General Cracked Hammer's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

Cracked Hammer left the ruined seal at dusk and rode straight for the chapel. He did not go alone. He had sent word ahead to two men who owed him blood work, and they met him at the tree line before the doors. One was thick through the chest and wore copper plate, an axe long as a man's leg resting on his shoulder. The other was shorter, bandana knotted tight, knives up and down his belt. Cracked Hammer nodded once. He drew the weathered black saber from his hip and started toward the doors. The chapel squatted under its own rot. Blood ran down the stones in old stripes. Bone charms swung from the eaves. Cracked Hammer put his boot to the doors and they cracked inward on the second kick. The big man went in first with the axe swinging low. The knife man peeled left along the wall. Cracked Hammer walked straight down the center aisle toward the raised platform at the back, where a tar-black pool bubbled into the base of a spiked throne, and the Derelict sat above it with a viper coiled on his wrist. The big man reached the steps first. He swung for the twisted limbs braced against the throne's base. The axe never landed. A shroud of dark magic rose from the pool and spread across the chapel like a wet sheet, full of screaming shapes that pressed out against nothing. The axe rang off it and threw the big man back into a pew. The knife man drove three blades into the shroud and lost all three. Cracked Hammer took one more step and stopped. He knew old craft when he felt it. He lowered the saber. The Derelict watched him from the throne. The viper turned its six eyes on the knife man and hissed. Salvo Viss spoke, and something under his voice spoke with him, older and slower. "You came for a reading. You refused the price. The price has moved." He raised the hand that ended in a black tar blade. "Before, one. Now, two. A limb you need. The heart of one you love. Or the Lazarus draught of the Draugr Queen. Choose two." Cracked Hammer did not answer at once. He looked at the shroud, at the throne, at the tar pool feeding both. The seal at the Sun Hole would not open on his hate alone. This creature had sabotaged it, and this creature knew how to close what he had opened. He sheathed the saber. "Done," he said. "Two. I bring them to you." He turned and walked his men back out through the broken doors. Outside, in the dark, he set his hand on the big man's shoulder and told him to ready a wagon by dawn. He kept his face still. He had agreed to the price. He had not agreed to pay it. Before the second sacrifice touched that pool, Salvo Viss would be dead on his own steps.