Called to Battle, Volume 1

by Larry Correia

  The big woman at the door—Flense—made a guttural shrieking sound. The alchemist Revane chuckled. Volus turned to Narn, lightning coursing around his hands.

  “Stupid Morte,” Saerl said. She gestured to the others. “Kill him.”

  Narn rose to face his death unflinching. He would take as many of these monsters with him as he could.

  Then he heard a magelock discharge from the direction of the kitchens, and a bullet sizzled toward the four mages. It crashed into an icy shield Revane conjured—a putrid thing that looked like frozen sewage—then exploded with concussive force that sent them tumbling apart. The alchemist took the brunt of the shock.

  Hands grabbed Narn’s shoulders and hauled him backward. “Come!” Svyn shouted in his ear. “We need to go! We need—”

  That was the last thing he remembered.

  Part 2: The Destroyers

  Narn woke violently. The world rushed in around him in an agonizing instant, making every inch of him burn. The air hung hot and dense, and his body felt slimy with sweat and blood. Then he remembered—remembered where he was and what had come to pass. The pain he could ignore, but not the sorrow in his heart. He had failed.

  “You wake, thank the goddess,” a human woman said.

  The words of Shyr, pronounced with that alien accent, brought him to his senses. He tried to rise but only strained at the bonds that held his hands. He lay shirtless, his wiry, scarred torso a mess of blood and bandages in the lantern light. He was in a small hovel, underground, with bent rafters holding up the packed earth. Snowmelt dripped from the smoky ceiling. Svyn leaned over him, her tunic stained with drying blood. Her luminous green eyes were weary but relieved.

  “I saved your life, but not stupid,” she said, her imprecise understanding of the language showing in her grammar. “I bind you until you safe.”

  Narn wet his lips. He never spoke to humans when he could avoid it, but he saw no other option. “Speak your human tongue,” he said in Shyr. “Your words offend me.”

  She nodded and finished wrapping a length of gauze around the last of his stitched wounds. “I did not think you would make it, but I had to try,” she said in a more comfortable Khadoran. “We are safe for the moment. An abandoned cellar on the edge of town. It will be a while before they find us here.”

  Narn looked at her impassively. She had not asked a question, so he saw no reason to speak to her.

  “You’re a mage hunter,” she said. Perhaps seeing some sign of his confusion, she quickly added, “Rylel told me of your order. I’ve even met a mage hunter before. She never told me her name—never spoke to me at all, in fact. Rylel spoke to her, convinced her to help us against my kin. That was them you saw: my aunts Saerl and Flense, my cousin Volus, great-uncle Revane, and Morte. I don’t even know what he is to me. They’ve hunted me all my life. But they killed her—the mage hunter, I mean. Slaughtered her like a hog.”

  Narn raised two fingers.

  “Two? There was another?” Svyn paled. “I’m so sorry. I never met the second. But it was my kin who killed them, not me.”

  Narn said nothing, but he let his expression show curiosity. He wanted to keep her talking, keep her distracted while he worked himself loose. Even though he’d been unable to flex when she tied him, the bonds were not too tight. In time, he could slip a hand free.

  “Why?” Svyn hung her head and raised one hand, around which green runes began to circle. “For this. For my magic. My curse.”

  Narn’s insides roiled. His eyes widened and he strained at the bonds. He couldn’t reach her, so he managed to choke out “No” in Khadoran, then turned his head to vomit onto the broken floorboards.

  “Sorry! I’m sorry,” she said. “It always did that to Rylel, too. Iosans, they—well, he said it was like poison to their souls. It’s not like regular magic. It’s . . . something else, something horrible.”

  Narn tried to wipe his mouth but could not. Svyn leaned in and did it for him. When she came close, he looked up into her face. She bit her lip and drew away.

  “I don’t know where it came from, not really,” she said. “Some say it’s infernalism, but my parents told me there is Orgoth blood in our bloodline. An apprentice, maybe, or a slave . . .” She shuddered. “All I know is it runs in my family, each generation growing stronger and stronger and killing each other for the power. And one day, my kin came looking for it. Aunt Saerl, she—”

  Sickly green light flashed in the air between them, and Svyn staggered against the wall. “No,” she said. “Oh, no . . .”

  The mage hunter fought against his bonds, determined to do something, but no attack befell him. Instead, the magic rushed into Svyn, and her whole body went taut as though stabbed, back and shoulders arched. Then, just as quickly as it began, it was over, and she fell to her knees, sobbing and retching.

  Narn knew he should be working to free himself during the distraction, but unexpectedly his heart went out to Svyn. He was unused to feeling even a shred of sympathy for a human, let alone an arcanist, but Svyn was the first one he had ever met who seemed to loathe her own power. The way she spoke of it put him in mind of the Retribution’s teachings: that human magic was a foul, disgusting thing. He realized he was dealing with something quite unusual.

  Also, he thought only a soulless hunter would take no pity upon her. She looked so helpless—so young and vulnerable—in that moment, and he realized she was barely more than a girl. She looked up, trying to stifle her sobs, and he met her eyes, so full of pain and despair. He did not look away but shook his head slightly and made as if to reach toward her. When he could not, he realized what he was doing and dropped his gaze. Human mage though she was, he found himself wishing to comfort her.

  “My blood . . .” she said. “When one of us dies, the rest of us . . . we absorb that one’s magic. It happened when my parents died, and now . . . Morte just died. I can feel him, inside me, wriggling. I can hear him laughing. He—goddess—” She retched again.

  Narn nodded grimly, then looked away conflicted. He took no small satisfaction in having destroyed one of the mages, but to see the awful consequences of that was not pleasant. If by killing one mage he empowered another, that was a thing the Retribution needed to know. He was dealing with a sort of magic no Iosan had ever encountered, to his knowledge, and the damage it did to his people was not only metaphysical but very much physical. The Iosans believed all human magic harmed them, and the existence of this tainted magic seemed to confirm that theory. Narn had to end this.

  Svyn composed herself with an obvious effort of will and rose to address him again. “This is my task,” she said. “I have to stop them. These last five, I can’t beat them. The closest I came was my Aunt Flense, and they just rebuilt her better and—” She shook her head as if to refocus. “I’m babbling. Sorry. I had a plan: find allies, lure them out here to minimize civilian casualties . . . But now you’ve killed my bodyguards and it’s just us two. If I let them kill me, they’ll take my power and do worse things. I need . . .” She took a deep breath. “I need your help.”

  Narn looked at her levelly. This he had not expected.

  “Rylel told me about your goddess and the Retribution. That some Iosans believe human magic to be tainted and unclean. Harmful.” Svyn hung her head. “I don’t know about all magic, but mine is certainly terrible. It’s brought me nothing but grief and madness, and I can see the horror it does to you. It was the same with Rylel. I know your faith demands you kill me, and I welcome it. I died the night my aunt tortured my parents to death in front of me. Only do this thing with me first—help me stop them.” She looked up at him with bright green eyes that seemed to glow in the lantern light.

  Narn never could have anticipated such a request. Had the world gone mad or just him? For Rylel to speak of the beliefs of the Iosans—the ways of their faith and their drive against human magic—was loathsome. Sharing such things was an act punishable by execution. And had not Narn done exactly that? Yet Rylel had stayed by th
is mage’s side despite the cost. His old friend had seen something in this human that made him violate his deepest beliefs. What?

  Rylel had been a Seeker, driven by faith to explore and learn all that he could. Perhaps he’d believed this magic Svyn and her awful family wielded was darker and more harmful to the Iosan people than mere human magic, and that was why he had fought alongside her, in hopes of destroying her vile relations. But could Narn do such a perverse thing? Could he forge an alliance against everything he had ever believed and known?

  Narn looked to Svyn herself. He had rarely seen such open-eyed drive, such willingness to die in pursuit of a just cause. He thought of Eiryss and the day she had completed her training. The determination in her eyes, and her words—fatalistic but not doomed, as though victory did not mean survival but justice. They had seen each other many times since then, and always that look was the same. And he always found his own resolve renewed in seeing hers.

  Svyn stared at him expectantly. “What say you?”

  Bright spots of crimson bloomed in the snow, like blood-red flowers poking through the surface. Clutching her midsection and gasping for breath against the driving blizzard, the gun mage stumbled through the thigh-high drift. Blood leaked from between her fingers and red-tinged spittle slid from her mouth.

  “Dammit,” she murmured. “Dammit, why couldn’t you listen?”

  A sound drew Svyn’s attention and she whirled, pistol raised in a shaking hand. Only the whirling wind greeted her, driving snow into her skin like tiny shards of glass.

  She spoke the words of a seeing spell, and green runes circled her hands, then her head. Her eyes shone with emerald light, and she looked all around her. “Who—”

  “Caught,” came a single word.

  Then a javelin hurtled out of the storm and impaled the arm she raised to defend herself. Crying out in pain, Svyn fell back a step and took hold of the javelin to pull it out. When she moved it, though, she shrieked as the barbs cut into her flesh. Then she saw a wire attached to the javelin, one that disappeared into the darkness.

  “No,” she said. “That—”

  The hum of electricity split the night, even over the howling of the wind, and lightning flowed up the wire to crackle around her body. Svyn tried to scream, failed, and fell convulsing into the snow.

  “Poor dear,” said the man in alchemist’s leather who loomed out of the storm. His goggles glowed with an angry red hue, an alchemical treatment that let his vision pierce the swirling snow. His voice rasped through his gas mask. “First you have bad luck with a hunter, then you pick the wrong ally, and now you’ve gone and had an accident, great-niece. Tsk, tsk. Not so great, I suppose.”

  Revane held out his left hand, where the wire on the javelin connected to a mechanikal glove he wore, and turned a wheel near his thumb. Svyn screeched as more electricity flowed into her. The alchemist released the charge so the accumulator could build up another jolt, leaving Svyn gasping for breath and shuddering in the snow.

  “There, there.” Revane flipped up his goggles, then leaned over Svyn. With his free hand, he wiped tears from her cheek. “I’m not going to kill you. No, no, no. Not right away, anyway. I want to savor your death. It’s better that way.”

  Svyn glared up at him, eyes defiant. The hint of a smile touched her lips.

  “What, did something I said amuse you?” He turned up the dial on his electrocution device. “You know I hate being laughed at.”

  A shadow surged out of the snow behind him, twin slivers of steel glinting in the awful red light of his devices. Revane half-turned, summoning icy green magic to guard himself, but Narn’s sabers knifed through his defenses. When he raised his gauntleted hand to defend himself, Narn’s first blade took it off at the wrist. An instant later the second saber rammed through the alchemist’s chest. Revane sucked in a breath and sagged against the mage hunter’s arm.

  Narn turned his blade point down, kicked the alchemist’s body off, and reached down to help Svyn. The gun mage rose, spat out a bloody piece of meat she’d been chewing, and showed Revane her midsection. It bore the stain of blood—mostly Narn’s—but was uninjured.

  “Sorry, Uncle,” she said. “It was either you or me.”

  Revane wheezed as he tried and failed to summon his green magic. He reached shaking fingers toward his severed hand—toward the dial to send electricity through the weapon into his treacherous niece. Narn stepped forward, saber raised, but Svyn held up her pistol, invoked a spell, and fired. The bullet cut the wire in two, sending both ends sparking off into the night. Revane shrieked as the electricity flowed back through the device and into his body. He gave a last incoherent mumble, then slumped into the snowdrift.

  Narn looked at Svyn’s pistol with disgust. It had not used the cursed magic, which would have made him ill, but any human magic filled him with loathing.

  The young woman followed his gaze to her magelock. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”

  Ignoring her and trying to let his hatred pass, Narn knelt beside the alchemist in the snow. He knew immediately the man was dead, because nausea filled him, and he saw green energy swirl around Svyn. She gritted her teeth and let the power flow into her. Only four of the cursed mages remained: Saerl, Flense, Volus, and Svyn herself.

  “I’m sorry I stopped you,” Svyn said, “but that device . . . It’s called a shock coil. If you had cut the wire with your sword, it could have electrocuted you instead. And I need you to kill my family, remember?”

  Narn nodded. He had understood what she had done the instant she’d done it. He hesitated to put his blades away, though, until she slid her magelock pistol back into its holster. Then he shook the alchemist’s half-congealed blood from his sabers and caught the fringe of the man’s cloak to wipe the rest away. Revane’s blood had a greenish tinge that soured his stomach. Perhaps the foul magic tainted his own body as well as harming that of an Iosan.

  Svyn knelt in the snow beside the corpse of her great-uncle and bowed her head. She whispered words in Shyr that Narn immediately recognized: a blessing to Scyrah, goddess of the spring, a prayer for renewal. The gun mage sensed him staring at her, as she always seemed to, and nodded solemnly. “Rylel taught me,” she said. “I’ve never had gods of my own, but as a Seeker, he knew of so many. He told me about them, and the only one that made sense was Scyrah. It doesn’t offend you, does it?”

  Again, Narn felt a pang of loathing that Rylel would have shared their goddess with any human, let alone a mage, but seeing Svyn praying respectfully gave him pause. Narn shook his head, though he was amazed a human mage would devote herself to a goddess whose continued existence required the death of all human mages. Perhaps Rylel had not told Svyn everything.

  As she prayed over the dead alchemist, Narn knelt next to Revane’s body to determine what he could use. Human alchemy was distasteful, but with his supplies lost to him, he had to be pragmatic. The man’s belongings were few: two incendiary grenades and a few smoke grenades, various powders that would mean more to an alchemist than to a mage hunter, and the remains of the device he’d used on Svyn. He took the grenades and was about to leave the rest when he found a last, fragile vial he recognized immediately. He took that too.

  Svyn finished her blessings and rose. “We have to move,” she said. “The others will have felt his death. They know I couldn’t kill Revane on my own, so they’ll know you are alive. Dammit.” She drew in her cowl against the driving snow, perhaps to hide her suddenly ruthless expression. “I wish they’d all just kill each other in a battle to be the strongest, but they won’t do that—not until they’re sure I’m dead or one of them. It’s Saerl’s doing. She knows that if one of them kills the others, it’ll be one against one, but with four of them against me . . .”

  Narn held up three fingers.

  “You’re right,” she said with a shudder. “Three of them left, each mightier now than the two we’ve killed, and getting more powerful with every death.”

  Narn loosened hi
s sabers in their scabbards and gave her a short nod.

  “Wish I had your confidence,” she said. “We should go back into hiding. Maybe Volus will lose patience and—”

  Then Narn felt it. He’d been able to ignore the dull ache in his middle even as it built over the last hour, but now it spiked wildly, making his gorge rise. Someone was using the vile magic, and it wasn’t Svyn. He lurched back and fended off her concerned hands.

  In the snowy curtains that separated them from the village, Narn saw a red spot that drew apart and diffused through the snow like a hunk of soap. Soon, the snow whirling around them had taken on a pink tinge, and when the flakes touched Narn’s exposed skin, they stuck, melted, and congealed black.

  “It’s snowing blood,” Svyn said. “Volus’ magic. He’s drawing the blood out of—gods, the villagers!”

  Svyn started to run, the snow churning around her booted feet, but Narn caught her arm. In the blizzard of bloody snow, she struggled for a second, uttering guttural curses in Khadoran that he did not understand, and then rounded on him. What she saw on his face cooled her rage, though.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to go.” Tears leaked down her cheeks. “Saerl’s killing the villagers until I face her. It’s a ploy to draw me out, of course, but I have to go. Do you understand?”

  Narn knew well what it was to be so devoted to his people. He nodded, but he raised a finger to his lips to counsel patience. Some might die now, but if Svyn charged in without purpose or a plan—without judgment—then she too would die, and her relatives would kill many more. He could not say if she understood this as well, but she hung her head in obeisance to his wisdom.

  “Yes,” she said. “We have to do this right or not at all.”

  Then he indicated her hand, which had started to glow with sickly green fire. Svyn uttered an oath and extinguished the magic. Narn nodded, then pointed to the magelock pistol at her belt, and nodded again when she put a hand on its butt.