Unbroken Chain: The Darker Road

by Jaleigh Johnson

  “Bashed their brains against the bars,” Tuva said. “We found a pair of shadow hounds, male and female, dead in their cages. You can’t imagine the mess.”

  “I can,” said a voice from the sickroom doorway.

  Ashok turned and saw Olra, the head of the Camborrs. She and her subordinates trained and cared for the beasts the caravan crews brought back from the Shadowfell. They’d dealt with all manner of strange and deadly monsters. Camborrs served an important role preparing the beasts for sale or use in defense of Ikemmu. In addition to his duties as a Guardian, Ashok had been training with the Camborrs under Olra’s supervision.

  Olra’s scarred face looked more grim than usual. She’d obviously heard what had happened. “What did Risic do when the beasts went mad?” she asked.

  Vlahna answered her. “Risic thought the storm caused it—maybe the beasts were terrified at being helpless in cages. He told us to let them loose, that we’d round them up later once the storm passed. If we didn’t, he said they’d likely kill themselves, and we’d end up back from a tenday caravan run with nothing to show for it.”

  Olra shook her head. “The fool,” she murmured.

  Tuva grunted. “The big she-panther managed to break out by herself. She was stronger than she looked. Once the others were loose, they ran out of the storm, circled back around, and came after us.”

  “The she-panther killed Risic,” Vlahna said. “He never saw his death coming.”

  Olra nodded. She glanced at Ashok. “Only a mad beast or a starved one would have run back into that storm to hunt.”

  “Maybe they were already tainted in some way,” Cree suggested. “Did Risic or anyone else notice anything strange when you captured them?”

  Both Tuva and Vlahna shook their heads. “Everything was fine until the storm,” Tuva said.

  “Then we have to accept that as the reason, or at least the trigger,” Ashok said. He exchanged a glance with Olra, who shrugged. He could tell she had her doubts, but she had no better explanation to offer.

  “Thank you,” he said to Vlahna and Tuva.

  Ashok left the tower with the brothers. Olra followed them down. They didn’t speak until they were outside.

  “For the time being, I’m giving you Risic’s duties,” Olra told Ashok. “Think you can handle yourself?”

  Ashok nodded. “I can do it,” he said, “as long as these two can watch the wall themselves for a few days?”

  Skagi put a hand to his mouth in mock alarm. “You hear that, Brother? Ashok’s leaving us. What’ll we do? First it’s guard duty alone—what’s next? Sleeping alone? Bathing alone? How will we undo our breeches and piss without him?”

  Cree nodded gravely. “I’ll aid you, Brother.”

  Ashok stiffened, but then he saw the brothers’ easy grins, and he relaxed. They taunted him in jest.

  “Tomorrow at the Monril bell, Ashok,” Olra said, ignoring the brothers. She left them to head in the direction of the beast training grounds and forges.

  When she was out of earshot, Cree sobered and said, “There’s truth in those jests. With Risic’s duties and your own, you’ll be a Camborr in truth before long.”

  “When that happens, you’ll need a new one of these,” Skagi said, lifting Ashok’s arm to expose the tattoo of leaping flames that extended from his forearm to his wrist. He’d gotten it for training the nightmare—and because he’d survived the maddening dreams the beast inflicted on its victims.

  “I think it should be claws this time,” Cree said. “You took down the she-panther, after all.”

  “He still hasn’t told the tale of how he did it,” Skagi muttered. “At least you can give us the bloody details, every rip and slash.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry,” Ashok said. “Truly.”

  Cree nodded. Skagi clapped him on the shoulder. “Fine then, speak,” the big man said. “I’m not going to stand out here all day.”

  “Guardians!”

  The shout came from the training grounds. Ashok turned and saw Olra vault the paddock fence and take off at a dead sprint toward the nearby blacksmith forges. He and the brothers raced to catch up with her.

  The forge huts spewed black smoke at the cavern ceiling. Thick clouds of it hung in the air like choking shadows. When they got near the closest hut, Ashok heard shouts and the clang of metal coming from within. At first, he attributed it to the normal sounds of forge work, but then Olra ran around the side of the building.

  “Escaped from the pens,” she said, breathless. “Two shadow snakes. They came this way. We have to warn the forge masters.”

  Cree and Skagi split off and ran to two of the other forges. Ashok yanked his chain off his belt and kicked in the door of the closest hut. A wall of heat struck him in the face. Olra darted in the room ahead of him, a barbed whip in her hand.

  The air reeked of iron and smoke and made Ashok’s eyes water. To his right the forge fire blazed, and on his left were workbenches and tables. Some held swages and hammers, while others gleamed with finished swords, axes, and polearms.

  The blacksmiths had already found one of the snakes. A shadar-kai man crouched near the weapon tables, and a woman stood silhouetted against the forge fire, her sweat-stained hair stuck to her face, fending off a two-headed black shape with a set of iron tongs.

  The snake’s two heads struck and darted at the woman. Its thick, black-scaled body wove in and out of the shadows, movements too fast for even Ashok’s keen vision to follow. Ashok came forward and swung his chain in tight, deadly circles around his body. The links caught the forge light and drew the snake’s attention away from the woman. Tongues flicking, it slithered toward Ashok.

  “That’s right,” Ashok said, his voice rough with the effort of holding himself back. “Come to me.” He wanted to send his spinning chain across the small space and cut the snake in two, but he held on to the impulse, letting it strengthen him. Vaguely, he was aware of Olra moving stealthily along the back wall of the hut toward the forge. The only sound he heard was that of his spikes slicing the air. He fell into a hypnotic rhythm, the chain spinning, spinning. He wouldn’t strike until the snake was well away from the woman.

  Then he saw, to his left, the other blacksmith grab a dagger off the weapons table.

  “Don’t!” Ashok shouted, but he was too late. The blacksmith hurled the weapon at the left head. Spinning in the forge light, the dagger missed and struck off the far wall, shattering the hypnotic spell Ashok had been weaving with his weapon.

  In a fluid movement, the snake darted around and sank its fangs into the muscle of the woman’s arm. She uttered a strangled scream and shook her arm convulsively back and forth to try to tear the snake loose, but her movements only made the wound worse.

  “Get the left head!” Olra shouted. She didn’t wait for Ashok to acknowledge the command but charged forward to get the attention of the right head. Her whip struck repeatedly at the snake’s skin, tearing away chunks of flesh.

  The right head obligingly came around and struck out at Olra’s thigh. The Camborr knocked over a wood bench and deftly slid it between her and the snake. The right head hit the wood, tongue flicking between the slats, then just as quickly retreated. Olra kicked out against the bench and pushed the snake back before coming in overhand with her whip. This time the barbed strands barely missed an eye.

  Ashok pulled his chain in and came up over a weapons bench toward the left head. The other blacksmith had picked up a second dagger off the table and prepared to hurl it. Ashok snatched it out of his hand as he ran past across the table.

  “Get outside,” he told the man and threw the dagger.

  The blade sank to the hilt in the snake’s flesh. Hissing, the snake released the woman’s arm. Dazed and poisoned by the snake’s fangs, the woman staggered back and slid to a sitting position against the wall.

  Ashok brought his chain up. He didn’t want the snake to have time to decide to go after the blacksmith again. He struck the thick meat where the tw
o heads became one, then whipped the chain back for another strike. Between his chain and Olra’s whip, they harried the beast so hard that it couldn’t decide which threat to defend against first. The heads jerked, twitched, and even snapped at each other in their frenzy.

  Yet every time Ashok shifted position in an attempt to corral the snake and move it away from the injured blacksmith, the beast struck out viciously and forced Ashok to defend himself.

  “The thing’s mad,” Olra said. She danced aside as the thick tail whipped at her flank. “Trying to kill itself.”

  “Just like the panthers,” Ashok said. They would never be able to contain the snake. “We’ll have to kill it.”

  “Finish it, then,” Olra said. Her scarred face soaked in sweat, mouth set in a grim line, she moved in for the kill.

  It wasn’t the first time they’d had to put a beast down, but something about Olra’s manner was different. Aside from Uwan, she was the most restrained shadar-kai Ashok had ever known, but instead of her usual measured efficiency, she moved forward eagerly and attacked the snake with obvious pleasure.

  The Camborr struck the snake again with her whip, and Ashok struck it with his chain, but this time the barbs were slow to come free, and Ashok’s chain didn’t distract the left head. It turned from him and surged at Olra over the top of the right head. Olra didn’t see it coming.

  “Watch out!” Ashok screamed. He dropped his chain and dived onto the snake, but its reach was too great. The left head struck before Olra could get her whip up as a screen. It sank its fangs into Olra’s neck and drove the Camborr back against the forge hearth. She dropped the whip and flung her left hand back into the burning coals.

  Olra screamed, but the snake choked off the sound, biting and pumping venom into her blood as fast as it could in quivering, jerking motions. At the same time, the reek of burned flesh filled Ashok’s nostrils. Olra’s arm spasmed. She couldn’t pull it out of the fire.

  Ashok snarled in fury and wrestled with the snake, dragging it back several feet by sheer desperation. Abruptly he saw the dagger still sticking out of its flesh. He let go with one hand and pulled the weapon out. He stabbed down, repeatedly driving the weapon to the hilt. Finally, he hit something vital. The snake’s heads reared up in unison and fell away from the forge.

  Released from the snake’s fangs, Olra pushed off the forge with her back and fell forward onto her stomach. She pulled her burned hand in close to her chest and lay still, panting.

  The snake’s heads made one last feeble attempt to strike at Ashok, but he wrenched the knife out and stabbed again to widen the wound. The heads dropped, the left on top of the right, across one of the workbenches.

  Ashok rolled away from the corpse. The heat and smoke made him light-headed. He put a hand against the floor to lever himself up and felt his fingers slip in warm wetness—Olra’s blood.

  “Ashok, are you in there?” Skagi’s panicked voice called from outside.

  “We’re alive,” Ashok called to him. “Olra needs healing!”

  He didn’t know if Skagi heard him. He crawled to where Olra lay. She tried to roll over onto her back but was too weak. Ashok took her shoulders and gently turned her.

  The snake had savaged her neck. It hadn’t merely poisoned her but had tried to eat her alive in its frenzy.

  “Quick strikes, shallow wounds,” Olra said. Her jaw muscles were rigid, making it hard for Ashok to understand her. “Doesn’t fit … their nature. Should have been trying to … hide from us.”

  “Don’t try to talk,” Ashok said. “Lie still here while I go to Makthar and get a healer. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  He started to rise, but Olra grabbed his arm. “Poison is the same,” she said.

  “I know, that’s why I have to hurry—”

  She ignored him. “Shouldn’t have … pumped all of it … into me, but it did. Nothing left to milk … for the merchants.”

  Her words penetrated at the same time Ashok saw the milky venom overflowing from her wound. There was almost as much venom as blood.

  “No,” he said softly, then louder, “No! Tell me what to do. How do I stop it?”

  Glassy-eyed, she pushed his hand away when he touched her wound. “You know enough … to know when there’s no more to be done. When you’re ready, you should lead the Camborrs … You have the skill … My wishes … my orders, tell Uwan. My life for the Watching Blade.”

  She relaxed. Contentment spread over her features, and she closed her eyes.

  “Ashok!” Skagi burst into the room. Blood and sweat streamed from his upper body, turning his spike tattoos a glistening red. “You’re needed.”

  “I told you to get a healer,” Ashok snarled. “Where were you?”

  “I’ve been with—” Skagi came around the workbench and saw Olra. “Tempus have mercy—”

  “Godsdamned oaths won’t help us!” Ashok cried.

  He expected Skagi to be angry at his blasphemy, but then he noticed the warrior’s pallor and the strain in his muscles where he gripped his falchion hilt.

  Cree wasn’t with him.

  “Skagi,” Ashok said, in a dead monotone, “what happened?”

  “Cree. You’d better come,” Skagi said.

  Ashok started to get up, but he stopped when he noticed the shallow rise and fall of Olra’s chest. “She’s not dead yet,” he said. “We can’t leave her to die alone.”

  “I’ll stay with her,” said a faint voice near the hearth.

  The injured blacksmith was trying to stand. She clutched the bite wound in her arm, but the fang marks were not as savage as those inflicted on Olra, and no venom dripped from her wound. Ashok and Skagi went to help her. Together they sat her down next to Olra’s still form. She cradled the Camborr’s head in her lap and nodded to the two men.

  “Go,” she said calmly. “We’re fine.”

  “The clerics are chanting over him,” was all Skagi said as he led Ashok to the hut at the edge of the training grounds. Inside, two healers, including the one Ashok had seen tending to Tuva, kneeled on either side of Cree, obscuring him from view.

  Ashok didn’t speak. As he stood watching the clerics work, he could not hold a thought in his head that didn’t involve killing. A red rage settled over his mind, a haze he did not attempt to quell. The last time he’d felt this way was when he’d confronted and killed Reltnar, a shadar-kai of his own enclave who had tortured Ilvani. Back then the rage had made him cold, methodical, able to deal with each threat as it came. Now he was helpless, as impotent as he had been kneeling at Olra’s side.

  Finally, one of the clerics stood up and walked stiffly over to them. “By Tempus’s will, he lives,” the cleric said. He directed the words at Skagi. The big man nodded, betraying no emotion beyond the oath to Tempus he uttered under his breath.

  The other cleric left to fetch litters to carry away the dead and wounded, and for the first time Ashok could take in the details of the hut. The room was similar to the other forge, with as much disarray and as many signs of fighting. Ashok looked for the body of the second snake, but it was not in the hut.

  Skagi saw him looking and explained. “Cree blocked its escape.” He pointed to a gap between the ceiling and wall stones that admitted patchy light from the torches outside. “This one was smaller than the other, but it still laid into him like a demon. I thought it would take his head off.” He swallowed. “Once he went down, the thing got out, but we’d hurt it enough, it flopped around, didn’t know which way to go. More Guardians came and finished it off.”

  Ashok wasn’t really listening. He kneeled in the cleric’s place beside the unconscious Cree. They’d cleaned the blood off his face, and Ashok saw that the fang marks spread diagonally across Cree’s face. One had punctured his cheek, the other his eyebrow. Between them, Cree’s left eye was missing, torn from its socket.

  “They couldn’t save it,” Skagi said, and for the first time Ashok heard a catch in his voice. Still Ashok said nothing, and eventu
ally he heard Skagi’s footsteps as the warrior left the hut.

  Alone, Ashok continued to stare down at Cree. The hot rage finally passed, and he thought he felt nothing, not relief or sadness. He simply stared at the place where Cree’s left eye had been and tried to conjure an emotion.

  This is what you’ve wrought, he told himself. Two battles—you may as well have fought in neither of them. Why had he sent the other blacksmith outside? To protect him? He could have helped them, provided another distraction at least. If Ashok had fought with a sword instead of a chain, he could have lopped the thing’s heads off one by one. There’d been a table full of weapons, and he hadn’t thought to grab anything but a paltry dagger.

  Ashok’s thoughts continued to ramble. He searched for a reason, he had to find an explanation for how it all went wrong. Why had he tried to grab the snake with his bare hands? Was there something wrong with his chain that had made him discard it? He reached for the weapon to see, but it wasn’t there. He realized he’d left it in the hut with Olra.

  Olra would be dead by now—Olra, who had been his teacher. She was dead, and he had no weapon. No matter. His chain hadn’t been able to aid either her or Cree. If only he’d fought with a sword. He’d killed the she-panther, but he may as well have let it devour him. He waited for Cree to wake and tell him that, that he wished the panther had killed Ashok.

  “Wake up,” he said, and then, savagely, “Wake up and say it.”

  He waited, staring at that empty socket, but Cree slept on, unheeding.

  When the clerics returned, Ashok left the hut and went to find Skagi. He found the big man and a pair of Guardians examining the body of the second snake, which was lying a short distance from the hut. It was smaller than the other serpent and had only one head.

  Ashok’s Camborr training took over, supplanting his grief for the moment. He reached down and turned the snake’s open mouth toward him to examine its fangs. “Almost no venom in this one,” he said. “It wasn’t nearly as worked up as the other.”