There was a bit of remorse on my part for having killed four men but I was starting to see my former mentor's point of view. Which gave me pause. The man seemed extremely jaded at life in the short time I knew him and I didn’t want to end up like that.
Even though I felt bad about what occurred, I still did the gruesome work of slicing off the ears and tucking them into a dirty leather sack I pulled off of the dead leader’s body. The fight had been quick and brutal but left a lot of blood in the canyon entrance. Unlike my former mentor, I dragged the bodies to the sides of the canyon. I didn’t have time or the inclination to bury them but at least this way they weren’t obstructing the road.
“Surely someone would come by and dispose of them,” I muttered.
Next came the part I wasn’t looking forward to. I searched the dead for anything of use. Other than a dozen plates, there wasn’t much. They had rough leather vests that seemed handmade and were too large for me anyway. Plus they smelled of old sweat and other things better not mentioned. The weapons would have been a nice backup if they hadn’t all broken during the fighting. I did manage to salvage the one buckler shield, replacing the old one that I lost in the fallen city of the ancestors. So that was a plus.
After pocketing the plates and strapping the shield on, I went to fetch my nervous horse who had continued to snort and huff near the blockade. The smell of blood was making her nervous but there wasn’t anything I could do about it for the moment.
Tying her to a nearby scraggly tree, I started pulling the obstruction from the road. It only took me about ten minutes to clear it but it was ten minutes where my nerves were screaming for me to leave, that something was coming. I quickly got back on my horse and urged her to a slow gallop out of the valley. I still couldn’t see anything on the road behind me but I kept up the pace for a good while before I led the horse off the road and into some nearby foothills.
It took another hour of riding before I felt that incessant voice in the back of my head, that was telling me of danger, finally go away. I still didn’t know if I was just being crazy and paranoid but I had been attacked so often that it was safer to just listen to my instincts. At worst I would add time to my journey.
***
What had supposed to be a simple one-day trip turned into a three-day trek through some winding canyons and low foothills in harsh terrain. The trip was made awful by the thorny plants that seemed to catch any loose clothing and left painful needles in your skin if you so much as brushed against them. Even my poor horse was whinnying constantly at all the scraping and rubbing to the point I had to walk her as she refused to carry me any further along the path.
I wanted to call it a path but if it was even a game trail it was an old one. But if the map was accurate I should be coming out soon onto a road. When I looked around, all I saw were more stunted trees and prickly scrub brush. The change of tone as my feet hit a new surface alerted me to a change. Bending over, I brushed the dust from the surface of some faded grey rock. It was an ancestral road. I had seen a few, and some were even still used between cities. Although, this one was in bad shape. Bushes and thorny plants poked up from cracks in the surface and the whole thing was covered in the fine dust and sand that blew about in the wind. But if I looked just right, I could see the road clearly as it cut across the terrain. It was subtle, a line where less stuff grew, and what did was shorter and less numerous.
Taking out the map, I looked at it once more. The road went on for some distance before forking and I needed to turn north on that fork to reach my destination. Rolling it back up and stuffing it in my pack, I got back to walking.
A few hours later, the destination came into view. I knew it was the destination because there was a large camp set in a shallow valley. With nothing else in sight, it could be the only place that the map indicated.
I was torn between heading straight to the camp and finding out what the hell was going on and scouting the area first and trying to figure it out from a distance before heading in.
Pragmatism and safety won out and I left my horse near a small stream a few miles back so she could rest in the meager shade and nibble on the tough grasses that grew along the bank while I scouted this camp. Picking my way along a ridge, I eventually found an area that let me view the camp from a distance.
At first glance, I may have mistaken it for a bandit camp as all I saw were armed men with spears, patrolling the outskirts of the camp. There were a few close calls as I had to duck down when one looked my way but I had remained unnoticed in my brush-filled lookout.
It soon became clear that this wasn’t a simple bandit camp. What changed my mind were the women and kids near the center of the camp. The women appeared to be cooking or cleaning around a set of water barrels while the kids ran about and played. Yelling and screaming as kids are want to do.
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I was about to leave when I spotted a wagon. I hadn’t given the wagons much thought as they are, well, wagons. But there were words in bright green painted on the side. From this distance, I didn’t know what the words were but I knew what they said from seeing them hundreds of times in my friend Gan’s yard back home. It was his father’s wagon, of that I had no doubt. His father had picked that specific hideous shade of green as it stood out.
With my spirits buoyed, I turned and made my way back down the overlook so I could go greet my missing friend and find out why the entire town packed up and left.
There was still a smile on my face when I stepped around a short stack of boulders that broke my line of sight to the trail ahead and nearly ran into a group of eight angry armed men. I even recognized the men and was just about to wave when one of them, Cordus, nearly ran me through with his spear.
Only my instincts saved me as I jumped back and pulled my sword. “What in the Mother’s name are you doing Cordus! It’s me, Bakus.”
“Oh, I recognized you, you fucking traitor!” the man spit, venomously.
The men had started to encircle me as soon as they spotted me and I found my escape already cut off by two other faces I recognized. Gan’s Father, and the ruthless Domini.
“What! I’m not a traitor,” I argued, trying to keep my eyes on all eight men as they formed a semi-circle, with the boulder pile blocking my escape from the rear.
Cordus was about to reply again when Gan’s father shut him up. “Keep your mouth shut, Cordus, or do I have to tell your father, you can’t be trusted with a weapon.”
The young man snapped his mouth closed and I swear I heard his teeth grind in frustration as I turned to Gan’s father. “Let’s talk this out, there seems to be some sort of misunderstanding here,” I plead.
“Oh, have you not become a chosen then?” the man asked, his spear never wavering as he did so.
“What, who told you I was going to do that?”
“My boy was kind enough to enlighten me to your treachery after his coming of age party. Of course, your father knew, that snake. Up and left before we found out. Did he also give you this location? I knew that bastard couldn’t be trusted. Here to study us, my ass. More like use us, then sick our greatest nemesis on us to eliminate any evidence that he had been there. But we never did fully trust him and left before you could return. But it seems he wasn’t satisfied with driving us from our homes,” Gan’s father replied with more than a little anger.
“Wha-,” I tried to say but the man cut me off. My head was spinning and I didn’t have any idea what was going on or why my father would want to study the townsfolk or why they would be afraid of me.
“But even after all of that, my son still wanted to try and convince you to stay. Of course, he failed in that, didn’t he. Always was a spineless boy. Then he vanishes with only a note left saying he was going to wait for you in the town and try and convince you to leave us alone. Going by the fact that you are here but my son isn’t, I assumed you murdered my boy?”
“What! No, there was no one in the town, except a band…” my words trailed off as my mind came to an awful, sickening realization. The bandit that had reminded me so much of Gan…was Gan. My sword arm dropped weakly to my side as it felt like the entirety of my world came crashing down around me with that epiphany.
“I can see that my words struck truth. No matter, we are well familiar with Chosen and how to be rid of them.” Gan’s father snapped his fingers and the seven other men began to rush me. It was too late, I was already dead inside, all they were doing was making it a reality on the outside.
There was a set of started screams that pulled me from my dark thoughts and when I looked up, all eight men were sinking into the hard dirt like it was water.
“Well, well, well… what do we have here?” Three riders approached at a sedate pace and I recognized them as the three from the restaurant. Then I looked at the men stuck up to their waists in the now hard ground and I realized who these three were.
“You were the three Chosen scouring my hometown.”
“Your hometown? Hmm, well that explains a few things, and yes,” the large dark-skinned man said as he dismounted from his horse, followed shortly after by the other two. “When we found you snooping nearby, we couldn’t help but be interested. We followed you and low and behold, what do we find but another Chosen. I lost a few plates on that bet,” he chuckled heartily as if this was just a normal everyday situation with eight men trapped halfway in the dirt.
“What, how?” I muttered.
“We can discuss that later. What’s this all about?” he gestured to the trapped men, who were furiously trying to free themselves. All but Gan’s father, who only stared on with hate-filled eyes.
“Um, they are the residents of that town. My hometown,” I replied.
“Oh really… funny way of showing hospitality. Any reason they want to kill you?”
“No, I mean, I don’t know…well, it seems I killed his son,” I pointed to Gan’s father, but quickly added, “but he attacked me in the dark and I mistook him for a bandit. The one you were inspecting outside the town,” I quickly added. After that, everything that happened since I arrived, just poured out of me in a vomit of words.
The man chuckled when I got to the part where Gan’s father said he knew how to deal with Chosen. The other two seemed less jovial about that statement, glaring at the men.
“I can assure you, this man has never met a Chosen in his life. And by what you say, I can guess his hostility stems from the fact that he and every adult in that town were occultists.”
It was one devastating revelation after another. My head was left spinning with everything I had learned in the last few minutes. So when the Chosen asked me to accompany them, I could only woodenly nod. They left the eight stone-faced men to struggle with their imprisonment as they led me to my horse. I couldn’t help but look back at the rage-filled face of Gan’s father with tears in my eyes. My entire world had collapsed in the span of moments and I was having a hard time processing everything.
All I could do was nod and point weakly as the three Chosen led me to my horse and probably to my eventual execution. I was having a hard time caring at the moment.