Haggar Bozeman had spent untold hours of pain, sweat, and tears trying to get ahead in life. He had built up a small trading business, owned his own textile mill selling cheap fabrics to the underclass, and exploited his workers ruthlessly as he attempted to move up the living scale.
Unfortunately, he had been thwarted time and again by other equally ruthless people. A fire at his mill. Organizers trying to unite his workers. Shipments lost in storage. ‘Protection’ fees from the local mob. Zoning inspectors that had to be bought off or he would be shut down. Pressure from richer men trying to buy him out for a tithe of the value of his assets.
He’d had enough of their tactics, and so when the whispers of the Cult of the Eye in Shadows came, he was willing to listen.
Now, he was engaged in a Summoning. The secrets he had been taught had not been great, but they were enough to let him aid in this thrilling ceremony, bringing in a servant from Beyond to help all of them finally realize their ambitions. The Wards of the city had, over the centuries, developed many holes, punched in them by interested parties trying to gain an edge over their rivals, and such a one was being used today.
Power was swirling in the air with their chants, building under the steepled roof, heavy with the smell of preservative incenses and the fresh blood of a couple of Boss Femerman’s bully-boys, personally volunteered for the role of sacrifice by himself. The Veil between worlds was being thinned slowly and subtly as the alignment of stars above disguised it from the Wards. Calls from unhuman throats were starting to echo from within the circle and stir the candles rendered from corpse fat, singing to them of ambitions nearly fulfilled.
“Hey, mister, what would happen if this candle fell over?”
Haggar Bozeman blinked, forcibly shaken from his trance, and looked over, his mouth falling open in shock.
She was incredibly cute, with long white hair in two ponytails bound with blue bows, huge pale blue eyes, an immaculate blue and white dress, and might have come up to his chest. His first impression was that he was definitely going to capture her and take her home to use as his sex toy with such youthful beauty, and then his vapor-raptured mind finally took note of where her hand was, and the question she had asked.
“What?” His tongue felt thick and heavy, even as his alarm rose. “No!” he protested, as other enraptured eyes turned his way, and tried to process what was going on.
Burghar Klauswitz responded perceptibly faster than everyone else, as if his mind was not lost to the magic and the drugged vapors. “Stop her!” he screamed frantically.
Veis pushed over the heavy candlestick. The heavy bronze stand and its unholy burden fell over, breaching the containment circle and messing up two of the painted symbols as wax spilled from the candle and marred yet another sweeping line.
There was a pause in the magic, the calls and sounds from beyond going suddenly and very ominously silent.
“Oops!” said Veis, and turned and ran away.
The Summoning Circle exploded with a scream of the Veil being ripped, and calls from beyond that were anything but obedient now. The first boneless arm flopped up through the Portal in the floor, drawing out a half-toad, half-cat thing the size of a rhino, looking around with five bulging eyes at the aghast cultists who could no longer control it.
The fear finally hit them, and the men began to scream even before it pounced on Haggar Bozeman with frog-like jaws opening wide, set with very un-froglike curved teeth.
---
“Aaaahhhhh!” Veis scampered down between rows of goods in the warehouse, and the ulgahi crashed into a box of cloth ties and buttons, which promptly stuck to its acidic, oily skin and began to smoke. Little feet moving very quickly, she darted away from it as the Aberrant writhed to its boneless feet, fixed three of its eyes on her, and bounded once, twice, and leapt up to grab this little snack fleeing away.
Rather abruptly, two other snacks slid in from either side, and a gleaming Rapier and Spear, both coated in the horrific blue shade of the Cerulean Sign, rose to intercept it.
The Spear hit first, right in through the mouth and driving into the skull atop it. The weight of the ulgahi slammed all the way down a foot of steel, until bone smashed into the boar-stopper behind. Its body kept going as the butt of the Spear crunched down into the stone floor, and the Rapier dipped, point driven by Anathema towards the most vulnerable points, and drove into the ribless chest and a certain organ behind there, spitting it cleanly.
Veis turned around, ran right up Verd’s braced leg and off her shoulder, spinning with her long knives as she kicked off a tall crate of loom parts to the side, and opened up its wide, flaccid throat as she cut across it, ignoring its flailing limbs. She hit a lower crate on the far side and rolled out of its range as a gaping cut nearly two feet long trailed behind her, jetting out greenish-black ichor at odd angles, which promptly began to burn cerulean and unwhite.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Verd let the heavy mass of the creature drop, twisting her Spear and leaning into it as she ripped it out, making the massive wound worse. The ulgahi tried to croak and paw at her with burred toe-pads that could stick to and rip away skin and flesh like glued fish-hooks. It plopped to the ground, its wobbling skull burning in two shades of hostile hues that were eating it up.
Feist looked down from up on a support beam, from whence he could have dropped down to instantly kill the thing. Grym swung out from the shadow of a pillar, like a statue suddenly starting to move and equally quiet. The girls below looked up at Feist, and he pointed back the way Veis had come.
There were more ulgahi to kill, although the screams of the cultists were more intermittent now as the Aberrants slowly and lovingly pulled them apart. They would not last long, as without a proper Summoning their existence here was subject to the stars, whose power would fade anytime between now and the sweeping power of Aru’s Great Renewal in the morning.
But that hardly meant their group had to sit around and wait for them to go away, when there was Karma to be had, right? With Grym and Feist there as back-up in case things went wrong, there was no great danger.
So went their first night in Konndital.
========
“Hi there.”
The man sitting at the table looked like a scholar, being thin, bespectacled, holding a book in his hands, and in the second-or-third season-to-last wave of fashion typical of a member of the middle classes. There was little to separate him from the other clerks and scribes also perusing this small café, where they could soothe their quiet complaints with hot kaffe and snobbish discourse with their peers.
Of course, nobody else in the place had three attractive teenaged girls gathering at their table, so all eyes were momentarily upon him.
“May I help you?” he asked them, watery eyes flickering over them, a momentary flicker of fear turning to confusion.
“We are here to deliver a letter!” Amber announced to him, Verd nodded, and Veis stepped forward with the letter in both of her small hands. “We have to confirm that you have read it, so please, sir.”
Mystified, the man took the plain envelope, which had an unmarked grey seal, opened it, and slid out the letter within. He held it up, and began to read.
It only took a few seconds for the blood to drain from his face. He swallowed, looked at the three girls, and read further. When his eyes finally found the signature at the bottom, his pupils instantly shrank to half normal size.
“I-I will be there,” he managed to gasp, his complexion not returning at all.
“Thank you!” Verd chimed helpfully, and all three girls curtsied to him and strolled quickly away.
---
Professor Culminos, time traveler, historian, and dabbler in chronal mechanics, swallowed as he looked at the symbol of a shadowed knife at the bottom of the letter.
He had thought that he was being subtle, careful not to interfere in the course of history, merely observing and doing research for what was sure to be an explosive paper, a first-hand account of one of the most tumultuous periods in history.
The Shadow and the Knife hadn’t even had to show up personally, merely sending this letter. Obviously, the Void Brother knew who he was, why he was here, and where he was. If he fled, likely the Brother would be there waiting for him, wherever and whenever he went, following his trace across time as surely as a Hound of Tindalos, and there to greet him when he synched with normal time again.
If he did not go, even if he returned home, he was likely dead as soon as he returned to his own time. The myths about their power were true...
But... he was not dead yet. He prayed softly under his breath to Uruth, Lord of all Magic, that he would get out of this alive, and reached for his kaffe to soothe his frayed nerves.
That his hand was shaking as he took it was noted by more than a few of his neighbors, who carefully turned their eyes away and minded their own business, not wishing to get involved in something which had so clearly frightened one of their peers...
-------
The wererat was a little surprised when its skull was crushed.
Generally speaking, a horse wasn’t much of a threat to it. Sure, a full-on stomping might be painful, but with DR 10/silver, werefolk in general were pretty much immune to anything short of a massive blow or something striking a weak point. Getting kicked by a horse was normally less dangerous to them than a normal human sticking another with a dagger.
Of course, when that hoof happened to have mithral horseshoes upon it, well, DR/silver was bypassed by starsilver, just like the more mundane stuff.
Energized titanium infusing his hooves, Tabi reared and came down on another wererat that was showing an unhealthy interest in The Wagon, and a narrow skull was pounded through and shattered.
Two squeaking and overconfident wererats jumped off the top of The Wagon, and the Horse stepped aside. They hit the ground hard, but with their DR, it meant nothing... until he spun, shifted all his weight to his front hooves, and like a see-saw, bent forward to kick back with both rear hooves.
Breastbones crunched, both rats flew back into the side of The Wagon with spine-tingling impacts, and he shuffled back a step as they fell to the ground, bereft of breath. His second set of kicks caught them both in their faces, crushing their muzzles and driving them back into their skulls even as their necks snapped.
The last couple of rats ran up at him, stabbing with their short swords, slicing at his legs and belly respectively.
He felt the pokes, and was amused despite himself. He turned his head, and his teeth sank into the furry shoulder of the one on his right. He lifted as the wererat squealed, and flung it up, then down right at his feet. Before it could recover, his foot came down and crushed its skull flat.
The last one finally realized something was wrong as it poked again, and couldn’t get past Tabi’s DR 7/-. The Horse turned to look at it, giving it a very unequine smile and snort of amusement. The wererat started to back up, and Tabi hopped as lightly as a deer, smashing himself sideways and crushing the wererat against the side of The Wagon. It didn’t do any real harm, but stunned the wererat and deprived it of breath. Tabi reached over, his teeth sinking into its ear, and flung it down in front of him.
The wererat just had enough time to squeal before the platter-sized silvered hoof came down on it.
Tabi looked over the assorted number of dead with crushed skulls, already reverting to their human forms. He snorted in disinterest, matching up what Mistress Hazé had told him about such things, and with patient disdain, reached down to drag the nearest one nearer to the parked Wagon and out of casual sight, kicking the corpse underneath it with an easy sweep of his hoof.
The girls would dispose of them properly when they came back...