by Marc Secchia
Death. My quoph had become heartsick of it. Men could die suddenly, or suffer for makh, for days even, in terrible agonies–before at last Mata’s light faded from their eyes, leaving nought but an empty casing to be discarded amongst the many others. All that remained was a dent upon the sward where the body had lain. My own living flesh was the more precious, the more expendable in comparison; my blood to be poured out in contempt of life’s vessel that carried it.
A roar surged from the Lymarian ranks. The drums struck up in furious disharmony for a moment, before merging into a strong rhythm that throbbed through our bodies even across the valley.
“What’s happening?” I muttered.
The soldier to my left gasped. “Sybali!”
Word rippled through our lines like wind setting a forest a-whisper. ‘Sybali! Trance-warriors! Nethespawn!’ The Sybali were a feared warrior elite, a caste of warrior-born who made reverence to Liathe, the Goddess of Sorcery–whose consort is none other than Ulim, God of the underworld and lord of all things wicked and depraved. Liathe’s symbol was the ulikarn, the double-bladed dagger carved of narwhal-horn. The men whispered that the Sybali trade their eternal quoph to the night-eaters, and from those ravening shades draw powers such as immortality in battle, blades that never shatter, and inhuman speed. Disdaining any form of armour, they rely instead on an ulikarn in each hand, and several makh of ritual meditation prior to battle that put them into a special trance.
Worst of all, they were women.
Many women command armies, but they do not march in the rank and file. That is a man’s duty. Soldiering is a menial task, of little regard in Umarite society. We men are the expendable ones, for we have no womb in which to nurture new life. One hoped war was a necessary evil when all proper diplomacy had been exhausted–as the Hassutls say, mark my words, dripping platitudes from their mouths onto the blades they are sharpening. Should a woman become a soldier? Unthinkable. Unless one is born Sybali.
For every rule an exception.
These thoughts and many more flitted through my mind as I strained–along with thousands of other pairs of eyes–to mark the white-robed line filing through the Lymarian ranks. Plain to see how men pressed back to give them wide berth. At the front they broke both left and right in seamless order. For a span the drums beat incessantly as the Sybali lined up before the Lymarian horde, a white quim-stroke of death upon the hillside’s dark scrolleaf.
Then the line began to move.
Our own drums spoke, signalling ‘hold’. One of the Hassutls–the one from Freyal in the far northwest of Roymere, he who actually dared to nick his blade in the heat of battle, and thus the only one of the Hassutls who commanded real respect among the militias–rode along the line toward us, shouting something. Encouragement? His lips moved, but I could hear nothing above the barbarous din. I wondered if the civilians would flee.
The Sybali crossed the valley floor at a steady trot, followed closely by the bulk of the Lymarian army. I could feel the advance through my feet. Eight thousand men on the move makes the whole world tremble. From where I stood in the fourth rank, I gazed over the shoulders of my fellows and watch them pour up the hill towards our position like a great, glinting shadworm, a multi-segmented insect that dwells beneath every boulder or rotting tree-trunk in the Fiefdoms. Their conical, pointed helms and upraised spears bristled toward the heavens, as thorny as stinge bushes with their finger-long white barbs, and each helm sported a gaudy ponytail that presumably indicated their allegiance. The crimson ones fought the best, we Roymerians agreed.
The customs of war are curious withal. Though they could have gained advantage, the Lymarians refused to outflank us with their greater numbers but instead, each day, would match the width of our front man for man. At sundown they broke off battle to allow both sides time to collect their dead before too many vultures arrived. Our yammariks took the corpses away for embalming, prayers, and burial in the Shrine of Akki-Ayali, which some call the Hall of Victors, while the Lymarians cremated their dead upon great bonfires laced with bitterwort branches and dwarf peppers. Garrak said they believed a holy smoke was pleasing to Mata. The stench drifted across the battlefield as if the miasmic breath of Nethe incarnate rose from Ulim’s hellish halls. Despite the smoke, millions of biting torflies feasted on the battlefield, turning the late afternoon black with their swarms. The grey ash of dead men encrusted our tents and clung to our nostrils.
I tried not to think upon the dead. Eventide after eventide, the yammariks removed them by the cartload. Worse, the injured. Their cries, muffled by the great cornsilk tents of the athocaries, formed a piteous backcloth to my increasingly fitful sleep.
Waking, I thought upon the dying. Sleeping, I dreamed of stealing into the tents to heal them.
Had I not the power?
Day by day, my reasons for not employing that power grew dimmer. My swordplay became more reckless. I snapped at my comrades, became foul-mouthed and foul-tempered, and hated myself the more. My eyes grew hollow in their dark sockets.
The Wurm stalked my conscience.
“Roymere!” howled Freyal.
“ROYMERE!” we howled back. “ROY-ROY-ROYMEEEEEERRE!”
Three thousand swords crashed against roundshields.
Jerked back to reality, I ran after Garrak and Salk. I took my place in the line. The Sybali were closing in fast. A volley of javelins shafted above my head, finding ready targets amongst the Lymarian horde. I saw a white robe fall.
Then the two forces slammed together. Shield locked against shield. Blade shattered blade. We may have been shouting, I know not. The roar of battle was all-consuming.
Somehow the Sybali had already danced through into the second and third ranks, striking with the speed of vipers. They were astonishing, at once beautiful and deadly. How they moved! Our soldiers blundered about; jatha in harness by compare. Time after time, our blows met only thin air. Theirs found throats, eyes, joints, and fingers. Our units collapsed inward in a dozen places. Wedges of Lymarian foot soldiers rushed forward, breaking us apart and grinding us up as a stone-mill grinds hewehat kernels for flour.
Abruptly, Garrak and I came face-to-face with a white robe. Her face was a mask of white paint, her hair drawn back in a clasp was white too, and her robe was spotless. The only splash colour was the red of her hands–one clasping a ulikarn drenched in blood, and the other, I realised in shock, was a stump yet spurting blood.
She lunged at me. With a grunt, I made to parry, but hit nothing. While I stared stupidly at the space she had briefly occupied, Garrak folded over as if he were a cloth folded in twain, gutted by a blow I had not even seen. He took the Sybali’s ulikarn with him. He must have, for she came up empty-handed. I almost smiled as I swung at her head.
A kick numbed my knee. A second dropped me on my back. And even as I fell, I felt a blow upon my wrist and suddenly, the Sybali loomed over me with my own sword clutched in her good hand. Salk’s javelin sprouted out of the Sybali’s thigh. No mind. She vaulted over me, rolled in a tight ball beneath his upraised shield, and stabbed upward with the full strength her arm.
Salk’s armour saved his life. The metal-reinforced leather edging turned the blow, causing it to slice narrowly across his upper thigh rather than deeply into the groin as intended. He lunged down with his shield, intent on crushing her, but the woman was quicker than quicksilver running down a windowpane. Her body jack-knifed. Slithered between his legs. The Sybali rose wraithlike behind him and then slipped past my soldier friend to rush at me. It was only as Salk tried to pounce upon her, and his calves separated uselessly from his ankles, that he realised something was wrong.
She had hamstrung him.
The sword whistled down. I rolled desperately. The blade snicked my arm as I fetched up against a corpse. The Sybali tripped over my rotating torso, but then performed an impossible pivot upon that maimed stump, as if she were a slender trout which, having ventured into the shallows, has to flee the flashing strike of a her
on’s beak. She raised my sword for the fatal blow.
The contact between us was enough to channel the power.
Dark and ugly was the power I unchained that day, and diabolical in conception.
Her heart ruptured.
I thrust the Sybali’s dead weight off my chest, wanting nothing more than to rid myself of the body and its accusing expression. I scrabbled for my sword. I put my roundshield up; took a look around. Garrak stared open-eyed at the sky. Someone had opened his throat, saving him an agonising death. I averted my eyes from the mess of his stomach. Salk, a hard-bitten soldier of over thirty anna’s service, sat gripping his ruined ankles and rocking slowly back and forth. Tears tracked down his grimy cheeks. He would never walk again.
Without my touch …
Revelation! My shoulders quaked with a primal emotion. As though yanked by traces hitched to a brace of jatha, I lurched across the space between us. Kneeling, I closed my quivering hands over Salk’s. I shut my eyes and there found, for the first time since I began soldiering, that shady pool of the quoph’s peace Janos had fought so hard to teach me. Did I hear the rush of a condor’s wings?
So long denied, the enormity of my actions became as clear to me as the lucent days of Doublesun. What had I become? A tool of pain. An anti-healer. Destroyer, rather than saviour. One who revelled in creating suffering. No. I had never revelled in death–had I? Had I done ought in my military service save render Ulim my utmost devotion?
I bowed my head. Indeed, I could not have raised it by any power at my command. The sense of iniquity was too crushing. Arlak was not some unthinking brute. Arlak had conscience, intelligence, and choice. Yet all that I loathed most I had chosen to do, and more.
I wailed, “Oh Mata, o God, how I have failed!”
Salk stiffened. His body leaped off the ground. I thought it was the power. I thought it was my doing, for his eyes were swollen wells of wonderment–but before I could stammer an apology, the ground lurched again. It grew a spine which tossed us aside, uncaring. Screesh! was the sound it made. The ridge elongated before our astonished eyes. A monstrous mole-run burrowed through the earth, waist-high, shedding great sods of turf off its back as it rumbled off a short ways.
Above the cabingdabash of battle, I could hear the beast panting as if an armourer toiled at his forge-bellows, pumping great gasps of air into the white heart to raise the temperature until metal runs like water.
That sound! Every last vestige of colour drained from my face.
Five blazing lanterns lit the inner sanctum of the great pavilion, but gloom still festered in its corners. The twelve Hassutls held council here, though this eventide the room was more crammed than usual–for my interrogation, no less.
“It chased him, sah,” Salk said, in the same ramrod-formal tone in which he had delivered his briefing. “Where he ran, the beast chased after.”
“And that was when the Sybali abandoned the battle!”
Freyal rounded upon the officer who had interrupted him. “Name and rank, soldier?”
“Lammak, sah! Tenlead of the Jerlak, sah!”
That made him a leader of ten units, some two hundred men. Less–many less–since we started this war. From my chair, I observed the altercation. Chained hand and foot, I could do nought else.
“Did I ask you a question, soldier?”
“No sah!”
“How do you fancy the first rank, soldier?”
Crafty! This Hassutl was dangerous. He knew officers preferred to stay further back. This man’s punishment was either to declare his cowardice, or to join the first rank where the most men died.
The officer yelped, “I shall do as you command, sah!”
A good reply, but Freyal missed not a beat. “Then return to the Third, Lammak of no rank. Tell your superior officer to report here immediately.”
Thus instantly demoted, the unfortunate man nearly ran out of the room. The Hassutl spun on his heel. His glare spared no man. “We lost six hundred and twenty-six soldiers, good men all, today!” he barked. “Who else wishes to play the fool, let him be dismissed now!”
No-one moved.
Our force had been decimated.
In the great pavilion, the Hassutl’s word was law. Freyal it was, I had learned, who had forged this unlikely coalition to counter the Lymarian advance–and from what I had seen, it was his iron will that bound them together. A bristling tygar of a man, his loose-limbed frame easily filled his armour; functional armour rather than formal. This set him apart from the other Hassutls.
He prowled over to Salk with sleek, pent-up menace. “Carry on, soldier.”
Salk shot back, “Sah! He ran toward the Lymarian line, sah! The beast chased after and ate three, mebbe four o’ the Nethespawn afore they could blink. It were that fast, sah!”
“Describe the beast.”
“It were nothing I never done seen before, sah.” Salk plucked his beard. “Ah’d say it were a shadworm, only them critters grow no longer than your arm, sah. It had these feelers it waved like this–” he wiggled his fingers above his head “–and the body were red rings, like rusty armour.”
“How big did you say, soldier?”
“Mebbe … five men laid head to foot, sah?”
Forget the Wurm’s body, I thought sourly. The end I’d seen came armed with a thicket of mandibles and pincers that had shovelled man after screaming man into its maw. Not that I’d paused to request further details or make polite conversation, mark my words! The entire episode had lasted less than a span before the Wurm burrowed into the ground and disappeared once more.
The Sybali had not been sighted since.
All because of a misuse of my power. Misuse? Exactly how selfish was it to save my own life? To protect myself, and Salk too, from the Sybali? My jaw clenched so hard, my ears hurt. And Jyla’s forfeit? Obviously the Wurm would appear when I used her bequest to maim rather than to heal. This second time it was clearer–I killed the Sybali woman by breaking apart an otherwise healthy heart. But the first? All I’d done was take the old man’s money …
Selfishly.
What would happen if the Wurm caught me?
“Arlak!” Freyal’s bellow snapped me out of my reverie.
“Yes, sah?”
“Your explanation is due, soldier.” I must have looked blank, for he added with heavy sarcasm, “How came a simple ranksman by such a pet? Who are you? Where do you hail from?”
This was easier. “I’m Arlak Sorlakson of Yarabi Vale, sah. It’s near–”
“I know Yarabi Vale.” Freyal was prowling again. “To my knowledge, Yarabi Vale is home to a clutch of vegetable farmers who have never in a thousand anna displayed the slightest hint of a Warlock’s skills.” He paused to smile at me. “And you, Arlak Sorlakson, are sweating.”
True, every word of it, down to my excessive perspiration. The Hassutl was not only dangerous, he was observant too, though why it should matter … “Yes, sah,” I offered, as blandly as possible.
“Dishonest men sweat differently,” said Freyal, still smiling. “They have a special stink about them. And dishonest men who are hiding a secret–they stink worst of all.”
I sat trembling in my best imitation of a pinned rabbit.
“So, Arlak Sorlakson, why don’t we go over your story one more time? And just in case a detail or two might go adrift in the telling, I’ll ask Tomak here to stand ready to help you keep your thoughts in order.”
Tomak was the Faloxxian brute picking masticated bits of meat out of his gums with the largest, most wickedly barbed dagger I had ever seen. His face was a mass of scarified tissue, swirling patterns painfully picked into the skin and deliberately made to scar by rubbing ash mixed with colouring agents into the open wounds. I had heard campfire tales about him. Apparently his tribe were especially skilled in the arts of torture, and their favourite pastime consisted of competing to see how long they could keep a man alive while removing all of the skin from his body with special, thin-bladed knive
s they fondly referred to as ‘person peelers’. They wooed their women by constructing necklaces for them of human teeth–the more necklaces, the higher her status in the tribe.
Freyal’s smile never slipped. “I’m especially interested in turning this secret weapon of yours to our use, Arlak Sorlakson. I want to know what rituals you have developed to summon the creature. How long can you hold the conjuration? How can we use it to defeat the Lymarians?”
I sucked in my lips. How much should I tell?
“Tomak, remind our guest we don’t have all eventide.”
“Wait!” I yelped. “It’s called a Wurm, sah.”
Freyal’s smile showed all of his teeth this time. He drawled, “I know. The Mistress Jyla sent word by message-drum. Mayhap you know her? I see you do.”
Thus, in one dread stroke, was my ruin laid bare.
Chapter 10: Scourge of the Westland
There is a Beast, a many-headed Beast,
A devourer of men and despoiler of life,
Whose breath is the blast of Nethe,
And whose name is War.
Phari al’Mahi kin Saymik, Wurm’s Tails
Madness. Utter madness. Who, of his own volition, hurls his mortal self headlong towards a horde of eight thousand enemy warriors, pursued by a creature of sorcery?
The first time, the Lymarians did not know what was coming. Perhaps they took me for a madman, or for a heroic fool–the more fools they–and let me advance to within a javelin-throw of their lines before they saw the earth rise behind me, and the Wurm burst through with a grating scream.
I slipped in turning aside. The huffing, screeching monster thundered straight into their lines, levelling men as tufts of hewehat grain yield to the sickle’s sweep. So many were packed together, escape was impossible. Until the Wurm burrowed back into the earth, all that I could hear was the terrified bawling of men trying to flee, and above that, the shrieks of the dying.
Freyal remarked favourably upon this ‘efficient’ form of warfare.
I spent the makh of darkness alternately weeping and throwing up, until my stomach took up knives and tried to slay me.