by Dylan Doose
The sound of arguing in the Romarian tongue, which Theron was learned in, caused him to turn from the conversation with his companions. His employer, or as Theron described him, his client, Olav Yegarov, stood in the bloodied square where the dispute was supposed to have just come to an end.
But it appeared that here in Romaria, the men in power were the same lying, thieving, bastard slavers as the high and mighty of Brynth. And as he often did when in the company of titled men, Theron wondered what made a beast, what a monster? Was it claws and fur matted with blood? Long fangs and slithering tongues? Tails and wings, horns and scales… Or is it all in the eyes? When the glint of life and passion is gone, and all that remains are dead orbs drunk with the blood and tears of all those they have broken on a whim.
“Yegarov, what is that old shit spouting from his comfy chair, in his cozy blankets?” asked Kendrick. The big man had been holding Theron’s claymore in its sheath, and he handed it to Theron.
The hefty blade felt heavier than its usual seven pounds after the exertion of the unarmed combat.
“Kvorag is claiming it was an unfair contest,” said Yegarov in the common tongue.
“Of course it was unfair. Theron just fought two men and won…with one eye.” It was Aldous who spoke now. He pulled back his hood. Theron often marveled at how quickly the boy had grown in height and bone structure despite the hardships of the road. Perhaps he was only late to grow and would not forever be paltry. But it was not just the boy’s appearance that had aged; it was his demeanor, his essence that had grown the most. When Theron met him, nearly two years past, he had been a nervous, volatile whelp. Now he was a calm, fierce, wolfish man who controlled fire…sometimes.
Other times he was still a volatile whelp…who failed to control fire.
“He is not talking about this contest,” Yegarov began. “He is referring to the contest, the horse race, where he first developed this sizeable debt to me.” Yegarov was smiling. This seemed to be a trend in the claims of his debtors. They were all cheated at gambling, all wealthy, all of some status, all refusing to pay.
None of them were good men, or good women, but collecting debts from them for a cheater and swindler was not about right or wrong.
“Yegarov, had I known the extent of how wretched a man you were prior to our contract, I would have never followed through,” said Theron.
“And here I was thinking you and I, and Ken and Aldous, had developed everlasting friendships. You wound me, Theron…but our contract ends tonight. When the sun goes down we may finally part ways in Brasov… But before that, convince this old man that it is in his best interest to pay what is owed.”
Theron spat, and pulled the claymore free from the sheath. The great sword had been many times modified over the past nine years, but it was still the same sword, the same parting gift from his father before Theron began the hunt. As it had been all those years ago, it was the tool of his art, and with it he had painted red on scenes of snow and ice, forests, swamps, manors, and hovels, and the decks of ships at sea. Nine years and here he was, with the same sword on a killing path.
On the spring lawn, five boys as green as the grass stood, hands on sword hilts as they surrounded their baron. They were not the hard men; the hard men were the slaves Theron had just beaten to death. These were the pretty young boys the baron liked to keep around to look at, to live through vicariously. Not one them had a beard, faces like babes.
Theron was capable of killing them all before Baron Kvorag’s piss finished running down his leg. He didn’t want to do that, not in the least, but with his one eye he stared at the boys like there was nothing in the whole world he wanted to do more than yell in bloody joy as he hacked them screaming limb from limb. He always had a hard stare, not as hard as Ken’s, though, who was standing next to him giving the boys the same look, but worse. No thrill in it, nothing in it at all but the promise that death was so very close, so very real, and so very unstoppable.
“Tell them to walk away, to find a new master,” said Aldous as he walked into the square, so now all four of them stood on the ground bloodied by the baron’s defeat. A ball of flame ignited and hovered an inch or so above the intricately carved staff that Aldous held in his right hand. The young bodyguards gasped at the sight. If they were not already broken by the looks of Theron and Ken, they had no fight in them now.
“If they fight us, they will die. If they don’t, after we leave, Kvorag will have them killed. Tell them that Yegarov,” Ken said.
Yegarov spoke in Romarian. His voice was calm, pleading almost.
The young men remained, and for a moment it looked as if they would defend the old wretch. Theron took a single step forward, his sword over his shoulder. They did not move forward or back, but their swords lowered a few inches.
Ken stepped forward, and Aldous as well, the wizard moving to the front, the ball of flame above his staff growing as he raised his other hand to it and whispered to the fire, words the others could not hear. The flame twisted and bent into a wing, then a talon, and a snapping maw of a wolf.
The swords went all the way down, and the boys did not speak as they orchestrated their retreat. The baron yelled and shook his gold- and gem-encrusted cane as his would-be guards gathered their things from the lawn and prepared to abandon their lord. Kvorag finally stood when he saw one of the young men taking a bottle of wine from the grass. He tossed his blankets to the floor, and on old, brittle knees he stumbled at the young man and tried to wrestle the bottle of wine away.
Likely Yegarov was not the only man Kvorag owed. With the civil war raging across the country at its peaking point of violence, these were desperate times. The young men were trying to take anything they could before setting off into dangerous country to find another lecherous old man to live off. Or perhaps they’d join the Dog Eater and his ragtag army and begin burning small towns and raping women and beheading children in their chapels. The options were limited in this country for those who were intent on a life free of conflict.
The boy shoved Kvorag to the ground, made off with the bottle, mounted his horse, and rode off with the rest. The baron crawled after him a short distance, then collapsed entirely and wept.
I n the end they collected what was owed. They took a horse and a cart, and on it a chest filled with the last bit of a broken baron’s gold.
“Where will you go now?” Yegarov asked, after they had ridden for a few miles down a wide road surrounded by rocky ravines and thick green woodland.
“We will escort you to Brasov, as agreed. We should make it there with at least an hour, maybe more, before sundown. You will pay us, and we will go our separate ways,” Theron said. He was about to say more, but before he did he saw signs of combat on the road. When he turned to Kendrick and the man gave him a cold nod, it was clear he saw the same.
Upturned dirt, boots pushed through mud, smears where bodies fell, faded red where they were dragged off. Torn blue fabric; from a dress, perhaps? The lady in the carriage on the road this very morn had worn a dress of this exact shade.
“Likely ambushed that same convoy we saw this morning.” Ken said what Theron was thinking.
He was about to respond when he caught the smell. It was faint, for all around them life and spring bloomed on the trees and vines, colorful flower buds bursting open, spreading wide in the season of birth. It was not enough, though, to cover the scent of death, and of the beast that followed.
“Ach! What is that smell?” Yegarov asked.
“What I’ve been waiting for,” Theron answered.
* * *
You are the same as I, we are one, oh children of mine. The red cloud follows your path, the rain never stops, and it is always blood. You could choose the truth. But you lie, you tell yourselves about purpose, about right and wrong, about justice, and redemption, but the truth is simpler. You are the very same maggot as infection; you are the wolf of hunger, the vulture of thirst; you are the energy of war, the messengers of death, and your
deluge of slaughter has formed rivers. They flow into my great sea, the sea in my cauldron. Kill me, my children; slit my throat and pour me in, but know this: After it is stirred and the fire dies, you will do what you can to turn away, to refuse the starvation, but you will break, and you will drink it dry. That is the destiny of your ilk. The change is in your blood.
—The Book of Dammar
* * *
Chapter Two
The Dog Eater
Near sunrise that very morn…
Lady Celia of Chech was not some common whore. She was a lady, from money…even if it is almost all gone. And her father was the baron…even if he is in tremendous gambling debt to many unsavory characters.
Her father was a cruel old man. He could have been her grandfather, or great-grandfather. When she was born he was already wrinkled and bitter.
In her mind’s eye, she could see his face when she had told him. Before her revelation, she had been nothing to him, a child, an inconvenience. After…he looked at her as if she were cursed.
The memory made it come again. Nausea. Anxiety. Hysteria. Then a lull, a calm in the maelstrom of emotion and dissociated humors. Breathe deeply. He is a good man, the man I travel now to see; deep down he is a good man. He must be, for how else would he be so blessed?
He will know what to do, and it will be the right thing. He will do the right thing.
The carriage bumped up and down as she clung to the wrist-hold and wedged herself in the corner to keep from being tossed. Her sobs came out in bursts to the rhythm of the road. And then she sobbed no more, wrung dry like a rag.
Outside the carriage, one of her father’s knights laughed. There was no reason for it to be at her expense, but the very fact that he could be laughing, that some servant to her father could be laughing at a time like this was…was…
Humiliating.
That villain I travel now to see… that tyrant had better acknowledge what he has done. Or I will ruin him. I will ruin him to nothing. All his flock will see him for what he is: a sinner, just like all the other sheep, a sinner and a passionate fool, and worse, a sorcerer, a practitioner of the pagan arts.
Celia felt a moment of strength, the calm returning as she gained conviction, telling herself she had the power to make this work out in her favor, not as a hard lesson, but as a glorious future prospect. She would keep her mouth shut about whom and what he really was, and he would shower her with his wealth, for she knew that Father’s prospects were dwindling by the day.
She would give it all to him, to her father, the fallen baron. His position in the fiefdom of Chech would have meaning and value again. He would finally see her; he would love her the way he would have loved a son.
She envisioned what that would look like, a loving father. It kept her warm as time passed.
Celia looked through the window at the trees. As they travelled, they only encountered one other group on the road, four men, one of whom looked to be another baron by his dress. He wore a dark coat with golden buttons and embroideries of golden lilies. His white hair was trimmed neatly and close to his skull. He was well shaved, and tidy as a man could be while journeying.
The other three were grim mercenaries, two of them maimed by battle. The blond man in the front with the untamed hair to his wide shoulders only had one eye, and where the other should have been was a horrific burn scar that covered his brow on the left side of his face and part of his cheek. Before he acquired that mark, Celia was sure he was a handsome man, villain or no. He had smiled what she thought to be the cruelest of smiles when he saw her peeking from behind the window curtain. She had scowled in response, and he huffed a laugh and turned away. He wore a long black cloak over chain mail, and on his back was a horned helm and a claymore that made her guess the villain had come from Ygdrasst or Blodjord in search of gold and glory…and blood, much blood.
All men are the same.
The man who trotted on a gray steed behind him was both hulking and hungry in appearance, thick with muscle, his frame made larger still by his black armor of boiled leather. But his cheeks were sunken and lean like the wide-shouldered northerner, and he had small, squinty eyes just above a scar that ran horizontally across his face. His head was shaved bald and he had a braided beard dangling from his chin with what looked like a shard of bone stuck through it. When he turned to face her it was with a stare much different than the first man’s, and it came without a smile. It was the look a man may give a rock, or a tree, or perhaps it was the way one stared at nothing at all. She shivered and closed the window’s curtain as she caught a glimpse of the last of the mercenaries, smaller and cloaked in red, with a long wooden walking stick lying across his horse’s back on the saddle.
They were going to see her father, no doubt. More collectors.
Indeed, Father’s prospects truly are dwindling by the day.
She stopped thinking of that, and turned her mind back to what lay ahead, not behind. But no matter where her thoughts turned, there were only men, murderous, lecherous, greedy men. Her mind went from her father, to the father, the Patriarch, and when she thought of him once more, she heard the voice call out from the pit of self-loathing within, “You think you are the first, you foolish bitch? You are the hundredth.”
She was not the same as the rest of them.
She would not allow the fiend to get away with this. All his promises, all the things he committed to, all the powers he had called upon in her name…were lies.
Do not cry again.
And she didn’t. She remained quiet and angry for many hours.
She kept the anger fed with thoughts of his face, his cruel face…his perfectly sculpted face. With his golden eyes and his silver tongue he had lured her, convinced her he was holy. He had shown her god, only to ultimately reveal the demon he was.
Her mother had always warned her that all men were filth. Her mother had hated Celia’s father. She spoke words so treacherous behind his back that if their utterance had been heard by a soul other than Celia, her mother would have long ago been thrashed, humiliated in the streets, and exiled, maybe hanged, maybe given up to the pyres at First Morning. To the man’s face, though, she was submissive, she did what was asked of her. Always.
That is the world. Men suffer the wrath of an abusive god, and women suffer the wrath of the same abusive father and all his sons.
The carriage stopped with a jolt, and outside the horses whinnied.
“Why are we stopping?” Lady Celia called through the carriage’s window without pulling back the curtain, anxiety once again rising.
After a moment the curtain was pushed aside by a mailed hand and Sir Zomat’s grizzled, pox-scarred face peered in at her.
“Apologies, Lady Celia, but there are three strangers approaching on the road. For your own safety, the convoy will stop and make sure these hooded figures are no more than vagabonds and not any of the Dog Eater’s curs, who by the decree of the Patriarch himself we must cut down, by law…your ladyship.” Zomat smiled. Half the man’s teeth were gone, the other half rotten from drink, but Zomat was said to be one of the best tournament fighters in the nation, and in a nation as large and contested with civil war and endless violence as Romaria, being one of the best tournament fighters was saying much.
Despite her father’s debt and his untimely dispensing of wages, Zomat and his men were oath bound before the Luminescent to the Baron of Chech. For whatever reason they stood by their oaths, so Lady Celia was glad to have them as escort. Especially with the Dog Eater and his army of pagan scum running rampant, burning chapels and tainting the minds of whole villages with their heretic ideals. An uprising of the young, wielding the thoughts of ancients, mad is the world in its cycles.
They said the Dog Eater was the biggest threat to the Patriarch and the church’s presence in Romaria since its founding nearly a hundred years ago.
That was what Lady Celia was told about them, but she couldn’t help but wonder what this man was really like, this one called
the Dog Eater. For she had been told many good things about the whoreson bastard that she now went to see and receive due penance from, but he was a bad man.
Perhaps this one, said to be an evil man by the faith, the Dog Eater, was a good man. Indeed, he was to his people. It was said he walked among them, fought among them, that with his own hands he built back the broken-down homes of his kin, and fed them as he would himself. Or so the pagans said…
She could hear Zomat talking down the road to the strangers, although she could not make out the words. The conversation sounded polite enough, and when she heard Zomat’s laughter, a rare sound, she was put at ease.
Celia rubbed her belly; the baby had just given her a formidable kick. She looked down at her stomach and asked the thing inside, “Do you hate me already?”
She was answered with screams. Her head jerked up. Heart pounding, she scuttled back and pressed herself into the corner, made herself small.
“Treacherous fiends!” came Zomat’s cry from outside, and armor clinked as the knights kicked their horses around and readied weapons.
“Protect Lady Celia at all costs. Do not let the peasant fucks to the carriage!” ordered another knight.
The yelling continued, and then Celia heard what sounded much like wind blowing through a metal chime, followed by the calls of beasts, howling and squalling every pitch of hell’s choir. This could only be a nightmare. She put her hands to her ears, closed her eyes, and tried to will her mind to wake.
Men were being wounded. And men were being slaughtered.
And it was no dream.
Nausea. Anxiety. Hysteria.
The carriage door flew open and she covered her eyes and flinched as a bloody gauntlet reached in at her. She screamed at the top of her lungs as the hand grabbed her and pulled her out.
“Get up!” It was Zomat. He held his mace in one hand and lifted Celia to her feet with the other. His iron plate armor was spattered with blood and his face was cut.
