The Shield of Daqan

by David Guymer

  All circumstance was running towards its confluence and it was there, at the end of its literal road at Orrush Khatak, where all heroes and their adversaries were being drawn.

  It was not just the demons of the Ynfernael that worked their hands in Mennara though they were the most overt. Andira did not know how the gods chose to operate, only that it was for mortal heroes to heed the silent call when it came, and to interpret the paths that had been laid for them as best as they could.

  “Two thousand knights,” said Fredric, looking everywhere but at Andira Runehand though there was little else to be seen. Broken earth and iron shoes seemed to echo and transform his words. Not enough, was what it seemed to say to her. Your hand has vanquished Archerax the Great, but the might of Baelziffar Demon King shalt undo thee.

  Andira grunted, her eyelids flickering, and swayed in the saddle before firming her thighs around the horse’s barrel and gripping the reins tightly. She had never heard the voice before, never communicated directly, but she had spent so long with the demon in her thoughts, and with the awareness of being in his, that she knew his words when he spoke.

  “Out of my head, Baelziffar. I will speak to you from the other side of an Ynfernael gate as I close it against you.”

  “We should have waited for the infantry,” Fredric went on, oblivious.

  “There is no time,” she said, addressing the baron.

  “So you say.”

  “Because it is true.”

  “What in the name of Kellos’ Justice do you expect me to do with two thousand knights against the entirety of the Locust Swarm?”

  Naught but anguish and bitterness in death.

  Andira shook her head.

  “Distract them for me. I will destroy the demon king,” she said, with a conviction that would have turned a sword. “All you need to concern yourself with is the Uthuk Y’llan.”

  Fredric laughed. “Is that all?”

  Even if by some means thou couldst best me here I would outlast you, mortal, and bring thy ruin some other day.

  “Some other day does not concern me,” Andira murmured.

  “What?” said Fredric.

  “Forgive me I was… thinking aloud.”

  She raised her hand aloft, adding it to the tumult of banners that flew around the Baron of Kell and his champions. The gritty air turned white around her, like falling snow around a half-shuttered lantern. Her blued armor sparkled like water in its light, her own banner, reclaimed from the battlefields of Castle Kellar by Urban Brant’s resourceful pages, snapped from the head of her poleaxe as she thundered over the Barrowdales on Sir Brodun’s old horse. Baelziffar would know her in any guise, but now that the moment was at hand she wanted all his servants to know who it was that had ridden in answer to the call. Let them see the hero who cast the great demon king back into oblivion and exult in her.

  It was almost dark.

  A good rider with a fast horse could cover the thirty miles from Castle Kellar to Orrush Khatak in an hour. A fully armored echelon of knights took considerably longer. They were close though. Andira willed them closer.

  “The evening grows warm,” said Fredric. “Strange. With night falling.”

  “We are close to the Gate,” said Andira.

  “I remember.” Fredric turned to gaze ahead. There was nothing there yet to see, but with one mailed hand he pointed to a spot in the distance where the sky, that great bowl of gray, was starting to break to red.

  The Gate of the Furnace lay before them.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Ne’krul

  Orrush Khatak, North Kell

  The heart was still beating in her hands, kicking like a newborn foal and soaked in blood and juices as she bore it from the sacrifice’s gutted body towards the pyre. It disappeared in a fizz and a crackle and a hiss of black smoke.

  The plume rose in the hot air and Ne’Krul craned her cadaverously thin neck to follow it. The smoke twisted and coiled into a horned shape that loomed over the Orrush Khatak, and Ne’krul shivered in ecstasy under eyes as white as hissing solder, until, too vast to hold its shape any longer, the shadow came apart and returned to the wind.

  With Ne’Krul’s first offering, the best she had been able to conjure had been a wraith of cloud that looked like nothing at all, and had survived for the breath of a single moment. Now, the bridge between worlds had narrowed to the span of a whispered threat or a cruel thought. The skin of reality that sheathed the Gate trembled like an eardrum, things squirming at the other side of the membrane as if to push through.

  And the shape had undeniably become that of Baelziffar, demon king lord of the Ynfernael.

  His coming spilled into the mortal plane in a thousand ways. The air turned red. Blood ran backwards. Eyes perceived the night in color.

  There had never been a moment in which Ne’Krul had been unaware of her ally’s presence, not in the hundred years since her first sacrifice in his name, but to the warriors of the Uthuk Y’llan he came in a giddying fury of visions, violence, and spontaneous acts of ritual suicide.

  Ne’Krul turned from the fire.

  The vale of Orrush Khatak forge had been transformed into a carnival of fire and pain. So great were the hosts of the Uthuk Y’llan that the road itself could not contain them, and warriors picketed themselves on the hillsides in dervish mood and filled the neighboring vales with noise. For twenty miles or more, the Uthuk Y’llan had transformed the hills into things of flesh. Spanning the valley at its midpoint stood an arch of bloodstone, an Ynfernael mineral well known to the wise of the Charg’r but long forgotten to the superstitious and unthinking folk of the west. Too perfect to have been crafted by human beings. Too unholy to have been a product of the yrthwrights’ flawed making. The Gate of the Furnace, it was called by its old name. And the first people, wiser to the truth of humanity’s origins as creatures of Ynfernael taint, had understood its nature and purpose. In the light of the Blood Coven’s pyres, arrayed in an unholy vigil around the foot of the Gate, and the hundred unprompted ritual blazes that dotted the valley walls, the rock appeared to glisten as though wet.

  The Ynfernael transmuted all. She could see pain, touch fear.

  Ne’Krul lifted her hand as though submerged to her neck in sludge and beckoned with a long talon slick with blood.

  “Another.”

  The corral of waiting victims cried out in vain for mercy, or for the intercession of gods that were powerless to aid them here or had never existed at all. Their terror was the sharp edge of a knife called Hate that quivered in a grip made of Pain. It was the tool with which she would wedge open the Gate to her ally’s realm and, with the strength she had drawn from the ravaging of Kell, cast it wide. The distances between herself and her otherworldly ally had shrunk from incalculable to inconsequential. Black mist seeped from the west face of the Gate without appearing to have originated from the east. The clouds themselves transformed as they passed above the ley line it marked, threading out into long parallel streaks that looked like the gouging of claws tearing through a weakening roof.

  The next victim was dragged screaming from the corral. She was a Suru’ithar. A Terrinothi westerling. The same word meant soft. The people of Kell thought themselves a hardy breed, toughened by harsh living. The Borderlands would have broken any one of them, and even that was as a paradise next to the Ru Steppes or the bloody hardships of the Charg’r Wastes, the true cradle of the Uthuk Y’llan. It had been there, long ago, wandering under the malign star of the Ynfernael atop Llovar’s tower, that Ne’Krul had first heard the summons of Baelziffar on a storm of crimson dust. There had been siblings but she did not remember them. Conflict, hunger, and the claws of demons had taken them all. Her parents though, she remembered. When the storm had spoken and promised her life in exchange for her parents’, she had paid it without reserve. The cost in blood had grown steeply since those di
mly remembered days, but so too had the rewards. And so she paid. The Suru’ithar could not understand such sacrifice. This was why her corral was filled only with captives taken in war rather than the ambitious, powerful and treacherous who generally provided in such grand rites of mass sacrifice. The fear in those souls, unsteeled by the daily hardship and brutal misery of the wastes, cut that much sharper at the Ynfernael’s walls.

  She prepared the ritual knife she was carrying with tired strokes while the struggling victim was strapped to the board.

  “Great Sister,” murmured a svelte blood champion with curved blades of bronze for hands and a ridge of bone for hair who appeared from the crowds like a visitation, there to avert her eyes and lower herself to both knees.

  Ne’Krul waited.

  The prepared sacrifice beneath her panted, short, shallow, like a rabbit in an eagle’s talons, staring at the blood harvester with ill-deserved hope.

  “Archerax has failed,” said the warrior. “The army of the Suru’ithar comes by the western road.”

  Ne’Krul bared her wicked fangs. Turning back to the woman, she stuck her knife into her belly. The woman’s shriek was long and uplifting. Blood welled up around Ne’Krul’s long fingers and spilled over the table’s sides. “Good,” she said. “The final sacrifice is here early.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Fredric

  Orrush Khatak, North Kell

  There was no hope of concealing their approach. The road cut a straight tract between the steep mounds of the Barrowdales, wide enough for four hundred men or for two hundred heavy knights riding abreast at a hard gallop. The entirety of Kell’s surviving knighthood, all that could be drawn from the four corners of the barony in the time at hand and spread out in ten gleaming lines.

  A mile or two on, the body of the Uthuk Y’llan began. Where it ended, Fredric could not say or guess. It spilled over the surrounding hillsides, vanished down the neck of the valley. Their campfires were like moonlight reflecting off waves at sea. Snatches of frenzied music, the Uthuk having an apparent preference for percussive instruments and shrieking horns, rose above the churn of voice and fury but there was no rhyme or meter to it that Fredric could catch. It was an impossible number, defying comprehensions, and Fredric found it surprisingly easy to avoid dwelling on the insanity of attacking such a host head on. Above them reared the Gate.

  It was impossible to look at for too long before one’s heart began to beat overfast and one’s eyes waver. A shadow and a malice leaked out of it, something that made even the steel-tempered Knights of the Yeron that flanked him turn irritable. What Fredric saw when he looked he could not describe: treachery, grief, a land engulfed, and afterwards he took pains to look anywhere but at the colossal monument they cantered towards. Only the supposed hero, sheathed in the golden halo of her rune-magic, seemed unaffected. Looking at her, however, even for a moment, brought him no ease. The knights were more afraid of her than they were of the Uthuk Y’llan.

  Fredric did not know what to think of her.

  “I hope when this is over you will tell me the story of how you came by that,” he said, over the pound of hooves, refusing still to look her in the eye. “I am no scholar, but I have read something of rune lore. I have never seen a design quite like that one in your hand, nor heard of a rune being written into the body of a living person.”

  “I dream of it sometimes,” said Andira, looking down into her bare palm. “I seldom remember it when I wake, and it comes to me less now than it used too. I do not know what that means, if it means anything at all.”

  “They must see that we are coming by now,” yelled the nearest of the Knights of the Yeron. Her name was Sathe Caldergart. The electors of the Order had recognized her seniority for the purposes of the battle but had yet to ordain her properly as grandmarshal, and thus she retained her old rank of lance marshal and had refused the honor of wielding Unkindness even in Kell’s dire need. She rode with her visor up, revealing graying hair, a face cleft by a diagonal scar and with one eye covered by a felt patch. The wind practically screamed through her spurs, through the golden wings of her helmet and the elaborate flutes in her armor. “Why don’t they react?”

  “They are a barbarian horde,” Fredric shouted back. “To my eye they are overconfident in their strength. Their focus is on their unholy ritual instead of on the west road.”

  Fredric felt himself flush with excitement. Here was a chance at real battle. A purer battle. There were no walls to fight over, no civilians to fear for, just two thousand of his best and noblest, and a single charge for death and glory. He allowed himself a grim smile inside his visored helm. If the Uthuk thought themselves triumphant over Kellar then he would be at the forefront of a rude awakening. He would break the Swarm under the lance and hooves of his knights, and all without a single sword in aid from Dhernas or Forthyn or the corsair soldiers of his mother-in-law’s island fiefs. He would carry this day, and it would be his name they hailed when next the lords met in Archaut.

  “Do not be taken in,” Andira warned, reading his thoughts even through the steel of his helm. “Be ruthless, but be cold. Pride and ambition are the domain of the Ynfernael. Hatred feeds it, in thought or in deed, and regardless of righteousness. The Uthuk Y’llan will no doubt feel differently, but to the demon king of the Ynfernael it does not matter who bleeds in the greatest number today.”

  Dame Caldergart scoffed. “This is not a joust, lady. Would you have us blunt our lances too?”

  Andira regarded her coldly. The knight shrank visibly from her light. “I would have you strike with true purpose, strike your lance cleanly through the heart of the Swarm and do not allow yourself to be distracted. However sincerely the Uthuk Y’llan invite you to slaughter. Strike for the witches that command this horde and strike hard, slay them before they can conjure the demon king from his ivory palace in the Ynfernael. Fail in that and this battle will become one that is wholly beyond you.”

  “I will not fail,” said Fredric, as though he had suddenly become the itinerant knight and she the baroness.

  “I will hold you to that.”

  “You are certain that the summoning of the demon king is their intention?” said Fredric.

  “I am,” said Andira. “Nothing less than the massacre of a nation would be enough to herald the return of Baelziffar to Mennara.”

  Again Fredric felt himself grow angry, but it was a purer hate, arising this time from within himself rather than from the ire washing out from the Gate.

  The Locust Swarm seemed without number. His knights would deliver an almighty cull, but he had read enough yellowed treatises, and experienced enough battle of his own, to know that a host as great as this one would eventually bog down even the mightiest cavalry and overwhelm them. They needed infantry to secure a position. They needed archers to harry the Uthuk, to hem their flanks, to pin their own cavalry and demon flyers and support the knights’ attack. They needed what he had implicitly known he had been lacking since he had looked out from the walls of Castle Kellar and wondered at his barony’s normalcy on the eve of war and that was more time and more soldiers. Andira did not care. She said as much, and Fredric could only admire her bluntness.

  They would win this battle now or they would lose it forever.

  “We will prevail!” he yelled, as much to bolster his own courage as to inspire his knights.

  “My powers will be needed to make us a path to the Gate,” said Andira. “For your own good and the good of all, it is on you to be sure that no sword or arrow can strike me down until the queen of the swarm lies broken under the bodies of her sisters.”

  “For Litiana.” He nodded to Sathe Caldergart, who in turn drew her horse closer to Andira’s. He drew his sword and held it aloft to ride amidst the streaming banners of Kell. The slow leach of the Ynfernael winked crimson along its golden edge, the natural magicks of the dragons spitting violently in com
petition from the Rune of Fate beaten into the base of the blade.

  “We are the Shield of Daqan!” he roared. “We face the fire and the shadow, emblems bared and proud, daring death to strike us as it may and knowing no fear. We do not ask for more than this. We do not question. We do it because for two thousand years we always have. We are the first people. We have fought off all the monsters of this world and we have won. We will fight them again today because it is not in our blood to lose. We are the Shield of Daqan. We are Kellar!”

  His warriors responded in like voice, a triumph of fierce shouts and strident horns. “Kellar!” they yelled back “Dragonslayer!”

  “There is no retreat!” Fredric cried. “I for one will not die an old man in Dhernas.”

  The knights laughed as they couched their lances. Two thousand of them. It sounded like a forest falling, trampled under a stampede of avenging hooves.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Ne’krul

  Orrush Khatak, North Kell

  The horsemen of the Suru’ithar rolled over the furthest elements of the horde. It was like watching a demon storm, all sand and metal and furious energy, crashing against the palisades of an oasis town. She witnessed, protected by bargains made and blessings given, while others were mauled and slain and left to rue their life’s inadequacies as destiny passed them by wearing skins of metal. The Locust Swarm was sufficiently huge that it could absorb a battle without affecting her unduly, but its screams and convulsions reached even her. She felt every death, tasted every flare of wrath as a bone knife turned on a steel plate, and saw every blossoming of pleasure as a warrior was trampled, run through, or gored. She took equal delight in it all. For every superficial distinction in color and culture between the Suru’ithar and the Uthuk Y’llan, they were all still kin. They were all human, and when they failed, they failed in the same human ways.