Marked for Death: The Lost Mark, Book 1

by Forbeck, Matt

  Burch reach down and picked up a small, metal vial. He raised it to his nose and sniffed. He wrinkled his nose and then tossed the vial to Deothen, who plucked it out of the air. “Healing potion,” Burch said. “Powerful stuff.”

  “It might have been the vampire,” Levritt said.

  “Healing magics harm the undead, my son,” said Deothen. “That would have been like poison to one of their ilk.”

  “The horse’s trail is clear as a road,” Burch said. “Let’s ride.”

  The shifter mounted his lupallo and spurred it to a trot, heading to the northeast. The others fell into line behind the squat, powerful steed.

  The hunters rode without speaking, the rhythm of the horses’ hooves the only sound they made. Soon, the edge of the crater reared up before them. Burch picked out an aggressive switchback path that worked its way up the curve of the crater wall, winding its way through the scrub. As the riders rose along the ever-steeper wall, they grew closer and closer to the swirling gray mists that obscured the crater’s edge. The air grew close and oppressive.

  “Is it always like this?” Brendis asked.

  “Ever since the Day of Mourning,” Kandler said, relieved to have something to think about other than Esprë. “This wall of fog rolled out to the edges of what was once Cyre, and no one’s seen a ray of sunshine in the Mournland since, even four years on.”

  “I thought we were already in the Mournland,” said Sallah.

  Deothen chuckled at that but allowed Kandler to explain.

  “Mardakine is on the edge of the Mournland. We’re low enough that the mists rarely reach the crater floor, and we’re close enough to the border that we sometimes see the sun. If the wind blows in the right direction, we can get full days during which you’d think we were in Breland’s green and fertile fields.”

  “They say little can live in the Mournland,” said Sallah. “You have a solid people here, but I wondered how even they could manage in such a place.”

  “That’s life on the edge,” Kandler said. “If it wasn’t for the crater being right where it is, I don’t think we could make it this close to this place.”

  “Then why are you here?” asked Deothen. “This seems an inhospitable place for a town.”

  “Everyone in Mardakine except for Burch and me hailed from Cyre—even Temmah. After the Day of Mourning, the people had nowhere else to go.”

  “Other refugees fled the place,” Deothen said. “Your people could have joined the others in New Cyre or Sharn.”

  “That’s deep in Breland, not Cyre.”

  “But your King Boranel granted them the land for New Cyre, and the town is run by none other than Prince Oargev. How much more Cyran could it be?”

  Kandler laughed. “Look around you. You see this place, how gray and horrible it is? The people of Mardakine love sunlight as much as the next person. No one enjoys living in the shadow of the largest mass grave in recorded history.”

  “Then why?”

  “Back when there was a Cyre, this crater was part of it. The people of New Cyre hope to one day return to their homeland. The residents of Mardakine live that dream every day.”

  “Seems like a nightmare to me,” Levritt said as the hunters trotted further into the mists.

  “Boy,” Kandler said, motioning to the mists, “this is nothing. You’re looking at the shroud over the body.”

  The mists grew thicker until it was nearly impossible for Kandler to see farther than the horse before him. Burch called a halt. While the others calmed their mounts, which were all a bit unnerved by their strange environs, the shifter pulled out a long length of rope and used it to tie their horses together.

  “What’s this about?” Gweir said. “We are experienced riders, and these are the finest horses.”

  “You can still get lost,” Burch said. “That would slow us down.”

  “Birds lose their way in this stuff and fly into the ground,” Kandler said. “Even I get turned around sometimes, and I’ve been through here dozens of times. The mist is miles thick, and most who wander into it never wander back out again. Burch is the only one I trust here.”

  “If you get separated, don’t move,” the shifter told the knights as he double-checked the knots in the line. “Don’t run. You could fall off a cliff or into a gully. Stay where you are and stay quiet.”

  “Shouldn’t we yell for help?” asked Brendis.

  “Only if you’re already under attack,” Kandler said.

  Burch frowned. “Stay quiet. I’ll find you.”

  “What if you don’t?” asked Sallah.

  Burch walked back to the front of the line and mounted his horse. Just two horses separated him from Sallah, but the mists were already too thick for her to see him.

  “Yell all you want then,” Kandler said. “Better to die fighting.”

  The hunters fell quiet then. Only the sound of their horses’ hooves broke the silence. The mists muffled the noise as if they were made of cotton. It was like riding through dark, angry clouds, waiting for the storm to break all around. With no sun to guide them, it was impossible to judge the time. Kandler counted for a while but gave up when he neared a thousand.

  After what seemed like half a day, Brendis spoke. “How long does it go on like this?” His tone mixed reverence with fear, as if he found himself in the house of an angry god.

  “Miles,” said Kandler, “sometimes more than others. Or at least it seems that way. It impossible to tell while you’re in here.”

  “Haven’t we already gone for miles?” asked Levritt.

  “It’s slow going,” Kandler said. “Burch is barely able to see the trail as it is. You can thank your god we have a trail to follow. It beats falling into a sinkhole or wandering into a trap.”

  “Yes,” said Deothen. “I was just thinking how easy it would be to set up an ambush in a place like this. Assuming you could see through the mists.”

  “Or turn into it,” said Sallah.

  “They won’t chance it,” Kandler said. As the words left his lips, he wondered if he should be as confident as he sounded.

  “Why not?” asked Sallah. “They could destroy us before we could draw our blades.” She rested her hand on the pommel of her sword and peered into the mists.

  “For one, vampires like to sleep during the day. Two and three, they’re powerful and immortal, so they’re arrogant and think they have all the time they need. Four, they’re cowards. If there’s even an off chance one of us could do something to part the clouds for a minute, they don’t want to mess with us. Five”—Kandler smiled—“because I say so.”

  “Who’s being arrogant now?” Sallah asked.

  The hunters fell mute again and rode on. After what seemed another few hours, the mists began to thin.

  “We must be near the end of it,” said Brendis.

  Gweir smiled. “Finally! I can’t wait to feel the sun on my face. I shall almost be glad to hear Levritt whining about how hot it is under his armor again.”

  The young knight began to protest, but Deothen cut him off. “You are Knights of the Silver Flame, not children. Behave—”

  Deothen’s voice stopped dead as the mists swirled back and revealed the blasted landscape of the Mournland to him for the first time. The hunters found themselves atop the crest of a hill overlooking a wide valley that stretched on for miles to the north and south. The grass their horses trod upon was dead and gray, as were the few trees scattered on the opposite hill in the distance. A tar-black river ran through the center of the valley.

  No animals moved here. No birds sang. The only sound was that of the wind rustling through the grass and the scrub and the rumble of distant thunder. The whole of the land lay under the shadow of a thick, unbroken layer of gray cloud. Miles to the north, lightning flashed, but it came down in all colors of the rainbow rather than electric white. Some of the discharges were a bright black.

  A trail ran down the hill before the hunters and crossed the river at a shallow ford. Th
e rocks shoved up through the water there like broken bones through skin. Things lay all about the ford, scattered in various formations that were hard on the eyes, as if the mind did not dare to examine them too closely.

  “What are those?” Deothen asked as he came to a halt next to Kandler and Burch.

  “There was a great battle at that ford on the Day of Mourning,” said Kandler. Thousands died.”

  “But that was years ago,” Deothen said as he made the sign of the flame in front of himself. “Did the victors leave behind the losers’ armor?”

  “There were no victors,” said Kandler. “They all died. Those are their bodies.”

  Deothen frowned. Sallah’s eyes widened. Gweir and Brendis offered up quick prayers to the Silver Flame. Levritt retched over the side of his horse.

  Kandler stared out at the hard land below. He knew Burch was looking back at him, but he ignored it. He didn’t think he could bear seeing the pain in his friend’s eyes. The shifter never liked it here in the Mournland, and Kandler felt guilty for having to drag his old friend back here once more.

  “I heard the tales,” said Deothen, “but they were impossible to believe.”

  Kandler nodded for Burch to lead the hunters down the trail. “You’re sure to see stranger things.”

  The hunters rode down the hill after Burch in single file. Gweir and Brendis continued praying, and Levritt joined them. Soon they began a solemn hymn.

  Deothen turned in his saddle to scold them. “Quiet, please. If the Blooded are out there, I’d rather not alert them.” He called to Kandler before him. “I believe the servants of Vol have been spying on us since we left Thrane.”

  “All the way through Breland to here? That’s bold.”

  “Not during the day, of course, but every night when we staked camp I could feel them out there watching us.”

  “Did you ever see them?”

  “Once,” Deothen said. “One of them got close enough for Gweir to hit with a burning arrow. They stayed farther away after that.”

  Burch looked over his shoulder at Kandler and Deothen and shushed them. “You’re worse than the singers,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” Kandler asked.

  Burch pointed toward the ford. “Tracks enter the river there. Hard to tell after that.”

  Kandler cursed. “It would have to go through there, wouldn’t it?”

  “Shouldn’t we ride faster?” Sallah asked. “Now that we’re free of the mist, what keeps us from moving at speed?”

  “Respect for the dead,” said Kandler, gesturing at the bodies mounded ahead of them. “Once we’re past the battlefield, it’s a race to see who can find these Blooded of yours first.”

  As the hunters neared the battlefield, Levritt retched again. Kandler wrinkled his nose at the scent, but he refused to comment. It was never easy to see this much death. He’d been here more than once, and it still turned his stomach. Everywhere lay bodies, right where they’d fallen four years past. Many of the faces still turned toward the sky, their open eyes and mouths full of water from a recent storm.

  Not a spot of rot touched the skin of the fallen forms. Some of the suits of armor bore spots of rust, their luster long since tarnished away, as did many of the weapons, several of which were still coated in the dried, black blood of their owners’ foes.

  “This would be a thieves’ paradise,” Deothen said as he marveled at the scene.

  “Most thieves value their lives more than the number of rusty suits of armor they could stack on a wagon,” said Kandler. “Only the desperate enter the Mournland.”

  “What’s that over there?” Deothen asked. He pointed at fractured stone spire stabbing toward the sky at the edge of the ford. The top part of it lay in pieces near its feet.

  Kandler cocked his head at it. “That’s the monument the Mardakines put up here after the end of the War. Old Entiss carved the symbol of the Sovereign Host into an obelisk he cut out of the floor of the crater. About forty of us carted it out here one day and set it up. That’s when we cleared the path through the corpses. We figured moving them was more respectful than running them over.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen it?”

  “Burch and I haven’t pierced the veil for the better part of a year. The last time we came this way, the monument was untouched.”

  “The trail passes right by it, boss,” said Burch.

  “We’ll check it out.”

  As the hunters rode through the battlefield, Sallah sneezed. “What is that smell?” she asked. “It’s not rot. It’s … something else.”

  “Old flesh,” Burch said. “Rust. Stale water.”

  “All three,” Sallah said before she sneezed again.

  Kandler gazed out over the hundreds of yards of bodies. Near the path, they were stacked three and four deep, but they thinned out farther away. Some were in pieces, hacked apart during the battle before the event that killed the rest.

  Others were whole, their skin intact, their armor un-pierced. Their faces, though, bore looks of terror far worse than the pained grimaces of those who had met an earlier death.

  “What in the light of the Silver Flame happened here?” Deothen asked.

  “The Day of Mourning,” Burch said, just as if those four words said everything there was to be said.

  “We know that,” said Sallah, “but just what does that mean?”

  “No one knows for sure,” said Kandler. He struggled for the right words. “In 994, the War heated up again. Cyre was situated in the middle of Old Galifar, the old empire, which forced it to fight battles on many fronts. Thrane, Breland, Darguun, Valenar, Karrnath—they all charged into Cyre at one point or another.”

  “Who fought here on that day?”

  “Whose bodies are we riding through?” Kandler gazed out at the time-frozen carnage, rain-washed clean of all but the most encrusted of the blood spilled there long ago. “This was a three-way affair. Breland ran Argonth up along the Howling Peaks and the Seawall Mountains until it reached the tower at Kennrun, right where the mountains came to an end. Its army got off there and marched the rest of the way into Cyre, hoping to take the Cyrans by surprise.”

  “Argonth?” said Brendis. “The Floating Fortress? I hear it’s as large as a city, big enough to blot out the sun. Have you seen it?”

  Kandler nodded. “I served on it. Burch and I watched the Breland army march into Cyre, off to its doom. Soon after, our scouts brought word of a goblin force marching north from Darguun. It launched out of Gorgonhorn, a fort just on the other side of Point Mountain, the last of the Seawall Mountains. The Llesh Haruuc, the hobgoblin leader, wanted to extend the goblins’ reach, and like most scavengers he figured that he’d clean up after the real fight was over. The goblins got there too early, though, and their warchiefs couldn’t hold them back. The sight of the Cyran and Brelander armies clashing in this valley got their blood up, and they charged right in.”

  Kandler stopped talking for a moment.

  “What happened then?” Sallah asked.

  “No one knows for sure. The battle raged on for three days, and at the dawn of the third day, everyone died. Whatever happened, it probably didn’t start here. We’re almost on the edge of the Mournland. Most people think something horrible happened in the Cyran capital. Some figure the princess made a bad, desperate deal with the Dark Six, maybe just the Devourer, and it finally came time to feed the beast. Others guess that one of the other countries involved in the war caused it, but they all deny it. If they did, they probably didn’t get what they wanted out of it. The creation of the Mournland ripped the heart out of Old Galifar. Most of the smarter people I’ve met—wizards, mostly—think it wasn’t any of that. They have this theory about different ‘planes of existence’ that orbit our world, waxing and waning with respect to us like the moons. They think the planes aligned in a once-in-forever kind of event that broke down the space between us and those places.”

  “What do you believe?” S
allah asked.

  Kandler grimaced as the hunters trotted the last few yards toward the broken monument. “I look out there,” he said, “and I sometimes think that if any part of the world looks more like Dolurrh I’ve never seen it.”

  The justicar dismounted and walked up to the monument. The others did the same and joined him. The river gurgled a stone’s throw away. Kandler knelt next to the toppled part of the obelisk and closed his eyes. Deothen put a hand on his shoulder.

  “You surprise me,” the elder knight said. “I didn’t think you were a believer.”

  Kandler brushed the man’s hand away and stood up. “I’m not,” he said. His eyes burned red with suppressed grief, but his face remained grim. “Before we put up the monument, some of us searched the battlefield for our friends.”

  Kandler strode over to the wider end of the stone and knelt down to examine the break. “I buried my wife here,” he said.

  Sallah gasped. “Here, among all this death? Why did you not take her from this place and give her a proper burial?”

  Kandler shook his head. “This is the way she would have wanted it. Out there … that’s not her homeland. For better or for worse, right where we’re standing, this is Cyre.” Kandler bit the side of his thumb until the urge to weep went away. “This was her home. She belongs here. Someday, maybe it will belong to her again.”

  Everyone lapsed into a respectful silence, and Kandler turned back to examining the damaged monument.

  “It wasn’t lightning,” Burch said. He had come up behind Kandler to peer at the broken end of the obelisk too. “No scorch marks.”

  Kandler nodded, ignoring the confused looks from the others. “See the marks here near the break?” he said. The place where he pointed was covered with the marks of dozens of tiny chips smashed off the obelisk. “Looks like a warhammer or mace.”

  “Maybe both.”

  “Maybe lots of them.”

  “Whoever it was, they wanted this thing down bad.”

  “Who?” asked Deothen. “More importantly, why?”

  “Does it really matter?” Sallah asked.