Deathsworn Vol. II

14 - Mud and Blood

For a series of moments, the world was little more than a sickening amalgam of colours, a symphony of death beaconed by men howling in misery and underpinned by the violent buzzing of stingflies. When clarity eventually came, it came in the form of Shar Agma's roar.

Blood and wet flesh clung to the shar's club like it had been doused in a river of gore. His scarred face was glazed in the juices of the men he had slain, the red running into his eyes and muddying the paint decorating his cheeks. A cloud of stingflies had amassed around him, tokening their fury in angry red welts as they attacked his face and chest. Even so, Bard knew his cry was not one of pain, but rather of primal desire to quell the Ooamanee's rebellion by mutilating their spirit and breaking their skulls. Starting with mine.

Bard's foot struck out of its own volition, slamming into the shar's injured leg. It buckled without a fight, forcing him to simultaneously take a knee and drop his club to negate being toppled altogether. In an instant his hand went to his boot and Bard had to scramble back to avoid being disemboweled by the hunting knife he brandished. 

Bard rose swiftly, one hand swiping the stingflies from his face and the other groping for his axe. Shar Agma stumbled forward before he could get it free, jabbing with the knife and missing by the grace of half an inch. He might have found his mark with the second jab, only Kana appeared to Bard's right, her own spear shooting forward and driving the shar backward, deeper into the stingflies and the mess of men who hadn't been lucky enough to escape them. Kana made to pursue him, but Bard grabbed her shoulder before she went beyond his reach. The Islander whirled around, drunk on bloodlust, one eye wide and frightened, the other swollen shut with bruising. 

"Leave him! Back to the village!" Bard urged.

Kana hesitated, and Bard knew in that moment she was battling with the inner-beast that roused in every warrior when killing was afoot; the one that pleads for just one more, the one that takes the dominant instinct for self-preservation and buries it so deep one has to dig to find it. 

She took a step further. "Kana ... don't-"

Suddenly a giant shadow was on the trail with them. It moved with such speed that in the first instance Bard couldn't tell what it was. Then Kana came flying back towards him and his knees went weak at the realisation. "Nightcats!" Kana screamed, grabbing Bard's arm and pulling him until his stumbling became a flat-out sprint into the jungle, the two of them fleeing the destruction he himself had orchestrated.

It wasn't until his ears were free from the sounds of skirmish that Bard acknowledged the pain. His arms and face were peppered with stings, and the wound Farai had given him was bleeding again, a dull ache pulsing in his arm.

He and Kana went briskly upon a trail she claimed led back to the village, one so thin a hound would have struggled to go at pace. The jungle walls pressed in on them like suffocation had been a stipulation of their design, and all the while Bard dove deeper and deeper into the pool of his own panic.

Of Tall Toyne and Taaj he knew nothing, nor of Pan and his brother Ogg. Utchaka was dead for a certainty, while Pono had very nearly inadvertently killed Bard himself as he sought to get away. The village. We must get to the village. What might await them there, and whether or not the island would claim them before they could find out, he dared not to dwell on. He carried his grandfather's axe readily in his hands, but for the first time in a long while it failed to splinter the shield protecting his doubts.

"We are safe from Congana here," Kana said, as though she could hear his troubled mind and its toiling. She strode confidently before him, trying her best to hide the limp Bard had already marked. "These trails, only Ooamanee know."