Arc 8: Chapter 41: The Vampire, Evangeline |
“I told you at Fife,” Evangeline said in a cold voice as she strode forward. “You should not have come here. This land belongs to wolves.”
I stepped forward as well, putting myself between her and the others. Lisette knelt by Olliard, and Penric had another arrow strung. They were both tense, waiting for my signal. Evangeline’s naked sword was like a steel sliver in the irregular shafts of moonlight filtering through the room, long and sharp, a war blade like mine.
The throne room doors slammed closed as though of their own accord behind the queen, trapping us inside with her. She wasn’t alone. Banner knights slunk through the shadows, their nocturnal eyes gleaming.
Had they encountered Tzanith? Was she—
Don’t focus on that now. The enemy is in front of you. I reached back and broke Penric’s arrow, wincing at the pain. It didn’t feel like it’d hit anything vital — the archer hadn’t shot to kill or maim.
“It’s over, Evangeline.” I tilted my head to one side to pop my neck. “I have the drow. Your allies have been decimated. Surrender, and I’ll make your death quick.”
The Queen of the Banner shook her head. She’d discarded the skull cap from the ball, letting her white-blond hair spill around her shoulders. Where she’d seemed simply regal earlier, now the dim stone and gloom of the inner citadel clarified her, dramatized her paleness and the hellish gleam in her eyes. She looked more real here.
“I do not understand you,” she said. Her expression was strangely pensive. “Why are you so loyal to Markham?”
I scoffed. “You still think he sent me?”
“You abandoned the rule of law when you murdered Randal Brightling in front of witnesses,” I reminded her. “While both you and he were the Emperor’s guests.”
“…That is true.” Evangeline glanced down at her hand, making a fist. The same one she’d used to tear out the boy lord’s heart. “I do not regret it… He was weak. He would have made us weak.”
“Maybe. We’ll never know. And it doesn’t matter, because I’m not here for him and never was.”
Surprise flickered across the vampire’s face. Her minions were waiting in the wings, holding off until their mistress gave them the signal to attack. She remembered how that had gone at Fife, and was wary of me.
She glanced past me to the other three, where Olliard lay unconscious. “You stopped him from destroying this place. Why?”
“Because it would have killed many people,” I said. “And because someone I suspect is a worse monster than you wanted it.”
Evangeline’s voice hardened with impatience. “If you are not here on the Emperor’s behalf, then why?”
I saw no reason for dishonesty. She deserved to know the accusation and the verdict. “I am here for the Faen of Draubard, who you captured and were feeding from. The one you intended to let Lillian Rue use to open a door to the Underworld.”
Evangeline’s surprise was obvious now. “You’ve put a lot together, haven’t you? Not just the brute. You surprise me, Alken Hewer.”
“You have blasphemed against the God-Queen’s laws. That is why I am here.”
“I assume Lillian is dead, then?” Evangeline asked. At my nod, she let out a disappointed sigh. “Pity. The hag was useful.”
“I have seen enough,” I said darkly. “I am sorry for what you’ve become, Evangeline, but it has to end.”
“Become?” Her scarlet eyes drifted down to her sword. “Is that all it comes down to? Elves and angels hoard their immortality, and when we gain even a shadow of their strength, they have to stamp us out?”
“Don’t be daft,” I spat. “You killed children. I saw it.”
She gave me no reaction. “I do believe, Headsman, that it is a tradition of your role that the condemned may offer confession before execution?”
I paused, feeling a flash of doubt and frustration. She was stalling. Why? For more reinforcements?
Well, it would give Emma and Hendry time to get further away, and besides… I’d offered Lias confession, and he’d done as much evil as Evangeline, possibly more. During my moment of hesitation, I narrowed my eyes and listened. My powers were trying to whisper to me. Usually eager for blood, my magic seemed quieter even with the presence of evil so close.
Something told me that refusing her would be painful. Whatever malformed shape my oaths had taken, there were still rules I needed to follow. Besides, I didn’t have the full story. I nodded for her to continue.
In a haughtier voice fitting of a monarch, Evangeline spoke so her words echoed across the throne room. “I shall not deny it! I captured the elf when she was found trespassing on my land. She hunted Lillian’s companion, so the witch sought my aid on behalf of her ally… but they merely expected me to assist them in their own scheme, and I do not enjoy sharing.”
She flashed her fangs in a self-satisfied grin. “My knights took the drow, and I interred her in my own keep at the Dawntowers. Lillian and Ildeban attempted to coerce me into giving her over, but I had certain demands. They slaughtered my messengers, which displeased me. After they realized that I would not simply do as they demanded, they agreed to meet me at Fife… of course, I did not trust them.”
“Which is why you turned that place into a death trap,” I said in realization.
“Yes. But then you were there, and that vampire hunter.” She nodded to the unconscious Olliard. “I admit, I felt rather hemmed in. So I proceeded to negotiate with Lillian, and she proposed her little ritual. She would give me an army of the dead straight from the depths of Draubard itself, and I would give her the drow when all was said and done, as well as my protection.”
I frowned. “Your protection?”
Evangeline nodded. “Yes. She never elaborated, but I gathered those two were hiding from someone or something. They agreed to join my court upon the formalization of my rule.”
The Briar, I guessed, hunting Ildeban as Chesh had implied. Only, weren’t they allied with Ager Roth? Surely, the Gatebreaker could protect them better than this petty night queen. It was more or less as I’d imagined otherwise.
“So you see,” Evangeline said in a suddenly harsh voice, “I have only acted as any sovereign ruler would. The prisoner you have taken was a trespasser, I was in my rights to capture or even kill her! You have slain my subjects, aided vandals who meant to set fire to my city, and infiltrated my court under false pretenses. And you would give judgement to me?!”
The vampires waiting in the shadows all let out threatening hisses and growls in response to their leader’s anger. Though they wore human bodies, they sounded like anything but. Were they all demons infesting human corpses, I wondered? Dark spirits who’d been hiding all this time, waiting for their moment to feast? The itch in my scars made me think so.
Evangeline did not seem possessed. Fel, yes, and proud, but otherwise as she had been in life.
“I’m not here to debate law with you,” I told her. “I answer to a greater authority.”
“I defy that authority,” Evangeline snarled.
I heard Penric’s bowstring creak. The gentle hum of Lisette’s sutures joined the sound. They were both with me, us three against a pack of devils.
I’d faced worse odds. I lifted my sword.
“Evangeline Ark,” I said in a voice that thrummed with auratic power. “You have broken divine law, and been given the Doom of Death.”
She merely took a guard, her face forming a cold, pale mask in the moonlight.
Her minions attacked first. They flitted from the darkness like dogs let off their leash, or like birds diving, so fast they seemed little more than eddies of wind.
But Penric was no mortal marksman. One of his consecrated arrows took the first night creature middair even as it reached for my throat, pinning it to one of the pillars and setting it ablaze. I ignored it, dashing towards my true target.
Two knights got between me and Evangeline. Cloaked in white and wearing checkered surcoats over solid steel, they lifted kite shields bearing the sigil of House Ark. They were not soft targets, or slow ones. Likely, these had been veterans even before becoming undead, warriors who’d fought in the Fall.
I slid to a halt, brought my sword back for a swing as they put their shields between me and their liege — and as my weapon passed from a shaft of moonlight into deep shadow, it sunk into nonreality. I willed a different weapon into my hands as they passed back into the light.
The axe had different weight, different reach, and was much better at dealing with armor. The red eyes of the vampires widened as Faen Orgis in its original form slammed down, an overhead chop that clove the helm of the one my right. Aureflame poured into him, boiling his eyes from their sockets and eliciting a hollow scream as I smote him down.
These might be veteran warriors, but they had not been fiends long enough to have experience facing a paladin. The eruption of fire as the vampire knight’s imprisoned spirit exploded from contact with my magic made the second flinch back. He thrust with his sword, keeping his shield up, but the blade slid off my left pauldron.
Evangeline had not moved. Her eyes were wide as a falcon’s, glaring, bright in the gloom. I felt a shiver in the air.
I leapt back the instant something slammed closed in the spot I’d been standing. It caught the second knight, and I got a brief glimpse of it — something all of calloused flesh and iron with many teeth. A mouth? An iron maiden? It evoked both.
It vanished in a blast of wind with a hollow howling noise. What was left of the Ark knight sloughed to the floor, just ground meat and melting steel now. I rolled into my fall and came up in a crouch, staring at Evangeline.
What was that? A demon? Her Art?
I’d gotten a brief glimpse of Evangeline’s technique during the tournament the past year. She could summon a cage of auratic blades to trap an opponent, though I guessed at the time it was simply a manifestation of a more complex Art.
Had her magic been corrupted by her transformation? I’d only seen it for the barest moment, but I could tell from what it had done to the unfortunate vampire spawn caught in it. Getting a direct hit from that would be death.
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Evangeline began to stalk forward, her sword held out to her side. A diseased looking miasma gathered around her, like viscous mist mixed with slime. I could feel the potential in that power — it was eager to take form.
She hunched and brought her sword back, its tip aimed forward as though she meant to ram it directly through my gullet. However, there was a rattling sound of metal, and the vampire I’d already killed suddenly rose to its feet behind her.
No, not to its feet — the body floated, limbs akimbo, like a puppet raised on invisible strings.
Exactly like that, and the strings weren’t invisible — I could just barely see them shimmering in the air, like the thinnest slivers of spun gold.
The dead knight lurched forward, slamming into Evangeline and wrapping her in a tight embrace from behind. Its movements were clumsy, jerking, but there was a strength in those captured limbs. Evangeline snarled and twisted, her attention momentarily taken from me.
I glanced to my left and saw Lisette standing not far. Her near invisible threads of aura, her sutures, ran in ten long lines from her splayed fingers. Rather than forming patterns between her hands with them like she usually did, they extended outward.
Just like Carus or Hyperia with their marions, she’d taken direct control of the fallen knight and puppeted him like a second body. Her face was set in grim concentration as her fingers flexed. Penric stood at her back, an arrow knocked.
Did she puppet him the same way? Had she all this time?
There would be time for that later, if we all still lived. I focused on Evangeline, shaped my own power, and stomped a boot down as a gust of phantom wind dragged me forward. I slammed into her from the front while she was distracted with the enemy behind, hitting her with the strength of a battering ram hurled by a storm ogre.
We went into the one of the pillars, collapsing it in an avalanche of dust and shattered masonry. The force of impact would have been lethal had I not been protected by the shield of wind the Eardeking’s Lance produced, and even with it I took plenty of cuts and bruises. The pain was distant, unimportant.
I extracted myself from the collapsed pillar and stepped back. Evangeline was half buried, her face a mask of dust and dark, inhuman looking blood. I couldn’t see the dead knight who’d been grappling her, and guessed he’d been crushed. He’d saved his lady from the same fate even in death, faithful to the end.
“You can’t beat me,” I told her.
Rage and frustration battled in the vampire’s features. “Arrogance.”
Perhaps, but I’d sensed it during our clash at Fife. I was the better swordsman and the stronger sorcerer. She was good — very good — endowed with undead strength and a brutally effective Art, but we were not equally matched.
I did not know the ritual that would activate her technique. Best to have this done. I lifted my axe, ready to deliver the final blow.
Evangeline screamed at me. It was a defiant scream, full of rage and hate. That diseased miasma that’d clung to her exploded, surging up and forward.
It almost swallowed me, but I felt pressure around my arms and waist and was dragged back. Lisette had caught me with her sutures and pulled me out of the miasma. Penric caught me, letting me brace on his arm before I barreled into the cleric.
“Thanks,” I grunted.
“The fuck is she?” Penric asked. “This feels just like…”
Something like fear flashed in the dyghoul’s — no, the wight’s — silver eyes. “It feels like that demon. The one who killed me.”
He was close to the mark. We could all see it as the bleak fog cleared, and the thing inside it dug at the stone with a clawed forelimb.
I recalled then the vision I’d seen of Evangeline’s past through the eyes of Finn Nu.
Isn’t it tiring, being weak? I can let you fly. Don’t you want to fly?
It had given her wings.
Evangeline’s true form was long-limbed, with a serrated spine that stretched thin gray flesh. Its forelimbs extended into webbed wings, the hands grown enormous and sporting black talons. The hind legs remained disturbingly human and shapely, though they bent back near the ankle to end at almost leonine paws.
The head was also somewhat feline, the skull stretching near transparent skin to give it an almost crystalline quality. It looked blind, its eyes shriveled, but it had a pulsing sensory organ on the front and large ears to compensate. Its mouth was red lipped and framed long fangs like a snake’s.
“She’s a demon,” Lisette gasped in horror.
Was she? The sensation in my scars hadn’t changed.
The pelt on my shoulders stirred, and an exhausted voice whispered from it. “No. This is not possession. Symbiosis, I think, or perhaps even subjugation.”
“Vicar.” I let out a breath of relief to hear his voice, and at the same time wondered at that relief.
“Beware,” the devil whispered. “She has fed from the champion of Draubard for many weeks. The demon will have made her strong, but Rysanthe’s blood has given her power.”
The vampire let out a hiss as it flexed its long wings. They made leathery crackling sounds as they stretched, and I could hear the strength in those limbs. The monster tensed, its back legs bending.
Penric released his arrow. It shimmered gold as it flew, striking Evangeline between neck and shoulder, in that cluster of dense muscle just below her enlarged shoulderblades. Her gray skin blackened around the shaft as it burned her.
Screeching like a harpy, the vampire beat its wings and launched forward. It moved with incredible speed, nearly fast as I had been propelled by my Art.
It aimed for Penric. There was no time to call up a defense. I threw myself into the demon-form’s path, moving on instinct. I felt its sharp claws lock around my pauldrons, the wind from its membranous wings slapping at my face. I tried to get my weapon up, but those blade-like talons secured their hold on my arms and squeezed. I let out a cry of pain.
Penric managed to loose another arrow at near point blank range, but all it did was enrage the vampire. She struck the archer with a wing, sending him flying, and when Lisette tried to reweave her Art, Evangeline lifted herself into the air with another flap and lashed out with a hind leg, raking her from wrist to elbow. The cleric fell back with a shout, clutching her mangled arm.
I was still caught in the fiend’s grip as it lifted itself high into the air. With brutal suddenness, it dropped back down and slammed me into the throne room’s floor hard enough to crack stone.
Hard enough to crack ribs. My vision splintered. I choked on my own blood as it welled up into my throat.
“Can’t beat you, can I?” Evangeline let out a rasping laugh. Her fetid breath drowned me as I tried to find air. At this close range, the foulness of her presence made my spiritual senses writhe in disgust. The itch in my scars was a burning agony, like four lines of fire branded into my face.
“What’s this?” Evangeline snuffled at those scars, and her voice became a croon. “Ah! You have been claimed as well. This mark…”
She cringed suddenly, pulling back from me. A different voice escaped her crimson lips. “It’s her mark! That rancid slut! He’s covered in her stink!”
The expression on the vampire’s face had changed. It belonged to something else now, something altogether more distant from human. Its mouth opened, and a long, thick tongue the color of a bruise slid out, lapping at my scars and leaving a trail of slime that burned like acid. The creature stiffened.
“What is it?” Evangeline asked, not speaking to me. “Why are you afraid?”
“We must kill him,” the demon hissed. “Kill him and flee this place, before she—”
“Stop your panic,” Evangeline snarled. “We will put our larva in him and make him ours, just like all the others.”
That statement filled me with a cold terror. Though they were distracted by their dialogue, Evangeline and her demon had both my arms trapped against the ground. They were strong, keeping me from moving so much as an inch, and I was still too disoriented to focus my will into any magical defense. Lisette and Penric were both injured, I couldn’t know if they would be able to help.
I craned my neck and found them. Penric had gotten to his feet and was stumbling towards Lisette, who lay against the throne, cradling her arm. There was so much blood… a major vein must have been cut. Penric moved stiffly, one of his legs twisted, but the wight advanced with stubborn resolve toward the cleric. His bow was cracked in half, left on the floor. Olliard still lay unconscious not far away.
Damn it. Raath El Kur and Yith had both been stronger than this, and I beat them. Even Vicar had been a tougher opponent. He’d wielded Art with a finesse that I could never manage.
No, I didn’t have much finesse. I had one way out of this, though it wouldn’t be pleasant.
“Vicar,” I hissed under my breath as I struggled against the vampire’s strength. The creature was still babbling to itself.
“I have no more fire,” the devil whispered tiredly.
I’d suspected that. “I need you to get off me.”
I didn’t want him to get caught in it.
He understood, and I felt him begin to dislodge from my shoulders. As I’d discovered at Edvard Agrion’s fortress during my confrontation with the Elf Queen, the hellhound could still move under his own power. Not much, little more than slithering about like a worm, but it was enough.
The Alder Knights had possessed many wondrous powers. The consecrated fire of the Alder Table, hewn from a mighty Eardetree to which Tuvon himself had bonded, could be shaped into a variety of different phantasms. I’d lost many of those when I corrupted that power with untethered spirits, made the magic shapeless in return for restoring its base strength. There were only a few I could still mimic, mostly the most blunt and aggressive ones, like the Lance and Rebuke.
The aureflame possessed three base qualities — to smite evil, to heal the sick and the wounded, and to shield the wielder. Its nature had been twisted, inverted, so it could no longer heal, and it did not passively shield me against hostile powers. It had been made aggressive, only capable of attacking. Or perhaps only interested in attack. It still healed me, but only as a side effect of having such hyperactive aura running through my body at all times.
And it could still manifest in its purest, original form — as fire.
This is going to hurt, I thought even as I called up my will.
Evangeline, or perhaps her demon, sensed something at the last moment. With a furious hiss, the fiend unhinged its jaw and went for my throat.
Too late. My entire body burst alight as pale golden fire, bleached nearly to white, blazed forth. I did not direct it, did not try to shape or contain it. I simply let myself burn.
I’d done something similar at Baille Os, when the demon Skreel had wrapped itself about my arm. It was crude, usually ineffective against a wary enemy, but Evangeline and I were practically embracing.
And that had only been the one arm.
I lost Evangeline’s pained scream in my own agony. I lost sound, lost vision, even lost feeling for a moment as my nerve endings blazed with spiritual heat.
Evangeline leapt off me, flapping back with such desperate fervor that her wings caught me. I gasped with a different, more blunt agony as I was knocked to the side, rolling from the force of the blow. I managed to get to a knee, vomited up bile mixed with blood.
I continued to burn. That was the risk of this — once I’d let up on that constant pressure keeping the hungry magic contained, let it feast, it wasn’t easy to get it back under control. Ghostly fire ran up my arms, my shoulders, gnawed at the gaps in my armor and burnt at my short hair. The stink of my own cooking flesh assaulted my nostrils.
But I had some resistance to heat, or else it would have killed me the first time I ever used it. Evangeline and her demon had it far worse.
I turned, and through the haze of fire and pain I saw her. She flapped madly, sending out gusts of wind in random directions as she turned about in circles, her gray flesh blackening where the flame raced across it.
The aureflame — no, more accurate to call it ghostflame now — was a living thing, malicious, hungry. There were still some of the stoic spirits of the Alder in it, true, but just as many of the damned. Those orphan souls were all too eager to take revenge against one of the monsters responsible for their pain.
I stomped forward as Evangeline made a futile effort to escape the dead. The irony, that she’d wanted to fashion a kingdom with this same kind of power, was not lost on me.
Neither did it amuse me. There was a lesson there.
The pain in my broken ribs was distant, a dull ache beneath my armor. The fire still crawled along my limbs, burning me near as badly as Evangeline, but that too was just noise. As I stepped from a shaft of moonlight into shadow and out again, my axe became the executioner’s sword.
“It’s time to rest, Ser Knight.” No more doom in my words, just tired truth.
A rumble went through the stones of the citadel, forcing me to pause my advance to keep my balance. We’d caused too much damage to the room. Parts of the ceiling were beginning to come down, revealing patches of moonlight and glimpses of night sky. The cold, baleful eye of the Corpse Moon shone down on Evangeline, illuminating her burnt wings and pallid flesh, that demon’s shape in all its hideous glory.
The spirit fire was starting to lose its strength, but it had done terrible damage. She huddled within the shelter of her own wings, letting out mewling sounds of pure pain and terror. She looked up at me, and her crimson eyes were wide with fear. Her face looked melted, half of it burned so horribly as to reveal naked bone and damp gristle, worse even than Maerlys’s wounds.
Those weren’t from me. That was the mark the Lindenwurm had given her.
Somewhere within me, his voice spoke again. He sounded sad. She still remembers the wyrm’s fire. It may be the one thing she truly fears anymore.
The voice startled me. I thought I’d discarded Finn Nu, but it was his voice.
She is not beyond redemption, he told me.
Maybe not, I thought. But that’s not my role. She can find her penance with the dead, if they’ll allow it to her.
I felt his sadness, his regret. All it did was irritate me.
You can’t redeem her, I snarled at that other presence. Look at her!
No reply. Letting myself go cold, I lifted my sword for the finishing blow. Evangeline cringed.
In that moment, the throne room’s doors creaked open.
We all looked. Me, Lisette and Penric, injured and beaten Evangeline. A shape stood in that open doorway, shadowed beyond the bands of moonlight. They were tall, and wore armor. When they stepped forward, they did so at a relaxed, confident pace, like the main actor of a stage play emerging for their key scene. They made a clinking sound as they walked, as though they wore a coat of chainmail.
No... that sound came from a net of trophy medallions, taken from a hundred defeated knights.
They stepped into the light to reveal black armor, a cloak trimmed in furs, a misshapen head.
It was Ildeban. He held a bouquet of flowers. White roses.
“I have considered your offer, Your Majesty.” His calm voice stood utterly at odds with the scene he beheld. “I have decided to accept, if you would still have me.”
The Briar King ignored all of us as he lifted the flowers. “Would you take me as your king and husband, O’ Queen of the Banner?”
