Chapter Four: Part Four

I am sorry for the delay, gentles. Busy holiday. Conclusion of Chapter Four, continued from Chapter Four: Part Three

While Silk spoke, Twig stared like a stone at him. At this point, Twig looked at Digger. Digger had been watching. He nodded to confirm Silk’s story. Silk spoke like a liar. He couldn’t help it and he’d never try to do anything about it. Digger’s honest face helped Silk’s position. The lad showed his use. Silk smiled again. “I’m sure that Ferryman got your notes,” Silk puffed on his cigar. “If you want a reply to them, you’ll have to go find it personally.”

“I do not know where to look,” Twig said.

“I do—it’s further north,” Silk said, looking Twig straight in the eye. Silk’s heart beat unevenly. It had since the wars. No one who heard his heart could judge anything from it. It never sped nor slowed. Twig looked like the kind who heard heartbeats. His eyes saw more than other men. Silk smiled. “Did you say Zombie Corps?” he said.

“I did,” Twig said.

“There are other members of the Corps?” Silk asked.

“I do not know.”

“If you’re here, shouldn’t they be?” Silk asked, grinning around his cigar. With a straight face Twig stared silently at Silk. “It seems like it to me. There never was a Zombie Corps active in the War. If you are here now, somewhere the Zombie Corps ought to be waiting. Shall we rally them?”

Twig stared at Silk’s smiling face for a second. He turned to Digger. “This man is strange. There is no reason for him to help me.” Twig walked away from Digger and Silk toward the woods.

“I have a venture that may prove compatible with yours,” Silk said at Twig’s retreating back. “When you learn more of the new world.”

“I am sure that you do,” Twig said. He disappeared under the shadows of the pine trees. Silence filled the void.

Silk’s and Digger’s horses huffed. Silk felt the sides of Lortie—his own horse—relaxing. Everything stood still for a while, the breathing horses and men the only sound. A few minutes later a rustle disturbed the undergrowth among the trees, like a rabbit ascending from a hiding place. A bird took wing across the road. Silk heard a fox chirrup.

“Has he gone away?” Digger asked. Silk frowned. The voices in his head nudged him forward, telling him not to give up yet. Tapping his horse’s sides, Silk rode on past the boulder in the road. Past it, the road took another turn into a wide flat in the hills. Without speaking, they cantered for a few minutes along the easy stretch of road. The pine woods along the road thinned as they went. Some hundred yards could be seen in both directions.

“Look there,” Digger said, nodding sideways. Keeping pace with them, on a mottled grey mustang, Twig rode through the thinning pine trees. He angled his mustang to get closer to the road. When it began rising over the next low hill he had rode just ahead of Silk and Digger. Silk noted a distinct lack of weaponry on Twig’s saddle, while Digger carried several knives, a sword, and a bow and arrows—Silk would not begin listing the plethora of weapons about his person. Twig lacked supplies of any kind. He must be starving.

“I will go to the nearest Zombie Corps rallying point,” Twig said. “You may accompany me.”
Silk’s lip curled at the back of Twig’s head. The flat nothing of Twig’s voice peeved Silk. Twig wasn’t supposed to have the power here. Silk didn’t know quite what to do just then. “Fine,” he said, slowing his horse so he fall a little behind Digger.

Taking a long breath, Silk filled his lungs with cigar smoke, watching the heads of the two young people ahead of him. Cheeky bastards.

Continued on January 9 (shall now be posting every third day)...

Chapter Four: Part Two

Continued from Chapter Four: Part One

“You know, price the size they’ve put on you, you’re not to be attracting just any mercenary,” Digger said. They rode their horses through the hills, along the highway where the murderers had turned up dead.

“That’s reasonable,” Silk said, puffing on a cigar.

“There are only two or three scalp hunters willing to pursue a warrant so expensive,” Digger took a thoughtful tone, waving three fingers to emphasize his point. “Low-Ball and his lads might,” Digger said. Low-Ball was one of Silk’s people, from the far southern peninsula, who’d turned his skills learned pirating into a mainland trade. Though Silk knew that Low-Ball had turned governor and spent most of his time attempting to unite the southern islands into a republic, and make “honest” trade—honest understood in a diplomatic sense. In any event, Silk had little fear of Low-Ball. “Then there’s Bogeyman,” Digger went on, mentioning one of the scary stories that had graduated from merely haunting the nightmares of children to tainting the stories that hard men told each other around campfires. For years no one believed that Bogeyman existed, and the few raving men who talked of him received the “mad” label. Digger believed Bogeyman existed—as did Silk.

“He’s been tied up with business, they say,” Silk said.

“Aye, so I hear,” Digger agreed. “He’s still a danger. He isn’t already rich and he always needs money.”

“That is true,” Silk said, scratching his cheek. Bogeyman always had some expensive venture on his platter, or so folk believed.

“And my father,” Digger said with thought in his voice. “He’d be up for the chase.”

“Yes,” Silk drew out the word, smiling. “That would be a worthy chase.”

“Aye.”

“Do you think he’d take it up?” Silk asked. Digger shook his head.

“He’s distracted with his own affairs,” Digger said.

“Pity.”

“If you actually wish to be caught it is,” Digger said as they rode past some huckleberry bushes frosted with old snow.

“You have very little faith in me,” Silk said, smiling.

“I hardly know you,” Digger said. Silk chuckled.

“You forgot someone,” Silk said.

“Did I, eh?”

“Tetch Slander and his boys,” Silk said.

“There is them—gods preserve you if they like the scent,” Digger said.

“Why? I think it’d be rather a lark evading old Slander and the Scarpy,” Silk snuffed, taking his cigar out of his mouth. “I fought beside them often enough. Fighting against them presents all new puzzles.”

“You are an odd one,” Digger shook his head, raising an eyebrow. He clearly could not believe that Silk was serious. Silk chuckled again. “Do as you like. I’d really like to clarify this Engelkind point.”

“I have declared war on the man.”

 “Right, you’ve declared war on Engelkind’s institution,” Digger was saying as they rode. Silk interrupted here.

“Just the man, not his institution,” he said, snuffling. He puffed on his cigar and looked around at the pine trees growing up the sides of the steep valley. It was the only highway out of town, Digger had said. Silk was not sure it smelled believable, but it didn’t matter much. The dead murderers had been found on this road.

“Declared war on Engelking the man—greater tang of blarney to that, but I’ll leave it aside till I know better of your character,” Digger continued.

“Most gracious,” Silk said.

“What I’m hearing as the moral to the grand story is Silk wants to see Engelkind killed, eh?”

Silk nodded. He heard something in the woods roundabout. Or, rather, heard an empty where scurrying critters ought to be audible. The silence had surrounded them for some minutes now. It had washed the valley suddenly half a mile back.

“Engelkind is a dictator and a scourge on future generations—does the young lordship’s conscience like the ‘tang’ of that?” Silk said, concentrating on listening to the woods rather than to Digger.

“Nay, I find it hard to understand. Legend tells us that Engelkind is a marked man, and that Ferryman’s own instrument is the only end he’ll meet.”

“And you have trouble believing I’m Ferryman’s instrument?”

“Aye. The story says Engelkind can only be killed by a thing unknown to this world.”

Digger was quite true, of course. Silk knew the story. He found it fascinating and he’d seen enough things try and fail to kill Engelkind the warlord to believe the legend. Ferryman occasionally marked men as his own quarry. The fact was well known. Those men only died according to Ferryman’s own design. No one had ever succeeded in directing or predicting the designs of Ferryman, the god of death and the end of things. What with Ferryman disappeared from the world, and Engelkind simply proceeding to age—he must be eighty or ninety already—it presented Silk a pretty puzzle.

He thought he had perhaps cracked it. The silence around him seemed familiar. As a clue, silence was wretched. It hardly told Silk anything. He paid attention to it, though.

“Well, we shall see,” Silk said.

“It’s too quiet,” Digger said.

They let the silence lower. It breathed through the trees—a scream with no breath, no throat, no voice. The icy sky pressed down on the snow covered ground. Before them, the road lay clear like a bated snare.

A noise like a hiccuping sob interrupted the silence. Stumbling from the trees, a man fell onto the road. His coat had ripped—he held a bloody hand to a too-limp shoulder, trying to steady the dislocation. With red shot eyes leaking frustrated tears, he stared at Silk. A grin cracked his face.

“He saw you,” the man said—Krist Novoselic gone far past the edge. Novoselic ran at Digger and Silk. Stumbled, though his legs appeared uninjured he had trouble walking. His breath came in grunts and snuffs. Digger’s hand fell on the handle of his bow, but he left his arrow un-nocked. Novoselic posed no threat; he loped past Silk and Digger, smelling of blood and sweat—muttering, “ha, he saw you, ha,” as he went. They let him go.

Digger looked sideways at Silk, raising an eyebrow. No words seemed required. The mad murderer spoke frighteningly for itself. Digger loosened his big knife in its sheath. Silk drew his curved two-handed sword, so that he looked prepared, although he thought he knew what had beaten Novoselic. With the mumbling, hiccuping breaths of Novoselic falling behind them, Silk and Digger rode their horses forward at a walk.

The road rounded a bend. Thick bushes blocked the view forward till they had made they turn. Twenty yards further on, a boulder stood in the middle of the road—the road parted around it. The boulder stood ten feet tall. On it, with no apparent weapon, stood a slim man, clutching a voluminous cloak like enough to a Holy Assassin’s around his shoulders. He had the hood up, though his face--youthfully shaped but shadowed around the cold eyes and sharp lips--stared out from the dark hood. His skin had the white cast of a corpse frozen in the snow on the ground. Silk recognized the pallor and nothing else about the person. That seemed strange. Silk expected to see someone else. His surprise, damnably, showed on his face for a second. The man standing on the boulder didn’t react. He stared passively at Silk. Silk gained control over his surprise after only a second. The man probably saw it.

A brief hiatus will be taken for Christmas. Continued on December 27...

Chapter Four: Part One

Continued from Chapter Three: Part Five

Twig contemplated the last words of the last Holy Assassin he had killed: Silk the Beast. It was the name of the next target of the Holy Assassins. Twig trusted the killer’s dying words. For some reason, the Holy Assassin had felt the need to tell Twig to kill Silk. “Carry on since we no longer can,” the Assassin had said. Sometimes, people called the Assassins the Ferryman’s Messengers.

Night surrounded Twig. He sat on a stone sticking out of the side of a hall. It commanded a clear view of the road north out of town and the woods around it. With only one break, he had been sitting on the stone for three days watching the valley for motion. Animals that moved among the woods caught his eye--wind moving the trees around--occasional resettling of snow as it melted or froze. From the stone he could see a mile to both the north and south. In the time, though Novoselic the murderer had been quiet in his movements, Twig had watched him move here and there in the valley. Novoselic checked his several snares for rabbits and ferrits and birds. He caught nothing for the first two days—his hunger must have been ravening. On the third day, Twig watched the subtle bending of bracken and the rushing of little creatures that indicated Novoselic’s passage along one of the gametrails on the far side of the valley. Novoselic must have found some creature in his snare because after a short time Twig saw the glare of a small fire, lit behind a pile of stones and whitening the already white snow only a tiny bit. Cooking his meal Novoselic would remain still for a time. That suited Twig.

Rising, Twig jumped off the stone jutting from the hill. He landed in loose snow—snow from the nights on the stone fell off his shoulders. Where he landed the hillside fell steeply to the road. In the powdery snow, Twig slid down the hill, keeping his feet and pushing off the trees that got in his way. Soon he reached the flatter bottom of the valley. He scurried across the road. When he reached the far side of the valley he began running up the rising ground. It soon became too steep to run straight up the hillside. He began grabbing onto trees, swinging to the higher side of them, and leaping further up to the next tree. Soon, he gained the snow-covered pile of rocks providing Novoselic cover for his cooking fire. Twig felt the flickering heat from the fire and the gurgling heat from the murderer. The smell of a quaill being skinned tinged the mostly still air.

Landing from his last leap on a craggy stone, Twig climbed the pile. Gloves tucked into a strap on his pants, he pried his cold fingers into the snow-filled cracks in the stones, the rough edges threatening to cut his skin. He kept his movements light, protecting his hands. Soon he reached the top of the stones and crouched just past the apex, looking from under his hood down at the rough man and his little cooking fire. Novoselic had a waxpaper poster in his hands. He examined it close to the cooking fire—the quaill half-skinned in the snow beside him. The poster had the face of a far southern man, with thick black hair and a trimmed goattee. In the etching his eyes looked intense and he smiled wildly. The poster said, “Wanted: Silk Golinvaux, enemy of the state. Known psudonyms: The Beast, Garrote, Black Ghost…” The list continued. It never listed his crimes--though it offered a huge reward. Far larger than Novoselic’s. Novoselic no doubt wished to turn in Silk and hoped to gain his own pardon.

There was the face of the man a dying Assassin asked Twig to kill. A strange suggestion. And Silk an enemy of the state. With the new turn his life had taken, Twig almost thought he’d do it.

Novoselic rubbed the back of his neck, as if he felt a chill. He glanced behind him as he did. Twig’s silhouette caught the corner of his eye. For a moment, Novoselic paused, looking sideways toward Twig. He then dropped the poster of Silk. Wheeling on the balls of his feet, staying in a crouch, Novoselic spun to face Twig. With the wheeling momentum, he drew and launched a knife at Twig. The knife flew well—Twig watched it spin toward him. It flipped through the frigid air. Novoselic began moving away from the fire the moment he released the knife’s handle.

The knife came within Twig’s reach. He moved aside. While he did, he raised a white hand. His fingers touched the cold, unpolished blade. Brushing the coarse metal, he slowed its flipping momentum. His hand found the handle; his fingers wrapped around the old bandages winding round it. Looking back at Novoselic, Twig stood. Novoselic had already started running.

Words seemed unnecessary during the last few weeks in the hills. Twig killed three murderers and gave them his message to carry. Each of them, with frighted recognition widening their mad eyes, attacked him like he had walked from their nightmares. They feared someone else who looked nearly like Twig. None of the desperate murderers had been willing to tell him anything. When he caught up to them, they fought tooth and nail—big rough men that they were—and went into a mad rage. He tried to preserve them long enough to inquire. The first died of stress—he had been starving and freezing for weeks. The second ran off a cliff. The third began to babble; he had already lost his mind and fought till Twig subdued him. Each were more fragile than men usually are. They were cold, mad men, and Twig got no wisdom from them. Their ghosts, he hoped, carried his messages. Ghosts have more stability of character, or so the stories say.

Novoselic ran from his little fire, his half-skinned quail, ran from whoever it was he mistook Twig to be. Twig began to hunt, Novoselic’s old knife loose in his hand.

Continued on December 23...