Dawn of War (13 page)

She peered out over the trash as the stomp of boots sounded around the corner. Though the watch was often lenient with the orphans they found on the level, doing little more than escorting them back to their rightful place, there had been a number of complaints made against them in recent days. To make matters worse, the soldiers had kicked them off the level just hours before.

The watch wouldn’t be so lenient this time.

Ellora’s breath caught in her lungs as the soldiers stomped into sight. She readied to run but knew immediately they hadn’t come to chase dirty orphans from the Sixth. They were about far more important duties.

She cast her eyes over the group of sour-faced men, led by the watch commander himself. In the middle of the wall of soldiers, shields and spears, a ragged man walked with his chin down, his bearded face turned away from the world.

Emboldened by the soldiers’ focus on the man, Ellora stood and stepped from behind the obscuring waste to get a better look. She hugged the shadows of the wall and inched toward the street, her eyes never leaving the prisoner.

He walked like a man destined for the gallows, his strength and will drained from his stride as though he knew his breaths were numbered. Ellora had seen such a walk before; she had seen it with her own father.

He had gone to the rope for killing a merchant who’d cheated him of his last few silvers. Those coins had meant everything to her father. They were what would have kept food on his family’s table through the cold winter months and wood in the oven for heat. To lose them was the final step off a steep cliff, her father’s pride and wavering hope shoved mercilessly over the edge.

Ellora was told he had strangled the man so violently the merchant’s eyes had popped loose from their sockets. The watch found her father, his hands still tight around the merchant’s cold, rigid neck, wracked with sobs that wouldn’t cease. They dragged him away in tears only to march him out into the field two dawns later. It was the last time Ellora had seen her father alive.

She watched as the trap opened beneath his bare and dirty feet. He dropped through it with a surprised gasp, his body dancing as he reached the end of the rope. Though only six at the time, the details of his final moment still shone clear in her mind.

Grateful for the blackened hood that hid his face from sight, Ellora watched in horror as her father’s bowels and bladder gave way without restraint. Urine soaked the tented front of his wool pants as shit ran in thick rivulets down his leg to stain the ground beneath in a dark, foul smelling puddle that cast off steam in the cold winter air. He twitched for several long seconds and then swung dead on the rope. He swayed back and forth in the wind until the hangman cut him down at dusk. In the darkness of her nightmares, he swung the same from that moment forward.

On that day, happiness and hope had died alongside her father. Ellora’s mother did what she could to keep food in their grumbling bellies, but with nothing to sell and no skills to trade, she had only her flesh to give.

Ellora remembered hiding in the shadows of their tiny hut, covering her ears to the sounds of men grunting and sweating overtop her mother just feet away in what had been her father’s bed a mere week before. Her mother’s soft squeals frightened her and she wished herself deaf.

Though she knew not then what her mother sacrificed to keep warm gruel in Ellora’s bowl, she understood deep down that it was wrong and that it hurt her mother more than she could know. It wasn’t right that her mother should suffer so.

Ellora pushed away the image of her mother’s weary eyes and empty stare and crept onto the street behind the squad of soldiers that were headed toward the gate to the Fifth. She wished the ragged man well and hoped he had no family that would suffer in the wake of his death as hers had at her father’s.

There were more than enough parentless children in the Ninth than the streets could provide for. They needed no more at the orphanage. Save for but a few children who’d been taken away by the Royal Guard when Ellora was but a child, the orphans only left when they were old enough to fend for themselves.

As the soldiers escorted the man from her sight, the heavy stomp of their boots fading away, she saw the rest of the orphans slip from the shadowed alleys and out from darkened corners to return to the street. Their faces were all turned toward the Fifth and the disappearing watch.

Ellora felt a growing heaviness in her chest at having seen the strange man’s arrival, a sense of foreboding she could not place. For no reason she could explain, she glanced up at the sky and spied the red-orange eye of A’ree staring down upon her. A squirming sickness roiled in her stomach at the sight.

The moon was a portend of ill tidings to come. She looked away as a chill prickled the skin of her arms.

Ellora’s father had gone to the gallows under the angry eye of Ree. Her mother too had met her own sad death during the Tumult. Her spirit broken, her flesh ravaged by the diseases borne of her desperate need to provide for her daughter, she drew her last ragged breath as the Iron Ocean raged against the far side of the Fortress Mountains. But despite her effort, that last breath was one of condemnation.

No one to care for her, Ellora was taken to the Ninth and cast amidst the orphans who fought for space to sleep on the mildewed and cold floorboards of the old orphanage. The king’s meager coppers did little to make their life better, but it kept a rotting roof over their heads and maggot-infested bread in their bellies.

Ellora’s hand brushed against the hidden pocket sewn inside the waistband of her threadbare pants and sighed as she fingered the two, thin coppers snuggled inside. It had been a poor day for beggars on the Sixth.

She glanced at the moon once more and cursed it, turning to watch the sun as it dipped below the jagged peaks of the mountains. She called impatient to the other orphans, gesturing toward the sky. It was a long way back to the Ninth. If they hurried they could make it before the shadows swallowed the streets.

For all the difficulties the orphans of Lathah faced during the day, they were nothing compared to what nightfall would bring were they to be caught out in the dark.

Ellora shivered and counted heads. Once she was sure they were all together, she rushed them toward home.

The shining glow of A’ree at her back, Ellora wondered what she could have done to the goddess to have upset her so.

Chapter Twelve

The daylight silence of the woods around him exploding with the coming of night, Domor sat low in the raft as the inhabitants of the Dead Lands shrieked in eerie displeasure at their presence.

He glanced at Jerul and noticed even his blood-companion had sunk lower on the wooden bench. Having rowed throughout the day, save for a few hours when Domor had taken over so the warrior could nap, Jerul’s arms trembled with effort. The purple veins at his cheeks stood out, swollen against the almost glowing pale white of his face. The warrior huffed with each rotation of the oars, glistening sweat running like rain across his broad chest.

But despite the weariness that seemed to infest his movements and had stolen his voice from him, Jerul’s blue eyes shined with an alert wariness. They darted like angry wasps, flitting back and forth but never lighting on any one thing for more than just an instant.

Feral howls peeled from out of the darkness, sending cold shivers dancing down Domor’s neck and back. He slunk further into the raft, cursing his long limbs when he could sink no lower. His feet butted up against Jerul’s swords and pack, and there was nowhere for them to rest. The craft had not been built with the gangly limbs of a Velen in mind.

He muttered a quiet complaint and glanced out over the rail to spy movement at the water’s edge. A dozen red eyes glared back at him, shifting and shimmering in the formless black that devoured the trees. Guttural barks and growls were flung at them as they passed, the eyes attempting to keep pace through the dense underbrush. Muted splashes followed them along as the creatures repeatedly tested the boundaries of the water.

Higher in the trees, sibilant shrieks cut through the night like the whistle of arrows. Domor searched the dark sky of the canopy each time he heard the droning buzz of an insect whirl by. Tiny tracers of pale green light marked their path overhead.

Domor’s knuckles ached, having clutched at the hilt of his dagger since he and Jerul sailed into the Dead Lands. He finally released his hold and groaned as he extended his fingers, the knuckles popping like bugs in a fire. He shook his arm to return blood to his hand, tingling pricks dancing amok along the skin.

Every once in a while, glimmers of A’ree cut through the canopy and seemed to dye the water blood red where it struck, as if opening a wound upon the surface of the river. Jerul drew Domor’s attention to one such beam.

“Ree watches us in her fury.” Jerul’s voice was raspy, the words harsh whispers.

Domor grunted and reached into Jerul’s pack to pull a
waterskin
from within its crowded depths. He tugged the plug free of the valve and squirted a liberal amount into Jerul’s open mouth.

“I had just begun to believe that Ree had blessed us with traveler’s luck, my friend, keeping the beasts at bay upon the shore, their sharpened teeth far from our flesh.” Domor flopped back onto the deck and took a sip of the water before sealing it and returning it to the pack. “But I defer to your judgment that we’re simply waiting for our doom to descend upon us, and I have only fooled myself into believing we might make it to Nurin alive.”

A tiny smirk of measured tolerance flickered at Jerul’s lips. “Ree tempers the good she provides with ill to humble even the most charmed of her children. Your sharp tongue may well strip the skin from fools, but it does little to sway the goddess from her path, of which only she knows. Mock her not lest you draw the attention of her fury.”

Domor settled back with a wry grin. He and Jerul had danced to this tune many times since their bonding. It was a rousing composition, with much give and take weaved amidst its notes.

Though born a Velen and raised amongst their pious kind, closest of the races of Ahreele to the Sha’ree, Domor asked questions that his people had no answers for. It was what set him apart, a near pariah amongst the Velen.

He’d been taught the story of Ree’s awakening and could recite it by rote, even deep within his cups. He knew the power of the magic that spilled from the ground, yet he could give no credence to the goddess’ presence as more than the stone upon which he walked. In all his fifty years, he had never once felt her hand in either guidance or disdain.

Though he believed in Ree—her flesh the earth, her anguished tears, shed at the misery of her great awakening, the oceans—he could not subscribe to the blind faith of the Velen, or the Yvir for that matter, that the goddess played a role in their lives beyond the physically obvious. Life was just life; it ebbed and flowed like the weather, clear skies to storms, only to clear once more when it was ready. Life was theirs to navigate, built upon their choices, good or bad, and not fettered to the whims of the goddess.

It was this belief that most upset Jerul.

The screams of the dark woods in his ears, Domor was in no mood to argue. He raised his hands. “Forgive me, my friend. I concede...for the nonce. This is not the time, nor the place, to discuss such things.”

Jerul grinned. “You give in too easily, Velen. I was hoping for a fight. What troubles you?”

“This is what troubles me.” Domor swept his hand toward the wild shrieks that flooded the trees.

He cried out mid-arc as something struck his wrist. His cry of pain and surprise was mirrored by another, much higher in pitch, and then a quiet splash that flung droplets of cold water onto his face. Domor drew his arm to his chest and scurried to the far side of the raft.

Jerul set the oars in a quick motion, locking them in place before retrieving his blades from the deck. Domor stared up at him. The hammer’s blow feeling at his wrist sent throbbing shards of pain down the length of his forearm. He sat stunned.

The warrior moved to the center of the raft and stared into the darkness. His blue eyes shone like beacons as they darted about. He blinked once and his lids narrowed as he seemed to focus on something. He ducked low with a grunt, his eyes suddenly wide. An obsidian shadow led by four yellow dots zipped over him with a hoary screech, missing the wild white hairs of Jerul’s
mohawk
by just inches.