Akiri: Dragonbane Read online

  “You’re Akiri. You look just like every story father ever told of you. Besides, no one else is brave enough to climb the mountain during the savage season. Father says you are the bravest man who ever lived.” The boy’s confident determination reminded him of Cammaric, and it was all he could do to suppress a smile.

  “He allowed you to come down here and watch for me every day? Don’t you have chores and lessons?”

  Seyla puffed out his chest. “I always finish my chores first, even when it’s snowing. And Mother gives me lessons before bed. The rest of the time I have spent here, watching.”

  He regarded the boy as if inspecting a soldier. “I think you may be in need of more chores, lad.” He reached down and squeezed his arm. “You need more muscle on your bones.”

  “I’m strong enough to swing father’s sword,” Seyla shot back, jutting out his chin.

  Akiri raised an eyebrow. “Then perhaps I have misjudged you, eh? You must be stronger than you look to lift the blade of a Dul’Buhar.”

  His eyes lit up with pride. “That’s what father says. He says one day he’ll teach me to fight.”

  “You mean he hasn’t yet? Well, then, that is something we will have to address right away. The son of Cammaric needs to know how to wield a blade. Come on, it’s getting late. If we don’t get back to the cabin, we’ll be stuck out here all night, and I wouldn’t want to have to explain to your mother why I let her precious boy freeze to death. Besides, I am hungry.”

  Seyla took Akiri’s hand and tugged. “Mother’s making a stew.”

  Akiri smiled, allowing the boy to pull him along.

  “Is it true you once rescued a noble from a thousand soldiers?”

  At first Akiri wasn’t sure which particular tale he was referring to, but then it struck him. “Yes. Your father and I were sent to rescue Lord Usil. King Nahala’s men had captured him on the road and were threatening to execute him unless we released several high-ranking officers we had captured a few weeks earlier. The only way to get him back was either give in to their demands or find a way to get Lord Usil out.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “Didn’t your father tell you this story?”

  “Sure he did. He said you killed a hundred men all by yourself. And that you saved his life.”

  Akiri chuckled. “Your father saved mine as many times as I saved his that day. And as far as a hundred men…” He looked down at the boy’s eager face, and not wanting to disappoint him with the reality said, “That sounds about right. But that’s not the best part of the story. After we rescued Lord Usil, King Nahala was furious. He was raging. Anger does strange things to a man’s mind, lad. He sent a thousand men to raze an Acharian village to the ground in retribution. Did he tell you about that?”

  Seyla shook his head, hanging on Akiri’s every word. “Did you save the village?”

  “Me? No. I was fighting along the eastern border. Your father and a handful of Dul’Buhar were all that stood in their way. Had it not been for his courage and leadership, hundreds of innocent people would have been slaughtered. He was a hero that day.”

  Akiri went on to recount the tale as it had been told to him, once he had returned from the east. “Dul’Buhar do not boast of their deeds, but such was your father’s bravery that songs were being sung in every tavern and inn throughout Acharia praising his name.” Soldiers still told the tale, though now his name was often mispronounced or changed entirely, erasing him from history. That was just the way it was.

  By the conclusion, Akiri could see the awe that the father’s deeds had inspired in his boy. Akiri did not believe in heroes, but if a boy was to have one, it was only right that it should be his own father.

  Akiri glanced at the sky, slate gray and threatening to bring more snow. The village could only be another couple of miles away. The thought of a warm fire and a good meal had genuine appeal.

  “I will tell you one more story about your father, but in return, you must tell me about your family and life here on the mountain. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” the boy said with a sharp nod, making a pact.

  He proceeded to tell Seyla another story. There was no need to embellish the details. He still could not understand how a woman and child could have made such a fierce warrior turn away from everything he had known. Borlon had said that it was the will of the gods. It was fortunate for Cammaric that Borlon was such an adherent to the fickle deities because if not for his willingness to intercede with the king, Cammaric would never have been released from his bond.

  Akiri then listened as the boy prattled on, telling him every little detail about their life, about his sister, his mother, his friends. Most of it revolved around the help he gave his father and how important they were to their small village.

  “Father won’t let me tell people he was a soldier,” he said. “He says it would change how people are with him. He thinks they would be scared.”

  “A better question is, why would you want people to know?”

  The boy shrugged. “I just would. Some of the other boys’ fathers were soldiers.”

  “Your father was more than a soldier. He was Dul’Buhar. Only the fiercest warriors were permitted to join our ranks. And he is right. People should not know. That you know is enough. It shouldn’t matter what the others think. We carry the truth in our hearts. It is enough. It has to be.”

  “Father says that too.”

  Seyla talked incessantly on the walk, his words whipped away by the wind. Akiri caught fragments of hurried descriptions – the annual Moon Festival; the Winter’s Rage, a three-day sacrifice to the gods where the villagers gave more than they had to give in hopes of a bountiful harvest the coming year; the Birth Day, where all children celebrated being one year older; and so many other things that made up the minutia of life in a village. Akiri wasn’t listening. He could smell burned wood in the icy air. It was too fragrant to be a campfire, and only grew stronger as they walked, until it became overpowering.

  He knew what they were walking into before they rounded the final bend; he’d been around death enough to know its signature scent.

  Smoke rose in the distance; far too much to be coming from any hearth.

  He quickened his pace. Beside him, the horse grew skittish. The aromas did nothing to calm the animal, and this was a beast used to the battlefield. Seyla hadn’t marked anything out of the ordinary and continued with his incessant chatter about the festival.

  The path curved more sharply. There was no missing the columns of thick black smoke or the flames engulfing several of the houses.

  They stopped, caught in silent disbelief.

  The boy stared, trying to understand. A heartbeat later, seeing his whole world ablaze, he raced headlong toward the rising flames.

  “Wait!” Akiri shouted, uselessly.

  He couldn’t just leave the boy to run into the fire. He released his grip on the reins and left his horse to chase after him.

  The boy did not look back. He raced through the snow, arms and legs pumping furiously, screaming his mother’s name over and over again.

  He was fast, but Akiri was faster. Seyla struggled against his grip, flailing and kicking wildly as he yelled, “Let me go!”

  The entire village was burning.

  This was no accident; the blaze had been deliberately started. He scanned the few buildings not yet ablaze, and realized what he wasn’t seeing: villagers. They should have been out in the streets fighting the fires together. This was their entire world going up in flames. There was no way this had a happy ending.

  He pushed the boy down, forcing him to sit, and maintained his hold, one hand firmly grasping his shoulder. “I need you to listen to me,” he said, his voice calm. He needed the boy to trust him. This close, the heat of the flames was intense. They banished the chill of the mountainside. He felt sweat bead on his skin. “You have to stay close to me. There is a good chance whoever did this is still here.”

  “But – ”

>   “I know everything you are about to say, boy. But there is nothing you can do, and getting yourself killed helps no one – understand?” The boy nodded, tears in his eyes. “Good. Stay with me. We will find them. Together.” He forced Seyla to meet his eyes until he nodded again.

  Akiri drew his sword with one hand and took the boy’s hand with the other.

  Cammaric’s house was on the far side of the village proper, perched on a rocky outcrop with a glorious view of the valley below. Akiri’s one hope was that the isolation might have afforded his old friend time enough to get his family to safety before the attackers came.

  They entered the village.

  Fires rose on all sides. The sounds of the blaze drowned out the winds as the flames ate through the brittle wood of the rooftops and tore through the walls as though they weren’t there. The heat was unbearable.

  Akiri scanned the devastation, looking for signs of who could have been behind this senseless waste, but aside from the obvious destruction of the fires, there was nothing – no hint as to what had happened here, no bodies on the street, no blood.

  Nothing.

  It was as though a ghost town was being scoured from the mountainside, and that was the eeriest of all.

  Off to their left, a horse screamed. A moment later, the animal came charging through the narrowest of gaps between the buildings, nearly trampling them in its panic as the beast raced down the mountain in search of salvation. Akiri looked back and saw that his own horse was still waiting patiently at the edge of the settlement. He had considered sending Seyla to stay with the animal, but knew that the boy would ignore any such order. In his place, Akiri would have likely torn the village apart stone by stone; as would Cammaric. So he expected nothing less of the boy. It was in the blood. He was his father’s son, and Cammaric was Dul’Buhar.

  As they reached the final building, more smoke up ahead betrayed the sickening truth: Cammaric’s house had not escape the destruction.

  Before Akiri could stop him, Seyla wrenched his hand free and ran toward his burning home. Akiri barely reached the boy before he could hurl himself through the blazing doorway into the fire within.

  “Stay here!” The force of the pent up rage swelling up behind those two words stopped the boy far more effectively than the grip on his collar.

  Akiri took one last glance up at the structure to reassure himself that the whole thing wasn’t about to come down on his head. He pulled his scarf up over his mouth and nose, and plunged inside.

  He stepped into a small living room with a hearth and several plain but comfortable chairs. The walls were decorated with a few souvenirs from Cammaric’s time with the Dul’Buhar, things that would have held no meaning to anyone else: a broken shield from when they had barely escaped capture during a raid, a dagger Akiri had pulled from Cammaric’s shoulder in battle, a shriveling portrait depicting the cities of Acharia. It would all be gone in a few moments. Flames clawed up the walls, eating into the soft furnishings and draperies. Smoke stole in from beneath the closed door at the far end of the room. Akiri felt the heat all around him, but it was nothing against the sheer intensity radiating off that doorway.

  The house was doomed. It was only a matter of when, not if, the place would be completely consumed. He had to get out of there if he didn’t want to suffer the same fate.

  “Cammaric?” he called, his words snatched away by the angry cackle of the flames.

  There was no reply.

  He tried again, shouting this time.

  Still nothing.

  Akiri stepped further inside. Through the choking smoke he could just make out the indistinct shapes lying on the floor.

  His instincts had been right. There was going to be no happy ending here.

  He strode into the room and crouched to check the first body for a pulse. It was Cammaric. His body bore the vicious wounds of the blade that had hacked and sliced through flesh and bone. The attack had been frenzied, and if the angle of the cuts were any indication, he had gone down fighting multiple attackers.

  The floor was slick with his blood. Akiri ran a finger through it. It was still sticky, meaning the kill was fresh.

  There were two more bodies on the ground: Cammaric’s wife and his little girl.

  Akiri felt a combination of rage and guilt stab at his heart. A few minutes earlier, and he might have saved them. On such moments the balance of life and death pivoted. He cursed the gods under his breath as he confirmed they were both beyond his help.

  Cammaric had fought to his last breath to protect them, and failed.

  His friend may have settled into the more sedentary life of husband and father, but he was still Dul’Buhar at heart, and even without their supernatural gifts it would take an exceptional foe to overcome him.

  The blood on the floor had spilled from Cammaric and his family. There wasn’t a single bead trailing away from a wounded foe.

  Akiri felt more than heard the movement behind him. The sound was too close to the floor to be the boy defying him. Akiri rose, sword at the ready, pivoting in a single fluid motion, ready to avenge his friend.

  The doorway was clear, lit by flames. He could make out the silhouette of the boy still waiting outside – out of harm’s way. Akiri made out another shape in the shadows; another body. He approached cautiously, his blade poised to lash out and end any threat, but the figure remained motionless.

  His scarf filtered out some of the smoke, but it was still hard to inhale, and difficult to see through the tears it stung from his eyes.

  The smell of the fire mingled with another odor: death. But it made no sense. Nowhere near enough time had passed for the reek to have become so deep-set and rotten to the core. He wanted to be mistaken, but he knew he wasn’t. He’d walked too many battlefields to be wrong. A man like him knew the smell of death better than he knew the fragrance of the sweetest flowers.

  For a moment, he thought he caught the sight of motion, but as he blinked back fresh tears, he couldn’t be certain that the shadows weren’t playing tricks.

  There was no denying the fact it was another body. But all of Seyla’s family were dead; who then was this?

  Keeping a tight grip on his sword, Akiri used a foot to roll the body onto its back, more from curiosity than anything else. The boy could have identified it, perhaps, but he didn’t want Seyla seeing the devastation in this room. The fire would take away the worst of it, but he’d never be free of the nightmares.

  One arm was almost severed at the shoulder. There was a deep slice in the neck that left the head cocked in an unnatural position. Up close, the stench was overwhelming. Even Akiri’s iron constitution was sorely tested. He rolled the head over, and the neck wound oozed to the sound of bone scraping against bone. The face was ruined with decay. He saw several deep gashes across the cheeks and nose, but none of these were recent injuries. Even in haunting firelight, he could see the decay and putrefaction. Maggots moved inside the man’s mouth, having eaten through the facial wounds. This corpse was long dead, and had almost certainly been dug up and dumped here, which made no sense.

  The heat was becoming unbearable.

  He didn’t understand what had happened here, but there was no way he could leave the boy alone, not when the attackers could return at any moment. Akiri started to rise. But a shiver of movement gave him pause. He was about to dismiss it as a trick of the fire’s shadows when one of the corpse’s eyes flickered open.

  Akiri wasn’t a man given to fear, but this had him scrambling back, sword held out in front of him, tip wavering wildly. There was no way on the gods’ green land this man could be alive. No way. But he was. The eyes didn’t lie. The man’s body bore a latticework of wounds no human could hope to survive, and he hadn’t – Akiri would have staked his life on it. The reek of decomposition was unmistakable. The man was dead. He had to be. Eyes open or closed, it didn’t matter. He was dead.

  For the first time, Akiri invoked the Death God’s name: “Xarbaal.”

&n
bsp; The sudden flurry of footfalls behind him caught his attention.

  Seyla called out desperately for his mother, then his father, and as though some grim magic were attached to those two names, the body began to shift and writhe. Only the foulest of magics could cause such a gruesome thing.

  Forbidden magic.

  The body rolled and started to struggle soundlessly to its feet.

  It was utterly horrifying to behold. The dead man’s head flopped and rolled on the twists of muscle that kept it attached to his body. There was no denying the thing was alive, though any argument for it still being human was harder to make.

  Seyla knelt beside his father, pounding on his chest and pleading for him to wake up, to come back to him. Akiri maneuvered himself between the boy and their unnatural foe as the creature stumbled blindly into the nearby table, its arm dangling uselessly at its side. Flames chased around it, gathering in intensity. Akiri coughed back another choking gulp of air. It was so thin now it was nearly impossible to breathe. The scrape of the table leg on the floor caught Seyla’s attention. The boy looked up. He couldn’t look away. He stared in sheer terror at the macabre scene.

  “Go, boy! Run!” Akiri yelled, but the child was paralyzed with fear.

  The creature swayed and stumbled as it moved toward the far corner of the room, away from the heat of the flame. Akiri thought it was trying to preserve whatever passed for its unnatural life, until the creature bent down to retrieve a chipped and rusted blade from the floor. The dead man turned and faced him, and stared him down with vacant eyes. Dead or not, there was no denying it could see.

  It loosed a dry, guttural roar; utterly inhuman and filled with fell intent.

  It was enough to wrench Akiri out of his shock. He let fly his blade. The first strike sliced through the creature’s injured arm effortlessly, but the wound didn’t so much as slow it. It came on with alarming speed, striking back with a low rising cut that forced Akiri to side step to his left or lose his guts through a wide gash in his side. The thing was much faster than it had any right to be. Its movements were jerky and uncoordinated, but like the fire that consumed the village, relentless. Akiri reversed the sweep of his blade, landing another wicked slice that opened a bloodless wound in the middle of the dead man’s chest. The creature didn’t so much as flinch as the gray ropes of its gut spilled out. It delivered a wild swing of its own, the rusty blade whistling by within an inch of his throat as Akiri rocked back on his heels. He feigned right, though the subtlety was wasted on the dead man, and stepped in, delivering a savage thrust and twist which unknotted his guts and bit deep into the vertebrae of his lower back. The dead man came on, swinging wildly, the rusty blade scything through the air between them, back and forth, implacably.