Heward decided that he did not like master slayer Pentarch whatsoever.

  The templar knew he often failed to communicate his feelings to others, but he did have them. There was a heart beating in his chest and it did care for others; the Lady Veronique was one of them. The old slayer’s heart appeared to be made of ice.

  They kept their vigil over that vile haven of abominations for days. Their only activity had been to set out poisoned meat for the wolf pack which haunted the area. Sitting in their camp, Heward brooded over the fact that the cold-hearted bastard sent the Lady Veronique in there alone.

  She was brave, terribly so. It was the trait in her which Heward most admired, but she was also much too brave for her own good. Pentarch used that to manipulate her. To let him use her as his bait. Now Heward shared a camp with that very scoundrel every night.

  What choice do I have?

  If Veronique-

  If the Lady Veronique was still alive, then she was depending on him.

  Heward knew the slayer and the sorceress could not be trusted. He had even begun to develop uneasy feelings towards the priest. The only one he knew for a fact that the Lady Veronique could rely on was himself. He would not fail her while he still drew breath.

  “It is done.” Heward heard Father Alexius behind him.

  “What is-?” the sorceress began to ask, when all of them heard a tremendous howl from the castle.

  The sound seemed to come from many voices, calling out- screaming with all their might. It was carried by a raging wind. Then it was gone.

  All of them stood unmoving for a long time. They watched in silence as two dark figures took flight from the castle walls, and then vanished into the night. All at once, the spell was broken.

  The slayer whirled on Father Alexius. “She did it!? The Black Palatine has been destroyed!?”

  “He is no more,” the priest replied.

  Heward recited a prayer to Reason.

  Clear my mind. Forge my body into a weapon against evil.

  “We must send a message back to the village at once. We can put together a force there to search the castle during the day and-” Pentarch continued his scheming, but Heward was no longer listening.

  He started to march towards the front gate.

  “Where are you going?” The slayer called after him.

  “The Lady Veronique asked me to swear an oath to her that I would not interfere until either she or the Black Palatine were dead. That oath is now fulfilled. I’m going to her aid.”

  “Don’t be a damn fool! How are you even going to get past the wall? If there are any guards still on duty, they’ll shoot you dead before you even get close.” Pentarch had known his suggestion about the Lady Veronique taking the gatehouse herself after slaying the vampyre was farcical from the moment it was suggested.

  Bastard.

  Heward ignored him and turned back to look at the sorceress. “Magister Isolde, if you would obscure my approach with an illusion, I would be much obliged to you. Otherwise, you all may proceed as you wish. I’m going to find the Lady Veronique.”

  Heward was surprised to see Father Alexius following him. “I shall accompany you as well.”

  He chastised himself for doubting the priest’s resolve.

  “You can’t-!” Pentarch began to object again, but Father Alexius stopped him with a look.

  “No. It’s better like this. Go back to the village as you suggested and return with medical supplies. Move quickly.”

  Just like that, everyone went into action. Pentarch turned and left for the village. Magister Isolde conjured a night mist which hovered over the ground and covered their approach. Heward and Father Alexius climbed down from their observation to post to where they could reach the gate directly.

  There were no guards on the wall, but the portcullis was closed. Despite his earlier bravado, Heward had no concrete plan how to pass the barrier.

  “Perhaps we can find a place to wait out of sight. If the human servants flee, they’ll need to open the gate and we can-”

  Father Alexius approached the portcullis, then knelt down to pray. Heward was not sure what good it would do, but he remained respectfully silent. Every part of their plan had hinged on prayer and fortune until now. Why should this be any different?

  There was some movement he could hear on top of the wall, but Isolde’s spell worked both ways. It was impossible to know what the muffled sounds actually meant.

  What evidence did they even have that the Lady Veronique was still alive in there somewhere to be rescued? It was all almost impossible to believe. Yet while any hope at all remained, he would die to protect it.

  Then, to his utter astonishment, the gate opened.

  He hastily readied himself for an attack, but there was no one on the other side.

  Heward turned to Father Alexius. “Did you do that?”

  “It was the Lady, not I.”

  For the first time in his life, Heward wondered if he was not blessed to be in the presence of a genuine saint. Heward was a cynic by nature. He had seen so many charlatans exposed in his time; he sometimes doubted the gods even troubled themselves with the mortal men of such a fallen age any longer.

  The templar would not let himself get carried away by thoughts of that sort. He said a quick prayer of thanksgiving to his own goddesses and stepped through the gate.

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  “Father, do you know where the Lady Veronique is now?”

  “I cannot say. You should do as you think best.”

  There was a barracks near to them. Heward looked inside and found more than a dozen men collapsed at a meal table. It looked like the work of poison, but none of them were the woman he sought.

  The castle did not appear so large from the outside, although it was said to extend well below ground. It could take hours to find her, even if there was no one left to oppose them. Too much to hope for.

  Heward heard shouting from men up on the wall. He moved back into the shadows.

  “The gate ith open! Into the gatehouth you foolth!”

  Boots thudded above them. The wind howled once more. Heward prayed that it would cover the clink of his own armor. Stone steps led to the top of the wall. The wind could not disperse Isolde’s unnatural mist, which muffled all torchlight. It roiled into undulating and lunging shadows that danced on the edge of the firelight.

  His sword was out.

  Heward could just see the three men come into view, standing in a murky halo of light cast by the torches at the gatehouse door. One of them was looking back and forth while giving instructions to the others. “Forget her, foolth! Clothe the gate!”

  The other two men cast worried glances towards another figure standing inside the room. A woman, wearing aristocratic dress and eyeing them disdainfully.

  Not Veronique.

  The man with the lisp heard Heward’s approach a moment before he arrived. His longsword still smashed through the man’s collar bone, then parted muscle and flesh until it shuddered to a halt against the middle of the poor bastard’s rib cage. A look of dull shock was frozen on his face as his legs collapsed under him.

  Heward pulled his sword free.

  The first guard to regain his senses put a hand on his companion’s shoulder, and pointed him forwards. The second drew his short sword and advanced as ordered. The first turned and moved towards the gate mechanism.

  Heward wanted to intercept the first guard, but the second intercepted him first. He warded off a clumsy overhand strike with his shield. Then Heward cut open the blackguard’s side, the soft flesh between the hip and the ribs. The man collapsed to his knees, releasing his weapon in instinct to clutch at his wound.

  There was no time to bother with him. Heward impaled him quickly through the chest and turned his attention to the final foe.

  The last man was gone. So was the woman. He hoped one of them would have led him to the Lady Veronique. They both appeared to have simply vanished, although Heward believed he could now hear screams and thrashing from the swirling mist outside.

  He should remain to secure the gatehouse so that they had a means of escape.

  But Veronique is not here!

  Heward did not think Father Alexius could do much good holding the gatehouse by himself, and the priest now appeared to have vanished as well. Heward realized he was alone.

  He would need to search the whole castle, room by room. The main hall was the most sensible place to start.

  Heward climbed back down in to the courtyard and passed through the great doors. So many doors, multiple levels. It would be most efficient to go from the bottom to the top. How vast was the undercroft beneath him? He was running out of time.

  A cry of pain from a room on the second level. Not a woman, but something to follow. Heward’s boots hammered the floor as he ran. He no longer had any care for stealth.

  He crashed through the door and took in the scene in an instant. It was a library. Two figures, one collapsed on the ground, one in a dress collapsed on a chair. Veronique!

  Heward went to her at once.

  The man on the ground looked like another thrall of the vampyres. Heward realized it was the final guard from the gatehouse in a spreading pool of blood. He was still twitching, and Heward presumed it was he who screamed.

  A blond man in barbarian attire entered the room through a secret door in a bookshelf, led by the woman from the gatehouse held at his sword point. The Vangrian must have had giant’s blood, he towered over Heward. He did not see Heward at once, but his eyes went right to Veronique.

  “I knew I’d finding you sneaking that murderous witch through your secret tunnels. You’ll both suffer for this betrayal.”

  “Stay away from her, you bastard!” At Heward’s shout, the man lost interest in the Lady Veronique and turned towards him. “I’m here for you, and you won’t have her until I’m dead!”

  The blow came so fast Heward hardly saw it. He raised his shield in time only by well-honed instinct. It still knocked him to the ground. His arm felt broken.

  “Another one of your puppets, Elizaveta?”

  Heward struggled back to his feet. He expected a follow up attack, but the first strike had sent the vampyre’s sword through his shield and it remained lodged there. The barbarian went for another weapon, which he took off the belt of the guard lying beside the Lady Veronique. Heward dropped his own sword and his shield.

  He had the vial of purified water he prepared into his hand by the time the vampyre turned. The first splash of water elicited a shriek. The second caused the monster to turn and flee into the corner in terror. Heward prayed in Liturgical to drown out the screams from the third, and then the fourth. From there, too many holes were bored in the creature’s lungs and esophagus to make more noise, other than a faint wheezing.

  Heward had a brace of stakes with him and drove one into the monster’s chest. He pounded at it with a mallet from his pack until he was sure the vampyre was completely dead. The woman from the gatehouse was gone again by the time he was finished.

  The battle was over, and he went back to the fallen form of Veronique. She was so still. Deathly white.

  Heward removed his glove to touch her face. So cold.

  He pressed his cheek to hers and took her hand. “Speak to me, Vero. Please.”

  Heward felt her hand tighten around his. His lips moved across her face. He still heard no sound.

  “Vero? I’m here now, you’re safe. You must stay with me.”

  Father Alexius arrived. Where the priest had been before, he could not say. The man appeared to move through strange angles, and often appeared with no telling how he came to be there.

  Her breath was rasping and labored. “I’m scared…”

  “There’s no reason to be. Just stay here with me. The priest is here, he says you’ll be well very soon.”

  Father Alexius was absorbed drawing lines and glyphs in chalk, and said nothing of any kind.

  “Stay with me… hold me tighter…”

  Heward could hear soldiers approaching. Many of them. Too many to fight. He held her closer. “That’s alright. I’m here with you. I swear that I shall not leave your side.”

  “I love you.”

  “I-” Heward heard the sounds of battle from outside the room. He expected someone to be on them at any moment, but they did not arrive. “-I won’t leave you, Lady Veronique.”

  Heward knew none of the signs which Father Alexius drew. Their basic forms followed familiar arcane principles. However, as he expanded on them, they grew and followed wyrd patterns which were utterly beyond the ken of any occult science which Heward knew.

  “Will she live? Can you save her?”

  “I’m not certain…” Father Alexius put down the chalk.

  He took a long thin knife to cut himself along the outside of his fourth finger. Then he commenced to write again, drawing his signs together with his finger in blood, to weave a spell unlike any Heward had seen before.

  “…I no longer have the clarity to see the lines of fate.”

  The noise of battle reached a fever pitch. There were screams of pain and many shouted curses. No one had yet been able to break through and reach them. Heward made certain his sword was close.

  The sound seemed to go on and on, ebbing and flowing in its intensity. Gradually, it began to die away as Father Alexius worked. The priest expanded his signs to draw across her face, and tore open her dress to make signs over her chest.

  Heward averted his eyes.

  Only scattered cries of pain and terror still came from outside. Heward took his sword and carefully looked back out into the main hall.

  He stared in horror for many moments before he could comprehend what he saw. Dozens of soldiers lay dead or dying, all of them were still. The only movement came from a few figures, which moved from body to body. They were women in elegant and expensive dresses, but horribly bloated. Their skin was a ghastly pink, and they looked like engorged ticks.

  He retreated back to Veronique’s side.

  He did not leave again until Pentarch and the villagers arrived with the dawn. The strange women were gone by then, but the pale cadavers of the guards remained across the hall, and frozen to the ground in the courtyard. It was only then that Heward realized several old journals in a strange proto-sylvan script had been left where Vero first lay. He took them before departing.

  They carried Vero back to the church by stretcher. Father Alexius remained her constant attendant. They did not investigate the fortress any farther. When they did, at last, send a scout back, he reported that the gate was closed once more.

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