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

by J. Edward Neill

  The village was as dead as she remembered it. Why the Furyons bothered guarding such a place, she knew she would never understand. Arjobec led her away from the tower and down a long, lonely alley. The barren street ended in a field just east of the city. When she emerged into the short, stiff grasses, she saw nothing but cold hard mountains and a narrow path winding between them.

  “The war is behind us,” said Arjobec. “Be glad, mistress. The hardest part of our voyage is nearly finished.”

  She looked back to the dead village, its shadows long and forbidding even in the bright daylight. “Should I be happy? So far you have moved me from one grave to the next.”

  “I understand, mistress.” He rubbed some hidden soreness in his neck. “You’ve every right to be angry. I only wish you’d try to embrace this life. You’re my master’s chosen. It ails me to see you content in one instant, miserable the next.”

  She stared hard at him, her gimlet green eyes dark as leaves at twilight. “If I ever seem content, it is only to placate you. You are a Fury, after all.”

  “Well and true. But you know I’d never harm you.”

  “I know, but you will deliver me to someone who might. You are plenty kind, but not so kind as to take me home.”

  “No, I suppose I’m not.” He shook his head, slow and sad.

  “Then perhaps you will do me one small favor.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Learn to expect no smiles, and be happy for the few you get. They will be rare, I promise you. In time, it is possible I might become as your master wishes me. But until then, I am dead. I look into every window and see death staring back. Every mountain seems a tomb, and every tree a perfect place for a noose to hang. You and yours have killed me. What other way could I possibly be?”

  For once, Arjobec was struck silent. Sagging in his saddle, he led her eastward, crossing over one last field before descending into the rocky vale beyond. Soon the tower and dead village were nothing but memories, quickly fading. She and her barrel-bellied stallion trod over rocks and weeds, streamlets and shallow, grey-watered puddles. The vale between the mountains was a wasted, weathered place, beaten by years of wagon wheels and horse hooves. “The way to the sea,” Arjobec explained. “And to Morellellus beyond.”

  With a heart as hard as the stone beneath her stallion’s shoes, she gazed through everything. The sky was bright and blue, the mountaintops gleaming with snow, but she wished for clouds, rain, and ash. To drown the Furies, she wished so hard it hurt. Wipe them out, and send me home.

  The Shadower

  After five days on the Furyon road and five nights of sleeping on cold stone and dry, crackling grass, Andelusia drew nearer to the Furyon harbor.

  There were few trees any longer, and ever less fauna. Most things on the path to the sea looked dead or dying. She saw carcasses rotting by the wayside, man or animal or somewhat else. She saw trees with husks sodden and split, brown bark turning black and curling as though aflame. It all happened recently. Not more than a month ago, she believed. Arjobec is lying when he says Furyon is more beautiful than Graehelm. If everything they pass wilts and rots, what must their homeland look like?

  She was tired, so very tired. She saw few shadows at her back any longer, only the hard road and the bleak horizon. Nights spent toiling at the Rockbottom or wandering in Grandwood were nothing compared to riding in the mountains. Her bones throbbed beneath her skin, while her eyelids hung like lead curtains over her eyes, wanting to fall forever closed. Even her stallion looked exhausted, plodding over broken rocks and meandering between black-barked trees more like a bitter old donkey than the proud beast he was. Worst of all were the Furyon rations Arjobec had secured from the dead city. Bread like boulders, wormy oats, and bricks of meat doubtlessly salted in a tomb, she ruminated. How do men make war with such stuffs in their bellies? Might it not have been smarter to stay home and eat richly than to invade Graehelm and sup like rats?

  On the sixth day since leaving the tower, during a warm but cruelly windy afternoon, she and Arjobec arrived at the outskirts of an abandoned Furyon war-camp. It wounded her gaze to see the evidence of the Furies’ existence. She glimpsed fire pits filled with ash, flattened and scorched patches of earth, and hundreds of trees brutally hewn. As she rode through the camp, she smelled something foul in the air, an unfamiliar scent carried along the breeze. Salt? Fish? Corpses? Nothing good, to be sure.

  The war-camp fell behind her. An hour later, the road snaked into a warren of leafless trees whose skeletal arms crowded her on both sides. She disliked the haunted woodland more than all the other places. Whatever phenomenon had slain the trees had done so mercilessly. Every limb looked like a corpse’s broken bones, and every sheaf of rotting bark like gangrened skin. She heard no birds, saw no squirrels, and smelled no life. The Furyon presence had killed the place, same as they kill everything.

  “Must it all die?” She felt dangerously bold today. “Is the Fury vision to make everything a graveyard, or is the point not to conquer Graehelm, but to kill it?”

  Arjobec struggled to conjure an answer. “There are casualties in war, mistress. Not all of them are human.”

  “Do not the trees breathe the same as we?” She gritted her teeth. “What of the animals? What will they eat when every tree rots and every field smokes from Fury fires?”

  “All good questions, mistress. I beg you; save them for another time.”

  She dared not push him much further. Rather than argue, she concentrated on the road, which Arjobec promised her was nearing its end. The mountains faded at her back. She saw the forest ahead, dead and dry, but just beyond it she caught sight of a tower. A dagger of stone, the tower jutted above the scarred landscape. It was no work of Mormist, but a Furyon edifice. “The first of four,” Arjobec explained. “We’re less than a day from the harbor. We may make it yet.”

  “Will we…sleep in it?” She grimaced at the tower.

  For once, his frown mirrored hers. “No. We’d not be welcome. The towers are for the Emperor’s men. Their masters are from Malog, come to observe the war. We’ll ride past and be happier for it.”

  A few hours more of slogging through the dead forest, Arjobec brought her near a second tower.

  It was taller than the first, brooding over the flat, water-sluiced hinterlands. It was a crooked place, looking like a sword dangling over the neck of a prisoner unseen. She blanched when she saw three riders emerge from its gates and sweep across the shallow waterways toward her. Our luck has run out, she feared when she saw their black pikes leveling. I will hang from the gibbet by next morning.

  And then the Furyons came, masked and malevolent. They slowed their horses and ordered Arjobec to stop, which the old soldier did without question. The Furyons captain, a tall, powerful man with a hooked nose and blue-veined skin, reined up his massive black steed and sidled nearer.

  “Mother of Malog…” she heard Arjobec curse beneath his breath. “’Tis Master Ceres.”

  Ceres of Malog passed his pike to the rider beside him and dismounted. She gulped hard when he glided past Arjobec and snared the reins of her stallion. His was a ghoul’s gaze. The veins beneath his pallid cheeks pulsed with a corpselike blue, while his lips were crooked, grey teeth protruding from his gums like little headstones.

  The two lesser Furyons remained still and stoic, but Ceres’s eyes were all for her.

  “Does he mean to kill me?” she whispered to Arjobec without breaking gazes with Ceres.

  Ceres sent Arjobec a silencing glare. The ghoulish Furyon walked once around her stallion, sniffing her like a wolf, penetrating her raiment with every flicker of his eyes. His inspection complete, he reached up and wrenched a lock of her hair out from its covering rag. “Grae,” he said in his profoundly thick accent. “Fire.” Rubbing several strands of her hair between his calloused fingertips, he smelled her as though she were spun of a scent that fascinated him. Then he let her hair fall to her shoulder and croaked something of significance
to Arjobec.

  Ceres and Arjobec traded words at length, and she sat numbly in her saddle. The worst of them thus far, she thought of Ceres. Worse than the tower guard, worse than the men on the bridge, worse even than the Pale Knight. Who are these people? What is Malog? I am a dead woman. Send me a sword, that I might take one of them with me.

  As Ceres spoke, his words fell into the air like dust from a dead man’s jaws. The sword on his back, its pommel horned and its crossbars made of blackened bone, seemed to pulse and thrum and cast a darker shadow than seemed possible beneath the clouded sky.

  The conversation between Furyons lasted for what felt like forever. She was certain this was the end, that Ceres would strip her down from her horse and do whatever it was Furyons did to woman captives. She tried to defy her fear, but felt her skin go cold beneath her woolen throw and sackcloth dress. Do not blink. Do not tremble. You knew all along what your end would be. Do not give them the satisfaction of weeping.

  Whatever Arjobec’s argument was, the old man gave it passionately. Ceres listened, and afterward uttered something which halted the old soldier’s breath in his throat. “Is it true?” Arjobec asked her when the Furyon knight finished. “No, it can’t be.”

  “What cannot be?” She bent her brow, but Ceres wrenched Arjobec’s attention away.

  The conversation continued. Arjobec was sweating, and Ceres smiling. She wanted to know what they were saying, and though she knew they spoke of her, she gleaned none of the details.

  Come the end of it, Ceres patted Arjobec in the chest with a black-gauntleted hand and grinned in her direction like a vulture leering at a corpse soon.

  “Go, Grae-fire,” the Furyon knight growled.

  “Go where?” she asked, but Ceres walked away.

  Ceres and his pair of Furyon knights shouldered their pikes and rode back to their tower. Arjobec leaned against his horse and sighed. He looked older somehow, the lines in his face drawn like rivers of rain across parched earth. “The harbor.” He gestured eastward, where the last of the hills died and the coastal hinterlands fled toward the sea. “We must leave, and quickly.”

  “They are not going to kill me?”

  “No.” He smiled thinly. “They wouldn’t dare.”

  “Ceres…” She said the name as though it belonged to an object, not a living thing. “What was he? Is he sick? Or is it just the mountain air again? You know, the air that makes men look like corpses?”

  Arjobec’s smile fell away. “Make light if you wish, mistress. I’ve saved your life again.”

  “A life not worth saving if you keep me in the dark.” She shot him her coldest look. “Every Fury ghost we meet, you say afterward you have saved me. What is it then? Why am I not mounted on a Fury wall? What do you tell them? Why am I still alive?”

  He gave her nothing, but mounted his horse and beckoned her to follow. Another time, another place, perhaps not so near Ceres’s tower, she might have defied him and refused to go. On the ship to Morellellus, she promised herself. I will corner him. He will tell me everything. Or I will hurl myself into the sea.

  She rode. The mountains fell farther behind her. As the day died and the setting sun lit fire to the skies, she and Arjobec camped in the grasses betwixt a hundred streams. Ceres’s tower was nothing more than a black needle on the horizon, and the next tower not nearly close enough to seem threatening. The eve drew on, and the clouds smashed themselves to pieces against the high peaks at her back. The stars emerged, twinkling like tiny coins scattered across night’s thoroughfare, while the moon shined upon the coastal flatlands. After a supper eaten in silence, she lay her head down upon her satchel. Another day gone. She stared blankly at Arjobec’s campfire. And tomorrow, the sea. And by evening, my last glimpse of Grae. And then, the nothing beyond.

  But Arjobec’s was not the only flame in the hinterland’s wide, empty wilderness. As she lay, she caught sight of another fire, a tiny red glow flickering in the darkness. The dark spike of Ceres’s tower lurked in the background, but the unfamiliar fire was much closer. “Are there other travelers out here?” she asked Arjobec.

  “Not likely, mistress,” he murmured.

  She nodded toward the distant glow. “Then what is that?”

  He glanced over his shoulder and shrugged. “An outrider perhaps. Or a scout.”

  “Why scout that which is already conquered? There are none of us Graefolk left. You have killed them all.”

  “You ask too many questions, mistress. Were you hoping to escape tonight? Did the fire change your mind?”

  “No, I know escape is impossible.”

  “And why is that?”

  “If you answer my questions, I will answer yours.”

  He did not, and silence reigned. She watched the distant flame for as long she could, and afterward plunged into exhausted, dreamless sleep.

  Arjobec was friendlier in the morning.

  Ceres of Malog was nowhere to be seen.

  As the sun crept over the horizon and she breakfasted, she watched and waited for the right moment to ask what had burned in mind since yestereve. “Who is Ceres?” she finally asked. “Why were you afraid of him? And what about his sword? It was…breathing.”

  “Why do you ask so much?” Arjobec sighed.

  “Because I want to know. What can it hurt?”

  “Best you forget Ceres, mistress. I didn’t expect him to be here.”

  “I will not forget,” she argued. “How could I? Give me this one answer and I will ask nothing more. For today at least.”

  Shaking his head, Arjobec rose to break camp. Today was his day to worry, she guessed, for she caught him glancing toward the mountains, seeming nervous that Ceres’s tower remained visible. While he toiled, she stayed put, bottom planted like a tree root atop the dew-sprinkled loam. “Mistress,” he conceded at length. “Ceres and those like him aren’t to be trifled with.”

  “Why? Is he a murderer? A madman? Some kind of monster worse than the other monsters?”

  The way he sagged suggested all three might be true. “Ceres is one of the twelve,” he said while packing his saddlebags. “A favored lieutenant of Chakran, renowned for his service in the wars before this one. He’s a warlord of Malog, the citadel of the Emperor, where other Furyons don’t go. Ah, but I shouldn’t tell you these things.”

  “Why do other Furies not go there? What makes him so special?”

  “Moon and stars, you’re persistent. If I answer, might we go? If we hurry, we may make the ships. But if we’re slow, Ceres might see us arguing and change his mind.”

  “I will ride as fast as I can. Now answer me.”

  Arjobec halted his work. He leaned against his horse, gaze gone into the sapphire skies where clouds no longer reigned. “They say the Emperor’s twelve aren’t men, but the shadows of Malog come alive. What I believe doesn’t matter, but most Furyons will tell you that creatures like Ceres aren’t so much the guardians of the Emperor as they are the whisperers in his ear. You met another in Orye, I think. Perhaps you remember him, the man with the snake blade, the only one in the room who truly had the Emperor’s attention. He was Vom, newest among the twelve, but by far the most feared.”

  She remembered the shadow man well. He glided into the room after the red-sun cloaks, she recalled. He said things about me in his language. He looked at me like I was made of gold, and the Emperor watched me thereafter.

  “What’s the matter?” Arjobec looked concerned.

  “Nothing,” she lied. “Maybe you were right. I ask too many questions. Tell me nothing more of the Emperor and his shadows. Put me on a ship and take me to this paradise of yours.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Please. Be done with it.”

  That morning, Arjobec led her toward the Furyon harbor. She was glad just to get away from Ceres, from the Emperor, from everything. If this was to be her final day in Graehelm, the coastal hinterland felt far from the worst place to spend it in. In the tall, swordlike grass, pools
of shallow water mirrored the sapphire sky, while serpentine streamlets undulated toward the sea. She looked northward, where a row of spiny hills struck upward like teeth against the prairie, and then southward, where the dry reeds and pale grasses ran to the end of forever. She knew why the land here thrived. He took me here on purpose. He wanted me to see one last bit of life before he locks me away forever.

  That afternoon, she approached the Furyon harbor.

  After leading her over a last rampart of rocks and grey loam, Arjobec took her beneath the shadow of another tower, beyond which lay a vast Furyon campsite. As her stallion trotted into the sands, the sun was just beginning its descent, plummeting behind the mountains as if not willing to witness her departure. The way to the harbor was a grim one. She saw bones in the earth, skulls and ribs and spinal remains. How many? She wondered at the carcasses. Do they not even bother to bury the dead? Does this tower have another Ceres? Why are so few Furies here?

  Startling her, Arjobec grasped the reins to her horse. She looked at him and then to the east, where the failing sun set a dazzling fire on the edge of the boundless sea. The foaming water and crashing waves were visible now, waging war against a pair of cliffs, beneath which some two dozen Furyon vessels lurked like monsters atop the water.

  “The ocean…” She shivered. “Might be pretty if not for the ships, the tower, and the bones.”

  “Beautiful nonetheless,” said Arjobec.

  “How can you say that?” She tore her gaze away.

  “I was a mariner once, during my youth,” he replied. “We followed these waters to many places. It wasn’t always war for us. There’s not always been so much death.”

  “What is a mariner?” she asked, not truly caring.

  “A master of ships, a watcher of the stars, a guide across the open oceans. A mariner is all of these things. I long for those days to return.”

  “So take me to a ship and steal me away.” Her eyes remained shut. “Sail me as far as you want, so long as we go somewhere other than Furyon.”