by Leo Carew
“I won’t have that from the warm grub who brought a tent, Vigtyr,” Pryce called over his shoulder, and the laughter redoubled. This was their favourite joke: Vigtyr had brought a tent with him. Aledas, the other Skiritai, professed never to have even seen a tent before. None of them, not even Tekoa, had ever used one on the trail and there had been great mirth as Vigtyr raised its canvas walls the night before.
But Pryce had not laughed. It was not funny to him. He had thought often of Vigtyr on their journey. He considered that there are some masterpieces you have to observe from far away to appreciate. A tapestry of silk, where each figure appears simple and unrefined when inspected up close, but back away and a kinetic, complementary current is revealed, sweeping from one end to the other. To Pryce, Vigtyr was the inverse of this. He made sense up close. He was wryly charming, dedicated, exceptionally skilled, physically imposing and ferociously intelligent. But when one backed away and observed from a distance, he somehow shrank to less than the sum of those things. Perhaps it was because he was so ravenously ambitious that he seemed dissatisfied with all that he had already. Or maybe it was because, in spite of his charm, Pryce had developed nothing close to a relationship with him. The tent seemed to encapsulate it: Vigtyr did not need any one of them. He would laugh with them as a group but insulate himself from them as individuals.
Up ahead, Pryce could see Roper riding with Aledas, the two of them guiding their small party. Bored of the mockery, he spurred his horse on to join them. They were riding across the narrow strip of Suthdal that separated the Black Kingdom from the mountains of Unhierea. They had crossed the Abus the previous evening, borrowing a barge from a bankside family to transport horses and weapons across the water. Now they rode fast, hoping to make it to Unhierea before word spread that there was a band of Anakim horsemen in Suthdal.
Pryce reined in beside Roper, and then tutted irritably as Tekoa cantered in next to them. “How is everything back there?” asked Roper, glancing at the pair of them.
“The conversation was excellent,” Tekoa decreed. “I supplied much of it.”
“How far to Unhierea?” asked Pryce.
“We don’t know,” Roper admitted. “But if we keep riding south-west, we can hardly miss it.”
“We should find out,” said Pryce, eyeing the sun sinking before them. “If we have to spend a night in Suthdal, we’ll need to find somewhere isolated.”
“Let’s ask one of the locals,” said Tekoa carelessly.
The party took a small diversion, drawn over some hills and into a valley, first by the smell of fresh dung, and then the clinking of cowbells. There, they found a cowherd: a man in dirty woollen rags who stared open-mouthed as they closed in. By the time he had realised the approaching horsemen were Anakim, it was far too late to escape. He still tried, turning away from his cows and sprinting for a stream at the valley’s centre, no doubt placing some desperate faith in the Suthern legend that the demonic Anakim could not cross clean water. But he did not even make the stream, Aledas spurring after him, extricating a foot from his stirrup and booting the cowherd to the ground. The ranger leapt off his horse and used one hand to hold his bridle steady, the other to drag the Sutherner upright.
The rest of the Anakim gathered round the cowherd in a circle, staring down as the man twisted this way and that, eyes darting from Vigtyr, to Roper, to Tekoa and back to Roper. He seemed not to want to look at Aledas at all, leaning as far away from the fist bunched at his collar as he could. The Skiritai was small for an Anakim, only a few inches taller than the cowherd, but he carried a silent and frightening aura. “Please!” the cowherd blurted in Saxon, staring at Roper. “Please!”
“Calm,” said Roper, raising a hand. “The border with Unhierea. How far is it?”
The cowherd could not reply, mouthing the words to a prayer.
“Unhierea,” Roper repeated. “How far?”
“That way,” said the cowherd, jerking his head towards the sun.
“Yes, we know,” said Roper. “How far?”
“Five… five hours,” stuttered the cowherd.
“Five on foot, or with horses?”
“With horses. Please, I have children! Two little girls!”
“Five hours for him,” said Tekoa. “What, three for us, if we hurry?”
Aledas nodded, but the cowherd was still jabbering.
“Don’t kill me, I beg, don’t!”
Roper and Tekoa exchanged glances. “Nobody must know that we are going to Unhierea,” said Roper, switching to Anakim and looking down at the man. Without delay, Pryce dropped from his saddle. Aledas understood what was about to happen and released the cowherd at once, taking a step back as Pryce drew a sword. At the scrape of steel, the cowherd began a panicked turn and was halfway round when Pryce struck off his head with a single back-swipe. The man’s body crumpled to the floor, his head landing on his pelvis and rolling down the valley, into the stream.
“Fixed it,” said Pryce, bending down to clean his sword on the cowherd’s clothes. The Skiritai laughed.
Roper frowned, and Pryce thought he might be admonished. He did not care. This was the only way to ensure the cowherd’s silence. The life of an individual was nothing when set against their task, and perhaps Roper recognised this, for he shrugged and turned his horse away. “We can make the border before dark if we hurry.”
Pryce stayed a little to polish his sword. It was steel: one of two he wore, called Tusk and Bone, that had been forged from Marrow-Hunter, the war hammer belonging to Uvoren. The steel carried a beautiful serpentine marbling, so unlike those used by the others in their party. Their swords were Unthank-silver: an Anakim alloy which was lighter, tarnished slower and kept a better edge. But Pryce liked the weight of steel. He liked the force of a steel swing and, in any case, no longer trusted Unthank weapons. His last had shattered in combat.
He caught up with the others and they rode on, changing their course slightly whenever they smelt Suthern livestock, or saw a Suthern dwelling. These diversions were required less and less as the day wore on, the hills growing quieter and emptier. Burnt out and abandoned farmsteads dotted the land. The walls and fences fell into disrepair. And the relentless teasing, which had provided most of the entertainment so far, acquired a new and crueller edge. Fear had settled heavily on the group.
“We must be getting close,” said Roper quietly. No sooner had he observed this then the ground before them fell away. All of them had to drag their horses to a sudden halt, looking down at the vast ripple in the earth below. They were on top of a ridge, with another opposite where the lands of Unhierea and Suthdal shied away from one another. Huge cliffs layered the far side like an unending citadel, and the silence that lay over it all was dense and heavy and prickling. They observed it together for a moment. “I wonder when one of our kind last set foot in these lands,” said Roper. “Onwards, my brothers.” He clicked his tongue and guided his horse down the near slope, the others following.
It took some time to find their way up the other side, and they were consumed at once in a forest of strange, shrub-like trees. They looked like crab apple to Pryce’s eye, though they bore no fruit on them yet. Each was tangled with mistletoe and small chattering birds, indecently loud in this place. The only creature they saw besides the birds was a squirrel, which Aledas knocked off a branch with a well-aimed slingshot and tucked into his belt.
The sun disappeared behind the valley walls that rose sheer on either side, the ground climbed steadily, and a consistent, biting wind began to grow. “This is katabatic,” said Gilius.
“What?”
“A katabatic wind. Probably caused by ice higher up. It will get worse.”
Pryce had brought no mittens and his fingers were growing slow and stiff. He balled them into the edge of his cloak as the sky dimmed and the wind began to howl. He noticed white fragments poking through the thin grass of the valley floor, Pryce first taking them for chalk. Then he realised they were bones: a blizzard of them. T
hey passed ruined drystone walls, and the trees were becoming smaller, bent permanently by the wind and pointing back down the valley.
Tekoa spoke suddenly. “Is that a settlement?” Some distant structure was appearing over the valley horizon. As they rode closer, they saw there were several of them, each a massive circular wall of stone with a roof of logs long collapsed at the centre. The walls, when they reached them, were crude, the stones that formed them enormous and lumpen, and the ruins somehow emptier still than the valley before it.
Roper stopped before the old walls, the others clustering uneasily behind. “Hello?” he called.
Silence.
“Gogmagoc!” called Roper. “Gogmagoc!”
There came no reply. All they could hear was the wind, moaning between the cracks in the wall.
“Deserted,” said Roper. “But it’s getting dark. We make camp here. At least the walls will shelter us from the wind.”
The Skiritai took the group’s horses into an overgrown bramble enclosure by the valley wall, sealing it off with some branches, while Roper and Tekoa saw to the fire. “What if that’s seen?” asked Vigtyr, eyeing the small ball of tinder that had begun to crackle cheerfully.
“We want to be seen,” replied Roper. “We’re here to negotiate. And it’s cold: our alternative is to freeze to death.” It sounded as though he found the second reason more convincing than the first.
“So where are the Unhieru?” Tekoa wondered, out loud. “This place has been deserted for decades.”
“We will find them,” said Roper. The fire was taking hold and helping to lift the sense of unfamiliarity from these ruins. “Some of those bones on the ride up looked fresh. They can’t be too far away.”
“I can smell something,” said Aledas, in his deep, flat voice.
Roper and Tekoa look up at that, silent for a moment. “What?”
The ranger shook his head. “Something new. It’s very faint.”
Pryce turned away and went to explore the old settlement. The bramble enclosures around the edges, which must once have been deliberately cultivated to pen livestock, had reached out and begun to consume the ruins. The old streets, if so grand a name could be applied to the uneven passageways between the walls, were nearly choked with prickling shoots. The walls towered over his head and some them had spilt across the path, so that he had to clamber over them, fighting against that growing wind. He found a crude doorway which he inspected for a while. Its top had collapsed, so he had no idea of its original height, but it must have been six feet wide. These ruins were almost geological: in scale, in crudity, in their exceeding and obvious age.
“Look at this!” called Vigtyr’s voice. It was too dark to go much further and Pryce was growing cold, so he turned back for the campsite. He arrived to find that Vigtyr had been clearing a space for his tent and unearthed a huge jawbone beneath a rock. The molars were flat, cracked and vast, and the incisors worn down to mere stumps. “Enormous,” muttered Tekoa, he and Roper inspecting it together. “What’s happened to the front teeth?”
“Almighty knows,” said Roper, eyeing the jaw. He looked up, casting around at the walls. “I’d suggest we fly our flag if the wind weren’t so fierce. We are a delegation after all.”
He never seemed fazed, Lord Roper. The impression he gave was always one of someone who was interested but not worried. Pryce suspected that was an act, but it was one he appreciated. Emotions are contagious, and you had to be careful how you conducted yourself under pressure. The others were more obviously subdued. They conversed in murmurs and sat as though submerged in cold water, huddled and stiff.
They prepared the evening hoosh, supplementing it with the squirrel taken by Aledas, spitted and roasted. Vigtyr tried to pitch his tent, but nobody seemed willing to help him and before he could secure it, the wind tore it from his grasp. It floated down the valley, a tumbling black shadow, swallowed in moments by the dark. Vigtyr came to huddle awkwardly by the fire, where the party shared the pot of steaming hoosh, each taking a spoonful and passing it on. When Pryce tried to pass it to Aledas, he would not take it. He sat with his eyes unfocused and his head cocked, evidently listening. Pryce set the hoosh down and strained his ears into the dark.
Then he heard it.
Over the roar of the wind came a distant marine howl: a high-pitched groan that echoed plaintively through the valley. The call faded, leaving just the hollow moan of the wind. Then, very faintly, another voice replied from the dark. It was half wolf, half whale, and made the hairs on the back of Pryce’s neck stand up. The eyes on the other side of the fire were wide.
“They’re close,” said Roper calmly. “Aledas, take some hoosh or send it on. I’m starving.”
Nobody slept much that night. It was too cold, though Pryce was grateful for the wind, which at least made it pointless to try listening into the dark for some guttural noise or giant footstep. As dawn showed itself behind the high valley sides, all of them sat ready by the fire. Gilius explained that the wind would likely stop as the sun warmed the valley, and so it proved. Heavy-lidded, they packed up and went to retrieve their horses.
Which were gone.
The branches that guarded the bramble enclosure had been ripped aside and there was no sign whatsoever of the beasts. The party stood and stared at the vacant enclosure in silence. “Now do you smell it?” asked Aledas. Pryce could: there was a waft of something wild and animal. The unfamiliar, unsettling musk of the Unhieru.
“So they were here last night,” said Tekoa. “They must have known where we were. Why didn’t they come calling?”
Nobody replied, Roper simply hitching the saddlebags over his shoulder. “Onwards,” he said. “Let’s see where this valley leads.”
They set off, Pryce stepping superstitiously between the bone fragments that protruded underfoot. He walked at the back with Aledas, who directed Pryce towards some near-invisible disturbance on the valley floor. “We’re following something,” he said.
“The Unhieru?”
“Something else,” he replied, snuffing the air.
As they walked, the dark mouth of a cave was revealed in the valley wall above them, half-hidden by more crab apple trees. “I’ll catch you up,” said Gilius, diverging from the rest of the party and trotting up the side of the valley. He had soon reached the mouth of the cave where he hesitated for a moment before disappearing from view.
They walked on for some time before Aledas pointed into the distance. “There,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been following.” Ahead of them was a dark, massive shape, ambling slowly across the valley.
“What on earth?” Roper murmured. They crept towards the beast, which ignored them, grazing contentedly on the valley floor. It was not a predator, that was clear, and perhaps a little like a shaggy aurochs with a single horn in the middle of its head, rather than two on either side. They gave it a wide berth as they passed by, Tekoa admiring it speculatively.
“I believe I’ve heard the Academy talk of such creatures,” he said. “A rhinoceros. They used to be common across Albion, when our ancestors arrived.”
“Where’s Gilius?” asked Roper, suddenly.
“He went to look at that cave, back there,” said Pryce, jerking a thumb in the direction they had come.
The party came to an uneasy halt, observing one another. “That was half an hour ago,” said Roper. He glanced at Aledas. “Surely he’d have caught us up by now?”
The Skiritai did not reply by word or gesture, merely meeting Roper’s eyes.
“He’ll be fine,” said Tekoa. “Doubtless he’s managed to get lost in the cave and will have to grope his way out.”
“We should go and find him,” said Roper. “Half an hour is a long time to be occupied by a cave. Maybe he’s trapped.” Roper stopped there, but may as well have added: Or worse. That was what Pryce was thinking, and he considered that if he were worried for the ranger, the others certainly would be.
They turned back, skirting once more arou
nd the strange horned beast until they were back beneath the cave. Roper led their group up the steep sides of the valley, calling out before him: “Gilius! Gilius!”
There came no answer.
Pryce jogged forward so that he and Roper reached the gaping mouth of the cave together. It was wide and low, and stank of the musk they had detected earlier. A feral reek of urine, which made the back of Pryce’s neck prickle, as though it were being watched by invisible eyes.
“Gilius!” Roper bellowed into the cave. The only reply was a distant echo. The others gathered close, staring at the dark opening. All were still and listening for a while, as though the ranger might yet call back that he could hear and was unharmed. “I’ll go and find him,” said Roper. “Guard the entrance for me, would you?”
“I’ll go with you,” Pryce replied. Roper smiled at that, touching his shoulder briefly. Each of them rested a hand on the hilt of their sword, and they began to creep into the cave.
“Don’t be long, lord,” came Tekoa’s voice behind them. With every step, the light grew fainter and that animal musk stronger.
Pryce had never entered a cave before: they were sacred ground to the Anakim, and only used in times of dire need. He could not escape the feeling he was being swallowed. “Gilius!” he called.
As the darkness grew, they slowed to a mere shuffle, Roper drawing Cold-Edge and using it to probe into the darkness. There was barely enough light to detect the dark outline of their passage. They had advanced perhaps twenty yards when the cave forked: their larger passage continuing to the left, and a narrower, shallower one joining from the right. Roper and Pryce strained their eyes into the bottomless gloom of each passageway, but could see nothing.
“My lord,” said Pryce. He was observing a patch of rock at the edge of the right-hand passage, gleaming with moisture. He took a pace towards it, reaching out a hand and wiping his fingers over the rough surface. It was slimy, and he touched the wet fingertips to his tongue. The taste of iron flooded his mouth, and he spat onto the floor. “Blood.”