Chapter 22 Blood Debt

Chapter 22 Blood Debt


Boom.

One of the huts was blown up as a horny beast crashed through it like it were made of a sheet of paper, and the night turned at once into a cacophony of noise and fire--torches flying through the air, roofs caving in, the ground shaking under the treads of the stamping feet.

The village was in decline. Not slowly. It was being ripped to pieces the way you rip to pieces something you have no thought of ever putting back together, bit by bit and no thought of stopping, as though an invisible hand had enclosed the entire settlement and thought it was now time to squeeze.

Beasts ran the streets with their eyes unclosed and unfocused, and the spears in their sides and the arrows in their throats and even the members that they had lost did not slow any of them, as they continued to charge, continued to snap and tear, continued to move forward like death had become their tongue. ROAAARR! One of the boar-like creatures struck a barricade and the entire structure broke down, throwing people up in the air, and the screams which followed were brief and definitive and said it all.

The villagers fought back with all they possessed--bringing out their own beasts, making some sort of defensive line, making some effort to get their families somewhere safe, but every second the tide drove further, and the burden of it was greater than any they had ever practised. The smell of blood had so thickened that it forced out all other smells in the air.

In the midst of all it, close to the village square, was the village chief, with a stone-cut face. It was his hands that betrayed him--they trembled a little, hardly, but sufficiently. His mouth was closed as a man bites into something he does not want to swallow.

His village. His authority. The value of his entire life in pride. It was all falling to pieces in front of his eyes quicker than he could think of how to prevent it. He watched down-going villagers. He saw houses get and burn. He would observe animals engage in combat as though fear had been cut out of them. It was no ordinary beast tide. He had lived through those. It was a massacre and somewhere in the back of his chest he was aware of the difference even though his mind was unable to fully comprehend it. The animals were not assaulting without reason. They were on a hunt, and it was a systematic, premeditated effort, of which animals had no right to be.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The vice chief entered the scene, dressed in rags and his face white and his chest heaving as though he had been chasing something which was just about to overtake him.

Chief! he screamed, cracking down the middle. We have not this! Something is amiss with these creatures! They do not cease! They are indifferent to whether they live or die!

The chief swung upon him and the vice chief jumped back, as though he were hit, though the chief had not laid a hand on him.

I believe you are blind, said the chief, with a razor voice. Yes, I can see how it is going on in front of me!

The vice chief swallowed, and glanced back at the battle field, where the villagers were being still torn asunder, and what was appearing on his face was not that of a leader in perplexity. Panic in the garb of reason.

Then what shall we do? he said, rising in voice. We kill them and others come! People are starving to death there! Down the village goes! Do we run? Do we do it now, just run?

The chief scowled. Pride and survival wrestled momentarily in his breast, and the combat was not wholesome or easy. His fists tightened. His shoulders drew in. No, he said, in a cold flat voice. You see we are the chief and the vice chief of this village and we cannot leave these people.

The vice chief gazed upon him as you look at a man who has not yet come to know that he is already dead.

Then he struck out with his hand.

GRAB.

He grabbed the chief by the collar, and pulled him along, and his voice was raw and desperate, and it was stripped of everything but the necessity to live.

Chief, hear me out! he hissed. We cannot use any choice here! they are not ordinary creatures and you are aware of it! Stay, and we die, where we are, and that is all!

The eyes of the chief opened wide--not with fright but with the surprise of being seized like a child. His hands were twitching, about to attack. But the vice chief bent nearer, breathing hot, voice going down to a sort of low and vicious.

And when you die, said the vice chief, what becomes of Paxton? Your son. You would have him alone? You wish him to be that useless fellow Lucius, who trots about with nothing and despises everything because there is no one to attend to him any more?

That name was a poison in a wound.

Lucius. The orphan. The talentless one. The boy whom the entire village had laughed at, and turned its back on.

The countenance of the chief turned harder than indignant. Something that is more intimate and more revolting. His hold of his weapon was two degrees loosened. He swallowed, and his throat jerked.

He detested the fact that the vice chief was correct. He detested it in a manner that was bitter and sour in his stomach. But right was right, and he had not lived this long to have pride make his choices which the survival should be making.

And with one last glance he took in the battle-field--the houses on fire, the dying people, the animals which would not halt--and he thought something within him snapped. What he did not want to call.

Then he breathed out, and this was the biggest breath he had drawn all the night.

"You are right," the chief muttered, his voice low and flat and carrying the weight of a man who has just made a decision he will have to live with. "We cannot die here. We cannot leave our sons without fathers. We fall back."

The vice chief's shoulders dropped with relief so strong it looked like his body had given up holding itself upright.

"Then we follow the caravan," the chief said, eyes narrowing. "It cannot have moved far. We catch up to the evacuation column and we go."

The vice chief nodded fast and was already turning to move. But then he slowed, and looked back at the villagers who were still holding the line in the square, still fighting, still dying, and something in his face struggled with itself for just a moment.

His voice went quiet.

"What about them?" he asked. "The ones still fighting back there."

The chief replied, without so much as a blink, without the slightest hesitation, without any apparent feeling whatever. His voice went forth like you talk of animals.

We abandon them, them, the chief said. They will slow the beasts down. they will purchase us time to effect our escape.

The vice chief stood motionless.

The chief went on in the same level, down-to-earth manner. Then we inform their families that they died heroically protecting the village, we erect signs, we go through the correct rituals, we pretend to mourn.

There was a moment of one long look of the vice chief at him, and in that moment whatever was now remaining of his better instincts snapped asunder as though the rope had come to the end of its tether.

He nodded.

And then both men fled. Not to the combating. Not to the bawing. Out of it, pounding at the dirt road with their feet, the sky blazing orange behind them, the village which made them and nourished them, and sheltered their entire lives, sinking in blood behind their backs.

A figure was watching them as they went, on the broken roof top above.

Alex. His face took half the light of day, and left the other half to shadow, and his eyes were serene--almost listless serene, the way a man looks who is watching something that he already knows will do just as he foretold.

His lips were slowly smirked.

So that it is, he said to himself. Chief and vice chief. Like rats they run. He stood and looked another moment, and turned off and walked back to the ruins of the caravan camp, with no haste whatever, as though he were aware of the destination of every line of this tale.

It appears, said Alex, we shall have a very pretty time playing.

Step. Step. Step.

He went off into the shadows.

Mean time the chief and the vice chief continued to run. Their breathing was in gulping intervals. Their bodies were wet with sweat. A mixture of fear and guilt, which neither of them was disposed to give a name to, shook their hearts, and made them keep on thinking about their legs and continuing their movement. The caravan was not making very good time. They were in good shape and they had a head start of sorts and would keep up. That was the plan. And that was what they said to themselves. And that was the myth that had their legs going in the night.

Minutes passed. Then more. The voice of the village was shut out as the wood crept up on both sides of them, and the screaming was supplanted by silence, and the further they ran the more the chief had the sense that the tightness in his chest was being relieved. He was able to breath again. They had made it. They were out.

Then the vice chief pulled up.

His feet dragged. His eyes went wide. His lips were parted without speaking.

The chief was looking after him.

and all in him turned chilly.

The caravan had arrived. Or what was the caravan.

Wagons were on their backs, as broken bodies. The wood was broken in bits too many to enumerate. Canvas was torn away. The entire road had been painted red and the bodies that were scattered about the road had been torn and thrown about so that some of them could not be identified at first sight, the arms crooked, the forms not in keeping with the faces that had once put them on.

There was iron in the air. As open things which were not supposed to be open.

The chief blundered on, dragging his feet, his mind still attempting to deny the information that his eyes were telling him. The vice chief walked round to his side, with little more than a whisper.

What the hell, said the vice chief. The beasts were to be in the village. How had they come here? But how could this be so?

The chief was not able to reply. His throat was like closed.

They were treading the rubble, and as they stepped, the wood and the things were beaten in their feet, and the farther they went the more the horror revealed itself, the manner in which a bad wound reveals itself when you finally brush the cloth off it.

Then farther on--two figures on the floor.

Two bodies. In the same way in the mud. Not strangers. Not random villagers.

The chief paused in his walk. The vice chief halted next to him. One heartbeat had the world in utter silence.

Then they both ran away.

Thud. Thud.

The chief fell on his knees, first, and his hands trembled at his first motion, and his eyes flew swiftly as he leaned forward, and he saw all the clothes torn, and the face and the hair and the blood that was everywhere.

"No," he whispered. The word had been broken. "No. No."

His hands were in icy contact.

His breath stopped.

and then to scream out at him his voice tore itself out of him.

How can that be true?--how can that be true?--he bellowed. "Paxton! How art thou dead Here?

The vice chief had fallen beside next to the other body. He looked at what was left of his boy, the wreck of him, and his hands trembled as he put out and felt the cold shoulder.

"Jarek," he whispered. Nothing but the word, nothing yet, the name, with which the word entered in a cracking and strangling. Then the blood of violence filled his eyes that it was likely to make his blood boil within. Who did this to you?--

then there was a voice piercing the silence.

Not a roar. Not a beast. No dark-footsteps.

A chuckle.

Low. Slow. And floating like smoke in the air. It held something in it that brought a tightness to the skin of both men, and before they knew what they were hearing.

The head of the chief appeared. The vice chief became speedy.

And out of the shadows around the wrecked wagons a figure was approaching, with his hands behind his back, and his pose easy and careless, as though he were coming out to meet some guests whom he has been waiting to receive.

The pupils of the chief were drawn in. The face of the vice chief turned all in fury and disbelief.

Alex.

But not the Alex they remembered. The body was the same and the face was the same, but something in it had shifted, sharpened, grown heavier somehow. His eyes held a brightness that had not been there before, and his presence felt different in a way that was hard to explain and impossible to ignore—like something had moved into him that had no business being inside a normal person.

He smiled.

"Good evening," Alex said, voice smooth and easy, soaked in something that was not quite mockery but was close enough to it. "Chief. Vice chief." He stepped forward, boots cracking on the broken wood beneath him. "To think that our reunion would look like this." His grin widened slowly. "Funny, is it not?"

The chief's whole body started to shake. His hand found his weapon. His voice came out like rolling thunder.

"Alex!" he shouted. "What have you done?! Were you behind the beast tide?! Was this you?!"

Alex tilted his head to one side, the way a person does when they find something genuinely amusing.

"The beast tide?" he repeated, letting the words sit in the air for a moment. Then he smirked. "No," he said, almost pleasantly. "I did not create it."

The chief's eyes narrowed. The vice chief's fists tightened.

Alex continued, his voice staying perfectly calm.

"But," he said, raising one finger, "I did make a few small adjustments." His smile sharpened at the edges. "A little push here. A little tweak there. A bit of encouragement at the right moment." He spread his hands open at his sides, a gesture of mild innocence. "And suddenly they became so much more lively than they were before."

The vice chief came to his feet, shaking from the knees up, his face gone red, his eyes wild with fury and grief mixed together into something almost incoherent.

"You bastard!" he screamed. "You destroyed our village! You killed our sons!"

Alex looked at him the way a man looks at a dog barking at something it cannot reach.

"Killed them?" he repeated softly, the word turning over in his mouth like he was examining it for accuracy. "No, no." Another short chuckle. "The beasts killed them. I am just a weak, talentless person who made the beasts a little better at doing what they already do."

The chief's jaw tightened so hard the muscle at the side of his face jumped. The vice chief's breathing came heavy and uneven, the sound of a man running out of a certain kind of patience.

Then Alex's eyes went quiet and something cold rose to the surface of them, replacing the amusement with something flatter and more deliberate.

"But," he said slowly, his voice dropping in register, "if I am being honest about it—" He took one more step forward and the air around him seemed to press inward slightly, the way it does before a storm. "I suppose I did kill them."

The chief's eyes widened just slightly.

Alex's smile came back, but darker than before, carrying something in it that did not belong to a young man who had spent his life being beaten in the dirt.

"And is that not justice?" he asked, voice conversational and light. "They bullied me. They laughed at me. They treated me like I was something you scraped off the bottom of a boot. So yes. Maybe this is exactly what justice looks like."

The chief exploded.

"How dare you call this justice?!" he roared, and the sound of it tore across the ruined road. "My son was innocent! Those villagers were innocent! You burned everything and killed everyone, and you stand there calling it justice?!"

Alex threw his head back and laughed, and it was not a normal laugh. It came from somewhere deep and accumulated, years of bitterness compressed into sound.

"Innocent?" he said, letting the word hang there with all the contempt he had stored for it. "You want to stand there and tell me they were innocent? You want to say that to me right now?"

The laughter stopped. Cut off completely, like a door slamming shut.

"There was nothing innocent about any of them," he said. The warmth was entirely gone from his voice now. Just stone. "Not one thing."

He held the chief's eyes and did not look away.

"I gave myself justice," Alex said. "I cleaned my own hands. So lower your voice, old man. You do not get to lecture me about what is fair."

The chief's entire body was shaking now—grief and rage pushing against each other inside him until the pressure had nowhere to go. He raised his weapon. His eyes were burning.

"You have gone too far," the chief snarled, his voice stripped down to something raw and ugly. "You will pay for everything you have done here."

He stepped forward, ready to charge.

The vice chief's hand shot out and grabbed his arm hard.

"Wait!" the vice chief shouted.

The chief jerked his head around, furious at being stopped.

But the vice chief's eyes were not on him. They were locked on something behind Alex, and the expression in them had gone from rage to something much older and much more afraid.

"Look," the vice chief said, his voice dropping to barely a sound. "Look behind him."

The chief's eyes moved.

And his heart simply stopped.

A wolf stepped out of the darkness at the edge of the road. Not a normal wolf. This thing was massive, standing taller than a grown man at the shoulder, its fur the pale gray of dead ash, its eyes carrying a dim and sick light that looked almost like thought. It breathed slowly, each exhale coming out long and deliberate.

Hrrr.

The sound alone made the vice chief's fingers go cold.

Alex looked over his shoulder at the wolf the way you look at someone you were expecting, then turned back to the two men in front of him with the same easy expression he had been wearing the whole time.

"I am surprised you noticed so quickly," he said. He stepped aside, clearing the space between the wolf and the two men. "I cannot quite kill the chief myself just yet." He shrugged, unbothered. "But it seems there is a perfectly good show available."

He walked over to a broken wagon wheel nearby and sat down on it like a man settling into a chair, elbow on his knee, chin resting in his hand, eyes bright with something between patience and pleasure.

"Let me keep it simple," Alex said, his voice lazy and comfortable. "If you can kill it, then you get to face me."

His smile widened into something sharp and without any warmth in it at all.

"So go ahead," Alex said. "Entertain me."

Alex smirked as he sat there watching the show.