Rythe Awakes (The Rythe Trilogy)

by Craig Saunders

  He straightened and looked around the room, bowing his head slightly to the leader of the Sard before speaking.

  “We ride tonight.”

  The others rose, taking sword before rising. They left the circle growing cold behind them.

  Outside, nine horses pranced impatiently, already saddled. The remaining devotees of the Order of Sard mounted and left. Only their temple home Sybremreyen remained behind, towering blackly into the deep night.

  *

  Drun rose and heaved an upturned boat from the platform. It turned mid-air, splashing into the sea.

  He had watched the Sacrifice and the Saviour take the path toward oblivion. The Sard had waited, changing with the times but always remaining the same in their duty; to watch for the coming of the three, and to oppose the machinations of the Protectorate wherever their evil manifested.

  Now the time of the last battle was near. Drun hoped that it was not too late to make a change. Tirielle and Shorn had made their choices, learned many lessons. Now the time had come for the Third to join them together.

  For their real teaching to begin.

  *

  Chapter One

  “Renir! Get up!”

  Renir groaned into his pillow and rolled the covers over his ears. His wife did tend to grate on his nerves first thing in the morning.

  “Renir! You can hear me!” Her shrill voice and harsh accent had seemed almost bearable when her breasts had been firm and high. He heard pottery clatter for some time before she resumed. “It’ll go cold,” Hertha scowled at the opening leading into the bedroom, “RRReniiir!” She knew there was no need to shout – the hide covering between rooms would not drown her out. Renir wondered if she took enjoyment from tormenting him. He stuck his fingers in his ears.

  “If you don’t get your lazy behind out here now, the dog’ll be eating your breakfast!”

  Renir Esyn was a placid man. He never understood his wife’s constant nagging; nobody else seemed to find him offensive. People took to him because he looked just like them. True, he was a shirker, but he smiled and was honest about it at least. Or so people said when excusing him to those he had offended. Everyone knew him for what he was – a lazy good-for-nothing. They even said so to his face, with rare honesty that flourished in small villages everywhere. In answer he would say, “I’m saving food for everyone else by not working up an appetite”, or something similar. People would call him a fool, then he would smile and joke and change the subject. He had an easy manner and was well liked by everyone but his wife.

  A pot flew at the hide, ruffling it out before it fell to the ground and shattered.

  He got up.

  After a breakfast constantly interrupted by snide looks from the dog and grating syllables from his wife, Renir donned his worn leather jacket and left without saying goodbye. He could hear Hertha as he wandered down the street, talking as if he was still there. He wondered if she was actually talking to the dog. Conspiring against him.

  The village itself was a pathetic cluster of shacks on the southern tip of Renir’s native land of Sturma. Sturma, a verdant country, nestled between Draymar to the west, Teryithyr to the north and the sea to the east and south. The villlage was more of a hamlet – a few simple huts, a tavern, an open stall for the traders that passed through, some fishing boats. The blacksmith’s was the only place outsiders ever really visited.

  As far as Renir knew the place had never been named. He called it ‘the village’, as did everyone else. The place did not matter to Renir, who had grown up in the foothills of the Culthorn mountains. They could be seen in the distance on a clear day. The village of his youth, Green Hall (named for the rotten hall that had been erected by a long-forgotten local Lord), was not there any longer. It, and his remaining family (his mother and his scrawny cousin Serig), had been destroyed soon after his wedding, along with the whole town. The Draymar, always the aggressor in border quarrels, had burned it to the ground.

  Renir had met Hertha there, and, after a hasty drunken coupling outside the local tavern (The Bull Catcher, where he had tasted his first beer) had felt obliged by the standards of the Sturmen Thanes and their laws to marry her. Which was true to some extent. At the time he had thought her a catch far beyond anything he could ever have dreamt. And he had been moderately drunk and flattered, like all young men, to be offered that which they crave. They had performed their deed behind the tavern in the dark. He had been itching from the cheap sackcloth he had thrown over an unopened barrel of ale at the back of the tavern. Hertha had fidgeted about too, evidently bored of him. Which was strange, he thought, for he had been swift.

  Renir would have got away with the pleasant memory of a drunken lay behind The Bull Catcher, a tale to tell his friends of the girl he had wooed, with her breasts like the mountains that hide the Draymar. He would have gotten away with the tale (or some tail, he thought, and chuckled to himself) and a memory if not for Jugun, the town gossip, who had happened to observe his endeavours whilst walking back from the tavern.

  Renir wished he had never married.

  A man of twenty-five already at that time, everyone thought he would turn out like Trangerth the blacksmith, who had never wed, and who it was rumoured had an unusual affinity for the beasts he shod. Renir had thought himself a lucky man; only his second time in the saddle and it hadn’t cost him a penny. Of course, when sobriety finally reached his head in the morning and she came to knock at his door, he saw her plain face and heard her voice. His mother had been delighted but Renir had inwardly cringed. He had thought to get out of it – drunken couplings were not unheard of – but for a man without a trade the law dictated that the woman could approach the mother of the man for permission to marry. If the man’s mother gave consent he would have to marry or join the army. He could have lied, he supposed, but there had still been a semblance of a guard back then, and Jugun was notorious. Not much of a choice for a man with Renir’s approach to hard work.

  He should have joined up. At least they had whores in camp.

  The law had come about after the battle on the Draymar steppes, some nameless land where so many young men of Sturma now lay with their skulls reduced to pots for saplings and grasses. His grandmother had told him once she hoped his grandfather was lucky enough to be growing something nice. He had always liked flowers.

  When Gek Fathand had issued the call to arms the other Thanes had each sent a thousand men. Not since then had any Thane inspired such devotion. Even when Gek had called all able-bodied men to war the enemy had still outnumbered them by ten to one. His grandmother, a nurse at the back of the lines, had watched Gek rally the men facing the overwhelming army of Draymar. He had held his great sword with one enormous hand. She said his hands were so large on his double-handed sword he had to use it one handed. Renir still wasn’t sure his grandmother’s tales were entirely true, but believed Gek had been called Fathand for a reason.

  The green grasses of the plain had been scarlet and silver that day. Cries of war gradually passed, as the cries of pain took the field. The most terrible cries came from the fallen horses.

  Wave after wave of Draymar were repulsed as the Sturmen fought with their backs to the foothills on the other side on the Culthorn Moutains, until the dead mounted so high as to make the Draymar’s horses useless. The Draymar commander – some Sturmen called him Tyrinne, some Gyrainne, nobody seemed clear on his true name – had ordered his lines to attack on foot, when Gek had pressed with every last man, catching them against their horses and in confusion.

  The battle had ended only when the bodies of the dead covered the field as far as the eye could see.

  Following the battle Gek decided that there were not enough people left in the Sturma to protect it, should another threat from the Draymar arise. There were few enough people as it were. The carcasses of towns abandoned by the dead littered the countryside. If the Draymar came in force again there would be nobody to stop them. So they were supposed to get married and breed like mud
-brags.

  Cackhanded, Renir thought. He was sure he could have made a larger impact on the population without a wife.

  The mountains rose in the distance, covered on the peaks by snow reflecting the suns’ glow, as he remembered that first night with Hertha. He sighed. Some men’s lives (and wives) are perhaps destined to be ordinary.

  The village slumbered. On his way up the tiny street, he passed fifteen houses, the one-story tavern, the fishcutters and the small market stall where most things were sold by passing traders (there was no need for an inn – nobody ever had reason to stay in the village overnight. If they did they stayed under the canopy of the market stall, until the next day’s trader turfed them out). All of the houses were still shuttered against the night, although the first sun had risen over an hour ago. It was cold on the coast where the salty air blew in and nobody in the village would rise from the comfort of their beds this early unless forced.

  The marital home stood next to the sea. The window of the bedroom looked out over the ocean and the door opened onto the village’s single street. Renir’s small fishing boat was shored in front of the bedroom window. Hertha insisted he drag it up there in case of thieves. Renir couldn’t remember a tale involving boat thieves but did not complain.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had looked out of the bedroom window either.

  Or the last time he fished. His last catch ensured enough food on the table after they had been traded at Turnmarket, and Renir disagreed strongly with working when there was no need. Hertha disagreed with him on this as she did everything else.

  He came to the front of the blacksmith Gordir’s smithy, where the big man was up and sweating, firing the great furnace ready for a day’s work. Visitors came from all over the Spar, the district in which Renir’s village sat, with work for Gordir. The blacksmith always had an order to fill.

  Gordir was a hulking man with hands tempered by years of heat and hard toil. The two men usually waved and smiled a morning greeting – a ritual for the few times Renir passed the smithy this early. The smith was often at work; early and late. Gordir’s work ethic was, it seemed, directly converse to Renir’s.

  A man of few words, but quick to smile in company he found tolerable, Gordir had a laugh that matched his size and a deep, hoarse voice; from the smoke in the smithy, no doubt. The two were often seen at the table in the local tavern, Renir talking loudly to the consternation of passing strangers. None thought to mention it with Gordir at the table.

  This morning Renir approached him and said, “What are you making today?”

  Gordir, who had put down thick, steel tipped bellows as Renir approached, answered, “I’ve been commissioned. The Lord is having his armour repaired.”

  “What was wrong with the old armour? Has our Lord been in the wars again?” His voice took on a dainty air as he said ‘our lord’.

  Gordir’s mouth turned up at the corners. Both men knew the Lord of their realm (the land awarded by his father, the Thane of Spar, for services in the battle against the Draymar over fifty years before) had not seen a fight in his lifetime. “His son knocked it off its display stand and dented the breastplate.”

  “I didn’t think the little brat strong enough to shift that bulk,” Renir laughed pointing at the huge breastplate. “Maybe you should let it out some while you’re at it,” joked Renir. “I doubt he even fits in his gauntlets nowadays.”

  Gordir shrugged quite eloquently. “I just do what I’m paid for.”

  “Don’t we all? Anyway, I’m going to Turnmarket this morning. It’s a long way off so I’d best be gone, lest she skins me for a rug.”

  “What are you buying?” asked Gordir.

  “Hertha threw a pot at me early this morning.”

  Gordir’s eyebrows raised. “Ah. New pots, then?”

  “Yes, she’s angry that I don’t work enough. She’s also angry that I have legs and arms and teeth, but then, she is angry at everything.” He gave a wry grin, “So, now I have to walk to Turnmarket on my day off.”

  “Isn’t everyday a day off for you?”

  “Ha ha.” Renir gave Gordir his best threatening look, but gave up before he embarrassed himself. “Right, I’m going. It’s too early for this.”

  Gordir thumped Renir on the shoulder. “Nevermind, the exercise will free those rusty limbs.” He let out a throaty chuckle. “Be wary though, there’s worse abroad than Hertha.”

  Renir glanced at the mountains. “Well, in that case I’d best be off. I’ll want to be back before dark,” he said, before rubbing his shoulder.

  “You can buy me a beer when you get back then.”

  “That I will.” Renir turned and headed up the street, his mood slightly improved. The sea was at his back and the mountains stretched before him. Gordir watched him go and returned to his work. He eyed the breastplate, rusting at the armpit, and shook his head. Too many things had gone to seed.

  Renir passed the last house and set off for the second peak from the left of the largest in the mountain range, with Turnmarket sheltering beneath it.

  *

  Chapter Two

  Sixty miles southwest of Turnmarket, Shorn rested in the wooded foothills leading into the Culthorn pass. Once through he would be able to see the mountain marker for the pass and Turnmarket beyond it, the only town for miles and thankfully Sturman. He looked relaxed. Only after running until the first moon reached its apex in the night sky had he realised that the hunters following him halted their chase whenever he stopped to rest. His suspicion, formed when he first encountered them, was confirmed; these were no creatures of flesh and blood. That knowledge in itself did him little good – without sword he knew he was practically defenceless – but it did allow him to realise his limitations. The beasts would not be slain by hand alone.

  It was now daylight and the second day of his pursuit had begun.

  That the creatures only tracked his motion was a blessing. He made the most of the advantage through the night, resting when tired, but using his greater speed to open a gap between himself and his pursuers. Now the entrance to the pass was in sight and the fearsome black hounds were not.

  Running through the night would have weakened most prey, but Shorn was inured to most hardships, through nearly thirty years of physical discipline. At a little over six feet in height, he was lean, running to gaunt sometimes during longer campaigns. Daily, when able, he carried out his Shartrias, ritualised exercises with and without his sword. His hands were calloused and fast from both practice and the reality of war.

  Few men knew their limits as Shorn did.

  He now knew he could outrun the beasts, at least until he reached Turnmarket (although he had no intention of dragging three dog-sized creatures into a small trading town and seeing what mayhem would ensue). With his canteen still containing water he could keep his strength long enough to reach the hills and find a refill from one of the many streams flowing from the rock. He had only taken sparing sips during the nightlong pursuit and showed no serious signs of dehydration or exhaustion yet. His lips were cracked a little, but then that was to be expected.

  Shorn saw no option to lose the beasts that did not involve the mountain pass. It would be cold, perhaps deadly cold. He looked down at himself and sighed. The creatures’ spines had torn what little thread was left from his favourite cloak when they first attacked. Not that it mattered. It was never a winter cloak.

  He knew he needed to open a considerable margin, to allow himself time to rest. The crevasses and the massive drops that were the main danger in the mountains seemed to be his best chance.

  Let them see how they faired at climbing.

  He still smarted at losing his sword. If he had been more attentive in the training camp, he would not be reduced running around in mountain passes. He would almost rather die fighting than have to resort to this petty game of hide and seek.

  He resolved to put the lesser dishonour aside in favour of righting the greater wrong: the theft of his swor
d. His sword in Nabren’s hands was unthinkable.

  Nabren had been his employer in his last job as a mercenary, training the Draymar for guerilla attacks across the border into Sturma. The man was bereft of all decency.

  Stupid, Shorn realised now with the benefit of hindsight, how his need for the constant challenge of the fight had overruled his misgivings when he had ridden into the training camp that first time. Work had been slow enough to bend his already shaky ideals and sign on with Nabren's band of miscreants. His skin had crawled from some presentiment then, cried out to him. The dull taint of magic swam eel-like through the air – dark, loathsome magic – and still he had ignored the senses that served so well. How quickly the proud fell when faced with the obsolescence of age. Only just past forty and he had let his fear of growing old persuade him that all was well. Stupid.

  Magic left signs a trained mind could discern. The signs he noted had not been subtle. Awakened one night from a troubled sleep, he had stepped outside his tent and his skin had itched, the inside of his nose irritated by the tarnished air. The sword he held at his side, his sword, had hummed from the power expended in the air. That had been the first time he had felt eyes on him, unseen, observing him from the dark. He had known at the time that there was nothing there that he or any other man would be able to see, yet he had also known eyes were watching him. He had not felt stupid raising the sword before him and letting it sing. The feeling of being watched subsided as his sword's song rose.

  That night he had returned to his bedroll and slept a fitful, careful sleep.

  When he had lost his sword he had not been attentive enough. His sword sang in the presence of magic. Its abilities aside, he could not afford to lose it. It was a sword of rare power, even more so when wielded by a master swordsman.

  He was embarrassed at the ease with which Nabren had stolen it. He knew of Nabren's reputation before signing on at the camp. The crazed mercenary was a man who profited from war, training warriors across the land for a price; something Shorn could understand himself as a man who lived for war. But Nabren was inhuman and Shorn knew it the moment he set eyes on him. A powerful man from the look of his body, Nabren’s face did not fit the image. The face was drawn tight, eyes hooded as if to hide the thoughts within. The eyes that looked out from the tanned face were dead, emotionless pits. A man could not live Shorn's life and not know that look. It was the look of dull death coming at you sword in hand. The look of villages, towns, and even cities burned and dismembered. And Nabren unaffected by any of it.