Abomination. Gary Whitta
was better than he had expected for having put well over a hundred beasts to the sword and scattering the rest to the winds. Now only Aethelred himself and whatever few abominations he still controlled remained a threat.
From then on, it became a hunting expedition. Wulfric and Edgard tracked the archbishop day and night, hoping to find him before he had the opportunity to replenish his numbers. The trail led them all the way to Canterbury, Aethelred’s seat, and to the cathedral where this whole horrific misadventure had first begun.
And now here they were, precisely four months from the day that Wulfric had ridden away from his wife and unborn child. It had been a long campaign, arduous for both body and spirit, but it was almost done, and he was almost home. His army was encamped not far outside Canterbury Cathedral. Aethelred was known to be inside, licking his wounds. One final battle to close the book on all of it, and Wulfric could at last return home. He would meet his son, by now a month old, for the first time, and make things right with Cwen. At last, he would begin his new life as a husband and father both.
But as anxious as he was to do all of that, he would not allow haste to be his undoing in these final hours. Aethelred had been bested in battle and his magick neutralized, but Wulfric knew better than to underestimate his opponent even now. He knew Aethelred to be a cunning man, a defiant man, and whatever he had been doing for the past three days holed up inside his cathedral, Wulfric felt sure that it was something more than simply waiting for him and his men to break down the door and finish him off.
No, Aethelred would not go down so easily as that. He surely had one final card still to play. The only question was, what?
Wulfric was still pondering that as Edgard looked at him, one eyebrow arched, waiting for an answer to his question. “That is why we’re here, isn’t it? To attack?”
Wulfric gazed across the plain at the spires of Canterbury, shrouded in morning mist. “We will attack when I have a better idea of what awaits us within, and not before,” said Wulfric.
“We know what awaits us within. Aethelred and at most a few dozen of his hellhounds—far fewer than we have already done away with. Why do we wait?”
They had kept a close watch on the path Aethelred had taken back to Canterbury as they followed, taking note of any settlements or towns he might have harvested for reinforcements. So far as they could discern, he had passed through none, opting instead for the most direct route back to Canterbury—meaning he could only have conscripted any individuals or small groups encountered along his way. Perhaps by now he had also turned Canterbury’s own staff and other retainers, but even then the numbers could add up to no more than Edgard was estimating. The sorcerer was trapped and under siege, his forces depleted, his magick useless. He was ripe for the finishing. Unless . . . The word ate away at Wulfric like the burning ring around his wrist.
“He’s been in there for days,” he observed with a nod toward the fog-shrouded cathedral in the distance. “Doing what, God only knows. Perhaps refining his magick to counter the wards on our armor. Perhaps training his remaining forces to better stand their ground, to fight more fiercely. Perhaps something we have failed to even consider. I don’t like it.”
“What evidence do you have to suggest any of this?” Edgard asked.
“None,” admitted Wulfric. “Only a bad feeling. Like the one I had before Chippenham. Remember that?”
“Hmph,” grunted Edgard, gazing out at the horizon. The two men had many differences on matters of war—from infantry strategies to the best way to silently cut a man’s throat—and had often debated late into the night, but Edgard had to admit that when it came to ill portents before a battle, Wulfric’s gut instinct was almost never wrong. He sighed.
“Wulfric, the only way for us to know what awaits us in there is to go and find it.”
Wulfric let the flower that confounded him fall from his fingers and stood, turning to look at his men, assembled not far behind him.
“Perhaps not,” he said. “Bring me Cuthbert.”
Edgard passed the order to a runner, and a few minutes later they saw the little cleric dashing across the field to where his commander stood, huffing as he ran, breath clouding in the morning mist. “It really is a wonder that boy’s still alive,” said Edgard with amusement as he observed Cuthbert’s awkward gait, his ill-fitting robes hanging off his willowy frame as though slung over a poorly made chair.
“That boy’s the reason any of us are still alive,” replied Wulfric. Cuthbert had come to earn his respect over the course of this campaign. High-strung and brittle he may have seemed at first blush, but when it mattered, he had proven himself no coward. At Aylesbury, Cuthbert had insisted on staying with the men until the last moment to ensure that every one of them had a freshly placed blessing on their armor, as well as on that of their mounts, before they entered the fray, in case the protective power of the spell—at that point, still an unknown quantity—should diminish over time. In doing so, he ventured far closer to Aethelred’s horde than he had thought himself capable. It was not until later, after the battle had ended, that he realized he had forgotten to place a protective blessing upon his own vestments and had left himself vulnerable to one of Aethelred’s curses. It was only by happenstance that he had not been targeted and turned into some dire beast that his own comrades would have been forced to put down. Cuthbert spent most of that night throwing up, but by then his actions on the field had earned him Wulfric’s esteem, and by extension the esteem of all the men.
Cuthbert had also proven invaluable as a curator and archivist of the many and varied forms of misshapen wretch that Aethelred had taught himself to conjure. Many of the beasts had dispersed, in all directions, after the battle at Aylesbury, and they were now scattered far and wide throughout the kingdom, living and lurking in the shadows, masterless and wild. They had become the basis for a new folklore fast spreading throughout southern England: nightmarish stories told around campfires and to restless children about dark, malevolent, shapeless horrors that stalked their prey—animal and human alike—by night, taking whatever or whomever they could find and dragging their prey screaming into the darkness to be fed upon.
Wulfric’s men had encountered more than a few of these feral types during their pursuit of Aethelred after Aylesbury, and after each kill Cuthbert took pains to catalogue it in his own bestiary, kept carefully in a leather-bound volume. He made detailed drawings of each species they came across, taking note of its behavioral characteristics, speed, strength, intelligence, and preferred method of slaying, thus making the next confrontation with a beast of the same type that much swifter and less likely to result in casualties. Cuthbert’s work was as exhaustive and scholarly as it was useful in its practical application, and even Wulfric admitted to finding it darkly fascinating. It took him back to his boyhood, when his father would teach him to study and identify various forms of insect life. Now the insects were twice the size of a man and could kill you from twenty feet away, but the principle was the same.
Cuthbert arrived red faced and out of breath. He tried to speak but was too winded for words to come.
“Take a breath, boy!” barked Edgard. “A knee, if you must.”
Cuthbert took a moment to regain his composure and catch his breath. “I’m sorry. Sir Wulfric, you have need of me?”
“A few nights ago you told me of another spell in Aethelred’s scrolls that you had begun to translate before his escape,” said Wulfric.
It took a moment for Cuthbert to recall the conversation. “Oh! You mean the scrying?”
“Yes. Can it be done?”
Cuthbert hesitated. “I’m not sure. My translation was incomplete, and—”
“But what you did translate, you remember precisely.” By now, Wulfric had learned that Cuthbert’s claim of a flawless memory was not unfounded.
Cuthbert nodded.
“Excuse me,” Edgard interjected, “but what exactly are we talking about here?”
“From my