by Eric Lewis
Gant stepped, paused, then looked up toward the eastern horizon, then the west. As he did so, out of the corner of his eye – a flash. Weak and brief then gone, but it had definitely been there. In the sky. “What the – ah!” He slipped, tumbled off the rock and down the slope into the whiteness of the clearing.
“Gant! Great.” Dannek hopped down and ran after him, careful not to trip and share Gant’s fate. “The rest of you stay here!”
Gant kept rolling until the ground leveled out. Then he slammed into something solid. “Oof!”
Dannek only barely missed crashing into it himself, blinded by the drifting snow and the falling dark. He grabbed at a branch of the lone tree to stop his descent. No, not a branch, it was too soft for that. It was…Dannek looked up, squinted, then gasped.
Gant shuffled to his feet. “Oh, that was stu— Hey Dannek, what’s the prob— Gyargh!”
Two bodies were strung up in the tree with arms spread wide. More than that, they’d been mutilated. Eyes gouged, bellies open with intestines forming bloody icicles, noses slit off, and their mouths…. “What, what is that?” Dannek stepped closer, revolted and curious at the same time. Then he looked down at the dead men’s legs, and between them each on the ground, dark frozen pools. “Oh for the love of gods.”
“They cut off their cocks and shoved ’em in their mouths,” Gant concluded. “Hells of a way to die. Was it…do you think it was Marchmen?”
“Dunno. Maybe. There’s no village or town around here, not with Firleaf gone. I don’t know who else…wait a minute. Look at their tunics.” Gant looked, squinted.
“Is that…are these bastards soldiers from opposite sides?”
Dannek nodded. “One red, one green. I wonder what they were doing out here.” He eyed their belts still buckled about their ruined torsos. “The purses are cut away, see? Marchmen might take the belts for the leather, but they don’t use money.”
“Robbers, then. Maybe they interrupted some kinda undertable deal – frattin’ with the enemy for fun and profit, like.”
“Hmm. But this looks personal. Taking the time to do…this. There’s gotta be more to it. But I’m not hanging around to find out.”
Gant glanced up at the dead men, than back at Dannek. “That supposed to be a joke?”
“Uh, no. Let’s leave this place.”
They trudged back up the slope to where the women waited impatiently, and Marella asked Gant what made him fall in the first place. “That was clumsy, even for you.”
Gant shook his head. “It’s the damnedest thing, but I coulda sworn I saw it….”
* * *
Vinian could’ve sworn she saw it, and she felt a new surge of energy, certain that she’d picked up her quarry’s scent. Well, sight anyway.
The jerks had been bad the night before, as she huddled next to her horse in the freezing wilderness. When sleep at last embraced her it kept its hold for longer than she’d intended and she awoke to full daylight, with no sign of the strange pair of insurgents. The spymistress cursed herself and her luck and started off up the road – it led northeast without crossroad or fork for miles yet but there were unmapped side paths leading to hamlets, hunter’s rests and robber dens without number. After most of a day of fruitless pursuit she saw no choice but to admit defeat and return to the queen empty-handed.
Then she saw it – another fire arrow shot straight up into the sky. Just a wink then it went out, but there were no more so it’d apparently served its purpose. And mine. It must be them. I’d thank the gods if they existed.
Vinian turned back and rode hard to where she’d seen the signal. There was no one there, but a set of horse tracks drew a clear path into the forest and up the hill due east. Her elation was short-lived when the tracks petered out under the scant canopy of trees that denied the ground enough snow to lead her on. For another half-hour she pushed on in as straight a line as she could manage, only to be faced with a wide, open land that gently but inexorably rose toward the rolling hills of the east. She peered across the brown, tangly mess, the rise and fall of land marked out in mottled white and fading into the distance. How will I ever find them in this? she wondered. It would be impossible alone. With gritted teeth she turned around to begin the journey back to Lenocca.
* * *
The arrow sliced through the cold air and buried itself in the branch an inch in front of Ulnoth. He yelped, slipped on a patch of slush and fell face first into the icy mud. The horses nickered and jumped at the commotion, and Alessia whipped her knife out, determined not to be so easily disarmed again.
“Hold!” The command rang out, and the leader of the trio of swaddled interlopers stepped forward. “What did I tell you? You bloody identify your target before you loose! That’s lesson number one!” He slapped the wayward shooter upside the head.
“I thought they was Marchmen!” protested the man.
“If they had been you wouldn’t have lived long enough to see them. Surrender your bow for today, and enjoy a week of laundry duty.”
“But—”
“Now.” The dejected figure handed off his weapon to the one next to him and moved to the rear of the pack. The leader pulled back his hood and offered a hand down to Ulnoth. “Sorry about that.”
Ulnoth wiped slush from his beard with a scowl. “Nice welcome, Corren. Won’t ask how you do for intruders.”
“Much the same way it seems. Came across a bit of a gruesome sight yesterday. Everyone’s on edge.” He glanced at Alessia, who still held her knife out in front of her. “Looks like you’ve had a like experience.”
“We’ll tell you all about it,” said Ulnoth, “but first I need a fire and some grub. You caught our little firefly I take it?”
“We saw. Bloody dangerous, that. Did you find out what you wanted to know?”
“Well, about that. Better gather everyone together, ’cause you probably won’t believe it and I don’t wanna tell it over and over.”
* * *
“You’re right, I don’t believe it,” said Corren when the tale was done. Ulnoth knew that the fact that he’d told most of it and not Alessia signaled that more had happened than he was telling, but he figured he’d told what needed to be known. “Both sides? At once? That’s…that’s monstrous.”
“What, unlike everything else that’s been going on the past few years?” Sally sat close to the fire next to Bedegar, who was nursing a cold. “Higher up you go the bigger the monsters are.”
Corren shook his head. “It just seems too far-fetched. What are the odds of us coming across that Thazovi, out of this whole big country, bound for Sarpoor with something this important?”
Nan shrugged. “What are the odds of all of us coming together and doing what we’ve done?”
“Point taken, but what good could we even do with this?”
“We could tell Pharamund what Artabarzanes is doing,” suggested Crander. “Expose the queen.”
“Or we could tell Engwara,” Emony answered. “But to what end? Even if one side knew, it’s not like they’d refuse their own source of funding. And the other would just deny it and accuse us of making it up. So would the bank.”
“We wouldn’t even get close enough to do the telling either way.” Someone from beyond the flicker of the fire said it, from the riveted council of all three dozen or so of them. That brought more argument, a cacophony of possible courses of action, raised voices.
“Quiet!” shouted Corren. “All of you. We don’t have to decide now.”
“Everyone’s right though,” said Marella in a soft voice. She rarely spoke, so when she did all voices piped down to listen. “It doesn’t matter which side you give that letter to. They’ll disbelieve and kill whoever tries to deliver it. There’s really only one option.”
“Well, don’t hold us in suspense, love,” said Allard.
“Give it to both s
ides. At once.”
There was a moment of silence as everyone listened for Marella to give some further clarification. Finally a voice asked, “But how? That’s just twice as suicidal.”
“No idea, but there’s an old gambler’s saying – when the odds are split twixt the favorites, bet on the long shot. How? That’s for our glorious leaders to decide.” Eyes turned to Corren and Alessia, and a few even to Ulnoth. The gazes weighed heavy on each of them.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chthonii
“Come on, it ain’t much farther,” Banwick said when Ulnoth paused to catch his breath.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on laundry duty? You know, for almost killing me?”
“Nope, my week’s finished. I’m a free man. That’s how I found it – I was out on my own looking for game.”
“Found what?”
“Come on.”
Banwick’s glee unnerved Ulnoth more than even a column of soldiers would have – no one so recently suffering Corren’s disapproval should have cause to be excited about anything. So when Banwick had gone into the hills morose as he’d been all week then come back positively giddy, Ulnoth figured something was either really wrong or really right. He trailed behind at a jog. “We’re makin’ a lot of noise, you know. We shouldn’t be—”
“There! There it is. Bask in the glory.”
All Ulnoth saw was a rock formation in front of him. Rock and bare trees and snow, just like everything else for miles around. A stream trickled, and somewhere nearby the rush of a waterfall. “I’m looking. What exactly is it I’m supposed to see?”
Banwick laughed. “Look closer. You see the pool between those boulders?”
“That puddle? I see it. So what? I – wait. It ain’t frozen.”
Banwick shook his head. “Nope! Look closer.”
Ulnoth clambered up to the formation. A big section of the hill jutted from the ground like a stony bone ripped out of the earth in a great wound, and a cleft where three large fragments of rock came together held a small pond. Smaller than that even, no bigger around than a wagon wheel. And not only was the water trickling from it not frozen, it was steaming. Finally Banwick’s attitude made sense as Ulnoth realized what he’d discovered. “A hot spring. You found a hot spring!”
“Yes!” Banwick danced and hopped from one foot to the other like a lunatic, ecstatic. “Hot, plentiful, and free.”
“And that waterfall—”
“Regular stream. The spring drains into it a bit downhill, hot and cold together.”
“You could do a lot of laundry in this.”
“Forget laundry, my term’s done. We can all have baths, my friend. Remember those? Merciful gods, I’d love to climb in there with that Sally tart….”
“Hey!”
“What?”
Ulnoth shook his head. “Nothing. Keep dreaming, I’m getting in there now.” He began to rip off his clothes, suddenly conscious of how grimy and foul he must be.
Banwick took hold of Ulnoth’s shoulder. “Whoa, hold up there. First we have to agree we tell no one about this just yet. Plenty of time for everyone, but there are finder’s rights to be observed. I need you to keep Corren’s precious patrols from stumblin’ over our little find. Just one day, agreed?”
“Hmm. Well that’s fair I guess, not that fair’s exactly a thing anymore. All right, one day.”
“Good.” Banwick nodded. “Now if you’ll step aside….”
“Wha— Why do you get to go first?”
“’Cause I found it. You go fetch some cloths.”
* * *
“Well. I’m lost.” Bestre was lost, and had been for a while. The realization didn’t come all at once but spread like a mold on bread until it was too green to ignore. Saying it aloud crystallized his irritation – and more than a little bit of fear – into a thoroughly ugly frown as he plodded through the woods looking for his squad. They’d gotten separated in the dark, and he dared not call out for aid. Not in this place, hells no. He lifted a wineskin to his lips but tasted only the last dregs. Great. Lost, cold and dry too.
General Duelleigh had sent them to investigate reports of Engwara’s partisans operating in the area. To seek, to find, but absolutely not to engage. What could the enemy be doing out here so far from any castle or town or port of worth, no battle or siege to join? But there were other reports too, and far more terrifying. The attacks, the disappearances, the bodies found all up and down the river valley with unspeakable things done to them…all officially attributed to outlaws, or Marchmen, or outlaw Marchmen. Word of mouth told different stories. Stories of invisible monsters, ghosts, of things even more sinister that men could not conceive of for fear of going mad. Like every Bergovan lad, Bestre had grown up on nighttime whispers of the Chthonii, the ancient gods-before-the-gods banished to the primal chaos yet doomed ever to seek out cracks in the bones of the world through which they might squeeze and wreak their havoc. He’d thought those tales themselves gone from memory long ago. Now….
Bestre shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “Stupid,” he said out loud with more certainty than he felt. “Just drunken stories, that’s all.” They must be. He looked up at the bright full moon and tried to remember his thoroughly inadequate navigation training to get some bearings. “Let’s see, downhill is that way, and the moon is to my left…wait. That way is down too, so….” Should I risk a shout? What was he truly afraid of? He lived in the real world after all, not some storytime dream. Man’s the worst monster I have to fear. Maybe I’ll walk on just a little further….
Bestre picked through a tangle of branches dragged down by the weight of snow, and some annoyed birds overhead made his heart jump when they flew off. Ahead he heard something – water gurgling over rock. Maybe I can follow it back down. He crept toward it, faster now that he had a direction to fix on. He stepped out of a thick patch of underbrush and was faced with the rising solid ground. Then he looked up. No….
A Chthonus towered over him. It shimmered silver at the edges and all blackest dark in the middle. It had the vague shape of a man but rippled with muscles and was enveloped in an ethereal vapor that twisted and writhed all around it like a skin made of live serpents. In one claw it held a sword the likes of which he’d never seen. And it was looking. Straight. At. Him.
It snorted a stream of smoke, and Bestre managed to force his trembling, piss-soaked legs to turn and flee back into the trees. He screamed in terror, and he kept screaming when he heard that the thing was chasing after him. He tripped, scrambled to his feet, ran some more. He came to a sharp drop of more than ten feet, and without a thought threw himself over the edge. Just get away get away get away havetogetawaygogogo….
He landed hard, knew something was broken but ignored it and shambled on. After some nameless amount of time he realized he was no longer being pursued, and only then did the pain hit him. Bestre lost consciousness.
In the morning Bestre’s squad mates found him where he’d dropped, curled up into a ball with a fracted ankle and whimpering about Chthonii. “Coming for me,” he said over and over. “It’s coming for me….”
* * *
After some nameless amount of time Ulnoth realized he was no longer covered in a layer of hot water but of ice, and only then did the cold hit him. “Argh, that was stupid!” He gave up the chase after stubbing his toe on a rock, then limped back to the hot spring’s warmth before hypothermia could set in. He tossed the antique sword he’d grabbed just before leaving camp onto the pile of his clothes and slithered into the pool. “Oh, that’s better.” Who had that fellow been? It was dark but it looked like it could’ve been a soldier. “Thanks, Banwick,” he muttered, “great job guarding the place.” I guess we have to let the secret out, he thought. Too bad – they could’ve been very comfortable living by the spring for a little while anyway, but if soldiers were moving in…. “Oh well. Least
I got my bath.” He luxuriated for a few more minutes before crawling out again steaming. He dried and dressed quickly then headed back to camp.
* * *
“Argh, it itches!”
“Of course it itches,” Alessia replied. “Water from hot springs is full of minerals. When you let it dry without rinsing off, you get salts on you. Which is what you two deserve for trying to keep it to yourselves.” She poured a jug of cold water from melted snow over Ulnoth’s head, making him shiver and moan some more. Corren and Nan encircled the pair lest they try for a quick getaway.
“Well, we’re sharing now,” said Banwick. “Didn’t think we’d have to move on so soon. What’re them sloggers doing up here anyway? We’re in the ass-end corner of nowhere.”
“How many did you actually see?” Corren almost snarled the question through grinding teeth, furious at the two for pulling something so selfish and at himself for not covering their tracks well enough.
“I just saw the one,” said Ulnoth. “Which is one more than he did.”
Banwick held his hand in front of him defensively. “Hey, I was havin’ a piss break. I swear I was vigilant—”
“Enough! They never travel alone,” said Alessia. “There must be more nearby. Do we hunker down and hope they miss us or risk moving out?”
“We could just….” Ulnoth made a slicing motion across his neck.
Nan rolled her eyes. “That’s original.”
“That’d just bring more when they didn’t return,” said Corren, shaking his head. “Besides, we can’t even be sure it’s us they’re looking for.”
“If we are they have a funny way of showing it,” said Ulnoth. “He took one look at me and tore off screaming bloody murder.”
Banwick grinned and seemed about to make a cock joke, but Corren’s smoldering gaze kept him silent – one week on the receiving end of it was enough.
* * *