Flametouched

  Flametouched

  By Brian K. Fuller

  FLAMETOUCHED

  Copyright © 2016 by Brian K. Fuller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portion thereof, in any form.

  First Edition

  briankfullerbooks@gmail.com

  briankfullerbooks.com

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  A big thanks to those picture books

  of sabertooth tigers I flipped through as a kid and

  to Jane Austen’s novels I read in college.

  The wild and the civilized – always better

  together.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Prologue

  The voice only he could hear started teaching him when he was just a boy. While much of the instruction whispered to him over the years jumbled about in his memory, the first lesson, the very first step in a journey nearing its completion, he would never forget.

  He had just lifted one of the flat, gray slate stones in the field of one of his father’s tenants. Four Peacock beetles scrambled around in the depression, sunlight accenting the delicate purple and green lines on the bulbous carapace of their bodies. Each beetle was the size of a man’s thumb with spindly, barbed legs and long antennae flailing in confusion, fumbling to understand the strange change in light and pressure.

  The soft pricks of the tiny legs didn’t bother a boy like him, though he knew his sister wouldn’t feel the same. Carefully he pinched a beetle between his thumb and forefinger and held it up to the sun to get a better look at the purple and green patterns on its back, the lustrous sheen shimmering wherever the sun struck it.

  He placed the insect in his palm and it circled about, antennae tickling his skin, probing where it might go to escape its confinement. He remembered thinking that a few of the little creatures in his sister’s bed would frighten her into enough screaming and yelling to deserve a whipping. Father had made it clear that at all times his children were to control themselves and be civilized, beetles or no.

  After he had admired the beauty of the Peacock beetle a few moments more, the steady, whispering voice spoke for the first time.

  Crush it.

  It should have surprised him more, but it almost seemed a part of him, a silent partner that had finally decided to speak up. Oddly, he couldn’t recall any effort to disagree or even an attempt to think at all. Perhaps it was because the Voice sounded like his own, though it clearly wasn’t his mind or his ideas.

  So without a second thought, he took the thumb of his other hand and ground the beetle into his palm, its pus-like innards popping all over his skin and spattering onto his clothes, mixing with the shattered fragments of its delicate shell. The beauty had fled, replaced by a sloppy goo that was, even to his boyish mind, ugly and revolting. He felt a sense of loss, a wrongness, as if something good had gone.

  It is only a beetle. Your emotions blind you to its insignificance. Crush another.

  He pulled another beetle from the depression, this time squeezing his victim between his finger and thumb until it exploded. The antennae continued to wiggle for some time afterward. Odd.

  Another.

  Soon he had exhausted his supply of Peacock beetles, and by the end of a day spent pulling up slate and destroying the creatures, the sense of loss he had initially felt was gone, too. By the end of that week he had massacred more beetles than he could count. He chopped them in half with knives, pulled their legs off, threw them on hot coals, smeared them into rocks, lined them up and jumped on them one by one, and on and on in an endless and macabre roll.

  Of course, all was done in secret beyond the watchful gaze of everyone. The Voice insisted on secrecy. The lesson was a gift for him alone. He was special. So when it told him to poke the eyes out of a fish, he did it. When it told him to maim a rabbit and throw rocks at it until it was dead, he did it. When it told him to pull the wings off screaming baby birds and feed them to the dogs, he did it. Sometimes it took days, sometimes months, but the Voice showed him again and again that he need not feel any remorse for these acts of destruction. Death was a part of life. Feeling sad or guilty for causing it was nonsense.

  Gutting the family dog when he was fifteen set him back in his progress. Its yelps of surprised pain struck an odd nerve within him. The Voice berated him for his guilty feelings and he felt ashamed. It took two more dogs and one of the hunting hounds before he could slaughter them with equanimity. His father believed a sabercat hunting in the area had done the deeds and had even set out to track it down. The father invited his son along on the expedition, but the son declined so he could go to the reeds by the pond and stomp on duck eggs.

  Of course, he kept up pretenses. Luckily, this took little work. His father punished his sister for her exaggerated weeping and moaning over the dog. The sister sought comfort from the brother and he gave it. She did not have his understanding, after all, and was to be pitied. She did not comprehend the fundamental impermanence of everything, the power of working with death rather than running from it. She held on to her hope in the Eternal Flame, an undying relic of the past. She didn’t understand that it, too, could end. The Voice told him so. It promised to show him how to do it.

  When he married, the Voice’s lessons helped him rid himself of his new bride’s annoying pet bird. It was pure white, large, and loud the whole day long. He bashed its head against a rock until it shut up and then gutted and de-feathered it. His cooks had no idea what it was when he brought it to them and had them baste it in butter and serve it as part of dinner. He wanted to laugh as his weepy, whining wife bemoaned her escaped bird while she washed it down with red wine. The Voice chastised him for his mirth. Just as there should be no pain in death, there should be no pleasure, either. All life came to an end, and it didn’t matter at all.

  His regret returned when he smothered his first born child, a delicate boy. Again the Voice scolded him and steeled his mind and heart with its stoic inculcations. It required the murder his second born as proof that he had absorbed the lesson. The second child, a girl, was born when winter and the Wasting Wind beat against the house. After he had smothered her cries, he blamed a servant for leaving the window in the nursery open. His family considered him merciful when
he refused to seek any sort of revenge upon the frightened, defensive maid. The Voice didn’t require her life, and he rarely took the initiative without its prompting.

  And so, when four years ago he had attended court in Bellshire, the capital of his nation, Bittermarch, the rhetoric of Ambassador Clout from the nation of Creetis—long antagonistic toward Bittermarch—struck a chord within him. The ambassador claimed the Eternal Flame nothing more than a parlor trick meant to help keep the House of Light in power and to lend the Queen a tool for controlling the people. She claimed the Flame genuine and unquenchable.

  The Voice knew the truth. Everything ended. Everything. The Eternal Flame was no trick, but it could be killed just as readily as a beetle or a bird or a dog or a baby. So he went to the Ambassador and told him so, confirming the man’s carefully reasoned arguments with half-truths he knew he would find attractive. He had an ally.

  But the time for the quenching had not come—yet. It took years to set his pieces on the game board and manipulate the already treasonous leanings of some of his peers. He never told them the truth of his purpose, of course. He had relied on seductive arguments that made the nobility feel cheated and less important than others. This was easily done as they seemed almost eager to feel slighted and exact revenge against their perceived oppressors.

  The long wait for the final act was nearly over. Ambassador Clout of Creetis moved quickly now. His countrymen starved and he needed to find a way to take some of Bittermarch’s prosperity from them. The Voice had started to speak more frequently as the conspiracy prepared to bear fruit. He killed more. He understood the world more. He felt less, as was proper.

  The unlearned and the ignorant would consider his actions a crime, his aims a heresy. The real crime was that no one understood but him. But when the Eternal Flame was quenched, when the eternal and unending became mortal and extinguished, the instruction for all would begin. He would make them understand. There was nothing on which one could rely for comfort or hope. Acceptance of the fickle, deadly world just as it was led to true enlightenment and peace. The Creetisians understood this better than Bittermarchians, but even they had not truly grasped it. The Voice had elevated him to teacher, and his lessons would come swiftly.

  Chapter 1

  Baron Davon Carver braced himself against a solitary oak, long rifle jammed firmly against his shoulder. Hunting sabercats near the edge of the White Waste in autumn was sheer folly; hunting them alone was stupidity incarnate. A hunter got one shot and one shot only against the agile beasts that ruled the Waste. They feared nothing and had in ages past developed a taste for human blood.

  Experience was Davon’s only ally, and he hadn’t paid it much heed today. If his shot missed the furtive animal that lurked somewhere in the tall grass ahead of him he would have no time to fish another bullet from his bag and slide it into the breech loader for a second attempt. The sabercat would simply run him down and tear him apart.

  Keeping one hand on the rifle, he removed his finger from the trigger and scratched an itch on his neck, another foolish thing to do. Sun and wind had tanned and weathered his skin during his frequent trips into the wild. His dark complexion made him, perhaps, the swarthiest Lord in all the peerage of Bittermarch, weathered face aging a twenty-eight year old into something that looked a few years older.

  Standing in the cold, the first flurries of the season trickling down from a moody sky, he knew he was taking horrible chances with his life, but the knowledge had no power over his heart—he simply didn’t care. He wouldn’t have even hunted near the chill of the White Waste so close to winter if his marriage hadn’t turned his home into something far colder than the numbing breeze from the south that pushed his scent straight toward the sabercat.

  His quarry was concealed in the long grasses of the rolling, northern plains that had all bent down, brown and brittle, in forced submission to the autumn cold that had stripped them of color and strength. He knew it was out there. Davon had waited for nearly fifteen minutes for it to emerge, the waning day getting darker and colder along with his thoughts.

  At any time the sabercat could spring and use its massive, razor-sharp teeth to tear his flesh and sever his arteries until he bled out. Violent thoughts of his own brutal demise on an unforgiving plain miles from anyone failed to raise any sense of caution within him. He shook his head. Was death really preferable to going home to her cold, passionless expression?

  “Good evening, Lady Carver,” he would say upon his return.

  “Good evening, my Lord,” she would reply, gaze fixed through the drawing room windows to the woods near Frostbourne, a place she hated almost as much as she hated him. “Did you manage to kill anything?”

  “No, but I was nearly gored to death by a sabercat this afternoon,” he might say.

  “Hmmm,” she would hum in reply, not really paying attention.

  How had it all gone so wrong? He had surprised her with musicians all the way from Bellshire. He had invited her obnoxious sister and her husband to lodge with them for the summer. He had brought her flowers, written her notes, complimented her incessantly, taken her on trips to every large town within a week’s distance so she could shop for the latest fashions. All he got in return was a steadily more practiced smile and an increasingly trite, “Thank you, my Lord.” He had even tried to pen a poem. A poem!

  And there was no way out. While he had grounds to divorce her, he wouldn’t do it. Hadn’t he disastrously defended her honor while they were engaged? Divorcing her now on moral grounds would make no sense and sully her name forever. He refused to take the advice of his longtime steward, Saunders, and do what every other Lord did—take a mistress and be done with it. He did not want to hurt her. He did want her to love him, but she refused to engage him and nothing he had done changed her feelings.

  A rustle in the grass seventy-five yards ahead of him banished his tormenting thoughts for a moment, and he reaffixed the rifle butt to his shoulder. He hadn’t even realized he had relaxed his stance. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy! Did he want the sabercat to take him down and kill him?

  Be calm. Stay focused, he thought to himself, trying to clear his head of Lady Carver.

  The flurries had nearly thickened enough to be called snow. It was late in the day, and he needed to get home before the temperature plummeted. There was no leaving now, however. If he turned to head back to where he had staked out his horse in the protected enclosure, the sabercat would take him down in an instant. Either he killed the cat or the cat killed him.

  And then it came.

  The hungry predator exploded from its hiding place and tore at him like a fierce mountain gale. Ears pinned back, the tawny sabercat whipped through the grass, yellow eyes wide and focused, curved incisors dripping in anticipation of a fresh meal to pass a cold evening.

  Davon sighted down the barrel and waited for the large carnivore to get close enough for a surer shot. The intervening grass complicated his aim. Fifty yards. Forty yards. At thirty yards he exhaled and squeezed the trigger, aiming just below the head where the sabercat’s heart beat furiously and air swelled its lungs. All he got was a harsh plink! and a wisp of black smoke from the barrel.

  A misfire.

  Instinct ordered him to retreat behind the wide bole of the bare oak tree, pull the knives he’d fashioned from the teeth of a sabercat he’d killed two months earlier, and hope against hope to do enough damage to scare it away. Running was pointless. Clearing the bad cartridge and reloading was too slow.

  But instead of panic, a strange calm settled over him like a warm blanket and he dropped his rifle into the lifeless grass at his feet. He had made an amateur hunter’s mistake, and that mistake was the perfect excuse to bring his suffering to an end. Stepping out from behind the tree, he closed his eyes, extended his arms, and waited for the sabercat to send him to the warmth and light of the Eternal Flame.

  Lady Carver would be free. He would be free, too.

  On its first pass, the sabercat blasted him
to the ground with a heavy hit to the midsection. He landed hard on his back in the dense grass, the impact evicting the air from his lungs. Again, instinct told him to move, to attempt to save his own life. Again, his heart and his will simply refused. In an instant, the sabercat returned. Davon kept his eyes closed, listening as it rustled the grass nearby and finally settled over him. Its hot breath warmed his chilled face, and the tips of its claws dug into his skin where a single paw compressed his chest and made it difficult to breathe. Where would it start to tear into him?

  He waited. And waited. The sabercat’s breathing gradually slowed and Davon swallowed hard and kept his eyes squeezed shut. Playing dead did not work with sabercats. They would eat anything in times of feast or famine. The beast had to bulk up for the winter now or risk death itself, so why wasn’t it chewing him up or toying with him? He had seen a sabercat play a gruesome game with a pronghorn for nearly thirty minutes before puncturing its neck and ending it. Perhaps the cat was bored and hoping his lordly catch would provide some squirming entertainment before finishing him off.

  Davon opened his eyes.

  It stared unblinkingly at him, golden irises almost seeming to glow in the weakening light. Perhaps all it wants is acknowledgment, he thought. It had won. It wanted him to show it. Davon met the sabercat’s primitive, powerful gaze for an agony of time, wondering what it was waiting for. The longer the odd scene played itself out, the calmer Davon felt, at least until the sabercat lifted its head and bellowed into the wind, a horrible sound that chilled him to the bone. It turned its head toward him again, and with one powerful swipe of its claws cut three lines down the length of his sternum, shredding his shirt and slicing completely through the strap of his ammunition pouch.

  Davon howled in pain. His hand reflexively clutched at the stinging wounds. Now I die. His mind seemed to detach from the scene around him and he closed his eyes again, hoping the sabercat would be quick. But the expected mutilation never came. The warm breath on his face was replaced by the cold breeze and the chill pricks of snowflakes on his skin. The grass rustled as the animal stepped away. Dumbfounded, he struggled to sit upright, opening his eyes to find the sabercat calmly padding back toward the White Waste, tail swishing back and forth.