by J. M. Topp
‘You need to stop thinking about it.’
Eymeg turned his head to see Tiebalt staring at him with his pale white eyes.
‘Go back to sleep, Tiebalt,’ muttered Eymeg.
‘It is eating your mind away,’ said the grey shuck. ‘She is dead. You killed her. It’s time to forget the past, ’Meg.’
He was right, but how could Eymeg stop a thought? Have you ever fallen in love with a dream? He closed his eyes, allowing his thoughts to run circles through his mind.
THE SUN SHONE through the hills of the morning dawn. Dew clung to blades of grass like fattened blue water babes. Tiebalt strapped his bedroll onto his horse and coughed, staring back down the road from which they had come. He coughed again and turned to Eymeg. ‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said, keeping his voice hushed. ‘Someone is following us.’
Eymeg glanced at his sides. ‘Is that what that smell is? I thought it was coming from Vos.’ He patted his horse’s mane, and Vos whinnied in response.
Tiebalt snorted from the air holes in his neck. ‘Old incense and mulled wine?’
Eymeg sighed. ‘It’s that altar boy, Gos-something. He must have followed us from Duren.’ Eymeg thumbed the hilt of his sword and hawked a wad of spit from his mouth onto the ground, much to Tiebalt’s disgust. The grey shuck shook his head.
‘Gosfridus,’ said Tiebalt. ‘The serf?’
‘We will try to lose him by Rokiev Bridge. If he has managed to follow us that far, then we kill him,’ said Eymeg. He unwrapped his bedroll and produced a leather-sewn quiver full of arrows, strapping the belt across his chest so that the quiver could rest on his right shoulder blade. He unlaced a bundle of nine arrows and dropped them into the quiver. Finally, he pulled out a wooden shortbow frame, uncoiled a thin bowstring fastened beside it, and strung it to the frame. He set the shortbow on a leather strap on his saddle.
Tiebalt mounted his horse. Eymeg put his foot in Vos’s stirrup and heaved himself over, patting the grey broodmare’s neck. The horses’ hooves chewed at the road as the two travellers raced across the land. The fields in between Duren and the Kingsoul were mostly desolate, and there was little sign of life. Trees and the surrounding grasses were dead or dying. The very air seemed heavy and seemed to weigh more than Eymeg remembered. It was difficult to breathe, and the chills came more often than merely because of the cold weather. The creek they rode beside had no life that Eymeg could see. A vulture flew high above the two horses, in search of the dead. Eymeg stopped from time to time to study a footprint marked into hardened mud or trampled grass.
Tiebalt sniffed the air once and rode closer to the edge of the creek. ‘Someone made camp here,’ he said.
‘More than just someone. There are hundreds of tracks farther down the road.’ Eymeg squinted to look ahead.
‘An ambush?’
Eymeg shook his head. ‘I doubt it. We would have heard something by now. No, whoever was here is long gone.’
Tiebalt glanced to his sides as he approached the crowded markings of feet on the ground. ‘Seems like a small band of soldiers. Their footprints are deeper into the mud than they should be. They were armoured.’
Eymeg shrugged and urged his mount along the road. ‘Let’s go. There’s nothing left for us here.’
After more than eight hours of hard riding, Eymeg and Tiebalt made a turn onto a road leading southeast. Eymeg spotted a wooden cabin in the distance. It was an odd structure since most of the fields they had passed were barren. No other building was in sight for miles. Smoke was rising from the house. Eymeg held a finger in the air and then pointed at it. He knew Tiebalt understood his signals. The horses slowed half a mile from the cabin.
‘Bandits?’ asked Tiebalt, riding up beside Eymeg.
‘The question is how many and if they are armed. No one lives in the middle of nowhere for nothing,’ said Eymeg, dismounting. He and Tiebalt tied their horses to a fallen tree. Tiebalt unsheathed his sword, and Eymeg drew his shortbow from the leather strap on his saddle. He notched an arrow to the string, keeping his eye on the smokestack and the light coming from within. He crouched low, with Tiebalt close behind him. He could smell the firewood burning from within the home. Shadows danced in the firelight. Eymeg neared the windowsill and poked his head in to see through the window. There was no one in the house. The bed was broken and cracked. A few other pieces of wooden furniture lay in pieces in a corner of the room. Ash made a grey carpet on the floorboards. Bare-footprints dotted the floor as if someone had walked through it recently.
‘The house is empty,’ said Eymeg with a grunt. He made his way to the entrance and realised that the door was wide open, swinging lazily back and forth with a tiny squeak. The dwindling fire fluttered as they entered the house. The one-room building was colder on the inside than outside, making Eymeg shiver in his cloak. He un-notched his arrow and put it back in its quiver.
‘Whoever was here might have seen us and left,’ said Tiebalt, sheathing his sword as well.
‘Too convenient,’ said Eymeg, looking out the open door. His hand hovered over his dagger hilt as he squinted his eyes into the greying light of the sky. ‘There are two graves out there.’ He paused for a moment, and then his eyes widened. ‘And someone is out there among them.’
He clenched his teeth and marched out the door with Tiebalt in tow. The sun was beginning to set. The house cast a dark aura ahead of them, looming. A figure rose like a black shadow in the dawning sun. Eymeg grabbed an arrow and notched it again. He pulled the bowstring to his cheek.
‘Where are your compatriots?’ he barked. Eymeg realised that it was a woman. She was covered in mud from head to toe. Her brown eyes sparkled in the red sun’s light. Her dress was torn in the middle, and she had bruises on her arms and chest. One of her breasts was poking through the tear. Her hair was matted and brown, but Eymeg didn’t know if it was due to the mud clinging to her hair. Tear trails stained her cheeks, and she wiped white mucus from her nose. Her cheeks were gaunt and her arms and legs thin and fragile.
‘What do you want?’ she said feebly, covering her breast and pulling part of her dress back onto her shoulder. Eymeg relaxed his bow arm and put the arrow back into his quiver.
‘We are two travellers seeking refuge,’ said Tiebalt behind him. He sheathed his sword and stepped in front of Eymeg. ‘We’ve travelled long and hard.’
‘Take what you want from my house and leave me be,’ said the woman softly. She then bent over her knees and laid her head on a mound of dirt. Rough wooden crosses marked the two graves, side by side. The woman sniffed and closed her eyes. ‘Just leave.’
‘It’s getting dark, and the cold will be fierce tonight,’ said Eymeg, looking down at her.
The woman sat up once more and looked at him. She studied him and then the weapons on their backs and hips. ‘Are you some sort of knight?’
‘I’m not a knight,’ Eymeg said with some hesitation.
The woman brushed a strand of hair from her face and sniffed. ‘I will make you stew if you help me.’
‘Stew?’ said Tiebalt with a hint of eagerness.
‘What would you ask of us?’ whispered Eymeg.
‘My husband, Rowan, is in the next field over. Please,’ said the woman as new tears began to collect in her eyes.
‘How can we help him?’ asked Eymeg as a frown crept over his lips.
‘I need you to kill him.’
Eymeg froze.
‘Why would you need us to kill him?’ asked Tiebalt, tilting his head.
‘He was growing sick. I travelled to Flodden for aid, but when I returned, I was too late,’ whimpered the woman. ‘The Fog changed him. Rowan killed my children. He wanders around the fields aimlessly and without reason. I tried talking to him, and he nearly killed me as well.’
‘In the field next to this one?’ asked Eymeg, pointing east.
‘You will find him there. Please, end his suffering,’ pleaded the woman. Newborn tears began to fall from her eyes. She fell to the groun
d and put her knees to her chest. ‘I will repay you with food. Please, I beg you.’
Eymeg looked back at Tiebalt. The grey shuck shrugged.
‘He shouldn’t be trouble to hunters like yourselves. Please, be quick and do not let him suffer any longer.’ Her lip curled as she tried to stop herself from sobbing.
Eymeg nodded.
‘Take the woman inside, Tiebalt, and meet me in the field,’ Eymeg said, squeezing the grip of his bow. Tiebalt nodded, hiding his face as he helped the woman up to her feet and guided her away.
Eymeg made his way through the field into the next one, crossing a dried creek bed. Twigs and clumps of hardened dirt crumbled beneath his footsteps. His eyes scanned the horizon. A lone man walked in the field, his head turned to the sky and his arms swinging lazily, bent and crooked. His back was arched unnaturally. As the sun began to go down, the man’s features were not so easily distinguished, but a hollow moan gave Eymeg reason to believe this was the woman’s husband. The man stumbled around in the field aimlessly, just as the woman had said. Eymeg notched his arrow and drew the string.
His hand was steady.
Would you even realise if I was gone? said a voice in his mind. This time, it wasn’t Father Sabathiel’s.
Eymeg hesitated.
It echoed in his mind once more, like a clear liquid dripping into a chalice. They all said they didn’t care if I left you. Do you?
He closed his eyes and tried to focus on Rowan. His hand began to shake. He clenched his teeth and held his breath.
Fwoop!
His arrow struck the man’s neck, only a millimetre from where he had been initially aiming. Blood spurted into the air, and Rowan went down in a heap without a noise. His body trembled and convulsed, and then he went completely still.
‘Good shot,’ whispered Tiebalt through his head wrapping. He had sneaked up behind him. Eymeg relaxed his bow arm and stood up. He walked over to the dead man. Rowan’s flesh was peeling from his bones in odd green and yellow colours.
‘No bite marks on the body. His jaw fell from his skull, but only because of disease, not through blunt force. He must have been this way for a few weeks, not long after the Second Age of Fog began,’ said Eymeg as he inspected the body with gloved hands.
‘What do you think did this to him?’
‘Though his limbs are bent and broken, there are no signs of daemonic magic, but that doesn’t rule out daemonic activity. His nose is blackened as if it had been held to a fire.’ Eymeg winced as the wind rose, bringing the smell of Rowan’s corpse to his nose. He spat on the ground.
‘A kouffyngtooth,’ said Eymeg finally, standing up beside Tiebalt.
‘How can you tell?’
‘Creatures like the kouffyngtooth spread noxious disease into the air, with the wicked intent of turning humans into vile creatures susceptible to magic. The blackened nose is one of its telltale signs,’ said Eymeg. ‘It’s either that or the Archdaemon is near. But I highly doubt that. We would be overwhelmed by hell-spawn at this point if that were the case.’
Eymeg wrapped a cloth around his face. The kouffyngtooth had to be dealt with as a matter of principle. He didn't know if it was instilled in him to think this way, as he was no longer a Veledred, but he did need a distraction from the torment of his own thoughts. Hunting a daemon would do just that.
‘It’s a wonder that the woman didn’t turn just as her husband did,’ said Tiebalt, glancing back at the house.
Eymeg knew a kouffyngtooth usually didn’t stray far from the creatures they infected. They were likely to stay near creeks and dank caverns. Eymeg made his way to the Greenwater River with Tiebalt close behind. The waters rushed by, the same colour as Rowan’s skin. Eymeg had only seen a creature like that once before, long before he had been a full-fledged daemon hunter. He shuddered as he remembered the smell of the alcove beneath Karagh Muín fortress where the evil creature had resided.
Eymeg’s nose tingled in remembrance as he picked up the scent of sour, putrid apples. His hand began to tremble, but he did his best to ignore the tremor, wishing it would go away on its own. He walked along the muddy edge of the river, and his boots sloshed quietly in the night. He heard a groan in the darkness and saw a rather large cave beside the waters. Eymeg neared the entrance of the cave and froze, standing as still as he could. The moon was glowing over the dark land—its reflection sparkling in the waters rushing past him. Strands of indigenous moss hung from the ceiling of the cave, like thin men hanging upside down. He slung his bow over his back and squeezed the hilt of his dagger. Tiebalt loosened his sword in its sheath.
A loud, hacking cough shrieked through the cave. Green water and slippery moss decorated the rocky path leading into the cave. Eymeg and Tiebalt followed the path into a large cavern. A creature sat in the centre of the cavern, with its head in its arms. The arms of the kouffyngtooth were almost as long as Eymeg was tall. The daemon had scales on its arms and legs that resembled small pebbles. It sported a turtle-like shell on its back, and three uneven and crude pipes poked from it. Eymeg knew noxious gases spewed from those natural exhaust organs, and he made special care to take shallow breaths.
‘Holy shit,’ he whispered. This daemon was three times bigger than the creature he’d faced beneath the castle of Karagh Muín. The kouffyngtooth hadn’t noticed them and was relatively still in the centre of the cavern. Moonlight poking from holes in the ceiling of the cavern washed the daemon in rays of blue. Eymeg knelt on the ground, and Tiebalt knelt beside him.
Tiebalt’s eyes were opened wide, studying the daemon before them. ‘I’ve never seen a kouffyngtooth like this one.’
‘Since when do they have shells like that on their backs?’ whispered Eymeg.
‘We can still slip away, ’Meg.’ Tiebalt glanced behind him to the opening of the cave.
Eymeg half-smiled. ‘Really? You want to run?’
‘This isn’t a laughing matter. We don’t have the proper knowledge to take this thing on right now,’ snapped Tiebalt with a cold glare. ‘Veledred never go in unprepared.’
‘We have to kill it, Tiebalt. And you forget: I am no longer a Veledred.’
Tiebalt sighed. ‘How do you suggest we take this thing?’
‘I’ve got a black powder bomb in my belt. We sneak up and drop it into one of those pipes on its back. Boom,’ whispered Eymeg, making an explosion gesture with his hands.
‘I don’t trust those elfen inventions.’
‘It’s not elfen. This is Weserithian. It’s made of blackstones,’ said Eymeg as he pulled the ball-like explosive from his belt and took a step toward the slumbering beast. Only, when he did so, he realised that the kouffyngtooth no longer was sleeping. Its dark red eyes were staring intently from beneath its thin, hairy arm. The creature had been watching them since the very beginning.
Eymeg’s breath stopped in his throat.
‘Oh, shit.’
The daemon raised itself from the ground and screamed at Eymeg and Tiebalt. The kouffyngtooth had an elongated neck, like that of a lizard, and its snout was horned. It opened its jaws with a loud cough. Without warning, it lunged at Eymeg and Tiebalt. Its claws were almost the length of Eymeg’s dagger. Eymeg ducked away from the blow, and Tiebalt blocked the claws with his sword. They split up to stand on opposite sides of the kouffyngtooth. The creature coughed, and this time green mist erupted from the pipes on its back. Tiebalt struck at the creature’s arm, but the rock-like scales were too tough. Tiebalt backed away and bared his sharpened teeth with a low growl. The kouffyngtooth turned to him and lunged. While the daemon’s attention was on Tiebalt, Eymeg lunged at his back leg, which wasn’t so heavily reinforced. His dagger sliced at the creature’s thin hind leg, drawing a line of purple blood. The beast howled in pain and kicked Eymeg in the chest, sending him sliding across the cavern floor.
‘Eymeg. The bomb!’ shouted Tiebalt.
Eymeg looked at the explosive on the ground far out of his reach. He must have dropped it after the kouffyngtoo
th struck him. The creature turned to Eymeg and stepped on the bomb, crushing it and dousing the black powder with swamp water. The creature coughed and then let out a massive howl. The green mist from its back spewed and spread even more throughout the cavern. The putrid stench of rotting food and faeces was clouding Eymeg’s mind.
‘Fuck,’ he said, picking himself up. He leapt to his left as the creature struck at him with a flurry of clawed attacks. Eymeg slid backward as he dodged the sharpened blows, but his right foot found solid ground. He redirected his loss of balance by kicking at the mud to his side, and then he launched himself at the wounded, bloody back leg of the creature. Eymeg buried his dagger into the leg and sliced savagely. The kouffyngtooth screamed and swung at him, slicing his chest. The blow knocked the air out of Eymeg, and he fell onto his back, holding his chest, bleeding from the freshly made wounds.
Tiebalt shrieked and ran with his sword poised to slice. He struck at the same spot Eymeg had and cleaved the daemon’s back leg off. But Tiebalt wasn’t done. He grabbed the severed leg and jumped onto the howling creature’s back. The severed limb was clawing, reflexively grasping and tearing at the air. Tiebalt sank his jaws into the kouffyngtooth’s shell and heaved himself up onto its back. Eymeg stood up slowly as he watched the grey shuck throw the limb into the kouffyngtooth’s pipe. He could hear the claw shredding the insides of the creature as gravity did its work in the daemon’s core. The kouffyngtooth shrieked and charged into the cavern wall with Tiebalt still on top of it. The cavern shook, and large pieces of rock began to fall from the ceiling. The kouffyngtooth fell onto its side.
Eymeg grabbed his dagger, raced at the creature, and sliced at the soft side beneath its jaw. With perfect precision, he cut the head off the kouffyngtooth. The beast’s body twitched ever so slightly and then remained still, as the tiny twitches of its dying muscles waned. Eymeg let out a sigh of relief and fell onto his knees. He looked around.
‘Tiebalt?’ he said, trying to catch his breath. The stench was almost too much to bear. The kouffyngtooth twitched.