Remove the Shroud: The King's Ranger Book 3

by AC Cobble

  A straggler returning from some mission to town? A scout sent to find the site of the ambush? Rew couldn’t tell, but he thought it a safe assumption that the bandits knew their ambush and failed. It was likely why they hadn’t opened the gate. They were afraid of who was out there, readying an attack, but no one else came or left, and nothing changed atop the walls.

  The sun set, and from within the fortress, lights blazed. It was as if they’d lit dozens of torches in the courtyard, casting a low glow on the towers and the men who walked on patrol. Rew studied the guards, waiting, and then, the screaming started.

  Deep within the fortress, men cried out, and on top of the walls, he saw hurried movement as the guards disappeared, running down into the courtyard. From the distance, carrying faintly over the empty landscape, he heard guttural cries, the sounds of violence. The light flickered, as if bodies were rushing back in forth in front of it, struggling. The bandits were being attacked—from within.

  It was over in a quarter hour. The watchers were gone from the walls. No one had cracked open the gate. The light stilled, though Rew continued to hear the occasional animalistic outburst. The screaming had stopped, but echoes of those terrified voices seemed to hang in the air.

  Rew waited, but as the night wore on, the fortress grew quieter, and the light faded until it was only the moon and stars that illuminated the pile of stone and iron. After an hour of hearing nothing, Rew moved down to the fortress wall and climbed it. He sat in the gap of a crenellation and looked down into the middle of the walled space, where the pale silver of the night sky fell on a charnel scene of horrific proportions. The dead were littered like sawdust in a cooper’s workshop, not just fallen, but torn apart, scattered around, devoured.

  Spread amongst the corpses of the men were those of narjags. Dozens of them that he could see, fallen by the swords of the outlaws, but it was evident who had won the day. There wasn’t a man left breathing in the fortress. Rew scratched his beard. From where he was sitting, he couldn’t see any narjags breathing, either. Several dozen from each side had fought to the death. Had they all killed each other? If someone was left, Rew couldn’t sense their presence inside.

  Where had the Dark Kind come from? Their stench, mixed with the scent of fresh killed bodies, filled the place. If there had been Dark Kind there the night before, he would have heard them or at least smelled them. He didn’t have a nose like those foul beasts, but he’d faced enough of them in the wilderness that he had no problem recognizing their awful tang, like unwashed sweat and rotten meat. They hadn’t been there the night before. He was sure of it. They’d come, somehow, but now, there were no living ones left.

  The door to the makeshift stockade he’d seen the night before was open. A pen for the Dark Kind? A pen for the humans? The only thing he was sure of was that the Dark Kind had not been there the day before, but they’d somehow appeared and then vanished.

  Disturbed, Rew turned, dropped off the side of the battlement, and headed back toward the canyon where his companions were hiding. He had a creeping tingle like beetles climbing over his back. Had the narjags skirted around him to find his companions? Could a spellcaster have transported the creatures into the fortress and then to the canyon? Neither seemed likely, but he had to know. He had to make sure Anne and the children were safe, and then in the morning, they would return and try to figure out what had just happened.

  The women were still recovering from their injuries and moving slowly when they arrived outside the fortress. It was clearly abandoned, except for the carrion birds flapping overhead. The rest of the party waited while Rew climbed up the wall once again and dropped down inside to open the gate. There was a heavy wooden bar locking it, and with some effort, he managed to wrangle it out of the hasps. With Raif’s help from outside, they hauled open the heavy wooden doors.

  Anne looked in, covered her mouth, and turned away. “I’ll wait out here.”

  “As will I,” murmured Zaine, hobbling away from the awful stench of the dead.

  Raif, shifting on his feet, pale-faced and sweating, looked unsure.

  “Will you watch over Anne and Zaine?” Rew asked him quietly. “They should be resting.”

  Relieved to have an excuse that did not bow his pride, Raif nodded gratefully and guided the women away from the fortress to a place they could all sit.

  Cinda looked at Rew and said, “I’ll come with you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know,” she acknowledged then stepped around him to walk inside, her lips tight, her eyes hard. She’d been clutching her injured side as they’d walked from the camp, but as she entered the fortress, she held out her hands, and Rew saw them moving, as if tracing invisible flows. He grimaced as she stepped over ravaged bodies, and her hands rose, like they were following the souls of those recently departed.

  Rew touched his longsword for a bit of reassurance and glanced around the buildings on the interior of the keep. He walked to the makeshift stockade he’d seen the bandits erecting and saw it was empty. He knew, in his heart, their answers lay inside the main building that stood with one of its thick doors ajar. The glow he’d seen at night had come from there, and the mounds of the dead around the doorway spoke to what had occurred. But he couldn’t bring himself to venture inside, not yet. He was beginning to suspect what he might find, the one logical explanation for what had happened there the night before.

  “Shall w-we…” stammered Cinda, looking at the great hall.

  “Let’s check the other structures first.”

  They did, though their search was not thorough. There was a kitchen and a nearly empty larder, a dormitory with beds for almost eighty, and rooms for what must have been the officers of the group. They peeked in those, but aside from a finer cut of clothing and privacy, they found nothing to give away the identities of the occupants. There was an armory that was surprisingly well stocked with similar weaponry to what they’d already seen on the bandits. Decent stuff, but it could be purchased in any public market in Vaeldon. Nothing that surpassed the quality of their own arms. They found a treasure room of sorts, though it was almost as empty as the larder. Surprising, given how many men the fortress was supporting.

  Still, Rew spent a few extra moments there, taking time to pick a heavy iron lock and throwing open a small chest to reveal it was half-full of dirty gold, silver, and copper coins. He scooped out several handfuls to fill his pouch and then rooted around in the room until he found another pouch and filled it for Cinda. “I can stop buying all of your brother’s ales, at least.”

  She nodded, tying the heavy pouch to her belt, but did not smile.

  They left the room, and the rest of the wealth it contained, behind. They needed coin for their travels, but they had filled up their purses with gold, and neither of them had any interest in hauling around the heavy chest and its fistfuls of copper coin. Besides, if the chains anchoring the thing to the floor had been easy to remove, one of the bandits would have stolen the chest long ago.

  With nowhere left to explore, they returned to the large building in the center of the fortress. Like the courtyard outside, the floor was covered in dead bodies of both men and narjags. They stepped carefully over them. The stench inside of the main hall was awful. His stomach roiling queasily, Rew saw a pack of dogs in one corner where they must have tried to hide, but like the men, they’d been slaughtered by the narjags. Around the dogs were piles of bones that the men must have tossed on the floor for the animals before the attack. They were mixed with the bones of those men now, and all of them had marks from gnawing teeth. Rew felt the bile rising in his throat.

  Beside him, Cinda gagged and looked away. “I don’t think I’ll eat much tonight.”

  Rew grunted and kept walking. It was a huge open room, the ceiling high above them supported by thick, wooden beams. The beams were stained with generations of soot from smoky fires that must have burned decades or centuries ago. The corners of the rooms and the walls were thick wit
h dust. There were tables lined with benches where the men must have taken their meals and another section where they could have held conferences. On the far wall of the room, past dozens of dead bodies and wide puddles of blood, was a freshly constructed arch set with glossy, obsidian blocks.

  “What is that?” wondered Cinda, ignoring the reams of dead as she marched toward the back.

  “A portal stone,” answered Rew. “Enchanters make them. They function like… Well, they open a portal. Unlike the invoker’s spell, they only allow travel between two distinct points. They’re common in Mordenhold, Carff, Jabaan, and Iyre. The king’s generals and ministers who can’t open their own portals use them to travel back and forth. This explains how the Dark Kind arrived and how they left.”

  “But to where?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it.”

  “Do you know how to work portal stones?” wondered Cinda.

  “I do.”

  “You could open the portal, and we could see what is on the other side.”

  “It could be an army of Dark Kind,” reminded Rew. He crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s probably an army of Dark Kind. Whatever survived this fight went somewhere.”

  “Oh, right,” said Cinda, glancing quickly behind them where the dead men and narjags littered the floor like moldy carpet.

  Rew followed her gaze, studying the great hall. Aside from the piles of dead bandits and narjags, it looked just as one might expect a bandit hideaway to look. There were filthy plates, discarded food, and ale barrels against the side of one wall. There was evidence of the rough games the men played to amuse themselves while away from the wine and women in the cities. There was no sign that anyone had ever bothered to clean the place. These men had lived in the moment, as their kind always did. They killed, and they feasted. They did not build or maintain what they had because one thought was already on their next move or that the next raid could be their last. There were no clues as to how or why the men had constructed the portal stones. And for a profession which did not have a reputation for building, why had they put the effort into the stockade out in the courtyard? Had they even constructed the portal stone?

  They didn’t, Rew surmised. Someone else had built the archway, and then tasked the bandits with guarding it. There was no bandit leader in this place. Their leader was on the other side of the portal. It explained why they hadn’t mustered a response to his attacks. They’d held out, hoping he would go away, and when he didn’t, their master slaughtered them instead of assisting. Was it rage? Or was it because secrecy was a more important concern than success?

  Could the pen outside be to hold narjags? Had the conjurer been tasked with commanding them? She hadn’t been strong, but perhaps if the creatures had been locked up, she’d have time to bend them to her will. Rew did not know what skill it took to communicate with and command narjags, but if she could summon an elemental, then he guessed she was capable enough.

  That was it, he decided. Once the conjurer was dead, whoever was behind it had no use of this place or these men. But why would someone portal narjags to a random fortress and imprison them there in the first place? What could they have been planning to use them for?

  Rew turned, studying the wooden frame of the arch and the obsidian set within it. The stones were necessary for such devices, he’d been told. The portal stones he’d used to travel between Vaeldon’s capitals were constructed entirely of obsidian. He supposed that was more permanent, and this recent installation wasn’t meant to last through the ages. He touched the wood of the arch, letting his fingers trace the grains there.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Cinda.

  “This is oak,” responded Rew. “It’s good wood. Strong and durable. It’s not found around here, though. Oak isn’t native to anywhere within hundreds of leagues of Carff.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Why would someone construct this portal here, in the middle of nowhere?” asked Rew rhetorically. “I imagine because they didn’t want it stumbled over or for it to be detected by any wards that would have been raised near the cities. That makes sense, if they’re transporting Dark Kind, but—“

  Rew stopped abruptly.

  “Why would anyone want to transport narjags to such a random location as this in the first place?” wondered Cinda, echoing Rew’s own thoughts. “The odds that we would stumble across such a place must be… I don’t know, not very good. There’s nothing anywhere near here!”

  “What if those odds aren’t so long?”

  “You think this was, ah, left for us here? The king’s test?”

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with us at all,” said Rew, shaking his head. “I mean, what if this isn’t the only portal stone where someone could bring the Dark Kind through? There were armies of them outside of Falvar, but they arrived in small groups, remember? Several times, we’ve heard rumors of the creatures in the area. Even in Spinesend, where no one has seen a narjag for fifty years. Where are they coming from? It’s not the wilderness. I would have seen signs of them there. If it was in the regions around the cities, then you would have heard more than rumor. That sort of thing would be on the top of everyone’s mind in the keeps, don’t you think?”

  Cinda nodded slowly.

  “Someone is using this portal stone, and probably others like it, to transport Dark Kind into the Eastern Province,” said Rew. “That’s the only explanation, and there are only so many people capable of launching such an operation.”

  “One of the other princes attempting to destabilize the region,” murmured Cinda, pacing around the room, raising her robes so she could step over the dismembered and ravished body parts. “That’s what you are thinking, isn’t it? One of the princes is gathering forces for an attack.”

  “They have to be,” said Rew. “What concerns me is that we’re finding Dark Kind here, far from Spinesend and Carff. There were Dark Kind in the barrowlands, equally as far from anywhere. Apologies to your family, but none of the princes, including Valchon, give a fig about Falvar. The target isn’t some far-flung barony or here in the midst of nowhere. The target is everywhere! What we’ve seen must be a tiny sliver of what is occurring. My guess, they’re trying to destabilize the entire province, keep Valchon putting out fires, while they move against him.”

  “If there is a portal stone here, and outside of Falvar, you are right. The portal stones could be… could be anywhere,” breathed Cinda. “They could be everywhere. Every noble in the Eastern Territory is dead, the cities leaderless. Someone has to do something! We have to do something…”

  “There’s nothing we can do while we’re on the road,” said the ranger. “King’s Sake, how would we even find more of these if they’re hidden in places like this? In Carff, there are portal stones where we can reach the other capitals, including Mordenhold. There’s also Prince Valchon…”

  “We should go,” said Cinda, gesturing at the stone. “If someone killed all of these men because of what we’d done, they could be coming back here. We’re not safe anywhere near this thing.”

  Rew frowned. “The king’s test.”

  “I agree,” said Cinda slowly, “but a test of what? Just to see if we’d find this, or if we’d… do what? Do what we did? Everyone’s dead. There’s nothing else we can do, Ranger. We should go.”

  “There’s one more thing we can do.”

  Cinda moved away as the ranger raised his longsword. He eyed the portal stone and the giant chunks of obsidian studded along its wooden frame. It was dangerous to mess with artifacts such as these, but all around them were the fruits of what the stone might bring. He couldn’t leave it behind, knowing that more Dark Kind might issue from it.

  He looked at Cinda. “Step back a little.”

  Swallowing, the girl stepped over bodies of both man and narjag, backing toward the door.

  Trusting to enchantments in the steel that predated even Vaeldon to protect him, Rew dashed forward and rammed the tip of
his longsword into one of the obsidian stones.

  The stone shattered like glass, and a jolt like he’d been struck by lightning snapped from the broken pieces, up his sword, and into his arm. Rew cried out in pain, took several breaths, and then struck again, shattering another stone and absorbing another shock as the magic was released. His body was twitching, his muscles quivering with painful spasms. The sword was cool in his hands, ensorcelled by old magic, but it couldn’t entirely prevent the kickback from the broken stones. There was power in each of the blocks of obsidian, fresh and raw, and when it was released, it was absorbed into the remaining stones or released violently. Rew gritted his teeth and struck a third time. This time, the blast from the ruined stone knocked him back onto his bottom. He sat there for a long moment.

  “Are you all right?” asked Cinda.

  “Sort of.”

  “You’re smoking,” remarked the spellcaster, coming to stand above him. She waved her hand over his body, stirring the acrid curls of dark gray that drifted off of him. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Rew looked at his palms. They were bright red, but as he flexed his fingers, he decided he could move them enough. He slowly got to his feet and shook his limbs, feeling them tingle like he’d been sitting on them. After a moment, he stooped and collected his longsword where he’d dropped it. The wood hilt was warm but no longer burning hot. The steel was still cold. He frowned at the portal. Three stones were shattered. Two remained. He hoped that was good enough, because he didn’t want to think about what a fourth stone might do to him.

  “Let’s go,” he rasped.

  Two days later, they arrived in a small village and settled at the inn there. It had rooms that, while not clean, were dry, and the common room featured ale that was wet. It was all Rew needed. Anne offered a litany of complaints until Rew pointedly inquired whether she would prefer to continue on the highway for several more days until they could find another small, dilapidated inn which might suit her better. After that, she’d retired to the baths without comment, a ceramic pitcher of wine and a wooden mug in her hands. Rew sat in the common room, sipping ale between casual attempts to prod the innkeeper for information.