The harpy swooped down and perched on the branch of a large oak tree, untouched by the flames. The buildings surrounding the oak tree had been spared the fires, and it was the one on my left where I’d seen the movement.

  Anger crackled through my core when I saw a drunken soldier stumble out of the building, rubbing his eyes as if he’d just woken up. Through the doorway, I could just make out an old man, skewered on the end of a sword. I didn’t want to think about who else the soldier might have killed or defiled elsewhere in the house.

  “Fellas?” he mumbled, looking around him in confusion. “Hey, where the hells is everyone?”

  Before he could say another word, I sent my harpy after him. The soldier was oblivious as the massive beast crashed into him and brought him to the ground. For extra measure, the harpy drove its talons into his shoulders, pinning him down.

  “Fuck,” he whispered, his drunkenness fading before terror. Eyes wide, he blubbered a prayer to the Lord of Light, and I couldn’t help but grimace.

  Even the God of the Chaste wouldn’t hear him now.

  But I couldn’t kill him yet. I wanted to question him.

  I attempted to speak through my harpy’s mouth, but the words were a garbled mess. They must have sounded terrifying because the soldier pissed himself after hearing them.

  I disengaged my senses from the harpy’s and ordered it to wait there but to keep the soldier alive.

  Back at the wagon, in control of my own body, I stuck my fingers in my mouth and whistled.

  “Fang, get over here!”

  As Fang came bounding over to me, rumbling the ground beneath him, Rami and Elyse looked at me with quizzical expressions on their pretty faces.

  “I’m going to take a quick trip to the village. Alone.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  I didn’t want Rami and Elyse to see the mutilated bodies of the women and children. Sure, they were both warriors and had seen their fair share of battle and death, but even so, the sight of slaughtered children was something that turned even my stomach.

  “Nobody’s alive,” I said. “Except for one man: a soldier who got left behind. I’m going to question him, then give him a little taste of some good ol’ justice. Fang will travel faster with only me on his back, and we’ll be back here within the hour.”

  Before either of them could raise any more objections, I jumped onto Fang’s shoulders, kicked my heels into his flanks, and commanded him to run at full speed. He took off at an eager sprint, bounding through the fields as he made a beeline for the distant village.

  As we sped through the forest, a deep pit grew in my belly. It was like the tingling of my sixth sense, but far stronger and far more persistent. It also seemed to increase in intensity as we grew closer to the village. It was like a loadstone’s powerful magnetism drawing me closer, a force that made my nerves tingle and my skin prickle.

  When we reached the village and started seeing the corpses, I felt it even more powerfully. I went to the unburned oak tree and found where my harpy was pinning the drunken soldier.

  He had passed out beneath her. I stroked her scaly neck, and she purred, a sound halfway between a strangled cat and broiling acid. I dismounted Fang and walked over to the unconscious man.

  I delivered a kick to his stomach, and he awoke with a start. He cried out as my harpy’s talons tore through his flesh, but he remained pinned.

  “You,” he whispered, eyes wide. “You command the beast?”

  “I command more than the harpy.” I gestured behind me at Fang.

  When he noticed the zombie-lizard, he let out a girlish shriek.

  “What the fuck is that thing?” the soldier said, his limbs flailing with panic. He yelped, his erratic movements only making the harpy’s talons carve more of his flesh.

  I pulled out Grave Oath and spun it slowly in my right hand. “Your soul probably isn’t worth much, but Fang is hungry.”

  “D-don’t let that thing eat me, please!”

  Fang rumbled out a menacing growl and leaned in closer, his huge jaws mere inches from the man’s face. His long lizard’s tongue flicked out of his mouth and darted across the man’s face. The soldier whimpered and shook.

  “If you hadn’t already emptied your bladder when my harpy attacked you,” I said, “I bet you’d be pissing yourself right now. Tell me, big man, how good of a fighter are you?”

  “I’m… I’m decent enough with my sword.”

  “I bet it’s a real challenge to fight unarmed old men? Women and children, too, huh?” I motioned for my harpy to release him, and she did as commanded. Her talons were certainly effective. Perhaps her name could be. . . Talon?

  Fang and Talon sounded like excellent names, and they fit nicely together. For now, however, I had a duel to complete.

  “Get your sword,” I said as I waved my hand at the soldier.

  The soldier started to sprint in the opposite direction of the house where he’d left his sword, but Fang jumped in his way.

  “No detours,” I said. “Get your sword. Now.”

  The soldier gulped before he plodded toward the house. He tugged the sword out from the old man’s corpse and trudged back to me.

  “Good. Now you’re going to fight me.”

  “Who. . . who are you?”

  “Justice. Although I go by other names too. The God of Death. Soultaker. You may have heard of me.”

  He gasped. “You’re… Soultaker?”

  “The one and only. Now, I figure you can earn your life. I don’t want folks thinking I’m not a merciful god. Before we have our little duel, though, I have some questions. First, where’s the rest of Rollar’s army, and, more importantly, where’s the prick himself?”

  “I-I don’t know,” the soldier muttered.

  “Fang, let’s see if we can jog this bastard’s foggy memory.”

  Fang lunged forward and bit down on one of the soldier’s arms. The man’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets, and he let out a piercing howl of agony. Fang growled and bit down harder, ripping the man’s arm off completely. As Fang chewed on the disembodied arm, the soldier screamed and writhed, with blood spurting from the ragged stump jutting from his shoulder–all that was left of his arm.

  “Oops,” I said. “I seemed to have totally forgot about the duel. I don’t suppose it’ll be easy to fight for your life with only one arm. But it’d be impossible to fight without the other one. So, why don’t you answer me?”

  “He’s. . . he’s probably reached Kroth by now,” the soldier gasped.

  “Kroth? Why’s he going there?”

  “A crypt. Temple ruins. The Tree God. He thinks there are relics there. He’s got a map.”

  “What’s on the map?”

  “Locations of lost and forgotten temples all across Prand. He’s trying to find them all.”

  I’d followed Rollar all across the continent before meeting Isu, but I never knew he actually possessed a map like this.

  “If you have a quarrel with Rollar, then you should go to Kroth. But I have nothing to do with him. Me and the others deserted Rollar’s army a week ago.” His eyes started to roll to the back of his skull, and I figured he wasn’t far from passing out from blood loss.

  “So, you and your buddies are deserters as well as cowards and bullies then. I can’t say I’m surprised.” I slapped him across the face so that he wouldn’t drop unconscious without answering my second question. “Where’s Rollar planning to go after Kroth?”

  “I really don’t know!” he whimpered. “He didn’t say. He was c-convinced he’d find what he was looking for there.”

  The scumbag was telling the truth; he had no reason to lie. It sounded as if he resented Rollar, and he would have no reason to want to protect him.

  “Well, I guess we’re done here,” I said.

  “So, y-you’re not going to let that thing eat me?” he asked with pleading in his eyes. “Do I still get to fight for my life?”

  “Sure.” I motioned for him to attack.

  Despite missing an arm and losing a lot of blood, he came at me with a deafening battle cry. I sidestepped his attack before slashing Grave Oath across his stomach. I watched with cool detachment as he dropped to the ground and clutched his stomach. He writhed and screamed while his body withered and his soul entered my dagger.

  The village burned around me, and I saw no evidence of any survivors. I could have spent hours scouring each home for anyone who was still alive, but I knew how ruthless Rollar’s men were. There wouldn’t be a single soul remaining here.

  As I walked toward Fang, I heard the clip-clopping of hooves. I pulled out my kusarigama and prepared to deal swiftly and brutally with whoever it was, but I lowered the weapon when I saw the rider trot around from behind a burning barn.

  “Isu, what are you doing here?”

  “Curiosity, maybe,” she answered with an unsettling smile. “Or perhaps I was drawn by the intensity of death here. I sensed it. I may not be a god, but I am still a necromancer.”

  “I sensed it, too,” I said. “When I came here, it felt like a kind of sixth sense.”

  “You are the God of Death, Vance. Does it surprise you that you can sense the presence of death when surrounded by it? That you are drawn to it, like iron filings to a loadstone?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Being a deity is so much more complex than you can even begin to understand. You have hardly begun to scratch the surface, Vance. A long journey lies ahead of you.”

  “I’ve never been afraid of hard work.”

  “And the work is very hard. In a way, I’m almost relieved that you took my divinity from me. It had started to become a burden instead of a blessing, truth be told.”

  I wasn’t sure how much of that I believed. She harbored no small degree of resentment for taking her divinity. Was she trying to deflect my attention away from that fact?

  On the other hand, maybe she had wanted me to take it all along. Why else would she have dropped so many hints?

  Either way, I wasn’t about to trust her completely just yet.

  “I’m beginning to wrap my head around that, yes.” I stared for a while at the corpses strewn across the village streets.

  “Corpses for your army,” Isu said, noticing where I was looking.

  The thought of a zombie child serving me was simply too twisted to imagine, even for me.

  Isu studied my face closely, her beguiling eyes keenly searching… for what? Weakness? A chink in my ethical armor? She would find neither, and she knew it.

  “No,” I said firmly. “There’s no way I’d raise the bodies of innocent dead like this. Enemy soldiers are one thing, but women and children… no. There are some lines that I’m not prepared to cross.”

  “Even if it would bring you great power and propel you from the rank of minor deity to major god?”

  I let the thought simmer for a bit. Still, I had my morals, and they would guide me. I wasn’t beyond changing them if needed, but it wasn’t necessary just yet.

  I hopped onto Fang’s shoulders, kicked my heels into his flanks, and took off without another word to Isu. I could feel those pupil-less eyes of hers burning into the back of my head, but I didn’t care. And, sure enough, I heard her spur her horse into a gallop behind me.

  When we returned to the others, they were eager to question me about what I’d seen in the village. I spared them the depressing details about the dead women and children but told them about the information I’d extracted from the soldier.

  “The ruins of Kroth, eh?” Grast said. “An ancient fortress stood there many centuries ago. It was supposed to be a thriving town, aye, a center of learning and commerce. Something destroyed it completely, though. Some say a dragon, others say a mysterious army of phantoms. Either way, there’s nothing there but ruins now. Hasn’t been anything but a ruin for at least a hundred years. Most of it’s been swallowed up by the forest around it.”

  “I’ve heard stories about it,” I said. “But that’s all they were, stories, vague mumblings and mutterings of curses and dragons and dark magic. And, of course, the mysterious disappearance of everyone who lived there. No bodies were ever found, right?”

  Grast shook his head, frowning. “No, Soultaker, that’s the one thing all the stories have in common: the townsfolk of Kroth simply vanished without a trace. Bloody uncanny is what it is, aye. Me, I wouldn’t go within 20 miles of the place. No, thank you!”

  I turned to Cranton, who was staring blankly off into the distance. “You’re the historian. What do you know about Kroth?”

  He continued to simply stare at nothing, as if he was in a trance. I snapped my fingers in front of his face.

  “Hey, Cranton! Wake up! Get back to the present!”

  He jumped and looked as if he was caught in the grip of extreme terror. Finally, though, the usual goofy expression returned to his face.

  “Man,” he said, “have you ever thought about, like whether a dog knows it’s a dog, and if it thinks the same thing about us? Does a dog wonder if a man knows he’s a man, and—”

  “Cranton,” I said with a sigh, “did you smoke any greenfoil while I was gone?”

  “No, Vance, no!” he answered earnestly. “I promise. I just… I just think about peculiar stuff sometimes.”

  “What can you tell me about Kroth? Specifically, whose temple was there?”

  “Ah, Kroth, interesting place, man. Lots of mystery.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “The temple was consecrated to the Tree God, with most of the town’s economy being based on logging and wood and such. The temple of the Tree God was really elaborate, with a labyrinth underground, the most complex in all of Prand. You could wander around it for days and get hopelessly lost. You’d starve to death, or go mad, whichever came first.”

  “What’s the point of the labyrinth?” Elyse asked. “There must be something to be had at the end.”

  “Too right,” Cranton replied. “Relics of great power. But nobody ever found them, so everyone simply thought they didn’t exist. Now, the temple is just an abandoned ruin in the middle of the forest. And, uh, obviously, with the disappearance of the entire population, most people give the place a wide berth anyway.”

  “If Rollar’s there, then he’s hunting for relics. They could be pretty damn useful to me. Not to mention that map he supposedly has.”

  “Do you want to make that much of a detour?” Rami asked. I knew how eager she was to get to Brakith in the hope of finding more of Xayon’s relics, and perhaps the goddess’ entire body. “It seems like a long way out of your way.”

  I wanted to help her, of course, and I also wanted to kick my uncle’s ass, but this was important. I’d be doing the good people of Prand a service since his scumbag troops were pillaging and raiding wherever they went. And if they learned the God of Death had saved them, I’d gain a good number of new devotees. With so much to gain from pulverizing Rollar and his army, I could afford to delay my visit home by a few days.

  “Considering what I’ll achieve by making this detour,” I answered, “yes, I am willing to take a few days to do this. If I can kick Rollar’s ass and take that map from him, it could open up a whole bunch of doors for me. And who knows what sort of awesome shit we might find in the temple there.”

  Rami sighed, but nodded, her jaw set. “It’s in my interest for you to grow in power.”

  “There are other benefits, too,” Elyse said. “Rollar’s army needs to be stopped.”

  I smiled. “And smashing his army will give me more troops and more power.”

  “Facing an entire army?” Isu asked. “Isn’t that a little bold?”

  “Perhaps. But great risks come with even greater rewards.” I turned to Grast, a sore feeling in my stomach. “You won’t be able to come with us, though.”

  “I assumed as much,” he said. “A bloody pity, but there’s no way this wagon would get you to Kroth. Not through a forest with no roads.” His red-blotted face became a frown, and even his eyes were downcast and his ears dropping.

  He loved seeing me and my undead troops in action, but at the same time, he was no fighter.

  “Er, if you think that’s best, Soultaker,” he said slowly. I think he was relieved that he was being sent home, even though he would miss us.

  “There is one more thing you can do for me.”

  “Anything, Soultaker. You just name it, and I’ll do my bloody best to do it.”

  “Spread the word about me. Tell everyone you meet that there’s a new god in Prand. A god who wields enormous power, a god who steals the souls of evildoers, who metes out justice wherever he treads. The God of Death.”

  “Aye! I can do that, for sure!” Grast’s face split into an ear-to-ear grin. “Every tavern from here to Erst and beyond will be hearing of your exploits. Aye, you can be sure of that. And I’m a bloody marvelous storyteller, I am.”

  “Excellent.”

  Another idea came to me.

  I’d need more than simple cairns by the roadside if I really wanted to establish myself and develop a reputation. I needed missionaries, priests, temples… all the essentials of a burgeoning religion.

  And I had a great idea of who my first missionary could be. Perhaps, if he proved himself worthy of it, I could even make him a priest. Then, if he did well at that, a bishop. That’d be something… a Bishop of Death. I liked the sound of that.

  Chapter Six

  My initial consideration for my first Fated was Grast. He was enthusiastic and more than willing to do anything I asked him. Except he had family and friends in Erst, and they could be problematic. Clergy from other religions were often celibate because it meant they could be unreservedly committed to their vocations. Grast might say he was dedicated, but there would always be a sliver of doubt, no matter the oath he took.

  My thoughts then turned to Cranton. He had a wife and children, but I gave it a few months—perhaps days—before they abandoned him. He was also a greenfoil addict, and I could use that to my advantage. That same addictive tendency would do wonders for furthering my religion—and, thus, my power—if it was in service to me.

 

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