Like a woman condemned, the scout advanced into the tunnel, bow drawn and arrow to her cheek. Scanning the bright green forest in front of her, Adarin heard only the harsh breathing, hard swallows, and the squelch of boots in muck as men at the outer perimeter turned and stole looks at the scene.

  The woman made it three meters into the tunnel, and Adarin expected her to die in a sudden, horrifying, and gruesome way. Any second now. Step, step, step.

  Under the gazes of the bloody eyes, she advanced further, growing more confident, and the scouts near the entrance began to relax. Shoulders lowered; arrows and gun muzzles dipped by fractions of a centimeter.

  Suddenly—a strange, high peeping noise, like a mouse asking a question.

  Adarin’s spider body tensed as he turned back the neck of his digital avatar’s body in his digital combat sphere. Fuck. Nobody ever looks up.

  And there he saw it. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Black beady eyes staring from furry faces. He wanted to do something, say something. But the woman, the scout, had already heard it, and with the inevitability of an avalanche, she was looking up. And screamed.

  An infernal screech alongside a detonation of black flapping leather answered her. She went to the ground. Arrows zipped through the air, clacking into stone, and gunshots thundered. Men and women screamed and scrambled back. One mage had the bright idea to make the skeletons flail their pikes like clumsy scarecrows, adding only to the chaos.

  Adarin felt the air stir, felt the thousands of wing beats above him—and then the swarms dispersed. For a split second he registered the chaos: men and women covering their faces; many had thrown themselves to the ground and dropped weapons. A few musketeers and one scout were already reloading their weapons, anticipating what Adarin dreaded.

  “Get ready,” he cried out. “If there’s an attack, it will come now.”

  He looked around. Soldiers scrambled back to their feet, covered in the stinky muck of the ground. Muskets were reloaded. Devon, Francesco, and the other mages held evocations, glittering with arcane wrath in their hands.

  Three seconds passed. Ten. Thirty. A minute.

  “Stand down,” ordered Adarin, his voice tight with anger. He swallowed. I have to share something with them. “Soldiers. The enemy is playing with us. Their goal is to psyche you out so that when they attack, you run. Do not let them win. Do not let yourselves be disconcerted by those stupid games.”

  Only silence answered him, and he ground his teeth. He gestured to the three scouts still standing by the entrance and to the one in the tunnel. “Go in. Scout the garden. I want a report in one minute.”

  The scouts again exchanged looks, and this time Adarin made a jabbing gesture with a manipulator. “Go. Now.”

  They set off, marching like prisoners sentenced to death through the tunnel, helping their comrade up, and disappeared into the green of the garden.

  Exactly fifty seconds later the woman reappeared, and Adarin noted the dark stain on her trousers and ignored it. Happens to the best of us. “Report, soldier.”

  She gave him a tight smile. “There’s a garden in there—fruit trees, wild roses. All overgrown. But—” She looked around. “It’s not rotten.”

  Adarin frowned and looked at Francesco. “The wards?”

  The young mage nodded.

  “Why didn’t we see this garden from the air?”

  He shrugged. “We used a wide-area scry. If the temple had anti-scrying wards, it probably used an environmental camouflage technique.”

  Adarin hummed a low response, ordered the men to move in, and advanced into the temple himself.

  The garden was beautiful, fruit trees impossibly in every stage at once—blossom, ripening, and heavy with yield. The rich fragrance of roses was confirmed by his spectroscope and the appreciative sniffing of his soldiers. Francesco looked around and touched the ground.

  “Sir Adarin, would you use an Analyze cantrip?”

  Adarin focused his intent around his divination core and let the cantrip well out. He felt it. The entire garden—flooded with Alteration magic. Almost like an artificial druidic growth.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Magus Cooper, hesitantly, before looking over his shoulder and studying the pathway where the bats had ambushed them.

  “It is,” Adarin replied. “A shame we have to cut it down.”

  There were several outraged gasps, but Adarin made another cutting gesture with his manipulator. “This is the only fortified position, and when there is an enemy hounding us, we need this place.” He swallowed. And the enemy knows that.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  They explored the temple’s two side buildings, and the colonnades surrounding the garden. It took Adarin almost ten minutes to figure out why all his senses were tense, what the unconscious part of his mind was warning him about.

  The ground under the roofs. Pristine. No leaves, no dust, no cobwebs. They found empty chambers, void of all but the heaviest furniture.

  “The entire place,” Francesco murmured. “It is as if servants just cleaned it.”

  “They are fucking with us,” Adarin hissed. Then he stopped, noticing the looks he was getting. Oh yeah. They don’t know about the vampires. They think their commander is going mad with paranoia, grumbling about an invisible enemy. He took a deep breath. Fucking hell. I need to think about a public announcement.

  They pushed through the garden. Adarin forbade, expressly, that anyone eat any fruits.

  At the precise center of the temple they found the warding stones and a multi-layered stone pagoda stretching up at least seven levels. Statues on the lowest level dedicated to Yarael, the Reaper. Statues of the hooded scythe bearer depicted him at each pillar performing his archetypical duties. The ceiling was a mosaic of his symbol: the white flame coming out of an urn framed by a black circle.

  Francesco stepped forward, and Devon rushed from the underbrush.

  “What? I smell magic inscriptions.”

  The foundation was the first thing that was truly damaged in the temple. It was cracked. A quick spectroscopic sweep showed varied lead alloys, mostly 75:25, with only a few runes still glowing—perhaps a third of the great circuit alive. He noticed Francesco swallowing and walked over. He was about to ask when he noticed what the young mage was staring at.

  They were deep claw marks.

  “What?” Adarin swallowed. “What do runes do that were deliberately destroyed?”

  Francesco swallowed hard. “They are racial warding schemas that would have made this temple uncomfortable for anyone who wasn’t a pure-blooded human. It would have warned its owners of that.”

  “The orcs?” Adarin ventured.

  But Francesco shook his head. “Those claws. The strength required to cut into stone this deep… A mage must have done that.”

  Adarin shuddered, recalling very well the creature with claws that were very much capable of doing such a thing—unless he was gravely mistaken.

  Francesco swallowed, then straightened. Magus Cooper, Devon, and he huddled together and began discussing disabling the old warning schema and laying the foundation for the Order’s new one.

  Adarin left behind one necromancer and his skeletons and a dozen musketeers and walked further into the temple. Let’s hope that at least one of the musketeers gets a shot off before they are all dead.

  He had almost reached the last quarter of the garden when another shriek tore the peaceful silence. He dashed forward, crashing through underbrush and barreling down rose bushes. Again the scout woman—but this time she was kneeling in front of the entrance of a large open hall that extended nearly fifty meters into the depths of the temple.

  Adarin blinked several times and adjusted the brightness. He had readied his diamondoid dagger, and root whips had already been seated. There stood the statues of the Seven Holies. The woman was on the ground, praying and crying.

  Adarin let his gaze sweep over the semicircle of looming figures. Even in the half-light of the alcove their forms were unmistakable. Ishna, the Mother—broad-hipped, arms open as if to cradle. Olivi, the Sage—hooded, book pressed against his chest. Varrek, the Warrior—rigid stance, sword point-down before him. Selmor, the Judge—robed, scales hanging from one hand. Tiranna, the Lover—slender, mask in one hand, the other lifted in invitation. Deymar, the Trickster—half-smile carved on a tilted face, fingers crossed behind his back. And at the far end, Yarael, the Reaper—a thin cloaked figure, hands folded over an urn.

  Then Adarin noticed the wrong details. The hands—dripping with fresh blood, steam rising. The eyes and mouths were bleeding as well. Soldiers rallied around them, some whispering prayers, but none reacting as badly as the female scout had.

  “The sacrilege,” whispered a sergeant.

  But Adarin shook his head. “Focus, soldiers. The sacrilege is secondary. This blood is fresh.”

  Eyes widened in horror, and sharp breaths were taken in. Muskets and arrows scanned the underbrush and the darkness of the colonnades.

  Adarin reached out to Francesco, but everything was fine at the pagoda. We need more troops here. While he guided the remaining scouting party into the remnants of the large temple—finding more eerily clean halls, pristine furniture, and rooms ready to accept new inhabitants—he reached out to Commodore Ashfield and ordered him to deploy two companies of Order troops to support him.

  But despite the heavy feeling in Adarin’s gut, nothing happened. The temple was just empty.

  Over the following hours, soldiers and settlers moved in, bringing supplies, bedding, and other materials into the temple. Adarin cut any protest short and had the garden systematically cut down. I’m not giving an enemy that prefers working with stealth and deception an acre worth of places to hide. Not in the middle of my base of operations.

  As noon turned into afternoon, meals were served from the restored temple kitchens, and two-thirds of the once beautiful temple gardens had been cut down. Rich soil soon turned into mud under marching feet.

  Adarin regularly checked in with all his officers, expecting—almost hoping—for an attack, for something. But nothing happened. Nearly two-thirds of their troops and all the settlers had settled into the temple complex, a tent city having formed where there had once been the garden, and the temple had taken on the appearance of a military encampment.

  When the other officers joined him—only Commodore Ashfield staying behind on the river—Liora gasped as she noticed the men and women trying to scrub off the blood of the statues of the holy archetypes. Adarin was still grinding his teeth. Apparently sandstone absorbed blood, so even though the fresh splatterings of crimson were removed, dull rusty stains remained—a terrible reminder to anyone entering the temple for comfort that they were not safe here.

  Nonetheless, time passed and everything was running smoothly. Materials were moved, men settled in, and dinner was served. Adarin ordered braziers and bonfires to be set up in the town, and the throaty, somehow wrong howling of the scouting wolf packs provided an odd comfort to everyone. Liora just rolled her eyes when Adarin inquired for maybe the seventh time if the wolves had found something. The dreadful mood was slowly giving way to jokes as the smell of stew spread over the encampment. Tents had been set up in the colonnades, and veteran soldiers were content to finally sleep under a roof, while settlers eagerly sketched out homes, workshops, and businesses.

  That was when screams erupted from the entrance.

  Adarin rushed across the complex, past agape faces looking around. As he reached the tunnel, he made out a familiar female scout’s voice. “Oh my gods—his skin. His skin.”