Chương 15

The first one came at him from the left. It was a centipede the length of a man, its body segmented and glossy black, with an elongated face, green mandibles that wept venom, and ten faceted eyes. Lodin's fist caved in its skull in a wet, hollow crunch. The second came from above. This demon had wings like a bat, talons like a hawk, a ratlike face and a maw lined with rows of teeth. It swooped in and Lodin caught it by the throat, crushed it. The third and fourth came together.

One was a hound with scales instead of fur, its snout flat and piggish, foam strung between its black gums. The other scuttled on eight jointed legs, its body low and bulbous, but the torso that rose from the center was furry and long-armed, with clever fingers and a flat face, and its eyes had the horizontal pupils of a goat. Lodin put the first down with an outside left hook to the head, the second with a straight right cross that blew apart its torso, and more came before the bodies hit the floor.

A serpent with a woman's face led the next wave, followed by a toad the size of a dog with teeth like needles, something that was all bulbous eyes and barbed tentacles, a hulking brute with tusks and hooves and four thickly muscled arms, and a thing like a skinned cat with a scorpion's tail. They poured from the darkness in an endless tide, and Lodin met them with his fists. His punches tore through chitin and flesh and bone. Limbs flew. Skulls burst. Ichor sprayed in arcs of black and green and red.

A claw raked his shoulder and he crushed the thing that owned it. Fangs sank into his forearm and he ripped the head from the body. They came at him from all sides, from left and right and above and below, and he put them down one after another, his fists a blur, the floor around him slick with blood and viscera and the remains of things that still twitched and would not be still. And they kept coming. The demons pressed closer, their numbers endless, a wall of teeth and claws and chitinous limbs.

He could feel the heat of them, the press of their hunger against his skin like a physical weight. The horde came from all sides, which meant this chamber had more than one mouth. Tunnels fed into it from the dark, and each tunnel connected to somewhere else beneath the Terraces. A network of hidden passageways to this evil place. He grabbed a spider-thing by one leg, swung it like a flail, and smashed three others flat against the stone floor. The impact shuddered up through his arms and into his shoulders.

The body came apart in his grip and he hurled the pieces at a cluster of winged horrors that dove toward his face. Something heavy struck his back. He caught himself, spun and faced a demon the size of a bear, its hide gray and hairless, its mouth a vertical slit lined with teeth that curved inward. The demon lunged. Lodin met it head-on. His left hook crashed against its jaw and bone shattered beneath his knuckles. The shock of contact sang up through his arm and into his shoulder.

He followed with a right cross that caved in its skull, and the massive body toppled sideways and crushed two smaller creatures beneath its weight. A serpent as thick as his thigh coiled around his ankle, its cold scales pressed tight against his skin. He stomped and felt vertebrae crunch beneath his heel, felt it go slack. A thing like a praying mantis slashed at his face with blade-arms. He caught one limb, tore it free, and drove the pointed end through the creature's thorax.

Chitin split with a sound like a lobster being cracked open. A demon with the body of a man and the head of a fly vomited acid at his chest. Lodin stepped sideways to avoid it but caught some on his shoulder anyway. Fire spread across his skin, bit into the muscle. He punched through its compound eyes and felt the head collapse inward like rotten fruit. The dead piled higher and the gaps between waves grew shorter. Lodin's fists flew in a blur. The floor grew treacherous with gore, slick beneath his boots.

His footing shifted and he adjusted, found solid ground, kept moving. Somewhere in the dark, more demons waited their turn. He could hear them, smell them, feel the weight of their malice press down on him from every direction. A centipede reared and he put it down without a thought. His knuckles split on chitin and he kept moving. Lodin's mind rendered an image of a subterranean chamber like this one, Lorn imprisoned within it, surrounded by a swarm of demons like the one before his fists.

The gentle voice returned, echoed from the walls. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"What a remarkable specimen you are. Much like your brother." The words hit him like a fist to the chest. Much like your brother. Something hot and bright ignited behind his sternum. His jaw clenched. His hands balled tighter, knuckles white beneath the blood and ichor.

"Where is he." The gentle laughter echoed again, and a fresh wave of demons surged from the darkness. He waded into the horde and the horde parted before him, split by fists that fell like judgment. Skulls burst beneath his knuckles. Spines snapped in his grip. He tore through chitin and scale and leathered hide, through muscle and sinew and the wet red meat beneath. The demons came at him in waves and each wave broke. He breathed in the stench of death and kept swinging.

Bodies piled at his feet and he climbed them, stood atop the mound of the dead and pulled down everything that flew or leapt or crawled toward him. Throats crumpled in his grip. He wrenched limbs from sockets and beat their owners down with the severed meat. Faces disappeared beneath his knuckles. The floor became a swamp. Gore painted the walls. The ceiling dripped red.

Lodin stood at the center of the carnage, chest heaving, arms slick to the shoulder, and the mountain of corpses beneath him steamed in the cold air. Then, without warning, the tide of demons ceased. Lodin stood atop the mound of corpses, breath ragged, and scanned the darkness for movement. Blood beat in his temples. His lungs burned.

"I asked you a question!" The darkness answered. Shadows at the edges of the chamber rippled like water disturbed by a stone, and then they rushed inward. They poured across the floor and swallowed the dead, rose up the walls and devoured the faint light that remained. A chill came with it that bit through his sweat-soaked clothes and sank into the marrow of his bones. Lodin turned, fists raised, but there was nothing to hit. The shadow closed around him like a fist, pressed against his skin.

He could neither see nor hear nor move, it seemed. The darkness had weight, it had substance, and it held him fast. A hand touched his chest. The fingers were profoundly cold, colder than anything he had ever felt. They pressed flat against his sternum, just above his heart, and the cold spread from that point of contact like frost across glass. A face emerged from the black, inches from his own. It was hairless and pale as candle wax, the paper-thin skin pulled taut over the skull.

The eyes sat deep in shadowed sockets, and they burned with a light that held no color and no warmth. The mouth curved into a smile, and the expression carved deep lines into that ruined face.

"Well met, Lodin Lundgren. I am Elder Gutou. Be still now," Gutou whispered.

"This will not take long." Cold sank through Lodin's chest, spread through his ribs, crept toward his heart. He felt something leave him, drawn out through that pale hand like water through a sieve.

"Your brother was chosen," Gutou said. His voice was soft, intimate, like a whisper shared between old friends.

"He is to be honored above all others. You should be proud." The cold spread deeper. Lodin's breath came short. Gutou's sunken eyes watched Lodin's face, patient, expectant, as if waiting for something. Something that did not happen. The smile faltered. Gutou looked down at his hand, still pressed to Lodin's chest. It was still drawing power from him. Lodin could certainly feel it, and so could Gutou, and evidently this was a shocking development.

"What…" Gutou breathed, "What is this…" His voice was even higher. Giddy, even. Lodin watched the hollows of Gutou's cheeks fill out and smooth over, watched the parchment skin grow supple and flush pink, then red. The sunken eyes blazed brighter in their sockets. Centuries of age and decay reversed themselves. Muscles knit themselves together beneath the flesh, filled it out.

"Oh…" Gutou breathed.

"Oh, this is... This is extraordinary." Lodin felt the pull intensify. It began to feel like a river flowing from somewhere deep beneath his bones and out through his chest. The cold spread down his arms, into his fingers, brought a fog into his mind. His limbs felt distant and heavy, as though they belonged to someone else. He tried to raise his fists and the signal traveled slow, too slow, lost somewhere between intention and action. All while Elder Gutou's expression grew ever more rapturous.

Lodin closed his eyes. Centered his mind. He had to overcome this unnatural daze. He turned his focus inward, down to the point where Gutou's hand pressed against his chest. To the place where the current flowed. The power moved through him. It had always moved through him. He was not its source. He was its channel. This was Guo Yan's construction, the secret wellspring of his strength. Lodin himself wasn't completely clear on the details of how it functioned. But it hadn't mattered at the time.

What mattered was learning how to use it. Because this was what would get Lorn back. Lodin reached for that current and pulled. Warmth flooded his limbs. The fog burned away like morning mist. His thoughts sharpened, his vision cleared, and his muscles remembered what they were for. Gutou's eyes went wide. Lodin's fist struck the Elder's chest and the force of it hurled Gutou backward through the dark. The shadows that had held him tore like wet paper.

He stumbled forward, caught himself, planted his feet on the gore-slick stone. His hands came up. His weight settled forward on the balls of his feet. Gutou rose from where he had landed. The skeletal frame was gone. In its place stood something vital and strong, flesh filled out over bone, muscle dense beneath skin white as alabaster. He was still hairless, still without eyebrows, his scalp smooth as stone. But the hollows had vanished from his cheeks. His jaw was square and firm.

His neck was thick, his shoulders broad, his hands no longer gnarled claws but the hands of a man in his prime. Only the eyes remained unchanged. They burned in that pale face, twin points of crimson flame, and they watched Lodin with a hunger that had not diminished.

"Fascinating…" Lodin settled into his stance.

"Come find out what else I can do." Gutou's smile was all wrong. It stretched too wide, bared too many teeth, and despite the refreshed vitality of his face, it still resembled the rictus of a corpse.

"My profound thanks to you, Lodin Lundgren." A pool of shadow opened at his feet and he sank into the dark.

"I shall find out what else you can do. But I just remembered a few matters that require my immediate attention, now that I've had the best meal I've had in centuries." His shoulders vanished beneath the black surface. His chin followed. Only the pale face remained, floating above the shadow like a moon on dark water.

"Fret not. We'll see each other again, very soon." The shadow swallowed him whole and left nothing behind but the stench of death and the silence of the deep.