TODAY IS TOO LATE (36 page)

They didn’t let Azmon down.

When they neared the plains an arrow hit Tochen at the base of his skull. He pitched forward. The beasts reacted with bellows and pointless attacks at neighboring trees. The soldiers rushed shields to Azmon and the other bone lords. Before they reached them, another lord took an arrow in the chest. A third arrow flew for Azmon, but he knew where they came from now and used his sorcery to knock it aside.

He waited. The attack seemed like the work of one archer. No hail of arrows answered. No war cry from thousands of elves. No great battle. Azmon exhaled. At his feet, his decoy was already dead. He grinned at the blood staining his white robes. The thrill of cheating death had been worth the effort to retrieve Lilith’s body. Perhaps this was the secret to eternity—disease and old age would never kill him, but taunting disaster made him feel young.

The army worked to fortify a new base built on the fields outside Paltiel. Timber palisades surrounded the camp, the wooden spikes still bright white and new, and a pit had been dug, like a moat around the wall, filled with stakes. There were two gates, facing Paltiel and away, also made of wood. Azmon led his soldiers over the ramps.

The camp buzzed with activity. He had split the army in two, using half of it to secure Shinar and the other half to prepare an invasion of Paltiel. Messengers waited by his tent, and Azmon ignored them.

“Bring the body.”

Two soldiers took the wrapped body from the beast and brought it into the tent. Azmon gestured at a table, and the body was gently placed. The clerks had all knelt before him. Azmon gestured for them to rise and cast about the tent for their leader.

“Where is Elmar?”

“Seeing to the stores, Your Excellency.”

“Summon him.”

Azmon allowed the men to change his soiled robes and boots. He was dressed in the royal white again. In the center of the tent, he sat on his throne, a smaller chair than the one in Shinar and much more comfortable. Someone gave him a cup of wine, and he sipped it as he waited for Elmar. The bald clerk entered the tent and bowed. Azmon gestured for him to rise. He was tired of the bowing and titles. They had a war to fight.

“Report.”

“The camp is ready, Excellency. The last of the troops report as we speak. We have two weeks of stores, and the last of the smiths have arrived.”

“The elves left our dead fully armed. I want to salvage the equipment, but the teams will need guards.”

“As you wish, Your Excellency.”

“How many beasts have the bone lords raised?”

“Thirty new beasts, Your Excellency.”

“How many wall breakers?”

“Fourteen.”

“We need more. Many more.”

“Of course, Your Excellency.”

“Anything else?”

“Word from Sornum and Rosh.”

Azmon listened to reports of unrest. Narbor neglected their taxes, and the Marshfen Orcs had raided again. He cursed the filthy orcs. They bred like rabbits, reached full size in less than nine years, and were almost impossible to exterminate. He felt most of the problems with the orcs came down to their youthful aggression. Elmar listed settlements that had been attacked or lost and the lords who begged for help.

“What do we have in Rosh?”

“Two thousand lancers and a thousand archers.”

“And how long has it been since the message was sent?”

“Over two months, Your Excellency.”

The larger his empire became, the more difficult it was to govern. A simple message could arrive weeks after an event, and many rebellions were left in his wake. He pressed too far too soon, overextended himself. Tyrus had argued against it all the way, predicting the problems. Azmon clenched his teeth. He needed his Lord Marshal. Dura and the elves would execute him as an abomination, but there was a small consolation. He was certain torture would not work on Tyrus, and his secrets would die with him. The man had enough talent to avoid the enemy, but the odds of surviving Paltiel were slim.

“I want five of the largest flyers provisioned for a flight over the ocean. I’ll select their riders later.”

“As you wish, Your Excellency.”

“Bring me an offering.”

Elmar paled. He gathered his clerks and shuffled them out of the tent. He returned a few moments later with a bleating goat.

Azmon dismissed him and moved to the table. He unwrapped Lilith’s corpse and cleared a space on the floor. He drew the Runes of Dusk and Dawn around the body, careful of the matrix and adjusting for the age of the body. Azmon pulled the goat to him, drew his knife, and started the ritual. As he spoke the language of God, a sense of dread crawled up his neck. To use the divine words as he did was one of the blackest blasphemies, and after all these years, it still disturbed him. The goat did not like the ritual either, trembling until Azmon’s knife, which could split a hair, cut the goat’s neck in one smooth motion.

Blood poured over the runes.

“Mulciber, hear my call.”

A sixth sense filled his vision, a place of shadows and flame and drifting ghosts. He found Lilith, a tendril of her connected to her body still. He reached out with his mind and pulled on the thread, dragged her unwilling soul from Pandemonium back into the world of mortals. The body twitched. Reddish light crept into her black eyes, and a silent scream of horror twisted her features.

“You failed, Lilith.” He raised a finger to her blue lips. “Shush, the pain is only temporary. Pandemonium does not give up its prizes easily.”

“No.” She rasped the word, turning it into a wail. “No.”

“Hush. The pain will pass.”

Azmon smiled at his success. This talent for communing with the dead had begun everything. His talent had drawn the attention of the other worlds, and while he regretted pledging to serve the demons, they taught him things no mortal had ever known. First he spoke to the dead, then he raised them, and finally he sculpted them into weapons of war. No other sorcerer, not even Dura, had achieved such mastery over life and death.

“Where is Tyrus?”

Lilith shared her last moments, and like most of the recent dead, she fixated on them. He pressed for more details, but all she described was Tyrus cutting her throat. Her last act was one of hatred, destroying her mount to kill them both. That Tyrus had bothered to cut her throat had offended her.

Azmon imagined Tyrus falling. Hard to believe his friend was gone. After all these years, the battles and the wounds, had Lilith found a way to kill the Damned?

“Did you kill Tyrus?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

The dead thing would not answer. Azmon drew a rune of misery on her chest and spoke words of power. Lilith writhed on the ground, but she did not know for sure. He had been alive when she died.

“Did I not say my daughter was more important? Why did you attack him?”

She gasped. “
He
attacked
me
!”

That was Tyrus. Azmon could imagine him, outnumbered, beasts in front of him, elves at his back, and yet he charged the most dangerous sorcerer on the field. A sadness, a sense of loss, filled Azmon. His friend was irreplaceable.

Lilith’s chin jerked toward him. “Kill me.”

“Kill you? My dear, you are already dead.”

Lilith’s face twisted in agony. She writhed on the ground. The denials and crying began, and Azmon waited for them to pass. The freshly dead were like babies in their way, unable to control their emotions, experiencing everything for the first time.

“Please. Release me.”

“Your skills are too rare to waste.” Azmon imagined what kind of beast he might create with such a sorceress. Materials like these let him push the limits of a construct. “I see a new creature, less beast, more graceful.” He thought through the runes. “Not as powerful as Tyrus, but far more clever. A beast capable of hiding in plain sight.”

“No.” Lilith wailed. “Not a beast.”

“Hush.” The patterns became too complex to hold in his mind. He needed parchment to continue calculating and time to prepare, but the possibilities excited him. “I offer you a redemption, Lilith. You will rescue my daughter.”

A note from the author

Thank you for reading
Today Is Too Late
. If you have time please consider leaving a review at your favorite bookseller’s website. Your feedback helps me write, and helps people find my work.

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Origins of The Shedim Rebellion

The Hobbit
and
Dante’s Inferno
warped me at a young age. Later on, I discovered
Conan the Barbarian
,
Paradise Lost
and
Le Morte D’Arthur
.

I wanted to write about archangels casting rebel angels out of Heaven without rewriting the
Old Testament
. So I invented my own world, changed a lot of the names, and added a few of the traditional fantasy races. I played with angelic folklore and reimagined the Nephilim as traditional fantasy races. The
Shedim Rebellion
became a mash-up of literary classics, pop culture, and my own brand of weirdness.

While researching rabbinical demonology, I discovered these biblical names:

Tyrus
: strength, rock, sharp

Azmon
: bone of a bone, our strength

Ishma
: named, marveling, exalted

Marah
: sad, bitter

Dura
: generation or habitation

Lael
: the mighty

Shinar
: the plain on which Babylon was built

Moloch
: king or ruler

Pathros
: persuasion of ruin

Rosh
: the head, top, or beginning

Gadara
: a place surrounded or walled

Samos
: full of gravel

Tyrus’s story began as a courtly romance inspired by the Arthurian Legends. I wanted to explore a darker version of
Sir Lancelot du Lac
, a brutal anti-hero who regrets his fall from grace. Through edits, I discovered the bigger story of rescuing a baby from demons.

My experiences from surviving cancer also worked into the story. The way Tyrus is hard to kill, how he responds to etching when others don’t, and his constant struggle with pain all echo my year in chemotherapy. I packaged it in an outlandish story, but the roots come from a very personal life and death struggle. Telling my cancer story with elves and dwarves seemed easier than writing a memoir, and I think everyone will agree that it is much more entertaining.

Acknowledgements

A small team of freelancers helped make this book possible, and it was a joy to work with all of them. I want to thank Red Adept Publishing for their help editing and proofing the book. I'd also like to thank Clint and Jonathan for their amazing artwork.

About Burke Fitzpatrick

Burke Fitzpatrick finished his MFA in Creative Writing in 2007. A life-long student and workaholic, he holds two other degrees in Graphic Design and Computer Information Systems. In 2010, at the age of 32, he survived a battle with cancer and used fantasy worlds to escape chemotherapy. After cheating death he added “stop wasting time and write those damn books” to his bucket list. He lives in Spokane, Washington.