There were stories of darkings occasionally slaying princes that withstood their wishes, but it was generally believed that they preferred humans to slay one another, either in singular acts of betrayal or en masse upon the field of battle.
It was as if the pleasure that the species derived from the death and misery they visited upon humankind was relished to a higher extent when that death and misery was inflicted by humans upon one another rather than by the darkings themselves. What they gained from such foul spectatorship, other than a sort of sick pleasure, no one knew.
It was as if the darkings had come – or had been created by some evil and unknown entity – solely to engender war, death, and ruin upon the earth.
Pulling on Noris’ reins, Brenyn guided the horse back into position in the second rank and the darkings passed from his view behind the line of trees.
Prince Taumus had suspected a darking would appear.
But had he suspected that a darking lord would appear? It was doubtful. Few of that higher order of the creatures, evidently, existed, and few were ever seen.
Yet one was here, today.
For a time, as the armies prepared their lines for imminent engagement – with the distraction of the two darkings drawing the eye of every soldier and greatly hindering those processes, Brenyn considered what he would do.
Prince Taumus, unquestionably, had asked that Brenyn be present in the event a darking should appear, though the prince had also stated that he expected nothing from Brenyn.
Brenyn closed his eyes as doubts flooded his mind. True, he had once caused the death of a darking – how, he could not say – but could he cause the death of a darking lord? How much power did a darking lord possess in relation to a lesser darking? Would his mother’s magic, should it awaken, suffice to destroy such a potent creature? Or would Brenyn himself be slain instead?
He had long desired to confront another of that foul species, and now, two of them were here on this day. Should he abandon his place in line and go to face them? While he agonized over this decision, a memory intruded upon his mind. It had been a darking lord, accompanied by a black darking, that had taken Emi.
Were these two the darkings that had come into Vicundium and stolen Emi away? Darkings were rare, by every account, and darking lords even rarer, much rarer. How often, he wondered, did the creatures travel in tandem? – a darking and its lord? Had he been given an opportunity to confront those that had taken Emi?
It was entirely possible that he would perish beneath the assault of such a powerful being. Even so, despite such misgivings, as Brenyn pondered the possibility that these two darkings might be the same that had taken Emi from him, a hard, ice-cold purpose sprang to life and strengthened inside him, becoming irrepressible.
A terrible fury – and cold determination – came with it.
He opened his eyes and looked over at Jed as he extended Noris’ reins. “Hold him,” he told Jed. “And see that he goes to the rear should battle develop ere I return.”
Jed frowned in surprise. “Where are you going, Bren?”
Brenyn shook his head. “There is something I must do. Fear not; I will return. Will you watch Noris for me?”
Jed, yet frowning in confusion, nodded. “Of course.”
Brenyn dismounted and slid his bow over his head and hung it from the horn of the saddle. Then, bearing only his sword, shield, and dagger, he hurried to the left behind the rear of the mercenary band and entered the trees. Once inside the concealing woodland, he went straight toward the east, down the sloping forested hillside toward the northern tributary valley, the broad green openness of which he could see below him through the trees.
When he came to the edge of the trees, he halted and looked to his right. The darkings yet sat their mounts on the knoll, perhaps three hundred paces distant, the darking lord positioned slightly in front of its companion. They were gazing west, toward the valley proper, along the lines of the opposing armies.
He examined the ground to his front. There was a fence that ran from the verge of the trees and down the gentle slope toward the stream. This fence was lined with brush and saplings and would conceal his movements until he crossed the stream, turned to his right, and began to climb the hill where the darkings sat.
Brenyn drew in a deep breath, summoned his courage, and left the woodland, striding along the brush-lined fence. Coming to the stream, the northern tributary, a few dozen paces from where it made confluence with the second stream to the south, he waded the shallow current, turned back to his right, and began to climb the grassy slope toward the darkings, who for the moment were concealed behind a small rise in the intervening ground.
After a few more paces, he evidently came into the view of the gathered armies, for he heard a murmur arise from behind him, a sound of shock and alarm that emanated from a thousand throats.
He did not look back toward the congregated belligerents, for the darkings also saw him as he cleared the small intervening rise and began to angle up toward their position upon the knoll.
The two heads, with their tall hats and white-masked faces, turned as one toward him.
Seeing their gaze upon him, Brenyn halted.
The black eyes glinted in the holes in the masks that covered their faces as they watched him. Neither moved.
A thrill of warning chilled Brenyn’s blood as he gazed back at the two sets of malevolent eyes that studied him.
Several moments passed.
Still the darkings did not move.
Nor did Brenyn.
Between Brenyn and the hilltop where the creatures sat, unmoving, upon their mounts, there arose a small secondary knoll. Steeling himself to move, Brenyn climbed to the top of this small rise and halted once more, facing them. He thought of drawing his sword but then reconsidered, wanting to see if they would speak to him before any threatening action occurred.
They were within earshot now.
Brenyn drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“I am from a land that is called Vicundium,” he said then. “It is in the far north of the world. Three years gone, two of your kind came into that land and took a young human woman away. Were those that came to that land and took her away the two of you?”
There was no answer.
The darkings did not move, nor speak, but their unblinking, menacing gaze remained fixed upon him.
The sun rose higher.
Behind Brenyn, the two armies, facing each other across the river valley, had fallen into astonished silence as they watched the stunning tableau of a single man confronting two darkings playing out upon the hill to the east. Silence seemed to have overspread the earth. The only sound was the soft susurration of the breeze as it moved among the grasses.
Angered by the darkings’ silence, Brenyn determined to ask once more.
“Did the two of you take a human woman from the land of Vicundium? Answer me.”
Silence.
Fury coalesced inside Brenyn.
“Answer me,” he demanded, “or die.”
At that, the darking lord made a small, quiet staccato sound that might have been laughter. Then, it spoke.
“You think to slay me, human?” It sounded mildly amused, and its voice was low, quiet, and frighteningly cold, like the sound rendered by the winds of winter moving through the branches of dead, gray trees. Once more, it produced the sound that might have been laughter.
“I was old a hundred years before the vermin that produced you were born,” it told him, “and I will yet be alive after you have been dead for another hundred years.”
Brenyn reached up and drew his sword. “Nay,” he answered harshly, “for you will die here, today.”
Silence fell again for a moment and then Brenyn raised his shield, held his sword at the ready, and moved forward.
The darking lord lifted its right hand.
Its black-clad companion did the same.
In the darking lord’s hand there was a cylinder, perhaps two fee
t in length, that gleamed dully in the bright sun of morning.
It pointed that cylinder at Brenyn.
Its companion aimed its weapon as well.
“Udethi-ez ferio,” the crimson-caped darking said.
A massive eruption of black, like vaporous lightning, issued from the end of the cylinder in the darking lord’s hand. A bolt of raw power, it sizzled toward Brenyn, as precipitous as a lightning stroke, and was joined by the lesser eruption of the second darking.
In that terrifying instant, while the bolt of power closed the distance, Brenyn sought his being for a surge of protecting magic.
None came.
The brightness of the sun overhead seemed in that moment to recoil before the onslaught of the darking’s black power.
Brenyn dropped into a crouch and tried to make himself small behind the protection of his shield.
The bolt of power struck him hard, driving him back, nearly toppling him down off the slope of the hill. Driving the heels of his boots into the soft, grassy soil, Brenyn held on, though only just.
The burst of the darking lord’s assault, combined with that of its servant, surged irresistibly around the edges of the shield, and found Brenyn’s flesh.
Viciously cold, it brought hideous pain with it.
Brenyn gasped as the cold began to eat deeply into his flesh, into his head, his shoulders, his knees and feet. Pain overwhelmed him. His sight failed; the world went dark.
And in that moment, he knew that he would die.
The pain was devastating, unbearable.
Time seemed to falter in the presence of such agony.
His mind darkened before the horrific onslaught.
And then… time truly faltered.
The breeze lay down and died, the sun dimmed.
Time shuddered to a stop.
Brenyn went numb; his senses failed; the pain remained but did not grow.
It seemed to him that he had died, for the world and all its sound and movement ceased, and there was a great silence.
It was as if, somewhere deep in the heart of the earth, the machinery of creation had ground to a halt.
And in that moment of nothingness, his power awakened.
Deep inside Brenyn’s being something fiercely hot came to life and rushed outward, speeding along the pathways of his nerves and through the conduits of his bloodstream. Racing outward, it drove the blackness of the darking’s power back, healing his flesh as it went, banishing the pain, expanding outside him and into the very air about him.
Inside his darkened eyes and mind a stunning illumination exploded, expelling the darkness.
The darking’s assault failed.
The cold and pain went away.
Time started once more and leapt forward, the sun abruptly brightened, and the breeze freshened in the tall grasses, enlivened by the fierce brightness that emanated from Brenyn.
The light that came from him rivalled the brightness of the emboldened sun of morning.
A hideous scream pierced the quiet.
And then another echoed the first.
A horse whinnied in pain and terror.
Brenyn, suddenly finding himself unmolested, lowered his shield, stood, and looked.
The lesser darking lay upon the top of the knoll, twisting and writhing, enveloped in black vapor that appeared to be rapidly consuming its body, shrieking as it perished in terrible agony. Near it, the darking lord, crimson cape seemingly deteriorating under an onslaught of smoke, struggled to its feet. Its hat was gone from its head, and the white mask that covered its face was no longer white but was instead a morass of blackness.
The darking lord found its feet and rose to its height, staring at Brenyn through the dark vaporous cloud that wreathed its head and shoulders, and then the blackness surged down over it to its feet and flared back upward again. The darking lord convulsed and let out a howl of torment. It began to shake and quiver, and then to jump, as if to escape the enveloping blackness. Its arms flailed wildly as it hopped about the hilltop in a gruesome dance of death.
After several moments of these macabre gyrations, with its body wreathed in blackness, emitting intermittent howls of agony, the lord’s body went rigid and it stood utterly still for a moment, like a smoking statue.
And then it toppled onto the grass.
It did not move again while the workings of its own power reduced it to nothing. A few paces to its left, the lesser darking was no more. A few small tendrils of gray vapor arose from the tall grass where it had fallen and been consumed.
Over to the right, galloping along the ridge to the southeast, the darking lord’s horse fled, racing into the distance. The other way, the lesser darking’s mount whinnied and bucked and then ran off in the direction of a distant farm where there were more horses grazing in a field.
Brenyn sheathed his sword and watched while the darking lord became no more than a dark stain upon the grasses of the knoll and wondered at the last few moments. The illumination that had arisen from the very depths of his being had thwarted the darkings’ onslaught of dark magic and then caused it to redound upon them, utterly consuming them as they had intended to do to him.
What was this power that dwelled inside him?
What caused it?
How had it come to be?
Despite the obvious destruction of the two darkings that he had just accomplished by the awakening of that power that lived within him, Brenyn knew no more now than before the attack.
It was clear that whatever magic dwelled within him, it was tremendous in power – to the extent of destroying a darking lord.
And yet he, its repository, understood it not.
Turning away, he pivoted toward the main river valley.
Thousands of pairs of eyes, from two lines of soldiers that faced each other across that valley, were trained on him.
There was utter silence.
The valley, fronted by two armies of several thousand men each, was so utterly quiet that the call of a hawk, high in the sky over to the south, sounded clear and shrill in the morning air.
Brenyn abruptly realized that he stood much closer to the enemy army than to the forces of Prince Taumus. The wings of the enemy army, consisting of a few hundred men mounted on horses, were no more than perhaps two hundred paces away. And just beyond the horsemen began the main line of the enemy infantry.
If those mounted men charged him en masse, he would be quickly and easily overwhelmed.
And they were all looking at him.
For one long moment, Brenyn and those men stared at one another.
Brenyn never knew what compulsion drove him to do what he did next. Perhaps it was rashness stimulated by the residue of the power that had surged through him minutes before. Or maybe it was simple anger at the fact that this army had come here to try and wreck that which Prince Taumus – a man Brenyn admired – was attempting to create in the midst of a world in ruin.
Without hesitating or considering further, he repositioned his shield, drew his sword once more, and moved purposefully toward the flanks of the enemy army.
For another moment, those horsemen at the very end of the enemy line stared in disbelief, and then, unwilling to face this man they had just seen destroy two darkings – one, a lord – they peeled off and began hastening toward the rear. When the cavalry melted away, the infantry, finding themselves exposed to a man who had destroyed two darkings, broke away as well and began to hurry off the field. Rank by rank, the enemy army began to withdraw.
Their commanders and princes, rather than rallying their troops, apparently decided that they, too, did not wish to confront the stranger – evidently a terrible and powerful wizard or sorcerer – that had proven himself deadly to magical creatures so far above their own station.
As the enemy began to abandon the field, Prince Taumus did not order his own army to pursue the retreating enemy host, but held his troops firmly in line, apparently deciding that a bloodless victory was preferable to carnage, eve
n when it favored him.
Brenyn watched the enemy army disappear over the hills to the south and then sheathed his sword and turned toward where Captain Murlet and his band waited upon the eastern wing of the army.
He waded the shallow river and climbed the slope. Silence yet held sway all along the line of troops that watched him come with widened, even frightened, eyes.
By the time he reached the position of Murlet’s band, Prince Taumus was there, seated upon his great gray-speckled horse out in front of Murlet and the others. He was accompanied by General Eizen and Captain Haish.
All those men watched Brenyn approach with astonishment evident upon their faces.
Brenyn came up to the prince where he halted, glanced over at Johan Murlet and Sergeant Kristo, and then he inclined his head to Prince Taumus.
“Your Highness.”
39.
Taumus studied him for a long moment in silence and then; “I have witnessed something this day that I shall never forget,” he stated. “I have seen the workings of your power, Brenyn Vagus, and find myself utterly astonished – and filled with hope. It seems that you have at last discovered how to employ that great power to slay the darkings.”
Brenyn considered that and then shook his head. “Nay, my lord, I have not discovered the how. I only know now that I can.”
Taumus’ forehead wrinkled with doubt. “I witnessed you destroy two of those creatures, Brenyn – one, a lord – and yet you know not how it was done? – even now?”
Brenyn shook his head. “Nay, my lord, I do not. Whatever power was bequeathed to me, it acts upon its own whenever I am in danger. I can neither summon nor restrain it.”
There was a moment of silence while the prince considered this, then;
“What will you do now?” Taumus asked. “Know this – you are welcome to join with me, Brenyn. Indeed, help rebuild my land and defend it from the darkings, and I will appoint you a prince in your own right.”
Another silence fell after this remarkable declaration, then, once more, with regret, Brenyn shook his head. “Thank you, Your Highness, but I recall your words – how that the time would come when the darkings would hunt me. I fear that time has now come. They will be now drawn to those about me, increasing the danger to others. I cannot allow it. Rather, now that I know that I can slay them, I will go and hunt them. I will hunt darkings, wherever they may be found, beginning here, in Merkland. I will remove them from all the lands that surround your principality.”
A Plague of Ruin: Book One: Son of Two Bloods Page 35
