Strength of Swords (First Cohort Book 2)

by M. R. Anthony

  STRENGTH OF SWORDS

  FIRST COHORT BOOK 2

  M. R. ANTHONY

  © 2017 M. R. Anthony

  All rights reserved

  The right of M. R. Anthony to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser

  Cover typography by Shayne Rutherford

  http://www.wickedgoodbookcovers.com/

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  1

  We gathered around the ruined body of our lady. Corporal Grief had carried her to the table in her room and placed her there. The table wasn’t long enough to lay her out fully and her lower legs dangled off the edge, hanging over the floor.

  “What are we to do, Captain?” asked Lieutenant Craddock. He’d arrived a scant two minutes after we’d made the discovery and repeated the question that someone had asked me just before he’d arrived.

  I was silent for a long time, still without an answer to give him. This young woman had represented every hope that we of the First Cohort could have dared to hope. Our hope that after hundreds of years, in which we’d killed the wrong people on behalf of the wrong ruler, we had finally been given the opportunity to change and to save ourselves from damnation.

  I had an emptiness within me, where previously there was determination and certainty. I had known despair and sorrow before. Each time one of my comrades in arms fell in battle, I felt these things, and each time I drank a toast in their names, I began the healing. The only time I had ever felt this same emptiness was centuries ago and even when I started to climb out of that pit, I knew that loneliness was all that awaited me at the top.

  “Jenna.” I spoke the word, so quietly that no one else in the room heard me, nor saw my lips move as they formed the name of my long-dead wife.

  When Jenna had died, I had thought that my life was over and that nothing could ever replace the love and friendship we had shared. Though I never again felt the bright light of love, I did find friendship. The First Cohort had found me wounded and in anguish. It had taken me in and given me back my strength. It could never fully replace what I’d had, but it had been enough. For nearly three hundred years, it had been sufficient. And even after all those years, I could still recall what had flowed in to take the place of my emptiness. It was anger.

  There was something within me that could not accept what had happened without my being able to respond to it. I could not allow myself to fall back into the pit – I had sworn that it would never happen again. I looked around the room at the gathered men. There were twenty or so of us in here, with more clustered in the corridor outside. I could hear the shouts and clamour of confusion in our barracks. Someone needed to lead them and I was the only man that could do so.

  “Corporal Grief. Sew up her wounds. I do not want her to be seen like this.”

  The corporal nodded his acquiescence and reached into his ever-present surgery bag for his needles and his threads. He could put half a dozen stitches into the smallest of wounds, even though his broad hands looked like they were better suited to felling trees.

  “Corporal Ploster. I want Leerfar. Do whatever you can to find her. I am going to cut off her other hand and her feet. And then I’m going to kill her.”

  “I will do what I can, Captain,” he said. “Her magic is different to mine and I do not know if I can trace it, but I will not rest while she runs free.”

  I looked at his face and saw the same anger in his eyes that I knew burned behind my own. Jon Ploster was not a master in his field, but he knew things that might surprise even the Emperor’s Death Sorcerers.

  “Lieutenant Craddock. Get out there and search. I want this building turned over until we find her. She does not bleed and she can hide herself well, but I will have her, even if it takes me forever and longer to do so.”

  As I spoke, the anger which I’d felt flooding in to replace the emptiness, grew until it did more than fill the space. It over-spilled the confines until it threatened to block out my rational thought. With an effort, I held it at bay, keeping it in check. I knew that if I let it consume me, there would be no turning back and I worried at what I might do.

  “Damnit, our debts are NOT paid!” I said. “This will not happen to us again!”

  Lieutenant Craddock pushed his way from the room, already barking orders. He was my equal in many things and I knew that I could leave the task of arranging the search for Leerfar to him. Most of the men in the room followed him, giving those of us who remained some space. Corporal Grief had already threaded his needle and was several stitches into our lady’s torn throat. He could work calmly and accurately in any situation and I had lost count of the number of times I had been given cause to thank him for his efforts.

  I watched him for a while as his hand rose and fell smoothly. Each time the needle descended, the red slash across our lady’s neck became gradually smaller. The marks on her back would take much longer to close.

  I stooped and picked up Leerfar’s severed hand, where it had been thrown on the floor. I turned it around in front of my face, studying the slender fingers, which remained wrapped around the handle of a runed short sword. With only the smallest of efforts I pulled the sword from the fingers and pushed it into my belt. It was only a little longer than the daggers we of the First Cohort carried, but with the power to cut through armour and parry a blow without shearing.

  I dropped the hand to the floor, where it landed with a thump on the wooden floorboards. I remembered how, a few weeks before, we’d ambushed one of Duke Warmont’s specials – Bonecruncher – and almost severed one of his arms before he’d escaped. When we saw him the time after that, his arm had been repaired and he’d used it as if it had never been injured. I stamped hard upon Leerfar’s hand, the sound of it startling Jon Ploster from his reverie. Corporal Grief flinched not at all. I felt the fingers crunch beneath my heel and I stood upon them again and again, until they were utterly shattered, the flesh burst and smeared over the floor. If Leerfar held any hope that she might one day recover her hand and have it reattached to her wrist, she would not find it able to hold a weapon again.

  I left Ploster to his seeking and Corporal Grief to his stitching, and tagged myself on to one of the search parties that Lieutenant Craddock had organised. I had other duties, but on this night of all other nights, I was not desperate to study cargo manifests, nor to contemplate the army’s finances.
I found myself with twenty other men, none of them from the First Cohort. Even with one hand missing, Leerfar was still dangerous enough to kill a group of five without too much effort. I was an expert with the sword and even in my battle trance I had not been close to beating her. We all have our strengths and mine lay with my men. Even though we were individuals, I counted us as a single whole - together we were immense in what we could achieve. I still had to confront the inconceivable numbers that we had lost in defending this forsaken town of Gold, but the time for that was later. I hoped that our business with Leerfar would be concluded first, but I was old and wise enough to realise that she was too crafty to be caught easily.

  The search was conducted almost in silence - no one spoke where they did not need to. Everyone was lost in his thoughts and I wondered what was going through their minds. The Saviour was the reason these men had joined in the fight against Duke Warmont and now she was gone. After this thought had formed in my head, I berated myself for it – the Saviour was a figurehead, but rebellion had been a part of these lands ever since the Emperor came and the Duke with him. I did not know what the immediate future had in store for our lady’s army, but it may be that it would not crumble.

  My group had been assigned to the south side of the town, which had been burned almost to the ground by the unexpected appearance of the Pyromancer. The streets stank of smoke and char, and bodies littered the streets still, many of their wounds fresh from where Leerfar had ordered her men to slay everyone who lived on this side of the river Fols. I saw the disquiet amongst my group as they took in what had happened to the town. I must confess that I knew none of the soldiers I was with by name and only a handful by their faces. I guessed that most of them were unaware how extensive the damage had been. Some of them had probably lived here in the past.

  One of the soldiers stopped next to the ruin of a building – just another flame-ravaged house along with all of the others. The man had his back to me and he stood still as he peered in through the empty doorway to the shell behind. The lower walls had once been grey stone, but now had a thick layer of black coating them and the upper floor was gone completely. I saw the man’s shoulders begin to shake and we all gave him a moment with his loss. Then, one of the others walked over and put an arm around him.

  “Come on Garvon. You’ll get your chance to claim your debts.”

  There was that word again – debt. Everyone owed something or had something owed to them. I feared that there would be many more towns like Gold before even a fraction of these debts were paid. I wondered if Warmont knew what was building up against him. He was an old hand at killing his own people, but the soldiers who’d fought in Gold were something new. These were men who had lost everything and men like these had nothing to be scared of any more. The more there were like them, the harder it would become for the Duke to hold the north. I doubted he’d care too much. If he had to burn down every place from Demox to Sinew, he’d likely have enjoyed it. The northern towns had never been his favourites and I was sure he’d not personally come further north than Furnace in the last two hundred years.

  We spent the hours trudging. There were no doors left to knock on and no houses left to search. We listened carefully and watched out for signs of Leerfar. There was almost no chance we’d find Warmont’s Fourth. We did, however, find some of her men. There was a group of eight, sleeping in the ruins of an old stone building without having set a watch. I didn’t know what the place had been before, but for these eight it became a morgue. It may have been that they hoped to cause mischief by remaining in the town, or perhaps they had simply taken shelter while they looked for an opportunity to escape. One of them gave the game away by snoring, which was easily heard by anyone who came within twenty feet of his repose. If any of my comrades had a sense of honour, it was well-hidden tonight and they cut the enemy into pieces without even bothering to wake them first. Better that they die quickly in their makeshift beds than overcome smaller groups of us in the coming days. The all-encompassing anger had not left me, but I did not take part in the killing and simply stood by until it was played out.

  When our shift ended, we returned to our barracks on the north side of town. We all had the odour of smoke about us, and many had splashes of blood on their armour and weapons. I was not best pleased to note that my own flesh and armour had become grimy with soot – I had not wanted to see the dirt on me again, at least until I had been given the chance to enjoy my cleanliness for a while. My bath in the river Fols already seemed like it was a lifetime ago, even though it had only been yesterday.

  My group broke up without a word and we went our separate ways. No one was in the mood for anything, let alone talking. I took myself back to my office. I had no plans to deal with my administrative duties, but sometimes I needed a period of solitude in order to gather my thoughts.

  There was paperwork strewn across my utilitarian wooden desk. I’d hoped to avoid it for a time by joining the patrol into the town, but procrastination never favoured me. There was no one to pick up the work I put to one side, and no one to do it but me. It wasn’t something that bothered me especially – I was proud of my rank and never afraid to tackle the work that I needed to do. Still, I couldn’t deny that some of these tedious duties were less enjoyable than other aspects of my captaincy.

  I picked up a couple of the papers, which had been carefully laid to the left-hand side of the desk. I recognized Lieutenant Craddock’s handwriting on them. He knew me well – something in my brain always focused on items to the left, before it gave time to things to the right. I was sure that everyone had foibles like this, but had never thought to ask anyone else about it.

  The top sheet was simply titled ‘First Cohort – Known Dead - Incomplete’. We called them dead but I didn’t really know if the word was accurate any more. I sometimes thought that destroyed would be a more precise term for what happened when one of us got so badly damaged that we were no longer able to function. The word had never sat easily with me. The idea of death tied us to our lost humanity, and its embrace spoke of forgiveness.

  My eyes scanned the list of names and I turned to the second page, to find a similarly long list – a wrenching compendium of our losses. I’d counted one hundred and seventeen names by the time I reached the end, committing each one to memory and whispering the names to myself as I continued. For each man, I forced an image of his face into my mind, before the passage of time could cause the sharpness of the remembered outline to fade and blur. I owed them this at least.

  My grim task took me through a significant portion of the night. I was not mawkish, nor reduced to tears by it, but it was my way of paying a measure of personal respect to the dead. When the time was right, we of the First Cohort would gather to remember them and toast their names. After we’d fought with Xoj-Fal the Wyrm, our numbers had already been reduced to four hundred and eighty-three. Now we were somewhere in the three hundreds. We’d been at nearly six hundred when we first met the Saviour and pledged ourselves to her.

  I had hardly finished when Jon Ploster arrived, entering my office without knocking. I never did care for formalities, except where military discipline was concerned. He looked unusually gaunt, as if he’d over-extended himself in his search.

  “I’ve found her,” he whispered.

  “Where has she gone?” I asked. “Is she close enough that we can catch her?”

  “It is not Leerfar that I have found, Tyrus. It is the Saviour.”

  There are times when you are confronted by something that is so unexpected, that you are unable to say anything immediately, while your mind scrambles around for words that will not make you sound stupid. I was afflicted by that feeling for a few seconds after Ploster had delivered his message. Eventually, I found myself able to speak.

  “She is dead. What do you mean you have found her?” I asked.

  “I was hunting for Leerfar. In my anger, I was able to soar further and faster along the strands than I have been able to before. I fel
t myself like a sorcerer of great power,” he gave a grim and self-deprecating snort at that. “But my anger also clouded my judgement and I flew much too far. It was as though I was being sucked further and further away, without my consent and with no power to refuse the journey. Then I found her. Another young girl with the same radiance we felt from our lady. Only she is not here, Tyrus. She is far, far away where we cannot easily reach her.”

  I struck my clenched fist onto the top of my desk. “What do you mean she is another young girl? And what do you mean that we cannot reach her? We swore that we would serve for an eternity if we needed to!”

  “She is somewhere in Blades, Tyrus. Right beneath the Duke’s nose.”

  2

  I was speechless. Though I had many questions that I wished to ask, they crowded around my tongue so that I was unable to form even one of them. Ploster saw my internal conflict – had no doubt suffered it himself – and spoke for me.

  “I don’t know how she got there,” he said. “Do you remember how we once discussed the possibility that there might be many Saviours – that each of the Emperor’s realms might have its own stories about a figurehead to save the people?”