The Seven

by Robert J Power

  It was an underrated skill to prepare and cook out on the march. Cherrie rarely tasked herself with the deed, lest her comrades believe it a regular duty. Sometimes it was better not to show one’s true talents, so she had always let her daughter do most of the cooking.

  Daughter.

  She stopped spinning mid-turn and caught the gasp in her breath as soon as it occurred. The fire didn’t care for her hesitation and began over-charring the long piece of meat in its heat. Whatever it was, it was salted and easy to cook. The dry sizzle ceased, and a flame appeared where it touched the fire’s tip for too long. She blew the catching flame dead and lifted her head from the little pirouette of smoke.

  “Oh, my Arielle.”

  Cherrie ripped the ruined piece of meat from the spit and flung it into the tree line. Let it become a feast to an army of diligent worker ants, she thought.

  “Oh, my beautiful, beautiful Arielle.”

  She fought true desolation and held her stony expression. She grabbed her chest at the mention of her daughter’s demise and felt her heart attempt to tear itself apart and end her misery.

  “Why did this come upon us?” she quietly moaned and tore a fresh piece of dried meat. She dipped it in oil and wrapped it around the spit. Her fingers burned as she did, but it was a pain she accepted and appreciated.

  Sometimes pain was a friend to the best of people. Pain reminded her she still took a breath, her heart still beat, and her mind still hoped. Pain warned her, but more than that, pain could be controlled and gifted when the rest of the world cut the spirit too deeply. Sometimes though, pain was all a torn apart person could feel as they gave themselves up to a world of darkness.

  Cherrie glanced at a revealing scar at the cuff of her gown and pulled herself from lamenting thoughts. So many scars. So many that there was never enough clothing to conceal them all completely. “War was tough,” she said to any man curious enough to ask why she had as many as she did. It was half a truth, which was better than the truth. War was tough, but a life in the brothels of Dellerin was truly devastating to both the soul and the skin. Sometimes it was a brutal patron who desired blood and thrust, while other times, when shame took hold, a few little cuts soothed her fragile mind. She was scarred, but it made her stronger.

  What scar would Arielle leave upon her soul?

  She removed her fingers, placed them to her lips, and enjoyed the deliciously salted anguish. Was there anything more reliable in the world than pain? Cherrie watched a drip of cheese melt completely and fall to a premature death in the burning embers below. Another fell after that, and she did not catch the delicacy or save it for later. There was no point, she thought and poured a glass of steaming wine. The thurken dinner was a ruin, and she didn’t give a spit for it. She cooked the meal because she had nothing better to do while she waited.

  “We will return you,” she whispered to the wind.

  She drank a bitter mouthful of wine and felt its burn on her empty stomach. Not too much, she told herself, lest he came back to sit and eat at the feast she had prepared. She tried to hate him. She wanted to hate him. She wanted to lash out and maim. Gift a scar of her own. Perhaps kill. She wanted her daughter to return whole. Therefore, she would wait for him to return and ask him the prudent questions until it sated her. And then, if he still wore the demented gaze, she could take out her frustrations on him.

  “My beautiful child,” she wailed in her mind, but her eyes barely flickered, for she was proficient in hiding emotions behind her face. And what a pretty face they told her she had.

  She poured the wine into the fire and realised she was suffering a state of shock. She accepted this easily enough. What point was there in clutching her knees and rocking back and forth until the pain ebbed away? Instead, she ripped the second piece of meat from the spit, and after a careful bite, she threw that into the trees. Nothing would ever taste agreeable until she had recovered her beautiful daughter from that monster.

  “Mallum will die by a Hound’s hand,” Cherrie whispered, and a thin smile fought its way to her lips.

  Her head spun, and she felt the lure overcome her once more. Let it, she thought bitterly, remembering the lost battle with Mallum. She had had her chance and was no measure to the cur. His skills were terrifying, and hers were instinctive, instincts tainted by an ethereal enchantment.

  Eralorien had spoken of the lure, and she knew enough to feel its presence. There was a power in knowing its potency and not even fighting it. Better it drive her forward. Kill Mallum, save Arielle. Simple plans were always the best.

  She understood Eralorien’s attempts at redemption, and she understood his pathetic plea for her to run from him. In his madness, he must really have thought she was a pathetic damsel awaiting ravaging, or worse—in need of saving.

  Cherrie poured more wine into the flame and watched it die again. It was also something for her to do while she waited for Eralorien to return and face her questions. What else did he do to her as she slept? Her knuckles turned white, and she ground her teeth painfully. She sloshed the bottle of Venistrian red in the fiery light and poured it over the cheese, down into the flames. Though the embers fought hard, the vintage smothered them, a good year as it was.

  She shuddered as darkness swathed the camp in eerie loneliness. She watched the embers burn away in the damp mound of cheese and alcohol. After a few breaths, she kicked the entire spit over and trod it into the ground with her heavy boot. For good measure, she stamped it to nothing, cursing deep within as she did.

  Thurk Mallum. Thurk Eralorien. Thurk Heygar. And by the demons of the source, thurk Bereziel above them all. He should have been here.

  Without the fire, she felt the cold immediately and relished the alertness it would provide. She pulled her dagger from her belt and the accompanying whetstone from her pack and sat atop her cart. Higher ground was always a habit. She scraped the blade along the grainy surface and enjoyed the gentle screech as she made her perfect blade a little more perfect. Perhaps if she sharpened it enough, she might pierce Mallum’s heart right through and kill him before he healed. She cursed her foolish hope, knowing full well the power in that invisible grasp and its ability to thrash her against a wall until she was mush. That was no way to die. Better to go out in a battle with many felled opponents at her feet.

  Cherrie regretted many things. Mostly it was the lies to her daughter. There was no sweetening of such a truth. She had lied to her for an entire lifetime, and she could never take it back. It didn’t matter that she had lied out of kindness, out of necessity.

  Cherrie’s own mother had also spent a lifetime on her back in countless different chambers, only for one fertile patron to leave more than smeared makeup and a river of sweat upon her. Cherrie had not died from the tonics prescribed, and so she had been born into a cruel world, inheriting the same occupation as her wretched, cold, and gloriously deceased mother.

  Arielle was conceived in love though, wasn’t she? Conceived in throngs of passion with the only man Cherrie had ever loved, in the hours before war called brave young men back to blood and death. Business disappeared for a time by her choice, and she was grateful that it was, for a child by any other man might have meant little. She hadn’t been ready to allow another to empty himself in her while her love’s memory was fresh. What was a month anyway after experiencing the true act of love?

  And in that last night, she had seen love in the boy. They had held each other until dawn, whispering their thoughts, fears, hopes and sorrows, and it had been incredible. It hadn’t taken long to discover a change in her body. When the time came, as it usually did for all in that profession, Cherrie couldn’t bring herself to drink the deathly black tonic of her own. She had held the bottle in her hand after end of business for three nights in a row before flinging it from her grasp and accepting the consequences. The gift.

  She refused to curse her daughter with her lineage. Better the little one believe her mother died in a plague. And as for her father, well,
his tale could be the first lesson that a trapped man was likely to bolt with the wind. She had never proven Cherrie wrong, and now she never would.

  Fleeing from Dellerin with a child had been easy enough. Less so, birth, but Cherrie found a way as she did with all great things. Starting a life with no noticeable skills apart from her staggering beauty soon brought her back into that world, albeit closer to the front line, where soldiers were willing, gold was plentiful, and business was very profitable. A few years renting a room in a clean tavern, earning her place on her back to doomed men as Arielle grew was the life Cherrie settled for.

  Then came the fateful rekindling with one of her highest paying customers and the entanglements surrounding him. Meeting Heygar that night in the tavern had reaffirmed the deception to her daughter and, inadvertently, condemned them both to a life of dishonesty.

  Tears fell from Cherrie’s eyes to the damp ground at her feet, and she halted the assault on the blade. She wished the only man she had ever loved were with her now, but he had left her without saying goodbye. A lifetime of silent lies still sat between them. Would things have been different if she’d have spoken the truth? Yes, she never would have become a Hound, and after Arielle, that was the greatest achievement of her life. She took a breath and continued sharpening her dagger.

  The discharged Heygar, weighed down with countless medals, had discovered her from across the room and charged through the crowd, roaring magnificently. He had whisked her into the air with sturdy arms, and despite herself, she had giggled—not in excitement but in the comfort of familiarity. He had professed his love for her as most drunkards did, and he had returned to her so many loving memories of Arielle’s father before war had separated them.

  It had been wonderful until he had opened his little bag of impressive coin and insisted he pay her thrice the rate for a week of her company. Cherrie had ignored the shame and accepted the offer, terrified to ask the prudent questions. Instead, she hoped the truth would reveal itself and, with it, a conclusion to the tale of the man she loved. So, she had taken the gold gladly, met the kindly fool every evening, and enjoyed herself as best she could until the last night.

  “I should have told him,” Cherrie said from atop her cart to the silent darkness. “I should have told them both.”

  Heygar’s best and oldest friend had appeared at the tavern with him, and her heart had both surged and plummeted in that same dreadful moment. So beautiful. So kind. So loyal. He had only ever had to pay the once and never after that. Nothing had changed about him apart from slightly premature grey in his hair and eyes, which burned with more passion. He had known Arielle was no little sister immediately, for that is what great weavers do, but the tale she spun that first night remained to this day.

  Oh, if she could turn back time and add a few little details, she might well have, but that was not how true tales of regret usually went. For they sat at a table and reminisced of times in Dellerin when both young soldiers, one of the blade and the other of the source, had raced each other to earn a night with the stunning young redheaded girl. Heygar had mocked their weekly argument over price, and she had laughed as though her insides did not curdle within.

  That wonderful night could not last forever, and an eager Heygar had earned enough vigour to take her to bed one last time, so she had nodded and concealed her remorse. Cherrie had played the dutiful whore for one night more and promised herself that come the morning, she would whisper the truths to her love. How well would he take the knowledge that he was the father of a whore’s child? Still to this day, she had no answer.

  She had bid her oblivious love a perfectly polite bow and walked with her patron through the town to dine upon some fine delicacies before a nice thrust. She remembered that Heygar had always liked to hold from behind, with her red hair grasped roughly in his fist as he got his fill. Bereziel, however, had pleasured her for hours with every limb and appendage he could offer before meeting her eye-to-eye for their inevitable conclusion.

  Were it not for the ambush on Heygar by four brutes along the quays that night, her life may have been different.

  They had crept up on them at the docks, where he had shown her the barge that would take his merry crew away on their first ever mercenary mission come the morning. The assassins tore him to shreds, searching for his gold, and she had watched on in terror as he had bravely fought them off. However, he was not the man back then he would become. He soon fell to their strikes and covered up as they plunged blades into him.

  It was the crimson blood streaming from his body, which shook Cherrie to life, and so, to death she went. She seized one of the fallen and some rather fetching daggers and set herself upon them ferociously. They never had a chance. She moved as if assisted by a beast in the source. Though they rallied after the costly surprise that a feeble whore could inflict such terrors upon them, they still died at her brutal hand.

  She had imagined they were her patrons, and her seething rage had driven each strike home. Even to this day, when war was upon them, she leapt into battle and tore apart memories of those thousand men who thrusted, lurched, and burst inside her, and she killed easily enough.

  That night was the first time she had swung a weapon in anger. When the red mist cleared, there were four dead men at her hands, and she had earned Heygar’s trust for life. She had never even considered revealing the truth thereafter. Instead, she had accepted a proposition from Heygar.

  “A pretty girl with knife skills could make a proper living in my fledgling mercenary outfit,” he had whispered as they had healed him back to life.

  Only a fool would have rejected securities like this. Who ever heard of a dead mercenary’s young kin turned out into the streets? It would never happen. A whore’s sister would soon slip back into that whoring world, but a mercenary’s younger sister would always be taken in and homed by the mercenaries’ guild. It was law, and one of the few she approved of.

  So, Cherrie had fallen in line with the man she had loved a lifetime, behind the man who controlled her destiny, and she had said nothing more. She did it partly out of loyalty to Heygar for offering her a life above what she had endured but also knowing how swiftly Heygar could take it away, were he to discover the truth of her heart. She chose deceit and never regretted it.

  30

  The Girl With Many Thoughts

  “Oh, my Bereziel, where are you when we need you most?” Cherrie cried, lamenting the double-sided blade of a life thrust upon her.

  Eralorien was a weaver with adequate skills, but he was the lesser replacement to the greatest man she had ever known. If Eralorien was a light of source power, Bereziel was a furnace of darker energies. If Bereziel were here now, things would be very different. Bereziel would have taken the fight to Mallum. Bereziel was far too wily for a lure. In fact, he was more likely to cast the lure than anything else.

  She had always suspected Eralorien might look upon her in that way but never enough that an enchantment could turn him to a monster. In all those years, did he really know little of her will or her temperament? He didn’t know her at all, for that could never be her fate. She would never give up her life and spirit for anything or anyone.

  Instead, she would fight for every breath, and she would know success. She was no waif in these matters, and with a blade at her side and her wits about her, there was nothing she could fear of Eralorien. When he returned with glowing, luring fingers and suggestions of love, blood, and rape on his mind, she would do what she had intended to do from the first moment she had woken up in the cart: find every detail she could of Arielle’s fate. She could easily slit his throat and bleed him until he stepped into death any time she liked. It only mattered what she learned before that.

  Her tears for Arielle had long since dried up. Lamenting with tears served little in this world unless a patron was paying for such behaviour. Better to embrace the anger and engage in strategy. It was the Hound in her.

  Cherrie heard the sudden breaking of twigs and
leapt from the cart with her dagger in hand. The crack became a cacophony of branches moving, muffled talk, and heavy boots. She held her breath and hid behind the wide trunk, where the leaves hung low enough they touched the ground. The voices grew loud, and she recognised them as her comrades’. She took a moment to make certain the unwanted tears were gone from her eyes. She would never be the victim ever again.

  Iaculous broke through the tree line first. As he did, he immediately spun around to where she concealed herself. He peered into the darkness to see if he could make her out within the shadows. A few breaths later, Denan followed. Both had their horses with them. The beasts ambled, laden with great weights. One carried baggage and supplies, while the other carried something she couldn’t make out in this faded light.

  Denan limped as though he had spent a night playing the ridiculous game of “belly punch” with Heygar and come off the loser. Few had ever beaten him at that game, she thought sadly.

  She missed Heygar something fierce. What had been a service to his kindness became comfortable as the years passed. She loved him in a way, and like Bereziel, she wished he were here. In all missions and matters, he had always somehow completed the impossible or recovered the irretrievable, until the impossible task became such an innocuous thing as floating. A whore and her two favoured patrons soon became a clan of skilled mercenaries. They had other brothers and sisters who joined the ranks over the Hounds’ life, yet the trio were the only ones to remain until Bereziel abruptly disappeared.

  “Have we found her?” Denan asked, crashing into the young apprentice’s mount and grabbing his stomach as he did.

  Cherrie slipped from the tree trunk and glided through the hanging leaves like a forest sprite of the night. She stepped into the moonlight, so they could see her. She kept her blade behind her back. It was reassuring and steady.