Path of Shadows
A SWORD & SORCERY DARK FANTASY NOVEL
Published by
www.splickety.com
Path of Shadows
Blood Mercenaries - Book Two
Published by
Splickety Publishing Group, Inc.
www.splickety.com
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-942462-32-3
Print ISBN: 978-1-942462-31-6
Copyright © 2019 by Ben Wolf, Inc. All rights reserved.
www.benwolf.com
Cover design by Kirk DouPonce of DogEared Design
www.dogeareddesign.com
Available in print and ebook format on amazon.com.
Contact Ben Wolf directly at ben@benwolf.com for signed copies
and to schedule author appearances and speaking events.
All rights reserved. Non-commercial interests may reproduce portions of this book without the express written permission of the author, provided the text does not exceed 500 words. For longer quotations or commercial concerns, please contact the author via email at ben@benwolf.com.
Commercial interests: No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the author, except as provided by the United States of America copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are all products of the author’s imagination and are used for fictional purposes. Any mentioned brand names, places, and trademarks remain the property of their respective owners, bear no association with the author or the publisher, and are used for fictional purposes only. Any similarities to individuals living or dead is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolf, Ben
Crimson Flame, The/ Ben Wolf 1st ed.
Printed in the United States of America.
To Will Wight and Dakota Krout:
Thank you for your boundless inspiration and support.
And special thanks goes to Robert Liparulo,
also for boundless inspiration and support,
as well as for accidentally giving me
the best possible ending for this book.
Contents
Map of Aletia
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter One
As the dragon egg hatched, Garrick Shatterstone wondered if he’d made the right decision.
Lord Valdis held the egg on his lap as the talons of a little black lizard poked through its fiery orange shell. Moments earlier, the egg had been a hard, gray stone devoid of life.
But thanks to Lord Valdis’s dark magic, the egg had transformed, and the dragon within immediately started to claw its way out.
Lord Valdis set the egg on the floor at his feet, and the dragon cracked through the bottom half of the shell. It slid along its own bloody mucus onto the stone floor, and it looked up at Garrick with glowing red eyes.
Most baby animals were objectively cute in some way, but this dragon was uglier than the inside of a pig’s stomach.
Covered in black scales and bloody afterbirth, it had four legs with talon-tipped toes, two wings, and a snout that protruded from its wretched face. Curved white teeth lined its small, yet intimidating mouth.
Small, demon-like horns jutted out from the sides of its head, curling backward instead of forward. Spikes arched down its spine and onto its tail, which resembled the bristled leg of a spider.
It squirmed and slithered and tried to find its balance on the stone floor. Finally, when it managed to get to its feet, it shook its head, and its neck twisted along with it. The dragon’s body followed, hard and fast, flinging slime in every direction.
Garrick wanted to recoil from the flying mucus, but he held his ground. Fortunately, none of it hit him.
Then the dragon stretched its wings, reared up on its back legs, and surveyed the room anew.
Its red eyes focused on Garrick again, then they shifted to look at Kent Etheridge, Garrick’s mage companion and mercenary partner.
Together with two other mercenaries—an ex-wyvern knight named Aeron Ironglade and a former Xyonate assassin named Mehta—they had brought Lord Valdis the dragon egg.
But Aeron and Mehta had initiated an altercation that resulted in the several dead guards that now lay around the throne room, and then they’d fled Lord Valdis’s castle.
The dragon fixated on those dead guards. It let out a small, abrupt screech, dropped down to all fours again, and skittered toward the nearest corpse.
It leaped into the air, flapping its membranous wings like a scaly black chicken, and landed on the guard’s body. Then it dug into the guard’s flesh with its teeth and front talons, ripping and tearing chunks of it away to devour.
The sight and sound of it threatened to upend Garrick’s stomach, so he looked away and instead faced Lord Valdis and the huge soldier in black armor standing next to the throne.
“Isn’t new life a beautiful thing?” Lord Valdis wore a crooked smile on his face, and his eyes—those terrible eyes—continued to give off the same otherworldly darkness that they always did. He leaned back in his throne of twisted, black bones and rested his palms atop the two black skulls at the ends of the throne’s armrests.
Garrick didn’t know how else to respond, so he replied, “Yes, Lord Valdis.”
But Lord Valdis didn’t really care about “new life” at all. The only reason he’d sent Garrick for the dragon egg in the first place was because he wanted to hatch it and then perform a ritual to steal its essence. Apparently, doing so would grant him “godlike power.”
Garrick had his doubts about whether or not Lord Valdis possessing godlike power was a good thing, but in the end, he’d been paid to do a job, not to judge the morality of his employer. And more importantly, if Garrick hadn’t complied, Lord Valdis would’ve wiped him from the continent.
A loud rip sounded behind Garrick and Kent—the rending of flesh. It reminded Garrick of their battle with Lord Glavan, another dark lord and a rival of Lord Valdis. Lord Glavan had used magic to tear the bones out of his own dead guards to use them as weapons. It had sounded much the same as the dragon’s flesh-ripping now.
After the stunt Aeron had pulled, and after how Mehta had sided with him, Garrick was prepared to cut them both into small pieces. And then maybe he’d feed them to Lord Valdis’s new dragon.
He had trusted them, and they had betrayed him, just like Noraff and Phesnos, two other mercs he’d worked with a few months earlier.
Lord Valdis needed a sacrifice for the ritual in which he meant to harvest the dragon’s essence. And that sacrifice was to be Kallie Ironglade, Aeron’s little sister.
Aeron, Mehta, and even Kent had known about it, but none of them had mentioned it to Garrick. If they had, things would’ve gone down much differently.
&nbs
p; But he couldn’t change the past, and he couldn’t talk to Kent about his role in it now. That would have to come later.
Garrick didn’t want to go retrieve Kallie, but he’d already sworn he would do it—partially to salvage his reputation and future as a mercenary, but mostly because it was the only way to survive Lord Valdis’s wrath after the damage Aeron and Mehta had done.
“I have something for you. Boros will bring it.” Lord Valdis lifted his hand slightly, and the huge soldier standing to his left turned and walked into the darkness behind the throne, toward the massive sigil of a three-horned ram—the emblem of Valdis Keep—hanging against the back wall.
Garrick watched Boros move. He was nearly Garrick’s size which, at 400 pounds of muscle and nearly seven feet tall, was no simple thing.
But unlike Garrick, Boros probably didn’t have troll blood in his ancestry to give him durable skin and extra-hard bones. He also probably didn’t have a slight greenish pallor to his skin and dark blue hair, either—two other results of the troll blood in Garrick’s veins.
The dragon continued to feast on the dead guards behind Garrick and Kent, and Boros returned a moment later with a weapon in each hand, in addition to the sword hanging from his belt.
At first, Garrick thought it might be some sort of ambush. He’d already resolved to rush back to his snow steel sword and shield on the floor behind him if necessary, though he doubted they’d do much good against Lord Valdis.
But the weapons in Boros’s hands looked vastly different than both the snow steel sword and the gleaming dragon sword Kent had left behind as well. One was a single-bladed battle-axe with a trio of long, brutish spikes protruding from the opposite side, and the other was a savage, spiked flail.
The spikes were dark purple in color, as was the edge of the axe blade. In the dim lighting of Lord Valdis’s throne room, Garrick could barely distinguish the edge’s coloring from the black steel of the axe head itself.
Its handle was made of some sort of vivid red wood. It looked about half as long as the battle-axe Garrick had left in the dungeon back in Etrijan.
Wicked spikes colored a deep violet, just like the spikes on the battle-axe, covered the flail as well. A gray chain connected its black head to its handle, which was also made of red wood.
The black portions of the weapons gave off a dark aura—difficult to see in the throne room but definitely there.
Boros flipped the weapons around and held them out, handles-first, the flail to Kent and the battle-axe to Garrick.
Garrick took the weapon from Boros and studied it. A slight pulsing sensation emanated from its handle, almost as if it were trying to push energy into his body through his palm. It was clearly a product of some sort of dark magic, but he’d never encountered anything like it before.
Boros returned to Lord Valdis’s side, and Garrick bowed. “Thank you, Lord Valdis.”
“The weapons you now hold are phantom steel, augmented with properties of dark magic,” Lord Valdis said. “They are brutal weapons, capable of seizing the essence of anyone slain with them and transferring it to the wielder.”
Garrick and Kent glanced at each other. Prior to this, Garrick had never heard of phantom steel. Mage steel, sure. He had a mage steel knife tucked in his belt, a lingering reminder of Noraff’s betrayal and the vengeance Garrick would soon deliver to him. And he’d carried snow steel weapons until just recently.
But then again, he hadn’t interacted with many dark mages until recently. Apparently phantom steel was a thing, and all these different types of weapons were more or less named the same way. Not very original, but at least he wouldn’t have to think too hard to figure out what the different metals could do.
“Ages ago, I personally forged them and wielded them in battle. They played an integral role in my development as a young practitioner of dark magic.” Lord Valdis’s haunting eyes fixed on Kent. “For someone such as yourself, such a weapon is a gateway to insurmountable power and longevity beyond your allotted years.”
Garrick had always suspected Lord Valdis was older than he looked. His longevity comment seemed to confirm it.
Kent gave a slight bow. “I am honored, Lord Valdis.”
“I trust you will find them to be useful in the days to come,” Lord Valdis said. “In addition to retrieving the girl, I also require you to bring me evidence of the demise of those who betrayed us.”
Garrick dared to ask, “What kind of evidence?”
“Killing them with these weapons will suffice,” Lord Valdis replied. “They will commend your friends to an eternity of walking the path of shadows—eternal death and suffering as their essences are conscripted into my service. And so, upon your return, these weapons will reveal to me everything I need to know.”
Garrick held up the battle-axe and looked it over. “Gladly.”
“A contingent of my soldiers will accompany you,” Lord Valdis added, “to ensure you succeed, and to provide me with assurance that you will not fail me again.”
Garrick bristled at Lord Valdis’s jab. Aeron and Mehta’s betrayal wasn’t really Garrick’s fault, even if Lord Valdis saw it that way.
Regardless, Garrick didn’t need “help” from Lord Valdis’s men. He was perfectly capable of dealing with Mehta and Aeron on his own. Having Kent as backup would more than suffice.
“It’s a generous offer, Lord Valdis,” Garrick said. “But we don’t need any help.”
“It is not an offer.” Lord Valdis’s devilish eyes bored into Garrick’s very soul. “Nor is it a request. They will accompany you, and they will be led by a commander of my choosing.”
Garrick’s teeth clenched, and he squeezed the battle-axe handle tighter, and it pulled harder at his will. Perhaps he shouldn’t have said anything. It was bad enough that Lord Valdis’s soldiers were coming along, but not having any control over them was even worse.
Now he’d have to deal with someone else, some other guy’s ego, while trying to fulfill his mission. He’d had enough of that with Kent when they first set out together, and he didn’t want to endure it again.
The rips and tears of the dragon feasting continued as Lord Valdis turned his head slightly, toward Boros.
At first, Garrick thought Lord Valdis meant he was sending Boros along as the commander, but Boros didn’t move.
Instead, a soft orange light began to glow from behind Lord Valdis’s throne. It grew brighter and brighter as a figure emerged from the darkness and stood on the other side of the throne, opposite Boros’s hulking form.
But it wasn’t a man.
It was a blonde woman, clad in black armor. She bore Lord Valdis’s three-horned ram sigil across her black breastplate, but instead of the sigil being black like every other time Garrick had seen it, it was blood-red instead—comparable in color to some of the Crimson Flame emblems he’d seen in recent months.
She held a pair of curved swords in her hands, each of them made of red steel and ablaze with brilliant flames. Red steel—it was arcane steel, the antithesis of snow steel. Though Garrick had never seen arcane steel, he’d heard of it. Such blades were, by all accounts, perpetually as hot as burning coals.
Apart from the armor, she had an appealing, feminine shape with great curves. The light from the fiery swords illuminated her face, which had a sort of common prettiness to it.
But upon seeing her face, Garrick had to restrain himself from attacking her right then and there.
Chapter Two
It was Falna, the fiery barmaid Garrick had encountered back in Etrijan.
Garrick had long since wondered what he would’ve done without that vial of anti-fire potion—or rather, a suspended solution, Irwin would have insisted. That suspended solution was the only reason they’d managed to defeat her.
“Garrick Shatterstone.” Falna’s voice dripped with overconfidence and disdain. “I always hoped we’d cross paths again, but I never expected it would actually happen.”
Garrick ignored her. “Lord Valdis,
if this harpy is your commander, I object. She and I have a nasty history, and she won’t deal with me in good faith.”
“Whether or not Falna deals with you in good faith is no concern of mine,” Lord Valdis said. “What concerns me is her loyalty, as well as yours, to me. Your end goal is the same: to return my stolen property to me so that I may proceed with my ritual on the night of the next new moon.”
Garrick’s stomach twisted, mostly at the idea that he would have to deal with Falna, but also at Lord Valdis’s assertion that Aeron’s sister belonged to him as property.
Falna’s gaze shifted to Kent, and she stared at him with narrowed, curious eyes. “Have we met before?”
Kent wore a scowl. “You nearly killed me, and Aeron Ironglade’s family, when you kidnapped Kallie and set fire to their home several months ago.”
Garrick’s eyebrows rose. Falna’s involvement with Lord Valdis ran deep, and Kent had no love for her either. Perhaps that could play in Garrick’s favor… somehow.
“Nothing personal, handsome,” she oozed. “Just doing my job. You happened to be in the way.”
Kent gave no response.
Garrick considered protesting again, but it wouldn’t do any good. If Lord Valdis said Falna was coming along, there was nothing Garrick could do to change his mind. Working with Falna was inescapable, no matter how much it disgusted Garrick.