BT II - Chapter 20 (Patreon)

“He’s been in there for almost a half hour now,” Leeka observed, nodding toward the squat two-story bar across the street from them.  “Do you think he’s stopped by for an after work ale or?”

Micah squinted into the darkness of the empty street.  They were deep in lowtown, what the locals called Jakint’s forgotten slums.  The poorly maintained cobblestones that made up the road had long since disappeared, replaced by packed dirt that turned into a river of mud whenever it rained.

Pools of water collected in footsteps and wagon ruts in the torn up street, glittering in the thin torchlight coming from the tavern.  The surrounding city was mostly dark and silent.  There was the occasional cough or distant murmur of speech, but Micah couldn’t spot anyone actually walking the streets other than the pair of burly guards standing in front of the tavern.

He frowned slightly, chewing on his lower lip as he eyed up the two men.  Both of them were big, almost as tall as Drekt and covered in thick, corded muscles that spoke of a lifetime of heavy labor.  They had scabbards strapped to their waists, an expensive precaution amidst the absolute miserable squalor of the expansive slums.

“I don’t think anyone that’s gone into that bar is just in there for a beer,” Micah said thoughtfully, eyeing the building.  “I’d bet my last point of attunement that there’s something fishy going on here.”

“It does seem awfully quiet,” Leeka agreed.  “So how do you want to do this?  Should I still be aiming for people’s arms and legs?  Sometimes the non-lethal shots can get a little tricky, especially if there’s any wind.”

“No,” Micah replied, stepping into the muddy street and walking toward the bar.  “I don’t think we’re going to have the luxury of aiming to injure here.  Unless I miss my guess, these men are going to have a whole lot of friends, and none of them are going to be happy to see us.  In fact, I doubt they’re going to be happy to see anyone with a blessing.”

The second Micah made it halfway across the road, both guards drew their swords.  He didn’t waste any time, firing an air knife at the right guard.  A fraction of a second later, Leeka’s bow ‘twanged,’ launching an arrow at the left.

A swirl of green flame appeared in front of both fighters, devouring Leeka’s arrow, and deadening the impact of Micah’s spell to the point that it only threw the warrior off by a half step.

“Well,” he muttered, twisting his hands to cast wind blade, “that’s new.”

Another arrow crashed into one of the charging swordsmen, but once again a flash of green flame annihilated it before it could harm its target.  The man didn’t even flinch, sprinting toward the two of them with unhinged abandon as he lifted his sword high.

Then Micah’s spell lashed out.  His target burst into protective flames, but the tongues of green fire might as well have been cotton gauze.  The wind blade cut through them with ease, severing both of the guard’s legs just below the knees.

The man collapsed to the ground wordlessly, his mouth open in a silent scream and his eyes rolling back into his head.  Micah lunged past him, thrusting with his spear toward the remaining swordsman.

His opponent swung his shortsword, attempting to intercept Micah’s weapon in a crude attempt to parry the attack.  Gritting his teeth, Micah arrested the thrust, transforming it into a feint, and launched a followup attack at neck level.

Green fire enveloped Micah’s spearhead.  Distantly, he could feel his Arcana skill awakening and tugging at his attention as the flames somehow began burning the kinetic energy behind his strike, but Micah didn’t let it distract him from finishing the blow.

Maybe half of the force behind his attack survived to meet the guard’s throat, but that was more than enough to tear the soft flesh open and stop the warrior in his tracks.  The man’s sword plopped into the wet mud of the street before he followed it, sinking to his knees before dropping face first into one of the many shallow puddles of water filling the road.

Micah frowned, stepping back from the corpse and flicking his spear to remove the man’s blood from its head.  Both of the men should have been forgotten which meant no blessings and no magic.  Still, the defensive ability that they had exhibited didn’t really seem like either.  More than anything, the fire had the faint smell of Elsewhere clinging to it.

“Shit!”  Leeka yelped from behind Micah.  He pivoted in the mud to find the archer pointing at the collapsed body of the man he had disabled with his spell.

He was burning.  Emerald flames, starting a handspan above the corpse, leapt and jumped into the night sky.  A second later, a wave of ice cold air robbed the heat from the left side of Micah’s body.

A verdant inferno engulfed the other warrior.  Micah took a couple steps away from the green flames, rubbing some warmth and life into his arm, a frown on his face as he dove into his Arcana skill to observe the two dead men.

“What in the name of the Sixteen is happening Micah?”  Leeka hissed unhappily.  “The last I checked, human bodies aren’t supposed to burst into flame upon death.”

“It’s not their bodies,” Micah replied, frowning.  “That fire isn’t fully on Karell.  It’s burning their very souls.”

“That…” Leeka trailed off only to spin and glare at Micah.  “That isn’t better.  That isn’t any better at all.  In fact, that sounds a whole lot worse.”

Micah walked up to the body that he had killed with a spear.  He dropped down to one knee and closed his eyes, reaching out with his right hand toward the ravenous flames.

The fire was ice cold, but by concentrating, Micah was able to ignore the worst of it with his Arcana skill.  The man’s tattered soul was scarred, like it was pieced together from bits and flaps of other souls by an inexperienced tailor.  But whatever weakness his spirit might have suffered from in the past, it was no match for the brilliantly glowing green seal planted in the center of the man’s being.

The soul jerked in the man’s body, trying but unable to escape the seal’s grip.  Chunks along the periphery broke off, crumblin into a thin mist that flowed directly into the glowing rune and igniting into the frozen green flames that danced around the downed body.

Despite the damage, Micah could barely make out some runework beneath the seal, far beyond his abilities, but still crude compared to a blessing.  Were the gods’ work was elegant shaping and guiding the soul’s power into a tangible ability, the new runes were sharp and ugly things.  Graffiti that damaged and defaced the entity that they were etched on, diminishing rather than multiplying the burning spirit.

He stood up, mouth set in a grim line as he addressed Leeka.

“It is a whole lot worse.  This isn’t the sort of thing that can happen naturally, and the sorts of beings that can do something like this aren’t to be trifled with, even by me.”

“I notice that you said ‘beings’ rather than people,” Leeka remarked, staring at one of the bodies as the ice-cold flame hovered just above its motionless form.  “I’m assuming that your choice of wording was deliberate.”

“Unfortunately,” Micah replied, walking toward the tavern.  “To the best of my understanding, I am the most skilled human alive in the type of magic that gave these men powers.  I can do maybe a quarter of what you saw them do.  The only entity I can think of that’s capable of this is the foe I mentioned when we were traveling to Zattara.”

“I was kinda hoping you were making that up actually,” Leeka said with a sigh, falling into step behind Micah.  “I mean, it would make things a lot easier if there weren’t some sort of apocalyptic warlord breathing down the back of our necks.”

“Daemon,” Micah grunted, pushing the door to the tavern open with the front of his spear.  Behind him, the two bodies guttered out, their souls expended and erased by the fires of Elsewhere.

The bar was empty other than a massive woman tending the bar.  She was almost as tall as Leeka and twice as wide, wearing a leather smock that was more stain than material as she washed a glass.  The tables and chairs of the common room were pushed to the side, covered in enough dirty dishes and food scraps to make Micah wonder how long the teetering pile of detritus covering them had been amassing.

The bartender didn’t bother to say anything.  The second she laid eyes on Micah she threw the heavy glass across the room.  His head jerked to the side, letting it shatter against the doorframe behind him.

A half second later, he was Flash Stepping out of the way as a gout of green fire erupted from the bartender's hand, carving a fist sized hole through the old wood of the tavern’s wall.  Before Micah could plant his feet, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end and he dove to the bar’s wooden floor, slapping into the wet planks with a hollow thunk.

An arc of green flame sliced through the air just above Micah’s back, sending a chill through his prone body.  On the other end of the bar, a wall exploded into ice covered splinters as it

Leeka’s bow twanged, and the bartender snarled.  Micah didn’t get a chance to see whether the arrow drew blood, instead focusing his effort on casting Explosive Thicket.

There was another pulse of cold air as the bartender drew on the power of Elsewhere once again, but before she could release the attack, Micah’s spell grabbed hold of the wooden floor and walls of the bar, twisting them into weapons.

The woman grunted and went silent.  Micah rolled to the side and jumped to his feet.  The bartender’s body slumped, unmoving and suspended on two dozen spikes of wood that were now growing from every surface around her.  Above her, the air burst into icy green flame, silently consuming what remained of her soul.

“What in the hell is going on Micah?”  Leeka asked uncertainly.  “These people are supposed to be forgotten, but whatever those fire shields they’re using are, they’ve eaten every arrow I’ve shot at them.  A couple hundred of these people, let alone the thousands and thousands of forgotten that are living in these slums, that would be enough to pose a credible threat to the city government.”

“I don’t know if Jakint knows what it’s dealing with,” he replied, frowning at the silently burning corpse.  “You saw that Pakkon guy the guards were apprehending.  If he could use… whatever these powers are, he sure didn’t display that ability.  It was almost like he preferred to be captured and imprisoned rather than reveal his new powers to defend himself.”

“Speaking of Pakkon,” Leeka squinted, glancing around the room.  “I don’t see the man.  Maybe he’s upstairs, but he’s certainly not in here for a beer.”

Micah frowned, going down to one knee and pressing his left hand against the bar’s floor.  Icy energy thrummed through the wood triggering his Arcana skill as some sixth sense of his activated.  He let out a deep sigh and stood up, shaking his hand to warm it.  Whatever was going on, there was enough ritual energy  buried beneath the bar to power a dozen war machines or one truly legendary artifact.

“I doubt he’s upstairs,” Micah replied, nodding toward the ground.  “There’s something nasty buried down there.  Something powerful.”

“I guess it’s time to look for a trap door or something then,” Leeka said, unenthusiastically, tipping a toe under a threadbare carpet and pushing it aside to reveal nothing but more rotting planks.

Before Micah could respond, the wail of an organ filled the room, its keening notes making the chairs and tables dance across the floor.  Energy swelled up from the floor, ice cold and ominous.

A second later it was joined by harps, each pluck accentuated by a burst of power that reached out with spidering fingers and played over the edges of Micah’s soul.  He gritted his teeth as chimes joined the cacophony, each one of them like a hammer blow, passing straight through his flesh to assault the core of his being.

“No time!”  He shouted, screaming to be heard over the noise coming from the bar’s basement.  “This isn’t something you can handle Leeka, I need you to-”

He stopped speaking.  Leeka’s eyes were glazed.  The organ played another chord and she began swaying in time to the music even as an unearthly collection of voices began to sing.  She began swaying, rocking back and forth in time to the music’s inhuman crescendos.

Micah kicked her.  He could heal broken ribs later, but whatever was happening to Leeka needed to stop.  The blow knocked the wind out of her and sent the dazed woman tumbling out of the bar and into the muddy street.

The harps redoubled their efforts.  Micah grit his teeth, using every ounce of the Arcana skill to smooth his soul, preventing the icy tendrils of magic that pushed through his flesh from having any loose ends to worry apart.

His mouth began moving, silently reciting the words to vacuum as Micah tried to pinpoint the source of the music.  The chime of the bells assaulted him, causing the room to spin as something in the magic made his skull vibrate along with the swelling beat.

Vacuum shredded the loose wood of the floor, opening a yawning chasm into whatever hellish den of cultists lay below.  Micah sprinted for the opening, mouthing the words to another spell as he jumped down into the dark.

Micah landed amidst a crowd of forgotten.  Dozens of them, all of them shackled to metal poles that jutted from the ground and forced to stand.  On the other end of the bar’s basement, was a macabre orchestra, illuminated by the baleful flicker of three braziers that surrounded the musicians.

The organ was fairly normal except the piping was clearly made from human bones, but every other instrument was worse than the one before.  The harp was made from a human spine, stretched and elongated with magic until it was large enough to be strung with tendons.  The bells were skulls, a metal pipe jammed through them to keep them in place while a hooded woman used a human femur in place of a mallet to play them.

But all of that paled before the chorus itself.  Ten heads, eyes wide with terror and stitched together into a mound of tortured flesh, it burned with an infernal green light.  The heads ignored all laws of anatomy, unleashing a keening wail despite having no lungs or throats to power the sound.

Then Micah finished his spell and poison fog obscured his view of the orchestra for a fraction of a second.  He took that moment to dart behind a nearby table, a crude structure made from stone and covered in tools and reagents used for ritual magic.

The room exploded as the torches ignited the fog.  Micah’s ears popped as the pressure wave from the blast rolled over him, deafening him for a moment even as it silenced the chorus permanently.  The ground shook under his feet, and almost immediately the foul smell of cooking flesh assaulted his nostrils.

For a second, he remained crouched behind the table, waiting.  When nothing happened, Micah popped his head out, casting augmented mending on himself to fix his ruptured ear drums.

The basement was a charnel house.  None of the forgotten had survived the explosion, and all but one of the musicians were dead, crushed beneath a cave in from the tavern above.  Despite the damage, all of the instruments survived, maintained by the dark magic that powered them even as they were buried under a wave of dirt and decaying wood  when the ceiling collapsed.

He picked his way through the wreckage, stopping in front of the organ.  Pokkan lay there, half buried under a beam that had fallen from the ceiling, crushing both of his legs.  The man coughed, wetting his lips with his blood, but Micah barely even noticed.

Adorning the wall behind the chorus, like the antlers of a prized deer or the taxidermied shape of a trophy fish, sat a spear.  Micah’s blood ran cold.

That was Trevor’s spear.  He’d spent days designing the ritual to enchant it, and hour after hour etching the intricate runes that powered the weapon.

He glanced down at the half conscious Pokkan, casting augmented mending on the injured man and not caring whether the spell caused his wounds to close around chunks of wood or metal embedded in him.  Just as the man seemed to come to, Micah reached down, grabbing him by a dirt stained tunic and pointing at the weapon mounted on the wall.

“Where is he?” Micah growled, shaking Pokkan slightly when his eyes began to lose focus.  “The man who wielded this spear.  Where did he go?”

Pokkan looked up at him, uncomprehending.  Then, a malicious grin split his face as he replied.  “The gambler?  The one that asked too many questions around town?”

“Yes,” Micah spat out, struggling to keep his voice under control.  “The gambler.”

Pokkan began laughing, a mad cackle punctuated by a rasp, as if the air were struggling to escape the forgotten’s damaged throat.

Micah grabbed him by the shoulder, squeezing until his prisoner’s bone snapped under the pressure.  Rather than dissuade Pokkan, Micah’s actions only caused the man to redouble his deranged cackle.

“You fool,” Pokkan choked out through his peels of uncontrollable laughter.  “For all of your power, you’re five hours too late.  The Bishop took your friends just after lunch.  They aren’t the type that can take the Chorus’ blessing, but we aren’t the type to waste a gift when it’s handed to us.  I just wish that I could live to see the power of the instruments the Bishop crafts out of their twisted bodies.”

“Fuck,” Micah muttered, reaching up to touch one of the Maarikava fangs jutting out from his shoulder armor.  “Second time's the charm.”

Pokkan kept laughing even as time slowed to a halt.  Then Micah felt himself being dragged backward, retracing his steps until he closed his eyes, letting the world disappear into a blur of reversed movement.

When he opened them again, he was standing on the bow of the barge, Jakint’s massive walls growing on the horizon with the morning Sun low in the sky.  Plenty of time before lunch.