by Dylan Doose
“Don’t harm them. Let them feed, let the sweetlets feed.” The witch was close. He could hear her, but he could not see her. The torch reflected on the surface of the fluid and the spawning pit was nearly fully lit, a score of brood mothers, half reclining, and hundreds of the blind child-rats. The witch hid amongst them.
Theron intended to dig her out.
His claymore severed undeveloped spine and skull like nothing. The blind things shrieked, and the first mother howled and wept. Theron did not know if it was in human joy or a mutated distress. It did not matter. Nothing mattered except killing that witch and crawling out of this cruel dream.
When the whelps were cleared, he raised his blade for the mother, possessed by a demon of disgust, mad and frantic. But his haze was broken for just a moment as he looked the forsaken thing in the eyes.
He knew them.
The sweet lass from the inn in Norburg, it was her. The redheaded girl. Caroline was her name. Horror congealed in his gut, but he held his place.
“I will free you, Caroline. I free you from this.” The claymore killed quickly.
The other brood mothers sounded a whimpering symphony of pleas, pleas for release, for the freedom of death.
“I shall emancipate you all.” Theron’s roar echoed in the pit, and the child-rats yowled in hellish answer.
The witch screamed and sobbed, still hidden, lurking and squiggling somewhere in the cesspool of afterbirth.
“Monster! Devil!” she shouted. “No more I beg you, no more!”
Theron swung his heavy sword side to side. He felt not the fatigue in his arms as he burned with torch and cut with blade, screaming, all the while trying to release some of the fire from the furnace of trauma that burned in his belly.
“I can listen to them sob no longer,” wailed the Emerald Witch.
“Then reveal yourself and die.” Theron hacked his claymore down atop the skull of another one of the wretched things.
She emerged for an instant before him from behind one of brood mothers. He caught a glimpse of the witch, her long black hair now crusted gray filth, her emerald eyes a muted glow, more the mud on the forest floor than a green canopy overhead. Then she submerged into the pool. The fluid bubbled for a few moments as Theron drew closer, his torch and sword at the ready. This is where it ends. The hunt has led me here.
The Emerald Witch broke the surface.
The Plague Witch she had become.
Her flesh grew and swelled before his eyes. Her jaw unhinged and her tongue extended from the mouth, more a tentacle than a tongue, with a hole in the tip. The tentacle dipped into the pool of placenta, blood, and offal. It throbbed as it drank, and the Plague Witch’s body grew larger and larger still as it consumed the ooze.
Indeed, this is where it ends, but it is not over yet.
The witch’s fingers morphed into tentacles, and her gut and breasts swelled and greened beneath the expanding yellow skin.
The hunter steeled his mind; he steeled his focus and went forth. He was not Theron Ward now, he was the hunter, and all manner of beast and fiend, no matter the realm, was his game.
“This is for my sister, and my friends.” He charged forward, slogging through the waist-deep goop, and swung his claymore one-handed, a mad painter of death and violence, the witch the canvas before him. When slashed apart, she would be his greatest masterpiece.
The tentacles on her left hand shot out like hurled spears. The blade met them, and three of them sprayed hot fluid as they tore from the hand. She screamed and her children answered: the blind rats squealed, some swam, and others crawled toward Theron. Hundreds. It did not matter.
Their great mother wept as she flailed at Theron. He back-stepped and set torch and sword to her “sweetlets.” Something grabbed him from beneath the surface. And there was a pressure on his mail boot on the shin. He lifted his foot and stomped down, and he felt a fragile skull burst beneath the pressure, the thing’s brains and blood now mingled with the birthing ooze of the rat kin.
As he held off the swarm, the witch returned her long tentacle tongue into the liquid and drank. As she did, the severed fingers grew back .
The burn in his muscles was beginning to grind through his rage, his desire to kill, and his desire to survive. He pressed forward, bashing and hacking his way through the useless whelps. One leapt upon his back, then another. They clung to his legs, and although most of them did not even yet have teeth, could not even bite, they weighed him down.
The witch shot out her tentacles; his sword arm was too heavy with the weight of her litter to sever the attacking limb this time. Tendrils wrapped tight round his sword arm and squeezed so hard he dropped his blade. Then the vile serpentine limbs grabbed him by the legs.
He went under.
Submerged completely.
It went in his eye, in his ruined socket. His mouth. His nose. The taste alone nearly killed him, driving him into hysteria; he struggled madly, but the rat things weighed him down, smothering him, drowning him in the spawning pool.
Stop.
Relax.
The hunter stopped struggling, his prey dragging him closer, closer. He began to rise from the mire of grime by the legs, the tentacles pulling him up. He fought not at all. The rats swam and crawled off him. His feet broke the surface, his body, his head.
Stay limp.
“Momma will squeeze out his blood, my sweetlets! Momma will turn his bones to jelly. Momma will feed you.”
Theron’s torch had been extinguished when he was submerged, but he could smell the breath of the witch as she spoke. He heard the tongue slithering from the mouth, saliva dripping. It wrapped around his neck slowly, thinking the hunter was no longer a threat.
The prey was wrong.
So certain he was out of the fight, the witch left his arms unrestrained. When he grabbed the tongue the witch tried to tighten it, to crush Theron’s throat and end it. He dipped his chin and flexed his mighty neck muscles. The defense held long enough for him to sink his teeth deep into the goopy tendril. The witch made a noise, not a scream, for she could not involve the tongue, just a strangled gargle deep in her throat.
Her grip on his feet loosened and she tried to retract into her mouth. Gauntleted fists grabbed tight and pulled. There was the sound of tearing fibers of flesh, audible over the squealing and moaning of the things still living in the now pitch-black pit. The witch dropped him, but he held fast to her tongue and twisted upright as he hit the fetid fluid, finding his footing.
He kept pulling as he stepped closer. The tendrils tried to grip him, pull him back under, but he tucked his head and widened his stance, and the horrible pain of her ripping tongue stopped the witch from generating any real force. The rat things tried to pile on him, but the hunter would not be stopped, not this close to the kill.
He knew he had reached the mouth when he reached out to grab another fistful of stretched, dangling tongue and instead he hit teeth. So he hit the teeth, gauntleted fist crashing again and again. She flailed but could not slow his blows. Nothing could slow him then.
“Your—”
Theron felt teeth explode, heard them shatter as he delivered the fourth strike, his left hand controlling the witch’s head movement by keeping a firm grip on the tongue.
“—fucking—”
Another blow.
“—magic—”
Another, the lower jaw unhinged, tentacles of restraint lost their grip, and the rats collapsed as well. The moaning of the brood mothers turned to a quiet drone.
“—did nothing to stop me!”
Unrestrained, the blows came down now in a flurry.
“Fire and sword!”
He roared into the pulverized face.
“Fire and sword, know that. Know that as you die!”
The witch was likely already dead, for the pit had gone completely silent, save for the sound of Theron’s panting and the dull mashing of his fists into the minced mound of meat.
That was the end of t
he nightmare of Norburg, the destroyer of Dentin, the end of Brynth’s foreign invader. The end of the Emerald Queen, the mother of rats.
That was the real beginning of the legendary hunter Theron Ward: in the north of Brynth, hidden in a cave, waist deep in plagued afterbirth, he was reborn. In that black abyss, the rotten heart of truest terror, he overcame. He conquered his first truly great hunt.
“It is an infection of the face, young man, in the empty socket of your eye, no less. Spare yourself the pain of what you ask me to do, for no matter what you will surely die,” said the surgeon of the small town.
“If I will surely die then I have nothing to lose. Do as I ask you, a final request, if you will,” said the hunter, his voice shaking, his body sweating and the pulsating infection in his hollow socket throbbing.
The surgeon heated the long knife until it was red hot. “Are you sure? I have no sedatives, young man. The pain alone may kill you.”
“I am sure. It is not my destiny to die like this. Dig this evil from me with a burning blade,” said the hunter.
The surgeon nodded to his helpers and they tied the hunter down. He clenched his teeth around a strap of leather as he tried to prepare his mind for the pain to come. There was no preparing for it; there was no bracing for that.
The infection popped and seared and the hunter screamed. He screamed from his soul, and so loud was the agonizing sound that the whole town shivered at the cry. Fire and sword, the hunter would not die.
Chapter Thirty
Moving On
I t had been two months since Theron Ward had left Dentin in pursuit of the Emerald Witch. Two months that Ken and Aldous remained, helping to put Dentin back together. Ken did what he could with just one arm, and what he could do was more than most men with two.
They had buried Chayse in the woods beneath the trees, her grave marked by a monument of her short swords melted into a hunk of iron that the smithy fashioned. They had buried other bodies, and now they rebuilt houses, and they helped plant crops. If there was a time when the women and children, when the elders and the sickly feared the wizard and Kendrick the Cold, that time was no longer.
They came to be known as great and charitable men, true champions of Dentin. They declined pay from the duke on the grounds that any coin given to them could instead be used for acquiring the needed resources to rebuild the destroyed village. They accepted only a bed to lie upon at night and food to fill their bellies. The work was grueling, and most days Ken could only manage six hours of labor, for his near fatal wounds still needed time to heal—small fractures and damaged muscles on top of his lost hand. Aldous had recovered fully, and he did what he could to put in eight- to ten-hour days, every day. This inspired Dentin’s people to work just as hard, and the progress of their work was inspiring.
“I feel good,” said Ken one evening to Aldous as they had ale before the fire.
“Yes? Your injuries are healing well, then?”
“The physical ones, yes, but the ones of the soul as well, lad.”
Aldous smiled at his friend, then his smile faded. “I still hurt terribly, Ken. I miss Chayse. I miss Theron.”
“So do I. So do I.”
“Do you think he found her?”
“I know he found her,” said Ken. “I know he killed her.”
“Is he alive?” Whatever Ken answered, Aldous decided he would believe.
“Aye, he’s alive. I need him to be alive.”
“Me too.” Aldous looked at his ale. “But what if… When do we move on?”
“I don’t mind it here,” said Ken, then he sipped at his ale and almost smiled.
“Neither do I. Eventually, though… eventually word will reach other cities about who and what we are. They will come for us. If we stay, we endanger the ones we saved, the people that see us as their champions.”
“So when do we move on?” Ken asked. To Aldous it sounded like Ken was asking for an instruction, as if he were asking for an order. Aldous took his time to answer, for he was not sure he was ready to be the one making choices.
“In a month,” Aldous finally said, his voice stern and full of conviction. Ken nodded. “We work and you recover for another month. In a month the village will be well on its way to being good as new, and… and perhaps Theron will return.”
“A good plan, lad.” Ken stood abruptly. “I’m off to the sack. I’ll see you at breakfast. You’re young, Aldous. You’re young and you’ve done a great thing. Off to a good start, I’d say.” Ken patted Aldous awkwardly on the shoulder with his stump, for he was holding his ale still with his hand .
Aldous put a light hand on the mutilated limb, and stared into space before him, nodding in appreciation of Ken’s words, but thinking of Chayse. Hurting for Chayse, for himself, for the life he would know without her.
Ken left the room and Aldous was alone with his thoughts.
Aldous thought of the woman’s voice. The one who had spoken to him in the battle, the one that had told him to protect Theron Ward. Who the voice of the woman belonged to, he did not know, yet he felt he had made an obligation to it, an obligation to some divinity to carry out its will. He swore sacrifice, said he would pay any price. Yet he lay in a soft bed, alive and thinking, and there was a chance, a high and terrible probability, in fact, that Theron Ward was dead. If that was so, he had lied to that divine force, a force Aldous was certain had given him the strength to summon the ravens of fire.
He reached absentmindedly, as he had many times in the many weeks that had passed, for the red gemstone around his neck, only to recall it was not there. It had not been there since the battle.
They ate breakfast with the duke and Fabius the next morning. So much progress had they made on the townships that the villagers were back to living happily in their own homes. As happily as villagers could be after their land was ravaged and their loved ones taken by a swarm of rats.
That is the nature of things , thought Aldous. One must find happiness after despair, lest life become nothing more than surviving from one tragedy to the next. The emotions must recover quickly; the good things must be loved whenever they can, for the good things do not stand the storm.
“Today is the day the church starts to be re-erected,” said the duke.
“There are still other houses, a stable and granary to get done,” grumbled Ken .
The duke frowned slightly but did not press.
“And you, Aldous? Where shall you be working today?” asked the duke. He did not make direct eye contact; he gave a quick glance from under his brows, his head tilted humbly forward.
“You’re a sneaky man, Duncan,” said Aldous, and he laughed.
“A sneaky man? I’ve never suffered such a charge before. What gives you cause to say such a thing?” asked the duke, smiling.
“What good do you believe it will do?” asked Aldous.
“I’m not sure I follow,” said the duke.
“I’m sure you do,” chimed in Ken, then he tore off a hunk of cheese with his teeth.
The duke sighed. “The church is not wicked. The Luminescent is not wicked.”
“I have done wicked things for this not-wicked God, Your Grace. You are a man who chooses to only see the good things, and you are young,” said Ken.
“You are right, Ken. I am young, and I do choose to see the good. I saw four unlikely heroes save my people and my land for no reason other than they felt obligated to protect those too weak to protect themselves. I saw a primordial goodness in you.”
“Yet your church would see us burn,” said Aldous.
“Not my church. Perhaps the king’s church, perhaps the churches in Aldwick, maybe the ones in Baytown and all the others in Brynth. Not mine, though. My church would not see you burn. Neither would my God.”
“There is only one Luminescent, is there not?” Ken said, the mockery clear in his tone. Despite the budding argument at the table, no tempers were flaring.
“I believe there to be one Luminescent, yes. He is
not a god that would ask for either of you burned, nor is he a god that would accept the king’s crusades in the far east.”
Fabius stopped eating and stared at the duke for a moment, shocked at these words. Dangerous words.
“That is a false god, a lied god,” Duncan continued. “The real God is good. ”
“God didn’t save your people. We did,” said Ken. “And if it was part of some design of his for this to have happened in the first place, then if I ever cross him it will come to blood.” Ken paused. “Let’s just leave it alone.”
“Very well, Ken.” Duncan turned back to Aldous. “Where will you be working today?” he asked again.
Aldous burst into laughter at the passive maneuverings of the duke. “Incredible. All right.” He nodded. “I’ll help with the church, but don’t expect me to utter a prayer, or start copying out scripture. The last believer that tried that with me… well, he shouldn’t have.”
Ken just needed one arm to chop wood, and that was what he had mostly been doing to provide lumber for the homesteads. Stone and brick the duke had to buy from other cities and towns that owned lands with quarries, but Dentin was plentiful with lumber. So Ken chopped away, and every two hours would load a mule cart with the wood and head into the village.
He missed having a left hand, that was certain. He wondered if he would ever be worth a damn in a fight again, and it both hurt and pleased him to think that he wouldn’t be. Perhaps this was an excuse to never kill again. Likely it was just that, though, an excuse. If he could split lumber, he could split skulls—that was a fact he had known for a long time. And so he practiced each morning in the hours before dawn.
He brought the lumber to the granary; there was already more than enough. Across the thoroughfare were the people hard at work on the church. Even those villagers who were inclined to sloth were bustling and laboring with great resolve to build the thing.
Fools. The true house of evil is that.