Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial

Arc 2: Chapter 15: The Hunt

“It’s too early for snow,” Vanya said, frowning up at the gray sky.

Emma looked less impressed by the rain of pale flecks settling across the land in a thin film. She opened her mouth to speak, pausing mid-word as a cutting wind sent drifts of misting snow and dead leaves across the hill. “We often had early winters back in the Westvales,” she said. “I still remember them.”

“That was mountain country,” I noted. I knelt, took some of the skyfall on my fingertips, then pressed it to my tongue. I spat it back out. “It’s not just snow,” I said, standing. “There’s ash mixed in.”

Emma pursed her lips. “Explains the color. What do you think it means?”

Vanya spoke before I could answer. “We’re too far west for ash rain.” She clasped her hands together, shivering at the bitter air.

I didn’t know what it meant, exactly. It could have been an ash storm blown in from the east, originating in those blighted lands where Golden Seydis once reigned. That didn’t explain the sudden cold, though. I suspected something else, but kept my peace.

Emma glared up at the sky as though it had personally offended her. Then, with a tsk, she turned to Qoth. The irk reclined in the shadow of an apple tree nearby, tossing one of its prematurely spoiled fruits between his gloved hands.

“Is the Night Coach ready?” She asked.

“For road travel, aye milady. Overcast skies won’t put us in the air, though.”

“Best be off,” I agreed.

Emma nodded, then turned toward the path leading down from the manor hill. She frowned, narrowing her eyes. I followed her gaze and saw why. Several riders approached us. They rode sleek creatures with ruddy brown coats and proud antlers adorned with metalwork — domesticated kynedeer, bred for riding and war. Lightly armored soldiers in a mix of chain and plate rode them. House Hunting bannermen.

We waited as they approached, and I recognized Hendry Hunting, Brenner’s son, in the lead. He had two guards with him, both wearing peaked helms and carrying long spears, the weapons somehow evoking the kind one might use to hunt as much as they resembled the traditional lance.

The big lad drew his crowned mount sidelong to us, removing his own tall helm. Unlike the guards, his helmet had two short antlers worked into its design, taken from pieces of the same material that grew naturally from his beast’s skull. His steed’s breaths plumed in the cold — it had been ridden hard to get here at speed.

“Hail, Lady Carreon.” The young lord tucked his helm under one arm, bowing his head to Emma. His mop of brown hair had been pressed flat by his helm. The effect made him seem even more melancholy, with that boyish face on his burly frame.

“Lord Hunting,” Emma greeted him, without as much gravitas.

“My lord father requests your presence,” Hendry said, his somber demeanor unchanged from my first encounter with him. “You, and your Glorysworn attendant.”

Emma glanced at me, a small frown quirking the side of her lips. “We were already on our way to—”

“Not at Antlerhall,” Hendry interrupted her. He grimaced apologetically. “At Orcswell.”

“Orcswell?” Emma asked, confused.

“One of the larger villages in the fiefdom,” Vanya whispered to me, though most of her attention remained fixed on the men-at-arms.

“But why is he at…” Emma’s face went pale. Paler. “You don’t mean…”

Hendry nodded, his expression cemetery grim. “He’s back. The Burnt Rider has attacked the village, driven its people into the hills.” He took a deep breath, letting it out in a frosting plume. “My father has gone out in force to meet him along with Ser Kross, and he wants you and your champion there. He believes we can end the threat today, once and for all.”

Emma looked at a loss for words. Her eyes wandered, as thought looking for a reply in her surroundings. She found me, and I saw the fear there — though, I thought perhaps I noted an excitement beneath it, a resolve to finally meet what haunted her.

A dangerous emotion. I turned to the lordling, catching his attention. “The Rider is at this village now?”

Hendry nodded, lips pressed tight for a moment. “The villagers say that, after he drove them from their homes, he remained in the village square. Almost as though waiting for something, or someone. My father believes the devil is calling him out. Even if not, he can’t let an attack on his people go unanswered.”

“I doubt it’s your lord father the spirit wants to see,” I said. In my own thoughts, I tried to understand the revenant’s behavior. Why attack random villages far from its true target? Why stand on challenge against an entire fief’s martial strength? Such spirits could be mighty, but they tended to only be truly dangerous in a more personal sense. I’d never even heard of one trying to go to war.

I didn’t like it, and didn’t trust it. I turned to Emma to speak, to tell her to stay behind and let me go with the Hunting lad, but she saw the demand coming and cut it down with brutal decisiveness.

“Ser Alken and I will be there,” she said, placing her hand on her heirloom sword. “Let us meet this devil at last and see its measure. I am tired of waiting, of hiding.”

I knew the look in her hawk’s eyes. I’d seen it often enough in my queen’s eyes, back when I’d still served as her sword. Rose had been impossible to argue with in those moments. I’d learned the hard way to keep close, keep sharp, and keep anything with a sharp edge away from her neck.

Just like old times, I thought with a sigh.

***

We didn’t take the coach. Instead, Emma and I rode the feathered chimera individually, accompanying Hendry’s group. We rode hard for several hours, the House Hunting kynedeer gracefully bounding across the land while Emma’s griffyn loped along, keeping pace with the sleeker beasts. Though their vestigial wings weren’t capable of flight without the aid of the sorcerous coach, they were durable animals bred to carry the nobility over hard terrain. Both kinds of mounts, whether beaked or antlered, had been designed to replace the horses of olden times, and both evoked the image of that displaced breed. Whether for function or nostalgia, or a mix of both, I couldn’t say.

I’d avoided using chimera since my tenure as a knight — a real one, not just this little farce with Emma’s “Ser Red.” They didn’t abide me for long. Or, more accurately, they couldn’t abide the gaggle of spirits that tended to shadow my steps through the land’s back roads.

More ash-mixed snow fell as we traveled, soon covering the whole land in a dour layer of pale, nearly white gray. Trees which had barely begun to feel the touch of Fall rained dead leaves, which blew across the fields in swirling eddies from the same biting winds that caught at our cloaks.

Perhaps it was only a trick of the light, or of my own mind, but I felt like the world narrowed as we neared our destination, like the gray sky grew closer, the hills rising higher and pressing in on the road. Then, finally, we reached Orcswell.

It was an idyllic community. On the larger side, with enough homes for perhaps fifty or sixty families, all of them finely made for comfort as much as function. No rude hamlet of thatched roofs and mudbrick, this. A cobblestone street ran through the village’s center, and I could see the ancient well the settlement had taken its name from in the central square. Orchards of apple trees had been cultivated on the village’s periphery, more scattered across the surrounding fields. A church rose on a small hill at the edge of the village, the auremark displayed like a warship’s banner in defiance of the threats lurking beyond the shadow of distant mountains in the west.

It looked empty. Shrouded in the same veil of ashen snow as the rest of the countryside, I felt as though I beheld the petrified carcass of a community, as though the whole village, its home and shops and orchards and fields, had all been entrapped in filmy stone.

I saw no sign of the oft-mentioned Burnt Rider. We did find Lord Brenner. He’d arrayed his retinue on a hill overlooking the field. He’d brought twenty knights, each with a full lance — a classic chivalric unit consisting of the knight, a squire, a heavily armed shieldbearer, and one or two archers. They formed a handsome sight, arrayed under the ashen sky, peaked helms and tall spears glinting in the wan daylight.

A small army, and probably most of his fief’s military strength, discounting the commoner levies Brenner could have mustered. He hadn’t gone that far, yet. Still, he seemed to be taking the threat seriously.

“Good of you to join us, Lady Carreon!” Brenner’s voice covered the hill like thunder as he approached. He made for an impressive sight all on his own, decked in green wyvern-scale armor reinforced with plate, his antlered helm sporting a white plume flicking about in the unseasonable wind. He rested a spiked warhammer on one shoulder, his bristling beard forming a stormy mane over his gorget.

Emma gave her own muted greeting to the lord, though her attention rarely strayed from the village below us. “I see nothing, my lord. Where is the Rider?”

“That is a very good question,” Lord Brenner rumbled. His eyes went to an aged man in homespun garb standing on the hill, looking ill at ease amid all that marshaled chivalry. “If we’ve been brought out on a wild goose chase, goodsir, I will be irate.”

Brenner Hunting said this very calmly, but the prominent lump in the old man’s throat bobbed nervously.

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“I swear to you, lord,” the villager said, “he was here. He came in the night, shrouded in flame, and made a great clamor. It was him.” His voice took on a note of hysteria at the end, his expression pale as the falling snow.

“Hmph.” Unimpressed, Brenner looked at the village again.

Ser Renuart Kross rode at his side on a shaggy creature with a heavy head halfway between feline and bovine. It had huge paws rather than hooves, and had been clad in rich tack of similar shadowy colors to the paladin’s own garb, with the Priory’s distinctive winged auremark worked into a steel cap on its heavy skull. I felt certain it had some lion in whatever alchemical mix had given birth to its forebears, like those pale beasts who dwelt in the northern peninsula and some parts of the east. His, however, had fur such a deep gray it was nearly black, and placid black eyes just like the kynedeer.

“I dislike this,” the knight-exorcist said, calm despite his words. “It feels like a trap.”

Brenner scoffed. “What kind of trap would a lone rider, however preternatural, spring on us? He is hiding, or has already fled.”

I reached out with my auratic senses, not unlike stretching out an invisible arm or tongue to feel the air ahead of us, but we were too far from the village. I felt a tension in the air, but I couldn’t tell if that was nerves — mine and all the knights — or anything supernatural. By Ser Kross’s distant expression, I suspected he did the same either with his own magic or with that intangible spirit clinging to him.

“Even still, it feels foolish to charge in blindly.” Ser Kross’s lips pursed and his gaze wandered until it found mine. “Perhaps a few of us should go on ahead, and see what there is to be seen?”

Lord Brenner followed the knight-exorcist’s gaze to me and Emma, a thoughtful look replacing his irritation. “That is sound thinking, father. Yes, yes! Lady Emma, I think it time to put that Glorysworn you dragged into this to use.”

Emma didn’t react to his sardonic tone, instead inclining her head graciously. She’d dressed in the garments she’d worn when we’d first met, something halfway between a courtier’s finery and militant uniform, and done her dark hair up in a complex bun, revealing her sharp, aristocratic features. “Very well. I would like to accompany this forward party.”

“Out of the question!” Brenner barked. “This devil is after you, girl, and you expect me to toss you in there like fresh meat on a hook?”

Emma gave the huge nobleman a significant look. Ser Kross let out a breathy laugh. “I think that is her idea exactly, my lord.” He spurred his horned mount forward. “I will accompany them. I am here for this purpose, after all.”

Brenner scowled, but seemed to submit to the idea. He waved a gauntleted hand in dismissal. “So be it. The three of you will go, and signal the rest of us either the all clear, or the order to charge.” He held out a hand, and one of his men placed a tall war lance in it. The arm sported a furled banner depicting the spear and stag of his house. He handed it to Ser Kross, and one of the men-at-arms showed the knight-exorcist how to give the required signals.

Finally, unable to hold his silence anymore, Hendry spurred his mount forward. Emotion twisted his previously calm features. “Father, let me go with them.”

Brenner didn’t even look at his son. “No. I want you to take Ser Aurand and Ser Lydia and deploy their lances on the east and south hills. If this wretch is hiding in Orcswell and attempts to flee, we will run him down, just like a fox.”

I took note of the hounds Brenner’s people had brought along — big, fey-eyed beasts with sleek frames and bloodred coats. He really is treating this like a hunt, I thought.

Hendry gathered his courage and tried again to convince the bearish lord. “Father, after what we discussed, I believe it proper I attend the Lady Emma into this danger. She should not go into that village with only two guards.”

Brenner finally met his son’s eyes. I’m not certain what passed between them in that moment, but Hendry’s gaze remained firm, his jaw set. The older Hunting finally nodded. “Very well. Then I will have Ser Lydia’s lance go with you.”

Emma didn’t so much as give Hendry a nod of thanks, her attention remaining fixed on the village. I thought I saw her jaw tighten, though, as the young nobleman pulled his mount closer to hers and gave her a reassuring smile. I felt a little knot of realization form in my chest.

No time to grapple with that just then. Too many, I thought with a grimace, seeing the group arrayed to investigate the village. I didn’t bother arguing. Somehow, I doubted the lord would care much for the tagalong mercenaries’ opinion.

So it was that eight of us went down into Orcswell. Me, Emma, Ser Kross, young lord Hendry, one of the Hunting knights, along with the squire, shieldbearer, and archer of that knight’s own retinue — almost a classical fellowship.

An eerie silence pervaded the snowy fields as we approached the village. A stream ran across the land, the same source of water that kept the nearby orchards bountiful and the meadows green in more seasonable times. The villagers had built a handsome bridge large enough for a wagon to cross over it.

“You should wait here, my lord, my lady.” Ser Lydia was a woman nearing her middle years, the face under her peaked helm narrow and grim. “I will take my lance across the bridge first, to make certain there is no threat.”

“I think it best that Master Alken and I go first,” Ser Kross said, before an argument could break out. “We can both sense aura, and can see more than what the eyes might tell.”

Emma and Hendry both agreed to this, and the Hunting knight acquiesced with a courtly bow from her saddle. “As you wish, ser priest.”

Ser Kross and I went over the bridge, passing into the village square and stopping our mounts near the orc well. It gave the knight-exorcist and me a private moment to talk. “You sense anything?” I asked him.

Ser Kross frowned, narrowing his flinty eyes to near slits. “My companion is agitated, but the feeling is not very specific. It’s less what I sense in the aura, and more what I smell with this that troubles me.” He tapped the side of his long nose.

I frowned, and took several exploratory sniffs. The cold and snow had muted it, but I realized almost immediately what he meant. A bitter smell lingered in the air. I recognized it, though I hadn’t smelled the like since—

The vision came immediately, with ferocious aggression. I watched as—

A bolt of green lightning splits a high, verdant peak towering above the golden valleys. The ensuing shockwave is unlike anything I’ve ever felt. When it passes, fire boils forth from the mountain, like blood from a sword stroke.

More images flash, assaulting me with greater speed moment to moment. Molten rocks rain from the sky, splintering tall towers, cracking proud avenues. Droves of people, mortal and fae, flee in a mad rush from a threat that is all around, and can’t be escaped. Knights in armor gilded or decorated with silver hold against Recusants wearing the colors of a hundred traitor lords, and monstrous things crawl across the smoldering walls, or feast on the ichor bubbling up from maimed eardetrees. Leathery wings and feral howls fill the air.

Over all of it, standing on a high rampart, a towering warrior with the head of a lion watches, his rumbling laugh of mirth echoing through the streets like thunder.

I see Fidei reaching out for me, trying to take my hand. I remember stepping away, horrified. I remember—

“Keep your oaths then, and see if they warm you!”

“Alken?”

I blinked, back in the village. It took me a moment to collect myself, and I winced as a spike of pain went through my skull. When I pressed my fingertips to my temple, I realized I’d broken out into a cold sweat. “What is it?” I asked.

Ser Kross had a strange look on his face as he stared at me. “You froze for a minute there. And, your eyes…”

Damn. I recalled when Ser Maxim had been taken by his own visions of the Fall, how golden aureflame had spilled out of him. What had the warrior priest seen?

“I’m fine,” I said. I took a deep breath, unable to keep the slight tremor from it. “It’s sulfur. I can smell sulfur in the air.”

Ser Kross nodded slowly, though his gaze lingered on me. “Yes, that is what I smell. I don’t believe we are near any springs or active volcanoes, so…” he shrugged his armored shoulders. “What are your thoughts?”

I cast out with my senses, trying to pinpoint anything of note in our surrounds even as I shook away the remnants of the violent vision. I felt something, a strange tension, just as I had up on the hill. I still couldn’t get a hold on it, but decided it wasn’t just nerves. Something potent had been here, but whatever it was, I’d never felt anything quite like it. I felt too quiet, not at all what I expected from the traces of a supernatural being, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

“I think, whatever was here, it’s gone now.” I frowned at the silent buildings. Snow still fell lazily from the sky, settling over the steepled roofs around the square, or on the abstract architecture of the old well.

“But possibly still nearby,” Ser Kross muttered. “Shall we call the rest of them in, you think? Do a thorough search?”

I nodded, not quite sure what to do next and still shaken by my memory-vision. We signaled Lord Brenner, and over the next twenty minutes his soldiers made their way down the hills and into the village bounds. After another half hour, the village had been declared clear.

“Goose chase!” Brenner scoffed. “What a farce.” He wheeled on Emma, as though the girl were at personal fault for his wasted time. “I am growing very tired of playing cat and mouse with this shadow of yours, little shrike.”

Emma lifted her chin. “You are welcome to wait for the Burnt Rider to find you in your castle, my lord. I do wonder, though, if you will have much of a fiefdom left in a month or two.”

I watched Brenner master his anger. Snorting, he turned to Ser Lydia. “I want the woods nearby thoroughly searched. If there’s anything to find, we will find it.”

He turned to the knight-exorcist then, lifting a hand to brush at his bristly beard. “Ser Kross, was there anything here?” When speaking to the Church knight, his tone turned more respectful. I wondered if the brash lord was, in fact, devout.

Ser Kross still looked half distracted. He had his head cocked to one side, as though listening to someone whispering in his ear, and seemed to be muttering to himself. The grayish snow falling on his dark garments made him look almost a statue, as artificial as the well nearby. “I believe so, my lord.” He sighed. “But, I cannot—”

We both felt it at once. To me, it seemed as though a great shadow suddenly stretched out from the distant horizon to flood the village with its touch. Nothing visibly changed, but to my less physical senses I suddenly felt as though I stood on a black lake, and I had to make an effort not to jerk on my steed’s reins in panic.

Then, a more familiar sensation struck me. From that impression of a titan shadow fallen on the land where I stood, I felt and heard the unsteady thumping of a great heart. Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-ba-bump.

A Thing of Darkness drew near.

Ser Kross’s head snapped up, his face stilling into an iron-hard mask. Emma, auratically aware as well, shivered suddenly as though struck by a chill wind. Only, the wind had gone dead. The snow had stopped falling as well, only a few tardy flecks still spinning down to settle on the village square as all went quiet.

“There!” One of the archers called out, breaking that spell of silence. Our eyes went to him, then followed his pointing finger to the northernmost hill overlooking the village.

A light had appeared there. A dour, smoldering red light, like a great ember suddenly bursting to life on the ridge line. Squinting, I could barely make out a shape within. Tall, made all of jagged lines, I beheld an armored rider on a tall steed. The beast and rider both were clad in charcoal black armor, and the red light burned from them. I could see fire clinging to both, dully burning, but could make out few minute details from this distance.

From that hill, the echoing sound of a bestial snort fell on us. It came from the thing the armored rider rode, which seemed to me very much the classical horse — only, it had curling ram horns emerging from its long skull, and eyes of smoldering flame.

We all watched, as though in a trance, as the rider held aloft the object in their left hand — a tall lance, blackened and warped. As the rider lifted its barbed tip to the sky as though in challenge, there came a sudden flash. A cloak of flames sprouted from the armored rider’s shoulders, flaring out behind them like a princely train.

The Burnt Rider, it seemed, had arrived. But his appearance wasn’t the source of the dread that struck me then.

“Queen of All Lands and Heir of Onsolem, protect us,” Lord Brenner’s eyes had gone very wide. “It’s him. It’s Jon Orley.”

The revelation of the Rider’s true name was of less import to me than what I realized as the full weight of the fire-cloaked knight’s aura settled on me. His presence in the world was enormous, at least as weighty as Rysanthe’s, or Lias toward the end of the wars. A being of true potency.

But I also saw the burning rune that scarred the sky above the hill where the rider stood. Fashioned of angry flame, made all of writhing lines and jagged, claw like protrusions in the reverse of the converging arrows and rising arc of the holy Auremark, I knew the symbol, had learned it during my studies in Seydis as an Alder aspirant. This creature that haunted House Carreon was no revenant. Or at least, not one made in the bounds of my world, on its surface or beneath.

We faced a Scorchknight of Orkael, an enforcer of the Iron Tribunal.

An agent of Hell.