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Gurney Bluff was a small village – about half the size of Randor's Pass – but it was at the intersection of two backcountry roads, and that made it wealthy relative to its neighbors. One of those roads ran north to Rycroft where the cobblestone highway began its track to Thoren. The other angled to the south connecting a series of small villages and towns to another major highway that continued to Wildern on Orm, the capitol of the Kingdoms. In a succession of betrayals that had followed his first, Ipid had explained all of this to Arin. He justified the betrayals by telling himself that such information did not matter. Arin would learn it all soon enough or gather it from someone else. Such petty knowledge was a small price to pay for his life.
Though miserable and terrified to the edge of sanity, the betrayal likely saved Ipid. Without the reprieve it bought him – Arin did not hit him once after that – he would have never made it to Gurney Bluff. He’d have given up, fallen from his horse, and been trampled into the dust. As it was, that may have been a mercy.
When the crested that last hill and saw the twilit village in the valley below, Ipid’s heart jumped with guilty joy. He knew what their arrival meant for the people of Gurney Bluff, but he also knew that the long day was at an end, that he could get off of the accursed horse, sit on solid ground, eventually sleep. As part of their, now friendlier, lessons, Arin had given him a few tips on riding, but it was not close to enough. He was not certain he would ever walk correctly again, his mind was a shattered husk, and he could barely keep his eyes open.
Thus it was that Ipid realized only slowly that something was wrong in the village below. He expected that the men who had been sent ahead would have secured the village, that the villagers would be huddled together, that they would be whimpering and scared, controlled but not comatose. He did not expect a panic but neither did he expect dreadful tranquility. Where were the riders? The villagers? By the Order, the dogs and cats? There was nothing. Silence. Stillness.
Even so, it was only when they passed the first buildings that the truth penetrated Ipid’s daze. The first of the bodies lay in the shadow the village’s first house. A man cut nearly in two. Others followed. Men, women, children. Trampled, mutilated, butchered nearly beyond recognition. A coward, Ipid turned his eyes, tried not to see the bodies, the blood-soaked streets, but there was no escape, nowhere for his gaze to hide. No mercy had been spared. Children barely old enough to walk had been trampled. An elderly man and woman lay together, mangled limbs still holding one another for protection. Another man with a rusty ax had a dozen arrows sticking from him like a pincushion. A girl of no more than eight had been decapitated, blond curls dyed brown by her drying blood. On and on the destruction went until they turned a corner and looked upon the village green.
Ipid did not make it off of his horse before his stomach sent what little contents it held spewing to the side of his mount. When his stomach was empty, he sat in his saddle heaving and crying. He closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, held his arms over them, but that was not enough to dispel the piled bodies of the villagers who had been herded together and slaughtered from his vision.
Ipid cursed himself as the cause. If not for him, the invaders would not have needed to proceed with such haste, would not have committed this atrocity. Yet, even as he cursed himself, he knew that the Darthur would have done this without him. If he had not told Arin about Holstead, one of the village boys would have. And how many of them would have been killed before they did? Even then, the Darthur would not have needed more than twenty men to guard the villagers. These people had been no more than an inconvenience, but Arin did not consider the lives of three hundred men, women, and children to be worth an inconvenience.
That realization shook Ipid to the core. He had known that the Darthur were brutal, that the villagers meant nothing to them, but such disregard for life was inconceivable. It smacked of a want for destruction, of disdain for the Order, of chaos, unbridled and riding free.
Ipid looked up to where Arin’s horse stood at his side, looked for signs of the glee that he must feel at such devastation. It was not there. For a flash, Ipid thought he saw regret in the young man’s eyes, but it was gone just as fast, replaced with steel, hard, unforgiving. There was no sign of pleasure, no joy in him or among his men. Ipid’s eyes bounced from soldier to soldier, but each face showed the same grim indifference that was, if anything, more frightening than smiles would have been.
In the end, Arin did not say or do anything. He leapt from his horse and strode to the door of the inn that bordered the green. Before he disappeared inside, he yelled over his shoulder in Darthur, “Clean that up!”
Chapter 20