Chapter 4 - The Secrets of the Ichor

I hugged the shadows like a lover I wasn't done with yet, using every trick Mistress Ashara had beaten into me over the last year. The Shadow Dance technique wasn't supposed to make me invisible, just really fucking hard to spot if you weren't looking for a half-decent rogue with a thing for stupid risks.

The stone walls of Blackrock Hold oozed with moisture, making my footing slippery as I crept toward the chapel where, if the intel was right, some serious bad-news shit was happening. Blood magic, if the rumors in Ashbourne were true. And if there's one thing I'd learned in my nineteen years, it's that rumors are usually just boring truths wearing fancy hats.

My breath came in slow, shallow draws, the way the Shadow Fox had taught me. "Breathe too hard and you'll give yourself away, Samuel," she'd hissed, smacking my ass with that damn riding crop she loved so much. The memory made me wince, and other parts of me stir. Not the time, Sam. Focus on not dying in this creepy-ass fortress.

The corridor ahead finally opened into the chapel, which must have been a proper house of worship once, back when people worshipped gods that didn't require bleeding animals on altars. I pressed my back against the cold stone, peering around the edge. Torchlight flickered from within, casting long, dancing shadows into the hallway.

Five hooded figures stood in a circle around a stone altar that looked older than dirt. In the center, bound and terrified, was a goat. Not just any goat, a young one with soft white fur and eyes wide with terror. They'd painted symbols on its hide with what I hoped was red paint, but the metallic tang in the air told me otherwise.

"Shit," I whispered. I wasn’t here for heroics. I’d come to put a stop to whatever Malkor was doing in this shithole, and more importantly, to find the girls he’d snatched from Oakhaven. If I happened to grab his grimoire along the way, well, that was just good business sense.

The acolytes began a low chant, their voices blending into an eerie hum that made my skin crawl. One of them raised a jagged dagger that glinted in the torchlight. The goat bleated in terror.

Look, I'm not exactly a bleeding heart. I've stolen from plenty of people who probably didn't deserve it. But sacrificing some innocent goat for whatever fucked-up magic these assholes were cooking? That crossed a line.

Besides, Mistress Ashara always said that causing a distraction was a legitimate infiltration tactic. She'd probably roll her gorgeous amber eyes if she knew I was risking my neck for livestock, but whatever. I’d probably get brownie points with Lily, and those were always worth cashing in.

I drew my twin daggers, the ones I'd saved three months of coin to have specially balanced. The weight felt good in my palms, the only thing that did feel good in this miserable, damp fortress. I counted the acolytes one more time. Five skinny baldies with probably zero combat training versus one professionally trained rogue.

Not great odds. For them.

I took a deep breath and darted into the chapel, my footsteps silent on the stone floor. The first acolyte never saw me coming, my left blade slid between his ribs like they were made for each other. He made a surprised gurgling sound and crumpled before his friends even realized they had company.

"Evening, gentlemen," I quipped, because if you can't be dramatic while interrupting a blood sacrifice, when can you?

The remaining four spun toward me, their faces hidden beneath those ridiculous hoods. The one with the ritual dagger lunged, swinging wildly. Amateur hour. I ducked under his arm and swept my right blade across the backs of his knees. He went down screaming, loud enough to potentially alert others, which wasn't ideal.

"Quiet, please. Some of us are trying to work here," I grunted, finishing him with a quick thrust to the throat. Blood sprayed across the altar, adding to the mess already there. I nearly slipped in it, catching myself on the edge of the stone.

"Fuck, that's gross," I grimaced, trying not to look at the red puddle around my boots. Blood always made me queasy. Ironic for someone slipping into Blackrock Hold, home of the infamous Blood Warlock.

Two of the remaining cultists came at me together, one brandishing a ceremonial knife, the other holding what looked like a human femur. Charming decor these folks had.

"The master will drink your blood!" hissed the one with the bone.

"Yeah, I get that a lot," I spun between them. My blades flashed in the torchlight, opening the throat of one while the other caught a dagger in his chest. He staggered backward, clutching at the wound, his hood falling back to reveal a pale man with wild eyes and blood dripping from his mouth.

I yanked my blade free, wincing at the wet sound it made. "You've got a little something..." I gestured vaguely at my own mouth, but he was too busy dying to appreciate my humor.

The fifth acolyte, smarter than his friends, was making a break for what I assumed was an alarm bell in the corner. I flipped my left dagger once, feeling its weight shift in my palm, then sent it spinning across the room. It caught him in the back of the thigh, sending him sprawling with a cry of pain.

I closed the distance quickly, retrieving my blade with a twist that made him scream.

"I'd say this isn't personal," I told him, looking into his terrified eyes, "but honestly, animal sacrifice is pretty fucking low." I silenced him with a swift cut.

The chapel fell quiet except for the soft bleating of the goat and my own heavy breathing. The smell of blood was overwhelming now, making my stomach turn. I held my breath, listening for footsteps. Between the screaming and the clanging steel, I'd made enough noise to wake every corpse in Blackrock Hold. The thick stone walls might have swallowed the sound, or they might not have. Either way, standing still wasn't going to help. I swallowed hard and gingerly stepped around the bodies to reach the altar.

"Hey there, little buddy," I said softly to the goat, who was struggling against its bonds. "Let's get you out of this mess."

I sliced through the ropes binding the animal. It regarded me with suspicious eyes.

"I'm one of the good guys. Well, not good-good, but definitely better than these assholes." I gestured at the dead cultists. "Go on, get out of here. There's probably grass... somewhere."

The goat didn't need further encouragement. It scrambled off the altar, hooves clattering on stone as it bolted for the door, leaving bloody hoof prints in its wake. I watched it go, hoping it would find its way out of this nightmare fortress.

With the immediate danger handled, I turned my attention to the altar itself. The stone surface was carved with symbols I didn't recognize, twisting, unnatural shapes that seemed to shift if I looked at them too long. The blood pooled in grooves that channeled it toward a central basin.

"Classic," I muttered, wiping my blades clean on a dead acolyte's robe.

Along the edge of the altar lay various ritual implements, brass bowls filled with herbs, chunks of colored chalk, and a large leather-bound book. I flipped it open cautiously, finding pages covered in the same unsettling symbols carved into the altar, alongside diagrams of human and animal anatomy that made me quickly shut it again. It wasn’t the grimoire, but I wasn’t here to browse Malkor’s bookshelf anyway.

"Nope. Not getting paid enough to read that shit."

I did a quick search of the bodies, finding nothing but a few copper coins and what looked like a human tooth on a string. I left that where I found it, thanks very much.

I sighed. No sign of the girls, and no sign of Malkor. I needed to keep moving deeper before someone discovered the mess I'd made. And it was definitely a mess.

"Next room," I whispered to myself. "And hopefully less blood in that one."

*

I stumbled through the archway connecting the blood-soaked chapel to what I could only describe as a mad wizard's wet dream of a laboratory. The air hit me like a slap from Mistress Ashara, except her slaps usually got me excited, and this just made my eyes water and my throat close up. Toxic green vapors curled from half a dozen bubbling cauldrons, their contents glowing with colors that definitely weren't found in nature. Shelves lined every wall, crammed with jars containing things that belonged inside bodies, not floating in cloudy fluid with their dead eyes following my movements.

"Holy shit," I coughed, the fumes already making my head swim. A particularly nasty yellowish cloud drifted toward me from a cracked vial that had spilled its contents onto a wooden table, where the liquid was actively eating through the surface.

I yanked a cloth from my pocket, the one I'd brought to wrap the grimoire in, and pressed it over my nose and mouth. Better than nothing, but not by much. The cloth smelled like Ashbourne's tannery district, which was a step up from whatever the fuck was brewing in here.

"Find the grimoire, don't die from poison, don't touch anything weird," I muttered through the cloth. "Simple enough."

Mistress Ashara's voice echoed in my memory: "Samuel, do try not to get distracted by shiny objects that aren't your target."

She'd said that last bit while running her riding crop along the inside of my thigh, which wasn't exactly helping me focus on the task at hand. Memory or no memory, my body reacted predictably. I adjusted my trousers and tried to focus on the horrifying laboratory instead of my eternally frustrated cock. She was untouchable, but she liked to touch.

The shelf nearest to me held a collection of preserved specimens that would give anyone nightmares. A three-eyed rat floated in yellowish fluid, its extra eye bulging from the center of its forehead. Next to it sat what appeared to be a human hand with scales instead of skin, fingers frozen in a grasping position.

"Fuck me," I whispered, leaning closer despite myself. Dozens more jars lined the shelves behind those, their contents mercifully blurred by clouded preservation fluid. I didn't wipe them clean.

"Nope," I muttered, moving on. "Definitely nope."

I cast one last look around the laboratory, memorizing its layout in case I needed to come back through. The constant bubbling of the cauldrons, the gentle tinkling of glass as vapors caused containers to expand and contract, the suspended horrors watching from their cloudy prisons. This room was designed by a mind that had crawled so far up its own ass it found new things to dissect in there.

I stumbled toward the far side of the laboratory, already dreading whatever fresh hell waited beyond, and slipped through the door. Grateful to leave the toxic fumes behind, only to find myself in a fresh nightmare. Somewhere ahead, muffled by stone, I could hear chanting. More cultists. Wonderful. This narrow passage made the chapel and laboratory seem like cozy tavern corners by comparison. Torches jammed into rusted brackets cast harsh, uneven light that did the decor no favors.

The walls, fuck me, the walls were painted with what could only be blood, not the fresh red stuff from the chapel but older, darker stains that had oxidized to a brownish-red that reminded me of rust on old weapons. Crude carvings covered every inch of stone not already decorated with bodily fluids, symbols that pulsed with a sickly greenish glow that made my skin crawl and my balls try to retreat into my body.

Malkor really needed to hire a different interior decorator.

The corridor stretched ahead, curving slightly to the right, making it impossible to see what waited at the end. The air here was cold and stale, carrying the unmistakable scent of decay that no amount of torch smoke could mask. Somewhere deeper in the fortress, something dripped in a slow, steady rhythm that echoed off the stone like a heartbeat.

As I crept forward, hugging the shadows between torches, that's when I saw the bodies. What I'd initially taken for odd architectural features along one wall were actually corpses, or what remained of them. Desiccated husks had been integrated into bizarre contraptions of metal and wood, their withered limbs splayed and secured with copper wire, their hollow eye sockets staring blankly at the opposite wall.

"Sweet merciful gods," I whispered, bile rising in my throat.

One body had been split down the middle, ribcage pulled open like double doors to reveal a complex mechanism of gears and tubes inserted where organs should have been. The tubes pulsed with the same sickly glow as the wall carvings, suggesting some fluid was being pumped through the dead flesh. A faint whirring came from inside the chest cavity, like tiny clockwork still grinding away long after anyone sane would have pulled the plug.

Another corpse had its skull opened, the top removed and replaced with a glass dome. Inside, something that looked disturbingly like brain tissue floated in clear liquid, occasional sparks of energy jumping between folds of gray matter.

I forced myself to look away, focusing on the path ahead rather than the abominations to my right. My fingers tightened around the hilt of my dagger, drawing comfort from its solid presence.

A noise from behind me froze my blood. Heavy footsteps, deliberately placed, each one landing with a wet slap against the stone. Something big was coming down the corridor from the direction of the laboratory.

I glanced frantically around for a hiding place, but the narrow passage offered nowhere to conceal myself. The cultists ahead were too focused on their chanting to have noticed me yet, but they would the moment I tried to move past them.

Then it appeared, a hulking figure that barely fit in the corridor, shoulders nearly brushing both walls as he lumbered forward. In the harsh torchlight, I got my first good look at what I could only assume was one of Malkor's guard experiments.

He might have been human once, but whatever humanity he'd possessed had been buried beneath layers of magical modification. His skin was a patchwork of different textures, scales covered one arm, while the other was normal except for an extra elbow joint. His head was misshapen, with a jaw that extended too far and contained too many teeth, some protruding at odd angles through his lips. One eye was normal, brown and surprisingly alert, while the other was twice the size and glowed with the same sickly light as the wall carvings.

He hadn't spotted me yet, his attention focused on the chanting cultists ahead. I had seconds to decide: try to slip past, hide, or eliminate the threat.

The decision made itself when he turned, his good eye scanning back down the corridor, landing directly on me.

A low growl rumbled from his oversized chest. He reached for a crude weapon hanging at his side, its edge notched and stained.

No time for subtlety. I launched myself forward, both daggers drawn. The guard was strong but slow, his weapon only half-raised when I collided with him. I drove my shoulder into his midsection, using his surprise to gain an advantage.

He grunted, a weirdly human sound from such a monstrous figure, and tried to grab me with his arm. I twisted away, slashing at his reaching hand. My blade connected, opening a gash across his palm, but instead of blood, that yellowish fluid oozed from the wound. So fucking gross.

The guard recovered quickly, swinging his cleaver in a wide arc that would have taken my head off if I hadn't ducked. The weapon embedded itself in the stone wall with a shower of sparks, giving me the opening I needed.

I darted in close, inside his reach, and slashed upward with both blades. The guard's attempt to back away saved his throat momentarily, my daggers instead opening twin gashes across his chest. The chanting ahead faltered for a second, then resumed. I didn't have long before somebody came looking.

More yellow fluid, mixed with something darker this time. The smell was atrocious, like an alchemist's shop built over a mass grave.

The guard roared, abandoning his stuck weapon to lunge at me with both hands. His fingers, too many on each hand, I realized with horror, closed around my throat, cutting off my air.

My vision started to blur as I struggled against his grip. My lungs burned. In desperation, I drove my knee upward, connecting with something soft. The guard's grip loosened just enough for me to twist one arm free.

I flipped my dagger into a reverse grip and drove it upward, under his jaw. The blade sank deep, the guard's eyes widening in shock.

I didn't stop there. I withdrew the blade and struck again, this time across his throat in a swift, clean cut that Mistress Ashara would have approved of. The guard's hands fell away from my neck as he clutched at his ruined throat, a stream of dark fluid pumping between his fingers.

He made a terrible gurgling sound as he collapsed to his knees, then forward onto his face. The impact sent a spray of warm blood directly into my face and across my chest.

"Fuck!" I gasped, spitting and wiping frantically at my eyes. The guard's blood was hot and tacky, already starting to congeal in a way normal blood didn't. It tasted like metal and something chemical that made my tongue go numb.

I sat there for a long moment, back against the blood-painted wall, listening to my own ragged breathing bounce off the stone. My throat ached where his fingers had been. I could still feel the pressure, the way my windpipe had compressed, the spots dancing at the edge of my vision before I'd gotten the blade up. Another few seconds and I'd have been another decoration on Malkor's wall.

I spat again, wiped my mouth on my sleeve, and took stock. Five dead cultists in the chapel. One dead mutant in the corridor. The goat was the only living thing I'd freed so far, and I was pretty sure it wasn't going to write me a thank-you letter. Mistress Ashara would have something to say about the body count. She always did. And those cultists down the corridor had gone quiet, which was either very good or very, very bad.

"You're leaving a trail, Samuel," I whispered, because apparently I'd started talking to myself in dark corridors full of corpse-machinery. Great sign. Very stable behavior.

But Malkor was still somewhere ahead, and so were those girls. Blackthorn's contract, Ashara's expectations, Oakhaven's missing daughters. All of it waited deeper in this nightmare, past whatever other horrors the warlock had bolted to the walls. If his grimoire happened to fall into my bag along the way, well, nobody said I couldn't multitask. I tightened my grip on my daggers, pushed off the wall, and kept moving. My boots squelched through the guard's blood as I stepped over the body.

One foot in front of the other. That was the whole plan now.