ever tell you how I joined the Dark Queen’s army?”
I frowned, not knowing where this offer of history came from and not much wanting to hear it. “No, and-”
“Well, listen.”
I listened, but he said nothing, while all around us in the tavern the smoke hung and voices rose in shouts and dropped low in growls.
“Listen,” he said again, finally lifting up his eyes, those deep wells all full of ghosts. “I’ll tell you about a boy, skinny brat, living on his father’s farm, away up on the plains of Estwilde. He wasn’t nearly grown, that boy, and not a day older than he had to be to take what was handed him. . ”
The boy, said Griff to me on that windy, wild night in the Swan and Dagger, the boy stood at the well, winding the crank to pull up the bucket from the dark deeps. Water, in those days just before the Second Cataclysm, was scarce. Rain never fell anymore. The well stream, which had always run swift under the ground, had months before choked to a trickle. The boy became used to letting that bucket of his tumble far down and cranking it back up again, turn and turn, until his arms ached with the work.
As he stood cranking, the boy looked out across the brown and dying fields, at the crops burned to ruin, the dust swirling in the ever-blowing wind. He cocked his head, listening to the sounds of the farm, his mother murmuring to his sister, his baby brother cooing in the cradle under the shade of the roof, his father talking to someone behind the barn. He looked up high, the back of his neck prickling. It seemed to him that he heard thunder or felt it rumbling, but the sky was hard and empty.
Like some great beast waking, the ground beneath his feet shuddered faintly. Dark, a cloud rose, up over the hill, past which lay the town. The wind turned, and the thick smell of burning came to him.
“Fire!” the boy shouted, abandoning the well. “Ma! Da! Fire! Fire in the town!”
Halfway to the house, he saw his mother pointing toward the hill, her eyes wide, her mouth open. The boy stopped to look where his mother pointed. All the blood in him went cold. It was smoke, aye, rising over the hill, but there was more-a great cloud of golden dust roiled and rolled before the darkness of smoke.
“Gods preserve us!” his mother cried. “Paladine save us!”
The boy’s belly cramped with fear as that golden cloud became an army, dark and solid and gleaming in the sun. Swords and war axes shone, and the sunlight glinted like bright little spears from the black armor of a troop of Dark Knights riding at the head.
Knights of Takhisis!
The boy didn’t think that. Well, he hadn’t the wit for thinking, had he? Terror ran in him, sweeping away all thought. No matter, that. He knew who came riding. Who hadn’t heard tales of what those merciless Knights had done in Kalaman? Everyone knew how they’d swept south from there into Estwilde on a bloody tide of rapine and killing.
The dark troop moved fast, horses’ hooves chewing up the road. Their voices came like the sound of a river at flood. The Knights kept to their course, thinking the little farm unworthy of their notice. Some of the foot soldiers didn’t hold so true a line. Roaring, they plunged across the field between the road and the farmyard. The boy saw faces contorted with the blood-chilling rage of men who’d lately been at a killing and lusted for more. He bolted to the house for his mother, and he ran right into the arms of his father.
“Cellar!” his father shouted, his infant son in his arms. He thrust the boy into the house, herding his wife and weeping daughter before him. Down under the center room lay a root cellar, cool and dark, a place to hide and pray these rampagers would satisfy themselves with looting. “Hurry, boy! Hurry!”
They had the hatch up from the floor. The boy tumbled in, shoved by his father. The infant wailed. Outside pigs squealed, cows bawled, and the army’s thunder shook the little house to the walls. The boy reached up to take the shrieking infant. Reaching, he heard his father cry out. His sister’s horrified scream echoed in his bones. The hatch crashed down, hitting the boy in the head and plunging him into stilling darkness.
There he crouched, half-conscious and bleeding. Just like in your worst nightmare, he heard his mother wail, he heard his father plead for mercy-not for himself, but for his wife and children. He heard the weeping and the sobbing and then the sudden silences like gaping holes never to be mended, unhealing wounds. All the while he shoved his thin shoulders up against the hatch, furious, raging, and trying to get out.
What did he think he’d do if he got out? Well, well, he was a boy, you remember, and full of mind-clouding fury. He thought he’d kill them, every one of those raiders.
When all the silences had fallen above, when all the deaths were died, the boy’s cursing was the loudest thing in the world to hear. He fell still, heart racing, terrified and knowing his own silence came too late. The hatch opened, and a hand reached down and grabbed his arm, dragging him up into the day. Light glinted off a deeply embossed golden ring, bitterly bright and stabbing the boy’s eyes.
Ach! It was a slaughter-field the boy found up there, red-running with blood. Bodies lay around the floor of the front room, his fair sister’s, his father’s twisted and broken, his mother’s covered in blood. The infant lay dead upon her breast. Shivering, belly-sick and cramping, the boy vomited, falling to his knees, and got kicked hard for doing that. A big man-that one with the big hand and the booted foot-yanked him to his feet. Fire crackled outside, smoke curled all around inside the house. The big man pulled the boy close so they were eye to eye. He stank of blood and sweat and murder.
“Mine,” he growled in Common Speech. “Mine!” He dragged the boy outside, where Griff’s wrists were bound, then tied on a long lead to the saddle horn of a pale horse.
That simply did the boy become a slave. The big man mounted his horse and rode away at the head of his murdering mob. The boy followed-well, he had to, didn’t he? — and he went in stunned silence until, atop a rise, his master stopped to look for sign of the army he’d left and must catch up again. The man looked ahead, but the boy looked behind him and saw his home, the little farmhouse, the barns and outbuildings. They sat like ashes on the land, and in the sky ravens circled, lowering for a meal.
In that moment the boy screamed his rage for the deaths of his family. Thus flew his first, fledgling war cry.
“That’s how I joined the army of Takhisis,” Griff Rees told me, still leaning on his elbows, soaking up the spilled ale.
I said nothing, because I had nothing to say. I’ve been told sad tales and sorrowful in my time, and this was one, but I’ve never known it to help a man to hear me say, ah, the shame of it; oh, the pity.
I looked long at him through the haze of low-hanging smoke from Baird Taverner’s badly drafting hearth, thinking about how he’d joined the Dark Queen’s army with a war cry in his throat and his heart turning to stone.
He said to me, there in the Swan and Dagger, that he would like to have killed the big man who enslaved him, but though he plotted and planned, he had no chance.
“Instead, I survived, fighting with the army, becoming as strong and ruthless as any soldier.”
I poured out the last of the ale, sharing it between us, all the while thinking that the killing you do in war is hard work for a man, worse work for a boy. He did it, though, that skinny boy who saw his family die on the plains of Estwilde, for among the slave’s duties was the obligation to defend his master in battle. He did that war-work well, learning the art of killing in hopes he’d get to use it in a better cause, to kill the man who’d murdered his family. He was an apt student. Soon they began to name him Killer Griff. Maybe it was then he thought he’d lost his soul, killed it in the killing, all the while yearning to work a particular murder. His yearning was never sated. In time he and his master parted, swept away from each other by the terrible tide of war that overwhelmed the High Clerist’s Tower in those rending days at the end of the Summer of Chaos.
“Ash Guth was his name,” Griff said. “He must have changed it, after. I’ve searched hard and never heard so much as a word about him since the war ended. Not from that day till this have I seen sign of him.” He looked down at the table, then up at me. “Not outside of nightmare.”
There must have been a lot of those, I thought as he turned his dark eyes on me and I heard his ghosts howling. Ah, not the ghosts of all those he’d killed in his time. Never them. I knew it now, I saw it: These were his ghosts, his phantom kin peering out from his eyes.
“I’ve got him now,” Griff said, tracing death runes in the spilled ale. “Got him sweet and sure, and there’s no way I’ll lose him again.”
