There he crouched, half-conscious and bleeding. Just like in your worst nightmare, he heard his mother wail, he heard his father plead for mercy-not for himself, but for his wife and children. He heard the weeping and the sobbing and then the sudden silences like gaping holes never to be mended, unhealing wounds. All the while he shoved his thin shoulders up against the hatch, furious, raging, and trying to get out.
What did he think he’d do if he got out? Well, well, he was a boy, you remember, and full of mind-clouding fury. He thought he’d kill them, every one of those raiders.
When all the silences had fallen above, when all the deaths were died, the boy’s cursing was the loudest thing in the world to hear. He fell still, heart racing, terrified and knowing his own silence came too late. The hatch opened, and a hand reached down and grabbed his arm, dragging him up into the day. Light glinted off a deeply embossed golden ring, bitterly bright and stabbing the boy’s eyes.
Ach! It was a slaughter-field the boy found up there, red-running with blood. Bodies lay around the floor of the front room, his fair sister’s, his father’s twisted and broken, his mother’s covered in blood. The infant lay dead upon her breast. Shivering, belly-sick and cramping, the boy vomited, falling to his knees, and got kicked hard for doing that. A big man-that one with the big hand and the booted foot-yanked him to his feet. Fire crackled outside, smoke curled all around inside the house. The big man pulled the boy close so they were eye to eye. He stank of blood and sweat and murder.
“Mine,” he growled in Common Speech. “Mine!” He dragged the boy outside, where Griff’s wrists were bound, then tied on a long lead to the saddle horn of a pale horse.
That simply did the boy become a slave. The big man mounted his horse and rode away at the head of his murdering mob. The boy followed-well, he had to, didn’t he? — and he went in stunned silence until, atop a rise, his master stopped to look for sign of the army he’d left and must catch up again. The man looked ahead, but the boy looked behind him and saw his home, the little farmhouse, the barns and outbuildings. They sat like ashes on the land, and in the sky ravens circled, lowering for a meal.
In that moment the boy screamed his rage for the deaths of his family. Thus flew his first, fledgling war cry.
“That’s how I joined the army of Takhisis,” Griff Rees told me, still leaning on his elbows, soaking up the spilled ale.
I said nothing, because I had nothing to say. I’ve been told sad tales and sorrowful in my time, and this was one, but I’ve never known it to help a man to hear me say, ah, the shame of it; oh, the pity.
I looked long at him through the haze of low-hanging smoke from Baird Taverner’s badly drafting hearth, thinking about how he’d joined the Dark Queen’s army with a war cry in his throat and his heart turning to stone.
He said to me, there in the Swan and Dagger, that he would like to have killed the big man who enslaved him, but though he plotted and planned, he had no chance.
“Instead, I survived, fighting with the army, becoming as strong and ruthless as any soldier.”
I poured out the last of the ale, sharing it between us, all the while thinking that the killing you do in war is hard work for a man, worse work for a boy. He did it, though, that skinny boy who saw his family die on the plains of Estwilde, for among the slave’s duties was the obligation to defend his master in battle. He did that war-work well, learning the art of killing in hopes he’d get to use it in a better cause, to kill the man who’d murdered his family. He was an apt student. Soon they began to name him Killer Griff. Maybe it was then he thought he’d lost his soul, killed it in the killing, all the while yearning to work a particular murder. His yearning was never sated. In time he and his master parted, swept away from each other by the terrible tide of war that overwhelmed the High Clerist’s Tower in those rending days at the end of the Summer of Chaos.
“Ash Guth was his name,” Griff said. “He must have changed it, after. I’ve searched hard and never heard so much as a word about him since the war ended. Not from that day till this have I seen sign of him.” He looked down at the table, then up at me. “Not outside of nightmare.”
There must have been a lot of those, I thought as he turned his dark eyes on me and I heard his ghosts howling. Ah, not the ghosts of all those he’d killed in his time. Never them. I knew it now, I saw it: These were his ghosts, his phantom kin peering out from his eyes.
“I’ve got him now,” Griff said, tracing death runes in the spilled ale. “Got him sweet and sure, and there’s no way I’ll lose him again.”
Like a cold finger at the back of my neck came the memory of the nickname I’d heard only once: Griff Unsouled. He looked like that, sitting there, his arms in the ale-slop, like something animate but with no spirit. I thought, once, for only a moment, that it was too bad for Mistress Haugh to be leading her father’s death right to him, but then I decided that was no matter to concern me. There isn’t a killing I do or help at that isn’t worked for gain. This one would serve that end just fine. Besides, would you deny that Griff Rees had this killing coming to him?
If anyone had asked me, I’d have picked a different horse for Olwynn to ride than her dancy little red mare. For that matter, I’d have advised she ride no horse at all but that she and Griff take the Haven Road walking, as I did. It’s a good road in good seasons, broad enough for three riders to go abreast, but lately storm rains had washed away the sides, leaving it narrow and soft at the edges. The red mare hated those soft sides, and she always found herself slopping around there. Olwynn, riding with Cae in a sling and close to her breast, did her best to keep the mare going straight down the firm middle, but the mare was contrary-minded as any mule, veering right and left and shying each time she felt the yielding edge of the road. Two hours out of Long Ridge, the mare had slipped three times and twice threatened to throw her rider- infant and all-into the road. Whatever hopeful idea we’d had of how far we’d get that day lay in ruins.
“Slit the damned horse’s throat,” Griff growled the fourth time the mare went slipping off the road. It was the first thing he’d said since we took to the Haven Road, and he didn’t say more than that. He rode ahead, dark and quiet. Me, I was left with the mare and the girl, trying to get them back onto the road again, dodging hooves and teeth all the way while Cae set up a long, howling wail.
The Dwarf of Darken Wood, that’s what Griff names me, and maybe you wonder why I spend so much time in that place. There are many reasons. One is the silence.
Olwynn held the child close, whispering soft sounds that were not words, when the mare clucked her head to start kicking. I moved fast and punched the beast hard between the eyes just as her head came down. I did some harm to my fist and none to the mare, but I got her attention. She let me lead her up out of the mud and onto the road again.
“Thank you,” Olwynn said, her voice low and shaking as she took the reins from me. “I–I’m not so good with horses. My husband, though. .” She let the thought go, rocking her baby. “Well, thank your for your help, Broc.” She said it sweetly, no smile upon her lips but the light of one in her quiet eyes.
“Come on!” Griff called, his pied gelding restless. “We’d like to get at least a mile up the road before nightfall, eh?”
We made good time after that. The mare seemed be weary of contrariness now and enjoyed the chance to trot in the brisk morning. I ran ahead of the riders, jogging along the road, checking right and left, my pack a comfortable weight on my back, Reaper on my hip, near to hand.
It’s not a good place to be, Darken Wood on the Haven Road. All the pretty stories you hear of dryads singing in the glades, the tragic tales of the ghosts in Spirit Forest, even the brave legends of centaurs over in the western part of the wood-these are true. When you’re going into Darken Wood from the Haven Road round near Solace and Long Ridge, though, you’d be a fool to worry about specters and dryads and centaurs. What you find there are bandits and outlaws hiding in the aspen woods, men exiled from home and kin by law or, like me, by choice. You’d be a witling to go in there without weapons and the skill to use them.