by David Guymer
In the opening that he bludgeoned for himself he spied Ne’Krul where she lay on the ground. She was shadow-wreathed, but the shadow had grown so massive that it seemed to stand over her. It resembled the knightly statues that he had seen once in an old Soulstone manor, overrun now by the woodland between the Tanglewood and Sern Genslyn.
This statue however was the starkest, most deathly white. The shadow it had previously inhabited had receded to form depthless pools within the hollow spaces of its eyes and mouth and to confer a mist-like definition to its musculature. Its crown was horned. Its back was winged. Its head was bowed, turned towards Ne’Krul as though in reflection. Its turned back was enough to paralyze Trenloe with terror. His arms fell cold and limp by his sides.
Ne’Krul cackled, clutching at the spear in her chest, and so too did the shadow. Neither was the original. Both seemed to be a copy of the other.
“How mighty you could have been had you allowed Prutorn to inhabit you. You could have ruled all of the west, sat in Archaut as Baelziffar’s regent of all the lands from Thelgrim to Lorim, as I will one day rule the Steppe.”
“As a demon’s pawn,” Trenloe spat.
“As his equal,” Ne’Krul replied. “They need allies on this plane as much as we need partners on theirs. It is not too late for you. You think you are a hero to the Suru’ithar? Amongst the Uthuk Y’llan you would be worshipped as a legend only one step removed from godhood, and even that might one day be within your grasp. Forget Prutorn. When Baelziffar’s ascension and mine is complete he will no longer need your body to walk in this plane. He will do so freely.” She laughed. “As Llovar Rutonu Lokander once did in the depths of the Charg’r, when he first broached the boundaries of the world and raised the Spire of Ruin in monument, so too will I do now in Kell. My name will be forever spoken alongside his. I will live forever, and Llovar’s conquest will finally be complete. Kell, and all the lands between it and the Spire, will merge with the Charg’r and become one with the Ynfernael.”
Trenloe held his head.
It was difficult to think in the presence of that shadow. Difficult to think.
Difficult to breathe.
He fought to hold onto his last breath, his last thought, struggled to remember what that had been. He tried to tighten his hands into fists but failed to command the fingers to move as one.
“Stop… feeding me lackeys and… fight me.”
“Not everyone is as mighty as you are Trenloe the Strong. But then,” she bared her bloodied fangs, “I am sure you remember. What kind of hero lets everyone fall but himself? What kind but a hero of the Uthuk Y’llan.”
“No!” Trenloe roared. Rage burned behind his eyes, and the force of his fury seemed to ripple the air beyond the blood witch like a pond struck by a feather. “Fight me!”
“Very well.”
The shadow lifted its horned crown. Its wings unfolded from its back. Every movement occurred without sound. Indeed, they drew sound and light from the world as if to fashion them, and all around could do naught but stand mute and watch in silent awe as the demon king made his decree.
“As thou hast granted me my desire, allow me to grant thee thine.” The demon king drew a sword the color of the last star’s dying light. “I will fight you.”
Chapter Fifty
Kurt
Orrush Khatak, North Kell
The battle wasn’t nearly so terrible, now it was on him. He’d practiced for it, drilled for it. All those half-remembered dawn exercises out on the flood plains at Bastion Tarn, back when the only thing that had come across the Lothan with impunity had been the fog rolling off the lower Dunwarr. The long marches up the endless tracts of nothing anyone wanted that supposedly marked the border with Forthyn. The endless cycles of unit, battalion, and regimental contests, all of it coming to a grand head in Castle Kellar with the garrison champion competing for honor at the Feast of Roland. It had always seemed like a tremendous time-wasting exercise. It was as though the marshals and baronets and so on had decided that since they had all these soldiers they had really better do something with them all, lest the baron take them all away.
And look how well that had turned out.
He saw it all for what it had really been now. It had been for this.
Most of Kell’s men and a good number of its women would have been trained. They might not have worn the baron’s colors in one of the big garrisons like Kurt had, but they would have served in one of the local militias, the patchwork of county warbands and ranger outfits that held the darkness at bay. They knew how to hold a spear, shoot a bow, stand in a line. Most would have defended Kell in some small way before today. There was a reason that Kell’s army was looked on with admiration and envy by baronies with five times the population and fifty times the wealth and it was here, in the oiled war gear and battered faces of the ten thousand infantrymen in grim array spanning the old road.
No one else took the Darkness as seriously. No one else had to.
Because the Kellar did it for them.
“Draw!” Kurt yelled.
Three long lines of bowmen, sixty in all under his command with a good arm’s length between each, drew arrows from the quivers set up in front of them and nocked them to their strings. They bent backwards, aimed somewhere between the far end of the vale and the sky, and then pulled them to their ears with an audible creak of stressed yew. He didn’t call for them to aim. There was no need. He could have ordered them to turn around and shoot backwards and they would all still hit a Darklander.
“Loose!”
Flax strings thwacked against leather wrist guards, rattling down the line of archers as their volley leapt skywards in a staggered sheet. Kurt watched it arc upwards, over the embattled ranks of mail-clad spearmen and golems, before hissing down over the Uthuk Y’llan as though it was raining snakes.
From what he’d heard of the Charg’r and the Ru, they probably felt right at home.
“Draw!”
And they went again.
Beyond the battle lines, the valley rocked and swelled, like a sea goaded to frothing outrage, the bone whites and bloody purples of the Uthuk surging with great and terrible fury around the chinks of silver and gold where Kell’s knights were still struggling valiantly on. Valor, Kurt thought, and shook his head. They could keep it. This was where the real work was getting done. There was where the world would get saved, if the gods decided it was worth it. For his own part, Kurt wasn’t sure he cared. It wasn’t as if he was leaving any great part of it behind. Elben, Sibhard, Katrin, his home: all gone. All he wanted now was to do what he could, to be as stubborn and awkward about bowing out as any proper man of Kell ought to be. He felt almost nothing at all, and a curious sense of empowerment and courage came with that fact. As though he was denying something precious to someone he didn’t know and who didn’t know him, but who despised him utterly nonetheless.
As he watched, a thin streak of gray burst out of the tide swell of Uthuk Y’llan pressing the Kellar shields. The warrior was long-limbed and demon swift, his back hunched under the towering weight of bone spurs festooned with grisly fetishes and pennons. Kurt tracked the thing as it ran, so inhumanly fast it almost flew over the shield wall, to drop in behind and stab its knives repeatedly into the line-sergeant’s neck before the warriors around him could reform and bring the berserker down.
Kurt nocked his arrow to the flatbow he now thought of as being Sarb’s and drew it back. He could have put an arrow through the Uthuk’s heart from there. Easily. But he wasn’t one man looking to hold his hill any more. He was one small part of the Shield of Daqan.
“Loose!”
Another volley arced up, arced down. More Uthuk fell, spitted with arrows, and Kurt was entirely unmoved. Someone, somewhere, trumpeted an order. The spearmen clammed up and ground forward a pace before resetting their wall of shields and asserting a new line about a yard
ahead of the old one. Twist and pull, he thought. Some things a soldier just didn’t have to think about any more. It wasn’t enough simply to hold and check the Uthuk there. There were too many of them, and the Barrowdale hills were far from impassable. The Kellar army had to force the question. They had to push. Even in defense.
Just then Constan trotted his horse up through one of the corridors that had been left between the formations, his mail jangling and bright. “We’re holding them!” he shouted as he rode past, holding his sword aloft, the flames of Kellos etched in acid along the length of the blade visible for anyone to see. “By the gods, we’ll win this thing yet!”
Kurt grunted.
It was still a little early in the day for that, but the troops seemed to like it.
Constan rode on, shouting his message to the front where, by the looks of things, they needed it more.
The archer to his left, to the right-hand edge of the third line, turned to him and grinned. She was about Sibhard’s age, with long blonde hair worn in braids and from a farm someplace called Zeiholt, further south and west than he had ever imagined he’d need to care about.
“What?” he said.
She shrugged.
“Draw!” he barked.
This time, as he raised his flatbow to turn his arrow skyward, his eye crossed the horizon of the Gate. Since the army’s deployment to the valley, it had been there. A strain through the air under the arch that made his heart beat harder and his palms sweat. Something ready to snap. Just at that moment it gave a sickening ripple. The streak patterns that had been prominent in the clouds came suddenly apart and the air, unseasonably warm until then, more Trastan summer than autumnal Kellar eve, became cold. A thump reverberated through the old paved road. Then another. Another. A deeply slow heartbeat.
Or perhaps, Kurt thought, footsteps.
Kurt held his shot and strained his eyes, but he could see nothing.
Just a shadow.
His archers lowered their bows and eased tension from the draw, uneasy, as the newly cold wind blustered though long hair, helmet plumes and Constan’s banners, bringing with it the murmur of doomed voices and the coming immediacy of dread.
With one voice, the Uthuk Y’llan gave a shout that chilled Kurt to his spirit. It wasn’t the sound of triumph. It was a cry of terror. And there was only one realistic way for them to get out.
Through the army of Kell.
Chapter Fifty-One
Andira Runehand
Orrush Khatak, North Kell
She was moments from failure, but she refused to accept it. Not while she was so close. The Uthuk Y’llan issued an almighty roar, fear and rapture equally bright in their fervid eyes and came at the Kellar knights with redoubled savagery. Only the aberrant champions, irredeemably a part of the Ynfernael realm long before this moment, seemed unfazed by the sinking of the mortal plane beneath their feet. They threw back their deformed, maned, spine-frilled heads and exulted, yelling out the name of Baelziffar their immortal sovereign and deity, even as Andira stubbornly went on striking them down.
Andira whirled her poleaxe overhead, once, twice, building up speed, and on the third loop struck the head from the iron-scaled neck of a blade-chipped Uthuk champion, using the momentum that granted to turn Hamma’s horse towards the sundered Gate.
“Now!” she roared, hoarse with determination. “We must get through now!”
Fredric turned his head towards her. His face was hidden from her but for the little bit she could see though the grid pattern of small holes in his visor. Even that was enough to share in the nightmare that the baron, and soon enough every mortal soul in eastern Terrinoth, was now living. The Ynfernael had been cast open. Reality had been upended. A demon king walked amongst them and all that had once been unheard of was now so. He said it all with his eyes. Nothing came out of him in words.
“Gather your knights!” she shouted. “Rouse them for one last attempt on the Gate. You have brought them this far in glory, do not allow them fade into damnation now!”
For a moment Andira feared that the horrors of Baelziffar’s Ynfernael domain had pushed Fredric too close to the edge, but the appeal to vainglory seemed to reach him. His helm gave the slightest of forward tilts as the baron nodded.
“Yes,” he said, his voice coming from someplace very deep, and echoing from him like a cry from the bottom of a well. “One last charge. That is how knights and heroes are meant to perish when it comes time for them to falter.”
“See me to the Gate and no further. This is no petty demon like those that Archerax threw against the walls of Castle Kellar. This is a fiend that was never meant to set foot in this world. He is beyond all your swords. Get me to the Gate and leave his destruction to me.”
“It will be done, my lady!”
The baron gave a shout, rallying his stricken knights to his voice. A few were too far gone to terror to listen and would not be roused. A great bard with power over hearts and souls might have reached them, but Andira did not have that gift and Fredric, for all his honest charisma, lacked that power. There was nothing to be done but leave them to fate, and prevail with the force they still had.
She raised her hand and raised her voice. Light blazed from her as she tapped the power she had been saving, pain filling her as though she were kindling being devoured by a fire. With a crescendo shout she punched the air in front of her, something far greater than her own fist and made of something more than mere rune magic punching a hole into the hordes of Uthuk Y’llan.
Her horse reared in the magical backwash, a glitter shower of light and color as, with the space to gather a charge, Fredric went. Horns blowing, the last two dozen Knights of the Yeron alive and sane were set thundering after their baron. Regaining control of her panicked steed, Andira shouted in frustration and galloped after them.
Her magic had made the breach. Fredric and his knights were the hammer and wedge that split the whole thing up the center. In their own terror of the colossus they had set loose on Kell, the Uthuk almost let them past.
With Fredric still leading, they burst into a narrow clearing that appeared to shadow the position of the Gate as it crossed the valley and the road. Great bonfires writhed, uncannily man-shaped, reaching with their fingertips towards the demented beckoning of the Ynfernael and screaming as though in anguish. Mortal warriors ran about without any obvious direction or plan. Witches sat on their knees, backs turned, hands raised up to the spasming Gate. Fredric had a free run.
“Knights of Kell!” he roared, spurring his horse into a mad gallop.
The vicinity around the bonfire looked like the scene of a parallel battlefield. Fredric’s knights trampled over a field of slain in their determination to assail the Gate and expunge the creeping dread of it from their hearts. A twelve-foot high silhouette stood framed before the Gate’s swirling fury. It was a shape without substance, an anathema, defined wholly by what it was not and what it denied. It was entirely white, the hard white of emptiness, of light so bright that it blinds and devours, the screaming void against which nothing could stand.
Baelziffar.
Fredric yelled a challenge. None of the knights had retained their lances through the long battle, and all followed suit brandishing swords and maces and battered shields.
Andira was awed by their foolish courage.
These were highborn men and women. They had been given everything, lives that the vast majority could only dream of, and yet they threw them gladly away for the sake of Kell.
Baelziffar was standing over the stricken body of a huge human man. There was no time to wonder who he was or how he had come to be there, lying beaten at the feet of the demon king. Fredric and his knights descended on him like an avalanche of metal.
Baelziffar did not move. Movement was for lesser beings.
The charge broke over him like a wave against a rock. Bodies we
nt flying. Armored men and horses went over as if they had just charged full pelt into a wall. Sathe Caldergart broke her sword against the demon king’s perfect form, screaming as a trio of smoking lines appeared across her cuirass and her body slid apart into four smoldering pieces. Those knights who were still alive and horsed galloped on past, raving about the lifetime of horrors they had just witnessed, and did not look back. If Fredric was amongst the dead or the insane, Andira did not know, and did not know which the baron would have preferred.
Still, Baelziffar did not move.
Andira swung herself from the saddle and dismounted at a canter, skipping several paces across the broken road while Hamma’s horse wheeled and bolted. She preferred to fight on foot. She gripped her poleaxe in a defensive posture, holding her runehand up before her like a talismanic shield. She was strangely unafraid and unexcited now that the moment she had been fighting towards for so long was here. She was almost surreally calm, focused on what needed to be done. The rune glowed and spat in the demon king’s contesting aura. The pain was incredible and the demon king, for his part, seemed to feel something of it too. A snarl smoked across the pristine façade of his expression.
He did not raise his sword, but it arrived there regardless, en garde.
“Thou art too late, paramour.” He was gesturing to the transforming corpses of the blood witch’s sacrifices ranked up before the gate. Another blink, another flicker of perception, and then he was not. “Soon my court entire shall make their way to this world. But I would be remembered as the first.”