Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial-Chapter 19Arc 8: : Van Kell

I’d barely put a foot back into the inn’s common room when a hurled chair crashed against one wall. The impact startled me, made me freeze before I moved forward. A shout followed, then several more, a whole burst of voices drowning each other out.

Reflexively, I reached for the nearest patch of shadow to pull out my axe, but something stayed my hand. The common room wasn’t in chaos, and the front door wasn’t open. We weren’t under attack. A large group gathered around one table close to the stairs, but most of them looked like mere spectators, their hands free of weapons, their postures either curious or aggravated but not panicked. Dead Casimir still stood behind the bar, his hands placed on its surface and his body leaning forward as he tried to get a better look.

I approached the crowd, and when the inn’s guests saw me they moved out of the way. In the middle of the circle of spectators stood my group. Several chairs were overturned and a table had been shoved aside violently, evident by the marks its legs left on the floorboards. The members of my lance stood in a loose scatter, each of them looking ready for a fight, but it wasn’t the mob of nightborn they were focused on.

Olliard of Kell remained seated on a lone chair. He was the only person in the scene who looked relaxed, one of his legs crossed over the other, one hand resting idly on the table while the other hid beneath his coat. His young apprentice stood behind him, slouching and sinister. I noted he held one of his puppeteer crosses in his hand, but I saw no marions present.

On the floor in front of the vampire hunters lay a huge man in a ragged cloak. The cloak was stretched over his spine by a humped back, or something hidden beneath that provided that effect. I didn’t recognize him, but guessed him to be a changeling by the distinctly bestial shape to his face, his snout-like nose, and teeth that didn’t quite fit inside his lips.

Olliard lightly kicked at the fallen figure with the toe of his boot, eliciting a pitiful groan. “Well, gentlemen, this is a rather embarrassing situation you’ve put us in. Do we need to take it further?”

He faced off with a mismatched group in rough garb who I took to be the fallen one’s friends. There were three of them, all dressed in the rough cloth of vagabonds and bearing a distinctly misshapen look. Their thick layers of dirty clothing didn’t quite hide the fact that their muscles bulged in some places and shrunk in others, or that their limbs weren’t proportioned correctly. Two of them were big, like the one on the floor, but the one positioned as a leader was conversely small, almost diminutive. They possessed one arm that hung low enough for thick fingers to nearly brush the floor, while the other was thin and curled against their chest like a dry tree branch. Their features were hidden beneath a heavy cowl.

Emma, Lisette, Hendry, and Penric looked torn about who to direct their own attention to. Many of the onlookers seemed to be paying more attention to Olliard, their focus almost eager. I decided to intervene before things went further.

Stepping into the circle, I put some volume into my voice and said, “What’s going on here?”

Olliard’s spectacled eyes glinted in the room’s inconsistent light as he glanced to me. “Ah, Alken, just in time. These ruffians made an issue of my presence, but I think we’ve reached an understanding.”

He prodded the fallen mutant with his boot again. One of the others growled and started forward, but the small one held out a hand to stop them. The leader looked to me, and I got a glimpse beneath the hood. He… or she? Had a surprisingly normal face despite their twisted appearance, smooth and youthful with strings of dark hair. The eyes seemed to glow like alchemical lanterns, somehow artificial.

“Headsman,” the small mutant greeted me in a melodic voice. “We seek no quarrel with you.”

“But with him?” I asked and gestured to Olliard. “He’s my guest. If you have a quarrel with him, then it’s with me too. And with the Keeper. You know this place’s rules.”

The creature — I wanted to say changeling, but I wasn’t sure — narrowed its lambent eyes. “You protect him because he is mortal, like you? Because he is human? And we are not.”

There was no particular emotion in those words. They were delivered flatly, like the ideas were disconnected strings of thought. I glanced at one of the larger ones, and realized a tube was sticking out of his open mouth, like some kind of proboscis.

Not changelings. Homonculi. Living things grown from vats and alchemical formulae.

“I don’t think he needs protecting,” I said, gesturing to the groaning homunculus lying on the floor. “And if you push a fight here, you’ll have your guest right revoked. Isn’t that right, Caleb?”

Caleb Garou had been standing nearby, closer to Olliard than the homonculi. His arms were folded casually and his stance relaxed, but he’d been watching the scene from a near enough distance to intervene.

He caught my gaze and shrugged. “That’s right. You fight in here, then we put you out in the woods and let you find the road again… if you can.”

Dark chuckles from the crowd. Caleb smirked and focused his attention on the doctor. “That goes for both parties. No tolerance. I’m certain there are more than a few here who’d jump at the chance to hunt you, Olliard Van Kell.”

The crowd fell abruptly silent. Apparently, not all of them had known the physiker’s true identity. I swallowed a curse and took another step forward. “No one’s fighting here tonight, and no one’s hunting anyone. Evangeline Ark is stalking the woods outside, and if she catches any of you, you’ll wish you’d spent the night nursing your bloodwine instead of settling old scores. Now get back to your tables, all of you.”

There were angry looks from all around, and they didn’t obey readily, but after some grumbling and some bared fangs the crowd did disperse. Caleb watching everyone with his calm obsidian eyes helped, as did the sight of the hulking creature groaning on the floor beneath Olliard’s calm visage.

The homonculi remained in place. I stepped forward and extended a hand to help the downed one up. He looked up at me with glassy eyes full of fear, and instead of taking my hand he scurried toward his comrades on all fours like an animal.

I turned to the group of vatborn. “Is there anything else?”

The leader studied me with their blank, oddly perfect face for a long moment, then turned and walked off without another word. The others followed, the wounded one limping and clutching his stomach. I felt eyes on me still, but that was to be expected.

I turned to the doctor. “What was that?”

“A distraction,” Olliard said lightly. “And nothing to concern yourself over.”

When I continued to stare, he sighed. “They were from Caelfall. They blame me for killing their father.”

Orson. That took me aback. I hadn’t believed there were any survivors from the mad nobleman’s laboratories. Those hadn’t just been homonculi, but orphans.

“No time for that,” Olliard stated. “You have questions, and afterward I have a proposal.”

He was right. I felt irritated that I couldn’t leave him alone for ten minutes without a problem, but the fact we’d gotten off with just this in a den full of people who would gladly rip the vampire hunter to pieces was already a small miracle.

The night remained young, however. Many of the guests were still staring at our group, their attention threatening. I already wasn’t popular amongst this community, and being seen to defend the infamous Olliard Van Kell…

A vagabond knight in battered armor and a changeling with a hog’s head who didn’t bother wearing a glamour glared at me from just two tables away. Another figure concealed in a cloak and hood seemed to also be staring at me from a corner table, and that shroud could have hidden anything underneath.

Damn it. I didn’t need this. “Fine then. Let’s talk, doctor.”

We moved to a table on the balcony level where we had relative privacy from the disgruntled group below. While I knew there were beings in the inn with inhumanly good hearing, I’d have to take the Keeper’s assurance that we wouldn’t be eavesdropped on to heart.

We all sat around a single table tucked into an alcove. A light hung from the ceiling illuminated our meeting, a little sun around which our chairs orbited. My group sat shoulder to shoulder, though I occupied the back of the table against the wall where I had the best sightline on our surroundings.

Olliard and his apprentice sat with their backs to the balcony. The doctor watched me over his laced fingers, seemingly deep in thought, while his scrawny apprentice tore into a meal with the gusto of a starving wolf. Neither seemed concerned by the scene they’d caused downstairs.

“Why don’t we start with why you’re hunting Evangeline,” I said without preamble.

Olliard spread his hands out. “I should think that obvious. She is a vampire. I am a vampire hunter.”

I felt my lips tighten in frustration. Olliard just stared at me with that grandfatherly calm. When we’d first met, I’d thought him nothing more than what he seemed — an aged, kindly man who was perhaps a bit naive, a bit too trusting. He’d taken me, a stranger and a man of violence, out of the wilderness and patched me up.

But there was steel in Olliard of Kell. His unthreatening appearance made him more dangerous, in some ways.

“You set an ambush for Evangeline at Fife,” I said as I worked through the events of the night. “But you weren’t the one she intended to meet there. Earlier, you said you thought it was us?”

Olliard nodded slowly. “I did not know who she planned to meet, only that she was likely to be there and distracted by some kind of liaison. When your group arrived, I assumed you to be the other party. I ordered Carus to act, thinking Evangeline was inside the church rather than simply one of her minions. Slaying her was our priority, but then we witnessed your group fighting the vampires, so I made the call to intervene. A messy business, but that’s the way of this kind of work.”

Emma drummed her fingers on the table in a clear sign of impatience, her eyes narrowed near to slits as she watched the hunter. Lisette stared at the table, her hands clasped as though in prayer and her shoulders slumped. She’d used a lot of power earlier in the night and was probably exhausted. We all were. Hendry hadn’t even gotten the chance to clean the blood from his brassy armor.

“We planned to destroy the master vampire here,” Olliard continued, “where she would be away from her place of power and vulnerable, and ideally take out whatever other faction she sought to parlay with. Now, unfortunately, we don’t know who that other is. Likely they were set to arrive later in the night, or perhaps saw what occurred and kept their distance.”

“Waste,” Carus said through a mouthful of bread. He swallowed and threw me a lidded glance. “Should have waited longer.”

“And how, pray tell, did you know the Queen of the Banner would be at that village?” Emma asked.

“How did you?” Olliard retorted, deflecting the question and directing the words at me. “Were you perhaps dispatched by the Ardent Round, Alken? I’ve heard rumor that the Headsman of Seydis was given a place in the Emperor’s court.”

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He seemed to take in my appearance then. “Last we met, you looked like the vagabond. Now you wear a Knight’s Mark and good armor, and travel in the company of a cleric and other knights. It seems as though you’ve come up in the world, and the stories have some truth. Much has changed since we last met, hasn’t it?”

“You won’t tell us why you’re here or how you got involved in this,” Emma said dangerously, “but you’ll try to get him to admit that he’s on Accord business?”

I held up a hand for peace and Emma sat back in her chair, her expression sour. I decided that perhaps I needed to give a little in order to gain a little. Olliard was clearly fishing for information, same as me.

“I am sanctioned by the Emperor,” I admitted. That was an open secret, no point in denying it, and I did wear my mark openly. “But I’m not here on his behalf, before you start thinking he sent me to kill Evangeline Ark. The Accord has put a bounty out for her, true, but news of her elevation hasn’t spread outside the Bannerlands so far as I know.”

Olliard nodded, his demeanor losing some of its ease. “Yes. She has closed her borders and kept information from spreading. She has guards along the forests and roads. Animals, vampires, even worse things. I’ve been keeping off the main roads and biding my time for weeks now, even before winter eased up. And then you arrived and now everything is confused.”

“Confused?” I asked.

“Look at it from my perspective, Alken. I learn that my quarry is planning some secretive meeting at this rural community at the border of her domain. I set up my ambush, choose my ground, and then the Headsman himself arrives and goes into the very location where I’ve set my trap. With him is a group decked out for war.” He waved to my lance. “It all seems quite suspicious. Either you were there to engage in talks with the vampire queen, or to kill her. In the former case, I have to ask why? Is the Accord trying to parlay with House Ark despite its corruption? And if it’s the latter, then I must consider you an ally.”

He leaned forward. “It is clear you are not my target’s ally considering what happened at Fife. I helped pull you away from that, and now I am stuck in this inn, surrounded by beings who would gladly kill me yet seem to hold some respect for you. I am putting on a brave face, but I assure you, Alken, that I am quite tense right now. If you could alleviate some of my concerns, I would appreciate it.”

“We were not there to parlay with Evangeline,” I said slowly.

Olliard nodded. “Good. That is a relief. So you were there to kill her?”

When I hesitated to answer, his eyes narrowed behind his lenses. “I see…”

“Do you?” Emma asked archly.

“Emma…” Hendry started to speak, but the girl cut him off with a sharp gesture with one crimson gauntlet. She pushed her chair back and stood to loom over the old hunter. She’d donned a black cape over her armor before we’d entered the inn, a finely woven garment with a high collar which helped hide her intricate suit. She looked almost vampiric herself, with the dark shroud slipping to reveal blood-tinted steel beneath, her black-brown hair cut short and her avian eyes flashing with frustration.

“Do you have any idea what the mere coincidence of our presence saved you from tonight, old man?” She demanded. “Evangeline had an army waiting for you there. Dozens of vampires hiding under the bleeding ground, waiting for their opportunity to sink their fangs into your withered skin. Do you honestly believe your fancy bottles of daylight would have saved you from that horde had we not distracted them? Had my mentor not been there to fight them, risking his life blade to claw while you hid in the forest like a rat!?”

“Emma!” I spoke sharply, and she went still. “That’s enough.”

Her glare twisted to me, but I kept my attention on the doctor. For his part, Olliard only looked bemused at my squire’s outburst.

“You are not wrong, young lady.” He acknowledged her with a nod. “Evangeline went to some effort to prepare her trap. Which leaves the question I think is lingering on all our minds.”

“Who was the trap actually for?” I finished for him.

Emma sat in her chair again, her armor clicking softly with the motion.

Lisette suddenly spoke up. “Who is your patron?”

She’d been quiet throughout the conversation, but her gaze went to her former master once she’d drawn the table’s notice. The hunter’s brow creased. A small tell, but one I didn’t miss.

“Lisette…” Olliard’s voice held a warning note.

“It’s how we operated before,” she told the rest of us, ignoring him. “Doctor Olliard is paid for each of his hunts. Sometimes he does it as a favor for a contact, like back at Caelfall with the preoster there, but usually it’s on commission. He’s a bounty hunter. A very specialized assassin.”

Something about the young woman’s manner was strange. She seemed too calm, almost peaceful, but I sensed a tension underneath her stoic mask.

“Well?” Emma insisted. “Who hired you to kill the Ark braggart, old man?”

“That information is confidential.” Olliard was still looking at his old apprentice coldly. “Which you should already know, Lisette.”

The cleric shook her head. “We are trying to stop monsters and traitors from destroying what remains of the Emperor’s peace. I am sorry, Olliard, but your professional integrity is not our concern.”

She directed her next words to me. “Alken, Olliard is probably working for some individual or group who wants Evangeline dead. Someone from the Houses, I think, probably either in Venturmoor or here in the Bannerlands. The Bannerfolk are more likely, and I’m guessing his employers are nobles who want the usurper dead but are too terrified of her to act openly. House Brightling and their allies, perhaps, though considering the new queen is an undead tyrant, it could be a large faction of her countrymen. The Church might even be involved.”

The sound of sliding wood preceded Olliard rising to his feet in a sudden rush. Lisette had spoken quickly, blurting her words out as though for fear they’d be stolen from her. For the first time, the doctor’s implacable exterior cracked and revealed some of the cold anger I’d glimpsed all the way back in Castle Cael.

Lisette flinched as her former mentor stood and wheeled on her. Penric was on his feet in an instant, a hand on the dagger at his belt. Hendry was a bit slower, but he’d gone tense, and Emma flashed her teeth in an expression that was more snarl than smile.

Carus seemed unfazed, but one of his hands went to a pocket on his coat. His eyes were distant, unfocused fragments of dark glass.

I remained still and seated. “Doctor.”

Olliard glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “What?”

“If you don’t sit down, and if your apprentice doesn’t take his hand off his strings, then I’m going to break the Backroad’s rule. I can survive the consequences. I’m not sure you can.”

I placed a hand flat on the table. “Sit. Now.”

By his expression, it was as though Olliard hadn’t even realized what he’d done. He blinked at me, then looked at Penric, then at Lisette. The cleric’s face was pale, but her posture remained steady. Her hands were laid flat on the table like mine, not prepped to weave her sutures.

Olliard slumped into his seat and cursed. “This is pointless! We’re on the same side.”

“Then act like it,” Hendry said in his soft voice. “Give us something, doctor.”

The old hunter let out an exasperated noise and took his glasses off, squinting at them as though looking for some misalignment. “Very well. Since my former apprentice has proven herself so astute, then I shall admit it. I was employed by a collective of noble Houses within the Bannerlands to rid them of Evangeline Ark. I won’t give you their names, and you cannot blame them for acting.”

“You don’t need to, and I don’t.” I glanced at Lisette, who remained in the same pose she’d maintained through the whole conversation.

She’d impressed me. I’d forgotten, almost, that she’d served Rosanna as a double agent and understood the nuances of politics and intrigue better than I might expect of a young priestess.

“That seems rather obvious, in retrospect.” Emma also seemed to let go of her rancor. “Why be so cagey about it?”

“Professional integrity,” Olliard replied smoothly. “And a small dose of healthy paranoia. Do I get to know who you’re here on behalf of, then? You claim it’s not for the Emperor.”

“I’m here on behalf of the land,” I said mysteriously. Olliard’s expression darkened, but I continued before his frustration could find purchase. “And I didn’t come here to hunt vampires. We’re here looking for another monster, one who was at that monastery not long ago.”

I leaned forward slightly. “Can you tell me anything about the Briar King?”

Carus frowned at me. The doctor mirrored my pose by leaning over the table.

“The Briar King?” Olliard asked in disbelief. “That is a myth, a fairy tale.”

I spread my hands out. “This is Urn. It’s the cradle of fairy tales.”

“True enough…” Olliard drummed his fingers against the table. “It’s not that I’m going to deny the existence of the Briar — indeed, I’ve hunted briarfae before — but stories of some enigmatic lord who secretly champions their cause are harder to substantiate. He is real, then?”

“Very,” I confirmed. “And according to what I’ve learned, haunting the Bannerlands for some reason. Odd coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Very odd,” the doctor agreed. “I’m sorry, but I know nothing of this.”

He didn’t flinch as he said this, even though I was looking directly into his eyes. Honest, then.

“Damn it,” I said simply. Then, with more heat, “God damn it.”

I leaned back in my chair, my shoulders slumping. “That’s a cold trail. Why the fuck was Evangeline at the same country church where the Briar King appeared? Who was she meeting there? You were supposed to tell me something useful, Olliard.”

The old man shrugged and smiled sheepishly as he put his glasses back on. “Sorry, Alken. It seems to me that the only one who knows anything useful is Evangeline, and she’s not likely to chat with us.”

“So what now?” Hendry asked me.

I wasn’t sure, but didn’t want to admit that to the group. I’ll have to talk to the Keeper, see if he knows anything.

This was becoming overwhelming. I felt twenty steps behind every other group and coming into this game far too late.

“For now,” I said with a sigh, “everyone should get some rest. We’ve been given rooms. Get a few hours of sleep, but be ready to leave before dawn or we’ll end up getting transposed along with the inn when it moves.”

Then, remembering something, I turned my attention back to the doctor. “Olliard, you said you had a proposal for me.”

He nodded. “Yes! I want you to help me kill Evangeline.”

I immediately began to shake my head in denial. “I have enough on my plate, and by morning she’ll have returned to the Dawntowers. There are seven of us. That’s not enough to siege a fortress.”

“I don’t plan for things to escalate to siege,” Olliard said with a small smile. “I have a contact amongst the Banner’s nobility. I will see them and plot the next step. Your own trail has gone cold, as you said, and clearly there is some connection between our hunts. Why not join me? Perhaps my venture and yours are the same.”

“He’s right,” Hendry told me. “I think it’s a good idea.”

Emma just shrugged, and Penric adjusted his cap. Lisette looked lost in thought, but didn’t argue against the idea.

“Where’s your contact?” I asked.

“A small township to the north,” the doctor told me. “I’d rather not say more here.”

He tapped his ears and gestured around us to the inn. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

“Fine,” I said with some lingering reluctance. “I won’t promise I’ll help you kill your vampire — soon as I find my own thread, I’m following it — but it’s better than any plan I’ve got. For now, I’m going to see if the inn can tell me anything. The rest of you clean up and get some sleep.”

“You need rest too,” Lisette reminded me.

“Not as much as the rest of you,” I told her. My attention was caught by my squire. She looked lost in thought, her expression strange.

“What is it?” I asked her.

Emma turned her head to stare at me. “Why all this rushing about, waiting to stumble on a clue? If we seek the Briar King, then why not ask the ones most likely to know anything about him?”

She leaned back in her seat and adjusted her cape so she could cross one metal-shelled leg over the other, and delivered her next words like some casual observation. “Why not just ask the Briar directly?”

Olliard lifted a bushy eyebrow at my squire’s suggestion. “I’m not even sure where to begin answering that question. Because they are the most vile of all elves? Because they would most certainly never even allow us into their burrows, even if we could find one, and because they would kill and eat us. Not necessarily in that order, I should add.”

“We don’t have to find them,” Emma retorted. “They can be called.”

“I know no Briar rituals,” the hunter said.

Emma glanced at me, and I felt a jolt of realization. She did. She could call the elves of Briar and Bane, had done so before.

“And even if any of us did,” Olliard continued sharply, “it would be foolish. They give nothing away for free, and all their gifts are poison. You don’t bargain with the Briar.”

“They can be bargained with,” I said reluctantly.

Olliard’s expression darkened. “And why would they want to give any information to you, if you are hunting their lord?”

He didn’t know what Maerlys had told me, that the Briar King wasn’t the leader of the briarfae so much as their slave, their plaything. What if they were willing to cooperate? What would it cost?

Even a conversation would be an insane risk, but so was waging a small war with a petty queen and her horde of monsters. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

Emma seemed to understand my thoughts. She didn’t push the issue, knowing that the idea had found purchase.

It would be her taking most of the risk if we went down that path. If it were just me, I wouldn’t have hesitated, but…

“It’s a thought,” I hedged, deciding to put the decision off for the time being. “For now, we aren’t leaving the inn until it’s close enough to dawn for Evangeline to have given up on us.”

Olliard stood then, his apprentice following suit after wolfing down the last of his meal and wiping his chin on a sleeve. The doctor bowed and bid us good night before departing.

I’d have to trust he wouldn’t cause another scene I might have to intervene with. The Keeper wouldn’t break his own rules, or allow anyone else to, so the two hunters would be safe as long as they didn’t do anything foolish or try to leave the inn before dawn.

I could not predict Olliard. Back at Caelfall, he’d gotten the better of me twice, first by ambushing and subduing me along with Lisette and then by infiltrating Orson’s castle and killing the baron himself. His new apprentice made me even more uneasy. Those dead eyes didn’t seem to fear anything.

I no longer felt like I needed to protect Olliard from the monster-infested inn, but rather that I needed to protect the monsters from him.