Deathsworn (Wattys 2018 Winner)

2 - Endholm

Bard always preferred things at the bottom of a mountain to the top of one. The horses liked it more for a start, what with their ancient legs not forced to negotiate rubble-strewn inclines. The wind boasted fewer teeth here, too, and the Mountainmen were scarce as the wolves, just the way Bard liked it.

They were now three whole days from Three-Peak Pass, the landscape far whiter because of it. Not because of snow - that wouldn't be expected to fall properly for another three months or so, when the thick of winter came - the rock just seemed to be lighter. Bard couldn't explain it, but then he was no literary man. Of all of them, Taaj was the most likely to know things he had no right to know, virtue of benefitting from an upbringing in Sand Country. Even he didn't know much about Scavania, though, so Bard left the subject be. He found it pretty enough in its own, isolated way. Smooth rises here and there, shelves of hard land that tolerated barely any green and formed corridors for the western wind to wreak havoc in.

It was in one such corridor they found themselves riding gently along. They were bordered on both sides by sheeted pale rock, a path the colour of chalk cleaving onward as it twisted and turned. For Bard and the others this was the usual road, one they had traipsed ten times or more and yet liked no better than when they had walked it the first time.

Their procession followed the usual order. Bodkin came first on his short, sturdy grey. He had the best eyes, did Bodkin. Bard rode in his immediate wake atop his ageing palfrey, Oath. Then came Taaj and Tall Toyne in tandem, a comical pairing given the huge differences in their physical stature. Finally, right at the back, on the big black that carried the bodies, went Weasel.

Bard glanced back at the two corpses folded over the flanks of Weasel's horse. It got him thinking about their purpose. It got him thinking about the list that ruled all.

'That last one, what was it he did again?' Bard had a strong feeling he could recall anyway, but he always found himself asking. Perhaps it was to better settle the conscience that plagued him daily.

'He was a raper,' Taaj told him bluntly. 'And the other one burned children. Or was it that one that burned children and the other one that was the raper? Makes no difference, all the same when they're dead.'

'They don't smell the same,' Weasel said from the back. It was easy to forget he was virtually still a child. His voice gave him away every time though. That and the fact he complained about things like the smell of dead men.

Time was when Bard would have taken umbrage to such unpleasantries as well. Were it not for the Burned Priests and their list, he would be living in Green Country, where he belonged, not hunting rapers and torturers across Oblivia. In a different life ... Taaj would still be in the Spice Ports, Bodkin would be in Ark, Tall Toyne living on some spit of land in the Island Kingdoms and Weasel ... Weasel would probably be dead anyway. Instead, we are here. Instead, we are ...

'That's because one's three-days-old and the other is nine,' Taaj quipped, back at Weasel.

'Ten,' Tall Toyne corrected him.

'Is it strange that I can taste the smell of rot?' Weasel swatted at the cloud of flies that escorted his horse. He looked tiny on the big black.

'It's strange that you don't shut up, even after I told you Tall Toyne don't like yapping,' Taaj said.

Bard could hear Weasel grumbling under his breath, but the boy didn't say anything out loud. He knew better than to test Taaj so close to Fara Mordova. The world grew bleak this far west, the spirits of any and all who ventured there shaded to darkness, men became irritable and short-tempered. For someone like Taaj that meant they moved to the wrong side of dangerous.