Still, Arturo felt lost, cheated. He had thought he had a true sword fighting Knack. He had worked so hard to develop it, to force it to appear, and had been so proud of himself when it had come, despite no formal tutelage or family history of such a talent. To find out now that his talent was not truly in sword fighting, but in spotting patterns…
What kind of future could a Knack like that bring me? If not a hero, what kind of person could I be?
Not wanting to get bogged down in dark thoughts, Arturo nodded at the villagers, heading back to their homes now, preparing to fight within the next few hours.
“We don’t really have a chance, do we?” he asked Yizel. “Ever seen a situation like this before? Ever heard of one?”
She looked at the villagers as well, so calm in the face of certain death. She shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe. That night I was telling you about, the night I almost felt the Queen’s power? I thought we were dead that night. Should have run away, just like we should be running now.”
“What made the difference then?”
“Before the sun set, the farmer took us in. He fed us, his wife spoke to us about life in the city, his daughter braided my hair. When I was fighting out there in the dark, outnumbered and terrified, I was fighting for them, to stop anything bad from hurting them.”
She looked at a nearby family, the father hugging his wife and child before they hurried off to the church to get locked away in the cellar.
“A person can achieve a great deal, if they’re fighting for something they love. And here we have a whole village, each with love in their hearts, and looking to fight for it.”
She turned to Arturo, saw his raised eyebrow, and he smiled when she blushed.
A cry came up from a nearby home. A child, on her way to the church, was pointing at the distance, shouting wildly.
Arturo looked up, heart beginning to thump hard, a drum beat beginning a song he had been anticipating for hours. There was a cloud of dust gathering on the horizon. It could have been caused by a storm brewing in the distance, but Arturo knew it was not. It was the bandits, riding hard to take their revenge.
“Well, time to defend something we love,” he said, standing up, flashing one of his winning grins to Yizel.
The woman’s face was pale, drawn. She was staring at the distant cloud in shock.
“Yizel?” he asked. “You going to be all right?”
She shook her head slowly, turning to look Arturo in the eyes. “Something’s wrong. Something’s horribly wrong…”
Crazy Raccoon stumbled through the Wildlands, not overly certain of where exactly he should be going. After leaving the boy and his Shaven, he had headed towards the village, the only location he knew the vague direction of. From there he had planned to make his way back to the river, but when he had arrived, exhaustion had overcome him. He had gone to sleep in the shadow of the cliffs behind the village, keeping out of sight of prying eyes. Upon waking, he had seen the village mobilising for war. After laughing at their stupidity, Crazy Raccoon had urinated, stolen a skin of wine from one of the homes on the outskirts, and was now making his way towards the river.
Dull-bladed idiots, he thought. Looking at me like I’m nothing, like I’m worse than them. Even the fucking Shaven. Bitch. And the boy, speaking to me like that. Me! Crazy Raccoon. Sure, I’m low now, but I’ve had a life of success as a Bravador, and will have again. Little prick. Probably jealous. But he’ll be dead soon, him and his bitch, if they stick around there any longer.
Despite his internal bluster, there was another part of Crazy Raccoon’s mind - a deeper part - that was in turmoil. He had lost against Procopio. He had lost again.
He thought back to the fight, back to Restless Hawk’s dead face staring at him from behind the onlookers.
“You told me I was the best,” he said aloud. She was not there, not even the visions of her that had been haunting him recently. “You told me I was the best, even without… You told me it didn’t matter. So why am I losing, now?”
Crazy Raccoon spat his mouthful of sour wine into the dirt, angry at catching himself speaking to the dead. At that moment, he noticed a cloud of dust gathering on the horizon, took another swig, and snorted in disgust.
There they ride. The bandits on their horses, coming for payback.
Then, Crazy Raccoon narrowed his eyes, looking at the cloud a bit longer.
That dust isn’t coming from any horses.
Despite himself, Crazy Raccoon could not help but want to find out more. He jogged back a bit to look out over the cliff ledge, to get a better view of the coming assault.
When he finally saw what was coming across the Wildlands towards the village, he dropped his wineskin, and sat down on the Wildland dirt, half-collapsing in shock.
“Plough my mother,” he said out loud. “Queen’s tits, they’re fucked.”
Arturo could see it now. He had expected a cloud of dirt, the brown of the Wildlands soil thrown up into the air by a mass of incoming horses. Instead, this was a cloud of deepest black, a smothering blanket being pulled across the grey sky.
Nothing natural could have caused that cloud.
Body numbing, Arturo took a step closer to Yizel. Someone in the village screamed, having caught sight of the cloud, realising it spelt doom for them all.
“What is it?” Arturo asked Yizel.
Yizel shook her head, then reached out her hand to grab his, gripping it tightly, never taking her eyes from the approaching blackness. A deep rumbling began. Arturo could feel it in his feet, could feel the land beneath him throbbing in anticipation, building in urgency.
“Queen’s tits, I didn’t even think she was real. But here she is, coming for us.”
“Who is it?” he asked again, a feeling of dread in his belly as he felt he knew the answer already. “Who is coming?”
Yizel looked him in the eyes. Arturo could see straight away that she had given up all hope, her face empty of everything except sadness and helplessness.
At the same time, Arturo was aware of movement above him. He looked up to see a single, small grey object floating down beside him, many more of them beginning to drop around the village. A delicate, petalled flower. A flower made of ash.
“You’ll have heard stories about her,” Yizel said, distantly. “The scourge of the Muridae, handmaiden to the Mistress of the Plains.”
The rumbling broke, but not with the thunderclap Arturo had anticipated. Instead, the air around him echoed with harrowing sobs. Coming from everywhere and nowhere, far louder than should have been possible, came the forlorn sound of a woman crying.
“It’s the Black Shepherdess, Starving Pup. And she’s come here to kill us all.”
As overheard in the taverns of Espadapan
The lord of the estate cowered in his room as his companions died outside. He knew he should have stood beside them, fought beside them, but he also knew it would all be for nought. After all this time, the Black Shepherdess had found him.
When the screams stopped, a strange calm overcame the man. This uncanny serenity persisted when black threads began to ooze out of the cracks in his bedroom door, gently easing the door out of its hinges, popping metal and wood from the wall. It was only when he heard the Shepherdess’ crying, only when her malformed face was pulled through the doorway by the billowing tendrils of her cloak did the lord give out an almighty cry, knowing that the hour of his death had come upon him.
“Alejandro,” the Shepherdess wheezed between the shuddering of her shoulders.
The man clutched the simple copper pendant that he wore around his neck.
“Not I,” he stammered back, holding the pendant forward as a talisman against his attacker. “I am not Alejandro, but I am of his line. He has been dead for over one hundred years. Please… please, release my family from this curse. I have done nothing to wrong you, or your Mistress. Please…”
The Shepherdess’ sobbing rose in pitch, and the man fancied that he saw a grin attempt to form on
her painted face.
“Alejandro. Son of Alejandro. Grandson. It matters not. You will suffer for what he did to me.”
The Shepherdess loomed forward, crying and grinning, thin fingers outstretched. The man screamed as she approached him.
The man’s screams died as he did, long before the Shepherdess’ fingers reached his flesh. He collapsed to the floor, unmoving, a cloud of dust pushed from his ruined lungs as he hit the floorboards.
The Shepherdess cocked her head at the unexpected death of her quarry. Then the smile faded from her face, and her wails increased in volume.
“No! He was mine, his death was mine! Why did you take him from me?”
The faded form of the Mistress of the Wilds rose from the ground in a swirl of dust, dust that solidified into the image of an old woman holding something red and wet in her hands.
The Mistress’ human mouth, the mouth on her face, did not move, but she held it pinched tight, staring at the Shepherdess in disapproval.
Instead, a flap of skin under the Mistress’ right breast shifted, and a mouth with the flat, angular teeth of a horse addressed the Shepherdess. “You must have known you could not take him without my knowledge. I did not command or allow this attack.”
“He was the last of Alejandro’s bloodline,” the Shepherdess wailed, tearing her fingers across the faded yellow wallpaper of the bedroom, scoring deep black lines across the walls. “His was the suffering I have been seeking for all this time. And now he lies dead, and by your hand. You have stolen my purpose from me!”
The Mistress of the Wilds raised her head to observe her servant, sternly. An unseen mouth, hiding somewhere in the wrinkles of her back, hissed, “You forget yourself, goatherd. Your will is mine, and mine alone. Many times have I told you to set this notion of revenge aside. Many times you have been punished for disobeying me. It should be no surprise that I would punish you again.”
The Shepherdess screamed, clawing at her own face this time, sending ash flowers falling to the bedroom floor. “Curse you! Curse you for taking his death from me.”
The Mistress looked at the dead man at her feet. “He was not bad, this one. Kept to the old ways, despite the Mouse in his blood. Gave me the strongest sacrifices, in return for keeping him hidden from you.”
“You knew?” the Shepherdess said, fingers tearing at her cloak now. “You knew where he was, and did not tell me?”
“Stop this at once,” the Mistress commanded. “Come now, back to the South. I have had glimpses of the future, and events are in motion that will demand the attention of all of my forces.”
The Mistress of the Wilds did not wait for the Shepherdess to respond, but instead faded back into the floor, returning to her hidden kingdom, expecting the Shepherdess to follow her.
But the Shepherdess did not. Instead, the demon’s sobbing lowered, and she knelt down beside the dead man, running her hand against his cheek, turning his pale skin ashen grey.
“I will follow you no longer,” the Shepherdess swore in a low voice, as the man - the bandit - before her turned completely to ash. “You have stolen my revenge from me, so I take revenge on you instead. I will strike at your people, I will strike at your worshippers, I will do all I can to interfere with your schemes. Where your worshippers hide idols of you to pray to, I will rip them down and scatter them across the plains. All will soon learn that to worship you is to court my attention.”
The Shepherdess rose, and beside her so did her new servant, the dead man now returned as her puppet. The Shepherdess left the bedroom, and the dead man followed. When she stepped outside, she was greeted by an assembly of her ash army, including the reanimated corpses of the bandits that had been killed as she had hunted down Alejandro’s heir.
The Shepherdess, crying - always crying - sniffed the breeze, sensing one of the Mistress’ idols close by.
“To me, my ash warriors,” she called, and the assembled forces walked towards her, merging with her. She expanded, the ash contained within her hate-filled form dissipating, becoming a cloud of darkness and anger, ready to spread across the Wildlands and take revenge upon the Mistress of the Wilds.
“Come to me, my new creatures,” the Shepherdess beckoned, encouraging her new servants to join with her, to speed her in her purpose.
The ashen bandits moved as one, merging with the Shepherdess’ storm. Their leader was the last to obey, pulling free the copper locket from around his neck and throwing it to the ground. The man once known as Procopio turned to his new master, his twice-dead face captured forever in a rigid grin, and bowed before becoming one with the growing darkness.
When all were assembled, the storm cloud moved east, the Black Shepherdess preparing to take out a century of rage and frustration upon whichever poor souls she found there.
On the horizon, the black cloud rose higher, coalescing into an unmistakable form - the silhouette of a cloaked figure, the black tendrils of the ends of her cloak stretching across the plain towards the small village.
The villagers began to shout and scream as they realised what they were facing.
Arturo stood in shock. “I don’t understand. What about Procopio?”
Yizel stared towards the villager militia, uncertain in the face of the oncoming cloud, flinching at the increased numbers of ash flowers falling from the grey sky. “Who cares why she’s here? What’s important is that we get everyone out of her way, as quick as we can.”
Realising Yizel was right, doing his best to ignore the panic in the back of his own mind, Arturo pelted after her.
Some of the militia had bolted as soon as the ash flowers had begun to fall. Arturo could not blame them. The others remained, machetes in hand, but they looked nervously at the impossible figure in the distance.
“Nothing’s changed, right?” a young man was saying to Yizel, but turned his attention to Arturo once he caught up with her. “We’re here to protect the village, doesn’t matter who it’s from, right?”
“No,” Arturo said, his decision reinforced by Yizel shaking her head. “Everything’s changed. We can’t fight this, and we don’t need to. The bandits were coming to attack you, wipe you out. The Shepherdess is a force of nature - stand in her way, she’ll destroy you. Get out of her path, and she’ll blow through town, letting us pick the pieces up later.”
A look of relief flashed across many of the faces of the assembled men and women. “The church? We could all hole up in the church, right? The Queen’s power would protect us there.”
Arturo looked at Yizel, and she shrugged. “Best I can think of, trapped between these cliffs. Try and get as many into the cellars as possible, hope that’ll be enough to deter her.”
“Alfrond’s balls, look!” a villager shouted, indicating towards the cloud with her machete.
Arturo was shocked when he turned to look at it again. The miles-high figure of the Shepherdess was still some distance away from Calvario, but that was not what the villager had been indicating. The black tendrils of her cloak had broken off, and now thick threads of blackness - dozens of them - were shooting across the Wildlands towards Calvario, far faster than a galloping horse could travel. Just outside of the village, the blackness coalesced into the forms of grey people, which began to run towards the waiting militia. Even from this distance, Arturo could tell that these things, although looking like humans, had no life in them. They ran in frantic, jerking motions, like marionettes with delirious performers. Men dressed in fighting gear were among them, but Arturo could also make out women in unsuitable dresses for combat, elderly in their nightwear.
Just like in the stories, the Shepherdess was sending her previous victims ahead of her. Her dead army.
“The wards will hold them,” another of the villagers shouted, indicating the dying chickens that were tied to the gateposts at the village edge. “We’ve never forgotten the Mistress. She won’t forsake us now.”
Even as the man said this, even as Arturo felt hope blossom in his breast, the first of th
e ash warriors reached the wards. The figure grabbed the chickens, pulled them from their posts, turning them to grey dust in his hands.
The militia moaned at the sight of this failure, as the horde of grey figures rushed past the forgotten offerings.
“Great Mouse preserve us,” Arturo muttered, gripping his blade in front of him.
Suddenly, Arturo felt time slow. His Knack was coming into play, working the way it had with the chatting villagers earlier, but on a much larger scale. Arturo felt amber sparks jump from his eyes in response to the ambient magic that worked within him right now. He realised he could see where the ash warriors were heading, could see the patterns of their movements. He blinked and saw the grey creatures flailing among the militia, a brief glimpse of the immediate future if things continued as they were. His Knack was aiding him in battle, but on a much larger scale than he had ever experienced before. Another blink, and reality returned to him. Exposed and frightened as they were, the militia would stand no chance against the ash warriors’ greater numbers. His Knack also showed him how this pattern of defeat could be changed.
“The village!” Arturo shouted, raising his blade high to gain the attention of the assembled defenders. “Get to the houses, get inside - we can’t fight them off here in the open.”
The militia did not need any further words of encouragement, and took off towards safety. Many of them were trying to make straight for the church. Watching the future echoes of the ash warriors that his Knack was showing him, he saw the enemy fall upon the villagers long before they made it to the safety of that far sanctuary. “The closest buildings,” he tried to shout. “We can’t make the church, but the closest buildings should give us some protection.”
A few of them heard him, and corrected their courses, but many more continued to run straight, panic fuelling their limbs and numbing their brains.
Dead, Arturo thought, unable to shake the images of their future fates that his Knack had given him. All dead. His stomach tightened, threatening to heave. He shook his head, dismissing the natural reaction. No time for that.
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