Reaper Of Sorrows (Book 1)

by James A. West

  Rathe sat sprawl-legged, limbs numb, head reeling. Everything was distant—Girod’s death, Lisana’s blood covering his hands and arms, the clash of steel not a pace distant. Some part of him wanted to fight, but the world around him became a muddled nightmare.

  Thushar, a snarling wolf defending his leader, wielded his sword and many of Osaant’s men fell. Those who survived dragged themselves clear of the carnage missing limbs, gashed to the bone, or eviscerated. A true Ghost of Ahnok, Thushar fought longer than any man should have been able to, but in the end, Osaant’s guards were too many. More swooped into the chambers and battered Thushar and Rathe into submission.

  Osaant ordered, “Keep them alive!” Quivering with fury, he spared a single glance for Girod, whose eyes had been dulled by death. “By all the gods, I will see that you both suffer before you die.”

  Chapter 7

  Lost in the murk, Rathe shifted on the damp dirt floor of the cell, making his chains rattle. He had been imprisoned long enough to grow accustomed to the reek of spilled chamber pots, moldy straw, and unwashed prisoners, but the clinking of his own chains still chilled his blood. He tried to judge the passage of days, but could not. Twilight was eternal in the deep cells, where only a single oil lamp, somewhere outside his barred cell, kept absolute darkness at bay. He slept and woke, tried to ignore the rumble of hunger in his belly, contemplated the palpable weight of misery upon his heart and soul, then slept again. He knew for certain he had slept a dozen times since Thushar had lost his life for the crime of protecting his commander.

  Shifting into a slightly more comfortable position, Rathe watched through the rusted bars of his cell as his companions slunk along the corridor, nosing through moldering straw, hunting for any morsel. Three-leg, a great black rat, slid between the bars of another cell across the way, making straight for a bare foot covered in running sores. Nose outstretched, it sniffed cautiously at the waiting toes. The prisoner, a man Rathe had never fully seen, did not stir. Taking that as an invitation, Three-leg took a tentative nibble. The foot thrashed weakly and drew back, a moan came from the darkness. Three-leg moved on, hunting a more submissive meal.

  Nub, a small gregarious rodent bereft of a tail, scurried quickly from cell to cell, as if knowing exactly what it was looking for and how to find it. Nub veered toward Rathe’s quarters, halted just out of reach and sat up, beady eyes giving him a curious once over.

  “Nothing for you this day, friend,” Rathe croaked. “Of course, you know that, don’t you?”

  Nub’s whiskers twitched, its head bobbed as if in answer.

  “Like as not, I will be dead soon,” Rathe continued. “Then, little one, you can have all the meat you want. How would that be?”

  Nub bobbed its head again, front paws held before its chest like a pleading supplicant.

  “Off with you,” Rathe said. “I am not dead yet.”

  Perhaps it was encroaching madness, perhaps imagination, but Rathe felt sure that Nub considered his words and, finding such an arrangement acceptable, it dropped to all fours and continued its rounds.

  In watching Nub’s progression, Rathe spied Patches. The two regarded each other. A one-eyed rat dotted with snowy spots, Patches did not move around much, as though trying to blend in with the shadows and crumbling brick walls. When it deigned to explore, it did so with heightened caution.

  “You have had a rough go of it, haven’t you?” Rathe said. Until coming awake the first day in the deep cells, he had never reflected on the conduct of vermin. He had discovered they had a hierarchy, and it seemed poor blemished Patches was at the bottom of its pack.

  “You will have to find your stones, if you ever want to make something of yourself,” Rathe advised with a wry chuckle.

  In answer, Patches lowered its head and slowly backed into the darkness of another cell.

  Rathe sighed and leaned his head back against the rough brick wall. Other vermin squeaked and hunted in the gloom, pausing occasionally to nibble a toe or finger on the chance that the owner of that appendage had died in the night. If the prisoner yelped or groaned, the rats scurried on. If not, they feasted until one of the gaolers collected the corpses.

  None of that bothered Rathe anymore. He supposed hunger made him lethargic, or maybe the lingering effects of whatever potion Girod had put into his wine. Or, perhaps I no longer care about anything?

  With that thought came a jumble of visions and sensations from that night: wine and celebration, surrounded by highborn with no greater cares than who to bed; Lisana’s seductive smile and the blue of her eyes; after, the scarlet flood pouring from the gruesome tear across her throat, those beautiful eyes glazing in death; Girod sword in hand, readying to strike her again. Rathe’s fist clenched tightly, as if around a hilt. In his mind, he skewered Girod’s bowels anew, pinning the brute to the headboard. The longer he let the ghastly images cavort inside his skull, the more tangled they became, losing all connection to reality. Maybe I am losing my mind? Given that he counted vermin as companions, even named and spoke to them, he guessed that made sense.

  Around him his fellow prisoners wept, moaned, or held silent vigil. Rathe closed his eyes which, improbable as it was, snuffed out the visions of his downfall. As he dozed, he saw Thushar’s severed head bouncing out of the stone basin in the executioner’s yard, the stump of the big Prythian’s neck spurting blood. He dared not allow himself any measure of self-pity, not with Thushar’s death cavorting his mind. Even as the executioner’s axe had fallen, with a smug Osaant and a chained Rathe looking on, Thushar had never lost his defiance or pride. Such a man as that did not deserve me for a friend.

  The hardest thing for Rathe was that Thushar had not condemned him for falling so easily into the trap laid by Girod and Osaant, nor had he regretted guarding a stuporous Rathe until the end. His last words, spoken in the dark of their shared cell, had been confident, even joyful. “The wine of the gods is surely better than the goat piss we have shared so often. I will wait for you at Ahnok’s feet, brother, with a plump wench on my knee, and a drunken smile on my lips.”

  I will remember you, brother, until we meet again, Rathe thought. That day could not be far off. Falling into a troubled slumber, Rathe could only hope to meet death with the same dignity….

  A kick to the ribs jarred him awake, but the blinding glare of a torch closed his eyes again.

  “It’s time,” a voice said with sinister jubilance.

  Blinking, Rathe saw that Cartach had come for him—the worst of the gaolers. He struggled to get up, but found he was too weak—food was not wasted on the condemned, much to the disappointment of his vermin friends. When he fell back, Cartach stabbed the torch against his belly. The pain was immediate, as was the sizzling stench of charring flesh.

  Rathe roared and scrambled back, legs thrashing. His bare shoulders slammed against brick, and his feet dug grooves in the urine-soaked floor. In trying to escape Cartach’s torch, he managed to stand. It was then that he noticed that his shackles had been taken off.

  “Knew you had it in you,” Cartach drawled. He was tall, with a cruel face, his body seemingly made of rawhide stretched drum-tight over corded muscle.

  Hunched over, arms clutching his singed belly, Rathe glared at his assailant through lank strings of filthy hair. As soon as it crossed his mind to attack the gaoler, Cartach’s fist rocked his head. Rathe hit the floor, shuddering and spitting blood.

  Cartach did not bother cajoling him to stand again. Instead, he grabbed a handful of Rathe’s hair and wrenched him up. With a shove, the gaoler sent him stumbling out of the cell. Companionable Nub and slinking Three-leg had long since darted for cover, but timid Patches looked on from the shadows. You know this game, yes?

  Rathe laughed at the madness of holding communion with a rat. Cartach’s fist crashed into the back of his neck, cutting off his remorseful mirth.

  “Gods be with you,” a wheezy voice called from deeper shadows, followed by mad, wailing laughter.

  Rath
e shambled along, head down, heart flopping like a rabbit caught in a snare. He had thought he was ready to meet Thushar in the shadow of Ahnok. Now he was of a different mind. I do this for you Patches….

  He spun, reaching for Cartach’s neck. The gaoler struck again, his blow like the kick of horse. Knocking Rathe to the ground did not satisfy him. The torch in his hand thrashed wildly as he stomped Rathe’s skull and put a boot to his ribs and back, and anywhere else left undefended.

  When the gaoler ended his attack, he was breathing hard. “Saw it in your eyes, same as I see it in every man’s. Your friend, a trueborn Prythian, was the only one in the last four years who died with dignity. Almost hated to see him lose his head.”

  Barely hearing, bloody and dazed, Rathe lay sprawled, too weak to curl into a protective ball.

  “Engus!” Cartach shouted. “Get down here.”

  A door opened at the end of the long, dim corridor. The second gaoler filled the doorway. The man was huge, head and shoulders taller than Rathe. And simple as a slug, he thought. He hated Cartach for his wanton cruelty, but Engus, trundling toward them with a slow-witted grin stretching his bland features, was a child poured into a killer’s body. He had wielded the blade that struck off Thushar’s head, but to Engus the brutal act had probably been no more momentous than slicing a melon.

  Engus shuffled to a halt above Rathe. He said nothing, only grinned his idiot’s grin.

  “Pick him up,” Cartach ordered with a strange, paternal kindness.

  Engus obliged, silently and easily lifting Rathe and cradling him to his massive chest. Engus’s vapid gaze shone a clear, pale gray in the torchlight. With a gentle touch, Cartach urged the giant forward.

  Rathe’s head lolled. Above him, the rotten brick ceiling gave way to firmer masonry beyond the doorway. They wended through twisting corridors for good while. After a last turn, the air cleared and brightened, and then a cloudless blue sky opened above his eyes. The cool air of his last dawn rippled his skin.

  High stone walls guarded the executioner’s yard from sight of the citizens of Onareth, but that did not keep a handful of observers from climbing up and taking a seat to watch the fulfillment of the king’s judgment. Jeering calls echoed around the yard, and Rathe wondered if they knew the famed Scorpion was about to die.

  “Put him down,” Cartach ordered, and Engus carefully settled Rathe on his feet.

  Rathe might well have been floating, for all the lack of feeling in his limbs. Under his breath, he began muttering prayers of supplication to Ahnok, but his heart skipped when he glanced at the block atop a high, broad platform of dressed stone. The block was fashioned from a slab of black granite, with a smooth groove at its center. Beneath the groove sat a stone basin—just large enough to catch a man’s head. It did not catch Thushar’s.

  “Where is the priest of Ahnok?” Rathe asked woodenly.

  Cartach gazed at him so long that he thought the brute had not heard. “You have no need of a priest.”

  “All men of Cerrikoth are granted the right to seek absolution,” Rathe said. “As I draw breath, I demand that right.”

  “Demand all you want, but no priest is coming to hear you.”

  “This is sacrilege—”

  Cartach cut him off with a slap. “Engus, bind this whining maggot to the pole.”

  Rathe’s blood went to ice when he looked beyond the block to a tall wooden post stained black with old blood. He had seen the same at every village he had sacked in the last year. By his order, scores had suffered the scourge while bound to such a pole. And so Ahnok passes his judgment in kind.

  “I do not understand,” Rathe said, as Engus prodded him forward.

  Cartach shrugged. “King Nabar took mercy on you. You will taste the lash to appease Osaant, then you will suffer banishment. Seems too kind to me, but….”

  Rathe heard what followed as a distant yammering. The irredeemable were banished to only one place in Cerrikoth: Fortress Hilan. Some said such a fate was worse than death. Besides the shame of banishment, in the forests thereabout lurked creatures forsaken by the gods, stalking nightmares with a hunger for living blood. In the end, life in Hilan was no less a death sentence than losing your head, only slower. Yet, I will live … and Nub will have to find another to sup upon.

  As Engus tied a hank of rope around Rathe’s wrists, a tall lanky fellow that might have been Cartach’s brother came out of a darkened doorway. He held a scourge with a dozen leather tongues, their tips glinting with steel barbs.

  Singing a tuneless lullaby under his breath, Engus attached Rathe’s bindings to a rope that ran through a pulley at the top of the pole. From the pulley, the rope stretched to a winch. After testing his knot, Engus moved to the winch, caught the handle, and began cranking. Squealing and clattering, the device pulled Rathe’s arms above his head. Engus stopped and threw the locking lever when Rathe stood on his tiptoes.

  “Make him dance, Engus,” Cartach called with a grin.

  Engus chortled merrily, and started cranking again. Rathe bit back a groan as his bindings dug into the raw skin around his wrists. Engus did not stop again until Rathe’s feet lifted from the ground.

  Heart pounding, Rathe vowed to face his penalty with as much dignity as Thushar had. Our places should have been reversed, brother. It is not right that I should live, where you perished.

  When the scourge fell, his teeth clenched so hard he thought they might shatter. When the next heavy stroke tore his back, he began to scream.

  Chapter 8

  As the birth of dawn drove the aged night into the grave of memory, the mounted soldiers followed a dusty road cutting through a sparsely wooded grassland. With the vanishing darkness also faded the glinting stars and the waning moon’s silver curve. Waking birds called from bush, shrub, and the occasional copse of bushy trees. The dewed greenery made for a heady scent, but went unappreciated.

  Rathe rode at the head of seventeen outcasts surrounded by forty unkempt, rather malicious-looking soldiers clad in rusted mail and tattered leathers. At the head of the column rose the winged Reaver banner of Fortress Hilan.

  It was a farce, that banner, Rathe knew as well as any true soldier of Cerrikoth. The scarlet skull of a fanged serpent hung between a pair of batwings, and rode a field of white above a brace of crossed, half-moon battle axes. There was no reaving in Hilan, the northernmost settlement of Cerrikoth, lying hard against the dark bastions of the Gyntor Mountains. Men sent there tried to survive terrible winters, disease, and the nightmarish creatures that hunted within those rocky crags. And such will be my home and my fate.

  Days had passed since Rathe suffered the lash, but he could still hear and feel the whistling snaps of barbed leather parting his flesh. A hundred stripes. Death would have been easier. It was not the pain that troubled him most, rather the disgrace of losing all he had fought and bled for since setting aside his father’s hoe for his king’s sword. Moreover, he was banished from all lands and cities of Cerrikoth, with the exception of Hilan and surrounding villages. If he chose to escape, the king who had shown him mercy would place a bounty on his head so large that every able-bodied fool within ten realms would devote their lives to capturing him. Once taken and brought back to Onareth, he would face execution, and such a death would neither be swift nor easy.

  Out of habit, Rathe glanced over his fellow outcasts to make sure none were getting up to any mischief. He winced as crusted scabs stretched across his back. He might as well have saved himself the pain. Scoundrels the outcasts might be, but Rathe saw men just coming to the full understanding of what it meant to be sent to Hilan. They rode in silence, heads bowed. The shoulders of more than one shuddered, as they wept quietly at their fate. Prisoners no more in name, but prisoners all the same.

  Captain Treon, a whip-thin despot with a witch’s long white hair, the piercing stare of a serpent, and the aspect of a starved corpse, had appointed Rathe the leader of the banished.

  “Other than assigning minor duties, y
ou lead nothing,” Treon had informed him, his voice a thin, rasping whisper. “Your purpose is reporting to me their past crimes, strengths, and weaknesses. Should any of these scoundrels misstep, you will pay the price of their folly with them.”

  Rathe agreed to that readily enough. What choice did he have?

  “You and your men are still soldiers of Cerrikoth, but until evidence proves otherwise, you are worth less to me than a smear of shite in a lackwit’s smallclothes. Should you or any of your men attempt escape, you and they will be executed on sight. As their leader, I will hold you responsible for their flight, or anything else they do. After all, a proper leader knows the minds of his men, no?”

  Again, Rathe had seen no way or purpose to argue against that. The life he had known ended the night he pinned Girod to the headboard … or perhaps even farther back, when he had hewn the life from Noor. Like his fellows around him, King Nabar had given him a chance at a new life—not much of one, to be sure, but a chance.

  Shifting in the saddle with a groan, Rathe pulled the cork stopper on a leather flask filled with a syrupy concoction so revolting he had at first believed it was poison. A grizzled healer had given it to him after tending his wounds with the admonition: “Drink this thrice a day until it is gone, and you will heal well enough.”

  And so he had taken the brew as directed. Unfortunately, the flask never seemed any emptier. Whether it helped in mending flesh, Rathe did not know, but when he could keep the potion in his belly, it eased his wounds and lessened the sting of his fall.

  His bald head glimmering in the sunlight, Loro trotted his mount up from behind the company and slowed at Rathe’s side. Formerly a sergeant of the City Watch of Onareth, Loro had lost his rank once for drunkenness, again for brawling and, like Rathe, this last time for sharing a bed with a woman he should have avoided. Even in the cool of dawn, sweat soaked the neck and underarms of the leather jerkin stretched taut across his chest and swollen belly. Fat though he was, Rathe judged that Loro carried a fair quantity of hard muscle and a warrior’s heart under those layers of suet. Of all the outcasts, only Loro seemed untroubled by his banishment.