The Black Altar: An Epic Fantasy (The Swords of the Sun Book 1)

by Jack Conner

  Baleron waited for the procession to pass, then slipped after them, wanting to know where the prisoners were being taken.

  Spiders moved from roof to roof and from building to building overhead, hunting for Baleron, but if they saw him they must have assumed he was part of the procession. Hells. If he drew too close to the Borchstogs, they would sense him, but if he let them put too much space between him and them, the spiders would pounce on him. Praying that he judged things right, he pressed on.

  Where had the creatures come from? He supposed Ixa and her lot had been the vanguard. They’d opened the gates of the city for a larger group of arachnids, but also for the Borchstogs.

  More screams sounded, this time from human throats.

  Buildings opened up ahead, and Borchstogs whipped and shoved their prisoners into one of the city’s few plazas. Space was limited in a mountain city, but the townspeople did need some open spaces, and so Haver’s Plaza was a place of winter-hardy greenery and fountains and statues—or had been. Now the statues had been defaced and despoiled, the greenery had been stomped and shredded, and bodies and body parts heaped in the fountains, which trickled red where they weren’t frozen or stopped up altogether. Flies buzzed about them. More flies buzzed around the many poles the Borchstogs had erected throughout the plaza and on their grisly occupants. The Borchstogs delighted in torture, and they’d lashed or nailed many of the townspeople to poles. Snow settled on the ragged ruins that were left.

  Baleron winced at the atrocities the Borchstogs committed. There must have been a thousand of the creatures in the plaza, and nearly that many captured humans. Most were too weak after days of torture to scream, but some still managed it, and their cries, louder at their source, sounded continuously. Borchstogs whipped them and flayed them, amputated limbs and drove nails into them, and that was only a small part of what their evil imaginations concocted. High tents had been erected, too, and some of the prisoners, mostly young women and girls, were being led into the tents for different torment.

  Baleron clenched his hand and turned away, feeling his body tremble with fury and anguish. He wanted to rush into the torture park and start slaying the brutes and freeing the survivors, but he knew that would only get him killed and would end up saving no one. I must help them. Somehow I must help them. They were his people, after all.

  After the group that he’d followed had brought their catches to the captain in charge of the park, Baleron merged back into the shadows of an alleyway. Two Borchstogs were just passing down it toward the torture park. Dried blood caked their pitch-black skin, and their eyes burned redly. Horns curled up from one’s head, but the other wore a helmet. Thick sharp teeth showed in both of their mouths as they grinned.

  “Look what we’ve caught,” said the one with the horns, speaking Oslogon.

  “Must be an escapee,” the other said. “We’ll tell Groth to be more careful.”

  “You tell him. I’m not getting near that bastard after what he did to Meglat.”

  Baleron hurled his spear. The one with the horns deflected it with his sword, moving faster than Baleron had expected, but then he saw the gems twinkling from the creature’s gauntlets. The soldier was magically augmented. Baleron hadn’t waited for the spear to land, though, but had charged immediately after it. He hacked halfway through the helmeted Borchstog’s neck before his blade stuck.

  The other creature wheeled on him, yanking out the huge, cleaver-like sword at its hip. Baleron had swung his blade from the center of the alley, where he’d had room to swing, but the Borchstog had been abreast his mate and didn’t have quite enough room. When he tried to bring the blade back to begin his swing, it struck the wall instead. Baleron plunged his hook through the bastard’s belly, right beneath a piece of armor.

  The Borchstog’s eyes bulged. Baleron ripped sideways, then up. The creature’s eyes rolled back in its head, and it sagged to the ground.

  Quickly Baleron retrieved his sword from the neck of the other one, then stripped him and donned his clothes. He didn’t want to get caught again. Once he was certain he could pass for a Borchstog, he moved back toward the torture park, and there he watched and waited, hoping a plan would occur to him.

  He needed to know where Ixa was. He needed to know why the enemy had come to Theslan. After the War, there had been other battles, other fights. The War had never truly ended, really, and many cities and regions in the south of the Crescent, including in southern Havensrike, had fallen to Oslog. The land was not as it had once been. But this seemed targeted to Baleron, planned, not a simple raid or whim. Ixa had been the one tasked with dealing with Baleron, so she must be their leader. He needed to find her and interrogate her.

  But where was she?

  Baleron moved away from the area of the torture park. Too many Borchstogs in that direction. As he left it, he noticed more spiders overhead, still leaping from house to house, but fewer now. They ignored him, but for how long? He needed to find a Borchstog and find out from it where Ixa had gone. If only I hadn’t killed those two. There would be others, though. There were far too many others.

  As he was passing a dark doorway, hands reached out from the shadows and dragged him inside. He dropped the spear and reached for his sword. A fist smashed into his jaw. Spitting blood, he reeled backward. Naked steel pressed into his throat.

  “Die, vermin!” said a voice. A human voice.

  “Unhand your lord,” Baleron said, as evenly he could.

  Gasps issued from dimly seen mouths. The figures around him drew back, and he stood, rubbing his jaw. He spat blood and swept the gathering with his gaze. A rough lot huddled in the small cottage he’d been passing, grimy and tense. More than one sported recent wounds.

  “I’m sorry, my lord!” said one of the men, Maeglin. “We didn’t know.”

  “Lord Grothgar!” said another, and with a start Baleron realized it was Tiron, the bowman who had accompanied him to Tulan.

  Baleron smiled. “It’s good to see you, my friend.”

  They clasped hands, and Tiron looked as if he were having to fight to restrain his emotion. The others muttered and made religious gestures, as if Baleron’s coming had saved them. One closed the door and locked it.

  “We thought you were dead,” Tiron said.

  As the others pulled up a chair and saw to making their lord comfortable, Baleron related a brief version of what had happened to him, finishing with, “I woke up to find the whole city overrun. I’m glad to see there’s some resistance left.”

  “What we can do, we do,” said Tiron. “Mostly it’s just snatching the occasional Borchstog off the streets. Sometimes we get to liberate some of our people.”

  “Do they join the fight?”

  “Those that can, yes. The rest hide with the others.”

  Baleron raised his eyebrows. “Where do they hide?”

  “The mines, of course.”

  Baleron nodded. The copper mines were ancient and extensive. Many of the copper veins had been exhausted long ago. But still the miners labored in their tunnels, eeking out the meager living they could.

  “The Borchstogs haven’t come into the mines?” he said.

  “Oh, they have,” said one of the others, a woman. She would have been an attractive one just a few days ago, but someone, likely Borchstogs, had carved a long gash from the corner of her left eye to the corner of her lips on that side, then repeated the process on the other. She must have been one of those these resistance fighters had liberated. “But they don’t know them. We were able to collapse some of the tunnels, stymieing them, and they haven’t bothered to find the ways around.”

  “They’re waiting us out,” said another. “Waiting for us to starve or die of thirst.”

  “They don’t know we have ways out,” Tiron said. “But finding food and water is getting more difficult.”

  Baleron rubbed his jaw. It ached, and he was tempted to ask who had struck him, but instead he said, “How many of you are there?”

 
; They traded looks, as if unsure if they should share that information, and Baleron didn’t blame them. He himself had just been tricked by a friendly face.

  In the end, however, Tiron said, “About four hundred. A hundred and fifty that are capable of fighting, and that includes the women.” He nodded at the marked woman, whose hand curled around the hilt of her knife, as if she longed to put it to use. “The rest are too old, or too young, or crippled.” He grimaced. “Most of that last group are survivors of what the ‘stogs have done to them over the last few days.”

  Baleron thought on it. Creaks issued from overhead. Everyone tensed. A spider was passing over the roof. At last it was gone, and they all breathed out. Baleron reached a decision.

  “If we could mobilize your people, would they follow me?”

  “Of course, my lord,” said Tiron the bowman. “Are you talking about … war?”

  “What else? You’ve been simply trying to survive, and I appreciate that, but if we’re to survive in the long run we have to get rid of these bastards. That means driving them off. There’s a few hundred men and women still alive on poles in the torture park. There’s probably closer to a thousand, but I suspect only a few hundred would be capable of wielding a sword or bow. But if we can free them, we’d have a force of five hundred or more, I’d wager.”

  Tiron grinned. “Baleron’s Fighting Five Hundred, eh, my lord?”

  Baleron returned the grin, remembering his old unit. “Indeed.”

  He stood, and the rest drew back, respectful and solemn. He approved.

  “What are your orders, my lord?”

  He told them.

  Baleron held his breath as they reached the torture park. Now was the critical time, when anything could go wrong. So far the spiders hadn’t cried out an alert. That had been a huge risk. Luckily Tiron and the other archers had been shooting them down when they could, and the groups—there were several—stuck to the narrow ways of the alleys for the most part, out of sight of the arachnids.

  “Just a little further,” Baleron told his lieutenant, a young man named Lothan. Tiron was leading one of the other bands. Baleron had split them into units of a hundred or so that they could move unseen.

  The screams and moans of those on poles in the torture park grew louder, borne on the wind. An icy wind had sprung up, bearing with it flakes of snow, and Baleron felt snow tangle in his eyebrows and melt as he moved along. His blood raced like fire, though, and he wasn’t cold. Night clenched the town in a dark grip, and he had to move cautiously. That was an advantage the darkspawn had: they could see well in shadow.

  Baleron crouched when he reached the edge of the park, and his men paused behind him. He glanced around, saw the advance man for one of the other groups, but not the other two. He waited, and presently the third materialized, then the fourth. Good. All were accounted for.

  Baleron raised his hook arm and made a chopping motion toward the park, and the other leaders raised their fists to signal they understood; it was too dark to see nods.

  “It’s time,” Baleron whispered to the men of his group.

  “We’re ready,” said Lothan.

  Baleron said a prayer under his breath, then rushed out from the alley toward a patrol of five Borchstogs making a circuit of the park, one of three sentry groups. Baleron hurled his spear into one’s throat, then hacked his sword into the belly of another. His men fell amongst the Borchstogs around him, and in moments all in the patrol were dead.

  Not pausing to see how the other groups fared, Baleron pushed forward into the torture park itself. A Borchstog that had been flaying the skin from the leg of one man tied to a post heard them and wheeled toward Baleron, bloody knife in hand. Baleron hacked off the hand, then slit the creature’s throat. Other Borchstogs busy torturing other humans continued doing what they were doing.

  They didn’t for long, though. Baleron’s group cut down another of the demons, then another. A fourth let out a shout and a dozen rushed toward the invading Men. Baleron’s group met them. This violence summoned others, and by the time they fell on Baleron’s men the other groups had arrived, and they attacked the Borchstogs from the rear. Several men died in the battle, but all of the Borchstogs in that wave did.

  The sound had drawn others, though. Baleron heard Borchstoggish warhorns wail throughout the town.

  “Their captain is organizing them,” Baleron said. “We must hurry.”

  His group cut down the humans on the poles that looked most capable of carrying on the fight, armed them and gave them what they could in the way of food, water and healing arts. By then spiders had gathered on the edges of the roofs surrounding the park, their large forms bobbing up and down in agitation on their long, segmented limbs. Baleron’s archers, led by Tiron, had been waiting for this, and they emerged from an alley and loosed their shafts in a deadly volley. Two dozen great spiders died instantly. Some fled, but another dozen shrieked in rage and leapt down into the torture park. If they’d waited for the Borchstogs to attack with them, they might have prevailed, but rage overcame them, and Baleron and his men were able to cut them down. When they died, some changed into human forms. None were Ixa.

  By then the Borchstog captain had gathered his force, and they rushed into the torture park to make war on Baleron’s defenders. Baleron had ordered his men back, and had his archers climb to the roofs where the spiders had been. They fired wave after wave of arrows into the Borchstogs while Baleron and his men lured them on.

  “Now!” Baleron screamed.

  Two companies of men, composed largely of the warriors that had been liberated from the poles, converged on the Borchstogs from the sides. The demons fought back, but they were overwhelmed. There amid the screaming figures on poles and the drifting flakes of snow, both sides fought to the death, and red blood and black stained the white powder below. In the end, the humans prevailed, and Borchstogs fled screaming.

  Baleron ordered one seized, then had the creature nailed to a pole and tortured. “Tell me where Ixa is and this will stop,” he told the demon.

  “Ul Ravast seeks the Mistress?” hissed the Borchstog, hatred and arrogance blazing in its red eyes. “Find her at the chapel. She will see to you.”

  Baleron nodded and hacked off the demon’s head.

  “Free the rest and prepare for another assault,” he told Lothan.

  “Where will you go?”

  “To the chapel.” Baleron gathered twenty men, including Tiron, and found horses for them all, stolen by the Borchstogs, then rode through the town toward the chapel. They cut down many Borchstogs as they went, but they also liberated a dozen human captives.

  At the chapel to Illiana they found many dead priestesses, but some still lived. The High Mother was being tended to, not by a priestess, but by a wandering mage that had been passing through the town just before the attack. His name was Olen, and his breath smelled like whiskey, while lice writhed in his hair. He had a good smile, though, and his work in healing the Sisters was appreciated.

  “Where did she go?” Baleron said. “Ixa?”

  “The evil witch?” the High Mother said. When Baleron nodded, she said, “She got what she needed and left. I don’t think her goal was ever to occupy the town or kill its people. That was only a side effect, but a welcome one, to her. She was more interested in the contents of the archives.”

  “Archives? What was she after?” This was a new wrinkle.

  Olen, who was dapping ointment on one of the High Mother’s wounds, said, “Are you sure you want to know, lad?”

  “I’m sure,” Baleron said.

  The High Mother grimaced. “Some old Borchstog fortress, long abandoned, but not far away. There were various accounts of it from back when the power that ran that fortress was a threat to all in the region. It’s not far away, just past the borders of Havensrike, which is why the notes on it where so good. And that’s what Ixa was after, those old, dusty accounts.”

  “Why would she be interested in a run-down Borchstog
fortress?”

  “Your guess is as good as ours,” said Olen.

  Baleron rubbed his chin. “But that’s what this was all about, then—finding that fortress. There’s obviously something there, something powerful, that Ixa desires, something that will aid her Mistress.”

  “Yes, so it appears,” said the High Mother. “Though I can’t imagine what that could be. Perhaps you could send word to your brother. The King could dispatch an army …”

  Baleron grimaced. “It would take weeks to get here, and perhaps more weeks to find Ixa and her troops. I wonder how many of them there are. If they’re numerous, they could return to quell the uprising.”

  “I doubt Ixa has any interest in that,” Olen said. “I saw her as she was leaving, and there was something strange on her face …”

  “Yes?”

  “A look of exultation. Of victory—rapturous victory. She had what she’d come for and had lost all interest in Theslan. I saw it all in an instant. She won’t be back, not anytime soon. She has business elsewhere.”

  “Someone must go after her,” said Tiron the bowman.

  Baleron frowned at him for a long moment, then, slowly, nodded. “Yes.” He let out a breath. “Yes, damn it, someone must. Your lord must send someone after them—to spy on them, to sabotage them if possible. But who?”

  “You still have knights, my lord,” said the High Mother. “Some live.”

  “Yes, and they have seen a good deal of battle, too, those that survived the War. But I can’t trust this mission to just anyone.” Without another thought, Baleron reached a decision. “I must go after her.”

  “And leave the city just when it needs you most?” said the High Mother, sounding shocked—and not without reason.