The General's Legacy_Part One_Inheritance

by Adrian G Hilder

  ‘You… are not strong enough for this.’

  It ran. It ran like a hurricane blows and Cory’s feet left the ground with his wrist still in the creature's grip. There had been no wind before but now the air rushed past so fast Cory struggled to draw breath. The world about him was a grey and black blur. The hurricane rushed past his ears. Ears that were increasingly in pain. His ears popped and the pain eased. The wind stopped and Cory’s knees crashed to the ground. Looking up, he saw the creature still grinning; it did not appear to be tiring after its sprint. They were on the top of a mountain and Cory still fought for breath. In the distance, the black ground dropped away from a cliff into a dead flat sea.

  ‘You are not strong enough for this.’

  Cory looked forward this time and the hurricane began again. At least now the world about him ceased to be a blur, but what was before him was behind him almost before he could arrange what he saw in his thoughts. There was nothing he could do about plummeting off that cliff though they didn’t so much plummet as fly down from it and onto the grey sea. Could this creature run on water? Was it even water? Looking behind, there were no ripples as they passed. They came to an abrupt halt on a small black island. Cory tried to get his feet under him.

  ‘You are not strong enough for this.’

  Cory was far over the edge of rational reason. A lifetime’s worth of madness was packed into the last few hours. His mind was well into the realms of anger and defiance.

  ‘Stoooop… saaaying… thaaat.’

  His words were lost in the hurricane. The grey seascape flashed back to the bleak landscape and the world continued to blur. They stopped again. Isn’t this where I started? Cory thought. Taking the time to think was a mistake.

  ‘You are not strong enough for this...’

  It almost sounded like a question. The hurricane returned and that word the soldiers use in the tavern escaped from Cory’s mouth. Ears in pain, popping again. On the top of the mountain. No mistakes this time. Just enough space. Cory planted his feet on the ground, gripped the creature’s wrist with his other hand and hauled back with all his strength, yelling, ‘I am strong enough for this!’

  Cory’s bellow burst out of his grandfather’s office and echoed around Dendra Castle.

  ***

  It was the middle of the night. The thunder and lightning had passed but the rain still fell like an ocean dropping from the sky. Steam continued to hiss and belch above the burning palace. Sebastian had returned to the lawn. It seemed to be where people gathered for some kind of guidance. Sebastian wondered where he would find his.

  Cory, exhausted, slid down from Sunny’s saddle and stumbled up to Sebastian.

  ‘Well?’ Sebastian asked.

  Cory left out of his report anything about the yellow-eyed lizard creature.

  Sebastian threw his hands in the air. ‘Magnificent… Superb… A completed floor mosaic and a magic sword. How is that going to help?’

  Condescension and irony from Sebastian. This was new. The words stabbed Cory in the heart. He had no anger left in him. He just stood there, cold, sword in hand, the tip resting on the ground. The rain poured over his eyebrows and into his eyes.

  Chapter 8

  Guardians of the Streets

  The Battle of Norvale, 1849.

  Kingdom Army of Valendo led by King-Consort General Garon Allus Artifex-Dendra.

  Deaths: approximately 320 before an orderly retreat from an indefensible position.

  Kingdom Army of Nearhon led by General Magnar.

  Deaths: approximately 210 before occupying Norvale.

  — Excerpt from the War Histories of Valendo

  Calm as an owl in flight, a voice came out of the darkness. ‘Are we at war?’

  Startled, Guardsman Hayden turned to the voice and his eyes widened.

  ‘No don’t turn around,’ the voice suddenly snapped. There was a sigh followed by silvery sounding words that Hayden could not understand.

  Hayden thought it would be a good idea to look out over the battlements and keep watch over the perimeter of Dendra Castle. He didn’t know why, but he thought it would be a good idea to forget what he had seen and answer questions.

  ‘Are we at war?’ the voice asked again.

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ Hayden replied.

  ‘What do you mean “hard to tell”?’ The voice began to sound impatient. ‘What is going on?’

  ‘They say the dead walk the streets in Tranmure. The dead stand and follow a dead mage that wears the crown of Valendo. The palace is burning. The king and the commanders are dead.’ Hayden stared down into the forest outside the castle as if there was something out there in the storm-ridden world he should be searching for. The trees jostled with each other in the fitful wind, leaves whispering secrets back and forth.

  ‘Who is in command?’ the voice asked.

  ‘Prince Cory,’ said Hayden.

  There was no reply. Hayden began to wish the trees would speak and share their secrets. Then the voice spoke calmly once more. ‘Have a horse standing at the castle gate in one hour. You will not remember any of this.’

  Hayden had the oddest feeling. His mind was suddenly clear and his thoughts sharp. Why was the stable hand tethering a horse by the gate? When he thought about that, his head started to ache.

  ***

  Cory stood on a bridge looking down at his unsteady reflection in the water. He had rarely seen himself wearing plate armour. It was normally used for ceremonies and military exercises. The visor was up and his humourless face mixed and shifted on the river’s surface. Nearby, the tall white obelisk topped by the rock sun stood watch over twenty guards in the plaza. Tranmure was a difficult city for thieves. The violent, the drunk, the troublemaker and the murderer all received justice from the city guard. They were an authority on which the burgled, abused and bereaved could rely. The guards stood wearing ringmail over leather armour carrying a glaive, a cosh and one in every five had a light crossbow. The men were trained and equipped to handle anything Tranmure had to throw at them.

  ‘What do you think the plan is?’ the youngest guard asked the man next to him.

  ‘Do you think there is a plan?’ a second guard replied.

  ‘Hit them over the head and throw them in jail until morning,’ a third joked. None of them laughed.

  ‘If they come back I’m wondering how good a glaive will be at… dealing with them,’ a fourth said, eyeing the blade mounted on the end of a pole almost as long as he was tall.

  ‘Send them over to Blake’s wife; she’s lethal with a rolling pin,’ a fifth said.

  ‘Her pastry’s not that bad,’ another added, presumably Blake.

  ‘So we can see — you need a bigger belt!’ the third guard said. A few chuckles followed.

  Cory shifted his gaze from the river to the sky as it darkened again and tried to see a future beyond the grey mist his mind imagined. He could only see a present, one that the men behind him didn’t seem to be taking seriously. The storm had passed, but the clouds were still heavy, releasing rain at unexpected times.

  Cory saw movement on the plaza’s eastern approach road. The road was usually busy with working people, farm animals, miners and cart loads of misshapen rocks heading for the smelting plant. Street traders with small stalls normally offered food, trinkets and tools along this road. It was deserted now. All of Tranmure seemed deserted, but people hid behind doors and shutters in their homes waiting for the storm to pass. Children were told kind lies. ‘It’s too wet to play out.’

  Cory studied the figures coming down the road with an emotional detachment. He had slept remarkably well between the small hours of this morning and the afternoon. He barked orders and pairs of crossbowmen took up positions either side of the road behind buildings. The church hospital beds were not bad for comfort and there was good food available. He did not want to think about why he couldn’t sleep in his own bed. The events of the previous night had be
come a place his mind refused to venture. Stay in the present; it’s safer.

  He drew his sword and the yellow jewel in the hilt lit up like the opening of a lizard’s eye. This was something else he added to the fast-growing list of strange new experiences. Black, bony figures came carrying hammers, pickaxes and shovels. Charred bits of leather hung from their frames — all that remained of clothing. The miners were returning home from their last day at work. None of them remembered where they lived, who their families were or who they were. They had instructions to follow and that was all.

  Gripping his shield handle, Cory moved in front of the guards, swinging the sword and warming up his muscles. The sword was as light and long as the unusual practice sword his grandfather sometimes made him train with. It carried far too little weight to be effective in a fight. Cory decided to use it anyway. After all, it had been used to defeat Rippers — or so claimed the painting above the fire in the castle Great Hall. When the bone figures neared, Cory and the guards could see just how fast they really were. The crossbowmen weren’t hidden from whatever guided their attackers. Crossbow bolts took out the odd rib here and there, then they were overrun like sandcastles on the beach before an incoming wave. A hammer clanged onto Cory’s raised shield and he swept the sword through a horizontal arc under it. From nowhere, an intense force threw itself behind the blade and the hips of the black skeleton shattered like a dropped clay pot. Remarkably easy. More once-miners swept through Cory’s peripheral vision as he ducked under a pickaxe, breaking a ribcage with a backhanded swing. Make it like a dance, find a rhythm. He turned and swung and the spindly black figures fell. The third guard fell, a pickaxe through his chest, his glaive stuck between the ribs of his attacker. The second guard was smart, smashing a skull with his cosh. The first, fourth and fifth guard — Blake? — copied and tried to crush skulls with their coshes. The fourth guard failed to get that far; he was cut open with the glaive of the once-third guard, who had stood up and started fighting against his former comrades. The second and fifth guards panicked and set upon the once-third guard with coshes, but the sightless, slack-jawed corpse took the blows with an unnoticed squelch and cut them both down with his glaive.

  Then they all got back up, wet entrails spilling onto the cobbled ground, and picked up their glaives to fight on.

  Cory continued his dance, soon finding the newer, more cumbersome targets as easy to cut down as the black bones. Somewhere in the melee, guards ten through fifteen were killed only to stand and turn on the remaining guards. Who fell after that, Cory couldn’t tell. It seemed anything that moved was now trying to kill him. He changed the pattern and increased the speed of his movement to focus on a zone immediately surrounding him. A new dance. The music, harsh clanging drums made with mining hammer on shield. The string section, the wails of the dying guards. Sweeping, swinging, slashing.

  The attack suddenly ceased.

  Breathing hard, Cory cast his gaze around and began to think that this wasn’t so hard. Broken black bones and twice-killed corpses were all about the feet of the tall white obelisk. Corpses that were the men he commanded only moments before. There had never been little wooden pieces on the castle briefing table to represent town guards. There was never a battle game where the slain stood again and fought their comrades. The old general had warned that the rules of the game had a habit of changing. Could even he have guessed the new rules were to hack down your own men before they killed you? Cory realised he wasn’t the only one standing. The youngest guard moved to stand back to back with him, holding his glaive, which he had used to do no more than keep whatever was coming from getting to him. He was breathless, shaking and white as a ghost. The young man had signed up for law enforcement and got the kind of nightmare only the most disturbed child would dream up. Cory knew he shouldn’t show weakness in front of the men — or man — under his command, but he couldn’t help it. He lifted his visor, bent over and threw up. A lumpy yellow mix mingled with the mostly red mix of men’s innards already on the ground. Rain began to fall again.

  ***

  A robed man sat cross-legged on the ground before the old general’s statue in the churchyard. Even in the dull light, the velvet of his robes shifted between blue and green hues. The robes started to collect spots of rain. The man’s voice murmured and the droplets were hurled outwards as an invisible sphere popped into existence. Rivulets of rainwater quickly formed and snaked their way down the magic sphere.

  The robed man did not need to see the archpriest to know that he approached. ‘How did this happen, Ranold?’ he asked.

  Ranold didn’t mind God’s rain falling on his head, but once he stood behind the robed man, he too was sheltered by the magical sphere. Ranold laid his hands on the robed man’s shoulders and replied with his own question. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Calm. At peace. But I sense my peace will be challenged.’

  ‘We don’t know how this started, all we know is Pragius has been…’

  A pained pause.

  ‘…corrupted somehow. He is no longer the man we knew.’ Ranold remembered well the day he blessed Pragius under the sun at his naming ceremony. Hadn’t he prayed for God’s protection from the evils of man over Pragius? What greater good was going to be served by this? There were times it was hard even for the archpriest to remember to have faith that such a greater good may come to pass. Maybe even beyond his own lifetime.

  ‘I don’t sense Pragius anywhere,’ said the man.

  Ranold couldn’t keep sadness from his voice when he replied. ‘He wields great magic power. He is being called the dead battle mage.’

  The robed man spoke more of his strange words, summoning another unseen magical shield. Then he asked, ‘Who controls Garon’s sword?’

  ‘Cory does.’

  ‘I mean, who is in control?’

  ‘I understood the question the first time,’ said Ranold.

  ‘I must go. Cory will be overrun any moment.’ The robed man stood, looked up into the stone general’s face, grabbed his cold hard wrist and pulled himself up onto the plinth. Leaning on the old general for support, he pulled a telescope out from his robes and focused it at the foot of the white obelisk in the plaza down the road. Panning downwards, he saw Cory with his sword drawn and the yellow jewel a pin prick in the gloom. Cory stood back to back with a single remaining guard. Panning behind them both, he sent his magical battle sense to that area of the ground, slipped the telescope back inside his robe, spoke a word accompanied by a flick of his wrist and was gone. Ranold watched the silhouette full of blue stars left behind by the mage fade away.

  ***

  The macabre figures stood upright on two legs and were made from the bones of men, but they no longer looked human. Cory wondered how long he could keep them at bay. There were so many of them, all sprinting with the strength of athletes unencumbered by the weight of flesh. Was he doomed to join them, picking apart the city with his grandfather’s sword? They were only bones. He could throw them off, stop himself being borne to the ground. A vision of his helmet being torn off and head beaten in by a hammer passed before his mind. They didn’t need to pin him to the ground to win. He swung his sword through a couple of arcs to loosen up. The young guard behind him yelped in surprise. The bone men were almost at the entrance to the plaza. Once there, they would spill around him in all directions.

  God help us, Cory silently prayed. He had no expectation of a reply.

  Bright light and a humming sound streaked over his shoulder from behind. No, not one bright light — a stream of them came pulsing past and punching into the front ranks of the skeletons. Ribcages burst and skulls scattered. A break in the light stream allowed a few of them through. Cory marked the zone of his reach in his mind and waited for them to enter. A new stream of lights started and the destruction resumed. Cory collected hammer and pickaxe blows onto his shield and sword before counter-striking with broad sweeps of his blade. They didn’t seem to care if they were
hit. More shattered bones fell around his feet and suddenly there was only the sound of the rainfall and the breath in his ears.

  Looking up the road, the only movement he saw was thin tendrils of smoke curling up from the carcases, quickly snuffed out by the rain. Cory stood at ease, pushed up his visor and turned around. The new arrival and the source of the destructive lights pulled back the hood of the robe he wore. Not that the man needed it for shelter, as the the rain ran off the invisible sphere surrounding him. ‘There are no more of them — not near here, anyway,’ the robed man said, as if to reassure a child the monsters under his bed were not real. The man had a precisely shaped moustache formed from two rectangles and trapezoidal beard. It almost looked painted on, but if paint were used the specks of grey would not be there. ‘How are you finding your grandfather’s sword?’

  Cory hesitated before answering. ‘Very strange, like it has no weight… and then it does.’

  ‘How many times around the route did it take you?’ the man asked.

  ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’

  A smile played across the man’s lips. ‘Oh, I think you do. The spirit in the sword, yellow eyes, weird hair, scaly skin… How many times did it drag you around the route?’

  Cory had not dared to tell anyone what he had seen when he first took up the sword. Conscious of the guard standing beside him, he answered slowly. ‘Once round, then I stopped it on the mountain top.’

  ‘Very good,’ the man said, nodding. ‘As good as your grandfather managed, in fact. Well, the first time anyway.’ Relaxing, the robed man approached offering the warrior’s handshake. Cory sheathed the sword, pulled off a gauntlet and shook his hand. ‘I had to get down to your level on my knees the last time we did this,’ said the man.