Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) (23 page)

“I suppose I could try it. Although I am
not sure I want to remember.”

“I believe in the power of dreams. Your subconscious
is trying to tell you something, but you are not paying attention. If you start
listening it may stop shouting at you through nightmares.” Mara looked at him
expectantly.

Finn sighed. “Okay, I’ll try. If there is
anything interesting, we can talk about it next time.”

“Good. I will look forward to it.”

Hael’s
first command, the Ninety-First Legion, was deployed to the Northern Campaign
the day after Graduation. The new Legion was not made up of entirely new
soldiers — that was a recipe for disaster. Only about twenty percent of the troopers
and officers were green, while the rest had varying levels of experience — from
twenty-year grizzled veterans to blooded boys who had managed to cling to
dreams of glory following their first battle. The greenest of the green
troopers and also the youngest was Bral, Hael’s aide de camp. On the day of
deployment, Bral was not well enough to travel, so the Legion had left without
him and marched north

The Host Healers has accelerated Bral’s
natural healing abilities, but accelerated healing had a price and that price
was pain. The Healers could speed up the mending process, but in doing so they
compressed the amount of pain he would feel into a shorter period of time. The
result was that Bral found himself leaving through the City’s Peace Gate a
month behind the Legion, with an arm that was almost completely healed after
paying the price of pain, a price he gladly paid to get out of the Academy. It
was the beginning of a journey to what he hoped would be a happier time in his
life. Anything would be better than spending another minute in the Academy, or
so he thought at the time.

It turned out that he was wrong.

The Peace Gate was much wider than the
Desert Gate to the south — it needed to be, as it was the gate through which
every Legion left the City for either the Eastern or Northern Campaigns. The
purpose of the Legions and the Campaign were to subdue the Feral and ensure
peace in the City, hence the gate’s name. That the means of maintaining peace
was the application of death, destruction and slavery on a massive scale was of
little interest to the Host; only the resulting peace mattered. Veteran
troopers half-jokingly referred to it as the War Gate or the Death Gate,
depending on how black their humor.

Bral hoped a week, travelling at a hard
jog, would allow him to catch the Ninety-First. The Legion was marching as fast
as a thousand troopers with support and supplies could move, so not very
quickly, and much slower than a single man, desperate to leave his past in the
dust behind him.

As Bral started a ground-eating jog, his
thoughts turned to Hael, who had risked the ire of an emperor for his little
brother. Bral knew that he could never repay Hael for saving him once again. 

Bral had worshipped his middle brother long
before Hael had dealt with Samael, and long before he had rescued him from the
hell of his existence at the Academy. Hael had been protecting him for as long
as he could remember. Before the bullies at the Academy there had been Lucan,
his eldest brother.

Lucan, the beautiful one, the one who
expected people to bow down before his glory, the one who punished and broke
all who opposed him. Actually it was more than that; he punished and broke all
who did not worship him.

To be fair, Lucan was quite glorious. He
was the most handsome of the three brothers. He was the tallest, he was smart
but not the smartest, he was strong and he could be charming when he wanted
something he could not get by force. His biggest faults were his ego and the
existence of Hael. Hael was proof that Lucan was not the pinnacle of Guest
existence, which did not sit well into Lucan’s world view. Bral could only
imagine Lucan’s rage at finding out that Hael was given command of a Legion.
The thought brought a small smile to his face.

Lucan liked to prove his superiority
through the humiliation of others, and his favorite target when he had been
growing up had been Bral. As they lived in the same house, Bral had been
readily available and he was younger, smaller and sensitive. In essence he was
an ideal target. Hael was also younger and smaller than Lucan but was not a
viable target.

Bral could remember the last time Lucan had
tried to enforce his will on Hael. Hael had seen Lucan take a ball from one of
the smaller neighborhood boys and played a game of keep away. After an hour of
the game the boy started to cry and Lucan started to laugh at him. Hael and
Caleb managed to retrieve the ball from Lucan and had sent the boy on his way.
Later that night, Lucan, not appreciating his fun being cut short, had rigged a
full chamber pot so that it emptied on Hael’s head when he left his room the
following morning.

The result was a disgusting mess and a
brutal beating. 

Hael beat his older, larger brother into
unconsciousness with his piss- and shit-covered hands and feet. That was the
last time that Lucan had tried anything with Hael.

The year that Lucan left for the Academy
had been the happiest year of Bral’s life. He had Hael to himself, mostly. They
had been inseparable, mostly due to Bral mercilessly tracking down Hael and his
brother’s best friend, Caleb, wherever they went. They could occasionally give
him the slip for an hour or two, but eventually he would find them and they
would all laugh about it. It had become a game.

And then that happy year of his life ended
and Hael left for the academy. Clea’s company had made it bearable.

He made an effort to not think about Clea
or Caleb.

Then, when he finally rejoined his beloved
brother in the academy, his own personal hell began.

He made a firm decision to think of his future.
A future brighter than any he could have imagined.

As Hael’s aide de camp he would not be
bunking in with the other soldiers, but would share Hael’s command tent, so he
could provide whatever was needed whenever Hael needed it. The position also came
with enough authority to prevent others from bullying him. The crowning glory
of it all was that he had been able to leave the Academy early. He owed Hael
his life and his sanity.

Bral put his past away and then he put his
hopes and dreams away, as he needed to focus on running if he was going to
catch the Legion in a week.

The latrines were getting fresher. Based on
the stench of the fecal trenches and the decrease in the number of maggots in
the trenches, Bral expected to catch the Legion the following day.

He had been traveling at a brutal pace for
five days, so it looked like he would beat his seven-day target by an entire
day. Hael would be proud of him. Or so he hoped.

The sun was almost down and Bral toyed with
the idea of pressing on through the night before deciding that the prudent
course of action would to find a secure place to rest up overnight. There was
no good reason to risk injuring himself while running in the dark.

Off to the side of the road, Bral saw a
boulder with a flat top that would make a good spot to camp.

Bral was able to jump and grab the top of
the boulder and pull himself up. The top was fairly flat and level. The sides
tapered slightly to a smaller bottom, which would make it difficult for any of
the usual predators to get at him. It was certainly more comfortable than the
trees he had been sleeping in since he left the City.

Wolves and hyenas would not bother a large
group like the Legion, but single travelers were fair game, even if warded.
Wards had little effect on animals, although they would protect him from
detection by the Ferals and the wild tribes. It was safer to sleep off the
ground and to deploy wards when possible.

Bral pulled the four black crystal cubes
from his pack. Each was carved with a
sigil
. The extensive conditioning
Bral underwent in the Academy induced a specific state of mind in him as he
focused on each
sigil
, enabling him to activate each ward component in
turn. He placed one of the ward stones to the north and focused on the
sigil
,
and a faint midnight-blue glow at the center of the ward stone indicated that
it had been activated. He then activated the southern ward stone, followed by
east and then west. Once all the wards stones were activated, a set of faint
silver lines connecting the blocks and outlining his camp flashed into
existence and then faded from view. Gooseflesh prickled his arms and legs as
the ambient temperature dropped slightly.

The energized wards would draw small
amounts of heat from the surrounding environment to power a Compulsion that
discouraged intelligent beings from noticing him. There were many different
types of ward but Bral’s was pretty standard for a lone traveler. The wards
would not prevent someone from finding him if he made a lot of noise or drew
attention to himself in some overt manner, but if he was quiet he would remain
undisturbed.

Wards set, Bral rolled himself in his
blanket to counteract the chill coming off the ward stones and drifted off to
sleep.

It was dark when Bral woke. The sky was a
moonless velvet cloak studded with diamond dust.

He heard a faint noise and then another.

He silently rolled over toward the edge of
the boulder, making sure to not break the warding, and peered into the night.

Thousands of shadows were moving along the
road. They were fairly quiet; however, it was impossible for such a large group
to travel in complete silence. Each stumble and scuff of a foot against the
ground produced a counterpoint to the gentle surf like the sound of thousands
of furs and leathers rubbing against skin as they walked.

He quickly checked his wards; they were
intact. If he just stayed put, they would not notice him and pass by.

Unfortunately, letting them pass was not an
option. This unknown force appeared to be following the Ninety-First and, based
on their stealthy nighttime travel, it was unlikely that they were friendly.
Bral had no choice in the matter. He knew what Hael would do in this situation,
so Bral could do no less.

He needed to scout the mysterious troop,
then he needed to bring whatever intelligence he could glean to Hael, and he
needed to do it while the information was of some use to Hael.

He left the relative safety of his warded
camp and eased over the lip of the boulder away from the road, taking only his
bronze short sword with him.

Moving slowly, painfully slowly, it had
taken Bral an hour to ease into his position in a tree by the side of the road.
He could now confirm that the shadowy figures that had woken him were Feral. He
could also see that his was no normal tribe, not by a long shot. It was bigger
than any Feral gathering he had ever heard of. This was a Feral army. He
estimated that there must have been fifteen thousand of them, and about half of
the group was made up of males of fighting age, aged eleven to fifty.

This high proportion of fighting males
supported his theory that this was an army, not a tribe. According to his
studies, a quarter of a tribe was usually considered combat capable, not half.
In addition, it looked like most of the males were also armed with wooden
cudgels and stone hammers. These typical Feral weapons were much cruder than
the bronze swords and spears used by the Legions, but the Ferals’ great
strength of arm and mind made these crude weapons deadly in battle when
deployed in force.

Bral slowly started to ease his way back to
the ground so he could make his escape when a branch he stepped on gave way and
sent him crashing to the ground. He landed awkwardly on his left arm and heard
a snap like the sound of a breaking branch. The subsequent wave of agony told
him that his partially healed arm had been broken again.

He blocked the pain and scrambled to his
feet as a thousand queries pinged off his mental shield. The queries
intensified. He focused to reinforce his shields. They held for now.

The Feral would now know that they had been
observed by one of the Guest. He would need to keep moving or they would get a
fix on him and Compel him to stop. His mental shield would not be able to
withstand the onslaught of thousands of angry Feral minds. Grasping his left
arm with his right, he stumbled into the night.

The sound of the Feral raiding party
searching the undergrowth was receding.

Bral had found an overgrown strand of
trees, a small forest, really, and had pushed his way into a thorny bush. His pursuers
had searched for a half hour but, as they really could not be certain if he was
hiding or if he was still making his way to the Legion, they had been forced to
continue up the road on their search.

Once they were out of sight and hearing,
Bral rose and pushed his way out of the concealing bush, the thorns leaving
tears in his clothing and bloody scratches on his exposed skin. He would circle
around them and strike directly to the Legion. They had the disadvantage of
needing to search every grove of trees, every clump of boulders and every gully
until they picked up his trail. As long as he did not rejoin the road too soon,
he would be able to build up an insurmountable lead. He would reach the Legion
first, as long as he could keep running.

Tears of relief flowed down Bral’s face as
he crested a hill and saw the Legion’s encampment spread out ahead. The
troopers’ tents were laid out in orderly concentric circles, with the command
tents in the center. Hael’s tent would be in the largest of the command tents.
There were ten other officer’s tents. The officers lived in relative comfort
with five officers to each tent.