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

by Sean Rodden

  But the great amber slid to a halt on the grasses, turned and reared. Feverish with fear, but ever faithful, Featherfoot would not abandon his master.

  And with a searing screech that would shrivel a lesser soul, the first of the foul and fulsome golgarrai fell upon the small brown man standing alone in the wing-buffeted grass. The demon was immense, easily thrice the Rhelman’s bulk, with wings spanning nearly twenty feet from tip to razor-taloned tip. It was markedly chiropteran in appearance, its vast membranous wings extending from its overlong forelimbs to its short stout hindlimbs. Its head was huge and hideously horned, distorted further by a mangy mane, crimson cancroid eyes and an immense protrusive maw in which long fangs gnashed like rows of great yellow knives. Its mightily muscled body was armoured in ironlike scales, squamous and serpentine, the most dense of these upon its bosom and about its throat, as impervious as any breastplate and gorget forged of steel. And despite its mass and misshapenness, the beast was surprisingly swift, unnaturally agile, and ever about it was the sinus-scorching stench of brimstone.

  But Runningwolf was also swift, was also agile, and no reek in the world would ever sway him, could ever stay him.

  The Rhelman deftly ducked below the striking jaws of the golgarra, slipped inside the deadly arc of a slicing claw, leapt, plunged his long knife hilt-deep into the creature’s clavicle, spun, and buried his axe-blade in the side of the beast’s skull. The golgarra shrieked once and tumbled to the ground, great wings collapsing, the momentum of its fall propelling it to its back. The thing was dead before its brackish blood besmeared the wounded earth. The beast’s body slid to a stop, shuddered reflexively, then lay still. Runningwolf, balanced upon its broad breast, tore his steel from the fiend’s foul flesh. And then, his visage the portrait of indifference, of insouciance, the Rhelman turned to meet the others.

  The golgarrai shrieked and screeched at the sight of one of their number slain. They raged in concert, crazed with hate and hunger, frenzied with fury. They plummeted upon the Rhelman, screaming shrilly, battering at him with their enormous bat-like wings. They reached to rend him with their wickedly curved claws. They strove to shred him in their massive maws. To impale him on their horrible horns.

  But their quarry was as a ghost, and the talons and teeth of the golgarrai struck only air and earth.

  Runningwolf danced among the demons like a wild thing. He was so very fluid, pantherine, ever swift, ever strong. His long black hair flew about him like wings of his own, his body bending, evading, avoiding. His knife and his hand-axe whirled around him, stabbing, slashing, and his legs and feet were as swift as his steel. Runningwolf’s battle-style was the definition of grace – artful, effortless, efficient. The golgarrai were unprepared for this enemy, one that fought back with such masterful poise and martial proficiency. They screamed as they died. And ever were the dark eyes of the Rhelman aflash with cool fire in his flat unfearing face.

  But the golgarrai were many. Very many. And they knew little terror but their own, and they were possessed of a cruel cleverness. Though not mortal in and of themselves, they knew the mortal heart, having long fed on the spirits of living things in the darkness of their distant demesne. They knew how to slice and sleave the human soul.

  Runningwolf heard Featherfoot’s heart-curdling death-cry above the cacophony of combat. Above. Ripping his knife from the soft flesh under the jaw of a dying demon, the Rhelman glanced upward into the coming night, saw three golgarrai aflight with Featherfoot flailing between them. Saw the bewinged fiends tear the proud Rhelnian to shreds in a crimsoning sky. Felt the stallion’s warm blood spatter his skin. Sensed something substantial break within him, felt part of his own self die.

  And Runningwolf’s stony composure shattered.

  Wrath consumed his heart, wildfire exploded within his soul, madness took his mind. The artfulness and grace of the Rhelman’s battle-dance gave way to the grotesque, to savagery and butchery. And he thought no more of his own well-being, but only of death – the death and ruin of the vile things that had destroyed his dearest.

  Beloved!!!

  Blood flew from Runningwolf’s steel like acidic rain in a windstorm. He raged through his enemies, his mouth stretched into the horrible battle cry of his forefathers, his war-screams slicing through the screeches of the hellish beasts even as his weapons ripped through their flesh. So swift was he in the slaughter that, despite his disregard for his own person, the golgarrai could not touch him. Again and again his keen metal cut past scale into muscle, bone, organ. Again and again the demons shrieked and fell to the blood-blackened grasses. Slow and awkward they then seemed as the grief-crazed Rhelman flashed around them, darted beneath them, leapt above them. And the stipends for their crime and their sluggishness were blood and pain and death.

  In the end, Runningwolf’s undoing came of not of golgarraish might – neither of the demons’ strength nor of their skill – but of ill chance.

  The Rhelman leapt from the back of a golgarra, ripping his knife free of the beast’s eye. He rolled away from the stricken thing, momentarily assuming the crouch of a panther about to pounce. He watched the demon as it died, its eye a fountain spewing foul fluids. It writhed upon the ground, retching reflexively, dead but for the last feeble motor responses firing in its broken brain. Runningwolf roared in rage and triumph, and turned away to meet his next foe, his next kill.

  But in its spasmodic death throes, the golgarra’s black wings splayed widely, flapping violently, and one long steely claw pierced Runningwolf from behind, running him through the middle, impaling him.

  The Rhelman gasped, dropped to his knees. His weapons fell from his hands. He looked down at the black barbed thing protruding from his belly, wrapped his hands about it, felt the seep of his own precious lifeblood. Shock was etched upon his flat face, a dark wonder was in his eyes. That he was dying did not surprise him – from the moment he had seen the black blot on the horizon, he had expected to die that day – rather it was the manner of his end that moved him so in those his final moments.

  Chance. Happenstance. Fate. The boldest, the strongest, the swiftest, the most skilled of warriors – even these might not choose the particulars of their passing.

  The triumphant golgarrai circled about and above him, shrieking with glee, closing quickly.

  Ah, dearest…I come for you now.

  Runningwolf fell to his side on the ground, the thud of his heart overly loud in his ears. He sighed. He felt his heartbeat enter the soil beneath him, felt the earth’s own heart pound in answer. Pounding, pounding, pounding. And as his own lifepulse faltered, that of the earth grew louder and stronger, like a thunder in the stone, or like great drums rumbling in the rock.

  Dun dun dun doom.

  Runningwolf felt the earth quake with rage, heard the demons screech in dismay, anguish, loss – sensed them hurriedly leave him, felt the dark wind of their departing wings fall foul upon his face.

  Dun dun dun doom.

  Powerful hands pulled him from the claw on which he was impaled, laid him upon the bloodied grass. Guttural voices that he did not comprehend muttered quietly, almost sadly, over his motionless form. And the drums in the earth fell silent.

  His cheek upon the grass, his eyes wide and staring, the last thing the Rhelman saw in the growing gloom of dusk was a small speck of white light – so far and so faint, but nearing from the north, impossibly swift, like a fiery comet hurtling through celestial skies.

  Then Runningwolf’s eyes went blank, empty.

  And he died.

  “Are you Death?” the boy asks of the figure upon the Spirit Horse.

  Something flickers in those cold uncoloured eyes, suggesting a small smile.

  “Many would consider me so, child.” A short pause. A strange warmth rises in the figure’s pale gaze. “You, however, may consider me otherwise.”

  “But…but you called for me,” the boy stammers.

  Silence.

  Then, “No, ’twas not I that called your
name, child,” replies the form in black, “but Eveningwind.”

  Eveningwind?

  “You are gifted with the talent to commune with all creatures equine,” reveals the dark one, “be those creatures horses, mirarra or elliamir. And as I am a Prince of the Athair, so Eveningwind is a prince of the elliamir.”

  Prince?

  “I am Yllufarr, Sun Lord of the Athair, Prince of the Folk of Gavrayel in Gith Glennin. In the tales of the people of Rheln I am the Sky Spirit called Fyllur Lumin. Eveningwind is my bearer, my intimate and my friend. And he has come here to summon you from Death.”

  The boy is astonished, struck dumb.

  “Thrice in your life will Eveningwind come to you, child. Twice will he claim you from the dark grasp of Death. Once, and for a time, will he bear you.”

  Claim me?

  “Eveningwind has some little power over Death. He is the reason I live, though all my Sun Knights have fallen and are lost to me and to this world. And Eveningwind has taken to you, and will not allow you to die.” The smile in Yllufarr’s gaze cools, becomes wry. “Your time, he tells me, is not yet come.”

  The boy blinks in wonder.

  “Yours will not be an easy life, child. You will return to your village. You will tell your elders that a Spirit Horse came to you in the wilderness, that the elliam is your totem creature, your spirit guide and protector. They will not believe you. They will accuse you of sacrilege, of blasphemy. You will be ostracized, banished, sent away. You will cease to exist in the minds of your people, your dearest kith and your own kin. Even in the hearts of your own father and mother, you will become one of the Invisible.”

  Tears swell in the boy’s eyes.

  “But you will survive, child. You will see things that no Rhelman has ever seen. You will go places where no Rhelman has ever gone. You will accomplish fantastic feats, do great deeds. You will become a Rhelman of legend. And in time, when the need is most dire, you will return to your people. And you will return as a hero, a saviour, a messiah – and as a son.”

  The Spirit Horse nickers. The sound is as a song, soft and sweet. A single gleaming golden strand falls from the elliam’s glorious mane, a sliver of the rising sun, and flutters to the ground.

  “Rise now, child, and return to your village. Remember what I have told you. Remain strong. Know no despair. Keep faith. Become the man the Teller speaks of in his Tale.”

  The boy stands, the solitary string of Eveningwind’s holy hair clutched tightly in one tiny hand.

  “Fear no death.” The pale pearly eyes become cold once more. “Fear only the dying.”

  Eveningwind turns, and Sky Spirit and steed glide into the coming dawn like ghosts. And are gone.

  Runningwolf woke to the smell of smoke and burning flesh. His eyes fluttered open, fought to focus. Above him, gliding awkwardly, great dark carrion birds circled slowly in a grey and gloomy sky. Heavily laden clouds had rolled in on the eastwind in the night as the Rhelman slept, undreaming and oblivious, and the dark dawn air was heavy with the promise of rain.

  Slept? But surely he had died –

  Runningwolf was on his feet in an instant. Memory flooded back to him through the shattered dams of slumber.

  Golgarrai. Flight. Battle. Featherfoot. Death.

  The Rhelman swiftly surveyed his surroundings. Some distance to the east a great pyre burned upon the plains, the carcasses of the slain golgarrai heaped carelessly upon one another and aflame. Burning, burning. The stench of their fired flesh darkened the dawn as effectively as did the hovering cover of cumuli.

  Southward a mound had been raised – a burial mound, certainly. And though it was unmarked and anonymous, the Rhelman knew what body lay there in the cool embrace of Mother Earth.

  Beloved.

  And immediately beside him, neatly arranged on the grasses, was the small assortment of his own trappings. His hand-axe and bone-handled knife, each weapon meticulously cleaned and polished by hands other than his own. His small bow and replenished sheaf of arrows. The silvered horn with which his Captain had entrusted him. The little bundle the Commander had given him. His meagre provisions and scant belongings. All tidily assembled.

  But he had surely died…

  Runningwolf moved his gaze to his middle, to where the claw of the demon had pierced him. A subtle spark of wonder briefly flared in his deep loamy eyes. The skin of his belly was smooth and flawless, marked by neither wound nor scar. He had healed – or had been healed – in the night. Completely so. As though his dying had been but an insubstantial illusion. But he remembered – remembered being impaled, remembered grasping the wicked talon, the cold sensation of its iron hardness in his hands, remembered feeling the fatal flow of his own blood. Reflexively, the Rhelman passed a hand over the place where the claw had run him through. He remembered dying.

  And then he remembered another thing.

  Drums. Dun dun dun doom. Great drums thundering in the earth. Dun dun dum doom. The war drums of the mighty akanga.

  The akanga had come to the field of battle and the golgarrai had fled before them. The akanga had then laid Runningwolf on the earth. They must have also placed his provisions beside him, must have buried faithful Featherfoot’s remains, must have gathered and set afire the carcasses of the demons. Had the akanga, those great spirits of stone and flame, also revived, resurrected, returned life to the fallen Rhelman?

  No – for all their power, for all their might, the akanga were destroyers, not healers, of ones other than their own.

  Another must have come. Another. One with influence over death.

  Another…

  And then the Rhelman remembered the light that had raced toward him from the north as his life had failed him. A light so white. So bright. So very pure. So very potent and puissant. The light of one whom he had encountered of a winter night so many long years before, of one come again for him upon his falling, come to lift him up, to bear him back.

  Abbawontandontas.

  A voice in his soul, the very voice Runningwolf had heard in that wintered forest so distant in time and space. Ethereal, eurhythmic, surreal. Playing in his mind like a divine melody once again. Calling to him.

  The Rhelman’s gaze was drawn westward, to the tumbled talus scattered at the foot of the Westwall, to the great shards of stone standing in the twin shadows of that colossal cliff and of the Haunted Mountains behind. Instantly, beat and breath and blood stilled within him. For there, atop a lofty rise of broken rock, brilliant and beautiful in the gloom of the sunless dawn, was the grand and glorious creature that had come and had called and had claimed Runningwolf from death a second time.

  Eveningwind.

  And the Rhelman knelt before the power and the glory of that prince of the elliamir, raising to his temple the totem pouch that held a single strand of the equine entity’s golden mane. And he closed his eyes in reverence of the Spirit Horse’s light and loveliness.

  Rise, Abbawontandontas.

  Runningwolf rose. He lowered his totem pouch to a hammering heart.

  Hiridith awaits you, Abbawontandontas. Your errand is yet urgent. Bid farewell to your beloved. But quickly. We must make all haste to Hiridion’s Walls. Come rain, come wind, we will achieve the Silver City two days hence. But each hour lost may mean the doom of the Fiannar, and therefore also of this Second Earth.

  Runningwolf’s eyes opened slowly, but he did not otherwise respond.

  Ah, forgive me, Abbawontandontas. Etiquette has eluded me, and I assume overmuch. Wind ruffled the elliam’s gleaming mane and tail and fetlocks as he stood tall and terrible atop the great rock. Sunfire burned in his intelligent eyes. Will you permit me to bear you, Abbawontandontas?

  Eveningwind’s unearthly beauty and power swam in the Rhelman’s otherwise earthy gaze. Silence. And then another silence accented the first. A second silence so loud that it was deafening. The silence surrounding Runningwolf’s unspoken reply.

  I will.

  Day and night disappeared. The world
vanished. Time ended. Runningwolf rode aback Eveningwind through the half-realm of light and shadows. The needs for sustenance, for sleep, even for air abandoned him. He was become at once ethereal and elemental. He was water. He was wind. He was the wilding of the soul. His spirit thrilled to the race.

  Once, and for a time, will he bear you.

  Runningwolf of Rheln could now go contented and complete when Death came calling a third and final time.

  Anconas gazed hazily into his flagon of ale, searching for his reflection there in the amber, seeing none. The tavern was thick with dirty oil-light, with wafting weed-smoke, with indeterminable food odours, some favourable, most not, with the sharp salient scent of spirits, with the bawdy reeks of bad perfume and unclean men. Despite the late hour, the King’s Head was busy, though hardly bustling, her Old Quarter patrons the usual assortment of labourers, soldiers, drunkards and whores.

  Anconas had been seated there at his regular table in the corner since dusk, having spent the greater part of the day scouring Hiridith in futile search of employment, inevitably drawn to the King’s Head in the city’s Old Quarter for the odd free flagon that his fame as a former Undercaptain of the North March Mounted Reserve still, though with faltering frequency, afforded him.

  The Undercaptain sighed, sipped his ale. Fifty days. Fifty days since the Commander had departed Hiridith under his new mantle of Ambassador to the Fiannar in distant Lindannan. Fifty days only, and how very far the veterans of the Reserve had fallen. Outcasts they had once been – thieves, swindlers, thugs – outcasts and pariahs, until the brothers Teagh had marshaled them, molded them, made them men. But outcasts they had become again. The Senate had no use for them, the Legion did not want them, the people had heard the stories of their valour and had, for the most part, grown weary of the tales of Northkeep and of Silver Bridge and of Anthum.

  With no vocations and few marketable skills, the men of the Mounted Reserve drifted as their celebrity waned. Their wives began to leave them. Their children no longer peered up at them with proud bright eyes. Society was in the process of discarding them. Some had disappeared, a few had died. Most, like Undercaptain Anconas, could be found in dimly lit and dingy bars, desperately clinging to a faded fame and a complimentary jar of ale.