5 - The Gleeman's Hymn
Meddlelfore was a poor man’s paradise.
It was not devoid of its strife, nor suffering, and certainly not without a thing as common as death. Yet it is not comfort that renders a place paradise, just as pain does not leave it otherwise. As the wizened Woodrelk--hag-kings of the Meddlelforian heights--would tell, it is only through perfection that paradise may be glimpsed. Freedom from puppet strings, severance to moral ties; a realm where one may roam wild, kill if hunger calls, struggle if death looms, but fall not to overbearing odds so long as their feet remain firm and their mind holds true. For perfection in the wilds is not safety, while fault lies not in hardship, as under the liberty to live tested--subjected to trials of one’s own volition--one uncovers the means to live free, proven. Free, not privileged. Wild, not chased. So it was, in a sense, as violent and depraved as it could prove and as often it did, a paradise for the poor, for those who were hopeless to afford better.
The realm beyond Meddlelfore’s greenery, however, was far from.
Towards its edges the forest thinned. Moss parted to sport rocks. Trees spindled until they were scrawny and twisted and sinking in height. The land itself--where it was once flat then in knolls, lost to some seamless rhythm--distorted. Depths pitted themselves askew, enclosing the forest’s vibrance with an ever near crouch of black. Hills cut short and died, grew to crude cliffs webbed in thorned roots that darker critters climbed. Shadows twisted, stole the straightness of sunlight.
With each step further south, the land hurt, pleaded. With each gaze high, the heavens clouded, cried away their glow. Together, the earth and sky in ritual plagued themselves to welcome a worser element. Together, the earth and sky grayed, to welcome Arakvan.
Homeland it was, to the deathly ailment named Patch, capital for the Clergy’s westernmost theocracy, and enduring victim of that unholy rampage they called in trepidation and prayer the Scourge; from which the land parted wide, tremors rattled Arakvan’s north, and out from the chasms spawned crawled a horrid array of night-made terrors. It was in the months that followed that Galehaven, its Dathaelich court and each of its starved stepstones found the need for the grim work of furrfiends, and the months thereafter that they learned no number of beasthunters would ever suffice in restoring what was.
A day’s walk would pierce the thin, wounded treeline that now held that home to horrors at bay. With each step, Eidrik and Horral held their breath. Even those who called the realm home could do naught but let their gall subside, simmer to eerie dread when the dead winds of Arakvan at last whispered through the wood. The growing cold was a promise that their motherland had not forgotten them. Their growing chills were an assurance that it would sip of their pains again.
And yet, their crawl proved proficient. The tightness of the trees was as obstructive to their march as would be mist. They vaulted fallen oaks, cut across clawing vines and pivoted around the steps and sounds of searching predators with an utter ease. They did not slow before warmth’s leave, or the cries of ravens, or the shake of branches when the air was yet still. Unwavering they were, until Eidrik’s eyes found deep earth and his breaths cut short at last.
Yawning, the earth gullied before his boots. In a rock throat lived a lightless stretch, rank with mold that splashed the gully’s edges like water around a well: a pitfall to the underearth and Arakvan’s starved shadow. Eidrik slowed in sight of it, frowned, then turned a tired eye to Horral, who bounded still with an eagerness fear could not shake.
“We’re drawing close,” Eidrik knew. “Within the hour, I fear.”
“Don’t fret,” said Horral. “We’d not earn a lone copper for the borsork if the wilds stretched forever. It’s high time we came home. High time we had a night to settle, at last.”
“Home doesn’t want us,” Eidrik groaned, semi-serious. “I’d wager she’s had her fill of killers.”
“Heh,” Horral chuckled, hobbling up a mossed climb with cane in-hand. “She’ll settle, too.”
Now Eidrik paused, not to observe and steady himself as he had before, but rather to ponder, and as capable and clever as he was, a moment of silent thought that questioned beyond which path to tread or which limb to sever was a rarer sight.
“Settling,” he voiced, unnerved. “Seems all do settle, one way or another, don’t they? It is such a hard thing…?” His words came quieter, snuck away, until he lost himself to the silence.
With hot caution upon his brow, Horral turned to him and, with the tap of his cane upon a trunk, brought Eidrik’s eyes forward. “Don’t lose focus, friend,” he urged kindly. “You’ve too many good deeds on your back for your conscience to dare weigh light.” Ahead he pressed, just slowly enough for Eidrik to not fall behind. “And for sorry bastards like us, there’s only more good deeds to do.”
But Eidrik was unmoved, smothered in the growing winds. His feet did meander forward, sputtering step after step, but his eyes only dragged behind him. The woods stripped him of his composure, and while it was a loss suffered for but the briefest of moments, the shame of that truth--that weight of vulnerability--slowed him a while more. It was the tap of Horral’s cane on rock that soothed him, swept him on, bleating beyond each call and scutter of the wilds. It was only that barren, striking melody that succeeded in making his troubles seem unnecessary.
So he followed the tapping man, as he often did and he always would, into dangers and darkness and whatever could be called worse; subdued by a thing as soft as a cane on rock. It was nothing other than a weakness of age Horral trusted unto him, a fickle reliance upon a false leg, revealed, but it was every word Eidrik needed to hear.
The forest expanded its units wide after a time of travel. Soon, the space between trees was a stretch, and where they faltered fields fattened. The foliage, like a shattered shield, could not keep light at bay, though the further they went the thicker the clouds grew, until the gold of Meddlelfore was a memory, and the gray of Arakvan’s loom a dim promise. They came very near the outskirts of the wood, very near where the old oaks parted forever, when they fell still.
A scent struck them like a battering wall they could not see. Under the air’s sullied taste their tongues twisted, and--gradually, reluctant--the ammolite axehead left Eidrik’s back to find a firmness in his fists.
Ash was in the air.
Over a rise, under a crossed trunk, through a sheet of creepers and down the cliff behind them rested the source of the scent. It was from atop the cliff that they beheld the smoke plume rising above those feeble trees. It was faint in its float, but its float was stretched broadly, evident to a great but aged flame. It was not until they breached the last of the oaks that the furrfiends glimpsed the smoke’s base. They felt their knees buckle, as their snouts fell inflamed.
“All-Father’s eyes…” Horral gasped.
There, at Arakvan’s frame, perched a decrepit span of ruin. Two dozen homes, shops, inns and a larder were crumpled black, drifting apart under each breeze. The smell of rot was thick, strangling. The trees opened wide and through them came wind with death on its back that barreled past the beasthunters. A tavern’s sign post dangled from one chain like a windchime. A mother and her husband’s square home was nothing other than a porch, charred, with rubble burying any memory of more. The roads were dark, littered in spent flesh and bone lost. The nearby woods were fallen or sickly from the fire’s choke. Earth here was dead, and atop it the dead stacked like some monument to the most heinous of gods, the most depraved and unforgiving of the All-Father’s twelve. Towards the town’s center, where four roads met, was an awful heap of dragged and plopped corpses. Some were warriors that died in battle, still bearing their brutalized garb. Some were fathers who fell in defence of their homes, wielding rakes and bricks in their smoking hands: spirits, who did not yet believe their duty done and their deaths of service. Most, however, were naught but ordinary folk, who lived one day and died the next without a whim to change fate or an armament to accost destiny’s headsmen. Their eye sockets were hollow, their mouths wide in frozen screams. They were mangled and cooked then left to decay to feed the beasts, in one wretched mound of inordinate massacre.
This was Arrenfaeld, and now naught remained but the shadow of good malice and rot’s giggling fumes, left to linger like ghosts upon the bruised straight. Lurking just past the treeline however, was a sea of open earth; disjointed but entire. It was a blur from behind death’s fog, but it took no wisdom to know it was the maw of Arakvan, opened wide at last.
Hesitant to not desecrate makeshift graves with wide boots, the furrfiends stepped forth. It was a cold truth that any clumsy stomp might shatter a corpse’s eternity. To face forever charred was a hardship beyond death, but there was a closure for those who passed on--or so Horral hoped--that they might find the afterlife with at least their limbs and neck intact. And so their approach was slow, careful. They watched each house’s corner as if its alleys were the lairs of reavers. Eidrik swore, if any rogues deemed this sprawling tomb a worthy fit for a ransack, they would swallow ammolite with their last breath.
Yet, despite the desires of violence or vengeance’s good intent, the air stayed still as the scent grew stronger. Soon, Eidrik and Horral walked with collars raised to cover their lips. The bodies, in approach, cemented themselves as unsightly. Ribs peeled back to spout burnt guts. All were sapped of any and all strength they held in life, with the pain of its departure locked in each empty gaze. There was a boon in their sacrilege however, as in victimhood they were same, and thus in their decomposition they were all equal; all together. The cost was individuality, any distinctiveness in a body’s entropy, but Horral thought always that it was better to die boneless with kin than alone in full strength.
Such thoughts faltered however, when he looked deeper into their silent screams. Their throats-- endless black, tightly entrapping. His stomach turned while the shade of their torment lured him near, but a hand on his elbow returned his will. Horral turned away, following Eidrik’s beckon, but guilt grabbed at his ankles with each step.
“Bandits?” Eidrik wondered, keen on seeming undisturbed. “Could bandits stoop to such depths? Could they even mount the strength to… slaughter an entire township…?” He gulped, then buried that dread in his belly. “Arrenfaeld was mighty once, despite ‘er scale. I fail to believe lone cutthroats could tear it so asunder.” His growl subsided as his eyes soared with recall. “Children toyed along the rise there. The old nan, Beatrice, was it…? She could cook a carrot pie that made your belly melt…”
“I remember,” affirmed a joyless Horral. “But it weren’t bandits that killed her, set her shop to ash.” He strolled further, then gestured to a pile of debris to his left, between what was once an inn and a longhouse. Amidst the particularly dark wreckage was an iron bar, still fastened to its ruined mantle on the inside of a door, that laid without a top or bottom. “Bandits don’t burn larders, less they’ve already stolen what’s inside. The lock is not undone.” He raised his eyes skeptically, scoping the horizon for any enemies yet to flee. “These bastards didn’t come here to steal. To let iron sing on bone, they came.”
Eidrik’s eyes narrowed, flush with a dour fury. Unknowingly, his axehead pulsed in his grip. “You don’t think it’s them, do you?” He stepped closer, facing Horral with all his upset. “The red riders… Veidt’s wardogs…” He shook his head, loosening wrath’s clench. “No, why would they? A feud, perhaps, with another township. Raiders from way of Eritle? Some Argolan vilespawn?”
It was considered, but soon Horral shook his head. “Arrenfaeld had no enemies. They kept to their borders, plied their trades.” He sighed out a wide breath, rank with coarse uncertainty. “Doesn’t make sense. No slaves were taken, no wealth stolen… not even the armaments were plucked from their wielders.” He ran a hand through his grayed hair, inspecting the horde up ahead. “Even if it were madmen keen on murder for the sake only of watching a body come apart, I can imagine no madman who goes without a trophy claimed, or does not add to his arsenal with picked steel.”
“Butchered, then,” said Eidrik. “By folk who could fight, too. Soldiers, perhaps. Or beasthunters gone mad.” Again he snarled, failing to keep vengeance at bay. “Not enough dead to mark this a battle. No theft to call it crime. Either we stir in the wake of a worse hunter, or Arrenfaeld was burnt just so folk might see the smoke.” Eidrik spat. “Perhaps they clung so close to Meddlelfore that Arakvan found offence.”
As he thought, Horral walked on. “Perhaps is a path to a thousand things. None of which will grant us a softer sleep, or save these poor sods from what comes after.” There was great tragedy by their feet, but in his age he knew sorrow and supposition would grant them nothing. “We can only pay our respects and carry on,” he said, and then so it was.
A sound mounted the wind before they breached the horde’s threshold. First it was a murmur under the breeze that slowed them. Then it rose, enforcing itself like some second gale that made their weapons tense but their kind minds ponder. Perhaps a survivor, they hoped, but hope was frail before risk, even to the bravest of souls, and when the dull echo grew louder still--into a chant whispered between the trees, they moved no more.
It felt ladylike, soft and endearing. Perplexion fell over them while they watched the woods, as the sound moved everywhere all at once, as if it truly had boarded the very winds. Though the noise was melancholic, dragged and high, it came like a mother’s lullaby to her babe, full of love and gentleness. The hymn entranced them, tempted their slumber, until they listened deeper, and heard that babe’s little voice crying--no! screaming.
Any comfort found, any optimism unearthed was offset and vanquished in a moment, while that shrill, pained plea rang true. Eidrik dropped his axe to both hands, turned back and pressed his spine against Horral’s own. Horral backed into the shove, bent his cane arm high, then snapped it out to his side. The handle twisted, its black tip cracked and out shot a thin steel rapier. Long, elegant, frighteningly sharp, the blade doubled his reach. With its emergence, all the vulnerability of age fell from him like snow off a stamped boot.
Their play was rapid, but it outpaced that of the hymning trespasser by a short inch.
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The corpse stack erupted. Charred remains blasted apart and those slain rolled to the mound’s base, while out from the hill flapped scaled wings; an abyss spread vast, like an unholy phoenix reborn from the ash. The thing was a gaunt cretin, human in form but with misfitting skin. Its limbs doubled a man’s in length, with grotesque flaps of excess flesh drooping from its forearms and shins. Elsewhere its frame tightened--sickly so, wrapping its malformed bones tight enough for jagged shoulders, ribs, knees and the bridge of its skull to jut out. A thin trail of scales paced the Gleeman’s pale flesh, as a tint of rotten gray over its white gold body. The further back they stretched, the darker they came, and their stretch circled even the spine that held them, coming black behind its touch. Its face was a man’s, but malignant in its warp, with a stagger seeking deprivation undone in every shift. Radiant tusks, so pearly they held whatever light the sky shed, butted out from its jaws. Below them was a long, crooked neck, with its own set of curved bones keeping it straight, frightfully strong. It was from that horrid throat that the hymn formed, then out its peeling, unmoving lips that it sounded through the air.
For a moment its grizzly reveal paralyzed them, before the Gleeman kicked into a glide and their senses restored sharp. Its soar slashed them, setting their defence askew while cane and axe curved in against the flight of its claws. Sparks flashed, then it was airborne again and aloft just beyond their reach. In turning it opened its mouth wide, hissed horribly, as if it were vomiting glass, then found a path through them again. Hurriedly they leapt. Horral frogged right, catching its swooping claw unaware, then before it could lift away he dug down into its hind legs. Eidrik was slower, though his axe clanged fiercely against the iron nails of the beast, while his neck was saved their slit.
Again it rose, again it hissed, then it fell like a star from heaven, hymning over the clap of its own wings, torn between feral intents. Horral strafed right and, in his fleeting steps, beckoned Eidrik by a shout. The creature, bloodlusted as it was, took to part between them and sever both in a single strike. It was fast, eager, insatiable, but impatience proved the quicker wound.
The Gleeman came low, just under the treeline, then rapid, gnashing out its hungry call. Eidrik moved left, forcing its flight wide and in the act shaving its precision. The beasthunter planted his feet firm, turned with a swing, and caught a shine of fear in the gaze of that descending monstrosity. It curved from him at the final moment, redirected in full to Horral, assuming so boldly that Eidrik’s plant meant a forfeit of range. Just as the Gleeman curved, Eidrik chopped down, and at the zenith of his strike released the pommel. The ammolite blade swirled with fearsome heft, chopping through the very wind in its launch. Like a wagon it crashed into the Gleeman, wedging into its shoulder and sending it into a loose spiral. Horral turned from his retreat, sped further still, then ducked low, and overhead he unleashed a wicked cut that caught the flailing beast in its wing.
The scales spread wide, blood soaked their butcher. The Gleeman rolled into the base of a tree, cracking the wood of the trunk with all its speed. It wailed as the hymn’s soft beat turned to shrieks. A faucet of red sprayed across its back, and on weak legs it stumbled, in a vain effort to find its feet. Over its shoulder strode Horral, his old eyes covered in blood.
The Gleeman attacked wildly, spinning its arms with a desperate need to taste and rip if only to distract from its own pain. Horral stepped back swiftly, and with one step alone was beyond its scuffle. He strafed to its side and pulled the thing’s eyes with him. Just as the Gleeman’s back turned however, the axe still in its shoulder tensed and the beast stopped in its tracks. Eidrik gripped his pommel firmly then ripped it downward, tearing the weak arm straight off the Gleeman’s body and cutting through its spine. It spun with an agony to bite out Eidrik’s throat, but Horral’s caneblade crossed into its chest. The Gleeman’s stare fell to the steel staking it for but a moment, before it fell limp over it and collapsed into a puddle of itself.
Horral withdrew the blade, dried it on the creature’s ruined skin, then gave a nod to his companion. Eidrik breathed deep, then shrugged.
“You alright?” he asked Horral.
“Yeah,” Horral replied. “Yeah… good.”
Without a moment’s thought, Eidrik kicked the slain monster onto its back, then dropped his axe through the torn chest. As if the blade was a shovel, he dug through its bones and caked his shins scarlet. With each swing came a sore breath, until the heart was unearthed and in his fist. Horral left him to his work, paced back through the homes and towards the pile. The bodies, upon closer inspection, revealed gouged throats, marked by sharp teeth.
“Our killer, maybe?” he thought aloud, to himself. “But a Gleeman doesn’t use fire.”
Eidrik focused only on the heart and did not answer. It dripped itself through his fingers, squirmed in his touch. The veins were black, but the flesh pale. In guessing the bounty for such a thing, he stared into it long enough for its stink to infest him, until at last he was irked by it. He deigned to drop it, though first the veins grew under his sight. He squinted, scowled, then looked closer. The heart, in his hand, beat.
Below it, the head twisted and reached its maw towards his ankle. Eidrik gasped, leapt back, dropped the heart, and let a cleaving strike tear the Gleeman’s skull in two. Annoyed, he groaned out a weariness, then chopped at the heart as well. When the work was done and the puddle of flesh in strips, he rested the axehead in its corpse and let a deep breath exude. A tiresome affair it was, as a Gleeman’s murder fetched meagre sums.
They had only just reached the lip of Arakvan, but already did it sport trials against them. The road would grow jagged now, as he knew all too well, and his bones would come all the more weary while his blade only dulled. The thought drained him, and heavy-headed he reeled his neck back to aim his irritance starbound.
But eyes looked back down at him; black and set to fury. In the branches hung a glaring mate: a Gleeman again, larger with limbs more wicked. It crawled down the tree trunk to smell at his skin.
Eidrik felt his heart drop. Wide-eyed and breathless, he made a hurried move for his axe, yet this time, the Gleeman was quicker. Its throat spat out a whispered laugh, childlike, then with thrice a man’s strength it bore into him, pulling Eidrik up and into its flurry.
Together they crossed the air and bashed through the nearest home at the end of the Gleeman’s glide. An ashed wall fell to splinters beneath their burrow and as one they rolled over its burnt interior. Old corpses crushed under them, but the Gleeman kept his grip firm and gave Eidrik no quarter, as his hat fell away and his dread came unmasked. It pinned him, dug its claws into his arms until he screamed, then dropped its neck low to bite the face from his skull.
Angered, steadfast, Eidrik slammed his forehead into the creature’s chin, staggering it little, but enough to pull an arm free and throw a fist into its throat. It fell back, choked in a pained aim to make sound, and in its fall Eidrik dashed out and for his axe. A claw caught his stomach first, upheaving his charge. Through the next wall he flew, emerging at its other end wounded and baked with the dust of death. Coughing on ash and feeling new blood between his fingers, Eidrik struggled to stand, but stand he did, and at full height he rebuked the Gleeman’s stalk with only a dagger pulled from his waist and his spare hand spent clutching his gut, from which a potent ache reverberated.
Yet the Gleeman did not rush from the home nor fly out into Eidrik’s open air. In some part of its awful, demented mind, it understood the game was nearly won. With a slow prowl, it crept its head around the edge of that breached wall; tusks braving the corner first, then its mangled jaw behind. A gentle hymn filled the air, while its dark eyes sought Eidrik out. On all-fours, the Gleeman engaged him on blood-wet grass.
Eidrik held the dagger out to push the creature back, but it watched the little blade like a bear watches fish. It stepped slowly, then quick, and with one swing the dagger met dirt. Eidrik, however, refused to forfeit. He turned his fists to claws, squatted low, and readied himself to lunge at the beast with hand and tooth alone. Eidrik roared against the monstrosity, and in his wrath was the promise that it would not see the day’s end.
Then lunge it did, yet before the distance was done away a whistle turned the beast’s head: a birdlike call, hailing from the deeper forest. Just then, Horral turned the corner opposite the sound at a sprint with his caneblade already in motion, but at the sight of the Gleeman’s distraction he slowed.
Lured by the sound, it stepped closer towards the woods and away from the hamlet, deserting Eidrik’s challenge and the sweetness of his flesh. The whistle went again. A scrape followed it: steel on bark. Further, the Gleeman crawled, until at last out of the far trees a form emerged.
It was a phantom of black, with a scarred skull. An outstretched arm held a blade unlike any the beasthunters had seen; no different from a monster’s claw. It carved its way along the trees, while the form whistled and its shade engulfed an otherwise unblighted green.
Then it stopped and the blade aimed straight.
Enraged, the Gleeman hissed, sprang and soared. It was swifter than the one before it, with a greater reach and a sharper sting at its end. Ulf Eldric did not move before its charge however, nor revolt against its flight, not until that flight’s very end, when its jaw cracked wide with the want of a first taste and a tongue shot out to lick the sugar from its kill.
The cloak whirled, the shadow danced. A steel screech shook the sky. In a moment, Ulf’s blade was still at his side. Behind him collapsed the Gleeman, without fingers or a head.
In a scamper, Eidrik's axe was retrieved, then dusted of its ill coat. His crumpled cap was again donned, and below its sagged flap beamed a ready venom. At once, the woods aired of stature and all threat. The trees shrank further still, while the air steadied with a numb wind. In sight of Ulf, nature’s peril shrank, as the doom of man affirmed itself.
Four steps brought him a lunge from the pair, where Ulf steadied atop a ridged split. The rock heightened him, and from his minor perch he eased. His blade lowered earthbound while his focus worked, but the grip remained tight and the gaze stayed harsh.
They were unsettled nomads, the Northman thought. Their garb was tight and fixed for woundage, evident to a certain experience only great hardship could instill, but worn, scabbed and elsewhere resized by the pull of claws. They were made adept by the wilds, he wagered, but a knight would turn them amateur. The axe-bearing man wore his ferocity like armour, intent on shedding no advantage an enemy’s boldness could boon. His gambeson was beat, his cap near refuse, and his axehead victimed to two hundred feats. Poor, though skilled enough to earn coin killing beasts. The beard that sealed his frown was strangled and crumbed with the flakes of fallen leaves. Mud marred his forehead and below the brown was bruised flesh. Capable, Ulf thought, but with old wounds untreated and weakness poorly hid. He would prove strong but slow, and in one miss the fight would be won and the ammolite offered to those beneath the earth.
His eyes flicked left, where the older of the pair stood. Now Horral bent as if nursing a limp, but Ulf had seen already the swiftness of his strikes. His stare was soft, welcoming. His lips, too patient to smirk but not so dreary as to assume an enemy’s scowl. There was a power in him, rightly concealed with fake frailty and wisely misled by an elder’s all-encompassing kinship. It was deceit, but an attempt worthy of a certain passing admiration. His cloak was weighted by a thousand journeys north and south and back again, but largely unscathed. Prey only to his own loyalty, the Northman concluded, before flicking his aim to the caneblade: another attempt at trickery. The steel was honed, sharpened deathly so, yet it was narrow and light. A strong strike to its center would render him defenceless.
Ulf’s watch tripped however, as the older fellow pivoted a hand behind his back. Disguised as a stable for a hurt spine, in truth it was as if Horral heard his very thoughts, learned of Ulf’s conclusion, and readied himself with a weapon again.
Another wise maneuver, but to Ulf’s eyes it was nothing more than a confirmation of an amateur’s impulse. Now the play was made and the lie revealed. The Northman looked away, knowing there laid a second blade concealed at the back of his belt.
“To think…” Ulf Eldric began, his watch returned to the woods. “In the East, they honour their saviours.”
“You saved only a steel’s chip, outlander,” Eidrik snapped, defiant before grateful, with murder crossing his mind swifter than trust. “And what does one so black seek so far south.”
Even one as lowly bred as Eidrik understood such nightly leather was commonplace only to the Winter Realms, or the White Gargantan as it was otherwise named. What he was unlearned of was the vehemence those that emerged from the White Gargantan could sport, but in one quick shot of the carob-colouring in Ulf’s sights he found himself as a student, with a student’s shock and wordless awe.
“You would do well to tame your tongue, beastfoe,” Ulf warned. “In these woods, there are worser things than a Gleeman’s song.”
Eidrik’s hesitance was palpable and of course fair, but an Arakvanin upbringing taught him well that to show fear was to surrender victory, and scarcely did victors elect mercy. “And who are you,” he challenged, “who finds himself so known to the common man’s horrors?” Taking his turn to intrude with peering eyes, Eidrik absorbed Ulf in his sockets. “A monstrous blade, a killer’s cunning…” he tilted towards Horral. “I’m unsure yet if we’ve been saved, or traded off to a greater predator.”
“Ahh…” Ulf breathed, nearly settling to a smile. He recognized something in Eidrik; something terribly familiar. “A predator I am, then,” he concurred. “And in this realm you walk--so torn, so weak--I am too your hunter, if it is horror I so deign.”
The axe came under two fists with a lean charging its strength. “No friend of man speaks so softly of evil,” Eidrik answered.
Now there was indeed a wrongness in Ulf. It sank his ease, grayed his eyes of their colour. “And you know evil, beastfoe? Here in your fields and forests, you think you’ve seen it?” The words dripped like poison, but genuine they were. “You’ve seen naught but the underbelly of the awful…” he said, as his head drooped in some quiet, distracted reflection, before resurfacing again with dire truth in its watch. “But alas, I am from its heart.”
“Steel, then,” said Eidrik, aiming the axe to the forefront.
There was a waiting moment between them. Ulf looked over the blade of rich ammolite, already envisioning the way it would strike dirt when the hands holding it died. Then he saw himself, rifling through their pockets before carrying on into the fields beyond, with only less folk to fight for them as were before. He frowned, considered the silence, then sighed out an airy reprieve.
“Not this day,” said the Northman. “Many men I have gutted in these woods, but never for something so little as pride.” He strode further, within an arm’s reach of Eidrik, making the beasthunter tense. Ulf passed him without worry, nodding to the corpse left in his wake. “Your hunt is your own. Pick of this creature’s bones,” he offered, passing Horral, too, who observed him with a marveling calm. “Claim your little trophy.” Ulf’s eyes slid serpentine over his shoulder. “Tread after me, if you so dare,” he warned, “but do not let me find your courage again, or I will cleave it in two.”
Their survival was a risk, Ulf knew, but necessary. They, in all their valiant, wasted life, would prove him right in the end, and the promise they did not know would be absolved by their deaths.
Only, Horral was not so soon decided. The Northman’s mercy was a sage thing, though with an audacity that was to his own body impudent, he wagered the stranger’s strength could be of some salvation--even if fleeting, and even if stark and inscrutable. In watching that dark cloak waver into the beyond, Horral imagined the power, the prestige of complete violence that left with it. That indeed was a wasted thing. He saw the ripples of fabric flex and fall flaccid, and in that black sea there was the shadow of the end. Horral raised his head high, breathed the cold winds he had breathed a million times before, and warmed himself with the thought of that bloody end.
“We are not adversaries, my friends,” he said at last, slowing Ulf’s retreat while the older man--who was of some five decades--closed the gap, and Eidrik snuck up as a distrustful guard. “We’re all of us victims of this horrid wood. Let’s not be made so lowly as to fight over a battle won, eh? As far as I can see, the enemies lie there, dead from your work and ours.”
But Ulf was unhearing.
“You see little, old man,” he scolded, to Eidrik’s quick refute of a step near.
“Mind your words, outlander,” the beasthunter cautioned, with a stomach for indignation that could not stretch for those dear to him. “If he is such, then I am a man blind.”
Threatening as the furrfiend stanced, Ulf was undeterred, but instead, by a dry tinge, amused. The words were refreshing in his ear and their boldness--the utter resolve to shield--quaint. He considered again combat, but again could see only a weakened word and one more winded hillock without its guardians. Ulf turned to see them true, then his voice grew grave with a verity he was keen to teach.
“The enemy is undying,” Ulf assured them. “Everywhere, it lurks. In every shadow, staining each edge of our world.” He stepped closer. “You would be unwise to call me friend. A fool to trust me by your fire.” He turned around a second time, while his voice sank lower. Eidrik heard warning, but to Horral’s ears there was a pain. “A friend,” the Northman said, “is better saved dead.”
Vicious was his tongue. So firm, it could not be fathomed false. Horral rested with his words a moment, considered them dearly, but failed in silencing himself before such heartlessness.
“Cruel words, Northman,” he said. “True, mayhaps, but never would trying folk align with a faith so unkind.”
Ulf resumed his departure, his words trailing into the trees. “And for that, these woods will bury you, while I leave them unseen.”
But seen he was, up until he reached the first sward of Arakvan, where the last of Meddlelfore’s trees stole his visage. The beasthunters stood still, snatched by a bizarre assortment of worry and unrest, thought and fear amidst the ashes of ruined Arrenfaeld and the stench of its slaughtered folk.
Then the winds blew cold again, and they remembered they must march on. On, to Arakvan. On, to there where gales lament.