The Black Road

by Mel Odom

  “IT’S THE DEMON’S DOING,”

  PALAT SNARLED.

  “The demon knows we’re down here.”

  In the next instant, a frightening figure surged from beneath the water. Formed of the rats’ bones, the creature stood eight feet tall, built square and broad-chested as an ape. It stood on bowed legs that were whitely visible through the murky water. Instead of two arms, the bone creature possessed four, all longer than the legs. When it closed its hands, horns formed of ribs and rats’ teeth stuck out of the creature’s fists, rendering them into morningstars for all intents and purposes. The horns looked sharp-edged, constructed for slashing as well as stabbing. Small bones, some of them jagged pieces of bone, formed the demon’s face the creature wore.

  “That’s a bone golem,” Taramis said. “Your weapons won’t do it much harm.”

  The bone golem’s mouth, created by splintered bones so tightly interwoven they gave the semblance of mobility, grinned, then opened as the creature spoke in a harsh howl that sounded like a midnight wind tearing through a graveyard. “Come to your deaths, fools.”

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  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Epilogue

  THE BLACK

  ROAD

  ONE

  Darrick Lang pulled at the oar and scanned the night-shrouded cliffs overlooking the Dyre River, hoping he remained out of sight of the pirates they hunted. Of course, he would only know they’d been discovered after the initial attack, and the pirates weren’t known for their generosity toward Westmarch navy sailors. Especially ones who were hunting them pursuant to the King of Westmarch’s standing orders. The possibility of getting caught wasn’t a pleasant thought. The longboat sculled against the gentle current, but the prow cut so clean that the water didn’t slap against the low hull. Sentries posted up on the surrounding cliffs would raise the alarm if the longboat were seen or heard, and there would be absolute hell to pay for it. If that happened, Darrick was certain none of them would make it back to Lonesome Star waiting out in the Gulf of Westmarch. Captain Tollifer, the vessel’s master, was one of the sharpest naval commanders in all of Westmarch under the king’s command, and he’d have no problem shipping out if Darrick and his band didn’t return before dawn.

  Bending his back and leaning forward, Darrick eased the oar from the water and spoke in a soft voice. “Easy, boys. Steady on, and we’ll make a go of this. We’ll be in and out before those damned pirates know we’ve come and gone.”

  “If our luck holds,” Mat Hu-Ring whispered beside Darrick.

  “I’ll take luck,” Darrick replied. “Never had anything against it, and it seems you’ve always had plenty to spare.”

  “You’ve never been one to go a-courtin’ luck,” Mat said.

  “Never,” Darrick agreed, feeling a little cocky in spite of the danger they were facing. “But I don’t find myself forgetting friends who have it.”

  “Is that why you brought me along on this little venture of yours?”

  “Aye,” Darrick replied. “And as I got it toted, I saved your life the last time. I’m figuring you owe me one there.”

  Mat grinned in the darkness, and the white of his teeth split his dark face. Like Darrick, he wore lampblack to shadow his features and make him more a part of the night. But where Darrick had reddish hair and bronze skin, Mat had black hair and was nut brown.

  “Oh, but you’re up and bound to be pushin’ luck this night, aren’t you, my friend?” Mat asked.

  “The fog is holding.” Darrick nodded at the billowing silver-gray gusts that stayed low over the river. The wind and the water worked together tonight, and the fog rolled out to the sea. With the fog in the way, the distance seemed even farther. “Mayhap we can rely on the weather more than we have to rely on your luck.”

  “An’ if ye keep runnin’ yer mouths the way ye are,” old Maldrin snarled in his gruff voice, “mayhap them guards what ain’t sleepin’ up there will hear ye and let go with some of them ambushes these damned pirates has got set up. Ye know people talkin’ carries easier over the water than on land.”

  “Aye,” Darrick agreed. “An’ I know the sound don’t carry up to them cliffs from here. They’re a good forty feet above us, they are.”

  “Stupid Hillsfar outlander,” Maldrin growled. “Ye’re still wet behind the ears and runnin’ at the nose for carryin’ out this here kind of work. If’n ye ask me, ol’ Cap’n Tollifer ain’t quite plump off the bob these days.”

  “An’ there you have it then, Ship’s Mate Maldrin,” Darrick said. “No one bloody asked you.”

  A couple of the other men aboard the longboat laughed at the old mate’s expense. Although Maldrin had a reputation as a fierce sailor and warrior, the younger men on the crew considered him somewhat of a mother hen and a worrywart.

  The first mate was a short man but possessed shoulders almost an ax handle’s length across. He kept his gray-streaked beard cropped close. A horseshoe-shaped bald spot left him smooth on top but with plenty of hair on the sides and in back that he tied in a queue. Moisture from the river and the fog glistened on the tarred breeches and soaked the dark shirt.

  Darrick and the other men in the longboat were clad in similar fashion. All of them had wrapped their blades in spare bits of sailcloth to keep the moonshine and water from them. The Dyre River was fresh water, not the corrosive salt of the Gulf of Westmarch, but a sailor’s practices in the King’s Royal Navy were hard to put aside.

  “Insolent pup,” Maldrin muttered.

  “Ah, and you love me for it even as you decry it, Maldrin,” Darrick said. “If you think you’re miserable company now, just think about how you’d have been if I’d up and bloody left you on board Lonesome Star. I’m telling you, man, I don’t see you up for a night of hand-wringing. Truly I don’t. And this is the thanks I get for sparing you that.”

  “This isn’t going to be as easy as ye seem to want to believe,” Maldrin said.

  “And what’s to worry about, Maldrin? A few pirates?” Darrick shipped his oar, watchful that the longboat crew still moved togethe
r, then eased it back into the water and drew again. The longboat surged through the river water, making good time. They’d spotted the small campfire of the first sentry a quarter-mile back. The port they were looking for wasn’t much farther ahead.

  “These aren’t just any pirates,” Maldrin replied.

  “No,” Darrick said, “I have to agree with you. These here pirates, now these are the ones that Cap’n Tollifer sent us to fetch up some trouble with. After orders like them, I won’t have you thinking I’d just settle for any pirates.”

  “Nor me,” Mat put in. “I’ve proven myself right choosy when it comes to fighting the likes of pirates.”

  A few of the other men agreed, and they shared a slight laugh.

  No one, Darrick noted, mentioned anything of the boy the pirates had kidnapped. Since the boy’s body hadn’t been recovered at the site of the earlier attack, everyone believed he was being held for ransom. Despite the need to let off steam before their insertion into the pirates’ stronghold, thinking of the boy was sobering.

  Maldrin only shook his head and turned his attention to his own oar. “Ach, an’ ye’re a proper pain in the arse, Darrick Lang. Before all that’s of the Light and holy, I’d swear to that. But if’n there’s a man aboard Cap’n Tollifer’s ship what can pull this off, I figure it’s gotta be you.”

  “I’d doff my hat to you, Maldrin,” Darrick said, touched. “If I were wearing one, that is.”

  “Just keep wearin’ the head it would fit on if ye were,” Maldrin growled.

  “Indeed,” Darrick said. “I intend to.” He took a fresh grip on his oar. “Pull, then, boys, while the river is steady and the fog stays with us.” As he gazed up at the mountains, he knew that some savage part of him relished thoughts of the coming battle.

  The pirates wouldn’t give the boy back for free. And Captain Tollifer, on behalf of Westmarch’s king, was demanding a blood price as well.

  “Damned fog,” Raithen said, then swore with heartfelt emotion.

  The pirate captain’s vehemence drew Buyard Cholik from his reverie. The old priest blinked past the fatigue that held him in thrall and glanced at the burly man who stood limned in the torchlight coming from the suite of rooms inside the building. “What is the matter, Captain Raithen?”

  Raithen stood like a mountain at the stone balcony railing of the building that overlooked the alabaster and columned ruins of the small port city where they’d been encamped for months. He pulled at the goatee covering his massive chin and absently touched the cruel scar on the right corner of his mouth that gave him a cold leer.

  “The fog. Makes it damned hard to see the river.” The pale moonlight glinted against the black chainmail Raithen wore over a dark green shirt. The ship’s captain was always sartorially perfect, even this early in the morning. Or this late at night, Cholik amended, for he didn’t know which was the case for the pirate chieftain. Raithen’s black breeches were tucked with neat precision into his rolled-top boots. “And I still think maybe we didn’t get away so clean from the last bit of business we did.”

  “The fog also makes navigating the river risky,” Cholik said.

  “Maybe to you, but for a man used to the wiles and ways of the sea,” Raithen said, “that river down there would offer smooth sailing.” He pulled at his beard as he looked down at the sea again, then nodded. “If it was me, I’d make a run at us tonight.”

  “You’re a superstitious man,” Cholik said, and couldn’t help putting some disdain in his words. He wrapped his arms around himself. Unlike Raithen, Cholik was thin to the point of emaciation. The night’s unexpected chill predicting the onset of the coming winter months had caught him off-guard and ill prepared. He no longer had the captain’s young years to tide him over, either. The wind, now that he noticed it, cut through his black and scarlet robes.

  Raithen glanced back at Cholik, his expression souring as if he were prepared to take offense at the assessment.

  “Don’t bother to argue,” Cholik ordered. “I’ve seen the tendency in you. I don’t hold it against you, trust me. But I choose to believe in things that offer me stronger solace than superstition.”

  A scowl twisted Raithen’s face. His own dislike and distrust concerning what Cholik’s acolytes did in the lower regions of the town they’d found buried beneath the abandoned port city were well known. The site was far to the north of Westmarch, well out of the king’s easy reach. As desolate as the place was, Cholik would have thought the pirate captain would be pleased about the location. But the priest had forgotten the civilized amenities the pirates had available to them at the various ports that didn’t know who they were—or didn’t care because their gold and silver spent just as quickly as anyone else’s. Still, the drinking and debauchery the pirates were accustomed to were impossible where they now camped.

  “None of your guards has sounded an alarm,” Cholik went on. “And I assume all have checked in.”

  “They’ve checked in,” Raithen agreed. “But I’m certain that I spotted another ship’s sails riding our tailwind when we sailed up into the river this afternoon.”

  “You should have investigated further.”

  “I did.” Raithen scowled. “I did, and I didn’t find anything.”

  “There. You see? There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Raithen shot Cholik a knowing glance. “Worrying about things is part of what you pay me all that gold for.”

  “Worrying me, however, isn’t.”

  Despite his grim mood, a small smile twisted Raithen’s lips. “For a priest of Zakarum Church, which professes a way of gentleness, you’ve got an unkind way about your words.”

  “Only when the effect is deserved.”

  Folding his arms across his massive chest, Raithen leaned back against the balcony and chuckled. “You do intrigue me, Cholik. When we became acquainted all those months ago and you told me what you wanted to do, I thought you were a madman.”

  “A legend of a city buried beneath another city isn’t madness,” Cholik said. However, the things he’d had to do to secure the sacred and almost forgotten texts of Dumal Lunnash, a Vizjerei wizard who had witnessed the death of Jere Harash thousands of years ago, had almost driven him there.

  Thousands of years ago, Jere Harash had been a young Vizjerei acolyte who had discovered the power to command the spirits of the dead. The young boy had claimed the insight was given to him through a dream. There was no doubting the new abilities Jere Harash mustered, and his power became a thing of legend. The boy perfected the process whereby the wizards drained the energy of the dead, making anyone who used it more powerful than anything that had gone on before. As a result of this new knowledge, the Vizjerei—one of the three primary clans in the world thousands of years ago—had become known as the Spirit Clans.

  Dumal Lunnash had been a historian and one of the men to have survived Jere Harash’s last attempt to master the spirit world completely. Upon the young man’s attaining the trance state necessary to transfer the energy to the spells he wove, a spirit had taken control of his body and gone on a killing rampage. Later, the Vizjerei had learned that the spirits they called on and unwittingly unleashed into the world were demons from the Burning Hells.

  As a chronicler of the times and the auguries of the Vizjerei, Dumal Lunnash had largely been overlooked, but his texts had led Cholik through a macabre and twisted trail that had ended in the desolation of the forgotten city on the Dyre River.

  “No,” Raithen said. “Legends like that are everywhere. I’ve even followed a few of them myself, but I’ve never seen one come true.”

  “Then I’m surprised that you came at all,” Cholik said. This was a conversation they’d been avoiding for months, and he was surprised to find it coming out now. But only in a way. From the signs they’d been finding the last week, while Raithen had been away plundering and pillaging, or whatever it was that Raithen’s pirates did while they were away, Cholik had known they were close to discovering the dead city�
��s most important secret.

  “It was your gold,” Raithen admitted. “That was what turned the trick for me. Now, since I’ve returned again, I’ve seen the progress your people are making.”

  A bitter sweetness filled Cholik. Although he was glad to be vindicated in the pirate captain’s eyes, the priest also knew that Raithen had already started thinking about the possibility of treasure. Perhaps in his uninformed zeal, he or his men might even damage what Cholik and his acolytes were there to get.

  “When do you think you’ll find what you’re looking for?” Raithen asked.

  “Soon,” Cholik replied.

  The big pirate shrugged. “It might help me to have some idea. If we were followed today . . .”

  “If you were followed today,” Cholik snapped, “then it would be all your fault.”

  Raithen gave Cholik a wolfish grin. “Would it, then?”

  “You are wanted by the Westmarch Navy,” Cholik said, “for crimes against the king. You’ll be hanged if they find you, swung from the gallows in Diamond Quarter.”

  “Like a common thief?” Raithen arched an eyebrow. “Aye, maybe I’ll be swinging at the end of a gallows like a loose sail at the end of a yardarm, but don’t you think the king would have a special punishment meted out to a priest of the Zakarum Church who had betrayed his confidence and had been telling the pirates what ships carry the king’s gold through the Gulf of Westmarch and through the Great Ocean?”

  Raithen’s remarks stung Cholik. The Archangel Yaerius had coaxed a young ascetic named Akarat into founding a religion devoted to the Light. And for a time, Zakarum Church had been exactly that, but it had changed over the years and through the wars. Few mortals, only those within the inner circles of the Zakarum Church, knew that the church had been subverted by demons and now followed a dark, mostly hidden evil through their inquisitions. The Zakarum Church was also tied into Westmarch and Tristram, the power behind the power of the kings. By revealing the treasure ships’ passage, Cholik had also enabled the pirates to steal from the Zakarum Church. The priests of the church were even more vengeful than the king.