The Fanged Crown

CHAPTER FOUR

30 Hammer, Year of Splendors Burning

(1469 DR)

The Road to Windhollow

Amhar and the soldiers left the grounds of the Winter Palace and headed north up the dirt road. Each man carried a hooded lantern to ward off the gloom. During daylight hours, the pleasant track wound through the woods until it reached the foothills and climbed into the mountains beyond Windhollow. Queen Anais would have taken that road, had she not got stuck in Celleu due to the fog.

Fog wasn’t a proper name for the weather, Amhar thought. Thick, fuggy, foul-it was as if gauze had enveloped the soldiers. Amhar’s breath clogged his nostrils and throat, and the fog pressed on his ears, smothering sounds. Darkness he could have handled-his eyes were made for the gloom of deep tunnels-but the fog obscured everything past the end of his axe.

He tried to recall the name of the soldier trudging up the road beside him, but he couldn’t remember. Or maybe he’d never known in the first place. None of the men on the road with him were in his regiment or stationed with him in Darromar.

Thinking of Darromar-right, ordered, well-built Darromar-Amhar wished he hadn’t been sent to the Winter Palace. It was an honor, to be sure, to be entrusted with the safety of the realm’s finest and the children of Anais and Evonne, the Heirs of Tethyr, besides.

But that night, in the presence of the abnormal weather, fear had wormed its way into his chest.

The groundskeeper vanished looking for the cook who disappeared with dinner unfinished. And why was that load of wood delivered in this weather? And then there were the guests themselves. They had managed to arrive before the fog settled, yet they were so fatigued they’d all begged off to their rooms to rest before dinner, without the usual preening and gossiping these sorts of events were full of.

Nothing made sense.

Preferring to be angry rather than afraid, Amhar focused his mind on Cardew, the idiot who was ignoring warning signs that were as plain as the nose on his face. Fussing about his dinner with an unnatural fog rising up and swallowing servants. And the children in the palace in that buffoon’s care!

If anything happened, Amhar knew he’d blame Cardew’s stubborn posturing for the rest of his days.

They reached the crest of the hill where they were supposed to rendevous with the man who had sent for reinforcements. The fog pressed in on them, smothering the light of their lanterns and deadening the sounds of their footfalls.

“Where did the scout go?” the man beside him asked, shivering in his uniform.

“He may be up the next rise,” Amhar said. “Too foggy to see where you’re at in this.”

Suddenly a noise like a door being ripped off its hinges broke through the fog and made the soldiers startle and yank out their weapons. They moved into a tight circle with their backs to each other, tensely waiting for something to materialize out of the fog. Soon, they heard skittering noises coming from beyond the light of their lanterns. Amhar felt oddly claustrophobic, as if he were in a tiny room. The skittering noises faded away, but the soldiers held their defensive position until the silence seemed secure.

“The wildlife,” Amhar said, his words sounding false even to his own ears. “They’re probably as disoriented as we are.”

Continuing their cautious walk up the road, they came to the foot of a steep rise where the ruts from cart wheels dug deep into the road’s surface. There was still no sign of the scout, but the fog was a little thinner, and they could see the diffuse light of the moon through the clouds overhead.

“Ugh,” a soldier said. “How come it got muddy all of a sudden?”

Amhar tried to lift a boot and found it stuck in wet earth where just a few moments before the ground had been bone dry. A dark liquid ran down the cart ruts, soaking the dirt. Amhar lowered his lantern and saw that the wetness wasn’t water at all. Blood. He raised his eyes to the dark shape of the cart looming on the crest of the hill above him.

He motioned to the men to be quiet, although their lanterns would have given them away from a distance. They moved up the side of the road. The first corpse tripped the soldier beside Amhar.

The body of a man lay half on the road and half in the watery ditch that ran along it. Below the waist his body was a meaty mess, and his unblinking eyes were open to the night sky.

“Beshaba!” the soldier cried, scrambling back from the corpse.

“Swords up!” another whispered. “We’ve found our trouble.”

The dark shape on the crest of the hill was a cart run off the road with a dead horse still harnessed to it. Amhar thought there were three more corpses beside the cart, but as he drew closer, he saw it was just one corpse hacked into three pieces. When the dwarf turned slightly to whisper to the soldier beside him, he saw horror on the man’s face.

Something moved behind them. Amhar dropped and rolled to the ditch as three dark-clothed figures darted out of the fog, holding scythes in their gloved hands. Amhar’s lantern went flying into the weeds behind him.

The attackers slipped in and out of shifting cones of light as his lantern flickered out. Men shouted, and swords clashed. Amhar gripped his axe and clambered to his feet as another soldier fell backward into the ditch, a sword in his chest.

Scrambling out of the ditch, Amhar rushed the attackers, his axe raised. He swung wildly into the murky fog, but the figures were quick and dodged his blade. The blunt end of a scythe flew out of the darkness, striking him between the eyes. Reeling backward, Amhar felt himself lose consciousness.

But not before he saw the distinctive curve of a pointed ear above a dark mask covering part of a man’s face, limned in the faint moonlight.

He awoke to a misty morning. Even before he opened his eyes, he remembered where he was and what had happened. Traces of fog still clung to the low-lying areas, but as the sun appeared on the horizon, strong winds off the ocean cleansed the steely sky.

Amhar pushed himself off the ground. It was not a surprise to see the bodies strewn across the track, but the level of brutality was something more than he could fathom. He tried to count bodies, to determine how many had survived, but the road was littered with so many pieces-recognizable and otherwise-that he gave up.

Amhar made a cursory search of the empty cart. If there had been a tarp, he would have covered the bodies, or as much of them as he could. Shivering with cold and shock, he stumbled down the hill to the palace, blood soaking his uniform and fear soaking his heart.