by Dylan Doose
They moved through the estate quickly. The butler and once knight Sir Hakesworth came to them with Theron’s claymore and Chayse’s bow and quiver. A servant was right behind carrying a two-handed bearded axe for Ken.
“What about me?” Aldous asked, as he ran with the other three from the front doors and into the courtyard. The manor house sat atop a hill, with the village below. Smoke rose from fires nipping at the town, and they could hear screams.
“You need no other weapon, but take this if you must.” Ken tossed him a sword. Aldous grabbed for it, fumbled, and at the last second got a grip. “Burn the bastards. I know you can do it, lad,” Ken said.
They were in a full sprint now across the field, and Aldous saw the first of the rats. Covered in boils and grotesque, heaping muscle, just like the ones at Norburg. Fear was something that he hadn’t quite remembered in all its detail until he set eyes on the rats again. Fear and anger. The hilt of the sword heated in his hand, followed by a pang of pain that shot up his arm.
His vision hazed and again he saw the blue, blue eyes.
The rat squealed before it came charging to meet them, and Aldous forgot about the heat and the eyes, and thought only about staying alive.
Chayse stopped, notched an arrow, and loosed it at the charging rat that was now under twenty paces away. The shaft went feather deep into the thing’s skull, and it was dead before it fell.
They reached the village, Ken cutting down two more rats and Theron taking down one.
Men and women alike were fighting the rats with whatever they had—a pitchfork, a broom, an iron skillet. A stocky, mustached man that Aldous recognized was clobbering a rat with a rolling pin in one hand and hacking it with a meat cleaver in the other.
Theron swung his claymore and assisted the man by plunging the blade into the vermin’s spine. It screamed, and the man—Bilfred, the cook, Aldous remembered now—chopped off the upper portion of its snout with his cleaver, the lower jaw and tongue dangling.
“I don’t want you using that for any more cooking,” Theron said with a laugh. Aldous swallowed back the vomit that rose in his mouth. Bilfred’s eyes were wide and filled with terror, but he managed to chuckle.
“Thank the Luminescent you’ve come,” said the cook. “They came with no warning.”
Clutching the sword with both hands, Aldous spun, and spun again. He heard a scream from his left. A woman was on the ground, two rats atop her, ripping open her belly and feasting on her guts. Chayse shot one of them dead, an arrow through the eye. Ken and Theron rushed the second. Ken hacked off an arm and Theron took off its head as the vile creature bawled.
Bilfred began to run, and Theron caught his arm and yanked him back. “Stay behind us, man!”
Bilfred looked at him, wild-eyed. “Theron—my wife, she is at her sister’s.”
Another two rats came running down the thoroughfare from behind them. Aldous was closest. He turned around to face them, his arms shaking, every part of him wanting to turn back and stand behind Theron and the others. Instead, with hot bowels and hazy eyes, he charged.
“Aldous!” Theron yelled from behind; Aldous could hear the hunter taking off behind him, and Ken’s heavy footsteps as well.
He could have slowed down, he could have let them make first contact, but something in him pushed forward, something made him want to prove to the others that they were in this together.
Under ten paces.
Aldous yelled.
Something sharp cut his ear and the first rat had an arrow down its squealing throat.
Five paces.
Aldous readied his sword. The claws came at him. He slashed out. Hot blood sprayed across his face and then Theron and Ken were upon the beast, hacking down on it, carving the thing like a ham. Its arms and head were off so quickly it was hard to tell who’d cut what.
Both men clapped him on the back, so hard he almost fell over face first in the dirt and blood.
Aldous looked at Theron, waiting for the hunter’s command. In the center of the village a few militiamen stood outside the town hall, fighting back a score of the rats.
“Chayse, Ken, go with Bilfred. Quickly. Aldous, with me. We will aid the militia.” Theron gave the order, and they acted on it.
* * *
Ken and Chayse sprinted to keep up with the cook. He was a man of nearly middle age and he was on the hefty side, but his rage and fear for his beloved wife stirred him into frenzy, and he ran with all he had to a farmhouse on the outskirts of the town. They ran at it from the west, and a pack of rats converged on it from the north.
“Hurry.” Bilfred coughed. “They will beat us there.”
That was true, and worse yet, Ken could see the door had already been ripped asunder. He feared the worst, but he said nothing. He felt so much empathy for the man it hurt. He had lived the anguishing fear of knowing an evil as foul as the Rata Plaga was descending upon the one you loved.
“You fucks! Turn here, devils!” Ken roared as the rats reached the farmhouse. They squealed and charged down on all fours, vile claws slipping in the snow as they hungrily came forth.
“Chayse, Bilfred, go around; get to your wife and her sister. I will send these vermin to the devil myself. I fear there are already more inside.”
Chayse nodded. If she wanted to protest Ken giving her an order, she held her tongue, and she and Bilfred cut right as Ken ran straight ahead.
* * *
“Ready, Aldous?” Theron whispered as they hid behind the wall of the blacksmith’s shop and peeked out at the skirmish between the militia and the score of rats. “We are going to flank them.”
Aldous felt woozy. A searing pain shot through his skull and he saw the image of glowing blue eyes once more. He had an ugly feeling he knew what these visions heralded.
“Are you ready, boy? Ready to use your magic? I need you.” Theron grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.
The pain exploded in Aldous’ head. All he could see was the glowing blue now, glowing blue in a river of green.
“Theron! My head… I can’t see.” He fell to his knees. The pressure was building. “A seeker… there is a seeker! He is close!”
* * *
Theron stared at the boy crumbled on his knees as he screamed in horrific pain. He was about to kneel when he heard the snow crunch behind him. In an instant he ducked down and stabbed out at the thing that came at him from behind.
His blade was met by the seeker’s and deflected. He was not surprised. They were rumored to be the best swordsmen in the kingdom, but this was the first he had ever had cause to face one. The seeker’s face was as white in the night sky as the snow on the ground; his eyes burned with blue flame from beneath the brim of his hat.
“The Emerald Queen sends her regards,” the seeker said in a courtly tone, and then began the dance. He wielded a thin saber and was perilously fast.
“Her regards sent from a seeker? Strange. Are seekers not tasked with removing the threat of sorcery?” Theron said as he met his advance and blocked the oncoming assault.
This wasn’t Norburg. This was Wardbrook. His home. His village. His responsibility. And he had brought her here, because since the night that she had lured him in the guise of the count’s daughter, she had been hunting him.
His foe’s blade was lighter by far than Theron’s claymore, and if he kept up the game this way, Theron would eventually fatigue and the seeker would get the better of him. Between the clanging of their blades, Theron could hear the militiamen screaming as the rats overwhelmed them. Aldous was still on his knees wailing, and Theron now understood it was the seeker’s effect on him, a dampening of his magic.
Theron lowered his guard and ducked the next sweep aimed at his neck. Instead of stepping away, he went forward, his head low, too close to swing his claymore. He dropped it, wrapped his arms round the seeker’s waist, and thrust his shoulder into the other man’s abdomen, taking him to the ground. They rolled. The seeker was stronger than he looked and ended u
p on top, where he twirled his saber in his hands and plunged it down at Theron’s head. Theron bucked his hips and drove a knee into the seeker’s low back, knocking him off balance and causing the descending saber to sink into the dirt beside Theron’s ear. They rolled again, Theron back on top. He caught the seeker by the wrists as the man was reaching for his daggers at his sides.
There was another scream from the militiamen by the town center, then the wail of a woman and the unified squealing of pustulant rodents.
Theron removed his hands from the seeker’s wrists and went for his burning blue eyes. He plunged his thumbs into the glow, giving the seeker the choice between his daggers or his eyes. The seeker tried to preserve his eyes. He grabbed Theron’s wrists and fought with everything he had.
In the end the seeker acted like any man as Theron’s thumbs poked at his eyes: he screamed as they warped from the pressure, and he screamed all the more when they burst.
“Why is your order aligned with the witch?” Theron demanded as he rolled the anti-mage over, and pressed one of the seeker’s own daggers against a gouged socket.
The seeker screamed out.
“Bastard,” he said, his whole body convulsing. “Kill me, end it.”
“Tell me,” Theron shouted.
“Brynth is weak, the king is weak… and they… they have power.” The blue-cloaked man was convulsing from the pain now.
“They? Who is they?” Theron delivered a pommel strike with the dagger.
“Leviathan,” the seeker spat through his agony. “Leviathan! The beast of many heads has risen, and all will choose to bend knee or die.”
The words meant little to Theron, and he had no more time for further conversation, so he buried the knife hilt deep in his enemy’s skull.
He stood above the dead man, chest heaving.
He stalked around the corner to the score of rats that infested his village, vaguely aware of Aldous scrambling to keep up with him, the seeker’s effect on the boy now nullified. The rats were attacking his people, killing the people whom he was sworn to protect.
It was the first time Theron Ward had felt like he failed.
“I’ll find you,” he whispered as he cut into the first slab of rat meat. It died without a noise.
He dodged right, cut left. Ducked, pirouetted. Hack. Slash. Angry. Focused. Two more dead. Another. And another.
“No matter how long it takes, or how far I need to go, I’ll find you. And I will know why you hunt me,” he whispered into the face of a dying rat as he carved out its guts, seeing only the face of the Emerald Witch.
* * *
Ken made quick work of the four rats outside. They lay in pieces at his feet, some still, some still twitching. All dead. One of them had landed a glancing blow with its claw to his right shoulder, but Ken could still swing his axe, and that was all that mattered.
Ken heard a woman scream, and stormed the farmhouse.
It was a large abode, three rooms and walls of stone. There were three little, mutilated corpses in the front room. Children. Ken cringed.
A dead rat lay in the center of the floor, its brains cudgeled out. Ken turned the corner. Bilfred was leaning against the wall, staring wide-eyed at his own intestines hanging from his split belly, and the creature that lay at his feet had a cleaver in its brain. Another two rats were dead on the ground, felled by arrows.
Chayse.
The huntress was on the ground in one corner of the room, grappling with one of the larger fiends. It had her pinned, and she kicked and pushed at the thing’s face as it snapped at her.
In the other corner was a human corpse, gender unknown from the mauling it had received, and next to that, a woman screaming as the buckteeth of long, lean vermin bit into her arm and shook it violently.
“Ken, save her, I’ll manage!” Chayse shouted.
Both the rats were formidable, and they would not go down from a single blow.
Fuck. Make the choice. Make it now.
The woman screamed. Chayse groaned as she held the mouth of her monster open, so the teeth would not sink into her neck.
There is no choice; you know what must be done.
In two strides, he was upon Chayse’s rat.
“The woman! Save the woman!” Chayse screamed as she struggled with the rat.
He swung hard. The long axe clipped the wall, and so the strike was slowed. It bit into the wretched thing’s flank and caused it to spin away from the huntress.
Furious, it set eyes upon Ken and came forward. He raised the axe for a downward strike. Too tight. It caught on the ceiling and he just barely dodged the incoming claw.
The screams of the woman behind him turned into a suffocated gurgle.
Chayse snatched her bow from the ground and let fly an arrow past Ken and the rat that faced him. The one attacking the woman squealed. Chayse let fly another shaft and the rat went silent.
Ken used the axe like a spear and stabbed the vermin with the spike on the weapon’s top. That blow forced it back. Chayse stepped out to its right side, and at less than two feet away she crouched and shot it in the ribcage. It twisted from the pain. Ken hooked the beard of the axe around the back of the abomination’s neck and planted a foot on its chest. He pulled the axe as he pushed with his foot; the blade of the axe’s beard slowly severed the creature’s spine, as Chayse pulled the arrow from its ribs and set to stabbing it again and again, her face a rigid mask of fury.
When it was done, Chayse looked up at Ken, her eyes immense and white, staring out from her black gore splattered face.
“I had it under control,” she said. She nodded to the two bodies behind Ken. “That is on you.”
Chayse was out of the farmhouse and running back toward the center of the town to aid Aldous and her brother before Ken had a chance to defend himself.
Always the villain.
* * *
We have been wrong, we have been unjust, and we have been wicked. Treat a thing as a beast and a beast it shall become. We have made magic evil—not those who wield it but us, the ones who fear it. They gave us medicine; we burned them at the stake. They kept the wolves from our door and we put them on the cross. They protected us against nature’s wrath many a time, and still we bound their hands and cheered as the plank was dropped out from under them. We laughed as they did the gallows dance.
We are the monsters, we know our own wickedness, we fear our own wickedness, and in our paranoia and self-loathing we projected our nature onto them. The Arch Servitor says they are heretics playing at God; it is not they but us who is playing at God. For we are the ones who have bestowed ourselves with the power to judge them by their very existence by their very God-given nature. We are the sinners and we must repent; we must ask for their forgiveness before it is too late.
* * *
Darcy Weaver’s appeal to the King of Brynth before the night of mage bane, when twenty men and women were burned alive. A week later Darcy Weaver was arrested and burned alive on the stake. There was no trial.
* * *
Chapter Sixteen
Something Useful
It was when the snow had melted and the earth had softened that Theron finally stopped searching for tracks, or clues, or anything that could lead him to the rats’ point of origin. He was a patient man, and an even more patient hunter, but it was spring, and he had no idea where his enemy hid. He sent messengers and riders to nearby cities and towns to make inquiries, in an attempt to discover if anyone had seen anything, if anyone could give him anything at all.
There was no success. At the funerals of his townsfolk all he could say to the weeping families and friends was: “I will avenge them.” How he would do so, he did not say. The families of the slain believed him. Aldous believed him. So did Ken and Chayse, but as the snow melted and the days grew longer, he no longer believed himself. The loss of confidence was a foreign emotion, one not pleasant in the least. An ill feeling crept over him. It was a sense of dread, the dread of a nemesis.
/> Theron sat in a brass tub, freshly filled with hot water by the servants. He lifted a petal of lavender from the water; it was not yet waterlogged and the beaded droplets rolled off the petal, unable to penetrate.
“You will lose, eventually,” Theron whispered to the petal.
Ken was also in a brass tub and had been talking for some time, but Theron had not been listening. He was not himself, and he knew it. The attack had changed him. And in a strange reversal of roles, Kendrick was the one who had more to say than Theron.
“What say you to that?” Ken asked.
“To what?” Theron dropped the petal and turned to Ken.
“To being a hunter and bloody well leaving this estate in search of monsters. We have been here for too long.”
“I looked for them. I have done everything I can to hunt for clues. So did you and Aldous and Chayse, and everyone under my employ. The tracks lead nowhere—not one bastard in Brynth seems to know a bloody thing.”
“I’m not talking about the rats and their witch. Maybe it is time to move on. You are a sworn hunter. So hunt.”
Theron had realized early on with Ken and Aldous that having friends was a great deal more difficult than having subordinates. Friends always had something to say—even Ken, who spoke little, and Aldous, who was often too afraid to speak—and with Ken and Aldous, things were said with enough value to be considered.
“Hunt other monsters? While the Emerald Witch is still out there? She has spies, Ken. What if we leave, only to return to ash? What if she strikes again?”
“Why here a second time?” Ken asked. “Why would she come again? She attacked only to lure you from your den. Leave here to hunt monsters, use yourself as bait, and she will come to you.” And when Theron made no reply, because he could think of no reply that at this moment he could offer, Ken pressed, “Who is she, Theron?”