Hollow Road

by Dan Fitzgerald

  “My name is Carl, from Brocland. I’m looking for Hoyle. He and my father knew each other.”

  The boy said nothing as he walked over to a metal triangle in the corner and hit it three times with a metal rod, then stood watching Carl as they waited. The boy’s gaze was intense but cool, and he did not seem intimidated by Carl, or even particularly interested in him. Carl heard a door close and footsteps coming up the path, and the boy returned to his bucket, pouring a bit more water on the coals, which produced almost no steam. Satisfied, he pushed the bucket next to the forge and removed his gloves.

  “You’ll have to pardon my son Anais here,” said Hoyle, holding out his hand toward Carl. “He chooses not to speak.” With this, he gave his son a sidelong glance, which was returned in kind.

  “Good to see you, Hoyle. I’m Carl, from Brocland.” He gave Hoyle’s hand a firm shake. “My father—”

  “I know who you are, son. Aubert and I did a bit of business back in the mining days. He was a good man. I was sorry to hear of his passing.” He looked down, ran a hand through his hair. “And your mother, of course. Though I never met her, I—”

  “Thank you,” Carl said, ending the man’s discomfort. “They have gone beyond, to where they are needed most.”

  “To where they are needed most,” Hoyle repeated, touching his heart in time with Carl.

  The ritual now complete, Carl decided to get down to business. “I was hoping, in the spirit of the friendship you shared with my father, to ask a small favor of you.”

  “If it is within my power, I will grant it.” Hoyle eyed the cart and Carl’s companions. “Please understand, I have many obligations of my own to fulfill, but I will do what I can, for an old friend.”

  “All we ask is for space on the floor of your shop, to take shelter for the night. We are returning to Brocland on an unfortunate errand, to deliver to its final resting place the body of a friend who has gone beyond.”

  Hoyle touched his heart again along with Carl, and they lingered in awkward silence until Hoyle broke it, a kind of desperate cheerfulness in his voice. “Well of course you can have the shop, think nothing of it.” Hoyle made a gesture with his hand as if he were sweeping any objection to the side, but his response was too swift, his lack of eye contact too obvious. He had been expecting worse. “I am very sorry for your loss. And I will see if my wife can spare some soup for you—she made a big pot just yesterday, so there should be plenty.”

  “That’s very kind of you.” Carl put his hand over his heart. “We’ll stay out of your way, I promise.”

  “It’s no trouble at all.” He looked at Carl a little nervously.

  “What news from Brocland?” Carl asked. “We’ve had scant word of late. Some fear there’s something wrong, perhaps bandits, or worse.”

  Hoyle ran his fingers through his beard, but it gave his chagrin little cover. “We have had no word from Brocland in near a month’s time,” he said. “The only thing—” He stopped, fiddled with his beard some more, then looked up, his eyes deep and a little trembly. “There’s a livery boy who’s gone missing, went to deliver two horses to a client in Brocland and never came back. Must have been, a little over a week ago he went off. Should have been back in three days, maybe four. But since, nothing. They’d thought of sending someone out to search for him, but...”

  “But what?” Carl asked.

  Hoyle shook his head. “There’s been talk of the Maer of late. You know the old stories? Half man, half beast?”

  Carl nodded. Leavitt’s question about the Maer was starting to make more sense.

  Hoyle shook his head in frustration. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s got folks too afraid to go out looking, so they find excuses to put it off, or they come up with other explanations. The boy stole the horses and has started a new life somewhere; he fell in love with a girl in Brocland; he fell down a cliff and was eaten by a bear. The boy’s own brother, no older than my boy, keeps saying he’ll go it alone if he has to.” He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head again, his eyebrows jammed down toward his frowning mouth. “Look, I’d go myself if I could, but—” he held one arm toward Anais, who stood with crossed arms and defiant eyes.

  “Well, Maer or no Maer,” Carl replied, “we will be taking Theo’s body to be buried with his ancestors. We have sworn to it, and we will see it done. And I promise you we’ll bring back the livery boy, or news of what might have happened in any case. You have my word.”

  Hoyle grasped him by the forearms and pulled him in close. “Do be careful,” he whispered. “I can see you’ve been in the service, and you look like a stout lad. I don’t know about your companions, but...” Carl nodded, and Hoyle closed his eyes, let his arms go. “I’ll be back out in a while with your soup.”

  Hoyle returned to the house, followed by the boy, who gave the coffin on the cart a long, slow look on his way out. Carl could hardly blame the kid; it couldn’t feel like good luck to host a dead body in your backyard. He waved the others over, and they retrieved their packs from the cart and joined him.

  “Nice digs,” Sinnie said as she unpacked her sleeping roll.

  “Yeah, but what’s with the creepy kid?” Finn stood up from his task to contemplate. “I mean, he didn’t say a word the whole time, did he? I couldn’t hear anything from back there but it didn’t—”

  “Not a word,” Carl answered. “His father said he’s...he chooses not to speak.”

  “Chooses?” Sinnie twisted her features in confusion.

  “Those were his exact words. Chooses.”

  “Like, he used to speak, but he doesn’t anymore?”

  “I guess. Or he can speak but he never does. Like Jeremy, sort of.” Jeremy was a kid they’d known in Brocland who never spoke, and you could never tell if he understood you, or was listening to what you said, or if he cared. He was one of those kids who just saw the world differently than everybody else, and some kids treated him like dirt for it.

  “Yeah, Jeremy, you’re scarin’ me!” Finn chimed in. It was one of the phrases they used to use to tease him, and Carl felt bad looking back on it.

  “Well, if you’re of a mind to be scared, let me fill you in on what Hoyle told me.”

  Chapter Five

  Sinnie joked with Finn as they rode, to chase away her growing unease. Tales of the Maer had always excited her, but things were starting to get a little too real. Legend had it the Maer once thrived throughout the continent and that humans displaced them, little by little, until at last they vanished entirely. But there were always rumors that pockets of them had survived, in the mountains perhaps, or in the thick swamps of the wild Ulau River delta, and that they occasionally forayed into human areas in search of humans for food, or slaves. She didn’t really believe the stories—no one did—but she also couldn’t get rid of the feeling maybe they did exist, that they had come back. And what she found in Brocland might be something entirely different than the sleepy village she had left five years before.

  “I always pictured them as hairy men with a snout like a wolf, but shorter, kind of smushed-in. But still with fangs!” Finn bared his teeth and held out his hands like claws.

  “Or maybe tusks? Like a man-boar,” Sinnie offered, doing her best to play along.

  “Yes, and their hair would be all stiff and bristly, and their feet would be hooves!” If Finn was feeling nervous about the Maer, he was hiding it well.

  “I have heard stories from a soldier who said he encountered them on a mission in the Hawk Mountains in the far east,” said Carl, who had sidled up to join their conversation, though the road here was barely wide enough for the three of them. “He said they look like men, even in the face, but they are much hairier, with thick beards reaching almost up to their eyes, even covering their noses.” He paused, scanning the road ahead, which wound through the thinning forest, with the hills rising ever steeper to their left and the valley deepening to the right. “They’re supposed to be fierce fighters, despite their primitive we
aponry, truly vicious.” He stopped again, looking down, and Sinnie looked from Carl to Finn, then back again. Carl looked up, silent, and the dull expression in his eyes gave Sinnie chills. This time, even Finn had no witty comment to share.

  Shortly after lunchtime, they passed Slippery Brook, whose icy waters rushed under a stone bridge that was older than anyone could remember, with Greenvale Road following it up a narrow pass in the rock. Sinnie knew that about a mile away, the pass opened up into a wide, sunny valley with a small lake, on the banks of which lay the village of Greenvale, a fishing and farming community. She had visited it once with her mother, who was trading several lambs for a ram after theirs was eaten by a wolf. To her it was a paradise, being so much sunnier and more wide-open than Brocland, which only received half the day’s sun in the shadow of the mountains. Sinnie had hoped they might stop in Greenvale, but she knew it was a little more than a day’s travel between Greenvale and Brocland, and unless they wanted to spend two nights rough camping along the road, they did not have time for any extra stops.

  Carl got off his horse to crouch and study the road once they passed Greenvale. “Three horses,” he said, running his fingers over imperceptible tracks in the dirt. “Heading toward Brocland.”

  “Just like Hoyle said,” Finn added.

  Carl nodded. “And no tracks I can see coming back this way.” His words hung in the silence between them, deepening it. They all knew what it meant, and none of them had anything to add.

  Past Greenvale, the road became narrower still, the hills and cliffs to their left steeper, and the valley to their right darker. The afternoon sun was swallowed by the hills, and on the few occasions when it poked its way through to them, the warmth was short-lived. A layer of haze, then clouds, crept up in the sky, lending a grayish cast to the landscape, where fewer and fewer trees grew as the soil became rockier. The valley below was full of pine trees, ferns, and scrub bushes, and Sinnie relished the distant clamor of the Snake River fighting its way down the valley’s rocks and boulders.

  As a kid, she had always dreamed of following the river from Brocland down to the sea, but she had only entered the valley once, when she had convinced her father to let her join him on one of his prospecting trips. It had been damp, itchy, and boring, but she came back to the place in her mind over and over. She would see herself leaping from boulder to rock to gravelly bank, splashing in the pools, running along a game trail, dodging branches and leaping over turtles, but she would always find a way to keep going, running down and down and down the valley, until at last she would dive from a high waterfall into the sea.

  The clouds had thickened by the time they set up camp in the shelter of an overhang, which they had all used before, like countless other travelers, the distance between Brocland and Greenvale being too far for one day’s journey except by a good rider with a fast horse.

  “No fire tonight, I’m afraid,” said Carl. “If there’s anything out there, we don’t want to make ourselves too obvious.” He made eye contact with each of them, apparently looking for dissent, but neither she nor Finn disagreed. The weather wasn’t cold, but the rock seemed to siphon the heat away from Sinnie’s body. Looking down into the valley as the daylight dimmed, she could easily picture the Maer, or any other imaginable monster or beast, prowling through the ferns, turning suddenly as it caught their scent, fixing its malevolent eyes on their paltry refuge. Sitting at the shelter’s edge during her watch, Sinnie couldn’t decide which was worse: sleeping fitfully with visions of snarling, hairy Maer hounding them through the dark woods, or staring out into the blackness imagining the same, and twitching when the smallest noise broke the night’s silence, which was as deep as the mountain dark.

  The pale morning light was a relief, feeble though it was, as was the fact the clouds seemed to have thinned. Sinnie gnawed at her journey cake, even drier and more tasteless than they had been at the start of the trip. She was sure her mother would send them back with some lamb pies and mutton jerky, maybe a loaf of rye bread and some raspberry jam. And some sheep’s milk butter, and some of the delicious mead she put down every fall. Her mother might not have been the most affectionate, but she was an ace cook. As Sinnie choked down the last bite, she decided she would rather face a legion of Maer than another day eating journey cake.

  They set out with grim faces and weapons at the ready. Sinnie wondered what magic Finn was preparing in his mind, if that was even how it worked. She spent her ride sighting targets and imagining herself shooting at them, adjusting for distance, breeze, and her height off the ground. She had never shot from a horse before, and imagined it would mess with her aim quite a bit. And though she knew how to ride, she wasn’t sure how she would control the horse and shoot at the same time. She noticed Carl was wearing his mail shirt, hood, and leggings, and had his shield strapped to his left arm, as if he were riding into battle. It both gave her confidence and scared the piss out of her.

  Several hours into their ride, Carl stopped abruptly, raising his right fist to shoulder level in what Sinnie assumed must be some kind of military sign to stop. About a hundred yards ahead, the road was covered with boulders and chunks of rock that appeared to have fallen from the cliff above.

  “Okay,” Carl said, dismounting. “Okay.” He studied the scene in front of him, then turned to his companions. “I can’t think of a better place for an ambush.” He eyed the cliff, which rose about fifty feet above the road, then looked down into the valley, which descended steeply at this point. “If this were me,” he continued, “I would have archers on top of that cliff, maybe someone ready to push off rocks. Archers just on the other side of those rocks, and swordsmen ready to leap over. And a couple of stealthy fighters hiding in the woods down there.” He pointed to the right of the road, about halfway between them and the rocks. “They would sneak up and attack from behind once the ambush got underway.”

  “So that’s how you’d do it,” Finn said in a quavering but jokey voice. “Good to know I can count on you if we ever need to lay an ambush.”

  “And if you had to avoid the ambush?” Sinnie asked, her voice no less shaky than Finn’s.

  Carl sighed, studying the terrain again. “Well, it would depend on how many of them I thought there were. I suppose in a perfect world, I would backtrack, descend to the valley floor and make my way past it.”

  “And what about the cart? It doesn’t really fit into your ‘perfect world’ theory,” Finn offered.

  “Well, we could leave the cart a little way back, head down, then back up again and come up behind them, hoping to catch them off guard.”

  “But what if they saw what we were doing and came and took the horses and the cart? We’d be pretty much up a creek, no pun intended,” Sinnie said.

  “True,” Carl agreed. “What we need is to find out if there’s really anyone there, and if so, how many, and how well-armed.” He gave Finn a hard look. “I know about the code and all, but maybe this would be a good time to let us know just what you can and can’t do.”

  Finn screwed up his mouth, then nodded. “Okay, well, I can toughen my skin, which would protect me from their weapons, more or less,” he said. “And the force shield, which you already know, but it’s a lot harder.”

  “Anything you can do to hurt or incapacitate someone?” Carl asked. Sinnie followed their exchange, rapt with the idea of seeing magic in action. The first time had happened so fast, she hadn’t really seen what Finn had done.

  Finn nodded weakly. “If I can get set, I can push out a blast of that same force that can knock someone down, maybe knock them out.”

  “And what about that rumor that you can fly?” Carl asked, a sly look on his face.

  “No, I can’t fly,” Finn admitted, “not yet. Some of the masters can, but the best I can do is a kind of powered jump, which can take me maybe twenty or thirty feet. But landing at the other end is still pretty dicey. I haven’t fully mastered the technique. And I just want to add, in case you were unaware, I have recei
ved extensive training with my staff,” which he grasped in a fighting pose.

  Carl nodded, frowning. “Sinnie, have you ever shot a flaming arrow?”

  Sinnie laughed nervously. “Sure, plenty of times, in Hertle’s show. I don’t have any resin, though.”

  “We could pull some off the torches,” Carl said. “And how far would you say you can shoot accurately?”

  Sinnie thought for a moment. “Probably thirty or forty yards at least. I used to shoot from twenty all the time, and I could hit an apple off a puppy’s head. But that was with time to aim, and no distractions.”

  Carl nodded again, scratched his chin, then squatted to examine the road. “The hoofprints continue at least this far,” he said, “so we can assume the livery boy and his three horses continued past this point. He probably assumed it was just a landslide, so he would have ridden right up to it, to see if there was any way around. And at that point...” He stood up, dusted himself off, and gave them a serious look.

  “At that point,” Finn said, “for all we know he was able to get through, and he made his way to Brocland, where he fell in love with a stable girl, and they are busy making hay as we speak...” Finn trailed off as he saw Carl’s expression.

  “If you want to ride on up and take a look, I’m not going to stop you,” Carl grumbled.

  “Well, I’m not saying—” Finn began, then stopped. “Okay, so we assume this is an ambush, and now you know what we can do. What about you, soldier man? Do you have anything to share?” Sinnie could hear the agitation in Finn’s voice.