by David Guymer
“Where are you, Baelziffar?” she hissed.
She looked up again to the staked-out remains of the garrison and this time did not look away.
This sacrifice had been performed recently. Within the day, she thought. But the power of the Ynfernael was not a thing to linger. It was an impatient force, always moving, always acting, and the magicks drawn into the world by this offering were already beginning to leach away. She could sense it, the way someone who knew the geography of a place could look on it in drought and see where the rivers would have flowed and known the path to the sea.
North.
Where would it end, she wondered? Was she being led to anywhere in Kell at all? Or would destiny guide her ever northward, on and on, across the mountains to the Weik, and onwards to whatever mysterious lands or sea lay beyond that realm?
But these were questions for tomorrow, and beyond even her powers to know.
It was frustrating, after so many years spent searching, but she consoled herself that she was closer than she had ever been.
Behind her, her pilgrims moaned as they noticed the castle’s unholy fortification.
“Impossible,” said the Greyfox, shaking her head. “Impossible.”
Sibhard glanced at her, as though surprised that the murder of Kellar troops could affect her at all. He swallowed as he turned back to Andira. “Was this the Uthuk?”
“No one else would do this,” said Andira.
“Is this what they would have done to Gwellan?” he asked, plaintive suddenly, and no longer the hero he strove to be. “And Nordgard Castle?”
Andira turned to him and smiled sadly. “I am afraid so. I know it is hard, but try not to grieve too much for them. Even the pain of your heart is a feast for the Ynfernael. You could not have helped them had you been there, but you are alive, and that is a victory of a kind. You can avenge them, if that interests you, and you can ensure this happens to no one else.”
“How… How am I supposed to not grieve?” Sibhard wailed.
Andira thought, and then sighed. “Practice.”
“Kellar is going to be surrounded already,” said Sibhard, turning away, from Andira and from the appalling view. “We’ll never reach it now.”
“It might just be possible…” the Greyfox began, “that we’re a teensy bit further out from Kellar than you think.”
Sibhard turned to her. “How much further?”
“I…” The elf looked around the defiled stronghold. Her shoulders slumped. “This isn’t one of Fredric’s watchposts. At least it hasn’t been for a long time. It was the hideout of a bandit chief I knew called Captain Beltran.” She gave a small laugh. “He had been a soldier once. But he was never any captain.”
“You mean to say you have not been leading me north at all?” said Andira, her eyes blazing suddenly like ice fire.
“Mostly north. And just a little bit east.”
“East?” said Sibhard. “East? Never mind that you’ve taken us miles from Kellar. You’ve put us right onto the Forest Road and in front of the Uthuk Y’llan!”
The Greyfox, already a waifish thing in her gaudy trappings and too-large demeanor, visibly shrank. Sibhard looked almost ashamed for having yelled at her.
Andira wondered if this, too, was a part of the elf’s subtle power.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” the Greyfox hissed. “The Uthuk weren’t supposed to come this far into the forest. Why would they attack a fort flying a bandit’s colors when the road would give them Kellar in a day or two?”
“You mistook the Uthuk Y’llan for an army of the more familiar kind,” said Andira, “led by sane captains with rational goals. Undoubtedly Baron Fredric and whoever was once lord at Hernfar made the same mistake.”
“You were hoping this Beltran would kill us and free you,” said Sibhard.
“A girl can dream, can’t she?”
Andira sighed. “Give the elf the bow she has been begging for.”
“What?” said Sibhard.
“What?” the Greyfox echoed.
“She’s only just confessed to betraying us,” said Sibhard.
“And I think she sees now how much good that has done her.” She turned and waved her still-glowing hand towards the defiled keep. “This is her future.” While Sibhard did nothing, the two pilgrim archers that flanked him quietly cut the Greyfox free. “The Locust Swarm will make friends of us all yet,” said Andira, almost softly. “Perhaps that is their purpose in all this.”
“That’s a very optimistic outlook, my lady,” said the Greyfox, rubbing her wrists where for the past few days the rope had been chafing.
Andira smiled. “What lies north of here?”
“North of here?” The Greyfox shrugged. “Nothing. We’re almost straight west of Kellar now.”
“There is always something.”
“Nothing but cold hills and heathland until you get to Forthyn and I’ve never ridden that far. Apart from…” She looked thoughtful. “Apart from Orrush Khatak. It’s a pass leading though the Barrow Dales, a particularly empty part of northern Kell. I’ve never been there. Nobody ever goes there. Not even adventurers.”
“Then that must be the true purpose of the horde…” Andira murmured.
“I told you there’s nothing there,” said the Greyfox. “Not even a ruin. Just an old road.”
“Whatever the Uthuk are planning we have to go to Castle Kellar first,” said Sibhard. “The baron needs us.”
“He’s not my baron,” said the Greyfox.
“Nor mine,” Andira murmured, though she felt as though she was coming to some agreement with herself rather than mediating between Sibhard and the bandit queen. “Baelziffar is north. That is where I have to go.”
She turned attention north. Always north. The stench of evil beckoned. The pull on her hand grew.
“But if we can help Fredric, can’t he help us?” Sibhard argued. “Didn’t the elf say it’d take an army to slay the demon king? Well the nearest army is in Kellar, isn’t it, fighting the Uthuk Y’llan?”
Andira thought. She did not like choices. The First had created fate as a straight path. Choice was an illusion created by ignorance.
“I am an army.”
“Please,” said Sibhard. “We can’t save Kell by sacrificing Castle Kellar.”
Andira kept her gaze north. She could not look at him.
“I am not here to save Kell. I am here to save the world.”
Chapter Thirty
Fredric
Castle Kellar, North Kell
Fredric struggled up the winding staircase in the dark, one hand running along the stone wall, the other on his sword hilt to keep the scabbard from interfering with his legs. Grandmarshal Trevin Highgarde and six Knights of the Yeron followed close behind, filling the narrow ascent with their clatter. The deep voice of the Roglun Horn, named for the first Kellar lord to bend the knee to Arcus Penacor, sounded again as Fredric pushed against the tower’s highest door and almost spilled onto a wide rampart. The night was chilly, and he shivered as he emerged. The warmth of Litiana and their bed clung to him only weakly, and his bleary-eyed squires had draped his out-garments over him with noticeably less care than they had applied to the fitting of his armor. A ballista turntable stood, uncovered, at both ends of the battlement. Two full crews and a unit of archers braced themselves against the cold winds with wool-lined helmets, thick cloaks, and a canteen of some kind of spiced cider between them.
He leant back against the door frame for a moment and gulped down the cold air.
Kezian Tor was the highest point in Castle Kellar, six hundred steps above the inner bailey, taller than the keep itself, and almost at parity with the lower heights of the Howling Giant Hills to the north-west.
Collecting himself, he pushed his way through to the parapet. The archers and weapon c
rews parted for him. Sir Highgarde and his knights followed.
Kellar, castle and town, spread out for him like a drawing on a map.
Pennons and torches fluttered from every rampart. Purple and gold. It might have been mistaken for an Elyana’s Day carnival, the grand celebration to mark the last day of the week-long fast, or an outpouring of pageantry for a visiting lord or a hero of high esteem. Were it not for the threat in the air. The lingering murmurs of the Roglun Horn.
The mood was tense. A man only had to stand out in the street to feel it. Even from its highest tower, Fredric could not ignore it. The city was wound as tight as a crossbow. Twenty thousand pairs of eyes looked eastward, along with every thought, every fear, every unspoken prayer. Every child in Kellar would have heard of Nordgard Castle’s fall by now. It was impossible to keep a secret that big in a castle. And in any case, these were hard folk. They would not have thanked him for trying. Even then, at that late hour, Fredric could see last-minute preparations being made. Ballistae were being oiled and tested. Rune golems were being awoken. Fresh units were armed and armored and sent to the walls. Those walls already shimmered silver and gold by torchlight, the helmets of so many men-at-arms making the ramparts appear as though they ran with metal.
To his surprise Fredric felt no particular sense of apprehension about what was to come or how he would be measured against it.
What he felt in greatest abundance, looking down on his city in its darkest time, was pride.
Here was the might of Kell, mustered in its fullest strength as had not been called upon since the first incursions of the Dragon Wars.
He found himself wondering if his generals might have been right all along.
What chance would Kell’s robber barons have had against a host as great as this?
He shook his head. It was one thing to hold a castle against the ancestral foe of every man and woman of Terrinoth. To subjugate a fractious land by force of arms was quite another. And raising these kinds of numbers from an impoverished country in such short order would bring problems for later. But later was later.
Fredric would call it a victory to have a later.
For the sake of his family, if not himself.
He turned to the captain of the watch.
“Show me.”
The officer passed him a long brass tube.
Fredric took it and put it to his eye. He trained it on the eastbound road.
The seeing glass was an innovation from the Torue Albes, a tool of piracy some called it, and one of the many toys and trinkets that Litiana had brought with her from the court at Alben.
Within the lenses of the seeing glass the haze on the eastern horizon became the dust kicked up by a marching column.
Somewhere in the distance, quite visible by day but hidden even from the Alben glass in the dark, the road forked into two. The Forest Road went south and east around the Whispering Forest, towards the Crimson Downs and the barony’s southern counties. Straight east went the ancient highway to the rocks at Orrush Khatak and the Barroway. No one knew who had built the road, or by what ancient sorcery it had been maintained when all trace of its builders had disintegrated with the passing ages. There was nothing there, and it was a road seldom taken unless the hour was late and the need desperate.
“Is it Constan with the army from the south?” he asked.
“It is too soon for him,” said Trevin. “And it was only ever a slim chance that he would return at all.”
“And yet he went anyway,” Fredric muttered, his resolve weakening, but only for a moment. “Then it is the Uthuk Y’llan. They run like a wind from the Ynfernael. More swiftly even than General Brant feared.” He turned to the captain of the watch. “Is there some way to see them more closely?”
Mumbling his apologies, the soldier took the glass from Fredric’s hands and showed him how to adjust the lenses.
He returned it.
Fredric put it back to his eye.
And gasped as for the first time he saw the oldest of civilization’s enemies.
A strange thrill went through him. It was like seeing something from an old text take physical shape, or a phantom from another person’s nightmare. He had always privately suspected the outlandish descriptions and eye-witness illustrations from the old histories to have been exaggerations. But they had all been true. The histories had overblown nothing. Fredric might have been better prepared for the reality of the Uthuk Y’llan if they had done so. No treatise read in an airy study, accompanied by an amphora of Al Aluaham wine, could recreate the curdling of the gut evinced by the real thing.
They were naked but for thick greaves that guarded their shins. Their skin was a grayish purple, like parchment under an arcane light. Their faces were long and cruel, their mouths unnaturally wide and filled with sharpened teeth, their hair long and whipping black.
The hand that held the glass wobbled and he took it two-handed and then lowered it. He found himself thinking again about the old histories, the genealogies of Timmoran’s Legendum Magicaria.
Could the people of Kell and the Charg’r truly share common blood?
Were the Uthuk Y’llan even human at all?
“There are so few of them,” said Fredric. The Uthuk were several miles away yet, but nevertheless he found himself whispering lest they might somehow overhear. He thrust the glass back to the captain of the watch. “Not nearly enough to storm Castle Kellar.”
A trumpeting bellow blasted from the south.
Louder even than the Roglun Horn.
Fredric gripped the battlement and turned in the direction from which it had come.
There was no thrill this time.
The blood ran cold.
A dragon, as large as a hill and as dark as the Aenlong bridge, climbed above the forest’s roof. One of its lesser kindred rose behind it, flapping hard to match speed and flank it as a knight would ride alongside his king. This smaller dragon was the green of aged copper, thin and scarred, as if from forgotten battles, and covered with mosses. It was no more than half the colossal span of the black dragon, but still seemed like a small castle taking flight.
Two dragons would be enough to break almost any castle, if not Kellar. The Uthuk Y’llan still approached from the east.
And the dragons had brought an army of their own.
A host of reptilian foot soldiers marched or, for those with vestigial wings and armor that was light enough to be borne, flew beneath their masters’ shadows.
For the longest age Fredric could not form words in his mind, until the two came that filled him with dread.
Dragon hybrids.
He had fought them before. They could be found all over the wild places of north-eastern Terrinoth, but they had always been a rabble. Little better than kobolds or brigands, and supposedly of lesser intelligence than either. He had never heard of them marching as an army, or clad in dragon mail. He had never heard of them aligning with the Uthuk Y’llan. The lords of the Heath and the Locust Swarm had both menaced Terrinoth’s frontiers many times, but always separately. Not since the dark days of Hellspanth and Llovar had they found common cause, and even that, supposedly, had been in defiance of the great Dragon Rex.
The black dragon bellowed as arrows from the city’s outer walls and towers began to rattle off its armored belly.
Fire turned the southern skyline white, and when Fredric could see again there was a hole in the city’s wall. He gripped the rampart, helpless to do anything about what he was seeing as, with a single flap of its wings, the dragon arrested its flight and swept aside. The downwash turned an already weakened corner tower to rubble and the dragon banked, flying off before any surviving bowmen could return fire. Its smaller lieutenant attended it closely, dropping low to broil the battlements it overflew in a torrent of greasy green fumes.
A few moments later the hybrids were over
the walls.
Screams spread ahead of them. Faster even than the flames could go.
Fredric greeted the sight at a strange remove, as though his heart had taken the moments of inaction to clad itself in armor. The uncertainty left him. He would listen to no more screams.
With a rasp, his sword came free of its sheath.
In a singular hiss of Joulnar steel, the Knights of the Yeron each simultaneously drew theirs.
“Rally every soldier. Man every wall.”
He turned to Grandmarshal Highgarde.
“And have somebody ready my horse.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Archerax
Castle Kellar, North Kell
The rising heat of a sea of fire filled Archerax’s wings. The city’s southern quarter was a steaming caldera of heat-fused rock and running metal. Such strongly built stone buildings as still stood were blackened and brittle. The screams of those within had brought a flicker of warmth to Archerax’s vast heart, but one that had faded with every ponderously slow beat until it was cool and hard once more.
He swooped low.
These were the children’s children of those who had stood against Hellspanth and Avox and Gehennor and who had seen Margath the Unkind so cruelly slain.
No man or woman would be left unburnt.
This he had vowed, and this would be done.
A company of archers scurried like rodents in the charred bones of what appeared to be a temple to one of the human gods. Black lips pulled back over hard gray teeth and steam emerged. Human gods. The idea amused him. A lazy sweep of his wings showered the ruin in sparks and embers. The humans sheltering there screamed, dropping their weapons in favor of beating on their burning clothing and rolling about in the soil like the ferreting little creatures they were. He chuckled, smoke pouring from his nostrils as he peeled right and climbed.
He could not be harmed by bow and arrow. The mightiest lance thrust could not pierce his scales, nor the broadest shield withstand his breath. The larger spear-throwers that the humans, towards the end of the Wars of Steel, had learned to construct could do him injury if he were to allow it, but they were unwieldy and slow. Humanity was not the only race in Mennara capable of adaptation. Archerax had learned well the lessons of the last war. To keep his distance. To spread his terror wide. To overrun the spear-throwers with hybrid soldiers and disposable allies, and only then to commit his own wrath to the fray.