A Plague of Ruin: Book One: Son of Two Bloods

by Daniel Hylton

Murlet’s expression turned grave though his eyes twinkled. “And why are you opposed, Clef, my friend? State your case.”

  “Nay, captain,” Clef replied darkly. “I will not state my case – I will show you.” Here, he reached down and twisted his wooden leg from off the stump, and then slammed it down hard upon the bar. “It’s because I cannot go along that I am opposed.”

  Murlet, a grin finding his face, reached down, picked up the leg, and handed it back to its owner. “Sorry, my old friend, but you are voted down again, as always.”

  Then, Captain Murlet’s demeanor became abruptly serious. “These ‘squatters’,” he stated, “are, in truth, a band of mercenaries that have been fighting for the prince of Merkland, whose land was invaded by an army of rebels. The army of Merkland was defeated, the capitol overrun, and the prince beheaded in the palace square. These mercenaries, perhaps a few less than a hundred in number, fled the field and escaped into the mountains of Morilund.”

  He paused for a moment and then continued. “It is rumored that they have a sorcerer among their number and Beran believes it to be true, so there is, perhaps, an extra measure of risk. Still, they were defeated, and though we have never faced a sorcerer, we know our own strength and what we can do.”

  He let his gaze rove over the room in silence for a moment; then continued, “We number but sixty-five, yet we are – most of us – veterans of many battles; we know one another well and have depended upon each other many times with blood in the balance.”

  He went quiet again for a moment and nodded, as if silently acknowledging an unspoken thought. “There have been times,” he continued, “when friends and comrades have failed to return from one of these endeavors of ours – indeed, too many. But we all have our reasons for being here –” Here, Murlet’s gaze found Brenyn’s for a fleeting moment; “– and we all understand the dangers of this particular sort of work.”

  He looked around at them all. “Two hundred and fifty gold,” he said, “is enough for each of us to gain a share of three, along with Marta, to pay Beran his fee, to put twenty aside for families of those that may not return – and still add twenty-two to the box.”

  When the shout that followed this announcement had died down, Brenyn looked at Jed. “What is the box?”

  “There is a strongbox in the safe room,” Jed replied, “where a measure of each take is placed. It is for the general needs of the band – weapons, food, liquor, things like that – and also in the hope that, someday, there will be enough for all of us to give up this life.”

  He shrugged and grinned. “Will there ever be enough? – not likely, but it is a nice thought. At least there is always enough for whisky.”

  Brenyn watched him. “If there ever was enough gold – that you could give up this life – what would you do, Jed? – where would you go? Would you stay here?”

  Jed thought for a moment and then shook his head. “Surely, there is a place in the world, some far distant corner, where a man might live in peace, away from war and darkings.” He smiled wryly. “If I could find me a proper wife, and build a house in that distant, forgotten corner, I would go there and leave the world to its own ends.”

  Brenyn grimaced. “I lived in a place like that once,” he said, “and I would yet be there had not the darkings come.” He sighed. “Should there ever come to be enough gold in the box,” he told Jed, “you’d better find a very distant corner.”

  Jed shrugged. “There will never be enough gold in the box, anyway,” he answered. “We are always needing new weapons and food – and liquor, of course.” Then his brow furrowed in pensive thought. “Some of the men here have wives and children,” he said, and he nodded. “That would be good enough for me, should I find a woman willing to live this sort of life.”

  Just then, Captain Murlet, who had been consulting quietly with his sergeants, raised his voice again. “These mercenaries are seasoned fighters and will resist us mightily,” he said. “They have murdered, ravaged, and plundered. It appears that they are men without honor. They have, however, mostly been left alone to work their will. All of Prince Pelterez’s troops are in the south, guarding the borders against treachery from the Merkland rebels and from its old enemy, Illnius – which is the reason he needs us. Hopefully, the wretches will have become complacent and let down their guard, and we can catch them by surprise. Even so, we will go into this as we always do – carefully. Go now and prepare your kits for the road. We leave the day after tomorrow at dawn.”

  As they left to prepare, Brenyn looked over at Jed. “Where is Morilund? – do you know?”

  “Off to the southeast,” Jed answered. “We did a job for the prince of Merkland a year or so back, after I first came here, and Merkland in on the plains just to the south of Morilund, which lies among the hills and valleys below the Cuddy Mountains.”

  “Captain Murlet seems like a good leader,” Brenyn stated then. “How is he in battle?”

  Jed nodded. “He is cool in battle, a hell of a fighter, and never goes in without a plan, so we take few casualties.”

  Brenyn frowned. “What did Murlet do before he became a mercenary captain?”

  Jed glanced around before rendering his response. “Now that is the subject of a good bit of speculation,” he answered. “Some of the men say that he was a high general in some prince’s army somewhere.” Jed glanced round once more and lowered his voice further. “Others claim he was once a prince in his own right – or perhaps the son of a prince.”

  Brenyn considered that for a moment and nodded. “There is something rather… unusual about him,” he replied. “He seems a natural leader of men. Maybe he was a prince somewhere.”

  Jed shook his head. “Captain Murlet never talks about his former life, anyway, so it’s likely we’ll never know.”

  Brenyn was up early on the appointed day, long before the sun found the sky. While he waited for the rest of the band to stir, he placed his weapons outside of Noris’ stall and paced back and forth in the gloom, thinking about the battle ahead.

  He was glad for the opportunity to go to battle. He needed to learn the skills of fighting if he was to be able to seek out and slay darkings. Even so, he found that he felt uneasy – not so much about the danger to himself, but about how well he would perform in the heat of things when death was at hand.

  The sky brightened above the mountains to the east and men began to appear in the streets, bearing weaponry and leading horses. Jed entered the livery just as Brenyn was saddling Noris. The two friends nodded silently to one another, gathered up their weapons and went out to join the others, who were forming up in the street. Brenyn was surprised to see two women among the company, one, a tall, dark-haired, slender, leggy woman dressed in leather, wearing shoulder armor, a leather breastplate, and bearing a long bow, and another blonde-haired woman of medium height, also dressed in leather, with a sword in a scabbard on her back.

  He looked over at Jed. “Those women – who are they?”

  Jed nodded his head in the direction of the women. “The dark-haired lady,” he said, “is Captain Murlet’s sister and the other is his special friend.”

  Brenyn frowned. “They fight?”

  Jed laughed quietly. “Oh, yes. The captain’s sister, Glora, is a superb shot with that long bow, and his friend – her name is Riana – can hold her own with the best of us.”

  “But they don’t train with us,” Brenyn said. “I’ve not seen either one of them on the training field.”

  Jed shrugged. “No need. They were with the captain when he arrived here, and he knows what they can do. He uses Glora to take down sentries quietly and from a distance – that sort of thing – and Riana never leaves his side in a fight.”

  A few minutes later, Captain Murlet appeared, accompanied by Beran Hile, and rode up to the front of the column and then the band moved northward out of town. In front of a few of the houses, women and children stood quietly, watching as the men rode out. Occasionally, one of the women would raise he
r hand or tender a slight smile, acknowledging her husband as he went by.

  The troop crossed the valley, forded the river, gained the road next to the western hills, and turned southward. The valley widened out as it went toward the south. The hills upon the west, to their right, climbed higher and trees thickened on the crests and down in the rugged ravines that sliced back into them. Over to the east, the hills gradually became high enough to be called mountains and reared high and dark against the bright sun of morning.

  After more than two hours on the road, and passing through mostly uninhabited country populated by a few scattered farms that seemed to struggle upon the poor soil of the valley, and the occasional small hamlet, the hills to the west had grown tall enough to rival the mountains upon the east, which were now beginning to diminish and tumble down into timbered foothills. Ahead, a line of green hills marked the southern limits of the valley. There was a gap in these hills where the river, apparently, abandoned the valley for whatever landscape lay beyond.

  Just before the troop reached these low, green hills, Captain Murlet turned aside and led them across a rocky ford in the river and then up into the highlands on the east, below the mountains. For the rest of that day, they travelled through trackless forest. To the south, a broad region of plains could be glimpsed through the trees, but Captain Murlet led them inexorably eastward while the high mountains fell away behind.

  Toward evening, they found a road that wound up into the hills from the lowlands to the south and turned toward the east. The captain led them onto this narrow, stone-paved track. The sun had dropped below the mountains to the west behind them when they arrived at a small hamlet set in a clearing of the forest.

  There were only a few scattered houses, but a rather large inn occupied the center of the village and there were three large barns that sat behind the place, next to the woods.

  A pair of bearded, heavily armed, hard-eyed men met them at the edge of the village. Captain Murlet raised his hand to bring the company to a halt.

  One of the men inclined his head to Murlet and then ran his eye along the column that stretched back into the woodland.

  “Business to the east, captain?”

  “Morilund,” Murlet answered simply.

  The man nodded. “That’ll be the squatters, then. They’re a rough bunch, I hear. You’ll need to be cautious with that lot.” He moved aside. “You’re in luck – the inn is quiet tonight and the stock of liquor is abundant.”

  Murlet nodded and urged his horse on. “Thanks, Jag.”

  When the troop had dismounted in front of the inn and were arranged in a large semi-circle three deep, Murlet addressed them. “There are but fifty beds in the inn,” he said, “so the younger men must find lodgings in the barns with the horses.”

  He paused after this statement and looked around before he continued. “I will pay for two drinks each at the bar. After that, go to bed and rest.”

  “What if we brought our own money, captain?” One of the troopers named Len Ganfer asked. “Can we buy a few more?”

  Murlet smiled wryly. “You know better, Len. We are here on business and must be upon the road at dawn.” He held up two fingers. “Two each and then to bed.”

  Len’s face fell, but he nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “What about a bit of companionship?” One of the younger troopers asked.

  Murlet scowled as he tendered his response. “So long as you are up at dawn and ready to travel,” he told the man, “I care not whether you sleep alone or not. But we leave at dawn.” He glanced around and nodded. “Right, then, go and get settled.”

  After ensconcing Noris in the barn and finding a place to bed down nearby, Brenyn left his weaponry and went with Jed into the inn. The main room was large with high ceilings. There was a long bar along the whole left side of the place and tables situated about the floor. Stairs at the back, in the righthand corner of the broad space, climbed up to a second level where a balcony ran across the back and around the right side.

  There were several women up there on that second level, leaning over the railing and studying the men that gathered below them. Most were scantily dressed in flowing robes that did little to hide the various attributes of their forms and, in a few cases, left nothing to the imagination.

  Brenyn stared up at the scandalous scene for a moment in shock and then, embarrassed by his behavior, looked away to find Jed grinning at him.

  “Thinking of buying a night of… friendship, Bren?”

  “No.”

  Jed glanced up and then looked back. “Why not? You are a good-looking fellow, Bren, handsome, a bit taller than average, and you have those unusual eyes. You might not even have to pay.”

  Brenyn shook his head and turned toward the bar. “No – I was simply surprised, is all, but I am not interested.” He looked over and met Jed’s gaze, frowning. “You?”

  Jed shook his head at once. “Oh, no. There was a fellow that rode with us for a time named Carlo, who indulged every time we came through here. Carlo developed some sort of weird, terrible disease – down there, you know. He died in agony, whimpering like a child, so, no, I am not inclined to, ah, indulge.”

  Brenyn drank one mug of liquor and then said goodnight to Jed and made his way out to the barn. As he settled in next to Noris’ stall, he thought of the feminine shapes that he had glimpsed inside the inn and his mind turned to Emi when he had seen her last. She had been nearly a woman, shapely though slender, and beautiful – and she had nearly been his wife before she was taken and lost to him. Those thoughts darkened his spirit and blackened his mood.

  Sleep did not come to him easily.

  The next morning, the rising sun had barely touched the uppermost branches of the trees when they were on the move once more. For most of that day, they again travelled through the forest, though upon good pavement. Off to the south, the plains had fallen behind, and higher hills rose up on that horizon, miles off. An hour before sunset, they came out of the woodland upon a landscape of gently rolling hills that gradually sloped down to a wide prairie that spread out to the north toward the foothills that lay below distant mountains and, the other way, toward high hills far away upon the south. Over to the east, many miles distant, yet another range of mountains peeked above the horizon. Just ahead lay a broad region of plains, rumpled by lines of hills here and there, with towns and villages and farms, and, over to the right, a large city. Further to the right, off to the south upon that checkered landscape, beyond a distant line of dark green hills, smoke arose, dark and thick enough to be the harbinger of war.

  Murlet halted the column at the edge of the forested country and sent the men into the woodland to make camp for the night. They were on the move again at daybreak. The road wound down out of the highlands and intersected with another, wider main road that turned east, passing through several villages and towns. As they passed through, the citizens of these hamlets observed their passage with wary eyes from doorways and windows.

  Riding near the middle of the column, Brenyn noticed that the road seemed to be trending in the direction of the larger city he had spied from the higher ground. Curious, he looked over at Jed. “Are we going into that city?”

  “Not into it, most likely,” Jed answered, “but that’s Inverlin. It’s the capitol of Morilund. We must go there to meet up with the prince’s legate. The legate will go along with us to ensure that we do what the prince is paying us to do.”

  Brenyn glanced north, at the forested foothills that tumbled up toward the distant mountains. “And the squatters are there? – somewhere in those hills?”

  Jed shrugged. “Most likely. We’ll soon know.”

  The sun was nearing the apex of the sky when they arrived at the gates of Inverlin.

  The column halted near the walls and Captain Murlet hailed the gates, announcing his business. Then the order came back for the company to move off the road, lest they impede local traffic, and wait. Brenyn and Jed dismounted and stood in the grass alongs
ide the pavement while Captain Murlet waited on the prince’s legate. The few locals that came along the road toward the city, mostly in oxcarts, hesitated before driving in between the two lines of rough-looking, heavily armed mercenaries. Once they had committed to the passage, however, the citizens hurried their oxen toward the city gates, looking neither to the right nor the left as they went.

  Within the hour, the prince’s legate came out, accompanied by two armed companions and the column mounted up again, went around to the north side of Inverlin and headed north along a broad and well-paved road. All the rest of that day, they travelled through a heavily populated and prosperous-looking region of farms and towns. War, apparently, had not yet come here.

  At evening, they reached a sizeable town where the legate and his companions would stay at an inn while the troop camped in the countryside, in a copse of oaks alongside a stream.

  The next day, as the sun rose to mid-morning, the landscape began to change. Towns were smaller and the farms fewer as the countryside became hillier and rockier, with only small groves of oaks crowning the heights. Ahead, hills tumbled up, punctuated by valleys through which ran streams of various sizes. Far away to the north, mountains reared their gray heads.

  The road, narrower now, kept on, winding into the higher country, cresting ridges and passing through the intermittent vales where there were villages and farms. Eventually, they came to a crossroads where the pavement ended in the center of a small village. Three gravelly tracks went out from this junction, one that went on into the north, toward the mountains, and two others that trended away east and west.

  The prince’s legate, a small, sour-faced man with curly dark hair named Gurn Avransen, led Captain Murlet and the column eastward. After passing over two ridges and through the grassy vales that lay between, they came to a narrow vale where several scattered farms had been burned and the houses and outbuildings razed, evidently the work of the invaders.

  Beyond this valley, the road climbed gradually up a shallow slope, topped with groves of oaks and outcroppings of rock. The column halted just below the crest of a rocky ridge where a small group of oaks had found purchase. The legate turned to Captain Murlet and indicated the top of the ridge to their front. “They are beyond that rise and the next vale,” he said, “but the top of the ridge in between is guarded.”