Prologue Two – Blackfang
Blackfang vaulted over a fallen log nearly half again his own height, craning his neck back to look over his shoulder as he flew to see if he was still being followed. Three black, flowing shapes, which did not mix with the surrounding shadows, fluttered from tree branch to tree branch. They were still on him. With a sharp curse, he rolled out of his landing and spun, horn bow up and ready, waiting for one of the demons to approach. He didn’t have to wait long. Almost as soon as he was on his feet, a black cowl poked up above the fallen tree – and promptly disappeared again with the shaft of a long arrow stuck through.
Another down. Two to go. Blackfang turned and fled once more, chased by the curses of his hunters. Laughter sprang to his lips. These southlanders were weak and stupid. The jungle had no pure blacks, even at night. Dark blues would have provided better cover – dark greens the best by far, if one was not willing to clothe themselves with the detritus of the land itself as Blackfang had. Even as he ran, bits of caked mud and ruffling leaves fell in his wake, laying bare the dark browns and greens of his leggings and tunic underneath. He had been well prepared, as the outrider of his small party, and yet they had found him somehow, and continued to find him still no matter how he masked his trail. He had almost reached the point of panicked flight, rather than the measured retreat he still somehow managed to convince himself he was enacting. Nine hours of this, he thought with disgust. These weak southlanders had no business chasing him about the jungle for nine hours.
Yet here they were, idiots from Ckuien Penance, chasing him with the enthusiasm of children running after a dog, and about the same amount of skill. The only thing keeping the pair of hunters on Blackfang’s trail was the horrible sigil still burning its way through his left shoulder, where one of their blasted sorcerers had managed to carve it in the short moments before the hunter had escaped from their hated grasp.
It had all started so simply in when he had left the fastness three days earlier. At the request of one of the chief’s sons, he and two others had set off to meet this delegation from the southlanders, as part of the trade agreement the clan had been labouring under for the last eight years. The small party had packed up the trade goods, in this case nearly three fully laden skids of boar pelts and spine dragon hides as agreed at the last rendezvous, and set off through the dark pre-morning jungle. The journey had been easy; each of them had done the same a dozen times or more in the last season alone. Down from the clan’s fastness on the side of Nef’s Finger, crossing both the Cipri river and the Lath on the path down toward the small vale which led to the foothills. No matter how many times he did it, Blackfang always hated the short climb down from the northern escarpment, descending into the jungle proper. His people may call the canopied darkness home, but somehow the transition from cool, bright mountain light to dark, cold jungle night always jolted his senses. The escarpment marked the halfway point in the journey, however. From there no special routes were necessary, no river fording required. A straight line, from the edge of the foothills directly to the ruins the southlanders called Shadow’s Reach.
A fitting name, that. Even the elders of his clan knew nothing of when or how the ruins came into being, only that no man should travel beyond the line drawn by its outstretched wings. Nor did the southlanders venture further into the jungle than the Reach itself, and even that only to continue trade relations established by those few foolish enough to allow their curiosity to take them into the dark of the jungle to begin with. The last contact had been made eight years ago when two of the chief’s sons, Porphigaul and Kintere, had wandered beyond Shadow’s Reach, through the whole of the dark forest, and found themselves lost on the southern plains, just outside the cesspool the southlanders called Ckuien Penance. Naturally, they had found similarly foolish men there, and the clan had been trading through the errant Porphigaul ever since. No one had seen Kintere since the pair had left, but Porphigaul was present at every meeting, arranged every collateral, profited from every trade. So when the trio had arrived at Shadow’s Reach this morning to find not Porphigaul, but his southlander partner and three dozen men with knives and swords of both metal and shining stone they had been, to say the least, nonplussed.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the leader of the southlanders had said amiably upon their entrance to the brightly lit clearing. “We’ll be taking those pallets, thanks.”
Not a good start to bargaining.
“Where is Porphigaul?” Laiet demanded. Even from his perch in the trees, Blackfang could see the leader of the southlanders was amused by the question.
“I’m afraid your countryman is somewhat indisposed in the King’s jails at the moment,” the man explained, limbering his long knife in its sheath on is hip. “As is his brother. We’ve come for your goods, in payment of his debt to the King.”
“We recognize no king, nor debt to one,” Laiet spat, turning on his heels and taking up the lead of his skid. “We will return in four days, to trade with Porphigaul.”
It was the wrong answer. Before Blackfang even had a chance to steady his bow, the leader of the southlanders made a gesture and one of his followers raised a knife that glinted like greenstone. There was a sickening feeling of wrongness in the air and a spear of light jumped from the greenstone knife as it swung, crackling, the spear slamming into Laiet’s back and tearing through his body to embed itself, quivering, in the side of a tree some two dozen spans away. The thing looked like frozen lightning, jagged and weird. Then all became jumbled.
Blackfang loosed an arrow, which bit the neck of the man who had killed Laiet, while Khaleel, the third in the party, broke and spun through half a dozen men with his daggers before any had the time to react. Within moments, two of the three dozen men were down, most killed and the rest bleeding their last, before the leader of the southlanders stuck Khaleel with his knife and spoke a word of power. The young hunter jerked, fire spilling from his mouth and eyes, and fell to the ground in a scorched mess. Sick in heart and stomach, Blackfang dropped from his perch and ran.
Directly into the arms of one of the remaining southlanders. This one, bearing shining stone rings, stuck the heel of his palm to Blackfang’s shoulder and hissed some arcane phrase, placing the beacon directly on the hunter’s skin, blistering it with the heat of sorcery. A curse on his lips against all bookish killers, Blackfang slew the man with the tip of one of his remaining arrows and flew into the jungle as close to straight north as he could manage on such rough terrain.
He had quickly found himself lost, on unfamiliar ground, with less than ten arrows left and immediately regretted not arming himself fully. Laiet had told him this would not be a hunting excursion; more fool him, so Blackfang had only brought thirty arrows and two of his smaller knives against the chance of catching their own food on the journey. During the first hour of his flight, he had lost one of those knives in the skull of a pursuer, and the other had been stolen from him by one of the final four almost three hours ago. Now, with only one arrow left and little reserve of strength, the only comfort Blackfang allowed himself was that he had most definitely not led these persistent killers back toward the fastness of his clan.
No, instead he would die alone, unsung, not even in the heat of holy battle or duel. Kienor Blackfang, most skilled of the hunters of Namar, would die alone, unarmed, and fleeing from only two men, having abandoned the bodies and weapons of his companions perhaps an entire day’s journey away. His soul would be doomed to wander the dark forest for all time, mourning his own stupidity in allowing these idiotic southlanders to chase him from any chance at glory. Porphigaul’s honour was not worth this. No man’s honour should be worth a true warrior fleeing through forest darkness for an entire day, especially not when that warrior ends up fleeing right into the arms of his pursuers.
Blackfang skidded to a halt as he entered a wide clearing, abutting a raging waterfall that must have been a hundred spans tall. Before him, ten spans away, the two remaining aggressors stood, crystalline weapons at the ready, sneering at him from under dark hoods.
“You didn’t think we’d give you up that easily, did you?”
The voice came from behind him, and Blackfang spun, bow up and ready with his last arrow pointed right at the throat of a tall, robed figure, deeply hooded, with sallow hands clasped over the sides of a massive book before him.
“What do you want from me?” Blackfang hissed, drawing the string of his bow steadily tighter. “You could have killed me a dozen times by now. Why disgrace me with this futile travesty of a hunt?”
“For exactly that reason,” the cloaked man responded evenly. “You did not wish to be chased, and I cannot help but oblige my own sense of irony.”
“This is not irony. This is bad comedy.”
“True enough,” the inky monolith agreed with a chuckle. “But it’s over now, so your worries are not entirely merited any longer.”
“And what will your lackeys do when you aren’t guiding their hands any longer?” To lend weight to his question, Blackfang loosed the arrow.
Which passed through the pitch-black figure and struck, with a resounding thud, into a wrywood tree far behind him.
“Why, I’m not sure,” the figure muttered quizzically. “Not less than they’re doing now, do you think?”
Blackfang had no occasion to respond. No sooner had the figure asked the question, than one of the two survivors breached his peripheral vision and raised its knife, sending a bright spark of writhing fire to strike Blackfang between the eyes. Dazed and suddenly very weak, the hunter fell to the ground and was carried away on an ocean of darkness.