“Listen, boy,” Carn snarled as he leaned closer. “I don't like your attitude. When we talk to you, you answer. If we tell you to do something, you do it, simple as that. Got it?”
“Get. Off.” Ayden gripped Carn's boot and twisted. The boy's startled face hid behind his arms as he windmilled and lost his balance.
Ayden leaped with agile grace to a wary crouch.
Band glanced at Carn, and the two boys advanced. “You know some fighting moves, then, dung?” Band snarled as he closed the space. “Let's see how good you really are.”
“You don't want to do this. You really don't.”
Ayden's words were like a spark to gunpowder. “Are you so sure of that, boy?” Band lowered his head, his boots pounding the stone floor. Ayden whirled to the side, snagging Band's neck under his arm and hefting him over his shoulder. Band crashed against the wall.
Ayden turned to meet Carn's assault. The big boy had retrieved his mace and swung it in a deadly arc. Ayden counted the tempo of the swings in his head and ducked beneath, flipping his leg up in a roundhouse kick, catching Carn on the temple. Carn grunted as he landed with a thud on his back, the mace rolling to one side.
A whisper of movement pulled Ayden's attention back to Band. He twisted, ramming his glove into Band's nose. Blood sprouted on Band's face. His fist caught Ayden in the stomach, and Ayden went down.
Carn was there. He wrapped his muscled arm around Ayden's neck, the rough fabric of his shirt scratching Ayden's skin below his chin. His other hand held Ayden's arms behind his back. Ayden twisted, but couldn't move.
“Spill his stinking guts, Band,” Carn snarled. “Spill them good.”
Band pulled his bare-knuckled fist behind his ear and struck, hammering into Ayden's left eye.
Ayden grunted in pain, a million sparks exploding in his vision.
Band's mouth widened into a perfect O of surprise that rapidly transformed into pain. Gray cracks radiated over his skin, running beneath his jacket to his neck and then crawling up his face like rain in the open cracks of parched earth. The cracks spread, taking over mouth, nose, and eyes. Finally, his entire head caved in, and what had been Band collapsed in a pile of ash, smoke, and limp clothing.
Carn's guttural cry whipped Ayden's gaze to him, and too late, Ayden realized that Carn had gripped Ayden's bare neck with his hand, too. Sickened, Ayden watched the same gray cracks race across Carn's skin, taking over his body entirely, sending him into a fountain of ash as well.
Silence blanketed the hall, interspersed with the occasional shuddering grunt of a Dragon.
Ayden reached with trembling hands to retrieve the maces. Like a man in a dream, he carried them down the hall to the weapons room and returned with a broom and a bucket. He cleaned up the mess, picked up the clothes and walked to the furnace room, tossing them into the incinerator with the ashes.
Then he replaced the bucket and broom, just as they had been. He drew a vessel of water from the well, stripped off his shirt and gloves, cleaned his mace wound thoroughly, and bandaged it. It was awkward; he couldn't reach it easily, but he managed to stop the bleeding.
He rinsed and wrung his shirt as well as he could before pulling it over his head. He tucked the sleeves back inside of the gloves, careful to cover all of his skin with the exception of his face and neck.
It was still early evening when he arrived at his quarters. Tannic would wonder where he was, but he cared little for Tannic's words right now. He closed his door softly behind him, seeking out the cot that took up most of his room.
He lay his body on it, stretching out to his full length with his booted feet hanging off the end. Band and Carn would be missing at the next training session, and Ayden would need to be as confused about their disappearance as the rest of the keep. His stomach turned with nausea.
He closed his eyes, and memories flooded his mind. Once again he was eight years old:
The taibos opened his mouth, and the words that issued forth swirled a dark cloud in the air. The vortex hovered above the sorcerer; his brilliant black gaze speared Ayden where he stood.
“Your touch shall bring annihilation, the brush of your skin, death and ash. You pitted yourself against me, and now you shall pay the price!” With a cry, the taibos hurled the curse. “Here's your price, boy. Choke on it.” Ayden had leaped aside, and the blackness crashed against the wall behind him, missing him by an orlach.
Ayden lunged for the door, dodging the second curse, but the third caught him full in the back as he threw himself into the stone-cold corridor.
He remembered lying there, staring into the darkness, terrified lest he should be dead, yet afraid to live, to walk the long years without the solace of touch.
Ayden's jaw clamped as he pulled his mind from his dark memories. He would get his revenge.
But his eight year old self sobbed helplessly inside.
Chapter Three
Cedric
Cedric pulled off the soft leather moccasins, tossing them to one side as he lowered himself over the rocks to the water below. His feet ached to submerge in the liquid. He couldn't see the bottom; the sun rippled across the surface like a thousand gleaming candles. He considered doing a full dip, conscious that his last bath had been two days ago.
But the hour grew later, the fiery arc of the sky deepened to a brilliant orange, and Cedric knew he should return to the den before much more time passed.
“No scorpions this time, Cedric,” Shaya, his mother, had warned him, a gentle smile on her face. He grinned now as he remembered the time he'd spread a handful of the arachnids before her, claiming it was all he could find for food. She'd eyed him sternly and told him to leave and only come back when he found something worth eating.
She had been teasing, of course. Still, he knew her tastes. She preferred algae and moss from the river bottoms, but that was hard to come by in the Rockmonster Dwellings where water and lush greenery were scarce. This pool was the one place he could find her favorites, and he was determined to bring home some river bottom grass, at the very least.
Not that she expected him to find her food. Still, he was glad to be able to provide this one service for her. She had, after all, kept him alive for the last thirteen years, comforted him, provided for him, given him a family when he had none.
When he'd grown old enough to begin asking questions about his origin, why he wasn't like her, she had only one thing to say.
“I cannot tell you who your true parents are, Cedric. I ... was given you. My gift, sent to comfort me during the darkest time of my life.” No amount of prodding, begging, or searching had ever caused her to clarify her murky statements.
Cedric had often lain awake at night, straining his memory to recall his past, the things that had happened before he had come to live with an outcast Centaur, but the images in his mind were flitting shadows. Darkness. Cold. The outline of a face. Nothing cleared the fog that blurred his memories.
Cedric plunged his feet into the cool water, his gaze moving over the lake shore as the rock shadows lengthened over the water. The sun sloped in a jagged glow behind boulder-lined hills, and he wondered if the Rockmonsters would be restless tonight. Generally, they kept their noise to a minimum, or if they did grow loud, their sounds didn't reach the safe den he shared high in the cliffs with Shaya. But their bickering always made Shaya nervous.
“It's one thing to have Centaurs angry at you, Cedric,” she'd explained. “The most they do is to banish you from their Clan. But to have Rockmonsters grow angry is an entirely different matter. If they happen to squash you, you'd be no more than a soft crunch beneath their feet.”
“So we just stay out of their way,” he'd said nonchalantly. He knew his absence after dark would make her nervous though, so he hastened now to collect the river bottom grasses and be on his way.
When he waded back to shore with his grasses slung over his shoulder, the sun had already set, and darkness was upon him. Shaya would be
worried, but he had yet to find his own supper. He couldn't eat grass like his mother; his human stomach refused to digest it. However, the scorpions had done the trick a time or two. Once he removed the stinger and roasted them over a fire, they weren't half bad. At times, he'd killed a coyote or a wild goat with a sling he'd fashioned from leather. He had hoped for a goat tonight, but he had run out of time.
Scorpions it was. He slid his feet into his moccasins, listening for the scuttle of scorpion feet on the rocky soil. Using a stick, he turned over a nearby rock, surprising the nearest arachnid. It wasn't much, but it would do for now. His stick blurred through the air so fast that the scorpion had no time to react, and Cedric speared the creature on the end of the wood to take it home for consumption. The grass dried quickly on his shoulder as he hurried back to the cliffs where Shaya waited in the den.
The stars had come out, pinning the sky with brilliant points of light. A coyote, or perhaps a Direwolf, howled in the distance. Their lands lay south of the Rockmonster Dwellings, and they'd been spreading farther afield. He'd seen them appear along the horizon where their huge furry forms created a disfigured web of shapes.
“What's beyond these lands?” he'd asked Shaya, many times. “When can we go to see it?”
“Someday, my son. Someday,” she'd promised. “Perhaps when you are older.”
But she'd never done it. Not yet. He wondered sometimes if she ever would. She'd always been reticent about “civilization.” “It's a world full of atrocities, my son. It is best to stay separate. Believe me, if I did not care for you so much, we would go tomorrow.”
As time went by, Cedric realized that it wasn't the wickedness of civilization that kept them from exploring it, but fear itself. Shaya was afraid to re-enter society, for fear of being turned away, sent back to where she had lived for the last thirteen years, this time without hope of ever returning.
Not that it does much good, he thought, kicking a pebble far ahead of him. She'll never force herself to find out if that's the truth or not.
A deep rumble shook the earth, and Cedric stopped, straining his eyes against the darkness.
There was another rumble, followed by a crash that shattered the stillness. A deep, vibrating groan from inside the earth sent Cedric stumbling backward, landing on one hip. The grass fell with a light thump to the rocky floor, scattering into drying clumps.
The stars blotted out one by one as a mountain rose out of the earth before him. The mountain grew, twisted, and groaned until Cedric could make out a massive head set atop a body. The thing was the largest monster he'd ever seen, at least forty spans tall; its arms swung beside it as it took its first steps forward. Its legs stretched into a rhythm that was marked by the steady thud, thud of heavy boulder feet.
Cedric was directly in its path.
He stared, all reason leaving him as the boulders stomped the ground only twenty lengths from him—ten, five...
He rolled to the side, sharp pebbles slicing into his ribs and his hips, shredding his skin.
Another groan from behind him grabbed his attention, and he turned to look.
There were two. Two Rockmonsters.
And then there were more.
They were convening or something. The first one met the second one head on. Cedric was watching a fight. A full-scale, gauntlet-thrown, Rockmonster battle.
More Rockmonsters joined the brouhaha. They threw heavy, crashing punches that rained rocks and debris down on him.
Cedric pushed to his feet, sprinting, watching over his shoulder, wide-eyed, as they had it out.
Shaya had always told him that the Rockmonsters should have been classed with Ogres or Trolls. They were stupid, overgrown creatures that had no thought beyond lying still, blazing in the sun, until one of them took offense at an imagined slight from another, and then they fought until one or the other exploded in a shower of rocks and rubble.
“It's not that they're bad, Cedric,” Shaya had murmured. “They just don't know how dangerously stupid they can be.”
But this altercation appeared much more serious. It wasn't just one attacking another. There were—he counted quickly from his vantage point behind a boulder some thirty yards from the fray—at least twelve of them here, no, thirteen. He'd missed one in the back running toward the others, his footsteps shaking the earth.
The one Cedric had seen first was swiftly losing the fight. His attackers came at him from all sides, and boulder clashes thundered as the first monster was driven back, back, back. They were moving close to the cliffs and the den he shared with Shaya.
No.
Cedric's only possible route to the den was through the legs of the fighting giants. It would take far too long to go around; the giants would demolish their den by the time he got there.
Cedric steeled himself. He pulled in deep lungfuls of air and then sprinted into the middle of the fray. A towering leg pounded no more than five lengths to his right. He over-corrected, leaping to his left and pushing himself forward.
He ran face-first into a rock wall, knocking himself to the ground. Stars flashed in his vision, and involuntary tears blurred his sight. His nose throbbed, and he clapped his palm to it, wondering if he'd broken it.
The stars blinked out again as a leg moved rapidly through the air straight above him. He let go of his nose and rolled to his feet, running forward, cursing the darkness, wishing he had started for home earlier.
There was nothing he could do about that now. The rising cliffs towered across the valley of the Rockmonsters with holes dotting the steep walls like aged cheese. The den he shared with Shaya was at the center of one of those ridges. Not far now.
Another leg crashed beside him, one of the boulders glancing off his arm. Pain shot to his shoulder. He shook it off and kept running, weaving where he could. The roars of the Rockmonsters were all about him, and he couldn't seem to leave them behind.
The den lay just ahead, the blank darkness of the cliff face striking terror to his heart. Shaya would have had a fire lit to welcome him had she been home.
She'd likely gone for shelter when the fight started.
Perhaps she was inside and unable to move.
But then she would have lit a signal fire for him to see.
Unless somehow one of the monsters had put it out for her.
Common sense told him that she would have put out the fire and gotten to safety. His pounding pulse told him she was trapped inside and injured ... or dead.
A jarring crash nearly sent him to the ground again. He caught his balance, but a cry ripped from his throat as he glanced back at the den entrance, bathed now in moonlight. A massive boulder blocked the opening. If Shaya was inside, there was no getting out.
Well, not easily. There was another entrance, through the roof, but it was too small for Shaya with her large equine body. Cedric could manage it well enough.
He had to check.
He sprinted in a wide arc to another tunnel's entrance a good forty spans to the left, diving inside, thankful for the temporary safety from the insanity outside. The Rockmonsters' roars sounded muted in here, almost still.
He ran up the tunnel's slanted curve into another chamber that opened up twenty spans above the canyon floors. The tunnel ran along the length of the cliff, an old waterway that had long since dried up, and he knew just how far it was to reach the hole where he could drop into the den.
She wouldn't be there. She couldn't. She hadn't built a fire, the entrance had been dark. She would have fled to safety, and he would find her as soon as the Rockmonsters succeeded in destroying themselves.
When Cedric dropped through the hole onto the floor of the den, he found the smoldering remains of the fire she had quickly trampled out. Shaya herself lay crushed in the entrance. Her equine body was twisted beneath the massive boulder; her leather-covered torso panted heavily on the dark floor.
“Cedric?” she gasped when she heard his footsteps.
�
�Mother.” He collapsed to his knees beside her. He couldn't see enough of her; the small light from the remaining embers was hardly enough to reveal even the outline of her face. “The boulder. We need to get it off of you.”
“No.” Shaya coughed and spit. Warm liquid spattered his knee. It gleamed, dark in the ember’s faint glow. Blood?
“No, Cedric, there's no use. Listen...”
But Cedric wasn't listening. He leaped once again to his feet, straining to push the boulder, his shoulder heaving into the jagged wall of it. It didn't budge.
Shaya coughed again, her breath rattling in her lungs.
“Cedric!”
Cedric was crying now; the tears washed down his cheeks, carving trails in the crusted dirt staining his face. He knelt by her head.
Her hand found his. “Cedric, listen. When I'm gone, there will be no one to care for you.”
“I'm seventeen, Mother; I can take care of myself.”
“No.” She coughed again, violently, and dark liquid foamed against her lips. “I mean, I don't doubt it, but your destiny is not to spend your life among the barren ruggedness of the Rockmonsters.”
Her coughs grew weaker. He could feel her slipping from him. That heavy stillness was coming, sliding over her body slowly from her hooves, to her great white withers, to her torso. Only her coughs disturbed the stillness. Her fingers were weakening on his.
“Mother, please...” His voice broke.
“Listen, I haven't much time.” Her whisper faltered. She coughed. “I took you when you were four, raised you as my own. You were ... special.”
Cedric swiped his hand across his eyes. The lump in his throat grew; more hot tears dropped onto his fingers.
“I turned my back on my Clan for you, my son. I've never gone back because—they—wouldn't have—understood. Your safety ... came ... first.” She struggled to speak; after a racking cough, she shook her head weakly. “My boy. My son.” Her lips curved into a smile. “You were born for greatness. Your mark proves it. You must go find your destiny, my Cedric.”
Kindle the Flame (Heart of a Dragon Book 1) Page 4
