"What?" Belmorn exclaimed. "What are you doing? Sorry for what?"
"For what must happen tomorrow." Galttauer lifted his head but could not pull his eyes from the floor. "My heart goes out to you, Rander Belmorn. And to your boy. Your journey has been a noble one, but it has been for nothing. There is no cure here, and the man you seek no longer exists. He suffered the same fate as Jayce. Just one of hundreds to fall victim to our witch." Spite and fear hung on the captain's voice, but he no longer cared. "She appeared seven years ago and the Veld had lived in her shadow ever since. I promise you this, blackfoot--she will shed no tears for your boy."
Belmorn opened his mouth, but no words came.
"But the witch is not my only concern," Galttauer went on, straightening his back but still unable to meet the other man's storm-grey eyes. "Not anymore. Not since those damned wolves infested our southern woods. I am in something of a spot, you see. All roads to and from my world are thoroughly blocked by monsters. Roon is the last of the great shield cities, and it was built well--with good bones and strong walls. Unfortunately, with all trade cut off, our resources grow dangerously thin--more so every damn day. Our goats are spent, and everyday our hunters come back less and less. Time is our true enemy, you see. No matter what we do, it ticks on. Soon, the people of this great and ancient city will be no more. Not at the hand of a bandit or the teeth of a witch... But safe behind our good walls, with empty, distended bellies." A smirk, this one mirthless, lifted the corner of the captain's mouth.
"I..." Belmorn seemed to be searching for words. "I am... sorry."
Snorting at such a ridiculous response, Galttauer finally looked the man in the face.
"But..." Belmorn continued. "I don't understand. You have able soldiers. You have rifles. Why do you not fight?"
For many long moments, Galttauer said nothing. His gaze wandered to bruises, a swollen cheek, the split lip that curved with a sneer... anywhere but the blackfoot's sharp, grey eyes. "Sometimes it is the simple questions that require the most complex of answers." He smiled wistfully, and then pinched the bridge of his nose. "But you, blackfoot... you are a stranger here. I do not expect you to understand."
"Just... Let me go. Let me continue on my way. If I die, so be it. But you should know, I have no fear of bandits. And as for your witch... my axes have tasted worse. Do you hear me? We can help one another."
"We can." The captain flicked a speck of something from his cloak. "Just not in the way you think. Your bravado is refreshing, but misplaced. Make no mistake, blackfoot, if I were to release you, it would be a death sentence that would serve no one. Not your boy and certainly not the citizens of Roon. But... perhaps you can provide them with some small measure of relief. Perhaps..." Galttauer let his voice trail off, as his eyes looked to potential near-futures. "These people don't know your face, nor can they account for your inexplicable presence here. What you have shown them is a man who, minutes after arriving, beat the hell out of five of my guards. Roon's people cannot stomach more hardship. Not a single drop. Already they are starved for relief. And tomorrow, their addled minds will be eased. That is how we help each other."
Taking and releasing a breath, the captain moved away from the iron door. "Tell me, blackfoot... in your vast travels, have you ever heard the name Mannis Morgrig?"
A sharp intake of breath answered that question.
The captain pulled keys from his belt, locked the cell door and walked away. A heavy clang against the bars followed him.
"Galttauer! Stop!" Belmorn roared. "Who is Mannis Morgrig?"
At this, Henric Galttauer stopped. "As of tomorrow..." he said with no pleasure whatsoever, "you are."
PART FOUR
COMEUPPANCE
4 - 1
Mannis Morgrig looked up from where he sat resting in his tent.
Men were shouting outside. His men. They sounded panicked, frightened. Standing, he reached for the knife that usually weighed down his belt. The scabbard was there, but empty. It took a second before he remembered where he had left it. There had been a tree. An old one strangled by dangerous vines and a poor wretch whom he had taunted and left to die.
No. Morgrig thought feverishly. It's not possible. Even if that bastard managed to cut himself free, he wouldn't come here. No man would do that. At least, no sane man.
Morgrig glanced at the saddlebags that sat on the table where he typically dined alone. He hadn't looked inside them yet. Something outside popped--then came a shrill, jarring sound like the initial clap of thunder. Hissing an inward curse, the large man stormed out of his tent with sword in hand.
The world outside was filled with smoke and chaos. But mostly smoke.
The campfire billowed a pillar of ash colored liquid. Only it wasn't liquid. Nor was it the usual sort of smoke produced by a usual fire.
FLASH!! CRACK!!
Unlike the first, the latest crack sounded as if it were made up of many smaller ones--as if someone had thrown a handful of black powder into the flames.
Morgrig's hand flew to his eyes, but it was too late. He had to fight through searing pain to keep them open. Through a blur of tears, he could see more of the strange smoke. Now two rivers of the stuff were pouring out of his campfire! Smoke didn't do that. Nothing did.
"Voss!" roared the Red Wolf. "Dirk! Slagter! The hell is going on here?"
"Mannis!" came a voice he could not place. "We're under attack, Sir! Someone is--ert!!"
Morgrig clawed the tears away from his eyes, battling to see something--anything. Then he wished he hadn't.
There were ghosts in the smoke, silhouettes and shades. They moved in and out of existence--stretching into shapes that no man could make. Snakes--this was his first thought. Whipping, lashing about inside the smoke. It was ludicrous, but he could see them growing, looping around and over one another as they assaulted his men. He could see neither heads nor tails, but the panicked shouts assured Morgrig that he had not gone mad. Whatever this was--it was actually happening.
Bellowing with rage, Morgrig lashed out at the things in the smoke. His blade sliced through coils and lengths of the phantom whips. A pain punctured up his arm. Bitten, his mind screamed, but wrongly. When he looked, he saw a length of thorny vine there--wrapping around his arm. With a cry of disgust, he ripped the coiling thing away, leaving a bloody track on the exposed flesh.
Not snakes, he realized. Vines!
The injured tendril wasted no time in attempting to insinuate itself around the hand that gripped it, but Morgrig acted in time. Hurling it to the ground, he stomped until only green pulp and thorns remained. The man turned, every inch of him a wild, raw nerve. The smoke was thick, but through it shadows flickered. Silhouettes of more parasitic vines--undulating, cracking like phantom whips. They were in the air and on all sides, and as far as Morgrig could tell, he was the only one who wasn't screaming.
All of this--somehow it had to be work of the man in the hood. The one he taunted and left to a most horrible death. Maybe the man had been some sort of wizard. Or maybe he had risen to Morgrig's dare--had moved fast enough and actually used the knife to free himself. Neither option seems likely, but deep in his gut, Morgrig knew it could be no one else. Whatever this was, didn't feel like an attack. It felt like retaliation.
"Rose man!" Morgrig's voice was ragged, unhinged. "You'll not catch me in a snare! You hear me, worm? I'll find you and by whatever Gods are watching, I'll tear you apart!"
There!
Someone was rushing towards him through the smoke. The silhouette was indistinct, but at the last second, he saw a telltale flap of cloak.
Bearing his teeth, the Red Wolf thrust out a fist. The attack contained all the will to shatter stone, but only smoke felt its wrath. In frustration he roared, following with a furious, horizontal slash of his broad, twice-edged sword. The second attack fared better and his opponent went down. Following this there came a hirking, gurgling sputter that sounded a little like music.
"Voss!" called Morgrig in
to the chaos. "Oye, Voss! You hear me?"
The brigand stood over his victim--glaring with triumphant, bloodshot eyes. He waved a hand, but the smoke would not be dismissed. His eyes burned and stung, but he fought to keep them open. Morgrig needed to see the dead man. The face of the son of a bitch who dared to attack him in his own camp.
"Fucking smoke!" he shouted. "Voss! Get your ass over here!" With that, Morgrig began to cough. Only a single bark at first, but quickly the fit doubled the man over.
From behind rang a shout. Someone else was rushing through the smoke. Morgrig spun, lashing out with every bit of force he had left. His sword clanged, sending reverberations up through his arm. Jolted, Morgrig recognized the shadow of a beaked mask. The one worn by his so-called butcher.
"That you, butcher?!"
The beaked face gave a nod.
A smile pulled at the corners of Morgrig's lips, and slowly, the shouts of his men returned to his awareness. More than a dozen panicked voices had melded into a single sound, like the drone of panicked wasps.
Of the two torrential rivers of smoke that had flowed so improbably from the campfire, only a lone tendril now trickled.
Suppressing a fresh cough, Morgrig looked down. The dead man's face was almost visible. Again he tried to wave the smoke away, but it was persistent stuff, swirling back into place almost immediately.
It was all so damned confusing.
Using his shirt, the Red Wolf wiped at his eyes. God, how they burned. All around, more and more shapes were appearing, slowly becoming men he knew. Men he commanded. Men whose bodies were now horribly bent and constricted. He wanted to count them, but his eyes kept slamming shut--each time with a new burst of pain.
"Plague of fucking whores--Voss!" he shouted into the chaos.
"It's Dirk, Sir," answered a voice. "Thank the gods you're still alive!"
"Never mind that, where is Voss?"
"Don't know, Sir. Hard to see anything in this."
"What the hell happened?" growled Mannis Morgrig.
"Haven't seen him since the first flash. We was lying about, waiting for the horse to cook, when all of a sudden, there was this bang like thunder. And then came the smoke. The smoke and the..."
"Vines." Morgrig frowned. "I can see that, Dirk. Got the bastard that did this, too. Got him right here." He looked at the man on the ground; his pallid face was almost visible.
"But sir..." objected Dirk. "Begging your pardon, but our attacker... He ran off."
"He what?" The Red Wolf shot an angry glare at his man.
Dirk nodded nervously. "Saw him myself, sir. Son of a whore was wearing a long cloak with a hood. Think it was that guy we left for the rose."
Morgrig felt like his insides were about to boil. He looked back down, finally able to see the pale man on the ground who wore a look of surprise. In a pool of blood lay Alberg Voss, Morgrig's most dependable lieutenant, still dressed in his long jacket. A single horrific slash to his neck gaped like a slanted, second mouth.
Morgrig was transfixed by the wound--confounded by it. For a few moments, he could only watch the gushes of red empty out of the man. Pulsing in a series of slow heaves.
"Sir?" The questioning voice belonged to the man called Dirk. A northerner neither the mental, nor physical match for the man on the ground. His hair hung in long greasy strands, and there were eight red lines painted on his face--four on each side.
"Mannis?"
Hearing his name, Morgrig looked up, inhaling a cold draft in through his nostrils. He scanned the camp. The smoke had cleared enough to reveal a scene no less grisly than the one at his feet.
His pack of wolves was bloodied. Broken. A half dozen bodies--some squirming, some still--were strewn about the camp. They were thoroughly wrapped in coils of thorny green ropes that all had the same origin point. From the still raging fire, flickering like an apparition in the flames, was a horrendous, bulging mass, a tangle of unburnt vines that approximated a sort of body. From this, the rest of the tendrils had grown. And it was to this that the man-sized pods were giving the contents of their veins.
How could this have happened? Morgrig's mind raced. How could it have grown so fast?
But there were no answers to these questions.
His bleary, groggy eyes settled upon a single perfect flower growing from the tangled mass. The petals slowly peeled and spread to reveal a center as red as blood. It looked like the inside of a heart, and like a heart, it was beating.
It was all too much. Something snapped inside the Red Wolf of the north woods. Morgrig threw back his head and howled. The sound travelled far, coursing with anguish and with mindless, bestial rage.
4 - 2
As the sound reached his ears, the alchemist froze in place, pressing his back hard against a tree. Kro had heard the fury and chaos, but to him, the howl sounded like something worse.
There were brass goggles over his eyes and a dark maroon cloth wrapped around his face--obscuring both nose and mouth. These he pulled off, allowing the cloth to fall to its usual place around his neck. Hungrily, he took a deep breath of clean air. The camp was on the far side of the forest. As such, he could feel the cold breeze coming off the lower veld, through the trees.
Around the tree trunk, Kro looked toward the still raging commotion. Then he looked down at the tiny, soot-dusted vial. At the meager bits of bone that remained, trying to understand and process what had just happened.
The plan had been to steal back his saddle bags amidst a cover of chaos and of smoke. As they ever had, the bones of the kindling boy worked like a charm. The kiss of an open flame was all it took to create a vast river of liquid smoke.
But something else had happened. Something Kro had not expected. Just after the first kindling bone had popped in the fire, he had felt movement in his breast pocket.
It must have been the proximity to the fire. The extreme heat had caused an unexpected reaction in the unnatural objects.
Panic had thrust him back to his traumatic imprisonment mere hours earlier--choking his very breath away. The seeds had become a writhing ball of vines, growing at an improbable rate. Heart in his throat, Kro had mindlessly seized the thing and hurled it like some hideous spider into the roaring campfire.
The men around had been shouting about the smoke. But quickly, those shouts turned to screams.
Even for a man of his experience, there were many things in heaven and earth that Tenebrus Kro could not claim to understand.
The vampire rose was an exceedingly rare, wholly unnatural thing. The creation of man's effort to improve upon what nature had made perfect from the start. Until a handful of hours ago, Kro had always given the plant a wide berth. But he had dreamed up plans for those seeds. Vital plans.
Something wicked stalked the Veld. The creature had earned her death many times over. Unfortunately, such things are not so easily hastened from their perch upon this mortal coil.
The seeds of the vampire rose had been vital. Half of a solution to a riddle he had spent nearly a decade trying to solve. The last question. The only question.
How do you kill a witch?
Tenebrus Kro had risked his life, not once but twice in a single night for those seeds. Then he had secreted them to the safest place he had. Stored in the breast pocket of his cloak, alongside the other half of the riddle's answer.
The small mass was a gland, shriveled and purple, like a dried out plum. He had discovered it quite by accident on a stretch of beach on the other side of the closest ocean. The seeds were treacherous to harvest, but that gland was irreplaceable. Perhaps it had been the combination of the two ingredients reacting to the heat of the fire or the strange liquid smoke. In truth, all Kro knew for a fact was he had wasted seven years of his life. Blown them all on a single night's worth of impetuous decisions.
His stolen property had not been reclaimed, but what was the point anymore? His last hope had gone up in smoke. Literally. To enter the camp again would be suicide, and while Kro felt little
desire to go on, he would not allow the wolves to be his executioners.
There was only one place left to go, a poison sanctuary if there ever was one. Tenebrus Kro sure as hell didn't have friends in Roon. Not anymore. No one would even want to sell him a horse. But none of that mattered.
As far as he could see, his well of options had officially run dry. And so, the alchemist cinched up the edges of his hood and started walking. If he moved quickly, he might reach the northern gate in a couple of hours.
"It'll be morning by then." He said to the dark woods. Offering a shrug. "Wonder if The Folly serves ale for breakfast."
PART FIVE
NORTHERN HOSPITALITY
5 - 1
Rander Belmorn was ushered at rifle point toward a crowd that parted as he approached.
The chains connecting his hands and stockinged feet forced his gait into a stunted hobble. He gazed at the gathering masses and frowned. How plainly they hated him. Eyes judged, even before any imagined crimes could be hung around his neck.
Belmorn wanted to scream, to vomit his outrage upon every face in that crowd. But one of the guards had gagged him with a red sash before they'd exited the barracks. They had clad him in his own coat and cloak, though the act was no courtesy. Belmorn had no delusion of how his dark garb made him appear. It had been his own idea, after all. Looking like a ruffian may have come with downsides, but it had warded off plenty of other trouble.
Not that any of that mattered now.
Belmorn tried to conjure an image of the two he loved most, they who he had failed. But as the stock of a powder rifle prodded him onward, he could see nothing but the gathering, scornful faces.
Turning his head, the blackfoot glared at the tall blond man responsible for his current predicament. Galttauer stood rigid, dressed in his finest armor and long velvetblack cloak. From an impassive face, his ice-blue eyes were fixed upon the crowd. He never saw the prisoner's naked hate or how it assaulted him with abandon.
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