Dark Harvest (Darkling Mage 2)

“Very funny, asshole.”

But this wasn’t funny to me, not at all. It was too similar to that one night some months ago, when I had discovered a wealthy couple – the Pruitts – murdered in their own home. That, and a dead god, but that’s a whole ’nother mess. Point was that I’d had prior experience with finding corpses when all I was out doing was trying to steal an enchanted artifact or two. How dare these people have the nerve to bleed to death in my general vicinity when all I wanted was to relieve them of their priceless bewitched belongings?

Sorry, terrible joke. I have to be honest though, Vanitas’s little warning was gnawing at me. That was how I found the Pruitts after all, by smelling, almost tasting their blood on the air. I trusted Vanitas enough to be able to detect that sort of thing. Hell, it would have been stupid not to. His hilt kept pressing into my back as he guided me like a dowsing rod. Just past that curtain, he seemed to say, pointing me towards the gazebo and its billowing drapes.

My foot sank into the earth, and my heart thumped. It was wet here, but not because of the artificial stream. I bent closer, daring to sniff at the soil. Wine, and the dirt was getting looser and muddier, meaning that the source of the liquid – the Chalice, no doubt – was somewhere inside the tent.

I shook the mud off my foot, cursing to myself. Sure, I could buy nicer things now, but my sneakers weren’t a dime a dozen. Though I couldn’t help thinking that there were more pressing matters. The smell of blood, for example. By rights I should have been anxious, on the verge of panic, really, but I knew that some part of me was still in denial. I’d seen enough death in recent times, and I couldn’t be so close to more of it. Could I? Not in a place like this, so tranquil, a garden of delights with its stream of cool water, and a second stream of wine.

Then a man burst through the curtains, screaming, blood on his face, his hair bedraggled, crazed eyes bulging. He was naked, his torso smeared in red. It wasn’t body paint, that much was clear. He clutched and pulled at his hair as he shrieked, his voice going louder and hoarser as he found me, as our eyes made contact. The man exposed his teeth – white, but streaked with gore – and charge

d straight at me, his fingers gnarled into a claw that stretched for my throat.

I panicked. No time to shadowstep, so I did the next best thing. Twisting out of the man’s trajectory, I let him come to me across the wine-slicked mud at the base of the gazebo. His screams didn’t let up as he slipped in the soft earth, but I aimed a kick at his shins for good measure. He went down heavily, collapsing face first, but the fall barely impacted his momentum. The man scrabbled at the earth, pushed himself to his feet, and with renewed, insane fervor, ran screaming for my throat once more.

Drugs. Had to be. Guy couldn’t be drunk. I didn’t care how much wine went down this psycho’s throat, even if he chugged it straight from the Chalice. No one gets that violent just because of alcohol, and he would have stayed down after that first trip. I watched him cautiously as he ran, my eyes flitting for the right shadow to enter –

When the leather straps securing the sword to my back snapped apart. I froze as the blur of verdigris and bronze sailed past me, the red garnets embedded in its hilt flashing as it rocketed through the gloom.

“No,” I shouted. But Vanitas kept flying straight at the man’s throat.

The last time this happened, Vanitas bulldozed dozens of shrikes, these horrible, multidimensional creatures made out of masses of tentacles and way too many teeth. Before that, just minutes after I met him, he cut a man’s hand off at the wrist. This wasn’t going to end well. I ran after Vanitas, wondering what I could possibly do to stop him, when I noticed at the last moment that he hadn’t unsheathed himself.

The wind sang as Vanitas swung from a fixed point in the air, cleaving a gold and green arc. Sending a crack through the room, the blunt edge of the sword’s scabbard collided with the crazed man’s face. The loud crunch and the spurt of blood from his mouth told me he was losing at least a couple of teeth in the bargain. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head as he fell backwards into the muddied earth.

“I thought you were going to kill him.”

Vanitas, still in his scabbard, scraped himself gingerly against a clump of grass, smearing away the man’s blood. “He clearly was not in his right mind. Besides, it’s not like I’m trying to get you in trouble on purpose.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“And we might have a chance of questioning him when he wakes up.”

“Unless you knocked his brain out along with his teeth. Does he even have his tongue still?”

“Hush,” Vanitas said. He hovered closer, floating at my waist level, blade upturned. “The cup. Where is it?”

That’s right. I parted the curtain at the same side of the gazebo where the drugged-up dude had emerged. Vanitas stayed close, which filled me with some small comfort. Who knew if there was another one of these lunatics hanging out in there?

Turns out there wasn’t. They were all dead.

“This is bad,” Vanitas said.

Bad was an understatement. The inside of the gazebo was decorated with the same mix of plants and silks as the outside, all formed around a small, shallow pool that had been built in the center. The Chalice of Plenty lay on its side, half-submerged, half-floating in the slow but steady tide of deep red wine that poured from its lip. The wine spilled over the edges of the pool, rendering the soil around it soft and muddy.

In the mud, and partly in the pool, lay all the corpses. A dozen from what I counted, naked men and women, their bodies marked with hideous red gashes. The tips of their fingers and their nails were a macabre crimson, as if they had clawed each other – or themselves – to death. Worse still was how some of the corpses had ecstatic smiles frozen on their faces, mouths in grins, their dead eyes glassy.

At least the ones that still had eyes, that is. Some of the grislier corpses had ripped their own eyes out. I held a hand up to my nostrils. Rot was far from setting in, but the sheer number of open wounds and the volume of gore made the gazebo stink of copper. Blood mingled with the wine spilling out of the Chalice, seeping into the mud. This wasn’t an orgy. This was a massacre.

Vanitas spoke again. “We should go. Now.”

“But what about the dead? What about the unconscious guy outside? We need answers.”

“We came for the Chalice, and we’re leaving with it. That’s what Carver wanted. Besides – we’ve got company.”

Weird noises emanated from far outside the gazebo, close enough that I knew they were coming from inside the house. I froze in place. Cops? Interlopers? No. Worse. I recognized those sounds, those characteristic hums and pops and squelches of human bodies materializing out of thin air. Teleporters.

The Lorica.