The Swampling King (The Windwalker Legacy Book 1)

by Ben S. Dobson

  “I said leave me alone!” Rudol snatched up his sword from where it had fallen, and thrust it at Josen.

  Again, that feeling of power rose from his gut, pulsed through his blood toward his outstretched hand.

  The ground in front of him trembled once, and then exploded.

  The sudden force threw Duke Castar up and away, but it didn’t stop there. A great swath of land across the center of the battlefield rippled under an invisible force, buckled, and burst open with a terrible roar. Surging earth picked up soldiers and hurled them aside; shards of rock lacerated flesh and shattered bones. Swords bent and broke, throwing fragments of sharp metal in every direction. Cracks opened in the ground, deep enough to drag down those trying to escape, and then snapped closed again, pinning limbs and crushing men whole. The damaged foundation of the old mill shifted; the building leaned heavily to one side, stone and wood groaning under their own weight, and then toppled over with a deafening crash atop a confused mass of wounded and fleeing soldiers.

  Then it was over. The surge passed, and the earth fell still.

  And somehow, Rudol stood unharmed. Broken stone and twisted metal and chunks of painted masonry from the falling mill had been thrown in every direction, but in a half-circle around him, the ground was clear.

  He couldn’t pick Castar out of the chaos. There was too much dust in the air, too much debris strewn across the field. And too many men. Hundreds. Some were already picking themselves up, no more than stunned or bloodied, but others had injuries far graver: crushed limbs, shards of stone jutting out of ugly wounds. Many didn’t rise at all. It was impossible to tell how many had been trapped or killed under the windmill—its broken arms and shattered body obscured whatever violence lay beneath.

  And not all of the victims wore crimson. Rudol had fought his way into enemy lines, and most of those near him wore Castar’s colors, but farther away, toward the edges, he saw pale swampling skin among the wounded. And worse, splashes of Aryllian blue.

  Men of the Plateaus. Josen’s men.

  “What did I do?” he whispered. He’d seen the swamplings’ deepcraft before, seen it used to take patrols by surprise, to throw soil into the air or bend metal at extremely close range. The power that had come out of him was a hundred times greater than that, or a thousand—closer to the force that had shattered the Queensgate than to the small geysers of earth the swamplings used for distraction. And he didn’t understand why.

  All he knew was that he had to get away, before he lost control again.

  Before he hurt someone else.

  “What did you do? It’s simple, little brother: you showed them what strength lies in a Windwalker’s blood.” The thing that looked like Josen stepped out of the wreckage of the mill, passing through the broken stone wall like a ghost. He was still grinning. “We’re going to have quite a lot of fun with this, don’t you think?”

  Rudol turned on his heel, and ran.

  49. New Roads

  Lenoden

  The first thing Lenoden noticed as his senses returned to him was the metallic stink of blood.

  A slow stream of sticky fluid dripped steadily down his forehead, and something heavy lay atop him. As his vision cleared, he saw that it was a man. One of his own, in fact, wearing a crimson and gold uniform. A foot-long spike of stone jutted from the man’s eye socket—the source of the blood warming Lenoden’s face.

  Recent memory flooded back to him all at once—the strange, savage way Rudol had fought, power rippling from an outstretched hand. He heaved the corpse to one side, and probed his body for injury. He was bruised and sore, and the links of his mail had been broken and scoured away in large patches by whatever force had thrown him across the field. A jagged shard of metal jutted out of his side, but it hadn’t gone deep. Gritting his teeth, he jerked it free, and pressed his hand against the wound. For a moment, he just lay there with the pain, staring at the sky.

  And then it occurred to him that he was completely defenseless, and he had no idea where Rudol was.

  The dead soldier’s sword lay on the ground nearby, dented and bent but still intact—it would have to do. Lenoden snatched it up, rolled over, and pushed himself to his feet, blade at the ready.

  “Rudol?”

  No answer, and there was no sign of him nearby. Shame. The old man might have helped him. Rudol would almost certainly seek a knight’s end now, but the last pilgrimage would be a waste of such power—power better wielded by a man of the Peaks than by a swampling. And beyond just that, Lenoden still felt a certain responsibility toward him, for whatever reason. He deserves better than the end he’ll find out there alone.

  That couldn’t be his concern, though. Not now. There were other, more pressing matters to worry about.

  Lenoden’s awareness of his surroundings returned slowly. The cries of the injured rose from a low buzz at the edges of his consciousness to a piercing roar that filled his ears. The ground beneath his feet was pitted and cracked and torn; what had once been a neatly tilled field had become a broken ruin. Men staggered across that ruin, clutching broken arms or limping on wounded legs, but as many again lay still, crushed in the half-closed grip of long fissures in the earth or beneath fragments of brightly painted masonry.

  And most of them were his. Around the edges of the destruction, there were swamplings bodies, or men in Aryllian blue, but most wore the crimson and gold of Goldstone.

  There was a hole at the center of his army.

  Windwalker blood. Auren had talked about the power of it, but this was beyond anything Lenoden had imagined—and as far as he could tell, Rudol had done it by accident. What could he do if he was trying?

  He raised his eyes, looked over the battlefront. The swamplings were closing in from the west, breaking through the thin line that remained there; Josen’s men were pushing against the stronger eastern flank. The two enemy forces met to the north, encircling Lenoden’s men and forcing them ever closer to the plateau’s southern cliff.

  He was surrounded, and Rudol had shattered the foundation of his defense.

  I’m going to lose.

  Until that moment, the thought hadn’t occurred to him. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. He was supposed to win the throne, to save the Peaks from the catastrophe that would be Josen Aryllia’s reign, to be celebrated as a hero and savior. Even when the swamplings had joined the fight, he hadn’t considered them anything more than another obstacle to overcome. And now he was outnumbered by enemies closing in from all sides, and the only way out was over the cliff. He could very well die pointlessly here on this field, accomplishing nothing. One name among many in a history written about somebody else.

  Just like his father.

  No. Not like that.

  “Auren!” He turned, sprinted across the field toward place where he’d last seen the old man, searching frantically. “Auren! I need you!”

  And then he saw him, a grey-haired figure in a blindfold and robe among the men nearest the cliff. Sir Horte stood with him—when Lenoden had gone to join the fight, he’d bidden his adjutant to stand watch over the old man, as much to keep Horte out of the way as out of concern for Auren. Now, the young knight was looking out across the broken field with the same look of blank incomprehension as every one of the knights and soldiers nearby.

  “You seem distressed, Your Grace,” Auren said, even before Lenoden had announced himself. The old man had long since given up pretending that his blindness was any real hindrance.

  “We are losing this battle, if you hadn’t noticed! You promised me the Plateaus!”

  “I promised you I would bring you through the gates, and I did. How could I have forseen this? I am no prophet.”

  “I don’t care! Just… just do something! If Rudol can do this”—Lenoden jabbed a finger at the ruined field—“surely you can do something like it!”

  “Perhaps. I have… more power now that I did before. But the circumstance is not the same. Our enemies are spread across the front, wi
thout a center to target, and that kind of uncontrolled destruction is as likely to harm your men as theirs. It would be a powerful display, but to little benefit.”

  “The Deeplings, then! Bring them back!” Horte and a hundred others were too near, listening to every word, and Lenoden saw the fear in their eyes at that. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but finding a way to win this battle.

  “They will not come,” said Auren. “Not in the daylight.”

  “This is no time for your games!” Lenoden gripped the old man roughly by the shoulder, and shook him, hard. “Tell me what you can do, or I swear by the Above, I will throw you from this cliff myself!”

  If Auren was frightened, neither his voice nor his face betrayed it. “I can get you away safely, with the bulk of your surviving men.”

  “What good is that? Josen will still have the last Windwalker, and the crown, and everyone in the Peaks will know that he bested me! It would be no better than defeat. I need to win.”

  “You won’t,” Auren said flatly. “You are outnumbered and outflanked. Stay, and you will be captured or killed. Run, and you live to fight again. The rest is politics. It matters little what man my grandson stands beside now—the lines have already been drawn.”

  That gave Lenoden a moment’s pause. “What does matter to you, old man? Don’t you want him back? Don’t you care?”

  “He made his choice.” Auren smiled that slight, infuriating smile. “A willful boy, my Eroh. I suspect he would be little use to you now, even if you were to recapture him. Why waste time lamenting what we cannot change? There is only one decision left to make, Your Grace. Run and live, or fight and die?”

  Lenoden looked over his shoulder; Josen and the swamplings were closing in rapidly from both sides, forcing his men across the broken ground toward the cliff. The space Rudol’s power had blasted clear was packed with soldiers now, and soon there would be no more room to fall back. He wasn’t accustomed to defeat—he hated this feeling, the desperation of it—but Auren was right.

  “This is not how I die,” said Lenoden. “Not like this. Do it.”

  “There will be a cost. There is always a cost.”

  “So you love to say. What is it this time?”

  “Your dead, and gravely wounded. You will give them to me.”

  “Don’t be a fool!” Lenoden shook him again; still Auren’s smile didn’t falter. “Whatever path you clear for us, how are we meant to retreat if we have to carry men who can’t carry themselves? We’ll be overtaken before we reach the foot of the Queensmount!”

  “I will see to that,” Auren said. “All you need do is agree.”

  What foul thing does he have planned? But there was no time left, and the wounded were lost already either way. Whatever the old man wanted them for, it made little difference. “Fine! Just do whatever it is you mean to do, and quickly!”

  “So be it.” Auren pushed his way nearer to the cliff and knelt some ten yards from the edge. Laying his hands flat to the ground, he bowed his head. “Signal your men to fall back. I will do the rest. And stand away from the edge.”

  Lenoden nodded to Horte; Horte raised his horn and blew. In answer, the men still fighting at the front began to retreat toward the cliff, and the men nearest the cliff stepped away until they were level with Auren.

  And then the dead began to rise.

  It wasn’t dramatic; there was no creeping dread or dark power in the air, like there might have been in a story. Lenoden didn’t even notice until he heard a shout from somewhere ahead, and turned away from Auren to look.

  All across the battlefield, hundreds of men that he would have sworn had been killed in Rudol’s quake simply woke, as if they were only now regaining consciousness. Not all of them; the crushed and pinned and impaled lay where they were, broken and still. Only those with less obvious wounds rose. They pushed themselves up on hands and knees, just as any man might—just as Lenoden himself had, not long ago—and stood. There was little to prove that they had been dead. It was cleverly done—anyone watching could easily assume that these men had only been knocked senseless by the sudden force of Rudol’s deepcraft.

  But Lenoden knew. He had seen Ulman Benedern standing and speaking not a day after his throat had been slit wide open. He knew what this was.

  And he didn’t care. Just then, if he got away from this place alive, he didn’t care what it took. Spirit of All, how far my standards have fallen.

  Josen and the swamplings advanced over ground that Lenoden’s men had once held; many of Auren’s risen dead were now scattered among them and even behind them. Cries of warning sounded from Josen’s side, but the swamplings, as always, were utterly silent. Their advance slowed as they responded to the new threat within their lines.

  On the nearer side of the battlefront, most of the risen moved to meet the enemy, protecting the retreat. Lenoden had expected some sign of their true nature, some stiffness or clumsiness, but to his eye, they fought just as they had while they lived. Those who didn’t join the fight instead began to gather whatever wounded and dead—truly dead—that they could reach, pulling them back toward the cliff. One dragged a body very near to Lenoden before leaving it to fetch another. The man had every appearance of life, even inclined his head with a properly respectful “Your Grace”, but there was something vacant to him, an emptiness in his eyes that made Lenoden shiver. Just like Benedern. They lose something when they die, and it doesn’t come back.

  In minutes, too many men were crowded together along the cliff’s edge, waiting uneasily for whatever came next. The ground was strewn with the injured and the dead; those hale enough to stand stood shoulder to shoulder and back to chest without an inch between them. And despite the risen men fighting before and among them, Josen and his swamplings were advancing still, drawing their half-circle tighter with every moment. If this takes much longer, they’ll force us right over the cliff.

  Something groaned mightily behind Lenoden; the ground shook under his feet. Startled, he turned back to where Auren knelt, and saw the cliff’s edge slope suddenly downward. Over the sheer drop, stone began to grind against itself. The entire face of the mountain shifted and changed. Great sheets of rock erupted outward or were pulled in, leaving a rough incline that descended sharply down the cliff-side.

  A road. He’s making a road.

  The path emerged from the rock in stages, hugging the cliff-side, stretching toward the main road. The men glanced nervously at Auren, and muttered amongst themselves, but self-preservation won out over fear—there was nowhere else for them to run. Better if so many hadn’t had to see it, but there was no helping that. It could be explained when this was over. As long as I have the Convocation behind me, anything can be called a miracle.

  It didn’t take long, but it felt to Lenoden like hours, with enemy forces fighting their way ever closer. His escape knit itself together out of the mountainside as he watched, until at last the new road met the old. They merged at the bend of a broad switchback hundreds of feet below, not far above the pass that the Eyewall had once spanned.

  The grinding ceased; the work was done.

  At the same moment, the great bulk of the risen men who had been gathering bodies to the cliff’s edge abrubtly ceased their efforts and moved to join the rest, holding back Josen’s men and the swamplings. Perhaps a hundred remained behind, lifting the dead and helping the wounded to their feet.

  Auren stood, dusted the knees of his robe, and turned to Lenoden. “They will not last forever, but they will make sure we are not followed. Have your men help carry the dead and those who cannot walk. But remember, Your Grace—when we reach safety, they are mine.”

  Lenoden wasted no time arguing; he was already issuing his commands. “Horte, sound the retreat!” he shouted. “The… the rear guard will cover our escape. Anyone who is able, carry the wounded and the dead. We will not leave them for these traitors to desecrate!”

  Even before he finished speaking he was moving, pulling Auren along with
him. The horn sounded, and men poured down the road behind them, some unburdened, others carrying the wounded and the dead. And guarding the retreat, Auren’s risen formed a protective barrier around the mouth of the newly-hewn road.

  Lenoden knew he should have been relieved. He wouldn’t die today, and he could rebuild his army—he had more duchies pledged to him than Josen did, more men and more coin. But as he fled down the path, surrounded by dead and wounded men he’d bartered away in exchange for his own life, he couldn’t help but stare at the old man beside him, this swampling who had come to him out of nowhere offering a miracle. Who could tear down walls with a gesture and carve roads out of mountainsides.

  Who could make the dead walk.

  It had been the only way out. Lenoden knew that, and he didn’t regret his choice. But even so, two thoughts haunted him now in a way they hadn’t just a few short days ago:

  Who is this man? And what did I agree to let him do?

  Zerill

  Zerill didn’t know where the quake had come from, but it had gutted Castar’s defense. Without a center to reinforce them, his soldiers were spread too thin across two fronts, and their line was breaking.

  But who did it? And why? The only person she could think of who was capable of using the deepcraft on that scale was Eroh’s grandfather—it was far beyond what any of the Makers could do. And the old man was supposed to be on Castar’s side. The sheer power of it had caught some of the Abandoned on the fringes, true, and Josen’s men as well, but Goldstone’s army had taken the brunt of it. It didn’t make sense.

  But those were questions for when the battle was done. Right now, Lenoden Castar was within her reach, and she meant to look him in the eye as he died.

  She’d grown used to the weight of her armor, and the light bothered her less with every moment. Her spear darted out, and again, and each time it drew highlander blood. The Abandoned pressed forward against the weakened enemy line; Castar’s men fell back farther and farther over broken ground.