Chapter 84: Book 1: Chapter 29 (Part 2 of 2)

<One of your quest chains from the Shattered Goddess has been unlocked> Quixbix told me.

 “Lay it on me, bud.”

Culling the Cloven-Hooved 1 (T)

The presence of the Hooved Horde, monstrous devotees of Carnax the Cloven-Hoofed, has been confirmed on your island. Locate them and establish the extent of their infiltration into your territory.

Success: Discover the location of the Hooved Horde encampment.

Rewards: 900 XP and future quests in the chain.

Token of the Bound.

Failure: If this quest goes incomplete the rest of this quest chain will remain locked and unavailable.

The quest seemed a bit underwhelming compared to what else we’d been getting. I would talk it over with Quix and the crew shortly.

I sheathed my scimitars as there was no danger nearby and wandered back over to the cluster of young people. Shana and Jackson had managed to calm them down which was good. There were a few sharp intakes of breath and fearful whimpers as I approached but my people were quick to soothe any ruffled feathers.

“Let’s get them back to the town,” I suggested.

The kids were reluctant at first but the promise of food and somewhere safe to stay convinced them to come with us. The youngest, Sarah, who I learned was only nine, was too weak to walk far, so I ended up having to carry her. None of them had eaten more than three or four times over the last week.

I guided the group in a slightly different direction from the one Anastasia had dragged the unconscious body of Desmond. The kids were already jumpy enough and didn’t need to see that.

Twenty minutes later, and we were back in the town. The newly risen gothic buildings that stood out like sore thumbs concerned them, so we took them to one of the remaining cafés and plied them with food and drink which they wolfed down without ceremony. Most of the children found my Acheronian-ness disconcerting so I hovered in the corner and let Shana and Jackson do most of the interacting with them.

After they had filled their bellies, they opened up a bit about what had happened to them. All of them had been on holiday here on the island with their families when integration happened. They had holed up in the various holiday homes on the southern end of the island and rode out the first few days. Many of them had heard the monsters scrabbling around the buildings, especially at night.

Then on the fourth day that changed, the creatures seemingly stopped coming and they and their parents thought maybe it was over. It wasn’t. Either that night or the following day the goat-like beastmen came for them. They killed some of the people and took the rest prisoner. From the kid’s description it sounded like they had collared the adults, but not them.

The beastmen hauled them to their encampment where a hideous structure had been built in a clearing with a stone altar in front of it. The children got very quiet at that point not wanting to go into any details of what they saw there. I could guess the details and didn’t blame them for their truculence.

After that, they were kept there for a week or more until Desmond, Marco, and the chasing Fomorians stumbled upon their camp and the two sets of monsters went for each other. The children, not being collared and now unguarded, were encouraged by the surviving adults to run and they did.

With their tale told and their stomachs full, Shana led them off towards the ship to make use of the bathing facilities and get them cleaned up. Meanwhile, Jackson went looking through the surviving buildings for fresh clothing to replace the ruined apparel they were currently garbed in.

Left to my own devices I started cleaning up some of the mess left behind. We wouldn’t want to attract any rats I thought to myself, and then chuckled at the inanity. Rats were the least of our worries these days. My mutterings were interrupted by the sound of small feet stopping abruptly outside the café doors.

I turned around and standing in the threshold nibbling on her lower lip nervously was Sarah, the youngest of the group. She was looking much better now that she had something to eat.

“Hey there, Sarah,” I said softly. “Why haven’t you gone with the others?”

“Um…I…um…I told the nice lady I needed to tell you somethin’,” she mumbled and stared self-consciously at the ground. Her bravery fleeing now she was face to face with me.

I recalled as I carried the dark-haired girl that she refused to look at me the whole way.

“Well, come on in then,” I said.

Sarah didn’t move, rooted to the spot.

I tried not to huff with impatience but dealing with children wasn’t my strong suit and the last thing I had been expecting to handle today.

 She must have picked up on my impatience and her eyes welled with nascent tears. “I’m sorry, mister. I don’t mean to be scared,” she whispered with a slight lisp.

Some of her teeth were missing but you could see the replacements erupting from her gums, so it was natural tooth loss and not a result of the past few weeks. I may have become an Acheronian, but it was difficult to be angry or stern when confronted with something that heart-achingly cute and vulnerable.

I sighed and made my way behind the counter of the café and rooted around at the back until I found what I was looking for.

“If you come in, I have a half dozen fairy cakes that you can scoff all by yourself. You won’t need to share with any of the others or anything. It will be our little secret,” I offered.

She looked at me quizzically. “Fairy cakes?”

I brought out the translucent plastic tray and put it on the counter. Inside it had six sponge fairy cakes with three different types of butter frosting, lemon, strawberry, and chocolate. They’d been horribly over-priced at twelve dollars for the tray but were free now.

“Those are cupcakes,” Sarah corrected me seriously.

“My mistake, young lady. Although, where I’m from we do call them fairy cakes. They are still yours if you want them,” I explained.

My offer of sugary goodness did the trick.

Sarah ran up to the counter, grabbed the tray, and sat down at one of the tables. I stayed behind the counter to give her a bit of space. This could backfire on me; those cakes had been in here for over a week and could have gone stale. Though as Sarah scarfed down one and then a second that concern faded as I smiled with amusement at her.

“Where are you from, mister? Mars?” she managed to mumble with a mouthful of lemon cake.

“No,” I chuckled. “England. I was changed when all this happened just like Shana with her long ears.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty cool,” she smiled. “I wanna be an elf, too.”

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“When you’re older, maybe,” I said.

Sarah rolled her eyes theatrically. “That’s what all the grown-ups say. Maybe you really aren’t from Mars, after all.”

We both laughed, and with the tension lifted I took the risk to come out from behind the counter and sit down on the other side of the table.

“So, what is it you needed to tell me, Sarah,” I asked.

Sarah looked down at the table and scoffed another cake before she built up the courage to share.

“This is all my brother Dougie’s fault,” she whispered with a sniff. “He brought the monsters.”

“Ah, Sarah, no that’s not the case. This isn’t anybody’s fault. Nobody made this happen, it just did,” I said trying to console her.

The knowledge I’d gleaned from Dean meant this was a white lie. The eejits that built Ashli were responsible, but it’s not like they meant for any of this to occur.

Sarah shook her head forcefully. “I’m not talking about all the monsters. Just the horrible stinky goat ones.”

<Torin, you need to listen to her> Quixbix interjected in my head.

That took me by surprise, Quixbix agreeing with a nine-year-old.

“Okay, I’m sorry for not listening, Sarah. Why don’t you tell me how this is your brother’s fault?” I assured the upset child.

Sarah ate another bite of cake before continuing. “Dougie isn’t really my brother. His Mom, Janet, married my Daddy last year and they came to live with us. Janet is real nice, but Dougie isn’t. He’s a meanie that calls my Daddy bad words all the time. That’s why he ran off after the strange people talked in our heads. He wanted to hurt my Daddy and he was with the bad goat monsters when they came to the house,” she sniffled, and a few tears streaked down her grubby face. “I didn’t see it, Janet wouldn’t let me, but I think he killed my Daddy for the monsters.”

So, Dougie was her stepbrother and it sounded like he didn’t get along with his new stepfather. But that didn’t automatically translate into him being responsible. Maybe this was the overactive imagination of a young girl who had been through an incredibly traumatic event.

“Sarah, why did Dougie hate your father?” I asked as kindly as I could.

Sarah wiped the tears from her cheeks and took a deep breath. “Daddy owned an Abby-tar and Dougie was a vegan. Although I don’t know what that is, Janet says it means he really likes animals, but so does my Daddy. Dougie calls him a murderer, but he isn’t. Dougie is the one who is bad.”

I’d heard enough. The pieces were beginning to fall into place.

Her father owned and ran an Abattoir and Dougie, being vegan, had not liked that at all.

The more she had told me the more distraught Sarah had become. I figured Quixbix could fill in the blanks, so I lifted her from her chair without protest and carried her over to the ship. One of the other adolescents took her from me and guided her to the crew bathroom to help clean her up.

<We should handle this today. Before you leave for the prisons. We need to separate those people from the Hooved Horde as quickly as possible> Quixbix suggested forcefully.

“Quix, I didn’t know you were such a softie at heart, pushing us to go on a rescue mission,” I teased the imp.

<Hardly> he snorted. <I had my suspicions when we got the quest, and what these children have described only confirmed those suspicions.>

“Explain, please,” I prompted him when it became clear he was being retaliatorily silent because of the teasing.

I could be polite, but I wouldn’t apologise.

<Fine> he sighed. <The beasts they described are Capronids, goat-headed beastmen. They make up the rank and file of the Hooved Horde and they are spawned creatures dedicated to Carnax the Cloven-Hoofed, much in the same way that the Fomorians kiss Sholmdir’s ass. Carnax is part of the Chaos pantheon and a keen rival of the Shattered Goddess. He doesn’t hate her in the same way as Sholmdir, but they have an intense rivalry, but I digress.

<It is very unlikely the Horde has any spawning crystals on the island, it’s too small. They are herd beasts and crop up in clusters where there is a lot of space. The hideous structure with an altar the children described is almost certainly a blood shrine to Carnax.>

“Blood shrine? Nothing called a blood shrine can be good news,” I interrupted.

<Not really, no> Quixbix went on. <Someone, and I’ll give you one guess who, took a priestly class of some description and joined the Cult of Carnax. They raised the blood shrine and summoned a nearby herd of Capronids to the island.>

“Sarah’s stepbrother, Dougie,” I said. “That’s why you wanted me to let her keep talking.”

<Yes, it was almost certainly him> Quixbix confirmed my assumption. <Here’s the thing, blood shrines are powered by, well, by blood. The Capronids, along with Dougie, will be sacrificing the slaves they’ve taken on that altar to power it up. The stronger it gets the more herds they can summon and perhaps even create a permanent portal to where their spawning crystals are located.>

That sounded bad.

<Which is why we should do something about this today. I think we’ve been lucky. From Sarah’s description, Dougie sounds young, barely an adult. This means he is inexperienced or stupid, probably both. The shrine will be linked to him as the leader of the cult on this island, but the number of sacrifices it can absorb in a day is based on the size of the local cult, which would currently just be him.>

<If he smartens up, or if there is a Capronid a bit cleverer than the rest to nudge him, he will pick out some of the weaker-willed or desperate-to-live slaves and coerce them into pledging themselves to the cult. That will increase the blood shrine’s capacity and accelerate the growth of its influence. If they establish a portal, the Horde on the other end can bring over other prisoners or cultists to strengthen the shrine on this island.>

“What you’re saying is that if we wait and give them two more days, we could find the island overrun with these fuckers,” I outlined.

<That sums it up. They wouldn’t be able to get past your shielding, yet. But you’d be embroiled in a war with them right on your doorstep and your concentration needs to be elsewhere at the moment. That and the shrine acts as a territorial flag, contesting your ownership, and preventing you from completing the first Storm’s Reach quest> he finished.

It sounded like we would be going hunting before we went recruiting.

I nodded and then asked the question which had bugged me since I learned of what had occurred. “Why didn’t the Capronids collar the kids? They wouldn’t have been able to run then.”

<You can’t collar children. Do you ever read the help files?> Quixbix snorted.

I didn’t deign to answer the cheeky bugger.

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