Written in Blood

by Span, Ryan A.

  “Do your gods truly live in this forest?” I panted.

  Yazizi sent me a crooked smile. “Don't be silly. They live on the steppe and the plains and the old ice. They don't trust the woods.”

  “Could we... speak to the others if we wanted?”

  “If you wish, but bad things can happen. It becomes easy to lose focus. You could be returned to our world with no chance of coming back.”

  “Couldn't I eat another leaf?”

  Yazizi shook her head. “Irit never works twice. The gods permit one pilgrimage, no more.”

  By silent agreement we resumed the hunt, and that was when we found our first omen.

  I spotted a small forest clearing with deer tracks going through it. In the middle lay a doe, unmoving, with an arrow through its eye. Some human items lay spilled across the ground next to it, though a few had been hastily removed, leaving only faded imprints in the dirt.

  Yazizi knelt by the animal's side and touched the base of the arrow. The whole body shuddered, yet made no noise. “Dead,” she said, “but not long.”

  “Is it one of their horses?” Such real-world thoughts tried to slip away from me, but I clung on.

  She nodded. “Her ankle is broken. Perhaps they tried to give her mercy.”

  “We must be getting close.”

  I clasped her shoulder, pulled her up by a handful of leather, and pushed her back into the wall of greenery.

  Hours passed unnoticed in the excitement. Every time the stag stopped to drink, to rest, or simply paused its run, we grew closer. Rest was the furthest thing from my mind. The fierce clarity of the irit thundered behind my eyes, making every heartbeat like a flash of lightning, carving bright patterns on my closed eyelids.

  Another stream crossed the woods in front of us, and though we approached silently, I heard a rustle and a brief splash followed by the fading sound of hoofbeats. We'd been upwind. The stag caught our scent and bolted.

  Yazizi and I sped to the fresh set of tracks in the grassy riverbank. She touched the prints and held wet mud up to her face.

  “We frightened him,” she whispered, voice trembling. “One moment more and we would've seen him with our own eyes. I never dreamed we'd get this close...” She looked at me, eyes wide and shimmering and full of faith. “Some pilgrims never find so much as a track. This is an omen, Karl. We could do it. We could take Orrobok's stag.”

  “Could we?”

  Part of me was eager, but a little voice inside me screamed against it. It reminded me of warm summer mornings at the foot of the church steps, learning my prayers under a harvest sun. I could see the old preacher's strong but kind face, his powerful voice booming sermons and tales of his Army days. For a moment the realm of the gods became the distant, unreal part.

  “Immortality and the favour of great Orrobok himself,” Yazizi said. “Everything a man might wish for. Come on.”

  We went, and the thrill of the hunt drove my doubts away.

  The hoofprints became ever fresher as we caught up. Other evidence of its hasty passing appeared, too; broken twigs, crushed flowers, even a slide mark in the mud where a large animal had stumbled and slid into a creek. The stag was tiring.

  The excitement kept us forging ahead over rougher and rougher ground. I could see the landscape change around me. The soft black earth turned brown, then red, then beige and green with lichen. The trees thinned out in favour of rock outcrops and sharp cliff faces. No longer cushioned by dirt and leaves, my feet were slamming into stone and exposed roots, and they soon began to hurt.

  Fortunately the tracks remained clear. The stag's scrabbling hooves left unmistakable marks on the chalky rock.

  Yazizi stopped to trace her finger along a set of scratches on the steep path upward. “We've driven it out of its territory. It's time we moved in for the kill.”

  “Byren,” came a voice from behind me, and I turned to find Faro, dressed plainly in the traditional vestments of a knight's squire. He waited respectfully while my eyes focussed on his blurry image. “The lady requests that you attend her. Immediately.”

  Yazizi and I shared a look, but despite my mind's sluggish understanding of the words, I knew I had to obey them. There was a contract with my blood on it.

  I made my stumbling, uncertain way back to the group. Everything around me seemed to twist and shimmer in strange ways. I tried to focus on the woman but she refused to become fully clear. I caught a glimpse of a white dress sewn with copper buttons and ornaments, all manner of jewellery gleaming a rich rose gold against her alabaster skin. Then the image vanished again, as if it had never existed.

  Sir Erroll, too, seemed grander somehow. Taller, younger, more powerful. He wore a long chain hauberk trimmed with silver and gold, and a cloak of red velvet patterned with golden crosses. The strange thing was the huge knight's tabard on his shoulders, a style that hadn't been worn in centuries, emblazoned with a big heraldic symbol in the middle.

  When I took a closer look at the symbol, I found that it shifted and changed depending on the angle of my eyes. One moment it resembled the King's crown and gryphon, the next it was more like the signet of the Duke, crossed swords over a silver chalice.

  Aemedd somehow looked much the same. A thin, hawkish old man with an unadorned bronze helm on his head. I wondered what that implied.

  “Byren,” the woman said musically. Her voice echoed in my ears as if coming from the bottom of a deep well. “You look like you've been hit with both ends of a wine bottle. Can you understand me?”

  “I believe so, Milady. It's hard to think.” I blinked dizzily. My trance was weakening. I fancied I could see sand from the corners of my eyes. “I'm not sure I can concentrate and hold on to the vision at the same time.”

  She crossed her arms lightly over her stomach. “We've found tracks. Fresh ones. Their direction is unclear, but our quarry can't be more than a few minutes away. I need to know where they are.”

  “We should scout from that clearing up there.” I pointed to a bare hillock rising out of the forest.

  “Byren, that's a cliff edge. The only thing beyond it is a sharp drop into the gorge.”

  “We'll have visibility,” I insisted, possessed by the obstinate, all-consuming drive to hunt. “If we can't see the stag from there, we won't see it at all!”

  Grudgingly, she inclined her head, putting her trust in me. Everyone else began to move and make preparations, which I took as a dismissal. I crept back towards Yazizi and concentrated hard on the damp brush in front of me.

  Only then did I notice her intent, frozen stare out to the horizon, one hand held up against the fading sunlight. She could have been a statue carved out of flesh and bone. Wary, I dropped to my belly and crawled forward to join her. From there I could follow her silent look to its destination.

  The sight left me speechless. There, on the horizon, a sparkling line of purple light blasted from the ground into the sky. It was no natural thing. The shaft seemed to go on forever, rising to infinity. It split the world in two like a knife driven through a rotting orange.

  “What in God's name is that?” I whispered, halfway between wonder and fear. My hand found hers and grasped it without thinking.

  “Another warstone. You'd best hope Khazon of the Vigilant Eye does not glance this way, my unbeliever.”

  “It would take more than that to stop me now!”

  She squeezed my palm to reassure me. “The stag will be ours. I promise you.” She peered out from our high vantage, over the golden steppes and plains glowing beyond the edges of the forest, and flashed a wild smile. “We are blessed, Karl.”

  In that moment, listening to her clear, ringing voice, I could believe it.

  Yazizi hopped from boulder to boulder up the rocky slope. I followed her with a fleetness of foot I'd never had in the mortal world, and there were several times when we lost sight of the others labouring behind us. Only our constant path markers kept them on course.

  We reached the top of the hillock panting
and eager for a moment's rest. Low bushes and one gnarled tree stood around a cool mineral spring, whose waters tumbled down the far edge of the hill in frothy rapids and waterfalls. As tempting as it looked, though, we didn't drink. Yazizi had been clear on that score. What looked like perfectly clean water to our eyes might not be so kind to our mortal bodies in the worlds of men.

  The hillock gave us a wonderful view of the countryside. The whirling leaves of the Tzan had thinned enough to let us see down into the great valley below us, where the lush, deciduous forest changed into a loose sea of evergreens whose countless needles swayed in the breeze. We also got enough of the blazing afternoon sun to have to shield our eyes against it. Yazizi beckoned me over and showed me a path leading down the steep hillside, barely a goat trail, but perhaps navigable by men on foot.

  She said, “The tracks stop here. He must have fled down. We'll follow as fast as we can, once we're rested.”

  I nodded and excused myself a moment. My stint in the land of the gods had made me forget most of my basic necessities, but something had begun to weigh on my mind since we started our climb. I needed a piss.

  A green bush provided enough modesty for me to get on with things. I was almost finished when I heard a clear hissing noise, like someone trying to get my attention. I glanced over my shoulder to search for the source of the noise.

  That's when I noticed Yazizi frantically waving her arms at me from the bushes on her side of the spring.

  “The stag!” read her silent lips, and she pointed viciously down the trail. “He is here!”

  When I leaned out to look, there it was.

  No living stag had ever been so magnificent. It was huge, muscle rippling smoothly beneath its brown and white fur. Its antlers fanned out into sharp, axe-like shapes, easily capable of disembowelling rivals or unwary hunters alike. Four massive cloven hooves drew sparks where they scrabbled against the stone.

  Again I was almost swayed. The animal before my eyes was the most divine thing I'd ever seen, larger than life in every way. And yet... If this was more than a mad dream, then nothing was for certain. Even the Harari believed in other gods beyond their own. Perhaps my God was out there. I wasn't the most devout of His children, but that was never the point.

  “We are blessed,” Yazizi whispered, held in awe by the sight. I hurried to lace up my trousers and picked up my things. There would be no rest now. We were too close.

  Our path would've been invisible to anyone looking at the gorge with normal eyes, yet we were hurtling down the steep rock face as fast as we dared, through grass and bushes that felt increasingly insubstantial. The vision was rapidly slipping away from me.

  The shadowy silhouettes of our companions followed in our tracks, swords drawn and arrows nocked.

  My legs felt like overcooked sausages by the time we rushed headlong into the trees on the valley floor. The vegetation here was better spaced than before, revealing a mess of fresh tracks, man and horse and deer alike. I kept thinking of the Duke's men as we followed them, and Yazizi cursed me for my clumsy, stumbling gait. My confused feet couldn't decide whether they were walking on grass or sand.

  “Byren,” the woman called to me. “Hold a moment.”

  Perhaps Yazizi was ignoring it, or perhaps she really hadn't heard in the heat of the moment. She ran ahead without breaking step. I followed for a few feeble paces but soon ground to a stop. The woman had called me, and my contract was clear.

  “There they are,” shouted someone, maybe Sir Erroll. He crowed in triumph. “We're behind the rocks, they have no idea we've caught them!”

  Aemedd, too, couldn't keep in his astonishment. “By God... She's led us right to them.”

  “They're coming this way,” said the woman. Her voice was smooth like expensive poison. “If we hurry we can fall on them before they leave the gorge. Well done, Byren. Well done indeed. Bring the girl back for me.”

  Sharp pain began to throb between my ears as I went to fetch Yazizi. My eyes watered, swaying back and forth between desert rocks and tough conifer forest. I bit my tongue and concentrated, but I could feel the trance slipping through my fingers.

  I don't know why I deviated from Yazizi's path. I wasn't in any state to think about it, didn't even realise I was off course until I tumbled down the hillside into a pile of soft leaves. The forest became suddenly quiet and intense. I raised my head a little to peer through the brush.

  Yazizi knelt in the shade of a huge oak tree, a strange growth between the rows of conifers. She held her bow out, arrow nocked to the string, and drew it. The curve of horn and laminated wood creaked as it bent backwards.

  The stag stood a dozen paces away. His head was half-raised, tired yet alert. He'd heard me fall, and his ears flicked and turned in every direction to scan for any further suspicious sound.

  By instinct I pushed myself up onto my knees, hefted my spear and shifted it to a javelin grip. Like the armies of ancient times, the Angian Guard carried a couple of javelins to soften the enemy up for a charge, and we'd spend whole days drilling the art of hurling several feet of wood in just the right way...

  “Byren,” I heard the woman call from somewhere far away. “Hurry. We need your sword arm.”

  I couldn't obey her. I was transfixed by the sight of the Harari girl and her prey, held in the moment.

  She breathed out and let her arrow fly.

  And missed.

  The shaft hissed well over the stag's head, and made a hollow thud as it drove deep into one of the pines behind him. Yazizi sat frozen, wide-eyed, her arms hanging in the air in the aftermath of her shot. There wouldn't be another chance. The stag was looking directly at her now. Any movement would cause him to bolt.

  “Byren!” the woman shouted, already well past us. I'd have to run to catch up...

  And yet, the stag was right here, the spear, the good throwing arm. All I had to do was launch.

  “Throw,” Yazizi whispered helplessly from her hide. “For the love of the gods, Karl, do it!”

  Sucking in an anxious breath, I wound my shoulder back, slid the smooth wood loosely between my fingers, took aim...

  I...

  I lowered my arms.

  I couldn't do it. To take that shot, I would've had to accept Yazizi's pagan gods, betraying everything I'd been brought up to believe. Saints help me, I couldn't do it.

  The stag must've heard something, because he looked straight at me with his glowing gold eyes. Instinct took over. A kick of his mighty legs plunged him into the treeline, thundering off towards freedom.

  The illusion broke. I was back on the steppe, kneeling in the sand, wearing desert clothes with my breastplate slung over my back. I saw the Duke's men trying to gallop through the gorge off to my left, but their horses stumbled in the shifting sand. They couldn't run away. I staggered to my feet, pulled my sword from its scabbard, and ran into the fray.

  Behind me, a wail of terrible loss echoed between the gorge's cold stone walls.

  The battle was quick and intense. Faro softened them up with arrows which pierced men and horses alike while Sir Erroll closed the distance, and I wasn't far behind. We fell on them with sword and spear and the savagery of desperate men.

  Blinded by the Tzan and totally unprepared for our attack, their discipline shattered. It was every man for himself in the panicky melee that followed.

  My spear-point thrust left and right, sinking through hard leather and into soft flesh up to the crossbar. There was a soft sigh as I withdrew it. One man dropped from the saddle. Another came at me, lance levelled to charge, and I planted my feet just so.

  Usually the contest between cavalry and spearmen goes to the one with the longest sticks. Here, though ‒ one against one in the shifting sands of the Tzan-blown steppe ‒ experience mattered more. There weren't many soldiers left on either side who could match me in that regard. While the Duke's man juggled his lance and his reins, I waited to receive him. One hand cradled the butt of my spear, the other gripped it about halfway
up the shaft, giving me the leverage I needed.

  I stood dead in the path of the charge until the last second. Then, I pushed my shaft up and to the left, caught his lance just behind the point and forced it out of the way. A moment later I took the spear down, planted it butt-first into the ground, and threw myself out of the horse's path. It still brushed me, knocked me down with its bulk, but not before my carefully-angled attack took the rider hard in the chest.

  Blood spattered onto me as he flew out of the saddle like a pole vaulter, and landed heavy on the ground, with the kind of wet crunch that told me he wouldn't be getting back up.

  The victory came at a cost, though. When I went back for my spear, I found its shaft in splinters, barely anything left of it. I took a moment to grieve, then drew my sword and surged back to my feet.

  I finally squared off against a shaky-voiced officer, his sand-scarf hanging halfway off his face. I watched him shout a few desperate orders, but nobody responded. The men were in disarray. His hands began to tremble when he realised he'd have to face me alone.

  “This is fun to you damned sand devils, isn't it?” he quavered, and I glanced down at my clothes, worn Harari-fashion against the sandstorm. He didn't seem interested in a reply. “You may have taken everyone else, but I promise you I won't go so easy!”

  He let out a hoarse yell and kicked his mount into a charge.

  Taking on a cavalryman alone without my spear was not where I wanted to be in life. My one advantage was psychological. I could see the terror in the man's eyes as he hurled his horse at me, and when I threw an experimental swing to his left side, he knocked it away with desperate strength without any regard for cutting back at me. He was so afraid to engage, he even let me sidestep the huge warhorse.

  Which gave me a free sweep at the animal's legs as it passed me by.

  I nearly took its hind legs off at the knee. Nearly, but not quite. The impact jarred up my arms, and a high-pitched, whinnying shriek rang out. Horse and rider hit the ground in a billowing cloud of dust.

  The officer stumbled out of it coughing, choking on sand, but his fight-or-flight instinct was still locked on the former. We'd have one last exchange before the remnants of his men died or surrendered around him.