A pale, nearly translucent creature sat hunched over the prone body of Cyrus, the innkeeper, who lay upon the floor. A few strands of hair hung from a nearly bald skull, skeletal features covered with skin as thin as parchment. Blue veins traced patterns across dry, flaking flesh.
The creature’s claw-like hands were around Cyrus’s neck. Its bare shoulders moved as it leaned in again to the big man’s face and kissed his lips.
Cyrus’s fingers twitched.
The feeder attached itself like a parasite and breathed in. Its torso swelled, filling with something that Cyrus gave up with a slow, ghostly sigh. As the blue glow from Cain’s staff washed over the room, it turned to stare blindly over its shoulder at him, eye sockets black and empty, ghoulish mouth open in a glistening, toothless circle, saliva dripping from the hole.
Cyrus began to shudder, his bare heels drumming on the floor.
What hell is this?
Cain pulled the last of the black seeds from his rucksack and tossed them at the creature’s feet. They sprang to life, tendrils digging into the cracks and sprouting up with unbelievable speed. The feeder screamed, a high, ear-splitting noise like the screech of glass against metal as the black roots lashed across the room, grasping hold of anything within reach and creating a forest of waving limbs.
Cain slammed the door shut, shuddering. Mikulov had heard the noises and was already in the hall, Leah right behind him.
“There’s a feeder in Cyrus’s room,” he said.
From the sleeve that wrapped over his wrist Mikulov slipped a punch dagger into his hand so that it protruded from his fist. The blade glowed briefly with markings of power etched into the steel.
The noises from inside had ceased abruptly. “I’m scared, Uncle,” Leah said. Cain looked down at her pale face, which shone like a tiny moon in the darkness.
“I will not let anything happen to you,” he said. “I promise.”
Mikulov opened the innkeeper’s door to a thicket of black roots that had spread across the frame. He sliced at them with his blades. The cut roots fell, writhing like snakes before shrinking away again to seeds, which Cain scooped up. In a few moments, the monk had cleared a path, and he stepped into the room and disappeared from sight. Then Mikulov appeared at the door again, Cyrus over his shoulder.
“The thing is gone out the window,” he said. “We are safe, for now.”
He carried Cyrus back to their room and put him on the floor, and Cain crouched over him, looking for any obvious wounds. His neck was deeply bruised. A moment later the innkeeper opened his eyes, his gaze unfocused; his head fell to the side, his limbs unresponsive. Cain tried to get him to speak, with no luck. It was as if the man was in a trance of some kind or had been drugged.
The big man seemed smaller and thinner than before, his flesh sunken around his eyes and cheeks, bones protruding in more angles and sharp points. He appeared as drained as a piece of dry fruit, his skin cracking, a hollow husk of flesh made all the more horrifying by the way his eyes rolled loosely in their sockets and his mouth hung open, breath rasping in and out like the last gasps of a dying man.
But Cyrus did not die. Instead he remained in the same state, unresponsive, his breathing irregular, his pulse faint. Cain listened to Cyrus’s rattling breath and thought about the creature he had seen, its eyeless face staring blankly at him. The sound of flapping wings came faintly from outside their room, and Cain felt a momentary darkness cross their path with a rush and a sigh, then pass out of sight again. He shivered.
The moment of truth was getting closer. Soon he would know whether the Horadrim still lived on or whether they had faded away into legend, leaving him as the last bastion against oblivion. Soon Ratham would be upon them.
May the archangels save us all.
Tomorrow, they would go to Gea Kul.
22
The Blood of Al Cut
Underneath the tower of stone and sea, the Dark One drew a circle around a familiar symboclass="underline" a figure eight with two pointed dagger tips at its bottom, amber gemstone in the middle. A candle fluttered in its center, but the edges of the room were shrouded in shadows, deeper than the night outside. Yet he saw everything with perfect clarity; his eyes had developed a peculiar sensitivity to light, the way a cat’s eyes cut through the darkness to spy its prey. There were other changes as well that were more dramatic. It was all part of his transformation from human into deity.
His ghouls had continued to spread across the land, bringing the essence of life back to him and filling the containment chamber. He felt its power swelling beneath him, a ticking bomb ready to explode.
Only four days until his coronation. It was time to make the first contact.
Something splattered across the symbol’s center. The Dark One looked up at the chained man hanging from hooks through his shoulder blades as he kicked and writhed at his bonds. Blood ran down his legs, dripping to the stone. A rune, the mark of Belial, glowed upon his upper arm like the embers of a fire.
The Dark One smiled. His master would not be satisfied to remain within his human host much longer. But the flesh was simply a vessel, and now he would call a new visitor to occupy it, a visitor he had been waiting a very long time to meet.
He went to the book propped upon the stand near the circle and read a passage aloud. It was a delicate ceremony, and it strained his abilities to call through so many years and planes of existence. The past was like a complicated series of interlocking plates that constantly shifted and rearranged themselves, marking the path through a dangerous maze of illusions; one could easily get lost inside and never return.
The candle flared up in a roar of flame, then died down again. The circle and symbol glowed red. He slid a dagger from his sleeve, held his other palm up, and pricked it. Blood welled from the wound, pooled there, and began to thread its way slowly upward like a fleshy, liquid worm, reaching for the blade and then running over it. He watched, fascinated, as the blade soaked up the blood, binding it to him forever.
He knelt at the circle’s edge, reciting more words of power, and raised the dagger with both hands, plunging it directly into the floor where the man’s blood had dripped, at the center of the figure eight. The blade sank to the hilt, slicing as smoothly through stone as it would through soft flesh.
At once, he felt the tremendous pulse of energy below him. The floor shuddered beneath him. Blood erupted all around the blade, spraying upward like a fountain, an artery cut clean through, spattering the Dark One’s face and washing over the stones, soaking through his cloak. It arced upward, bathing the hanging man until he was barely recognizable as human. Still it continued, on and on, the blood of the dead and the damned, the blood of countless victims and warriors, slaughtered on the killing field and condemned to the depths of the Burning Hells for eternity.
The blood of Al Cut.
“Lɪft ðә vel frә hɪz ajz,” the Dark One said. “The thread is bound.”
His consciousness began to expand, stretching out in all directions as rivulets of blood ran like tiny rivers through cracks and seams. He was moving through space and time, linked to a thousand beasts across the land, hiding in sewers and basements and caverns, slinking through the night: wendigos, spider mages and flesh hunters, khazra and scavengers and fallen ones. He sensed the hundreds of thousands of slumbering dead, buried in the muck of seas and through the centuries, moldering away in catacombs and graves, entombed beneath the earth. All of them awaiting his command.
Not yours, his inner voice whispered, but the Dark One pushed it aside, refusing to let the doubt creep in. The power was his to control and wield, and his alone. The Worldstone destroyed, he was destined to bring about the destruction of humanity and the fall of all of Sanctuary, just as his bloodline had brought about its salvation centuries before. He would cut out the sickness of mankind. It was written in the prophecies, his true surname seared into history. He had seen it all himself.