veil.

He lifted his huge weapon and stepped forward.

He wasn’t paying enough attention to the terrain. Forgivable, in the dark and the rain.

I had paid attention. I’d jumped back over one of the narrow drainage trenches along the side of the street. It was several feet deep, and full of fast-flowing water.

The man stumbled, losing a leg into the trench. He let out a grunt, and in an instant became much shorter. He managed to keep hold of the wheel with one hand, using the other to catch the gutter’s lip and stop himself from getting dragged off by the current.

I pulled a rondel dagger from within my coat — a long spike of solid steel, meant to punch through gaps in a knight’s armor. I stepped forward, grabbed the pointed back of the man’s cowl, and drove the blade into the center of his throat just beneath his veil.

The priorguard slumped, gurgling, and the breaking wheel collapsed onto the street with a shudder. I slid the blade out, leaving it red nearly up to the hilt. Then the current caught him, and he vanished under the black water.

My own breath sent out puffs of mist into the damp air as I took a moment to catch it. I squinted through the storm, seeing movement. The rest of the priorguard had ignored me, moving to surround the coach and secure its occupants.

The big one had been a distraction, a stalling tactic.

I sheathed the rondel, grasped one of the breaking wheel’s handholds, and lifted it up onto one shoulder. I grunted under its weight, leapt the drainage channel, then began to walk forward. My posture took on a very slight stoop under the cumbersome tool. I limped on my wounded leg, each step sending spikes of pain through my muscles.

I took in the details of the scene as I walked. The beautiful coach had turned onto its side, its glass-paned windows shattered, its remaining wheels broken. The dead scadumare lay in a growing pool of its own blood, which had started to drain into another gutter along the side of the street, as though the city itself hungrily drank its life. The other chimera remained alive, but had fallen under the weight of its yoke. It screamed and struggled, possibly injured.

The priorguard ignored the animal. They gathered around the coach, and several had jumped up onto it. They peered into the interior, man-catchers at the ready.

I caught sight of Emma. She lay on the street, very still. I felt my heart squeeze.

I could take her and run, leave the dead boy and his noble paramour to the ungentle mercies of Inquisition. I didn’t know them. I owed them nothing.

I almost did it. I’d already seen so much blood tonight.

Rosanna was counting on me. And I’d grown very tired of failure.

Several priorguard noticed my stumbling approach. Orders were given. Six split off from the coach to accost me.

One lifted a hand into the air. I caught sight of an emblem dangling from a chain in that hand, and he made a complex motion with his other. The copper glow of an inquisitorial trident began to form above him.

I’d already started imbuing the breaking wheel, which they’d so helpfully made into a receptacle, with aureflame. The wood beneath the iron plates began to emit an ember glow.

The priorguard adept lifted his hand higher, then chopped down. He broke the phantasmal auremark, releasing its stored power with the ritual motion. A musical note filled the air, like a bow swept across the cords of a heavenly violin, and a guillotine of angry scarlet-and-gold aura sliced toward me.

I sidestepped, twisting, and it missed me by inches. It cut a deep groove in the stone, and sliced a lamp-post ten feet behind me cleanly in half.

I brought my arm back, and hurled the wheel underhand. It spun through the air like a top, soaring in an arcing motion up, then down. It made a rhythmic basso sound as it spun through the rain.

Whump-whump-whump-whump-whump—

It struck the adept and broke him against the street.

The two halves of the sliced lamp post fell behind me.

I’d started running even as I’d released the wheel. I jumped, threw my whole body into another priorguard so we both went tumbling. I had my rondel in hand, and stabbed him three times in the chest. I rolled off him, came up with my dagger in a tight grip, and sprinted for the coach. I bared my teeth as I went, boots slapping water off the stone beneath me.

A bolt of lightning split the sky like a god’s blade. The ensuing blast of thunder was an almost physical thing.

Somewhere, a church bell tolled.

Every hair across my body suddenly stood on end. The sensation I’d felt before, of something huge and terrible in the sky, erupted into focus. Another bolt of lightning struck a tower a block away. A third cut the black clouds.

There were still a dozen or more priorguard alive, and they were pulling Laessa — rain-soaked and disheveled, but alive — out of the coach.

I was meters away.

Something fell out of the sky. It fell like a comet, striking a belfry less than a block away. The tower broke, collapsing in a shower of rubble and dust, and whatever had struck it went into a three story home on the opposite side of the street. The resulting impact seemed to shake the very foundations of the city. Everyone standing on the street, including myself, staggered.

In a moment, the rain ceased. Something, a wooden beam perhaps, split with a sharp crack.

We all froze. Me, the priorguard, Laessa, the undead boy being pulled out of the carriage.

Something enormous stood from the rubble of the building. It had a hunched shape, with arms nearly as long as its body, near every inch of it covered in wispy black fur. It turned slowly. Eyes large as mirrors and white as milk stared at us.

The figure was nearly featureless, like a smudge in the approximate shape of a muscular humanoid. Another bolt of lightning flashed, giving us all a better look at it.

Its face, nearly vanishing into the mound of its enormous shoulders, resembled of all things a black dandelion. Perfectly round, surrounded by a mane of wispy black hair. Almost unreal.

Then that blank face split to reveal yellow fangs. Arcs of lightning crackled around it as it stepped onto the street. It stood thirty feet high even slouched, and nearly as wide as the street.

“Forsaken Throne,” one of the priorguard whimpered.

I felt as stunned as they did.

The storm ogre strode forward and let out a rumbling growl echoing with the same thunder churning in the clouds above. Then, its eyes blazing with white light, it roared.