Good Company

by Dale Lucas

  “It took several months to coax the whole story out of her, but apparently, it went something like this: When food became scarce and the snows hadn’t abated, Hobb had taken it upon himself to gather all the children of the village—two dozen or so—into his home. He said it was to protect them, but most felt it was to hold them hostage. Then, with the help of a few accomplices, he gradually worked his way through the town—quietly at first, more deliberately when his plans were no longer deniable. He murdered every one of the adults and ate them, feeding them to the children to keep them fattened and ready for consumption if need be. Any who tried to escape were hunted down and slain by his abettors. When he ran out of victims and only his loyal companions remained, he started getting them to turn on one another. Finally they were all eaten, as well, and only he and the children remained.

  “But by that time, the children themselves were accomplices. They had not only grown adept at butchering the victims that Hobb brought them, but had also acquired a taste for the flesh they supped upon. Little by little, Hobb started to note that his supply of children was dwindling, yet the children’s hunger remained sated. About the time he tried to tell the children that he, and he alone, would decide who lived and who became meat, the children decided that he—so fat and well fed—could feed them all.

  “But they kept his head, as a sign of respect. Those who found that lone girl still dwelling in his cabin said she spoke to the thing, as though Hobb could yet converse with her.”

  “Gods and devils of the deep . . . ,” Torval breathed.

  Rem nodded. Even now he tried to imagine what he might feel—what he might try to tell himself to make sense of it all—if he found a child alone in a charnel house eating the remains of a baby. He honestly could not imagine. Even in light of all the wickedness he’d witnessed in Yenara, he was fairly sure that such a horrible sight would simply defy understanding.

  “At any rate,” he continued, suddenly overwhelmed by the silence, “that’s how the place earned its name. Sanctuary became Hobb’s Folly, and it’s been a locus for legend and superstition ever since. It’s obviously just a ruin now, since it has no permanent residents, but most who pass through here still say the place is home to unquiet spirits, and most sensible travelers refuse to camp within sight of the place.”

  “And that’s where we’re bedding down tonight?” Torval asked. “Whose bright idea was that?”

  “Thank the lord marshal,” the Raven said with a smile. “He’s bound and determined to show everyone in these woods that he’s not afraid of anything—old superstitions and ghosts least of all.”

  Rem was about to assure Torval that there was nothing to fear—the stories were just stories, after all, and Rem himself did not believe unquiet spirits still haunted the ruins of Hobb’s Folly. But at that moment Galen returned to the company at speed, riding right past the lord marshal and hurrying to her captain and her mistress. Rem could not hear her hasty report, but he saw the looks on the women’s faces when they received it.

  “What is it?” the lord marshal cried from the front of the column. He turned his horse round and rode back along the line toward where Galen sat her own mount, in conference with Tuvera and the Lady Tzimena. “I’m still the leader of this expedition,” he barked as he approached, “and I demand to hear your report.”

  It was Captain Tuvera who answered him, calling so that he could hear, even at a distance. It was her raised voice that allowed Rem and Torval to receive the news, as well.

  “Bodies, Lord Marshal. Fresh. Just up ahead.”

  There were three of them, discarded haphazardly some distance off the road, about halfway between the beaten track and the river, farther south. The whole party hobbled their horses on the road and trudged into the woods behind Galen as she explained to her captain and the lord marshal what had led her to leave the road and investigate. Wirren, the wain driver, and young Brekkon stayed with the cart, the horses, and the prisoner while the others hiked a short distance through the wood to the kill site.

  “My horse smelled them,” Rem heard Galen say. “When the beast started balking and stamping, I thought she’d gone mad. Then the wind changed and I smelled it . . .”

  They broke through dense underbrush and emerged in a semicleared grove, ringed by madrone and white alder. Almost immediately Rem saw the bodies: one sprawled facedown, the earth beneath him stained darker by all the blood that had run out of him; another speared to a tree on the far side of the copse; a third who seemed to have expired after trying to crawl away, the half-bent positions of his arms and legs and the long, ropy trail of intestines unfurled in his wake suggesting that escape—even survival—had been a foolish dream. Several broken fern fronds, scraped portions of the thick forest loam, and obvious footprints made it clear there had been a great deal of hasty activity there. A few travelers’ packs lay strewn about, turned inside out to spill their contents chaotically over the open ground.

  “Hit and run, I’d say,” Galen continued, as she moved to the dead man sprawled facedown across the clearing. “This lot was here, resting from a hike or something of the sort, and someone hostile found them and beset them. But that’s not even the worst part.”

  She knelt beside the dead man, took a handful of cloth from his thick wool tunic, and yanked. The man’s head was drawn up with his body, and they all saw what she meant.

  The dead man’s face had been torn away. A sharp line of black, coagulated blood suggested that it hadn’t been ripped, either, but methodically cut. All that remained was a sticky red ruin, exposing muscle fiber and white bone, all now littered with specks of woodland soil and already crawling with flies.

  Rem shot a glance at the Lady Tzimena. To her credit she didn’t look away. The young woman stared, grave and somber, just like everyone else, drinking in the horrid sight of that man without a face.

  Galen laid him back down again and suggested the others. “The one speared to the tree is missing several fingers and looks like he had teeth yanked right out of his gums. And you can see the crawler’s entrails. Someone gutted him and left him to die slow. Probably took every ounce of strength left in him just to make it to the far side of the clearing . . .”

  “Why are we here?” the lord marshal asked. “What is it we’re meant to see in this?”

  Galen stared at the lord marshal for a moment before turning to her own commander. Captain Tuvera swept her eyes over the grim scene before them. “This slaughter would appear to be its own lesson,” she said. “There are dangerous folk about.”

  “Not just men, either,” Croften said, staring at something in a muddy patch of ground on the edge of the scene. Everyone closed on the big scout, and he knelt to show what he’d found: a large broad footprint, clear as an etching, in the moist loam.

  Rem recognized the shape of that footprint immediately. Only Torval spoke.

  “Orc,” the dwarf said.

  “He’s right,” Galen agreed, and crossed the clearing, pointing to yet another small clue lost among the chaos of the scene. “Look here.”

  Rem saw that she was pointing to an arrow, protruding from a large spruce like a small, sickly limb. The arrow was unusually short, the shaft painted black, fletched with crow feathers.

  “Orcish?” Elvaris asked.

  “Close,” Galen said. She swept her dark, tight braids away from her wrinkled brow. “Goblin.”

  “Aemon’s bones,” Wallenbrand said, searching the ground around them. “So that’s what this is? Orc-sign? And they’ve got at least one goblin archer among them?”

  Galen shrugged. “So it would seem.”

  Everyone in the company exchanged worried, wary glances, then began a slow, individual scan of the trees and landscape surrounding them. All at once, the Ethkeraldi Forest—already so dark and ancient and unwelcoming—seemed actively hostile. Carnivorous. Hungry.

  Rem looked to Torval. His partner was already scanning the trees and the forest shadows around them, all but willing the brutes to s
how themselves. Rem cursed inwardly. This was the last thing they needed. If there were orcs abroad in this wood and they threatened the caravan, Torval wouldn’t beg off until every orc—or he himself—was dead.

  It seemed the unquiet spirits haunting their yet-to-be-reached campsite would be the least of their worries . . .

  A little over an hour later, as the day’s light faded toward a bruised and dusky purple and the shadows of the forest deepened around them, their party arrived at its ill-starred campsite.

  Rem felt a strange sense of disappointment when they rounded a bend in the forest road, saw the tree line before them thinning, and realized that the low, dark huddle of structures up ahead was the infamous ghost town. As they rode into the overgrown clearing that had once been a thriving trade post, Rem thought the place almost welcoming, and certainly more prosaic than he’d imagined. Most of the buildings had collapsed after centuries of neglect, but several of the larger structures still stood under sagging, shattered roofs or behind log walls sprouting hoary moss and colonies of toadstools. The largest of them, squatting in pieces on the south side of the forest road, looked like it might have once been an inn—two stories, broad and tall, with what looked like a long, covered porch along two sides and numerous well-spaced windows in its facade. Sometime before their arrival—decades, probably—a massive spruce had fallen, crushing the sagging roof and shattering the old inn’s eastern wall. That fallen tree was now little more than a worm-and insect-riddled shell filled with piles of wood pulp and sprouting fungi, but the mess it had made upon collapsing was unmistakable.

  Though the empty foundations of small, long-abandoned houses yet lined the forest road, the greater measure of the little burg’s buildings were clustered on the north side. The divided stalls of a onetime stable were unmistakable, even in ruin, as were the squat, round stone base of a granary and the tumbledown bones of an Aemonic church. But lording over them all, raised upon a small knoll and still possessed of both solid walls and the vague sweep of a peaked roof, was the building Rem marked as the manse of Remus Hobb. Surely the man who’d built this place would have chosen that site for himself—elevated, tucked away in the northwest corner of the village, close to the open space that had probably once been a town square and close beside a rocky stream. A tree had fallen on that structure, as well, opening its back end to the elements long, long ago. But if any building on the site had been the home of the arrogant fool who’d tried to make this place thrive, that had to be it.

  Rem had never seen anything like it; it was, very literally, a town where no one lived. Not entirely ruined, yet certainly far past its prime and long abandoned. There was just enough form and function remaining in the village’s bones to suggest order, a kind of homey neatness, yet sufficient blight and decay to make the camp’s long and storied history clear at a glance. It did not frighten him so much as sober him: Look how easily the natural world crept in to reclaim what mankind had tried to wreak upon it. At the end of everything, time, nature, and the elements always won.

  They chose as their campsite the little clearing that might have once been a town square, on the north side of the road, with old Hobb’s ruined manse on one side and the skeletal Aemonic church on the other. The stream was close by, and there was plenty of grass for forage, so the horses were unsaddled and set loose to graze while the company set to its nightly duties. With Wirren’s help, Rem and Torval unhitched the Raven’s cage from the ox wain and rolled it over uneven ground to a spot just beyond their campsite, nearer the ruins that Rem had marked as onetime stables. The prisoner would be in their line of sight all the time, but at the edge of any light the fire might provide, and too far away to speak or converse with anyone regularly. Concurrently the lord marshal’s men and Captain Tuvera’s swordmaids split into mixed pairs and began a survey of the area, to work out where the watch posts would be and what approaches provided the most cover for possible attack. As everyone else bent to their labors and prepared to pass the night, the Lady Tzimena and her nurse, Kolia, built a fire and started cooking everyone’s supper. This seemed to be the one task the soldiers from Tzimena’s retinue and the lord marshal’s men would allow her to do in peace, with only minimal objections or intimations that such labor was beneath her.

  Rem and Torval were just completing their own hasty camp setup when the Raven deigned to speak with them.

  “Could I get out of here?” the Raven asked from behind his bars. “My legs are cramped and my back is killing me. I can’t stand up in this thing—”

  “I’m fairly certain that’s the idea,” Torval said as he shoved stones under the cart’s wheels to brace them. “You are a prisoner, after all.”

  “Keep me tied,” the Raven said. “Keep me chained. I just want to stand upright for a few minutes and have a piss in the bushes instead of through the bloody cage bars.”

  “Not happening,” Rem said. “Even if we trusted you and wanted to allow it, the lord marshal never would.”

  “So you work for him now?” the Raven asked, putting himself upright on his knees and starting to undo his trousers. Even in such a strange position—crouching, not standing—the Raven still had to turn his head sideward a bit to keep from thumping his skull on the cage bars above him.

  “You know gods-damned well we don’t work for him,” Torval said, truly offended. “We’re not going through this again.”

  “Of course not,” the Raven said, loosing a stream of urine through the bars onto the ground below. “I’ve heard you say it a hundred times now: I’m nothing but a pay purse for the pair of you.”

  “See?” Torval said to Rem. “He’s learning.”

  “The good news is,” Rem said, “there doesn’t appear to be rain in store tonight. So there’s no need to put the tarp on you. You get to sleep under the stars, with nothing but the sounds of the forest and the wind in the trees around you.”

  As if in answer to Rem’s description, a horrible scream tore through the stillness of the woodland evening. Rem heard the beat of bird wings in answer to the scream, fleeing that sound for a safer perch elsewhere. A quick glance at the campsite told him the others had heard it, as well.

  Torval looked genuinely frightened. “What in the sundry hells was that?”

  Rem clapped the dwarf on the shoulder to reassure him. “Just a hillcat. They can be dangerous one-on-one, but it won’t come around here—not with so many of us tromping about.”

  The Raven settled back into a sitting position again, his trousers laced. “Let’s just hope the lot of you make it through the night,” he said smugly. “This place . . . There’s a blight upon it. Maybe it’s haunted, or maybe it’s just poisoned ground, but most who dare to camp here flee before the night is done. I’ve never known a single person to spend a whole night here without something terrible befalling them.”

  “Something terrible,” Torval huffed. “Like what?”

  The Raven shrugged. “Hard to say. The place knows you. It can look right into the center of you. It’ll know what it needs to show you to expose your fears, your darkness.”

  “Poppycock,” Torval muttered, trying to forcibly shove his fear of just moments ago aside. He trudged away toward the ever-growing campsite, twenty yards from where they’d secured the cage.

  Rem was about to follow his partner when the Raven’s steady gaze caught his own. For what seemed an eternity, the two men stared at one another. It was an appraisal, Rem knew. A sizing up. He did his best not to look intimidated.

  “I’m not exaggerating,” the Raven said quietly, calmly. “This is dangerous country. Surely the bodies you found earlier prove that.”

  Rem shuddered, recalling the dead man with no face.

  The Raven made a strange face: a mask of both worry and sadness. “I can’t help you if you don’t give me a reason to.”

  “Help me?” Rem asked, incredulous.

  “The both of you,” the Raven said, “you and your little partner. I told you, I bear you no grudge. But when thing
s get bad—”

  “Stop right there,” Rem said, moving close to the cage. “You think we’re a pair of babes in these woods? That we’ve never faced death? Never killed? That’s our stock-in-trade, sir. Every gods-damned night we wander about looking for your kind: criminals, miscreants, whoremongers, and thieves. For the record, I don’t trust you or the lord marshal, but even distrusting you both, I’m not afraid of you, either. And neither is Torval. So stop trying to intimidate us.”

  “I’m trying to make sure you make it home alive,” the Raven said slowly, earnestly. “You don’t understand what you’ve stumbled into the middle of here, or that you play no important role in it whatsoever. When things get bad—and they will get bad, now that we’ve entered the forest—you and your companion become the two most expendable members of this expedition.”

  “What should we do, then?” Rem asked. “Run home, empty-handed?”

  “Better,” the Raven said, still speaking under his breath. “Get me out of here and I’ll pay you myself. You know who I am. You know I’ve got treasure troves all through these woods.”

  “And earn the ire of a duke and his lord marshal?” Rem answered. “No thank you.”

  “I’ll treat fairly with you,” the Raven said. “They won’t.”

  “The lord marshal’s a hard man,” Rem countered. “Unbending, a bit of a prig, but he’s bonded by a ducal seat and subject to his own sense of honor. He’ll treat fairly with us, if only to prove to himself what a fine, upright fellow he is. You, on the other hand, do nothing but try to ingratiate yourself to us—to earn our trust, or our pity. Which of those two people should I trust, I wonder? The one who honestly doesn’t give two shits about me but who values his own honor and reputation, or the one who keeps trying mightily to be my friend because I have the keys to his cage?”