Chapter One #2
“They’ve been carried off,” said Lorath, rage stirring again. “While many of them were alive, no doubt. Some may still live, if we move quickly.” He turned to Tyrael. “Or do you still wish to call off this hunt?”
Tyrael bent and picked up the skull cup from the blood circle on the ground.
He turned it over, studying it, then set it upon the altar.
“We do not know who the attackers are. However, whether they are vampires or demonspawn, I agree that it is our duty as Horadrim to intercede.” He glanced at Lorath.
They departed from the settlement and marched northwest, deeper into the wetlands.
With each passing league, they found the terrain more forbidding, a labyrinth of sluggish streams and stagnant pools where paths that appeared firm would give way suddenly to quagmires of sucking mud.
The trees and brush around them closed in with fiendish thorns.
The air thickened with the noxious fumes of decay, and the biting insects grew more voracious.
A chilling fog seeped into their clothing like the grasping fingers of the dead that haunted the scattered ruins.
“Why would anyone choose to live out here?” Donan asked, soaked to his waist, his boots caked with muck.
For all that the younger man had been through, he still looked with naivety at the broken world the Horadrim labored to repair. Lorath answered him with some bitterness: “Perhaps they prefer the dangers here to those in the city.”
The younger man lowered his voice. “Is it…difficult? For you to return here, I mean?”
Lorath clenched his jaw. “What’s past is past.”
A moment went by. “Is it true you went down below the marsh, into Corvus with Tyrael?”
“I did.” Lorath had no desire to see those sunken halls and roads ever again.
“A city of the Firstborn…” Donan shook his head in wonder. “What—what was it like?”
Lorath knew he meant no harm. Donan was eager, and very clever—no doubt a valuable recruit to their order—but his curiosity often led him down paths best left undisturbed. “It was empty,” Lorath answered, in a way that ended the conversation.
Night fell halfway through their journey, and they had no choice but to make camp on the driest patch of earth they could find.
They lit no fire, to avoid attracting unwanted attention, and ate from their dried stores.
The crescent moon peered down at them through drifts of pallid, sickly clouds, offering little light.
In the darkness, the marsh came alive with the drone of insects, the grunts and croaks of amphibians, and the lonely call of a distant owl.
Tyrael took the first watch, and Donan fell asleep quickly.
Eventually, Lorath drifted off as well, but familiar nightmares assailed him.
He had been free of those dark dreams for some time, but his return to the Blood Marsh had awakened old memories, and he soon found himself in Corvus, within an underground tomb, watching helplessly as Malthael, the Angel of Death, cut down his fellow Horadrim; and then he was in Westmarch, the city of his birth, as Malthael’s army of reapers swept through its streets, slaughtering all in their path.
He saw a small child with red hair who stood paralyzed before a ghostly shadow looming over her, and he rushed into battle to defend her.
He swung his polearm slowly, as though against a mighty current, but he managed to defeat the wailing reaper.
Then he took the child’s hand, and she looked up at him.
She was not a child he knew. She was every child in Westmarch, and Lut Gholein, and all the other ravaged cities where the innocent died by the thousands.
“Come with me,” he told her. “I will keep you safe.”
In the next moment, an arrow struck her in the chest, almost passing through her small body.
Lorath watched in shock and horror as blood bloomed across her dress.
She died in his arms, eyes wide in terror and filled with tears of pain.
Lorath howled in powerless rage, then awoke with a start.
He came to in his bedroll in the Blood Marsh, worried that he might have cried aloud in his sleep.
Donan snored next to him, undisturbed, but Tyrael was watching him, a shadowy silhouette against the marsh, his eyes two sparks of light like dim stars.
“The deepest wounds take the longest to heal,” he said.
Lorath sat up feeling embarrassed and defensive. “What would you know about injury?”
Tyrael spoke with patience, despite Lorath’s effrontery. “I am now as susceptible to harm as you.”
Lorath shook his head. “I know. Forgive me. It’s just that…you don’t need to worry about me. I’d rather we focus on healing Sanctuary.”
“What makes you think the two are different?” Tyrael asked.
Lorath made no answer to that and rose to his feet. “I’m awake now. You might as well get some rest.”
The former angel nodded and moments later had settled himself against a tree, eyes closed, though Lorath wasn’t ever sure how much the man actually slept.
Tyrael may have become mortal, but he wasn’t exactly human—or, at least, he wasn’t the same kind of human as Lorath, Donan, or the settlers they hoped to save.
The rest of that night passed without incident, and after spending another day slogging through marshland, they came upon the blood-drinker encampment in the gloom and mist of an evening drizzle.
A palisade of tall, sharpened wooden stakes hid the interior from view, but that was not its only defense.
The enemy enclosure occupied a small hillock in the middle of a stagnant mere.
The water there smelled rank, with a different kind of foulness than was found elsewhere.
As Lorath drew closer, he realized the odor emanated from human remains.
The blood-drinkers had filled their natural moat with the bones of their victims. Hundreds and hundreds of victims. Lorath glimpsed a rib so slender it could only have come from a child, and deep within himself, a roar shook the lair of his rage.
“Why—why would they do this?” Donan’s hands hung at his sides, his shoulders slumped in horrified disbelief.
“Depravity,” Tyrael answered. “And cruelty, to make the crossing that much harder for those who would come here seeking justice for the slain.”
Lorath picked up a long stick and prodded the water, down to the soft mud and silt of the lake bed. “No one can cross this without a boat. You’d be mired up to your waist.” He left the long stick where he had lodged it and peered at the fort. “There must be a bridge or path somewhere.”
He crept along the shore, keeping to the tree line, and the other two followed behind. Lorath listened for any sounds coming from inside the encampment but heard none. Were it not for the woodsmoke in the air, he might have believed it stood empty.
The rain eased as they made their way around the mere, and the mist thickened to a low-hanging fog over the water.
On the far side of the island, they discovered a wooden causeway laid on uneven pilings.
It stretched across the moat, some fifty paces from the shoreline to the fort’s main gate, in full view of a squat tower where a single shadowy guard stood watch.
“So it isn’t entirely empty,” Lorath whispered.
“But it’s so quiet.” Donan crouched down next to him. “Their main force must be elsewhere. Perhaps away on a raid?”
“It would appear so,” Tyrael said.
“Fortune is with us.” Lorath pointed at the gate. “If we can get inside, we can take the whole encampment. Then we lie in wait for the rest of the blood-drinkers to return.”
“How do we get inside?” asked Donan.
Lorath grinned. “Through the front door.”