Werekynd - Beasts of the Tanglewild

by MacNiven, Robbie

  The Sarks moved. They’d been lucky, or chosen their timing well (Roddick presumed the former), because the warden was at that moment looking in the opposite direction, away from the treeline and towards the relief detail currently tramping east on their way from the camp. The Sarks rushed the armoured man, one of the twins using his brawny bulk to shoulder-charge the man into the dirt, the other hefting his axe. It fell with a gristly crunch, hewing the stunned man’s helmeted head in half as easily as it had split branches seconds before.

  Roddick didn’t see the act of murder. In fact, killing the warden hadn’t even be part of the plan. He’d left that bit open-ended – so long as the man didn’t follow them. The twins had improvised in the only way they knew how, but Roddick didn’t give a damn about them or the other workmates. He was running, running for the Tanglewild, over gorse and bramble and snagging thorn. He would be free from these bastards, even if it meant leaping head-first into the flames of the Everhell.

  Even if it meant plunging, alone, into the Tangewild.

  A patrol of Protectorate crossbowmen spotted Roddick as he made his sprint over open ground. They’d been facing away initially, towards the trees, wary of the possibility of a fresh werekynd raid even after all these months. But as Roddick scrambled by they realised they were witnessing yet another escape attempt, and swiftly brought their weapons to bare. Roddick panted a desperate curse as a trio of bolts speared past, burying themselves amongst the undergrowth of the Tanglewild’s edge. For a moment he could almost feel the agony of one slicing open his calf or punching into his side, but the range was long and the crossbowmen’s aim hurried. The bolts all went wide, and as they set to the cumberson task of ratcheting back their strings and reloading, Roddick at last disappeared into the darkness of the Tanglewild’s ever-shrinking depths.

  It was like a gate slamming shut behind him. Whereas the open plains and half-cleared undergrowth of the marches had been ruddy with the last light of the day’s sun, in here twilight’s grip was already turning to night. Roddick ducked in under the great bows of the trees, the branches snapping back behind him to plunge him into primordial shadow. He stumbled, branches and vines snapping and snagging at him. His ragged breath and the scuffle of his feet through the leaf mulch underfoot were the only sounds now.

  He knew he had to keep going, had to get deeper. The idiot Sarks had killed the warden, and that meant the Protectorate were likely to send at least a token force in pursuit. But instinct made him pause. He couldn’t see. The Tanglewild had shrunk and shrunk these past nine years, hacked back to its ancient core by the relentless, desperate orders of Duke Lorenzo. Where once these mighty old trees would have stood tall at the very heart of the dark woodland, now they were a part of the outer edge of the forest. In places the trunks were so thick and so tightly-packed that he couldn’t even squeeze between them. The canopy overhead was so dense that not a single shaft of pure sunlight reached the undergrowth. And even the pallid illumination which did exist was gone in an instant, the sun’s last rays vanishing into night’s long shadow.

  Roddick stopped and turned in a circle. He’d gone less than a hundred yards, yet already his sense of direction was gone and his eyesight was straining.

  Was he being pursued?

  The crash of snapping twigs and ripping thorns confirmed that he was. The Sark twins had followed after all, and now came tumbling through the undergrowth to Roddick’s side.

  “We got ‘im,” the first beamed, slapping his brother on one meaty shoulder. “Split ‘is skull clean!”

  “Here, boss,” said the other. “Where we headed now exactly?”

  Roddick didn’t reply. He was staring at the axe still held in one of the twins’ fat paws. The axe still dripping with the warden’s blood.

  “You idiots,” he breathed. The twins looked nonplussed.

  “What is it, boss,” one asked. But again, Roddick didn’t reply. He was already running, running as far from the twins as he could. A roar rent the woodland air, shivering the boughs and making the twins start.

  “Boss!” one called out, but Roddick was already two dozen yards away and extending his lead.

  He didn’t look back as he ran. The idiots had brought blood into the Tanglewild, fresh, wet, running blood, and Roddick hadn’t lived all his life as a woodsman without knowing that you never spilt blood in the Tanglewild if you would help it.

  Tanglecats could smell it a mile off.

  Too late, the twins realised the peril they were in. They began to lumber after their fleeing accomplice, but the thing hunting them already had their scent. Roddick didn’t look back, not for their desperate pleas, nor their even more desperate screams as the feline predator caught up. He heard the snap and crack of branches, the rustle of undergrowth, a scrangled cry, a sob, a thump, and then silence descended once more, silence apart from the hammering of his feet and the thunder of his heart and the labouring gasp of each breath he took. He couldn’t see where he was going, he could only force his way through the ever-thicker foliage, and pray the copious meat of his two former-workmates had already satiated the Tanglewild’s deadliest predator.

  He would be so lucky.

  The tanglecat was on him before he was even fully aware of its presence, all sleek fur and bloody claws. The beast was huge, easily twice as heavy as Roddick, and it pitched him to the ground with a practiced twist of its body. He yelled with primal fear, trying to scramble back onto his feet, but it had him pinned. Claws dug into his shoulders, eliciting a hiss of pain. The bulk holding him down was almost invisible in the darkness, but its eyes shone through quite clearly – two slit-pupil, yellow orbs, regarding him from mere inches away with animalistic intelligence. It’s breath stank of the twin’s blood. He tried to spit – one last act of defiance – but his mouth was dry with terror. He was frozen, and in half a second he’d be dead.

  A half second, before a fut sound interrupted proceedings. The tanglecat yelped, the sound so high-pitched that it threated to pop Roddick’s ears. There came a second fut, and a second shriek, and now he felt the weight atop him shift as the feline turned in distress, hissing at the surrounding darkness.

  A third fut. Roddick braced himself for the tanglecat’s cry, but this time it didn’t come. There was a thump as the huge predator rolled off him, limp. Suddenly he could breathe again.

  He lay there, trying not to pant, trying to stay deadly still and hope that whatever had just killed the tanglecat didn’t notice him in the darkness. All was quiet, only the faintest rustling of leaves and the dull creak of ancient bark providing ambient noise to back up Roddick’s pounding heart. What had just happened. What was that noise? Something had attacked the tanglecat, attacked it and beaten it in seconds. Was it still alive, or simply unconscious? What had dispatched it?

  “Get up,” said a voice, right above Roddick. The escapee yelped with fright, and a moment later strong hands grabbed him by the front of his ragged shirt and hauled him bodily to his feet. He hissed again with pain, blood trickling from the gouges in his shoulders where the tanglecat’s claws had sunk in.

  “You fled the work-gangs?” the voice asked him. The darkness was so complete that his questioner was all-but invisible. Roddick strained to try and make him out, all the while edging backwards. There was only one creature in the Tanglewild he’d ever heard of that was capable of dispatching a hunting tanglecat, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was glad to meet said creature.

  Werekynd.

  “I did…” Roddick said slowly. “With two others.”

  “They’re dead,” the shadowy figure said. “And you would be too were it not for the paralytic venoms of these blow darts."

  A blowpipe. That explained what had brought down the tanglecat.

  “Why are you here?” the figure asked.

  “Where else could I go?” Roddick said, desperately playing for him. The scent of a man-beast lingered in the air, but it was not as strong as he’d expected it to be. And this particular creature had an
unusually firm grasp of the human tongue. It was only then that Roddick realised the obvious.

  His saviour was human.

  “Relax,” the man said.

  “Wait,” Roddick managed, but there was another fut, and he felt a sudden stinging sensation just below his right collar bone. He opened his mouth to say something, but for some reason he couldn’t remember what, and his tongue didn’t seem to want to move. A distant part of his brain told him to run. He tried to turn, but the paralysis had spread to his limbs too. What did you expect to happen, something somewhere said. His head? His head ached. He…

  The undergrowth rushed up to meet him, and it was only then that true darkness fell.

  The Fall of the Wall

  The wall came down, like a prophecy fulfilled, just after noon.

  It was the most southern of the bastions, old as Bilbalo itself, an edifice of brick and mortar that had dominated the city skyline. It had stood proud though all three of the Great Sieges, but it stood no longer when faced with the Miremere. The marshland had grown irresistibly, turning the fields beyond the wall to mud and the mud to slime, and the southern bastion had begun to sink.

  The stone and mortar had cracked and split, until that day when at last, with a terrible crash, it had caved in on itself and its rotted foundations.

  Ferdano witnessed it. He had been riding back from Juristator Arelo’s house in the southern burgh district, and as the walls finally split his horse had shied, throwing him to the cobbles.

  Consciousness wavered. He tasted blood on his lips, and realised it was running from a gash across his temple. His ears were ringing. The air was choked with dust, as though a marsh fog had suddenly settled over the Protectorate city.

  Then he realised that the ringing in his ears wasn’t just in his ears at all. People were screaming.

  He scrambled to his feet. His horse, Bartimaeus , had bolted. His vision swam, and he had to steady himself against the wall of a nearby bakery. There were other people around him, other people who were recovering from the collapsed of the Wall. Some had started towards the great ramp of rubble that had once been the southern bastion, and Ferdano realised that it was from there that he could hear the screams emanating.

  “I helped pull them from the rubble,” he said later, before Duke Lorenzo. “One by one. I don’t know how many are still under there. Women and children as well as men.”

  The master of Bilbalo said nothing, did not even look at Ferdano. The envoy was coated in a thick layer of dust, and had torn the hem from his doublet to stem the wound on his brow. Beside him Captain Gabrielle’s armoured bulk exuded pure disgust at the envoy’s ragged state.

  “The miremere continues to expand,” Ferdano went on when nobody else spoke. “Despite what was promised. Despite reducing the Tanglewild to a third of its size these past years, despite the loss of thousands of men and the burnings of the Marcher settlements by packs of Werekynd... we have upheld our part of the bargain. So why haven’t the Miremancers upheld theirs? Why does the marshland encroach on our city more with each passing day?”

  This final question was directed at Eduard, Lorenzo’s adviser. The wizened councillor said nothing, but his gaze was stony, his thin lips set. Ferdano looked from him to Lorenzo. The past decade had been hard on the Duke, harder than any previous Duke’s regin certainly. The lanky, stern boy had grown up fast. Aged fast, Ferdano corrected himself. Already grey tinged the sleek dark hair beneath the golden circlet, and lines crept along the noble brow in deepening furrows. He had not been a mere boy for a long time now.

  “We must contact the Miremancers again,” he said slowly, voice echoing around the vast, chilly space of the Council Chamber. “We must seek fresh negotiations. This pact we made is long past.”

  “Sire…” Ferdano said. He hesitated as councillor Eduardo’s expression turned from to one of outright distaste, but ploughed on regardless. “Sire, we cannot afford to negotiate on this matter any longer. The Great Pack under the Werekynd known as Vega is still amassing beyond the Tanglewild’s northern boundaries, and General Novo reports he hasn’t men sufficient to hold the Marcher borderlands any more. We must seek peace with the Werekynd, and withdraw from the Tanglewild.”

  “What do you advise,” Lorenzo said to Eduardo, as though Ferdano hadn’t even spoken. The Duke’s old councillor remained silent, still glaring at Ferdano. Eventually Lorenzo turned back to him.

  “You are dismissed,” he said to the envoy. “Await my next instructions in your chambers.”

  Ferdano opened his mouth as though to say something more, then thought better of it. He bowed and backed out of the Council Chamber, the heavy door slamming shut behind him.

  “He is not to be trusted,” Eduardo said before the echoes had even died away. “I have been seeking guidance in this matter, sire. Night and day the matter of the Miremere has consumed my attentions. My conclusion is certain. We cannot now return to the ways of peace we once knew with the Werekynd. It has been ten years of toil and bloodshed, and even if we were to forgive them they know nothing to such emotions. We must see this course through, and then turn to dealing with the Miremancers once and for all.”

  “Ferdano has a point,” Lorenzo said quietly. “We’d be fighting on two fronts…”

  “We won’t be fighting the Miremancers at all,” Eduardo said. “Diplomacy can still be relied upon to win the day in that regard. But Ferdano is not to be trusted. I believe at best that he botched the last negotiations with the MIremancers.”

  “And at worst?”

  “He has betrayed us. He should be seized, and questioned. That may shed some light on the reasoning behind the Miremancers and their ongoing expansionism.”

  “His family has shown nothing buy loyalty…”

  “With respect sire, his family were too close to your father. What attributes has Ferdano displayed that make him so suitable for the post of Bilbalo Protectorate’s foremost envoy?”

  “He has a wealth of common sense, and experience.”

  “A wealth of cunning, you mean? Let me speak with him, sire. Bring him in.”

  Lorenzo frowned, an all-too common expression these days. There was a grate of plate mail as Gabrielle stirred, and a brash cough.

  “Yes Captain?” Lorenzo said.

  “With your permission, sire, I’d be more than happy to take him,” Gabrielle said, smiling grimly. “Just say the word.”

  Lorenzo sat and said nothing. These past ten years had been a strain beyond words. He had watched his people sucked into a brutal war with the man-beasts, and all in the desperate hope that the curse of the Miremancers and their ever-expanding realm of decay could be appeased. Yet still the marshes crept further every day, consuming the outlying fields and hovels of Bilbalo and driving his people within the safety of the Wall. And now even that was breached. It would be repaired, but the rot would still spread.

  He had to reach an accord. He had to halt the eradication of his lands, before pestilence and famine overtook the overcrowded city he ruled.

  “Bring him in,” he said.

  Werekynd Rising

  Roddick wished he’d just stayed unconscious. Someone had tied him to a stump in a small clearing lost deep in the Tanglewild’s depths, the surrounding woodland dark and gloomy. What was more concerning was the fact that, by the look of it, the someone in question had been a man-beast.

  The clearing was full of werekynd. The monsters were ignoring him, for now. Some were scraping a ghastly assortment of axes, swords and falchion blades with whetstones, buffing leather and bits of old plate, or conversing to one another in their crude were-tongue. Others ate with the savagery of dogs, or returned from the encroaching Tanglewild with fresh game or cut timber for the lean-toos scattering the open space. The clearing was an encampment, and Roddick was tied up at the heart of it.

  He was deader than the Sark twins.

  “The sleeper awakes,” said a voice behind him. He jumped and bit back a curse, all hopes that the werekynd
would overlook his new wakefulness gone.

  “We are sorry for tying you up like this,” the speaker continued, pacing round into Roddick’s line of sight. “My were-kin have been fighting men for too long now. Sometimes I think I am lucky they do not eat me in my sleep. For a complete stranger like you to appear in their midst, well, it is tempting for them, yes?”