by Dylan Doose
Two horses were at the head of the cart, black as the night sky behind them. They were almost invisible but for their wide black eyes reflecting the flames on the men’s torches, and the steam that shot from their noses in the bitingly cold air.
It felt a long walk to that cart. Every step closer, the ache in his eyes began to recede, and Alma’s animalistic sobs from the house began to fade. There was no fear in him. No sadness. No rage. Just one word and one name. Murder. Salvenius.
* * *
“I will not keep you from the dark, for I cannot keep the dark from you. When night falls and the stars fade, when black clouds smother the moon, and all the lanterns of the cities burn out, when the candles have all melted and the fireflies have withered and died, from darkness you cannot hide,” said the mother as she rocked her golden-haired child into sleep.
* * *
Chapter Three
Hunting’s a Gentleman’s Sport
The thing left a trail of thick black blood and green pus. More a stream than a trail, if Theron Ward, hunter of monsters, wanted to be precise. It was wounded and wounded horribly, but not dead.
Grimmshire was not the only town ruined by the plague. As far as Theron knew, the whole country had a piece of it. The rats came with those terrible black boils. Rats larger than dogs. In the beginning they came in swarms. Now they appeared alone or in small roving packs, as if a once powerful bond or tether that bound the group had been weakened.
Four years ago, they had come and spewed their filth into the town. Two days was all it had taken until half the town was crawling and squealing with the rats, puking up pus and bursting black boils. The other half of the town became the swarm’s feast.
Those who didn’t turn simply couldn’t. The priests said that only the sinners turned, that the pious were protected from the plague. Theron doubted that, for he was not a pious man and he knew a thing or two about sin—sins of the flesh mostly—and he had been exposed to enough plague to wipe out a city.
Yet he had not turned.
Theron suspected something more sinister than nature, or the work of gods and devils to be the villainy incarnate that had unleashed such wickedness upon the land. He suspected something more human, or slightly more than human. Unpopular opinion, but his opinion nonetheless.
It was midday, but it was dark in the ruined town. The clouds shrouded the sun, gray and threatening, but not a drop of rain. The once green pastures were yellow as far as the eye could see. Once this had been a bustling, happy little town. Now there were just the colors of pus and piss and ash all around, beneath those suffocating gray clouds.
There came a rustling sound from the chapel, the one building in the town not entirely burned to the ground. It had been painted white when it was built, and painted black with soot and ash when death had come to its town. The stained glass windows were shattered, shards of the vibrant panes scattered round in the dirt and the yellow grass.
“How appropriate,” Theron muttered to himself, as he slowly unsheathed his silver claymore from his back. It gave the singular squeal of scraping steel as it left the scabbard, and he smiled. As his blade made its sound, so did the wounded thing from within the chapel. It was in there, suffering and dying, thanks to its earlier encounter with Theron.
Deep breath. Time to finish the job. Do I lure it out? Or do I finish it off within?
Theron often faced such dilemmas on his hunts and, as he always did, he flipped a coin, a Brynthian ducat, the face of the king on one side and the dragon on the other. He flipped the coin. Dragon.
Theron burst through the door. His skin crawled at the sight of it; they always made his skin crawl, though he had killed over a hundred. He could kill over a thousand and still his skin would crawl.
Theron was a beast hunter, had been for nearly a decade, but the rats had always disturbed him the most, more than any creature or demon. What made the things so terrible was not the giant, rotting buckteeth that burst from the mouth. It was not the boils or the tufts of matted fur. Not the long tail or the brutish muscles, not the naked, sagging female breasts or the male parts dangling, filthy and crusted.
It was the eyes, for the eyes remained entirely human. And so, Theron was certain that a human being was still left in there, with no control over what it had become and begging for its torment to end.
This one had been a woman once, perhaps a mother, a lover, a sister, a daughter. For a dreadful moment he pictured his own sister taking the form of the wretched thing before him.
The creature was a hulking brute of a thing, hunched over and contorted in pain, half her body covered in muscle—monstrous heaps of muscle—anatomically all wrong and grotesque. The other half was pulsating with yellow and black boils, bubbling and bleeding. Each one looked as if it had its own heartbeat as it heaved and writhed. Theron had shot it twice with his crossbow. Two bolts stuck out of the creature’s chest; one was cracked and dangling and the other remained deep, blood oozing from the partially clogged holes every time it took a breath. The wounds would have killed any man in moments. He had shot the foul beast three hours earlier and nearly twenty kilometers away in the count’s city of Norburg.
It was done running, though. Its breath came out heavy and in gurgling rasps, which told Theron that there was a good hole in one of its lungs. It retched and a pint of black blood poured from its—her—rotten maw.
Theron pulled down his black-brimmed hat, nice and tight so it wouldn’t fall off. Then he rushed at the rat that had once been a woman—and somewhere inside still was—both hands tight on his claymore, his black coat billowing behind.
She was wounded and in a corner, and, like all beasts, that made her all the more dangerous. She squealed and charged, swinging her muscled arm at Theron, razor claws at the end. He ducked under it, but with immense speed the rat lashed out with a back swing. Theron brought down his claymore on the rotten flesh, but he only had room for a half swing, and so his blade was lodged halfway through the arm. The rat screamed and twisted away, spraying Theron with its filthy ichor.
Killing was a hard thing. Rata Plaga or not, the fetid beast still felt pain. The greatest difference for Theron between killing one of them or a man in combat was that the screams of the rats were always worse.
Deep breaths, deep breaths and ferocity until the task is done. Theron Ward, monster hunter, was a man who never flinched.
They backed away from each other. Theron retreated up the altar steps backward, looking into the human eyes of the plague rat as he did.
“Come to your peace. End your suffering, woman.”
It made a sound as if to speak, but only released the squeal of a rat.
“I know that somewhere in there you hear me. You know my words. You understand me.” He could see a terrible woe in her eyes, the woe that came with being the monster in one’s own nightmare. The woe in a dream where one was a passenger to their own wickedness. When he stared at that singular despair, he did so with a haunting dread, a dread that, one day far from now, after years of slaying vile beasts and evil men, he too would share those eyes of woe. He swallowed that dread and carried on. “The fear is gone because you have given up on fear. You have accepted you cannot wake, that the only release is death, but there is no control and death is not yours to take. Let me give it to you.”
She made a deep sound, like a sob, the sob a human makes when it sounds like an animal, and again she retched, pus oozing from her lungs and guts out between her rotting teeth.
“I will set you free,” Theron yelled in a great fury, but his anger was not at the thing before him—his anger was at whatever thing had allowed it to come to be.
The beast roared, enraged that Theron had contacted the woman within, furious that he had appealed to the vessel. As the hellspawn came ripping forward, its human eyes welled with tears. Perhaps of hope, perhaps a symptom of the plague.
Theron raised his mighty silver claymore, the blade sharper than winter’s bite. He leapt from the altar and broug
ht down the sword with the strength brought on by a near decade of swinging that heavy sword, of riding, of brawling, of hunting monsters. As the honed edge of the heavy blade rent through flesh and bone, as it obliterated skull and brain, the rat screamed, Theron screamed, and together in that moment they each found peace.
* * *
A small stream ran just north of Grimmshire. Theron took a moment to wash the filth from his hands, for it was a nasty business cutting out a heart and putting it in a jar. It was nastier still when it was the heart of a Rata Plaga. He felt calm, as he often did after a hunt. There were always nerves in the stalking, in the chasing, and in the killing, but when it was done there was a surreal calmness. He grinned to himself as he looked into the heart within the jar, another little story in the saga of the legendary hunter Theron Ward.
He whistled a tune that his mother used to hum to him as he walked the muddy road back to Norburg. He whistled past a procession of barebacked, hooded men, known around Brynth as Doom Sayers. The cult had formed at the very beginning of the Rata Plaga, and they had been walking through mud and mire, whipping themselves, ever since. They sang some hymn or some prayer—Theron did not know—and whipped their backs bloody as they walked down the path.
Theron whistled as he passed a dead tree with strange carvings and the skeletons and fresh corpses of woodland creatures hanging from the branches. He whistled as he passed by barren farms with skeletal serfs tilling dead ground. Brynth was a nasty place, and Theron had realized early on that to deal with the nastiness sometimes it was best to squint your eyes and whistle a tune.
He reached a crossroads; from it the city of Norburg was in view, if he kept to the western path. From the northern one there came rolling a carriage, two black horses pulling and a good twenty men marching with it, all armed to the teeth.
Theron paused at the fork and stared a moment.
“Who goes there?” the man at the front of the brigade called out.
“Theron, Lord Wardbrook. I am under contract to the Honorable Count Salvenius to deal with the rat that killed a man in Norburg. This I have done,” Theron called.
“Very good. At least one of Norburg’s problems is bloody solved.”
“One of them?” Theron asked. “Are there others?”
“A bloody sorcerer burned down the chapel just a week ago.” The brigade was now at the fork, and they turned to go in the same direction as Theron.
“Yes, I heard about that,” said Theron. He had heard about it, but he was not entirely sure he believed it.
“Are you heading back to Norburg now?” asked the leader.
“As a matter of fact, I am. Perhaps I will travel the rest of the way with you lot.”
The leader blushed red. “I’m afraid not, Lord Wardbrook. We are under distinct orders to not allow anyone else, other than the King of Brynth himself, in the party with us.” He nodded to the wagon. “Delicate package, you see?” The man offered a meek smile.
Theron scowled. “It’s not but another quarter hour walk. I can see the front gate to the city from where I now stand.”
“I’m sorry, my lord.”
“Well then, what would you have me do?” When the man made no answer, Theron continued, “Are you implying that I should stand here and wait for your entourage to walk safely through the gates and only then follow?”
“I’m sorry, my lord.”
Theron sighed. “You’re damn well lucky I am under your count’s employ. For if this situation that is now occurring were to be occurring under any other pretense, you and I would be having an issue, sir. I’ve dueled over far less.”
“Pretense?” the man asked.
Theron gave a circular wave and then gestured them on.
* * *
Lower Norburg smelled of something foul. All of Norburg smelled of something foul, and in truth so did every city Theron had ever had the pleasure—or in this case, the displeasure—of visiting, but Lower Norburg’s stench was in a class of its own. Four years since the Rata Plaga had mostly subsided, the majority of those susceptible had already turned, and most of those who were immune had been ripped apart and eaten by the swarm of the susceptible.
Then they just left. The swarm of human rats simply disappeared. The priests said they went back to hell. Theron doubted that, because he was still being hired to hunt them whenever they popped up and were spotted by a village or in the woods. This was the first time in four years that one had been seen in the city. It was as if it got lost on its way to somewhere else.
A grimy, soot-covered citizen looked out of a broken window of a second-story home as Theron walked down the cobbles of the main thoroughfare. Theron offered the man a smile; he always smiled at townsfolk.
Always smile at strangers, Theron. Nothing puts a wayward soul at ease like a friendly smile, his mother used to say. His mother was a strange woman, and she and Theron were not on entirely good terms, but he did still follow some of her advice. For better or worse.
The man in the window spat on his own floor and receded into the shadow.
Theron grinned and shook his head. The fellow was likely overwhelmed at having had a personal glimpse at the monster hunter Theron Ward.
He had been to Norburg many a time before the plague hit. It had been painfully overpopulated, with three or sometimes four families crammed into a single home. At all hours of the day and night, the city streets had been crammed with human traffic. Shopkeepers would be yelling the day’s bargain; children would be running, their mothers hollering after them. Street urchins would be picking pockets and nabbing food from carts, city guards hot on their tails. Theron never liked all the commotion, but this was even worse. There was only one family for every four houses now, a shopkeeper was a rare sight, and a child even rarer.
Theron felt a pinch of guilt as he looked at the miserable place—survivor’s guilt, as well as the guilt of wealth. He was a wealthy young man, largely by inheritance of a fine country estate. Wardbrook, thirty kilometers north of Grimmshire, was where he called home, all twenty-two rooms and four hundred acres. Indeed, Theron was rich, and he did feel guilty, but not guilty enough to give his land and wealth away. What could they do with it anyway? All the money in the world wouldn’t fix what happened here. Their problems can’t be bought away, they must be fought away.
Theron jogged up the high steps that led to the open gate separating Lower and Upper Norburg. He walked into the lavish and abandoned the lowly. Upper Norburg was the perfect opposite to its lower counterpart. The sky was still gray, but the upper city burst with rich color and life. The noble class drank, gambled, ate, and fucked with vigor unmatched by the times before the plague. As if coming so close to death awakened a stronger desire for life within them. Or some such nonsense. To Theron they were nothing but spoiled scum, nearly as bad as the monsters he hunted. What he hated most about them was how close he was to being them, and that was why he had taken up the hunt.
Before seeing Honorable Count Salvenius and collecting the bounty, Theron thought it would be appropriate to retire to his rooms at the inn, have a hot bath, and change in to something more courtly than his gore-drenched overcoat and hat.
He walked through the door of the inn, and without looking at its keeper, a grouchy old lady whose name Theron had forgotten, said, “Bath—hot, please, very hot. Soup as well, with meat preferably. I know you have it. Some bread also. Something heavy. I’m very hungry.” He was halfway up the stairs when he was done delivering his demands to the innkeeper, then he turned to look at the woman for a moment. She was old, fat, and scowling. He smiled at her as wide as he could with his perfectly straight white teeth.
The grouchy lady scowled all the more at Theron’s smile, as if she was anticipating what his final request would be.
“And if you don’t mind, could you send up that servant girl. Uhm… Caroline? Yes, indeed, Caroline was her name. I must talk to her… about the manner in which… she makes the bed?”
“Will that be all, Mas
ter Ward?” The innkeeper snarled, her face all wrinkled and mean.
“Yes, that would be splendid, thank you.” Theron bounded up the rest of the steps terribly excited for a hot bath, a hot meal, and a fiery Caroline. He had paid the innkeeper four times the standard fee for his stay, so although she was a foul old bat, she was willing to please.
Theron had seen the bruises on the lovely Caroline’s arms, no doubt inflicted by the goblin-ess under whom she was employed. It was his duty to always save the damsel in distress from any beast—in this case, it was a very human beast. He wasn’t quite sure yet how his current actions amounted to saving her, but he would figure that out later.
The hot meal came first, and since the inn was located in the upper district of Norburg, it was not half bad—not nearly as good as Bilfred would have made it at Wardbrook, but pretty decent nonetheless. Theron hummed a tune as he ate and watched two servants fill his tub. He had been paying for the King’s Suite, so his rooms had a monstrous bed, a tub, a hulking wardrobe, and a wonderful full-length mirror. The straw-stuffed mattress was fresh, the linens clean, and Theron counted himself lucky to have found such a miraculous place. Theron wasn’t sure if he liked the mirror or the bath more.
When he was done with his meal and his bath, Caroline knocked at the door. A perfect evening after a hard day’s work.
“Do come in,” Theron called through the door.
“Missus Roche says you summoned me, my lord?” Caroline looked at Theron for a moment then blushed and looked at the floor. That was because he was standing in the center of the room in a wide stance and his hands on his hips, in the same garb he wore at birth.
