Bone lord 2, p.27
Bone Lord 2, page 27
“Not if I can help it.” I whipped up my hand and shot a crossbow bolt at his face.
The little wrist crossbow was a deceptively powerful weapon, and it zipped its bolt across the cavern far faster than my uncle could react, even though he embodied the power of the Blood God. My aim was true, and the bolt smashed into his left cheek, burying itself almost completely into his face, and sent him staggering back. The Tree God’s magic began to spread across his face, which started turning brown and woody in texture. My uncle dropped his huge flail and gasped and grunted, pawing at the end of the deeply embedded crossbow bolt.
“Suck on that, asshole!” I yelled.
Turning him into a tree hadn’t been how I’d planned to kill him, but I wasn’t about to let him unleash whatever Blood Magic he was capable of wielding. It was a little unsatisfying, but ultimately the wisest option.
Coughing and gasping, he dropped to his knees, with all of us watching grimly as his face turned brown.
But then, he managed to get a grip on the end of the crossbow bolt and pulled it out of his face. Snapping it in half, he tossed the broken bits aside and started to laugh, slowly and loudly, a booming, mocking sound. When he turned around to face us, blood was flowing freely from the hole in his cheek the bolt had made, but all signs of the Tree magic were gone, and his skin was normal again.
“Foolish boy,” he growled. “You think that trinket can harm us? You think that little toy of a forgotten god can contend with the kind of power we wield? Now, you die, all of you.”
He picked up his three-headed flail and started whirling it around his head, and I sensed potent magic being summoned. I had a feeling that something really bad was about to go down.
“Get behind the shield wall!” I roared as I simultaneously commanded Jandor and his zombie Crusaders to lock their shields together to create a solid barrier between my companions and my uncle.
Everyone scrambled to get behind it, while I summoned the power of death from the deepest pits of the earth, plunging my mind and consciousness deep into the soil and harnessing the death energy of millions of corpses and skeletons buried beneath ground for thousands of years. I drew it up from the depths, sucking the ancient, all-numbing cold into my body, and channeled it into the magic shields of my zombie Crusaders, constructing a black wall of unimaginable cold, imbuing the steel of their shields with the blackest power of death.
And just as I did this, my uncle roared out a throaty bellow— his voice and the Blood God’s voice combined— and blasted a surging, spreading vein of red lightning out from his triple-headed flail. The boom of it rocked the walls of the crypt, sending down a shower of plaster dust and bits of masonry. Had I not strengthened my Crusaders’ shields with death energy, the power of the blood lightning would have killed us all instantly.
Instead, however, the red Blood Magic met a force it had not expected to encounter: the black magic of Death. The red lightning smashed into my Crusaders’ shields and sent them staggering back from the brute force of the impact, but my Death magic was strong enough to deflect the blast, and veins of red lightning bounced off the shields, rocketing outward in all directions, smashing holes through the walls they hit and bringing parts of the crypt ceiling crashing down. One vein hit one of the oblates, and he was vaporized in the blink of an eye. Nothing remained of him but a sprayed bloodstain on the side of the huge cauldron and a grisly pair of smoking feet.
“So, you are stronger than I thought, boy,” my uncle and the Blood God both said, the latter’s thunderous voice booming from my uncle’s throat. His eyes had now turned blood red, and trickles of blood were oozing out from them and dribbling down his cheeks. “Not nearly strong enough though!”
Veins of lightning crackled and surged around the spinning chains and heads of his flail as he whirled it around his head again. I braced for another impact, summoning more death energy from the depths of the earth and spreading it through my Crusaders’ shields as they hurriedly got back into formation.
“We have to counter attack!” I yelled. “Rollar, blast that asshole with your hammer!”
“As you command, my lord!”
Rollar leaned out from behind the shield wall, his hammer glowing, and sent out a crack of thunder that rocked the walls of the crypt almost as violently as my uncle’s blast of red lightning had. The force of it hurled my uncle up through the air, slamming him into the back wall of the crypt, but he retained his grip on the flail, and it continued to shine with rippling currents of red electricity.
“Hit him again!” I yelled, and Rollar blasted out another ear-splitting boom of thunder, which hurled my uncle up against the ceiling, after which he came crashing down in a heap on the floor, groaning.
Still Rodrick managed to grip his lightning-crackling flail, so I popped my head out above the top of the shield wall and fired off a few crossbow bolts in quick succession, each of which slammed into my uncle’s plate armor, the magic-imbued bolts piercing the red steel as if it were mere paper. I knew he could shrug off one shot of Tree magic, but half a dozen would at least slow him down. I sent bolt after bolt into him, his body jerking as each successive shot slammed home. I plugged three into his torso, another into each of his shoulders, another into each of his legs, and then, for the coup de grace, aimed a shot at his head, but the crossbow trigger clicked impotently. I looked down and saw that I was out of bolts.
“Fuck,” I said. “Just when I needed one more fucking shot!”
Even though I couldn’t finish him off now, the crossbow bolts and the thunder attacks had done some pretty serious damage to him, and he was groaning, slumped against the wall, forced to dilute the focus of his power to fight off the effect of the Tree magic.
“Now,” I roared, “you die, you piece of shit! He’s down everyone, charge!”
“Wrong,” he gasped. “You think it’s ending, you fool? It’s only just beginning!”
He swung his flail weakly, launching another bolt of red lightning, but this one wasn’t aimed at us. Instead, he sent it into the cauldron of boiling blood, from which thick red smoke started to rise, while the oblates’ chanting grew more intense. They amped up the red lightning they themselves were sending into the boiling blood, and it boiled and frothed and smoked more intensely.
Then, crawling and coughing up blood and plucking crossbow bolts from his body, my uncle struggled over to the shining portal of light. He looked up at me, his eyes still the color of blood, and smiled, blood pouring out of his mouth.
“You’ll have to do a lot better than this to stand any chance against us, nephew,” he rasped as he plucked one last crossbow bolt from his body. He flung it scornfully in my direction and stumbled through the portal, his body melting into the light and disappearing.
“No!” I yelled, racing toward the portal. “You’re not getting away. Not this time, you goblin-fucker!”
It was too late though; seconds before I reached the portal, there was a blinding flash of light, and then it was closed. The stone doorway crumbled and collapsed into a pile of rubble. My uncle was gone, and I had no idea where he’d disappeared to. Hell, for all I knew, he could be halfway across the world right now, or even as far off as Yeng or the Isles of the Sun, or down in the Sunblast Desert or Targon.
“Vance!” Elyse screamed. “Forget about your uncle. We’ve got trouble!”
“Big trouble!” Drok echoed. “Very big trouble!”
I spun around and saw that the boiling blood in the cauldron was starting to take form. Two enormous red, scaly hands were rising up out of it. I’d seen those huge, clawed hands once before, through the eyes of the dead, before an entire town was annihilated.
“Oh, fuck,” I murmured. “The Demogorgon.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
From what I’d seen in the flashbacks of the dead in Kroth, the Demogorgon was not something to be fucked with, and here it was, being summoned from whatever hellish plane it usually inhabited via a giant cauldron of blood and the power of the Blood God.
I wasn’t strong enough to take on this big red asshole, not yet, so we had to stop the summoning from being completed. I would need some extra power for this fight, so I drew on the power of my skeletal troops, channeling it through my body and focusing it into the chain of my kusarigama.
“Take out the oblates before they finish summoning that thing!” I yelled, charging at the cultist nearest me. “Everyone, pick one of these assholes and kill him!”
With a united roar, my companions charged out from behind the shield wall, and the oblates were forced to put their summoning ceremony on hold to defend themselves. I’d hoped that these pricks would be easy to cut down, like Bishop Nabu’s pathetic little monks, but they were in a different class altogether.
The oblate I was charging at, a thin, gray-bearded man with piercing blue eyes, spun around to face me, red lightning crackling in bright veins from every one of his fingertips.
“You cannot stop us,” he rasped. “The power of the Blood God flows through every one of us!”
With a wordless shout, he blasted out twin jets of lightning at me. I smashed them away with a whipping lash of my kusarigama chain, but when the chain connected with the bolts of lightning, two of my skeletons exploded in showers of bone splinters and bone dust.
I only had a couple of skeletons with me, and once they were all gone, my kusarigama would lose a lot of its potency, so the need to deal with these monks was urgent. I dashed in, whipping the chain around in a wide arc at the oblate’s head. He leaned back, arching his spine, and the chain whistled through the air an inch or two above his face. He came up laughing arrogantly, red lighting dancing on his fingertips again. But what the idiot didn’t know was that I’d intended for that strike to miss.
By the time he popped his head back up and lunged his hands forward for his counter attack, I was already sliding along the ground toward him, the blade end of the kusarigama in my hand. He barely had time to glance down and see me sliding under his legs, and as I slid through them, I slammed the blade end up, directly up. It pierced the oblate’s taint, between his balls and his asshole, and ripped a destructive passage through his innards, with the point emerging from his upper back. The momentum of my slide pulled the scythe-like blade out, opening most of his torso in a horrendously massive cut.
He screamed as half of his innards fell out of his suddenly opened body, then flopped onto the ground, thrashing and spraying blood and guts everywhere as he died. I came up out of the slide running, my focus shifting immediately to the next target. As I raced toward him, I shot a glance over at the vat, and alarm shot through me when I saw that the Demogorgon’s arms were now forming from the boiling blood.
To my left, Rollar was engaged with an oblate, using his huge hammer to deflect the cultist’s red lightning attacks and counter attacking with savage blows of the hammer, each smashing the oblate back a number of yards. Rollar’s opponent, however, was able to take most of the force out of the blows by blocking them with his lightning-crackling fists.
To my right, Elyse and Rami were tag-teaming one of the summoners; his lightning-powered hands were full as he desperately tried to fight off Elyse’s rope of light with his right hand and Rami’s vicious flurry of sai strikes with his right.
Ahead of me, Isu was engaged with another oblate. Using Captain Jandor and his zombie Crusaders as shields, she would dart out of a gap in the shield wall and blast acidic mist at the oblate, then duck back behind cover when he countered with a shot of red lightning.
Drok, Sarge, and my remaining skeletons had surrounded two more of the Blood God clergymen, and were attacking them with frenetic fury, with Drok in berserker mode, throwing immensely strong and super-fast attacks with his twin axes at the oblates, who were desperately holding off the attacks, back to back, with no chance to counter.
My zombie snipers were shooting at monks with their crossbows, but the oblates were stopping the crossbow bolts with their lightning-enhanced hands and disintegrating the bolts upon impact.
My companions would defeat the oblates—of this I was certain—but the problem was that there were too many of them. There were still a couple more oblates around the cauldron, chanting and pouring red lightning into the boiling blood to continue the summoning ceremony. Now, it had reached the point at which the Demogorgon’s head, shoulders, and torso were materializing. By the time we killed all of the oblates, it would be too late, and the Demogorgon would be fully materialized in this plane.
Then, we’d all be fucked.
There had to be something I could do to stop this. I didn’t have enough time to take out all of the remaining oblates one by one, and I couldn’t use my corpse explosion spell without harming my companions. Was there another way I could kill a bunch of them simultaneously? Or another method of using corpse explosion?
That was it.
As the idea took form in my head, I began to trade blows with the next summoner, with me fending off his lightning attacks with the chain end of my kusarigama and him desperately trying to block the slashes and hacks of the blade end with his lightning-charged fists. I faked a slash at his abdomen, and as he was blocking the blow, I drew Grave Oath one second and thrust it through his neck the next.
I didn’t wait for the dagger to suck his soul out though. There was no time for that. Instead, I whipped the blade out of his neck, unleashing a torrent of blood, picked the dying oblate up, and hurled his body into the cauldron of boiling blood.
He screamed in agony as the blood boiled him to death, and as he sank into the seething, foul-smelling liquid, I dropped my weapons, charged my fingertips, and prepared for my corpse explosion spell. I zapped a charge into his submerged corpse, and with a massive boom, the blast rippled through the cauldron, sending a huge plume of blood up to splatter the ceiling and drench the remaining oblates, who howled and writhed in agony as the boiling liquid burned their skin.
It didn’t kill them, though, and despite the pain they were in from the third degree burns, they continued to chant and blast lightning into the cauldron. While the explosion had taken a chunk out of the materializing body of the Demogorgon, the hole that had been ripped in its giant torso was quickly filled with more blood.
“Shit,” I muttered.
I needed a different plan, and I needed it fast.
Then, a memory came to me, a memory from my early boyhood, when I’d taken my kid-sized crossbow to hunt rats in the castle crypts. I remembered that there’d always been a ton of rats living down here, and I suspected that this hadn’t changed in the years I’d been away.
“Rollar!” I yelled. “Your Beast helm! Give it to me. Hurry!”
With a roar, he sent out a crash of thunder from his hammer that was so powerful that it hurled the oblate he was fighting up and back well over a dozen yards. The screaming cultist hurtled through the air, screaming, and landed with a plop in the cauldron, howling as he was cooked alive and sank into the boiling liquid.
Rollar whipped off his helm and tossed it across the chamber to me. I caught it, put it on, and felt its magic coursing through my body as I used that magic to locate every single rat in the crypts and the castle, everywhere nearby. It was like I had done in the Tree God’s temple, but a much more desperate command for assistance. I called them, communicating to them a sense of very real and urgent danger. If the oblates succeeded in bringing the Demogorgon into this realm, they would be as dead as we would be. I needed them to attack, now.
The rats understood, and being nervous and fearful creatures as they were, they grasped the immediacy of the danger they were in and responded to my call to attack right away.
From every nook and cranny in the chamber, rats began to swarm, coming in their hundreds, then their thousands, and they all charged, like a great furry, writhing ocean wave, at the remaining oblates. The thousands of rats swarmed over each summoner, biting and gnawing with a vengeful fury.
“That’s it, rats, get those assholes!” I yelled, as more and more rodents poured out of the holes in the wall and the cracks in the floor, piling on top of the screaming monks, who were dropping to the floor and writhing beneath a living carpet of fur, tails, and relentlessly gnawing incisors. “Eat the fuckers alive. Strip every last scrap of flesh from their bones!”
Now, there was no more red lightning being shot into the vat of blood, and the Demogorgon’s body paused in its materializing. To completely stop the ceremony though, I needed to put out the fire beneath the cauldron and stop the blood from boiling.
I needed my skeletons for this job, and I sent a signal out to Sarge and his skeletons to follow my commands. While Drok hammered back an oblate with his berserker rage, Sarge and the other skeletons dropped their weapons and began picking up the dead bodies of the clergymen who had been killed already. Under my direction, they began running over to the cauldron with the corpses and tossing them into the fire beneath it.
I wasn’t planning on smothering the fire with corpses though. No, quite the opposite. I was going to use force to put an end to this summoning, extreme force. Once the skeletons had piled seven or eight dead oblates into the flames, I yelled at everyone to retreat and get behind the zombie Crusaders’ shield wall.
I felt energy sizzling on my fingertips, and invisible threads connected me to each of the burning corpses in the fire. I pulled every ounce of magical power I possessed into my fingertips, aiming to make this the biggest explosion I’d ever pulled off, and unleashed the energy.
The force of the explosion hurled me off my feet and slammed me into a wall a dozen yards away. It knocked the Crusaders’ shield wall down flat, bowling over everyone behind it. It also launched the huge vat of blood up into the air with such force that it smashed a gigantic hole through the rear wall of the chamber, dumping all of the boiling blood into the adjacent chamber. The fire was extinguished, and the summoning ceremony was wrecked.
On the floor, the rats swarmed away as quickly as they’d come, and only blood-spattered skeletons remained of the oblates the rats had eaten alive. I was half stunned, with the back of my skull throbbing and aching from the impact of hitting the wall, even though the Beast helm had cushioned the blow. Still, I breathed out a sigh of relief. We’d successfully stopped the summoning of the Demogorgon.
