His Sacred Incantations, page 1
His Sacred Incantations
The Warrior's Guild, Volume 2
Scarlett Gale
Published by Unnatural Redhead Creations, 2021.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
HIS SACRED INCANTATIONS
First edition. April 30, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 Scarlett Gale.
ISBN: 978-1393362364
Written by Scarlett Gale.
Also by Scarlett Gale
The Warrior's Guild
His Secret Illuminations
His Sacred Incantations (Coming Soon)
Watch for more at Scarlett Gale’s site.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By Scarlett Gale
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
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About the Author
About the Publisher
To my beautiful elf wife, Crystal.
Chapter 1
Lucían thought, perhaps naively, that he and Glory would have some time to settle in to their loaner quarters in Granite Falls. They’d ridden quite a way from the Guild Headquarters in Knightsrest, and he was hoping to get the lay of the land around the auxiliary Guild Hall here, maybe unpack his saddlebags and do laundry before he had to face the issue of the strange, dangerous creatures attacking people in the nearby mountain pass, or hunt down the stolen manuscripts that would have brought them here regardless. He thought they’d have time to make some kind of plan, for him to learn more about the city, to at least learn where the library is in this Guild Hall. It really shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he’d thought wrong, he reflects, as he and Glory (aka Glory of the Snow; aka the She-Wolf; aka an actual member of the Warrior’s Guild; aka the woman he loves) find themselves herded directly from breakfast into a meeting.
When she’d first purchased his indenture contract from the Abbot at the monastery he thought he’d help her retrieve some stolen books and then return to the cloister when he was done, slipping back into his life of holy piety and loneliness. Life had had other plans, though, plans that involved several daring thefts, one stabbing, a heart-wrenching confession on Glory’s part, a lot of confused lust on his part, and finally a willingness to cast his vows aside and follow his heart into her arms and bed. Lucían still can’t believe his luck, even as he drags his attention back to the burly, older woman on the other side of the table telling them about the monsters he’s come here to try and stop.
“They attack at night, and they move wrong,” she says, running a hand through her cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “That’s the main thing we’ve gotten from the survivors. It’s not a lot to go on.” She’d introduced herself as the Hammer, right after she’d asked Glory about the new scar on her eyebrow and received a shrug in response. She looks every inch a Guild leader, even as she huffs a sigh and pushes some papers across the desk. Glory neatly slides them aside to Lucían, who picks them up automatically. The papers contain eyewitness accounts of the attacks, taken down by someone with neat, even penmanship, and he settles in to read them while Glory and the Hammer discuss their mission in more detail. Indeed, the most common description is of puppet-like movements, somehow deeply wrong to look at. The creatures have teeth and claws, but some of the accounts say they walk on all fours like an animal and others describe something that walks upright, like a human. There’s something niggling at Lucían’s brain as he reads, familiar like he’s seen it in a dream, something that slides away when he tries to think of it directly, so he leaves it be and keeps collecting information. There’s no theft associated with the attacks, just violence, and it doesn’t seem like the creatures are interested in eating the dead, either, so hunger isn’t a motivator. No one seems to have documented what the wounds look like, or how they’ve healed up, which would be useful information. Lucían sets the papers back down in a neat stack and steeples his hands in front of his mouth, thinking hard.
“Lucían?” Glory’s voice breaks into his reverie, and he blinks and looks up. She and the Hammer turn to him with nearly identical head tilts, and Glory asks, “What do you think?”
He frowns. “It sounds familiar, somehow, but I still can’t place it,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose like that will help. “When was the latest attack?”
“A week ago,” the Hammer says. “The survivors are recuperating with the healers at Our Lady of Love and Service. It’s a nunnery and public hospital.”
“Oh, yes!” Lucían says. “The Sisters! I know them.” He frowns and waggles a hand in the air. “Well, I know of them. They’re affiliated with Our Lord of Light and Humility somehow, I was never clear on the details exactly. Do you think I might be able to speak to some of those who were attacked? I might be able to learn something from examining the wounds, as well.”
The Hammer nods. “Shouldn’t be hard to arrange. We’re working with the Sisters on this matter since they’re treating the wounded. Once you’ve done what you can here in town I suggest we just send you out with the next large trade party. It’d be a damned sight easier to figure this out if the attacks had any rhyme or reason to them, but our patrols still haven’t seen anything, so the whole Guild is feeling a bit useless at the moment.” She runs her hand through her hair again and rubs the base of her neck, tilting her head from side to side with an audible crack. The wrinkles at the corners of her dark eyes speak of a woman who smiles a lot, but the lines around her mouth show recent stress etched deep into her tea-dark skin. “I’ll send word to the Sisters to expect you this afternoon. I understand you have a side mission?”
“Asset recovery,” Glory says with a nod.
“Feel free to work on that this morning and someone will collect you when the Sisters get back to me. Dismissed.” The Hammer gathers up her papers as Lucían and Glory exit. Lucían can still feel the ghost of an idea itching at the back of his mind, but he knows from experience that it’ll resolve itself when he’s least expecting it, so he pushes it to the side for now. “Is there a map of Granite Falls around here somewhere?” he asks Glory. “We can at least get locations on the books this morning.”
“Should be one in the library,” she says. “It’s laid out the same here as back home. I’ll go up and find a map if you want to drop into the room and grab your supplies?” Lucían nods, and she pulls him in for a quick kiss before striding away. He smiles like a fool all the way back to their room, the novelty of kissing her still new and delightful after the few weeks since he finally screwed up the courage to reciprocate her feelings, and he keeps smiling all the way up to the library. He’s still smiling when Glory looks up from the large map spread over the table. “What?” she asks with a grin of her own, and Lucían shakes his head, pushing up on his toes to kiss her.
“I just love you, is all,” he says, tucking himself under her chin as he wraps his arms around her waist, and she brings her hands up to scritch at his scalp.
“I love you too, my sweet boy,” she says, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “Now find us some books!” Lucían extricates himself from her embrace reluctantly and turns to examine the map of Granite Falls. The city layout is, frankly, weird, half of it carved into the cliffs, half of it built on rocky outcroppings, all of it connected with bridges. There’s a huge road that switchbacks through the center, leading up further into what Lucían assumes is the mountain pass, and back down the slopes the way they rode up.
Weird or not, though, his tracking magic should still work, so he glances over the runes for the first book and readies the pendant. Glory stands by with a piece of parchment and some graphite, giving him a nod when he glances over, so he pulls at the Lord’s power within him (which turned out not to be dependent on guiltily obeying vows of celibacy, so the Abbot can go choke) and draws it down into the crystal. It’s the work of just a few minutes to track both books, and when he lets the magic fade Glory looks pleased.
“The holy book is actually in the same neighborhood as Our Lady of Love and Service,” she says, tapping the map. “We can do some further tracking when we head over there this afternoon. The poetry volume is here.” Her finger taps the map in a neighborhood closer to the mountain pass. “It’s... not a good neighborhood,” she says with a sigh. “I think it’s likely we’re going to find it in another smuggler’s den, so we’ll cross that road when we come to it.”
Lucían shudders, the memory of their previous encounter with smugglers crawling into his memory and bringing with it trauma, screaming, and the smell of burnt flesh. “I’d like to avoid getting stabbed again, for sure,” he says with a grimace, and Glory pulls him in for a tight hug and lays her cheek on the top of his head.
“Never again, Lucían,” she whispers, voice intense and deadly. “I will kill any man who lays a hand on you.” That... that shouldn’t be a turn-on, but it definitely is, the determination in the She-Wolf’s voice rippling up and down his spine, and Lucían momentarily wonders if they can have sex in the library. She releases him from her embrace before that thought can fully form, though, pressing a kiss to his forehead and turning to pick up her notes.
“Should we check the location of the grimoire?” she asks gently. Lucían grimaces again, resenting that hateful, horrible grimoire and how it refuses to leave his life. “I suppose,” he says reluctantly, “but it’s bad enough I had to illuminate the thing. After we retrieve it I swear I will find a way to never think about it ever again.”
“This is a noble goal and one in which you will have my support,” Glory says with only slightly exaggerated seriousness. “You’ll have only to whisper the need for distraction to me and I will remove the grimoire from your thoughts with exceptional thoroughness.” She unrolls her regional map across the table as she speaks, bending over much further than she needs to and arching her back. The view is almost excellent enough to make up for having to think about the book, which he knows is the point.
Well, nothing for it. Lucían presses his magic back into the tracking crystal and concentrates on the runes embedded in that fucking book. As with the previous times he’s tracked it, the grimoire hides from him, his magic sliding away from it like water from a duck. As with the previous times, he grits his teeth and struggles on, feeding the spell with spite and frustration. I made you, he reminds the book, I spent three weeks locked away with only you and my inks for company. You can’t hide from me. He pushes a bit more power into the spell, concentrating on the vision of runes on a page, the time he cut himself sharpening his quill and had to ink over the bloodstain, that horrific illustration of an animal sacrifice that he’d wept over, and finally the crystal snaps taut on its chain. Bitter triumph fills him, along with a distant shiver of evil magic and dread and the whisper of claws, and then the spell snaps and Lucían shuts his eyes against a headache.
“It’s still in the Cloudpath Ruins,” he says, and Glory’s hands settle on his neck to rub out the tension at the base of his skull. He relaxes under her warmth, letting it wash away the residual pain of the magic backlash and the bitter memories and the lingering dread in his guts.
“We’ll see what we can do here and leave that one until last,” she says, kissing his forehead as she drops her hands. “We probably have a couple of hours before we hear from the hospital. Would you like to explore the neighborhood, or do some training, or...?” When he opens his eyes Glory’s looking at him expectantly, and Lucían drags his thoughts away from the grimoire to answer her question.
“Explore, a little, I think,” he says, drumming his fingers on the table. “Are there any foods Granite Falls is specifically known for?” Lucían settles the tracking spell items back into their little leather case and starts rolling up the large map, Glory immediately leaning in beside him to help.
“They do a very good steamed bun,” she says as they safely return the map to the shelves. “And the views of the mountains are obviously spectacular. Oh! And the things they do with puff pastry! I’ll take you to a bakery, come on!” Glory grabs his hand and tugs, pulling him out of the library, and Lucían lets her, trying to suppress his laughter at her excitement as she continues to extol the virtues of the city.
There’s a cliffside plaza not far from the Guild, so she takes him there, buys him some of the steamed buns from a street cart, and Lucían forgets to eat his for a long moment when they step out from behind a building and the mountains are right there, huge and snow-capped and so close it seems like he could touch them. They sit under a tree, shaded from the warm spring sunlight, eat their dumplings with their shoulders pressed together, and Lucían finds enough bravery to lean up and kiss her, heedless of the midday crowd around them. She slides her hand into his hair, deepens the kiss just a little, and then pulls away so she can drop a tiny kiss on his nose. He’s beaming, he knows it, knows he must look ridiculous, but Glory just wraps her arm around him and pulls him in against her side, so he drops his head on her shoulder. They stay there, leaning together and watching the world pass by. It’s wonderful, spending quiet time with Glory, it feels luxurious and indulgent after their eventful stay in Knightsrest and their weeks of travel, and Lucían lets it wrap around him like a blanket, turns it into a memory he can cradle for when their lives explode again.
Too soon Glory decides they should head back, and they arrive at the Guild shortly before the messenger returns from the Sisters. “They’d be happy to let you speak to the survivors, and welcome any assistance you can offer in ridding us of this plague,” the young woman says, handing them a folded sheet of parchment and pushing her sweaty bangs out of her blue eyes.
“Thank you. Please tell the Hammer we’re heading out immediately.” Glory claps the shorter woman on the shoulder, who nods, turns, and hurries off down the hallway. Lucían makes a quick stop at their quarters to grab some supplies, and when he meets Glory at the stables she already has both horses saddled and ready to go. They mount up and ride out, the quiet moment shredded away under the weight of duty. Lucían rolls his shoulders back and takes a deep breath.
Time to get to work.
Chapter 2
“Our Lady of Love and Service,” Glory says with an expansive wave, after their mildly harrowing ride through the streets and bridges of Granite Falls. (Lucían had thought he was over his fear of horses, but adding elevation to the mix? No thank you, it’s terrifying.) The wave has to be expansive, he reflects, because the hospital is huge, several stories high and at least as wide as the Knightsrest Guildhouse, the white stone walls set back from the road behind a carefully tended garden. He follows Glory to a side entrance into the stables, and they leave the horses in the care of a short nun whose broad, round face seems built for smiling. There’s a covered pathway from the stables to the hospital, and as they pass through the gardens Lucían notes that they’re ornamental and practical, some beds containing medicinal herbs carefully pruned to look beautiful while providing necessary ingredients, others containing flowers that he knows to be both aesthetically pleasing and extremely useful in a tincture. It’s impressive, and he’d love a chance to talk to whoever designed it.
The hospital interior proves to be just as well-designed as the exterior, with bright, airy architecture and windows high-up on the walls that allow light to pass from the outside rooms to the inside hallways. It smells clean and herbal, and women of every age and skin tone walk smoothly and quietly from room to room, all wearing matching habits in a simple, practical design. Lucían finds the place more impressive the further inside they get, can’t help comparing it to the cold, cramped stone of the monastery and finding his former home extremely lacking. He can even hear a choir in the distance, their harmonies echoing through what he thinks is a courtyard outside, adding an additional calming and ethereal air to the place. Why couldn’t the monastery run a place like this? he wonders suddenly, anger blossoming in his chest. Why couldn’t we help people directly, like the Lord called us to? Why did we have to be under his thumb?
“We should announce ourselves to the Senior Mother,” Glory says, leading him down a hall to the left, deeper into the facility. “She’ll be able to tell us where we need to go. Also, it’s polite.” Lucían lives to be polite and also wants to see more of the hospital, so he nods and goes where he’s led. It’s hard to resist the urge to peek into every room that they pass, but his curiosity is no reason to invade someone’s privacy, so he settles for learning what he can from the public spaces. At one point he spots a nun carrying a basket of bottles, gets the barest glimpse of the characteristic luminescence of a potion infused with magic, and wonders how much this hospital had to pay the monastery for the contents of that basket. What else could they have spent that money on if the Abbot didn’t hoard knowledge and money like a damned miser? How many more people could this hospital serve if they didn’t have to beg potions out of a hidebound old man?
