David Farland - Sons of the Oak

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.

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.