Chương 16: Run Boy Run

Voices called to him on the wind. Snatches of conversation that made no sense. Giggles and laughs from people he had once lived with, shouts and jeers from those he had once loved. The hills were infested with witches, and they were inside his head. Asgar ducked beneath a shelf of rock and squatted on his haunches. He'd have to move soon, but he needed a moment to breathe. The running was easy enough.

Repetitive, back-breaking labour was nothing new to him and running in armour felt much the same as working the fields with hoe in hand. The whispers were new though. They tried to pull him off-course. To confuse and beguile. Flashes of memory corralled him from all sides, subtly twisted to give everything an unsettling feel. They wanted him to stop, to turn away, to head down one of the many goat-tracks into the ravines that littered these hills in search of a different path.

But Asgar had his purpose, and his purpose was through. He'd picked the tallest hill he could find in the right direction as soon as the whispers started, and that was his goal now. It might have been quicker to slip through the valleys, but that way lay madness. Too easy to get lost down there, even with his map. If they were already rattling around in his thought-cage, what could he trust his own mind with, really? The simpler the better, and there were few simpler tasks that climbing a big fuck-off hill.

He straightened, cinched his heavy bandoleer tight across his chest, and then set off running again. To distract himself from the voices, he held three thoughts in his mind: the big hill, the Golden Lance, and his companions back at the encampment. They were all that mattered, and all three required him to keep climbing.

Avarron approves of your slaughter. You have gained a level. Level 16 achieved. Blood ran down his arms in rivulets. Corpses lay scattered before him. The hill's summit was marked by a black stone plinth that drank in the morning sun. It felt weaker up here, somehow. Thinner. Shadows pooled in the depths of the valleys and the world around him was washed out and grey. Asgar let his breathing slow as the raking wind wicked the sweat from his brow. He'd not expected a fight up here, but it had found him nonetheless.

Another witch, though this one younger, without a cauldron nor ritual circle to her name. She may still have wielded terrible power, but he hadn't given her a chance to show it off. She'd spotted him from a hundred yards away as he'd climbed, breath sawing in and out of his lungs from the steep incline. Her manic cackle alerted him, but when she'd pointed one clawed finger his way and called lightning from the heavens, he'd wasted no time gawking.

He'd dived away, rolled to his feet, then thrown his spear with all the power his enhanced body could muster. Straight through her chest and out the back, it had gone. He'd spent more time looking for the damn thing amongst the rocks behind her than actually fighting with it. Didn't matter though, as when combined with his killing of the orc chieftain the day prior, Avarron was pleased enough with the slaughter to grant him his next level anyway. All's well that ends well.

Two goat-men lay dead beside her as he'd arrived atop the hill. He'd spent a few moments inspecting their corpses, and they looked to be more sick experiments. The stitching at their neck was amateurish, and the gaping cavity where their hearts should have been implied they'd been dead before the defiling of their bodies. Asgar could only hope anyway. Beyond the hill lay more of the peaks. In a seemingly endless march towards the horizon, hills rolled out in the grey half-light before him.

He had many miles left, and fewer hours in which to traverse them. He ran on.

Asgar's body was far beyond mortal by now. 16 levels in a squire class had reforged him into something stronger, more enduring, more perceptive and agile than any normal human. He could run faster than the quickest messenger, could lift loads heavier than the strongest old farmer and see farther than the canniest of hunters. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. But such changes were recent and he lacked the skills to make use of them properly.

He missed the scoring of hoof and horn on the rocks above as he jogged below the ridgeline. He missed the quiet sobbing and the smell of unwashed hide on the wind. When the body came hurtling his way, he certainly heard the scream, but he wasn't fast enough to avoid the impact, and while he was tough enough to avoid being knocked out when his head hit the rock behind him in the fall, he was still left groggy and confused.

He reeled to his feet, hand instinctively going to his belt to draw the hatched forth and raise it overhead. He stumbled toward the creature that had ambushed him, but rather than attempt to gore him, it scrabbled on the ground into an uneven sort of ball shape, and shrieked again. Asgar stopped in place and just looked at it, blinking away the stars from his vision and trying to make sense of the confused picture. It had the body of a goat, no denying that.

Dun-coloured bristly fur, four clopping ungulate hooves, stubby little tale. Regular goat. But its head… Asgar stared in shock and horror. He'd encountered a few more of the goatmen—ghastly creatures created by the vile magik of the witches in these hills, they had the bodies of human men with goat heads sewn atop their necks in mockery of the natural order. This creature before him then was a… mangoat? Its body was that of a large ram, but its head was all-too-human.

Stitched atop the horizontal neck, the face was disconcerting in its normalcy. The thing was crying, its face screwed tight in agony and grief, tears trickling down its human cheeks from its human eyes to drip off its human chin.

"What are you?" Asgar breathed, not expecting an answer but needing to verbalise his horror.

"An abomination!" the creature sobbed. That more than anything made Asgar recoil. To defile corpses was one thing—the witches would die for that alone if he encountered them—but to curse a human mind to exist in such a vessel? The goatmen had been simple soldiers, seemingly no smarter than your average goat, which was, in Asgar's opinion, not very smart at all. To be able to speak though? Fresh horror surged through him.

"Hold still," he growled.

"I'll end your suffering."

"What do you think I was trying to do?" the mangoat wailed. Asgar looked to the ridge above where the goat had leapt his way, then down at the hillside disappearing beyond the path. He could see how, before he'd come hurtling around the corner, the drop may have looked steep enough to kill oneself if they made it over the path and down into the open air above the valley. Stubby legs though. Goats were great at climbing, but they weren't built to leap like deer. Seems this one had overestimated his abilities.

"Brave of you," Asgar commented.

"What's your name? Seems only fair that I carry your story with me if I'm to be the one that ends it."

"I am—I was —called Gendry." Gendry the goat? Asgar bit back the sarcastic response and kept listening.

"I lived in a village to the west. Brooksmeet. No idea how I came here, it's at least a hundred miles to these hills. You hear stories, you know, and we always cut to the north to avoid the hills when we travelled for the annual drover's market. Cattle drovers, we were, you see, and no chimera, neither. Just regular steer for us. Me and the wife took over from her father two decades ago, never had no help from nobody.

'Course, when we had little Rosie, things changed, but…" he stopped, staring morosely off into the distance.

"I had a wife, a child. I…If you can send word to them, I'll be forever grateful." Asgar tried his best to not be affected by the tale.

"I'm with the Golden Lance's 2 nd regiment. There will be someone that can send word, and I promise to let them know." The goat— Gendry, Asgar forcefully reminded himself—sniffed and leaned his neck out.

"My thanks then. Make it quick."

"Always do," Asgar replied solemnly.

"And I swear to whoever's listening, I'll kill the fuckers that did this if I ever see them." Something inside Asgar shivered at the words and his soul burned that little bit brighter for just a moment. Then he was back on the hill, Gendry nodding gravely as he waited for the release of death. Asgar raised his hatchet high, but when he came to bring it down, the mangoat shouted, "wait!"

"You need a minute?" Asgar asked. Impatience gnawed at him. He didn't have time to give this man the dignity he so desperately wanted. Thousands of lives rested on him reaching the watchtower in time. As harrowing as this man's plight, it simply couldn't compete in scale.

"No. I can't do it, not like this. Leave me here." Asgar shook his head.

"Can't do that."

"Yes you can." Gendry's back leg pawed at the raw, open wound in his chest where a heart should have been. Something sickly green glowed within instead.

"I'll die anyway as soon as you kill the witch that did this. They're at the end of the ridge. Just… let me die with some dignity." Blowing a breath out through his cheeks, Asgar nodded.

"Fair's fair. How many are there?"

"Two. A few goatmen with them, all with weapons."

"Like you, or the reverse?"

"There are none like me," Gendry said bitterly.

"Some sort of sick fucking joke, I think." The horribly disfigured creature that had once been a man looked up at Asgar with pain and rage written clearly across his face.

"Kill them all."