by David Benem
He was swept to the moment just before the violence, just as the hamlet was raided. Shouted warnings sounded. He watched through the woman’s eyes as she cracked open the door of her hovel and beheld sharp-featured men in hides and leather armor charging through the hamlet on horseback. They howled in harsh voices and hoisted curved blades and long spears.
The woman’s gaze darted about and the sounds of her quickened breaths rushed and wheezed. There seemed no means of escape. She eased shut the door and moved its wooden latch into place.
A child wailed. Her child. Her daughter. She spun about and snatched the rag-swaddled, red-haired babe from her basket. She shushed the infant but the girl wailed all the louder. She drew the child close to her breast, offering softly spoken words of comfort. “Hush now… It’s alright, my little love. Mum’s here. It’s alright. Quiet…”
The child’s sobs subsided.
A frantic din sounded outside. The woman chanced a peek through the shutters of her small window. One of the mounted strangers—black-eyed and face full of rage—thrust a spear into a peasant’s chest, driving him to the ground in a twitching heap.
The woman started to call out but stifled her words with a trembling hand. Clutching her child, she ducked away from the window and sank to the straw floor, into the shadows of the hovel’s far corner.
More frenzied screams. The thud of hooves and the clash of steel. Sounds of bodies falling to the wet ground. Moans of terrible pain.
All of that, yet the child seemed content, at ease. Her tiny mouth tilted upward and her green eyes rested upon her mother’s face.
“It’s alright, little love…”
Soon all fell quiet beyond the hut but for the squelch of boots and hooves and the utterance of terse commands. “All are dead,” came a man’s sharply-accented voice. “All except for a few of the women. Take your spoils!”
The woman looked to her child, focusing solely upon her in the dark interior of the hut. She caressed the girl’s pinkish face. With a shaking hand she soothed the girl’s brow and stroked her red hair. Tears welled in the woman’s eyes, her sight clouding over.
“Shh…” she whispered, naught visible but the pale circle of her daughter’s face. “It’s alright, little love… Stay quiet, now.”
She blinked. Heavy tears dropped from her eyelids, falling to spatter upon the infant’s round face.
The girl seemed startled but then smiled wide. She giggled—loudly—her cheeks dimpling. “Mama!” she blurted through a gleeful chuckle.
“Shh!” the woman hissed. “Shh!”
Footfalls slopped in the mud outside.
An instant later a loud crack and crash.
The woman’s gaze jerked from her daughter’s smiling face to the sight of a tall, long-haired invader smashing away the remains of the hovel’s door. He had a curved sword drawn and a grim look upon his sharp features.
“No!” she shrieked, pressing back against the wall and standing. She clutched her child with one arm and brandished a thin fist with the other. “No!”
The fierce-eyed marauder stormed across the short distance, kicking aside the hovel’s flimsy furnishings. He feinted with his sword then thrust out his free hand, seizing the woman by her red hair as she recoiled.
She screamed. She squeezed her daughter close as she was dragged across the straw-covered floor. She flailed with her fist, striking the man’s arm.
But to no avail.
She bawled as she was dragged stumbling across the sharp splinters that had been the door to her home. The man yanked her upward then tossed her out into the day’s gray haze. She slipped and staggered, holding her daughter close. The child cried, now. Together they tumbled to the ground, a brown muck broken by crimson rivulets.
She scrambled back, away from the man. Away from the point of his weapon. She held out a hand as though it could ward away the blade.
She stopped suddenly. She had backed into something.
She turned and found herself faced with another stranger, this one shaven-headed with dark, almond-shaped eyes. The man grinned toothily. Others sat atop tall horses behind him, wiping wet blood from their blades.
The woman screamed, looking this way and that. Her village was a ruin. All about lay the dead.
She glanced to her daughter once more. “It’s alright, little love,” she said in a frail, sweet voice.
She ran. Hopelessly she ran through across the muddy earth, holding her daughter close.
It was not long—seconds, perhaps—before a horse thundered aside her.
A shining blade swept across her vision, a silver arc across the gloomy sky.
She fell. She fell upon her side. Her child sobbed in the mud beside her, the girl’s pale face now speckled with blood.
The woman reached, her arm twitching with spasms. She clawed at the mud, drawing her arm outward.
At last she found her daughter and pulled her close one last time.
Then all faded to black.
“Prefect Kreer!”
Kreer blinked dumbly, senses still distorted from his trance and his ears ringing with the woman’s screams.
“Prefect!” demanded the green-cloaked man standing over him. “Are you awake? Are you with us?”
Wil, Kreer recalled through the fog of his thoughts. The Variden.
“I have you, Prefect,” said Barly, clasping Kreer beneath the arm and pulling him up and away from the fire. “I have you.”
Kreer stood on wobbly legs, eyes nervously flitting about the village for signs of the invaders his vision had revealed. He pulled in a shuddering breath, leaning more than he would have liked against Acolyte Barly.
“Water,” he said, voice weak.
Lund, the skinny, freckled acolyte, found a wineskin and came near. Kreer instinctively withdrew, for a moment finding the youth’s red hair unsettling.
“Prefect?” Lund asked, cradling the wineskin.
Kreer shook his head, trying to shake away the remnants of the vision. “Water, please.”
Lund tilted the wineskin to Kreer’s lips and the water flowed. Kreer swallowed several times before turning his head away, sated and with his thoughts beginning to clear. The reality of his surroundings solidified at last.
“Prefect,” came a rougher voice, that of Wil. “May we speak? Stendall and I have found the bodies of Arranese warriors by the stream. The signs indicate the Arranese slaughtered the villagers, then the highlander the Arranese. We should discuss this. Perhaps the highlander and his company are allies of ours, however unlikely?”
“No,” Kreer said, waving a hand and drawing a deep breath. “A moment. I need a moment. The spell is quite taxing. I must recover and make sense of what was revealed. I have learned much, much not visible to your eyes.”
Kreer shifted from Barly’s supportive grasp and smoothed his garments. His hands ached—he realized he must have been gripping the fabric of his robes all the while.
He staggered away from Wil and the acolytes, weaving unsteadily across the wet ground. Crows squawked, still ripping flesh from the corpses. They fluttered their black wings as he neared but did not flee their banquet.
Kreer looked about the ruins and the dead, seeking the child, the pale, red-haired daughter he’d held—she, the woman, had held. There seemed no sign of her, no echo of her cries.
He feared the worst and it saddened him.
At last he found the hovel, the home occupied by the woman and her daughter. The door had been kicked through, just as he’d witnessed. He steadied himself against the remains of the doorframe and peered within.
It was a small, pathetic place. Broken furnishings of brittle, ill-carved wood lay strewn across a straw-covered floor of dirt. Kreer wandered inside the cramped space and spied the shadowed corner in which mother and daughter had taken brief solace.
He’d not seen the highlander and his murderous companions commit this slaughter. Rather, he’d seen angular-featured horsemen, men with curved blades and almond eyes.
Raiders from Arranan.
He cursed, feeling—knowing—such could not be true.
He denied the truth of the image. It was contrary to his pure faith, to his pure purpose.
It had to have been the highlander Karnag and his vile band of assassins.
Any vision indicating otherwise had to be the highlander’s perversion of the spirit, his abuse of Castor’s power. His effort to deceive.
No, Kreer thought. The highlander does not fight for Rune. He is an abomination. He seeks death alone, and the spirit of Castor must be ripped from his soul.
Kreer looked to the small, simple basket that had served as the child’s bed. To the shattered remains of a rocking chair. To the clumsy wooden carving of a horse pressed into the hovel’s dirt floor.
It cannot be true. Such would be a perversion of the Faith, and the Faith cannot be perverted.
Kreer knew he needed to possess the spirit—control it—so as to bring it in line with the tenets of his order. He knew violence, whether against foe or friend, would never be employed by Castor. Such wanton destruction stood contrary to the Sentinel’s divine wisdom.
The highlander deceives us.
“Prefect?” asked Wil from behind.
Kreer sniffed and straightened his long spine, stretching to his full, tall height. “Yes,” he said, certainty again filling his voice.
“It seems the highlander and his company hunt the enemy,” said Wil. “Are you certain of your cause? Are you certain we should strike down one who seeks to destroy those who wage war upon us?”
Kreer closed his eyes briefly, focusing upon faith and the purpose that drove him. “I witnessed what happened here,” he said, turning. “You and your brother Stendall are deceived by the highlander’s lies—by the manner in which he’s twisted Castor’s spirit. I saw and felt it all. I witnessed the truth. The highlander and his company killed every one. The Arranese arrived only after the slaughter, and were slaughtered themselves in turn.” Kreer held their gazes, and none shied away. “We must hunt down this highlander. Then we must destroy him.”
13
THE PROMISE OF REDEMPTION
Lannick sat high in the saddle, craning his neck to take in the whole of the scene before him. In spite of all his losses, all his grief, a crooked smile managed to slip across his face. Suddenly it felt as though he’d sloughed away the weariness of his long journey, the heavy burdens of his past. The promise of redemption, he knew, lifted him.
Below, beyond the sloping hillside, bustled an encampment upon the sun-soaked plain beside the mighty Silverflow. A vast number of men gathered about innumerable tents, wagons, and corrals of horses and other livestock. Steel glinted in the midday sun and smoke rose from many campfires.
An army, he thought.
“An impressive assembly,” said Ogrund from beside him. “Well-armed and well-supplied.”
“Indeed,” said Lannick, glancing to the squint-eyed and green-cloaked Variden. Ogrund had pressed him with only a handful of questions and hadn’t scolded him with old proverbs. Yet the man’s narrow gaze drew often to Lannick in seeming appraisal, as though he remained unsure whether Lannick met the measure of his task.
“There are many soldiers,” Ogrund said, “but are there enough to present any sort of challenge to General Fane’s forces?”
“Yes,” Lannick said, trying to give his voice the ring of conviction. “They are more than enough if properly led. So long as the right hand wields the sword, as they say.”
“Hmm,” Ogrund grunted.
Randyn—the pock-faced sergeant of Vandyl’s oath-bound—spurred his horse beside them. “Captain? It’d be best to allow me to handle introductions. There are some among the deserters who know me. Once we arrive at their camp I’ll—”
“We’ll not need wait,” said Ogrund. “Look there, atop the ridgeline.”
Lannick followed the man’s stare and spied four soldiers riding the crest of a grassy hill. One raised a lance tipped with yellow cloth that snapped in the breeze. He moved the weapon in a slow circle, an apparent signal to the encampment below.
“Likely not the first time they’ve seen us,” Randyn said. “These soldiers are ever on watch for an assault from General Fane from the east or the Arranese from the south, and have patrols ranging far about these lands.”
“Then why have we not been confronted?” asked Lannick. “We have near fifty men.”
“They’re used to seeing Thane Vandyl’s colors ranging these lands,” Randyn said, “and know well his… sympathies. I should address them.”
Lannick nodded. “By all means, Sergeant.”
Randyn bowed his head. “Sir.” He turned his horse and spurred it toward the patrol, holding hands upward and away from his weapons as he rode.
The patrolling soldiers rose no alarm as Randyn approached, rather greeting him with brisk salutes as he neared. The group spoke for a time, Randyn gesturing toward Lannick and the others. Randyn handed something to a patrolman—a scroll, perhaps—then turned about and led the patrol back toward them.
“They appear to know the thane’s man,” Orgund said. “A promising sign.”
Arleigh Lay sidled over on his horse, a nasty smirk across his face. “Looks like those old instincts of yours might still be intact, Captain. So long as we can keep you sober, that is.” He chuckled and rode away.
Lannick laughed, the gibe failing to trouble him. “Perhaps so.”
Ogrund raised a brow, ever so slightly. “I find no humor in this. One’s poor behavior in the past sows doubt among others in the present. The example you set now, Lannick, is vitally important precisely because of that past behavior. You must lead by example, and must show no failings.”
Lannick’s grin curdled and he thought of Brugan’s words. “Keep your edges sharp, lad… Even if it means reopening those old wounds now and again.”
Lannick turned to Ogrund, steel in his eyes. “Lead by example? These men know I’ve suffered in the worst of ways, suffered losses that cut so deep you couldn’t possibly comprehend. Did I allow those hardships to drive me to drink, to make a miserable hole of my life? Sadly yes, and that’s something that shames me. But these old soldiers see me here now. They see that suffering driving me toward revenge. They can say what they will, but I’m determined to make them see every day a man who’s crawled out of that hole, who’s seen life’s worst and fights on still.”
Ogrund sniffed, watching as Randyn and the four scouts closed the distance.
A thick-necked man of perhaps thirty years held the lance—still upraised with its yellow sash snapping—and seemed the patrol’s leader. His dour face bore the stitch of a recent wound. The others were younger, though they too had hardened looks about them.
“Captain,” hailed Randyn as they neared. “The corporal here,” he said, gesturing to the rough fellow with the lance, “says they’ve been awaiting our arrival. He and his men are to escort you to the camp’s commander. Immediately.”
Lannick shifted his jaw, sensing the weight of the moment. He felt Ogrund’s eyes and those of many others upon him. How I miss Brugan, he thought. His comfort and his counsel.
He knew then he had none to trust, none to lean upon aside from himself.
“Lead the way, Corporal,” he said at last.
Keep your edges sharp, lad.
Lannick rode down the long hillside, several yards behind the corporal and his patrol. He found his hand drifting between the press of his Coda in his purse and the hilt of the prized sword on his hip. He wondered which he’d need first. He’d not known exactly what to expect upon arriving at the camp, but the idea of some kind of interrogation made him uneasy.
His recent successes had granted a new confidence, yet those old ghosts of doubt haunted him still. What was more, the importance of this encounter made things seem at once more daunting, more critical. He worried that without these deserters—this army—he had little hope of seizing his revenge and winning the war that would follow.
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He spat. He needed this to happen. He needed his revenge, his victory. He’d spent far too long languishing in past failures and could not allow himself to fail again. He owed this to his dead family and his dead friend Brugan. He owed this to the old soldiers of Pryam’s Bay. He owed them all, and himself, a triumph.
And he owed General Fane his due.
They trotted down the hill’s bottom and onto the grassy plain below. Soon the patrol led him to the camp’s outermost edge, a makeshift fortification of piled earth only as tall as a man in most spots. A creaky gate of wood opened and they entered the camp.
The encampment held a massive assembly of fighting men that grew ever denser as they made their way through, and the scene struck Lannick with a rush of familiarity. It appeared so very like those military camps he’d been a part of during the war with the Tallorrath a decade before. The air—thick with the odors of sweat and smoke—moved with the ring of blacksmiths’ hammers, the drone of nagging insects, and the lilting song of many conversations.
Countless soldiers gathered about, ranging from barely more than boys with the wispy beginnings of beards to gruff veterans with faces like chewed meat. All wore the red sash of Rune, though these fellows had marked theirs with a thick stain of black across the sash’s middle.
They sharpened weapons, repaired armor, mended wounds, or lounged upon crates and sacks of supplies. They tended corrals of horses and oxen and mules; others gutted chickens or stirred steaming cauldrons of soup. Some rested on tattered bedrolls in the open air, while those more fortunate reclined within small tents shielding them from the buzzing mosquitos. Thankfully only few made obvious use of the outdoor latrines.
Most of the eyes that found Lannick turned quickly on to something else. A small number, though, lingered, particularly the gazes of some of the older veterans, their heads seeming to struggle with the memory of something nearly forgotten.
“Just there,” said the corporal, gesturing ahead.
Lannick turned to see a tall tent standing not more than twenty yards away. A flag moved lazily at its top, a red square of linen bearing a black cross.