Rend the Dark (4 page)

***

Ferran stood amidst the carnage of the
cavern, staring down in guilt and shame at the body of the young magistrate.
The final notes of Mireia’s chant died in the echoing cavern, leaving only a heavy
silence. Riffolk knelt down at the side of Hileon’s ruined body, tears
streaming down his face, and his head shaking back and forth.

The Ruins had been killed. Their bodies had twisted and
shriveled after death, ultimately melting away into nothingness. Such was
always the way with the creatures of the Dark. They faded away, leaving only
their victims behind.

Warden Aker stood back by Mireia. He shook his head as he
looked around the nightmarish space. “Why could you not sense them?” the old
warden said.

Ferran walked over and picked up a piece of the broken
wooden plank with the strange curved markings upon it. He held it out before
him, and his voice was tight with anger. “This,” Ferran said. “This is no mere
charlatan’s false hope. These symbols somehow have the power to cloud our
sight.”

“When it shattered, I was able to see them,” Mireia said,
still kneeling. Her face was pale, and it seemed an effort for her to remain
upright.

Ferran watched her closely, concerned for her as she dealt
with the torrent of grief and pain from Hil’s death. The death of the innocent
always seemed to affect her powerfully, more deeply than it did him. No, he
corrected himself. Not more deeply. Differently.

Mireia felt loss. Ferran felt rage.

Riffolk spoke without looking up from the body of Hileon.
“What does that mean?” he asked. There was none of the earlier strength and
boldness that characterized the young man when Ferran had first met him. The
death of his friend and the maddening horrors seemed to have shaken him to the
core.

“It means we now know the face of our true enemy,” Ferran
said.

Mireia nodded. “I have no doubt now. The mindless state of
our attackers this morning made me suspect, but the descriptions in the
accounts of the Order correspond exactly to what we faced here. Shokrul. The
Weavers of Betrayal.”

“Have you faced these things before?” Warden Aker asked.

“No. Nor has anyone in the Order. Not for hundreds of
years,” Mireia responded.

Ferran shook his head. “The Shokrul are parasites. They
inhabit their victims, taking on their memories and mannerisms, living amongst
family and friends who have no idea there exists a horror in their midst.
Normally, we would be able to see their darkness through even this disguise,
but…” Ferran held up the piece of splintered wood with the strange symbols and
threw it against the wall of the cave.

“Ferran,” Mireia said, her voice low. “With those wards in
the town, there could be any number of the creatures there. There could be a
queen.”

Riffolk looked up at them. “A queen?”

“I’ve heard enough,” Warden Aker said. “We need to leave
now and return in force. Call in more acolytes, and I will arrange to have the
village cordoned off and the surrounding area put under quarantine. This
infestation cannot be allowed to spread.”

“No,” Ferran said, and all in the cavern looked to him. “In
the time that will take, it will already be too late. These things are old and
cunning, but above all, they are survivors. If there is a queen, it knows we
are here and that we have discovered it. It will make the hive disappear, and
before it does, it will take as much food as it can.”

“Groveland Down,” Mireia said, concern clear on her face.
“I can contact the Order spiritually. But even with hard travel, it will be
three days before they get here.”

“And Groveland Down will be a gravesite by then,” Ferran
said.

The warden frowned with a look of grim consternation. “You
cannot mean to return to the village without reinforcements,” he said. “To what
end? The priority must be to not let it get away, lest the rest of the march,
perhaps the entire ward fall to this.”

“The order will know, I promise you that,” Mireia said.
“And they will track it. But Ferran is not wrong. Once it is gone, the village
and all its people will be gone as well.”

“If we strike now,” Ferran said. “If we are fast enough, we
may be able to take the creatures unawares and save the people.”

Still the old warden stared at him, and Ferran shook his
head, searching for a way to make the man understand why this was something he
had to do. “You know Mireia’s father, Cadell.”

The warden nodded. “For a long time now.”

“Years ago, an old man came to an orphanage and stood
against terrible horrors, fighting so that a group of children might live
through the night,” Ferran said. “We were nothing, my friends and I. Merely
orphans, forgotten and discarded by everyone. And yet in our most dire moment,
he came for us. Delivered us.” Ferran clenched a fist. “This is the debt I
carry, Warden. If I cannot do for others what Cadell did for me, then I may as
well have died that night.”

“And what if there are no innocents left in that village to
save, acolyte?” Warden Aker said.

“There is at least one innocent left,” Ferran said. “That
girl had the sight. If she had already been taken, then she would not have seen
such things or spoken to me of them. Even if she is the only one. I will go
back.”

“I will go with you,” Riffolk said, and they all turned
toward the magistrate. He had covered Hileon’s body with his cloak and now
stood, wiping a forearm across his eyes. “Hil was never what you would call
brave, and yet his last act was selfless and courageous. In a way, he was like
the man at the bottom step you told him about,” he said, looking over to
Mireia. “Hil died so that we would know of the danger and so that others might
live. If we just allow the village to die…” Riffolk took a deep shuddering
breath and then steadied himself. “If the village falls, then my friend will
have died for nothing.”

Warden Aker looked from the young magistrate and back to
the two acolytes. Then he shook his head and pulled out a scrap of cloth. He
began to meticulously clean the blade of his sword as he spoke. “With those
symbols in place, you will have no idea what is waiting for you there. You will
be as blind to these creatures as we are,” he said, gesturing to himself and
Riffolk. “We must destroy the runes first, then you can spot the disguised
shokrul, and then we take them before they can regroup and escape.”

“We?” Ferran said, a grim smile beginning to form on his face.

The warden did not look up. “Contact the Order by whatever
means you have. If we fail, they will have to pursue these creatures. We will
see to saving what lives we can.” The warden thrust his sword back in its
sheath. “You are not the only one with a debt to repay to old Cadell.”

“Or Hileon,” Mireia said softly.

“Or Hileon,” Ferran said, and the others rose to their
feet.

As the setting
sun reddened
the sky overhead, Ferran stood at the fence just outside
the village. Mireia had finished contacting the Order. Warden Aker had seemed
relieved at that. It was a comfort, he said, to know that should they fail
here, others would come to avenge them. Ferran had nodded in response, but he
had said nothing. He did not intend to fail.

Beside him, Riffolk was breathing heavily. He had his sword
out, and was gripping it so hard his arm was shaking. Ferran could feel the
tension coming off the young man. “You know what to do,” Ferran said, not
asking the man, but more reminding him what they had talked about.

Riffolk nodded mechanically. “Break the symbols wherever we
find them. Kill anything that you and Mireia point out. Get the innocent to
safety. Break the symbols wherever…” He repeated the steps of his instructions
over and over. The words were numb and hollow, recited like a litany, a prayer
against the darkness he knew was coming.

“Riffolk,” Ferran said, cutting through the repeated words.
“You’ll be alright.”

Riffolk’s eyes grew slightly wider and then he laughed.
“No. No I won’t. I’m frightened,” he said. “More than I ever really have been
before.” He licked his lips nervously. “Hil. He was the timid one. I used to
give him a hard time about it. He was scared of everything.” He shook his head
once, hard. “I understand him much more now. I wish I had been a better friend
to him.”

Ferran stared out at the dying sun across the length of the
village. Before them, people went about their lives as the day drew to a close.
“When I was a child, I lived with fear as a constant companion. I saw things
that no one else did, and eventually I began to question what I was seeing.”
Ferran shook his head, remembering those dark days. “I did not know what was
worse. That what I was seeing wasn’t real. Or that it was. But when I joined
the Order, I learned an important lesson about the true nature of fear. Would
you like to know it, Riffolk?”

“I would,” Riffolk said, swallowing hard.

Reaching back, Ferran pulled forth his spear and held it
loosely in one hand while the other produced the length of heavy chain. “The
opposite of fear is not courage. We tell ourselves this, but it is a falsehood.
Courage is merely a means to an end. No, the real opposite of fear is power.”

Ferran’s face broke into a tight, feral grin. “When you
killed the shokrul in the cave, you learned you could have power over it. When
you accepted the possibility that you could die today, death lost its power
over you.” The hard smile grew wider and Ferran extended his arms out in a
shrug. “So what reason is there to fear?”

Ferran put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You can’t
change what’s past. For Hileon. Or for yourself. But you can change what
happens now,” Ferran said, then, looking across at the others, motioned to them
and headed down to the village.

As Ferran walked past the outer fences and into the actual
village proper, he felt the others at his back. He came to a stop in the middle
of the main thoroughfare, his spear resting on his shoulder. The warden moved
over to one of the wooden boards with the strange, blasphemous symbols on it.
It was the one Ferran had studied their first time in the village.

Ferran gave the warden a nod, and the warden drew his blade
and smashed the wooden icon.

Immediately Mireia’s eyes burned with a feverish light. She
spun swiftly in place and then her hand lashed out, a finger pointing at a
group of workers returning from the field. “There!” she shouted.

As Ferran followed her direction, he saw one of the crowd
looked different now. Oily black shadows like living tar flowed over his body
in the unmistakable stain of the Dark. Ferran locked eyes with the creature
that had disguised itself as a man. “No more hiding,” he said and charged.

Immediately as he attacked, the tainted thing changed. It
erupted from its human guise in a shower of blood and viscera, spraying it over
the shocked and terrified workers. Its bloated, spider-like abdomen
swelled, and it thrust it forward, shooting threads into the heads of two of
the nearby workers.

The two men gasped and jerked and then slowly moved to try
and block Ferran’s path. Ferran darted past the hapless workers to get in close
on the creature. Ferran smashed it in the face with a chain-wrapped fist
and felt its fangs break under the blow. He wedged the length of the spear
under the creature and tossed it to the ground. It screamed as its segmented
legs skittered and kicked at the empty air. Ferran reversed the spear and
stabbed down, pinning the creature to the dirt of the road.

Even as it finished its death throes, Ferran was up and
moving, his eyes scanning the faces of the now-terrified villagers that
streamed past in a panic for any sign of the Dark. Behind him, Warden Aker
gathered the threaded men, who now with the creature killed were already
shaking off its effects. Riffolk caught up to Ferran as the body of the
creature began to melt and dissolve. Ferran looked at the magistrate.

“Ignore the threads, go for the creature itself. Kill it
and you free its victims. Do you understand?”

Riffolk nodded, and Ferran looked back toward Mireia. Her
lantern was out before her, and it held a dim glow. “Nothing more here. We move
on,” she said, her voice strong and clear. She pushed forward, moving up beside
him.

With the commotion from the first fight and the panic from
the villagers who had witnessed it, the tranquil evening sleepiness of
Groveland Down was quickly turning to chaos as men and women came out of their
homes.

The warden fell behind to deal with the freed villagers,
and Ferran tasked Riffolk with finding and destroying more of the corrupted
sigils. Riffolk caught sight of one dangling from the eaves of a small house
and rushed forward, shattering it with a blow from his sword. As he broke the
symbol, Mireia’s lantern flared brightly and her eyes glowed.

Before she could speak, a man exiting a house with his wife
and young son threw his head back and screeched an ear-shattering sound
and then erupted into the monstrous form of the shokrul. His family staggered
back and screamed.

Chaos erupted in the street as three more villagers shifted
violently, shedding their human guise in an eruption of blood. They began to
shoot forth the terrible threads into anyone that was close enough to be a
viable target. The possessed victims shook and twitched, then began to advance
on the group. All around, villagers ran screaming.

Riffolk charged the creature nearest him. It skittered
backwards on its segmented legs, hissing at him with its fanged maw from behind
the screen of its controlled victims. Lashing out with the long length of
silver chain, Ferran caught the creature around the leg, sending it sliding
down to the ground. Riffolk lunged forward, hacking away at the thing with his
sword.

Ferran then spun, stretching out with the spear and
slapping the length of it across the face of one of the creatures coming for
him. He continued the motion, allowing the whip-like swing of the chain
to snap toward the monster. It screeched in horrific pain.

Over the wailing of the creatures and the panicked screams
of the villagers, Ferran heard the familiar notes of Mireia’s chant. Her voice
rose, the ancient words ringing out in the clear, clean music of her song. The
shokrul shook and writhed as the words struck at them and tore at the darkness
they were made from.

Ferran moved around her, the bright light of her lantern
flaring as he lost himself in righteous fury. One of the creatures fell before
him, and as it died, Ferran could not wipe the grim smile from his face. Today,
these monstrous horrors would learn what it meant to fear.

Beyond the melting corpse of the shokrul, Riffolk finished
off the creature he was engaged with. The magistrate was covered in gore and
was screaming in rage as his blade rose and fell, again and again, even as the
monster began to dissolve. Around him, the possessed villagers who had been
clinging to his arms began to shake free of the creature’s domination.

But the other two creatures began to scuttle away, climbing
up onto the nearby roofs as they fled from the burning light of Mireia’s
lantern and her painful words. Ferran yelled for the others to follow him, and
he began to chase the things through the paths of the village.

As he crossed the main square, he saw Warden Aker running
his way. The warden had a cut along his forehead that dripped blood into his
eyes, but he wiped it away as he caught up with Ferran. “It went this way,” the
warden said, pointing with his sword in the direction that Ferran’s quarry was
moving.

Ferran nodded. “The ones we fought as well.”

Riffolk gasped for air beside him, his eyes wild. “Where
are they going?”

They rounded the last house of the village, and the
magistrate’s question was answered. Before them was the village graveyard, and
in the dying sunlight, Ferran saw three of the shokrul crawling over the large
hill at the center of it. The white stone of grave markers shook and fell over
as the ground shifted. The creatures on the hill began to keen and screech,
their human faces a mixture of rage and ecstasy.

Ferran watched as the earth gave birth to the monstrous
form of a shokrul queen.

The green grass and moss-covered hill fell away as
the bloated, festering horror arrived onto the surface. Its body, larger than a
whole section of the village, was a writhing riot of fleshy sacks, each with a
human face that screamed into the growing dark of the evening with a sound that
hurt the very mind. There was no front or back to the creature, only mass, and
the shifting tortured faces that made up its body. It was a creature made as
much of madness as it was of flesh.

As it arrived into the world, it began to lurch and shake,
and the bulbous sacks vomited forth its young. Creatures in various states of
development were expelled from the mountainous form, falling to the earth
below. Some were fully formed, and scuttled to their feet, joining the others
that rode atop the queen. Others were half-formed, barely beyond the
larvae stage, and died stillborn on the ravaged earth. Hundreds of creatures
emerged from the queen as it expelled the entirety of its brood.

In the face of utter horror and madness, Ferran did the
only thing he could. He stepped forward. In his hands, he gripped the spear and
chain. On his face, he felt the black tattoo of the Order like it was a living
thing that burned and moved in the presence of an ancient enemy. Mireia began
her chant once more, and the clear, pure beauty of her song was a reminder that
there was so much in this world worth fighting for. Worth saving.

Warden Aker was on his other side. “Cadell will be jealous
he was not here for this.”

Ferran gave a final look to Mireia. She did not cease her
singing, but she raised the lantern before her and in the shining light, she
met his eyes. Then Ferran advanced toward the towering mound.

The flood of offspring crawled toward him. The more mature
and fully formed creatures shot out their spidery threads. There were so many
in the air that Ferran could not stop them all, and he began to feel the stings
of them entering his flesh. As they did, he felt the pressure of something dark
and utterly alien in his mind, but his defiance roared up inside him like a
wild animal, and he swung his spear, severing the threads. Still more shot out
from the wave of creatures before him, locking him down. Around him, the others
were caught as well.

And then over the nightmare chorus of the keening things
and the disgusting viscous movements of the queen, he heard a roaring sound
approaching. Trying to clear the threads away, Ferran looked back and saw a
line of torches coming from the village. The people of Groveland Down were
marching, and at the lead was the village headsman and his young daughter.

The crowd of villagers charged bravely into the cemetery,
into the face of the horror that had risen from within their village. They
fought with torches and with whatever weapons they could find at hand, swinging
at the terrible creatures around them and pushing hard toward Ferran and the
others to try and free them.

The first of the villagers managed to reach Ferran, cutting
the threads that stuck into his body and driving back the creatures nearest
him. One of the creatures leaped upon a man from the village, vicious fangs
tearing at his throat as it bore him to the ground. Enraged, Ferran stabbed the
creature with his spear. The righteous anger at the brave man’s death allowed
him to cut through the darkness in his mind.

The obscene lump of the queen shook, and the thousand
mouths on its terrible body shrieked and gibbered. The brood of shokrul shifted
toward the villagers. As more and more diverted away, Ferran felt the pressure
ease off his mind, and he began to move more freely. He cut with the blade of
his spear, tearing away at the threads.

As he freed Mireia, she raised her lantern high over her
head and her chanting rose in strength and volume. There was a fury to her
voice now that Ferran had never heard before, and the light from her lantern
flared like a sun in the gathering dark.

Riffolk and the warden lashed out at the creatures around
them, joining with the villagers. The scuttling forms of the spider-like
things dove into the crowd, biting with their horrid fangs and striking out
with their legs. Their spidery threads were everywhere, but the people of the
village overwhelmed them, never giving them a chance to secure domination over
their victims.

Ferran ignored the creatures and made directly for the
queen, running across the broken ground. The myriad of human faces that shifted
and appeared in the body of the queen watched him and screamed out. With a
savage cry of rage and joy, he leaped into the air, bringing the spear down
before him.