The Book of the Blade Read online

  The Book of the Blade

  Eric R. Asher

  Also by Eric R. Asher

  Keep track of Eric’s new releases by receiving an email on release day. It’s fast and easy to sign up for Eric’s mailing list, and you’ll also get an ebook copy of the subscriber exclusive anthology, Whispers of War.

  Click here to get started: www.ericrasher.com

  The Steamborn Trilogy:

  Steamborn

  Steamforged

  Steamsworn

  The Vesik Series:

  (Recommended for Ages 17+)

  Days Gone Bad

  Wolves and the River of Stone

  Winter’s Demon

  This Broken World

  Destroyer Rising

  Rattle the Bones

  Witch Queen’s War

  Forgotten Ghosts

  The Book of the Ghost

  The Book of the Claw

  The Book of the Sea

  The Book of the Staff

  The Book of the Rune

  The Book of the Sails

  The Book of the Wing

  The Book of the Blade

  The Book of the Fang

  The Book of the Reaper*

  The Vesik Series Box Sets

  Box Set One (Books 1-3)

  Box Set Two (Books 4-6)

  Box Set Three (Books 7-8)

  Box Set Four: The Books of the Dead Part 1

  Box Set Five: The Books of the Dead Part 2 (Coming in 2020)*

  Mason Dixon – Monster Hunter:

  Episode One

  Episode Two

  Episode Three

  *Want to receive an email when one of Eric’s books releases? Sign up for Eric’s mailing list.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Also by Eric R. Asher

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Note from Eric R. Asher

  Also by Eric R. Asher

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2020 by Eric R. Asher

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Smashwords Edition, 2020

  Smashwords Edition License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Edited by Laura Matheson

  Cover typography by Indie Solutions by Murphy Rae

  Cover design ©Phatpuppyart.com – Claudia McKinney

  ~

  There is more in the shadows than you know.

  ~

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You can leave as soon as the ritual is done,” Cornelius said, not breaking eye contact with Alexandra.

  The water witch narrowed her eyes. “I understand. I won’t wait around here to find out if you died.”

  Beth grinned at Alexandra. “Just take care of Ashley, yes?”

  Alexandra glanced over her shoulder as if she could see all the way to the river through the trees. “I will stay with her until your return, but I have been away from Nixie for too long. And I still believe we should inform the wolves of what you are doing.”

  Beth shook her head. “Hugh has his hands full chasing down flying heads and gods know what else. If we pull him out of Kansas City, it could be disastrous.”

  “Agreed,” Cornelius said, slipping out of his leather jerkin. He held a flat brown disc out to Beth.

  It felt rough between her fingers, like old leather, but it was stained like an ancient bone.

  “You don’t want to know,” Cornelius muttered. “Don’t ask.”

  Alexandra scrunched up her nose. “Is that cartilage?”

  “Cartilage?” Beth asked. “That’s not so bad. We do deal in blood, after all.”

  “The cartilage itself isn’t so bad.” Cornelius didn’t hide the grimace on his face. “It’s what we have to do with it.” He unfolded an old stained piece of parchment. Inside waited a pattern of sharp lines and harsh corners. It was nothing like the gentle loops and whorls she’d seen Ward use in the past. By comparison, this was savagery.

  “Give that to me.” Alexandra gestured for the cartilage. “I can carve it faster than either of you.”

  She took the cartilage tile from Beth and unsheathed a narrow blade from a scabbard at her waist. Cornelius held up the parchment for her to study. In a flurry of quick strokes, Alexandra carved the pattern into the center of the cartilage. She repeated it with another tile Cornelius handed her before taking a moment to compare both tiles to the parchment.

  “That should do it,” Cornelius said.

  Beth took one of the rounded pieces of cartilage from Alexandra and flipped it over between her fingers. “How do we activate it? You said it goes under the skin?”

  “That’s the part you’re not going to like.” Cornelius untied the collar of his linen shirt, exposing the gray of his chest hair. “Make the incision horizontal across your sternum.”

  Beth shrugged. A few cuts wasn’t much to worry about for a blood mage. It was how they drew their power, how they called on forces from outside themselves and pulled them into different realities. So she supposed it made a kind of sense, that it required an unusual cut to step into the Shadowed Lands.

  “Make sure you have the sigil right side up. And then slide it inside of the cut. It must be flush against your breastbone, nothing but blood between them.”

  “You’re making a deep cut,” Alexandra said.

  “That’s why we needed a healer.” Cornelius dug his blade into his chest until Beth could hear the metal edge scrape the bone beneath. His jaw flexed, but Cornelius didn’t hesitate as he slid the cartilage into the cut. Much to Beth’s horror, whatever that sigil had done caused blood to all but explode from Cornelius’s wound.

  Alexandra cursed and went to work healing the blood mage. She drew that bright red substance back into his body and Beth stared as the far edges of the cut knit back together, the vessels within sealing themselves once more as the blood returned to the body.

  “A little warning wouldn’t have been so bad,” Alexandra snapped.

  “I went first. That’s all the warning you needed.” Cornelius shifted a steely gaze to Beth. “You saw how to make the cut. Place the rune correctly, or it may not be the gateway to the Shadowed Lands that we walk through.”

  “No pressure,” Beth muttered.

  She’d been cut open enough times over the years to know exactly where she needed to make the incision, but as comfortable as she was carving patterns and
sigils into her arms, stabbing herself in the chest wasn’t the most appealing idea.

  “If you don’t believe you can do this, I will make the journey on my own.”

  “Always an inspiration, aren’t you?” Beth muttered.

  A tiny smile worked its way across Cornelius’s lips.

  She didn’t respond further to his taunts. Instead, she placed the cool edge of the razor-sharp blade against her flesh. A chill ran through her, as if her blood already knew what was coming.

  Beth pressed down, wincing at the depth of the blade as it caught briefly on bone and sank into cartilage as she dragged it across her chest. She double-checked the sigil’s position as warm blood poured from the cut. Feeling the cartilage disc pry against tendons and muscles, she settled it against her breastbone. Beth was used to pain, but this was something else. She felt fire rise, a cold thing at first that turned into a blistering heat as the flow of blood doubled.

  Alexandra cursed again and pulled Beth’s hands away from the wound. The undine’s touch felt warm as her healing waters seeped into the wound, pulling blood back into Beth’s body, stitching together the rent flesh, until finally sealing itself. The only signs of the wound that remained were the bloodstains on her jeans and bra.

  “That was too deep,” Alexandra said.

  “I’d never done it before,” Beth said. “Besides, I’m not dead.”

  “Yet,” Cornelius said. “This is only the first part of our journey. We go to a dark place, and it is not a place of peace.”

  Alexandra eyed the older blood mage. “But you’ve been there before.”

  Cornelius shook his head. “I have gazed into the Shadowed Lands. But I have never visited them in a physical form. Once, many decades ago, it is said that a handful of blood mages made the journey, managed to return. But their stories were broken, their senses snapped into madness. I cannot be sure what awaits us.”

  Beth frowned. “Awesome. So what do we do to get there?”

  “Every gate has a key. The sigil you wear in your chest is half of the key. The other must be carved into the surface of your flesh.” As Cornelius spoke, he etched a circle into his palm. Beth copied each of the lines onto her own palm until the pattern matched Cornelius’s.

  The cold blade dug just deep enough to draw blood, to form two inverted and overlapping chevrons, pointing to either her wrist or her fingers. Two lines of an X met in the middle before Cornelius drew his blade away and Beth followed.

  “When we press our palms together, the gateway will open. Do not hesitate, for the doorway does not lead only from here to there, but can lead things from the Shadowed Lands back into this realm.”

  Alexandra stiffened at those words.

  Beth had heard things like that before. There were enough dark magicks in the realm of the blood mages that an unintentional summoning was often a risk.

  She turned to Alexandra. “Watch over Ashley for me. And if anything happens…”

  “I’ll see you soon,” Alexandra said, reaching out to squeeze Beth’s arm.

  Beth nodded and sheathed her dagger.

  “We go to a place few have witnessed.” Cornelius raised his hands, preparing to press his palms together. “Be ready to fight. Be ready to run. Be ready to leave me, if you must.”

  Beth started to say something, but Cornelius cut her off. “Place your palms together and step forward. Do not hesitate.”

  And with that, Cornelius’s bloody palms met, and the old blood mage stepped forward. Beth didn’t wait to see what happened. She put her own palms together, feeling the sticky warmth of the blood on her left palm meet the clean flesh of her right, and in that instant, a fire welled up from her chest, flowing past her shoulders and down to her fingertips as she stepped to Alexandra’s side. In one breath, she could see the water witch wringing her hands together, and in the next, the world was gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Beth had traveled through portals more than once. The Warded Ways were a good method for testing your tolerance for motion sickness, while other portals simply felt violent when you traversed them.

  But this … this was different. This was smooth, and if the sun hadn’t vanished from the sky above her to reappear behind a distant mountain range that hadn’t been there a moment before, she might not have thought she’d moved at all.

  A flash of light caught Beth’s attention. She stepped back when she realized it was the flat of Cornelius’s blade laid against his forearm. Had he seen something she hadn’t? Even as the thought crossed her mind, she reached for her own blade.

  “What is it?”

  Cornelius’s gaze roamed the surrounding clearing. Beth followed his focus, studying the small outcroppings of rock that could have been a monument, or a tomb, eroded by an unknowable number of years.

  “Nothing.” Cornelius finally turned back to Beth. “There’s nothing here.”

  Beth relaxed her grip on the blade at her waist. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “The stories I’ve heard,” Cornelius said. “I expected giants to be waiting for us, death on a scale rarely seen in our own realm. I did not expect this.”

  Something chirped in the gnarled and twisted branches of a tree that had claimed its place in the stone of the clearing. Beth worried it could be a signal to one of the giants Cornelius feared, but instead the head of a small rodent-like thing scurried down the trunk and hopped up onto a nearby rock. It cocked its head from side to side, the stripes running down its back and through its bushy tail reminding her of a cross between a chipmunk and a squirrel.

  As soon as the creature had come, it left.

  “Not the largest giant I’ve ever seen.” A slow smile lifted Beth’s lips.

  Cornelius grimaced. “While I appreciate your humor at times, this is not the place for it.”

  It took everything she had not to roll her eyes. Sometimes Cornelius was too serious for his own good. She understood his concern, them being outside a realm they were familiar with, but it was clear nothing was about to attack them. Or if it was, they weren’t going to see it coming.

  Beth turned back to the sun in the distance. The odd shapes of the peaks reminded her of a place she’d once seen in Colorado: the Garden of the Gods. But something wasn’t right. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but those distant peaks looked wrong.

  “It’s unsettling, isn’t it,” Cornelius said. “The only problem is I can’t tell why.”

  There were few things Cornelius hated more than a lack of answers. Beth had always seen the man trust his gut, and it had saved them more than once, but she knew he hated it. He wanted information, solid intelligence on how to act in any given situation—but walking through a portal between worlds, that often needed instinct more than knowledge.

  Beth reached out and touched Cornelius’s arm. “Maybe we should go the other way, then?”

  Her mentor nodded and headed across the clearing. Rounded peaks waited behind them, as if the blood mages stood on top of an old mountain range. That realization sent a chill down Beth’s spine. Because the clearing they stood in should’ve been a mountaintop, but instead it had been cut down into a flat plain like a wide plateau. But the plain didn’t have the structure of a plateau.

  “This isn’t natural.” Beth stopped at the edge of the plateau and frowned at the gentle slope leading down into a valley. “The trees are just as twisted below us as the one we saw in the middle of the plateau. Something … removed the mountaintop.”

  “I don’t like this.” Cornelius crouched and ran his fingers along the hewn stone. “The edges are too clean. The rock is too smooth. I think you’re right. Perhaps this was done by one of the giants.”

  Beth looked out across the mountain range. Nothing moved. No wind greeted them; no mountain shifted as if it might be the slumbering form of a giant. The place seemed dead except for the occasional scurrying of more furry rodents like the one Beth had seen earlier, and a handful of the beetles they preyed on.

  Beth f
ollowed the rim of the plateau, looking for any way down the mountain that might not involve them falling from one tree to the next. She wasn’t the biggest fan of heights, especially when it meant dropping into a shadowy forest that she couldn’t see the bottom of.

  Her search wasn’t in vain. She’d made it some fifty feet away from Cornelius when she saw it. Dead leaves, oddly shaped like wide pine needles, obscured it so well she almost missed it.

  Beth stepped off the plateau and dragged her foot across the detritus. “Cornelius! Come here.”

  He hurried over to join her, crossing his arms as a cold wind tore through the trees around them. As fast as it had come, the world fell silent and still once more.

  Cornelius stared at the gray slab that waited beneath Beth’s boot. “Stairs?”

  Beth nodded. “And they look human-sized. I think we should follow them. They aren’t well-kept—most of them are hidden by fallen leaves. But you can still make out where several are. They curve around the mountain.” Beth pointed to the last step she could see before it vanished around the mountainside.

  Cornelius looked up at the sky and then back down into the shadows. “I don’t think we’re getting off this rock without going into the darkness. Let’s go.”

  The sunlight faded. The green of the leaves growing from those twisted branches fell into a shadow dark enough Beth couldn’t see the color anymore. The leaves didn’t crunch beneath their boots. The loudest thing around them was their own breathing and the occasional rustle in the underbrush.

  Every time Beth felt the stiff leaves touch her arms, she expected the scent of pine, but that didn’t exist here. Instead, everything smelled different. The dirt was familiar as was the subtle smell of decay their boots kicked up, but there was no crisp mountain air here. She had trouble putting her finger on it. But eventually it came to her.

  “The air here is almost stale.”

  “Agreed.” The path widened and Cornelius stepped ahead of her. “Like an abandoned house opened after decades.” It was almost too dark to see now, but the sky far above them hadn’t dimmed by any noticeable degree.