by Travis Peck
“Get off the road,” Lerius urged to Hossen as he jerked at the reins. His horse balked at first, the water was up to its knees, and though the road was muddy, it was still preferable to willingly stepping off it onto unknown terrain. The healer raised a hand over his eyes to keep the worst of the rain from them. He strained to catch any glimpse of what might have made him so reluctant to approach what looked to be a welcome refuge for the night.
The fire was clearly visible now that the rain had lessened ever so slightly. It was crackling merrily and invitingly. A large dark splotch sat by the fire but he could not identify what it was from where he was standing. He dismounted, forgetting the terrain as he splashed up nearly to his hips, though he could scarcely get any wetter. “I’m going to get a closer look. I hope I’m mistaken, but something doesn’t feel right about this.”
Hossen agreed to stay but Lerius felt he was only humoring him. He was grateful, nonetheless, for the stalwart comrade he had found in the innkeeper. He slogged through the water; if the rain hadn’t been coming down so hard, he would have been making a tremendous amount of noise crashing through the brush. But, as it was, he hardly heard anything over the blustering storm. Once he had made it roughly a third of the way to the fire, he stopped to try and make out exactly what that indistinct blur was.
It was black, not only from the darkness of the night, but it was painted black, and then he had it. It was a massive coach. It was perhaps the largest land conveyance he had ever laid eyes on. He saw a dozen large oxen tied up for the night beside it. Normally, coaches were pulled by heavy draft horses. He had only seen oxen this large used to pull plows, and in such cases, only one or two of the beasts were needed. This monstrosity had twelve of the brutes needed to pull it along.
He didn’t see anyone warming themselves by the fire but could make out light shining through the shuttered windows of the coach. There was someone inside. Surely there should be more people in camp than whoever was inside; harnessing and tending to the oxen would require at least two other workers. He doubted that whoever owned such a coach would start their own fires and rub down, feed, and water a dozen large and ill-tempered oxen. There was something wrong about this. He could not shake the feeling and wondered if recent events had unhinged his mind. Was he being paranoid? Still, he could not shake the feeling. People who were mad didn’t think that they were mad. Right?
Lerius was just about to turn back to rejoin Hossen, to apologize ashamedly for letting his unfounded suspicions get the better of him, when he heard something in the direction of the coach. The noise must have been quite loud to hear it over the near-deafening storm. He saw a figure interpose itself between him and the fire, casting an eerie shadow. He thought he was hearing a low rumble, almost like someone humming. Then a loud crash made him flinch. The figure had thrown a large piece of wood next to the fire. So this was the individual who made the fire, he suspected.
He soon discovered that his eyes had been playing tricks on him. The figure was now standing right next to the carriage, which was apparently not as large as he had originally guessed. Another deep rumble and a barely audible whisper sounded from within the conveyance; Lerius could not make out anything that was being said because of the distance and heavy rainfall. The figure outside the coach bowed low, and he heard another rumble.
Then the figure walked over to the line of cud-chewing oxen. Lerius’s jaw dropped. The figure was giant; it made the oxen look like calves standing next to an adult. His eyes hadn’t tricked him. The carriage was massive, but even more impressive was the stature of this figure before him. He could not make out any other details, and he was not sure if he wanted to. With the storm still blowing hard, he continued trusting his instincts that warned him against approaching the strange camp that could possibly provide them with shelter. Oddly, it was the foreboding sense of evil coming from the coach, and not the giant outside of it, that unnerved him the most.
Lerius had encountered several people suffering from giantism over the course of his training, and it was certainly intimidating to be in their presence, but they were just normal people—only larger. In the few cases he had seen, the person afflicted had difficulty moving about. This figure, on the other hand, was moving around quite fluidly. He heard the rumble again. He realized that the sound was the giant humming a tune to himself as he tended to the oxen.
Noises from beyond the camp made him pause. It sounded like a group of people crashing through the woods to join up with the coach, but not from the road like one might expect. He had a sudden fear well up through his body, and he almost gave a warning shout. Ravinors! Not the ones chasing them, either. It was a different flock.
He remained silent, some deep instinct buried his cry of alarm. The large figure only spared the ravinors a perfunctory glance and went back to tending to the oxen. The ravinors streamed into the camp. Their vocalizations came to an abrupt halt once they surrounded the fire. He saw several ravinors set down several heavy burdens. He could not discern what their mysterious cargo was, but it looked to be the carcasses of some unlucky creature; he hoped none of them were human.
Lerius saw a small skirmish break out amongst the ravinors as one of their number tried to filch a mouthful of flesh before its turn. Barks and grunts broke out at the excitement. Lerius scarcely saw the movement it was so fast. The giant was within the fracas in the blink of an eye, and the offending ravinor was flung out of the camp—a good dozen yards—before it slammed to the ground with shocking force.
The giant raised himself up to his full height. Lerius, comparing the giant’s height to that of a common ravinor, figured that it was thirty hands tall, almost double that of a full grown man. The ravinors seemed to respect this discrepancy in stature as well; they cowered before the enraged giant. No sound came from the creatures now.
The weak, rattly whisper muttered from the coach again. The voice sounded hiss-like and angry. The giant cowered nearly as much as the ravinors had for him as he approached the coach. The obvious trepidation Lerius observed in the giant as it neared the wagon was almost comical. The behemoth rumbled his apology. Any doubt whatsoever that the occupant of the coach was someone Lerius wanted to meet, evaporated.
If an angry whisper could cow such a titan, he could only imagine what manner of creature resided within. The giant, having accepted his admonishment, bowed low and returned to shepherd the flock of ravinors. The creatures cringed away from him. Plainly not wanting to be used as a target for him to vent his anger on from being scolded. But the lesson had been learned, and the camp was now stone quiet. The ravinor that had been cast out of camp got back to its feet shakily and tentatively rejoined the flock. When it returned, it stayed well back from the carcasses and the fire—and especially the giant.
Lerius capitulated to his growing urge to leave the camp, having more than satisfied his curiosity and proven his suspicions to have been well-founded. Hossen was only a few strides away, staring pale-faced and mouth agape. He had seen what the healer had and looked as poleaxed as Lerius felt.
Shocked and afraid. Two states that he now seemed to perpetually exist within. Grabbing Hossen’s shoulder, he steered the innkeeper back to their mounts that were now tied to a tree. He was glad Hossen had thought to secure them, for they looked to be having difficulty controlling their fear. They had heard the angry bellow as clearly as the humans had.
Mounting back up, he coaxed the mounts to return to the road and set them heading north. Even though this was bearing back to however many ravinors were chasing them, he felt it best to put some distance between themselves and the ravinor camp. They would leave the road again after a candle of riding and would then circle back around to the south. The horses were anxious to leave the area and did not have to be urged onward through the clinging mud that covered the road. The group traveled as quickly as they dared in the heavy rain. The last thing Lerius wanted was to be penned in between two ravinor flocks, the giant, and whatever Taker-cursed creature was inside that
coach.
Darkness reigned complete, but for the occasional glimpse of the moon shining through momentary breaks in the clouds, by the time Lerius gave the signal to turn off the road and into the wild. He had to admit that the rain had probably saved their lives this night. It did not make him any less drenched, but he was able to appreciate it more now.
The had to travel slowly, and he pitied the horses as they slogged through the shifting terrain; the thick and sticky mud was as slippery as crossing a stream over slick rocks. He thanked the Giver that the night air was mild. Even soaked to the bone, as he and Hossen were, it could be worse. Much worse, he thought as he went over the strange scene in his mind that he and the innkeeper had witnessed. Lerius could not stop wondering about the giant—no—the giant ravinor, the mysterious coach, and whatever manner of creature had been inside it.
“That was a ravinor, wasn’t it?” Lerius broke the silence, but he kept his voice to a whisper.
“What else could it be? It spoke to them, didn’t it?” the sodden innkeeper answered.
Lerius could not think of any other explanation, but he was confounded by how a giant could have been turned. Not to say that giants had any sort of immunity to the ravinor infection, but the odds had to be remarkably low that one of them was even involved in a ravinor attack. He had only seen three humans with giantism. And that was only because they had sought him out for healing their chronic joint pain and bone maladies.
“Have you ever seen a giant before today?” he asked. Deepbrooke was a small village, but it was on a well-traveled roadway that might have seen a giant or two pass through over the years.
“I’ve never seen one,” Hossen responded. “I’ve only heard of one. I heard it from someone, who had heard it from someone else, whose brother had heard it from someone who had seen one in Styr.”
“Exactly,” Lerius said. He believed that what he had seen could not have been a human turned into a ravinor. He had always heard that when humans turned that they brought with them their old maladies and infirmities. They were stronger, certainly, but being turned did not suddenly cure a human of everything else that had ailed them. This giant moved as any fit man would have, smoothly and stunningly precise for such a towering figure. Another point to mention to Mon Lyzink. He wondered how many more discoveries they would add to their tally. He also wondered if they would live to tell the scholar about everything they had seen. Lerius feared that they might not survive their next discovery; if it hadn’t been for the heavy rain, they would not have survived this one.
Hossen nodded thoughtfully as the healer explained what he knew of giantism. “So you think they’re changing?”
“I don’t know if they are changing, or are only now revealing themselves, but obviously something has changed, if the past few days are any indication.”
The innkeeper chuckled. “Things have seemed—out of sorts—recently. If anyone can help us, it’s Lord Geryn. I’ve heard that he funds some of Mon Lyzink’s research. Having a benefactor’s blessing would surely be a good introduction so we aren’t immediately turned away by Mon Lyzink for being raving madmen.”
Lerius thought Hossen made a good point. There was no guarantee that Mon Lyzink would even see them, but with the help of a confidante—a confidante who has a deep purse—they would have a better chance of being seen, and hopefully, taken seriously.
“It seems we now have another reason to see this Lord Geryn.” Lerius longed to reach the estates of the wealthiest man in the empire. I can’t take much more of this. He hunkered down as closely as he could to his horse’s neck as the wind howled through the surrounding trees. The biting wind made him shiver in his water-soaked clothing, further punctuating his thought that he was reaching his limits of what he could handle.
There was nothing for it but to go on, and there would certainly be no stopping this night. They wouldn’t be able to fall asleep in such conditions anyway; neither could the horses. Onward then.
Chapter Nineteen
TWO DAYS LATER, MARTEL, Mon Lyzink, and Yurlo were getting closer to their quarry, but they had not caught a glimpse of them yet. The long days of deliberate pursuit had brought them ever closer; the signs were fresh. The prince, newborn, and mother were traveling at a steady pace, an indication that they were unaware of their pursuers. And Martel knew that Mon Lyzink wanted to keep it that way. They wanted to discover where the ravinors were going, and if they spooked them…only the Taker knew where they would change their course to then.
The three men doggedly followed the trail. They had grown adept at distinguishing what set these tracks apart from other prints. Over rocky ground, across small streams, and through spongy moss, they stayed on the trail. The sky was overcast now and threatening rain. Martel was certain that they would still be able to follow if it did start to rain, but he wasn’t looking forward to testing out that theory.
Martel had taken the opportunity to go through their supplies and had found plenty of oiled leather and other treated materials that should serve admirably to fend off the worst of the rain, but it would still be miserable. The hard-blowing, steady eastern wind would drive the rain at an angle that even their waterproof cloaks and hats couldn’t completely protect them from.
The ground rose sharply ahead to the north as they reached the foothills of the mountains. The same mountain range that they had suspected was the ravinors’ destination. The trees grew sparse. Crawling vines and shrubs were the only vegetation that grow on the hardscrabble landscape. The terrain was rocky and Martel was surprised that anything was able to grow at all on such a barren surface. But there were some hardy plants that must have been able to send their roots down through small cracks in between the rocks where they managed to find purchase, just enough to sustain themselves. The few trees that grew here were much shorter than their lowland relatives, and with the strong wind continuously howling around him, Martel suspected why that was so.
Martel’s observations of his environs were interrupted by a sudden halt called by Mon Lyzink. His mentor sat with his back straight and eyes alert, gazing into the distance with his hand, forgotten, left raised in the halt signal. Martel squinted his eyes. The thinned-out trees let him see for a great distance up the hill. Several moments passed, and he wondered if there was anything there at all. Right when he was about to give up his search, Martel saw movement far up on the foothills. There’s definitely something up there, but is it our quarry, or a mountain goat, or some other high-altitude denizen foraging about?
He remembered the eyeglass that the legate had provided for them with their supplies. Martel dismounted and walked his two horses—his own mount and the packhorse—up to the front of their column. He passed the reins to Yurlo who accepted them without question. Martel quickly located the eyeglass in the foreigner’s saddlebags. The apprentice walked over and handed it to his master so he could get a better look.
Mon Lyzink accepted the eyeglass with a brief nod of thanks, his eyes never straying from whatever was moving up ahead. “Taker curse it. I think it’s a horse… Whatever it is, it just went behind those rocks there,” his master said, pointing at a small outcropping several hundred yards distant. “Get mounted back up. We should be able to get a better view once we pass that small bend.”
Martel hobbled as fast as he could back to his mount and saddled up. His heart beat faster with the anticipation of finally getting a look at what had caused all this fuss. The group took off at a pace just shy of a gallop; they were all eager to lay eyes on what they had been chasing. Martel saw the bend in the trail ahead that would give them a line of sight to whatever was behind the outcropping. As they reached the bend, the riders clustered together. The other two stayed close to Mon Lyzink, anxiously awaiting their own turn with the eyeglass once the scholar confirmed what he had seen.
“Aha,” Mon Lyzink said triumphantly. “It’s the horse, and there’s the mother and babe, still mounted…but wait—I don’t see the—”
A blur crashed int
o Martel, knocking him clean off his mount. His breath rushed out of his lungs with the impact, and the violent jarring sent a wave of pain through his injured ankle. Martel was flat on his back and staring up at his assailant. Black eyes bore down on him, the intelligence behind them was plain to see. The prince!
The ravinor grabbed him and tossed him away like a toddler’s unwanted doll. The air in his lungs was forced out of him again as he landed hard on the ground. He gasped at the pain in his ribs. Unable to breathe, Martel turned and watched his master and Yurlo converge on the ravinor prince. His mentor waved his shortsword back and forth in front of the prince, trying to keep it between his apprentice and the creature. This method might be enough to flummox a normal ravinor, but this one ignored the attempted distraction and lunged quickly, slapping the sword out of his stunned mentor’s hands. The prince punched Mon Lyink’s chest with an outward facing palm. Mon Lyzink flew backward a half-dozen yards from the force of the strike.
Martel’s air returned in a blissful gulp, but he was too concerned with his comrades to notice. Struggling to his feet, pain blazed through his ankle and ribs as he stood upright. Stumbling toward his fallen master, Martel saw the prince rush toward the prostrate scholar at the same time. He yelled out a warning to his master, but the old man was too badly shaken. He gazed about drunkenly, unaware of the coming danger.
Before Martel could cover any more ground, he saw Yurlo grab onto the prince’s arm and tug him back. The Rhyllian was a small man, and the ravinor was the same size as Martel and Mon Lyzink, though clearly much stronger than it had a right to be. The prince grabbed onto Yurlo’s arm. Martel cringed as he expected the small foreigner to be tossed aside.
As the creature swung, remarkably, the Rhyllian was able to hang on. Launched into the air by the mighty swing, he landed smoothly and rolled to his back. Using that momentum, he kicked up with his legs; the motion propelled the prince up and over the islander. The prince landed hard onto the rocky ground but was up in a blink. Tilting his head at the small Rhyllian, the ravinor was as surprised as Martel was by what had happened. Martel knew that it was but a momentary reprieve. The prince charged in again.