Blood Sabbat
To one unholy victor go the spoils.
From his cover in the darkness, Bishop Diclux watched the witches cavort in the light of their bone-fire. Breasts shook and trembled. Sweat flew from tossed hair. Mouths ejected grunts and spewed wild ululations. Within the flames, a massive form hunkered, turning its shaggy, horned head from side to side in slow, baleful arcs. Diclux, Christian priest in public and diabolical warlock in secret, wrapped a hand around the hilt of his sword.
This was going to be a hunt to remember.
Diclux’s companions this night were his Hammer, eight warriors chosen from his enclave for their loyalty, cunning and appetite for blood. They had hunted together before, but never had their endeavors promised such gains. The extermination of the coven before them tonight would be a great victory against their age-old rivals in the service of dark powers.
Of perhaps even greater importance was the spirit the women summoned. Immaterial as the beast yet was, it could do little except watch over the ritual, but once it was in the world, the witches would be able to direct it to their own ends. It would be a whip with which they would first lash the warlocks, before turning it on the wider world.
The witches’ high priestess was nestled past the outer ring of dancers. She stood near the fire, her arms raised to the sky, fingers forking, tongue elocuting a sinuous incantation.
Diclux vowed that before this night was over, he would see the high priestess fall before him.
As one, Diclux and his men leapt into the clearing, blades arcing. Within moments, before the witches could sound a cry of alarm, the warlocks had cut down three of their prey. Nude and unarmed as the women were, they had no physical defense against the warlocks’ edged steel.
To Diclux’s right was Talfos, a tall scarecrow of a man who had taken his first steps into the dark with Diclux when they were boys. Nights in the parsonage study, Diclux would confer with Talfos over a game of chess. The man had a deliberate and cunning mind and had always seen Diclux’s advance within the warlocks’ enclave as key to his own success. In chess, he could be devastating, and Diclux had lost more games against him than he had won.
Talfos had advised him to keep the hunt secret. The open inquisitions of the priesthood in other dioceses were vulgar spectacles that rarely identified any true witches. If lucky, such a maneuver would put one or two active members of a coven to the stake while the others went into hiding, whereas a more clandestine operation, subtle and over time, could yield so much more.
And it had. Subtle information gathering coupled with regular reading of the auguries had revealed clues that led to further clues that eventually led to one woman, then another, until they had 12, one short of the magic number.
A couple of those women were now attempting to flee. One hopped atop a large cooking spit and lifted into the air, but Diclux hacked her down before she could fly beyond harm’s range. She hit the ground kicking and beat a stuttering tattoo against the dirt until the life within her died.
Diclux felt good. After all the waiting, finally some action! There were ranks higher than grandmaster, and after this night, he would aspire to them.
Just then, the Hammer’s scout, a man named Briar, burst into a pillar of violet flame. One moment he was bludgeoning a witch to the ground with a spiked club and the next he was a pile of smoldering flesh.
The remaining women now mounted a ferocious defense. A lanky crone charged at Diclux — loping, her breasts swinging — and was on him before he could raise his sword. She clamped her legs around him, pinning his arms to his sides and pressing her hag’s sex against his black leather breastplate. Jagged fingernails raked through his left eye.
Diclux roared in pain and hurled the woman aside. She landed queerly, on all fours. She had changed into something touched by the witches’ infernal moon, something lupine and mad. Teeth bared, she leapt for his throat.
Diclux knew he could not survive a physical assault by this creature. He tore off a leather patch sown loosely to his belt, tossed it at his attacker, and spoke the verbal command. The hexagram sewn into it flared, opening an inverted cone of light that swallowed the witch-beast in midair. The patch fell to the earth, withdrew its cone of light, and sealed with an abrupt metallic sound as of a lock snapping shut.
Diclux put a hand to his eye.
It was destroyed.
Around the clearing, the other women were changing as well. Bones shifted and flesh stretched into animal homologues of the human form: claws, carnassials, muzzle and hock. This was an unforeseen development. Diclux had expected to bring his band to the sabbat as butchers to a slaughterhouse, but now he wondered if they had not arrived as cattle to the slaughter.
He kicked an impaled corpse from his sword and with his remaining eye searched the clearing for the priestess. The night had become a disjointed nightmare, and he had lost sight of her. Flames, screams, spilled guts and were-creatures jumped, blended, disappeared in the flickering firelight. Over it all, the infernal goat loomed, waiting to be birthed.
“Bones shifted and flesh stretched into animal homologues of the human form: claws, carnassials, muzzle and hock.”
Diclux calmed his mind. He must see the whole board. Even in a closed game, the more powerful pieces could strike from a distance. The high priestess was the witches’ queen, and the thirteenth woman Diclux and Talfos’s search had uncovered.
Discovering her had been difficult. As with all of the other women in the coven, Diclux had always known she would be a familiar face from the community, but the mundane world was ever a series of shifting veils obscuring the solid truth, and she would have wrapped herself deep within them. The midwives, teachers and widows of the world would serve as diversions, even as she herself hid among them. Diclux and Talfos had tried every means within their grasp, even conversing with the dead one night in the graveyard of St. Sabriel Church, but to no avail. Then something amazing had happened.
The identity of the coven’s leader had been revealed to him one Sunday as he delivered a sermon on the everlasting torment of the damned. He had grown fervent, elucidating the maladies suffered by those in the Lake of Fire, burns that blister and spew pus, all hair, even flesh, boiling from the body, bones blackening and breaking. This, forever, with God and the righteous looking down from their holy mountain.
Then it had appeared, a sigil burning in florid shades of blue over the head of his most stalwart parishioner’s eldest daughter, one well past the usual marrying age. Her name was Abigail, and now that he had her identity, the beating heart of the enemy body, he would be able to hone in on the coven’s activities. All their secrets would be spilled, and he would lap them up.
Diclux had continued his explication with renewed fervor, his voice filling the empty spaces of the place of worship. The gnashing of teeth. The wailing. The swallowing of tongues. The naked, smoking masses crawling over and clawing at one another. All murderers, whoremongers, idolaters, liars, thieves and adulterers burning. Everyone on fire. Forever.
That day, he had pleased his flock like never before. Afterward, his congregation had praised him in the most glowing of terms. He had served them Hell and they had eaten it up. Gobbled it up like carrion! He had realized then that being a preacher was the easiest vocation in the world. One only need offer leadership, and people love to be led. Find the hungry spirit within the weak, the little beast with teeth that tear, and feed it. The beautiful soul did not exist.
Only this tiny monster.
Diclux’s eye found Abigail now. She had retreated nearer the fire, her lesser witches having formed a pawn chain of sorts before her. The defenders had suffered too many casualties to hold firm, however, and Diclux penetrated in a series of swift, sure strokes.
As he approached the priestess, he followed the movements of her hands. They arced and gimbaled, one empty, the other wielding a large, serrated knife of black steel. Each contortion was one stage in a calculation of almost mathematical progression toward a predetermined conclusion — although Diclux doubted she saw it that way. Witches employed a greasy vocabulary to their magic, shifting energies and double meanings rather than a solid architecture of interlocking pieces.
A pentaculum in purple fire spread across an invisible plane in the air over the priestess’s head, and with each completed skein of her spell, a new rune entered the configuration, slightly altering the whole.
The priestess watched him warily but did not stop casting even when he stood directly before her. She no doubt thought that if she could but finish her spell, he would no longer be a threat to her: The beast at her back would destroy him.
Diclux had his own reasons for waiting.
“Father Diclux,” she said, pausing her chant, “out doing the Lord’s work?”
“After a fashion,” Diclux said. “After all, he is a vengeful god.”
“So you like to remind your sheep. What would the good people of St. Sabriel say, I wonder, to know their intermediary is actually a demonolater?”
She resumed the incantation. The pattern over her head shifted, outer symbols moving in toward the center, new ones appearing in their places.
“I worship no one,” Diclux said.
She arched an eyebrow at him and continued her dance-like movements. Her body was slick with sweat and heaving with exertion. Diclux was all too aware of the fleshly delights displayed before him. The black mystery between her legs beckoned, but mastery of the dark arts came at a cost, so some doors were now forever closed to him.
She noticed his attention and smiled.
“What you cannot have, you kill,” she said, placing the final rune in the center of the pentaculum with the flick of a wrist.
The moment had come, and Diclux was ready. He had prepared his countermeasure over all the years of his search, building the spell steadily, piece by piece, and sealing it within a hexagram tattooed into the palm of his hand and ordinarily hidden by a glove. This, he slapped in red fire over the heart of the witch’s diagram. The goat-devil stirred, as if to step from the fire, then settled on its haunches, its red eyes boring into Diclux with hatred drawn from the deepest pits of nightmare.
The priestess’s eyes widened in horror as she realized what Diclux had done. She lunged at him with her knife, but, having expended her strength in execution of the summoning, staggered and collapsed.
Diclux laughed. Now he had her consort, and he would put the beast to good use. Famine. Pestilence. War. All of this could be accomplished with such a creature, but these maleficia lacked in savor what they possessed in magnitude. By applying the brute spiritual power of his new tool to the hatred, the avarice, the falsehoods that pervade every community, every human soul and every act, he could work true wonders.
Abigail was trying to push herself up from the dirt. One hand still held the knife. Her eyes were fixed on Diclux in fury. In her weakened condition, however, he knew she was helpless.
Diclux walked over to her and stepped on her wrist, crushing it. She refused him a scream of pain, but her lips trembled with the desire to cry out. Her hand released the knife and he kicked it away.
Squatting, Diclux turned the priestess’s head so her eyes must see the full moon. “Do you see her?” he said. “Your goddess? She cannot help you now. She has abandoned you. She has no power we cannot break. God made man. Then he made woman. The rest is a long tale in suffering.”
With both hands, Diclux twisted her head further until her neck snapped and her body fell limp. He stood and looked down upon her broken form, once so ripe with life. She had been right. What he could not have, he could kill.
And that was power enough for him.
Diclux turned to see the remainder of his Hammer, only two men now, closing in on one last remaining witch. Whatever grotesque forms she may have adopted during the struggle, she had used up her magics and now was nothing more than a naked human with nowhere to run. Diclux’s men did not have much left in the way of magics either, but they still had their steel. The final woman joined her companions on the clearing floor as one more inert substance among others.
Diclux found Talfos’s lifeless form among the dead. He wondered about the new state of his friend’s soul. Had God shown pity on him as some of Diclux’s public profession preached? Had he gone to Hell to suffer? To rule? Or was this — Diclux laid a hand on the man’s ravaged flesh — all there had ever been?
Adept at leading others with his answers, Diclux didn’t have any for himself.
He watched as the remainder of his Hammer prepared for the victory feast. Under the burning gaze of their recently acquired Horned One, they righted the witches’ overturned banquet table, started a cooking fire, lashed together large spits, and searched the killing ground for the choicest cuts of meat.
The warlocks would feast well this night.
© 2020 J.P. Williams
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