Drowning at Dusk Ch. 04

The ceiling caved in above me. A board slammed into my head, sending me to my knees. I scrambled out of the way of the next deluge of debris, saved by the speed of the fury-rune.

I rose directly into the next swing of that massive abomination.

Its bony fist cracked into my chest, and I flew backwards into the pile of rubble. Pain flared in my ribs, the breath fled my lungs, and I'd have surely been knocked unconscious outright were it not for the fury-rune.

The death mage was nowhere in sight.

I righted myself, coughing up dust and gripping my blade.

"All right," I said, spitting out a wad of bloody spit. "Let's dance, you ugly bastard."

I kicked against the dusty wall, sending myself vaulting into the air. I slashed as I descended, tearing through a massive outstretched hand. My boots collided with its shoulder. Before it could twist its other arm to grab me, I slashed three times down onto what passed for its head, then flipped off of its back, landed deftly despite a new surge of pain in my ribs, and slashed again at the back of its legs. Bone and sundered flesh rained down beneath those blows, and I twisted away to avoid a sweeping counterattack.

As I moved, I kept an eye out for the mage or my companions. Deathly howls roared from the south. Fire flashed; Xelari must have been desperate enough to deploy her eruption-rune.

I needed to get to them.

A damned hard task, though, given the creature before me.

The brute turned to face me, and its cobbled-together body trembled. Grinning at the hope that it was near its end, I rushed forward to finish it off.

A cluster of bones embedded within its chest exploded, sending forth a volley of bone-shards directly at me. I screamed as the fragments tore into my arms and face, leaving long and bloody gashes in my skin. Other pieces slammed into my armor, a few just barely piercing through.

I continued my charge despite the pain, leaping up and slashing at an outstretched hand. The other fist, however, collided with the side of my body, causing a few of those shards to punch through my armor and into my torso. I screamed with pain and fury, and had time for one last desperate slash before its hand grabbed my leg.

It threw me towards the ruined cabin. I slammed into the rotted wood, pain flaring through my body from the impact and from the shards still stuck in my flesh. My vision swam, my consciousness wavered.

"No, no," I gasped, struggling to stay awake.

A roar from the grass. A sharp boom, a melodious song. Darkness devoured the edges of my sight. The undead brute was there one moment, and then gone.

I must have passed out, but I was too terrified and confused to be able to guess how long I'd been out.

Forcing myself to my feet, I stumbled out of the wrecked cabin. I spotted Dazyar first; the bard was slumped in a bloody heap near the edges of the clearing; I couldn't tell if he still lived.

Xelari was upon her back, the massive undead brute looming over her. One of its arms had been burned away, and its body bore horrific scorch marks, showing that the dusk elf had done excellent work on the beast before it had gotten to her. Its one remaining arm was clasped around her throat, and she kicked and flailed beneath it.

The death mage, still nursing the wound I'd given him, stood a short distance away. He held his rune-skull high. With his back to me, the bastard surely had misjudged my strength and assumed that I'd died from the impact to the cabin.

The sound of Xelari's panicked chokes and gasps spurred me into action despite my pain. The lingering power of the fury-rune gave my limbs enough strength to run.

Enough strength to kill.

I broke into a sprint, leaving behind a trail of blood and shards of bone that dislodged themselves during my frantic charge. The death mage turned, eyes widening. His gasp of shock turned to a bubbling rasp as my blade cleaved into his neck. He spun, blood spraying from his half-severed head.

The undead brute crumbled, its bony components raining down upon Xelari. The dusk elf retched and gasped for air, shoving aside the pieces of the creature that had nearly killed her. I noticed a large piece of bone jutting out of her thigh, her dark blood pooling on the ground, but at least she was alive.

I wasn't so sure if I could say the same for the bard. After sliding to the ground at his side, I saw a horrific mess of cryptwolf bites upon his left arm, and a bone-shard jutting from just above his collarbone. His eyes were glazed over and bloodshot; his chest rose and fall in ragged, weakening breaths.

"Xelari!" I shouted. "Healing!"

"You damned fool!" she shrieked back, tossing aside a femur that had landed atop her once the brute had collapsed. "We needed himalive to see if he worked for Heroth!"

"That doesn't fucking matter now," I snarled back. "Dazyar's going todie."

Growling underneath her breath in her native tongue, she limped over to me and readied her runestone. She instructed me to remove the bone jutting from his chest first; the moment I tugged it out, she placed the stone over the wound and sent tendrils of healing energy into him. The wound sizzled and sealed up, and we repeated the process to the wounds in his legs.

She glared down at the shard jutting from her own thigh.

"Pull it out," she snapped.

I didn't need to be told twice, given how infuriated I was with her being angry at me for killing the mage and saving her. Once I tore it free, she wailed in pain but managed the strength to seal up the wound. Next she forced me onto my back so she could see to my injuries, plucking out the shards, and running the stone over my ribs. I screamed in agony as the fractured ribs snapped themselves back together. My vision swam again, but fury managed to prevent me from passing out again.

Several minutes passed; all we did was sit, glower, and catch our breath.

"That was foolish," she said, glaring over at the dead mage.

"That creature of his was going to kill you."

"Then you should have chopped off his hand or his leg, or beaten him over the head with the flat of your blade. With him dead, we have nothing to tie him to Heroth."

"It takes death to break a necromancer's chains to their creations, Xelari. If I'd had more time, I could have found-"

"Who's Xelari?" Dazyar muttered.

Xelari and I whirled to look at him, our eyes widening. Neither of us had noticed his return to consciousness.

"And what's this business about Heroth?"

Xelari's eyes drifted to her knife. I gave a sharp shake of my head.

"Rest, Dazyar," I said sternly, hoping he would catch the hint.

Instead, he rubbed at his head and righted himself, and brushed his fingers over the fresh scar above his collarbone.

"A good story for the ladies, I suppose." His dark eyes swept over us, then to the dead necromancer. "But a better story would be the truth." He looked to Xelari. "Keltara is not your real name, is it?"

Clenching her jaw so tight that I could hear her teeth grind, she gave a simple shake of her head.

"And what does Heroth have to do with some necromancer mucking about with undead wolves?"

"We're not sure," I said, despite Xelari's withering glare. "But we have...suspicions that Heroth may not be the upstanding Lord-Protector he appears to be. He may have links with necromancers."

"Why in the Voids would you think that?"

"You are not entitled to answers, Dazyar," Xelari snapped. "Be grateful I expended my limited healing magic to save your life. And be satisfied with the meager answers we have given you."

"No," he said, settling a bloody hand on his cutlass. "I almost fucking died today. And I likely wouldn't have stumbled out into the wilderness with you if I'd known the full truth."

"The day is not yet done," Xelari said, her voice dropping to a low and menacing hiss. "There is still time for-"

"Stop," I growled, taking the fiercest tone I'd yet used with the dusk elf. She glared at me, but I ignored the ire in her gaze and looked back to Dazyar. "Xelari serves an organization known as the Deathless. I..." I chewed my lip, aware of how bizarre our alliance was. "I was hired by Heroth to kill her. She turned the tables on me, captured me, and recruited me to her cause. I'm helping her find out why Heroth wanted her dead."

"The Deathless," he repeated. "The hunters of the undead?"

"You've heard of them?"

"Snippets. Rumors. Whispers. An old friend of mine said he was hired as a guide for some treasure hunt of theirs way up north. They paid well, but the work was too dangerous for him to try it again. Far too many damned ghouls and wraiths for his liking." His brow furroed. "And if for some reason you think Heroth is an enemy of the Deathless, I can understand why you'd keep that quiet."

He removed his hand from his weapon and offered Xelari a warm smile.

"The truth is soothing, isn't it?"

"If this smirking bard betrays us," Xelari said, jabbing a bloody finger in my direction. "You will be the one to clean up the mess and cut his pretty throat."

Cursing once more in the dusk elf tongue, she stormed off towards the mill, no doubt to search for any evidence as to who had sent the death mage to that mill.

"Sorry about that," I said with a sigh.

"Near death experiences are a valid reason for tempers to rise," he said. "But I've no interest in a heated argument. I just want a soft bed, a bath, and a damned drink."

"Likewise."

We sat there for several minutes, passing back and forth a flask of water.

Out of nowhere, Dazyar leaned his head back and released a weak, raspy little laugh.

"I suppose if Heroth is potentially a necromancer, this rules out claiming the bounty, doesn't it? Wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that we may have uncovered evidence of his involvement."

"Aye. We'll find a way to compensate you, though."

"Wasn't about the silver. Was about the story. Was about doing the right thing."

The silence clung to the chilly air for a few long moments.

"You tried to kill her," he said finally. "How close did you come?"

"Very. Made it to her tent, managed to slash open her cheek. Had I been a bit faster, the blade would have gone into her throat or her eye."

"And she forgave that?"

"I wouldn't go that far. She saw me as a useful tool. A weapon. An asset. I helped her deal with some undead and a little treasure hunt up in the Wildwood."

"That's not all you help her with, is it?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, the two of you are sleeping together, yes?"

Despite the tension and my exhaustion, I managed a chuckle.

"Aye. It's...complicated."

"From attempting to cut the woman's throat to spreading your legs for her...aye. Hard to think of a more complicated partnership than that." He sighed. "But I suppose I can sympathize. I've slept with someone who wanted me dead. Back when I was apprenticed to a master bard, another apprentice wanted my spot. So he poisoned me, but I managed to survive. He ended up moving on and finding another apprenticeship, but we crossed paths in Mrenhold, and ended up in bed together."

His eyes took on a warm gleam.

"The first fuck was...tedious. Satisfactory, I suppose. But in the morning he confessed to having tried to kill me and the fuck we had after that was anything but tedious."

I laughed.

"You took it well."

"No, he took it well." He licked his lips. "Deep, hard."

Xelari's return from the ruined mill cut short my next chuckle.

"If you two are done amusing yourselves, I could use some assistance."

I rose, commanding Dazyar to rest since he was more injured than I. Xelari's face remained as cold and cruel as it had been the night she'd tortured me.

She showed me to a large beam that had fallen over a bookcase and a chest. Together, we grunted with effort and heaved the heavy beam out of the way so she could inspect the bookcase.

"I thought you were dying, Xelari."

"I was. Moments away from death, no doubt. And you made your choice. You chose my life over the answers that would uncover Heroth's motives."

"That was an easy choice. Are you saying you would not have done the same were our situations reversed?"

She knelt in front of the chest and placed her shaking hands upon it.

"I would have done exactly what you did, yes. I would have put the cause at risk for the sake of..." Her body heaved with a few heavy breaths. "And that is what worries me."

I blinked, staring down at her back while she popped open the chest and rummaged through it.

Unsure of what to say or do, I simply stood in shocked silence for a time, before finally managing enough sense to kneel down beside her, and placed a hand on her shoulder.

She reeled back as if struck, her face contorting into a snarl.

Gods above. Was that a damned tear I'd seen in her eye?

If it had been, she blinked it away quickly. No. It couldn't have been. A trick of the light, that's all. And if it had been a tear, surely it had only been a result of lingering pain from the injuries she'd suffered.

"Perhaps not all is lost," Xelari said, lifting a leather satchel and pulling out a few scrolls. "Property records of some kind."

I reached out, gently grasping her wrist to tug the satchel away.

"Xelari, we can look this over later. We can talk about-"

"There is nothing to discuss. You made your choice. A choice that I foolishly admitted I would have also made. The past is over. Now we must look to the future." She pulled a few more scrolls and a leather pouch from the chest, and swept past me to return outside to Dazyar.

"A bard like you performs for the guildmasters, barons, and merchants of Arkostead, yes?"

"Of course. Weddings, funerals, duels, fancy dinners. Why?"

She shoved the satchel of scrolls into his grasp.

"What can you tell me about the people responsible for issuing these properties?"

Frowning, he sifted through the scrolls.

"Looks like there's only one property. These are just all of the various documents for it. The banking guild, mason's guild, the tax collector, the city watch...must have been quite the valuable property to warrant all this paperwork. I am no jurist or legal scholar, though."

I moved to stand beside him, looking over his shoulder. All of the documents provided an address in one of the nicer districts of Arkostead, overlooking the sea. While I hadn't ever undertaken any contracts in that area, I had been hired by a handful of people who lived or did business there. I didn't recognize any of the names of the people who'd issued the documents, though.

"They all seem to be issued to one man," I murmured. "Reynard Devalin." I looked to the corpse. "Maybe that's him? And that property was payment for services rendered?"

"I don't see a purchase agreement. Thus I don't know who actually sold or gifted him the property." He shuffled through the papers a bit further. "Ah. Here. This one from a banking guild. Shows the transfer to Reynard Devalin from Patrigan Kossil."

"It can't be that simple," I hissed. "That's the name of Heroth's steward."

"People in power can be driven to foolishness and recklessness if they are overconfident," Xelari said. "Patrigan sent you to kill me to strike a blow at the Deathless, and sent Reynard here to use undead to ravage the roads."

Would Patrigan have really been foolish enough to leave his name in writing on a document granting property to a necromancer? I supposed the property transfer alone did not prove that he'd hired Reynard to assail the countryside. It wasn't as if they'd written down Reynard's orders to summon undead wolves to ravage the trade routes.

"To what end, though?" I asked. "And was he doing this of his own volition or on Heroth's orders?"

"We shall find answers in Arkostead, one way or another."

"And what part, precisely, am I to play in your hunt for answers?" Dazyar asked, handing the papers back to me.

"You could help us," I said quickly before Xelari could snarl out a threat. "You know the city even better than I do. And a smiling, charming bard could get us into places we couldn't get otherwise. And there's silver in it for you. A lot of it." I glanced at Xelari. "From my share, if need be."

"I'm offended that you appealed directly to my greed first, instead of my decency and love of the city," Dazyar said with a weary smile. "The noble, right thing to do would be to investigate this for the good of the people of Arkostead. If indeed our Lord-Protector is hiring necromancers to attack merchants and travelers, something needs to be done."

"This is not as simple as performing for a fancy merchant or fighting off cryptwolves," Xelari said, crossing her arms. "We may be going up against one of the most powerful men in the Commonwealth."

"Which is exactly why something needs to be done. The powerful, more than anyone, need to be held to account." With a pained sigh, he forced himself to his feet. "And believe me, I harbor no resentment due to you hiding this from me. It's not as if you tell someone over breakfast that you're hunting down the Lord-Protector."

"We're getting ahead of ourselves," I said. "It's Patrigan we need to focus on first. And if the trail leads to Heroth, we'll go from there."

I offered an arm to Dazyar, helping him limp back to the grove where we'd left our horses, while Xelari delayed to dispose of the dead, scorching them with eruption-runes and containing the fire lest it spread to the plains.

While Dazyar and I waited for her by the horses, we shared another flask of water, and he stared out to the ruins of the mill.

"She's going to fucking kill me, isn't she?"

"No. She just needs time. I tried to kill her, remember, and she ended up allying with me. You've done nothing as egregious as I did. I think she's just touchy because this particular alliance wasn't forged on her terms."

"A woman who wants to control everything."

I laughed.

"You haven't the slightest idea." My smile faded. "But I won't let her hurt you. She'd be a fool to even try, given how useful you'll be, and how helpful you've been. We wouldn't have been able to bring down Reynard without you."

"All I really did was distract some cryptwolves, hurt a few of them with my magic, and then piss off that big brute until it punched me half to death, and laid there bleeding out while you and Xelari did the rest of the work."

"Still a contribution," I said, with all the warmth that I could muster.

Xelari, still silent and brooding, soon joined us. We mounted our horses and set out, with her pausing every hour or so to give us another pulse of healing magic to further tend our wounds and keep infection and pain at bay.

The dusk elf said not a word for three whole hours, until she realized the sun was setting and we wouldn't have time to reach the next town.

"We should find shelter. Even with Reynard dealt with, there still may be cryptwolves on the road, so we must be wary."

As the shadows of the trees stretched across the road, we passed by a shepherd and his flock crossing the road. The poor man practically jumped out of his skin at the sight of us, until we reassured him and shared news of the cryptwolves' defeat. After a bit of chat about the state of the roads, we asked about shelter in the region, and he gave us directions to an old ruin just off the road to the east.

It was better than sheltering in a beleaguered shepherd's barn for the evening, so we set off.

The bones of an old stone structure rose from the grassy hill. Moss covered nearly every inch of the ancient stone, leaving no trace at all of what it might have been. The locals must have carted away most of the other stones, leaving behind a shell of its former glory.

We dismounted halfway up the hill, and I scraped away some of the moss in an attempt to discern what it had been. Clearly it wasn't of elven make, for which I was grateful; the last damned thing I wanted was another encounter with ghouls or dryads.