Blood Loss: The Chronicle of Rael

by Martin Parece

  All of the activity silences immediately when Kryjek returns. He holds the skin aside for another Northman, and he only releases it after this second passes. This new Northman is an image of Kryjek twenty years into the future. He has the same red hair, though with streaks of gray, and the same tall and narrow frame. He enters the hall wearing black leather breeches and matching boots, but he wears no tunic or jerkin of any kind. This dispels any illusion that his frame is easily breakable, for Rael sees a body that looks as hard as steel. He carries a few scars on his body, most of which appear to be from the weapons of men, except his right arm. Starting just below his shoulder, the arm is a mass of scar tissue that travels down below the elbow with four great gouges. It looks to Rael that some great beast had nearly shred all the flesh clean off the man’s bones, and if it was one of the bears that now adorn the wall and throne, this man named Horjek must be a fearsome warrior indeed. He sits in his throne of bone, and if it is uncomfortable against his back, he shows no sign of it.

  “What is your name?” Horjek asks in a loud voice, in perfect Western.

  “I am Dahken Rael.”

  “You talk like a Westerner, but you have the gray skin sickness. I don’t understand why the Westerners would let their children suffer so.”

  “It is no sickness,” Rael replies, but the chieftain’s dour face indicates some offense or challenge. He adds, “My skin is a mark of my race. All Dahken have it, no matter from where we are born. It is the mark of Dahk, the Blood God.”

  “Urso the Great Bear rules the North, not Dahk,” Horjek pronounces loftily, an edge to his voice.

  “I mean no offense. Dahk does not deign to rule anywhere. His people simply are what we are.”

  Horjek nods in acceptance and after a moment asks, “Do you know why you have been brought here, Dahken Rael?”

  “I do not,” Rael replies, and it is mostly true. To be sure, he knows it has something to do with the white bear. Clearly these people worship the animal on some level, but they are not above killing it, as the trophies before him clearly show.

  “We knew that an ice bear had taken to the old lava cave. Kryjek here,” Horjek says with a motion to the man who must be his son, “has long wanted to prove his mettle as a warrior and leader. I decided today would be that day. Such things are important for the day that I can no longer lead. Kryjek says he arrived with his men to find you. He says you killed this bear, alone. He is no liar, but such things are beyond the strength of one such as you. Even I, the greatest in the line of Jek, could not manage such a feat.”

  “Regardless, it is true,” Rael says tonelessly. “The proof is in the skin and skull behind me. You may not believe me, for I am a foreigner. Believe the word of your own son.”

  “Such things have no meaning here,” Horjek shouts back, thumping the fist of his scarred arm against the throne. “Kryjek’s word stands as a warrior of this clan, not because of his parentage. Westerners have proven that a king’s son can lie as well as anyone.”

  “I did not mean to offend,” Rael replies calmly with a slight nod of his head. “I will leave your lands should you desire it.”

  Horjek begins to smile and then laugh uproariously at these words. Rael looks on confusedly; in one moment, he seems to have angered what would be a lord in the West, and yet now the man finds humor in his words. Perhaps Horjek does not understand the Western language as readily as he seems to?

  “Dahken Rael,” Horjek says, standing from his throne,” it would be a slight on my clan’s honor to exile you. You have slain an ice bear in my hunting grounds, and I am bound by Urso’s law to accept you as a warrior. You are not a Northman, so I am not certain as to your place within the blood of the clan, but such things are problems for tomorrow. Feast and sleep here tonight. Tomorrow, I shall send men to recover the bear’s meat and bones. The meat we shall eat, and the bones and skin you shall keep.”

  “Horjek, I have no place to keep such things. All I have is my horse, my armor and some coin.”

  “You are a warrior of Clan Jek,” Horjek replies as if his words explain everything. Seeing no understanding on Rael’s face, he explains, “All warriors must have a home in which to sleep, bed women and display their trophies.”

  13.

  Rael spends the next two days anxiously awaiting the opportunity to set out once more for the cave in which he fought the ice bear. He is held up on two accounts – the building of his house and the celebration around the killed bear. Apparently, Horjek neither lied nor jested about either, and the village’s men set to the construction of a small stone and clay hut immediately the next morning. In the afternoon began the roasting of the bear’s meat and a celebration that involved Rael eating parts of the bear that he didn’t particularly want to contemplate. He has a stomach ache the next day, and it would have been poor etiquette to leave while the men finished his home. As such, he waits one more day.

  Rael readies himself for his short journey through the mountain trails, and he smiles briefly at the fairness of the day. The storm had long passed, and the sun shines overhead to warm the air so that his breath no longer shows in white puffs. The snow melts quickly, turning the ground soft and muddy, and clear cold water runs down the sides of the mountains. Large amounts of snow occasionally tumble down to land in a wet heap. Two of the village lads, not quite yet men, had taken the time to clean Rael’s armor and sword, and he gleams in the bright mid-morning sun. He decides to make this trek on foot, for he estimates it should only take him an hour at most to reach the cave.

  Rael leaves his new village, and he does well to ignore the long, interested looks of the people he leaves behind. Two small boys follow him when he leaves, and they spring from tree to rock, hiding as if he doesn’t know they are there. About halfway down the track leading from the village, Rael turns abruptly to catch them in the open, a smile on his face. He sends them home with a nod back toward the village’s stockade wall.

  Rael follows the call in his blood as it pulls him back toward the cave, though he likes to think that he remembers the way. After all, this outcropping of rock looks familiar, and he definitely remembers that small tree growing out of the rock face to his right. The truth is that with the snow melting, none of it looks familiar. The mountain passes are generally rocky, and one can easily turn an ankle if one doesn’t take care. The snow seemed to have made the going easier as he trudged through it before, for it packed down under foot to even out the rough irregularities of the ground. Also, now Rael’s boots want to sink into muddy ground, and one particular low lying area has a pool of frigid water almost a foot deep from the melting snow running its way down the mountainsides. Regardless, the beautifully crisp day energizes Rael, and he finds his way back to the cavern with ease.

  As he enters the crevasse, it suddenly dawns on him that he no longer feels his blood being pulled in two opposite directions. Whatever other person or thing called to his Dahken blood is now gone.

  The cave still shows the remains of his titanic struggle against the bear with a huge reddish brown stain on the floor. Rael ignores this and strides directly toward the lava flow and its natural stone bridge. He pauses for a moment before crossing, for should the bridge not hold his weight, he doubts that he could move quickly enough to avoid a terrible end. He gingerly pushes one foot on the path before shifting almost all of his weight to it, and sensing no danger, Rael steps forward once. He bolts across the six or eight feet, moving so quickly that he only has a sense of the immense heat for just a moment.

  The dark hole, about four feet across and five tall, beckons to him. Rael stares at it in the hopes that its secrets will simply reveal themselves, but he can see nothing in its depths, for the orange light of the lava only seems to penetrate a few inches into the blackness. Rael is well equipped for this situation however, and he pulls a torch from his back, one of two held there by a thin leather strap. He turns to stick the end of the torch toward the lava, and flame jumps into being just from the heat of the molten r
ock. Without a second thought, Rael delves into the darkness.

  The flickering torch lights the way before him only so far, and Rael has to hunch his back in the cave as he is almost a foot taller than the ceiling. More than once, he straightens too much to bang his head against stone, and occasionally a bit of rock jumps out to strike him. He starts to bend his legs as he goes, trying to shorten himself as much as possible. The cave’s floor is even and flat as if water had smoothed it out over time, and Rael notices that the air here is substantially cooler than the larger cavern behind him.

  The passage opens into a small, irregularly shaped cave that varies in width from about five to a dozen feet. The floor in this cave is slanted downward left to right, and Rael holds the torch close to the floor so as to more clearly see. About halfway down the sloping floor, the texture of the ground changes from rough and rocky to smooth and even. It almost looks like a stream of water frozen in place but made of gray rock instead, and the surface is almost completely flat.

  Rael squints in consideration of this, and he reaches one bare hand out to touch the smooth area. It’s warm, very warm. Rael, with as much grace as plate armor allows, steps over this section of the cave floor to carefully balance on the sloped rock. Once there, it’s steeper than he realized, and he nearly loses his balance to fall belly first onto the warm, level part of the cave’s floor. Only his free hand, outstretched above his head, steadies him as it brushes up against the rough ceiling.

  Rael drops to his ass and scoots sideways across to the other side of the cave. He finds two more dark maws, tunnels leading off into darkness, and he is not sure which direction he should go. He simply looks from one to the other and back again in quiet consideration. Rael shrugs, though there is no one around to know it except him, and he moves toward the right tunnel. Just as he is about to enter, something catches his eye – a Rumedian rune carved into the rock above the tunnel entrance – “living quarters”. Rael examines the rock over the other tunnel and finds another rune; this one says, “Commons”.

  He returns to the right tunnel and starts into the darkness. The air here burns his lungs with both its heat and stench, and Rael hopes the exit is not too far ahead. Even with the light of his torch, the gloom makes it impossible to know how far he has moved into the tunnel, and just as he begins to feel light headed, he sees a soft orange glow up ahead. It is just like that put off by the lava in the earlier caves, but Rael moves for it with as much speed as he can manage. He bursts out of the tunnel into a wide and deep cavern with a high ceiling. The air here is cooler, despite the river of molten rock that moves through it off to his right. Mesmerized by it momentarily, Rael thinks it must be the same as in the first large cavern, and he wonders if it moves near the tunnel he just exited, accounting for the heat.

  He pulls his eyes from the lava to look across the breadth and depth of the cavern. It is filled with ancient, rotting detritus that looks to have once been beds, cots and other sorts of furniture. The left side of the cavern is intact with a number of makeshift sleeping areas divided from each other by walls of wood. Worms and moths have long eaten away most of the wood and cloth, leaving behind dried out husks that poorly represent the forms the furniture used to have. As Rael looks back across the middle of the cavern, the debris is more acutely destroyed, apparently having been part of a great fire of sorts. As he moves into the cavern, he sees that much of the mess is coated imperfectly with a layer of rock.

  How many Dahken occupied this room when the mountain vomited lava into it?, Rael wonders.

  A number of small tunnels and crevasses exit this large cavern in all directions, but there are two side by side on the far side of the cavern to which Rael is drawn. The left looks like any other cavernous tunnel with a roughly circular mouth. The right has a permanently “lived-in” look as a large steel door has been fitted over the natural exit. Rael holds his torch high above his head in the hopes that these two passages are also marked, and the effort does not go unrewarded. The left tunnel leads down and twists away into darkness, and engraved over it is the rune “catacombs”.

  Rael steps into this tunnel, and immediately a wave of heat strikes him. He cautiously inches his way downward to find that the tunnel’s rough floor makes it significantly less treacherous than he expected. As he begins to round the first bend, the terrible heat continues to build, and Rael grows more and more certain that he does not want to continue down this path. The tunnel straightens out, though it continues its trek down, and Rael can barely make out a familiar soft orange glow. He stops and squints into the darkness, and now that he is no longer moving, he becomes aware that a low roar hills the air. It is completely unlike the deafening roar of the bear, more steady and unfaltering.

  Rael turns and climbs his way back up to the large cavern, convinced that the catacombs no longer exist or are at least blocked off from access. He finds himself standing before the steel door, and excitement runs up his spine when he reads the Rumedian above the door. “Lord Dahken Drath”. He grasps the door’s pull and discovers two things. The handle is uncomfortably warm to the touch, and the door itself does not budge. Rael lightly runs his hand across the steel surface and finds that the entire door shares the same warmth. He kneels as he feels the warmth build closer to the cave floor, and on one knee he discovers something else. The bottom of the door is melted to both the stone below it and the metal frame into which it is set.

  Rael stands and sighs, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. He had read much from the Chronicler while at Sanctum and in Tigol, and so he hadn’t really expected to find any Dahken alive here. But he had hoped. Despondent, Rael doesn’t bother to explore the rest of the caves, for he knows what he will find if he does.

  * * *

  “What goes on here?” Rael asks Kryjek.

  When he had returned to the village, Rael found most of villagers gathered around a large fire behind Horjek’s abode. Stark silence fills the air, allowing Rael to clearly hear the cracking and snapping of wet wood and the low wailing of a single soul. He found the tall Northman on the crowd’s periphery, solemnly looking into the assembled crowd.

  “Funeral,” Kryjek replies. “Dead babe.”

  “A dead baby?” Rael asks. “Sad.”

  Kryjek nods slowly and says, “He born with gray sickness.”

  “Gray sickness,” Rael repeats quietly, somewhat confused before understanding strikes him. “The baby was a Dahken. He died?”

  “Left in cold.”

  “Left in cold? I do not understand.”

  “Our way,” Kryjek says, turning to face Rael. “Babe born with gray sickness left in cold to quicken death.”

  “You leave them out in the cold?!” Rael explodes, drawing hard looks from the Northmen closest to them. He quickly reins in his feelings and tugs at Kryjek’s arm so that the big man follows him to a spot several yards away from the funeral gathering. Once away, Rael speaks urgently, “I told Horjek it is not a sickness. It is the mark of Dahk, my people.”

  Kryjek’s face remains stoic as he responds, “Is our way. North hard. Needs strong, not weak and sick.”

  Rael opens his mouth to respond angrily, but becomes wordless when the Northman stalks away to rejoin the crowd. He stares after the man, wondering what could make these people so heartless as to be willing to leave a newborn baby to die in the cold. He blinks and notices that Horjek watches him, watched the exchange, and it dawns on Rael that even father and son do not claim each other. He turns to tiredly trudge to his new and humble home, hoping that the cold of the North never pierces his own heart so much as it has these men.

  14.

  Rael’s feet hurt. He bought a horse right after his first return visit to Sanctum after killing Demon, and he always had a horse throughout his employment in Akor and his travels into the North. When he felt the pull southeast, he knew it was beyond the mountains, yet not too far away. Rael had already found that a horse’s usefulness throughout the mountains was somewhat limited, and so he dec
ided to undertake this journey on foot. He had forgotten how hard it is on the feet to march every day carrying the weight of steel armor, something of which he is now well reminded, and the aching began before he made it to the foothills leading into Losz.

  At least spring had warmed the air enough to keep snow away. After Rael’s first winter in the North, he has seen enough snow to make him completely uninterested in the stuff.

  The foothills connecting northwestern Losz to the North is very little different from those joining the North and Aquis, at least to Rael’s eye. They roll up and down such that one can see for miles from the top, but has no inkling that the outside world exists when at the bottom. Almost knee high grasses grow here, and trees are few and far between. What few do grow are barely taller than a man and have sparse branches and leaves. The deep and narrow valleys between the hills shield him from the cold winds and would make hiding easy, should he need to, and as such Rael camps in them every night without a fire.

  On his third day into the foothills Rael finds himself in high spirits, for the air is warm and the day bright and sunny. The hills begin to level a bit, the difference between their peaks and valleys substantially less extreme. He stops at one crest to look long in the direction that his blood pulls him, and his eyes are drawn just off of his path to the right. He stares long and hard, willing his eyes to make out the vista with better clarity. It does not work of course, but he tries anyway.

  “How could I not have seen that before?” Rael asks no one in particular.

  Off in the distance stands a black, spiraling tower that seems to glow purple in the bright morning sunlight. He’s never seen a Loszian tower, but he needs no one to tell him that is what he sees for it matches every written description he has ever read. The thing almost appears as the center point of a blight on the countryside, for the lands at least a mile around it appear sick and black. In drastic contrast to the castles of Aquis, this tower has no keep underneath it and no walled courtyard or battlements. As if the tower itself is more than enough to protect its inhabitants from marauding Northmen, it sticks out from the land like a twisted black splinter.