by David Guymer
“When Kell sinks wholly into the abyss, then, perhaps, I will concede that it is too late.”
“I have taken great pleasure from thy hunt, Runehand. I shall keep thee, after thou art slain.”
Even anticipating the onslaught to come, Andira was barely prepared for it.
Blows rained down from nowhere and everywhere, all at once. There was no lead to them, no footwork or body language to read and interpret; the demon king simply moved, like a shadow always ahead of a moving light, and the blows fell. She parried by instinct and a vanishing degree of foresight. She punched with an open hand. The rune smacked into the demon’s chest like a thunderclap, and for the first time in their altercation she saw the demon king move.
He threw out marble white wings and twisted into shadow. Andira whirled as the demon king was behind her, sword striking the horizontal shaft of her poleaxe like a mountain falling across her guard. The grit and pebbles paving the ancient road exploded up from around her feet, and she reeled back as the debris got into her eyes.
The demon king’s strength was colossal. Physically, he was smaller than Archerax had been, but there was far more to Baelziffar than his earthly dimensions. Of the two of them, of the three of them, he was assuredly the greatest.
“I am godlike.” He moved towards her, every flicker carrying him closer. “I am immortal. By what right does a creature of animal kind spar with me?”
Another flicker.
His sword was upraised.
Another.
It turned point down.
Baelziffar’s eyes smoked. His smile was the perfection of darkness. One more movement and she would feel hellmetal as the sword split her body in two. Her quest would be over. A part of her would welcome that, but failure she would rage against until the final breath was dragged out of her. She tried to move out of the way, but her mortal body was just too slow.
Suddenly Fredric was there.
The Rune of Fate that emblazoned his sword had done what its draconic creators had intended for it to do: it had found its moment and its place, even at the cost of its wielder’s sanity, and his life.
The sword burst through Baelziffar’s stomach, the Rune of Fate burning like a sunrise as the magic of dragonkind warred with that of the Ynfernael. The baron’s eyes were alive with nightmares that none but he could share, playing out in mirrored reflection against the black film that seemed to cover his eyes. And yet he struck his blow regardless and struck it hard.
Baelziffar roared. Darkness crystalized within his yawning mouth. Reality broke and fragmented as the demon king writhed. There were two of him. Then there were three. Four. Five. Six. A hundred. An infinity. All of them a still-life composition in agony.
Then there was only one.
Andira took her poleaxe two-handed, the rune in her hand glowing brighter than her fated soul, and struck.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Kurt
Orrush Khatak, North Kell
The battle was lost. All done but for the sticking folk up on spikes. The captain was dead, and his southern companies were running. Kurt didn’t know what had happened to General Brant, but he’d seen a giant centipede thing of the Ynfernael, all hooks and teeth and leaking venom, trample his standard and eat his horse. Somewhere in the mad stampede that had overtaken the Kellar lines the general’s clarion still sounded. Long blasts repeated the same panicked cry over and over. Kurt couldn’t see the musician or figure out which direction the call was coming from. All directions had become the same. People fought everywhere and over nothing, discipline and cohesion lost, sides done away with. It was every man for himself now, whichever way he turned.
The Shield had been broken. Its pieces were being cast aside.
Way, way above Kurt’s head, a second battle was being fought on its most terrible scale. Lightning lashed and stabbed across the sky giving short lives to a thousand shadows around every figure struggling to get clear. Around the vicinity of the Gate it became too harsh even to look upon. People were dying in droves and it didn’t matter. To the demi-gods dueling over the blasted Gate it didn’t matter a damn. Kurt didn’t know what he was supposed to do now but run.
Who would have thought it: Kurt Stavener wanted to live after all.
Wielding Hamma’s heavy sword two-handed, his old round shield strapped across his back, Kurt sprinted from the front lines with the fires of hell on his back. A handful of his unit were still with him. The blonde woman who had been stood nearest when the line had crumbled and the Uthuk Y’llan had spilled through. The boy from Trenton. A few others similarly kitted out with arming swords and knives, their bows cast aside with their empty quivers. The rest were dead, mad or fending for themselves somewhere else and doing better than he was probably.
An Uthuk swung her scythe at him. He ducked, ran on, didn’t bother to counter. He saw no point in it now. The blade struck into one of his soldiers who gurgled as he went down. Trenton rammed his sword into another Uthuk’s side, screamed as he ran into him and fell over. The rest left him behind.
The Uthuk Y’llan were fighting like rats to get out of the valley, no different to the Kellar. Kurt hacked, kicked and bludgeoned his way through a dozen minor, brutally significant skirmishes, before falling on a knot of spearmen clustered together behind a wall of Darklander corpses and an upturned supply wain.
At the last moment Kurt held his blow, his remaining soldiers ploughing into his back and menacing the spearmen with their weapons.
The warriors were liveried in the castle’s purple, but the Ynfernael made a mockery of a man’s colors. Whether it made him see foes as friends, or friends as foes, Kurt didn’t know, the end result was blood on his hands. Kurt pulled his sword up, about to simply give the spears a wide berth and keep on running, when the unit sergeant called out in surprise. Gray eyes very like his own widened in his soot-grimed face, and he pulled off his kettle helmet, revealing pale, almost-clean skin and a prominent widow’s peak.
Kurt stopped short. His heart fluttered in his chest, unsure if or how it was supposed to beat. The Ynfernael was not supposed to give these kinds of miracle.
“S- Sarb?”
The boy had changed so much in a short time.
He almost didn’t recognize his own son.
The bowmen lowered their weapons and ran past him to merge gratefully with the larger group of spears. Their leader’s reaction to his opposite number was permission enough for them.
Sibhard put a grubby hand on Kurt’s mailed shoulder. Kurt layered it with his. He didn’t know what to say. “You’re alive,” sounded trite. It was all he had.
“Elben?” Sarb asked.
A tear fell from Kurt’s eye. He shook his head.
He squeezed his son’s hand. They had a moment only, but a moment was more than he’d been expecting when the Ynfernael had opened its gates. He’d take it.
He doubted there were many men fleeing Orrush Khatak just then with more than they’d taken in.
“Run!” Sarb dragged on his arm, pulling him on as the sky above them exploded and a demon raged, and the day rained red stone.
Epilogue
Chapter Fifty-Three
Greyfox
Barrowdales, North Kell
Greyfox crossed her arms and leant forward over the creaking saddle. The horse was one of Kell’s sturdy hill breeds with stocky legs, shaggy coat, a mane like wire and stamina in buckets where it lacked in speed. She had developed a certain fondness for the animal after their wild ride west, evading the flesh ripper packs and hybrid scouts that had plagued the border regions to get word of the Uthuk invasion to Fredric’s neighbors. The horse had been borrowed. Looking at what was left of the battlefield she had returned too, she was supposing she got to keep it now.
Silver linings.
Sir Hrothgang Liedner trotted his enormous destrier alongside her and peered out from under the be
ak of his bascinet helm. The wind pulled vainly at his blonde beard. Greyfox did not know how status was measured within the Marshals of the Citadel, the famed knightly order of Archaut, but Sir Hrothgang was something high within their ranks. His plate was silver and gleaming, blustering with blue ribbons, the golden crown of Daqan bold on every shining surface. Even his mount was dressed in mail, not merely caparisoned but armored after the fashion of its rider. No ordinary horse could have borne such a weight of metal so far across Terrinoth so quickly, and it was no ordinary horse. Ten hands taller than Greyfox’s steed and barrel-chested, short hair the color of bronze. It came from the finest stock in all of Terrinoth, descended from the horses of kings bred centuries ago from those reared by the orcs of the Ugluk Badlands. Or so it liked to tell her. Whether it was hardship, burden or supernatural peril, the warhorses of the marshals treated it with equal disdain.
The taskforce that Greyfox and the marshal had hurriedly pulled together from the yeomanry of Pelgate and Dhernas, about six hundred horse and foot in disparate, flapping liveries looked anxiously over the silent hills as their commander crunched on ahead.
“This is only my second visit to Kell,” said Sir Hrothgang. “But should there not be some kind of arch structure here?”
Greyfox puffed out her cheeks, at a loss. She did not know what to say apart from what General Brant had told her. There was no Gate, no Furnace, no structure of any kind. Just a rubble wall of red stones that spanned the width of the vale. It was broken only towards the center, by a crater large enough to have swallowed the marshal’s entire army, which had been partially filled in with jumbled stone.
She licked her lips nervously.
“We should probably head back to Dhernas,” she said. “It looks as though we missed it.”
Sir Hrothgang was silent a long while. “It looks as though we missed the beginning.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Grace
Frostgate, Forthyn
The young baroness of Kell shivered in the cold. She was wearing armor that was too large for her, and carrying a sword that was too heavy. A thick coat feathered with snow was drawn tight, a fur-trimmed collar so high on her that it pricked the tops of her ears. She looked ridiculous, but she did not want to upset her mother who had suffered enough, or offend their host by refusing his gifts. The coat, the armor, and the sword, had all been gifts from the thane of Frostgate. He had thought highly of her father and been genuinely grieved to learn of his fall to the Uthuk Y’llan. Grace had been moved by it, enough to wear the emblems of his city as she set out. The shield strapped across her slender back was all she carried that was her own, the unblinking Owl of Kell bobbing with her gait, looking back down the snowy road towards the city gate already half buried in the swirling snow.
Grace wondered if she looked any less mercenary than the half hundred fur-wrapped warriors that traipsed ahead of her. Wrapping herself deeper into her coat she watched them march. Her breath steamed as it left her mouth and froze her face. She did not know what she was looking for.
She wished her father had returned from Orrush Khatak. She wished for it every morning and night when her mother insisted she pray to Kellos and Syraskil for the destruction of their enemies.
Thinking of her mother, she turned and looked down.
Grace was taller now, if only slightly, her mother consigned to the pony-drawn limber since the Uthuk Y’llan had forced them to abandon Castle Kellar. And any last hope for her father. Grace had watched the hero, Andira, draw her from her coma, but whatever magic she had wrought had failed to make her walk. Perhaps she had forgotten that part, or had intended to return and complete her healing after the battle. Her mother had added the hero’s name to the long list of enemies against whom she planned vengeance, but her father, she knew, would have wanted her to look for the best possibility rather than the worst. It was exhausting, balancing them both in her mind. And it was a long road back to Kellar.
Mother was bundled up in skins and furs so that only her head and one arm were showing, the dirty whites and natural grays so distinct from the flamboyant hues of the Torue Albes. Her dark curls were tousled and knotty, her tanned face pinched, her lips blue, but refusing to bend to the cold and shiver. She was a princess though, whatever her trappings, and was herself dressed in mail and armed.
“Lutetia Dallia had less than this at her back when she set out to humble Lorim and become the first queen of the Torue Albes,” she said.
“They are mercenaries,” said Grace. “I don’t trust any of them.”
“Good. You should not. You are a baroness without a barony and surrounded by enemies. There is no one you can trust now but me.”
“Not even Graf Thorne?”
“Trust that he would rather have an indebted girl in Castle Kellar than the son or niece of some other rival, but no further than that. Frostgate and Forthyn have problems of their own.”
“I think… I think I’m a little scared of them.”
Her mother smiled. It was neither reassuring nor kind. There had been little gentleness left in her since the hero had led her husband to war. It was as though something good in her was still asleep, paralyzed like her legs, waiting for the hero’s return. It sounded like a story from one of the old myths. “That is good too.”
“I just wish we could have waited a little longer.”
“For what? For people to forget your claim, or to discover old claims of their own? No. Waiting is what your father would have done, and he was the first baron of Kell to lose Kellar since Penacor times. The time is now, while winter puts ambitions to bed and the coming of the Uthuk Y’llan occupies minds in Archaut.”
Grace bit her tongue, her heart urging to stand up for her father’s memory, but not wanting to argue with her mother.
It would do no good.
She was hurting. She needed Grace to be strong.
Grace sighed and nodded.
A misfit band of uncouths, sellswords, and motley adventurers, those miscreants too deep in their cups or too imbecilic to have departed Frostgate before winter closed the northern roads, and all led by an eleven year-old girl with nothing to offer but a lot of promises, and a bitter woman from beyond the Kingless Coast.
It did not sound like the opening to a propitious saga, not the ones with the happy endings that her father had always preferred to read.
But she hid it, and looked stern, and obeyed her mother.
She marched south.
To retake Kell.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Kurt
Fort Rodric, Pelgate
Most of the refugees from Kell had stopped at Dhernas Keep. They had streamed through its narrow black gates, until the panicked officer at the watch had ordered them shut. After that they had pitched up outside, a new township of rough pavilions and tents spreading out along the broken rock of the Soulstone-era embankment that forcibly abutted the River of Sleep and had once marked the fuller extent of the old city. A hardy, wearier few had gone on. Of them, a fair few had taken the High Pass, never mind the enclosing winter and the warnings of dragon hybrids and undead in the Broken Crags. In the Free City of Forge there’d be sanctuary. And better, there’d be work. A future.
Kurt hadn’t believed a word of it, and neither had Sarb. They had always been alike, he realized. Their last months apart had only made them more so. As world-weary and bitter as each other. Kurt was not sure he approved of the change, but he was alive. They were both alive and he would not tempt the gods now by asking any more of them than that.
Only a very few had carried on south and west into the lowlands. They crossed, unremarked, into the occasionally contested border country sandwiched between Dhernas, Pelgate and Frest, funneled like many an eastern aggressor between the Mountains of Morshan and the Ashen Hills towards the great bastion at Fort Rodric. A world removed from the rich iron mines of the Broken
Crags and Forge that landscape was, and many empty miles still ahead to the farmlands of Pelgate’s Velvet Plains. It was just bleak grassland and scrub soil, as though Kell had extended its southern toe and added its own familial claim to the disputed border.
Rune-marked obelisks occasionally broke from the Ashen Hill to their right and stood watch, shepherding their westward trudge. Who had built them and who had marked them, no one knew. Dragons. Darklanders. Elves. No one gave it enough thought to care, except to shudder as they passed under their graven warnings.
At the last settlement before their destination, a walled village of a few dozen houses that one of the furtive locals they had passed earlier that day had called Koniston before fleeing into the hills, the path forked.
To the north was the baronial capital, and the mines that were its lifeblood, the village existing there solely to provision them with beef, tallow, and labor in exchange for Forge coin.
The other way went west.
The majority turned wearily at the fork and climbed upwards into the Ashen Hills.
They left just two men behind.
Sibhard stuck his spear into the ground. It had become less a weapon than a walking cane these past weeks on the road. “Is this far enough?” he said, the same question he’d been asking since Castle Kellar.
Kurt shook his head as he watched the others disappear into the hills. In his bones he knew it would never be far enough. He could not envisage the day when he would be able to stop looking over his shoulder.
“Further west,” he said.
“Until when?”
Kurt turned from the north road and looked up. Sibhard stood beside him silently. The inhabitants of Koniston stared sightlessly back from the tall stakes on which they had been impaled. Crows sat idly on their shoulders and cawed. Kurt set his jaw, resting his hand on the hilt of Hamma’s sword.
He would not lose hope now.
“Until we run out of west.”