by David Guymer
He had been beaten, poisoned, spiritually mistreated, but the scrawny creature flew back from him all the same, landing in a broken sprawl in the midst of the ritual clearing.
A maddened hiss told him that the warlock had not been alone
Uthuk Y’llan poured into the circle of firelight, ritual knives and sacrificial blades twinkling. Their skin was a pale purple-gray, studded with bony lesions ranging from bumps and spikes to horned skulls. Male and female, they were equally emaciated, sparsely clad in scarlet rags and ringlets of bone.
Trenloe took a deep breath.
This, he thought, is better.
An Uthuk witch shrieked as she leapt on him from behind and stuck her knife in his shoulder. He grunted in pain. There must still have been some poison in his muscles. He did not remember being this slow. He stumbled back a step, turning it neatly to his advantage by headbutting the woman and shattering her jaw. Gritting his teeth, he yanked the knife out of his shoulder. Another warlock swung for his throat. Trenloe jerked back by instinct, snatched the arm by the wrist and pulled, dragging the scarecrow figure to him along his toes, then buried the stolen knife in the warlock’s chest. The Uthuk screamed as Trenloe threw him to one side.
The last blood witch drew back to the light’s edge and began to mutter. “Ynkarn anat’aan ek an.” The flames within the braziers sputtered and grew tall and Trenloe felt her invocation as a tingling in his veins. The socket eyes of the hanging censers turned red. The Uthuk brandished her knife and, teeth bared, ran it across her own wrist. “Sank ekek nah…” Blood welled up under the cruel knife, but rather than run down her arm it solidified into a clutch of whipping tendrils.
The witch’s voice climbed to a shrill laugh.
“Look out!” someone who was not the Uthuk witch yelled.
Trenloe leapt to one side as a blood tentacle groped towards him. Another darted out. He beat it aside on the back of his fist. A third stabbed at him in the same moment. He slashed the Uthuk knife across it. The thing burst like a jellyfish under a heavy stone, splattering him with vast quantities of blood. Far more than the witch’s act of self-harm had spilled and far more than the Uthuk woman could even have conceivably contained.
Trenloe threw the knife at her.
The blade broke her nose and sank into the middle of her face.
Her eyes crossed to look at it and the ruin of her face gave a bubbling laugh. The tenor of her voice shifted downwards. Fire limned her mouth and the whites of her eyes turned black. An ecstatic look of horror remodeled her face, even the bone of her skull snapping and mutating into something goat-headed and obscene.
Trenloe looked on in revulsion as the witch changed and grew.
This, he realized, with a sick feeling in his stomach and a crawling horror in every square inch of his skin, was what the Uthuk had had in mind for him.
Trenloe looked around for a bigger weapon.
He had never faced a demon before, never encountered one outside of songs. He had no idea how to kill one. Spying the thick wooden stake he had been bound to he returned to it. It was buried deep into the ground, but he gripped it between both hands and pulled with all his might until the length of wood snapped off. He stumbled, then used both hands to swing what was now a heavy wooden club with a crude point at either end back towards the demon, impacting its transforming host so hard that her head snapped back into her shoulders. She scuttled about on the spot, her face buried upside down between her expanding shoulders, and with the ink black eyes of a demon, she grinned up at him.
“It is a rare host that the blood sister Ne’Krul and my lord Baelziffar offer to me,” it said, in the breathless rasp of the bent corpse it was. “Perhaps too rare. This is respite, Trenloe the Strong, not victory. The days when the great Prutorn must clothe himself in mortal flesh are numbered now as the breaths of the dying. Savor them.”
Rotating the spar in his grip he used it like a conventional spear and drove it through the witch’s back, bursting her black demon-possessed heart. The witch twitched and slithered, still changing, cackling occasionally and hawking up black bile, until at last she became still.
Trenloe held onto the spear for a while longer, until he was certain the demon was dead. Then he let go and tottered backward, finally allowing his abused body to feel its weariness. He looked around, searching the heaped rubble and the more distant, low-burning fires for signs of Uthuk. But nothing came. The ruin, wherever it was, appeared to be empty.
“They are all gone,” said the same voice from before.
Trenloe turned.
Beyond the firelight he could now see, arranged in a half-ring behind the stone pedestal, another line of wooden stakes. To each of these another man or woman had been stripped and bound. Their bodies had been daubed with baleful sumbols drawn in blood. Some of them appeared to be people of Kell, but many more had the dark hair and pallid skin of Uthuk tribespeople. What they were doing there Trenloe could not imagine. As well as being bound they had been gagged too, but one of them appeared to have worked hers loose in the fighting. Her heritage was difficult to make out. Her skin was preternaturally pale, but with only the faint lilac pigment to tell of some distant Uthuk in her bloodline.
“Where?” he asked.
“North and west,” she replied, in a heavily accented form of the western tongue.
“And where… where are we?”
With her head, the only part of her that was free, she gestured around her. “This was Nordgard.”
Trenloe felt as though he had been struck. “The castle?”
“Yes.”
“That’s impossible.”
She shrugged.
He looked around him again. Rubble and fire. The smell of baked stone. His memories of the battle at Spurn were jumbled but vivid enough. He recalled the dragon. Suddenly everything made a terrible kind of sense.
The old woman from Gwellan.
His Companions.
Dremmin.
All of them gone.
He sank to his knees and for a moment he remained there, head bowed.
What would it take to fight a monster like that? Or an army of them? What kind of a hero? It had been pride, or so the bards sang, that had brought the Dragonlords from their homes in the far north to end the reign of the Elder Kings. Was it pride too, he wondered, that had brought the dragon to Spurn to inflict the same on Trenloe the Strong?
“How long has it been since the battle?” he asked.
“I do not know,” the woman said, “but not long. The Uthuk don’t keep prisoners for long.” Her voice lowered. “The demands for sacrifice are too many. And too frequent.”
Trenloe took that in. “You were to be sacrificed as well?”
A number of the other captives, though still gagged, began to weep.
“We were offerings to Prutorn.” At the name, Trenloe shuddered, the taste of its breath still clinging to his face. “He is a demon of the Ynfernael, but a mere servant of the great Baelziffar. I am told that he was banished by some mortal hero in a great battle to the south of here. An unholy place called Sudanya. Offering you as his new host was a gift to appease him, and tighten Baelziffar’s ties to Ne’Krul.”
Trenloe pinched his forehead.
There were too many new names for him. Too much strangeness.
“You know a lot. You are Uthuk?”
“Yes and no,” she said, in a harder tone. “I fled here from Last Haven with everyone else. But I speak the language.”
“I don’t suppose you overheard anything about my weapons?”
“Sorry.”
He bent to pick a knife off the ground. It would serve.
“Are you going to cut us free?” the woman asked.
Trenloe thought about it a moment.
For most men, the purple color of her skin alone would be reason enough to leave her,
and everyone with her, exactly where she was. Dremmin would certainly have argued that. Dame Ragthorn might have too. But Trenloe had been raised better. And he had to make his own decisions now.
He cut her down.
Then he proceeded to free the others.
Wincing, the woman rubbed at her abraded wrists. “Where will you go now?”
“North and west,” Trenloe replied.
“Why?”
“That’s where the Uthuk have gone.”
“Would you mind if we came with you?”
Trenloe looked over his fellow captives. There was not a small knife or a stitch between them, and most looked in far worse a way than he did. “Why?”
“Because that’s where you are going.”
Trenloe thought about it for a while and then nodded.
“My name is S’yarr,” said the woman.
“Trenloe.”
The Uthuk woman smiled, as though he had said something adorable. “I know who you are.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ne’krul
Gwellan, South East Kell
The dragon, Archerax, descended on spread wings the color of black marble, conjuring devils of ash and chipped bone from the flattened town. With the slow grace of something inevitable and cruel he settled onto a pillar of shattered stone, black talons the length of greatswords crunching deep into the burnt rock. The outline of the structure was just about visible beneath the dancing ash. Tells of stone and melted nail heads describing rooms that no longer existed, bone-white lumps lightly buried under black sand, mourning people that no one alive now remembered. A wooden post, incongruously unburnt and upright, stood outside where a front door had previously been, a fire-blasted sign hanging from a crossbar and swaying madly in the dragon’s downdraught.
Tucking in his wings, the dragon lifted his horned head, its immensity briefly eclipsing the moon. A low grumble rose up from his deep throat and smoke seeped through his teeth, like a threat issued from the deep earth.
“I thought you would never catch up,” he said, speaking the Uthuk tongue with a liar’s eloquence, but in a voice of thunder that rolled and rolled and would not end. It ground bones in sockets, pressed skin to faces and squeezed organs in their soft bags of meat. “You Uthuk Y’llan speak highly of yourselves, but you are slow.” A number of tribal chieftains and blood mages quailed as Archerax lowered his long neck towards them. He sniffed and growled. Flames licked his nostrils. “Where is the little witch who dared go inside my mind to summon me? It is dangerous, little witch, to treat a dragon as one would some lesser being. Our thoughts are older than the stars and as perilous to hold too near.”
“I was the one who commanded her,” said Ne’Krul, refusing to be cowed.
The dragon’s head was the size of a chariot, armored and horned like the bier of a demon lord. His eyes were a hard and blistering white. His nostrils flared as he took in her scent, then exhaled heat that set her long hair blustering. She could have reached an arm into each nostril and never touched the back or the sides. She could have lost herself in his mouth. Truly, Archerax was amongst the oldest and mightiest of his kind. But she did not fear him or his kin and she would suffer no insolence in view of her sisters. She stood proudly as he sniffed at her, the hunch of her back lending her a posture that might have been judged subordinate were it not for the crook of her lips and the scarlet gleam in her eyes.
She licked her white lips, empowering her next words with the cajoling, coercing, insanity-inducing gifts of the blood-siren. “If you desire recompense for the value of your sullied thoughts then you will have to exact it from me.”
Archerax rumbled, apparently amused. “You speak to me in the voices of ancient kin long dead. Have a care, Ne’Krul. Your blood magicks hold little sway here. I have burnt two castles this night and eaten many men and horses and it is not yet morning. Test me and I may yet come to think that my need of you and this alliance is less than at first I conceived.”
“Test you?” Ne’Krul hissed. “I have the power to break you one bone at a time and make you beg for me to be merciful and end you swiftly.”
The dragon laughed.
A number of less stable ruins in the vicinity collapsed into ash and dust.
“Yes, but you will not use it, however much such a feat would delight you. The power is not yours to spend. You merely hold it for another. So speak thusly to me again, little witch, after you have spent this power for its rightful purpose, and we will see if you are so bold.”
Ne’Krul bit back her reply.
The dragon had proven useful. While she knew the secret names of powerful demons who could have wrought on Nordgard Castle what Archerax had, and the incantations to summon them, such rites would not have come without great personal expense and peril. She could not have pushed so far, nor so quickly, nor elevated herself so high above her sisters in the esteem of the Ynfernael without his aid. There were times when she wondered if the dragon understood the role he played in the power politics of the Darklands, and of the demon realm, but she suspected that he did, and saw some advantage for his own gain. Dragons were wiser than their arrogance suggested, and cunning beyond the understanding of mortal wiles.
“We Uthuk play our part,” said Ne’Krul, allowing the dragon a barely perceptible bow of the head. “While you level the great cities and towns, my warriors lay waste to the countryside and make sacrifice. If there is any word of our attack that flies ahead of us then it will be words of panic and fear that will sound as sweet as music to the ears of Baelziffar and his kin.”
Archerax growled, dark lips peeling back over his fangs as though discomforted by a corroded tooth. “Speak not that name again.”
Ne’Krul smiled and permitted herself a deeper bow. It was gratifying, and reassuring, to know that he was as wary of her patron in the Ynfernael as he ought to be. “We are together now, dragon, and together we can push north on our final goal.”
The dragon issued a gout of fire that had the wary gathering of blood witches and champions ducking to the burnt ground.
Even Ne’Krul flinched.
“No, little witch. This is where we separate. We share a common purpose but differing goals. We are not friends, you and I, and your ambitions hold no interest for me.”
“We hold promises over one another,” said Ne’Krul. “Such promises of pain as are not easily broken.”
Archerax laughed. “Nor do I fear you. Not your magic. Not your master. And not all the might of the Darklands arrayed with steel before me. Knowing as I do how much that galls you gives me warmth in this cold land.” He lowered his head again to her. The fire about his lips flickered back, and he issued a conciliatory rumble. “Tonight, I fly westward, to the castle home of the Dragonslayer who felled Margath the Unkind and cast my forebear’s ruin into the icy waters of the Weeping Basin. Eight hundred years has it been since Shaarina Rex called the dragons back from the Land of Steel, but never in that brief span have our eyes long strayed. They say that the Age of Heroes is passed, ended once and forever with the demise of the Elder Kings and the end of the Dragon Wars. But they are wrong. Heroes arise at need. They may hail from any place, and at any time, but there are places in this world that call out to heroes like a siren to the sea. Kellar is one. I will destroy it now, lest it be allowed to stand and defy us both in future, and by my tooth and flame will I end the Dragonslayer bloodline once and for all and bring its proud dynasty low.
“Your species’ ember gutters. Pale imitations and pretenders are you who remain. Even in your Darklands where demons walk and in lands unknown to all but the mind of the First who speaks of them not, this is so. So lend me your swiftest warriors, blood sister, those whose Ynfernael mounts and demonic gifts might allow them to keep pace with a dragon in flight. I will add them to the host I muster for myself there. I will destroy Kellar in a night of fire unseen since my kindred d
escended on the city of Tamalir and brought down the Soulstone line. This I have sworn. When it is done your warriors will be free to rejoin you, and you will find your own black purpose in the north unopposed by troublesome heroes.”
“What do you know of my purpose?” said Ne’Krul.
Archerax gave no answer.
With a deep laugh he threw his wings out wide and extended his neck to its full, awesome length. He beat his wings for lift and Ne’Krul struggled to remain proud under the downwash, bone fetishes and robes flapping about her, shielding her dark red eyes with a bony hand.
“Decide quickly, little witch,” he said, climbing slowly towards the distant moon. “Aid me or not, but I go now, and ere the cold sun rises a fifth time over this land Kellar will be no more.”
Part
Three
Chapter Twenty-Six
Andira Runehand
The Whispering Forest, South Kell
The trees grew taller, broader, prouder in the dark green crowns that they wore. Light became a rarer sighting, something smuggled on a gust whenever a breeze distracted their kingly gatekeepers and then taken away just as swiftly. Even the game trails left in the forest floor became narrower the deeper into the forest they went, crowded out by gnarled roots and deep drifts of ancient leaves. The rabbits and small deer that had made the trails showed themselves occasionally, utterly unwary of the spears and arrows of armed men, eyes twinkling in the gloom, before vanishing back into the dense undergrowth. Such trails however, though Andira’s pilgrim-soldiers were neither as light as rabbits nor as nimble as roe, were all that there was to follow. As such they walked in single file, slowly, miserably, every whipping branch drawing blood and every stinging plant finding bare skin.
The Greyfox went first, Sibhard after, then a long snaking file of pilgrim-soldiers, with Andira trailing a few paces behind.
The battle with the Greyfox and her warband had tested her. The night-long pursuit that had ended with the former bandit queen their supposed captive had exhausted them all. But Andira had looked to the sky then and judged it nearly dawn, and insisted they march on until dusk came again. If the Uthuk Y’llan had chosen to move on Kell, now of all times and after so many hundreds of years, then she could only imagine that Baelziffar would soon be readying his own final move.
