Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1)

by J. Edward Neill

  As four times their number washed over them, the black riders drew up their blades and fought, dealing out grievous injury to many that assailed them. Ropes of blood blacker than the night streamed from the ends of several blades. Piles of Marlos’s men stormed each rider, and though several were slain, the rest did the grisly work of opening Furyon throats and sliding knives between ribs. As he watched the wild melee, Rellen’s breath caught in his throat. Was that Marlos who fell? Therian? The men of Barrok shouted at the enemy to surrender, but their words fell upon the ears of men who did not know the Graehelm tongue.

  In the end, every foe who had climbed the slope was hewn down. Their torches were stamped out, their lives extinguished, but their purpose perfectly served.

  “Rellen!” Saul hissed. “More riders! Look!”

  He snapped his gaze away from the slaughter. Far behind the finished fight, he saw ten more riders lurking in the valley, looking on without joining their brothers’ slaughter. They had approached unseen along the riverbank, a handful of torches among them.

  “The bastards,” Bruced spat. “They knew we were here! They drew us out!”

  “Shoot them,” he ordered.

  The clifftop archers went to work. Longbows twanging, fifteen Mormist hunters rained death down upon the riders. The enemy was ready. The riders wheeled their mounts, raised black shields against the sky, and sped southward into the valley. They passed through a storm of arrows and stones, a deadly shower whistling past their ears and clanging against their shields, but the cliff was too high and the deep of night too dark, making it impossible for the Graehelm warriors to aim. Unharmed, the enemy fled back into the throat of the valley, back into the darkness.

  “Milords, their armor,” an elder bowman said despondently. “Too thick. Their shields the same.”

  Before the others could so much as breathe, he was off. Plucking up his lantern and knifing through the trees, he raced down the side of the cliff like a meteor streaking to its death. He pelted across the hard pebbles and sprinted toward the Gholesh shore, arriving just in time to witness Lothe’s men finish off the last of the Furyon riders. He heard a scream and a grunt as a knight of Barrok slipped his blade between the joints of the fallen foe’s armor. It was gruesome work, enough to set his empty stomach to squelching.

  “Therian? Marlos?” he called as he approached.

  It was not Therian or Marlos who greeted him, but Garrett. His face striped scarlet with blood, his sword steaming, Garrett strode from the darkness, looking as though he had slain all the Furyons by himself.

  “You?” Rellen hardly believed his eyes. “I told you to stay with me.”

  Garrett wiped his bloody blade clean against his sleeve. “I went where I was needed.”

  “I knew it. I should’ve come with you.”

  “Aye.” Garrett grinned. “You should have.”

  “Therian and Marlos. Did they make it?”

  “They did. Look yonder.”

  He gazed into the carnage. Torches lay strewn across the river bank, fallen where the dead had dropped them. He spied Therian first. He watched the lad slink between corpses, snatching up a Furyon sword and shield when the knights of Barrok were not looking. Therian tucked the treasures under his arm and made his way back toward the treeline.

  “Going somewhere?” Rellen intercepted him.

  “Rellen!” Therian’s mail jingled as he halted. “I…found these on the field below. They’re not like any I’ve seen.”

  Therian laid the sword and shield upon the ground. Garrett knelt and lifted the sword from the rocky soil. He balanced it in his grasp, eyeing it from pommel to needlelike point. The blade’s ebon surface reflected no light, seeming almost invisible in the darkness.

  “Well?” Rellen asked.

  “Nearly weightless,” Garrett observed. “Of an alloy I have never seen. A fine blade, elegant and sharp. Our enemy is well-equipped.”

  Rellen snatched the shield from the ground. He held it above his head, squinting at the strange markings etched upon its surface. “Here.” He handed it to Garrett. “Take this, the sword too. Therian can fetch another set if he likes.”

  Rellen turned to Therian, who pouted at the loss of his treasures. “Where’s your uncle?”

  “Alive and well.”

  “Any captives?”

  “No,” Therian mumbled. “All dead. The fools wouldn’t yield. More of ours were slain than expected.”

  “Their armor is thick, their swordarms strong,” Garrett added. “If not for our numbers, we might not have prevailed.”

  Rellen gazed over Therian’s shoulder. Even with the dark so deep, he spied at least one dead Grae knight for each fallen black-mantled foe. “Therian, take a set of weapons to Lothe,” he said. “Show him what we’re up against, and bring Marlos to me when you are finished. Garrett, come with me. We need to tell the others.”

  Blood

  On a dim, cheerless dawn, the Gryphon company stirred from sleep on the cliff top.

  Their tents sagged beneath the miserable sky, their banners’ blues and greens muted to ashen grey. Every fire was long dead. Little more than a few tendrils of smoke crawled into the canopy of the hardy clifftop trees.

  Rellen was among the first to rise. His tent highest atop the cliff, he padded outside, half expecting the screams of battle to greet him. But there was no battle, no drums of war, no clash of Grae steel against the enemy’s ebon alloy. The only sounds he heard were murmurs from his waking comrades and the guttural rumble of distant thunder.

  The clouds were heavy this morn, and the valley mist thick as broth. He supposed at first the weather might mean another day’s peace, but the feeling did not linger. As he wandered from tent to tent, noshing on a hunk of bread and rousing men who took too long to wake, he heard the thunder crack like a mountain breaking. Streaks of scarlet lightning pierced the sky above the valley, and the rain began to fall.

  “More rain. Just what we need.” Marlos joined him in the camp’s center.

  “Maybe Endross told the truth.” He opened his palms to catch the falling water. “Maybe the storm’ll slay us before the day’s done.”

  Marlos frowned. “No. Never say that. Saul says the valley’s still empty. The mist is too thick. Might be the enemy is lost.”

  “Might be,” he said, doubting it.

  After a brief breakfast devoured in silence, he joined the Gryphon company as they assembled at the edge of the cliff. The valley was an eerie sight, the mist clinging to the river like the skin of a molting snake. Dawn resembled dusk, with clouds too black to be real burying the sun. A hundred men clustered to each side, he heard nothing but thunder and rain. “Hard to wage war in this mess,” he said to whoever might listen.

  Nearby, Bruced stood sentinel at the cliff’s edge, his two-tined spear erected beside him. “It’s ugly as Marlos’s mother out here,” the big man bellowed. “Think they’ll come?”

  I wish I knew.

  “Do we hope for battle today?” he said. “Or for another week of waiting? Which is worse? Fighting and dying or sitting and staring?”

  “The former.” Bruced grinned. “Obviously.”

  The longer he gazed into the vale, the harder the rain fell. Falling calamitously upon all surfaces, sheets of it washed into the valley, against the cliffs, and across the forest. It muted the waterfall’s crash, pummeling the earth with such vigor it seemed the rain was all there was and all there ever would be.

  A long while he stood, drenched and dour, until he heard another sound arise. The reverberation rose up from the valley, thumping rhythmically like ocean waves against a far and unseen shore.

  Neither thunder nor rain.

  Is it them?

  Are we dead?

  “What’s that?” said a fearful Mormist hunter.

  “Falling rocks. Maybe an avalanche,” answered another.

  “No.” Rellen shook his head. “Falling rocks make no such sound.”

  Another sheet of rain saturated
him. Another burst of ashen lightning cracked the sky. The soldiers beside him gasped.

  The Furies are here.

  Marching shoulder to shoulder, rain pinging like pebbles against their ebon mail, they flowed out of the mist and up the valley like poison corrupting an artery. So many of them. His eyes widened as they came. Lothe thought they had twice our numbers.

  I say triple.

  The lightning flashed again and again, and each time it seemed the armored mass leapt forward, vanishing in one instant only to appear closer to the valley outlet in the next. From somewhere in the belly of the horde, a mesmeric chant cut the air, the same from yestereve. The chant was desolate, uttered in a tongue neither he nor any of the Grae men wanted to know.

  “If we had gods, I’d pray.” A Mormist soldier tilted his helmet to slough the water off.

  “Not me,” said another. “Better to run than pray.”

  “Crows pluck my heart out!” Bruced spat on their fear. “What’re you afraid of? Black armor and fancy swords? These are men same as us, and they die just as easily. All I want to know is; what’s that damnable chant? Archers, find the singing sod and put him down!”

  “Sorcery,” Rellen shuddered. “Maybe the same power that makes the rain.”

  Startling the men nearest him, he leapt to his feet and marched away. Alone, he walked along the cliff edge until he emerged at its highest point. There, where no trees lived and the barren rock jutted over the valley like a dagger over a waiting throat, he stoked his lantern to life. When the flame caught and the light glittered gold behind the glass, he held the beacon aloft and cast its eye down toward the forest.

  See me, Lothe. Ready your men.

  The enemy marched. He watched, sick to his stomach, as their foremost ranks curled away from the Gholesh and halted at the bottom of the slope leading out of the valley. The newborn day might as well have been dusk, for the clouds boiled black, blanketing the world as surely as midnight. When the enemy footsteps stopped, the lightning ceased to flash and the valley was plunged into darkness. All he heard above the rain was the chant, a groan like a thousand waking dead, one voice that seemed a chorus. Is this what Endross heard before the end? Must be. I should’ve stayed with you, Ande.

  If you can hear me, run.

  And then the voice went silent.

  The lightning reappeared in spades, leaping from cloud to miserable cloud as if the heavens were at war. Beneath the deathly, ashen light, Rellen saw the clouds begin to swirl, an abyss opening with a hollow black hole for a center. The lightning’s sickly, otherworldly light burned at the bottom of the clouds like pale flames beneath black charcoal. His gaze fell again upon the enemy host. He saw a lone soldier, a figure in black shouldering his way through the motionless mass of warriors.

  The figure made his way to the vanguard of the enemy host, and Rellen saw the sword in his grasp, a blade of black raised to the sky. Whoever you are, I’ll slay you, he swore. Marlos will string you up, and Bruced will beat the blood out of you.

  The nameless man held his blade high. A thousand flames burst alive in the forest in answer. Rellen’s heart soared. He knew Lothe had seen his beacon, for the flames were those of Barrok. We’re ready, at least. We’ll not die without a fight. The fires looked like stars exploding in the night. A thousand hellish eyes they were, awakened in the woods, challenging the invaders with a wall of fire and steel.

  His hand fell to his sword. His jaw clenched so hard it hurt. He turned away from the cliff edge, only to find Garrett keeping vigil over his shoulder. “You again.” His fear fled for an instant.

  “Look.” Garrett motioned to the sky. “There where the sky is darkest. Ser Endross’s storm.”

  “Mother of mercy.” He looked the heavens and saw what Garrett meant. “He was right…”

  Never in his life had he seen such a storm. The clouds, black as night and fuming grotesquely, vomited sheets of frozen rain and jagged plumes of pallid lightning. The storm began to twist and churn around its hollow center, and he forced his gaze down to the foremost enemy soldier, who still held his sword on high. The weapon seemed to hold sway over the tempest, commanding the clouds to move directly above the trees where Lothe and his host were stirring.

  “The storm!” he shouted over the thunder. “Look!”

  “I see it.” Garrett blanched, looking for once in his life disquieted.

  The storm widened. The rain stung. Garrett clapped Rellen on the shoulder, nodded, and sprinted down the slope to battle. I can’t follow him, not yet.

  I have to see this.

  He heard Lothe’s horn blast, and he watched as the Barrok army erupted from the forest. Lothe’s archers were first to emerge. Spilling from the trees by the thousand, they erected themselves on the sodden earth, bent back their bows, and released, sending a hail of arrows hurtling toward the front of the enemy. Furies, Rellen spat their name. Lumaur called them Furies. Let them all die, an arrow in each throat.

  The archers’ aim was deadly, but the storm was not so easily pierced. The Furyon blade-bearer swung his weapon wildly back and forth, and even as the blizzard of arrows reached its highest point, a terrible wind arose against it. Most of the arrows were thrown down, their shafts broken and twisted, while others crashed harmlessly atop the slope, far from their targets. The few that punctured the wailing wind fell onto the Furyons, but shattered like glass against their black, mirror-like armor. Wasted, he despaired. Kindling in the storm. What now?

  A break in the thunder, a moment of silence, and he heard the rally cry of the Grae crack the air. Lord Lothe cried out to his knights. “Wind and weather, tricks and illusions! See if rain can stop our steel! Go! Go! Slay them all, knights of Grae! For Barrok!”

  Lothe’s archers fanned to the sides of the slope. As they hurried out of the way, rows and rows of Grae knights and swordsmen erupted from the trees. The storm’s preternatural light shined blue upon their helms and shields, making them appear more like water than men, a foaming wave sent from the sea.

  Far below, the Furyon soldiers stirred. Ten rows deep of Furyon pikemen lowered their spears and pointed a line of bristling death toward their enemies. A Furyon cry shook the air and the pikemen moved forward as one, but no sooner did they take ten steps than they halted again. Again the Furyon blade-bearer raised his sword, and again he spoke his damning words. The chant. Rellen wished Lothe could hear it. Kill the one with the black sword. Kill him now!

  Time stood still for what seemed like an eternity. The clouds boiled, and the chargers of Barrok slowed. Every warrior on both sides looked to the heavens, where the eye of the storm, blackest of all storms, opened its maw even wider than before. Lothe’s men came to an utter standstill, hypnotized as a pinpoint of light appeared in the abyss. Down, down the blue light plummeted, a seething bolt of lightning, trailed by another and another and another. The lightning plunged into the Grae ranks, cracking and rending the earth, killing at random. Many hundred times it struck, stretching over Lothe’s army like the limbs of an ancient tree. The knights of Barrok screamed. Those who were struck writhed in blue flames, cooking in their armor like hunks of meat trapped in ovens. The frenzied fingers from the sky torched thousands, and when at last it ceased, some three thousand Barrok men lay dead and smoking on the battlefield.

  Above the wailing of the wounded and the groans of the dying, Rellen heard the laughter of the Furyon blade-bearer.

  Emboldened, the Furyons counterattacked. The blade-bearer hoisted his weapon, and the wall of pikemen surged up the slope and into the shattered Graehelm host. Their charge was met by another volley of arrows, but their armor turned it aside. Up the slope the enemy poured, a throng of spikes and death thrusting out from the shadowed vale. Form up! Rellen screamed inside his head. Make a line, stop them cold, else we’re all dead!

  He bolted for the battle. As he wended his way down the cliff, sprinting between the trees like spears, he caught sight of Lord Lothe. Atop a black-maned destrier, the champion of Barrok leve
led his lance and charged the Furyons across a graveyard of his fallen comrades. The Grae knights followed his lead. Whether foolish or brave or filled with grief at the sight of so many brethren slain, the scattered knights and swordsmen fell in behind Lothe and stormed the Furyon lines. This time, the lightning did not come to claim them. The sickly blue light of the storm began to fade, plunging the battlefield into near total darkness. When the Grae and Furyon lines collided, Rellen heard more than he saw. The clash of sword, pike, and shield was engraved into his senses, and when he reached the cliff bottom, the earth beneath his boots ran dark with a river of blood.

  The mounted knights of Barrok struck hardest. They smashed into the Furyon front line, dying by the hundred atop enemy pikes, but carving wide gaps for the footmen to stream into. Waves of men, silver and black, crested and crashed into one another like oceans colliding. The Furyons shuddered, their ranks breaking, then reforming, and then breaking again. The sheer rage of Lothe and his knights swept away hundreds of Furyon lives, claiming them as though they were leaves fallen into the Gholesh. We’ve a chance, Rellen hoped. Turn this battle on its ear. One victory is all it’ll take.

  Pelting down the slope, he glimpsed the Furyons’ trap after it was too late.

  He saw it when the Furyon outer lines began to fold inward, and he knew the Barrok knights had pressed too deep. No. No! He wanted to scream. Fall back! Fall back! But it was too late. The Graehelm fighters drove into the Furyon ranks like miners into the earth, hacking and hewing and carving too deep for their own good. A Furyon commander cried an order out, and a rank of many thousand shadow-garbed crossbowmen streamed from their hiding place near the river. The Grae knights reared and bolted. The Furyons fired. Too swiftly, thousands of black steel quarrels whistled through the rain, tearing into Grae horse and rider. In droves the knights of Barrok fell. None of their shields were thick enough, and none of their mail so hard as to protect them from the Dageni bolts screaming like hornets into their skin.