Shadows & Sorcery #170
I think you know exactly what’s going on here!
The first story this week took about three days to figure out before I dropped it and just did something else, which practically flew onto the page. Screen, technically. You get it. In fact, each story this week formed itself without much struggle, and I do hope that’s reflected in them.
But before anything else, an important note: next week is the 31st chapter of The Path of Poison! So catch up the serial’s triumphant return HERE
Or if you think serials are dumb and silly and that Sepp absolutely sucks and want to make him sad, you can check out last week’s triple bill of witchery, madness, and the first part of our little trilogy starring agents Candorick and Rudge HERE (reading this won’t make Sepp sad if you like him)
Lastly, please leave a like when you’re done—let the stories (and me) know you enjoyed them!
This week, we learn about the curious practices of Castle Sorcery, we delve into the wintry wilds with a Hunter of the Dead, and we join our two agents as they arrive in the eastern lands of the Saint’s Domain…
Castle Sorcery
The sun had long set on the wizard's first day in the castle. His coming had been full of ceremony, meetings, a grand dinner, more meetings, and more ceremonies between each, all of it done with the knowledge, firstly, that wasn't even the beginning—tomorrow was the official pledging of loyalty to the castle legend—and secondly, Venginus the wizard was being subtly tested. There were aides in this place who had outlived two other wizards, they knew what to look for, and Venginus knew what to show them. If he had shown them in the right way was debatable, and he wouldn't really know until sunrise. So he had two options: retire to his bed and hope for the best, or give into hubris and give himself a head start on the reading.
Venginus reclined in a high backed armchair by a small fireplace which lit his snug chambers well. The room was a sort of squat hexagon, it had straight, even sides, with a single thin, arched window, but the ceiling rose to a point of shadow. A number of volumes, browned with age, sat stacked beside him. Most were short tracts and treatises by interior and a few outside sources on the castle legend, and there were two or three meatier tomes he might set aside for later. He would need some sleep, after all.
But for now, he let himself be excited. Even if the castellans had their reservations, this lore was fascinating. The quest which formed the basis of this castle's culture, its identity, its power, and its privilege, was unlike the others had been a part of and studied. Long ago, said the thin scrawl of a leather-bound tract, the ancestor (as ever, the nameless ancestor, some things never change) took the oath to seek the chalice, and was granted one taste of its honeyed waters. The blessings imparted by that taste had been passed down from scion to scion by oath and rite ever since. So just what the hell all the ritual around libations, the clinking and mixing and spilling of wine cups, supping from the chalice-fountains, and the whispers of blood offerings meant was beyond him, but in all fairness, castles did invent things. They had to. And yet, the place was green, so these practices couldn't be entirely without merit or efficacy. Vines and grass and ferns and drooping-boughed trees practically infested the place. Something to do with the blessing as passed through liquid mediums, through overflowing vessels, he guessed. Yes, that must be it, he mentally noted. Spill a little more tomorrow—if they let you.
Venginus spent an hour or two skipping through different books, letting his eye fall on things that caught it. A lot of repetition with minor variation. Another thing that didn't change. The wizard had been a journeyman for twenty years, and for about eight of each decade, he had, of course, dwelt as an apprentice in two other castles whose legends he shared. Eight years around hot-headed glory-seeking warriors going into frenzied battle-trances where they might seek visions of the sword promised to some worthy descendent by the nameless red knight. That he had well and truly hated every moment of. Still, he came out of it a decent swordsman. Hard to be otherwise when from every angle came another bellowing over the seventy-two sacred strikes of ritual combat. That was their repetition. He wouldn't ever hold the legend's sword, but that wasn't for him anyway. His last apprenticeship was in the verdant south where he had personally went on an expedition to seek some sign of the temple grove. Finding out that every road really did lead to it, if one had sworn fealty and oath, was quite an experience. But it was a long road, and the scions were content to tread upon it lightly for the guidance it brought to other things, and make some several hundred, likely thousand, maps and charts to be repeated and recompiled by every new scion.
He took one of the larger books with him to bed when the fire began to get too low. He had used one of its embers to light his candelabra—chalice shaped, naturally—and had then stuck himself into a short section detailing vaguely more the meaning than the actual actions of the castle's oath-taking, whereby one became part of the legend, and partook of the blessing. Some of it he knew, for it touched on details common to all castle existence. There was talk of how marriages between castellans did not mix quests, and of how all children vied for the position of chosen scion, or get married off elsewhere. Or maybe stay at home in case another scion is needed. Couldn't be too careful, a few quests had been imperilled by accident, plague, and war. A few had been lost to time, to be forever unfulfilled. These things he knew, however, and had experienced their dramas. But sure, he knew more otherwise. Unofficially, families tended to offer each other aid to be counted in some small way in the legend, helping maintain fragile alliance. He spent a while flicking through pages, scanning lines and passages of long-winded, elaborate histories, until he found some passages relating to wizards, and these he relished in, reminding himself of what he was, what he meant here, and his place in the land.
The court wizard, said this particular tome, was second only to the scion themselves. True, thought Venginus, but best left unspoken. Like aides, advisors, or men-at-arms, wizards partake in a ritual bonding of loyalty to share in the blessing of the quest—to gain some measure of its power. But unlike married off children or castle stewards or whoever else, when a wizard left and swore their oath to another legend, their blessings didn't vanish. They were small, but they were more than any one scion would ever have, and came with the knowledge of power and the wisdom to use them. No one, the book continued, knew why. But Venginus did, and he was glad the scions and castellans and lords were so mired in their ancient traditions that none genuinely even considered taking up another quest. Nothing was stopping them, save for the elaborate culture they had constructed around themselves. He guessed some old castellans knew this, too, and never spoke of it, lest war consume their land in the scrabble for the gathering of quests—of power. It was only in the solitary wizard did quests mix to any extent. Venginus, as he was, sat now with the know-how and ability to execute sacred strikes and seek guidance from the spirit of the land. He could instruct young lordlings in combat and go out to obtain revelations in lonely places. He hoped soon that regenerative powers might be added to that list, so that perhaps a scion or two of this castle or another would look with favour upon him when purified of their questing wounds.
At some point, sleep overtook Venginus, his candles guttering and fading, the strain of focusing his eyes on the words taking their toll. His last thoughts before he snapped awake to the sound of the morning horn after a period of calm darkness were thus: just what in the world was their rite of oath-taking going to involve, and would he have the appetite for it? If that was the test, he was glad to face it.
Hunters of the Dead
Long ago, in the mists far before the dawn of recorded history, farther back than any dared guess, ancient humans uncovered a secret. Knowing this secret, a select number of them set about preserving their corpses in hidden tombs deep within arid or frozen places, where they might go untouched by future humans, geological upheaval, or the encroaching seas.
Unfathomable aeons later, they awoke, having outlasted the span of death itself.
And they continued to awaken, having passed their secret down through the centuries themselves, and through the faithful, whose husks rise in servitude. Yet, at every juncture, they have been met with guardians, sentinels, paladins, and hunters of every kind and form whose existence, either in the shadows of civilization or in the hallowed halls of lords and priests, has been a fixture of human history.
Hailaz was such a hunter, and he was back where he belonged. Thick fur boots and fingerless bracers held the creeping cold back from his extremities, but his bare chest was filled with lungfuls of frigid air and his flesh relished the bracing chill. Masses of hot breath enwreathed his face, revealing his tawny skin bronzed by far away suns, but his mane of hair was still the grey of the icelands. He was, in this place, the very image of raw, bestial vitality, undimmed and untamed.
This was not the first time had strode the wastes in pursuit of the undead. But it was the first time he had stalked the ice fields and stark hillsides as a hunter true. In his youth, when he had been little more than a beast, and contended with beasts for hot blood and meat and fire, he had come across the frightful cavern of graven stone he later learned had been the tomb of a primordial undead, freshly awoken to eternity. There he had met with two who called themselves hunters, and had set to all-devouring flame the unliving blasphemy which defied the savage, elemental gods he knew only in his heart. By the hunters was he inducted into their order and charged with sacred duty—but at the cost of the grim truth which had blasted his brain and left only the pure core of his primal drive to range free, unbound from the superstitious cowering of his earliest memories. Though this world knew no gods, their vision remained within him, and were finer gods for it. This world was all they had, to no afterplace was there to go, and so it must, at all costs, be safekept from the predations of eternal inhuman tyrants.
It could be seen as nothing less than temple to itself, a monument to sin and hubris, hidden in a rime-encrusted deep where pale, diffused light slithered from the distant sun down the sheer, ice-slick walls. Aye, a vision such as what birthed him so long ago. Graven stone fashioned by hands best left forgotten, from when they say the frost was a sweltering tangle like the eastern reaches. Hailaz grumbled at the thought. He had been out east, into the unhallowed ruins where water fell in steady streams and heavy drops from a thick, green canopy of hanging vines, where things has big as his head crawled on too many legs, where a thing that walked in spiced robes commanded bulging-eyed men in loose wrappings, and where all had finally met the bite of powder and flame. He held even now an intense loathing of it.
Hailaz never carried more than he absolutely needed with him. He only felt comfortable with a few tools, with less things to keep track of, because fact was, in the heat of the hunt, and of battle, trying to locate, like some hunters, the right dagger or pouch or what have you, it only served to confuse he who was, despite his life in the cities, still only mere steps from beasthood. He had on one side his favoured short blade: a leaf-shaped, single-edged cleaver with a gentle forward curve, flare, and sharp taper (terms he had uncharacteristically delighted in as he learned from smiths), capable of cutting and hewing deep, and the on the other side, a fairly hefty, insulated, and sealed pouch of sparking salts. They were as a miracle to him even after all these years. There was much of civilization he could not understand, and less he could come to terms with, but the blademasters and armourers and chemycks who made these salts, those he held a keen fondness for. Taking a small measure of it in his fingers, he deftly scraped the rough black granules across the sides of his drawn sword, where they smoked and flashed to life, lighting up the wandering passages he now trod through. No torch, no lanterns, no candles necessary, not for him. Better have the sword ready anyway, because this one was already awake. No one out here to give sightings and things, no one but wild men like him, so only when it had begun to encroach on human domains had word come to the hunters, and had Hailaz left to cleanse his homeland of another horror.
He had never had to ask why it was right to destroy the awoken ones, but in his time with the sages and scholars of the hunters, he did often wonder. There had been times and places when there were too few hunters to manage the awakening of the undead, and some far, lonely places still bore the mark of the strange and terrible reign of things that did not want for food or rest, things that could delve into other secrets locked behind the barrier of mortality, things that might return from all but the most thorough destruction. Truth was, beyond persistent legends to keep mankind wary, if not fearful, the undead were anathema to the cult of vitality, flesh, and blood which seemed ever-present themes in human faith wherever Hailaz went in his travels. Man lived and died and was glad for the pulse of flesh and heat of blood. And so they found those avatars of unhallowed aeons of dust and desolation abhorrent in a way that existed beyond words.
He let those thoughts filter and slither through his head as he gazed at the grey flesh of a corpse that had died longer ago than he could conceive of, shuffling on wiry limbs covered by a threadbare brown shawl. There were five other shapes crouched around it—wild men, like him, but a little wilder, and not so much human as approaching human. It had been awake long enough to gather around it a cult of these poor folk, and likely there were more nearby. This also meant it was capable of something to cow them into servitude. This also meant it was alone, with no other undead to labour for it.
Hailaz had been a hunter since before he made his living destroying the undead. Since he could hold a spear and draw a bow he had been doing so, taught to him by his mother who he once believed had went to run with the gods, but now he knew slumbered eternal, free from the blasphemy of undeath, her bones long ago having become dust. And so it was little trouble for him to extinguish his sword in the heaped ice, creep lightly and swiftly over the treacherous frost-wreathed stone, and leap, blade held aloft, and deliver the first fatal strike down through the shoulder and ribs of the risen one. A violent rustling as of a storm wind in the dying autumn trees escaped the thing, and it went to turn, no doubt to use whatever tricks it had used to enslave the wild men who jumped and hollered in shock and fear. But Hailaz knew his prey, he'd known since he'd cut to ribbons one such horror all those years ago, and made for the arms first in two heavy swings, before knocking to the stone the undead with his shoulder, where it scrabbled like an insect trying to right itself.
It looked at him with pale, dry, rheumy orbs he didn't believe really saw, so much as they sensed in some alien way. It hadn't waited these immeasurable millennia for it to end like this. But Hailaz gazed back, and his eyes, enflamed with passion and rage, said it would.
His blade broke one leg, then his foot the other. It was hard to think something so hilariously frail could pose such a threat. But he believed it could. He stepped forward, and placed his heel on the thing's writhing skull. He let out one mighty bellow to silence and focus the wild men, which huffed and snarled in confusion. He cast his glance to each one in the wordless way the wild men of the ice fields communed, and set his heel with a dry crunch through the undead skull and into a pile of ashes. He poured his pouch of salts on the stilled corpse. Stilled, not dead. It could not die. It had died, and had come out on the other side. But it could be stopped. He took one single handful, spread it across his sword and let it ignite, thrusting it into the pile which erupted into crimson flames that reduced the primordial undead into a fine coating of bluish grey dust.
The world was older than any could guess, and humankind had walked its surface for almost just as long. Untold hundreds of millions of human beings lay dead in the earth. Most were dust, some were bones, and fewer still lay serene in stone tombs where they would continue to awaken until the end of time. And until that end, there would be hunters to meet them at every turn.
Saint's Domain
The realization only hit Candorick and Rudge some leagues into the strange eastern wilds: Lord Jerican could simply have waited for whatever this was to come to Anchorhold, for if the buzz around this new saint, this new vision, was legitimate, it would arrive sooner or later. But then again, they had also decided, it could get there before them, or it would meet them. So off to Pillarment it was either way.
They had set out on a pilgrim wagon heading east, surrounded by wide eyed devotees, chanting, and scented candles for some several leagues. It was a popular and often necessary form of transport. The further one went from the cities, the less the world tended to work the way it ought to—according, that is, to ancient visions that had long ago faded away, and were all but lost. That was the extent of Candorick and Rudge's knowledge on the subject, and it had been a necessary education for their work with Jerican. But they knew there was more to it, and until something came up which required them learning it, it would stay so.
The amount of blessings Jerican piled on them always made Rudge restless, and more than once in the first three days of the journey, he hopped off their wagon to just run beside it. It was Candorick who found it easier to pass the time with small talk. Their affiliation with Jerican wasn't a secret, and technically, neither was this expedition, so Candorick shared what he knew. The Communion pilgrims they travelled with were rather excited to learn of it, and many well wishes were shared between them. They both, however, ate voraciously whenever the wagon made a stop anywhere, which they'd come to understand as a common side effect of all that energy. It boosted everything up, appetite included. Thankfully, for both them and every single inn they ran across, Jerican's coffers were as deep as his devotions.
Outside the seven cities, settlements were small and few. In the wilds, the world ran in unpredictable ways, and it was the opinion of just about any religious official worth their sacred salt that it was the existence of good, faith-bearing folk forming connective tissue between the cities that pretty much kept it all running. But there were vast stretches of space where human feet did not often tread, from which came the most horrible stories. Grey mists in which caravans vanished, great stalking shadows, hungry maws in the hillsides, lost time, not to mention refuges for bandits and cults with something to hide. The cities were each vast sprawls, but the smaller towns and villages took the form, usually, of walled, fortified estates with close ties to the cities they spread out from, or small anarchic communities of pioneers and ascetics between and beyond the estates. Each kind was more than happy to receive visitors and travellers, and their web formed a kind of highway across the spaces between the seven cities. Without fail, whenever they passed through one, Rudge would comment he'd like to vanish into one of the communes.
But besides these hardy folk, the smaller, more distant settlements didn't tend to make it long. As they passed from the dry, dusty lands around Anchorhold and into the cold, wet east, the caravan passed by more than a few dead, desolate villages. Some were little more than incongruous growths of sand and dust or moss and vines on vague roadsides, some seemed like they had slowly decayed in the shadow of curious rock spires until the final stragglers gave up the ghost, and some, for reasons none could quite put their finger on, seemed as if abandoned on the edges of black forests in extreme hurry. Doorless portals and gaping windows stared out from these places especially, and they always moved a little faster through them. They had broken out their medium bone relics and Communion seals at those points, their fellow pilgrims following their lead—as if Candorick and Rudge, who often joked they were glorified errand boys, were priests. The bones helped with the illusion. Sunbeams were invoked freely and the Great Tapestry of Stars bid shift for just a moment until they could leave those places behind. More than once, Rudge ran his thumb over the blackflame seal Jerican had given to him.
And then, weeks passed. It hadn't really sunk in just how far out they would be going, and just how much the news of the new saint had affected Jerican. They had been sent out far before, leagues from Anchorhold and into the wilds. It seemed he was sending them farther and father every time now. Candorick had joked once or twice maybe he was trying to tell them something. Then, when a particularly long stretch of silent, lifeless wilderness finally showed signs of relenting, they knew they had entered the eastern lands proper, and the growing unease, discomfort, and exhaustion of the long journey began to dissipate.
For the most part, life seemed to manifest in pretty similar ways to back home. Walled estates dominated, though much more spread out, the land around and about them tended to by legions of robed attendants. Candorick had taken the time to learn what he could of the east, and had passed as much to Rudge as he the latter man would listen. Unlike their homeland where the Sun and Star cults were eminent among the Communion, out here, the twin saints of Vine and Harvest held mighty sway. They were, in life, twins who taught humanity how to work the land, but not how the land worked, that cultivation was itself was a sacred act of communing with the land, and that its fruits and the enjoyment of them were themselves sacred festivities. There were even Spirit Trees seen holding special positions in the rolling farm fields, lending their strength to the land, and the living obtaining that strength in return in one grand cycle. Even the smaller anarchic communes were farmers and viners, and of these there were many. It seemed as if the eastern lands were one sprawling pastoral paradise.
But then they came out of these borderlands, and into Pillarment true.
It was a cool, damp land of mountainous peaks and summits of primordial stone, grey and stately, with mist washing over lush swathes of country and deep woods, all dwelling under a pale sky. The familiar signs of the Communion were comforting in the city of stepped and tiered palaces and courts, with intricate stonework and swooping roofs of dark wood, all of which stood in stark contrast to the dusty vista of arches and obelisks back home. And yet, for all its exotic colours and smells and cold, there was something about the place most curious of all: where was the "buzz" Jerican had been so keen on seeking the source of? Yes, the city was lively, as lively as Anchorhold ever got, but these two fellows had an eye for religion. The way Jerican had talked about it all they expected to see preachers and oracles and mediums out in force, lining the streets, howling from the rooftops. But everything they saw was perfectly within reason. Maybe a little foreign, but they kept looking, and nothing of particular import was turning up.
After some two hours or more of wandering the streets of the city slowly forming an idea of just what was going on here, Candorick and Rudge sat at a table outside a peculiar Pillarmentan type of ale house, only here they sold a pallid, milky concoction with a monstrous kick to it. Were it not for the invocations coursing through them, they'd have cast their cups aside. But drink or not, they'd figured it out. Having come to Jerican through his channels, his network and web of rumormongers and excitable little ministry agents, it became clear this was an underground movement someone thought had potential. Whether or not it did, they'd be the judge of that, but regardless, they were somewhat peeved by it. What they needed was to get some concrete information, and this came in the form of what seemed to be a local government minister camped out in this hole in the wall over a protest within her ministry.
"Yes, yes, there is indeed talk of something out there, past the city, lots of talk, lots of movement," she said all that between gulps of that sharp wine, "visitors and ambassadors keen on faithful matters been talking for months on end. Talking about a new faith. All in on it. What's it all about? Don't know myself. All kinds go out in the High Wilds, and you're foreigners so you don't know it's no good. But it's finally reached you, so it must be trouble then," she laughed with a snort. "The dragon priests have an eye on it, north pagoda, go see their head guy, his lot acts the sentinel for cult matters. You go, I don't plan on leaving this wonderful place until that faithless bastard Iamano resigns his title!"
And so they left to see the dragon priest, who dwelt within a rather impressive, looming headquarters wholly unlike the squat, half-sunken lair of the cult head in Anchorhold. The dragon cult was one of the many smaller, less popular cults which nonetheless compelled immense devotion from its adherents. As Candorick and Rudge climbed the spiralling staircase of the stepped tower and announced themselves as agents of Lord Jerican of the Ministry of Public Works of Anchorhold, they were reminded just exactly why. Someone stood with their back to them, stooped over a table they could plainly see was covered in open documents, charts, maps, and the like. This person wore little more than loose hangings which depended from the waist, the entire upper torso completely unclothed, for from their back their grew, out of what looked to be open wounds, a pair of stunted, membraneous wings. The medium of the dragon saint, who they say was still aflight in some distant space, waiting until the time was right to return and rule the world, and until then, offered blessings of might through the medium of wings. One could see why the Communion establishment both accepted them, and held them at arm's reach.
The conversation was terse and brief. There was a new saint, the priest said, a new vision, a new power dwelling out beyond Pillarment. The ministers were as yet unsure what to do about it, but more and more were accepting it every day, and the dragon cult were keeping more than a close eye on its doings out there. It had not tried to establish a formal presence, but believers came and went, and word spread among the hierarchies of the city. It would come down to the Communion, or this, in the end, was the priest's opinion. It sought, so he said, to make the city its domain. The priest showed them its whereabouts and told them to go to it if they must.
"Just make sure you've your allegiances set straight before you set foot back in Pillarment," was the last thing he said before turning away, back to his work.