The Warded Man

Anticipating the move, Arlen threw himself backward. He hit the ground in a roll and came back up a few feet away from the blinded creature, facing the other two corelings as they launched themselves his way.

Again, Arlen was impressed. Not to be fooled twice, the corelings did not attack in unison, staggering their strikes so he could not play them against one another.

The tactic worked against the demons, though, for it allowed Arlen to focus upon them one at a time. As the first reached for him, he stepped right up, inside its grasp, and boxed its ears. The explosion of magic collapsed the demon to the sand, where it shrieked and writhed in agony, clutching at its head.

The second demon was close behind the first, and Arlen had no time to dodge or strike. Instead, remembering another trick from the last encounter, he caught the creature’s wrists and threw himself onto his back, kicking upward. The sharp scales of the sand demon’s abdomen cut through the wrappings on his feet and into the flesh beneath, but it did not prevent Arlen from using the creature’s own momentum to hurl it away. The one he had blinded continued to flail about, but it was little threat.

Before the thrown demon could recover, Arlen pounced on the one writhing on the ground, digging his knees into its back and ignoring the pain as its scales cut into him. He caught the coreling about the throat with one hand, and pressed the other hard into the back of its head. He felt the magic beginning to build, but was forced to relinquish his hold too soon in order to roll out of the way as the coreling he had thrown renewed its assault.

Arlen came back to his feet, and he and the sand demon circled one another warily. It charged, and Arlen bent his knees, ready to sidestep the slashing claws, but the demon stopped short, snapping its stout, powerful frame about like a whip. Its thick tail collided with Arlen’s side, sending him sprawling.

He hit the ground and rolled to the side just in time as the heavy, ridged end of the tail thudded into the sand where his head had been. He rolled back, narrowly avoiding the next blow. As the sand demon retracted its tail for another strike, Arlen managed to grasp it. He squeezed, feeling the ward tingle in his palm, then grow warm as the magic gathered. The demon howled and thrashed, but Arlen held fast, locking his other hand just below the first. He quickstepped to keep out of reach as the magic intensified, finally burning right through the tail, popping the ridged end off in an ichorous splatter.

Arlen was thrown by the severance, and the coreling, free again, whirled on him and attacked. Arlen caught one of its wrists in his left hand and jabbed his right elbow into the creature’s throat, but the unwarded blow had little effect. The demon flexed its sinewy arms, and Arlen again found himself flying through the air.

As the creature pounced, Arlen called upon his last reserves of strength and met it head-on, locking his hands around its throat and bearing it backward. The coreling’s talons ripped at his arms, but Arlen’s limbs were longer, and it could not reach his body. They struck the ground hard, and Arlen brought his knees up to the coreling’s arm joints, pinning the limbs with his weight as he continued to choke, feeling the magic swell with every passing second.

The coreling thrashed about, but Arlen only squeezed harder, burning through its scales and into the vulnerable flesh beneath. Bones cracked, and his fists closed.

He rose from the now-headless demon, and looked to the others. The one whose ears he had boxed was crawling weakly away, its will for the fight gone. The blind demon had vanished, but Arlen was untroubled by that fact. He didn’t envy the crippled creature its trip back to the Core. Most likely, its fellows would tear it to pieces.

He finished off the demon limping pathetically in the sand, bandaged his wounds, and then, after a short rest, picked up his roll of provisions and headed on toward Anoch Sun.

Arlen traveled night and day, taking his sleep in the shadow of the dunes when the sun was highest. On only two other nights was he forced to fight; once against another pack of sand demons, and once against a lone wind demon. The others he passed unmolested.

Without the weight of the sun upon him, he covered more distance by night than by day. He was windburned and raw by his seventh day out of the oasis, his feet blistered and bleeding and his water gone, but new strength flowed into him as Anoch Sun came into view.

Arlen refilled his skins at one of the few working wells, drinking deeply, and then set to warding the building that led into the catacombs where he had found the spear. In some of the nearby collapsed buildings, wooden support beams were left exposed, and in the dryness of the desert, they remained intact. Arlen harvested these, along with the sparse scrub brush, for fires. The three torches left at the oasis and the handful of candles in his warding kit would not last long, and there was no natural light below.

He rationed his dwindling supply of food carefully. The edge of the desert, and the nearest hope of more, was at least five days from Anoch Sun on foot, perhaps three if he traveled at night as well as day. That didn’t give him much time, and there was a lot to do.

For the next week, Arlen explored the catacombs, carefully copying new wards wherever he found them. He found more of the stone coffins, but none contained weapons like the first one he’d found. Still, there was an abundance of wards etched upon the coffins and pillars, and more were painted into stories upon the walls. Arlen could not read the pictograms, but he understood much from the body language and expressions on the sequential images. The works were so intricate that he could make out some of the wards on the weapons the warriors carried.

There were new breeds of corelings in the pictures, as well. A series of images showed men killed by demons that looked human, save for their teeth and claws. One central image showed a thin coreling with spindly limbs and a scrawny chest, its head enormous for its body, standing before a host of demons. The coreling faced off against a robed man who stood before a like number of human warriors. The faces of the two were contorted as if in a contest of wills, but they stood well apart. A halo of light surrounded them, as their respective armies looked on.

Perhaps most striking about the image, the man held no weapon. The light emanating from him seemed to be from a ward painted—tattooed?—upon his forehead. Arlen looked to the next image, and saw the demon and its host flee as the humans raised their spears in triumph.

Arlen copied the ward from the man’s forehead carefully into his notebook.

Days passed, and food dwindled. If he stayed in Anoch Sun any longer, he would starve before he found more. He decided to leave at first light for Fort Rizon. Once he reached the city, he could secure a bank note against his accounts to cover a horse and supplies to return.

But it galled him to leave having barely scratched the surface of Anoch Sun. Many tunnels had collapsed, requiring time to dig through, and there were many more buildings that might have entrances to underground chambers. The ruins held the key to destroying demonkind, and this was the second time his stomach had forced him to abandon them.

The corelings rose while he was lost in thought. They came in numbers to Anoch Sun, despite the lack of prey. Perhaps they thought the buildings might one day attract more men, or perhaps they took pleasure in dominating a place that had once stood in defiance of their kind.

Arlen rose and walked to the edge of his wards, watching the corelings dance in the moonlight. His stomach rumbled, and he wondered, not for the first time, at the nature of demons. They were magical creatures, immortal and inhuman. They destroyed, but they did not create. Even their corpses burned away instead of rotting to feed the soil. But he had seen them feed, seen them shit and piss. Was their nature entirely outside the natural order?