by Ty Johnston
Hanging upon the wall behind them were human skins, stretched wide like deer pelts. Each of the women clutched a human leg, the feet sticking out, and chomped into the burnt flesh. The man held a cooked hand and sucked the dripping fat from between the knuckles. Their faces were covered in red gore.
Then Kron noticed the iron spit over the fire. Skewered above the flames was a torso, a human trunk. Boiling blood seeped from its cracking skin and dropped sizzling into the coals below.
A roar of anger filled the cave and the three eaters looked up in surprise. As Kron charged, he did not know from whom the scream came, but as he brought his sword down to smash one of the women, he realized the scream was his own.
The man chewing on the hand let it fall as he scrambled for a club between his feet. He never had a chance to lift the weapon as Kron smacked him on the back of the head with his sword.
The last woman saw a chance and dove at Kron, landing on his back. She tried clawing at his face with her dirty fingers, but his head was turned away from her. Realizing the fight could be over before it started if he didn’t do something, Kron knelt and dropped his sword. He reached over his shoulders and grabbed the woman by her hair and yanked her over his head. She landed directly in front of him. Kron pounded her face several times with a fist, knocking her unconscious, as he looked up to spy the other woman trying to crawl to the tunnel.
Kron gripped a rock from the cave’s floor and jumped on the crawling woman’s back, bringing his improvised weapon down on her skull. She moved no more. But that didn’t stop Kron. He swung the rock again and again and again until the woman’s head was little more than a bloody, ragged mess.
What stopped him were sounds of running feet and hollering from the tunnel.
He quickly jumped to the other woman and man, and gave each of their heads several hard cracks with the rock.
Then a hefty man in a tunic of hairy human flash charged screaming into the room. Kron did not hesitate. He slung his rock at the man’s face hard enough to break his nose.
The man came on, however, a rusting sword in his hands swinging for Kron’s head.
Kron sidestepped the blow, then kicked out, smashing the cannibal’s left knee and sending him to the dirty cave floor. Kron stomped out, smashing the monster’s fingers and making him drop the sword. Then Kron lifted the dropped weapon and stabbed, the blade running through one of the man’s eyes and entering his brain.
Two more crazy men charged into the room, one brandishing a large sword and the other a club. The two came up short when they saw the death dealt out to their family.
Kron used their hesitation and charged at them with the sword in his hands slicing air.
The man with the club went down first, his chest laid open from groin to throat. The other man had mind enough to lift his sword to block the rain of blows falling on him. For a moment it looked as if he could continue holding off Kron until help arrived, but then the man in black sunk the sword into his opponents leg, making the man scream and fling himself backwards.
Kron was on him in a second, jamming the sword into the center of the man’s chest, impaling him in the muddy floor.
Kron snagged his own sword and darted forward into the tunnel, sheer rage keeping his momentum going. He was in a living nightmare. He could not imagine hell being worse.
***
“Tie them up, captain?” one of the men in leather asked.
Adara sheathed her rapier. She and Randall were surrounded by at least a dozen of the men, each with a sword in their hand and a bow on their backs.
“Not just yet,” the biggest of the men said. He had long, straggly blonde hair and pale skin. “They don’t look like inmates, and I want to find out why they’re here.”
“We’re not exiles,” Randall said. “We’re looking for a friend.”
The big man stepped closer to Adara and Randall. “Who are you to have a friend in the Prisonlands?”
“My name is Randall Tendbones,” Randall said. “We were traveling when our friend was separated from us.”
“You’re a healer by the looks of your robes,” the man said.
Randall noted the man did not seem to fear him as a user of magic.
“And I’m Adara Corvus,” the woman said with a look in her eyes telling the men around her she was not happy to be in her current situation.
“Who is this friend of yours?” the man asked.
Randall glanced at Adara, who nodded to him.
“He’s known as Kron Darkbow,” the healer said.
The big man with yellow hair looked surprised, then he glanced to one of his companions, an older fellow with a bushy beard. “Name ring a bell with you, Frog?”
The man called Frog nodded. “Warden on the West side last I heard.”
“We’re trying to find him,” Adara said. “He might be in trouble.”
Several of the men laughed.
“He’s definitely in trouble if he’s hanging around these parts, missy,” the biggest man said, then bowed. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Captain Weaver, and these are my men.”
“You’re wardens?” Randall asked.
“That’s right,” Frog said, then motioned to the other men. “No need for swords, boys.”
The leather-clad soldiers sheathed their weapons and a few of them moved away to retrieve their horses tied in the distance.
Weaver looked around the den, then turned back to Adara and Randall. “You picked a good spot,” he said. “We’ll camp here for the night.”
“We must go after Kron,” Adara insisted.
“We will wait until morning,” Weaver said as his men began to scrounge for firewood.
“If we wait until morning, Kron will be dead,” Adara said.
“And if we invade Sawney Gean’s territory in the middle of the night, most of us will be dead,” Weaver said.
The other wardens around the camp voiced agreement.
“In the morning,” the large Weaver said to Adara. “I suggest you get some rest until then. And what the blazes are you doing riding through the Prisonlands? Don’t you know about the rebellion?”
Adara and Randall appeared confused.
“Kron had hoped some wardens would help us through the Lands,” Randall said. “We noticed guards missing at a checkpoint. I guess that’s part of the rebellion?”
“The inmates got weapons somehow,” Frog explained as he laid down logs for a fire. “Some armor, too, but we don’t know who gave it to them.”
“The inmates have broken through in several places here in the south,” Weaver went on. “Plenty have escaped, and there’s talk the Eastern Pope is sending an army to help us.”
“Most likely he’ll just invade and take the whole thing over,” Frog said.
Weaver shot a glance at his man. “That’s against the treaty.”
“Doesn’t mean he won’t do it,” Frog said as he sparked a fire with flint and steel.
“Gean stayed put, however,” Weaver said. “We were sent by the Voting Council to root him out, stop him from killing any more wardens.”
Adara shook her head, as if what she was hearing was more than she could comprehend, then she eased away from the others and sat on a fallen tree.
“The truth of the matter is, the Lands are wide open,” Frog said. “Us wardens are doing the best we can, but we’re outnumbered. The inmates aren’t supposed to be armed.”
Randall followed Adara and plopped himself down on a log. “The treaty will be useless after something like this,” he said. “The pope and the Ruling Council will tear it to shreds, and there’s no telling what Kobalos will do.”
“Nothing will happen quick,” Weaver said. “If we can get the borders back under control, then nothing might not happen at all.”
“Or it could mean another war,” Randall said. “Especially if the pope’s army invades.”
Weaver and Frog remained quiet, looking as if they did not like the way the conversation had turned.
“There’s nothing we can do for Kron now,” the healer said, as if reading her thoughts. “We need our rest. And Captain Weaver is right. We will be better off trying to save Kron in the morning.”
Adara remained quiet.
“I give you my word we will find him,” Weaver said, unfolding a sleeping blanket and spreading it on the ground near Frog’s fire.
***
Kron had lost all sense of time. He barely had any cognition of being alive. It occurred to him more than once while charging through the dark tunnel with bones crunching beneath his feet that he had died and gone to hell. Lord Verkain’s war demons couldn’t be worse than the horror that opened before him around every corner. Blood and bodies and bones were everywhere. The bodies were the worst, sliced and chopped and chewed upon.
The tunnel Kron traveled never seemed to end. It twisted and turned and had side branches, but he stuck to the main path, following the trail of bleached jawbones and rib cages until he came out in a cavernous chamber. The ceilings were high and dotted with razor-sharp stalactites like spears falling from above. Several large fires burned in the corners of the room and around each blaze was a group of individuals, the Gean family at dinner, munching upon their own kin and the remains of border wardens.
A trio of wardens still in their leather armor hung upside down along one wall, the men’s throats slit and chunks of skin on their faces missing.
All eyes in the cave were on Kron, most of the men too shocked to move. For a second Kron was surprised they had not been ready for him, but he realized he had run a goodly distance through the cave system.
The shock of seeing Kron suddenly broke and several of the Gean family grabbed weapons.
Kron didn’t move for long moments, watching the monsters gather their instruments of death and begin to make their way between rocks and spear-like mineral deposits. Then he let loose with a roar that jarred the ears of his foes and seemed to shake the very walls of the cave.
Fear registered in the eyes of the approaching cannibals and they halted.
Kron roared again, this time putting the strength of the yell into his legs and arms as he charged forward, into the nearest group of human monsters. He slashed his heavy blade left and right, decapitating one man and gutting another, then jabbed straight ahead to impale. She dropped away with her chest wound sucking on Kron’s sword. For a moment the man in black could not to draw the weapon to him. A blow from a cudgel smacked Kron hard in the shoulder, but he was beyond feeling the pain. He kicked out and connected with his attacker’s groin, then he grabbed the man by the sides of his head and planted his thumbs into the man’s eye sockets. Kron squeezed, forcing his thumbs deeper and deeper into the man’s eyes, burrowing into the skull. The man screamed and spat blood, but to no avail. In seconds he was dead, his skull crushed and his eyes gouged out.
Kron swayed for a moment, catching his breath while staring at the atrocity he had committed. He felt outside of himself, as if he were floating above and looking down upon his own body.
A scream from behind made Kron turn. A trio of the cannibals, two women and a man little older than a boy, charged their way between two boulders.
Kron dropped to a knee and yanked his sword out of the dead body. The first woman was on him then, slashing away with a short curved sword. She sliced along the back of Kron’s left hand, but the wound was shallow, bleeding more than it was dangerous. He slashed out with his own weapon, knocking her sword from her hand.
Kron stopped for a moment, staring the woman in the eyes and giving her a chance to surrender. She did not. She sprang forward, her clawlike fingers reaching out. Kron had no choice. He slid his sword between her ribs.
The other woman and the youth stepped forward, each swinging nail-studded clubs. They were easy work, dead in seconds as Kron cut through their bodies before drawing another breath.
He stared across the cavern then, spotting another dozen or so of the monsters working their way to him. In the tiny part of his mind that was still rational, it dawned on Kron that the arena for his fight was perfect. The ground was too tortuous for his opponents to surround him or for more than a few of them to attack him at once.
He had them all to himself. He could spend all night chopping away at them. And he did.
***
The grizzled old man who was Sawney Gean spat red slobber into the fire in front of him. He glared between the gray hairs that fell before his eyes and watched the flames waltz around a human head, hollow eye sockets staring back at him.
As the night sky turned a dark blue, evidence the sun would be making its appearance soon, the leader of the Gean family shifted his sight to his new favorite weapon. The sword was huge, longer than Gean was tall, and it rested next to him on a layer of fir needles.
Gean smiled. The attacks on the border wardens had gone well, better than Gean could have predicted, but he knew a patrol was near. His scouts, two of his youngest daughters barely in their teens, had told him so. Recent events in the Prisonlands had shifted the weight of power from the wardens to the prisoners, many of whom had already fled. Gean wouldn’t leave. He refused to. And why should he? He had everything he wanted right here. Plenty of food. A decent cave that wasn’t too cold. His family. What more could he find anyplace else? What could upset his little corner of the world? Even if he were recaptured by the wardens, it was unlikely he was to face death; the death sentence was forbidden against exiles as long as they were still within the Lands. It was the law, and the wardens loved their laws.
“Da!” a husky voice yelled from the cave behind Gean.
The cannibal chieftain swiveled on his feet without standing. Despite his pride in his family, he realized many of them were idiots. They often needed him to settle the most simple of disputes, so he was rarely intrigued by whatever dilemma they brought before him.
“Da!” the voice yelled again, and Gean saw Sanual, one of the youngest boys at only thirteen summers, running from the cave.
The boy knocked aside the hanging moss that hid much of the cave’s entrance and skidded to a halt in front of the man who was both his father and his uncle.
“Da!” the boy repeated.
“What is it, youngling?” Gean asked. “Spit it out.”
“It’s that feller we was chasing in the woods, Da,” the boy spoke. “The one who was with them other two that escaped over the river.”
“What of him?” Gean requested. Sanual was a good boy, but he was never too quick in giving out information.
“He’s in the cave!” Sanual nearly yelled. “He’s killin’ everybody. He’s already cut up Roug and Rouphus! And he’s slingin’ some sword left and right and all over the place!”
Sawney Gean’s eyes went hard as he pondered the death being brought upon his family. He realized most of them probably deserved what they were getting, but still, they were his family.
“Round up Torey and Wally,” Sawney ordered. “Have them get the rest of the kin and get back here quick.”
Sanual was also good at taking orders. He scrambled into the woods in search of his family without a question.
“Good boy,” Sawney said as he used his sword to lift himself to standing, his stone-like eyes continuing to stare into the cave’s entrance.
No, no one treated a member of the Gean family like this, he told himself. As Sawney Gean moved toward the cave, he already had plans for torture. He would eat this man slowly, one inch at a time, starting with one of his eyeballs, but leaving the other so the man could witness what was happening to him.
Yes, it was a good life, thought Sawney Gean as he brushed aside the vines over the cave entrance. It was a good life and it would be a good morning. He would have a fine breakfast after fine entertainment.
***
Other than Kron, there was only one other still alive in the cavernous room. The last cannibal was a young man with wild, splayed hair and
a makeshift spear gripped in his hands. The young man, if he could still be considered human, had watched most of his family slaughtered. A few tried to run, but Kron countered their escape attempts with throwing darts and knives, finishing off every last human monster with a blow from his sword before they could dart down one tunnel or another.
Now the sword lay at Kron’s feet, and was drenched in nearly as much gore and blood as was Kron himself. Darkbow leaned over with his hands on his knees. His eyes focused on the last surviving member of the Gean family in the cavern.
The boy stood his ground with his spear clutched at his hips. His teeth were grinding so hard blood was dripping from his gums.
“Do it,” Kron said.
The young cannibal took a step, then hesitated, his eyes shifting to the side of the cave as a new presence entered.
Kron followed the youth’s gaze to see an old man walking into the room. The old man was bent from age, but appeared to have power in the muscles that showed beneath his tunic of human skin. Hanging from a leather scabbard on his back was a sword so long it drug the ground behind him.
“My wife,” Sawney Gean said with sorrow in his voice as he looked down at a dead woman near his feet. He appeared calm outwardly as he saw she had been struck from behind, her back split open to reveal ribs covered in gore.
Sawney Gean looked at Kron Darkbow. The old man’s face was emotionless.
“You have taken my family from me,” the old man said.
Kron reached down and lifted his sword. “Now I will take your life.”
“Patr,” Gean said to the boy with the spear, “kill this man for your father.”
The youth charged without hesitation, his spear aimed forward as he rushed.
Kron had little problem with the boy. His sword slapped aside the tip of the spear, then he lashed out with a fist, catching the youth in the throat and crushing his windpipe.
The boy, struggling for breath, dropped to his knees. He reached out, his hands clawing Kron’s pants as he slid to the cavern floor and died.
