Chương 233: A Demon in the Dark

Ch. 233 - A Demon in the Dark No one was ready for him, not once he got serious about killing people again for the first time in months. The attackers perished under violent and mysterious conditions, and the defenders who found the pieces of those bodies were often sickened at the sight. Their disgust did not stop Simon from doing what needed to be done, though. He'd grown stronger, not just physically but in his abilities, and no one without magic could do much to him.

How could you fight a seven-foot tall beast with the strength of ten men that could freeze you with a look and vanish into smoke? They all grew to fear him, and it was well that they should. Simon feared what he was capable of as well. In an effort to spare Ionar the worst of his deprivations, he traveled north after only a few nights of slaughter. It was there they were most besieged and needed a miracle most. Some part of him wanted to talk to the King before he left.

He wanted to speak to Seyom one more time, but he knew that would be an act that was as selfish as it was horrific, so he only allowed himself one last look at his great-grandchildren playing in the palace garden from a distance before he soared north toward Coramin. He skipped the Oracle for the same reason. While he checked to make sure that the caldera city was still there, he made no effort to visit it.

As much as he wanted her insight, or perhaps the insight of her replacement at this point, for Simon wasn't sure if she was immortal, he stayed away. The only indulgence he offered himself was to stop by the mosaic that he had made with Bertrand half a century ago. It was still there, but it was no longer a lonely slab of rock in an out-of-the-way place. Instead, there was a marble pavilion surrounding it now, with an altar dedicated to "The Greatest of Teachers."

That touched Simon enough to make his eyes water as he was moved to tears for the first time in his entire beastly life. Even though he was hungry enough that he should have spent the evening hunting, he spent most of the night just gazing at that silent moonlight temple and appreciating the works of great beauty that he'd helped make so long ago. Well, he spent half the night looking at the well-preserved mosaic. He spent the other half looking at his hands and wondering how he'd gone from that to this.

Not even those hours of self-pity could stand between him and more bloodshed, though.

"I'll make art when this is done," he told himself before he returned to his current lair to recuperate and bask in the tragedy that was his current life. On the following night, he did not visit again. Instead, he devoured a pack of beastmen before continuing north. It took him two weeks to reach the border fortress and find a place to shelter from daylight. By then, its defenses had all but collapsed. It wasn't hard to see why.

They had too few men, and those who died or were wounded were replaced by beardless boys who were as green as they came. Simon had no idea how they would last the winter or really how they'd managed to hold the sea this long. Fortunately, he was in the miracle business, and it wasn't hard to see how to take apart the enemy's assault, a piece at a time. Ionia had never been a populous nation. It was the mountains and the seas that protected them from the deprivations of their neighbors.

The mountains couldn't do their jobs, to stop the invaders this time. Not even in these narrow passes. How could they when the enemy built bridges and reinforced paths so that siege engines and barricades could be brought to bear. Their camps were large and lay well out of reach of the defenders' few catapults, but the fortifications themselves were not that impressive. It was probably only the mage's unwillingness to risk their own lives that had preserved the small fortress this long.

Without his magic, Simon could do nothing to reinforce it. What he could do, however, even without magic, he could make the approach that much harder. Under the cover of darkness, it would have been the simplest thing in the world to tear apart the supports of those hasty structures and send them all tumbling down the slope. Still, even that wasn't enough. It would have been too sloppy. Stop Simon, think he chastised himself.

If you destroy a bridge, they'll just stop using it or build a new one, but if you sabotage a bridge, then who knows how many people will fall to their deaths. The beast within him had been thinking about the sprawling battlefield only in terms of vulnerabilities and body count, because that was what it craved. Even if it couldn't taste the carnage, it wanted more of it, but there was much more to it than that.

The pass was narrow, and there were so many ways to reach it from the valley below where they waited in safety, but mountains were dangerous places, and he'd grown much stronger than he'd been the night he killed dozens with his first rock slide, and this time he could kill far more with a little effort. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. For those first few nights, Simon only made the watchmen who might catch him disappear.

Instead of murdering people directly, he severed ropes, clawed at critical supports, and studied rock formations. Though he didn't do anything with the latter immediately, he noted the places where the stones might be used to the most devastating effect if and when the Murani tried a night attack. The worst part of Simon's subtle plan was he didn't get to see when his sabotage took effect. For a few nights, he might weaken a bridge, only to wake up and find it in ruins.

That was satisfying, but it was more satisfying to linger at the edges of campfires while skittish soldiers retold the horrible events. Their version of events was no doubt exaggerated, but even so, he'd seen dozens of bodies in the gorges and bloodstains that indicated that some had already been carried away, alive or dead.

"We're cursed, I tell you," one young man said, "Cursed! The Ionians have some evil sorcery, and the mountains themselves are turning against us."

"We have plenty of sorcerers as well," another man said with a shrug.

"If there's evil magic, they will counteract it somehow." Simon had been planning to kill the small group to start the panic that nowhere was safe, but that insight made him hold off. The mages at the heart of the army were a sort of security blanket for everyone else, which meant that real fear would probably require their elimination. Last time, he'd started with the general, but this time, he started with the warlocks. He didn't kill them in their tents. Not at first. He was too wary of their trinkets and traps.

They existed in a compound within a compound at the center of the army. They were practically untouchable there, to a normal foe. Simon could have snuck in and touched them all he wanted, but even he stayed away. He knew the place was riddled with tapestries and rugs marked with binding and force runes, making it dangerous to explore too deeply. Instead, each night after he fed, he watched and waited, waiting for them to leave. They had to leave eventually. They couldn't fight a war from within that crude camp.

They couldn't plan to rebuild or attack while they cowered behind their walls. The warlocks had no reason to cower, though, not at first. Those first few nights when Simon hunted them, they had no idea they were being hunted. They went about their business. They drank with friends and visited the outskirts of the camp to make love to their favorite whores. They just never returned home. All anyone found of them were charred and mutilated corpses. Things didn't stay that easy for long.

The guards they were escorted by didn't do much to deter Simon. His ugly yellow claws couldn't quite rip through steel plate mail, but such armor made a convenient handhold to slam the unfortunate wearer into the ground hard enough to crush their ribs. The mages fought with force and fire. Sometimes, they even landed a blow on Simon, which made him appreciate how much it hurt to be on the receiving end of magic. Not that it was enough to save them.

Those attacks did more to stall the overall battle than anything else. Afraid for their own safety, the mages stopped leaving their compound. Not just during the night, either. They stopped leaving it at all, at least according to rumors. Those went wild after so many deaths. They called Simon a demon and gave him a number of creative names. Some, like the Bloodthirster, were appropriate, given that he was a vampire. Others gave him even stranger names, like Night Creeper or the Breaker of Ways.

It took a few nights for the Murani to settle on the idea that he was a Fury. That was a mythical creature unique to Ionar that dealt out righteous and deserved vengeance to the wicked. Simon had done a number of paintings on the subject, so he didn't mind the comparison, though he was far uglier than any fury he'd ever illustrated. A Fury was an old woman with claws for nails.

She often had wild dark hair that would strangle cheaters and a tongue that was nearly as sharp as her fangs that she would use to drive liars to suicide. Ugly as those withered spinsters were, they were still human. Strangely, though, by the time they'd decided what he was, the average soldier no longer seemed nearly as afraid of him as he once had. It turned out there was an answer for that, too, after he lingered long enough to listen to the watchmen speak about it.

It turned out that their confidence was once again the Warlocks's work.

"They will definitely use magic to banish the Fury," one man explained.

"Old gods have no power over new ones. There's no way such a relic can defeat us."

"I thought they were summoning a demon from the pits below to do battle with it?" another one asked.

"Haven't they done that before?"

"They have," another agreed.

"I heard about it from a friend who fought at Darndelle. They don't like to do it much because of how many slaves they have to sacrifice, but Demons can certainly be made to fight if the price is right." Simon was skeptical of the latter, but he was positively incredulous about the former. Banishing him with a spell would be impossible because he wasn't a summoned creature.

As to summoning a demon to fight on their behalf, that was more believable, but Simon had only read about such instances rarely, even in the heart of the Unspoken's black library. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see, he thought as he soared into the night and observed the mage compound from afar. They were certainly up to something big. He could see the preparations from a ways off, but he did not yet know what it was.