The Crimson Pact: Volume One
“The Failed Crusade” written by and copyright 2011 by Paul Genesse and Patrick M. Tracy
“Solitary Life” written by and copyright 2011 by Donald J. Bingle
“Inside Monastic Walls” written by and copyright 2011 by Chanté McCoy
“Brother's Keeper” written by and copyright 2011 by Lester Smith
“Stained with Nightmare Juice” written by and copyright 2011 by Isaac Bell
“To Duty Sworn” written by and copyright 2011 by Jess Hartley
“Hidden Collection” written by and copyright 2011 by Sarah Kanning
“Inquest” written by and copyright 2011 by Barbara J. Webb
“The Things That Crawl” written by and copyright 2011 by Richard Lee Byers
“Monsters Under the Bed” written by and copyright 2011 by Patrick S. Tomlinson
“Sins of the Father” written by and copyright 2011 by Kathy Watness
“Crimson Mail” written by and copyright 2011 by Gloria Weber
“Cherry Picking” written by and copyright 2011 by Rebecca L. Brown
“Chicago's Finest” written by and copyright 2011 by T.S. Rhodes
“The Transition” written by and copyright 2011 by Justin Swapp
“Brotherhood: Fall of New York” written by and copyright 2011 by Garrett Piglia
“Frankie's Girl” written by and copyright 2011 by Kelly Swails
“Shell of a Man” written by and copyright 2011 by Daniel Myers
“An Ideal Vessel” written by and copyright 2011 by Sarah Hans
“Love, Gangsters, and Demons” written by and copyright 2011 by Elaine Blose
“Bull King” written by and copyright 2011 by Larry Correia
“Run” written by and copyright 2011 by EA Younker
“Plastic” written by and copyright 2011 by Craig Nybo
“Red Test” written by and copyright 2011 by Patrick M. Tracy
“Withered Tree” written by and copyright 2011 by Suzzanne Myers
“Of the Breaking of Stars” written by and copyright 2011 by Chris Pierson
Digitally published by Alliteration Ink of Dayton, Ohio at Smashwords.
The characters, incidents, and dialogue herein are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, persons, or monsters, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
The Failed Crusade by Paul Genesse and Patrick M. Tracy
Solitary Life by Donald J. Bingle
Inside Monastic Walls by Chanté McCoy
Brother's Keeper by Lester Smith
Stained with Nightmare Juice by Isaac Bell
To Duty Sworn by Jess Hartley
Hidden Collection by Sarah Kanning
Inquest by Barbara J. Webb
The Things That Crawl by Richard Lee Byers
Monsters Under the Bed by Patrick S. Tomlinson
Sins of the Father by Kathy Watness
Crimson Mail by Gloria Weber
Cherry Picking by Rebecca L. Brown
Chicago's Finest by T.S. Rhodes
The Transition by Justin Swapp
Brotherhood Fall of New York by Garrett Piglia
Frankie's Girl by Kelly Swails
Shell of a Man by Daniel Myers
An Ideal Vessel by Sarah Hans
Love, Gangsters, and Demons by Elaine Blose
Bull King by Larry Correia
Run by EA Younker
Plastic by Craig Nybo
Red Test by Patrick M. Tracy
Withered Tree by Suzzanne Myers
Of the Breaking of Stars by Chris Pierson
Editor's Note by Paul Genesse
Publisher's Note by Steven Saus
by Patrick M. Tracy and Paul Genesse
Part One: The Rusted Vale
News of our victory came not in the happy shouts of the freed multitudes, but in the groaning voices of the animate dead. Ours was a victory that none would confuse with triumph. The best half of us lay broken within the Rusted Vale, the rear guard left to puzzle out the events that had been no more than far-off echoes within the smoke and crashing iron. We knew only that we had finally won, that the Crimson Pact was redeemed, that we could all go home. Tired as we were, no man lifted a fist to celebrate. No Blessed Woman smiled. No church Catechist recounted the litany of our good fortunes. The cost had been too high, the wager of battle too awful. In that moment, winning didn’t seem to matter. It would not be long before we found that even the brief illusion of victory would tear away like fog before the wind.
We had to reanimate the dead to learn the terrible truth. When we could find corpses whole enough to take the enchantment, that is. Most of them lay in torn, unrecognizable chunks no bigger than a man’s finger. Our front-line troops had been destroyed to a man. No living soldier remained to tell the tale. How had our enemies, at the moment of their apparent defeat, disappeared into a rolling, living explosion of acrid fire? What twisted plot had allowed them to lure us in, only to annihilate us and make good their escape? Only the dead knew.
The landscape, a blasted waste of flaming corrosion, would never again support life. Nothing wholesome remained. Trees were charred skeletons; grass had turned to ash; even the rocks were glazed with black, tarry soot that wouldn’t wash away. The comrades we brought back had known torment no human mind could bear. Wrenching them back into their broken bodies was a crime we will spend our lives trying to forget. They screamed until we were forced to pulp their heads with the burial spades, providing us with nothing but fodder for night sweats and drinking binges.
You begin clean. You begin with fine intentions and a cause. The ending is always burnt black, broken promises strewn about with the dead and all you had hoped to do slipping through your hands like the steam of your breath in midwinter.
Some of us were learning these truths for the first time, most of us merely being reminded. The Spirit Coaxers, with their black candles and their guttural chants, summoned the ghosts back into the broken vessels of our fallen friends. For those who had the power over death’s threshold, there was never so ill-favored a day. As bad as The Day of Burning was for all of us, it was worse for the Spirit Coaxers.
Nothing could be done. We needed to know what they’d seen at the front, what had happened, how things had gone so utterly wrong. A few of them had seen the last awful moments. From beyond death’s veil, they remembered. Curse the gods, but they remembered it all.
It fell to me, General Cruek Ostor, to hear the gasped words of the dead. I carry every word verbatim, an entire army of nightmares within me, loose-ranked and mutinous, hollow-eyed as my own reflection after these many sleepless nights. Fragments of all the dead live inside me.
Often, but little could be understood amongst their anguished cries. “It burns! It burns!” they would scream. Or it would be the name of their mothers, perhaps their sweethearts they would never see again. Nothing useful. Sometimes, though, there would be a soldier who seemed to know. A soldier that, as we grew to understand the depth of our own futility, would prove to be a collaborator with the demon horde.
The most enlightening account came from a Catechist who had once been a scholar, historian, and poet. I have collected all of his written works, but none more important than this. His insistence on being with the front-line soldiers to record the events of what was to be our final victory led to his doom. It was a doom he chose for himself, I believe. He knew what was coming, and welcomed his own destruction.
The mad proclamation from his tormented ghost will become his most enduring poem and must never be forgotten.
“From out of the dark, from whence no light could hope to escape, the demons yelled out, not in defeat, but mirth. All the assembled Kasu-Hurun demons, laughing at their cosmic joke, laughing because they had slipped free of their nooses and leaped outward into the unknowing worlds beyond. They laughed because some amongst us have always known their secret stratagem, always grasped the chains of dark iron and helped to pull them free. Every hemmed-in battle line merely sharpened the blade that would cut them free, every seeming victory a mere sham, a sacrificial gambit to bring them closer to their ultimate aim. It was they that encompassed victory on the day that was to be ours, and we were left, holding only smoke and ashes. The Crimson Pact, a human endeavor, had bent like reeds toward the evil it hoped to fight. It suffered the imperfection of our very blood. We had always been doomed to failure.”
Those words and others hang in the shredded tapestries of my mind. They were the best account we had. The nightmarish story from the Catechist is the closest we had to an explanation in the grim aftermath of our day of glory. Never has the taste of victory so quickly soured into defeat, and never have the square-cut holes into which the fallen heroes are lowered been more difficult to dig. The sky above us was a bruised, weeping purple, even at midday. It was a day in which you would search through the wreckage, following the sound of weeping, only to discover that those sounds came from your own lips, that all hope had ebbed away, replaced by a bitter tide of woe. I knew then that our long war had only escalated, spreading over the manifold worlds. I knew and couldn’t imagine what could be done. Everything I thought I knew had been shattered, my soul a broken cup that would hold no wine.
I can no longer imagine I will see the conclusion of this war. It will devour me, just as it devoured the bravest front ranks of our army. Perhaps it is the nature of crusades to only leave wounds and burned-out places upon the ground, missing brothers and failed hopes. I hope it is not so, because our crusade, this Crimson Pact, must continue on if we are ever to mend all we have broken.
Who first swore the Crimson Pact? That was before my time, two life spans of men before the season of my birth. I, General Cruek Ostor, am a military man, son of a family of stone cutters fortunate or unfortunate enough to have learned the craft of war alongside the sons of men of much higher station. I have only my mind and my resolve, no gifts of magic or divine providence. I cannot see the events of the past or future, but only what confronts me at the distance an axe can clear. The War Masters taught me that the Crimson Pact was a blood oath to hunt the Kasu-Hurun demons to the end of the world, giving them no quarter and allowing them no sanctuary. That was enough. I replaced the hammer and chisel and the back-breaking stone saw with finer implements, replaced the rock quarry with the long, long road and the weight of armor upon my shoulders. It seemed like a fine bargain. I can’t imagine ever having been so young.
People swear pacts out of need, self-interest, idealism. Ours was no different in this regard. Never mind the long-term costs, never mind the darkness that hides behind our own occluded vision. In a little while, all the goals and reasons will be lost, both fair and foul. Only the bloody inertia of the crusade is required.
Long before I cut my cheeks and touched my bloody thumbs to the page of the Pact Book, all but the grim need for victory had faded away. The longer we harried the demons, the stronger they became. They fed on misery, even their own. War suited them. Wound them and the scar grows back like iron and bone. Grow as merciless as they, and they only nodded in grim approval and fought harder. They never tired of it, though the same cannot be said for our own forces.
I have seen the finest men I know cut short or crushed in spirit as we walked our damned road. Whether lowered into the embrace of the soil or left to linger, hollow-eyed and spent but still alive, I count them as dead, casualties of an ambition crafted before our birth that will go on long after we are but dust. I wish I had the energy to rage against it, but I find that it has deserted me. As well to be angry at the sunset as its fires fade down into their own darker ashes. As well to never try, in hopes of sparing yourself the chance at failure.
Here is what I know: What we cannot buy with blood, we will attempt to buy with magic. What we cannot buy with blood or magic, we will plead with the gods of the firmament to deliver for us. When the gods fail, we flail outward, grasping any dark tendril that will hold us from oblivion.
In our striving with the Kasu-Hurun, we made liberal use of every element at our disposal. I can’t say which weapon was our undoing, or if it was all of them in combination, or if we ourselves lack the purity of purpose to accomplish any great goal without a corresponding tragedy. All I know is that we borrowed too greedily and too often, and this chilly failure is our notice that payment is due.
Two weeks had passed since the Day of Burning. The survivors had been occupied with the business of honoring those who had not survived. The Rusted Vale had become a land of graves, all the stones for miles around employed for sealing tombs against looters, human or otherwise. No one had the spirit for the usual ceremonies, the shouting and speeches about the fallen. There were no work songs, no crude jokes. The music of shovels cut the ruined earth. Theirs was the only distinct voice.
I sat on the ground, ash in my hair, blood dried on my face, knowing that I would never again be clean. My two captains, Bandarin and Kalamat, sat with me. Kalamat looked about like a man whose dinner disagrees with him but is afraid to speak to the cook. Bandarin evinced as much discomfort and sadness as his heroic features allowed. At last, the conversation we all dreaded came to pass.
“The men want to go home, Sir. They’ve had a belly full. These last days, it’s been undertaker’s work, not soldiering. The demons are gone, and I don’t see what more we can do. It’s passed beyond what we can hope to change,” Kalamat said.
“That is the way their thoughts run?” I asked.
“Some of ‘em, yes. Some’s of the notion that it ain’t over, but that’s the minority. You’ll need to talk to ‘em and give ‘em some reasons to keep hoping.”
“What do you think, Kal? Do you think such reasons exist?” Under that purple sky, the talk of courage and continuance seemed just a charade, made asinine by the foul breath we used to push it from our lips. I could barely hold myself up. The images of dead men screaming with the agony of reacquaintance with their own tattered souls, of putting them to silence with the rough end of a shovel—these things whirled behind my eyes like evil children who wouldn’t stop their frolicking as the funeral procession passed upon the road.
Kal searched the cemetery plain with haunted eyes. “I think that sometimes we fail, and sometimes, there’s battles that can’t be won, no matter how much gets sacrificed. I say we go home and send up wishes for forgiveness. That’s just my feel of things, Sir, since you asked.” He gazed down at his bandaged forearm. His armor hung in shredded ribbons, his one eye still swollen shut with a massive bruise that obscured his features and slurred his speech.
“I don’t know if it’s fair to ask them to go on,” I said.
“Armies don’t march on fairness,” Bandarin pointed out. “They march on orders, and ideals, and hardened men who they trust to sell their lives only for the right reasons. They still trust you, Cruek. You’re the man to keep them together, to see this through.”
I scuffed at the sterile dust near my leg, drawing a picture of an axe, as I always seemed to do. “They trust me?” I coughed, as close as I could come to a laugh. “How? Am I still a good man, after all this? Am I a man who could ask them to go on from here? I wonder. I don’t feel like that man tonight.”
Bandarin clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re every bit that man. More so than ever, I think. It’s good to have qualms after what we’ve seen, but the men need you to find a way to be sure again.”
I nodded. Bandarin, face dirty and his leg held straight against a broken bone, was at ease with all of it, impervious to the frailties Kal and I fell prey to.
“With all the demons gone to…wherever they went, what can we do?” Kalamat asked me after some time had passed.
“Not all of them are gone,” I said. “You know that as well as I do. Many passed through our lines on the march, and just as many remained hidden through their magic and their wiles. As to where they went, the dead Catechist said it plainly enough. They went out to the countless other worlds. We, through our own mixed efforts, gave them a leg up on this goal. I intend to find a way to pass to those other worlds. I intend to hunt down the remaining demons and press them for information until we find a way, and then we must prosecute the war wherever it takes us.” I don’t know if I really believed. Maybe saying it out loud began the process, hardened my resolve somehow. How could I even fathom the way to follow them into the beyond? Such things were the realm of Spirit Coaxers and Blessed Women, not soldiers whose feet were rooted in the mud. My words to Kalmat and Bandarin were like the grin of a man forced to kneel under the headsman’s axe.
Kalamat sighed, seeming to fall into himself and become smaller with each hard word on my part. “I imagine some will agree. The rest can be made to. They swore the Pact, every man and woman among them.” There was no pride or pleasure in what he said. Every noise of his lips and throat came out begrudgingly, clawing to stay unsaid.
“I’m not interested in making them stay if they can bear it no longer. If they feel called to stay . . .”
“If you stay, I stay,” Bandarin swore, casual as ever with his fate.
“Kal?”
“Forgive me, Sir, but I don’t think I can. My girls at home have grown up with nothing but stories about me. I’ve lost their faces in my mind. I don’t think I’ve got even one sword swing left after what I seen.”
“You’ve served well and done more that I could ever ask for, Kalamat. Go home. Enjoy what life remains to you. Just,” I put my scarred fist against his heart, “stay for another few days, and I’ll never call upon you again.”
He lowered his head. “Thank you, General.”
I rose and helped the hobbled Bandarin to his feet. We would have a long night of planning.
We gathered them together that next morning, such a legion as we still had at our disposal. I climbed atop a lectern made from the wreckage of wagons and addressed them.
“I know you men have been tested to the utmost of late. We have all come near to despair and had our moments when we thought we could go on no longer. What we have seen here in the Rusted Vale…has been the cruelest trial yet. None of us stand here who have not lost those dearest to us, and bits of our spirit with those passings. It appears that we have come to the end of a campaign, only to find that the march has only begun. The Kasu-Hurun have escaped us, yes, but we swore a vow that does not end with the disappearance of our quarry.
“There are yet demons abroad in our lands. In their damned brains, the secrets of our betrayal fester. I mean to chase every one of them to ground and know those secrets. We’ll find a way to complete all we’ve sworn to do. I know you men, and I know that you don’t want to end things with the bitter taste of smoke in your mouths. I won’t order you to continue. Each must search his heart for the will to keep going. It can’t be enforced. If you have it within you to follow me, we’ll march two day’s hence. Those who can’t bear another day can report to Captain Kalamat and march for your homes. No less will be thought of you.”
“So we can go?” a question flew up from the ranks.
“I would ask you to stay, but I wouldn’t demand it from you. Examine your feelings about the Pact, and let that steer you,” I answered. Despite my hope to refrain from holding the Pact above their heads, I’d done just that. Every day we find new ways to diminish ourselves from what we hoped to be as children.
“For me, there ain’t nothing to go back to,” another voice spoke. More than a few murmured in assent with this. “I’ll keep on, if only to honor those we put down in the soil, my only friends.”
I could only bow toward the sound of that voice. It had gone beyond any words of mine by then. Nothing I had said really made a difference, or said more than that soldier, whose identity I have never learned. As they chose, they stayed or left. Perhaps four in ten remained true to the cause. It seemed twice as many as I’d hoped for. With that, we broke into shards. I wonder if it was no less brave to give up on that day. For the rest, we went on, weighed down by the dross of our shame.
Part Two: Chainweight
We caught the demon Kaivahno at dusk, running him down into a hollow filled with sapling trees just beginning to regrow from a clear cut. It took every one of our crossbowmen to stop him, though he was no bigger than a boy in stature. Even up close, writhing as our bolts pushed, hissing out of his frail-looking body, he appeared as a human waif. He’d slain and eaten at least a hundred women—bone, gristle, and entrails. All that he left untouched were the bones of the feet. With these, he created little sculptures he left for others to find. I had long since stopped trying to grasp our quarry’s rationale. If they bothered with such logical things, would I be better for knowing it?
Bandarin, my most stalwart and closest comrade, dismounted and ran to the creature, pinning it to the ground with his spear. The demon released a multiple-voiced shriek that stung my ears and caused sparks like a grinding wheel to dance before my eyes. Bandarin never faltered. The best of us, the bravest, my own savior in countless battles, he was all that a fighter could be, unbowed even when the true folly of our quest had been revealed.
Bandarin somehow kept the demon pinned with his spear and drew his sword for a killing blow.
“Captain Bandarin, no!” I shouted. “We must have him alive.”
“Not this time, General,” Bandarin said. “Don’t ask me to spare this one. His victims…they were naught but little girls, many of them.” He looked back at me, pleading with dark rage in his eyes.
“We must have information before justice,” I said, “but I promise you he won’t survive the night.”
Still, Bandarin wavered, his battle lust had gotten the better of him before. Was he going to disobey my order and dispatch the demon forthwith? None of the men who had seen its crimes would fault Bandarin.
Some of the wild light left my captain’s eyes. Releasing his sword, he used both hands to pin the squirming demon to the ground. Thanks to Bandarin’s discipline, this one would live to suffer our questions.
When the tendrils of hopelessness pierced me, Bandarin had always stood true. His unwavering morale, his cheer when all about him lost theirs—these had been a rare comfort to me on the march. It had always puzzled me that the men seemed ill at ease with him. I would have thought that they would have thrown me aside and followed Bandarin alone, but they had not. Of course, I said nothing, the mute authority of my own command killing the words before they could hit the air. If I could have…but no, we do only what we do. Hopes and wishes don’t come into it.
I turned to our Catechist, who sat his steed clumsily and tended to grasp the saddle horn with a white-fingered grip. In response to the demon’s cries, he had clapped his palms against his ears. From the smell of his vestments, I thought that it was likely that he’d lost his water at least once on the ride. I ignored this. He was not a soldier, and, until we no longer needed his special skills, I would have to take who the Confederacy of Theologues sent, regardless of their shortcomings.
“What do you make his weight, Enlightened Rameau?”
“His . . .”
“Kaivahno, our quarry. Yonder demon. What does the evil little bastard weigh?” I half-shouted over the ongoing din of the cursed thing’s pain.
The Catechist touched his fingers to his bald, tattooed head. “Nine stone. Perhaps a little more.” The holy man shivered, vomited from his horse, and rode away. I could hear his placations to the gods, but I didn’t think they’d listen. The fact that they worked through such a craven coward at all called their judgments into question in my mind. The ways of the gods grew more mysterious by the day.
Ullmer, the trapper, did his own calculation. “That’s two hundred and fifty-one links of standard chain, General Cruek.”
“Make it three hundred, Ullmer. Three hundred, at least. I don’t want the demon to so much as wiggle beneath the burden.”
With the human-shaped demons, chainweighting was the only thing that worked. Any locking mechanism would fall from them in a moment. They could escape even the sternest cell. Their own weight in iron, wrapped around them as tight as men could wind, seemed the only prison that would serve. Those who remained here after the Day of Burning were especially difficult to kill, the spies and trusted agents of the Kasu-Hurun. They had tasks to accomplish, fresh wickedness to perform. They also had information.
I had so far been unsuccessful in extracting anything but bragging, threats, and prolonged screaming from our demon prisoners, but they were our best hope of finding some secret, some tool to keep the war with their race from escaping us utterly.
“I hope that Catechist is fetching the Blessed Woman, General. The demon is growing rather stronger, and we’ll need her here if we’re to wrap him safely,” Bandarin said, his voice ragged, sweat bursting from his brow despite the chill of the evening air.
Ullmer and his men swung free lengths of their chain against the demon’s flanks hard enough to burst the gut and bone of any normal man. The demon continued its horrid screams, threatening with each muscular surge to escape from Bandarin’s pin and run amok, killing horses and warriors alike. To keep the one tiny creature at bay, a whole team worked to their uttermost, steam rising from their faces, breath ragged, teeth bared in effort.
The Blessed Woman came down into the hollow a moment later, her presence causing the shouts and screams of the demon to increase twofold. With a gesture, the woman silenced the beast, forcing its body to convulse, then fall back in a swoon. She had been with us since just after the Day of Burning, nearly a year. She was tall and fragile of build, with but little feminine curve to her shape. I couldn’t remember her ever saying more than three words together outside the formal proclamations required by her calling. Her eyes betrayed nothing, but some hint of pain lingered around her, some deep ache that had been etched into her deeper than any capacity to comfort could go. She wrapped herself in her shawl, which had once been crisp white but was now the same wash of gray that any light garment becomes when used too long upon the rough trails of war.
I acknowledged her, waving her forward to our prey.
She stopped, watching me for just a moment. “This one will talk. Not the truth. Not at the beginning, but…” she looked at the ground now, “eventually, perhaps. Press him hard enough, and he’ll talk.” She touched my elbow, the first I’d ever seen her reach out in all that time. “Remember, though, that knowing doesn’t always make it easier.” That near her, I could feel her power thrumming in the air. Her touch was electric, my every nerve responding to her. My armor caused me some discomfort as my body flexed at her touch, but I kept it from my face.
“I need to know. Easy isn’t a concern.” My voice sounded disembodied, as if it came from someone else’s throat.
Her eyes, just for a moment, opened up and allowed me a hint of what lay beneath her outward fortifications. “Of all the generals, I’m glad you were here to lead us.”
I blew out air. “Why?”
“Because you know that things must go on far longer than our taste for them remains. You knew the agony of dawn to dusk work as a young man, and that familiarized you with the idea that our lives are leased stretches of time, made possible only by our capacity to withstand all the troubles of the day. You are not a romantic, to be heartbroken by some perceived failure or setback.”
She turned away, leaving me to think about her words and wonder if they were true. She withdrew a short rod of maple, remnants of the bark still attached, and touched its end to the demon’s forehead. It straightened, stiff as a fence post. Its eyes slammed open, the color of blood and grease, its mouth bristling with fangs, its hands turned to hawk talons, its skin colored ocher.
“In the touch of the natural world, you are revealed,” the Blessed Woman said. “You are a stranger, an unwholesome vessel, a thing which does not belong and cannot fit. You can only destroy, corrupt, and sicken. In your passing, none will lament. I castigate you, demon of the Rusted Vale. You will accept your punishment with stoicism, and when next a wound threatens your life, your uncanny fortitude will not save you.” Her words spent, she stepped back to my side.
Not needing to be told, Ullmer and his men finished chainweighting the demon. Three hundred links, pulled taut and hard around the small body, nearly mummified the creature. A sheath of sackcloth stretched over the whole bundle, and four men hoisted the bound demon into a wagon.
“Thank you, Blessed Woman,” I said. She stood near me, close enough for me to smell the tree sap scent that always seemed to linger near one of her calling.
“In confidence, you may call me Yasi.” She gave me the smallest of all smiles, just a ghost within fog.
“I…yes, I will.” My heart beat hard. I didn’t quite know how I felt. It had been a long time since anything poked its head above the deep blanket of grim determination.
“Our newest Catechist is worth less than the horse that carries him. I’ll help you with the interrogation, if you’ll have me,” Yasi said.
“Nothing we’ve tried yet has been successful. I’d welcome your help. It might chasten Kaivahno to know you’re standing by.”
“If they could be chastened, my dear general, they wouldn’t be demons. I might be able to frighten him a little.” Another smile, this one somewhat more fully formed.
I wanted to ask her why she was talking to me, and why now, and a helmet full of other unformed questions that I couldn’t easily give voice. My tongue grew heavy and uncertain with those topics, though, and I remained quiet, watching her, really seeing her for the first time. There was an element of grace to all her movements. She wore a ring of silver on her finger and another on her thumb, that one larger, perhaps a man’s ring. Those small clues made me think of all the tragic turns of fate that must dwell in her past. It was impossible for me to imagine anyone in my company not suffering the heavy toll of a dark road. Perhaps I’d become too good at guessing another’s pain, and only imagined it.
Bandarin approached us then, and Yasi faded back into herself, leaving me to wonder why I’d been the one to bring her out in the first place, and what it might portend.
“They’re setting up a tent on the cleared ground,” Bandarin said, gesturing with his chin to where the cart had labored. “The men, as usual, will camp some distance away, just to be safe.”
I nodded, saying nothing, gazing after Yasi as she floated upslope, neither slow nor hurried, perhaps more of a mystery than she’d been at dawn.
“You look tired, old friend. I could handle this one, if you wish,” the captain offered.
I clapped him lightly on the arm. “No, I’ll do it. You’ve had your measure of glory today, wrestling the creature to the earth like the Heavenwalkers from the old myths. I’ll see to the ugly business of demon torturing.”
Bandarin laughed. “Heavenwalker! You’ve clearly mistaken me for someone else, Cruek. I’m barely considered tolerable company in a noisy ale hall. I fall well short of the picture you’d paint around my head. It’s easy work to follow when I’m lead by one such as you.”
I shrugged. For a moment, all I wanted to do was tell him how much he was appreciated, but it was a clumsy thing to speak on, and the moment passed. “I’ll tell you if we learn something useful.”
“You’d better tell me first, old friend.”
Bandarin walked away into the twilight and was gone. I led my horse back to where the tent was being erected, passing him off to a functionary who was no more than a dim outline against the trees. The sounds of hammers driving pegs, the talk of the men, the clatter of horses, booted feet, and wagons as the bulk of our forces moved away from the torture tent—all these things seemed to float slow on the air, every sound distinct and odd.
I saw two men move away when Bandarin came near and spoke to them. They moved with a purpose, and I wondered idly what it could be. I didn’t know them, but it had been a long time since I’d cared to learn every face and name under my command. Too many had been lowered into the silence of a grave, too many lost friends to count.
The torture table seemed too large for the demon’s small body. Even encumbered with heavy iron chain, his form sat in the middle of the stained, chipped wood like an afterthought. Some of them were so much larger, though size had little to do with how dangerous a demon might be. Uncanny things, they were rarely what they appeared.
Yasi, the Blessed Woman, held his ankles while I cut the rough sackcloth from him. The creature arched, every muscle contracting with manic intensity at her touch. He screamed. Though he was forsworn from making a sound, with only a whispered breath, that silent scream filled up the tent.
When she took her hands away, Kaivahno slumped back to the table, sweating out vinegar and brimstone so pungent that it assaulted the eyes. His grease and blood eyes rolled from one of us to the other, waiting for the next assault. I unrolled a kit of instruments. There was a mixture of tools within, any frightening-looking object I’d ever found. Many of them were a mystery, even to me. I kept them in the kit primarily for the purpose of fear and confusion. The needle-like rib bones from fish were useful, however.
We’d discovered that, for reasons unexplained, bones from fresh water fish were inimical to demon physiology. This proved valuable when so many other methods of harming them were ineffective. Most wounds healed within minutes, seconds even. Not so with fish bones. Still, torture was not my trade, and I had no taste for it.
I found a device with sharp fish ribs protruding like a comb along one side of a hardwood shaft. I waved this over the top of Kaivahno’s face for a moment, then gave him a meaningful look, but said nothing. Though still muted by Yasi’s magic, I could hear his quick, indrawn breath. So much of pain is in the mind. Demons are superb examples of that. They can be torn and shredded, pierced by arrows and blades, and yet go on without the hint of concern for their injuries. Knowing that they are transitory, that there will be no permanent scar, they have the luxury of ignoring the pain. It is without meaning and import. With something that would cause them true harm, they were not so brave.
I pulled from my belt a small leather pouch, easing it open. I removed a pinch of its contents and sprinkled it over the demon’s bare, clawed foot. His eyes flashed with the pain, his face contorting, his sharp, uneven teeth grinding at his lips until blood spilled out and ran down his cheek. It pooled, nearly black, on the table near his ears.
“Jewel dust. Amethyst, jade, and sapphire. I’m told it feels like unending wasp stings, or perhaps being flayed of your skin.” I wiped the dust away, seeing the sudden, violent swelling of the skin, as if his foot had been plunged into boiling oil.
After several long moments, Kaivahno’s body relaxed. The redness decreased but little. Yasi’s castigation had made him far more vulnerable. I could dash his head loose from his shoulders, and he would know true death, whatever that held for a demon. The three of us in the tent knew well enough that he would not survive the night. The only question was how much agony he would suffer before the mercy of the end.
Yasi produced a small clay jar, sealed with wax and thin cloth. She swished around the liquid contents near Kaivahno’s ear, her face masked in the veil of a thin, amused smile. “You know what this is, don’t you?”
Slow horror grew in the demon’s eyes. He turned his head away, looking at me, pleading with his eyes. The true features that the boy-like facade often hid faded slightly, but he couldn’t veil his true nature. Not in the presence of a Blessed Woman.
“If you want the mercy of a clean death, you’ll answer my questions, and you’ll answer them truly. I will give you a few minutes to make your choice.”
Yasi and I walked out of the tent, standing together outside of even a demon’s earshot. “What’s in the jar?”
She turned her eyes to mine, only a few inches short of my own height. “The sweat of a good man doing honest labor. Nothing is more harmful to them, nothing makes them feel the pangs of all their sins so keenly.”
I shook my head. “I’d never heard of this.”
“It’s secret knowledge, given only to the few. Most would miscarry the harvesting, or would use it to the wrong ends. It must be kept to the most trusted of allies.”
“You told me,” I pointed out.
“I did.” She touched my cheek, then kissed me gently on the mouth, just a brush of soft skin against my own wind-roughened face.
Blood raced in my temples. Vague bursts of light decorated the corners of my vision. Yasi turned back toward the torture tent, waving me to come with her. I did so, grasping her hand as I came even with her steps, my chest ringing with the shattered shards of abandoned hope, just now remembered.
Kaivahno’s cheeks were wet with a coward’s tears. “I’ll talk,” he swore. “I’ll tell you everything. I…I don’t owe them enough to withstand what you’ve got in store.”
I turned to Yasi. “You believe him?”
She furrowed her brow, watching him for a long time. We both ignored the demons imprecations, wheedling, and tears. “I do,” she said at last.
“Very well, speak. When I’m satisfied, I’ll see that you die easy.”
The demon’s tar and blood eyes bored into me. “You’ll do it? Yourself?”
“If that’s your request, yes. What would it matter?” I asked.
“They say,” he paused, “my kind say that General Ostor is a man with iron nerves, a teller of truths. I trust you to strike quick and sure.”
“Many things are said about me, it seems. My aim is keen and my hand unwavering when called upon to snuff out the life of a demon. I’ll be the one who handles the killing implement, and I’ll strike a merciful blow, though no such mercy was shown to my own absent friends.”
The demon nodded, easing his head back against the table. It took a moment before he said anything. When he did, the sound of his voice was dry as two tinder twigs rubbing against one another.
“There are many worlds. No one knows their number. Some are so much alike to this one that you’d have to squint to see the differences. Others are…far stranger. Many of these worlds, up until recently, have been barred to us. We have been forced to congregate on a few worlds like this one. The ages of the universe change, though. Doors that have been shut are opening. It takes great magic, though, to move immortal creatures across the void, and there is no greater magic than the blood of suffering, sacrifice, and war.
“By your crusade and all those given up to the fanged mouth of oblivion, you helped us accumulate the power to leap free of this prison and make our way to worlds that are not yet inured to our presence.”
I shook with the knowledge, unable to speak. Yasi gripped my hand hard, her eyes blinking against the tears that wouldn’t be denied. This was the truth I’d chased so long. Hearing it, it was hard not to wish that I hadn’t.
“All this time, all the killing was calculated, the fighting done at the Kasu-Hurun’s pace? Didn’t they fear being defeated before their goals were met?”
Kaivahno shook his head. “You don’t understand. All the sacrifice was agreed upon in advance, carefully weighed and considered. Who did you think came up with the Crimson Pact? From the beginning, you have been…made to measure.”
“And yet here you are, on the torture table and doomed, giving out all the secrets you bear to spare yourself from pain,” I barked, rage and pain burning in my gut like coals from a forge.
“I am one of those sacrificed, one of the last. I always knew that this day would come. I’d hoped…hoped for longer, but I suppose that is the case with everyone. Because of my frailties, and because I can pass for human under the casual eye, I was to stay behind. Every group has those who possess whatever they wish, and those who duck low and must be satisfied with scraps.” The demon’s body and voice betrayed all the thwarted ambition and humiliation within him, emotions that I was well versed in.
“How do we follow them?” I asked. Out of the depths of my own sorrow, my own shame, the question swam up to the surface.
Kaivahno laughed. “Follow them? Why? Your whole crusade is a tool of our grand stratagem, the Pact simply a trick of the Kasu-Hurun. It’s over. The prison door is open, and you can walk out!”
I shook my head. “I swore an oath. Not to demons, but to myself alone. The wording of my covenant is clear. Though the void should bar the way, I am still obliged to follow and destroy your ilk until death or victory comes to pass. I ask again, how do we follow?”
The demon was silent. Yasi put her hand upon his neck, wrenching a shrill scream from him, twisting him so hard that I could hear his joint locks and sinews creaking with the strain. “Answer the question,” she whispered. Her tears fell upon his flesh and burned like acid, but her jaw was set.
Kaivahno fell back as she let him free. He swallowed, shivering, sallow with fear and with the unknowable pain of the damned at the touch of one who knows their weakness. “It…it could be done. With magic. The magic of the dead. There is a complication, however. One that the Kasu-Hurun didn’t face.”
“Speak,” I commanded.
“A mortal can’t pass the void intact. To walk that road, you’d have to leave your body behind. You’d have to pave that first step along the way with your own pain and death’s blood. You’d have to be insane to try it.”
“Then perhaps there is a chance,” I growled. “A madman can do the impossible sometimes.”
Both Yasi and the demon’s eyes grew large and frightened. I am glad I never had to behold the expression that twisted at my face.
Part Three: Into Eternity
My axe fell. Kaivahno’s head rolled from the table and thudded to the canvas floor. I opened the smoke hole at the top of the torture tent and took Yasi’s hand. We stepped out into the clear night air before the demon’s body began devolving into greasy smoke and vile tar. My legs shook with the burden of all that the demon had said. I didn’t doubt for an instant that his words were true. It was all too monstrous, too thunderous in its easy destruction of my last few illusions.
I let myself sag to the damp grass, looking out over the sapling trees, just shadows in the starlight, whispering all my foolish hopes back to me. Yasi sat behind me, a leg to each side of my body. She pulled me back against her lap, her breast, putting her lips in my hair. Without the presence of the demon, her power hummed like the vibration of someone singing at full voice. “It’s a lot to ask, even of the brave men you lead.”
“It’s too much to ask anyone, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps.” She stroked my cheeks and ran her fingers in my hair. “Will you tell them…all of it?”
“About the Pact? No. They’re good men. I won’t make them carry that burden. We’ll have to bear that part alone.”
“You’re going, aren’t you? You’ll go out into the unknown and face their wrath alone.”
I didn’t say anything, not wanting to, not wanting to think of it. I didn’t know why Yasi had become mine, or how. She wasn’t beautiful, nor was I an object of desire. We were broken people, hurt too much to be whole, but we had been fit together just in time for our kindling hopes to be crushed to dust.
“Cruek?”
“I’m going, yes. I have to,” I told her.
She held me closer. “Then I’m going with you.”
Gamlod the Spirit Coaxer was a huge man, fleshy and dark of countenance. He reluctantly discarded the joint of meat he’d been chewing. They called it beef, but I was fairly certain that it was horse meat. The men knew that as well as I, and simply clung to the illusion of what they hadn’t had for so long.
He rose, dusting his hands on his filthy trousers. “This doesn’t sound like idle curiosity to me. Steering souls outward to the other worlds upon the moment of their deaths? Robbing them of whatever eternity they’ve got in store?” He shook his head, his jowls continuing to move for a moment after his bone and muscle halted. “A nasty bit of business, so far as I’m concerned. The soul grows exhausted here on the tangible world. It gets thin and worn as a kitchen knife too often sharpened.”
“What I want to know is if it’s within your power. Can you make it so a spirit could choose to travel across the void, rather than going to its rest?” I swallowed, looking around me for people I knew were not there. Spirit Coaxers were left to themselves. The soldiers viewed them as inevitable elements of the struggle, but had no desire to share a fire with them. Though the hollow stare of a long-time fighter can be daunting, looking into the eyes of someone who can call back a dead soul and push it into the husk it recently vacated wasn’t something any natural man would choose.
Gamlod looked up at the sky, which had clotted over with clouds now. Soundless flashes of lightening winked in the far off horizon. “I could do it. Compared to wrenching souls back from their reward, steering one just taking flight would be easy enough.”
“Good. Think about how it would be done. Figure out the details and be ready to perform the spell by tomorrow,” I said. The sound of it stunned the air around me. The knowledge that the flesh to be nullified was my own, the spirit to soldier on mine, surrounded me like rancid bog water. Yasi and I would face that doom because I’d been unable to dissuade her from accompanying me on the journey.
Gamlod held up his hands, palms out flat in a warding gesture. “Easy now, Cruek. If I weighed what we know about the other worlds against a palm full of spit, it would be the latter that would tilt the scales. Every world has its own rules. Maybe the traveler would remember everything from his previous life, maybe just vague feelings. Perhaps he would steal someone else’s body, pushing that soul out of his skin in a flash. Then again, it’s possible that he’d be born a babe and grow like anyone else. There’s no way to tell.”
“All journeys begin with uncertain destinations, Gamlod. This one is no different.” I hoped to sound as off-handedly heroic as Bandarin, but failed.
The Spirit Coaxer looked between me and Yasi, setting his teeth. “Are you saying that you intend to send men across the void, so as to continue this war…somewhere out there?” he swept his hand across the vast mystery of the sky.
“I intend to go myself. Be ready by dusk. The Blessed Woman will go with me. Please make the preparations.”
He bowed his head. From under the shadow of his hair, he asked a question. “What do you propose to tell the men? You’re responsible for them; they march at your behest. Something will have to be said. They’ve lost so much, and yet they remain true. What can we who remain possibly tell them?”
The last remaining vestige of my resolve threatened to collapse, but I held on. “Tell them that I have done something that I don’t have the heart to ask of them. If they wish to follow, let them seek that path on their own. I will leave my journals. They hold any petty insights I may have made. Read them over, share what you feel would be most useful.”
“You understand that some of them are crazy enough to follow you, right?” he asked.
“There are limits to what I can bear, Gamlod. Even if I’m tricking myself, I don’t want to bear the burden of stealing eternity from them.”
“You seem to be untroubled by the burden you’ve lain over my shoulders, Cruek.”
“There is nothing about this that doesn’t trouble me. Nothing is how I would have it, were there any real choices left.”
“So you say. Know this, though. I won’t be the one to free your blood and help you martyr yourself. You’ll have to find a closer friend than I for that grim job.” Gamlod turned away, walking to his tent with slow and tired steps. I turned back to Yasi, who touched my shoulder and steered me toward my own tent.
When we arrived, I held the flap open for her, offering my clumsy and wordless invitation. She took it, and we did not sleep, using up the last few hours like anyone who knew their life’s cup had been drained to the dregs might do.
Bandarin squatted down and covered his face with his palm. “You’ve gone mad.”
He held the final memoir I’d written as the day waxed and waned, as well as my journals stretching back as far as my ascension to general. I had just told him most of what I’d learned, all but the ugliest of truths. I’d shared my plans with him, my most trusted and cherished friend. The setting sun colored the horizon salmon, red, and gold. The air was crisp and clean, a wind having lifted the remnants of cooking fires away. “Perhaps I have gone mad, but I’m resolved. I have a hard thing to ask of you, Bandarin.”
“You want me to be general? No. I’m not one to lead. I’ve got no head for it.”
“Harder than that. I need someone to strike the telling blow. I trust no one else with the task.”
Bandarin laughed, a coughing noise in his throat. “You are a hard man to know, Cruek Ostor. You’re my best friend, and yet I have too many occasions to curse the day we met. It’s a wicked thing you ask of me.”
“Will you do it, and will you find a way to hold the men together afterward? I’m not asking you to lead them, but they trust you.” Everything, even this conversation, had become distant, slightly unreal to me. I was already disengaging from the world, my eyes cast to strange destinations that even I could hardly guess at.
He stood up after a moment, meeting my gaze. “Of course I’ll do it. Haven’t I always been there to save you when things get rough?”
“You always have,” I agreed.
With that settled, Yasi and I went to see the Spirit Coaxer. He looked at us with a sour expression and squinted into the brightness of the sunset. “Go into the tent and disrobe. I’ll need access to every exit the spirit can use to escape the body.”
We did as he said, no longer shy of each other after what had passed in the hours of the night. We were tired, only half present on the world, a foot already upon the uncertain road ahead of us.
Gamlod approached us with a wax pencil that smelled of smoke and pungent herbs. He marked our skin in seven locations, a few of them both private and uncomfortable. His heavy hands moved without sentiment or lingering care. He glared at us in between his guttural chanting and his rune-making, his dark face carrying an expression of infinite annoyance, as if he’d had a fine evening planned, and we’d spoiled it altogether with our foolish schemes.
“There. Die within a reasonable span, before the runes wear and the magic unmakes itself, and you’ll be propelled along your way,” he grumbled. “Damned fools.”
“How long would the spell last?” Yasi asked.
Gamlod shrugged. “A few days. A week at most.”
“Is there a method of…” I stumbled over the words now.
“Any violent death will suffice. I doubt that either of you will lie down and slip from life as an old farmer would, gazing at his bare toes as the light fades and the heart ceases.”
I wanted to thank him, to talk about what might come after we made good our death, but his taciturnity stifled anything I might say. We dressed and left his tents without a word. Bandarin appeared, dressed in his finest remaining raiment, his face new-shaved and his hair brushed back.
“We should take a stroll out into the new growth and find a secluded spot for our,” he paused to shake his head, “rather, your little adventure.”
The three of us walked, unnoticed, out of the camp and into the scrub trees. It was a fine evening, a gentle twilight that made it possible, almost, to forget the Day of Burning. Almost. The sky still sometimes glowed with purple light, the wind still bore subtle hints of the Rusted Vale’s taint. The healing would be a long time in coming yet.
“Tell them…tell them I found a way to rejoin the real fight. Don’t tell them the details yet. Just say that I’ve gone to stalk the Kasu-Hurun in their new haunts,” I told him, my voice quiet against the rustle of the limbs. The forest smelled like rotting leaves, rich soil, and hundreds of smaller scents I’ve never been a keen enough woodsman to learn. Crystalline elements of the sun shot through the upper branches, dappling the light on Bandarin’s face. Yasi’s arm wound through my own. I realized that I wasn’t frightened. Whatever happened…I felt I was ready. A dangerous thing to imagine, dangerous as holding a razor to your neck.
Yasi stopped me. “You’re smiling.”