by Anton Le Roy
I take the opportunity to readjust the various strappings I have wrapped tightly around pulled muscles and damaged joints and then before we freeze we put our layers of clothes back on and when we’re done with that we walk away from the scene without a backward glance. Stopping further down the path we gaze at the vista below. A late afternoon sun has finally scorched away the mist from the wide valleys and we can marvel at the sweeping landscape spreading from left to right.
Back and knees are killing me, I’ve got a headache from the fall earlier and I still haven’t fully recovered from the rigours of surviving Loktie’s realm, so, I chew on a small lump of Redleaf and the pain in my aching body slowly numbs a little.
“Why aren’t we dead?” asks Gregor and not for the first time lately.
I don’t know. Again. To be honest though that same question could have been asked for years! What saved us this time? Gregor’s brooch, luck, or something else? What’s more important than that is who tried to kill us and I don’t mean the weirdo hiding under the blanket. Satipo.
“Can you believe it, Vet? After all these years and this is how we find out he’s still alive.”
All these years. How many? I’m in my fifties now, so must be, say, thirty odd years? By the gods has it really been that long or is my maths bad? It was a day of death and fire. A day when lots of my brothers, sisters and friends died because of me. The beginning of the end of my family of Red Dogs. The day I could never forgive myself for. I still remember the look on his melted face that day, the look in those piercing eyes to be more exact. The moment that became the last between he and I.
We’d gone back to the battle scene, the dead city, the neighbouring towns, everywhere we could think of as we tried to find our missing Red Dog brethren. We looked and we looked and never found Satipo and Pitt. It was hard for me to go on as normal after that, especially while struggling with the grief of losing Whistle and the others and knowing I was alive at their expense. Losing Whistle tore me up especially, so great was my affection for him.
People said I wasn’t to blame but they were lying, I knew it, could see it. All of them blamed me, blamed me for everything, and there was only one escape from that: running away. Running from my responsibilities. Running from the pain. Running from Wetlock. The more I hated myself the more I shut her out and I didn’t deserve someone like her.
“Still alive…” Gregor continues, “Not that I ever doubted he was alive. He always was a hard man to put down.”
Not to mention the rumours spread amongst old friends years later. Snippets here and there while we travelled the seemingly endless world on our seemingly endless meanderings. I never thought he was dead either, not that me and Gregor ever talked about it. We never really talked about that day much at all really. We just put it behind us and got on with our lives, as you do. I could never truly escape it though and finally that past has caught up with me, got me trapped in its fanged jaws and won’t let go till I do something about it. I got plenty of other regrets I should face up to, but let’s take it one step at a time, eh?
He’s out there somewhere. Maybe amongst the spikes of those mountains or the rolls of those hills. He could be one of those specks in the distance for all I know, looking right back at us. Seems like he’s not the only one unable to get over that day and he clearly still blames me, and Gregor it seems, too.
“Vet,” growls Gregor, his eyes still on the valley, “Don’t you dare.”
“Dare what?” Pointless rebuff – he knows me too well.
“I know what you’re thinking and I don’t like it, not one shitty little bit. It’s madness!”
“We have to.” Nay, I have to.
“Bullshit!” Gregor finally spins and grabs my shoulder with a shake to wake me from a bad dream. His great size looms over me. “Bastard just tried to kill us, Vet! He ordered those two fuckers to do it! And a whole damned village got destroyed in the process!”
“Exactly! Yet we still live, so what does that mean?”
“It means that we get to turn around, walk away and enjoy this gold until we waste it all on women and wine. Then we go on another bunch of quests again that have nothing to do with the past. Like we always do!”
“No.”
Gregor angrily bares his teeth. “I want payback with those two priests for what they did here just as much as you do, I wanna squish out their eyes with my thumbs and cut out their hearts, but…” He curses. There is pain in his eyes. He knows this could break us. “Satipo… Whistle… all the others… That day was so long ago now, Vet.” I know, and are we even the same people anymore? “What do you think will happen when we find him? He obviously hates us for what happened back then. Hates us enough to want us dead.” He’s trying to hide how much that truth crushes him. “We just gonna hug and make up?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“So are we gonna repay him in kind for what happened today instead?”
I shrug. What happens will happen. Either way it’s time we had a little chat. And what would I even say? Sorry for the hurt I caused you? Sorry for reducing Whistle, Link and Blunt to piles of charred body parts? Sorry that Whistle was forced to sacrifice themselves for us? Sorry for the deaths of many others we held dear? How the hell do you ask for forgiveness from that? Scream that I didn’t mean to do it like a kid who just broke something? Should I really blame him for trying to kill me? Trying to kill Gregor on the other hand, I would never expect that. Maybe he blames Gregor for somehow leaving him behind too. Destroying the village though, regardless if Satipo did or didn’t tell them to do that, well those two priests are going to pay for that in blood.
“I have to know,” I mutter, tension in my jaw and in my knuckles. “What happened to him? How could he have done something like that?” I gesture behind and then wonder at my words. Do I mean the destruction of the village or the intended murder of the two of us?
“He always was the crazy one.”
Not like this.
We have to find him. We have to convince him that we didn’t abandon him. We have to save him from whatever nightmare has consumed him. And maybe then he’ll be able to somehow forgive us. “We have to try to do this.”
Gregor turns to face the settlement remains, perhaps unable to look at me. “And how do we even find him anyway?” You already know, you’re just trying to find excuses to give up on the idea.
“We track those two priests. Shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe they’ll return to the Princess, maybe not, but they’ll go to Satipo first I’ll wager.”
In the silence I watch a few of the escaped horses milling about further down the path. As if on cue our two main horses walk back up towards us. I hadn’t noticed they were still alive to be honest. Still all saddled up too. Hadn’t spotted if the stable boy was amongst the deceased but then a lot of them were too messed up to identify.
“I’m going to find him, Gregor,” I state. With or without you.
He knows he cannot win this argument as he looks down at the purse of gold within in his hand. Gregor could go his own way and leave me to it. It would be really easy for him and I wouldn’t blame him at all. I know him too well though and I’m not at all surprised when he sighs and says, “Fine. Then let’s go before I throw you into that grave too.”
Chapter 6
Before.
Carefree days. Carefree despite the chores, the orders, the strict regime, the daily dice with death. Carefree despite the demands of army life and the rigours of endless wars. The three of us were so very young and we didn’t care where life was taking us, or how, we were just enjoying going along for the ride and every day we were doing it together with the rest of the Red Dogs and the Six. As a family.
My sword dripped with blood and my boots squelched from pools of red underfoot. Satipo knelt down and ran two fingers into that cooling liquid. Then he drew patterns on his handsome face just like one tribe used to do before our army slaughtered them all in a skirmish several months ago. It was a way to further st
rengthen our bond, he claimed. I followed suit and so did Gregor and indeed we felt like blood brothers. It was just us three there, split from the rest of the Red Dogs on a routine mission that ended up the usual way: people died at our hands.
The fresh corpses before us were of all kinds: man, soldier, woman, elder and child. Even though I saw them I didn’t see clearly. It didn’t seem real enough. Their deaths were at our hands and yet these hands of mine felt like someone else’s. Although we were just following orders that day changed things, things deep inside. There seemed to be an energy fizzing across the scene too, sharp like static upon my skin. Perhaps it was our unified strength that would never be broken.
Satipo smiled and I understood the madness there within him. It oozed out of him to seep into our own brains and I let it because it made me feel even more alive. I revelled in its purity.
“There will be no separating us three,” he said, his grin a white toothed slash across his red marked face. “We are bonded forever us three and only death will steal us from each other. Only death.”
Me and Gregor eagerly agreed. “Only death.”
Now.
There are numerous days I wish I could go back to a time in my youth and I could educate myself of the foolish things I’d done and would do (on most occasions that education would involve a swift punch to the face and I would probably enjoy it too). Foolish things like executing those innocent people and children, even if we were under orders. Other days I know I wouldn’t be the man I am today without those regrets that have shaped me and perhaps I would be dead without them. Too many mistakes for me to fight or forget anyway, all collected over decades of endless battles both on and off the battlefield and plaguing me in the form of ghosts. Ghosts of many different friends I’ve lost, or innocents I’ve failed to save, or those I chose to murder (like those whose blood we callously used to paint our faces in a blood pact) and even of foe I’ve felled (sometimes those I wish I hadn’t and sometimes those I’m glad I did). Now it’s my turn to be a ghost, my turn to chase someone down and those two priests dressed in black are going to lead us straight to him.
Down into the valley we ride, where the air warms a little although not enough to see an end to the snow, which lies like an old thinning rug thrown haphazardly across the uneven land. Half-hearted snowflakes drift lazily here and there, threatening to worsen but never seeing it through. Evergreens and conifers stand in abundance and occasionally shiver snow from their shoulders. When spring eventually comes these lower lands will brim with colour and bloom. For now it sleeps. Waiting. Curious moose and deer lurk within those forest depths. Snow rabbits and foxes zip out of sight when we get too close. For a moment I think I see Loktie’s Coyote watching us from amongst the heather – must have just been a wolf.
Empty walkways wind down and down, amongst rock and tree and the occasional hiss of an ice cold stream. Sometimes the way is steep or sometimes slippery with ice and must occasionally be traversed by foot before we can get back in the saddle. There’s little need for much tracking on such barren routes because, aside from the fact that there’s really only one safe track down, most of the time we follow our nose instead. Brother Vim’s dark magic has a certain unpleasant smell, at least one that we can recognise after nearly being torn to pieces by it. Just as if the mage is dripping wet he leaves a vague magical residue in his wake, fleeting, yet remaining long enough for us to notice it. Hanging in the air like a burp. Leaking across the ground like a minor spill. Gregor’s revulsion to it helps immensely too, much to my amusement, and I like to think that has more to do with his bad mood instead of the real reason. It’s funny that we never really talked about Satipo when we took to the road after the eventual collapse of the Red Dogs and now we’re trying to find him we still don’t talk about Satipo. That suits me just fine though. There’s too much I have to get straight in my head first.
Eventually the trail becomes a path that becomes a tatty old road vaguely carved through high banks of snow and in the base of the valley it winds its way through the uneven terrain of a joyless looking landscape forming the small kingdom of Eiseggar. Vim’s tracks guide us through a few road junctions meaning we’re going a different way to how we originally came. There have been no remnants of humanity since we left the destroyed mountain village of Awt behind and now signs of life soon appear: shabby farmsteads with small amounts of livestock (better suited to the weather in their naturally thick winter shags); settlements made up of two to three squalid little huts; and occasional travellers on the road, be they on horseback or old carts.
I heard that Eiseggar once had a modest amount of wealth until centuries of bad luck and local wars had reversed such fortunes. Now it’s the bullied kid kicked and punched and mugged for its meagre riches by its many neighbours, largely ignored by merchants due to a lack of any real trade and poor farmlands, and often forgotten by many due to being pretty insignificant. Still doesn’t stop them from punching above their weight though: I hear there’s been a resurgence of an age old scuffle with Ellen, one of the better equipped neighbouring kingdoms. You can still see remnants of past battles however old (it’s hard to tell) in the form of small dilapidated forts on nearby hills or distant ridges with their walls broken and scolded. There are settlements too that show the scars of war and we pass through a couple of larger towns almost empty of life save for a few stubborn residents. Cold winds and light snowfall whistles through open windows and smashed roofs while snow settles on broken things that litter the streets. The remaining denizens of these dead towns stare out at us with grubby, cold faces as a reminder of just how helpless the poorer people of this kingdom really are. I see other faces too and these ones are not alive – it’s hard to tell if they’re my ghosts or not.
We rarely rest during the day and our nightly slumbers are brief in many of the disused homes we use to hole up in along the way. In such abodes the roof is usually busted in and at least one of the walls has partially collapsed although they still provide enough shelter against the chill and sporadic snowfalls. Our fire is also well shielded in there and hidden, which is useful when you don’t want to be spotted by any local bandits that probably lurk in the empty villages. From our little snuggled up ball of furs in one corner by the fire whoever is on watch at the time keeps an eye out for the lightening sky. Daylight. Time to get up. Time to go. Don’t want to lose the trail. Want to make up as much time on the priests as possible. Feels like we’re only a day behind and yet we get the sense that we’re always on the brink of losing them.
One morning, about a week after leaving Awt, we hit the largest settlement so far: a battered old garrison town named Cort nestled between a big forest and the foot of a valley wall that becomes another offshoot of the Sanpelle mountain range. The unmanned town walls rise up from the snow like a set of broken teeth while the gatehouse slumps to one side from subsidence. I don’t know where the gate doors have gone and the two shabby looking guards are only concerned with stoking a fire to keep warm. Inside is much the same picture as previous towns where all the beat up buildings are devoid of life. On foot we trudge through the main road in silence save for the occasional snort from our horses as we weave between dunes of snow and bits of fallen masonry or rotted carts. The snowfall has picked up, slapping at us from the palms of a gusting breeze.
“Doesn’t sound too friendly,” says Gregor at the sound of muffled voices a couple of streets down.
Round the corner and we see a skinny teen getting hassled by four bandits. Like the two guards his soldier uniform is well worn with pieces missing from his light armour while his winter cloak is thinning in patches.
“Well he’s not gonna last long at all,” Gregor adds.
An understatement. The bandits are flashing knives while the kid is unarmed and on his ass, his face frozen in a mixture of horror and shock. Doesn’t take long to take pity on him and we casually wade in to the rescue. Taken by surprise two of the bandits flop into the snow in great splatters of blood before th
e others can react. One of them is about to speak to me but I don’t care what he has to say and my blade half severs his head. A short yelp and the fourth is hacked down by an axe. The boy just sits there staring at us in awe, oblivious to someone’s arterial blood spraying onto his boots in a slowing pulse.
“No need to thank us,” I quip, wiping my blade on a bandit’s furs.
Finally he blurts out a bunch of ‘thank you’s and we help him to his shaky feet. A quick fumble in the snow and he finds his battered sword, the edge damaged by old nicks. He doesn’t seem to care that we’ve looted the four bodies in the meantime.
I tell him, “You should keep hold of that a little better next time,” as he slides the sword through his belt. Doesn’t even have a proper scabbard – Eiseggar’s army must be pretty badly supplied.
Embarrassed he nods, eyes trying their hardest to ignore the dead bodies, “Yeah, I know. Thanks again.” It’s obvious the lad’s not up for soldiering – Eiseggar’s army must be pretty badly staffed too. “I’m Private Sephan,” he bashfully adds with a stupid grin.
“And we’re just passing through,” I reply. “Anyone live in this dump? Somewhere we can get some supplies?” The priests deviated here from the main road for a reason, maybe they stocked up too.
“Yeah, well there’s something that kinda resembles life on the other side of town. It’s not much though. I’m going that way anyway, may as well just take you there?” As we leave the bodies behind us Sephan desperately tries to stick up for himself, “Look… back there… I was taken by surprise, you know?”
Gregor can’t stop smirking. “Aye, of course, kid.”
Maybe I can take advantage of his naivety. “How long you been stationed here?”
“What, in town? Just a couple of days. Was just running a few errands before I had to get back to my outpost. Been there a couple of months with my platoon.”