by Ty Johnston
“No,” Masterson said. “That was not an option.”
“Your sense of pride is too strong.”
Masterson nodded again.“Perhaps. Or my sense of honor.”
Furrows grew above Bayne’s eyes.“Do not allow your manners to conceal your bloodlust. You are no better than the Gath, and your posturing sickens me.”
“Regardless,” Masterson went on, “it would seem my weaknesses have slain all I held dear.”
A silence settled between the two. It was an uneasy quiet, filled not with determination, anger and hate as is often the case with harbingers of violence. Instead, this quiet spoke of an ending that had gathered slowly over years, like the death of an old one sick and alone at home in bed.
Eyes traded more than glances across the short distance. Bayne’s eyes spoke of hard knowledge, but of an uncertainty of the future and the past. Masterson’s gaze told a different tale, a weary tale. The Caballeran had seen much in his many days, but most of it was of cruelty and harshness and death.
The distant wails of wind scratching along the sides of the mountain ruined the silence.
“Before you slay me, I would have a question,” Masterson said.
“Ask.”
“This rider you follow, the one who would have you slain, why do you chase him?”
The wind’s torrent built in power, moaning along the rents and rocks of the mountain. The very crags and cliffs seemed to want to shutter Bayne from speaking further.
But Bayne held to no superstitions. He would speak.“The man has answers I seek.”
“Very well,” Masterson spoke, tightening the grip on his sword. “I asked but for a single answer. You provided.”
“Ask further,” Bayne said. “I have no wish to speed your death.”
Masterson’s eyes narrowed and dried.“I have witnessed your skill and strength, but mayhap this old dog has tricks of which you’ve never witnessed.”
“Do not be a fool,” Bayne said. “You know who I am. That has been the problem since I entered the village.”
“What do you mean?”
“There would have been no gathering of mercenaries if I had not been the prize.”
“A bag of gold speaks much,” the Caballeran said.
Bayne scoffed.“This was no contest over mere gold, old man. You know this, as do I. The Gath, the Pursians, even yourself and your kin, all were here in hopes of bringing down the mighty Bayne. This was a contest to decide who was the strongest. It was a foolish game, a contest of cultures.”
Masterson’s eyes narrowed further until they were slits.“How so?”
“All men die,” Bayne said. “It matters little how strong their arm, how mighty their feats, how high they are held in esteem. It matters little from which nation they come. Gath, Caballerans, Ashalites, all can be fine warriors, but all die. Warriors, soldiers, kings and emperors alike. Training and experience help to extend that life, to protect it, but eventually we are placed beneath the stones and the dirt. Seeking death early is the highest form of audacity.”
Now Masterson’s eyes widened.“Perhaps seeking death is all that is left to some of us after a lifetime of butchery.”
Bayne glanced back to the village, the two-story houses he had left but minutes earlier. Streams of smoke no longer rolled above the chimneys.
“You may speak truth,” he said, “or at least a truth for yourself. But that is no excuse for the killings of innocents. I witnessed a family carved unto death within one of the village homes. Would you deny Caballerans are guilty of such?”
Masterson shook his head.“I would not. It is customary when mercenaries roll into a foreign town. It is cleansed.”
“It is laziness,” Bayne spoke. “Easier to slay those who might rise up against you than to treat them civilly. There is no honor in that. Honor is found among brothers who stand beside one another, but this can not be found when you butcher all who could be your brethren. You are left with nothing but honoring yourself, and that is narcissism.”
The old man's eyes grew befuddled. He appeared uncertain of further words.
“Do you have more questions?” Bayne asked.
“This rider you follow,” Masterson said. “Who is he?”
“Verkanus.”
“The emperor?”
Bayne nodded.
“He is dead.”
“Only rumor,” Bayne said. “His body was never recovered. He fled to the desert after the final battle against Trode.”
A grim smile crinkled Masterson’s face.“The powerful mage finally met his match with the Trodans, eh?”
“After three battles,” Bayne said, “the final one decisive.”
“You seek revenge, then?”
“No,” Bayne tried to explain. “I seek answers.”
“To what?” Masterson asked. “You were said to be one of his generals, one of his strongest assassins. You stood alone against hordes and wiped them away with a swing of your sword.”
“He … he brought me into being,” Bayne said.
“What?”
“It was the final conflict with Trode,” Bayne went on. “He summoned me from … elsewhere … and used me against his foes.”
“Then what answers do you chase?”
“Who I am. What I am.”
“What you are? You are a man, plain and simple, as any other.”
Bayne shook his head.“No. I have not the same…requirements…as other men. I need little rest and sustenance, though I can enjoy both. I have found my thoughts are not the same as other men. I am not as distracted as they when it comes to connections to this world.”
“What are you speaking of? I understand not your words, warrior.”
“Your clans. Your gods. Your links to other men. I have them not, nor do I wish them. If anything, I see them as distractions.”
“Distractions to what?” Masterson asked.
“To life itself. To a sane mind.”
Masterson used his sword to point at one of his dead sons, then to the other.“You would consider these distractions?”
“Only if you allow them to be.”
“And have I?”
“You have.”
“Then let me be distracted no further.”
The Caballeran strode forward.
A fist smashed into the old man’s face.
Masterson dropped to his knees, the sword plummeting.
Bayne hit again. And again. And again.
The downed mercenary no longer wore a face. His features were flattened, looking like a butchered side of beef. With a last gasp that forced a red bubble between the crushed slash of his mouth, Masterson fell over on his side. Dead. Unmoving. No more.
Part III: The Tavern
The following morning was a bright one. The sun ruled high in the heavens above ochre wisps of clouds. Short-billed swallows snatched at insects in the air above the mountain’s sides. A gentle wind beat at the trees below the peaks, washing the leaves of dust and the smallest of crawling creatures.
Blood had dried to a dark cake in the streets and alleys of the village, and two dozen humps of dirt now lined the sides of the road leading away from the town.
It had taken Bayne the rest of a day and most of a night to haul the bodies of the villagers and of those he had slain outside the circle of buildings. Finding a shovel had been an easy enough task as each of the houses had been well spirited with domestic tools, reminding the warrior that families had lived here, families who had planted flowers and dug up gardens and grown their own food and sewed their own clothes.
The amount of digging might have broken another man, but Bayne held reserves unavailable to others. An hour before the sun would rise across the green horizon to the East, the shovel’s head patted the last of the dirt onto the last of the graves.
Then Bayne returned the shovel to where he had found it in a shed next to one of the houses.
Next came a bath of cold water in a tub, this too found in a back room of one of the houses
. The water was provided by an indoors well pump. The powdered soap and towels were provided by a cupboard in a kitchen that would likely see little use in the near future.
The grime and sweat of the night’s work cleansed from his body, Bayne went to work washing his few clothes in a wooden bucket with a scrub board and more of the powdered soap. After hanging the clothes on a line in a yard, he retired to an empty bedroom where he lay in the nude for an hour. It was all the rest he needed.
Soon enough he was clothed again. His fortune still strong, he lucked upon a bottle of oil, a can of grease and a copper-wired brush in the cabinet where he had found the soap and towels. The next hour he spent grinding grit and dirt and dried blood from his chain shirt and weapons. The half hour after that he spent in oiling down his armor and weapons. A sleeveless doublet padded with goose feathers was discovered hanging in a bedroom and made a fine new shirt to go beneath his chain.
It was late morning when he walked out of a village house and closed the door behind him. He stood in the center of the small town and glanced about from door to door. The birds no longer sounded and the wind was still. The place was like a crypt.
Bayne shook his head and turned, walking out of the village without another look back. Why he had taken the time and gone to the effort to bury those he had not known and those he had slain was unknown even to Bayne himself. His lips would remain silent on the matter, and no one would ever know to ask.
The road ahead meandered its way around the mountainside, taking the warrior above the roofs of the village and the smokeless chimneys. The trees along the ground were further away and their verdant insignia no longer held the bright green of health but a darker green, sickly in appearance and almost smoggy. Still, the day ahead was bright and could have been cheerful if not for the blood of the day past and the stoic visage worn by Bayne.
At times the road was bricked in scarlet and tan, other times it was packed earth. In a few short stretches the path turned to gravel and sometimes sand. But always the road bore on, curving along through the gray rock and the nettles. The cliff to Bayne’s right drove up and up, broken in many places by shadow and crags before becoming invisible in the clouds high above. The drop to the left was straight and dire, though occasionally the plunge was less severe and broken by boulders and brush and sometimes a rare tree.
It was a sparse trail that rose gradually without causing a man to work too hard, leaving him free to gather his thoughts and to forecast hopes and dreams and fears of the future. But Bayne was always silent. If he hoped or dreamed or feared, he kept it locked within. He was not one to talk aloud to himself, nor did his steady gaze show deep, interlocked workings behind the eyes.
Silent, and perhaps morose, he walked on.
His path twined its way around the mountain in a continual bend, and it felt to the wandering warrior as if he had been walking, marching, forever on the trail of the mage who could provide him answers. Bayne supposed that long walk had begun truly the day he had come into existence some ten years earlier. Existence? Perhaps that was not the right word. Wakefulness might be more appropriate. At least he could remember nothing before that day of battle.
And it had seemed his existence had been filled with war and death since, though usually not of his own choosing. Whether that was his fate or dire circumstance, Bayne would not hazard a guess, though he mostly had come to accept whatever lay along his route.
Today that route brought him to a tavern.
Around another bend the warrior plodded, coming to a halt to stare at the three-storied wooden structure against the side of the mountain ahead and to his right. The building seemed little more than a façade, sticking out from the side of the mountain as if the interior itself must slink back into the stone. The main portion of the building was stained and tottering, giving the place an appearance of creaking age. But the place seemed in no threat of falling apart or crumbling mainly due to its solid base of large rocks and gray mortar. At some point someone had tried to add a bit of color to the establishment, having painted the closed shutters of the multiple windows a green, but that green had faded with time and was no longer a signature of happier times but a sad reminder of days long past and forgotten.
Out front was a stone stoop with three slate steps leading up to the entrance. To the right and left were hitching posts where a half dozen steeds were lined in front of a watering trough.
Multiple chimneys, two coming straight out of the mountain behind and above the building, belched multi-colored smokes. Reds and greens and yellows smoldered their way higher into the sky along a path like that of a rambling snail.
The road itself, here compacted earth, widened and wound to the left of the place and apparently continued along the side of the mountain. A sign post was planted near the middle of the road in front of the building’s entrance. The hanging sign read“The Knotted Mesh.”
A tavern, then, as Bayne had suspected.
He trod forward. Though his constitution was beyond that of all mortal men he had encountered, he knew better than to tire himself thin. Besides, Bayne possibly could learn more of his quarry.
He pushed his way through the darkened rosewood door with the brass fittings and a central stained-glass window that portrayed a spider sitting at the center of a web. Inside, his senses were assaulted from all sides. Darkness held sway here, but tiny flashes of yellows and oranges and blues and greens and reds and purples and millions upon millions of colors common and uncommon flashed and blinked from corners of the room, top and bottom and all around. A dull smoke hung about the place, adding to the perception of gloom that the multitude of colors could not destroy. Dull odors lingered about the long chamber that stretched forth, the smells sometimes stinging at the nose and other times leaving behind a sweet numbing. A chillness permeated the place, raising bumps along Bayne’s bare arms.
It was difficult to see through all the gloom. Bayne closed the door behind him in hopes killing the day’s bright would allow his eyes to adjust all that much sooner.
Before him stretched a long hall, a fine wooden bar stretching the length of the left wall back into the shadows of the establishment that indeed did run into the mountainside. Far into the mountainside. Bayne could not make out a far wall. Oil lanterns hung from sconces every dozen steps along the walls providing the only steady light, and even that pale beneath the haze and fugue of the place. Along the right wall were row after row of round tables, two chairs to a table, and these too stretched back into the dark. Bayne could make out a railed stairway some distance back on his right that appeared to lead up to a balcony that extended the length of the second floor; up there, too, were more and more of the round tables with pairs of chairs.
Bayne blinked and noted the bar on his left sported a mirrored backing that ran the length of the bar, or so he supposed since he could not see the far end of the bar and it and the mirror stretched back and back and back into the nothing that was the back of the tavern.
Despite a relative calm and quiet that lingered, the only few sounds being clinkings of glass and bottles behind the bar and the occasional scuffling of a chair being moved across the stone floor, The Knotted Mesh was not an empty place.
The denizens were seated individually, one at each of the tables, none at the bar and none together. They were nearly all male and came in all sizes and shades, most dressed in robes and cloaks though a few sported garb with more of a dash to it like that of the wealthier folk in cities. Nearly all were young, having seen perhaps only a score of summers each. None appeared to wear weaponry other than the occasional dagger or knife.
In front of these quiet, seated faces came the flashing lights of many colors. Pinks, purples, reds, yellows, greens, blues of every shade. Hues representing the whole of the rainbow and perhaps beyond winked in and out in miniature strobes before the faces of those seated at the tables. What appeared to produce these illuminations were gems floating in the space above the tabletops. At some tables a single gem hovered,
the size of a man’s fist. At other tables, multiple precious rocks hung upon the air, circling about one another and dipping and diving. The gems themselves rotated in their colors, rarely staying the same tint for longer than a few seconds.
The stares of those seated were fastened upon the floating gems as if enthralled, as if looking into the face of a god and finding great, mysterious wonders laid out for all to see and know.
Bayne did not know what to make of all this. It was something beyond his ken.
“Welcome, sir.” It was a soft voice to one side, opposite the bar.
Bayne turned to find a middle-aged fellow staring up at him. The man wore short-cropped dark hair above a pale silken shirt, black padded breeches and leather boots that rose up to his knees. He was obviously a tradesman of some sort, likely a well-to-do tradesman considering the newness, freshness and probable cost of his simple clothing. Though not dressed as a noble or the like, he was clearly of a better station in life than the average man.
Bayne just stared at him.
The fellow seemed to ignore the blankness of that stare.“What will be your pleasure this day, sir?”
Bayne blinked.
“Sir?”
“What is this place?” Bayne asked.
The man smiled.“This is The Knotted Mesh, sir.”
“A name that signifies nothing to me.”
“Ah.” A spark of understanding came into the stranger’s eyes.“This is a tavern, of sorts, specializing in gathering facts, messagingand erudition.”
Bayne’s eyebrows arched in befuddlement.“A spy network?”
“No, sir.” The fellow chuckled. “The Knotted Mesh is not in operation for any particular government, guild or association. If any such organizations wish to keep particular information … undisclosed … then it is their privilege. However, sometimes those who venture into this establishment attempt to retrieve such information regardless, and they are usually dealt with by the proper authorities of whichever --”
“Your establishment?”
“Yes, sir.” The man nodded. “I am the founder of The Knotted Mesh.”
“And you are?”
