Read Online The Axe and the Throne by M. D. Ireman - Free Book Online Page A

Galatai south to raid the Dogmen villages. These were not just raids for food or supplies, these were raids fueled by hatred. Titon had come to despise Dogmen in earnest by what he’d borne witness to. Wolves and dogs tied to trees, beaten, starved, made to fight each other for scraps, all for the men’s amusement—these were a people worth wiping from the land. The raping was also justified as far as Titon was concerned, though he no longer partook. The women certainly were not any less guilty than the men, and in fact most kennels were maintained by the fairer sex. The Dogmen’s women were certainly pleasant enough to the eye, looking about the same as Galatai, if slightly shorter and more buxom. Titon’s father had taught him that to rape a woman was to kill her soul, and to kill a man’s soul one had merely to rape his woman. Titon had long ago vowed not to spare any Dogmen souls, and when he still led raids, his men had been happy to oblige.
    There were limits to their debauchery, however. It was forbidden to take a Dogman as prisoner, be they man or woman. Galatai put chain to neither man nor wolf.
    Whereas the Galatai’s persecution of the Dogmen was checked by certain restraints, it would seem in contrast the Dogmen’s impropriety had no bounds. On occasion, during raids in the cold winter months, Titon found the dogs chewing on the frozen remains of piles of starved children and perished elders. It was true that digging a grave during the winter was ten times as hard, but one could thaw the ground somewhat with a fire or at the very least place the body under a pile of river rocks. Titon’s father said it was the true measure of a man whether he buried his fallen during the dead of winter, and as such Titon had always dug an even deeper hole in the frozen earth for his dead brothers, to show proper respect.
    Almost equally offensive was that so few of the Dogmen fought to protect themselves. All Galatai, even the girls, were taught to use a bow and throwing axe at a young age and were expected to use them to defend their homes. These Dogmen had at most only one of every ten men take to weapon to defend what was theirs while the rest cowered inside. Titon found it beyond disgraceful.
    Elise’s father was one that hid, and he hid more than himself. After finding the man trembling in a corner, begging for his life, Titon, as he often did, began first to destroy his fancy home. It was not enough to kill these evil men. They had to also know that all they had was being ruined.
    Her father was a rich man with a large home. Dogmen considered those who bred demon-dogs to be most valuable, and kennel owners tended to have the most wealth. Her father must have had over five-dozen dogs crammed into a small shed overrun with piles of shit and reeking of death from the stillborn pups left to rot or be eaten.
    As Titon used Elise’s father’s head as a battering ram to remove some walls, he broke through to a hidden room. Large houses held large secrets he had learned, and this was not the first such room he had discovered within Dogmen homes. Titon let out a monstrous roar of laughter, eager to see what treasure was within. The room did not smell of gems and coins, however. It had the familiar stench of piss and shit like the kennels. In the center of the room he saw a girl on all fours, dressed in loose rags, chained to a spike in the ground as a dog or wolf might be. But Titon saw only wolf in this girl as she snarled and growled and snapped at him in defiance when he approached. She was a few years younger than he, and her long messy hair was as white as the fur of a Storm Wolf—save for the dirt in it.
    The girl was wild and Titon could not conceive of a way to subdue her without the same disgraceful bindings used by the Dogmen, so he simply broke her chains and hoisted her to a shoulder, allowing her to claw and bite him until she tired. She had a fiercer stamina than