Well of the Damned

Well of the Damned

Book three of The Kinshield Saga

by K.C. May

Well of the Damned

Copyright 2012 by K.C. May

All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

This book is entirely a work of fiction. The
names, characters, places, and incidents depicted herein are either
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment
only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If
you would like to share this book with another person, please
purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, please purchase your own copy. Thank you
for respecting the author’s work.

Cover design and layout by T.M. Roy / TERyvisions www.teryvisions.com
Map of Thendylath by Jared Blando / www.theredepic.com

Chapter 1

Sithral
Tyr had been trapped in a long, dreamless slumber. He knew as he
started to awaken that something was terribly wrong. Before he even
opened his eyes, his body was besieged by a pain so intense as to
drive him to the brink of madness. It centered in his spine and
pulsed with every frenzied beat of his heart and, mercifully, faded
to numbness as it spread from his hips towards his feet. He couldn’t
move. The lack of feeling in his legs left him with no sense of where
they were.

Tyr opened his eyes for a moment and was horrified by what he saw: a
monster— no, a demon. Half again as tall as a man but black as
night and glossy with a triangular head, it stood over him, blood
dripping from its six-inch claws. He shut his eyes again, hoping to
be mistaken for dead. This was impossible. Such a creature didn’t
truly exist, but the foul stench of decay and the muffled screams
coming from below were real. An alien memory came to him of its black
eyes glittering with anticipation as it sank its claws into him.

“Stop,”
a man cried in a voice shrill with fear. He sounded close, but Tyr
didn’t dare open his eyes again to see. “I’m your
summoner. I called you forth as my champion. You’re bound to
me.”

Familiarity
danced around Tyr’s mind. A man he knew perhaps, but the pain
in his back made his thoughts sluggish and put recognition out of
reach.

“You
are mistaken,” it said. Its tri-tonal voice felt like knives
slicing Tyr’s ears to ribbons. “I am bound to Crigoth
Sevae. You do not command me.”

Then
he heard the man choking, followed by a sharp intake of breath and
the thud of something heavy hitting the floor.

The
screaming below started anew but faded to silence as Tyr’s mind
lost the battle with pain. He slipped into comfortable nothingness.

When
he next awoke, all was quiet, and a merciful, heavenly warmth was
flowing into his body, washing away the pain as water did blood from
a wound. He willed it to continue, nearly coming to tears with
relief. The sensation of pinpricks moved down his legs and dissipated
as the agony in his back faded to a dull ache. After a moment, he
could feel his feet and even wiggle his toes. With his mind no longer
clenched in pain, a memory began to take shape: being stabbed in the
belly by the sword of Daia Saberheart and sinking to his knees in the
weeds beside the road while blood and entrails filled his hands.
Distantly he wondered why the pain was in his back rather than in his
gut.

When
he opened his eyes, he saw the warrant knight Gavin Kinshield
kneeling beside him, looking at him curiously. “You!” Tyr
said. Then he caught sight of his surroundings. This wasn’t the
road where he and his friend Toren had battled Kinshield and
Saberheart but a cottage upon whose wooden floor he lay, unarmed and
defenseless.

Tyr
blinked, confused, unsure how he’d gotten here. Images of an
otherworldly demon plagued his thoughts. Not far away, his former
associate Brodas Ravenkind lay unmoving. He must have been the man
Tyr had heard begging for his life. Then that would have meant the
demon was real. Ravenkind’s guard Red and two women battlers
were also dead. Then he saw what was left of his token, a green cat
figurine made of porcelain. He had chosen it to house his soul when
the clan elders condemned him for saving the children of his village
several years earlier. Now it lay shattered on the floor.

Kinshield
took him by the arm and hauled him to his feet. Pain flared in Tyr’s
hip and shoulder, not completely healed. “You can thank me
later,“ Kinshield said. ”Now you’re going to gaol.”

Gaol?
Before Tyr had a chance to understand what was happening, Kinshield
pulled him roughly outside. Tyr blinked hard in the bright sunshine
while his eyes struggled to adjust. “What are the charges?”
he asked. His voice was higher in pitch than usual but not high
enough to sound effeminate.

Two
women battlers bound his wrists with a leather strap. That was when
he first saw that his hands were much paler than they should have
been and lacked the tattooed ward lines he’d had since he was
born. Seeing his unwarded hands was shocking, but when he saw breasts
jutting from his chest, he cried out in alarm.

A
woman? How is this possible?

He
thought of the soulcele token shattered on the floor, his memory of
being stabbed on the road and subsequent dreamless slumber, this new
body.
By
the gods!
He hadn’t been asleep. He’d been
dead.

Things
were starting to make sense. The previous owner of this body must
have died at the hands of the monster he’d seen, and Tyr’s
soul, released from the token, had taken up residence, submitting him
to the excruciating pain of the injury that had caused her death.
“Where’s the demon?” he asked his captors. “It
killed— tried to kill me. It killed Ravenkind.”

“King
Gavin saved you,” one of the battlers told him, a woman who
looked vaguely familiar. “He saved us all.”

King
Gavin?
he
wondered.
How
long have I been dead?

The
next couple of hours passed quickly. Tyr was taken to the Lordover
Tern’s gaol and walked forcibly down a corridor while prisoners
on both sides hooted and whistled and propositioned him. He was put
in a cell that measured roughly one and a half paces by two with
stained brick walls. The bed was a canvas hammock whose four corners
were tied to a stiff iron bed frame. Dark, wet filth had gathered in
the corners of the cell where the floor met the walls. The smell of
old human waste and sweat permeated the gaol, causing Tyr and the
other prisoners to cough, sometimes in uncontrollable fits.

He
was given a dented, tin cup and two buckets, one filled with water
and the other empty. He looked down into the water bucket at his
reflection. For all his thirty-three years, the only reflection he’d
ever known was Sithral Tyr’s narrow, angular face with the
black lines and swirls around his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. The
face looking back at him now was not only more feminine but wider of
jaw, thicker of lips, and rounder of eye. The button nose had a bump
at the bridge. The chin was flat and smooth, lacking his whiskers and
cleft. He touched the soft, black hair that hung forward and pushed
it back over his ears as he gazed into the dark eyes. Who was this
woman and how had she died, leaving a body that, with a bit of magic
healing, was perfectly serviceable? She hadn’t even been dead
long enough to soil her clothes before Tyr’s soul took it over.

He
lay on the bed and tentatively explored his new body with slender
fingers, trying to force his mind to grasp what his hands were
telling him. He was a woman now, and judging from the thickness of
his forearms and the hardness of his biceps and legs, a battler. The
Tyr he’d always been was male. Could he learn to think of
himself as a she? He’d always considered the women of
Thendylath pathetic, foolish seductresses. Now he was one of them,
but he didn’t feel any less dignified or wise. The notion both
disturbed and intrigued him. At least he was alive, by the grace of
the gods he thought had forsaken him and, he thought grudgingly,
Gavin Kinshield.

He
looked up and saw someone peering at him through the little window in
the door, a man with black hair and beard and decisive eyes.

“Who’s
there?” Tyr asked, sitting up. “What do you want?”

“You’ll
find out soon enough,” the visitor said. He chuckled and walked
away.

Chapter 2

Some
hours later, after the sun had set and the gaol was lighted only by a
few lamps on the walls in the corridor, roaches and centipedes
crawled boldly across the floor and up the walls. Several pairs of
footsteps approached, but the bugs didn’t bother to hide. Tyr
stood against his cell door, looking out through the square opening.
The black-beard returned with two guards and a squat, well-dressed
man, who wore his long, white hair braided and tied back into a
single tail, and another braid in his gray beard. The old man’s
eyebrows were so bushy, he ought to have braided them as well. The
guards each held an oil lamp. This new visitor put on a pair of
spectacles.