Forsaken Hunters_Book Zero of The Age of Dawn_A Prequel Read online

  Forsaken Hunters

  Book Zero of The Age of Dawn - A Prequel

  Everet Martins

  Illustrated by

  Sebastian Horoszko

  Contents

  DRM

  Zoria Map

  1. Brenna

  2. Dark Work

  3. Shopping

  4. The Kuro Brothers

  5. Partners

  6. Leads

  7. The Oakmourn Plantation

  8. Found

  9. Dinner

  10. A Deal

  11. Principles

  12. Blood

  Newsletter

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  DRM

  The author has provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management (DRM) software applied so you can read it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices. Copyright infringement is against the law.

  To you, for making it this far.

  Zoria Map

  “It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand...”

  ― Søren Kierkegaard

  One

  Brenna

  The country was vast, treeless, and red. As barren and broken as her life.

  Jagged hills rolled past like the spines of ancient beasts. The clay earth flowing beneath Lillian Thorne’s bare feet was studded with stones worn smooth, the only relic to indicate that there had once been water in this wasteland. The arcing contours made her foot bones ache, but it was a welcome relief from the miles of stabbing gravel that covered the path over the last ridge.

  With every step, she left ruby footprints behind. Her blood smeared over the dried blood and sticking sand of nameless faces marching in the line before her, blotting out their perfect tracks. Blood mixed with blood mixed with nothing. That’s what they were now. Nothing. Slaves. They were merely tools to be used and discarded once they no longer functioned.

  It wouldn’t be long until she fell from infection. She didn’t have Ribwort oil to cleanse her wounds. She had nothing. She was nothing. Trousers, chains, and sunburns were her only possessions. Even her hair, once luxurious, now framed her hollow cheeks, the strands all bent and broken.

  The chains never stopped tinkling with her every plodding step, threatening to drive her mad. Each slave was bound at the wrist with a pair of manacles joined at the middle to another length of chain binding their ankles. Each set of chains was bound to the man in front and the man behind, rendering fleeing on foot an impossibility. Every slave gang always had at least a pair of elders in the group. They were dead weight. The Tigerian race was far more intelligent than she thought.

  She loathed her enslavement and her Tigerian slavers. What she hated most was how her fetters prevented her from making a proper squat so streams of hot piss didn’t run down her legs, burning at her wounds. Then it would dry, and the odor was so foul it made her retch when the wind blew it back in her face. It felt as if everything in this world was against them.

  She’d been enslaved for well over six months by her estimate. It was difficult to keep an accurate account of time passing in one’s mind. She had lived well enough and was prepared to die, even welcomed the Shadow Realm’s warm embrace. Her expression on most days was a stoic smile, because the only thing she could control within the hell she’d found herself in was her countenance.

  A gale tore a curtain of sand from the trackless plains, whipping it over the marching men and producing groans of discontent. The sun was a relentless orb of hate, casting its rage upon the backs of the enslaved. Sweat trickled down the furrow of the muscular back marching in front of her. She watched the way his pinched scars fluctuated and twitched under slabs of leathery muscle. They were a map that only led to a grim future. It was a future that told of turning big stones into smaller stones, toiling over farms, or mining. If you were lucky, you’d become a Tigerian’s pleasure toy. At least then you could spend some time inside, out of the heat.

  Lillian raised her arms, her once porcelain skin raw and red with sunburn. The chains sang with the tireless clinking of metal on metal. She swept a length of obsidian hair out of her eyes and behind her ears, her hair brittle with sweat, dust, and sand. Her upper lip was a bit fuller than the bottom, both wilted and scabbed. The act of wearing her slight smile was painful, yet pleasing.

  No one spoke to her, and she spoke to no one. Every slave kept to themselves, deep down in their own personal forms of torture.

  One of their two captors circled the marching line, and Lillian watched him in her peripheral vision, never looking directly at him. She’d learned this mistake the hard way and had the scars to prove it. The price of disobeying their taskmasters was lash strikes to the back so hard they cut through flesh and rent muscle, only stopping at bones. Tigerians didn’t take defiance lightly, stomping the sparks of rebellion down before they became a fire.

  She had read much about the Tigerians before arriving on the realm, but books couldn’t prepare her for their cruelty. She knew they enslaved men, but she’d never guessed that she could possibly be captured. Her arrogance and pride had led her here. She’d been a fool.

  Lillian and Baylan Spear, her betrothed, were sent by the Arch Wizard of the Silver Tower to take the pulse of the Tigerian realm. Bezda Lightwalker, the Arch Wizard, said they were to observe only and act like they were slavers. “It would be a simple task,” Bezda said. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  Lillian balked at the idea of a human posing as a human slaver. “Could there be such men so brazen to enslave their own race?” she had asked. Nonetheless, Bezda insisted that there were such evils in the world and the gambit would work. As in all things, there was a hierarchy in the Silver Tower, and she was obliged to follow her leader’s orders.

  They left the realm of Zoria a little over seven months ago, spent weeks on the barnacled Warwick traversing the black waters of the Far Sea, only to be led into the arms of an awaiting band of slavers on the shores of Tigeria. They had been betrayed by Captain Derwood, a man whose loyalty to the Silver Tower apparently only went as far as the highest bidder for his cargo. They were bought and sold, their bodies exchanged like a commodity into the hands of countless slave masters. She no longer kept track of who owned them now. It didn’t matter.

  The waiting slavers shouldn’t have been a problem for Lillian, for she had been blessed with the Dragon god’s strength. There were two known gods in the world, the Dragon and the Phoenix. The Dragon granted women, and rarely men, the ability to conjure fire from the air, control the nature of the winds, call stone from the earth, and for those particularly blessed, summon lightning from a cloudless sky to strike down their enemies. The Phoenix granted men the ability to mend the most grievous of wounds, summon impenetrable shields of light, telekinesis, and for those of the most advanced blessings, teleportation through portals.

  The Tigerian slavers knew Lillian and Baylan hailed from the Silver Tower and guessed correctly that they could use magic. The Silver Tower was where the wizards of Zoria went to cultivate their talents with like-minded peers. To Tigerians, they were a rare form of human who would fetch a mighty sum of coin with the right auctioneer. Wizards were also a creature to be feared, maybe flayed once captured. The Tigerians had countermeasures prepared for their powers.

  Equalizer crystals were a forbidden artifact in the Silver Tower. They could nullify a wizard�
��s powers, rendering their strengths to that of mortal men untouched by the gods. Norms, the term wizards disdainfully used to describe mortals. They were supposed to have all been destroyed or lost, according to the Tower’s scholars. It seemed their knowledge had been severely lacking.

  She had reached for the Dragon, planning to turn the waiting slavers into pillars of ash. They’d laughed before slapping chains on her arms, legs, and neck, the locks clicking with a deadly finality. No.

  Baylan was sold into a separate slave gang, both screaming as they were torn from each other with tear glossed cheeks. She watched him fade away until he was a speck cresting a sand dune. Watched until there was nothing more to be watched.

  At first, she clung to life with the fire of revenge and the ever-fading love in her chest. She tried to keep her love bright, but it was invariably beaten out of her, spirits crushed under the crack of their master’s lashings. She had all but given up, fate accepted. Why she continued to live was still a mystery. She came to the grim realization that she would never see Baylan again.

  She gazed down at the Equalizer crystal, suspended from a heavy chain from the iron collar around her throat. The Equalizer pulsed with a pinkish glow as she tried to reach for the Dragon but found only an impenetrable wall of glass blocking her from its power, always just out of reach like a lover’s grasp. She stopped trying, and the crystal once again became colorless, resting between the valley of her firm breasts.

  She peered down at her bare breasts, trying to remember how much larger they had been before her body started cannibalizing what little fat stores remained on her figure. She couldn’t remember. Her mind was muddled from the ravages of malnutrition and crippling exhaustion. She thought they were nice once. She watched as a strip of dried skin peeled off the edge of her right breast, flitting away in another stinging gust. She ran her tongue along her mouth, searching for some vestige of moisture, dragging at her inner cheeks, her mouth always filled with the tang of her bleeding gums.

  Toshi, one of their two captors, swayed from the back of his Tougere mount. Tigerians had humanoid bodies, although that was about where their similarities started and ended. Their feline heads possessed the features of a cat, eyes gleaming and wide as saucers, teeth like razors. Their lithe bodies were covered in pelts in every pattern from spotted blacks to striped browns. They were typically shorter than men, but a few towered over them. Their hands and feet resembled those of men, but where men had blunted nails, they had pointed talons. The facet of cats they most seemed to embody was their pitiless cruelty.

  She watched him watching her from under the slits of a swathe of hair that had fallen over her brow. There was no way he could’ve known she was watching him, but to be safe, she quickly averted her eyes.

  More fearsome than the Tigerians themselves were their Tougere mounts. Much like mountain lions found in the Mountains of Misery from her home in Zoria, they were ten times as large. They were more than sturdy enough for a man to ride, their heads as big as a boulder with enough crushing power to hew a man into halves. She only knew this because it’d happened to a disobedient captive. From their mouths emerged pairs of canines as long and sharp as short swords, and from their enormous paws were talons keen enough to disembowel a man with a single swipe. She’d seen this too.

  Toshi’s pelt was jet black with a few smears of white as if someone had inverted a cup of cream over his head. He wore a burnished breastplate that he polished every night, though dented and marred with the signs of hard use. Along his waist, ornamented pairs of scimitars bounced against the edge of his saddle. To Lillian’s relief, they padded away, every step of the Tougere thumping at the earth. The beasts dwarfed horses in weight and power, though their legs were bred to be squat, making them easy to mount for Tigerians.

  Leading the gang was Taji, his coat the pattern of a tabby cat, his Tougere mirroring his coat such that at times they appeared one and the same. He preferred the spear and shield, both resting across the back of his saddle. Curled among them was his lash, mostly used not as a weapon but as punishment for malingers.

  The glint of sun off steel filled Lillian with longing. All she wanted was a comb to straighten her mess of hair and a knife to slit her throat. Was that too much to ask? The masters knew that slaves were prone to suicide, so they were searched twice a day for makeshift weapons. They couldn’t sell the dead.

  Night fell, and with it, bone chilling cold. The path became a forest of dead trees, all bark and leaves stripped away, leaving only ivory skeletons behind. This land had been different once, in a different time. They marched onward, huddled under threadbare blankets providing just enough warmth to keep them alive. A woman fell from the cold one too many times, halting the gang as she staggered into the nameless face in front of her. The man grunted with annoyance, jabbing an elbow into her ribs.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, the hoarse word barely audible.

  The man replied in Tigerian, a harsh-tongued language in which she was only starting to glean words and phrases. “Careful,” he said. His hair was curly and an oily black, cascading down his bony shoulders.

  With the halting of the gang came blessed silence. For a moment, the chains didn’t jingle. She smiled the broadest of smiles.

  Toshi dismounted with a growl, setting his golden eyes at the back of the line. Lillian’s moment of happiness came to an abrupt halt, and she stared down at her feet, eying her toes, white with cold. She knew what fate would befall this unfortunate soul. She didn’t have to look.

  Toshi’s sword slipped from its sheath with a murderous ring. The mirror bright finish passed under the edge of her vision, reflecting a sliver of the grinning moon. It reminded her that there was still a world beyond tinkling chains. His paws scraped at the earth, toenails clacking on stones. The sound of metal chopping into bone was followed by the woman’s gut twisting shriek. Toshi continued chopping, first through her wrists and then through her ankles, and finally her neck.

  It was apparently more efficient than simply unlocking their manacles. Or perhaps Toshi simply enjoyed this method of killing. She would become tonight’s stew, and one did not resist what little food you were given. If you did, you were force fed. Lillian had learned this the hard way too.

  There was a time when she resisted consuming the flesh of her fellow men. Even that was brutally squashed down. She remembered her mouth being pried apart and throat squeezed by fur lined hands. Her eyes were hot with tears of resistance, but spoonfuls of human stew were shoved down her gullet as they massaged her throat, forcing her to swallow. The punishment for vomiting was steep. It was difficult to sell slaves on the verge of death.

  The dead woman’s manacles were stowed in a saddlebag, and her body strapped to the Tougere’s rump. Blood trailed from her wounds, streaking its hind legs and matting in its fur. Lillian lifted her eyes to regard the woman’s face, then was grimly reminded she’d been beheaded. Her dead torso twitched. Lillian distantly wondered which part of her she would be forced to eat. The poor woman seemed to have a fair amount of fat on her buttocks and legs.

  Lillian’s throat worked in tremulous waves, jerking her head away before her guts betrayed her. She focused on the trees on the side of the path, noticing their limbs were coated in a thin layer of ice, the weight of it making them bow. She let out a long-controlled breath, mastering her body if not her mind.

  Taji growled and waved his paw for them to continue. “March,” he grunted in Common.

  Their chains rattled to life, stabbing at her ears with renewed ferocity. Everywhere she went, chains jingled. Even in her sleep, she heard their rattle, a constant reminder of her captivity. When a man shifted by the campfire, they whispered of new tortures. They were always jingling.

  Lillian waited for them to stop, but they took no rest that night. It was unusual and sharpened her senses from the stupor of endless marching. They must be behind schedule, or perhaps drawing closer to their next destination. Lanterns sputtered from poles clutched in Tosh
i and Taji’s hands, gently creaking as they swung. Toshi padded alongside the main body of the slave gang while Taji, as usual, led from the front.

  The sun crested the horizon, showing the sinuous path winding among the dead trees. Their white skins became the colors of fire as the sun started to warm her cheeks. Their shadows stretched out like demon’s claws, raking at the scorched ground as they searched for lost souls to ensnare.

  Something approached from the north. It was a black smudge at first, materializing into what she guessed was a wagon. Then came the gentle creak of wheels spinning on greased axles, confirming her suspicion. A pair of lanterns burned at its corners, illuminating a human driver who used a horse to pull her carriage, which was strange. Strangest of all was that the driver appeared to be female. Lillian wrinkled her brow and found herself giving a nervous swallow. She turned to look back down the line of captives, seeing everyone else shuffling their feet and licking sunburned lips. A few even met her eyes for the first time.

  Mutters passed over the group, some wondering if this intruder would be their new master. Was there anything more despicable that one willing to enslave their own race for coin? Lillian thought not.

  Toshi drew up from their flank and joined Taji at the front to welcome the wagon, or perhaps, slay its owner. The Tougeres’ fat tails lashed at the earth as they were made to halt, waiting for the carriage to arrive. One of them let out a rumbling growl, its triangular ears twitching at the echoing sound of stones crunching under wheels and hooves clopping at the earth.