Chapter One – The Cleansing of Darnuth Keep by Kelly D. Tolman

Posted by admin on September 29, 2008

The Cleansing of Darnuth Keep is a fantasy novel describing the adventures of Colter Halfspear as he becomes a man and an initiate of magical powers.

I pulled up a bucket of water from our well out on the old farm. My father built it a few kilometers east of Dunston near a low rocky hill where he could defend it easily if needed. In the spring when the buds and shoots gave new life I often roamed the hills in search of adventure. Summer came early, and the sun pounded hotter than even mamma could remember. Drought had turned the farm into a worn down shell of nothing. Our few cattle died during the cold but too dry winter. Crops refused to grow. Nothing had a will to stay alive out there, not then. Despite our losses, I always found the farm a nice place.

We needed the bucket of water for Corbetta, my little sister, who slept. I knew she was sick, probably dying. Mamma sent me to get the water as much to help Betta as to get me out of the way.

I brought the water back and sloshed the bucket onto the table in the back room of our house. Once it had been a rather fine mansion. Now it was two rooms, one where we slept and received guests and one where we ate. The fire two winters before had burned everything. Without money we could only repair so much.

“Do you want me to get some tyrnwood,” I asked her.

“No, I don’t want you going out anywhere.” I never saw her frightened, or at least I never noticed it before, but lately mamma seemed frightened a lot. Then her voice softened. She tried to coax me out of going. Her weathered face was gentle most of the time. “It’s getting dark, son. It may not be safe.” Her jet-black hair, just gray at the temples, hung to her waist, and her green eyes looked at me full of love and tender concern.

“I’ll be careful,” I protested. “I’ll take the bow. Besides, I won’t go far.”

She relented with a sigh. “Leave the bow, Colter. You won’t be able to use it in the dark.” I think that’s the one thing I remember best about mamma. She always had common sense. Others tell me about how their mother could cook one thing or another, but my mother had sense. So I left, out into the fading sunlight to find a handful of tyrnwood and hope it would help.

Tyrnwood flourishes in the late summer. Midsummer had not yet reached us and the plant was still hard to find. But I knew where to look. More importantly I knew where to look without hurting my feet. I owned no shoes to wear day-to-day then. I used a pair of my father’s shoes for special times, but not for scouting tyrnwood.

Across the valley I saw the faint light of the nearest farm as they settled in for the evening. Their farm suffered like ours, though they hadn’t yet lost their livestock. Although one large ranch ran cattle near Kerby a few kilometers further west, the farms near Dunston clustered closer to the village. Our farm ranged farthest out, where my father cleared land for himself and built a buffer between the wild and the rest of the valley.

A patch of tyrnwood by a dry creak bed liked to come up early each summer, and I could follow the path easily in the moonlight. Tylos blessed my efforts. It may have been the rising full moon, or just some lucky guess, but I spotted a plant and pulled it out gently. Then I heard the distinct but still distant snap of a twig.

Under the light of a full moon on a farm with no animals, that twig meant something unfriendly must be out there. Though only a boy of fourteen summers, I had sense not to drop the tyrnwood and skill not to make more noise than necessary. No ranger of the south could have made a faster, more effortless trip back to the house. I knew every rock and shrub near our farm and I loved every meter of it.

We hung a tattered blanket at the back of the house in place of a door. We built the new room after the fire consumed most of the old house. One room from the older part of the house, the brick house as we called it, remained in tact but ugly from the fire. Once my mother welcomed wealthy guests in the great hall, and served wonderful parties. Now, with burned out doorways boarded up, it served as a place to sleep and talk while my mother tried to explain away our misery.

Mamma watched me come in and read my face instantly. “There is something out there,” I said. “It moves on two legs. I’m sure.”

“Give me the tyrnwood, and get the bow and your father’s spear.”

We kept my father’s spear in a creaky old chest in the great hall. My sister slept on the bed in one corner, sick and hot with fever. I dug out the weapons and waited. I heard my mother bolt the sturdy original door to the front of the house. She waited silently. We had no door between the two rooms, and I could see by the light of the embers of the dying fire out to the shadow of the blanket at the back of the house. A trail behind the house led into the low hills of the eastern empire. Beyond the partial walls my father had started to build, stretched a wild expanse only lightly patrolled by imperial soldiers. Since my father’s death, the paths leading to our door had grown more dangerous each winter.

As I crouched in the darkness, waiting for the unknown, I concentrated on trying to breathe silently for the first time in my life. I had played hide and seek with other village boys, but this time the danger was real and I held a bow in my hands. I noticed a slight movement in the shadows, some flicker of starlight out of place. Although I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, I drew and fired an arrow in one smooth motion. From a very young age my father taught me to hunt and shoot, but I was too small to pull the bow to its full length. The arrow did less damage than I expected.

The creature screamed out in pain and anger and lashed about with horns and claws. It paused long enough to glance around the room. Then it caught my scent because it charged into our home with one arm dangling uselessly at its side. I tried to get the half-spear into my hands but fumbled in the dark and it rolled away. In the next instant the beast lunged and pinned me to the ground. I could smell the foul breath, like rotten meat and vomit, closing in all around me.

Somewhere in the darkness mamma screamed and for the briefest moment the beast turned its attention away from me. I kicked and pushed and managed to grab the spear, but in the darkness and fright I couldn’t tell the sharp end from the blunt and had no idea how to attack with it anyway. I thrust what I hoped to be the point, but it quickly snatched the spear from my hands and I heard it clatter to the floor. In desperation I threw up my arms, and it began lashing at me with its horrible claws, rending my arms, shirt and chest. I heard another scream, or maybe two, in the dark. Then I felt the great weight of the beast suddenly collapse over me. It stopped scratching and biting, but I felt I would be smothered. In the darkness I heard my mother crying and calling my name.

“I’m all right mamma,” I said, though I’m sure I sounded awful. “I’m a bit scratched up, but I’m all right.”

“I had our knife hidden,” she said. “Oh, Colter, I thought you were dead. It was lashing and growling.”

“I’m okay. I’m alive.” To my own astonishment and I’m sure to my mother’s, I was indeed alive and only badly scratched instead of bleeding to death. We dragged it outside, into the cool dark night and prayed to Tylos to save us from any more harm.

“Was that a Kaarum?” I asked. I had heard stories, everyone has heard stories, but I had never seen one.

“Yes, but they haven’t been heard of in this part of the empire in many winters, not since your father went to war. You were just a little boy then, and Betta wasn’t born yet.”

“Will there be more of them then?”

“Not tonight. Kaarum hunt in packs, or alone, didn’t your father teach you that?” I remembered he had, but I knew better than to say anything. “Now get some rest. Tomorrow Master Wilder is coming, and I think we should go into Dunston with him. The village council will want to hear about this.”

Terror gripped me through the night. Even after the crickets started again and the warm summer night washed over me I felt alone and exposed. I held back the tears that night by clutching my father’s spear and fell asleep in my mother’s arms. It is right for a boy to be frightened. It is good. Nobody should live in a world where there is so much evil that children aren’t afraid of it anymore.

Copyright 2008 Kelly David Tolman

On to The Cleansing of Darnuth Keep Fantasy Novel Chapter Two

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