The Worlds of J D L Rosell Page 3

  "Tal, you must listen. When the time comes, you must say these words, with this precise pronunciation. Do you understand me?"

  He glanced back at her. "I'm beginning to think I don't."

  "Then listen!" she hissed. "The words are: Hefisk. Dordry. Themult. Do you have them?"

  Tal nodded with a frown. "Those aren’t the Worldtongue. Are they—?”

  "The Darktongue, yes! You must say them when the time comes. Give me your word!”

  “But what do they mean?”

  Then he saw them. The first of the Ravagers, a lithe Nightelf, bolted up the stairway and knelt, a crossbow leveled at them.

  No time to dodge — Tal threw up his hand and shouted, “Wuld!” The quarrel that had been snapping toward them careened and blew to the side as a gust rose from his hand. The Ravager cursed, dropped the crossbow, and drew a pair of short swords as his fellows came barreling after him.

  Tal pushed Keeper back around the other side of the painted Fount circle as the Ravagers filed up the stairs. Five had survived, each of a different Eastern race, but united in a loathing that radiated from them with the intensity of a brush fire.

  “You,” a bull-headed man said in Reachtongue as he pointed at Tal. “Reachman. Give in, and we make it quick.”

  “A quick death or a long one.” Tal shrugged. “I’m not concerned about the method — just the results.”

  The Nightelf cackled and gabbled something in his own tongue. The bull-man glanced at his companion, then back at Tal. “He says do not speak too soon. Ulash is master at pain.”

  “Oh, well in that case…” Tal held his hands forward, wrists facing up. “Take me in now!”

  Despite his bluster, he knew there was little hope of avoiding their fate. They’d run out of traps. The simple cantrips he could cast now would likely be countered by the Nightelf, and perhaps one of the other Ravagers if they had sorcerous blood. Five on two was never good odds, and least of all when he was exhausted to his core and had an ancient Nightelf as his second.

  Recognizing the taunt for what it was, the bull-headed Ravager ignored him and glanced down at the Fount symbol, then motioned his companions to either side. They closed in, steel held at the ready, eyes full of their thirst for blood.

  Then Tal felt an unexpected pressure on the end of his sword, and he jerked back in surprise. Keeper was staring at him, her hand closed over his blade and already wet with blood. The point of his sword was pressed into her robes.

  “Now, Tal Harrenfel,” she said calmly, though her eyes were wide with fear. “Say the words.”

  The Ravagers had not paused at the strange scene, but closed in, a mere dozen feet away. Yet, for a wonder, Tal found himself tongue-tied.

  “For her!” Keeper begged, then pressed herself onto his blade.

  Tal stared in mute horror as the old Nightelf shuddered and slumped onto Velori’s sharp steel. Yet just as he thought he could not stir, he met Keeper’s eyes and found his lips moving.

  “Hefisk dordry themult,” he whispered.

  Keeper snapped backward, her spine arched to an impossible degree for so elderly a woman, then collapsed and slid off his blade. Yet from her mangled body rose a sanguine mist that coalesced into an amorphous cloud, then into the vague image of a person.

  The Ravagers had not slowed, but howled and charged at Tal and the crumpled Keeper. He moved on instinct alone, parrying one blow, sidestepping another, moving through the motions as his mind fell entirely blank. A scimitar chopped through his defenses and cut open a gash in his arm, but even as pain lanced up it, he felt it as if from a distance. Words of sorcery rattled off his tongue, and flashes of wind and fire burst from him. But even as the Ravagers failed again and again to kill him, he knew he was losing.

  Then one of the two facing him, the Nightelf, dropped his weapons and grabbed at his own throat, eyes bulging, then crumpling backward. The bull-headed Ravager next to him took three wary steps back, bovine eyes wide as they looked up at the cloud rising from his companion, then turned tail as the mist closed in on him.

  He couldn’t run fast enough.

  Tal let Velori fall to his side and looked numbly around. All five Ravagers lay prone and lifeless across the painted, stone floor. No mortal wounds had been inflicted on their bodies, yet he knew they were dead just the same.

  The red mist twisted above the Fount symbol, then morphed into a person’s shape for a moment, almost resembling the woman it had risen from. One hazy arm pointed down at him, then at the wall behind him. Tal followed its direction to see it pointed at the hole in the wall where he’d put back the tome of Hellexa Yoreseer.

  Walking slowly toward it, he wiped his bloody hands on his clothes and carefully took the book in hand. The book he could not read. The book that Keeper was supposed to have translated.

  He turned and saw the misty figure watching him still. He held it up, uncertain.

  “Is this what you want, Keeper?” he asked softly. “Your sister’s life’s work?”

  If it was the old Nightelf he spoke to, he couldn’t tell. But a moment later, the crimson mist dispersed like smoke, fading into nothing as it reached the pointed top of the ceiling.

  Tal lowered the tome and held it loosely by his side as he gazed at the scene around him. He’d summoned a devil through blood sacrifice. He’d massacred an entire company of Ravagers. And he’d looted a desecrated Obelisk of its greatest treasure, the tome that could elucidate the deepest mysteries of his life.

  Yet, as he mulled over his accomplishments, he found he beheld few of his past deeds with more shame.

  “Enough,” he muttered to himself as he cleaned Velori on one of the corpses and sheathed it. “That’s enough. Tal Harrenfel must die this day.”

  He took the tome in both hands. Keeper had died for this chance. For her sister’s knowledge to come into fruition. For a Fount to be recognized for what and who he was. Here, he knew, lay his purpose.

  “I will find someone to translate it,” he said, eyes wandering over to Keeper’s corpse. Or I’ll be damned if I don’t do it myself.

  Tal lowered the book and closed his eyes as he tilted back his head and breathed. But though he longed for a cleansing breath, the Obelisk didn’t hold it for him. Smoke, fire, and blood — stenches that a man could lose himself in, that he’d lost himself in for too many years.

  But if he was to fulfill both of their purposes, he had to return to who he was before. To the simple boy in his simple town in order to labor on this, his final deed, until it was finished. Brannen Cairn of Hunt’s Hollow was his name once more, for with Bran the Bastard, it had all begun.

  He opened his eyes again, and felt the change as if it had been a magic-bound oath. I am Tal Harrenfel no longer, he told himself as he picked his way across the room and down the ruined stairs. I will leave the tower a new man. He already felt lighter for it, the burden of the bloody violence lifting.

  A long time later, after he’d burned Keeper’s bodies and interned her ashes within her sister’s beloved tower, he finally reached the open door and saw daylight beyond. Tears sprang unbidden to his eyes. He held the book close to him and walked across the fire-scorched stones and stepped out into clean air and blinding daylight. And as he breathed in, he smiled at the rush of heat through his blood. For the first time, he felt certain of what he needed to do, and he felt hope that he might succeed.

  Bran took a step and knew that he finally stepped onto the right path.

  Tal’s adventures continue in A King’s Bargain, Book 1 of Legend of Tal.

  * * *

  Tap here to read it on Amazon (free on Kindle Unlimited)!

  When Hunting a Chimera

  Legend of Tal: Short Story

  Tal crept through the darkness, breath quick, muscles burning, tortured joints creaking. He crept forward, slow as the forest itself, soundless as the trees, shadowed as the cloud-covered moons.

  When hunting a chimera, it paid to be silent.

  He’d tracked the b
east as it made its way down from the East’s mountains where all such horrors came from, and though it hadn’t killed any of the farmers from Hunt’s Hollow, a soldier’s widow and her infant son lay within its claimed hunting grounds. And so, once again, he found himself digging up his sword from its resting place, stringing his bow, and pretending to be the man he’d been before.

  But I never was able to stand by, he mused. For all the good it ever did.

  Yet these last three years, at least, he could claim to have done good. This close to the East, towns expected at least one casualty every year. But since he’d settled in the marshy lands and begun his patrols, the towns surrounding Hunt’s Hollow had yet to suffer any. In town, they called it a miracle, a sign that the Whispering Gods still extended their protection from on high.

  Though none who saw him would call him an angel. Ugly was perhaps too strong a word to assign him, but with scars crisscrossing his skin and hair growing in gray and white stripes, he could hardly be called a beauty.

  But compared to this monster, I’m a gods-damned princess.

  The chimera’s musk was heavy in his nostrils, making his breaths come even shallower. A horrid mix of unwashed fur and reptilian stink, and something else the man couldn't place.

  Bird shit. He repressed a silent groan.

  But even with the most caustic aroma he could think up filling his head, Tal was grateful. If he smelled the chimera, the chimera wasn't smelling him.

  The beast, bent over its meal, was oblivious to his approach. He heard its jaws ripping, chewing, swallowing — a sickening song, but one that dampened his fear. As long as it was eating its prey, it wasn't eating him.

  Tal crept closer, and the chimera came into sight. With the moons out from behind the clouds and the chimera in the clearing, he could see all twelve feet of its length, its silhouette seeming more a boulder. The snout of its lion head gleamed with blood as it put its huge paws on the prey and ripped off more meat. Its eagle wings, twice the length of its body when extended, were folded along its back, and its cobra tail rested on the feathery pillow. The back legs, thick as an ostrich’s, anchored thick into the earth as it tore at the meat. And on one shoulder, lolling with each limb pulled from the prey, was its goat head, always asleep unless it was alarmed.

  Only the two heads. That was good. A chimera’s third head was the worst of the lot. And as long as the goat head stayed asleep, he knew he’d remained undetected.

  Normally, the serpent tail would have been awake and alert right now while the lion head slept, and its keen night vision would have long ago seen him approaching. But, so long as the lion was awake and eating, the snake would remain asleep.

  When hunting a chimera, it paid to wine and dine it, like an amorous young lover hard in pursuit of a conquest.

  But as Tal reached the edge of the clearing, he found his bait rapidly disappearing. The deer he'd dragged to the clearing earlier that day had been a full-grown doe, but the chimera had already eaten its way through the prime parts. If he knew chimeras — and having been forced to study them and other Eastern beasts for years, he believed he did — it would soon leave off its feast to sleep, leaving the rest for later.

  And if that happened, no matter his preparations, the hunter would become the hunted.

  Lifting his bow, he notched an arrow, then hesitated. The small shaft of wood hardly seemed enough to kill such a monster, and he doubted he'd have more than one shot at it. Big as it was, a chimera would move far more swiftly than a man, even through forests, which were far from its natural habitat of craggy hills.

  Little as his life meant these days, he sorely did not want to be digested in a chimera's belly.

  But he pictured the lonely farmhouse nearby, and the woman and her child standing in the doorway. He pictured her kindly face, heard the boy's high-pitched laugh, and found a grim smile on his own lips.

  For them. He thought to himself as he often spoke aloud, as if an audience hung on his every word. For them, and the rest of the innocents. For those who hardly know the touch of the East. For those who can still be saved. I may be the shadow of the Tal Harrenfel of legend and renown. But I am still enough for this.

  At another time, he would have laughed at how he plumed his feathers like a cockerel in a farmyard. But he couldn’t deny that resolve replaced the fear, and he found the bow lifting, his trained eye finding the small target fifty paces away, his muscles straining to draw it back.

  As the lion head lifted to choke down a particularly tough piece of meat, he released.

  The arrow flew through the darkness, barely more than a shadow, whistling lightly. Tal only knew it hit his target when the chimera roared and reared back, wings spreading, tail bolting upright and hissing.

  The wailing screech of the goat head filled the night, splitting his ears and dulling the world around him.

  Fixing his watering eyes on the silhouette of the shaft off the chimera's head, Tal shouted, "Kald!"

  Flames erupted from the shadow, putting on full display the bloody, snarling lion head. The beast roared afresh with the pain as the fire spread down its mane, and the goat head shrieked incessantly on.

  Trying to focus through his pounding head, Tal notched another arrow as he backed away, making for the grove of tightly packed trees he'd spotted earlier. Not good that the beast still pawed at the arrow sticking from its eye; not good that the flames hadn't finished the job. If he hadn't killed it with the first arrow, odds were he wouldn't kill it at all.

  But when hunting a chimera, it paid to have a back-up plan.

  Abandoning all pretense of being the hunter, Tal turned and bolted, stumbling and jolting his knees with every misstep. "Stubborn bastard, aren't you?" he huffed as he made for the grove.

  Behind him, underneath the goat head’s shrill wail, he heard the branches splintering under the chimera's lumbering run. Cursing breathlessly, he ran faster still. The silver birches were just ahead — almost, he could feel the beast's breath on his back as it roared again — then he was slipping through the trees and spinning, drawing back his bow as he did.

  The chimera crashed into the trees as if it hadn't seen him, and with one of the lion head’s eyes impaled and the other dazzled by flames, he supposed it might not have. High time I make sure it never does.

  But as he aimed at the remaining eye, the chimera reared up like a stallion hoofing the sky. Only instead of a nice, plump underbelly to shoot into, a fourth set of eyes, red as burning coals, stared at him.

  There were three heads after all — only instead of growing from his shoulder, the dragon head grew from its belly.

  Only one thing to say to that. “Yuldor’s burning balls!”

  As the dragon head opened its mouth, an inferno burning at the back of its throat, he let the arrow fly and threw himself back. Even as the cold ground battered him, flames scorched the air behind, blasting him with heat and evaporating the sweat from his skin. But a moment later, the fire broke off, and a hiss of pain broke through the goat head’s shriek. It seemed his wild shot had found tender flesh somewhere on its underbelly.

  Tal clawed at the ground to escape another blast of flames, then reached for another arrow and drew. The lion head faced him again, the chimera having settled back down on its front paws, though he could see the red eyes watching him from between those massive legs. The lion head roared and threw itself against the trees, bending them and splintering them. A moment more, and it'd break through. The goat head seemed to screech even louder as the chimera battered it against the branches.

  He let his arrow fly with a yell of his own. "KALD!"

  Only five feet away, the arrow buried deep into the lion head. The chimera started to roar again, then cut off and shuddered, stumbled forward a step more, then slumped down. The goat head gave one last, gargled bleat, and like a sheep hit in the head by a stone, it slumped over, limp and lifeless.

  But though Tal dropped his bow, he didn’t drop his guard as he jumped to his feet, drew his s
word, stepped to the side, and swung down at the space where he’d just been.

  The glint of yellow eyes was his only warning as the cobra struck — just in time for the sword to sever clean through its neck. The heavy head fell to the forest floor with a thump.

  When hunting a chimera, it paid to not let your guard down.

  Tal shuffled back, panting, almost tripped over a root, but barely stayed upright. Smoke choked him as the wood behind him burned, the flames casting the clearing into flickering light. His side throbbed, and as he touched it, he found his shirt damp with blood. The old wound had opened once again.

  Still, he found himself grinning. He was still alive, and no matter what pains he’d gathered, that was worth smiling about.

  But he knew it wasn’t quite finished. Edging forward, he prodded the cobra head with the tip of his sword, and it moved with the heaviness of dead flesh.

  "Right. That part's dead."

  He eyed the lion head, mane still smoldering, as it lay unmoving between the cracked trees. Instead of poking it with the sword, he set the blade down and picked up his bow, drawing and letting an arrow thump between the creature's ribs.

  The chimera groaned, then flopped onto its side.

  Tal grinned. “That should do the trick.”

  As the beast rolled over, it revealed again the dragon head huddled between the legs. The red glow in its eyes was fading, but still it laggardly looked around at him, the black slit open wide. Tal kept his distance as he notched another arrow, drew, aimed. A moment later, the red eye closed forever.

  For a moment, he stood, admiring his handiwork. He'd killed one other chimera before, but that had likely been a cub still. Not many men could claim such a feat, and none in Hunt's Hollow.

  He shook his head. “I’ve killed warlocks and marauders and unnamed creatures from the Deep. How low I've fallen to compare myself to pig farmers and shepherds."