R. Salvatore - The Bear

But it was no fight Bransen could accept. He darted for the side of the hill, catching the awkward swing of a youngster's stick. He shoved the child to the side as he sprinted past just to get clear of him. Bransen reached the lip of the hill, more stones and sticks following his every step, and he leaped and fell into himself, into his ki-chi-kree, mimicking the magic of the malachite gemstone. He flew, he floated, he leaped far into the darkness, out from the hill at such a height that he caught the branches of the trees below and half pulled, half ran along those intertwined elevated walkways.

By the time he dared stop, by the time he had ended the enhanced magical trance, the campfire in the hillock was a distant speck of light, the continued shouted protests a distant din. The troubled young man sat back against the tree trunk, shifting so that his vantage point gave him a clear view of the starry sky. He tried to digest what he had just seen, tried to play past the incongruity of the battered woman coming at him with such primal hatred and violence. He replayed what he had seen on the hillock and affirmed to himself that he had not witnessed it in the wrong light. She had been taken against her will and beaten into submission-of that, there could be no doubt.

Were these people so desperate, so out of sorts, that such behavior had become acceptable to them? Was their loss so profound to their sensibilities that any semblance of order, even if it was order under the stamp of a heavy and painful boot, brought a measure of security and comfort?

Bransen could hardly comprehend the reasoning behind it, but he quickly came to understand the reality of what he had seen: the ultimate breakdown of civilization itself. This was the result of war, taken to the extreme, the desperate and forced primitive order out of inflicted chaos and agony. This was the result of utter helplessness in the wake of complete loss.

He tried to sort it out, conjuring past experiences and knowledge. He thought of the Book of Jhest, with passages describing such atrocities. He thought of his own life in war. Towns in Vanguard had been similarly razed by the hordes inspired by Ancient Badden, but never had he seen anything akin to this!

The difference in Vanguard had been the faith the survivors held in Dame Gwydre and the other nobles. Even when all had been lost except life itself, those people in Vanguard knew that their larger constructs of society, the dame and her court, the Order of Abelle, remained and would be there to shelter them and to feed them and to help them build anew. The people on this southern hillock had no such comfort. To whom would they turn? Yeslnik had done this, but his foe, Ethelbert, to whom they had pledged fealty, could not come forth, could not protect them. Did he even wish to?

These people had lost many of their loved ones and their very way of life. Because of the scorched earth and utter ruin, because of the absence of hope itself, they saw no way to reclaim it. As brutal as those four men leading the clan had been, they were the only measure of security and stability those poor folk on the hillock could hope to know. They were darkness, to be sure, but they were also the guides through the darkness, however wretched.

The young warrior knew that he could go back and kill those four and perhaps convince the others to then follow him. He could take them to Pryd, or even to Ethelbert.

He stared up at the stars and he shook his head at the helpless futility of it all.

He slept there, up in the tree, exhausted from his ordeal and from, most of all, the emotional battering he had taken in the shock of the cruel reality.

He awoke before the dawn, thinking to go straight off to the north to Pryd Town. Instead, Bransen went along the foothills of the Belt-and-Buckle. He avoided the hill where he had fought, but he looked for other clans. He found many of them scattered among the hills, desperate people living in caves or under overhangs or atop hillocks that provided them a defensive position. Bransen didn't get close to any, the bitter experience fresh in his thoughts, but he viewed them from the nearest vantage points, one after another, throughout the rest of that day. He ended by climbing as high as he could among the nearby mountains, a clear perch to widen the view below him.

Dozens and dozens of campfires dotted the night terrain, one or two at a time, mostly, but with one congregation of more than a score.

Bransen marked that spot and went there before the dawn.

He found the same situation as he had witnessed on the hillock, only many times larger in scale. This was the prime clan of the region, it seemed, with no fewer than fifteen armed bosses, men and women alike, brutalizing and commanding many others, young and old and infirm.

Soon after he left that complex of rudimentary dwellings built under the overhangs of red-rocked cliffs, Bransen came across the scene of a recent battle-probably one between the clan he had just left and a lesser group that had happened upon them.

Crows picked at the bodies scattered in the region, which included a few who might have fought back and a few more, very old, who would have no doubt been helpless in the face of the assault. There were no children to be found, however, except for the body of a single young girl. Bransen glanced back at the large clan and wondered how many among the children he had seen there were recent acquisitions.

The troubled young man did not sleep in that devastated region that night. He couldn't sleep. So he walked back out to the road and to the northern fork that would lead him to Pryd Town, and north beyond that, he hoped, to Chapel Abelle and Cadayle.

"Not as secure as you insisted," King Yeslnik scolded Laird Panlamaris when the truth of the murderous night became evident across the city.

"What do ye know of powries?" the laird asked flatly.

Yeslnik stared at him for daring to so challenge the throne. Indeed, all about the pair, men and women of both courts shuffled nervously.

"You ever fight one?" Panlamaris went on, not backing down an inch. His voice grew thick, his accent flowing in and out like a master bard scaring a group of children about the bonfire with tales of goblins and ghouls. "You ever stick your sword into one's gut, tearing out its innards and thinking your battle done, only to have the beast laugh at ye and leap on ye?"

Yeslnik started to scold him but wound up merely swallowing hard.

"Aye, but it's a dactyl demon itself the witch Gwydre's put upon my city and upon us all," he said, standing up straight and casting his gaze all about the room. "Don't you doubt it, King Yeslnik. The powries are more than Palmaristown's problem."

He kept glancing away to the east as he spoke, toward Dame Gwydre's chapel prison. His thoughts turned to a vision of a charge against those walls, when at last they would be breached, when Dame Gwydre would kneel before him, begging for mercy.

"And what will you do about our problem?" King Yeslnik said-again, Laird Panlamaris realized when he turned his attention back to his present surroundings.

"Your city has a most important guest, the king himself," Yeslnik said. "And you allow these beasts to crawl in at night and cause such mischief?"

"No warships in port this night," Panlamaris said. "The powries come from the river, and so the river will be watched."

"See to it that they do not return until my own ship is long gone from your wharf."

"Aye, my king," the laird repeated absently, for his thoughts were again on Gwydre, kneeling before him, crying and begging until the moment he took her head from her shoulders. They called it Sepulcher. To the powries this was procreation, and for hundreds of years it had been the only means of continuing their race. Mcwigik and Bikelbrin and the others took the hearts of their fallen comrades and buried them, then danced their magical movements and sang their songs invoking the healing powers of the world to breathe life into those hearts anew. In a matter of weeks a new powrie would emerge from the shallow graves, small at first but fast to grow into the image of the one who had provided the heart.