Abomination (13 page)

Sir Wulfric! Let go! You must let go of the sword!

He tried to do as the voice bid, but his hand would not respond to his command. As the dire beast moved toward him again, to within striking distance, Wulfric focused all the mental capacity he could muster on his sword hand, and felt his grip slowly begin to weaken. And then the beast leapt at him and he stumbled backward, the foul stench of the monster’s breath upon him—

Wulfric cried out as he felt himself hit the ground and looked up to see gray clouds drifting idly across the sky above. Edgard and Cuthbert hovered over him, looking down upon him with expressions of grave concern.

“What happened?” he asked, realizing then that he was breathing hard, his chest pounding. Edgard and Cuthbert both looked relieved as they saw Wulfric’s eyes focus on one, and then the other.

“You should not have touched the sword,” said Cuthbert. Wulfric looked and saw it lying in the grass, just beyond his reach. Cuthbert had removed one of his outer garments and thrown it over the blade. “I’m afraid it will have to be destroyed. The skill to disenchant it is beyond my ability. My apologies.”

Wulfric sat up groggily. “I was . . . I was
there
,” he said. His mind stumbled, recalling all that he had experienced in those last few moments.

“Remarkable, is it not?” replied Cuthbert with scholarly enthusiasm. “The clarity of the vision is almost—”

“What did you see?” demanded Edgard, and Cuthbert sobered instantly. “I saw what I had seen at Canterbury before,” he said, and he looked to Wulfric. “When the archbishop first began his experiments.”

Wulfric nodded. Now he understood why the farmlands and pastures surrounding Canterbury were eerily devoid of the animals that would usually be seen grazing there. He had assumed that they had been moved, or had fled in fear of whatever evil was brewing inside that cathedral. But he knew now what had become of them.

Wulfric sat astride Dolly, bedecked in her cavalry armor, with Edgard at his side, before the assembled ranks of his men on the hillside overlooking Canterbury. The time they had spent idling while Wulfric pondered had only sharpened their eagerness for this final battle; he could see it in their faces. And now that Wulfric knew what awaited them inside Aethelred’s lair, they would have their wish.

“In his desperation, Aethelred has reverted to the most primitive form of his cursed magick,” he announced. “He has gone back to whence he first began, transforming common animals into vile abominations that he hopes to use as a last line of defense. Whatever
small measure of control he had over the men he once enslaved, he has even less over these beasts. They may fight savagely, but without discipline, courage, or loyalty. That is what separates us as soldiers of God’s virtue, protected by his divine blessings, from the forsaken wretches in there.” He thrust his sword arm in the direction of the cathedral. “Canterbury is home to our most sacred beliefs, yet has been besmirched by a foul, blasphemous presence. No longer. Today we cleanse that cathedral and return it to God’s grace. Today we send the evil infesting it, along with the heretic who summoned it, back to the place from whence it came—
to the very depths of hell!
”

His men roared in unison, swords thrust aloft. As Wulfric turned his horse toward the cathedral, he and Edgard shared a last look, of the kind known well to soldiers who had seen battle.

“Good speech,” Edgard said with a smile as he glanced back at the men assembled behind them. “Their blood is up.”

“I only hope that no more of it than necessary is spilled today,” replied Wulfric. “Now let us be done with it. I want to go home.” And with that, he held his sword aloft, released a bellowing war cry, and spurred his horse toward Canterbury, with the thundering of three hundred hooves at his back.

Unlike the many Norse fortresses and strongholds to which Wulfric and Edgard had laid siege in their time, Canterbury was not designed to withstand an attack. Aethelred had made an attempt to barricade the outer doors with whatever materials he could find, but they gave with little effort, and Wulfric led the charge inside, into the cathedral’s spacious outer cloister.

Once a place of tranquil reflection, the cloister now more closely resembled the many battlefields Wulfric had seen on campaign, or the sacked villages to which he had borne witness as a child. The ground was stained dark with dried blood and the lifeless bodies from which it had been spilled—the bloated, flyblown carcasses of some of Aethelred’s contorted creatures that in their mindless savagery had taken to attacking and killing one another. Patches of ground were burned black from those beasts that belched fire. The whole place reeked of sulfur and bile and death, though there was little time to dwell on it. The many horrors that still lived within Canterbury’s walls were rising from their slumber and moving to intercept the throng of mounted men now surging into the courtyard behind Wulfric.

Wulfric spurred Dolly on, into the fray. The first beast they encountered was trampled beneath Dolly’s hooves, the second decapitated by a swing of Wulfric’s sword. The blade he wielded now was not his favorite—that one had been rendered useless
by the scrying—but he was no less lethal with it. The third beast attacked from outside his field of view—an oily tentacle coiled around the wrist of his right gauntlet and yanked him out of his saddle. His left foot was caught in its stirrup as he fell, and he hit the ground headfirst, hanging upside down on Dolly’s side.

The tentacle released Wulfric’s wrist and retracted, leaving a corroded ring around his gauntlet. As Wulfric struggled to free himself, he glimpsed, upside down, the beast that had dismounted him closing in. Even as it came closer, it was difficult to make out what exactly it was from this upended perspective. Wulfric still had hold of his sword, and he swiped wildly at the beast to keep it at bay, giving himself enough time to finally wrest his foot free from the tangled stirrup and right himself. As he rose and stood before the snarling beast, it occurred to him that it was no more recognizable right side up than it had been upside down. Its scaly, armored body was sinuous and lithe, and it moved like a serpent, except that it had four vaguely canine legs, an elongated nose, and sharply pointed ears. Its jointed tail curved upward and around behind it, like that of a scorpion. But where the stinger would have been, the tail instead bloomed open like the petals of a leathery flower to reveal within it the tentacle that had dismounted Wulfric. That tentacle slavered and writhed like a grotesquely distended tongue.

What had this horror once been?
thought Wulfric. He studied it for traces of the familiar, some visual clue to its prior anatomy before Aethelred had desecrated it.
Some kind of dog? A wolf, perhaps?
It was difficult to tell. Even for someone familiar with Cuthbert’s bestiary, there was always something new to chill the blood and shake one’s faith in God. What manner of God, after all, would suffer such a blasphemy upon his earth?

The tentacle rattled like a cobra’s tail and shot out at Wulfric once again, this time trying to snatch his sword from him. But Wulfric was faster; he sidestepped deftly and, with a downward stroke, sliced the tentacle clean in two. The serpentine beast
shrieked as it retracted the bloody, flailing stump and, enraged, charged straight at Wulfric, jaws opening wide to expose rows of slobbering canine fangs. The beast’s body lay low, no more than two feet off the ground, so as it came at Wulfric, he simply leapt atop it and, straddling it, plunged his sword down into its back, between the scales that ran along its spine. The beast shrieked ever louder and thrashed helplessly as Wulfric drove his sword deeper, skewering it to the ground. Still, it refused to die until Wulfric twisted the blade in place to open the wound wider and spill out its blood in a radiating pool beneath its quivering body.

When the beast was finally still, Wulfric withdrew his sword and turned to survey the scene. The battle was now fully joined, his men spread out across the courtyard and engaging all manner of misshapen beasts at close quarters. Watching as they hacked and bludgeoned their way through the monstrous herd, Wulfric grew satisfied that the fight out here was well in hand. Though they were outnumbered, it was clear that his men would carry the day—these lower, animalistic forms that Aethelred had conjured in his desperation were still fearsome, but less so than the humanoid varieties his men had become well accustomed to killing.

Wulfric headed toward the cathedral itself, where he knew he would find the fount of all this misery and death, and where he would finally put an end to it.

The wooden door was barred but gave with two slams of Wulfric’s pauldron, and he entered into the cathedral’s central nave. Sunlight shafted through the narrow slits of its windows and over the rows of pews that extended into darkness at the far end, where the raised altar was masked in shadow. His sword still drawn and at the ready, Wulfric trod carefully down the central aisle, his footsteps echoing off the stone slabs beneath. As he proceeded farther inward, the sounds of the battle outside receded, and he was suddenly aware of how quiet and still it had become. A church was supposed to be peaceful, but not like this. This was . . . not peace, just . . . nothingness.

There was an enveloping, almost suffocating sense that whatever a man might carry inside him, to armor him against despair or to bring him solace or comfort, had somehow been left behind, abandoned, upon entering this hall. It was the most unsettling sensation Wulfric had ever felt, and in that moment he knew exactly what it was. The presence of true evil.

He moved carefully, aware that one of Aethelred’s dire wretches might be lurking between any of the rows of pews he passed. And as he drew closer to the chancel, where the cathedral’s altar stood, and his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness there, he slowed. Here he began to make out the shape of a cloaked figure, seated, unmoving.

“Aethelred,” he whispered to himself, so quietly that not even a soul seated in the pew closest to him could have heard, and yet the cloaked figure seated fifty feet away rose as though he had heard his name.

“You will address me as Archbishop or Your Grace,” said Aethelred. He spoke softly, and yet when his voice reached Wulfric it seemed to echo powerfully all around him, in a way that had nothing to do with how sound normally carried in a place like this. This, too, Wulfric knew, was something else, something wicked, at work.

Aethelred took a step closer, into a beam of sunlight, and Wulfric’s suspicions were confirmed. Whatever dark magick the archbishop had immersed himself in these past months had utterly consumed him. His face had become pale and drawn, his frame wizened to the point of skeletal frailty. And his eyes . . . his eyes were worst of all, deeply jaundiced and shot through with blood. He barely looked human. As Wulfric regarded him with revulsion and dismay, he contemplated the final, bitter truth of the power Aethelred had unlocked. Such was its malign influence that it radiated not only outward, to make warped and pitiable creatures of its intended victims, but also inward, to slowly, gradually, visit the same fate upon any man who employed it.

While others might have hesitated out of sympathy for what appeared to be little more than a pathetic, afflicted old man, Wulfric knew better; he knew how much more dangerous Aethelred was than he appeared. Cuthbert had placed a fresh blessing of protection on his armor before he rode into battle, but still he took no chances; he made haste to close the distance between Aethelred and himself, to strike the corrupted priest down before he could summon one of his infernal spells. But to his surprise, the archbishop made no effort to defend himself; he did not raise a hand or mutter a word as Wulfric bounded up the steps to where he stood—not even when Wulfric grabbed him by the throat and forced him backward over the altar, his sword at the old man’s throat.

This is too easy
. Wulfric was briefly perturbed by the thought but set it aside to focus on his task. It was then that he hesitated, looking at the archbishop for the first time up close. Close enough to smell the sour stench of his breath, to see every line etched into his face. He realized it was not the yellowing, bloodshot appearance of Aethelred’s eyes that he found troubling; it was the
way
the priest looked at him. He stared up at Wulfric, eyes wild and unblinking, as if he had journeyed into some unthinkable, nightmarish beyond and never fully returned.

Wulfric saw in that moment that Aethelred’s magick had corrupted not only his body but his mind, had driven him to the depths of irrevocable madness. Killing him would be an act not only of justice, but of mercy.

And yet something stayed his hand. The edge of his sword was barely an inch from Aethelred’s pulsing throat; it would be the work of slicing an apple to open up his flesh and watch the life bleed out of him. But there was something about the crazed, otherworldly look in the man’s eyes. They bored into Wulfric, seeming almost to peer
within
him, into his very soul. He was the one holding this feeble and defenseless old man at swordpoint, so why did he feel so . . . vulnerable?