Blackmark (The Kingsmen Chronicles #1): An Epic Fantasy Adventure Sword and Highland Magic Page 9

  Jherrick den'Tharn stared down into the glassy eyes of the dead boy.

  The fey blue light of the Roushenn Palace Hinterhaft flickered uneasily over the boy's pale features, accusatory like ghosts lingering at the edges of Jherrick's vision. He hunkered by the body, the leather of his cobalt Guardsman jerkin creaking slightly in the cavernous silence. A catacomb-thick darkness filled the empty corridor behind the walls of Roushenn, but for the wisping globes of vague blue light that gently traversed the upper reaches of the Hinterhaft’s arched ceilings. Like dusky sand water swirled in a glass, the fae-wisps sometimes floated down towards the floors. Curious about death, their blue lights never lingered long from a corpse, inquisitive like fireflies. One wisped close to the boy's face, lighting its sallow emptiness, those candlewax-smooth features. Just a bristling of beard starting there, on the chin. Purpled bruises around the boy's neck standing out in livid detail. Four strong fingermarks upon each side.

  Jherrick hadn't killed the boy. Those weren't his orders.

  He waved one hand at the blue globe, and it wafted away.

  In another place, in another life, the lad could have been Jherrick's brother. They had the same straw-gold hair, the same fair skin, the same sea-grey eyes, a similar lean stature. Twelve or thirteen, the boy had been just on the cusp of manhood, that transition where a kitchen page starts to train at waiting table to move up in life, to become a proper servingman. Jherrick had started that way, before he'd been moved into Palace Guard by the ruse dealt for him by his true allegiance.

  Deal with that. That's what Castellan Lhaurent had said.

  Deal with that. Like the dead youngster was just some nuisance, some rotten cord of wood to be heaped upon the slag-pile.

  With a resolute sigh, Jherrick grasped the lad's arm, hauling the dead weight up over his shoulders. Jherrick was lean for his twenty-three years, but it was all muscle, honed to perfection upon the dry side of a sword. Though most of his official time was spent reading through lists and ledgers with Guard-Captain Olea den'Alrahel, his unofficial time was spent doing odious chores such as this for the Khehemni Lothren, many of which required a fit frame and a hardened mind.

  The boy's slender form dangled across his shoulders as Jherrick moved at a brisk walk, sliding effortlessly behind Roushenn’s walls through the Hinterhaft corridor. The arched catacomb soon opened out into a massive space whose heights were lost but for the vapid blue globes. Jherrick traversed it diagonally, to a section of wall that saw little use. He pushed on the stone and some mechanism clicked. A section of wall pivoted away to reveal one of the little-used servant's corridors of Roushenn. The torch-brackets were few and far apart this deep inside the mountain, and it had been the lad's bad luck to have taken this particular shortcut with the delivery of spices he was making from one larder to another.

  And his further bad luck to lean against this particular section of wall while adjusting his sack over his shoulder.

  Not many stumbled upon the five sections of wall in all of Roushenn that could access the Hinterhaft. Four of them had been partially blocked by large armoires and bookcases, so that one had to sidle into a shadowy niche to give the wall a push. But this one, a little-used path between larders, was left unblocked for deliveries. And so it was now that Jherrick delivered the dead lad's body back out the hidden door like a sack of grain, stealing along a quiet section of corridor that led to the east garden.

  It was full night as he pushed on the garden door and into the soft warm night. Summer was here in full, and a peeping chorus of frogs followed his quiet movements, the only mourning that the poor dead boy would ever get. Unease gnawed in Jherrick's gut as he pushed through a little-known door in the rear of the palace guard-wall, one that led directly to the Kingswood. Patrolled by Guardsmen of Jherrick's own allegiance, he received only shadowy nods, a regular as he was through this door in the dead of night. Nodding back, he moved off down the path with his burden, his bootfalls a dull thump upon the thick loam.

  The Kingswood should have been a place of solace. Shifting shadows filled the vegetation from a slivered summer moon. A low double-hoot of a bridge-owl reached his ears. The trickle of water spilled over rocks as Jherrick stepped carefully over a stream. The night was silent but for this music around him, a synergy most ignored. But not Jherrick. The night was his protection in his duty, and he had learned to take its solace when he could. Sometimes he thought he heard the night speaking to him, as if spirits lingered in the trees, whispering absolution in the rustling of the leaves. Salvation for a young life gone wrong. It made him come to peace to walk beneath the trees and believe it so, a kind of empty bliss where he could ignore the heavy burden across his shoulders.

  But his midnight sojourn ended too soon for true solace. The cedar and barreloak hollow where the wolves knew to expect their meat loomed suddenly, a sallow slope of last-year's leaves showing the deep rents and claw marks of constant scuffle over gristle and sinew. It was a dark place, riven with a desperate energy. The smell of death lingered here, the cloying stench of entrails ripped apart and bones cracked open, a latrine acridity that no midnight wind could scour clean.

  Surveying the scene, so calm now in shifting grey shadows, Jherrick’s stomach churned into a gripping knot, knowing how it would go. Knowing how much torn flesh the dead boy's body was about to become. Knowing how the wolves would prowl in, wary at first, sniffing for life. And when the meat was found to be unable to fight back, they would surge with yips and growls, teeth flashing into blue skin, worrying the dead boy's body until sluggish purple blood coated their muzzles black in the night shadows.

  A howl of expectation sounded, a little too near. Jherrick's sword was in his hand, fast. And suddenly, he knew he couldn't leave the boy there, not like that. Not to be ripped apart like all the others. His flesh was too young, too pure, too… something.

  Too good to make a meal for wolves.

  Backing out of the hollow, Jherrick moved away from the slope, his sword still out. Watchful eyes were upon him, glinting by the high moonlight above the boughs. He could almost hear the pack's hunting tension in the dark, like bowstring pulled taut for a long shot. And they could feel his own readiness, his sword glinting in the darkness as much as their eyes, that he was a predator in the night as much as they.

  Just as fast with his own kind of claw.

  “Come try me,” Jherrick murmured to their tension. “Come for your meat if you dare. But this one’s not coming to you. Not this time.”

  His legs were strong as trees beneath his load, his posture wired and fierce. He'd drop the body to fight if he needed to, but it wasn't going to come to that. Jherrick could feel them, drifting away like smoke, back through the silver-dark cedars. A ready enemy was no enemy to fight.

  “Smart choice.” Jherrick murmured to the rustling silence. He slid his sword away. Now that the possibility of a fight had passed, he let himself shiver, let his body shudder it out, relieved. Something he could only show to the night, this weakness. Not something he could ever show to the Lothren’s watchful gaze. Hefting the body more securely atop his shoulders, he thought of where to take it. And suddenly, he knew. The boy's mother was a mushroom-hunter for the palace. Jherrick knew she went out every dawn from her modest cottage in the Second Tier, taking the same path through the Kingswood to her favorite spots. Jherrick angled for that path now, picking his way off-trail through fern and snake-vine.

  Dawn was kissing the pale sky as he found the right path at last. Gently, he unloaded his cargo, settling the boy's body in the middle of the cedar-strewn litter of the path. Unsheathing one longknife, he sliced the boy's purse strings, took the leather pouch. He raided the boy of a lapis pendant that wasn't worth much, and a stout ring of silver with a decent sapphire, probably once belonging to the boy's father. The mother would find the lad, think he'd come to visit her as a surprise, and that highwaymen had gotten him in the night.

  His gaze roved the scene, making sure it looked right.
The boy looked almost peaceful like that, curled on his side, as if sleeping. Like a fire-yarn where a young boy stumbles into a ring of fae-caps and stumbles out years later, on the cusp of manhood, sleeping deep from his time dreaming in the fae lands. Jherrick was about to turn and go, when he suddenly paused. Something pulled at him; a memory of a peaceful life lost. A family, lost. He knelt, setting the ring upon a flat white stone in the path, as if it had been carelessly dropped. Where he knew the morning sun would find it through a break in the oaks.

  Where he knew the mother would see it.

  Slipping back into the thick vegetation, he hunkered beneath a madrona. A sense of rightness filled him, at what he had done. So beautiful the scene; so peaceful. Early-summer henianthus was in full bloom, and the bush he lingered behind was fragrant with pompous purple bells, their scent wafting forgiveness through his tired body. The glossy leaves and ostentatious blossoms would catch the eye, distracting from the waiting man behind.

  A chorus of titwidget and bunting-sparrow erupted around him in their spring courting glory. And as the sunlight from the eastern side of the Kingsmountains dappled the forest, the mother finally came into view. She was still young, upright, with long blonde hair bound over her shoulder. A true woodswoman of Alrou-Mendera, strong like Jherrick’s own mother had been, she wore breeches and a fitted hunting-jacket, and boots for foraging. Her gaze swept the verge of the path, a basket upon her arm. And then swept the path ahead. She stopped. Gasped. Ran. Fell to her knees screaming. Weeping. Jherrick saw her glance at the flat white stone in the path, saw her pick up the sapphire ring, glinting in the sunlight. A long wail ripped through her, and she flung herself over her dead son.

  It was somehow worse than the howl of wolves.

  Bitterness twisted Jherrick's gut. He melted back into the vegetation, a shadow lost in the underbrush.