I used to think there was nothing worse than that.
I was wrong. Kitsal Hamlet was worse than that.
* * *
It started raining just after dawn the day we set out from Green Hill Castle, and it continued all morning as our column wound its way down the hill and off to the northwest, toward the ford. I was riding in the vanguard with about twenty scouts, making sure we didn’t inadvertently blunder into any magical traps, ordinary traps, or ambushes. There were a few, at first, crude things that probably wouldn’t have done much even when they were fresh. I ripped through them like cobwebs.
But then the number of obstacles passed, and we thought we were through with the worst depredations the goblins had inflicted on Green Hill. Then the vanguard went up the ridge on the other side of the ford, over another ridge, and down into the shallow valley where Kitsal Hamlet was.
In Alshar and Castal, they call any group of huts with more than three families and less than ten a “hamlet” – otherwise it’s a village. In Remere they’re known as ‘cantons.’ I don’t know what they’re called in Merwin or Vore – I’ve never been there. But in Alshar they’re called Hamlets, and this one had four families crowded into five huts.
Past tense.
The goblins had arrived here first, it seemed. Kitsal was a tiny dot just outside of the Green Hill bounds, a cluster of homes of peasants and charcoal burners who eked out a meager existence on the margins of the two baronies. The four families had all been related by marriage or blood. I’m guessing that the goblins attacked them at night, because two of the bodies were still in nightclothes. In fact, they were the only two still dressed.
Everyone else had been stripped naked, beaten, and then tortured.
I could tell something was wrong the moment the winding path that led into the northernmost vassal of the Baron of Fesdarlen. Kitsal was a “border hamlet,” that is, an unofficial settlement near to the frontiers of two contentious fiefdoms. Usually these places get started as thinly-disguised smuggling operations, outlaw communities comprised of peasants on the run from justice in one barony taking refuge in the other. I don’t know how Kitsal got started, but that’s the kind of place it was. Poor. Unkempt. A community living on the margins of society by doing the jobs no one else wanted: trapper, tanner, woodman, charcoal burner.
There wasn’t a stone tower, a wall, or even a brick building that they could have taken refuge in away from the goblins. Not a root cellar. There wasn’t even a timber building – the crude huts they lived in were round wattle-and-daub affairs in various states of shabbiness.
They weren’t totally destitute – there was a large flat stone near the central fire pit where they made flat-bread. The goblins had used it as a sacrificial altar. There was an iron kettle three feet wide nearby, also communal. Only instead of vegetables and the odd bit of mutton or chicken or fish, it now it had fly-covered, rotting bones in the cold muck in the bottom. Children’s bones. About four of them. From the skulls, the largest of them was perhaps seven.
The corpses of the adults were tied to trees or posts around the center of the fire, where they had been forced to watch the proceedings. Except for the two in their nightdresses, they had been nailed to the walls of their huts. All the bodies bore testimony to the various means of inflicting pain that had been inflicted upon them: knives, rocks, sticks, slivers, fire, heated metal, boiling water . . . the limbs and extremities had been smashed, burned, or hacked off, piece by piece, by someone who knew how to do it without killing the victim right away. Even two days after the goblins had left, their corpses were still locked in a rictus of horror reflecting the terror in their final moments.
“Dear gods,” Azar whispered behind me. That impressed me. He’d seen some carnage in his time as a warmage. “They dare . . .”
“They do,” I said, grimly. “Look,” I added, nodding toward the corpse of one woman nearest the fire pit. She had been bound with her arms suspended from a branch tied cross-ways to a sturdy oak. Maybe twenty years old, her naked body had been tormented for days. There was a wooden ladle jammed in her mouth, so far down her throat it had ruptured it. I hoped she was dead already when the beasts had given her that indignity.
I dismounted, along with Azar and Astyral, who were with me. I had the twenty or so Hellriders who were with us form a loose perimeter while we studied the miserable place.
“She was held here . . . while her children were slain in front of her,” I said, sadly, as I touched her face gently. Her eyes, thankfully, were closed. I didn’t want to see the horror in them that might have survived death. “Not just slain . . .”
“Boiled,” Azar said, hoarsely, as he stared gingerly into the kettle. “Alive. See, their bonds are still in the bottom of the pot wrapped around their arm bones. They made her watch her own children get boiled alive.”
I removed the spoon, my heart sinking into disgust and despair. “And then they made her . . . they made her eat some of it,” I said, my heart in my throat as I carefully removed the spoon. “See how her teeth are broken? She tried to resist, but after making her suffer, and eating the stew in front of her and the rest, they tried to make her eat it. They killed her for refusing.”
“Captain, take a look at this,” Astyral murmured, kneeling in the torn up ground around the fire. “There were some fights, here. Not goblins, humans. I’m not a great tracker, but . . .” he said, fading off as he brought out his witchstone and cast something over the area. In a moment he grunted. “Yes, definitely two humans fought here. They were both wounded. One died . . . the other was dragged off.”
“That’s a pretty impressive spell,” I said, trying to focus on something – anything – to keep my mind from acknowledging the horrors around me. “Anything else?”
“It’s . . . it’s pretty confusing,” he admitted, glancing around purposefully. “If I had to guess, I’d say that the there was some kind of gathering here of between . . . twenty and thirty goblins.”
“And a shaman . . . his marks are all over the place,” I added. “Not one of the low-class kind, either. An urgulnosti. This one knew what he was doing.”
“It wasn’t just sport,” Azar agreed. “There was purpose, here. Some necromancy, perhaps?”
“It’s been known to happen,” I nodded. “But it looks less like they were trying to reanimate them, and more like they were sacrificing them. From the looks of things, the terror must have gone on for hours . . . days. That kind of raw emotion in the air can make a lot of things happen.”
“So what was the purpose of . . . of all of this?” Azar asked, a look of supreme disgust on his face. I could sense his own raw emotion boiling beneath a calm, cool exterior. When it finally came out, it was going to be ugly.
“You’re the thaumaturge,” Astyral said, standing up and nodding toward me expectantly. “You tell us. I can track, but I can’t tear down a spell.”
Damn. He was right. Azar was great at blasting enemies with righteous fury, and Astyral had more finesse than just about any warmage I knew, but this wasn’t warmagic. It was thaumaturgy.
I sighed. “I’ll take a look. It might be important,” I admitted, more to myself than them. I really didn’t want to look into this for fear of where it would lead. But I had to. That’s why I was the captain. “You and Azar go give me a perimeter. Make certain I’m not disturbed . . .” I said, looking around at the corpses hung out like solstice decorations around me. “Any more disturbed than I already am,” I added.
They both nodded gravely and went off in opposite directions while I sat down on the ground in front of the baking stone that had been used for such a macabre purpose. The victims’ blood stained the gray slab black, and the ants and bugs were already swarming around the edges to exploit the gory bounty.
I closed my eyes as I took out my stone, and I prepared myself thoroughly before I began the first silent invocation. I chanted a whisper under my breath, knowing that feeling my mouth shape the words and syllables was more import
ant than actually hearing them, and I visualized the first keystone components of the spell. In moments, the rest of the world fell away, and I was surrounded by the faint remnants of the goblins’ spell.
I was right – the work was far too patterned and orderly to be the work of your average rural shaman. This was well thought-out spellcraft, deliberately applied for specific purpose. It was masterful, in its way – the mechanics behind it were elegant, if I understood them right, and whoever the practitioner was, he had used the seething energy of despair he’d collected with his stone extremely efficiently. I’d only seen work like this a few times, and I had been exposed to a lot of gurvani magic back in Boval. I probably knew how to interpret it as well as anyone.
Despite its elegance, it was jagged and harsh – this wasn’t a simple protection spell, or a shielding spell. There was greater purpose to it. And as I studied it more closely, I noted that it wasn’t a single spell, but three separate ones. Even more interesting.
Holding the images in my mind, I cast the Mortine’s Discovery appraisal spell, which separated the three sets of symbolic energy from each other. I took them chronologically, to help better establish what happened here. I owed the people of Kitsal Hamlet that much.
The first one was a seeking spell of some sort, I determined, but unlike any seeking I’d ever seen. But then I’d never seen a seeking on that scale before, never one that powerful and obscure. It had required a lot of force to implement, I could see, and the objective of the seeking, while obscured, was clearly something of power or value. The lingering knot of magical forces that remained imprinted on reality was not something I could easily untie, not without knowing more of gurvani magic.
So a seeking. They were looking for something.
The second spell was far more powerful and broad in scope, according to the Discovery spell. I could see that it was offensive in nature, but insidiously so: it was a potent emoting glyph enforced and amplified. I feared what I would find if I tried to interpret it, and wasn’t confident that the interpretation would be particularly accurate, but then I realized that I was just coming up with excuses why I shouldn’t do it, instead of just doing it.
I kept the Discovery spell in place and cast a standard Thaumaturgic diviner known as the Second Interpreter of Gois, one of the ancient Archmagi of Perwin. It examines the essential character of emotional-based magic. (For those taking notes, his First Interpreter is for elemental magic, and his third is for Theurgic. Yeah, you’re probably right not to take notes.)
It took a moment for the spell to begin to work, but then it would have taken hours for me to cast it without irionite. A cascade of glyphs, specially-created by the Archmagi to represent human emotions, appeared in a circle in front of me.
Fear. Terror. Panic. Agony. Helplessness. Sadness. Desperation. Anguish. Confusion. Hate. Rage. Temper. Jealousy. Hopelessness. Sorrow. Lament. Despair.
Despair, most of all. It pulsated in front of me like a beating heart, more palpable than even rage or terror. Despair ruled this casting. But the others were powerful in their own right.
It was a litany of pestilent emotions, wrapped tighter than a braid and combined in one oppressive miasma. It was the selected emotions from those poor victims of Kitsal, made large by magic and projected into the other half of the spell. I needed yet a third spell for that, and I didn’t feel like being reminded of what I was handling here – the dying thoughts and feelings of these people – any more than I wanted to handle their tortured bodies. So I dropped the Interpreter and used a more analytic spell for the other portion. I suppose I could have held on to all three, but that was just work I didn’t need to be doing right now.
The analytic spell told me that the emotions, having been bottled like wine and amplified, had then been poured out into the psychic atmosphere around us in a sophisticated sending spell.
The goblins were, quite literally, making us feel bad.
There was a lot of warfare potential for that – I’m good at blue magic (shorthand for emotionally-based or charged spells – like sex magic) and I’d used such runes exhaustively against the gurvani in Boval during the siege. Terror is an excellent ally, but a treacherous foe. Despair even more so. A couple of well-placed runes could get an enemy commander or an important officer off his game enough to make bad decisions. And a demoralized enemy is hard to compel to fight.
But I’d never seen anything like this. My runes were standard, similar to the glyphs I’d seen from their sending. “Rage” is a pretty easy emotion to manifest, after all, we’ve all experienced it. It’s almost comfortable. “Fear” is another easy-to-understand emotion, since everything more advanced than a slug can feel it. But these were far more particular.
This wasn’t just fear, it was “fear for the lives of my family” and “fear for my life,” boiled down and distilled to its brutal essence. It wasn’t just sorrow – it was the sorrow of watching your babies being boiled alive for the entertainment and nourishment of your captors. It wasn’t just anguish, it was the anguish of . . .
Oh, gods.
It was the anguish of being given the choice, of either watching your beloved child’s limbs be eagerly bludgeoned by one of those wicked iron mallets the gurvani favor, starting with the fingers and toes and working up to the pelvis and then being thrown in boiling water to suffer even further before they expired . . . or being allowed to spare her that horrible fate by bashing in her skull yourself before she was cooked. Brutally murdering your child out of a sense of motherly love . . . it was that specific kind of anguish. An emotion so raw, so powerful, and so foul in its inception that it washed across my mind like a putrid hide.
I vomited uncontrollably for a few minutes, after that.
I almost didn’t continue, because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to be alive, after understanding what the purpose of the sacrifices here had been. They had been designed to elicit just that kind of anguish and despair, so that it could be captured and broadcast like a handful of seed. It was the most vile and loathsome feeling I’d ever encountered.
I understood, finally: part of the reason behind the generally lackluster defense of Alshar was due to this spell – and others like it – being forced into the sub-conciousnesses of every man, woman, and child for hundreds of miles around. It infused the very ether, tainting every thought and every action without us even realizing it.
Oh, most magi have basic protections against that kind of intrusion, but they rarely extend it beyond themselves – too much work and (before irionite) far too much energy. Even with irionite, the power expenditure needed for a spell this size would be staggering. That’s why the shaman had to use the pain and anguish of his victims to fuel the spell, as well as provide the “inspiration.” Even with his stone, without a direct link to his bloody divinity, he’d have to find the raw power someplace else.
And the effects were clear. I’d seen the reflection of these emotions on the face of every refugee on the road, every peasant cowering inside castle walls, every lord realizing he faced the end of his days and the end of his line. It would be nearly impossible to live within range – and I had no clear idea how large an area that was – and not have those thoughts unless you had the empathy of a stone.
Having that in the back of your mind, day in, day out, haunting your dreams without you knowing it? It produces its own sort of terror, the kind that leads to abandoning determined thought and descending to the most primal depths of desperation and despair. And when your enemy is already terrified and full of despair, your battle is half won.
Weakened and shaken, I took a breath and resolved to press on, spitting the last bits of bile out on the ground. I still had one more spell to dissect. I owed it to these people to finish this job.
The final spell was the most direct and specific of the three. It was also the simplest to fathom. A directional spell, primed for one area, and saturated with but one motivation: panicked hesitation.
It to
ok me three tries to triangulate the target of the spell, based on multiple sightings taken at different angles. I was pretty certain where it was supposed to go the second time, but I wanted to be certain.
Vorone. They were targeting Vorone, where Duke Lenguin was “gathering a force” and “marshaling his resources,” while Tudry lay besieged and the Wilderlands burning. Panicked hesitation. That perfectly described all of the contradictory orders and reports that were coming out of Vorone while terrified peasants were being drilled by sergeants, and knights were holding tournaments – tournaments! – in an effort to prepare for the coming battle . . . whenever Lenguin got around to it.
The Dead God and his shamans – no, call this one a priest, this was beyond simple shamanic magic – had been raining doubt and hesitation, fear and insecurity down on the minds and hearts of Alshar’s leaders, far beyond the capability of the Alshari Court Mage to defend against – if he even had the ability. This was a powerful bolt, decisively cast, and it brought new perspective to the war.
While I had been dithering about troop movements and enemy positions and political considerations and how many pounds of sausage we needed . . . the goblins had been poisoning the very air we breathed . . . the very thoughts in our heads . . . without our realizing it.
It was a ghastly use of an elegant piece of magic. I was impressed and appalled at the same time. And the implications were clear: Duke Lenguin’s army would not march anywhere as long as he and his men were subjected to this miasma of doom and uncertainty. And that wasn’t even the worst thing. The worst thing was that this crafting, this murderous sorcery, had the feel of a part of a greater whole.
The Spellmonger Series: Book 02 - Warmage Page 18
