The Forge of Men Page 8

  Kratos shook his head and made a chopping gesture with his hands. “There is no justice in the hall of a Hold Mistress,” he growled. “There is only her will and whatever scrap of law she chooses to bend to her purpose of the moment. If she can stir up enough support among her sisters, then that will is given the official seal of approval and passed down as ‘justice’.”

  Nikomedes turned with a look of plain surprise on his face at Kratos’ sentiment. He supposed he should not have been surprised to hear such words but, heretical as they were, he felt there was a core of truth in them.

  They continued in silence for a few minutes before Nikomedes resumed, “I was informed that I would bear the mark of the traitor and that the only way to avoid such a fate was to choose summary execution, the method of which was my choice.”

  Kratos stopped in his tracks and Nikomedes turned to see the larger man begin to chuckle. “You mean…you actually chose the Trial of the Deep?” Kratos asked with a hint of incredulity.

  Nikomedes’ eyes lowered to the ground as he replayed the sequence of events in his head, as though he too could scarcely believe it. After a moment’s pause he nodded, and the two of them continued their march toward the mountains.

  “I didn’t choose immediately,” Nikomedes said after another lengthy pause. “I was sitting at the cliffs where my brother and I had spent many an evening before he left…” he trailed off, uncertain of how to proceed. He quickly decided that the truth was best, so he set his jaw. “…before he left with Felix eight years earlier.”

  Kratos nodded knowingly. “I believe I have the lay of it, then,” he said in his deep, grating voice. “Your brother, Nikomedes, was quite the warrior under Felix; I’m told he took our western gatehouse singlehanded before succumbing to his wounds. You took his name after slaying the beast of the deep, and there was nothing Eukaria could do to object since you had played their game and won—against all odds.”

  Nikomedes nodded stiffly and kept his eyes forward, but Kratos clapped him on the shoulder and began to laugh. “Boy, you’ve got a vein running down the middle of you that I’ve never seen—or heard of. Killing a kraken…” he trailed off doubtfully, “I don’t know if I’ve ever had the stones for that.”

  His laughter died down as they continued their march through the cold, wet mud and it was nearly an hour before he spoke again.

  “Still,” Kratos said, as though they had been conversing the entire time, “had you been wearing an officer’s gear, you wouldn’t have survived long enough to win your fellows’ lives for them back on the field.”

  Now it was Nikomedes’ turn to stop in his tracks, and after a few paces Kratos did likewise as he turned to face the younger man. “What do you mean?” Nikomedes asked.

  “It’s simple,” Kratos shrugged, “my men were under orders to eliminate the officers and elites first—any of the hopefuls who could scalp one of Felix’s elites was guaranteed automatic advancement to Black Arrow.”

  Nikomedes thought back to the engagement and realized that he had seen that very thing unfold, but he had not recognized the significance it at the time—an oversight of potentially disastrous proportions.

  “Not that I disapprove, mind you,” Kratos continued as he turned and resumed his march. Nikomedes reluctantly followed the larger man, who continued, “Deception is one of warfare’s six pillars, after all; any man who wishes to master battle must learn each pillar as though it was a part of his own body.”

  Nikomedes had never heard of these ‘six pillars’ of warfare before, but despite his curiosity he held his tongue. Instead, he decided to ask a different question. “How many gained advancement?”

  Kratos cocked his good eyebrow. “Ah,” he said finally in comprehension, “that. Six hopefuls managed to make good on my challenge; four of them survived the battle and march with us still.” The gargantuan man shrugged his shoulders. “I left Blue Fang Pass with a hundred thirty Black Arrows and return with only twenty fewer than I started with. All told, it was a paltry butcher’s bill to avenge the Red Dawn.”

  Nikomedes had wanted to ask about the Red Dawn, since he had never heard anyone explain exactly what it was that his brother had given his life for, but he did not believe now was the time to ask.

  Seemingly reading his mind, Kratos sighed deeply. “It’s a long story, boy,” he began, “but the short version goes like this…” He ran his hand up over his balding, scarred head before continuing, “A few decades ago, a group of men came together to protest what they believed to be injustice at the hands of their Hold Mistresses. At first their protestations were only made in private…like some sort of secretive knitting circle,” he spat venomously. “But a few years into their regular meetings a man joined their group, and he listened to their whispered indignations for six months without saying a word.”

  Nikomedes saw a huge carrion bird of some kind fly overhead, and the two men watched it fly toward the mountains before veering to the east and disappearing as it landed a few hundred meters away.

  “Anyway,” Kratos continued, “the man stopped attending after that and no one heard from him for two years. But after two years’ time he returned, and things with the group were exactly as they had been when he’d left. Those supposedly brave men whined and complained about their lot in life for weeks on end, until one day he took to the center of the gathering during their usual wailing and gnashing of teeth. The crowd went quiet, and he just looked at each one in turn before speaking two words: ‘follow me.’ That said, he turned and left the room.”

  Nikomedes was unsure how much of this to believe, but Kratos had obvious passion as he told the story so it was difficult to ignore it entirely.

  “Some of the men followed, but some didn’t,” Kratos explained, clearly caught up in his retelling of the story. “Those who followed the man went out in the dead of winter and trudged through snow, sleet, and the numbing, deadly cold. They marched for days until they arrived at the foot of a mountain which the man began to climb. They followed him, and some fell from the sheer rocks to their deaths but the rest made the ledge where the man awaited.”

  Silence hung between them for several minutes, and finally Nikomedes broke down. “What did they find?” he asked with more eagerness in his voice than he would have liked.

  Kratos gave him a wry grin before shrugging indifferently. “Perhaps you’ll see it for yourself,” he said cryptically before his long strides took him away from Nikomedes, leaving the younger man to consider his words.

  Another week of marching brought them up through the valley between the two huge, nearly symmetrical peaks which towered high above them. The path they used eventually ran up the western edge of the valley, and turned into a road which had been carved into the mountainside. Every few hundred meters was a watch post positioned fifty meters above the road they walked, and each of those watch posts housed a handful of sentries and an unlit signal pyre.

  Beneath those same watch posts was a cave entrance, and Nikomedes saw a few children poke their fur-bundled heads out of the occasional opening to watch the warriors trudge their way up the valley. A quick look told Nikomedes that the caves were home to hundreds—or, more likely, thousands— of people who were dressed cleanly in furs and thick, patchwork cloth.

  Through the lightly falling snow, Nikomedes thought he could see a structure in the distance. After nearly an hour of walking the winding, mountain road, and counting no fewer than thirty cave entrances with people milling about them, he finally did see a structure straddling the valley.

  “Have you ever beheld a finer thing?” he heard Kratos’ voice from the wall to his left, and he turned to see the massive warlord leaning against the hewn stone of the mountain.

  Nikomedes looked back to the huge fortress, the main buttresses of which ran far down the sheer face of the ledge on which it was built. The stone which had been used to build them was a dark blue, and against the snowy mountainsides beside them they looked like nothing so much as a pair of gia
nt fangs stretching down from the fortress walls, which were themselves shaped like a contemptuously curled lip.

  “Blue Fang Pass,” Nikomedes breathed in awe, despite his desire to keep his reaction neutral. The fortress appeared huge, many times larger than the Citadel of Hold Mistress Eukaria, and it stood out in stark contrast to the natural stone of the mountains between which it was built.

  “Aye,” Kratos confirmed as he turned to view the incredible piece of engineering. “It took less time to build than you might expect, but that was owed to the abundant stone in the area,” he explained, gesturing to what was obviously a spent quarry on the other side of the valley, “and, of course, to the back-breaking efforts of its builders.”

  They walked the rest of the way to the fortress in silence, and Nikomedes could only marvel at the tactical advantages of such a location. Assaulting it in force would simply be impossible for too many reasons to count…but the purpose of building such a massive structure here, in the middle of the mountains, eluded him. There was no strategic value to the pass, since all which lay beyond was covered in snow and therefore unable to support agriculture of any kind.

  Then Nikomedes realized what Kratos had meant by his story the previous week. “This is what your father showed the men who followed him,” he said, and Kratos stopped in his tracks to give Nikomedes an approving look.

  “Aye, boy,” he agreed. “Except, of course, back then it was naught but an empty, barren pass with a few clay huts and an unexplored network of caves—caves which now house those who can’t earn lodging in the fortress itself. More than two decades of hard work gave rise to the majority of what you see today, but we’ve worked to fill in the gaps these last few years following the Red Dawn’s depletion of our ranks.”

  They came to the near end, or side, of the fortress whose battlements rose fifteen meters into the air. Nikomedes made his way to the edge of the sheer cliff into which the road had been carved, and looked down. Far below—at least a hundred meters—was a torrent of water which sprung from between the two, fang-like, supporting pillars of the fortress.

  “Aye,” Kratos said as he tilted his head toward the water outlet, “that was the hardest bit of engineering, but my father always an eye for such things…no one knew the ice like father, and he re-routed the melt-water runoffs to the fortress where we’ve got mills turning half the year for working metal in the foundries.”

  Kratos made his way to the head of the procession, and Nikomedes did likewise after stealing a glance down the long, narrow valley. He was once again struck by just how difficult such a location would be to assault.

  The gate was still closed, and Kratos approached with Glacier Splitter in his hands. He stood before the massive, iron-bound doors and turned to his army. “Men,” he called out, his booming voice echoing off the stones of the mountain valley, “welcome home!”

  The gate behind him slowly creaked open and Nikomedes only now realized which end of the fortress they were standing before. He looked up to the top of the gatehouse and wondered how his brother could have scaled the inverted angle of the smooth, stone walls.

  The army thundered through the gate, surging past their warlord with whoops and calls of victory which were boisterously returned by the soldiers manning the battlements, who shook their weapons in the air to greet their returning brothers in arms.

  Nikomedes made his way toward the gate where Kratos awaited him.

  “You may not enter,” the massive warlord declared flatly.

  Nikomedes gave him a flat look before stealing another glance at the western gatehouse. “What must I do?” Nikomedes asked evenly.

  Kratos took a deep breath of the cold, mountain air which he slowly exhaled, briefly giving him the appearance of breathing smoke. “To enter Blue Fang Pass, a warrior must prove his loyalty to the Hold,” he explained. “For most, this requires little more than accepting a brand…”

  Nikomedes felt his choler rise as he unconsciously clenched his fists at his sides. “I will not be marked,” he growled, “and any man who attempts to do so will die.”

  Kratos chuckled. “I’d thought as much, which is why you will be allowed to skip that particular step,” he said with obvious amusement. “The gates close behind me, and will only open again on my command…or when a Black Arrow requests entry.”

  Nikomedes’ eyes narrowed as he realized the test which was now put to him. “Very well,” he said as he turned and examined the paths leading up and into the mountains. After finding one which he thought would carry him around the western mountain’s edge, he dropped all of his gear and set out without looking back.

  “Don’t you want to know where they live?” asked Kratos at his back, clearly enjoying Nikomedes’ poorly-concealed displeasure.

  Nikomedes shook his head and called over his shoulder, “If I don’t find one, it will find me.”

  Chapter V: The Hunt

  Nikomedes had trudged around the mountain for two days, stopping to make camp in a small cave the first night out. The cold was extreme, but there was little wind so he managed to sleep some during the night. Inside the cave he found a few foot-long pieces of jagged, blue stone which he took with him the next morning.

  The next evening he came to the snowline and descended down the slopes of the mountain. He would need food if he was to survive in the frigid climate of the mountain, and he would need skins for crafting his own cold weather gear.

  Not long after leaving the snowline, he came to a wooded area and saw signs of animal life, so he set about the task of crafting snares and deadfall traps. He was not familiar with this particular region, but it was clear that rodents lived in the woods and he would need to take whatever food he could find.

  There were some flexible, vine-like climbing plants which suffocated the smaller trees of the woods, and he found that when they were smaller they would serve as a reasonable form of binding or, if he had the time to weave them, a crude rope.

  So as he set his traps and snares, he gathered as many of the long, thin vines as he could find and coiled them across his body.

  When he was satisfied that he had enough vines for his purpose, Nikomedes made his way back to the start of his snare line nearly ten hours after setting them. He had marked his passage with chest-high, broken limbs to avoid becoming lost in the dark woods.

  The first snare was empty, but the second and third had already yielded small rodents, which he carried with him as he checked the rest of his traps. He finished his search with four total rodents, which he laid out on the ground as he used a few carefully selected pieces of wood with which to make a fire.

  He rubbed the dry, dead sticks together in the same fashion he had learned from his father before his eighth year, and soon there was a wisp of smoke. Not long after, he was cradling a small bundle of dry moss in his hands and blowing gently until it burst into flames.

  Ten minutes later he was cleaning the rodent corpses, each of which was large enough for a meal. He took the furs and scraped them against a few pieces of wood, and while he had no salts for curing the hides he knew he could make temporary gloves out of them by turning the skins inside out and wearing the soft fur against his hands.

  When the corpses had been gutted, Nikomedes used threads from his clothing to stitch the best of the skins into a small pouch, into which he placed the innards before securely fastening the makeshift pouch to keep the smell from spreading too far.

  He made a spit from a few nearby, live branches, and while his quartet of rodents cooked over the open fire he began to weave the smaller pieces of vine together into a long, stiff cord.

  Nikomedes sat in absolute silence while he went about his work. He was reminded of the weeks he had spent weaving the ropes he had used to trap and, ultimately, kill the kraken. Those weeks had been much like these past days, filled with quiet contemplation and single-minded focus like nothing he had known before or since, and only now did he realize how much he had missed that sense of solitude.

&nbs
p; Against the sea monster he had been able to use multiple smaller lines which had been at the estate where he had lived with his father. They had originally formed fishing nets for use in one of the inland lakes when the fish ran there yearly to spawn, but he had disassembled them and used the flexible, strong material to fashion a rope strong enough to trap, however temporarily, the deadliest monster known to his world.

  The line he was fashioning from the vines would be nowhere near as flexible, but if he could find the proper location to deploy it, it would serve its function adequately.

  After his meal was finished cooking, he ate one of the rodents on the spot, keeping the small bits of cartilage which he stowed in the pouch with the innards, and he ran a vine through the other three carcasses which he slung over his shoulder and trudged to the edge of the tree-line.

  Darkness was nearly upon him, so he found a large, heavily limbed tree near the edge of the forest and climbed up until the limbs were no longer strong enough to support his weight. Nikomedes broke a few branches from higher in the tree and used them to fashion a platform on which he could sleep for the night. The rustling of the coniferous tree’s needles in the wind were mesmerizing, and before long he was asleep.

  The next day he was about to begin his march back toward the mountains when a speck of motion caught his eye, and he squinted to see a large carrion bird circling in the air in the distance. It could not have been more than a kilometer away, but the thick blanket of fog which had rolled in during the night nearly obscured it from view.

  Nikomedes knew that he had enough food for a few days, and could melt snow for drinking water once he had returned to the mountain’s slopes, but he had reservations about his bait. The four rodents’ guts would do a good enough job of attracting a predator’s attention by their smell, but any good predator knows to sight its prey before exposing itself. Without a meaty carcass to display, he was unlikely to entice the beast to enter his trap.