Location: The Foothills Outside Fubar
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Fall
Barkla’s tunnel, as luck or dwarven memory would have it, had let them out not far from the very sewer grate Emcorae and Nathily had first forced open two nights before. It was Nathily who remembered the promise first — Mossflower’s nose pressed to her palm, the whispered vow to return — and despite everything still weighing on them, despite Barkla’s own warning that they’d bought themselves nothing more than a morning’s grace, she found she could not simply walk past that debt unpaid.
They found the gully within the hour, and there, grazing at the tree line with the particular unbothered patience of creatures who had never once doubted their riders would return, stood Mossflower and Joanne. Joanne, true to her nature, barely lifted her head from an ongoing investigation of some cluster of thistle-berries she’d apparently deemed a delicacy worth ignoring an entire war for. Mossflower was rather more attentive, her ears pricking forward the instant Nathily’s scent reached her on the wind.
But it was the shadow at the tree line beyond them that stopped both Azoras cold.
Something crouched low in the brush a little ways off — grey-coated, powerful, watching the horses with an intensity that made Nathily’s hand fly to her falchia before conscious thought had caught up with instinct. Emcorae was already drawing his katana, the memory of a rabid, snarling shape on the Iron-Haul still fresh enough to color his alarm, when the creature rose from its crouch and came padding out into the open — and the horses, rather than bolting, barely reacted at all.
“That’s—” Nathily started, disbelief creeping into her voice.
She never finished. Barkla, coming up the slope behind them with his makeshift bundle of belongings slung over one shoulder, let out a whoop of pure delight and broke into a run, and the great wolfhound answered him with a bark that cracked halfway into something closer to a sob of joy, bounding forward to meet him with an eagerness that flattened the dwarf flat onto his back in the grass.
“Garf, you great mangy beast!” Barkla laughed, wrestling with the hound as it lapped at his blood-crusted face with frantic, delighted licks, recognizing him — Nathily understood now, watching — not by any helm or crest or scrap of armor, since Barkla wore none of it, but simply by scent and shape and the particular weight of a friend he’d feared he might never find again. “Aye, I missed you too! Get off, get off, you overgrown pup, let me breathe!”
Emcorae lowered his blade slowly, katana hanging forgotten at his side as he watched the reunion unfold. “That’s the same beast that stalked us on the Iron-Haul.”
“Aye,” Nathily said softly, some old guilt she’d carried since that mournful howl finally beginning to unknot in her chest. “And I owe him an apology, it seems, for ever doubting what he wanted from us.”
It took the better part of a candlemark for the reunions to properly run their course — Emcorae with Joanne, burying his face against her neck in a silence that said more than words could have; Nathily with Mossflower, murmuring soft elven endearments against the mare’s velvet nose; and Barkla, still tangled with Garf in the grass, laughing in a way Nathily suspected he hadn’t allowed himself since long before his capture.
It was Nathily, reaching for the old tethering gift of her people, who learned the fuller truth of it from the horses themselves — fragmented impressions of fear and flight, the wolfhound’s shadow dogging their trail through the borderlands, and then, at last, the cornering in a tight glade that both mares had been certain would end in blood.
“He never meant them harm,” she said, relaying it to Emcorae in fits and starts as the images settled into something like a story. “He cornered them only because he couldn’t make them understand otherwise — he was trying to learn if they belonged to Drokka masters, the same way he tried with us on the trail. Once they stopped running long enough to actually look at him, they understood. He’s been watching over them ever since.”
“Then why didn’t you just tell us that yourself, on the trail?” Emcorae asked, not entirely joking, glancing toward the wolfhound.
Garf, extracting himself at last from beneath a laughing Barkla, gave a low, almost sheepish huff and pawed once at the ground in Emcorae’s direction, and something about the gesture was so plainly apologetic that even Nathily found herself laughing despite the ache still sitting heavy in her chest from everything the last two days had cost them.
The laughter did not last.
It was Garf who broke it, bounding suddenly toward Barkla’s meager bundle of salvaged belongings where it lay discarded in the grass, sniffing at the stolen sword and the few scraps he’d carried out of the Ninth Ward with an urgency that turned, within moments, to visible distress. The wolfhound’s head came up sharply, swiveling in every direction, searching, whining low in his throat — waiting, Nathily understood with a sinking heart, for a second familiar scent that should have accompanied the first.
Barkla went very still.
“He’s looking for Brega,” Emcorae said quietly, and did not need to ask whether he was right.
Garf’s search grew more frantic, more confused, circling Barkla and whining at a pitch that climbed steadily toward something far worse, and when at last the wolfhound turned to fix his master with a look of pure, uncomprehending appeal — where is he, where is the other one, why does he smell of grief and nothing else — Barkla’s face crumpled in a way that no army, no dungeon, no torture Ramssee’s men could devise had managed to break.
He did not speak. He only bowed his head, and the silence that followed said everything Garf needed to understand.
The howl that came then was unlike anything Nathily had heard in all her years in Arbola’s canopy — a raw, bottomless wail of grief that seemed to rise from somewhere older than language, rolling out across the foothills until even the wind itself seemed to still in deference to it. It went on, and on, and on, each fresh cry tearing fresh grief loose from all of them, until at last the great hound simply folded himself against Barkla’s chest and would not be moved, and the dwarf wrapped both arms around him and wept without shame, for the first time since any of them had known him.
Nobody spoke for a long while after that.
It was Nathily, eventually, who remembered the second burden Mossflower still carried — a long, cloth-wrapped shape she had recovered near Rasburg on their journey south, never quite certain, until this moment, why she’d thought to keep it. She retrieved it now with hands that trembled more than she expected, and unwrapped it before Barkla with a gentleness that felt, somehow, wholly inadequate to the moment.
“I believe this belonged to your brother,” she said softly, offering the gilded meiterstaff across her open palms.
For one unguarded instant, something almost like a smile touched Barkla’s ruined face — recognition, tenderness, the ghost of some private memory neither Azora would ever be permitted to share. Even Garf lifted his head at the sight of it, ears pricking with a confused, hopeful eagerness that broke worse than the howling had.
Then Barkla’s expression collapsed into something far darker, and with a roar of pure anguish he tore the staff from her hands, surged to his feet, and brought it crashing down against his own raised thigh with a violence that shattered the ancient wood in two.
“Damn you, Brega!” he bellowed, flinging the broken fragments as far into the trees as his fury could carry them. “Why did you leave me? Why did you not wait?”
Garf howled again, mournful and lost, and Joanne and Mossflower shied back from the raw force of the dwarf’s grief, and Nathily found she had no words at all left to offer — only silence, and the quiet, aching company of shared sorrow, until at last the worst of it burned itself out and Barkla sank back down into the grass, spent, Garf pressing close against his side once more.
A Place to Breathe
It was Barkla himself, some while later, who found the strength to move them all forward again. “We cannot sit in open ground much longer,” he said, his voice rough and hollowed out but steady. “There is a place — Brega and I marked it, before we ever set foot inside those cursed walls. A cave, just south, cut into the ridge. We meant it as a fallback should the city prove hostile.” His mouth twisted, bitter. “We were wiser than we knew.”
The cave, when they reached it near midday, proved shallow but defensible — a narrow mouth easily hidden by scrub, opening into a dry hollow large enough for the three of them, the horses tethered just outside among the rocks, Garf curling immediately across the entrance like a living door no one would get past without his notice.
For the first time since the sewer grate had closed over their heads two nights before, they allowed themselves something like rest. Nathily tended the worst of Barkla’s wounds with what remained of her supplies, the dwarf grunting through it with more patience than either Azora had expected of him. Emcorae shared out the last of their dried rations. And slowly, as the adrenaline of the last two days finally began to ebb, the conversation Barkla had demanded back in the Ninth Ward found its way back to the surface.
“You owe me the rest of that Kwest,” the dwarf said, around a mouthful of waybread. “Who, and why. All of it. I’ll not be dragged across half of Terra on half an explanation.”
“Diked Dinus,” Emcorae said. “The King who was. He was never wronged by me half so badly as he’d have the world believe — Lynsy was promised to him by her father and his, a bargain struck between two old men long before either of us had any say in it. I fell in love with her anyway. Stole her from a marriage that was never going to make her happy, and I’d do it again a hundred times over.” His jaw tightened. “Diked might have let it go – after all he clearly forgot Lynsy entirely when he rose to power – although it seems he was only a puppet of this Ramssee fellow? In any event, it was Lynsy’s brother who betrayed us – Dugan Finch saw fit to remind his ‘friend’ Diked what he’d lost, and told him exactly who’d taken her – me!” He stared hard into the fire as he continued. “I’m told Diked sent his Myz to my home to find me. Kaoz murdered nearly everyone I loved in a single night — my mother, my father, more kin than I can say aloud without my voice breaking. Only my grandfather survived to tell me of it. Worst of all is that I wasn’t even there to die beside them; I was in Arbola, begging sanctuary for a woman I loved, while Kaoz slaughtered my family and dragged her away in chains instead. I swore over what graves I could find that Diked would answer for every one of those deaths, whatever it cost me to collect the debt.”
Barkla’s expression soured. “Then this Kwest chases a coward already stripped of his crown. Small satisfaction in that.”
“There may be more satisfaction in it than you think,” Nathily said carefully. “Ramssee’s own mistress told us, before we fled the palace — Diked didn’t run alone. He rode out with his bodyguard. A Myz.”
Something shifted behind Barkla’s dark eyes, slow and dangerous, like a stone beginning to roll. “Kaoz.”
“We don’t know for certain,” Emcorae admitted. “But given what Holms told us in the sewers, and now this—”
“It is him.” Barkla’s voice had dropped to something low and absolutely certain, all trace of his earlier bitterness burning away into a far colder purpose. “There is only one Myz who serves this rotted kingdom, and I would know his stink across a continent.” He set down the waybread, appetite forgotten. “Where do they go?”
“We don’t know that yet either,” Nathily admitted. “Only that they’re gone from Fubar, and hunting Emcorae in turn.”
“Then we find out,” Barkla said, “and we follow, wherever the trail leads. I care nothing for your Diked, understand — a deposed king is a dog with no teeth left to bite. But if Kaoz walks beside him, then your Kwest and my vengeance are the same road, and I will walk every league of it beside you.”
What Was Done at the Villa
It was Nathily, gentler now, who finally asked the question that had been sitting unspoken between them since the Ninth Ward. “Barkla. What happened to you both, after you entered Fubar? You said you were ambushed — but not by whom, or how.”
For a long moment the dwarf said nothing at all, staring into the small fire Emcorae had risked kindling at the cave’s mouth, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone flat and careful in a way that told Nathily, more than any tremor could have, exactly how much he intended to leave unsaid.
“We thought our entry to the city too easy,” he said. “We should have known better. Kaoz and a full company of Ramssee’s guard took us at the inn where we’d taken rooms — Brega and I, unarmed and unwarned, in the middle of the night. We fought. It made no difference. The Myz alone could have broken us both without the soldiers’ help at all.” His jaw worked. “They dragged us to a villa outside the city walls — I’m told it was Ramssee’s own manor once, before he gave it over to his pet monster to do with as he pleased. I will not describe to you everything that happened there. Some of it, I will carry alone, and Brega’s memory deserves better than to become a tale told around a stranger’s fire.”
Nathily did not push. Emcorae, beside her, said nothing at all, his own jaw tight with an understanding that needed no further explanation between two men who had each buried people they loved.
“I will tell you this much,” Barkla continued, quieter now. “Kaoz wanted to know of our purpose — why two Drokka princes had come north, what we sought in Akka, and most importantly whether others followed behind us. He took his time asking. He took considerable pleasure in the asking.” His hand rose, unconsciously, to the bare scarred skin of his scalp. “The shaving was the least of what he did, and I will say no more of the rest. Brega held his tongue through all of it. He held it until the very end, and it was that silence, in the end, which killed him.” A muscle in Barkla’s jaw jumped. “Kaoz does not suffer defiance gracefully.”
Garf, sensing the darkening of his master’s voice, pressed closer against the dwarf’s side, and Barkla’s hand found the wolfhound’s scruff without seeming to notice he’d reached for it.
“I should have died there beside him,” Barkla went on. “Kaoz meant to finish me too — I remember that much clearly enough, bound and bloodied with the Myz’s shadow falling over me. But a rider came. A messenger, sent from the palace itself, from Ramssee directly, bearing orders that we were not to be killed — that we were worth more alive, as hostages, than as two more corpses added to whatever grim collection the Myz was keeping in that courtyard.” A short, humorless huff escaped him. “Kaoz did not take the order well. He obeyed it — barely — and then he took his displeasure out on the poor fool who’d delivered it instead. One life spent to spare mine, and the man never even knew whose fate he was purchasing.”
“And then?” Emcorae asked, quiet.
“And then I was dragged to the palace dungeons instead of the grave, and Kaoz kept what was ours as his own reward for his restraint.” Barkla’s eyes, when he lifted them, had gone hard as flint. “My father’s armor. My axe Neckbiter. The Helm of Hacktor Derkillez, worn by every Drokka lord back to the War of the Ghast itself. And Brega’s gear too – also priceless. I doubt Ramssee ever saw them. Surely Kaoz kept them for his prize. They sit at that villa still, and I will not go on any Kwest until I have what’s mine back!”
“But we don’t know where the villa is.” Nathily was confused.
“Finding it will take time – time we don’t have.” Emcorae grunted.
“A Drokka never forgets his steps.” Barkla scoffed. “Finding the place won’t be a problem. If you want my help, you’ll follow me. When the moon sets we move. You can have Diked, but Kaoz is mine!”
The fire cracked and settled between them, and for a long moment none of the three spoke at all — Emcorae staring into the flames with the particular stillness of a man adding one more debt to a ledger already overflowing with them, Nathily watching Barkla with an ache in her chest she suspected would take a long while yet to fade, and somewhere above them, carried faint on the wind, the first cry of a search horn sounding from the direction of Fubar’s walls — a reminder, unspoken but unmistakable, that whatever grief they’d allowed themselves, their enemies had not stopped hunting for even a moment while they’d wept.
As for Kaoz being hunted – I wish I had known about it at the time. Kaoz was my own making — every Myz that has ever drawn breath in this world owes its shape and its hunger to my hand, and I have never troubled myself to hide that particular lineage from anyone who thought to ask. I confess I take rather less pride in it than I once did. Kaoz would, in time, fling himself at Inanna’s feet instead of mine, trading whatever loyalty he owed his own maker for the prettier lies of a snake-goddess with better promises to offer than my own — and if that sounds like the bitterness of a spurned father, I will not trouble myself to deny it. I made the wretch. The least he owed me was the decency to stay bought. Listening to Barkla describe what that ungrateful creature did to two dwarven princes in a stolen villa, I confess I felt rather less sympathy for Kaoz’s eventual fate than perhaps I ought to have. I know precisely how his story ends, and I will tell you plainly: it gives me no small satisfaction to know that a dwarf’s axe, or something very much like it, is coming for him long before Inanna’s promises ever could.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 