Steel, Blood & Fire (Immortal Treachery Book 1)

by Allan Batchelder

  Vykers had never meant that much to anyone. He was universally feared, to be sure, but no one admired him. And no one missed him now, he was certain. But he would not wallow in self-pity. That, too, was for lesser men. He – Something…something was scrabbling in the back of his mind, like a rat in the walls. For a moment, he considered resisting. Then he realized the only way to catch this rat was to let it into the room.

  “Warrior…”

  Vykers was on all-fours, foraging in a gully. He paused.

  “A moment of your time…”

  He raised his head, held his breath, looked around. No one. This was something internal.

  “Warrior.”

  He laughed. He was going mad. He’d figured it might happen, sooner or later.

  “I am here.”

  Vykers looked around and noticed a pale root or stick under his left knee. Moving off it, he saw several more nearby. Not sticks. Bones. And there, between two stones, a skull. He scuttled towards it, laughed again. “Vykers, old man, you have well and truly gone ‘round the bend!”

  “Not so,” the voice replied.

  He dug the skull out with his wrists. The back was missing.

  “I met my end here, yes.”

  Vykers sat back on his haunches, contemplating the skull.

  “Will you not speak to me?”

  “Why are you talking to me?”

  “Because you’re here. And I’ve been waiting too long for someone, anyone, to come by.”

  “And then…?”

  “Take me away.”

  “You’re out of luck,” Vykers said. “I’ve got no hands and no use for your bones, if I did.”

  “But I may be of use to you.”

  This time, Vykers laughed himself faint. “Who are you?” he asked. “Who were you?”

  “I was – am -- Fourth Shaper to his Majesty, King Orstoth.”

  Vykers sat. “Was. He’s dead, too.”

  The voice was silent.

  “So, you’re one of them Burners, huh?”

  “We prefer ‘Shapers.”

  Vykers laughed. “And I’d prefer to have my hands again, but what we want’s got nothing to do with what’s coming to us. What’s your name, Burner?”

  “I was called ‘Arune.”

  “Huh. Never heard of you.”

  “And your name is Tarmun Vykers.”

  “Maybe you were a mage.”

  “Vykers-the-Vicious,’ they call you, and ‘the Reaper.”

  “I doubt they call me anything, anymore. Far as anyone knows, I’m dead. How’d you die, anyway?”

  “Long Teeth.”

  “Svarren?”

  “That’s an older name for them, aye.” Arune said. They’re also variously known as Svarrenii, Worrenu, and Varn. “I’m surprised you haven’t encountered them hereabouts.”

  Vykers’ head snapped up; he scanned the forest.

  “I told you you weren’t mad. A madman wouldn’t care for his own safety.”

  “It’s just that I hate those fucking things. And I’d hate to be set upon when I’m defenseless.”

  Now, it was the shade’s turn to laugh. “The Reaper, defenseless? You underestimate yourself.”

  “I have no hands or feet, fool. I can’t run from predators nor defend myself once they catch me.”

  “Take me with you, then. I can help.”

  Vykers glanced at the skull in irritation. “Assuming I haven’t gone completely batshit, and you are more than you seem, how can you help?”

  “Take me with you, and I’ll show you.”

  “You’re getting on my nerves, Boney. What the hell difference does it make if you lie here or in my cave for all eternity?”

  “We won’t be staying in your cave for all eternity, as you put it.”

  Vykers brooded.

  “I offer you fire,” the ghost said.

  Vykers grinned, in spite of himself. “Fire? You can give me fire?”

  “What sort of Shaper would I be if I couldn’t conjure fire?”

  “Yeah, but you’re dead.”

  “For now.”

  “Okay,” Vykers shrugged. “Let’s go back to my cave…”

  *****

  Aoife, On Her Mission

  Aoife followed the old man to an inn, near the town’s well.

  “Here y’are, mistress: the town hall, the marketplace, the church and o’ course the inn, all rolled into one.”

  “The church? Then your town has a spiritual leader?”

  “It does now,” said the old man, looking her up and down.

  “But I can’t stay” she protested. “Long.”

  Whereupon the old man laughed, “They all say that.”

  Turning, he led her inside, where a thick miasma of odors almost knocked her over. Here, she smelled sweat, mold, mildew, candle wax, stale beer, wood smoke, tobacco, animal fur, baking bread and…some sort of stew. Experience told her that her exact position in the room dictated the balance of these odors, and that moving around would produce both better and worse results. The trick was finding the good spots, which was often made more difficult by the other occupants of the room. This particular room was packed, as she suspected was usually the case, given its multifunctional purpose in this community. Thus, her entrance was well and widely marked, and she felt a hundred eyes upon her instantly, some welcoming, some skeptical, a few apathetic and several, quite drunk. She turned to thank the Captain of the Guard, but he had slipped away, unnoticed. Steeling herself, Aiofe waded into the crowd and made for a pair of welcoming eyes, which belonged to an old red-headed woman with few teeth but countless wrinkles.

  “Good e’en to you, Sister” the old woman chirped.

  “Good e’en to you,” Aoife replied. “How does one go about getting the innkeeper’s attention in this…this…throng?”

  Laughter. “He knows you’re here, he knows you’re here. He’ll never miss a penny comin’ through that door!”

  A large bowl of stew and a tankard of ale clunked down on the table in front of Aoife, as a pair of meaty arms withdrew behind her. Aoife turned, only to see the innkeeper’s broad back as he bustled through the crowd on his way to another table.

  “That was fast,” she observed.

  More laughter. “Aye. There’s none don’t love Locksby. Best innkeeper in the Lake lands.”

  The aroma drifting up from her stew gave Aoife further evidence. “This smells impossibly good. It lacks only a small loaf of…”

  Bread plopped down next to her bowl, but before Aoife could thank the man who brought it, he was gone again. “He must be spirit-touched” Aoife said, to yet more laughter. “I’m Aoife, by the way” she said to her table mate.

  “Frieda,” the old woman answered, “the town gossip,” she finished, not without pride.

  “I must say, Frieda, I’ve only met you and the Captain of the Guard, but you folks seem in surprisingly good spirits.”

  “Ah, there’s plenty o’ piss-and-vinegar in Shoulty – even some as use piss as vinegar, but all-in-all, we’re a good-meaning folk.”

  “Then perhaps you’re not in need of my services…?”

  “Now, I din’ say that. Kerbie’s legs’ve gone foul – ya c’n smell him two homes away – Nell’s not recovered from birthin’. There’s many a widow needs comfortin’, and then there’s that odd Soolan boy…”

  That odd Soolan boy. That odd boy.

  Aoife looked into the fire and thought back to another, in the hearth of her parents’ cottage. She remembered a winter storm had been raging outside. She and her parents were huddled close to the flames, while her brother Anders lolled on the floor, babbling to his fingers.

  Anders was odd and more than odd. He had been born three weeks late, as if disinterested in joining the rest of humanity. Though his hair was black, his eyes were of blue so pale they seemed almost colorless. It was disconcerting, looking into those eyes. Fortunately, Anders never maintained contact for long. But he didn’t speak well or often, so it was
almost impossible to know what he was thinking. As the saying went, “there was no ‘there’ there.” He just didn’t seem to recognize – or even acknowledge – people or events around him. For Anders, Aoife believed, there was no difference between her family and the stones in the hearth; they were not human, they were simply more “things” he encountered. She found that heartbreaking for the first few years of Anders’ life, but eventually came to accept it. No, that was wrong: she became resigned to it.

  Aoife figured she must have been about nine years old that night, which meant Anders was six. She could still picture her mother, in the glow of the flames, plucking a bird for dinner, while her father sat nearby and smoked his pipe. He favored lowlands tobacco, and whenever she smelled it, it brought back a thousand memories. She loved her father and mother fiercely and wanted to love Anders, but…But.

  It was a cozy little cottage – her parents had worked endlessly to make it so – but the wind nevertheless found its way through various cracks and crevices and whistled discordantly at her family like an angry guest, unhappy with his welcome. The rain battered against the roof and walls, as if trying to reduce them to rubble. Yet their little home remained defiant.

  There came a banging on the door and not a polite banging, either. Everyone reacted, except Anders. Aoife’s parents exchanged looks. Without a word, her father reached up, hefted a piece of firewood from a nearby pile and slowly approached the door.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  He looked back, and Aoife’s mother stood, clutching her kitchen knife. Her father extended his club and used it to raise the latch. Suddenly, the door exploded inward and a tall, grey-black figure crashed through, stumbling a few steps before collapsing on the floor near the fire.

  Aoife remembered the strange, crustacean-like appearance of the thing. He – it – was wearing armor, but it seemed more a part of its skin. No armor she’d ever seen fit so snugly or meshed so seamlessly with the material beneath and between its plates. And the color was so weird – not silvery, nor grey, nor even a proper black…more like an exhausted black, a super-murky grey, a shade heretofore unknown. There was, Aoife noticed, a sword in its belt, but by the look of its scabbard, the sword was as strange as the creature itself. As for the creature, a hairless, waxy yellow head emerged from the armor, with two shiny black orbs for eyes, but without ears or a nose. A sickly grey tongue darted out from its slit of a mouth. The creature shuddered and gasped.

  “Kill it, husband!” Aoife’s mother urged.

  “Kill it? I’m not goin’ near the damned thing. Look at it, will you?”

  “What is it, father?” Aoife asked.

  “Damned if I know,” he answered. “But it don’t look healthy, that’s certain.”

  “We can’t have it in our house!” Aoife’s mother complained. “You’ve got to drag it back outside.”

  “In this weather? Are you mad, woman?”

  “Are you mad, husband? We don’t even know what it is!”

  As her parents argued, Anders crawled over to the thing and moved almost face-to-face with it. Noticing this, Aoife shrieked in fear.

  “Great One, preserve us!” her mother cried, while her father stood petrified.

  The creature grasped Anders’ collar and pulled him near. Aoife’s father raised his club and took a tentative step closer. The thing appeared to be struggling to say something when, without warning, it vomited all over the boy and then went slack. Aoife’s father finally rushed in and bashed it on the head, but it was clear it had already died. Her father stood over it, prodding it with his log. The girl and her mother stood nearby, in shock.

  “I’m cold,” Anders said, the first words he’d spoken in weeks.

  *****

  Long & Company, Corners

  Spirk Nessno was the village idiot or, more accurately, the prototype for a new generation of village idiots. There was nothing obviously wrong with him and, except for the port wine stain that covered the left half of his face, nothing remarkable, either. In fact, Spirk was so bland as to be almost invisible. There were occasions in which he would quite literally go unnoticed in a room of two. But he possessed transcendent gullibility. He was the Grand Master of Credulity and displayed a dizzying virtuosity in that regard. And, as a nothing who’d believe anything, he was paradoxically unique.

  “He’s our secret weapon!” Janks told his cohorts.

  “Against what?” Long Pete asked, skeptically.

  “Dunno. But I’m certain whatever-it-might-be’s unequipped to deal with the likes of Spirk Nessno.”

  Long nodded. The legend of Spirk Nessno was not to be gainsaid…

  *****

  When his parents were young, Spirk’s mother ran afoul of a local witch, who cursed the poor peasant with infinite fertility, and by the time Spirk was born – twenty-third of thirty-seven children – the wretched Nessno clan had eaten itself out of hovel and home. So it came as no surprise – even to Spirk – when, at the tender age of fifteen, he was given his father’s rusty sword and encouraged, rather forcibly, to go and find his fortune in the wide world. Or at least get a damned job. For a simpleton, however, he had a remarkable aversion to simplicity.

  “I’m lookin’ fer ad…adventure,” he announced, as he burst into the infamous Hog’s Tooth Tavern one stormy spring night. “Adventure and…uh…a job!” The patrons of the Hog’s Tooth were a frightening lot and probably wouldn’t have bothered to look up if Alheria herself had come cartwheeling through the door with seventeen demons in her wake, but most were so flabbergasted by the outrageous naïveté of Spirk’s declaration that they felt themselves compelled to examine the boy for signs of madness. Spirk, uncomfortable with this sudden scrutiny, could only gasp and roll his eyes, like a fish thrown onto a dock. Shaken from his near catatonia by the waves of derisive laughter that thundered towards him from all corners of the tavern, Spirk turned on his heel and was just about to run weeping into the rain when a voice called “Boy!” Cautiously, he ducked back into the tavern and noticed a man waving at him, while his two companions regarded Spirk with expressions that approached religious wonderment. Occasionally, they whispered amongst themselves, squinted their eyes at the boy and dropped their jaws in even greater amazement. As he drew nearer, Spirk could make out snatches of their conversation, but try as he might, he could make no sense of it.

  “I’m certain of it, Korith!” Spirk heard a rather large fat man tell the stranger who’d called to him, “He’s the one. He’s the one foretold!”

  “Yes, by Frumda!” a second man told Korith with a tremulous voice, “He does bear the mark!”

  “Dosin, Rundel,” the man called Korith said calmly, “We must speak with the boy first, that our prayers may be answered.”

  Spirk was completely bewildered. Something in their conversation suggested these men thought him to be someone of great importance; he even believed they might be in awe of him. But that was ridiculous. Arriving at their table at last, he was able to get a closer look at his admirers and was quite shocked to find them ordinary – even non-descript. From the clothing they wore, they could as easily have been woodsmen as craftsmen or mercenaries. No more enlightened than he had been before, Spirk turned to the man called Korith and said “Yeah?”

  “The simplicity of his words! The honesty! Surely, he is the boy of prophecy!” the thin man, Dosin, cried out enthusiastically.

  “And look!” Rundel added, “He does bear the mark of the Rooster across his left eye…”

  “That’s ‘Mark of the Griffin’ weren’t it, Rundel?” Korith corrected.

  “Oh, aye…aye…so it is. And what a beautiful griffin it is, too.” Rundel agreed, reaching out hesitantly to trace the angry birthmark on Spirk’s face.

  Still, Spirk found himself at a loss.

  Finally, Korith spoke to him directly.

  “I say, boy, my friends and I were wondering if…if er…we might have seen you somewhere before…?”

  “Um, well…I sorta doubt it,” Spi
rk began. “See, I’m not from ‘round here. I’m from Bloodge, and I…”

  “Bloodge?” Korith repeated in obvious amazement. “Did you say ‘Bloodge?”

  “Well, yeah, and…”

  Korith threw himself down onto the filthy floor. “He is the boy of prophecy!” the man exclaimed to his eager companions. “He bears the mark and comes to us from Bloodge! He is the one!”