Tales of Magic and Misery: A Collection of Short Stories by Tim Marquitz

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Tales of Magic and Misery: A Collection of Short Stories by Tim Marquitz Page 23

by Tim Marquitz


  The woman preened, straight-backed and tall, confident in her superiority. Her purple robes clashed against the solemn whiteness of the hill, her shorn scalp glistening in the gloom. Gnarled hands traced invisible shapes in the air. Gryl’s gaze fell back to the circle. It was a conduit, the sorceress amplifying her energies in preparation. It was the circle that had alerted Gryl to her presence.

  His hands shook at seeing it, memories threatening to overwhelm him. He had been murdered within such a circle and reborn in its embrace, time and time again, the ritual purification feeding him with agony until he could devour no more. That was what the sorceress had in store for Kel.

  Gryl glanced over at the boy. Kel had fallen to his knees, his hands clasping at trails of red that stained his tunic. To Gryl, the wounds looked shallow, but they were only the beginning of the boy’s suffering if the sorceress had her way.

  Lying beside Kel, Damien floated in pool of his own blood, clouds of steam billowing around him. A bone blade jutted from his skull. Its flesh-wrapped pommel quavered above as though a flag pole driven to ground. He was the lucky one, death having come swiftly to collect him.

  Just a few feet behind them, Brant whipped his falchion overhand and slammed it, again and again, into the last of the Thrak’s who’d fled. The butcher’s block thump sang out against the rocky walls. Covered in blood, thick rivulets running down his frame, the sergeant kicked the berserker’s carcass aside. He screamed at the sorceress, crimson streamers dangling from his lips as he stumbled toward her.

  “I’ll kill you, whore.”

  The sorceress only grinned, her fluttering movements stilling. Darkness welled about her hand as she held it out toward Brant. Before Gryl realized what she intended, bolts of ebony screamed from her fingertips. Nowhere to run, the sergeant reached out for anything to shelter behind.

  His hands found Kel.

  He yanked the boy in front of him just as the bursts of energy hit. Kel screamed, spears of blackness piercing his flesh. Held fast by Brant, he writhed beneath the virulent caress, skin peeling back in waves. When the spell broke, Kel tumbled from the knight’s grip and slumped to the ground. Brant staggered off in a daze, wisps of black smoke wafting off him. After a few steps, he fell, as well.

  The acrid scent of charred meat slithered into Gryl’s nose as he launched himself at the sorceress.

  “No!”

  His voice echoed across the clearing though he hadn’t realized he’d yelled.

  The sorceress spun, surprise rippling across her features. If she recognized Gryl for what he was he would never know. His throwing blade punctured her eye, burying itself deep in the well of her skull. He landed just short of where she stood and drew his sword across her throat as he darted past. The sullen whump of her body collapsing sounded at his back as he rushed to examine the boy, his sword sheathed before the sorceress hit the ground.

  Gryl’s heart sputtered at what he saw.

  Kel’s clothing had been burned away to expose the entirety of his misery. Blackened pustules covered his exposed flesh like a swarm of giant beetles, their ashen mounds quivering as though possessed of a life of their own. The boy gasped when Gryl knelt beside him. His every breath, shallow and sharp, sounded like his last but still the next one came, and the one after that. Gryl cursed the boy’s stubborn defiance and looked to his eyes. The lids had melted away, leaving nothing to hide the bubbled mass of ruin that sloshed inside the sockets. Gryl felt his own eyes well up, tears warming his cheeks as he looked down on the wreckage of the boy.

  “Did you get her?”

  Gryl’s tears stilled when he heard the knight’s raspy voice. He looked up from the boy to see Brant digging at the snow in an effort to sit up. While his skin had been scorched by the sorceress’ spell, he had escaped its full wrath, hidden as he’d been behind Kel.

  A low growl slipped from Gryl as he rose and went to stand in front of the sergeant.

  “Well, did you, skeg?”

  Brant struggled to his elbows with a grunt, still unable to see across the clearing to where the Avan sorceress lie dead. His dark eyes settled on Gryl. The sergeant’s baleful smile was smeared with a layer of soot, but it shone through. Among all the myriad scrapes and crusted wounds, which covered his face, there was nothing there that resembled remorse.

  Gryl grabbed the knight’s throat, sinking his fingers in deep as he pushed the man to his back. Brant’s eyes went wide as Gryl yanked his long dagger free, the blade shimmering in the reflected pallor of the cold north. The sergeant stiffened as the knife drew closer, but Gryl had no intention of letting him slip away so easily.

  With the tip of the blade, Gryl split the sleeve of his tunic, opening it from his wrist to his elbow. As he peeled the fabric back, Brant sputtered against his grip, seeing the woven patchwork of scars revealed, but Gryl held him fast. Weakened by the sorceress’ blast despite what he’d done, there was no escape for the sergeant. Gryl grinned at that thought.

  He set the tip of the dagger to one of his scars and the mass squirmed as though a worm slithered beneath the skin. Warmth throbbed up the length of his arm. Brant struggled, his pulse pounding against his temples, face reddening. He cursed, but the words came out as phlegmy gurgles.

  The blade sank into Gryl’s savaged flesh and carved out a single line of scar tissue, a layer of skin peeling back beneath the knife with ease. It came loose in a ragged rectangle. Dots of red appeared on the meat beneath, but no blood flowed. Gryl speared the piece of flesh on the tip of his knife and shifted his other hand from Brant’s throat to his jaw. He ground his thumb and forefinger into the joints as the sergeant gasped for breath, forcing his mouth open. A deft flick of his wrist spun the dagger about. Gryl slid the blade into Brant’s mouth, driving the carven flesh into the back of his throat. The sergeant swallowed on instinct, the scar tissue sucked into his stomach with a retching gasp.

  “You’ll torment no more children.”

  Gryl pulled his blade free and shook the bloody spittle from the blade, releasing Brant. The knight coughed and clasped at his throat, desperately drawing in air.

  “No!” Mihir screamed as he staggered up the rise to see Gryl standing over the sergeant. “Don’t kill him.”

  “I hadn’t intended to.” Gryl laughed and slid his dagger into its sheath. “Death would be a mercy. He doesn’t deserve such kindness.” He spit on the knight and stepped away.

  Mihir stood his ground and stared as Gryl returned to Kel. The boy still breathed, though that was hardly a kindness. Gryl reached beneath Kel and scooped him into his arms, waxen skin peeled away at the slightest touch. The boy moaned but unconsciousness was his sanctuary. He didn’t awaken.

  Brant thrashed in the snow, kicking up a mist of white powder and crystalline stars. Deep, guttural groans spilled from him as his fingers clawed at his chest, bloody streaks smeared across his armor. His wild eyes bulged, shimmering with an eerie, emerald hue. He stared unseeing at the billowing sky, drool splattering his lips and chin as he howled. The bitter stink of urine filled the air.

  “What did you do to him?” Mihir asked, terror drawing a mask across his features. He stepped away as Gryl drew closer.

  “I gave him a taste of agony.”

  Gryl started down the path, his burden hanging limp in his arms. Brant’s cries swelled to shrieks that reverberated through the maze of stone. The sound followed Gryl toward the horizon, but with every step it fell further behind until it faded away.

  Through it all, the boy breathed on.

  An Exclusive Look at the Forthcoming Tales of the Prodigy Novel:

  An Empire of Tears

  Previously Unpublished

  Prelude

  “Pain is not your enemy. Not to be feared or dismissed, but embraced. It is the fire that tempers the blade, the cold that stiffens the steel, the hammer that shapes the edge. Welcome the pain that ushers your evolution from worm to warrior for, in its absence, you will be left wanting.” –Myr Eltara, Avan Seer, Warden of t
he Bellator Prodigium

  A lifetime on land does nothing to prepare a man for the sea.

  Gryl gripped the prow and stared out across the inky blackness of the Demarcean Sea. It churned beneath a blanket of stars, diamonds flickering across its surface. Avantr, the only home he’d ever known, had been swallowed by the darkness well over a sevenday before. Its shores were little more than a memory lost to the icy breeze. The cold pecked at his exposed cheeks and brought tears to his eyes. Its frigid embrace stole the breath from his lungs. His stomach mimicked the sea, raucous and ill at ease. Of all the things Gryl might claim to be, a sailor would not be one of them.

  The deck creaked beneath his unsteady feet, and every slap of the sails set his teeth on edge. The vastness that roiled before him made him feel small, insignificant, a mote of sand in an endless desert. He swallowed hard against the brine that soured in his throat. Its taste was unnatural to him, a bitter reminder of the task that lie ahead.

  “You should not be out here again,” a quiet voice said at his back.

  None of us should be, he thought, yet said nothing, only offering up a nod to the quartermaster as the man circled around to stand beside him at the rail.

  “I do not think Myr Eltara would like you leaving your chambers,” Denal said, casting a furtive glance toward the hatch that led to the hold below.

  Even in the gloom, Gryl could see the worry in the man’s narrow, dark eyes; caring eyes, oddly enough. For all his authority aboard the Vanguard, he knew nothing of their mission on the turbulent sea or their purpose in the land beyond yet he had taken on the solemnness that emanated from soldiers in his care as though it were a virus. Still, his fears were dust in the coming storm, and Gryl envied the man his ignorance. He would set his charges on the shores of Shytan and return to Avantr, none the wiser for the bloodshed he’d released.

  “Yet my mistress has not forbidden it,” Gryl answered, offering up a sly grin to ease the somber mood. And she wouldn’t, oblivious as she was to his discretions. Like his brothers who slumbered in the hold below, the sorceress had no cause to imagine one of her prodigies would leave his bunk to roam the deck. “And I believe that is because you have not told her of my trespasses.” It was a statement more than a question. For days, Denal had watched him from the quarterdeck in silence, no doubt wondering what brought the prodigy out into the dark each night. He had held his tongue or else Gryl would not be there.

  “I would not presume to do so,” Denal said. “She would be cross?”

  “She would.” While that thought might once have carried his weight in terror, Gryl was long past such concerns. He was what his mistress had made him: a killer, unmoved by the horrors of life or death. At least in all the ways that mattered to the sorceress. Gryl shrugged, motioning toward the water. “There is much in this life I have not witnessed. I would spend my moments gazing upon the world we travel rather than be entombed within the hull of this ship, dreaming of the world I’ve left behind. The ghosts of the past will be there when I return.”

  Denal smiled. “You are wise for a man bred of the steel.”

  “My mistress would call me foolish,” Gryl answered, “but if all I ever experience is the blood of another oozing warm between my fingers, what purpose is there for my own to remain within my veins?”

  The man nodded. “You are different from the other prodigies.” His gaze slid to Gryl, neither accusing nor pitying, simply stating an opinion he’d come upon. His eyes unconsciously traced the web of scars across Gryl’s exposed skull.

  “Have you known many of us?”

  A smile brightened Denal’s lips, seeping into his eyes. “No, I must admit I have not, but I feel that alone is testament to your difference, friend. A man does not get to know a prodigy, and yet here we are.” He swung his arms wide to encompass them and the deck.

  Gryl grinned. “Too true, though I fear our short companionship already nears its demise.” He gestured over the sea, a greater darkness welling against the backdrop of night.

  “The Jiorn Highlands,” Denal said, spying the mountainous range in the distance. “Our destination. We’ll be there by dusk tomorrow eve.”

  “Shytan,” Gryl whispered.

  The name of the land was a strange taste upon his tongue. For all he knew of the distant land, lessons drilled into his skull by his mistress and her ministers, he truly knew nothing. The men who called it home were his enemies, or soon would be. Perhaps that was all he needed to know. He let out a flaccid sigh.

  “Our paths part,” Gryl said, holding his hand out to Denal. The quartermaster took it, his grip tight. “Until you come to retrieve us then…”

  Denal said nothing. He might not know what we are about, Gryl thought, but he is not blind or slow of wit. The Avan would not deliver an army of prodigy to a foreign shore in expectation of peace.

  “Well met, Quartermaster Denal. May the winds bring you safely to port,” Gryl said, mouthing the invocation he’d heard the sailors offer one another as they’d set sail.

  “And may the land be steady beneath your feet,” the man answered. “Perhaps I’ll see you on the other side, friend.” Denal’s rough hand slipped loose of Gryl’s as they said their farewells, the last words settling over them with a quiet finality. Gryl’s gaze lingered in the distance.

  Despite their pleasantries, they would never see each other again, Gryl understood. For beyond the foreboding cliffs that separated the sea from the land of Shytan, he and his brethren would be the flame that set the world afire. Success would see the expansion of the Avan Empire and, after which, the prodigies would return to the shadows, weapons sheathed until they were called upon once more. Failure would mean little different as far as the world were concerned. It meant their corpses would be scattered across the hostile land, a lesson to those who came after who would dare the Shytan might. Neither end promised a reunion with passing spirits such as Denal.

  Gryl gave one last nod to the quartermaster and slithered into the hold. The walls bore down on him as he eased into his bunk and pulled the threadbare covers overtop, more for their comfort than warmth. The steady rhythm of his brothers’ breathing sang a song of unity, calling him to join them in their repose, but Gryl could find no peace in the cramped quarters after tasting the open space above. He stared at the ceiling until dawn set the feet of the sailors in motion on the deck, a sound he’d grown used to in their short time aboard the Vanguard. Soon, even that fleeting familiarity would be gone and he would be on his own, a thorn in the spine of a people who’d done him no wrong.

  He wondered at his masters’ purpose until sleep took mercy on him and he wondered no more.

  Consequences

  “You are unlike any warriors this world has ever seen. Agony has come and gone and yet you still stand, towering over the ashes of your former selves. You are flesh made steel, weapons of Shahl, the embodiment of her will on earth, the serpent in the darkness, death on the wind. Your time has come. Arise, prodigia. The scarred goddess welcomes you. –Myr Rolant, High Priestess of Shahl, Praefectus of the Bellator Prodigium

  The flames that licked the walls stirred the memories in Gryl’s skull like embers drawing a last gasp. The heat of the brand, the smell of flesh blistering and melting beneath the iron as his mistress added one last scar to the patchwork of his ruined flesh; the sign of their goddess, Shahl, Bringer of War.

  “Burn, demon!”

  Gryl crouched to avoid the churning smoke and peered between the slats of wood as they blackened and warped in the heat. The men who’d cornered him—he counted five—stood outside, laughing and taunting, heedless to the pleas of those they’d trapped inside the church alongside him.

  “There are children in here!” the priest shouted, his voice raw from the smoke and sharp with righteous anger.

  The men only laughed louder. Their hatred burned as bright as the torches they’d used to set the building alight, faces glimmering with sadistic glee while they watched the church smolder and be consumed. They c
ared nothing for the innocents who died so that they might earn the bounty placed on Gryl’s head. These were not men to feel guilt. They were not men at all.

  Gryl glanced over his shoulder at the old priest. He clung to his flock and stood rigid behind the meager defense of the pews, a half dozen children draped about his waist. Terror made pools of their eyes. They were an undulating mass of limbs and shiny, wet and sniveling faces, as fearful of Gryl as they were of the flames creeping to consume them. Perhaps more so.

  “I’m sorry.” The words meant nothing to them, Gryl knew. He’d been the one to take shelter in the church without realizing others were there. He’d been the one who brought Thaedus and his mercenaries down upon the priest and his charges. No words would right this wrong. “Give me a moment to clear them from the door, and then get the children out of here,” he told the priest. Only actions.

  Gryl knocked the bolt from its rusted clasps and kicked the door wide, darting out from the church low to the ground. His skull throbbed where Thaedus had struck an earlier blow with a mace, and his wounded knee scraped across the landing, but Gryl would not be deterred. He would not be responsible for the deaths of the children or their guardian, his hands already soaked crimson with his deeds. The men howled in welcome like feral beasts as he leapt from the stairs. He’d no weapons but his hands.

  They would be enough…for now.

  The first of the men, a swarthy southerner with shoulders as broad as a stallion, lashed out with his spear. The point was a silver blur streaking toward Gryl’s face. He deflected it before it could bite, catching the flat of the blade against his forearm and sliding along the shaft. The warrior backpedaled in an effort to reset, but Gryl had momentum on his side. He clasped the man’s wrist to hold him steady and drove a shoulder into his sternum. There was a muffled pop as something gave way in the southerner’s chest. He stumbled and Gryl followed, twisting the man’s arm about and stepping beneath it. A sharp, downward blow snapped the southerner’s elbow. He collapsed with a scream as Gryl claimed the warrior’s weapon, spinning its gleaming head about to face the others, slashing through the man’s throat as he did. A quiet thump signaled the southerner’s death as Gryl set his stance.

 

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