Polite Temper Boy Book One: The Hermit Read online

a bow and fire an arrow at a distant target, a hopeless frustration which promised the embrace of failure, and let loose the creature of disappointment. Let out the monster of uselessness. He still couldn’t hear anything but the battle; not even his own heartbeat, nor the sound of his own breathing. Nothing but the chaos. Nothing but the pulsing, bloodthirsty animal before him devouring itself like a self-destructive glutton.

  He gazed forward with an emotionless expression.

  Pale eyes, cold and empty.

  Eyes dry, and exhausted.

  So exhausted.

  Behind the Backlanton battle lines was the only way down to the shores of the black sea. The only way down to the woman who had risen from those ink-like waters. He knew he had to get down there, and felt the uselessness fade as if the rain were trying to cleanse that too. Felt as if hope wasn‘t lost entirely. The feeling was refreshing, but had a sour taste to it. Tasted of bad endings and worse beginnings. The battle before him seemed so large, so unapproachable–and yet it was also moving further away. Descending into obscurity, but maintaining existence. Maintaining hugeness.

  He looked back down at the blade.

  “Only one way out. One way to her,” he said, not able to hear himself, but feeling the strange words leave his lips just the same.

  And then everything went black.

  2

  He woke up tied to a dead tree, his arms behind him and bound around the trunk. At first it was hard to see, his vision blurry, the uncertainty of the situation muddling his perception. The rain had stopped, he knew that much, and the sky made deep throaty noises, threatening to rain again. It appeared bruised under his blurry vision, as if the tears of rain had left a mark on heaven‘s placid skin. Appeared to hurt as if it couldn‘t block out what it had witnessed. Seemed forever marked.

  His sight slowly drifted back into focus, and he found himself blinking, the stuttering of his eyelids making his head hurt worse.

  The battle was over.

  The sounds of hell gone with it.

  One look forward proved that.

  Bodies lay everywhere, blood and mud marbled into each other, and crows already circled the sky, deciding which lifeless treasure looked the most appetizing. Yes, it was definitely over.

  But how had it ended? The thought coursed through him like a river through underground tunnels, flooding his thoughts in a dull dread.

  What happened?

  The back of a large hand struck his left cheek, drawing blood, and the question flew from his mind before it had a chance to finish, plummeted from existence like a raw chunk of food spat down a dark hole. But the soldier in black armour did not call out. Made no sound.

  “Backlantons took the survivors as prisoners,” a craggy voice said with a slur. “Probably dead by now. Ruthless they are.” The voice was coming from an old man with grey-black skin riddled in intertwining tattoos of half faded claws and swirling lines. A long white beard, so white that it seemed to glow, fell from his face in a in a scraggly triangle almost long enough to touch his muddy belt. His teeth were large and unnaturally white, but slightly crooked, like ghosts with collapsed skulls peering up from behind peeling lips. His eyes were like dark jewels, and were also large. Unusually large. Like the beard, his hair was long and bleached white, making his skin the colour of ebony in comparison. He was a medicine man, the soldier realized suddenly; the glowing hair, and odd formations of tattoos were plain enough to see. Such medicine men usually dwelled along the edge’s of Bahnn, the unexplored forests past the far western side of the world. They lived as hermits, and were rarely seen by outsiders. Some said they originated from somewhere in the depths of those old woods, and others said that they were the first of the Fellekons, driven out from their homeland centuries ago by the dusty skinned tribes. Keterious, they were called. The ancient ones, stuck in-between the memories of faded empires. The last of the old world. The medicine men.

  They were thought to be extinct. In fables, seeing one was said to be good luck–but what did this mean?.

  “You got a name?” The medicine man asked, poking at the soldier’s armour. There was a smile–or a sneer, it was hard to tell–on the elderly man’s face, and a hint of madness in his eyes.

  “Vincent,” the soldier in black armour said, coughing. “My name is Vincent Fane Daguabal.”

  “Good. Very good,” again there was that smiling sneer, “and where does Vincent Fane Daguabal hail from?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Vincent’s armour–made of thin sheets of black steel, and strips of darkened leather–was clearly marked with the North Vellonian insignia of two long swords crossing a shield on the chest, and that of bears on the shoulders. Some of the imagery was smeared in mud, but most of the gold symbols showed through. The man beneath the armour was also fairly typical for a Vellonian: dark hair, fair skin, and symmetrical features. The only thing not Vellonian about the man was his pale eyes–which was more of a Backlanton trait, but still common enough in Vellanon. Most Vellonians had either brown or dark grey eyes, and Vincent’s were a faded ash green, the colour of tarnished silver. Not quite the dark grey of his homeland, but not blue like the barbarians. Grey enough to belong.

  The medicine man pulled out a rusty dagger from a belt slung around his shoulder. The ugly little weapon seemed to leer with a dirty grin from those large bony hands, seemed like a mute fascinated with torture. After tossing it back and forth a few times, the old man held the blade across Vincent’s cheek, its shadow casting a cold line across the soldier‘s features. “I guess you’re new to the ways of this man standing here before you, aren’t yah boy? New to my way, when, and how. Well, I’ll tell yah what. Since it's your first time here, I’ll bend the rules slightly. I’ll let you keep your eyes. Next time will be different.”

  Even though the dagger wasn’t touching his cheek, it seemed to have a weight to it, seemed too heavy for the scrawny man before him, and it wavered slightly, like a paintbrush contemplating a raw canvas.

  “Yes, you understand don’t you,” the medicine man said, shaking the arrow still lodged in Vincent’s right shoulder, the knife in the other hand almost falling against the soldier‘s face. “You wana scream don’t yah? Wanna call out like some howling, worthless, mutt dog.”

  Vincent grimaced, but said nothing.

  Made no sound.

  Held it in.

  “Cause of me they overlooked you, boy. I hit you over the head and pulled you back here. Tied you to this here tree. Saved you.”

  The image of the old man creeping over the bodies flashed through the soldier’s thoughts. He imagined the ancient hermit crawling slowly over the corpses on all fours, like a burnt lizard with a white wig slithering up and over black armoured rocks, sneaking up with a muddy weapon clenched in-between uneven teeth, raising slowly still, and then snuffing out that morning with one furious blow to the back of the soldier’s skull, one single motion to bring the unsuspecting man from there to here.

  Vincent looked ahead, uncertain eyes estimating the truth in what the medicine man had said. He was definitely further back from the scene of battle. Much further. Judging by the sky and the scent in the air, it was well past noon, closer to evening. Enough time for the battle to end–it had after all almost ended before he was knocked out.

  “Quit day dreamin!” The old man wiggled the arrow again, harder this time.

  “What do you want from me?” Vincent coughed, his voice dark and hollow, the sound of bitter wind strolling through abandoned halls on a lonely winter night, the sound of a dead man’s whisper echoing up from the base of a rugged mountaintop.

  The old man mimicked the question in a baby voice. “I should be asking you the same question, boy,” he then said, face crumpled in a grimace.

  “I–I don’t understand.”

  “Well boy, you and I met for a reason.”

  “The woman by the water?”

  “What? Quit talking nonsense, those waters are poison.”

  Thi
s Vincent knew. The black waters at the southern edges of Fellekon had been poison for as far back as anyone could remember.

  “Oh you know the reason alright.”

  Vincent gave no answer, but his eyes told all, seemed to have a mouth which refused to lie. Confusion and anger shone through clearer than words could have described, clearer than the hermit would of expected.

  The old man saw–and misinterpreted–the expression in those eyes instantly, saw only hate, and struck him twice with the back of his large bony hand. “I’m not a stupid man,” he squealed, “you can’t trick me no matter how hard you try.”

  “Sorry,” Vincent said.

  The single word seemed to startle the old man, and this time he really did smile, the sneer only slightly visible. His dark deranged eyes seemed even more detached from the world now, and a strangeness lurked within them. He was like an executioner who had lost his chopping block, and had gone mad without it.

  Vincent hadn’t even meant to say sorry; it was something that just came out, like a sneeze.

  The soldier tried to gain a better understanding of his surroundings. He was up on a hill, his hands bound tightly behind him by coarse rope, the twine digging into his wrists in an ugly line of pain. He was sitting, not standing, and the ground was cold. The mid-sized tree was dead, and gnarled branches crept out across his view of the sky like black veins. The sky itself was beginning to break apart into fractured clouds–still