by Dylan Doose
She screamed and pleaded, said she was not a pagan, that she had only seen the shaman out of desperation for her sick boy.
I stepped forward and offered the man in command—a right bastard who called himself Chevic the Cheery—the coin I had acquired during my time in that land, by looting the bandits that came upon me and selling medicaments in towns.
I was hung along with her for my efforts, and once again I lost those whom I pursued.
—Gaige De’Brouillard’s Journal
* * *
Chapter Twelve
Blessings
Before…
She wept in silence , and she wept alone. Not entirely alone, she thought as she stared at him from her dark corner of the stone room. She huddled on the floor, hunched over, hugging her knees against the fear and the cold.
“Not entirely alone,” he said in a voice that rumbled like a quaking mountain. His ash-black lips, scarred with hundreds of cuts of pink and red, pulled back from his rows of pointed teeth in a most demonic of smiles. She stared at him as maggots crawled from between his lips and dripped off his chin to lie writhing on the floor. “You have me. I will always be with you.” His hundreds of pink, lidless eyes gleamed across his skull from his brow, down his snout to his blood-crusted nostrils and across his many-pronged antlers. “You still have your god.”
“I still have my demon,” Dalia replied in a whisper. They had had this discussion before, and always they failed to agree. But she did as he said anyway. Somewhere deep inside, she knew each thing he asked—commanded—brought her closer to her vengeance. But she balked each time for the things he asked…the things he demanded…what she knew she must do… It was all too soulless.
“Dalia, this must be done,” Dammar said. “You know this is a means to an end.” The demon played the kind father, something she had never had.
“Knowing it doesn’t make it easy. I am a human being. Do you know that?” Her tone rose above a whisper now, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to form words through the tears.
“I do know this. Perhaps better than you.” A clawed finger at the end of a long, black-furred arm reached out and wiped away her tears.
“Why me? Why can’t you do it?”
“We are one and the same,” he said. “And each action you take will make you stronger, as I am strong. As our goal draws closer, you will change.”
“I don’t…I don’t think I can survive any more changes,” she said, her voice soft. The voice of surrender.
“You can’t. You will be reborn. Isn’t that better than merely surviving?” Dammar reached his massive hand under Dalia’s arm and helped her to her feet.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if anything is better than anything else anymore. It’s all stained with blood…”
But the decision was made. She would do as he said. She always did as he said, no matter how much it hurt, or how much it pushed her away from ever feeling joy or happiness or love again. She did what he told her because when Dammar left the room, and gave her back her own mind, her lost love would appear, screaming as he slid down the spike toward the fire of the burning pyre. All those priests watching, all those people throwing things at him, and spitting on him because he was a sinner, although what he had done to be punished so, Dalia could not recall. She could recall only tiny, hazy fragments of their time together, but she could recall his death in every lurid detail. Strange how some things faded while other things remained. She had once thought it would be like a puzzle to piece her memories back together, but to complete a puzzle one needed all the pieces. She only had a hundredth. Perhaps a thousandth.
There came a hard knocking upon the thick oak door, and Dalia turned to face it.
“Dog Eater, you all right? Who are you talking to?” It was Corvas. He’d been outside the door the whole time, guarding it while she came to her verdict.
“Fuck off, Corvas. Go down and wait with the condemned. Ask them if they have any last words that they want written to their loved ones.” Dalia paused, seeing exactly how futile such words would be. “Or ask them nothing at all.” Her voice was solid, betraying no signs of her melancholy or her lunacy or her regret.
When she turned back to Dammar, he was not there.
Show yourself. Show yourself to us all. Give me your power.
Dalia wiped the tears from her sunken eyes and hollow cheeks and walked to the longbow in the corner opposite her. She wanted someone there with her; she wanted someone to hold her and tell her it would be all right, that she was only doing what she had to, that she was pushed, forced, left with no choice. She wanted a human being to do that. But such a person, such comfort, would make her weak. So she remained alone with her god and her ghosts.
She lifted the bow and pulled from the quiver four arrows, and walked through the door to the balcony of the manor house. She and her men had taken the town under Dammar’s order—her order, as far as the men were concerned—but that order appeared to have been a colossal mistake. They were surrounded. Besieged. Facing imminent death. Some of the men had decided they did not like the odds.
In the street under the balcony, Kirill and the other deserters were on their knees, hands bound before them. She could understand why the others had done it. Why they tried to desert under such circumstances. But Kirill? You dog, you who shared my bed, whom I valued above all the others, save Corvas. You with your tall, lean body and your eyes the blue of a river and your hair like waves of gold. You, the one who almost made me forget about my vengeance for a moment. This is how you repay me? Strike my heart and I will strike yours.
Corvas stood behind those kneeling on the ground, his hand on the hilt of his sword, waiting for the order to take off their heads. He did not want to kill these men; she could see it in his eyes. In the time she had known him his hairline had receded, and the single streak of gray in his hair had become its entirety. He was as relentless and cold as he had been the day she met him. Except for her. He was never cold to her. But to others…he would as soon lop off a hand or a head as sit down to a meal with you. An ape, he always said he was. But he looked like a very mortal man now, an old, tired man who was only getting older. He had become skeletal like her and all the others in the past weeks as the rations dwindled with the Enlightened military host surrounding the taken town.
She would not make Corvas give the order. She would not give the order herself and let her men’s blood be on another’s hands.
“Look at me,” she called out. And as they did, those men on the ground below, her men who had broken faith with her, Dalia pulled back the dead-heavy draw of the longbow, her shoulder creaking, her muscles and tendons straining in her emaciated form. But she kept pulling, because to these men, these desperate, starving, weary men, she had to be the daughter of their god.
She loosed the first arrow and took the man to Kirill’s left through the throat. His name was Dirndl. He had a farm and family far to the south, but when he heard a force was gathering in the north, not just a roving band, but a force that if made large enough could one day truly rid the land of the Patriarch’s oppression, he and his son and two others from his town had come. They had given the Dog Eater their oaths, to fight for her, to fight with her, until they, she, or the Patriarch were dead.
Dirndl had tried to shatter that oath, to flee before he saw the task through, so he choked and twitched on the ground as he bled out and suffocated on his blood and on the arrow shaft, bound like a pig.
“Wait, Dalia, please. We were going out, foraging…” Kirill said, his voice shaking as he watched Dirndl die. He’d used her name—before all the men, he’d used her name. He did not call her Dog Eater. He did not call her commander. He called her Dalia, as he had in the dark of night when there was nothing between them but air and passion.
As she looked down at him, at his face and his eyes and his long, wavy hair, she saw someone else looking back at her. Her love. Her long-ago lost love. How had she not seen it before? It struck her t
hat she had not chosen Kirill for who he was, but for who she had wanted him to be: a boy long dead, burned on the pyres.
Dalia strung the next arrow. The other two she held vertically against the bow. Every muscle ached—her neck, her forearms, her back—and the pain shot up to the base of her skull. But she had been through worse, so much worse. So had he, the one I must avenge.
Dalia loosed the second arrow and it stuck Kirill through the heart, killing him instantly.
Her knees almost wobbled, but she did not allow them to budge an inch, for if they did she would crumble to the ground and weep. She bit down hard until her teeth felt as if they’d burst; she bit down on the pain and sadness until it was only rage.
The two remaining prisoners bound in the street were only boys, two boys two or three years shy of being young men. She readied the arrow, pulled the string, aimed, and released, all in a heartbeat. One boy dead. The other…
The other was a boy weeping, watching his love burn in a place that was not here, a place of white stone walls and gold and fire, terrible holy fire. The boy’s love was Selkirk. His name was Selkirk and he was screaming, crying out for that strange boy whose name she could not remember as the spear went in and the pyre was lit, and there was nothing else there, just him screaming on the pyre, and her floating in black space above. All around them, black darkness.
That boy who watched…she knew his name, though she could not bring it to mind. If she only searched long enough she would find it, find him. He looked like her.
She released the arrow.
The ghosts faded, and the street returned, with her men and their somber faces lit by torches, and Corvas and his haunting stare. She threw the bow from the balcony to land before the corpses of the four men—boys—she had called brothers. And one of them lover.
“Had these men come to me,” the Dog Eater began, her voice scraping against her parched throat. But she managed a soothing tone, the tone of a mother. “If they had come to me and asked to return home to their farms, or their families in the mountains or by the stream…” She paused a moment, and when she continued, the tenor of the mother faded away and was replaced by the she-devil that ruled with fear, when fear was needed more than love. “I’d have sat them down, and reminded them kindly of their oath to me. The oath they gave to fight against our oppressor until the Patriarch, they, or I, was dead. I would have reminded them that if they went back to their homes, they’d do so only to see their children either worship the sun, kneel before the Patriarch and his priests, to be forced to feel shame and guilt, to be whipped and beaten under the yoke of the church, or they would be forced to watch instead as their children slid down the spike toward the flames of the pyre.”
The men all listened with their heads bowed, the night sky above. The torches in their hands cast light and shadow onto their faces so that they wore the same mask of death. Corvas did not look down; he continued looking at her, and he looked into her eyes with wonder, fear, and admiration, as he had so many times.
“Had they come to me, these men would have seen that when I speak, it is only the truth.”
Silence greeted her words.
And as the silence grew heavy, so did the wind until there was silence no more. A monstrous wind gusted through the town of white stone. It howled through the windows, and the tall pines just beyond the walls creaked and swayed. Then a glowing pink and red streak arched through the black night.
The men craned their necks to follow its path across the sky.
“A gift from Dammar!” one cried.
“Aye, a gift from the antlered god.”
Dalia said nothing.
An instant later, the ground shook like a shield rattled by a hammer blow, and fire erupted beyond the walls. Screams of wounded men filled the night, the screams of the Patriarch’s soldiers.
Now, Dalia, lead them. Lead my children to victory. It is now that I shall reveal to them our power.
Over the screams and the sound of the fire, over the startled murmurs and shouts of her men, over the sounds of panic from outside the walls, Dalia heard the music of wind chimes.
The sound soothed her. She forgot about the hunger pains in her stomach and the ache in her dark soul from the thing she had just done, and her mind was consumed entirely by that chiming sound. She returned to her room from the balcony and lifted a wooden shield and her war pick from where it lay in the corner, and hurried down the stairs. Out in the street her men were gathered, still shocked by both the execution and the fire Dammar had rained down on the enemy.
“Weapons!” Dalia yelled at them.
“You heard her! Weapons! Get your fucking weapons!” Corvas shouted. “Dammar has answered our prayers, and from the celestial sky he cast down that blazing boulder to doom our foe! Let us finish them!”
The men cheered and drew their blades. Some ran into the nearby stone houses to throw on their armor, or gather weapons and shields. From the speed with which the force rallied and was rushing from the town’s gate to the river—where the golden knights and soldiers were putting out the fires on their companions’ backs and attempting to form a line—it was unimaginable that the Dog Eater and her men had been three weeks on tight rations. They were fueled with bloodlust and the adrenaline released from a chance at survival.
“Form line! Form line!” ordered the captain of the enemy force.
The blazing boulder was a hundred or so feet behind him. The trees around it were aflame and the fire was spreading. Ash fell like snow and drifted on the wind into the river that reflected the blazing orange of the burning trees. Golden-armored limbs lay strewn across the ground, blood soaking the grass and mud.
Only a handful of men managed to form up against the charge. Corvas sprinted past Dalia and took the lead, his blue steel knives gleaming red from the reflection of the blazing woods. The remains of the celestial boulder continued to make that chiming sound as it cast out a purple glow.
Corvas, who was closest to the boulder, collapsed as if struck by an arrow. Dalia shot forward, sprinting through a marsh of mud and blood and severed, charred limbs, certain the man was dead.
Then pain hit her, a crushing pressure that weighed on her heart and lungs and limbs, and she went down flat, all her muscles contracted in seizure.
Make it stop, Dalia beseeched the demon within. I’m dying. It hurts like I’m dying.
Wait, came the demon’s response, and the chime sounded once again, the purple glow growing frenzied as it pulsed. With each beat Dalia began to regain control of her body and her muscles. She stared in bewilderment at the flesh of her exposed forearms as she got to one knee. Her skin was purple.
She heard a rallying cry from the Patriarch’s force, and she looked up to see dozens of them charging her.
With every step that they closed in, Dalia felt the strength in her rising. Around her, her men howled and shrieked like animals, bleating like mad goats. She saw Corvas rising to his knees. Before she could know joy that he was alive, he burst into a bloody mist.
When the mist cleared, in Corvas’s place was a silver-furred brute, drenched red with his own blood, long tusks protruding from his maw.
Around him, others sprouted the heads of goats, their skin purple and blue, as if it were bruised and about to rip from the hulking muscles that manifested beneath the surface. Others sprouted feathers and talons; still others fangs and claws and the heads of dogs. But all were still humanoid enough to carry their killing tools as they went forth to the meteor’s chiming metronome.
Dalia stumbled to her feet, her skin glowing vibrantly. She felt no fear, only anticipation, as she understood Dammar’s power. Her men were these beasts. These beasts were her men, and she looked around in awe as the ash fell and the skyline burned red and her men, her soldiers, charged toward the oncoming wall of golden armor and shields.
In appearance Dalia was unchanged, as far as she was aware, but for the purple glow that pulsed from under her skin at the same pace as the celestial boulde
r, and her veins had taken on a color near white, so that they reminded her of a spider’s web.
Corvas roared and was the first to clash against the golden enemy. He hooked the captain’s shield with a crescent blade and yanked it aside, then swiped down with the other. It rent the helm on the first blow and split the man’s head in two, down to the chin. Three ram-headed warriors used their thick, curling horns to bash aside shields and then used their swords to gut the exposed foe.
Dalia joined her people—her beasts—in the slaughter. She ducked a lance and deflected a sword, danced under a mace swing, and, with her pick, spiked a man through the back of his unarmored knee. He went down. A form with the body and face of a man—but for the six useless, small crow wings protruding from his back and the raven-like beak that bulged from his human face—threw himself onto the crippled golden warrior. The birdman ripped the helm from his enemy’s face and began pecking the skin apart. He squawked as he did so, and his mutated wings flapped in a frenzy, sending black feathers in every direction.
Everything can change. The oppressed can become the oppressor, Dalia thought as she moved on to find another foe. They were running, the creatures of Dammar’s wood on their heels. The rest of her force remained with the corpses of their golden enemies.
They were eating them.
The prey can become predator, came Dammar’s voice in her mind.
Dalia swallowed. She was hungry, famished, compelled by a desire to feed so intense that obeying it was no choice. So she knelt at a body as a man with a lizard’s face slashed a dirk straight down the abdomen to expose the guts and buried its green-scaled snout into the mess.
The blood rushed from the chasm in the corpse and took the form of a human face. It moaned as it slid off the side of the dead body onto the ash-covered dirt. On all fours, like an animal, Dalia leaned in over the coagulated, moaning face made of blood, and with a gluttony she could not control, she slurped it up.
