Beyond the Hell Cliffs (30 page)

Chapter 24

Smoke rose so high into the
Spring air that it looked like a complete overcast for miles around.  To those villagers of the south, the lines of fleeing refugees and the scattering of lone homesteads hidden in the forests or sitting atop hills, it was ominous.  They had heard the screams and cries of the Sabans and those cringe-worthy roars of the monsters from the Greimere, but the battle that raged in the village of Duransk was unlike anything that they had heard of.  From history and stories, the southern-most peasants of Rellizbix knew that battles were quick and clean.  War was commonplace for these people.  The urban cities of the northern parts of the kingdom had not seen war since the days of the first Saban kings, but those farmers and tillers below the Pisces River lived with the threat of the Greimere raids forever and this was not a battle that they were accustomed to. 

Riding atop a cart, her small face smudged with soot, a Twileen girl looked back, over the heads of the Sabans in the line of fleeing refugees at the pillars of black rising from her home.
  She pushed the stray strands of her coal-black hair away from her eyes, which shined like the fires behind them.  Around her fear and anxiety reflected in the faces of the Sabans that she rode with.  She was not afraid; only angry.

Chev’El was only eight years old, but she had been on her own for almost a year now, after her mother died.  When the first signs of the approaching horde came, she had wanted to hide.  She was good at hiding.  Her mother told her it was because they were from the western forests; the Oaksplinter t
ribe.  The Saban man who drove the cart she rode atop and his wife grabbed her from the streets that morning, before she woke.  They would not allow her to stay inside the village with the monsters coming.  She had actually wanted to catch a glimpse of one, but she did not get the chance.

“
Did you see the size of the army that rode in to Duransk?” a man asked in the procession.  “Could they not have spared a few to escort us?”

“They needed everyone they had, of course,” another man answered.  “They could spare no men on the first encounter with the Greimere.  Would you rather they
be shorthanded when they go into battle?”

“I would rather not be caught on the open road to be ambushed by a stray group of those things!”

“It’s not that,” a man with grey hair and a beard said.  He was older, but had the powerful walk of an old soldier and the scar over his eye was from a blade.  “That was the 1
st
and 4
th
Regiments and their armor was shining.  The Ninth Regiment is the closest to the south this time of year.  The 7
th
and 8
th
Regiments are even still in the Wilderness.”

“What are you saying, you?” the second man asked.

“I don’t need to say anything.  It’s obvious to those willing to see it.” The man looked up and found Chev’El’s curious eyes.  “They don’t care about us here in the south; not as much as their own glory, that is.”

“Careful with your tongue, stranger, we are patriots all!” one of the men said.  “Or maybe you care nothing for the brave men back there, dying to protect us from an insatiable enemy, you coward!”

“King Helfrick only sends his best to this war, to end it quickly and save more people!” another man yelled.

“Most likely you are a discharged soldier yourself, who blames great men for his own failings!” a woman said.

“Cattle should not taunt the panther just because he chooses to ignore them,” the older man said softly. 

“Funny words for an old man fleeing danger with the rest of us ‘cattle,’” one of the men said.
  “All of the panthers are still back there, where the fighting is.”

He turned and brushed his hair back from his face, displaying the ugly pink ravine that ran down his face.  “This is not a cooking accident or from a farming instrument mishandled.  This is from an axe, twenty-two years ago, when I was young and stupid enough to believe the Regiments would be at my rescue.  How many of you have seen a Rathgar up close?  How many of you have stood
close enough to feel their rank breath on your face; to see their oddly-vibrant eyes cut through you with pure hatred as sharp as a Twileen dagger; much sharper than the iron blades of their battleaxes?”

“You stayed behind to fight the monsters by yourself?” Chev’El asked, fascinated.  “What happened?”

“What normally happens when a few barely-armed huntsmen stand against an organized army, child: we were massacred.  The Ninth Regiment was an hour away when the first signs of attack happened on the outskirts of Bellkirk.  Three hours later we realized that they had passed by us, moving to a more ideal battlefield in which to engage the roaming horde.  Our chance to flee had already passed.  We could only stand at that point and let the wave of teeth and iron crash over us.”

“
Then how are you still here?  Did you hide while your fellows were killed?” a man asked.  “If all were killed, then what are you, a ghost?”

“I was spared,” the older man said.  “I don’t know why, but after my brother had fallen it was only me and they just stopped.  I was blind in one eye… a broken arm and ribs; I was little more than a snarling animal at that point, snapping at anything that came close to me.  One of them just looked at me, his massive axe resting on his shoulder and his sky-blue eyes burrowing under my skin.  He could have cleaved me in two with one swing and I was certain he would, but he only slapped his chest with his fist and then turned away.  Then they left and I buried my family.”

“They just left?” Chev’El asked.

“Sounds like bullshit to me!” the woman scoffed.

“Yeah, those demons leave nothing alive in their wake,” another man said.  “I hear they roast the young and wear the skin of the women as trophies and that they tie their belts with the innards of those they’ve murdered!”

“If ‘Panther’ here had really fought with one of those things, they would be wearing his face like a festival mask right now!”

“That old man cut his face falling on a plow or something.”

“I believe you, mister,” Chev’El said.  “My name is Chev’El and I wanted to see one of the Rathgars, too… but now I don’t.”

“Because you’re smart, Chev’El,” the man replied.  “The Treewalkers usually are, aren’t they?”

Chev’El brightened at this.  Whoever this man was, he knew that she was from the forests and not one of the Twileens from the plains or the coast.  “What’s your name?”

“I am Sevictus,” the man replied with a smile.

It was another month before Chev’El returned to Duransk, one of the first to return to the destroyed village after the battle.  She travelled with Sevictus and had already started learning the frontier skills of a huntsman from him.  Her dark hair was short and away from her face and on her leather belt was a skinning knife.  She was well-fed and cleaner than when she lived on the streets of the village,
yet dirt and debris clung to her clothes and hair.  Though her face was alive and full of eagerness to learn from the grizzled mentor, she was shocked when she arrived to see the carnage of the village.

“Is this normal?” she asked her teacher.  “What happened here?”

“A massacre,” Sevictus said, looking around at the piles of charred bodies and the empty-eyed heads screaming silently atop long poles in the ground.  The ground was littered with smashed wine barrels and the clear decanters that carried the bubbly juice that Faeir mages enjoyed.  Empty boonivarn gourds were scattered among broken beer steins and there were clean carcasses of fowl and game resting atop make-shift tables.  Carrion birds were few, as most everything edible was already picked clean.

“It looks like… a festival happened here shortly after the massacre,” Chev’El said, picking up what looked like a pair of lacey panties that mostly prostitutes or exotic dancers wore.  “Who… who was doing the celebrating here?”

“This was a Rellizbix victory,” Sevictus said, pulling a burned pair of shackles from one of the piles.  “Not all of these bodies were dead when the fire blazed.”

“So our soldiers defeated the enemy, stuck their heads on poles, burned the prisoners alive… and then feasted?” Chev’El asked.

“And they left to the southwest, the same direction the attack came from,” Sevictus said, pointing the trail that had been beaten into the ground by thousands of boots, hooves and wheels.  “They are giving chase to the ones that retreated instead of moving to secure the other villages parallel to Duransk.  This is abnormal.”

“What is abnormal?”

“Everything, Chev’El.  This was not just the 1
st
and 4
th
Regiments that we saw from before.  There was at least another regiment of men here and for some reason they had all of this booze on them.  This isn’t how the army works.  We do not burn prisoners alive and then drink among the death screams.  That is not the actions of a defending army.  It’s much too… vengeful.”

“They did not even clean up after themselves,” Chev’El commented.  “This will take forever to rebuild.”

“We’re not staying, Chev’El.” Sevictus was already headed to the southwest part of the village ruins.  “There is nothing but death here.”

“We’re going to follow the regiments, aren’t we?” Chev’El asked, grabbing her pack and trotting off after him.

“Something is amiss, even for something as horrible as this war.  I wish to see what this has meant for the rest of the land down here.  I wish to see what terrible state the king’s men will leave us this time.”

Chapter 25

Tiberius looked upon the Hell Cliffs as the sun broke over the mountains to his left.  He had only once before looked out onto the barren dirt of the south, far below the line that divided his people from their dreaded enemy.  The last time he had looked out on the Greimere’s land, he was relieved.  He was a young officer and seeing the Cliffs was his sign that the war was over.  Now he watched the last few dozen Rathgar flee across the cracked red landscape, escaping his wrath as fast as they could.  This time Tiberius watched them with anticipation.

Behind him the men of Regiments were sleeping off the booze or watching over the few prisoners they had taken. 
Tiberius did not like having any of these wretched creatures among his men, but it was necessary; he needed information on the lands to the south.  He needed to know what would be waiting for his men, if anything, once they crossed into the Greimere Empire.

“Have they gone, sir?”

Tiberius turned to see Captain Laurent standing behind him.  The young captain was bright-eyed and ready.  He was not a drinker or a glutton, like so many of the other soldiers.  Laurent was clean, but ferocious in battle.  He held no love for the Rathgar or their allies.

“They flee back to their Emperor, I suppose.”

“Will that pose a problem to our mission, sir?  The Witzer Cannon is still days away.  They will have an opportunity for ambush and they know these lands better than us.”

“I know,”
Tiberius replied.  “They lost a lot of men here in our land; more than they have ever lost before, I imagine.  I hope that I do not overestimate them, Captain.  I hope that they do have something for us.”

“Sir?”
Captain Laurent asked, confused.

“I want more than this slaughter, Captain.  I want them to put up a fight in their own lands.  I want them to fight like demons when we come for them, because men who fight like that are scared.  I want them to fear us so badly that they throw everything they have at us.  Then, when we break them, as they watch the Hammer of Rellizbix crash down on their miserable skulls, they will go to whatever afterlife awaits their kind knowing that their entire empire was completely outclassed.
”

“Aye, sir,”
Laurent replied.  “I, too, think we have put up with their villainy for far too long.”

“Captain, get the men up and around,”
Tiberius commanded.  “Send someone to the supply camp and get the translator over here.  I intend to get whatever information out of these trolls I can before the day is through.”

The line of Rathgar looked nervously about.  The sight of so many heads lodged on pikes must have been unnerving them.  They had not had an easy night.  Their naked bodies were caked with blood and dirt and they smelled like urine, most likely from the free access every drunk had to them the night before.  Only one had a different look on his large face and it
was a concern of General Tiberius.

“That one there, the large one giving me the eye,”
Tiberius said, pointing to the largest, most battered Rathgar of the group.  “Pull him out of line and question him first.”

Several Saban soldiers pulled the Rathgar out of the lineup and brought him over to where
Tiberius, Laurent and Vi-Sage Malthus stood.  Malthus was one of the few Faeir who could interpret the Rathgar language and speak it fluently enough for questioning prisoners.  As a Faeir of the Aerial Sect, Malthus wore white and light blue robes and his sparkling grey coif looked as if it had been frozen in time right as a strong wind caught it from the side.

Malthus’s melodious voice sounded strange grunting out the Rathgar tongue and it made
Laurent cringe as if he smelled something foul.  The Vi-Sage gave the Rathgar a prepared speech about his rights as a prisoner and a few other things that were standard practice.  Only this time it was all a lie.  Tiberius had no intention to uphold the rules for dealing with prisoners that had been established in the treaty with Greimere.  As far as he was concerned, the Emperor had destroyed the agreement the moment he had the messengers killed.  In doing so, the ignorant fool had spilled Caelum blood. 

Tiberius
’s thoughts drifted back to his king and the grief that had overtaken him once the knowledge of his son’s death had finally set in, after all the talk of war was over and his course set. 

It was a few nights before he sent
Tiberius and the entire 1
st
Regiment off to obliterate the encroaching horde.  The boy’s Twileen mother had found out somehow and travelled all the way to Thromdale.  She was a pretty thing, for a tree-walker and despite her age, which was nearly ten years over the king.  She had dressed herself elegantly in Saban attire and make-up, though her dark-shaded eyes were a bit messy by the time she reached the palace.

She refused to leave the front gate until word was sent to the king that she was there.  As no one knew who she was, it had taken quite some time before anyone bothered to inform the king.  Once Helfrick found out, he sent for her immediately.

“Your Highness, are you sure about this?” Tiberius asked, watching his king smooth his hair back and pull a robe over the night clothes he had been in for several days.  “People will wonder what business a Twileen whore could have that would get her in to see the king in such a time.  Gossip will run wild!  The nobles will not stop…”

“Stop,
Tiberius.  She is the boy’s mother.  She deserves to know what has happened and why and she deserves to know what will be done about it.”

“I do not disagree, my lord.  Can we not send a messenger, though?  I will gladly tell her myself.  I am the Commander of the entire Rellizbix Army and I can speak for you.  I will gladly take the brunt of her despair.”

“No, Tiberius, you will not relay this message for me.” The king did not even look at his old friend.  “I am Helfrick Caelum and Caelums do not hide from their failures.”

“
My lord, you have failed no one,” Tiberius replied.

In an instant the king had
Tiberius by the throat and up against the wall, his reddened eyes wild with anger.

“What do you know of it?” he screamed.  “
You’re too busy kissing my ass to concede the truth, Tiberius!  Stop trying to convince me otherwise!”

“As you wish, my lord,”
Tiberius choked.

A knock on the door came and Helfrick let go of his general and gathered his robe about him.  “Let her in and
do not speak or move from the door no matter what.”

Tiberius
nodded, rubbing his neck and opened the door.  He dismissed the escort, let the woman in and then stood firm at the door.

“Hello,
Nuallan,” Helfrick said.

“My lord,”
Nuallan whispered, bowing lightly.  She wore dark red and black, her conservative Saban dress covering all but her face, which was shadowed by a large hood.  When she pulled it back, Helfrick gazed down at her amber eyes, as big as arrowheads and as cold as stone.  “I hear we are at war with the Greimere.”

“That is correct.”

“Where is my son?”

“We do not know,
Nuallan.”

“You do not know.” She did not phrase it as a question.  She already knew what he meant.

“None from his mission have returned,” Helfrick continued.  “We received word a week and a half ago that our southern settlements had been attacked.”

“
Raegith gets sent into the Wilderness on a secret mission no one knows of, just before war breaks out, and none from his group return.”  She paused for a moment.  “How convenient.”

Tiberius
stiffened at the implication, but kept himself from acting.

“Nuallan, I will avenge him, I promise…” Helfrick began.

“I don’t care!” she screamed, closing the distance on the king.

Tiberius lunged forward, but Helfrick held up his hand to halt him.  In the next instant Nuallan’s hand whipped out from beneath her cloak and struck Helfrick hard across the face.  She was so small she had to hop in order to reach him, but her strike was hard enough to roll his head to the side.

Again she hit him, and then again. 
Tiberius stood by helplessly, realizing that his mighty king, the Golden-haired Prince that had felled Nogrim the Behemoth with nothing but a warhammer and brute strength, was powerless before the petite Twileen and his own guilt.  He would let her hit him all night if her strength kept up, but he would tear Tiberius apart in his hands if the general tried to interfere.

Finally
Nuallan stopped and collapsed crying at his feet.  In a rare display of emotion, Helfrick wiped the moisture from his face and reached down, lifting the woman up to her feet.  He embraced her, even as she fought him, until she was finished weeping.

“I will avenge him,
Nuallan.  This invasion has been going on for hundreds of years and I will now destroy it and the entire Greimere Empire in Raegith’s name.  Every beast and brute south of the Hell Cliffs will suffer what our son did tenfold.  I swear this to you.”

“What does it matter, Helfrick?”

Tiberius flinched at the informal way she addressed the king, but Helfrick said nothing.  She pulled away and looked up at him, reaching up to his face again, only to caress it instead of accost it.

“You’ve aged so much since that night.  Back then you were
simply a prince and a Paladin.  You were so strong and handsome and I was helpless to your charm.  I could not believe that the future king of Rellizbix wanted me to entertain him for the night. I was infatuated with you. When I realized I was with child; that it was yours, I cried for how badly I was about to affect your reign.  I knew that I could not become the queen and that Raegith would never be accepted.  Even then, as a single mother-to-be, I only thought of you and your reputation.

“Now I can only think about how much that naivety has cost me.  I should have fled my village and raised Raegith far, far away from you and your cruel kingdom.  I should have kept my son so far away from this decadent world that forced such a brave king to hide his own blood for fear of his reputation.  We would all have been better off, would
n’t we?”

“No,
Nuallan, I would not have been,” Helfrick replied.  “It may not seem so, but I cared for Raegith too.  I’m destroying the pillar of my rule for him, for Fate’s sake!  I may not be king after this is done!”

“
I’m sure you’ll lose quite a bit over this,” Nuallan said.  “You’ll lose men to the war, the legitimacy of your rule will be threatened… the poor souls below the Pisces will lose their lives or the lives of their family.  The Greimere will lose their lives and their very existence. 

“Raegith was a spark of life, Helfrick.  He was good and lively and would
have brought light to every soul he touched, no matter what station life gave him.  He did not need to be a prince or royalty of any kind to give his gifts to this world.  Now he will give us all nothing but death and loss.  Forgive me if I am not consoled by this.”

“Then what can I do,
Nuallan?  This is it; you have power over a king in this very moment, woman.  What would you have of me in order to ease your soul?  Name it and I will concede.”

“My lord…”
Tiberius said, completely appalled at his behavior around this woman.

“Just leave me be, my lord,”
Nuallan said, coldly.  “I don’t need anything else from you… ever.”

“
Nuallan…”

As the king looked after her, the Twileen bowed and turned, heading toward the door. 
Tiberius blocked her way, but the king waved him away and the woman left the room.  The escort led her down the hall and that was the last he saw of her. 

The king dismissed him in order to be alone after that and a few days later
Tiberius was riding out of the gates of Thromdale.  Even as he left his home, his thoughts were only on the king and his well-being.  He had never seen anyone humble Helfrick so in the entire time he knew him.  It pained Tiberius to see his king in such a state and he hesitated to leave Helfrick, but he knew his duty.  Besides, he was no good at consoling kings.  The best way he could help his king was by doing what he was best at: killing Rathgar.

Tiberius
snapped back to the present as the nagging voice of Malthus came to him.

“Sir, he is not making any sense,” the Faeir sage informed him.  “He’s actually being defiant and it is spreading to the others.”

Tiberius looked over to the line of Rathgar.  They stood a little bit straighter now, despite their injuries.  Their morale was higher, even as prisoners.  Perhaps they were foolish enough to believe that the Rellizbix Army would not cause them any harm once they were captive.  Such might have been the case before their despicable kind murdered the king’s son.

“The big one is doing this?  What does he say?”

“That’s the thing, it doesn’t make sense.  Maybe I’m not translating it correctly or it is some form of new slang…”

“Just tell me what the hell he is saying, Malthus!”

“He says… that the Grass will avenge him.” Malthus was clearly uncomfortable around the general and his apprehension was growing with his failure to gain anything from the prisoners.  “He isn’t talking about the grass that we walk on.  He’s giving it an honorific… as if ‘Grass’ were a person.”