by R J Hanson
Dunewell turned back to the remaining drow, the one with two broken arms, and found one of the girls, the one with red hair, standing over him with one of his swords in her delicate and bloodied hands. As Dunewell stepped toward her to comfort her, the drow began to plead his case, although in a language Dunewell doubted the girl understood. When the drow’s mouth opened to form his next word, she slipped the end of his sword into the space between his teeth.
The drow stopped speaking and tried to gesture with his hands by holding them out to the side, indicating his surrender. Clearly the drow soldier assumed she was trying to scare him into silence or submission. Dunewell did too. The look of shock on the drow’s face matched the one on Dunewell’s when the girl continued to push the tip of the sword into the drow soldier’s mouth. She did not thrust it quickly, and she did not slash or hack at him with rage. Her face remained emotionless as she slowly forced the blade through his tongue, the edge separating teething and prying several loose. The drow began to scream, a scream that was lost in the roar of the waterfall and the gurgle of blood.
For several moments, long after blood and ceased flowing from the drow’s neck and mouth, the girl twisted and rocked the blade back and forth, gradually hollowing out the grisly wound as one might drill a hole in a flute with a dagger point. Dunewell, who had witnessed many battles and many deaths, understood the actual injury before him. This girl’s life had been changed forever, and it would require great fortitude for her to let this strengthen her instead of destroying her.
Dunewell walked past her to check on the shorter one with dark brown hair. He found her crouched just beyond the corner, huddled with her arms wrapped tight about her pulled up knees and rocking back and forth. How many times had he found Silas in this very same pose doing his best to battle another bout of the Vile Twitch?
Without warning, his heart contorted in his chest for his brother that was, and the creature he had become. Dunewell had pushed Silas far from his thoughts for many months now only to find his love and his regret renewed in the vision of this tortured girl. Dunewell prayed in his soul then; prayed to Father Time. He begged for the chance to return to those days so many years ago. He begged for one more opportunity to tell his mother, Helena, what she was doing to her son. He begged for one more moment with Killian when he could either turn his heart with his words or pierce his breast with his sword.
Dunewell picked the younger girl up and carried her back down the tunnel. Back toward the waterfall and back toward the outside world, hoping her soul was coming with them.
When he managed to get both girls to the landing, he took up the harnesses originally made for Jonas and Maloch. As Dunewell was tightening them to fit the two captives, Maloch approached from behind.
“Here to cut us off?” Maloch asked, gesturing to the drow dead at his feet.
“I don’t think so,” Dunewell said. “They weren’t expecting us. I think they happened upon the rope and harness that we left behind and were just beginning to investigate it when we three arrived.”
“Just the two?”
Dunewell shook his head and jerked a thumb toward the waterfall rushing only a few yards away. Dunewell looked Maloch over then and noticed a new pack and a few other items missing.
“The pack?” Dunewell asked.
“The drow here are evil,” Maloch replied with a nod. “Their food is not. I grabbed some waterskins as well.”
“You’re breastplate?” Dunewell asked.
“It is with my greaves. They are becoming a longsword, a Shyeld-Hayn, in the hands of a Lanceilier as we speak.”
“That’s a generous gift.”
“Would you believe it only made him more suspicious?”
“Yes,” Dunewell replied. “Yes, I would.”
“Thoughts on getting them past the river and back toward Inquisitor Ranoct?”
“I think I have that worked out,” Dunewell said as he took up the rope. “You climb down behind us, just in case. I’ll lower them down, eighty feet at a time, and leap from landing to landing myself. Once we’re down, I’ll start to work on a raft. I know we’ll have to move a good distance downstream before the waters will be calm enough to navigate, but I think that is our best bet. I haven’t worked out how we’ll get Jonas across though.”
“Don’t worry about him,” Maloch said. “I told him what I knew of the upper caverns, and we arranged to meet on the northeast face of this mountain. I only hope he can make it through those caverns alone.”
“You know a great deal about Jonas,” Dunewell said as he gathered up the last of the rope. “Far more than he would like, I’ve no doubt. But, did you know that he made a practice of hunting Shadow Blades?”
“That’s true?” Maloch said, doubt plain upon his face for Maloch had heard the stories of the Gray Spider.
“True.”
Dunewell grabbed the two dead drow, one in each hand, and walked to the landing where he hurled their bodies into the chaos of rushing water. Then he moved the two girls to the edge of the landing and explained to them again how he planned on getting them from one landing to another. If either of them understood his words, they didn’t show it with an outward response. Dunewell reached again for the drow short sword the girl with the red hair still held. She pulled back from him, dangerously so on the high ledge, so he decided to surrender that battle.
The descent down the stairs went much quicker than the climb up. It didn’t hurt that the young girls together didn’t weigh a quarter of what Maloch and Jonas weighed. In short, easy work, Dunewell arrived at the bottom of the stair alongside his two charges.
The taller girl, the one with the red hair, draped one arm around the shorter one while holding the looted drow short sword in the other. They leaned against a nearby tree and watched the stair with sharp eyes.
Dunewell removed their harnesses and set about looking for fallen trees that would serve as raft material. His champion-enhanced strength served him well, and, in the time it would have taken ten men, Dunewell had seven large logs together. He didn’t bother stripping away limbs other than those that would interfere with ensuring one log sat next to another with as small a gap as possible. To his thinking, the remaining limbs would serve as excellent handholds should they be needed.
As Dunewell was tying the last lash to secure the logs together, Maloch was taking the final steps down the rocky climb. Dunewell herded the two girls onto the makeshift raft and then took up the end and began to pull it along the land, moving it downstream to calmer waters. Maloch paced along next to Dunewell keeping his eyes, and his ears, on the forest around them and the stair behind. Maloch still took a moment to note the sheer strength Dunewell possessed. In his estimate, it would have taken a team of at least two oxen, and perhaps four, to pull that raft. Dunewell was doing it with one arm while carrying his war hammer in the other hand.
After another two hours, the sun, although not close to the horizon, was still down enough that the thick forest around them was growing quite dark. The waters of the Whynne were still very rough, so they decided to set up a cold camp there for the night.
Dunewell collected an armload of evergreen boughs and laid them out as a bed for the two girls out of the wind. They curled up together into the boughs and looted cloaks against the coming chill of the night. Maloch passed Dunewell a waterskin and a bag of dried fruits that he, in turn, passed to the young girls.
Dunewell strode to the river’s edge, where he took another deep draft from the replenishing waters of the Whynne. When he returned to the camp, he accepted a small bag of jerky from Maloch. They ate in silence as the two captives drifted off to sleep.
“I can watch for a while,” Maloch whispered to Dunewell. “You get some rest.”
“I’m far from needing any rest,” Dunewell said honestly. “The waters, flowing water, grants me an energy, a vigor, that is hard to describe.”
Maloch nodded, looked to the stars of the sky, and then back to Dunewell. He saw the question f
orming on Dunewell’s face. Their telepathic link had been severed when they moved more than a hundred yards or so from Jonas, the source of the magic. Now Maloch relied on his years, centuries actually, of traveling in the company of warriors.
“Ask,” Maloch said simply.
“The mind-link we shared, why was Jonas so set against using it to help the girls?”
“Why ask me?”
“You seem to know far more about him than he would like, and more than anyone else I’m aware of,” Dunewell reasoned. “You also seemed to understand his sudden reaction to the idea.”
“Were it anyone else, I would tell you that you must ask him,” Maloch said as he let his eyes drift back up to the stars; how he’d missed them. “However, your life, and the lives of many others, may be in the balance soon, and it is something you should know. Furthermore, I doubt he would ever tell anyone himself. Almost a hundred years ago, he led a group of soldiers into the lair of a vampire deep within the wastes of Tarborat.”
Maloch paused, took a long drink from a waterskin, and continued.
“His brother, Lord Velryk, was among those soldiers. They found a young woman who had been taken by the vampire but was not yet turned. Her name was Giselle. Lord Jonas opened his mind to her in hopes of soothing her; instead, he infected all those under his command with her fear. Many of them lost their lives in that lair. As to how much of that was due to Jonas’s decision, who knows. I can tell you Velryk blamed Jonas, and the girl, Giselle, for the deaths of the soldiers that fell that day. Jonas left the King’s service shortly after that and married Giselle. Jonas left his life as a soldier and his brother behind. Velryk blamed him for that too. A few short years later, Giselle was killed by an assassin, a Shadow Blade.”
“The vampire was Slythorne,” Dunewell said as much as asked. “And he’s the one that hired the Shadow Blade.”
Maloch nodded thoughtfully and then rolled his cloak around him and propped himself up at the base of a large tree. With another nod, Maloch pulled his hood down over his eyes and was asleep with the practiced ease of a soldier in the field.
Dunewell kept watch the rest of that night, but neither heard nor saw anything that seemed out of place. As the sun began to climb in the east, Dunewell cleaned and oiled his weapons and then took another deep drink from the Whynne. As he was returning to the small camp, Dunewell saw that Maloch was awake and polishing the edge of his fine blades with a whetstone.
“Give me a few hours, and I’ll hunt us up some fresh meat,” Dunewell said quietly so as not to wake the two girls. “Do you mind waiting here?”
“My guess is they will sleep for as long as we let them,” Maloch replied. “No, I don’t mind a bit. Although, I don’t see a bow or sling.”
Dunewell smiled, nodded, turned, and began to jog south, parallel to the Whynne, and about a league west of it. Dunewell was jogging at a pace a swift horse would have had trouble maintaining. An hour into his run, he made two observations. One, the river had become much quieter and would likely be calm enough here to cross. Two, he smelled a small herd of deer up ahead.
Dunewell slowed his pace and began to stalk silently through the dense forest, making sure to stay downwind of the game. He eased himself along, putting aside any thoughts of time or goals and allowing the stalk to take as long as it must. He extended his thoughts, his feelings, and could detect the lifeforce of the deer, experiencing their heartbeats as his own.
Long before he could see them, Dunewell was able to examine them and make his selection of the right one to take. There was an older buck among them that should be left because he guided the rest and took care of them. There were a few does, several fawns, and two younger bucks. Of the two younger bucks, one was strong, mindful of the others, and quick. The other was smaller, less concerned for the herd, and was eager to get to the waters of the Whynne regardless of possible predators.
As Dunewell decided killing the smaller buck would be better for the herd, and thus better for the forest, the similarities struck him with breathtaking force. He couldn’t decide if he was being overly dramatic, seeing this as a metaphor for him and Silas, or if Bolvii, or perhaps Silvor, were trying to tell him something. Perhaps they were trying to show him that when it came to life and death, only the benefits of the greater good mattered. As Arto had once postulated, ‘the needs of the many…’
Suddenly the deer were bolting toward the river, and a quick testing of the air told Dunewell why. Wolves.
Dunewell sprinted forward, hurtling huge fallen trees, and leaping to swing from lower limbs fifteen to twenty feet from the ground. As Dunewell tore through the forest, he saw them, the wolf pack, as they moved to encircle the small herd of deer. Not a wolf pack though, at least not what Dunewell had thought. The smell was very similar, and at a distance, they looked like wolves, yet these were something else entirely. Craven-jackals.
Dunewell was no woodsman but knew well enough that wolf packs would hunt, much as he had planned to, only the weakest of a herd thereby feeding their pack and strengthen the herd of deer. Craven-jackals killed and ate everything they encountered. They were already moving to encircle the herd of deer and trap them against the waters of the Whynne. Craven-jackals would kill all the deer, whether they could or would eat them all. Craven-jackals were a curse on the land.
Dunewell leapt from the last limb and hurled himself through the air. He hit the ground running and drew his war hammer as he ran. The craven-jackals saw him coming, but too late. Dunewell charged among them, kicking the first one high into the air, striking the second with his hammer, and punching the third hard enough to break its neck. There were more than a dozen remaining and, had he been mortal man, could have easily killed him. However, they drew back, a few latching their maws onto the fallen of their number. Dunewell at first thought he may have found a redeeming quality in the craven-jackals after all as he watched them drag their wounded from the small glade and back into the cover of the thick forest. He dismissed that thought when he heard them, sensed them, begin to eat the three he had killed.
The small herd of deer bolted dangerously close to the still swift waters of the Whynne but did finally veer south again and ran along the edge of the mighty river toward their escape. He could have given chase and caught them, but somehow felt that would be to disrespect the omen he believed he’d witnessed. Or, perhaps he was hoping to find a means, any means, of excusing his inability to kill Silas and his hesitance to do so even now.
A few hours later, Dunewell returned to the small camp to find Maloch standing guard and the two young girls still sleeping. Dunewell took another deep drink from the river and then approached the lightly snoring children.
Dunewell gently placed a hand on each of the girls’ cheeks and began a whisper of a prayer to Bolvii. As he prayed, the familiar blue glow began to build slowly around his hands and then flow into the faces of the wounded children. In a few moments, the soft hue had spread to cover the girls entirely.
Dunewell then pulled back from them and, severely weakened, staggered back toward the Whynne. He took another deep drink from the flowing waters, the symbol of life, and was refreshed.
“Can you do anything for their… state of mind?” Maloch asked as he squatted on his heels next to where Dunewell laid on the riverbank. “In the faith of Time, only priest and clerics have those prayers.”
“Not that I know of,” Dunewell said, pulling himself up to lean on one elbow. “This… this whole thing is more feeling my way through than studying and learning. It’s hard to explain.”
“The most pure prayer is not the lengthy and complex prayer of an accomplished priest,” Maloch said as he looked back toward the two girls who were beginning to wake. “The purest is the one that comes from the heart in earnest love for one’s brothers and sisters. You have a good heart, my friend.”
Dunewell thought back over brothers who died in the mud of Tarborat, and of the other brother he allowed to escape. Dunewell was afraid of what else Silas
might do, and what acts, what sins, might be heaped upon his own soul. For Dunewell had failed to stop his brother when he had the chance and, even now, wondered if he would have the strength to see to Silas’s adjudication when the time came. Perhaps even more concerning than those worries was his sin of omission. The sin that marred his soul. The sin of failing to protect Silas when he was a child. For what man can call himself just when he knows of the torture of a child and takes no action to stop it?
Dunewell rolled over to drink deeply from the river again as Maloch rose to stand next to him.
“I think they will feel better when they’ve had a chance to bath,” Maloch said as he nodded his chin toward the two captives they’d rescued.
“The chill in the air is a bit sharp,” Dunewell said as he stood and drew his forearm across his mouth, wiping water from his thick beard and mustache. “There is a good fire going at our next camp, and I have meat cooking that should be ready by the time we arrive.”
Maloch nodded again, pointed south, and raised an eyebrow to Dunewell.
“You can’t miss it,” Dunewell said.
Maloch started off in a light jog, heading south on a game trail parallel to the river. Dunewell returned to the cold camp and extended a hand to the girl with the red hair. She accepted and, without a word, he helped both of them up, and they began their walk south.
Dunewell paused at the edge of their small camp to wrap the rope around his left arm and began dragging their raft along with them. It occurred to him then that he might have been better off waiting to build the raft until they reached a point of the river where he could put it to water, but he dismissed that thought. His muscles enjoyed the labor of pulling the raft, and his mind needed the distraction.