I Know Not (The Story of Fox Crow) (25 page)

      I remembered everything.

14 

The Hidden History

Behind Me

The world was in color, bolder and
richer than I had ever seen. Corpses stood, eyes angry and wounds still fresh, packed impossibly deep in the crypt, stretching for a mile in all directions. I stood, pulling myself from the cold stone floor before turning to a cloaked angel standing before me, towering over me.

      I had always known he was there.

      Something began to scrape my heart with veins of frost as the figure raised his arms. Two hands, carved of aged alabaster, emerged from within the robe woven of webs and night. In one palm sat an old, withered heart, as if taken from a man’s chest and plunged into a jar of salt. The blackened, saddened thing was strewn with black feathers, and it beat pitifully against the fingers that retrained it. In the other hand was a monstrous, malevolent thing, an organ that never sound home in any sane man’s chest. Tentacles sprouted from the surface and reached for me, eyes opening up across the powerful muscle, weeping streams of blood that broke into thorns and shards of glass against the floor. He seemed offering both to me, waiting with the patience of one who has no life left to trickle through the hourglass.

      Then, for the first time, I turned, and I ran.

      I burst through the crowd of my victims that pressed in, screaming curses written in guilt and death. The voices rushed at me, filling my head. My mind spun like a crippled bird, whirling and dying and screaming– the Animal inside me roared like the primal thing it was, shaking the rafters of my soul and flooding me with its strength. Then it was no longer in me, but beside me, a huge, hairy thing of claws and fangs, reaching out for me in its endless rage. I dove beneath the grasping talons and made for the stairs, which became a forest in the wild places of the Kingdom. No, it was not the kingdom. It was the Kingdoms, the split Kingdom, before King Ryan - during the Reunification War.

      I had a family, a loving upbringing I can barely remember. I was ten when I joined up with the baggage train to Ryan’s army. I wanted to fight for my country, to follow a real hero into battle, but the quartermaster placed me where men have placed boys for centuries…in the rear to distribute and manage the supplies needed to run an army.

      I was cold and hungry, and very, very tired. I was young and terrified. The wave of corruption and power before the battle lines of the Kingdom’s finest troops reached in and twisted me. An old toothless man, leader of the baggage train we were set at spit black juice from the shredded root he was chewing and watched grimly. I asked if we would survive. “If they live,” he said in a cancerish voice as he gestured to the wall of men between ourselves and the massed barbarian horde - as good as demons to me, “we live. Those beasts won’t recognize the articles of war. If they reach us they will slay us.”

      “Will Ryan save us?”

      He laughed, wheezing like a bent and broken tree, “If he lives he will try. Our well being is in the hands of Fate now, boy, and Fate cares not if you be a hero, or a fool. She is cruel or kind all the same.”

      I saw the brave soldiers die by the thousands, but more heralded to Ryan’ banner to take up the fight than died on the spears and swords of the western barbarians. I saw the scavengers who came and picked over the bodies of the dead. The scavengers grew rich off of the blood of other men, not risking any of their own. I saw the soldiers, too tired to stop them from killing the few poor bastards that were still alive when the vultures got to them.

      I knew then it was better to be a scavenger than a soldier. Watching the butchered men scream for healing that would not come, seeing entire cities burned, seeing the very earth burned and spoiled beneath the feet of barbarians, something died within me. I remember watching the redcaps climb from their dark places and feast on the fallen heroes at night. I was ten years old.

      A roar behind me caused me to turn and bolt. I dodged past the scene and ran through the woods to the feet of the mountains, leagues flying beneath my feet. I was there, and I saw Ryan, bloody and desperate, lead those last few men on the charge that made him King, re–united the Kingdom, and drove the few surviving enemy back over the mountains. I was there when he thanked us, and paid us in debased campaign coins, and rode off for his throne and his palace, leaving us in the dirt. I watched myself looking left and right, to the face of each man, hoping for orders that would make everything make sense, that would tell me where to go next, orders that would never come.

      I followed the lost boy across the Kingdom as his debased coin was stolen, spent, or swindled away. The nightmares pressed in on me as I traveled, cold and alone towards a half remembered hovel. Ryan got a parade to each capital, I trod on frozen feet to a burnt, abandoned place I once called home. Winter pressed in as I lay screaming in the clutches of my parents bones. The Barbarians had been here, or Ryan’s abandoned soldiers looting toward home. I had been spared their fate by my foolishness.

      I trudged along the icy, mud–covered roads of the newly re–minted Kingdom trying to find food and shelter. There was none. No one had any use for another mouth to feed, at least not until next fall when the harvests could be brought in.

      I stumbled through dreaming forest which became an alley in some, unnamed city. Four boys were savaging a fifth. The victim was so small, so defenseless, and though all the fight had been knocked out of him the older boys continued to kick him -me- to kick me mercilessly. I did not scream, did not yell, I only stared blankly out into space, tears crawling down my face, imagining their deaths over and over and over.

      The Beast broke into the alley and I leapt, my hands grasping a low windowsill. In seconds I was moving upwards, but the Beast did not follow. It had been distracted by the bullies, whom it tore into ribbons of flesh that splashed from the walls. It saved the younger me, still laying on the ground, for last.

      I heard my own screams as I shattered a window and crawled inside, finding myself at night, in a building I knew intimately. The long shadows and sharp edges were more horrible than any creature of tooth and claw. I saw myself in bed and I couldn’t breathe.

      Those were long nights in an orphanage, under the cruel hands of the masters of that place. We were hired out for jobs to ear our keep, dangerous toil in inhuman conditions. We did it to earn our gruel and place on infested straw mattresses. I remember the punishments of Master Niall, sometimes given in the middle of the night for offenses not remembered. We didn’t understand it for what it was. We just saw it as another kind of beating.

      The next year I was one of the boys kicking smaller children. Later that year Niall came for me in the middle of the night. The smell of his breath was like dog shit. I snatched a sharp knife from his bed stand and severed his dangling fruit. His screams echoed off of the walls like a nightmare that propelled me off into the winter cold.

      Faced with starvation and frostbite, I killed a sleeping man for his food and his gold. The feeling of power tickled my senses and pushed back the utter impotence that had taken me. By the time I was twelve, I was a petty murderer on the streets of a city, any city, every city, in the Kingdom. I would kill, and steal, until the bounties became too high, and then slip out for another place where I would start all over.

      I was fifteen when one of the derelict of the city came to find me and offered me gold in exchange for a life. I did not want to believe him, but a handful of silver convinced me he may have a coin or two of gold to spend. It was not a simple murder, it was not done subtly, but the man died and somehow I escaped. Payment was made, as promised, but it was delivered by a man with the gaunt face of the dead. He moaned that I had been noticed, that I had potential. If I was willing to pay. I looked at the short stack of buttery golden coins in my hand and closed my fist over top of them. I wanted more.

      The Beast shattered into the room and reached for me, claws dripping with a hundred vile humors. I gathered the dark curtain into a net and tossed it at the thing, and it became a thick straw mat upon which an older me was fighting.

      During this time I drank other’s life like cheap wine, hunting for and against the law to catch lesser criminals to gather the gold for my training. I was soaking up the arts of murder, far to the south.

      A fantastically ugly woman, made up of sharp points and cutting edges, looked at me from over a rooftop as my legs cart wheeled into space. Now I remember why I wear my sword on my back. I remember her name is Elidra as she sneers, “The moment you cut a corner, it will leave an edge sharp enough to slit your throat.”

      I shuddered. The unfamiliar voice was colder than all the winters throughout time. I absently wandered to a fire in a forest where a man built like a razor blade, spoke intensely, “Not all stealth is quiet. The ears hear danger in the unfamiliar, boy. If an ear is used to a creaking mill, no creaking will disturb the sleeper.”

      I turned away and there were dozens of others, each one bore me no love, but taught me in exchange for the gold I earned by murder. a huge weight slammed me and I hit the ground. Suddenly I was laying down and a man was jabbing an inked needle into my back hundreds, thousands of times. He was drawing the lines that bound me into the Ragmen, the symbol of the Great Murderer and Master of Secrets, Isahd.

      There were whispers that the tattoo would grow, that it would twist, and that it would burrow into the very soul.

      I heard “Are you going to get up, or am I going to kill you here?”

      I rolled to my feet but the teacher I expected was not there, instead a great bearish western barbarian –Bjorlov!- was beating me badly with the wooden weapons. He picked me up and shook me like a mastiff with a drunk rat, “’ero’s die boy! You ‘ave to do better!”

      He threw me to the mat, but an even older me stood up into my own head. It was not Bjorloff teaching me, it was the Beast coming in full force. But I did not fear. Since the days of my training I have had hundreds of lessons, thousands of victims. The rage inside is my tool, not my master.

      The Beast lunged, hateful, hurtful, and hungry. I simply moved to the side, lashing out with a whip made of black steel and drawing a bloody line down its flanks. The wall at then of his whole body thrust shattered into dust, but as I turned the Animal was exploding out of the cloud of chalky dust. I went low, flinging the blade overhead as the storm of teeth and claws blew past. His roar changed to a scream as he fell and destroyed another wall within myself.

      There are some men who see a rock and know there is a sculpture inside. There are those that see a blank page and can feel the soft curves of the story and wishes to bed down upon it. There are those that listen to the wind and the rain and can capture the notes in fleeting puffs of air. The Dark Thing is like that. I am like that. Assassins are like that. Our medium is death.

      The Beast blew by one final time and I cut it three times, spilling blood, bile, and viscera across the entire road.

      Road? It was not the Beast. I was carrying a crossbow. I had shot a Knight.. No! An Inquisitor like the knight of Amsar on the road. I had pierced this holy judge’s foot to the ground, then calmly reloaded as he sought to free himself. I laughed as he tore himself free, mangling his foot.

      He drew his Angel–hilted sword and struggled toward me as I punctured his lung, crushing his chest–plate in. I had taken his bright sword from his numb fingers and hacked his head from his body with the impossibly sharp edge. It flashed and crackled, hot lightning clinging like fire as the blade blackened as my victim’s head tumbled down the hill and splashed into a pond surrounded by fir trees. I looked at its darkened surface and raised my prize into the sky, cackling with triumph. I brought the blade to my eye as the interior shadows deepened.