Immortalibus Bella Read online

  Immortalibus Bella

  SL Figuhr

  This is a SL Figuhr Book

  Published by SL Figuhr Publishing

  Copyright © 2013 by

  All rights reserved under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Universal Copyright Convention and the Berne Convention For The Protection Of Literary and Artistic Works. The author of this book, SL Figuhr, secures all rights to this book, including the rights to reproduce this book in whole or in part, in any form whatsoever, and extends such privileges to absolutely no other parties, individuals or companies. Not including ebook exemptions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, by any electronic, mechanical, or other means including, but not limited to, all existing and yet to be invented information duplicating, storage or retrieval systems, without the specific permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9911498-0-3 (SL Figuhr Publishing)

  ISBN-10: 0-9911498-0-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013919779

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, images, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Book / E-book cover design:

  www.celairen.com

  https://www.facebook.com/celairen1

  Acknowledgments

  Edited by: Josephine Henke

  Cover Art by Celairen, using designmethod/Shutterstock.com, OlegZhevelev/Shutterstock.com, Dynamicfoto/Shutterstock.com Nataliia Antonova/Shutterstock.com, EkaterinaVBorisova/Shutterstock.com, MPFphotography/Shutterstock.com

  DEDICATION

  Thank you to all my friends, both old and new, and my family, who supported and encouraged my endeavors through countless rewrites and rant sessions.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Connect Online

  Sneak Peek

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Y ou know what I miss the most?” Colin mused. “Technology. Life was so much easier when one could book a flight online, call anywhere, and have a room ready and waiting at the end of a journey.”

  Shit or get off the pot,” Eron groused.

  “Still, where have the remnants gone? The metal? The concrete?”

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Damn mortals and their wars.Mica crested the stony hill to find his friend Eron resting comfortably on a large gray boulder scored with an undecipherable glyph. Why this should irritate him, he didn’t know, but like the steadily rising temperature, so did his anger. “Thanks for scouting ahead. Wouldn’t want to be met by any bandits.” The sarcasm slipped out.

  His dark-haired friend merely drank from his canteen before shutting his eyes. “Blow it out your ass. Your forced march toward nothing, leaving us too tired to fight, is the problem.”

  The other man clenched his jaw. He refused to be drawn into an argument. He turned his head to see how his brother was getting along. Colin walked up, dropping his pack with an audible sigh.

  “I need a break, bro. This path isn’t the easiest to navigate. Besides, I think I’m getting a hole in my boot sole.” He sat down, inspecting the bottoms.

  It was petty problems like this that prevented the men from catching up to Nicky and finding him. Mica walked a few more paces, the elevation giving him a clear sight line of their destination. The rocky gray mountains they were traversing curved around a valley. A middlingsized town sat below, surrounded by forests, a river cutting it in half before emptying into a harbor. He checked the hand-drawn map he had purchased from a merchant. The view seemed to match up with the map.

  He recapped his canteen, turning to the resting men. “Break time’s over. Let’s go.” He received no reply, his brother now scribbling in his journal, his friend trying to fake sleep.

  “I said let’s go! Now! Put that damn thing away; you can record your observations later.” Mica barely kept from snatching his brother’s pride and joy and tossing it over the precipice before them.

  “I’ve had all I can take of your bitching and whining. You made a promise to me. If you have any honor left, you’ll keep your damn word, seeing this through to the end. The end which is down there.” Mica turned away from his friend to stare blindly over the landscape.

  He snorted. “Your bones are liars. You’ve been feeling it for a while now. Dementia setting in? Alzheimer’s, maybe? The man had his head up his ass. He saw a young man, not a little boy.”

  “Bickering isn’t helping,” Colin offhandedly remarked, now scanning the land through a spyglass. “It’s just the fatigue and hunger speaking. We’ll feel better once we eat and sleep.”

  “This. Is. It.” Mica replied forcefully. “Our quest will end here. Finally, after countless years of trials and tribulations, we will be rewarded,” he continued with enthusiasm.

  Mica gave a steely-eyed glare. “Tricks. The boy’s up to his old games. Nicky hired someone older who faintly resembles him to pretend he’s Nicky to throw us off his whereabouts.”

  Mica went rigid, turning on his friend furiously. “The king of Gemica’s women were adamant about the fact there was a little boy matching Nicky’s description with the King of Macinas when he visited.”

  Eron’s hands curled into fists, wanting to plow them into his friend’s face for what he considered the man’s stupidity and ignorance. “I don’t need to figure anything out. You’re the one wanting to twist the truth because you can’t or won’t accept it. Nicky is gone. He’s been gone for decades. He’ll surface when he wants.”

  Eron’s brow furrowed. “There are two rulers? The King of Gemica didn’t mention that. Odd.” He reached for the glass, more to piss his friend off than because he cared about the anomaly.

  Colin handed the piece over and began flipping pages in his journal. “We don’t have time for you to write it down,” his brother warned.

  “No, I remember . . .” He flipped some more and read another section before crying out in triumph. “I knew this place sounded familiar! Remember when we met the old crone who said she could see the future?”

  “Not this crap again!" Mica groused. “She’s a fake; they all are.” “Nope, sorry. I don’t recall, buddy. What did she say?”

  “She said we would have many towns yet, and miles to go, before it would end. She said we would know we had found the place we seek when ‘from behind a thick forest rises the spires of a castle, hidden in the mist and embraced by mountains in a crescent moon. A town harboring evil lies before the forest, and the town holds that which you seek.’”

  Mica snatched the spyglass out of his friend’s hands, almost ramming his own eye out as he took a look. After a moment, he found what the other two men talked about, but barely. A bead of sweat dripped in his eye, and he blinked, staring harder. The hidden building was now in plain view, a lighter gray than the mountains. It perched on its rock aerie, spires proudly stabbing the firmaments, pennants blowing in the breeze. Mist billowed out from twin waterfalls to
either side of the castle on its perch, the sun bouncing off the cascading water and producing faint rainbows in the spume. A long causeway stretched from the rock base over the swirling maelstrom of water created by the cascades joining below. The stone road ended in pillars topped by carving. A wide dirt track led away and disappeared into the forest. Sweat obscured his vision again.

  By the time he blinked it away, the castle was gone—only its towers peeked up over the forest. Mica lowered the glass a bit to rub his eyes— damn! He must be getting heat stroke or something. He set the glass back to his eye, but the scene was the same, lots of forest and the hint of something more. He handed the glass back to his brother.

  “I think you’re both crazy. I saw nothing.” He paid no attention to the protests behind him as he descended the stony track, his thoughts keeping him company.

  Mica recalled with startling clarity the fantastic tale the little boy who called himself Nicky had spun, like something out of a book or a really bad movie: an evil man forcing him to be an apprentice in some cult with strange, dark rites after killing the boy’s family. Nicky didn’t understand why the man had done it or how his parents drew the attention of such a figure. Mica had taken the boy in, trying to get him help, and justice for his murdered family.

  The man scowled, anger at how he had been tricked making him speed up into a jog, unmindful of his brother and friend trailing behind, or of the path he followed. He had adopted the lying brat, was going to make him his heir, and the child tried to kill him. Mica’s boots pounded the narrow, rutted track. The straps of his pack dug into his shoulders with each footfall, his sword slapping his leg. None of the discomfort mattered. He blocked it out, running down the twisting path. He stumbled, almost turning his ankle, and decided to slow down.

  His heart pounded, sweat dripping, breath coming in gasps, as he stopped. Mica drained his canteen before realizing he was alone. He looked back the way he had come, but his traveling partners remained hidden from view. The big man slumped to his knees, head hanging down.

  If I can just finish this quest, I can rest. Letting the kid escape and believing any of his bullshit was a mistake. I will not be duped by him again. If he had just been content with taking his wrath out on me, and not those I cared for, it would never have come to this.

  He sat back on his haunches, realizing he needed to find a source of water. What was taking those two so long? He had just refilled his canteen from a rushing brook when Colin and Eron appeared. Now he had to wait for them to take a rest break. He paced back and forth, inhaling the crisp air.

  “What about bandits?” came from behind him.

  “I think infested was Gemica’s idea of a joke,” Eron replied.

  “I’m being cautious. You do know what the word means, don’t you? It’ll be pitch black in there, perfect conditions for an ambush,” Colin worried.

  “Just because it’s near-impossible to kill us doesn’t mean we need rumors preceding us about men who won’t or can’t die," Colin retorted. “I would rather not be met by peasants with pitchforks and torches.”

  “Ah, the good old days,” Eron sighed.

  “Great!” Mica enthused. “On we go.” He started off.

  Colin swore at his brother’s back. The three men walked steadily onward across the Downs, last rays of the sun sinking as they came to the forest edge. The trees blocked most of the moonlight, making it difficult to see inside the forest and the road they followed. They had to slow their pace as their eyes adjusted. Eron heard a strange whistling sound.

  He had made the safety of a tree, trying to peer around it. He saw Mica nip behind another one across the path while his friend dragged a leg behind him, arrow shaft protruding from his thigh.

  Wild yells erupted from all around. Their attackers burst forth from the nearby trees and bushes, surrounding them. Colin was still out in the open. Eron knew the archers had to be readying another round. He slipped out of his pack, and tackled his friend. The man let out a scream of pain, drowned out in the thunking of arrows, as they landed behind a tree. Colin hissed. It would take his leg a while to heal even after yanking the arrow out. Eron drew his sword, not sure where Mica was. The bandits laughed and jeered.

  “Come on out, and maybe we won’t kill you!”

  “Yoo hoo! Here piggy pig, pig!”

  Eron struck, killing two out of four archers before gaining the safety of the trees on the other side of the road. From there, it took a further ten minutes to thin the band down. The remaining handful gave up, fleeing toward the mountains. The two men walked over to Colin’s ‘corpse,’ guarding it while they waited for him to reanimate. He sat up with a groan as his friend reached a hand down to help him up.

  “You’re still alive.”

  “And your brother’s the one they saw die,” Eron shot back.

  Colin was leaning against a tree, resembling a porcupine. Besides the arrow sticking out of his leg, there were four in his back, another in his side, one in his upper arm, and half a dozen in his chest. “A little help here? I don’t fancy going into town like this.” He was trying to inspect his clothes. “Damn, I don’t think I can repair this much damage,” he muttered to himself.

  Mica walked over to tend to Colin, snapping the fletching off and pushing the rest of the barbs and shafts through and out of his body so final healing could begin, unmindful of his brother’s muffled screams of pain.

  Eron seethed inside. I told the smug bastard to wait but no, it’s hurry, hurry, hurry. We may be impossible to kill, but it doesn’t mean you act like an idiot.

  Mica ignored Eron’s mumbling, waiting for his brother to wrap his cloak tightly about himself to hide the blood stains and holes in his clothing. “Come on, brother, let’s get you into town.”

  Eron and Mica supported Colin’s weight as soon as he felt able to continue on. It was slow going before Colin was able to walk unassisted. They emerged from the forest to find a big bright-yellow moon illuminating the way. The road widened, though still rutted, passing through a long open grassy meadow. The men were close enough to the town they could see the outlines of buildings making up the outermost edges of the town. The dark hid a lot of detail. What the men could see of the town was not cheerful; it looked and smelled like many a squalid backwater teeming with poverty and disease.

  The men guessed it was close to midnight as they trudged into the area. An overpowering stench of putrefaction saturated the air, singed their noses. Dour images seen through a haze of wood smoke did not give them much hope for decent lodgings. Most of the buildings were shuttered tight. Their fears were confirmed at the first inn they came across. A good strong wind could blow it over, but the decrepitude of the place didn’t stop it from being full. The proprietor told them of a tavern where they would be guaranteed lodgings. Colin didn’t like the lack of guards as they made their way through the town. Flaring torches outside the tavern showed a creaking wooden sign—a fist with bloodied knuckles—hanging overhead, proclaiming, “The Bloody Knuckles.” The three men shared a glance, but shrugged and entered. The ill-lit, filthy, smoky interior gave the tavern a sinister look. Men, along with a handful of women, bristling with weapons, cast looks of suspicion, hate, greed, and murderous intent toward the newcomers. The three men let their hands drop to their sword hilts, missing a small group of people turn their backs hastily away. As the travelers worked their way farther inside, one of the members of the group who had noticed them went up to a big man at the bar to whisper in his ear.

  The three men gave a collective sigh of resignation, sitting down at a wobbly table, preparing to order what dubious fare the place provided. The sounds going on above led them to believe the tavern doubled as a brothel. They returned the curious patrons’ looks with blank, empty stares. After a ten-minute wait, a malnourished girl of about fourteen made her reluctant way to their table.

  She had new and old bruises covering her exposed skin. Her tremulous voice was hard to hear over the noise. “May I get you something to eat
or drink?”

  The girl nodded, scurrying away. They watched her try to avoid the grasping hands of the men, while flinching at each crude remark flung her way from the patrons.

  Mica snorted. “Oh, I have no worries he’s found someone to sucker into caring for him. It’s so much like all the other places we’ve been; I just know he’s here.”

  The girl came back with the ale, temporarily stopping the conversation. Each man reached for his mug, cautiously sampled the brew, and shuddered at the sour taste. They tried to take the smallest sips possible.

  “Shall I call the girl back over and ask for wine or spirits?”

  He nodded glumly, thinking back to the times when it was possible to get a decent brew even with the cheapest of spirits. After the initial sip, Colin set the mug aside, drawing out his journal and ink to record the day’s travel. He was proud of it, keeping the leather cover supple by rubbing animal fat into it and wrapping it in a bit of silk tied with a silken cord. The journal was as long as his forearm and about a foot thick.

  Eron assessed the tavern. A raised platform with a large stone fireplace dominated one wall; before it, men, drunkenly carousing with scantily clad women, filled benches around a long table. The serving slaves could hardly keep their mugs filled. Directly in front, patrons rolled dice and bet. A few played with cards made from wood or tree bark. The bar itself was crowded with a boisterous group contentedly harassing the serving girls. At the far back, barely seen in the flickering light, a set of stairs led up into gloomy darkness. Thick layers of dirt and grime covered the whole scarred wooden tavern floor. Very few of the patrons appeared as well-dressed or half as clean as they were. Filthy, coarse fabrics woven of wool or cotton were paired with leather and fur. It was a contrast to the three men whose clothes had a tight weave, showing not a patch or repair from skillful mending, including their dusty fur-lined cloaks. All the men seemed to carry a weapon, be it a bow, sword, club or short knife, and sometimes more than one. Eron noticed some had made attempts at armor; there were a few pieces of cured leather, some wooden shields, and a very few scraps of metal. He noticed the bartender eyeing them fiercely between yelling at the girls.