THE CHAINED GOD’S CURSE
PART ONE
Day became dusk, and a lone traveller walked a pale road.
The man was young, though boyhood was far behind him. Those years had left him tall and lean, skin bronzed by long journeys beneath the sun, with strong limbs and a sword at his side. He had no name, but when a name was needed people called him Nettle.
Beside his leather belt and scabbard Nettle wore only a tunic, bright green once but faded, and beneath it a simple cloth about his loins. On his feet were leather sandals, well worn. He carried no other possessions but his blade and the coin it earned him.
The traveller turned his face, which was long and handsome, to the darkening sky. Rain had begun to fall, though no wind stirred. He scowled stormy-eyed at the heavens, raking one large hand through his mess of black curls.
“Fie!” Nettle muttered to himself. “A curse upon this weather. And thricefold again upon those that cast me out here!”
Not a day hence had he made port in Whitehollow, the only village upon this small and nameless rock in the sea folk called the World’s Edge. The journey had been arduous, ending with no small amount of rowing, the wind dropping and sea calming as the island had come into view.
Nettle had tied his boat at port and made haste to the warm hearth-fire glow of the tavern, hoping to rest his bones. And indeed, for a time he had sat and eaten and laughed in good company, and enjoyed the glances of the innkeeper’s daughter as she brought him horn after horn of ale.
But the mood soon soured, and whispers began. There was talk of a curse that had befallen the village, and some opined that a strange traveller had been the cause. All they would say was that some fell spirit was invoked, before falling wide-eyed and tight-lipped.
One man accused the newcomer of being a sorcerer too, and before his ale-swilled tongue could protest Nettle was cast out of the village gate, on the far inland side from the port.
The rest he’d sought had never come, and the traveller’s limbs ached for a bed, yet he trudged on. He would find some place to shelter for the night. Despite the rain, the night was not so cold as some he’d known. Then by morning he would take the road in a wide berth around the village palisades, sneak back into the port, and row away to more welcoming horizons.
As he walked, the traveller wondered at the beauty of this secluded isle in the dwindling evening light. The paths on which he trod were entirely white stone, pale and dusty chalk, as were the bare cliffs and boulders which rose up from the grassy fields around him.
Sheep grazed upon the heathered hillside despite the rain, and trees rustled at the growing downpour. Their trunks were slim but sturdy, bent double as if they had grown all their lives in a gale.
Yet still, no wind blew.
Presently, Nettle reached a fork in the road. Ahead, the way dug straight into the hill through a valley of quarried stone, hard edges of dusty white turned slick with rain. To the side, the path sloped down and toward the west from whence it had come, and the hill overlooked the lights of Whitehollow and the dark expanse of the sea.
This was his path then, but before Nettle turned to take it his eye caught something that sent one great hand quickly to the hilt of his sword. In the quarry, to the side of the road, was a figure, laying slumped in the muddy roadside beneath a great grey cloak.
Nettle peered through the rainfall and waning light of dusk at the shape, then beyond it and up the sides of the quarried cliffs. Cautious, yes, but he had not survived so long upon the road alone without being first to strike in an ambush.
Here though, he was alone. “Ho! Friend, are you sleeping?” He feared he would receive no answer, and when indeed none came he approached close enough only to draw his sword and prod at the figure with the flat of it. Still no response.
Weapon in hand Nettle knelt by the body and turned it over in his strong arms. Poor soul. A man not much older than Nettle himself, face bloodied and caved upon the rocks. A fall, perhaps, from the great height of the chalk cliffs above.
“Rest well, friend, and bear me no grudge. But I’ve more use of this than you.”
Nettle unfastened the grey cloak from the corpse and slung it about his shoulders. It was thick wool, mottled grey, and dry within. Beneath the man was dressed much like Nettle himself, with a scabbard at his waist.
Nettle drew and checked the blade against his own. The stranger’s sword was bronze, of fine make and untarnished. The leaf blade was double-edged, stout and keen, and the grip was bound in burgundy leather. At its pommel was hammered the face of the sun. He swung the weapon, feeling its weight, and smiled, replacing his own nicked iron sword within the corpse’s scabbard.
Something glinted in the polished surface of the new sword, and Nettle wheeled about, looking for torchlight. Nothing. Still alone. He marked the source now, in the mud where the body lay. Grasping for it with strong fingers he pulled it free and peered in wonder at his find.
The trinket was black iron, rough bands wrought into a ball, like a cage for a bird or a rat trap but too small, affixed to a short chain of the same make. In its centre was a light, a sourceless and flickering candle flame. Held aloft, it cast its light as well as any torch into the velvet darkness.
As Nettle turned it he saw how the glow kept its place within the sphere, sputtering but still burning in the dirt and falling rain. The piece was in fact two halves, joined by a hinge and a lock, though nowhere about the body or in the dirt of the road could he spy a key.
This was a spirit. Nettle had dealt little with them in his travels, for which he was thankful. The spirits were wily and their ways and powers mysterious, of a world separate from the honest deceits of mortal men.
And yet... To see this tiny flame so bound, sputtering in the rain and left behind by its master in the mud, Nettle’s heart was moved. For above all things he loved freedom, and despised nothing so much as captivity and tyranny.
Working his fingers between the tiny bars to gain purchase, Nettle wrenched the two halves of the cage asunder. The light remained miraculously in the air, then floated up before the traveller’s dark eyes as if to hold the gaze of its saviour.
A moment later, it flew up, dodging between raindrops, and sped away into the night.
Nettle gazed up into the gloom for a moment, eyes readjusting with the spirit’s light now gone. The twilight was all but gone now. He would have to return to the path quickly and find the distant lights of the village to guide him through the night like a beacon.
Feeling some small contentment, he stood and turned to leave by the other fork of the path when a sudden cold clasp around his ankle held him firm.
The stolen sword still drawn, Nettle wheeled about in horror to see its owner grasping at him, dead eyes lolling, staring past the blood and mud to meet his terrified gaze.
Sorcery! Nettle swung the blade at the living corpse, but its grip on him bore some unnatural strength, and it pulled hard enough to take his footing from under him.
The strike swung wide, and Nettle fell into the dirt beside the undead stranger. That terrible strength held him down, that glassy stare fixed, unblinking.
“Begone! Back to the grave with you!” Ice was in Nettle’s veins as he yelled at the dead man, voice echoing along the pale quarry and out into the lonely night.
He brought the sword down again with a powerful swing and hacked at the wrist of the cold, clammy hand that clasped him. His strength and skill with a blade had not left him despite his fear and the bone and taut sinew was severed, though the arm had not blood left to give.
The corpse swung its free arm, sharp nails raking the flesh of Nettle’s calf as though they were the claws of a beast. This wound did bleed, and Nettle grimaced at the sudden shock of pain. There was more strength in that blow than any he’d endured from the living.
Nettle scrambled through the dust and dirt, kicking free the limp hand which twitched and groped blindly. The dead man blocked his path. He spun, letting the stolen cloak fall from his wide shoulders, and ran onward down the quarry road into the shadow of night.
Curse the spirits! This was the sorcery the villagers had been so wary of, Nettle was sure. A power to raise the dead was more terrible than any he had seen. Was that body once the sorcerer cast out from Whitehollow? Or had Nettle himself called down the curse by freeing the imprisoned flame?
As if in answer to his wheeling thoughts, a warm glow appeared from the black night and shone across the quarry ahead. The floating flame had returned, now hanging in the air ahead of Nettle, lighting his way.
“Is this another trick? Are you the evil these people have abandoned me to, or else my saviour?”
The light gave no answer, dancing back and forth across the pale road. Nettle had no desire to follow, but heard a noise from behind and by the spirit’s light saw the dead man shambling towards him. The fresh wound in Nettle’s leg stung. There was nothing for it. He would be rid of this horror by whatever means he could.
The traveller ran. His passage was eased by the hard white stone of the path, though the pain in his leg still throbbed with each heavy footfall. All the way the little werelight kept ahead, until it veered from the path and nearly out of sight.
Nettle stumbled to a stop. The flame had shown him a route through cracks and crags of stone, away and up the hill. Whether it was an illusion or some other trickery he could not know. He knew only that terror was on his heels.
Gritting his teeth against the deepening sting of his bleeding leg, Nettle pressed on, slipping away from the road and, he hoped, out of view of the waking corpse. Soon the light brought him to an opening in the hillside which it slipped inside, and Nettle followed.
The cave beyond was small and silent, a natural hollow in the white rock hill. In here the light of the spirit made the walls gleam, and every stone and shadow dance. Nettle could not hear the shuffling of his pursuer, only his own heaving breaths. He waited, wary, sword in hand.
Outside the cave mouth the squall was finally easing and the clouds parted, drawing away in scudding scraps to reveal a full and brilliant white moon and a purple sky full of stars.
The deep exhaustion and pain from his wound finally took hold and he lay there, lungs burning, body weak and still. One star seemed to dance about before his eyes, then they blurred and closed, and darkness took him.
TO BE CONTINUED...
