The Vorrh

twitched up, across his rushing throat.
    The mortally wounded twin dropped his knife, grabbing at his own neck in a hopeless attempt to strangle the flow. His brother rushed to his side, one hand on his pistol, the other hopelessly attending to the ravaged wound, not knowing whether to fight or save his twin. The debate was settled for him by the lightning point of the written sword, which pierced his eye and was pushed to the back of his brain – he caught flashes of text as the words raced past the confusion of his other oculus.
    As children, both twins had received some formal education. In their early years, they had been taught the elemental principles of grammar by a country curate. Later, they attended two years at a nearby seminary, where their reading and writing skills were greatly enhanced. They had not come from the gutter, like most of their kind, but from a respected family of seed merchants; the little town where they were born had been mildly affluent. But, at the tender age of twelve, they had turned from the upstanding paths of scholar and cloth and wilfully run onto the twisted, bitter road that brought them to this place, where they now danced in their own blood.
    The stranger brought his face close to the shuffling man and hissed, ‘The scripture of the blade says, THE WAY!’ – he thrust the blade in further, so that the words were deep inside – ‘THE TRUTH!’ – the point grated and stopped against the bone of the skull – ‘AND THE LIFE!’ With this, he brought his other hand down, pushing steel through bone, skewering the blade’s length through the bobbing head. He twisted the blade, the words vanishing with a crunching sliver, and then pulled it clear of the wobbling rag doll in one swift, smooth stroke. Caught in a moment of rubber balance, his victim briefly looked like a child’s toy or a dancing monkey. Still holding the dying man, the cleric cleaned the blasphemous blade on the lapel of his victim’s twitching coat, before letting him drop to the steaming floor.
    The dog, inert up to that point, twitched an eye open at the sound. But it had all happened so smoothly, with such minimal movement, that there was almost nothing to be seen and, observing nothing of consequence, he stretched comfortably, lay his head back on the stony floor, and returned to his dreams.
    Each action had been focused, precise and confident. It had been an execution in every meaning of the word, and the power of its malice was pristine in its inexorable certitude. There had been an air of delight about the act.
    The perpetrator turned to the innkeeper, who had remained motionless throughout, and placed two heavy coins and a flat, wooden sheath on the bar. He opened the sheath and displayed a tablet of hard wood, covered in gold writing, a wax seal at its base and an insignia on the seal. The innkeeper’s gaze was fixed on the coins.
    ‘The money is for you to clean this away. Do you know what this is?’ The fat man nodded and avoided looking at the stranger’s face.
    ‘I am Sidrus, and I have jurisdiction in this sector.’ He opened his hand to reveal the same wax insignia, tattooed onto the palm of his hand. ‘How long were these two waiting here?’ he demanded.
    ‘Eleven or twelve days now,’ said the innkeeper, cautiously picking up the coins, and holding their weight in his closed paw. ‘Them and the other one together, the black one.’
    ‘And where is he?’
    ‘I don’t know, been gone two days now.’
    The cleric knew he was telling the truth; he had been watching the inn, only entering after the other man had left. ‘Have any others passed this way in recent weeks?’ he asked.
    ‘Just drifters and strangers, moving on.’
    The man dressed as a cleric suspected that there would be many more hunters seeking their prey, more assassins trying to kill the man with the bow, before he got close to the Vorrh. He did not know how many he would have to dispatch to protect the Bowman and allow him to make the impossible journey through the forest to the other side, where he would be waiting for him. He could not enter it at all, and had circumnavigated its perimeter to reach him. It had taken him two months to arrive in this shithole.
    The bodies of the twins had stopped twitching. Stepping clear of the lake of their blood, he picked up the wooden tablet he had displayed and made for the door. A dim, gawping youth stood in his way by mistake, frozen to the spot as the incident