“Oh. Oh, no, no,” Scab hissed through a hand covering his mouth. He circled around a mast where all the bodies had been spitted through the underside of their jaws. A young man and woman had torn free from the mast. Their mandibles hung loosely from the sides of their ruined faces.
“This!” Walter turned Kez around to face the men trickling under the gates. “This is our enemy!” he screamed and felt his eye fill with Dragon fire. This couldn’t be real. Was he in the Shadow Realm again? Was this a nightmare? “This isn’t real.” But he knew it was.
Scab gagged and puked over the edge of his saddle. “I didn’t sign up for this,” he said through his coat sleeve.
Walter wanted to laugh at the absurdity of his words. The corners of his lips twitched into the start of a smile.
“Something funny, Walter?” Scab’s tone had taken on a deadly seriousness. His hand fell to his sword hilt, his coat sleeve streaked with yellowish bile.
“Well, this!” Walter threw his arms open. “This is funny!” He dismounted from Kez and walked him to a pole with only a few bodies pegged at the top. His hand quivered and fumbled, dropping the lead rope when he tried to secure Kez there. He bent over and grabbed the rope, gave Kez a gentle pat along his neck. He got the rope around the giant spear and crusts of blood flaked down onto his boots. “This is all very funny, isn’t it, Scab?”
Scab watched him with a wary eye. His horse seemed to have felt the same and took a few steps away from Walter.
Walter took a few staggering steps and fell to his knees. The world blurred with his tears. “Fuck!” he let out in a long, tortured scream. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” He pounded the ground with both arms. His fist struck something sharp and his hand burst alight with the glow of the Phoenix. The pain felt good; a reminder he was still alive.
He leaped up, filled with the fury of the Dragon. A sword of fire sparked from his stump. He ran to the nearest spear and chopped through it. A crack split the air and the great pole tottered over onto the ground. The bodies attached to it squelched and sprayed out with globs of congealed blood when they struck earth.
“Where are you? Fight me!” he shrieked. “Damn you!” The air fizzled as Stormcaller danced through it, tearing through the base of another spear. The mercenaries gave him a wide girth, not wanting to be on the accidental end of his rage. Walter was prone to accidents, they knew.
“Cowards!” he roared. He ran up to another pole and punched it. It exploded into a hail of burning splinters and filled the air with streaming fire. He ran from pole to pole, chopping them down and bellowing out with all of his pain. “No, no. I’ll find you, I’ll kill all of you!”
He looked to the sky and conjured a burst of air that shot him at least twenty paces from the ground. Jets of fire flared from his hand and stump, pushing him to greater heights. When he looked down, it wasn’t the fear of plummeting to his death that struck him, but the number of spears that stretched the whole mile to Breden square. “So many, so many, too many!” he cried. His body convulsed and every muscle contracted with all the force they could gather. Balls of fire burst alight around him like a cloud of anger. He kicked his legs and snapped his arms straight. The fireballs burned in every direction, streaked down in great arcs to the spears standing below. Each fireball collided with the base of a spear, blowing them apart and sending close to half of them toppling over.
“Bastards!” he yelled, but it felt weak in his throat. He had used far too much of the god’s powers and felt the energy draining from him like a pierced water skin. The air supporting him faded and he dropped from the sky like thrown stone. The ground reached up to meet him and burning spears filled the edges of his vision. He thudded into the ground and pain flared like a blade through his leg. He looked down to see his femur poking through his thigh, bone cracked and pinked with blood.
“Ugh,” he groaned and crawled away from a burning length of wood. Exhaustion beat into him like a club, begging for him to sleep right there beside the burning forest of spears. The Phoenix was there, patching his leg back together like a dutiful parent. Its cool glow hummed behind his closed eye. He’d lost himself.
“Walter. Are you alright? I saw what happened.” It was a voice he wasn’t expecting to hear then. He opened his eye to see Grimbald staring down at him and offering a meaty hand.
Walter shook his head. “This was my home. I understand — understand how you must feel now.”
Grimbald nodded, bent and grabbed his forearm, his strength a reassurance in a world filled with fragile impossibilities. Walter let himself be pulled to his feet and stand on unsure legs.
“You don’t have to do this alone, Walter,” Grimbald said. His big hand brushed dirt from his arms and plucked a twig from his shirt. “You’re not alone in this.”
Walter nodded and wiped his eye and exhaled with a great breath. “This was my home,” he repeated. “Thank you.” He clapped him on the shoulder.
Scab rode up with a big grin pasted on his face. “A great show, Walter! Can you do it again?”
“Fuck off, Scab. These were — were the people I grew up with.” Every word came out ragged.
“Ouch, my heart hurts.” Scab put a wounded hand on his chest. “What about all that talk earlier, ‘we’re all dead already’ and such?”
“Maybe now’d be a good time to just go on and lead your crew,” Grimbald said, crossing his arms over his barrel chest.
“Fair enough,” he shrugged. “Just one more thing. As you know… my men have yet to be paid—”
“And?” Walter narrowed his eyes at him. Was this the moment he’d take his men, tuck tail and run?
“Well, we don’t work for free.” Scab turned his head and peered around at his men fanning out over the path and between the masts. “Is it going to be a problem if my men take what they want from here? Seeing as nobody is living, it seems…”
Walter snorted. “They can have what they want. No one here will be needing anything anytime soon.”
“Splendid.” Scab’s fingers twiddled together and his rings tinkled. He pulled on his reins and darted off.
“But, that’s stealing.” Grimbald balked. “You’re going to let them steal from the dead?”
“The pillage is yours!” Scab bellowed out to his men. That got a few whoops, cheers and broad smiles on sullen faces.
They were disgusting creatures. It didn’t matter if they were wading in a sea of the dead, as long as there was some sort of material gain it seemed. “Doesn’t matter. We need Scab and his crew, the dead don’t need their belongings.” Walter’s voice was hard.
“But—” Grimbald protested.
“Leave it alone, Grim. There are bigger things at hand here. C’mon, come with me to the square. I get it, I do. We just have to put aside our honor for now, until the demon god is dead and all of this is behind us. Only then can we try to be normal.”
Grimbald grunted with disapproval and shook his head. “You’re acting strange.”
They followed the winding road towards Breden square. A place where he once came to get sundries for his parents, where life was simple. Memories came like waves, little snippets of a life that could have been someone else’s. He remembered staring up at falcon soaring around and around. He remembered chatting with Juzo on the way to Sid-Ho class. That memory sent a chill through his bones. He’d never talk to Juzo again. Not in this life, at least.
Scab’s men rooted through houses along the road like locusts to a corn field. They smashed through boarded up windows and kicked through burned doors. A pair of men worked together to drag out a painting, all the while arguing about who would get to keep it. A beaming wiry man came out of a blackened house with gleaming candle holders in each hand, likely someone’s family heirloom. A few men had tied up over-fattened pigs and were dragging them back towards the Breden gates.
Everything was ruined. Windows were shattered, bits of glass lining the edges like teeth. Doors sagged off hinges. The roof of a farmhouse had started to cave in
, the spine of the roof forming a perfect downward parabola.
“I can’t believe you’re letting them do this,” Grimbald scoffed. “I mean, look!” He pointed at a pudgy man rolling two cheese wheels down the road and licking his lips.
“It’s already done. Let it go already,” Walter said.
Grimbald sighed and scrunched up his face. “It’s not right.”
As they drew closer to the town square, the din of pillaging mercenaries faded behind them. If only they knew the best loot was likely in the square. Scab seemed to know and followed them from about twenty paces behind. It took almost all of Walter’s willpower to pass each mast of spitted bodies without cutting them down. He wanted to see everything first, make sure the Death Spawn horde was really gone.
An all too familiar animalistic gibbering reached his ears. “Cerumal,” he breathed and nodded towards the square, not quite visible yet from around a bend of road and houses before it.
Grimbald growled and nodded at him. He dismounted from his donkey and secured him to a fence pole. Walter did the same and turned to Scab, seeing him smartly mirroring them. Walter beckoned for Scab to come and he shuffled over, holding his sword to keep it from rattling in the sheath.
“What is it?” Scab huffed like a blacksmith’s bellows.
“Death Spawn, not sure how many. Stay low,” Walter whispered.
An angry squawk came from around the bend. Walter pushed through the gate on the low fence and pressed himself against the house’s siding. It was split shakes and coarse against his arm through his cloak. Grimbald and Scab trailed behind, their bodies bladed against the house. There wasn’t anything he could see from here but a narrow band of shrubs and trees that shrouded the town square.
“Well?” Grimbald hissed into his ear.
Walter shook his head. “Can’t see, move slow.” He slipped from the edge of the house and threaded through the shrubs, careful not to disturb any larger branches. A twig snapped and crunched behind him, freezing him in his steps. His heart thundered in his chest. Why was he so worried about a few Cerumal? They were nothing to him, he reminded himself. He’d killed hundreds of them already.
“Sorry!” Scab mouthed, tendons in his neck taut as bowstrings.
Walter raised his hand for them to stop. He waited, straining to hear for the telltale signs of movement. It sounded like there were two, softly speaking in their strange tongue. He wondered if any man had ever translated their language. Walter crept forward and gently parted the leaves on a pair of branches. Needles softly cracked below his boots.
In the center of the square was a pile of bodies stacked high as a house. The empty eyes of a dead man stared back at him from within the tangled pile. His nose seemed to have been cleaved from his face and his eyes removed. The bodies weren’t complete anymore, though. It looked as if most had been ripped asunder and haphazardly thrown back into the pile. Most of the torsos wore the burnished armor of the Midgaard Falcon. Red-plumed helmets were strewn about the square, standing like nightmarish flowers. Here was the better part of the battalion that had never returned to Midgaard.
A pair of Cerumal squatted at the base of the pile. One held a severed arm in its claws and gnawed on the bone near the shoulder. The other sunk its teeth into an ashen thigh and tore a bloody chunk of flesh from it.
Walter swallowed and slipped back into wood and eyed Grimbald.
“Well? Are there Death Spawn there?” Grimbald crouched.
“You’re not going to want to see this Grim,” Walter whispered, eyes drooping with the weight of all this horror. He would see it though; there’d be no stopping him.
“Let me see,” Scab carefully pushed his way between them and peered out where Walter had. He stood there for a solid minute and slinked back over to them, face white as an apparition’s. “Brace yourself,” Scab said to Grimbald.
“What could be worse than what we’ve seen already? It couldn’t be worse. Could it?” Grimbald asked.
Grimbald started for the tree and Walter grabbed his arm. “Control yourself.”
He jerked his arm free from Walter’s grip and peered through the trees. Walter watched as Grimbald’s arms reached back and slipped his axes from their leather sleeves. He walked through the outcropping of trees and branches rasped against his armor. “Hey!” he shouted.
Walter followed behind him, seizing the Dragon and caressing the Phoenix. Their full embrace still felt foreign sometimes, peace and rage intermingling as a single entity, awaiting his command.
“So much for control.” Scab drew his sword with a ring. “Such distasteful creatures.”
One of the beasts turned to face them with an arm in its mouth, dripping blood at either end. The arm still had a bluish scrap of clothing wrapped around it. Its eyes burned like a pit of coals and it charged towards them, arm clutched between its daggers for teeth. Mid-stride, it grabbed the arm from its jaws and brandished it like a club and shrieked.
Grimbald dashed at the Cerumal, raised his axes up to introduce it to their honed edges. They hacked into its sides, splitting its torso almost in half, but getting stuck on the last bit of ribs. Red waves crashed over Grimbald and painted half of his face in its blood. He spat with revulsion.
The last Cerumal sat at the tower of flesh, intent upon finishing its meal it seemed. It tore another ragged hunk of flesh from the leg it had been working on, but dropped it and turned to run when Grimbald extracted his axes.
“Not today,” Walter said. He punched with his stump and a fireball lit the earth. It collided with its bounding form, punching a fiery hole through its wide back. It stumbled on legs short of blood and fell through the broken window of Casey’s store, impaled upon a sword of glass. Most of the store had been badly burned, but a few edges of wood remained untouched by the fire’s lick. The big wooden soup bowl that had served as his store’s sign hung over the door, the bottom coated in soot.
Walter remembered Casey, who had once poisoned the soups for Walter’s last Festival of Flames. It was his first encounter with Death Spawn, the day his parents died. Casey had made a bargain with Asebor, given a touch of his power so he could have his way with the village children in a dungeon under his shop. Walter made him pay with his life. It was his first taste of sweet vengeance; a taste he’d never forget. He remembered coming there as a child to get corn soup for his mother and had been lucky to escape Casey’s affections. He watched the Cerumal’s legs twitch over the edge of the window and turned back to Grimbald and Scab. The memory was dashed away like a broken mirror.
Grimbald snorted and stared at the pile of bodies. He held his axes at his sides in white-knuckled death grips.
Scab stood with crossed arms, shaking his head at the horrors.
Walter saw that most of the eyes had been plucked from heads, eaten most likely. It left the dead with faces that looked to be weeping tears of blood. They weren’t so much as complete bodies, but limbs hacked free from torsos and casually tossed onto the pile.
Scab cleared his throat. “These… these creatures do this to men?”
“They do,” Walter nodded and bit the insides of his cheeks.
Grimbald let out a great sigh and his axes dropped from his hands, sinking into the soft earth. “This is why your precious marks don’t matter. When these creatures roam the lands, this is what’s going to happen to you if you don’t help us.”
“I understand you and sympathize with your cause. We all have our wants and needs… and marks will always matter,” Scab’s soiled hands went for his mustaches and twirled them. “This time will pass, like many others before it. We’ll forget about it, move on and greed will reign once again.”
Walter wanted to refute that idea but stopped himself from wasting his breath. He knew that some men would never change, even when staring into the mutilated face of your potential future.
Grimbald seemed to feel the same, responding to Scab with a grunt.
“Now what?” Scab asked. “Once the men are done pillaging er
— taking their share. We move on?”
“Now, we dig,” Walter sneered.
“No.” Grimbald shook his head. “We don’t have time to dig,” His icy eyes met Walter’s.
He was right. “Now, we burn.” Walter nodded gravely. It wasn’t right, wasn’t proper, but what was anymore?
“Lots of burning,” Scab sniffed.
Now that the mercenaries’ saddlebags were stuffed to the point of the seams stretching, they gathered around the square to watch the pyres burn. There were six of them in all, spread out around the square. The men had walked up beaming and joyfully chattering about their most recent acquisitions. It was expected for this lot, Walter thought. They acted as if the skewered Breden denizens were no longer there, spitted on the beams they passed. They’d hauled the possessions of the rotting bodies past them, as if they were somehow immune to that same fate. Men could choose to be blind to any form of horror.
Minutes passed and Walter watched the fires reflecting in their eyes. Faces turned from jovial to brooding, likely imagining themselves in that mix of charred wood and cooking bones. The curtain between this world and the Shadow Realm was narrow enough that Walter thought he could see a shimmer of demons on the other side of them, like faint outlines of clouds in the distance.
Walter sat on Kez and ran his fingers through his coarse mane. The sun was peeking overhead, cutting through billowing gray-black clouds. The wind tussled Walter’s sweat stiffened hair. “I have to go to Nyset’s old place. To see if her parents… are still there. Come with me?”
A New Light (The Age of Dawn Book 5) Page 9