by David Guymer
Trenloe turned to Dremmin who produced her nastiest smile and winked.
“Head on, lad. I can bed us and feed us well enough and there’ll be no real work discussed up there.” With a jerk of her head, she gestured with inhuman certainty to where Hernfar’s keep presumably loomed in the mist. “She probably just wants to shake your hand and tell all her friends back in Archaut how she met a real-life hero.”
Chapter Six
Kurt
Gwellan, South East Kell
“They came right out from the forest. Bold as daylight.”
Holger Thorenburgher spoke with the air and manner of one who’d pronounced on this dark omen – or dark omens much like it – more than once before, but wouldn’t be so vulgar as to make meat of it now. With the livestock markets empty, the magistrates closed up, and foot traffic through the town’s wooden gate going all the wrong way, the aged timbers of the Black Lamb were one of the few places in Gwellan where folk could still congregate for news. This, despite the emptying of the town, they continued to do in some number, since Holger was to gossip as a high priestess of Aris was to alms for the poor. The stout chestnut bar was his altar, the greasy apron his chasuble, and the spit-rag and tankard in his meaty hands his scepter and rod.
Most soldiers were natural gossips. Anything to escape the dullness of their own day-to-day routines. But Holger’s morbid fascination with recent events put Kurt’s nose out of joint.
“Ain’t natural,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Ain’t right. The Downs is for folk like us as works the soil, and the forest is for the tree spirits and the fae and the dragon half-breeds that old Baron Roland, may he rest easy at Basin’s bottom, weren’t able to kill. Something in the forest has kept their numbers up, they say, made them grow bold and strange. More alike to the old ghosts of the wood than the dragons of the Molten Heath. A man who enters so far as to gather deadwood or hunt for small game will be paying the forest back tenfold in the end.”
Nodding heads greeted this statement.
Woe betide him or her who failed to concur with Holger under his own roof.
“The Greyfox is one of those Primalists as still worships the spirits in the Howling Giant Hills, I’m telling you. Leastways that’s my reckoning on it, you can take it or not. She’s bargained with the wood for a share of its powers, the old sorcery of the elder world, and all our lives is the price she’s promised in return. Either that or our allegiance to the wood.”
A fearful, angry muttering swept about the crowded taproom as Holger stuffed the rag into his apron’s breast pocket, set down the metal tankard, and crossed his big, heavily tattooed arms across the bar top.
“What do you say on it, Stavener? You’re closer to the forest than anyone, except for when Yorin is in his hut up in Latwood.”
The muscles across Kurt’s jaw twitched as he battled the urge to brain the man against his own bar. “I don’t know how you do it, Holger. Really, I don’t. All I asked from you is if you knew anyone with sheep to sell. That’s all.”
“What good’ll sheep do you now?” called a drinker from his long trestle.
“Aye,” said another. “S’like feeding a bear and hoping it don’t take your hand.”
“You’ll not find anyone selling,” muttered a third.
“Not unless you’re looking to buy from the Greyfox,” said Yorin, bleakly.
The old woodland ranger was fetched up against the far end of the bar with his boots up on a stool, dressed in a tough outfit of dark browns and pale grays with a feathered hat on the counter beside him. Kurt had known of him from the army, a Darkland Ranger for Dame Ragthorn of Hernfar, and apparently a good one, but he was more often to be found in the Black Lamb these days, or laid out somewhere nearby to it.
“Everyone with land north of Gwellan got hard hit,” said Holger. “Most of them were through here before joining the west road, and not a one of them had aught but the clothes on their backs. We’ve not seen days like these since Margath the Unkind led his dragons here during the Third Darkness. Something big is coming. Something bad. You tell me now if you think I’m wrong.”
“You ain’t wrong,” someone dutifully answered.
Sarb leant along the bar to nudge Kurt’s arm. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have left Elben in the house on his own.”
“He’ll be all right,” Kurt whispered back. It was half a day’s gentle riding to the farmstead from Gwellan and it wasn’t often that he would leave Elben there alone. Ordinarily he would have brought his younger son with him and left Sarb to mind the dogs. Elben loved the bustle of the town. Like his mother had. Almost as much as Sarb hated it. But there’d been nothing else for it. Kurt needed to replace his lost animals if they were going to see the winter through and he didn’t think much of the idea of letting Sarb out of his sight. The boy was still hot from the previous night. The odds of him getting it into his head to do something rash like setting out to track the Greyfox into the Whispering Forest were uncomfortably high. “Provided we can find someone who’ll sell to us we can be home again by dawn. And in any case, I doubt the Greyfox will be back any time soon.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because there’s nothing left for her to have.”
Sarb slumped over his elbows, staring sullenly at the counter.
“We should fight back,” he muttered after a while.
“With what?” said Holger, overhearing. “The baron’s no help. Dame Ragthorn can’t, or won’t, with the Uthuk stirring again in the east. And Sheriff Jolsyn is, well…” He picked his tankard back up off the counter and resumed polishing. “She’s as handy as a cup with no bottom isn’t she?”
“We’d do it ourselves,” said Sarb. “That’s what the Greyfox did, isn’t it? Take hungry and desperate folk and bitter old soldiers and turn them into an army?”
“Speaking of bitter old soldiers,” said Holger, raising an eyebrow, “what did you do in the army, Stavener?”
“Sing a lot of songs,” said Kurt, to a smattering of laughs.
“She took herself half of Kell,” said Sarb, angrily, banging on the counter with his fist. “All I’m saying is we defend Gwellan properly and patrol the downs.”
“And why not run the Greyfox to her den in the forest and dig her out while you’re at it?” said Kurt.
Heads around the taproom nodded.
“And why not?” Sarb countered. “If the forest spirits have already sold the bandit queen their powers then there’s nothing left to fear from the woods.”
Elben had withdrawn a lot since his mother’s death. He barely spoke of her. Sarb was just angry. Kurt frowned.
Why oh why couldn’t he have grieved more like Elben?
“It’s two thousand years since the Locust Swarm brought Darkness to Kell,” said Kurt. “As far as I can figure it nothing worse has hit Terrinoth since that Terrinoth didn’t somehow do to itself. Waiqar was the great hero of the day before becoming Waiqar the Undying. And the Third Darkness was the Dragonlords’ punishment for the hubris of the Elder Kings, or so the stories tell it, so don’t be so keen on being the savior of Kell.”
Sarb swore under his breath, imaginatively enough for his father to wonder who he’d been speaking to, but made no argument.
Kurt turned his attention back to Holger
“I’ve a ton of work waiting for me back home. A roof to mend and Fortuna only knows how many bodies lying in my yard to be buried. I know you know everyone and everything around here.”
Holger massaged his chins. “It might be I know of someone looking to move some pigs. They’d help you with that other job of yours as well.”
“Sheep,” said Kurt.
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Kurt looked down and muttered. “Katrin always liked sheep.”
Holger fell quiet a moment.
Sarb got up without say
ing anything and walked away.
“I don’t know the first thing about pigs,” Kurt mumbled.
“I don’t know the first thing about people and yet here we both are. Anyways pigs is all he’s got. Take ’em or leave ’em.”
The sound of raised voices reached through the stout oak of the Black Lamb’s door. A few heads turned towards it as Kurt slid a brown coin across the bar.
Holger picked it up and held it to one of the yellowish beams light that fell through the holes in the thatch. “Not been through the Greyfox’s paws yet. Traders from the north don’t much like her coins. Best they start getting used to ’em, I reckon.”
“Where can I find these pigs?”
“The old livestock market up top. Hoping some fool like you’ll show up. A friend of mine, Pranten, is looking to take the road west and with coin enough in his pocket to buy passage on to Fort Rodric, so he’ll sell if you offer him twice what they’re worth.”
Kurt sighed, then nodded.
“Fine.”
“And what’ll you do when the Greyfox comes for more?”
“That’s not your problem.”
“So that’s it, is it?” said Yorin, still slumped back with his feet up. “Your own first and everyone else never?”
“Isn’t that why Baron Fredric sent us both home?” Kurt shot back.
The ranger stared at something invisible in the hanging dust. “Maybe we’d all be better off with the Greyfox.”
Holger frowned, and the inn fell into an uncomfortable quiet.
It was the familiar sound of a large group of people neither openly condoning, nor entirely condemning, something that even a day or two ago would have been unspeakable.
“To the bandit queen,” someone said, raising their cup.
A few folk drank.
Yorin himself just stared sullenly into his.
“Well, I’ll leave you all to it,” said Kurt, getting up and looking around for Sarb. The boy was nowhere to be seen. The door was open and a couple of men were huddled either side of the frame, out of the cold and the drizzle, and peering onto some kind of a kerfuffle outside. It didn’t take him long to figure out where Sarb had got too. “My son the hero,” he muttered as he pulled on his old coat, picked up his old bow, and stepped out into the rain.
Chapter Seven
Andira Runehand
Gwellan, South East Kell
Andira staked her long poleaxe into the earth and lowered herself to the road. Her knee plate squelched into the thick mud, filth and grime sliding from the blued dwarf-forged steel like water from an oiled sheet. She held out her hand, wincing in familiar pain as the rune inscribed into her palm crackled to life. A ghostly yellow light glowed through the blood and skin of her hand, showing through the back as a cross, or perhaps a sword, bound within an incomplete circle.
The Gwellan townsfolk who had been watching her and her entourage of pilgrim-soldiers with fear started fleeing up the hill road and screaming of sorcery the moment the first rays spilled from her hand.
Andira did her best to ignore them. She always expected a little unease when she exercised her rune-powers, but her first impression of the Kellar was that they were a more-than-usually suspicious and mage-fearing lot. She approved, although their fear was regrettable. There was a good chance that she would need local guides if she was to pursue her quarry across this unfamiliar northern territory.
With a grunt of effort and another flare of pain, she returned her focus to the rune, tracing the lower half of the circle with her mind. Harnessing the bound magic of a rune required no special talent. That was what made them so sought after, and so valuable, but only an expert runemaster had the expertise to manipulate the components of the rune shape to enact the full spectrum of effects. That Andira was capable of such feats told her that she had once been rune-trained. Perhaps. But how, where, or when such a time in her life had come about, she had no recollection at all.
Through eyes limned with runic sunlight, she blinked and saw the town anew.
“What do you see?” asked Sir Brodun, her protector, a billion leagues away by her side.
“The Ynfernael...”
The clouds above the town were thick and torn, the yellow of bad blood and wreathed in multicolored fires that would burn without end. The spikes of the town’s stockade grew lengthy. Teeth sprouting from a demonic mouth, splintered and bleached, as if by hard acid, even as the world about it became dark. The fleeing townsfolk were shades caught in tar, wriggling worm-things about which ragged crow-things flocked like starving birds for an after-storm glut. The Ynfernael was the plane that existed parallel to and below the mortal realm of Mennara, a world where hatred and prejudice were physical things and where demons dwelt in a constant state of war. Words of some sort rumbled through its tormented sky like the echo of another world’s thunder. Andira could not understand them. The language of the Ynfernael was spoken not with the consonants and vowels of human speech, but in torment and horror.
She shuddered, her fingers stiff as mummified claws as she folded them in, dousing the rune again. She blinked, her mortal sight retuning slowly.
Hamma Brodun was holding her shoulder steady.
The former knight was a large man, and a hard one, his features coarsened by a grizzle of white hair. His breastplate was dinted and absent any knightly heraldry. His long-sleeved coat of mail, while at least as old as he was, was immaculately kept and oiled. In one hand he carried Andira’s holy standard. In the other he led a dirty gray horse with the off-hand ease of second nature. He was the only one amongst Andira’s procession of pilgrim-soldiers to possess one. Out of humility, however, he seldom rode. Sir Brodun had forsaken his rank and its privileges, sold off his holdings to outfit her in arms and armor, and given his ancestral seat in Carthridge to the Church of Kellos, much to the chagrin of a few disinherited heirs and an embittered wife, of whom he spoke little.
Andira did not recall much about their first meeting as it was the earliest memory that she had. They had fought, she knew, for apparently she had strayed into a tomb complex that lay under his family’s protection and he had mistaken her for a Mistlands grave-witch. She had won.
His hand was on the hilt of his sword as he stared at her hard in the eye.
“Andira?”
She gave a weak smile and nodded. “It is still me, Hamma.”
The knight’s grip on his sword loosened. He did not, however, remove his hand. “You have been looking too far and too often into the Ynfernael. The demon will start to take notice.”
After recruiting her first pilgrim-soldier in Sir Brodun, Andira had wandered aimlessly for a time: silencing a restless wight here, driving a wyrm from a ruin there. But she had always been certain that she had a destiny. How else to explain the power she had acquired given that she had no memory of obtaining it? All she needed to do was keep going, keep fighting, and eventually it would reveal itself. It had done so quite by chance, while exploring the demon-tainted ruins of Sudanya in northern Frest, where she had vanquished the demon lord Prutorn, and learned the name of Baelziffar, its master.
Now, she felt her purpose.
“We gain on him,” she said, rubbing at the back of her hand as pain settled down and became one more ache. “My sense of him grows. There are times when I feel as though I can almost glimpse him. The Ynfernael is a distinct plane but one that parallels our own from beyond the veil. He strikes north from his domains over Sudanya, marching his legions towards another site of power twinned with somewhere in Kellar, I am certain of it.”
“That could explain the rumors of Uthuk rising in the east?” said Hamma, still the soldier, even after two decades of restless questing.
Andira nodded. The Uthuk Y’llan had consorted with demons for so long that every aspect of their culture had become corrupted by it. When nightmares racked the Ynfernael, it was the tribes of
the Charg’r Wastes who woke screaming. “And the banditry and famine we have heard of as well. Be vigilant.”
Hamma grunted and nodded ahead. “I’m always vigilant.”
Townsfolk with the look of provincial marshals, outfitted in stiff wools and boiled leather, armed with a rough assortment of axes and staffs and the infamous Kellar short spear, were filling up the road ahead of them. Some gestured towards Andira. The word “sorcery” appeared on several mouths, and a stranger one, “Greyfox”, on others. They seemed in no hurry for violence, however. The majority of Andira’s pilgrims were clad in nothing more threatening than old robes and sandals. A few carried bows, and a talented handful that Hamma had begrudgingly trained bore swords, although they would storm the Black Citadel of Llovar itself if Andira were to lead them, and feared neither hardship nor pain. But at two hundred strong, with dragon runes inked onto their faces in imitation of the one that Andira had unwittinly branded onto Hamma Brodun in their first encounter, they were an intimidating force for any peasant militia.
“Long have I yearned to see the legendary Shield of Daqan,” said Hamma, with a sour flourish. “The embodiment of martial excellence. The great defenders of the east.”
“Strength comes in many guises. Do not be so quick to judge.”
Hamma gave an idle shrug, his hand still light on his sword hilt as the crowd ahead of them continued to grow. “Who’s this Greyfox they’re in such terror of?”
“I do not know.”
The knight turned to her. “Is it you?”
Andira turned her gaze inward, but her memory of her life before the rune was empty, a blank wall without pictures. “I… do not know that either.”
Hamma sighed. “All the ground we’ve covered, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.”
Leaving her poleaxe stuck in the ground Andira held up her hands. The townsfolk took a collective step back, warding themselves with the protective sigils of Kellos, Aris, and lesser deities that either Andira did not know or whose symbols the townsfolk drew incorrectly.