by P D Ceanneir
The chaos on the path back to the buildings left hundreds of Wyani foot dead on the three mile route from the mouth of the valley. Most of Klingspur’s remaining men hid inside the few intact buildings of Glyn Brae. Telmar ordered those buildings blocked up and then fired. He himself used the Arts to increase the flames intensity and transfer the flames to the other houses. As the enemy panicked and tried to escape the flames, archers cut them down. Literary hundreds of dead soldiers from Klingspur’s host lay long the escape route back to the Brae.
It was a great victory for Telmar and one that would change everyone’s opinion about him as a worthy monarch, but in his mind, he was not a king. His sovereignty was a means to an end so he could defeat his enemies, real and elemental.
Sometime later on the second day after the battle, someone discovered Klingspur’s body as the king’s men moved the dead onto a makeshift funeral pyre. No less than ten arrows punctured his body. The one that pierced his heat proved fatal. Telmar ordered the duke’s body wrapped in gauze and buried under a stone cairn. The king himself inscribed a slate with the words.
Klingspur Cambrian, Duke of Dulan and Lord of the Wyani
Bravely died here on the 24th Sin 2983 YOA
Sleep well
My Royal Cousin
5
The defeat and death of Klingspur sent shockwaves around the continent and placed the theatre of this disjointed war clearly on Telmar’s activities. By the time my father and I had learnt of the new king’s victory Telmar and Count Talien had finally met up and moved west to take Duncattrine.
However, another battle occurred at about the same time that should have ended the war in its entirety.
On a foggy early morning of late Oplacus, two hundred longboats disturbed the mist bank at the edge of the Keveni Bay as they stealthily rowed towards Keveni Town harbour. They blocked the docks as they beached. Over two thousand Berserkers of the Hotten Isle Bear Clan stormed the town, plundering and slaughtering as they went. Once the streets guttering ran red with blood, they torched the houses.
Jarl Olav, Cokato’s father, was a ruthless man. He was in his mid-fifties and as strong as an ox. His people were mainly hunters, farmers and anglers, but in times of conflict, many regarded them as the most savage of the Hinterland folk, hence the title, “Berserkers”.
The Jarl ignored the castle on the Mor and moved his men north to find Lord Mauldorne’s host. Mauldorne, now cut off from his base in the town, could not fail to see the smoke from his burning home, but he marched north anyway to siege Dulan-Tiss.
Joaquin Ri, characteristically for him, would not wait behind the walls of the city when he knew the upstart Keveni lord was on his way. Therefore, he defied Telmar’s royal orders, sallied out of the citadel with his army, and moved south to meet Mauldorne.
Jarl Olav found Mauldorne’s army first. He ambushed the host when they travelled through a narrow wooded pass near the Temple Woods. Most of the Keveni cavalry died in the attack as did a large proportion of the archers. If the Berserkers had refrained from the plundering of the baggage carts then they would surely have finished off the rest of the enemy. As it happened, Mauldorne was forward of the baggage with his infantry, and retreated north only to find Joaquin Ri marching towards him.
The battle against the Ri was a hard fought slog near the banks of the Dulan River. The Ri was much outnumbered, but his dogged determinism won through. The young lord had no choice but to retreat into the mountains with his battered host. Lord Joaquin did not give up, even though he had suffered heavy losses. He spent the better part of two weeks hunting down Mauldorne and finally trapped him in a narrow gully where, using the despised words, “Arcun, and no quarter”, he let his men fall upon the hapless Mauldorne’s men.
Many years after the war Mauldorne’s grandson visited the gulley in which his grandsire had died. He would commission a Cairn of Remembrance to his name inside what locals called No Quarter Gully. The destruction of Keveni Town and the slaughter of Lord Mauldorne’s army proved to be a dark moment in the civil war and the finger of blame pointed straight at Telmar and his ruling administration, even though he never took part in that battle. Grandfather certainly became more wary afterwards. He sent more soldiers to augment the Rogun divisions in the forts of Pander, Curran and Chunla on the Tattoium-Tarridun border.
Already, the war was only several weeks old and five major conflicts had taken thousands of lives. More would perish before the wars end.
Meanwhile, Joaquin Ri returned victorious to Dulan-Tiss in late Nectan. He then escorted Jarl Olav west to Duncattrine before the worst of the winter weather set in.
Duncattrine was a simple garrison town, with a stone keep on a motte hill and a wooden palisade surrounding the stone and thatch houses of the soldiers’ families, it is a ruin no, for obvious reasons. Telmar’s siege of Duncattrine lasted for fourteen days. First, Cokato’s Berserkers broke into the palisade by hacking thought the wood with axes, and then he moved his men in to capture the small town. Once the town fell, the keep then capitulated after ten days. The king sent the high-ranking prisoners to the dungeons of Dulan-Tiss; although they were charged with treason he felt generous enough to grant them their lives in exchange for fealty, those that did not would face trial.
By the time Lord Joaquin and Jarl Olav arrived, the siege damage to the palisade had undergone repair and been strengthened with thick oak struts. Telmar intended to winter in Duncattrine because the Baron of Aquen, Klingspur’s adjutant, was still at large, although intelligence reports confirmed the baron had decided to secrete himself away inside Aquen Town for the winter.
Telmar was furious at Joaquin Ri for leaving Dulan-Tiss, but he was given assurances that it was left in good hands. The Ri had promoted one of Count Talien’s sons to Acting Regent in his absence. On hearing of Lord Mauldorne’s death Telmar fell into a sullen mood.
‘Then those who oppose me are vanquished,’ he said. ‘Come the spring I will send my host to deal with Aquen. In the meantime we sit out the winter here.’
If the new Vallkyte king thought the war was over, he was sorely mistaken. Events would unfold in the coming spring that would throw the whole continent into conflict and all King Telmar had to do to incur the wrath of King Valient, was to kill the king’s only son, my father.
BOOK THREE
THE DEATH
OF A
PYROMANCER
The Door
“Memories are like doors into the past, ideas are doors to the future, and dreams are doors into the present. If you can open them all at the same time, then you are a god.”
The Fall of Darkness: The Elder Ninnian
1
Loremaster Lars sat cross-legged on the other side of the hot coal fire pit. Sweat trickled down his nose from his forehead. He only moved once to pick up a ladle from a leather bucket and pour the water onto the white coals so that the steam became thicker and the heat intensified inside the cowhide-wreathed dome of the Loremaster’s hothouse.
Telmar sat between Jarl Olav and his son Aelfric Cokato. All three were topless and glistened with sweat. The king had discovered that the old Loremaster spent much of his time in the hothouse as winter set in. He not only used it to keep the chill away from his joints but also to go on vision quests for the Jarl, and anyone else that asked him questions about the future. Lars was a practitioner of magic, an art unknown in Tattoium-Tarridun because of the study of the Rawn Arts. Telmar judged that his magical abilities had kept him alive for over a hundred and fifty years. He was clearly the oldest non-Rawn he had ever met and still looked as if he was in his sixties: though thin and hunched, bald, and with a dark wrinkled face, he nonetheless did not act like an old man as he fixed Telmar with smiling eyes that were bright blue and vibrant with life.
‘What is it you seek, Fire King?’ he asked Telmar using the Hinterlander title affectionately.
‘I want to know more about the Helbringer?’ asked the king.
The Loremaster’s
smiling eyes now became bereft of humour. He sighed.
‘In my people’s religious theology we have something similar to your own,’ he said. ‘We both have Hero Halls given to us by the gods where we can eat, drink, and joke with our fallen friends and defeated enemies. You have a place where the Damned go, where the worst, most evil souls endure torment for a thousand lifetimes to ponder on the atrocities that they committed while alive. We have such a place.
‘It is called Hel.
‘There is a legend that the Hel God, Mortis, brother of Al, sent his son to the surface of the world to test the purity of the souls still within the living. Where the son goes Hel follows, that is why he is called the Helbringer.’
‘You have seen this creature?’
Lars nodded. ‘When I was very young it came to devour Hildbern, my home.’
‘So you saw the Door also?’ asked Telmar with some excitement.
The Loremaster nodded again, but frowned at the king. ‘How do you know of the Door, few people have seen it and lived to tell the tale?’
‘I see it in my dreams,’ explained the king.
Lars smiled. ‘I see. You are a man with gifts from the gods.’
Telmar chuckled. ‘Hardly.’ He thought for a moment before asking, ‘tell me. Are you aware of the Rawn Practice of Thought Linking?’
‘I am aware of it, yes.’
‘I wish to use it to see the event of the Helbringer’s coming within your memories; with your permission of course.’
Lars looked at Jarl Olav who nodded once to give his permission. Telmar had been quite overwhelmed at his first meeting with Cokato’s father. The man was big and fierce, with long drooping blond moustaches, and he viewed the world from under a deeply furrowed brow that gave him a constantly angry look. However, his personality was in stark contrast to his appearance. He was a man of great humour and, to the king’s surprise, a very good artist and poet. The Jarl had a fine eye for detail and Telmar would sit through the winter hours watching the big man paint on canvas. Apparently Olav carried a battered and scratched paint box with him wherever he went and he even painted the aftermath of his battle with Lord Mauldorne. The painting, and many others by his hand, now hangs on the walls of the Aln-Tiss Treasure Room. Telmar learnt much about Olav’s style and it was at this point in his life that he began to improve his own technique.
The Jarl’s extraordinary gift for prose happened on him at a young age. Being the youngest son of the Jarl, his father, he learnt to become a Skald, a form of Royal Bard, and served an apprenticeship, which instilled a love of the written word on him. Fate, war and plague saw him rise to become the leader of his people, but he still regaled his rapt audiences with wonderful stories in his longhouse back home. This strange quirkiness in Jarl Olav’s personality made him many friends, even to those daunted by his looks. He and Telmar would become close, as too would Joaquin Ri, but it was Count Talien, an amateur poet himself, who would become his lifelong friend in the cold dark months ahead.
Lars looked from Olav back to Telmar and said, ‘very well, what must I do.’ Telmar moved around the fire until he knelt before the Loremaster.
‘Keep the memories of the event on the surface of your mind. Remember the sights and smells, the feelings you had and the words of those around you. See everything with clarity,’ explained Telmar as he placed his hands on either side of the old man’s head.
‘Open your mind to me…’ he said and felt the familiar flip of his stomach as he fell into the mind of the Loremaster. Colours and smudged images drifted by him. Sounds became distant, then drew closer. Cold air struck his face and he was running…
2
…through the crowd as he carried the small blue bottle in his hand. It had a cork and a red wax seal so the liquid inside did not leak out as he ran. Loremaster Olathe would not be pleased with him if it did.
Lars was nearly nine and had been one of five other boys apprenticed to the Loremaster for the past three years. He had learnt much in that time, but was still given menial tasks because he was the youngest, although the quickest when it came to running errands.
The blue bottle held a sleeping draft that Olathe had concocted for Yegrain, the Jarl’s wife, quite possibly the most beautiful woman Lars had even seen. Therefore, the errand was not a complete waste of his time.
He ran through the wide high street of Hildbern, the largest city on the island of Nothgorge, off the coast of the Hinterland. Hildbern Hall, the home and ruling seat of Jarl Louth, Olav’s great great-grandfather, sat on a low crag of rock surrounded by hundreds of A-framed, cedar-roofed houses of the town. The hall was mainly made of wood, though it sat atop a high stone foundation wall inside its own palisade. The hall was so large it rivalled King Harald’s own council hall far away in his summer retreat of Methvealt.
Four burly Bondsmen of the Jarl’s retinue halted him at the open gate of the halls palisade.
‘Got business within, little Lars?’ asked one known to him as Kiel of Woodhelm. He was a minor noble and duty bound to the Jarl in his capacity as bodyguard, just like the other three who guarded the gate with him. Lars was not put off by these big warriors; they had no business questioning an apprentice Loremaster and the light blue shift he wore over his linen shirt would allow him to pass through any area of the town unhindered. However, Kiel was a friend of his father’s and only asked out of boredom and curiosity.
Lars, breathing heavily, showed him the bottle as he passed. ‘Poison for her ladyship. May she rest in peace,’ he said jovially.
‘Cheeky scamp,’ laughed Kiel, directing a gloved hand towards the boy’s ear, and missing. Lars stuck his tongue out at him as he ran on. The other three guards laughed as they watched him go.
Lars took the wide stairs to the main entrance of the hall. The hall was home to the old Jarl, his wife and children, along with servants and advisors. They all lived in the upper level where a balconied gallery, which ran all the way around the square hall, led to the rooms. The balcony overlooked the hall itself, which was furnished with a long table and chairs. Every day, from mid-afternoon to late evening, it filled with men and women of noble birth as they ate and drank together with the Jarl and his family.
Right now Jarl Louth sat with his two oldest sons, six nobles of his Bondsmen, and Shipmaster Sere, leader of the Jarl’s many longboats. As usual, they were discussing raiding campaigns for the coming summer, now that winter was fast approaching and the Yonish Mountains to the east were snow-capped, meaning many passes would be closed with winter ice.
Behind the long table was the central hearth and, to the rear of the hall, there was another seating area that curved around two tall backed thrones. Sitting at one of the tables were Yegrain, her two daughters. Their mistresses also sat with them, all the women were repairing old tapestries and shawls with fine bone needles and dyed wool.
Jarl Louth was a strict man when it came to people entering his hall. Only high officers of his court could walk in without permission. The Loremaster was one of them and his powers usually allowed his apprentices to act on his accord, but Lars was a boy of breeding who had good manners, and so he waited at the threshold until the Jarl saw him and beckoned him in. The boy gave the men at the main table a wide berth and ran towards Lady Yegrain.
Yegrain was the Jarls third wife and was half his age. She was buxom and blonde, with a good nature and a ready smile for Lars every time she saw him. He blushed as he handed her the blue bottle of the sleeping draft.
‘Thank you, Lars, and thank your Loremaster for making more of this brew,’ she said in a sweet voice. ‘I have no idea what he puts in it but I have had such wonderful slumbers these past months that I rarely remember my dreams. The little one here sleeps well also,’ she patted her swollen belly. The child would be a boy and Olav’s distant ancestor.
Lars, as an apprentice, knew what was in the brew, but decided that the girl would be better off not knowing the recipe.
‘I will be sure to tell him, my la
dy,’ he said confidently enough, but Yegrain’s two daughters were giggling at him and he felt very exposed as he stood in front of the table with all these women watching him.
‘Be silent you two and get back to work!’ shouted Yegrain and her daughters cast their eyes back down at their stitching work. ‘Or I will ask Lars to turn you into newts.’ She turned back to the boy and winked at him. He smiled at her, and was about to say goodbye, when she suddenly gasped loudly as she looked over at something to her left. The women around her looked up from the table and then turned to see what Yegrain was staring at in such wide-eyed shock. They all squealed in fright and stood up from their stools, which fell with a clatter.
Lars heard the men at the main table shout and draw swords, at the same time he turned to look in the same direction as the women. What he saw made his heart thump in his chest.
It was the Door.
As I sit and write this, I can sense the strange feelings of fear and confusion that welled up inside Lars. I sense Telmar’s memory of the moment he sees the Door in the Loremaster’s mind and the feelings of shock from the witnesses in the hall.
One moment there was a dark empty space in a gloomy corner at the rear end of the hall, and then the next, the Door filled it. It seemed to give off an unearthly ethereal glow. Lars, in the instant that he took in the sight of the Door, knew it was wrong. His training as a Loremaster told him so. He did not ask where it came from. He did not approach it to scrutinise its structure, he just stared in shock, and so did everyone else.
Jarl Louth and two of his Bondsmen tentatively approached it with swords and shields raised. Lars watched them tap the pillars with their blades. The sound they made echoing through the high rafters of the hall’s immense roof with an ominous tone.
Telmar, in that instant, looking through the eyes of the young Loremaster, noticed that the Door was the same, but different. The Skrol on the black lintel was gone. Hinterland Ogham, the written language of Lars’ people, had replaced it. However, it said exactly the same thing as the Door in his dreams.