Nightlord: Sunset (17 page)

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31
ST

I
’m going to start shifting days at sunset.  This midnight stuff is too confusing, and my watch tells me this place has days twenty-two hours, eighteen minutes long or thereabouts.  Which means my calendar is also going to get out of whack if I’m here long enough… wherever “here” is…

Anyway, I ran down the horsemen.  Sounds silly to have a man on foot chasing men on horseback, but I’m not exactly a human being any more, so that’s okay.  Besides, they came to a stop.

I would guess there had been a group of wagons, about fourteen or so, pulled into a large, cleared area off the roadside.  I’m sure there were a couple of fires for cooking and for light.  For all I know there could have been a dozen men and women dancing around them, children playing or eating their supper, and a fiddler or two.

Now the fires were much larger as the wagons burned.  Men and women and, yes, children were
moaning wounded, unconscious, or dead.  The horsemen were firing the last wagon as I came into view.  The smell of burning wood, burning flesh, and burning hair were strong in the night air, and I could see the pillars of dark smoke rising into the still sky.

The leader shouted commands at his men and lobbed a torch into the last wagon, then mounted up.  It looked as though they had lost none of their number, although one was favoring a leg.  They all wore swords, but each was carrying a crossbow—all leveled now at the wagon just starting to burn.

I didn’t see any weapons among the fallen, unless you count a couple of large sticks.

They waited until the flames were going well inside the last wagon.  The ones on foot remounted their horses, then wheeled away and rode back toward town.  I could feel them as they passed; there was something similar to them, much like the assassins sent after me.  It was a fiery glow around them, something that would burn me, I felt sure.  But it was softer, less intense.  More of a campfire than a blowtorch.

A campfire can still burn you.  I didn’t like it a bit.

Still, they passed by in, if anything, more of a hurry going back than coming out.  The horses were all tired, and the men equally so—but they laid in with a will, as though pursued by the Devil.

Considering that night had already fallen, in other circumstances they might have been right.

Still… there were other things on my mind besides killing miscellaneous troops.  Well, okay, that was on my mind, but how to go about it was what dominated.  And here were the wounded and the dead…

I came into the light to look them over.  Tendrils of power uncoiled and reached, touching the bodies and reaching through them while the wagons burned.  I reached into the wagons as well, through the fires, just in case.  Altogether, I found four wounded.  The rest were dead.

Waste not, want not, as the saying goes.  I drank from the wounds carefully, getting blood without brilliance from the dead, then turned to the living ones.  Two were going to die shortly; that much was apparent.  One, a young girl no more than fourteen, was already sinking into the final blackness.  So I took her, drained her of that living spark, and watched the lights go out in the rooms of ruin and the house of dust. 

The other, an average-sized fellow with a large stick of firewood near his hand, had blood in places it wasn’t supposed to go.  I could feel him leaking into his guts from the sword-wound through them; he was already pale, almost ashen, and cold to the touch.  I drank him too, drawing out that vital essence and watching it dim to nothing. 

With each of them came a piece of them, becoming a part of me.  I felt the music of the fiddler, the song of the singer, the dancer’s movement, and the poet’s words hung like letters of gold on silver smoke.

The remaining two were in doubt.  Left alone, they were probably dead; the man was badly cut across the face at an angle, a wicked slash that parted an eyebrow, the bridge of his nose, and the opposite cheek.  It provided a lot of blood, and the slash across his chest—nasty, deep, to the bone—had not been enough to seriously threaten his life.  But he looked like he was a dead man with all that gore. 

I used dead men’s clothes to bandage his chest and face, then applied a small healing spell—one of the few I could recall; I had not been too interested in them at the time, and my previous incarnation had not been too devoted to their creation.

The other was a woman.  Of the two, her life force was much stronger, her body being somewhat less damaged.  She had suffered a good blow to the skull.  The scalp under her black hair was also open to the bone from the edges of the weapon—I presume a sword that turned in the wielder’s hand—and provided enough blood to satisfy the murderers.  I touched the leaking places with tendrils of power to get a better idea of the damage; head wounds are tricky things.  The jagged edges of the skull fracture against my tendrils' touch was like licking sandpaper.  I felt the slow oozing of blood into her brain from even deeper damage, so I applied that healing charm a bit more precisely, wrapping it around the wound.

They seemed stable enough when all was said and done, which presented me with a small dilemma.

What now?

With a sudden sense of realization and dread, I discovered I was now responsible for them.  Much like picking up a stray kitten and feeding it, I was now honor-bound to care for them until they could care for themselves.  While this struck me as something of an inconvenience, I thought better of it after a moment.  The situation had some small upsides to it.  If they lived—and I felt she would; his odds were worse, but still good—then they would be an invaluable source for learning the language and culture of the society into which I had been thrust.

Okay, okay—into which I had unknowingly plunged myself.

There wasn’t much to salvage from the fires; the wagons burned quite well.  There were a few cows and horses loose in the vicinity, but none seemed disposed to be helpful and return to the scene of bloodshed and fire.  So I was faced with the choice of either going to chase down a mount or two and leaving my newfound pets alone, or trying to move them by hand—an uncomfortable prospect at best.  And in his condition, possibly dangerous.  Hell, maybe for her, too.  Travis is the nurse, not me!

The sound of an animal and the gleam of many eyes made my decision for me.  No leaving them alone.  There were wolves—or a boojum, maybe even a banth—within the wood.

Instead, I drew the sword.  I hacked up the bodies of the fallen and tossed the pieces away from the burning wagons.  It was a chore and took some time, but it kept the hungry things from coming up to sniff at me or my new pets.  The sounds and sights of wolves and other things tearing flesh in the shadows of the trees gave a peculiar, surrealistic quality to the scene.  Was this really some place on another world, or was this merely madness?  Or perhaps this was Hell and I was damned.  Whatever, it seemed to me the night was something more than it was, and it made me afraid.  No, not of the wolves or of the night, but of something within me, because I responded, somehow, to the scene on a level I did not wish to examine too closely.  Another time, another time, I promised myself, hoping I would forget.

The wolves were not at all unhappy, however.  They lingered after they had eaten their fill of the dead, sitting or lying, fat and satisfied, all around the dying fires.  They paced occasionally, or moved to a more comfortable patch of grass—always a little closer, drawing a ring about us as the burning wagons died to embers.  Other things stayed out of the firelight and occasionally had a momentary challenge with members of the wolf-pack, but the abundance of food made such contests mild.

Then the lead wolf stepped into the shrinking ring of firelight and faced me.

I looked at him.  He looked at me.  He snarled.

I touched him with a tendril of power, lightly stroking his spirit.  The taste of an animal’s spirit is different from a man’s.  Less complex, less refined.  In terms of human food, it is the difference between waving a stick with meat on it through a campfire, and an eight-course meal presented by
a European school for chefs as a final examination.  Still, there are times when all you want is a roasted chunk of meat.

It laid its ears flat, whimpered, and backed away.  It didn’t know what I was, but it knew enough to realize that challenging me was a bad,
bad
idea.  Once he was out of the light, he turned, howling, and ran for it.  The rest of the pack was on its feet in an instant and chasing off with him.

I tried to analyze what I was feeling.  Tasting the spirit of the wolf… it was… good, in a way.  It was the stirring of some primal instincts men have forgotten.  The smell of wind, the taste of flesh, the uncertainty of the hunt, the challenge of battle, the satisfaction of the kill, a different satisfaction from a belly full of good red meat, the vying for dominance and power within the pack.

Every piece of a spirit or soul or life-energy—or whatever you want to call it—brings a tiny fragment of itself to become part of me.  This did not inspire me to howl at the moon or run naked through the forest, but it did make something within me stir in response.  Are we all beasts?  Are human beings just animals that have learned to think?  Possibly.  I knew there was something of an animal in my own heart.

Again, it was not something I wanted to explore right then.  I had too much to do.

I watched them go before I started looking for some smaller trees or larger branches.  I built a large travois, a triangle of two long branches and several smaller ones.  This I bound together with belts and bits of harness, then covered over with the clothes of the dead. 

This is not as easy as I make it sound.

After loading both my charges on this, I began to drag them along—no real destination in mind, but definitely away from the scene.  I headed away from the road immediately; the ground was chewed up enough that the twin scars the travois left behind might be missed.  I hoped.

My passengers were heavy, but I was well-fed and strong.  What slowed me down was the twisting path I had to take to avoid undergrowth and close-spaced trees.  I kept going until nearly morning and wasn’t a bit tired.  I stopped when the man moaned; I put the travois down.

“Are you awake?” I asked, moving to the rear.  He opened the eye that wasn’t covered in bandages, stared at me with it, and then made a weak gesture:  thumb and little finger held out from the fist.  He directed it at me and said something—I believe he would have been forceful if he hadn’t been quite so beaten up.

“Sorry, old fellow,” I replied.  “I don’t quite understand.  I almost feel as if I should; doubtless my recent meals are helping with that.  So you lie down and rest.”

I took out my canteen and unscrewed the top.  Mentally, I thanked Travis for insisting I bring some mortal survival equipment.  I poured a little of the water into my hand so he could see it, then drank from my hand.

It made me queasy, but it stayed down.  I doubt I could have held it down if I’d had much more of it.  File that away under “
only
blood at night,” as a reminder.  Eat what I like during the day, drink wine, water, or Grandma’s Herbal Cure-All, but
only
blood at night!  I held out the canteen toward him; he shook his head.  I put it away and moved to take up the travois again, slogging on into the woods.

He asked me a question.  I knew it was a question.  I couldn’t tell what it was, though, so I ignored it and kept going.  Presently, I heard him weeping.  I suppose I might have too, if I had been hacked across the face and left for dead amid the slaughter of my family and friends.

It was getting on toward morning when I came to a creek.  It looked to be about hip-deep and maybe twenty feet across, with cut banks and a lot of smooth rocks at the bottom.  I could see small fish.

Good enough.  I put down the travois and got to work, pulling down vines and branches.  A lean-to isn’t hard to make, just time-consuming.  Build two, facing each other, and you have something that looks a lot like a tent and is pretty good at keeping the rain off.  I had time to get all the branches I could want and set the main poles before sunrise started to get close.

I did my best with some stick figures in the dirt and a lot of hand-waving to tell him to stay here.  I was fairly certain he wasn’t going to go anywhere, but it never hurts to make sure.  I set off into the bush at a good clip, heading off to find a bit of privacy; I doubted that either of them would take kindly to the idea of a dayblood—and I didn’t want to be forced to sit still where they could just unzip me.  It would be more than just embarrassing.

I found a good spot and got out the bags. 
Sunrise came and went.  I packed up the bags again and jogged back to my human pets, resolving on the way back to have a bath.

He might have been in pain—surely he was—but he wasn’t willing to lie still.  He had dragged himself to a tree, leaned up against it, and was tying a large twig of pine needles to a length of straight branch.

“Buddy, you’re one of the toughest men I’ve ever known,” I said.  He looked up, saw I was smiling, and showed his teeth in return; I can’t really call it a smile, but I give him an A-for-effort.

I let him tie stuff together and I helped.  We started language lessons at that point, too; Rethven, he called it.  I learned his name was Ubar, and the lady—still unconscious—was a relative of some sort whose name was Utai.  We also traded a lot of nouns.  Tree, rock, water… and then more difficult things, like pine, oak, maple, creek, river, boy, girl.  Verbs required a lot more drawing and hand-waving; I decided most of them could wait until the necessary effort wasn’t damaging to him.