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SOME WAY HOME
PART ONE
by Matt Spencer
THREE GLIMMERING BARS of razor-sharp metal lashed and struck at Caglar like maddened snakes. Blood and sweat slickened the grip of his heavy cut-and-thrust rapier. Just five left now, the woman and the last two men, against him and Draa. No, he realized, just four, because Draa had gone down with a blade in the gut. How long since Draa fell? The last man Caglar had stabbed had rallied and rejoined the fray, even after taking a blade between the ribs. Caglar respected that.
A good swordsman’s either deadly or dead, with no in-between, his old instructor used to say.
Now the rangers had him on the retreat, pressing him back across the rocky outcropping. Stones skittered beneath his feet as the steep drop loomed behind him.
Their eyes bore into him with righteous triumph, along with the overconfidence of three against one. It made them careless. Fresh madness flooded his brain and throbbing limbs. He finished off the wounded man and sprang to the left, back onto solid footing, putting the Spirelight commander between himself and the turncoat Schomite girl. As they pivoted in surprise, he lunged in at the tall, powerfully built commander. Their blades bit and locked in a bind. Caglar spotted the dagger on his opponent’s belt. His free hand pulled it from its sheath, drove it in beneath the leather armour vest, and jerked sideways. The commander gulped, dropped his sword, and folded forward.
Here came the woman, practically trampling over her fallen comrade, her sabre swooping at Caglar’s skull. He parried and darted away. She stalked after him and attacked more cautiously now that it was just the two of them. Beneath the blazing sun, their arms grew heavy so their blades chimed and slithered at a slower rhythm. Until moments ago, he’d thought they were on the same side.
‘It’s not too late to change your mind,’ he panted.
They both knew that was a lie, almost as bad as her betrayal. A trace of doubt still flickered through her murderous gaze. Then she made a low lunge and sliced him across his calf, right as his rapier got her in the neck. She gurgled and sank to the grass.
Caglar’s head cooled as the last echoes of clashing steel died away. He lurched towards the fallen girl. Pain flared through his leg, so he collapsed to his knees next to her. He touched her dead cheek, let out a sob that she didn’t deserve, then strutted agonizingly to his feet and slapped his sword home into the scabbard.
Thirteen bodies littered the meadow, five of his gang including Draa, eight of the rangers who’d ambushed them. His bleary eyes fell on the dead woman. Six of ours, seven of theirs, he still wanted to think.
Draa had warned him not to trust her. One of the oldest stories in Noresterland, probably in all Deschemb: just another farm girl, ’til the local Spirelights raped and murdered her village and her family, so she’d taken up her pa’s old sword and turned to banditry, where she’d had to fight twice as hard as any of the boys to prove herself, in whatever gang she rode with. Anyway, she’d known how to fight, which was all that had mattered to Caglar. Looking her corpse over, he noted how she wore her hair… pulled back in a single whip-like braid, just like the female Spirelight soldiers wore theirs. That should have been his first clue. The saddest part was, her sob story was probably true… except somehow, the Spirelights had gotten to her, offered her something that was enough to betray her own kind, to ingratiate herself among Caglar’s bandits and lead them into this ambush.
Caglar’s eyes watered and blurred like an old man’s. Through the trees to the north, he could just make out the road he and the others had followed through the gully. Were those more hooves clattering in the distance, or just the blood pounding in his skull? His leg stung and throbbed. He glanced down and realized the cut ran deeper than he’d thought. His slick, shaky hands managed to bind it up well enough that he didn’t bleed to death. He located his travel sack and canteen. The latter sloshed, less than half full. He noticed the commander’s dagger, still clutched in his left fist. It was a fine knife. He went and worked the scabbard from the commander’s belt, fastened it to his hip, and found a path down the steep hillside, towards the inviting shade of the trees. He made it halfway down before realizing where he was headed: Ashwind Forest.
For generations, his people had shunned this strange, otherworldly wilderness. There’d never been a time when they would live there, though his ancestors used to venture in on hunting expeditions, or so he’d heard. Centuries ago, when the Spirelights first came to these shores, before their Empire and their gods had made war, the native Schomites had tried to tell them, ‘You folks are moving into the Ashwind Forest? You glowsticks are crazy!’
Or so Caglar’s ma used to tell him as a boy. He hadn’t seen Ma or anyone else back home in years, not since he’d abandoned lawman training for a bandit’s life.
The sun blazed down on him from a clear sky, yet a sombre, misty cloud spread out above the murky, wooded expanse, like a mere few steps separated the harsh day from spectral, dreaming dusk. The mossy branches twisted like bodies writhing in torture, twining and tangling impenetrably over endless deadfall, yet… was that a clear, narrow path spreading out right in front of him, like a darkened doorway had opened just for him?
He sighed as he hobbled onto the winding, darkening trail, just relieved to finally find some shade. Always listen to the voice of the lands, like Ma used to say.
CONTINUES NEXT MONTH |
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