Chapter IV The Forgotten Village
«The villages the empire abandons do not die of hunger. They die of silence.»
The Forest of a Thousand Souls was left behind the way all things that leave a mark are left behind: without noise, without farewell, with the silent certainty that something has changed even if one cannot say exactly what. Estus walked for two days along paths that barely deserved the name, traced by the passage of animals and men who no longer existed, winding between low hills covered in dry grass and grey stones that jutted from the earth like the bones of a buried world.
He did not think of the elf. Or rather, he forced himself not to think of her with the same discipline with which he forced himself not to think of Frederik, of Abigail, of all the names that inhabited the corners of his memory like tenants who refuse to leave. He had learned, over the years, that memories are like wounds: if you do not touch them, they hurt less. They do not disappear —nothing truly disappears— but they become bearable, they integrate into the fabric of daily pain until they become something that can be carried without falling.
The landscape changed gradually. The forest's pines gave way to open fields where the wind blew without obstacles, carrying a fine, yellowish dust that got into the eyes and between the teeth. The snow had disappeared entirely; here winter was not white but grey, a dirty and monotonous grey that stained the sky, the earth, and everything that existed between them. The rivers he crossed were low, nearly dry, with stony beds where the water barely covered the ankles.
Estus walked with the sword over his shoulder and his eyes fixed on the horizon, with that particular posture of one who has no destination but is in no hurry to arrive anywhere. His body moved by inertia, by the habit of advancing that was the only thing separating him from stillness, and stillness, for someone like him, was equivalent to death. As long as he kept walking, as long as his legs kept carrying him from one point on the map to another, he could keep his thoughts at bay. He could pretend he had a purpose.
⁂
He saw the village before he arrived. Or rather, he saw what remained of it.
From the top of a low hill, the hamlet spread across a small valley like an open wound in the skin of the earth. No more than forty houses —if they could be called houses— clustered without order or symmetry around what had once been a central plaza and was now a rectangle of compacted earth where three emaciated hens pecked without conviction. The buildings were of old wood, darkened by years of rain and neglect, with thatched roofs that in many cases had partially given way, revealing the interior beams like the ribs of a dead animal. Some doors hung from a single hinge. The windows, the few that had glass, were cracked or covered with rags.
There was no wall. There was no watchtower. There was nothing to indicate that the place deserved to be protected, nor that anyone, at any point, had considered its inhabitants worth the effort of defending.
Estus observed for several minutes before descending. It was a habit acquired during his years as a mercenary: never enter a place without having studied it first. He counted the entrances and exits. He identified the high points. He calculated the distances. All automatic, all mechanical, like the beating of a heart that needs no permission to keep functioning.
When he descended the hill and his boots touched the main street —a dirt road rutted with wheel tracks and stagnant puddles that smelled of manure— the village reacted as all places that have learned to fear strangers react: with silence.
Conversations died out. Doors closed. The few inhabitants who were outside —a woman carrying a water jug, an old man sitting against a wall, two children playing with sticks— looked at him with that mixture of curiosity and mistrust that Estus knew well. It was not exactly fear. It was something more primitive: the instinct of prey that detects the predator and stands still, waiting for it to pass.
And he always passed. That was the tacit agreement he maintained with the world: I do not bother you, you do not bother me, and we both keep breathing one more day.
⁂
He found what he was looking for at the far end of the village: a building slightly larger than the others, with a wooden sign nailed above the door on which someone had carved, with more will than talent, the word "Tavern." The interior was exactly what he expected: dark, small, with a ceiling so low it nearly grazed his head, and a dense smell of stale beer, wood smoke and human sweat that had embedded itself into the walls like a second coat of paint.
There were four tables. At two of them sat men who seemed fused with the wood from the sheer amount of time they had spent there, with jugs in front of them and gazes lost somewhere in a past that was probably just as miserable as the present. Behind a counter made of planks, a fat, bald man cleaned a glass with a rag dirtier than the glass itself.
Estus sat at the table farthest from the door, with his back to the wall. Always with his back to the wall. The sword rested against the table, within reach of his hand. He ordered food and drink with a gesture, without words, and the innkeeper served him a watery stew and a jug of something that passed for beer, with the nervous efficiency of one who wants to finish the transaction as quickly as possible.
He ate in silence. The stew tasted of little and nothing, like everything cooked with ingredients that have already been used twice before, but it filled the stomach and that was enough. While he chewed, he observed the village through the window. Life —or what passed for life in that place— unfolded with a slowness that was almost painful. A cart pulled by a donkey crossed the street. A woman hung out laundry that was already grey from too much washing. A thin dog lay down in the middle of the road and no one moved it because there was no traffic to interrupt.
Villages like that existed by the hundreds at the empire's borders. Too small to appear on maps, too poor to pay the taxes that would justify the presence of a garrison, too distant for anyone to care if they disappeared tomorrow. The empire treated them the way one treats weeds that grow between stones: ignored as long as they do not cause trouble and pulled out when they get in the way.
Estus knew that kind of abandonment. He had lived it from below, from the districts with no name, from the childhood he never had. And though he felt no compassion —compassion was a luxury that required a connection with others that he did not possess— he recognized in those vacant gazes something familiar. Something that was almost kinship.
⁂
The afternoon was advancing when the first signs appeared.
Estus noticed them before anyone else, as always. It was not a concrete sound nor a defined image. It was something more subtle: a vibration in the air, a change in the texture of the silence, like when atmospheric pressure drops before a storm and animals sense it before men do.
He set the jug on the table. His fingers moved toward the sword's grip with the naturalness of one who brings a hand to the chest when feeling a twinge.
Then he saw them.
They came from the northern road, raising a cloud of dust that stretched behind them like the tail of a dirty comet. There were many. Estus counted as they approached: five, ten, fifteen, twenty. Perhaps more. They rode thin horses covered in mud, and they themselves were in no better condition: patched clothing, cracked leather armor, rusted but functional weapons. Bandits. Raiders. The kind of men who thrived in the empire's margins the way rats thrive in dumps: feeding on what others discard.
Their leader rode at the front, a broad-shouldered, thick-necked man with a scar that crossed his forehead from side to side as if someone had tried to crack open his skull and nearly succeeded. He carried a long-handled axe strapped to his back and a smile that was not a smile but an exhibition of teeth: the gesture of a predator baring its fangs not because it is happy but because it wants its prey to know what is coming.
The village contracted like a fist closing. Doors that were already shut were barred. Windows were covered. Those who were outside disappeared with the desperate speed of cockroaches when a light is turned on. Within seconds, the main street was empty except for dust and the echo of hooves drawing closer.
Estus did not move from his table. He kept drinking. He watched them through the window with the same dispassionate attention with which he would have watched a storm approaching: inevitable, impersonal, indifferent to him.
The bandits dismounted in the central plaza. They moved with the brutal confidence of those who have done this before, many times, in many villages just like this one. Three of them walked directly into the nearest houses without knocking, without announcing themselves, without the slightest trace of hesitation. Shouts were heard. Broken glass. The cry of a child that cut off sharply, as if a hand had silenced it.
The leader remained in the center of the plaza, turning slowly, evaluating his domain with the repugnant satisfaction of a feudal lord inspecting his lands.
—You all know how this works! —he shouted, and his voice thundered against the wooden walls like thunder in a box—. Food, coins, whatever you have! Anyone who hides will regret it! Anyone who resists will regret it more!
⁂
Estus finished his beer. He set it on the table with a soft thud. The innkeeper was crouched behind the counter, trembling, face buried between his knees. The other two patrons had slipped away through a back door that Estus had identified when he entered.
It was not his problem. It was not his village. It was not his people. He had no reason whatsoever to intervene, and every reason in the world not to. A mercenary does not fight for free. A mercenary does not fight for strangers. A mercenary does not fight if there is no coin purse waiting at the end of the blood.
He stood. He took the sword. He walked toward the door.
He was going to leave. He would simply go out the back door, circle the village through the hills and continue on his way to nowhere, leaving behind another raided village, another story of misery that did not belong to him. That was how the world worked. The strong devour the weak, and those who can walk leave before it is their turn.
But then he heard something that stopped him.
It was not a shout. Shouts were common, expected, part of the soundscape of violence he knew as well as the sound of his own breathing. It was something worse: a muffled sob, small, insignificant, that filtered through the wall's boards like the thread of water that signals a dam about to break.
A child.
No. Several children. Crying in silence, with that terrible ability that the empire's children learn before they learn to speak: the art of crying without making noise, because noise attracts attention and attention attracts punishment.
Estus stopped with his hand on the back door's frame. His jaw tightened. A muscle flickered in his cheek.
He did not think of Frederik. He would not allow himself to think of Frederik. But something deeper than thought, something that lived in the place where memory becomes instinct, activated like an ember the wind uncovers.
He let out a breath that was almost a grunt. And instead of going out the back door, he turned around and went out the front.
Into the street. Into the plaza. Toward the bandits.
⁂
What happened next was perceived in different ways by the few people who dared to look through the cracks in their shutters.
Some would say afterward that it was like watching an animal emerge from its den. Others, that it was like watching lightning strike on a cloudless day. But all would agree on one detail: the calm. The impossible, unnatural, almost obscene calm of that tall, scarred man who walked toward the center of the plaza with the same tranquility with which he might have walked toward a fountain to drink water.
Three of the bandits saw him first. They were looting a cart that some merchant had abandoned in his flight. They stared at him with the confusion of those who cannot understand what they are seeing, because what they were seeing made no sense: a man alone, with the sword still sheathed at his back, walking toward twenty armed men as if taking a stroll.
—Hey, you! —shouted one of them, a thin man with an eye patch—. Are you deaf or stupid? Get back in your hole!
Estus did not respond. He kept walking.
The band's leader noticed him. He turned toward him with the axe still strapped to his back, not considering it necessary to draw it. A lone man did not warrant the axe. A lone man barely warranted a glance.
—And who is this? —he asked no one in particular, with an amused tone.
Estus stopped ten paces from him. He looked him in the eyes. And for an instant —an instant that the band's leader would briefly remember in the last seconds of his life— something passed between them. It was not a verbal threat nor an aggressive gesture. It was the gaze. Estus's eyes, empty as dry wells, dark as caves where light never enters, told the leader something his brain took too long to process: that he was facing something that should not exist, something forged by a violence so sustained and so absolute that it had ceased to be a man and become something else.
But the leader was a man accustomed to intimidating, not to being intimidated, and his pride was faster than his survival instinct.
—You got something to say, dog? Because if not, I'm going to...
He did not finish the sentence.
⁂
Estus did not think.
That was the truth no one understood, the truth that made him dangerous in a way other combatants were not. Soldiers think. Warriors think. Even the best of them, the most experienced, the most lethal, at some point during combat resort to the mind: they analyze, calculate, choose between options. And that instant —that blink of deliberation that separates perception from action— is where they die.
Estus did not have that instant. He had lost it, or perhaps burned it away, at some point during the eight years of blood he carried on his back. His body did not consult his mind before acting. The sword moved because the danger existed, and between the danger and the steel there was nothing: no thought, no doubt, no fear, no compassion. Only the arc of metal cutting the air with a precision that was not elegant but brutal, not beautiful but necessary.
The sword came out of its sheath and found the leader's throat in the same movement. A single fluid gesture, without transition, without pause, as if drawing and killing were the same indivisible act. Blood gushed before the body understood it was dead. The axe the leader never managed to unstrap fell to the earth with a metallic sound that was the first measure of the symphony to come.
And then the others attacked.
Not all at once. The first were three, the closest, those who reacted by instinct before fear had time to arrive. They charged with short swords and knives, shouting, because shouting is what men do when they are afraid but do not want to admit it.
Estus received them the way water receives a stone: without apparent resistance, flowing around their attacks, occupying the spaces they left open as they moved. The first lost the hand holding his weapon before understanding he had lost it. The second received a diagonal cut that opened his chest from shoulder to opposite hip. The third tried to retreat, but Estus was already inside his guard, too close for the knife to be of any use, and the sword passed through his abdomen with the obscene ease of steel entering soft flesh.
Four dead in less time than it takes a man to exhale.
The others organized. Or tried to. They spread into a semicircle, surrounding him, seeking the numerical advantage that was their only real advantage. There were still sixteen. Sixteen against one. The mathematics were on their side.
The mathematics did not know Estus.
He moved among them like a storm that changes direction without warning. There was no pattern to his movements, no predictable sequence that an observer could anticipate. Each blow was born from the previous one like waves are born from the sea: continuous, relentless, inevitable. His body turned, crouched, advanced, retreated, with a fluidity that was not grace but survival distilled into its purest form.
A bandit swung a slash at his neck. Estus dodged it by centimeters —no more than necessary, never more than necessary— and replied with an upward cut that split the man's jaw. Another tried to drive a spear into his back. Estus pivoted on his axis, let the tip graze his side, and cut the wooden shaft with a sharp blow before driving the sword into the spearman's chest.
Blood splattered the plaza's dry earth, forming pools that spread like shadows. Bodies fell with the clumsiness of objects that stop functioning. And Estus kept moving, kept cutting, kept being what the world had made him: a survival machine that made no distinction between killing and breathing because both things had stopped being different.
Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
Those who remained began to retreat. The semicircle dissolved like a sandcastle under the tide. Some tried to flee but did not get far. Others dropped to their knees with hands raised, begging in voices that broke before finishing the first word. Estus did not hear them. Not because he was cruel —cruelty requires intent, and he had none— but because in that state, in that place inside himself where combat took him, sounds meant nothing. They were noise. And noise does not stop a sword.
Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.
The last tried something desperate. He threw himself at Estus with arms open, seeking a deathly embrace, trying to immobilize him with the brute force of his weight. Estus received him with a knee to the stomach, folded him over like a piece of paper, and when the bandit fell to his knees, the sword completed the arc that had begun with the first death.
Twenty.
Silence.
The kind of silence that only exists after violence: dense, almost solid, as if the air itself were in shock. Estus stood in the center of the plaza, surrounded by bodies, the sword dripping, his breathing barely altered. He did not pant. He did not tremble. He showed no sign that what he had just done was extraordinary or even difficult.
He wiped the blade on the sleeve of a corpse with a gesture of pure routine. He assessed his own injuries: a superficial cut on the left forearm, a blow to the ribs that would hurt the following day, nothing requiring immediate attention. The damage inventory of a professional reviewing his tools after the job.
⁂
It was then that he heard them.
Hooves. Many. Organized. The rhythmic, disciplined sound of horses ridden by riders who know how to ride, who march in formation, who obey a cadence that is not that of chaos but of order.
They came from the southern road, and when they appeared on the horizon, Estus knew exactly what they were before seeing the standards. He knew from the sound —too regular, too precise for bandits or mercenaries—, from the formation —two parallel columns, with scouts ahead and a defined rearguard— and from something more: a quality in the air, a presence that was less physical than atmospheric, as if the very earth straightened itself at their passage.
Imperials.
It was a small detachment. No more than thirty soldiers, mounted on warhorses that made the bandits' bony mounts look like ponies. Their armor gleamed under the pale sun with a brilliance that seemed to defy the landscape's filth: polished metal plates, red capes over the shoulders, closed helms that turned their faces into anonymous surfaces of steel.
But it was the one riding at the front who captured Estus's attention. Not because he was the largest or the most visible, but because of the armor.
White.
A white that did not belong to that place. A white almost aggressive in its perfection, as if it had been forged in a world where dust, blood and misery did not exist. Every plate, every joint, every rivet gleamed with a cleanliness that was more than aesthetic: it was a declaration. A declaration that whoever wore that armor belonged to a different order, to a sphere of power so far above the mud and poverty of the village that it did not even deign to soil itself with them.
The helmet was open, revealing a face that Estus examined with the attention he devoted to any potential threat. He was a man of about forty years, perhaps more, with angular, severe features, as if carved from the same stone as the empire's fortresses. His jaw was a right angle, his eyes were the color of steel in winter —grey, cold, stripped of any emotion other than a calculated assessment of everything they looked at—, and his hair, cut short in military fashion, was dark grey with silver streaks that gave him the appearance of burnished metal.
On the breastplate of the armor, engraved with surgical precision, gleamed a symbol Estus knew. He had seen it for the last time in the metal of the guillotine that killed his brother, between rust stains and layers of dried blood.
A lion pierced by a sword.
The symbol of the first chapter of his life. The symbol he had dismissed as insignificant and that now, years later, reappeared before him with the silent insistence of things that refuse to be forgotten.
The detachment stopped at the village entrance. The soldiers dismounted with the mechanical efficiency of men who have repeated that gesture thousands of times. The general —because that was what he was, a general; the golden insignia on the shoulders said so, the ornate gauntlets, the white cape with gold borders that fell from his shoulders like a king's mantle— did not dismount immediately. He remained on horseback, motionless, observing the plaza.
Observing the bodies.
Observing Estus.
His eyes moved slowly from one corpse to the next, counting, evaluating, reconstructing what had occurred with the analytical precision of a strategist who reads a battlefield the way others read a book. Estus watched how his eyes followed the trajectories, how they identified the angles of the cuts, how they processed the information with a coldness that was a twin of his own.
Finally, the general dismounted. He did so with the slow gravity of one who knows that every one of his movements is observed and that every gesture is, in itself, an act of authority. His boots touched the village's earth with a sound that was like a sentence: the empire had arrived, and everything it stepped on belonged to it.
He walked among the bodies without looking at them. Not because they did not matter to him, but because the dead were already dead and his attention was reserved for what was still alive. And what was still alive was that man standing in the center of the carnage, with a blood-stained sword and eyes that showed neither fear, nor pride, nor anything at all.
He stopped five paces from Estus. He studied him during a silence that extended like a crack in a stone wall. There was no threat in his posture, but there was no warmth either. It was the posture of a man who evaluates, who calculates, who decides.
—Twenty men —he said at last. His voice was deep and dry, like stones rubbing together—. Alone.
It was not a question. It was a statement. And in that statement, Estus recognized something he knew well: the language of war professionals. Without ornament, without emotion, without the need to impress or be impressed. Only facts.
Estus did not respond. He merely sheathed the sword with a movement that was the only answer he considered necessary: I am alive, they are not, that is all there is to say.
The general looked at him a moment longer. His grey eyes settled on the scars on Estus's face, on his hands, on the way he held his body —relaxed but ready, like a trap that seems harmless until you step on it— and something changed in his expression. It was not a smile. It was not approval or admiration. It was recognition. The silent recognition of a predator that identifies another predator and understands they are made of the same material.
—General Caelius Maren —he said, and he did not extend his hand nor make any gesture of courtesy. Men like him did not need courtesies. His name was sufficient.
—I did not ask your name —replied Estus.
The general did not flinch. He nodded with an almost imperceptible movement of his head, as if that response were exactly what he had expected.
—No —he said—. But perhaps you will need to remember it.
He turned and walked back toward his men with the same measured steps with which he had arrived. He gave orders in a low voice that Estus did not try to hear. The soldiers began to move through the village: cleaning, organizing, doing what imperial armies do when they arrive at a place that no longer has anyone to protect it. Claiming it.
Estus stayed where he was a moment longer. He looked at the symbol on the general's armor: the lion and the sword. Then he looked at his own hands, still stained with blood.
And he left. Walking in the direction opposite to the imperials, as he always did, as he always would. Toward nowhere.
But something had changed. Something without a name yet, something that resembled the sensation of a piece fitting into a puzzle whose complete image he did not know. The general had seen him. Had measured him. And in those grey, cold eyes, Estus had recognized something he had not expected to find: the reflection of someone who had also killed so much that he had stopped counting.