Hand of the Hunter: Chosen of Nendawen, Book II

by Mark Sehestedt

  Tasting it.

  Savoring it.

  Reveling in it.

  And when she woke, the world was cold. Dark. The chill of winter stone and sunless soil. Jatara could feel it all around her. The mountains’ height. Their roots, buried in cold ground. The weeping of a thousand winters burying all in cold. In dark. In emptiness.

  So empty …

  She woke to hunger, and that overwhelmed everything else.

  The hobgoblins had made their camp only two days’ march from their nearest shelter—a cave stashed with provisions made worryingly low by a long, hard winter. But after this day’s work, their worries were no more. They feasted on horseflesh, and better yet, on manflesh. It was a good day’s work.

  An ambush on the thirteen out of Highwatch had not been without sacrifice. They’d lost nine of their own—five to the pale woman with the strange, half-shaved head and one eye. That one eye had made them hesitate at first, for the god Gruumsh One Eye was hated and feared by their people. Just when they’d been on the verge of letting her go out of pure superstitious dread, she had dropped her steel and fallen to her knees, as if in a daze. As if Maglubiyet himself had stripped her soul and given it to them, an offering.

  They’d dragged the slain riders behind them—clothes and armor and all, back to their camp. The sun fell, and they stoked their fires, bold and full, to beat back the cold, but the clan knew the ancient way of the warrior. They took the horses’ limbs and ate the flesh raw off the bone, giving thanks to Maglubiyet and slaking their thirst in new blood.

  But the riders, the ten men and three women …

  These they cast in a pile after stripping them of their weapons. The Damarans and their leader had fought well, had brought glory to their gods. The clan would feast on them with all due ceremony after the proper rites.

  And so Jatara lay in the pile of corpses, amidst her slain companions. Because she had been the leader, because she had been the last to fall, because she had killed more than any other among her fellows …

  Because of these things the clan laid her topmost on the pile of corpses. They whispered prayers to Maglubiyet and sprinkled the blood of their feast upon her as they made the sign of the slain on her face and covered over her one staring eye.

  And just when their revel was at its height, when the warriors had slaked their thirst, filled their hunger, and settled into their self-satisfied celebration …

  Jatara woke.

  The thing inside her stirred, and with its stirring, her limbs twitched with life, and awareness returned to her, like the stoking of fire from dormant ashes.

  She blinked once, saw the stars overhead, framed by the snowcapped peaks, the darkness between them made all the blacker by the shine of starlight on frost.

  Jatara smiled.

  She could feel the wound on her right side, breaking all the way through muscle and bone, rendering her right arm useless. But that would be easily healed, given proper nourishment.

  Jatara blinked again and sat up, stirring the pile of corpses beneath her. She could hear the hobgoblins nearby reveling around their fires. She could feel the stamp of their feet as they danced their victory. The tremor their feet sent through the earth mirrored the beating of their hearts…

  … that sent the blood racing through their veins …

  … that filled the night with its song …

  … that called to Jatara and the new power within her.

  She tumbled off the pile of corpses, her pale feet striking the ground. Her killers had taken her boots. The leather would be flayed into strips, the strips braided to harness armor or perhaps a belt.

  Better this way, she thought. She could feel the pulse of their celebration in the ground. Could feel the stamp of their feet, the beats of their hearts, and the heat of the life within.

  Her stomach growled.

  Her mouth watered.

  She came forward out of the dark.

  The leader of the hobgoblins stood before the greatest fire, Jatara’s sword held high above his head. He had stripped down to a loincloth and gouged his flesh in honor of Maglubiyet. He roared. He sang his song of victory into the dark. He waved the steel of his victim for all his followers to behold.

  And then his victim stepped out of the darkness and into the heat of his fire. A blasphemy to the honor he did his god. She could feel the blood in his veins. So close. So hot. The life. The nourishment.

  She ran from the darkness, left arm outstretched, fingers flexed to rend.

  “Mine,” she said, and fell upon him. It was the one thing that would not leave Jatara’s mind. It set the rhythm of her heart. It sang in her blood. “Mine. Mine. Mine.”

  Killing the hobgoblin chief had been easy. Her fingers opened around his throat, closed, and pulled. His heart had still been beating when she’d ripped it from his chest. She’d done it so quickly that his people were too shocked to do anything but stand open-mouthed while their chief died. But it didn’t last. Many had weapons in hand already, and in moments every empty hand had found steel or club. Then the slaughter began.

  Jatara did not know how many blows she’d suffered. But the power was surging in her, the fire, burning and consuming and demanding ever more. Warm flesh and hot blood slaked her thirst, and her wounds healed. Broken bone fused. Torn flesh knit together. Even skin closed. And every strike upon her only fueled her fury. It did not take long for the hobgoblins to realize this foe was beyond any of them.

  The clan shaman, an old crone of a goblin, fell on her knees before Jatara and closed her eyes. On the back of the old crone’s eyelids, she had painted her skin so that they seemed to glow. “Blessed of Maglubiyet! Blessed of Maglubiyet!”

  Jatara crushed the crone’s neck beneath her left foot.

  By then, most had already fled into the dark, but a few still in the blood ecstasy of their celebration fought on. They died with the rest. Even as Jatara let the last broken, lifeless body fall from her grasp, the final footfalls of the hobgoblins faded into the mountains.

  So hot was the thing within her that she took no thought to find her boots or replace her torn clothes. She took only the sword that the hobgoblins had taken from her, then she was back on the hunt.

  And that was when she noticed.

  It had been many days since that wretched little wench had gouged out Jatara’s eye. The physical pain had lasted for days. The blow to her pride had never healed. But now …

  Jatara waved a palm in front of her face, just to be sure. Then, very carefully, like a baby bird taking its first step out of the nest, she closed her left eye. For the first time in days the world did not go black. She could see. The spirit inside her … the feast … it had not only brought her back from the verge of death. It had improved her. Not only could she see, she could see better than she ever had. Her vision could pierce the dark.

  And still, she knew which way her brother had gone. Even though he was dead, still some cord connected them, past and present, and if she wanted to she could point to the paths he had taken, like a child with her eyes closed can still find the sun.

  The trail was days old, but it had not faded to her new senses. Beyond sight or smell, she took the sense of the trail into her mind, like dry fleece soaking in a rich wine. The scent of her beloved and her quarry became one with her awareness. There was nothing but the hunt.

  Two days after the slaughter of the hobgoblins, Jatara came to a hollow in the hills filled with the strangest standing stones she had ever seen. A casual glance might have mistaken them for ice, but Jatara’s newfound senses knew they were crystal—albeit of no kind she had ever seen. Some stood almost straight up, many times her own height, but most leaned haphazardly at seemingly random angles.

  Kadrigul had gone in there, she knew, and part of him had never come out again. Still, Jatara could sense something of him deeper in the mountains. There was no trail there. It was as if he had disappeared inside the standing stones and reappeared many miles away.

  She did
n’t understand. But it was not understanding that drove her anymore. And so she continued on, deeper into the mountains.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AFTER HWEILAN TOOK HER FIRST UWETHLA, GLEED’S teachings filled every moment of every day, but Hweilan reveled in them. True, there were days when the rasping prattle of the old goblin’s voice grated on every nerve, like the ceaseless scritch-scratch-scratching of a windblown branch scraping against her bedroom window. But mostly she gorged on the new knowledge.

  Some days they sat huddled near his fire while rain pelted the lake and the wind set the entire tower and its covering bells to tinkling. She learned the names and natures of every tree and plant. She learned to make poultices and mix various herbs to speed the body’s healing. And she learned their opposites: which roots, barks, leaves, and buds could be used to make poisons ranging from the deadly to those that would merely numb the senses. She learned which roots and berries could be crushed to make a paste that would mask her scent and even hide her from creatures whose eyes saw heat in the dark. But these were the easy lessons.

  Gleed also taught her rites sacred to Nendawen and Dedunan—though part of Hweilan still thought of the latter as Silvanus. Of the nature of Jagun Ghen, she had seen much in her vision, but Gleed taught her the Lore—how generations of her people had learned to fight him. He taught her the words of power, and how to bind the words themselves with the uwethla. Etched into her skin, they would bind the Lore in her mind. But etched into arrows …

  “They are deadly to the demons of Jagun Ghen.”

  Hweilan and Gleed were sitting just inside the woods near the lakeshore. Through the branches she could see the decrepit tower, its myriad bells and trinkets twinkling in the late afternoon sunshine. A small fire burned in its ring of stones between them, and next to it lay a pile of fresh sapling branches, which Gleed was teaching her to shape and harden into arrows.

  “These demons can be killed then?” said Hweilan.

  She remembered the first night she had seen Nendawen. Green light had wreathed the black iron of his spear, and looking back, had there not been symbols etched into the metal and along the shaft? Had the light not leaked from them, like water eking through the first cracks of the summer thaw? Perhaps. Although her mind had been so numbed by terror and exhaustion at the time that she thought her newer knowledge might be coloring her memory. But she remembered one thing for certain.

  Seeing Nendawen and the spear in his hand, the thing—the demon—possessing Kadrigul’s dead flesh had done something she had not seen it do even when facing Kunin Gatar. It had feared. It had beheld the Master and the weapon in his hand with abject terror and despair leaking from every pore. It had forsaken its shell and fled. Nendawen had thrown his spear, and here again the details were cloudy, but she thought it had consumed the fell spirit. Eaten it like a choice morsel.

  Gleed pursed his lips as he considered her question. “Killed …? Hm. Well, that depends on what you mean by death. They are spirits, and if by killed you mean ‘cease to exist,’ then no. That is not possible for any spirit. But they can be …” His brows knit together, making the deep wrinkles of his face deeper still. “Captured. Contained. Rendered powerless.” Gleed shrugged. “Words fail here.”

  She looked down at the narrow shaft of wood in her lap. The arrow seemed a frail thing, but she had sensed the power in the words of their chant as they made it. A hint of that power leaked from the uwethla she had etched halfway up the shaft. It was almost like a scent, but this one did not hit the nose. It touched on something deeper, some lower part of the brain that was much more awake in beasts than men.

  “This will capture them?” she asked.

  Gleed smiled. “I am glad you asked.”

  She waited, and when he said no more, she said, “Well …?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “This is something that, to understand, you must see. You must experience for yourself. Tomorrow, we send this demon that hounded you back to the Abyss.” He smiled, showing all his sharp, yellow teeth. “Sleep well.”

  Hweilan lay in her pallet that night, remembering the horror of the days after she fled Highwatch. There had been that brief moment of elation, seeing her Uncle Soran coming for her when she’d been told all her family was dead. But her first look at his empty eyes, and she had known. It wasn’t her uncle. Something that knew only destruction and hunger looked at her through those empty eyes.

  That thing had chased her through the mountains, through the realm of Kunin Gatar, until the queen herself—with a little help from Lendri—had finally destroyed Soran’s body. But still the thing had come after her, filling Kadrigul’s body. Looking back, she realized that in her heart she had known that at the time, though she hadn’t stopped to consider it. When she did, she knew her instincts were true. Even after the body was destroyed, the demon found a new “home” and came after her. If it could do such things, move from dead flesh to dead flesh as if it were nothing more than changing clothes … then the real fight was against the spirit within. She had seen that in her visions and since gained understanding of it from Gleed’s teachings.

  But that did not make the thought of facing the demon again any easier. Had not Nendawen dealt with the thing already? Apparently not.

  And here, Hweilan’s visions were lacking. These most sacred rites were for the chosen few. The chosen one—the Hand of the Hunter.

  When sleep finally took Hweilan, the last night she’d spent in the Giantspires haunted her dreams.

  Emerald light sparking around barbed black iron.

  A presence of flame and hunger screaming as it fled across the cold water.

  A streak of black and green as the spear arced overhead.

  A maelstrom of darkness and light of a thousand colors.

  A scream that struck beyond hearing, searing itself into her bones.

  After that, the Master, his eyes glowing from the mask, framed by crooked antlers. His right hand dripped blood.

  Hweilan woke with a gasp.

  Gleed was just stirring the fire in the hearth. “You’re awake,” he said. “Good. Get dressed.”

  They walked through the woods most of the morning. Always uphill, the stream that fed the waterfall ever on their right. Gleed said nothing the entire time. It was the quietest he had been in a tenday or more. Standing outside the tower, the morning still only a glow above the jagged horizon, he had said, “Think on all you have learned. Make the Lore fresh in your heart, ready in your mind. For what you are about to learn, you will need every lesson. Stay sharp.”

  After that, nothing but the sounds of their breathing and footsteps and the forest around them. Even the forest sounds grew quieter by the mile, as if they were entering a temple where silence reigned and the very air demanded whispers.

  The land grew steeper, the trees thinned, and by midmorning they were climbing stone outcroppings as often as they walked deer trails. Despite his age and apparent frailty, Gleed scaled them, agile as a monkey.

  They stepped onto the height just shy of midday. It was a flat area, completely treeless, the ground mostly windswept grass and lichen-encrusted stone. It was the first time Hweilan had seen so much sky since … how long? Since she’d come to this strange land.

  The few clouds that marred the overhead blue seemed very close. The frayed gray hems of their skirts seemed almost close enough to touch. Beyond the rim of the height, the land fell away in hundreds of miles of forest, broken only by the silver sparkling of rivers and Gleed’s lake, far below them.

  Gleed kept walking, his staff thumping the ground in front of him. “Not much time now,” he said. “Come. We must hurry.”

  Looking past him, Hweilan saw where he was headed. Land and sky, everything around her was the very picture of wilderness. Except for one thing. In the very center of the height, a black shaft, well over twice Hweilan’s height, stood up from the ground. Her first glance at it made her heart skip a beat. She recognized
it. Nendawen’s spear.

  When she had first seen it, the first arc of the moon breaking the horizon, it had seemed a fragment of night. Seeing it there under the light of the late morning sun didn’t change her first impression. The smooth wood of the shaft and iron of the point, half-buried in the earth, reflected nothing. The small bit of shadow it cast in the short grass seemed more a part of this world than the weapon itself.

  That was where Gleed pointed with his staff. “Inside is all that remains of the demon in this world. We must perform the rite when no darkness remains, when the sacred weapon stands fully in the light, surrounded by not even a hint of shadow. Only then can the spear be cleansed from the evil within. Here.”

  He tossed something and she caught it—a bag, slightly larger than her hand, made from the skin of some animal and tied shut with a cord of braided hair.

  “What is it?” she asked, loosening the knot of the cord.

  “Ashes from yesterday’s fire,” said Gleed. “Rowan ash, sacred to the Master. Scatter it in a circle around the spear. Leave no gaps. And say the Words with me. Bind them in your heart.”

  Hweilan did as she was told. The little goblin leaned upon his staff and began to chant in the language of the People.

  “Great Nendawen, Hand of Dedunan, Child of Ao,

  Our Master whom we serve, hear me now.”

  Hweilan repeated the words, her mind and tongue comfortable in the ancient tongue.

  “Bless now our circle, bound in the ash of sacred flame.

  Bless now our hands, whose blood flows in your name.”

  The last of the ash sifted out of the bag, completing the circle in a tiny mound of gray dust. Even as the last of it fell, Hweilan heard the thick flutter of feathers and looked up. Upon the haft of the spear sat a raven, its feathers as black as the weapon’s shaft, but the bright midday sunlight reflected a deep blue off its crown and beak.