by Greg Benage
Chapter 12
Redmourn came for him at midday. Thorn had spent most of the night and much of the morning puking his guts into a chamber pot. By the time an excited scav burst into the Duck and announced the wight’s arrival, Thorn felt just about ready to die.
Mara grabbed his chin roughly and studied his face. “If you weren’t so damn sweaty, I’d think you were a corpse.”
“Don’t know why I’m sweating when I feel so cold.”
“Can you do this, Caleb? You won’t kill Redmourn by puking on his shoes.”
“Well, he’s here. I guess it won’t make much difference to him if I’m feeling poorly.” Thorn pushed himself up from the table and checked his weapons, and then pulled the iron torq from his neck and set it on the table. He looked at Mara and held her gaze. “If it turns out I ain’t up to it, you run like hell and don’t look back.”
Thorn pushed the bearskin aside and walked out into the middle of the street. Where it passed through the camp, the old stone road was covered over with hard-packed dirt and manure, and the rain had turned it to mud. He looked around at the tents and shanties that pressed in close, saw a few faces peering out at him. Thorn wasn’t sure whether he should hate them or be grateful they even cared enough to be curious.
Finally, he looked down the street towards the ruins and saw Redmourn standing there. The wight didn’t look any different than he had before, red paint and all. He stood in the middle of the street with his hands at his sides, waiting patiently. Thorn drew his sword and his iron knife, and gestured for the wight to come on. Redmourn flashed a grin and advanced.
Thorn knew it the moment the wight stepped inside the hexing circle. Redmourn bent over, clutching his middle like he was about to heave his breakfast onto the dirt. After the morning he’d had, Thorn knew just how he felt. The wight’s legs trembled, then buckled, and he fell to his knees. He raised his head, and Thorn was surprised to see a look on his face that wasn’t rage or hatred. He had a little smile that crooked one corner of his mouth, and it was only the exposed fang that made it look like a snarl. It was a look that said, “I can’t believe I just fell for that.”
“The stones are strong,” Redmourn said. “Star-metal, buried in the mud, black as night, and cold. But something else…”
“My wizard rubbed some magic on them.”
“Ah, of course,” the wight said. “The magic of my fallen city.”
“It ain’t really yours. Not anymore.”
“No, you are right, it is not mine. Not anymore.”
“I guess you know I mean to kill you. That’s what we came here for, the both of us, and we might as well get to it.” Thorn gripped his sword and took a step towards the wight.
“You mistake…discomfort…for incapacitation,” said Redmourn. He climbed slowly to his feet and drew the bronze sword and hatchet from his belt. He cocked his head and looked at Thorn. “For that matter, you do not look entirely well yourself. I believe we can still have our fight, you and I.”
Thorn could have counted the number of duels he’d been in on one hand, and the counting would have left a couple of fingers unused. When he was a soldier, a battle always began with formations, maneuvers and bright banners waving, and it ended in a chaotic melee. The lines met, they merged like vicious, rutting beasts, and before long it was hard to tell friend from foe and even harder to care.
In a melee, a soldier’s most valuable skill wasn’t strength or speed or endurance—it was awareness. If you knew who would try to kill you next, where they were and what they were doing, you’d know how to deal with the man in front of you. You’d see a comrade sink his blade into the enemy, and you’d know he was just moments from turning and putting that steel in your adversary’s back. No need to take any chances—you just had to buy a few seconds until it was time for your opponent to die. Or you’d see an enemy do the same to your ally, and you’d know you had to strike quickly before you got a blade in your own back.
Thorn always felt like he could live through a melee by keeping his wits about him and getting some luck. He’d kill when he had to, but most of it was just a matter of doing his best not to die. Stay alert, commit to the fight only when you had to and wait for the beast to pass you by.
His fight with Redmourn wouldn’t be like that. The beast was watching them both, and it would take one of them before the day was done. Thorn felt the fear spread out inside him, slow and cold. His heart raced and his belly tightened. He always told himself he wasn’t afraid to die, but that wasn’t really the truth. He wasn’t afraid of being dead—dying still scared the piss out of him.
Redmourn stood perfectly still with his weapons at his sides. Thorn moved around the edge of the hexing circle, one foot crossing over the other, and the wight turned with him. Thorn wasn’t so much looking for an opening as steeling himself for what was to come. Feint with the dagger, thrust with the sword.
He lunged and Redmourn stepped aside. The wight’s sword flicked out and laid open Thorn’s cheek, from just under his eye down to his chin. Thorn staggered back and pressed the back of his hand against the wound. It came away slick with blood. The wight stood and waited, lowering his weapons once again. Blood dripped from the point of his bronze sword into the mud.
Thorn rushed in and slashed at the wight with his dagger. Redmourn caught it with his hatchet, twisted his wrist, and sent the dagger spinning away. Thorn chopped down with his sword and the wight slapped the blade aside. He swung at Redmourn’s head, and the wight ducked low, hooked the hatchet around the back of his ankle and pulled his leg out from under him. Thorn teetered and fell flat on his back.
Redmourn circled as Thorn scrambled back to his feet. “Some of my people believe that when you consume a blunt’s blood, you take some of his spirit into you,” the wight said.
Thorn didn’t respond. He’d never had much use for gabbing during a fight, and anyway he didn’t have the breath for it. His chest heaved and his nose whistled as he pulled air in and pushed it back out. He climbed to his feet and advanced. He thrust with the sword—once high, once low—and the wight danced back.
“I think it is nonsense,” Redmourn continued. “I have fed on more blunts than I can count, and every one the same. Perhaps it is merely a superstition, or perhaps blunts have no spirit to take. Who can say? Your friends, the big one and the blind one, they tasted the same.”
Thorn snarled and swung his sword. Redmourn met it with his own blade, and the impact stung Thorn’s hand like a hive of bees. He bulled in, swept a knee into the wight’s groin and heard the air go out of him with a soft hiss. Then Redmourn’s hatchet bit into his side, just above the hip bone, and Thorn’s brief moment of satisfaction was shattered by an explosion of agony. He let out a howl and clasped the wight in a grapple, his right arm around Redmourn’s back, still holding his sword, and his free hand hauling on the wight’s long, fine hair. Thorn sawed awkwardly at Redmourn’s back with the blade and pulled savagely at his hair, wrenching his head to the side.
Then Thorn leaned in and sank his teeth into the wight’s neck. He tore at the flesh, grinding his teeth together, and blood welled in his mouth. Redmourn shrieked and shoved him away. Thorn stumbled back, his wounded hip gave out and he tumbled hard into the mud. He wiped the wight’s blood from his lips with the back of his hand, and spat. “You were right. I don’t taste no spirit, either.”
Redmourn started laughing. He dropped the hatchet and pressed a hand to his neck, pulled it away and looked at the blood on his fingers. “My princess used to bite me, when we were first becoming acquainted. You people simply do not have the teeth for it. We call you blunts because of your flat, blocky faces, you know, but it goes for your teeth as well. The grinding and the gnawing—it really is quite painful.”
“Glad to hear it,” Thorn said. He had a hand pressed against the deep gash in his side, and still his shirt and trousers were soaked with blood. He sat in a pool of it, the edges slowly expanding as he watched. He gripped the hilt of his
sword with the blade point-down in the mud and used it to pull himself to his feet. Redmourn darted in and kicked the blade away, and Thorn collapsed on his back.
The wight straddled him, and Thorn lashed out with his fists. Redmourn seized his wrists in either hand and slowly pressed his arms down, pinning them to the ground. Thorn strained, and thrashed, and twisted, but he couldn’t dislodge the wight.
Redmourn flashed his fangs. “This is how it’s done, Caleb Thorn.” The wight bent down and Thorn felt hot breath against his throat. He felt the curious sensation of his skin resisting the fangs, and then he heard a crisp snick as it surrendered and the wight’s teeth sank deep.
Thorn stared up into the clear blue sky. The sun was high overhead, but his vision had darkened and the light caused him no discomfort. It’s time to sleep. As he had every night for all the years of this, his second life, his life alone, he tried to conjure the faces of his wife and son in his mind. And they were there, finally, at the last.
He saw his wife sitting by the window in the house he had built, rocking their child in her arms. The light touched their golden hair, mother and son, and set it aglow. His wife turned to him and smiled, and it didn’t matter anymore that this image could not be real. He looked into her eyes, blue as the northern sky, and studied the line of her nose, the curve of her lips, the delicate arch of her ears. He looked at his son, eyes closed, thick lashes against fair skin, sleeping peacefully in his mother’s arms. The child’s lips were slightly parted, and his small chest rose and fell with his breathing. Thorn reached for them.
The idyllic portrait was shattered by the sound of Redmourn’s retching. Thorn blinked his eyes, tore his hands free and shoved the wight off of him. Redmourn toppled onto his back and Thorn rolled away. He rose to his hands and knees, and then struggled to his feet.
The wight was choking and coughing, vomiting dark blood onto his face and chest. His back arched, his chest heaved and blood spattered and sprayed with every savage convulsion.
Thorn stumbled over to his sword and winced as he bent down to pick it up. “Copperas,” he said. “It’s iron, of some kind or other. The Schoomen use it to treat thin blood.” He laughed, but it turned into a hiss when the pain flared in his side. “Thin blood. Ain’t that something? Well, that’s how my wizard learned about it, anyway, but he used it in larger doses as a poison. I guess it works even better on wights than it does on merchant princes.”
People were filing out of the Duck now, drifting out of the tents and shanties, too. A few of them had swords or other proper weapons—bandits, probably—and the rest held knives, shovels, hammers and axes. They formed a ragged circle around Thorn and Redmourn, and it tightened slowly as they came on, like a noose around a condemned man’s neck. Thorn felt the show of courage and solidarity was somewhat tardy, but he didn’t dwell on it. They may have been late, but they didn’t have to come out at all.
Jem stepped forward, holding a heavy miner’s pick in both hands. The scav looked to Thorn as if he were asking permission. Thorn nodded and gestured at the wight with his sword. “Go on, then. Make it clean and fast.”
The scav moved up next to the wight and looked around at the others. Thorn had an uneasy feeling about it, looking back at Jem, but that was the thing about uneasy feelings—they came on fast, but a man was always slow to act on them. The scav raised the pick over his head and brought it down.
“No,” Redmourn said, black blood spattering his lips and face. He caught the pick in both hands, the iron tip no more than an inch from his forehead. He moved faster than a striking snake, tearing the pick from Jem’s hand and rolling into a crouch. He swung the pick into the side of the scav’s head, driving the point through his skull and out the other side. Blood splashed on the ground and the force of the blow hammered Jem’s corpse into the mud.
Redmourn charged the line of scavs, and they didn’t do much to slow him down. Thorn himself didn’t have time to do more than lift his sword and take a few faltering steps after the fleeing wight. Redmourn raced down the street, making for the sanctuary of the trees, and Thorn was stunned by how fast he moved.
An arrow sprouted from the wight’s chest. He stumbled ahead a few strides and then stopped, tilting to one side and clawing at the shaft. Thorn looked over at the Duck, up where Mara maintained a position on the roof of the tower. She already had a second arrow nocked. She drew the string back to her cheek and loosed. Redmourn flicked his hand out in a blur and slapped the arrow aside. He started running again, maybe twenty strides from the tree line, and Thorn hobbled down the street after him.
Mara’s third arrow planted itself in the wight’s guts and the fourth pierced his throat, right under his chin and out the back of his neck. Redmourn fell to his knees, tore the arrow from his throat in a fountain of blood, and started crawling. Thorn came after him, but the wound in his side was on fire and he couldn’t walk much faster than Redmourn could crawl.
Quinix came out from behind the Duck and approached the wounded wight cautiously. He held something tightly in one fist, and dragged the iron-barbed net behind him with the other. When he was still well out of the wight’s reach, he threw out his hand and a grainy green cloud settled over Redmourn. More copperas—Thorn had been sure the wizard made him eat it all the night before. Redmourn choked and gagged, pawing at his eyes. Quinix took the net in both hands, just like Thorn had showed him, and cast it over the struggling wight.
Redmourn howled and collapsed into the mud. Then he started crawling again. Quinix looked to Thorn with an expression on his face that said he was all out of tricks. Another arrow buzzed down from the tower and pierced Redmourn between the shoulder blades. The iron barbs of the net cut deep into his flesh, and the wight kept crawling. He had reached the edge of the forest by the time Thorn caught up to him.
It occurred to Thorn that if all men died like Redmourn, there might be a lot less killing in the world. No living thing was meant to endure what they’d done to the wight, and yet he still lived. Ragged breaths rasped in and out of him and sprayed blood from the ugly hole in his throat. Where the copperas had touched him, it left hideous burns on the pale flesh, like the work of some caustic acid from an alchemist’s laboratory. Angry red wounds flared around the iron barbs, and jagged black lines radiated from them like cracks in glass.
Redmourn got one arm free of the net. He reached out and placed the palm of his bloody hand on the gnarled roots of a great oak. The wight made a sound, no more than a murmur, and Thorn couldn’t tell if it was a word or a dying breath. He placed the point of his sword against the back of Redmourn’s neck and pressed down, feeling the blade cut through bone and flesh into the soft, blood-soaked loam of the forest floor.
Thorn stood over the body for a long while, both hands on the hilt of his sword, holding himself upright. After a time, he was joined by Quinix and then by Mara. “That’s it, then,” the wizard said. “It’s over now.”
Thorn didn’t answer. He cocked his head and listened. He couldn’t understand the whispering of the trees, but he knew what it meant. The wood whispered of vengeance.
###
Eldernost: Book Two
A SERPENT IN THE STONE
Coming August 2012
https://www.eldernost.com
If you enjoyed this story, don’t miss The Underworld Cycle, an urban fantasy series by Greg Benage, writing as Cameron Haley.
MOB RULES
SKELETON CREW
“Retribution” in HARVEST MOON
Available from Luna Books in digital and print at fine bookstores everywhere.
