Chapter Seven
“How and where I got it is information undoubtedly worth killing for.” Kit shifted his shoulders rather uneasily. “Despite your threat, the answers to those questions are not the sort of thing to be discussed with someone in the capital for nothing more than the Bear’s Eve Ball.” He looked to the Warlord for confirmation of his assessment.
Drustorn stood taller even than Kit, and, while they probably weighed the same, I had the feeling that the wiry man would beat Kit easily in any sort of fight they could have. Chaosfire filled his eyes fuller than it had Eirene’s, but I saw no other indication of the changes commonly wrought on a man by Chaos. Of course I knew the stories about Garn Drustorn and his famed Chaos Raiders, but my experience with the things said about my father had been enough to make me wary of believing everything I had heard.
“It is my feeling, in this case, no harm will come if Locke is allowed to hear what you have to tell me.” While older than Kit by nearly a dozen years, but not even twice my age, Drustorn’s voice had a calm strength that made me feel good and, apparently, vanquished Kit’s reluctance to talk. “Locke, please put the sword up. After you tell me what you know, Lieutenant Christoforos, I will want to hear how Locke knew that dagger was manufactured by the Bharashadi.”
Kit sat down in one of the chairs, and Drustorn waved me to the other one after I locked the door. He remained standing and folded his arms across his chest. “Lieutenant?”
“Approximately three weeks ago I was leading a small patrol in Menal to check on some ruins that had once been in Chaos, but have been part of the Empire since the province was liberated. There had been reports of some Church of Chaos Encroaching activity in the area. We all knew that those reports were false, since the Black Church tends to be active near the borders, not in the middle of farmland.”
The Warlord nodded. “Superstitions die very hard, I know. So you rode out to check and had a magicker with you.”
“An Aelven woman of Warder rank, yes sir. We found the ruin and checked it thoroughly but found nothing. Taci, the Warder, used a spell that she described as being akin to a sieve. Because Chaos magick has a certain taint to it, she said its residual effects could be detected by her spell. She even put enough energy into the spell to let me see it as a cerulean ball that flattened out into a glowing cobweb. It grew and spread out with its anchor at the ruin, then faded.
“She reported she had found nothing, so we made camp that night at the ruin. It was already snowing in the plains, and wolf packs were coming down from the mountains to hunt. We decided braving whatever ghosts the locals had seen was preferable to freezing to death or being overrun by wolves. The ruins provided enough shelter for ourselves and our mounts, and the well meant we had fresh water.”
“I know I would have chosen to stay there, too,” I commented. In Kit’s description I could hear the whistling of the wind and the howls of wolves coming across a snowy plain under the bone white light of a full Lovers’ Moon. I smiled as I imagined being alone on those plains with only Cruach as a companion, and I knew instinctively it would be the wolves that would be fearing us and not the other way around.
“Shows you’re not entirely without sense, Locke.” Kit turned the dagger over in his hands and concentrated on it. “That night Taci awoke with a start and cried out. Even by the time I got to her she had not fully become aware of where she was. My lord, it was as if she were in shock, or so I thought. I had my people bank up the fire, and we made her some vusopeh tea. We had to force her to drink it, but once she got some into her, it started to bring her around.
“Once I made sure she had not been hurt somehow, I asked her what happened. She was not certain. She said her hands were numb, much the way they feel after you accidentally hit something very solid with a sword. Obviously she’d not done that while sleeping, so we assumed the cause of her shock might be magickal.”
The Warlord nodded. “A rather logical conclusion.”
“Yes, sir. Taci considered whether or not she’d been attacked by an enemy, but rejected that idea since she’d suffered no real harm. In thinking about everything she decided her shock had something to do with the spell she had woven earlier in the evening. Because she had put the extra strength into it to enable me to see it take effect, the spell had remained active over a much greater range, just how far, she said, she could not be certain. What had shocked her, however, was the sheer virulence and power of the Chaos magick spell she had detected. Unprepared for it, it had addled her.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So there were Chaos Encroachers in the area.”
“That’s what I thought at first, Locke, but Taci said what she had felt was nothing like their magick. She pointed her hand out in the direction in which the Chaos magick had been sensed, and I had several of my patrol make an arrow out of building stones pointing straight out in that direction. Then Taci and I rode about a third of a league to the west and she cast another of her detection spells. This time she refined it so it would only search in a ninety-degree arc. It went out invisibly this time, and within a minute she had a new direction for the magick.
“I marked everything down on my chart of the area and was able to determine that whatever she had felt looked to be four leagues off to the south, just entering the forests. As that area of Menal is not heavily populated, I was very reluctant to tangle with anything that powerful in the middle of the night because we were only a scouting patrol with a single magicker. I forced everyone to get some sleep so we could be alert the next day, when we did go after it. In light of what we found, I don’t know if this was the correct tactic to choose.”
Garn Drustorn shook his head. “You’re here now, reporting this information. That’s far more valuable than our learning about the problem you encountered after you’d gone missing for a week and another patrol found your corpses.”
“That was my feeling, too, sir, but the risk might have been worth it.” Kit sighed heavily. “Taci knew from her spell that we’d located the nexus point of the casting, and I knew it from what I saw. The snow, which was running about knee-deep thereabouts, had been melted down to the ground in a triangular pattern about ten feet on a side. All around there, throughout this small clearing in the forest, lay dead wolves. Some of them had been flash-burned with all their fur singed off, while others looked as if they had been roasted for hours on a spit.”
The Warlord frowned. “With no cooking pit in sight.”
“No, sir.” Kit’s face hardened as he continued his story. “Being out there in Menal, I have no love for wolves, but this pack died hard, very hard. We couldn’t tell if they got a piece of what they attacked, but they’d been dogging its steps for the better part of a day. They surprised their prey because that spot wasn’t particularly defensible—though with magick it turned out fine.
“From there we started tracking the thing, and I think I saw it once. It surprised us by trying to cut back on its own trail. It came in toward our camp from downwind one evening, and the horses let us know they were upset. We chased out after it, and I think I got an arrow into it—left shoulder. I can’t be certain—it was running, at night, and fair distant. I saw a blood track, though.”
My jaw dropped. “You hit it at night at something beyond point-blank range? How big was it?”
“Man-sized, more or less.” Kit glanced sidelong at the Warlord, then nodded. “The thing looked pretty much like the picture-book illustrations of a lion, from the time before Chaos came. It had a mane and a long tail with a bushy brush of hair at the end. The mane seemed to trace down the spine, but it was difficult to tell because the whole thing was black, excepting, perhaps, its eyes. I saw glints of gold in its eyes, but that could be as much my imagination or reflections of firelight as it is fact.”
“I think you saw gold eyes all right. You realize, Lieutenant, your description is consistent with that of a Bharashadi Chademon.” Drustorn held his right hand out, and Kit gave him the slender, barbed blade. “You said you saw blood.”
“Yes, sir. On more than one occasion. Where I got my arrow into it I saw blood in the snow, and it looked dark purple. Hansen, one of my people, said he’d seen blood that color from a Chapanther that had been killed over in Tarris. Later we saw some more from where a bear had fought with the creature. The bear had been killed, and its hide had been stripped off. Apparently the creature had appropriated the bear’s lair for shelter.”
“It killed a bear?” I shook my head. “Did it use magick?”
“No. Taci sensed no residual magickal power, and the marks on the bear’s carcass indicated it had been killed by dagger and claw.”
I blinked. “If it was the size of a man and did that, it must be very strong.”
Drustorn nodded. “Chaos demons are often quite powerful.”
Kit winced. “True, but could this have been a Chaos demon?”
Kit’s question focused me on the problem with which he and the Warlord wrestled. Everyone knew that creatures born in Chaos could not penetrate the Ward Walls and live. It just could not be done without resulting in their death. We all knew it. We had been given that as the one fundamental tenet of our lives in the Empire. It was a fact that no one disputed.
Another fact not in dispute was that an incredible number of Chaotic creatures had been released into the Empire when the provinces of Menal and Tarris were incorporated into it. The activation of the Ward Stations that created those new provinces pushed the Ward Walls out instantly, trapping an incredible number of creatures nurtured by Chaos within the new province. While many creatures had been slain in the century since Tarris’s birth, some of the Chaos beasts had established a stable population and were breeding true even in my father’s time, or so his books reported.
None of those creatures, at least as nearly as I knew, were capable of using magick. Clearly the thing Kit had chased was a magick user, but it was also possible that any magick it used was an inherent power, not a spell. While a spell might mimic a dragon’s ability to breathe fire, a dragon’s breath is not a spell, for example. Even as I offered that idea as a possible explanation, I knew it did not truly cover the facts available.
“Where did you find the dagger?” I asked. “You said a dagger was used on the bear’s corpse, but do you know if it was this one? Could someone else have inflicted those wounds with a knife afterward?”
“In other words, how do I know the creature carried this dagger?”
“Right.”
“Good question.” Kit gave me an appreciative nod. “We didn’t see tracks from anyone else around the bear’s body, so I assume the wounds were inflicted by the creature. The kill was fresh, but I didn’t have the dagger to match against the wounds, so I don’t know if this was the one used on the bear.”
The Warlord nodded. “Not an easy thing to determine at the best of times.”
“No, sir, though Taci said some magickers could have used a spell to do the job. As for the dagger itself, well, who was carrying it is still something of a mystery. We tracked the creature further south and two days later, at a cabin in the forest, found more evidence of its passage.
“It had snowed during the early morning just lightly enough to dust the whole area. We found a dead man lying face down beneath this thin blanket of snow, so we assume he died in the night. When I rolled him over I found the knife stuck in his chest. There were plenty of signs of a struggle in the area, but no more purple blood. I cannot tell if he was stabbed, or just knocked down to where he fell on the knife himself.”
“And the man had a history of being a Chaos Rider, correct, Lieutenant? That way you could not be certain if the dagger was something he had brought back from Chaos himself, or something the creature left behind.”
“That is the mystery, Warlord.” Kit sighed heavily. “The creature ran upright, and it ran on all fours. It did some very intelligent things to elude us, and it did some very stupid things to put us back on the track. Aside from changes made to put us on a false trail or to make travel easier, it always angled south.” Kit plucked at his service tunic. “We tracked it to within a league of the capital here before we lost it.”
The implications of what Kit had related made me swallow hard as I considered them. I saw three possible solutions to his problem. The first was that some sort of strange Chaos creature—one that had not been seen in Tarris or Menal before—had wandered from its normal range and found itself being hounded south. The second, which was really a variation of the first, was that a small band of Chademons had managed to anticipate the annexation of Tarris and had hidden themselves in the province when it was reclaimed. They stayed quiet and only now decided to make trouble. It was even possible that Chademons born within the Ward Walls would be able to pass freely through them as anything else born on this side could do.
While that second conclusion was quite nasty in and of itself, it paled by comparison to the third. That one, quite simply, was impossible by everything I knew of the Ward Walls, but I realized that was painfully little. Simply stated, a Chaos demon, apparently of the Black Shadows tribe, had managed to pass through the Ward Walls. Of course, the most terrifying thing about that was that if one could do it, others could as well. This was, then, the worst-case scenario, and I thought it would be foolish not to give it some weight, no matter that I knew that it was impossible.
I shivered. “Could a Chaos demon have made it through the Ward Walls?”
“Not possible.” Kit crossed his arms over his chest. “Even Audin should have taught you that such a thing is impossible.”
The Warlord smiled. “I think impossible is too strong a word to use here, Lieutenant. Impossible really means that no one has found a means for doing something up to this point in time. As powerful as the Ward Walls are, they are just magick. Whenever a spell is worked, a counterspell can destroy it. The Ward Walls are strong because of the number of Warders we have maintaining them, and because of the complexity of the weaving. That does not mean they cannot be breached.”
Kit’s face darkened. “How?”
“I’m not a Warder, Lieutenant, so I don’t know if I can give you a full answer to that question.” Drustorn shook his head. “As an example, though, we know there were many magickal items of great power lost when Chaos overswept the world, and only a fraction of them have been recovered. There are undoubtedly also countless sorcerers’ strongholds that were likewise subsumed, and we have no idea of what or even who might lurk in them. Of the most powerful of wizards—the Twelve who formed the Seal of Reality—nothing has been heard since the time of the Shattering, so this might be their doing.”
I frowned. “But if magick was used to breach the Ward Walls, wouldn’t someone have felt the taint of the magick? If Kit’s friend Taci has a spell that allows her to detect such things, I can’t imagine that the sorcerers tasked with maintaining the walls wouldn’t use a similar spell to monitor assaults against the walls.”
“That’s a good point, Locke, but it could have been non-Chaos magick that created the hole.”
I nodded to the Warlord. “Or it might not have been magick at all.”
“Meaning?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Perhaps there is something in Chaos that absorbs magick the way a bandage absorbs blood. If it soaked off enough strength from the walls, something might be able to make it through from the other side.”
My cousin shook his head. “I don’t think I like that idea.”
“Nor do I, but we are speculating well beyond anything we can support with the evidence you have brought us, Lieutenant. What we do know from it is that a fairly lethal creature of Chaotic origin is close to Herakopolis. This is not something that can be taken lightly.”
The Warlord looked toward me, then flipped the dagger around and extended the hilt in my direction. “So tell me, Lachlan, how did you recognize this as being of Bharashadi manufacture?”
I accepted the weapon and tested it for weight and balance point as I had been instructed by Audin. The heavy hilt felt good in my hand, and I had no fear of it twisting in my grip. The cross hilt felt solid enough to be used for parrying, and a line of stars twisted along its edge for decoration. The wide blade had been crafted with a long, slender diamond in cross section to strengthen it down the center. A third of the way down on the lower edge, and halfway back on the upper a wicked hook had been cut down and into the blade. The knife, when thrust in and rotated even slightly, would pull and slice on retraction, making the wound virtually untreatable without magick.
Staring at the knife I tried to answer Drustorn’s question. “I am not certain, sir. I know that Audin, my grandfather and Bladesmaster, mentioned the Black Shadows frequently as I grew up. The stories of Cardew likewise emphasized his hatred for Kothvir, their leader. As I saw this dagger closely resembled those on the wall, I must have assumed it was of Bharashadi origin. It was a snap judgment, made in haste. Was I wrong?”
“I suspect if I asked either of you to name Chademon tribes you’d start with the Black Shadows, so even a guess would have brought that answer. In this case you were correct.” Drustorn walked over to the wall and pulled the other two Bharashadi daggers from the wall. “You are aware these are special?”
Kit and I both nodded. “They are vindictxvara—my uncle Cardew brought them back from Chaos.”
“Right,” I added. “They both have images of my father on them. They were meant to kill him.”
“True enough, but there is something more here. The shape of the cross hilts and the way the star pattern is worked along the edges indicate these knives were fashioned for a Chademon who was a member of Kothvir’s brood.”
I looked down at the blade I held and saw the pattern of stars repeated. “It’s the same with this one. Perhaps the man Kit found murdered had ridden with the Valiant Lancers on an expedition with our fathers. He could have gotten it then.”
“That’s likely the answer, Locke.” The Warlord’s eyes narrowed. “If it isn’t, however, the magnitude of our problem has grown. On the off chance we are dealing with a Chaos demon who has actually found a way to breach the Ward Walls, its pedigree means it is far more dangerous than we might otherwise dare to believe.”