© 2020 Simon McHardy. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
For Hamish and Lotte.
“I feel death’s icy grasp upon me.” The wretch raised a withered arm, the skin black with fungus, to his nurse. She did not move, and the limb floated back to the bed, light as a feather. Morwen rolled her eyes and looked out the arched window at the dark waves that thundered towards Wichsault Castle and smashed themselves on the rocks far below. In Morwen’s view it was a pointless drama. The sea had tried to topple Wichsault for thousands of years. It should give up—like this old git.
Morwen’s mouth drooped at the corners, and her brow knitted. In a voice that cracked with self-pity—not sympathy—she said, “I’ll get you something for the pain. Close your eyes, it’ll all be over soon.” She spun around to leave the room and upset the demon on her shoulder who grabbed at her hair to stop his fall.
“It’s true then, I’m going to die?”
“Yes, and very soon by the looks.” Morwen continued her march from the room and ignored the rows of blackened, corpse-like figures decaying in their beds. Fourteen in all, the most yet, crumbled in their skins as the fungal roots guzzled on the juice of their flesh and organs. The man let out a heart-wrenching whimper that was joined by an accompanying chorus of groans from the other patients. Morwen rolled her eyes again. It seemed recently her eyeballs spent more time staring at the top of her skull than anywhere else.
A long, gloomy corridor led to the room which held her apothecary supplies. The only light came from a solitary torch spluttering in the chilly drafts that soughed over the stones. The rapid tapping of Morwen’s footsteps was deadened by the crash of the hundred-foot waves far below. The sound was always there hissing in her ears. The walls, like everywhere else in the castle, were covered in the black fungus carried in by the clouds of death from the forest.
“That wasn’t very nice,” the demon, Szat, said. He tossed a sucked chicken bone to the ground, yawned, and wiped his greasy hands on Morwen’s robe. Szat, the size of a house cat, insisted on riding on Morwen’s shoulder despite her complaints that he gave her an awful backache. He was naked except for a grubby loincloth Morwen demanded he wear. Without this minimal garment, he left unsightly marks on her shoulder. He looked like a boiled baby, skin blister red. His mouth was twice the size it should have been and filled with yellow teeth that could easily crack the chicken bone in half, should they be so inclined. His eyes, pretty pond-scum green, always blinked slowly and wetly as if to savour the experience.
“No point in lying to them, no one ever gets better from black rot. It’s best they get used to the idea.”
“What do I care about sick people? I meant, you nearly made me fall off back there. You know these wings are just for show.” He buzzed a set of small blowfly wings and produced another chicken leg which he thrust into his salivating mouth and gnawed greedily.
“I mean, I’m a warlock,” Morwen continued, ignoring the demon’s complaint, “trained in the dark arts, capable of untold destruction, and the justiciar has me making a whole lot of wasted, mouldy people ‘as comfortable as possible’ before they pass into Summerland.” The corridor turned at a forty-five-degree angle into more shadows and dust.
“You’re the only one left with any healing skills. What do you expect?” Szat said between mouthfuls. Morwen tried the second door on the right. It creaked, opened an inch, and stuck. She kicked the door viciously, and it slammed open. Szat was forced to grip his mistress’s hair again.
“Careful,” Szat spluttered. Half-chewed food showered Morwen’s robe. He withdrew his hand and gazed at the chicken bone entangled in Morwen’s auburn locks. Morwen shook her head; the bone remained. What did she care anymore? The castle was doomed. Nearly everyone who counted had black rot. All her hard work climbing to the top was for nothing. She was the High Exarch now, with a coven of none. The whole lot of them were dead. There wasn’t a soul to lord her power over and make miserable.
Morwen took stock of the room, little bigger than a storage cupboard. The musty odour of dried plants mingled with the brackish tang of the sea. A small window cast a sliver of grey light onto shelves lined with near-empty jars of herbs and roots. Morwen sighed. She would need to find time to replenish her stock in the forest, and that would mean a guard escort. She really hated those guys, especially Goron. His mother must have got her M’s and G’s confused. She didn’t know what her sister, Anwen, saw in him. He must be great in bed. Surely even that would get boring after a few months, though, and his many inadequacies would become overwhelmingly evident.
Morwen took down two of the near-empty jars. The sleeves of her robe slipped back to reveal her scarred wrists. Her left hand, minus a pinkie, gripped the glass awkwardly. One jar contained a black, twisted root called devil’s toes which caused a dreamless sleep. The other held tiny, white flowers called wife’s lover, which brought about intense feelings of euphoria. Together they would guarantee her patients, and by extension her, a good night’s sleep.
Morwen began to mash the flowers and roots with a mortar and pestle while Szat belched in her ear and produced a third chicken leg from nowhere. She added a dash of alcohol to the black paste to dilute it.
Szat leapt from Morwen’s shoulder onto the table, grabbed the mortar, and downed the lot.
Morwen growled in frustration and banged her fist on the table. “That’s all I had.” Szat grinned back at her. “Now what am I supposed to do? They’ll be up all night.”
A sudden thought occurred to her. She glanced up at a jar full of pale red leaves with black dots in the centre. Why didn’t she think of that before? The best solution for all concerned.
“Ah!” said Szat noticing what Morwen stared at, “Killer’s eye, that’s my girl. We could finish up here then go and visit the kitchens and see what cook has ready.” Killer’s eye—one leaf and the heart never beats again.
“A pleasant death, much better than all the suffering the poor things are going through right now. It would be inhumane not to do it.” Morwen poured a handful of leaves into a fresh mortar and began to mash them up. The pulp gave off a sweet, dusty scent like raspberries as it gradually turned into a light pink paste. How could anything that smelled so wonderful and looked so pretty be wrong? “Feel free to help yourself,” Morwen said.
“No thank you,” Szat replied.
Morwen spooned the last of the mixture into the old man’s mouth. He swallowed with an exaggerated gulp. “This will give me sweet dreams?” he asked.
“No, it will kill you,” The man’s eyes widened in terror and then glassed over.<
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Morwen sat on the window ledge, a contented smile on her face, and listened to the endless crashing of the waves far below, the mournful howl of the wind, and Szat snoring on her shoulder. Through the swirling mists and sea spray, she could make out the distant cliffs of an island. Since she was a child she’d dreamed about sailing there, making herself its queen. It may as well have been the moon—no one sailed the black sea.
Goron sculled the tankard. The beer streamed off his chin in two rivulets and onto his naked and muscular chest. His mat of chest hair turned into dewy, golden grass. A woman, who was not Anwen, his betrothed, dried it with long strokes of her tongue and growled appreciatively as if Goron’s chest hair had been the missing ingredient the beer needed. What her tongue missed, her naked breasts didn’t. Her work done, Jasin released an unladylike belch, flopped onto her back on the wooden bench, and stared up at a thistles’ nest in the rafters.
“Another drink for your captain,” Goron roared. He waved the empty tankard at his seventeen guards, all that remained of his force after over one hundred perished from black rot. From the other side of the great hall they waved their own tankards back enthusiastically, misinterpreting the gesture. Goron tried yelling some more but that only excited them further. He knew better than to ask Jasin, and he lurched to his feet with a heavy sigh. The floor moved beneath his feet, and he found himself following it, in a roundabout way, to the beer keg.
He didn’t mean to be this drunk, none of them did. It was a blatant dereliction of duty. Half of them should be on watch but assigning nine guards to patrol the vast fortress of Wichsault was pointless. The minimum needed to man the gates and walk the ramparts was twenty. His instincts were right when he thought about it, best to spend the last of their days drunk until the enemy breached the castle, or the black rot claimed them. But his sense of duty was deeply ingrained, and Goron knew he couldn’t defy it for long. Tomorrow they would be manning their posts, but tonight they would be swilling ale and chasing women.
Oda, a huge woman who had to pass through most doors sideways, bellowed. She liked to play rough when she got drunk, and Goron was her favourite plaything. She stamped her foot and charged, the bellow still in her throat. Goron tensed his belly for the attack and, at the last moment, staggered to his left leaving nothing but the wall to stop his assailant. Oda’s head was tough, but the wall, despite its coating of the black mould-like substance, was tougher. Oda’s head exploded like a roasted pumpkin, and its contents slithered down the wall into a gruesome pile on the floor.
Goron shrugged at the mess and continued his journey to the keg. He filled up his tankard, drained it, and poured another. The other guards sensed things were about to step up a notch and jostled around the barrel to fill their own tankards. “Time for some dares, boys.” Jasin, quite obviously, wasn’t a boy—her tits were still out—but she let out a resounding cheer with the others.
What do you dare when there’s only one woman in the room, and you fancy her, and don’t want everyone else getting their mitts on her?
Goron caught sight of the tabard of Gilac, the first Justiciar of Wichsault, dancing like a kite in the north wind blown in from the black sea that found a thousand ways to make life in the castle miserable. “I dare you, Torbin, to eat Gilac’s rags.” It was a blatantly disrespectful act that, at any other time, would get him whipped, but there was no one left to do the whipping.
Torbin, an enormously fat man who couldn’t do up his regulation belt and was forced to sling his sword and scabbard over his shoulder, looked up at the wavering piece of material and grinned. “Aye, always thought it looked delicious.”
Goron didn’t think so. It was a mouldy, old tabard with a crude drawing of a hairy warrior yelling underneath a once-golden sun. It took six arrows to shoot the tabard down, and everybody pitched in to cut it into bite-sized bits. Torbin began scoffing it with gusto, washing each mouthful down with beer until a wad of the material stuck in his throat, and he began to choke. His frantic hand motions and purple face were hilarious until he stopped moving.
“Oh,” said Goron realising Torbin was dead, “Better than the rot.” The response elicited a cheer from the remaining guards, and Torbin was quickly forgotten.
“I dare you, Borne, to trick the black.” Tricking the black meant the risk-taker leaped out the window and, as the black sea was about to claim another victim, the adventurer turned in mid-air, grabbed the window ledge, and pulled himself up. It was a trick Borne was built for, wiry and short with cat-like agility. He’d performed it numerous times before and even in states of greater drunkenness.
“Right.” Borne drained his tankard, stretched his back with a dry crack, and took a runup. He didn’t want to jump too far but enough to clear the ledge. He pulled it off and, midway through his leap, he twisted and reached out. His fingers clasped the ledge, its brick surface blackened with the strange mould that came with the miasma from the forest. The ledge crumbled in Borne’s hands. He stared at the handfuls of rubble and blinked a couple of times before the reality of what happened set in. By then he was already halfway through his long journey down the cliffside. That left him enough time for a surprised yelp before he was dashed on the rocks and swallowed by the black sea.
The three faces that peered out the window at the rocks far below witnessed all of Borne’s body fluids depart from him in a split second. “The rot won’t get him either,” Goron said.
The guards cheered.
“It did in a way, though,” Jasin said scraping at the mould coating the windowsill.
“Right, Androw, battle axe catch.” Thud.
“It might be time to stop playing that game,” Jasin said. Looking around the room at the carnage, Goron was inclined to agree. “Unless you want me to dare you to do something very naughty.” She led him to the table, pushed him back onto it, and ran her finger from Goron’s throat to his belly button. His britches began to swell.
“What would that dare be?” Goron asked.
“I dare you to last longer than last time.” Jasin tugged down his britches and expertly went to work.
Goron tried to fill his head with horrible memories. The plum-sized boil he lanced on the back of one of his men last week. Jasin climbed on top. Her breasts dangled in front of his eyes, and the heat of her sex pressed against him. Goron groaned and clenched his fists. It wasn’t working—his chamber pot, his mother wrapped in muslin, being thrown from the castle into the sea.
“Goron!” a voice screeched. Anwen stood in the middle of the hall shaking with rage.
That did it. Goron’s libido jumped out the window and dashed itself on the rocks below.
Packmaster Caroc squatted down in the water reeds on the bank of the river Grayl and watched the two boys approach, fishing rods and tackle boxes slung over their shoulders. It was telling they would risk leaving the castle to catch the bitter-tasting, translucent, bulbous-eyed fish that lived in the murky water. Food in the castle was in short supply.
Caroc wasn’t the only one observing the boys. Six toadoks hid in a copse of trees to his right. The forest dwellers were loathsome creatures with the bodies and heads of toads and the spindly legs of malnourished children with rickets. They’d obviously heard the rumours Wichsault was in its death throes and journeyed from their village in the west to see if they were true. They wouldn’t be disappointed. The battlements were largely unmanned, sections of the castle crumbled from the dark rot, and the scarcity of lights flickering on the walls during the night advertised how few inhabitants remained.
Caroc should have dealt with the small group. A year ago he would have—he was a ranger—it was his duty. But he was afraid. He’d spent his time over the last week skulking in the flatlands around the castle, not daring to go near the deserted village of Mournburn with its chomite infestation, or the brooding Forest of Tadblack teeming with equally murderous inhabitants. And now, to top off his heroics, he was cower
ing from enemies outside the castle gates.
If the boys continued on their path to the river, it would take them past the toadoks. It was daylight, and he couldn’t hope to warn the children without being spotted. He’d have to fight if he wanted to help them.
He looked down at the arrow he gripped in his right hand. It was trembling. So too was the reflection of a young man with shoulder-length, blond hair, a long face with an aquiline nose, and emerald green eyes. He’d been told he looked like an elf even though nobody in the castle had ever seen an elf.
He sneered. The face of the last ranger of Wichsault, the packmaster, sneered back at him. The face belonged to a coward. The thought hurt him and, for a moment, his eyes flashed in anger. Memories surged up of the man he wanted to be, brave, a protector, and a bane to all the creatures that threatened Wichsault. As quickly as the fire in his eyes came to life, it dimmed and went out, as if drenched by the river he saw them reflected in. He was Caroc the coward again, hidden in the reeds and shaking at the thought of fighting a few toadoks.
A movement to his right caught his attention. He pulled up his tattered, earth-brown hood to cover his blond hair and turned his head slowly. The toadoks had crept from the trees and were stalking their target. The boys were oblivious of the danger they faced, their chatter carefree and casual. Their fate would be horrible. When captured, they would be taken back to the toadoks’ camp and given marsh flower. Paralysis took only minutes, and the boys would remain fully conscious without any dulling of the senses. They would be stripped and flung into a pot the size of a peasant’s hut, with a variety of unfortunate swamp creatures. Floating on the surface, watching the clouds roll by, they would be slowly poached alive.
He had to act now. He could easily take out two toadoks before they got anywhere near the boys, then lead the others into the forest where he could lose them without difficulty.
Now they were directly between himself and the boys. Caroc aimed his bow at the creature bringing up the rear. Blood roared in his ears, louder than the fast-flowing river. A steel trap crushed his chest, and he stretched his mouth desperate for air. He wasn’t breathing. He’d been holding his breath. He took a short gasp, too loud.
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