A Warrior's Burden: Book One of Saga of the Known Lands

by Jacob Peppers

  She wracked her brain looking for some sort of answer, but she could find none. There were simply too many, that was all. Even if they somehow managed to take care of the soldiers stationed at the back—another vain hope waiting to be dashed—then it would make no difference, for they would not be able to do so silently, and their efforts would only alert those stationed at the front. Ten against four—one of which knew nothing of fighting and had only just risen from the ranks of childhood into adulthood—were long odds, at best. Twenty-five against four were impossible ones.

  “How many can you take?” she asked Priest.

  “Done quiet?” he said. He gave a shake of his head. “Two—maybe three. No more than that.”

  Maeve winced. Perhaps one or two herself, assuming her knees or her back didn’t give out on her in the doing of the thing. That left five at best, five for a young boy and an overweight mage who, just then, was looking like he was getting ready to piss himself. Not good odds. Not odds at all, really.

  She shook her head. “I don’t—”

  “I’ll need help.”

  She turned to look at Chall, the mage’s face pale but his expression resolute nonetheless. “Help?” she asked.

  He winced, clearly embarrassed, as he motioned to the wall the priest had climbed down a moment before. “Getting up. I’ll need to be able to see—it helps.”

  Maeve frowned at that, and it wasn’t just at the thought of trying to lever the mage’s significant bulk up the wall somehow. Up at the top of the house, he would be significantly easier to spot than Priest had been, not just because of his size but also because he was not exactly known for his stealth. In fact, the only person she knew who lacked subtlety more than the mage was Cutter himself. Despite all her complaints, all the times he made her want to strangle him, she liked Challadius, the man who managed to find a way to make her laugh when no one else could, and she did not enjoy the idea of him climbing up to the top of the building only to get filled with arrows, for she had seen several of the guardsmen with crossbows strapped to their backs.

  “Even if we do manage to get you up there,” she said reluctantly. “Can you do it?”

  He grunted. “I’m a bit out of practice, I’ll admit, but…do we have any choice?”

  Well, there was no real argument to that, so she sighed. “Don’t get yourself killed, alright?”

  He gave her a sickly smile. “I’ll try my best.”

  They spent the next few minutes trying to lever the heavy-set man up, the priest giving him whispered instructions for where he should put his hands as they did. It was a miserable, sweaty, straining experience, but eventually the mage was in place, and Maeve was able to dismiss the fear—which had grown with each groaning moment—that the wall, assuming they got the man up there, would buckle beneath his weight.

  Thankfully, though, the wall held, which meant that out of all the thousands of ways they might die in the next few minutes, they’d at least avoided death by a crumbling wall.

  “So he…he’s going to cast a spell then?”

  Maeve glanced over at the boy and was reminded, once more, that while she and Priest and Chall had done this a thousand times, been in these sort of situations and survived far more times than anyone had a right to, it was largely new to him. “Yes, lad,” she said, softly, “he’s going to cast a spell.” Or at least, she hoped he was. From what she’d seen of the mage, the only magic he’d performed in the last fifteen years or so was increasing his belly size and, of course, managing to not get knifed in the back by someone he pissed off. Which, of course, was everyone that he met.

  “How…how will we know when he does it?”

  If he does it, Maeve thought. “Oh, lad, you’ll know,” she said. “Trust me.” An easy thing to say, perhaps, but not so easy to do judging by the youth’s troubled expression. Not that she could blame him—the fact was, she didn’t wholly trust herself.

  ***

  Matt’s hands were sweaty, his body tense. He was more scared than he had ever been. Even in the days spent fleeing into the Black Woods with Cutter, he had been too busy running and being exhausted to be as scared as he might have been, too busy reacting. But now they were not reacting but acting. They were here because of him and him alone. If he had said nothing, only followed, then he and the others would be safely away, leaving the village to its fate, which meant that if any of them died here—if all of them died—it would be his fault.

  It was the hardest thing he had ever done, crouching there and waiting, and it was all he could do to avoid asking Maeve anymore questions. Instead, he peeked around the corner, watching the soldiers stationed at the inn door. There were four of them there, and others moving around the edges of the inn, stacking pieces of wood along the walls.

  He watched the men, wondering how anyone would be willing to kill an entire village of people, and as he did, he remembered what Cutter had said, how he had scolded him when he’d said he wanted to become a soldier. The man had been angry, and he had been surprised by that anger. Now, though, he was not so surprised. He was thinking of that, looking at the grim expressions on the soldiers’ faces, when he became aware of an odd sound. It was a sharp, screeching keening, low at first, so low that he could almost think he’d imagined it.

  But slowly, it began to rise. It was a terrible, somehow unnatural sound, and a chill ran up Matt’s spine. And it was not only the sound, as terrible as it was, that unnerved him, that made him begin to shake, for while that was bad, what happened next was worse. Mist started to gather around them, a frigid mist that stole the heat from him where it touched his skin, so cold that it almost seemed to burn.

  “Oh, t-that bastard,” Maeve said, the words coming out broken as she shivered.

  “I-I don’t u-understand,” Matt managed, his own teeth chattering, “Maeve, wh-what’s happening?”

  There was a hand on his shoulder, and Matt nearly screamed before he turned and saw the man, Priest, watching him. “Relax, lad. It isn’t real, not any of it. Keep telling yourself that.”

  “B-but the mist,” Matt managed, looking all around him, seeing that in the space of seconds, the mist had risen so that it was taller than a man, obscuring the soldiers posted at the back door to the inn from his view, making of them little more than vague shadows.

  “They come with the mist,” Maeve said, her voice grim.

  “W-who?” Matt asked, struggling with a budding panic growing within him. “W-who does?”

  Maeve turned to look at him, her expression grim. “The Skaalden, lad. The Skaalden.”

  Another surge of fear ran through him at that. Matt had never seen the Skaalden, for he had been born here, in the Known Lands. But he had heard some bit of the frost creatures, the monsters who had so easily overridden his people’s homeland and forced them to flee to this place. And always, when he did, they were spoken of in hushed whispers. Whispers from men who would not hesitate to talk in raised, angry voices about the Fey.

  “B-but they’re not here,” Matt said, the cold and his own fear making it a struggle to speak, “th-they can’t be here—” But then he cut off, the words getting strangled in his throat as he noticed figures moving in the mist. He could not make them out well, no more than vague shadows as they were, but what he could see was enough to know that they were not human. In fact, these figures stood half again or more as tall as any mortal man, even Cutter who was the biggest man he had ever seen—but that was not the worst.

  The worst was that their proportions were…wrong. Their figures were slim, their arms far too long for their bodies, hanging so low that they seemed to scrape the ground as they moved. And then, there were their faces, at least what he could see of them. Faces that were long and narrow with mouths which seemed to stretch up on either side nearly to the top of their heads. Mouths that, as he saw their silhouettes, were filled with sharp, razor-like teeth.

  “Oh gods,” he muttered, “oh gods help us.”

  Suddenly, there was a face only inch
es from his own, and he saw that it was Maeve, the woman’s own skin pale and waxy. “They’re not real, lad,” she hissed, but despite her words he saw that she too, was afraid, that her words were little more than a harsh whisper. “Remember that—they are not real.”

  At first, Matt’s panicked mind could not seem to understand what she was saying, but then he remembered the mage, Challadius, who had climbed up on the ruined house. They’d told him that he would know what the man was doing when it came, but surely this could not be it. No, there was no way a man could create this mist, could form those creatures lurking within it, moving and looking out of it with eyes as pale as hoarfrost. Eyes that, it seemed, were looking directly at Matt.

  The soldiers posted at the inn also began to notice those figures moving in the mist around them. And they, like Matt and the others, were afraid. They began to shout and point, drawing their blades, yet despite this, they made no move to charge the figures in the mist, and those at the door of the inn instead remained where they were, their backs hunched against the building’s outer wall, frozen in their fright. Matt could not blame them.

  He might not have been a soldier or a warrior, but even he could see that such creatures as lurked there in the mist could not be bested in combat, could not be conquered, and a man faced with them could only run. Could only pray.

  And indeed, it seemed that as he watched, the men began to do just that. Two of the four turned and with cries of terror, sprinted into the night as fast as their legs could carry them. Matt watched them go, struggling to keep his teeth from chattering and to control the worst of the trembling. That was when he noticed something strange—the mist had risen all the way to the top of the inn and was darker there, thicker.

  He frowned at that, something striking him wrong, and then he realized what it was. It was not mist at the top of the inn after all—it was smoke. Which only meant—

  “They’re firing the inn,” Priest said. “We have to go—now.”

  Before either Matt or Maeve could respond, the man drew the bow from his back and broke into a sprint, directly at the inn and, closer still, at those forms lurking in the mist—in their dozens now—which seemed to have grown somehow, towering nearly to the top of the inn itself, so high that their great elongated faces disappeared somewhere above, in the mist.

  “W-what do we do, Maeve?” Matt asked.

  “Damn,” the woman cursed. “Stay here, boy.” She gave her head an angry shake. “I’ll try to keep that damn man’s virtue from getting him killed.”

  “B-but I-I want to help,” Matt said.

  The woman glanced back at him from where she’d risen, and he saw that there were two knives in her hands, though where they had come from he could not have guessed. “Help?” she asked, not cruelly, but with what sounded like genuine curiosity. “How? No, lad. You stay here—watch Chall. Best you don’t get involved in this. Chall is vulnerable when he’s casting, and he’ll be weak after he’s finished. He’ll need looking after. His magic will distract the soldiers—the gods alone know there’s few things more distracting than the Skaalden—but if one of them happens on him and puts an end to him while he’s concentrating on minding the spell, we’re all done.”

  Matt wanted to protest, opened his mouth to do exactly that, but before he could say anything, the woman was turning and sprinting toward the inn and in moments, she vanished into the mist after Priest. As he watched her go, another feeling crept past the overwhelming fear—anger.

  Anger that, once again, he was to be left alone, anger that he, a man grown, was to be treated like a child and left to be a nursemaid to a mage instead of helping to rescue the villagers. Which meant that the others would get all the credit, and he would be left with nothing at all. It wasn’t fair, particularly since without him, they would not have come back in the first place, for all the others would have happily left the villagers to their grim fate.

  But Matt was not a child. Neither was he a nursemaid. Matt had heard many stories of heroes throughout his life—some from his mother when he was a child, and others he’d discussed excitedly with his friends, and in none of those stories had the heroes of the story ever sat back and hid while others did the fighting, the saving.

  Besides, he told himself that Chall was fine—the mage was still hidden on the top of the wall, and the soldiers were far too busy being frightened of the Skaalden to pay him any mind. Matt took a moment to climb up the wall—a far longer moment than the man, Priest, had taken, a thing he noticed and which bothered him—and looked at the mage.

  The heavy-set man was hunkered over, staring out at the mist and the creatures moving within it. There was a strained expression on his face and despite the coolness in the air—much of which had been brought on by the phantom mist—the man’s forehead was covered in sweat. His hands were in front of him where he lay on his stomach, twisted into what looked like claws, and he was trembling.

  Maeve had been right about this much, at least—if one of the soldiers happened on the mage while he was using his magic, the man would clearly be unable to defend himself. Likely, judging by his unfocused gaze, he would not even notice that they had come upon him until he felt the bite of their sword and nothing after.

  “Chall?”

  “Not now, lad,” the mage said, hissing the words through gritted teeth.

  “They’ll need help, Maeve and Priest, I mean, but Maeve said—”

  The mage let out a weary growl, turning to stare at Matt. Suddenly the illusion flickered. Only for a moment, but for a brief instant, the mist, and those figures lurking within it, vanished, revealing Priest and Maeve running toward the soldiers at the inn. “What is it, boy?”

  “Chall,” Matt said as several of the soldiers began to take note of the two figures rushing toward them, “something’s happened.”

  Chall frowned, looking back toward the inn. “Shit,” he hissed. He waved his clawed hands desperately, as if trying to snatch something only he could see out of the air, and then, in another moment, the mist was back, the figures lurking inside it as well.

  “Chall,” Matt tried again, “will you be okay if I—”

  “Go, Matt,” the mage growled, “now.”

  Matt recoiled at the rebuke, hurriedly climbing down the wall of the burned-out house once more. He was standing there, angry at being forgotten, at being left behind, his face heating with a mixture of annoyance and shame, when he thought of something. Yes, the mage’s words might be seen as a rebuke. But then, they might also be seen as permission. After all, Chall had told him to go, hadn’t he?

  Matt glanced once more up at the mage. The shadows would cover him, keeping him from the soldiers’ view—and anyway they were far too busy worried about the phantom figures lurking in the mist, shouting panicked cries to each other, to go searching for him. What’s more, Maeve and Priest would need Matt’s help. The woman had told him to stay, yes, but she had told him because she thought of him as a child. But he was not a child, was not helpless. So, he looked at the mist—and the giants moving within it—took a deep breath, and ran forward, leaving the mage and the cover the building provided behind him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  There is no beast more dangerous, than one cornered.

  No man more dangerous than one with nowhere left to run.

  —Unknown author

  He could hear the sounds of their pursuit as they approached, the padded shuffle of their footsteps, the harsh rasps of their breath in the cool air as they sprinted to catch up with what they believed to be their fleeing prey. And Cutter had fled, at least for a time, but he had not fled as a deer might when it caught the hunter’s scent, wildly and without thought, for whatever else he was, for whatever else he had been, he was not prey, not then and not now.

  But the men chased him as if he was, as if he were the fox and they the hounds, barreling after him without caution, without fear. That was their mistake. He stood with his back propped against the wall of a house, the surface stil
l slick with soot, and he listened to them come. Two in this group, judging by the sound. There would be others, of course, spreading out through the village while some moved to surround the village and cut off his exit, making sure that no avenue of escape was left to him. But then, he had never been planning to escape.

  So, instead of running for the village edge, an edge which would soon be guarded by soldiers if it wasn’t already, Cutter stood at the wall with his massive axe in his hand. And he waited. It had always been the worst part of it for him, the waiting. The doing of the thing was rarely so bad as the fantasies a man created for himself while he waited for it to begin. He knew that, for he had learned it during a hundred other situations like this one, and so he did not concern himself with Matt and the others, did not wonder at whether or not they were safe, at whether or not they would be able to save the villagers. What he could do for them he had done already.

  There was only the here, only the now. Only the feel of the axe haft in his hands, its weight a solid, comforting, terrifying presence. When he judged the front man of the two to be rounding the corner, he stepped out, grunting as he swung the axe with all his might. The blow connected solidly, slightly above the man’s chin. He did not have time to scream or even slow as most of his head was lopped from his shoulders in a bloody rush. The second man did have time to scream, but no more than that before Cutter pivoted, doing a half-spin and bringing the axe back to bury the blade in the man’s forehead.

  With a grunt, he ripped the axe free, and the man collapsed to the ground on his back. Cutter started to turn but paused as he caught sight of the man’s face. Or, at least, what was left of it. Perhaps by some trick of the light, or his own mood, or perhaps because it was simply the truth, the soldier looked young. In his early twenties, if that. Only a few years older than Matt.