Abomination (12 page)

“He’s been in there for days,” he observed with a nod toward the fog-shrouded cathedral in the distance. “Doing what, God only knows. Perhaps refining his magick to counter the wards on our armor. Perhaps training his remaining forces to better stand their ground, to fight more fiercely. Perhaps something we have failed to even consider. I don’t like it.”

“What evidence do you have to suggest any of this?” Edgard asked.

“None,” admitted Wulfric. “Only a bad feeling. Like the one I had before Chippenham. Remember that?”

“Hmph,” grunted Edgard, gazing out at the horizon. The two men had many differences on matters of war—from infantry strategies to the best way to silently cut a man’s throat—and had often debated late into the night, but Edgard had to admit that when it came to ill portents before a battle, Wulfric’s gut instinct was almost never wrong. He sighed.

“Wulfric, the only way for us to know what awaits us in there is to go and find it.”

Wulfric let the flower that confounded him fall from his fingers and stood, turning to look at his men, assembled not far behind him.

“Perhaps not,” he said. “Bring me Cuthbert.”

Edgard passed the order to a runner, and a few minutes later they saw the little cleric dashing across the field to where his commander stood, huffing as he ran, breath clouding in the morning mist. “It really is a wonder that boy’s still alive,” said Edgard with amusement as he observed Cuthbert’s awkward gait, his ill-fitting robes hanging off his willowy frame as though slung over a poorly made chair.

“That boy’s the reason any of us are still alive,” replied Wulfric. Cuthbert had come to earn his respect over the course of this campaign. High-strung and brittle he may have seemed at first blush, but when it mattered, he had proven himself no coward. At Aylesbury, Cuthbert had insisted on staying with the men until the last moment to ensure that every one of them had a freshly placed blessing on their armor, as well as on that of their mounts, before they entered the fray, in case the protective power of the spell—at that point, still an unknown quantity—should diminish over time. In doing so, he ventured far closer to Aethelred’s horde than he had thought himself capable. It was not until later, after the battle had ended, that he realized he had forgotten to place a protective blessing upon his own vestments and had left himself vulnerable to one of Aethelred’s curses. It was only by happenstance that he had not been targeted and turned into some dire beast that his own comrades would have been forced to put down. Cuthbert spent most of that night throwing up, but by then his actions on the field had earned him Wulfric’s esteem, and by extension the esteem of all the men.

Cuthbert had also proven invaluable as a curator and archivist of the many and varied forms of misshapen wretch that Aethelred
had taught himself to conjure. Many of the beasts had dispersed, in all directions, after the battle at Aylesbury, and they were now scattered far and wide throughout the kingdom, living and lurking in the shadows, masterless and wild. They had become the basis for a new folklore fast spreading throughout southern England: nightmarish stories told around campfires and to restless children about dark, malevolent, shapeless horrors that stalked their prey—animal and human alike—by night, taking whatever or whomever they could find and dragging their prey screaming into the darkness to be fed upon.

Wulfric’s men had encountered more than a few of these feral types during their pursuit of Aethelred after Aylesbury, and after each kill Cuthbert took pains to catalogue it in his own bestiary, kept carefully in a leather-bound volume. He made detailed drawings of each species they came across, taking note of its behavioral characteristics, speed, strength, intelligence, and preferred method of slaying, thus making the next confrontation with a beast of the same type that much swifter and less likely to result in casualties. Cuthbert’s work was as exhaustive and scholarly as it was useful in its practical application, and even Wulfric admitted to finding it darkly fascinating. It took him back to his boyhood, when his father would teach him to study and identify various forms of insect life. Now the insects were twice the size of a man and could kill you from twenty feet away, but the principle was the same.

Cuthbert arrived red faced and out of breath. He tried to speak but was too winded for words to come.

“Take a breath, boy!” barked Edgard. “A knee, if you must.”

Cuthbert took a moment to regain his composure and catch his breath. “I’m sorry. Sir Wulfric, you have need of me?”

“A few nights ago you told me of another spell in Aethelred’s scrolls that you had begun to translate before his escape,” said Wulfric.

It took a moment for Cuthbert to recall the conversation. “Oh! You mean the scrying?”

“Yes. Can it be done?”

Cuthbert hesitated. “I’m not sure. My translation was incomplete, and—”

“But what you did translate, you remember precisely.” By now, Wulfric had learned that Cuthbert’s claim of a flawless memory was not unfounded.

Cuthbert nodded.

“Excuse me,” Edgard interjected, “but what exactly are we talking about here?”

“From my understanding of the scrolls, scrying allows a person to see what is elsewhere,” said Cuthbert. “The spell describes the use of a reflective medium such as polished metal or a pool of still water to project the image of a distant location exactly as it appears at that moment, like a window into that faraway place. I have done my own study on this, and I believe it may be possible to go further, to actually cast an immaterial projection of oneself into that place, and to explore it remotely, just as though one were actually there.”

“And you can do this?” Wulfric asked, intrigued.

“In theory,” said Cuthbert. “But in matters of magick, it is often a far cry between theory and practice.”

“I need you to try,” said Wulfric. “I need to know what lies in wait within the cathedral before I commit my men. That knowledge could be the difference between victory and defeat, or at the very least determine how many of us survive the day. Do you understand?”

Cuthbert was silent as the weight of what Wulfric was asking began to sink in. He began to wonder what he might have just talked himself into. He felt his stomach start to ravel itself into a knot. “I understand,” he said finally, with as much calm as he could muster. “I will try.”

“Good,” said Wulfric, holding an expectant gaze on Cuthbert.

It took the young cleric a moment. “Oh! You mean now?”

“That would be preferable,” Wulfric said with a thin smile. Cuthbert turned a shade paler.

“I . . . I will need a reflective surface of some kind,” said the young priest. “Something glass or—”

Cuthbert flinched as Wulfric drew his broadsword, the flat of its blade glimmering in the sunlight that was beginning to peek through the gray cloud-filled sky.

“Will this suffice?”

Cuthbert regarded the sword and saw his own face looking back at him. Wulfric made the meticulous maintenance of his weapons and armor a point of pride; the blade was so finely polished it was practically a mirror.

“I believe it will,” Cuthbert said. “If I may?”

Wulfric offered him the sword. On taking it in hand, Cuthbert almost toppled over—it was far heavier than he had imagined.
How does he even carry this damned thing around
, he thought to himself as he wrestled with it,
let alone swing it in anger?

Wulfric and Edgard both took a step back and regarded Cuthbert with great curiosity as he laid the sword on the ground and sat cross-legged before it. He placed the fingertips of both hands on the blade, careful to stay far from the edge—he knew Wulfric kept it as sharp as he kept it shining—then closed his eyes and began to mutter the incantation under his breath. To Wulfric and Edgard it sounded no different from the words they’d heard him use many times before when placing the protective blessings on their armor; it was the same unintelligible, arcane tongue.

For several minutes they watched him sit, reciting the same lines over and over, seemingly to no effect, and then Edgard grew restless. He leaned toward Wulfric and whispered. “How much longer before we know if this is going to—”

Then he cut himself off. At that moment he saw something that beggared belief, even after all that he had seen in these past few months. Cuthbert seemed to somehow
shimmer
, becoming momentarily translucent, like gossamer, as though no longer fully
there, before returning to a fully corporeal state. Both knights stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Did you—” Edgard began.

“Yes.”

“What was that?”

“I don’t know.”

Cuthbert had now stopped reciting the words; he seemed to be in some kind of trance. Unmoving, like a statue. Wulfric found it disconcerting. The only time he had ever before seen such stillness was in dead men. He watched Cuthbert closely, looking for any sign that he was in fact still alive. At first, he could detect none, then he saw that the young priest was breathing, but so slowly and so shallowly that he barely seemed to be breathing at all. Still, Wulfric did not like this. Since he did not know how this was supposed to work, he had no way of knowing if something had gone wrong.

“Cuthbert?”

No response.

“Cuthbert!” Louder this time. Still, no response.

Wulfric had leaned toward Cuthbert to rouse him with a shake when the boy’s eyes suddenly snapped open. But Cuthbert was not looking at Wulfric, or at Edgard, or at anything in his field of view that they could discern. His body was still there, but he seemed to be seeing something else entirely, something beyond their perception. And finally, he spoke, his voice low and measured.

“I am there.”

For an hour, they watched Cuthbert sit there, motionless save for the occasional flinch or quiver, like someone in the midst of a powerfully vivid dream.
Or a nightmare
, Wulfric thought to himself. And yet Cuthbert’s eyes remained open the whole time, blinking never once, staring into that faraway place. Occasionally he
would shimmer, as before, and become momentarily transparent, as though he were as much in the other place as here before them. “Something is not right,” said Edgard with rising concern. “We must wake him.”

“Not yet,” said Wulfric. He did not begin to understand the workings of this magick, but he knew enough to surmise that disturbing Cuthbert in his current state was just as likely to strand him in that other place as return him.

All changed when Cuthbert’s flinches and twitches suddenly became something more—at first strange spasms, then violent convulsions. Wulfric’s eyes widened in alarm as Cuthbert lashed his head from side to side, as if in the grip of some sudden terror. He cried out, kicking his legs as though trying to scramble away, but his feet found no purchase, the grass beneath them still wet with morning dew. And yet while the lower half of his body resisted, his fingertips remained firmly fixed to the mirrored blade of Wulfric’s sword, unmoving, as though that half of his body were paralyzed by his connection to it.

“All right, enough,” Wulfric said as Cuthbert continued to writhe and protest. He and Edgard moved in together, Edgard grabbing the boy as Wulfric went to separate him from the sword. It took all of Edgard’s might to restrain Cuthbert enough for Wulfric to pull the sword free—but as Wulfric touched it, the world around him fell dark. He was no longer in a sunlit meadow but surrounded by dank walls lit by flickering torchlight, a narrow hallway extending into shadows and gloom. It was difficult to see; his vision was somehow distorted in this place, his surroundings indistinct and disorienting, as if viewed through thick glass. He could see clearly only what was directly in front of him, while all that on the periphery of his vision melted away into a blur.

He heard a low growling behind him and turned—slowly, for moving in this place was sluggish, akin to the motion within a dream. It took a moment for his vision to orient itself and focus on what was now in front of him: one of Aethelred’s wretches, but
unlike any he had seen in some while. Most of those that Wulfric’s army had fought at Aylesbury and after retained at least some characteristics of the human men they had once been—mostly they walked upright, on hind legs. The thing before him now was more like the potbellied monstrosity he had first encountered, down in Alfred’s dungeon. It sat low on the ground, its four clawed limbs extended on either side of a bulbous torso that resembled a giant lizard. Try as Wulfric might, he could not make out more through the distorted lens of his vision, save for the leathery, barbed tail that swished back and forth. There did not appear to be a head, at least none that Wulfric could see, just a gaping mouth where a head should have been, lined with razor-like teeth.

The beast scuttled toward him aggressively. Wulfric’s retreat was like wading through knee-deep sand. He looked down and saw his sword in his hand, and he thought to slay the beast with it, but it felt so heavy he could barely raise it. Then he heard a voice, faint at first, so faint he thought it might be his own mind playing tricks. But it grew louder, unmistakably real, and recognizable as that of young Cuthbert.