The Subtle Knife
Angarak shifted his position for the fifth time in as many minutes. This backwater drinking hole was not to his tastes and the ancient wooden stool he was forced to perch on was not at all what his delicate backside was used to. He had tried asking the surly dwarf with the filthy dishrag for some sort of cushion but the ‘cushion’ he produced was so riddled with lice that he preferred numb buttocks to itchy ones. Still, he thought, you go where The Bank sends you and you collect from whoever The Bank tells you to collect from.
Today he was collecting from someone unusual, or was that something?
People often thought that The Bank was only interested in money, and they were right. What they didn’t think about was what The Bank was willing to pay out to get it. They wanted whatever was here in the Halpi mountains but so did everyone else. They couldn’t just pay anyone to fight there so they had him thinking outside the box.
It was time. He stepped out into the yard and flinched as four chickens and a very angry goose startled by his approach clucked and hissed as they darted away. It was time to buy an army for The Bank.
Although unutterably vast and unfathomable in its reach, The Bank was in its essence simple: it gathered wealth. Vast hoards of gold and precious items were hidden away in the vaults all over Pannithor. What most people didn’t realise was that if that was the only thing The Bank dealt with there would be vast numbers of people, creatures and monsters that The Bank couldn’t control. Without control there wasn’t certainty and without certainty wealth was fleeting.
He sighed as he approached what seemed like the right spot, just outside the inn. He drew the dagger ever so carefully and prepared himself. The alcohol running through his veins made him stagger slightly, but it also protected him from what was coming next, because who else but a drunk or a madman would do what he was about to. The dark, pitted metal seemed to gleam in the evening light as he drew it downwards and felt rather than saw the stuff of reality begin to rip and tear.
The creature that stepped through seemed to regard him with pure hunger. Shadows seemed to dance around it where there shouldn’t have been any and it began to reach forward. Quickly he raised the dagger and slurred, “I’m the one… I bough… brought you.”
It paused as another creature stepped through the portal. This one thinner, taller and faster. The depths of darkness where he felt their eyes should be regarded him. He pointed across the valley where more troops were marching by the inn.
“Over there. Your payment is over there.”
They both turned. Suddenly without warning all manner of creatures began to burst forth from the portal and skitter and crawl outwards into a sort of battle line. Their eruption had not gone unnoticed and the other force began to turn. As he looked across, he realised he had made a big mistake. It wasn’t an army of living, feeling creatures but an army of the dead. Would the Nightstalkers even be able to feed?
Opposite, the shambling mass of skeletons and zombies formed up and furthest away a vast mass of horsemen drew up. From amongst them a single warrior emerged and headed straight for the Nightstalkers. The Nightstalkers were drawn to it and the Dream Hunter flew at him almost madly. He had to be a vampire to draw it out that way. The warrior went down under a mass of fiends as the Dream hunter reached him at the same time and the shadows swallowed him whole. Spurred on to rescue their leader the horsemen put on a burst of speed and slammed into the Nightstalker leader. Angarak cursed that it would be banished so soon after being summoned.
Nearer his position by the inn the Nightstalkers had pushed into the centre of the valley, but behind the mass of undead he could see larger troll like creatures and animated vampire infantry in gleaming equipment, led by a wizard in Ophidian dress. Could it be the famous Jarvis?
Fiends, scarecrows and butchers clashed with skeletons and undead as hunched creatures with a wide array of long claws passed Angarak’s position. Then another group passed him and he was looking at… himself. A moment and they were passed, the creature melding back into a formless shadow as it moved away.
There was a keening wail of rage as the other Nightstalker leader flew over her troops and landed near Jarvis’ fellow necromancers as they chanted spells of binding. Even as it landed the large shambling shapes behind were turning. Angarak cursed once more as the wailing was cut short. The skeletons and zombies were holding fast in the centre but, at that moment, the reapers struck. Rotting limbs flew everywhere as their long claws ripped into the shambling creatures.
Then the vampire infantry struck. Gleaming armour glinting in the last rays of evening light, they charged out of a copse of trees straight into the path of the doppelgangers. Their long swards rose and fell but for every amorphous shape they cut down another would rise up and form itself into the living image of its opponent.
Only faster.
Afterwards, Angarak watched as the shadows shambled off towards the mountains and new that whatever the price, The Bank would pay it for the contents of those mountains.