In Pain and Blood (Spellster Series Book 1)

by Aldrea Alien

  Shaking his head to clear the image from the forefront of his mind, he continued. “The guardians must answer to the overseers and leashing everyone could very well mean the overseers would have to continuously sanction every lesson. Everywhere. That’s hundreds of orders every day.”

  “So it’d be like a general having to dictate how every arrow is fired in battle?” Marin asked.

  “Exactly. And the metal the collars are made from is rare. It’s typically only used on those considered worthy of leaving. That’s a few dozen people at most.” His gaze lifted to where he knew the tower sat, hidden by the trees now they’d descended the upper half of the hill. “But there are hundreds in the tower. That’s without even touching on how leashing everyone would lead to repurposing as children outgrow their collars. Such tampering would make the metal highly unstable and—”

  Authril wrinkled her nose. “Right, right,” she said, waving her hand. “I remember you saying it goes boom! really easily.” The warrior eyed the pouch at his hip as if talking about it might make the twisted remains of the collar inside do just that.

  “I’m sure an alchemist could explain it better, but yes.”

  Beside him, Katarina hummed. “I’ve always wondered, how does the collar know you’re getting a command from someone higher in the ranks? Do the alchemists weave spells into the collar?”

  “From what I’ve been told, it doesn’t per se. The process of a leashing digs into your mind. It… links with your subconscious. I know a lowly soldier has no authority over a sergeant, so even if they ordered me to attack, the collar holds. Unless I also know his superiors are dead.” That’s what had held him back at the ambush, he was sure of it. If he had just known who was next in command…

  The hedgewitch shuddered. “It sounds dreadful. How can you actually want to be leashed again?”

  “Want?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. I must be leashed.” He couldn’t remain in the tower. No one permanently returned once that metal wrapped around their neck. No one in Demarn had ever been unleashed. He couldn’t even remember any tales of it happening to spellsters outside of the kingdom, either.

  “So, if you were leashed now,” Marin asked, “who would you obey?”

  “Tracker.” The reply fell from his lips without hesitation. Even if he were still in the army, a hound’s order overtook all others. Only a few people were higher. They were called the King’s Hounds for a reason.

  His gaze flicked to where the man walked well ahead of them and his stomach twisted. Ever since apologising for kissing him, the hound hadn’t attempted more than the occasional flirt. Dylan thought a few nights in Authril’s arms would banish the man from his dreams, but the memory persisted there, too, lingering in the early morning haze.

  Soon, it wouldn’t matter. He’d be back in the tower and the hound would be on his way. Unless Tracker waited for him to be leashed, but surely the overseers would keep Dylan within the tower until the king ordered. Even then, they wouldn’t be alone. Authril would move on—as would Katarina and perhaps Marin, too—but there would be other spellsters for the hound to keep an eye on.

  They reached the bottom of the hill where the forest thinned out. Tracker waited on the tree line, kept purposely distant from the tower walls. Dylan halted next to the man and took in the sight of his home.

  The tower had seemed so small whilst living in its confines, a restriction of only travelling up to another level to find space. Seeing it anew, it was a beast of a building, caged by walls standing taller than even Toptower’s namesake. Never had he believed the place that had once been his whole world was the size of a village.

  “By the gods,” Authril breathed. “I know it’s just called the tower, but I didn’t expect it to be so big. I was thinking more like the fortress at Toptower. This is…”

  “…a lot of building,” Marin finished for the other woman. Her head turned his way, although her gaze remained rooted to the tower. “How many spellsters did you say there are?”

  “Hundreds.” He’d never been entirely certain how many. Dylan frowned. There was something off about the wind. A familiar scent that churned his stomach.

  “I believe the overseer’s last census put them at little over a thousand strong,” the hound said. “And, if you factor in those who guard and serve them… Well, there is a small city behind those rather robust walls.”

  “Inside,” Dylan corrected the man. “The walls are as wide as the average house. The servants live inside them.” His gaze drifted across the parapets. That mist still lingered, clearly issuing from somewhere within the walls.

  Marin tipped her head up, frowning thoughtfully at the tower as they crossed the open road to the tower gates. “If there’s so many of you, why did they only send one spellster to the frontline?”

  Dylan briefly tore his attention from the parapets. “Not everyone’s capable of battle,” he mumbled. What he’d first mistaken as mist was smoke. It drifted up on the breeze, coiling around the tower. But there shouldn’t be any smoke.

  “Sure. But just the one? There must’ve been others good enough to join you.”

  He shrugged. Perhaps not in raw power, but strength didn’t equate to the finesse in which a spellster like Fredrick could attack, or even the skill behind honing a single skill set such as Sophie and her knack with fire. “Maybe, but—”

  “You wouldn’t send all your best breeding stock into battle at once,” Authril said right over the top of him. “Got to keep some in the stables. You should be able to relate to that.”

  “But they’re people, not animals,” Marin snipped back.

  Dylan slowly stopped hearing the pair of them bickering. That gut-cramping scent grew stronger the closer they got to the gates. He dragged his feet, having to actually exert effort to take each step.

  It could’ve been the smell invading his nose, an odour that reminded him all too well of the army camp, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

  Still, he couldn’t turn away. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as his imagination made it seem. Perhaps the smoke didn’t come from within the tower confines at all, but beyond. They could’ve been burning all manner of things out… side… the—

  Dylan came to a halt, his feet turning leaden as his gaze alighted on the main gates standing open like a giant’s maw. There should be guardians. His chest tightened. The gates were never open without them bridging the gap. Why weren’t there any guardians?

  Blind terror had him running for the entrance.

  Tracker darted past him. He halted just outside the gates, his back suddenly stiff. “Stay back,” he warned, whirling on Dylan and pushing him away from the entrance. “Let me go in and…”

  Dylan stopped hearing the elf. He saw easily enough over Tracker’s shoulder. The twisted shape of a man lay just outside the main entrance.

  No. He pushed past the hound. It can’t be. There was slight movement. A loud droning filled his ears. They were alive. He could fix this. He could—

  Hundreds of flies launched into the air, zipping around them to resettle on the corpse. The stench of decaying flesh hit him, sending him reeling back, his hand clapped over his mouth.

  Now he was standing in the shadow of the gates, he could see what waited just inside the entrance. Six men littered the archway, four of them in armour. All of them covered in droning flies.

  “We should go,” Tracker said, laying his hand on Dylan’s arm. “Push on for Whitemeadow.”

  “No.” He jerked free of the hound’s grasp. “There could still be people inside.” People who needed help, who needed him. This was his home. He couldn’t just leave.

  “Dylan.” Those honey-coloured eyes brimmed with sympathy. “I am sorry.”

  He turned from the elf. The hound thought everyone was dead. Tracker wasn’t saying it, but the words were there, plastered all over his face. “No.” That couldn’t be true. He dashed through the gates, hurdling the fly-bloated corpses blocking his path.
>
  “Wait!”

  The second gate stood open. He raced across the courtyard, ignoring Tracker’s call. The pounding of his feet on the flagstones echoed through the space. Dylan pushed himself harder, each footstep jarring him to his teeth.

  “You have no idea what is in there!” The hound’s words chased Dylan through the second gate. The echo of another’s hurried footsteps suggested that Tracker followed.

  Dylan barely halted at the notion of waiting for the man to catch up. He raced across the second courtyard between and into the tower to be greeted with darkness. A shaky thought brought a ball of fire to life in his hands. He held it high as he ran through the tower corridors.

  Everywhere he went, every room, every nook he could think of… stench and flies greeted him. Men, women, children. Elven and human alike, all cut down.

  He climbed the stairs, his heart hammering and his chest tight from fighting to breathe. There had to be someone still alive. This couldn’t be everybody. It just couldn’t. The tower held hundreds of people. Maybe… maybe they’d been attacked and these poor souls were the attackers.

  “Stop!”

  He collapsed against a wall at Tracker’s cry, his legs too weak to disobey even when the rest wanted to push on. No. There were children here. The tiny bodies of babies cradled in a guardian’s arms. Spellsters and servants littered the corridors where they’d fallen trying to flee, their bloated faces twisted in horror.

  These were victims.

  A hand fell on his shoulder, squeezing. “I am truly sorry,” Tracker said. His arm wrapped around Dylan’s torso, the other securing Dylan’s arm over his shoulders. “Come.” Tracker stood, taking Dylan with him. “We will find somewhere less gruesome for you to rest and try to figure this out. Just keep that light of yours burning. I do not fancy adding our bodies to this lot.”

  Dylan complied, holding his flame-embalmed hand before them as he allowed the man to dictate their passage through the tower. He stared at every corpse they passed, he couldn’t do otherwise. His eyes burned from not blinking, but not a single tear dared to fall. “How?” he whispered. The tower was supposed to be safe. How could something like this happen?

  “I wish I could answer that,” the hound replied, sighing. “I truly do.”

  Tracker guided him back down the stairs leading to the bottom level. Those long fingers hugged the far side of Dylan’s waist and dug into his robe to keep him from falling whenever he stumbled. Dylan hadn’t thought the man was this strong. Or careful.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the women waited.

  Authril and the hedgewitch stood with their weapons bared and ready should anything creep out of the dark. Whereas Marin crouched over one of the guardians who’d fallen in a doorway, a torch in her hands.

  “This actually looks quite fresh,” the hunter said as she poked at the corpse with the tip of an arrow. “I don’t think this happened more than a day or two ago. Took this in the back of the head.” She waggled the arrow, its tip dark with blood. “They all have been. Well, not arrows, but blades… daggers, swords, knives and the like. I can’t find one sign of…”

  “My dearest hunter,” Tracker growled. “Do shut up.”

  She looked at the man, her gaze flicking to Dylan and back. Her dark red brows knitted together. “We’re surrounded by corpses, how is me being quiet going to help him?”

  Glaring at the woman and shaking his head, the hound gently lowered Dylan onto the bottom step. His fingers cupped Dylan’s cheek as if he were a child. “You will stay here, yes?”

  He nodded. Where could he possibly go that wasn’t worse off than this? It seemed the lower floor had taken the least bit of damage. He dreaded to think what it looked like further up the tower or within the servant quarters. But he’d have to find out eventually. He’d go back up, once he had steeled himself, and search every room.

  Katarina looked about, perplexed. “Where did Tracker go?”

  Dylan mimicked her in scanning their immediate surroundings, but the hound was nowhere to be found. He stood, in the faint hope that the man would appear. “We should look for him.” They’d no way of telling if any of the murderers were still around and he’d rather not find out via stumbling over the elf’s corpse.

  As one, they searched the tower’s lower level with the light of a torch illuminating their path. Bodies emerged from the darkness wherever they went, from inert shapes on the edge of the flickering torchlight, to grotesque blockades they were forced to step over or skirt.

  Bitter relief washed over him with every unrecognisable face, each spike slathered with a heavy dose of guilt. He shouldn’t be relieved to not know these people. He’d grown up in the same place, learnt in the same rooms, ate the same meals. Shared so many things in common bar one.

  The putrid stench of singed flesh and hair dominated their current corridor. Dylan covered his nose. He tried to breathe through his mouth, but the greasy air left a coating on his tongue. His stomach, having made some rather unpleasant connections with that smell, churned like a milkmaid making butter.

  “Argh,” Marin drew up a section of her cloak to her face. “Smells like someone’s charred a pig.”

  “More like people,” Authril muttered at his back, the words fast followed by some hasty shushing from Katarina.

  They turned a corner to where the corridor led to a side door and out into the gardens. Pale grey light stretched ahead of them. The splintered remains of a door lay scattered across the floor.

  A shadowy figure stood in the doorway, solidifying into that of the hound as they drew closer. He didn’t move, barely even acknowledged their approach.

  Dylan halted beside the man, at last able to see what held Tracker’s attention.

  A mound sat in the middle of the trampled flowerbeds. It smouldered, smoke still pouring from it. Sooty flames flickered to life every now and then. He stepped closer, heeding the morbid call to know exactly what that mound was made of.

  “Dylan,” Tracker called, his voice strained. “Come back. You truly will not wish to see more.”

  Defiance kept his legs moving. What could be worse than the slaughter they’d already witnessed inside?

  Closer, and he could make out individual pieces of… More bodies. He staggered back, then fell as his legs gave. The whole mound was made of burning, smouldering corpses. Now his eyes knew what to look for, he easily picked out individual arms and legs. The heads were worse, sometimes devoid of a body.

  His gaze fell on a familiar face. Sophie. The fire had claimed her blonde hair and melted one side of her head, but it was undeniably her. The longer he stared, the more people he could identify. Fredrick… Ben… Several guardians that he knew were in charge of training the children.

  He turned from the mound, losing the battle with his stomach. The morning’s meal splattered across the grass as he retched.

  Consoling fingers gently rubbed his back and held his hair away from his face.

  Blinking and sniffing, Dylan lifted his head to find Tracker had crouched at his side, his brow furrowed and his eyes dark with quiet sympathy. With one hand, the man tucked Dylan’s hair behind his ears whilst, with the other, he produced a small piece of soft cloth.

  Dylan took the cloth and wiped his face. He wobbled to his feet before allowing Tracker to guide him across a path leading through the gardens and back towards the front of the tower.

  “Try not to look,” the hound cautioned. The grip of the man’s arm, wrapped about the back of Dylan’s waist like a cradle, tightened. It was sound advice.

  But heeding it was an altogether different matter.

  The remains of magic fizzled through the air. Scorched grass and baked earth spoke of a fire-slinger’s final stand. A puddle of what he’d hazard a guess had once been ice flowed into a hollow that looked very much like a blast zone. It was all the evidence of fighting that was missing within the tower’s lower levels. These people knew there was a threat, had perhaps been warned.

  It still
hadn’t saved them.

  More bodies were piled up against the walls. Children, for the most part, struck down where they huddled once their guardians had failed to protect them. Cracks along the slabs of stone suggested a few had tried to break through the wall.

  There were other people amongst the dead that he couldn’t place, men and women in a strange uniform of baggy pants, unbleached linen shirts and dark coats. None of it appeared to be of Udynean make.

  Tracker frowned at them as they passed, but if he recognised the armour, he said nothing.

  It wasn’t until they were resting on the steps outside the tower’s main doors that the man released him. There were bodies here, too. Their intact and bloated forms somehow seemed easier to stomach. Smoke still lingered in the air. Charred boar. Marin was right about the stench. He didn’t think he’d be able to stomach pork again.

  Tracker collapsed next to him on the stairs and sighed. “It would seem that leaving you here is no longer a viable option. Not amongst this. Especially when I have no clue as to who killed these people.”

  Katarina hummed, settling on the opposite side of the hound. “Those men in the strange armour… I’ve seen it before.”

  Grunting, the man nodded. “Talfaltaner. They dock in Wintervale often enough. I would not expect them to come within five hundred feet of a single spellster, let alone a thousand.”

  Dylan frowned at the flagstones at the base of the steps, where a pool of blood marred the spot. He tipped his boot to one side, obscuring the sight. “Do you think they attacked the tower?” Talfaltaners had no tolerance for magic of any sort. A spellster caught by them would be better off slitting their own throats.

  They were also rumoured to kill anyone trying to protect a known spellster as the guardians were trained to do. And the servants. It made sense.

  Tracker silently gnawed on his bottom lip for what seemed like forever. The man stared so intently at nothing that Dylan could almost see the metal calculations the hound made swirling before them. “You would need a lot of people.”