THE DAMNED ONE HUNDRED
Jonathan Maberry
1
“If the Gate falls, we fall!” Kellur yelled at the top of his voice.
The iron doors remained shut. Silence was the only voice that spoke to him beyond the ghost echoes of his own words.
“They won’t answer, Father,” said Kan.
“They’ll answer,” growled Kellur, then added, “They must.”
Kan looked away, and Kellur immediately regretted his words. He knew that his son was unable to meet his father’s eyes. The boy was embarrassed, and for good reason. His words were weak. They were a house of straw built in the wind. They must was many weary miles from They will.
Kellur squared his shoulders and stepped up to the doors. They were twenty feet high but narrow, and every inch of each bronze panel was set with carvings of demons and gods, heroes and monsters. The whole of the scriptures were there. The birth of Father Ar in the endless fields of the Summerlands. The last of the old gods blowing her last breath into Ar’s lungs, making him immortal, beginning the age of the New Faith. And all of the parables and stories of the six Books of the Faith. All of the wonders and miracles, all of the treachery and bloodshed upon which their beliefs were built. The sacred and the profane, recorded here in thousands of tiny metal figures carved from solid bronze doors. The works of a hundred nuns for a hundred years.
The great doors were set deeply into the living rock, the metal work perpetually in shadows. Kellur knew full well that no sunlight ever touched those doors. No sunlight touched this side of the mountain pass at all. It was why these witches had chosen this spot to build their cathedral.
“Open the door and hear me speak,” bellowed Kellur. He pounded the side of his fist against the bas-reliefs of Mother Sun and the hero twins. “I come in the name of the Chosen. I come as defender of the faithful. Open!”
The sound of his pounding fist coaxed echoes from within.
“They will not answer,” repeated his son. Kan was sixteen winters old. A fine, strong boy with his father’s face and the hard, clean build of his grandfather. Blacksmith shoulders and scholar’s eyes. Like all the men of their line. Warrior artisans. Poets and fighters. And like all of them, stubborn.
“Hush, boy,” snapped Kellur. “They’ll answer if I have to knock these doors down.”
The boy opened his mouth to say something, then shut it. He looked away again, facing east toward the howling wind. The road down from this mountain pass twisted like a snake. The bones of ten thousand times ten thousand men littered the hollows at the foot of these mountains. Bones of heroes, bones of soldiers who had marched along that path toward the Red Gate that blocked the way one mile to the west.
No one walked through those broken rocks. Not yet. But far, far away, the sound of drums could be heard. It was like thunder from a coming storm. Kellur knew that his son was listening to that sound more than he was watching the road. The mountain passes amplified distant sounds and carried them for freakish distances. To someone who didn’t know this, those drums sounded like they were no more than five or eight miles away. In truth the vanguard of the Hakkian army was more than fifty miles away. Days away.
That distance was not a comfort. The Hakkians were marching as fast at the treacherous pass would let them go. As fast as the whips of their sergeants would make them march. As fast as the war songs of their trumpets would impel them.
They would be here in two days. Three, if they paused to rest before they assailed the Red Gate. Soon the lumber carts bearing the components of their siege engines would roll up the long slope toward this spot. There the army would pause and build its towers. The towers that had brought down West Aylia and Goshtan. The towers that had allowed the Hakkians to flood like ants over the walls of Betheltown and Vale.
Then the Red Gate would fall, and the whole of the west would be laid bare to the enemy.
The fear of that, the horror of that, put steel into Kellur’s fist, and he spun around and hammered the door until pain exploded in his flesh and sent shocks up his arms.
“Open the door, you damned witches. Open the door to the Champion of the Faithful. In the name of Ar I demand this!”
He staggered back, chest heaving, hands pulsing with pain, mind ablaze.
Despair was a black scorpion that crawled through his mind.
Then, from far above, a voice spoke. Old, creaking, leathery. Nasty.
“You dare invoke the name of the usurper god when knocking at our door?”
Kellur and Kan looked up to see that a section of the rock wall above the door had swung out on iron hinges. A woman leaned out to stare down at them. She was so comprehensively wrinkled that she appeared to be little more than a mummy. Wisps of gray hair clung to her yellow scalp, and her eyes were so deeply set that they seemed to be the hollow sockets of a skull. She craned her head forward to study them, but she still stayed within the shadows.
“Woman,” said Kellur, “if woman you be, then yes, I dare invoke my god. But if that is an evil thing to you, then tell me by whose name I should call, and I will be on my knees in prayer if that will get you to open these damned doors.”
She studied him, her lips writhing as if preparing to speak, but for more than a minute she said nothing.
“Will you not speak to me?” demanded Kellur.
“You would bend a knee to the true goddess?”
“Father . . .” whispered Kan, “what are you doing?”
Kellur ignored his son. “Name her and I shall sacrifice a thousand spring lambs on her altar.”
“Even to the point of forsaking the false god, Ar?”
“Even then.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You wear the coat of a Knight of the Faith. You call yourself the champion of that religion. Why would such as you forswear his beliefs? What calamity would make you do this? Or do you come here with lies, as so many have before?”
“What choice have I? The wolves are at the door, and the hour of our doom is at hand. That is not poetry; I am not quoting a song. This is real, and it is happening. I am the Champion of the Faithful, loyal son of Father Ar, this is truth. But the greater truth is that I am charged with protecting all of the Faithful, with protecting everyone west of the Red Gate from their enemies.” He pointed toward the eastern road. “Those enemies are coming. Do you not hear the thunder of their drums? Do you not know the doom they bring? You ask me if I would forswear my religion to save my nation? Let me in so that you can look into my eyes and know the truth of my heart. You are witches; surely you have some spell that will assure you that I speak the truth. Ensorcel me. Spill the entrails of a kid and read the secrets of its blood.”
The witch watched him for a long, long time. She said nothing, but those thin lips twitched and writhed like worms.
Then she withdrew and pulled the stone trapdoor shut, leaving Kellur and Kan Kellurson standing on the doorstep.
Kan shook his head. “Oh, Father—I told you this would not work.”
“Hush.”
But the boy pointed a finger at his father. “You spoke heresy to that crone. You promised to betray everything you believe in. I . . . I . . . don’t know what to say. I am . . . ashamed for you.”
Kellur took a single step toward his son, but it brought them to within a finger’s breath of each other. Kellur, taller and broader, looked down at the boy.
“And what would you have me do? Leave without their help? Would that raise me in your esteem? Should I go back to the wall and try to hold it with a scant thousand men? If there are even a thousand left. The soldiers of the Faithful desert in the hundreds. The walls are half bare. Will Father Ar send twelve legions of angels to fight alongside us? Isn’t that what the prophecy says? Well, lad, those legions are slow in coming, and the enemy marches with great haste.” He took another step forward so that his son was forced to yield ground and step back. “You tell me what you would do to save our homeland. What will save your mother and sisters? What will save that girl you fancy? What will save our people from being wiped from the face of this world?”
The boy stared up at his father, but though he tried to speak, he could not. In the end, he turned away and walked ten paces toward the Red Gate. Then he stopped, and his shoulders slumped.
The wretched silence that followed was broken by the sound of rusted metal hinges screaming in protest. Kellur and his son both turned to see the doors of the witches’ cathedral opening inward.
The witch who had spoken to them stood inside the arch, her skeletal hands clutching dark red robes to her bony frame. Behind her, the shadows within the cathedral seemed to twist and move as if there were a hundred demons hiding from the sun’s pure light.
Kan cried aloud and drew his sword, but Kellur held out a warning hand. “Sheathe your blade, boy,” he growled. “We are guests here.”
The boy frowned but did as he was bid. The witch smiled. Her smile was an ugly thing. If disease and sickness were embodied in the form of a woman, its smile would be like that. It lacked warmth and promised awful things.
The witch beckoned. “Of your own free will and heart’s desire, I invite you to enter.”
Kellur straightened his shoulders and nodded. “And with free will I shall enter.”
With his son trailing uncertainly behind, the Champion of the Faithful entered the great church of the Red Religion.
2
The witch said nothing, but instead turned and led them down a long hall with vaulted ceilings. Fires burned in buckets hanging from the rafters and thousands of candles dripped from sconces mounted without pattern on the brick walls. Between the sconces hung rich tapestries of great antiquity, their faces covered with embroidered women of surpassing beauty. And yet as Kellur passed, those women seemed to turn to ponder him and his son. It was a trick of the light, he knew—though he was not certain of that knowledge. This was an abode of witches, after all.
They approached another set of doors, and these were even more massive than the outer ones. They rose in a graceful arc to stand fifty feet tall and were banded with steel set with rivets as big as his fist. Across the doors and along the walls was a single carving of a woman in repose, her gowns flowing around a voluptuous body, her hair coiled like serpents. The sculptor had captured a vulpine intensity in the woman’s smile. And he’d fashioned her arms across the doors in such a way that as they opened it was as if she were opening her arms to embrace whomever entered.
It was beautiful and intensely unnerving.
“Father—?” began Kan, but Kellur waved him to silence.
The hag stopped outside the doors and gestured for them to enter. As they passed her, Kellur saw the pernicious smile that twisted her weathered face.
He stopped. “Do you have something to say to me, old woman?”
Her only reply was a chuckle. She held out her hand, indicating the room beyond. Kellur took a breath, then walked past her. Kan followed quickly, his hand on the hilt of his sword.
The room beyond those doors was vast. The walls and ceiling were lost in shadows, and the roof was supported by scores of ornate pillars. At the far end—seated like a queen on a throne—was a woman. She was as different from the withered crone as it was possible to be. Dressed in silks that were blood red and snow white, the woman was young and ripe and beautiful—easily the most beautiful woman Kellur had ever beheld. Her face was exquisite, heart-shaped and framed by masses of curling black hair. Her eyes were a vivid green, the green of summer sunlight on newly unfurled leaves. Her lips were as red as all the sin in the world. The silks she wore were translucent, and Kellur could see the womanly curves beneath, and the dark circles of her nipples on each full breast. She wore no jewelry except a dagger on a leather girdle, the handle slanting across her taut stomach, the tip pressed against the silks through which he could see the dark triangle of her pubic bush.
He was instantly flushed with a desire to hold this woman. To kiss her. To tear away those silks and plunder those loins.
And at the same moment he wanted to drop to his knees before her and worship her. As a queen. As a goddess. As a woman in the full richness of her power.
He heard a sound, almost a cry, and turned to see Kan gazing at her with glazed eyes, his face twisted with lust and fear.
The woman wore a knowing smile, clearly aware of the effect she had on men. On any man.
“Welcome to my hall,” she said. “I am Celissa, eldest of the Red Sisterhood.”
Eldest, thought Kellur. Surely an honorary title. This woman could not be older than two dozen winters.
“What do I call you, Lady Celissa? Are you a queen?”
“Lady Celissa will do. Anything more would be ungainly, Kellur Hendrakeson of Argolin, Champion of the Faithful, defender of the Gate.”
Kan gasped, but Kellur bowed. “I am pleased that you know me, my lady. If you know this, then you must know of the danger that approaches.”
“I know many things,” she admitted, “but many of my sisters do not look beyond our walls. Tell them what brings you here to our church.”
“Sisters?” echoed Kan, but as Kellur and his son looked around they realized with cold horror that the shadows that filled the great room were not merely lightless air. Figures stood there, hunched and misshapen. Vaguely womanish, vaguely human. They stood as still as statues, many covered with robes and cowls, hands clasped to their bosoms, eyes as dark as those of the witch on the wall.
“Father,” whispered Kan, “we have walked into a trap. These witches will drink our lives.”
“Be silent, boy,” snapped Kellur. “We are guests in this house, and by Father Ar, you will respect . . .”
He let his voice trail away, aware of the sharpening of attention from the watching figures. There was a hiss of conversation, but he could make out none of the words.
Kellur cleared his throat. “Be quiet, boy.”
He turned to face Lady Celissa. Her mouth still smiled, but there was heat behind her gaze. “You swear by a name that is never spoken in these halls,” she said in a voice that was softer than her eyes. “You come here to ask our help, and you stain the air with that name.”
Kellur placed a hand over his heart and bowed low. After a moment Kan did so as well.
“I spoke in haste and from habit, my lady,” said Kellur. “I am ashamed of my clumsiness and beg forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness,” said Celissa slowly. “You ask much.”
He said nothing.
“Rise and face me, soldier of Argolin,” she said. “And you, too, child.”
They stood, father and son, and looked up at this beautiful woman on the throne.
“Tell us all what would make no less than a champion of your religion come to us, the Red Sisters.”
Kellur took a breath, nodded, and gestured backward, indicating the world beyond this chamber and this church. “The Hakkians march on the Red Gate. They are already in the foothills of these mountains and in two or three days they will be here. Right here. They will burn everything in their way, my lady, and then they will lay siege to the Gate.”
“Why should we care?” asked a voice from the shadows. It sounded like the woman from the wall, though he couldn’t really tell.
“Do you not know the history of the Gate?” he asked. “This pass, this cleft in these mountains, was placed here by the grace of . . . of whatever god or goddess you believe rules this world. This mountain pass that has been fought over for six thousand years until the Red Gate was built.” He shook his head and once more gestured to the world outside, as if it could be seen through stone and shadows. “The Red Gate. Do you ever look beyond your walls? You never venture outside, as far as we know, so maybe you don’t care about the pass, the Gate, and everything beyond it. On the other side are fertile valleys on whose slopes and in whose plains grow the wheat and corn and apples and garlic that feed the people of half the world. Lose the Gate and lose the crops. Lose the Gate and starve fifty thousand people. Lose the Gate, lose the war. This is not complicated math, even for those who do not study war.”
“The Gate is strong,” said another of the shadowy women.
“Strong, yes,” admitted Kellur. “But it can fall. It has fallen. I know. I fought to hold this pass on three separate occasions.”
It was true, and he told them of it. The first time had been when he was sixteen, the same age as Kan, barely able to hold a light straight-sword. Too small yet to hold anything with real heft. He’d staggered along through the valley to the Gate, groaning and sweating inside the furnace-hot weight of his father’s old armor. The metal was too heavy, the chainmail bit and burned him, and the helmet was a full size too big. And he’d gone to that fight carrying the added burden of knowing that he was only a body. Nothing more. Something to cram a narrow pass. Something to soak up arrows or weary the arms of the enemy soldiers. He was not expected to fight with any skill. He was not expected to kill a single one of the enemy. He was not expected to be anything more than obstructive meat that would slow the enemy so that they would be spent when they met the real soldiers.
That Kellur did not die was more luck than skill. He’d picked up a dead soldier’s pike and an enemy lieutenant had fallen off his horse and landed on the tip of the blade. Perhaps the gods were having a grand old time messing with the lives and fates of their worshippers. The punch line of that cosmic joke was that the lieutenant was important. The son of a priest, and a man—though quite young—who everyone believed was graced by the God of War.
To see him fall, speared by a boy, his blade unbloodied, his mettle untested, was a worse blow than anything a thousand soldiers with sword and spear could have accomplished. The heart went out of the enemy, and the Gate held.
The second time was different.
Kellur was a sergeant then. Older, bigger, in the heat of his twenties, with all of the boundless energy the young are granted by gods who are strangely generous at all the wrong times. Kellur had stood with a hundred other men, each of them village champions or veterans of the coastal wars. They’d each drawn lines across their chests above their hearts with a thrice-blessed dagger and then taken sips from a cup of commingled blood. They’d sung the old war songs that had lyrics whose meanings were lost to the ages. They’d locked shields and laughed as the enemy cavalry rode toward the Red Gate.
Of the hundred blood-brothers, nine survived.
Those nine spent the next four years as slaves to the invaders. The valley and the lands beyond? It took ten years for them to recover even after the invaders were driven out.
Then there was the third time.
Kellur was forty then. Older, slower—jaded—but wise.
That was the first time the Hakkians had come out of the east. Five thousand of them had come. Lightly armored but heavily armed, and they threw themselves against the Gate. Kellur was captain of the guard. He pitted his two thousand soldiers against their numbers, and after three days of wholesale slaughter, he took the head of the Hakkian captain. It had been a costly win, though, and both of his brothers and fourteen hundred of his men had gone to the Summerlands. If the Hakkians had been better prepared or had come in greater numbers, the Red Gate must surely have fallen.
They tried it again, and again, each time with small armies that were nonetheless large enough to drain the resources of the defenders. Kellur, now elevated to general, took five thousand heads during the last battle, but it was at the cost of three thousand men. And the Gate itself was badly damaged from fire and battering ram. It had been hastily repaired, but the army was strained and weak. The new recruits came and enlisted by the thousand, but they were green. The Hakkians were a vast empire, and their soldiers were hardened from years of endless warfare and heartened by conquest everywhere but here.
“Now,” he told the gathered witches, “the enemy comes again, and this time they are prepared. They’ve learned from their defeats. They do not send a few thousand lightly armored scouts against us, nor do they waste a legion of light cavalry. My spies have gone mad trying to count their numbers. They come up the mountain with a hundred thousand soldiers. An ocean of spears comes to take the Red Gate. And this time they bring more than rams and torches. This time they bring siege engines and mineral fire and all of their weapons of war. This time they come like an ocean, and the Red Gate will be swept away.”
The hall was utterly silent.
The lady on her throne regarded him with hooded eyes and a secret smile.
“You talk of an inevitable defeat, Champion,” she said. “If this is already written in the book of fate, why come to us?”
“Because, my lady,” said Kellur, “there is only one thing the Hakkians fear. There is only one enemy they will not dare to attack.”
She raised an eyebrow, and the curve of her smile tilted upward. “And what is that?”
Kellur said, “This cathedral stands outside the Gate, as it has stood for ten times ten thousand years.”
She nodded.
“No army has ever taken it,” he said, “because no army dares. Each time an army has come up the mountain road to assail the Red Gate, they march past this church. They do not look upon it. They do not speak as they pass. They will not speak of it. Any man who dares name it or even call attention to it is cut down by his own fellows lest that transgression offend those who live within these walls.”
Celissa leaned ever so slightly forward. “And do you know why?”
Kellur met her level stare. “I know, my lady. I know why this church is left untouched. I know why the churches in Hestria and Vale have also been passed by despite centuries of war and conquest.”
Her eyes flicked to Kan and back. “Does your son know?”
“He knows the rumors, the campfire talk. Like all of the children beyond the Gate he thinks that this is an abode of demons. You are the things he was taught by his nursemaid to fear when he would not eat his greens or do his chores. You are the monsters of our nighttime.”
Celissa sighed and looked away. He caught an emotion on her face. Was it sadness? Annoyance? Some commingling of both? The other witches murmured and whispered.
“And yet you come here, to this abode of demons.” It sounded like those words hurt her pretty mouth.
“I do, and I come with humility.”
“Why? If you know what we are, Champion, you know that we will not venture from our halls to fight your wars.”
“I know that you won’t,” he agreed, “and I know that you can’t. Not the oldest of you, for the kiss of Mother Sun would turn you to dust.”
They hissed at the mention of her name.
“I know that you cannot abide the light. Only the youngest of you can endure it, but only for a day or a few days.”
“A few days,” she said softly. “You do know us.”
“I do.”
“Once more I ask, why come to us? If the invaders will pass us by, and if we cannot come to your aid, then how is this anything but a wasted trip for you? And a dangerous one.”
“My lady, when was the last time you heard from the Red Churches in Hestria and Vale? When was the last time your sisters there sent word to you here?”
There was more whispering in the shadows, but Celissa held up her hand for silence. “If you ask that question, then you must know the answer. We have not heard from either church for seven moons. But that is not strange. Sometimes years will pass before word is shared between the churches. We expect them to send word to us before the solstice.”
Kellur once more placed his hand over his heart. “I would not willingly cause you hurt, my lady, but I fear that you will never again hear from your sisters in those churches.”
“And why is this? What makes you think you can speak for them?”
Kellur opened the flap of the pouch tied to his belt. He removed a handful of ash and, kneeling, let it fall to the floor. It rained down like sand.
“This is all that is left of the Red Sisters of Vale,” he said. Then he took a second handful of ash from a second pouch. “And these are the ashes of the Sisters of Hestria.”
He knelt there, head bowed, hands wide, fingers and palms stained with ash.
The witches screamed.
They screamed and screamed so loud that Kellur and his son clapped their hands to their ears and cried out in pain. Even Lady Celissa screamed. Tears boiled from the corners of her eyes, and as she wept, her eyes changed from vivid green to a dark and terrible red. She rose from her throne and pointed an accusing finger at them.
“What insanity is this? What lies are these? Do you want to die screaming? Do you want to see your son torn apart and consumed? I will eat your heart and—”
She stopped, cutting off her own words as she staggered and darted out a hand to catch the arm of the throne. Sobs wracked her whole body, and in that moment it seemed to Kellur that she was not a young and beautiful woman, but a hag far older and more wrinkled than any of the other witches. Ancient beyond the counting of centuries. Everything—her youth and beauty—was nothing more than a glamour.
Had this been another day, Kellur would have screamed and run from this place. He’d have run straight to the nearest shrine to Father Ar and begged the mercy and protection of his god.
But this was not another day.
“My lady,” he said. “I am sorry for your losses. On my life I am. But the blood of your sisters is not on my hands, nor on the hands of any of my kinfolk. The Hakkian armies laid siege to those churches and tore them down.”
“They cannot have done this,” she snarled. “They fear us.”
“They fear you, but they hate you more. And they know you. They know that you cannot abide the sunlight, and so they brought their siege engines to batter down the walls of the churches in Hestria and Vale. They brought those cathedrals down, and they burned the forests of Hestria to let the light in. They tore down the mountaintop of Vale to chase away the shadows. This they have done with their machines of war. And in the sunlight they hunted your sisters down and watched them burn.” He shook his head. “Were there none of them who were young enough to endure the sunlight? None who could stand and fight them?”
Celissa wiped at her tears and shook her head. “No. Not in either church, and none here. The youngest of us is a thousand years old. We . . . we cannot step into the light. Not for a moment. Not even to kill. Not even to feed.”
She put such hate into that last word that it seemed to burn in the air.
She looked toward the doors, to the east.
“They are coming here to do this to us?”
“My lady,” he said, “they will do this. This time they will not pass you by. This time they won’t ignore this church as if it is nothing but a bad dream. This time they will tear down your walls and let the sun burn you. And then they will throw their weight against the Red Gate, and it, too, will fall. In a week the Hakkian flag will fly over the graves of both our peoples, and then we will be no more.”
The murmuring around the room was like the hissing of a thousand snakes. Celissa sat down. Her glamour was back in place, but the face she wore was filled with grief.
“Then the world we know is at an end. How funny to learn, after all these years, that immortality is not a passage into eternity. There would have been a poem about hubris there, but it will never now be written. The Hakkians have no art, no poetry. They are barbarians.”
“They are human, my lady. They can bleed.”
“But we cannot fight them, as you have so told us with such brutal clarity.”
Kellur smiled. He could feel the way that smile cut his face. He knew that it was an ugly smile. Humorless, grim. Kan looked at him and then quickly looked away.
“Why smile?” demanded Celissa. “Is this all some joke? Is that the purpose of your visit?”
“It is not, my lady. It’s just that there is one thing we can do. There is one tactic we have not yet employed.”
“What? Do you propose moving your army into our church? They would be killed when the walls fell, just as we will.”
“No, my lady,” he said. “I have read all of the old books, and I have consulted our priests and mages. Before I dared come here I learned everything I could about the Red Sisters. This is how I know what I know.”
“To what end?”
He got to his feet and walked to the foot of the throne. As he came to a stop he jerked aside his scarf and bared his throat. “Take my blood.”
She was so surprised that she laughed. The other witches chuckled.
“Father!” cried Kan. “What are you doing?”
“You came here to commit suicide?”
Kellur shook his head. “Only in a manner of speaking. I want you to make me what you are.”
“You’re insane,” laughed the lady. “Or you haven’t read enough? Did the books not tell you that men cannot become what we are?”
“I believe they can. There are tales of men who were bitten and were thereafter transformed into monsters. They gained such power.”
“And they died,” she countered. “The magic does not work on them. They become like us for a few days only. Then the blood pours from their eyes and mouths and their bodies begin to burn.”
“I know.”
“They die in terrible pain. In agony. They die screaming, driven mad from pain before the sun burns them to ash.”
“I know,” repeated Kellur. He jerked his scarf off and threw it to the ground. “And I come here asking for that.”
“Father,” pleaded Kan, grabbing his arm.
“You are insane,” said Celissa.
“Perhaps. But those old stories spoke of what happened before those men died. They were like the titans of old legend. They had the strength of fifty men. Arrows and spears could do them no harm. They fought without swords or spears, and none could stand before them. And they could stand in the sunlight.”
“For how long? A day? Two at the most?”
Kellur nodded. “Yes. For that short a time.” He put a foot on the lowest step of the throne. “Give me this gift. Give it to my son. We will then give it to the hundred strongest of my soldiers. This we will do on the eve before the Hakkians reach this pass. They will come in their thousands and we few, we hundred of the damned, will meet them there. Each of us with the power of fifty men. Each us indifferent to their swords. They will march against us, and here, right outside of the walls of your church, we will meet them. One hundred monsters to defend your witches and our own folk.”
Celissa was listening now. All of the witches were.
“If the Hakkians feared you before, imagine how they will fear you once a hundred of your demon soldiers go howling among them, tearing them limb from limb. Smashing their siege engines. Killing them. Washing this mountain in blood. How long do you think they will press their attack? How long do you think their courage will hold?”
Celissa watched, eyes bright as blood.
“All we need do is hold them here throughout the daylight hours. One day. And then when night falls, you can come from these halls to avenge your fallen sisters.” Kellur bent and took her hand, kissed her fingers. The glamour that made her beautiful was for the eyes only and none of the other senses; his lips could feel the withered fingers and taste the ageless dust of her.
Behind him, he heard his son weeping. It broke his heart, but this was the end of the world.
“And your son?” asked Celissa gently.
“He is a soldier of Argolin. He will die either way. As a man, he would be swept away and forgotten. As a vampire . . . he will live forever in the histories and songs.”
Celissa got to her feet and descended the steps until she stood eye to eye with him. She was a tall woman and, in her magicks, so beautiful. Her eyes blazed with such intensity that he could actually feel the heat on his skin.
“They say that the age of heroes has passed,” she murmured, brushing hair from his face. “It has been generations since we sisters met a man we could admire. A man with whom we would gladly share our gift if we thought he could share eternity with us.”
Kellur said nothing. His heart was hammering in his chest.
“Neither our goddess nor your gods are kind to us, Kellur, Champion of the Faithful. They bring you to us, and now we must cast you into the dust of history.”
“Yes, my lady, but at least this way there will be history.”
She nodded.
Kellur reached back toward Kan and took his son’s hand.
“Can you promise me that this will not hurt him?”
A fresh tear fell down Celissa’s face. “No,” she said. “I respect you—and him—too much to lie. Not now. Not at this moment.”
Kellur heard his son sob. Just once. Then Kan’s hand squeezed his. He believed that it was not the desperate clinging of a child but rather the firm grip of a man.
“Then let us write the next page of history,” said Kellur.
3
Three days passed.
On the morning of the fourth, the Battle-King of the Hakkians rode his chariot into the pass. Behind him were the knights of his host and behind them the legions he commanded. The cathedral rose above them, and beyond that stood the Red Gate.
The Battle-King had expected the massed ranks of the Argolins to be waiting. He expected archers on the wall in their hundreds. He expected more than the hundred men who stood in a line across the throat of the pass.
The sun was hot above them, but the day was cold. Steam rose from the hundred men, as if they stood on the smoking ashes of some great fire. But the ground beneath them was dirt and grass.
Two men stood before the waiting hundred. A tall man and a boy. They looked like father and son, and they wore matching armor.
A general reined his horse beside the chariot. “What is this, my king? A party to sue for terms?”
“Who cares?” said the Battle-King in a bored voice. “These fools think they’re going to get into one of their songs.”
He spat upon the ground.
Movement caught his eye, and he turned to look up. On the walls of the cathedral several small windows opened, and the faces of old women watched from the shadows.
“Witches,” he sneered. “Pass the word to begin assembling the siege towers.”
The general nodded, then pointed his sword toward the Red Gate. “And what about those fools?”
The Battle-King waved a hand. “Oh . . . kill them all. Bring me their heads. We’ll build a pyre with them. Let the witches and those behind the gate enjoy the smell.”
The general grinned and spurred his horse toward his waiting captains. All of them laughed as they arranged their men for the charge. Only one of them did not. He frowned instead and when the general asked what was wrong, he nodded to the waiting hundred.
“None of them are wearing swords, sir. Have you noticed?”
The general shaded his eyes and looked. His smile flickered, but only for a moment. “Idiots. Ah well, it will be that much easier to cut them down. Signal the attack.”
The call went out, and the knights moved aside to let the pikemen advance. Thousands of them.
The general raised his sword and then slashed down. The pikemen broke into a run, each of them yelling the name of their king.
The tall man and his son smiled at them as they came.
Only the front line of the pikemen saw those smiles as they closed in to kill. They saw how wide those smiles were.
And then they saw the teeth.
Oh gods, they saw those teeth.
By the time the general called up the heavy cavalry to try and rescue the pikemen, everyone had seen those teeth.
The Hakkians were no longer chanting the name of their king.
They were screaming it.
And they were damning it.
From the high walls, the witches of the Red Sisterhood watched the slaughter. And they waited for sunset.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. He’s the author of many novels, including Assassin’s Code, Flesh & Bone Dead of Night, Patient Zero and Rot & Ruin; and the editor of V-Wars: A Chronicle of the Vampire Wars. His nonfiction includes books on topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop-culture. Since 1978 he has sold more than 1,200 magazine feature articles, 3,000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. Jonathan continues to teach the celebrated Experimental Writing for Teens class, which he created. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founded The Liars Club, and is a frequent speaker at schools and libraries, as well as a keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers’ and genre conferences.