Saint Elm's Deep (The Legend of Vanx Malic Book 3)

by M. R. Mathias

  “The beast is upon us,” the approaching rim rider called. His mount looked like it was charging to ram them. “Beware! The Shangelak was seen in the sky only moments ago.” The man wasn’t yelling for their benefit alone, he was calling out so that all could hear him. His pumpkin-colored vest marked him as a rim rider, but he barely slowed his mount to repeat the warning to his fellows as he thundered by. Vanx supposed he was headed up the road to warn those in the lodge.

  Just then, a roar split the morning wide open. In the distance, Vanx saw it coming at them in a streaking glide, like an eagle swooping on a fish.

  “It comes for us!” Vanx yelled and began shedding his gear to get at his bow.

  Brody was doing the same and cursing for not having a weapon in hand, while both Chelda and Xavian spoke swift words to Gallarael to keep her from shifting forms.

  The young rim riders had their bows up and were already loosing by the time Vanx had his bow unbundled. Their shots were hurried and way off the mark, and their mounts wouldn’t sit still. Vanx couldn’t blame them.

  Vanx knew that he’d never get his bow strung in time, but he didn’t stop trying. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Chelda, still burdened with her pack full of saber fangs, striding out with her ancient sword drawn, as if to take on the swiftly swooping creature all by herself. It sent a chill through him like he’d never felt before. What happened next was as unbelievable as it was horrifying.

  Xavian sent a streaking ray of lavender energy sizzling through the air at the beast, but with only the slightest twitch of its wings, the creature tilted and avoided the string-straight stream of energy.

  The rim riders loosed again, but even when they hit, their short range arrows didn’t have enough behind them to penetrate the thing’s hide. Then Brody stepped forward and put a crossbow bolt into the gray, flying-cat-beast’s shoulder. At the same instant, Chelda leapt up, and made a startlingly agile swipe across the creature’s underbelly.

  Vanx felt, more than heard or saw, Poops suddenly ducking and diving to avoid a grasping talon, but when he brought his eyes up, hot black blood from the wound Chelda had opened up splattered across his face and blinded him.

  There was a thumping of wing beats over them, then a man’s scream erupted. It was frantic and desperate, and then Gallarael’s scream cut over it. Vanx got his eyes clear of blood just in time to see Brody flailing wildly in the creature’s claws. He was beating at it with his crossbow, as if it were a club. It was a futile effort, for already the thing had carried the old Parydonian archer up into the sky and out of bow range. Even if he managed to get it to turn him loose, Vanx saw, he’d only fall to his death.

  Vanx wondered sadly if that might not be a better fate than what the beast would do to him when they set down somewhere.

  Then he was fighting for breath as Gallarael clutched him into a savage hug.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Three pints of stout I bought her

  and then she quenched my loins.

  But when I said I love you dear,

  she ran off with my coins.

  -- Parydon Cobbles

  Vanx eyed Chelda over Gallarael’s shoulder. The big woman was following the beast with her eyes. Her hair was disheveled and pressed against her face, her sword hanging loosely in her grip, dripping blood in the snow.

  Vanx saw the blade clearly. The color was fading from it. It had been glowing with a slightly blue tint, but no one else, not even Chelda, seemed to have noticed.

  Her hand went to her brow and she squinted. He saw her mouth some words but didn’t hear them. Gallarael’s sobbing and Poops’s agitated barking drowned them out. Then her hand pointed toward where the creature had gone, and a satisfied grin spread across her face.

  “I got it,” she said louder. “Look!”

  Vanx looked. The beast was losing altitude in fits and starts of frantic wing beats. It dropped slowly at first, then one wing folded askew and the huge creature began twirling down like a leaf from a tree. Brody’s flailing body fell, and Vanx could hear his distant scream. He was glad Gallarael didn’t notice the sound. From such a height, there was no chance of surviving, and Vanx was glad they couldn’t see the impact of his body. Chelda and Xavian were running behind the rim riders, then. Poops looked to Vanx then danced an excited circle. His bark was full of worry.

  “Go, then,” Vanx told him. “But be careful, and stay with the others.” He doubted Poops heard him, much less understood his words, but there was no doubt the dog knew what the word “go” meant. He was already off, racing awkwardly to catch up in his thick bundled fur. Vanx wanted to be happy that Poops wasn’t favoring his arrow wound, but the loss of Brody was too much to allow it.

  “What happened?” Gallarael asked from where her face was buried in Vanx’s thick coat.

  “Chelda’s blow was true,” Vanx said simply. “They fell from the sky.”

  “Do you think—” Gallarael pulled back and looked into Vanx’s eyes.

  “No.” Vanx didn’t honeycoat it. “There’s no possible way.”

  She seemed to accept that and began to pull her emotions back into herself.

  “He was a good man, that one.” She sniffled softly. “He reminded me a lot of Trevin.”

  “Shhh.” Vanx gave her a final hug and let her go. “Don’t get lost in sorrow, Gal. Out here is not the place to lose your wits over the ones you care for.”

  She wiped her nose on her own furred sleeve and gave a tiny nod of understanding. “I’ll be all right.” She held his eyes. “It’s just that restraining my urge to change brings on a deep well of emotion.” She sniffled again but held her shoulders back a little more proudly. “It’s not easy maintaining control.”

  “But you did it, as you always must. You cannot change what you’ve become, but you can master some aspects of it. Make your condition an asset, not a hindrance.”

  She nodded again, hugged herself and stared toward where the others had gone.

  Vanx looked around and wondered where all the people had come from. They were still a good way from the village, but at least thirty people were mingling around the rim riders. He decided there must be more dwellings than he thought scattered in the hills.

  “Let’s go help them,” Gallarael finally said.

  “Are you sure?” Vanx asked. He’d seen a man’s body after he’d fallen from some cliffs once. The skull had split on the rocks like a huge, gray-yoked egg. It wasn’t something he wanted to see again, especially if the egg was Brody’s head.

  Vanx motioned to the rim rider nearest them that that they were moving on. The man shook loose of the people questioning him and used his fierce-looking ramma mount to move them back; then he stayed behind Vanx and Gallarael, either out of fear or respect.

  It took the better part of an hour to get to the others. Another crowd had formed up around the twisted body of the fallen beast. A short distance off to the side, a smaller group huddled around Brody’s broken form. They weren’t any closer to the village itself, but this area was flatter and the trees far more sparse. A pair of stone-and-mortar homes with steep, tiled roofs stood a stone’s throw away. A brace of fat gray leapers was half-skinned on a rack behind one of them.

  “He told me he has a young brother still in King Oakarm’s service back in Dabbledon,” Gallarael said. “Can we afford to ship his things there?”

  “I’ll speak to Chelda about it,” Vanx promised. “Maybe the next caravan can take them to Orendyn. Darbin will handle it from there. Brody had a lot of coin hidden in his house, too. His family should get that as well.”

  “And a penned accounting of how he died,” Xavian added as he joined them.

  Poops nudged Vanx’s leg, but the dog settled at Gallarael’s feet. Unconsciously, they’d stopped far enough away from their friend’s corpse that they didn’t have to look upon it yet.

  “Is it bad?” Vanx asked and cut his eyes at Gallarael sharply.

  “Not much blood,” Xavian said. “He probab
ly died from fright during the fall. There is a gash in his side from the beast’s claw, but he looks to be at peace now.”

  Vanx didn’t tell them that Brody had been all too aware as he fell.

  Just then, Chelda began yelling and ordering people back. A man on a wagon sled that was being pulled by some hairy, ox-like beast was coming up toward them. Chelda was trying to get him to come to Brody instead of the dead creature.

  Vanx left Gallarael with Xavian and went to Brody’s side. He knelt down and put a hand over his friend’s heart, then realized that what he was seeing wasn’t that much different than the visions from his dreams. Only there wasn’t exaggerated blood and gore splattered all over the place, just a dead friend.

  “My goddess,” he said quietly, “I beg you to make his transition into the after as swift and easy as can be. He died fighting at my side. He died well, and he deserves no less.”

  There was no reply from the goddess, nor did he expect one, but he could almost feel her presence when the little silver leaf at his neck tingled. A long, reverent silence followed.

  “What prayer was that?” Chelda asked under her breath. Before Vanx could answer, she moved away and yelled sharply, “Why is he stopping?”

  She spoke using the strange accent of her people, but Vanx was already picking it up. She was angry, and the amount of command in her voice was unmistakable. It surprised Vanx when her voice suddenly choked off.

  Vanx looked up from his fallen friend and saw the sled driver had stopped his beast and was staring back, hard-faced, at Chelda. The resemblance between them was plain—as plain as the disgust in the old man’s glare. Chelda went pale. The pride of her brave deed, and all the pain and anger of Brody’s loss, had drained from her. It surprised Vanx that he couldn’t see it all puddled in the snow at her feet.

  Chelda’s father said nothing. He glanced about, as if weighing a heavy decision, then abandoned his sled, turned his back on his daughter, and stalked away toward the cluster of cabins from which he’d come.

  Vanx thought he saw a tear stream down Chelda’s cheek, but she wiped her face, sighed deeply, and resumed barking orders to anyone brave enough to venture within earshot of her.

  Brody’s body was loaded first and hauled off to the preparer’s lodge. Vanx watched all this while scratching Poops’s ears and contemplating the fact that, as soon as the Shangelak had died, the feelings of warning and proximity inside him had vanished. He reached the conclusion that the warning was a feeling that had something to do with the greater draw that beckoned him. That meant that the beast had something to do with his quest. He decided that he needed to tell the others this, but not right now. Riggaton Manix and his troop of formidable-looking rim riders were galloping toward the growing crowd of people gathered around the beast Chelda had killed.

  “Meek Wee!” someone yelled. “Meek wee feer thee regetteen.”

  The sled was returning, too, with a new driver. The crowd parted, and Vanx watched Chelda flag the sled to a halt. The rim riders rolled the heavy creature onto the deck and lashed it down.

  Chelda stood near a group of backslapping, head-shaking people who were starting to treat her as if she were some ancient champion from a minstrel’s ballad. She looked relieved when Riggaton Manix scattered them with the aid of his hard military voice and his fearsome-looking men.

  The people withdrew slowly in groups of excited babbling. The relief that the thing that had been attacking them was dead was plain in their faces. Vanx knew that Chelda’s life among her people would never be the same. She was a hero to them now, and Vanx could tell that not even her father’s disappointment would be able to overshadow the deed she’d done this day.

  The riggaton put a man called Kegger in charge of escorting them to a bedding house by the river. Kegger, and the rest of the group riding with Manix, held some sort of rank higher than the typical pumpkin-vested rim riders. These men wore vests of studded brown leather, and their cloaks were a deep forest green. Kegger was well over six feet tall and carried an axe at his hip that had a double-edged blade the size of a feast platter. The nickname Kegger, Vanx learned, had been given to him because his chest was easily the size of a barrel keg.

  The axe their guide carried, Vanx knew, was not for hewing trees. Swung with the weight and muscle of such a huge, towering man, the blade would easily cleave flesh and bone with no resistance.

  Manix had his men turn over the ramma mounts to the group. Poops didn’t like the curl-horned beasts but was wise enough to stay out from under their sharply hoofed feet. The two younger rim riders followed behind the group and, as Manix had ordered, kept the curious onlookers from bothering them as they rode into the village.

  Riding the ramma was sort of like riding the horses the Parydonian knights used, only these were smaller, and far easier to stay seated on. Vanx could imagine wielding his blade from his saddle, but even though he felt he could stay seated, he didn’t want to ride one of these things across a sheer mountainside.

  In its own way, Great Vale was a city. It was just a widely spread frontier city. All of Chelda’s talk of eldritch storytellers and village men fighting the wilderness for respect fit the place. There wasn’t an overweight or lazy looking person to be seen. Everyone was armed; even the housewives had long daggers at their hips. Yards were tidy, the fences and herd walls all in good repair. The homes were well constructed out of either block-and-mortar or logs. Only the rarest of them stood more than a single story tall, and all of the roofs were steeply sloped to shed the weight of the ice and snow.

  The roads were wide, snow-packed ice, with little of the dark filth that stained the streets in Orendyn. Only a few of the ways looked well-traveled, though. People were outside doing their daily chores and tending their business, but all of them stopped to watch as Kegger led the group by. Some of them, the ones who had already heard the news, offered words of appreciation. Others simply stared curiously. There were very few dogs, and the few that Vanx did notice looked a bit wolfish. Instead of barking and raising a ruckus when Poops and the rest of them paraded by, they only paced at the edges of their properties with raised hackles and low warning growls.

  There were no chickens or clotheslines in the yards and no horses or cows in the pens. There were certainly no two-legged kangas. There were a lot of the thick-furred pig-looking beasts moving around in fenced areas of muddy snow, though. There was also a young girl with a beautifully carved ivory stick in her hands urging a gaggle of fat gray-and-brown, yellow-beaked geese along a side street. She was heading toward a crowded crossroads, where Vanx could hear the sounds of haggling taking place. He tried to catch a glimpse of the market square, but they moved beyond the road too fast, and it was left behind them.

  There were some other animals and a surprising amount of trough-like garden boxes sitting on sled skids. Some held beautiful flowering plants, but most of them boasted fruit-bearing shrubs. An older woman with ice-blue eyes and hair as white as snow was pushing one such flower box out of the barn behind her home.

  Vanx looked up and saw that the sun had decided to chase away the gloom this day. He only wished that Brody hadn’t just been killed by some strange beast that had been most likely looking for him.

  When they got to the rooming house, they found the common area and spent the day drinking away their grief. Vanx only sipped and kept to himself. He couldn’t help but feel guilty, but the guilt fueled his determination. If he found the force behind the beast, he would show it what he felt about Brody’s demise. He swore he would.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Way out on Dragon’s Isle,

  old Pyra she does reign.

  Just one blast of her fiery breath

  and you’ll not be seen again.

  -- Dragon’s song

  A sorrowful chorus of howling cut through a particular part of the Lurr Forest known as Saint Elm’s Deep. The sound startled a flock of bloated scarlet blood-beaks up from the fairy girl’s corpse in a loud fluttering of wing b
eats and warning caws. Nearby, another scavenger, a prong-horned fox that had been sleeping off its own bellyful of fairy flesh, bolted away into the depths of the undergrowth. In an instant, a full-blown carrion feast turned into a lonely, grotesque sight. The half-eaten child-sized remains lay all alone on a bed of entrails in a trample of blood-stained snow.

  There was no one type of animal howling out; in fact, there was no animal in Aserica Rime’s forest that was simply one type of animal. Most of her children felt the bond-link, and all of those who did felt the loss of Sloffon when he crashed into the ice and died. Even a few of the Lurr’s trees gave voice to their anguish over the loss, though their sorrowful rumble was more felt through the earth than heard.

  Clytun roared out in a half-mooing growl that rattled the empty vials and beakers on the Hoar Witch’s brewery shelf. The containers that were not empty were full of green bear bile, or bright yellow fairy urine. There was a tub of deep blue-colored venom, and half a dozen other stoppered jugs and flasks full of fluids and parts. Clay pots of spider eyes, a blend of ground toad guts, and many other horrible-smelling concoctions with unthinkable ingredients lined the shelves as well. There was a small packet of unicorn lashes and even a jar full of fermented dwarf vomit. All of these, save for the thickest of her brews, rippled with the strength of the minotaur’s anguished roar.

  Aserica Rime let out a high-pitched cackling peal herself. Anyone not sharing her tainted bond-link might have mistaken it for a manic laugh, but the creatures of her forest knew it was filled with pain. The Hoar Witch’s mourning cackle died into a snarl of anger, while the others, both inside her crystal palace and out, went on voicing their grief. She’d lost quite a few of her children over the years, and losing them never got easier. The pain of their deaths was intense at first, but unlike the earlier ones, she had calloused herself from the lingering effects of such a loss. She let the fact that Sloffon had taken out one of the warlock’s party form a scab over the open wound his death left inside her. Once that was done, she continued to scheme and plan.