Chapter 1 - Death

The meadow on either side of the road was painted with russet and brown-black rotted splotches of gore in the golden early morning light. There were flies; many, many flies. They rose in droves where the scavengers and gore birds disturbed their orgies. Clouds of them sometimes blotted out the frozen sky. The stench…. Gods the stench made Lyla’s bile rise and her already empty stomach tried to relieve itself of contents that it had already lost.

As the healer’s apprentice, Lyla had been sent to investigate when the smoke of fires had stayed for more than one day hovering out in the distance along the caravan route. Old Reane was too ancient to make the trip quickly, so her young apprentice had been sent instead.

No one had really seemed concerned. It was common for a caravan to stay out on the main roadway instead of proceeding through the passes to the village if there were those ill among them. No trader worth his salt would want to be known for bringing sickness, even if it were a harmless sickness like a cold, to a village.

So off Lyla had popped like the good young woman she was to do the bidding of the healer, the Chief, her father, and all the elders. Not until the young woman had reached the carnage, did she realize the reason so many individuals of authority had gathered to give her the instructions.

She’d thought it was just because it was her first trip outside the passes alone. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been sending her to neighboring villages by herself for the better part of a decade. But…leaving the highlands and going below the passes that kept them separate from the rest of the world? That was a different matter.

“Not that there’s likely to be anything beyond your ability to heal...” The crotchety chief had assured her hastily. “…But, if it seems as if the trouble is beyond us, don’t stop. Head to the city of Balast and give this to the Magistrate.”

This had been a wax-sealed oilskin courier canister. The Imperial seal, a golden branching tree encircled with intricate designs shone gold from either end of the courier case. Light reflected from the shining metal as if enchanted. She’d been mesmerized by the little glints of light as they flitted past the trees flanking the road on her trek.

Now that she’d arrived, the beautiful dancing lights of her passage were no longer fun. There was no distracting the dark-haired young woman from the horrible sight before her. It wasn’t just illness that had waylaid the traders on their way through the passes to more remote villages.

Knowing better than to turn back or touch anything, Lyla held in her sobs the best she could and ran. She had to get to Balast. The smoking remnants of the wagons meant that this site had already been looted. The way the women’s clothes were tugged and twisted to expose indecent views let Lyla know that it would be worse than terrible if she was discovered by the brutes who had ransacked and pillaged this group.

There were guards, dead guards. Soldiers which had been stronger and more skilled than she could ever hope to be lay cut down with their limbs strewn across the beautiful landscape and their guts dripping on the wildflowers of early spring. What could one girl hope to accomplish against the brutes which had committed this act of abomination? What hope did she have of reaching the safety of Balast where the Emperor’s cargo ships brought trade from every corner of the globe to the deep turquoise harbor? What hope did her village have if she didn’t reach help in time?

Only once she had been there, as a young girl. Ten years it was now since the view from the ridge overlooking Balask took her breath away and made her chest tight with the wonder of it. Just as this moment, the horror of her current surroundings made her terrified and stole the wind from

her lips. Flying through the carnage, with a speed that only came from great fear, Lyla ran.

She’d never run so hard in her life. Cold spring mountain air whistled painfully in and out of her raw chilled throat. All the while the smell of rotting, burning flesh coated her lungs and sinuses with nauseating, searing pain.

The rotting was what made her feet take such flight. These bodies were old. Days, maybe weeks old, but the fires were just dying. This was a trap. These bodies’ murderers had returned to burn the wagons after the bodies had been dead for days. After there was no more plundering to be had from these dead. Lyla had nothing save her healer’s satchel of herbs, a water skin, and the courier canister with its secret message.

How many heart-pounding miles she ran, Lyla didn’t know. But where she could run no more, she jogged, and when she could jog no more she walked. When she could walk no more she crawled, scurrying along on her torn hands and knees, less concerned with the possibility of infection than she had ever been in her life.

And when she could breathe again and the stitch in her side let her stand, she hobbled and stumbled slowly into a standing gait. The pattern held through the day, and into the night when she stumbled more frequently and once found she had disastrously left the road which was hardly more than a track, overgrown as it had become in the spring bloom.

Far as she had come, the fresh night air was incapable of washing the scent of blood or the crisp sharpness of blackened putrefying flesh from her mind. Lost and disoriented, Lyla shuddered with the knowledge that her village could be gone at this very moment.

That trade caravan had been large. As large as her village! Maybe? They’d had more weapons to a single soldier than she was certain she had ever seen in her entire village. Her village didn’t even have a name. They were just the mountain village. One of many nameless places deep in the high valleys that could only be reached by days and weeks of slow treacherous travel in the warmer months. And they were completely isolated in the winter.

How could they have sent her? How could the village elders have sent her? She was nineteen! She raged at the unfairness of it all. She was angry at their betrayal. That they would have sent her instead of one of the young men. If they’d suspected foul play they could have sent someone through the game trail.

But to send her? On the main road. Alone? She was weak. She was just a healer’s apprentice. She was… she was… she was the only person in the village under the age of sixty who had ever been to Balast. Because she was the healer’s apprentice and had needed to have her magical ability tested by the city Magi as a child before she could be considered for entrance into the school when she was old enough.

Lyla cursed in an inaudible whisper between ragged searing breaths. The very magic that had saved her from being forced into an arranged marriage, the magic that was going to let her leave her small village for the temples of the Lord of Healing later this spring was the very thing that may have condemned her to death.