by Paul Kearney
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE IRON WARS
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1999 by Paul Kearney
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Electronic edition: July, 2002
WHAT WENT BEFORE . . .
F IVE centuries ago two great religious faiths arose which were to dominate the entire known world. They were founded on the teachings of two men. In the west, St Ramusio; in the east, the Prophet Ahrimuz.
The Ramusian faith rose at the same time that the great continent-wide empire of the Fimbrians was coming apart. The greatest soldiers the world had ever seen, the Fimbrians had become embroiled in a vicious civil war which enabled their conquered provinces to break away one by one and become the Seven Kingdoms. Fimbria dwindled to a shadow of her former self, her troops still formidable, but her concerns confined exclusively to the problems within the borders of the homeland. And the Seven Kingdoms went from strength to strength—until, that is, the first hosts of the Merduks began pouring over the Jafrar mountains, quickly reducing their numbers to five.
Thus began the great struggle between the Ramusians of the west and the Merduks of the east, a sporadic and brutal war carried on for generations, which, by the sixth century of Ramusian reckoning, was finally reaching its climax.
For Aekir, greatest city of the west and seat of the Ramusian Pontiff, finally fell to the eastern invaders in the year 551. Out of its sack escaped two men whose survival was to have the greatest consequences for future history. One of them was the Pontiff himself, Macrobius—thought dead by the rest of the Ramusian kingdoms and by the remainder of the Church hierarchy. The other was Corfe Cear-Inaf, a lowly ensign of cavalry, who deserted his post in despair after the loss of his wife in the tumult of the city’s fall.
But the Ramusian Church had already elected another Pontiff, Himerius, who was set upon purging the Five Kingdoms of any remnant of the Dweomer-folk—the practitioners of magic. The purge caused Hebrion’s young king, Abeleyn, to accept a desperate expedition into the uttermost west to seek the fabled Western continent, an expedition led by his ruthlessly ambitious cousin, Lord Murad of Galiapeno. Murad blackmailed a master mariner, one Richard Hawkwood, into navigating the voyage, and as passengers and would-be colonists they took along some of the refugee Dweomer-folk of Hebrion, including one Bardolin of Carreirida. But when they finally reached the fabled west, they found that a colony of lycanthropes and mages had already existed there for centuries under the aegis of an immortal arch-mage, Aruan. Their exploratory party was wiped out, only Murad, Hawkwood and Bardolin surviving.
Back in Normannia, the Ramusian Church was split down the middle as three of the Five Kingdoms recognized Macrobius as the true Pontiff, while the rest preferred the newly elected Himerius. Religious war eruped as the three so-called Heretic Kings—Abeleyn of Hebrion, Mark of Astarac and Lofantyr of Torunna, fought to retain their thrones. They all succeeded, but Abeleyn had the hardest battle to fight. He was forced to storm his own capital, Abrusio, by land and sea, half-destroying it in the process.
Farther east, the Torunnan fortress of Ormann Dyke became the focus of Merduk assault, and there Corfe distinguished himself in its defence. He was promoted and, catching the eye of Torunna’s Queen Dowager, Odelia, was given the mission of bringing to heel the rebellious nobles in the south of the kingdom. This he undertook with a motley, ill-equipped band of ex-galley slaves, which was all the king would allow him. Plagued by the memory of his lost wife, he was, mercifully, unaware that she had in fact survived Aekir’s fall, and was now the favourite concubine of the Sultan Aurungzeb himself.
The momentous year 551 drew to a close. In Almark, the dying king Haukir bequeathed his kingdom to the Himerian Church, transforming it into a great temporal power. And in Charibon two humble monks, Albrec and Avila, stumbled upon an ancient document, a biography of St Ramusio which stated that he was one and the same as the Merduk Prophet Ahrimuz. The monks fled Charibon, but not before a macabre encounter with the chief librarian of the monastery city, who turned out to be a werewolf. They ran into the teeth of a midwinter blizzard, collapsing into the snow.
A ND now all over the continent of Normannia, the armies are once more on the march.
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars . . .
Henry IV, Part I
PROLOGUE
I N the sweating nightmare-fever of the dark he felt the beast enter his room and stand over him. But that was impossible. Not from so far, surely—
Oh, sweet God in heaven, overlord of earth, be with me now . . .
Prayers, prayers, prayers. The mockery of it, he praying to God, whose soul was black as pitch and already sold. Already lost and consigned to the fires of eons.
Sweet Ramusio, sit with me. Be near me now in this lost hour.
He wept. It was here, of course it was. It was watching, patient as a stone. He belonged to it. He was damned.
Soaked in perspiration, he opened his gummy eyelids to the all-embracing dark of his midnight room. Tears had fled down the sides of his neck as he slept and the heavy furs of his bed were awry. He gave a start at their lumpen, hairy shape. But it was nothing. He was alone after all, thank God. Nothing but the quiet winter night wheeling in its chill immensity beyond the room.
He scratched flint and steel together from the bedside table, and when the tinder caught transferred the seed of sparks to his candle. A light, a point of reference in the looming murk.
Utterly alone. He was without even the God he had once reverenced and to whom he had devoted the best years of his life. Clerics and theologians said that the Creator was everywhere, in every niche and pocket of the world. But He was not here, in this room. Not tonight.
Something else was coming, though. Even now he could sense it hurtling through the dark towards him as unstoppable as the turning sun, its feet hardly setting down upon the dormant world. It could cover continents and oceans in the blink of an eye.
The furs on his bed gave a twitch, and he yelped. He clawed his way to the headboard, eyes starting out of his head, heart hammering behind his ribs.
They gathered themselves into a mound, a hulking mass of hair. And then they began to grow, bulking out in the dimness and the candleflame, the room a sudden playground of moving shadows as the light flickered and swam.
The furs rose and rose in the bed, towering now. And when they loomed over him, tall as some misshapen megalith, two yellow eyes blinked on in their midst, bright-hungry as an arsonist’s flame.
It was here. It had come.
He fell on his face amid the damp linen sheets, wor-shipping. Truly here—he could smell the mu
sk of its presence, feel the heat of the enormous form. A drop of spit fell from its maw and as it struck his neck it sizzled there, burning him.
Greetings, Himerius, the beast said.
“Master,” the prostrate cleric whispered, grovelling in his soiled bed.
Be not afraid, its voice said without a sound. Himerius’s reply was inarticulate, a gargle of terror.
The time is here, my friend, it said. Look up at me. Sit up and see.
A huge paw, fingered and taloned like some mockery of man and beast, raised him to his knees. Its pads scorched his skin through the wool of his winter shift.
The face of the winter’s wolf, its ears like horns above a massive black-furred skull in which the eyes glared like saffron lamps, black-slitted. A foot-long fanged muzzle from which the saliva dripped in silver strings, the black lips drawn back taut and quivering. And caught in the teeth, some glistening vermilion gobbet.
Eat.
Himerius was weeping, terror flooding his mind. “Please master,” he blubbered. “I am not ready. I am not worthy—”
Eat.
The paws clamped on to his biceps and he was lifted off his feet. The bed creaked under them. His face was drawn close to the hot jaws, its breath sickening him, like the wet heat of a jungle heavy with putrefaction. A gateway to a different and unholy world.
He took the gobbet of meat in his mouth, his lips bruised in a ghastly kiss against the fangs of the wolf. Chewed, swallowed. Fought the instinct to retch as it slid down his gullet as though seeking the blood-dark path to his heart.
Good. Very good. And now for the other.
“No, I beg you!” Himerius wept.
He was thrown to his stomach on the bed and his shift was ripped from his back with a negligent wave of the thing’s paw. Then the wolf was atop him, the awesome weight of it pinioning him, driving the air out of his lungs. He felt he was being suffocated, could not even cry out.
I am a man of God. Oh Lord, help me in my torment!
And then the sudden, screaming pain as it mounted him, pushing brutally into his body with a single, rending thrust.
His mind went white and blank with the agony. The beast was panting in his ear, its mouth dripping to scald his neck. The claws scored his shoulders as it violated him and its fur was like the jab of a million needles against his spine.
The beast shuddered into him, some deep snarl of release rising from its throat. The powerful haunches lifted from his buttocks. It withdrew.
You are truly one of us now. I have given you a precious gift, Himerius. We are brethren under the light of the moon.
He felt that he had been torn apart. He could not even lift his head. There were no prayers now, nothing to plead to. Something precious had been wrenched out of his soul, and a foulness bedded there in its place.
The wolf was fading, its stink leaving the room. Himerius was weeping bitterly into the mattress, blood trickling down his legs.
“Master,” he said. “Thank you, master.”
And when he raised his head at last he was alone on the great bed, his chamber empty, and the wind picking up to a howl around the deserted cloisters outside.
PART ONE
MIDWINTER
The spirit which knows not how to submit, which retires from no danger because it is formidable, is the soul of a soldier.
Robert Jackson, A Systematic View on the Formation, Discipline and Economy of Armies, 1804
ONE
N OTHING Isolla had been told could have prepared her for it. There had been wild rumours, of course, macabre tales of destruction and slaughter. But the scale of the thing still took her by surprise.
She stood on the leeward side of the carrack’s quarterdeck, her ladies-in-waiting silent as owls by her side. They had a steady north-wester on the larboard quarter and the ship was plunging along before it like a stag fleeing the hounds, sending a ten-foot bow-wave off to leeward which the weak winter sunlight filled full of rainbows.
She had felt not a smidgen of sickness, which pleased her; it was a long time since she had last been at sea, a long time since she had been anywhere. The breakneck passage of the Fimbrian Gulf had been exhilarating after the sombre gloom of a winter court, a court which had only recently emerged from an attempted coup. Her brother, the King of Astarac, had fought and won half a dozen small battles to keep his throne. But that was nothing compared to what had gone on in the kingdom that was her destination. Nothing at all.
They were sailing steadily up a huge bay, at the end of which the capital of Hebrion, gaudy old Abrusio, squatted like a harlot on a chamberpot. It had been the rowdiest, most raucous, godless port of the western world. And the richest. But now it was a blackened shell.
Civil war had scorched the guts out of Abrusio. For fully three miles, the waterfront was smoking ruin. The hulks of once-great ships stabbed up out of the water along the remnants of the wharves and docks, and extending from the shore was a wasteland hundreds of acres in extent. The still-smoking wreck of the Lower City, its buildings flattened by the inferno which had raged through it. Only Admiral’s Tower stood mostly intact, a gaunt sentinel, a gravestone.
There was a powerful fleet anchored in the Outer Roads. Hebrion’s navy, depleted by the fierce fighting to retake the city from the Knights Militant and the traitors who had been in league with them, was a force to be reckoned with, even now: tall ships whose yards were a cat’s cradle of rigging lines and furiously busy mariners, repairing the damage of war. Abrusio still had teeth in plenty.
Up on the hill above the harbour the Royal palace and the monastary of the Inceptines still stood, though pitted by the naval bombardment which had ended the final assaults. Up there, somewhere, a king awaited them, looking down on the ruins of his capital.
• • •
I SOLLA was sister to a different king. A tall, thin, plain woman with a long nose which seemed to overhang her mouth except when she smiled. A cleft chin, and a large, pale forehead dusted with freckles. She had long ago given up trying for the porcelain purity that was expected of a courtly lady, and had even put aside her powders and creams. And the ideas which had prompted her to don them in the first place.
She was sailing to Hebrion to be married.
Hard to remember the boy who had been Abeleyn, the boy now become a man and a king. In the times they had seen each other as children he had been cruel to her, mocking her ugliness, pulling at the flaming russet hair which was her only glory. But there had been a light about him, even then, something that made it hard to hate him, easy to like. “Issy Long-nose,” he had called her as a boy, and she had hated him for it. And yet when the young Prince Lofantyr had tripped her up in the mud one winter’s evening in Vol Ephrir, he had ducked the future King of Torunna in a puddle and smeared the Royal nose in the filth Isolla stood covered in. Because she was Mark’s sister, and Mark was his best friend, he had said. And he had wiped the tears from her eyes with gruff, boyish tenderness. She had worshipped him for it, only to hate him again a day later when she became the butt of his pranks once more.
He would be her husband very soon, the first man she had ever let into her bed. At twenty-seven she hardly worried about that side of things, though it would of course be her duty to produce a male heir, the quicker the better. A political marriage with no romance about it, only convenient practicalities. Her body was the treaty between two kingdoms, a symbol of their alliance. Outside that, it had no real worth at all.
“By the mark eleven!” the leadsman in the bows called. And then: “Sweet blood of God! Starboard, helmsman! There’s a wreck in the fairway!”
The helmsmen swung the ship’s wheel and the carrack turned smoothly. Sliding past the port bow the ship’s company saw the grounded wreck of a warship, the tips of her yards jutting above the surface of the seas no more than a foot, the shadowed bulk of her hull clearly visible in the lucid water.
The entire ship’s company had been staring at the war-wrecked remnants of the city. Many of the
sailors were clambering up the shrouds like apes to get a better view. On the sterncastle the quartet of heavily armed Astaran knights had lost their impassive air and were gazing as fixedly as the rest.
“Abrusio, God help us!” the master said, moved beyond his accustomed taciturnity.
“The city is destroyed!” one of the men at the wheel burst out.
“Shut your mouth and keep your course. Leadsman! Sing out there. Pack of witless idiots. You’d run her aground so you could gape at a dancing bear. Braces there! By God, are we to spill our wind with the very harbour in sight, and let Hebrians brand us for mooncalf fools?”
“There ain’t no harbour left,” one of the more laconic of the master’s mates said, spitting over the leeward rail with a quick, hunted look of apology to Isolla a second later. “She’s burned to the waterline, skipper. There’s hardly a wharf left we could tie up to. We’ll have to anchor in the Inner Roads and send in a longboat.”
“Aye, well,” the master muttered, his brow still dark. “Get tackles to the yardarms. It may be you’re right.”
“One moment, Captain,” one of the knights who were Isolla’s escort called out. “We don’t yet know who is in charge in Abrusio. Perhaps the King could not retake the city. It may be in the hands of the Knights Militant.”
“There’s the Royal flammifer flying from the palace,” the master’s mate told him.
“Aye, but it’s at half mast,” someone added.
There was a pause after that. The crew looked to the master for orders. He opened his mouth, but just as he was about to speak the lookout hailed him.
“Deck there! I see a vessel putting off from the base of Admiral’s Tower and it’s flying the Royal pennant.”
At the same second the ship’s company could see puffs of smoke exploding from the battered seawalls of the city, and a heartbeat later came the sound of the retorts, distant staccato thunder.