Warlock of the valley, p.1
Warlock of the Valley, page 1
Warlock of the Valley
Heroes of the Valley, Volume 4
K.J. Coble
Published by K.J. Coble, 2022.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
WARLOCK OF THE VALLEY
First edition. October 30, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 K.J. Coble.
ISBN: 979-8215243770
Written by K.J. Coble.
Also by K.J. Coble
Against the Endless Dark
Flight of the Old Wolf
Hell's Jesters
Hell's Jesters
Cry Havoc
Rebel Hell
Back Into The Fire
Hell or Highwater
Last Call
Heroes of the Valley
Defenders of the Valley
Blood in the Valley
Stand in the Valley
Warlock of the Valley
Scourge of the Valley
Curse of the Valley
The Quintorius Chronicles
Lord of Exiles
Legion of Exiles
Republic of Exiles
The Vothan Guard
The Tome of Flesh
Crypt of the Violator
The Witch of Vendar
The Witch of Vendar
Hell at the Gates
Twilight in the City of God
Standalone
Magic Fire - Metal Storm
The Shadows of Maunathyrr
Ashes of Freedom
Beyond the Bulwarks
Watch for more at K.J. Coble’s site.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By K.J. Coble
Dedication
Prologue | Shadow from the Past
Chapter One | Separate Paths
Chapter Two | Cries for Help
Chapter Three | Rescue
Chapter Four | Unwelcome Returns
Chapter Five | The Warlock
Chapter Six | Reunion Interrupted
Chapter Seven | The Question
Chapter Eight | The Tale of Years
Chapter Nine | Take What Is Mine
Chapter Ten | The Streets of Eredynn
Chapter Eleven | Barrow Hill
Chapter Twelve | Realm of the Dead
Epilogue | Threads of Shadow – Still Loose
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Further Reading: Scourge of the Valley
Also By K.J. Coble
About the Author
For everyone who loves Halloween -- and rolls their eyes when Christmas decorations show up in stores in October.
Prologue
Shadow from the Past
Danelle could already feel the flutter of the entity, though worlds still separated them.
She sat at the edge of a circle chalked into the floor of the uppermost chamber of Zerron’s Tower, cross-legged, hands up with the palms facing inward. The presence of that other, infernal plane of existence tickled hotly across her skin, as though she held them too close to a fire. But hold them she did; her life and, aye, her soul depended upon it.
“Shazzash,” she called into the quivering air.
The chalk boundary at which she sat was the outermost of three, each inscribed with sigils of power gotten from her Master’s tomes or memorized from his hard lessons. Candles perched along the borders, precisely-spaced. The innermost of those burst into cyan flame and their wax ran down along the symbols and borders. Circled by their glowing outline, the center circle hissed and crackled, taking on a cherry glow that crumbled into a magma-like pool.
“Shazzash,” Danelle repeated, the word almost forcing itself from her mouth.
The name, that of an entity from beyond the energetic sea of the Cosmos that lay beneath all things material. A minor being of the Demonic Vortex. But a strangely familiar one. She’d called it once before, under the supervision of her Master, and that meeting had gone rather poorly. It tormented her still. That name.
Pressure intensified upon her palms, like something leaned against a door and she barring the way. Sweat tickled down the side of her face as the air went heavy, hot, stank of brimstone and scorched blood. She grimaced and pressed back with mind and soul. She’d gone beyond the words of a spell, now.
This was a contest of the will.
The candles of the second circle flamed, ran into the prepared patterns, then melted the boundary between worlds a little more. The pool of magma-light spread outwards, stopped at the next border. The summoning worked quickly now, almost running on its own, running ahead of Danelle’s control. But she knew this spell and knew the thing on the other side of it. She kept her control focused on that name and on the outer circle, the barrier.
The last ring of candles lit and the glow chewed through the second circle, rolled with a hungry crackle out towards the last. The chamber hazed around her with its heat and the vile miasma of two existences meeting, warring with one another. Tendrils of otherworldly fume rose from the lava-like glare, twined into patterns that could be symbols, or desperately grasping claws.
And from the depths of that fiery syrup, a form rose. An ape-like head emerged, framed by quivering, pointed ears, followed by a set of wings, folded up around a scrawny tangle of arms, legs, and twitching tail. A barb gleamed at the end of the last and claws flashed from crooked fingers. Eyes split open with a glow to match the pool birthing it. Fangs glimmered as lips peeled back.
The hellish light dimmed. Only the flutter of the last circle of candles remained. The demon—the imp—stood upon the stone floor of the chamber, stood in Danelle’s world. It gave its drooping wings a shake and spread them as it stood before her.
“Shazzash,” she repeated its name, one last time.
The creature took a step towards her, then recoiled slightly as it beheld the outer circle, the still-guttering candles. Eyes flared petulantly. “You are not the child from before.”
Danelle knew the words would sound like rusty blades skirling across a whetstone to the uninitiated. But she heard them clearly, in a sneaky, taunting voice. “I haven’t been a child in a long time.”
“That is so.”
And it was. Only a few months before—horrid, terrible, terrifying months—Danelle had seen cities burn, had seen wars and atrocities and the dead dredged from their graves. She had seen—and wielded—magic of the most appalling sort. She had watched Gods walk the world.
She’d watched Their hate turned loose.
There’d been light, too, desperate, struggling light, comradery, family. Love. She’d stood with her Master, Jayce Zerron, and with the warm circle of his friends. And she had changed, no longer the wizard’s apprentice—a wizard herself.
But none of them were here now. They’d gone their separate ways. And she was alone.
“My powers have grown,” she insisted.
“They have,” the imp agreed, lingering close to the candle-starred boundary and reaching out. It retracted its claws with a hiss. “So, you have little need of these barriers.”
Danelle chuckled. “I think we’ll be fine, for now.”
“We don’t have much time,” the imp, Shazzash, snapped. “Let me through. Let me help you. Now.”
Another laugh, but this one tinged with unease. Danelle could see the entity’s agitation. More than just anger at being ensnared in her sorcery, the scrawny-legged creature paced the edge of her summoning circle as luminescent spittle dripped from its teeth to hiss on the stone floor.
But lies were a demon’s every breath.
“I haven’t brought you here to play games, Shazzash,” Danelle said. “I have need of knowledge.”
The imp snarled and spat, but it calmed itself after a moment. “What is it you need to know” it paused sneeringly “child?”
“There is a name,” Danelle said, and couldn’t help the flutter in her chest. “Missiva. I cannot find any significance to it in my research, other than as a favorite of the common folk in the late Vullian Era.” She glared at the squirming, distracted-seeming entity, made it meet her gaze with its infernal one. “Do you know it?”
“Of course, I do,” Shazzash replied, fangs bared into a hideous grin. “It is yours.”
Danelle wobbled as though struck by a great wind. She blinked, eyes stinging as sweat tickled the corners. He palms fell to her thighs and a sigh of shock whistled from her chest. She had known she would hear this. She had known that name, spoken to her in her dreams, across what seemed a great distance.
Spoken by him, that vision, that shadow—also in her dreams, but increasingly lurking at the edges of her waking hours. A caped, cowled figure of grand, terrible bearing. So familiar. Like the name. Missiva. Her name, or so said this thing.
“You know it, too,” Shazzash cackled. “Has he been here?”
Danelle gave herself a shake. “Has who been here?”
“You know who,” the imp replied. It scratched at the edge of the wax-slathered chalk circle. “Let me out of here. You need my help.”
“Enough of these games, creature!” she boomed and Shazzash actually quailed away from the boundary, shrank to the floor. “What do you mean, it’s my name?”
Slowly, the imp straightened up from its reflexive cringe, wings folding back and hands away from its face. “Don’t you remember it? Don’t you remember you?”
“I sai d enough—”
“Don’t you remember me?”
Danelle held back the retort she had ready. Because it was true. She did.
Shazzash nodded, seeing her recognition. “There’s a reason my name found its way into your Master’s tomes. That meddling Zerraxian know-it-all doesn’t know everything! There’s a reason you picked me, of all the blasphemous names in the Catalogue of the Damned to experiment upon. You sensed me. You knew you’d need me. And you do. You need me, Missiva.”
Danelle found herself caught by the glowing slits of the imp’s stare and shook herself. “Don’t call me that! Games...more demon games. This was a mistake.”
“No!” Shazzash shrieked and fell to its knees, hands folded together in a mockery of prayer. “No, please. Don’t send me away! The hour is late!” It crawled close to the edge of the circle, hissed when a claw touched a dribble of wax. “You’ve heard the name in your sleep, yes?”
Grudgingly, “I have.”
“It’s him,” the imp insisted. “He must be close. He’s calling you. Don’t listen to him!”
“And I suppose I should listen to you?”
A clamor of bells cut off any response the demon might have offered her. It was the tower door chimes, shaken by a lanyard running down to the structure’s first level—tugged almost frantically by the racket of them.
Danelle frowned. It was near midnight and the only visitors she could possibly have would have come from Edon Village, sitting just down the hill from the tower. And the few villagers that had returned to rebuild after its destruction during the uprisings of the spring had kept largely to themselves, avoiding the wizard’s apprentice and even the hint of the magic that had brought such upheaval to their lives.
“Stay there,” she told the imp, then paused with a smirk. “Unless you prefer to return to the Vortex.”
“It’s him!” the imp repeated with a shriek. “Don’t go!”
Danelle rolled her eyes. “Seeing as you’ve been so forthcoming about the who and the what, I think I’ll trust my own senses on this matter.” She turned and headed for the chamber exit, the imp pleading at her back. But those pleas did bring her to a pause at the doorway.
She glanced towards the work bench, over by the book shelves. A hint of unease worming its way into her psyche, she reached out a hand, spoke a quick word of spell-casting. A surge of warm tingle ran up her arm as flesh and bone conducted the power of the Cosmos, and one of the wands leapt from the desktop to fly into her hand. Reassured as she fingered the item, she continued.
Stairs wound down a narrow shaft at the heart of the tower, branching off at doors leading to the various laboratories and living chambers. Most remained empty now, even with her return. They’d always seemed cold, lonely places, but with Jayce gone and no one else rattling about the largely-neglected rooms, the Tower of Zerron was as bleak as a tomb.
Cheery thought, Danelle chortled to herself as long-legged strides carried her down the steps to the cramped foyer on the first level. But the tone of her thoughts didn’t improve as she came to a halt there, staring at the door at the end of the short vestibule, lit only by a single, guttering candle lamp.
The wand warmed to her grasp, seemed a living thing, tensing for action. The floor beneath her sandaled feet emanated an unnatural cool. Even the air had taken on a crackle, like instant before a lightning strike—or before magic is used. Danelle could still hear the faint echo of the imp’s shrieked demands, warnings, all the way from the top level.
The bells clanged anew, hard.
Danelle shook it all off and stepped to the steel-banded, ensorcelled door. Releasing both the physical lock and the non-physical, magical ones, she drew it inward and looked out. But instincts she didn’t fully understand compelled her to hold the wand behind her right hip, just out of sight.
Four men stood in the damp hazy dark, draped in cloaks that had to be uncomfortable as the Remordan Valley’s typical summer heat blanketing them. The air smelled of grass and cooking smoke and the Talos River, from which the fishing folk of Edon Village took their sustenance—and something else, something old, dry, barely at the edge of Danelle’s senses.
She ignored the latter as she regarded the men, and recognized the first. “Speaker Fletcher! What brings you to me at so unusual an hour?”
The man drew his cowl back from flaxen hair and a narrow-boned faced. Sweat beaded waxy flesh and his eyes glittered with something akin to fever. Lips quivered into a smile, but his fingers had trembled. The chief magistrate of the tiny village, he was a ratty, scheming little man of provincial superstitions and prejudices, had never gotten along warmly with the magic-users that squatted atop the hill overlooking his domain.
But he’d never been afraid of them—as he appeared now.
“Mistress Danelle,” he said quaveringly, “might we come in? There’s been...an event.”
She glanced at the others, men of the village she recognized. But the weird, vacant glimmer of their stares was anything but familiar. Her blood cooled, curdled with the sense of something very wrong. “What’s happened?”
“A...” Fletcher shot a half-glance over his shoulder “...birth gone wrong. I could describe it to you, if you let me in.”
“A birth?” She frowned at him. Faintly, she could hear Shazzash’s pleas from upstairs, still screeching. “Certainly, that’s more something for a midwife...?”
“Please,” Fletcher’s voice was suddenly earnest. He took a step closer, but remained a respectful several strides away. “He...that is, the child is not right.”
Danelle’s nerves settled slightly and she released a slow breath. Fletcher had stood with her and Jayce when the Skinner barbarians had rampaged across the Valley in the spring, had fought at their sides. He’d come back to the razed ruins to rebuild, even when so many had given up on the sad, little place. Edon Village and its few remaining denizens were his life.
“Very well,” she said. “Come in and tell me.”
Fletcher’s taut frame relaxed at the words and he started towards her. The others followed at his flanks, almost in a rush. Danelle backed into the foyer to admit them entrance. But a twitch of pain ran up her wrist from the wand and she hissed, looked down at the item. It was one of Jayce’s many experiments, a Wand of Sundrops, crafted in the art of an Acolyte of the Sun—which he’d once been—and possessing multiple spell properties.
One of those was detecting danger.
Swallowing, she looked up reflexively. Fletcher loomed in the doorway, backgrounded by a hazy shaft of moonlight that had broken through the night’s overcast. That illumination caught in his eyes, gave them a wild, hungry flutter. That same feral brilliance caught in the gazes of his companions, crowding close behind him. One of them smiled, teeth glittering—fangs glittering.
Fletcher extended his foot over the threshold. A line carved into the stone there flared cyan as he did, as though he’d broken some unseen barrier with his presence.
Just that, in fact.
A crash of tightly-contained energy tore through the space. The thunderclap of it flung Danelle backward into the foyer, shattered her senses with brilliance so terrible she felt it shine through her bones. She hit the floor, skidded, stopped. For a moment, all was echoing din and stench of ozone.
Then she was clawing at herself frantically, seeking any hurt the blast had done her as ears rang and pulse throbbed. Other than the sting of skinned elbows and backside, she found nothing. Fumbling for the wand, she grasped where it’d fallen and scooped it up, scrambled back to her feet.
Smoke purled off the now-blackened line tracing the inside of the doorway, sparks popping from glassy, fused stonework. Beyond, in the night, piles of cloaks and limbs squirmed like stomped spiders on the grass, the thunderstruck villagers struggling to rise once more. One stood unsteadily with his forearm bent at a nauseating angle. Snarling, eyes shining with savagery more than pain, the man straightened it with a crackle of bone, unbothered by what should have been a crippling injury.
Danelle staggered to the doorway’s edge, holding the Sundrop Wand before her. “I don’t know what’s happened to you,” she snarled out into the night, “but that Ward Against Evil was just one of this Tower’s defenses.” She pointed the wand. “And I have many more.”
