Chapter 168: High Orc

Blood rose in front of us before the flames could reach us.

It poured up from the cave floor in a thick red curtain, and in the space of one breath it solidified into a wall. The scarlet fire hit it and spread across its face like water thrown on a stone. The wall did not crack. It did not even smoke.

Small holes ran across its surface, none wider than a coin. Heat leaked through them in thin, steady streams, and it took me a moment to understand why they were there. The wall was not blocking everything on purpose. It was letting us feel the fire, so we would know when it stopped.

I counted my heartbeats while the heat pressed against my face. Charolette stood a step to my right with her jaw tight. Sera had put one hand on the hilt of Cataclysm, which would have done nothing at all.

The heat stopped a few moments later.

Culex turned the wall back into liquid. It ran together in the air, like a ribbon being pulled into a fist, and then it went hard again in his hand as a dagger, dark red and thin as a finger. He held it loosely and did not look at it.

He told us to walk along the edges of the cave, as close to the walls as we could, and to move as fast as we could.

We did as we were told.

None of us argued.

The captains went first the rest of us after them, in a long line with our shoulders brushing the rock. The stone was cold and damp, and the floor was slick with something I did not want to look at. My boots slipped twice.

The cave opened out the farther we went. The ceiling rose until I could no longer see it, and the walls spread apart, and the dark in the middle of the room was so wide that it felt like standing at the edge of a lake. Black scorch marks covered the floor. Old ones, and new ones from the last few minutes.

Then I saw it....

In the center of the cave stood a figure about twelve feet tall. Green-gray skin, a heavy lower jaw with two yellowed tusks, and a body built like a stack of boulders. A long robe hung from its shoulders, stitched with silver symbols I could not read, and a staff of bone twisted with copper wire rested in its left hand. Its eyes were small and yellow, and they were already on us.

[You Are Looking At A Nightmare Horror: High Orc]

The pressure that came off it was different from Saud’s or Scharlott’s. It was not loud. It sat in the room like a heavy cloth over a lamp, and my breathing grew shorter in it. I kept my head down and my feet moving.

’A Nightmare,’ I thought. ’Above a Devil.’

He had. While we hugged the wall, Culex walked straight down the middle of the cave. He did not hurry. He still held the blood dagger loosely.

The High Orc raised its staff.

It spoke. The words were deep and wet and in a language I had never heard, and every syllable seemed to weigh something.

Silver light ran along the symbols on its robe.

The copper wire on the staff began to glow. I felt a cold edge brush across my mind, even from the wall, like the shadow of a hand passing over my face.

A curse, and a heavy one. It was not aimed at me.

Another followed. Then a third. The orc kept casting, one after the other, and each new curse made the air thicker. I caught the feeling of something pressing on my muscles, slowing them, dragging at my joints.

Another tried to climb into my head and make me forget where I was. It was a mental curse and a physical one, both layered, both aimed at the man in the middle of the room.

Culex kept walking.

His stride did not break. His head did not turn. The curses reached him and slid off, one by one, as if he were made of glass and they were rain.

The High Orc stopped chanting.

For a moment, the cave was silent. The orc’s huge hand tightened around the staff. Its yellow eyes had gone wide, and its lower jaw hung open a little, with a string of spit between the tusks. It had thrown everything it had at a man, and the man was still walking.

’Saints are immune,’ I thought. I had heard it said, and I had not understood it until now. It was not that the curses failed. It was that they were never going to work.

The orc stepped back.

It slammed the butt of its staff against the floor, and fire burst out of the air around it. Orange, then red, then a deep scarlet.

The flames climbed fast, twisting upward and curving inward until they closed over its head in a dome. It was a wall of fire, thirty feet across, and the heat hit us even from the edge of the cave. I raised my forearm against my face.

The orc stood inside it, safe, with only its eyes showing through the flames.

It lifted its staff again. White light gathered at the tip, then thin beams of it shot out from the dome in every direction. They hit the floor and the walls, and wherever one landed, the stone turned to smoking glass. One passed within a few feet of the captains, and I heard one of them swear.

Culex stopped walking. He stood fifteen feet from the dome with the beams cutting past him on both sides, and one crossed his sleeve and burned a hole in it.

He looked at the hole, and then he held out his other hand.

Light gathered on his palm, and a small shape stepped out of it.

It was a fox. Four tails, and no longer than a man’s arm. Its fur was a pale, clean color, and its eyes were calm. It sat on Culex’s palm, then hopped to his shoulder, as if that was where it had always belonged. Then it opened its mouth.

A ball formed in front of it, black at the center with a faint, cold glow around the edge. It looked small.

The fox flicked its tails.

The ball shot into the dome.

Whump!

The scarlet fire bent inward where it hit.

For a second, the dome held. Then a crack ran across it, a line of dark through the flames, and the fox made another ball, and another.

It did not rush. Each one hit a little to the left or right of the last, in the places where the crack was widening.

Whump! Whump! Whump!

The orc’s staff shook. I could see its hand shaking on the wood. It poured more light into the beams, and the beams flickered and weakened.

The dome was fighting itself now, burning and tearing at once. Culex stood in front of it with his hands at his sides and did not spend a single drop of his own power.

The fox did all the work.

One last ball hit the center.

The dome shattered.

It broke into hundreds of flaming pieces that fell and vanished before they touched the floor. The heat blew past us in a single hard gust, and my hair whipped across my face.

When I looked again, the High Orc stood alone in the open, with nothing between it and the king.

Its yellow eyes were enormous. Its chest rose and fell in short, ragged breaths.

Culex took one step forward.