There was little risk of attack. These lands had been taken by the wyrmlings years ago, and the warrior clans had long since lost the will to fight for their return.
Vulgnash saw nothing in the night but a pair of wild oxen; some stags drinking beside a pool; and a young wolf prowling in a meadow, jumping about as it hunted for mice.
It was only when they spotted a village in the distance that Vulgnash took pause. It was a village full of new humans, of runts. Their cottages looked restful, lying in the fold of a vale. Smoke curled up from last night’s cooking fires, and he could see goats and cattle in their little stick pens.
Vulgnash had not given much thought to the runts. The wizard he had caught was one of them, and he wondered now if perhaps some of the wizard’s kin might not come looking for him.
As a precaution, he stopped the wagon. “Go down to that village,” he told his warriors, “and kill everyone.”
He stood guard as the wyrmlings loped off across fields that glowed golden in the moonlight. A couple of dogs began wagging their tails and barking as the wyrmlings approached, but their barking grew frantic as they realized that some new terror was approaching.
A human man came to a door to investigate, just as the wyrmling warriors approached; a wyrmling hurled a spear through him.
Then the warriors were on the houses. They did not go in through the doors. They kicked down walls and threw off the roofs. They screamed and roared like wild beasts, striking terror into the hearts of the little ones.
And then they ran down anyone who tried to escape.
They made sport of the slaughter, ripping off the legs of living men, pummeling mothers into the dirt, searching through the rubble of broken houses to find the babes, then squeezing them as if they were small birds.
In all, it took less than fifteen minutes, but it was time well spent.
Vulgnash felt as if he had accomplished something.
They ran afterward, for more than an hour through the night, the warrior’s hearts pumping hard from bloodlust, until they reached an old abandoned hill fort. It had a single watchtower that looked out over the rolling hills, and a great room and a kitchen that had once garrisoned troops. Beyond that, there was nothing more but some moldering sheds, their wooden roofs weighed down by moss and blackberry vines.
The birds had begun to sing and the stars were dying in the heavens. The fort looked like a good place to camp for the day. In fact, there was no other place on the trail behind and no likely spot ahead for many hours. The old fort was Vulgnash’s only choice.
BENEATH THE UGLY STONES
A scholar once told me that he could prove that men of renown lived longer than others. The wise woman of the village, the hero of battles, the acknowledged master of his craft-whether it be a baker or smith or only a chandler. Each lived an average of seven years longer than others of their kind.
“The secret,” he said, “is praise. We all need it. It is a tonic that restores both the body and soul. Children need it to grow up to be healthy.
“Unfortunately, the stupid and the wicked need it too, and so often are undeserving. Look to the motives of those who commit crimes, and all too often they do it hoping to raise themselves in the esteem of others.
“And it is also for the praise of others that good men do well. Thus our need for praise can prod us down the path of goodness, or onto the avenues of evil.”
“King Urstone is groping for eels,” Warlord Madoc told his sons that night. “This plan of his-rescuing this otherworld wizard-it’s a vain hope. He is only forestalling the inevitable.”
“The death of his son?” Drewish asked.
“Aye, the death of his son,” Madoc said. The army had bedded down in the caves, but Madoc and his lads were in a small vale beneath the shadows of three huge sandstone rocks, each looking like some monstrous face, twisted and grotesque.
“You would think that Urstone would have forgotten him by now,” Connor said. “You would think that he’d have given him up for dead.”
“Mmmmm,” Madoc grunted in agreement. “It’s a point of honor with him. He wants to be seen as a man of compassion. He can’t let it be said of him that the wyrmlings love their children more than he does. It would make him somehow…callous, tainted.”
“Do you think the wyrmlings do love their children more than we do?” Connor asked.
Madoc scratched his painted chin thoughtfully. “A mother bear will do anything to protect her cubs. A wyrmling is no different. They have the instinct, and they’ve got it strong. Zul-torac is as bloody-handed a wyrmling that has ever led a war, but still he loves his daughter, and she is made all the more precious by the fact that he can bear no more.”
“Can a wyrmling really love?” Connor asked.
“Not in the way that humans do,” Madoc said. “But they have feelings-greed, fear. What they call love is bound up in those. Greed because they want to possess a child, to own something that is an extension of their lusts. Fear because they believe that children confer upon them a sort of eternal reprieve. They give their children as servants to Lady Despair in an unending succession, and so long as their lines continue, they believe that she will not punish them in the afterlife.”
Madoc didn’t really know much about such things. He had never really studied wyrmling philosophy. He was only repeating snatches of lore that were repeated around the campfire. He had never quite understood why the wyrmlings failed to wipe out Caer Luciare. Kan-hazur was just a worthless wyrmling child in his estimation. It only made sense that Zul-torac would hunt down the last of mankind, even if he had to hack his way through his own daughter to do so.
Yet for a dozen years now, the wyrmlings had let the city go. Never had it been attacked in force. The only incursions came from wyrmling harvesters that haunted the wood and fields outside the castle, taking only the unwary.
Yet Madoc had developed a theory as to why the wyrmlings didn’t attack, a theory so monstrous, he had never dared to speak of it openly, a theory that had been borne out-in part. Only now did he voice his concerns.
“My sons,” he said. “There is a good reason that the wyrmlings have spared us. They need mankind. Their harvesters need our glands to make their foul elixirs. King Urstone has never thought this through, but the wyrmlings would not dare to kill us all. Instead, they let us live, like pigs fattening in a pen, waiting for the slaughter. It isn’t our hostage that has saved us for so long. It is…necessity.”
Drewish smiled and gazed up into the air. Obviously, the idea amused him. “If we are but animals waiting to be harvested, why not cage us?”
Connor laughed. “Because it takes work to feed a pig, to keep him caged. Why not let the pigs feed themselves?”
“The caged animal is easier to kill.”
“There’s no sport to hunting a pig in its pen,” Madoc said with a smile. “And the wyrmlings are nothing, if not lovers of blood sport.”
It was true. The wyrmlings were bred for blood-lust. Without men to hunt, they would quickly begin slaughtering themselves. Madoc knew that the wyrmlings could indeed harvest glands from their own kind-but that would soon lead to bloody war.
Connor seemed uncertain. “Are you sure this is true?”
“Certain,” Madoc said. “My men captured a harvester last winter. It was only with fire and the tongs that I could pull the truth from him.
“And five weeks ago, we took another, and did him until he told the precise same tale.”
Madoc took a deep breath, gave the boys a moment while he let the information settle in. “Now, there are these little folk abroad. A village here, a village there. How many of them could there be?”