by Dylan Doose
The girl raised her head and turned to the men.
“Under the floorboards, in the back of the tavern, is where they keep their extra stores of grain that they hide from the collectors. It will be good for the horses. There is a well-fed dairy goat in one of the stables, and a donkey—”
“You devil whore—” the matron shrieked.
The girl took one step toward the matron with each word, and before the haggard woman could say a fourth, she had Mad Dog’s picked cudgel through her brain, the spike sticking her right between the eyes.
“Under the floorboards in the chapel there is gold,” the girl continued. “And in the house of the one they call mayor will surely be more plunder, for after Brasov finishes their taxing, the mayor of this shitty town comes around, and takes some as well.”
Corvas began laughing once again, because this was not a day of losses after all. This was a day of gifts, gifts from Dammar. In a matter of minutes, everything had changed.
“And you, the replacer of Mad Dog and Tillus…” he said to the girl. “What are we to call you?”
“I am the Dog Eater,” she said, and licked the blood from the flat of her knife.
* * *
The boy had never been in a prison cell. He wasn’t sure if this was one.
He thought it was not, for it had a chamber pot, behind a curtain, even. There was a bed in the center, and although it was not as soft as his at home, it was a bed. There was a wardrobe. The wall had a painting, and the heavy wooden door, locked from the outside, opened twice a day for meals to be slid across the dusty stone floor on a rusted iron plate. The door had not the iron bars of a cell door like those in the stories of dungeons deep that the boy had been told by his father.
The boy wept as he thought of his papa. He had the fits of melancholia every day now. Silent, racking sobs, as tears cascaded down and he rocked himself back and forth, curled in a ball in the room’s dark corner. The other three corners were lit, but the boy wanted nothing to do with the light, so every day after he woke he crawled to his dark corner and waited for the rusty plate to slide across the floor.
It was the thirteenth day when the door swung open fully and in the archway stood two priests. They wore dark blue robes, nearly black, with golden collars—robes like those of the priests who had burned his papa.
“I am Father Riker,” said one of the priests, eyes filled with the same cruelty as the one at the execution. “I come from the monastery in Norburg, young Aldous Weaver. I invite you to throw away all earthly ambitions and to give your life to the sun, to the only god, the only answer, the Luminescent.”
“What if I refuse?” asked Aldous, his voice scratching his throat.
Father Riker’s eyes blazed with hate, with revulsion, “Then you will die screaming like your heretic father,” he said, as if he were talking to the lord of demons himself.
* * *
Chapter Eight
An Unfriendly Invitation
The road curved around the ridge to the left. The right fell to trees and stones and the raging river below. The earth dipped for miles and all was green in that expanse, but for the glimpses of blue from the country’s largest river. Beyond this were the jagged spines of mountains so tall they were capped white with snow, and in between the icy peaks the last bit of daylight was dying, painting the sky red before it changed to black.
“The bandits remained on this road after they murdered Yegarov.” Theron grimaced. “And stole the horses and gold.”
“That’s what the marks on the road say,” Ken agreed.
“Unless the bandits were wizards, the road does not lie.”
“They are quick,” Ken pointed out.
“Quick, certainly. But these are not the most intelligent rogues. For if they had a modicum of wisdom they’d have altered their route from…straight ahead.”
Kendrick huffed a short laugh. “I don’t think they know what follows them.”
“And what would that be?” Theron asked, wary of the answer.
“You tell me, Ward.”
Theron did not tell him; he just kept riding, and Ken did not press. They followed the tracks around the ridge at a walking pace, allowing Aldous time to reach the strategic point that looked down onto the road.
“Do you think he will do it?” Kendrick asked.
“Aldous?” Theron said. “He had better, or he is off the team.”
Ken huffed another laugh, but Theron knew they were both concealing worry for the boy. That was how a man was supposed to worry about another man, by insulting his character should he blunder and die.
“And if he can’t climb a rock what good is he anyway,” Kendrick added. Theron turned a moment and looked at Ken’s iron fist and wondered if he would have been able to do it. When he saw Kendrick was smiling, he got the joke, and they both laughed and kept on going.
Night belonged to the Dog Eater. When the sun sank and the moon rose, the woods came alive with crackling infernos that blazed towns to ash, and the screams of the innocents on both sides of a civil war echoed as people were slaughtered by the Dog Eater’s guerilla fighters, or tied up in their homes and temples, where they would be burned with their next of kin by the Golden Sons, Romaria’s church hounds.
Every country had them. The Golden Sons here. The Seekers in Brynth.
Theron had heard much of the group of elite rangers whilst in this country, but they were yet to cross paths with them. Kendrick had mentioned, with rage visible on his often stone-calm face, that they were formed of archers from both the Brynthian and Romarian Enlightened armies that had fought in the crusades in Kehldesh, that they hadn’t gotten their fill of sticking holes in peasants, or perhaps they just became too violently addicted to stop.
As these thoughts crossed Theron’s mind, the first scream echoed below in the forested valley. “And it begins anew,” he muttered, rubbing his temple where the ache from earlier in the day had returned and grown stronger.
“The nature of things,” Ken muttered back, and they halted their horses a moment and stared at the blood-red sun that foreshadowed the night to come.
“I listen to the sounds and I am ashamed,” Theron said.
“There were times we intervened,” Ken pointed out.
“And times we did not.” Theron sighed. “We have stepped in not once since we met Yegarov.” After killing a few more than a score of men on both sides, saving villages that were only burned down in the weeks that followed, the old men gutted, the women raped and maimed, the strong children taken to the church, or into the woods for the rituals to the god of the forest turned devil. The weak children, they got hacked to bits.
Theron thought back to the conversation he and Ken had had the last time they had stepped in to a fight that was not theirs. “If we keep this up we will be dead in a few more weeks, or we will have involuntarily picked a side of this war. Are we soldiering, or are we hunting?” Ken had said, the whites of his eyes and teeth glowing in contrast to his blood-drenched face, the bodies of six would-be murderers and rapists at their feet. They had won that fight, and they had done so with ease. But Ken had been right: one could not enter a war zone and start killing forces on both sides on moral whims. It was reckless heroics, faithless martyrdom. So they had had to make a decision, and that was to not get involved.
“Theron,” Ken said now.
“Yes?” Theron asked, and he could tell it was time for a conversation, time to discuss the morning’s events, all of them.
“What are we doing here? In Romaria? Yegarov is dead. After we get the gold, what is our purpose? I will do it if you ask me to, but I wish to be a mercenary no longer. I did my time fighting and killing for bad men.”
Theron turned from the lines the cart’s wheels had made in the dirt and the prints of hooves, and stared at Ken a long moment.
“Is that what you think me to be now? A bad man?” Theron asked. There was a time where he would have asked that question to a man like Ken hoping the man would say
yes, and Theron would challenge him to a duel to the death. For some reason he would have thought that the right thing to do. But this was a different time, and he only hoped for Kendrick to say anything but yes.
“You’re too hard on yourself,” Ken said, and as he did from time to time, Theron felt as if the man was looking directly into his thoughts with those small simian eyes. “If you are a bad man, then there are only evil men in this world, but I see this road we have been walking, with these coats we’ve been wearing… It’s not you, Ward. It isn’t how your story goes.”
Theron breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you. Thank you, truly, for that, my friend. I think sometimes you would make a better writer than the boy and a far superior philosopher than I.” He paused. “In Brynth, in the cave where I killed the Emerald Witch…” Theron’s mind drifted back to that dreadful place. “I returned to it after my wounds were tended by villagers. I lost my sword in the final fight, in her breeding pool.” Theron paused again and shuddered as he recalled the sounds of the bloated women turned brood mothers, and the squealing of their humanoid rat children as he dashed their brains under his boots. “It was a place most foul, Kendrick, a place that should never exist… I returned for my sword, and with torchlight I searched every nook and crevice of the place until I came upon a hidden sort of mechanism, a small lever that I only discovered by luck and luck alone, for I hit my knee upon it in the dark.
“Even with torchlight the place had a demonic darkness to it…as if the shadows were alive and fighting back the flame. When I pulled the lever, a stone door opened. It led to a slender hall with a study worthy of an estate, well lit by emerald flames.”
“The witch was already dead, no? Her enchantments, how did they remain?” Ken interjected.
“Well, they obviously were not her enchantments, Kendrick. The woman was a pawn.”
Ken looked startled, as startled as he ever could. “A powerful pawn.” He paused. “You never thought to mention it before now?”
Theron wasn’t certain he had meant to mention it now, but it was too late for uncertainty. He nudged his horse back into a canter and nodded for Ken to do the same as they rode on, hugging close to the wall of the cliff above, and vigilantly examining the tracks for any abrupt change.
“Within the study I found what one would expect: a number of alchemical substances, beakers, flasks and such, scrolls and books of spells spanning across a three-thousand-year timeline,” he said after a time. “But among the books there was only one that was not a book of spells, and I could tell from the witch’s alchemy notes that she was the writer of this book.
“It was titled The Book of Dammar, and was written as if she were conversing with the forest god quite literally, and not on some spiritual plane. From her words, I believe Dammar to be a demon. From her simple possession of such a book, I fear he is part of the order of Leviathan.” Theron was silent a moment, thinking of the order, their determination to rule all, to wipe out free will, to swarm through the world like a fungus, infesting all they touched. A serpent with a thousand heads. Cut off one, and a hundred more would grow.
“So you came here to find Dammar, demon or god,” Ken said.
“I had thought we would come here, we would catch Dammar’s trail quickly, and I was going to tell you then about what I had found in the witch’s lair. It was a lead but it wasn’t much, so I said nothing. Then I led us astray.”
Ken grunted.
“I walk with guilt and a sense of failure every day now. I wish I could say that it is my plan to return to Wardbrook so that we may regroup, strengthen, and set out again in search of a different head of the hydra.” Theron shook his head and frowned. “But alas, we cannot go back, heroes to some, perhaps, but to the ones that have a say, we must hang. I will tell you this, though. When the swine demon spoke his prophecy, as his flesh melted into the earth, I felt a terrible premonition that tonight destiny will give us our chance at Dammar.”
Again they rode in silence, then Ken asked, “Is it because you fear I will desert?”
Theron cocked his brow and raised a gloved hand to his stubbled chin.
“Is that why you keep things from me? The lad I understand. You would rather rally him at the last moment than let the fear build in him. I just don’t see how I have to prove myself to have an unshakeable will to your cause, our cause, as hunters. I’d be of a better help to you if you kept me informed.” The knuckles on Ken’s remaining hand turned white, the only indication of the insult Theron had caused him.
“You’re smarter than to think that is why I keep my plans from you, friend. I do not doubt your will in the slightest. You proved yourself to me in Norburg, at Wardbrook, and at Dentin; any one of the three would have done,” Theron said, and when he did he was aware of the slightest loosening of Ken’s jaw. He had been down this road before, the road of alienating those close by closing off, by hiding.
Grow up, Theron, his sister chastised in his memories. Hunters, like wolves, must act in a pack with a unified mind. Failing in this is to tempt fate. Chayse had been fond of repeating what their father had taught them. You must always know exactly, without question, what your disciples think of you. If you cannot, then you must forever work alone.
He could no longer bear the thought of working alone. He did not wish to imagine a time when he would hunt monsters without Ken and Aldous by his side.
“Why, then?” Ken asked, clearly not fully satisfied that his character was not in question.
“I keep things from you, especially this, because now that I have voiced it, I owe it to you and myself to see the task done. I was—am—afraid. I am afraid that I am not prepared for what is coming, and the longer I lied, the longer I kept the mission a secret, the longer I could wait before deciding on whether or not to abandon the course. Simply, Ken, I fear my own ambition and I fear death,” Theron said. It was a strange sensation, admitting weakness.
“That’s a damn good reason to lie. As good as any. I’m glad you found reason to tell the truth. You’re made of good stuff, hunter, the best of it.” Ken paused, then continued, his voice low, “I’ll let you know something. I, too, fear death.”
They exchanged a look and kept riding.
Theron raised his hand when he saw the tracks come to a halt, the road stained by blood that was hardly dry. He dismounted, pulled on his helmet, and stayed close to his horse. Ken slid silently from the saddle. They clung to the wall of rock directly below the far side of the cliff they had sent Aldous to scale, becoming impossible targets for potential archers above.
Theron knelt and squinted his eye, trying to make sense of the marks in the dirt, the marks of death, but little struggle. No bodies. The cart had swerved from the road, leaving a trail of blood between the lines of the wheels. Theron followed the trail until it went off the ledge.
“We will have to take a look over the ledge to know for sure,” Ken said, as he had clearly come to the same conclusion Theron had.
Staying low, Theron moved off the stone and, keeping his horse close to shield him from potential archers above, followed the blood trail to the ledge and peered over. No hail of arrows came from above, but a few hundred feet below Theron made out the mangled form of a horse, a robed figure smashed apart on toothed rocks, the splintered cart, and the gold and silver glinting in the last moments of light. Then the sun was below the mountains beyond and the blanket of night was pulled over the sky.
Theron stood and went back to Kendrick.
“It’s down there,” Theron said. He exhaled, flapping his lips like a horse. “Who would do that? Who would rob a cart and send it over a ledge with the bounty unclaimed? Amateurs or intentional?” Theron asked the question to himself as much as he asked it to Ken.
“Does it matter? We aren’t about to climb down and get it, not with Aldous out there…” Ken made a vague gesture, his tone not betraying his disappointment about the gold, if he had any to begin with.
“It’s smashed on the rocks far below. We cou
ldn’t get to it if we tried. Besides, we have a wizard to find. We stay on the wall until we reach the slope. Hopefully Aldous will be down it, then we continue to Brasov as planned, spend the night in the Patriarch’s city of white and gold, and wait and see if the swine’s prophecy comes to fruition. Hopefully it does not. Hopefully we can drink the night away with the coin we do have, and in the morning we can make a more structured plan. Full disclosure this time to you both.” Theron nodded, his eye locked on Ken’s. “I give you my word.”
Small stones fell from an overhanging ridge in the stone wall onto the road next to them, and they looked up. The rock wall gradually sloped down, and to the left of the road was a path up the to the top of the ridge.
“Dammit,” Theron said, then turned to Ken. “We can’t take the horses up there.”
Before Ken could respond, there was a rustling in the trees and then a ball of fire hovered in the growing darkness.
“There he is. You had us worried a moment, lad!” Ken called to the fire.
Five more such flames appeared, and then there were ten. Then more. Theron’s relief turned to angst, then to a storm of all the emotions that he needed in order to start killing, for not one of those flames was conjured by Aldous.
They illuminated masked men in green hooded cloaks.
