James Barclay - Rise of the TaiGethen

Jeral turned again, a full circle this time. His breathing was ragged and he couldn’t keep the heat from his face or the thundering from his chest. He gasped in air. The rain was getting lighter. The ground was covered in bodies, drenched with blood mixed with water and mud, and the last of his men had been slaughtered.

There was nowhere to run.

Jeral backed away towards the river. Maybe if he jumped in…

Elves and panthers watched him dispassionately. All but one pair disappeared back into the forest, ignoring the elves they had presumably come to save. One pair remained. They walked towards him. The elf, his teeth and fingers glistening with fresh blood, had one hand on the panther’s head. The animal was growling deep in its throat.

Jeral felt water swirling around his feet and heard the splashes of his boots in the shallows. He stopped; it was pointless to attempt an escape.

‘Please,’ he said in elvish. He dropped his sword. ‘Please let me live.’

Jeral had never thought of himself as a coward but the notion that he might attack this solitary pair to avenge his command never entered his head. The elf stared at him and closed to within a pace. Jeral’s nostrils were filled with the scents of blood and beast. He knew he was trembling. It took all of his courage to hang on to his bowels.

The elf reached out a hand, slowly and deliberately, gripping Jeral’s lower jaw. His fingernails cut Jeral’s cheeks and the pressure he exerted grew painfully intense. He pushed his face into Jeral’s. Jeral could feel his raw power and the enormity of his hatred.

‘We are ClawBound,’ he said, his voice hoarse and quiet. ‘Fear us.’

The elf relaxed his grip and released Jeral, letting his fingernails scratch deep into Jeral’s cheeks. Jeral felt the blood begin to gather and bead.

‘We will come. We will destroy you,’ he said, finding a modicum of bravado if his life was to be spared.

The elf cocked his head. ‘You are mistaken.’

They walked away back into the forest, which Jeral continued to watch long after they had disappeared. One last time, he let his gaze travel over the scene of slaughter. He tried not to focus on the dead. A hundred yards from him, the Sharps were still praying. Not one of them had moved.

Jeral shook his head. He felt sick. He turned back to the river, its barges and its nets full of logs waiting to float downstream. He wondered, bleakly, how hard it would be to steer a barge alone.

They are either examples of elven perfection and purity, or are symptomatic of our descent to inevitable extinction. They could very well be both.

Auum, Arch of the TaiGethen

Auum lifted the human’s head from the mud by his hair. He examined the wounds and let it drop. He wiped his hands on his thighs and stood up.

‘Five,’ he said. ‘Malaar?’

Malaar straightened from the body he’d been examining. He nodded.

‘One more,’ he said. ‘But that’s all.’

‘Six ClawBound pairs,’ said Auum, walking towards him. ‘And look what they did. This was no battle, it was butchery. Follow their tracks back into the forest, see if there’s a single direction or if they split.’

‘Or we could ask them.’

Malaar indicated the elven working party. Auum didn’t know whether to feel pity or contempt for them. Three hours and more must have passed since the ClawBound attack and the liberated elves still sat by their axes and the desecration they had been forced to wreak on the rainforest. They were watching the TaiGethen with a wariness that was close to suspicion.

‘I’ll speak to them,’ said Auum. ‘Follow the tracks. Tell me what you find.’

‘Auum!’

Auum turned. Elyss was staring down at the ground on the river bank. The hulks of barges sat in the water, ugly and with nets still bulging with stolen timber. Auum trotted over to her across the blood-soaked churned mud surrounding the multiple mutilated corpses.

‘What have you got?’

Elyss crouched and indicated a line of impressions in the silt leading north along the bank. After three hours, rain and river had erased most of the tracks but the story they told was clear enough.

‘They let one go,’ said Elyss. ‘He can’t be far away.’

‘Serrin, what have you done?’

‘We can still catch him. Stop word getting back to Ysundeneth.’

Auum looked at the three barges stretched across the fast-flowing river. Two had rowing boats strapped to their sterns. One did not.

‘He’s a lot further away than you think.’

‘We have to stop him. Don’t we?’ asked Elyss.

‘It won’t stop what’s coming,’ said Auum. He stared into the forest, his sense of frustration growing. ‘Our efforts would be better spent stopping the ClawBound repeating this. Though, Yniss knows, part of me has no desire to hold them back.’

Auum stood up, his gaze falling on the elves gathered near the eaves of the forest. Their prayers of lament had been like a murmur through the forest, leading the TaiGethen to this scene of carnage. They had not turned from their prayers in the time Auum and his people had been picking over the site.

Auum walked to them, for the first time listening to the words of the chant. He frowned. It was a lament for the lost. The ClawBound would not have so much as scratched an elf, so who was lost? Auum glanced over his shoulder at the flies clouding over the bodies now the rain had ceased. Surely not for their captors?

One elf, an Apposan by his broad back and muscular arms, was leading the service. Auum knelt by him, laying a hand on his shoulder and pressing the other to the mud.

‘Yniss blesses you and saves you for greater tasks than being the slave of man. You need not mourn them, no matter what they may have become to you.’

The Apposan turned his head but he would not look Auum in the face, keeping his eyes a little to the left and focused down at the TaiGethen’s shoulder level.

‘Humans defile the rainforest even in death,’ he said. ‘Their blood will poison our river. We do not mourn them. We mourn those this attack has condemned.’

‘Is it really so certain?’

‘Ten elves will die for every man lying here.’

‘ Ten? ’ Auum heard Elyss gasp behind him. ‘I am truly sorry we were too late to stop them.’

The Apposan nodded. Silence had fallen across the clearing. Auum lifted his head with a hand placed gently under his chin.

‘You can look at me,’ he said softly. ‘I am no human. I am Auum, Arch of the TaiGethen. And you are free, all of you.’

The elf shook his head. He had a powerful frame but his face held the stress of his captivity and the wrinkles on his face and thinning dark hair gave him age beyond his years.

‘I am Koel. I speak for this gang and we are not free. We will never be free.’

Auum pushed back so that he could see Koel’s eyes. A hundred and fifty years of captivity had beaten his will down to nothing but there was still something there that man could not kill.

‘You’re going back,’ said Auum quietly. ‘Aren’t you?’

Koel nodded and dropped his gaze to the ground once again.

‘You can’t!’ Elyss stepped up, her voice shockingly loud in the quiet before the rains came again. ‘You’re free. You can join the fight. Liberate your comrades!’

Koel looked back at Auum. ‘There have to be some left alive to liberate.’

‘How many will they kill?’

‘They kill ten for every one of us that escapes. Elves dragged from the pens and strung up in the Park of Penitence. Our people are eviscerated and left to die with the lizards, rats and birds feasting on them. The old, the sick and the weak go first. Those of us who can’t see them can smell them. So no one tries to escape. We must not.’