by David Benem
The young men’s faces tightened with tension.
Fencress turned ahead and crept closer, ears pricked and eyes searching the dark. She instinctively found the quiet parts of the earth, her footfalls making no sound. The man continued to sob, the wail punctuated by painful groans. Fencress quickened her pace, feeling a need to discover what had happened before whoever lay ahead bled his last.
What have you done, Karnag?
She came close enough to see the hollow of depressed grasses formed by the man’s fallen shape. A terrified moan escaped the man and his breath rattled. Fencress had heard such cries before, after unlucky folk had slid off the points of her blades.
Closer still, such that she could see the man’s heaving chest, bare and muscled and slick with a dark wetness. Then close enough to see the face, a silver mask of agony in the moonlight.
She knew it instantly.
“Karnag!” she shouted. She darted her keen eyes about but spied no one else nearby. She dropped to her friend’s side and placed a gloved hand upon a brow beaded with sweat.
His gaze was fixed upon the night sky, eyes not lifeless but filled with panic and tears. He threw a hand upward, as though warding away some unseen terror, but then withdrew it and trembled. He seemed to notice Fencress not at all and appeared but a frail shadow of the fearsome killer she knew him to be.
She noticed his mouth moving, sputtering half-formed words in an anguished wheeze. Her eyes drifted to his chest where a dozen or more long, shallow lacerations welled with blood. She saw also his hands, broken nails crammed with dark, wet gunk. She wagered the wounds were self-inflicted.
“They are dead,” whispered Karnag. “All but the children…”
Fencress placed her hand upon his brow. “Karnag,” she pleaded, “you have to wake from this nightmare.”
Karnag’s eyelids fluttered and at last he seemed aware of her presence. He raised up and shivered, his head seeming to clear after a moment. “There are so many yet to perish,” he said, his voice finding again its strength. “I can see them all, every one, and those who tell tales of such things will not be able to count the number. Tomorrow will be but a brief verse of a terrifying song.”
Fencress shuddered. “What happens tomorrow, Karnag?”
“The Gravemaker sings.”
Karnag roused them at dawn, though Fencress hardly required the effort. She’d barely slept, her thoughts haunted by imaginings of whatever grisly task Karnag had planned.
“Get to the road,” he commanded, directing them to horses he’d readied. He’d not donned a shirt, wearing only stained leather trousers and weathered boots. Dried blood and long scabs decorated his massive torso and his giant sword rested across his back. “We ride.”
“To those who follow us?” Fenress ventured. “Those witches we saw a few days back?”
“No,” Karnag said. “They will meet their fate at the appointed time, but not now.”
Fencress’s head soured, though she kept the cheer to her tone. “Who, then, will be the beneficiaries of our particular talents?”
“We ride for heads unsuspecting. Death will visit itself upon many this day.”
Drenj and Paddyn moved haltingly, eyeing Fencress as though asking for answers. She returned their pleading gazes with a sigh and a heavy shrug. She felt their fear. She’d spent years as a thief and assassin, but had no taste for wanton slaughter. She didn’t have a tender heart—no one could after killing so many—but the notion of killing for killing’s sake chilled her. And she worried this was about to be just that.
She thought of asking Karnag about the night before. She soon thought better of it, though, noticing the menacing look that darkened his face. She’d seen it before—many times recently and less often in the years before they’d killed the Lector—and knew his mind would not be moved. She settled instead for silence, avoiding Drenj and Paddyn’s nervous gazes as she gathered the last of her possessions and trudged to her horse.
“Mount your steeds!” Karnag shouted. “Follow me!”
They all obliged, fear a fire licking at their backs. They rode, driving toward the blinding orb of the rising sun. They galloped over low hills of tall grass and fields of fallow farmland. At a seemingly random point, Karnag wheeled his mount in a new direction and they followed, trampling across a furrowed field. They had no grasp of Karnag’s destination but it was clear he traveled with purpose. None of them possessed the courage to question him.
A terrible unease haunted Fencress as they rode. The previous night had unnerved her, with Karnag reduced to no more than a sobbing whelp at one moment then becoming an eerie soothsayer the next. She wondered what nightmares worked through his head to cause such a man to rend his chest and weep, but supposed that was something she’d rather not know.
Karnag crested a grassy rise ahead of them and reined his stallion to a stamping halt. Fencress noticed smoke hanging low upon the sky beyond. She slowed as she rode up the hill to approach him, Drenj and Paddyn quiet behind her, and used old gamblers’ tricks to keep the emotion from her face.
Karnag spun his horse about and regarded them grimly, the dead look once again present in his flint-colored eyes. “Thaydorne has sent war bands away from the front to scout north and west. Those men have become hot with bloodlust, their heads stained by the same corruption as his. There stands a village over the next rise where one such war band engages in rape and slaughter. They laugh—laugh!—while death approaches them. I will use them to send my brother a greeting.”
My brother? Fencress shifted uncomfortably upon her horse. She feared Karnag, but knew she could not allow that fear to drive her from him. If there came a chance to save him she needed to be present to seize it.
But does that chance exist anymore?
Karnag studied them with lifeless eyes. “There are fourteen Arranese warriors.”
Fencress frowned. “That’s too many for the four of us during daylight, especially if they’re trained soldiers.”
Karnag cocked his brow, a strange, puzzled look upon his hard face. “I will slay ten. You will kill two. You,” he said, nodding to Paddyn, “will take one with your bow. And you,” he said to Drenj, “will cower at a distance and then become useful only at the end. The one man I let live will be sent back to his Spider King with my missive. It will happen thus.”
With that, Karnag spurred his horse onward, moving it to a brisk trot down the slope of the hill’s far side. They followed wordlessly, Fencress ahead of Drenj and Paddyn. She glanced back to the young men as they rode, pity creeping within her. She’d been hardened by years of dark work, but knew these two hadn’t developed the stomach for blood.
They descended to the tall grasses in the valley between the hills then rode upward, Karnag silent and stoic as he rode. He came to the top of the hill and stopped his horse, studying whatever lay below with his heavy jaw set and his gaze a warrant of death. He seemed an inevitability now, a great force of fate forging his way toward some unknown but invariable end.
Fencress neared Karnag upon the hilltop and beheld the scene before her. At the slope’s bottom stood a smoldering hamlet of no more than ten structures, all small, decrepit hovels of burned and burning wood. About the meager buildings lay the bodies of what Fencress guessed had been their residents, humble folk with guts spilled and limbs hacked. An infant wailed as it clutched the corpse of what seemed its mother, the woman’s throat a bloody gash. Near the narrow stream at the village’s center, close to a collection of horses, stood a rough gathering of Arranese warriors, angular-featured with pointed ears and almond-shaped eyes. They whooped as they passed among them two girls, barely even teens, who wept and flailed helplessly as they were tossed about.
Fencress’s fear gave way to anger. She took her hands from her horse’s reins and placed them upon the hilts of her twin blades. She remembered her childhood home, some backwater hellhole near the Southwalls. It, too, had been raided years ago by brigands, and she was sold thereafter into slavery.
She tugged her black cowl overhead.
“Ready, Karnag,” she said, squeezing the swords’ handles. “Let’s kill them all.”
“We will,” he said, his voice the certainty of truth. “All save one.” He then fell eerily quiet, closing his eyes for a time.
Fencress exchanged tilted glances with Drenj and Paddyn. “Karnag?” she asked.
His eyes opened. “It will happen thus.” He then howled some arcane battle cry and charged on his black mount down the hill, barreling toward the ruined village. They rode in his wake.
The Arranese seemed slow to notice them over their own screams and those of the children left alive. They were halfway down the hill when one long-haired warrior spotted them, paused, then stammered and shouted to his comrades. The Arranese dropped the girls to the dirt and drew weapons, mostly curved swords but a number of spears as well. Then the Arranese rushed forward to meet them.
Karnag galloped on, nearing the village’s outermost buildings. He unsheathed his great blade, the steel shining in the morning sun. “Gravemaker!” he roared, rising in the saddle.
Almond-shaped eyes widened in apparent disbelief and the Arranese stuttered to a halt. A group of perhaps six bolted onward, clustered together and pressing ahead in a knot between two of the burning homes.
Karnag yanked his horse’s reins and moved straight at them. Twenty-five yards, fifteen. He pressed himself upward to a squat upon his saddle. He came close to the gang of soldiers then jumped, flying through the air and raising his sword as he did. The Arranese shrank away from the charging horse. Karnag fell upon them with a mighty swing of his sword. His blade took the heads of two and the better part of a third’s.
Drenj and Paddyn lingered but Fencress rode just behind Karnag. She swept a blade toward one of the remaining warriors, finding his neck with the edge. The sharp-featured soldier fell to his knees, clutching at a fount of blood.
Karnag threw himself against the other two soldiers near them, shoving them through the wall of a burning house and into the flames. They writhed madly and screamed as the fire engulfed them.
Karnag left them and dropped his sword low, dragging it against the dry dirt of the town’s empty spaces with an awful scraping. Somehow the sound seemed louder than the wailing of the girls and the infant.
The two girls ran into the stream, leaving the remaining eight Arranese warriors shouldered together at the stream’s bank. They appeared to be hard men, dusky skin broken by scars and lean bodies knotted with sinews. Cowardice, though, seemed to wilt them as Karnag approached and their weapons shook in their hands.
“I am the Gravemaker!” Karnag screamed, the sound of it a thunderclap. “I am your fate! I am your ending!”
A warrior on the far side of the group lunged and attacked with his sword. Karnag cleaved the man’s arm from his torso before the blow reached him.
Fencress heard the whistle of an arrow and watched as a shaft whirled past her and plunged into the chest of the tall Arranese warrior at the line’s center. The man, shaven-headed, clutched the arrow in shock then fell back into the stream behind him. The faces of the soldiers about him filled with panic, wide eyes shifting between Karnag, Fencress, and the hillside where Paddyn nocked another arrow.
Karnag became a crashing wave of violence, screaming as he tore his great sword across and through the leather-clad warrior nearest him. Then the next. His precision was perfect, the strikes finding their mark just before any counter, just prior to any defense being raised. He slipped and slid about, his blade ripping through the line of men. It seemed a storm of blood, Karnag killing the Arranese each in turn with sickening quickness and efficiency.
One warrior tumbled forward then around, his back toward Fencress. She raised a sword and plunged it through the base of the man’s skull. She yanked it back and watched as the raven-haired man slumped near her horse’s hooves.
There remained alive just one Arranese warrior, a nervous-eyed man of perhaps thirty years with black-and-gray hair tied in a knot. He held a spear with trembling hands. His mouth formed silent curses and his angled eyes darted tearfully about his fallen countrymen.
Karnag came before him, his massive sword upraised and a fearsome snarl upon his face. “You,” he growled, “you I allow to live so that you may deliver my message to your Spider King.”
Fencress heard footsteps behind her and spun her horse about. She sighed in relief when she saw Drenj and Paddyn walking their horses into the village, dour looks on their faces. Drenj seemed particularly affected, his eyes turned to where Fencress guessed the crying baby hugged its dead mother.
“Come,” called Karnag. “Drenj and Paddyn. Guard this man while I work. Make certain he does not flee.”
The lone warrior stood at the stream’s edge, clearly shaken by what he’d witnessed. Paddyn and Drenj moved to his sides, weapons drawn and wary eyes upon him.
Karnag went to one of the dead soldiers and stripped him of his clothes. He retrieved the man’s knife then flipped the body over, turning it face down in the bloodied mud. Fencress winced as Karnag set about skinning the man’s back as he would game he prepared to cook. He sliced away a thick rectangle of skin, nearly two feet long and a foot across. After making the final cuts, he laid out the flesh upon the ground.
Karnag smoothed and flattened the swath of skin with careful hands. He then dipped the point of his dagger into the bloody mass of muscle left upon the body. He moved the dagger to the skin and shifted it about in some precise pattern. Again he dipped the dagger in the corpse then etched something upon the skin. Over and again he did this before Fencress realized he was writing something in blood upon the swath, the dagger his quill and the flesh his parchment.
At last Karnag sank back and beheld his work. Words of some strange tongue were dug deeply into the skin and stained crimson. Seemingly satisfied, Karnag pressed himself close to the skin and blew as though drying ink.
“This scroll is my missive,” Karnag said, rising from the ground and holding the skin. He strode to the Arranese warrior and stood before him, brandishing the flesh. “You will give this to your king. You will tell him that I, the Gravemaker, gave this to you. You understand my words?”
The man nodded, shaking more than ever as Karnag loomed over him.
“Very well. Paddyn, fetch two of their horses. One for this man to ride and one upon which to rest my message.”
Paddyn obliged, walking quickly to the collection of horses still loitering just upstream.
“What does it say?” Drenj asked, almost as much fear in his voice as was drawn across the Arranese warrior’s face.
“It is the elder tongue,” Karnag said. “The old and secret language of the gods. It means ‘I come for you, Brother. Death is mine alone to wield.’”
Fencress found the wailing infant, a girl at most a year old, still clutching the corpse. She was thin, underfed, with pale skin and red hair like her mother. Both the babe and the dead woman were clothed in rags.
Fencress pulled her cowl from her head to let her black hair fall and pressed a gloved hand outward, hesitantly. The baby screamed, snot and tears mixing on her round face and dripping in a string to the dead woman whose eyes remained fixed skyward.
Fencress withdrew her hand and removed her gloves. She reached again for the little girl, the strand of tears and snot breaking as she pulled the baby from the corpse. She pressed the child against her black shirt still wet in places with blood. The embrace felt awkward and did nothing to soothe the baby’s cries. Fencress had no gift with children and couldn’t recall ever holding one before.
She’d not known much of her own mother and felt a sharp pang at knowing this girl’s life would have a similar absence. She hid the baby’s eyes from the corpse and tried rocking her as she’d seen mothers do. The girl’s cries softened.
Fencress reckoned she’d left many children without fathers and some without mothers, though she refused to let herself regret the deaths of bad people. This child’s mother see
med a simple sort, not the sort to have owed a bad debt, to have killed another’s relative, or to have risen to ill-gotten power. Not the sort of person an assassin would have been hired to kill, but rather a loving mother who’d had the bad luck of living in the wrong village at the wrong time.
The woman’s daughter had just lost all she knew. Fencress clutched her closer, swaying from side to side. “Don’t remember this, child,” she said softly. “Your mother will be waiting for you in the Elder God’s heavens, if there is such a place. Say goodbye and forget seeing her like this.”
She walked with the baby toward the stream. Drenj and Paddyn moved about what was left of the village’s homes, salvaging provisions. She spotted Karnag near the stream’s edge, scraping a whetstone down his sword. On the stream’s far bank, aside a frail tree, cowered the two older girls who’d been tossed about by the Arranese, wet and weeping. They glanced nervously to Karnag, seemingly wondering what to think of the man who’d just slain the slayers.
Fencress waved to the two, trying to summon them over. They caught sight of her and drew near each other, speaking hurriedly while studying Fencress with wide, tearful eyes.
Fencress pointed to the baby, then to the girls. Between their shaking sobs they seemed to be arguing. They looked very much alike, with ginger hair, freckles, and gawky frames in simple dresses of simple cloth. Fencress guessed they were sisters.
“Come!” she called. “No one here will harm you. I swear it.”
After another frantic exchange they arose. They walked with halting steps, eyes shifting from Fencress to Karnag. Soon, though, they stopped, seeming too afraid to come nearer.
Fencress shook her head and spat. She balanced awkwardly, grasping the baby while removing her boots. She then forged through the stream toward the girls, hoisting the baby overhead as she did. She danced her way barefoot across the stream’s rocky bed, through knee-high waters while keeping the infant dry. She bounded up the bank beyond and pulled the baby to her breast once more.
The girls had crept closer, worried looks on their sad, drawn faces. Fencress regarded them with all the kindness she could find within. She tried to appear nothing like the killer she knew herself to be.