Meek

Chapter 55: Heavy Losses

Even in the daytime, the blacksmith's shop was empty--except for Eli, Lara, Acuro and Gertrud.

The hearth was cold, the bellows were still. There was no hiss of steam in the cooling tank or ring of hammer against anvil, and dust covered the brickwork and tongs.

Eli frowned at the weapons on the workbench. Short swords, broadswords, a saber, a two-hander that looked about the right size for a troll. A battleaxe, a pile of daggers. Plus a few polearms leaned against the wall near a mound of bandit armor that still reeked of sweat and death.

"Are you sure about this?" Arcuro asked, for the fifth time.

"Stop bothering them," his mother said, then told Lara, "It's all yours. And the horses in the stable. Take whatever you want."

Arcuro scratched his curly hair. "If they don't come back, mother, their deaths are on our--"

"We're not doing this for you," Eli interrupted. "We're doing this for us."

Because even if he didn't know what he was, or what he was becoming, he knew this much: you didn't stand aside when people slaughtered children. Not troll children, not human children. Maybe he'd been born anew. And maybe he needed to learn, anew, the difference between right and wrong, just and unjust. But whatever he'd done, and whatever had been done to him--you didn't murder children.

"If you die--" Arcuro started.

"If we die," Eli interrupted again, "bury our bones in the trees."

"Oh," Lara said.

In dryn, Eli said, "You stay."

In dryn, she replied, "I come."

"Why? No good you."

She smiled at him with fake warmth and told Arcuro and Gertrud, "I'll just take one of the bows. I'm no use in a brawl, but I'm a far better tracker than Meek."

Oh. Right. That's why she'd come. So he could find the Bloodwitch--and the lady, though that felt less urgent now.

"I wish we could tell you more," Arcuro said, apologetically. "All we know is, they headed toward the Weep. The lady saw the risen, sent a rider for more mercenaries, and headed off."

"She loosed her pigeon, too," Gertrud said.

"We'll find them," Lara said, testing the draw of one of strung bows.

"Who'd she send the pigeon for?" Eli asked.

"I don't know," Arcuro said. "We don't know. I saw her talking with her lieutenant and her, um, companion, then she sent the bird."

"Her companion is her mage," Gertrud said.

"A three-fold one, you said," Eli told her.

"A three-fold one, I guessed."

"How can you guess such a thing?" Lara asked.

"You can't," Acuro said.

"Yet I did. Now you two, leave us." Gertrud shooed Lara and Arcuro away. "Both of you, out. I have something to say to Meek."

"Mother--"

"Go!" Gertrud snapped. After they left, she stepped to Eli. "Path of the Palm, huh?"

"Yes, mir."

"But you can only heal yourself."

"That's right."

"Makes you hard to kill."

"So far," he said.

"The Bloodwitch, though? She's more than a mage. She'll kill you ten times over. And her risen, they're not good at dying either."

"I'll watch my back."

"I don't care about that, Meek. I don't care if you live or die."

"Oh."

"I just--" She took a breath. "I need a promise from you."

"What's that?"

"If they're dead? If she already killed them?" Her face sagged and for a moment she looked like exactly what she was: a tough, frightened, wounded old woman. "You make sure they stay that way. You hear what I'm saying?"

"Yes, mir."

"We can't face that, you understand? If they're dead, you bury them."

At first, the tracks leaving West Town were obvious enough for Eli to follow. Wheel ruts headed northeast, from a wagon weighed down with a cargo that made his teeth ache.

He didn't know much about tracking, though. Sure, he'd picked up a few tricks working as a hayward's helper, but he'd mostly repaired fences and counted herds. And when the earthen road turned into cobblestones, he lost the trail.

Lara didn't, though. She pointed out the signs of the bandits' passing--and the mercenaries--while speaking mostly in dryn.

So Eli practiced his numbers and learned three words for 'horse droppings.' He learned far more than three swear words, because Lara truly wasn't good on a horse. Even worse than him, and he couldn't always manage a canter. A walk, a trot, or a gallop, fine, but not a canter.

So her mount kept wandering off while she cursed and sawed at the reins. Which, given the grimness of their task, offered a few blessed moments of lightheartedness.

At least until she found a shoe in the underbrush. A tiny, child's shoe.

"Oh, Mother." She bit her lip as she looked down at the curl of battered leather. "Oh, Meek."

He nudged his horse closer. Didn't know what to say, so he just lingered there, staying nearby. Reminding her that she wasn't alone.

"That's why they were trying to protect us," she said, blinking away tears. "Cause they couldn't protect them."

"We'll find them," he promised her.

She looked toward the distant Weep, which was hidden by rolling hills and new-growth forests. She half-sang a few words in dryn that he thought were a prayer. Then she silently continued onward.

She lost the trail briefly atop a smooth hump of bare rock, like the dome of a giant's bald head. She tossed Eli her reins and dismounted. Partly to inspect the ground but partly, he suspected, for a break from riding.

"The mercenaries turned east," she said, after walking in a circle around the edge of the rocky hump. "A day or so before the bandits came through, heading north."

Eli looked eastward. "The lady's forward camp is that way?"

"That's my guess."

He rubbled the stubble on his cheek. "We could follow them, join forces."

"If they're still there."

"Which they're probably not," he admitted, "considering the Bloodwitch went silent days ago. The chances are that they're fighting, bogged down somewhere."

"Plus, we don't know how much time we have." She swallowed. "We don't know how much time they have."

So they headed northward, only slightly faster on horseback than they'd been with the donkey cart. Still, eventually Lara's horse settled into a rhythm, alternating between trotting and walking, and they made better time. The hills flattened into a wide river valley that sloped toward a crease in the landscape.

And toward the still-distant Weep, which spanned the Ehrat River.

The ruins of farmhouses appeared more often, which after a time turned into the ruins of a village. The husks of a few dozen buildings moldered on either side of the road. The faint remains of wattle-and-daub walls were visible as bare spots among the grass and shrubs. Chipmunks watched from heaps of collapsed brick and lizards sunned themselves on the remains of stone foundations.

An hour later, the stones changed.

The edges smoothed. The rocks merged together.

And in the next village, they found stone walls fused into single pieces; curved, lumpy shapes like the prows of shattered ships. Chimneys sagged into pillars that reminded Eli of the 'stalagmites' in the clister caves.

They'd reached the outskirts of the Weep.

Wealthier villages had thrived closer to the ancient city of Ehrat Break, which meant more stone. Soon Lara was tracking the bandits through fields of hollow stone mounds, the remains of melted houses. Drooping windows and doors opened into shadowed interiors, like eye sockets in the skulls of enormous beasts.

"Blessdamn," Eli said.

Lara agreed, in dryn.

"And we ahead one two hours from city," he said.

"And we're still an hour or two from the city," she corrected.

"Still an hour or two," he repeated.

Lara frowned at the ground. "Hm."

"What?" He brought a spark close and barely detected faint indentations. "Horseshoe prints or a deer hooves?"

"The mercenaries rejoined this road," she told him. "Heading north."

"Following the bandits," he said.

"The first group," she said. "With the children. The ones who left the camp last night, they rode right through."

"Maybe we'll get lucky," he said. "Maybe the mercs already killed the witch."

She shot him a look. "You're the oddest combination of naive and vicious."

"The very definition of wisdom."

"You're such a burl," she said, but not un-fondly.

She moved slower for a time, her eyes on the ground, and he ate fist-fulls of cured olives, pit and all.

Then his forward spark detected something on the breeze. "Hold!"

Lara tugged too sharply on her reins, but for once her horse obeyed.

Eli drew his sword and sent his other spark sweeping to the sides while shooting the first one higher and forward. "I smell--"

Then the wind changed, and the stench of death washed over them.

"--that," he finished.

The sparks didn't detect any sign of danger, or of life. Just a lot of death. So they dismounted and crept stealthily closer. Well, Lara did. She moved as smooth and silent as a cloud's shadow. Eli just walked a little more quietly than usual.

Thirty feet ahead, a wide crossroads was covered with a flapping, fluttering carpet of crows and vultures. At their approach, the birds took flight with a rumble of wings and revealed the bodies.

Six of them lay in the crossroads, with two or three times that many farther along the road. The spark found others, fallen between the hollow mounds of half-melted buildings.

The stench made Eli's eyes water and the taste of olive turned bitter in his mouth.

Still, he stepped to one of the more-intact corpses. "Bandit." And after he checked a few more. "They're all bandits."

"These are," Lara said, walking slightly farther ahead. "Look at the trails. The mercenaries took their fallen fighters and--blight!"

A spark flashed, and found her staring between a row of low, sagging mounded buildings. Staring at a splash of blood against the stone. More than a splash. Looked like gallons of blood. Or like someone had swung a millstone instead of a sword and pulped his targets.

Eli stepped along the row, drawing his sword.

More blood.

He found more bodies, but only smears and drag-marks where mercenaries had fallen.

No sign of what caused that kind of bloodletting.

"Um," Lara said, looking around a corner.

The circling birds shrieked and cried overhead, then returned to the crossroads to feast.

"Eli," she called, looking at a bloody print. "Meek, here. I think this is--"

A spark followed a wide smear of blood around a corner and he saw the carcass. Chopped into pieces, yet five times the size of an ordinary man. At first he took it for a horse, but it was no horse.

"--a bear track," Lara finished.

He touched her elbow. "It's dead around the corner. It's, uh, not a normal bear."

"One of her pets."

"Yeah."

"Okay. Mother take me." She took a breath. "Okay."

She stepped around the corner ahead of him and made a noise at the sight. The bear's exposed bones were deformed and the flesh was a stew of rotten meat. Insects crawled and flew and burrowed.

"Looks like ..." He started, to take her mind off the carcass. "Um, looks to me like the mercs hit the bandits, then the bear hit the mercs."

"Yes," she said, after she surveyed the scene. "The mercs took heavy losses. They killed the--the bear then gathered their dead and wounded and fled."

"You mean they left."

She shook her head. "No, they fled. They grabbed their dead in a hurry and hauled arse eastward."

"After they killed the blood-bear?"

"Look like." She frowned at the bloated, hacked-apart bear corpse. "Uh ..."

"What?"

"That print I saw didn't come from this bear. It came from bigger one."