Ravinor

by Travis Peck

  The Geryn estate was industrious and prosperous, and he knew that it did not have to be so. The amount of maintenance alone that he had seen was likely to eat into a sizeable amount of the profits generated from the land. Of course, when you are wealthy enough, you can afford not to squeeze every copper out of your businesses. But Lerius suspected that this lord actually cared for his workers, unlike others he had met.

  Lerius made his way to his room, his body protesting even the minor exertion of going up the stairs. He needed to rest, and thanked the Giver he would get the chance.

  He stripped off his clothes and splashed some water on his face from the basin. He fell asleep within moments of his head hitting the soft pillow.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  THE GROUP FINALLY STOPPED in the afternoon of the next day. The night had passed by agonizingly slowly, and yet, painfully swift for Martel. They had traveled all night, and his bad ankle held up well in the cast Yurlo had prepared, but only just. More troubling than his ankle, was the angry red scratch on his arm. He could feel the infection spreading through his body from the slight wound. Slight, but it would be the end of him. He had not stopped bothering at it with his fingers as he marched endlessly and numbly onward.

  He gratefully flopped down on the ground as the ravinor holding his leash let go. He slid down the closest tree with his back against the trunk. Martel gave a great sigh as he was at last able to elevate his ankle after the long night’s march. His fingers subconsciously found their way back to the wound that was still hot to the touch. Yurlo and Mon Lyzink joined him around the tree. The three exchanged tired looks, but did not dare attempt to speak again.

  As the ravinors curled up en masse amongst the other trees, the ravinor Martel thought of as the sergeant, or overseer, walked over and tossed them one of their waterskins and some bread from their saddlebags. The three men divvied up their meager, though unexpected, meal between them. It did little to sate Martel’s hunger, but he needed any nourishment he could get.

  The two trueborns and the sergeant conferred briefly and then separated. The sergeant walked over to a dozing ravinor and kicked it with his boot, stirring the creature awake. The overseer grunted a few times and pointed over to where the three captives were sitting. The ravinor peon’s reluctance turned into a cringe as the sergeant raised his hand to threaten the underling. The peon shrank away from the sergeant and darted over to the prisoners, where it sat on its haunches a few paces from them and turned its unblinking gaze on them.

  A ravinor staring at you from a few yards away made it difficult to rest. The ravinor seemed, to Martel’s eyes at least, to have once been a man his own age. Its lanky hair was stuck to its scalp with dirt and grime. Its nails were hard and long. The extra hair growing all over its body—the ravinor’s tunic looked to be in danger of falling away at the first stiff breeze, which allowed Martel to see what it was supposed to cover—was not uniformly growing, but rather formed in disparate patches here and there. The canines were elongated much like the nails were; as a result, the once-human’s mouth appeared fuller and more menacing.

  But with ravinors, it all came down to the eyes. Those black eyes; a dark window into a foreign mind whose perspective no human could really know and could only guess at. Martel had the feeling that he and his two companions would be getting a much closer look at the ravinors and would no doubt be witness to a level of intimacy with the creatures that even Mon Lyzink had failed to achieve until now.

  Martel had to temper his excitement at what they—his companions—would discover in the coming days or weeks ahead. He would be getting a first-hand view of ravinor life any moment now when the ravinor fever would pull him unerringly into their world. Unfortunately, there was no way he would be able to communicate any of his findings back to his mentor.

  They passed the waterskin back and forth until the refreshing contents were gone. Most people would not want to share a drink with an infected person, but the islander and his mentor were both immune, and so were safe from the possibility of the infection being passed in such a way. He knew it was not contracted like that in any case. Martel hoped at least that hadn’t changed for those humans that were lucky enough to survive the fever. As unlikely as it was to survive the infection, at least there was some hope, once a person recovered, that they would never have to worry about being turned again. He knew he would feel remarkably different if he only had to worry about his physical well-being and not the danger of losing his soul and self-identity.

  Surprisingly, with all that going through his mind, Martel’s eyes closed against his will. He did not know when he opened them next if he would still be human.

  ***

  He bolted upright and looked around wildly. Yurlo muttered quietly in his sleep beside him but did not wake. Mon Lyzink raised two bushy eyebrow his way, but Martel did not respond yet. He had panicked when he realized he had fallen asleep, and during his scare, he noticed that he was not feverish. The scratch on his arm felt like a normal scratch. The heat that was rolling off it during the march the previous day was no longer there. He might as well have scratched it on a sharp limb, or rock, for all that it irritated him now. He looked to his mentor, stunned.

  “I feel fine…” Martel said, so shocked that he ignored the ravinor snarling at him as he spoke.

  Mon Lyzink smiled broadly, and Yurlo, who must have awoken with the commotion, gave him a slap on the shoulder.

  Martel started to laugh. His chances of surviving as a ravinor prisoner were still not good, but now he knew that he would not become one of them—one of those poor, doomed souls trapped behind black eyes. He could not help it. He laughed again with relief. Martel roared with laughter to the point where he couldn’t draw a breath. Mon Lyzink grabbed his arm sharply to bring him to, but he could not control himself. His relief was so strong that he did not notice, or care, that a figure was stalking over to the three men. The crowd of ravinors surrounding them were vocalizing angrily at their rest’s disturbance, and they seemed on the precipice of violence just as the figure arrived.

  Martel suddenly pitched over, holding his head, as something hard struck him down from behind.

  “What is wrong with him?” the trueborn asked Mon Lyzink, his tone just short of livid. He was clearly concerned with the odd behavior of the apprentice scholar.

  “He feared he was… That he had a fever.” Martel heard his mentor answer as he remained clutching at his head in pain. It had stopped his laughing fit though.

  The trueborn scoffed, then said, “I am not a wretch. I am not diseased like these others. But if you do that again I will have one of them infect you,” the trueborn said, threateningly.

  Martel nodded, one hand holding his aching head where the ravinor had struck him. His scholarly mind raced at the exchange. Trueborns did not pass on the infection by scratching or biting a human. Wretches, he called them. Not peons, or drones, but wretches. It indicated that the strata between varieties, or sub-species, of ravinors were even more firmly established than he had realized.

  It reminded him of the smug superiority that some Styric citizens held over their neighbors from bordering lands even though they still belonged to the same empire. The heavy scorn in the trueborn’s voice had been every iota as hateful as any bigoted human Martel had heard disparaging people from lands other than their own. But was the trueborn’s scorn due to the fact that the humans had thought the pure ravinor carried the infection? Or was it simply because the humans had dared to attribute the disease-spreading characteristic to the trueborn, making him no different from a wretch?

  The apprentice remained still and avoided looking directly into the baleful stare of the angry trueborn. The ravinor, satisfied that he had cowed the human that had offended him, marched off back to his blankets while waving for the wretches and sergeant to continue their rest. Martel noticed that the only ravinor who did not get up to watch the confrontation had been the spokeswoman. She was watching but did not bother to stir from her
confiscated bedroll and blanket.

  He remembered that the trueborn had submitted to the will of the spokeswoman when they had first been captured. Were there physical differences between the two trueborns as there were between the trueborns and the wretches that he could not detect, or was it simply a question of rank? He wished he could ask these questions of his mentor and Yurlo, but despite their proximity, and after his strange outburst caused by his immense relief, he did not dare push the trueborn any further.

  Martel tried to go back to sleep, but he had a terrible headache from the blow to his head. He was giddy from relief, though, thank the Giver, not as giddy as he had been when he had first woke up without the fever. That had been a fit of mad joy that he had never experienced before. Of course, he had never before had to contemplate the inevitability of being turned.

  He glanced to his companions who were both snoring. The small islander was snoring louder than the larger scholar. That innocuous fact reminded him of the foreigner’s unexpected martial skills. He wondered what other surprises the islander might have hidden away. His first thought was that the Rhyllian’s fighting prowess might help them escape, but the young scholar found that he did not want to escape. He wanted to see the stronghold of the ravinors and meet this terrible queen, if only to lay eyes on her.

  As much as he wanted to be safe in his bed in Mon Lyzink’s tower, or safely camped out carrying out their usual experiments and observations, he knew that what he and the two others would soon observe would trump any other scholarly discovery that had been made throughout the history of the empire. They may even find something that could permanently end the ravinor threat on the continent.

  Martel shut his eyes, but sleep eluded him. As night fell, the ravinors began to stir. The nocturnal nature of the creatures prevailed despite the behavioral changes they had witnessed. He tried to figure how long it had been since the world had changed and could not come up with a figure. It had all passed by in a blur of terror, relief, discovery, more terror, and so on; the dread of imminent danger had not left him since he was first stalked and chased after their experiment had gone so horribly wrong.

  That seemed like ages ago, now. He would never have predicted that he, his mentor, and a Rhyllian would be captives of three flocks of ravinor wretches who were commanded by a sergeant and two trueborns. Not to mention that they also would be seeing a live ravinor babe suckling at its mother’s teat. As if the infant had heard his thoughts, it began to wail as the camp stirred to life.

  The mewling sounded identical to the hungry cries of a human babe. And just like a human infant, its cries stilled immediately when offered a milk-swollen breast. Why the disdain toward wretches if trueborns were birthed and reared by the simple-minded creatures? Was it perhaps the shame of the limited intellectual capacity of the wretches? Too many questions to answer, and they were just beginning to test this wellspring of knowledge.

  Their ravinor guard, a female wretch this time, grunted at them, and the message was clear. It was time to march once more. Even the simple wretch realized the need for the humans to attend to the call of nature and did not protest as they relieved themselves. Once again, they were given the waterskin, refilled for them, and some bread and cheese. Martel hoped that the ravinor who fetched the water filled the skin from a clean stream. He shuddered at the necessity of relying on one of these creatures to procure their drinking water. Oddly, he noticed that the wretches did not seem to be at all enticed by their food, but the trueborns helped themselves from their confiscated stores. It seemed the wretches preferred meat and simply would forgo eating all together if they could not get that incomparable staple.

  The march began at nightfall with the three humans stumbling along in the dark. The ravinors kept up a steady pace and would pull at their respective leashes if one of them lagged behind. Martel’s ankle was throbbing mightily during the resumption of their journey, but eventually it became numb from the exertion. The pace was much faster this night, and they traveled much farther than they had the previous day.

  The apprentice had no idea where they were at this point. He knew the village of Glennin had been close, but he did not think it was any longer. The pace, mixed with the pain of his ankle and ribs, left him little time to muse about their location or to study the ravinors in such close quarters. Martel’s earlier enthusiasm toward this opportunity to further his, and the empire’s, knowledge of ravinors was tempered by the necessity for him to focus on every step lest he stumble and bring the wrath of the trueborn down upon him. His head still ached from his last lesson, and he did not care to have it repeated.

  This time, when the group stopped, the three humans collapsed around a likely tree—a tree otherwise unclaimed by any wretch or trueborn. Martel and the others had only eaten a small portion of bread and cheese at the beginning of the grueling day’s trek, and his body was begging for more sustenance. Mon Lyzink was faring even worse than Martel was. He was an old man and sometimes Martel forgot that because of his mentor’s usual indefatigable presence. Yurlo was in the best shape of their group, despite having beaten the trueborn in a fight—in two fights. Surprisingly, he was healthy and hale, and not a scratch on him.

  The apprentice scholar had no trouble falling to sleep even with the bright sun shining through the treetops and flashing in his eyes as the branches waved about in the breeze. He did not wake up until night fell once more. And once more, he was prodded awake by a wretch poking at him with a stick. Martel winced when he stood up; he must have stayed in an awkward position during his sleep. His neck and back were protesting his sleeping arrangement. He searched the ground and saw the tree root that he must have slept on. Add that to my list of ailments. At least his headache had faded away to only a dull pain behind his eyes. This morning—or night as it actually was—started just as the last one had. They trudged along behind their captors, who would give them an occasional tug on their leashes to remind them to keep the pace up.

  The days of rest and the nights of travel became a routine that seemed without end. The mountain range that had been small in the horizon since the beginning of their captivity, now grew closer and closer after each night’s march. Martel assumed that it was their destination but could not identify the range. He needed to have a look at a map to narrow down the possibilities, but he didn’t think that one would be forthcoming.

  He lost track of the candles, days, or possibly weeks of monotonous travel. The landscape gradually changed from forest and plains, to an alpine climate with stunted trees found on the leeward side of boulders and outcroppings as they began to ascend the range. Martel’s ankle had actually improved through the rigorous travel, and Yurlo had removed the cast with his belt knife—which their captors had not bothered to take away. Martel agreed with the sentiment. What could be done against three flocks of ravinors with three small belt knives?

  The worst part was not their ravinor companions, or the night replacing the day as their active period, but rather the fact that they could not speak to one another. They were always within an arm’s length of each other but could not communicate other than sporadic looks that failed to convey any idea other than the most basic. Martel was bursting with impatience to discuss all the various ideas he had about the ravinors and their apparent caste system. Unfortunately, there was nothing for it but to wait and hope that whenever they did finally reach their destination, they would be allowed to speak together again.

  A few days later, after steadily climbing through the narrow pass of the unknown mountain range, Martel knew they were getting close. He did not have any particular feeling that was telling him this, but rather a simple, and yet astounding, observation. The mountain pass the group was traveling through split through the rock with either side presenting a nearly vertical face. Essentially, they were traversing through a narrow, high-altitude canyon. That was not the most striking detail Martel noticed. The detail that stood out the most to him was the presence of ravinor guards stationed at intervals alo
ng the ridge above them. Some of these guards carried spears, others had bows or crossbows. Most of them were also outfitted with helms and breastplates. Martel was shocked. Even the sergeant and trueborns in their escort did not carry weapons. He suspected that the trueborns could use the weapons, as they seemed to be the most like humans. Perhaps the two trueborns were high-ranking enough to eschew the pedestrian tools of warfare?

  More and more ravinors appeared atop the ridges. Some were clearly wretches who were naked or clothed in rags, but the majority of the sentinels were either sergeants or trueborns, or so it appeared to Martel. The path, only the width of five ravinors with their arms spread wide, coursed through the canyon like a river, winding through this way and that.

  In one straight stretch of the trail, Martel saw sections of walls that had been placed on wheels. It looked like a wooden palisade wall with a hedge of sharpened stakes jutting out to the front at different angles. It must be a mobile wall that could be placed into position as needed to ward off invaders making their way this far down the path. No one could deny the intelligence required to create such a structure. How long had ravinors duped the human race into thinking they were simple creatures who only strove to fill their bellies with flesh?

  The path widened into an opening that, from a bird’s-eye view, would seem to be a circle with the path narrowing before and after. The sheer walls here were not entirely natural; Martel could clearly identify the bladed-tool marks of shovels, picks, and spades where they had cut into the hard rock. The ravinors had widened this area for a purpose. Or purposes. Martel wondered if the widened area allowed the ravinors, if under attack, to place more reinforcements behind the narrow path. An attacker would be limited to the number of soldiers that could meet the ravinors at any given time. This circle would let them rotate ravinors through, keeping them fresh and replacing any casualties.