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He found the soldier behind a palm, loosing arrows into the camp. When he heard Allred, it was too late. He looked to run but the cold steel of his sword at his neck convinced him to put the bow down.
The soldier was terrified, young, and Allred understood both these things in a quiet way and said nothing to the man while he held the blade to his throat and waited until the last of the fight died down.
In a moment of mercy, he considered killing him there and then instead of bringing him to Cole.
He led the man out from the trees once the fight was over and back to camp and tied his hands with rope Stoneburner gave him. Stoneburner took him over to the table and gestured for him to sit beside the other prisoner, an older man, who kneeled on the ground.
The older man wore a ribbon of the Optri around his forehead. This changes things, Allred thought.
Cole smoked his pipe at his makeshift table. Helga stood near him, talking to the side of his head, Cole saying little.
Cole spoke to him, “I’ll talk first. If that elicits no useful answers, we will proceed from there. Accompany your cousin elsewhere for now.”
Both prisoners heard the interchange. The older one understood its meaning. Hartha and Hortha flanked each of the men. Mage stood back in the shadows; eyes fixed on the back of the Optri man.
Allred beckoned Helga over and she followed him a few steps away.
“I didn’t lead them here,” she said.
“No one said you did.” He didn’t doubt she thought that was true. “Did any of your people fall?”
“No. Nor, did they throw themselves into the fight.”
“Good,” he answered.
“What I saw today, the vipers, those birds, the things up there—”
“Just the start,” he replied.
He took out a redleaf roll and lit it from a torch flickering nearby.
“Those are Throneland soldiers, cousin. How did they find us here?”
If he had been leading their group, they’d never have shown their faces, never would have fought here and never would have died. He would have gathered information instead of trying to gather heads.
“Cole will find out. The Optri man won’t talk. If the younger one won’t, Cole will make him. If that happens, cousin, I’d prefer you turn away.”
Helga looked pale in the moonlight. The weight of the Haunt already had started bearing down on her.
“He will know if they are lying?”
“Cole has a way of seeing through people.”
The look that crossed her face indicated she might finally understand what the Relic Hunters were.
You didn’t survive the Pits without trouble. She had known bloodshed. She just didn’t know the many ways it can be shed, yet. He would have liked to save her that, and knowing he couldn’t now, he satisfied himself with a smoke and a shrug.
“I’m going to check on my people and the two boys,” she said and left.
More torches flared up around the camp. The sound of men pulling bodies through dirt, gathering fuel for a pyre. He saw Stoneburner leading the two boys and the donkey off towards the creek. That was good the boys lived. As Helga walked away, Cole signaled for him.
He unsheathed his sword as he approached. The younger soldier turned towards him. Carefully, he put the side of his sword to his face, turning him to face Cole.
Scrolls appeared out of the darkness behind the table and whispered in Cole’s ear.
Cole turned to the prisoners.
“Why are you here?”
“I didn’t know—” the younger prisoner started.
The older one was on top of him in an instant, lunging up from his knees, his mouth seeking out the younger soldier’s throat, missing it, and biting his ear instead. The Optri tore off the soldier’s ear and spit it into the dirt then kept coming at him.
Hortha grabbed the attacker. He tossed him to the ground away from his erstwhile ally, who screamed but couldn’t reach the bloody side of his face with his bound hands.
Allred put down his sword, moved forward to help the soldier. Cole didn’t blink, simply sat there watching, unstirred.
“Take the Optri over there. If he moves again, cut him but don’t kill him,” Cole said.
Hartha and Hortha stood the man on his feet and pushed him away into the night. He licked the blood from his mouth and shouted some curse to his dark gods.
“Doctor,” Cole bellowed.
Aodlen hurried over, looked at the ear, the blood, the soldier, then retreated and returned with a clean bandage. It smelled like it had been dipped in a distillation of astringent herbs. Aodlen showed the soldier what it was before he pressed it against his head. The physician bade Allred hold the bandage to the man’s head and went back to the blankets where his tools were. He brought back some sort of salve. He applied it to the flesh where the ear once occupied. Allred could feel the soldier’s body shaking beneath his hand.
“Easy,” he said.
“What’s your name?” Cole asked.
Through some sobbing, he answered “Aacten.”
“Who is that man?” Cole asked.
Aodlen gave the soldier a drink from a flagon of fresh water. The young man drank. In the torchlight, he saw his face clearly. It reminded him of friends he had seen scared out of their minds years before.
Boasting men in the morning, shaking in the evening shadow.
He turned away. He didn’t want to look at his face anymore.
“I don’t know, sir. We are a small company stationed a fair ways north of here. We spend most of the time doing nothing.” Aacten motioned his head towards the darkness where the Optri man had been hauled off by the two twins. “He appeared and took command, brought us here. He never talks but he’s, well, you see what he is, So—”
“You know what the Optri are?”
“I’ve heard, yes, everyone has heard of them.”
“He is one of them.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Optri were the secret units of the Throne. Spies. Torturers. Diplomats. The military could not control them, though they were forced to work with them. They all swore to the Throne by way of devotion to a particular battlemage who was loyal to the Throne. These battlemages usually, but not always, mastered the most esoteric and dark arts of magery. One of them had taken command of this regular soldier’s unit and they had come to trek them.
Aacten didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, the Optri had just said, they were seeking unlicensed explorers.
“He is the only Optri with you?” Cole asked.
“They have their own ships, their own ways. We don’t even see them, too ... different. Rumor is they have a command ship somewhere. I’ve heard it houses a mage. I’ve heard wicked things of it. It was so easy down here before he showed up. Before all this. We just sailed around, show the banners in Port Shamhalhan, never go farther south than the Middle Isle.”
Allred believed him. It sounded like standard Throneland work in a neutral area. They would be given a little silver to spread around to local chieftains. They might help with local problems, capture a bandit for them. It built goodwill for the Throne, and it was the way they controlled places they didn’t occupy. And when and if the time came, to occupy, well they would have some of the inhabitants favorable to them.
“You know who we are?” Cole asked.
“I don’t know. I just … this was a good place to serve. That … thing never talks. I tell you, not a word. I don’t think he’s even a man. All was easy until he showed up. One of my friends—they’re gone now, aren’t they? All of them are dead,” Aacten said.
“You know who we are?” Cole asked, again.
“My ear is gone.”
Quiet had come over him. Bleeding and the realization everyone he had known was dead.
“Yes, your ear is gone. Did anyone from your group escape here?”
“How would I know? I don’t know who is dead.”
“How many with you including yourself?”
“Ten,” the man said.
“The Optri command boat, how far away from here is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it. It’s just a rumor. The Optri, I didn’t even really believe they were real until that man showed up. Our unit, we were the only Imperials down here, almost. There’re thousands of these islands down here in the southern sea. I’m from the Plains of Alsworn. Never seen anything like this place until my unit shipped here. We landed in the village down there, talked to no one just straight away up the mountain. We’ve been just going from island to island. Whatever we’ve been looking for, he wouldn’t say.”
“Expect anyone else to come?”
“I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”
“That’s all for now,” Cole said, waving his hand. Allred lifted the soldier to his feet.
“Are you going to kill me?” Aacten asked, embarrassment in his voice.
“We are the Relic Hunters of the 9th. We remember. What does the Throne say to that? You can speak honest.” Cole said.
Aacten let out a bitter laugh followed by a sob. It seemed the stories they told of their outfit in the Thronelands differed from some of the popular legends at-large.
“Savages,” Aacten whispered, “Rebels. Dark magic-wielders. Malcontents. They say you should have all died and if you had, there would be peace.”
He smiled at the soldier’s honesty. It surprised him.
“And?”
“If you’re Cole—they say you’ve gone mad from living in Haunts and dealing with unclean spirits.”
Cole stood, stretched, sat his pipe on the table. Let his fingers linger on it, staring down while he spun it on the rough surface, thinking.
“Tonight, you’ll be fed. You’ll have fresh water and wine. Our doctor will tend your ear. After he finishes healing our men you’ve killed and wounded. For that, I don’t blame you. You’re a soldier and you serve the Throne.” He looked up and stared straight through the soldier. “Just like we did.”
The man relaxed a little for the first time. Believed him. Cole spoke with authority.
In the light of the torches on the island of Esmer, the one charge Aacten spoke rang true enough to him. The Relic Hunters of the 9th had spent too much time in the Haunts.
“Take him to the doctor,” Cole said and waived him away, peering out into the darkness where the twins had taken the Optri.
He led him over to Aodlen. The doctor barely looking up from this bloody work, gestured to a tree on the fringe of the camp and told him to tie him there.
He did. Aacten whispered twice, “Will you really let me live?”
“Cole doesn’t lie,” he answered, and returned to the table.
Now the Optri man was on his knees and Hartha and Hortha stayed close, their axes at the man’s throat. The Optri man stared at Cole in the firelight, his face split by a terrible grin. His arms were bound high, his right arm terminated in a still bleeding stump.
Not far away, on the outskirts of the camp, the funeral pyre was lit. The flesh-smoke drifted across the camp. The wind blew the smoke to where they stood, occluding them all, obscuring the Optri man in black banks of it, which he inhaled deeply. All the while, the man’s eyes, like rain-wet rocks stared at Cole.
Scrolls came through the smoke, holding a small black bag and put it on the table in front of Cole, who didn’t break his gaze with the Optri man.
“His hand was located on the tower above, propped on the railing, facing the camp,” Scrolls said in his flat voice, “It contains a living Eye. We are found out.”
Worse than he thought. Much worse. When the soldier said there were no more Imperials on Esmer, he believed him. But now, there would be more coming with certainty. And first among them would be the Optri.
Cole broke gaze with the Optri man, untied the small black bag and took out the severed hand which belonged to the man staring at him. He placed it flat on the desk, palm up. The flesh was dead but in the middle of the palm something wiggled and squirmed—an inhuman eye couched in the dead flesh. It stared up at Cole. Cole picked it up and sat the stump of the wrist on the table, the eye facing the former owner of the hand.
“Yours?”
A cold smile to rival the Optri man’s own broke over Cole’s face, as waves of the smoke from the funeral pyre swept over them.
The Optri man’s face shifted in the dark and smoke. He breathed in deep, again and again, inhaling the smoke of the flesh of the dead with relish. At the pyre, Allred could hear a few prayers go up among the Rats, low chants of lament. Of the Black Boat men, he heard nothing.
The Optri man spoke slowly, opening his mouth wide. His voice was too loud. Each of his earlobes were missing and the canals filled with some material. Along the scarred skin of his skull, tiny tattooed script ran in the form of a serpent. Each cult had their own strange practices of disfiguration to mark them.
“I have no hands. I have never had hands. That is the Master’s Eye. And the master’s hand. It serves him. It watches you Cole and what remains of the 9th.”
Cole gestured to Scrolls, “On to the pyre.”
Scrolls picked up the hand, put it back in the black bag, turned and walked to the fire. In the distance, Allred could see him approach the flames and toss the hand with the Eye onto it. When it met the fire, the Optri man laughed.
“How far away are you?” Cole asked.
“Oh, never far,” the Optri man replied in a sing-song voice, too loud. The accent was of the central Thronelands.
“You’re just a servant.”
“One among many.”
He moved around to face him, his sword up and out and pointed and ready to strike him down in case he moved towards Cole. Even with the two giants holding the axe at the man’s throat, he didn’t like this. They ought to cut him down and put him on the fire now, instead of later.
“How far away?” Cole asked, again.
“Never far.”
Through the smoke Hartha squinted, “He’s got a Doom root in his mouth, Cole,” he said. The giant moved to take it from the Optri man’s mouth but Cole waved him off.
“Let him. Give my regards to your master,” Cole said.
The Optri man bit down onto the root, which he had kept secreted behind his teeth.
“He knows your aspect,” the Optri man said.
“And your worldly master?” Cole asked.
“No,” the Optri man said.
The stalk of the plant the man chewed on would soon end his life. It was a powerful poison. Despite that, he kept his blade point trained at his face. He chewed and smiled at him, not flinching and then he let out a terrible, long scream of victory and fell to the ground, his mouth erupting in blood.
“To the pyre,” Cole said and stood, lighting his pipe.
Hartha and Hortha lifted the Optri man up and carted the corpse to the flames.
Now, they were alone for a moment. Him and Cole.
“The choice. Pack everything, double-time march back to the Black Boat. Leave Esmer, start somewhere else. Or we go,” Cole said.
Allred knew already what he would chose. He said nothing. Let Cole talk.
“Figure that Optri man sent our location to the Optri ship with the Eye. We have at least a day’s lead, even if they are on the shore, could be they are weeks away.”
“If they show up while we’re in the Haunt or fighting the Upside Fever, I don’t know we survive,” he answered.
“If we walk away, we just located a Haunt for the Optri and the Throne and we profited nothing,” Cole replied.
“We won’t back down, we both know it. It’s just how we go about it. Force a march back to the Haunt tonight though and we lose more people on the way up.”
“Dawn march,” Cole agreed.
There was another problem, they hadn’t spoken of, “Thousands of islands in the southern sea. How did the Optri man find us in the first place?”
“In Port Shamhalhan,” Cole said.
“Helga says she didn’t lead him here.”
“They saw us, or they saw her. On the sea or in Port Shamhalhan. It doesn’t matter now. If you wish to speak against going forward, speak now, Allred.”
He did not hesitate, “I follow.”
Cole nodded.
So, into the mouth of a Haunt with Optri on the trail.
“At first light, we march.”
He nodded and looked down at the blood-stained dirt, where Aacten’s ear sheltered in the shade cast by the bent low-lit grass where the two prisoners had fought.
“First light,” he echoed.
Cole sat back at his table, picked up his pipe and added its smoke to the dissipating flight of the dead.
He made his way to the funeral pyre. The bodies burned, the work done, most had turned away from the sight and smell to their own fires—all but the dwarves of the Rats and Hortha and Hartha. The Green Islanders knelt near the flames, eyes shut and lips shifting and made their prayers for the dead.
He stared into the flames, put his hand on the hilt of his sword, saluted the fallen.
He would have to get a new count of the living and the dead in the morning.