Days Of Light And Shadow (53 page)

Even knowing he was dying in agony the big man could find something to taunt him with. Something in him to laugh at. And it wasn’t right. Except that he knew it was.

“Stop it!” He screamed at the big man, an almost wordless shriek of pain and rage. But it didn’t stop him. If anything he laughed even louder, somehow even finding the strength to raise his hand and point at him as he laughed.

“Shut up!” This time even he couldn’t understand what he screamed. But it was everything he had. Every bit of anger and rage he had, every morsel of grief and pain, every scrap of hatred. And the man just kept laughing. Laughing and pointing. And even taunting him.

“You know you killed her.”

“No!” Surely Finell’s scream could have been heard by the stars above it was so loud. And it still wasn’t loud enough.

“Yes. You were the one that gave that little rat the position. You gave him the chance to strike her down. Wherever her soul is she hates you.”

“No!” Finell just kept shrieking, his denial, trying to make the words stop, but they wouldn’t. He just kept laughing.

“Yes! You know she hates you.”

“No!”

“Yes! She knows all now. She knows your evil. That you were a shame to the family. That you should never have been born.”

Something within Finell broke then. Turned to dust before the brigand’s laughter, and before he knew it the knife was in his hands again, covered in yet more blood. This time he was crouched right over the man, and he had another hole in him, a wound in his shoulder, so near to his throat. And the man wouldn’t stop laughing, as if it was the funniest thing in the world.

Finell stabbed him again, screaming with fury, sinking the blade deep into the man’s chest, desperate to stop the laughter. But it wouldn’t stop. The man just kept laughing at him, and telling him all the most terrible secrets he’d never wanted to hear.

So he stabbed him again, and again, and again. Over and over he plunged the knife deep into his chest, feeling it sink in, watching the blood spray in all directions, and still not stopping the laughter. It just wouldn’t end. Desperate he kept stabbing, screaming his rage, and stabbing with all his might until finally he simply couldn’t any more. His arms were so tired that they couldn’t lift the knife any more. His lungs simply couldn’t find enough air to breath. And his throat was completely raw from screaming.

It was only then that he could look down on the face of his enemy and see what he’d done.

The man was dead. More than dead. He was completely destroyed. His face was gone, all that remained of it a gory wet mass of bleeding flesh. His neck had been almost completely severed. Only a few flaps of skin held the remains of his head to his body. And as for the rest it looked like something that wild dogs would leave after they had finished eating. There was blood and flesh and bone, all mixed up with the torn scraps of his clothing, almost scattered by the ferocity of his strikes. And there was blood everywhere. So much blood.

It drenched what had been the remains of the man. It flowed in pools through his bedroll and on to the ground, and even ponded around his knees. It was scattered thick against the canvas of the tent, dripping down it like rain. It was covering Finell from head to foot. Soaking his clothes. It was in his mouth. He could smell it, taste it, almost gag on it.

The man was dead, and he wouldn’t stop laughing at him.

It was then that Finell understood the truth. That the man’s laughter was in him. In his soul. And that it would never stop. Because he was right. Finell knew that his soul was doomed. He hadn’t realised it until just then, but the dead man was right. Finell had been trying to deny the undeniable.

His laughter was a torment that would not end. His laughter would live in his soul until his dying breath, a poison without a cure. It might not end even then.

Even his one true victory had turned to ashes.

Broken, destroyed in a way that he could not even understand, Finell rose to his feet and silently left the tent. There was nothing more for him in it. Not any more.

Outside he heard the moans and cries of the other brigands in the still air, and he ignored them. There was nothing he could do for them either. Neither save them nor kill them. There was nothing more to be done at all he realised as he walked out into the forest.

Save one thing.

Finell was surely many leagues from the camp when he realised it, and he had no idea which direction he’d travelled. Night had fallen hours before. It was cold and he was covered in blood. The cries of distant dire wolves rent the air as they prowled the great forest. If they smelled the blood on him they would hunt him down. And he cared about none of that. He cared only that there was still something he had to do. That he had a purpose. One single shining purpose.

There was still one more who had to die. Y’aris.

It was a thought to cling to as he walked. A goal to dream of. A purpose to live for. It was the only thing he had left. And even without his willing them to, his feet started taking him south. South to his betrayer. South to his end.

He only wished the laughter would stop as he travelled there. But he knew it wouldn’t.

Chapter Eighty Two.

He was cold, bitterly cold, and Terwyn pulled his cloak tight around him. Yet it was a sunny late summer day, the air was warm and in the distance he could see the heat haze over the fields. The blackened fields of Greenlands dotted with burnt out buildings. Much the same as the fields he’d set ablaze not that long ago. He shivered. The cold was inside him, and he knew it would never go away.

It wasn’t for their former comrades who had passed from the world during the night that he felt the chill. They had killed themselves, opening up their wrists with sharpened stones, all that they had available to them as they began their long march home. He shivered a little more, unable to help himself. But not for them. True, what they had done was dishonourable. True, they had condemned themselves to the underworld by their actions. And it was also true that they had been friends as well as comrades. But it still wasn’t for them that he shivered. If anything he envied them. Their pain, he hoped, was over. The rest of them just had to continue until their own end brought them mercy.

Of course the two who had died during their first night on the road back, had not been the first to die by their own hands. They would not be the last. Many more would take the same journey. They had weeks of marching left to them as they followed the wagons home, and he wondered how many of them would arrive in Leafshade. Facing their people was a torment no one wanted to face. Returning to their houses and families, to their loved ones, admitting their crimes. Just the thought tore holes in their hearts. But then every day was already the same.

He guessed that the others knew the same dark thoughts. After their weeks and months in the prison, weeks that should have been years, years that should have been ended with the pull of a lever and the snap of a neck, they should have been happy to be going home. But no one was happy. There was no joy in the world any more, and in his soul he knew that there never would be again. And that was as it should be.

Every day, every minute, every second, he saw those people he had killed in front of him. He saw their faces, he heard their cries, even in his sleep. And worst of all, he remembered the pleasure that had come with each terrible act. The old and the sick, women and children, the injured and the surrendering, slaughtered by his own hand. How could he have done that? How could anyone?

The elders had tried to explain, but there was no explanation. There could be none, and there should be none. They said it was a demon that had made them do these things. But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Not when it had been his own hands holding the weapons. Not when it had been his own mind telling him to, and his own soul laughing every step of the way. If there was a demon it was him.

And yet there was a darkness. He could feel it within him, clutching at him, trying to drag him down. A darkness of unutterable cold and hunger that had dwelled in his soul. Maybe it was only the memory of it that remained. Maybe the elders had truly cast it from him. But he could still feel it. He knew that somewhere within him it dwelled, waiting for him to slip back into its reach. That it dwelled within all of them.

That was why the others had truly killed themselves. The memories, the guilt and shame were terrible. But the constant, terrible fear that one day they would slip back into the demon’s clutches, that was unbearable torment.

“Please, does anyone know the names of the people we bury today?” The guard called out from the front where they were busy laying the last of the stones on to the make shift burial mound, wanting to have something to put on them. It was not the first time he had asked Terwyn realised, though he hadn’t really been paying him any attention. It was unimportant to him. Or it had been, until he suddenly understood the truth.

“No names.” He spoke up, answering the man, slightly surprised at how strange his voice sounded. How long had it been since he had last spoken? Days? Weeks? Longer? And why did he care? What did it matter if the man had a name for the dead? But it did somehow.

“What?” The guard came up to him, his face full of questions and doubt.

“We have no names.”

“But -.” The guard’s voice trailed off.

“We came from the soil, we return there, and no one should know us. No one should remember that we ever lived. It was a mistake that we were ever born. A crime.” Terwyn fell silent after that, his words spoken, and though the guard kept asking him to explain, he didn’t. He forgot about him in truth as his thoughts returned to their dark spiral, and eventually the man went away, surely more confused than he had been before he’d spoken.

In time, some one up front gave the order and the wagons began to move again, and they followed, bound as they were to them by their harness. And as they marched slowly past the two burial mounds, no one even looked at them. They were of no importance. Just two piles of rocks out in the middle of the burnt pastures. Two dead creatures slowly returning to the soil as they should.

In the end, that was all any of them were, and he looked forwards to the day when he would be one of them.

He pulled his cloak a little tighter against the chill of the late summer sun and let his feet carry him back to Elaris.

Chapter Eighty Three.

Iros was troubled. He had been for a long time, something that his people probably guessed, even though he tried to pretend the wisdom of Nanara and the serenity of Llia at all times. But what the messengers had been bringing to him of late was disturbing and he had no explanation for it, save that it was simply the continuation of evil.

First the war. An obscenity that should never have happened. An evil that had claimed so many innocent lives and very nearly destroyed his home. And something that still made no sense to him. An angry high lord was one thing, but an army of moon misted soldiers was something else. And if the elders were right, they were only the beginning of the Reaver’s evil. But still they had been beaten back.

Next had come the abominations. They still came. More of the demon’s soldiers. Crawling out of the great southern forests in their ones and twos ever since the war. But at least in those numbers they could be handled, even by the most badly damaged towns. It was simply a matter of maintaining a watch and having men ready with their weapons. But who was to say that they wouldn’t start coming in larger numbers?  Or when?

During the war with the Reaver a millennia before, they had been described as a plague upon the land and their armies as hordes. Only a well-defended city could hold the tide back. And even coming as they were, they were a constant reminder that all was not as it should be. They were a harbinger of dark times ahead. And that after a terrible war that had left his land torn apart and his people brutalised.

But as if all of that hadn’t been enough, then the disappearances had started.

People continued to disappear even now that the war was ended.  A lot of people. They were mostly from the smaller towns and villages, but there were also travellers and farmers and trappers. Those who lived a long way out of the towns. And always it was without any explanation. They hadn’t moved to other towns. They hadn’t said farewell to friends and neighbours. They’d simply not been there when others had asked after them.

At first it had been only a few. A man here, a family there. And save for the rate at which it kept happening, it hadn’t been too much of a worry. In the wake of the war it had actually seemed normal. But since then more people had started disappearing and the numbers were growing steadily. It was from more towns and cities. And it wasn’t just Greenlands. The problem was growing.

When so many of his people were disappearing without cause, that was troubling. When the same thing was being reported from so many of his towns it was more so. But when the same news was being reported from the other southern lands, it became something more disturbing. Something sinister. A pattern.

The other lords thought the same. In Preston and West Hold, Copper Hills and Torrington, the reports were gathering along with worried families. People were vanishing in such numbers from all the southern cities that patrols were being sent out hunting for them, while pigeons flew day and night with the names of the missing, hoping that they would be found elsewhere.

They hadn’t been found though.

The thought, at least officially, was that they were simply people who had lost their homes and their work, and who were seeking out new lives for themselves elsewhere. But in his very bones Iros knew it was more than that.

Especially when they had started getting messages not just from the other lands in Irothia, but all the other realms, reporting the same thing. Elaris was particularly badly hit. And given that they had little left in the way of a civil structure, the problem was likely worse than they knew.

Maybe it wasn’t so surprising that many elves were moving. They had just lost a terrible war, overthrown their high lord, and much of their land was in disarray. With no high lord any more, and members of six great houses all vying for the vacant position, life surely couldn’t be as straight forward for the people as it had once been. And of course with refugees everywhere, flooding the cities and the towns, chaos had to rule. It would come as no surprise if many of their people moved at short notice, looking for somewhere else to live.

But it wasn’t just the elves, just as it wasn’t just the humans.

There were now reports from the trolls, the dwarves, the sprites and the gnomes. They’d suffered no war, no loss of leadership, no cities destroyed, and yet they were reporting disappearances as well.

Something was happening, and it wasn’t good. But more than that, when he plotted the reports on the maps every day, he could see a pattern emerging. A pattern a soldier knew well. The disappearances formed a circle, its centre somewhere in the elven realm. That was the sort of pattern a military man might see when he was hunting down an enemy who was striking out from a hidden base. Striking out in all directions.

It wasn’t just a single base though. There were many. It had taken him a while to realise that. But as more reports had come in and he’d started plotting them he could see a circle forming within Greenlands. And that could only mean one thing. There were outposts. There was one in his land. And when he’d sent that information on, other lands had reported the same thing. Smaller circles of disappearances, dozens of them, spread across the realms, all of them together forming a giant circle around something in Elaris.

He could do nothing about Elaris, save send messages to a high lord who still hadn’t been decided upon. But Greenlands was a different matter. And when he plotted out the disappearances within his own lands, he could see a small, almost perfect circle forming around a place he knew well. Or at least a place that he knew of too well.

Winterford.

The very name sent shivers down his spine. And not just his. Its name was known to all of Greenlands, mostly as a place of darkness and mystery. No one lived there. No one had in a very long time, though sometimes outlaws found the isolation of the lands to their advantage. After all, no one went there, so it was a good place to set up camp. Of course, not all of them returned from those camps, and those who did brought back tales of ghosts and wolves that woke children up late at night and kept the bards employed.

The land itself was mostly empty. A wasteland of scrub, grasses and swamp that had been like that for longer than anyone knew. But at its heart so the tales went, there was a village. A village that was so old it had no name. A village that had been deserted before history had begun to be written. And it was always the village that was the heart of the bards’ tales.

A village where the dead and the damned walked the streets. Where dire wolves prowled the forests surrounding it. And where monsters dwelled. Monsters and of course dark wizards, or so the bards would have it.

Iros had never given the village that much thought, except as a child when it had been a tall tale on a long dark night around a roaring fire. Then it had been exciting and mysterious. But not since.

Now it seemed that it was becoming exciting and mysterious again. But not in the way that it had been when he’d been younger.

Which was why after the court had ended for the morning, his feet had begun taking him in the direction of the rangers’ new quarters in town, and why almost without him being aware of it, his hand began knocking on the big oak doors of the burnt out stables.

The door was of course open already. Since the fire they no longer closed as the frame had warped. His knocking was simply for the sake of politeness. But still a ranger appeared in front of him as if by magic and greeted him with a polite smile, before showing him in. Say what you would about the rangers, and many elves had spoken poorly about them at great length when he’d been living in Leafshade, they were polite.

Inside things were fairly much as he’d expected. They were stables. The horses had stalls to themselves and plenty of fresh hay and water, and the wolves seemed to have made the large yard theirs as they basked in the sunshine. Meanwhile the rangers were trying to make do on the first floor of the building. It had once been the hayloft, store and saddlery where all the tools and tackle were kept, and a few extra supplies. It was at least large enough for thirty bedrolls to be laid out, and it had a partially intact roof to keep the rain off, but it wasn’t ideal accommodation.

Where parts of the roof had been burned to ash, carpenters had replaced the wooden beams, and then oiled sacking cloth had been thrown over the holes and tacked down as they waited for more permanent materials to arrive. Just as everyone else was waiting. It was probably no worse than many other houses that his people were living in. But it still wasn’t good.

Captain Maydan rose from the table to greet him as he approached, and briefly Iros found himself wondering where they’d managed to find such a huge piece of furniture. Not to mention how they’d dragged it up the stairs.

“Captain Maydan.” He greeted the captain politely as seemed appropriate, especially considering that he was about to ask him for a favour. “How are you settling in to your new quarters?”

“We are making the best of things Lord Iros.” And they were. But in the end their quarters were simply a set of half burnt out stables, and if they were to make them a home a lot of hard work would need to be done. But the same was true of so many others. Half the town had been burnt down by the Royal Watch, and the carpenters were working all the hours of the day just trying to repair what they could. Damage like that which Greenlands had suffered, took years to repair. And the same was true of all the southern towns and cities.

“I’m glad. I wish I could do more, but my resources are very limited and needed everywhere.” It was the plain truth and he hoped that the scar faced captain understood that much.

“We can see that for ourselves Lord Iros, and we are not unhappy.” Iros couldn’t read his face. The scars made it hard to begin with, and then the man was careful never to give anything away. He would undoubtedly be a worthy opponent in games of strategy and chance.

“And the people. Have they been accepting of you?” Iros hoped as much, he had given instructions that they should be welcomed, but he doubted it would have been a popular command around the town. The war was still so fresh in people’s thoughts, and the rangers were elves, more or less. Their thin builds, pointed ears and brightly coloured hair marked them as such, even those who were of mixed blood. And most people wouldn’t have cared that they wore the leather armour of rangers rather than the black of the Watch.

“There has been little trouble.” The captain was being generous Iros knew. There had been trouble. But he had given his guards strict instructions to watch them, and make sure that any trouble ended before it began. If nothing else, these thirty rangers were a part of his town’s defences, though they probably wouldn’t see it that way. He needed all the men at arms he could get, and those who could actually ride out and check on the outlying towns and villages were more valuable still.

“I’ll keep the patrols walking the street for a while yet, to make certain that it does not become any more. I hope that’s acceptable with you.”

“We will be happy with that.” The captain smiled for the first time since Iros had met him, an expression that wrinkled his scars in strange ways. “We do not wish to cause trouble.”

“I didn’t think you did captain. The patrols are only because I have many angry and grieving people within the town. With that and the ale flowing too freely, trouble is always near. I keep patrols wandering by all the inns and taverns, the grove, the markets and anywhere else where problems might arise. I need the people to see them, to know that they are safe and that the law will be upheld.” Which was why he was recruiting as fast as he could. But almost no training was happening. He had all the men he could find, out on the streets in their uniforms day and night. If it came to a fight he had very grave doubts about their ability to win, but he was gambling that just their presence would stop the fights from starting. It was a poor way to run a force, but the best he could do.

“I understand.” Did he? Iros wondered about that. Did he take him at his word, or did he still believe that the patrols were there to watch him and his riders? He had no way of knowing. Maybe it was time to visit Wildflower Grove and speak with Yossirion again. If nothing else the elder was good at putting people at their ease, despite his gruff tones. And Saris would love to visit him. As it was she was quite happy exploring the ruined stables, and sniffing the wolves also wandering about freely.

“Good. And perhaps there is a way that you can put the people’s doubts to rest.”