Elves: Rise of the TaiGethen by James Barclay Read Free Book Online

back into the forest, ignoring the elves they had presumably come to save. One pair remained. They walked towards him. The elf, his teeth and fingers glistening with fresh blood, had one hand on the panther’s head. The animal was growling deep in its throat.
    Jeral felt water swirling around his feet and heard the splashes of his boots in the shallows. He stopped; it was pointless to attempt an escape.
    ‘Please,’ he said in elvish. He dropped his sword. ‘Please let me live.’
    Jeral had never thought of himself as a coward but the notion that he might attack this solitary pair to avenge his command never entered his head. The elf stared at him and closed to within a pace. Jeral’s nostrils were filled with the scents of blood and beast. He knew he was trembling. It took all of his courage to hang on to his bowels.
    The elf reached out a hand, slowly and deliberately, gripping Jeral’s lower jaw. His fingernails cut Jeral’s cheeks and the pressure he exerted grew painfully intense. He pushed his face into Jeral’s. Jeral could feel his raw power and the enormity of his hatred.
    ‘We are ClawBound,’ he said, his voice hoarse and quiet. ‘Fear us.’
    The elf relaxed his grip and released Jeral, letting his fingernails scratch deep into Jeral’s cheeks. Jeral felt the blood begin to gather and bead.
    ‘We will come. We will destroy you,’ he said, finding a modicum of bravado if his life was to be spared.
    The elf cocked his head. ‘You are mistaken.’
    They walked away back into the forest, which Jeral continued to watch long after they had disappeared. One last time, he let his gaze travel over the scene of slaughter. He tried not to focus on the dead. A hundred yards from him, the Sharps were still praying. Not one of them had moved.
    Jeral shook his head. He felt sick. He turned back to the river, its barges and its nets full of logs waiting to float downstream. He wondered, bleakly, how hard it would be to steer a barge alone.

Chapter 5
     
    They are either examples of elven perfection and purity, or are symptomatic of our descent to inevitable extinction. They could very well be both.
    Auum, Arch of the TaiGethen
    Auum lifted the human’s head from the mud by his hair. He examined the wounds and let it drop. He wiped his hands on his thighs and stood up.
    ‘Five,’ he said. ‘Malaar?’
    Malaar straightened from the body he’d been examining. He nodded.
    ‘One more,’ he said. ‘But that’s all.’
    ‘Six ClawBound pairs,’ said Auum, walking towards him. ‘And look what they did. This was no battle, it was butchery. Follow their tracks back into the forest, see if there’s a single direction or if they split.’
    ‘Or we could ask them.’
    Malaar indicated the elven working party. Auum didn’t know whether to feel pity or contempt for them. Three hours and more must have passed since the ClawBound attack and the liberated elves still sat by their axes and the desecration they had been forced to wreak on the rainforest. They were watching the TaiGethen with a wariness that was close to suspicion.
    ‘I’ll speak to them,’ said Auum. ‘Follow the tracks. Tell me what you find.’
    ‘Auum!’
    Auum turned. Elyss was staring down at the ground on the river bank. The hulks of barges sat in the water, ugly and with nets still bulging with stolen timber. Auum trotted over to her across the blood-soaked churned mud surrounding the multiple mutilated corpses.
    ‘What have you got?’
    Elyss crouched and indicated a line of impressions in the silt leading north along the bank. After three hours, rain and river had erased most of the tracks but the story they told was clear enough.
    ‘They let one go,’ said Elyss. ‘He can’t be far away.’
    ‘Serrin, what have you done?’
    ‘We can still catch him. Stop word getting back to Ysundeneth.’
    Auum looked at the three barges stretched across the fast-flowing river. Two had rowing boats strapped to their sterns. One did