by Dylan Doose
He pulled up with his left hand; his untrimmed nails bent back and he winced. His feet came off the ground as he jumped, and his right hand reached up to grab on to the first good hold on the rockface. The fingernails on his ring and middle fingers of his left hand tore from the skin, and the burning throb was instantaneous.
His right hand grabbed the hold firmly, and, feet planted, he brought his hurt left hand into the same grip as his right. He glared at his torn nails. He hated Theron in that moment. It was unjustified, and he knew that he should know better, but he was blaming the hunter for the nails halfway off his fingertips. They oozed purple-red blood that dripped onto the green moss that had grown in the crevice where Aldous’s fingers were wedged.
He hung for a moment trying to generate the energy for the next movement. He would have to kick off with his feet and throw himself backward, then extend his arms in the nick of time to grab the overhanging ledge. It was only a five-foot distance, likely less, but it appeared more. They had been traversing hard terrain, making deadly climbs for near a year now. With the fighting both in Romaria and back in Brynth, Aldous was strong and light, but it wasn’t enough. He was beyond exhausted after the climb and the encounter with the beast, not to mention their ridiculously early start that morn. A voice in his head was telling him he could not make it.
No… No! Shut your mouth. I can make it. It is nothing but one more challenge, one more hero’s task. I can make it.
“One,” he whispered, and dipped up and down, his fingers oozing dark blood.
“Two.” Another dip and a deep breath. “You can do it, you can do it.
“Three.” He kicked off and pulled up with the digits of both his hands. Reach. His right hand took hold, his left…almost. The blood made him slip. Pain jolted through his right arm, and he thought the muscles from his wrist to his chest were all about to rip off.
I should have cut those nails.
He repeated it like a mantra of focus as he struggled for his life on that treacherous rock. He looked down…down at the steep fall, the jagged rocks, the far-off river and hard trees that promised his destruction if he did not look back up and finish his charge.
I should have cut those nails.
He hurled his left hand back up and got a hold. He began to pull himself higher, legs dangling. A line of fiery pain burned from the tips of his fingers all the way to his right shoulder. It took an instant to realize it wasn’t merely fiery pain. It was fire ripping from his pores and licking at the rocks.
With a yelp, he snuffed it. Time and place, Aldous. Time and place.
His left fingertips throbbed and slipped. He was pulling, but he was not going up, not high enough. Aldous thought of swinging with his legs for some momentum. But his fingers were slipping. If he swung, he would fall.
I’m going to die. Like a fool, like a weak fool…too contrary to cut his nails.
Mouth dry, heart and lungs pounding in his ribs, Aldous heaved and pulled, rising. At the highest point he swung his leg, his sole connecting with smooth rock. He yelled as his body swung back down, and, with a last-ditch effort, he used the return momentum of his swing to get his leg back up…up and over the precipice and his foot into the crack.
The story changes even now. Victory is close. He could taste it. It tasted like copper in the back of his throat. He could feel it too, and it felt like his ankle was going to snap in half, and that his toes were going to break as he used his leg muscles to pull his body up. His right hand went up and forward, and found a grip. So he pulled and adjusted his foot in the crack so his ankle did not snap. His left hand then leg came up, and the hardest part was finally over. He had done it.
The rock formed back into the earth of the mountain, and before him was once again tough terrain, but not murderous terrain. He only managed seven steps into the trees before he realized that his effort had been for nothing. He had failed, and he was going to die like a fool.
A score of green-cloaked archers in golden masks formed to look like smiling faces waited in ambush. The archers Aldous was supposed to have gotten the jump on.
Their bows were drawn and their arrows nocked, all aimed at his chest.
“Don’t reach for the staff, my wizard friend,” came a Romarian-accented voice.
“And if I feel too warm,” said a second voice. “…or see any strange lights coming from your eyes,” chimed a third, “we will do a trick of our own and transform you into a porcupine.”
They all howled with laughter.
“On your knees, wizard!” one of them barked, and the laughing stopped.
Aldous sighed and did as he was told. Far away back in Brynth, in a prison cell right before Aldous was to be tortured and executed, Theron Ward had promised he would keep him alive. He had done just that.
If these smiling bastards wanted Aldous dead, they’d have killed him. If they wanted him on his knees it likely meant he was being captured, and if he was being captured there was still the chance of torture and execution. Which meant Theron Ward could once again make good on that promise. It hadn’t even been two years, after all, so his word was still good. Wasn’t it?
* * *
The sorceress closed her eyes, and ever so slowly she lowered her delicate hands with long nails painted an icy blue toward the babe in the wicker crib. He had been a silent infant until the incident with the rat. A day after that, he began to cry and he did not stop.
Three days and nights of it and Lady Weaver was ready to go mad; whilst her husband sought out the sorceress, she and the servants were alone with his endless woe. And although she would never admit it aloud, she was afraid every time she went to him, afraid that she would end up like the rat. A pile of ash, and baby Aldous giggling as he played with it like sand.
And then it happened.
Aldous stopped crying.
The sorceress gasped. Her head tossed back, golden hair swinging up then down in an arc, revealing a long, beautiful, straining neck.
Lady Weaver swooned. Darcy grabbed her. “It’s all right, my dear, it is quite all right. Diana is a most consummate professional,” he said, squeezing his wife close and kissing her forehead.
Diana, the sorceress, began raving in tongues, and blue vapors poured from her mouth and drifted down toward the boy, as red vapors exited him with terrible sounds. Demonic sounds. Lady Weaver screamed. Darcy covered her mouth. Diana opened her eyes and turned round, soaked with sweat.
“Well?” Darcy asked. “Is it a curse?”
Diana smiled, a sickening smile, impossibly sinister on a face so beautiful. “A blessing,” she said.
* * *
Chapter Seven
Blooming Death
Before…
This nameless village in a nameless valley in Romaria’s south was on the country’s small belt of good farmland, and that would have been a good place to be, if the country was not the place it was. They didn’t have much to begin with; after the Golden Sons of the Golden Sun came through, they had even less. The Church of the Luminescent taxed the farmers so heavily that no matter how much their crop yielded, they would always go hungry. When the farmers weren’t dealing with the smiling church thugs, they were dealing with roving bandits.
Corvas and his men rode into the village on a day in late fall when cold rain formed a layer of sleet over the dark mud ground. Corvas the Cruel, they called him. The children, women, and old men who made up the town’s population averted their eyes from the gaunt and grizzled men as they trotted down the main thoroughfare on steeds so thin their skin clung to their ribs.
There were no men here, no fighting men, in this nameless town. There were only boys and old cripples, with broken women and melancholy little girls, and the silent old crones with all-knowing dead eyes, made mute from what must have felt like eons of suffering over the course of their many decades.
Corvas saw them. He understood their plight. He came from a village much like this one, but a village beneath the canopy of Dammar, the god of the
wood, rather than the smiling sun. He was a pagan and couldn’t give a sickly dairy goat’s shit for the plight and misery of these maggots born in the wrong place. There would be no blight if they hadn’t come, no farms, no castles or churches, only the woods, the hunt, and the shrines to Dammar.
When Corvas got down from his skeletal black horse, his men did the same. When they threw open the door of the tavern and he stared at the man and the matron behind the bar and the drunk old men who spent their days and nights there cowered over their mugs, when Corvas’s lieutenant demanded food and ale, and beds to be arranged, women to be brought, he felt no guilt, no shame.
This was nature.
This was the law in this country, no matter what god one was praying to.
“We have little food and ale, sirs,” said the matron. “But we will bring you what we can spare, of no cost to you, of course.”
“What you can spare?” asked the lieutenant. “You will bring the fucking lot, you will! And women. Bring us women. We have been on the road for days,” he yelled, brown spit shooting through his black, rotten teeth. “I nearly fucked Torvan last night, I was so desperate.” He turned to face the rest of the crew, smiling his black grin. They all howled with laughter, all but Torvan and Corvas. Corvas had not laughed in some time, and another of the constant jokes about fat Torvan was not going to do the trick this time.
“I’m sorry, sirs.” The matron kept her gaze on the floor, her words barely above a whisper. “But this town is a pious town. We serve the Luminescent. There are no such women here.”
The lieutenant tilted his head back, looked down his nose at the haggard woman, and said, “What the fuck are you, then? Eh? Show us a tit!”
Again the whole band burst into laughter, this time Torvan included. And still Corvas was unamused. He was the alpha in a pack of chimps. He let them have their fun, but he always made it clear he was above it. That the lowly things they were, he was not.
“Sir?” said the woman, blushing, humiliated and afraid.
“I’m no sir, no knight of the church. Do you see a sun sigil round my neck? Eh? Look at this, look at his mark.” The lieutenant lowered his face so he was eye to eye with the woman. His head was shaved, and on his brow was tattooed a stag skull, the mark of Dammar.
“What do you want her to see?” asked a female entering the drama. “A disgusting, cowardly rodent hiding behind the mark of Dammar? Pretending to be one of the forest god’s children?”
Corvas turned, his attention snared. There was a girl sitting in the corner, her back to the room, and until then no one had noticed her. She was wearing a black bear fur over her shoulders.
“What do we have here? I like the sound of that voice.” The lieutenant turned from the matron and, reaching across the wooden bar, shoved her to the ground with a palm to her face. His comrades laughed. “Show us your face first, girl, then I’ll tell you if I want to see the rest. And then we are all going to fuck you raw.”
“Is that right?” said the girl, her back still turned.
The lieutenant crossed the room toward her, and though Corvas was certain she could hear his steps, she did not move. That should have been enough warning to make the lieutenant back away. Corvas could have warned him, for he knew that if a girl talked to a man like that in this horrid nightmare of a country, it wasn’t because she was looking to get fucked. It was because she was looking to do some fucking.
The lieutenant didn’t even have the wit to draw his weapon. And he learned too late that when you treat animals like toys, eventually you’ll be reminded they have teeth.
The lieutenant reached out and grabbed the girl’s hood. Without leaving the stool on which she sat, she spun round.
Silver flashed across the lieutenant’s wrist to his elbow, and the room was splashed with red. The silver glint of her knife flashed low and slashed across both of the lieutenant’s inner thighs. Perfect cuts all to arteries. Fast. Sharp. Light touch. For the first time in months, perhaps years, Corvas was entertained.
The lieutenant took a few steps back, his blood bursting out across the room with the last pumps of his heart. The girl remained sitting, her cloak soaked through with blood. She pulled back her hood and looked over her shoulder to reveal sharp features, with wide, piercing brown eyes and the tanned skin of a wanderer specked with blood.
“You fucking bitch! You killed Mad Dog!” To Corvas’s surprise, it was fat Torvan who roared the remark, and got to his feet and lifted his mace.
The others simply looked at the lieutenant’s corpse in amazement, then back at the girl holding her bloody knife, some farmer’s piece of steel, crude but sharp, and more than strong enough to cut through flesh. They had no interest in fighting this girl. They were tired and hungry and more than content to simply watch the entertainment.
“Come on, then. I’ll send you to your beloved Mad Dog and he can hump you again in the Eternal Woods,” said the girl, finally standing from her stool. She was taller than Corvas, maybe six feet, and she had long limbs like a spider that could reach around and close in with death from many angles. Her exposed forearms from beneath the bear fur revealed cords of muscle. He had seen peasant women with strong bodies. But it was her eyes that told Corvas this girl was no peasant. She was a killer, a very talented killer.
Torvan barreled across the room and Corvas accepted that he, as well, was about to die.
Torvan yelled and, like the fool he was, raised both arms for an overhead swing to try and finish the girl in one skull-obliterating blow. The crude dagger flashed and stuck from the back of Torvan’s neck, droplets of blood spattering Corvas’s face. The girl pulled the knife free, and as Torvan fell she slashed him twice more cross the neck. After he hit the ground, she grabbed his hair, yanked his head back, air hissing from his open throat, and took less than ten seconds to saw Torvan’s head off. She nudged it with her toe and it rolled to Corvas’s feet.
He looked down at Torvan’s head. He looked up at the girl. She smiled. And for the first time in eternity, Corvas erupted with laughter, a terrible fit that had him holding his sides and wiping his eyes by the time he was done.
“You are the leader of this pack of filthy mongrel dogs?” the girl asked Corvas.
“I think of them more as monkeys. Have you ever seen a monkey? An ape?” asked Corvas.
“No,” said the girl.
“They’re like us. Only they are not,” Corvas said, and when she only stared at him, unblinking, he added, “I’m the leader, yes.”
“The first man killed, I want his mail. I want that war pick he didn’t have the chance to reach, and I want his position, whatever it was. And twice his usual share.”
Excitement unfurled in Corvas’s gut, but he said nothing. He just looked at the girl in her hooded black fur cloak, her hands steady and dripping with blood, and he ran a hand through his black beard with the first lines of gray in it. He was getting older, and this girl…this girl was not even close to her prime. She had fire and she had animal drive. She could be shaped. She could be his. The son he never had.
“You are not seriously considering this fucking cunt, are you? I’ll tell you now, Corvas, I will not be taking any orders from a whelp bitch,” said Tillus, the company archer. The only company archer, and only the third man to have voiced mutinous words during Corvas’s career as a leader of brigands, so it was…regrettable when he knew the only course of action was to stand, free one of his knives—a thin crescent moon blade, light yet as unbreakable as diamond, a blade he had stolen from the corpse of a Kehldeshi trader that he had murdered—from its sheath and take off the archer’s head.
Which he did.
The stump of the man’s neck sprayed blood as high as the low tavern ceiling, and it dripped back down onto the rest of the men, who stood from their chairs and stepped out from under the dripping ceiling.
“I accept your terms,” Corvas said to the girl. “He was the lieutenant, so you are now the lieutenant, and the man I just killed was our onl
y archer, so you now will also take that role. I hope you can use a bow.”
The girl grinned. “Better than I can use a knife.”
Corvas looked at his four remaining men. He didn’t care what they thought. He’d leave them here and ride out with the girl. He’d kill them, or let her do it. But they did not look as if they wished to die in that tavern, and so they said nothing as the girl stripped Mad Dog of his rusty mail half-shirt and took the small, deadly war pick from his belt.
“What about the fat man? What was his role?” She doffed her bear fur and put on the mail shirt over her own layers of filthy wool and cotton.
She was beautiful. That was what Corvas thought when he looked at her big eyes and her sharp, fine bones. Delicate death.
“Torvan kept us warm at night,” said Kirill in nearly a whisper, and the other three fools sniggered. They could not help it, even after what they had just witnessed.
“Well, I don’t have enough meat on my bones for that,” said the girl, and smiled. For a moment she looked like a normal young lady, a pleasant smile in pleasant company. But for the blood spattered across her face, of course.
The men chortled at this remark.
“And if any of you try to seek warmth with me, I’ll give it to you, but I’ll be on top and the only penetration will be done with my knife. When I’m finished, I’ll keep you warm until morning. Do you understand that, boys?”
They stopped their sniggering and bowed their heads.
Mayhaps she’s right; they are more like dogs.
She turned to face Corvas.
“What am I to call you, chief?” She dipped her head in a low bow.
“I am Corvas. That is all I am to be called. Welcome to the fold,” said Corvas, and his full chain mail shirt clinked as he gave a slight bow and extended his open palm to her. She lowered herself to his hand and licked it, as was the custom when a new tribe member entered the fold. It was a ritual from a time older than language in these lands. The only time Corvas had licked a palm was when he pledged fealty to his father at the age of five. Since then it was only others placing themselves in that compromising submissive position. Yet after the girl, her dark brown hair tied back so that she looked straight into Corvas’ eyes as she licked his palm, leaving a mixture of her spit mingled with Mad Dog’s and Torvan’s blood, it was Corvas who somehow felt he had just submitted.
