Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1)

by J. Edward Neill

  “Another year of walking.” Marlos’s complaint was at best halfhearted. “At least there are no more swamps. Or are there?”

  “No. No more swamps.” Dank shook his head. “Beyond the mansions, we’ll find a great city sleeping on a hill. Illyoc, they call it, named for the Archithropian road descending from Malog. All roads in Furyon lead there. We’ll go north of Illyoc to the obsidian citadel. Remember; don’t remove your helmets or your armor. Don’t speak even if spoken to, and show no emotion if a Furyon confronts you. Most of all, and this is very important; don’t simply mosey along. March as a soldier might. You’re actors in a play. Your reward for a good performance is to live.”

  Dusk deepened. Even locked behind their Furyon armor, the men’s weariness hung plainly from their shoulders. After a hard stare at the far horizon, Dank ordered that the journey was done for the day, and that tonight’s would be the final campfire. “Enjoy it while you can.” The warlock unfolded his arms from his giant Furyon sleeves. “Anything we eat tomorrow and beyond will likely be uncooked.”

  Garrett set down his things and rubbed the soreness from his limbs. Later, when the stars began to wheel and the moon shined sharply over the grass, he broke his routine of dining alone. He joined the others at Dank’s tiny campfire, whose lavender flames had made quick work of the swamp hen Marlos had caught. The branches of Darken were still near enough to blot out a quarter of the stars, but the cries of the mire’s creatures were gone, and the shadows nowhere to be seen. There are no ghosts in the open grass. He was grateful as he hunkered between Marlos and Saul. Our enemy from here on is men.

  He and the others fell quiet as the night deepened. They were watchful of the clouds racing southward to the sea, of the tiny lights winking on the far eastern horizon. It was when the silence grew too deep Marlos spoke up. He who is never comfortable without talking, thought Garrett.

  “I have two children, you know,” Marlos blurted. “Young lads, both of them. They’re not quite Therian’s age. I wonder what they’d think of me coming here.”

  “You have children?” Saul seemed surprised. “You never said.”

  Marlos shrugged. “You never asked.”

  “They would be proud,” said Dank.

  “Doubtful. They and their mother are likely relieved to be rid of me. ‘His grousing is someone else’s problem now,’ they’re saying. ‘He’s off to war, and more’s the better.’ But what about you lot? Any little ones, Saul? What about you, ser knight?”

  “None,” said Endross.

  “I never wed.” Saul looked more than a little sad.

  Marlos grinned. “I never asked if you wed. Takes less than that to pop out a little one. You’ve traveled much. You mean to say you never met any Grae girls on your way to Gryphon?”

  “Only the one. And she was far fairer than the likes of me could hope for.”

  “…and half your age,” Marlos added.

  Even the vaguest mention of Andelusia was enough to darken Garrett’s mood. Saul had spoken often of her during recent nights, and by now her story was known to everyone. “She and Rellen were meant for each other,” he offered, his heart hurting.

  “Aye,” said Marlos. “There’s one thing we can agree on. The lad was in love the moment he saw her. Never seen anything like it.”

  “She was a special girl,” said Saul. “Half her village was mad for her, but too afraid to approach her. The other half was jealous to the point of hatred, and still just as afraid. But if she noticed it, she never said a word. She was wise enough to know there was nothing she could’ve done.”

  A long silence, and Marlos piped up again. “Why do you think she ran away from Verod? If she’d have waited, she and Rellen might be together.”

  “No one will ever know,” Garrett interjected. “We should leave her name to rest.”

  Until that moment, Dank had never said a word whenever the subject of Andelusia arose. He had always listened, still as a stone, as Saul told his stories. “The fire girl…” he sounded almost sad as he murmured. “Doomed to wander forever.”

  “Oh? What do you know about it?” Marlos grumped.

  Dank arose and brushed the dirt from his cloak. “Plenty. You think I didn’t notice her in Gryphon? It’s the last place I would’ve expected her to be.”

  “Wait…” Saul narrowed his eyes. “You knew her?”

  “It’s as you said.” Dank slid back toward the shadows. “She’s special. I noticed her the same as the rest of you did, but for far different reasons.”

  The torrent of questions came. Saul and Marlos wanted to know why Dank had never said anything and what other secrets he might have kept. They called after him as he walked away, but the warlock seemed colder than usual, and spoke not another word.

  Nor should he, thought Garrett. Ande deserves to rest, free of our squabbling.

  The next days went by in a whirlwind of marching, hiding, and scavenging off the Furyon plain.

  If it was harrowing, Garrett rarely noticed. He desired nothing for himself any longer, neither comfort nor camaraderie. Cold as the armor he hid behind, he marched toward Furyon’s heart as though he were alone. The others worried, fretted, and voiced their many pains, but he remained silent, a dark cloud looming over all their heads.

  For eight days, Dank led the way north and east upon the great Furyon grassland. Garrett imagined himself as a knife, sliding between Furyon’s ribs, cutting through mansion and farm, river and canal. As other times, he felt like a crow flying, a scavenger at civilization’s edge. By day, Dank dared to approach the Furyons. The warlock spoke to farmers and shepherds, always using the native Furyon tongue, somehow satisfying all questions asked of him. Dank even bartered with the enemy, trading a secret stash of gold and silver Furyon coins for much-needed food. That is his true magic, Garrett realized. He has planned this for ages. He knows their customs, their language. This is his obsession.

  The march went on.

  Gryphon, Mormist, Morg Umal, and Darken were all but forgotten. Eternally masked, Garrett swept past houses, pastures, castles, and black towers. No Furyon soldiers swept down upon him, and no cries of infidel rang out. The Fury folk seemed not to mind the presence of four silent soldiers and a meek, bedraggled man marching across their land. Either they are sick or Dank has them fooled. We might cross the whole of Furyon and never be touched.

  Though safe from attack, Garrett’s plagues were many. He endured wind, rain, and withering summer heat. His armor began to feel like a part of his flesh, the plates clinging to him like a second skin. He itched and ached, bled and bruised, but he never took the Dageni mail off except at night, and even then only his helmet. The others followed his example. With each new day, every tract of Fury land crossed, they uttered fewer complaints and asked far fewer questions.

  Like his dreamed-of dagger, he slipped ever deeper into Furyon. Dank led him through hamlets, farms, cities, and everything in-between. They spent nights in barns, in fallow fields, and in gullies, wet and stinking. After a while, it became apparent that nearly every Furyon man between twelve and sixty was absent, and that those left behind had little concern for the war. The Fury people looked soulless and sullen, half-dead already, their gazes so empty and uncaring that Marlos often quipped destroying the Object and ending the war might actually do them a great favor. Garrett paid Marlos’s cracks and the Furyons’ moods less and less attention. More than anything, he found himself motivated by a singular thought:

  Andelusia, he said her name to himself whenever the others slept. At night, she wandered among his dreams, whispering to him at the edge of perception. Rellen would be furious, he knew. For this sin and the other. If I had two necks, he would cleave them both. And yet I cannot forget her.

  And then, on the ninth eve since slipping free of Darken, he came to a new place.

  It was an hour before darkness, and after halting on a cobbled road, Dank lifted his finger toward the vast, ten-thousand towered city in the distance. “Illyoc,” said the
warlock. “Impressive, no? What do you think?”

  Marlos stopped between Dank and him, his breaths sounding like a tired old boar’s behind his Dageni mask. “Now that’s more like what we expected,” the Gryphon captain huffed. “Is this the end? Is it here?”

  Garrett knew the answer. No, he thought, but did not say. We will know when we are near.

  “Malog’s still far away,” affirmed Dank. “Follow me, and keep quiet.”

  And so Dank led the way to Illyoc, city upon the hill.

  Garrett remembered all that Dank had told him of the place. Illyoc was Furyon’s hub, the center of the wheel around which all the spokes of trade and military movement spun. Warriors, merchants, and nobles alike journeyed to the city during every voyage, bound by Furyon’s unspoken law to pay it homage. Like Graehelm, Furyon was a godless realm, but Illyoc’s walls were said to be hallowed, such that every man, woman, and child who approached knelt before the black stones and uttered words even Dank did not know…or will not tell us.

  Garrett knew before long that he approached Illyoc city at a grave hour. The grand metropolis’ vaulted walls and thousand turrets looked intimidating, the stones all painted black as a starless night, but he saw no watch upon the walls, no lights within the towers. For a city so huge, he became wary when he glimpsed not a single banner flying. He listened closely, but heard no heralds calling out or music ringing. This is a city for many hundreds of thousands, he recognized. But here I see a million and there is no sound.

  Illyoc sat atop a steep, barren mound, surrounded at its bottom by a sea of shacks and hastily-built stone huts. The Furyons were everywhere outside the walls: standing, milling, and sitting, but few of them working. The outer walls seemed as though decay had set in. An iron turret here was half-collapsed. A wall there had moldered into rubble. The closer Garrett came, the more he saw of the city’s outsides, and the more he thought it moribund. This place was beautiful once, at least to a Fury eye. Today it rots.

  “Sickness,” Marlos observed. “Everywhere.”

  “Why are all these people here?” questioned Saul. “I would’ve guessed Furyon to be wealthier. These folk look poor, pale, and hungry.”

  “Illyoc…” Dank shook his head. “It’ll look plenty different on the inside. These people are here to pay homage, but the Emperor will not allow them closer to Malog. Look at their faces. They’re sick with the Object’s influence. The closer we get to the Malog, the worse it’ll be.”

  “I see no river.” Marlos scanned the rocky fields west of the city. “We can just go around it.”

  Dank shook his head again. “No. We must go through it. To go around is not accepted. Now be quiet.”

  In a hard line Garrett and the others followed Dank, treading the winding road toward Illyoc’s southern gateway. The gateway, he saw as he neared it, was guarded by a company of Furyon warriors, all holding pikes and wearing sleek, sharpened helms. Dank led the way still closer, until the towers behind the walls loomed like mountains overhead. Marlos and Saul shambled nervously, and even Endross slowed. When they were twenty paces away from the Furyon guards, Dank bid them stop.

  “Is this wise?” Saul breathed hard behind his mask.

  “Shhhhh,” was Dank’s only answer.

  The skies were clouding. Night approached on shadowed wings, blotting the stars out one by one. Through the narrow gap in his visor, Garrett saw the great southern gateway creak open, the giant hinges wailing as doors twenty men tall opened wide. From within Illyoc, a mass of Furyon men and women began to stream out, driven by dusk toward the shanty hunts outside the walls. It was now, during the first moments of twilight, Garrett saw closest the faces of the Furyons. Weary and pale the people were, with sallow skin and black hair swaying like weeds across their eyes. They seemed hungry, perhaps not for a warm supper but for life itself, as though none of them had drawn a joyful breath in many, many months. The peasants’ gazes, cold and unhappy, did not rise to meet his. Their eyes remained fixed on the road, and their feet were slow and shuffling as beasts of burden. More than anything, he noted that none of them spoke. If they still had tongues behind their teeth, not one in ten thousand made a sound.

  Once the bulk of the Furyons passed out of the great gate, Dank renewed his stride, but not toward the wide-open doors. The warlock led Garrett and the others a different way, striding beneath a great set of chains supporting a drawbridge that had not been raised in a hundred years. Some hundred paces Dank went, stopping at a bare portion of Illyoc’s wall where no grass grew and no shanties were near. It was there Dank knelt. Like a beggar, he crouched in the ashen dirt and touched his left palm to the weathered outer wall. “Do as I do,” he told them.

  Garrett was first to kneel, then Saul and Endross, and finally Marlos. Stretching his fingers out from his claw-like Dageni mail, Garrett touched his left hand to the wall. He could not feel the wall beneath his metal digits, but it did not matter. As though he were a Furyon, he held himself still as death for many minutes, while Dank offered a prayer in a language he had never heard before. “All who come here must do this,” Dank whispered.

  Yes, thought Garrett. Because the punishment for not doing so is death.

  After many moments, Dank withdrew his hand from the wall and clasped his palms together. He rose quickly afterward, beckoning them to follow.

  “What was that about?” Marlos asked. “What did he say?”

  “You ask too many questions,” Garrett said. “The answers do not matter.”

  It felt all too easy entering Illyoc. When Dank sauntered up to the Furyon gate guards and traded a few words with their leader, Garrett’s palm hovered above the hilt of Lorsmir’s blade. The conversation was heated, but brisk, and when the Furyon captain’s shoulders dropped and his black-mantled men backed away, he knew the warlock had won them over. Dank shot him a secret grin and moved beneath the gateway arch.

  He followed, and the world outside the city fell away.

  If Illyoc had ever been beautiful, it was no longer. The city looked not nearly as ancient as Dank had described, and in no way resembled the pitiful shanty slums outside the walls. The Emperor’s new Illyoc was a shining, glistening thing, its dark, spiraling towers heaped together like swords bent on conquering the sky. The towers seemed everywhere, their shadows impossibly long, while the dwellings below blended together like black oil, the walls of one indistinguishable from the next. Every surface seemed artificial, so sharp a contrast to the weary world outside that Garrett hesitated upon entering, thinking he saw eyes looking at him from every one of the city’s lightless windows.

  Ill at ease, he moved through alien place with his palm always on the pommel of Lorsmir’s blade. Striding on the smooth, glasslike streets beneath the towers so impossibly tall made him suspect the city had been designed by hands other than those of living men. He marched past the main façade and onto the largest of the city’s streets. There were few Furyons here, and fewer still who were not warriors. He threw his gaze in every direction, taking in as much as he could. Illyoc’s innards were faultless. Its shops and inns seemed to belong within a painting instead of real life. The building blocks of every structure were not ordinary stones, but shining slabs of jet, mined from some distant, deep well in the earth. Doubtless the same mine our armor comes from. Illyoc’s alleys were empty and impossibly clean. Every building, every vault and steep tower stairway looked spotless, as though none of them were meant for the living to set foot upon.

  “Archithrope’s designs…” He heard Dank marvel beneath his breath. “Look at the towers, the walls. This is what every city looked like. I feel…almost at home. It all makes sense now.”

  He wondered what the warlock meant, but the thought fell away when he spied some twenty Furyon soldiers. Dressed in polished Dageni plate mail, the knights emerged from an alley and spread out like flies dispersing to many banquets of carrion. He sensed they were busy with dire errands, for they marched with swords and glaives in grasp, making hardly any sound
as they went. Some entered towers while others swept past him on the street, and it was all he could do to feign disinterest and follow Dank.

  I am at his mercy now. We all are. We have been since we left Verod.

  Soon the knights were gone and the streets barren once again. For more than an hour, he and the others marched in the center of Illyoc’s widest thoroughfare, speeding northward through the city. The way grew darker. The air felt thick and humid. He saw the stars no longer, and half-suspected the ebon towers had speared and slain the moon. There were no natural lights, only Illyoc’s street lanterns, whose collective glow caught the street just so, scattering long shadows like broken glass at his feet. He walked and walked until his feet ached and his helmet felt stifling. He sensed the clouds gathering overhead, and felt the rain begin to ping against his shoulder plates. He marched more than half Illyoc’s breadth without encountering a single soul or hearing any sound other than his own footsteps. He allowed himself to become almost comfortable, for upon the black streets he felt invisible to all eyes. The dagger driving deeper. His mantra echoed in his mind. Make no misstep here, and live to die another day.

  It was then, even as he began to believe he might cross the whole of Illyoc without seeing another Furyon, he heard boots fall hard upon the street behind him and felt a heavy hand fall upon his shoulder. He stopped, whirling to see who had accosted him. The lone Furyon knight seemingly came from nowhere. Garrett locked gazes with him, the fortress of a man whose body was hidden beneath an untold number of lobstered Dageni plates. The Furyon looked like a part of the deep shadows, looming over him like a tower, standing close enough that the whites of his eyes shined through the slits of his hornlike helm.

  “Ugra mae rohk,” the knight grunted at him in the guttural Furyon tongue. “Ae frun ae mehr ta Illyoc?”

  Garrett understand none of it. He stayed still as death as the Furyon’s voice fumed like smoke from inside his helm.

  “Ugra?” The knight’s steel fingers drummed atop his shoulder plate. “Gae mehr sun trema?” The beast’s other palm fell atop the pommel of a blade wickeder than any Grae smith could dream of forging. This will not end well. Garrett felt his muscles began to coil. If I slay this monster, the towers will empty and death will come.