by Dan Rabarts
For one of the very rare times in his life, Akmenos wished he hadn’t eaten. Looking up, his gorge rose. Belly rippling with muscle and covered in wiry hair. Arms as thick as small trees, hands that could crush Akmenos’ skull effortlessly. His gaze continued up, past a neck so massive it was impossible to tell where the shoulders ended and the head began. Huge nostrils flared over a gaping bovine maw, which glistened bloodily. Two long horns dripped gore. The beast’s huge chest heaved, and its fists flexed open and closed as it surveyed the room.
Akmenos had heard of the Taur but had never seen one. He’d certainly never expected to meet one so soon after heartily devouring an ample portion of one of his brethren—and it was a him, to be sure.
The bullman’s nostrils flared.
“Hello,” Akmenos croaked, swallowing a burp and discretely pushing away the gravy-stained plate.
“Akmenos son of Bane?”
He stifled a small yelp of surprise. “Ah, yes? How may I help you?”
The taur extended one huge skull-crushing hand. “Come with me.”
Akmenos gulped. “Are you planning on eating me, too?”
The bullman barked, perhaps a laugh of sorts. “I find your kind hard to digest.” The taur scanned the room, his eyes coming to rest on the haunch sizzling over the fire.
Akmenos hurried to his feet. “Well, if you’ve come to my rescue, shouldn’t we be going?” He gripped one huge hand—or, to be more precise, a finger—in his uninjured hand and pulled himself up, trying to distract the bullman from the sight.
“Filthy creatures,” the taur muttered, heaving Al’s corpse into the flames with one mighty hoof before turning to Akmenos. Frozen in place, Akmenos’ mouth worked silently. All that was left of Jack were several eviscerated pieces strewn across the floor. Blood scrolled down the walls in thick, dark rivulets. “On my back,” the taur ordered, “and hold on tight.”
Akmenos could barely speak, much less argue. The bullman hoisted him onto his shoulders, crouched through the low cave entrance, and ran. Yet again, Akmenos wished he hadn’t eaten.
~
The hound leapt off the plinth at a mad dash, its eyes wild. Hrodok let it go. However much its unexpected passenger may have spooked it, it forged on, implacable. Nose to the ground, it scoured the sands, gaining speed as it headed for a stand of boulders. Hrodok watched it go. Whoever had summoned these hellish beasts and bent them to their will must have command of both the plinths and what lay beyond. Could it be Sianna? Why would she be sending spirit hounds to do her work, unless…
Hrodok cursed under his breath and spoke a spell, blinking across the desert to reappear near the hound. It was nosing around the boulders with a fervour, sniffing at traces of blood and scratches on the stone as if something hard had scraped through them. Hoofs, maybe, or horns.
Sianna had lost Akmenos. Somehow, his brother had escaped down one of the many wormholes of the plinth network. Could Hrodok have been canny enough to emerge from the void in the same place his brother had? The hound, apparently catching a scent, bounded down the hardpan towards the desert. Akmenos wasn’t an outdoorsman; he couldn’t have made it far. Calling on his magic yet again, Hrodok blinked along in the moondog’s wake, keeping pace behind it without ever walking a step.
~
Akmenos didn’t see the carnage being wrought upon the hyena city, because his eyes were shut tight. It took all his strength just to grip the taur’s hairy shoulders, and it didn’t seem sensible to waste effort just looking around. Thankfully, the bullman wasn’t running towards the battle, but away from it. Howls and bellows and the crunch of snapping bone assaulted Akmenos’ ears as the taur drove aside any hyena fool enough to stand before him.
The sounds of fighting gradually faded, swallowed in the mesa’s twisting caverns. By the time they emerged into afternoon sunlight, Akmenos suspected a veritable army of taur must have descended on the hyenas, possibly as some sort of retaliation, or as an act of conquest. Whatever the reason, the hyenas’ fate was not his concern. Rather, the fact the bullman had asked for him by name seemed rather more important, and rather more ominous, than it had at first. A dozen questions burned in his head, each of which spawned a dozen more. But between holding on for dear life and trying to keep his lunch down, Akmenos had neither strength nor breath for conversation. He peeked over the massive, gore-soaked shoulder and saw a herd of taur, clutching axes and hammers as long as he was tall, pouring into the mesa.
“All of this, just for me?” he managed to gasp.
“Keep your head down and your mouth shut,” the bullman hissed back, and Akmenos ducked. When two tonnes of raw muscle and razor horn tells you to shut up, you shut up.
Chapter Twelve
Akmenos squinted against the stinging sand. He clutched the taur’s wiry hair, and endured. The bullman ran across the desert, through the failing sun, towards the distant mountains. Occasionally, it slowed its pace and sucked from a heavy waterskin at its side, but it didn’t stop, even as dusk fell and the ragged peaks filled the night sky. Akmenos’ bones were being jostled from their sockets, and if he survived until morning, he’d be a ball of aches. His mouth was full of grit, his eyes caked shut, but he dared not ask the bull for a mouthful of water. His swollen hand pulsed with an ache as deep as bone.
Both moons rose above the horizon, casting the desertscape in twin palettes of light and shadow, the silvery lemon of Auranos and Saunge’s watery pink, like blood and piss swirled through water. On loped the taur. Still Akmenos gripped his shaggy mane, head spinning.
Finally, the bullman slowed, stopped, and sank down, letting Akmenos slide from his back. Akmenos collapsed in a contorted heap on the ground. Pulling his knees up to his belly, he rocked, moaning softly. A waterskin touched his lips, wet and warm. He sucked like a calf at the teat, the liquid soothing his throat. Then he resumed his whimpering.
“You must stand, Akmenos of Kriikan. You have far to walk to reach the sacred circle before sunrise.”
Akmenos coughed, choked slightly. He’d been trying to chuckle. His throat was too raw to speak.
“People have gone to great lengths to bring you here. Prove you are worthy of their sacrifice.”
With considerable difficulty, Akmenos rolled onto his back and lay staring up at the megalithic tower of muscle and horn, the twin moons seeming to rest one on each of the bullman’s shoulders. Those shoulders which barely sagged, even after hours of running across the desert. “If this is some sort of joke—”
“The Holy Flame are not in the joking business.”
Akmenos stared at the taur, and the taur stared back.
“You understand, then,” the bullman nodded sagely.
Akmenos shook his head. “Who in the screaming abyss are the Holy Flame?”
In its turn, the taur nodded again. “That’s right, you know nothing. I shall say no more, but understand this: The Holy Flame offer sanctuary from those who seek to destroy you. Ignore their offer at your peril, for the sacred circle may transport you either to the path to their haven, or to the first steps towards the stronghold of your most foul enemy.”
“Someone wants to destroy me? I have a foul enemy?” Somehow, after all that had happened, this came as little surprise.
“The Eternal Stair will shatter your brain, rape your spirit and shred your body, leaving you to be fed upon by their undead minions in the wastes. Beware everything they say, for they speak only in lies. Remember that the Holy Flame has saved you twice now from death at the hands of the Stair.” The taur regarded Akmenos critically, as if for the first time. “I daresay you can use all the help you can get.”
Akmenos glared and got to his feet in a pique of outrage. This took several wheezing minutes as he winced and groaned and stretched inflamed muscles, but finally he was standing, hands on hips, panting hard, and giving the taur his most daunting glare from beneath his horns.
“I was fine back there on my own, and I’ll be fine here on my own, too. You think I need you and yo
ur Holy Fire or whoever? Screw it. I had those hyenas wrapped around my little finger. I didn’t need any Taur army sweeping in to my rescue.”
The bullman’s thick bovine lips split in a grotesque grin, his massive nostrils flaring in the cool air. “Then you sound like just what the Holy Flame seek, and a worthy foe for the Eternal Stair. I will leave you to your quest. You’ll need this.” He pulled a black ivory-tipped cylinder from a pouch at his waist and passed it to Akmenos. “Follow this path, and be sure to reach the sacred circle and make your choice before sunrise.” The taur unslung a second waterskin and dropped it on the sand. “Good luck, Akmenos Son of Bane.”
“Hey, wait a minute—”
But the bullman turned away, and with massive strides disappeared into the desert night.
“I was bluffing.” Akmenos sighed and watched him go, all his righteous indignation draining away. What in the abyss was going on? He surveyed the silent desert, stretched his aching bones, sniffed at his odour—now more bull than hornung—and finally turned to survey the goat’s path that wound into the foothills.
The path was outlined weakly in shades of blood and urine. Akmenos scooped up the precious waterskin and, muscles protesting every step, began the ascent, his agonised hand clutched against his chest. How was he even going to find the damned circle—presumably another plinth like the one Scimitar had brought him to—before sunrise, much less figure the damn thing out and make whatever choice he had to make when he got there? The only choice he wanted to make was what to cook for breakfast, but he doubted he’d have much option. Sunbaked scorpions, if he was lucky.
It was only when he finally reached the plateau that Akmenos grew suspicious of the contents of the waterskin. He must’ve been walking for hours, considering how low the twin moons now hung in the sky, yet his muscles no longer ached, and nor was he as exhausted as he should’ve been. He was hungry, of course—that went without saying—but, barring a short stop for a small plate of eggs, bacon, potato hash, mushrooms, tomatoes, sausage, stuffed lamb’s kidneys and toast smothered in fresh churned butter, he was confident he could’ve walked for hours. The waterskin, which he’d been sipping from since he started his trek, still felt full. He regarded the hand sliced open by Scimitar’s treacherous blade. The wound had closed, the swelling subsided. Taur magic? Who knew?
Had he not known he was looking for another plinth, Akmenos may have mistaken the sand-covered plateau for nothing more than a flat space amidst the rocks. Wind-driven sand concealed the steps. Akmenos scuffed away an inch of grit with his hoof, revealing the carved glyphs. The eastern sky was growing lighter, leaving him an hour or so before sunrise.
He skirted the accursed plinth, gathered scraps of scrub and thorn and arranged them in a small circle of stones, wherein he easily started a small crackling fire. As a cook, it was essential he could make fire with the most rudimentary of fuels and tools, and of course he wouldn’t be much of a chef without his flint and steel. No rubbing sticks together for him.
His little campfire eased the desert chill from his bones, and he sat down to study the markings on the scroll case. His fingers ran over its surface, tracing indentations of graven inscriptions. Glyphs, maybe, or just decoration. While the case’s ivory caps were locked in place, the body comprised four sections, each of which could be turned. The engravings ran in straight lines down the length of the case, representing a plethora of languages. Akmenos recognised Hornung, Elvish, Dwarvish, and Base, as well as several mysterious lines of text which baffled him. Trollish, maybe, or Wyrmken. Maybe Giant, if giants had a written language. He tried to imagine giants writing with their huge fingers, squinting to see the tiny scroll case, and laughed.
Probably not Giant, then.
This was some sort of cipher, a puzzle box of sorts. Whoever wished to unlock the scroll case must turn the four sections, aligning different texts to find meaning. It would be far too easy to assume that simply aligning, for example, the Hornung text, would reveal a single answer. A quick trial of this proved that when the lines were arranged together neither the Hornung nor the other languages he could read made any sense. This was, therefore, a scholar’s test, designed to thwart brutish adventuring types. Which of these archetypes had the taur mistaken him for—scholar or adventurer—and how could the bullman have been so very wrong on both counts?
Akmenos whacked the case experimentally on the ground to see if it might, perchance, break to reveal its contents, but to no avail. He was considering the implications of tossing it in the fire to see if it might burst apart, when he heard running feet.
Akmenos jumped up with a start, stuffing the scroll case into his dusty apron, and scanned the plateau. The area was suspiciously devoid of boulders or other convenient hiding places, and the scattered bushes were thin, ragged things offering no chance of concealment. Besides that, his fire would lead whoever was coming right to him. He had no time to put it out and hide its traces. He must boldly face whatever fell thing came his way, be it monster or man, devil or daemon, ghoul or ghost. Because he did bold so very well.
He gripped the hilts of his knives, braced his hooves in the dirt, and waited. What he saw, however, chilled his bones. Not the shadowy hound whose spectral skin glowed silver in the gloaming, nor its teeth spread open in a snarl that glistened yellow as the moon, nor its wide pale eyes as it pounded across the open space towards him. Not the apparition’s ethereal claws throwing up clouds of glittering dust as it loped his way. Not the spine-tingling howl that seemed to echo down from across a vast void as the beast closed for the kill. No, it was not the glowing hound of hell intent on his blood that filled Akmenos with fear and fury, but rather the figure behind it, appearing as if out of nowhere, grinning from ear to ear.
“Hello, brother,” Hrodok crooned.
The hellhound leapt for Akmenos’ throat.
Chapter Thirteen
Probably for the sheer drama of it, Hrodok waited until the last possible moment to yank on a silvery leash, skittering the hound backwards like a gagging bag of bones. He stood, grinning as Akmenos scrambled away, putting the fire between himself and the slavering beast.
“Get that thing away,” Akmenos growled, hating himself for the fear in his voice.
Belatedly, he pulled a bone-handled knife from his belt and waved it before him in a truly fearsome manner. “Or I’ll gut it.”
“Funny.” Hrodok smiled. “I didn’t realise Skerrl bought his monkeys enchanted weapons for chopping onions.”
Akmenos risked another glance at the dog, blinked twice as he looked at it, through it, saw desert and moonlight behind the ghost of ribs and hide. Its teeth sure seemed real enough.
“Well, we have some pretty vicious onions, you know. And turnips that’ll take your head off if you look at them wrong.”
Hrodok pulled a pipe from one of his belt pouches. He proceeded to fill it with cloveweed, breaking the dry bitter leaf in his fingers and pressing it into the bowl, and prompting Akmenos to pat his pockets down for his own pipe. When had he last had it? Which pocket had he tucked it into? Did he even have any cloveweed of his own?
“Sit, brother. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Really?” Akmenos looked at the hound, whose eyes had grown dark.
“No, that’s not true. I couldn’t resist.” He rolled his fingers under his nose, savouring the fragrant resin. “But I’m not here to hurt you. I came here to save you, before you get yourself into any more trouble. Smoke?” Hrodok pulled a glowing twig from the flames and sucked gently on the pipe until it began to puff.
Akmenos wavered. “I’m not in any trouble.” His eyes darted to the horizon. Grey light silhouetted distant desert peaks.
“Sure you are. You’re you. Difference being, the trouble is normally contained to a kitchen. Now here you are, stirring up problems not only at home but in different countries. You’re just lucky that you’ve got me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I know you didn’t kill that pri
nce. Not only are you not that clever, or that ambitious, but I’m fairly certain it was Skerrl. Who knows how much the damn wyrmken paid him to pull that off and point the finger at you, so the Landarians would revolt against Hornung? All very dire political games I’m afraid, and you no more than a pawn in the middle.”
Akmenos flushed. He wasn’t just a pawn. He’d kissed a beautiful woman, and he was wanted by the Holy Flame. He was no-one’s gaming piece. His fingers stroked the scroll case in his deep pockets.
“But fear not, brother. I can help clear your name, and we can all go back to Kriikan. As I understand it, there’s an opening for an imperial chef.” Hrodok grinned, a warm, infectious, false thing.
“You underestimate me,” Akmenos intoned, drawing on every epic tale of heroism he’d read as a child and, indeed, as an adult, to fill his voice with pride and wonder. Or so he hoped. “I’m wanted for higher things.”
Hrodok raised a crooked eyebrow through a pall of smoke. “Oh really? You going back to the hyenas, then? They’ll be pleased to see you. I imagine they’re hungry by now.”
Akmenos squared his shoulders. “I doubt you’ve ever heard of the Holy Flame, but I’m to become one of their—” Akmenos stumbled only briefly in his grand speech, for he had no idea exactly what of the Holy Flame’s he was to become, “vaunted warrior knight servant templars. Yes. An acolyte most high, assuredly.”
Hrodok’s brow tightened. When he spoke again, his light lilt had a harder edge. “So, you’ve been drawn in by the lies of monsters, then? I always took you for a fool, Akmenos, but nothing this unwise. What was it, a wyrmken? Taur? What manner of beast has filled your head with such drivel?”
“You can’t tell me what to think,” Akmenos stormed, “you’re only my brother, and a worthless one at that!”
“Listen to yourself!” Hrodok leapt to his feet, stalking around the fire. Akmenos backed away, one eye on Hrodok, one on the hellhound. “I face untold dangers to track you down and keep you safe and you have nothing but spite for me? You would rather believe some hellspawn wants you to become a soldier of the Holy Flame than that your own flesh and blood has risked life and sanity to rescue you from yourself?”