Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  “We’re not voting,” said Gabriel calmly.

  Moog wheeled on Clay. He jerked his head toward Gabriel as if to say, Talk some sense into him, and his eyebrows jumped as if to add, Please.

  Gabriel was regarding him as well, and behind that placid stare Clay caught a glimmer of uncertainty. Gabriel knew the bridge was a bad idea. He knew, as well, that if Clay refused to follow him across, then so would the others.

  The Defile was the safer choice. Giants were dangerous, sure, but easy enough to avoid, especially at night. And it wasn’t as if every giant was a vicious killer—except the children. The children were nasty buggers. In general, however, they treated humans the way humans treated spiders, which is to say they were as likely to cup you in a palm and carry you to safety as they were to scream and step on you.

  The Nightstream wasn’t the worst idea, either. They’d lose a week or so on the journey, but it was a fairly straight path to the other side, and goblins—even in numbers—were a lot less scary than rasks. As well, spending a few days in the dark felt preferable to crossing a narrow strip of ice over several thousand feet of empty air.

  So, yeah, there were safer ways to cross the mountains, but there was not, assuming they could cross the bridge without incident, a faster way. Clay might have weighed these things against one another. He could have taken into account the protests of the others, except that, in the end, only one thing really mattered.

  You would come it if was me, right, Daddy?

  Clay closed his eyes against the ache in his chest. He clenched his fingers, imagining he could feel his daughter’s tiny hand in his. What would he give to see her now? To hold her in his arms and breathe her in? What would he risk to keep her from harm? What would he dare if her life were threatened?

  Everything. Anything. Clay opened his eyes.

  “We take the Cold Road,” he said.

  “No …” Moog’s voice was barely a whisper.

  “Moog, listen, it’s the—”

  “Impossible,” breathed the wizard.

  “Well, c’mon now, I wouldn’t say …” He trailed off, since Moog was very obviously not listening to a word he was saying.

  The wizard’s expression slipped from shock to disbelief—the sort of amazed wonderment you’d expect from a child who’d begged for a horse for their birthday and was given an entire herd. He raised his arm and pointed a trembling finger past Clay’s shoulder.

  Clay turned to look. At first he saw nothing but a rising slope littered with rugged brown stone, but then something shifted against the hillside, and he saw … he saw …

  Matrick’s voice broke over his thoughts. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Clay squinted, shading his eyes from the sun. What he saw looked a great deal like a bear, except it was bigger than any bear he’d ever seen. It had grey feathers in place of fur, horned ears above a stubby black beak, and a pair of large eyes. Comically large, in fact, which spurred Clay to realize, at last, what exactly he was looking at.

  “OWLBEAR!” Moog was dancing on the spot. “It’s an owlbear! I told you, didn’t I? I told you! It’s real! I knew it!”

  Ganelon smirked. “Then why do you sound so surprised?”

  The wizard ignored him. “This is incredible! Nobody’s ever seen an owlbear up close and lived to speak of it. Gods of Grandual, if that old bastard Katamus could see this!”

  “What did you say?” Matrick asked.

  “He was my professor of Biological Impossibilities at Oddsford. He didn’t—”

  “No,” Matrick cut him off. “I mean about no one seeing one up close and living?”

  “Well, obviously,” said Moog, as though it actually were obvious. “Or else they wouldn’t be considered a myth, would they? Also, did you see its claws? It could cut a tree to kindling with one swipe!”

  He went on speaking, but whatever he said was drowned out by deafening and distinctly territorial WHOOOOOOOT!

  Clay was hoping no one had seen him jump when Ganelon reached suddenly for Syrinx. The runes blazed to life and the axe muttered like a sleeper kicked awake. “It’s charging,” he announced.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Bards and Broken Bowls

  “I still don’t see why you had to kill it,” said Moog sulkily.

  “Oh no?” Matrick asked. “Why don’t you ask the zombie?”

  “Zombie? Seriously?” Kit shook his head in disgust, but then proffered his right arm, which had been savaged almost to the bone by the enraged owlbear. “Anyway, I fear killing the beast was our only recourse, Arcandius. The poor creature was … well, it was angry.”

  “It was only trying to protect its little ones,” Moog grumbled. He wore Gabriel’s old pack slung over his chest, inside which were the two cubs they’d found on the hillside after the Owlbear was dead. Their beaks were barely big enough to clamp down on a finger, but their eyes were huge, gold as the Summer Lord’s beard, and seemed to ask, Why did you kill my mother? whenever Clay made the mistake of looking their way. They mewled ceaselessly, only growing quiet when Moog stroked the soft white down on their heads, as he did now.

  “Well I was trying to protect my little ones,” said Ganelon. He reached over to pet Matrick, who flinched away and self-consciously smoothed his thinning hair.

  Gabriel glanced back over his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Moog. It was her or us.”

  The wizard sighed and looked down at his whining charges. “I guess so. But at least I can keep these two safe.”

  Safe? Clay almost scoffed. We’re going to the most horrible place in the world by the most dangerous route possible, but okay, sure.

  “Have you decided what to name them?” asked Gregor. Beside him, Dane giggled for no reason at all.

  “Not yet, no.” The wizard winced; Clay could see that bearing the cubs was taking a toll on his stamina. “Can we rest soon, Gabriel? They look hungry …”

  “Soon,” said Gabe without turning.

  They’d been climbing all day. First the rugged foothills below, then the mountain itself, which Kit informed them was called Deliverance. Clay’s legs were on fire. His right knee had started popping with every step, which might have troubled him more had he not heard Moog’s and Matrick’s knees clicking as well, so instead he just found it darkly amusing. Ganelon was unaffected by anything resembling fatigue. He climbed with the dogged gait of an automaton. Sabbatha appeared tireless as well, despite her heavy black armour. She’d gone quiet over the past few hours, stalking along beside Ganelon while Umbra bounced like a garish fishing pole on her shoulder.

  But still Gabriel led the way, fueled by determination alone. Clay saw him falter several times. Once he tripped and went sprawling, but he leapt up as though drawn to his feet by unseen strings, a puppet dancing beneath the hand of its own indomitable will.

  Up they went, until the forest resembled an ink-dark sea lapping hungrily at the mountain’s feet. Up, until snow crunched beneath their feet and every breath plumed white before them. Up, until the air grew so crisp and cold that Matrick suggested they might turn the cubs into a pair of warming cloaks, and Moog proposed they slit Matrick open, unspool his guts, and take shelter in his belly for the night.

  They found a cave shortly before dusk. It was empty but for a small table and two damp pillows, each of which was occupied by a decrepit skeleton. Between them was a moonstone Tetrea board bristling with beautifully carved figurines. The game was one in which two players waged a war between Grandual’s gods: one controlled the forces of the Summer Lord and his daughter, Glif, while the other played on behalf of the Winter Queen and her son, Vail. It was a game of tactical foresight and cunning strategy—which was to say that Clay Cooper had never won a match in all his life, including an especially embarrassing loss to his nine-year-old daughter.

  On the board below, one of the Winter Queen’s pawns had been advanced two squares ahead.

  “Brilliant,” said Moog.

  “These two were masters,” Kit agreed.
r />   Clay frowned, gleaning nothing of the sort. Stranger still: The skeleton of a cat was curled beside the table, as if the creature had been content to sleep itself to death while one of the so-called masters contemplated a move he would never make.

  Ganelon grunted and scratched the whiskers on his chin. After a moment he stooped and slid a pawn on the opposite side forward.

  Sabbatha grinned. “You sure about that?”

  Ganelon glanced up at her, and if Clay didn’t know better he’d have said the southerner looked intrigued. Ganelon motioned at the board. “Be my guest.”

  The daeva’s grin turned feral. She kicked one of the skeletons aside and settled herself in its place. Ganelon grasped the other by the skull and flung it away.

  If Clay thought the scene before had been strange, now it was outright bizarre. A notoriously malicious bounty hunter and a peerless killer hunkered down at a Tetrea board, he mused. Now I’ve seen everything.

  Someone had brought up bards, which in turn led to a discussion about how they died, since that was what bards did best.

  “Which one was William?” asked Matrick. The old king had found a flask somewhere—Clay wasn’t about to hazard a guess—and took a swig, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand. “Was he the one that got gobbled up by a crypt slime?”

  “That was Cook,” Clay reminded him. They’d managed to gather a few bare branches from outside the cave, and he fed one now to the waning fire.

  “Oh yeah!” Matty slapped his knee. “I remember Cook! Great kid. Terrible cook. Hell of a bard, though, and a decent pickpocket, too.”

  Not if that pocket belonged to a crypt slime, Clay mused. The boy had seen something glinting within the cube-shaped gel and plunged his hand right into it. But crypt slimes, not unlike people, rarely reacted kindly when someone jammed a fist inside them. Also, they were extremely corrosive: The young bard had been nothing but a dismayed-looking skeleton by the time they’d killed it, still clutching the worn copper coin that had cost him his life.

  “Great kid,” Clay echoed. “Anyway, William was the nobleman’s son. We called him Sir Billy, remember?”

  Matrick snorted. “Sir Billy! Gods, he hated that name. Arrogant little shit, wasn’t he? Whatever happened to him?”

  Gabriel was scraping his dinner bowl clean with a finger. Tonight’s fare had been a disappointing mix of overcooked sausages and undercooked lentils, but Gabe had devoured it like a prisoner given salted steak after decades of gruel. “Castrated by a nymph,” he said.

  Matrick cocked his head. “What? How did I not know that?”

  The frontman shrugged. “You drank a lot.”

  “Good point,” said Matrick. He tipped his flask again, and afterward smiled wistfully. “Recca was nice.”

  Recca had been Saga’s first female bard, and accordingly several of them—Clay included—had been madly in love with her. But Recca, unfortunately for everyone involved, had been in love with a bloodeater. It turned her, eventually, and Gabriel had been forced to drive a silver stake through her heart. They’d gone after the bloodeater next and made damn sure it suffered.

  “Well, she was a whole lot better than Catrina, anyway,” Matrick added.

  Clay shifted from one elbow to the other on his roll, hoping to relieve the pain creeping into his lower back. It helped, for the moment. “Catrina … was she the moontiger?”

  “Raksha,” said Moog. “Not a moontiger.”

  “There’s a difference?” asked Ganelon without taking his eyes from the Tetrea board. He and Sabbatha had been at it all night, eating supper where they sat, muttering quietly to one another between finishing one match and beginning another. Clay had no idea how many games they’d played, or who was winning, since they both approached it with the same fierce intensity with which they fought.

  “Of course there’s a difference,” Moog was saying. “Moontigers are lycanthropes.”

  Matrick looked puzzled. “They can see through walls?”

  “What? No!” The wizard shared a my friends are imbeciles look with the revenant before deigning to explain. “Moonies are people, just like you or me, except they turn into animals during a full moon. It’s a disease, actually.”

  “Like drinking,” Gabe clarified, throwing a smirk in Matrick’s direction. “Mostly you’re a man, but sometimes you’re a monster.”

  Matty said nothing, but looked thoughtfully at the flask in his hand.

  “Well, yes, I suppose it is like that,” said Moog. “Now rakshas, on the other hand, are monsters, though they can make themselves look like people, as Catrina did. They’re not evil, necessarily, but the vast majority of them are assholes.”

  Clay could attest to that. Though she’d posed as a bard, Catrina had in fact been an assassin hired to kill Gabriel. She’d seduced him first (not an especially difficult task) and then attacked him in his quarters while the band was at sea. Gabe had narrowly escaped and fled, stark naked, onto the ship’s deck with the raging tigress hot on his heels. Clay had managed to fight her off until Ganelon arrived, and the southerner had tossed her, scratching and screaming, over the rail and into the sea.

  Rakshas, it also bore mentioning, were not especially strong swimmers.

  “Ah, here it is!” Moog, who’d been rummaging through his bag for several long minutes, now withdrew what looked like a seashell made of brass and wood.

  Clay was trying to decide whether it was some sort of bomb when the wizard brought the shell to his lips and blew a few tentative notes through a grille on one end. An instrument, he realized—which didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t also a bomb. Moog was Moog, after all.

  “I traded a pair of old boots to a trash imp for this, straight up,” said the wizard.

  Matty looked dubious. “What does a trash imp need boots for?”

  “He ate them,” said Moog. When Matrick’s expression slipped further toward incredulity the wizard added, “It’s true. He filled them both up with mustard and ate them right there in front of me. I swear, a trash imp would eat its own offspring if there was mustard on ’em.”

  He blew another series of exploratory notes into the shell before slipping into what was surprisingly recognizable as a song. Matrick sipped at his flask and smiled appreciatively. Gabriel closed his eyes. Kit hummed as though he knew the tune, and Clay, who didn’t, lost himself in the fire’s fitful light. He heard the quiet clack of a moonstone piece.

  “I take your queen,” Ganelon announced, and Sabbatha swore under her breath.

  “Again?” he asked.

  “Again,” she answered.

  Clay went on staring, Matrick went on drinking, Kit kept on humming, and Moog played on and on. The air in the cave began to smell just a little bit like salt. The brisk mountain wind rolled in from outside, whispering in the corners like a wave spilling secrets to the shore. The shell’s song was a mournful sound, and so it came as no surprise when Matrick, having sucked the last dregs from his flask, spoke as though their tiny fire was the pyre of a departed friend.

  “What’s the best part about being immortal?” he asked Kit.

  The ghoul spent a long moment considering. “Fearlessness,” he said at last.

  One of the little owlbears stirred awake. Moog laid the shell aside and hauled the cub into his lap, stroking the silky feathers between its saucer-shaped eyes. “How do you mean?” he asked.

  “You’d be surprised how many choices one makes due to the intrinsic nature of self-preservation,” Kit said. “When survival is no longer an issue, well, all bets are off, as they say. My first few years as an immortal were especially reckless. I took risks no mortal ever could. I leapt from the dizzying heights of waterfalls and strolled like a sightseer through the carnage of battlefields. I spat in the face of death, and death could do nothing but rage in impotence as I worked up another mouthful of phlegm.

  “And then of course there’s the travel element,” he remarked cheerily. “I’ve wandered the deep places of the world without fear o
f starving or falling prey to some awful monstrosity crawling around in the dark. And believe me, there are some awful monstrosities crawling around in the dark. I’ve explored the ocean depths without needing to come up for air. I’ve roamed coral labyrinths and walked the submerged streets of ancient Antica.

  “I once explored the shores of a land to which no ship had ever sailed and met a tribe of blue-skinned barbarians who had never even heard of the Dominion—or of Grandual, even. They killed me, obviously, as barbarians tend to do with strangers in their midst, and offered my body as a sacrifice to their savage god. But when I refused to stay dead they decided to worship me instead.”

  “Sounds better than being a king,” said Matrick.

  Kit nodded. “It was—until a plague tore through the village and killed every man, woman, and child in the tribe. I was left alone to do whatever gods do once all who believe in them are dust.”

  “Such as?” Moog prompted.

  “I did a lot of hiking, actually. And swimming. And I whittled things out of wood, though I never really got good at it.”

  “And what about the worst thing?” Matrick asked. “What’s the downside to being an immortal?”

  The ghoul chuckled. “Well for a start it’s been hell on my complexion. I was a handsome devil once, though you’d hardly know it now.” He fell silent for a moment, gazing thoughtfully into the fire while his eyelids fluttered.

  “I suppose it gets a bit lonely sometimes,” he said after a while. “There are occasions on which I’ll laugh at some amusing memory only to remember that the person it concerns is a century dead. And companionship—let alone intimacy—can be a scarce commodity when you look as I do. Children scream at my approach. Men reach for swords to slay me, or torches to burn me, or holy symbols with which to smite me—it’s all very tiring, if I’m being honest. And it goes without saying that with the exception of a few blessedly twisted individuals, not many women look longingly at a bloodless ghoul. There’s only so far a rapier wit and extensive wine knowledge will get you when your … uh …apparatus is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.” He winked at Moog. “Though that problem has since been remedied by a certain wizard and his magnificent phallic phylactery.”