The Knife in the Dark

by D. W. Hawkins

  “They’re zealots,” D’Jenn agreed. “They’ll haunt our backtrail until they have another opportunity to strike. Mount up—we’ll take them while they’re still confused!”

  Dormael felt Shawna’s hand squeeze his shoulder as she spoke.

  “Protect Bethany! We’ll take care of this!”

  Dormael nodded, then heaved again into the grass. He heard the jangling of harnesses, buckles, and stirrups as Shawna and D’Jenn made ready to leave. He retched over and over, until he was out of breath from the effort of his body rejecting what he’d eaten. The hooves of Mist and Charlotte pounded away into the hills as D’Jenn and Shawna took up the chase, and still Dormael continued to vomit.

  He felt a tiny hand on his shoulder, and reached up blindly to hold it.

  “I was doing the same thing earlier,” Bethany groaned.

  Dormael started to laugh, until he tasted the blood in his mouth again.

  **

  D’Jenn rose in the stirrups, leaning into the turn as Mist churned the trail to muck beneath her hooves. His right hand was tight around the hilt of his morningstar, the weapon held ready to strike. Shawna rode just to his right, a half-step behind, teeth clenched into the wind. The woman rode with easy grace, showing a casual skill which D’Jenn had only seen echoed by the horse tribes of the Dannon steppe. It was easy to forget that her father had been a horse trader, but not during a tense ride such as this. Shawna barely needed to grip the saddle.

  The trails that meandered through these craggy, wet hills were nothing more than the low points between them, corridors carved by eons of water and wind. The fleeing Cultists left a wide swath of ruined earth in their wake, which was easy enough to follow. The line of sight kept shifting as they tore through the trails, the folds of the land hiding things around each bend.

  The twilight was fading. If they didn’t run these men down before darkness fell, they would lose them. D’Jenn gritted his teeth, and dug his heels into Mist’s flanks. The mare replied with a quiet burst of speed, dipping her head into the effort.

  A pair of riderless horses came into view, running headlong around the bend in the trail. D’Jenn waved his mace in the air and gestured toward them, indicating to Shawna that they were ahead. She lifted her own blade back at him, the surface of her sword bending the twilight into slippery patterns. D’Jenn leaned forward and stroked Mist’s neck, then urged more speed from the beast.

  When he rounded the bend, he spotted two of the fleeing Cultists.

  They led a troop of riderless horses on a dash through the darkening hills, gesturing back and forth as they argued in heated tones. The Cultists caught sight of the pair of them, and snapped the reins to their mounts. D’Jenn smiled, and summoned his Kai.

  Maybe these bastards could resist his magic, but their horses couldn’t.

  D’Jenn whipped out with his Kai and yanked the lead horse’s leg out from under it. The beast jerked to the ground, going down so quickly that it had no time to scream. The Cultist, though, did scream as he was thrown from the saddle. The man tumbled a short distance into the bushes, rolling to a stop at the side of the trail.

  The second rider avoided the first, much to D’Jenn’s frustration. His mount veered hard to the right, and barely kept its feet as it thundered past the crippled, screaming horse on the ground. D’Jenn was forced to the left side of the path, which put the fallen Cultist on the opposite side from his weapon arm. D’Jenn cursed as he was forced to slow down.

  “I’ll go after the other one!” Shawna yelled as she pounded past, taking Charlotte wide of the downed horse.

  D’Jenn reined in. “Just watch out—there’s a third one out there somewhere!” He didn’t know if Shawna had heard him, but there wasn’t much he could do if she hadn’t. The girl could count well enough on her own. He wished her good hunting as she disappeared into the gloomy maze of hills.

  Mist whinnied and danced in a circle, sensing the distress of the struggling horse nearby. D’Jenn dismounted and went to the beast, taking in the thing’s broken ankle. He always felt worse about killing animals than he did about his enemies—after all, the beasts were only demonstrating their loyalty. Grimacing, he reached out with his Kai and snapped its neck. It was well beyond help, and there was no reason to let it suffer.

  He heard rocks crunching underfoot, and turned to see the Cultist struggling from the ground, grunting with the effort of standing. The man’s breathing was shallow, and his face drawn with pain. He caught sight of D’Jenn, and pulled his sword from its sheath. His armor reflected the twilight in intricate patterns of brass inlay, the shadows illuminating the scowl that was carved on his face. A shield had been thrown from his back, but it was lying too far away, and the man made no attempt at it.

  D’Jenn opened his mouth to tell the man to lower his weapon, but in the space of time it took him to breathe, the Cultist was moving forward in a fighting crouch. He thrust at D’Jenn, testing his reactions. Once, twice, three times the blade licked toward his face, a flash of steel in the gloom. D’Jenn slipped away from the thrusts, using his Kai to augment his sense of where the blade would come next.

  The man was injured. He hissed through his teeth every time he made an attack, and favored his left leg. D’Jenn could see, now that the bastard was facing him, that the grimace on his face had more to do with pain than anger. His attacks were clumsy, and coming from weak positions.

  Perhaps D’Jenn’s time sparring with Shawna had sharpened his perceptions of such things.

  Tiring of the game, D’Jenn stepped into the man’s next attack, catching the edge of his blade with the haft of his morningstar. He kicked down at the man’s injured leg, buckling it at the knee. The Cultist screamed in pain.

  The noise cut off as D’Jenn’s morningstar cracked his skull like a melon.

  He stood over the man’s body for a moment, breathing with the exertion of the fight. He turned and went for his horse, meaning to follow Shawna into the hills. Before he made it to Mist, however, something punched deep into his left arm. D’Jenn growled in pain, turning instinctively away.

  A crossbow bolt stuck from his shoulder.

  D’Jenn rushed to put his back to a nearby boulder, trying to get something between himself and the unseen crossbowman. He closed his eyes and reached out with his magical senses, trying to discern the direction from which the bolt had come. There was nothing in his magic, no sign of anything living—probably an effect of the strange armor the Cultists were wearing.

  He heard something, then—a scrape of boots across stone, and the noise of scree sliding downhill. The sound came from his right, high up the side of the knoll. D’Jenn scooted around the boulder, trying to keep the stone between himself and the bowman. When he was situated, he reached up and yanked the bolt from his arm with a short grunt of pain.

  “You might as well come out, sorcerer!” a voice called. “I’ve got you sighted in. My friend is taking care of your little bitch right now. If you come quietly, you won’t be hurt.”

  “Won’t be hurt?” D’Jenn scoffed. “That’s odd. I thought you Cultists killed wizards for sport!”

  “We put them on trial before the gods, in the name of the Clever One,” the man snarled from somewhere uphill. If D’Jenn could keep him talking, maybe he could figure out his position.

  “On trial for what?” D’Jenn yelled over his shoulder. “Having the gall to have been born?”

  “Your kind was never meant to exist,” the man snarled. “You were meant as a test for mankind—a thing to be conquered. Once you are all eradicated, the gods will return to us!”

  “So much for ‘you won’t be harmed’,” D’Jenn muttered. Then, louder, “Who told you that?”

  “Who…what?” the man asked.

  “Who told you that?” D’Jenn said, closing his eyes to listen. “Who told you that killing off all the wizards in the world would bring back the gods?”

  “It is written,” the man replied.

  “Where?” D’Jenn a
sked, putting as much scorn into his tone as he could.

  “In the Aeglari Codex,” he growled in return. “Now come out! Blaspheming will only reflect badly on you during your trial!”

  “No trial,” D’Jenn shot back, listening hard for the man’s reply.

  “You will be judged, and offered as a sacrifice if your sins prove—”

  D’Jenn didn’t give the man time to go on. Though he couldn’t sense the man’s presence in his Kai, he could hear his voice, and knew from which direction he was shouting. He had to take the Cultist down. Shawna might be coming back through the draw at any moment. He didn’t want her to be surprised by a crossbow bolt to the face.

  He gathered his power, and sent the boulder behind him hurtling toward the Cultist. He drew up an instinctive magical shield as the protection of the stone was tossed away, but there was no need for it. He heard the man scream something nonsensical, the scrape of stone hitting steel, and then a body tumbled down the hill. D’Jenn scrambled to his feet, favoring his injured arm.

  The Cultist, though, was no threat to anyone. He lay in a tumbled heap, legs twisted, arms hanging limp. His eyes were unfocused, and he made a low, unbroken groan in the back of his throat. Blood flowed freely from the man’s head.

  “Told you there would be no bloody trial,” he growled, fingering the hole in his shoulder.

  A clatter of hoof-beats sounded from behind him, and D’Jenn turned to see Shawna riding back around the bend, leading a small group of horses. He rubbed the blood from his wound between two of his fingers, and winced as he tried to move his shoulder back and forth. The wound had tacked into the meat of his arm, and it throbbed something awful. It was nothing fatal, or crippling, though.

  “I was wondering where that third one had gone,” Shawna said, leaning out from the saddle to take in the scene. “You’re bleeding. Will you be alright?”

  “Aye, I’m fine,” he sighed. “Just a bolt through the arm.”

  Shawna shook her head at him. “You Sevenlanders are all crazy. I thought I’d gather up their horses. Our friends won’t be needing them anytime soon, and they’ll just wander around out here, anyway.”

  “Not a bad idea,” he said, grimacing from the pain in his arm. Now that the excitement of battle had worn off, he was starting to feel all the little hurts he had acquired. “Let’s get back to camp before it gets dark.”

  “Don’t forget your friend,” Shawna said, indicating the Cultist with a grimace. “He’s bubbling something out of his nose.”

  “Right,” D’Jenn grunted.

  He ended the man with a quick blow from his morningstar. As Shawna turned and began to walk the horses back toward camp, D’Jenn crouched and examined the Cultist’s armor. D’Jenn was no Infuser, but he was fascinated with the art of writing spells onto objects. The brass inlays were definitely a magical equation of some sort, but not one that D’Jenn had ever seen. He already had one piece of the armor, but he ripped a greave from the man and carried it in his injured arm. Once they made it back to the Conclave, the Philosophers would want one piece to study for themselves.

  There was no reason to tell them about the piece he kept for himself.

  “Are you dying back there?” Shawna’s voice called from the dark. Looking up, D’Jenn realized that the moon had come out. Night had fallen, and the silent stars above twinkled in a clear sky. He would have to study the armor after they reached Ishamael.

  “I’m fine,” he called, breaking his reverie and heading for Mist. “I’m right behind you.”

  The Old Witch Herself

  The land began to change. As the party made their way north, dragging a train of newfound remounts and pack horses, they climbed into the wide plateaus of the Gamerit highlands. The Runemian Mountains loomed to the north, a jagged line of haze reaching toward the wide, clear sky. In the summer, the land was green in a way that spoke of ripeness, of life teeming from every tiny inch of the place. Now half the land was winter-browned and slumbering, but clumps of stubborn greenery clung to the hills, where evergreens refused to surrender to the season.

  “This is where you’re from?” Bethany asked, gazing out over the windswept highlands. She huddled deep into her cloak, and Dormael had drawn his own around her narrow shoulders to help shield her from the chill. Soirus-Gamerit was warmer than Cambrell had been, but winter still found a hold.

  “Aye,” he sighed. “I grew up a few days north of here. D’Jenn, a day or two further northeast. These are the lands of our clan. We’re still a few days from the lands of our family.”

  “Clan? What’s a clan?” she asked, looking at Dormael over her shoulder.

  “A clan is made up of a bunch of families that all live in a certain area,” Dormael said, trying to think of the best way to explain it. “Clans work together. They help each other, protect each other.”

  “Are you in a clan?” Bethany asked.

  Dormael nodded. “I am—or, I was. I’m Blessed, dear, like you. I come from a clan, was raised in a clan, but I can no longer be beholden to a clan.”

  “What’s beholdened?” she asked.

  Dormael laughed. “Beholden, girl, not beholdened. It means that I no longer have an obligation to my clan, because my responsibility is to the Conclave and the Council of Seven.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have Eindor’s Blessing, little one. Because I have magic.”

  “So…does that mean that my responsibility is to the Conclave and Council of Seven, too?” Bethany asked.

  “It will be, if you choose it so,” Dormael nodded.

  “I didn’t have a clan,” Bethany sighed.

  “You didn’t?” Dormael asked. He had wondered about the girl’s past. Several times he’d worked up the gall to ask her a question, to try and extract some small bit of information from those boundless, color-changing eyes. She never revealed much. All Dormael had deduced was that she had grown up on the street, and he couldn’t be sure of that, either. “If you didn’t have a clan, dear…then what did you have?”

  “I have you, silly,” she laughed.

  Dormael couldn’t stop the smile that appeared on his face.

  “Oh,” he said. “Of course you do.”

  “What was your clan?”

  “The Red Hills Clan,” D’Jenn said, having dropped back to listen. “Dormael and I left when we were young, though. Most of our childhood was spent at the Conclave, learning to use magic.”

  “Why is it called the Red Hills Clan?” Bethany asked.

  “Every summer a certain red flower blooms throughout this region,” Dormael said. “So the hills are called the Red Hills. The clan takes its name from them.”

  Bethany nodded, expression serious, and went back to gazing out at the blowing grasses.

  “Do you have any of that root that Seylia gave you?” D’Jenn asked. His arm was wrapped in a bandage, after Dormael had seen it washed and burned. It would be throbbing like mad.

  “The Old Man’s Root?”

  “Whatever it’s called,” D’Jenn grumbled.

  Dormael fished what was left of it out of his saddlebag, and tossed it to his cousin. His face was still sore, eyes dark, but it no longer hurt enough to need the root. An arrow through the arm was much worse than his wound had been, anyway.

  “Thanks,” D’Jenn grunted, biting off a strip of the root and chewing with a grimace. “Two more days, you think?”

  “Day and a half, if the weather holds,” Dormael said.

  “Until?” Shawna asked.

  “Until we make my family’s homestead,” Dormael smiled, turning around to regard her.

  “Will your family have food?” Shawna asked. “Real food?”

  D’Jenn laughed at the question, but Bethany turned an excited glance on Dormael at the mention of food.

  “Trust me,” Dormael said. “My mother will shove three meals down our throats at a time, and load us up for the trip like we’re putting on a feast at the end.”

  “Alcohol, too, d
on’t forget,” D’Jenn said.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Dormael smiled.

  “You did say that your mother makes firewine,” Shawna said. “I hope she has something a bit less…potent.”

  “I’m sure there will be plenty,” Dormael said.

  “Even for four guests, and all these horses?” Shawna asked. “Back home, only country estates could afford such hospitality.”

  “Sevenlander homesteads aren’t just cabins on the plains,” D’Jenn explained. “Entire families live on them.”

  “It’s a bit like your country estate, actually,” Dormael nodded. “At least, where size is concerned. My family’s homestead is very large, but more than just my immediate family lives there. We have a few cousins, a few aunts, uncles. Even non-relatives who just come to work the farm here and there.”

  “Dormael’s family has grown wealthy, so his homestead is more like a compound,” D’Jenn said.

  “It’s not all that big,” Dormael said.

  “Wait until you see it,” D’Jenn smiled, riding over Dormael’s objections. Dormael shot his cousin a flat look, but said no more about it.

  As the day wore on, the trail became a well-traveled cart path and joined with a road made of hard-packed dirt. The rain had held off for almost a full day, so the road was a bit soggy, instead the slogging pits which they had experienced in the lowlands. They kept going until night began to fall, and set camp near the road. They were getting into lands that were settled and peaceful, and there had been no further signs of pursuit.

  Still, Dormael was tense with anxiety.

  He loved his family, but felt a detachment from them. Having left at such a young age—at eight springs—to learn the use of his power, most of his attachments had been made in Ishamael, with people who shared his gift. All wizards knew that they would outlive their relatives who didn’t have Eindor’s Blessing, and that made familial relationships difficult.

  Some managed it, especially Hedge Wizards who served the communities from which they had come. They reentered their families, and it was simply accepted that they lived longer. Still, most of the ones who lived long enough would retreat from society, and go into the wilderness. For Warlocks like Dormael, who were always traveling and never home long enough for much of anything, familial ties were tenuous at best.