Bloodraven

by Nunn, PL

  He felt skin slick with blood. Throwing out his senses in panicked desperation, he felt the slow, shuddering beats of a heart failing, of mortal wounds that pierced kidneys and heart.

  He heard an ogre voice growling something. Heard words filled with seething hate and he knew who it was, even without seeing. Deathclaw, striking the only way he could now at Bloodraven—from behind in the dead of night.

  Yhalen was sobbing, clutching to Bloodraven’s shoulder and rocking as he cried. He could feel death creeping up, fast and inevitable. Deathclaw’s hand shot out and slammed against Yhalen’s chest, knocking him backwards before the withered ogre began to crawl over Bloodraven’s body to crush him.

  One huge knee in his gut pressed the air out of Yhalen as a hand covered his face, pressing it back against the rock floor. Smothering him even as his skull was slowly crushed. As Bloodraven died beside him.

  No. He wouldn’t allow it. He couldn’t. As desperate as he was to save his own life, saving Bloodraven’s seemed a greater urgency. He summoned that subtle, inconsistent power within him and grasped hold of the wavering aura of Deathclaw’s vitality. Saw it as a dimly glowing, splotched thing.

  He snared it like a man gathering the web of a spider around his hand, letting the strands cling to his hand as he wound them around and around his fingers, destroying the structure as he withdrew.

  Deathclaw gasped, a dry, choking sound, and the weight of his body on Yhalen lessened, the strength of his grip on Yhalen’s head letting up suddenly as his arms trembled. Yhalen shoved up at him, and he toppled with a wisp of dry skin. Yhalen rolled, digging both hands into Bloodraven’s arm, willing that stolen vitality into his failing body. He plunged into the depths of his flesh, instinctively finding the worst of the damage, and willing wounds to close. Willing torn flesh whole again. There wasn’t enough stolen life-force from Deathclaw, who had already been depleted, to finish so grave a healing. Unflinchingly, Yhalen gave of himself, letting his vitality flow into Bloodraven like water dribbling through his hands. He was barely able to concentrate as it left him upon the vital task of directing the flow.

  He collapsed atop Bloodraven, head spinning, vision dark around the edges, body heavy and leaden. A sudden flare of light blinded him and the deafening cries of ogre voices echoed in his head.

  He saw in the flare of torchlight, the hide ripped off the mouth of the den and a collection of wide-eyed, snarling ogre faces glaring in. Saw the withered collection of flesh and bone he had made of Deathclaw, the body seeming like a corpse dug up, dried and shrunken from its grave, only identifiable by the tattoos and the multitude of gold rings in his ears. Bloodraven still and bloody, and himself, hands and arms smeared with red.

  They stared, seeing what he saw, and horrified at the implications. Then the natural ogre impulse to destroy what one feared set in and the first one crowded in, crouching low to enter the small den.

  Grabbing him by the hair, the ogre flung him against the wall, next to the husk he’d made of Deathclaw.

  He hit headfirst this time and slid down, choking on the blackness that rushed into the void the air made as it left his lungs. He vaguely felt the wrench as he was grabbed up by the arm they’d injured this morning, felt muscle scream and bone grate, and with his last drowning thought, bemoaned the fact that he didn’t know whether he’d saved Bloodraven or not and never would.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Consciousness was a shock, Yhalen not having expected to ever regain it. The fact that it came hand in hand with pain was not such a surprise. He emerged in darkness, though there seemed a hazy glow of orange flickering in the corner of his vision. His eyes refused to focus enough to pinpoint the source.

  His shoulder ached, though his body was too leaden to move and attempt to relieve it. He was cold.

  Cold and naked as he lay on frigid stone in a dark room. It took him a while to realize his hands were bound behind him, as were his feet and knees. He was gagged against a wad of cloth stuffed in his mouth with a rope holding it in so tightly, it cut into the sides of his mouth.

  His mind moved in sluggish circles, falling back into the pool of unconsciousness before drifting back up to focus on the pain and the cold, flittering across a distant fear that as a whole was swallowed up by the utter weakness that stole independent thought and action. He’d done it to himself, he mused, in one of the periods where clearer thought prevailed. He’d stripped himself of strength and life-force and vitality in a vain effort to—what?

  Blood stirred in his memory. Blood on his hands, blood pooling out of wounds that he struggled to close. Not his wounds.

  Bloodraven. Bloodraven. Bloodraven….

  Yhalen sobbed, the first sound he’d made since his awakening, and pressed his cheek against the stone in grief. It hadn’t been enough. He didn’t think it had been enough, not all of his strength, not all of the life-force he’d ripped from Deathclaw. Goddess—no, not Goddess. Never would he call to her again, tainted beyond redemption. And she’d allowed it, had withdrawn her protection of him long ago. It left him with no one to cry out to in his grief but himself, nothing to do but lie there and shudder while he wondered dismally when his heart had been so thoroughly lost to an enemy. So he cried in silence until he heard the sound of footsteps approaching.

  The light grew, bobbing as someone carried a torch around the bend of a tunnel. He caught a momentary glimpse of the tiny chamber he was in, low-ceilinged and barely longer than his body, before two human men entered, The same pale, blonde slaves who had restrained him while the old ogre shaman had practiced his ritualistic magic on Yhalen’s body. Another human followed, holding a torch in trembling hands, and Yhalen saw that it was Vorjd. He was bloody and bruised, his chest striped with the deep cuts of a cruel whipping. The shaman’s slaves grasped Yhalen’s upper arms and hauled him up, dragging him between them into a larger, torch-lit chamber. Wooden shelves lined the walls and held countless painted clay jars. Straw was scattered on the floor and the ceiling and walls were covered in rune signs. The old shaman sat on a fur pallet, rocking back and forth and chanting.

  They dropped Yhalen to the floor at his feet. The chanting went on for a few minutes more, the old ogre’s eyes rolling up in his head. The chamber was full of strong incense that burned Yhalen’s eyes and made his head spin. He lay there, concentrating on breathing when his body felt so heavy that it was a struggle to draw breath.

  The chanting stopped abruptly. After a moment of silence, the shaman spoke and Yhalen heard Vorjd’s trembling voice translate.

  “The spirits and your own actions have condemned you as a practitioner of dark magic.”

  Vorjd paused, waiting while the old shaman spoke again.

  “The honor of this clan has been sullied, and you will be killed in the manner of a witch who cursed this clan.”

  Yhalen moaned into his gag, wanting to ask Vorjd if Bloodraven had survived. He cast his eyes up to the bearded slave, pleading for an answer to the unvoiced question. None came. Vorjd shakily set his torch into a bracket on the wall and backed out of the chamber. Yhalen heard the slap of his feet as he fled.

  The shaman made a motion and his slaves dragged Yhalen to his knees before the old ogre, wrenching the cord loose that held his gag and removing it from his dry mouth.

  The shaman forced his mouth open and popped in several pellets of the sort he had used earlier to muddle Yhalen’s mind. There was little enough need to do it, Yhalen having already depleted his own strength. Now his head grew fuzzy and he found it hard to concentrate on anything but the direct touches to his body. Those he felt with excruciating focus. The fingers biting into his arms, the hard stone under his knees, the rough rasp of barbed cord cutting into his flesh.

  The slaves let him go, shoving him hard onto his back. The shaman reached down and grasped his bound ankles, dragging him closer to pin Yhalen’s feet between huge knees. He began chanting, low and rhythmic in his rumbling voice, and painted two swift symbols upon the soles of Yhalen�
�s feet. He then took a knife and dipped the edge into a bowl of the same dark liquid before slicing it slow and deep across the instep of each foot.

  Yhalen screamed, his body jerking, legs unable to find freedom from the steely clasp of the ogre’s knees. The cut itself was a torture, but the burning of whatever poison coated the blade made it tenfold. Like his palms with their still embedded thorns, his feet began to swell and throb in agony. The blade dipped again and sliced across his heels, biting to the bone. Yhalen screamed again, voice cracking, world narrowed down to the focus of pain.

  One of the slaves put a noose around his neck, then jerked it tight and dragged him back across the floor by it as the shaman loosed his hold on Yhalen’s legs. The other slave sat on his thighs and held his writhing body while his fellow fastened the end of the noose to a crude ring set in the floor. They drew knives then, and he cried out in fear of what they would do, but they only cut the bonds on his knees and ankles. Each of them quickly grabbed a leg, and looped a rope around each ankle, their hands sliding a little in the blood. They spread his legs, stretching his body to reach two more widely spaced rings and causing the noose on his neck to tighten, choking off all but a trickle of air.

  He lay there gasping and shuddering in pain as he struggled to breathe, his wide eyes fixed on the old shaman who hefted his bulk off his pallet and moved to sit cross-legged next to Yhalen’s body. The slaves hurried to gather his ritual items, sitting them reverently within his easy reach as he chanted and made meaningless motions in the air over Yhalen’s head.

  Yhalen faded out, sucked into the throbbing center of pain at his feet. He came back as the ogre clutched his face, thumbs biting into his cheeks as he forced Yhalen’s mouth open. He stuffed something in, a ball of bitter tasting twine and bramble woven with thorns that ripped past his lips, tearing into the inside of his mouth and tongue as the old ogre pushed it by his teeth. When his jaw was forced closed, the sharp edges of thorns dug into the roof of his mouth.

  Yhalen’s screams were muffled, blood-garbled things in his throat. The inside of his mouth was shredded and bleeding from the thorny ball and his throat worked constantly, swallowing the blood.

  All the while the old shaman chanted, a low rumbling singsong of the same incomprehensible words over and over and over.

  Consumed by pain, Yhalen searched for the power to destroy them, to wither them into husks as he had Deathclaw—anything to stop the pain. But he couldn’t find his focus. The outside world, the world beyond the physical hurt, was blurred and distant and without control. Without purpose and concentration, he had no power over it.

  The chanting became more distant, like something heard through a rush of falling water. He felt light touches on his chest. The swirling of patterns painted with the brush of a feather, soft and teasing before something sharp and hard thrust into his navel. A thorn, digging into the little recessed nub and tearing past skin to embed itself into the flesh and muscle beneath. It was one more pain among the many and he moaned hoarsely through the prickly gag. One more throbbing irritation that began to swell with the toxin that had coated each thorn.

  The knife sliced across his nipple, cutting deep down the center. He couldn’t see the damage, but he felt it. Felt it when a thorn was plunged down into the bloody split flesh, nestled in deep by the prodding of a big finger. There was too much blood in his throat to do more than gurgle in agony. The other nipple was cut, and the thorn pressed down with enough force to embed the tip into his breastbone. He felt the flesh swelling around it, engorged by poison. The blade marked his torso, shallow cuts along his ribs on his stomach, in the hair above his cringing penis.

  The little pains were a relief almost, their infliction drawing his battered mind away from the greater ones. Perhaps the respite, slight as it was, had been designed, a few cruel moments to gather the shredded edges of his mind before the shaman grasped his cock and sliced up the bottom side from base to tip, a thin gash that almost immediately began swelling. A thorn was jammed into the slit at the tip, forced inside by the tip of the blade and Yhalen squealed past the thorn ball in his mouth and slammed his head against the floor in an animal frenzy to escape, world narrowed to comprehension of nothing but the torment his body endured.

  He fell into insensibility, not quite able to escape to full unconsciousness, for the hurt was too invasive to allow that peace, but past caring, limp and drifting at the edge of oblivion and wishing for the death he’d been promised. He hardly noticed at all when they untied his legs to flip him over and begin the slow mutilation of his back.

  The pain would not allow the escape of unconsciousness, so he was vaguely aware when they dragged him out. Vaguely aware when the ogres took him from the hands of the human slaves and held him up by one ankle, the rest of his limbs dangling uselessly, to the roars of the assembled ogre crowd.

  They dragged him by that ankle down the path to the village and through the crowd of massive ogre feet and legs. He was spit on, pissed upon, even kicked if they were quick enough to land a blow as the warrior dragging him marched along. Beyond the village to a stretch of field between the forest and the cliffs, with the whole of the clan following, still jeering and roaring their appreciation of his slow execution.

  There was a structure of sorts erected there. Thick poles set in the earth with thinner poles secured perpendicular to the ground. They grasped his other leg and lifted him up, head down, ass up, so that his hips were level with the lowest rung and began securing his legs, ankles to each end and legs stretched so far, so abruptly, that it felt as if tendons tore. He was bound tight against the rung, rope at ankles, knees and thighs. They strung a rope through his hands, still bound at his back and attached it to the top rung, pulling him up so that his back arched painfully, and his shoulders strained in their sockets, through his head was still lower than his hips.

  The warlord stepped forward, and spoke loudly to his gathered clan. They roared in a frenzy of anticipation.

  Kill me now, he thought. Kill me now and make it end. All he could see was the ground and his hair, lank with sweat and blood falling around his face. The first strike of the whip made him jerk with renewed pain—a curious surprise, considering the greater pains his body had endured. The crowd screamed in appreciation.

  Another strike by the hand of Wartooth and the metal-studded strands of the whip slashed through his already torn skin, but this time there was no burning poison to swell the cuts closed, limiting the flow of his blood. This time the red began to freely roll down his body, streaming down his face, blinding him as it pooled in his eyes, wetting his hair, and darkening the ground beneath him.

  The lashing stopped and he was distantly aware through the haze of pain and the welcome loss of blood that made his senses dull, of the crowd moving back to a great distance, but not departing entirely. Of the light of morning that made his shadow grow on the ground.

  He waited to die. His blood seeped and slowed, and his wounds clotted, prolonging his demise. He cried what tears he could over that denial and hung there, shoulders slowly sliding out of joint as his blood pulsed in his head. An hour passed, perhaps more, while he passed in and out of consciousness.

  Distantly, he heard the flap of wings, heard the raucous cry of a carrion bird. He felt the weight of the first of them jar the rung his legs were secured to as it landed, and knew what the final method of his execution was to be. Picked apart by scavengers while he still lived. He moaned and broke the promise he’d made to himself, praying to the Goddess to strike him down now, before they could start in on him.

  It was an odd sort of dream, flecked with the scent of violence around the edges and the subtle awareness of pain. But at the center there was a lethargic quiet that was all pervasive. Getting past the peaceful silence to discover the threat that stalked at the edges of perception was a monumental task, and not one he was necessarily willing to undertake, immersed in lethargy as he was.

  It was easier by far to simply sink back into oblivion, to le
t the wolves that roamed the night do as they wished. What cared he? One oblivion seemed as welcoming as the next, now that he’d tasted the solitude of it.

  He’d had enough of fighting. A lifetime of it, from the moment almost of his birth into the cold world. Fighting for the right to his mother’s teat, fighting to survive the horrendous strength of the other toddlers, for the right of food and shelter that, after those first few years of life, his mother stopped particularly caring if he got.

  He might have died, like so many other half-blood children, of starvation or exposure—or from the sheer cruelty of the older children—if he hadn’t proven quick of wit and clever even at so tender an age. Even so, the cleverness of a child barely capable of speech would not have gone far to ensuring his survival if it hadn’t been for the weakness of an ogre war chief presently out of favor with the clan council.

  Mateless and with a young full-blood son of his own, Nagmor Icehand took him in, and was ridiculed for it.

  If he wanted a slave, they cried—the proud, ruthless members of the clan—why not take a human, who would scurry about his duties faster and be easier to reprimand for stupidity. Icehand, among ogres, was considerably long on patience. He tolerated insults to a great degree, and after a point simply dispatched the voice that persisted in agitating him. Eventually, all but the most foolhardy ogres ceased to belittle Icehand’s choice of foundling. At least to his face.

  No such temperance was practiced towards the child when he wasn’t within the direct protection of his newfound guardian. It was worse for him, perhaps, because Icehand had taken him in and defended his choice and defended his little half-blood from the idle malice of others. They went out of their way to harass him, to belittle him, to hurt him if they could—and he endured. And grew strong and wily in his stratagems to avoid them. And soon enough his machinations revolved less around escaping their cruelties than exacting vengeance for past wrongs endured.