Belial - Episode 1 of the Elder Bornshire Chronicles Read online

  Blade stopped at the edge of the garden, not trouncing a single row, and munched the grass that tried to creep in.

  “So, a lack of any danger frustrates you?” she asked.

  “I am a soldier with no war, a priest with no church,” he admitted. “I confess that whatever God intends for our lives, Shanay, I cannot believe this is it. I listen, but I do not hear Him. That is my frustration. Where are the angels He sent before?”

  She continued to stare at him. An average woman would have ranted that perhaps she was not enough for him, or that he focused only on himself to the point of separating, but Shanay was not a typical woman and her feelings had never been opaque. She stood by his side as his wife, and even before that obligation, side-by-side and back-to-back against anything that had tried to push them apart.

  As though she read his thoughts, she said, “I am not going to let serenity drive you to lunacy. Do not take this as a criticism, but if we are going to remain here, I think it best that we return to Ploor and hire men of the trades to construct a decent house for us. We have enough wealth. There is no reason for you to torture us both with your mighty hammer. I think that even Blade has grown tired of hearing your cursing that particular tool.”

  Across the way, Blade raised his head, as if suddenly aware of what passed between them and nodded his head, throwing a few snorts their way.

  “Traitor,” Arthur grumbled and casually picked up a small stone and heaved it Blade’s direction, as much a tease as anything. The rock rolled into the garden a good distance from Blade who snorted what sounded much like an equine chuckle.

  In another time, Arthur might have been insulted by Shanay’s insinuations, but when the draw came down to these two, he could not reprimand them. Still, he felt compelled to gripe.

  “Tomorrow we will ride to Ploor and see what tradesmen are available. If we cannot hire what we need, maybe we should leave this place. Go somewhere.”

  He climbed to his feet, picked up his sword, and started across the porch.

  “Go where?” she asked, but Arthur did not answer. Instead, he opened the door, paused, and then passed through the entryway.

  As Arthur closed the door, Shanay felt a foreboding slide onto her. Arthur Bornshire did not hallucinate. If he sensed that danger awaited them, then she would much prefer to meet it from her saddle.

  Lethe trotted over to Blade and the two horses stood still as stone, gazing at one another as if they could talk. That could not be so, but both Blade and Lethe showed more humanity than some of the people Shanay had met. In their own way, they considered Arthur’s temperament and his agitated state. Maybe the trip to Ploor would provide answers, give options. Unseen danger lurked. She, too, sensed the mired land cringe.

  Whatever the future brought, Shanay resigned herself that peace would not be theirs until they both lay in their graves. Maybe that was God’s ultimate plan for them all.

  The day neither started well, nor ended well for a fifteen-year-old boy named Adam. His father, Drile, had brought Adam and his mother, Surg, from the Ringed Hills to the lower Eastern Mountains nearly five years before. They fled the presence of bandits and appalling creatures that wandered out of the valley of the notorious Wizard’s Tower.

  At least that is where Drile speculated the beasts originated. His father never had the courage to sojourn to that ghastly place to confirm his suspicions, and Adam did not fault his father for that lack of—courage.

  Perhaps wisdom courted Drile. Rumors abounded about a war at Wizard’s Tower years before they had left the Ringed Hills. Those rumors provided Adam with many a wakeful nightmare.

  Their first winter in the mountains had set down early. Drile, Surg and Adam had not managed to get their crops harvested in time since they had spent an abundance of time trying to complete a domicile for them before the winter pounced. They had spent their first year living in a cave at the site of their home. They had all nearly starved or frozen to death before an early spring rescued them. No one died, but illness sequestered his mother at spring’s arrival. Although her recovery eventually tended, her health returned slowly, the small bones of her cheeks sharp and her arms still painfully thin.

  Since that time, they had not let winter corner them, but the Eastern Mountains, even in the lower regions, had infertile soil, and though their careful ministrations to compliment the dirt with forest nutrients had helped, no season had yet been bountiful. For that reason, Drile had wakened Adam hours before the sun rose and sent him into the forest to hunt.

  This season, a heavy mantle of frost blanketed the ground. The deep green of the trees had begun to turn to reds and oranges and some leaves gave up their grasp.

  Adam’s father owned superb archery skills and had instructed Adam well. He had taught Adam to construct his own bow. They had wandered the forest for just the right hickory tree, his father’s careful eye examining each candidate and “seeing” the stave within. With the sapling felled, they had hauled it back to the house to work the tree into multiple staves and with that; Adam had gone to work with a drawknife. With it, he did the rough shaping, the skill his father had learned making wagon wheels during his first two years in Rome’s Legion.

  His first attempt had gone well, but did not suit his father. Adam did another without protest. When finished, the bow would be his. Thus, the time invested felt like his decision.

  Next, he scraped the bow with a spoke shave until he had shaped it to his father’s approval. After that, he mixed fine and coarse sand from the creek bed and smoothed the wood further. He worked the ends to a slender curve and was greatly surprised to find that his mother had taken the time to spin him a fine string for his new weapon.

  Having strung it, he tillered the bow, hanging it from a tree branch and then pulled down on the bow itself while the string held it to the branch. He made a few scribed marks with his knife, unstrung the bow and returned it to the spoke shave for minor shape corrections and smoothing. Three times more the cycle continued until his bow met both he and his father’s liking.

  Drile insisted that the first dozen arrows be a gift from him to his son, but he and Adam searched multiple times over several months through the forest to find a stash of straight and dead limbs to make his arrows.

  He would bring them home, dry them slowly over the fire in the evening, carefully shape them, whittle and smooth them until they met his own specifications. In this thing, Drile did not coach him, expecting Adam probably did not need instruction. He had carved arrows for his father since his youngest memories and quite a few he had seen return home, spent on an animal.

  With the arrow sanded, he would cut a notch, being careful not to split the still forming projectile and would fetch a bone-carved arrowhead from his father’s collection, or he would carve one himself. His mother would boil bones of any game his father brought home that could yield an arrowhead, removing the gristle and set the bones out to dry. Adam would pick a bone, realizing that the best choices were the largest bones where he could make an arrowhead that fit into a flat spot. A slight curve would not hurt, but the arrow would not fly quite as true.

  His last step was to fasten the arrowhead to the arrow and add fletchings, a few on each arrow made from feathers of birds they plucked. He carefully grooved his arrows and slid each individual fletching into their designated groove. Finally, he secured the fletchings with fine twine his mother spun from wool.

  He and his father practiced together when chores allowed and hunted when in need. His father had served in the Roman guard as a young man, but had fled the empire with his family when the rebellion gave him the chance. That was how they had come to the Ringed Hills.

  Drile had taught Adam the basics for handling a sword, but they only had the one, so Adam’s skills in that area were much less refined than his adeptness with an arrow.

  This particular day, the forest floor lay matted with fallen leaves, but the damp, cool air kept the leaves soggy and quiet. That gave Adam somewhat of an advantage. H
e had already taken three rabbits and a large fowl. He did not particularly like birds. They all pretty much looked the same to him, and he thought their taste bland. His mother, however, liked the ones with green plumage on their heads.

  Now, he had better game to challenge. Stealthily, he crouched and waited back off a game trail, camouflaged in his grayish-brown cloak that his mother had made. Seventy paces away, a stag stood, looking his way. The afternoon wore on. Both archer and the hunted remained still as stone, waiting for the first mistake.

  Adam did not intend that the error be his. If he could get a stag this day, and another before the first snow, his family would do well this winter, despite the fragile harvest they had managed. Antlers could be carved into knife handles and other tools, and this particular stag had the largest spread of antlers that Adam had ever seen.

  He gradually eased himself out of sight behind a thick and gnarled walnut and waited. Littered over the leaf-covered ground were nuts, many nuts. Once he had taken his stag, he intended to return to this spot and gather those fruits. They would be quite a gift from the woodlands. He doubted he could even haul them all in a single jaunt.

  The stag had been heading his way before stopping. From his current position, he alerted. Given time, the mighty stag may still come. Therefore, Adam remained immobile, breathing smoothly, quietly, though he felt excitement for provisioning his parents.

  Time dragged. Adam kept his patience checked.

  Suddenly, he heard a telltale snap of a branch only a few paces away. The stag approached.

  Adam nocked an arrow to his bowstring, took a slow breath in and then let the air out just as slowly. Three times he did that, but his concentration cracked as the pungent tang of smoke reached his nostrils. From the steep slope above, a haze of brown smoke poured through the forest from the direction of his home—too much smoke.

  Forgetting his prize, Adam gripped his bow and plowed between the trees, his thoughts about nothing but that their house might possibly have caught fire. If a fire had started in the structure, not only might their house burn, but despite the forest’s soggy floor, fire could jump into the forest itself which spelled certain death for all of them.

  The stag did not spring away as the boy jumped up from his place behind the walnut tree and sprinted up the slope and through the forest. After the lad had disappeared, the air around the stag shimmered and the creature morphed, turning into the guise of what it truly was, a Horseman.

  Famine had watched this family for years, certain that they would bequeath their lives to the grip he held on the Eastern Mountains. Not all the earth could be fertile, or humans would spread across the entire world, consuming more than could be provided. They required restraint. They must toil if they were to appreciate the gifts they were given.

  Light meant nothing without the dark. Life meant nothing without death. Food meant nothing without hunger. He pondered this, a stern look on his shrunken face. Thanatos would be here soon and Famine’s duty to the mountains had nearly come to an end. What awaited the boy this day might chart a new course for them all. Famine, for his part, wondered why the constraints upon them had not bothered him before.

  Adam hurdled toward the thickening smoke, the angle of climb not fazing his youthful legs. His father had recently added a mud and rock fire circle with a mortared flue to their home to carry away the smoke. Such an arrangement provided the ability for them to have an indoor fire come winter, but he had completed the fireplace just a week before. Adam had still been home when Drile set about building a preliminary fire to season the mortar.

  Nearly out of breath, Adam reached flat ground. Unrecognizable voices and shouts rose into the night. Immediately, he ducked underneath a broken shrub at the edge of the trees. Blazing carnage lay before him, the wooden structure of their home consumed in flame.

  A dozen or more heavily armed men stood in front of the burning house. Two restrained Drile by his arms while another man repeatedly punched Drile’s face and his ribs.

  Drile was not frail by any measure, but unlike these men, he was lithe and molded by the life he led. These men stood as tall as his father did, but their shoulders bulged their armor. If they had been hammered into shape upon a mousehole anvil, he would not have been surprised.

  Adam’s mother, Surg, struggled near the house, restrained by her throat by a large man with a long and scraggly beard. Most of his right ear had gone missing. His black hair clung slickly to his head. Vividly, a brand inscribed his neck, a circle with three spiral arms. The brand scar was the size of his father’s hand and one spiral wrapped around behind the man’s mutilated ear. Adam had seen scarification before, but only on freemen who had escaped Rome’s slavery. Even then, the scars had not been so large or bold.

  Adam’s mother wept, “What do you want from us?”

  Her weatherworn face writhed. The years had come into her hair that spring and spread quickly. The gods had not graced his mother with what most men would consider womanly features, or if they had, her harsh life had worn them away, but Adam thought his mother beautiful and his father loved her with his every thought.

  None of the thugs paid creed to anything she had to say, as though she did not exist. Adam squinted to grip his anger.

  “Tell me where he is!” the leader shouted at Drile.

  He wore the same brand as the first man, had fair but greasy hair and dark skin that looked like over-tanned leather. He punched Drile twice before allowing him to speak.

  “I don’t know who you are talking about,” Drile answered, blood dripping from the side of his mouth and down his chin.

  “Best you tell me.”

  Drile spit twice in the man’s face. Both times a good bit of blood ran down his chin.

  Grinning hideously, the leader nodded a silent order to the man who held Surg.

  Before Adam could react, the tall one-eared man heaved Surg by her neck like a dead animal into the middle of the blazing house. Her shrieks echoed throughout the range as she writhed in yellow flames.

  Adam stood and sent the arrow he had meant for the stag through the right ear hole of the man who had burned Surg alive. The arrow bent and came out just above the stricken man’s remaining ear. His arms started toward his head to grasp the shaft. Halfway, his arms fell limp, dragging his knees to bend. He folded over against the side of the house, his head and face coming to rest on a blazing log.

  Before his associates could react, Adam sped a second arrow toward the brute who pounded his father, but that arrow missed. Instead, the projectile struck the man, restraining his father, in the stomach. His legs buckled, and he made the same groaning sound as a well-shot bear.

  Adam reached for a third arrow, but that was the last. From out of the night, an object struck Adam in the forehead and conscious thought blew away like a spark in the wind. He buckled in an unconscious heap.

  Chapter 5

  Drile cried out as he saw his son drop like a pierced rabbit. He started and wrestled to break free. The leader turned his attention away from the boy to Drile. Numbness folded over Drile, his wife and son’s death smothering him.

  Why had this happened?

  “Tell me where he is!”

  “I don’t know what you are—”

  The leader drew an iron knife, shoved Drile down to the ground and pounced. He pinned the less heavy man with his knees, grasped Drile’s hands and placed them on his own wrists.

  “You have as long as it takes me to force this blade into your chest to tell me what I want to know. You can save yourself at least. Tell me and live, or hold me back as long as you can.” He clutched his knife in both hands and bored through Drile’s resistance.

  “We don’t know!” Drile protested, trying to overcome the strength of the man above him. Was this a nightmare from which he could flee such foul madness?

  Slowly, the blade descended in front of the man’s weight. The blade point punctured Drile’s shirt. Sharpness impaled him. His resolve faded. His family gone, nothing
remained to carry him further.

  As each moment of his life passed before him, regret took his last breath from him. The world slid away as his attacker slowly stabbed Drile once, twice, six times. It was his last thought that he had failed his son.

  Seeing Acacio’s impatience dispute their information gathering, Veer regarded his own reticence. The death of a drudge gave his conscience no labor, but their patron demanded results with no tolerance for failure.

  Several of the troops lifted Drile’s corpse and deposited it into the inferno.

  “Maybe you should have waited to exterminate him until we had our information, Acacio,” Veer leered. Acacio leapt at him, their faces close together. His breath stunk of dung weed, but Veer imagined his smelled no better.

  “Do not test me, Veer.”

  It would have been hard to pass a knife blade between the two men, both equally tall and equally hardened.

  They stared at one another, neither man giving way. Veer had no intention of backing down and he never had. If their consigner had not appointed Acacio as their leader, Veer would have gladly accepted the duties and the consequences therein, both good and bad.

  “The day we accepted his mark, he warned you.”

  “And I am warning you,” Acacio replied.

  Half a dozen more heartbeats went. Finally, Acacio turned his back on his second and faced the remainder. They had paused to see what would come of the confrontation, and perhaps he gleaned some bit of regret that nothing had come of it. None of them bothered to examine their comrade who had an arrow through the head. His hair and beard had scorched and his face sizzled in the flames.

  Acacio felt a smidgeon of satisfaction that such a scene did not disturb them. Their comrade with the arrow to the stomach still rolled on the ground. Acacio went to him, placed his left hand on the man’s forehead, and then severed the downed man’s throat with his own blade. No one objected, knowing that they only stood because of the luck of a draw. Acacio would have killed any of them as easily, and they he.