“Put your hand on the staff!” Venneck told Thomas, planting it in the marshy floor with a hideous squelch. “Put your hand on it and focus!”
Thomas did so, closing his eyes and holding his breath.
“Bilbalo!” Novo roared as he plunged his sword into the Miremancer trying to drown Red in the effluvium of the wall. The thing made no noise as it was run through, but again the chamber was set ablaze with an unwholesome illumination. The fleeing spirit of the last Miremancer earthed itself in Lorenzo, whose eyes finally snapped open. They were gone, replaced with two pits of maggot-filled black filth that started oozing down his pale cheeks. Red splashed to the floor, shaking and retching.
For a moment, Ulthric greyed out. He could feel the tendons in his neck bent to breaking point. His head throbbed, giddy with the lack of air. He was sure his eyes were about to burst from their sockets, like a foul mockery of Lorenzo’s own nightmarish visage.
Then Vannicken, big, faithful Vannicken, smashed into the flesh-puppet. He’d shifted, muddy hairs bristling, fangs and claws out. The force of a fully transformed werekynd’s charge would have pulverised most humans, especially one as deceptively frail Lorenzo. But the former duke was no longer a thing of mere dead flesh and bone. The full weight of entropy had channelled itself into his remains, now a bastion for the escaped Miremancers to occupy. With Vega’s sacrifice they had bound themselves to an avatar, a champion of death with which to battle life, decay with which to combat change.
They would not release their grip on Ulthric, the Pup born to rule.
Thomas and Venneck were his only hope now.
* * *
Thomas walked the spirit world at Venneck’s side. It was a disquieting place, a shaded mirror of reality that was full of icy breaths and sad sighs, half-shadows and muffled footsteps. This was the end of the weave, or so Venneck had always told him.
The red-painted werekynd seer was beside Thomas, his lean frame abruptly devoid of the mud and blood which had accumulated in the battle to the Keep. They were both still gripping the warpwood staff between them. It was the key, Thomas understood. The living conduit to the dead past.
“Hrothgar!” Venneck shouted, his voice muffled and distant, though he was standing within easy touching distance. The place around them resembled the chamber where their waking-selves still stood, though the looming grey shadows made everything indistinct. There was nobody present but them.
“Hrothgar!” Venneck shouted again, searching the creeping shadows for some sign of hope, some indicator that they hadn’t travelled all this way at Ulthric’s side in vain. “We need you now!”
“Ulthric won’t last much longer,” Thomas said, the words seeming to hang slow and heavy in the icy air.
“I cannot do this alone,” Venneck said, voice pleading. “I’m not strong enough.”
“You’ve always been strong enough, Venneck,” creaked a voice behind them. They turned, but there was no one there.
“I know what you saw, master,” Venneck said. “I know I’m to die so that this cancer can be banished. It’s my destiny. Let me fulfil it!”
“Some destinies become tangled,” said the voice, like the breath of a light wind through high branches. “When the weaves intertwine, the end can be different from what was seen at the rope’s start.”
“Ulthric cannot die!” Venneck said. “It’s my place, not his! Master, please!”
“I am coming,” the voice said. “They are strong, but I will break them if you weaken them enough. Strike now Venneck, or we are all lost.”
Thomas’s eyes snapped open and he gasped as air returned to his lungs. The chamber was in total chaos, collapsing all around them. The Miremancers, invested in Lorenzo’s corpse, stood tall at the centre of the room, radiating their vile marsh light. Ulthric was limp in their grasp. The others were struggling to keep their feet and make it to the Pup in time. The Keep was collapsing, the stonework finally giving way in the face of the Miremancer’s decay.
Venneck was back too. He hefted the warpwood staff, a snarl on his lips. There came a noise like the knifing of a sharp wind through leaves and branches, and the distant creak of ancient timber.
The Tanglewild was coming.
* * *
Vannicken was down and unconscious, beaten into submission like an unruly pup by Lorenzo’s unkillable remains.
Novo swung at the corpse with all his faltering strength, sword chopping into the arm squeezing the life from Ulthric. Never in his darkest nightmares had he imagined raising his weapon against his duke, but it was quite obvious that the thing trying to kill them all was no longer the man whose bloodline he’d sworn fealty to.
The impact of his blow jarred the general’s arm. There was a crack, and he realised with a sickening sense of horror that rather than lop through the taut limb, his sword was actually snapped and shattered against Lorenzo’s elbow. The corpse’s bones were stronger than steel.
Its reflexes were fearsome too. Without slackening its grip on Ulthric, the Miremancer puppet lashed out with its other arm. The blow caught Novo on the jaw and sent him spinning away, blood bursting from his split lip.
Even as the general struggled to keep his feet Red stormed in, screaming. She ploughed her dagger into one of the duke’s muddy eye sockets, driving the wicked tip home with both hands. What should have been a fatal wound seemed to have no affect at all; again the puppet swatted its assailant aside, breaking Red’s nose with a casual ease.
Ulthric was unconscious, possibly dead. As Novo and Red stumbled, dazed, through the mire of the collapsing council chamber Roddick picked up the only weapon he could find – Vega’s notched broadsword, embedded in the Miremancer’s pulsing throne. With its back to him and too busy strangling the last breath from Ulthric, the foul spirits inhabiting Lorenzo were unaware of the heavy blade’s downward swing until the last instant.
It was the moment Venneck and Thomas had been waiting for.
“Now,” the seer whispered, the word barely escaping his clenched jaw. For a moment the worlds of the spirits and that of reality seemed to blur, colours melding with the shadows, distant howls echoing from the ether and bouncing back from the chamber’s turbulent walls. There was the roar of a mighty gust of wind through a forest, and the crash of splintering bark.
Vega’s broadsword fell.
The old, battered blade cleaved down through flesh, bone and spirit alike, splitting Lorenzo's skull like an overripe fruit, carving down through the torso, splattering black fluid, mud and mulch across the chamber. The Tanglewild – Hrothgar – had smashed the Miremancer’s hold just long enough to make the puppet vulnerable. Before they could resist Roddick’s swing the corpse of the duke was made useless, cut clean in two.
The grip on Ulthric went instantly slack, and the Pup crashed to the ground.
There came a keening wail then, the noise of death made impotent. It rose to a terrible pitch, forcing everyone in the chamber to clamp their hands over their ears. The sound cut off as abruptly as it had started, and was replaced by a blast of light that burned the vision of all present. Stunned and blinded, Roddick felt his sense of balance go. He hit the squirming mulch underfoot as the Keep came down around him.
The last thing he remembered was a hand on his shoulder.
Then darkness.
Epilogue
One Year Later
“You’re sure?” Thomas asked.
"Yes,” Venneck replied without opening his eyes. “It’s long overdue.”
“But the war pack?”
“Are enough as it is. Don’t worry about them. They’ve been longing for a fight for months.”
“What about –”
“Yes, he’s already said he doesn’t mind if you go. You’ve stayed with us for far too long.”
“I’ll return,” Thomas said defensively. “I’m not even sure if I’ll be welcome with them.”
“Our paths won’t cross again for some years, Longhair,” the seer said.
“Di
d Hrothgar tell you that?”
“There are visions,” Venneck said, looking and Thomas and baring his fangs in a smile. “And there are intuitions. You’re as fine a seer as me now Longhair, so you tell me.”
“I’ll only say ‘until we next meet,’” Thomas said, embracing Venneck after the human fashion. The seer returned the unexpected gesture, and barked with laughter.
“Take care Longhair. Go with the Tanglewild’s blessings.”
Thomas left the next morning as the sun rose, walking south-east. He climbed all the way, until the grass became tundra and the soil rock, jagged peaks rising to either side of him. The sun hid and all the world turned grey and stony.
Darkness was falling when it happened. There was a hiss that made Thomas start, followed by a crack as the arrow which had just struck the rock in front of him clattered to a stop between his feet.
It was fletched with red bloodfowl feathers.
The figure who’d loosed it had another on the string, but she knew she wouldn’t need it. Thomas squinted up at the edge of the narrow defile where she was standing, and grinned.
Red returned the expression. Her old cape was gone, long lost amidst the Keep’s ruins, but in its place she wore the thick shroud of black feathers that signified the rank of chieftain among the crowmen. A hunting party was stood at her back, eyeing Thomas and his werekynd markings warily.
Ignoring them, Red slid down to Thomas’s level and returned the arrow to its quiver.
“Strange to think this is where we first parted,” the young human seer said, smiling down at his little sister.
“Fitting that it’s where we meet again,” she replied. “Welcome home, brother.”
* * *
An army halted on the edge of the Tanglewild. The noonday sun picked out the streaming pennants and shone back from burnished breastplates and helmets, shields and swords, halberds and harquebuses. It was the Army of the Protectorate, and it was at war.
The cohorts were only a fraction of the force that the human realm could have put in the field a decade earlier. The bloody war with the werekynd and the near-total destruction wreaked by the Miremancers had reduced the once-serried legions to what was, on paper, a pitiful handful.
But that handful which did remain contained the finest soldiers the Protectorate had ever known. Scarred, experienced, each one a survivor, a victor in the long, slaughterous battles of the past ten years. They stood tall, proud and strong, awaiting their next orders, each man fully aware of what was expected of him. None more so than their commander, the Old Dog, Marshal Novo.
He rode to the front of the arrayed battle-host, gold-trimmed plate mail blazing like a second sun in the midday light. On either side a trumpeter and his personal standard bearer. At his back rode a wing-carrier, bird on his wrist, ready to relay a message straight back to Bilbalo. The old marshal turned to regard the man, and the glittering host behind him. There was no other body of men or beasts in the Known World who could best them.
Save perhaps one.
They came from the darkness beneath the eaves, picking their way forward with the slow, easy grace of natural-born predators. The discipline and precision of the Protectorate soldiers was nowhere to be seen amongst their ragged masses, but the light shone just as bright from old chainmail and axe heads, broadswords and bared fangs. Novo reigned in as the werekynd approach, the leaves of the Tanglewild whispering a blessing to their emerging champions.
This was a day Novo had yearned for.
Like the Army of the Protectorate, the man-beast’s Great Pack was much reduced. But the marshal knew from grim experience that there were more than enough of the furred half-human monsters to turn the fields and brush around them red.
And that was why he was here. Numbers meant everything.
The werekynd halted just beyond the Tanglewild’s edge, snarling and growling amongst themselves as they surveyed the war host come to their borders. The ranks parted to allow the passage of a beast born of human nightmares – a great, lean tanglecat, its slit-eyes surveying the humans with predatory intelligence as it padded forwards.
Upon its back rode the Master of Packs, Ulthric Greatfang.
With a flick of a claw the werekynd brought his tanglecat to a halt a dozen paces from Novo, far enough away so that the scent of the alpha predator didn’t spook the human’s horses. Novo in turn dismounted, plate armour grating as he approached the leader of the werekynd. They met midway between their respective hosts, the human gazing up into the man-beast’s yellow eyes.
“Well met, Novo Werekin,” Ulthric growled, extending an arm. Novo grasped it, hand-to-elbow, the warrior’s grip.
“Well met, General Ulthric,” he replied, using the werekynd’s honorary human rank. “It’s good to see you again friend.”
“Nothing brings back old times like the shedding of blood,” Ulthric said, trying and failing at a human quip. “I take it that the armies of Duke d’Algar have begun their invasion of your northern provinces?”
“They have,” Novo said. “And we are still too few to match them. They would be at the Wall within a week.”
“They will not come within a dozen leagues of it,” Ulthric said. “I have consulted Venneck and the spirits of our home. I will lead the great pack at your side, Werekin.”
“On behalf of the Protectorate, I thank you,” Novo said, offering a short bow. “And on a more personal note, it’s been far too long. How fare your kin?”
“Hungry,” Ulthric said. “We haven’t drawn blades in anger for a long time. If you hadn’t come with news of this invasion, we may have had to raid your Marches again.” The werekynd barked with laughter, and Novo smiled despite himself.
“I would tell you of court life, but I fear the boredom would risk our alliance.”
“I shall humour you, old man,” Ulthric said, turning back towards where Sawtooth was waiting patiently, head on its paws. “It’s a long march. Longer if you expect us to halt and camp with you, slugging beasts that you are.”
“We’ll see who reaches d’Algar’s army first,” Novo said, mounting up. “For the Tanglewild,” he added.
“For the Protectorate,” Ulthric echoed.
Together the two hosts turned north, marching side by side.
D’Algar wouldn’t know what hit him.
* * *
Roddick watched the human and werekynd alliance departing from a distance, resting on his shovel. There’d been rumours circulating amongst the markets of Bilbalo for weeks, saying Lorenzo’s daughter – now master of the Protectorate – had acceded to Marshal Novo’s advice about another pact with the Tanglewild. It seemed she’d made the right decision. Her northern rivals would think twice before invading again now that man and man-beast fought as one.
As the unified host disappeared into the midday haze, the former labourer kicked the shovel blade into the dirt once more. How different this was, he thought. How strange, to work at his own pace and for his own gain, rather than beneath the lash of an uncaring master.
Digging was much better than chopping. He’d sworn he’d never pick up an axe again after he’d first escaped into the Tanglewild. Not that he’d ever need to – one thing the Protectorate had no shortage of after the war with the werekynd was timber. The log homestead behind him was testament to that.
Roddick had come here, to the Edgewood, after the battle for Bilbalo. He’d set his shovel in the dirt that looked out onto the dark boughs which had first given him shelter, and not stopped until he had a plot of land and a new home.
Sometimes he still had nightmares. He remembered the tanglecat’s blazing eyes and animal weight bearing him down. He remembered the reek of hungry werekynd all around him. Most of all he remembered the aching fatigue of that long march and battle through Bilbalo. The events in the Keep were just a blur. After he’d cut down the Miremancer’s puppet he’d passed out. Thomas had carried him out, whilst Novo, Red and Venneck had take Vannicken and Ulthric. They’d all thought the Pup was dea
d, but nobody was going to leave him.
Outside what little was left of the alliance assaulting the marsh golem had retreated. With its binding magic dissipated the unnatural monstrosity had begun to come apart. The remains of the Keep collapsing on it had well and truly finished it off.
They’d offered Roddick all sorts of honours and rewards, of course they had. He was one of the Heroes of Bilbalo, who’d dragged the city’s shattered husk back from the claws of ultimate destruction. In the aftermath of it all the last thing he’d wanted anymore was public recognition. The sights and strains he’d endured since fleeing the work gang had nearly broken him.
Werekynd - Beasts of the Tanglewild Page 17