Better to be safe than sorry. They cleared away the snow by hand and managed to find enough dry wood for a small fire. Gennevera heated up some leftover meat and some water for making hot tea to give them energy for their journey. As beautiful as these snow covered hills were, Carym felt the urge to move on. The Sigil Stones seemed to be pulling him, urging him onward. The farther along the journey they went, the more aware of the stones he became. It seemed as though each stone pulled and tugged at him in different ways, each triggered odd sensations within him. Although he wasn’t always aware which specific stone was being active, today he was certain the black stone was radiating something....irritation, it seemed.
And so the group slung their packs and began their trek back to the road. After a few hours they encountered their first traveler along the way. He was a man dressed in a black tunic with a red star emblem on his chest, and a black hooded cloak. He was of average height with slick black hair, sharp features, and a sword strapped to his side. He walked with a slight limp, empty eyes looked neither left nor right. Kharrihan waved for the group to halt and he stared intently at the man.
“Greetings to you fellow traveler!” called the elf. “From where do you hale?” Kharrihan spoke to the man in Ckaymrish but the traveler did not respond, he just continued to walk towards them.
“Kind sir, we are weary and need information about the road ahead. Can you assist us?” he asked again, this time using Common Cklathish. Again no response. Suddenly Kharrihan backed away from the approaching figure and joined Carym, sword drawn. Zach turned and faced front while Gennevera and Bart half-faced to the rear.
“What’s the matter, Kharr?”
“His feet!”
Then Carym saw that the man made no tracks in the snow. In fact it seemed as if he was walking through it without disturbing it at all. The closer it got, the more volatile the black stone in his coat seemed to be, that familiar sense of a rising tide growing. He wondered desperately how much more trouble he was going to get his friends into simply by being with them.
“Ghost!” hissed the elf. Carym guessed as much. “Off the road, he may not challenge us.”
The air around them suddenly became bitterly cold, even though the winter sun was shining in the sky. Zach grabbed Carym by the arm and yanked him out of the path of the man. As the thing passed they saw that its eyes were completely white and its flesh was pasty gray, seemed to be dripping off in places. Although it wore a surcoat of significant quality, the being seemed grossly disfigured, its legs were of different sizes causing it to walk in an odd shuffle. Its face was locked in a furious glare, jagged scars adorned its neck and face, it left an awful stench in the air as it passed.
“My god!” said Carym as the creature shambled by, he had to stifle a gag. “What was that?” He looked to Kharrihan for answer. The elf seemed unwilling to answer for a moment. Then he spoke.
“A ghoul,” he said quietly. “I am truly sorry, my friends. That creature could only have been one of Baron Tyrannus’ wandering knights.”
“What does that mean, elf?” demanded Zach, not liking the change in the man’s tone.
“It is not good.”
“What do you mean? Speak plainly!” Zach was getting angrier by the second.
“Zach, be easy. Let our friend share his knowledge with us,” warned Carym. Gennevera was now standing beside Carym and he sensed her anger at Zach’s outburst.
“Centuries ago, a man known as Baron Tyrannus ruled this land. A vicious, evil, black soul if there ever was one. His favorite pastime involved torturing people to slow and painful deaths, usually by impaling them on a great spike. Men, women, children; it mattered little to him. All he cared about was causing death and he would create any excuse to do it. It is said he once impaled a man for turning the wrong way upon leaving his court.
“He is long dead now, but the memory of his deeds scarred these lands beyond redemption. No one comes here willingly. Even the Ckaymru people know better than that.”
“But you brought us here!” accused Zach in anger.
“No, he brought us here. The Black Baron resides here still, in tortured undeath, never to move on to the afterlife. His minions patrol the borders of his lands, borders that can shift without one even knowing it. And if you are caught in a shift of the Black Baron’s borders, you are doomed to travel straight to the castle itself.”
Gennevera nodded her agreement of what was happening.
“Then we flee, now!” Zach demanded.
“It is not so easy, friend,” said Bart.
“You know of this curse as well?” Zach turned his angry glare at him.
“Aye, all who live in Ckaymru know of that one, so they do,” he said quietly. “We will try to flee. But whichever way we turn, we will still end up at the castle.”
“Carym, I think we are being watched,” said Gennevera, worried. “From all around us.”
“Aye, the Black Baron’s minions, do not doubt,” said Bart, turning this way and that, his twin rapiers in hand and his flute tucked safely away.
“Well, let’s get moving! I don’t want to wait for something to come to us,” barked Zach.
“There is no other choice,” agreed Bart, lost in thought. “We must move on. We have a journey before us and it is not getting any shorter. We find out soon enough if the curse has caught us.”
Carym agreed, and soon the group resumed their positions along the flanks of the road and began their trek. No sooner did they begin moving, hands on the hilts of their swords, when a band of oroks sprang from behind some trees with swords drawn and arrows nocked.
“Blood and fire!” cursed Zach. “What bloody next? I don’t suppose you have any hurkin with you? Some giants, maybe?” Zach shouted at the oroks, anger blazing.
“Lay down swords, humans. We not hurt you,” spoke the beast in broken Cklathish.
“Not much!” The other three chortled and commented in their guttural Orokish language, amused by their leader’s joke.
“I think, orok, that you are out-matched this day.” Carym connected his fighting batons and enflamed them, the sight of the fire caused a few of the oroks to step back, muttering. Bart’s rapiers both flared with brilliant white light and he began to swing them in the air. The combination of the bright light and the whistling sound of the rapiers was a bit disorienting to Carym and the others, though its effect on the oroks was greater.
The oroks began milling in confusion in response to the bard’s noisy display and Carym decided it was time to strike. He charged into the front most ranks of oroks swinging his fighting sticks in a deadly arc, smashing down on the top of one orok’s head. An orok stepped behind him; sensing it, Carym slammed his stick backward and into the solar plexus of the orok stunning it. Then he whirled to his left, bringing his stick in a wide arc, and connected with the temple of the stunned orok behind him, which collapsed in a heap.
As Carym was dispatching these two oroks, Bart and Zach had joined the fray. Zach with his dagger and sword and Bart brandishing twin blades of his own, the two began tearing into orok flesh. Kharrihan had silently flanked the group of oroks, climbed a tall tree and leaped out into the air above the patrol leader. His small blade found purchase between the orok’s shoulder blades and he rode the beast to the ground. Deprived of leadership, the remaining oroks retreated back the way they came.
Carym was grateful for the reprieve and took a moment to catch his breath, counting the members of his company. All were present, and appeared to be unharmed. “Thank Zuhr!”
Zach started going through the pockets of the dead oroks examining their contents. Kharrihan and Bart helped while Gennevera approached Carym and stood beside him.
“What the blazes are oroks doing here?” he wondered. “They certainly weren’t ghosts.”
“The lawlessness of this land has attracted them from the tunnels. It is a shame, so it is,” answered the bard sadly.
“Bart, why would there be oroks in a haunted forest?” Carym
was satisfied to see that the group had stripped a pair of bows and a number of arrows from the oroks. Although not the brightest of the Orcish races, oroks were known for their skill in bow making and archery. They just weren’t always bright enough to know when to engage with a bow and when not to.
“In the past decade, a few bands of Highland oroks emerged from the tunnels of the Underllars and established tribes in these mountains. We believe they were forced out from the Underllars by the deeper races, so we do. Perhaps they find comfort in the lands of the Black Baron. They are a wicked lot, so they are.”
“Hmm,” Carym was skeptical. “Oroks are some of the most cowardly creatures I have ever met. I doubt they would willingly come to a place like this unless they were forced to.”
“You may be right, so you may!” said the bard, waving a rapier and acknowledging the point.
“A mystery that will perhaps reveal itself in time,” said Kharrihan.
“And one that I could do without!” griped Zach.
Other than arming themselves with Orokish bows and arrows, there was little of use to be found on the bodies of the dead oroks. They had all been plainly garbed in simple leathers, yet bore no insignia. It was odd that a band of oroks should be so uniformly dressed.
The group continued along the road following the tracks of the fleeing oroks until the tracks vanished without explanation. No more snow had fallen to cover the tracks, and there were no indications that the oroks had met with others. They simply vanished. Kharrihan suspected another mysterious border-shift caused their sudden disappearance and suggested that perhaps the group had the good fortune of being pushed back into the lands of Ckaymru during the shift.
They continued on without incident until nightfall, seeing no one else on the road and no tracks. This, according to the bard, was a well-traveled through way; there should have been more passersby. By the time the group stopped in the evening to make camp, both of the veteran travelers of the Isles agreed that they now were inexplicably lost. A mere hundred yards back, the men had a good sense of where they were and where they were heading. Now, they were lost. The land was different, like none of the lands of Ckaymru they were used to traveling. When they tried to backtrack to find their bearings again, they could not find any landmarks they recognized.
Border shift. Carym thought dejectedly, cursing himself for bringing his friends into this trouble. The thought of leaving the group behind and setting out alone had crossed his mind more than once.
They found an embankment that sloped down several yards from the road and provided them with concealment from sight. Considering potentially dangerous encounters, they thought it best not to start a fire. As the night passed Carym began to sense that heavy, oppressive presence again. Using his sight, he saw that the Shadow Tide was roiling and swirling angrily all about the land. Although the other Tides were present, they were clearly muted as though the Shadow Tide were choking out the others. The weight of the stones became much heavier then, the oily black stone more than the many others. It was odd how, at times, the black stone could seem so appealing, and other times so appalling.
Throughout the night the sleepers were plagued by horrible nightmares depicting gruesome scenes of torture and impalement, while those on watch were constantly battling a paranoid sense of being watched. Voices drifted out of a cold fog eerily lit by the silvery moon, whispering of the terror and pain to come.
As daylight broke over the camp, the companions were glad to see the cold and cheerless sun.
They quickly broke camp and began to ready themselves for the day’s march when they heard loud noises coming from the road. Carym slipped quietly up the embankment moving from tree to tree. When he reached the top and peered out at the road he froze in place. Another band of oroks, about a dozen strong, were standing on the road in a tactical formation, with swords drawn and bows nocked facing a foe that Carym could not see. These oroks wore garb similar to that of the band they faced on the road earlier.
The oroks were grumbling to each other and looking around nervously. A strange looking orok in the back of the group barked orders and the oroks moved forward in military fashion. Carym was stunned. Oroks don’t typically fight in an organized fashion. The orok in charge was tall, swarthy, muscular, and very human looking. As he looked this way and that, Carym saw an intelligence and shrewdness there that was not present in the ordinary slovenly oroks.
Hurkin! he realized.
As with the presence of the baron’s wandering knight, the temperature dropped and Carym’s breath caught in his lungs. Then he heard a hideous scream and saw the heads of the front two oroks fall from their lifeless bodies. The other oroks in the formation began to swing wildly at their unseen foe. The hurkin leader ordered his archers to fire and a volley of arrows flew through the air; silver tips flashing in the sun.
Some of the arrows flew harmlessly into the ground or into trees, yet some stopped in midair as if striking an invisible object before falling to the ground. The piercing scream filled the air again and two more oroks fell to the ground writhing; then two more and still two more. There were now but four oroks, plus their hurkin leader left facing this foe. The remaining oroks looked helplessly around as they fired volley after volley at their unseen foe. Soon two of the remaining oroks fell, one of them seemed to find purchase for its silvery axe before it died. Indeed, the axe remained suspended, and the faint outline of a man-shaped creature began to appear. Terrified, the remaining two oroks turned as if to run.
The hurkin leader swung his great silver sword before him and killed his oroks as they tried to flee. Then he advanced upon the invisible foe and swung his great sword viciously, trading blows with the attacker. The more he swung the more Carym could see a faint outline of a creature taking shape. The sound of metal on metal rang in the air as the powerful hurkin warrior locked swords with a creature that became more visible by the minute.
Finally Carym could see the abysmal being and it was hideous. It stood nearly ten feet tall on spindly legs and had arms that were unnaturally long ending in wicked claw tipped hands; one of those hands wielded a sword and the other a whip. It was ghastly, worse even than the appearance of the ghoulish wandering knight. It was a hodgepodge of rotting flesh and bones and even sticks and other pieces of trash sewn or otherwise improbably fastened together. Maggots crawled over rotten flesh, flies seemed to cloud around the beast, and cockroaches could be seen scampering around its unseeing, empty eye sockets. The stench of death wafted away from it, overpowering Carym and causing his stomach to turn violently.
Zach crept up silently behind Carym. The two hunkered down into the brush to avoid detection as the battle continued on for several more minutes; both opponents were taking heavy blows. The hurkin snarled as he landed blows down on the hideous beast eventually chopping off the creature’s whip hand, but not before taking a few nasty strikes from the whip.
Carym was morbidly fascinated. Why were the oroks fighting against the undead? Clearly they weren’t in league with Baron Tyrannus if these ghastly creatures were indeed his denizens. The monster landed a heavy blow to the head of the hurkin, causing him to crumple to the ground feebly waving his sword. The massive dismembered hand crawled quickly along the ground to the weakened warrior and latched on to his neck, squeezing. Carym saw with horror that a swarm of bugs spewed from the open wound at the wrist and began to devour the hurkin.
“What do we do, Zach? Should we help?”
“No! Hurkin are not to be trusted!”
Carym found himself in agreement with Zach. Still, he found it hard to look on as the mighty warrior fought the creature of undead horror. With a surprising effort the hurkin lurched to his feet, the clawed hand still wrapped around his neck, his body being eaten by bugs, and with gallant effort hurled his sword at the beast. The monstrous creature was big and powerful, but it was too slow. The sword flew through the air, spinning horizontally, and sliced the head of the monster from its body. At once, the creature cr
umpled to the ground, and whatever force held it together left it. What remained was a pile of flesh and bones and rotting organs, among other things which the men could not identify, and of course the bugs which began to feed on what was left of their host. The hurkin had tumbled to the ground, his air supply long since gone, and died.
“Whoa,” whispered Zach. “How do you like that? They killed each other!”
“Are you sure the hurkin is dead?”
“I’m sure. He’s got a hole the size of my fist in his neck and a thousand of his new best friends are crawling in and out of it.”
“Dear god, where did that thing come from?” Carym wondered.
“Foul magic.”
The pair waited a few moments to be certain nothing else moved. The bugs that had infested the corpse suddenly disappeared. The rest of the group had joined the two men and had seen the last moments of the grizzly battle. They moved up to the road and inspected the body of the dead hurkin, and the oroks for information. Kharrihan disappeared, presumably scouting the area.
“Bart, what do you make of all this?” asked Carym.
The bard shook his head. Pointing at the remnants of the monster he said, “This is the work of Baron Tyrannus, no doubt. In the last days of his life, the crazy bastard experimented with black magic, he did. Looking for ways to save his life, he experimented on the living and the dead, creating horrible beings, hoping to create a vessel to host his black soul. They say it never worked, and in the end his spirit was doomed to haunt his castle forever, so it was!”
Carym was thankful that in the last few days he’d had some time to really study the book that Mathonry had given him. Now that he had seen the capabilities of these evil concoctions of death, Carym had an idea how to fight them in battle if need be. He watched Zach swinging the sword that belonged to the deceased hurkin, an amazed look in his eyes. Indeed the blade seemed to move unnaturally fast in his friend’s hands, it was a marvelous weapon. Its blade was silver yet it seemed to absorb the light from the air around them, serpents festooned the blade and crosspiece and the hilt itself seemed to be one long writhing snake.
The Black Keep (The Chronicles of Llars) Page 16
