Destiny’s Crucible
Book 4
Forged in Fire
by
Olan Thorensen
Copyright 2017
All rights reserved
The is an original work of fiction. Any resemblance to people and places is coincidental.
ISBN 978-0-9972878-4-4
Maps
For maps to help orient the reader to the planet Anyar, go to the web site www.olanthorensen.com.
A list of major characters is given in the back of the book.
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1: BURNING
CHAPTER 2: TIME DEMANDS
CHAPTER 3: WORD FROM NARTHON
CHAPTER 4: SEAL THE BORDERS
CHAPTER 5: A NEW PLAN
CHAPTER 6: A NEW PLAYER
CHAPTER 7: FIRST MEETING
CHAPTER 8: FUOMI IN CAERNFORD
CHAPTER 9: CHANGE OF PLAN
CHAPTER 10: CARRONADES AND SNIPERS
CHAPTER 11: TO OROSZ CITY
CHAPTER 12: CONCLAVE
CHAPTER 13: WAR COUNCIL
CHAPTER 14: SELFCELL
CHAPTER 15: FIRST SITE
CHAPTER 16: YOZEF AND RINTALA NEGOTIATE
CHAPTER 17: PROMOTION AND IMPRESSIONS
CHAPTER 18: GATHERING OF THE CLAN
CHAPTER 19: RELATIONSHIPS
CHAPTER 20: GOOD IDEA OR NOT?
CHAPTER 21: NARTHANI PREPARE
CHAPTER 22: DECISIONS
CHAPTER 23: BATTLEFIELD CANDIDATES
CHAPTER 24: ISOLATE PREDDI
CHAPTER 25: LAUNCH
CHAPTER 26: TO THE SEA
CHAPTER 27: CHANGING OBJECTIVES
CHAPTER 28: CHASE
CHAPTER 29: STALEMATE
CHAPTER 30: TEMPORARILY HOME
CHAPTER 31: BATTLEFIELDS AND COMMANDS
CHAPTER 32: PREPARE TO MOVE
CHAPTER 33: OROSZ CITY AGAIN
CHAPTER 34: RINTALA’S DECISION
CHAPTER 35: NARTHANI
CHAPTER 36: INTERLUDE
CHAPTER 37: PREPARATIONS
CHAPTER 38: “YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME”
CHAPTER 39: A SEA OF SAILS
CHAPTER 40: IT BEGINS
CHAPTER 41: RECON IN FORCE
CHAPTER 42: HERE THEY COME
CHAPTER 43: WAITING
CHAPTER 44: WILL THE WALLS HOLD?
CHAPTER 45: ON TO ADRIS
CHAPTER 46: RETURN TO OROSZ CITY
CHAPTER 47: FIRST ATTACK
CHAPTER 48: LIFE OR DEATH
CHAPTER 49: ANYONE CAN FALL
CHAPTER 50: RESOLUTION
CHAPTER 51: THE LAST SHIP
CHAPTER 52: THREE CLANS
CHAPTER 53: CHANGES
EPILOGUE
MAJOR CHARACTERS
To forge: “Make or shape an object by heating in a fire or furnace and hammering.” —Oxford Dictionary
There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self. —Benjamin Franklin
The strongest steel is forged in the hottest fire, and the seeds of strength are often contained within the husk of weakness. —Chinese proverb
People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity. —John Adams
Only in the crucible of strife does God burn away the impurities to reveal the essence of a person, an inner core that might otherwise have remained hidden for an entire life. —Rhaedri Brison, Planet Anyar
Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be. For without victory there is no survival. —Winston Churchill (copied by Yozef Kolsko)
Prologue
Twenty geosynchronous surveillance satellites watched planet Anyar’s surface. A constant stream of data fed directly or was relayed by the satellites to an orbiting station housing the artificial intelligence (AI) programmed to observe and send periodic reports to its creators. In the planet’s previous year, the AI’s attention on one island had increased several-fold. Recent observations noted sailing ships headed for the island. A single ship approached from the northeast, and a group of fifteen ships were farther away to the west on the ocean that covered one entire hemisphere of the planet. Having no information about the ships’ purposes, the AI could not associate the data with a single human on the island. A human known to the AI. A human who had just suffered a fitful night’s sleep.
Chapter 1: Burning
Yozef strode through the rooms and searched every closet and cupboard. Wherever he found a lantern, he opened it and poured the kerosene on the floor. When he’d finished with the kitchen, he propped open the outside door. With the pistol he always carried now, he struck hammer to flint to generate sparks. The kerosene caught fire, and the blaze spread through the house. Within seconds, flames shot out of open windows as the fire roared through every room. A minute later, flames engulfed the entire structure. Even as the inferno obliterated evidence of an evening’s gathering turned to carnage, he couldn’t shake off memories of blood, terror, and images that had disrupted his sleep.
Thirty Minutes Earlier, Keelan Manor, Caernford
Yozef Kolsko had lain awake almost an hour. He hadn’t jolted awake from a nightmare, as happened following the raid on St. Sidryn’s Abbey. Then, for sixdays afterward, recurring nightmares had roiled his sleep: screaming Buldorians attacking him or the sight of a dead child cleaved by a raider ax. He had feared such nightmares would come back after the Battle of Moreland City. However, though he slept fitfully then, he couldn’t recall specific dreams.
Now, during the last month, he’d slept with turbulent dreams, then awoke dizzy, heart pounding. The dreams followed a similar pattern since the attempted assassination of Culich Keelan during Maera’s birthday dinner. The hetman had survived the attack, as had Yozef, Maera, and Aeneas, their new baby. Not so fortunate were Maera’s sister Anid; Aeneas’s wet nurse, Mirramel; Norlin, the teenage boy who worked at the Keelan manor; or two of the hetman’s guards.
His dreams relived that night, sometimes with scenes of what had happened and other times what might have happened. This morning, he awoke from a dream of bursting into the great room to see Breda Keelan holding not Anid but Maera, a musket ball hole in her forehead. The previous night, he’d watched himself stab the helpless Narthani he’d wounded. After both dreams, he felt strangely detached, while planning what he intended to do to all the Narthani and regretting the wounded assassin had died so quickly.
He had escaped without a scratch, to his amazement, even though he’d been in the midst of the fighting. Aeneas was unharmed, but Yozef still felt sick at the memory of seeing the baby’s nightshirt torn by the blast of an attacker’s firearm, the shot missing by an inch the soft newborn skin. Maera came through with only bruises from smashing into furniture while she dove to the floor.
Others were not so fortunate. Carnigan took a musket ball in the arm and several shotgun pellets to his torso. The arm wound was serious enough to incapacitate him for a week, but he agreed to rest only after Gwyned berated him for pretending it was minor—which the medicants assured him it was not.
Wyfor Kales lost the two smallest fingers of his left hand and took a glancing shotgun pellet along his head. However, the wiry man left the next day, along with Balwis Preddi and three other men, on a retaliation mission against the Narthani commander in Eywell Province. Even though they succeeded in killing Colonel Memas Erdelin, Yozef still wasn’t sure if he’d sent the men on the dangerous mission after rational evaluation or as an emotional urge for revenge. While everyone else congratulated those carrying out the mission and Yozef for its conception, only Maera knew Yozef’s ambivalence
. She urged him to put it behind him but didn’t offer an opinion on the original decision.
Culich Keelan suffered one of the two worst wounds from the attack. A shotgun blast to a shin forced the medicants to take off his leg below the knee. While the medicants prepped him for surgery, the hetman reassured them that he knew they had done everything possible to save the leg, and at least it was his bad leg from an old injury. He even quipped that he’d probably be more mobile with a peg than the original lower leg. Breda, his wife, cried and laughed as the medicants put him to sleep using ether, the first innovation Yozef had introduced and the basis for his thriving industrial enterprises.
Ceinwyn Keelan, the twenty-year-old daughter of the hetman (eighteen Earth years) and Maera’s sister, came to Balwis’s aid when an attacker came at him from behind. She succeeded in distracting him until Balwis could deal with him, but she suffered a hideous wound from the attacker’s short sword. It sliced the side of her head from just below the eye to the bottom of her jaw and back past the ear. The flap of flesh, cheek, and ear hung loose, connected by only a few inches of skin. Medicants sewed the flap back in place, and only after two sixdays were they satisfied the flesh had enough surviving blood vessels to support the cheek as it fused back together. However, they were honest with Ceinwyn and her family. She would carry a great scar along the side of her face.
All these deaths and wounds Yozef remembered in excruciating detail, particularly in his dreams, though a single act haunted even his waking moments. In the desperate fight to defend those he loved and cared about, he had killed five men up close. At the end of his first year on Caedellium, Narthani-sponsored Buldorian mercenaries attacked St. Sidryn’s abbey. During the successful defense, he had merely distracted attackers who were dispatched by other defenders. At Moreland City, he had helped man artillery, though any casualties these inflicted had occurred a distance away, and he didn’t directly see the consequences of his actions. Not so with the assassination attempt. There, he caught the first two attackers by surprise as he crouched in shadows and fired while they rushed through the front door. A third man he shot in the back as he followed a cluster of attackers heading for the great room containing most of the people, including Maera and Aeneas.
He killed a fourth man and wounded a fifth in a brief, chaotic blade fight with three attackers. In that dark and desperate moment, Wyfor Kales’s admonition that Yozef needed to react and not think in a fight overrode any fears. The final attacker fled, leaving Yozef with the wounded man. Yozef’s higher cerebral centers told him the man would provide intelligence on the identity of the attackers. However, the lower, more primitive portions of his brain overruled, and he killed the helpless man with enough knife thrusts to slaughter six men. Only after the adrenaline washed from his blood, and he crouched, bloody knife in hand, above the body did he come back to himself and rush, fearful, to the great room to find Maera and Aeneas.
And later, when assured his family was safe and abundant help had arrived, Yozef walked the dark grounds, wondering who he had become. Balwis offered reassurance that he would have done the same, yet Yozef was not mollified that he’d acted like his bloodthirsty retainer and companion. It wasn’t so much that he’d killed that ate at him. He simply couldn’t believe how little regret he felt at executing the wounded attacker.
Who was Yozef Kolsko? What kind of man was he? He knew he’d undergone changes since being cast onto this planet, Anyar, by the Watchers. That was the name he’d given them—the alien race whose vessel had accidentally collided with his airliner. He’d been traveling to a national chemistry meeting in Chicago when his life on Earth abruptly ended. The Watchers had rescued him and healed what they implied were terminal injuries. Yet they wouldn’t return him to Earth, because he knew of their existence.
His adjustment to being cast away was hard. He’d lost his old life and found a new one on the Island of Caedellium. He judged he’d succeeded. In the process, however, he’d evolved into someone he wouldn’t have recognized as himself had they met on Earth.
Joseph Colsco and Yozef Kolsko. Was Joseph Colsco of Earth—the nerdish, unathletic avoider of physical contact sports and young man of modest ambition—now Yozef Kolsko, a principle figure in defeating Buldorian mercenaries and a Narthani army, and a deadly defender of home and family? Although he struggled with the idea and the cognitive dissonance it elicited, he acknowledged the reality: he was Yozef Kolsko, industrial magnate, enigmatic repository of knowledge, military adviser to Caedellium clans against the Narthani, and anything else he needed to be for the survival of himself, his family and friends, the clans, and the knowledge he hoped to transmit. He did his best to push aside lingering remnants of Joseph Colsco.
The first hints of morning light told him dawn approached. Maera stirred next to him, and he wondered what she dreamed. He stifled the urge to reach out and hold her. In his fitful sleep, he’d been aware of how many times she rose to feed and comfort Aeneas. She needed to sleep as much as she could, so he got up quietly and checked the crib next to the bed. Aeneas slept the sleep of the innocent. He’d kicked off the thin blanket, as he regularly did, and Yozef pulled it back to the baby’s waist level. It would be off again in minutes. He walked out of the bedroom and into their quarter’s main room. There, he lit a lantern and used the opportunity to work on his latest science journal. He had to keep them secret until some uncertain future when all could be revealed.
The Kolsko household lived again at Keelan Manor because they had no home of their own. For a month before the Narthani assassination team struck, the Kolskos had lived in a newly constructed house a half-mile from the Keelan family home. After the attack, Yozef had accompanied a support force for the thousand-man raid into Eywell and Narthani territory, led by Denes Vegga. Maera had started workers repairing damaged doors, windows, furniture, and holes from musket and pistol balls, along with cleaning or replacing bloodstained rugs and wood.
Yozef locked the latest journal into a cabinet that only he had access to. He walked from the manor to their house. The sun still hung below the eastern hills, yet workmen labored at the house when he arrived. Some men greeted him, those he knew, others bowed, and some stared. Oblivious, he walked through the foyer where he’d shot two men and down the hall where he’d shot a third man, stabbed a fourth through the diaphragm into his heart, and mutilated the helpless wounded Narthani. He passed the kitchen door through which he’d seen Norlin lying dead and walked into the great room previously filled with Narthani corpses, Breda Keelan holding Anid’s body, and all the other lifeless, wounded, and shocked.
He later couldn’t remember making a decision. He approached a cluster of men he’d passed on the veranda. “Who’s in charge of the repairs?”
“I am,” replied a gray-haired man.
“Get everyone out of the house and into the yard,” ordered Yozef.
“What? We just started today’s work. Is there something—”
“Out. Now.” Yozef voice was icy, as were his gray-blue eyes.
The foreman knew not to argue. “Mellyn, Artor, get everyone out of the house.”
“What—” started one man.
“Now! Just do it.”
The two men scattered, yelling at workers within sight, then running into the house. Within a minute, a dozen workmen had gathered around the foreman, who had moved into the yard with Yozef.
“They’re all out,” said the man.
Yozef nodded. “Stay here and don’t interfere.”
The foreman didn’t ask what he or his men were not to interfere with.
Flames shot out of open windows as Yozef walked back to the shocked workmen. Exclamations died when they saw his face. The foremen verbally restrained a few men who’d run for water buckets. The fire roared through the structure. Within one minute, flames engulfed the entire house. Within five minutes, workers from Keelan Manor came running or riding—to be clued into stunned silence by the original workmen. Yozef stared at the blaze without speaking
.
Then an arm encircled his waist. Maera didn’t speak, just clutched at him and watched the inferno. Yozef looked around. He didn’t know when the others had arrived: Carnigan and Balwis, Mared, even Culich in a carriage, his bandaged, shortened leg propped on pillows, while Breda helped him sit up.
Culich’s face appeared to be carved out of rough stone. Breda wept. “The right thing,” said the hetman. “None of us could have entered the house without remembering. We’ll build another house, better than this one and some distance away. The grounds here will be cleared, and we’ll plant flame trees. Anid always loved them.”
“He’s right, Yozef,” said Maera, not crying, though her voice choked. “I started the repairs, although I didn’t know how I’d live in the house, nor could I imagine anyone else living there. Not after what happened. You’re right. It’s only a building. It could never be our home again.”
The onlookers gradually dispersed, returning to homes or moving to other jobs. When the last flames died, only Yozef and Maera were left. All except for Carnigan and Balwis, who kept an eye on the man they were entrusted to protect. Both men were unsure what he would do next, and the uncertainty led them to scan the surroundings for any danger.
“Let’s go back,” said Maera. “Braithe is tending Aeneas and has probably fed him. It’ll do us both good to hold the baby and remember what was saved from that night.”
Chapter 2: Time Demands
Yozef and Maera busied themselves the rest of the day, not speaking of the morning conflagration but both thinking of their return to Keelan Manor.
“I wish I could imagine the last sixdays hadn’t happened,” Maera said as they entered their quarters for the night. “Our new house, Anid, Ceinwyn, Father’s leg, and the other dead or wounded. It’s an odd feeling. Us back in my old quarters. Anarynd in the same guest room. Gwyned, Balwis, and Carnigan in the same guest cottages.”
Forged in Fire (Destiny's Crucible Book 4) Page 1