Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial-Chapter 5Arc 7: : Raid

I stared at the man, too dumbfounded for words for a long moment. However, as my senses returned to me I ripped my arm away and took a step back.

“Vicar.” My voice came out as a low growl, full of anger and hostility. My hand tightened on the rondel at my belt, on the verge of drawing it.

Kross stared at me warily. He looked terrible, his eyes sunken into deep hollows and ringed in bruised skin. His gray cloak — I hadn’t noted the color with all the snow and mud on it — looked tattered and worn. He still wore the fine plate armor I’d always seen him in, but the cuirass was dented and marred. One vambrace was missing completely, the exposed arm covered in stained bandages.

He looked like he’d just dragged himself out of a battlefield. Even still, I felt a deep and consuming anger build up.

This man — no, this creature — had caused so much grief. He’d been the hidden hand trying to force Emma into becoming a pawn of his masters. He’d helped the Priory commit acts of murder and torture on a mass scale. He’d condemned countless souls I would never know to the flame, and tried to steal mine at least once.

Renuart Kross, Vicar of the Credo Ferrum, was a monster. A villain in the truest and most unambiguous sense. A liar, a killer, and a servant of the dark lords of the Iron Hell.

A servant of devils may as well be a devil himself. I drew my dagger from its sheath.

Kross’s eyes widened. “Wait, please! I came here for help.”

“Don’t care.”

A hand clasped down on my wrist. I spun on the one who’d stopped me, but paused when I saw pale, almost yellow eyes staring back.

“This is neutral ground,” Saska said in a calm voice. “No violence.”

She didn’t seem to grip hard, but I felt an unnatural strength in her warm fingers. She’d come from nowhere, it seemed, but I was too angry to feel the right amount of terror that she’d gotten past my guard so easily.

I spoke through my teeth. “You know who he is? What he’s done?”

“Most who come here have done evil,” she said. Her gaze shifted, and when I followed it I saw that the Keeper had approached. The guests and servers scattered around the taproom, both on the lower and upper levels, had stopped their conversation to watch the drama unfold. Curious faces peeked down from the balcony ringing the taproom.

The Keeper glanced between me and Kross, then looked to the door and frowned. “What are you doing here, Vicar?”

Kross turned his exhausted face to the Keeper. “Falstaff. Your protections still hold? This is neutral ground for anyone who seeks sanctuary?”

The Keeper nodded. “You’re safe from anything outside. Not necessarily from my own people, though.”

The threat was obvious. Many of the Keeper’s people, mostly women with a few men among them, had gathered close to form a loose circle around us. They were all quiet, and all of them gave me the impression of a pack of predatory beasts stumbling on something unfamiliar, waiting to see who’d try its taste first. I felt an instinctive shiver even though they weren’t watching me.

I heard that rattling sound again. The blond woman I’d noticed before — Lucienne, the lamia — peeked over a table as though she were sitting on her knees behind it. A long, serpentine tail curled around the table’s legs. 𝘙𝔞ƝȪ𐌱Ɛs̈

“I told your people already.” Falstaff’s voice was cold. “You’re not welcome here anymore. You tried to fish for marks in my hall after I explicitly forbade it, so the Credo isn’t welcome.”

Kross sighed heavily. “Dis. I told him… it doesn’t matter. I’m being hunted, old friend. I need your protection.”

The Keeper shook his head. “We haven’t been friends in a very long time, Renuart, if we ever really were.”

For the first time, some of the mockery I was used to hearing in the false knight’s voice revealed itself. “Yes. I heard you’d gone local, claimed a piece of this faerie infested land for yourself. Don’t play the fool, Falstaff. I still see the hellfire in your eyes. You can surround yourself with these malcathe, but it will not change your nature.”

I felt the sudden anger in the room like an almost physical pressure. The faces around the little island me, Saska, Falstaff, and Kross had formed seemed to grow sharper.

“I don’t think they like that word,” I noted dryly.

Kross ignored me and kept his attention on the innkeeper, making a visible effort to collect himself. “I’m being hunted. I am aware of your rules… anyone who walks through the door belongs to you and yours.” He nodded to the shapeshifters and wicked faeries gathered around us. “And anything that lurks outside is kept at bay. Indeed, I imagine you often put some of your own out in the forest to drive people in. We used to pull the same trick in Edaea, don’t you remember?”

He was rambling. I got the sense he was bordering on delirious and badly injured.

“I recall,” Falstaff said with even more sourness than his norm. “What’s after you, Renuart?”

Instead of waiting for an answer, he looked at Saska. She had her head cocked to one side, as though listening for something.

“He was followed,” she told her master. “They are lurking outside our circle for now.” Saska’s voice lost some of its calm. “I do not like their smell.”

Falstaff folded his arms and glared at Kross. “What trouble did you bring me, crowfriar? You better not be trying to involve me in something. This is neutral ground.”

“Only among your own community.” Kross gave the other man a pointed look. “You know there are powers which care nothing for your rules, Falstaff. You think I don’t know why you move this place so often? Keep it mired in illusions, guard it with half truths and rumors, keep clientele limited to those too disenfranchised to be interested in betraying its existence?”

He glanced at me, and his haggard face became thoughtful. “With one exception.”

One of the women standing behind the Keeper suddenly spoke. She was short, made to look taller by merit of an elaborate powdered black wig . “Did you come here for sanctuary or to play at being the smartest cock in the room? I say we peel him and see how he dances. Been a while since we’ve had decent sport.”

Some others murmured in agreement. The lamia’s tail rattled loudly. I caught sight of Eilidh near the back of the group. She gave me a worried look.

The others, however… they no longer looked like an unassuming gaggle of barmaids and common harlots. Their eyes were bright and hungry, their teeth sharp.

Kross saw the same thing and tensed. I felt a prickle of heat in the air, one that didn’t come from the taproom’s fire. The crowfriar was shaping his aura. I caught the scent of brimstone.

I felt something else as well, something I didn’t understand at first. A sense of unease that didn’t have anything to do with the pack of monsters standing behind me or the infernal soldier. The aureflame, that “torch” Falstaff had spoken of that burned in my core, flickered as it sensed something.

It was always restless when dark creatures were nearby, and I’d learned to mostly ignore it inside the Backroad — everything in here set off alarm bells. But this felt different. Not a warning, but...

Almost like it was being called.

My eyes went to the door Kross had just walked through, and a suspicion began to form.

“You didn’t come here to seek sanctuary,” I said aloud. Kross finally seemed to pay attention to me.

What had he said? They’re after me. I need your help.

He wouldn’t have gone straight to me if he just wanted to guest in the inn. And his comments… You know there are powers which care nothing for your rules, Falstaff. You think I don’t know why you move this place so often?

The others were still arguing. Several of the Keeper’s people were insisting they punish Kross for his trespass and rudeness, while Falstaff seemed to be trying to keep things calm. The guests mostly just seemed entertained at the drama.

I caught sight of Sans. He was edging towards the entrance to the hallways beneath the stairs, his gaze fixed on the door.

Saska’s head suddenly shot up, like an alert dog. A deep growlbubbled in her throat, the sound not at all human.

The door opened. Just like when Kross had entered, it was like a shout inside the room. Cold swept in from the night along with a flurry of snow. Everyone stopped talking at once and turned to look, every pair of eyes seeing the same thing.

A figure stood in the doorway. It looked shadowed at first, but I realized quickly that the person standing there wore black armor not dissimilar from my own. The armor looked battered, dented, and badly scarred.

He reminded me of the Mistwalker Company. His armor had an archaic design, with a breastplate fashioned to look like a muscular torso and leather strips forming a skirt around his waist. Only part of his right arm showed bare skin, and it looked pallid and dirty, covered in a thick sheen of sweat.

A tight fitting helm covered his head with a mask affixed to it. The mask bore a face locked in an expression of saintly calm. Stains ran down beneath the small eyeholes like tears, almost invisible against the sooty metal, and a spiked band ran around the forehead. It resembled a wreath of thorns.

He took another step forward. His armor clicked. The masked face tilted to one side, an almost curious gesture. The armored man held a small, economical hatchet in one hand. The weapon dripped with gore.

In his left hand he clutched a severed head by the hair. The terrified eyes of the hostler stared at us, fixed forever into a pleading expression, clenched teeth bared into a rictus.

Renuart Kross, seasoned veteran and servant of Hell, stared at the figure in undisguised terror and took a single step back.

Once again, I felt that strange pull. The aureflame seemed to be almost drawn to this macabre stranger, but not in a hostile way. I couldn’t comprehend it. My natural, human senses were screaming in warning at me. My hairs stood on end, and my fingers instinctively tightened on the grip of my dagger.

The armored man’s masked visage scanned the gathering. When those weeping eyes found Kross, the head stopped. I heard him suck in a breath through the single small breathing hole on his iron mask, a wet, slurping sound.

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He moved with incredible speed. From total stillness to a dead sprint, the change so sudden it startled me. Someone shouted. Saska spat something in an unfamiliar language and moved, but not toward the stranger. She put herself in front of Falstaff.

I stepped forward, all my confusion about the situation fading as my combat instincts took over. The man wore armor, but my rondel — basically a long steel spike — was made for this. A knight killing weapon.

The stranger went directly for Kross, but I interposed myself and got his weapon hand by the wrist. I put him into a lock — I expected supernatural strength or some other trick, but he went down under my weight. I bent his arm behind his back, something that would have forced anyone else to drop their weapon from the pain.

But he didn’t. There wasn’t even a gasp. His head tilted towards me. Again I heard that sucking intake of breath, almost a gurgle. He smelled foul. Like feces, blood, and unwashed flesh.

Part of me wanted to just disarm him and wait for this situation to be clarified, but that strange inner sense of revulsion I felt made me think it was a bad idea to let this man — if he was a man — live. I slammed my rondel’s blade under his helm and into his chin, punching directly into the brain.

He shivered, then went still. A moment later his bowels loosened, adding to the horrible smell in the air. The head of the dead groom went rolling, stopping at the feet of one of the inn’s women.

That had been far too easy.

Only once my pounding heart settled did I realize that I’d panicked at the stranger’s disturbing entrance and let my fighting instincts take full control. And I’d just broken the Backroad’s rules by killing this man. My head shot up to the Keeper, but he didn’t look angry. His face was pale. Kross stood right next to him, and Saska still had her back to her master in a defensive posture. The small woman was lowered into a half crouch, her fingers curled like claws.

“He’s human,” I said to them.

“There are more,” Kross said.

One of the windows broke. There were more shouts. One of the lanterns shattered and the room grew suddenly darker. A burning sphere, iron wrapped in some kind of mesh and flickering with angry red flames, rolled across the floor and stopped not far from where I knelt.

I saw it, started to shout a warning, and then the bomb detonated.

I was thrown back, my whole body spinning horizontally through the air. Angry bullets of shrapnel tore into my cloak, struck my armor. I had the wherewithal to cover my face, and felt the sharp impacts against my vambraces.

I hit the ground. My ears rang, muting the surrounding chaos. I managed to stand up, almost tipped over as vertigo seized me. I turned in an almost full circle before realizing I’d faced away from the threat.

The explosive had caused bedlam. Tables were broken and turned onto their sides, guests and servers lay on the ground in blistered, bleeding heaps. People were shouting, and the noise would have been deafening if the bomb hadn’t done that first.

Some kind of alchemical device, I thought. The smell in the air was bitter. Brimstone.

I caught sight of Falstaff. He knelt over a small form crumpled on the ground — Saska. She’d been even closer to the bomb than I had, taking it at near point blank range. She wasn’t moving.

“HEWER!” A voice barked. I spun and found Kross with his sword in hand. The blade had been broken about two thirds up its length, but he raised it and faced the inn’s front. I followed his gaze.

More black armored figures poured into the taproom. They came through the door, or burst through the windows, all clad in dark iron and all wearing concealing helms with masks nailed to the fronts. They were eerily silent, neither shouting orders or screaming with battle rage. They carried small axes, morningstars, cleavers, hammers.

Some clutched stranger weapons. One turned to me, lifting a long pole with a ring on the end, its inner edge sporting steel teeth. A man catcher. The ring snapped closed several times as its wielder advanced.

I shook the last of the fog from my brain just in time to dodge aside as the instrument snapped at my face. I stepped forward, grabbed the weapon’s haft, then yanked. The man fought me with savage strength, nearly taking us both to the ground. He was breathing heavily through thin slits in his mask, each exhale labored and wet.

I could see his eyes through the small holes in the mask. They were wide and dilated, the sclera red with burst veins.

I stabbed my rondel directly into one of those eyes. The man barely reacted, though the force of the blow knocked him back. My blade came out with a wet pop and a spray of gore. The man’s breathing grew heavier, faster. He managed to get his weapon back and swung it like a club. The ring at the end had spikes on the outside too, and he nearly slammed them right into my skull.

I decided to use a trick that’d served me well in the tournament the past summer. Infusing my left hand with aura, I waited for the soldier to lunge forward again and punched him right in the center of his breastplate. The metal crumbled beneath my fist with a brief flash of golden light. The ribs beneath broke, and the man stumbled back with a grunt.

He took another step toward me, then stumbled. Frostbitten fingers — he wore no gauntlet on that hand, I noted — scraped at his breastplate. He couldn’t breathe, the armor caved too far in to let him inhale. I could hear him gasping.

I stepped forward and finished him off, ramming my dagger into his helmet deep enough to get his brain. He crumpled, dead.

They still had to breathe. They didn’t seem to feel pain, but they were human.

And there were a lot of them. I scanned the war zone the inn had become. The black armored soldiers stormed in, moving like an iron tide, and they were butchering people.

I watched one strike down one of the Keeper’s girls with a hatchet, dropping her like a heavy sack of grain with a blow to the skull. Another had one of the guests beneath them and was stabbing a blade into his stomach over and over.

But this wasn’t an ordinary inn, and people were fighting back. I watched Tam, the changeling who looked like an enormous toad, literally crush one of the armored invaders under his weight with a sudden leap. Not far away, a screaming wraith literally slipped into a soldier’s armor. He fell to the ground, spasming and convulsing, blood bubbling through every seam on his suit.

One of the Backroad’s women shivered out of her glamour, revealing a shrieking elfin thing with piranha teeth. She spat acid at one of the intruders, and it began to form a cloud of steam around him as it melted armor and the flesh beneath.

But the soldier did not die, did not stop. Injuries that would have sent anyone else screaming to the floor for an agonizing death were ignored, and the black-armored figure swung a flail at the fanged changeling and broke her neck.

He turned then, saw me and stepped forward for more violence, then suddenly fell as the acid finally reached something vital.

I was so shocked and disturbed at the sight that I almost died to a billhook. I dodged it at the last second, cursing as it swept the air inches from my nose in a downward swing.

Their armor makes them harder to hurt, a cold, analytical part of my mind whispered. They don’t seem to feel pain. Anything that isn’t instantly lethal is useless.

I didn’t think aureflame would work well on these, but it would make their armor easier to deal with. I let golden fire flicker over my dagger as the masked soldier stepped back, lifting his billhook over his head for another chop.

He froze suddenly, staring at my burning blade. His helm had a more decorative look to it, a sallet with a flaring neck guard and a beaked front. The mask beneath looked serene, a cherubic face with rounded cheeks and spiraling designs to allude to an innocent blush.

This one tilted his head at me. No, at my blade. He seemed entranced by the fire.

A sword licked out and cut his head off. The decapitated body crumpled, and Kross glared at me. He had a fresh wound on his cheek that wept down the right side of his neck.

“Keep your head,” he snapped. “Or you’ll die.”

The false paladin turned and stared at Falstaff, who’d dragged the unconscious or dead Saska to the edge of the fire pit, pressing his back to the low wall of bricks ringing it. “Falstaff! Can you move the inn?”

The Keeper blinked up at Kross, looking dazed. Saska, who looked badly burnt, blistering wounds covering the left side of her face, stirred in his arms. Still alive.

I turned my attention back to the inn. Many guests had tried to flee into the back or into the upper levels, but the armored invaders had found some other way inside, perhaps through the windows in individual rooms. They poured out of the halls, killing indiscriminately. Some had crossbows.

Flames were beginning to crawl along the floor near the still open doorway where the bomb had gone off. A steady flurry of snow and chilling wind weren’t doing a thing to abate it.

Nearby, three of the masked soldiers were advancing on a group of people. Eilidh was among them, hiding behind the colorfully dressed westerner who’d sat at her table before. Jean-Luc. He swung an enormous sword — a zweihander — which seemed too big for the lanky man.

But the packed inn room wasn’t suited for the weapon. One of the soldiers, perfectly still a moment before, suddenly twitched with speed and dodged the blow, letting the long blade slam into a table. The masked butcher then swung out with a sharp hook attached to a chain. Jean-Luc fell with a cry as blood spurted from his shoulder.

The other two soldiers moved forward. I moved, sheathing my dagger as I did. I reached into the dark space between my cloak and left hip, using the red garment to create a deep shadow there. My hand sunk into that shadow, finding a freezing dampness on the other side.

I grasped roughly shaped wood, felt the little imperfections and burs like that of a wild branch, and pulled my axe free.

I leapt up onto a still intact table, used it to propel myself, and swung. Shadowy wisps still clung to the axe, like it trailed darkness. The helmet of one of the masked soldiers split under the faerie blade, blood and gore spurting out of every opening as the dead man fell under me. One of his companions lashed out without any warning, moving with an almost insectile reflex. I parried, kicked his leg out from under him, then used the time while he found his feet again to turn to the one with the hook-chain.

I flinched as that evil hook lashed out, managing to catch it on a vambrace. Sparks flew into my face. Growling, I stomped down hard on the floor. The wooden boards beneath me cracked under my sabaton, and golden fire bloomed out in a violent blast not unlike the small bomb from before.

It was an ugly, improvised attack, barely an Art, but it did its job. The soldier blew back away from me, crashing into a table and breaking it while amber-tinted flames crawled over him.

I turned to the one I’d knocked to the floor. He was already on a knee, an axe in one hand and a steel banded truncheon in the other. Drool poured out of the holes perforating the bottom half of his mask, like he was frothing at the mouth behind it.

I took a cue from Kross and decapitated him. It took two swings. He almost seemed to welcome the second, his arms slumping as I aimed for the cleft I’d already made in the side of his neck.

Sweat beaded on my skin. I gasped for breath, the short fight already taking its toll. These people, whoever they were, fought like berserkers. They threw themselves into the fray with no regard for injury, forcing me to put an equal effort into putting them down.

I heard Kross shout again. He was fighting two of the soldiers, both of whom were taking turns drawing his attention before retreating so the other could advance. Not completely insane — some were using tactics, communicating with an eerie silence and a reflex that bordered on inhuman.

“Falstaff!” Kross barked. “What is the delay!?”

The Keeper was standing by the fire pit in the center of the room. He held a hand over it, and serpentine tongues of fire coiled around his arm. Sweat beaded on his skin, and his eyes looked hellish.

“Something is anchoring us here,” he shouted. “I can’t move the inn!”

One of the black-armored soldiers went for the innkeeper. The same one who’d killed the acid spitting hagspawn. There was a flash of movement, then Lucienne — her upper half a pretty young woman with long hair and skinny arms, her lower half an enormous green snake’s tail covered in scales with a rattle at the end — slithered around the invader’s feet. She coiled around him like an anaconda, trapped his arms and legs.

The lamia stared down at her captive with almost curious eyes, smiled, then twisted her tail in a sudden and dramatic movement. Every one of the fully armored man’s limbs broke, metal screeching and grinding as it twisted and deformed.

She hadn’t killed him. His neck hadn’t been touched. I looked away from what happened next, feeling sick.

The short, bloody battle was ebbing. There’d been more than twenty of the armored raiders, and more than half that number were left scattered across the inn as the survivors retreated back out into the night, leaving as suddenly and quietly as they’d entered.

The Backroad’s inhabitants… they’d died in the dozen. I didn’t count, but there had to be more than thirty bodies, many dead and others badly injured. Someone was sobbing. There were shouts, pained cries.

It’d all lasted barely minutes.

I had wounds on my face from where shrapnel from the bomb had grazed me. Some fragments of metal were embedded into my armor. One of them emitted smoke.

“Fire,” I said, pointing to the spot where the bomb had detonated. The crimson flames were moving slow, but they were spreading. The Keeper noticed them and hissed, spitting something I didn’t catch. The brighter fire inside the pit flared, and the ones from the explosion began to dwindle. The creature inside the pit ate the flames.

I searched and found Kross. He’d killed several of the attackers and taken more injuries for it. He propped himself up with what was left of his sword, looking haggard.

Baring my teeth, I started towards him. He’d caused this, brought these nightmares here.

A hoarse, despairing cry ripped through the room, stopping me. I turned and saw Jean-Luc and a few others I didn’t know. The lansquenet was wounded, but it wasn’t him they were gathered around.

A dull feeling crawled into my chest. I started to approach. Most of the ones huddled near the wall where I’d heard the sound were the Keeper’s people. One of them heard me and turned. A black haired changeling whose glamour had come off during the fight, revealing something spider-like with too many limbs and eyes.

She hissed, probably just seeing my black armor and not distinguishing me from the ones who’d done all of this. I stopped, and when I looked past her I saw what they’d all gathered around.

Eilidh was propped up against the wall. Her face was pale, and blood pooled underneath her. A crossbow bolt protruded from her chest, just under the right breast. She breathed with obvious difficulty, each one emerging as a low wheeze.

Her eyes were scared. When she tried to speak bloody foam came out instead of words.

The bolt was in her lung. She was dying.