Path of Bones

by Steven Montano

  She watched Kath. He kept his eyes on his food, trying not to look at any of the Bloodspeakers. She thought about his family. The sight of his baby sister’s severed and rotting head had been like a knife in her chest.

  The air was grave, and for some reason Ijanna felt like the Red Hand were eating their last. How much did they really know about Kala? What was she doing in Corinth, especially with so much support? It was clear she was searching for something, but Ijanna couldn’t begin to imagine what, especially since she knew so little about the Princess except that she secretly consorted with known criminals and held a power that connected her to both Ijanna and Chul Gaerog.

  Could Kala’s being there have something to do with the Blood Queen? Or had something else drawn her to Corinth?

  Worry gnawed at Ijanna’s stomach, and her pulse quickened. Now that she was so close to finding Kala she wasn’t sure what to do. She’d tried reasoning with the Witch Mother, and that had ultimately led to the death of Kath’s family at the hands of the Chul.

  What am I doing?

  She had to get Kala alone after the Princess met with Gilder and the Red Hand. Ijanna needed to get a feel for what the Princess was like and see if she could learn what the woman was doing in Corinth. Then, when the opportunity presented itself, Ijanna would reveal the bond they shared and see if the woman had learned anything about their fate that Ijanna didn’t already know.

  I just hope I’m not making another terrible mistake.

  “Are you all right?” Kath asked her quietly. A few murmured conversations rose among the stone-faced Red Hand now that they’d finished eating.

  “I think so,” she said. “Are you?”

  “I’ll get by,” he said.

  The tent flap pulled open, and bloody light poured in around the dark silhouette of a slender man standing outside. He was Allaji, with long white hair and skin as pale as the moon. His cloak and clothing were pitch, and he wore a double-bladed Den’nari raak’ma slung across his back.

  Gilder nodded to the stranger, then stood and addressed the assembled Bloodspeakers.

  “My friends,” he said. “This is Drazzek Ma’al, ally of Kala Azaean.”

  Forty-Six

  Where am I?

  Pain flashed across his body. His eyes were crusted over with blood, and his skin flaked and oozed brackish puss. His gnarled wrists and ankles twisted against his bonds.

  He stared into the darkness, and remembered.

  As a boy growing up in a devout Goddess-fearing household, Dane had often wondered if there truly was a hell. The Church of the One Goddess certainly thought so, and his youth was filled with lessons about the unfaithful being thrown into fire-laced pits where they’d suffer and burn for all eternity. He’d stopped going to Church a few years before he’d joined the White Dragon Army, and he recalled little of what he’d been taught aside from those images of perdition.

  Is any of that real? he’d wondered. Or was it something they just told us so we’d behave?

  Dane was less inclined to believe in hell as he grew older, even as the stark and bitter realities of the world came into clearer focus. War was a demon, disease was a monster, famine was a bastard, all of them very real problems he’d witnessed firsthand, brutal truths which made the notion of burning pits filled with non-believers seem ridiculous by comparison.

  Up in the Razortooth Mountains, surrounded by the screams of the dying and wading through rivers of blood, Dane finally realized the truth: hell wasn’t a place. It was the cruelty of the world, the darkness in men’s souls. It was suffering and want, revenge and hatred. There were personal hells and collective hells, all of them unique, all of them terrible in their own way.

  Each person would know many hells over the course of their life. Dane himself had known quite a few.

  The first had been the death camps, a place where a part of him would remain trapped until the end of his days. He could never block out the sight of the dying, the burning, the sound of women being raped and children being tortured, not even if he gouged out his eyes and tore his ears from his head, which was surely the least he deserved.

  He lived with one hand on the cold presence of the Veil; it kept his mind in a haze, and he used it to numb himself the way other men dulled their senses with drink.

  Even that hadn’t been enough, for the death camps had scarred his soul. He felt wrong, tainted. A sense of dread weighted his lungs like he’d breathed poison. Whenever he slept his flesh crawled, and even if he didn’t dream of the man with the black face he still woke bathed in sweat. When he wasn’t held in magic’s embrace his mind was overwhelmed with dread.

  Dane hated himself. He’d never be clean again, and memory of what he’d done played in his mind day and night. He saw men roasting in open pits of hot oil; women stuck in spiked iron cages; people impaled on tall wooden stakes to slowly slide to their doom. They'd spread the remains of the dead into shallow and unmarked holes.

  All because they’d been born with black tongues.

  He’d only been one of the architects of that madness. The Dawn Knights were guilty – no lone individual was responsible for their blindly following the Empress’s insane directive. General Crinn may have given the orders, but they followed his commands without hesitation, even when their devotion drove them to torture those they thought less human than themselves.

  It hadn’t been like that in the beginning. There had been days of pride and honor. The Dawn Knights weren’t just soldiers but champions of the Empire, the elite of the vaunted White Dragon Army. They were selected for missions no other soldiers could do.

  Or would do.

  Now the name of their order was a curse. The Empress betrayed them when the camps were discovered and revealed to the people of the Empire. By that point, most of them were already dead.

  Dane remembered feeling his heart swell with pride as they carried out the Empress’ will. He’d watched in her name as teenaged girls burned and men were dragged naked across fields of sharp stone. He vaguely recalled crushing a young boy’s skull beneath his boot.

  It didn’t seem real, didn’t seem like it had been him, but someone else, some dark and stained creature who wore his skin.

  Dane and a few others – Hask, Gavyn, Arkav, Traeger, Kraegen, Ghost, Corva – decided to put a stop to things, even though by that point it had already gone too far. He couldn’t remember what it was that had finally pushed them back to reality: too many dead children, too many screams for mercy that had gone unanswered, the overwhelming stench of the dead, the gritty taste of burning bones. It didn’t really matter – they’d decided they needed to get out, to end the insanity. They couldn’t just run away, for there were people still alive, people who didn’t deserve to die.

  They had to decide when and how to stage the coup, how to subdue Crinn and stop the killings without having to face the other Dawn Knights…their comrades, people they trusted and loved, whom they’d battled next to and risked their lives for. He and the others met in secret and tried to come up with a way.

  They never had the chance. That night the Red Hand attacked, taking the death camps completely by surprise. The militant Bloodspeakers were well-armed and determined. Crinn responded with brutal force, repelling the outlaws and ordering that all remaining prisoners to be brutally slain.

  Most of what happened after that was a blur. The Red Hand routed, and many died, including most of the Dawn Knights. Not a single Bloodspeaker walked out of the death camps alive. Dane and the others tried to stem the slaughter by hacking Crinn to pieces.

  The earth was soaked red by the time it was all finished. Smoldering bodies filled the sky with smoke. Dane and his co-conspirators stumbled away from the ruins of the camp, losing each other in the bloody mists, off to roam their own personal hells.

  Dane was deathly ill for a week. His dreams burned, and his stomach was empty. No sleep, and no respite from the screams and the stench of innocent blood.

  He’d crawled into an isolated cave
on a barren peak high in the Razortooth Mountains. He was without food or water. Dane cried for days, begging forgiveness from the One Goddess, knowing he didn’t deserve it. He vomited into the snow, his skin freezing in the icy wind.

  What have I become?

  The weight of the lives he’d taken threatened to crush him: every child who’d never grow up, who’d never know love, who’d never hold their parents. Families gone, promises broken, futures that would never happen. Every death sent ripples, lives ruined and hopes lost. His body burned with sorrow.

  Winter wind whipped through the cavern. There was no easy way down, and he refused to Touch the Veil.

  He wanted to die. He deserved to die. But he didn’t have the courage to do it himself.

  Dane stripped naked and stayed in the cold, freezing, starving, alone. And yet he didn’t die. He couldn’t. The Veil healed him when he slept, preventing his extremities from turning black and falling off and keeping his skin just warm enough for him to survive. He lay in pain, lacking the will to move, hoping that if he filled his mind with images of death his dreaming self would let it happen. But he kept waking up, healed and clinging to his pathetic existence.

  He was covered with frost but dripping with sweat, his skin cracked and bleeding. Dane remembered the black face, the image of The Dark Angel. Corvinia’s assassin, sent from the heavens to strike in the name of justice.

  The Dark Angel had visited them. He’d taken the form of Marros Slayne.

  Slayne had come from a more tarnished history than the rest of the Dawn Knights. He wasn’t really one of them, just a mercenary who’d been imprisoned and offered freedom in exchange for serving the Empire. Most of the others took even his presence as an insult. Slayne trained to use the Veil, though his gifts were never well-honed, and he was given a vra’taar, the Dawn Knight’s traditional weapon, a symbol of their unity and sense of order. Though Slayne never actually used the sword, preferring his short blades and ring’tai, the other knights still took offense, and the mercenary certainly didn’t help matters with his cold and distant personality. But in spite of what the others thought of him Slayne worked with calculated efficiency and professionalism and never overstepped his bounds. He was a peerless tracker and scout.

  Slayne’s own wife had been among the prisoners he’d help round up for the camps. He’d taken her himself...she was a Bloodspeaker, after all.

  How could they have been so blind, all of them? Dane had wracked his mind wondering how he could have allowed himself to do the things he’d done. Maybe Azaean had used the Veil to twist their minds.

  Or maybe we were doing our duty, and we justified it by telling ourselves it was the right thing. It helped to see the Bloodspeakers as less than human, even when they cried for their mothers or begged to go back home.

  Slayne had been as mad as the rest. He’d dressed as the Dark Angel, covered himself head to toe in black paint, surrounded himself with drugged Bloodspeaker women and executed them one by one. His wife had been among them, bound and pleading to her husband to take her home, telling him she loved him. It was the last thing she said before the blade fell.

  The Red Hand attacked that night. Slayne killed several Dawn Knights and Red Hand in the ensuing chaos, and Dane did battle with the mercenary in the clouds of ash and smoke. Bodies were strewn everywhere. Bloodspeakers and Dawn Knights fought all around them, warring shapes in the black fog. The ground was stained dark with blood, and Crinn’s ruined body was close by. Walls of flame blanketed the darkness of the forest.

  Hatred for Slayne raged through Dane’s soul. He fought relentlessly, determined to destroy the mercenary, not just to kill him but to make him suffer. Looking back, he realized Slayne had become for him what the Bloodspeakers had been to them all: the embodiment of everything that was wrong and broken, the culmination of the world’s evils, a physical manifestation of all he hated about himself. It hadn’t taken much to push the Dawn Knights into madness. Azaean hadn’t needed the Veil to compel them to murder those people: the capacity for slaughter had been there all along.

  The two men battled in the blazing field, neither gaining advantage. A Veilcrafted bomb went off at their feet. Dane took a grievous wound in the stomach from the shrapnel, an injury that had never fully healed. His back was a ruin of cuts from the shards of wood and steel he landed on after the blast sent him flying through the air.

  He and the other survivors found no trace of Marros Slayne after that. It was over.

  Not really over, of course – the true nightmare had just begun.

  Fearing for their safety, the half-dozen surviving Dawn Knights went their separate ways, unsure of what they’d do but no longer able to stand the sight of each another. Being Dawn Knights had been their entire existence, the meaning of their lives, but staying together would just serve as a reminder of how far they’d fallen.

  Dane spent days in those mountains, willing himself to die, screaming as the horrors of what he’d done played out in his mind. The Veil kept him alive even though he’d never mastered the art of healing, even though Veilwardens and Dawn Knights had no such ability. It was as if the world was forcing him to live on as atonement. He didn’t get to escape the knowledge of his crimes, even if he tried.

  He couldn’t recall what it was that eventually drove him out of that cave and down from the mountains. He trekked through bitter winds and deep snow, navigated razor bluffs and scaled harsh peaks. Cold and numb and shaking with delirium and pain, Dane eventually found his way out of the Razortooth. He was half-starved and barely alive by the time he emerged.

  A band of forest rangers found him. Recognizing his status, they gave him food and extra clothing and helped nurse him back to health. They didn’t know what he’d done, not yet. It would be another week before the Dawn Knights were declared criminals – former servants of the Empire who’d allowed their blind fear and hatred of Bloodspeakers to carry them into madness.

  By the time news of their crimes had spread Dane was in a fishing village at the edge of the Grey Sea. It was a simple place, with barely two hundred residents but a great deal of traffic along the trade roads. Dane had managed to fit in easily and maintain his anonymity, fearful of the repercussions his actions would bring even before details of the massacre started to travel. The reactions among the people there in the village had been decidedly mixed – while most feared the Bloodspeakers, everyone agreed that the once-esteemed Dawn Knights had gone too far, and should be punished.

  Dane had trouble sleeping, and when he did it was full of nightmares. He saw the faces of children he’d hanged, smelled the women he’d burned, heard the men scream as he’d pushed them back into pools of boiling fluid. Sometimes they were already dead, crying to him in cracked and hollow voices.

  Eventually Dane headed east, out of Jlantrian territory. The Dawn Knights were being hunted. He no longer wanted to die, but he still didn’t believe he deserved to live. Either way, there was nothing left for him in Jlantria. It was no longer his home, and never would be again. The dreams of his youth had blown away like the ashes of those he’d left dead in the mountains.

  Azander Dane kept moving to try and keep the nightmares at bay. He drifted for three years, putting himself in harm’s way working as a mercenary and hunter, tracking people for money.

  He was a corpse, walking. A shell of what he’d been.

  What was he looking for?

  He hadn’t known until he’d returned to Ebonmark. The Dream Witch, Ijanna, was out there, a survivor of the camps. Would ensuring her safety be enough to redeem his soiled soul? Could someone as tainted as he ever be forgiven, or was he doomed to this cursed existence?

  He had to try. He owed himself that much, at least.

  Forty-Seven

  Where am I?

  Dane knew the answer: a new hell.

  There was no reason he should have been alive. Dried blood was caked all over his naked body. His arms were pulled cruciform to the ceiling, and the muscles in his shoulders bur
ned.

  The darkness was thick with the smell of blood. His bare feet slipped in something greasy. Dane had to piss, so he did, and he cried out in pain because his genitals had been mangled and his urine came out like a stream of fire.

  Pain crawled up his skin like a horde of spiders. His weight pulled him down, and the ropes painfully ground against his torn wrists. He felt snot dangling from his nose and bloody drool on his chin. Dane blinked, blinked again, but the darkness was still there. The world was dull and silent, and every sound he made echoed back at him.

  How long have I been here?

  He had vague memories of being beaten, of Drakanna and other Blood Knights pelting him with their fists and hammers and slicing him open with bladed gauntlets and knives. He should have been in even worse shape than he was, and he wondered if Chairos wasn’t healing him between beatings just for the sport of it.

  Sleep came, or perhaps it didn’t. It was hard to know in the dark. He saw the black face now and again, leering at him, mocking him, making him watch the execution.

  Dane’s feet couldn’t find purchase and his wrists sent jolts of pain down his arms every time his weight shifted, so he just hung there, weeping and bleeding, blind and alone.

  “Wake up, you little bastard.”

  He’d dreamed of a land of wolves. He still heard their calls, smelled the musk and urine, and he badly wanted to be with them.

  Dane’s blood-crusted eyes slowly opened. The pale room came into view, and a blast of cold air lanced across his tender flesh.

  A single lamp spilled dim light into the tiny chamber and cast a yellow pallor on the blood-soaked floor. Pain shot through his mouth even though nobody had touched him. His crusted scabs felt as if they were being peeled open. Nausea spiraled up his stomach and punched against his spine like an iron fist.

  Icy water fell over him, so shockingly cold he thought he’d pull out of his skin. He screamed.