A grunt was all he could manage by way of response.
When he returned to the central mass of the force Samine found him, touching his arm gently. She had a conspiratorial look on her face and was looking sideways for eavesdroppers as she whispered to him.
'Chalos! I discovered something!'
'Eh?'
'They took prisoners!'
'What?' He thought back to the attack by the Riln archers and swordsmen and shuddered. 'I thought they killed them all.'
'No, just the ones that would bleed out.' She grinned. 'When we strike camp, I think they're going to interrogate them. Who knows what secrets they'll let slip under the iron and the knife?'
'Great,' Chalos replied, trying to sound cheerful. It was good news, he supposed. Any information on what lay ahead would be useful. But he couldn't help feeling that whatever cruelties the Krune would inflict on their captives would simply be in retribution.
'What's the matter?' Samine asked.
'Nothing... I just....' he looked down at his hands which gripped the reins of the shadamar limply. They were pale and they shook like those of an old man. 'You were right, Jolm doesn't know a thing about this place. All he saw on the map was what looked like a forest. He doesn't know the path and he's too proud to send a rider back to the Duke for aid.' He met Samine's wide hazel eyes. 'We're marching deeper into mystery with every step.'
'All the more reason to get the most out of these captives.'
'You think that will help? They'll say anything under torture. And besides, how can anything they say as they die in agony ever be substantiated? They'll use their last shreds of defiance to fill our heads with lies. That will be their final victory, before death claims their grateful souls.'
'You are a miserable one sometimes, Chalos.'
He pulled his cloak tight around him and crooked his neck to enable Mysa to nestle closer. He had never felt so distant from those around him. It was as if he had slipped and fallen into someone else's dream or travelled to a world that was little more than a sandpit for an alien god of utter indifference to play in, its cartoon realm populated by hollow props painted to look like people.
The word spread from rank to rank. A Sign! The Gilt Plates have left a sign! Lieutenant Jolm responded to the scout's report with excitement, plunging forward from the heart of the force, shouting for the men ahead to make way. The battalion had parted before him in an orderly ripple, evidence of how well trained the soldiers of the Black Talon were despite their monstrous appearance.
An hour later, the section of the line in which Chalos and Samine were riding passed under the sign. Twenty feet up the trunk of a tree, a Riln soldier had been bound cruciform, head, hands and feet missing and his own sword buried hilt-deep into his exposed gullet. As the Black Talon passed under the grisly totem, the Krune bellowed with delight. Chalos could only manage a groan. He was feeling sick again. Travelling over the flat floor of the Doyu Basin had been bad enough, but he was being tossed about all over the place by his shadamar as it negotiated the uneven terrain of the Woodland. He had to pull his eyes away from the corpse as a wave of nausea hit him. He managed to suppress the sickness with some effort.
'The Gilt Plates!' Samine said. Her expression was one of awe mixed with a little disgust, as if the horror of it thrilled her. 'They're as brutal as the rumours say. Look, Chalos. Look at how they leave a signpost!'
'Uh-hmm,' Chalos replied, unable at that moment to speak.
A little while later they passed the second marker, then the third. Chalos kept his eyes straight ahead, watching the column as it struggled to remain coherent, its serpentine flow split by trees and outcrops. Sometimes, they passed what seemed to be little hovels formed by twisted trees, or bizarre stone mounds that looked like crude skulls with flowers bursting from the eyes. The whole place seemed too strange to be real. But the stench of its fecundity, and the brightness of its foliage, assailed the senses like no dream ever could.
'I don't like this place,' said Mysa.
'Me neither,' Chalos muttered.
'I'm going up.'
'What? No!'
Too late. The bird left his shoulder and burst through the canopy, her course true as an arrow's. For a moment, a beam of clear, clean light cast down and Chalos had to shield his eyes. Then the huge green leaves flapped back into place and he was in the shade again. The accursed murk of the Dallian Woodland.
'Perhaps she's going to get some air,' Samine said, leaning close. 'Sixt is not himself, either.'
'Sixt?'
'Oh, sorry – my Accomplice.' She gestured to the iguana in the saddlebag. A lazy grey-blue head, with glassy eyes, was slumped through the open lip of the leather case. A tongue of bright red flickered out. 'I forgot to introduce you, didn't I?'
'Hello, Sixt,' said Chalos, giving the small thing a wave.
The eyes regarded him without blinking and the tongue flicked again. Then the eyes closed and the creature withdrew into the saddlebag.
'He's usually very talkative but I don't think the kingdom of the Riln agrees with him.'
'The magic is different here,' Chalos said. 'It's why the Riln only have illusionists whilst we have all manner of sorcery. I suppose this difference must affect the Accomplices, since their souls are anchored in the realm of magic.'
'You're smart, Chalos,' Samine said. 'Really smart.'
'Oh, um, thanks.'
She frowned at him, fascinated. His cheeks burned.
A loud squawk, frenzied and harsh to the ears, erupted above their heads. The fracas was extraordinary enough to send a few dozen shadamar reeling, shaking their manes and snorting beneath their bone-helms. Chalos looked up, squinting. Several brightly coloured birds were hurling themselves about, their short, hooked beaks snapping between shrieks.
Mysa!
He stared up, impotent, willing the crow to be all right. There was nothing he could do though. He couldn't even tell what was happening.
But unlike the healer, Samine was not stunned into paralysis. She cried to spur her shadamar and broke from the force, making a claw of her right hand. With another cry she thrust the hand upward. Coruscating violet light blazed, crackling up the trees. Whole branches exploded into flame. Three of the vicious parrots fell. A fourth, fifth and sixth followed, all charred beyond recognition by the time they hit the ground. Then Mysa spiralled down, somehow unharmed by the flames but clearly in distress. Samine cantered forward on her shadamar and caught the bird in her lap.
Chalos charged over in a panic.
'Oh, gods and bones! Mysa!'
Samine looked up from the bird in her lap, her face aghast.
As night began to fall the Black Talon found a bizarre fort-like structure seemingly shaped by trees that had grown to form four walls at right angles with an enormous, prodigiously thick tree sprouting from the north-east corner. They set up watch and threw their bedrolls out upon the earth.
It was warm under the canopy, warmer than it ever had been on the Doyu Basin. The earth, mossy and soft, seemed heated from beneath. Sleep was easy.
But not for Chalos.
He remained awake most of that night, nursing Mysa. She had not regained consciousness since returning from her impromptu scouting mission and with each day that passed her inky black feathers became less lustrous. Her claws were curled up in what looked disturbingly like rigor-mortis.
'Oh, Mysa,' Chalos whispered, stroking the bird's back. He longed for her to spring to wakefulness, peck at his hand and then admonish him for something or other, but she was barely drawing breath.
Every now and then Chalos would glance over at Samine who lay a few feet away with her back to him. He would watch her side rise and fall silently and his mind would wander.
Despair was claiming him, he knew. And one of its primary weapons was fantasy – fantasy that drew the unwary further from the real world and deeper into introspective solitude and eventual misery, a well from which there was no easy escape. The harsh truth was that he didn'
t care. Having no love of the real world, he could feel the final strands of his emotional and psychological attachments to it fraying and falling away, one by one, but could not mourn their loss.
Eventually he forced himself to fix his attention on the crow.
If Mysa was not a creature of magic I could heal her. But I know nothing of how her soul was bonded to her body, or how her life force flows, so my only hope would be to cram her with healing energy and hope that her innate magical processes did the job themselves... but I'm nowhere near powerful enough. Even a Flint Wizard would struggle to find that sort of energy. He sighed with resignation as the truth dawned on him. My only real power cannot help my only real friend.
Fate was mocking him.
He eventually fell into a fitful sleep. When he awoke, he ached from head to toe.
'Up you get, slinger!' a gruff voice said. He opened his eyes, scowling up at a crumpled purple face. The Krune soldier gripped his shoulder in an enormous hand and shook him vigorously. The healer's whole skeleton rattled.
'Alright,' he moaned, trying in vain to bat the hand away.
'The lieutenant wants you now!'
Half rising, half dragged up by the Krune's gauntleted fist, Chalos got to his feet. He scooped up Mysa's cool body and swaddled her in burlap, holding her to him like a newborn. Then he allowed the Krune to haul him away from the camp.
We're on foot, not shadamar, he noted. This meeting will be a brief aside, somewhere close.
He was right. Just ten minutes later they were negotiating a fallen tree that traversed a crooked river. Beneath, water trickled over shiny black stones. Bizarrely coloured flowers poked out in clumps on the left hand bank. A frog with sickly yellow eyes blinked and burped before diving in ungainly fashion into the water.
Jolm leaned against a tree up ahead, his back to the two approaching men. The soldier announced the slinger's presence, saluted to the lieutenant's back and then marched back towards camp. Chalos found himself wondering if he could find his way back without help, having not paid much attention to the route they had taken to the meeting. But he was too tired to panic. His pale hands held Mysa snug to his chest.
He heard a crunch. An apple was being chomped by powerful jaws, the core snapping. A moment later the chewed up pulp was swallowed with a satisfied gasp.
It was then that he saw the huge demon-faced helm sitting on a rock next to the Krune officer. It was the first time he had seen Jolm without it, although he could only see the back of the man's head. Chalos noticed that beneath its black braids the lieutenant's skull was misshapen as though it had once been split and reattached in ham-fisted haste. The hair grew strangely on that skull as if the man's scalp had two crowns, one wildly off-centre. The healer's eyes moved down along the lieutenant's broad and muscular form to the hips where the armoured legs seemed identical, both bowing out to the same side. Even the feet seemed fixed the same way and Chalos saw that the man wore two right boots. This detail, more than any other, illustrated how Jolm of the Twisted Root had earned his cruel monicker.
'Lieutenant,' he said. 'Good morning.'
'And to you,' said Jolm, a gauntleted hand casting the apple aside. Chalos watched it bounce, now but a fragment, into the foliage.
'That was edible?' Chalos enquired. He had heard that much of the fruit of the Dallian Woodland was poisonous or at the very least unpleasant.
'Most things are edible,' Jolm replied. 'If you have a strong stomach.'
Now Chalos noticed something else, a grotesque display high on the tree above Jolm.
Another marker.
The body was strapped even higher up the trunk. A Riln warrior hung there, arms and legs pulled brutally back, bound at the wrists and ankles. The corpse was again headless but unlike the others it was also split from throat to groin with dozens of flowers rammed into the bloody crevice. Chalos doubled over at once and vomited. When he was done wiping the strands of slime from his lips he lowered himself shakily to the ground.
'The Gilt Plates have marked our path well, don't you think?' Jolm said. 'Resourceful of them to use the fallen enemy in so practical a fashion, no?'
'Very resourceful,' Chalos said weakly.
'They travelled that way,' said Jolm, pointing north-eastward with his clawed finger. 'I have sent scouts ahead. We will break camp only when they return.'
'Sounds good.'
'Hm-hmm.'
Chalos felt Mysa spasm. He looked down. Her eye threatened to flutter open but then she slumped back into despondent stillness. He stroked her wing.
'What wounded her?' the lieutenant asked.
Chalos glanced back to Jolm. The Krune still had his back to the healer but the helm stared from its place on the rock, the eye grilles somehow seeming to see everything. Chalos found himself speaking to the helm.
'An arrow, I think,' he said. 'I'm not sure.'
'It was not in the wound?'
'No. I think Samine plucked it out.'
'You can't heal her, I take it?'
'No,' said Chalos glumly. 'I can't. I can only heal people and animals. Or at least, the people and animals whose anatomies I have studied. Krune, Rovann, Phaeron, Ektan, Sanul... shadamar, pavarine, curalk...' He sighed, listing the various creatures that flocked to the banner of the Ten Plains King or followed in the wake of its soldiers. 'Nobody can heal Accomplices, so far as I know. It takes too much power.'
He saw Jolm give a solemn nod.
'You are alone then.'
Chalos had not been prepared for the sudden sadness in the Krune's voice and it touched him.
'I suppose so,' he admitted. 'Although Samine – I mean, the Dread Spear – has been supportive.'
'It is good to have friends,' Jolm said. 'For some of us, forming such bonds is difficult, is it not? There are... obstacles.'
'Yes.'
With a grunt the mighty Krune warrior hefted the helm and slammed it over his head, without turning around. Chalos heard fixings clip into place. Then the lieutenant spun to stare down at him through the impassive demon's face.
'You are important to our mission, slinger. If there is anything you need, you must come to me immediately.'
'Thank you, lieutenant.'
'Let us walk back together,' Jolm said, striding past in his peculiar but effective gait. 'I must appraise you of certain details pertaining to the Gilt Plates for when we find them, many will certainly require your healing touch.'
Chalos followed him, finding that despite the deformity of the Krune's lower limbs Jolm possessed a sure-footedness that left the healer struggling to keep up, especially on the uneven ground.
'You really think we'll find the Gilt Plates?'
Jolm reached up to push a branch away. The ancient wood groaned and cracked under the gauntlet.
'Of course! They are a redoubtable band of killers known across the kingdom for their intractability. Whatever losses they took there will be something of them worth salvaging. We will rescue the company even if it means assimilating the survivors into this force.' He cocked his head. 'Although, marching alongside Dauwarks does not appeal to me. Whatever their attributes, a mix of peoples is no good for a unit of soldiers. Purity is coherence, and coherence is purity.'
Twice Chalos almost slipped on the mossy earth. Slick tubers, tangled vines, unstable logs, strange guano – all of it threatened to upend him. Yet even in his heavy clanking boots, both curved to the left at the toe, Jolm moved with something approaching grace.
'I had not known they were Dauwarks. I thought they were Rovann, like me.'
The Krune officer seemed amused by this and a low chuckle escaped him.
'Rovann? Blood-drenched Sickles of the Gladestorm, slinger! You Rovann are too small to be real soldiers. What are your kind at best, six foot? Six foot and a half? No, the Gilt Plates are Dauwarks alright. Big and wide, clad in armour your kind could not even lift let alone march under.' They passed under a dappled shaft of light. Shiny black insects the size of fists scurried amongst fuzzy o
range-stalked plants. 'You have not been trained in Dauwark anatomy?'
'Uh, not really.'
'Don't worry. They may not look it but they are like big Rovann. Everything is in the same place, more or less, and functions in the same way. They don't have their brains in their buttocks or their balls in their throats, for instance.' Again, he chuckled. 'The folk of the Ten Plains have more in common than you think, beneath the skin.'
Well, we're all willing to die in a strange land for a king we have never even met, Chalos thought. How's that for common ground?
'We soldiers know a lot about anatomy,' Jolm added. 'We carry out more autopsies than any of your scholars. We just do it quicker, and with bigger blades.'
'You also know a lot about the Gilt Plates,' Chalos asked, keen to maintain conversation. Although they were mere minutes from camp it still seemed as if they had slipped into some other, distant realm of the Dallian Woodland, and would never see another soul again. 'You have fought alongside them before?'
'Oh, ha!' the lieutenant roared. 'Fought, yes. Alongside, no!'
'You were enemies?' the healer gasped.
'When the King finally conquered Datha'Aish, it was the Gilt Plates that broke us,' he said without a shred of bitterness. 'They smashed into our lines like a huge glittering bull, leaving paths of blood and shattered bone. In awe, we surrendered to them. First, the callow Tarukaveri and then my people, the brave Tarukataru. The master of the Gilt Plates, Dolga, saw the worth in our warriors, and advised the King to offer us a place in his army. Now, the Black Talon and the Gilt Plates are the most renowned close-quarter fighters in all of the southern plains.'
Fascinated by the tale, Chalos realised why Jolm held Agryce, the other Krune lieutenant, in such contempt. She was Tarukaveri, the tribe that had surrendered to the King first. He wondered which tribe Duke Elas belonged to. He was about to ask when Jolm suddenly paused and turned, placing a huge gauntleted hand on the healer's shoulder. Frozen to the spot, Chalos stared wide-eyed into the dark glare of the demon helm. 'With any luck, Dolga still leads the Gilt Plates,' Jolm boomed. 'Then you shall see a hero!'
Healer's Ruin Page 5