Chapter 3



Yorth awoke to the sound of wood being chopped. He strained to lift up his head and look towards his window. He saw the soft gray sky and could tell that the sun hadn’t even come up yet. Why is father chopping so early? He groggily turned back over and buried his face in his pillow, trying to fall back asleep. As soon as he did, the sound came again. He tried to just ignore it and fall asleep. He would have to tell his father not to chop so early later.
Crash!
Yorth sat up in his bed suddenly to the sharp shattering of glass coming from what seemed to be the front door of his house. A moment later, he heard the door slamming open hardly and the tinkling of more glass as it hit the floor. Yorth’s blood ran cold, and he was absolutely paralyzed by fear. His breathing came sporadically, as if he was trying to stay as quiet as he possibly could. He heard the soft ka-lumping of heavy boots going down the hallway, right towards his room. Another door opened in the house, probably from his parent’s room he thought. He heard his father’s voice: “What are you doing in he-” There was the cracking sound of an impact, and a loud thud as something large hit the ground. Then there came a blood-curdling scream from his mother. Yorth squeezed his blankets in his hands until his knuckles were white and a cold sweat ran down his face. I have to do something, he thought.
His heart was racing so fast and hard that he could see it pounding through his shirt. His breathing was no longer periodic, and now it seemed that he couldn’t get enough air. He was breathing so deeply and quickly that he became dizzy and saw stars in shades of purple and white dancing before his eyes. He tried to calm himself down a little, and got out of his bed quickly, yet shakily. His mother was still screaming. It had seemed like several minutes had passed since he awoke to this new, nightmarish world, but it couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen seconds.
There was a shovel in the corner of his room that they had used to work the previous day. It seemed the only object that would be suitable for a weapon, so he hurriedly picked it up. He could feel the cold sweat from his hands soaking into the dry wood as he held it. He walked towards his bedroom door quickly, yet in fear of the horrors that may lie beyond. Just as he was reaching down to open the door, he heard another crushing impact, and his mother was silent. This shocked him for a moment, but then he was more determined to try to protect his family in any way that he could. Now feeling that he was ready for anything, he burst through the door.
As he entered the hallway, he saw two men. Both wore scraggily, black clothing and stiff leather jerkins. The one closest to Yorth was carrying a large spiked club and the other had a medium length sword in one hand and a small, dark colored buckler in the other. The one with the club had just come out of his parent’s room. He looked down toward the club, which was now stained with a dark shade of crimson. As he looked down further, he saw his father’s motionless feet coming out of the room into the hall and a large spot of blood that soaked the hallway rug right beside them.
By this point, the men had seen him, and were moving towards him.  He noticed that they had a blank, emotionless expression on their faces. At seeing the blood on the rug, Yorth screamed, “No!!” and lunged towards the man with the club, gripping the shovel tightly over his head. He moved very quickly such that the man didn’t expect it, and had no time to dodge the attack. Yorth brought down his shovel squarely into the man’s forehead. His head reeled backwards, and he slumped to the ground, unconscious. The shovel had left a large gash in the man’s cheek, which now bled profusely.  Yorth felt a sudden desire to see more of his blood. The other man began to come towards him, when his mother yelled “Run, boys, run!” This she did very weakly and it seemed that it took every bit of energy for her to do it. The man with the sword went into her room, and she became silent once more.
While the man was still in the room, Davin poked his head out of his bedroom door, white as a ghost. As soon as he saw him, Yorth yelled, “Go, Davin! Run!” With slight hesitation, Davin ran down the hallway and went through the door that had obviously been hacked open with the club. Yorth then thought again of the other man who was just coming out of his parent’s room. He thought of himself with his peasant’s shovel going against a warrior carrying a sword and shield. The idea seemed absolutely ludicrous. You can do nothing more to help here, he thought to himself. This was partly his rational side, and partly his gut-wrenching fear that was talking.  As the man came out of the room, stepping over Yorth’s fallen father, Yorth decided that he must leave. I’ll just get myself killed if I stay here, he thought. To try to distract the man for a moment, he threw the shovel hard towards the man and then ran back towards his room. The intruder blocked the shovel with his shield, and went in pursuit of Yorth.
Yorth thought that he must get out through his window, the only way that seemed possible. There was a ceramic jar on top of a large chest next to the door. He took the jar and hurled it through the window, which window shattered loudly, and he then heard the jar shatter as it hit the ground. He went to the now open window and scrambled through, oblivious to the shards of glass that remained in the window frame, cutting his hands and arms. Glancing back, he saw the intruder pull a small crossbow that he had tucked in the back of his shield. Yorth now moved more quickly through the window. When he was about half way out, he heard the snap of the bowstring and felt a sharp, jarring pain in his right leg, which was still inside the window. He yelled and fell out of the window, landing on his back. It was a drop of only a few feet, but it was still enough to knock the wind out of him.
He lay there a brief moment, trying to pull himself together. The cold morning dew that had collected on the ground was soaking through his clothes, chilling him. The last thing he wanted to do was to get up and run, but he knew he had no other choice. So, in burning pain and unable to breathe fully, he got up and began to run. With every step on his right leg, there was a stabbing pain that ran up all the way to his back.
As he ran, he saw scenes similar to what was happening in his own home throughout the village. Villagers were fleeing their homes. Darkly dressed men on horseback cut some down where they stood. Men on foot were breaking down the doors of houses and screams could be heard from the surprised villagers who awoke to these terrifying strangers intruding their homes. Some houses were on fire, and it looked like the attack had been going on for several minutes, at least. It had only been a minute or so since Yorth had been awakened and he wondered how he could have slept through any of it.
The only thought that was going through his head was that he had to get out of the village, and fast. He suddenly remembered a way to get through the village fence without having to go through the front gate. There was a beam that had been loose for a long time and his friends and he had used it when they were younger to leave the village whenever they wanted. It wasn’t far from his house, so he went as quickly as he could towards where it was. As he went, he no more noticed anything that was happening around him. His only thought was to get to the break in the fence and prayed that none of the intruders would notice him.
After what seemed like an eternity and a great expanse of distance, he finally came upon the place where he could get through the fence. He pushed it to one side and quickly went through. There was a grove of trees that was located very close to the fence. He scrambled towards it and went into the protective branches. There was a small hollow in the ground behind a couple of trees, and he quickly jumped into it, finally feeling somewhat safe. His leg was throbbing with pain, but it still felt good to be off of it. He looked down to where the pain was coming from, and saw a small wooden bolt that was stuck in the side of his thigh. A stream of warm blood was flowing down his leg and over his bare foot. He then noticed that despite all of his carefulness, he had sliced his hands on the shards of glass on the window frame. His palms and forearms were gashed open in several places, and sticky, drying blood encrusted his hands. Suddenly feeling the pain of it, he curled his hands carefully. As he sat there, trying to figure out, or believe, what had just happened he put his head against a tree and cried. The riotous sounds of the invading mob could still be heard, but he tried desperately to not listen to them. More than anything, he just wanted to wake up from this hellish nightmare that he had been thrown into.
For several hours, Yorth hardly moved or made sound of any kind. The only movements that he made were the uncontrollable shivering that he tried desperately to suppress, in fear of being detected. He lay there huddled with his arms around his knees, trembling. His clothes were more or less soaked through with ice cold water that had come from the moist ground beneath him or that had dripped from the trees above. He spent all this time trying to gather what had actually happened. Trying to make himself not believe it and at the same time knowing that he had to believe it. It had happened, he would tell himself, and nothing he would ever do or think was going to change that now. He also spent a great deal of time worrying about Luthia and her family. Maybe she had gotten away and found another hiding place, he hoped. He didn’t want to get up and find out that she was dead. He couldn’t handle that. Not now.
He wrestled with these facts in his mind for hours on end, with every minute seeming like an eternity. What good would it do for him to go and find out that his life had been torn apart? Several times he considered just staying there until the cold (or something worse) got to him. Why not? he would say to himself. My family’s dead, and I’m just going to get up and find out that Luthia’s dead also. However, as he thought about it more and more, he knew that that might not be true. He himself had seen his little brother Davin run out of the house. He could have gotten away. Couldn’t he?
After gathering the courage to go back for a while, Yorth stood up and started to walk back towards Shondale. As he put his weight onto his right leg, the cold, numbing pain from his wound that he had had for those hours suddenly regressed back into the stabbing, sharp pain that extended up his back. He winced dryly and almost fell back down, but he fell into the large tree beside him. He leaned against it for several moments, getting his bearings and telling himself he needed to be more careful. He then headed for Shondale again, half limping and half hopping on his good leg. He wondered how he had possibly gotten so far from the town without even remembering any pain. He could hear nothing coming from inside the village wall, and saw several pillars of thick, black smoke, which contrasted starkly against the pale blue of the morning sky.
He re-entered the village cautiously. He then stood there for a moment to take in what had happened to the town that was the only home that he had known all his life. Several houses were on fire, some still burning while others had been put out. Bewildered townspeople stood around with blank, ghastly expressions on their faces. Many were helping to pick up debris or put out fires. Others just stood there in utter disbelief.
Then he noticed the bodies. There was a cart being pulled by two people that was gathering up anyone that had been slain. Yorth had never seen a dead body in his entire life. It made him sick. His whole body shuddered at the thought of seeing the cart go by his own house. He turned in the other direction and started to cry.  He leaned against the village wall, wishing that he had never come back to the town. He kneeled on the ground and nursed his wounded hands as he cried, trying not to look back. Suddenly, he felt a hand on his shoulder. Startled, he turned his head to see who it was. It was Tarrim, an old, plump man who had been a good friend of Yorth’s father. “Everything will be alright, son,” he said and forced a kind smile. “Let’s go get you cleaned up.”
Tarrim helped Yorth up and helped him to walk. Yorth didn’t bother to ask where he was being taken and at this point he really didn’t care. Neither of them said anything as they walked. At this point, there wasn’t really much to be said. Yorth again got the feeling that this couldn’t possibly be real. Then they passed fairly close to Yorth’s home. He glanced up just quick enough to see a small spatter of blood on the inside of his parent’s bedroom window. He quickly looked down at the ground again and resumed his sobbing. They walked half way across the town, passing from the packed dirt roads he was most familiar with to the river stone-paved roads so characteristic of the areas where the wealthy merchants and landowners lived; Yorth never felt comfortable in this part of town, despite-or perhaps because of- the nicely paved streets, and enormous two-story houses with wood shingle roofs and a glass window in every room. They continued on to one of the larger homes near the center; the home of Hilmar Closson. He was-or had been- one of the wealthiest landowners in Shondale, member of the Town Counsel and Ambassador to the Highseat of Gaembril province.  The home had been ransacked, by the looks of it.  He did not see a member of the Closson family anywhere. The main doors were broken in and several windows also, and there was a fairly large gathering of people outside, all looking very worried.
“What’s going on here?” asked Yorth quietly. He wasn’t even sure if Tarrim had heard him.
“They’re gathering all of the injured here. Sure are a lot of ‘em. ‘Twas the reasonable thing to do I suppose, considering it’s the biggest home in Shondale. It’s a bloody horrible thing, though. All these hairy happenings, and the Clossons just up’n vanished. So have a lot of people. Bloody awful.” Tarrim had an angry yet stalwart appearance.
“What do you mean, they vanished?” Yorth said as they approached the front doors.
“I mean they were taken. During the attack. I don’t see how they could take so many folks so fast but they just-“ Tarrim trailed off just as they were entering the main doors. Yorth tried to just put it out of his mind for now.
Tarrim brought Yorth inside. As soon as they entered the doors, there were several people lying on blankets in the hallway. As he went further in and walked past some of the rooms, he saw that there were four or five people in every room. They were all being cared for by other townspeople. Intermittent screams of pain could be heard from the different rooms and the house stank from the blood. It reminded Yorth of going to the butcher’s shop.
Yorth was brought into a room at the end of the hallway. It was a fairly small bedroom where three wounded people were already being treated. One lay on the bed, and two on the floor. Tarrim sat Yorth down on a chair in the corner. The man on the bed was unconscious, with a blood-soaked cloth wrapped around his head. The two on the floor had arms and bodies wrapped, probably from sword slashes Yorth thought. Tarrim had left the room for a few moments and returned with a large bowl filled with water and some strips of cloth cut from some blankets or sheets. For a moment, Yorth had forgotten completely about his injuries and why he had been brought here. Tarrim carefully cleaned his wounds with the water and a rag. The arrow had to be extracted from his leg, and the wound had to be stitched together, which was very painful, but the cuts on his hands only needed to be cleaned and wrapped up.
“What exactly happened today, Tarrim?” Yorth asked. ‘It’s like a nightmare.’ He tried not to think of his family...or of Luthia.  Tarrim glanced up from Yorth’s arm and promptly looked back.
“I’m not really sure,” he said after hesitating a moment. “I don’t know if anybody really knows. It”s all just a blur in my head still. Ever since I awoke this morning it has seemed like a nightmare to me too.” Yorth thought he saw some tears forming in the man’s kind eyes. “The bloody devils came in through the window. I thought I could stop ‘em, but I- Why couldn’t I? And-Nella, my wife- Why her? I couldn’t even save my own wife…”
By now Tarrim was crying quietly, with tears dripping down his face and onto Yorth’s wrappings. This made Yorth start crying also, though he turned his head and tried to hide it. The next few minutes they were silent, while the wrapping was finished. Just as Tarrim was about to finish, Yorth implored, “Who could’ve done such a thing?”
Tarrim had regained most of his composure. “I..I don’t know. Seems inhuman, you know? Some think it was just a band of traveling bandits, but I say it’s the Gerrinoth.” The utterance of that word shocked Yorth. He had heard of the Gerrinoth, but only in stories. He always thought they were untrue, just created to scare children. He recalled the tales of brutality and horror that had been told to him by older boys when he was very young. He also recalled the nightmares they had given him.
As far as he could recall from the stories he remembered, the Gerrinoth was a race of monsters, or demons as some may have called them, twice as tall as a man and able to throw flame from their clawed hands. They were said to reside in the great mountains to the east, leaving only to wreak havoc on whomever they could.  As he had grown older, he had convinced himself that such creatures could never exist. He looked up to Tarrim. “But I thought that all those stories were just farce-weren’t they?”
Tarrim’s face became grave. He hesitated for a moment then said “Oh, they’re true, the whole bloody lot of ‘em. I saw ‘em once, too, when I was but a lad.’ Yorth felt chills run down his back as he heard this.  “I’ve never told nobody, though.  Guess I just pushed away those memories, hoping I would never have to think of it again.  Can’t really do that now, eh?” His head turned toward the ground with a look of embarrassment-or perhaps guilt; Yorth couldn’t say which. Tarrim quickly broke himself loose of it.  “Uh..anyway, I was a boy of nine or ten years, and me and my pap made a journey to Tlalund for to do some business. We had some friends near that city, and they let us lodge with them for the time we had to stay. They had a boy about my age, Myls ‘is name was, and him and me would go around the town while my pap was doing his business.  We were wandering around, playing, and ended up behind some of the shops near the outer wall.  We saw two men stumble out of a shed behind one of the homes; dressed in black like these folk were.  They had a strange, forlorn look in their eyes, couldn’t quite describe it to ya.”
“I noticed a similar look to the man I saw,” said Yorth, as another chill ran down his back. Tlalund was the capital city of all Larion. If this sort of thing could happen there, what hope did Shondale have? “But these were just men, not the monsters from the stories I’ve heard.”
  “No, they weren’t. But it’s gotta be connected somehow… You’ll see in the end.” Tarrim said, then paused for a moment and shook his head.  “Anyway, Myls and me hid there behind a bush, so as not to draw their attention.  They were carrying a, uh...bundle with ‘em, and it seemed that there was a person wrapped up in there.  That was enough to just scare the living breath right out of ya, but even stranger yet, was when they took the bundle and slipped it straight over the stone wall and ran off into the forest. We were scared out of our wits, but our curiosity got the best of us. We ran to the nearest gate and chased on after them. We followed their trail for a while, and coming over a hill we saw them down in a dry river bed. There we saw them speaking some uh, someone, or something…” He hesitated to go on, but saw the intense interest in Yorth’s eyes. “Sorry,” he continued, “never told anyone this before.  It was tall as a draw horse, but covered in long robes so I couldn’t see anything of its skin or face or anything. The men passed the bundle they carried to the tall one, and they all just parted ways. The strangest thing I ever saw in all my days. As you can understand, we were too scared to move or do anything, and just hid in the trees for nigh on an hour before turning back for the city.  Come to find out the next day that a certain wealthy townsman came up missing and the Larion Guard went about asking all sorts of questions to people. We felt that we should tell, but we were so afraid that those men might have seen us and somehow known who we were.  It seems silly now-we should’ve said something-but we were just boys.”
Tarrim looked at the ground and lightly shook his head again with regret. Yorth was in utter disbelief of what he had been just told-that these demons of the mountains may actually exist. He couldn’t see what they might have to do with this, but something wicked had to be behind all this. The thought chilled him to the bone. Tarrim said nothing more, and Yorth did not see it fit to ask him any further into his experience, although he desired to know more; to know about whom it was that had just come and taken his life away from him; to know why they had done such a horrible thing.  He didn’t think that having that knowledge would bring any solace to his heart, in fact it may simply invite further grief and anger, yet for some odd reason he still felt the desire tugging at his soul.  Yet looking up into the older man’s face, Yorth could see that Tarrim most likely did not know anything more than he had said.  
Just then a portly, stern-faced woman in a drab peasants dress and a long apron strolled into the room.  There was no need for introduction, for everyone knew that this was Allaneh Mriln, the town Herbsmistress.  She was the one who took charge of the care of ailments, injuries, childbirths and all things medicinal.  It was customary for a town of any respectable size to have an Herbsmistress such as Allaneh who, as the title implied, was very knowledgeable of the use of plants, herbs, and alchemy for just such things.  Luthia had been studying with her for a time, and was very interested in the working of herbs.  The thought of her again filled Yorth with worry.  I can’t stay here any longer, I must go find her, he thought. Not saying a word, she scanned over Yorth to assess his condition, then started fumbling through small vials and pouches in her rough cloth side bag.
She suddenly spoke to Tarrim, the pretentious air that surrounded her becoming all too apparent.  “Make the boy a poultice with these jehbona leaves, press it on the wound along with some spiders’ webs. Fresh ones. And make him a hot tea with the extra leaves as well. That should stop the rot from taking hold.” From the bag she handed him several slender, deep green dried leaves as long as the man’s forearm. Without another word she turned and walked straight to the next injured person, not leaving enough time even for the “thank you” that Tarrim tried to squeeze out. He followed the stiff woman’s instructions with exactness, though he hardly needed them. Something so plain as treating a wound didn’t require the training of an Herbsmistress. He needed her jehbona leaf more than her brazen suggestions.
As Tarrim was finishing up dressing the wound, Yorth peered through a window high in the room, seeing that the sun was now nearly directly overhead. He doubted his own eyes for a moment. Surely in could not only be noon. It seemed like an entire day had passed since those ghastly events that morning. Just thinking of all the things that had happened to him and the ones he loved filled the young man with rage and confusion. How could one’s life be changed so terribly in so short a time? Why had this happened, and what could be done to rectify it? Surely there had to be some way.