by David Guymer
The road to get here had been long and bloody, paved for her by the sacrifice of friend and foe alike and the promises of demons. But her sisterhood would soon recognize her as the greatest of their number. She would anoint herself the heir to Llovar and they would praise her as the goddess she fully intended to become.
She glanced over her shoulder. The coterie of bond witches averted their gazes, lest the petty hatreds they harbored failed to amuse her and earn censure.
“The Ynfernael is ready to spill upon the mortal world,” she said, addressing a stick-thin woman bound like a mummy in a crimson shroud. Her face and hands were the only flesh exposed, and these crawled with tattoos of demonic eyes and runes of prophecy. Re’Kaan was a psychosis siren, a master of far-speaking and far-scrying, and in the infliction of madness from afar. “Visit our brothers and sisters beyond the Lothan in their thoughts and in their dreams. Tell them that the time is now.”
Re’Kaan risked an upward glance, a flicker of wiry lashes. “And our other… friend.”
Ne’Krul smiled at her sister’s awkwardness. Neither the Uthuk nor the Ynfernael had a native word for friend and so she uttered it in the deep growl of the masters of the Molten Heath.
“He will join us when it suits him, but by all means, sister. Reach into the monster’s dreams if you dare to. Tell him that the Fourth Darkness begins.”
Chapter Eighteen
Trenloe the Strong
Spurn Castle, Hernfar, the Borderlands
Trenloe had never seen a flesh ripper before. He had certainly never seen a hundred of them, powering across the shallow waters of a river ford, more like huge, flayed men loping along on all fours than the hounds he might have imagined from the old songs. Their bloody physiques repulsed him, red-scaled monsters as fast as horses and as massive as lions, the powerful flow of the Lothan causing them no difficulty at all. Dame Ragthorn splashed into the shallows, the water running up to the gilded discs that protected her knees.
“Shields and spears!” she yelled, and soldiers, anchored by the two Borderland knights, formed up around her to present a wall of round, iron shields. A second rank stepped in behind them, thrusting their short, heavy spears through the gaps. Their discipline was inspiring. Companions made up the third, fourth, and fifth ranks. Trenloe himself stood front and center, taking up the space of one and a half men and stabbing the pointed base of his huge kite shield into the riverbed. Bethan struck up a song, low and fierce, striking out the martial tempo with hammer and shield.
“Shield of Daqan!” Ragthorn roared.
The soldiers responded with a hoarse cry.
“We stand!” Trenloe bellowed above them all, raising his axe high. “We stand and give not one inch.”
And then they came, through the mist and the river spray, like nightmares of blood and bone given form and voice. A rattling volley of arrows hissed down from the castle and clattered off bone armor. The demons charged through it. Trenloe lifted his shield and took half a step forward. There was no time left to think. He swung his axe. It crunched into a flesh ripper’s chest. The creature whined like a kicked dog and fell with a great splash of water onto its side. He stepped back into line as another dropped onto its muscular hind legs and lunged, rising out of the water and crashing into Trenloe’s shield. The monster’s weight bore him down. The cold Lothan rushed over his head and flooded his armor. His world became fast and loud. Scrabbling claws. Churning limbs. He hauled his head above water with a gasp. The flesh ripper gnashed for his face. He ducked just out of its reach. Its fangs were the color of bone and the length of knives. Its eyes were lidless, the yellow-red of Llovar’s star.
Dame Ragthorn’s mace crunched into the side of its head and the creature splashed sideways. Sergeant Marns and another soldier helped to pull him up.
“Thank you,” he breathed, but the soldiers were already pulling back into line.
A flesh ripper with a studded iron collar stove in the shield wall, using its head like a battering ram, and sank its jaws into a spearman’s leg. The soldier screamed. The river spray turned bloody. “Hold the line!” Dame Ragthorn bellowed, Bethan leading a wedge of Companions to pull the mauled soldier back. “Hold the line! Help is coming! Heroes of Daqan!” Demon hounds shrieked like raptors as they galloped from the fog. Soldiers screamed and wept as they held them at bay. The heavy blades of the Borderland Knights glittered and flashed. Arrows hissed about them like rain.
Trenloe roared and swung his shield. The blow smote the inch-thick bone plating of the flesh ripper’s ridge head, cracking it and leaving it dazed. It opened its jaw dumbly as Trenloe planted his boot on its shoulder and struck its head from its neck with a single blow from his axe.
He stood over its corpse, bloodied and dripping, and roared until he was hoarse.
“My beating heart!” Dame Ragthorn cried, allowing her knights to draw her back. “We will all have reputations to earn today!”
“I think Dremmin might have been in the right mind all along,” Trenloe yelled back. “We should have all fled to Nordgard Castle.”
“We could not have outrun the Locust Swarm. They would have swarmed us in the marshes. It is too late now at any rate.”
Trenloe turned at the sound of an arrow thudding into human flesh.
The Uthuk berserker grunted, his upper body swaying with the impact of the arrow to his chest, and ran on regardless. More swarmed after him. Many more. Lilac-skinned. Yellow-eyed. Their faces were long and contorted by savagery. The occasional hulking champion sported a cracked helmet made from the skull of some personally bested monster or a plate of dented steel strapped across one shoulder, but the majority were semi-naked and feral, clad only in strips of red-dyed cloth and the slave brands of their demonic masters. Spurn’s arrows fell on them like rain. A few fell. Most simply ran on with arrows sticking out of their bodies. They were less men than demons themselves. They felt no pain.
Trenloe’s muscles bulged, his grip tightening over the haft of his axe.
He would show them pain.
Aggression rolled ahead of the Locust Swarm. The way a man’s hair might stand on end in the seconds before a lightning strike.
“They are flesh and blood!” Dame Ragthorn yelled, breaking the spell. “Hold the line and let the Lothan have them!”
The first wave of berserkers slammed into the wall of Daqan shields. Uthuk screamed and howled and kicked up water, raking, chewing, clawing even as they were run through with spears and lay dying. A warrior flung herself at Dame Ragthorn. The Uthuk’s knives were made of knapped flint and shimmered as though stained with old blood. Trenloe intercepted her with a blow from his shield. She did not get up. More Uthuk swarmed over her. Trenloe felt his fury rising. A high, looping axe-swing split an Uthuk berserker roughly in two. He roundhoused another with his shield. The warrior went six feet, sending another three sprawling to be trampled under the rest of the swarm before splashing clear of the shallows. As an afterthought he broke a warrior’s face with his elbow. He fought like a bear baited by dogs, felling two with every swipe of his mighty paws.
“We are the Companions of Trenloe!” He beat a scythe-wielding Uthuk to the ground. “We hold this ford until Dremmin’s return.” He hammered his axe deep into a warrior’s skull. “I will hold it alone if I have to. Let no man or woman stand with me who does not wish to do the same.” He kicked the body off his axe. “If Llovar himself came to force this crossing then he would find me still here.” He beat his axe’s flat against his shield. Both were slick with blood and the sound they made was that of a wet drum. “So come test your strength against mine, Darklanders! Come shift Trenloe the Strong if you can!”
A hulking warrior pounded on its chest and bellowed. Trenloe looked up at thing that had once been human.
It stood a foot taller than Trenloe and its shoulders were huge. Its arms were stupendously muscled and ridged with spikes of bone, a
nd were far, far too long for a man its size. “I am Mikran Izt’har,” it said, knuckling towards him. “I will test my strength against yours.”
Trenloe turned a punch off his shield, but its strength was outrageous. A normal man would have felt the bones shattering in his arm. Gritting his teeth, he struck back. His axe gashed the brute’s forearm. The other fist dropped like a hundredweight from a cargo crane. Trenloe raised his shield. The punch crumpled it. Metal wings lifted up around the grotesque’s fist, and Trenloe sank to his haunches. Summoning all his stubbornness and strength, Trenloe pushed back. Bits of bent metal flew off his broken shield as he beat it across Mikran Izt’har’s near-human face.
The grotesque roared and staggered, unable to lift its gargantuan arms quickly enough as Trenloe buried his axe in its neck. It crashed backwards in a geyser of bloody water, the enormous muscles of its arms standing clear of the water like rocks.
Trenloe lofted his weary axe above his head and gave another roar.
“Trenloe!” Dame Ragthorn shouted.
“Trenloe the Strong!” his Companions replied.
For several long minutes that lasted a heroic age, Trenloe was everywhere at once between the shield wall and the Uthuk, an invincible champion of an elder time. Something from a song. Where berserkers threatened to break through the wall of Daqan shields, Trenloe was there with his axe to beat them back. Where flesh rippers were driven by Uthuk whips to flank the slender Daqan shield wall then Trenloe had the brawn yet to wrestle them to the ground and throw them into deeper waters. Fighting was all that Trenloe had ever been good at, though he had lacked the stomach for baronial warfare and his heart balked at casual violence. But for all that, he had been born for this fight, a hero alone at the edge of the world, and he fought as such, as though the fate of all that was good rested on his broad shoulders.
But the men and women who battled against the swarm beside him were not cut out to be heroes.
They were just soldiers.
A Companion fell to an Uthuk scythe. Then another to a punch from a spiked glove. A Borderland knight stood before a second lumbering grotesque and was crushed, armor and all, with a single blow from its fist.
“To me!” Dame Ragthorn bellowed, soldiers rallying to her side before a bone-tipped spear found its way between helmet and gorge and slid into her throat. The Lady of Hernfar gagged and blubbered, blood welling up over the golden gauntlets she brought up to stopper the flow, and folded unsteadily to the riverbed.
Trenloe watched her fall with a wrenching tightness in his chest.
Dremmin gone.
Now Ragthorn.
It all depended on him now.
He laid into the swarm in a frenzy and for a moment at least he drove the Uthuk singlehandedly from his friends.
But he was only one man.
That was true even of the mightiest heroes.
Marns cried out, his shield torn from his grip. Bethan screamed as a flesh ripper fell on her. He remembered the day outside Dawnsmoor when the bard had first strolled into his camp and for some reason had simply never left. Her song ended in savagery.
“Fall back!” he roared, tears and river water mingling in his eyes. “Fall back to Spurn!”
He made a wall of himself between the Uthuk Y’llan and his fleeing Companions.
He would hold this ford until the Lothan ran dry. He would hold it until the god Nordros burned hot and Kellos cold, until Aris fell hungry and Fortuna’s luck expired. He would hold it until the warring of the Stormlords drove the Torue Albes under the waves and the hunger of the Chaos Snake devoured the Charg’r Wastes.
A serpent hissed.
Pain flared suddenly in his arm and Trenloe stumbled.
He looked down.
An arrow stuck out of his right bicep. It did not hurt at all.
He looked up.
Sinuous shapes, all flowing robes and recurved bows, slithered through the fog at the back of the swarm. His vision turned watery. He became acutely aware of the sound of blood pulsing though his ears. Another arrow thudded into his thigh. He grunted. The leg collapsed under him and he dropped onto bent knee with a splash.
Poison, he realized. The arrows of the Uthuk are poisoned.
He tried to lift his axe, but he could no longer feel the fingers of his hand.
The weapon slipped from his grip.
A third arrow banged off his breastplate. A fourth again found the meat of his arm. He sank a little deeper onto his haunches.
Something in the sky above him issued a triumphal blast.
Trenloe looked up as a great darkness swept overheard. It was a shadow and an ancient dread, armored and terrible, head horned and long tail barbed, the colossal span of its wings broader than the keep at Artrast.
Trenloe felt himself sink into the mud under his bent knee.
A dragon of the Molten Heath.
The winged terror circled high above the castle’s tower. Arrows rattled off its black scaled underbelly. A ballista twanged and undershot. Fire ignited in the dragon’s deep throat as it flapped its wings to brake and climb. A torrent blasted the entre run of battlements from the tower’s top. Trenloe saw bowmen silhouetted in flame before dissolving in ash. The dragon delivered a trumpet so loud that the baked stones of the tower shivered and cracked. Then it rose higher, wreathed in the fires of the yrthwrights, before delivering a contemptuous breath of fire that brought the entirety of the castle down. Trenloe heard the wild screams of horses before the stables were mercifully buried under a mountain of fire-blackened rubble.
Trenloe screamed for Rusticar, but his tongue had become chalk in his mouth.
With a feat of strength surpassing all others, he defied the Uthuk poison in his veins and made himself stand.
He would stand before the dragon. He would measure his strength against the terror from the northern skies and he would break it across his knee. He would stand.
He would–
An arrow thudded into his uninjured shoulder.
He blinked and staggered.
His eyes opened long enough to register the Uthuk berserker hurtling towards him.
It swung its club.
And then the Lothan took him.
Chapter Nineteen
Kurt
North of Gwellan, South East Kell
“I wonder what Sarb is doing now.” Elben lowered his cards to stare mournfully out the window. The little steading faced north. Under a bright moon and a clear sky the southern outriders of the Whispering Forest might have been just visible from there. If it had been possible to make out even the new pigsty on the other side of the stream through the cheap slab of leaded glass.
This had always been Kurt’s least favorite part of the day: too late for more chores, but too early for bed, nothing left to do now but to eat the little he had, dwell on thoughts he didn’t want, and sit with sons he didn’t understand.
A son, he corrected himself.
“It’s your bet,” he grunted.
Elben returned his attention to his cards.
Something on the downs howled.
Kurt gave it no mind. Some fools had broken the forest’s peace and it’d be taking its due tonight.
The howl came again. A little closer.
Elben added to his neat stack of coins, deliberately setting each one with the defiled “face” side up. The Greyfox pillaged right across southern Kell these days, but she seemed to just scratch out and then throw away everything she took. A child could find her coins anywhere. They had become so commonplace as to be almost worthless.
“I’ll call you out,” he said, and with the seriousness of a general deploying his model soldiers to battle he moved the coin stack forward. Then he laid out his hand. “Frontal assault.”
Kurt spread his own cards across the table.
His djinni count
ered Elben’s naga priestess, his two Weik warriors bettered his son’s goblin pair, and an Undying King thoroughly outscored a Queen of the Elves.
“You’re awful at this game,” he said.
“I don’t understand the scoring,” Elben admitted, leaning forward to admire the cards on the table. “I just love the pictures.”
The game was called Cradle. Kurt had no idea why. He’d picked it up at Bastion Tarn. How Sibhard and Elben had come across his pack and learnt to play he couldn’t remember. Katrin, probably. His heart gave a twinge.
He pulled the spread cards together and shuffled them back into the deck.
“Why don’t you teach me a game?” he suggested.
“Me teach you?”
“Sure, why not?”
“What kind of a game?”
“Any kind.” He shrugged. “What did your Aunt Larion play with you while I was in the east?”
Elben deflated, his initial enthusiasm in the idea faltering as he thought. “I can’t think of any.”
Another long howl rattled the window frame.
It sounded close enough to freeze the milk in his belly. Just over the far side of Old Gray. And familiar too. Disturbingly familiar. He’d never faced the Uthuk himself, there was no crossing at Bastion Tarn, but he’d been trained for it, and he’d heard them. Kellos, he’d heard them. Like something crossed between the growl of a bear and the cry of a hawk, yet more alike to neither.
Kurt turned towards the window. He eased his chair back from the table.
“What is it?” said Elben.
“Probably nothing. Stay there.”
He stood and crossed to the corner where he kept his bow stave. Remembering why it wasn’t there any more, he said a word that Elben was too young to hear, and then lifted the old sword and battered shield from the mantle
“Stay here. Get under the table.”
“What’s going on?”