Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy

by Shawn Speakman

  As the king took his throne he reached into a great glass bowl filled with wooden pegs onto which the name of every child in Kethia had been inscribed. No child was excluded, regardless of station, for what parent could forgo such an honour? Having chosen, the king stood and called out the name of the blessed child. On this occasion it was a boy of perhaps eight years, the son of a shipwright who proudly carried him forward, the boy bouncing on his father’s shoulders, laughing happily. The king greeted the boy with a kiss to the forehead before leading him, knife in hand, to the font from which the gods would drink come the moon-rise. The gods have ever blessed us, but they are also ever hungry.

  It was the ascension of this particular king that provided the spark to war, for this king was a warrior, known to history as Tavurek and described by Karvalev as the apex of Kethia. His stature and prowess in battle matched by a mind keener than the sharpest blade. It seemed as if the gods saw our need and sent Tavurek from a prior age, for he was not made as other men. The Volarians were very thorough in destroying all images and statues of Tavurek, so the accuracy of Karvalev’s description cannot be judged, although Entril’s portrait of the doomed warrior king is in broad agreement with most Volarian sources:

  He towered over his men as they advanced on us, unhelmed and arms bared, wielding a great two-bladed axe as if it weighed no more than a twig. A fury of muscle and steel, inspiring those that followed him to unhesitant sacrifice.

  We know little of Tavurek’s early life, though Karvalev intimates he was born to a wealthy trading family and spent much of his boyhood at sea. There are various garish and frankly absurd legends surrounding Tavurek’s seafaring days, from abduction and seduction at the hands of exotic island queens, to savage battles with pirates where it’s said he learned his deadly skills. Surely the most outlandish of these fables is the future king’s epic battle with a giant, many-tentacled monstrosity from the ocean depths. Naturally, he emerged the victor but with wounds so severe he lay near death for several days. Whatever the truth of these tales, it is clear that by the time Tavurek rose to prominence he was both widely travelled and physically formidable. To the Kethians, however, his most important virtue was not his martial prowess but his passionate hatred of the Volarians.

  Karvalev has left us a record of Tavurek’s first public address to the Kethian populace. Allowing for some poetic phrasing which can almost certainly be ascribed to the scholar’s hand, the speech provides an unambiguous insight into Tavurek’s virulent anti-Volarian stance:

  Can they even be called men? These beasts, these curs, these wretches? Where is their honour, I ask you? Where is their courage? Where is their religion? They call us blasphemers. They say we dishonour the gods whilst their every act is an abomination. There is more religion in my dog!

  References to the gods abound in Tavurek’s speeches. A Kethian ambassador to Alpira named him as the most devout man ever to sit on the throne, and we can say with some certainty that the new king considered his mission to be a divine one. They have called to me, my friend, Karvalev has him saying one evening as they shared a sparse meal of berries and water, it being the custom for Kethian kings to live frugally. The gods . . . I have heard their voice, and they name me their instrument on earth. The Volarian filth must be wiped away.

  This does, of course, raise the possibility that Tavurek may have been insane, or at least partly delusional. If so, it was a shared delusion, for his people never wavered in their support, even unto death.

  The first serious clash came barely two months after Tavurek’s ascension to the throne when he led a fleet of warships directly into the Cut of Lokar. The king’s express intention was to choke off Volarian commerce, weakening the city in advance of an invasion. This proved a wildly ambitious notion. It appears the Volarians may have had some forewarning of Tavurek’s intentions, for his fleet soon found itself attacked in front and rear. A Verehlan sailor was witness to the subsequent debacle and gave the following account to an Alpiran associate several months later:

  It all happened at night and at first I thought the gods had set both sky and sea afire. I saw many men tumbling from burning ships, alight and screaming as the Volarian mangonels did their work, the fireballs falling like a fiery rain. The Cut is rich in white-nosed sharks, small but vicious buggers they are, like to swarm on you in packs. There was so much for them to feed on it seemed the sea was boiling. By morning the shore was thick with wrecks, some Volarian but mostly Kethian, and the sharks were still busy feeding.

  Tavurek somehow managed to survive the calamity and return to Kethia with the remnants of his fleet. Oddly, for a king who had authored such a calamity he was greeted with universal acclaim and there is no record of any dissent among the Kethian populace. He has a way about him, Karvalev said of Tavurek in the aftermath of the disaster. A means of capturing the souls of all men. I have never truly understood it, but even I find no room for doubt in my heart. I have never been more certain; this man is meant to lead us.

  After such naked aggression it was inevitable that the Volarian counterblow would be swift. Kethia was soon blockaded, the Volarian fleet forcing all ships to seek harbour elsewhere regardless of flag, even sinking a dozen neutral vessels when their captains proved deaf to intimidation. However, the main blow would be delivered by land rather than sea. There are various estimates of the size of the Volarian army that marched into Kethian territory barely three months later, from Karvalev’s surely exaggerated half a million to Entril’s more restrained but still barely credible two hundred thousand. However, it was surely a formidable force, possibly the largest army to take the field during the Forging Age, and certainly the most experienced.

  The vile practice of employing slaves in Volarian armies would not take root for another four centuries, so their soldiers of this period were all free men. The basic Volarian military unit consisted of the infantry battalion with an official complement of one thousand men, though many would remain under strength in the field as battle and sickness inevitably took a toll. Most soldiers were conscripts aged between sixteen and twenty-five, their numbers swelled for the Kethian campaign by reservists called back to the army by emergency Council decree. Most battalions were a mix of youthful conscripts and veterans who had chosen a career in the army in preference to the often dire uncertainties of Volarian civilian life; the practice of enslaving impoverished debtors had been enshrined in law by this point, and life for those without wealthy family connections could be highly unpleasant. At the very least the army offered some measure of security. Three meals a day, a whore twice a week and a battle every now and then to sate the belly and fill the purse with loot, Entril records his senior sergeant saying. The recipe for a happy soldier, Honoured Commander.

  Although life in the army may have been preferable to poverty, standards of discipline were so rigid as to border on sadism. The most lenient punishment prescribed by the Volarian military code consisted of ten strokes of a barbed whip, usually meted out for such crimes as an unpolished breastplate or tarnished belt buckle. Unauthorised drunkenness earned fifteen strokes, and disrespect to an officer twenty, which may well have been fatal for many recipients. The harshest punishment was reserved for deserters, who could expect to have their hands and feet cut off and the stumps coated in pitch before being set upon by a pack of slave-hounds. A particularly cruel, but undoubtedly effective disciplinary measure took the form of collective punishment for battalions deemed to have acted in a cowardly fashion. One hundred men would be chosen by lot and obliged to lead the charge in the next engagement, completely naked and armed only with a single sword. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that those who fought the Volarians often spoke of their unmatched bravery.

  In addition to the standard battalions the Volarians also maintained a number of elite, all-veteran formations, each with a long list of battle honours and bearing a name rather than the bland number afforded other units. These names were mostly derived from the heroes of legend, ‘Livella’s Bla
des’ and ‘The Sons of Korsev’ being perhaps the most celebrated, having fought in every major engagement of the Forging Age without ever tasting defeat. In the struggle that followed, however, even such formidable soldiers would come to learn that invincibility in war is a myth.

  Whilst the bulk of the Volarian army consisted of infantry, they did maintain strong cavalry contingents, mostly drawn from the sons of the wealthy merchant class, and a highly effective, perhaps crucial corps of military engineers. Via a remarkably swift series of bridging operations, it was these engineers that enabled the Volarians to cover more than one hundred miles of Kethian territory within the first five days of the campaign, all without meeting serious opposition or word of the invasion reaching Tavurek, now licking his wounds in Kethia. Once word arrived, however, the king lost no time in responding.

  Kethia had a small standing army of perhaps twenty thousand men, though its strength had been severely denuded by the Battle of the Cut. To augment this meagre force Kethia had instituted a long-standing tradition of hiring mercenaries from far and wide, a practice that had increased tenfold with the advent of war. So it is unsurprising that the picture Karvalev paints of the force that marched out to confront the Volarians is a cosmopolitan one, as well as shedding more light on Tavurek’s uncanny ability to inspire loyalty in even the most hardened heart:

  Archers from the shores of the Jarven Sea took their place alongside dark-skinned slingers from Vehrel. Lancers from Atethia called ‘brother’ to savage pale-skinned axe-men from the northern mountains. And all bowed low to mighty Tavurek, giving solemn oath to follow him to the fire pit and fight the Dermos themselves should he so ask. That this oath was truly spoken, none can doubt, for these men no longer received pay. They came to us as mercenaries but stayed as loyal Kethians, and as such they died.

  As ever, sources vary in estimating the size of the Kethian force, but it was almost certainly outnumbered by at least two to one. Despite the disparity in strength, the clash that followed four days later was anything but one-sided. The two armies met at a point some thirty miles from Kethia and barely a mile inland from the southern bank of the Cut of Lokar. The Volarians had wisely opted to keep close to the shore in order to enable constant resupply by their fleet, another factor in the swiftness of their march. Entril describes the battlefield as:

  . . . merely rolling farmland, devoid of hill or landmark that might afford it a name. The Kethians came on in a solid mass, eschewing manoeuvre or feint for a charge aimed straight at the centre of our line. When the day was done we had a name for the field, The Spoiled Land, for what could grow on such corrupted earth?

  Entril’s own account of the fighting is a confused morass of close-quarters encounters with men he describes as maddened beasts, void of reason or fear. Therefore, we are obliged to refer to the report of the overall Volarian commander, one General Derilev, for a description of the battle as a whole. Derilev appears to have been an experienced officer of some renown, though his handling of the campaign speaks more of basic competence than inspired leadership. His account must be treated with considerable caution, conveying as it does the sense of a long-serving officer employing outlandish claims to avoid responsibility for near disaster:

  There are several unquestionable reports from my most seasoned veterans firmly asserting that they saw Kethian soldiers continuing to fight on after suffering mortal wounds. Clearly, we have underestimated the vileness of our enemy, for it is my belief that they could only have effected a penetration of our centre through unnatural means. When the dead are seen to fight there can be only one conclusion: the Dermos are risen anew and now make their home in Kethia.

  The Dermos, My Emperor will surely recall from Land of Nightmares, are the legendary enemies of both gods and men, said to reside in a fiery pit beneath the earth. Derilev goes on to describe how the Kethian breakthrough was stemmed by the vaunted Sons of Korsev who threw themselves into the breach at the last moment, sacrificing two-thirds of their number but fighting with such ferocity that the Volarian line had time to reorganise. Derilev expends considerable ink in describing his deftly executed counterstroke, pulling back the battalions in the centre whilst reinforcing his flanks and sending his cavalry against the Kethian rear, thereby inflicting a crushing defeat. This must all be considered at best an exaggeration and at worst a desperate lie, for Karvalev describes the Kethian army retreating to the city in good order, albeit badly mauled. The length of the subsequent siege is also evidence that, regardless of Derilev’s claims, Tavurek retained considerable military strength in the aftermath of defeat. It is also significant that Derilev would soon find himself replaced by a new commander. I searched in vain for further mention of him in any history, although the Council’s notorious treatment of unsuccessful generals is probably ample explanation for his absence.

  Entril wrote to his wife shortly after the battle, relating that he had lost a third of his men most to battle, a few to madness, and found himself elevated to battalion commander as all the officers senior to him were now dead. If losses on such a scale were typical it must have been a badly shaken army that laid siege to Kethia, but lay siege they did.

  The Volarians were no strangers to siegecraft, the Forging Age being rich in tales of their expertise and patience in reducing enemy fortresses and cities. Initially, it appeared Kethia would be little different. Entril relates how the newly appointed Volarian commander gave a rousing speech to the assembled army soon after the siege began:

  ‘A month of spadework, men,’ he promised us, ‘to earn a lifetime’s worth of loot.’

  This new commander emerges as an even more obscure figure than the unfortunate Derilev, known to history only by the less-than-flattering title Entril has his men affording him when his optimistic speeches became tiresome—‘The Lying Ape.’ In fact it was more than two months before the first direct assault, The Ape having grown impatient at the meagre progress made by Volarian engineers as they inched their trenches closer to the walls. Over ten thousand men were ordered into the attack, charging forward with scaling ladders at three different places in the hope of dividing the defence sufficiently to allow a breakthrough. It proved an unmitigated disaster, barely three thousand men straggling back come nightfall. Entril described the survivors as:

  Wide-eyed and black with soot. Babbling of unkillable enemies and the Kethian king appearing at will in their midst, wielding an axe that cut through armour as if it was rice paper. The Ape gave the coward’s punishment to one in every ten, but the fear provoked by their rantings took root, and fear is the worst plague for any army.

  Clearly possessed of a stubborn streak, The Ape tried again three days later, doubling the size of the assault force and placing his elite battalions in the vanguard. Entril’s men were ordered to support an assault on the main gate by the Spears of Morivek, one of the most celebrated formations in Volarian history. A palpable sense of shock, not to mention mystification at his own survival, is discernible in his next letter home:

  Assailed from above by a ceaseless rain of arrow and rock, the Spears clawed their way onto the battlements on either side of the gate. How they fought, my dear—I do not have the words—it seemed as if I gazed upon men fashioned into rock, the Kethians breaking on them like a storm-driven tide. As ordered, we charged forward with our great iron-headed ram, pounding and pounding at the gate as the Spears held the wall above. All for nothing.

  Entril describes his men breaking through the gate but finding their way blocked by a deep pit filled with what appeared to be water, revealed in fact as oil when a single torch fell from above and soon all was flame. Entril tried to rally his men but their waning courage shattered completely when the Kethians on the battlements above began to throw bodies into their midst:

  . . . bodies in Volarian armour each bearing the crest of the Spears of Morivek, and every one was headless. The men ran, heedless of my exhortations, and soon I stood alone at the shattered gate. Knowing death would come swiftly, I straightene
d my back and resolved to meet my end with the dignity due my rank. On emerging from the gatehouse I forced myself to pause and raise a defiant gaze to the Kethians on the walls. I saw only one man, face lost to the gloom of gathering night, though I knew him by now. He looked at me for a long time, hands resting on the haft of his great axe, then raised his arm and pointed a finger at our own lines.

  Curiously, Entril appears to have suffered no punishment as a result of his men’s cowardice. This is perhaps due to the fact that The Ape was found dead by his own hand the following morning. This, of course, necessitated the appointment of a new commander, and he proved to be a man with a surfeit of patience.

  Vartek Lovril remains the most celebrated figure of the Forging Age, and one of the few luminaries of the pre-imperial period not to be largely expunged from the visual and historical record during the Great Cleansing. His reputation had already begun to grow by the advent of the final Kethian war, but it was a renown built entirely on personal courage and fighting skill rather than command. Vartek had spent his early years in the northern port of Varral, until recently an independent city state. Vartek’s father had been one of the principal conspirators in the coup which had unseated the previous regime and opened the way for Volarian annexation.

  Being a third son, and therefore unlikely to receive more than a paltry inheritance, Vartek had enlisted in the Volarian army at an early age. This appears to have been done without his father’s approval, for Vartek entered the ranks as a common soldier whereas his social standing should have been sufficient to secure a junior officer’s commission. However, the myriad opportunities for distinction offered by the Forging Age soon saw Vartek’s courage and skill vaunted throughout the empire, ensuring swift promotion. I’m sure My Emperor would find a complete list of all the battles and feats of martial prowess ascribed to Vartek somewhat tedious, so suffice it to say that he was quite possibly the most dangerous man to ever wear a Volarian uniform.