by Dylan Doose
Ken thought of the church in Grimmshire. Suicide was a sin according to the scriptures, yet the father there had assisted in the suicide of his entire surviving flock, then took his own life to spare them and himself from the plague .
Had he lost his miserable faith? Or had he found a higher one?
Ken would never know the answer to that.
He walked the mule and the cart of lumber to the church.
“Have you come to aid us?” asked the duke himself as he hammered a nail into a plank of wood.
In Ken’s experience, when nails went into “holy lumber,” there was a human hand or foot in between.
“No. You can have the wood, though, Your Grace.”
“Thank you,” said the panting, sweating Duncan.
Ken growled, turned, and walked away. He heard Aldous laughing as he did.
He was glad Aldous had little enough of an opinion to work on the church. He knew the boy did not all of a sudden become a believer; he was simply being helpful. Ken doubted he would ever be able to do that. He knew strong ideals and unwavering opinions were things that stagnated humanity as a whole. It was the very thing he hated about the church, and it was hypocrisy he saw in himself that he had such an unwavering opinion about it. Regardless, Ken would never forgive and forget the thing that he had become in the name of the God of Light.
Ken walked for an hour. He went past the ravine and climbed a hill; it was soon to sundown, and he sat down on the grass. The clouds had lifted, they had lifted some time ago, and it was because of that he knew Theron had succeeded in slaying the witch. It was a childish deduction, it bordered on religious, but at least his belief was in a man. Ken reached into his pack and took out a loaf of stale bread and some roast fowl. He ate as he watched the setting sun, and decided he would sleep there on that hill under the stars. In the morning it would be three months since the battle. Two weeks ago the duke had warned them that he had gotten word that there was some rabbling in Aldwick and the Imperial City that the fugitive Kendrick the Cold and a rogue sorcerer were responsible for the protection of Dentin .
Ken would sleep here this night under the stars, and in the morning he would return to Dentin. Together he and Aldous would go on their way. Where they would go, they were not sure, but they would stick to the plan of Theron and Chayse. They would stick to the path of the hunt.
Kendrick gave a last look to the horizon before he laid down his head. He jerked upright and squinted in the fading light, and for the first time in his life he saw something good on the horizon. His heart pounded and his eyes welled with tears.
Happiness.
Hefferus the smith sat in his shop, smoking on a pipe and nursing a pint as he read a book by some bloke by the name of Darcy Weaver, some drivel called The Indisputable Science of Goodness. His wife was highborn and had insisted he learn to read. There was no sense arguing, for she always won.
“This is drivel, a whole lot of drivel. I’m more than halfway through the bloody thing and there hasn’t been a single battle, not even the mention of a dragon, or an Upir, or any manner of werebeast! I won’t have it, I tell you!” Hefferus tossed the book into the furnace. The fire grew, and he thought he might just forge something small, a dagger perhaps. Before he could start, into his shop walked three men: two of the nastiest lads Hefferus had ever seen, and a lad small in form but with a devil’s eyes.
The man in front drew his sword, a silver claymore. He handed it to the smith. The smith looked at the blade and his eyes went wide, for it was of his own forging.
“By God. Theron Ward?”
“Indeed.”
“Have you… have you come for something to be forged?”
“Indeed. My claymore, the one you gave my father. I want it larger, heavier. And my friend here”—Theron indicated the mountain of muscle to his left who appeared to only have one hand—“he needs a fist. An iron fist.”
The smith smiled his toothless smile and cracked his knuckles. “You’ve come just at the right moment, lads, for just now I stoked my fire. Sit and tell me of your adventures as I set to work.”
Epilogue
The Path
A cross the sea, to the northeast, in the mountainous landscape of the Romarian highlands, in a small village in a downtrodden tavern, Vilnous Neta sipped on his ale and chewed on his mutton.
“I’ve never seen the like,” Vilnous began. “A whole pack. Twelve at least. Never have I seen them in a pack. Always they hunt alone. Days most dark are coming, brothers, days most sinister and dark.” The man shuttered and swallowed back his ale, then slammed it down and nodded to the barkeep for another.
“How did you escape, Neta?” asked a frail, white-bearded man to the left.
“I wish to never say if you allow me this secret. I am ashamed for running, so very ashamed.” Vilnous bowed his head and stared at the ground. He put his mutton aside, his appetite lost.
“You need not be ashamed, brother. Who would not have run in the face of such terror? Romaria has no more great knights, no more hunters of old. There are no more heroes.” The white-haired old man slumped in his chair. “What can a man do when his path meets that of the devil but turn and flee, lest he be taken to hell?”
“Or worse, forced to walk the very path of the fiends,” said a glum, hooded man to Neta’s right. “The Lycans howl in the night, the demons rise from pits of fire, the banshees shriek, and the Upirs and their lords feed. Our lands are cursed.”
“The whole of the world is cursed.” It was a woman who spoke now, wrinkled and hunched, with a foggy eye, slurping gruel and tapping her long, filthy nails on the table at which she sat while she ate. “Have you not heard of the happenings in Brynth seven months past? A plague of ratmen, not much unlike our Lycans, but in the form of sickly rodents. They destroyed entire cities, a swarm of them.” The whole tavern fell silent at this, all but for the sound of the old hag slurping at her gruel. “Yes, it is not just we who are cursed, but the whole of the world.”
“Why? What have we done? What has man done to deserve the demons that torture him?” asked Vilnous, not exactly expecting an answer.
“It is a test, a cleansing and a test,” said the hag. “Only the strong shall survive.” Then she cackled, spitting up a bit of gruel as she did. She turned her foggy eye to the men at the bar, only her foggy eye. The other remained starring down at the gruel. “None of you shall survive it, for you are weak.” Again she cackled, more madly now.
“Enough, you old hag,” barked the barman. “You’re bad for business. What did I tell you about keeping your doom talk to yourself, eh?”
The few others in the tavern grumbled their agreement.
“Do I make you uncomfortable… ladies?” asked the hag.
“Keep to yourself, you old crone, I’m warning you.” The barman stepped out from behind his bar.
“Warning me? What will you do? Throw out an old lady into the cold and the rain? And in these dark times no less, with all manner of beasties and hellions running ’round?”
“I swear I will if you don’t bloody well keep to yourself. And quiet down the slurping on your gruel,” said the barman as he returned to his post and filled another mug for one of his thirsty patrons.
The door to the tavern opened, and the cold, wet wind blew in with a howl .
The first man to walk through the door was tall and immensely broad in shoulder. He pulled back a black hood. His long blond hair was wet and fell carelessly down to his shoulders. He was handsome—half his face was, at least. His left eye was missing, burn scars replacing it. He had a large sword on his back and a small, strange crossbow on his hip with a quiver of silver bolts. Gold chimes with strange markings dangled from his chain mail and made music as they swayed side to side from the wind coming through the doorway.
The second man to come through was a few inches shorter and more than a few inches wider in the shoulder than the first. He pulled back his hood, revealing a visage more scar than face, one long and particu
larly deep one running nearly from ear to ear just below his eyes. His hair was shaved down to the scalp and a thick braided beard accentuated the might of his broad jaw and powerful chin. There was an axe at his hip on his right side; his left hand was clenched in a tight fist… a solid iron fist. From his cloak and armor dangled the same strange golden chimes, and in the wind they added to the mindless tune of the first man’s.
Last to enter was a young man, wet black hair slicked back off a sharp-featured face, hollow cheeks, a sharp chin, and sharp jaw. He was excessively lean, and there was more murder in his eyes than the first two. He walked with a staff, a most magnificent staff with detailed carvings of wolves and ravens. He did not wear a black cloak like his companions; instead he wore a deep red one with light black mail beneath. On his hip was a short sword and around his neck was a red gemstone, which looked to be in a lady’s fashion.
The trio sat at the back of the tavern and said not a word.
“What will you have, travelers?” asked the barman from across the room.
“Ale and a meal,” the blond one said, then turned back to his comrades. Normally the barkeep would ask unfamiliar patrons to show their coin before they were served. He did not ask these men, though. He only poured three flagons.
Vilnous Neta had a terrible feeling about these three men. A deep foreboding, a sense of dread that whoever these three were, dark things were close.
“Who are they?” he whispered to the barman.
“I don’t know. Friendly strangers, I hope.”
“They don’t look like friendly strangers,” Vilnous said as he took a quick glance back at the men. The one-eyed man with the blond hair locked Vilnous’ stare and grinned. It was not a friendly grin. Vilnous had an impulse to stand right then and there and run out the door into the night and the storm, to run from the town and into the woods with all its terrors.
“What brings you to our town, hunters?” asked the hag as she tapped her filthy nails on the rotting wood table.
The dread magnified as Vilnous looked at the three strangers, awaiting their response. They stood back up, and the blond man’s great sword scraped and screamed as it left the scabbard. The stout man with the axe and the iron fist cracked his neck side to side. The black-haired younger one snapped his fingers on his left hand and a small ball of fire hovered over his fingertips.
Vilnous cowered along with the other men at the bar, but it was too late to run.
The hag stood from her chair and put down her gruel spoon. Her good eye rolled back into her head; the foggy one remained staring. From outside the tavern, over the thunder and the hammering of the rain, the beasts began to howl.
THE END
Catacombs of Time
A Sword and Sorcery Novella
* * *
Some scholars say that the author Darcy Weaver wrote a total of one hundred and thirty-six manuscripts. Others argue that he wrote many more. Weaver was burned at the stake three centuries past in the year 1264 for heresy. His crime was in protesting the night of mage bane, a festival held by the church and the Brynthian royal court wherein scores of mages were burned. The majority of Weaver’s original work was burned with him, so it is impossible to know with certainty exactly how prolific he was. Much is unknown about the man whose works of philosophy still bear relevance today, in the year 1572. Stories abound of his wife, who became a nun and slew herself after killing forty of her sisters whilst they slept, and of his son Aldous, who some believe was a wizard. The truth of these stories is questionable. Copies of his work are hard to find, but if a scholar finds himself looking, there are said to be two places where one is certain to discover the man’s work: the University of Villemisère in southern Fracia, and the Museum of National History in middle Brynth, the building and surrounding estate known as Wardbrook at the time of Weaver’s death.
—Excerpt from The Pilgrim Scholar
by Francois LaFrete,
head of history at the University of Villemisère
* * *
Chapter One
The Wind of Memory
The moon was red that night. It peeked through the only part of sky not hidden away by the leaden clouds of the manic storm that shifted from bouts of light mist descending from the heavens, to downpours that made it hard to breathe and see. Lightning split the sky, illuminating it momentarily, then leaving it in shadow once more. Thunder resonated, and it was as if the gods themselves were waging war high above with the cannons and arms of the cosmos, and the storm was the fallout of a battle whose combatants were indifferent to the plight of man.
Below the moon and the clouds, where the rain poured down and the lightning threatened destruction, was the University of Villemisère, which had stood in this place for three hundred years, since the time of the first appearance of the Rata Plaga in Brynth. Five stories of lecture halls and laboratories, of studios and dormitories, of mess halls and infirmaries, and long, high-ceilinged corridors with dim lamps dampening the souls of those ambitious youth who braved the years of solitude and anguish that the university promised.
The wind blasted against the front doors. They swung ajar and the draft gusted its way through the vast cylindrical atrium, with its dead gray walls that looked black in the gloom, but for the spaces that had a sleepy orange haze cast by weak lamps. The wind whirled around, an invisible tornado that flew up the wooden stairs, worn by so many years of students and professors hurrying between classes, and then turned left down a corridor, scraping away gray flakes of paint as it went. It put out a lamp nearly a second before it reached its dying place in the library, the smallest breeze now, just a whisper of the thing it had been.
Two forms sat hunched forward over a scarred wooden table. They were alone in the library at this late hour and their conversation was deep, carrying their minds to a different place, and so they cared not for the fury that came down from beyond. They did not notice the wind.
“What you are proposing, Gaige… What it is that you are proposing…” Professor Lumire began, his words reverberating in his swaying, saggy cheeks. “It is not science. It is not medicine.” Lumire paused again and lit his long wooden pipe, the light from the match painting shadows above the old doctor’s wrinkles as he frowned, deep in thought. “Gaige,” he said sternly. “You have just this last year finished your schooling, and already you would reject its teachings?”
Gaige scowled at this remark and swiveled uncomfortably in his chair across from Lumire, wondering if his teacher and mentor knew him at all.
“I reject nothing. I wish only to expand my knowledge, to expand all knowledge.” Gaige kept his voice calm, but his heart was pounding. He had waited two full years before revealing his thoughts and research to Lumire, and this was not the reaction he had hoped for.
“Expand knowledge, you say?” Lumire leaned across the table, his eyes so wide Gaige thought they might just pop from the old man’s skull. “In… in bloody sorcery?” Lumire whispered the last word, and he turned his head to the doors of the library to make sure no one was there.
“Not sorcery. I am a mortal man. My powers will always be that of a mortal man. How far those powers can go, I am not sure. Science will be the answer.” Science was his religion, his faith, his occultism. Science was the hope of mankind. “Science is beyond sorcery. What I will come to learn will not even the battlefield between us and those with arcane blood… it will dominate it,” Gaige said, his face hovering close to Lumire’s above the library table.
He could see every nuance of his mentor’s expression, but Lumire could not see his. Gaige always wore his iron-beaked doctor’s mask, for that was the identity he preferred over that of a sickly addict. The mask was the face he showed the world and the veil that hid him from view.
Lumire stared at him and Gaige looked away first, offering his mentor that small token of respect. He sat back and took out his steel pipe, then reached a hand to his beaked mask and tampered with a mechanism, opening a slot in the right side. There he in
serted the pipe, then closed the two nostrils with a flick of another very small lever. He drew a match, lit it by running it across the side of the iron beak, put the flame to the bowl, and inhaled. His mask was airtight now, so the moon’s widow packed into the pipe burned at a rapid pace. Gaige listened to the shush of the cinders as he took in the smoke. He opened the nostrils of his beak, removed the pipe, and held the smoke deep in his lungs.
He exhaled. The smoke of the moon’s widow, a plant so potent that even the inhalation of its ground petals’ aroma could produce soothing effects, burst from the mask’s nostrils.
Lumire’s frown dragged the corners of his mouth lower and deepened the wrinkles that ran down toward his jaw. “We’ve discussed this—”
“And we are not discussing it again.” Gaige shrugged. “I am sick.”
Gaige had always been sick. He was born with a leg that was hardly a twisted strip of bone, with cords of stringy muscle that refused to function on all but the most rudimentary level. It was a weak excuse for a limb. Despite this, Gaige was not weak. He now viewed the agonizing limb as an excellent source for experimentation. Through the study of science and medicine and its applications upon himself, Gaige was fighting, and he was winning against the cruelty of his own design, training the leg to be stronger at a cost of ever-increasing pain. Of course there were other side effects, those of the manner of mental phenomena, those of the physical body, and those of a social nature. They were effects he documented but they did not stop his research.
As to the pain… Pain or not, he refused to cut the leg off. He kept it as a reminder of his humanity.
“The populace will see your science as sorcery,” Lumire said. “They will see it as playing God. Worse yet, the seekers will put an end to any research. The lord regent will come down with all his wrath upon the university just for association with your name if you continue in this dreadful dabbling!”