James West - Reaper Of Sorrows

“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.

As 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.”