The Iron Wolves

by Andy Remic

  Kiki nodded.

  “And you, bitch?”

  “No need to get personal,” smiled Trista, running a hand through her golden curls. “I, like the others, would like my… freedom returning. You all know, as do I, how this affects our everyday lives. I would enjoy living my final years as a… normal person. That would give my life a certain… equilibrium.”

  Silence followed.

  Kiki nodded. “Mount up. Let’s get through this damned forest as quick as we can.”

  They rode as fast as the forest trails would allow. Still the silence was oppressive and complete, and Kiki felt the eroding consequences of the place; her mind turned more and more to her mental torture by Suza, to her need for honey-leaf stimulation, to the cancer that was wearing her down and, finally and ultimately, to the death of her beloved friend and father-figure. Dalgoran. Gone. She could not believe it was possible! It was heart-wrenching, terrifying, horrifying and deeply, deeply heartbreaking. So sad she wanted to crawl into a hole and… (hush) die.

  They stopped mid-afternoon for a much needed rest, and Dek helped Kiki ease the body of Dalgoran from the back of the general’s mount where he had been tied. Narnok went about making a pan of stew, as Kiki took a long drink of water from her canteen and gazed about her.

  Motes of light danced through the forest.

  It was a beautiful place, but terribly sombre; utterly melancholic.

  She shivered.

  Truly, it was a place to die.

  They sat and ate from wooden platters, and then scratching his stubble, Dek mumbled about going for a piss. He wandered a short way from the makeshift camp and urinated into a bed of ferns, sighing to himself as he laced up his trews and cursed Narnok for not adding more salt to the stew. It’s what every good stew needs, he thought, a good bit of generous salt. Adds flavour and replenishes lost reserves. Nothing like a good bit of salt to really make a meal stand out.

  He turned, and screamed…

  The others came running, weapons drawn, poised and ready for combat with mud-orc or splice, and stopped dead. Dek was staring at them, face ashen, a fake smile on his taut face. “Sorry about that,” he said, deepening his voice. “Gave me a bit of a shock, it did. Not what you’re expecting when you’re stowing your cock back in your trousers.”

  The Iron Wolves stared at him, then slowly turned to see what had startled the pit-fighter. It was a body, strung up by the neck. A woman, by the clothing, although it was now impossible to tell from the features. The withered skull, still with a covering of paper-thin dead skin, was a pale brown in colour, with sunken sockets containing no eyes. A grey rope fixed the corpse in position against an ancient, twisted tree trunk, and the belly and legs seemed curiously bloated, expanded, whilst the arms had withered away to little more than bones. The hands, also, seemed bigger than they should; probably an effect of the skeletal limbs. One hand was missing, and the arm seemed to end in a tuft of grassy tendons. The clothing, a flowery dress, was muddied and torn. The feet wore expensive boots, crusted in mud and pine needles.

  “By the Seven Sisters,” murmured Kiki. “That is truly horrific.”

  “It gets worse,” rumbled Narnok, who’d taken several steps ahead, up a short embankment and between two massive ancient oaks, which seemed to act as pillars bordering some great portal into…

  They scrambled up the soil and leaves, and stood, mouths open, eyes wide, staring out at a massive glade of hanging corpses. There were perhaps seventy or eighty bodies, each hung by their own hand on short tattered ropes, wearing a disarray of clothing, dresses and shirts and trews, some in boots, some barefoot, all crusted with mud and dirt, as if they’d been hanging for years. Poppies grew all around the glade, adding bright red clusters to a very sombre place.

  Nothing moved in this mass place of suicide.

  Nothing moved at all.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” said Trista, quietly.

  “What would make so many kill themselves?” whispered Kiki.

  “We need to leave,” said Zastarte, no smiles, no flippancy, only a core-deep urgency which spoke to the rest of the Iron Wolves. “Right. Fucking. Now.”

  They moved back to their makeshift camp, packing swiftly and lifting Dalgoran to the back of his mount.

  “How long till we leave the forest?” asked Zastarte, suddenly, his eyes haunted and glittering as if he suffered some kind of fever.

  “Two days,” said Kiki. “Maybe a day and a half, if we kill the horses.” She gave a weak and bittersweet smile.

  “Then we need to kill the horses,” said Zastarte, brutally. “Come on.”

  They rode fast and hard, pushing their mounts with little mercy, then swapping to the spare horses and pushing them with the same relentless need. But still the day wore on and gradually the sun dropped lower in the sky above the tall trees, the green diffused light getting weaker and weaker and weaker, until the Iron Wolves could do nothing but acknowledge the fact they were going to have to spend another night in Sayansora alv Drakka – the Forest of Suicide. The Forest of Angry Spirits. The Sea of Trees…

  They rode late into the night, until exhaustion threatened to cripple one or all with a serious fall. They dismounted, warily, in the unending total blanketing silence. Narnok mumbled something about gathering firewood, and Kiki gestured to Dek to accompany him.

  “None of us goes anywhere alone,” she said.

  “So, if I need a shit, you’ll come with me?” grinned Zastarte.

  “Prince, I’ll even wipe your backside if it stops you drawing a razor across your windpipe.” His smile fell, then, and his handsome features creased into a frown.

  Narnok and Dek built a raging fire and dragged various fallen logs to form a semi-protective barrier. Narnok made another of his dubiously famous stews, this time using wild onions Dek had discovered in the forest. This time, when Narnok was not looking, Dek added more salt.

  They sat around the fire, eating, and then thinking. The horses, tethered to one side, seemed docile, drugged even. Kiki crossed to her mount, a grey mare, and stroked her muzzle. The creature nuzzled against her, but soon lowered her head and stared at the ground.

  “It’s even affecting the horses,” noted Trista.

  “Yes.” Kiki retook her seat, and warmed her hands against the blaze as Dek added more chunks of wood he had, along with much moaning and carping from Narnok, hewn using Narnok’s fabulous double-headed battleaxe.

  “It’s not for chopping wood,” moaned the large axeman.

  “Shut up, or we’ll freeze.”

  Now, with the blaze lifting their dampened spirits, Trista started to sing, a lilting sorrowful tune, melodic, haunting, spiritual, in the long dead language of the Equiem. Eventually her notes faded into silence, and the forest crept back to fill their souls with the emptiness of the void.

  “It’s just unnatural,” grunted Narnok, finally.

  “What, Trista’s singing?”

  “No no! That was beautiful. I’m talking about this place. This bloody silence. It gives me the damn and bloody creeps.”

  “More than a glade of eighty corpses, you mean?” said Kiki, one eyebrow raised.

  “Point taken,” muttered Narnok.

  “Listen,” said Zastarte. “Here is the plan.”

  “What plan?” said Narnok.

  “The plan I’m going to tell you if you listen, axeman.”

  “Oh. Well, why didn’t you say?”

  Zastarte stared at him. “I remember. I remember this,” he said.

  “Oh? And what does that fucking mean?”

  “I’d forgotten. Heh. But now I remember.”

  “You’ll remember my boot up your fucking arse, lad.”

  “Ahh, and now straight to the terrible anal insults. Narnok, you need to relax, my friend, and let people speak, and then, and only then, engage your brain before you open your mouth. I see the last twenty years has done nothing to expand your horizons, nor increase your intellect.”

  “Eh?
”

  “Look. This place is haunted… or infused with… demons, or whatever the hell this phenomena would claim to be. I suggest two of us keeping watch at any one time throughout the night. It’ll be safer that way.”

  “But we’ll only get half the sleep,” moaned Narnok.

  Zastarte gave a tight smile. “We’ll do it your way then, shall we? And one of us will submit, lay down and commit suicide. Then you’ll get all the sleep you need – for an eternity. How does that sound?”

  “Point taken. No need to go on about it.”

  “It’s a good idea,” said Kiki, wearily. “We’ll sleep in shifts, keep one another awake, watch the others for signs of… anything untoward. Who’s going first?”

  “I will,” mumbled Narnok, casting an evil look towards Zastarte. “As long as I don’t have some dandy popinjay to keep me company, boring me with tall tales of his exaggerated sexual exploits. Or then I will fucking hang myself.”

  “I’ll sit with you,” said Trista, and beamed him a smile.

  Narnok stared back, his heavily scarred face impassive. “As you wish,” he said.

  Within minutes the others were asleep from sheer exhaustion, and Narnok and Trista sat across the fire from one another, watching like two tomcats across a cooked chicken leg. It was Narnok who broke the silence first.

  “Why did you volunteer?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re a slippery eel, Trista. You always were.”

  “You had an eye for me, back in the day,” she said, smiling seductively.

  “Just the one eye for you now,” said Narnok, pulling his axe close and hugging it like he would a lover.

  “Why don’t you come over here and sit next to me, Big Man?” she said, beaming another smile and patting the log beside her.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I seem to remember that falling in love with you was like a death penalty. How many men died because of you? In the good old days?”

  “It is not my fault young handsome chivalrous heroes chose to do battle and duel over my exquisite beauty.”

  “Ha! You played them for idiots. Gullible fools falling over themselves for a simple kiss or a glance from them fluttering eyelids. You used to make me sick.”

  “Only because you never got a slice of my cake,” she smiled.

  “I was good looking enough, back then, right enough,” said Narnok, staring at her.

  “I have one question, then.”

  “Go on.”

  “Why did you never try for me? I think you would have found me extremely accommodating.”

  “I got pissed once in Vagan,” said Narnok, staring into the fire. “Ended up sharing a bottle of Vagandrak Red with a professor from the university. An expert on insects, he was. Ha! What fucking use is that, I ask you? What point? Anyways, he tells me this story about this little black spider, can’t remember its name, horrible black legs, red markings on its back, deadly as they come. Send you screaming and begging for mercy with one little bastard bite. Deadly to humans. According to this professor type, can’t remember his name, forked beard, cross-eyed, probably from the chemicals. Anyways, he reckons this spider would fuck its mate, get impregnated, then kill him.” Narnok glanced up then, more to see if Trista had fallen asleep than to see if she was really listening to his tale. She hadn’t, and she was.

  “Go on,” she said, voice soft.

  “Or, more precisely, this little bugger would have sex, then eat the male partner. Sex, then dinner, so to speak. Except the father was the main course. Sexual cannibalism, this professor type called it. Horrible!”

  Narnok shuddered, then looked long and hard at Trista.

  “So?”

  “That’s you, that is,” said Narnok.

  “What, a ‘sexual cannibal’?”

  “Yeah. Sex and death, hand in hand.” He grinned at her. “That’s why I never went near you. I like a good fuck as much as the next man; but unlike this little black spider fellow, I ain’t willing to give my liver and lungs for the privilege. No woman is that good.”

  “Ha! Maybe you should try it. Maybe I’d surprise you.”

  “Or maybe you wouldn’t. Tits are tits and quim is quim. It all gets a bit the same, after a while.”

  “What happened to your eye, Narnok?”

  “Some bastard put it out. I made him eat his own eyes before I chewed out his throat.”

  “A shame. And the scars to your face? Cut you up bad, did he?”

  “He did.”

  “This because of your wife? The one who fucked Dek?”

  “I think this is getting too personal,” said Narnok. “Now, what I’d suggest for a happy watch is shutting your mouth before I cut off your head.”

  “And you think you could?”

  “I’d make a pretty good stab at it. So to speak.”

  Trista smiled sweetly. “I’m sure you would, honeycake.”

  They descended into an uneasy silence, watching one other across the fire. Neither spoke for a long time, and eventually Narnok fished out his whetstone and started honing the blades of his axe with short, easy strokes.

  “You love that axe, don’t you?” said Trista, eventually.

  “More than any woman.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “This true love has never let me down.”

  “I wish I knew that feeling,” sighed Trista, and closed her eyes, rubbing her eyelids.

  Narnok honed his axe blades. It relaxed him. It reminded him of years ago, in the army, waiting for battle. Always waiting for battle. Ninety-nine days out of a hundred, always waiting for a bloody battle.

  The whetstone hissed across steel.

  Narnok felt his eyelids heavy. And it felt nice. It felt good. It felt… right.

  And… gradually… he slept.

  Kiki awoke with a start. She’d been dreaming about her brother, who slipped a noose around his neck and stepped off a bench. The rope made a snapping sound as it cracked tight. At the top of the stairs she screamed, lurching forward to save him…

  And she blinked.

  Was it real? Did it happen?

  Smoke curled from the embers of the fire. Kiki stared at the sleeping figures of Narnok and Trista. And then… Prince Zastarte, who stood, rapier drawn, his eyes gazing down into… the fire.

  “No,” murmured Kiki, and leapt from her blankets, lurching across the short space and grabbing Zastarte as he stepped forward – into the flames. He blinked, and looked first at his rapier, then down into the glowing embers, then up at Kiki. Confusion flooded him and he rubbed his jaw, then his eyes, and coughed and stepped away from the fire.

  “What was I doing?” he said. And he was like a child again. Lost, and lonely, and alone.

  “You were going to burn,” said Kiki, gently.

  “That makes sense.”

  The others came awake. The night forest was, if anything, more ethereal and deeply frightening than during the wintry daylight, such as it was. The only light came from the slumbering fire. Orange ignited the features of the Iron Wolves. They stared at one another, like newborns, like amateurs, like the idiot naïve.

  “What happens next?” whispered Trista.

  “We get the fuck out of here,” said Kiki, voice level.

  And the trees… groaned. For the first time in nearly three days the trees spoke to them. Branches shifted and creaked, leaves hissed, and the forest seemed to come – alive. Like snakes through grass, tree roots curled along the ground and Kiki danced back from several questing tendrils. Branches bowed as if blown by the wind, leaning down towards the group and Dek snarled, “This bastard place wants us, wants to keep us!”

  And a high-pitched gibbering sound sailed between them, like an army of ghosts, like a battalion of the murdered. Stay with us be with us play with us; we want you we need you, you are ours to see and touch and hold and taste and be with for evermore. Stay with us and play with us, you need us like nothing you ever needed before
, you can feel our love and our understanding and our purity. Come and be a part of something bigger, something great, something eternal, an essence you could never understand, a calm place, a loving place, join with us, you can feel what it’s like on the other plains of reality… we praise the Equiem, and worship those who existed Before.

  “No,” said Kiki, forcing growled words between stubborn lips.

  And the sighs and joy and laughter turned to serpent hisses and groans and the cries of the tortured.

  You WILL stay with us, fuckers, you will become a part of this place; for you have invaded our realm and the only way to survive our realm is to become a part of it, to exist here, to worship here and understand and become part of our Ancient Lore…

  They came, from the darkness, the hung, the gouged, the cut, the bled, the poisoned, the dismembered, the sad, the necrotic, the dead, the dead, the dead, the dead. Moving slowly, many trailing the ropes of the noose, they advanced slowly from between the trees, coming from the darkness, hands outstretched, eyes white and blank and lifeless…

  “No!” screamed Kiki, as all around her the Iron Wolves stood, motionless, unable to react, unable to do anything. And the slaughtered, the murdered, the suicide cases from the last hundred years emerged and tugged and nagged and muttered and persuaded…

  Narnok stepped forward, axe slamming around, and a head was cut from stooped shoulders. There was no blood. The body collapsed, deflated, to the woodland floor. The spell was broken, and the Iron Wolves drew weapons and, back to back, faced this new enemy, this spirit of the woodland, these victims of a dark, invasive possession.

  “We need to get to the horses,” growled Kiki.

  The Drakka dead shuffled forward, gathering the coils of their nooses as weapons, and with a scream Kiki launched herself at the moaning, shuffling throng, sword slamming left and right cutting limbs and heads from bodies without blood, without screams, without emotion; like a fishmonger pares pale white fish flesh. It was quite the most sickening slaughter Kiki had ever delivered, and she felt like she wanted to puke. There was no joy in battle. No sense of bettering a foe. It was just sick. And sorrowful. And pathetic.