Sylver Seeker Book 7
Chapter 26 (291) - Shocking
Whether he had been told not to use the D word, or if this was something he decided on his own, Sylver didn’t ask, but the way Lorn was practically shaking as his see through intangible body floated mere inches away from him, he had to assume this was the first time the man had ever seen a D word in the flesh.
“Are you going to turn this into a song too?” Sylver asked.
He’d seen men flinch less when he stabbed them, then how Lorn reacted to him speaking.
It took him a little too long to compose himself to answer, and only through some minor miracle did the man manage to talk without stammering.
“It’s already a song. Never got as popular as I thought it would, but… I understand why, now,” Lorn said.
“I see,” Sylver said.
Aside from the muscles the worms seemed to have eaten through the ligaments and cartilage too, so the hearts were flabby sacks of blood, the lungs were all collapsed, and they did something to the teeth that made some of them sandy and brittle, it was very strange.
Even more strange was that there wasn’t a single brain amidst the gigantic mountain of meat, not even a fragment, and this was just Sylver eyeballing it since there were too many to count, but he got the sense there were more human bodies in the pile, than there were human heads.
Livers and kidneys on the other hand, were worth grinning about, glands of all types in every form he could have wished for, and enough eyeballs to fill up a swimming pool with them.
“Can I ask you a favour?” Lorn asked.
“Sure.”
“Can you take my family to Arda?” Lorn asked.
Sylver wasn’t completely caught off guard by the question, but the way Lorn phrased it was strange.
“I could, but if it’s because of what you saw just now, you should know this happens every other day, basically everywhere, even in Arda,” Sylver said.
Lorn was quiet for about a minute.
“That can’t be true,” Lorn said.
“Ask literally any priest. You have kids, did you never think about why a priest or the equivalent of a priest was in your house the day your child was born?” Sylver asked.
“I always thought it was… I don’t know… Wait, so were they checking to see…” Lorn said without actually saying it.
“I understand the humor in me saying this, but go visit a temple. Any temple,” Sylver said.
Lorn stopped moving, and somewhat slowly faded out of sight, and disappeared from Sylver’s soul sense too.
It was warm inside the barrier-covered city, so warm that more than a few wine bottles left inside cupboards had either shattered or the corks flew out of them. He estimated the temperature of the air to be in the low fifties, very uncomfortable for the living, and unpleasant for him on account of his insides warming up a bit too much, but it was preferable to having to deal with fluids in the edges of his limbs freezing.
Without the fire making the air move around, the water vapor that had gathered into a cloud in the top of the barrier had traveled downwards, and in a matter of minutes caused the sewer system to overflow.
There wasn’t much of a smell, the slimes bred for cleaning didn’t like the light and mostly kept to themselves, small groups of insects gathered together and tried to attack them, but while these slimes weren’t oily the way slimes in the wild were, they were just as acidic, so the bugs dissolved on first contact.
“I don’t understand how everyone knows this but me,” Lorn said as he appeared in the exact spot he had disappeared in.
“It was never a secret,” Sylver said.
“Apparently, but still. If it’s this common, why have I never you-know-in my entire life?” Lorn asked.
“Credit where credit is due, the human temples especially, have a really solid grasp on it. I myself thought they were a myth up until I was an adult,” Sylver said.
Nyx, for obvious reasons, never talked about demons when he was “young” and Adema was just religious enough that she presented the concept of demons in such a way that it never clicked in his head that they were “real” until he saw one in person.
“Hmm?” Lorn looked to his left, away from Sylver.
“The madam taught me. Why?” Lorn asked. “No, never. Ahhhh, I see, that makes sense,” Lorn said to the air on his left.
“Could you do this somewhere else,” Sylver said with a faint scowl in his voice.
Lorn turned back to him.
“Yeah, sorry. Apparently priests tell children,” Lorn sucked in a breath through his teeth, “when they’re teaching them to read,” Lorn said.
Now that he thought about it, Adema was the one that taught him to read and write.
“What else don’t I know that’s common knowledge?” Lorn asked.
Sylver looked up at him.
“How would I know, what you don’t know?” Sylver asked.
“I don’t know?” Lorn said.
“You’re a fully grown adult man with a wife, children, and a business, if you don’t know something by this point in your life, you don’t need to know it,” Sylver said.
“When you put it like that… So, wait, are all the myths true? Are they terrified of frogs?” Lorn asked.
Sylver looked up at him.
“No? Why would they be terrified of frogs? Where did you even hear that?” Sylver asked.
“It’s in a, there’s a song about it,” Lorn said.
“They’re not afraid of frogs. Cats and dogs can sense them, but it varies by the individual cat and the individual dog. Look, find the oldest priest you can, and ask them. There are entire chapters dedicated to this in their holy books, they’ll be more than happy to answer any question you have on the subject,” Sylver said.
Lorn looked like he was about to say “I don’t want to talk to a priest,” but changed his mind and didn’t say it.
He quietly floated in the air while Sylver sat on the ground and used the meat puppet to crack open the bones he’d gathered to scoop out the worms inside them.
He didn’t have any plans for the bone worms, he would either keep them in a barrel, or incinerate them when he had a chance.
There wasn’t anything to get out of them, they didn’t have any magic to study or copy, functionally they were leeches with a different mouth, and he knew everything there was to know about leeches from his early blood magic days.
Since it didn’t cost him anything to store them, he would keep some as a sample in a jar, just in case, but there were easier, faster, deadlier, and more controllable ways to infect a city, and if he could come up with suffocating them, other people would too, even if it might take then a little longer to come up with the idea.
“So, Arda,” Lorn said.
Sylver looked up at him.
“Is it just what happend?” Sylver asked.
“No,” Lorn said.
Lorn had this look on his face that all but said “there’s something else I can’t talk about.”
Given his abilities and previous employment, he was heavily involved in Merol’s affairs, and likely knew things he was forbidden from revealing to anyone, under the threat of death.
Or under the threat of his family’s death.
“How many people would there be?” Sylver asked.
“Sixteen in total,” Lorn answered without pausing to think about it.
“You, your wife, four kids, that’s six people, who are the other ten?” Sylver asked.
“I’m staying here, it’d just be them. Two parents-in-law, three sisters-in-law, and three brothers-in-law, and their spouses. What’s the wife of your brother-in-law called?” Lorn asked.
“Dwarves have a word for it, but there isn’t one in Eirish. I need to talk to Nels before I can say yes or no,” Sylver said.
“Of course, of course, this isn’t a-there’s no hard feelings if you say no, this isn’t a life or death thing,” Lorn said quickly.
“If I was certain I could fly there, it wouldn’t be a problem. But with the ice and all the rest, it would be a whole journey, weeks, if not months, even on horseback,” Sylver explained.
“By all the rest do you mean the giant thing crawling around?” Lorn asked.
“I mainly meant the messed up weather, but that too. Have you seen it? The thing above the ice I mean,” Sylver asked.
“Can’t pass through it,” Lorn said.
Sylver sat up a little straighter.
“You can’t pass through the ice?” he asked.
“No,” Lorn said, in a way that Sylver understood to mean he had no intention of going above the ice even if someone figured out a way to let him pass through it.
###
Gathering all the bone husks took half a day.
[Dead Dominion] had a range of just under 200 meters, and as he discovered, if he focused on bones exclusively he could feel where they were much further than 200 meters. He could then have the shades manually search for the infested jaw bone stuck inside a crack in a house’s foundation.
It wasn’t strictly speaking necessary to gather them, every single bone worm was dead and wasn’t a danger to anyone, but by gathering up all the bones he was killing two birds with one stone.
Goodwill with Camilla and her people, and perfectly cleaned bones, the pinholes where the worms entered them were a problem structurally speaking, but they were more than good enough for carving sigils into to be used in rituals.
Lorn’s skills weren’t used all that much, anywhere the bone worms might have been able to crawl into, the shades found with ease, and unlike Lorn they could materialize nearby and reach into the hole or crevice the infected bone was laying inside of instead of just telling Sylver where it was.
The skulls Syvler had been hoping for were a disappointment, for some reason the bone worms broke every skull they infected into individual pieces, they could still be useful, but more than a handful of rituals required very whole skulls.
The rituals that needed skulls were the sort where the skulls had to be naturally whole, gluing the pieces together wouldn’t work, the rituals would know the differences.
“They’re bringing people in to help with the clean up,” Lorn said while floating halfway inside a wall.
Sylver got incredibly irritated with him for a reason he couldn’t figure out, until he realized what Lorn had reminded him of.
Fucking Chrys.
Pissed off at the fact that he was pissed off at Chrys when it wasn’t her fault that the red ice was blocking her powers, Sylver finished the circle loop around the city, and made his way to where the “bad quarter” had torn itself into pieces.
The barrier around the city blocked his [Dead Dominion] from feeling or connecting to the blood pooled against the slippery surface of the barrier. Surprisingly enough all of the dead he could see were men, adult men for that matter. One had had a giant chunk of his skull bitten off, by human teeth curiously enough.
Cannibalism was one thing, biting a skull hard enough to break it with your teeth was different, even if it was functionally the same.
A Redcap curse seemed like the most likely explanation.
Except nothing about the appearance of the dead bodies said “curse” to Sylver. To make a living person do something like this meant the curse was a high enough tier that there couldn’t not be a physical sign of it…
It was possible, but who would go through all that trouble to curse people and then go through even more trouble to hide the fact that they cursed them?
The simplest explanation was mass hysteria or a fast acting chemical?
If it were chemical there would be people losing it in the “good” three quarters, mass hysteria made more sense, those people were living in their own shit for months, the giant silhouette on the ice was likely the final straw.
Closer than he would have liked right at this moment, a man with a faintly glowing pale grey scarf wrapped tightly around the lower half of his face stepped out of a curtain in the air.
“Will regular fire be enough?” the man asked.
His voice was muffled by the scarf.
“There’s no air for a regular fire,” Sylver said.
The man looked down at the metal box he was holding in his hand, flicked it open with his thumb, and aside from producing a tiny spark whatever else was meant to happen, didn’t happen.
“Just bring them to me,” Sylver said with almost a sigh in his voice.
###
Merol had an overabundance of druids, on account of all the various flowers they grew to eventually use as pigments.
But these weren’t “druids” in the foul smelling, oily haired, “one with nature, to the point there’s a birds nest in my beard” druids, these were mages that called themselves druids.
Sylver got the sense aside from the class there was a cultural aspect to why they called themselves druids that he was missing, but none of the eight “druids” were interested in talking to him, so he kept his distance while they measured out milliliter precise amounts of liquid fertilizer and used a needle fine puppet to feed the fast growing sapling’s individual roots.
The tree reminded Sylver of a cigar, it was a similar brown colour, and its long flat trunk had that same slightly bumpy texture.
Leaves peeled themselves away from the lower part of the tree as it grew upwards, like a palm tree, but they were flat, and in with the light illuminating them from the back he could see bubbles in the fluid moving around inside the leaves spreading out through the thin leaves and joining back together as they looped back to the trunk.
One of the druids kicked the tree, and the whole thirty meter tall thing shuddered as its leaves spread out all the way, it looked like a child tried to make a pine tree out of clay.
All eight druids raised their hands into the air, and as they slowly walked around the tree they started spinning their arms like they were swimming through the air.
A breeze kicked up all the dust that had settled on the ground of the nearby walls of the buildings, the dust flew towards the tree, and disappeared into the thin gaps between the leaves that from a certain angle reminded him of fish gills.
The air felt itchy against the fleshy parts of Sylver’s face, it also had a faint lemon taste to it, and as the wind continued to get stronger and stronger doors snapped open and a few in the distance shattered apart.
Like it had been stuck and got dislodged, the wind got so fast and strong that it started to whistle, and also brought with it a sharp plank of wood, that one of the mages standing guard over the dancing “druids” pointed her staff at and made the plank freeze in place before pushing it into the ground.
He heard the sound of dry fabric flapping in the wind, and turned to see Scilla’s white curly hair fluttering in the wind exactly the same way the enormous curtain she was holding open was.
According to the Spring piece he’d left with Nels, Prune had come looking for Sylver, struck up a conversation with Nels, and for some odd reason they got along so well that Nels had spent most of the time she’d been here talking to the small elf woman.
He knew it would be a whole thing with her later on, but Sylver decided not to tell Nels about the demon he’d helped “kill.” She was in a good mood, and with Lostal being this close, talking in a foreign language would be pointless.
Sylver’s mood on the other hand soured even more than it had previously, as he looked at the glass jar of honey standing on top of a waxed wooden barrel that Mora had reinforced with her threads to make it air tight, he realized he could have, and should have, asked for permission to get through the openings so he could get Aleri and settle the situation with Lostal.
Then again… with the ice, the situation was more or less settled for the moment regardless of Novva’s letter. Even if he did tell them about it, it was unlikely they were going to do anything while the ice was above them.
On top of that, there was also that silhouette that may have caused the barrier to shut off.
But since he and Quentin had already shook hands on the matter, and Sylver was looking at his reward for clearing the city of infection, the hollow-vault wasn’t a good enough reason for him to attempt to alter a deal after it had already been shaken on, and then fulfilled from both sides.
It wasn’t just merely rude, it was unprofessional, and the sort of thing that would be a bigger mark against his name and character than if he had merely agreed to something and then failed to uphold his end of the deal.
###
There was a small tea light candle on the floor of the house Sylver and the rest were staying in, and the smell it produced was so intense it burned his eyes when he tried to go inside.
A small boy in Camilla’s white colours ran over to them a few seconds after that, and informed them that they needed to wait for the candle to finish burning before entering the house, and to open all the doors and windows to air out until the smell was gone. He also said to discard any food they had, and to gather any fabrics they had like bedsheets, towels, clothes they might have had stored away, and that someone would be by later to collect them to clean them.
On the one hand, this wasn’t necessary, there weren’t any dead bodies in this part of the city, but as Lostal asked why they were throwing their food away, the small boy said that he’d been told that when the barrier went down “illnesses” from the people living outside crawled through the streets and may have infected the food and the soft materials.
Courtesy of [Still Water] none of this was an issue for them, they didn’t have that many things to begin with, but so as to play along the shades stripped all the beds, gathered all the towels, and aside from a jug of drinking water all the food in the house was floating around down in his [Still Water] puddle.
Lostal and Matson supervised, or at least watched, while the shades deep cleaned the house starting from the bathrooms, then the bedrooms, and cleaned around Sylver while he made coffee to see if the beans he’d bought were going to disappoint him.
Klara sat with Mora and Nels outside so as not to get in the shades’ way, and as Spring saw a young man with a cart filled with labeled cloth sacks approaching the house, he had all the shades hide, and Lostal and Matson picked up the mop and rag and cleaned up the last speck of dust.
As the young man pulled his cart to the next house, the coffee finished steeping, Sylver poured himself a cup and mixed it with milk and honey, and after asking Nels if she wanted any, poured her a cup too without adding anything.
He sat next to her, next to the shade her head was attached to. The light coming in through the sky above was dimming, and bathed the scrubbed clean cobblestone street in a warm orange light, somewhere on the left children were yelling at each other while running in a circle, a small dog was barking from one of the roofs, and the air was the perfect blend of warm but with a faint breeze.
Sylver leaned back against the wall of the house, he held the cup up to his face, and just as his lips were about to reach it, he felt Scilla’s presence inside the house. What he, for the time being, considered his house.
He held the cup a mere centimeter away from his lips for a few moments, before he pulled it away and unceremoniously dropped it and its contents down onto the floor, where it passed through his [Still Water] portal, and froze in time at its perfect drinking temperature.
He stood up from the step he was sitting on, and tried to make a decision regarding Nels.
“I can’t actually help, but I can repeat whatever you say with confidence,” Nels said, and being two steps ahead as always, she knew from how he was treated back in the temple that these people weren’t going to just do as he said, and were going to try to argue with him. He nodded at her.
Inside the house Sylver placed two small bird’s bones down on the kitchen table.
“I might be away for a while, there’s food in this one,” Sylver held up the smaller bone, “and all our corn in case things are calm enough for the market to open. Same as before, no-one goes out alone, keep an eye on Klara, and if Mora starts acting strange, follow her lead,” Sylver said to Lostal and Matson standing near the table, and got a nod from Klara over on the couch that she heard what he said.
“What about the-” Lostal raised his hands to make a gesture of some sort, but by the looks of it he could tell there were other people listening to them right now, so he put his hands back down.
“I need to do this first, that’s next,” Sylver said, on the assumption Lostal was talking about Aleri and the hollow-vault.
It took him a while, but eventually Lostal nodded at him.
“There’s coffee if you want some,” Nels said with a gesture towards the copper pot Sylver had used to make the coffee.
“Good luck?” Matson half said, half asked.
“Thank you. Spring is in Klara’s shadow if you need anything,” Sylver said.
Stepping through Scilla’s soft curtain-like portal into the tunnel was like slowly walking naked into a cold lake.
Sylver immediately felt sleepy and had to stop himself from yawning, followed by the feeling of smoking an entire cigarette in a single breath.
There was a pot of ice sitting in the oven, intense hot holy energy flowed in a spiral around the room, while cold wet water vapour parried it and cooled the oven down to room temperature.
If he were alone this wouldn’t be a problem, just a dense layer of dark energy around his skin and he would forget there was any holy energy floating around, but if he did that with these paladins around, they would start increasing the density of the holy energy protecting their skin, and even on a good day Sylver would eventually lose this game of tug of war.
So, he simply toughed through the hot wisps of air, and tried not to lower his guard too much when the cool dark wisps soothed his metaphorically blistering skin.
They were underground, if the raw stone all around them wasn’t enough of a clue, Sylver could feel Mora’s presence far far above him.
They were kilometers, not just hundreds of meters, underground.
There was a skewed wooden doorway embedded inside the stone on one side of the somewhat circular room, and a perfectly square vault door made out of a mixture of gold and platinum, with peppered chips of silver coins that were so blessed that Sylver was fairly certain just touching one of them with his bare hand would cause his entire arm to burst into flames.
There were three priests, two gigantic paladins, and a very young woman covered from head to toe in a shiny sheet woven out of silver threads whose soul had a deeply unpleasant feeling to it. Not in the prey sensing a natural predator sense, but like he was looking at a bear cub and knew full well there was an adult bear lurking not too far away.
“Have we met before?” Sylver asked the covered up woman.
She didn’t so much as acknowledge his presence, and when he lifted a hand up to scratch his face, the two enormous armour clad men, or possibly women, took a step forward and now stood between Sylver and the covered up woman.
He couldn’t see inside the thin gap in their helmets, the armour itself was glowing to his eyes, and their skin inside the armour was glowing even brighter, sort of an inversion of someone’s face being hidden by the darkness of a hood.
The small covered up woman had something in her left hand, it was small, and heavy enough that she was having trouble holding it. She walked one shuffling step at a time towards the almost singing with holiness vault door.
She stopped a half meter away from the door, slowly lowered herself down to her knees, pressed the thing she was holding against her chest, and added extra pressure using her other hand.
Similar to the door, Sylver couldn’t quite hear what the girl was mumbling, but he could tell by the way Nels’ eyebrows were twitching every other time the girl breathed in between mumbling, that she was reciting a prayer far above what someone of her age should have been capable of.
Unlike proper, real, magic, the young girl’s praying was answered with a long and loud humming sound, the edges of the door grew alit with sparkling light, the small room was illuminated with all manners of colours, and filled it up with so much holy energy that Sylver had to place his hand on the shoulder of the shade Nels’ head was attached to, to stop the shade from disintegrating.
The humming, lights, colours, and other relatively minor methods of showing off took their sweet time to disperse, Sylver could hear bells ringing in the distance for some reason, this wasn’t as badly disorienting as the temple, but by the end of it he was left with the unpleasant taste of stale air in his mouth.
One of the paladins lowered themselves down to the girl and as if they were picking up an infant, lifted her up into their arms, and walked backwards out of the room through Scilla’s curtain.
Instead of descending into the floor or swinging open, the square vault door turned into a shimmering liquid, and like someone was blowing a bubble, expanded away from the group into what Sylver had been certain was solid rock according to [Advanced Earth Manipulation].
It looked like it was coating the inside of a large room with wet gold paint, but as the bubble of liquid metal kept stretching itself thin the coating split and tore like a silk sheet.
The room was in the shape of a tall cylinder, the ceiling a half sphere, with tiny sigils neatly carved into the multi coloured stained glass.
The walls were made up of hexagonal blocks of shiny grey metal, with hundreds of hexagon shaped holes in it, some were empty, some had crystals trapped inside them like gems in a ring, other holes had thin glass on top of them with twigs, piles of leaves, feathers, all sorts of magical catalysts.
Just the ones Sylver immediately recognized would have made a year long adventure to get them worth the effort.
The floor of the room was pure platinum, polished to a mirror finish, the grooves from the shallowly cut sigils in the metal made the bright beams of light shining down through the coloured glass from the ceiling bounce off the walls before eventually aligning in the center of the room in the shape of a perfect circle.
It almost looked like an inverted chandelier, but instead of glass hanging from the ceiling, it was sticking up from the floor, except in this case the glass was pure light.
Inside the circle, in the very center of the room, there was a completely normal looking clean shaven bald human man, sitting on the cold metal floor with his legs crossed.
Both of his hands were loosely clasped together in his lap, his head was slumped forward like he was about to fall asleep, and he was clothed in a single sheet of white fabric that he had carefully wrapped around his body like a robe.
“That’s a fucking demon lord,” Sylver said calmly with a finger pointing at the man in the middle of room.
End Of Book 7