Fire and Sword

by Dylan Doose

  “If Ken didn’t make it, Theron would not have harmed you. You know that, right?”

  “He is a fearsome man. I have never seen anyone fight like he. Not ever, and I hope I never shall again, but that is not why I thank the divinity. I am glad your companion is alive. I have heard terrible things of him, yet all I saw was self-sacrifice for helpless strangers. And you, young wizard, you and you alone have shaped my opinion on those of your ilk. Not the Emerald Witch, but you, bringer of the ravens and the flame. You will forever be to me and all those in this hall a savior, a protector divine. Grim heroes you may all be, but heroes you are, both those who lived and the one who fell.”

  Those close by raised their cups in toast. Even Fabius raised his. He was disheveled, his thin mustache was unkempt, and his shirt was stained. He was a better man for it.

  Aldous raised his goblet to Chayse… Chayse… He was glad the duke did not say her name. He could not bear to hear her name.

  * * *

  Caroline was a country girl, a sweet, boisterous country girl. Mama raised Caroline all alone; she never spoke of Papa, not once, not even his name. Caroline craved excitement, so she left Mama’s little abode. On the back of a donkey to Norburg she rode. High hopes and dreams did the country girl hold in her breast; perhaps she would meet a handsome man and together they would nest. A handsome man she met, such a handsome man was he: blond locks like an angel and muscles like a beast. He loved her once and off he went. She prayed that he’d return. When there came a knocking, her high hopes and dreams would learn that at her country home she should have stayed, for the rats they took her.

  Where she went she could not say. All she knew was that it was to some foul nest, and soon she would bear children to suckle on her breast.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Spawning Pit

  The green mist shied from the flame of the torch. The witch’s hollow was damp, and the walls crawled with viscous pus and other putrid filth that slowly slipped down to the stone floor. The tunnels were numerous, but the choice was clear, for a most hellish sound echoed from one, a distant squealing and the moaning of women… Deep and guttural, heavy and crushed.

  “Theron Ward!” The voice of the witch echoed through the tunnels. It whirled the mist and slid the slime.

  “Reveal yourself!” Theron roared. Fearful squeals and heavier moans, frantic and in great distress, were his answer.

  “Turn back. Leave my home, devil,” the Emerald Witch wailed as the hunter descended ever deeper into the dreadful tunnels. The squealing and moaning grew and grew. The green fog thickened and a distinct scent of rotting beef liver burned in his nose. Some strange organic heat began to permeate through his mail and cloak, and moistness thickened the air.

  “What are you mustering in the deeps, witch? What foulness causes such stench?” Theron spat, bile rising in his throat. The ungodly moaning became so loud he feared the walls might crumble.

  “Leave them be! Don’t you harm them, don’t you harm my sweetlets!” The witch’s voice crackled with woe. “You have taken enough from me. I will leave Brynth. I will abandon the Covenant of the Leviathan if you just let my sweetlets be.”

  “I know not of what you speak, but I have come for your life, hell specter, and before I leave this cavern I will hear the banshee scream. You killed my sister, slaughtered the innocents of Norburg, and rid Dentin of many sons, fathers, and husbands. You have already chosen the price. I am merely here to collec—”

  Even with the torch, the ground was black, so Theron was caught unawares by the pit he fell through. The fall was not far, perhaps only five feet until he hit the fluid. Waist deep, it splashed into his face as he hit the bottom. He kept his balance and kept the torch dry. It remained lit. Part of him wished it hadn’t.

  The first thing to hit him was the immense power of the odor. Rotten liver, shit, rats. He retched and spewed up his meager breakfast.

  The next thing that his mind forced itself to accept was the sound. And then the sight of them, a horror he could barely understand.

  They tried to talk, to shriek, to beg, to do only the devil knows what, but all that came was a most grotesque and gluttonous groaning. There they were, the young women taken from Norburg. They were women no longer, but rather chained monstrosities, things so revolting, so pathetic that Theron felt his skin crawl, and a cold, sick sweat drenched him head to toe.

  They were naked, and pus pulsed from a thousand terrible sores. They had grown more breasts, like the teats of a pig, and their offspring—naked things that looked half rat, half human child, with a layer of flesh still over their eyes—squealed and suckled blindly.

  The fluid, the foul-smelling, rotten, liver-scented fluid, Theron then understood was a pool of afterbirth and filth. Again his stomach heaved, but it was dry.

  Not in all his years of the hunt, not in his worst nightmares, could he even fathom the blasphemy to man that was that pit.

  “Don’t harm them. Let them feed, let the sweetlets feed.” The witch was close. He could hear her, but he could not see her. The torch reflected on the surface of the fluid and the spawning pit was nearly fully lit, a score of brood mothers, half reclining, and hundreds of the blind child-rats. The witch hid amongst them.

  Theron intended to dig her out.

  His claymore severed undeveloped spine and skull like nothing. The blind things shrieked, and the first mother howled and wept. Theron did not know if it was in human joy or a mutated distress. It did not matter. Nothing mattered except killing that witch and crawling out of this cruel dream.

  When the whelps were cleared, he raised his blade for the mother, possessed by a demon of disgust, mad and frantic. But his haze was broken for just a moment as he looked the forsaken thing in the eyes.

  He knew them.

  The sweet lass from the inn in Norburg, it was her. The redheaded girl. Caroline was her name. Horror congealed in his gut, but he held his place.

  “I will free you, Caroline. I free you from this.” The claymore killed quickly.

  The other brood mothers sounded a whimpering symphony of pleas, pleas for release, for the freedom of death.

  “I shall emancipate you all.” Theron’s roar echoed in the pit, and the child-rats yowled in hellish answer.

  The witch screamed and sobbed, still hidden, lurking and squiggling somewhere in the cesspool of afterbirth.

  “Monster! Devil!” she shouted. “No more I beg you, no more!”

  Theron swung his heavy sword side to side. He felt not the fatigue in his arms as he burned with torch and cut with blade, screaming, all the while trying to release some of the fire from the furnace of trauma that burned in his belly.

  “I can listen to them sob no longer,” wailed the Emerald Witch.

  “Then reveal yourself and die.” Theron hacked his claymore down atop the skull of another one of the wretched things.

  She emerged for an instant before him from behind one of brood mothers. He caught a glimpse of the witch, her long black hair now crusted gray filth, her emerald eyes a muted glow, more the mud on the forest floor than a green canopy overhead. Then she submerged into the pool. The fluid bubbled for a few moments as Theron drew closer, his torch and sword at the ready. This is where it ends. The hunt has led me here.

  The Emerald Witch broke the surface.

  The Plague Witch she had become.

  Her flesh grew and swelled before his eyes. Her jaw unhinged and her tongue extended from the mouth, more a tentacle than a tongue, with a hole in the tip. The tentacle dipped into the pool of placenta, blood, and offal. It throbbed as it drank, and the Plague Witch’s body grew larger and larger still as it consumed the ooze.

  Indeed, this is where it ends, but it is not over yet.

  The witch’s fingers morphed into tentacles, and her gut and breasts swelled and greened beneath the expanding yellow skin.

  The hunter steeled his mind; he steeled his focus and went forth. He was not Theron Ward now,
he was the hunter, and all manner of beast and fiend, no matter the realm, was his game.

  “This is for my sister, and my friends.” He charged forward, slogging through the waist-deep goop, and swung his claymore one-handed, a mad painter of death and violence, the witch the canvas before him. When slashed apart, she would be his greatest masterpiece.

  The tentacles on her left hand shot out like hurled spears. The blade met them, and three of them sprayed hot fluid as they tore from the hand. She screamed and her children answered: the blind rats squealed, some swam, and others crawled toward Theron. Hundreds. It did not matter.

  Their great mother wept as she flailed at Theron. He back-stepped and set torch and sword to her “sweetlets.” Something grabbed him from beneath the surface. And there was a pressure on his mail boot on the shin. He lifted his foot and stomped down, and he felt a fragile skull burst beneath the pressure, the thing’s brains and blood now mingled with the birthing ooze of the rat kin.

  As he held off the swarm, the witch returned her long tentacle tongue into the liquid and drank. As she did, the severed fingers grew back.

  The burn in his muscles was beginning to grind through his rage, his desire to kill, and his desire to survive. He pressed forward, bashing and hacking his way through the useless whelps. One leapt upon his back, then another. They clung to his legs, and although most of them did not even yet have teeth, could not even bite, they weighed him down.

  The witch shot out her tentacles; his sword arm was too heavy with the weight of her litter to sever the attacking limb this time. Tendrils wrapped tight round his sword arm and squeezed so hard he dropped his blade. Then the vile serpentine limbs grabbed him by the legs.

  He went under.

  Submerged completely.

  It went in his eye, in his ruined socket. His mouth. His nose. The taste alone nearly killed him, driving him into hysteria; he struggled madly, but the rat things weighed him down, smothering him, drowning him in the spawning pool.

  Stop.

  Relax.

  The hunter stopped struggling, his prey dragging him closer, closer. He began to rise from the mire of grime by the legs, the tentacles pulling him up. He fought not at all. The rats swam and crawled off him. His feet broke the surface, his body, his head.

  Stay limp.

  “Momma will squeeze out his blood, my sweetlets! Momma will turn his bones to jelly. Momma will feed you.”

  Theron’s torch had been extinguished when he was submerged, but he could smell the breath of the witch as she spoke. He heard the tongue slithering from the mouth, saliva dripping. It wrapped around his neck slowly, thinking the hunter was no longer a threat.

  The prey was wrong.

  So certain he was out of the fight, the witch left his arms unrestrained. When he grabbed the tongue the witch tried to tighten it, to crush Theron’s throat and end it. He dipped his chin and flexed his mighty neck muscles. The defense held long enough for him to sink his teeth deep into the goopy tendril. The witch made a noise, not a scream, for she could not involve the tongue, just a strangled gargle deep in her throat.

  Her grip on his feet loosened and she tried to retract into her mouth. Gauntleted fists grabbed tight and pulled. There was the sound of tearing fibers of flesh, audible over the squealing and moaning of the things still living in the now pitch-black pit. The witch dropped him, but he held fast to her tongue and twisted upright as he hit the fetid fluid, finding his footing.

  He kept pulling as he stepped closer. The tendrils tried to grip him, pull him back under, but he tucked his head and widened his stance, and the horrible pain of her ripping tongue stopped the witch from generating any real force. The rat things tried to pile on him, but the hunter would not be stopped, not this close to the kill.

  He knew he had reached the mouth when he reached out to grab another fistful of stretched, dangling tongue and instead he hit teeth. So he hit the teeth, gauntleted fist crashing again and again. She flailed but could not slow his blows. Nothing could slow him then.

  “Your—”

  Theron felt teeth explode, heard them shatter as he delivered the fourth strike, his left hand controlling the witch’s head movement by keeping a firm grip on the tongue.

  “—fucking—”

  Another blow.

  “—magic—”

  Another, the lower jaw unhinged, tentacles of restraint lost their grip, and the rats collapsed as well. The moaning of the brood mothers turned to a quiet drone.

  “—did nothing to stop me!”

  Unrestrained, the blows came down now in a flurry.

  “Fire and sword!”

  He roared into the pulverized face.

  “Fire and sword, know that. Know that as you die!”

  The witch was likely already dead, for the pit had gone completely silent, save for the sound of Theron’s panting and the dull mashing of his fists into the minced mound of meat.

  That was the end of the nightmare of Norburg, the destroyer of Dentin, the end of Brynth’s foreign invader. The end of the Emerald Queen, the mother of rats.

  That was the real beginning of the legendary hunter Theron Ward: in the north of Brynth, hidden in a cave, waist deep in plagued afterbirth, he was reborn. In that black abyss, the rotten heart of truest terror, he overcame. He conquered his first truly great hunt.

  * * *

  “It is an infection of the face, young man, in the empty socket of your eye, no less. Spare yourself the pain of what you ask me to do, for no matter what you will surely die,” said the surgeon of the small town.

  “If I will surely die then I have nothing to lose. Do as I ask you, a final request, if you will,” said the hunter, his voice shaking, his body sweating and the pulsating infection in his hollow socket throbbing.

  The surgeon heated the long knife until it was red hot. “Are you sure? I have no sedatives, young man. The pain alone may kill you.”

  “I am sure. It is not my destiny to die like this. Dig this evil from me with a burning blade,” said the hunter.

  The surgeon nodded to his helpers and they tied the hunter down. He clenched his teeth around a strap of leather as he tried to prepare his mind for the pain to come. There was no preparing for it; there was no bracing for that.

  The infection popped and seared and the hunter screamed. He screamed from his soul, and so loud was the agonizing sound that the whole town shivered at the cry. Fire and sword, the hunter would not die.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty

  Moving On

  It had been two months since Theron Ward had left Dentin in pursuit of the Emerald Witch. Two months that Ken and Aldous remained, helping to put Dentin back together. Ken did what he could with just one arm, and what he could do was more than most men with two.

  They had buried Chayse in the woods beneath the trees, her grave marked by a monument of her short swords melted into a hunk of iron that the smithy fashioned. They had buried other bodies, and now they rebuilt houses, and they helped plant crops. If there was a time when the women and children, when the elders and the sickly feared the wizard and Kendrick the Cold, that time was no longer.

  They came to be known as great and charitable men, true champions of Dentin. They declined pay from the duke on the grounds that any coin given to them could instead be used for acquiring the needed resources to rebuild the destroyed village. They accepted only a bed to lie upon at night and food to fill their bellies. The work was grueling, and most days Ken could only manage six hours of labor, for his near fatal wounds still needed time to heal—small fractures and damaged muscles on top of his lost hand. Aldous had recovered fully, and he did what he could to put in eight- to ten-hour days, every day. This inspired Dentin’s people to work just as hard, and the progress of their work was inspiring.

  “I feel good,” said Ken one evening to Aldous as they had ale before the fire.

  “Yes? Your injuries are healing well, then?”

  “The physical ones, yes, but the on
es of the soul as well, lad.”

  Aldous smiled at his friend, then his smile faded. “I still hurt terribly, Ken. I miss Chayse. I miss Theron.”

  “So do I. So do I.”

  “Do you think he found her?”

  “I know he found her,” said Ken. “I know he killed her.”

  “Is he alive?” Whatever Ken answered, Aldous decided he would believe.

  “Aye, he’s alive. I need him to be alive.”

  “Me too.” Aldous looked at his ale. “But what if… When do we move on?”

  “I don’t mind it here,” said Ken, then he sipped at his ale and almost smiled.

  “Neither do I. Eventually, though… eventually word will reach other cities about who and what we are. They will come for us. If we stay, we endanger the ones we saved, the people that see us as their champions.”

  “So when do we move on?” Ken asked. To Aldous it sounded like Ken was asking for an instruction, as if he were asking for an order. Aldous took his time to answer, for he was not sure he was ready to be the one making choices.

  “In a month,” Aldous finally said, his voice stern and full of conviction. Ken nodded. “We work and you recover for another month. In a month the village will be well on its way to being good as new, and… and perhaps Theron will return.”

  “A good plan, lad.” Ken stood abruptly. “I’m off to the sack. I’ll see you at breakfast. You’re young, Aldous. You’re young and you’ve done a great thing. Off to a good start, I’d say.” Ken patted Aldous awkwardly on the shoulder with his stump, for he was holding his ale still with his hand.

  Aldous put a light hand on the mutilated limb, and stared into space before him, nodding in appreciation of Ken’s words, but thinking of Chayse. Hurting for Chayse, for himself, for the life he would know without her.

  Ken left the room and Aldous was alone with his thoughts.