Arc 1: Chapter 26: Unhallowed


    “Something’s wrong,” Catrin said, as we approached the vige in the hour preceding dawn.


    I had noticed the same. There were no guards at the gate, as there’d been when I’d arrived with the doctor. The streets of thekesidemunity seemed quiet. Empty.


    Out over theke, the ck towers of the Falconer castle jutted from a shifting haze of fog, cast in its own eerie glow against the ck horizon. A ghost castle, brooding and watchful.


    I wondered if the Baron was watching us even then.


    “Maybe something’s happening at the keep,” I said.


    “Or maybe your hunter friends killed everyone,” Catrin suggested, half joking.


    I grunted a non-reply. I didn’t think the doctor was that dangerous, but it paid to be ready for anything.


    We approached the vige cautiously, but openly. Tiny blue lights flitted around us, illuminating the overcast gloom. They giggled like little bells and chased one another, toying with the frayed hem of my cloak or flitting in and out of my raised hood. They yed with Catrin’s hair too, though she swatted at them, half-annoyed and half charmed. They’d followed us from Irn Bale’s manor.


    “<em>You remind them of the Gilded City,”</em> Irn Bale had said. <em>“They are fickle creatures, but perhaps they will give you somefort. Remember, Sir Knight, there is beauty in this world still worth fighting for.”</em>I wish I could believe it.


    We passed through the gates, and no one challenged us. It wasn’t until we were in the vige square that we found anyone.


    “Bleeding Heaven,” Catrin cursed.


    I guessed it was the priest the Baron had sent me and Quinn to kill. He’d been strung up on a post above the square’s fountain. The fountain was old, some remnant of more bountiful days, a piece of clever masonry bearing the image of an Onsolemite herald, which had likely once filled itself from some underground spring.


    Now the stone basin was filled with blood. The priest had been beheaded and disemboweled, though his gold-brown preoster robes remained. The head adorned the fountain itself, eyeless and tongueless. Night insects swarmed it.


    Whatever Olliard had done to rescue the man, it hadn’t worked. Had they been caught out in the marsh? Were the doctor and his adept apprentice dead too?


    “I’m guessing this was the Mistwalkers,” I said. It reminded me of the butchered bridge troll.


    “Fucking butchers,” Catrin said. There was a strained note in her voice, almost desparate. She inhaled sharply through her nose, taking in the fountain’s gory scent. She shuddered, and a blush formed on her cheeks. “We…” she licked her lips. “We should get moving. Get away from this.” She cast her gaze around, and it was obvious she was trying to look anywhere but at the fountain. “Where do you think everyone else is?”


    I swallowed my disgust at her reaction and started moving toward the vige church. “I can guess.”


    The chapel, like the fountain, was older than much of the rest of the settlement. Its bell tower rose high above the rest of the structures around it, made even higher by the low hill it sat on. A single gargoyle perched atop the overhang of the oak doors, its beaked face contemtive, almost sleepy.


    I paused and reached out with my aura toward the gargoyle. Dead, or so long dormant it may as well have been.


    Catrin eyed the chapel dubiously. “Need a quick pray before we head back to the keep? I’m not judging, but I think I’ll wait out here.”


    I moved to the door and, like with the gargoyle, inspected the auremark worked in solid gold to the front doors. I sensed very little power in it. The metal seemed faded. Tarnished. Several wisps flitted toward the door, drawn perhaps by its faded energy or my own attention. Their light dimmed as they touched it and discovered, to their disappointment, itsck of magic.


    I nced back at the dhampir. “This ce is barely hallowed. You should be fine.”


    Catrin shook her head, her mop of hair swinging with the motion, and remained nted on the street. “I’d rather not take any chances with holy ground. Sorry big man. I’ll be out here when you’re done.”


    I shrugged and tested the door. It was locked. I frowned — outside of a crisis, it was taboo for any chapel or temple to lock its doors. They were supposed to be open sanctums, ces of refuge for the faithful warded against threats by faith and ritual, not by barred doors.


    Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred tform. Support original creators!


    Technically, I was forbidden from going into churches unless ordered. But I’d sinned often enough this seemed a small heresy, and it was for a good cause.


    I ced my fingertips against the auremark — it was nearly as tall as I was, and almost perfectly matched the little talisman Lisette had carried, the golden tes forming an arch pierced by three converging lines. I murmured a prayer, using the barest touch of aura.


    Emunicate or no, I was yet sanctified. The holy symbol split in two at mymand, the double doors swinging open.


    I stepped inside, and nearly gagged on the smell. The wisps retreated into the shadows of my cloak, hiding from what I found.


    I’d found the vigers.


    The chapel was fashioned in an older style, the dais in the center of the room instead of at the far end from the entry — a tall basin, usually filled with blessed water, worked into the floor in the center of a circr, dome-ceilinged room. Windows lined the upper walls, allowing either sun or moonlight in at all hours, the outer parts of the room half hidden behind supporting pirs encircling the central space.


    The vigers had been piled around the dais. Blood dried within the floor’s many grooves and cracks, like a hundred miniature charnel rivers. I could barely see the holy basin for all the corpses piled around it. Young and old.


    My eyes, with their cursed blessing, saw the entire thing clearly. No detail was hidden, no shadow so deep I couldn’t capture every facet of the nightmare in my memory. My gaze fell on the old innkeeper who’d properly weed me to themunity. His eyes stared unblinking from the mound, rimmed with red. His teenage daughtery against him, as though clutching him for safety.


    I’d known. I’d known there was no way the diabolist nobleman could properly use his minion without something profane. This is what he needed the mercenaries for.


    Toote. I was too damnte to make any sort of difference. Orson Falconer hadn’t been fooled by my improvised ploy, he hadn’t sent me out into the marshes as a test.


    He’d wanted me out of the way.


    I stumbled toward the altar. The smell of rotting meat, feces, and blood made me want to flee from that ce, empty my guts out under the clean sky. I moved toward the ughter instead, some unseen gravity tugging me onward on unwilling legs. I kicked something and nearly fell. When I looked down to see what it was, the corpse of a child stared up at me. It had rolled off the mound.


    I did vomit then.


    When I was done, I wiped my mouth and started to turn to leave. Something gave me pause. Movement in the edges of the room? I tightened my grip on the Faen Orgis and turned slowly, ring at my surroundings.


    The domed ceiling and pirs of the chapel were carved withplex scenes, all meant to depict the history of the Faith. Ranks of archaic knights battled the ve armies of Recusant kings. Alongside them congregated images of ancient lords offering their crowns to the God-Queen. Great storms and floods swept across the ins and mountains of the continent as the converted Edaean kings led their armies into Urn, to fashion new bastions against the chaos in the West.


    Legend. History. The long march of history and legend, inscribed into ivy-wrapped stone.


    Blood had been sttered across all of it.


    My eyes took in more scenes, more wars, more fables I’d known since childhood stretching across those walls. My gaze lingered on one pir which showed a group of knights surrounding a tall, regal figure with flowing hair and pointed ears. The elf held an axe, very much like the one I carried, his image superimposed over a towering tree epassing most of the stone pir’s length. Lines of gold had been worked into the stone to add definition and color to the great tree.


    I knew the elf. I knew the tale. <em>And the greatest lord of the Eld, wisest among all who walk the world in flesh, took an axe to the great golden alder which had stood in that ce since the silence of the world was broken. And he, the elf king, hewed down that tree, and from its ruin shaped a power then bequeathed upon Men, so they may hold a candle against the hungering dark.</em>


    My heart began to beat faster. I blinked, and the image changed.


    The stone-etched image of the elf had fallen. The knights had driven their swords into his back, pinning him to the ground. The tree became a ckened, charred husk half its original length. The scenes of war carved along the other pirs took on a more visceral aspect, until I was certain blood was beginning to trickle down like miniature waterfalls, pooling onto the open space in the room’s center, even dripping from the ceiling to form a macabre rain. Fiendish things danced within the chaos, crouched on the shoulders of kings, spurring on scenes of ughter,ughing.


    I could hear themughing.


    I blinked again, and images were as they had been. The knights bowed before the elf king, who stood tall again, their swords held in supplicant hands. The rest of it was just cold stone, unmoving. Dead.


    Profaned.


    I moved closer to the basin. I used some of my cloak to cover my mouth and nose, though my gorge gibbered threats with every step. There was something in the stone hollow. Something moving.


    I leaned over the piled bodies and looked into the receptacle. It was full of crawling insects. Centipedes, spiders, maggots, beetles… they swarmed over one another, devouring, breeding, dying. Many had spilled into the piled corpses of the vigers and the same horror was uring there.


    Somehow I knew — though I couldn’t say whether it was some insight from my oaths or a more primal instinct — that there was a hollow within the basin, an emptiness just under that crawling, writhing mass. A hole in the world.


    Something had been born here. Something terrible.


    <em>Toote.</em>


    “He said this was justice.”


    I whirled, a snarl half-formed on my lips, only to see a figure slumped against one of the pirs epassing the room’s center. He was young, overweight, dressed in the in brown robes of a chapel brother. His brown hair was matted to his head. Blood and worse soiled his robes.


    The young priest’s eyes slid up to me. They were bloodshot. “He said this was justice for our sycophancy, that the Onsin would not save us for all our prayers.” He lifted cracked fingernails to his temple and wed at the raw flesh there. His words took on a hysterical edge. “He made me pray as he killed them. He said they could not hear me.”


    I approached the monk and knelt at his side. He shied away from me.


    I showed him the Faen Orgis. The Doomsman’s Arm. Wil-O’ Wisps emerged from the shadows of my cloak to flit about the weapon, illuminating the elven patterns engraved to the axe de. The monk’s eyes widened.


    “They heard you,” I told him.