by Rachel Ford
Ceinwen nodded briskly and pointed again to the tracks. “They’re heading in this direction. We should follow the track.”
At the same time, a thought flashed through Jack’s mind:
Objective added: follow the trail of blood to locate the strange animal
So he did. The tracks zigzagged through the muddy road for a bit in the direction they’d been heading. Then they wandered into the grass. But the splotches of blood left a very clear trail, and Jack moved quickly.
The blood was still wet, which meant either that videogame physics were at play – and liquid blood would never dry while it waited for the player – or that the animal had only recently passed by. Either way, the whole thing felt real enough that he didn’t want to delay.
They walked for a good twenty minutes. The trail grew sparser, and Ceinwen murmured, “Poor thing. I’m surprised it didn’t bleed out already.”
They kept going. The blood led to a kind of cave or alcove between jagged granite. A medium-sized gray animal lay slumped at the mouth of the opening. It had a great, bushy tail and pointed ears. But it wasn’t breathing.
Arath laughed. “Looks like it did bleed out. Silly bugger. What’d you go get yourself into, eh?”
The ranger moved for the dead coyote – Jack was pretty sure it was a coyote, although he’d never seen one in real life – when animal sounds arrested his step. They were soft and doglike. Arath yelped and drew his sword, spinning around in a circle while his gaze darted about the open ground in search of the source of that noise.
Er’c pointed at the cave and said, “Odin’s teeth: pups.”
Jack followed the direction of the young man’s finger, and he stared. They were pups, but they didn’t look like dog pups, or coyote pups. They looked – well, otherworldly.
“Silver mountain foxes,” Migli said. “Friendly animals. They’re frequently domesticated in these parts. Very good pets they make.”
“That must be their mother,” Ceinwen realized, gesturing at the dead fox.
Jack glanced again at it, and its fluffy tail and fine coat. Not that he was an expert, of course, but he supposed this creature looked too elegant to be a coyote. Even in death, it had a kind of majesty to it. Then he glanced at the pups: little balls of fur, all crying and yipping and trying to get past the stones that barred their way.
“Poor things,” Ceinwen said. “They’ll never survive on their own without their mother. Not this young.”
Arath had stopped hyperventilating and started watching the pups. He nodded now. “Well, only one thing to do.”
Jack nodded. They’d have to take them back to Fox’s Crossing, he figured, and see about finding someone to take care of them. He was about to say that when Arath went on.
“It’s the only merciful thing to do in the circumstance. Anyway, those are fine pelts. I’ll bet I could get a good bit of gold for them.” He traded his sword for a dagger and moved toward the cave entrance.
Jack’s brain didn’t quite follow the other man’s line of thinking as quickly as it probably should have. Still, the idea of killing a cave full of baby foxes seemed so unthinkable that it took him a minute to catch on.
His companions were quicker on the uptake, though. Ceinwen hollered out a, “Don’t even think of it.”
Karag moved to block his way. Er’c had turned a ghostly pale green hue, shouting, “Stop, Mister Arath. You can’t do that.”
Frosty belched out a tiny trail of ice. Even Shimmerfax snorted and stamped its feet.
Arath stopped and turned, seeming genuinely surprised by the reaction. “What?”
“What?” Jack sputtered. “You’re going to murder them.”
“Murder?” Arath laughed incredulously. “They’re kits, Jack. Dumb animals. You can’t murder a dumb animal.”
“Good. That’s what I’ll use in my defense, when they put me on trial for your slaying,” Karag said.
“Come off,” the other man protested. “You people are serious, aren’t you?”
“For once, I must side with them,” Migli said. “The Mountain Fox is a noble creature. To kill them in such a way? It’s cruel, Arath.”
“Cruel?” He repeated the word as if Migli had been speaking a foreign language. “I’ll tell you what’s cruel: leaving these poor little vermin to suffer now that their mom’s gone and popped off. That’s what’s cruel.
“But putting them out of their misery? Nothing cruel about that. Quick and easy…” He brought his dagger toward his own throat and mimed out the act of cutting – a rapid slice, from ear to ear. He even accompanied the gesture with a sound effect that made the entire party shiver – a kind of squee noise. “They bleed out long before they would have starved to death, I collect the pelt. Everyone’s happy.”
Everyone was not happy, though, and they made that quite clear – all at once, and all quite forcefully. In the end, astonished and protesting all the while, Arath sheathed his dagger and stood down. He watched with surprise as the group declared they would cart the kits back to Fox’s Crossing.
“I don’t know where this Mayor Ashford is,” Jack said. “And I’m not going to waste any more time trying to find him. Let’s get these pups to safety and get back to finding Kalbidor.”
Arath declared this madness. His companions were tenderhearted fools, and he could not believe that he had ever got caught up in such absurdity. He said this several times, but everyone ignored him.
They made a kind of saddle bag for each of the pups, which they secured to Shimmerfax’s back. The unicorn looked quite silly, Jack thought, with sacks of squirming fox pups hanging from it. Still, it’d work. So he declared that they should move out.
Ceinwen knelt by the dead mother and closed her eyes, placing a finger to its head. “Be at peace. Your children are safe.”
Arath rolled his eyes and flailed his arms in exasperation. “Unbelievable.”
Ceinwen started to rise. But then she froze. “Jack, look at this.”
There was an urgency in her tone that immediately captured his attention, and he hurried over. So did the rest of their crew.
So they all saw what she was pointing out at about the same moment. Which gave rise to a near unanimous chorus of mortification and recrimination.
“Freya’s blade, that’s awful.”
“By the gods, couldn’t you have warned us?”
“Sugar, Ceinwen: you could have told me it was a gosh darned hand.”
Because it was indeed a gosh darned hand – or what was left of it, all bloated and chewed and purple in color. A horrible stink emanated off of it.
“It’s not just any hand, Jack: it’s Mayor Ashford’s hand.”
That took some explaining. He couldn’t even tell for sure that the appendage was human in origin, due to the discoloration and bloating – much less who it had come from. But Ceinwen’s reasoning proved solid.
It came down to a signet ring – a ring that bloating had nearly obscured. With a little work, and quite a bit of nausea on Jack’s part, she got it off. The design was a coat of arms with a fox on it.
He frowned at the sight, but refused to touch it. “That looks familiar.”
“It’s the Fox’s Crossing coat of arms,” Migli said.
“Exactly,” Ceinwen nodded. “I saw it when we were in town.”
“Oh.” That made sense. He’d probably seen it too, but not paid much attention. “But…uh…what’s it doing in a fox’s mouth?”
“Ashford is dead. If this is his hand – and who else would be wearing the town’s seal? – he’s been dead for a long time. Probably, since about when he went missing.
“I’m guessing the momma fox here took it to feed her kits.”
Jack glanced down at the silvery gray animal, its side streaked in blood. “Then who killed her?”
“I don’t think it was another animal. It looks like some kind of stab wound. So a hunter, maybe. Or maybe one of the mayor’s men is still alive.” Ceinwen shook her head. “We need to find
the body, Jack. We need to figure out where she got this.”
As much as he wanted a reason to disagree, Jack couldn’t think of one. All his reasons for continuing earlier presented themselves now. They were closer than ever to learning what happened to Ashford. Now was no time to walk away from his reward.
And, if he hadn’t quite made up his mind, the quest updated with a new objective.
Find the body to match the mysterious hand.
“I reckon,” Migli mused, in the same, ponderous way he usually did when dropping a hint, “we should follow the trail of blood back to its origin.”
“Good idea,” Ceinwen nodded.
Jack wasn’t sure that it was. The fox could have taken its injury anywhere. It could have been by the bodies, or miles away. But he didn’t have a better suggestion, so he nodded. “Alright. Let’s go.”
They did, tracking the same trail they’d followed before but in reverse. It led them out to the road again, and then across it to the other side of the path. The drops got heavier here. They’d started to congeal, too. Jack was almost impressed at the level of realism.
Until they tracked the blood back to its origin, anyway – and the game’s realism hit him in all its dubious glory, like a bat to the face. The breeze kicked up, and before he’d taken half a breath he was choking and gagging on the stink of rotting flesh.
Karag wrinkled his nose. “Well, I guess that settles the question of whether the mayor is alive or not.” Ceinwen nodded, and Er’c staggered away to vomit in the grass.
There before them lay a pile of three bodies, all bloated and discolored like the hand had been.
“I don’t know about you, Sir Jack, but I for one have seen enough,” Migli declared.
Jack was about to agree when Arath laughed. “You pack of pussy willows. Are you telling me you’ve never seen dead bodies before?” He ambled over to the stack of corpses and tapped one with his boot.
“Have you no respect for the dead?” Ceinwen wondered, aghast.
He grinned at her. “Not really. But if it helps, I don’t have much respect for the living, neither.” He turned his attention to the bodies again. “Well, this is definitely where our fox found her trophy.”
He pointed to a putrid looking arm, swollen to twice the width of a normal limb. “Someone cut this fellow’s hand off.”
Ceinwen nodded. “Yes. Some kind of large, heavy blade.”
Jack frowned. He hadn’t, it was true, paid much attention to the severed hand. In truth, he’d done his best to look at it as little as possible. But this surprised him anyway. “They dismembered the mayor?”
Arath started to nod, but then he stopped, frowned, and laughed out loud. “Actually, no. This isn’t the mayor at all.”
“What do you mean? It has to be: he was wearing the mayor’s ring.”
“Yeah, but – I don’t think the mayor had horns. At least, not that anyone mentioned, right?”
Chapter Eight
The man with the severed hand, it turned out, wasn’t a man at all. He was a demon, with horns and strange, runic symbols carved into his skin – symbols that glowed when Arath’s hand came near them.
That confused everyone. And the objective that followed didn’t help clarify matters.
Objective added: search the area for clues as to what happened to the mayor.
Still, Jack didn’t have any other options. So he gave the command to spread out and start looking for anything of interest. Most of the crew moved away from the stinking pile of dead flesh as quickly as they could.
But Arath remained by the corpses, scouring them with an interest that seemed a little too keen to be purely professional. A minute later, Jack understood his reasoning when he declared, “These other two are human, alright. But damn my eyes, if they haven’t been picked cleaned. Not a copper piece between them.”
This earned him side-eye from everyone – even Migli. Shimmerfax snorted what Jack would have sworn was disapproval. But, then, he decided that wasn’t possible, and he went back to searching the ground. Dusk was starting to settle in, and he wanted to finish before it got dark.
He didn’t find anything. But Karag did. “Look here: footprints. And they look fresh.”
Jack hurried over, and sure enough, he saw boot imprints in the ground. He had no idea if they looked fresh or not. But Ceinwen nodded, and so did Arath. Keeping his tone low, the ranger drew his blade and said, “We’re not alone, Jack.”
Karag nodded toward a thicket of bushes. “They lead this way.”
Arath glanced over at Er’c. “This’d be a good time for you to trot out one of those fancy fire spells of yours.”
Jack nodded. He knew a few fire spells of his own. Hell, he’d accidentally started a forest fire with a fire spell once, back in his newb days. He glanced at the thicket, and its dry brambles and thick undergrowth. And he hesitated. He wanted to think he’d learned his lesson about playing with fire.
Er’c proved to be his redemption from temptation. “I can’t just fire on someone, Mister Arath. Not without knowing if they be friend or foe.”
Arath groaned to himself. “Gods almighty. You people and your consciences are going to be the deaths of us all.”
Jack, though, nodded. “He’s right. We can’t shoot until we know who is there.” He drew his sword and moved toward the thicket. “Hello? Can you hear me? Whoever you are, come out.”
At first, nothing but silence – and Arath’s groans – answered him. Then, he heard rustling in the bushes.
“Come out,” he said again.
“We mean you no harm,” Ceinwen added. “We’re here to help you.”
Jack wasn’t sure about that. The way he saw it, that had about a fifty-fifty chance of being true. Maybe this was one of the mayor’s guys, and they could render aid. And maybe this was whoever had presumably killed the mayor. In which case, he was about to wind up dead.
A trembling voice called out, “Did Marsha send you?”
“Yes,” Ceinwen said. “We’re friends. We’re here to help you.”
The bushes rustled and started to move.
“Use your fireballs, dammit, boy,” Arath urged Er’c. “Before it’s too late.”
Er’c ignored him, and a moment later a pale, gaunt, dirt-streaked face poked out of the bushes. “Who are you?”
Three dialogue options presented themselves to Jack.
My name is Jack, and I am an adventurer come to save you. Tell me, what is your name?
It’s your lucky day, kid: Sir Jack is here. So why don’t you tell me who it is that has the privilege?
And,
You’ll speak when you’re spoken to. Who are you, and what are you doing creeping around in the bushes? Speak, or I’ll cut you down!
Jack chose the first option. The kid crawled a little further out of the bushes. He was young – maybe fifteen or sixteen years old – and one of his arms hung in a makeshift sling. “My name’s Andrew. I work for the mayor. Or, I did work for him.”
“He’s dead, then?”
“Yes sir. At least, I think so.”
“You…think so?”
Andrew nodded. “The demons, and that William fellow – they took him. They killed Richard and Frances. But they took Mayor Ashford.”
Jack had two possible responses to that:
And where were you while your boss was getting kidnapped, and your friends were being gutted by demons?
And,
How did you escape, Andrew?
He chose the second option, and the young man hung his head. “I…I ran, Sir Jack. I’m ashamed to admit it, but when the demons appeared – well, there were so many of them. And I ran and hid in these bushes.”
Arath laughed. “Smart boy.”
“Tell me,” Ceinwen said, “did you see what happened?”
The boy stared at her with an open mouth – awed, apparently, by what he saw. “Uh…yes ma’am.”
“Tell us everything – from the beginning.”
So An
drew did.
Mayor Ashford had picked two swordsmen – Frances and Richard – and his personal assistant – Andrew – to accompany him on what was supposed to be a reconnaissance mission. “We’d had reports of strange beings at the base of the mountains. Ugly creatures, people said. Skulking creatures.” He glanced sideways at Migli. “We thought – well, the truth is, we thought they might have been dwarves.”
Migli sputtered out a protest at that, but Jack encouraged the boy to go on.
He said that they’d had an uneventful trip. “We spotted a few raptors, but they didn’t bother us.”
Jack frowned at that. It was the third time someone had alluded to raptors, and he still had no idea what they were. But he filed that away for later on. He had more pressing questions now. “What happened then?”
“We set up camp, sir. They came at us in the middle of the night. Led by that blackguard William the Wanderer.”
Karag exclaimed at this that he’d known – he’d just known! – something was wrong with that man.
Andrew nodded. “Very wrong. He was in the company of – well, demons. I don’t know what else to call them: big, ugly things, with eyes that glowed red. And horns – horns, Sir Jack! I never saw nothing like that before, except in storybooks. I know it sounds mad, but I swear: they was demons.”
Jack assured the boy that he believed him. Then, with a little coaxing, he got him back to the narrative. The demons and William had fell on them in the middle of the night. Frances and Richard put up a good fight, but the demons cut them down. Andrew took an arrow to the arm. “That’s when I ran. And when I got to the bushes, well, they were already dead. Frances and Richard, I mean.
“But not Mayor Ashford. They was more careful with him. I don’t know why, but it was odd-like. They wanted – I think they wanted to take him alive. Maybe to torture him. I can’t think of no other reason.” The boy shivered at that, and his eyes watered. “I should have put up a better fight, shouldn’t I? I was a coward, wasn’t I, Sir Jack?”
Ceinwen assured him that he wasn’t, and that he had done all he could. Arath snorted. “Of course you were. But you’re a live coward, and your courageous friends over there, they’re dead. So you tell me who the fool is?”