by Jon Kiln
Nisero drew his blade and slashed along the bandit’s exposed ribs. The armor took most of the attack, but Nisero opened the side and cut the flesh. The bandit dropped his sword arm and circled away. As he rode hard toward the ridge, Berengar pulled himself up onto the other horse and kicked it into motion.
Nisero watched as the captain closed the distance. The bandit cried for help and then flung his blade around behind him in a desperate move to fend his pursuer off. Berengar leaned out and swiped through the back of the rider’s head, through the base of his skull. His body went limp and dropped off the side of his horse. The horse veered off the trail and Berengar pursued the animal.
The bandit on the ground next to Nisero coughed and groaned. Nisero lifted his sword. The man clutched his chest and spewed out a string of words in at least two languages. Nisero did not understand all of it, but he caught enough to know the man was crying for his mother. The lieutenant had heard that often enough from friend and foe alike on the battlefield. He neither felt disgust nor pity for the man on that account.
Nisero approached and pressed the point of his sword to the man’s chest, just above the wound the captain had delivered. As he pressed above the man’s heart, he felt a weakening discomfort in his own elbow. Nisero tapped the man’s chest and heard the thunk from the armor. The heart would be a better finishing blow, but Nisero was not willing to pain his elbow for the sake of mercy for a bandit. He brought the point up and rested it against the man’s throat.
The bandit stuttered. “No. No. No. No. Please, no.”
Nisero leaned down and drove his sword through. The bandit heaved and sputtered. His body shook once more and then went still. The man went limp, and air gurgled wet out of the wound around the metal.
Nisero drew his sword out and wiped it off on the man’s dark cloak as Berengar rode back up leading the second horse.
The lieutenant brought his sword up before he realized it was the captain inside the dark cloak. Berengar smiled. “Take his robing and mount up. It won’t fool anyone for long, but it might work from a distance. We have a long ride and many enemies, Nisero.”
The lieutenant looked down at the cloak and wished he had not cleaned his blade on it. Nisero sheathed his sword, and rolled the bandit over and untied the cloak. As he tied it on himself and pulled up the hood, he felt wet spots at different areas that he hoped were blood.
As he mounted, hoof beats sounded from more than one direction. Nisero took a deep breath and felt pain travel up and down his body through his muscles, joints, and skin. “I’m getting too old for this degree of adventure, sir.”
“I know how you feel, and then some, Nisero.” Berengar grunted and shook his head inside his hood. “Our adventure has taken the turn to where we are the ones pursued, instead of the pursuers.”
They kicked their stolen horses into motion and rode away, hidden beneath their dark, bandit cloaks.
Chapter 10: Ghosts of Things Once Living
They rode through the night and doubled back twice to avoid search parties. As they circled wide between marked trails and into the rising hills, Berengar pushed them farther west toward the Blue Mountains. He had no clear notion of where Solag hid in the vast expanse, but they had gotten this far, and the captain believed they could find his trail again as they pressed forward.
Still, Berengar wished he had the chance to take his sword to more of Solag’s overlords. Either for information or the achievement of removing more of them from the land.
They entered another pass that dropped them into shadows. They were momentarily hidden from the rays of the rising sun, which fought to break past the curved peaks of the mountains.
“Do you know where we are, sir?”
Berengar sighed and chewed at the inside of his mouth before he answered. “This is farther than I have gone, on this side of the border of the kingdom. I am not familiar with the territory here except for stories and maps that are too old to be accurate.”
Nisero cleared his throat. “Is there a way to be certain that we are not riding into a dead end?”
Berengar looked back and saw dust and smoke rising off the trails in the distance behind them. He wasn’t certain which signs were showing camping, pursuit, or pillage, but he was certain that Solag’s bands were trailing them.
He noticed Nisero’s face in the growing light. Even under the hood, he could see the bruising and the twist on his nose. Dried blood marked his cheeks and lips.
“I know we cannot stop yet to worry about it. Let’s press on.”
After a while longer, they dismounted and walked their stolen horses through the narrows of the pass. Berengar did not say it and Nisero did him the respect of not bringing it up again, but the captain feared that they were closing in on an impasse as the lieutenant had feared.
He heard laughter above his head and gritted his teeth. Berengar looked up along the walls which now extended forever up the sides of the first of the Blue Mountains. He waited for more arrows or stones to rain on him, and blot out his vision permanently.
He saw movement, and homed in upon creatures weaving their way up the outcroppings, that speckled up the mountainside in a rough spiral. Their spotted backs and tight fur confused him at first, as he watched them bobble from one ledge to another. He imagined that could not be much different than the spectacle that he and Nisero had put on, as they fumbled their way up the ridge the night previous. Berengar heard the insane laughter echo down again and he realized he was watching a pack of jackals navigate their way up the rock.
He squinted and shook his head. “I did not know that jackals climbed.”
The captain saw that Nisero was looking up as well. His nose was definitely broken, Berengar decided.
“It appears so. At least in this strange land,” the lieutenant said.
The lunatic laughter filtered down from above. The captain turned his attention back to the blue rock climbing into the sky. The bray of some other animal ripped through the air. Berengar scanned and spotted a ram with its shaggy coat and massive, curled horns. It stumbled and nearly tumbled off its ledge above the jackals, before making a successful leap to another outcropping. The captain did not have any manner of spy glass, but he thought he saw familiar splotches of red in the fur, with more dripping down over the rock in thick globs. The jackals pressed their pursuit after the ram, higher into its territory.
Berengar gripped the horse’s reins tighter and rolled his shoulders. Nisero had gotten the worst of it in their panicked leap off the Way of Blood, but Berengar was older, and his bones were not as prone to bounce back from impact. The thought seemed to bring out the pain in his knees and back more. He noticed a hitch in one hip that hadn't been as significant before he had jumped.
Berengar turned away from the ram before the chase was concluded. He did not hold out much hope for the majestic creature, and wasn’t sure how that translated to his own pursuit within a pursuit. He also wasn’t certain whether he was the ram or the jackal in the analogy. His mind seemed to be too foggy to sort out the answer either way.
The captain sighed and pulled himself back up into the saddle with a stab of pain from his hip. “I know how you feel old goat.”
Nisero laughed behind him. He grunted as he lumbered up into his own saddle. “Let’s not compare just yet, sir.”
Berengar snapped the reins and coaxed the horse forward a bit faster between the rocks.
The path weaved down deeper into the shadows and back up again. The path split twice ahead of them. Berengar took the right pass the first time and the left on the second split. He had no solid intelligence to guide his choices or to justify his decision. For his part, Nisero refrained from pressing for an explanation. As they rode on, Berengar came to realize that his instinct was based on which path gave him the greatest sense of dread. Whichever side had provided the most base level of fear, that was the way he chose and the path they followed. Something in him believed that dread was rolling off the spirit of Solag himself, and
the dark intentions he held for Arianne.
Berengar closed his eyes and rolled his head around his neck. “Vengeance upon the father for the death of a father.”
Nisero spoke behind him. “Sir?”
Berengar only realized after the lieutenant responded that he had spoken the thought aloud. In the lull that followed, Berengar debated whether to remain silent, beg the lieutenant off, or to change the subject. He felt the horse’s sides heave under him and the subject was changed for him.
Berengar looked back over his shoulder. “We’ll need to rest the horses unless we intend to ride them until they die under us.”
Nisero stared past the captain. “We’ll need to decide what to do about that village too.”
“Village?”
“The one ahead of us.”
Berengar turned his attention back forward. The horse naturally followed the curve of the path through the mountainside. Below them, he spotted the shapes of buildings nestled between larger boulders. Some of the buildings rising and falling from sight were long like communal structures, while others appeared only just large enough for a single family.
The roofs of the buildings were missing. Pieces of broken shale shingles lay peppered around the base of the exterior walls, like the sand and rock chips off the ridge of the Way of Blood. Had that thick erosion not been gathered below the ridge, Berengar suspected he and Nisero would have lain there with broken legs and backs. He imagined falling on the broken shale around the buildings below might be a different experience. Splintered and graying pieces of beam jutted up from the exposed edges around the tops of the buildings. This appeared to be old damage, and not from any recent attack or trouble.
Berengar finally spoke as they reached the next bend, where the trail sloped down toward the mysterious ruins. “I think these are the remains of a village, rather than a working village.”
“I’m not sure I should find that far more comforting, but I do,” responded Nisero.
Berengar nodded. “In a land ruled by bandits and murderers, it is nice to find a place empty of more trouble. At the very least, we have one less decision to make at the moment.”
“True enough.”
They reached the end of the trail and Berengar dismounted first. He took the reins and they led their horses around the husk of a cottage. Berengar looked through the open doorway to see the heavy stone of the roof collapsed inside, crushing whatever had once been there.
He spotted a low bench cut from rock, mounted on the wall next to and outside the doorway. It was too short for an adult, but Berengar imagined that it might have been built for the comfort and use of small children. He pondered whether the owner of the house and the builder of the bench would have thought his little gift to his children would outlast them all.
Berengar’s mind drifted to a thousand little projects around his own house, now in a greater state of ruin that these stone houses. In time, rain and wind would be far less kind to the scorched, wooden remains than these stone walls. All evidence of his family’s existence, including the pitiful grave markers he had created for them, would be wiped away from the land. He felt a thick sense of thankfulness that he had not been around to become attached to all the little, temporary trinkets around his home. He realized his long, physical distance spared him a great many tiny memories like this little bench. A wave of guilt followed these thoughts, and clung to his insides like something wet and sticky.
He shook his head and looked away. Looking away brought more abandoned structures into sight, one after another. In a rare, broad space ahead of them, in the fattest section of the strange valley, a well stood crumbled and collapsed on one side. The pieces of shaped stone lay wet and coated with green growth. Berengar was a split in time and place again. He saw the well in Patron’s Hill over the top of the well in front of him. His mind compared the water sources of two destroyed villages.
Berengar mumbled, “They probably thought they were quite safe too.”
If Nisero heard him, the lieutenant made no comment.
Water gurgled up and out of the broken side of the well. It flowed between the rocks and down a path between the buildings. As they drew close, the captain saw that the water followed a trench down and along the side of the mountain. He could not tell if it was natural or man-made. The source in the well was a spring which bubbled up from a crack in the ground. As far as Berengar could tell, the well had been built for show around the natural spring. It would have created a shallow pool to draw from, but would have still poured over the side and down into the trench. In the absence of people, the well wall had collapsed, but the spring had continued to flow with no regard for the emptiness around it.
They allowed the horses to drink and sat down with their backs to the surviving section of the well.
“Eventually,” Nisero said, “we’re going to need to face them or lose them from our trail. That is even before we deal with locating Solag himself.”
“Which is your preference?” Berengar closed his eyes.
“Sir?”
“Between the options of facing, or losing, our bandit friends?”
The captain heard a pop off to his left. He opened his eyes and turned his head. His vision was blurred from lack of sleep, and sunlight that had finally broken between mountains. His mind turned the shadows between and inside the ruins into evil creatures from other realms. He tried to blink the edges back onto objects.
“I’d like to lose them,” Nisero said, “but we have a narrow set of options, and we are in rough terrain that they know, but we do not.”
One of the shadows moved. Berengar leaned out to look around the well, but did not spy what he thought he had seen.
“That would seem to leave us with facing them with our swords and battered limbs,” said Berengar.
“We are also tapped on supplies, and again in land that does not lend itself to foraging or charity.”
The captain thought about the ram on the mountainside. Even he was in his own element as the jackals pursued. Berengar realized that he and the lieutenant had chosen to ride headlong into Solag’s domain.
“Perhaps we should just stay here and rebuild this quiet village,” Berengar said. “Do you wish to be the mayor or the priest?”
Nisero laughed. “I think I’d rather be the tavern keep.”
Berengar shook his head. “That requires skill with handling inventory and patrons. You and I have already shown our ability when it comes to keeping up with our supplies.”
“No,” Nisero said, “if it is just a village of two, I think I can keep track.”
Berengar heard a scrape and definitely saw motion at the edge of his vision. He scrambled to his feet and drew his sword. Nisero was up and armed in the same instant. The horses bobbed their heads and backed away from the spring. Berengar wasn’t sure if his partner and the beasts were reacting to the same noise he had heard, or if they were startled by his sudden movement.
“There,” Nisero pointed.
Berengar saw a man bent low to where his fingertips rested on the ground. He was naked and covered with hair. His gray beard spread in a wild screen over his chest. His colorless hair hung down his back in dirty twists. The captain saw insanity in the man’s eyes.
He heard the scrape again and looked in that direction to see two more men crouched with the same wild eyes and gray skin.
“There’s more than one.”
Nisero turned. “A lot more.”
Berengar circled and saw more than a dozen men crawling out from around buildings and into the doorways. The captain had a stray thought that he was having trouble remembering the last nice town he had visited.
One of the men pounced and Nisero swung. The man staggered back out of reach with his back bent backwards instead of forward. The move gave him a twisted, grotesque stature that looked more demonic than human. He showed gray teeth and hissed as he rolled back to his feet and fingertips.
Another sprung and landed on the lip of the well behind th
e captain. The naked man extended his legs to leap off at the soldiers, but Berengar swung into the man’s chest. His flesh opened wide enough to expose his beating heart, before he fell behind the wall into the broken well. Berengar swore the man’s organs were gray too before he had disappeared from sight. A flush of red washed down the slope in the flow of the spring water.
The captain spun back around and saw the strange men hopping in toward them. Nisero and the captain both whipped their swords from side to side and the bent men hopped backward.
The first arrival with the gray beard landed on the captain’s horse’s flank. He sunk his teeth into the horse’s flesh and the animal reared. Nisero made a stab, but the man bounded back out of reach. Blood ran bright over his lips and dyed his hair. The horse circled and bucked, showing a broad wound of torn flesh deep in the muscle.
“What are they?” Nisero growled.
Two men sprung at them and Berengar slashed through both their throats in one motion. Blood sprayed into the air and painted the street as they fell to their backs and thrashed. As they stilled and their blood flow tapered, Berengar replied calmly. “Just people.”
The men closed around them, but suddenly jolted and darted to the side. They scattered and vanished into the ruins as quickly as they came, leaving their dead companions on the ground. The sudden departure reminded Berengar of rats, or a flock of startled birds.
He heard another scrape and looked around. Echoing shouts drew his attention. The voices came from the trail they had used in their approach to a village they thought was abandoned. A long line of dark riders charged down the curve of the track toward them. Berengar thought, even those addled maniacs are afraid of Solag’s bandits.
“They’ve seen us,” Nisero said.
“I think we’ve haunted this village long enough, lieutenant.”
