The Great Pandemonium: Nobilitas Obligat

Part IV: Bloodward

Part IV. Bloodward

With a click of her tongue Sacha sent Shikra on his way, the goshawk soaring quickly out into the open sky and vanishing into the fog bank that was rolling down from the highlands like a gray and forbidding wall. She had sent the bird off to the nearest Antenox outpost with the message that they were headed into Nighttyr Keep. Coord had made sure she had added in the order to summon every Inferi magic user in the highlands to deal with the Oratio should they fail to report back success within a month's time.

Coord was confident in her abilities, but Drystan had come to learn that she was awfully pragmatic, as well. Whatever this Oratio Nocis was up to it had her deeply worried and erring heavily on the side of their not being able to secure any victory at all.

The former recruit shifted his feet in his stirrups, looking up at the charred skeleton of what had been the fortress capital of the entire region. They sat at the collapsed ruins of the outer gatehouse, situated at the top of a slope of land littered with the rubble of the wall that had once enclosed the courtyard, stables, and storehouse. Beyond the rise was the inner wall, still mostly intact but scorched by the fires that had immolated the entire area and seemed to have left the dirt forever blackened and bereft of life. Nothing green had sprouted from the ground in the area of the keep since it had been set to the torch nearly twenty years prior, not even lichen or moss.

Beyond the bailey was the keep itself, a looming castle with rounded towers that pierced the layer of fog overhead and sat wearily staring down at the emptiness that surrounded it. The keep appeared as though it had been gutted, with only two of its four towers still standing around an otherwise collapsed central area encircled by siege-hammered walls that barely managed to remain standing. In the early morning hours the mist of the moorlands surrounded the place and made it seem to float atop a blanket of off-white haze.

If Drystan was not certain in his soul that he was going to find ungodly demons roaming within he would have considered it quite a magnificent sight to behold. The still-proud ruins of a betrayed lord standing tall in a field of mist, struggling to withstand the assault of unrelenting time. From all he had read the Nighttyrs had proved themselves time and again in service to the Empire with nothing less than unflagging valor since the War of Expansion when they had been given the lands of the Outremer. As with every noble family there were outliers who abused their power with impunity, but even the tales of those men were nothing compared to the stories he had heard about other noble houses. Most of those he had heard of because they required the direct intervention of the Inquisition and wound up being examples used by the men who had trained him, not because he had actively researched them in any fashion.

Still, the Nighttyrs seemed to have had a proud legacy and did not deserve what befell them. Especially not without a proper trial in the church courts as was required to convict any title-bearing member of apostasy and strip them of their holdings. The coup of Dane Weist had always bothered him, and that was well before he learned that he had anything at all to do with the family.

Shaking himself back into reality he watched as Coord dismounted and draped the reigns of her horse over a fallen length of iron that had once been part of the main gate. She looked over at Sacha. “Still feel honored?”

The Inferi grinned and slid out of her saddle. “Of course.”

Drystan slung his head and arm through the shoulder belt that supported his borrowed broadsword and followed Sacha in tying off his horse. As soon as his feet touched the ground a biting chill rose up through his toes and seized hold of his stomach. “There's a killing field near here.”

Nodding, Coord indicated the area beyond the second wall. “It has grown to encompass the whole of the inner bailey since it was first inscribed years ago.”

He scowled, having read up on the ways a killing field was created not too long before he left the Rectory. “We'll need to find the locus. It won't be too far from the field itself. I can dismantle it.”

Coord nodded her head, tightening the leather straps of her teardrop-shaped kite shield against her right arm. Like everything he had seen of Antenox so far, the shield was bereft of any other embellishments save for the two-headed wolf symbol etched into the steel by hammer and chisel. Coord's was unique in that she had sharpened the lower point into a second cutting edge instead of leaving it rounded off as most tended to do. It was the first time he had seen anyone with such a shield. It was the first time had had seen anyone wield one with their sword arm, as well.

Drystan walked ahead of the two Inferi, feeling the chill in his feet grow colder with each step he took towards the killing field. There were no inscriptions denoting where it began and ended, no wards visible to signal that it was there. The only real sign was the presence of skeletal remains littered throughout the bailey—everywhere else scavengers had long since carried off what remained of the dead, but the field between the inner wall and the keep they lay intact and undisturbed. Animals instinctively avoided the malignant aura of a killing field, sensing the unnatural magic that bound souls to the earth.

A movement caught his eye and he turned his head to look at it. A mangy gray-and-black tabby cat, nothing more than fur draping a feline skeleton, stalked out of the collapsed stables and limped pitifully on towards the inner bailey ignorant of their presence. The wind shifted and he caught the rotten stench coming off the cat's hide, something close to the gut-clenching smell of untreated and gangrenous flesh.

Drystan took off after the tabby in a dead sprint, tearing across the ashes that once had been the storehouse in effort to catch up with the cat before it made it into the killing field. He had no idea why he was in such a rush to save the creature, but before he realized it he had crossed the inner wall and found himself standing among a dozen or so skeletal remains. With a pathetic mewl the tabby sat down, curled its skeletal tail around its feet, and slowly turned its head to look at him with a face which long ago had its eyes clawed out.

It was then that the dead rose from the ground.

Drystan hardly had time to call back over his shoulder that the tabby cat was the locus for the trap before a skeleton clad in the tattered remains of a guard uniform shook itself free of the ash and dust and locked its one remaining hand around his throat. Though it had no flesh left the binding magic was more than enough to lend the thing the strength of a carnival strongman, strength it was mindlessly using to try and rip his head from his shoulders.

Pushing forward with his head he drew his sword and ungracefully hacked the arm off the skeleton, then slammed the weighted pommel down on the crown of its skull and kicked himself free. Four more rose to take its place as the one he had dismantled continued to claw at him even though its skull had been shattered to pieces on the ground.

“Proceed to the locus and dismantle it, Drystan Nighttyr.”

His head snapped to the side and he saw Sacha marching headlong into the fray, her normally unremarkable brown eyes blazing a brilliant orange as though they were the heart of a fire. Gripped in her right hand was her broadsword, and in her left was a viciously spiked mace which she had picked up from the ground of the bailey. There was a disturbing grin on her face; she looked thrilled by the fact she was amidst a field of undead targets upon which she could unleash her fury without restraint. She danced through them, crushing skulls and severing limbs as she went, as though she were a demon in her own right.

The snapping of bones much closer to where he stood distracted him for a bare moment and he saw Coord swinging the sharpened edge of her shield downwards across one of the skeletons aiming to drag her down into the ground, slicing it cleanly in two from shoulder to hip. Her face was cold and drawn, her lips pressed into a thin line. What disturbed him the most was that her eyes no longer had any color to them at all—they were white through and through, and though she looked practically blind she sliced her way through the undead tethered to the killing field as though nothing moving escaped her notice.

”We shall assure your success by assailing the warding,” said the Brigadier in a voice that made him feel he was in the presence of someone entirely different than the woman he had been traveling with up until that point. “Be swift. We will have little time before Nocis notices our presence.”