Sharp as forged nails, The Hatchet leaped from his platform perch before his wheeled vehicle ceased rolling. Dwarfed by the socketed pole of his own banner, he brushed past the flurry of belated salutes and pursued his hammering tirade. ‘I said harness me a fresh team. Straightaway!’
The troop’s flabbergasted horse-boy apparently failed to move fast enough. Caught clutching the string of officer’s remounts kept close at hand for emergencies, he had nowhere to jump as the Sunwheel host’s Supreme Commander of Armies uncorked his vile temper.
‘Feed your eyes to the buzzards, they’re good for naught else!’ The Hatchet snatched the ribbons from his charioteer. Angry, he whipped the freed ends through the terrets and lashed the wet straps in the face of the master of horse, just puffed up at a flustered sprint. ‘Have me back on the road with your best team on a ten count. Then strip your insignia. You’re demoted!’
The Hatchet barreled onwards. Above the excuses gabbled in his wake, his bellow laced into the foot-troop, abrasively pitched to split heads.
‘Prepare to march! Are you simpering girls?’ Through the petrified rush to form lines, his gravel tongue flayed a lummox for sloppy deportment. ‘Refasten that helm, you!’ Elbowed through the nearest standing row, The Hatchet lambasted another misfortunate. ‘What’s this? A shambles? Yes, your trumpeter’s neglected to announce me by fanfare. Milk-suckers! You’re unfit to be nose-led. This is my battle-field, not a parade ground! Yet I don’t see a proper dressed weapon among the sorry lot of you!’
Bow-legged and broad as a bristled mastiff, The Hatchet spiked his way past the front ranks. He wrenched the lit torch from the cringing staff sergeant and whipped the flame in a contentious arc. Herded backwards, the diviner scuttled in an arm-waving flap that nearly toppled him on his rump.
‘Move aside. Where’s my captain? Ah, there, you lame wretch! Get this troop on the move. March them north at the double!’
‘North!’ yelped the diviner, snatched back from a fall, and self-righteous enough to swerve granite. ‘Lordship, you’re possessed. The True Sect will never revoke the Light’s call to advance against Shadow!’
‘Your fussy talent’s unfit?’ The Hatchet’s contempt rang through his slit helm, tilted upwards in withering survey. ‘I’ve more use for a hog’s sack of rotten potatoes than your sanctimonious whining.’
The diviner stiffened in mortal affront.
The Hatchet laughed. ‘Piss yourself. Here’s the real news: the Master of Shadow’s slipped past your puling priests.’ A scale gauntlet jabbed coastward, where more billowed smoke smudged the horizon. ‘The clever bastard set Torwent in flames, then bolted off like a jack-rabbit. If your misbegotten dedicates hop quick, we may pin the devil-spawn down before he reaches the river. To stop that disaster, I’ll chew holy hide! Can’t risk letting the search get bogged down if that quarry holes up in the marsh at the inlet.’
Recoiled, slit-eyed, the diviner engaged his intuitive faculties. His adroit probe raked into The Hatchet’s subtle aura, seeking for traces of coercive spells or the suspect pattern of insanity.
But the frothed-up commander refused to keep still. A lightning pivot chased his frocked antagonist backwards again, then forced a drastic, stumbling retreat from an aggressive stride pitched to pulp flesh. ‘Report to the head-hunters,’ The Hatchet snapped. ‘Double quick! If your gift’s not useless, then steer their first sweep. Show them which direction their dogs should sniff to quarter this forsaken country.’
To the by-standing captain, The Hatchet barked, ‘Are you soused? I said, move! Get these slackers away on the jump!’
The jutted helm swivelled back like a wind-vane, slot sockets trained on the diviner. ‘Your task, from my mouth: this invasion gets turned face about.’ The Hatchet strode off forthwith, still abrasively howling, ‘Drop other priorities. The high priests demand that the border gets sealed! Every resource we have regroups to defend Tysan. Woe betide us if you lot fail today since our quarry’s the Spinner of Darkness himself!’
To the captain, last words flung off in scorched haste, ‘If this dandified ninny gets in your way? Here’s my direct order. Tramp over him!’
The by-passed diviner took umbrage. Robes hiked to his skinny knees, he sprang in fixated pursuit. His path crossed four head of fractious horseflesh as the relief team just harnessed swept down at a jog, hitched to the general’s war-chariot. The diviner swerved and missed their milling hooves. But not their panting groom, who cannoned into him. Both tripped, entangled. Flung from his desperate grip on the lead, the horse-boy went down, his upset too loud for the flattened diviner to exercise his refined talent.
Meantime, the horse-drawn vehicle rolled past to a deafening clatter of wheels. The honed rims were lethal. Nobody died since the general’s daft reinsman sprinted after, at risk of life and limb as he vaulted aboard. Eyes ringed white, braced against the careening sway of the platform, he freed the hitched reins and curbed the runaway vehicle.
‘Nice to see one good man on his toes.’ The Hatchet sprang within as the rig rumbled past. Above the commotion, through the stamp and plunge as the fresh horses fought the clamped hold on their bits, his ferocity climbed a bilious notch higher. ‘That barn’s to be fired, your worship? Yes? Shut your yap. I’ll do that myself! But not before I see your Sunwheel rump chase the dust kicked up by my troops’ brisk withdrawal!’
The diviner shoved off the bothersome groom, whose obsequious apology included limp efforts to blot the splotched muck off his vestments. ‘You’ll pay for this! I will see such blatant insolence leashed. You’ll bow to your true master, brought to your knees before Erdane’s high priest!’
But the indignant threat raised no impact, lost in the back-drop of tumult. While the assembled foot ranks marched past, their jangled agitation effectively foiled the diviner’s empathic Sight. No temple-trained talent could pierce through that morass, even to target a suspected heretic. The diviner tried anyway. Purpled with effort, he stretched his focus to survey his antagonist, distanced as a toy on the fast-moving chariot. Yet his probe embroiled in yet another outbreak of humiliation and turmoil as The Hatchet upbraided the miserable men detailed to round up the villagers’ livestock.
‘Leave them loose?’ a scarlet-faced wrangler howled, shocked. ‘But these animals will only strengthen the enemy. Better they’re moved on the hoof and corralled to feed our own troops!’
‘Not on my watch!’ The Hatchet redirected his reinsman, who responded and veered the fresh team through the unwieldy, mixed herd at a gallop.
Bawling cattle stampeded. Startled plough horses bolted. Goats and sheep bleated and scattered. Their terrorized flight battered through the out-bound files of troops, who pelted lest they become trampled. Above the pound of hooves, through shouts of dismay as crazed animals also routed the lancers’ neat ranks helter-skelter, the Light’s Supreme Commander yelled over the sensible protest of his hag-ridden captain. ‘You suggest my supply lines are as ineptly managed as this?’
Under scrutiny again, the chewed officer blanched.
Reassured at speed that everything elsewhere remained in smart order, The Hatchet snatched up the team’s reins himself. He muscled the splendid foursome onto their hocks and wrung them to a sliding stop. A second spectacular move made them rear. For a hung moment, his whip poised over their quivering backs as they wheeled on their hind legs. Then they settled without mishap.
While the fraught bystanders stared with pent breaths, poised to dodge the next irruptive rampage, The Hatchet bored back into the crest-fallen hostler. ‘I’m told our provisions are not under threat. Let those blighted beasts go! This troop’s on quick march without use for stragglers. I’ll put the next yapping fool to the sword who crosses me with a hindrance.’
Blistered under The Hatchet’s evil regard, the disarrayed pack of steel helms coalesced with the speed of clumped mercury. The Light’s dedicates vacated the riven village in a whirlwind retreat and left the charred ruins and the slaughtered corpses for th
e dismal rain to rinse clean.
Only the balked diviner seethed enough to risk a brazen glance backwards. He distrusted the runt officer whose tin-clad abuse had overstepped the arm of temple authority. The diviner maintained his stubborn watch as the Light’s sanctified observer. He would not cede his post before he verified the execution canon law had decreed for the tainted captives.
Therefore, he watched the arc of the thrown torch, then the spurt of the flame that ignited the hay-barn’s thatched roof. Though the act made The Hatchet’s faith seem above question, righteous doubt would not rest. Never, before his sanctified talent divined that the screams of Shadow’s condemned minions were genuine. He listened, intent, until the galvanic surge of raw human terror beat the air, ripped into the primal patterns of panic.
‘Light’s will be done,’ he murmured, devout. Then he shielded himself, before the agony of multiple deaths distressed his sensitive faculties. Infallible talent discerned the clear truth: abrasive, insufferable, The Hatchet had not flinched from his honour-bound duty. Shown nothing to prove a liaison with Darkness, the Sunwheel diviner abandoned the pyre, bristled to fury, but satisfied.
No dedicate eyes remained on the scene to bear final witness. For the villagers trapped inside the blazing barn, the inferno that roared through thatch overhead promised death without hope of reprieve. The desiccate air shrieked, roofed over in fire. Smoke billowed. Each thickened breath hurt, until their laboured lungs felt stuffed with hot flannel. Wafted flurries of cinders scorched their nostrils and throats. Their horrified screams shredded reason. Children wailed, while the desperate mothers pried and pounded their fists bloody on the fastened doors.
The nailed planks held firm. Long before the stout timbers succumbed to the fire, living flesh would blister and scorch. Suffocation already threatened survival. Lit crimson and ruby and sulpuhrous orange, the pall deadened the piteous cries of the victims. Poison fumes folded the weakest ones, coughing, when a frigid blanket of darkness clapped down.
Like a nightmare apparition, the phenomenon swathed the rampage of the conflagration. Its arctic breath inflamed skin with a chill to bring frost-bite, and cracked stones in the dry-wall foundation. The shot slivers exploded with whip-crack reports and pings like glass tapped under pressure.
Galvanized beyond panic, the hoarse shrieks of the women and children shrilled to their redoubled terror. None realized the worked veil of shadow descended with intent to spare them. In harrowed dread, nails torn to the quick, they battered and clawed to escape in a bestial frenzy. Few noticed the persistent male voice that exhorted them to stand down. Arrived in the pitch-dark as though sent by an arcane miracle, a stranger caught their hands and touched shoulders, and gentled their hysterical children. His shout pierced through the clamour at last. ‘The sorcery that suppresses the heat of the fire was wrought by the hand of a friend!’
‘Who are you?’ an outspoken woman inquired. ‘A True Sect deserter reformed by regret?’
‘No,’ he responded, stung to offence. ‘I’m no temple believer!’ He had entered the barn through an overhead window, too high to access with safety. ‘You are going to be saved, but not that way!’ He added quickly, to forestall a stampede to scale the burning wall, ‘We haven’t the time! Besides which, the loft tackle’s burned through.’
His urgency rallied the desperate mothers, who gathered their hacking children.
‘We have to move, quickly.’ Choking himself, set at risk alongside them, the valiant stranger ran on, ‘Wrought shadow can’t clear the smoke, or keep the blazing roof from collapse. I will lead you out! But you must cling to each other. Keep quiet and stay close. If you scatter and run in thoughtless disorder, your escape will draw enemy notice.’
Amid the blind dark, the man gathered the women and their hysterical children. Huddled with them, he urged their groping steps towards the back wall of the barn. The paralyzed and the recalcitrant received his steady encouragement. The easy strength of a farm-hand helped the tottering elders to stand. Punished equally by the unnatural cold, the earnest fellow commanded their trust.
‘Rest assured, I won’t leave anyone.’ He stripped off his cloak, tore the fabric in strips to cover the noses of any who struggled to breathe, then wrapped a shivering child in his jerkin. He steadied the infirm, and chased the last stragglers to the rear entry. There, against the ravenous crackle of flame, and beneath the snap of frost in the black air overhead, the industrious creak of a pry bar disclosed another’s fierce effort to break through the nailed panels from the outside.
Then the wide door burst free. Fresh air swirled in, needled with sleet where the dark shroud of sorcery snap-froze the curtain of rainfall. Doubled with coughing, the blistered survivors burst over the threshold and surged towards safety. The fire they fled burgeoned all the faster, fed by the draw of the draught. Live cinders flurried, quenched harmless by shadow. But the groan as tortured wood settled above gave warning the roof timbers already buckled.
‘Hurry!’ cried the man still inside, held back with the brave who shouldered the need to carry those fallen unconscious. In the hellish scamble to rescue the laggards, no one noticed the fate of the fellow who had broken through the sealed door.
But grey daylight at last unveiled the soot-streaked, tall stranger who defied temple justice to spare the condemned: a muscular crofter with a family man’s kindness, and a recent, pink scar on his disfigured nose. ‘Keep close,’ he instructed. ‘The fired barn must mask you until the troop’s rear-guard scouts have passed from view down the road.’
‘Your friend’s gone to make certain?’ somebody asked, while a disheveled maid with torn sleeves and freckles stepped up to offer a blanket.
Her loan was refused. The blond stranger tipped his head back and stared upwards: saw, in fact, that the retardant barrier of shadow had parted to nothing and vanished. Carmine flames towered skywards unchecked, a searing inferno that roared in sheets through the skeletal remains of the timbers.
Around the forlorn group, the thick smoke swirled, teased apart by the rush of the updraught. The outlander looked on in haggard dismay, then exclaimed in shocked hurt and betrayal.
For a distinctive armoured chariot had gone, along with all sign of the clever companion left in sole charge of the reins.
Surrounded by refugees distraught with tears, and burdened with clinging children, the stranded stranger stood speechless. Soaked through his shirt by cold rainfall, he watched the fire’s frenetic destruction until the hay loft whoosed into collapse and the massive beams tumbled like jackstraws.
‘Whose sorcery crafted the darkness that saved us?’ a woman with red eyes and singed hair asked at length. ‘Was your companion Fellowship-sent? If so, take my word, if you don’t know already. An initiate power comes and goes in this world for no man’s idea of convenience.’
The blond fellow’s distanced stare stayed disconsolate. ‘In this case,’ he said gruff, ‘I provided a reason.’ In fact, the galled surety haunted: that the sword in his hand pledged in stubborn defense surely had provoked this brusque quittance. ‘But safest for all if I hold my tongue. The person who spared you stays nameless.’
That secret was going to be kept though they pleaded. Beyond doubt, Tarens knew: the prince whose heroics had spared these villagers did not intend to return. One understood why, beyond personal scores. The inherited prompt of a clan chieftain’s instincts suggested this parting also arose out of sacrifice. For the sake of a friend beloved like a brother, dead by enemy hands in Daon Ramon Barrens, Arithon would suffer no other spirit to shoulder the same fatal risk. Neither would an upstart crofter be sanctioned to kill, even in loyal protection to guard the last scion of Rathain’s royal lineage.
‘Damn your finicky morals,’ Tarens swore to himself, chilled to the bone despite the heat billowed off the wrecked barn. The charge laid on him became acidly plain as the drizzle doused the band of dispirited women who mustered to abandon their broken homesteads. Battered, they left their beloved slai
n where they lay without pause for burial rites. The remnant clan custom died hardest of all, to survive for the sake of the living.
A stout matron bundled in a plaid scarf touched Tarens’s arm and returned the jerkin lately stripped to succour her little one. ‘For grace, might I ask for your name?’
‘Iyat-thos,’ he answered on impulse. ‘Iyat-thos Tarens.’ Town-born, but no longer the dirt-simple crofter, he embraced the fated heritage bestowed by Arithon’s former clan liegeman. ‘I will be going with you to help.’
Gratitude eased the pinch of grief on the woman’s capable features. ‘I thank you. But we will not lack for male strength. The Fellowship Sorcerer left us a warning. We sent one strong man from each family away. The rest stayed for blind cover to hide the escape of the most able among us.’
Tarens lost his breath. ‘You knew those who remained here were going to die?’
Tears fell then, to streak through the soot smudged on the woman’s pale cheeks. ‘No, though we realized some would be lost. The men and the boys who resisted the war host chose to place themselves in jeopardy. They hoped a quick victory might leave us the village, stripped of provender and livestock. But that plan to cut losses saved nothing at all. No one imagined a temple diviner demanding the murder of innocents.’ She gathered up her stained skirt with bruised dignity, then reached fast enough to scoop up a small girl who cried over a sodden, ripped carcass. ‘We owe you, Iyat-thos. And your talented friend, whoever he was, since we live by the courage of his worked sorcery. He dared the forbidden against the Light’s canon. When you find him, please grant him the honour of thankfulness in our stead.’
Tarens knew where his foremost loyalty lay. But a weeping toddler clung to his leg, tousled and trembling for lack of a father to comfort her. A boy Paolin’s age, with the same dimpled chin, flicked stones angrily through the mud-puddles. Hate sustained that one, before sorrow, while other young mothers clutched wailing infants, too overwhelmed to absorb their fresh losses. Small children straggled at their muddied skirts, without shelter or food to sustain them. A girl, perhaps twelve, nursed a bruised cheek, sequined with scabs from the punch of a chain-mail gauntlet. Nearby, a dairymaid nursed her new-born, while another riddled with cinder burns knelt keening, with two toddlers clutched in her bloodied hands. Tarens’s heart twisted. On this hour, etched in fire and smoke, human need forced his decision. ‘I will stay at hand anyway. Until I’m not needed.’