Reaper Of Sorrows (Book 1) (7 page)

Rathe’s head lolled. Above him, the rotten brick ceiling gave way to firmer masonry beyond the doorway. They wended through twisting corridors for good while. After a last turn, the air cleared and brightened, and then a cloudless blue sky opened above his eyes. The cool air of his last dawn rippled his skin.

High stone walls guarded the executioner’s yard from sight of the citizens of Onareth, but that did not keep a handful of observers from climbing up and taking a seat to watch the fulfillment of the king’s judgment. Jeering calls echoed around the yard, and Rathe wondered if they knew the famed Scorpion was about to die.

“Put him down,” Cartach ordered, and Engus carefully settled Rathe on his feet.

Rathe might well have been floating, for all the lack of feeling in his limbs. Under his breath, he began muttering prayers of supplication to Ahnok, but his heart skipped when he glanced at the block atop a high, broad platform of dressed stone. The block was fashioned from a slab of black granite, with a smooth groove at its center. Beneath the groove sat a stone basin—just large enough to catch a man’s head.
It did not catch Thushar’s.

“Where is the priest of Ahnok?” Rathe asked woodenly.

Cartach gazed at him so long that he thought the brute had not heard. “You have no need of a priest.”

“All men of Cerrikoth are granted the right to seek absolution,” Rathe said. “As I draw breath, I demand that right.”

“Demand all you want, but no priest is coming to hear you.”

“This is sacrilege—”

Cartach cut him off with a slap. “Engus, bind this whining maggot to the pole.”

Rathe’s blood went to ice when he looked beyond the block to a tall wooden post stained black with old blood. He had seen the same at every village he had sacked in the last year. By his order, scores had suffered the scourge while bound to such a pole.
And so Ahnok passes his judgment in kind
.

“I do not understand,” Rathe said, as Engus prodded him forward.

Cartach shrugged. “King Nabar took mercy on you. You will taste the lash to appease Osaant, then you will suffer banishment. Seems too kind to me, but….”

Rathe heard what followed as a distant yammering. The irredeemable were banished to only one place in Cerrikoth: Fortress Hilan. Some said such a fate was worse than death. Besides the shame of banishment, in the forests thereabout lurked creatures forsaken by the gods, stalking nightmares with a hunger for living blood. In the end, life in Hilan was no less a death sentence than losing your head, only slower.
Yet, I will live … and Nub will have to find another to sup upon.

As Engus tied a hank of rope around Rathe’s wrists, a tall lanky fellow that might have been Cartach’s brother came out of a darkened doorway. He held a scourge with a dozen leather tongues, their tips glinting with steel barbs.

Singing a tuneless lullaby under his breath, Engus attached Rathe’s bindings to a rope that ran through a pulley at the top of the pole. From the pulley, the rope stretched to a winch. After testing his knot, Engus moved to the winch, caught the handle, and began cranking. Squealing and clattering, the device pulled Rathe’s arms above his head. Engus stopped and threw the locking lever when Rathe stood on his tiptoes.

“Make him dance, Engus,” Cartach called with a grin.

Engus chortled merrily, and started cranking again. Rathe bit back a groan as his bindings dug into the raw skin around his wrists. Engus did not stop again until Rathe’s feet lifted from the ground.

Heart pounding, Rathe vowed to face his penalty with as much dignity as Thushar had.
Our places should have been reversed, brother. It is not right that I should live, where you perished.

When the scourge fell, his teeth clenched so hard he thought they might shatter. When the next heavy stroke tore his back, he began to scream.

Chapter 8

A
s the birth of dawn drove the aged night into the grave of memory, the mounted soldiers followed a dusty road cutting through a sparsely wooded grassland. With the vanishing darkness also faded the glinting stars and the waning moon’s silver curve. Waking birds called from bush, shrub, and the occasional copse of bushy trees. The dewed greenery made for a heady scent, but went unappreciated.

Rathe rode at the head of seventeen outcasts surrounded by forty unkempt, rather malicious-looking soldiers clad in rusted mail and tattered leathers. At the head of the column rose the winged Reaver banner of Fortress Hilan.

It was a farce, that banner, Rathe knew as well as any true soldier of Cerrikoth. The scarlet skull of a fanged serpent hung between a pair of batwings, and rode a field of white above a brace of crossed, half-moon battle axes. There was no reaving in Hilan, the northernmost settlement of Cerrikoth, lying hard against the dark bastions of the Gyntor Mountains. Men sent there tried to survive terrible winters, disease, and the nightmarish creatures that hunted within those rocky crags.
And such will be my home and my fate.

Days had passed since Rathe suffered the lash, but he could still hear and feel the whistling snaps of barbed leather parting his flesh. A hundred stripes.
Death would have been easier
. It was not the pain that troubled him most, rather the disgrace of losing all he had fought and bled for since setting aside his father’s hoe for his king’s sword. Moreover, he was banished from all lands and cities of Cerrikoth, with the exception of Hilan and surrounding villages. If he chose to escape, the king who had shown him mercy would place a bounty on his head so large that every able-bodied fool within ten realms would devote their lives to capturing him. Once taken and brought back to Onareth, he would face execution, and such a death would neither be swift nor easy.

Out of habit, Rathe glanced over his fellow outcasts to make sure none were getting up to any mischief. He winced as crusted scabs stretched across his back. He might as well have saved himself the pain. Scoundrels the outcasts might be, but Rathe saw men just coming to the full understanding of what it meant to be sent to Hilan. They rode in silence, heads bowed. The shoulders of more than one shuddered, as they wept quietly at their fate. Prisoners no more in name, but prisoners all the same.

Captain Treon, a whip-thin despot with a witch’s long white hair, the piercing stare of a serpent, and the aspect of a starved corpse, had appointed Rathe the leader of the banished.

“Other than assigning minor duties, you lead nothing,” Treon had informed him, his voice a thin, rasping whisper. “Your purpose is reporting to me their past crimes, strengths, and weaknesses. Should any of these scoundrels misstep, you will pay the price of their folly with them.”

Rathe agreed to that readily enough. What choice did he have?

“You and your men are still soldiers of Cerrikoth, but until evidence proves otherwise, you are worth less to me than a smear of shite in a lackwit’s smallclothes. Should you or any of your men attempt escape, you and they will be executed on sight. As their leader, I will hold you responsible for their flight, or anything else they do. After all, a proper leader knows the minds of his men, no?”

Again, Rathe had seen no way or purpose to argue against that. The life he had known ended the night he pinned Girod to the headboard … or perhaps even farther back, when he had hewn the life from Noor. Like his fellows around him, King Nabar had given him a chance at a new life—not much of one, to be sure, but a chance.

Shifting in the saddle with a groan, Rathe pulled the cork stopper on a leather flask filled with a syrupy concoction so revolting he had at first believed it was poison. A grizzled healer had given it to him after tending his wounds with the admonition: “Drink this thrice a day until it is gone, and you will heal well enough.”

And so he had taken the brew as directed. Unfortunately, the flask never seemed any emptier. Whether it helped in mending flesh, Rathe did not know, but when he could keep the potion in his belly, it eased his wounds and lessened the sting of his fall.

His bald head glimmering in the sunlight, Loro trotted his mount up from behind the company and slowed at Rathe’s side. Formerly a sergeant of the City Watch of Onareth, Loro had lost his rank once for drunkenness, again for brawling and, like Rathe, this last time for sharing a bed with a woman he should have avoided. Even in the cool of dawn, sweat soaked the neck and underarms of the leather jerkin stretched taut across his chest and swollen belly. Fat though he was, Rathe judged that Loro carried a fair quantity of hard muscle and a warrior’s heart under those layers of suet. Of all the outcasts, only Loro seemed untroubled by his banishment.

“You are supposed to be scouting ahead of the company, not behind,” Rathe grumbled, glancing at Captain Treon to make sure the man had not observed Loro’s arrival.

Loro shrugged by way of explanation, then gave Rathe a long, appraising look. “Sooner you let your old life wither and die, the sooner you will feel better about the new.”

“And I should trust the wisdom of a viper?” Rathe rejoined, startled by the man’s insight.

“You sting me, friend,” Loro said, grinning broadly. “I am no viper, but a boar with a savage hunger for wine, plump teats, and lusty wenches.”

Rathe could not help but laugh at the man’s vulgarity. Loro joined in, bellowing wild guffaws to unnerve an executioner. Captain Treon gave them a withering stare until they fell silent, then faced forward. If he thought it odd that Loro had come up on the column unseen, he did not mention it. The man had seemed distracted of late, his flat gray eyes ever scanning. He might have been keeping a look out for raiding bands of plainsmen, but Rathe thought not. Treon seemed to be looking for something he had forgotten.

Rathe said, “I trust you didn’t find anything?”

Loro laughed again. “On the contrary. A caravan of women travel this way. Might not be women my mother would approve of … but then, she was an eyeless hedge witch with a taste for sour wine, and was convinced that smearing bat guano on her cheeks would keep her young.”

“What are you going on about?” Rathe asked, thinking he had misjudged the man’s sanity.

“Maidens of the Lyre draw near,” Loro said in exasperation. “They sing, dance, tell tales of heroes and fanciful places—surely you have heard of them?”

“I have,” Rathe said. “I would not have expected to find them so far from a proper city.” He had heard many stories of the traveling women, but had never come across them.

“It’s said they are daring,” Loro shrugged. “All that matters is this night I will have something prettier to look at than Lord Snake.” Rathe raised an eyebrow. “Captain Treon,” Loro said, lowering his voice.

Rathe sighed. “I should tell him what you found, before he thinks we are being attacked, and puts an arrow in the first woman to show her face.”

“Good idea. I will stay here and keep an eye on our sulking brothers,” Loro said with a sympathetic grin.

As Rathe reached Treon, a woman riding sidesaddle topped the rise ahead and drew near before halting. Her horse, pale as morning mist, had a regal bearing and fine lines. Rathe had seen a thousand such horses. He had not seen a thousand such women. A breeze played with her emerald green riding cloak, showing the silken folds of a pale yellow gown clinging to a figure that dried Rathe’s tongue. She noted his appraisal, and returned the favor with a lingering glance of her own.

He told himself to look away, but neither his eyes nor his head obeyed. What finally convinced him of his folly was a vision of Lisana as she had died. She had betrayed him, but he found it difficult to hold her to account, as she had been deceived herself.

“I am Lady Nesaea,” the newcomer said to Captain Treon. Sable ringlets tumbled over one shoulder, looking freshly washed and glowing in the sunlight. “In trade for your protection on our way north to the Shadow Road, the Maidens of the Lyre will gladly provide your gallant men our services.”

Nesaea glanced from Captain Treon to the other soldiers, her eyes so deeply blue as to look violet. When her gaze fell again on Rathe, she offered a smile seemingly meant for him alone, and he knew trouble had found him once more.

In his whispering rasp, looking as if he had stumbled across a hidden chest of gold, Captain Treon readily agreed to Lady Nesaea’s proposition. Rathe noted the man’s eagerness, though he did not share it. A pretty face, Rathe accepted, was one of those weaknesses Commander Rhonaag had mentioned. If he would have any sort of meaningful life, Rathe knew he would need to put his head down, follow orders, and behave as a green recruit eager to serve.

He told himself that and more, but when Nesaea wheeled her mount and rode back to her companions, Rathe could not look away from the curves of her figure nestled in the saddle, nor forget the enchanting expressiveness of her eyes.
I am a man cursed,
he thought without humor.

Within the hour, without slowing the march, the Maidens of the Lyre had merged their caravan with the column of soldiers. For the first time since setting out from Onareth, the Hilan men rode with something more than bland indifference to the world around them, and the outcasts shed some of their misery. Music and song helped, rising from the backs of a score of wagons that bore the look of broad-bellied ships, all painted gaily. The melodies were pleasant, but the beauty of the singers made the soldiers sit straighter in their saddles. Some even attempted to wipe off the dust coating their mail.

Captain Treon seemed to suffer their presence, but Rathe noted that he took a keen if furtive interest in Lady Nesaea. For her part, she returned his glances with coy looks of her own. A dagger of jealousy prodded Rathe’s heart, but he pushed it aside. If she would rather have a filthy snake for company of an evening, then so be it.

When Treon called a halt for the night a full two hours before they had ever made camp before, the Maidens of the Lyre wheeled their mule-drawn wagons into a broad circle.

“Well,” Loro said appreciatively, dismounting with a weary grunt, “they are not fools.”