Curse: The Dark God Book 2 (25 page)

However, they were closer to Rogum’s Defense. Maybe this was a landing for a surprise attack.

What Argoth did know is that he had a third of Shim’s dreadmen with him. Others would be out on patrol, which meant Rogum’s Defense might itself be threatened.

“You can’t fight the mists, Zu,” a grandfather said. “We sent men to investigate, but the blackness took them, struck them to the ground.”

Argoth didn’t dare split his men. It would be pure folly to send forty new dreadmen against a hammer of Mokad’s most powerful. He’d need his whole force to overwhelm those dreadmen, which meant he either chased after them and attempted to rescue River and Talen, or he went to Woolsom.

If the enemy captured Talen, they’d enthrall him. In time, they’d turn him into a weapon, a Glory. At least, that was the plan of the Devourer that had planted him. Who knew what Mokad might do with him? But the Wilds were treacherous, and so Harnock would have the advantage there. River was fearsome in her own right. But against a full hammer of mature dreadmen?

Argoth cursed. By all that was holy! They were his sister’s children! But the greater danger lay in Woolsom. He made his decision and turned to the travelers. “Did you send word to Rogum’s Defense?”

“Yes,” said the old woman, “but who knows if they made it through?”

If Mokad was landing, he had to be there. He couldn’t leave Shim with only part of an army.

Argoth took one last look at the mountain and the crows. He prayed the Six that River and Talen would be able to get to Harnock’s.Then he faced his men. “We ride to Woolsom!”

28

Woolsom

ARGOTH RODE INTO Woolsom too late. Dead animals lay about the houses. The bodies of the inhabitants were scattered about as well, but the bulk of them, both old and young, lay in piles next to the village workshop.

Argoth dismounted. The wind whistled about the workshop and houses. Great numbers of flies flitted about the bodies, filling the air with a loud buzzing. It was grim work searching through the bodies, especially when moving the little ones. He moved one small girl with a sprig of lavender woven into her hair. The sight of it struck him. That was something Grace would wear. In fact, not two weeks ago she’d tried to weave such a sprig into his own hair. Argoth laid the girl gently down and moved to another. With each body his dismay and anger built.

None had survived. All had an odd blackening about their necks and chests. The eyes of a few of the corpses had begun to cloud over, but the stiffness of death had only begun to set in. Furthermore, there were no frights. He suspected the last of these good folks had died less than an hour ago, which meant that whoever had done this was not far ahead.

Oaks was out by the road. “They’re headed for Fishing,” he called. “The tracks are clear as day.”

Fishing was a small community scarcely more than a mile away. It was named, not for its fishermen, but because of its role in a practical joke played by locals on unsuspecting travelers. If he hurried, he just might be able to catch the murderers before they repeated there what they’d done here and at Redthorn.

Argoth ordered his men up. He sent a handful of riders to scout ahead and on both flanks. He also ordered a hammer to form up a rearguard. The remaining seventy-five dreadmen followed him and Oaks. The scouts raced ahead. The rest of the men came behind at a trot.

The road cut through fields with their short stone fences, then into the woods at the base of a row of hills. Fishing lay on the other side of the hill ahead. Argoth and the column of riders trotted into the wood. They rounded a bend and saw one of his scouts up ahead, a man lying on the ground next to him.

Argoth rode forward and looked down upon the man.

“We got him before he could blow a warning,” the scout said.

The man’s face and head were shaved and painted in yellow, white, and black. Sticking out of his side was the last few inches of a twelve inch crossbow dart. He wore a tunic of otter skins over his mail that was gathered with a red and black sash at his waist. About his neck hung a cord of shark’s teeth. He was still breathing, glaring.

“He’s Bone Face,” the scout said and held out the man’s sword hilt-first to Argoth.

Argoth took it. Letters in Bone Face script had been carved upon the leather wrapping. Argoth turned to the dying man. “Your chief?” he asked in Bone Face.

The man grinned through his pain and made a wretched face. He said something unintelligible in his awful tongue, something about the wind.

Argoth turned back to his scout. “Were there others?”

The man shook his head. “Just this one, Captain.”

An army would have fists and hammers of men positioned as scouts and outriders, not a lone scout, which meant this Bone Face group was small.

Up the hill someone made the warning call of the black crane, signaling they’d found the enemy.

Argoth turned to Oaks. “We’re going in quietly. Tell the men to dismount when they get to the top.”

Oaks passed the order back, and the column moved forward. Argoth scanned both sides of the woods as they rode to the top of the hill and couldn’t help wonder: in all the years the Bone Faces had been coming, they always came to steal goods, livestock, and people, not kill them. Why start killing defenseless villagers now? And what was this blackness?

They reached the top of the hill without incident, quietly dismounted, and tied up the horses. The men removed their bows and other weapons from the saddles. Argoth himself had brought a crossbow and sword. He slung his quiver of bolts across his back and drank the last of his water. When the men were ready, he broke them into three hammers, and then they slipped into the cover of the trees and carefully made their way down the other side of the hill.

As he descended, he got his first glimpse of the blackness through the branches of the trees. It was common enough on some mornings to see small patches of fog lingering in the folds of hills and valleys along the coast. But it wasn’t morning and this mist wasn’t white—it was dark brown, almost black, as if a smoke lay over the village. The mists stretched a few hundred yards across, concealing many but not all of the buildings. The thick heart of the mist flashed, but the colors were all wrong—instead of the red and orange of fire, they were pale lavender and yellow.

Argoth got a better look when he and the three hammers reached the bottom of the hill and crept to the edge of the tree line.

Fishing was a village that lay in the crook where two lines of low hills met. A Y-shaped crossroads sat in the middle of the village. That’s where most of the houses and workshops clustered. But all that was shrouded in the smoky mist. Only a few of the outlying homes were visible. One such home stood along the road up ahead in the thinning edges of the strange darkness.

Three horses lay on their sides in a corral next to the home. In front of the house in the road lay the bodies of a woman and a dog. The mists here were unusual, but they did not move as the Redthorn children had reported.

Argoth scanned the area and heard men’s voices down the lane, from within the village.
He took a footlong crossbow bolt from his quiver and placed it in the crossbow. It was true he could put more shafts into the air with a horse bow, but numbers weren’t the only thing he was looking for. A crossbow had a higher speed at close range. Besides, if there were Bone Face dreadmen here, and Argoth encountered them up close, he’d only have time for one shot anyway
.

He was about to give the order to move out of the trees, when a man’s scream rose from deep inside the mists. Moments later a great sigh followed it, as if the mists themselves had taken a breath.

The hairs on the back of Argoth’s neck stood straight on end. The men looked at each other in alarm. Argoth turned to Oaks, but he was as baffled and alarmed as the rest of them.

Argoth had never read about or seen anything like this in his life. But he reminded himself that those who held the lore were nothing more than men. Men who fed their own kind to their masters. And he suddenly wondered if they had stumbled upon a feeding, if what created this blackness was one of the Devourers.

He motioned the hammers forward, and the men emerged from the tree line and crossed the open space before them, entering the thinnest parts of the mist. The hammer on is left ran forward and took cover behind a fence. The one on his right found cover behind the corral. Argoth ran up to the house, his hammer behind him. The door and windows stood open. A fire burned low at the hearth, but other than that the house was dark and empty.

Ahead, the towering mists flickered, and another great sigh rose from the heart of the village.

The sound unnerved him. What sort of rough beast would make such a noise?

More houses and buildings lay ahead. Argoth thought he heard the sound of men talking in the Bone Face tongue, but couldn’t see anyone, so he motioned the hammers forward again.

They stole silently across the gardens to the next set of buildings. The homes here were just as the first one had been—dark and empty, thin trails of smoke rising from the chimneys. The hammers moved forward again, hopping fences and passing bird pens.

The mists were thicker here, turning the sun into a smoky, blood-red circle in the sky and partially obscuring the other hammers.

There was another flicker and the mists sighed again, much closer this time. A jolt of fear shot through him. This was surely the breath of something large.

He motioned his hammer out from behind the house, but as they fanned out, something in the corner of his eye caught his attention. He dropped behind a two-wheeled handcart and motioned for the others behind him to get down.

A small lane ran past a home up ahead and joined up with the road that ran to the heart of the village. Through the mists, two Bone Face warriors forced a short line of women and children down the lane at sword point. The Bone Faces wore the same black and red sash as the man they’d found in the wood. Their faces were painted the same white, black, and yellow. Argoth had not seen this combination of colors on Bone Faces and wondered what it signified.

He gave the signal for his men to hold their bows as the Bone Faces and their captives disappeared into the mists down the lane. Argoth waited a moment more, then motioned the hammers forward.

The men in the hammer on his left moved like ghosts in the mist and disappeared behind a barn. The men in the hammer on his right took up a position alongside a house, the top of which disappeared into the dark, thickening fog. Argoth and his men crossed the road and moved up behind a low wall.

They were close to the Y-shaped crossroad at the heart of the village. He could see movement ahead, but the mists were thick, cutting visibility. It would be foolish to charge in without knowing what they faced. Somebody needed to find out what lay before them, and of all the men here, he was the one best suited to recognize this lore for what is was. So he signaled for the hammers to stay put. Then he quietly lifted himself over the fence and made his way forward through the unnatural murkiness.

The voices of men rose from the mist ahead. A horse nickered. Argoth crept forward to the side of the house that faced the crossroad.Across the road three horses with Bone Face saddles stood tethered to a hitching post in front of another house.

Whatever force the Bone Faces had landed, it was becoming apparent the full army was not in Fishing. This was some small advanced unit.

At the edge of the village the murk was thin, but here it was thick. The mists suddenly glowed and flickered, flashed with the witching yellow and lavender light, and then they exhaled loudly all about him.

Argoth swallowed and crept forward until he saw the crossroad before him.

Long tatters moved in a slow wide circle around the crossroad. Suddenly a thick smoky apparition broke away from the circle. It floated along the roof top of the house across the road and curled down its chimney. Another tatter about six feet long moved along the ground and curled around one of the horse’s hind legs. The horse whinnied in alarm and pulled at its tether, the whites of its eyes showing in fear.

A wave of alarm washed up his back and prickled the hairs on his neck. What were those
things
? A foreboding rose in him—this wasn’t going to end well. But they couldn’t fight an enemy they didn’t know, so he readied his crossbow and crept farther down the side of the house.

A woman pleaded. “Please,” she said. “Please.” A man laughed. But there seemed to be other voices all about him murmuring.

A tatter of mist floated around the corner of the house and came toward him. Argoth pressed himself back against the wall and froze. The tatter approached, but it slid past and continued on.

Argoth exhaled a huge breath. What in the name of Regret had he and his men walked into? His whole body shouted for him to flee, to turn around now, but he forced himself forward. When he reached the edge of the house, he crouched low and looked out at the mist-shrouded crossroad.

A tall wiry man stood in the center. His head was shaven. His chest was bare and painted, not the normal black and white of the Bone Faces, but red and yellow. About his neck hung a necklace of teeth and another of feathers tied to fingers. He held a rough black stone in his hand.

The Bone Faces didn’t order their Divines like the Western Glorydoms. Instead, they had wizards that they called Kragows, which was their term for chief men. This was one of them. There were about a hammer’s worth of warriors with him, some of them dragging bodies away, some of them guarding villagers. Two of the warriors held a woman before the Kragow.

The Kragow muttered something, and it seemed as if the very air about him began to melt, to ripple like old glass. The rippling extended up a number of yards above him and flickered at its edges.

The Kragow spoke again, and the flickering turned violent. A moment later there was a flash of lavender and pale yellow light as a huge rent tore through the rippling. Black mist poured out. As the rippling tore open, it breathed, as if some great beast had opened its maw. But it wasn’t any beast for Argoth could see some different place on the other side of the gash.

Great lords, had that Kragow ripped the very fabric of the world?

Then the Kragow reached, impossibly, into the woman. She groaned, and he pulled forth something as long as his arm that bucked and shone with a pure light.

Argoth watched in horror as the woman cried out and slumped in the arms of her captors.

The Kragow held the shining high. It thrashed, trying to escape, but it could not break free of the Kragow’s grip. It was not clear through the rippling what he did, but the shining thing slowly stilled and stopped resisting. Moments later it began to dull and turn gray. The Kragow shouted and the rippling about the Kragow slowed. The gash between worlds closed up with another sigh. With it went the lavender and pale yellow light. Then the rippling was gone.

The Kragow released the grayness, which rose up and joined the other mass of tatters circling in the mist, circling this Wizard like dogs on a chain. The graynesses seethed, and he realized they were the source of the murmuring.

And then it came to him—wraiths.

That’s what they had to be, but wraiths were things of the world of the dead, not this one. Yet what else could these be?

The woman groaned in pain. A part of her had been ripped out, but not all. Nevertheless, the wounds to the bonds between Fire, flesh, and soul would be fatal. She would die, just as those at Redthorn and Woolsom had. Just as those piled about this crossroad were dying.

Argoth found his breath. He tried to estimate the number of wraiths that roiled in the mist. Were there a hundred, two? Just about the number of those who lived in Woolsom, Fishing, and Larkin.