Night of the Chalk (Spies of Dragon and Chalk Book 1) Page 11

  Zarus studied his marks.

  Cal tried to keep his voice level through the pain burning through his arms and chest. He hoped the sight of all the Chalk he had killed would enrage Zarus. “See any friends of yours? Maybe your father?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  “Friends? Fathers? You know us so little. No. This is good. I kill a man with many marks. I will take your dragons. They follow power. They will follow me. I will show them your head. Gelden Carr will reward me. This is good.”

  Zarus smiled, or at least his unnatural face shifted in a way that seemed to indicate amusement. “You have many marks, but you fall for my trap like a child.” Zarus lifted a small object to his mouth. He blew into it while twisting bizarrely, as if he played a strange music instrument. What came out instead of music was the sound of a baby crying. He continued for nearly a minute, capturing a variety of different cries and hues, all shockingly realistic.

  He put the instrument away and gripped his knife with both hands. Cal tensed.

  “With marks like these, I should make you suffer. I should paint you with the chalk and bury you while you live. You will know despair. But Gelden Carr requires your death this night. So you die.”

  Zarus very slowly raised the knife in a ritualistic fashion, his eyes on Cal. The Chalk on either side tensed in anticipation, eyes locked on the knife.

  Cal prepared to die. His breath slowed. There was a shift in the firelight behind Zarus as an enormous shape rose behind his shoulder. Cal, desperately drawing on all the military training he’d ever had, kept his eyes on Zarus, focusing on the marks under the Chalk’s dark eyes.

  As Zarus raised his blade to its highest peak, prepared to plunge it into Cal, a hammer smashed into the side of the Chalk’s head, nearly knocking it off his slight body. He was driven so violently sideways he left his feet, dead before he hit the ground.

  The huge beast wielding the hammer pivoted on his enormous legs and hurled the weapon at the Chalk to Cal’s right, hitting it in the face with the iron crown of the heavy war hammer. The Chalk to the left wasted no time, thrusting his knife at Cal’s exposed neck. But Cal had thrown himself backwards just before the thrust, which passed right in front of his nose. The beast, now weaponless, took one big step to the Chalk and seized his neck in his huge hands. There was a loud crack as the Chalk’s brittle bones began snapping. The beast tossed the carcass to the side and went back to the second Chalk to stomp on his head, which quickly collapsed with a dry, gasping sound.

  Cal struggled to his feet as the beast turned towards him. The Dura Mati towered over Cal even when they were both standing, north of seven feet tall. His thick bluish body rippled with muscles. Atop the massive body was a head that would look more in place on a bull, with a flared nose, prominent brow, and one thick twisting horn made of dark grey bone. The one horn began broadly at the left crown and curled into a sharp point a few inches from the left temple. The other horn was broken off after about a third of its length in a jagged tear. He wore a ragged loincloth with a few packs strung on it and many bracelets, armlets, and necklaces of iron, steel, and gold. Without the war hammer, his hands were clenched into thick fists.

  “Good to see you, brother,” Cal said.

  The Dura Mati looked darkly down at Cal. “Little man has strange friends,” he said. He picked up his hammer, walked heavily over to the fire and sank down into a lotus position, arms folded. Cal knew from experience that probably concluded their conversation for the evening.

  Cal let out a shuddering breath. Zarus Coff’s hideous crying baby instrument had masked the Dura Mati’s approach. The minotaur never would have made it through the brush without alerting the Chalk otherwise. The vanity of the strange Chalk had led to his death. Cal wiped the sweat from his brow with a trembling hand. His chest stung fiercely.

  First, he would wash that foul white dust off of himself. Then he would dress the wounds that burned his chest. Then he’d see what this Zarus Coff and his nameless companions had been carrying. He was guessing they had followed him from somewhere in the vicinity of Delhonne, which meant they had dragons camped somewhere around here. He’d have to wait for the approaching daylight to try to track their path and find their dragons. And he should check on his own dragons and make sure everything was okay with them. The Dura Mati should have two dragons with him. They would need to be seen to. It would be a busy morning. As he made his plans, one question repeated over and over in his mind. Gelden Carr had ordered his death. But who was Gelden Carr?

  Chapter 17. A Different Sort of Struggle

  Aaron and Miriam rolled in her bed, clawing at each other’s clothes. They were both enflamed with passion. For Aaron, it was like a starving man being led to food. It had been a long time since his travels had taken him to a woman’s bed and then not always as beautiful as the thin, lovely Miriam, with flawless lines and high, small breasts.

  Miriam made love eagerly and loudly. For her, love was a tool to flatter, to beguile, to sap energy from a mark until he was sharing his deepest secrets. She couldn’t entirely shake off these tendencies, though Aaron was a far more complicated prey. A stubborn part of her was filled with genuine desire and hope for something different and new.

  She had been surprised when Aaron had approached her. He’d been meeting in the back with Conners for twenty minutes or so. The Corvale mingled, taking advantage of the rare social gathering despite the late hour. When Aaron approached her, he made a few token efforts at subtlety, but it didn’t take a genius to see what he was interested in.

  Corvale men were rare. They had been disproportionally affected by the Slaughter. When the Chalk descended on Wyelin, the traveling party they destroyed represented something close to eighty percent of the Corvale tribes, closer to ninety-five percent of the fighting men. It led to a great many widows and orphaned daughters who had not traveled on the pilgrimage. The remnants of the society struggled to retain and produce loyal young men in reasonable numbers. As a result, healthy, young men of the Corvale, especially those with some status, rarely left gatherings like this alone. A newcomer like Aaron could have his pick of this crowd. But he had walked out of the back room, scanned the crowd, and immediately honed in on Miriam like an arrow.

  Aaron carried a field of influence around him in this place, a weight. Here he was the center of the world tonight. The stories, the dragons, his mere existence as a survivor and witness to the Slaughter. Miriam balanced his influence with her own energy though. She was well known and respected throughout the room. Women who had been waiting for Aaron took one look at the direction he was headed and melted away. None of them wished to compete with Miriam, in her quiet way a champion of the Corvale women. She was who they came to when hurt or threatened.

  It seemed almost as if the crowds parted when Aaron approached her. It lent a sense of inevitability to their coupling. Miriam accepted Aaron’s unspoken offer and recommended that they head to her place. It wasn’t a difficult decision for her. She was attracted to Aaron. She’d been inspired, even moved, by his stories and the potential change he represented to the Corvale. But mainly she was an information seeker. She had no problem using all of her assets to learn the secrets of the world around her. Many men had spilled their plans to her in a shared bed. To be honest, if Aaron hadn’t asserted himself, she may have made a play herself, though she suspected Cal would have been the target.

  The sex was aggressive but short. Aaron rolled off of her and they lay next to each other on the bed, breathing heavily. The silence went on a little too long. Miriam finally rolled over, smiled at him, and offered him a drink. Aaron nodded, rolling out of bed, pulling his pants on, and sat barefoot and shirtless on a stool near the window. He rolled a cigarette as she threw a robe on and poured two whiskeys in glasses and added some water from a jug.

  “You realize that you managed to go the entire night without discussing the dragons?” she asked, handing him a glass and declining the rolled cigarette he offered.

  “Yes,�
�� he answered. “By design. I wanted to see if your people would accept me without the allure of the dragons.”

  “They’re your people too,” Miriam said.

  “Yes, they are. But…I really wasn’t sure how tonight would play out. I’m glad it went the way it did,” he said.

  She smiled. “Me too.” After a pause she continued, “Can I ask where the dragons come from?”

  Aaron hesitated. “Look, I like you, Miriam, and I’ve decided to trust you and Conners, but it’s been a long night, and I’ve had to sift through a lot of memories. I promise to tell you sometime, but, it’s just been a long night.”

  Miriam let the room fall into silence, more comfortable than the last one. She slowly reached out to Aaron, raised his arm. With her fingers and eyes, she began reading the stories embedded in his tattoos, first reading up his left side, then down the arm, back across his shoulders, over to his right side. A lifetime of violence recorded in ink. As she finished, she leaned back on the bed without offering any comment.

  “No marks for you?” Aaron asked, brushing a hand over her smooth, bare shoulder.

  “I’ve been traced.”

  Tracing was far rarer than marking. Some Corvale and others of the eastern tribes preferred not to have their deeds on display. If they still desired the honor and tradition of marking, they would request tracing from the mark masters, the tattoo artists that preserved the lore of the ink. The masters would undertake the same steps, the same cleansing of the skin and the tapping of a needle into the flesh. With tracing, some said they used an invisible ink. Others said it was merely a needle with no ink. It left no visible sign, the act of being marked the important part. Miriam would have chosen this route to preserve her anonymity, her ability to use her body as a snare for men without revealing her story.

  It was said that if one paid the right kind of attention the tracing could be detected, read as easily as the marks on Aaron. He leaned towards Miriam, wordlessly requesting the right to read her as she had him. After a moment’s hesitation, she stood up before him, naked and proud in the moonlight.

  The moonlight slid across her narrow hips as Aaron examined her left side with his fingers. He focused, not sure how to listen to his hands and read her pale skin. He gently ran his fingers up and down the place where marking most frequently started, the left hip. It was hard to keep his sexual desire from intruding. His hands longed to caress her, but he forced them to listen to her instead, to read her skin rather than grasp it and pull her towards him.

  He traced upwards. As his hands moved, he began to feel something. Lurking just below the surface, more like a trapped energy than a physical imprint. He ran his hands back down, slowly. To fix on one spot revealed nothing, but the movement brought forth a sense of journey, a path she had followed, the places she’d been, the enemies she’d confronted, death dealt. It did not bring clear images, only faint impressions like the heat left by a body long after leaving a bed. Impressions of men who had beaten, raped, standing over their delicate feminine prey, thrilled in their shadows fallen over faces of tears. They reached out for one more meal, a vixen who had stumbled into their grasp almost too easily. One last greedy breath but the breathing slowed and suddenly the vixen was all blade, valued flesh torn from the body to fall to the floor. The men fell into their shadow, disappearing to be mourned by none.

  As Aaron’s hands withdrew, he found he was shaking. He did not know much more than he started with. Her secrets were still her own. But he knew they ran deep. She was deadly, hiding steel beneath the sweet outer layer. He suspected he had just discovered the fate of any man foolish enough to bring violence to the women of the Delhonne Corvale. Among her other roles, Miriam was their defender.

  If anything, Aaron was more wary of Miriam than he had been before. And he didn’t need more wariness in his confusing life. But Miriam quickly left behind the effects of his reading, if there were any to mirror his, and slid into his lap. His desire returned powerfully.

  “Surely you’re not ready to go to sleep quite yet?” she asked, kissing him on the neck.

  “Maybe not just yet,” he said, casual words betrayed by the ferocity with which he drew her back onto the bed.

  Thirty minutes later Aaron slid off the bed where Miriam lay sleeping and walked over to the open window. The chill night air and the dim moonlight streamed into the small room. They were above an inn in a nicer part of the City Center. He could see some foot traffic below though the streets were mostly quiet in these few hours before dawn.

  Even in this quiet moment, in a comfortable room with a gorgeous woman, Aaron couldn’t shake the memories of last night, the deceptively gentle flap of the wings of the dragons chasing him. The helpless feeling of pursuit took him back to long ago, crawling through a tunnel with a large beast snarling right behind him. He wondered if he would ever know what it was like to be free of enemies, free of fear.

  The night he had met the dragons was a hard memory for him, in some ways even harder than the memory of his mother’s death. He and the Dura Mati had bashed their way through long miles of Chalk patrols circling the Tower of Sidvale. At some point both were well aware of what remained undiscussed, that they were going into the jaws of a trap they would not escape. They were far beyond enemy lines and making their way deeper. Neither intended to live out the night. Aaron lost himself in the fighting, the clash of steel, the violence. On the other side of surrender, he found peace. No more striving for a life that had been destroyed when he was just a child. He took his small dose of revenge, beheading, gutting every Chalk that came near him. The bodies piled up behind him.

  Next to Aaron fought possibly the finest hand-to-hand warrior in the world. The Dura Mati had embraced death, had wanted to die ever since he crossed paths with Aaron. Their encounter had led to the loss of his kingship, his wife, his children, his pride, his freedom. He was broken like the horn on his head, and he longed for the oblivion of death. He wielded his war hammer brutally, smashing heads, knees, torsos, anything in his way. He left more opponents crippled than dead, not even bothering to follow up the devastating blows he delivered.

  Each patrol they encountered grew fiercer, but each was left in a pile behind them. Their horses had fallen in the skirmishes hours before. Neither Aaron nor the Dura Mati bothered carrying a pack anymore. No food. No water. It was a one way trip.

  When they finally reached the Tower, it was deserted and quiet. It rose up from a barren hill like an ancient fist thrust towards the sky. Aaron led the way up the winding stairs to the top. As he stood looking out of the open northern facing chamber at the top, he saw a sea of torches, the Chalk gathering for the charge at the Tower that would spell his death. The Dura Mati sat slumped in a corner of the room, breathing heavily and waiting to die.

  Aaron took a seat at the edge of the chamber, legs dangling out into the void below. He pondered his failure. He had failed to make a life for himself, failed to build anything. He was a man living only to kill and destroy, to turn others into weapons, to break them against his pointless, directionless anger like he had broken the Dura Mati. He had been an escapist. He escaped the slaughter of his family and friends through a tunnel and he never stopped running, or really crawling, away from what he wanted. He used vengeance as a hobby, something to keep him moving, an excuse to seek out danger and court death. And now he had finally quit flirting with death and given himself to it. He removed the stone locust, his link to Cal, the only real friend he’d ever had, and prepared to throw it over the edge. After he’d done that, he’d throw his sword next, with the shepra packed into the hilt. His last ties to this world.

  That was the moment when he saw the dragons, just the tiniest black spots against a grey moonlit sky. It took him several moments to process what he was seeing, but finally it sank in. He saw hope. He saw another chance. Aaron called the Dura Mati over. It took many tries before the slumped minotaur finally answered and more still before he rose to his feet. But once he’d lumbered over to th
e edge and seen what Aaron had, his breath slowed. He too saw hope, a return to power, a way out of the shame that imprisoned him.

  The fight to hold the room long enough for the dragons to arrive was savage. Both fighters found renewed strength, but the sheer number of Chalk hurling themselves against the door eventually forced it to give way. Then it was close quarters against an endless stream of enemies. When the dragons finally filled the large opening at the edge of the room, there was no time left for hesitation. Aaron and the minotaur leapt onto their backs and rode them off into the night.

  Aaron’s memories of that night were not of triumph or exhilaration. He remembered the shame. The shame of knowing that, however briefly, he had given up on this world and himself and lain down to die. With his feet dangling off the ledge of the Tower of Sidvale, Aaron had surrendered to the execution awaiting him just beyond the prison cell he passed his days in. He had given up on fulfillment, on retribution, on creating something from the ashes of his life.

  His rebirth was no less painful. Touching the dragons awoke something within him. The Aaron who was plagued with self-doubt, the directionless wanderer, was not invited on this ride. The dragons had no questions, no patience for second guessing. With the dragons, you were a leader and you took them to blood and glory and triumph, or you stepped aside and laid down and died. Aaron found himself forced into a leadership role without the luxury of hesitation and doubt. He became a different man that night.

  Aaron stared out of the window now, watching the skies. The moonlight drenched his scars and tattoos, the bruises from his fall from the sky last night. His fists were clenched tightly. The skies over Delhonne were no longer safe. The streets never had been. If he was going to escape with what he came for, he would need to be the man who came south leading a host of dragons. He needed to leave behind the child crawling through the dark, desperate and afraid, enemies driving him away from what belonged to him once and always.