A muffled scream from the direction of the village center stayed his hand. He was on his feet in an instant and sprinting out the door, sword and bow in hand. Another scream drew him on. He recognized it as Elle’s voice, his Elle, and she was frightened, in pain.
“Elle! Elle! Where are you?”
Another scream pulled him onward. He made straight for the gathering elm in the center of the village.
He would kill whoever or whatever had slaughtered Fairelm, he would gut it, slit its throat, pull out its innards with his hands.
“Elle!”
He sprinted around the corner of the Ferrods’ livestock pen, hardly noticing the heap of blood and gore that had been the Ferrods’ cow, and into the commons. A thin, bald man, his shirtless torso covered in boils, scars, and tumors, had just finished. . kissing her?
The man heard Gerak’s approach and turned. His eyes narrowed in anger and he slid behind Elle, his forearm wrapped around her throat. Inexplicably, a dozen or more mangy cats, their faces all fangs and eyes, sat on their haunches around the man. She didn’t look at Gerak; her eyes were open but vacant, staring out at something Gerak couldn’t see.
Gerak’s emotional state distilled down to a singular need to kill, to murder, to put arrows into this diseased bastard’s eyes. He dropped his sword, drew an arrow and nocked, all of it instinctive, as rapid as thought.
“Get away from her, now!”
Elle gave no response to the sound of Gerak’s voice, and the thin man’s wide, fevered eyes squinted as he focused on Gerak. He smiled, showing the mess of his mouth, the crooked teeth of various sizes and shapes.
“Where have you been hiding?” the man said, his voice much deeper than the frame of his body would suggest.
Gerak trained his sight on the center of the face, a hard shot, but he’d made harder. He advanced and the shot got easier with each step he took.
“I said let her go.”
A man lay on the ground near Elle, his face bloodied, his filthy shirt pulled halfway up, exposing a fat, hairy stomach. The man lurched up and shouted, “Gerak! Kill them! They want me to take them to the Oracle! I won’t do it, Gerak!”
At first Gerak did not recognize him, but then the moustache and girth brought recognition: Minser. The peddler’s unexpected presence made no more sense than his words.
Gerak put Minser out of his mind, walked slowly toward the man holding Elle, sighting along his arrow. A few more steps closer and he’d take the shot. The man maneuvered to keep Elle between them, but he seemed more amused than fearful.
“You know this woman?” the man said. He shook Elle and her arms and legs bounced sickeningly, as if unconnected from her body, as if she were a doll, as if she were already dead.
Gerak picked the spot he’d fire, right between the bastard’s crazed eyes. He visualized the arrow’s flight, prepared to loose.
“Gerak, look out!” Minser shouted, then screamed and curled into a ball as the cats pounced on him, clawing and biting.
Before Gerak could make sense of things before him, the splash and thud of heavy boots from behind whirled him around. A massive man in a battle-scarred breastplate, his hair long and disheveled, his eyes as dead as those of a fish, pelted toward him, a massive sword held high. Instinct and adrenaline seized Gerak-he sighted and released and his arrow sizzled through the air and slammed into the man’s chest, knifing through the plate armor, sinking half the length of the shaft, and spinning the man to the ground, dead or dying.
Gerak spun back around while drawing another arrow-nock, pull, sight. The rat-faced man still sheltered behind Elle. The cats crawled all over Minser, nipping casually at his ears, fingertips, cheeks. The peddler lay curled up on the ground, screaming, crying.
“Get them off! Get them off!”
“Now you die,” Gerak whispered to the man, and prepared to loose his shot.
An unexpected blow to the side of his head caused him to see sparks and drove him face down into the wet earth. He was distantly aware that he had fired his shot into the ground. Adrenaline allowed him to hold onto consciousness, but barely. He rolled over, bow held defensively before him, his vision shaky.
The large, armored man he had shot loomed over him, the arrow still sticking from his chest. The man leered behind his beard, raised a booted foot.
“You should be dead,” Gerak muttered.
“I am,” the man said, and slammed his heel into Gerak’s face.
A crunch as his nose shattered, a flash of pain, more sparks, then darkness.
Sayeed grabbed Gerak by his cloak and dragged him through the mud toward his brother.
“What do we do with this one?” Sayeed asked.
The cats looked up from their torture of Minser, hope in their eyes.
Zeeahd looked at the woman prone at his feet, her eyes rolled back into their sockets and showing only whites, her mouth thrown open in a scream she’d never utter.
“He seemed fond of the woman,” Zeeahd said. “Let them have each other.”
The cats looked disappointed and left off tormenting Minser. The peddler lay huddled on the ground, weeping, bleeding from dozens of bites.
Zeeahd hopped off the deck and nudged the peddler with a toe. “Now you will take us to the Oracle.”
Minser’s face was still buried in his tunic. “I told you I don’t know where the abbey is.”
Zeeahd nodded at Gerak. “Then why did you tell him that you won’t take us, rather than can’t?”
Minser went still. He turned and looked up, his face bloody, tear-stained, one of his ears bleeding freely from a cat’s bite.
“Don’t bother to lie to me, peddler,” Zeeahd said. “I know what I want is in your head. I’ll have it.”
Minser, bloody, muddied, somehow found the strength to summon a last bit of defiance. His double chin quivered when he spoke. “I’ll die first.”
“No,” Zeeahd said, and kneeled to look him in the eye. “I won’t let you die. Instead, I’ll inflict pain. The cats will inflict it. My brother will.”
Minser’s lower lip joined his chin in quivering.
Zeeahd continued, “Pain today. Pain tomorrow. And the day after that, until finally you do exactly as I’ve asked. Is that what you wish?”
The cats gathered around the peddler, eyeing him, meowing. Minser began to shake. Sayeed saw terror root in Minser’s eyes. It would live there the rest of his life. And yet still the peddler did not acquiesce. He closed his eyes and shook his head.
Zeeahd sighed like a parent exasperated with a child. “Start cutting off his fingers, Sayeed. Then feed them to the cats.”
Sayeed drew his dagger and seized Minser’s sweaty hand. The peddler shouted, tried to resist by balling his hand into a fist, but he could not hope to match Sayeed’s strength. Sayeed locked the peddler’s arm in place, pried his fist open, and put the edge of his blade to the base of Minser’s index finger. The peddler shrieked. His body and breath had a stink born of terror. The cats gathered near, meowing excitedly.
“You are not men! You are not men!”
“Cut it off,” Zeeahd ordered.
Sayeed let the blade bite just a little, and whatever little bits of resistance Minser still possessed crumbled.
“All right! All right! The gods forgive me, but I’ll show you! Don’t cut off my fingers! Just don’t! I’ll take you as far as I remember but that’s not all the way. The Oracle sees when the worthy seek the abbey. He sends an escort and they lead followers through the pass. None know the whole way but them.”
“A pass?” Sayeed asked. “It’s in the Thunder Peaks?”
Minser hesitated, swallowed visibly, nodded.
“How far from here?” Sayeed said, shaking the fat man. “How far?”
“I think. . two days’ march,” Minser said. “Maybe three.”
“I told you, brother,” Zeeahd said, triumph in his eyes. “We find the Oracle and he’ll tell us where to find Erevis Cale’s child. And then the Lord of Cania will free us of these curses.”