Read The Damned 01 - White Wolf for Free Online Page B

hillside, near the old ruins of the watchtower. Kalia’s crippled dog was squatting beside him. Todhe’s father, the councilman Raseev, had put out an order for the hound to be killed. Kalia had brought Jesper to Rabalyn. The girl was distraught and Rabalyn had reluctantly agreed to hide the hound and brought him up to the watchtower. He didn’t know what to do next. A three-legged dog was not easy to hide.
    Rabalyn stroked the hound’s large head, scratching behind its spiked ears. It pushed in towards him, licking his face, and laying the stump of its amputated right foreleg on Rabalyn’s lap. ‘You should have bitten him harder,’ said Rabalyn. ‘It was just a nip. Should have taken his leg off.’
    From his high vantage point Rabalyn saw a group of youngsters emerging from the houses far below. One of them pointed up towards him.
    Rabalyn swore, then swiftly tethered a lead round Jesper’s neck and led the hound off down the far slope.
    If he skirted the town, and waded across the river at its narrowest point, he could reach the monastery by dusk. They’d protect Jesper, he thought.
    Abbot Cethelin sat in his study, and in the lantern light pored over the ancient map. It was of thin hide, two feet square, the symbols and lines of mountains and rivers carefully etched in the leather and then filled with gold leaf. As with many pieces from the pre-Ventrian era, what it lacked in accuracy it more than made up for in beauty. As he stared at the map he found himself wishing he had been blessed with the gift of spiritual flight, like his old friend Vintar. Then he could have floated free of the monastery and up into the night sky, to stare down over lands he could now only imagine through the delicate tracing of gold upon leather.
    But that was not his gift. Cethelin’s talent was to dream visions, and to sometimes see within them faint threads - like the gold on the map. He could sense the malignant and the benevolent, constantly vying for supremacy. The large affairs of men, with their wars and their horror, were identical to the battles that raged in the valleys of each human soul.
    All men had a capacity for kindness and cruelty, love and hate, beauty and horror.
    There were some mystics who maintained Man was little more than a puppet, his strings being tugged and manipulated by gods and demons.
    There were others who talked of fate and destiny, where every action of men was somehow pre-ordained and written. Cethelin struggled to disbelieve both these philosophies of despair. It was not easy.
    In some ways he wished he could embrace the simplistic. Evil deeds could then be laid at the door of evil men. Unfortunately his intellect would not allow him to believe it. In his long life he had seen that, far too often, evil deeds were committed by men who deemed themselves good; indeed were good by the mores of their cultures. The Emperor Gorben had built Greater Ventria in order to bring peace and stability to a region cursed by incessant wars. To do this he had invaded all the surrounding lands, razing cities and destroying armies, plundering farms and treasuries. In the end he had his empire, and it was at peace. He also had an enormous standing army that needed to be paid. In order to pay it he had to expand the empire, and had invaded the lands of the Drenai. Here his dreams had been crushed by the defeat at Skein Pass. Now everything he had built was falling apart, and the region was descending once more into endless little wars.
    No wonder the people of the town were frightened. Armies tended to plunder towns, and the war was getting closer. Only two months ago a battle had been fought not forty miles away.
    Cethelin moved to the window and pushed it open. The night breeze was cool, the stars shining brightly in a clear sky. Flames were flickering again in the town’s northern quarter. Some other poor soul was watching his house burn, he thought sadly.
    A dog barked in the courtyard below. Cethelin leaned out