by Dan Wells
He pulled away from his mother and knelt by the cellar door, helping his father pry up the covering boards. He heard a scream from somewhere outside—the first of many—a long, curdling scream of unbridled fear, and his mother cooed more loudly to Irina, holding her close, stroking her hair, their eyes shut tight against the world. Pyotr pulled up a board, Orsus another. There were three left. They heard another scream, and below it the deeper thud of hoofbeats in the road outside—no, not hooves, but something different and alien. An unfamiliar cadence that made Orsus’ skin crawl. He shivered and tore at the boards.
Another scream, closer.
The smell of smoke.
A guttural, inhuman roar.
“Done,” Pyotr grunted, tearing the last board from across the cellar door. He swung it open. Orsus recoiled at the scurrying sounds below. The door was like a black window into nothingness; Orsus could see the first few rungs of their old wooden ladder, and then all else was lost to the void. Pyotr took Irina, holding her close while Agnieska descended into the hole. “Stay on the ladder if you can,” he whispered. “The rats won’t climb it . . . I don’t think.”
More hoofbeats outside. The door shook against the jamb, but Orsus couldn’t tell if someone was pounding on it, or if it was simply the wind. Pyotr glanced at it wildly, then lifted Irina down into the hole. Her wailing grew louder, and Orsus heard an answering chitter from the rats below. Agnieska grabbed the girl, practically smothering her to keep her quiet, and though Orsus could barely see them in the dark he could hear his mother sobbing. He started to close the door, but his father caught it and shook his head.
“You too.”
“But I can fight.”
“You’re a boy.”
“But I’m big.” Though it was technically true, he felt small and babyish for saying it, as if he were bragging about being toilet trained instead of his unprecedented physical size. Even at ten years old he was bigger than half the young men in town. Just two days ago, he had wrestled Gendy Rabin to a standstill. “Gendy will be fighting,” he said.
“Gendyarev is sixteen years old.”
“And I’m almost as tall!”
Pyotr put a hand on Orsus’ shoulder. The screams were louder now, some human, some eerily, indefinably different. The human screams sounded painful, scared, or both. “Listen to me,” said Pyotr. “You’re my son, and I’m proud of you, and I’ve never doubted you, and when you’ve said you could do something I’ve let you try, every time. Sometimes you’re right, and sometimes you get hurt, but that’s how we learn.” He shook his head. “This isn’t something you can learn from—you either succeed or you die. I need you to live, and to take care of your mother and sister. Do you understand me?”
Orsus’ eyes were wide, and he felt his lip start to quiver. “Aren’t you coming with us?”
Pyotr breathed deeply, staring solemnly instead of answering. “I need you to watch over them,” he said at last. “Do you hear me? Do you understand?”
Orsus’ voice cracked. “Are you going to be okay?”
The door rattled again, harder, and Pyotr swore under his breath. “I love you,” he said softly, practically picking Orsus up as he pushed him back into the hole and down the dark ladder. “I love you.” He closed the door, and Orsus heard a dull scratching above as his father dragged something heavy across the floor to cover the door. Irina was still crying, their mother struggling to quiet her. Below them, the rats scuttled hungrily.
There was a crash in the room above, and Orsus heard his father roar a challenge. Other voices answered it, sharp and sibilant, and then there was more crashing, more screaming, more thuds and thunks and cracks and howls. Orsus cowered in the darkness, clinging to the ladder, feeling the dull reverberations as the impacts shuddered down through the wood in his hands. He imagined his father being hacked apart by the Tharn or torn to pieces by whatever monsters they had with them, and he knew he should be helping, but he was too scared—too scared even to move—and so he clung to the ladder and prayed they would leave and hated himself for thinking it. The world tumbled, his vision disappeared, and sound ceased to have meaning.
Then the sounds stopped.
Orsus listened, straining his ears to hear something, anything, from the room above him. He hadn’t gone deaf; he could hear his mother’s soft sobbing below him and the rats chittering beneath her. Above him, though, was nothing: no fighting, no screams, not even a footstep. He waited, holding his breath.
Had his father won? Then where was he? Had the fight moved on? If the Tharn had won, then where were they? He longed to ask his mother’s advice, but she was below him; she had heard less than he, and explaining the situation might alert any enemies to their presence. Besides, his father had left him in charge. If he was dead, then Orsus was the man of the house now. He could make this decision on his own. He had a responsibility to do so.
So he waited.
A soft sigh that might have been wind, or might have been a distant scream. He couldn’t gauge the volume or distance of anything through the thick wooden door. A long stretch of nothing. A creak that might have been upstairs, or might have been his own weight shifting on the ladder. Another stretch of nothing.
Nothing and nothing and nothing.
Thud.
It wasn’t loud, but it was there. Above him, not directly, but definitely in their cottage somewhere. A footstep, but Orsus couldn’t tell what kind.
Was it his father? But why would his father step so softly? Perhaps he had killed the first group of Tharn and was afraid of attracting more. Orsus wanted to ask him if it was safe to come out, but what if it wasn’t him? What if it was a Tharn, who’d killed his father and was searching the cottage for loot or food or slaves? He should stay quiet until the raider left . . . unless the raiders had already gone and this was a rescuer from the village—Gendyarev or his father, or one of the men from Aleksei’s logging crew. But a rescuer would be calling out for survivors. If it was someone from the village, and they were being this quiet, it was because they were hiding. Maybe the Tharn were hunting them—if Orsus let them in, it might save their life. Or it might expose them all, and his mother and sister would die. He didn’t know what to do.
Something scraped loudly across the floor.
Orsus looked up. His father had covered the cellar door with something, probably their thick wool rug and then perhaps a leg of their table, or his mother’s heavy wooden chest. Now someone was moving it away. His father? Or a Tharn raider looking for something good to steal?
Whoever it was hadn’t spoken. Orsus readied himself to lunge upward. His only useful weapon was surprise. The wool rug was moved away, and faint lines of orange light outlined the square shape of the door in the floor. Orsus blinked at the brightness and wondered how he could possibly fight the intruder blind. The door moved slightly, then flew open. Orsus screamed, but it was the only attack he made, half war cry, half terror. Light flooded in and blinded him, and with it the smell of smoke and fur and blood. He kept screaming, eyes closed, and when a pair of hands reached down to haul him out of the hole he flailed wildly, hitting someone’s arms and chest and legs without any apparent effect. The figure tossed him aside with the same strange, sibilant words he’d heard earlier, and Orsus felt his blood freeze: this was a Tharn. In his own home. He had to do something.
He expected to hear his mother scream, or Irina, but they stayed quiet. Orsus rolled when he hit the floor, coming up against a wall and struggling painfully to open his eyes. The room was bright, still orange, and, he realized too late, on fire. The cracks and snaps he’d heard were the wood walls of his home spitting and popping as the fire devoured them with long, orange tongues. He forced his eyes open farther and saw two bodies, one of them hairy and bestial, half man and half . . . something. Wolf, maybe, or ox, or a combination of both. The other body, smaller and sickly yellow in the flickering firelight, was his father. The two corpses lay in a pool of shared blood, their clothing shredded, their bodies too b
roken to be anything but dead. Orsus heard shuffles and stomps and more meaningless words. Finally, he got his eyes open far enough to see the Tharn that had pulled him from the cellar. Just one, tall and snarling with a mane of fur around his mostly human face. The creature pulled a burning brand from the wall and dropped it into the cellar, peering after it to see what treasures it revealed. Orsus couldn’t understand the words, but the look of disgust on the raider’s face was obvious. The thing turned away from the hole and began rifling through the other objects in the home, searching for something to steal from the humble cottage to make its raid worthwhile.
Orsus scrambled to the edge of the cellar and looked down. The rats were scattering to the corners, away from the light, and his mother was still sitting on the ladder, still clutching Irina’s limp body, still rocking back and forth and sobbing and sobbing, her hand clamped tight over the little girl’s mouth.
“Mama?” asked Orsus. She didn’t answer. Irina didn’t move, and he wondered if she could even breathe.
The Tharn spoke again, loudly, and Orsus looked up to see the monster bending over him with an unmistakably angry look on his face. It shouted a string of impatient nonsense words and finally peeled back its lips in a grotesque imitation of human speech.
“Eat,” it said. “We eat. Where?”
Orsus felt his fear turning to anger—that this thing would come here, to the poorest cottage in the village, and kill his father for the food they didn’t have. Was his sister dead too? What had happened to his mother? The thing continued its stuttered demands, and Orsus knew that he should attack it, that he should try in some way to defend his home, his family, that he should try to avenge his father, but he couldn’t do it. He crawled backward on the floor, trying simply to get as far from the towering monster as he could, hoping he could hide or escape or disappear.
Another Tharn shouted through the open door, something harsh and urgent. The raider in Orsus’ home looked up, called back just as harshly, and snarled. It hasn’t found what it wanted, Orsus thought, and now it’s time to leave. Orsus had just enough time to think, It’s okay, we’ve made it; it’s going to leave now when suddenly the Tharn drew a jagged bone dagger from its belt, walked to him impassively, and stabbed him in the stomach. No familiar emotion registered on the thing’s face; it simply bent down, plunged the knife into his gut, and walked away. Orsus cried out, weeping uncontrollably, feeling his life seep away in hot, liquid spurts all over his hands.
This is the end, he thought. We’re all dead. We have nothing left. He curled up in a fetal ball, lying on the floor, watching as the Tharn walked back toward the door and out into the snow—
—except it didn’t walk out the door at all, and Orsus remembered the darkest rumor he’d heard about the Tharn: if they couldn’t steal human food, they would just as happily eat the humans. Orsus watched in dawning horror as the hungry monster stood over the open cellar door, pulled another dagger from its belt, and hurled it down into the hole. Orsus’ mother shrieked, her body fell loudly to the floor, and the chittering of the rats rose up like raucous laughter.
Orsus felt his jaw quiver. His pain turned to anger, to rage and then unbridled fury. To kill him was one thing, but his mother? An innocent girl at the bottom of a pit? He pulled the dagger from his stomach with a grunt. The Tharn knelt down, unslinging an empty leather bag from its back, and unwrapping two thin carving knives. Orsus gritted his teeth and rose to his knees. The Tharn hauled Agnieska’s body up from the cellar, to save his meal from the rats, and threw it down by the bag. Orsus grabbed the edge of the table and pulled himself to his feet, inch by agonizing inch. Blood poured from the wound in his stomach, squishing in his boots and leaving dark-red footprints as he staggered across the floor. At the last second, perhaps alerted by the noise, the Tharn turned around. Orsus saw the shock in its eyes as the victim it thought was dying raised its own dagger against it, plunging the weapon toward its foul heart. The creature caught his wrist, but its grip was already weakening, and Orsus’ fury made him feel stronger every second. He wrenched the dagger free and slashed it across the creature’s throat, slitting it from ear to ear. It fell to a heap on the floor, hot blood spilling out to mingle with that of his parents.
Orsus heard a voice and looked up to see another Tharn in the doorway, staring at him in what Orsus’ slowly fading mind could only interpret as surprise. Behind the creature he could see others, laden with sacks from their pillage, arrayed around a tall, monstrous chieftain. Other cottages were burning, too. The beasts growled gutturally to each other and glanced anxiously up the road.
“He killed three,” Orsus choked out, one hand brandishing the stolen dagger and the other clenched tightly against the hole in his gut. “I will have two more of you to pay his debt.”
The Tharn raised its axe, but the chieftain stopped him with a sudden bark. The Tharn snarled at Orsus, then turned and dashed out after his fellows as they raced for the trees. In a heartbeat they were gone, like shadows in the darkness.
Orsus collapsed to his knees, alone in the burning ruin, watching the empty doorway numbly. He wanted to lie down, to forget everything and die. He clutched his still-bleeding wound with one hand, his mother’s hand with the other, and the world grew dim and silent. It was cold, he knew, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything. He never wanted to feel anything ever again.
The last thing he saw was the men from the village, armed with axes and rifles, trying to pull him from the burning wreckage. In his madness he stabbed one with the Tharn’s bone dagger as they dragged him from his mother’s side.
Aleksei Badian surveyed the village fair with a disinterested eye. “Nothing here but trash,” he said with a sigh. “If people actually wanted these worthless knickknacks they’d sell them more than once a year at the harvest festival.”
“Probably good food, though,” said Orsus. He sniffed. “I can smell roast meat, and at least one of those stalls has hot pie.”
Aleksei flipped him a coin, and Orsus caught it deftly. He was only fifteen, but he was the biggest man on Aleksei’s crew, and one of his most trusted agents. “Get me a pie then. Lamb if they have it. Come back with apple and I’ll cut your hands off.”
Orsus looked at the coin, far too much for a single pie. “What do you want, ten?”
“I want happy employees,” Aleksei said with a smile. “Bring me a pie, and then . . . whatever.” He leered. “Buy yourself something pretty.”
Orsus shrugged and walked into the crowd. Aleksei was rarely this free with his money, but they’d had a profitable run last night and he was in a good mood. Someone had tried to ship goods through the valley without paying the kayazy tolls, and Aleksei’s bratya had given their sleeping caravan an unmistakable message that this was not to happen again. Orsus had especially impressed him by overturning an entire wagon, all by himself, spilling out the cargo and breaking the wheels and axles against the rocks on the side of the road. They’d even taken a few trophies—just coins and a few raw materials, nothing traceable—and so Aleksei was in a mood to reward them. Orsus bought his boss a lamb pie, fresh from a squat black oven and piping hot, and jingled the ample change in his fist, wondering how to spend it.
He thought about a pie of his own or a fat brown cake full of raisins and nuts, but Orsus had been an orphan for five years, scrimping and saving for every penny; he was too careful with his money to waste it on such a luxury. A skewer of meat would be more useful, but still not the most economical. He wandered the fair, shoving his way through the crowd, looking through the stalls for new blankets or dishes or something he really needed, and then he saw her.
The center of the fair was an open square with a wide wooden floor, perfect for the stomping dances favored by the mountain villages. That floor was full now of whirling, stomping couples and a trio of musicians with their instruments: a violin, an accordion, and a tambourine. They were playing the kareyshka, and a crowd gathered to watch. Near the edge of them, clapping her ha
nds and laughing, was the most beautiful girl Orsus had ever seen. Her hair was brown and red and gold in the sunlight, like a forest in autumn, and her eyes lit up with a brightness and joy that made him long to see them closer. He stared, captivated, and in a sudden fit of madness he walked to a flower stall and slapped down his money, pointing to a crown of chamomile.
“That crown, and quickly.”
“I just bought that,” said another young man, tapping the coin he’d placed on the table—slightly underneath, Orsus noticed, his own coin. Orsus slid it out, so that his own money clinked down onto the wooden table, and handed the coin back to the man.
“I think you’re mistaken.”
The young man raised an eyebrow, his lips curling into an angry sneer. “You think just because you’re so big you can barge in here and get whatever you want?”
“Yes, I do.”
The man faltered, staring at Orsus’ thick lumberjack muscles, but seemed to swallow his fear. He placed his money back on the florist’s table.
Orsus felt the rage growing inside him, just as it had that night in the raid, just as it always did when anybody threatened something that was his. He wanted to shove the man down; he wanted to crush his hands and snap his arms and stomp on his chest until his ribs cracked to splinters and his guts oozed like jelly. The world turned red. He heard the warning growl of some massive mountain wolf, and the arrogant young rival muttered something about daisies and scuttled off into the crowd, pale-faced and sweating. Orsus almost chased him—his foot was already rising from the ground—but he stopped. The enemy was gone.
What was I thinking? he wondered, feeling the wrath drain away. What would she have said if I’d started a fight right here? My mother hated it when I fought. Maybe this girl is the same?