Chapter Two
They lit a campfire in a clearing in the woods surrounded by cypress and swamp oak, near enough to the shoreline for the guard to see it clearly, even through the fog. Moments later, a cry of alarm went up inside the fort.
“Do you think they’ll take the bait?” Donan asked.
Lorath nodded. “Right now, I’d wager they’re trying to decide which of them will come out here to investigate.”
“How do you know?”
“The priest answered that in the journal you found,” Lorath said. “These blood-drinkers are emboldened. Overly confident. They feel strong behind their wall and their moat. They can’t imagine a foe who would dare oppose them.”
“And we must avoid making the same mistake,” Tyrael said, “until we know what power emboldens them. Now, ready yourselves.” He sat on a log near the fire and pulled his cloak around himself to cover his armor, having insisted on being the one left exposed, while Lorath and Donan hid among the nearby trees.
Before long, the gate opened, and a solitary warrior left the safety of the fort.
Lorath readied his polearm as the fiend trotted along the causeway through the fog, heavy boots drumming on the rough planks.
The thudding stopped when the enemy reached the shore, and Lorath heard the ring of a drawn blade.
The blood-drinker made no effort to approach the campfire quietly, stomping and snapping twigs, and when he stepped into the light, Lorath saw he matched Tyrael in height and the breadth of his shoulders.
For armor, he wore the gnarled hides of swamp creatures beneath a dirty cloak.
He wielded a broadsword, and he carried a wooden buckler with a battered metal boss.
Human skulls with the tops of their craniums removed hung from his belt, and crimson sigils covered his face and his skin, drawn in what Lorath assumed to be blood.
“You chose the wrong place to rest, traveler,” the warrior said as he passed the tree Lorath hid behind.
Tyrael sat like a statue as the blood-drinker approached. “Who do you serve?” he asked.
The warrior halted. “What?”
“Which foul being do you serve?” Tyrael asked. “Name your master.”
The warrior chuckled. “Those are your last words? Odd choice.”
Lorath sensed the man would attack with his next breath, so he leapt from behind the tree and charged.
The blood-drinker had only enough time to spin around before Lorath drove the point of his polearm deep into his chest, delivering what should have been a killing blow.
But instead of collapsing, the warrior merely grunted, then used his buckler to backhand Lorath with shocking strength, throwing him across the clearing, where he landed hard, stunned, gasping, struggling to remain conscious as he rolled onto all fours.
Tyrael had drawn El’druin, and Donan now stood in the firelight with his staff.
Both men looked on in surprise as the blood-drinker dropped his buckler, gripped the haft of the polearm still stuck in his chest, and pulled the blade free.
Then the warrior hurled the weapon at Lorath like a spear, which he barely dodged.
The polearm struck a tree instead, its point embedded deep in the wood.
Tyrael and Donan attacked as one, their actions coordinated, practiced, fluid. But the blood-drinker moved with incredible speed, and he seemed unaffected by the few blows the two Horadrim managed to land.
Lorath wrenched his polearm from the tree and rushed to join his comrades.
He didn’t know what infernal power strengthened their foe, but he assumed the blood-drinker needed his head attached to stay in the fight.
He seized an opening in the melee, leapt high, and swung his blade wide, a strike that would leave him vulnerable to counterattack if it failed.
The warrior tried to duck, but Lorath’s polearm found his neck and sliced halfway through the meat of it, a wound that seemed to stagger the blood-drinker at last. The enemy swayed on his feet, spraying blood, and the tip of his sword dropped, though still he refused to fall.
Then Donan rushed in, head down, and drove his shoulder hard into the warrior’s stomach, shoving him backward toward the campfire.
The blood-drinker stumbled and toppled into the flames, and in the next moment, his cloak went up in a blaze.
That was when he finally showed the first signs of pain, thrashing and howling through his savaged throat.
“Silence him!” Lorath hissed.
Tyrael brought El’druin down and finished the decapitation Lorath had started. The clearing fell silent as oily smoke rose from the burning corpse.
“We needed his cloak,” Tyrael said.
“In the fog, yours will do well enough,” Lorath replied.
“You attacked too soon,” Tyrael said. “We learned nothing.”
“He was about to attack you. ” Lorath wiped the blade of his polearm clean on a patch of velvet moss. “And we learned all he would have told us. The real answers are inside that gate.”
“Are either of you injured?” Donan asked.
Lorath had sustained wounds in battle without realizing it before, but this time, he had emerged unscathed. The other two Horadrim had likewise avoided any serious damage.
Donan crouched and leaned closer to the burning body, squinting through the smoke and the flames. “He wasn’t a vampire. But his power seems to have come from blood magic. I wish I could have studied the symbols on his skin before the fire got to them.”
“No time for that, anyway,” Lorath said. “They’ll be expecting him back. Let’s move.”
They arranged themselves as they had previously planned and moved toward the causeway.
Donan and Lorath went first, posing as captives driven forward by Tyrael, while he marched behind, cloaked and hooded, impersonating the blood-drinker.
The fog did much to obscure them, just as Lorath had hoped it would, and they made it almost to the gate before the guard on the watchtower called out to them.
“What have you brought back, Garack?” he asked.
Tyrael said nothing. The gate remained shut.
“Oy, Garack!” the guard shouted.
“Now,” Lorath whispered. Then he and Donan spun around and charged toward Tyrael, shouting and feigning an attack. Tyrael allowed them to bring him down so they scuffled in the fog, trusting that it would get the guards’ attention.
The tower guard bellowed a cry of alarm and an order to those below.
Then the gate opened, and three warriors barreled out onto the causeway, two men and a woman.
None of them looked as imposing as their emissary to the campfire had been, but their size would matter less than their power if they were all practiced in blood magic.
“Remember,” Tyrael whispered, “take off their heads as quickly as you can.”
The three blood-drinkers had little time to react as the Horadrim suddenly turned and launched their assault.
Lorath’s polearm cleaved the head from the first to come within reach, one of the men.
The other two skidded to a halt, and then El’druin flashed.
Another head wheeled through the air and splashed into the mere, and the third blood-drinker turned to run.
Donan pounced on him, caving in his skull with repeated blows of his staff while Lorath raced toward the open gate.
He found one more warrior inside the fort, and he dispatched him quickly with an upward thrust of his polearm through the man’s throat and into his head.
That left only the guard on the watchtower, who by then had taken aim at him with a bow.
Lorath threw himself against the base of the tower as an arrow whistled past him.
Then he heard a gasp from above, and the guard slammed into the muddy earth at Lorath’s feet with Donan’s dagger in his back.
Some of the blood-drinker’s bones had snapped when he hit the ground, and yet he still tried to rise, gurgling on his own blood.
Lorath put an end to him just as the other Horadrim raced through the gate.
“Is that all of them?” Donan asked.
“For now, I think,” Lorath said, turning to survey the encampment.
It was a squalid place, littered with bones and refuse.
At its center lay an enormous communal hearth and a ritual altar caked with so many layers of dried blood, it almost resembled wax.
Wretched hovels surrounded the fire, constructed more poorly than even bogan dwellings.
Lorath had no idea how many slept in each, but he assumed some several dozen occupied the fort.
Behind him, Tyrael shut and barred the gate. “We have no idea when the rest of these blood-drinkers will return. Donan, you will stand the first watch on the tower. Lorath and I will investigate the encampment.”
“Yes, Tyrael,” Donan said with a slight bow of his head. As he climbed the rickety ladder up the tower to take his post, Lorath shook his head, somewhat bemused by the younger man’s continued deference.
“I will begin with that altar,” Tyrael said. “See what you can discover in their huts.”
“Will do,” Lorath said.
In the hovels, he found soiled and flea-ridden bedding, rudimentary furniture, skull cups like the one left behind in the village, and human bones that showed signs of gnawing.
In one, he located the fort’s cache of plundered goods, including barrels of ale and bottled spirits, jewelry, spices, honey, and oil.
In another, he found a stash of weapons, mostly crude blades and a few crossbows.
A smell of decay pervaded the encampment, and flies filled the heavy air with incessant buzzing.
Lorath had seen all he needed to pass a sentence of death on the blood-drinking cultists, but he continued his search with diligence, following Tyrael’s command, until he came upon something unusual.