“Faster, you lazy nag,” grumbled Hansel deVetica, right hand playing over the whip that lay on the seat beside him while his left held the reins.
The horse that drew his wooden cart continued at the same slow, meandering pace through the forest, as if she cared not a fig for her master’s orders. Hansel grabbed up the whip, then, and he would have struck the worthless mare, if not for an arm that grabbed hold of his elbow from behind.
Hansel rounded on the other man, a snarl on the merchant’s lips.
“You dare lay a finger on me, dog?!” Hansel growled.
The hand pulled away in an instant, and the young man shrunk away, raising his palms in the universal gesture for, No threat.
Hansel allowed himself to exhale. His expression must have visibly calmed a bit, because the whippersnapper spoke then.
“My apologies, sir,” the young man said, speaking in his queer foreign accent. “I just hate to see you waste good horseflesh, that’s all. I told you I grew up around the animals. Your wee nag is giving it all she has, and she does nae have many good years left to her. If you whip her, maybe she moves faster for a little while. Or maybe she collapses then and there. Patience, sir. That is all I counsel.”
“Laying hands on your master and talking back,” Hansel said, sneering. “You must be feeling awfully bold this evening. Remind me, how long does your indenture contract have left on it?”
“Sir, I was just trying to—”
The horse interrupted them with a loud whinny, and Hansel was forced to pull his attention back toward the front of the cart. The nag was rearing up on her hind legs, seemingly out of nowhere, as if there was something frightening in front of her.
“Control yourself, you stupid beast!” Hansel roared. His hand clenched the whip tightly now, and his eyes darted from side to side. He was thinking less of whipping the nag now, more wary of the possibility that there were wolves in the trees nearby, or perhaps bandits.
A shadow passed suddenly overhead. Hansel’s eyes were lowered, looking for whatever had spooked his horse, so all he noticed was a large area of darkness that disappeared almost as suddenly as it had appeared.
In the back of his mind, he thought, As if it was a swift-flying bird, but much too large to be a bird in flight…
Then the nag was on all fours again, and Hansel’s eyes crinkled as his expression turned confused.
No bandits? No predators?
He pulled on the reins and uttered a low, quiet, “Whoa…”
The horse slowed and then quickly stopped, and the cart with her.
Hansel turned back to his indentured servant, Adam.
“Check that none of our cargo is loose, boy,” Hansel said. “Something strange got into this horse. I would not be surprised if she got a whiff of one of those strong spices and…”
His voice trailed off as he got a look at Adam’s face. The boy was petrified, and for once, seemingly not of Hansel.
The merchant snapped his head back to the front and quickly scanned the area again to see if any bandits had come out of the woods since he turned away. But he saw nothing new.
Hansel frowned.
“Did you not see it, sir?” Adam asked, his teeth chattering.
“See what, boy?” Hansel asked. “Is this when the horse reared?” He turned back in time to catch Adam nodding.
“There was a great, massive, scaled creature with wings and a long tail,” Adam said. “Rising up out of the horizon like the Great Leviathan from the good book…” Adam began quietly praying in that strange tongue of his, and Hansel found himself resisting the urge to strike the servant once again.
You can sell his contract to another merchant once you get back to one of the larger cities, he thought. The boy’s not truly cut out for this work. He scares too easy, jumping at shadows and such. Now he’s seeing mythical creatures… Even if he does have a good head for numbers, you also need the stomach for this business.
The small village of Rankelberg, where they were headed, would not have any merchants worth nearly what Hansel had accrued through long years of trading combined with three dangerous journeys to the Spice Islands. They were only stopping there because it was Hansel’s home, and he wanted to drop off some of his profits before they continued towards the city of New Eristrea.
I’ll just keep from giving away my intent for now, he thought. Keep the boy doing his best work for me. Once he calms down, at least…
Adam continued uttering his prayers and showed no signs of stopping, however.
Come on, you pussy…
After another minute, Hansel simply shook his head, dusted himself off, and started the nag moving again.
The next part of the journey was quiet, except that after a minute, Hansel began to smell something coming from the air before him.
Smoke.
As he raised his eyes from the area immediately in front of them, he saw thick columns of smoke rising up from someplace ahead, stark and ugly against the glow of the setting sun.
It was an unwelcome sight, especially in a densely wooded forest.
Hopefully it turns out to be somewhere on the other side of the village, Hansel thought. He hoped he would not have to turn back. It was getting late for travel.
He commanded the horse to slow down. It would not do to rush headlong into a forest fire. Not when a fortune in highly flammable spices sat just inches behind him.
They continued the ride, the air growing worse and worse, but no fire coming into view, until finally they rounded a corner. Then Hansel could see it: the village and the fire.
No…
As the horse drew them closer, all Hansel could do was grit his teeth and take in everything as his field of vision encompassed more and more of the village.
Each second made the view more disturbing. Every building his eyes fell upon was already thoroughly engulfed in flames. It had been a modest settlement, only perhaps twenty families in their little wooden cottages. Now there would not be two twigs left unburned in the whole village.
And there was something else.
Where are all the people? Where is the fire brigade?
Not a creature stirred amid the flames and smoke. Hansel would notice other strange details later, when he recounted the story. The fact that the fire seemed to somehow be contained entirely within the borders of the village. The way that even the cone of heat given off by the flames barely reached outside of their radius.
There was something strange about how the settlement burned. Something horrific and unnatural.
But Hansel’s conscious mind ignored all of that for the moment.
My house, he thought. My family. I have to go to them!
His cottage was larger than the rest, and it was therefore set at one of the village borders, a location chosen so that he could cut down as many trees as needed to make all the space he might want.
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The result of that now, though, was that Hansel had no direct line of sight. It was the furthest building away from the forest path.
Hansel snapped the reins, ignoring the cries of protest from the back of the wagon, and the nag burst into motion.
As soon as the beast crossed the threshold of the village, it was as if the wagon and its passengers had stepped into an oven. Thick streams of sweat seemed to flow from every pore, and Hansel found even his eyes much tearier than they had been, despite having only traveled a few feet.
Ignore it, he ordered himself.
But the horse slowed, choking out ragged breaths that suggested the beast was having trouble getting enough air. Smoke was all around now, as if it had been largely contained within a bubble before, but now the bubble had burst.
Hansel was not worried about the nag’s wellbeing in that moment. She could die for all he cared, so long as she accomplished this final mission. He snatched up the whip and cracked it over the horse’s back.
“Go, you wretch!” he demanded.
The horse went.
The wagon shot through the central path of the burning village, the horse running like it was the one on fire instead of the only feature of the landscape that remained intact.
Hansel passed the burning house that belonged to Mayor Richard, the village blacksmith’s smithy—where even the anvil and furnace were slowly melting away—and the local war hero Georg’s cottage, which was almost completely burned to ashes.
But he barely noticed any of those things in the moment.
Hansel’s eyes remained peeled for any signs of living villagers—none were forthcoming—and he looked out for his cottage.
Finally, as he passed through the thickest of the veil of smoke, he saw it. His cottage was as embroiled in flames as any of the other buildings.
This was also where Hansel took note of his first dead body. He had surely passed others, but as he saw this one, his eyes truly registered the image.
A male corpse, it seemed to him, charred to a crisp. Burned beyond recognition. Barely more than a skeleton and ashes.
About the size of a teenager, his mind suggested, unbidden.
His heart seemed to stop.
My son.
Hansel was hardly aware of what he was doing as he stopped the horse, leaped from the wagon, and flung himself onto the body.
“My son…” he moaned softly, cradling the blackened figure in his arms.
As he tightened his grip, bits of the body began to break apart. The head tumbled from the shoulders, and the rib cage that Hansel was trying to embrace snapped and burst. Bits of bone and charred flesh fell from his grasp and struck the ground.
Where they hit, they disintegrated into ash. As the last bits of the corpse fell away and shattered into gray-white dust, Hansel knelt, stunned, amidst the ashes.
All that remained of the body he believed to be his son’s was a soot stain on his shirt.
“A nightmare,” Hansel thought aloud. “It must be a nightmare.”
He drew back and slapped himself hard across the face. The blow drew tears from his already watery eyes, but it did not wake him from his slumber.
“No. Real? It cannot be real…” Hansel giggled madly. “Just a dream, just a dream—”
“Master! Master!”
Hansel’s attention was pulled back from the scene of his despair by his servant’s voice, yelling urgently from behind him.
Stupid boy, he thought. I am losing everything that matters to me in life…
Hansel turned, and his eyes widened. A stray spark from the village seemed to have caught the wagon on fire. There was a blaze burning across the wooden seat where Hansel had been just a minute before.
That fire is spreading much too fast, Hansel noticed dimly. I have never seen the like without accelerant. Maybe the spices?
Then he realized what he was thinking. The spices! His whole fortune was in that cart, now that his home had become an inferno. He could start over, make a new life in a different town, if only he had the spices.
As Hansel reevaluated his situation, he observed that Adam was struggling with the fire. The servant was trying, clearly sincerely, to put out the flames, using a towel from the back of the wagon to beat at them.
But Adam was as ineffectual as his master might have expected. Somehow, instead of the flames diminishing, the servant had managed to set the towel itself on fire.
Hansel took a step forward, ready to join Adam in the effort to save the merchant’s worldly goods, when he saw the flames lick their way from the towel onto Adam’s bare arm.
It was Adam’s scream that stopped Hansel in his tracks. The young man’s voice became unnaturally high and loud, and as Hansel watched, the flames ran up the lad’s arm, to his shoulder and then his neck.
Adam began to tear off his burning clothes and fling them away from his body, but there was no use. The fire had already spread to the skin underneath, and it seemed to like the taste of the boy.
At some point, Hansel was aware that he had stopped moving forward, transfixed by the sight and the sounds of his servant slowly burning to death in front of him.
He shook himself. He was not normally a man to be paralyzed by circumstances. Whether it was pirates, robbers, or wolves, he always reacted appropriately.
His eyes scanned the ground quickly, and he came upon a full wooden bucket of water. The kind that the fire brigade used.
He didn’t stop to think about why it was still there, only grabbed it by the handle, pointed it at the wagon, and threw its contents in Adam’s general direction.
The water flew through the air and hissed as it passed near the wagon—then seemed to disappear.
What?
It took Hansel a moment to process that the water had evaporated on contact with the flames. This inferno was like nothing he had ever seen before.
The wagon was lost now, clearly. He could tell that much. So was Adam. As Hansel watched, the indentured servant let out one final moan, then crumpled to the floor of the burning wagon and lay still.
The nag whinnied, and Hansel recognized that the horse was still not on fire.
He spun, looked at his own house, and decided no one within could still be alive amid such pervasive, all-consuming flames. He forced himself to forget the wife and daughter whose bodies he had not seen or touched, whose deaths he had not confirmed in any way. Then Hansel rushed toward the horse, and he unhitched it from the wagon at a speed he had not been capable of for years.
The merchant threw himself over the horse’s middle and smacked it on the rear, and then they were galloping forward, out of the strange, hellish world that had been Rankelberg.
Hansel and his horse made their way to the nearest town, Weisston.
There, he told his story in hallucinogenic verbiage to the first man he saw.
Hansel finished, “No survivors. Nothing left. All dead. All lost.”
He collapsed and was rushed into the town doctor’s house, where he slept for three days. When Hansel awakened, he repeated the same story, but with less certainty. He kept stopping and asking for assurance whether what he had seen was real or a nightmare.
An assurance that no one could give him.
When a group of men, acting based on Hansel’s strange story, made an expedition to the isolated village, nothing remained of Rankelberg. The party ended up wandering for a time, because they did not recognize the site when they found it.
Eventually, one of the men who had spent time in the area realized that one of the larger clearings they had repeatedly passed in the forest had a large amount of strangely colored soil. They returned to the spot, and upon further examination, they realized the dark soil was actually ash. There were also melted lumps of iron scattered over the ground where metal had been.
Nothing beside remained.
The party looked for clues, but they came up empty, and at any rate, all had work to get back to. If, as it seemed, there were no survivors, there was little point in further investigating what was likely the work of raiders from the neighboring Kingdom of Vangul. They would report what had happened to the local lord, and he would do something about it or report to his overlord, and so on.
The tragedy at Rankelberg, as the incident came to be known, would go down as a mystery much theorized about in ensuing years.
Hansel, the last survivor of Rankelberg, would gather a colorful reputation about him. He spent the last of his gold coins on liquor in the days following the attack, and he seemed to remain in a state of perpetual drunkenness ever after.
He was always either deep in a bottle or looking for work in exchange for more alcohol.
Normally, such a man would be the object of disgust in Weisston, but given the aura of tragedy that hung over Hansel, he became more an object of pity than anything else.
Twenty years passed, and in the sleepy town of Weisston, little changed.
Nothing much happened, until one day, when Hansel was in the local tavern…
He had a little money that afternoon, and he was buying drinks for the other men around him, currying favor after a fashion, so that they might take care of him similarly when he was not so flush. Even after his breakdown, Hansel’s shrewd merchant brain was always seeking opportunities for gain.
Then a certain man stepped through the tavern doors.
He looked to the bar and caught the tavern keeper’s eye.
“Water, if you have it fresh and pure,” the man said. “If not, I will have beer.” Then he flipped a gold coin onto the bar, with remarkable coordination despite being almost ten feet away from where the coin landed.
That got the tavern keeper’s attention. He was a man used to taking copper coins, or silver when he was lucky and the money for the harvest had been good.
“Yes, sir!” the tavern keeper exclaimed eagerly. He set to work cleaning a glass for the new patron.
Hansel had been deep in his own drink and his own drunkenness, but something about the newcomer’s voice tickled his brain.
He turned his head, and his eyes shot open.
“You!” Hansel croaked.
The newcomer turned and looked at Hansel, and the man’s eyes seemed to show a flicker of recognition. That was when the face fully registered with Hansel.
“You’re dead, man! Dead!”
The newcomer appeared unruffled. But the tavern keeper glared at Hansel.
“Hey, Hansel, we tolerate your antics around here most of the time, but this fellow is a stranger in town. Don’t you scare business away from my establishment!” He turned to look at the stranger—who Hansel was quickly becoming increasingly certain was not a stranger at all, but Georg, Rankelberg’s old local hero. “My apologies, stranger. If he’s bothering you—the town drunk, you see, he really doesn’t mean any harm—I will happily turn him out of doors.”
Georg dismissed the tavern keeper’s concern with a sharp shake of the head.
“I can handle myself,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. And I’ll take my drink over there.” He pointed to a table in the most distant corner of the room.
As Georg walked toward his table, Hansel realized suddenly why the veteran was so easily recognizable even twenty years later.
He has not aged a day, Hansel thought. Even as Hansel himself had grown gray and white hairs everywhere, wrinkles in places he did not know a man could have wrinkles, and stiff, leathery, sun-damaged skin, Georg was still the same tall, lightly tanned, dark-haired, bearded figure he had always been. Not a single white hair. How?
As Georg took his seat, Hansel, ignoring the tavern keeper’s dirty looks, rushed after him. Without waiting for an invitation, Hansel slid himself into a seat opposite from Georg.
“You’re Georg,” he said breathlessly.
Then the tavern keeper was at Hansel’s elbow, grabbing him by the wrist.
“That’s enough, Hansel,” he began.
“I told you that it was all right,” Georg said dismissively. “Please release him. And, on second thought, bring two ales.”
Hansel looked up at Georg’s face and saw a hint of pity in his expression, before it disappeared and the neutral expression in the man’s steely eyes returned.
The former merchant waited until the tavern keeper had released him and returned with the two ales before speaking again. As the establishment’s owner walked away, Hansel finally allowed himself to broach the subject that had not left his mind for twenty years, with the one man who might have an answer for him.
“What happened to our town, Georg?” he asked in a low voice. “Tell me. Please.” His tone descended rapidly into pleading as he thought of the family he’d lost. “I have to know.”
Georg sat quietly for a moment, sipping his ale. The silence felt like a refusal—perhaps even a rebuke.
“You owe it to me,” Hansel added defensively. “As a—” As a friend? No, they’d never been friends. Georg had always been a queer sort, haughty and aloof, and Hansel had always kept his distance from anything that smacked of darkness or violence. It was an instinct with him.
“As a neighbor,” Hansel finished.
Georg regarded him in silence for a moment more, dark eyes steady and appraising.
“I owe you nothing,” Georg said finally. He opened his mouth to say more, but those first words were more than Hansel could stand.
The former merchant reached across the table and grabbed Georg by the wrist. To Hansel’s surprise, however, he was unable to so much as stop Georg from raising his mug to his lips. It was as if Hansel had grabbed hold of a moving ship and was trying to stop it with his bare hands.
Georg took another sip of his drink.
“I owe you nothing,” Georg said again after he had swallowed, “but I will tell you what happened anyway. I hope the answers will bring you some peace. I understand you have had a difficult time in the ensuing years. You should go ahead and drink, too. It is a long story…”