Demonworld Book 5: Lords of the Black Valley (Demonworld series)

by Kyle B. Stiff

  Yarek turned away in disgust. Jarl roused himself from sleep and plopped down in the sand beside his Khan in order to record the momentous event.

  Wodan had already grown sick of his role as judge. He remembered his first such trial outside of Pontius. Brothers from a certain tribe had beaten the younger pup of another tribe. Wodan had the brothers lashed by the father of the beaten pup, then made the brothers give payment of cloth to the father. Unfortunately, his judgment was seen as their Khan “taking sides” with one tribe over another, and so one of the offending brothers took the counsel of the disrespected chieftain and called out the Khan in battle. Wodan was forced to kill the dogman rather than lose his army, the tribe of the beaten pup walked about with pride for having curried the favor of their Khan, and the dead dogman’s brothers wore the marks of their lashes with the pride of underdogs. Wodan had only tried to stamp out asshole-ish behavior; instead, he himself had been on trial.

  Not only that, but now Wodan was positive that the former Khan must have refused to act as judge in the epic trifles that beset his people. Every day, more and more loud-mouthed victims came to their Khan seeking justice by way of spectacle and drama. He began to realize that if he let them, the victims would come to him all day long, the journey would be forgotten, and starvation would soon set in.

  “Naarwulf,” said Wodan. “You feel up to busting some heads?”

  “Gladly,” said Naarwulf.

  Time for a new tactic, he thought. Wodan rose and shouted, “Shut up! Be still! Settle down! Get over here! Sit! Now!”

  The dogmen quieted down. The victimized dog limped dramatically to his place before the Khan and lowered himself with an agonized groan.

  “We’re not going to sit around all day and listen at any of you bitch and moan. I’d heard that the dogmen were powerful warriors who could settle their own affairs. Perhaps I heard wrong. At any rate, I can see that some sort of beating has occurred. All of you who have been accused – stand up!”

  They did so, looking at one another as they shrugged dramatically. “Naarwulf is going to beat each of you, just as you have beaten your brother. You feel up to that, Naarwulf?”

  “Of course,” Naarwulf growled. Before the nearest dogman could reply, Naarwulf flexed his beefy arms, then tapped a dog on the chin such that his body plowed into the sand.

  “But, Khan!” cried one of the accused.

  “Don’t complain,” said Wodan, shaking his head. “Stand and take your licks.”

  Naarwulf went down the line, happily beating down each offender with a single blow.

  “Now, you,” said Wodan, signaling to the dog with the split lip who had brought charges against the others. “Naarwulf, give him one, too.”

  Without a second thought, Naarwulf cracked the dogman in the side of the head, spinning him about before he hit the sand.

  “That’s for summoning the power of your Khan,” said Wodan, standing over him. “You’ve gotten your justice. But from now on, learn to take care of your own problems.”

  Wodan sat beside Jarl, whose pen was flying across paper. “I don’t get it,” said Jarl. “Where was the justice in that? I always thought of you as a bit more-”

  “The other day, when you were still asleep,” said Wodan, “I had to judge in a maternity dispute. Two women laid claim to the same pup. Don’t ask me how the confusion came about in the first place. So the way I handled the situation was... I pulled the old trick where you say to divide the kid in half and give one half to each of the claimants.”

  “Genius!” said Jarl, shaking his head. “Only the true mother would love her pup enough to give him away!”

  “No, no, it didn’t work at all. The dogwomen both agreed to this decision.” Wodan sat silent for a moment, then said, “Perhaps the maternal instinct atrophies when your greatest wish for your baby is to first be born a son, and second to die a good death in battle. Then again, both of the dogwomen were from different tribes. Perhaps in their eyes, denying a rival tribe a potential warrior was worth more than letting a child live.”

  “I… see…” Jarl looked at the dogmen rising and rubbing their jaws, then said, “What did you do about the child, then?”

  “There was no confusion about the father. He was a big, strapping warrior more interested in putting notches on his belt than raising a kid, so I crossed him off the list. But I knew an old couple, a big fat dogwoman who was already wet-nursing several pups, and an old dog who knows a bit about hunting and finding herbs, and also knows how to stay out of trouble. I gave the pup to them in the hopes that they would be able to teach him some useful things about how to get by in the world, instead of corrupt him with a lot of aggressive nonsense.”

  “Hm. That sounds good, but what does that have to do with those dogs you had whipped just now? Why did you have the victim whipped as well?”

  “I was saving him from a revenge killing,” said Wodan. “They don’t think like us, Jarl. I can’t favor one tribe over another. It’s not about justice. It’s not about justice at all.” Wodan sat in silence for a long time, then said, “I have to get them to the Black Valley. I have to get them there, in one piece… and turn them loose.”

  “Against… well…”

  “There are things in this world far worse than dogmen, Jarl.”

  * * *

  Zachariah was enjoying being less of a leader every day. They followed the dark, sluggish river into the east, and he could think of nothing but to continue on. In the days leading up to the battle against the dogmen, he thought that he was growing into a leader of men. His soldiers followed him because he was driven by a plan, a goal. But the plan fell apart, the goal disappeared, and then Wodan returned with an army of his own and a dream far stronger than any he had ever seen before. Zach no longer troubled himself with the affairs of the soldiers from Hargis, even though they were few in number after the battle. No one seemed to mind.

  For a few days, he wondered if he should busy himself with trying to allocate their resources. The dogmen were eating up their food as if they were expecting a well-stocked supply depot halfway between Pontius and the valley, and Wodan was so busy adjudicating disagreements and breaking up fights that he had no time for resource management. Naarwulf had looked busy about the matter for a day or two, but soon gave it up, as it wasn’t really in his nature. The dogs wouldn’t listen to Jarl or Freyja or Nilem, Yarek seemed to think the matter was beneath him, and Chris Kenny seemed useless for anything but complaining and bragging.

  Zach knew that he didn’t care about allocating supplies in any organized manner, and the reason he didn’t care was because he truly believed that Wodan could get them across the wasteland, and all the way to the Black Valley, before the food ran out.

  From his horse, Zach watched Wodan sitting atop his covered wagon. Other than Yarek, whose relationship with Wodan he didn’t understand, Zach knew that no one knew Wodan better than he did. They had not spoken much lately, but Zach could see the strain on him. Wodan was used to throwing himself into danger and overcoming the odds, but he wasn’t used to leading people and taking on their burdens. He guessed that Wodan was drawing strength from his dream, but Zach knew that a battle between a dream and reality was an uneven match.

  Zach found himself spurring his horse closer to Wodan’s wagon before he knew what he was going to say to him. Wodan’s face looked hard, his expression distant and uncommunicative. Zach wondered, for a moment, if Wodan knew that he was playing with people’s lives. Not just in this gamble, this journey, but in judging and punishing without any sort of education in the matter. Would that do something to Wodan? Change him, twist him into something hard and unreasonable?

  As Zach drew near, Wodan turned and smiled.

  Zach returned the smile, and thought, What was I thinking?

  “Wodan, there’s something I need to know.” Wodan waited, so Zach continued. “It’s, well… it’s about your body.”

  “Growth spurt,” said Wodan, winking. “I had to lea
ve all my old pants behind in Pontius.”

  “A growth spurt gives you the strength to kill dogmen?”

  Wodan could see that Zach was serious, so he said quietly, “Zach, I’m not even sure myself. Some old men from my homeland, they… they did something to change me. You’ve seen Haven. You’ve seen small examples of what they could do. Well, they… modified my body.”

  Afraid, Zach almost asked, “Are you still human?” but stopped himself. He tried not to show it, but his heart began pounding. Now that he really looked at him in the moonlight, he truly did seem alien, unnatural, changed into…

  “But look at this,” said Wodan. He began to pull his left arm from the wolfskin cloak, then remembered that it was covered in scars and pulled out his right arm instead. Wodan looked about conspiratorially.

  Zach looked at it for a while, then said, “Your arm’s longer than before, but… it’s not that big!”

  Wodan pulled the cloak back over himself. “I don’t understand it myself, but my body seems to… well, flare up when it… when I… get angry, or scared, or determined. That’s how I can fight these dogmen and survive. But after each fight, I… I try to hide this from the others, but after each fight, I’m completely exhausted, man. All I want to do is eat and sleep after something like that.”

  Zach shook his head. “I don’t see how your people could have done this to you and not given you some warning, or at least some instruction.”

  “I don’t think they understood it themselves. They didn’t really do it all on their own. Yarek told me that they used… some thing… that they found in the Black Valley. And I can tell, Zach… I can tell that my body wants to go there. It wants to go home.”

  Zach worked to stifle his panic. If he was some kind of monster, he thought, if he had been turned into something inhuman, then there’s no way he would be telling me this now. He wouldn’t be opening up like this. Right?

  Even as Zach told himself this, he couldn’t help but think of the contrast between what he knew of Wodan and what others told him. The Wodan he knew was kind and giving and full of humor, but if half the tales that others told of him were true, then Wodan had more blood on his hands than anyone he knew. There was something cold and hard in Wodan that he simply did not know or understand.

  “But Wodan,” said Zach, choosing his words carefully. “If there is some… foreign… thing… in you… something that reacts on its own… do you know what I’m getting at?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “Well, aren’t you afraid that there’s a chance that this thing inside of you isn’t really you, and it’s guiding you to the Black Valley for its own purposes? Couldn’t it be using you as a vehicle purely for its own ends? Are you really sure that you want to go there at all, Wodi?”

  “Hm,” said Wodan. “That reminds me.” Wodan leaned over the far side of the wagon and saw Yarek sitting on a sideboard below. “Yarek!”

  “Khan?” said Yarek, leaning upwards.

  “I forgot to tell you. I want your Reavers to accept your commands alone. Not mine. If you ever see me changing in a way that you consider malevolent or… inhuman, I want you to give the order to have me killed. Understand?”

  “Oh,” said Yarek, staring for a while. “I actually already gave that order.”

  There was a sharp yelp beside the wagon, and they saw Naarwulf’s eyes stabbing into Yarek. Wodan leaned back and laughed.

  Chapter Four

  Demiurge Theory

  Forty-Two Years Ago

  Didi sat alone in the cafeteria of the Department of Science. He was only dimly aware that he was hungry, but he had to acknowledge that he was tripping up on problems that never should have been a hindrance; hunger was no doubt the cause. He stared down at his oatmeal.

  The other scientists looked at him strangely. Most likely they all knew that he was only eighteen and had never attended public schooling, much less the University. Their strange looks might also be caused by the fact that he was shielding his eyes by holding an open hand onto his forehead. He had absentmindedly left his sunglasses back in his research area, and if he hobbled all the way across the underground complex to get them, he would be sidetracked by his duties and would forget to eat. But the light in the cafeteria was bright, much brighter than in his work area, and already it was drilling into the center of his skull, painful and disorienting.

  The oatmeal was another worry. He had to be mindful of what he ate. He had been careful, very careful, about researching whether the oats sent here came from a company that also processed green rye - one of the foods to which he was terribly allergic - and while oatmeal was good for him, by some strange loophole in the food processing industry’s standards green rye was often labeled simply as rye, to which he was not allergic. He had been burned in the past, and so he hoped that his bowl of oatmeal had been processed nowhere close to green rye. He had eaten his lunch he brought from home (two days ago? three?) and he was simply too busy to return home.

  “You think this is actually going to be good for biologists?” said a senior scientist at the next table. “We’re pushing these juniors so hard on the genome problem that the horror stories are gonna spread. Then next year it’s going to be you, me, and a bunch of physicists worrying about the same stuff they’ve been worrying about for a hundred years.”

  “No, no, no,” said another. “My son’s a research assistant in the biology department. Believe me, they bitch and moan, sure. But you know what they say? ‘The only research assistant you have to worry about is the one who isn’t bitching.’ ”

  The other laughed, then said, “Did you see the comic Dr. Renfield posted? He said we should report back to the Head that the human genome doesn’t exist - if we all agree that a human is pure meat all the way through, then we’d get a little rest, at least!”

  They both laughed and Didi turned away from them. He was aware that he knew little more than the bare minimum about his fellow man, having spent most of his life indoors studying alone in near-darkness, trying to ignore the host of pains in his body while others his age worried about dating and exams at the University. To him, acceptance as an assistant into the DoS was a dream come true. Now, he had a chance to advance the various sciences that, before, he had only studied. His acceptance under such unusual circumstances had even caused his hard-hearted father to admit that perhaps his strange son had not wasted all those hours alone.

  As he ate his oatmeal he relaxed his shielding-hand and saw a young scientist. He had noticed this one before - he had a stern face, thinly curving mouth, an aquiline nose, and white hair. The scientist was in line to order his food and had been watching Didi. Didi knew that this man’s work was respected but, for whatever reason, he was also greatly feared. Didi could not recall his name, but knew that he worked with a team that acted as a sort of advance guard in the battle to record and decode the human genome, the great project that had taken over the DoS.

  The man seemed to be about to speak across the room to him when he noticed a group of scientists enter. The white-haired man took his tray of food with robotic movements while his eyes bore into the newcomers. His face grew pink, then red, and he shook.

  “Renfield,” the white-haired man hissed. The newcomers, intent on their own conversation, continued on, and so he shouted, “Renfield!”

  Silence slapped into the cafeteria, dull and heavy. All eyes turned to the white-haired man. At the head of the newcomers, Professor Renfield said, “What is it, William?”

  “You! You!” shrieked the white-haired man. “You think I don’t know what you did to my report!?”

  “Professor Childriss, if this is about-”

  “Li-i-i-a-ar! Charlatan!”

  “See here, now-”

  “Cretin! Base ignoramus!” He slammed his tray of food into the floor and sprayed its contents everywhere. Didi was shocked to the core at the show of unprofessionalism.

  “Childriss, if you want to get a hold of yourself, you can come and meet me at Dr.
O’Looney’s office and-”

  “Your funeral! I will meet you at your funeral!”

  “Man, have you gone insane? This is unheard of and I-”

  “Unheard of?! Hear this, Renfield! I WILL HAVE YOU MURDERED!”

  Professor Renfield backed away, forcing each step through the solid sludge of discomfort that weighed heavily on everyone. Once he gained some distance, he whirled about, staggered to the door, and muttered, “This is the last day you’ll ever work here, Childriss.”

  The room was still as Childriss turned to take another tray from the counter. Snuffling on tears and growls, he took a seat near Didi. Two other scientists immediately rose and left, their meals barely touched. Childriss looked down at his tray shaking with fury, and just as some semblance of movement crept into the other scientists, Childriss lowered his head, buried his mouth in his hands, and vented a muffled, primal shriek. All eyes locked on him once more. Once Childriss released the thing that gripped him, he wiped his eyes and turned to his meal.

  Just then Didi’s stomach clenched up. Pain, horrible pain. The oatmeal had indeed come into contact with green rye. No doubt about it.

  “Hello. I’m Professor William Childriss.”

  Didi looked into his clear blue eyes and realized, in a flash, that the genetic string referred to as LJM17-18-18 was, in fact, only an extension of RRR16-17 - it had no real function of its own, and the idea that it did was completely incorrect. The other man’s face became unreal as Didi decided that the strand of code that hung between LJM17-18-18 and RRR16-17 must, in fact, be a relatively recent mutation. It could have any function, or perhaps no function at all, and in all likelihood LJM17-18-18 could not work without the existence of RRR16-17.