The High King: A Tale of Alus

by Wigboldy, Donald

  "He's a beautiful animal. What's his name?"

  Serra's voice startled him from his thoughts. The girl was good at making herself a shadow even when not using the magic from Alyanna, he wondered what it was again, but answered, "Baaron."

  The horse's coat was primarily of brown. A white diamond ran from the animal's forehead down his nose. Serra patted Baaron's nose and the gelding whickered happily. Smiling, the girl stated, "Baron, huh? A bit premature if I understand your relation to Cadmene's throne, isn't it?"

  Tightening the saddle and adjusting the stirrups to hang to a comfortable length, he answered, "The name suited him, not me. I never asked to be anymore than a soldier for the king. My older brother will take my father's baron title not me, so I have little enough worries on that score."

  "Oh," the girl replied quietly and continued with petting Baaron's nose and neck. Baitrum could not tell if the tone meant disappointment or something else entirely.

  The stable boy arrived shortly and nodded to Baitrum. That was all. One little nod which left one eyebrow lifted on Serra's brow in curiosity, though the girl was used to secrets and didn’t pry. The captain of the queen's guards acknowledged the lad with a similar nod before pulling himself into the stirrups. With a hand offered to the girl, he asked, "Are you coming?"

  It was a little awkward pulling her onto the back of Baaron, but after a couple of attempts, the girl finally allowed herself to be pulled up in front of Baitrum. With the shift she wore, Serra was forced to ride side saddle. It was a little uncomfortable, but it would be a relatively short ride to the caverns.

  As they rode through the city and out of the north gate, Baitrum could not help but enjoy the feeling of Serra held in his arms. The man blushed and was thankful that she was not looking at him before he could recover his composure. Her occasional adjustments caused her body to rub almost seductively against his and the girl seemed to not even notice as she took in the countryside leading to the mountains.

  The man was wondering if she truly did not feel even the least bit the same way as he. When Serra stated casually, "I haven't ever been able to come this close to the mountains before. The hills seemed large where I grew up, but, compared to these towering mountains, they are little more than mole hills," he realized that she did not.

  Humility and even some disappointment were forced back as Baitrum rejoined, "The hills of Cadmene were smaller still than those I have seen here in Marshalla. When our knights came here, we were suitably impressed, though I have heard that further north are even taller peaks."

  The two talked about this and that as they crossed the next few miles. Baaron made no complaints as he trotted along under their combined weight as one might have thought. Serra was not much heavier than his armor after all and he wore no armor this day, so the load of the couple did little to inconvenience the warhorse. Soon they arrived at a stand of trees well below the entrance to the caverns.

  "Now what?" the girl asked. "We can't wait forever, according to the queen. We need to get inside."

  "And we won't," the soldier replied. He led the way through the trees after tethering the horse near a small spring and the fresh grass beside it. Baaron had deserved a rest after his exercise, and they would be a little while anyway. The soldier patted the animal's neck and proceeded to lead the way through the small grove and up the hill towards the lowest opening.

  They were still in the trees just below the entrance when Baitrum sensed that something felt wrong. He listened and gathered the first realization of what had spooked him. As the two of them crouched among the bush and brush below the opening to the caves, the soldier realized that there was complete silence all around them. No birds, no animals and, most surprisingly, no guards were in sight.

  Serra had stayed low beside him and, as the man began to cast about for signs of those that should be there, he noted the questioning worry of her glance. Baitrum shook his head slowly, even as the man continued to look for signs of the guards that he knew should be there. After nearly a minute, he leaned closer and whispered, "Stay here. I'm going to see what happened to the guards. The ones I called for shouldn't be here yet, so the guards have got to be around here somewhere."

  With a grimace, Serra nodded. She didn't totally approve of his need to leave her behind, but she would not stop his investigation. Baitrum slipped quietly out of the bushes and used the larger rocks and bushes to mask his approach from the cavern opening. With eyes searching all around to watch for a trap to be sprung, the soldier was nearly to where the dirt road led to the darkened entry when he noticed a pair of flying bodies silhouetted by the lightening, early morning sky to the northwest. They were floating away and over the ridge of the next closest hill, more of a small mountain in size. The distance was over half a mile, but he knew that they were not birds.

  Baitrum shivered, even as he realized that they were disappearing over the hill's crest. If the caves were being guarded by gargoyles now, he feared for the men that were coming to perform the risky diversion for him. They could dare normal soldiers, but a single gargoyle could probably kill them all by itself.

  Ignoring his fears, the man took the last crouching steps to peer over the edge of the cavern's landing. The spy couldn't stop the gasp of shock from leaving his mouth as he spied the remains of the guards laying cast about the nearby rocky floor. The tattered remains of armor and the black cloth of the uniforms helped identify that they had belonged to the special guard, known as the Sorcerer's Blade. How many men lay here dead was harder to determine for Baitrum. The remains had been torn literally limb from limb. Armored torsos seemed to have exploded from supernaturally devastating attacks. He noticed a couple of helmets, dented but still containing the heads they had attempted to save, but assumed that there were probably more nearby if he chose to look for them.

  "What happened to them, Baitrum?"

  Serra's voice caused him to nearly jump out of his skin from surprise. Laying his right hand across his chest to steady his rapidly beating heart, Baitrum turned to see the girl lift her hood to reveal her physical presence. "I thought that I told you to stay behind," he snapped. Noticing her face paling and fearing that she would faint, Baitrum grabbed hold of the girl's sleeve and started to pull her away from the carnage.

  Shaking free of his grip, however, Serra took a deep breath to steady herself and said, "No, Baitrum, we need to go inside."

  "Are you crazy?" he whispered in shock. "Whatever did this to them could just as easily do this to us. I won't let something like that happen to you if I can help it." His face started to redden at his choice of words, even as Serra had the ghost of a smile slipping through her own fears and queasiness at the mutilated soldiers.

  "Then don't let it happen to me, but we need to find out what happened here."

  "But..."

  "Look at this mess," the girl said gesturing towards the torn bodies, even as she looked ill. "The destruction seems to be directed away from the entrance, which means that whatever killed them has probably left already. We're probably safer inside than out, if that is true." She paused as Baitrum knelt to touch his fingers to some of the blood lying on the ground at their feet. "What are you doing?"

  Looking up worriedly and scanning all around them once more, he answered quietly, "The blood is still warm. They may still be nearby. This a fresh kill."

  Serra's face appeared only slightly more fearful, but she also looked around carefully. Her voice was still calm as she replied, "Then we'll have to be careful, won't we? Come on. Let's get this over with quickly."

  Baitrum gave in and drew his sword from its scabbard. With it carried at the ready before him, the lieutenant crept into the darkened tunnel. After several feet, he found a torch. Grabbing the wooden handle, he held off lighting the end and continued further with only the light from the cavern opening allowing their eyes to see.

  They were plunged into complete darkness and Baitrum was preparing to light the cloth end when another light made itself known well d
own the stony tunnel. As they moved further inward, he followed both his instincts and the more used hallways known by the disturbed dust on the floor and the torches that continued to appear at regular intervals.

  He checked behind him occasionally to see if Serra was still there. Sometimes she needed to remove her hood to acknowledge his worries, other times she ignored him and they would continue to push forward. It took quite awhile before the duo found anything that told them they were on the right trail.

  A body, or what was left of it, lay in a small chamber attached to the tunnel they followed. A door had been used to separate the chamber from others, but now it lay in splinters. The splinters all pointed towards a force seeking the inside.

  "Whatever it was wanted to kill the sorcerer before moving on," Baitrum said after a moment's examination. Serra said nothing and the two continued to move deeper into the stony earth. They found more chambers and more bodies as they went. The smell of blood soon overcame Serra to the point that she couldn't help herself from gagging and finally throwing up the contents of her early morning's breakfast.

  "Sorry," she whispered ashamedly.

  Noting his own stomach's queasiness, Baitrum shook his head, "Don't be. The smell almost has me doing the same. Let's continue before we're both sick from this stench."

  He lost track of time, but finally they found the end of their tunnel. A large chamber, that had proclaimed itself by a glow that could be seen well down the hall, anchored its end. The glow was not that of torches. It was the wrong color to be so. Almost like a mix of the reds and oranges of most flame and the greens like those seen through a well lit emerald glass, the glow reached for them down the stony hallway.

  It was hard for them to cross those last feet to where a pair of doors had once hung in the chamber's mouth. The glow seemed like an illness waiting to infect them with its corruption. The clunk of Baitrum's boots on the more or less whole but fallen doors, seemed like a noise echoing from a grave, and a grave it was.

  Inside the chamber, a fear, like none he had ever known, crept over him. A chill of dread and revulsion swept him up. Serra's gasp from just behind him proved that she could see and feel what he had found.

  The chamber was a fair sized rectangle in shape. From the fresh cuts on some of the inner walls, Baitrum could tell that it had been widened recently, probably to accommodate the gargoyles and dragons that had been seen exiting the sorcerer's tunnels. On the far wall, a gate of stone had once stood directly against the stone surface behind it, but now things had changed greatly.

  The wall of stone that had stood behind the gate was no longer there. In its place, a strangely lit portal opened onto another world, a world of desert and stone huts. It was the world of the gargoyles and dragons though they did not know this then. All they knew was that all the sorcerers appeared to have been slain within the chamber and a portal stood open without appearance of wanting to close anytime soon.

  "Gods," Baitrum gasped. "What has happened? Have the gargoyles broken through to our world permanently? I pray that they haven't."

  "Why?" Serra asked instantly with a faint whisper filled with fear.

  "If they have come here to stay that means Merrick has lost all control of them. If they decide to break from Merrick, they could decide to conquer the world for themselves. How would we possibly stop them if they decided to try?"

  The girl said nothing and both stood silently contemplating what that future would be like.

  Chapter 37- Old Friends

  Waves lapped against the shore. They were still capped in white, but they had lessened in strength with the passing of the storm. The morning's light revealed a beach still cluttered with the debris dredged up by its fury. The fisherman pirate stepped through the driftwood and kelp carefully, but not so gently that he would not disturb the crabs hidden beneath their sheltering darkness.

  With a deft flick of his wrist, the man stooped and tossed one of the scuttling creatures into a bag already squirming with his catch of the day. The pirate rubbed a sleeve across his forehead to sop up the sweat starting to appear on his brow. The weather following the storm was much warmer than that of the day before and was laden with extra humidity trapped on the island from both the rain that had fallen and the usual moisture rising from the ocean surrounding it. The man knew that it was going to be a hot, sticky day.

  It was then as his hand passed his eyes that the pirate noticed the body where it lay upon the shore. He had missed it earlier due to his preoccupation with the crabs and the clutter of debris that nearly covered the corpse. Making a face, the pirate moved forward to check just what kind of man had fallen to the nastiness of the storm.

  He doubted that the body could be a pirate. Every ship he knew to be near had taken refuge in the port of Gibros half a mile further down along the shoreline. It must be either a merchant foolish enough to have been blown near to the pirate isles or more likely a pirate hunter.

  As he stepped over the final wooden barrier, the pirate noted a second body beside the larger gray haired man. White, he clarified silently to himself, the giant of a man had white hair. Scratching his head with a free hand, the pirate considered them thoughtfully and finally decided to take a closer look.

  He grimaced to himself. Before he had become a pirate, the man would never have been able to look on a corpse so casually. The man was just morbid enough to want to see who the dead man was, but to do so with no emotion except that of curiosity, proved just how much he had changed in the past two years.

  A gasp pulled from the pirate's mouth as he noted the big man and his face in particular. Recognition justified what had prompted him to look. He knew this man and not just by reputation either. Kneeling beside the giant, the fisherman noted that he still breathed. The other man was equally alive, but it was the giant that drew his full attention. Nudging the man in the side gently, the giant still refused to show life beyond his breathing.

  "Fine, you always were a deep sleeper," the pirate muttered quietly. Setting the bag down carefully beside him and making sure that its drawstring was tightened enough to prevent his catch from escaping, the man moved both hands underneath the unconscious man. Setting both feet carefully apart, the pirate heaved and rolled the giant roughly onto his stomach.

  The giant gasped as his sleep was cut short. "What...?" he grumbled in surprise while his sleep enshrouded mind tried to catch up to his surroundings.

  "About time you awoke, isn't it, sir? The day could be half gone for all you seem to care."

  "Who...?" he asked turning to face the pirate. The giant's face lit up in shock. "Janus? Am I dreaming, my friend? It wouldn't be the first time that I had awoke wondering what happened to you. Is this real?"

  "Master Aramathea, I don't know how you came to be here, but I would hazard a guess that this is real enough. How did you wind up here anyway?"

  Shaking his head to clear the cobwebs, Gerid raised a hand to his forehead as if to relieve a headache. When his eyes returned to the pirate, he answered, "I could ask you the same. When last I saw you, we were in the slave pens. How did you wind up back with the pirates, or are you with them?"

  "It is a long story. As is yours, I gather. Who is your friend?"

  "My friend?" Gerid turned in the direction Janus pointed and his eyes widened. "Jahkob. I forgot that he was with me." Gerid's eyes glazed slightly as he thought to himself aloud, "Does that mean the girl was real as well then?"

  "What girl?" Janus asked searching around them for a third body.

  Gerid glanced around briefly and shook his head again, "Never mind, I guess. Must just have been a dream. There is no way that such a strange creature could exist."

  Janus looked thoughtful, "A woman that was as much fish as human?"

  Gerid looked at him in surprise. "You mean that she was real?"

  Shrugging, the pirate replied, "A story told by the pirates is that there is supposed to be a race of people that live beneath the seas. Most of them don't believe the old story,
of course. It's just a story told to the children as they go to bed, like those of trolls or gods like our parents told us in Marshalla. There may be truth hidden in the tales, but who truly knows what inspires such stories."

  Gerid shrugged, "I may be starting to believe some of the things about the gods and the girl did seem real enough, but like you say who knows?" Gerid leaned over and slapped Jahkob's face lightly. The waterlogged sailor coughed a quick staccato as he began to awake. After a moment the man opened his eyes just enough to see Gerid's face and give a groan.

  "Time to get back to work again, sir? Kind of strange to have you coming to wake me." The man tried to raise up and gave another, louder groan and was forced to lay back again. "Sorry, sir," he mumbled apologetically.

  Patting the man's shoulder gently, Gerid shook his head, "Don't worry, Jahkob. We aren't on ship. You must have blacked out in the storm. You and I were washed ashore last night after being knocked into the sea."

  "Can barely remember the storm," Jahkob mumbled and started to doze off once again.

  "It must have taken a lot out of both of you," Janus stated as he looked over Gerid's shoulder at the sleeping man. "Actually, I'm rather surprised you survived last night's fury."

  Gerid looked up from his kneeling position and stared steadily at the other man's eyes. "What happened to you? You never said."

  His former friend shrugged, "I was bought by a merchant to help fill out his crew." Janus smiled grimly, "Threw up all over the idiot on the first day. Even now it tends to take a day to get over being seasick, but my captain took me out with him every time.

  "Anyway, back to your question. The second month with the merchant ship, we were attacked by the pirates. Captain Salazar spied the slave's tattoo on my forearm and decided to keep me as a servant. When the captain found out that I could actually fight half way decently, I was promoted up to a full sailor. I've since earned their respect and learned enough about sailing that I've been made one of the ship's sub-lieutenants." Janus smiled slightly and Gerid knew that the man was proud of his accomplishments. From what Gerid knew of the pirates, it was a rare honor to achieve such a rank from Janus' original position as slave. He knew the next question before it was asked, and cringed a little when his friend decided to ask it. "So how about you, Gerid? I spied the scar on your hand. How have you been doing since you were sold into slavery?" Janus winced slightly. Both men felt the harshness of the unspoken bitterness they had felt over the past nearly three years. It had been unfair to all of them to lose their lives to slavery, but they knew now that life was not always fair.