The territories north of the great Kerouyan River sit buried in a winter of folk legends and witchcraft. The air is pregnant with malice like a daemon made manifest and omniscient, but do you know its shape or how it moves and by what science or method it chooses its prey? The few, remote souls of the region do not and lo they board up and wall the pale against it and the strange chimeras and spectres which move out among the pine and the darkness. Against the hideous silhouette that stalks there, lank and spiderlike and towering up into the boughs of great trees. Or the packs of strange beasts, foreign to this land, but sick with madness or the companies of people congregating in the guts of once-abandoned wreckage, burning effigies of bulls and crudely-made men. Or the deadcart hauled by a father and four, unblinking sons. Or the man made of flies or the old sutler in his coat. Or the silence. The animals drive south as the malevolent cold thickens and Qheje’li wanders with them. The winter creeps in after him under his skin.
Three days later, he is in a small hamlet by the name of Orchard Ferry. He barters fur for a night in a cramped tavern room with space for a bed and a shelf and nothing more. He barters too much. The tallow candle on the shelf bathes the five-by-eight in light; he has never slept in a place such as this. The drunken roar in the ribs of the tavern below. The dingy walls and the grease stains left by fatty candles. Warmth. Warmth in the smiles and the speech and the eyes. Laughter filtering into the room from a pair of children playing out in the streets. It reminds him that even among the gregarious lot, he is alone.
When night comes, a fever settles in. Wild apparitions crawl out from the crack beneath the door or through the slats in the timber walls and up from under the bed. The old man in the coat visits him but says nothing. He is always smiling with eyes like dead stars and Qheje learns what true fear is. In the early hours of the morning, the man leaves, and a deep, dreamless blackness follows in his wake. Qheje feels as if he is drowning. When he wakes, he’s in the middle of the woods again and the village is nowhere in sight. Two days pass before he finds the road and another two brings him to another town by another name. The town is alive with gossip. A whole family, the villagers are saying, torn apart by wolves. It was Orchard Ferry, but was it the wolves, or was it him?
“I don’t much like the look of him,” a middle-aged man with a broken nose sneers over his wooden tankard. Unlike other communities where places of worship tend to be its cropping-up point, Berwickshire, a bordertown nestled between the great wald and the southern plains arterial to the Ul’dahn desert, seemed to spring up around her one tavern. Although commonly frequented by merchants peddling their wares and other foreigners, Qheje’li has, for some unknowable reason sitting at the far end of the bar, struck a nerve in the man who is now fitting him with a withering glare while his leg does a jig beneath the table.
“Leave him, Joel. Reckon the wailers’ll sort him out.” His brother is finessing a cinch of rope into different kinds of knots. He was a sailor in his youth, but now he has a bum leg and a bad back and can’t finish a full day’s work without the pain putting him up. He occasionally glances to the miqo’te but shows disinterest. “We ain’t soldiers no more. It’s not our place.”
“It don’t work like that and you know it. We’re always soldiers.”
His brother pauses with the knot to look up and roll his eyes at Joel. He cranes to spit into a metal bucket at his foot before grabbing his old walking brace and using it to hoist himself onto his feet. He looks at his brother again and then across at Qheje’li, running his tongue along his teeth while he thinks.
“Joel, just shut that shithole of yours and listen. Savvy? Good. Now, you remember when we was young – oh probably ten or eleven for you, thirteen for me – and pa was set to take us hunting after the harvest, but, being the ornery, impatient shit you’ve always been you says to me at the crack of some dawn: ‘Lester, let’s go huntin’ and I says: ‘Well now, Joel, you and I both know daddy said that he’d take us first thing come harvest end.’ But you ain’t havin none of that and you’ve got your foot down, like way down, like ‘surprised it didn’t go through the floor’ down and I reckon I could rightly see that so I roll out of bed and slap on some overalls and grab the old muzzleloader, the one fitted with the new bayonet pa’d just picked up from the smith and slapped on, and you and me we went out there to do our business. You remember that, Joel?”
“Course I remember that, what’s this got to do with nothin?”
“Well, we found us a big old pig, I took a turn shootin him and then you did with yours and we did some mighty fine work for two lads of our age if I do say so myself, but the pig wasn’t dead and so we followed the stubborn bitch near on two hours if I recall, course the memory ain’t what it used to be, but yeah and we find it just splayed out and lookin like it’s about to breathe its last and you get the idea that you’re fixin to finish it off with pa’s nice, new bayonet. Wanted to break her in, I guess. Still with me there, brother?”
“Yeah, I’m still with you but I don’t see the relevance in none of this.”
“Well, I know, but hold on I’m getting there. So you’re fixin to gut the pig and I’m seein that she’s down but she ain’t out and I’m also seein a mean look in those eyes that says: tread not here. I try to tell you this, see, and again you’re havin none of it cause like I said: ornery, impatient shit. So, you get to the point of just yanking the rifle from me and trudging up to the beast and, well, damn Joel. We both remember what happened then, don’t we? You was bleedin all over the place before I got enough of a sight to pop her in the head. You nearly died that day were it not for the grace of god.”
“What a fuckin day that was, learned my lesson that’s for sure.”
“Well, see, now that’s what I’m gettin at. I’m not sure you did learn your lesson because what I see is that same dumb, ornery piece of shit fixin to jam a bayonet into the gut of a cornered animal who don’t see that the animal is cornered and down but he still ain’t out and that his tusks are still sharp and his eyes are the kind of desperate that makes you mean and makes you dangerous. And I’m seein my brother who I love dearly – you do know I love you dearly, I tells you so much – about to make the kind of mistake that he might not be able to walk away from.”
The two men are quiet for a moment. Lester watches Qheje’li and Joel stares at the toes of his boots beneath the table. His leg has fallen still and he punctuates the silence by spitting into Lester’s spittoon. He speaks first.
“Probably not even worth the energy anyways.”
“Probably not. Course, that’s just my piece. You got a bug well I ain’t gonna stop you. Hell, I’ll throw in with you cause that’s what brothers do, but you know what I figure? I figure that right about now Mary’ll be finishing up supper and you and I know she always makes too damn much, enough for both of us, and that she’d be sure delighted to see you at the table seein as you don’t visit us much no more.”
“Yeah. Suppose you might be right. She does make some mighty fine grub, don’t she?”
“God’s truth. Now, hurry up and grab your possibles. Looks like it’s itchin to rain.”
The following day, the sky is thick with black and lighting cracks across her surface while the heavens pour down on the small town. Only a few, brave souls go out into the weather. There is a father and his two, eldest sons trudging in the wet and hollering for their kin: a young girl caught out in the storm. A mercenary built of more solid stuff than the folks in the town kicks out through the front door of the tavern and barrels down off the veranda like some truculent and enraged beast, his hobnailed boots sucking in the mud. He wears a weathered, brigandine vest and there is a rill of blood coming out of the side of his head where an ear used to be. He is snarling. His friends call him Charlie, but he doesn’t have any friends.
“Gonna kill the bitch,” he growls back to a partner who’d stumbled out onto the porch after him. He spits blood out and turns back to stare through his slick mane at Qheje’li, some twenty paces across the muddy sprawl, nearly crouched to his haunches and nigh-feral. There is blood around the boy’s mouth and none of it is his own. Charlie slides an aged backblade from its scabbard and tosses it from one hand to the other and then back. “You hear me? Gonna split you open, crotch to lip. Make a new fur coat out of you.”
Qheje’li is still spitting bits of ear out from in between his teeth when he drags a curved dagger about the size of a normal man’s forearm from a hide sheathe at the back of his hip. He stays low and for every two steps Charlie takes Qheje’li takes one step back.
“Got claws, do we? Then stop scamperin back, you fuckin mutt. When I’m done here, gonna kill your whole, goddamn family, you hear me, boy?”
Qheje’li doesn’t speak. His eyes are wild and lost and something rumbles between his ears. Charlie is grinning and muttering something under his breath as he closes the distance. His body lowers. He says something about Qheje’li’s mother. He brings his sword to bear. He lunges. There is an awful sound of bone and Charlie is screaming. Some have crowded in the doorway of the tavern to watch.
“Unnatural,” a man mutters darkly from a window where he watches and holds his daughter close. Half of Charlie’s size, it was surreal for onlookers to watch as Qheje snapped his arm at the elbow without difficulty. He’d gotten too close. Someone vomits at the sound.
Charlie is stumbling away and wailing, his sword stuck somewhere in the mud. A step back for every two steps Qheje moves forward. There is nothing intelligent in his eyes. There is nothing but fear in Charlie’s. He fumbles behind him with his good hand and snaps a misericorde forward, shaking.
“I-I’ll fuckin, I’ll fuckin... stay back!” He punctuates the air with the narrow blade once, twice, and then on the third stab, Qheje brings his dagger around and strikes the misericorde from his hand before turning the blade, bringing it back, and messily lodging it into the back of Charlie’s knee.
He yells as his body twists and collapses into the mud. Qheje is on top of him and Charlie is screaming and flailing wildly as hands – terrifying, suffocating, unknowably powerful hands – close over his skull. He feels their crushing vice right before a pair of thumbs dive into the sockets of his skull. Qheje doesn’t notice the spurt of blood as he bites down and opens up another with the artery on the man’s throat. He doesn’t notice anything anymore. The screaming turns into gurgling, into wheezing, and then into quiet. His partner watches it all, transfixed as if by some Other’s decree. A cosmic judge lording over the presentation and its bloody sprawl. Qheje sits astride the man’s hips, unfurling upwards. Arms slack at his sides. Eyes on the ether. Anointed in violence, he is a testament to a law older than stone or dirt. He breathes deep and then the moment passes. He hobbles to his feet in a fever-dream that he’s yet to wake from these past two years. He looks to the villagers on the board floor porch, but he doesn’t see them. He looks off into the woods.
An hour later, the two boys looking for their sister find their father already knee-deep in a newly-formed river and he is crying over a small body buoyed up among the deluge. The body is still. And the rain never stops.
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