Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1)

by J. Edward Neill

  Deep in the forest, far from the nearest dwelling of Tratec, the Furyons halted. Saul reined his horse before the three ragged men, and the rest of the riders fanned out to surround them. There was no escape from this part of the woods. Rider and tree blocked the way the Furyons had run, while at their backs the earth gave way like a waterfall over the edge of a rocky precipice.

  “Surrender or jump,” Saul challenged them. “The choice is yours.”

  The tallest Furyon among the three, his hair long and black and slicked with sweat, ripped his blade from the scabbard at his waist. It was a wicked thing, both edges graven with sharpened spines. Its bearer spat a venomous diatribe, and Saul understood even though every syllable was foreign. No surrender, he took the Furyon’s words to mean. They want to fight.

  Marlos was first to Saul’s side. The Gryphon captain pulled hard on his stallion’s bridle and leveled a spear-tip at the Furyon’s chest. “I say we take them alive. It’s not often we get the chance.”

  Saul thought it unlikely, but offered terms to the Furyons nonetheless. “Soldiers of the storm, if you grasp so much as a word I speak, surrender,” he told them. “Else your lives are forfeit.”

  The foremost Furyon seemed to grasp his meaning. He smiled with crooked, yellow teeth, rattling the blade within his sickly grey palm. “No Grae,” the fiend managed to spit in the common tongue. “Die Grae.”

  “Look at him.” Saul shouldered his battlestaff. “Diseased, half-starved, and still wants to fight.”

  Marlos snorted. “Well enough. He dies. The other two can watch.”

  Before Saul could argue, Marlos cocked his spear and hurled it. The point caught the Furyon dead in the chest, gouging a great hole in the man’s thin leather hauberk. The man crashed limply to the earth, his limbs a loose jumble atop a pool of spreading blood.

  “Look there,” Marlos shouted to his fellows. “I told you they’re not immortal. If the others move, kill them the same.”

  Saul sprang down from his horse and leveled his staff at the two who remained. Though spies they may have been, cowards they were not. The sight of their fallen brother served to enrage them. Well done, Marlos, he thought wryly. Like as not, we’ll get no answers now, only corpses.

  Like a pair of cornered beasts, the nearest Furyon kneeled to retrieve the spined sword, while the other ripped Marlos’ spear from its tomb in the dead man’s chest. With hate swelling in their eyes, they bared their teeth. “Die Grae,” they cursed. “Murg ae Grae.”

  “Kill them,” said Marlos.

  “No!” Saul whirled his battlestaff. “Dennov will want them alive. Save at least one.”

  The riders held back, spears cocked and ready. Marlos fumed, but kept his swords in their sheaths. Battlestaff swaying, Saul moved closer. Sick as men on their death beds. He observed the Furyons’ sunken faces and bloodshot eyes. Grey and skinny as starving rats. What’s the matter with these men? Do they all look the same without their armor?

  The Furyons seemed not to mind their condition. The one with the sword flicked out his blade, and Saul feigned retreat. Just as he expected, the Furyons sensed weakness and charged. The first slashed his toothy sword in a wide arc, a wild blow which he ducked beneath. The other lunged with the scarlet-tipped spear, grazing his thigh and shearing off many ringlets of mail. They don’t fight like sickly men. He circled them cautiously. Vicious still, like wolves.

  Marlos and the riders made no motion to interfere. They made a ring around the battle, ready to join only if it took a turn for the worse. The Furyons pressed Saul, and he whipped his battlestaff up and down, warding off a dozen killing blows. They’re not accustomed to fighting like this. I’m like water, but they’re like iron, rusty and slow to warm.

  For what seemed an eon, they wore themselves to fatigue against him, slashing and stabbing, but failing to break through his whirling battlestaff. After hurling the spined sword in frustration and missing, the lead Furyon charged him, but he struck the fool’s hand, powdering every bone therein. The second Fury made a last desperate lunge, but Saul turned the spear aside, and after three cracks of his staff, the man crumpled beneath him, his jaw, wrist, and ribs crushed like kindling beneath his pallid skin.

  Marlos’s riders descended from their saddles and came down upon the Furyons three to a man, binding them with a few merciless twists of their ropes. The captives howled in pain, but were soon gagged with the scraps of their own coarse, black shirts. “Miserable dogs.” Marlos trotted to Saul’s side. “I doubt they’ll talk. Even if they do, what’ll they say that we can understand?”

  Saul leaned on his staff to catch his breath, panting the same as the Furyons. “I’m not an inquisitor. I did my part. The rest is yours.”

  Marlos shook his head. “One day that staff of yours’ll break, and then where will you be?”

  Saul regarded the Furyons, whose broken limbs sagged at their sides while the Mormist men dragged them away. “Tell that to them,” he said without smiling as he vaulted back into his saddle.

  Marlos and his riders swept back toward Verod, captives in hand.

  Saul fell in behind them.

  His mood was no better for the small victory over the Furyon hounds. Nineteen days since Rellen’s leaving, and we remain unconquered, he thought. But how much longer can we hold?

  There had been small attacks, to be sure, a few Furyons with poisons and knives, but the bulk of the Furyon horde was unaccounted for. Only spies and assassins, smoke and skirmishers so far, he thought grimly as he trotted back into Tratec. But where’s the storm? When will the rest come?

  These were the same questions he asked himself every day, the musings for which there were no answers. Walking his weary horse over the Crossroad, he shook his head for the hundredth time. No battle today, he decided. Only a few feints again, a few pricks in our ribs.

  That day, Saul chose not to return to Verod with Marlos and the others. Until well after midday, he spent his hours walking the outer paths of Tratec. The forest was choked with thousands of tents and hastily thrown-up cabins. The rustic feel of the old city was gone, and the lanes between the trees clogged with all manner of mountain folk. He talked to dozens of them, commoners and soldiers alike, most of whom knew him by name, all of whom liked him. Most of the soldiers were bannermen of Ennoch and Ruel, and had turned against their missing masters to serve the common cause. Their blue, silver, and golden standards caught the breezes atop the roof of every dwelling, and their confidences seemed high. Unrealistically so, he thought each time he heard their laughter and songs. Unless they know something the rest of us don’t.

  By late afternoon, the clouds thickened and a cool drizzle cascaded down, though it was hardly the same as a Furyon storm. There were no bitter winds, no horns, and no chanting from the darkness in the east. Better still, there was no lightning. We live another day, he reassured himself again. Maybe Rellen will make it back in time.

  As evening settled over the forest, Tratec and Verod swam in a sea of twilit mist. The nightly patrols, rendered sightless by the haze, were summoned home, and work upon Tratec’s defenses slogged to a halt. Saul was among the last to return to Verod. His beard shaggy and wet, his boots sodden, he strode into the castle gates like a dog returning from a day of hunting. Ragged. He ran his fingers through his hair, his locks hanging in wet, curled shanks behind his ears. A mutt amongst the knights. His Gryphon tabard, so hewn and dirty from fighting and traveling, drifted in tatters at his knees. Too weary to sit with the soldiers in the hall, he plodded up the stairs toward the castle’s highest tower. It had once been Rellen and Andelusia’s tower, but they were gone now. Anymore, the tower was used for the men of Gryphon to hold council.

  The tower room was dark when he entered. Lighting a lonely candle, he sank into a chair and began to rub the grit from his fighting staff in vain attempt to restore its long lost polish. The elegant weapon was his last bond to home. Carved from Cour oak and capped with iron from Lumaur’s furnaces, he knew it like he would
a friend. For it is, he mused. Saul of Elrain’s last companion. Once most of the blood and dirt were gone, he took up a knife and made a small tick just above the staff’s bottom, where blemished wood became hammered iron. There were nearly twenty such ticks in the stonelike wood, all of them recently made.

  Lost in his careful carving, he never saw Marlos, who had stood in the shadows beneath the far windowsill all along. “Quite a chase this morn.” Marlos’s voice was barely audible above the din of the rain against the window. “You and your battle-stick never cease to amaze.”

  He kept whittling. “We can kill and capture dozens every day, but it hardly matters. Not when there’re hundreds of thousands.”

  “If only all of us were so talented at slaying them.” Marlos nodded. “How many dead have you cut into that stick of yours? Ten? Twenty? They say you fought for King Lumaur. Has your weapon lasted all these years?”

  He shook his head. “These marks are not for the dead. They’re for counting the days since Rellen rode west. I worry for him and Garrett.”

  “Aye. I miss them too. But it’s us you should worry about. We’re the ones caught ‘tween the Furies and Mooreye.”

  Finished with making his mark, he rose and joined Marlos at the window. There was no moon or stars tonight, only the darkness reigning above the treetops. “I worry not so much for ourselves.” He scratched his beard. “I worry for the people. The mountainfolk are good folk, undeserving of this. Their lords have abandoned them. Without us, they can’t survive.”

  “Or even with us,” quipped Marlos. “Unless the King comes riding in with twice what Barrok had, how do you think this’ll really end? You and me split on Fury pikes, that’s how.”

  He remained quiet for a time. There seemed nothing to say that had not already been said. The rain made such a clamor as to drown his thoughts out, pelting the glass and pummeling the tower stones.

  The deep silence lasted until the tower door swung open, revealing rain-soaked Therian, returned to Verod after a day of back-breaking labor. “Uncle!” the lad spouted, shaking a shower of water from his hair. “Fine evening this is.”

  “Have some manners, boy,” Marlos grunted. “Dry yourself before you drown us. This is a council room, not a mess hall.”

  Always the same with these two, he thought. But thank goodness the boy survived. Marlos might’ve cut his own throat had the boy not escaped Gholesh.

  Marlos, still shaking his head, rested his elbows on the sill and let out a weary puff. “No manners, this boy,” he groused. “I need Bruced back. He was the only one the lad listened to.”

  Therian joined them at the window. Saul shut his eyes, glad that uncle and nephew waged no further wars. It was in those moments, even as he felt his limbs relax and the pressures of the day begin to lift, a rumble of thunder shook the tower from top to bottom. That was loud…too loud for the night’s waning rain. The entire tower quavered like a blade of grass in the midst of a windstorm, shaken so powerfully he half-expected the floor to fall out from beneath him.

  “Thunder, lightning, and bloody rain.” Marlos gazed into the blackness beyond the window. “I wish my wife were here, and we in the bed. She’s the only one loud enough to drown out a roll of thunder like that.”

  Saul searched the night sky for flashes of lightning or another wave of clouds, but saw nothing. Another shock of thunder came then, and again the tower rattled. “The rain slows. But still the thunder claps.”

  “Aye. Sounds like something else to me,” remarked Therian. “Louder even than auntie, I think.”

  Marlos shot his nephew a dark look, but Saul shushed them both. A third crash of thunder sounded, a crack like Verod splitting in two, a sound even louder than the previous two. “Thunder, but not from the sky.” His breaths frosted the window. “Listen closely. Hear that? Are those footsteps? Do I hear a drum beating?” A hard stare into the darkness, another shake of the tower, and he glimpsed a sight that made his blood curdle in his veins. “Down there! Look!” He pointed to the treetops. “See it?”

  Beneath the cover of the countless leaves, just beyond Tratec’s outermost rim, an ember burned in the darkness. Like the blaze of a fire barely contained in its hearth, the collective glower of thousands of torches reached up through the forest, licking the sky, a hellish uprising. From within the fires, the heavy thump of marching drums announced what any who saw the red sky already knew:

  The Furyons had come.

  Tratec’s peace was ended.

  Marlos backed away from the window. He opened his mouth to order Therian to run to the hall and warn the others, but the tower door was already swaying from the lad’s exit. Marlos peered back outside, as if to make certain his eyes had not betrayed him. “Furies… I thought they’d never come.”

  “Remember the plan,” Saul cautioned. “We raid them until they reach the castle, we fight until the castle is doomed, and then we ride. The Furies have few horses. We just might have a chance to escape.”

  “My wife will never forgive me if I die here,” grunted Marlos.

  Saul was first into motion. All his thoughts of exhaustion and hunger were flung aside, all his sensations corrupted by terror of the Furyon horde. He and Marlos dressed hastily for battle and descended the stairs together, leaving the tower behind, an empty shell of cold stone. When he came to the bottom of the stairs, he found Verod already in a panic. Men were running hither and to, and their terrified shouts filling the castle from top to bottom. A few foolish words of warning from Therian. He regretted not halting the boy. And last month’s calm is undone.

  He watched as some men sprinted to gather their arms and rush into battle, while others bolted into the night. The panic was such that it seemed the Furyons had already battered the castle gates to splinters and were moments from storming inside, though it was not so.

  “Stop! End this!” Marlos roared. “Remember your training! We fight as one!”

  Only a few dozen men came to Marlos’s call. Most of the rest swarmed to the gate, spears, swords, and armored shoulders clanking uproariously. Among the few that came to Marlos’s side was Dennov. The young nobleman waded through a hundred men, moving like a leaf hurled through a gale.

  “They must listen if they want to live,” Marlos beckoned Dennov and thirty others into an alcove. “To fight the Furies without order is to die.”

  Dennov was no longer the serene, sympathetic lad Saul remembered from Gryphon. As he hunkered in the shadows of the alcove, he saw the lad’s face drawn, his eyes sagging from lack of sleep. “What’d you expect?” The nobleman said. “I pleaded with everyone to abandon this place, but few of you chose to go. I told you Rellen’s leaving would divide us, and lo, it has. These are no longer my men to control. You bargained for this, and so they’re yours.”

  Saul feared Marlos might draw his swords and carve Dennov to ribbons, but the captain of Gryphon only fumed. “Listen to me,” Marlos swore. “We had a plan, and a good one. If these fools choose not to follow it, they’ll all die before sunrise.”

  “Follow? Even now when the Fury storm descends?” Dennov’s laugh was a hollow one. “They saw Rellen’s blade, true enough, and their will to stay and fight was kindled. But he’s gone now, and things have gone just as I thought.”

  “What then?” Saul picked his moment carefully. “Advise us. What should we do to rally them?”

  “I don’t know.” Dennov shrank, fading into the alcove depths like a ghost. “And I can’t say I care any longer. We’re dead men. I’d run were I you. The farther away, the better.”

  Saul was stunned to hear it. Twenty days of planning, and he chooses now to cut us off. We’ll get no more help from this one. He’s not the ally Lord Emun wanted him to be.

  The men looked to Marlos, whose jaw was locked tight and whose eyes spat fire in Dennov’s direction. The clamor of men flying to battle receded from the hall. As the quiet deepened, another in the alcove stepped forward.

  “Milords, if I might speak,” said Adarros, emi
ssary of Orye. “The men…they resist Marlos because they don’t want to die for a Graehelm master. They came here to find common cause under a Mormist banner, but there’s no such thing. They hold nothing ill toward Marlos or his soldiers, but they want to win this fight for themselves, not for the place they’ve been taught all their lives to distrust. Perhaps if you appoint a captain of Mormist instead of a Grae man, they’ll fight as one instead of in tatters.”

  “Who?” Marlos’s face was red as flame. “Who’ll do it? No time to cast lots. We must pick a man, and quickly.”

  Again the alcove became hushed. Another twenty soldiers streamed past, torches flaring in their wake, but afterward all sounds within the hall died. Someone, anyone, worried Saul. Step forward. Claim control of this madness. If we flee or fall too quickly, everything we did was for naught.

  He watched Marlos back away, disgusted. He knew that Adarros, though wise enough to call for a Mormist champion, was no leader of men. He looked from face to face, from intrepid warrior to wearied stoneworker, but saw none who wanted the mantle of hero. “Shall it be no one?” he said. “I’ll fight the Furies no matter who’s master, but the thousands outside need a commander.”

  Another dread silence, and Dennov crept meekly back into the light. The torches hanging within the alcove caught the whites of his eyes, the flutter of his robes sounding like a bird alighting atop a wintered tree. The lad best beware. Saul stiffened. Marlos will string him up by his innards.

  “I’ll do it,” Dennov said miserably. “The men know me best.”

  Saul doubted the lad’s sincerity. “A moment ago you were fit to flee, and now you want to lead? Is this the courage of Mormist?”

  The rest of the men remained silent. Dennov lowered his head. “I’ve no choice. The others may not listen, but I’ll not be the one to condemn us. My father would cleave me himself if I fail. Rellen was right; he never should’ve had to ask for Mormist to fight. We should have risen up ourselves.”