The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “Dal nolle soche shil farran yeae.” The cryptic words fell from its rank lips in a husky voice, dropping the man back to the ground, his eyes closed.

  The girl began to weep weakly.

  Then the child’s mother rose and threw herself at the dark renderer’s arm, trying to break its hold on her daughter. Screams and cries rose up from around the camp. The velle shoved its free hand into the woman’s hair and yanked her head back hard. Then it drew her face up close to its own and inhaled slow and long. Maral couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw something like steam pass from the woman’s mouth into its nostrils. The woman cried out, her voice steadily weakening. Soon, she slumped and fell back into her daughter before dropping to the ground beside the man. The velle held a bitter grin on its pale emaciated face and raised its chin, shrieking at the multitude of captives, its shrill cry more than a warning. The sound echoed horribly, at once silencing and stilling the countless mass of helpless victims. They were able only to watch and listen.

  Then the velle turned back toward Maral, whose own anger had risen again as he observed the child, who stood looking down at her mother at her feet and weeping openly.

  He forgot himself entirely and raised his right hand, turning it palm up, receiving the Sky in token, then balled his other hand into a fist and held it out toward the malefactor.

  “To the dust!” he said, his voice filled with rage.

  He could feel other velle behind him. He would die, even if he could put down this one. But he no longer cared. If for nothing but this single awful act, he would see the demon destroyed.

  He let loose the Will, the raw emotion shooting forth with its own terrible force at the creature. He focused it, pushing it at the beast’s head. It was all the power left in him after the events of the day, but it was still considerable.

  But in that moment, the velle tightened its hold on the child’s wrist, and her body began to slacken. Her eyes, though…he would never forget her eyes. They widened, seeming to look far away, to see something awful and frightening. Perhaps it was only the agony of losing her own soul, of having it rendered into something new and destructive. He would never forget the fear and helplessness in the girl’s face.

  The Quietgiven renderer seemed briefly to stand straighter, its body more robust. With a dark smile, it simply lowered its other hand, and all the energy of Maral’s attack diffused to nothing more than a slight breeze. Then it yanked the child’s arm hard, and in an instant she dropped to the dry earth, desiccated, dead. The velle then raised a hand and brought a sudden pressure to bear on Maral’s head. Wind whipped around him, as though he were caught in a tight, choking vortex.

  His body was being pressed in from all sides. He felt as if bones were ready to snap in his arms as he held them up to shield his face.

  To the earth I return.

  But before the pressure became too great, he heard a resounding cry—“No!”—and the pressure stopped.

  Maral lowered his hands to see a young man, perhaps sixteen, toppling the velle. The boy had run at the renderer and driven it to the ground.

  With unlikely gracefulness, the demon rolled and came up with its talon-like hand around the lad’s neck. It hissed at him, then immediately turned again to face Maral. As they came around, all the fear he had known before seemed as nothing, when he saw that the boy was his son, Talan.

  “Dear Sky, no,” he said, his voice failing.

  How had they gotten Talan? Why was he here?

  “I couldn’t let him, Father. I couldn’t—”

  Before he could consider it more, the velle squeezed the boy’s throat, choking off his words. Then it focused its gaze on Maral, a hint of dark amusement on its lips. In that moment, Talan’s eyes began to shut, his body slump. The velle raised two fingers toward Maral and the vortex resumed, pressing in on him more savagely than before.

  He tried to push it back, but his strength seemed all but gone. He managed to watch as his son’s life ebbed slowly beneath the touch of the velle. Talan tried to show Maral a brave face, but he knew his son. The boy was terrified. He also knew that the lad, himself on the path of study to become a Sheason. understood what was happening to him.

  He was helpless. He would die. Unless Maral did something to save him.

  Unlike the young man today that I let go….

  Maral saw in his own beleaguered mind the quiet bravery of the man earlier that day who had been willing to die so that others could return to fight these Quietgiven. He recalled his king who would not speak of his own lost son. And then he looked back at his own dying child. He knew he could not let the valor of all these be in vain.

  With all the strength he could find, he pushed back the onslaught of the velle’s rendering and jumped aside, falling hard to the earth. The force he’d thrown off struck the ground and tore a gaping hole where he’d been standing, the impact sending great rocks and sprays of dirt and ash into the air. Maral couldn’t be sure, but he thought he also sensed something of his son in the dissipating attack, as though the boy’s rendered spirit lingered like a fading residue of the velle’s assault.

  The velle stepped over the small family that lay heaped at its feet, dragging Maral’s son along as it started toward him. Maral had little left to give. He had to choose between one last rendering of the Will and the strength he’d need to try and make it back to his own army. Escape was a foolish notion, he knew—there were so many Quiet around. But he had a simple choice: fight or run.

  He had rolled onto his back, readying the Will a final time, when a swarm of bodies descended on the velle, and more yet upon those dark renderers standing on the low embankment to his right. The captives, hobbled as they were, had stood, shuffled toward their captors, and thrown themselves physically upon the velle, stacking atop them like cordwood laid up for winter.

  “Run!” his son shouted.

  Maral stood, feeling weak and confused as he looked out over the hundreds who stood watching, their vacant eyes now lit, he thought, with the vaguest spark of hope.

  It was only then that his mind allowed him to see, that it showed him the lie that, until this moment, he’d managed to tell himself about this camp of prisoners: they were his own, almost all of them. Some were the families of Sheason, others were residents of their city, Estem Salo, that he and his fellows had left behind when they came east to answer the convocation’s call.

  By my last Sky.

  His mind called forth images of his home, the city of Sheason, nestled high in the mountains of the Divide, consumed by flames; of dissenters executed with the wave of a rendering hand; of the generations of knowledge and wisdom, stored in the Archives of Estem Salo by his people, likely now seized or destroyed by the Quiet.

  May our safeguards have held our secrets….

  Maral looked at his son, whose eyes drooped even as he struggled against the grip of the velle. He had been blind. They all had. These races out of the Bourne—Bar’dyn, velle, all of them—had come to war with more than bloodlust. He saw clearly now the true strategy of the Quiet, allowing peoples to mobilize, while leaving precious things unguarded as they built armies.

  The dark irony was that even in their collective strength, the nations of the known world were utterly overmatched.

  He thought he now also understood why it seemed the Quiet army had come later than they’d expected: Among, perhaps, other stops, they’d gone to Estem Salo.

  And this current assault was the last insult to be heaped upon the resistance of the nations, but more ironically, on the Sheason themselves: that the renderings of the Quiet when they met Baellor’s last stand would be made by stealing the life from their enemies’ own dear ones. It was more than an insult; it was a terror tactic intended to weaken the resolve of those who followed.

  “Run!” his son shouted again, then fell to his knees.

  Maral stole one last look at his boy, then at the hundreds standing across the shallow valley, and turned and ran. As he did, it felt as if somethin
g inside him broke.

  Just to fight one more day.

  He clawed his way up and out of the basin, and raced blindly out across the scorched, barren plain, heading, he hoped, in the direction of his king and those Sheason who yet remained.

  His lungs burned. Exhaustion threatened to tumble him to the ground. But he kept his legs beneath him, as he tried to think of what to do next. How could they hope to stand against them? Would he have to renounce his oath?

  Perhaps oaths, too, have a breaking point.

  The very thought intimated a path he was not sure, even now, that he could follow.

  ~

  Every last man of Baellor’s army, now perhaps only twenty thousand strong, stood silent and still in the light of predawn, waiting. Scouts had brought word that the Quiet were on the move early. Baellor stood in front of the line, the point of his sword in the hard dirt, his hands resting on its pommel. He scanned the horizon for the enemy, knowing they would come rested and—as Maral had counseled—with a renewed sense of purpose. His own men were tired and fearful, particularly after yesterday’s demonstration of the velle’s power.

  His strategy to rob the velle of their source to render the Will had failed; they had brought their own. There was nothing more to do but see this out to the bitter last. Messages had already been dispatched to Recityv to evacuate that city. Additional messengers had been sent to the other realms and nations, carrying notes for those peoples to take care for their own safety. As he watched for signs of the enemy, Baellor imagined the years ahead: Quietgiven hunting down mankind, since no military force remained to stand against them; a lawless world, one that accepted the sacrifice of innocent life to enable their dark arts. He would almost be glad to be dead when the world he envisioned came into being.

  But more than anything, he would like to have had one more day with Elonas and Olara, his wife and lone surviving child. Too seldom does a king take care to mark the important moments with his own family. It was an error he welcomed the chance to correct. But in his heart, he held no hope of it.

  To his left stood Maral Praig, Randeur of the Order of Sheason, a ceaselessly critical and faithful counselor…a good friend. In the night, Maral had been to the camps of the enemy, and escaped. His face looked haunted, and a bit uncertain, in the weak grey light. This morning, not a man or woman from his order remained behind the front line—no one would be healed of wounds today; all stood with Baellor’s men, their eyes trained ahead. And though these Sheason appeared more weary than the men of sheath and steel, they gave not a single step, standing as far forward as the rest.

  The blue hues of morning blurred the scars of the landscape around them, but could not hide the stark contrast of earth and sky, nor banish the smell of blood, or the blighted earth, stripped of color and life. A clear sky slowly surrendered its stars to the coming of day, and the distant sounds of heavy feet rose on the air. The calm of the moment was almost painful in its suggestion of the violence soon to follow.

  Baellor kept a firm forward gaze. Let this be my last testament: that I would not run or yield, even when no hope remained….

  In the hour that followed, the Quiet drew ever closer, slowly coming into clear view. The enormity of the Quietgiven army disheartened many of his men, who unwittingly uttered sounds of despair. The columns of Bar’dyn…the brigades of the half-breeds…and the other races out of the Bourne…all of them came on. And leading the wave of creatures were the velle, who brought in tow several hundred of the captives Maral had told him about. Men and women and children heavily bound in lines behind them—the families of these Sheason standing with them.

  This disturbed Baellor most of all. He looked over at Maral, who caught his eye and shook his head. The Sheason knew Baellor’s mind, and even now silently counseled…pleaded with him.

  Don’t do it, Maral was telling him. Perhaps there is another way.

  We will see, he thought.

  He did not consider it lightly—killing the helpless captives had occurred to him sometime in the small hours of the night. A war tactic: remove their ability to render. But the thought caused him to think of Layosah, the woman who had forced him to remember his own oath and office, who had nearly killed her own child to make him see. There was a kind of betrayal in killing one group of people to save another.

  And these are the families of men and women who have died alongside us.

  But war had its own rules. When the time came, he would know what to do.

  He focused on the advancing Quiet. They did not scream or taunt or wail. These breeds from so distant a place came marching into the vague light of morn making only the sound of their feet upon the soil. Their faces remained placid, their expressions studied, if grotesque. They did not halt or slow. They walked toward them, closing the gap.

  Then, a hundred strides away, the velle stopped, their captives still too distant to be recognized. At the far edges of the Quietgiven line, the Bar’dyn continued, coming nearer to Baellor’s men. The faces of these creatures hardly changed as they hefted their great weapons and set upon the convocation army.

  Steel and leather and wood clashed, grunts and cries rising up in the far east and west of the great plain.

  It had begun.

  For every Bar’dyn his men took down, Baellor lost two. The line was failing already. He looked ahead at the velle and realized that several had taken captives by the arm and were rendering quietly some protection over the Quiet already engaged. Several of the men and women lay slumped at velle feet, entirely spent.

  Seeing it, Baellor decided. I am sorry, my friend.

  Baellor raised his sword high against the cerulean blue sky and dropped it with a shout, “Let fly!”

  Two hundred archers raised their bows, having received their instruction hours ago, and took aim at these human vessels being used for their life’s energy. From a chorus of bowstrings, arrows took flight, darkening the sky in a wave as they sped toward their targets.

  As he watched it begin to unfold, Baellor felt sick at heart. But before the arrows struck, a gust of wind rose up from the ground and sent the volley over the heads of the captives and into the Bar’dyn several rows behind them. Sechen turned sharply to see the Sheason all with hands outstretched. He caught Maral’s eye.

  “Fool!” he yelled at the Randeur of the Sheason.

  “Not this way!” his friend shouted back.

  Before Baellor could say more, the line began to collapse. Bar’dyn had flowed in around the velle and were engaging in battle all up and down the line. Baellor’s men fell back or were crushed under great hammers and six-foot blades.

  They could not hold. They were being flanked already. In a few moments, there would be no options left. He looked around, desperately seeking a strategy for this last stand, a way to defend their flanks.

  Then his eyes lit on the symbol of the Sheason Order sewn to the cloak of one of the renderers close to him: the three rings, one inside the next, all joined at one side.

  “Pull back!” he commanded. “Form a great round. No flank. Three men deep. Archers behind the rest!”

  His order was repeated by his captains all along the line, and quickly the last several thousand men retreated and pulled themselves into a circle a few hundred strides wide. They managed to keep the Quietgiven in front of them, leaving no flank. Archers worked their bows, firing arrows over the heads of their comrades. War machines fired and reloaded, sending boulders into the densely packed ranks of the enemy.

  The physicians who’d come to aid the Sheason had abandoned their needles and gut and taken up spare blades.

  In this round, we will battle to the last, Baellor thought, and worked at each Bar’dyn who stepped in front of him.

  He didn’t know how long they fought, but with each moment, the circle grew smaller, his men falling, others stepping into the breach. Slowly, the number of men dwindled, his soldiers hewn down by an army like none any man had ever seen. He caught glimpses of the velle, who seemed now to b
ide their time. It did not appear their craft would be needed. Beyond them, the dark columns of Quietgiven stretched without end. By nightfall, nothing would be left of Baellor’s army.

  He fought on, but hope had gone out of him.

  ~

  The circle continued to tighten. Maral had already lost a number of Sheason. Some had fallen to the sword. Others had rendered their own soul and strength until there was nothing left and they dropped, utterly spent, empty.

  Baellor’s army gave all they had to the battle, but it would not be enough. He imagined the world that would remain when these valiant men had all been put down. A dark age would ensue, where the only use of the Will would be to corrupt and use and enslave. They would harvest the land until it all looked like this barren waste around them. And then they would have to turn to mankind to fuel their renderings, as they had started now to do.

  His mind raced, seeking answers, trying to recall something from the annals of history and the Estem Salo Archives, where he’d studied most of his life. But try as he might, he could recall nothing that might help them. They were simply outnumbered. They hadn’t the collective energy or strength to defeat the Quiet this time.

  He cast a quick glance at the line of velle standing patiently beyond the battle round, remembering yesterday’s awful demonstration of their power, when they all drew upon the Will at once. Then he looked past them at the human captives—their friends and families—who waited to be used. He hadn’t told anyone other than Baellor who these captives were. He feared it would too dishearten these men and women, or perhaps make them tentative when they must, instead, be bold.

  But as he weighed that decision again, he pondered the moment yesterday when many velle had simultaneously rendered, and thought, too, of the velle the night before who had used the life of another to draw on the Will.