He looked across the clearing, down towards the trees in the distance. Bran had insisted on using it as a watering place, allowing everyone a chance to get out of the vehicles and stretch their legs. Eric wasn't too keen on it. An enemy could get much closer to them in the trees and then charge right at them, even though the guards had deployed to make it hard for anyone to ambush them. Eric hoped that Bran’s confidence was fully justified. If they were attacked, they’d be pinned against the river and would be unable to retreat. He could swim – and he knew Hind could swim – but he didn’t know how many of the others could swim. Besides, he’d pledged that he would take part in guarding the convoy and he wouldn’t run. He shook his head and pulled himself to his feet. A few more days of travelling and then they would be in Garstang City itself.
And then we can start on the next leg of the journey, he told himself, as he caught sight of Hind’s golden hair at the riverbank. The sight aroused a flush of lust in him, far more than he’d felt for any of the women throwing himself at him – but then, he’d faced attempted seductions from member of the Royal Court, who were shockingly blatant – and then a wave of frustration, matched seconds later by the ring. They couldn’t be anything more than brother and sister on the trip, not husband and wife. He strode over towards her, admiring the way the sun caught on her hair, feeling her shared frustration. They were growing closer mentally, yet physically there was still a barrier between them. Part of him wanted to throw it all away and just make love to her – and he knew she felt the same way too, which made it worse – but the rest of him knew better. There was no time for fun and games.
“That’s the potions done for the night,” Hind said, shoeing the little girl away from her. Branet gave Eric an odd look – Eric had a suspicion that Branet had realised that they were more than just brother and sister, although the gods only knew what conclusions she was drawing – but allowed herself to be pushed away. Her father had warned her that she would get the strap if she didn’t behave herself next to the potions mistress, for Hind was saving him some trouble and money. “How are you?”
“Tired,” Eric said. Tired and frustrated was a more honest answer, but there was no need to say it out loud. The problem with the trip was that it had given him plenty of time to brood on his dead father and how he’d been forced to flee, leaving the Royal Guard to make their hopeless final stand. Hind had tried to comfort him as best as she could, but he was a man of action and hated sitting around doing nothing. The best he’d been able to do was drill the guards, which had probably had them asking questions about just who Eric actually was. “I wish, I wish…”
His words were cut off by a scream from the small coppice at one edge of the clearing. Morningstar was in his hands at once as he ran towards the sound, followed rapidly by Hind, uncaring of her appearance or her dress. She was more used to running in trousers and it showed, so she caught at her dressed and pulled it high enough to allow her to run freely. Eric knew that he should object, but there was no time. He just hoped that no one would be looking too closely.
The scream cut off just as he reached the trees, followed rapidly by a thump. Eric held Morningstar out in front of him and stared into the darkness, finally seeing a small and broken body lying on the ground. It wasn't Branet – that had been his first thought – but another child, a young boy who had been around seven years old. Eric nodded to Hind and she created a ball of light, allowing it to drift into the darkness…and something lashed out at them. Eric jumped back and allowed Morningstar to find its own targets, slicing at black tendrils that seemed to unerringly home in on him. They didn’t seem deterred by the magical sword at all.
Hind pushed the light further into the darkness, revealing a creature that looked rather like a ball of wood. It had strange tubes with teeth on the end – it took Eric a moment to realise that it sucked the life out of its victims – that came towards Eric, trying to latch on to his body. He sliced them off one by one, but they always grew back, rather like a demented hydra. Cold red eyes fixed on his face as the creature lurched forward, intent on adding a Prince to its dinner. It had already killed one child.
Eric leapt forward, drew back, and sliced down right into the heart of the creature. It squealed – a high-pitched noise that made his ears hurt – and lashed out at him, but it was too late. Eric thoroughly eviscerated the creature step by step, slicing it into tiny pieces that finally died under his blows. He drew back as the creature crumbled into dust and reached for the dead body, pulling it out into the light. The body was already decaying, as if someone had sucked all the liquid out of the body. It felt as dry as dust.
He watched helplessly as the mother mourned her dead child, before he was buried in the clearing without even a marker to mark his grave. Hind set up a tiny ward that should keep the creatures from digging it up and devouring the body, allowing the tiny child to rest in peace. And then, there was nothing they could do, but return to the vehicles and carry on. The journey couldn’t end with a single death. He was vaguely aware of Bran watching him, as if the convoy’s leader had figured out something he shouldn’t have, but it hardly seemed to matter. Eric felt as if he had failed the dead child. He didn’t even know the boy’s name.
Hind took his hand and held it tightly, giving him what comfort she could, but it was too little. The black mood that possessed him refused to leave for hours.
Two days later, they entered a village and called for the population.
No one appeared. The village was as dark and silent as the grave.
Chapter Twenty
Eric drew Morningstar as he jumped off the stagecoach, feeling the gravel crunching beneath his feet. The village seemed completely deserted, yet there was a growing feeling of unease within his heart and soul. A village was never deserted. Even if the men had gone off to the fields – or the quarries, in this part of the world – the women would still be working in the village, making the food and bringing up the children. A village should never have been simply abandoned, unless something disastrous had happened, yet – as he swept his eyes along the low stone buildings – he saw no sign of trouble and strife. The buildings were untouched. Whatever had taken the people, if anything had taken the people, had left them completely unmarked.
“There’s nothing,” he said, sensing the unease of the horse pulling his coach. It wasn't one of the magically-enhanced horses he had ridden to the hunt, in the few relaxing days he’d had as a Royal Prince, but its senses were still sharper than those of its human masters. He laid a hand on its flank absently as he peered around the village and the beast jumped. Something, something lingering just beyond the edge of perception, had spooked the horse badly. “There’s no one around at all.”
Hind jumped down beside him, one hand on the knife she wore at her belt. “That’s absurd,” she said, her face taking on the vagueness of a magician using their third eye. “There has to be someone about.”
Eric frowned. They had stopped right on the edge of the village, but he could see that no one had wasted much imagination on the buildings. They were all built from grey stone, presumably mined in the village itself or in a nearby quarry, and passed down from family to family as the years wore on. Someone could be born, marry, have children and die in such a village, without ever seeing the wider world around them. Eric had visited similar villages during royal tours and he’d been left staggered by the attitudes of the villages, who – at best – had regarded his visit as an unwelcome distraction from the important business of bringing in the harvest. Oh, they’d said all the right things and kissed the right asses, but Eric had been able to tell that they’d meant none of it. They’d hated the aristocrats and spat at their retreating backs.
“There’s no one here,” he said, feeling an odd sense of purpose. “I think we’d better investigate the village.”
Hind didn't try to disagree, smiling openly for the first time in several days. Eric could sense her excitement; as much as she had professed to dislike her job as a Free
lance Mage, she had actually enjoyed it considerably. If she’d discovered an abandoned village during her career, it would have been her responsibility to investigate and discover what had happened to the missing people. There were all kinds of strange and nasty creatures lurking in the shadows and persistent rumours of dark wizards and necromancers, rumours that had been confirmed when the zombies had attacked them. If Herod had been plotting for so long...
He looked up at his wife sharply. “Could this be a trap for us?”
Hind narrowed her eyes. “I don’t see how,” she said, finally. “They’d have to know where we were going and then they’d have to get a message in ahead of us...”
“Might be possible,” Eric said. He smiled. Perhaps it was a trap, but at least it was a break from the monotony and frustration of the journey. “Come on. Let’s go tell Bran what we’re doing and see what he has to say.”
Bran was in a frustrated mood himself as he wrestled with the horses, wondering which of his clients would be the first to complain. He’d been promising them all a night in the village inn – which would have been preferable to spending another night in the open or in the rough tents – and, sooner or later, someone would have complained about the delay. The horses were having none of it. They seemed keen to get away and would have bolted if they hadn't been tied to the wagons. He nodded with apparent relief when Eric explained what he and Hind intended to do and bade them farewell with a distracted air. The trip manager had too much on his mind.
“I'm coming with you,” Branet proclaimed, as soon as she realised that they were heading into the deserted village. “I can help look for them, I can, I can...”
“You’re staying right here,” Hind snapped, firmly. Eric concealed a smile behind his hand, knowing that she could sense it through the rings and that trying to conceal his amusement was futile. She gave him a sharp look and turned back to the young girl. “Branet...you can’t come with us. Stay with your father and look after him, or I’ll fix your feet to the ground.”
It was a threat that would have cowed most children, but Branet refused to budge until her mother came up, gave her a hefty smack on the bottom and marched her back to their private stagecoach. Eric and Hind exchanged grins and turned to the road leading up to the village. Before anyone could offer any other distractions or delays, they were walking up towards the first building, leaving the rest of the party behind. The guards had fanned out to guard the perimeter, but none of them knew what they were guarding against, if anything. Eric knew that there were rumours of old creatures, strange monsters buried within the Greenwood or deep in enchanted caves, that woke up and feasted on humanity for a few days before going back to sleep, but his instincts were warning him that the menace hadn't gone. There was danger close by, watching them.
Morningstar hummed in his hand as he lifted the sword, trying to use its curious magic to locate the danger, but nothing happened. His father had promised to teach him more about the Great Swords and their abilities, yet Eric had learned little before his father had been assassinated and sent him running for his life. The Great Swords were weapons out of myth; they had to be capable of doing more than just cutting through enemy weapons and guiding their user to strike firm blows. He had always had the sense that the sword was watching him, judging him, as if unlocking its abilities was a test of some kind. Perhaps now he could learn how to use it...but nothing different happened. The sword just hummed in his hand.
“We’ll start with that building there,” Hind said, pointing to one of the blocky stone buildings at the edge of the village. Eric followed her as she walked up to the door and moved her hand in a complicated pattern over the lock, before stepping back in puzzlement. “It’s unlocked. I sense no magic at all.”
Eric blinked. “That’s not so odd, is it?”
“Maybe,” Hind said. There was a curious tightness in her voice as she pushed at the door, which opened with an alarming creek. “Even a tiny hovel should have a ward set up by someone in the village, this close to the mountains or the Greenwood. If they didn't, all kinds of supernatural vermin would come in and start taking people.”
Eric followed her line of thought. “So something broke through the wards?”
“More like drained them,” Hind said, in puzzlement. “There isn’t even any residual magic in the air.” She ran her hand over the stone wall, frowning. “Coming?”
She stepped into the building and created a light globe, allowing it to hover in the air so they could see the interior. There were few windows and very little natural light, leading Eric to wonder what would become of any child brought up in such an environment. Would they grow up as stunted human beings, or would they spend most of their time outside. The dirt and grime surprised him; he had always had the impression that even the poorest of commoners tried to keep a clean house. After the research magicians at the Academy had discovered that tiny creatures that lived within waste products caused illnesses and other problems, everyone knew to keep clean and boil water before drinking. The smell in the air, a rotting smell that he wondered might be dead bodies, proved to be decaying food.
He looked into the backrooms and winced. There was only one bed and a massive pile of blankets. It was barely large enough for one person, yet he had the impression that a large family had lived crammed into one of the tiny buildings. He couldn't imagine it, even when he’d slept in the barracks as part of his military training; it hadn't been as bad as the commoner hovel. The stench was overpowering and he gagged, stumbling out of the house and swallowing hard to keep from being sick. A moment later, Hind followed him out, her face set in hard cold lines.
“Gods,” Eric said, feeling another wave of nausea washing over him. “How can people live like that?”
Hind’s eyes were cold, looking into the distance as if she was seeing something in the past. “They don’t have a choice,” she said, tiredly. “They were all born into the village and without magic. The only thing the village had to sell was ore from the mines and stone from the quarries, so every boy child from when he was very young would be put to work, digging out the ore for the landlords. I’ve seen so many of them broken by such early suffering, trying to return to the mines even though they needed to rest...you can't imagine the horrors.
“If one of them refused to work, he could be declared an exile and booted out into the wastelands, forced to spend the rest of his days as an outlaw. If all of them refused to work, the Lord’s tax gatherers would organise an armed force and set them on the miners, forcing them back to work. I witnessed the aftermath of such an attack once; the men the tax gatherers had found whipped everyone in the village, before having their fun with the women. Worst of all...”
Her voice hardened. “The men the tax gatherers used to break these tiny rebellions were the men from the nearby villages,” she continued. “They were in the same trap and would do anything just to get a little extra spending money, or just to burn off their own frustrations or...and it kept them all nicely divided. It’s an endless cycle of suffering to produce the ore, yet the miners never get a surplus, never get a chance to make something more of their lives. The tax gatherers are very cunning. The taxes just happen to be whatever the villagers had produced, and perhaps just a little more, to make the headman scrape and bow and grovel in front of them.
“I was born on a farm, in a far more liberal kingdom, and even my family had the same problem. If we worked hard, we could keep our heads above water, but we could never get anything more. If I hadn't had magic, I would have been married off by now, producing more children for the farms while working at backbreaking labour for the rest of my life. How long do you think you are going to live? The average person in this kind of village lives forty years at most. A man of fifty would be an old man. I’ve known girls who were grandmothers by thirty.
“There’s no room for mercy in this world. Those who become crippled are thrown out into the cold to die. Violence is common, terrifyingly so; the strong always dominate the weak
. A woman without protectors is nothing more than a victim; rape, even of married women, is prevalent. A woman from this sort of village who is never raped in her life is rarer than white-star diamonds. It’s a hard world and it is made harder by the people living in it.”
She turned away and hugged herself tightly. Eric, at a loss about what to do, reached out and placed his hand on her shoulder, only to discover that she didn't lean back into his embrace. He could feel her anger and rage through the ring, but it wasn't directed at him, more at the people who had held the village down for centuries. He’d never seen anything like it himself, yet he couldn't understand why. How had he never seen it when he’d been on royal tours?
“The Lords wouldn't want you to see anything like this,” Hind said, answering his unspoken question. She relaxed suddenly into his hand. “You might start asking pointed questions about how well they take care of their people. Every time you saw a village, you would have seen one that had been prepared for your inspection, with everyone in the village carefully briefed on what answers they should give to any questions – and promised bloody slaughter if they failed in any way.”
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