After tense seconds that dragged on to tenser minutes, I finally found enough strength to stand on my own. Hawke had also begun to stir, thrashing about in an attempt to free himself from his entanglement.
“Are you okay?” I cried as I tried my best to pull the mess of a tent off of him. It took some work, but eventually he stood shakily, clutching at his chest.
“I should ask you that,” he managed to wheeze. “You were lucky you didn't break your neck.” He turned back and forth, sucking in a painful breath. “We're in trouble here. The horse has our supplies, and we'll never make it through the Madness without him. Stay close.” He drew the sword at his hip, pointing it forward while keeping a protective hand on my shoulder.
“Did you see where the horse ran off to?” he asked. I nodded and pointed where I saw Sir Brown horse take off. With a nod of his own, he started slowly leading me down the canyon.
We were barely past the campfire when the sound of falling hooves reached our ears. “Sir Brown Horse is coming back!” I cried hopefully.
“Maybe, but those footsteps are too fast,” was all Hawke had time to say. Sir Brown Horse erupted from the darkness at full gallop, and he wasn't alone. All I saw was a bright flash of red before Hawke pushed me out of the horse's path, throwing himself backwards and just narrowly avoiding the trampling hooves. I heard a clash of steel and tried to push myself up to see what had happened.
Instead, I found myself being hauled up bodily by the waist. At first, I thought Hawke was trying to carry me somewhere, until I heard him call out for me from the other side of the camp. Whoever had grabbed me was the person who had tried to ride us down, and he was rushing towards the scaffold leading out, fast.
I tried to call back to Hawke, but no sooner did my voice start to rise that my captor struck me sharply, all but knocking me out. As I laid limply in their grasp, my abductor started climbing directly up the walkway at astonishing speed without so much as bothering to follow the ramps in the slightest. In seconds we were at the top, and my captor was already sprinting away at full speed.
When I tried once more to call out, he struck me even harder, and everything went black.
* * *
How much time passed until I woke up, I couldn't tell you. The first thing I noticed was the musty smell, not unlike a certain nauseating scent I had just been introduced to recently. Despite the pulsing pain in my head, I forced my eyes open. They had swollen near to shut, leaving me with only faint slits to peek through.
A dim bonfire was the lone source of illumination, and for a brief moment, I thought I was back at the campsite from before. With some effort and a lot of throbbing, I was able to look around a bit. Immediately I realized that I couldn't have been farther off.
Course, mildewed stone surrounded me on all sides and comprised the floor, leading me to figure that I was in some sort of cave. The cave itself was about the size of a large den, but the only furnishing was a stray boulder and the largest pile of bones I had ever seen. It teetered precariously towards the ceiling, and though it was made of a mass jumble of various animals, there was no mistaking the small pile of round, clearly human skulls stacked neatly around the base.
I tried to push myself to sit, but my hands and feet had been bound together behind me. Even rolling side to side was almost too much for me to do, and my whole body throbbed so much it wasn't worth the effort.
“Eyes open. Good.”
The voice startled me, a voice unlike anything I had heard before. I looked around, but no one seemed to be there with me. However, there was one spot that the light didn't reach: the sole entrance to the cave. Something was moving there, but I couldn't make it out in the shadows.
“Glasses will come for Little. Glasses protected. Glasses will watch Little die.”
I shivered at the sharp, stilted way it spoke. It felt like a cheap imitation of how a person would speak. When the speaker stepped out into the reach of the light, I saw I was far more correct in my assumption than I had hoped to be.
Its skin shimmered bright as a drop of blood in the glow of the flame, crossed all over with faded pink scars. Its eyes were like bleached bones, reflecting nothing, yet I could almost feel its perverse gaze settle on me. Two gaping holes filled the space where a nose would be on a normal person, sitting just above a massive mouth that I could have fit my whole head inside. Its teeth were tiny saws, perfectly locked together in a monstrous grin. It lumbered towards me, back hunched while lanky and muscular arms dragged along the floor. In place of hair, long horns grew down and curled around the smooth, earless sides of its head.
The beast stopped in front of me, bending even lower until I could smell the decay and iron on its breath. It ran a finger along my cheek, almost carefully, before smacking me across the face again.
“Don't die yet. Glasses must see. Glasses will regret.”
It lumbered back towards the exit, and all my pains were forgotten as fear roiled in my gut like an illness. I had lived most of my life in the grip of a demonic man, but my former master paled in comparison to the genuine article.
Chapter 7: The Inhuman
I couldn't tell you how many hours I spent in that festering, oppressive cave with that monster. There were hundreds of questions buzzing through my mind, but I learned quickly that whenever I even looked like I was going to speak, the only answer I'd get was a punch to the stomach or a slap in the face. I was lucky to even be able to see out of my swollen eyes, looking back on the experience.
Instead, I spent the untold hours watching the thing pace in and out of the cave. Sometimes it would go to the pile of bones and rearrange them ever so slightly. When the fire started to die, it would go down the passage and return with wood from who knows where. At one point, the creature left for at least an hour. When it returned, it was chewing slowly while holding a large piece of something lumpy and dripping a dark liquid. What it was eating was one question I pushed far out of my mind.
The worst part was when it started talking to me.
“Who Little. Where see Glasses first. Ever see grinel. Ready to die.”
It spoke everything in a very short, terse manner, and never changed its tone, yet I wondered if its bizarre voice could even inflect like a person's as it did its best to ask questions to me. Of course, it struck me whenever I tried to answer, so I quickly figured it was just thinking out loud, and kept my mouth shut.
Most of my time, I thought back to all the stories I had heard about demons when I was growing up on the plantation. It was one of the favorite subjects for the slaves to talk about when we had a little bit of free time to converse over our meals; there had been dozens of tales of demons laying entire towns to waste, leaving them as nothing more than burning fields and razed buildings. Some stories told of their ability to slip in amongst humans in disguise, where they'd spread their progeny who would one day grow up to destroy their homes and everything within their reach. Others spoke of them unleashing ghouls and thralls that did the dirty work for them, that they would claim domain over wherever they sowed destruction.
The main consensus, no matter the story, was that they existed only to destroy. Sitting in the safety of our ramshackle hut, it was easy for the slaves to talk about what they had never seen or experienced. Oh, of course they knew it's how demons were, but aside from the strange ghoul that had wandered onto the estate that fateful day, one had never been seen on old “Master Morau's” compound. Seeing what one was like in the flesh was far more sobering than any scary story.
After what felt like days, the monster returned again, fixing those dead white eyes on me. It stepped right over the fire and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Cry now.”
It began to press down, hard. My bones popped and I gasped in pain, but tears refused to come to my eyes.
“Need cry. Scab Kahlot need Little cry.” It pressed harder until my shoulders felt like they'd snap. My face scrunched in pain, yet still my eyes remained dry.
“Littles always
cry. Little don't. Scab Kahlot dislike.”
There was no point in trying to explain that crying from pain was something I hadn't done in years. Overseers and masters hated nothing more than a worker prone to bawling, and those who couldn't learn to shelve their pain or anger or sadness were not long for this world. It was something I just couldn't bring myself to do on command.
It smacked me around a bit more, practically bouncing me off the walls. While its expression never changed, I could tell it was getting aggravated. Apparently, it didn't often encounter someone who was used to being beaten and lashed on a regular basis.
“Need cry or Glasses won't find until dead. Cut arm maybe.” It started towards the pile of bones, but froze when a soft noise echoed through the exit. It looked at me, the grotesque grin plastered on its face growing wider, before loping down the corridor. More tense moments passed as I watched the dark opening, with only the faint crackle of the burning wood to keep me company.
A sudden piercing cry rang through the cavern, like a saw trying to cut through another saw. It twisted and warped more as it bounced around the walls until the whole room was filled with such a horrific din that I would've gladly cut off my own ears if it would've ended the noise. Before the sound had time to subside, the demon tumbled into the room, clutching at a stump where it once had an arm.
“Where is she?” I heard in an all too familiar voice.
“Hawke!” I tried to scream, but it came out as barely a hoarse whisper. The demon had done much more harm than I thought. Even through my bruised and inflamed eyes, though, there was no mistaking the tall figure that stepped into the firelight, sword raised before him. The reflection from his glasses hid his eyes, and his face was an expressionless mask, but cold fury snapped his words.
“If you don't bring her here right now, you'll wish you could–” He froze as he caught sight of me on the floor. I must have looked even worse than expected, as his only response was a breathless, “Oh lord, what has he done.”
The demon was huddled against his bone collection, rasping breaths between its gnashing teeth. I found grim satisfaction in seeing it distressed, but that little joy curdled quickly as it removed its hand from the stump Hawke had left it with. The wound bubbled and stretched, contorting as it grew at a rapid pace. Within seconds, the demon was flexing the fingers on its newly grown arm, just as dangerous looking as the one it had lost.
“Little is alive. Glasses watch die.”
Hawke's glasses flashed for a moment, and though I couldn't tell exactly, I thought I saw a terrible fire burning in those eyes.
“Touch her again, Scab, and you'll lose a hundred arms,” he swung the sword to point straight at the demon. It winced away, but let out a stuttered screech that almost could be mistaken for laughter.
“Respect Grinel, Glasses. Scab Kahlot. Name right.”
Hawke stood without saying a word for the briefest pause. “Scab Kahlot jhogaka teppet,” he suddenly uttered in the same stilted way the demon had been speaking.
Scab the demon stood frozen, mouth agape. When it finally found its voice, it began to screech in a tirade of words just like what Hawke had said. The two began what sounded like an argument, back and forth in the jagged language, losing me completely.
While my captor was distracted, I began to struggle a bit more freely against my bonds. The knots were incredibly tight, and my fingers were far smaller than I would have liked to try and undo them, but I didn't want to just lay there doing nothing.
“Mikhasa sago teppet!”
I startled as the demon spat something that sounded like my name. I froze, afraid it had caught me trying to escape, but its blind gaze still locked onto Hawke. My guardian opened his mouth to retort but remained silent as his eyes flicked towards me, narrowing just a bit. His shock only lasted that one moment. He turned his attention back to the demon and spoke again.
“Look, Scab Kahlot, this is pointless. You can't kill me, and I can do things to you that'll make you yearn for death. Release the girl and we'll leave you be.”
The creature cocked its head sideways, as if thinking, but only responded with its shredded imitation of laughter. “No deal. Little dies until Glasses surrenders.”
Scab walked to its array of dismantled skeletons, the filthy excuse for a loincloth that clothed it dragging like its ungainly limbs. It shuffled through the bones for a few seconds, eventually pulling out one that was longer, thinner, and darker than the rest. After a couple seconds, I realized it was actually a very worn looking sword sheath with an even older looking hilt. Hawke sucked in a breath.
“Tell me who gave you that,” he hissed. It wasn't a question; it was a command.
“Found,” was all Scab answered, his demonic smile stretching into a painful grimace. “Crazy Glasses sword. No edge but left scars.” It traced a finger along the faint lines that crossed all over its skin. “No sword do that but crazy sword.”
Scab grabbed the hilt and freed the weapon from the aged sheath, and even with my bad eyesight, I could see what it meant by no edge. The blade looked more like a rusted piece of thin iron curved into the vague shape a sword. Still, the demon visibly shivered at the sight of it exposed.
“Now deal. Glasses let Scab Kahlot cut until death with crazy sword. Or Little gets instead,” At this, Scab stepped to me and placed a hand on my face, pressing until I was certain my head would cave in.
“Fine.” Hawke stepped forward until he was dangerously close to the fire. “Get off her now or no deal.”
Scab released the pressure immediately, and I gasped at the sudden relief. I was fortunate the demon wasn't paying more attention – I had worked most of the way through my knots and it might have gone berserk if it saw how close I was to freeing myself. I could only hope that Hawke was capable on taking such a beast head on.
Scab walked until he was standing directly on the fire. It sputtered and licked up its leg, but the demon seemed completely unaffected as a thin tongue flickered over its teeth.
“Arm for arm,” it hissed. Without missing a beat, Hawke stuck his left arm out, the sleeve falling aside to expose flesh. Scab shook his head, looking with scorn at the sword Hawke still held in his other hand. Hawke glared but obliged and offered his other arm, dropping the sword with a clatter to the stone floor.
Licking its thin lips, the demon took hold of the proffered arm with its free hand and set the rusty sword to Hawke's bicep. The beast let out a throaty chuckle as its fingers tightened around the hilt and it gave a hearty tug of the blade. Hawke's face tightened, but he didn't let out a sound as his blood began to run to the floor. After several agonizing seconds of sawing at the appendage, Scab gave a final wrenching pull and ripped the sword all the way across his arm, leaving a deep gash. It looked at the wound, then spat in anger.
“Sword no sharp. Barely cut arm. Cut Scab Kahlot and left scars but not take arm off Glasses. Why.” Its tone got less and less coherent as it ranted until it dropped common language altogether and started spewing its strange demon tongue in rage. It raised the sword high overhead to bring the blade down on Hawke's head.
Hawke dove out of the way of Scab's strike, grabbing the sword he had dropped and rolling to a kneel. As he rose, the blade bit upward into the demon's extended arms, taking both off and sending its rusted weapon spinning across the ground. Scab snarled and dove for it, but Hawke was already lunging across the cave towards the liberated weapon. Both reached for it, and the demon would've won with its longer arms if they had still been attached. Instead, Hawke took firm hold of the fraying hilt and brought the blade around.
As he did, a bright flash filled the cave and blinded me even worse than I already was. When I finally blinked the glare out of my eyes, Hawke had already closed most of the distance between him and myself. He stood only a few feet away, but Scab Kahlot was some distance behind him, one of its clawed hands freshly regrown and digging into Hawke's back.
“No need sword to kill. Scab Kahlot rip out Glasses heart eas
y,” the demon growled. Hawke took a heavy breath and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“You should know better than that, Scab,” he scolded. “I don't turn my back on an enemy that can fight.” He looked at me and frowned. “You probably shouldn't watch what's about to happen, Micasa.”
I had no time to ask why, as just then the demon let out another unearthly roar before gurgling and collapsing into an indiscriminate pile of its former parts. Hawke didn't bother looking back as he knelt beside me, reaching forward but looking hesitant to touch my numerous injuries.
“I'm sorry. I should have been paying more attention, but this still happened. I'm so sorry. I'll get those ropes off you soon, just take it easy.”
I responded by pulling my arms free of the weak bonds and sitting up, a feat that was far more difficult than even I had expected it to be. Hawke took a step back in surprise.
“It's okay, I got free while you were fighting the demon,” I explained, still barely able to talk above a quiet croak. “It was easier to undo the knots when I thought of them like locks.” As if to demonstrate, I reached for the bindings at my legs and undid them in moments, despite them being nearly tight enough to cut off my circulation. Once again free, I took the opportunity to stand and stretch, though that was enough to double me back over in pain.
“Don't overdo it,” insisted Hawke as he set a ginger hand on my shoulder. “I'll carry you back to the horse. You need to rest.”
“It's okay, Hawke, really,” I said. “I was beat a lot at the plantation and still had to work afterward. Scab wasn't even as bad as the overseers. I just want to go.”
He looked at me, a fresh frown creeping onto his expression, but he nodded. “Alright, let me just take care of one more thing.”
I started hobbling towards the exit while Hawke sheathed the rusted sword and tucked it into his robe sash. I tried not to look too closely at the mess of viscera that once was Scab Kahlot as I dragged myself past it, but I couldn't help but jump when it began to pulsate wildly.
Broken Soul (The Scholar's Legacy Book 1) Page 9
