by Greg Curtis
The captains paid him no attention however, as they engaged in their own discussion. A conversation that sounded to her more like a duel. And a conversation that she found herself strangely uninterested in. It didn’t matter to her that the new captain had been given his instructions by the king of Irothia to help with the investigation of the disappearances. She wasn’t troubled by the thought that he seemed to have the view that he would be in command. Or that her captain held the exact opposite view.
The only thing that mattered to her was that she was scared. This was an unfamiliar land. They were surrounded by a dangerous enemy that could be lurking anywhere. They were tired. And they were riding into a battle. A hundred extra riders with crossbows, and a strange priest with some useful magic seemed like a gift from the Mother.
She didn’t care who was in charge. She just needed to get some sleep.
Chapter Eighty Six.
Village of the damned.
That was what the dragoons called it, and it seemed to Dura to be a good description. Just riding into it she felt a chill fall over her, and it was another sunny day. The others knew the same. She could see it in their faces. Even the dragoons knew it. They had fallen strangely quiet the moment they’d left the open tussock and entered the village, and they were never quiet. She might not be experienced in the ways of the Grove, but even Dura realised that the chill was of the soul. There was something dark here.
There was something in this ancient village that had poisoned the ground. Poisoned it so terribly that even centuries after it had been abandoned, nothing save a few tenacious weeds could grow. Riding through the tussock had been terrible, but when they had taken that step from the tussock grasses so tall that they could hide an army of monsters, to the circle of bare ground and weeds that the village sat in, things had become so much worse. It was a feeling of something cold and slimy crawling all over her skin. Crossing into the village her first thought was that she wanted to go back and face the abominations.
At least there weren’t any of the creatures. Not in sight anyway. And there was nothing to hide them. Just a few hundred mounds of rubble and weeds that had once been houses and shops and the like. At least she assumed that that was what they once had been. There was so little left of them that they could have been anything. Regardless, if any abominations had been anywhere in the ancient village, they would have seen them. Unless they were lying down behind the piles of rubble waiting to pounce, Dura thought suddenly. A moment later her fear eased. Abominations just didn’t act in that way. They were more or less mindless. Too damaged to even remember how to walk properly.
That at least was something. Up until then the rangers had been fighting off attacks every hour, day and night. Her dreams of sleep had proven to be just that, dreams. Daydreams at best since during the hours of darkness they were nightmares. But with the three priests at their sides, they’d somehow fought their way through the endless fields of tussock with only a few minor injuries. In her quiet moments Dura found that odd. So many battles, so many abominations killed, and yet none of them had been killed. It seemed somehow too good. Even, though she didn’t want to think it, too easy. As though they’d been let through.
Yet if they had, if this was truly a trap, where were its teeth?
The village seemed peaceful. Dead. An ancient collection of small ruins slowly decaying. And if the houses had been made of wood instead of stone, they wouldn’t be even that. There would be nothing at all remaining of the village. Nothing save for a feeling of dread.
“Riders, make your fire.”
The order came as a surprise, but still Dura and the rest obeyed, drawing their longbows and wrapping oil soaked rags around the ends of a couple of their arrows. And Captain Harrigan didn’t seem to be opposed to the idea as he rode beside their captain. Instead of arguing as the two of them had been doing for days, he spoke quietly with Captain Maydan, occasionally pointing at some of the nearer ruins as if selecting targets.
But what were their targets going to be?
That puzzled her as she sat there with her bow ready. The ruins had no timber left. That had rotted away centuries before. All that remained of them were crumbling stone walls with small forests growing out of their middle. Obviously whatever had poisoned the ground, hadn’t poisoned the dirt under the houses and the greenery and small trees had burst from them, knocking over what little remained of the walls. What was left were barely recognisable as ruins. So what was there to burn? And why? It wasn’t as if they would ever be of any use again. No one could live in the ruins. There simply wasn’t enough of the buildings left to make into homes.
“Arlen.” The captain pointed at the ruin furthest to their left. “In the middle.” The ranger promptly lit her arrow and let it fly straight into the middle of what had probably once been a house. The arrow arced gracefully through the air leaving behind a trail of black smoke, and landed exactly where it should. But no fire burst forth from inside the crumbled piles of stone that had once been walls. Had anyone really expected it to? But the lack of fire didn’t seem to bother the captain.
“Sia.” He pointed to the next ruin and they all realised that it was the start of a pattern. One flaming arrow into the heart of each pile of rubble. So Sia let her arrow fly and it disappeared into the middle of the next ruin, and nothing happened. But it didn’t matter. The next ranger lit his arrow, the captain gave the order and the arrow was sent flying. Like all the others Dura obeyed when it was her turn, and knew only a sense of relief that she hit her target cleanly. It would have been embarrassing to miss. Even from horseback and at a good range, it wasn’t a difficult shot to make.
And so it went on.
One by one all thirty of them launched their arrows, and when the last of them had fired they moved a few steps further into the village and started all over again. It made no sense but they obeyed.
Then someone shouted out just before Dura was about to loose her second arrow and she discovered that it did make some sense after all. Several of the first few ruins they’d hit were actually on fire. That surprised her for a moment. But it wasn’t the ruins that were burning she eventually realised. It was the small forests inside their remains that were slowly catching fire. It had been a long hot summer and the bushes were tinder dry.
Was that what the captain had intended? Was that enough? And why? What was the purpose in burning mounds of ancient rubble and weeds?
Dura wondered about that after she loosed her arrow and prepared her third , carefully tying another oil soaked rag around its tip. Even if they all caught fire, and it was slowly beginning to look as though they might, would that do anything? Whatever was wrong with this place, it had died centuries before. So could fire truly cleanse it?
Then she heard an all too familiar screeching and didn’t care.
An abomination had emerged from one of the burning ruins, and as it rushed towards them as quickly as it could, she really had time to realise only one thing. It was on fire. The accursed things burnt, even if it didn’t seem to bother them. Then someone loosed an arrow directly into its head and the moment they heard the thunk as it hit home, the thing fell down, dead. But it continued to burn, and that mattered. Like a log on a fire, flames and putrid looking smoke burst from its flesh and sooner or later she knew, it would be nothing but ash.
More screeching started to come from the other buildings, both the ones that were burning and the ones that hadn’t yet been set alight, and several dozen more of the things burst out from behind them and came shambling for them. It was almost as if they’d been hiding in them, waiting to spring an attack on them, before they’d realised that if they kept waiting they’d burn to ashes. But that couldn’t be. These things had no minds. They didn’t think and they didn’t plan. They just charged anyone the moment they saw them. They couldn’t actually have been hiding behind the ruins, lying in wait for them. Could they?
It didn’t really matter though. They simply had to die. And out in the open wit
h no tussock to hide them, they made perfect targets, especially when the elder’s cast their normal spell and they stopped running. Dura dropped one cleanly at two hundred paces, a shot she was pleased with, while others even further back were also falling to her fellow rangers.
Soon all of the creatures were down, two or three dozen at least, and she knew a sense of relief. It had been one of the quickest and easiest battle’s they’d faced over the previous week. In fact it seemed almost too easy after the struggle they’d gone through to reach the village. But they weren’t finished, and immediately the last one fell Captain Maydan had them starting once more with the flaming arrows. Every building had to burn.
So they carried on, little by little moving in to the heart of the village and setting each ruined building alight. And those that didn’t catch fire the first time, they hit and hit again until they did. Everything had to burn. Dura didn’t fully understand why they were burning an already ruined village, but it felt good. It felt as though each fire helped to cleanse the place. To wash away the stench of evil.
In time the sky was thick with black smoke as all around them flames leapt high into the air and scores of fires snapped and crackled furiously all around them. Everywhere they turned, Winterford was burning, and though the acrid smoke stung her eyes and scratched at her throat, she liked it. The others did too. She could see the smiles on the faces of her friends, and even among the dragoons she could hear the laughter in their voices as they spoke among themselves. Unlike rangers they talked a lot.
Eventually the last fire was lit, the last mound of rubble began burning, and she wondered what next. What had it all been about?
They’d come all this way, fighting abominations at every turn, battling the endless tussock as well, and for what? A week in the saddle, muscles aching from the ride, eyes heavy with exhaustion, nerves stretched taught, and they hadn’t found anything. No trace of the missing people. No explanation. It didn’t seem right somehow. Even if they’d burnt the village and maybe with it destroyed some sort of evil, it wasn’t enough.
She wondered if the others felt the same way. But as they slowly made their way back to the point where they’d first entered the village, she decided not to ask. Either they knew the same sense of disappointment and they’d just be sharing it, or they didn’t and her words would simply cause upset. Better to keep her doubts between her and the Mother.
“Brother Ericus.” Captain Harrigan called to the priest once they had all regrouped, and Dura wondered why. Everything was done wasn’t it? The village was burning, slowly being cleansed by the fire. The abominations were dead, burning with the rest of the village. And the mission was complete. What else was there to do? But the dragoon captain’s voice said otherwise.
“Ready.” The priest nodded to his captain, drew his quarterstaff from the scabbard around his horse’s neck, and raised it above his head in one hand. She had to admit as she stared at him, he cut a striking figure as he did so. Almost a heroic one. The sort that artists would commit to canvas. And not the sort that people would generally mistake for a priest.
“Silene.” He called his goddess, his voice clear and strong, and immediately his staff burst into fire. Strange, white flames that ran from one end of the staff to the other and yet somehow didn’t burn him. Not even his hand where he held the staff. The flames simply seemed to dance between his fingers.
Then he started speaking in one of the ancient tongues. Words forgotten by time. Powerful words spoken slowly, that rolled through the air like quiet thunder. Words Dura didn’t understand, but which still set her hair standing on end and somehow seemed to flow right through her. It was a spell of some sort, and not the usual one he used when he called Silene’s light down upon the abominations. This was something else. Something far more powerful.
“Aswa!” Dura recognised the last word he intoned as he thrust the staff high into the air. Everyone did. It was the word traditionally used to end a prayer in every faith she knew of. She understood that it meant praise be in one of the ancient tongues. But what it meant was unimportant. What was important was the pillar of white fire that suddenly streaked down out of the clear blue sky to completely engulf the priest and his horse the moment he said it.
In the blink of an eye he went from being a man on a horse holding a flaming staff, to a pillar of white fire with a faint shadow within it in the shape of a rider and horse. And as if that wasn’t frightening enough, without warning an arm of that fire suddenly streaked out from the priest to strike somewhere inside the burning village.
Between the flames and the thick smoke she couldn’t see what he had struck at, but she could hear it. She could hear it, them, scream with rage, and the one thing she did realise instantly, was that it wasn’t one of the shambling soulless monstrosities. They didn’t feel pain, and the sounds they made were strange otherworldly shrieks and growls. This was more like the scream a man would make when he was unexpectedly injured.
Dura drew her bow once more, and notched an arrow as she stared into the flaming village, trying to see who had screamed. The others did the same, and then they all waited nervously to see what was coming out of the fire.
They didn’t have to wait long.
The man, whoever it was that had screamed, started intoning some unfamiliar words, and though she understood them no more than those of Ericus, she didn’t like them. They made her skin crawl as though something cold and slimy was crawling all over her. Dura shuddered, unable to control the urge, and many others did the same. Even the dragoons locked away in their shiny metal armour.
Then the elders started intoning, light, gentle almost musical words that lifted the soul and some of that coldness lifted from her. She knew then that this was going to be a battle of magic not bows, but still she held her longbow before her, just in case.
“Aswa!” Ericus raised his staff once more, and another pillar of white lightning streaked down from the heavens to engulf him in its glory, before he cast it into the flaming village.
The man screamed again, either hurt or frightened by what had come at them, but that didn’t stop the chanting, and that Dura understood meant that there was more than one of them. One to scream, one to chant. At least.
Then the purpose of the enemy’s prayers suddenly became obvious as a globe of pure blackness sprang forth in the middle of the burning village. Without thinking Dura loosed an arrow straight into the heart of the darkness, glad to finally have something to aim at, and she wasn’t alone. At least a dozen bolts and arrows disappeared into its shining darkness. Did they hit anything? She had no idea. But as she notched another arrow into her longbow and pulled back on the string, she didn’t care. All she cared about was that they had something to aim at.
She loosed her second arrow straight after the first hoping only to hear a scream from within. Someone cleverer than her, loosed a flaming arrow into it, and for a brief moment as the fiery streak entered the blackness, she could see her enemy. Only for the shortest of instants, less than the blink of an eye, but enough that she could make sense of them.
Figures in robes, half a dozen of them surely, and all of them bent in prayer to their demon god as they ringed a stone altar. She couldn’t tell any more than that, but she didn’t need to. What they were was far less important than what they were doing. They were kneeling, and she knew her first two arrows would have sailed harmlessly over their heads. She would not make that mistake a third time.
The next time she aimed lower, pulled her draw string all the way back to her ear, to the point where she worried that the longbow might almost snap, and released the arrow straight into the heart of the kneelers.
It hit!
She knew it. She heard the solid thunk of the arrow burying itself in flesh even over the sound of the prayers and the crackling of the fires. And best of all she heard the scream. It was small, quickly controlled, and probably not much more than the surprise at being scratched, but it was something. Others began doing the same, and s
oon arrows were slamming home into flesh, and she could hear more screams.
Ericus struck for the third time, and this time when his blast hit it tore apart the inky blackness, and finally revealed their enemy to them. That was all any of them could ever have wanted, and with all the speed and power they could call on, they began hitting them.
Three went down in the blink of an eye, arrows sticking out of their bodies like the spines on a hedgehog, and the others were hit as well. The leader, whichever one it was, stopped his chant in his panic. And then they tried to run. But they were too late. Thirty rangers and a hundred dragoons would not be denied, and they barely made a dozen steps before the arrows and bolts carried them to the ground. And once there, they didn’t move. Just to be sure though, they loosed a few more arrows in to their flesh, looking for any sign that they still lived. There was none.
