A Dance of Fang and Claw: The Ranger Archives Volume 3, page 1
A Dance of Fang and Claw
THE RANGER ARCHIVES: VOLUME THREE
PHILIP C. QUAINTRELL
Also by Philip C. Quaintrell
THE ECHOES SAGA: (9 Book Series)
1. Rise of the Ranger
2. Empire of Dirt
3. Relic of the Gods
4. The Fall of Neverdark
5. Kingdom of Bones
6. Age of the King
7. The Knights of Erador
8. Last of the Dragorn
9. A Clash of Fates
THE RANGER ARCHIVES: (3 Book Series)
1. Court of Assassins
2. Blood and Coin
3. A Dance of Fang and Claw
THE TERRAN CYCLE: (4 Book Series)
1. Intrinsic
2. Tempest
3. Heretic
4. Legacy
For Henry… Welcome to the fold
Touch to zoom/see www.philipcquaintrell.com for HD map
Dramatis Personae
Asher
Ranger
Borvyn Murell
Lord of Dunwich
Captain Lonan
Captain of the Kelp Town Watch
Creed
Werewolf
Danagarr Stormshield
Dwarven smith
Deadora Stormshield
Child and daughter of Danagarr and Kilda
Doran Heavybelly
Ranger
Kilda Stormshield
Dwarven Healer
Lord Kernat
Lord of Kelp Town
Merith
Vorska
Nasta Nal-Aket
Father of Nightfall
Russell Maybury
Werewolf/Ranger
Salim Al-Anan
Ranger
Vouder Stould
Gang Leader
Contents
1. Crying Waters
2. Ranger Business
3. Three Nights of Fright
4. The Investigation
5. Amber in the Dark
6. Aftermath
7. Secrets In The Walls
8. The Wolfman
9. Russell Hobbs is Dead
10. A Long Way To Go
11. Where It All Began
12. A Monster Walks Into A Bar
13. Digging In
14. Second Opinion
15. A Fool’s Hope
16. Creatures Of The Night
17. A New Ally In An Old War
18. A Short Reprieve
19. Survive The Night
20. Moving On
21. Palios
22. This Is What We Do
23. First Blood
24. Rangers Aren’t Born, They’re Forged
25. Short Days And Long Nights
26. They That Must Endure
27. A Mirror Darkly
28. The Wolf At The Door
29. The Pack
30. Wild Hunt
31. Another Monster In A Ranger Suit
32. Down, Down, Down
33. Into The Past
34. Under The Mountain
35. Home
36. The Road To Legend
Afterword
Author Page
Author Notes
Appendices
Chapter 1
Crying Waters
Wretch - This might be the twelfth edition, but these monsters have featured in every iteration of our fine bestiary. It’s as if these creatures have accompanied us from the very hands of the gods. There might be some truth in that, as our oldest legends would suggest we humans came from The Wild Moores. A humble ranger cannot say. What I can say is, be it the damned Outlanders or the Wretches that blend in to the trees, don’t go anywhere near The Wild Moores without expecting a fight.
As for the Wretches themselves, they can blend in with their environment. You’re going to need Dovun Dust, let me tell you. Throw it high in the air and let the beasts move through that red cloud. No missing them then. Swing true and victory will be yours.
A Chronicle of Monsters: A Ranger’s Bestiary, 12th Edition, Page 5.
Balor Ved, Ranger.
Bleak was the sky, a cold twilight that reflected in the black waters of the lifeless swamp. Blacker still were the trees that rose from those waters, like the petrified fingers of Death itself. At disquieting angles, and with ne’er a branch nor leaf, they reached for that setting twilight, that insipid sky. Beneath the still surface, the shallow water was home to naught but a web of dark roots that knotted together the small wood of ominous pillars.
A ripple, a tsunami to those stilled waters, pushed between the trees.
A man followed in its wake.
His green cloak pressed upon the water behind him and fanned out across the mirroring surface. The water reached to just beneath his knees yet the muddy base was beyond sight. The roots wished to trip him, to bring him down into the swamp’s numbing embrace. It was with the measured steps of a ranger that the man advanced, his feet shifting to fit precisely between the twisting snakes of gnarled wood.
Asher stopped.
Crouching, he ran two fingers over the slick bark of the nearest tree, an inch above the waterline. It was there that the trees were so black as to appear a void that swallowed all the light and colour from the world. Inspecting his fingers, he observed a glistening substance that clung to his skin as readily as it did the trees.
He was getting closer.
The ranger smiled.
The setting sun still offered some of its bleak light when he heard it, that distant call of distress he had been anticipating. The shout for help was garbled but the shriek of terror that trailed it was piercing, cutting through the lifeless swamp as a ray of sunlight might cut through rainclouds.
Asher changed direction and pursued the call for help and the sound of panicked splashing. He ventured beyond the barren trees and into a clearing where the swamp rapidly deepened into untold depths. Perhaps forty feet out, he spied the troubling scene that had drawn the four missing people from nearby Kelp Town.
Like the ranger, they had seen the hand desperately clawing for life and the head, concealed by matted black hair, that routinely broke the water’s oily skin to cry for help. Asher imagined them charging into the deep and swimming out to save the apparent girl before she drowned.
The ranger did no such thing.
To quiet the alarm in his mind, the instinctual part of him that felt urged to dive forward and save the girl, Asher retrieved his folded bow and thumbed the latch to snap the limbs to life. The sound of the taut bowstring’s release filled the eerie atmosphere with more tension. Whistling across the glassy water, the arrow sailed directly into the girl’s head, impacting with a wet thud.
Then he waited.
“Help!” came the laboured call, only a moment later.
Asher took a breath, his mind able to focus now on the irrefutable truth of the situation: it was a Hell Hag.
He had suspected as much when negotiating the terms of the contract, back in Kelp Town, and had pressed upon the town’s watch the colossal task ahead of him were he to slay it for them. He didn’t enjoy driving up his price in towns or villages, where the populations were smaller than the bustling cities and they relied so much more on their true grit to survive, but he hadn’t been delusive in his description of the beast. Hell Hags didn’t die easily.
Asher looked back at the way he had come, knowing that Hector remained tied to a tree at the swamp’s edge. A Chronicle of Monsters: A Ranger’s Bestiary was in his saddlebags, the leather-bound book the last of its kind. He had spent the previous day poring over the relevant archive only to discover that he knew it word for word. It was little comfort.
Turning back to the deeper swamp, he watched the girl’s body rise as high as her shoulders, both hands dashing the water. How wretched a beast Hell Hags were, to use the ragged corpse of a previous victim only to lure in more. How the creature was able to puppet a human’s terror so accurately Asher could not say, only that it possessed the vile limb somewhere along its spine. It was an image beyond nightmares in which he envisioned the monster manipulating the body’s vocal cords, likely repeating the victim’s last words.
Since his bow was useless in the fight to come, he collapsed the limbs with a flick of the wrist and returned it to his back for now. He drew his two-handed broadsword. There was no better sound to the ranger than steel ringing free. The weapon was relatively new, having only rested on his hip for three months, but it was identical to the previous sword and the one before that. Its weight and balance were faultless, the blade a perfect companion in his expert grip. Inevitably, he was still likely to lose it or break it before the next winter blanketed Illian. The ranger always chalked it up as a hazard of the job and was always sure to keep some coin aside to pay for the replacement.
Considering the arena in which he was to fight this particular monster, Asher stepped across to a grassy knoll and spun the broadsword around, driving it into the firmer ground. Using the guard as he would a hook, the ranger proceeded to remove his quiver and bow and hang them on it. After unclipping his cloak, the bemired fabric was draped over them all. That left him with one significant weapon, its hilt of sandy brown leather protruding over his right shoulder.
The silvyr short-sword slid from its scabbard, the rare metal singing as it scraped against the hard leather and tasted air. So light was the weapon that it could have been mistaken for a child’s toy, yet so strong was the hourglass blade that it could cleave steel with a measured application of strength. It would have no trouble passing through the hide of a Hell Hag.
The ranger needed no more than an upward glance to know that night was coming, and fast under winter’s unyielding watch. He sighed. “Best be getting on with it then,” he muttered, his voice as dry as brittle leaves.
Ignoring the Hag’s foul puppetry, Asher prepped his silvyr blade, lathering it with a pre-made paste, awarding the weapon the venomous bite of a Luxun. He had slain the Luxun almost a year previously and had been awaiting a reason to employ the venom he had harvested from its glands. Having taken the water into consideration before setting off from Kelp Town, Asher had also prepared an insoluble paste to prevent the venom from being washed away.
All he had to do now was stab the fiend.
Leaving his broadsword and gear behind, Asher took deliberate steps into the deeper waters. Arcing ripples heralded his approach, reaching as far out as the dead girl who had once pleaded for her life. The water quickly rose about him as he descended the natural slope. The cold of those waters was bitter and raw, a seizing hand that sought to undo him, to hollow him out of all warmth and strength.
The touch of it cast his memories and instincts back to an earlier time in his life, when he had been no more than an initiate in Nightfall. How many times had he and others been weighted down with stones and thrown overboard, into the murky depths of The Adean? Survive or die. It was the Arakesh way. Only when he could hold his breath for a number of minutes and function suitably in icy waters could he progress. Not everyone had.
After twenty feet he ran out of ground and took to swimming. The ranger looked about him for any signs of the Hag’s true limbs coming to claim him, but he failed to even see his hands pushing through the ink-black water. Coming to a stop only a few feet away from the putrid meat puppet, Asher began to tread water.
“Come on then,” he rasped, growing impatient.
The girl sank unceremoniously into the swamp.
All was still and hushed but for Asher’s continued treading. Knowing what was to come, he began to take successive large breaths, helping his lungs to fill his blood with more oxygen than it would usually hold. The coil about his left leg was barely felt before it pulled him under, returning the swamp’s polished black top to its pristine condition.
Pitch-black was the vault beneath that sealed top, so capped by the monster’s natural oils. Not a single sliver of light was permitted entry, creating a watery abyss. It was an environment all Hell Hags knew instinctively was an advantage to them: they who had been born in the dark.
But now there was another monster down there with it, a monster that fed on the dark.
A part of the mind that lay dormant in all but the initiated of Nightfall came to life, fuelled by an elven brew that had been forced upon him since childhood. The Nightseye elixir, coursing through his veins, turned the black surroundings into an extension of his body, defining every aspect with the impossible reach of his senses.
The swamp was dead. Not even the plant life could survive a Hell Hag and its natural secretions. The monster itself dominated the ranger’s mind, feeding all but his sense of smell with information about its macabre body. The shape that displaced the water around it gave Asher the impression that it was similar to a spider, with a bulbous body and large legs that rose up before sinking down into the mud. From that rounded torso, however, extended the abominable limb that worked the now limp corpse.
Asher could taste the rotting flesh of that body, just as he could feel the smooth bones that littered the glutinous ooze below him. It would have been enough to drive most to madness, to be thrown into hell before death. Instead, his mind had collapsed into a smaller space, a shapeless void that dragged him down, as surely as the Hell Hag did. It was an iron curtain of solitude, of absolute focus.
It was the realm of the Assassin.
There was no fighting that murderous part of him now, not when he needed it so. Rather than fight it, as he would, Asher let those old thought patterns take over, comforting him, reminding him that he was the apex predator.
It wasn’t the only thing he was allowing to happen. Had he wished, he could have slashed at the tentacle that pulled him ever deeper, but the Hag was saving him precious energy and bringing him to it. Soon, he knew, the worming limb that gripped him would be accompanied by more, and they would seek to entangle him and draw him into the jaws of that watery perdition.
He could feel them, unfurling towards him. Their every movement secreted more of the black oil that rose to collect at the surface. One came for his arm but he raised his free leg and it gladly coiled around it. He could hear the parting of small fangs and ringed suckers as the Hag prepared to strip him to his bones, sucking in the meat and all else with ferocious proficiency.
The creature lacked any eyes to see the silvyr blade in Asher’s hand. The acute senses it possessed likely didn’t know what to make of the mineral, only that it was to be discarded as waste. Perhaps with that in mind, another tentacle prowled about his arm, intending to wrap around his wrist and squeeze it from his fingers.
But he was close enough now, and so he was done playing the victim.
Ignoring the probing tentacle, the ranger tensed his bound legs and tucked his upper body in. A single swipe sliced through the organic bindings and spilled inky blood. The beast recoiled, sending ripples that disturbed the coated top. The remaining tentacles ceased their subtle approach, floating about him like seaweed, and came for him with a vengeance.
The ranger cut down two more before a third tugged on his ankle and cast him down like an anchor. His impact disturbed the ossuary of broken skeletons, filling his ears with their rattle and the resounding knock of his short-sword biting into a discarded femur bone. The tentacle around his ankle contracted and he was yanked through the debris and up, returned to the monster.
Again, he found the angle and severed the tentacle. Asher floated before the Hell Hag and sensed its increasing agitation. The Luxun venom would be slowly spreading through its wretched system, though he would need to deliver a greater sting if he was to bring the monster down for good.
Before departing Kelp Town, Asher had questioned his use of the Luxun venom. He knew the bite of an Arkilisk could bring down a grown man in minutes and would certainly have killed the Hell Hag by now. The Basilisk’s smaller cousin, however, would have taken far longer to track down, distant as it was in The Evermoore. Deciding the monster needed slaying sooner rather than later, the ranger had settled for the Luxun venom he already possessed.
Feeling the burn in his chest, he began to regret his decision.
With so many tentacles now useless to it, the fiend adjusted its stance and raised its front half, there to reveal previously hidden claws. They unfurled and came for him, snapping as a crab’s would.
Asher had no intention of engaging those claws, each capable of cutting him in half. Perfectly aware of his surroundings, the ranger made his evasion by grasping at one of the retreating tentacles and letting it pull him out of harm’s way. Indeed, the nearest claw fastened shut only a moment later, chopping through the water and his previous position.
