The Shield of Daqan

by David Guymer

  For a moment she remembered.

  She knew who she was.

  Her mouth shaped a wordless roar as she pushed back.

  The dragon’s fire broke against a barrier that had become suddenly unassailable. It broke off, bellowing in surprise and fear, and strove to climb beyond her reach.

  But too late.

  Andira’s rune-barrier struck the dragon like a spiked boss of scalding light, driving the dragon’s beaten fire before it and through its gaping jaws. The dragon’s throat swelled. Smoke spewed in thick plumes from through its clenched teeth and from its nostrils. With a deep roar of pain, its head snapped back and its impossibly gargantuan body listed over in midair. It fell to the ground like a stone that had been bestowed the power of flight and had it taken away, levelling utterly a swathe of the outer bailey and cracking its jaw against the second gatehouse.

  Andira turned and sprinted to where it lay.

  The dragon lifted its dazed head from the rubble of the inner wall.

  Her poleaxe came down.

  The dragon jerked, bringing down another dozen yards of wall.

  Andira had cut halfway through its neck.

  She clambered onto the dragon’s shoulder, even as it bucked and writhed beneath her, and swung her poleaxe high above her head. It flashed with the lingering traces of energy and Andira screamed for the searing emptiness it had left inside of her, and brought it down once.

  The rune-sharpened blade completed the task at the second attempt.

  The dragon’s head thumped to the ground and rolled away.

  Andira’s body was a moment behind it, her memories gone forever.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Fredric

  Castle Kellar, North Kell

  The castle was ruined. The dust refused to settle. Soldiers stumbled about as though through a fog blown across the Howling Giant Hills on a rising wind from the Ynfernael. They gazed about themselves with numbed expressions and raw eyes as though unable to accept the magnitude of the destruction, or that so titanic a force could be meted out onto Castle Kellar and that they themselves had somehow managed to endure it.

  They had won.

  The dragon hybrids had broken with the death of their godlike masters, flying back to the forest to carry the bitter memory of Kellar steel to another generation. The Uthuk Y’llan, Fredric had not even seen since the withdrawal from the city, and appeared to have been slain to the last. He was not entirely sure how, but he was assuming the woman with the rune on her hand had something to do with it.

  Castle Kellar had stood as it had for two thousand years.

  But their triumph had a distinctly hollow feeling.

  Fredric felt as though he had been thrown off the edge of a cliff and had, by some miracle, survived. There was a persistent ringing in his ears and the taste of blood in his mouth. He had not yet tried to move. The one time he had considered it he had almost passed out from the pain. Turning from the gargantuan corpse of Archerax the Great, half buried in the ruin of his castle and rinsed in the faint blue glow of the hero’s rune, Fredric looked down.

  Litiana’s nose was broken, her lips torn. Her face was purple with bruising and smeared with blood and ash. Her hair had pulled out of its tight braid and, in many places, from her head altogether. She breathed, but shallowly. The slight rise and fall of her chest brought with it rippling shifts in hue as the metal plates sewn into her brigandine caught and then lost the glinting light. He dared not look at what remained of her legs. He doubted very much that she would ever walk again.

  Holding back tears, for the sake of his soldiers, he leant down and brushed her cheek with his own cracked lips.

  “The city is safe,” he murmured.

  He did not know what else to say, but he had been told that a dying person could hear that which was said to them and even in their last moments be comforted by it.

  Or perhaps the comfort was for himself.

  “The day was won. Archerax the Great is slain. When you are well enough…” Here his voice threatened to break, but he went on. “When you are well enough, we will all take a ship to Alben and spend a season or two in your mother’s court. The year, perhaps. The queen would love to meet her granddaughter, I’m told. And I hear that sea air is restorative. By the time we return Kellar will have been rebuilt. I will commission the most expensive landscapist in Lorim and have them dig the sailing lake that you always claimed the city needs. I will call it Lake Anna and it will be the wonder of the east. To hell with Urban and his demands for an army.

  “Anna?” He bent towards her again. The faintly mild touch of her breath spread goose bumps across his cheek. He gave her a gentle shake, as if through doing so she might wake. The tears he held back pushed their way through. “Anna?”

  He sensed something moving towards him through the murk.

  He looked up and sniffed back his tears.

  Soldiers in grimed and war-battered armor were gathering around him, emerging from the pall of dust like the wraiths of men slain in battle recalled to their master’s side. Their postures were those of weary souls, but there was a certain glow to their faces. They lived when they knew full well they had no right to it. They had survived a battle that children unborn would sing of and they had seen a monarch of the Molten Heath brought low by a hero’s hands.

  A swordsman in a bent kettle helm, the simple owl device burnt from his breastplate, raised his fist to Fredric in salute.

  “Dragonslayer!”

  On a sudden rush of pent-up elation and sound, every man and woman still alive within Castle Kellar picked up the chant.

  “Dragonslayer! Dragonslayer! Dragonslayer!”

  Fredric did not know what to say.

  So he said nothing at all.

  It did not seem important enough just then to correct them.

  Part

  Four

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Trenloe the Strong

  The Forest Road, East Kell

  The survivors of Hernfar toiled north. They spoke little. There was little to say.

  Purple and brown hills, clad in scruffy winter coats of ling and broom, rolled northward, growing progressively older and meaner as they did so, the wind tugging at them with ever greater menace until they appeared to shiver like dogs cast out into the cold.

  The road they followed was winding and narrow, for all that it was the main arterial way from Kell’s south to its more prosperous north, occasionally paved with stone, but most commonly comprised of packed dirt that sleeting showers had made squelchy and treacherous. On his way into the barony from the west Trenloe had regularly spied sheep grazing on the heathers, smoke curling from some isolated steading, or even, on occasion, the silhouette of a watching rider on a nearby hill. He had seen these things and thought the place desolate. Now even they were gone. Nothing living stirred the landscape besides grass, and that only at the behest of the cold wind from across the Lothan, and he did not know what to think. The ravages of the Uthuk Y’llan had been indiscriminate and total.

  Walled hamlets lay like the ruins of some other age. Crofts dotted the hillsides and the near bank of the river, studies in absolute stillness, blemishes on an otherwise pristine land.

  After several days of joyless travel trailing the Uthuk army northwards, keeping the steel-gray tendril of the Lothan always to their right, they happened upon a crossroads.

  There was only one real road here, Trenloe knew, and it was the Forest Road, skirting forest and river and hill to join one edge of Terrinoth’s bleakest frontier to its other. The other trails most likely joined up some of the smaller outposts they had passed. One wriggled up into the hills and swiftly disappeared while the other, it seemed was destined for the forested eyot that sat in a froth of freezing white water about a mile over the Lothan. It looked nearer to the Borderlands’ side than it was to T
errinoth’s. Its isolation had not spared it. The familiar scarecrow figurines of the Uthuk’s sacrificial offerings stood on its banks under the hanging canopies of junipers and rowans. The crossroads itself was strewn with entrails, joined together in tangled knots to please the Uthuk’s unholy patrons.

  Trenloe’s skin squirmed at the trace of Uthuk magic and he scuffed them out with his bare foot.

  “I feel I should say something.”

  S’yarr shrugged. Unlike Trenloe, far broader and taller than the narrow-bodied Uthuk norm, she had managed to find herself some suitable clothing and was garbed now in a stiff leather jerkin with a bloodstain on the breast and a pair of wiry woolen trousers. “Then say something.”

  Trenloe thought. “I can’t think of anything.”

  The woman shrugged again. “After what you’ve been through I’m surprised you can still speak at all.”

  Trenloe shook his head. Yesterday’s trauma. Already forgotten.

  He bore it because he could.

  After that they went on. Foot by foot. Yard by yard.

  The hills became higher and less rounded, their character aligning ever more with the snowy granite peaks of the Dunwarr that faced them from across the river’s channel. The Lothan itself grew louder and more boisterous. It foamed white for long stretches, dissolving into tricky cascades where the rock became too tough even for the river to break down. The road became steeper and more sinuous in order to circumvent the harder country, their path now most commonly flanked by crumbling cliff walls of slate. Trees stalked them over the western slopes. These were not the blackthorns and spindles that had infested the marshes of Hernfar but lindens and whitebeams and oaks, true forest giants, broad-leafed and dark-trunked. No roads at all veered off that way. There was no evidence of habitation of any kind, nor of grazing or even of Uthuk Y’llan. And yet, as far as Trenloe could tell, no one had sought to flee that way. There was an older menace to the woods that urged Trenloe to avoid it, even at the cost of ending up like those poor folk at the crossroads.

  When night fell, and with the forest to their west it fell suddenly, they rested, ate a little of what they had and drank. Fresh water, at least, was plentiful in eastern Kell. They slept fitfully, too weary from their travels to keep a watch, the moon showing through speeding tatters of gray cloud.

  Trenloe woke with the dawn, but the others were slow to rouse. They were malnourished and footsore, miserable and cold. As intent as they were on following wherever he led, they would have been falling by the wayside long before then if he had allowed them. And so he had not allowed them. Look after those folk as are weaker than you, his father had often told him. Which, Trenloe had learned since then, had meant most folk. Each day, he had set them a slightly slower pace than the day before, but he knew he could not keep that up forever. The road was simply too long, the country too unforgiving of frailty.

  “You may have to think about cutting them loose soon,” S’yarr murmured.

  She, alone amongst the survivors of Hernfar, had some vigor left to spare. The Uthuk Y’llan did not feel the cold. Either that or through some act of resilience they chose to ignore it. And preternaturally thin though they were, they seemed able to cross vast tracts of country with great speed.

  “No,” said Trenloe.

  “It would be for their own good.”

  “They won’t fare any better left here.”

  “Better to die of hunger and cold than whatever the Uthuk can come up with.”

  “I can protect them,” said Trenloe firmly.

  “If you really wanted to protect them then you would have gone south instead of north.”

  Trenloe frowned. There was a little truth in that. But north was where the danger lay, and so that was where Trenloe had to go as well.

  A few hours later however he was laughing at an unexpected stroke of luck. The others looked at him as though the desolation had finally driven him mad as he left them in the road and jumped into the ditch that ran alongside it.

  A hay wain lay abandoned in a bramble thicket. The mutilated remains of a dray horse were harnessed between its wooden shafts and jagged sigils had been scratched into its low sides, but the cart itself appeared undamaged. At Trenloe’s urging his companions cut away the horse’s tack and harness and watched, bewilderment at the Trastan hero’s taking of the animal’s place between the shafts turning quickly to amazement as he gave a great roar of effort and hauled the heavy wain out of the ditch and back up onto the road. A few of them clapped, and Trenloe laughed aloud, reminded of happier times, as though the hard pumping of his heart was not only feeding his muscles but purging them of some more pernicious foulness.

  “You really are a miracle, Trenloe,” said S’yarr, as the others climbed onto the back of the wain. “Even a demonic possession can’t keep you down.”

  After that, with Trenloe drawing the eight of them in the cart by hand, they made better time than they had since the first night out of Nordgard Castle when the terror of their ordeal and the zeal of the chase had still been on them. He even sang a little, snatches of the travelling songs that he knew, but Trenloe had never been able to hold a complete set of lyrics in his head, much to Bethan’s amused despair, and the verse of one ballad merged easily into the chorus of the next and repeated often. His audience listened in contented bewilderment, watching the landscape drag by, and did not seem to notice.

  The strange sense of equanimity with desolation lasted until around midday when they saw their first Uthuk Y’llan north of the Downs.

  It was a scattered war party, spread out over the flank of a hill and disappearing over it, lithe warriors all armed with recurved and tasseled bows, clad in spiked harnesses and with long hair worn in topknots that flapped like vipers in the wind and wet. Each one of them walked at the head of a small train, three or four hunched slaves strung out behind them and laden with goods. Trenloe tensed. S’yarr had plundered an Uthuk hookspear, and most of the others were similarly armed with weapons taken from the dead at Nordgard Castle. Trenloe himself was unarmed and unarmored, roughly clad in a few scavenged rags and the dirt, mud, and soot of the forest road.

  To his surprise, the Uthuk did not immediately attack. Some of them even raised their long, bird-thin hands and waved, baring sharp teeth in grins and calling out in their equally sharp language. S’yarr barked something back and their laughter rang across the barren hills.

  “What did you say to them?” Trenloe asked.

  The Darklander would not meet his eye. Her expression was haunted. “You don’t want to know.”

  After that they passed many more, and closer. They were stragglers and scouts, rearguards and raiders, warbands with their own chieftains and only notional allegiance to the Blood Sister and who trailed the horde out of fear rather than loyalty or for their own opportunities to plunder. As they continued on north the trailing elements of the great Locust Swarm became so numerous that the hills moved with them, as though crawling with ants. Huge and unruly columns of barbarian infantry filled the road, and just as they were nearing the point where it began to bear west, hugging the shape of the forest towards Castle Kellar, the numbers became so great that they were driven from the road altogether.

  Trenloe watched the Uthuk march by. It dawned on him. He and his companions were so grimy and haggard, dressed in their enemy’s clothing, that the Uthuk Y’llan could not tell the difference. They did not expect to see anything but more Uthuk coming up behind them, so more Uthuk was all they saw.

  He drew up the wain on a patch of mossy scrub, set the shafts down and rolled out his sore muscles. He turned his neck to push out the stiffness. The wind cut across him, dry and cold and flavored like stone. S’yarr sprang out of the wagon and came to join him. She planted her spear in the ground.

  “You should rest before we go any further,” she said.

  “I’m just a little stiff in the shoulders. I�
��m not tired.”

  The woman nodded. She knew him a little now, enough to know that he did not know how to lie. She gestured towards the road. “The army split here. The cavalry and their flesh rippers went west. The infantry left the road and went north.”

  Trenloe looked out over the craggy hills and wind-scraped gravel stretches. The wind pinched tears from his eyes. He was not entirely certain where he was, maps had never held the same fascination for him as they had for Dremmin, but he had the feeling that S’yarr’s home of Last Haven had to be directly east of them by now. He looked at her. She was not looking that way. But then, of course, it was not there any more. He wondered if prior warning of its fall might have better prepared the castle at Nordgard for the coming invasion. If only anyone in Terrinoth had cared enough about folk so low, about events so far beyond their eastern frontiers, to even look.

  “Were you a tracker, back in the Darklands?” Trenloe asked.

  “My father was. He came to Last Haven hunting a bounty, met a half-Uthuk local woman and decided to stay.”

  “Your mother?”

  S’yarr grinned. “No. But that’s another story.”

  “So,” said Trenloe. “Do we take the road west? Or do we fall in with the rest of the horde and carry on north?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  Trenloe frowned. He had been making his own decisions for over a week now. It had not become any easier with practice. “North,” he said. “If that’s the larger force, as it seems to be, then that’s where Ne’Krul and the rest of the Uthuk witches will have to be.” He thought a bit longer. “And that’s the bit we can still catch.”