The Pagan Night (12 page)

“Vow knights put her down just after the equinox,” Doone said. “Too regular, that one. Could be the hound?”

“It is not the hound,” Ian said with more confidence than he felt. His family’s totem spirit had a history of dangerous predation along the border of Halverdt’s lands. Ian could never bring himself to lift a spear against the great beast, though he had seen its furry back flickering between trees ever since he was a child. “And this close to the Allfire, it’s probably not one of the regular manifestations.”

“Aye,” Doone agreed. She looked up and down the column. “Let’s get about it, my lord, before the men lose their cool.”

Before I lose my cool, you mean
, Ian thought, but he gripped his spear tighter and crept forward.

They crouched at the edge of a broad clearing, grass and stone limned in Cinder’s light. At the center of the clearing were the remains of a horse and rider, armor a splintered shell of steel and leather. Of the rest of Marchand’s knights there was no sign. Cinder was in half aspect, his cloak drawn across his face. Yet there was still sufficient light to see. Ian crept to the clearing’s edge.

“Do you see anything?” he whispered.

“Dead knight,” Doone answered.

“Besides that. It’s close, you can taste it in the air.” Ian breathed deeply, and his nose filled with the murky stink of swamp and tombs.
Not natural. Not godly.
He prayed a quiet prayer to Strife for strength, and Cinder for clarity of mind. Then he stepped into the clearing.

“My lord,” Doone hissed. Ian waved her off.

“Your steel may do some good, but only if you take it by surprise. Wait here. I will draw the beast.”

“That is a terrible plan.”

“You shouldn’t speak to your lord’s son this way, Doone. I will speak to Father of your impertinence.” He gave her a smile that none of them could see, then walked slowly into the clearing.

There was no sound from the trees, of insect or god. Only a handful of breaths brought Ian to the dead knight in the center of the clearing. The man was beyond help. With the butt of his spear, Ian snapped the knight’s visor back and recognized him: Grandieu, a knight from the dusty hills around Heartsbridge. He had ridden with Ian’s father during the Reaver War. The knight had been opened from crotch to heart, his ribs cradling a ruin of pulped organs. A chill went through Ian’s chest, shivering the sweat on his chest. He tapped his spear against the ground and scanned the tree line.

“I think it’s gone,” he called back to Doone and her men. “The other riders must have led it away.”
Or been chased to their death, somewhere between these trees
, he thought.

The loose line of Blakley soldiers followed the knight into the clearing. The far tree line shattered and shook, and delivered a god into their midst.

It unspooled from the trees like a ribbon of darkness, lightning fast threads of liquid night that slumped out of the forest and pooled on the ground. It was huge, two horses wide and bristling with legs and arms that stuck out of the tangle of its body. The shape of a man fell from its front and crawled forward, his body bound in cords of shadow. The mass of the gheist was dragged along behind, rising and falling on half a dozen other legs, hands, and other unidentifiable body parts.

He saw the bundled form of a woman whose whole body was being used as a leg. The god looked like a tumor of bodies, tied together by satin ribbons, glowing with malevolent, purplish light.

“Much bigger than a dog,” Ian whispered to himself.

The demon slithered toward them, sometimes slow, then as quick as fog in the wind. A single torso sat atop the body of bodies, broad shoulders and thick arms grasping at the air. It strained against the dark cords that held it in place. White, tattered robes stuck out between the shadows, and a pilgrim’s cowl hid the man’s face.

The gheist opened its mouths and howled.

“Fuck this,” Ian said, and ran. He passed Sir Doone and her men, grabbing at them as he went by. They followed, those who had not already taken flight. The ponderous thumping of the gheist’s pursuit disappeared, replaced by slithering wind. Ian dared a glance behind him, just in time to see the beast arc its body like a twilight rainbow, bounding over him to land with a thunderous crash at the forest’s edge.

Ian skittered to a halt, staring at the roiling mass. Doone and the rest clustered around their lord’s son, gripping their weapons in quaking hands. The beast howled again.

“Or we could make our stand here,” Ian said.

The demon fell on them, arms and mouths and grasping ribbons of night.

A
S THE BROKEN
god howled across the field toward them, its myriad of teeth gnashing and shattered arms tearing the ground, Ian knew terror. His limbs froze, his blood stopped, his breath and lungs went solid in his throat. The spear at his hip trailed forgotten through the grass. He watched the gheist come, action forgotten, bravery fled.

He should have died.

The beast crashed forward, and Sir Doone responded. The knight struck with her sword, gripping it in both hands and screaming as she thrashed the blade against the gheist’s coiled limbs. Something cracked, the beast howled, and then slid to the side.

On the ground between them, lying at Ian’s feet, was an arm. It was thin and wasted, the product of a life of deprivation and hard work. The gnarled fist was lined in dried blood. The tattered remnants of a mendicant’s robe wrapped the flesh, the edges charred and grimy.

The gheist circled like a wolf, snapping its jaws, growling in many voices. Ian looked from the arm to the demonic figure, then raised his spear.

“The bodies break!” he shouted. “Destroy them, and only the gheist will remain!”

The soldiers raised their voices and their swords, then broke into a stumbling charge with Ian at the fore. The gheist clenched tighter into itself. Ian felt a thrill at cowing such a large abomination. His men fell on it, hacking and breaking and cleaving it into pieces.

The gheist struck back. It seemed to break apart, bodies flying from the core, the black cords that bound it together straining against skin and bone until the bare flesh of the possessed showed through the binding. They clawed at the Blakley soldiers with fingers broken open, their bones tearing at armor and flesh, shattered wrists punching past chain mail and drawing blood. Ian saw two men go down, then another, overwhelmed by enemies who would not falter when their bones were broken and their flesh cut.

Ian drew close to Sir Doone, weaving the tip of his spear through the air. The gheist avoided the bloodwrought tip of his weapon, slipping away whenever Ian tried to bring it to bear. He used this to clear some space around the knight, who was hard pressed by the gheist’s remaining limbs.

“Grim business,” Doone spat through clenched teeth.

“Aye,” Ian agreed. “We’ll need to break soon.”

“No breaking. There’s nowhere to break to.”

Ian looked around the field of battle. The knight had the truth of it. The gheist’s tendrils were circling their increasingly tight perimeter, diving in and snapping one or two of the Blakley men down before circling again. They were penned like cattle. The massive creature moved fluidly, a handful of possessed bodies pressing Ian’s position while the rest moved past to attack the flank. Ian watched with horror as it coiled around them, tighter and tighter.

“That one remains,” Ian said, pointing at the torso that seemed to stick out of the center of the slithering mass, broad shoulders and a head like a boulder, split by a wide and horrific smile. “The others move around it.”

“Head of the snake?” Doone asked.

“Maybe. Maybe not, but it doesn’t seem to care about the rest of its bits.”

Sir Doone didn’t answer, occupied as she was with hacking apart one of the gheist’s slender forms. It turned out to be a woman. Her head fell from the tendril-laced mass of the god, rolling between Ian’s feet. She wore the silver-and-gold-twined circlet of a celeste. Ian’s mind wrestled with that, wondering at a gheist made up of the bodies of dead priests and penitents.

Doone drove back the demon, aided by Ian’s spear and her own maddened fear. Two of the Blakley men remained, and those bleeding from many wounds. Only Ian was unharmed.

“It’s afraid of the spear,” he said. Then he made a hard decision. “Stay here. Whatever you do, don’t follow me.”

“My lord?”

“The hound! The hallow!” Ian yelled, the ancient battle cry of his tribe. Ever since he was a child, he had dreamed of giving voice to those words in some great battle. Half-expecting to die beneath the gheist’s assault, he’d be damned if he would pass up the chance to bellow it now.

He dived forward, straight at the big man at the swirling center of the gheist. His spear cut the air. The gheist fell back and then, when it realized it couldn’t get completely away from this unexpected charge, collapsed into his path to try to stop him. Suddenly Ian was flooded with black-coiled arms and legs, blunt teeth gnawing at the thick leather on his arms and breaking the skin of his chest. Something tore through his face, ragged bones plucking at the soft skin of his cheek and raking his jaw.

Blood poured into Ian’s eyes, and still he fought forward. He vaulted over one body, grimacing as shadowy tendrils wrapped around his ankle and sucked him down, struggling toward his goal in spite of the storm of pagan energy that lashed against him. The gheist tried to fall away, the tendrils of its presence straining as the core rolled and the rest of the bodies threw themselves at their attacker.

He fought through them.

With a final push he jumped clear of the attack and plunged his spear into the heart of the core figure. The bloodwrought blade of the spear sizzled as it cut through the shadow coils, into flesh and grated bone. Ian buried the weapon in the chest of the mad god.

Then there was silence. Everything was still.

The corrupted god gave voice to a dozen mouths. Howling.

Then its presence wilted like a vine in drought, the dark tendrils of power slithering back to the core, lashing limply against the ground as it abandoned the myriad bodies, each falling loose-limbed to the ground as the god left them. The ribbons of the gheist’s true body coiled in a tangle around Ian, battering his skin and burning his spirit, flailing in one final attempt to be free of the spear’s grip. They pulled away from him, wrapping around the wound, and then slumped to the ground, a loose knot of broken power.

Ian sagged to his knees. The spear was sunk to the shaft in the chest of a burly mendicant, his robes stained with blood and dark ichor. As the corpse folded in on itself, the dead man’s cowl fell back from his face. He had the pagan ink, though it was drawn in paint rather than tattooed into his skin. A wave of hatred washed over Ian, traveling through the spear and into his arms, his bones, his heart.

And then it died, dissipating into the air like the memory of a dream, cut away by morning’s light.

“Gods… damn,” Doone said from behind. Ian looked back. The survivors—Sir Doone and two others—knelt before the fallen god, leaning heavily on their swords to keep from toppling over with exhaustion.

“Damn that god,” Ian agreed. He tried to stand, but his knees were weak and his strength was gone. “Never thought I’d break a gheist.”

“Really? Then why the hells did you lead us out here?”

Ian shrugged. He settled onto his ass, laying the spear across his knees.

“Well, someone should get back to the camp. Let them know what we’ve done. Send someone out to gather Sir Grandieu and…” His voice trailed off. He looked over to the dead knight. A tangle of blackness was gathering against the man’s shattered chest. As Ian watched, the pale white of Grandieu’s ribs was eclipsed. With a sound like grinding marbles, Grandieu knit himself back together and rose again, knight and horse bound together with bands of night and heresy.

“Oh, seriously, what the hells?” Ian said. Exhaustion beat against his chest. He unfolded slowly, struggling to his feet. Doone and the survivors closed around him.

The body of the knight and the corpse of the horse wove together into a grotesque hybrid of armor and flesh. The broken length of the knight’s spear wrapped tight with the gheist’s strange ribbons, shattered and broke again, given life by the fallen god to become a prehensile limb, tipped with scything jaws of splintered wood.

The gheist turned toward Ian, snapping those narrow jaws together. It sounded like swords clashing.

“Well. We made a hell of a try,” Ian said.

Sir Doone stepped in front of him, raising the notched length of her sword and bellowing her fury.

“
The hound!
” she yelled.

She was answered from the tree line. The shadows of grass and young trees swirled as though caught in a sudden wind, and then a lone rider burst into the clearing.

“The hound! The hallow!” the rider called, full plate glinting in Cinder’s light, shield and spear lowered for the charge. He thundered across the clearing and crashed into the gheist at a full gallop. There was a shattering of metal and bone. Bits of armor and flesh tore free of the gheist’s grip, spraying across the grass of the field like broken pottery. The rider rode straight through, turning near the tree line and presenting his spear to the gheist. He rose in his saddle, slapping his visor up.

Malcolm Blakley glared across the field at his son, the moon illuminating the hound on his shield and the blood on his spear.

“Run, you idiot!” he shouted, then he lowered his visor and prepared for a second pass. The swirling mass of shadows at the center of the field seemed shocked by Malcolm’s attack, but largely unhurt. It squared itself up to face the charge, shadowy tendrils rising from its shoulders like wings.

At that moment a new sun broke among the trees, coming from the direction of Greenhall. As Ian watched, a knight of the winter sun hovered into the clearing. She wore the ornate plate-and-half crimson armor of her sect, traced in gold, marked with the sanctified runes of the Lady Strife. A tabard tied loosely over her breastplate showed the gaunt, black tree of the winter sun. With the Allfire so close, the bright lady’s power was near its apex, and that power shone through the armor. Runes burned with an amber light, molten gold and blood flowing through them in a never-ending circuit.