9. Raengar
Erich Sumavari, Prince of the House of Death, was a good-looking man. He had dark hair, a straight nose, and was almost as tall and broad as Raengar himself.
He wouldn’t be nearly as handsome, though, after Raengar fed him all his teeth and left him strangled in the woods.
“Come on, Butcher King,” Erich drawled over his shoulder as he set a punishing pace on the trail up the side of the High Queen’s Mountain. “Keep up.”
The nickname grated on Raengar’s nerves, made him grind his teeth. Raengar had just flown into Morvarand from Koppar, a city built at sea level. Morvarand had an altitude of 7,000 feet, and the High Queen’s Mountain was higher still. At this elevation, the oxygen in the air felt thin and useless, something that never seemed to bother him on a dragon’s back no matter how high he flew, but hiking up the steep mountainside with his sword and armor made his muscles and lungs burn with need.
He wanted to stop and rest, to try and pry the oxygen out of the thin air, but he would rather let his pride kill him before he showed any weakness in front of Sumavari. The smug bastard.
“Come on, hurry up, we need to get there before the rain washes the trail away,” Erich called, looking up at the dark cloudy sky that had just started to produce a few drops, but ominously promised more. Erich wore just as much armor as Raengar and wasn’t out of breath, but Raengar was convinced Erich was part mountain goat.
Raengar grunted in response, and he pushed his body faster still, the burn in his lungs intensifying.
He should have insisted he fly his dragon, Deimos, up here, despite the impending rain and Erich insistences that they climb the High Queen’s Mountain on foot.
After the attack the House of Ice had led against Death—the Siege of Surmalinn, and the fall of Povelinn—the Guardians had made House of Ice the benefactors and keepers of House of Death for a hundred years as a way to help build and repair the damage they had inflicted on the house. Whatever House of Death needed, House of Ice provided as penance. Food, clothes, gold, soldiers, border security, education, and most of all training for their soldiers had been provided to the House of Death by Ice in the last fifty years since Raengar had assumed his throne.
Raengar and Isolde, the new co-rulers of Ice after the death of his father, had placed Tag Norvakson in charge of the efforts being made to help Death rebuild. So, a few weeks ago, when Tag sent his Blood Hawk, urging Raengar to come to Morvarand and look at something “troubling” Erich’s scouts had found on the High Queen’s Mountain, Raengar made the time.
Tag Norvakson was a dutiful soldier, an Ice-Born man through and through with unfailing loyalty to king and country. So Raengar had come, trusting that Tag would not waste his time.
He had also come to meet Erich Sumavari. The House of Death’s royal family was famous for being secretive. After most of them had been butchered during the War of Sumavari, they had started to hide their identities from the rest of the Realms. The first time Raengar had seen Queen Rosalie Sumavari was at her coronation. He had grown up with the rest of the princes and princesses of the Realm, but not the Sumavaris. He would not squander an opportunity to meet another Sumavari, who was not only a prince of the House of Death, but the general for House of Death’s army.
Raengar had to admit that the novelty of meeting the prince was absolutely not worth his pain and suffering, however. Erich had insisted he take Raengar up here himself. On foot. The fewer scents on the trail the better, Erich had said. Whatever the fuck that meant.
They hiked for another thirty minutes, Raengar’s quads and glutes prickling with exhaustion, when Erich finally held up a hand. “We’re here.”
Raengar looked around at the balsam pine trees that looked exactly the same as the other 600,000 balsam pines they’d hiked past for the last two hours. Raengar pinched the bridge of his nose. “We are where exactly?”
Erich kept creeping through the woods, before falling to one knee in the mud and pointing to something on the ground.
As Raengar got closer, Erich put his hand out next to the tracks.
Hoof prints. Two toes deep, heavy hoof prints that were double the size of the hand that Erich laid next to it.
Giant moose roamed freely around the Jagamine Mountains throughout the Realms, feeding large populations of dragons, felidra, and griffins throughout the country. Seeing tracks like this was not unordinary.
Raengar looked at the track with an eyebrow raised, as irritation made his throat tight. “A moose?”
“No, too big.”
“Elk?”
He shook his head.
“A giant cow then?” Gods, Raengar was going to pitch this raggedy son of a bitch off the side of the mountain.
Erich shook his head. “No, it’s too big for either of those. We think it’s a . . . we think it’s a minotaur track.”
Raengar’s irritation evaporated, and trepidation took its place. Raengar’s head snapped up to look at Erich’s face. No obvious lie was detectable in his dark gray eyes, but to say that he thought the tracks belonged to a minotaur was a very serious claim.
Minotaur’s didn’t belong to the world of Illus naturally. The only record of minotaurs were those that were summoned from hell. They were monsters only spawned from the Pits. Pits were opened when a mass amount of magic was burst in the ground and a bridge of sorts was formed from Hell to Illus. Monsters of all forms would try and flood through the connection, some fighting for the chance to live in a world other than Hell, some fighting for the chance to prey on the people.
There had been two Pit Wars before in recorded history, the last one had been a horrific bloodbath for all the countries on Illus.
If a minotaur truly was in these mountains, then it would confirm that a Pit had been opened again, that Lyondrea was summoning them, and that the Realms would shortly be going to war in an effort to close the Pit before too many creatures came through the connection.
Raengar resisted the urge to reach out and grab Erich by the front of his black chainmail armor. “Do you know what it would mean if it was a minotaur track?”
Erich reluctantly nodded his head.
“Have you or your men seen one?”
“No, but the tracks . . . they go for miles back and forth from here to Lyondrea and they are too big to be moose; no cattle live this far up—”
“But how do you know—”
As if in answer to the question burning on Raengar’s tongue, a deep, nightmarish roar ripped through the air behind them.
Raengar was up and around with his sword drawn before the sound pinched off. “Go back Erich, fetch Tag. Get Deimos.”
“I’m not leaving you here—”
“Unless you have a shit-ton of Death Magick at your disposal that I don’t know about, I want you out of my way. Now.”
Erich was dangerous, he was good with his sword and had a mind made for war. There was a reason that his sister had named him her general. When it came to hand-to-hand combat, however, Raengar would smear the floor with him. Raengar was taller, burlier, and had been raised by Katalon the Corrupt to become the most lethal man on the planet from the day he was born, six hundred and thirty-two years ago.
“Magick won’t work against it. Some Pit monsters have an Obsidian Circlet—” Erich protested, but Raengar cut him off.
“Erich,” Raengar bit off, perfectly aware of what the obsidian circlet meant to him. “Deimos. Now, Sumavari.”
Sagely, Erich shut his mouth, and Raengar heard him start to run back through the thicket that they had just hiked through.
Raengar waited for a minute, maybe two, the blood rushing in his ears, and his pulse nothing but thunder in his veins, when the minotaur finally stepped out of the bush.
Half man, half bull, the minotaur was a sight straight from nightmares. It was huge, seven feet tall with horns that spanned out threateningly to each side at least three feet, and a thick black fur that covered it from horn to hoof.
Raengar’s eyes locked on the black crystal embedded in the minotaur’s forehead and cursed. An Obsidian Circlet. A gift from the God of Monsters to protect his children against the magick of the Gifted. It made monsters immune to magick and made them extremely hard to kill.
The minotaur turned to face him, sniffing loudly. It roared before lowering its massive head and charged. Raengar lunged to the right, narrowly missing the minotaur’s outstretched arm.
Like most of the Pit creatures, minotaurs had varying levels of sentience ranging from creature to creature. If Raengar could talk to him, and find out what was going on, maybe the minotaur would be an invaluable asset.
“Can you speak?” Raengar yelled at the creature. But he was only answered by a loud bellow. The minotaur was fast enough to grab onto the front of Raengar’s tunic but not fast enough to dodge as Raengar sliced his sword up, and severed the minotaur’s hand off.
Raengar was sprayed with blood as the minotaur bellowed in pain, turned, and ran into the forest. Raengar sent a shard of ice after him, hoping to strike him through the heart, but the shard hit the minotaur’s back and splintered away uselessly. The obsidian circlet mounted in the minotaur’s head protected the creature from Raengar’s magick as it sprinted away on legs much faster than Raengar’s own.
The implication sat heavily in Raengar’s chest as he watched the beast disappear through the trees.
He didn’t have any proof.
There were no other witnesses to see the Minotaur in all its fury besides the King Butcher himself.
The Council of Houses in Valitlinn would never accept that as enough proof to send the Realms into war, and yet every day they waited was another day that Lyondrea was dragging Pit Monsters out of hell.
That’s how Tag and his men found Raengar. He was staring off into the Jagamine Forest on his knees, covered in dark red minotaur blood.
“Fetch my Blood Hawk,” Raengar ordered, not bothering to look at any of them. “Lyondrea has reopened the fucking Pits.”
Tag grunted his assent, and Raengar finally turned to look up at his second in command. “And someone tell Erich that I will freeze the balls off the next man who calls me the Butcher King.”