by Helix Parker
“I love our life here,” Cassandra said, running her hand over his chest. “I love the grass and the trees. The calm of it. No one bothers us here, but if we want to see people, cities are nearby.”
He nodded.
“Leon?”
“Yes?”
She took his chin in her hand and turned his face toward hers. “Are you happy here? With me?”
“Of course.”
“Are you really?”
“Yes, I’m very happy. Why would you think otherwise?”
“Your previous life.”
“My previous life doesn’t matter.”
“But you still think of it sometimes, don’t you? I see you looking at that… thing you buried. What do you think of when you see it?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I asked, didn’t I? I want to know. What do you see?”
He was quiet for a long time. “I see the bodies piled up in front of me. Bodies don’t rot like you think they do. We think they shrink and dry and turn to bones, but that’s not what happens. They grow larger. They expand. The faces get fat, and the skin putrefies and falls off. The nails turn black, and the eyes are the first to rot away, or to be eaten. Animals like human eyes. And I see their faces. Each one of them waits for me, all the men and women and children I’ve killed. They wait for me on the other side of the veil, and they say, ‘Welcome, friend. Welcome, murderer.’”
When he stopped, she wasn’t certain what to say, so she just put her head in the crook of his arm, and they watched the sky as it turned blue-black. The birds were retiring for the night, and the crickets began to chirp. Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled a mournful cry.
The sound of little feet padding across the wooden floor could be heard. Their daughter, Star, plopped down on the other side of Leon.
Star placed her head on his chest as if he were nothing more than a pillow and looked up at the sky. “Do you think there’s people there?”
“Where?” he asked.
“In the sky, silly. Is there other people there?”
“No, the gods are there.”
“All of the gods?”
“Some of them. Gai, the goddess of the world, lives here with us. Ses, the god of the sea, lives deep, deep underwater where we can’t travel. He watches the ships that pass over him and makes judgments about them. If he likes you, you will have a safe passage. If you displease him”—he pinched her belly, and she squealed—“he will send the gorax sharks after you.”
“Who else lives here?”
“Well, there’s Lom, goddess of the harvest, and her brother Lam, god of food and wine.”
“What about Rain?”
Leon glanced at his wife, who shrugged. “How do you know about Rain, little peapod?”
“My friend Jory said Rain kills people and wears their faces. That he skins them alive and then eats whatever he doesn’t wear.”
“Well, Jory is just a little boy who doesn’t know anything about the world. Rain is the god of death. He determines where and when people die. He’s very important.”
“Why?”
“Because if we were to live forever, we would go insane. So Rain makes certain that we do not, that we pass through the veil when it is our time.”
“And he has a sword called Blood. The sword that screams. Jory said it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”
Leon suggested, “Why don’t you think about Neth instead?”
“Who’s Neth?”
“Neth is the goddess of family. We’re your family, me and your mother, and soon your new little brother or sister. It’s the most important thing in the world, peapod. Nothing else is truly worth dying or killing for.”
She considered that a moment then said, “Well, I think Neth should give Rain a family. Then he won’t want to wear people’s faces.”
He chuckled. “I think he would agree with you.”
5
As the night wore on, Edgar found that wine lubricated people’s mouths, and all sorts of information would slip out. He walked around the tavern and bought wine for anyone who could give him information about the raiders.
He discovered that they were called the Marauders of Burke. Or just the Marauders. Some people told him they were not men but were descended from animals that had bred with men. Others insisted they were demons under the sway of Chedes, god of the underworld, and that they killed in his name. And still others informed him that they were just men who had developed a taste for blood and flesh—much as a wolf, once it had tasted the flesh of man, would always prefer it.
As the night drove forward, people grew more jovial, but Edgar didn’t feel it. The full knowledge of what had occurred began to dawn on him, and more than once, he had to leave the tavern and find a quiet spot behind the building to just weep. He wept for all the men, women, and children, and he also wept for himself because he was utterly alone.
But inside his belly, something tingled and scratched—a pure, burning lust for revenge. He had never felt such a thing. Calm and with an even temperament, he didn’t understand men or dwarves who lost their minds to rage. Fury seemed so beastly and foreign to him that he didn’t think it was a proper emotion for a man unless he suffered from madness.
But with his new experience, he understood. He knew how men could kill each other in cold blood and not only have no regrets, but enjoy the act. He would enjoy the Marauders lying at his feet, bloody and broken and begging him for help that he would never give.
Coming back into the tavern after another session of weeping, he sat in the corner and, for the first time the entire night, ordered wine. He sipped it at first then guzzled it as if it were water and he were lost in a desert. The alcohol stung on the way down and heated his belly. His face grew hot. A sweeping numbness overtook him, and he suddenly felt… better. Not good, but better. And he knew that he had learned two lessons that night about why men did the things they did. One was vengeance, and the other was the drink.
He approached a lovely young girl who was drinking with two friends. Some men made lascivious comments as they walked by, but the girls ignored them and continued with their conversation.
Edgar strolled up to them with a new pitcher of wine. “May I ask you some questions? In exchange, you may have all the wine you can drink.”
“What we would really like is some food,” the red-haired one said.
Edgar shouted for a wench to bring roast chicken and boiled goose eggs then pulled up a chair. It took him a moment to climb up onto the seat, and the girls giggled. He didn’t sense their laughter was malicious, more that they thought he was adorable, like a child. He wasn’t sure which was worse.
“The Marauders of Burke. What do you girls know about them?”
Red Hair glanced at her two friends. “Why do you ask, dwarf?”
“Today, they killed a lot of people that I cared about and some I didn’t. We asked for help from the nearby cities, and none came.”
“The king’s law doesn’t apply to them.”
“Why not?”
“Because they are servants of the king. Or perhaps he is a servant of theirs.”
“Why do you say that?”
“They worship the darkness. The filthy and the vile. Chedes gives them great power for their sacrifices. They are called the Marauders and are led by a man named Erebos.”
“Is that what you think my people were? A sacrifice to their god of darkness?”
She nodded. Pouring a cup of wine, she took a sip, keeping her eyes on the table. “They’re not like men. They can’t be reasoned with. They cannot be bribed with material things, for they care about nothing but the dark. And they have the king’s protection. If they killed people you cared about, it was for a purpose. And the lawgivers in the surrounding towns were told beforehand to stay away.”
He nodded, taking a long drink of wine. “And how does a young girl like you know so much about the dark worshippers?”
She swallowed, her
eyes moving up to meet his for only a moment before she turned them back down to the table. “They did the same to my village, Santori, on the coast. Only a handful of us escaped. When we appealed to the King’s court for justice, we were denied. No reason was given. But when the court adjourned, a man—I don’t know his name—pulled us aside. He took pity on us, I think, and he told us what had happened. He said the Marauders were under the protection of the king, and if they destroyed a village or even an entire city, it was with the king’s blessing.”
Edgar drank and considered her words. After the girls moved to another table, he continued drinking until he could barely remember his own name and was so stumbling-drunk that he scarcely made it across the street to the inn. When he got there, his clothes were covered with sticky mud, and he thought he must’ve fallen in the street, though he didn’t remember doing it.
He was given an upstairs room, but he looked at the winding wooden staircase with the split beams and asked for a different one. After he received the key to one on the main floor, he went in and began taking off his clothes but decided it was too much work.
He lay down but then sat up again. The burning in his belly was still there, so pure and so forceful that he wondered how he would ever think about anything else again.
During the attack, he had been so concerned with surviving that he wasn’t able to focus on much else. But as he sat in that room, the screams and smells hit him, overwhelming him as if they were a physical force. An image of a young woman being picked up and hacked to pieces as if she were a pig came to him. The Marauder threw her severed head into the hut of a family that was huddling behind a window, no doubt praying that the invaders would pass them by. But they didn’t. Five Marauders flooded into the little hut and came out some time later, covered in blood. One of them was chewing something.
Edgar also thought of Dase. She had been strong and beautiful and always kind to him. They had been spending more time together, and he had thought they would be wed if he could get her father to approve. But that day hadn’t come. The image of her nude and battered body lying in the grass was so strong, he vomited.
He retched over the floor then lay back in the bed. He held on to the sheets because the room was spinning.
Dase, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t save you. I couldn’t save anyone.
6
The fifty Marauders rode like nightmares over the countryside. The road before them was clear, as anyone on it quickly made way. The smart ones hid. The dumber ones stood by the side of the road, and if the Marauders could reach them with their swords, they lopped off heads, arms, and hands without even slowing. The black steeds pounded their hooves like earthquakes into the hard dirt. It seemed the very trees around them moved.
Rodrick felt nothing but an untainted, effervescent power. He rode at the head of the clan. His men were dirty and bloodied, with bellies distended with meat. Good, clean meat. Not like the wild animals and the savage men they hunted near Castle Night, their home.
Rounding the Mountain of Houdin, they approached a sizeable castle built on the side of a cliff. Its parapets, sharp edges and spirals made the structure appear otherworldly, ripped from the underworld and placed among the world of men to put them in awe. The oak bridge opened like some atrocious maw swallowing the men and horses whole.
The backside of the castle was built into the cliff. The walls ran to a precipice that dropped off to a crevasse so deep the bottom couldn’t be seen. Marauder babies would have an injury inflicted, such as a cut across the belly, after they were born. Then, if they wept for too long, they were thrown from the parapet into the abyss. If they remained strong, they would be sent to the nursery on the bottom floor of the castle where wenches would raise them until they were old enough for training, typically seven years.
The training was meant to turn them to stone, to eliminate all within them that resembled humanity. They would be thrown into forests and told to hunt for food. They were given axes, swords, and daggers and trained to kill. The targets used were people who had fallen to the Marauders.
Rodrick thought back on his own training as they approached the castle. His first kill had been a man who had begged for his life. Rodrick had understood then how weak people could become. A grown man wept and begged a seven-year-old boy for his life and the lives of his family. The man’s pleading was so pathetic that Rodrick almost didn’t kill him because he thought it would be bad for his name to kill one so weak. But in the end, his clan had wanted him to do it so he did. He sliced open the man’s guts and watched his rainbow-colored entrails flop out onto the ground. The man had screamed like a girl. The entire thing was still the most humorous thing Rodrick had ever experienced.
Rodrick led his men into the stables, where the young ones took their horses. Most of the men then broke away to go to the mess hall and begin a drunken feast that would last until the morrow. Then they would sleep for several days and, on the morn, get up and get drunk again.
Rodrick slapped a few of his remaining men in the face, as was the custom after a good ride. He then went up the stone steps to the castle’s main entrance. There were no guards. No one would be stupid enough to actually break into Castle Night.
The castle was built almost like a cave without windows, so no natural light filled the space. The only decorations were ancient weapons that hung on the walls like witnesses to the Marauders’ power.
They did not discriminate in the sense that the outside world understood that term. Elves were accepted to the Marauders, as were dwarves and the mysterious Gaen Sae, a people that lived far to the north and were said to possess magical powers, even the ability to speak to the dead. His own second in command, Hess, was of the Gaen Sae.
Hess, his skin bright blue in sunlight, almost like sapphire, would read the twigs and the dirt. The future, he would always say, was in flux. And nature could tell which direction it was going.
But Rodrick cared not for such things. Gods, witches, mages, and magik were all things that only children believed. He cared about the time between his earliest memory and the last moment before his death. Anything before or after was of no concern to him.
He crossed the great hall, glancing up at the swords, battle-axes, and shields adorning the walls. Some of them were taller than a man, weapons that had been wielded by giants that no longer walked the earth. Rodrick would have loved to have seen such beasts roaming the Great Plains. To see them decimate cities and destroy armies… the very thought put a grin on his face.
As he came to another winding staircase, a chill went up his back. His master was upstairs. Rodrick feared nothing—neither man nor beast nor death—but his master filled him with an icy terror that made him quiver as if he were a child lost in the Forests of Beryl, scavenging the corpses of animals for food and weeping through the night.
He straightened his spine, climbed the stairs, and entered his master’s chamber. The massive, high-ceilinged room was the only one in the castle that had windows. The rectangular openings overlooked the precipice below and the forests beyond.
His master stood staring out the windows at the darkening sky. Tall and muscular, a bear of a man, he wore a black cloak. His inky-black hair came down to his shoulders, and his face was wide and thick, as if chiseled from an unyielding stone. But all Rodrick could see were the eyes and forehead. The rest of the face was covered by a stone mask in the shape of snakes wrapped around the head.
Rodrick bent to one knee. “Lord Erebos, it is done.”
“They are all dead?” Erebos asked in his deep voice that sounded as if it came from a pit in the earth rather than from a man.
“All dead, master.”
“You have something to say to me, Lord Rodrick?”
“No, master. It’s just… killing dwarves was not a challenge for the men. They enjoyed it, as I did, but there is no army that can stand against us. If all the Marauding clans were to join—”
“All the clans have joined together.”
�
�But I mean physically join together. Not just in name, master.”
“There are none above me. When I require them, all the clans shall do as I say. Do you doubt me?”
“No, master. I do not doubt.”
Erebos turned to him, and his eyes were like fire. “Another clan is coming, Lord Rodrick. I expect them to be greeted well. Over ten thousand Marauders.”
Rodrick could never look at his master’s eyes for long. He turned his gaze to the floor, feigning respect and hoping his master didn’t see the utter horror with which Rodrick regarded him. “Why such a large force, master?”
Erebos turned back toward the window. “I intend to show the kingdom why they fear the night. We will take the city of Dolane.”
Rodrick looked up. “Dolane? It has over a million people. The king will never—”
“The king is a coward and a fool. He will do as I wish.”
“Yes, master.”
“You did well. Go and celebrate with the men. But tell your Gaen Sae to join me here.”
“Of course. Thank you, master.”
Usually, Roderick felt relief upon the ending of any encounter with his master. As Rodrick descended the stairs, he had a sense of foreboding, as if a momentous decision had just been made, and he was powerless to stop its effects—for good or ill.
Rodrick pushed away the thought with effort and headed for the mess hall. Hess was rolling a small set of bones. The men around him were drunk, but the wine was not slowing. Hess sat quietly with his legs folded on top of the table, the bones making chinking sounds as they hit each other.
The revelry grew louder and became even worse when a string of women and young boys were dragged into the mess hall. They were sacrifices from the neighboring towns. They gave warm bodies when commanded, and in exchange, they were allowed to live.
