Chapter 9 : Wolves

High loomed the Haddlebush, a bark behemoth strangling the skies. Its trunk was tremendous, and from the tendril roots it fed down into the dirt came a craggy plain below, abrupt with land raises and just as sudden with its falls. The rugged steep was laden in giant leaves, the size of a man’s head, coloured in ambers, reds, and violets all the deeper. From the towering branches of the Haddlebush they fell and heavy did they weigh upon the ground. The mountain of oak could swallow a town to its inside and remain unfilled, and indicative of that insatiable hunger its arms ranged to cloak every sward in shadow and bask each soul in fear. At its peak was an arid woods of wide-woven bark, stabbing out and stretching up and conquering heaven at such a height one from below could look up and feel their knees wobble with the thought of a fall. Here was a city to birds; some of gargantuan feather with talons that slew, others scabbed and modest scavengers of low air. Like refuse slung against their homestead, rope wrapped many of the lowest branches, and low they ran to sway hung corpses. The dead alone laid the mortal claim to the Haddlebush, but their skins were rotten and chilled, and birds pecked of their flesh to suck the sweet blood beneath. They were a puppet army, slaves to the wind’s drag and shove. So many bites in their hides let organs ooze to drip over the horrid drop, while blood fell to the gales to be slapped and splattered across the core of that colossus. From the very bottom to the top most shallow, a carved stairway of wood encircled the tree so that the hangmen could rise to their grim duties, but what breed of hangman could summon the courage to dare ascend was another question entirely.

Breaking the fallen leaves into dust in their trot was an unseemly horde of men. Caked in dirt, rough with wounds untreated, and echoing carelessly up the trunk of the Haddlebush with their swordplay was a fat sum of raiders, reavers and worse. Their camp was a rattle of cheap tents and quickly-roused stone walls, no higher than a hip. Sleeping bags slumped under the winding roots and legs dangled over their edge as folk sang and fought and feasted on stolen spoils. Midday cast its grey glare against them, somehow worsening the honour of their play. Its bleak glimmer proved the dark of their grins and that hollow want hot in their eyes.

They were some dozen, no greater than thirty, but the Whilderwheats had been kind. To their great fortune, the beasts proved scarce, as if a greater hunter had been through to chase them out, and in the aftermath of the Skjallstrom they found stone homes undefended and skin free to take as they pleased. Now they reveled by their campfires and wrestled in their smokes. To the inner edge of their camp, where the tree shed black, indeed it was the deeds more vile; more undeserving of the light that crossed its earth.

The ground was soiled with blood beaten out from bound farmhands. A raider squatted over a blonde man, kicking his ribs until he answered some mad riddle the raider himself surely did not know. To his side, a pair of marauders stripped a younger farmhand, then beat him with sticks until his dance made them snicker. Then further back, under a great arching root, a man and woman—wed—toiled in the dirt. One was a dimple-cheeked brunette, beautiful if not for her thin chin and broad temple, and of course the bruises that stained it. Her husband was fair in turn, with a healthy red beard and a bald head that revealed all the glamor of his gaze. His jaw was firm and his smile full, once, but beatings had driven out its handsome grace. Now he breathed heavy, with his face in the dirt and a boot pressing it down, while his wife wept with hands bound behind her back. Then a man, smelling of manure and mud, fell over her, and her cries were silenced under his thrust.

The clamor of joyed carnage owned the air of the camp, as to its outer stretch amassed the bulk of its members, in a crude circle where they formed their arena. Garrott numbered among them, though he was granted a high root to sit upon like some thief-king’s throne. Grinning, he watched the combat with a spectacular angst. The crowd rooted and roared, shifted like a disturbed tide, while the combatants stumbled and bled within. On the dirt already were two bodies dressed in rags, their wrists just recently cut of their bonds. A third commoner battled earnestly, drenched in sweat and with a gut already nicked. Inexperienced, he stumbled over the corpses of his kin with a panic, and that same unnerved need to survive drove him flailing at his opponent, who had been charitable enough to lend the man a short sword. But his own was long, hard steel, and he was clad in a winged, steel half-helm.

“Come, pigfuck!” the raider beckoned, his taunt a grimy rasp that accommodated well his backroad foulness. “Come, show us this strength you use to please that sweet wife of yours!”

The crowd laughed, Garrott grinned further still, and on the man came with all the fear and none of the fury, despite his wife already lying dead in the terrain behind him, near his brother and their hired hand. Too ugly to take, they called her—the love of life to which in all things crucial he was betrothed—before slitting her throat to the bone. Now, here her mate whimpered and crept, shaking around the rust of his hilt. It was clear to all in sight that he had never before used a blade for anything other than cutting his carrots and skinning his hares, chopping only the wildest wheats only to pull at the cabbage beneath them. It was with a gatherer’s instinct that he came forward; cautious, committed more to a quick escape than a killing lunge.

“That’s it, pigfuck,” his foe egged on. “Let me see the might of an Arakvanin man!”

The petty yeoman swung forth. With a twist of the raider’s wrist, that short sword he fastened himself to so dearly was dropped to the earth. The bandit out from the wide and savage Meddlelfore beheld then an easy victory, but did not relish an end so near to his play so ardent, so he stepped slowly, like a bear to its deer backed against rock, with lumber entrapping it and a lame hoof abandoning flight. The raider feigned a lunge, toyed upon the farmhand with death, dangled his own eternity before his very eyes with all the cruelty of man direly uncouth. The commoner shivered, jumped, and again the band shrieked out their cheer.

“What’s the matter?” the raider pressed. “Are we scared, pigfuck? Are we scared of—what? A little blood?” He turned to the crowd with a chirp. “He’d never last through Meddlelfore, to be sure! What would we wager if he dared duel an oak? Might he chop the tree down over himself?” They answered with a cacophony of chuckles and bids, and turning back to his prey that raider saw tears and came vicious. “Don’t cry on my fucking pit, pigfuck!” he yelled.

With a step the gap was gone, and in a twist the common man lost his head. Terror petrified itself over his skull while the tongue slipped and squeezed between fear’s last snap. Already did his killer seek the next skirmish before the head had rolled, eyeing first the captives still in use under the tree, then turning to his own kin. His blade aimed straight and found each man’s chest, save Garrott, and to all he spoke his challenge. Some hooted with jests, others took haste to hesitate; framing their unwillingness as a thing just short of cowardice for all to see, but none embraced that grimy offer of a badlands duel he so coarsely pettled. Loud, the raider grew, until all under the tree had to hear him and see the sprawl of his arms, then question their impugned clout.

“Who will prove mightier than a man bound!” he called, fearless and as resolute as the metal in his hand. “Or is little pigfuck our day’s champion?”

Again, some dissuaded him through careful words, unkeen on losing life to a matter so mild, so frequent and already so visited in their eastbound gallivanting. Others distanced, waved off the challenge, pretending they had some other importance to attend to. Names were fed to the arena, but in question their owners dispersed, and soon that package of lewd, craven vulgarity did indeed surmount the pit’s opponents, and for a few scarce seconds became its champion.

“Is my might our greatest!” he asked in boast, but that victory’s seconds were spent. An air of sharp, hushed restraint breezed through the band. It was a sound lower than their chant, but like a choir’s cadenza all fell silent, as if a conductor’s stick crossed their jugular and wrapped tightly over the throat. All knew—even Garrott, whose grin died—that the voice belonged to Rhaebjorn.

“What might is there…” he spoke, unseen, “in killing what’s bound?”

A wave of dismay flushed the pit’s champion of his bold ardor. The crowd looked at him the way one sees blasphemy spoken before its victim. Bouncing blades fell low, throats stilled. The camp, in a moment, was as quiet as the land before their arrival, and so again the wind ruled. Out from a high perch stepped an ashen cloak, ghostlike. His face was white wood with only eyes and nothing in them. On his back laid a brutal scythe, bladed at both ends. In an effortless descent, the form struck the earth, and its grey folds came apart at the chest. Upon it and below the wispy garb was a deep leather, overlapped by two crossing bands of iron that formed an “X” across the core.

“How strong are you, reaver?” Rhaebjorn asked, in a slow approach that split the swarm. “Before an unburdened blade?”

His hand touched the center of his edged staff; fondled it with a smooth love, then tensed into a fist that aired new life through his cloak. His form warped, changed, and the cloak unwrapped death in the form of Rhaebjorn.

“Let us see,” he ordered, and the raider tensed into terror.

Averse but with his reputation weighed then against his sword hand, he stifled his heart’s tremor and readied his weapon. In a lunge, the raider cut at Rhaebjorn to kill him before his scythe was drawn, but quick did the grey wind change, and the longsword split air. The spectre watched the steel fall, waiting until it nearly struck dirt to turn his eyes at the wielder, amused by such a meagre slight. In that closeness, with the reach between them minute, the pit’s champion saw straight through the slits of the white mask. He beheld something look back at him from within that ashen swirl, and his mouth fell agape like a beast paralyzed. Something sinister watched him from that darkness. Something in that dim, inscrutable space wanted him dead.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The raider leapt back with a wild slash, but Rhaebjorn let his foe’s fear drive him far and stayed unchanged before the swing. Now, at last, his scythe was lifted from its rest. The staff was obsidian and the steel moonshone. At each end of the dark rod a curved blade grew, though either aimed opposite from the other. The weapon was a hurricane in wait in and of itself. Rhaebjorn left it to his right hand and carried it high overhead, then bent his knees and placed a free grip to the ground. His head bowed and aligned with his kill, then he waited.

“Pigfuck,” he said simply, uncharged.

His confidence evaporated, the raider forced his hand forward. With a growl he jumped at Rhaebjorn. Few beheld, in that spur of grim motion, what actually transpired, but all knew with a clarity that the raider’s blade never met Rhaebjorn’s own, and at the scythe’s end a flat pommel struck the champion across the jaw. It could have just as easily been the blade that found bone with nothing more than a twist, but as Garrott could see and that doomed raider soon learned, Rhaebjorn did not seek a victory so unenjoyed.

The next spars were an instant batterance that flipped every grin from the crowd into bleak consternation. The raider’s sword whiffed, and the pommel answered with a bludgeon. Twice, then thrice, then two times again. The last fell against the knee and popped it from its socket. Bloodied and bashed, the pit’s champion sank to a doglike crawl and groveled before the mighty form that laid him low.

“Please…” he whimpered, feeble, desperate, humiliated before his brotherhood and with a pride absolutely impaired. “Please… end it. I’m sorry, I swear… you’re right, I-I’m not mighty… n-never was… just… let me die.”

For a long while, Rhaebjorn watched the pitiful display. He let the pleas soak the air until all the camp’s merry was burnt away, and then longer still he watched those ragged breaths and those scared, begging eyes. Then, compliant, he used the blade at last, and the man’s face tore in two, but the helm remained miraculously untouched.

For the rest of the day, the fighting ceased. The corpses were dragged into a pile that would burn in their wake, and atop them as king laid the champion of the pit, without a mouth to smile at his great victory. Rhaebjorn returned to some unseen root to lurk, while Garrott laughed heartily at the grizzly ordeal and those that idly cleaned it up.

Under the roots, however, the merriment did not cease. In the deep shade, shock and horror could not dispel that iron-bound bane that reaved upon the helpless. Still, bodies shook with fervor’s torment. Still, eyes wept and wounds dripped. The captives were a carnival of urge, endlessly indulged upon and within. Eventually, as day became noon and tents were packed away, the dancing farmhand was beaten to death. The blonde to his side, unknowing of the riddle’s truth, at last felt his ribs break and jut against his lung. When his breaths staggered, his assailant grew unnerved, and so granted a quick cut into his skull that bled out his brains into the path of the wed pair. Still, the wife was enjoyed and the husband was made to watch, though consciousness came and left him like a flickering candle, often leaving her to hurt alone.

A particularly disheveled bandit kneeled behind her and pulled at her hips. His grunts were scratchy and his humps ragged, chapped. Around him bustled his peers, packing up their few belongings and stuffing thefts into satchels. Casually, they stepped around the affair, though one stopped to ruffle the woman’s hair with a snatching pet. After most the warband was cleared out from the roots and aimed to the plains ahead, Garrott finally approached to see what had dragged their departure. When he turned the corner, he laughed.

“Tyran!” he called through a grin. “How bloody long’s it take for you to get it up?”

The jolly devil jittered gleefully. His deed enveloped his every sense, making him shake with a pleasure that did humour Garrott, until his eyes fastened and his gaze fell carefully. Along the hand of his bladesman, half concealed under his sleeve, was a stretch of skin scabbed white. His master frowned deeply, as anger swelled within him, for upon Tyran’s knuckles down past his wrist ran the Patch.

“Never took you for a liar,” said Garrott, standing menacingly tall over Tyran. “And yet even now your skin pales with sickness.” He shook his head, the deed ceased, and the wide eyes of Tyran filled with terror, as his victim came equally mortified; feeling the corruption wedged inside of her. “A shame you die here, Tyran. Would’ve rather’d gutting you for the lads to watch.” He placed his hand over the man’s head. “But we can’t take chances with plagues, boy.”

The force of a boulder rammed Tyran’s skull against the base of the Haddlebush. The first slam sent him spinning and scattered any thoughts that might voice mercy, but by the fourth his bone broke in and red seeped out. By the seventh, his eye drooped from its socket, though there was left no life to purge. Garrott, disinterested, let the corpse fall flat, and hardly noticed as Tyran slid alongside his victim once more. The brunette woman saw the stare adrift in that clobbered head, which now sagged into goop. The lifeless watch alone made her jaw drop, but when she beheld the Patch crawling up his arm Garrott’s words from before made sudden sense and descended against her. He, through his lust, had infected her with a death worse than his blade could grant. Only dread was in her then, and it pulled her from the dirt with a tremble.

Garrott propped his greataxe against her throat, slid its flat edge over her jugular up to her chin, then tilted high, so that their eyes could meet. And meet they did, holding for a time while he savoured her fright. She could smell the gore staining his hand and nearly puked, as well as the rot emanating from between those cracked lips. Garrott caught her gag in his ear, and pleasure was a clot between his black teeth.

“Not to worry, madam,” he said. “This is a fortune for you. With all that disease up your ass, none of his ilk will dare fuck you again.” Then his head swiveled and he found her husband, fainted in the mud. “Especially not him.”

The axe raised and planted into the ground at the other side of the man’s head. His eyes had no chance to open before the light behind them died. With a spasm, he went limp and gushed himself out over the dirt and across the fingers of his lover, who could for a time only look into his splintered skull, before the reality eventually set in.

There was an instant of apprehension, but before despair could scream out from her bloodied lips her heart failed her, and she struck the dirt. Garrott snorted, humoured, then shrugged and carried on.

In short time, the band was wayward, with the Whilderwheats spanning before them and the Haddlebush looming behind, when their final member deigned to follow. Stepped out from behind some nook in the massive trunk, Rhaebjorn floated across that desecrated earth. He looked blankly down at the bodies and the divots and the insides that filled them. None of it was to his interest, but when the body of the tortured woman laid by his boots and under his watch, his ears flexed and his gaze narrowed down against her. He enveloped her in his narrow sights. Rhaebjorn breathed some cold, cryptic air, then carried on, leaving her to the shade of the Haddlebush to stalk the caravan that droned away.

There she remained, as hours painted her in her husband’s blood and worked disease deeper down into her. A sigil of decay, the only thing left was for maggots to make themselves known, and when evening arrived they too did curse her flesh. One wrapped her fingers and bit into her palm, another crept up her thigh and began its burrow. A third inched across her temple, then drove down at her eye.

And the eye came open.

With a gasp she coiled up into panic. The plump, pale maggot died in her fist and flew against the bark. Its kin were swatted and stomped, and she arose wounded. After a second standing, she wished she had let the maggots burrow deep into her mind until it could form thoughts no more, for the pain of sight and the knowledge of its sequence was an anguish far worse. Her hands were a faded scarlet, and in wondering why, she felt at the dark gloss across her cheeks, with each inch she fingered granting an inch more to that frantic width of her gaze. Still, a pain writhed between her legs, and she knew death was not forgone in the least. Her husband’s body laid unmoving by her feet, soaking her toes red and answering her wonder with a wet truth.

Lost to the fog of awe, she dropped her back against the base of the Haddlebush where bashed brains ran dry. Her hands lost feeling against the bark. Her eyes clouded, unwilling to see the rotting mound beneath her. She wobbled towards unconsciousness again, until the unfelt touch of flesh embedded in the wood tossed her into a slip. Her barren legs twisted and she fell back into that murdered mud with a splash. Blood erupted up around her and covered her lap, while under her legs sprawled bits of butchered men.

Clasping hands over her eyes to seal away the sights that were too horrid to be true, Jennette wept. Fiercely first, then gutturally as her voice drained from her, then at a wail as the sun fell away from her horror.

She was but another widow of Arakvan, whom night would soon devour. Like a widow, like any faithful heart that was snipped so suddenly of its strings, she wept with words unformed and pushed tears down between the blood of her fingers. Like a widow, she laid and bent and wrapped herself low as if that could subdue the sickness in her stomach or the pain in her chest. Like a widow, her voice eventually gave out, the stink of rot overpowered her, and she sat there silent, unmoving.

Then, unlike any Arakvanin widow seen before, with the dull, gaining doom of sunset glowing against her, she stood. Jennette stepped over the mess of death and neared the pile where they stacked the other slain. Very unlike a widow indeed, she stole rags, a cloak, the half-helm from its slain champion, then fulfilled the robbing by plucking an old axe up from the weapons thought too poor to carry along, and so discarded.

Unlike any victim Arakvan had ever known, she donned that bloodied helm bearing wings and heaved up the old axe over her shoulder, and with a gaze of stone staring through the slits of her steel, Jennette stepped in the tracks of the caravan and into the swards beyond.

Death would have treated her kinder, but it had others to see first.

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