Reaper Of Sorrows (Book 1) Read online

  Sanouk’s expression shifted from morbid glee to open-mouthed shock. And all the more so when Rathe rushed for him at a dead sprint. Rathe heard the snap of the bowstring, felt the shaft score his temple, but he did not slow, did not so much as flinch.

  Out of arrows, Sanouk lifted the bow like a club and delivered a cracking blow across Rathe’s face. Stunned though he was, Rathe ducked the next swing, and rammed a hand’s span of the arrow’s length under Sanouk’s ribs. The breath blasted wetly from the lord’s mouth. Rathe ripped the arrow free, then jammed the crimson slathered broadhead into Sanouk’s throat. Before Sanouk could draw back, Rathe gave the slippery shaft a wicked twist, and then jerked the arrowhead free.

  Sanouk stumbled back. Blood poured from his neck, and more bubbled over his lips. He tried to speak, but could only manage a gurgling hiss. Rathe struck once more, driving the arrowhead into Sanouk’s remaining eye, and deeper, piercing his brain. Jittering violently, Sanouk fell at Rathe’s feet, and abruptly went still.

  “May you dance for Gathul,” he said, thinking on that other place he had seen behind the god’s teeth.

  After a time, Rathe turned back to rejoin the battle, doubting he would achieve anything beyond getting himself killed. A triumphant shout gave him pause.

  Loro burst through the gate, trailing a tangle of rope from one foot, and holding a broken barrel stave in each huge fist. He halted and caught Rathe in a rib-cracking bear hug. “You have done it!” he declared, settling an unsteady Rathe back to his feet.

  “Done what?” Rathe asked, blinking in confusion. Only then did he recognize that the din of battle had ceased.

  “When Sanouk fled,” Loro answered, “most of the men who sided with him dropped their swords and surrendered.”

  “And those who did not yield?”

  Loro’s face wrinkled sourly. “Those who the Maidens did not shoot full of arrows while scampering along the battlements, escaped over the wall.”

  Rathe clapped Loro on the shoulder, and ended up leaning on the man. “If not for you, brother, that bastard might have gutted me. From now on, I should call you the Scorpion.”

  Loro bellowed laughter. “I am a boar, not a creeping bug. Always was, always will be.” He grew serious. “You don’t suppose one of those fine wenches would let me nuzzle her—”

  “I cannot help you with that,” Rathe interrupted, grinning wearily.

  At that moment, Loro’s gaze fell on Sanouk’s corpse. “Gods and demons, you caught him? I thought he had escaped with the others.”

  Rathe considered how the lord had waited for him in ambush—the man’s last and greatest gamble—but instead of trying to explain the encounter, he shrugged. Loro nodded, though questions burned in his eyes.

  “Ask me on the morrow,” Rathe said, and Loro nodded again.

  They walked back through the gates, Loro half-carrying Rathe. All the while, the fat man turned from victory to prattling about plans for seducing any number of the Maidens of the Lyre.

  Rathe laughed at all the right places, but all he wanted was to get Nesaea out of the catacombs, and find somewhere to sleep.

  Chapter 30

  A steady rain fell from a leaden sky hung low over Valdar. Save that no watchmen stood in the turrets, the village looked much the same as the first time Rathe had gazed on its weathered wooden palisade.

  “You think any of Sanouk’s men are in there?” Loro asked.

  Rathe shrugged. “If so, then Erryn must have captured them, and is now sharpening an axe for their necks.”

  Half a turn of the glass gone, the young woman, accompanied by a handful of Hilan men and the wagon driver Breyon—who turned out to be her distant cousin—had passed unmolested through the rickety gates. The sound of clucking chickens and a shutter banging against a windowsill were the only sounds from within Valdar. All had remained too quiet to think anyone with ill-intent waited behind the palisade.

  Quiet or not, if Erryn did not show herself soon, Rathe meant to ride in, despite her insistence that she be allowed to deal with Mitros, and anyone else she found who had played a part in making her people suffer. “This fight is mine more than yours,” she had told him. “If any remain when I am finished, you can have them.”

  Ringing the village wall, a number of the Maidens of the Lyre stood ready for battle atop their shiplike wagons. The rest aimed wheeled ballistae or mangonels much the same, Rathe suspected, as they had against Hilan. It astounded him that the Maidens had gone to such elaborate extents to rescue their leader, even using one of their own to bewitch Sanouk. Without the young woman Milia, who had garnered the lord’s affections and earned a place in his bed, the gates of Hilan might never have opened to her sisters.

  Rathe caught Lady Nesaea’s eye. She smiled coyly, a striking figure, again the goddess of silver and snow he had seen on that distant night against the plainsmen. Like a true general, she cast her gaze back over her warriors, ensuring they were arrayed and ready. Nesaea had not spoken of her time behind that infernal barrier below Sanouk’s keep, but more than once she had screamed herself awake, then lay shuddering against him until sleep once more stole over her.

  Thinking of sharing her bed furrowed his brow. She was a fine, strong woman, to be sure, but he suspected that his life—the uncertainty that awaited him—was not for such as her. He would have to broach that topic at some point, but a few more days delay would not hurt anything.

  “I don’t think anyone from Hilan is here,” Loro stated, scratching himself, then taking a swallow from a wineskin. He wore as many scabs and bruises as Rathe, earned by fighting his way through the forest back to Hilan along with Erryn, Breyon, and the other prisoners taken from Valdar.

  “They wanted to go to Valdar,” Loro had explained, “but I told them Hilan was the riper plum—and the first that should fall, if they had any hope of taking back their homes. It took little enough to convince Erryn that I needed to pull you out of the fire.”

  Afterward, Loro had come across the Maidens of the Lyre, and learned of their plan to attack Hilan in order to rescue Nesaea. He promptly aligned himself with the woman Nesaea had freed after being taken captive. Fira was her name, a beautiful if stern woman who had since taken Loro into her wagon, and into her bed.

  From what Rathe gathered, during the confusion of the plainsman attack north of Onareth, Treon had ordered Fira, Nesaea, and Carnala taken captive. No one knew if Sanouk had commanded Treon to specifically target the Maidens of the Lyre, or if their capture had merely been coincidental. By design or not, it had proven to be a grave error, for the full fury of the Maidens of the Lyre had fallen upon Sanouk and his fortress.

  “Sanouk’s men may not be here,” Rathe said to Loro, “but do not forget their tracks. If they are not here now, they were at some point.”

  On the dawn after the battle at Hilan, once Nesaea and the others who served as Sanouk’s sacrifices had been tended, along with those wounded during the battle, Rathe had trailed Sanouk’s devoted soldiers far enough to know that they had made for Valdar. It had been in his mind to pursue straight away, but there had not been enough able-bodied soldiers to form even a small company. Moreover, his own strength had been so limited that tracking Sanouk’s men a few miles had left him feverish and weak. Faced with that, and knowing that Mitros and his bandits were entrenched at Valdar, Rathe had reluctantly decided that attacking the village would have been a fool’s errand.

  Near on a week had passed before he had enough hale soldiers and Maidens of the Lyre to set out. Another week had been squandered traveling the unforgiving mountain road to Valdar. His instinct, though he loathed to accept it, was that after coming to Valdar, Sanouk’s men had refitted and turned south for Onareth and the lord’s brother, King Nabar. As such, Rathe knew he must soon get as far from the Kingdom of Cerrikoth as possible. King Nabar’s affections for his brother might have been weak, but not so weak as to allow what would doubtless be spoken of as Sanouk’s murder.

  Rathe sighed heavily, f
inally accepting what he had avoided thinking on over the last few days. “I accept your advice.”

  Loro cocked a scabbed eyebrow at him, then poured more wine down his throat. “What advice is that, brother?”

  “That we live the life of bandits, mercenaries, and gods know what else, in order to earn coin enough to feed ourselves.”

  “I will miss Fira,” Loro said without batting an eye. “Truth be told, she’s a bit vulgar for my tastes.” His eyes went wide, oblivious to the irony. “Some of the things she does would make a slattern blush! By all the gods she—”

  Rathe cut him off with a raised hand and a chuckle. Before he could tell Loro to keep such things to himself, Erryn strode through the gates, her motley retinue trialing behind with hard grins. In one hand, fingers curled around a few thin strands of hair, she bore Mitros’s head. Where the rest of him was, Rathe could only wonder.

  “His days of raping and torturing are over,” Erryn announced when she drew closer, holding up the grisly trophy.

  “What of the others?” Rathe asked.

  Erryn flung the head away and watched it bounce across the muddy grass. “Lord Sanouk’s men were here. They took Mitros’s men, but left him behind. Many of my people had been locked in the mines, forgotten. The rest are like to be in the forests, or fled altogether. Mitros we found lying in his own squalor, drunk and insensible.”

  “You know your people cannot remain here,” Rathe advised. He had told the same to the villagers of Hilan. Whether or not King Nabar sought to avenge his brother’s death, word of rebellion would enrage the king and the nobles of his court. Highborn of no land would tolerate rebellion.

  Erryn scanned the decrepit palisade, and then the crags rising into the sodden mists beyond. “The greatest part of Onareth’s wealth yet lies within the mines. With so much gold, we can build a fortress and an army to resist anything Nabar dares to throw against us.”

  “So you would make yourself a queen?” Rathe asked in jest.

  Erryn’s lips spread in a mischievous smile. “Stranger things have happened. Perhaps naming myself Queen of the North is not so strange after all.”

  Breyon shouted, “Queen Erryn!” The cry was quickly taken up by the soldiers at her back, and the Maidens of the Lyre.

  “I could use a wise general,” Erryn said after the raucous chanting faded. “A man of war and honor … a man who was once the king’s champion, and who could treat with potential enemies and allies alike. Such a man as that,” she added, her cheeks reddening, “could, perhaps, rise higher … even become a king.”

  Loro whistled softly, looking between Rathe and Nesaea.

  Rathe cleared his throat, avoiding Nesaea’s pointed glare. “You honor me, but such is not my path.”

  Erryn looked at her fingers, red with Mitros’s blood.

  “However,” Rathe added, “I will remain here awhile—a fortnight, no more—to help you begin building a proper army and defenses.” Even a fortnight was too long, but Rathe could not live with the idea of abandoning Erryn and her people without the smallest assistance. He would give advice, and leave it in Erryn’s hands to see that advice put into practice.

  Erryn’s face cleared at his offer, and her eyes brightened as if he had secretly given her a chance to persuade him to accept her idea of kingship at her side. Nesaea’s countenance grew stormier.

  Gods, Rathe mused sourly, will I ever tread an easy path?

  The gods, whether amused by his plea or sympathetic to his plight, kept silent.

  He should have told Erryn she was a fool for thinking to stand against Onareth with naught but an army of crofters, miners, and a smattering of outcast soldiers gathered from the foothills of the Gyntors, but as she had said, stranger things had happened down through the ages. If he did not miss his guess, she had the fire within her to oversee the rise of a new kingdom.

  Once the storied Scorpion, now an instigator of rebellions. Life he decided, was strange indeed.

  Epilogue

  Rathe halted his mount, motioning for Loro to rein in abreast of him. He cocked his ear, listening for the thunder of pursuing hooves, but hearing only silence. Perhaps we outran them? The thought held more hope than truth.

  The party hunting them was large, no less than a score of armed horsemen. They might have split, with one group riding ahead, while the other pressed in on their heels. The Gyntors lay hard to the north, and the grassy steppes of Qairennor waited many days west. The only route that offered any chance of escape was the one he least wanted to take.

  His time in Valdar, twice the agreed fortnight, had taught him that where the foothills harbored many a stalking abomination, the heart of the Gyntors was worse. Over brimming mugs of ale, he had heard it told that folk once lived in great cities perched atop high plateaus, or sheltered within deep vales. Those were dead places now, all the tellers of such stories agreed, shunned by even the most brazen treasure seekers. Why those civilizations fell into ruin, no one knew for certain, but suspicion ranged from dark sorceries to vengeful gods, to men forgetting they were men and becoming bloodthirsty beasts.

  “I don’t suppose you regret leaving Valdar so soon?” Loro asked, scowling at the forest rising around them, grim and indistinct in the gloaming. Snow-clad cliffs and crags loomed higher still, peeking down at the world from behind streamers of mist.

  Rathe arched an eyebrow. “Was it not you who spoke fondly of the life of a bandit? Besides, we had delayed too long already—that we are running now, is proof of that.”

  Loro glared. “I intended that we should be profitable bandits on the shores of the Sea of Muika, not a pair of hungry dolts running from bounty hunters through these accursed mountains.”

  “I think you have heard too many bard’s tales, brother. A bandit’s life is a mean affair, and usually ends under the swinging axe of a headsman, or in a deep, lightless cell.”

  “If you thought so,” Loro snorted, “then why did you agree to it?”

  Why indeed? The question was simple, the answer harder. On one side Erryn, the other Nesaea. Caught between two women, each jealous for his affections, was a poor position for any man.

  Also, there was his surety that those hounding them now were from Onareth. While no definite word had come that the esteem once granted Rathe by King Nabar had been revoked, he sensed that disavowal as keenly as he felt the changing of the seasons. Like a foul odor drifting on the wind, he had detected a looming danger drawing near some days before seeing the first sign of those who pursued them.

  Luckily, he and Loro had ridden from Valdar before that threat found them. Had they remained in the village, Rathe’s presence would have brought down the full wrath of Onareth upon Erryn and her people before they were prepared to repel such an assault. For a time, at least, Erryn and her people would stay safe in relative obscurity.

  Before Rathe could form a simpler answer to Loro’s question than what had passed through his mind, the metallic ring of an iron-shod hoof striking stone turned him. A shadow stirred farther down the trail, within a dense thicket of pines.

  “Which way,” Loro breathed, looking west as if to tip the balance in favor of his choice.

  An arrow flashed an inch above Rathe’s head and thudded into a tree. “North,” he growled, wishing he could have advised any other direction. Sawing the reins, he put heels to his mount.

  “Gods and demons!” Loro cursed, following hard after.

  Cool and dark, the waiting forest welcomed them into its ancient embrace, promising sanctuary for the moment, but telling nothing of the future, or revealing the wonders and evils that it kept hidden.

  Other Books by James A. West

  If you enjoyed Reaper of Sorrows - Songs of the Scorpion Volume I, be sure to check out these other exciting fantasy books by James A. West:

  Heirs of the Fallen Series

  Book One - The God King

  Book Two - Crown of the Setting Sun

  Short stories

  Night’s Hunt

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  Biography

  WHEN JAMES was thirteen years old he read The Talisman, by Stephen King and Peter Straub, and a seed of an idea was planted that someday he, too, would create different worlds and realities. After a stint in the US Army, a year as a long-haul truck driver, and a couple as a log home builder, he enrolled at the University of Montana. There, he majored in Psychology and, by chance, took a creative writing course. Words started to flow, and worlds were born. James lives in Montana with his wife and his bodyguard, a Mini-Schnauzer named Jonesy.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Epilogue

  Other Books by James A. West

  Biography