The Brat's Final Gambit

Niam, Davin, and Maerillus stood outside of Kreeth’s manor. Overnight a thin scrim of snow had fallen and frozen hard, painting the ground in blemished white tones. Above them perched the den of the most evil man Niam had ever encountered. Joachim had ordered the doors and windows left open, and a large pile of ruined furniture lay where it had been tossed from the killing room Jalt had turned into a sty of carnage.

Now, with all of the windows and doors left open, the place looked like the gaping face of an eyeless and decapitated corpse. Niam shivered. He had no way of imagining the thing Jalt had become. How could anybody so willingly give himself over to something like that? Maerillus looked up at the building with a hard expression that seemed to flicker from rage to contempt and back again. He had been unusually pensive and brooding after arriving back from a trip with Mr. Sartor and Joachim. Maer had barely spoken to anyone, and when he did speak it was only about stopping whatever was going on down in Kreeth’s basement.

Niam was glad that for once someone seemed to hate Kreeth with a similar intensity. He now longer felt so alone, and it made him feel more than a touch of affection for Maerillus. How messed up was it that he felt a stronger kinship with his friend because Maer was now as miserable as he was?

Behind him, an entire company of soldiers now ringed the estate, waiting uneasily to get started. Several weeks ago, Joachim had come back to the manor with these men to dispose of the bodies and the gore-covered furniture when one of the cleaning crews went missing. To all appearances they just vanished into thin air. Now the men shifted with impatience.

“Swords drawn at all times,” Joachim’s voice finally rang out in the crisp air. “No man is to be more than ten feet away from another. And if anyone sees something odd or strange, you are to back away and send the message. No one will be out of sight. Am I understood?” The response rang out in the affirmative. With a curt nod, Joachim growled, “Let’s do this!”

As the troops moved in, Niam followed. Dark eddies of sorcerous energy tugged at him in foul currents. Once he made it to the locked room’s secret entrance, he was struck by the power emanating from Kreeth’s basement. Kine’s voice carried from the hidden passage as he called out, “Something’s different about the door.”

Joachim’s face darkened. “No one has been allowed on the property.”

Kine’s face appeared in the doorway. “Niam?” he beckoned.

Niam didn’t want to get any closer, but he clenched his teeth and moved forward. “I thought you said you brought help,” he coughed nervously as he followed the Hammer down the stairs.

“I brought you.”

“Oh really . . . I wouldn’t bring me anywhere.”

“You seem to be able to get yourself in all kinds of trouble when you do.”

“Precisely.”

“Precisely,” Kine echoed, and then his voice became all business. “I can feel the flows surrounding the door, but your senses far outdo mine. What are you getting off of this?”

Niam saw right away that something different moved within the thing. Dark lines resembling an evil script crisscrossed everything from the jamb to the hinges. Niam explained this to the Kine. “Mostly they’re concentrated around the hinges and the release,” he added after studying it a bit more.

“Show me,” Kine said. Concentration wrinkled his face as he focused on the trap before him. Niam guided Kine’s hands as he traced the flows for the Hammer.

Kine nodded his head. “I thought so. I felt the nodes here and here,” he said, indicating several points around the hinges. “That’s where he has stored the charge for anyone trying to open the thing.”

Niam let out a frustrated sigh. “I can’t find a way to undo this. It’s almost as if he tied it off from the inside.”

“He left the kingdom. He couldn’t have done anything like that that I’m aware of.”

Niam looked up at him. “Are you sure he left? I don’t mean to ask the obvious, but how can we be sure?”

“Multiple witnesses. Both here and on the continent.”

“Oh.”

“Spell must have altered itself, but we won’t know anything until I can get inside.”

“They can do that?” Niam asked, worried about what might be facing them and what it might be able to change into.

Kine inclined his head sagaciously. “There’s a whole branch of magic specializing in it.”

Niam shook his head. “I don’t like this.”

“Nobody likes the idea of lightning launching itself at them,” Kine grunted.

As Niam studied the trapped door, he noted the way dark whirls of energy pooled at several points, seemingly contained by opaque, filmy sacs, and shook his head. “I don’t think this is a bolt or anything like that. The flow is too lazy, like it’s collecting on the door’s surface . . . like a bladder filled with urine.”

“Fire then,” Kine said curtly. “With time I’d have sorted it out, but you’ve proven yourself more than useful today, Maldies.”

“How do you plan on handling this?”

“First I plan on getting you out of the way. Pay attention, though. This will help keep you and others alive. If the lines of force run through an object and build up inside, it will usually explode, and that’s a problem for anyone nearby because there will be bits of whatever does the exploding flung in every direction.”

Niam whistled to himself.

Kine went on. “If the power pools or spreads out, fire will be the likely result. And if there is a massed charge focused on one point, you’re looking at a bolt of energy. Nasty stuff, that,” he said grimly.

“But you’re immune,” Niam interrupted.

“Sorcerous fire, yes. Bolts, yes. But explosions will kill me if I take enough force or shrapnel just like anyone else. That’s what I use rams for.” With that, the Hammer all but pushed Niam up the stairs. “Out and away with you, Maldies. I don’t feel like seeing if you have a Hammer’s immunities today.”

Niam was all too happy to oblige. As he rounded the corner, Kine met Joachim’s eyes. “You get everything figured out?” the count asked briskly.

The Hammer nodded his head. “Would have taken me a lot longer if I hadn’t had Niam.”

Joachim’s eyes flickered from Niam and back to Kine again. “We’re ready when you are.”

Niam listened as Kine’s footsteps took him back down the stairs. He squinted his eyes, waiting for a deafening roar or a gout of flame to burst into the hall where everyone took defensive positions behind shields.

The metallic sound of a door latch clinked, and a sudden, brilliant green flash followed it. Wispy filaments of greenish flames shot out into the hallway. The heat from the flames caused Niam’s throat to close reflexively. The next moment, he blinked, and it took him several heartbeats to realize that he had been thrown to the floor. He sat up, shakily. Joachim called out to Kine. “You alive?”

“Alive,” Kine intoned.

As Niam picked himself up off of the cold floor, soldiers rushed forward. Quickly, he got to his feet and darted past the troops. Kine was laying at the bottom of the landing, unsteadily pushing himself up. The first of the troops at the head of the line paused at the Hammer’s upraised hand. Niam bounded down toward him. Davin and Maerillus approached quickly from behind with Joachim.

“Everyone wait a moment,” Kine said shakily. He stood and moved his jaw in circular motions to equalize the pressure in his ears, rubbing the wound on his leg furiously. When he saw Niam watching, he gave a thin smile and said, “Usually carry earplugs just in case of that.” Then he held an arm out to prevent Niam and Davin from worming their way around him. Davin was ready for a fight. Maerillus held the same determination on his face.

The Wizard’s Hammer was the first to enter the room, followed by Niam, who gasped at what he saw. At the far end of room, a pile of desiccated bodies lay like discarded rags. The corpses had a deflated appearance, as if everything within them had been drained, leaving only husks of skin and bone behind. Even more disturbing, six bodies were suspended from wooden frames, their bodies making an X where the legs and arms were spread in postures of humiliation. Aqualine and translucent tentacles of some kind emerged from a central point within the magical circle, seeming to sink into the bodies of the people immobilized upon the racks. Their emaciated faces were little more than cadaverous canvasses of skin stretched across skeletal scaffolding beneath.

Joachim and Kine looked at one another for a moment. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” the count asked, trembling with fear and outrage.

“Never this bad,” Kine shook his head vigorously. “It’s like that thing down there is feeding off of them.”

Niam did not want to look down there anymore. His head was full of eels. Below, limbs of energy twitched and hitched hungrily, with a tracheal or esophageal motion.

A firm hand closed around Niam’s shoulder.

Two. Kine’s and Davin’s. “It doesn’t get easier, kid. You just get stronger,” the Hammer told him.

“How do you manage this?” Niam groaned.

Jolan Kine shook his head. “Jort eased me into this life as much as a mentor possibly could. Even then it wasn’t easy. You’ve been tossed into things even seasoned Hammers rarely face. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to go down there without worrying one of you three are going to follow me until I’m ready.”

Niam looked down, fighting wave after wave of the all too familiar sickness that washed over him in the presence of sorcery. Jolan Kine walked past him, and Niam said quietly, “He killed my brother and sister. I’m coming too.”

Kine stopped and turned to protest as Joachim said sternly, “You three wait.”

Davin stepped to Niam’s side along with Maerillus. “This is what we’re here for,” Davin said with every bit as much authority as Count Joachim. “We cannot let Mr. Kine go down there alone.”

The count let in a deep breath and looked at them with an unreadable expression, then impatiently insisted, “You’ll let Maldies go first and the two of you watch him. He looks as sick as a goat in a mildewed corn bin. If either he or Kine tells you to get out, don’t you dare make me risk my men to haul your sorry hides up here for not listening.”

Maerillus and Davin looked at one another and then at Niam, who nodded his head.

“Yes sir,” both said at the same time.

A grim, hard smile tugged at Kine’s lips and then it was gone. His voice was crisp. “If that’s what you want, so be it. Touch anything without my consent and you’ll be leaving that hand behind.”

“Yes sir,” two of them replied in unison. Predictably, Niam said nothing.

They followed Kine cautiously down the stairs into the basement where death and a Sorcerer’s dark circle waited. “You three go that way and I’ll go this way. Niam, keep yourself open and an eye out for anything,” Kine commanded.

“Already on it,” Niam said between chattering teeth.

The sound of Maerillus and Davin moving close behind was comforting. Though Niam did not know whether his teeth chattered out of fear or nervous anticipation, he forcibly clamped his jaws together so he could hear. The air around him seemed to shake and shudder with unseen perturbations, the way it must feel in the bottom of a small pond if a large boulder were rolled into it. Niam sensed little else. He was awash in a torrent of sludge fouler than the thickest scum at the bottom of a privy shaft. A flicker of motion, furtive and nearly indistinct, caught Niam’s eye. “No,” he said. “It can’t be.” He froze and stared at the nearest body hanging from a rack. A woman. How old he could not tell. One eye flickered feebly. “Hey!” Niam shouted out in alarm. “Hey! Jolan! Here! Alive!” was all he was able to get out.

Then Niam reached out to her.

“STOP!” Jolan cried out.

Niam’s hand halted just as he realized it was about to come in contact with the tentacle reaching from the floor and into her sternum. Quickly he withdrew it.

“Fool! You’ll kill yourself and everyone with you,” Kine snarled.

Niam looked up at the woman in grotesque amazement.

Kine pushed him firmly aside. “Get those damned emotions under control Maldies, or I’ll have you tossed out of here!” he demanded. “You have to be able to think. . . think!”

Niam’s face flushed. “Yes sir,” he managed.

“She is alive,” Joachim said, aghast.

Kine’s response was solemn. “The spellwork inside of this circle is keeping her alive as it feeds off of her. I’ve seen Sorcerers use spellwork to siphon the life force off of other living things.”

“Why?” Davin asked as if asking why a scorpion stung its prey.

“To empower their spells. Nothing short of drawing power from Aboleth brings more power.”

“This is just draining their lives into the earth,” Niam said bitterly.

The Hammer stood there rubbing his chin, his eyebrows furrowed in furious thought.

“Look,” Niam said, peering beyond the glare cast at the terminus point where the opaque tentacles radiated from the rock. “The floor has been ripped up here. There’s a circle within a circle down here!”

Kine and the others had to shield their eyes to see. Niam looked around for any other threats, and seeing none, took a deep breath then stepped across the outer circle.

“Fool!” Count Joachim exclaimed.

“There wasn’t a trap,” Niam told him in a voice detached from the moment. His mind worked quickly as he studied the flows of power emerging from the stone to draw away the life force of the victims. “Not this time anyway,” he finished dismissively.

Maerillus looked around through heated eyes, as if he were disappointed by the fact that there was no one to fight.

“This whole thing reeks of a trap, Maldies,” Kine murmured as he bent down to examine the floor. “This is a part of something older than the mansion,” he said after studying the point of emanation for several long minutes.

“How old?” Joachim growled, not liking the fact that something this dangerous had existed within a half-hour’s ride from the edge of his estate.

There’s an older circle used for ceremonial magic that appears to be inscribed into the rock beneath,” Kine said. “And the writing hewn into the stone appears Guldeen.”

Joachim spat a curse.

“Makes sense that Kreeth would try reviving an old practice of theirs,” Kine added. Niam knew their sacrifices once left the ground soaked in their victims’ blood.

“Do you think Kreeth worshipped the Dark Gods?” Davin asked in alarm.

Well before men had come to the continent, the Guldeen had served the demon lords of Aboleth. Not gods in any sense of the imagination, yet forbears of all sorts of abominations, the powers and agencies whose auspices fueled the success of the inhuman Guldeen were ever hungry. And they held an implacable hatred for humanity that went unrivaled even by their abhorrence of the Feythean, who lived across the sea.

“We’ve got to do something for these people,” Davin said. “Soon. They’re going to die if we don’t.”

Niam knew that they would die anyway. Just as the people stacked like dry bundles of cordwood against the shelves had died.

“No,” Niam said. He held his hand out, feeling the power wafting off of the tentacle buried in the poor woman above him. The thing writhed like a slug in the throes of a mating ecstasy.

“What are you doing?” snapped the Hammer.

“Something to get my hand left behind,” Niam said remotely. All distractions receded as he blocked everything out except for the effects of the Sorcery. The vile torrent of excrement washed over him.

Distantly, someone said, “Grab him!”

Niam moved close to the stream. “Can’t think this through. Have to feel it,” he heard himself say.

“No. Don’t touch him,” Kine snapped at the others. “Let him try.”

But that voice was far away. All that existed right now was this one tendril of corruption and the person connected to it.

As his fingers came within an inch of the ghostly rope, the glowing cord moved away from him, as if reacting to his presence. No matter how quickly Niam’s fingers snaked toward the thing, it shied away.

Through his outstretched fingers, Niam felt a pulsing, dithyrambic current. Something organic, beating, and alive. A presence. Something slumbering, not yet awakened. Alien and inherently hostile.

“Cut the flows,” Niam gasped, jerking his hand away. “We’ve got to cut the flows!”

“Pox take it all!” Davin said and stepped through the circle to grab him.

“There are groves along the circumference that may allow us to pry this inner ring up,” Kine said to Joachim.

“What’s going to happen if we do?” the count’s voice was hard and sharp.

Kine looked up at Niam, and Niam met his gaze with a shrug. “I don’t know. But I do know that this is feeding something deep in the ground. ”

“Necromancer,” Joachim hissed.

Niam’s heart quailed at even the briefest thought. Of all the darkest magics practiced, Necromancy and Sorcery were twin sides of one very malevolent coin—specializing in the resurrection of the dead, of instilling an unholy force into animate and inanimate things. While Sorcery left off with summoning evil intelligences for power and knowledge, Necromancy was the hard side of the dark art where matter and the caustic energies of Aboleth came together in an unholy union. The taint they left behind took a terrible effort to eradicate once it took hold. In the past, this was the thing that had corrupted the Dread Lords.

Jolan Kine rubbed his hands together. “I need something to pry this up with . . . a sword maybe, unless your men can find a pry bar.”

While Joachim sent orders to find something suitable for the task, Maerillus checked the rest of the victims.

“They’re alive,” he said angrily. “Barely, but alive.”

Niam looked down in defeat. “I couldn’t stop it,” he said quietly.

“None of us can without severing the connection,” Davin said.

Niam turned away and his voice quivered. “I ought to be able to,” he told his friend. “Otherwise why would I have the powers I do? This just isn’t right.”

“Niam . . .” Davin began, but stopped. There was nothing he could say as far as Niam was concerned. “Niam, we have to do what we can when we can.”

Before Davin was able to say anything else, a soldier came in bearing an armload of tools—pitchforks, hoes, a spade, and several swords. “Found these out back!” he declared, trundling clumsily down the stairs as he came with the cumbersome load. And then he saw the bodies all around. “Great Lord!” the man exclaimed.

Niam snorted humorlessly. It said something that men trained to kill and die were stopped short by the sights in this mansion. Kine used the sharp edge of the spade to break the outer circle. Niam felt some of the forces contained flow out.

“Kreeth will know that we’re here now. He’s connected to it,” Niam said as the energy dissipated. He did not know how he knew. But it was there inside of his head. On the racks all around the room, the cadaverously thin men and women began stirring feebly in their shackles. From the woman suspended above Niam, there came a long, shuddering sigh.

“I’d give good money to know how this was done with the monster out of the area,” Davin said between gritted teeth.

“Accomplices,” Kine growled, now positioning his spade’s blade into the lip of the inner circle. With a motion of his wrist, he told everyone else with flat bladed tools to do likewise. “It looks like the stone in the center of this is funneling the lines of energy from their source below. I bet that was what the empty box you brought me contained. It’s too bad that Kreeth had already removed the thing,” the Hammer said bitterly. Then he maneuvered himself into position so enough force could be applied to his makeshift lever to move the stone base at his feet.

“Now?” the last soldier to position himself over the seam asked.

“Now” Kine said, and everyone leaned into their implements, straining and groaning.

“Don’t let up!” Kine called out. “Stone’s moving.”

Davin let go of the ho and said, “Here, to me.” The Hammer looked down at the thick spade and nodded, trading tools with Davin. Davin set the blade into the stone and grunted as he shifted all of his weight onto the haft. Wood popped and groaned beneath the strain. “Now!” Davin said with his jaw clenched tightly. “Harder!”

Everyone responded by digging their legs in and bunching up against the weight of the stone inset. A grating sound suddenly issued from the center of the circle as the stone began to tilt. Immediately, the six lines of power feeding off of the people winked out of existence.

“It’s stopped,” Niam said with relief, stepping back from the displaced circle, which now looked like a thick disk of stone fixed into a natural rock setting. Visible now, a hole lay below—a crack really—revealing a darkness that appeared limitless.

Joachim called out for more men to help cut the people down from the racks. “Get these bodies out!” he demanded tersely. “I want them identified and returned to their families so they can be buried.”

“No doubt some of these have been attributed to that damned trall,” Kine said, working at his wound with the flats of his hands.

“Yes,” the count agreed.

Niam looked around. How the Sorcerer’s accomplices had gotten into the basement without being seen was a mystery to him. “I don’t see any kind of passage here,” Niam said aloud.

“I was thinking just the same thing,” Joachim said crisply, “And my men have been all over the place.”

“What are you going to do with this?” Niam asked, curling his lip at the thought of all the death that had taken place there.

“I’ll have it burned to the ground,” Joachim said angrily.

From above, sudden shouting drew everyone’s attention. A soldier burst into the basement. “Sir, it’s our missing men. All seven of them, approaching from the woods!”

“What about my guards surrounding the property? Are they under escort?” There was something in Joachim’s voice that struck Niam as troubling.

The soldier shook his head. “No sir. But there are animals with them. A dozen or so. Mountain lions, wolves, and bears by the look of them.”

“I told you,” Jolan Kine said to Joachim.

The count nodded and his face became a mask of fury. Cold steel sparked in his voice when he said, “To arms men. Sound the word.” And then to the four of them, “We’re under attack.”