Rise of the Red Harbinger

by Khalid Uddin

  Baltaszar added Bain to his list for revenge, after Oran Von. Down the road, past Bain’s house, a crowd had gathered outside the school on the left. The brick school spanned a length of four blocks, and had all of its outside torches burning. It would be futile to stay on this road, as Baltaszar would find little to keep him from being seen.

  He turned right at the road behind Bain’s house, staying close to the dark wooden fences. Mud caked his boots, breeches, and cloak, causing him to lift his knee to his chest every time he took a step. Luckily, because of the rain, it simply looked as if he was walking carefully to avoid slipping and falling, rather than sneaking by.

  Keeping himself cloaked and clinging to the fences on his right, Baltaszar realized that the third house on the left side of the road belonged to Harold Joben and his wife, Carys. About two years ago, the couple had invited Joakwin and the two boys for dinner after a meeting at the Town Hall at the end of the street. They had wanted to betroth their daughter, Lea, to Bo’az, and as a result, they would always find reasons to talk to Joakwin. Baltaszar had wondered why they liked Bo’az and not him, but he figured the black scar on his face had probably turned them toward his brother. Bo’az had reciprocated the interest in Lea, two years his younger, but always grew nervous around her and never spoke.

  The Jobens had served a feast including four game hens, rosemary roasted potatoes, sweet yams, onion soup, stewed beef with carrots and peppers, bread, and fruit pies. Carys was known as the best cook throughout Haedon, and she loved to live up to that reputation. She was a pleasant enough woman, always polite and smiling, and her love of talking encompassed everything from the correct way to butcher various animals to the intricacies of religion and the Orijin, their god.

  How she ended up with Harold, Baltaszar could never understand. Carys had amassed hoards of money from her talent and had plenty of suitors, even as a girl. While she maintained a slender frame and soft, beautiful features, Harold was physical evidence of his wife’s cooking prowess, and his protruding gut expanded every year. Over the years, he had more and more difficulty standing while teaching at the school. He grew so fat that even his chairs were replaced every few months.

  At dinner, Bo’az had constantly looked down at his plate while Carys and Lea tried relentlessly to prod him into conversation. It had annoyed Baltaszar how timid Bo’az acted. Mid-meal, Harold, bits of food stuck to the sides of his mouth and soup dripping from his chin, shot up from his chair yelling, “Smoke! Smoke! There’s smoke coming from the kitchen!”

  Sure enough, when they’d looked toward the kitchen, black smoke billowed through the doorway. The men had rushed to extinguish the fire. They had raced from the kitchen to the well behind the house, carrying bucket after bucket of water. After over an hour of drenching the kitchen and stamping out flames, the men had prevailed over the fire. However, all that remained of Carys’ beloved and famous kitchen was a small piece of burnt wooden counter top and a few piles of ash. Even the walls had been partially burned down.

  At the time, Harold and Carys had considered the whole event a terrible accident, but in the months that followed, Fallar Bain paid daily visits to them, repeatedly imparting his beliefs of Joakwin’s involvement with black magic. Ultimately, Bain managed to convince Harold Joben. Oran Von had been skeptical of any foul play, especially considering Joakwin had been sitting and eating with them and would have no motive. However, Bain and Harold Joben managed to rally the townspeople behind them, all supporting the decision for Joakwin to be either confined to his farm or exiled from Haedon. The town’s support came easily. Bain had simply appealed to them, explaining that Joakwin desired Carys for himself and, if he could not have her, would burn down her kitchen to deprive her of her livelihood. Once the masses demanded justice, with no opposition, Oran Von had to appeal to them or it would have cost his own head.

  He had at least given Joakwin the reasonable punishment of being confined to his own farm. Von also restricted Baltaszar and Bo’az to curfews, they would only be allowed to leave the farm to run necessary errands, such as trading. The Haedonians were wary that the twins might also know the dangerous magic their father practiced, and therefore, kept Baltaszar and Bo’az under close watch whenever they were in public.

  Bo’az took things with difficulty, constantly wandering off to sit under a tree for hours. He’d felt embarrassed about their situation, especially because he’d missed his chance with Lea Joben. Often, Baltaszar ended up running his father’s errands alone, because Bo’az had run off and couldn’t be found.

  The street rematerialized in front of Baltaszar. He could not keep having these flashbacks if he wanted to reach the forest safely, and he didn’t have much farther to go. Baltaszar passed the Joben house, then the next house, and turned the corner again. On his right, the enormous Town Hall building towered above. As a child, it had been modestly sized, but Oran Von ordered expansions to it every year. These days, the building was as long as half the town. During town meetings, even if everyone in town showed up, they’d still only fill up about three quarters of the building. Baltaszar realized how little he would miss Haedon and Oran Von’s need for pointless structures. With his father dead, and his closest friend having left Haedon over a year ago, there remained no soul in this town who would treat him kindly.

  Baltaszar passed one last row of houses and reached a clearing by the forest’s outskirts. Looking down the muddy road to his left, he could faintly discern a score of people running in his direction. Judging by the distance and severity of the rain, they wouldn’t see him from where they were. Baltaszar sighed, separated from the fence, and sprinted toward the trees and shrubs that waited ahead. The last house he ran past belonged to Dirk and Mila Samson. The occurrences on an autumn night in that house, over a year after the Jobens’ kitchen incident, affected his father more than anything Fallar Bain had done. His father had never told Baltaszar what happened. Baltaszar saw the agony and regret straining his father’s eyes and face for months after, although he never brought up the situation. Many people started calling his father a murderer after that, so it became easy to assume what happened.

  From then on, his father wore a melancholy countenance every day. He’d never revealed the whole story to Baltaszar or Bo’az, but Baltaszar knew it had all revolved around the Samsons’ four-year-old daughter dying. He’d just assumed that his father had been accused of it. Once Von dubbed Joakwin a murderer at the execution, his assumptions only seemed truer.

  Baltaszar shook his head. He had to focus. Aside from the falling rain, the trees had cast too many shadows for him to be seen now, and no one would dare step foot into the forest.

  He ran through rows and rows of trees, past all the trail markers that he and his brother had set to find their way back and forth to the camp, deeper into the thick forest. They had agreed to camp as deeply as possible, as an attempt to keep the townspeople from investigating their campfire. Most people in Haedon were too afraid to walk more than a few feet into the forest, as they’d all believed childhood tales about monsters and demons. They called it “The Never” for more than one reason. They believed that anyone who went in never came back out. They also swore to never go in, believing the forest never ended. Baltaszar had stopped concerning himself with such nonsense when he was about five. There were more important things to spend his time worrying about than scary stories. Besides, he and Bo’az had been hiding in the forest for weeks, and they hadn’t been spooked by a single thing. Aside from the swaying of the trees overhead and the occasional animals running around, things had been very quiet.

  Baltaszar turned to check how far out of sight he was. The clearing was half a mile behind him and barely visible. Satisfied, Baltaszar turned back around, stepped gingerly, and collapsed to the ground.

  The events of the night had drained his body of the strength to do anything except cry. Baltaszar lay, for what seemed like hours, where he’d fallen. His face trembled while warm tears and rain gushed down his face and
mixed into the mud he lay in. He felt no desire to get up and had no idea what to do with himself from this point on. Baltaszar had no real memory of his mother; his father was all he knew. And now the man was gone.

  Hours later, Baltaszar realized he hadn’t even gotten to his camp yet. And that the rain had stopped. Arising, wiping the mud and tears from his eyes and face, he noticed two small red dots in the distant underbrush. He blinked to clear his vision and they were gone. Perhaps it was just the light.

  A thought boomed in his skull like a kick from a horse. As far as he knew, his father’s body still lay in Haedon Square, mangled and burned. If left there, it would only be desecrated once people saw it still lying on the ground. And Von was the type of man to leave it there to be vandalized.

  Looking at the sky, Baltaszar realized he still had nearly two hours before the sun would begin its ascent. Baltaszar ran back to the edge of the forest. By now, everyone in Haedon would be sleeping. With the rain having stopped and darkness still prevailing, his mission could prove easy. The biggest difficulties lay in getting his father’s body out of the wide open square, then carrying it through the mud back to the forest.

  Baltaszar sprinted to the outskirts of Haedon, stopping only to relieve the ache in his lungs and sides. The houses that lined the perimeter were dark and quiet. If he walked toward the school now, Baltaszar knew he could get to the square undetected. By now, the lanterns and torches would be out and there would be fewer houses for him to pass.

  It took him nearly half of an hour to cover the remaining distance to Haedon Square, a distance that he could walk in a few minutes, given normal conditions. As he walked out into the wide open square, Baltaszar’s eyes groped through the darkness to find any evidence of his father’s body. Plumes of smoke danced from each of the buildings on the south and east side of the square. The moonlight shed some light into the giant courtyard. Searching across the square, he noticed a lump lying on the ground in front of the hanging platform. It was the only mass on the ground of the courtyard. When he’d fled earlier, bodies had littered the square amidst the chaos. Only one mass remained.

  However, what he saw was too large to be his father; it was almost big enough to be two people. And then he saw movement. Baltaszar froze, unsure of what he was seeing. Before worrying about the rational choice, he ran toward his father’s body. Despite the mud, he kept his footing and dashed faster and faster ahead.

  Something or someone arose beside his father’s body. Another person. Baltaszar clumsily slid to a halt in the mud and found himself staring up into the eyes of a stranger. The man’s chest met the level of Baltaszar’s face; he stood taller than Titus the executioner, who until now was the largest man Baltaszar had ever seen.

  I have to…No. Don’t think. Just act. Lunging, he butted his head hard into the man’s ribs and attempted to wrap his arms around the massive tree trunk-sized body. The man pulled him off with one hand and threw him to the ground next to his father’s corpse. Baltaszar landed on his back with a thud and, for once, felt grateful that the rain had left the ground so soft.

  “I am not here to fight you,” the towering man whispered to him. “Stay calm. The last thing either of us needs is for attention to be drawn to us.”

  The man wore a long dark cloak, similar to the one Baltaszar himself had donned, except that it had no hood. “Then why in the name of Orijin are you standing over my father’s body?” Baltaszar managed to keep his voice low, despite the anger that drove it.

  “You speak of Orijin. Good. Then you know religion. I was simply checking to ensure there remained nothing of value on him; nothing that someone else could find that would lead to you or anything else.”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “We have never met,” the man said. “But I have known of you for some time. Your father and I worked for the same people.”

  “Your words are nonsense. My father has been a farmer his whole life. I’m warning you now, I have a weapon. I don’t know who you are, but if you leave now, I will not attack. I give you my word.” Don’t let him see your fear. He hadn’t realized it, but he’d gotten up and was standing and facing the other man.

  “Boy, your threats mean nothing. If I wanted, I could kill you. Save your breath and your energy. Where you’re going, you’ll need it all.”

  “Where I’m going?”

  “I would assume, considering you have the Descendants’ Mark, you would be going to The House.”

  “You’re not making any bloody sense.” Thought fragments pulled Baltaszar’s mind in every direction.

  The man shook his head, “There is much you have to learn. Let us move behind the platform. We risk too much by talking out in the open.” Behind the burnt and blackened hangman’s platform, they sat beside each other, leaning against the wooden posts. “It seems you do not understand the significance of what is on your face,” the man said. “That line on your face represents an honor bestowed upon generations of Descendants.”

  “It’s a damned scar from being burnt as a child. My house burned down and the fire killed my mother. It’s not some stupid line.”

  “I imagine that’s what Joakwin told you. He lied. The only reason you live in Haedon is because he was trying to protect you. He assumed that if he tucked you away in the middle of the Never, he could raise you as a normal child and you would never question anything.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense. What makes you think I believe anything you have to say? My father has just been hanged in front of my whole bloody village, and you think that I will believe you just because I found you here in the middle of the night? I’m not some little child who’s going to hang at your every word just because you’ve come with these bloody stories about my father.”

  “Then let me tell you more. If I cannot manage to convince you with what I know, then you are a fool.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you want here, but I’m not going to sit here and listen to you. I have to leave before they kill me as well. I only came to bring his body back with me. My only concern now is finding out why my father was falsely accused of black magic, and then getting some type of justice on those responsible for this.”

  “Think about it, boy. That scar, as you call it, is a perfectly straight line down your face. How is it that you would only be burnt on that little piece of your face? Are you really that much of a fool?”

  Baltaszar was losing his grasp on what to believe. “Fine, and supposing you’re right. I’m supposed to just believe you? If I hadn’t come back to get my father we would never have met, and you wouldn’t have been able to tell me anything. If I had stayed in hiding, what would you have done?”

  “Trust me, Baltaszar Kontez, I would have found you.” Baltaszar’s eyes widened. “Yes, I know your name. You’d be surprised about how many people outside this forest actually do. I was given this mission because of my abilities to find people. I am the best tracker in the world. After searching your father's body I was coming to find you next.”

  “Y…you could have just asked someone in the town. They would’ve told you my name along with my father’s and my…”

  The man cut him off, “There’s a voice inside your head that does not seem like your own.”

  “Wh…” How could he know this?

  “You do not know when exactly it got there or how, but it speaks to you as if it knows you, like an old friend. It tells you the things you do not want to hear, but perhaps need to hear from time to time.”

  Baltaszar now stared at him, his mouth agape. He had never mentioned that to anyone, not even his family. He’s right; I don’t even know when it started talking to me. Was it tonight? But even then, it felt familiar, like I’d known it before. “How…”

  “Perhaps now you believe. In fact, there are people in this world who can actually help you with that, help you find the source, or even get rid of it for you, if you desire.” Baltaszar was hooked. There was no possible way that anyone could know about the voice
in his head. Yet now, this man before him revealed knowledge of it and that there was a possible cure. “Baltaszar, I understand that Joakwin was executed on false accusations. Yet, his death was necessary, perhaps the only thing that could have set you free. This world is much larger than your little hidden town. There are people in this world you need to meet. People who can set your life in the right direction.”

  “And what direction is that?”

  “Did your father never teach you of the original Harbingers? The messengers of the Orijin?”

  Baltaszar struggled to understand what connection any of this could have to God, but then, he barely had any idea about anything he’d been told during this conversation. “We learned of the Orijin as children, and my father instilled in us a devotion to Him throughout our lives. But he never spoke of any messengers.”

  “Pity. Look above us, candles are being lit in the windows. I do not have the time to say everything on the matter of your father, your past, or the mark on your face. There are others in the world who can help you. If you really want answers about your father, you must go to the House of Darian. The Headmaster there is a man named Marlowe. If there is anyone in this world who knows about your father and your past, it is he. And if, after speaking to him, you still have doubts, there are others there who are quite capable of helping you. Now we must part ways.”

  “That’s it? You have not finished explaining things to me! Why did you bloody come here if you would only give me half of a story and then leave?”

  “I am a regular man. You are a Descendant. You have a manifestation, use it to help you. People on this side of Ashur will welcome you.”