Gods & Dragons: 8 Fantasy Novels

by Daniel Arenson

  Mandarack considered the request while Garet leaned back against the tree, shaking with the effort of freeing his emotions. Above his head, a flock of crows cawed and spun their way from the river towards the open plains.

  The grey-haired Bane had already turned back towards the campsite. “I will instruct Salick to answer any questions you might have,” he said over his shoulder. “Ride beside her tomorrow. Learn quickly. You have only a few days to make up for a lifetime of ignorance.” He had gone a dozen paces when he realized Garet had not followed him. He turned towards the boy and saw him looking up at the mass of black birds. “What is it now, lad?”

  Garet lowered his eyes. “Master, crows should fly to their roosts at this time of day.” Dusk had settled around them, muting the colours of the small valley. “No crow would sleep on the open ground. Why would they fly away from their nests?” The flock poured across the sky above them, obscuring the face of the pale, full moon.

  Mandarack did not answer. He stood, with his eyes closed, turning his head slowly from one side to the other, as if listening to a distant sound or seeking out a barely discernible scent. The movements became smaller and smaller until he faced the thin column of smoke that rose, almost invisible against the darkening sky, a quarter mile away. Garet, looking in the same direction, felt a tingling in his belly, a nervous fluttering.

  Mandarack opened his eyes, looked for a moment at the smoke and turned quickly towards their camp.

  Garet hurried behind the tall man, trotting to keep up with his long strides. The Master, usually invisible in his calmness, seemed to grow and crackle with impatient energy. Salick looked up as they came into camp. She ran over to their pile of gear, laying her hand on the long, leather case still tied to the saddle.

  Mandarack shook his head, “Not yet. The demon is not so close. Bring the weapons and come with me.” He quickly made his way up the embankment. Salick followed with the case and Dorict fished a long pole out of the pile, one end covered in a leather bag. Marick hurried over and grabbed the hatchet from Garet’s hand. For once the cheerful apprentice looked serious. Dorict plucked a wide-bladed knife from a saddlebag. All three Banes scrambled after Mandarack, leaving Garet to follow empty-handed. At the top of the cut, he pried a fist-sized rock out of the dirt and ran after the Banes before the deepening night could hide them from his sight.

  They ran, making surprising speed for such a disparate group. Garet’s sore muscles warmed and loosened as he followed. Clouds danced across the moon’s face. In moonlight and shadow they sped along the top of the river cliff until they arrived at the source of smoke. It was a homestead much like the farm he had seen across the river: a sod cabin with a thatched roof, a mud and stick chimney, a beehive shaped bread oven near the door, and a corral beside the house. But this chimney still produced its thread of smoke, and the corral was not empty, though it contained nothing alive. As Garet took in the clawed and chewed remains of four cows and their calves lying in pools of their own blood, the fear that had been growing as they neared the farm threatened to come pouring out of his stomach and onto the ground at his feet. Salick noted his distress, and although she was green-faced herself, sternly signalled him to cover his mouth to keep from vomiting.

  Mandarack held out his right arm, the left hanging limply at his side. Salick opened the case she carried and brought out a length of metal, bright in the moonlight. Oval at one end and sharply pointed at the other, it looked like a narrow shield. Mandarack slipped his arm through a loop at the blunt end and gripped a smaller loop nearer the point. His forearm was now covered in gleaming steel from his elbow to a foot below his knuckles.

  Salick put out her hands to Dorict. The boy thrust the knife into his belt and nervously untied the bag at the end of the pole he carried. He handed her a queer, three-pronged spear. With a thrill of recognition, Garet thought, I’ve heard of this in the songs of the Sea Lords. A trident! The shaft with its barbed tines was taller than Salick as she held it nervously before her. Garet glanced at Dorict and Marick. Each bore a weapon now, Dorict a knife and Marick the hatchet. Garet hefted the stone he had dug from the dirt; it had a comforting weight. He looked up to see Mandarack staring at the rock in his hand. After a slight hesitation, the old man nodded, but then waved the three boys back with his shielded arm. The moon peeped through a rift in the bank of clouds. There was no sound; even the crickets had left off their chirping. The world seemed to be holding its breath as the Master and his apprentice approached the closed door. At a nod from Mandarack, Salick poked it open with the prongs of the trident.

  The night exploded.

  Salick and Mandarack jumped back as the door slammed closed. The frame did not stop it, and the planks continued to bow outwards from some hideous pressure within. Now the frame itself broke and brought the sod wall with it. Beams cracked, and the turf roof fell in. Something immense pushed its way through the debris and out of the ruined farmhouse.

  The demon was huge. It towered above the five humans ranged against it. Garet could easily have walked under it without brushing the distended belly with his head. Its breath reeked of fresh blood, and drops of it slid off the hooked claws at the end of each spindly leg. The demon’s head was small in proportion to the mass of its chest and stomach but it was still eerily familiar to Garet. The black eyes were smaller and set under larger ridges, these rising up into wickedly sharp horns; the beak was shorter and stronger, and yet it was kin to what Garet had slain. Shaking itself free of the roof beams, it battered through the remains of the wall and attacked.

  Mandarack waved them all farther back and engaged the demon. Moving with a grace and economy of motion that would have been impressive in a man half his years, the Demonbane easily avoided the slashes of the creature’s front legs. With the quick, precise movements of a sparrow flitting from branch to branch, he sidestepped each vicious attack. Garet soon saw the strategy behind his jumps and twists. Mandarack was leading the creature into the corral, where it soon stumbled over the broken rails and dead cattle in its pursuit of the old man. He had still not used the shield to either protect himself or attack the thing.

  When the creature inadvertently hooked a back leg into the gutted body of a calf, Mandarack shouted, “Now!”

  Salick ran forward and thrust the trident through the fence rails. She pinned the demon’s other back leg between the weapon’s tines and, with a strength not apparent in her slim form, twisted the shaft to lock the leg and drag it towards her.

  The creature, already overbalanced, tried to jerk the leg back in its fury to catch the old Bane darting just out of reach.

  Salick, gasping with the effort of restraining the beast, called out, “Dorict, Marick!”

  The two boys dropped their weapons and ran to her, wrapping their arms around her waist and shoulders. After a moment’s hesitation, Garet dropped his rock and joined them, grabbing the remnant of the shaft that stuck out behind Salick’s hands and twisting hard in the same direction. With a crack, the thing’s leg twisted and it crumpled screeching to the ground. Mandarack fell on it like a bolt of summer lightning. A strong thrust of his shield arm drove the triangular point into the demon’s neck. Garet couldn’t tell if the thing’s throat was cut, but the blow ended the fight. Its free legs clawed the ground as it wheezed and struggled for breath. The younger Banes kept a tight hold on the trident. Mandarack stood, as poised and relaxed as the leader of a harvest dance, shield raised for another blow. But it was not needed. The clawing slowed, then quickened again into spasmodic jerks. Finally, the demon slumped in death, one leg still hooked in the calf’s body.

  The younger Banes relaxed, and Salick untangled her trident. Marick smiled at Garet. “Lot of good that rock would have done!”

  Looking at the size of the creature slumped on the ground, Garet could only nod his head in agreement.

  Dorict punched Marick on the shoulder. “Fool! He had nothing else!”

  Marick kept on smiling, used to Dorict’s disapproval.
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br />   The larger boy turned towards Garet and said approvingly, “Well killed.”

  Garet, still breathing hard from the effort of holding the beast, mumbled his thanks.

  Salick agreed, perhaps a bit reluctantly, “When you helped us, well, you did the right thing.”

  Marick added wickedly, “For once.”

  “Salick.”

  Mandarack’s dry voice interrupted them. The old man was breathing a bit harder than usual, but seemed otherwise unruffled by the battle. Salick handed her trident to Dorict and helped her master remove the shield from his arm. The Bane then put his hand on Salick’s right shoulder and repeated the words Dorict had used, “Well killed, Salick.” His apprentice swallowed and looked fierce as she fought back tears. He did the same with Dorict and then Marick, both of whom swelled visibly at the praise. Garet tried to step into the background, but Mandarack’s firm touch on his shoulder stopped him.

  “Well killed, Bane.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE DEMON JEWEL

  The small party of Banes walked slowly back to the campsite, each wrapped in his or her own thoughts. Mandarack’s silence had become a wall, and even Salick did not walk near him. He had not allowed her or the others to examine what lay beneath the skewed and fallen roof of the poor farm. After crawling back out from under the broken rafters, he had walked away without a word or sign. Salick had rounded up the others and followed.

  Garet felt the queasiness in his stomach fade as they left the body of the demon behind them. Why did demons still terrify him when they were dead, he wondered as he walked behind Marick. True, the queasiness and jitters had been stronger when the thing was alive, but even now the creature’s corpse was horrifying. How could he know where the demon power started, and his own natural fear of a thirteen-foot tall nightmare left off?

  At the camp, Dorict and Salick washed the weapons in the stream. From his voluminous saddlebags, Dorict produced a soft cloth and dried them. The weapons were then replaced in their leather sheaths. The younger Banes soon got out their bedrolls; no one wanted dinner after what they had seen. The silence of their master was a blanket over all of them, and even Marick bedded down without his usual banter. Mandarack sat with his back to the distant, slain demon and stared into the fire. When Garet woke in the grey light of dawn, the old man was still sitting there, staring into the dead embers. It was impossible to say if he had slept at all.

  After a cold breakfast, Mandarack drew Salick aside and spoke softly to her. Garet watched her nod, uncertainly at first but then with more enthusiasm and agreement. She waved and Garet came over, yawning after his fitful sleep. He had dreamt of returning home, but the small cabin was empty. The hearth was cold, and spider webs covered his mother’s pots and pans. As he put his hand on the loft ladder to search for his family, a shiver of fear came over him, and with the slow sureness of dreams, he realized that a demon waited for him in the loft. Sleep had not been easy after that. Waking and seeing Mandarack’s silhouette in the light of the dying fire had reassured him, and he had eventually drifted off into other desperate, though unremembered dreams. Salick’s stern expression did not help his nerves and he wrapped his arms anxiously around himself as he stood before her.

  “Come with me,” she commanded, “and bring the hatchet.” She began the climb to the top of the hill.

  Mystified, Garet asked Dorict for it. The younger boy retrieved the small axe from his saddlebags and handed it over.

  “Right. We should have thought of that last night,” Dorict yawned, “but, you know, it was too…too…” He flushed and turned away to busy himself with saddling the horses.

  Still confused, Garet followed Salick, hatchet in hand, back to the ruined farmhouse. She skirted the building, face turned aside, and walked resolutely up to the sprawled form of the demon.

  Garet decided to begin his education. “Salick, why do I still feel afraid of this…” Words failed him in describing the thing before them. Faced with what it was and what it had done, even the word ‘demon’ seemed inadequate.

  Salick held her hand out for the hatchet. She seemed to weigh her words as carefully as he had last night. “Garet,” she said, with none of her usual disdain, “Master Mandarack has asked me to tell you ‘what any Southerner would know.’ But this goes beyond common knowledge. It is a thing known only to Banes.” Her eyes narrowed and she was the old Salick again. “And you will never speak of this to anyone outside the Banehall!”

  Garet nodded, and when she kept glaring at him, belatedly added, “I promise.”

  Salick returned his nod and knelt beside the demon’s head. She pushed it over and raised the hatchet to strike it above and between the eyes. She explained her purpose between strokes.

  “The ability to project fear is common to all demons.” Thwack. “Although some are stronger than others.” Thwack. Her words had the quality of a recital, as if she were repeating something she had heard many times. “Each kind of demon possesses an organ, called the demon’s jewel, in its forehead.” Thwack. The hatchet had split the skull of the creature, and Salick pried the blade back and forth to widen the opening. Garet strove to keep his breakfast in its place. “The size of the jewel is what really determines the level of fear felt by any human or animal and the distance at which that fear will be felt.” Her tone changed to one of disgust as she pushed her fingers into the opening and probed inside. “The demon you killed was a ‘Shrieker;’ they have large jewels.” Her look indicated that Garet was not to let this go to his head. “Of course, the one you killed was not particularly large. This,” she tapped the strongly ridged head with the blade of the hatchet, “is a ‘Basher’ Demon.” An unwelcome memory of the creature plowing through the wall of the farmhouse rose in Garet’s mind. Salick continued, “They have a relatively small jewel.” With a wet, sucking sound, she pulled a small blue sphere from the gaping wound in the demon’s head.

  The ‘jewel’ was neither shiny nor particularly gem-like. To Garet, it looked like a stream-smoothed pebble. Salick handed it to him. The bottom of his stomach dropped as the jewel’s surface touched his flesh. Curious, he experimented with holding it close to himself and then far away. There was a slight but noticeable difference in his queasiness. He next placed it a hundred paces from the creature and slowly backed away. The fear did decrease with distance from the stone, and no longer increased with closeness to the demon’s corpse. Salick watched these activities curiously. Finally satisfied, he handed the stone back to her.

  She wrapped it in the cloth Dorict had used to dry the Banes’ weapons. “The strongest sensations come from touching the jewel with your bare hands.”

  He had to agree. Touching the jewel made him feel as if he were falling from a great height. His stomach made desperate attempts to get past his clenched throat.

  The demon’s carcass still lay splayed out over the gutted cows. The clouds of the previous night had retreated again to the horizon, and it promised to be another hot, sunny day. By noon the demon would no longer need its jewel; the stench would drive away anything with a nose. But plundered of its jewel, the corpse no longer had any particular terror for Garet. One of his questions had been answered. He took the hatchet from Salick and wiped the blood from it on the grass with a grim smile. Handling demon bodies was becoming second nature.

  Not as repulsed by the corpse, Garet realized that this was the first time he had seen these creatures in daylight. Leaving Salick waiting impatiently outside the corral, he examined it.

  The first thing that struck him was the colour. He had never seen the Shrieker, save in the uncertain light of the winter lamp or later when it had been charred black by the fire. The ridges that swept up from the hatchet wound on the Basher’s head were a startling shade of blue, but the rest of the head, along with its back and the outside of its legs were a deep, dry-blood red, fading to a light pink on the rest of the body.

  Prodding the skin while Salick wrinkled her nose in distaste, he discovered it to be as
tough as boiled leather. No wonder Mandarack had waited to strike a vulnerable spot. Even a sword slash would be of little use against this natural armour, for he could see that the shield had crushed the throat, not cut it. The legs, at first sight so insect-like, were actually jointed in the same fashion as his own. Although freakishly long and thin, the bunched muscles of its back and shoulders explained the incredible strength the demon had shown last night. As if to offset the length of its limbs, the demon’s fingers and toes were shorter than a Shrieker’s but much more heavily clawed. Garet swallowed hard as he saw the dried blood and long strands of blond hair stuck to those terrible weapons.

  He straightened from his examination, expecting to find Salick fuming in her impatience. Instead, she was staring upriver, past the collapsed house. The crows that had alerted them to the demon’s attack were back. They circled nervously in the air above a stand of birch some distance from the house. A crowd of them would land in the branches but then others would suddenly take flight, creating an unending chaos of broiling, noisy birds. Garet realized that they were poised between a fear of the demon’s jewel and a hunger for the small mountain of carrion meat in the corral.

  She turned from the crows to glance at the demon’s body. “Come on, Garet. They’ll eat it now.” She looked somberly at the collapsed house. “They’ll eat everything.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LESSONS

  Salick seemed to have completely accepted Mandarack’s order to tutor Garet. Although she often rolled her eyes or shook her head at the depth of his ignorance, she answered all his questions as fully as possible. In the next two days of riding, he learned more about the South than he had in all the previous years of his life. Not that it all made sense. Each piece of information, although freely given, stubbornly refused to connect with any other piece to make a sensible whole. Why did Shirath have sixteen ‘Lords’ and only one ‘King,’ a young man named Trax? Why were Banemasters equal to lords even though they had no section of the city, a ‘ward,’ Salick had called it, to rule? Why did Salick seem to think that the Shirath Banehall was as powerful as the King if the Ward Lords were less powerful than King Trax? The more he heard riding at Salick’s side, the more questions poured out of him.