The Path of the Sword (2 page)

Chapter 2

The city, always alive and bustling, lay still in the late afternoon gloom, deserted, looking like one of those ancient cities left behind after a dreadful plague, left like an injured animal to die, to rot as it disappeared into the encroaching world, to be forgotten in the mists of time.

The Dakariin raid that morning had left fires blazing throughout the city but by midday they had begun to die down. The husks of burnt out buildings seemed to loom, appearing suddenly out of the thick smoke that yet lay low over the streets like a tattered funeral shroud as Daved, sword in hand, carefully made his way through the dim, deserted streets. Staying to the west side where the shadows pooled thickest, he darted from door to door, carefully scanning the alleys and streets for any sign of the pursuers he remained convinced must surely be nearby. He did not see any Dakariin but what he did see threatened to overwhelm his terror with grief.

Amidst the debris left from the vicious attack he saw the bloody, broken bodies of townsfolk littering the streets like refuse, lying where they had been struck down. He could plainly see how many had died: To his left lay a well dressed trader missing the upper half of his skull, red-gray ooze congealing like fungus spread on the cobbles around the ruins of his head; up ahead across the street the torso and arms of a powerfully built man, perhaps a smith or a miller—Daved did not recognize him—hung from a window with two arrow points protruding from his back; and as Daved walked, he stumbled over a foot at the mouth of the alley he was passing. A glance revealed a woman, her skirts torn roughly away, lying in a swampy pool of her own blood. And there were more. Many, many more scattered in singles or in heaps; except for the blood and the smaller lumps that he tried very hard not to look at, he might have thought that everyone had just fallen asleep where they stood and fell to the ground.

Wiping his own blood and tears from his eyes, Daved continued wending his way in a generally northerly direction. His legs felt weak, wobbly. His heart pounded, his throat screamed for water and his lungs blew like a bellows. He was so very weary. Yet, even with his physical agony combining with the emotional turmoil of spine-chilling terror and mind-numbing sorrow, he remained constantly aware that to stop would mean death.

So he continued, passing the home, surprisingly intact with no more than broken windows and a ruined door, of the whore he sometimes visited after carousing with his fellow cavalrymen and he dimly hoped that she had not suffered much before her inevitable demise.

Daved’s head snapped up, eyes wide, and his heart skipped a beat. A voice. From somewhere up ahead. Trying to stifle a whimper, he ducked into the nearest alley and hurled himself over the mound of putrid refuse that barred the way. He landed with a jolt, a lance of pain riding up his arm to his elbow, and he lay still, holding his ragged breath, listening. The voice came again followed by another, louder, deeper voice and Daved’s heart sank. He had not been certain who the voices belonged to but now he was clearly able to make out the guttural dialect of the Dakariin. He could not be certain if these two were part of some random patrol or if they were with the hunters that were chasing his spoor, but Daved was not particularly inclined to go ask them. So, he burrowed himself deeper into the pile of stinking garbage as quietly as he could, suppressing a wince as he felt something cold and wet slither along his cheek, and he waited.

The voices grew closer yet and Daved began to make out the sounds of their footfalls on the cobbled stones. Just as Daved became convinced that they would walk by, oblivious to their prey hiding under last week's dinner a few feet away, all sound ceased. He urgently stifled the mad compulsion to jump up and flee when he realized that the two men must have stopped right at the mouth of the alley he was hiding in. Perhaps he could make it, he thought wildly. The moment of surprise when he rose might just be enough to give him the head start he needed. Daved squeezed his eyes tightly shut and held his breath while his lungs continued their frantic protests for air. He was certain the pounding of his heart, so thunderous in his ears, must give him away.

The deeper voice erupted loudly, and Daved clamped down on a scream, tasted blood as an involuntary spasm caused him to bite his lip. The first Dakariin’s voice quavered timidly in answer to the larger man and then yelped in pain after Daved heard the unmistakable smack of flesh against flesh. The bigger Dakariin roared angrily and a moment later, an eternity to the nearly hysterical man hiding under trash not fifteen feet from where they stood, Daved heard the sounds of footsteps again as the two murderous savages began to move away.

Daved waited a while longer before carefully extracting himself from beneath the stinking, life-saving trash and, quietly making his way to the other end of the alley that had nearly become his tomb, he peered out and saw the district’s main market square. He conjured up a map of the city in his mind and knew that arriving at the market square meant that he had made it approximately a third of the way through the northern part of the city.

He carefully examined the large square from the cover of the alley before deciding on any new action and for the first time since the disastrous charge a few hours prior, he felt something new, something that seemed intrusive, maybe even blasphemous. Could it have been relief?

Although the market square had sustained damage in the pillaging, it did not appear nearly so ravaged as the rest of the city through which Daved had passed. It seemed to Daved that he had found the northern perimeter of the Dakariin advance. The eastern end of the square had survived mostly untouched, with only a few broken windows marring building fronts, and sparsely scattered debris littering the ground. The west end, the end from which Daved peeked furtively from the shadows of a dark alley, had suffered somewhat more. Several shops had been burned. One so badly, the stone façade had crumbled, leaving a pit of ashes and shadows and little else where once there had been a thriving seamstress’s shop. Even this damage paled in comparison to the southern parts of the city where entire blocks had been ravaged by cataclysmic conflagrations.

Staying close to the wall of the alley, he inspected the grounds of the square more closely and was even more encouraged by the sparsity of bodies scattered about. His furtive scrutiny revealed just three corpses, a nearly incomprehensible decline after the horrors he had witnessed. He tried to see past the east end into the streets beyond, daring to hope that perhaps a large portion of the city had been spared the depredations of the Dakariin army but the narrow glimpses he was afforded were not clear enough.

The relative normalcy of the market square had restored some of Daved’s composure; his heart stopped trying to hammer its way through his ribcage and his lungs no longer sucked quite so greedily for air, even though his throat still burned for need of water. The grief and terror still lurked, like a predator in the dark, just around the next bend, waiting, waiting... But Daved found it easier to control and he resolutely pushed it down in his mind, storing it away for another time.

Daved, having decided it was safe to proceed, took no more than three steps into the square when off to his right, he heard the echo of more Dakariin voices emanate from a street across the way. Once again his heart lurched, jack-hammering in his chest, and the terror flooded back, washing away his fleeting, crystalline sense of calm in a roiling torrent. He spun about, glancing wildly at his surroundings and a familiar sign caught his eye. Just two doors away he spotted the Horse and Chariot, a tavern he had often frequented with his friends in better times.

Yesterday
, the thought skittered across the outskirts of the manic tumult that was his mind,
I was here just yesterday!

He hurried as quietly as he could manage for the door of the tavern, vaguely noting that a part of one wall had collapsed causing the roof to cant wildly. The Dakariin sounded closer and he knew that his options were severely limited: seek refuge in the tavern and hope that it would be enough, or be captured, tortured and killed. He could not go much further with such weariness weighing him down. Too much had happened, too much had been witnessed. The tavern seemed to beckon him, luring him with thoughts of safety and maybe even rest.

He made his decision and with it, his resolve for stealth and care evaporated. With a last, desperate sprint, he crossed the threshold, raced past broken tables and overturned chairs, and vaulted over the bar that still stood, though it was battered and charred around the edges.

Catching his foot on the edge of the counter, he fell awkwardly and the last thing he remembered for a time was the sight of an empty shelf rushing up to meet his head—
where's my helmet? Aren't I supposed to be wearing a helmet?—
followed by a flash of lightning behind his eyes.

Followed by darkness.

Chapter 3

“
Move it, you sluggards!” roared Colonel Ferril. He was normally an even-tempered man but he was having a very bad day. This morning, he and his family had arisen, eager to begin preparations for the Feast of Shadows that they should be having this evening—right about now actually, cooking, cleaning, dressing and drinking (and why not? It was the Feast of Shadows after all) and so he had been completely caught unawares when word of the Dakariin attack had reached him. He vowed to himself for the tenth time since the first alarm had sounded that the sentries and rangers who had been manning the outposts along the North Road would be drawn and quartered for not sending word of the impending invasion.

They couldn’t all have missed a force this size passing through,
he thought darkly, which brought a horrible notion to mind. Maybe they had not missed the invaders. Maybe the invaders had simply taken steps to ensure that word would not reach him, allowing this battle to rage on this day of shadows. He shook his head while his men ran about him, and for a moment he relived a horrible event.

No more than two hours ago, he had watched in horror as six hundred of his men, his finely trained cavalry, were cut down in front of his disbelieving eyes. He had sent out his sally force hoping to stall the Dakariin attack on the front gate but the Dakariin had seemed to have been waiting for just such a force. They had reacted, he admitted with a grudging respect, admirably. He had not even been able to provide back-up; even his archers would have been useless. The Dakariin had engaged his cavalry so quickly and completely that any arrow launched from the battlements would have had as much chance of finding one of his own men as it would have a Dakariin. Not that it would have made much difference in the end. So he had watched the slaughter unfold as stunned and sickened as every other soldier manning the wall. Of course, he had expected losses. He was a seasoned soldier, and a good one, he thought. But what he saw, what he
watched
...

After being forced to endure the sight of their city slowly dying at the hands of savage pillagers, the rout had nearly broken the spirits of the men frantically defending the keep. For the past hour, Colonel Ferril had been angrily pressing his men to redouble their efforts to save what was left.

The rout had the opposite effect on the Dakariin. The attack came with a renewed fervency that dismayed the Killhernans even more. The defenses were breached at several points along the wall and Ferril’s swordsmen set aside the pots of burning pitch they had been spilling over the walls in favor of their preferred weapons, the swords they had trained with since their adolescent years, engaging their seemingly rabid enemy all along the battlement. For a time, the discordant peal of sword on sword dominated the afternoon as men battled desperately, bitterly, for their honor. Honor? No. That was a rich joke. No, their lives.

Not ten feet away from Ferril, a Dakariin leaped onto the wall, followed immediately by a second. Ferril lunged, a dagger appearing as if by magic in his left hand. With a flick of his wrist, the same dagger suddenly sprouted from the throat of the first Dakariin, along with a red bloom of draining life. At the same instant, his sword seemed to jump into his right hand and within a heartbeat, it found its mark as well, and he buried it deeply between the second man’s ribs. He spun, dragging his sword free of the dying man’s chest, and slashed at the head of the third Dakariin who was just cresting the crenellations. He felt a crunching impact as his sword bit deep and the third Dakariin convulsed, his grip slackening.

A pike appeared, reaching out from behind him, catching the ladder his enemy had been climbing, and with a grunt of effort, the soldier behind him pushed the ladder away from the wall. It teetered, hanging inanely in space for a moment as though it would defy logic, defy convention and just stay there so it could become some sight-seeing attraction for future tourists—
“Can I climb it daddy? Can I?”—
then toppled backward, dumping its cargo of wide-eyed, slack-jawed Dakariin howling onto the heads of their comrades and the bloody ground below. More soldiers rushed up to fill the gap in their line and Colonel Ferril spun around, murder mottling his features.

“
The next one of you cow’s asses who lets any of those scum set so much as a toe on these walls is going to hang by his ankles while I personally tar and feather you!” Even amidst the clamor of battle, no one had difficulty hearing their commander’s enraged voice.

As he searched along the stained and sooty walls however, he noticed that there were no more ladders reaching up from the remaining horde below. The Dakariin advance was halted at the walls and the soldiers crowding the battlements started to notice. A weak cheer rose up in the ranks; arrow after arrow peppered the beleaguered ranks below as his archers renewed their attack.