Swords & Heroes Story #2

Korvix and the Heart of Darkness by Matt Hilton

Jun 11, 2024

Matt Hilton is a thriller-writer-turning-sword-and-sorcery storyteller, which seems a natural evolution if you think about it. In this short, brutal piece, we get all that we love about thrillers - a desperate hero, an evil villain, high tension and fast-paced action - plus sorcery, sword play (in this case, an axe will do), and a resolution befitting a barbarian warrior. However, Korvix may think twice before accepting another mercenary assignment involving demons! - Ed.

This week, we present Story #2, ‘Korvix and the Heart of Darkness’ by Matt Hilton.

Korvix and the Heart of Darkness by Matt Hilton

“I am freedom.”

The woman stood on the bottom step of the cellar’s stairwell, awaiting Korvix’s response. Slowly, his bloodied eyes registered her presence, his concussed brain finally making sense of the figure before him.

Even through the clots adhering to his lashes, eyelids swollen from repeated beatings, she was a vision of beauty.

An emerald green dress fitted to her body as perfectly as any masterpiece designed by the artisans of Eastern Vrhyn. Her musky scent filled his nostrils as an aphrodisiac. Blazing red hair hung about her shoulders, curls bunching on the slopes of her alabaster breasts. Her dress was cut low, and he watched the slow rise and fall of the pale orbs that it strained to contain. On her feet were satin slippers, as green as her dress, as green as her eyes as they surveyed him.

“Have you come to release me, woman?”

“I have come to set you free,” she corrected in a voice as mellifluous as distant birdsong.

“Then undo these chains and allow me to face death with my hatchet in my hand.”

The axe-wielding warrior’s hatchet lay propped against a barrel next to his ripped off clothing, all out of reach. He was trussed to an upright beam, stripped as naked as a baby. His flaxen hair hung loose over his shoulders, bloodied at their tips where his hair rubbed the open wounds on his back.

“You misunderstand me, outlander,” she said, her voice every bit as sweet as before, but it was the sweetness of decay and rot.

“It was worth a try,” said the plainsman from the northern tundras. “Release me, at least, and I’ll face your brethren barehanded if I must.”

She took the final step into the dungeon and halted again. Her features appeared set in porcelain; her lips were the painted smile of a sinister clay effigy, eyes as solid as their emerald twins. A dim flame in a sconce flickered in the stairwell above her causing the shadows to jitter and shift. The woman’s shadow did not move, because she had none.

“Who are you?” Korvix asked.

“I am the one you came looking for.”

“You are Sur-shuh?” He pronounced her name as it would’ve been spoken a thousand leagues to the north.

“Seer-sha,” she corrected, in a singsong, archaic tongue. “As I said, my name translates from the language of the elder kings as ‘freedom’.”

Korvix rattled his chains, thinking of freedom and how he’d use its gift given the opportunity.

Seer-sha moved without seeming to move. She didn’t walk, that was for certain, because Korvix eyed her long, shapely legs—imagining them wrapped around his middle—and they never once put as much as a ruffle in her form-hugging dress.

His lustful thoughts clung on, even after he realised they had been inserted into his brain through her magical trickery. He had to tear his attention back to her face. No, she hadn’t walked over to him, yet when he tilted his head up to meet her gaze, she was directly in front of him, so close he felt the exhalation of her cool breath on his skin.

“Why did you seek me, outlander?”

“Why do you think, sorceress?”

“You wish to kill me.”

“Killing you was never agreed upon. I’m paid only to stop any further killing by you.”

“Yet you brought with you an axe to chop off my head.” Seer-sha lifted her right hand and something cold and hard-edged settled under Korvix’s jaw. “And you brought this.”

He couldn’t see what she held to his throat, but didn’t have to. He knew it was the knife presented to him by Grius, the chief cleric of Draxxa, when the old holy man had related the details of Korvix’s mission to him.

“It just might come in handy,” the cleric had said as he’d handed over the intricately carved silver blade. The handle was bone, carved from a human fibula. “I’ve heard that this blade is enchanted, imbued with the power of an angel at the beginning of time….”

“There could be no truth in those stories,” Korvix had told him. “You know how tales grow and change and take on lives of their own the more wine is imbibed. Do you really think a demoness is harvesting souls in the bleakest dens beneath Draxxa?’

“I heard that you entertained an entire inn with a tale involving a resurrected goddess helping you to save the throne of Pyre… Are we only to believe when tales of the supernatural spring from rogues like yourself?”

“That’s dependent on how much ale I’ve quaffed,” Korvix had grunted.

It would be a difficult claim to palate for most, but Korvix could swear to its authenticity before the dreaded devil, Skathalos himself, without placing his soul in jeopardy. However, he needn’t. Grius believed Korvix’s claim, and it was on the back of hearing it that he’d sent men to fetch the axe warrior, offering him the task of ridding Draxxa of the foul demoness.

Accepting the cleric’s offer of reward, Korvix had prowled the backstreets of Draxxa, asking questions and shaking answers from those reluctant to speak.

And now he’d paid the price of his stupidity, he thought. He should have traded in that knife at one of the many stalls that lined the neighbourhood, exchanging it for a fresh horse and provisions to aid his onward journey.

But he hadn’t been able to deny a tugging sensation in the knife, a feeling within the silver that drew it like metal filings to a lodestone, as if it sensed the presence of Seer-sha’s dark energy and drew him to her. Alas, it had not tried turning in her fist since she’d threatened to open him with it.

Seer-sha removed the knife from his throat. His relief was only momentary. She held it between his legs.

“Hold on there, woman! Let’s not be hasty,” Korvix said in a throaty rasp, and then continued to curse under his breath.

“What are you complaining about?” the sorceress asked.

“I’m regretful, sorry that we’ve met as enemies. I believe you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“You like the way I look?”

“Of course, woman. Which red-blooded man wouldn’t?”

Seer-sha proved as vain as most other supernatural beings he’d heard of who weaponised sexual desire to deceive and enrapture before sucking out a man’s life force. Not that he’d come across many during his wanderings, but there had been Ymyr, wife of the sorcerer Androphorous, enchantress and shape-shifting serpent who’d tried luring him to her bed.

She was at once before him then at the bottom of the stairs. Seer-sha ran one hand through her fiery hair, the other remained propped on her hip. Then she spun away, turning her head to give him a smoky pout over one bare shoulder. The dress shimmered off her body, liquid as quicksilver, puddling around her finely turned ankles, and Korvix was given a view of her in all her glory.

“What about now?” she teased. “Do you find me comely?” Seer-sha turned with a dancer’s grace and again was before Korvix without any sign of apparent volition. She had looped her knife hand over her breasts; her other hand was placed over the juncture of her thighs.

He tried to concentrate on her eyes and the tiny wrinkles at their corners.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“I was old before Eiv was born,” she said with a smile.

Korvix grunted at her boast. Eiv, in the cleric Grius’s religious beliefs, was recognised as the first female, supposedly the mother of the first races of men that perished in O’Bel’s great cleansing of the earth millennia ago.

“So you’re not exactly in your prime, eh?”

For the first time Seer-sha frowned. Immediately a smoky grey haze outlined her figure.

“You do not appreciate this form?” she said. “Perhaps you would prefer if I were a boy instead?”

“I’ve no interest in those of my own sex. Neither do I fancy every doxy that drops her silks in front of me.”

“You dare call me a doxy?”

“Old whore, if you’d prefer?” Korvix said. “Ancient pox-ridden harlot?”

Seer-sha made a sound that should never have come from her enchantress form. She rumbled out a growl like some great dagger-toothed cat on the prowl.

She raised Grius’s silver knife. “I can draw your essence whether you wish to mate with me or not.”

“I’d rather you slit my throat,” Korvix said. “I’ve heard that lying with a demoness is akin to entering a cavern of ice. Where’s the pleasure in that? And anyway, what’s this about you taking the seed from a man then passing it to one of your brothers so he can impregnate women with his demonic brood? What do you call his hellish offspring? Cambions, are they not?”

“You’ve researched well,” Seer-sha said.

His taunting had evidently worked because she’d forgotten about slicing his throat and again moved away. As for his research? Everything Korvix knew of her ancient race had come from the chief cleric.

“Is that your intention here in Draxxa, to breed your own crop of devil-scum? What then, you’d make this city your hellish home from where you’d launch a conquest of the world?”

“You think this is about birthing half-breed whelps? Whoever told you these lies is an ill-informed fool. My kind has no interest in drawing your dishwater seed: it is your life essence that we desire. I’m coming now to set it free!”

Suddenly Seer-sha wasn’t the enchanting vision of beauty of before. Her looks fell from her in the same shimmering river of mercury that had earlier shed her dress.

Her fiery mane shrivelled into a keeled bald skull, her almost translucent skin metamorphosing into a warty grey hide. Her breasts shrivelled, while talons erupted from the tips of her fingers and toes. When he looked up again, her green eyes had sunk back into the skull and were now nestled beneath a thick, ridged brow, and her mouth… O’Bel’s seething blood! It was a puckered gash, lamprey-like, armed with dozens of needle teeth.

Seer-sha let out a wild hiss that grew louder and more piercing until it stabbed his brain.

Korvix was relieved that it wasn’t a mating call but a summons. From overhead came the rapid clumping of footsteps. She had her lackeys on standby; they were the brutes who’d ambushed and overwhelmed Korvix, beaten him mercilessly, and then hanged him in the witch’s cellar like a side of beef. They were an ugly, malformed bunch, less than human and pitiless, so maybe there was something in Grius the chief cleric’s Cambion myth that Seer-sha wasn’t admitting to. Any second now and those brutes would come downstairs and hold him while Seer-sha had her wicked way with him.

For the last minute or so, Korvix had been straining his fingers and wrists, manipulating them within his bonds, seeking and working against weaknesses in the old corroded links. As she hove in, he strove to free his arms from the clinging links; Seer-sha putting his energetic thrashings down to one playing hard to get.

Her needle teeth nipped into his lips, and she clamped on tightly. A slick, wiggling tongue invaded his mouth, and he coughed in revulsion.

Earlier, under her magnetic influence, he’d imagined Seer-sha’s legs wrapped around his middle. Now the dream became reality, and it was a nightmare. He felt the icy clamminess of her as she tried to clamp on. The invasion of his mouth was bad enough, and then the extraction of his soul began. His violation must be stopped!

With a shudder, he let out a roar of denial. He wrenched loose from the chains, broken and twisted links clattering on the floor, and snatched the knife from her grasp. He reversed it just as Seer-sha realised he’d broken free. She snapped her tongue from his mouth and reared back, the curvature of her fangs almost tearing his lips off before she’d fully disengaged.

He stood before her, his broken chains hanging to each side.

She looked at his empty hands. Then dawning realisation struck, and she peered down at the handle of the silver knife jutting from between her withered breasts. Her mouth opened in a moan that never escaped her throat. She was dead; she just didn’t know it yet.

“Away from me, hag!” Korvix reached out, braced his palms against the knife handle, and gave her a hard shove.

She fell flat on her back and didn’t move.

Under its own enchanted power, the knife continued to drive into her until it was fully embedded within her chest. From her orifices, molten bloody liquid bubbled out, and the stench was horrendous.

Grius would be happy to hear that the enchanted knife had worked better than even he’d imagined, literally leading Korvix to the heart of darkness.

He left the knife jammed in the succubus’s carcass. Maybe by extracting it she would rise up again like an unquiet revenant in a cursed tomb. He reached instead for where his hatchet had been dumped against the barrel. It would be more effective than a knife against the group of man-things now charging down the stairs. They roared and howled as they came, brandishing clubs and staves.

Naked, Korvix greeted them with the hatchet raised. They stumbled to a halt, to stand in a dumbfounded semi-circle behind their late mistress. Initially her death stunned them, as if it had not been believed possible to slay her, but as her essence pooled on the floor, stinking of rot and corruption, reality hit and a wild roar lifted in unison. They were enraged by her death. But their rage paled before Korvix’s.

“Expect no mercy,” he shouted and laid in with his hatchet.

Before, when they had ambushed him, one of the cowardly dogs had crept up on him and clubbed him from behind, leaving him dazed until his brothers could pounce. With a sturdy net they had controlled him while they had beaten him senseless with their wooden clubs.

He was a different foe entirely when faced head on and with hatchet in hand; and as he’d warned, no mercy was given.

Heads were split, limbs cloven through, bodies crushed. His spilled blood became naught in comparison to what he withdrew from them in repayment. When he left the chamber, the demoness’s henchmen lay scattered in sundered parts.

Korvix had dressed in what he could reclaim: his torn trousers, cavalry boots and scarred leather cuirass. His dripping hatchet he kept hold of until he was well clear of the demoness’s subterranean den.

Seer-Sha’s corpse had become a putrescent puddle by the time he’d finished dressing, and with little fear of her rising from death, he’d fished from the slime the silver and bone knife. Alone it wouldn’t prove to Grius that Korvix had completed his task, but the decapitated head of the Cambion he’d stuffed into a sack and thrown over his shoulder should suffice.

~** ~ **~

Korvix and the Heart of Darkness © 2024 by Matt Hilton. Image by Gioele Fazzeri from Pixabay, used by permission. All rights reserved. You may restack this story via Substack but do not republish elsewhere.

Matt Hilton is the author of 13 novels in the Joe Hunter thriller series, 10 novels in the Grey and Villere thriller series, and of a number of standalone crime, mystery, thriller, and horror novels. As well, Hilton loves to read and write Sword & Sorcery fiction. His character—Korvix the Axe-Warrior—has appeared in Clashing Blades, a collection of Hilton’s S&S and heroic fantasy tales, and two novellas, Korvix and the Treasure of Pyre and Against the Crimson Gods. Another Korvix adventure, “Black Rain, Grey Snow and Red Death,” will soon appear in Savage Realms Monthly.

For more, visit MattHiltonBooks.com.

Did you enjoy this story? Want to talk about? Drop a comment!

Lyn Perry's S&S Roundup

Discussion about this post