Whispers of War: The War for the North: Book One

by Sean Rodden

  A man called Teji Nashi opened his eyes.

  His jaws bunched, biting down upon a most bitter word.

  Leeches.

  The perfumed air seemed to sour.

  “Oh, dear.”

  Did you feel that, sister? Did you feel it, feel it, feel?

  Waif looked up from the massive meaty mess upon which she perched, her small form hunched on her haunches. Rivulets of blood slicked her chin. Her fine fair brows twisted together. She clasped the burned thing tighter to her breast.

  I am not sure, brother. I think I felt…something. Something may have touched me. A prodding, perhaps. Or a poke.

  Yes! A poke. Poke, poke, poke.

  The little girl rose to her feet atop the putrefying carcass. She looked about the interior of the command tent. Cocked her head to one side, listening. She sniffed, then licked the fetid air. She then shrugged, tucked the burned thing beneath one thin arm, crouched once more, and with her bare fingers she tore a strip of raw red flesh from the rotting remains of the King of the Giants. Her teeth ripped into the shred ravenously, maggots falling from her scarlet lips as she chewed.

  There is nothing here, brother.

  But I felt it, sister. I felt it, felt it.

  These bodies are so sensitive, brother. They betray us. Always feeling. Feeling so much. Feeling and needing.

  Yes, sister. Feeling and needing, needing and feeling. Feeling so much, so much, much, much.

  The little boy moaned.

  The little girl glanced up.

  Do you ache, brother? We have but little time before the Halflord comes. Tell me, brother, tell me – do you ache?

  Urchin’s wide blue eyes met Waif’s across the dead King’s huge hollow chest cavity. Met and held, shining, shining. One small red hand reached for another.

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

  And down they sank into the crimson sludge.

  Night on the Northern Plains was growing old, growing cold. The camp was unnaturally quiet. Even the snores and occasional night terrors of the slumbering warriors seemed muted, strangely subdued. From the rough rock-rings of unnumbered extinguished campfires, the sibilant sound of embers disintegrating to ashes hissed and slithered into the star-pricked darkness. Vipers dying in the night. There on the Plains, in a world awaiting war, the everpresent eventuality of dissolution was an audible, tangible thing.

  “I don’t like this.”

  Mounted upon her monstrous render, Ev lin Dar raised one fine brow toward her habitually dolourous companion.

  “You don’t like anything, Gren del Mor.”

  “Untrue. And unfair.”

  The second brow raised. “Oh?”

  “I like raw meat. I like black wine. I even like you, Ev. Sometimes.”

  “I see that I’m in good company, at least,” sniffed Ev lin Dar. “I’m flattered.”

  “You should be,” returned Gren del Mor with no hint of humour.

  Ev lin Dar cast her sharp white gaze back toward the closed entrance to the immense command tent. Two enormous half-Urks flanked the fastened flaps, chaotic corruptions of nature, brutal bestial beings spawned of abominable ambition and blood magic. Small yellow eyes set deep in yet yellower faces radiated a wanton lust as their cruel gazes devoured the dark beauty of the female Bloodspawn before them.

  Ev lin Dar disregarded them entirely.

  “Our malformed friends are enamoured of you,” grinned Gren del Mor. “Come, Ev, a small boon, a sweet smile for your admirers.”

  She ignored that as well.

  The half-Urks leered and lapped their bulbous black lips.

  “Sorry, fellas,’ sighed Gren del Mor with a shrug. “Not tonight.”

  Indecipherable voices, smothered and muffled by heavy skins and canvas, issued from within the command tent.

  Between her muscular thighs, Ev lin Dar’s mar render shifted slightly, terrible talons tearing into the dark earth. When she stroked the creature’s neck, she felt a slow silent thunder reverberate in its throat. The beautiful Black Shield’s fine brows crumpled into a frown, her tigress tattoo contorting apprehensively.

  “The beast is uneasy,” observed Gren del Mor, “despite its unequivocally enviable position.”

  The tigress snarled.

  “Your cone is crooked, Gren.”

  Gren del Mor jolted, his hands jerking upward to hastily yet thoroughly inspect his perfectly tapered hair. Soon satisfied, he lowered his hands.

  “That was uncalled for, Ev,” he chastised in a hurt tone. “And you have the audacity to call me disagreeable.”

  Despite the night’s distinct chill, despite the lascivious leers of ogling ochre ogres, despite the serpents in the dark, both Ev lin Dar and the tigress smiled.

  And then she recalled the man facing demons within the hide and canvas structure before her.

  All smiles die.

  The little girl smiled.

  “Are you appalled, Halflord?” she quipped, the pitch of her voice high, the sheen in her eyes bright. “Do you find us…abhorrent? Do we disgust you? Repulse you?”

  Kor ben Dor looked up into Waif’s grinning eyes, the dead white of his own betraying no emotion, the set of his tattooed countenance as flat and as impassive as painted stone.

  Waif giggled, clutching the burned thing closer to her barely budding breasts.

  “Dear brother, I do believe we have at long last truly offended the Prince’s lofty sensibilities.”

  Somewhere beneath her, Urchin sniggered.

  “Offended him, yes, yes. Oh, what naughty brats we are. Bad, bad, bad.”

  The Halflord inhaled slowly, deeply. He rolled one immense shoulder, grinding away a bothersome knot in the thickly layered muscles. The motion seemed a careless shrug, but was actually something more, so much more.

  Yet he did not otherwise respond.

  “The dead are infinitely simpler to inhabit than are the living, Halflord,” the little girl imparted almost pleasantly. “Simpler, but much less…satisfying.”

  The ruined corpse of Arn’badt, King of the Giants, loomed before Kor ben Dor, animated and erect, swathed in strange sorcerous shad-owlight. Waif sat perched atop the cadaver’s headless shoulders, her spindling legs dangling casually, tiny feet bare but stained dark with what could only have been blood. Well below her, crouched in the hideous hollow of the dead Graniant’s disemboweled belly, Urchin rocked rhythmically back and forth, bloodied arms curled about his knobby knees, his cherubic face plastered in a gruesome grin.

  “The dead offer no resistance, the souls having fled the shell.” Waif smiled beatifically, despite a solitary maggot wriggling awkwardly across her blood-streaked chin. “Though this particular one did not fly far.”

  “We caught him,” giggled Urchin within the corpse’s abdominal cavity. “Caught him and ate him. Chewed him, ate him, ate him up.”

  “His terror was…delicious,” Waif beamed. Her slim pink tongue flicked out, snapping up the pale slug. The thing made a sickeningly wet, gushing sound as she crushed it between her teeth. Viscous fluid oozed from one corner of Waif’s smile. “My brother and I extend to you our sincere gratitude, Halflord.”

  Slowly, deliberately, Kor ben Dor cracked a crick from his neck.

  And he said softly, “Speak.”

  Waif blinked, clasping the burned thing closer.

  “But we have been speaking, Prince of the Bloodspawn,” she complained. “Some of us more loquaciously and eloquently than others, of course.”

  “Speak.”

  The little girl frowned.

  “Your single-mindedness is admirable, Halflord. Admirable but annoying. Do you seek to irritate me?”

  A purposeful pause, then –

  “Speak.”

  Waif scarcely suppressed an infuriated scream.

  Calm yourself, sister. Calm –

  “You impertinent shit!” Waif shrieked. “You were summoned two days ago, and you only now deign to darken our door with your vile and despicable self! Prince or no, I
will have you flayed alive!”

  A genuine shrug.

  “The messenger indicated that I should come at my own convenience,” the Halflord said, his melodious voice as soft and as smooth as silk. “Until now, it was not.”

  “Not what?” seethed Waif, her eyes burning.

  “Convenient.”

  “Not convenient? Not convenient? And should I have the skin peeled from your flesh?” Spittle and grub guts flew as Waif raved. “Would that…inconvenience you, Prince of the Bloodspawn?”

  “Momentarily, perhaps.”

  “Momentarily? You think too highly of yourself. You would do well to remember that you are but half a lord.”

  “Unnecessary.” Kor ben Dor made a dismissive gesture. “Others insist upon reminding me.”

  Waif glowered down upon the Bloodspawn, her large eyes glimmering, deep dark blue lamps, baneful and lurid.

  “I shall instruct you in inconvenience, mortal.” Her hiss was the sound of a soul slipping from a dying man. “And your very hide will be the instrument of your enlightenment.”

  The Halflord shrugged once more, seemingly aloof, without care – but at his sides his huge hands stretched deliberately, long strong fingers spreading and flexing.

  “You would find me a poor student, blutsauger – my skin is thicker than you might suspect.” His white gaze wandered impassively over the repugnant ruination of Arn’badt’s corrupted carcass. “Thus my lack of outrage.”

  Waif glared, her jaws chomping, champing.

  Easy, sister. Still your anger. He purposefully baits you. You must calm yourself, calm, calm, ca –

  Oh, shut up!

  Gradually, the set of Waif’s features softened, her eyes dimmed to a gentle gleam, and she smiled the smile of angels.

  “Tell me, Halflord, do you know why you were created? The purpose to your design? To your…existence?”

  The Prince of the Bloodspawn drew a sharp breath. Answers? Does this contemptible creature offer me answers? He willed his hands to relax. Tell me.

  “I do not pretend to know the motivations of the Blood King,” he replied quietly.

  Waif’s laughter was a shrill song of madness.

  “The Blood King…oh, that is good. You, for all your pretense and posturing, presume the creative genius, the brilliant intellect responsible for your design, belongs to a meagre half-undead mage with an insatiable blood fixation. Such willfully flaunted ignorance – priceless, purely priceless!”

  Kor ben Dor said nothing.

  Tell me.

  “You do know” – the little girl’s eyes narrowed to sapphire slits – “that you were manufactured, do you not?”

  The Halflord only stared, his face fixed and placid. Go on, demon.

  Waif grinned wildly.

  “The Blood King was neither the architect nor the engineer of the Bloodspawn, but only the manufacturer. Suru-luk does not create, he does not…dream. He merely constructs. The fool’s sole duty is to mindlessly, mechanically follow the plans provided him. And even then he gets it wrong more often than not, a truth to which those horrid little half-Urks out there so capably attest. No, sweet Prince, the Blood King is but the hammer in the hand of another, of one far greater than himself.”

  Kor ben Dor nodded, silent and speciously serene.

  Ah. Another. But not you, demon. You, like the Blood King, are but a hammer…only bigger, heavier. Yet you fail to see this – and mock my ignorance, when your own is the greater. Who, blutsauger, is the true fool?

  “Suru-luk is the hammer, Halflord,” sneered Waif, reddened fingers digging into the burned thing at her bosom. “You are the nail – and the Fiannar were to be the skull.”

  Yes, the Fiannar. But I knew this. Wait – the creature said…“were”?

  Prince Kor suppressed the frown threatening the insensate stone of his countenance, verily biting down on his tongue.

  “Yes, sweet prince, you and your precious Bloodspawn were meticulously, fastidiously, deliberately designed to destroy the Fiannar. To meet them on their own ground – meet them, engage them, and annihilate them. The sole reason for the existence of your race is the obliteration of another. Such sweet purpose, such glorious cause, a thing so brutally simple, more pure than fate, more profound than any destiny. The extermination of the Fiannar. This magnificent deed you were to achieve, this splendid feat you were to accomplish. But no longer.”

  Were, but no longer. Something has happened. Something has… changed.

  Waif grinned in insidious silence.

  Tell me, demon.

  Crouched in the hideous hollow of Arn’badt’s abdomen, Urchin slid the side of one bloodied finger along the thin line of his twisted lips, his tongue snaking out to slurp blood from the slickened skin.

  Tell me.

  “You will not bring doom down upon the Fiannar, Halflord.” Waif’s voice was light and breezy; her sweet, cherubic face veritably glowed. “No, you will not do this good and glorious thing.”

  Will not? Or would not? Choice is implicit in her words, though she would mask it in obfuscation. But why? Why would I not choose to destroy the Fiannar? Why would I turn aside from the only purpose I have ever known?

  “The Bloodspawn are strong, blutsauger.”

  Atop Arn’badt’s headless shoulders, Waif cocked her head to one side, beguilingly demure, disarmingly decorous.

  “Of course they are, Halflord. But Eryn Ruil? The Fiannar? No, I think not. I cannot risk it.”

  Risk it? Risk what? What is it that you fear we will do, demon? Why do the Bloodspawn terrify you so?

  Kor ben Dor stared at the Leech, his gaze hard and white. Said nothing. Waited.

  Waif beamed.

  Urchin slurped noisily at a finger.

  And then the little girl sighed, a sound as soft and as sinister as a snake sidewinding on sand.

  “I believe, Halflord, that you and your dear Bloodspawn would be more effective…elsewhere.”

  Elsewhere. Not Eryn Ruil. Not the Fiannar. Where then? And against whom?

  The Prince of the Bloodspawn rolled one shoulder, then the other. Muscles bowled and rippled. At his side, his huge hands flexed into boulders of stone.

  “Tell me.”

  And she did.

  “Sirs?”

  The word tapped at the Decan’s consciousness. Like a finger on a tabletop. Incessant and irritating. Regorius rolled over in his bunk, tugged the blankets up a touch higher, closed his eyes just a little tighter, stubbornly clinging to the hypnopompic haze of failing sleep.

  “Sirs?”

  The tapping became a poking now. More invasive, more insistent. A stick in the ribs. Maddus and Riffalo and Rooboong tossed against the prodding, turning away, groaning, moaning, pushing their faces deeper into the plushness of their pillows.

  “SIRS!”

  Regorius sprang awake, leaping up only to hear the thud of his head hitting the wooden slatted underside of the bunk above him. He slammed back down onto his mattress, eyes bedecked with tiny twinkling lights. Then the pain came.

  Rooboong and Riffalo jerked awake, profaning profusely if not profoundly in their native tongues, instinctively reaching to their hips for weapons that were not there.

  Maddus actually yelped, rolled, and plummeted from the top bunk to land in a tangled heap of blankets, arms and legs on the floor. There he remained, groaning.

  “My apologies, sirs,” said the silhouette of a guardsman in the doorway. His voice sounded suspiciously like a smile. “I was instructed to wake you, wait for you to dress, if necessary, and then escort you. Sirs.”

  Regorius gingerly tested his scalp for blood, felt none, but could distinctly discern the lump already starting to sprout beneath the shocks of stark white hair.

  “Instructed? By whom?” Despite the little stars swimming across his sight, the Decan detected no light seeping around the drawn window curtains. “Is it even morning yet?”

  “Very nearly, sir.”

  “Damn, my head hurts.” />
  “The foreseeable consequence of a third consecutive night of festivities at the Fifth Folly, sir.”

  “No, dumbass!” snapped the Decan. “The foreseeable consequence of banging one’s head against an upper bunk! Now who sent you?”

  “The Doctor, sir.”

  Regorius’ pink eyes narrowed. He squinted past his private dance of stars to the tall form framed in the open doorway.

  “Ah. Lionnus, is it? The Doctor’s bodyguard.”

  The smile slid into the young outrider’s voice once more. “I assure you, the Doctor needs no bodyguard, sir.”

  “Lackey, then.”

  “No cause for hostilities, sir.”

  Regorius stood slowly, teetered, used a bedpost to brace himself as the chamber spun kaleidoscopically around him. Perhaps the third night at the Fifth Folly had indeed been a bit…immoderate.

  “No cause for…? You wake me up in the middle of the night –”

  “Nearly dawn, sir, as I have said.”

  “– you make me conk my noggin against wood that seems more like stone –”

  “You did that yourself, sir.”

  “– and you have the balls of steel to tell me there is no cause for hostilities?”

  The silhouette of Lionnus cocked its head to one side.

  “Perhaps I could be a little more empathetic, sir. I will work on it. Will you and your men be pausing to dress, sir?”

  “Pausing to…? Teller’s Tongue, no! We aren’t getting dressed, and we aren’t going anywhere!”

  “Very well, sir. Come as you are, then. Please follow me, sirs.”

  Regorius was too distracted by disequilibrium and a churning stomach to protest any further. He wobbled woozily after the tall outrider, awkwardly maneuvering around Maddus’ huddled prostrate form.

  Rooboong and Riffalo fell in listlessly behind the Decan.

  As Rooboong stepped over him, unfortunate Maddus raised one hand in supplication, groaned, and wheezed the piteous plea –

  “Come…back…for me.”