Reaper Of Sorrows (Book 1) (15 page)

Rathe bristled. “Then I would request a larger party.”

“No,” Treon said. “Four are enough.”

Rathe’s sword flashed from its scabbard. Treon flinched back, belatedly groping for his own blade. By then, Aeden had spun his mount and clattered across the bridge, followed by Rathe and a chuckling Loro. Eled hung well to the rear, his tight features tinged an unpleasant shade of green.

The foursome rode through the glade, crested a rise, then left the road and plunged into the forest, following an overgrown game trail. After a few hundred paces scrambling their mounts over downed trees, crossing muddy brooks and bogs, the way opened on a grassy meadow. A stag bounded away when they came into the clearing, its antlers crashing through the brush. After a moment, silence fell.

“Over there,” Aeden said, pointing at a distinct silhouette hovering amongst a stand of white-skinned birch.

Rathe gradually detected the contours of a wagon hidden within the murky greenery.

“What’s that stench?” Loro asked, raising an arm to his nose.

Rathe had smelled the same many times over, on countless fields of battle. “Death,” he muttered, a finger of unease coiling through his insides.

Loro cast a baleful look at Aeden. “Has a dead huntsman’s camp so unmanned you?”

Aeden dismounted. “See for yourself.”

Rathe climbed down, tied the reins to a bush, and followed Aeden, their boots sinking ankle-deep in the miry ground. Cursing the damp under his breath, Loro came along as well. Eled stayed put, glancing nervously from shadow to shadow.

The wagon stood empty and missing one wheel. A pillar of rock stacked under the bed kept it upright. The spare wheel leaned against the bole of a nearby tree. Rathe squatted, studying the wagon’s route that led to its final resting place. The driver had wended his way between the trees, following a path that might have been a road long before, but was now choked with low bracken and grass. For the most part, the grass had sprung back, but faint ruts remained. “Hasn’t been here long.”

“A fortnight, no more,” Aeden said.

A bitter gust fell off the misted spires of the Gyntors, pushing before it the cloying reek of corruption. Raising his face into the wind, Rathe spied a ragged tent hunkered a little deeper into the forest. He looked a question at Aeden, and the man’s jaw tightened in answer.

The closer they came to the tent, the stronger the stench of rot grew. Skin prickling with unease, Rathe halted several paces away, tried to get an image of what had happened. Animals had scattered stores of dried goods around the tent, and its sides had been shredded to flapping tatters. By the pile of wood shavings and kindling next to the blackened fire ring, it looked as if the huntsman had been about to start a cookfire. On a nearby stone, flint and rusted steel waited for hands that would never pick them up. From a picket line, four ropes fell to a cluster of carcasses—oxen, by their size.

“Is this all?” Rathe asked.

Aeden pointed to a place of dense undergrowth, the murk made deeper, more substantial, by the coming dusk. Fresh footprints in the slushy skim of snow showed where Aeden and Eled had already walked.

Wanting to get back to the company before full dark fell, Rathe moved to the spot, searching, and halted mid-step. The legs of a pair of corpses clad in woolen trousers poked from under the brush, as if they had died trying to find cover. As scavengers had been at the camp’s stores, so too had they been at the dead, savaging rotten meat and strewing entrails. Beetles and grave worms, sluggish with cold, churned through the soupy corruption.

“Fever must have taken them,” Loro said.

“No fever did this,” Rathe said, nodding toward two rounded lumps covered in strands of dark hair.
Heads
. While a wolf or bear might have torn the skulls from the dead men, neither animal would have placed them upright and side-by-side, as if to grant the gaping eye sockets leave to watch the slow decay of their bodies. Such as that took the calculating mind of a higher order of creature.

“Something watches,” Loro warned, looking back the way they had come. The trio moved together, brandishing swords. The forest gazed back with bland menace. Shadows lay thicker than before.

“By all the gods,” Aeden whimpered, the wavering tip of his sword pointing at a group of pale shapes flitting between tree trunks. A moment later, the creatures vanished into forest.

The three men stood mute, still as iced statues.

“What—”

“We must get back to camp,” Aeden said. “Come!”

Chapter 18

T
hey ran to their horses, all looking in different directions for another glimpse of the elusive creatures. The forest revealed nothing. Eled sat his mount where they had left him.

“Did you see?” Aeden asked.

Eled, who had regained some of his color, paled again. “See what?”

Aeden swallowed. “The Shadenmok and her demon hounds!”

Eled let out an agonized moan and sawed the reins, dragging his horse around. Without a word, he kicked the mount into a hard gallop.

Rathe leaped into the saddle, waited just long enough for Loro and Aeden to do the same, then went after Eled. Rathe fought against whipping branches and his horse’s plunging stride until breeching the forest’s grasp. Having caught up with Eled, the foursome raced back along the road to the first glade.

Captain Treon and the rest of the soldiers looked around at the thunder of hooves. Before Treon uttered a word, Eled began screeching, “Strike camp! We must flee.
Now!
”

“What’s the meaning of this?” Treon demanded.

“Shadenmok!” Aeden cried, provoking a few startled outbursts.

Treon glanced at Rathe, for once his gray gaze showing something different than anger or hate. Fear leaped within them. “What did you see?”

Rathe shrugged. “I know not what I saw,” he admitted, then described the creatures as best he could. “Perhaps it was mist, or a dark fancy conjured after seeing the dead huntsmen.” He did not quite believe that, but then, he did not want to believe the alternative. He had been frightened as a child by tales of fell creatures lurking within the black forests of the Gyntors, things that stole flesh and mortal souls with equal abandon. He did not wish for those stories to become reality.

“Are you sure you did not see bandits?” Treon asked, voice trembling.

Loro shook his head at the same time Aeden blurted, “It could not have been.”

Eled shivered. “I saw nothing.”

Treon regained some of his composure. “Probably a pack of wolves—”

An agonized shriek rose from the south, stilling the captain’s words. Another cry followed, and abruptly cut off. The soldiers scanned the woods, goggling eyes twitching back and forth.

“That was Alfan,” someone muttered. “He went out to hunt.”

“Fool’s been drinking again,” Treon said unconvincingly, “and is toying with us.”

“Or the Shadenmok hunts him,” Aeden blurted.

“We must organize a search,” Rathe said.

“No,” Treon countered. “I will not risk good men for a single, buggering fool with no more sense than a stone.”

“Then I will find him on my own,” Rathe said. He was not keen on locating the man who might have ravished his backside over a barrel, had he misstepped the day he arrived at Hilan, but Alfan was a soldier under his command, and a brother-in-arms until he proved differently. Moreover, now was an opportunity he had waited for in which to begin implementing his plan against Treon. All the better that the cause was just.

Treon sneered. “The Shadenmok is a race of she-devils that fill their wombs with the seed of dead men, then give birth to Hilyoth, their hunting hounds. You would challenge such a creature alone … in the coming dark?”

Behind that derisive expression, Rathe saw the face of pure cowardice. “If I must,” he said, praying to Ahnok that no such hellish creature actually existed … or if it did, he prayed for his god to lend him the strength to defeat it.

“I will join you,” Loro said. “There are torches in the wagons.”

For a moment, no one moved. Then, hesitantly, a handful of the Hilan men stepped forward, then more. None looked to Treon for permission or guidance. Instead, all eyes fell on Rathe.
I am the whipped dog no more.

Not waiting for Treon to argue, Rathe squatted, drew his dagger, and stabbed the tip into the churned snow and mud at his feet. “We are here. Alfan is in this area. And here,” he said, scratching a deep groove, “is the road where we will form up, with no more than ten paces between each man. At my word, the line will beat the forest until we find Alfan … or whatever hunts him.”

He looked up, marking each face. “If we do not find him before our torches fail, the forest may become his tomb.”

Treon scanned the soldiers around him, and Rathe could see his mind trying to work out a response. If Treon refused to allow the search, he would lose more respect than he already had. Moreover, he had to know Rathe would go, whether granted leave to do so or not, and that act of defiance would further bolster his standing.

“Take half the men, lieutenant,” Treon snapped, his face reddening. “The others and myself will remain here—to guard camp, and build fires to ensure you find your way back.”

“I would expect nothing more from you,” Rathe drawled.

Before Treon could register the insult, Rathe called for every man to take up a torch. After the torches were lit, the soldiers hurried down the road. Rathe came last, and Breyon halted him with a touch.

“Your captain has it only part right,” he whispered, one muddy brown eye hidden by a fall of disheveled hair, snowmelt dripping off his crooked nose. “The Shadenmok … she has a taste for the seed of men, aye, but she will slaughter anything with the blood of life in its veins. In the last moon’s turn, six have been taken from Hilan, and only two were men. The rest were womenfolk.”

Rathe looked after the soldiers, the need to hurry hard upon him. “I have not heard this before. Are you sure your people did not wander off, get lost?”

Breyon shook his head slowly. “We searched, but Lord Sanouk and his pet viper will not trouble themselves with the cares of the village. We could have used the soldiers, but most are from Onareth. The villagers are of Hilan and the northern forests. We know these lands, but we found naught. Besides, those who vanished are not folk who would have left without word. Something
took
them.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Rathe asked.

Breyon cocked his head toward Treon. “Because you are the
Scorpion
. Even in Hilan, we have heard of you and your deeds. I hoped you would listen … hoped you would help, where others will not.”

Rathe shook his head. “I am not sure—”

“I
am
sure,” Breyon insisted, and clapped him on the shoulder. When Rathe nodded, he spun away without another word.

Rathe looked after the lanky woodsman a moment, then ran after the soldiers. The plan he had revealed to Loro had been to rise above Treon, show the man for the brutal coward he was and depose him, all without shedding a drop of blood. In that way, Treon would suffer a disgraced life, lose the authority he held most dear. He still meant to do those things. Yet Breyon’s plea for succor changed things, for it placed upon Rathe the responsibility that should have been held by Lord Sanouk. Should he lend himself to Breyon and the folk of Hilan, he would be treading upon dangerous ground. But how could he turn away from them?

Rathe pushed aside matters that did not need addressing at the moment, and caught up with the soldiers. The snowfall had increased, the sifting white beating back the shadow of dusk, even as it obscured visibility. He positioned the searchers, then moved to the midpoint in the line, between Loro and Aeden. Feet shuffled and wide eyes peered through the burry gray veil of falling snow. No one wanted to be the first to step away from the protection of the road.

“Begin!” Rathe called, motioning the men forward with his torch.

After little hesitation, the soldiers stepped off. To the last, each had drawn his sword. Inside of four paces, the forest engulfed the searchers. Twilight marched rapidly toward full dark under the gentle, hissing voice of drifting snow. Trees loomed, muting forest sounds.

“See anything?” Aeden called, sounding a short step from panic. He waved his torch overhead, peering into shadowy undergrowth.

Rathe shook his head.

Aeden pushed forward, slashing the brush with his sword. He gave a startled squawk and disappeared. Snow-topped bushes shook where he had been, and the sounds of struggle intensified. Rathe’s heart lurched into a gallop, his hand tightened on the sword hilt. He had taken his first step toward the fallen soldier when Aeden popped up, covered in snow and wet leaves.

“I fell,” he said, looking morosely at his extinguished torch.

A gurgling howl rose up, not twenty paces ahead.

“Alfan!” Aeden bellowed. “Where are you?”

Rathe stared through the whirling white. Something shifted under a leaning fir.

“You see that?” Loro demanded, even as the pale figure faded into the gloom under the tree.

Aeden made a strangled noise and ran back toward the road. Rathe ordered him to stop, but the soldier never slowed. Drawn to the yelling, the other searchers converged, their advance marked by bobbing torches.

“With me,” Rathe commanded, and crept toward the skulking murk under the leaning fir’s snow-clad needles. A metallic glint dancing with torchlight caught his eye, and he halted the others with a word. The men formed a half-moon circle around him, torches raised.

Between them and the hoary evergreen, a sword rested on a skim of snow, its clean edge running with reflected flame. A fan of crimson splashes steamed around scattered boot prints. Alfan, bleeding and battling, had run to that spot, spun round and round, striving to keep an enemy at bay … an enemy that had not left any tracks of its own.

With the scent of fresh-spilled blood in his nose, Rathe looked to upper boughs. “Alfan?”

No answer came.

“I will climb up,” a gravelly voice said. Rathe turned to see Remon’s lean, whiskered face. “He’s a dullard, but he’s my friend. I would know if he’s dead or maimed.” Eyes tight with fear, he handed off his torch, ducked under the lowest branches, and set to climbing.