Chapter 5 - Armies of the Dog...
Gareth feared he tempted foul fortune as he set the torch to the pyre and burned his former brother and king's remains. The Stonebrooks did not rise from the same blood as the wild men who first lived upon the land. Lore and legend told that the Stonebrooks originated from the very rock of their land, and that such origins demanded that the Stonebrooks in death return to that rock as their remains were interred within the stone mausoleums buried beneath their keep. The Stonebrooks tamed their land. The Stonebrooks established the rule of law. They ruled from the ancient keep. The Stonebrooks were more than the wild men who preceded them, and so the ashes of the gray-eyed rulers were never meant to mingle with more common bone.
“Maker show me mercy,” Gareth sighed as the flames tasted Luke's remains.
Thus it was blasphemy to burn a Stonebrook to ashes, an act with consequences too grave to guess.
Gareth knew it did him no good to brood upon his sacrilege. He was now a Stonebrook king, and not all decisions would give his conscious peace. Instead, Gareth thought upon Markus. He did his best to imagine how the dark arts might have twisted Markus's shape, but he knew too little of wizardry to envision such contortions.
Markus delivered such cruelty through the fog – a cruelty that moved young daughters to murder fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, a cruelty that made villagers tremble in the cold, a cruelty whose poison proved more venomous than that of even the basilisk, a poison delivered through fog rather than through fang.
Thus Gareth burned his former brother and king. He could not come to believe in Markus's magic over the fog only to then deny the other powers a necromancer was rumored to possess. He would commit blasphemy before watching Luke's corpse rise to stalk through the mist.
Gareth's fingers itched as he watched the smoke rise in the cold, his memories drifting to those days he watched the smoke float from the fires King Harold made from the fallen forest. Those last three fingers itched terribly, and Gareth's hand drifted to his side where other men sheathed weapons.
Asguard's nostrils flared. His hair bristled. The dog's eyes reflected the burning pyre and glowed in the early night. His ears pointed, and his growl revealed teeth.
Gareth patted his dog's flanks. “Forgive me for being so tempted by steel, Asguard. I am the new Stonebrook king, and no matter that you are the greatest of the war dogs, I cannot deny that I still crave the sword at times when my fear peaks.”
Asguard turned his eyes away from his master's and barked at the thick fog.
The crowning of the new Stonebrook king that night proved a simple ceremony. Even the somber Stonebrooks had been known to throw lavish feasts abundant in meat and in wine. The crowning of a Stonebrook king once summoned troubadours to their keep. Villagers in their realm once considered it a lucky omen for their children to be born during the week-long celebrations that paraded at the time of the old Stonebrook kings. The Stonebrooks had fallen far when Gareth took his seat upon the throne carved from rock from which the gray-eyed men ruled their empire. There were few smiles as the court sage lowered the Stonebrook's stone crown, unadorned by jewel, silver or gold, upon Gareth's brow. Wren stood in her vermillion robes and watched Gareth's soul strain to accept the weight.
Gareth did not retreat into the king's inner chamber for sleep that first night he wore the stone crown. The blood staining that room's walls would not soon be cleansed. Instead, Gareth summoned what advisers remained to him. Versed in the statecraft of diplomacy and trade, none of those thin men with their long, gray beards offered insight into the nature of those powers Markus wielded through the fog. The black magics were relics of a wild, distant time before the arrival of the Stonebrook kings. They were arts that preceded the keep's construction.
So Gareth and his advisers shifted through the keep's ancient library, a place Stonebrook rulers had come to think filled with children stories. Gareth sneezed as he turned through worm-nibbled pages of cracking tomes and scanned stiff parchments. None of the fables Gareth read offered any hints to the weapons that might have been mustered against a necromancer's dark powers.
Gareth roused his sentries from their chambers. His men of armor quickly answered his call, for neither did they sleep well in that keep infested with fog. In the middle of the night, Gareth sent them into the village to summon to the Stonebrook throne every astrologer and alchemist they could find. He ordered his sentries to return with any wrinkled grandfather or midwife whose stories of myths and monsters might include the slightest mention of wizards who rattled the dead's bones.
Those sleepy, worried villagers the sentries returned to Stonebrook throne lacked any knowledge concerning ways to combat Markus's powers. Instead, they answered their new king's summons with worsening news of fog. The fog grew colder, and household fireplaces added no warmth regardless of the intensity of their flames. Villagers shook in their beds while things clawed upon their rooftops. Taverns and inns crowded with farmers who fled their rural homes with tales of desecrated barrows, where broken earth and stone whispered that the disturbances of those graves originated beneath, rather than above, the ground.
The fog thickened, hiding the moon and stars so that darkness gained weight. Expectant mothers moaned from frightful pains. Water refused to boil. Terrible visions of ghosts tormented the blind. Cats and rats fled the village in preference for the wilderness. Not even the ravens any longer gathered in the deepening fog and chilling cold.
Asguard sat at the foot of the Stonebrook throne. Though his hair bristled, Asguard remained silent as his master listened to every dark story his sentries returned from the village. Asguard never trembled when the fog fought the sun so that only a dark morning arrived after the night.
Gareth surprised his court when he smiled after the final sentry returned relating an account of a horrible shrieking heard overhead during the night's fog.
“I should not have doubted that I knew from the start how I would combat Markus's chilling fog,” Gareth reached over his throne and pet Asguard's ear with the thumb and two remaining fingers of his good hand. “We will assemble at my old training field. Old Ebon's craft will arm us against the dark arts.”
The advisers and guards exchanged confused glances.
“My father's horses fail us,” Gareth spoke. “All the armor and lance he forged and collected will do us no good without those horses for mounts. Swords will hardly cut against something as unsubstantial as mist. I am a king of the kennel, and as such, I will fight my brother with the army I know best. I'll fight the frightful fog with the mighty dog.”
Roused by his master's words, Asguard trotted next to Gareth as the newest Stonebrook king marched out of his ancestors' keep to face the magic that threatened his first day of rule. Though a gray-eyed king of the Stonebrook line, Gareth would fight the dark magics with neither stone walls nor steel. He would instead fight his enemy with tooth and fur.
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Kennel, Kingdom and Crown Page 8
