Now, there was no more red lightning being shot into the vat of blood, and the Demogorgon’s body paused in its materializing. To completely stop the ceremony though, I needed to put out the fire beneath the cauldron and stop the blood from boiling.
I needed my skeletons for this job, and I sent a signal out to Sarge and his skeletons to follow my commands. While Drok hammered back an oblate with his berserker rage, Sarge and the other skeletons dropped their weapons and began picking up the dead bodies of the clergymen who had been killed already. Under my direction, they began running over to the cauldron with the corpses and tossing them into the fire beneath it.
I wasn’t planning on smothering the fire with corpses though. No, quite the opposite. I was going to use force to put an end to this summoning, extreme force. Once the skeletons had piled seven or eight dead oblates into the flames, I yelled at everyone to retreat and get behind the zombie Crusaders’ shield wall.
I felt energy sizzling on my fingertips, and invisible threads connected me to each of the burning corpses in the fire. I pulled every ounce of magical power I possessed into my fingertips, aiming to make this the biggest explosion I’d ever pulled off, and unleashed the energy.
The force of the explosion hurled me off my feet and slammed me into a wall a dozen yards away. It knocked the Crusaders’ shield wall down flat, bowling over everyone behind it. It also launched the huge vat of blood up into the air with such force that it smashed a gigantic hole through the rear wall of the chamber, dumping all of the boiling blood into the adjacent chamber. The fire was extinguished, and the summoning ceremony was wrecked.
On the floor, the rats swarmed away as quickly as they’d come, and only blood-spattered skeletons remained of the oblates the rats had eaten alive. I was half stunned, with the back of my skull throbbing and aching from the impact of hitting the wall, even though the Beast helm had cushioned the blow. Still, I breathed out a sigh of relief. We’d successfully stopped the summoning of the Demogorgon.
For a few moments, all anyone could do was breathe. It had been a hard fight, and we’d come within an inch of being annihilated by an ancient demon from the darkest pits of hell. My uncle had escaped me, and I had no idea where he’d escaped to, but we were still alive, and we’d bloodied the Blood God’s nose, so to speak. Both he and my uncle now surely knew that I was a force to be reckoned with, which was both good and bad news simultaneously. They would be a lot more cautious in their approach to fighting me from now on, but on the plus side, I’d shown that I was strong enough to take them on.
And with my uncle having fled, I could get the actor to give a public confession about the vampire scam and my uncle’s lies. We had the bodies buried in the ruins and these ones hanging from the ceiling in here as hard, indisputable evidence of his crimes. My name would be cleared in Brakith, and my title and reputation could now be restored. From now on, my uncle would be the hated pariah here, not me.
Groans of pain coming from all over the chamber, from the various spots where my companions had been thrown by the force of the blast, indicated that while they were a little hurt, they were mostly okay. Eventually, everyone managed to struggle to their feet. There was blood everywhere, and the stench from months or even years of accumulated blood was beyond overpowering.
“Come on,” I said, dusting myself off. “We’ve got one last thing to do before we can call it a day. Xayon’s body is somewhere in my uncle’s vaults, and we need to find it. After that, we can all have a very well-deserved rest.”
Just as I finished speaking a contingent of guards raced into the room, their weapons drawn.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“What the fuck is going on here?” the sergeant of the guards roared. “What were all those explosions, and who the hell are all of you?”
“Unless you want these to be your last minutes alive,” I warned him, “you’d better all drop your weapons and surrender right now. My uncle has fled, and I’ve come to take back what he stole from me: my birthright, the lordship of Brakith.”
One of the older guards stepped forward, a man I recognized from my boyhood.
“It’s you, Lord Vance,” he said. “But, you don’t look like a vampire no more. Have you been cured of vampirism?”
“I haven’t been cured because I never was a vampire to begin with.”
“By the gods,” the man murmured after I’d explained everything. Staring in horror at the corpses hanging from the ceiling, he concluded, “All this was happening under our noses, and we didn’t even know.”
“Only a select group of guards was allowed down here in the crypts,” another guard said. “And it looks like you’ve already killed them all.”
“Yeah, and unless you want to be just as dead as those assholes, all of you better drop your weapons and surrender right now.”
“Drok not killed enough people yet!” Drok roared, swinging both bloody battle-axes at once.
Rollar growled wordlessly, his huge hammer glowing, and the women settled into fighting stances. The zombie Crusaders locked their shields together, Sarge picked up his huge golden greatsword, and my zombie snipers cocked their crossbows. The guards weren’t the brightest guys around, but they could see plainly enough that if they tried to fight, there would be a bloodbath, and they’d come off a lot worse than we would. The old guard was the first to throw down his sword.
“I surrender,” he said, dropping to his knees.
