“Too arrogant, my old trainer would’ve called you, had your lot not killed him.”
“I-I was only following the great lord’s orders. I had no choice!” she cried. Tears slid down her eye and out from under her mask. She shook her head. “I never wanted this, no, no, no never wanted it at all.”
“And here you are,” he gestured at her. “A ruined shell.” Much like himself, he thought. He was always one mistake away from being on the wrong end of the blade. He knew how it felt.
“Please. Spare me, I’ll do anything,” she choked out. Her gut pulsed like a wave and her shoulders shuddered.
Walter turned to see a few spiders remained. Grimbald was covered in what he guessed was their blood, leading a group against a hissing spider. “Call them off,” his voice was iron.
She frowned and tilted her head to the sky. “Yes.” She nodded and whispered something in a tongue unknown to Walter.
“Yeah! Run you bastards!” Grimbald shouted. Walter saw the spiders back off and retreat up the trees, leaving countless injured behind.
“Spare me, please. Heal me. You can heal me, can’t you?” Marcine coughed. “You — the dual-wielder. You can heal me?”
“Why do you fight for him?” Walter squatted down and met her eye. Who was this woman? How had she become so corrupted? What did Asebor give her?
She met his eye for a second and turned away. “He saved my life once. In a time before you were born, before your parents, before their parents, and the parents before. In a time a child…” she shuddered, “you couldn’t imagine.”
“You chose the wrong master,” he snorted and rose.
“But my arms. My wounds. I’m going to die if—” Walter’s boot hammered into her gut, blowing the air from her lungs. She rolled onto her side and jets of blood spattered on the dirt from her wounds.
“Walter,” Grimbald said from his flank. He ignored him.
“You.” Marcine heaved a rasping breath. “Please, mercy.” She choked.
Walter’s lips pulled into a predatory smile. He turned to look at Grimbald.
“No,” Grimbald whispered.
“Mercy!” he screamed. “Mercy? The same mercy you’ve shown to these men? The same mercy you would’ve shown them if I weren’t here? No,” he breathed. Mercy had shown him what it did to his friends. Mercy had left him alone in the Shadow Realm, never to return. He had been sent there to be food for demons. “Here’s your mercy.” His eye narrowed to a deadly slit and burned bright as the sun, Dragon a torrent in his body.
“But you said—” she protested.
A beam of fire lanced the earth near her legs. She shrieked and writhed, tried to crawl away. The line of flame traveled between her legs and up her belly. Flesh smoked and fat spattered on the roaring heat. Her screams were a distant echo in his ears. He was mesmerized by the unlikely dance partners, fire and flesh. At the ends of flickering flames, he saw a series of Dragons, clawing and biting into her. They were apparitions in the air, invisible unless you tried to find them. He wrinkled his nose at the stink of her rotting meat. The flame tore into the earth, bisected her chest, and finally split through her skull. The halves of her body squelched apart and hundreds of insects skittered out, fleeing in all directions. A green mist sighed into the air from the spot where her heart should have been.
Walter gagged and clutched his stomach, heaved a glob of bile onto the ground. It struck the edge of his line of fire and hissed into smoke. What had he become? But no, this was what he must be. He blinked and let the torrent of fire die. It left an afterimage in his eye that burned like a starry sky.
Scab frowned while brushing himself off, sheathed his sword. “Do tell me there’s no more of them out there? Not sure my fragile old soul can handle any more excitement.” He shuffled off and put his hand on Wart’s shoulder, engaging him in soft conversation.
Walter stumbled back and fell into something that felt like a tree. Grimbald grunted, shifted his shoulders and lowered him to the ground. Walter looked up at him and swallowed. Grimbald slowly shook his head at him and licked his teeth under his upper lip.
“What?”
“You said you would give her mercy.” Grimbald crossed his arms.
“Sorry, can you repeat that? Ears still aren’t quite working right.”
“You lied to her,” he said louder.
“How do you know?” Walter croaked.
“I heard you, that’s how.”
Walter rolled onto his back and stared into the sun, then closed his eye. The sun became a glimmering orb cut by a spear of darkness. “There’s no room for mercy anymore, Grim. Mercy gets your parents killed.”
Grimbald stood over him, blocking the sun. “But your word, you—”
“So I lied. Did it to save some of the men. There’d be a whole lot more dead. Do you think our word would’ve made any difference if the role had been reversed?”
“That’s not the point,” Grimbald huffed.
“Then what is the point?” Walter asked. He opened his eye, peered up at him while shielding it from the sun.
“I don’t know,” he sighed and plopped himself beside Walter.
“They’re not like us. They can’t be reasoned with, don’t abide by our rules. If I had let her go, she would have made our lives a whole lot worse by the end of the day. Maybe she’d return with ten of those snake-dragon beasts.”
Grimbald frowned at him. “I’m going to go help the wounded.” He pushed himself up and limped over to a man clutching a bleeding arm. He threw an icy glance at Walter over his shoulder.
Walter closed his eye and drifted off into a deep sleep. The debt of the powers had to be paid. He had to make hard decisions. Decisions he’d have to live with, but knew them to be right.
Chapter 5
Breden
“A stolen moment can be one of most beautiful things.” -The Diaries of Nyset Camfield
Walter gripped the frayed leather reins of his mount and gave them a tug. The horse’s hooves clopped to a stop beside the madly grinning Falcon soldier. Bits of dirt clung to his cheeks and soot trailed along the side of his neck. His lips had been torn apart at the corners and a terrible wound yawned up to his cheekbones, showing all of his teeth. He’d been smiling that way for days it seemed. A bulbous Rot Fly cleaned its legs on one his molars. His eyes had been replaced with squirming maggots and his tongue looked to have been partially eaten, shredded by crows. The charred embers of a small fire, a cook fire maybe, fought for life at his side. The forest was thinner near the village, the presence of man keeping it at bay. Squat shrubs interspersed with old trees reined in around the road leading to Breden.
Grimbald pulled up beside him and took a big breath. “The Falcon must have come here.”
Walter sucked his teeth. “Yeah. Maybe it was the other battalion King Ezra sent to the west?”
Grimbald grunted. “While we fought the Lord of Death on the Plains of Dressna?” He stared down at the dead man.
“I think so.” Walter swallowed. “Or maybe a small group had departed from the main battalion to check that everything was alright in Breden.”
“Hmm.”
The group had spent most of yesterday burying the dead and tending to the wounded in the Woodland Plunge. Walter healed damaged ear drums and the most severe wounds. The Phoenix’s debt was already starting to press on him like a yoke around his neck.
When the new day’s sun rose, they headed south to Breden. Coming here wasn’t tactically necessary, but Walter had to go. Certain things had to be done because they were the right things to do. He had to give Juzo’s parents closure and tell Nyset’s she was still well, as far as he knew. Dragons, he missed her. He felt his thoughts going to her, but he wrangled them in and dashed them apart on the jagged rocks in his mind. He had to stay focused on the present. He could think about her later.
Given the few red-plumed bodies that littered the curving path into his old village, he didn’t think there’d be much of anyone to tell anything. Maybe this
was the worst of it. One could always have hope, couldn’t they? Besides his duty to his friends, he wanted to return to Breden to be reminded of what home felt like. It was like an ancient memory now, cracked in the ravages of time. Home was best kept as a memory. It would never be found quite the same.
It seemed Isa, Nyset’s Tower assassin’s words were true. Isa had said that Breden had been razed. Walter didn’t want to believe it and couldn’t until he saw it with his own eyes.
Scab’s men followed behind. The ghosts of their mutterings carried on the sea breeze, their echoes tinged with worry. A mercenary with a pointy-cut beard held a bandaged arm close to his chest. One man rode with his leg splinted with a pair of sticks, held stiffly out into the air and bumping into every stray bough. More than a few men had been poisoned by Marcine’s spiders. Their faces became the chromatic blues of a drowned man’s, shortly before hissing out their last breaths. Walter wanted to heal them, but if he healed one’s poison, he’d have to heal them all, and if he did that, he’d be too drained to defend himself. Sacrifices had to be made. Blood had to be shed. They were only the beginnings of the souls he’d lead into oblivion.
“I presume you’d like for us to enter this city with you?” Scab queried from behind.
“Looks like it’d be a good idea,” Walter nodded. He gave a hard exhale through his nostrils, trying to push out the stink of rot but only made it worse.
“Do remember this when you’re considering whether or not to give us the customary bonus payment.”
“Customary, eh?” Walter asked. He tried his best to act as though he were familiar with the notion.
“Customary,” Scab nodded and bobbed up his eyebrows, then grinned.
Walter gave his mount a name, Kez, and gave him a heel to get him moving. The Coastal Road narrowed as they drew closer to the town, maybe ten minutes away from the main gates. He missed the salty air of the Abyssal Sea, almost forgot what that icy air felt like. Kez navigated around a second body sprawled out across the dirt road. Three Death Spawn arrows were lodged in the man’s back, pierced through his polished armor, as if it were made of hay.
He remembered watching one of those arrows pass through his father’s neck. It was the night of the Festival of Flames and was supposed to a be night of merriment, not slaughter. Walter learned then that life often gives you what you least expected. What mattered was how you reacted to the arrows and cuts of this world.
He rounded a bend and his breath caught. Kez mirrored him by halting and blowing out a snort. The path leading to the Breden gates was more bodies than earth. Armor gleamed from tangled forms and red plumes swayed in a gust. A few dark carrion birds squawked with annoyance and fluttered into nearby trees.
“C’mon, Kez, you’ll be ok now.” The words were for the horse as much as they were for himself. He gave Kez a gentle kick and he reluctantly started making his way through the obstacles. A fat bird screeched at him from a waving bough. Its belly was bloated and looked to be a nibble of rotting flesh away from exploding. Walter thought it a tremendous feat that it could still fly.
A Death Spawn spear had been jammed up under a man’s breastplate and pushed out his throat. The folds of his pudgy neck opened like a book around the spear’s barbed point. Walter covered his nose with a handkerchief crusted with old blood and winced at the acrid stench of decay. There were Death Spawn corpses here too, though at least three men for every demon. Between the bodies were weapons of all manner. Broken swords, scarred shields, and blooded spears filled the path where bodies hadn’t.
Two men died in an embrace with their limbs intertwined, some bent the wrong way. Both of their heads had been smashed in by something blunt. A young man, maybe some would still call a boy, had his intestines pulled from his guts and unceremoniously stuffed into his mouth. He wasn’t a soldier, but a farmer in dirty overalls. There were women there too, and children. Flies contentedly buzzed and streaked the air.
Walter felt numb to it all, because it had to be a dream.
“Walter,” Grimbald started. “I don’t know — I. This is too much. I don’t know if I can do this again.” He pulled the Blood Donkey to a stop in the flood of dead men. Its wine-red fur was stark against the gray of the dead. Grimbald’s face was white as a corpse. Creases formed in the corners of his down-turned eyes.
Scab frowned down at a man whose head had been hammered into a fleshy paste mixed with fragments of bone.
Walter stopped Kez. Every man had his own internal war to wage, a war that could only be fought in the solitary halls of one’s mind. Sometimes you won against the demons. Other times you lost and had to turn back. “It’s alright, Grim. Wait on the outskirts, come if you feel like you can, but there’s no need if you don’t want too.” Walter shrugged and nodded at him. “I understand.”
He remembered how it felt to see a dead man and feel something besides emptiness or hatred for his enemy. What were those other feelings? Sadness? Pity? Empathy? He could imagine and remember what those felt like, but now he felt nothing.
“With my Pa and all, with Shipton. It’s just too much. I’m sorry.” He turned the Blood Donkey. It let out a blubbering bay and mercenaries parted to let him through.
Walter pushed down the sick that wanted to come up. He would plow on, there would be no turning back here. He had to face this. This was real. This was life in this world.
“Surprised he made it this far,” Scab said. His eyebrows danced when Walter looked at him.
“Why do you say?” Walter had to suppress the rising urge to knock Scab from his horse. He pictured himself leaping over, dragging Scab down, grabbing a dead man’s helmet and beating Scab’s face flat with it.
“No doubt, your companion is a tough bastard. But he’s soft as a walnut on the inside. Not like you are I. We—” He flamboyantly gestured. “We’re already dead men, living in desiccated husks of ourselves, I’d say.”
Walter snorted. The scars around his neck itched and he clawed at them with overgrown nails. The man knew very little about death, Walter reckoned. Did he know what it meant to die? Did he know what lay beyond the razor thin veil of this world? “Maybe. We’re all dead really. Just a matter of time.”
“Death comes for us all,” Scab agreed. “Earlier for most in my profession, though I do like living.”
They came upon rows of spears jammed into the ground on either side of the path. They were topped with severed heads, their mouths gaped open with surprise. Some heads still wore helmets, strapped under broken jaws. Walter paused at one of them, a familiar face.
“Hassan,” he whispered. “What have they done to you?” Walter started to reach out and touch him, but stopped himself half-way, fingers trembling. The spear under Hassan’s raggedly cut neck protruded out of the top of his head. The tip of the spear had a skewered bit of brains on it. He had worn his beard the same way, cut to a point. It seemed to have been left undisturbed despite all the other trauma.
Walter’s hand retreated to his side and curled into a fist. “Damn them, damn them all!” he growled. There was nothing he could do now, though. Anger was a useless emotion unless there was an enemy to direct it at. He sighed and felt some of the fire drain out of him. The weight of all the dead around became his burden to bear. He had chances to kill Asebor and had failed every time. There was too much blood on his hands and no amount of water would ever wash it all off.
“Every time,” he breathed.
“Eh? Someone you knew?” Scab asked.
He nodded. “Someone I knew in a former a life.”
Scab raised a crusted brow at him and continued. “Still, I like my life. I enjoy living as I’d imagine you do as well. Do you think that perhaps all of this…” he waved at the piked heads, “is some sort of warning we should heed, perhaps?”
“Go back if you’d like. I don’t think Grimbald would mind the company.” Walter and Kez started on towards the gates.
“Well, my curiosity is piqued. It’s rare that I encounter something ne
w, it’s refreshing, really.” Scab twiddled an end of his soiled mustache.
“Never seen dead men?” Walter asked.
“More than I care to remember. I’ve never seen so many Falcon soldiers dead. The force must have been formidable.”
“Death Spawn,” Walter muttered. “You’ve only seen Cerumal and whatever it was we just fought. Just the tip of the spear, as it were.”
Walter stopped Kez at the gates of Breden. The wall stretched to the north and south, encircling the village. It was made up of long timbers carved into points at the top. Bark had been scarred and hacked off in strips from its sides and arrows bristled like spines.
The sign reading “Breden Embraces All” hung down at an angle from the intricately carved trellis that made up the archway beneath the wall. It swayed and creaked in a breeze. Beside the sign on either side of the trellis were a pair of mutilated bodies, arms and legs chopped off. They were suspended from nooses, their necks unnaturally stretched and reddened.
“Looks like they’ve welcomed us with open arms.” Scab snickered at the swaying bodies. “Cut them down!”
“Right, boss,” Wart yelled back from farther down the line.
Walter blew out his cheeks and urged Kez onward. “This was my life,” he whispered and passed under the archway, the gates left open as they traditionally always had been. He leaned over on his saddle and held his breath to avoid brushing against one of the butchered Falcon soldiers.
He moaned at the sight beyond the gates. He lifted his chin and his lips drew into a frown. Maybe Grimbald had made the right decision after all. Great lengths of carved spears studded the grounds all around. At first, he thought they were a new Death Spawn weapon, but realized they were young trees cut to points with their branches removed.
Men, women and children had been spitted on the trees. Their clothing stripped away; their flesh bare for the world to see. The spears had passed through their undersides and out bellies, mouths, and chests. Some spears held at least ten bodies, stacked atop each other, spitted through their guts. They had apparently spent more time with others. Upon one spear, bodies were laid upside down, spears going down throats and coming out asses, each person’s head stuffed into the ass of the other. Arms and legs hung limp from the great masts, some clutching each other for some sliver of comfort. Small fires burned near spears and into the distance, sending narrow towers of smoke curling through the gloom. Walter’s eye caught a figure whose flesh was the same colorless hue as Isa’s, hairless and stacked among the others.
A New Light (The Age of Dawn Book 5) Page 8
