DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) (121 page)

A
YDRIAN FOUND
M
ICKLIN
’
S
V
ILLAGE AS THE FIRST SNOW DESCENDED OVER THE
frontier of Wester-Honce, and found, to his dismay, that the place was deserted. No second disaster had emptied the village, he soon discerned, for it seemed to him as if the huntsmen had, in an orderly manner, packed up and walked away.

The snow continued to fall throughout the day and the night. By morning, the young ranger found himself surrounded by more than three feet of the white stuff. He had no food, no companions, and no practical knowledge of the immediate area, but Aydrian, well-trained and in complete harmony with nature, was hardly afraid. He remained in the area for a couple of weeks, seeking any clues about the weretiger and the disaster that had begun the downfall of the village. Finding none, he turned his gaze back to the east.

Knowing full well that a mighty storm might descend upon him, but hardly fearing that prospect, the young ranger started out again, thinking to take a circuitous route back to Festertool.

A week later, he found a small village, no more than a cluster of houses, a place much like the abandoned Micklin’s Village. He was greeted warmly by the three men and one woman who were in the common room, though they had never heard of Festertool, let alone any ranger named Nighthawk.

“What’s bringing the ranger of Festertool out so far, then, in the blows of winter?” the woman asked him.

“Micklin’s Village,” Aydrian explained. When dark clouds crossed the faces of all four in the room, the young ranger’s hopes brightened. He told of his findings and of the tale of Mickael that had led him there in the first place.

“Yeah, I know Mickael,” one of the men answered. “Roll bones with him every market.” His voice dropped to lower, grimmer tones. “Used to, anyhow.”

“A terrible fate, they suffered,” the woman added. “All torn up by the beast!” She shuddered.

“What more might you know of this beast?” Aydrian asked, leaning forward in his chair. “For I am sworn to slay it.”

“Never heard of it before it attacked Micklin’s Village,” the woman answered, and two of the men nodded their agreement.

“Heared of the beast in Palmaris,” the third man said, “many years ago, during the plague. Heared that Queen Jilseponie did battle with it before the gates of St. Precious and that she drove it away with her power.”

“Queen Jilseponie!” another man said, lifting his mug in a toast.

“Aye, but that was a decade and more ago,” the woman replied. “Are ye thinkin’ it’s the same beast that sacked Micklin’s? Or the same that took three in Tuber’s
Creek?”

“Tuber’s Creek?” Aydrian asked, but the others were too immersed in their own conversation even to notice.

“Aye, and the same that killed Baron Bildeborough of Palmaris,” the third man was quick to respond. “Bishop Marcalo De’Unnero’s the name they gave to the thing. A most wicked one was he! The same beast who killed Nightbird.”

The other three villagers groaned and nodded solemnly, but Aydrian could hardly draw breath, let alone make any sound. Had this all been somehow predestined? he had to ask himself. Was fate playing a cruel trick or a kind one, allowing him the opportunity to avenge the death of his father?

Aydrian listened intently as the four chatted, speaking of Nightbird, his father, and of De’Unnero, the weretiger, speculating as to whether that creature and this one might be one and the same; and arguing whether it was really De’Unnero, or Father Abbot Markwart, who had truly killed the great ranger.

When their discussion finally began to settle, Aydrian managed to find his voice and ask again, “Tuber’s Creek?”

And so began the next leg of Aydrian’s hunt, a journey to the south and east, to a small village on the banks of Tuber’s Creek. He arrived a few days later, to find the place solemn and as gray of mood as was the winter sky.

The young ranger, declaring that he had come in pursuit of the beast, had no trouble in finding folk willing to talk of their loss. Theirs was a story that should have torn at Aydrian’s heart, a tale of three men lost, one dragged off with no more left of him than his ragged and bloody clothing. But in truth the young ranger, as he listened to the story, was considering only his own potential gain or ultimate loss along this road he had chosen to walk.

“Oh, and the poor girl Sadye,” one old woman crooned. “She was first to find the clothing of her dead man. Broke her, I say.”

“First to find?” Aydrian noted. “Where might I find this Sadye, to hear her tale?”

“Palmaris, I’m thinking,” one of the men remarked. “Said she’d be goin’ home, and so she did. And I’m missin’ her singing, I am.”

“More than singing,” insisted the superstitious old woman, and she made the sign of the evergreen, the Abellican symbol of life, as she spoke. “A prophet she was, by me own eyes and ears!”

“How so?” Aydrian asked.

“Singin’ o’ just such a beast,” the old woman remarked.

“Sadye is a bard,” one of the men explained. “And she came to town recounting the tales of Micklin’s Village, a new song and one of her own making. Alas that the same unlikely fate should befall her own husband!”

“She had come from Micklin’s Village?” Aydrian asked, more than a little intrigued.
And the beast followed her here
, he privately reasoned.

“Aye, she said she’d gone through that doomed place,” the man answered. “And now she’s out for Palmaris, and God be with her that she make it home.”

A few of the others murmured their prayers for poor Sadye, but Aydrian’s
thinking was drifting along different lines than sympathy. “Pray tell me,” he bade them all, “of the other songs of Sadye the bard.”

A few curious stares came back at him, but he held his expression calm, not letting on about any of his growing suspicions—not really suspicions but, rather, a growing hunch.

The townsfolk sang to him, then, many of Sadye’s songs. Old songs and new ones, lyrics that had been around for hundreds of years and her original pieces. One of the latter, in particular, caught Aydrian’s attention.

The Lyrical of Marcalo De’Unnero
.

It was all fitting together just a bit too neatly.

The folk offered him a house for as long as he wanted it, the same house where Sadye and her man, Callo, had lived during their short stay in Tuber’s Creek. As anxious as he was to be out on the hunt, Aydrian wisely accepted their offer, and he remained in the village for more than a month. By day, he helped out wherever he could, hunting and with the chores, but he made certain that he was back in his house, alone, each night, and there, in a curtained-off area, the young ranger went to Oracle.

And learned—of Palmaris and Marcalo De’Unnero. Nothing specific came to him, just general feelings, but the greatest lesson for Aydrian those nights at Oracle was the certainty at last that the shadowy figures he could bring into the cloudy background of the mirror realm were really two distinct entities. Or one with battling emotions, he believed, for the feelings he got concerning the man he now suspected to be the weretiger were very different indeed on different days. From one figure, he felt nothing but hatred for the man, from the other, something more akin to respect.

Still, he could glean little more than that, so after a few days at his Oracle-induced contemplation, Aydrian turned his thoughts more to the present, trying to piece together clearly all that he had heard of the beast, all that he had heard of Micklin’s Village and of the tragedy at Tuber’s Creek. Had the two tragedies been the work of the same creature?

Aydrian believed the answer to be a resounding yes, for how many such beasts could exist? If Mickael was to be believed, Bertram Dale—or whoever this Bertram Dale might be—was the monster.

But if that Bertram Dale was the same man as Callo Crump, as Aydrian believed, then where had the grieving Sadye come from?

The question did not prevent Aydrian from thinking that Bertram and Callo were one and the same. He heard about the torn and bloody clothing of Callo Crump. But if the creature had ripped Callo’s clothing so viciously, Aydrian would have expected there to have been pieces of Callo found also. Still, the villagers were convinced of Sadye’s sincerity and were fretfully worried about her having headed out on the dangerous road alone.

Every night, Aydrian finished Oracle by rubbing his hands over his face. He had a nagging feeling about all this. He believed that the beast that had torn up Micklin’s
Village—a weretiger, surely, and no natural cat—and the one that had slaughtered the hunters from Tuber’s Creek were one and the same; and, furthermore, that the beast could be traced back: to Palmaris and this strange monk named Marcalo De’Unnero.

Or perhaps it was Aydrian’s hope more than his belief. For if his suspicions proved correct, how fast his legend would grow when he brought the head of the weretiger in as a trophy! Furthermore, if his suspicions concerning the origins of the beast were correct, if it was indeed the monk from Palmaris all those years ago, then it was common belief that the weretiger was somehow gemstone inspired or created.

Whenever he thought that, Aydrian dropped a hand into his pouch of gemstones and ran his fingers across their smooth surfaces. With the training Dasslerond had given him, his own inner powers, and the training he was receiving from the ghost in the mirror at Oracle, Aydrian was confident that he could win any battle involving the use of gemstone magic.

Any battle.

“I
t is the life of the Pryani Gypsy!” Sadye proclaimed one cold winter morning, her exuberance mocking Marcalo’s typically dour mood. “We travel the world, seeing what we may.”

“Until the tiger comes forth,” Marcalo reminded.

“As with the gypsies,” Sadye said with a laugh. “When their thefts become known, they pack their wagons and flee.” As she finished, she waved her arm out toward the wagon at the side of their small encampment, box shaped and covered, a portable house. The pair had acquired it a month before, finding it abandoned in one of the many towns through which they had ventured since they’d left Tuber’s Creek. It was as much their home now as any of those towns, for they did not dare remain in any one place for any length of time. They had changed their appearance again—Sadye had cut her brown hair shorter and Marcalo had shaved his head and was now sporting a thin mustache—but they knew that Marcalo might be recognized by any of the survivors of Micklin’s Village, who were rumored to be wandering the lands, and that either of them would be known to any of the folk of Tuber’s Creek. If they encountered any of their former neighbors, they would have a hard time explaining away the existence of Marcalo, supposedly slain by the beast.

And so they wandered, through the weeks and through the towns, whenever the paths were clear enough for the wagon. If the snows trapped them, the weretiger went hunting at night, easily bringing home some food. That beast was out regularly now, at least once or twice a week; and often it was Sadye, playing the discordant notes on her lute, who brought it forth. On several occasions, when Marcalo had assumed the tiger form, Sadye had not driven him off but had sat there with him hour after hour, all through the night, her small lute the only barrier between her very life and this menacing beast.

Now she feared the weretiger not at all, and neither did Marcalo believe that he would ever kill or even harm her.

It wasn’t a happy situation for the former monk, though he loved Sadye and their time together. But Marcalo De’Unnero found release for his inner passions, both in making love to Sadye and in allowing the weretiger to come forth. Still, his frustrations about the last ten years could not be dismissed, and while Sadye might be showing him a more exciting journey, it was still a journey without a destination.

Perhaps most exciting of all to De’Unnero were the times he ran in the forest as the weretiger, issuing his great rumbling growl with full knowledge that it would carry across the miles to nearby villages. He could imagine the trembling of the townsfolk at hearing that mighty call. Perhaps some would come out to hunt him—those kills Marcalo De’Unnero could justify.

On one such night, a warm evening in the late spring of God’s Year 841, the weretiger’s growl carried on gentle winds to the folk of a small village, including one young visitor to the town.

Aydrian sat bolt upright at the sound, his heart pounding, his eyes wide. It took him some time to muster the nerve to collect his clothing, his gemstones, and his sword and to walk out of the barn the townsfolk had generously offered him for his temporary home.

Many of the folk were outside, gathered around the central courtyard within the cluster of houses.

“That yer cat?” one man asked as Aydrian approached.

Another roar split the night, and Aydrian watched children clutching their parents tightly in fear. That image stunned and, in a strange and profound manner, wounded him, but he told himself that such displays prevented the true growth of the warrior. Had he spent his childhood clutching his mother, or even Lady Dasslerond, he would never have been able to find the courage now to go out into that dark and forbidding forest.

“Ye’ll find the tracks in the morning,” another man remarked.

“I will be skinning the cat before morning,” Aydrian the Nighthawk replied, and he drew out his sword, his other hand comfortably, and comfortingly, resting in his pouch of powerful gemstones. He walked off into the darkness, using every skill the elves had taught him to orient himself to his surroundings and to keep his head clear, his fighting muscles on the edge of readiness.

He found the weretiger, or the weretiger found him, on the road far outside the tiny village. The great cat came out onto the path swiftly, in a sudden charge, but as soon as Aydrian fell into a proper defensive posture and faced it head-on, it veered aside, circling him.

Aydrian knew then that, as he had suspected, this was no ordinary animal. There was an intelligence behind the cat’s eyes, malevolent and certainly human. How clearly the young ranger saw that! And only after a few minutes, turning slowly to keep facing the circling tiger, did Aydrian realize that he was holding the
hematite, and that, likely, he had unknowingly projected his thoughts through the gemstone to heighten his understanding of the nature of this beast.