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As if my luck couldn’t get any worse the heavens opened. There came a great and deep roll of thunder and raindrops the size of eyeballs fell from the sky. They hurt as they hit my head and the cheap wool of my overcoat did nothing to protect me. I pulled my even cheaper hood up but was drenched in under a minute of the deluge. We slowed for fear of our nags loosing footing on the now slick mud and no one said anything. We continued in silence. It was a miserable night that reflected our mood perfectly.
Rain clouds obscured the moon and we travelled in near dark. It was cold enough for me to breathe steam and though it had stopped raining my wet clothing stuck to me limpet-like. I felt frozen. I tried to remember when I’d last felt contented. I mean full-bellied safe contented. We travelled a half-mile further before I reasoned that it must have been over a month ago. That made around four weeks of impromptu meals in run down hostelries or heaped across windswept campfires. Four weeks of sleeping rough under starry skies or on tavern cots crawling with lice and stained with old urine, and four desperate weeks of fighting to survive in a world devoid of comfort and therefore, ultimately, alien to me.
Before this drifter lifestyle, this haphazard existence of moving from one backwater hovel to the next, the sprawling city of Never had been my home. I’d made a name for myself there and could walk its streets with confidence. I had to keep my distance from the city guard but the back ways and alleyways I owned.
I was a thief and, because of my skill with a sword, a respected one too. Some knew me as the Blade, in homage to the short stabbing steel strapped to my back. Others called me Moribund after my sword. That was my warped sense of humour at play, moribund, near death, the point of my sword, Moribund, put my targets just on the tipping edge of snuffing it. Needless to say, none found it funny, save for me. Even fewer people called me the Dark, after the shadows a good thief learns to live in, and I loved the dark. It empowered me, made me invisible. I called the dark my night coat and there was nothing I couldn't do when I was wearing it. But outside Never my power waned. I was reduced, assuredly so, and being hunted forced me into situations I was unqualified to deal with.
I cast a look over my shoulder but saw nothing but the darkness. The old me, the one that had lived in Never, had looked forward all the time and never back. He was too well known to ever be a victim. In the slums and all across the cutpurse fraternity he was a celebrity. The new me, the exposed me, cast another nervous look back. An assault could come at any time. These four weeks of living rough had taught me that. My enemy had an uncanny knack for knowing where I was. I should suspect my travelling companions but I had to put my trust in something, hadn't I? Besides, since journeying with them they had proven themselves, sort of.
I’d met Smidgen before Bent but hadn’t known either of them for long. Three weeks, I reckoned, give or take the odd day camping out of town. That wasn't time enough to get to know someone but it sure was long enough to gauge their intentions. Both of them could have killed me yet neither had and that had to stand for something.
I would be first to admit there was something odd about both the strays, but at least they didn't work for him: that ceramic made cluster of dark arts the Golem. Me still riding around breathing paid proof to that sentiment and, being honest now, I was glad for their company, oddballs that they were. We made three targets rather than just one lonely cold and wet one. And both my ‘strays’ could fight, I’d no doubts of that.
I turned in my saddle and the worn leather creaked. I shivered too as I was really feeling the cold now that the rain had soaked through to my skin.
I couldn't see anything in the dark. I don't know what I expected to come lumbering out of the darkness but I expected something nonetheless.
Birkin, perhaps, in hot pursuit, with a whole legion of Bushites following not far behind.
I’d left that room in a terrible state. So much so I wondered if he would ever be able to rent it out again. Blood and death left an impervious odour no amount of scrubbing would be able to lift from the floorboards. Still, it hadn’t been my intention to commit murder, just the way it worked out.
Suddenly there was movement to my right. I couldn't see much in the dark but thought that Smidgen’s nag had slipped. Bent pulled on his reins to stop and I did too when I heard Smidgen hit the ground.
It was a hard fall and he cursed as he landed. “What is it? What’s wrong?” I gasped.
Smidgen started retching. “Get some light,” I said to Bent whom, despite being hooded and thus masked, pulled a sarcastic face. I could sense such derision by the way his head cocked to one side. Smidgen was gagging hard now and I gave up on trying to motivate Bent who had no intention of helping us anyway. “What’s wrong? Is it her?” Smidgen’s body shook violently as he coughed and retched and spluttered. I could see glimpses of his prone body in what little moonlight passed between the shifting clouds and saw enough to know he was on all fours now. He balked and I took a blind step backwards. I’d seen this once before and it horrified me. Smidgen vomited a big clump of hair. I was thankful there was little light and as I snatched my eyes away I saw what I thought to be a pair of feet spilling from his mouth. He had over eaten again. What else had he devoured before coming to my aide back in the village of Bush?
Bent evidently bored with the situation and characteristically unsympathetic, started forward in the darkness.
“Wait,” I shouted after him. Torn between helping Smidgen and ripping Bent off his horse, I flapped my arms and paced up and down ineffectively. “Wait. I’ll need help getting him back up.”
“It’s okay. It’s stopped now.” Smidgen rolled back onto his knees. He was gasping hard and needed time to recover but he clearly didn't want to be left alone. He made to stand and I rushed in to help.
“Bent, don’t do me no favours,” I grumbled, taking the full weight of Smidgen across my shoulders. My knees nearly buckled under the strain and Smidgen must have sensed so much for he started to walk unaided. He was a little bit shaky but he managed.
“Why didn’t you leave me behind?”
“Well you did me a favour in eating her,” I said, thinking that if it had have been broad daylight with the threat of following villagers, angry villagers, I would've done. “Don’t go reckoning me soft though, the minute you cease being of any use and I’ll drop you like a hot poker you turd.”
Bent came out of the darkness ahead of us, trailing Smidgen’s old horse behind his own. It seemed he hadn’t deserted us after all.
I avoided looking at him by watching as Smidgen remounted. His horse, poor thing that it was, almost shook with the strain of his immense weight.
“First opportunity we get we should steal you something bigger,” I said.
“What could be bigger?” said Smidgen for his nag was already twice the size of mine. It was an ugly beast, much like its rider and both he and it were well suited, being unnaturally large and ungainly. He looked almost comical sat so high up, fearfully clutching at the reins in case he slipped off. I considered what I must look like as I was relatively new to this riding lark too. Not much call for a horse in the city of Never. Smidgen and I were learning the ropes together, or rather, the reins.
“Come on. Let’s put some real distance between us and Bush.” I ‘yaa’d’ as I kicked at my horse and she shot forward real quick. The sudden speed was exhilarating. I could get to like this riding around. Man and beast as one and I got to sit on my arse the whole time. Just got to stay on that was all. Easy.
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“Where are we going anyway?”
We’d been riding through the night and dawn was breaking to the east. The chill of an impending morning touched all three of us and I shivered and rubbed my hands together. My fingertips stung with the cold.
Smidgen seemed recovered from his ordeal and wanted to talk. Of us three he was the most gregarious. Ironic really as he was the least likely to make friends. Then I looked up from my lap and registered Bent and scratched that notion about Smidgen as normal friendships sat uncomfortably with each and every one of us. We scared it away just by being who we were.
“Where are we going?” Smidgen asked again.
I didn’t answer for in truth I’d been content to follow Bent. There was a quiet authority about our dark cloud and if he had an agenda then I was happy to follow for now. My plan was to keep working south and every stop I’d made since leaving Never drew me closer to Black Pots, a place so corrupt that anyone could buy passage abroad; for the right price, naturally.
I had to leave the mainland and fast and when I reached Black Pots I would take the first ship out of port. If Smidgen and Bent chose to stay behind then we would part happily. Our relationship worked that way. In the short time we’d known each other a fragile dependency had formed but we put no expectations on each other. This was a relationship without roots, without ties. Ours was an alliance easily made and so could be easily broken.
I felt sure I wouldn't voyage alone though. I thought Smidgen would take ship and follow me to Marris or Hempentine but Bent’s intentions were harder to interpret.
Sometimes I saw interaction as an ordeal but Bent blatantly avoided it and with great fervour too and as a consequence he was a hard man to hold a conversation with. Me and Smidgen were the closest he had to friends and yet he hardly ever spoke to us. I knew more about the thing hunting me than I did about him. But Smidgen was a safe bet. He would want to go with me. So desperate for a pal was he.
Some time passed before Bent growled the word, “Claw.”
Smidgen took time to think about this and then, “Why Claw?”
“Claw.”
You couldn’t argue with a man like Bent and Smidgen realised this, which was why he turned his attention to me. “There was more stability in my life before we met,” he said light humouredly.
“Go back to being kicked and rooting through middens for food scraps if you like,” said I. “You don’t have to ride with me.”
“I know that. But I’d go wherever you went.”
“A bit too sentimental there, Smidgen. You’re beginning to sound like my mother.” By the gods he sure got attached to people quick. Three weeks in and already he would die for me. I would make friends with a woodlouse if I thought I could gain from it but his eagerness to be accepted bordered on the creepy. “We’ll have no life debts or blood oaths here,” I said half-jokingly but I meant it. “I don’t need self-sacrifice on my conscience as well as everything else. Tell me, what did you do before I met you?”
“Got kicked, rooted through middens.” Just mentioning his past seemed to upset Smidgen and with all the skill and delicacy of a bull with a raging hard on he changed tract. “Why does the Golem want you dead?” he asked.
I skirted that question as I had many times before. My turn to be delicate with a hard on. “I’ve got to get to Black Pots. Perhaps I’ll go there after Claw. You and Bent are welcome to come too. At 'Pots I’ll take passage across the sea.” I knew it was still there but nonetheless reached behind to touch the large canvas bag I’d carried since leaving Never. It was a gesture of reassurance as I felt its contents through the tough material, but my moment of dependence didn’t pass unnoticed.
“And why can’t you show us what’s in there? You carry that bag around like it was valuable,” said Smidgen.
“Will you stop harping on? It’s not important,” I said. It was a large canvas bag strapped to the back of my saddle and it was testament to my companion’s characters that neither had tried to spy a look; least that I was aware of. “It’s just a family heirloom I like to keep close. It’s of personal value only. You understand, right?”
Smidgen nodded though I knew he didn't. He hadn't got a family so sentimentality was wasted on him. “Play your games, Flendin,” he snorted, geeing up his nag to catch up with Bent. For a monster he sure was easy to upset, was Smidgen.
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The rumours were rife: the Devil was in the village of Bush.
True or not the buzz that morning had an effect on the surrounding hamlets like a magnet drawn across a page of iron filings and people came to the village in droves. Morbid fascination spurned them on where fear made them doubt the wisdom of their actions and they crowded the muddy thoroughfare for just a glimpse of the ultimate evil.
Bush was too small a village to have its own Sheriff so the one from Hammers had been summoned. He’d travelled through the early hours of the morning to reach Bush and was surprised at the news that greeted him. “I don’t doubt there’s been a murder. By the gods there’s little else to do in such a village but talk of the Devil is tantamount to invoking him and I won’t tolerate it. I won’t.” The Sheriff pulled the curtain away from the narrow window and breathed deeply. Gods it was cold, and early morning bright too and he squinted. Common people came close and peered through the window at him and he cursed them under his breath.
The Sheriff’s name was Orton and he loathed early mornings almost as much as he did backward villages. Hammers was a thriving town budding with commerce. Bush had an inn and a pig farm. Civilisation couldn’t spread quickly enough, he thought.
“Where was the murder committed?” he asked. The red nosed curious took it in turns to annoy him by poking their heads through the window and talking loudly about him as if he wasn't there. If he had to tolerate them then he supposed he should make them work for him.
“In the inn, sir. Birkin’s the landlord, sir,” said a commoner, who then proceeded to perform a bow-curtsey hybrid before almost slipping over in the thick mud. His thick calloused hands slammed against the side of the wagon as he only just caught himself and the Sheriff rolled his eyes.
These backwater villages had no sense of propriety; no handle on how to behave civilly and it vexed the Sheriff deeply. He stepped down from his wagon. Mud came as high as his ankles and he had to extend an arm to catch his balance. “Like walking on honey,” he evaluated. His driver dismounted, proffered himself as walking aide.
“Why do you say the Devil is here?” Orton asked of the rabble. Now that he was out and stretching his legs he felt more disposed to conversation. His driver made a point of hitting those that got too close.
“He’s in the tavern with Birkin. No one else dares go in. He gives us a bad feeling.”
“He looks different too,” said another. “He just ain’t right.”
Ignoramuses. Faecal smelling mud wearing ignoramuses.
Finery was strange to these simple people so someone like Orton, on three hundred fennigs a year and lodgings, made them feel awkward. This assumed Devil would likely be a noble from Never. Sweet smelling and velvet wearing he would automatically get them suspicious, wary, and limited intelligence could feasibly construe such wealth as evil and foreign, as devilish.
“Perhaps he did the murdering too. Sort of thing evil would do, right?” An inbred woman whose chin curled up to tuck neatly beneath her nose thought better of touching the Sheriff on the arm. The driver forced her back with three hardy slaps and the Sheriff raised his eyes heavenward and sighed.
“Please give me room, lots of room. I don’t need your opinions. This ‘Devil’ would be an official from the great city,” he said wafting the commoners away with a handkerchief and a limp effeminate wrist.
Sheriff Orton’s quick mind was already formulating the scenario of past events. There must have been a murder last night, and a particularly gruesome one to warrant the Sheriff’s attention let alone an important official from the city.
The great King had been killed in the city of Never and Turned were back in the world. The two events had to be linked, had to correlate to one another. There could be money in this somewhere for the Sheriff. He wasn’t sure why but officials from the cities were always frivolous with money. “Get downwind of me man. Don’t know what smells worse, you or your pigs.” Orton waved an enthusiastic farmer away and stepped up to the inn where no one else dared to follow. As one the paupers cooed as he felt for the door and pushed.
It was dim inside. Some shutters had been opened but those that hadn’t bled light through unprepossessingly. It was like looking through a jar of dirty water, indistinct and murky. The stench of hops was overpowering and Sheriff Orton could feel his taste buds wakening and he licked at his dry lips. He hadn’t had breakfast yet; so urgent had the message sounded last night to ‘come with haste’. “You must be he,” he said, ignoring the landlord Birkin and addressing the stranger. “Where is the body?”
“Don’t go upstairs,” said the stranger. His voice had an emphatic edge to it, sounding how Orton imagined a wall would, if a wall could talk. There was no flexibility to it, no room for argument. His flat, deep, unemotional cadence complimented his appearance perfectly as he was solid looking and the floorboards he stood upon bowed beneath his enormous weight indicating an unusual density about the man. Another wall analogy?
Orton had expected Never flamboyancy so he was shocked when his eyes finally adjusted to the gloom. “The Golem,” he uttered, daring not to blink. Fear rooted him to the spot.
The Golem was moulded by inept hands and as such was a shapeless bulk, lopsided and paint peeled. His large head was chipped all over and was a thing of mesmerizing ugliness.
Tiny eyes were pressed deep inside the fat head, black like buttons, unblinking and unemotional and crude features had been moulded into the clay giving him a fat nose and a large rounded chin shaped like a man’s elbow. This was no official from Never. This wasn’t even human. Those creatures from the south had crafted it and set it loose to make chaos now that the King was dead. What's more this Golem had possibly killed the King for the circumstance of his death was still a mystery. Orton was wary. Petrified and wary. Mainly petrified.
Movement from the top of the stairs and Orton immediately looked up. A hat, tall and black and with a rim of jagged bone, was making its way down step by creaking step. Damn Orton’s eyes if he wasn’t seeing something inherently evil. The hat was taking a step at a time and the Sheriff, sensing the malice emanating from the thing, backed away from the stairs. He didn't want the evil entity to touch him, to even get close.
“You’re the Tracker, the Golem.” He pointed accusingly at the stranger. When there came no reply Orton turned to Birkin for confirmation. The landlord was as pale as death, his eyes wide and unblinking. The hat was almost ground level and the landlord squealed audibly lest the thing come too close to him. Orton tried to flatten himself further against the wall, tried to give the hat as much space as he could, to make himself inconspicuous. It had a personality all of its own and, was it his imagination, or had the thing sneered as it passed him?
This Tracker was The Golem of the South. It hailed from the infamous land of Kakkakin and many called it Hunger for its appetite for death was insatiable. It took people, ordinary folk like the Sheriff and the landlord, and ripped their souls out, turned their cadavers into lumbering monsters that did its murderous bidding. It, just like the rulers of Kakkakin themselves, made the Turned. The monsters of the world.
Golem wasn’t of flesh but of painted clay and stone and inside he was hollow save for the souls he greedily hoarded. These souls gave him weight, rather as blood and guts and organs would to a living thing, and the more he reaped the heavier he became. As diabolical and omnipotent as the Golem was he was still only a weapon of some greater unseen power, the tool of a malevolent people far to the south. How the Tracker came to wander the wide world was a mystery, but what put him there in the first place was a greater one still. Or rather what mad magic could have conceived him was.
Kakkakin was a place of mystery, dark arts and death. Its rulers meddled in the affairs of other states, terrorised neighbouring lands with their monstrous emissaries. But they themselves remained faceless, unknown. Fear held them unchecked and unchallenged. They were lawless.
“Well?” said the Golem and something must have passed between him and his hat. Some telepathy or other means of silent negotiating for it seemed as if the Tracker was learning about the rooms upstairs, about the places the hat had been to, what it had ‘seen’. “No body,” he concluded and beckoned the hat hither by tapping his thigh twice. It clanged metallically, the way ceramic sounds when struck.
Hat sidled over to him, bunched up then stiffened.
“Hat wants to know if Flendin the Blade was here?” asked Hunger turning his head first to the Sheriff and then to the quivering landlord. There was something desperately unnerving about the Golem’s mouth not moving when it spoke. The black eyes moved this way and that, but never the mouth.
“No,” Birkin shook his head emphatically. “No one of that name has been here. We had a Mr Reaven and a Lord Fungingam from White Stables but no one else. It’s getting close to winter. We don’t get many visitors in the winter. Hell, we don’t get many in the summer.”
“Bush is just a farming community and of no import,” Sheriff Orton fumbled clumsily. He was babbling. Nerves made him babble. Damn pig farms and rundown taverns; he should never have left his warm bed this morning. This devil, Hunger, had stopped walking the earth years ago, hadn't he? But damn his eyes if he wasn’t seeing magic and the worst kind too, the black kind. What made him feel even worse was that the common folk had been right and he had dismissed them. They said the devil was in Bush and he hadn’t believed them. They had been right, the faecal smelling paupers.
Hunger turned to face him and the hat creased in the middle like it was sneering. Orton must have said or done something wrong, something to incite the devil. Perhaps the Golem had read his mind the way an omnipotent power could, and sensed all the fear, the loathing and the dread he felt. Perceived all the animosity and anger he would direct at the Golem if only he had the courage.
Something had to give and just when Orton couldn’t take the silence and the stare any longer it did; Birkin startle to babble. Fear had worn his defences down. “I thought it was odd, them leaving at such a strange hour. You know, in the middle of the night. So I went up to their room. They’d made a poor job of cleaning the blood up. Everything’s ruined mind, the covers, mattress, got it everywhere they had. The fact there was no body didn’t even cross me mind at the time. I sent for Poddy.”
Hunger and the hat turned as one to face Birkin. “Poddy?” the mouth asked without moving.
“Yeah, Poddy. Me boy Poddy. I told him to take as any horse left in the stable and ride over to Hammers. Get the Sheriff over here quick like.”
“That’s me,” Orton added awkwardly. Nerves really had got the better of him.
––––––––
It was pointless lingering and Hunger started for the door. The inn juddered in reaction to his weighty steps. Tables shook, cracks split open along the walls and the floor bowed threateningly.
Hat was over half as tall as Hunger and together, one on top of the other, they would never have fitted inside the building. Once outside it crawled up the back of the Golem to settle upon his head. As the Golem moved Hat teetered precariously, suggesting it might fall, but it never did. Eventually it squatted down and regardless of how exaggerated Hunger’s movements then became or how forcibly he stomped it remained rigid and unflinching like it had anchored down.
So, he had killed the woman Turned, Black Carnal. That was her blood staining the room red upstairs. Out of six Turned Hunger had sent against him he had killed four of them. Of the remaining two, one would never walk again and the other had just disappeared. Hunger knew this wasn’t the work of a simple thief. There was more to this Flendin the Blade than he had first thought. It mattered little. Hunger had more Turned, many more.
The thick mud outside slowed him down, but The Golem of the South was as inexorable as time and nothing and no one could evade him forever.
––––––––
I thought Smidgen’s horse looked drunk. Its gait was unsteady and there was real effort in its stride, but then Smidgen was a big man and must weigh three, four, five times more than me, maybe more.
“She deserves a big bag of carrots as reward for lugging you around,” I said as way of making conversation.
Both Smidgen and Bent ignored me.
“Aw, you still not talking to me?” I needled. Still no response from either of them.
I thought I understood Smidgen though every so often he threw me, surprised me.
He could be moody and especially after eating something big that blew him up like a ball or a bladder. But food wasn’t what caused his spat with me.
We had had a small falling out and it centred on a bag I’d carried all the way from Never. Smidgen wanted to be trusted and to be told of its contents but I wasn't ready to tell yet. I hadn’t known him long enough to impart all my secrets and it was hard to just open up like that and expose yourself when you lived a life of corrupt subterfuge. Instinctively my lips were sealed and, much to my companions ire, I couldn't foresee them opening any time soon.
He rode ahead of me, abreast with Bent. He was obviously still stewing though Bent would be no confidant and he would be better off getting conspiratorial with a lump of wood than with our dark cloud.
Let him sulk. I wished he understood that I did trust him, well sort of, but I couldn't reveal too much of myself. It was too soon. It just didn't feel right to forgo all my secrets to a man I’d only known for three weeks.
Regardless of how friendly he was I still hadn't known him long and I had to remind myself time and again to err on cautions side. The agents of the Golem, the Turned, could be cunning. They could appear unremarkable, like that woman I killed in Bush and, just like with her, they could pretend to like me just to get at my bag.
What I had in the bag was, well, it was complicated. At some perspicuous moment I would demonstrate my faith and give him it to look after. He had helped me out many times before and not just in Bush and one good deed deserved another, didn't it? Besides, I liked him. Once you got past the terrifying ugliness of the man his was an easy character to get on with.
In truth I was more wary of my other companion, Bent. Where Smidgen was an emotive being Bent was the exact opposite to that and it was hard to understand where I stood with him relationship wise. Smidgen I felt needed to belong, to be accepted, was dependent on me being there for him whereas Bent was just bad.
So much so I could almost smell it on him.
Bent didn’t need anyone. Not even the mother that had, long ago, brought him screaming into the world.
I thought I should call them back for they were getting ahead of me and we were supposed to be looking out for one another but I let them be.
We were on our way to Claw. Why? I didn't know.
Today Bent was calling the shots but I was watching him. Typical of me to be suspicious but a thief wouldn’t live long if he wasn't just so. I geed my nag up, keeping them both in sight.