A Sellsword's Mercy

by Jacob Peppers

  “That makes sense,” Leomin said, obviously relieved to find an excuse to avoid Seline’s glare. “After all, a group of bandits would hardly chew on a pig like that.”

  “Exactly,” Wendell agreed, “they’d chew on a bunch of ‘em.” He didn’t notice the Parnen’s frown of confusion, didn’t see him open his mouth as if to protest only to close it again. “I ought to have known better—a single pig ain’t gonna feed an army of bandits no matter how it’s split. Anyway, point is I showed it to my father, and he told me weren’t no bandits done the deed at all, but a coyote, probably a pack of ‘em. We set out the next mornin’, him with his bow and me with mine. My father was always a fine tracker—best in the village, shit, best in all of Telrear you ask me—and it weren’t but the work of a few hours to find ‘em. Well, long story short—”

  “Or long,” Leomin muttered.

  “Well, either way, we killed the coyotes one and all, saved those pigs from bein’ butchered like their buddy, and I reckon they were probably just about as grateful as pigs can be.”

  “Which is to say not at all,” the Parnen captain said.

  “Right,” Wendell agreed. “Anyhow, we saved those pigs sure enough, took out those coyotes that would have been the death of not just them but the other livestock in the village if left alone, or so my da said. ‘Course, that didn’t stop us from eatin’ those same pigs when the next Fairday came around.”

  Leomin groaned. “In the name of the gods, the Akalians don’t eat people, Sergeant.”

  “And how would you know?” Wendell said back. “Look, I ain’t sayin they do or they don’t—all I know is what savin’ my father and I did that day, we didn’t do for the pigs. Maybe you’re all right, and the next time we see the general he’ll be right as rain, bitchin’ and snappin’ at everybody around ‘em. You know, his old self. And the boy, may be he’ll keep on being weird. But, then, if either comes up with a couple of bite marks in ‘em well…don’t say I didn’t tell you. No offense, lads,” he said, turning to speak to the Akalians who only watched him silently. Escorts to see them safely to Perennia, the Speaker had said, but Wendell didn’t much care for the look of them, figured if a coyote could stand upright and walk on two legs he’d be giving him a look just about the same as those Akalians were now. A look he didn’t deserve—the gods knew he’d been nothing but nice to the bastards.

  “We can only do what we can do, Sergeant,” Adina said, and there was a sadness in her voice that told Wendell he wasn’t the only one that regretted leaving the general behind. “We must hope that Aaron is able to win whatever battle he fights, just as we must hope that we reach Perennia in time and are able to do something to rectify the situation that Grinner has caused. Now,” she said, looking at each of them in turn. “Are we ready? We have little time to waste if we hope to be of any help to May and Councilman Hale.”

  Wendell nodded along with the others, if a bit grudgingly. Adina was right in the main, of course. They couldn’t stand aside while May was executed, but that didn’t mean he liked it. It seemed to him that far too much of their plan relied on hope. And he could have told them—if they’d listened—that he’d shown up at plenty of brothels with nothing but hope in his pockets, and he’d been disappointed every time. But he didn’t think it was what they wanted to hear just then, so he walked on, trudging after the others toward Perennia and whatever horrors awaited them there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Something struck the horse from the side, and it stumbled, barely managing to keep its feet. Growling, Aaron lashed out with his blade, striking the offending shadow then bringing the sword back to slice through the next closest. He’d been riding toward the tree for what felt like hours, but they’d yet to reach it. Still, he’d thought they’d been making good time, could see the giant tree getting closer, before the creatures piled in thick all around them, forcing them to first slow down then stop altogether.

  The horse was trained well, and it lashed out with its hooves. Where those thunderous impacts fell, shadows turned into dust, but despite the horse and Aaron’s efforts, it wasn’t long before they were both covered in fresh cuts and scrapes, each small enough wounds on their own, but taken as a whole, they threatened to leech the strength from Aaron. His sword felt impossibly heavy in his hands, as if someone had decided to strap a boulder to it, but still he fought on, raising it again and again, his muscles burning and feeling loose, disconnected.

  “Come on then,” he rasped to the horse as he struck at another shadow. “If we don’t get out of here soon, we’re done for.”

  The horse seemed to hear him, for it kicked out with its back legs, destroying several creatures that had been rushing at it, then began a labored charge forward, its muzzle flecked with crimson foam, its eyes full of pain and anger both. Aaron did what he could to keep the shadows off the beast, swinging as fast and as well as his exhausted body would allow, but more than once the nightmarish creatures made it through, and the horse screamed in a voice that sounded all too human as their claws cut bloody furrows down its side.

  Aaron risked a glance up at the tree, stretching up into the black sky past his sight, saw that they were getting closer, and urged the horse on. The Virtue floated at his side, a floating ball of magenta light once more, and lighting their way the best she could. “Not much further, boy,” Aaron said to the horse, though he didn't know if it understood him, didn’t know, in truth, if it even was a boy, but such a thing as that was the least of their problems.

  The creatures were pressed in thick around them, all manners and sizes, and despite the beast’s efforts, the sellsword felt sure that they would be bogged down again. Instead, the horse continued to push its way forward with a shocking determination, and finally they burst free of the knot of shadow that had surrounded them. A clear path opened in front of them so that Aaron could see the girl sitting huddled at the tree. “Come on!” he yelled, and the horse seemed to give its own bray of agreement, charging forward as best as its exhaustion and wounds would allow as the shadows closed in on either side.

  Aaron began to believe that they would make it, after all, were no more than a few dozen feet—seconds on the horse—away from the girl and the tree, when suddenly dozens of shadows appeared from either side of the massive trunk. He lost sight of the girl altogether, and felt a moment of impotent anger. There weren’t that many of the creatures considering how much he and the horse had slain in the interminable amount of time they’d done battle with them, but plenty enough to slow them down, to waste their time so that the army of darkness behind them could catch up and finish its work.

  He was trying to decide what to do, what he could do, when the horse leapt. He had not thought horses capable of roaring, but this one did even as its powerful legs carried it upward, over the top of the first row of creatures. Aaron had a flash of hope, thinking that they would clear them, but the hope was quickly shattered as he realized that, for all the horse’s efforts, they were going to land in the middle of the creatures. At the apex of its jump, however, the horse seemed to buck, and before he knew what was happening Aaron was flying through the air, up and over the heads of the waiting shadows.

  He struck the ground hard, the breath getting knocked out of him for what felt like the hundredth time in the space of an hour, and he rolled to a jarring, painful stop only feet away from the girl. Looking at her, he saw to his dismay that where once her wrist had been stuck into the tree, now her entire arm up to the shoulder was, and the black, pulsing lines had spread across her neck and one side of her face. Speak to her Aaron, the Virtue said, you must make her understand, make her realize that the creatures are no more than the products of her own fears. You must show her how to vanquish them.

  Aaron had no idea what in the name of the gods the Virtue was talking about, but he decided that he had to try. “T-Tianya,” he wheezed. “You have to let it go. Your…fear. You have to let it go.”

  “I cannot,” the little girl said, her voice sad an
d pitiful. “I don’t know how.”

  Letting out a hiss of pain, Aaron worked his way to his feet and turned back to see the horse kicking wildly, destroying the shadows seemingly by the score, but he felt his heart drop as he saw what must have been thousands more closing the distance with impossible quickness. They would be on the horse in another few moments and, once they were done, it would be his and the girl’s turn.

  He spun to Tianya, grabbing her shoulder. It was hot, the skin fevered to the touch, but he resisted the urge to let go. “Listen,” he growled, “what are you afraid of? That you have failed, that you will fail? Everyone fails, Tianya. It’s a man’s—a woman’s—willingness to try again that makes her brave.”

  The girl met his eyes, her shame writ plain across her features, and when she spoke it was not in the voice of a child but of the woman he knew. “I failed them. They all died to that…that thing and I ran. I was…afraid.”

  The horse let out a scream of pain, and Aaron risked a glance back at the battle. One of the creatures was hunched on the beast’s back, its talons disappearing into the horse’s sides, but the horse gave a mighty buck, and the shadow went flying. Turning back to Tianya, Aaron forced a calm into his voice that he did not feel. “Of course you were afraid,” he said. “Who wouldn’t run, when facing a monster like that behemoth Kevlane made?”

  “They died because of me,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I might as well have killed them myself.”

  Aaron growled, growing angry now, and his grip on the young girl’s shoulder tightened. “Are you so vain that you’ll take the credit for every dead man on earth? Is every soldier lying in their graves your responsibility then? Every corpse in every cemetery put there by your hand?”

  “They were my men,” she said, her face wretched with guilt. “And I abandoned them.”

  “Sure you did,” Aaron said, “you ran and because of it you’re alive. They didn’t, and they died, died fighting for not just your cause, but their cause. You did not force them to be there, Tianya, and taking the responsibility for all their deaths, claiming them as your own, steals the meaning of their sacrifice.”

  “What meaning?” she spat, anger sharpening her unfocused gaze. “They are all dead, Aaron Envelar. Dead and gone, all of their efforts, all of my own, come to nothing but dust. What meaning may be found in any of it?”

  Aaron shook his head. “There’s something I’ve learned, Tianya, something I’m still learning. Meaning doesn’t come with victory, with winning whatever battle we set ourselves. Meaning comes from fighting it to begin with. Those men who died did so for a cause greater than themselves, because they believed in something bigger. In the end, the fact that they lost means nothing. They stood where other men would have run, they fought where others would have begged, and they went to their deaths with courage. We can all hope for little more than that.”

  She seemed to consider his words, to be thinking them through, and Aaron felt a surge of hope. He was beginning to say something else when suddenly the air was pierced by the horse’s terrible scream. The creatures were climbing all over it now, raking at it with their claws, biting into its flesh with their teeth. It gave another great kick, knocking many of the creatures loose, but not all, and then it seemed to turn its head, seemed to meet Aaron’s eye, as if to tell him that it had done all it could, that it was sorry it couldn’t do more. Then, in another moment, the shadows swarmed over it like ants, and the horse vanished from view.

  “Nooo!” the sellsword bellowed, surprised by the fury and sense of loss that rose in him at seeing the beast brought down, for it had been his companion in this nightmare world, standing with him against the inevitable darkness, and he bared his teeth in a rage that did not come from the power of the bond but one that was entirely his own. “You bastards!”

  There was a flurry of motion as the shadows feasted and in mere seconds they separated once more. Where the horse had been, there was no sign. No blood to mark its passing, not even so much as a single white hair to show that it had ever been there at all. For the horse was no real creature of blood and muscle and bone, but the girl’s imagining, a dream. And though dreams could die as well as men—and did so at least as often—the most terrible thing about their passing was that, when they perished, there was no evidence that they had ever existed at all, no corpse for the dreamer to mourn, nothing but an emptiness where something grand had once been, nothing but an awful stillness where once it had breathed.

  “Dreams die, Tianya,” Aaron rasped, his voice harsh with fury. “Men die. All we can do is to make sure that, when they do, they don’t do so for nothing.” Good men try.

  Aaron, don’t—

  But whatever the Virtue had been about to say was drowned out by Aaron’s own roar, an answer to the horse’s final cry, a recognition of the death of yet another dream in a world that could ill-afford the loss. Then he raised his sword and charged into the shadow.

  He hacked at the creatures of nightmare with abandon, swinging his blade first this way then that, demanding more of his bruised and battered body, more speed, more strength. Deep down, he knew that the burst of energy his anger had given him would be the last of its kind, but he did not care. He saved nothing, held back nothing, and he fought better than he had ever fought before. He slew the shadows with a blade shining brilliant white, cutting them down in droves like some avenging god come to wreak a divine retribution.

  But even as he did so, he knew that he would not, could not win, for those he slew in the light rose again in the darkness. Still, he fought on anyway, the breath rasping in his lungs, for he now understood that the definition of a man, the truth of him, was not in the battles that he had won, but the battles he had chosen to fight. And for one of the first times in his life, Aaron fought not in reaction to some wrong, but because he chose to. Because the battle before him was one worth fighting, worth dying for, if that was what required, and slowly the anger that had fueled his charge changed into a sort of peace, a contentment in knowing that however it ended—and that ending seemed clear enough—he had done something worth doing.

  He drove deeper and deeper into the heart of the shadow until, standing before him, was one of the great behemoths of darkness, so tall that he couldn’t see where it ended. He didn’t hesitate, just charged toward it, his blade leading. Unlike the smaller shadows, there was resistance when his blade met what served as the creature’s ankle, but Aaron grit his teeth and kept going, the brilliant blade cutting a furrow across the shadowy limb, the wound leaving a burning trail of white in its wake.

  The creature let out a great roar, a massive hand swiping down at him, but he dove to the side, rolling just out of its grasp. Then he was up and running again, burying his blade deeply into its leg once more. Another roar, this one greater than the first, and Aaron felt, more than saw, the great weight of the creature’s bulk shifting, swaying like some huge tree preparing to topple to a woodsman’s axe.

  He kept up his attack, hacking away at the creature as if, by defeating it, he might somehow defeat all the darkness not just in this dream world, but in all worlds, might, in conquering it, lay waste to the evils that plagued the lives of men and women from the moment they were born. Suddenly, the creature gave a great lurch and began to fall. He dove out of the way, and after what felt like an eternity, the creature landed with a great, silent whumpf, crushing thousands of its allies beneath it. The impact made Aaron’s teeth rattle in their sockets, and he felt as if some malicious, giant child had picked him up and started shaking him. But soon it was over, and when he rose from the ground, he rose bloody, as full of pain as most men were full of blood, but smiling for all that.

  He continued to smile even as three more of the great hulks seemed to materialize in front of him, even as weak arms raised his sword in front of him, forced to grip it two-handed now to be able to lift it at all, for though it was a sword forged in a dream, made from it, dreams, Aaron was beginning to learn, had their own weight. The
creatures began taking their lumbering steps toward him, and in between their feet milled thousands of their smaller brethren.

  “No.”

  For a moment, Aaron was so consumed by his own thoughts that he believed the word had come from his own mouth, some last denial before the end came upon him. It wasn’t until it came again, stronger than the first time, that he realized it wasn’t his voice at all, but a woman’s voice, full of power. The creatures must have heard it too, and they hesitated, appearing unsure for the first time, shadows who had once been confident in their own preeminence quivering uncertainly at the rising of the morning sun.

  “No!” The voice came a third time, and it was not a whisper or a statement now, but a shout, a roaring greater than any that had issued from the mouths of those towering monstrosities of darkness. This time, the shadow creatures did not hesitate, but backed away as if hurt or scared, their limbs coming up as if to ward off some unseen blow.

  Aaron turned, his weary legs nearly giving out beneath him, and was shocked to see that where the young girl had once crouched, now stood a woman. He recognized her as Tianya at once, and she seemed to him to be the best version of herself, not plagued by the fears and doubts that latched onto the living, but standing straight and proud. A soft, white light glowed around her, through her, as she stared out at the throng of shadows creatures surrounding her and the sellsword, her anger a palpable thing.