Chapter Ten
After almost two weeks on horseback, Druadaen was glad for the chance to walk the two miles to the bountiers’ base. He had expected them to maintain greater distance between their refuge and their very vengeful prey, but they explained that outrunning the Bent over any significant distance required horses—and out on the Graveyard, horses were more of a risk than a benefit. Even if there was enough wood to build a barn, the Bent would smell the horseflesh and swarm until they had devoured every last morsel of it.
Over the centuries, ambitious bountiers had occasionally attempted to create bases large enough to accommodate stables and scores of men. But whenever a human base became that large, it drew the pekt like flies to honey…or other substances. Between what they perceived as a territorial challenge and the richness of such a target proved irresistible to them, who would make common cause with other Bent species to remove both the meat and the human interlopers.
It was apparently much the same wherever bountiers worked, whether out upon the Graveyard or in the foothills of the Cleethpale Mountains that ran down the center of northern Ar Navir like a spine.
Indeed, there was apparently more variation among the bountiers themselves. Those who worked the Cleethpales were an amalgam of Clearwall borderers, hunters, and outpost garrisons. They all had families, and often property, nearby so they were motivated at least as much by protecting those they loved than any love of coin. Conversely, those who worked the Graveyard had only one reason for being where they were: to collect the bounty on the Bent.
As such, they were a rougher lot than the others. Only a few were from nearby Teurodn, and none of them hailed from its western borders. Indeed, not a one of them had families back in the human realms, which they called the Lands or the Streets. Their pursuit of the Bent was year-round, save the latter half of winter, when their prey remained in their warrens. The reasoning of the pekt echoed some of Druadaen’s own recent concerns; if a raid necessitated traveling beyond the ready reach of shelter, then the weather was likely to be even more deadly than humans.
Druadaen did not ask questions as they walked, but he heard occasional phrases in Connæaran, Midlander, even Khassan and Bleklish, and usually in native accents. However, most of their exchanges were in the polyglot merchant’s tongue known as Commerce, and their dress, weapons, armor, and opinions were as diverse as any group that Druadaen had ever encountered. The only thing they had in common was a dogged pride in being professional, which was to say full-time, Bent bountiers: self-styled mongrels who paid court to no king, and made a living with their own bloodstained hands. In this case, at a rate of fifteen marks of silver-copper billon for every matching pair of ears or thumbs they brought to the paymasters of border garrisons.
Under other circumstances, Druadaen would have had some concern for his safety among such a group. Whereas he’d met many soldiers who’d become hardened to killing, these men had become indifferent to it. However, out here, even he felt the quick, reflexive embrace of a kinship and bond stronger than any personal differences or material disputes. And not because he had put his sword alongside theirs, but because they were just a small group of humans bivouacking at the very edge of the Bent lands, and so, were never more than a few heartbeats away from the possibility that they might be overrun and massacred.
Druadaen, who had been scanning the horizon for their camp, finally asked, “Where’s your blockhouse?” The odd looks he received was the first indication that the information conveyed by his commander’s information had been flawed in yet another particular. “So,” he concluded, “you don’t have a blockhouse.”
The archer, a taciturn Bleklauner by the name of Omur, shrugged. “Can’t really say that we have a house at all.”
“Then where do you live?”
They topped another of the Graveyard’s low rises and the leader—Fronbec—pointed down the slope. “There.”
Druadaen looked for some kind of construction at the base of the next rise, then noticed a narrow path cut into the backside of the slope they were on, just a few feet below them. “Tunnels?” he exclaimed. “You live in tunnels? Near the Bent?”
Gradda shouldered past him. “They don’t dig out here. The soil is too sandy. It caves in.”
Druadaen kept staring. “So, does that mean you are better at tunneling than they are?” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded not merely incredulous but doubtful.
“No,” Fronbec answered, waving for Druadaen to follow them. “It started as a sod house. Oh, about fifty years ago.”
“Sixty,” corrected Omur flatly.
“Or sixty,” Fronbec conceded with a good-natured smile. “Over time, groups of bountiers expanded it. Rains smoothed the sod into the slope, and ice hardened it. Now, be sure to step where we do.”
Druadaen nodded, took care to watch where his horse placed its hooves.
Omur nodded approvingly. “If he steps in one, he’s done for. When the Bent stumble into one of our traps, it’s just a stake through their foot. With a horse, it could be that, a broken fetlock, or both.”
* * *
His mount just barely fit through the sod house’s relatively narrow entry and took up almost a third of the antechamber. But as Druadaen hitched the horse and removed the tack, he became aware that this spacious, circular room had a purpose beyond the shedding of mud- and blood-smeared gear. Almost a dozen inward-facing murder slits lined the walls between the entry and the much sturdier inner door.
The last to enter, Omur shut and barred it, then headed toward a narrow tunnel at the other end of the barrackslike interior.
“Mind we weren’t followed,” Fronbec called after him.
“That’s my job, isn’t it?” Omur disappeared into the narrow slot in the far wall.
“Where’s he going?” Druadaen asked.
“Watch post,” Gradda muttered.
Druadaen frowned, recalled the shallow, featureless dip in which the sod house was located. “I saw no watch post.”
“Kind of the point,” the Sanâllean grunted.
Fronbec chuckled at Druadaen’s annoyed frown. “Come have a seat with us.” He gestured to stools arrayed around a small, homely firepit with a hood and wooden tubes venting the smoke up through the ceiling. Noticing Druadaen’s silent study of the arrangement, he explained: “Plenty of peat, out where the sweetgrass meets the sourgrass.” He tapped one of the tubes. “Doesn’t make much smoke, and what there is goes through wet sandstone before it reaches air.”
“And the Bent haven’t found you by the smell?”
Fronbec shrugged. “A few have, but they’re most oft loners, scouts—and only one or two have ever lived to carry word to others. Assuming they didn’t meet some other fate on the plains first.” He sat, poured the steeping birch tea into cups, handed one to Druadaen. “Mind’ee; the reason we can camp here at all is because it’s a skip beyond where the Bent are wont to rove, even if they mean to raid over the border. And if that’s their purpose, they’d fain dodge us. Needs must that it’s quick in and quick out for them. If they haven’t put at least three leagues between themselves and the frontier before the Teurond cavalry arrives, it’s like as not they won’t see their warrens—or anything else—again.”
He took a long draught of the tea, raised an index finger to point at Druadaen as he drank. “Now, about this mission of yours…” His voice trailed into a silence he clearly meant Druadaen to fill.
Druadaen obliged. “Garasan journeyed to the Plain of Grehar to gather word of the Bent: how many are seen, where, and how frequently. I am told it was his intent to learn more about their…er, habits.”
One of the bountiers who hadn’t been in the fight against the urzhen raised an eyebrow. “Funny he didn’t ask, then.”
“Hi-yeh, but he was cagey,” Gradda murmured. His eyes shifted sideways to assess Druadaen. “Cagier than yerself, at least.”
“Aye,” Fronbec allowed, “but our new friend is a good bit younger, now, ain’ he?”
Druadaen had to raise his hands to break in. “Wait: Garasan was here?” Silent nods. “And you said, ‘he didn’t ask.’ So, has he gone to investigate the warrens of the Bent? Have I missed him?”
“Well, no and yes. He hasn’t gone into the brutes’ warrens, but you have most certainly missed him.”
Druadaen pushed down a surge of impatience at the opaque answer. “Well, do you at least know where he was headed? Or if he means to return here?”
Silent looks were exchanged before Fronbec cleared his throat and said, “He…eh, was finished with his travels.”
“Very well, but where did he go?”
They all nodded westward.
“How long ago?”
“Two weeks, maybe three.”
Bedamned, easier to get a bone from a bulldog! “And where might I find him? Are there further camps to the west?
“No,” Gradda muttered, “but plenty of pyres.”
Druadaen stared, frowned. “Pyres?”
Fronbec was watching him steadily, even sadly. “Yes: pyres.”
“Oh,” said Druadaen. “I see.” But he didn’t, not right away. The news that the veteran Outrider was dead had always been a possibility, but he’d never taken that thought to its logical conclusion: that he might have to carry on his work alone. The new weight of his mission hit him like a physical blow. It was a moment before he’d recovered enough to ask, “Why a pyre? Why not bring his body back?”
“It’s tradition, you might say.” Fronbec shrugged. “It’s become an expression of ours, that a dead bountier has ‘gone to the pyres.’ No way to bring a body back over all those leagues, not if his mates mean to outpace the Bent. So there are pits, near the peat fields, where we burn ’em.”
Druadaen put down his cup, tried not to feel sick. “How did he die?”
“Well.” Gradda punctuated his succinct answer by draining his tea and expelling an exasperated sigh. “He died well. Can’t say more than that.”
Druadaen shook his head. “But if you saw him di—”
“What we saw,” emphasized Gradda, “was your friend getting feathered with arrows. He was already behind us, and he couldn’t keep up. Then he couldn’t stand up. And then they were around him, hacking, their axes red. We didn’t watch any more.”
“We couldn’t watch any more,” Fronbec amended. “Not if we wanted to get away alive. There were still too many of the brutes.”
The long, low room was still until Druadaen cleared his throat. “So Garasan ‘went to the pyres.’ But his body…he’s still back there?”
Fronbec started as if someone had stuck him with a pin. “Gods, no!” He studied Druadaen. “We go back to take care of our mates. When we can. In the case of your friend, we were able to get far enough ahead of the chasers to lay an ambush for the Bent who were tracking us. Then we doubled back and saw to your friend.” He nodded somberly. “Burned ’im, or at least tried to. Just like with our own dead.” He scratched at his half-full beard. “See, lad, Bent ain’t picky about their meat, if you take my meaning.” He met Druadaen’s eyes. “But then, burning’s a fit end for you Dunarran folk. That’s your rite, i’n’t it?”
Druadaen nodded, felt the answering silence grow heavy enough to smother them all.
“Well,” Fronbec muttered, “I’m sorry you’ve come a long way for nothing, young sir.”
Druadaen sighed, then squared his shoulders. “I haven’t. I am charged to continue Garasan’s mission if he failed to complete it.”
“You mean counting the Bent? Well, we can tell you what we’ve seen these last weeks. And I remember him writing in a small journal before that, I think.”
“That will be a start, at least. It is also my responsibility to collect any remaining personal effects for his family.”
“He had family?” asked one of the other bountiers, as if the concept was not merely novel but alien.
Gradda’s voice was flinty. “‘Gather his effects’? Does that include bounties?”
Fronbec held up a hand, shot a warning glance at the Sanâllean. “Er…we didn’t have cause nor right to know aught about a man’s purse…at least not while he was alive,” the grizzled bountier muttered. “So it was hard to know what might have been his,” he concluded lamely.
Ah, but since Garasan was dead and you never expected anyone like me to show up looking for him…Well, any money the Outrider had brought with him, or bounty he was owed, hardly mattered anymore. “By effects, I mean letters, keepsakes, any of his gear that would be welcome to the Legions or as a legacy for his family.”
Gradda seemed to relax, more than he had since the melee with the urzhen.
“Well,” Fronbec mused, chin in hand, “we set aside almost everything he left behind that day. But if the fire did its work, then everything he carried was lost. Had to douse him with oil and make away with our own lives. Fires draw the Bent like a candle draws summer moths.”
The rest nodded, adding their own details of Garasan’s pyre. A few had made warding signs to protect Garasan’s body until it was ash. Others offered short prayers to their gods. Then they left the Outrider’s corpse to whichever agency of fate was destined to devour it first: the growing flames or the greedy jaws of the Bent. And none had been back since, so it was unknown how completely the body and gear had been reduced.
Druadaen had heard their accounts as if they were speaking through a tube filled with cotton. He nodded his thanks, asked, “Do you plan to hunt out there again?”
Fronbec shook his head. “Too late in the season, now. Remember the rain that was threatening as we came in? One cold, hard blow from the Boreal Sea would freeze it, and then we’d be catching our death of lung fever. Hunting the Bent near their lairs is warm-weather work. Now, we’re just picking off small raiding parties: the brutes who haven’t gathered a larder to see them through the winter and who don’t think much of their chances of stealing from—or eating—their neighbors.”
Druadaen nodded, considering. “In your opinion, are the Bent nearing horde-mass?”
All but two of them stared, grumbled at the unfamiliar word. Fronbec looked like he’d eaten an old lemon. “What the witchquim is a ‘horde-mass’?”
“A horde-mass is what creates the emergence of a Horde. It is when the Bent population has become so great that they can’t continue to support their numbers unless they start raiding the surface for food.”
“Oh,” Fronbec said with a blink. “That? We just say they’re a-hordeing. Some call it a PekTide. And hi-yeh, it’s nearing. The last two springs, there have been a few more Bent raiders abroad.” The older bountiers nodded along with him. “So they’ll all come a-ravening out of their burrows sometime late this spring, I wager.”
Druadaen hoped he suppressed his surprise at the answer, looked around at the cramped, homely burrow in which the bountiers themselves lived. “And how will you survive that…er, PekTide?”
All of them laughed. “By not being here, lad!” Fronbec chuckled. “Only a fool stands his ground when the flood is higher than his head!”
An eminently logical answer, but Druadaen’s interest now fixed the one just before, which, as he reflected upon it, made little sense. “You believe the PekTide is coming because of a slight increase in warm-weather raiders?”
“Hi-yeh,” Fronbec nodded. “And because it’s about time for a Horde. Some thought it would be this year, but that didn’t feel right to me. The raiders were all pekt. No other kinds of Bent. Not even any Reds among the Rotters.”
Druadaen hoped to eventually learn what all those terms meant but, more immediately, he needed to reconcile the points at which Fronbec’s assertions failed to align with either common sense or the laws of nature. “But if there are already so many Bent living underground, wouldn’t that require an equally large increase in the number who would have to come to the surface to get food? Both before and during the winter?”
Fronbec shook his head so vigorously that his long gray locks swayed back and forth. “Ye’re not talking animals, now, lad. Ye’re talkin’ the Bent, and when they come in numbers, they boil up all at once. It’s their way.”
“Yes, but how can their numbers grow into a, uh, PekTide if they don’t get a lot more food?”
Most of the bountiers shrugged. Their leader seemed a trifle annoyed. “Listen, young, er, ‘sir,’ no one goes deep enough to learn such things. Or if they have, they don’t come back to say. So we don’t know. And we don’t need to. Could be magic in ’em, I suppose. But my guess? They feed on each other.”
“Well, we know the Reds do, right enough,” said Gradda. The others agreed with solemn nods.
Druadaen controlled the impulse to shake his head at the bountiers’ circular reasoning: if the Bent preyed upon each other, that would diminish their numbers, not increase them. It recalled the folly of the old fable in which a castaway on a barren island tried to remain alive by devouring his own body, bit by bit.
Unaware—or at least unbothered—by the contradictions implicit in his explanation of how the Bent repopulated into Hordes, Fronbec adopted a posture not unlike some of the more self-important docents under which Druadaen had studied. “The Bent don’t make plans, y’see. Their actions are naught but what’s in their nature. Ruled by their lusts, they are. When they want something, they want it right away and go straight after it. It’s an old borderer’s adage that ‘to get to water, a burning pekt will run through oil.’”
The snickers of his comrades encouraged him to greater heights of oratory. “And of all the things a pekt wants, victory stands first. And the more blood, the better. What little mind they have is always on that, even more’n rutting or eating. Although truth be told they go about all three in much the same way!”
He smiled at the bountiers’ laughter before continuing. “So not only do pekt welcome battles, they need ’em. Stands to reason, then, that bloodlust is in their marrow, that if they don’t get their fill of fighting and killing, their lust for it will drive ’em mad. Well, more mad.
“And that’s why there’s no sense in ’em, and why they have no interest in parley. As borderers say, ‘Bent will talk peace when cows eat meat.’” He shrugged. “So when there are too many o’ ’em in those burrows, they go after each other, natural enough.” He leaned back and finished his tea at a gulp. “And there’s all the answers you need, young feller.” They all looked at Druadaen expectantly.
Sorry to disappoint, but…“I thank you for sharing all this knowledge. As you will no doubt appreciate, though, my commander will expect that I find Garasan’s body or what is left of his pyre, to both confirm his death and gather observations of the site.” And while I’m at it, try to find a way of learning more about the Bent. Risky, but maybe that will help me get my posting to the Legions. “To that end, I would be most grateful if you would tell me how to reach it.” Even Gradda shook his head sadly, as if Druadaen had announced his own funeral.
“I’d talk you out of it, if I could, lad,” Fronbec muttered. “As I say, we shall not be back that way until spring. If then. And you’d do better risking your life at dice than going out there alone and unfamiliar with the land.”
His eyebrows rose in response to a sudden inspiration. “Now, what if I could give ye the name of one or two fellows just a shade older than you who’ve actually been in those burrows? They’re down southways now, what with the cold coming, but they might be willing to bring you back with them in spring. Would that suit you? Enough to set aside this mad-risky scheme of yours?”
“Why, yes!” Actually, no, but when I’m done, I’ll be sure to seek them out. “Who are these bountiers?”
“Well, they’re not bountiers, exactly. More travelers in the service of fortune, as t’were. Come, I’ll tell you how to find them as we eat.”
As Druadaen consumed a very fine and filling dish of Sanâllean olla podrida, he listened to Fronbec’s fragmentary description of two persons who sounded far more like highwaymen than canny scouts or astute observers of a different species. But the old bountier insisted that they had been in the tunnels of the Bent for some time and, having lived to tell the tale, were likely to know more of that conglomeration of related races than anyone else. At least anyone that a fine, upstanding Dunarran was likely to meet anywhere—except, perhaps, over crossed swords.
As Druadaen tended to his gear, he turned their names, descriptions, and details over and over in his mind, resolved to commit them to memory. He continued the repetitions as he stretched his length upon a straw paillasse, and resolved to keep at it until the sheer dullness of it carried him over the murky border into blissfully dreamless sleep.
* * *
Druadaen checked to make sure the girth was not too far forward on his mount as Fronbec and Omur approached.
“Last time I’ll say it,” the older man said. “If you take that horse, you’ll regret it.”
“I must.”
“They’ll see you—or smell you—and that will be the end of your mission, lad.”
Druadaen couldn’t suppress a grateful smile; there was absolutely no practical reason for Fronbec to be solicitous. Frankly, it was probably better for the bountiers if he never returned to make a report. He nodded. “You’ve made the risks very clear. But you’ve also said that there shouldn’t be many Bent out raiding anymore.”
Omur shrugged, face impassive. “There aren’t. But there are always some. And those that are will see you profiled against the horizon or smell the horseflesh. So if they’re out there, you’ll find ’em. Which is to say, they’ll find you.”
Druadaen checked that his gear was secure and swung up into the saddle. “I will be back to collect Garasan’s journal and other belongings. Thank you for holding them until I return.”
Fronbec shrugged. “Least we could do. Just…don’t travel at night, don’t dally anywhere too long, and grow a pair of eyes in the back of your head. And I know it’s a bother while you ride but keep that bow strung. You may want it in a hurry.”
Druadaen raised his hand in farewell, turned the horse slowly, and urged it into a trot toward the west.