Marked for Death

Chapter 18

Deothen frowned. Sallah’s eyes widened. Gweir and Brendis offered up quick prayers to the Silver Flame. Levritt retched over the side of his horse.

Kandler stared out at the hard land below. He knew Burch was looking back at him, but he ignored it. He didn’t think he could bear seeing the pain in his friend’s eyes. The shifter never liked it here in the Mournland, and Kandler felt guilty for having to drag his old friend back here once more.

“I heard the tales,” said Deothen, “but they were impossible to believe.”

Kandler nodded for Burch to lead the hunters down the trail. “You’re sure to see stranger things.”

The hunters rode down the hill after Burch in single file. Gweir and Brendis continued praying, and Levritt joined them. Soon they began a solemn hymn.

Deothen turned in his saddle to scold them. “Quiet, please. If the Blooded are out there, I’d rather not alert them.” He called to Kandler before him. “I believe the servants of Vol have been spying on us since we left Thrane.”

“All the way through Breland to here? That’s bold.”

“Not during the day, of course, but every night when we staked camp I could feel them out there watching us.”

“Didyou ever see them?”

“Once,” Deothen said. “One of them got close enough for Gweir to hit with a burning arrow. They stayed farther away after that.”

Burch looked over his shoulder at Kandler and Deothen and shushed them. “You’re worse than the singers,” he said.

“Where are we going?” Kandler asked.

Burch pointed toward the ford. “Tracks enter the river there. Hard to tell after that.”

Kandler cursed. “It would have to go through there, wouldn’t it?”

“Shouldn’t we ride faster?” Sallah asked. “Now that we’re free of the mist, what keeps us from moving at speed?”

“Respect for the dead,” said Kandler, gesturing at the bodies mounded ahead of them. “Once we’re past the battlefield, it’s a race to see who can find these Blooded of yours first.”

As the hunters neared the battlefield, Levritt retched again. Kandler wrinkled his nose at the scent, but he refused to comment. It was never easy to see this much death. He’d been here more than once, and it still turned his stomach. Everywhere lay bodies, right where they’d fallen four years past. Many of the faces still turned toward the sky, their open eyes and mouths full of water from a recent storm.

Not a spot of rot touched the skin of the fallen forms. Some of the suits of armor bore spots of rust, their luster long since tarnished away, as did many of the weapons, several of which were still coated in the dried, black blood of their owners’ foes.

“This would be a thieves’ paradise,” Deothen said as he marveled at the scene.

“Most thieves value their lives more than the number of rusty suits of armor they could stack on a wagon,” said Kandler. “Only the desperate enter the Mournland.”

“What’s that over there?” Deothen asked. He pointed at fractured stone spire stabbing toward the sky at the edge of the ford. The top part of it lay in pieces near its feet.

Kandler cocked his head at it. “That’s the monument the Mardakines put up here after the end of the War. Old Entiss carved the symbol of the Sovereign Host into an obelisk he cut out of the floor of the crater. About forty of us carted it out here one day and set it up. That’s when we cleared the path through the corpses. We figured moving them was more respectful than running them over.”

“How long has it been since you’ve seen it?”

“Burch and I haven’t pierced the veil for the better part of a year. The last time we came this way, the monument was untouched.”

“The trail passes right by it, boss,” said Burch.

“We’ll check it out.”

As the hunters rode through the battlefield, Sallah sneezed. “What is that smell?” she asked. “It’s not rot. It’s… something else.”

“Old flesh,” Burch said. “Rust. Stale water.”

“All three,” Sallah said before she sneezed again.

Kandler gazed out over the hundreds of yards of bodies. Near the path, they were stacked three and four deep, but they thinned out farther away. Some were in pieces, hacked apart during the battle before the event that killed the rest.

Others were whole, their skin intact, their armor un-pierced. Their faces, though, bore looks of terror far worse than the pained grimaces of those who had met an earlier death.

“What in the light of the Silver Flame happened here?” Deothen asked.

“The Day of Mourning,” Burch said, just as if those four words said everything there was to be said.

“We know that,” said Sallah, “but just what does that mean?”

“No one knows for sure,” said Kandler. He struggled for the right words. “In 994, the War heated up again. Cyre was situated in the middle of Old Galifar, the old empire, which forced it to fight battles on many fronts. Thrane, Breland, Darguun, Valenar, Karrnath-they all charged into Cyre at one point or another.”

“Who fought here on that day?”

“Whose bodies are we riding through?” Kandler gazed out at the time-frozen carnage, rain-washed clean of all but the most encrusted of the blood spilled there long ago. “This was a three-way affair. Breland ran Argonth up along the Howling Peaks and the Seawall Mountains until it reached the tower at Kennrun, right where the mountains came to an end. Its army got off there and marched the rest of the way into Cyre, hoping to take the Cyrans by surprise.”

“Argonth?” said Brendis. “The Floating Fortress? I hear it’s as large as a city, big enough to blot out the sun. Have you seen it?”

Kandler nodded. “I served on it. Burch and I watched the Breland army march into Cyre, off to its doom. Soon after, our scouts brought word of a goblin force marching north from Darguun. It launched out of Gorgonhorn, a fort just on the other side of Point Mountain, the last of the Seawall Mountains. The Llesh Haruuc, the hobgoblin leader, wanted to extend the goblins’ reach, and like most scavengers he figured that he’d clean up after the real fight was over. The goblins got there too early, though, and their warchiefs couldn’t hold them back. The sight of the Cyran and Brelander armies clashing in this valley got their blood up, and they charged right in.”

Kandler stopped talking for a moment.

“What happened then?” Sallah asked.

“No one knows for sure. The battle raged on for three days, and at the dawn of the third day, everyone died. Whatever happened, it probably didn’t start here. We’re almost on the edge of the Mournland. Most people think something horrible happened in the Cyran capital. Some figure the princess made a bad, desperate deal with the Dark Six, maybe just the Devourer, and it finally came time to feed the beast. Others guess that one of the other countries involved in the war caused it, but they all deny it. If they did, they probably didn’t get what they wanted out of it. The creation of the Mournland ripped the heart out of Old Galifar. Most of the smarter people I’ve met-wizards, mostly-think it wasn’t any of that. They have this theory about different ‘planes of existence’ that orbit our world, waxing and waning with respect to us like the moons. They think the planes aligned in a once-in-forever kind of event that broke down the space between us and those places.”

“What do you believe?” Sallah asked.

Kandler grimaced as the hunters trotted the last few yards toward the broken monument. “I look out there,” he said, “and I sometimes think that if any part of the world looks more like Dolurrh I’ve never seen it.”

The justicar dismounted and walked up to the monument. The others did the same and joined him. The river gurgled a stone’s throw away. Kandler knelt next to the toppled part of the obelisk and closed his eyes. Deothen put a hand on his shoulder.

“You surprise me,” the elder knight said. “I didn’t think you were a believer.”

Kandler brushed the man’s hand away and stood up. “I’m not,” he said. His eyes burned red with suppressed grief, but his face remained grim. “Before we put up the monument, some of us searched the battlefield for our friends.”

Kandler strode over to the wider end of the stone and knelt down to examine the break. “I buried my wife here,” he said.

Sallah gasped. “Here, among all this death? Why did you not take her from this place and give her a proper burial?”

Kandler shook his head. “This is the way she would have wanted it. Out there… that’s not her homeland. For better or for worse, right where we’re standing, this is Cyre.” Kandler bit the side of his thumb until the urge to weep went away. “This was her home. She belongs here. Someday, maybe it will belong to her again.”