Talion Revenant

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Hal dove from the house and tackled one of the swordsman. My father, bleeding from a dozen wounds, turned his full attention on the other and crushed his sword arm. My father turned back to help Hal when an arrow burst through his chest from the right. It spun him back to face the archer seated high up on a horse. The second arrow thudded into his chest and pierced his heart. My father fell lifeless and the sword spun from his hands.

  A second archer shot at Hal and missed. Hal twisted his foe in front of him so the second arrow killed the swordsman. Hal could not support the dead weight, and as he tried to drag his shield back up an arrow ripped through his throat. Hal fell beneath his dead enemy.

  The Hamisians dismounted and, with the Daari in the lead, they entered the house above me. The soldiers smiled when they saw my mother and sister; my mother and Laura were terrified. Grandmother, the cleaver hidden in the folds of her dress, was calmer. She watched the soldier the way she'd watched over us children, and decided the Daari was most dangerous.

  "Let us alone!" Mother pleaded. She hugged Laura and pressed back against the wall. Mother was pretty, but the terror in her face made her ugly. She had always been strong and confident—a rock in all emergencies. The soldiers stripped that away from her and reduced her to a scared child.

  "Let us live." Grandmother's plea was more reasonable than my mother's.

  "Perhaps, for a while," answered the Daari, "but we have our orders."

  Grandmother's face drained of color. She knew our secret was no longer a secret; nor was survival an option. The fire of life left her eyes and she struck.

  The cleaver chopped into the Daari's throat, spraying blood everywhere. He reeled away with his hands vainly trying to staunch the pulsing geyser shooting from his neck. Grandmother strode forward and slashed at the next soldier. He parried her easily and his riposte took her through the chest as the arrows had taken her son.

  She died. And, after several hours of screaming and pleading, my mother and sister joined her.

  I lay in the darkness alone and cried. Once again I lay blind to all but the shadows, and deaf to all but the drip, drip, drip of blood leaking through the floorboards from above.

  * * *

  Ring shook me awake. Sweat covered me and my limbs trembled. I blinked my eyes and wiped the tears away.

  "Nolan, are you hurt?" The words, while stated in a form to suggest concern, rebuked me for not having told him of any injury earlier.

  I blushed from the shame. I shook my head. "Nightmare."

  Ring looked at me, and for the only time during my Journey, shared my feelings. He nodded. "Everyone has them. Go back to sleep."

  "Sure." I lay back down but I knew, after long years of experience with this dream, sleep would be elusive. I'd long since discovered I could only do one thing to lock the nightmare away: I had to finish it. I lay back, breathed deeply to calm myself, and forced myself to relive that incident.

  * * *

  I recovered from the sunfever a day and a half after the attack took place. I had vague memories of the sounds, but knew nothing of the sights the dream would bring to me that night and later on. Still, I did know something was wrong because no one had come to see me for a long time, and I heard no sounds from above.

  And a puddle of blood lay dried and cracked on the root cellar floor.

  I pushed the cellar trapdoor up and came face-to-face with the Daari. My heart leaped to my throat—scarring on his face was hideous, especially bloated as it was after two days of his being dead. I wondered why he lay there, and why my family would leave a dead body in the house. It made no sense!

  Then I saw Dale and my grandmother.

  I didn't cry; at least I don't remember crying at that point. I walked through the house like a ghost and denied everything I saw. These bodies could not be my family. My mother, my sister would never lie like that. Dale's head could not possibly be at that angle. This was some jelkom's trick, or I was still dreaming mad dreams in the grasp of the sunfever.

  I walked into the front yard and saw more I could not believe. I waited for Hal to get up because he was famous for his practical jokes: the arrow in his throat had to be a trick. My father could not be dead because there was so little blood. Malcolm fell with his wound in the dust so I didn't notice it at all.

  "It's me, Nolan," I called out. "You can stop now. I'm well." No one moved, but I knew they couldn't be dead because death came to take the old, like my grandfathers, not a whole family.

  My denial lasted until I found Arik. Terror perverted his face and deformed it into a mockery of the optimistic expression he always wore. It ripped away his innocence. The lance pinned his body to the ground—the feathers on its end floated gently in the breeze—and served as a concrete reminder of how his body had betrayed the spirit it housed.

  The scavengers had started on him.

  I collapsed and cried. I knelt beside Arik and waited for anyone, or anydiing, to comfort or kill me. I cried until no more tears could come, and my chest ached from the sobbed half-breaths. I cried until I realized my tears came more for me than for my family.

  I had to care for them first. I had a lifetime to care for myself.

  Within two hours I dragged all my family's bodies back into the house. I laid them all out as if they were sleeping and put my mother and father side by side. I could not dress them because death had swollen their bodies, so I laid their favorite clothing over them. I lifted my grandmother into her rocking chair.

  "Yes, Grandmother, I saw the rune you wrote with your blood. I know what it means. I'll do it." I spoke with her as if she was alive. She had to hear me. In her last seconds of life she'd drawn a symbol on the floor, one linked to Hamis and the evil that had killed her. I remembered the stories she had told and I knew I had to honor all the bloody rune represented.

  Lastly I dragged Lyel into the house. I decided he should be with my family because he had died for me. They had come for us and he had been mistaken for me. I put him next to Dale. I knew he liked her, and she him, though neither one had discovered that fact about the other in life.

  I'd hauled the soldiers' bodies from the house. I also took the things I'd need on the journey to Talianna, including the gold coin my family had treasured. Then I started a fire and burned the house to the ground.

  While my home burned, taking my family and acquainting me with the scent of a pyre for the first time, I had one other task to perform. I dragged the soldiers' bodies to the trees we had planted to protect the house from the north wind. With a mallet and some heavy framing spikes, I nailed each man to his own tree.

  Smoke from the fire lazily drifted around the farm. As if sentient, it gently pushed me away from the burning house, and chokingly halted my one suicidal attempt to join my family. I picked up the satchels of food and clothes I'd prepared for my journey and never looked back.

  But before I left our farm forever, just to the leeside of the trees, I knocked down our scarecrow. I wanted nothing to disturb the scavengers.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Talion: Misericordia

  The flickering, yellow torchlight extended into the Dhesiri tunnel for just over twelve feet, but everything beyond its pallid circle of conquest remained pitch black. I adjusted a small tab of leather on my right sleeve so it covered the back of my right hand, and secured it by tightening a leather loop beneath the middle and ring fingers on that hand. I rubbed my hand on my pants to dry it, then took firm hold of my ryqril and slowly walked into the tunnel.

  I'd dealt with Dhesiri a couple of times before, and had spent a certain amount of time with Dhesiri-hunters learning about the creatures. Most people call them goblins, but the hunters eschew that term. As one once told me, "Goblins frighten bad children, but Dhesiri will eat them. Folks that think of Dhesiri as goblins probably don't believe they exist at all. Them's the folks that end up in a Queen's supper dish!"

  Dragons supposedly created Dhesiri to be a parody of humans and to give humans something other than dr
agons to hunt. Most Dhesiri, I've been told, are child-sized, tailless lizard-men. The Dhesiri live in colonies, like ants, with hundreds of workers bringing food for the Queen. The Queen's job is just to lay eggs to keep the colony alive. The colonies live underground in warrens.

  About a hundred yards in, the tunnel dropped six feet then climbed back up eight. I kicked some footholds in the tunnel wall and drew myself over the top of the vertical shaft quickly. I knew the dip was just a trap for rainwater, but it provided an excellent place for an ambush. Dhesiri were not supposed to be smart enough to think of such things, but I was and I decided to be careful because I did not relish meeting the Queen while looking up from a stewpot or serving platter.

  The narrow tunnel wound through the ground somewhat aimlessly. The workers that dug it must have been following a root or the buried course of an old stream. This heartened me, because the workers only built tall, wide tunnels under the direction of a Dhesiri warrior, and I had no desire to meet one of them in a tunnel, or any place else.

  I'd never seen a Dhesiri warrior before, and most of my informants were very vague about them, which I took as a testament to the warriors rarity and ferocity. They are supposed to stand eight feet tall, have a long tail and a powerful build. They mate with the Queen and act as her guardians. Each colony can only support a half-dozen warriors because of their voracious appetites and their tendency toward cannibalism when the workers failed to find enough food. Lastly, they are rumored to possess near human intelligence, which could make them even more dangerous than just their physical size would suggest.

  Inching along the tunnel was hot and dirty work. I felt the wall with my left hand and slid my right foot along to test for any pitfalls. I held my right hand out and pointed the ryqril off in the darkness like a lance. I moved in bursts, then stopped and listened for any reaction to my movements. Once I felt safe I'd move forward again and repeat the whole process.

  The tunnel split into three smaller tunnels and I paused at the fork. Even though I'd now worked deeper into an inhabited warren than any of my teachers, I felt certain from what I'd learned about abandoned warrens that two of the tunnels would lead out or into traps. The third passage undoubtedly led deeper into the warren.

  I crawled about ten feet into the mouth of each tunnel and felt around for any clues that might help me make a choice. The light Dhesiri workers left no tracks, but in the third tunnel I found a ring. In the darkness I could not see it, but by touch I could tell it was a man's ring set with his family crest. I had to assume one of the three men dropped it to point out the correct tunnel.

  I struck off through the third tunnel. The roof of this tunnel rose only four feet high and forced me to work forward at a much slower pace. I dropped to my left knee and continued on in that half-kneeling position. My right hand remained extended and my left hand trailed along the wall. I didn't like the reduction in my mobility, but the passage's size absolutely ruled out the possibility of a warrior ambush, so I did take comfort in that.

  I got forty feet along into it when a worker came scurrying at me. It's little mind tied up with whatever task it had been given, it did not see me. I heard it and raised my left hand to stop it. I touched its chest and immediately slid my hand up to its throat. I slammed it into the tunnel wall opposite me and drove my ryqril into its chest.

  The goblin died quietly because I choked off all sound it could possibly make with my left hand. It thrashed a little but, thanks to the armor on my right sleeve, did me no harm. It did send a chill down my spine because it's flesh felt remarkably like Rolf's after Chi'gandir had changed him. The mental picture of Rolf merged with my image of a Dhesiri warrior and it took me a moment or two to get going again.

  I dropped the corpse behind me and continued forward. The tunnel broadened and some light leaked into it from ahead of me. I stopped at the edge of the semicircle of light and looked out.

  I'd reached the heart of the warren.

  Just the sight of the Grand Gallery took my breath away. The Dhesiri-hunters told me how they had once dug down to a gallery in a deserted colony and described it as just a big hole in the ground. That description, while accurate in a general sense, really denigrated the surprising majesty and complexity of the place. From where I squatted in the mouth of a tunnel high up in the gallery, the whole thing looked alive. The entire area below glowed with luminous mosses and fungi that cast the deep hole in shades of green and purple. A four-foot-wide ledge spiraled down through the brown, striated earth around the gallery's interior face and the dark mouths of tunnels large and small dotted the gallery walls.

  I guessed I'd want one of the larger tunnels, because the Warriors would need access to the prisoners. That eliminated many of the tiny tunnels immediately. I also imagined the prisoners would be somewhere in the middle of the warren in a place not close enough to the top to tunnel out nor far enough down for the air to get stale and kill them. While workers would eagerly eat carrion, the hunters said the Dhesiri preferred to feed their Queen fresh meat, especially horseflesh.

  I cut a diamond in the dirt wall beside the tunnel I'd come in through. Then I left the tunnel and worked quickly around and down a couple of levels. I stopped whenever workers moved above or across from me, but they all stayed hunched over and watched their own feet. Like preoccupied children they noticed nothing and went about their tasks with no concern for the safety of the warren. While pleased that their single-mindedness protected me during my infiltration, I shuddered at the idea of a horde of Dhesiri who had only one thought: "Kill the intruder."

  At first, the reptilian odor of the warren almost overwhelmed me. The dry, musty scent laced the air thickly, much like the odor of a stable that has not been mucked out for weeks. Despite the scent, though, the warren was very clean. I suspected the workers carried all refuse to the gallery and pitched it into the darkness below me. I could easily imagine the gallery's central cylinder going deep enough to reach an underground river, both to sweep garbage away and provide water for the colony.

  I flattened against the wall beside one of the large tunnels. Two Dhesiri workers trundled out to the ledge with armloads of bloody bones. They did not notice me and, as they threw the bones off the edge, I pushed them out into the darkness. They did not scream, and fell so deep I never heard them hit bottom.

  I picked a bone up from the ground. It was a vertebra, fresh, from a horse. I smiled. If they'd fed the horses to the Queen perhaps the prisoners were still alive. I scratched a crown into the wall beside the tunnel, assuming the Queen was somewhere further along that passage, and continued my search for the prisoners.

  Despite the thought I'd given to the problem of locating the prisoners, I would have missed them completely but for quick thinking by one of the prisoners. A dozen large tunnels fit my requirements for size and location, and searching each one was impossible. I scratched a number beside each and moved on, but at the sixth I noticed parallel grooves heading off along the tunnel, going away from gallery.

  I dropped to one knee and ran my left hand over the grooves. They'd been cut into the hard-packed earth by a pair of spurs. Somehow one of the prisoners had freed his feet and dug his heels in to leave a path for me to follow. I grinned, nodded my head, and ducked into the tunnel.

  The tunnel turned gently to the right and sloped down a bit. I worked along it in a running crouch until I saw an opening. Through it I spotted a chamber where three men were tied up and left against the wall like so many sacks of grain. I could see one warrior standing watch, but he faced the prisoners and seemed unaware of my approach.

  The warrior stood both taller and broader than Jevin. Like most lizards he had a huge tail and did not have ears, only holes in the sides of his head. I hoped that meant a reduction in hearing, because I had to traverse twenty feet of shadowed tunnel before I could get to him.

  Beyond him I got my first glance at the three prisoners. King Tirrell's handsome face matched the profile on Hamisian gold coins. He had an aquiline
nose, strong mouth, and high cheekbones. His hair was full and steely gray. He looked strong—clearly a warrior despite his years on the throne. The eyes, though, were dark, brooding circles of midnight, and they reminded me that his years on the throne also made him a politician.

  The other two prisoners were younger, my age or slightly older. Duke Vidor had a narrow, slender face as yet uncreased by worries or difficulties. He watched the Dhesiri with dark blue eyes that appraised every movement and sought out weaknesses in the enemy. He reminded me of a cat, both because of how he watched the warrior and because of his generally lean build. I didn't know if he had the skill to be a fighter, but he seemed to have all the instincts, and that counted for a lot all by itself.

  Count Patrick, on the other hand, was not a warrior born. He had bright red hair and a slightly chubby face. While his clothes were very much cut along the lines of the hunting suits worn by the other two—and, for the most part, as somberly colored—vibrantly colored bits of cloth trimmed his clothing. If I'd not been able to trace the spur tracks to his boots, I would have supposed him nothing more than a court fop. His body was thick around the middle, unusual in so young a man, yet his blue eyes spoke of intelligence and common sense.

  Count Patrick saw me as I padded down the hallway. I raised a finger to my lips unnecessarily. He blinked once then looked at the warrior. "Excuse me, how long must we endure this outrage?"

  The warrior lazily turned his head toward Patrick. He eyed the Count like a snake watching a mouse from ambush. "Sssoon you eaten," it hissed out with difficulty.

  "I demand you take us to the Queen immediately!" Patrick's voice took on an annoying whine.

  The warrior's head backed a bit, then darted forward on the thick neck. "You will see her soon enough, fat one." It hissed out a laugh, forked tongue played along the edge of its mouth. I'm fairly certain that's how he discovered me, by "tasting" the air.

  Realizing something was wrong, he licked the air again. He spun on me and reached out a two-finger, one-thumb hand to grasp a huge, knotty club. He filled the opening into the prison and advanced slowly in my direction. He hissed out another laugh because I only had my ryqril in hand.