Clay scratched at his beard. “Uh … that’s …”
“Gabe,” his friend answered for himself, straightening a little as he gave his name.
The woman gaped. “You mean Golden Gabe?” Gabriel nodded, and she shook her head in disbelief. “Well, you ain’t what I expected, I’ll tell you that for free. My daddy told me you were fierce as a lion and cool as a Kaskar pint. My mum used to say you were the prettiest man she ever saw—’ceptin’ my daddy, o’course. But look at you here: meek as a kitten, and so damn—” she frowned like a farmer assessing an ear of rotten corn “—old.”
Clay shrugged. “Time’s a bitch,” he said.
The young woman laughed. “Yeah? Well she clearly has it in for the pair o’you.” She squinted up at the sun. “Anyhoo, my girls and I have some silver to spend, so I’ll thank you for that.”
Clay managed a wan smile. Despite the fact that she’d left them without food, coin, weapons, or with any foreseeable means of keeping his feet warm in the long, cold months to come, Clay couldn’t quite bring himself to dislike the woman. She’d been affable enough (for a brigand, anyway) and she’d had the good grace to leave Blackheart alone. So there was that.
“What do they call you?” he asked.
Her grin grew wider. “I’ve been called many things,” she said. “A thief. A harlot. A spittin’ image of the goddess Glif herself. But when you tell this tale beside the hearth tonight, you can say it was Lady Jain and the Silk Arrows who took your stuff.”
“You’re a band?” Clay asked.
“We’re band-its,” she answered. “But I like to think there’s hope for us yet.” She scampered off, and the Silk Arrows melted into the forest behind her.
Clay let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and looked on despairingly while Gabriel knelt to collect the stones he’d emptied from his pack.
“Seriously? Is there a reason you’re bringing a handful of rocks on this fool’s quest of ours?”
Gabriel went to the roadside. When he found the stone Jain had kicked into the grass he examined it as though seeing it for the first time. “These belonged to Rose,” he said. “She used to bring them up from the beach when we lived in Uria. I thought I’d bring them in case sh—”
“She won’t want them,” Clay snapped. “She won’t care that you brought her a handful of rocks from halfway across the world, Gabe. She’s not a little girl anymore, remember?”
“—in case she’s dead,” Gabriel finished. “I thought maybe I would put them on her grave. She’d like that, I think.”
Clay shut his mouth. He felt, at this particular moment, like an asshole.
Before long they were shouldering their packs, and to Clay’s very great surprise he found a sandwich still wedged in the bottom of his. He handed half to Gabriel, who raised an eyebrow.
“That’s lucky.”
Clay snorted. “If you say so. I sure hope this incredible good fortune of ours holds up all the way to Castia.”
“And back,” remarked Gabriel, too intent on eating to have noticed the sarcasm in Clay’s voice.
Within minutes Clay swallowed the last of his sandwich, and with it the aching memory of the woman who’d made it. “And back,” he said eventually, without any conviction whatsoever.
Chapter Six
The Monster Parade
As a man who’d once made a living exploring decrepit ruins with the intent of killing whatever lurked inside, Clay knew more than most about the Old Dominion. The ancient empire of druinkind had, once upon a time, encompassed all the known world, from Grandual in the east to Endland in the west, as well as the sprawling expanse of the Heartwyld Forest in between. The druins were brilliant craftsmen and powerful sorcerers, who ruled with the liberty of gods over the then-primitive tribes of men and monsters. But as with anything that grows too big for its own good—ambitious spiderwebs, for instance, or those giant, late-harvest pumpkins—it became something altogether monstrous, and eventually collapsed on itself.
The Exarchs in charge of governing the cities of the Dominion rebelled against the ruling Archon, and a civil war erupted. Though immortal, the druins were relatively few in number (Moog had once told Clay that druin females could give birth to but a single child), so they bolstered their armies with monsters, which the Exarchs had bred for generations to be more fierce and feral than ever before. The creatures proved too wild to control, however, thus giving rise to the first great Hordes: vast hosts that swept unchecked across the Old Dominion and brought it to ruin.
An Exarch named Contha built an army of massive golems hewn from stone and bound to thralldom by runes that … well, in truth Clay had no idea how the runes worked, and most of the golems he’d encountered while touring had been masterless, rampaging juggernauts. At any rate, Contha’s golem armies were smashed to rubble by the ravaging Hordes, and so the Exarch abandoned his fortress and fled underground, never to be seen or heard from again.
Some said the immortal Contha had since returned to wander the crumpled ramparts of his citadel and bemoan the fall of his beloved Dominion, while others suggested he remained belowground, reduced to a gibbering troglodyte that dwelled alone in the smothering dark.
Clay figured he’d just fucking died. The druins were so long-lived as to seem immortal, but they could be killed—Clay had seen one killed—and there were a lot of nasty things living down there in the darkness.
The ruin of Contha’s fortress had served as a rallying point during the War of Reclamation. In the shadow of its walls the Company of Kings had driven the remnants of the last Horde back into the Heartwyld Forest. Eventually a settlement sprang up around it, a place where those brave enough to enter the Wyld could gather and supply, and for those who returned to spend their newfound riches or drink away the memory of the horrors they’d barely escaped.
Before long Contha’s Camp grew into a proper town. Someone built a wall, and when the town swelled into a big, bloated city, someone built a bigger wall. Somewhere along the way the name was shortened to Contha’s, then eventually to Conthas, though it was also called the Free City, for although it was technically within Agria’s borders, the king (in this case, their old bandmate Matrick) laid no claim to lands so near the savage border. There were no taxes there, no tariff on goods that passed through. Conthas was a bastion of enterprise and opportunity: One of the last wild places in an ever more civilized world.
That being said, Conthas was a shithole, and as far as Clay was concerned the sooner they were rid of it the better.
It was half past noon on the third day since he and Gabe had set out from Coverdale. They were road weary, dust cloaked, and so hungry that Clay’s mouth watered when a man outside the gate offered him what appeared to be charred rat-on-a-stick.
The last meal they’d eaten was two days earlier, when a sadistic old farmer had tossed them each an apple for doing push-ups on the road. Clay had found a turtle scrabbling up the muddy slope of a creek bed yesterday, but while he’d busied himself starting a fire Gabe had wandered off with the turtle and set it free. He’d placated Clay with assurances that Kallorek would feed them like kings once they reached the city, and Clay passed those same assurances on to his growling stomach. Sadly, his stomach was less susceptible to bullshit than his head.
Conthas was the same old circus he remembered. No king meant no law; no guards to keep the peace or discourage violence before it got out of hand. No taxes meant no one to clean gutters or lay down stone for roads, and so Clay and Gabriel sloshed through what they hoped was mud as they passed through the wide-open gates into the city whose parents had hired a prostitute as a babysitter and never come home.
The main strip ran along the defile between two hills. The city crawled up either slope like a mould, cloaked in a mantle of cloying grey smoke. Clay could see several fires burning unchecked, but no one seemed overly concerned, and certainly no fire brigade was rushing to put them out. To the north loomed the sealed fortress of Conthas itself, clen
ched like an iron-shod fist against the glaring sun. Some sort of temple was under construction on the southern hill, unfinished and shrouded in scaffolding.
It was said the Free City drew all sorts, but mostly it drew all sorts of bad. Bright-eyed adventurers from all over Grandual came to Conthas with dreams of joining a band and touring the Wyld, and inevitably those dreams were distorted, like something reflected in a mirror made of shoddy glass. That, or they had the mirror broken over their heads.
You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting an adventurer, or a thief, or a thief catcher, a bounty hunter, a smoke wizard, a wandering bard, a claw-broker, a storm witch, a sell-sword—or else those who came to profit off this bunch: armourers and ironmongers, harlots and haruspices, dice men and card sharks. Scratch peddlers skulked in alley mouths, while the addicts on whom they preyed slouched in the mud with knives in their hands, bloody gouges on their arms, and blissful grins on their haggard faces. On every corner was a merchant selling magic swords and impenetrable armour, or an alchemist pawning potions of enchantment, or water breathing, or invisibility. Clay even spotted one labelled IMMORTALITY.
“How much for that?” he asked the old woman selling it.
“One hundred and one courtmarks,” she announced. “No refunds.”
Clay frowned down at the vial. “Looks like grass and water.”
The woman glared at him until he moved on.
On the Street of Shrines they passed temples dedicated to each of the Holy Tetrea. Clay heard screams drifting from the barred windows of the Winter Queen’s austere refuge, and moans of pleasure behind the silk curtains of the Spring Maiden’s sanctuary. There was a lineup outside the temple of Vail the Heathen. Farmers, he assumed, come to pray for a fair harvest. Many of them carried squirming calves or mewling lambs to be offered up as blood sacrifices to the Autumn Son. One desperate-looking man clutched a mangy cat in his arms. The animal had guessed its fate, apparently, since the farmer’s arms and face bore a network of angry red scratch marks.
Priests clad in the red-and-gold vestments of the Summer Lord were shooing a beggar from the steps of their church. The poor wretch was draped in soiled grey robes, and Clay nearly gasped when he spotted the beggar’s char-black hands, one of which was reduced to little more than a flailing stump.
A rotter. He grimaced, unable to suppress a shiver. Aside from the more tangible horrors lurking among the poisoned eaves of the Heartwyld, anyone entering the black forest risked being afflicted by the Heathen’s Touch, more commonly known as the rot. What began as a dark stain on the skin soon hardened into a black crust that clung to the flesh like barnacles to boat’s hull. Scraping it off was impossible without tearing away swathes of flesh, and it didn’t matter anyway, since the crust would grow back regardless. Inevitably it would spread, or manifest itself on some other part of the body. Affected limbs would rot through until they crumbled away, until at last the disease laid claim to the victim’s throat, or some vital organ. If they were especially lucky, this happened sooner rather than later. Clay had heard of rotters living for years in restless agony before death finally claimed them.
There were, allegedly, many ways of forestalling the disease—anything from drinking tea brewed from a dryad’s eyelashes to visiting an oracle somewhere high in the Rimeshield Mountains—but despite the efforts of Grandual’s greatest minds there was no known cure. The rot was a death sentence, plain and simple.
“Clay, look. It’s Moog.” Gabriel tugged at his sleeve, pointing to a wall plastered with posters. A number of them depicted the wizard, badly drawn but instantly recognizable. He was grinning from ear to ear, one eye closed in a knowing wink.
Clay squinted to read the words scrawled beneath: “Magic Moog’s Magnificent Phallic Phylactery. Zero to Hero with just one sip. Satisfaction guaranteed!”
Clay scanned some of the other posters on the wall. One offered a bounty for the toxic breath of a rot sylph, another called for bands willing to kill Hectra, Queen of Spiders. He was wondering whether Hectra was actually a spider or merely a woman who styled herself their monarch when the noise around him disrupted his thoughts.
There were men moving up the street, four abreast and three ranks deep, armed with cudgels and oval shields. They hadn’t resorted to violence yet, but had managed to clear a good length of street behind them with iron glares and those big shields. Behind them walked a man in soiled leathers with a wolf’s pelt draped over his head. He raised his arms and called out to the crowd.
“Good people of Conthas! Hear me!”
Clay searched the crowd for good people and came up short, but Wolfhead went on nevertheless.
“Make way for the Stormriders, only just returned from a daring tour of the Heartwyld.” He waited for the rising babble to subside before going on. “They will be preceded by the Sisters in Steel, who have subdued the goblins of the Cobalt Caverns and their fearsome Warchief, Sicklung!” Wolfhead and his shield-bearing goons pressed on, forcing a path where some were slow to make one.
There was a commotion farther down the street. Peering west, he saw a column meandering down the mudded thoroughfare. The Stormriders—a band, Clay presumed, though he’d never heard of them—would have paid out-of-pocket for a parade through Conthas. And as the procession drew near it became clear that those pockets were very deep indeed.
A cadre of drummers led the way. They were clad in long gowns sewn with strips of bark and hats that sprouted tufts of green foliage. Children scampered among them dressed as wood sprites, gossamer wings trailing behind as they ran. Behind them waddled a huge hulk of a man. Half his face was painted blue, in likeness to the Feral Men who called the black forest home and lived on a diet of flesh and blood—or so the stories went, anyway. Clay had met more than a few cannibals who preferred a well-roasted chicken over the fleshy rump of some hapless adventurer, but chickens (unlike hapless adventurers) were notoriously hard to come by in the Wyld.
The brute was draped in exotic fur, with a horn slung over one shoulder that might once have been a dragon’s tooth before someone hollowed it out and made an instrument of it. He jeered at the crowd, working them into a frenzy, and then blew long and deep on the horn. Its call reminded Clay of the wind moaning through high places, or the sound of something wounded wailing in the dark.
Next came the goblins. Two rows of six, each with their hands bound, linked to one another by chains that slithered like iron snakes through the mud. They were a sickly looking bunch, scrawny as beggars, but lively enough. They snapped and screamed gibberish at the crowd, and didn’t seem to mind when someone lobbed a bloated tomato or a rotting fish their way.
They’re probably starving, Clay reckoned. Wait till they get a sniff of rat-on-a-stick.
Behind them came their warchief, Sicklung, limping in his fetters, sporting a face so battered and bruised he looked ugly even by the notoriously low standards of goblinkind.
The Sisters in Steel were not at all what he’d expected. Clay had fought alongside plenty of women warriors in his day, but these three looked nothing of the sort. Their hair was done up in ringlets and tied with bright ribbons. Their eyes were thick with smoky kohl, their lips painted red as roses. And their armour! It looked brittle as porcelain, designed to show off skin instead of protect it from a sword’s edge or an arrow’s piercing tip. They cantered along on a trio of pristine white mares whose silver barding gleamed like mirrors.
A man out front whistled at one of the Sisters as she passed. Uh-oh. Clay winced, preparing himself to see a man trampled into the mud. Instead she smiled and blew him a kiss.
“What in the fuck?” Clay heard himself ask of no one in particular.
Beside him, Gabriel bobbed his shoulders. “That’s how it is now, man. I told you. So much spectacle, so little substance.” He snorted, nodding in the direction of the goblins. “They probably bought those poor buggers at an auction.”
The column marched on. Now came the spoils reaped by the Stormriders during their tour
of the Wyld. A squad of men marched by bearing relics of the Dominion: blunted swords and rusted scale armour recovered from ancient battlefields.
Next came an ox-drawn cart loaded with the crumbled remains of one of Contha’s rune-bound automatons. The pieces were fitted together so observers could apprehend how massive the golem had been in life.
“That’s impressive,” said Clay. “Those things go down hard.”
Four heavily armoured men escorted a lanky troll weighed down by heavy iron manacles. The thing’s arms had been severed at the elbow and capped with silver studs to keep it from regenerating new limbs. Two of the men bore torches and used them to corral the beast whenever its coal black eyes lingered too long on someone it thought looked particularly appetizing.
An enormous ape striped like a tiger came after. The woman who held its leash was smiling and waving, occasionally reaching up to stroke the ape’s fur. It grinned whenever she did this, evidently besotted by its handler.
A strange hush had come over the crowd. Looking right, Clay saw another cart approaching. It was as wide as the entire street, hauled by six oxen and rolling on ten stone wheels. The steel bars of the cage it carried were as thick as a man’s leg, and in the shadows within he saw something—a glimpse of coarse fur, the metallic glint of scales …
“Frost Mother’s Hell …” Gabe put a steadying hand on Clay’s shoulder.
And then Clay saw for himself what the Stormriders had brought back from the Wyld. It was a chimera. And it was alive.
He swallowed hard. Felt a pang in his gut that might have been fear, or exhilaration, or both. Either way, he’d felt nothing quite like it in a long while. He’d once heard someone (Gabe, probably) say that while most things were born to live, an exceptional few were born, instead, to kill. Chimeras were very much the latter.
This one was obviously drugged. Its movements were slow and sluggish. Its serpentine tail hung limp between the bars of its cramped prison. Wings that would throw a house into shadow were folded against its back. Of its three heads—lion, dragon, and ram—only the dragon seemed to take interest in its surroundings. Its jaw was clamped shut by an iron muzzle, and smoke plumed from its nostrils, obscuring the slitted yellow eyes that peered through the bars as if it were the one on the outside looking in.
Kings of the Wyld Page 5
