The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 479: Finding the third duke

Haryntha stopped beside him, looking at him with a question in her expression that she kept silent.

Jolthar stood still and looked around them slowly, taking in the landscape from ground level with fresh attention rather than continued forward momentum.

The nynthralls were everywhere, packed in their mindless multitudes against the shield’s surface. Still, their distribution across the wider terrain beyond what he could see directly was the piece of information he was missing.

He needed height.

He let the telekinesis engage, the familiar sensation of it rising through his system with the ease of a technique his recovered channels could handle without complaint.

His feet left the corrupted ground and his body rose smoothly upward through the sphere of Haryntha’s shield, the barrier adjusting around him as he went, lifting with him as though it understood what he was doing and intended to remain useful.

Ten meters up. Then twenty. Thirty.

The swarm below became a carpet of pale writhing bodies stretching away in every direction, the individual creatures losing their specificity and becoming a pattern, the mass of them revealing its shape the way a crowd looks different from a balcony than from inside it.

From up here, the pattern was immediately and clearly legible.

The nynthralls were not evenly spread. They never were, he had learned, because the malice that drove them was never evenly distributed — it pooled and concentrated the same way water found low ground, and wherever it pooled, the creatures gathered thickest.

From fifty meters above the ground, he could see those concentrations clearly, darker smears of movement against the already dark landscape, areas where the density was so extreme that the ground beneath the creatures was completely invisible under the weight of pale bodies.

The number was much larger than what he had seen until now. Even the Blackmoss Spire didn’t have this many Nynthralls.

There was one concentration that made every other look sparse.

Northeast.

Perhaps two kilometers ahead.

The creatures there were packed beyond anything he’d seen since entering the Depths, a mass so dense and so large that it registered as a geographical feature rather than a gathering of individuals, a moving blackness that sat at the center of the visible terrain like a wound refusing to close.

Something was there.

He looked down at Haryntha and pointed northeast with two fingers, clear and direct. She nodded without hesitation, already shifting her path before he had finished the gesture.

He flew.

The telekinesis carried him forward above the swarm at a pace that ground travel couldn’t have matched, the corrupted wind pressing against his face, the Depths spreading out below him in all its vast wrongness.

He kept his altitude steady and his eyes on the concentration ahead, watching it resolve from a dark smear into a shape as the distance closed between them.

A castle.

Or what had been a castle before the Depths had spent what must have been decades doing its patient, terrible work on the stonework.

The walls had partially fallen, entire sections collapsing inward or outward depending on how the decay had taken them. The towers that had presumably once stood at its corners were entirely gone, reduced to rubble mounds that the black moss had long since consumed and incorporated into the general corruption of the ground.

The stone everywhere was black, not the natural grey or brown of unaffected masonry but the deep, thorough black of material that had been saturated with malice over a very long time, every pore of it filled with something that had replaced whatever structural integrity the original builders had relied upon with something else entirely.

But it still stood.

The main structure of it, the great hall at its center, remained upright through sheer stubbornness of construction, old walls refusing to fully surrender to what had been working against them for longer than most kingdoms lasted.

The roof of the hall had given way at some point, fallen inward and left the interior open to the sick sky above, a ragged gap where stone and timber had once kept weather out, now letting in the permanent purple-grey light of the Depths without filter.

On the highest point of the remaining wall, standing on a broken section of parapet with the particular stillness of something that had been standing in exactly that spot for a very long time and saw no reason to change that, was a figure.

Jolthar’s eyes found it immediately.

The smile that crossed his face was genuine and simple.

The clean satisfaction of finding the thing you came to find.

There you are.

He adjusted his angle and came down toward the open roof, picking up speed in the descent, the wind building around him as the distance to the castle floor closed rapidly.

The broken hall rushed up to meet him and he let it come, controlling the fall until the last available moment before converting it into a landing, both feet striking the rubble-strewn floor with a concussive burst of displaced air that sent corrupted dust and fragments of ancient stone scattering in all directions across the full width of the ruined hall.

The sound of it echoed hard off the remaining walls and rolled back at him from three directions simultaneously, the old stonework carrying the impact through its bones and returning it as a fading rumble that took several seconds to fully die.

Jolthar straightened slowly and looked around.

The hall was enormous even in its collapsed state, the remaining walls rising fifteen or twenty feet on three sides before meeting the open sky.

Nynthralls packed every available space along those walls, pressed shoulder to malformed shoulder in the mindless density of creatures drawn to proximity with their source.

They lined the rubble mounds and crouched in the gaps between fallen stones and clustered in the dark corners where the corrupted stone met the corrupted ground, hundreds of pale faces all oriented toward the same center of attention with the blank unified focus of things that had forgotten they were individuals.

None of them moved.

Because above, on the parapet, the duke had not yet moved.

And in a space governed by the duke’s will and the duke’s malice and the duke’s ancient accumulated presence, nothing moved until the duke decided movement was appropriate.

Jolthar looked up at the figure and he summoned his sword, Knashii.