The Herald of Som: Chapter Two
Previously:
The Endless War between Merros and Orynheim is about to come to a bloody close. Tyruc, a hapless traveler conscripted into the Orynian army, is desperate to survive the night, even if that means abandoning those in need.
The fields continued to burn. The titanic ships overhead fired volley after volley upon each other, uncaring of the stray shots that cratered the ground and wiped out lives indiscriminate of allegiance.
The sounds of war rang out: clattering weapons and armor, calls for retreat and advance, howls of pain and victory. A cacophonous song of murder masked as glory.
Tyruc slowed to a pitiful cantor. He had no idea where to run except “away,” if there even was anywhere on the blasted continent that would be free from the effects of the thousand-year war waged between Orynheim and Merros. Still, he continued to move, driven by the primal urge to survive.
How did I get myself into this? he wondered as he stumbled along. He did not belong here. He was neither Orynian nor Merrosian; he was a traveler who came to the warring land of Jorza on a whim.
A stupid, stupid, stupid whim.
He skirted around another dirty hill to a clearing populated by three large tents.
Nestled together tightly, their gray canvases camouflaged them from above. Each was marked with the Merrosian royal crest as well as another symbol that gave Tyruc a thrill of hope: a pair of antlers drawn in white chalk, the international symbol of healers.
Crouching, Tyruc snuck toward the nearest tent, dropping to his belly and crawling when he reached its corner. He carefully laid in the small gulf between two of the tents and eased up the edge of the one on his right to peek with one eye at the interior of the space.
Tyruc’s vantage point was beneath a cot; the underside of it was soaked and dripped thickly to the dirt below. The tent was illuminated by light-touched lamps glowing supernaturally bright.
More cots line the tent, nearly all of them occupied. A pair of soft boots paced the center aisle extending down the tent’s length, and Tyruc squirmed along the edge of the canvas to get a look at the owner.
A tall woman with golden-blonde hair and bronze skin, likely one of the Forestfolk, glanced over the cots without comment. She wore a plain white dress, the belt across her waist laden with pouches and various implements. Tyruc praised the heavens, knowing a chemist like her would likely have physical supplies that included water and perhaps even food to draw from. Had she been a priestess, he might not have been so lucky.
The woman walked all the way down to the tent’s opposite side, about-faced, and returned. She wrung her hands in front of her, absently trying to wipe away dark stains with a washrag. As she passed by Tyruc’s hiding spot, he heard her muttering to herself in a tongue he thought must belong to the elves.
They were both startled when one of the wounded screamed out, Tyruc nearly yelping as well.
The healer moved to a cot across the aisle farther down to Tyruc’s right. He took that as a sign and peeled the edge of the canvas up just enough to allow him room to wriggle his way beneath it and into the tent. While the woman shushed her patient, he crept around the edges of the cots and hoped their occupants would be too miserable to pay him any mind.
At the far end, away from the woman and her patient, a narrow wooden table held various tools of a healer’s trade as well as a large wooden bowl and a clay jug. The bowl must have been for the healer to clean her hands and soak rags with, meaning the jug had to be filled with water.
Tyruc had not had any water in days. He was dimly reminded of the intense thirst that gripped him in his youth growing up in the desert.
All sense of stealth was lost as he lunged toward the jug, grabbing it and upending it over his mouth. Two or three mouthfuls sloshed within, and Tyruc greedily chugged it down in a matter of seconds.
“What are you doing?”
Tyruc turned slowly, jug still pressed to his lips.
The healer stood at the foot of the cot she had been tending with her hands perched on her hips. Tyruc was usually adept at improvised lies and excuses, but his addled mind could only muster a stream of curses at his own stupidity.
The woman withdrew a knife from the back of her belt. Tyruc held the jug to his chest and backed away, bumping into the table and toppling its contents to the ground.
Annoyance flickered over the woman’s face. “Stop that,” she snapped.
Her command was forceful but not malicious, and though everything in Tyruc wanted to run or resist, he found himself glued to the spot.
The woman stepped up to him. “Turn around.”
When he did not immediately acquiesce, she grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him, and the next thing he felt was cold metal against the back of his neck.
His eyes squinted shut to brace for the coming pain.
From a young age, Tyruc had been sure he would be short-lived. A macabre imagination convinced him that some tragedy would befall him during his youth, but his childhood amongst the dunes then his adolescence aboard ships and traversing the backstreets of busy ports came and went. His early adulthood passed by in the same manner.
So much of Tyruc’s life had been spent running. He escaped from his orphaned childhood. He escaped from the various people he robbed and the authorities sent after him. He even escaped the clutches of a few monsters along the way.
But still he was sure he would be dead well before he made any difference or any headway in the world. He lived from one day to the next, one year after another, aimless and narrow-minded.
When he surpassed the age of twenty-five, a switch flipped in him. He had survived a quarter of a century just fine. But his survival had been utterly self-centered, without a mark made on the world around him, no remaining familial connections, no friends to speak of.
Of course I would wind up gallivanting off to a warring death-continent, he bemoaned in his head. Cut down by a murderous medic. Is that irony?
He only then noticed that he was not bleeding out in the medical tent. Instead, the knife at his neck was picking methodically at the stitching on the back of the leather collar around his throat.
“This would be easier if you would stop shaking,” the healer mumbled.
With an audible pop, the collar came free.
Tyruc slowly turned to see the healer toss the band into a basket nearby, joining several other similar leather bands. He looked to the beds containing wounded Merrosians and saw several with red chafes around their throats, and an awful truth dawned on him.
He hazarded a comment. “I think I saw some Orynian troops wearing them, too.” He tried to gauge her reaction, but she had stepped back a few paces, tapping the blade against the heel of her other hand as she clinically examined him.
“Mm,” she hummed. “Rumor is that the collars were smuggled over to them recently, and they didn’t hesitate to put them to use, I’ll wager.” She clicked her tongue. “You don’t look injured, so other than drinking all of my clean water and knocking over my tools, what are you doing here?”
“I, uh, felt sick.” Tyruc, you are a better liar than this! he reprimanded himself.
The Forestfolk woman nodded, however, and gestured to the few empty cots, sheathing her knife. “Take your pick.”
The aisle was narrow, so Tyruc was forced to squeeze past her to take one of the cots; as he did so, she slipped the jug from his hands and returned it to the table, also stooping to pick up the fallen items and reorganizing them.
Tyruc chose one between two men who looked to be sleeping and perched on its edge. He eyed the far ends of the tent, calculating which would be easier to escape through, when he caught the woman making strange motions with her hands.
Tyruc was familiar with the gesticulations of spellcasting, though not adept at it himself, but he had only heard of a chemist’s ability to shift matter. The woman moved her hands downward over the jug’s opening like pulling on an invisible rope and squeezed her hands into tight fists. Wispy motes of light gathered, pulled into the top of the uppermost fist; then from the bottom of the lower fist, water sprinkled into the jug. She repeated the movement multiple times, wringing more and more vapor from the air and into liquid, until the vessel was nearly full.
By the time she finished, her face had become drawn and her shoulders drooped. She brought a fresh washcloth dipped in the water over to Tyruc and pressed it to his neck, and he hissed as the contact stung.
She gave him a pitiless roll of her eyes. “The skin is badly chafed here. I’ll need to clean it so it doesn’t get infected.”
As she pulled various materials from her belt, he could not resist asking, “Why did you remove my collar? I mean, I appreciate it, but what if I try to run?”
“Slavers’ collars are not allowed in my tent.” The response came with a bit of bite. “They interfere with magic,” she added, though it sounded like an afterthought instead of a true explanation.
Tyruc sensed a story there, but there would be no time for that. As soon as she was distracted again, he would dash for the exit furthest away from the healer and make his way southward. Whichever way that was.
“Besides, where would you run to? Step outside of this tent and you’re back in the bloodshed. This is the safest place for any of us.” The woman sighed and stepped away.
Tyruc’s neck no longer stung, and when he reached up to touch it, the skin was smooth as though never damaged at all.
He contemplated staying there. Wait out the fight, stay out of harm’s way until some serendipitous moment arrived for him to make his exit.
But the illusion of that option was dispelled in twofold: first, the growing look of suspicion he thought he saw in the woman’s eyes, and second, the new arrival that came through the tent flap.
The shrieking man was carried in on a stretcher by two other Merrosian soldiers. He was a Plainfolk man like Tyruc, and his left arm was a mangled mess. The healer directed them to a cot across the aisle from Tyruc; as soon as they placed him down on it, they both rushed back outside. Their faces were blanched and they murmured darkly to each other on their way out.
“Get over here,” the healer demanded.
Tyruc looked about to see who she was referring to, realizing with a start she meant him.
“Now!”
Tyruc hurried to the screaming man’s right side. The soldier’s whole body flexed, contorting him away from his ruined arm. The healer knelt beside the cot, withdrew her knife, and cut away what was left of his sleeve and the straps attached to his pauldron.
“What do I do?” Tyruc asked, queasy and shaking.
“Hold him down and try not to vomit.”
“I make no guarantees.”
As the woman operated on the man’s arm, Tyruc pressed down on the soldier’s chest and abdomen to stabilize her work. Slashes crisscrossed his armor, a few places dented sharply inward. Those marks and the two soldiers’ haunted expressions stirred Tyruc to new worries.
Tyruc began to hear an odd grinding and popping sound amidst the man’s cries, and apparently the healer heard it as well.
“He’s going to grind his teeth to a powder, or worse, bite his own tongue off,” she explained, handing him another rag from her belt. “Work that between his teeth to bite down on.”
Tyruc did as he was told, rolling the rag into a cylindrical shape and putting it to the man’s mouth. As he tried to get the man’s mouth open, the soldier’s body bucked, and the healer barked something in her elven tongue. Tyruc braced his knee against the man’s chest and pried at his mouth again. A slight gap appeared when the soldier breathed in, and Tyruc wedged the rag into place, returning to holding the man down.
“Not bad,” the healer muttered, “but the rest of this will be much worse. We have to remove the arm.”
Tyruc felt a wave of nausea surge in his throat. “You can’t just…” he wiggled his fingers.
The woman shook her head, her eyes intent on his. Tyruc was no hero, and he was certainly no medic, but he was stuck here for the moment. He continued to hold the soldier down as the healer went to work on the bloody task.
When it was finished, the healer rocked back, exhausted, and Tyruc was grateful it was over. His arms ached, and his ears rang from the screaming, but now the soldier looked peaceful by comparison to his previous state.
At the end of the operation, the healer had pulled essences from the herbs in her pouches much the same way as she had pulled water from the air, threading their combined effects into the soldier’s wounds. He was well on his way to falling asleep, but he was mumbling around the improvised gag.
Tyruc went to pull it away, pausing to look at the healer for approval. When she nodded tiredly, he removed the shredded cloth.
“—kls…” the man slurred, his eyes already drooping shut.
Tyruc bent his ear closer to hear his whispers.
“They… they released…”
The healer leaned forward as well. “Who? Who released what?” she softly questioned him.
“They released…” Before he could finish, a new noise tore through the night that did not belong in their tent or on the battlefield. Howls, bestial and close by. The man’s eyes snapped open and his jaw dropped.
“Jackals!”
Cold confirmation gripped Tyruc, and the healer’s eyes grew wide.
Jackals prowled the realms to the north, including the land that Tyruc hailed from. Brutal and voracious, the hound-like monsters more than earned their place as bedtime story villains. But they had no place here on the southern continent.
“Those bleeding Orynians,” the healer shook her head in disbelief. “The carnage those things will wreak is unconscionable.”
Tyruc would have agreed, but the soldier coughed wetly and grabbed his forearm.
“Not… them… us.” he managed through gritted teeth. “Merros released them.” The soldier had used the last of his remaining strength, flopping back into unconsciousness.
The woman moved to check on him, but another howl rang out closer. It was followed by the yips and chatters of its pack.
The healer leapt to her feet and stepped into the aisle, extending her hands out toward the lamps and then sharply pulling them back to herself. The lights extinguished simultaneously, drenching the tent in darkness.
The canvas walls were now translucent from the light coming from the other two tents around them, and Tyruc could see the shadows of other healers moving in them.
The Forestfolk woman muttered pleading prayers next to Tyruc in the dark.
It did not take the jackals long to be drawn to the medical camp. Perhaps it was the lights of the other two unwitting tents, but Tyruc figured the scent of blood was the more likely culprit. The woman pulled him to her and placed her dagger in his hands.
“I will lead them away. Stay here and keep my patients alive.”
“What? No, that is a very bad idea,” he whispered back, “a very bad, stupid idea. Do you know how fast those things are?”
He heard a grim smile in her voice when she replied, “I will be faster.”
Screams came from the other tents. The hunched back of a canid shadow slipped into view through the canvas, and the monster’s silhouette pounced upon a fleeing occupant.
The Forestfolk woman squeezed his arm for a moment, and then she ran for the tent flap. For a brief second, just enough light came through the opening for Tyruc to see her look at him one last time before speeding away. A sharp whistle came from outside, and the jackals took up the chase with a chorus of snarling barks.
Tyruc mourned the woman for only a second; it was all he could afford. Everything was happening too quickly. The night felt like he was on a runaway horse, each moment fleeting but deadly, and there was no time to catch his bearings. The darkness hugging around him in the tent should have been comforting, private, but was instead oppressive and promised hidden danger.
Though the jackals all seemed to have followed after the healer, his imagination told him one could easily have slipped into the tent with him and was now approaching him from behind, or from the side, or even from straight ahead.
Tyruc rotated in a circle around himself, squeezing the hilt of the dagger she had given him until his hand ached. She had told him to stay and protect her patients, but he was no use to them. He was no use to anyone, not even himself.
For the second time that night, he ran from those he should have helped.
Coming up in Chapter Three:
As the Final Battle races to its inevitable climax, Tyruc wanders labyrinthine trenches, but something in the darkness with him is on the hunt.