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Authors: David Farland

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BOOK: Sons of the Oak
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Then he recalled the cracking sound in the woods when he'd first found the bodies. It had been loud. Too loud for a creature that moved as silently as a strengi-saat.
The monsters had been trying to draw us away from their young, Fallion realized, the way that a peeweet will fly up and give her call to draw you from her nest.
Breathlessly, he raced to the lower levels of the keep, burst down the short hallway, and threw open the door to Rhianna's room.
He found her lying quietly in bed, her face unnaturally pale, almost white, drained of blood by the healers' opium. Someone had brushed the twigs and leaves from her hair, and washed her face, and Fallion felt astonished that he hadn't noticed before that she was pretty, with flawless skin and a thin, dainty mouth.
The room was dark. There should have been a candle or two burning by the bed, but either the candles had gone out, or the healers had blown them out so that Rhianna could sleep more easily.
Yet as Fallion held his torch aloft, it seemed that its light grew wan, unable to penetrate the gloom. He felt a faint breeze tickle his right cheek, and glanced toward the window. Shards of glass showed where it had been broken, and other shards lay on the floor. Something had hit the window from the outside.
Humfrey came creeping into the room, hissed a warning. “Dead. Smell dead.”
Fallion inhaled deeply, caught a whiff of putrefaction. He could not see beyond the bars of the windows. It seemed that the gloom grew deeper there, so deep that even the torchlight could not penetrate it.
Humfrey hissed in terror and bolted out the door.
Fallion's heart raced, and he held the torch aloft. He drew his dagger and held it before him. “I know you're there,” he said weakly.
There came an answering growl, so soft, like the whisper of distant thunder rolling down from the hills. The torch sputtered and began to die.
Fallion saw the flames suddenly diminishing in size, fighting to stay lit. There was no wind to blow them out.
The strengi-saat is doing it, Fallion realized, sucking away light, the way that it had in the forest.
Fallion's heart pounded, and he suddenly wished for light, wished for all of the light in the world. He leapt toward the window, hoping that like a bear or a wolf the monster would fear his fire. He thrust the torch through
the bars, and suddenly it blazed, impossibly bright, like the flames in an ironmonger's hearth.
The fire almost seemed to wrap around his arm.
And then he saw the strengi-saat—its enormous head and black eye right outside the window, so much larger than he'd expected.
Many creatures do not look like their young. Fallion had expected from the young that the monster would have soft black fur like a sable or a cat. But the thing that he saw was practically hairless. Its skin was dark and scabby, and though it had no ears, a large tympanum—black skin as tight as a drum—covered much of the head, right behind its eye. The eye itself was completely black, and Fallion saw no hint of a pupil in it. Instead, it looked dull and lifeless and reflected no light, not even the fire of his flaming torch.
If evil could come to life, Fallion thought, this is what it would look like.
“Yaaah!” Fallion shouted as he shoved the torch into the monster's face.
The torch blazed as if it had just been dipped in oil, and the strengi-saat gave out a harsh cry—not the bell-like tolling that it had given on the hunt, but a shriek of terror. It opened its mouth wide as it did so, revealing long sharp teeth like yellowed ivory, and Fallion let go of the torch, sent it plunging into the monster's jaws.
The torch blazed brighter and brighter, as if the beast's breath had caught fire, and giddily Fallion realized that this creature feared fire for good reason: it seemed to catch fire almost at the very smell of smoke.
The strengi-saat leapt from the wall and Fallion saw it now in full as it dropped toward the road. The light shining through the membrane in its wings revealed ghastly veins.
Outside, a guardsman upon the walls gave a shout of alarm. Fallion saw the gleam of burnished armor as the man rushed along the wall, drawing a great bow to the full.
The monster glided from the window and hit the road, perhaps thirty yards out, and crouched for a moment, like a panther looking for a place to spring. It shook its mouth and the torch flew out, went rolling across the ground, growing dim as an ember.
To Fallion's surprise, it seemed that the torch was almost gone, burnt to a stub, though a moment ago it had been as long as his arm.
Fallion feared that the beast would escape in the darkness.
But at that moment an arrow flashed past the torch and Fallion heard a resounding
thwock
as it struck the beast's ribs. The wounded strengi-saat appeared only as a shadow now, a blackness against the night, as it leapt into the air. But Fallion heard the twang of arrows from three or four directions, and some shafts shattered against stone walls while others hit the beast.
He drew his head back from the window, wary of stray arrows, and heard triumphant shouts. “We got it!” “Damn it's big!”
Fallion peered out. The ground was only two stories below and the monster had not gotten more than two hundred feet from him. The guards rushed to it with torches in hand. These were force soldiers, rich with endowments, and they ran with superhuman speed, converging on the beast as soon as it hit the ground, plunging swords into it.
It lay on the cobblestones, a looming shadow, and gave one final cry, a sound that began as a snarl as loud as thunder, and ended with a wail. The noise made Fallion's heart quaver, and hairs rose on the back of his neck.
Then it succumbed, dropping as if its life had fled in that horrible cry.
Fallion peered out the window and drew a breath of astonishment. He had only seen the strengi-saats from a distance, shadows against the trees, and had thought them to be a little longer than his horse. But now he saw that the beast was four times the length of a tall man, and that it dwarfed him.
The guards were talking, babbling almost giddily, like young hunters after their first kill. Fallion couldn't make out all of their words.
“How did it get over the walls?” someone asked, and another added, “Without being seen?”
There were mumbled responses. No one seemed to know, but one guard, the one who had first raised the cry, said distinctly, “It came from there,” nodding toward the keep. “It's all shadows there. I would not have seen it if someone hadn't launched a torch at it.”
The guards stared up at the window: at Fallion. Even though the room was not lit, Fallion had no doubt that they saw him, for these were force soldiers, gifted with endowments of sight.
They peered at him in breathless silence, and someone said softly, “Fallion.”
He saw fear in the men's faces. They were imagining the punishment they'd get for letting such a monster near the royal heir.
“I'm all right,” he said weakly, reassuring them.
But from the far-seer's tower came the long plaintive bellow of a warhorn, and suddenly the warriors were bounding off, running up to defend the castle walls.
Fallion's heart raced as he imagined strengi-saats attacking in force.
ASGAROTH
Every lord at some time must resort to intimidation to govern his people. I find it best to be consistently swift and brutal, lest my enemies confuse my kindness with a lack of resolve.
 
—Shadoath
But it was not strengi-saats that came against Castle Coorm.
Iome stood upon the walls above the gate and looked down upon a small contingent of warriors, perhaps fifty in all, mounted upon their horses out in the darkness, out beyond the moat. Three of them bore torches, and Iome could see the party well. They were a mixed bag—knights from Crowthen in their black mail upon black horses; minor nobles from Beldinook in their heavy steel plate, their tall white war lances raised to the sky; burly axmen from Internook dressed in gray.
Behind them came a train of long wagons, the kind used for transporting horsemen's lances.
Taken altogether, they looked as scruffy as poachers, as cruel as a band of brigands.
Their leader though, he was something altogether different: he was a tall man, and lean, and sat aback a reddish destrier, a blood mount from Inkarra, bred to travel dark roads.
The leader wore no armor or device to tell where he came from. Instead he wore robes all of gray, with a deep hood that hid his face. His cape pin was made of bright silver—an owl with flaming yellow eyes—and his only weapons seemed to be a boot dagger and a war bow of black ash that was very tall, strapped in a pack on the back of his horse.
There was a darkness about the man, as if shadows bled from his pores and drifted about him like a haze.
He is not of this world, Iome thought, her heart pounding in fear. King Anders of South Crowthen had given himself to a locus, a creature of the netherworld, a being of pure evil, and if anything was left of Anders, Iome could not see it. The creature before her had been transformed into something altogether different.
Iome studied the warriors around the dark rider, looking for anyone that might be his accomplice, the man she had heard called Shadoath.
One ruffian spoke up, a fat strapping warlord of Internook, “We come to parley.” Iome recognized him.
“Draw near, Olmarg,” Iome said, “and speak.”
Olmarg glanced at the shadow man, as if seeking his permission, then spurred his own potbellied war pony to the edge of the drawbridge.
Olmarg looked up at Iome, the old cutthroat's face a mass of white scars. He wore gray sealskins, and his silver hair was braided in ringlets and dyed in blood. “We've come for your sons,” Olmarg said.
Iome smiled. “Never one to mince words, were you,” Iome said. “I appreciate that. What happened to your face since the last time I saw you? Was it eaten by wolves?”
Olmarg grinned. In his own lands, friends often exchanged insults as a form of jest, and Iome was relieved to see that he took her cut in the proper spirit. Olmarg shot back, “Harsh words—from a hag. To think, I once dreamed of bedding you.”
“Eunuchs can have such dreams?” Iome asked.
Olmarg chortled, and Iome felt that she had won. She got to the point. “So, you want my sons?”
“Give them to us and we'll raise them like our own: good food, ale in their bellies, women in their beds. And a promise: your boy Fallion, he can have the run of Heredon when he's fifteen.”
Iome grinned, a smile that was half wince, amused that Olmarg would think that she'd want women in her son's bed. “Royal hostages?” Iome asked. “And if I say no?”
“Then we'll take them,” Olmarg said, “dead, if need be.”
Fifty men didn't represent much of a threat. But these weren't commoners. They were Runelords, and would put up a fierce battle. More than that, they represented half a dozen nations, and might well have powerful allies back home.
And then there was the shadow man. Iome couldn't even guess what powers he might bring to bear.
“I see,” Iome said. “You want to make it easier for the assassin's knife to find them?”
“We're coming as friends,” Olmarg said. “We want Fallion to know us as friends, and allies. That's all.” He smiled as persuasively as possible, the scars on his face rearranging into a mockery of friendliness, and his voice became sweet. “Come now, think on it. You're wasting away. You'll be dead in no time, and who will raise the boys then?”
Iome gave Olmarg a dark look. Olmarg was a pig, she knew. A murderer and worse. She could dismiss his request without a thought. But she gazed down upon the shadow man. “And what of you? Do you wish to raise my sons as your own?”
The shadow man rode forward, stopped next to Olmarg. He did not look up, and Iome could not see his face. Thus he kept his identity hidden, causing Iome some lingering doubt.
It's not Anders after all. If it were, he'd show me his face.
“You have my word,” the shadow man said, his voice as resonant as a lute. “I will raise the boys as my own.”
His tone drove a spike of fear into Iome's heart. There was something wrong with it, something dangerous, as if he had taken hundreds of endowments of Voice. Iome could not tell if it was Anders who spoke or some other being. He sounded too pure and lofty to ride with these men.
And Iome knew that he would be handsome, that he had taken endowments of glamour. If so, the luster of his appearance and the persuasiveness of voice would combine to seduce the boys, bend them to his will. He'd have them eating from his hand in no time.
In Rofehavan it was said, “When you look upon the face of pure evil, it will be beautiful.” Suddenly Iome wished that the shadow creature would pull back his hood, reveal his beauty.
“I know you,” Iome said, and she spoke the name of the locus that had crossed from the netherworld, “Asgaroth.”
The stranger did not deny it. “If you know me,” he said, “then you know that you must submit.”
He glanced back at his men, gave them a nod.
Half a dozen men dismounted and rushed to the lance wagons, then removed their wooden lids. What they pulled out were not lances.
Instead, they pulled out three large stakes, like thickened spears with dull points, and even in the shadows Iome could see that each was elegantly carved and painted, like some gift that a foreign dignitary might offer a neighboring lord.
Yet impaled upon each of these stakes was a human form. The bodies were not just thrust through. Instead, the victim's hands and legs had been tied, and the stakes had been driven up through their nether regions with great care and threaded upward until the lances' points broke through their mouths, like trout upon a skewer.
The soldiers rushed forward and shoved the stakes into the ground so that the bodies were raised up high. Then they stood beneath, waving their torches so that Iome could see the identities of their victims.
What she saw shook her to the core of her soul. Among the impaled were Jaz's personal guard Daymorra. Next came Iome's childhood friend, Chemoise. And last of all was Gaborn's uncle, Duke Paldane, the man that she had planned to place in charge of her kingdom as regent.
Iome gaped in amazement. Of all the dark deeds she had ever witnessed, none struck her with as much force. It wasn't that she couldn't imagine such evil having been done. It was that she couldn't imagine
how
it had been done so quickly.
All three of these people had been under Gaborn's protection, and he had been dead for only a few hours. Chemoise had been in Heredon, hundreds of miles away, in the Dedicates' Keep. Paldane had been in his own castle. For both of them to have been abducted and put to torture—it could only mean that Asgaroth had known for weeks that Gaborn would die this day.
How can I fight such foreknowledge? Iome wondered.
“So,” Iome said, looking at the grotesque forms on their splendid skewers and trying to remain calm. “I see that you have made an art of murder.”
“Oh, not just of murder—” Asgaroth said, “of
viciousness.
”
There was a soft moan from Daymorra. Paldane moved an elbow. Iome realized to her dismay that both had survived the impalement. The stakes had been threaded past vital organs—heart, lungs, liver—in the most ghastly manner.
Through the haze of shock, Iome registered a movement at her side. She glanced down, becoming aware that her sons had come up to the parapet despite the fact that she had ordered them to stay in her rooms. Iome felt angry and alarmed, but she understood how hard it was for the boys to restrain themselves. Now the boys leaned over the merlons to get a better look.
Fallion seemed to stare calmly at the impaled, as if he would refuse to be intimidated, while Jaz gaped in shock, his face leeched of blood.
Iome feared how such a sight might scar the boys.
The shadow man shifted his gaze slightly, stared hard at Fallion, and Iome suddenly realized that this demonstration had not been for her benefit as much as it had been for Fallion's.
For his part, Fallion could almost feel Asgaroth's eyes boring into him. It was as if Asgaroth looked into Fallion's chest, into his soul, and everything was stripped bare to see, all of his childhood fears, all of his weaknesses. Fallion felt that he had been weighed and found wanting, and now Asgaroth scorned him.
Fallion's knees trembled no matter how hard he tried to stand still.
That's what he wants, Fallion realized. My fear. That's why he did this. That's why he brought the strengi-saats.
And with the realization, Fallion suddenly felt a sullen rage blossom, one that left him in a numbing trance.
There is an end to pain, he realized. There is only so much that he could do to me.
Fallion said steadily, and not too loudly, “I'm not afraid of you.”
The shadow man made no move. But as if at some hidden signal, Asgaroth's soldiers went to the impaled victims and clubbed their shins with the torches so that Fallion heard the snapping of bones, and then held the torches to the victims' feet. Both Daymorra and Paldane cringed and writhed, and Fallion could hear them choking back sobs, but neither gave in. Neither of them cried out.
Fallion saw Asgaroth's game. He would try to enlarge his realm through intimidation.
Fallion reached down to his sheath and pulled his own dagger, then held it up for Asgaroth to see.
“Is that the worst that you can do?” Fallion asked. He stabbed himself in the hand, drew the dagger across his palm, opening a shallow wound. He
raised his palm in the air so that the blood flowed freely. “I don't fear pain,” he said, then added calmly, “Is that why you
fear
me?”
Asgaroth trembled with rage. He sat upon his destrier, clenching the reins, and Fallion looked over to his mother's soldiers on the wall, many of whom were staring at him in open amazement. Fallion curled his bleeding hand into a fist, and drew it down quickly, as if striking a blow, and against all of the rules of parlay, he shouted, “Fire.”
Fallion had never ordered a soldier to kill. But in an instant, every archer upon the wall let fly an arrow, and the marksmen fired their ballistae. It was as if they had been aching for permission.
Arrows swept down in a dark hail. A dozen cruel Runelords were slaughtered in an instant, and many others took wounds. Horses screamed and fell, bloody rents in their flesh. Fallion saw dozens of men, arrows lodged in them, turn their horses and beat a hasty retreat.
But Asgaroth went unharmed. Before the command to fire had even left Fallion's mouth, the shadow man reached over with his left hand and grabbed the fat old Olmarg, lifting him easily from the saddle, and threw him upon his pommel, using the warlord as a human shield.
It happened so swiftly, Fallion barely saw the movement, attesting that Asgaroth had many endowments of both metabolism and brawn.
Then, as Olmarg filled up with so many arrows that he looked like a practice target, Asgaroth raised his left hand and a powerful wind screamed from it. In seconds every arrow that flew toward him veered from its path.
Fallion could hear the twang of bows, could see the dark missiles blurring in their speed, but Asgaroth tossed Olmarg to the ground and then sat calmly upon his horse, taking no hurt.
Many an arrow landed nearby, and soon Asgaroth's victims, impaled upon their stakes, had each been struck a dozen times, putting an end to their torment.
And though the archers kept firing, Asgaroth gazed hard at Fallion and shouted, “If viciousness be art, then of you I shall make a masterpiece.”
Asgaroth calmly turned his blood mount and let it prance away, its hooves rising and falling rhythmically as if in dance, until it rode off into the darkness. The shadows seemed to coalesce around the rider, and in moments he became one with the night.
He's coming back, Fallion thought. In fact, his men are probably surrounding the castle now as they wait for reinforcements.
BOOK: Sons of the Oak
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