by Dale Lucas
Then the mystery stepped through the flames, fury incarnate, so terrible and strange that Einar could barely believe his own eyes. If every man and dwarf around him had not gasped or cried out almost at once in shared disbelief, he might have thought the thing was just some phantom summoned by his fevered, frightened mind in the moments before he took his last breath.
But no—to Einar’s great wonder and dread, that thing that strode through the flames was real—as real as the blood he tasted in his mouth, as real as the smell of human sweat and burning pitch that now surrounded him. It was roughly the height of a man, but broader, as if someone had stretched a stocky dwarven body to a height of six heads or more. It was neither human nor dwarf, but something altogether alien, molded of an agglomeration of materials—mud, soil, bones, broken stone, all stacked and pressed and bound together by some unknown, otherworldly force. Though it was roughly anthropoid in shape—two arms, two legs, a torso, a head—it was lopsided, uneven, its unpleasant shape an indicator of its probable origin as a thing not born, but made.
It was the stuff of nightmares, brute force and remorseless vengeance personified.
For a moment Einar wondered if it was a demon, come to punish them all for their foolish hatred, their embattled wickedness. Then the beast turned its dire and fiery gaze on the nearest masked men and, with a roar that sounded like a mountain avalanche, lumbered into their midst.
From the alley floor Einar watched as it tore into the parcel of men surrounding his dwarven comrades, snatching them up and casting them every which way as though they were mown-down chaff. He felt a strange thrill when he saw the beast move to grab one of his companions, hesitate for the barest instant, then simply shove the dwarf aside and reach for the next human scrambling to escape it.
It snatched men by their cloaks and flung them against the alley walls. It took up one man by his head, then closed its huge, blunt fingers around his skull, crushing it like a grape. As that man’s now-headless body crumpled to the mud, the creature felt another man laying into its hunched, bone-encrusted shoulder with what looked like a stonemason’s hammer. The creature reached over its shoulder, grabbed the attacker by his night cloak, then hove him forward, slamming him bodily to the mud. As it stepped forward to continue its onslaught, it crushed the man’s rib cage beneath its blunt, rounded feet.
Einar saw the knot of masked men around him quickly dispersing. Some fled outright. Others tried to do battle with the beast, but it maimed or killed all who opposed it, every injury and killing undertaken with no hint of either malice or struggle. It simply struck and killed as though it were swatting flies. It lumbered, it swung, it grabbed, it threw, it struck. There was only blind, blunt force—nothing else.
Einar watched from the muddy ground, terrified, as the beast painted the alleyway with the blood of their enemies. When at last there were no more to kill, or cripple, or send fleeing into the night, the thing simply turned and lurched away from them, offering no acknowledgment to those whose lives it had just saved. It trudged back through the dying flames in the main alleyway, then off into the deep shadows and cold night beyond.
Einar, astonished and silent, looked to his men. They were broken and bleeding but, miraculously, still alive. It occurred to him then that he should see how many of their enemies had fallen to their mysterious avenger, but when Einar rolled about and surveyed the damage in the alleyway, he was sorely disappointed. So far as he could see, almost every human body that had littered the mud and refuse choking the alley just moments ago had been removed. Clearly their attackers did not want anyone or anything left behind that could identify or incriminate them. Not only the wounded but even the dead had been shuttled away.
Somewhere whistles shrieked. Bootheels pounded near. By the sound of their steps—light compared to a dwarven tread—those approaching were humans.
Someone had called out the watchwardens.
Nearby a groan. Einar tried to rise, keen to investigate, but his ruined right knee made standing impossible. Nonetheless he pressed on, sliding along as best he could, using his good left leg to propel him. Crammed into an alcove just off the intersection of alleyways, about a stone’s throw from where the fire had been ignited to arrest their retreat, two human bodies lay, twisted around one another, a tangle of limbs awash with blood and mud and soot. Einar wriggled past his men, each tending his own wounds, struggling to regain his own feet, and made straight for the groaning and vaguely stirring pile of human flesh that lay there.
The watchwardens were arriving now. Einar could hear them approaching from two directions—the mouth of the main alley, where they’d chased their quarry into this death trap, and at the far end of the tributary that bent off to the left. He would have to move quickly. He intended to have some answers of his own, if he could. He prayed that the groaning man he heard was not only alive, but coherent.
Einar disentangled the limbs and yanked. On top was a corpse—one of the masked men, blood leaking from his nose, his open mouth, and his ears, the mask itself askew on his ruined face. His body seemed to have collapsed, most of his bones shattered when he hit the wall.
But beneath him someone stirred.
Einar’s squad mates were gathering round now, all pressing in for a good look. He reached down, laid hands on the curled-up figure pressed against the clammy brick wall, and hauled him to his feet. The cowering figure beneath the corpse was a young man. The leather strap holding his mask in place had broken, and the mask had fallen away. The boy’s smooth, youthful face was streaked with mud and blood, and he shook uncontrollably, seemingly in shock.
But he was alive.
Einar held the young human upright and studied him, noting that, despite his bloodied and begrimed appearance, he didn’t seem injured—at least not in any significant way. A few scrapes and bruises, perhaps. A couple of fingers stood out from his left hand at a strange angle. Overall, though, he seemed undamaged.
And that meant that, finally, Einar’s people might have an advantage. Here was a prisoner, and prisoners could be interrogated.
Strong hands suddenly fell on Einar and yanked him away from the boy. The wardwatch had arrived, having converged from all directions. Einar counted five: four humans, one dwarf. As the watchwardens handled them, jostling them roughly and snatching the young prisoner right out of their dwarven hands, Einar tried to explain.
The dwarven soldier started shouting at Rem and Torval the moment they dragged him off the half-conscious young man on the alley floor.
“We were the victims in this!” the banged-up dwarf stammered, as though trying to explain his ragged state. “We gave chase to a miscreant and he led us right into this alley, into an ambush.”
Torval tried to help the armored dwarf stand, but the younger dwarf immediately fell, his right leg clearly refusing to support him. Before Rem could even ask what had happened, how he’d become so bloody and battered, Torval broke in, already in a froth.
“Victims—is that right?” Torval snarled. “And just what gave you lot the right to go chasing miscreants? Last time I checked, you were Eldgrim’s house guard, not a police force.”
The dwarf offered Torval some sort of answer—defiant, dismissive. Rem didn’t pay much attention. He was more interested in the body that lay beside them. Rem gave the dead human a quick study, including a few experimental pokes and prods.
“Torval,” Rem said, trying to interrupt the heated flurry that was under way between Torval and the wounded dwarven guard, “this one’s cracked as milled corn. His bones are broken like a bag of glass.”
Torval, taking a moment to consider Rem’s report, turned and shoved the dwarven soldier up against the wall. “Is that how you treat miscreants?” he asked. “Chase them into an alley and beat them ’til they’re nothing but a bag of gravel?”
“See here,” one of the dwarf’s squad mates shouted, “let the sergeant go!”
The dwarven sergeant held up one hand to his soldiers: Quiet, I’ll handle this. He looked to Torval
now, then to Rem, then back to Torval. He seemed to be struggling to calm himself, to start talking sense. “It didn’t happen that way,” he said to the two of them, “and I’ll explain it if you’ll let me.”
Torval shook a thick finger in the sergeant’s face. “I warned your master what would happen if he set you lot loose in the streets! I warned him!”
“Torval,” Rem said softly, “Look what I’ve found.”
Torval turned away from the sergeant in answer to Rem’s call. Rem crouched near the wall of the alley now, his own coat thrown around the shoulders of the only still-breathing human in the alley who wasn’t a watchwarden. Rem hoped that Torval could see his face clearly in the light from their fellow watchwardens’ torches now. The young man, though conscious and alert, was clearly in shock, eyes downcast, mouth hanging open, breathing quick and shallow.
“Is that …?” Torval began.
“Jordi,” Rem said, nodding. “From the masons’ guildhall.”
“He’s one of them!” the dwarven sergeant blurted. “He’s the last of them! The rest fled! They took most of the injured and the dead with them, but that one was among them!”
Torval stepped forward, studying Jordi’s pale, begrimed face.
“We should have a right to question him!” the dwarven sergeant said, lunging, as if to grab the boy and yank him right out of Rem’s arms. “His friends attacked us! They nearly killed us!”
“Oh, is that right?” Torval asked. “Then why are the four of you still standing, and the only dead body I see is that of a man? And this boy, who you clearly failed to kill?”
“We held our own!” one of the other dwarven guardsmen said. “We were outnumbered, but we beat them back. It was that thing that saved us!”
“What thing?” Rem asked.
“It walked right through the flames!” another of the sergeant’s dwarves said. “Waded right into them. Broke them and crushed them, tore them to pieces!”
Torval looked puzzled by all that. He looked to the sergeant, as if for corroboration. The sergeant nodded soberly.
“They’re telling the truth,” their leader said. “I don’t know what it was, but it came out of nowhere, and it saved us before lumbering off again.”
“Bones,” Jordi suddenly muttered. “Eyes on fire. And earth … earth that smelled like death.”
“What’s he on about?” Torval asked, looking annoyed.
“I’m taking him back to the watchkeep,” Rem said. Truth be told, he understood that dwarven sergeant’s desperate need to lay hands on the boy, to beat his own answers out of him. Understanding that need was what convinced Rem that, one way or another, he had to get Jordi away from here. The boy wouldn’t survive the night—and wouldn’t yield any of the answers the wardwatch needed—unless he could be secured and protected in a watchkeep cell. To make his intent clear, he looked to the dwarven sergeant. “We’ll lock him up,” he assured him. “He’s not going anywhere.”
“By rights he should be ours,” the sergeant said. “His men tried to murder us.”
“But this thing,” Torval interjected. “What are you on about, this thing? This thing that intervened on your behalf?”
“It was like that beast from the old stories,” another of the dwarves stammered. “Don’t you remember? The demon that Ormunda the Red made, during the great orcish tyranny.”
“Those are bedtime stories,” another dwarven guard scoffed.
“Maybe,” the first barreled on, “but that’s what it reminded me of! The Koff … the Kroft—”
“The Kothrum?” Torval offered.
The dwarven guard snapped his thick fingers. “That’s it! The Kothrum! You know the stories, don’t you? You’re one of us!”
Torval studied the dwarven guard, then looked to the sergeant for affirmation. The sergeant could only nod and shrug. “I don’t know if I’d call it that,” he said, “but he’s right—that’s certainly what it brought to mind.”
Rem studied Torval’s face in light of that strange news. His partner looked as if he’d been punched in the gut. For a moment Torval stood staring at them, incredulous, shocked, dumbfounded. Finally he turned to their fellow watchwardens.
“Get their statements and see their wounds tended,” Torval said. He turned and faced the sergeant as he offered his last order. “See that they make it back to the ethnarch’s manse safely.”
Rem looked to the dwarven sergeant. It was on the tip of his tongue to say something—anything—that might assure the battered dwarf that, whatever had happened, the watchwardens now on hand would keep them safe. To Rem’s great relief, the dwarven sergeant gave him a silent nod before Rem had offered even a single word. Clearly he was satisfied that they’d now been treated with some fairness—some dignity. As Rem nodded in answer and got to his feet, ready to help Jordi to his own, he looked for his partner.
Torval had wandered away from them, off into the dark tributaries of the alleyway, moving like someone adrift in a dream … or a nightmare. Once more Rem wanted to offer words of assurance, this time to Torval, but he could summon none. So, satisfied that the scene was secure and there was nothing more for him to do, he yanked the still-shocked Jordi to his feet and urged the boy to take his first steps on their long walk back to the watchkeep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Rem delivered the young stonemason, Jordi, to the lockup. Soon after his arrival back at the watchkeep, Torval joined him, looking preoccupied by something—haunted by it, even—but remaining tight-lipped as to what that something might be. For a time Rem was content to keep his head down, slowly writing out a report to justify the young stonemason’s arrest, while Torval sat nearby and brooded. Finally, after a little less than an hour, Djubal and Klutch arrived from the crime scene with the body of the dead stonemason in a wheelbarrow. The corpse was removed to the dank lower chamber that served as their informal mortuary, Djubal and Klutch wrote their report, and the night’s strained silence persisted.
It was in the midst of that silence that Rem found himself lost in thought, trying to tease out just what it was that had Torval so bound up. It wasn’t the worries of the previous weeks—all that mess with Tavarix and the ethnarch—but some new concern. Rem was fairly certain it had been brought on by the testimony of the dwarves at the crime scene, but he was loath to simply come out and ask.
In the midst of all that watching and wondering and Rem’s silent attempts to dare himself to ask Torval to open up about whatever now troubled him, Hirk arrived and ordered both of them to the dungeons.
Hirk led them into the bowels of the watchkeep. Surprisingly, though, it was to the mortuary and not to the dungeons themselves. There Rem and Torval were urged into the damp, cold little chamber where the dead stonemason from the crime scene was stretched out on a sweating stone slab. Eriadus, the quartermaster and the watchkeep’s default surgeon, circled the stone table and the corpse, examining every inch of the dead man in his own inimitably haphazard fashion, with a method that Rem had learned only resembled disorganization and madness and belied an astonishing thoroughness.
Just as Rem was about to ask why they were here and not in the dungeon proper, interrogating their prisoner, Ondego arrived with the boy, Jordi. Queydon trailed in after them, her presence clearly announcing that they were about to begin an interrogation.
Ondego gave young Jordi a shove, heaving him right up to the stone slab where his dead companion lay. As the young stonemason’s apprentice stared at the dead man on the table, Ondego threw one of the confiscated leather masks from the scene on top of the corpse’s chest.
“Playing goblin in dark alleys at midnight?” the prefect asked.
The boy shook his head. Rem studied him. He looked genuinely sickened, genuinely scared. Breaking him couldn’t possibly take them long. Rem almost felt sorry for the lad …
Ondego slapped the boy headwise. It was a hard strike. He delivered the blow without even changing his bored, hangdog expression.
“Talk,” On
dego said. “We’ll get it out of you one way or another. Don’t make us pry it from you.”
Someone moved at the corner of Rem’s vision. He turned and found Torval slowly examining the dead man’s body. As Rem watched, the dwarf gently felt the broken bones beneath the corpse’s pallid skin, fingered shattered ends where they had broken through, and seemed to make a long, deep, silent appraisal of the corpse, never uttering a word as he did so. What was the dwarf thinking? Rem could not remember the last time he’d seen him so troubled …
“It shouldn’t have come to this,” the boy finally said. “We didn’t want it to come to this.”
“False,” Queydon said simply. Hirk stepped in, snagged the boy’s left arm, and folded it behind him. The boy shouted and beat the stone slab with his free hand.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Hirk asked. “Now try again—and no cack this time. The straight truth. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“That was the truth,” the boy squealed. “I didn’t want it to come to this!”
“Better,” Queydon said.
Hirk released him. “You didn’t want it to come to this,” the lieutenant said, “but your friends did, didn’t they? This—an eye for an eye, blood for blood—was exactly what they were after, wasn’t it?”
The boy stared at the dead man. Tears cut tracks down his cheeks, and he shook his head as though struggling to will away the terrible sight before him. He bent over the stone table and wept. Hirk looked to Ondego, silently asking if he should urge the boy along. Ondego shook his head.
Rem caught the prefect’s eye and gave a little sideward nod. Could he try? Ondego, having often deferred to Rem’s softer touch in interrogations as a means of keeping the prisoners on continually shifting ground, shrugged and nodded, indicating that Rem was more than welcome to do so. Rem approached the table then, directly opposite the weeping young man. He settled himself down on his elbows and lowered his head, so that he could try to catch the young man’s gaze on the same plane. When the boy raised his tear-reddened eyes for a moment, Rem gestured to the mask discarded on the dead man’s chest.
