Demonhammer: Tales of the Avernine, #5

By M.S. Hund

A hammer is poised to smash the demons of the Avernine…

A newly galvanized revival sweeps across the territory, led by a terrible machine. Standing in the machine's path is the wandering gunslinger Ezra. But Ezra isn't convinced that the demons of the Avernine, including himself, don't deserve destruction. And there are other forces that have plans for him, plans that don't necessarily include his survival.

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Demonhammer is the fifth book in Tales of the Avernine, a dark fantasy western series featuring demons, witches, mutants, and possessed guns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jebesyl Press
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201737993

Book preview

1

There is darkness, and there is pain. There is a limb-twitch where he knows he has no limb. And then another. And another. How many arms does he have? How many should he have? Are they arms? Legs? Fingers? He strains to sense any hint of the siren that called him here. Where is she? What is this place? Where is he? Is he dead? Resurrected?

I was a man. He has no voice, but he sends the thought spiraling through a pain-lashed void, wondering why he bothers.

Spark of agony and searing heat. Another twitch of muscle where once there was none. Is that another limb taking shape? How many now? His body shifts, and the movement is wrong. He is too large, misshapen and terrible.

Whispers chitter, like rats lurking in the gloomy, abandoned corners of his mind. There are others trapped inside him, others not like him. And they are hungry.

Bind them, sings the siren, her voice a sudden, silver spike through the gloom, jolting him into action. He strains to respond to her voice, to bask in her presence. He remembers her. She has called him here. He knew her in the time before this darkness, though she is different now…

The chittering tide rises. Panic skewers him.

Enslave them before they consume you.

He does not understand her. Will the whispering rats devour him? Even as he asks himself this question, he becomes conscious of gnawing teeth, ragged and sharp.

A weaker mind, a less disciplined mind, would falter.

He does not.

Whipcord response. Reflexive rage funneled as a noose, a chain, a manacle, binding those who would devour him. How many enemies does he face? A handful? A score? Does it matter? He will make them his servants.

His perception expands, spreading through the extensions lashed to his new and unfamiliar bulk, a monstrous body inhabited and powered by…

By what?

Parasites? Rats and insects? Threats? Foes?

No longer. They are part of him now, part of the clockwork that surrounds and embraces the core of rage and intellect that is his purified essence.

What have I become?

Silence.

His bound servants cower and seethe, hating their chains, hating him. The siren does not answer him, but she is here, somewhere in the encompassing void. Watching. Is that approval he tastes wafting from her? Approval of what? Of his subjugation of the rats?

No. It is more than that.

She relishes the hatred he feels for the creatures chained to him. They are demons. They must be. He has never had a sense of their kind before, but he has seen their handiwork, he knows their patterns. Why are they bound to him? What pollution is this? Molten wrath surges through him, and the demons respond in kind.

He channels their raw spite into phantom limbs, and the vast bulk of him shifts in unfamiliar ripples and shivers. Light appears in the void, a hot shifting of yellows, oranges, and greens clotted with purple. The colors are fed to him by a handful of his enslaved demons, though he cannot interpret what the colors mean or place them into coherent shapes. Not yet.

Who am I?

The chaotic mass of colors devours his howl. A name hovers outside comprehension, a lost thing like the missing limbs, the absent eyes, the body stripped away.

And replaced.

By something bigger. Stronger. Faster.

The old things don’t matter. Not any more. Names. Bodies. He will shed them like the useless detritus they are. Relics sacrificed before rebirth.

He hurt you. The siren’s voice is a caress, a cool ripple of water across his fevered existence. He knows her but cannot give shape to the memory.

The boy with the gun, she croons, and he remembers.

He lashes out without thinking, a demon limb responding to his loathing with vicious speed and power. There is a crunch, a scream, and something drips on his skin.

Skin? Not skin. His hide. His shell. Carapace.

He is safe within it, shielded and protected.

Other voices tug at him. Human voices. Demons feed him their sounds, though they cannot pull meaning from the noise. Not yet. But the reek of their fear is strong and bitter.

What would you do to that savage boy? the siren sings.

Vengeance burns. Limbs twitch. His bulk rolls, and something screams as it is crushed beneath him. Several things. Unimportant things.

He will find the boy and rend him limb from limb. Once, he would have relished dissecting the connective tissue, prying into the secret workings of the boy’s body. Now he just wants to see his blood.

Though he does not know where to find him.

I will help you weave a web to net him, sings the siren, and shapes coalesce from the bright chaos. Words don cloaks of meaning.

It’s awake, someone says, and his demon senses pick the woman’s voice from the chorus of screams that surround him. The words are cold and angry, dwindling into a distance he cannot perceive.

Sleep, the Siren sings. Recover your strength. You will need it soon enough.

This place will destroy me, Tom thought as he gripped the cross with stiff fingers. A bitter smile quirked the corner of his lips. As I once would have destroyed it, he mutters, studying the cross, a thin reflection of the elaborate gold monstrosity still packed with his red inquisitorial robes in the chest at the back of his tent. It was the boy’s cross. Ezra’s. Worn with age and frequent handling. The wood gleamed smooth and warm in the fading light.

Men from Brother Tom’s revival had recovered the cross from a burning cabin.

Brother Tom’s revival…

Tom lifted his gaze to study the long tent pitched outside the revival camp’s ward-ring. Any hint of a smile dripped from his face. This wasn’t his revival any longer. This was an army, a crusading force poised to strike at the heart of the Avernine Territory, to lance the demon gate and purge this land of infection. It was everything he had wanted and dreamed of in seminary. Wasn’t this why he had donned the cross in his youth, why he had worn the red robes proudly, why he had traded red for black when he saw the chance to strike down his enemies?

Wasn’t it?

He shook his head, fingers tracing the polished wood of the Protector’s cross. He’d crossed an ocean and a continent, trafficked with demons and fallen priests, turned aside from the path laid out for him by Rome to pursue a mission that felt holy, that felt blessed by the Protector. So why did he feel so lost? Why did his desire to eradicate demonkind feel so empty?

Figures emerged from the tent into the purpling gloom, hurrying back to the safety of the warding posts that ringed the camp. Why had they built the long tent outside the ward-ring? What were they hiding in there? They’d been working in secret for weeks while the rest of the revival stewed, eager to hunt demons.

Tom frowned. Only half the people that had gone out to the tent were returning. Two men carried a third who thrashed and moaned between them, dusty clothes stained dark and wet. Behind them was a woman, a tangled mass of black hair pinned back from her face by glasses glowing faintly in the gloom. Minerva, the ward-witch. Tom resisted the reflexive urge to spit, watched her scarred fingers swipe at something on her cheek, leaving a dark smear.

Two young women came last, heads together as they always seemed to be these days, white-robed Keziah guiding the blind Rebecca with gentle, almost intimate touches, fingers to shoulder, to elbow, to back. Keziah’s lips moved in quiet communion as her gaze swept the camp, resting on Tom for a moment. She dragged delicate fingers through a spray of cropped, coppery hair. Had some red faded from it, or was that just dusk weaving its subtle magic? Rebecca smiled, her blind gaze fixed on the sky above the camp.

Tom gripped the boy’s cross tight enough to bruise. His revival had become her crusade. Hers and Keziah’s. They were building something in that long tent, some weapon to strike at the heart of demonkind. And the ward-witch was helping them.

He lowered his eyes to the cross. Keziah should be his weapon. Nico, his old friend from seminary, gripped by devotion to ancient passions and lost knowledge, shaped his three daughters into lances to pierce the demon gate at Avernus, to rid humanity of another pocket of evil. Nico had been so close to achieving that goal, but he was dead now, as were two of his daughters. His weapons. His lances.

Only Keziah remained.

Keziah, who Tom should wield as the sharp edge of his desire, the fulfillment of his mission. Tom touched the cross to his lips. It was so light, plain and fragile compared to the heavy gold heft of the inquisitor’s cross he bore for so many years in the service of Rome, hunting and burning, purging the world of demons and their spawn and the malice they spread. But there was truth in the simplicity of this cross. No heft or ornament to distract from what it represented.

The Protector.

Root of the Church.

Tom’s fingers traced the sign of the Protector across his chest. The Protector’s teachings had seemed so simple to the young Tommaso Giani before his induction into the secrets of the Church in Rome. No burden. No ornament.

No hate.

Tom slipped the cross into his black robes and turned back to the camp.

2

Something stirred on the road behind Ezra, some malignant breath that sent icy fingers through his bones. He sought Brother Lorenzo’s cross and found only the frayed fabric of his shirt. How long would he continue to reach for it without thinking? Why had he thought of it now?

He fixed his gaze on the fire rather than the skeletal face that hovered behind it. They’d made camp late, just as they did every night. No need for warding posts with the pale driver and Keren around. Ezra blinked away purplish spots on his vision, wondering why they even bothered to camp. He could probably sleep in the cart, and the pale driver didn’t seem to sleep.

Sweat tickled his ribs. Was the revival still behind them? What was the pale driver playing at? He’d come to Ezra in Purgatory, warning of the revival’s imminent advance on Avernus and the need to get there first, but they’d spent the past few weeks criss-crossing the Territory, sometimes following the witch-roads, sometimes cutting across rough scrubland, always moving faster than the gaunt horse should have been able to drag two men and a cart.

And the weight of the gun.

Sometimes, Ezra would catch himself thinking of Keren as she was when he first met