The Ashen Brotherhood

Chapter 4: The Price of Survival

The wound was infected.

Caelan knew the moment he woke, his shoulders were burning with the kind of heat that had nothing to do with fever dreams. He pulled back his torn shirt and saw the gash from the Legion ambush—red, swollen, and a weeping fluid that reek of corruption.

"Let me see." Joss crossed the small cave, his massive frame blocking what the little light filtered down from above.

"It is fine." Caelan tried to cover the wound, but Joss pushed his hand away.

The giant studied the infection with clinical detachment. "You have two days before the poison spreads to your blood. After that, you die." He opened his pack and pulled out a leather kit. "This will hurt."

"Everything hurts." Caelan braced himself against the stone wall.

Joss worked quickly, cleaning the wound with something that burned like liquid fire. Caelan's vision went white with pain, but he made no sound. Twenty six years of surviving had taught him that screaming changed nothing.

"The blade was poisoned," Joss said, packing the wound with herbs. "Cheap Legion trick. Means to kill you slowly if the cut does not."

"Can you stop it?" Rhen asked from the cave entrance, where he was keeping watch.

"I can slow it. But he needs proper medicine." Joss tied off the bandage with brutal efficiency. "There is a supply cache that is two days' climb from here. Old Westmark outpost. If it has not been looted, there will be antitoxin."

Caelan did the math. Two days to the cache, time to find the medicine, then continuing through the Scar. They had twelve days left before Aldric's inauguration. The margins were too thin.

"We keep moving," he said, standing despite the way the cave tilted around him. "We cannot afford delays."

"You cannot afford to die," Joss countered.

"Then I will die moving forward." Caelan sheathed his blade, ignoring how his hand trembled. "Aldric is twelve days from becoming untouchable. I will not fail again because I was too weak to push through the pain."

Joss studied him for a long moment. "You are like me. You would rather die than live with another failure."

"Is that not why you are here?"

"Yes." Joss shouldered his pack. "But I have already lost everything. You still have something to fight for."

"Revenge is not something. That is all I have left."

"I was not talking about revenge." Joss glanced at Rhen, then back to Caelan. "But you will figure that out yourself. Or you will not."

They climbed.

The Scar revealed new horrors with each passing hour. There are sections where the walls are so tight that they have to move sideways and pack scraping stone.

The rope bridges spanned the gaps so wide that falling meant minutes of screaming before the impact. And always, the sounds from below—howls, whispers and things that might have been words.

Caelan's shoulder worsened each hour. The infection spread tendrils of red across his chest, and his fever increase until sweat soaked his clothes despite the cold.

"We need to rest," Rhen said, catching him when he stumbled.

"No time."

"You are about to fall off a cliff because you cannot walk straight. We rest."

They found a shelf of stone barely wide enough for the three of them. Caelan collapsed against the wall, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The world swam in and out of focus.

"Drink this." Joss pressed a waterskin to his lips. The liquid tasted bitter and medicinal. "It will buy you a few more hours."

"What was that?" Caelan asked when he could speak.

"Something I made from Scar plants. It will slow the poison but also slow your heart. If I give you too much, you will die. And, if I give you too little, the poison will kill you." Joss corked the waterskin. "Welcome to field medicine."

Rhen sat beside them, sharpening his knife with nervous energy. "Tell me about Aldric. Before he betrayed you. What was he like?"

Caelan closed his eyes, remembering. "He was brilliant. Patient. He found me when I was twelve, after raiders killed my village. I was hiding in the ruins, half-dead from hunger." The memories came sharp and clear despite the fever. "He could have left me. Instead, he took me to Valdris. Fed me. Trained me. Made me into something more than a starving orphan."

"He made you into a weapon," Rhen said quietly.

"Yes. But I was grateful for it. I had a purpose. Family. The king treated me like a son. Aldric treated me like—" Caelan's voice caught. "I thought he treated me like I mattered. Now I know I was just a tool he kept sharp until I needed to be discarded."

"You mattered to your king," Joss said. "I saw how you fought to reach him. How you knelt beside his body. That was not the behavior of a tool. That was loyalty."

"Loyalty that came too late."

"You were twenty miles away because Aldric sent you. The fault is his, not yours."

Caelan wanted to believe that. But the merchant's face haunted him—the man he had killed, the innocent investigator who might have saved everything if Caelan had questioned his orders just once.

"I never questioned him," Caelan said. "In twenty six years, I never for once doubted his orders. What does that make me?"

"Human," Rhen answered. "You trusted someone you should have been able to trust. That is not a weakness. That is normal."

"Normal people don't kill on command."

"No. But normal people can't survive what you have survived. They don't protect kingdoms for decades. They don't cross the Scar with infected wounds because they refuse to fail again." Rhen met his eyes. "You are not what Aldric made you. You are what you choose to be now."

The words settled into Caelan's chest, heavy and strange. He had spent so long being the Shadow that he had forgotten there might be something else. Someone else.

A sound echoed up from below. Not the creature howls this time. Human voices. Shouting commands in Legion dialect.

The three men froze.

"Impossible," Joss whispered. "No one follows into the Scar. No one."

But the voices grew closer, along with the clank of armor and weapons. A full patrol, climbing toward them with grim determination.

Caelan forced himself to his feet, drawing his blade despite how his vision swam. "They are not following. They are hunting. Aldric must have offered something significant to make them enter this place."

"Your head?" Rhen suggested.

"More than that. He is terrified." Caelan smiled without humor. "Good. Fear makes men careless."

"We cannot fight a full patrol in your condition," Joss said.

"Then we do not fight. We run."

"Run where? We are on a cliff face."

Caelan pointed up, to where the Scar's rim was barely visible. "We climb. Now."

"That is two hundred feet of sheer rock," Rhen said.

"Yes. And the Legion will expect us to go down or across, not up." Caelan sheathed his blade and gripped the stone. "So we climb."

Joss cursed in his native tongue but started climbing. Then, Rhen followed.

Caelan pulled himself up, his infected shoulder screaming with each movement. Below, the Legion voices grew louder. They had reached the shelf and found it empty.

"Where did they go?" someone shouted.

"Check below! They must have descended!"

Caelan climbed higher, his fingers slipping on stone slick with his own sweat. The fever made everything distant. He could not feel his hands anymore, and he could not tell if his grip was secure.

Fifty feet. Seventy five. One hundred.

His hand missed the next hold. He swung out, dangling by three fingers, the world spinning beneath him. For a moment, he considered letting go. It would be so easy. The pain would stop. The guilt would stop.

Then Joss's hand locked around his wrist. "Not today, Shadow. You die after Vane dies. That is the deal."

He pulled Caelan to the next ledge. Rhen was already there, pale and shaking but alive.

They climbed the rest in darkness, the Legion searching below while they escaped above. When they finally pulled themselves over the Scar's rim and collapsed in the Blackwood soil, Caelan could not tell if he was laughing or crying.

"We made it," Rhen gasped. "We actually made it through."

"The easy part," Joss corrected, pulling Caelan upright. "We still need to reach that supply cache before the poison kills him."

Caelan swayed on his feet, the world tilting dangerously. "How far?"

"Two days at normal pace. One if we push." Joss looked at him. "You have one day's worth of strength left. Maybe less."

"Then we push." Caelan took a step and nearly fell. "We push, or I die trying."

They moved through the Blackwood at a pace that should have killed them. Joss led, breaking trail with brutal efficiency. Rhen supported Caelan when his legs gave out, half-carrying him for miles at a stretch. The fever climbed higher, until Caelan could not tell what was real and what was delirium.

He saw Aldric in the shadows, smiling. Saw the king's corpse following them through the trees and he saw the merchant he had killed, asking why, why, why.

"Stay with us," Rhen kept saying. "Stay with us, Caelan. We need you."

Why? He wanted to ask. I am just a killer. Just a weapon. Aldric was right about that.

But he kept moving because stopping meant failing, and he had failed enough.

When they finally reached the supply cache—a cave hidden behind thorny brush—Caelan collapsed and did not get up. Joss disappeared inside while Rhen kept watch, one hand gripping Caelan's cold fingers.

Minutes passed. Or hours. Time meant nothing anymore.

Then Joss emerged, his face grim. "The cache has been looted. Everything useful is gone."

Rhen's grip tightened. "Then he is going to die."

"Not yet." Joss knelt beside Caelan, pulling out a knife. "There is one option left. But he will not like it."

Through the fever haze, Caelan understood. "Burn it out."

"Yes. The infection is localized in your shoulder. If I burn deep enough, I can kill the poison before it spreads." Joss's expression was sympathetic. "But it will hurt worse than anything you have felt. And you might not survive the shock."

Caelan looked up at the canopy above, at the patches of sky visible between branches. Eleven days left. Eleven days to reach Aldric.

"Do it," he said.

Joss heated his knife in a small fire until the blade glowed red.

Rhen looked away. "I cannot watch this."

"Then do not." Caelan closed his eyes. "Just make sure I do not bite through my tongue."

The blade touched his shoulder, and the world became nothing but fire and was screaming darkness.