THE HUNTER’S REDE
F.T. McKinstry
Copyright © 2016 F.T. McKinstry
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.
First edition published 2011 by Double Dragon Publishing
Second edition 2016
Cover Art by F.T. McKinstry
Table of Contents
Map: Sourcesee and West
Prologue
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
Glossary
Thank You
Upcoming Release
New Release
About the Author
Other Titles by F.T. McKinstry
Connect with F.T. McKinstry
Prologue
Warm rain caressed the babargon trees that crouched on the rise overlooking the Anglorean outpost deep in the Tarthian jungle. In a land with no winter, the autumnal equinox had just passed; the new moon hung like a stagnant pool above the woolen cloud cover. As night stole the last of the light, fog settled into the shadows, muting voices, hiding movement and sinking its teeth into the imaginations of tired, wounded warriors.
An assassin gazed upon the captain’s tent with the patience of a praying mantis. Unseen and unknown to all but the few who paid him, his tall, lean body draped between the weeping trees, he waited, his mind caressing the glimmering watch-web he had cast around his post to warn him of any unwitting intrusion.
In his homeland of Ostarin far to the north, they called him a hunter. Here, they called him kav’tib, which in their fluid tongue meant warlock, in no good terms. Icaros, the wizard who had raised him after the earth took his mother away, once said, There is more to being a wizard than pretty tricks! The Keepers of the Eye know the minds of gods.
The hunter was far from that. But his tricks, such as they were, proved good enough for the Tarthian nobility. They had hired him for being lawless and without loyalties, a servant of the Old One, the primeval, feminine force of cycles, birth and death who knew all things even beyond the timeless ramparts of gods. Even so, Lorth wouldn’t be the most skillful, highest paid assassin in Sourcesee without the things Icaros had taught him. He knew things beyond his multifaceted training as a warrior, things only wizards knew.
For seven years, he had hired out his services to the warlords of Tarth, an empire of wet, wooded lands that had as many boats as carts, a desolation of brackish marshes, towns on stilts, jungles dripping with moss and the warm, fragrant nectars of constant rain. All manner of life grew here, every kind of creature that crept, slithered, swam or flew, humans notwithstanding. These were bronze-skinned, tall, with rounded noses and deep-set eyes the color of swamps, eyes that knew the mysteries of things that flowed. Dominated by the Great Reson Fen near the borders of Anglorea, Tarth was known for its concoctions, everything from rich, heady drinks to narcotics, medicines—and of course, poisons.
He reached up and touched the orange-sized scar on his neck, a five-rayed star left by a near-fatal spider bite. A Tarthian woman had found him gasping and burning in the hazy shadow of a willow tree that leaned over a quiet brown-black river. Like images from a dream, he still remembered the way the water pulled on the long, thin leaves hanging down, the scent of jasmine, the feel of the woman’s hands on his face, chirruping birds, croaking frogs and the numbness in his arms and legs. She had dragged him away from the water and into an unpleasant hollow that smelled as if the mud itself were rotting there. He never knew what she had done to him—let alone why—but on the other side of a seemingly interminable delirium he had awaked, alone, weak and, amazingly, alive.
He hadn’t known the face of his own death before that, though he knew death in every part of his nature, being the hand that so often dealt it. Now, the spider bite lived in his body as a presence just below the surface of thought. It sensed the nature of events around him, and intensified when anything came along to which he needed to attend.
He’d never learned the name of this spider, but he had learned that the deadly creatures lived only in the swamps that fed the headwaters of the Mroc. While following the straggled path of the company below, he had captured one and brought it to this hidden outpost. With a word, he had crept as a whispering shade into the captain’s tent and respectfully loosed the spider into his blankets. The warrior was a man of little note, not the kind of top-heavy lords and commanders whom the hunter usually targeted. His orders had been specific with this one. Keep it quiet, keep it hidden.
The war had begun in the distant southwest, beyond the Red Forest River, where the borders of Tarth dried out and the stony, brushy hills of Anglorea stumbled up and ran with fresh winds as if relieved to get out of the rain. The hunter had left his gold’s worth of blood on those stones, and in the mud and pools of the forests, silently and without a thread of emotion for those whom his aristocratic employers picked to die. He couldn’t have said what the war was about, exactly. A hunter didn’t concern himself with that. He had crept like the nameless spider into the underground, into the shadows of warriors, lords, horses, whores and swords; into the moaning, oil-darkened recesses of the war machine and there he practiced his art. He cared little for where the river of life flowed or why.
He had become the river, rising and falling to the rhythm of the Hunter’s Rede, an unwritten set of codes, shades, they were called, designed to guide assassins in their work. But it was more than that. Shades between the darkness and the light, the Rede whispered the wisdom of the wilds. After so many years, it had rooted into his animal mind as instinct.
As he waited for death’s exhale, feeling the water on the slick black trunks of the babargon trees soaking into his cloak, the hunter wondered, as he did every year at this time, why he remained in this land. Though his lords paid him well for the things he knew—things they feared to know—he had lost his lust for coin and the accomplishments that grew from the fertile soil of conflict. His rhythm had become a rut in the mud, an inexorable cycle, like the void between the sun and rain that drove living things to breed.
He stared into the dark, every sense alert for the alarm that would tell him the spider had done its work. Rain fell, frogs croaked, and bats ruled the skies. The jungle drank until intoxicated, and then drank some more. After a time, the encampment below grew still, an invisible, silent heartbeat in the writhing arms of the jungle. Trusting to his senses, the hunter dozed, his thoughts flowing like the river beneath the willow tree.
~*~
Snow blanketed the mountains, brilliant leaves of ash, birch and maple flew on the cold autumn air and winter constellations sparkled on the horizon of an indigo sky. Lorth walked between the shadows of hemlock trees to the howling of wolves.
Icaros tossed a piece of wood into the hearth. “Go where ye will,” he said in his deep, lyrical voice, his eyes shining with sad twilight. “But your bones are in the mountains, boy.”
“I act from knowing,” the hunter replied, quoting the Shade of Instinct.
Two mighty r
avens rose from the ground and took to the air, flying north. Thick snow swirled from the sky and enveloped them.
Silence descended as a swan, white as ice, and landed in a pool with a velvet rustle.
~*~
The hunter opened his eyes with a start as the spider scar on his neck flared out with pain. Without moving, he looked down at the encampment. Nothing stirred; no voices, sounds of tent flaps or stomping feet disturbed the night.
Until something stepped from behind the tree at his feet.
A boy stood before him. Strange, thin and pale with dark green eyes and flaxen hair, he shimmered in a layer above the physical; there, and yet not. The hunter searched his memory for a phrase in Aenspeak, the wizards’ tongue, used to reveal the nature of a thing. The child said something that the hunter hadn’t heard in a very long time: his name.
Lorth! the specter spoke into his mind. You must return to Ostarin. The Mistress of Eusiron has need of you!
Lorth remembered the words: “Moridrun fore sarumn.” But the messenger had power beyond his; the command fell like a handful of weeds as the boy disappeared, leaving behind only a breath, faint as the warm fog rising in the pre-dawn light. Go now!
The hunter blinked into the jungle, stunned.
Eusiron stood in the heart of his northern homeland of Ostarin, a hundred miles north of Os on the Wolf River. He had studied swordsmanship there as a young man but had known only as much about the Mistress as any blade in service to the realm. Beautiful, mysterious, she ruled with the hand of the Old One, and held herself as inaccessible as a star, a lover to the gods. Why would she summon him? No one in Eusiron knew who he was, let alone where, after two decades.
He moved his gaze to the Anglorean captain’s tent, afloat in the mist. A predator catching the scent of prey, he studied the shadows, sensing a change. He heard a voice—and then a telling shout, followed by men rallying to alarm.
The owl flies near.
The hunter grabbed his things and slipped from the shelter of the babargons. But he didn’t head west to deliver his report and collect his pay.
He went east, towards the port of Searf.
Given the ruthless complexity of the Tarth-Anglorean war, Lorth knew his royal employers would by no means release him from their service. Indeed, they’d been eager enough to take advantage of his addiction to the jungle’s throb. But the quality of his nature that made him an attractive tool to the Tarthian lords also prompted him to answer his eldritch summons with all the conscience of a wolf trotting away from a watering hole. Like the wolf, he stood to the Old One alone, and while he might take a drink, he was still wild.
Tarthians. Too much water, and not enough shores. The Shade of Fate whispered to him as he settled his mind on the shrouded light of the rising sun: I owe nothing.
Chapter 1
Shade of Unknown: I have no name.
In the Ostarin Mountains, it is said, only wizards and hunters know the true meaning of darkness.
Lorth considered this as he stepped from the hatch of the Slippery Elm, the only vessel in Searf that would grant him passage to Sourcesee. He had paid the captain more than his ship was worth for him to ignore his better sense.
Several sailors lined up above to watch him go. No one said anything. Believing him to be a kav’tib, a bad omen at sea, they had ignored him during their journey as they might a siren’s whine; evidently, no one survived a spider bite the likes of his without magic or divine intervention. To a Tarthian, there was no such thing as that kind of luck.
His scar had been pounding for the last day and a half. Nearly a moon’s cycle had passed since the autumnal equinox, yet the air was unseasonably warm, humid and close, giving him an uncomfortable sensation that the heavy weather had followed him from Tarth. As he stepped from the beam onto the pier, he breathed a word in Aenspeak that enshrouded his body in a moth wing of nothing in particular.
Thus clad in his cloaking spell, he strode away from the vessel over the salt-bleached planks. His heartbeat quickened beneath the great port of Os, gateway to the realm of Ostarin. Beyond the moored ships and crafts, cradled in the surrounding cliffs, lay a jumble of fisheries, old stone houses, inns, taverns and the offices of merchants, lords and shipwrights. Crying gulls wheeled on the overcast sky, perched on docks, roofs and outcroppings, and rocked upon the uneasy waves. Ravens vied for scraps left by a fishmonger or a tavern master. Woven into the strident cries of the birds were the calls of fishwives, sailors and deckhands, barking dogs, hammering, splashing, roaring falls and the yawning groans of hoists, hulls and sails.
Not much had changed in seven years—but for one thing. Atop the granite watchtower perched like a sentinel on the rocky shore, stood a spear holding a great standard billowing on the wind: dark brown, red hills outlined in gray, and a single sword standing down in the center. It belonged to Faerin, a war-torn realm west of the Ostarin foothills beyond the headwaters of the Strike River. The Faerin army was commanded by a warlord named Forloc, a singular brute of a man whose cruelty was legendary. Men in brown and red, with dull helmets carved with a single elm leaf that marked them as foot soldiers, milled about near the tower and in the crowd moving around on the docks.
To Lorth’s knowledge, a Faerin presence had never been tolerated here with anything but enmity. For decades, since the Tarthians had banned them from the port of Sceil on their far northeastern border, the Faerins had attempted to take Os by force, to gain access to the Ostrael Sea. They had never succeeded.
And yet Lorth noted a marked absence of the Os City Guard. Like most cities, Os employed men-at-arms who stood at the ready in case of trouble. Many of the guardsmen hired out their blades to other realms, to stay trained, but they hadn’t needed to defend Os from an invasion in Lorth’s lifetime, if not longer.
It was generally known, if not assumed, that the Keepers of the Eye, a powerful order of wizards who kept balance in the world, had a hand in the protection of Os. The Keepers had come centuries ago and given the city its name: os, an Aenspeak word that meant “between earth and sky.” In the center of the city stood a High Keep that ensconced a Waeltower of topaz crystal, with seven sides. According to Icaros, the geometry of a Waeltower channeled the power of an iomor, a well of energy in the earth below, into the spire above, and that the pattern in every tower differed depending on where on the planet it stood. The Waeltowers belonged to the Masters of the Eye, who knew the dimensions of consciousness, the living boundaries between reality and perception, and the connections between experience and desire, emotion and stars, light and water, sound and structure.
To Lorth’s mind, the Keepers of the Eye had always seemed overly structured, bound as they were to annoying things like conscience, responsibility and the realms they couldn’t see, the realms of the Old One. They called her Maern, the word in their tongue for “mother” which, ironically enough, defied the precepts of structure. The Keepers didn’t tend to get involved in the rise and fall of kingdoms, warlords, and armies; they left that to time. But, for whatever reason, the Keeper of the Os Waeltower disregarded that convention by sheltering the city from invasion. The hunter glanced once more at the watchtower claimed by Faerin. Perhaps the large tumblers that governed the Keepers’ affairs had finally lined up. As Icaros used to say, Everything changes. The cosmos itself cannot defy the gaze of the Old One when she turns. A successful invasion was only a matter of time.
As he stepped down onto the crushed shells and seaweed carpeting the shore, Lorth released the sea from his veins, scattering her seductive whispers into the earth of his homeland. He touched the blade strap on his shoulder, pulled his cloak around him and headed for the street that wound up into the city.
Something followed him. He turned as a small orange cat leapt from the edge of the pier and trotted to his feet, her tail raised and curling at the tip. Lorth’s cloaking spells didn’t fool animals; they saw right through them. He knelt and moved his hand over her fur as she rubbed her body against him, purring loudly.
“Graemalkin,” he said, using the Aenspeak word for a cat. “I explained this, ay? Where I go, you can’t follow.”
He stood as heavy footsteps pounded the pier. “Sele!” bellowed a deep voice. The first mate of the Slippery Elm approached wearing a wild expression of unease. The cat belonged to the captain. The sailors cared for her, and considered her lucky, yet she had slept each night of the journey with Lorth. They had believed she protected them by binding him. Lorth knew better. He merged with her for companionship and made a bond.
The first mate picked up the cat and stroked her with his fat, tanned hand. With all the bravado of a rodent challenging a panther he said to Lorth, without looking at him, “You’ll not take her from us.” It was the most anyone had said to him in weeks.
Lorth spoke a word and came into focus, though he had learned from experience that his features, the ghost-pale skin of a Northman with the gold-green eyes of a wolf, were almost as unnerving to a Tarthian as the shadowy form of a cloaking spell. Ironically, though a hunter of his caliber wouldn’t bother turning his gaze on anyone without something rather substantial to show for it, the sailors would have more reason to fear a hunter than they would a wizard, who wouldn’t harm or influence anything out of hand.
From the corner of his eye, he noticed two armed Faerins step from the shadow of the tower and move in his direction.
“Just saying our farewells,” Lorth replied in flawless Tarthian. Still avoiding his eyes, the first mate wrapped his cloak over the cat and left without further comment. She meowed softly as the merchant returned to the ship.
Now alone, the hunter deftly recast his spell of fog, then released a breath and moved on. The Faerins had quickened their pace. He stepped onto a swaying bridge that crossed a small chasm of swirling oily-black water and then ascended a long stair of battered stones to a landing. A scaffold stood there, holding a vessel under repair. By the time the Faerins reached it, Lorth had lost himself in the activity of the docks.
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