Authors: Tim Akers
T
HE WAY AHEAD
was dark and crooked. The gheist’s path left the wreckage of Gardengerry and traveled north, twisting from river to road and beating back the thick oak and elm trees of the forest like a trail of broken bones. The shadows of its passage lingered in the sun, clinging to the dirt in scraps of night and nightmare.
Frair Lucas followed this trail as much in his dreams as during the day. Each night his mind conjured the shape of the following day’s journey, tracing the widening damage the gheist was doing to the naetheric paths of Lord Cinder.
There was something awful about this newborn god, unlike any demon Lucas had hunted before. A gheist manifesting on the verge of Lady Strife’s highest holiday, it wrenched the life from the land, leaching the vital energies from trees and soil, leaving them ashy and soft. Bark crumbled under Lucas’s hand, and his boots sank deep into the ground. The air in the wake of the gheist tasted like charred incense.
Nothing about this was right. Nothing about it was sacred.
* * *
Lucas was three days from Gardengerry when he woke one morning with the distinct feeling that one of his dreams had found its way into the daylight world. He lay perfectly still, listening, blinking up at the eaves of oak leaves that had sheltered him through the night. His breath was slow and tired. His bones ached from another night on the road, another lifetime far from home. Lucas was just starting to sit up when something stirred at the edge of his hearing. It sounded like the dry shuffling of leaves, though autumn had not yet robbed the trees of their clothes.
Lucas eased his legs beneath him, then sat up. His staff lay across his lap.
The gheist was at the opposite edge of the clearing. A field of dew-tipped grass glistened between them, crowned by midsummer glory, trees and shrubs as bright and green and swollen with life as Lucas could imagine. Even the sunlight was heavy with golden energy.
When Lucas had fallen asleep last night, this clearing had been gray and sullen, leached of greenery, prey to the passing demon Lucas was tracking. Something had changed. Everything had changed.
The gheist lumbered out from the trees and into the clearing, a shambling mass of muscle, a bear with fur that glimmered amber and sunlight, tall as a horse and as wide. It snuffled among the grasses, and the blades of grass writhed around it like eddies of water in a turbulent stream. The fur on the bearlike back rippled in response, and then the individual hairs blossomed and grew, each one twisting open into a dandelion seed. A wind rose, and a cloud of seeds wafted off its body, drifting in the shafts of sunlight, gliding to earth to sprout new growth and new life.
It was not the gheist he hunted.
“Drawn by the corruption…” Lucas whispered to himself, but the gheist heard him, and rose onto its hind paws, towering over the clearing like a mountain of sunlight and life. Its face was not that of a bear, but more like an eel, a wide mouth of scything teeth that gaped open, slick with blood. Black blood and bile.
“…and corrupted yourself,” Lucas added. He had hoped to leave this gheist alone, to let it go about the business of renewing the forests of the north, repairing whatever damage the rogue god from Gardengerry had wrought. Most of his brother inquisitors would never have considered such a mercy, but Lucas had spent enough time in both Suhdra and Tener to know that total suppression of the gheists could harm the land. He suspected that the church’s rigid suppression of the gheists in the south was at the root of the current blight, an opinion that would have gotten him branded a heretic in Heartsbridge. So if this one had been drawn by the corruption and sought to repair it, that was all the better.
Yet the corruption had tainted the god, and so the demon it had become had to be culled, the land set back to rights.
The gheist gasped out a long, mournful sigh, and the sickness of its jaws flooded the clearing. The grasses withered at its breath, the sweet air turned sour, and the dappled light that danced through the trees shivered and dimmed. Lucas drew his staff in front of him, then called upon Lord Cinder’s gift of naether.
“I will break no peace with you, demon,” Lucas muttered, “and ask for none in return. Return to your realm, and you will find no argument with me.”
The gheist dropped to all fours and charged toward Lucas. Its slow, rolling gait shook the ground. The haze of its fur, now floating in the air, streaming behind it like a banner, squirmed with embers that danced through the seeds and stitched the air in lines of amber and gold. Lucas planted his staff and twisted the air around it, lacing shadows together, binding his flesh to the fog-thick essence of the naetherealm.
Lucas’s blood chilled as his spirit left the mortal world. The gheist’s fiery charge brushed Lucas aside, but instead of crushing the priest, it passed through him as if he were a wisp of smoke.
Once the bear was past, Lucas threw aside the skeins of shadow, leaving them to ground harmlessly into the forest like dark-veined lightning, kicking up puffs of ash and silt where they struck. He whirled on the gheist, pulling power from the naetherealm and attempting to bind it to the rogue god. Shadows snapped against the demon’s flesh, scattering the downy spore from its back, catching on its limbs and snarling its gait.
Slowly the gheist turned, lazy, heavy, its slabs of muscle and fat breaking the bonds Lucas summoned. Lucas could see the god’s eyes, saucers of golden light shot through with dark veins, as if the corruption that had claimed its jaws was slowly working its way into the brain.
The demon lowered its head and lumbered again into a thunderous charge. Its gaping jaw dragged through the grass, leaving a trail of pitch-black spittle that bubbled and hissed in its wake. Its back rippled with the rolling gait of its muscles.
Lucas assumed a stance of meditation, balancing his frail frame on one foot and leaning against his staff. He touched his forehead to the staff’s focusing icon, then dropped his mind into the naetherealm, leaving his body dangerously exposed in the mortal world. Yet he had no chance of defeating this beast with flesh and blood. His strength was of the mind, and his hope for victory lay in thought and deception.
The world changed around him, and time slowed down. The clearing lost its amber sheen, the vibrant life replaced by the cold weight of the naether. Lines of force and energy, the inevitable charge of the gheist, arced out from its body, etching a path that would tear through the frair in a matter of heartbeats.
Untethered from his body, Lucas examined his attacker.
“Nature spirit, as I thought,” he said to himself. “Restorative. Some aspect of spring, come to undo winter’s damage.” His spirit floated past the gheist. “But it is not winter that has broken this land, and so you are driven mad.” The demon’s form was like fog, insubstantial in the naether, shot through with its own magical energies as well as the darkling tendrils that had corrupted it.
“A spirit of unrest has settled on your mind,” Lucas whispered. He traced the presence from the gheist’s jaws into its skull. The black strap of darkness writhed and bucked. “And there is little I can do to save you—even if that were my calling. And so, I must find some way to end you. Or perhaps help you end yourself.”
With a steadying breath, Lucas reached into its mind. It was a realm of chaos, so unlike the minds of blood and light that he was used to fighting, a tumble of instincts and urges that nearly swept the old priest away. Lucas bore down, focusing on his task, reminding himself that the gheist had nearly reached him. He untangled the beast’s senses and found its vision, stained by corruption but still bright, holy in the pagan way, seeing the world in terms of life and death, health and decay.
Vertigo swept over him—it came with seeing himself through the eyes of this creature. He barely recognized himself, and felt a flutter of revulsion go through him. And then Lucas pushed through. He bound the gheist’s eyes to the naether, surprised at how quickly the corruption welcomed the binding, how weakly it surrendered.
Then he pulled free of the gheist’s mind.
“Gods, but what a madness this one holds,” he muttered. Tethers of shadow trailed from his hand, linking his will to the gheist’s vision. Exhausted, he took a moment to still his own mind…
…then returned to his body. Lucas gave a startled gasp as air filled his lungs and the warmth of the sun scorched his eyes. He stumbled back, but was able to glimpse the fragile threads of shadow that strung between his hand and the gheist.
Only a moment had passed, and the demon was thundering forward, a bellowing, rampaging, terrible force of nature. Lucas fell to the side, jerking the shadow threads, pulling at the bear spirit’s perception and balance. It rumbled past him, folding to the ground with a gasp. It struggled to its feet, turned and charged again, but now Lucas had it well in hand, drawing it to the side whenever it got close, bending the gheist’s vision to baffle its mind, to make a maze of the grassy clearing.
As the gheist stumbled around, letting out droning bellows of confusion, frustration, and despair, Lucas slowly sapped its strength. He drew shadows from the forest to entangle it, formed increasingly confusing puzzles in its mind, spiked shadowy darts into its thick hide. With each step the gheist weakened, its divinity dissipated, like light from a guttering candle.
Finally, pitifully, it fell.
The gheist lurched forward, front limbs buckling, snout and shoulders plowing into the ground. It dug a trench with its bulk, coming to rest at the center of the clearing. A final cloud of firefly seeds rose up from its back, floating aimlessly in the shafted sunbeams, before disappearing into the everealm. Lucas stood at the beast’s shoulder. He untangled the deception of naether, clearing the god’s vision. The gheist stared up at him with one eye, a shimmering pool of wet, golden light, shot through with dark corruption.
“Such is the cycle, my friend,” Lucas said, patting its shoulder. It was warm and thick, the muscles twitching with exhaustion. “Such is the way of your life. Whatever drew you to this clearing, I must escort you out. Have peace, little god. Go home.”
He raised his staff and struck the gheist a sharp blow between the eyes. He was an old man, and such a blow would never hurt a creature of this size if it didn’t carry with it the banishment of Lord Cinder, the god of winter and death. The gheist’s body collapsed, folding open like a split purse, bleeding light and heat and the thick, musky stench of new spring growth.
Lucas stepped back and watched as the creature’s body melted away, sinking into the ground as though it were water. The grass sprang to new life, the air cleared, and a wave of vibrant energy washed out from the gheist’s dying breath. The trees all around the clearing grew a little, the grasses rustled and sprouted, suddenly reaching Lucas’s waist. He couldn’t help but laugh at the change in the air. It was like stepping outside on the first day of spring, the first birdsong in your ear, the promise of summer in the air.
“And so it goes,” he said. “You return to the everealm, and I return to my search.” He rubbed his face, a momentary revulsion shivering through him as he remembered how he looked in the eyes of this little god—the revulsion it felt. He shook it off.
With his staff, Lucas parted the grasses at the spot where the gheist had fallen. The vegetation was incredibly green and hearty, little spears, broad of leaf and sturdy. It took some effort to find the ground.
There, shivering in the dirt, was the flat black strap of corruption. Like a snake in the vines, it hissed as the sunlight found it. Lucas raised his staff and crushed its head, grinding the shadowy tendril into the dirt. It writhed against the darkwood shaft, whipping through the grass and trying to find purchase on Lucas’s boots. Finally, something cracked, and the corruption dissipated. It broke apart and bled into the dirt. The grasses sickened and died at its touch.
Before he left, Lucas made sure the ground was sanctified in Cinder’s name.
Something dark was growing in the trail of this demon from Gardengerry. Something Lucas didn’t understand, but something he was learning to fear.
* * *
The next day found Lucas well down the trail, and staring at a fork in his path. A second gheist had manifested, either alongside the demon from Gardengerry or in pursuit. Now two trails burrowed through the forest. There was no way of telling which belonged to the original quarry.
The first trail turned sharply east toward Greenhall. It was good that Sir LaFey had traveled on ahead, to warn the duke and prepare the defenses, though she would be hard pressed to arrive before the fast-moving gheist.
The second trail turned north. Straight into Tener. Straight for the Fen Gate.
Content that Elsa could manage things in Greenhall, Lucas turned his feet toward the pagan north. His path led to the Fen, and House Adair.
M
ALCOLM LEANED HIS
head against the cool stone wall of the doma and breathed deeply. Night had fallen, and he wanted nothing more than to curl into bed and sleep away the pain of travel. His spine felt like a cooking rack, searing the muscles of his back with each step, and the pain in his hips, his knees, even his feet, would not relent.
The feet seemed like a particularly cruel joke. If Malcolm had walked from Houndhallow he could understand his feet hurting. His head was already pounding, and he hadn’t even spoken to the duke of Greenhall yet.
“This is what it’s going to be like from here on out,” Dugan said. The knight was standing in the center of the doma, hands crossed over the hilt of his sword, staring up at the painted frescoes that described the movement of the stars and the seasons of the twin gods of the Celestial church. “Waiting in their holy places.”
“Our holy places,” Malcolm answered. He stood by the door, resting against the lintel. “I see you at every high day, and hear your prayers at the solstice.”
“The wine is good,” Dugan said. “Never fault the Suhdrin for their wine.”
Malcolm shifted his weight to the opposite foot and settled against the wall once again. Dugan smirked.