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

by J. Edward Neill

  “They came to us on my birthday. The Archithropians needed a scribe, and who better than me? I was no warrior. I was too meek, too skinny. Perhaps if Father hadn’t taught me so well, they’d have marched right past us. But my words were sharp, and my tutelage better than any other farmboy. It was either do as I was told, or hang from my father’s rafters. I hoped they might take me far from the war, that I might do my work peacefully, but no. They took me to battle and bid me record every horror they inflicted. I saw things. I learned things. Whole cities burned. Entire armies rose up from death to fight those whom once they protected. There were storms, always storms, as one by one the warlocks of Archithrope descended upon Nivil cities and cast them into oblivion. I wrote all that I saw. I saw too much. How many hundreds of years did I write? I can’t remember. I filled whole tomes with what I witnessed: the bone pits beneath the earth, the decade-long dusks, the men like ghosts, and more.”

  “Hundreds of years?” Marlos scoffed.

  “The world was different then.” Dank shook his head. “And as I said, I learned things. The small spells you’ve seen me work are nothing held up against the magicks flooding the world in Archithrope’s day.”

  “How did you survive?” asked Saul.

  “The truth?” Dank’s eyes went blank. “Sometimes I forget. We marched around the world a hundred times, it seemed. It was how long? Five hundred years…maybe? I returned home. My farm was gone. My valley…gone. I never found what became of my father or where his tomb lay, if they even gave him one. When I escaped later that year, I lived in exile in the far south. You’d call it Thillria today. I spent unknowable years as a hermit on the shores of the Selhaunt, wanting to forget what I’d seen. But then I heard a rumor. The war was over, they said. Niviliath and Archithrope were destroyed, and the artifacts lost in a maelstrom that lasted a decade and left no soul alive. I had to see it for myself, so I returned to the north. I took a ship to the eastern coast of what is Mormist and I crossed these very mountains. I came to the small kingdoms of those who had fled the fighting. They warned me to go no further, but I did. I walked until my shoes had no soles and my ribs jutted so sharply against my skin it hurt to breath. And then I arrived. It was just as they said. Niviliath and Archithrope were gone. I wandered for many years west and east, and I found only ash and crumbled ruins, the remains of the war, the earth marked by endless, uncountable tombs.

  “I went back.” Dank sagged, and the campfire began to fail again. “But there was nothing. The Archithropian fortresses were dust. The dark cities that had spanned days in every direction were gone. It was the artifacts’ doing. The slow entropy of the evil things the Tyberians rebuilt consumed them in the end. All the lands north of Graehelm, including all of what are Elrain and Furyon today, were destroyed. ‘The infinite battlefield,’ they used to call it, though you wouldn’t know it today. So many years have passed. The remains of the war are no more than fossils and dust, most of them long since grown over with green pastures.”

  Dank’s eyes were wet with sorrow, and his usual boisterousness collapsed into shadow. Huddled beneath his cloak, Garrett looked into the little man’s eyes and pitied him.

  “Are there others like you?” Saul broke the silence. “Others who…learned things?”

  The flash of darkness in Dank’s eyes told the truth of it. Garrett knew what was coming.

  “There are some,” Dank said bitterly. “But we’ll not talk of them. Not tonight.”

  That night, a dreamless sleep claimed Garrett’s mind.

  Come mid-morning of the next day, he awoke to the snap and crackle of a roaring campfire. His mind felt muddy, and his footsteps on the frosted ground plodding and painful. I should not have slept so deep. I am losing my edge. He rejoined the others in their clearing, and saw that Marlos, for all his surliness, had shot a deer. The creature’s haunches were sizzling above the flames. When he sat down at the fire, Dank passed him a seared strip of game, which he ate without a word. Saul and Endross were next to rise, and they took their strips of meat as though they were coins thrown to beggars.

  After the meal, all became quiet. The trees shivered in the wind and the sun went into hiding behind a somber layer of clouds. Garrett leaned against the trunk of a grey-needled spruce, his heart full shadows. He saw Ser Endross suffering. The knight sat with arms crossed over his shins, rattling in his armor like dice inside a gambler’s cup. Endross’s skin was white as death, his face like pale bark on a tree dangerously close to death. “Now is the part when you tell us what happens next,” Garrett said to Dank as he watched Endross shiver. “And when you propose a remedy for our wounded friend.”

  The darkness in Dank’s eyes had vanished with the sunrise. Eyes half-hidden by his cowl, the little warlock looked as serene as ever. “We march in an hour. We’ll help the good ser get a bit further down into the valley and then take a day of rest. One is all we can afford.”

  “One day?” Marlos snorted. “The man needs a week. Look at him.”

  “One day,” repeated Dank. “He’ll live, I think. Five there were and five there must be, at least until we set foot in Furyon. The time for dying will come soon enough.”

  “Don’t talk about me as though I’m not here,” creaked Endross.

  Dank raised his palms to apologize. “I’m sorry. I meant no—”

  “I’m alive still.” Endross glared. “There’s no cold that can kill me. It’ll be swords for me in the end. The more, the better.”

  “I’ll give the ser this much.” Marlos chewed on his venison with a grimace. “He’s a braver man than I.”

  Endross adjusted his sitting position, wincing but not daring to cry out in pain. “I’m not brave.” His eyes gleamed with the fire’s reflection. “I’m angry. The Furies must pay for what they did.”

  “And for what they will do,” Garrett added.

  No Turning Back

  Ten days of marching in the cruel, craggy valleys east of Morg’s mountain, and Garrett witnessed Endross survive.

  For the first two days, he kept vigil as the burly knight was tormented by the flux, his coughs rattling in his lungs. Marlos and Saul admitted they expected to wake and find the knight stone dead, but it never happened. Garrett was not as surprised as the others when the flux waned. When sleeping on cold stone, marching beneath bitter rain, and supping on poorly-cooked venison would have slain lesser men, Endross proved too powerful. They knew the knight would live when he began eating like a lion again, chopping wood for the night’s campfires, and singing throaty dirges in the old tongue of the Triaxe knights. Garrett could not speak for the others, but to see Endross awaken each day made him believe it might be possible to make it to Furyon after all.

  Though whether we live a day beyond that is another matter.

  On the eleventh morn, he awoke in a valley beside a silver-watered stream. The vicious rains of last night were departed, and the dawn bright enough to make him wince. A last day of comfort, he thought as he stretched and toyed with Lorsmir’s sword. In another life, I might have lived here.

  The valley felt like any of the hundred he had already crossed. Grass as green as moss swayed beneath his boots like a carpet laid for a king. Grey-capped mountains vaulted up on either side, their slopes swallowed by oceans of trees. The stream was deep enough to be full of trout, the timber on the mountainsides strong enough to build a cabin with. It might have been perfect, if not for Furyon.

  “Today’s the day.” Dank smiled grimly as he joined the others for breakfast beside the stream.

  Sitting in the impossibly soft grass, Garrett chewed on a strand of twice-cooked meat and sipped from a cup of cool water. Everyone was here and as alive as yesterday. He saw Saul, stoic and serene, waiting for someone else to speak. He saw Marlos, who wanted to darken the day with his usual cynicism, but who had largely held his tongue ever since slaying Morg. Endross was ever present, looking hale as a bear as he pried bits of wood from the blade of his axe.

  “You have yet to tell u
s how you intend to cross the sea.” Garrett cut the tension cleanly.

  Dank blinked and pointed to the far end of the valley. “See there? The Furies aren’t far beyond. We’ll follow the stream and climb down the rocks. If I remember right, there’s a field at the bottom.”

  “And then what?” asked Marlos.

  “The harbor. There’ll be hundreds, probably thousands of the enemy. We’ll find high ground and wait until nightfall.”

  “What good’ll that do us?” Marlos used his teeth to tear a strip of meat in half. “There’ll still be thousands in the dark.”

  “He means to steal a boat.” Garrett gazed hard at Dank. “He wants us to sail it to Furyon.”

  “Correct.” Dank grinned slyly.

  “He didn’t bother to ask if we know how to sail,” said Marlos. “Perhaps he forgets we’re from Graehelm. Prairies and oak forests make for good mariners the same way fleas make for good houseguests.”

  “He has a plan for that, too,” Garrett guessed. “Like everything else, he has yet to tell us about it.”

  “Right again.” Dank licked his teeth. “There’s a time for everything.”

  Garrett shouldered his sword, donned his black hauberk, and stood sentinel in the grass until the others finished their breakfasts. The day’s journey began just as the sun burned the last of night’s clouds away.

  Following Dank’s lead, he and the others trailed the crystalline stream’s eastward slithering, striding on both banks in comfortable silence. His gaze was set against the sun, and for once his mind uncluttered with the horror of all that had happened in Gholesh. If this is to be our last road before the end, it is not so bad, he thought. We should have died on the mountain, a meal for monsters. The morning was cloudless and warm. The sweet smells of summer drifted through the trees and across the valley, the fragrance of a hundred thousand pines tasting like honey on his tongue. A chorus of birdsongs echoed from every hollow, and everywhere he looked he saw fauna peering out from the shadows, the creatures not knowing what to make of the strange men they had never seen before.

  At valley’s end, a treacherous descent awaited. The bright-watered stream spilled over a tumble of ten-thousand year-old rocks, plunging over a rocky wasteland and into the coastal grasslands lying far below. Garrett took the lead, accompanied by Saul. Spending his childhood in the mountains had left him as surefooted as a goat, and no matter that one slip might mean the end of him, he leapt from rock to rock fearlessly.

  Halfway down, he heard boots falling on the rocks just behind him. “I smell the sea,” he heard Saul say. “It’s close.”

  “I have never been. Only west for me. Graehelm, Yrul, and Romaldar.”

  “So far…” Saul marveled. “And all of it in Emun’s service?”

  “Some of it. Not all.”

  Saul vaulted over a ledge and wended between a dozen boulders to catch up. “Let me see if I can make sense of this. You’ve been many times abroad, but not always as Rellen’s man-at-arms. You’re a fighter, more talented than most. You must have been in the Grae army, I imagine. Did you serve Ahnwyn? Another lord? I didn’t think you were so old. You can’t be more than five and twenty.”

  “I am five and twenty. But I was never in the army.”

  “So then…” Saul pressed. “You traveled for your own fulfillment, or maybe you were a mercenary? I only wonder because the others have said so much, and you so little.”

  He supposed the truth was harmless anymore. So far from home and the ears of those few he loved, he imagined no injury could be done. “You wonder where I learned to fight.” He did not look at Saul when he spoke, but instead at the grassland far below the rocks. “I was Ennoch’s man.”

  “The traitor?” Saul asked it mildly.

  “When Father died, Ennoch took me in. He needed a spy, and I was young and impressionable. My family did not want it, but young men rarely listen to their mothers and sisters. He sent me to Triaxe, where men like Endross showed me the way of the sword. I found my calling at Gallen Hold. They used to put me in the courtyard against ten men at a time. I thought it was entertaining. I was a fool.”

  “And you spied?”

  “After Triaxe, I went deeper into Graehelm. I was young. I was brash. I was alone. I did not know the way of things. I did many tasks for Ennoch…I cannot tell you all of them. If Marlos knew…if Endross suspected...”

  “Our journey would unravel.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Does Rellen know?”

  He let out a hard sigh. “No. It was he who saved me from that life, and I never brought myself to tell him. If you know Rellen, you know he does not have many questions for the world. He is all dreams and deeds. What happened yesteryear matters nothing when set against what happens tomorrow.”

  As expected, Saul was not a harsh judge. The man of Elrain absorbed it all unflinchingly. After another thousand rocks crossed and a great deal of contemplation, Saul asked his final question, the one Garrett had been waiting for.

  “Does Dank know?”

  “I told him nothing.” He leapt atop a rock and gazed over the grasses spreading toward the sea. “But he knows all the same. It was me he waited for in Gryphon, or so he says. The silver bracer was meant for Rellen, but Lorsmir’s blade for me.”

  “Do you believe it?” Saul halted beside him.

  “It does not matter what I believe. Furyon must fall. That is all that matters.”

  Not long before twilight, the march slowed. The coastal grassland and its thousand streams were crossed, and the mountains were squarely at his back. Under a violet-streaked sky, he and the rest trailed Dank to the top of a rock-strewn mound, barely big enough to call a hill. The mound was treeless, and when he reached the top, he saw the lay of the land as well as any raven might.

  “Crows take my balls,” he heard Marlos curse. “Everything’s dead!”

  Perched like a tower upon the hard hill, Garrett looked out and saw the remains of what had once been a forest. The great swath of dead trees, their roots twisted and black, corrupted his gaze to the end of sights. “The tempest has been here,” he said without needing to ask Dank.

  It was true. The ragged scars of the Furyon storm blighted everything beyond the hill. The damage was incredibly widespread, the earth torn more than at Gholesh, and as noted by Endross, even more than by the storm that had taken Ahnwyn’s host. “It moved east to west.” The knight observed the direction the trees were bent. “It must’ve gone on for days.”

  Dank wagged a crooked finger at the devastation. “If you didn’t believe before, let this serve as warning. Storms and fallen trees are but the beginning.”

  “Oh, we believe plenty,” grunted Marlos.

  “You should.” Dank nodded. “The storm follows the Furyons. Wherever they go, life will end. It was worse in my day, but this is bad enough.”

  Garrett stood still on the hilltop. I need no more of this, he thought. I have seen enough.

  The others gaped for a while, amazed that the Furyons had survived the storm’s destruction. After searching the devastation for many solemn moments, Saul extended his arm. “One, two, and three. Can you see them? The towers?”

  They looked where he pointed. One after another, they picked out three distant spires lording over the battered landscape. The towers were black and seemingly cut from obsidian. Garrett knew they were of Furyon make, for their sides resembled the telltale ridges of Dageni armor, and their tops bristled with sword-like crenels. The towers were not so near that anyone inside could possibly perceive the travelers, but Dank hurried them down the north face of the hill nonetheless. “Wasn’t expecting those,” the warlock admitted. “We’ll head for the sea until sunset and cut back toward the harbor after dark. Keep quiet. Tonight’s not for dying.”

  The sun slipped lower. Garrett trailed the others into the outskirts of the destroyed forest, where no Furyons bothered to patrol, and where nothing lived. He picked his way between fallen, black-husked trees and he slogged thr
ough the shallow, muddy streamlets crisscrossing the forest floor. Dusk came quickly to the filthy land. Long shadows swept across all surfaces. Every tree he passed, he pitied, and every carcass he glimpsed felt like an injury the others could not feel. More animals have died during this war than men, he thought. The Furies will go hungry for their crimes.

  And then he heard the ocean.

  It began as a distant crash, the waves pushing and pulling against a shore he could not see. In and out of his ears it went, a thousand muted footsteps marching up and down the sand. He heard it booming through the trees, and after a while longer of walking, the voices of the others were drowned out. When at last the sky was stripped of daylight and few streaks of violet were all that remained, he glimpsed the starlit shoreline through the trees. Like the darkest of oils, the water crashed and swirled against jagged rocks. As likely to kill us as the Furies, he thought. Marlos will hate it especially.

  A while longer of skulking through the graveyard of trees, he halted. Dank had led the way to a wall of rock, a stark cliff jutting from the blighted soil like a dagger into the dark of night. The cliff was higher than the trees had ever been, barring the way forward. Like a curtain wall, it extended into the sea on one side and deep into the forest on the other.

  “We mean to go around it, not up it, I hope,” said Marlos.

  “Quiet,” Dank hissed. “Listen. We’re close.”

  The travelers became deathly quiet. Garrett heard it first, a low murmur riding beneath the sounds of the sea. “Voices,” he whispered. “Someone is shouting.”

  “Furyons,” Dank clarified. “On the other side of this wall.”

  Marlos grumbled. “So what do we do? Swim around the rock? Surprise them by bursting out of the ocean? Garrett kills the first thousand, and we another dozen or so?”

  “Silence. Just follow,” said Dank.

  Garrett was first to file in. He crept along the cliff wall, trailing Dank at a dozen paces. Where he went, no starlight reached. The cliff and the murdered trees blocked out too much of the sky, drowning everything in darkness. He saw Dank’s eyes glitter green in the pitch, and he followed as the little man cut through the shadows like a knife. When he and the others caught up, they found Dank standing before a great fissure in the wall, a crack in the stone no taller than the top of the little man’s head.