James West - Reaper Of Sorrows

Osaant glanced at Girod. “She cannot be allowed to tell her tale, but again, mind that you spare the Scorpion.”

Girod was already moving. Too late, Rathe threw up a hand to block the man’s boot from slamming into his face. Dazed and bleeding, he reeled off the side of the bed and crashed to the floor. The blow shocked him into awareness. With clarity came the implacable killing rage he had embraced for so many years when joining battle. As he moved to rise, Lisana screamed. The sound of steel striking flesh ended her cry.

Rathe bounded off the floor, eyes burning like black fire, and found Girod balancing on the mattress above Lisana, her pale white neck parted like an obscene pair of crimson lips. She made choking sounds as blood poured over her chest and clutching hands. The blow had nearly decapitated her. Girod’s sword rose to finish its grisly work, and Lisana’s glazing eyes followed the glimmering blade.

Howling, Rathe leaped, naked and dreadful. Girod whipped around. Rathe saw the sudden fear in the bastard’s face, and rejoiced at the horror he wrought. He slammed a fist into the man’s groin, and Girod’s mouth sprang open. Rathe caught Girod’s wrist before he could swing the sword and take off his head. The effects of the drugged wine still surged through him, but for now wrath overpowered it, and he drove Girod back against the headboard.

“You will not live long enough to benefit from this treachery,” Rathe growled, squeezing Girod’s wrist until the joint under his palm cracked. As the sword fell, Rathe reached across himself and caught the hilt. With a roar, he rammed the blade through Girod’s bowels and deep into the carved wood at his back, pinning him there.

“Rathe!” Thushar bellowed from the doorway, followed by Osaant’s outraged squawk.

Rathe tore the sword free and thrust Girod away. The man tumbled to the floor, not yet dead. Lisana slumped to one side and went still. The fury left Rathe as quickly as it had come. Confusion and uncertainty, emotions from which he had never suffered, crashed over him. The sword fell from his limp fingers, and he crumpled to his knees at Lisana’s side.

There came a scuffling behind him, but he did not turn, even when Thushar’s strong arms wrapped protectively around him. The Prythian warned Osaant’s gathering guards to stay back, but to Rathe his voice came from far away.

“Do not make my troubles your own,” he murmured, sinking into a dreamscape of bemusing hues as the drugged wine fully addled his wits. “Let them have me, brother.”

Unheeding, Thushar threw Rathe off the far side of the bed and jumped down next to him. “Take up your sword!” the Prythian bellowed.

Rathe sat sprawl-legged, limbs numb, head reeling. Everything was distant-Girod’s death, Lisana’s blood covering his hands and arms, the clash of steel not a pace distant. Some part of him wanted to fight, but the world around him became a muddled nightmare.

Thushar, a snarling wolf defending his leader, wielded his sword and many of Osaant’s men fell. Those who survived dragged themselves clear of the carnage missing limbs, gashed to the bone, or eviscerated. A true Ghost of Ahnok, Thushar fought longer than any man should have been able to, but in the end, Osaant’s guards were too many. More swooped into the chambers and battered Thushar and Rathe into submission.

Osaant ordered, “Keep them alive!” Quivering with fury, he spared a single glance for Girod, whose eyes had been dulled by death. “By all the gods, I will see that you both suffer before you die.”

Lost in the murk, Rathe shifted on the damp dirt floor of the cell, making his chains rattle. He had been imprisoned long enough to grow accustomed to the reek of spilled chamber pots, moldy straw, and unwashed prisoners, but the clinking of his own chains still chilled his blood. He tried to judge the passage of days, but could not. Twilight was eternal in the deep cells, where only a single oil lamp, somewhere outside his barred cell, kept absolute darkness at bay. He slept and woke, tried to ignore the rumble of hunger in his belly, contemplated the palpable weight of misery upon his heart and soul, then slept again. He knew for certain he had slept a dozen times since Thushar had lost his life for the crime of protecting his commander.

Shifting into a slightly more comfortable position, Rathe watched through the rusted bars of his cell as his companions slunk along the corridor, nosing through moldering straw, hunting for any morsel. Three-leg, a great black rat, slid between the bars of another cell across the way, making straight for a bare foot covered in running sores. Nose outstretched, it sniffed cautiously at the waiting toes. The prisoner, a man Rathe had never fully seen, did not stir. Taking that as an invitation, Three-leg took a tentative nibble. The foot thrashed weakly and drew back, a moan came from the darkness. Three-leg moved on, hunting a more submissive meal.

Nub, a small gregarious rodent bereft of a tail, scurried quickly from cell to cell, as if knowing exactly what it was looking for and how to find it. Nub veered toward Rathe’s quarters, halted just out of reach and sat up, beady eyes giving him a curious once over.

“Nothing for you this day, friend,” Rathe croaked. “Of course, you know that, don’t you?”

Nub’s whiskers twitched, its head bobbed as if in answer.

“Like as not, I will be dead soon,” Rathe continued. “Then, little one, you can have all the meat you want. How would that be?”

Nub bobbed its head again, front paws held before its chest like a pleading supplicant.

“Off with you,” Rathe said. “I am not dead yet.”

Perhaps it was encroaching madness, perhaps imagination, but Rathe felt sure that Nub considered his words and, finding such an arrangement acceptable, it dropped to all fours and continued its rounds.

In watching Nub’s progression, Rathe spied Patches. The two regarded each other. A one-eyed rat dotted with snowy spots, Patches did not move around much, as though trying to blend in with the shadows and crumbling brick walls. When it deigned to explore, it did so with heightened caution.

“You have had a rough go of it, haven’t you?” Rathe said. Until coming awake the first day in the deep cells, he had never reflected on the conduct of vermin. He had discovered they had a hierarchy, and it seemed poor blemished Patches was at the bottom of its pack.

“You will have to find your stones, if you ever want to make something of yourself,” Rathe advised with a wry chuckle.

In answer, Patches lowered its head and slowly backed into the darkness of another cell.

Rathe sighed and leaned his head back against the rough brick wall. Other vermin squeaked and hunted in the gloom, pausing occasionally to nibble a toe or finger on the chance that the owner of that appendage had died in the night. If the prisoner yelped or groaned, the rats scurried on. If not, they feasted until one of the gaolers collected the corpses.

None of that bothered Rathe anymore. He supposed hunger made him lethargic, or maybe the lingering effects of whatever potion Girod had put into his wine. Or, perhaps I no longer care about anything?

With that thought came a jumble of visions and sensations from that night: wine and celebration, surrounded by highborn with no greater cares than who to bed; Lisana’s seductive smile and the blue of her eyes; after, the scarlet flood pouring from the gruesome tear across her throat, those beautiful eyes glazing in death; Girod sword in hand, readying to strike her again. Rathe’s fist clenched tightly, as if around a hilt. In his mind, he skewered Girod’s bowels anew, pinning the brute to the headboard. The longer he let the ghastly images cavort inside his skull, the more tangled they became, losing all connection to reality. Maybe I am losing my mind? Given that he counted vermin as companions, even named and spoke to them, he guessed that made sense.