Westhaven by Rowan Erlking (ebook audio reader .txt) 📖

The huge Cordril blinked. So did the others, each of them looking equally shocked.

“Wait a second, how does he—?” The fifth Cordril in the group stepped forward, reaching out to Key. But an archer let go of his arrow and shot him.

The Cordril fell back as his comrade caught him, the arrow sticking out of his upper chest.

The other Cordrils whipped out their swords and struck back. One shoved Key to the side, or tried to. As the Herra men met the demons with their weapons, Key found himself face-to-face and sword-to-sword with the huge Cordril that had been standing in front of him. The young boys that had been working on the arrowheads scrambled to get out of the clearing. The older ones rushed up to jump into the fight, though in reality there was no place for them in the battle as the men were fighting blade to blade with the demons as the archers pulled back, waiting to shoot.

Sword clashing against sword, the proof of their strength became clear. The quick-swords broke against the finer Kitai blades, rendering most of the wielders on the human side defenseless. Only those that held Key’s swords stood firm against the Cordrils’ blades, even cracking them.

Unfortunately Key was a better sword maker than a swordsman, especially against the demon he faced. Key lost his blade in the middle of the fray, knocked from his hand. The demon grasped Key by the neck, holding his blade to the boy to run him through.

“No! Not Key! Not the boy!” shouted the smithy.

“Then stop!” shouted back the demon that had already made Key weak from his touch. The boy was already hanging limp in his grip.

The Herra men with their swords backed off, though the archers got ready.

The boys backed up also. Rainold and Weston stared at Key whose head lolled to the side. His arms drooped.  Tiler and Polen looked likely to jump in to kill the demon anyway. Berd had run off somewhere. The huge white demon himself blinked, glancing at Key. Then he tightened his grip, looking to his comrades.

“He’s valuable,” that Cordril said, nodding to his partners. “Educated…Swordsmith…huh! Get this, fellas, the swords that withstood ours are his work.”

“No way,” the leaner faced pal said, wiping the blood off the side of his face.

“Maybe we should just take him,” the fifth of their group said.

Key gasped, weakly struggling. “Even if you take me, absorb me, demon, you’ll never be able to make my family’s swords.”

“I disagree,” the white demon holding him said.

But the Cordril leader shook his head, limping over to the one with Key. “No, stupid. Muscle memory is different. We’d just be killing the golden goose.”

“Besides, we came here to speak with their leader,” the third of their original trio said.

“I’m here.”

Everyone looked up the hill. The camp leader peered down with the dark glare he reserved for those that really annoyed him. Berd stood up the hill nearby, panting.

“Now let the boy go.”

The brawny Cordril lowered Key down, dragging the boy with him. “I don’t think so. We need a guarantee that you’ll listen to us.”

The camp chief met the Cordril’s glare, his mouth spread into a thin line. “Say your piece and be quick about it.”

Sighing, the lean faced leader who was at the brawny Cordril’s right gave a bow and said, “Under the circumstances, normally we would be minding our own business and letting you mind yours. However, we have learned that to get among the…Sky Children, we need human help.”

“Why?” the camp leader asked, his eyes barely looking at Key who was near passing out in the demon’s grip.

“You’re a man for words….” Tilting his head, the lean faced Cordril said, “Look, we got off on the wrong foot. My name is Lesar Macmon. These are my colleagues, Gregor Stili, Ben Larken, Donal Conohay, and the man holding your precious Key is Yadis Macoy. We have traveled a long way to find and punish the descendants of Camus, the brother of our ancestor and the cause for our people to be stuck on this godforsaken planet—the people you call Sky Children.”

“We don’t call them Sky Children,” the leader said with bite. “They call themselves that. They are nothing but blue-eyes to us, as are you.”

“It figures,” the Cordril named Lesar murmured. “Look, you want to be rid of them, and so do we. So let’s make a deal.”

“No deals,” the Herra Hills leader said.

The brawny Cordril called Yadis lifted Key higher by his neck. “We’ve got collateral.”

“You mean a hostage,” the camp leader bit back.

“Same thing,” Yadis said.

Key blinked his eyes open then looked around himself as if he had come to and was regaining his strength. One of his arms still clung to the huge Cordril’s arm. The other hung down near his side pocket. Key stuck his hand inside and felt for his dagger, which he had kept strapped to his leg. He had made it reachable through a hole he had made in his pocket.

“All we want,” Lesar said, “Is for you to help sneak us into a city where the Sky Children are. That’s all.”

“And what is to stop you from taking their place?” the camp leader asked.

The Cordrils rolled their eyes almost in chorus.

“We told you,” Lesar said. “We don’t care about human politics. We’re just interested in the—”

Yadis interrupted him with a piercing yell, clenching his side where Key had stabbed him with his dagger. But then Key shouted out because just as suddenly, all his recovered strength sucked out with a jerk.

“Yadis! Let go!” Gregor, the third of trio Key had recognized, jumped at him, prying them apart. He had a hold on Key, the boy hanging limp like a sack from his grasp. “We don’t want him dead!”

“He stabbed me!” Yadis shouted, yanking the dagger from his side. Almost that moment the wound closed up, the blood hardly dribbling down except from the dagger. The demon then stared at the dagger, blinking at it.

The archers raised their crossbows.

“Don’t even think about it,” Gregor said, holding Key up as the boy convulsed with small twitches. “He could still die.”

Everyone in the clearing watched Key as his chest continued to rise and fall going slower and slower, though his cheeks looked sunken and his skin gray. Ben and Donal of the Cordrils joined Gregor as he lifted Key up in their arms, keeping their hands off of his skin. Lesar sighed, tilting his head when he did and brushed Yadis’s hand. There was just the faintest of sparks before Yadis grimaced then nodded with a knowing look.

“Fine,” Lesar turned and said to the crowd. “We’ll give you a day to think on it. In the mean time, we’re taking the boy. We’ll return him tomorrow. We’ll pick the time. And don’t think we can’t take you all on. We have hundreds of years of memory and practice behind us.”

The five white demons retreated almost like a single entity, their blue eyes glowing as they escaped through the white shrubbery. Though the Herra men tried to chase after them, the demons were well gone into the snowy landscape on their long legs, far ahead in the hills with the knowledge of hideaways in them probably stolen from some hapless human who had crossed their path.

“What now?” The smith and the others turned to ask their leader who had continued to stare off where they had taken Key.

He turned and spoke to the magician. “We need to contact Kleston.”

The magician nodded.

*

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Gailert read that philosophy again for what seemed the billionth time. There was something repugnant about it.

Glancing at where the boy was nodding off again, Gailert then sighed. If that philosophy were in fact true, that would mean the demons in the forests were his allies…that he ought to use them against the humans. But those thoughts were too much like the ideologies of witches and magicians. In his experience, often enemy of his enemy was also his enemy. Like those parasitic spiders. All they wanted was their own survival. Everyone was prey to them. Or goles. They did not attack most Sky Child communities because the gift of touch was deadly to them, but Gailert had no doubt that goles would eat a Sky Child if they could. The idea of alliances between species did not work anyway. Horses were tamed. So were dogs. Most farm animals were domesticated so that they did not run, even from the chopping block.

There was always a pecking order in which one species ruled over the other. Even among the humans’ own species, they divided society so that wealthy and skilled minorities ruled over the poor and unskilled majority. Only in desperation would two groups work together. Then the pecking order would start again. Conflict was never ending.

He turned the page. Reading the philosophies of the first Sky Lord and all the memories he had written down before he passed on his memory to others, Gailert felt a twinge of wonder if the Sky Lord himself had a skewed view. Those with the passed-on memory would never think so. But having never inherited the gift to obtain the memory, Gailert wondered if perhaps his view was less cluttered, more objective. Too many people thinking the same reduced chances for innovation. The Sky Lord ascribed to the opposite, that same thinking maintained a high status quo.

He turned another page. Scanning the words, Gailert then closed the book. All of it was like that.

The boy had started to snore a little.

Rising from his seat, Gailert puzzled, peering down at the boy. Strangely his mind wandered to the missing boy from Bekir Lake. It was odd to think of him, looking at this boy so different from him. But then it was their differences that reminded him so much of that runaway servant. That boy never slept when Gailert read in the study. He always kept his head down, but he never slept. In fact, Gailert rarely caught him sleeping even when it was time to sleep. The child was always awake before dawn, even in the cellar’s dark. And the boy always fell asleep long after he did. This boy before him nodded off whenever he got bored, which usually happened in the study.

Reaching out, yet halting in before touching him, Gailert waved his hand before the boy’s closed eyes. Not even a twitch. His other boy would have jumped.

Blinking, Gailert looked up wondering where that boy was.

*

Key had no idea where he was when he opened his eyes. A flicker of light reflected off the walls from a small fire. But mostly he was hardly able to move to see anything else. His limbs were sore, and his arms were twisted behind his back. In fact, as he tried to roll over, he found that his feet were tied also.

“Ah ha! The key awakes!” the Cordril Key had recognized as Ben announced, hopping over to his side. Ben had a recognizable mole near his ear, which was his only distinguishing feature. “You have quite the tolerance for abuse.”

“Quit picking on him,” Lesar, the lean-faced leader, said. He squatted next to the fire without giving Key a glance.

“I just wanted to know if he was hungry,” Ben replied.

“I don’t think we should feed him,” that burly one, Yadis, grumbled, casting a glare at Key while plucking at his blood stained coat side. “The kid’s dangerous.”

Lesar snorted. “You’re just complaining because he got you.”

“He stabbed me!” Yadis snapped with a slight hop up. “It could have been fatal!”

“Just an inch from your heart,” Donal, the shortest one, put in, scooping something up from the pot on the fire Key finally noticed. Ben also scooped some up, adding what looked like a flat piece of bread. The Cordril then walked over on his haunches to the boy, ducking low to avoid the ceiling.

Key stared up at the low ceiling then around at the curving