The Dark Paladin Read online

  She looked down at her leather breeches and dirty blouse. She nodded and pulled her light brown hair into a bun as she walked through the door and into her adjacent bedroom. Sylas passed her, and she watched him to make sure he was going to do what he promised.

  “I’ve got him,” Sylas assured her before shaking Jonas Shelby.

  She saw dark wings flapping against her bedroom window, smearing guts and gore across the thick glass. In the corner was her own black armor set. She looked at it out of the corner of her eye as she tied her hair with a worn strip of leather. She hated the dark color. She painted it that way for Cedric, to show solidarity with him and to share in his shame. In truth, she did not feel the same as he did. Where he saw a demon lord, she saw a savior—a woman who gave her the power to vanquish the undead and demons. Without the Holy One, the world would be doomed and her family with it.

  The thumping continued as she sat down in a sturdy chair and put on her leather shirt, chainmail skirt and chausses. She hardly recognized the weight of her mail hauberk. She slipped on her plate sabatons and tightened the leather straps until everything was snug. Then her leg guards. Then something curious happened. The whole world went silent. She stopped fastening her armor as her ears adjusted.

  No birds against the window. No thumping along the walls. No scurrying of feet and claws along the porch. Nothing.

  “Mom?” Sylas asked from the other room.

  “Is Papa up?” she asked.

  “No,” Sylas answered.

  She heard him mumbling encouragement to Jonas Shelby.

  She grabbed her black pauldrons, breastplate and backplate and squeezed through her bedroom doorway. She strained her ears to hear something, but everything outside was still.

  “Mom?” Jonas Arrington asked.

  His light brown hair was wavy and his green eyes filled with worry. He wore his full boiled leather armors, including his helmet. Behind him was a medium-sized hammer strapped to his back. Sylas had equipped him well.

  “It’s ok, baby,” Allison said, rubbing Jonas the Younger’s head. “Help me.”

  She dropped her pauldrons to the floor and slipped through the leather straps of her breastplate. Jonas pushed her backplate against her shirt and began to fasten it against her breastplate. Allison panicked as she realized her daughter was not in view.

  “Sarah!” she called. “Sarah!”

  “I’m right here, Mum!” Sarah said, leaving the children’s bedroom dressed in full blackened leather armor.

  Allison forgot her worry about the quietness and smiled as her three children were in full view. Her father lay on his side in the room to her left, still wearing his cream-colored, ragged nightgown. Sylas shook him gently, still urging Papa to rise. The hearth fire spread warmth throughout the living room. And the stillness was so foreign and surreal, especially for a house in a forest, that her mind was hyper alert, recording everything.

  Three loud, slow knocks rapped against the door in front of her. Human knuckles. Heavy and patient.

  “Cedric?” she asked.

  She clicked her fingers and pointed at the pauldrons on the floor. Jonas the Younger fumbled with them, raised them and helped her put them over her breast and backplates, covering her shoulders and the weak spots under her armpits. She felt better. More protected. Almost ready.

  “Sarah, grab my helmet and the Twin Sisters,” Allison commanded, “and each of you get behind me.”

  Jonas Arrington pulled his four-foot war hammer. Sylas joined them in the living room and pulled his weapon as well, identical to his father’s.

  “Cedric?” Allison asked again.

  What came back was a strange voice. Human but cold.

  “Don’t be impolite,” the man said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of me by now. Let me in.”

  Sarah rushed back into the living room and handed Allison her helmet and sword. Allison slammed the black-plated, barbute helmet onto her head. She grabbed her two swords, the blessed blades bestowed on her by The Holy One. They lit up like carnival fires, brightening the room.

  “You are who I’m looking for!” the man said in response to the lit interior. “Paladins!”

  The front door burst inward, shards flying everywhere and tinkering off Allison’s metal armor. She protected her eyes and children instinctively with her hands, still managing to hold onto the Twin Sisters despite the surprise.

  A man with a ragged dark cloak, long black beard and raven hair smiled through the shattered doorway. His teeth were abnormally white, not yellowed like most people, and they were sharp. He strode slowly and confidently into the room.

  “Such beautiful blades,” the man said, “and children.”

  He waved to them and she saw her sons retreat slightly behind her out of her periphery.

  “What do you want?” Allison demanded.

  “This world is mine,” the man said, “and your people are getting in my way. You seem important to this…” he chuckled, “Order. Who are you?”

  “We are paladins,” Sylas said.

  “You are not!” Allison said. “Mister, I don’t know who you are, but we’re not important. We’re just a family, trying to make ends meet out in the woods.”

  Orcus chuckled and took another couple steps forward. Allison and her sons backed away. Her father Jonas Shelby was in view, but still sleeping. The man peered into the room and then looked back toward Allison and her children.

  “A family with two demon-killing swords filled with Light?” the man asked. “What do you really hope to do with two short swords? You think you’re going to leave this place and swing until your arms get tired? You think you can keep that up for twenty years? Forty? A thousand? We are endless. We are horde.”

  “Mister,” Allison said, “I don’t know who you think you—”

  “My name is Orcus,” he said, “and I am a demon lord—the most powerful demon lord on the surface of this planet. I command the undead, pestilence and disease. Whatever your master has told you, it is a lie.”

  “The Holy One hasn’t—” Allison said, her swords still held ready to strike.

  “The Holy One?” Orcus asked. “Is that what she has you call her? If that woman is holy, then I’m a saint four times over. She’ll lay down with anything to get what she wants. She’s slaughtered even more creatures than I have. Women. Children. Women with children still inside of them. You think she’s holy? You think she’s pure?”

  Allison winced at the implication, but she didn’t believe him.

  “You lie,” she said. “All demons lie.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, now you get it. And what do you think she is? What do you think any of us are? How many of your kind remain? Just what kind of chance has she given any of you against an army of tens of thousands? 30 paladins? 40? 100?”

  “We have enough,” Sylas said.

  “Shut it,” Allison warned. She didn’t want to goad a demon lord into a fight, and she didn’t want her children to be his focus. She’d never faced a demon lord. No human had. The last thing she wanted to do was get into a fight with a creature she didn’t know the limits of when her children were within paces of a god amongst demons.

  “You are not my enemy,” Orcus said. “Your master? She came here for something. Even I don’t know what it was, but she doesn’t have it yet. You paladins? You’re a plaything. She’ll grow tired of this planet, and then she’ll leave me here to fight Demogorgon. You think I’m evil? I just want you to live forever.”

  “As a mindless undead cretin and slave!” she said.

  “But immortal,” Orcus said, raising his hands. He peered into the room where her father slumbered. “You get old. You get frail. You lose your minds. You get sick. Strokes. Heart attacks. Diseases. Cancers. Things you don’t have the medicine for. Some things you don’t even know how to explain. I take that away. I give you immortality. I don’t fling you into the Abyss, like your master does. Or Demogorgon. I keep you there, in the back of your skull. Near your loved
ones. Near your homes and friends.”

  “Unable to communicate with them,” Allison said.

  “How do you know?” Orcus asked. “Have you ever been undead before? I hear there’s a whole town of undead south of here in Perketh. The people work normally. They fraternize and their children play stick ball in the streets. Perhaps, I could give you that immortality. Would you like that?”

  “I didn’t ask for immortality,” Allison said.

  “Who wants to live in a world set fire?” Sylas asked.

  “So informed,” Orcus said exaggeratedly, “but wrong. You’ve apparently heard of Demogorgon, the chief of our mother’s creations. I’m naurun like him, but I don’t seek the flame. I seek life. I seek unlife. Your people have a choice. Mekadesh doesn’t want this world, and she doesn’t care about you. Take it from me. Believe me, I know. She wants something on this planet. Not you. Not your sons or daughter. Not your father or your husband. An object, probably. Something she’s lost. Perhaps from when she last tried to destroy the universe.”

  “You lie!” Allison accused.

  “Do I?” Orcus asked.

  Allison took a step backward, and she saw Orcus’ eyes grow bigger as her children huddled behind her.

  “Is this your answer?” Orcus asked. “Are you condemning your family to the Abyss?”

  “Door,” Allison commanded.

  She heard one of her sons fumble with the back door behind her. Orcus shook his head slowly and then two leathery bat wings shot out of his back, covering the wall beside the front door. The demon lord began to advance. A long black weapon seemed to appear out of nowhere, like it grew out of his arm. He raised it, and Allison growled in defiance as she readied her Twin Sisters to deflect a mighty blow.

  But a white light blinded her attacker, and sparks showered the room as something massive and heavy hit the demon lord in the shoulder, forcing him backward.

  To her surprise, her father had emerged in his nightie and a two-handed, white-hot war hammer. He slammed it down again on Orcus, who defended himself by raising his right arm. The hammer came down mightily, but the demon lord’s arm took the blows. Specks of bright light flew into the air with each smite, blows so hard they would have shattered any demon in the trials on Mount Godun. Orcus recoiled and hissed at the sparks of holy flame. He lashed out with his wings, brushing Allison’s father back.

  Jonas Shelby came back screaming fiercely.

  “Papa?” Allison asked, her bright swords dropping slightly at the spectacle.

  “Go!” he yelled as he brought his hammer down again.

  She hadn’t seen her father with such energy since his stroke. He had barely even spoken in ten years. She turned and pushed her sons and daughter through the door. Her son Sylas saw the first undead attacker before she did. He brought his large hammer down, through the skull of a slimy, moss-covered man. Jonas the Younger swung at a brown elk with a hammer, but the animal evaded the blow. Sarah thrust at the creature with her short sword.

  “Go!” Allison repeated again.

  She watched the Light flicker like heat lightning through the back door of the house. She worried over her father as the sound of his hammer hitting something like metal echoed out into the backyard. An undead man reached for her, and she sliced through his shoulder. His flesh seared and a white light flashed in his eye sockets as he crumbled to the ground.

  A buck with gnarled, mangy lips snapped at Sarah, and Allison saw red. She cut right through its rancid neck, decapitating it cleanly. Sarah looked back at her in confusion, stumbling away from the house.

  “Run!” Allison said. “Do not stop!”

  The forest around them came alive as the metal clanging from the house continued. Over and over, her father swung at Orcus. She felt an immense pride well in her as she stabbed and slashed at another undead man who lunged at Jonas. Squirrels and birds came out of the bushes. The ones her children missed, she cleaved in two. They made their way east where Allison knew most of the paladins were fighting the undead emerging from Xhonia.

  In time, the metal clangs from her home grew fainter. Then they stopped. Allison teared up as she pierced a bear cub through its wretched, undead heart.

  “Thank you, Papa,” she said. “Thank you.”

  19

  The Southern Invasion

  Prince Jandhar stood on the bow of a war birlinn, a type of oared galley employed by the Visanth Empire for centuries. On land, he wore his long black hair in a turban. At sea though, he let it hang down, unbraided and uncoiled to his mid-back. When he was a kid, sailing with his father King Jofka, he loved to close his eyes and feel the wind in his hair and against his naked tanned chest. But since his father died to the assassin Theodore Crowe, Jandhar never closed his eyes near enemies. And in these Small Sea waters, just south of the Kingdom of Surdel, enemies were everywhere.

  As they approached a line of twenty war ships of Surdel, Jandhar called for a halt to the rowing. The admiral of the local Surdel fleet ascended the bow of his flagship and saluted. Jandhar exhaled a sigh of relief. He knew about the King’s invitation and safe passage, but there was no guarantee that all of the naval commanders in the thousands of vessels in Surdel’s navy had gotten the same message.

  “Godspeed!” the opposing admiral yelled. “I have word from my wife via pigeon… that the undead have swarmed down through Alefast! Before long, they’ll be at Fomsea. Godspeed to you, sir! May you find success!”

  Jandhar smiled and waved. “I’m sure we will, Admiral! We’ll kill our enemies and drive them from this land!”

  The Admiral waved, misinterpreting Jandhar’s promise, and returned to his quarters. Dozens of hardened men from both sides lined the decks. Heavy ballistae lined the opposing vessels, each capable of piercing his flagship’s hull. In previous decades, they would have already fired.

  Jandhar’s largest pet Jahgo breathed against his neck. Contrary to popular belief, the exhalation of a dragon was not hot. Their breath only got warm when they became angry, or when Prince Jandhar gave them the command to fire. Trained as they were by Jandhar, they were loyal to a fault. They would rather die than disappoint him. Otherwise, they were playful creatures who grew to a couple dozen feet long.

  Jahgo was an overachiever and Jandhar’s favorite. Thirty feet from nose to tail, scaled, black with a yellow belly and mean when it wanted to be. Jahgo had three brothers named Nintil, Zosa, and Venzin, all of them green and fifteen to twenty feet long. Their sister Jasmine was white as snow—a rare albino dragon and almost as long as Jahgo.

  He had personally bred them in southern Visanth, in the Shadeen Mountains, and saw to their obedience training with the finest dragon handlers in the world. Jahgo had been born and bred within a couple years of his father’s death. The brood had only one purpose, for all of their expense, which would have paid for a smaller nation’s army. And they were already perhaps the oldest dragons who had existed since Cronos or Sven had changed their species, for dragons were notoriously fragile creatures. Most barely survived their shells.

  The membranes within their heads that produced the jet of hot fire degraded with every use and with age. Each creature was destined to one day try too hard and fight for too long. Once the fire and combustion broke those membranes, the creature would burst into flames or explode quite spectacularly, depending on whether the flammable liquids filled its stomach first.

  Hundreds of Jandhar’s brood had died in such ways. It was only his staggering vengeance that gave him the patience and endurance to watch his hatchlings try, fail, and explode—over and over again.

  But while these five lived, for those few years as adults, they were superweapons. They could raze whole towns. Light up an army of thousands. One of them could avenge his father’s murder and engulf Kingarth’s main keep in flames. Five of them could burn a hole in the world so large that Cronos himself would think twice of messing with Visanth again.

  And each of these dragons, his own personal brood, were with him on this s
hip. They sailed to Surdel from Scythica, the capital of Visanth. This flagship was one of a hundred under his command in the fleet, and all of them laden with pikemen, roughnecks, and killers. Ten thousand men strong. And none of them, not even all of them combined, were as deadly as his five dragons.

  The Visanth Empire came to this land at the invitation of King Aethis Eldenwald to help Surdel fight demons and undead. But Jandhar did not come to help Surdel. He came to avenge his father. He would land at Sevania in the far south of Surdel, and then he’d burn a path straight to Kingarth. He swore on his father’s soul that Kingarth would burn like Jofka’s lifeless corpse had burned on the royal funeral pyre north of Malak.

  20

  The Second Offer

  Ashton awoke crumpled against the wall of the makeshift icebox for Frederick Ross. His nightmares had been terrible, filled with tortured visions of Riley, Clayton and rotting corpses. Waking up in the cold was better, but not by much.

  The metal sconces on the wall were smothered. Light filtered in through stained glass windows that were protected by a thick layer of insulating, translucent off-white glass. The result was that the furniture took on an eerie, softened rainbow of colors in the daylight.

  The walls were made of stone and well-masoned. He might be able to chip away at the blocks of glass in the windows with his silent roommate’s sword beneath the table. However, Ashton worried that if he were caught in vandalism or trying to escape, Godfrey Ross might do more than choke him next time.

  He pushed himself to his feet and refused to look at the body of the famous champion. He walked over to the door and tried the handle, but the door would not budge.

  “Come on!” Ashton yelled, rubbing on his bare arms under his cloak to fight the cold.

  He glanced at Frederick.

  “This is not going to work!” he yelled. “I’m not doing it. I’m not raising another demon!”

  He put his hands on the table and looked at the refracted sunrays coming in through the windows.