Enter the Lamb's Head (The Adventures of Ranthos Book 1)

by Jasper B. Hammer

  “Enough of that,” said Alrys, pulling a smile across his face, “I have you, your sister, and your butcher. Perhaps one day you three will join the Order.”

  Ranthos smiled, “I’d like that.”

  “Yes, cub. I as well,” said Alrys, his despair disappearing once again. Alrys showed Ranthos his shield, which bore a black-spotted white leopard—or perhaps a tatzelworm—with its claws buried in a human skull on a green field. The paint was chipped and old, and the shield bore many scars. “This is our coat of arms,” said Alrys, “This creature is the tatzelworm. See these spines along its back, the forked tongue, and the horns on his head?”

  Ranthos nodded, he assumed it was only stylized. “Why’s it called the Order of the Tatzelworm?”

  “Allegedly, our founder met the tatzelworm.”

  “Did he kill it?”

  “It might have killed him,” said Alrys with a smirk, “I’m not quite too sure.”

  Ranthos chuckled. It could have been the Tatzelhunter who founded the Order. Though Ranthos assumed that were the Order created by a Tatzelton native, it’d be called the Tatzelorder. They were much too lazy to use a four word title.

  “I think it was fate that I met a young hodge of such promise there in the Tatzelwood,” said Alrys, “Don’t you?”

  “Perhaps,” shrugged Ranthos, “Were you tracking the buck when you met me? Is that why you were at the Oakstop?”

  “I was there to kill flockers,” said Alrys, “There were some very powerful people in Tatzelton that needed to be stopped.”

  “Who?”

  “You wouldn’t know them,” said Alrys, “They weren’t locals. They had an outpost in the forest where they whipped some of the more violent townsfolk up into quite the frenzy.”

  Ranthos nodded. He had no idea. “Why did you kill Erhardt?”

  “I was scouting the outpost when he, Yannick, and his friend Wilbur spotted me. After I heard from the serving girl at the Oakstop that they had blamed you, I knew that I had to work fast. Sarky, Vhurgus, and I had to strike.”

  “What about the buck?”

  “Well,” said Alrys, “I had you for that, didn’t I?”

  Ranthos nodded, “I would have appreciated some help.”

  “So would I!” said Alrys, “There was much to do. We can put that dangerous business behind us. Everyone is safe now.”

  Ranthos nodded. “Why did they call you the Hexencaster?”

  Alrys laughed, “That would be on account of my sorcery. Keep up cub.”

  “Sorcery?!” said Ranthos, hurrying to match Alrys’ long strides, “You mean to tell me that you have all three types of magic?”

  “There are more than three,” said Alrys, “But yes. I’d be a lousy warrior if I didn’t gather up as much magic as I could, wouldn’t I?”

  “What do you do with your sorcery?”

  “That is a fascinating question that I myself have yet to answer in a satisfying way.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Alrys. If you do it, tell me how. I want to do it, too.”

  Alrys took a moment to think before answering, “Sorcery derives from the powers of the Weird. Do not approach the Weird carelessly, Ranthos. It is powerful magic that can rend the mind of the unprepared. Much of the Weird is wicked, though there are channels through which one can use it for good.”

  “Which are?”

  “Extremely dangerous and even more complicated. For your purposes, theromancy and blossom will serve you well enough.”

  “Can you teach me sorcery when I am strong enough?” asked Ranthos hopefully.

  “Of course,” said Alrys. “Speaking of magic…” he covered his nose as they neared the stench of rotting corpses. “Have your bow at the ready.”

  Ranthos contorted himself out of his pack and readjusted his quiver on his belt and double checked his bowstring. He might need a new one soon. “What for?” said Ranthos, “Are you expecting trouble?”

  Alrys removed his packs as well, and hid all three of them in the taller grasses.“I don’t know how many flockers are left at Sortie-on-the-Hill. Perhaps they’ve come back for the corpses… as they are wont to do.”

  Ranthos nodded, “Why do they do that?”

  “To please the Weird.”

  “Sorcery?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Alrys with a grin. He strapped his shield tight to his arm.

  “You’ll explain later?” Ranthos knocked an arrow.

  “Yes, I will.” Alrys practiced a swing with his mace.

  Ranthos was content, flinching as Alrys feinted a blow at his head.

  Cautiously, they approached the standing stone on the hill, where flockers’ weapons were lain out. No one had taken them. Interesting. The rot only grew stronger, and Ranthos readied himself to launch an arrow at any oncoming villains.

  He could hear blue-faced vultures squabbling over the meat, and he heard the distinct cackle of a hyena, and then another. “It sounds like there’s only scavengers here,” said Ranthos.

  Alrys nodded.

  They crested the hill, and looked down again at the horrible scene. The bodies strewn across the field were covered in long-legged, blue-faced vultures who puffed their feathers at each other, fighting over the trunk and the beast’s innards. Ranthos counted ten—eleven hyenas. They looked like mangy dogs, or huge weasels. They had round ears, wide mouths, spotted hides and stubby hind legs. They would cackle and laugh as they rolled around in the carcasses. It was sickening.

  Ranthos’ lip curled as he watched the scavengers greedily hoard the rotten flesh.

  A hyena noticed them, and sounded a yip, and the rest poked their heads up at Ranthos and Alrys, who raised his shield in front of him. Ranthos saw him tense, and held his bow out in front of himself, ready to draw and fire if any made a dash towards them.

  He’d seen hunters lose their hands—and worse—to hyenas who wanted their catch. The one time Ranthos had encountered them, he backed away and let the pack take whatever he had killed.

  Alrys cast an eye toward Ranthos, “We’ll have to scare them away from the bodies—“

  “Are you mad?!” Ranthos interjected. “There’s at least twelve.”

  “We’ve got to work on your counting, cub.”

  Ranthos scowled, “Are these bodies that important?”

  Alrys nodded, without a word.

  Ranthos saw that he had struck a nerve. “Alright,” he said, “How do we do it?”

  “It’s fairly simple,” said Alrys.

  “That’s good!”

  “Stare the big one down until she runs away.”

  “What.”

  The hyenas seemed to get bored and returned to scavenging.

  “Lock eyes—“

  “I heard you.”

  “Then what’s your problem?”

  “I thought maybe we could make loud noises—“

  “That wouldn’t work.”

  “This doesn’t seem to be any smarter.”

  “Are you a hodge?”

  “I am.”

  “Alfar are apex predators, above even humans.”

  “Does that mean alfar eat—“

  “Sometimes. But not all alfar eat people.”

  “Oh…”

  “Animals are more afraid of alfar than they are of humans.”

  “I’m only half—“

  “Hasn’t stopped me.”

  “Then you do it.”

  “Do you want to learn or not?”

  “…”

  Alrys clapped his shoulder, took his bow—

  Took his bow?! Ranthos snatched it back. “Alrys there is no way—“

  “They don’t understand weapons. They know teeth. Show them your teeth.” Alrys backed away from the hyenas—who hadn’t stopped staring.

  “My teeth?! I want my bow.” Ranthos followed Alrys a few steps back, smelling the anxious hyenas behind him.

  Alrys yanked the bow from Ranthos’ hands. “Show me your teeth.”

  Ranthos smiled.


  “Angrily.”

  Ranthos snarled. It was awkward. He flushed.

  Alrys inspected his teeth from a few angles. “Not bad… You’ve got decent incisors.”

  “What are those?”

  “The four sharp teeth you have. Alfish incisors are longer than humans. Open your mouth a little.”

  Ranthos did.

  “Smaller.”

  Ranthos adjusted.

  “Snarl.”

  Ranthos did. He didn’t like this.

  “Gooooooooood.” Alrys shoved him forward; Ranthos caught his foot on a stone, and tumbled down the hill.

  31

  Predominantly Scavengers

  Ranthos scraped his knee, then his arm, then hit his side on some hard sheep bones. “Scut,” he moaned breathlessly as dust clouded his vision—kicked up by thirteen rushing hyenas.

  Flickering shadows passed over his eyes as the vultures took to the sky.

  The hyenas cackled and howled their calls at him like some deranged performance. Ranthos pulled himself to his feet, but his hand slipped on the slick corpse of the sheep and a hyena caught his foot in its mouth.

  His face slammed against the side of the once-cursed sheep corpse—like hitting a hardwood floor with a thin rug.

  Ranthos snapped his attention to the hyena gnawing on his foot, face pressing against the gnarled fleece. He kicked and shouted at the beast, who thrashed its body around madly.

  An onlooking hyena seemed to cackle, and feinted a snap at Ranthos’ arm. Ranthos pulled his arms close against his body so that none of them could quickly snatch away a piece of him.

  Ranthos’ boot did little to protect his foot from the jaws of the hyena, though he felt little pain —likely a result of the sudden frenzy. He’d be hurting like Hell if he lived through this. Ranthos curled himself up and pummeled the face of the hyena on his foot, to little use. Ranthos beat at its head rapidly, but the thing’s bristly hide and thick skull hurt Ranthos’ hand more than he hurt it.

  The remainder of the pack circled around Ranthos menacingly, yammering in their crazed language, their dull eyes trained on him as they paced. Every moment or two a braver hyena would charge towards him—but most seemed content to wait out Ranthos’ current duel.

  Ranthos heard his bones snap. He roared at the hyena and crashed his free boot down on its face.

  The hyena suddenly smelled scared, opened its jaws, and scurried back to the pack, only to be met with punishing bites from his compatriots.

  Ranthos seized this opportunity to stand, and shifted his weight off his bloody foot, which—if anyone asked Ranthos—began to hurt way too early. Couldn’t he have a few moments before noticing?

  Alrys, back up the hill clapped and cheered. “Gooooooooood!”

  Ranthos sneered up at him angrily.

  Alrys pointed behind Ranthos, prompting him to turn around just in time to kick away his next challenger. The small hyena fell to the ground and scrambled off to be reprimanded by the pack. Brutal creatures.

  Ranthos surmised that they were certainly not hunting him, for if they were, he would be long dead. This must have been some sort of challenge, perhaps something to do with determining social standing within the pack.

  Instinctually, Ranthos snarled at the next challenger, but instead of fleeing, this one fainted a few snaps of its wide, drooling mouth, and feigned a charge.

  Ranthos took a step towards it and bared his teeth in response, only barely preventing the beast from biting him. Each time Ranthos growled, the hyena would back away the slightest bit.

  The hyena snapped a handful more times, and Ranthos replied similarly, narrowly dodging more wounds. The hyena yapped and yammered, and Ranthos rolled a growl in his nose.

  Ranthos was deathly afraid, and felt like his primal nature had taken complete control, or at least given him some instinctual guidance.

  The challenger finally began to feel the hints of fear, while the pack behind it smelled thoroughly entertained, and more than a little hungry.

  The challenger took a deep breath and swelled up enough bravery to make another charge at Ranthos, this time aiming for his crotch. Ranthos caught its mouth with his hands and was thrown onto his back. The hyena’s jaws were certainly much more powerful than Ranthos’ hands, so he had only one option to prevent it from tearing his arms apart.

  The hyena’s breath fell onto Ranthos’ face, coppery and warm, and its drool flew out of its mouth wildly as it shook its head.

  Ranthos shoved his hand deeper into the hyena’s mouth, as its teeth tore into his flesh. Ranthos balled his fist around the beast’s tongue, and pushed his hand further inside the beast. Ranthos gripped the hyena’s torn ear with his other hand to gain some measure of control over its head.

  The hyena yelped and whined, and as soon as Ranthos began to pull on its tongue, it released its grip, Ranthos threw its head off his arm and slammed it against the ground. Ranthos straddled it, still holding the tongue and the ear. The beast smelled fully afraid now, and the edges of Ranthos’ vision began to darken.

  This had happened to him before, in Tatzelton when he saw the smoke coming from his house, or when he was on the run from Yannick and Wilbur.

  The next moments were flashes: the feeling of a tongue ripping out of a mouth, a staggering hyena, pouring blood from its teeth, bristly hair against his arms, and more hot drool on his hands. There may have been two more challenging hyenas, or perhaps there were three—Ranthos couldn’t tell.

  By the time he was fully aware of his surroundings, he was panting, crumpled on all fours. His rotten side hurting only slightly less than his broken foot. His hairy forearms were lacerated with more cuts and scrapes of teeth, and his jaw felt sore.

  Alrys hands laid him onto his good side and his voice said softly, “Well done cub, that was a Hell of a fight. Hell of a fight indeed.”

  Ranthos looked up at Alrys, “Really?" He certainly didn’t feel like a Hell of a fighter, and couldn’t shake the pit in his stomach. His hands felt dirty—caked with something evil. He smelled his own guilt almost as strongly as the rot around him. Ranthos hardly knew what he had done, but it felt wrong. He felt like he had broken some law, he had disobeyed some code.

  He’d killed countless creatures, but every kill previous felt somehow fair. Like he had earned the beast’s death, and like its death had some purpose.

  “What happened?” asked Ranthos timidly.

  Alrys pulled off his boot and rolled up his pant to reveal another atvyyrk on his leg, blue and gray, with the designs of the stone, though from his ankle and up the back of his calf, it was covered in Blossom’s healing moss, growing on his body like it was a stone in the Tatzelwood. “What happened was you gave the pack the scare of a lifetime.” Alrys removed a pinch of the moss and began placing it inside Ranthos’ forearm. It grew and stitched his wounds closed warmly, the glowing buds sprouting as the moss gathered more blood into itself. “Take your shoe off for me, Ranthos cub.”

  Ranthos kicked it off with his other foot, and Alrys began repairing it with some more moss. “Did I kill—”

  “You killed one, cub.”

  Ranthos nodded, and felt sick to his stomach.

  “I understand how you must feel.”

  “I’m alright.”

  Alrys creased his brow.

  “This moss is a deal smellier than the moss used before,” said Ranthos, deflecting.

  Alrys chuckled, “That is correct, cub. I didn’t want any moss eating the soil in my arm faster than your seed, so you get this for today.”

  “I didn’t see you grab any.”

  “I didn’t show you that I did.”

  Ranthos shrugged, and finally felt well enough to stand. “How long should I keep this on?”

  “Your arms should be fully healed by now, and your foot may take a few hours. I think the bone is broken.”

  Ranthos agreed, and picked the withered moss off his forearms, which left behind a number of jagged scars—as if Ranth
os needed more of those. “I won’t forget today for a long while.”

  “Cover them up with atvyyrk,” said Alrys.

  Ranthos nodded, pinching the hard skin between his fingers. It was almost as odd as the scar on his lip which he could feel with his tongue. Some wound from the buck had cut the whole way through. Ranthos now had more scars than he could count and it had only been what? Two weeks? Perhaps less. He wasn’t very good at counting.

  “You look good with scars, cub.”

  “Thank you…” Ranthos trailed off as he saw the corpse of the hyena he had killed, lying in the dust motionlessly, a pool of blood around its lolled mouth. Ranthos’ hands, now clean of all blood, felt sticky with saliva. He couldn’t take his eyes off the hyena, but tried to clean his hands on his trousers.

  Alrys had to have smelled whatever Ranthos felt. And placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Do you want to talk?”

  He did, but he hardly knew what to feel, much less what to say.

  Alrys apparently didn’t need a response from him. “It wasn’t you.”

  “It wasn’t anyone else.”

  “You weren’t conscious.”

  Ranthos turned back to him.

  “Everything got dark and…” Alrys tried to figure a way to explain it, but stopped midway because he realized Ranthos understood already. “Alfar call it kafjokll.”

  “Kafjokll?”

  “Fury.”

  Ranthos nodded. It was a fitting description. “Why does it happen to me? It only started happening to me very recently too. I don’t understand it…” Ranthos didn’t feel like himself when it happened—he felt like he had lost himself in those moments of fury, that he was given away to some animal. Before now, it never troubled him. He never did anything wrong with it.

  Though, Ranthos couldn’t decipher what exactly felt so wrong about killing an attacking hyena.

  “It happens to many alfar—or hodges for that matter—with extreme personalities. I was explaining this to your sister after you had fallen asleep in the moss, she has another uniquely alfish talent called ‘grsk’ which doesn’t have a precise definition in our language, but means ‘connection’ most roughly.”

  “She connected with the barruses and the horse,” said Ranthos.