by GJ Kelly
The wind had indeed backed to the southeast, bringing with it cooling breezes and the promise of clear and gentle nights. Which, he thought, while welcome to travellers on the road Jarn, would be something of a disadvantage to a hunter sneaking through the woodlands trying to catch up with a dark thing unseen and then to destroy it.
For a fleeting moment, looking down at the stick poking up from the dirt and the gravel around it, he saw himself back in the Keep, before the sword, plunging it into the home-stone, Elayeen’s hand in his and in Allazar’s, and then that deep and massive sound from far below them…
For a fleeting moment, he remembered the look she had given him at the end, as the great wave rushed back from its journey to the Teeth, that deep and massive sound from far below them once again. He remembered the surge of love and fear in her eyes, flooding through her hand and through their throth. Love for him. Fear for him. And then it had all been taken away. It had been the last time she had seen him, through her own beautiful eyes.
Morloch’s rasping voice echoed unbidden in his mind:
Know this, king of nothing, know this! All the horror and dread I shall unleash upon your festering world is the wages of your sins against me!
But Gawain knew Morloch’s weapons, the fear and the terror, the lies and deceit and the doubt. He had used them himself upon the Ramoth to great effect. Dwarfspit, Gawain thought, and remembered another voice, one he knew much better, one he knew he could trust:
I have always been proud of you. I know you will do well. Remember who you are, and be true to yourself, and to Raheen.
Yes, Father, Gawain smiled sadly. Then his features became grim once more. His angry pronouncement of his name and heritage to Allazar had reminded himself that it was not he, Gawain, who had caused all this. It was not he who had sent the Eldengaze to possess his beloved, nor was it he who had etched hidden knowledge and power within the wizard’s outwardly ordinary frame. It was not Gawain who had made the circles upon the floor of the Great Keep nor was it he who had made the longsword with its unseen runes swimming deep within a steel forged by unknown smiths in a time beyond the mists of myth.
No. He knew Morloch’s weapons well, knew them when he saw them and when he heard them. The circle and the sword, and the powers of Eldenelves and Elder Wizards had been set aside by those ancient magi against the day they would be needed against Morloch. It was Morloch who had triggered the need for their creation, and Morloch who had triggered the need for the three of Raheen to unleash those ancient powers. All the guilt and all the responsibility lay heaped at Morloch’s door, and it was Gawain who would come a-knocking to see the rightful owner collect what was long overdue.
Another glance at the stick, and then an eye on the wind. “Time to go hunting.” Gawain whispered, smiling grimly. He checked his weapons, jumped up and down several times to ensure nothing rattled and all was secure, and then set off, due south, following the road for two hundred yards before loping off into the woods, arcing towards the southwest.
The going was surprisingly good, the rains had softened the undergrowth so that those leaves which had fallen early simply flexed underfoot rather than crackling like a handful of twisted hay. Gawain surprised himself by enjoying his quiet progress through the forest which, as Tyrane had remarked earlier in the day, was thickening the further away from the road he moved. It had been a long time since he’d had to use his old skills, skills which had almost atrophied during their long traverse of the plains from Ferdan and in the hills of Threlland before. Hunting rabbits for Allazar near the charcoal-burner’s cabin had been good exercise, and had helped sharpen his senses as well as his aim.
It had been a long time since he had hunted alone. And it felt good to be alone. Here, in the woods, moving cautiously and quietly deeper into the forest, he felt somehow liberated. For one thing, here there were no Callodon or Gorian eyes watching his every move and gesture. No crunching of boots and wheels and horses hooves on the crumbling track to Jarn. No icy and grating voice of Eldengaze jarring at his nerves like the raw touch of cold on sensitive teeth. Gawain wanted Elayeen back. Perhaps his absence might give her the strength to return from wherever she went when the Eldengaze was upon her. Perhaps the hidden knowledge the wizard possessed would ‘come to the fore’ and help Elayeen control the ‘gift’ the circles had bestowed upon her, and bring Elayeen back to him. Perhaps.
But the best part of moving quietly through the forest, the part which brought a grim smile to Gawain’s face and lit up his eyes, was that he was free to be Gawain once more. As he had been, hunting in the woodlands around the shores of Lough Rea at home, or hunting the Ramoth throughout the lowlands. Here he was no King of Ashes, no husband, no famed Longsword warrior, no Traveller, no DarkSlayer. Here, there was simply Gawain, the forest, and his quarry. After the chaos of Ferdan and the peaceful but urgent haste across the plains, after the tumult of the circle and the chaotic emotional upheaval of its aftermath, and then the sudden rise of the ‘gifts’ which had stricken Elayeen and Allazar and seemed to set them far apart from him, it felt good to be alone.
He felt as he imagined a wolf must feel, if wolves indeed thought and felt about themselves at all. He simply let go of everything and allowed all his old training, senses and experiences free rein, almost felt them rising up from beneath blankets of idleness on a bed of enforced indolence where they’d languished for months.
His eyes darted, wide and alert, noting the way underfoot and its hazards, noting the boughs and branches overhead, head jerking this way and that, ears straining, all senses alert for sounds which should be there but weren’t, and sounds which shouldn’t be there but were. It was exhilarating, and as he moved deeper into the forest and began swinging slowly further to the north, everything else faded from his mind, leaving only the forest, and the quarry.
There was no real need for haste. It was barely mid-morning, and where the sun had flashed and flickered through the trees and branches when the column had jogged along the road, now Gawain picked his quiet way through a world of steady light and colour, the sunlight filtering through the canopy overhead and glittering like the shards of a shattered mirror whenever he glanced up and over his right shoulder.
Damp earth, mosses, fungi and decaying leaves, ferns and bracken, all the scents mingling. Insects buzzing, songbirds calling, the occasional chattering of alarm from blackbirds and the sudden clapping of wings as doves and pigeons took flight, though none of the alarums came from Gawain’s quiet passing below their roosts. Here and there, at a distance, an occasional scurrying, voles and mice, shrews and squirrels. Around the edges of muddier puddles and wallows, spoor of fox and wild boar, and once, even of wolf. The forest was thriving, and with Raheen gone, soon it would reclaim the road to Jarn, and even the outpost at the foot of the Downland Pass, and Raheen’s isolation from the world would be complete.
Gawain swung farther north, heading northwest now, a direction he would maintain until he cut across whatever spoor the darkness had left in its wake. Eldengaze had stated that the thing was on foot, and not tracking them from the air. Gawain paused, looking and listening, and then flicked a glance to the east; nothing but trees. It was getting darker, too, the splinters of light reaching the forest floor diminishing, plants unable to survive in the gloom giving way to leaf litter and the mosses and fungi that thrive on them, the scent of decay rising. Whatever was passing through the forest here should leave an easy path to follow in that leaf litter and humus beneath it.
Gawain shuddered in gloom. Whatever was tracking the caravan must also possess some mystic vision, something of at least the power of the eldengaze. Hopefully it hadn’t glanced over its shoulder lately.
It was almost noon, as far as Gawain could tell from the slivers of light above the forest canopy, when he cut across the trail left by the darkness Eldengaze had seen. Gawain simply stood and stared, stunned. It wasn’t one track. It was nine, as best he could tell. Eight men, though for all he knew it could be eight
Grimmands, and some kind of beast, four-footed by the spoor. What manner of beast, he couldn’t say, except that it was large and powerful, because from the drag-marks in the soft earth around him, it looked very much like four men were struggling hard to contain and control the beast. It was heavy too, from the depth of the strange footprints it left; three toed, like an enormous clover-leaf, with a broad lobe of a heel, and at least eighteen inches across. Gawain had never heard of the like, much less seen it.
Large though the beast might be, and heavy too, it was still able to keep pace with the caravan travelling north along the Jarn road. As Gawain followed the trail, loping along quietly in the soft and churned earth, his eyes told him of the occasional struggle that the men running either side of the beast had endured, and their attempts at keeping the creature moving roughly parallel to the unseen road a good mile to the east. The unknown group had made no attempt at concealing their tracks whatsoever, and from the gouges in the earth, whatever it was clearly wanted to veer away from its present due-north course and head straight for the caravan, and that was worrying indeed.
Gawain had to be cautious though, and remember the hunt, forget all else lest worry for Elayeen and the others fogged his judgement or clouded his senses to the point where the enemy became alerted to his presence. His face grim, an arrow tightly strung in his right hand, he set himself a gentle pace, one that would allow him to hear his enemy’s progress through the forest long before they became visible, and one that would keep the enemy from hearing his approach.
An hour later Gawain paused to drink from a stream of cool clear water, up-flow from the point where the darkness had crossed. He emptied his water skin and refilled it, and then sat quietly, listening intently. He thought he heard a guttural, unnatural sound, far in the distance, but the gurgling of the stream had drowned it. When he’d drunk his fill, and heard nothing more save the woodland sounds he expected to hear, he moved off again.
It was mid afternoon when he heard the sound again, much louder this time. It was an explosive, deep and resonant cry, more like a bark than a growl, a short kraaahl! of a cry which seemed to bounce from the trees and sent a tingle down Gawain’s spine. Nothing in nature made such a sound, Gawain knew it instinctively. And instinctively he slowed his pace, and moved off the track that the darkness had made through the forest, and began to close upon his quarry with the greatest of caution.
oOo
22. The Beast
It was perhaps an hour later when he heard the heavy beast snorting, and an accompaniment of rattling chains. He moved a little further to the west of the darkness, so that his scent couldn’t possibly swirl through the trees to reach whatever foul nostrils waited in the gloom. And waiting was what they seemed to be doing. A little later, Gawain was stunned to hear voices, accents thick, and Gorian from the sound of it. Silently, and using all the skills of concealment and stealth he’d ever been taught by every forester and woodsman, hunter and soldier he’d ever known, he crept closer.
“…they keep stopping!” a voice hissed, irritated, but sensible enough to understand that noise carries even in a forest.
“It is obvious. They are moving faster so they are tiring faster, and need more frequent rest periods. Stop your whining,” a second said softly, the voice carrying a sneer of authority in its nasal tones.
“The beast knows they’re there and it’s hungry! But for the black chains we’d all have been Kraal-food days ago!”
“Aldayan is right,” A third voice muttered, “The chains and collar are the only thing keeping us alive, though they didn’t do Karayan much good when the Kraal had him for breakfast three days ago. If you hadn’t gotten us all lost in this threken Eastland forest we could’ve loosed the beast and been back across the river days ago.”
“And whose task was it to obtain a map of Callodon, Brayan of the Eastguard? Who was it who guided us across the river Ostern using a map obviously made by some Pellarnian resistance scum!”
There was a sullen silence, broken only by the snorting of the beast, and the clink of chains being drawn tighter. Gawain eased forward, keeping low, moving from tree to tree.
“Now that we have that settled,” the sneering voice asserted, “Be silent while I use the Jardember.”
“If they really are travelling straight along a road, Darimak,” the one called Aldayan announced, “Then after keeping that pace for the best part of four hours they’ll be resting for a lot longer yet. Besides, it’s time to eat, I’m starving and so are the rest of the boys. Keeping this threken Kraal under control is threken hard work!”
“Then eat! But do it in silence and stop your whining or by Morloch’s Eye I swear, Jerraman demGoth will hear of your insubordination!”
“Jerraman demGoth ain’t here. Jerraman demGoth ain’t the one hanging on the end of a threken chain with a threken Kraal at the other end of it. Jerraman demGoth is probably sat on his black arse in his black tower on the banks of the Eramak in Pellarn Province stuffing his face with roast beef an’ feeding sheep to his pet threken Graken.”
Not if Jerraman demGoth and his pet threken Graken were on the Jarn road two days ago, Gawain thought to himself, slowly inching his way up into a tree. People so rarely look up, and up would give him a better view of his quarry with far less risk to himself than creeping any closer would entail.
“I warn you, Aldayan you witless oaf of a guardsman, one more word and I shall feed you to Jerraman demGoth’s pet Kraal-beast! It would rid me of your constant whining and sate the beast’s appetite enough to make the rest of us safer, at least until those Eastlanders lead us to the town that lies at the end of their road!”
More silence, except the clink of metal upon metal.
Gawain eased himself out onto a stout bough, and froze. Below him, and about twenty yards away, stood the beast, and the eight men with it. The sight of it was blood-curdling.
The Kraal-beast was immense, standing at least seven feet tall on its four stubby and knee-less legs, though the weight of the monster in the soft earth of the forest floor had left the four-lobed prints some six inches deep in places. It was short-necked, broad chested, and its skin, if skin it was, seemed to consist of great armoured plates, as though sheets of steel had been riveted together to give it form, the blackness of aquamire swimming and moving within them. Its head was awful, so large that a great hump of bone and muscle on its shoulders was needed to support it. A single horn, black and sharply pointed, rose up from its nose, perfectly positioned to rip open the underbelly of a horse, and Gawain didn’t doubt for a moment that with a single toss of that immense head, a horse could be flung clean over the creature’s back. One round black aquamire eye at least twelve inches across bulged from the top of the flat forehead, though from time to time a pair of crusty armoured lids blinked over it, like the lids of the grotesque eye-amulets worn by Morloch’s emissaries. Short, boar-like tusks protruded from each side of the creature’s mouth, but its teeth, if any, were not visible.
The size and weight of the Kraal-beast was staggering. Gawain could scarcely believe what he saw. Certainly no arrow thrown or shot from a bow wielded by man or elf could hope to defeat such a creature. A grappinbow of the kind Martan of Tellek had described, used to fire immense iron bolts and ropes across a gorge or river for bridge-building might put a dent in the Kraal. Perhaps. The thing looked as though it could charge through a village of stone-built houses, end to end, and not be troubled in the slightest.
Gawain blinked, and dragging his astonished mind back to the hunt, allowed himself to breathe again. About the immense creature’s neck and shoulders was a loose black iron band shaped in the manner of a horse collar, at least three inches thick, and it, like the chains hanging from it, swam with aquamire. Four chains, two each side, and a man at each of them. And they were big men, too, all of them, including three standing well clear of the Kraal and the chains that seemed to give them a measure of control over it. The last man of the eight, though, was obviously the one nam
ed Darimak, and from his black clothing now dirty and frayed, and from the way he held aloft a familiar looking carved ball of black wood, this short and weaselly Gorian was a dark wizard of some kind. Though, from the way the big men of the guard spoke to him, not a very powerful one.
“They are still resting.” Darimak declared with great authority, and lowered the Jardember.
“Mmo Ffit,” one of the other guardsman muttered through a mouthful of food. It looked to be some kind of Gorian equivalent of frak, though cut into small slabs or bars rather the familiar round Threlland cake that Gawain enjoyed.
“Be silent!” Darimak cried aloud, and it was a mistake. The sudden and unexpected noise clearly startled the Kraal-beast.
It lifted its head a surprising distance given its size, its one great eye closed, and the great gaping maw opened to reveal rows of black, shark-like teeth. Kraaaaaaaaaaaaahl! came the sudden deafening call, a short-lived but blood-numbing explosion of sound.
For the briefest moment, Gawain thought he saw the flash of a whitish line between the back of the creature’s lower jaw and the immense armour plate of the beast’s chest, just in front of the iron collar as the jaw closed and the head lowered, the single eye opening once more. The Kraal swung its head towards the north-east, the direction of the caravan, and it lurched.
At once, the two men on the Kraal’s right took up the sudden slack on their chains, and the three men who had been standing idle dropped their food and dashed to add their strength to the chains on the beast’s left side. It took all five men on Gawain’s side of the creature to prevent it breaking loose and charging away through the forest.
“Hold it! Hold it!” Darimak screamed, and held aloft a short rod of what looked like iron, and began chanting. His screams only upset the Kraal more, and again it lifted its head to issue its deafening call.