“You think he will kill me,” Ulthric surmised, a vicious smile tugging at his fangs.
“Seeing you now, I’m not so sure. If you’re set on challenging him, after all these years, then I won’t be the one to stop you. But you’re timing couldn’t be worse. We’re preparing to strike south. The humans are almost broken, and when we crush their final army the road to their city will be open.”
“We’ll have our revenge on mankind soon enough,” Ulthric said. “Whether Vega is leading the Great Pack or not. I’ve waited long enough to settle old scores. Take me to him.”
“I’ve already sent a pup back to the main camp to inform them a fresh pack is on its way. I’ve been left with the sentries. Last I heard Vega himself was butchering some manling scout party nearby. We must be wary, word has it that the girl the humans call ‘Red’ is in the area. Her war band is far deadlier than any of the other Protectorate cohorts.”
“Just take me to Vega,” Ulthric said. For vengeance. For the pack.
* * *
Red turned the scalping knife over in her hand, and grinned at the bound werekynd.
“How many packs have joined Vega Broadcleaver?” she asked. The man-beast pup just snarled in her face, fangs snapping. It had gotten over its initial shock at Red’s ability to speak its tongue. She’d made it her task to learn were-speak during her many forays into the Tanglewild, and every time she took one of the man-beasts prisoner she’d ask it for tales of Thomas the Lost.
“How many packs,” she repeated. She stabbed the bound beast in its flank. Werekynd were tough, an attribute Red enjoyed using to her advantage. The animal grunted as the blade slid home beneath its pelt.
“You want to know about your brother,” the beast managed, swallowing blood, and Red realised that it was grinning.
“You’re kind know I seek him,” she said, twisting the blade in its grip of flesh. “You know I’ll do this to every one of you disgusting animals until I find him.”
“He’s one of us now,” the defiant pup said, barking with laughter. “He is werekin! He fights with the packs!”
“You’re lying,” Red hissed, and there were tears in her eyes. She yanked the knife free and plunged it home once more. The werekynd shuddered, but kept laughing.
“Tell me where he is!” Red screamed, stabbing her captive over and over. “Tell me you mangy beast!”
It was Grimbol’s broad hand on her shoulder that finally stopped the bloodshed. The pup was hanging limp, a bloody, ragged mess. Red sniffed hard and cuffed tears of anger from her eyes. They’d done this before, taunted her with invented stories about Thomas the Lost. Told her he fought as a werekynd now. Of course they were lying. They knew how to spite her, but every time she heard the story she simply resolved not to stop until she found him.
Or until every last werekynd was dead.
“I’ve just come from Novo’s pavilion,” Grimbol said in her ear, speaking gently. “It seems he is planning a truce with the Great Pack. He wants this one released... or he did, before you killed it.”
“What?” Red said sharply, turning away from her murdered prisoner. “That’s absurd. There hasn’t been any sort of truce between us and the beasts for nine years. Even if we wanted one they’d never accept it.”
“The Duke’s chief envoy rode in this morning,” Grimbol said. “He looked ragged. I didn’t hear what they said, but he’s carried on north.”
“Towards the Great Pack?”
“It seems so. Perhaps word has come from Bilbalo. Perhaps it is peace.”
“Over my festering corpse,” Red snapped, and set off towards Novo’s pavilion.
As she went she swiped the scalping knife dry on the hem of her cape. Over her corpse, or that of every last werekynd.
Saarl's Last Hunt
A new pack arriving so late caused more than a stir in Vega’s encampment. Werekynd of all ages abandoned their shelters amongst the rocks to stare at Ulthric’s little band. His pack ignored them, following their leader and his feline mount resolutely into the heart of the camp. Vrak led the way, saying nothing to the questions barked to him by his inquisitive kin.
It didn’t take long for Vega to hear of the new arrivals. He shoved his way through the thickening crowd, and Ulthric watched as his expression turned in an instant from shock to hate.
“Still alive then, pup?” he growled, interposing himself before Ulthric and the pack. His arms were by his side, his stance relaxed, but everyone present could sense the tension coursing through his veins. The beast within had stirred at the sight of Ulthric, old memories and old promises goading it awake.
Ulthric said nothing. He too could feel the thing inside him, the beast which set werekynd apart from both man and animal, the curse that plagued his kind. It was waking up, slow and sluggish, shaking off months of slumber. The more aware it became of Vega and its surrounds, the more it would seek to wrench control from Ulthric.
The Pup did not intend to resist it.
“You crawl back here on your giant cat,” Vega sneered. “Has the shame finally overcome you, Ulthric Wereborn? Have you come here to die?”
“I’ve come here to reclaim the pack,” Ulthric replied, sliding from Sawtooth’s back. The big tanglecat was hissing at Vega, but he stilled it with a brush of his claws through its fur.
“And where have you been all these years?” Vega said. “Cowering in the depths of the Tanglewild, playing with the seers –” his eyes shot to Verreck, who remained unmoving “– whilst true werekynd have died in their hundreds defending our ancestral home. What have you done these past nine years but hide away? I didn’t even know you still lived.”
“You speak of war, and defending our home,” Ulthric said. “But where has that gotten you? The Tanglewild has been all-but destroyed. Our werekin are a broken people. Even now, should we win our final battle, we cannot reverse the losses we have suffered. What will any of it achieve?”
“
I know what this will achieve, pup!” Vega barked, swinging his mighty broadsword free. “You’ve no honour, pup. Look at your pack!” He nodded towards the werekynd gathered behind Ulthric, and Thomas and Roddick in particular. “You even count humans among our number! When I have killed you, pup, and cut the head from your body, I am going to flense them both. Slowly, and alive. Then I’ll feed them to your pet tanglecat. What do you say to that, pup?”
“I say you talk too much, Vega,” Ulthric snarled, gripping his axes. “I challenge you for leadership of the Great Pack.”
“The challenge has been issued,” Verreck said, his voice solemn. “If any think it should not proceed, speak now.”
Silence. The werekynd surrounding Vega and Ulthric said nothing. Even Vrak was still, not meet the eyes of either combatant. Then, so sudden that it made Sawtooth start, a human voice spoke out.
“With all respect masters, I don’t recon we quite have time for this.”
It was Roddick. Even he seemed surprised at his own words, clamping his mouth shut and going deadly still as their echoes died.
Four hundred bestial eyes turned to glare at him. He stared back, wide eyed.
“Did it say something?” Vega demanded.
“I… I just mean…” Roddick trailed off, stammering. “I just mean what with the Protectorate army not so far away, why are you killing each other and not them? Pardon me for saying, masters, but I’d rather not fall back amongst their company, considering how it was that we… parted…”
The werekynd stared.
“A challenge to pack leadership is a tradition amongst them,” Thomas whispered to Roddick, trying desperately to explain.
“Why?”
“Because… that’s how they determine who the new pack leader will be!”
“Can’t they just do that after the battle?”
“I said, what is it saying?” Vega barked, taking a step towards the humans.
Roddick recoiled visibly.
“He’s questioning why we’re trying to kill
each other,” Ulthric replied. Vega bared his fangs.
“Broadcleaver!” called one of the onlooking werekynd. The one that had spoken, a leering brute lacking an ear and bearing a vicious scar across his snout, stepped forward.
“What is it Vorek,” Vega snapped, still glaring at Ulthric and his accompanying humans.
“A man has been caught riding this way from the direction of the main human encampment.”
“Then kill him,” Vega said. “What are you telling me for?”
“He came alone, and unarmed. From what we can understand, he wants to speak to you.”
Vega rounded on Voreck, a deep growl rising in his throat.
“I have done enough speaking this morning. Just kill him and leave me be!”
“I come with news you must hear, weremaster,” said a new voice. The werekynd parted, growling and snapping, to admit another human into the tense circle. The clothes he wore, velvet and silk, would once have marked him as a member of a Protectorate court, perhaps even a nobleman, but the mud covering his breeches and riding boots and the dishevelled look on his face betrayed him as something far less now.
“This is the human,” Voreck said, gesturing towards the new arrival.
“Can you speak for me?” the man asked Roddick, spotting a fellow furless amidst the gathering. “My name is Ferdano, and I was until last night the chief envoy to Duke Lorenzo.”
“They’ll kill you,” Roddick said, not wanting to make his own precarious position amongst the man-beast even worse.
“That they may,” Ferdano nodded. “But it is a risk that must be taken. I have come straight from General Novo’s encampment. If these beasts do not heed the news I bring, I will not be the only one to die today.”
* * *
Saarl had long ago lost count of the number of prey – man and beast alike – which he had hunted. He was old now, longer in tooth than any werekynd he had ever met, yet still his heart could not help but thrill at the speed of the chase, at the foretaste of the blood that would be his. The beast within was loose, and though he and it had long ago reached the accord of old age, it still flushed his thoughts with bloodshed.
It had been a long time since he had done this. A long time since he had given himself up to the passions of his kind, and revelled in the hunt. For nine years he had lived a life of solitude, hunting the borders of the Tanglewild and the edges of the Miremere. His service to Duke Lorenzo, his assistance in the destruction of his own pack and the butchering of many of the crowmen, had seen him free to roam as he pleased. As the Tanglewild and his fellow werekynd descended into total war with the human Protectorate, Saarl had put it all behind him. He would have been slain years before by the pup Vega. His actions had been justified – he’d given his all for the pack, and now he was free.
Or so he’d thought.
Leaving the pack behind, Saarl had come to learn there were many things about the world which he had not before considered. The works of the Protectorates and their allies had always been a distant thing, something unworthy of concern for a pack leader who’s day-to-day duties were to keep his charges alive and fed. But when he had left that behind, and gone to live amongst the humans, he’d learned that there were powers at work in the world which shaped the actions of his kin before they were even aware of them.
The humans were damned, enthralled to marshland spirits they could never hope to tame. Saarl had been their unwitting accomplice, and in his freedom he had swiftly learned that the Miremancers held more sway than any single werekynd or human lord. Everyone did their bidding, whether they knew it or not, whether they wanted to or not. Even an old pack master like Saarl.
The end was coming. Saarl could sense it. It seemed everyone could. The Miremere was rising, a storm was brewing above Bilbalo. And in amidst it all, a final set of orders had come to Saarl. Hunt down the human called Ferdano, and kill him. He’d gone north, so Saarl went north as well, shifted, hunting, thrilling at one last chase.
Saarl would taste blood again, and amidst the fires of a saga’s end, he would know one final victory.
The Fall of Bilbalo
Old Nol brought down the Keep.
It would have been viewed as a supreme irony had anyone stopped to consider it. The great cannon of Duke Lorenzo’s Protectorate, one of the first of its kind, had sounded each midday and middlenight hour for the past fifty years, had slain the Black Wyvern Hagmaw and had defended the city throughout every one of the three Great Sieges. Now this blessed relic, this icon of Protectorate strength and ingenuity, was the instrument of Bilbalo’s fall.
The gun sat atop the Keep, and as it boomed for the final time it brought down the wall beneath it. The successive hammer-blows of each concussive blast, day in, day out, had caused cracks to worm their way into the Keep’s walls, cracks which had grown and further split with each day, beyond the sight of man. The rot which had gripped Bilbalo with the silent finality of the grave had helped, burrowing deep into the fortresses’s ancient stone foundations. Imperceptibly, little by little, the Keep had begun to tilt on its crumbling base. Now, at long last, the work of ages had been completed. Old Nol crashed back on its trail one final time, and the Keep's wall fell.
It did so slowly, a painful and majestic sight for the soon-to-die gawping up at it. There was a crack, a tremor which ran through the streets and alleyways and caused the rickety stalls of the Grand Bazaar to collapse. The crack presaged the fall, as the southern side of the Keep’s four towering walls began to topple.
Eduardo was the first to die. His private chambers were located directly beneath Old Nol, and as the wall came away the great gun fell, pulping the ancient councillor. The Miremancers cared nothing for deals or promises. Eduardo had sold his soul and his city both, and his remains would never be found.
Like Eduardo, those within the Keep’s chambers facing onto the southern wall had only a few moments of shrieking terror before they were submerged amidst the falling cascade, their bodies dashed and broken in a bone-crunching eye-blink. Duke Lorenzo, who had retired to his bed with a violent cough and a wracking headache, was started from a nightmare to find half of his bedchamber simply gone.
Those beneath suffered a similar fate to many of those within the Keep. The nearest bystanders were instantly obliterated by a mountain of rubble. The crack was followed by a deafening boom, a death-knell that shattered windows in the city and echoed out over the silent marshland to the south. The screams of Bilbalo were lost amidst the earth-shattering crash, and Old Nol’s great barrel and her crushed crew were buried amidst the downpour of stone. The collapsed wall demolished half of the Grand Bazaar, leaving none of the trader hubs or bartering stalls standing. Flying debris felled and crippled more of the citizenry of Bilbalo, and as the final stone came to rest a great cloud of choking dust was already spreading out from the heart of the disaster.
It settled across the city, shrouding the streets in a white pall, rendering the already dark day closer to twilight. In the wake of the terrible noise of the Keep’s collapse came the silence of shock, the silence so commonly found following in disaster’s wake. Survivors picked themselves up, blinked, struggled for air, struggled with disbelief. The Keep tilted, the stonework grating. It still stood, yet the southern face was now exposed to the elements, and even as the citizens of Bilbalo stared up through the dust, eyes wide and white with horror, more stones continued to tumble from its shaking bulk.
The city’s woes had only just begun.
As though Old Nol’s devastating midday blast had been the signal, more sections of Bilbalo began to cave in on themselves. The remaining bastions were the first to go. Like their southern brother, the great stone and mortar outcrops of the north, east and west sections of the Wall crumbled and fell. More sections followed – gatehouses, towers, lengths of the parapets, all tumbling in ruin. The Wall, which had stood firm in the face of all the threats to assail the city down its long, bloody history, was breached in countless places.
It
had resisted armies, monsters and the most ingenious of siege weapons, but this enemy came not from without, it came from within. It had crawled up through mud and rock and stone foundations, an inch at a time, a millennium in the making. It had done the immortal bidding of the Miremancers, and undermined Bilbalo with inevitable completeness. It had rotted the city’s heart, and now that heart gave out as every single defensive structure fell in upon itself.
Overhead the storm broke. The black clouds which had rallied to the Keep like carrion scenting corpse-flesh were rent asunder by a lance of lighting. The thunder echoed out an instant later, as great and terrible as the crash of falling masonry. Rain began to lash the streets, washing away the dust and the blood.
And in the seething depths of the Miremere, death finally took on form. The stagnant pools and bogs began to ripple with motion that was not only due to the downpour. Slowly, shapes started to pull themselves from the muck, bedecked in filth, limping and shambling and slithering in the direction of the broken city. A nauseous, green-tinged fog arose from the Miremere’s depths, shrouding the shambolic horde and seeking out the shattered walls with creeping tendrils.
Werekynd - Beasts of the Tanglewild Page 10