by P D Dennison
The sun fell surprisingly fast over the tall cliff walls and it became dark in the pass even though midday had only just come and gone. The clearing seemed as good a place as any to set up camp. Several little clumps of pines and poplars grew in tiny glades intermingled with dry grass from the scant rain that found the bottom of the High Pass and dead fall littered the ground. The spot looked good for a campsite complete with firewood, and while the safety and defensive position of the clearing could be better, they would have to do. At least the two companions no longer remained confined to the narrow pass they’d spent the afternoon in.
Quiet, peaceful and serene with only the sound of the winds up top gently whistling down and the occasional cry of a hawk or an eagle to be heard echoing from somewhere up in the craggy cliffs above, the camp offered Ravak time to relax and reflect on the strange encounter he’d had at Deep Fiend Lake earlier in the day.
He munched on some dried venison and drank with it a healthy portion of water as he sat staring into the fire pondering what the creature could possibly be and how it had gone so long without being dealt with by the Winter Wolf. The legends told of the lake kept folk away and the odd sighting most likely only fed the rumors of how terrible the beast was. Travellers from the South didn’t help with the enormity of the myth of Deep Fiend Lake, but of course, if any of them had seen the beast drag a buck down into the deep as Ravak had, they’d be telling the terrible truth.
The meat was perfectly salted and dried. Still chewy and soft, not too tough and very satisfying.
He kept seeing flashes of the Deep Fiend in his mind while he unwound. He had no idea what the creature actually was, but he thought on it long and hard and decided it was one of the dead things Kadok, the shaman in his village had told them about in childhood tales of terror told of the Horror Hills around the great fire. Its eyes colored all pale purple while still slightly illuminated held the gaze of their victim. The old conjurer had told the children this was a tell tale sign of the dead things that walked, a remnant of the dark magic used to bring them back from the dead, a weak charm of sorts. He decided the creature must have been well fed as the witchdoctor had told them the dead eat the flesh of the living. He told them when they are starving, they begin to rot and pieces of flesh begin to fall from their bodies. The beast’s hide remained fully intact and felt leathery to the touch, save for the odd spot of decay. The Fiend also seemed to be in good health due to its incredible strength and remarkable speed. It had moved almost supernaturally.
Ravak spent the remaining hours of the evening refashioning the bridal Sleipner had torn earlier in the day and when finished, watched the dying embers of the fire dance as his eyes grew heavy until he finally decided to lay down and sleep.
He couldn’t have been out for more than what seemed five minutes when he awakened to cries of help clear as the stars above in the night sky. Sleipner became startled and let out a whinny. The cries came again, panicked and wailing as they grew closer. The sounds came echoing from the mouth of the pass the two companions had spent the afternoon in and Ravak assumed the worst. Some hapless soul had no doubt had an encounter with the Deep Fiend in the dark of the night and been surprised and seriously injured by the beast, but who could be out here besides himself and Sleipner? They’d seen no one on the trail to the north toward the Great Northern Plains from which they’d come, and no one had come past them from the south, unless they’d gotten by him in his sleep.
He threw a few logs on the fire and blew the coals hot again with the intent to shed a little light on the situation. If he had to fight that damned ghoul again, he’d be ready to take its head off this time and put an end to its reign of terror in the High Pass once and for all. The cries came once more. He heard them right inside the mouth of the pass. The voice of a terror stricken man, breathing heavily and crying out all at once, his voice and his panting echoing off the switchbacks within the pass as it led up to the clearing came echoing out of the chasm. He pulled a torch from the fire and walked to the edge of the firelight. His spear in one hand, his axes, his bow, and his quiver all strapped back on and ready for anything that might come out of the darkness.
He saw the face of the man appear first. He was bent and dragging something behind him. The man, in a complete state of panic, cried and slobbered uncontrollably. As he drew closer Ravak saw the filth covering the man. He’d been badly mauled. His head bled freely from a huge claw mark above his left ear that had left four flaps of skin hanging loosely with the appearance they would simply fall off leaving the man with a bare bone skull on the one side of his head. Ravak knew in an instant the man bore the mark of the Deep Fiend. He needed help if he was to survive the night. He dropped the torch and ran out to greet the man.
Ravak could now see the poor man dragged another person behind him. The body, badly mangled hung limp as it slid through the dust on the rocky floor of the High Pass, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. Ravak couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He grabbed the back half of the body and hoisted it off the ground and they trotted toward the firelight. The injured man limped heavily as he ran.
“Thank the gods you’re out here or we’d surely have fallen prey to that awful thing.”
The body was fairly light so Ravak guessed it must be a woman but the face, clawed savagely and bled freely. The swelling from the wounds made her all but unrecognizable. Bits of hair matted with coagulated blood, dirt and twigs stuck to her face and neck. He laid the body out on the rock next to the fire, placed a balled up rag under her head and handed the man a skin of water. Acting quickly he also tossed one of his axes down and told him to be ready as he turned around back toward the pass and headed outside the firelight toward the torch he’d dropped. Behind him, the man began to sob again, but handily grabbed for the axe.
“By the gods no, not again. Why is this happening to us?”
Ravak trotted silently toward his still burning torch. He came within about ten yards of the flame and saw a shadow on the far side of the torchlight quickly move to the left around the revealing light source and duck into one of the small thickets that studded the clearing. He stopped and backed up slowly before running into the revealing light of the flames himself. He hoped the creature had not seen his shadow pass in front of the flames behind him. Ravak ducked down and held his spear close as he trotted over to the thicket where the creature had run for cover. He moved with wolf-like stealth and silence as he swiftly closed the distance between himself and his prey.
Less afraid now than earlier in the day, Ravak felt he had an understanding of the creature and why it fought so brashly when he’d first encountered it. It had no fear of dying because it already knew death and when wounded, it quickly regenerated itself. The old witch doctor Kadok had told them the only way to truly finish the undead was to take their heads clean off.
The Winter Wolf Clan had actually captured lizards with similar regenerative powers and surgically removed the glands that secreted the regenerative hormone from the reptiles, but how could an undead creature have such powers? Kadok had never mentioned the dead regenerating. The shaman, through seasons of experimentation had come up with a potion, made from a suspension containing a concentration of the hormone, which would provide the same regenerative properties to a man when injured. A great boon to their medical treatment, it had saved many lives.
He refocused his thoughts on his prey and headed into the thicket. His eyes had now adjusted to the dark almost fully. He saw nothing moving about. Stopping fully for a moment and ducking down to wait for the sound of movement, he heard it. The beast was already two thickets over and moving toward the campsite rapidly. He could scarcely believe the beast had moved with such stealth. The creature would have to pass in front of the light being cast by the fire soon and when it did, Ravak would be ready.
Ravak headed back out into the clearing, running fast and hard along the thickets leaping over rock and boulder to gain ground. Every second would count now. He analyzed the terra
in in front of the campsite, illuminated by the firelight. A couple of larger bushes and rocks of various sizes, nothing to slow him down.
He saw the creature briefly as its shadow shot quickly in front of the firelight. He was sacrificing all stealth now for the sake of time to gain first strike.
Gulping down dry panicked breaths, he tried to steady his breathing. His heart pounded wildly. He knew he needed to be calm for the strike to be effective. He blinked long and slow, drinking in the cool night air as he did so, clearing his mind and slowing his breathing to match each stride the way his father had taught him to do when the exhilaration of the hunt sometimes overtakes the hunter. The brush moved ahead as he closed on his prey and out jumped the injured man scrambling, swinging wildly behind at the bushes, half screaming and half crying as he fled.
The creature revealed itself, stepping out into the light to give chase to the injured man as he jumped for the safety of some nearby shrubs. The ghoul caught him by the throat in mid air. Its dead eyes now looked much more brightly illuminated in the dark of the night. Its scaly skin glowing faintly orange as it reflected the firelight. The injured man fought for his life, kicking and screaming, grabbing onto the Deep Fiend’s hands at his throat, struggling for air and freedom. He flailed and gurgled, sputtering and slobbering as he used up his last breath. He tried to scream but the beast’s powerful hands choked the sound out before it could escape his lips.
Ravak leapt into the air for the boulder in front of him as the fiend closed its grip around the injured man’s throat. One of its enormous claws opened and its massive arm came back to make the killing blow to the man`s torso, Ravak leapt again, this time with all of his might, straight up into the air letting out the roar of a wolf as he did so. The fiend heard the cry. Temporarily distracted from its prey, it turned to see Ravak coming down from above with his spear drawn back in his arm ready to strike. Ravak`s eyes filled with sheer, wild ferocity. In that moment, Ravak became the predator and his prey had taken the bait of his cry and fallen right into his trap. The spear landed directly in the beast’s eye with great force. The Deep Fiend let out a gurgling slobbering roar so loud and terrible that the ground shook. Spit flew from its maw as it clawed in a panic at Ravak while dropping the injured man to the ground and reeling backward from the full weight and force of the attack.
As the two hit the ground, Ravak drove the spear home, pushing it fully through the back of the Deep Fiend`s skull and forcing the head of the spear deep into the ground purposefully to snare the creature. Ravak reached to his waist for his axes quickly, but the beast, still coherent, shoved the large Barbarian off and sent him rolling into the dirt. It howled, gurgled and shrieked violently as it tried in vain to free itself from the spear but its black tarry blood ran from the wound like an open tap. The ghoul began to lose strength as the full enormity of the wound began to take its toll. Ravak, though bruised and winded from the tumble, rolled back up to his feet deftly and drew his axes from his girdle with a skilled spinning motion and tightened his grip to make the killing blow count.
“You’ll not escape me this time, foul creature,” Ravak hissed at the Deep Fiend as he strode confidently toward the beast, whirling both axes as he prepared to chop its head off. The first strikes sunk deep on each side of the ghoul’s throat and the blood came out in a torrent covering Ravak, the ground, and nearby boulder in a hot spray of black death. The beast clawed at him, but it had lost a great deal of blood and strength. Still pinned to the rocky earth by the Winter Wolf’s spear, its flailing did nothing to save it from its fate.
It struggled for its unlife to remain conscious but as the second stroke of the axes found their marks, the creature’s arms dropped, its legs stopped squirming as the magic that sustained it seemed to leave its body altogether. Ravak withdrew for a moment, panting hard and looking down at his blood covered mangled prey.
“Is it dead?” came a meagre, sobbing tiny voice from behind a nearby boulder.
He brought the axes down hard several more times chopping away at the savage meaty mess of the fiend’s neck until the final blow freed the head completely from the spine. Ravak grabbed it by its scraggly black blood soaked hair and raised it high above him howling and praising the moon.
As the two men regained their composure and senses they sat around the fire sipping back and forth from Ravak’s water skin. Sleipner had finally calmed and lay back down in amongst a couple of small shrubs.
Suddenly the injured man stood up and cried out, “Manya!” and ran over to the body they had dragged into the camp only moments earlier. It seemed like an eternity had passed since he’d left her there. Again, the man began to sob uncontrollably. He poured some of the water from the skin on the woman’s face to clean her wounds, muttering to himself incoherently as he worked.
It was a woman; Ravak deduced that much from the name ‘Manya.’ He rose and went over to the figure to see if he could help. She clung to life, gurgling and gasping for air. Shallow, laboured breathing told Ravak she didn’t have long if he didn’t act now. She let out a slight whistling sound as she breathed, signalling she had blood in her lung and that the blood had begun to seep back into the wound, slowly drowning her as it coagulated.
“Move,” said the large Barbarian to the smaller injured man. “I can help her.”
Ravak pushed the man away gently, but firmly and began to cut away her clothing with his razor-sharp hunting knife. The remains of her garbs, the Deep Fiend shredded and soaked in blood. As the cloth came away, Ravak could see a massive claw wound in her left side right below her breast.
“A few inches higher and she would have been killed swiftly. That might have been a more compassionate end for her than this,” Ravak said as he examined the wound.
The injured man’s eyes widened, filled with tears once again. His lip shook and he swallowed hard as he tried to maintain what little sense of sanity he had left available to him after enduring such an ordeal.
“Get some more water and some strips of hide. Over by the ram in those packs.”
The injured man had trouble understanding Ravak’s thick northern accent but he understood water and hides. When Ravak spoke he pointed at Sleipner. The man scrambled and scavenged through the packs for the skin, returning quickly.
Together they sopped up the blood and washed the wounds so they could see the hole that was causing the woman trouble breathing. Ravak quickly pulled out an arrow and placed it on a rock, quickly cutting both ends off with his hunting knife. He held it up to the light in front of the man and showed him the firelight shining through the length of the arrow’s shaft. “Hollow. Whistling Willow makes excellent arrows. Very light, very fast,” Ravak proclaimed.
He whittled at the ends to remove any burs from the wooden reed to ensure it was clean for the procedure. He then rolled the end in the fire quickly and deftly to heat and sanitize the wood. He continued to do so until it smoked lightly and began to burn red hot. The man watched in horror as Ravak returned to Manya’s side and deftly found the opening of the wound with two fingers. Gently but quickly he popped the swollen hole open, allowing a torrent of blood to spill out and run down her side. He skillfully slid the pipe into the woman’s wound, the blood sizzling from the hot reed as it entered. Ravak slowly and methodically kept feeding the tube into the wound until blood appeared from the hole at the top end. He then gently pushed it in another half inch and a small geyser of blood shot straight up into the air and out of the woman’s chest. Once the tube was in place he gently applied pressure around the wound and pumped the blood out of the woman’s drowning lung. The injured man was amazed and could see immediately what Ravak was doing. He mopped up the blood with the pieces of hide and washed it away with the water from the Barbarian’s skin.
“Where did you learn to do that?” he asked, astonished a Barbarian would know how to perform such a seemingly advanced surgical technique.
“My people. My witchdoctor,” said Ravak.
“But you’re a sav
age!” the man exclaimed. He caught himself before he said anymore. Ravak stopped nursing the wound and turned to him slowly with a somewhat annoyed look in his eyes.
“And still I am here saving you and your wife, an uncivilized savage come to the aid of a rich southern city man! Imagine what your people would say at such a thing!” Ravak went back to work on pumping the blood out of Manya’s lung and there was silence between them for what seemed like an eternity as Ravak worked. The man might have had trouble with Ravak’s accent, but the Barbarian seemed to have no trouble understanding him, nor did he seem to have any trouble articulating in the southern Common Tongue.
Ravak washed her with the last of his water. Her breathing had stabilized and the whistling and gurgling had ceased. The make shift tube had worked, and had cauterized the wound around it so the bleeding stopped completely. He capped off the pipe with a little wad of coal to keep the blood from spilling out if she moved.
The injured man had felt uncomfortable after what he had said and decided to tend to the camp to help make amends. He gathered some firewood and restoked the flames, found some of the hides in Ravak’s packs, and laid them out on the ground for sleeping. He made two fresh beds up, one for each of them. He found some of the venison and a skin of whisky Ravak had saved, but had forgotten about. He approached the giant clansman with his arms extended.
“Eat friend. Forget what I said earlier. I was confused. Let’s eat and regain our senses. My name is Turynn Silverleaf, and I am both honoured to make your acquaintance and grateful for your much needed aid, my friend.” Turynn bowed deeply to show his gratitude. “Though I have nothing to offer you right now as reward, know that I am forever in your debt for saving myself and my sister from certain death at the hands of that ghoul.”
Ravak smiled broadly as the realization he was a hero overcame him. He felt himself blush and he lowered his head. “Thank you, Turynn, but your praise and gratitude are unnecessary. I did only what was right and honourable to do. My name is Ravak Ekesson, warrior, hunter, and woodsman of the Winter Wolf Clan. Now please sit. Let us drink and use the whiskey to clean your sister’s wounds further. Perhaps you should wet a strip of hide and clean your own wound. Your head doesn’t look so good. Let me help you stitch it back together.”