Roars of War: The War for the North: Book Two

by Sean Rodden

  “And my husband?”

  Violet vortices reeled. “The Lord Alvarion is…splendid.”

  The Lady of the Fiannar absorbed this with a slow and knowing nod of her own. Splendid. Of course, he is. She then looked toward her friend once again. A swift, seeking study. When next she spoke, care and concern were writ in her tone, at once implicit and explicit.

  “And your own husband, sister?”

  A slim curl that may have been a smile took Sarrane’s severe lips. Her answer when it came was strange and enigmatic.

  “Master Tulnarron is in desperate need of a bath.”

  Cerriste blinked. Stared. Frowned. “I do not – ”

  And then, unsought and unsolicited, the image of Tulnarron of Arrenhoth rose before her. Tall and terrible he towered, a fell phantom sodden in the gore and gristle of slaughtered foes. Gruesome, grotesque. Completely drenched in wet death. The apparition grinned and blood shone on clenched teeth.

  “Ah.” The ghastly creeping thing that shivered then across Cerriste’s skin also quivered in her voice. “I…ah…see.”

  Sarrane was silent for a moment, and in that silence was the sound of a small smile.

  Then, “Some sights are best left to Seers, Lady.”

  A long mournful squawking sound turned Cerriste’s attention skyward. A vast group of vultures soared smoothly on scarlet thermals, winging northward to the woeful place where war was being waged. Behind the great kettle, clouds of bh’ritsi churned furiously in the dawn. Briefly, the Lady of the Fiannar followed the flights of both bird and bug with grim glimmering eyes. Her lips formed a thin slit in her face.

  So many eaters of the dead. Meaning there are so many dead to be devoured.

  One hand wrung the whitewood of her weapon, the other sought solace in the abrasive sensation of raw cork on palm. She lowered her gaze, staving off the dread demons of her agile imagination, holding at bay the vivid visions that ever plague those who are helpless, hapless, powerless to intervene, to make a difference, who can do nothing – who cannot even so much as watch.

  But only wait.

  “Verily, sister. Best left to Seers, indeed.”

  Sarrane did not reply. The purple puissance in her strange eyes swirled and whirled and whirled and swirled. Round and round and made no sound.

  The Lady of the Fiannar peered at her quiet companion.

  She sees. She sees so that I need not do so. She sees. All of it. And she suffers. For me. For all of us.

  Cerriste caressed the oak trunk one last time, her long slender fingers lingering lovingly, sending the comfort she had fleetingly found there back into the silent soul of the tree; she then stepped out from the deep verdant shadow into the pale yet palpable pink of descendent dawn.

  “You will remain here, Sarra?”

  “For now, C’ris.”

  The Lady nodded. Parted her lips to say something more, but allowed whatever it was to remain unspoken. Some things need not be voiced to be understood.

  The Seer Sarrane pulled the hood of her hunting cloak up over her shining hair.

  And the Lady Cerriste turned away.

  “Find them.”

  Sarrane had heard those words upon waking. Well before dawnfall, a flash of gaudy light and a disembodied voice in the cold night air at her ear. A pair of words growled in anger, heavy with hate. And underlying them, a sense of dread, of desperation. All the more disturbing because the speaker had most certainly been a Darad. And the Daradur were a folk seldom desperate.

  The Seer had not recognized the voice of the speaker. Her experience with the Stone Lords, however extensive, was limited to the mara Waratur, and though he was doubtlessly a Darad, she did not believe that the speaker numbered among the Wandering Guard of that warlike race. Nevertheless, he was known to Sarrane. Rather, she knew of him. That burst of garish light had named the Darad for her, no less surely than had he come, personally introduced himself, sat by the hearth and shared stories with her through the night.

  Azugar. The legendary First Axe of the formidable Fifth Army of the Daradur.

  The Golden One.

  “Find them.”

  Sarrane blinked slowly, the whirling within her peculiar eyes weakening as she gazed over the Gardens of Galledine to the place where blood and death and pain ruled. The Seven Hills of Eryn Ruil. Where crimson tides crashed again and again against the grassy shoals of the Three Lars. She needed not possess the powers of a Seer to know what was happening there. And for the time being, she had seen overmuch.

  Nevertheless, for all her powers prophetic, prescient and precognitive, for her abilities clairvoyant and divinatory, she could not shake the chilling sensation – no, the absolute conviction – that she had not seen enough.

  “Find them.”

  The Seer lowered her head, woe-weary eyelids shuttering her sight.

  Find whom?

  The Lady of the Fiannar descended the great stone stairs of Riam Liath in silence, a messenger of morning bearing word of woe and war to the waking world. The heel of her staff tapped the rock at her feet, striking a soft yet steady rhythm, inaudible and unheard, mimicking the drip-drip-dripping of water droplets measuring time on the other side of Second Earth. Her head bowed, dark hair floating behind her like tattered battle banners, she made her way down the moss-softened steps. Alone. And though the grave tidings she bore were entirely expected, the weight of the words yet unspoken pressed upon her as would a vast sea on its bed – though this sea was red and salted with death.

  Intentionally distracting herself, Cerriste took some slight solace in the sight and feel and mingled scents of Riam Liath. Riamh a’Liath urn Man-u Cerrystaline. Ancient fortress of her own ancestors, of the valiant yet vanished House of Cerristallin. A grey-green hulk hunkered between the western eaves of Galledine and the shining shoals of the Dragon’s Tear, Riam Liath soared above even the tallest trees of the Gardens, an enormous edifice of hewn limestone bound in avaricious ivy chains. The rock of the stronghold had been worn smooth and rounded by centuries upon centuries of wind and rain, scrubbed and scoured to the bone in places by seasons uncounted, made plush in others by a thousand generations of moss. Tumbled towers, crumbled walls, crumpled walkways, rumpled roads. All rendered amorphous and ambiguous by the long slow passage of time and the reclamation of the rock by Galledine.

  One might easily have lost one’s way in such a place.

  But the Lady knew the ruins of Riam Liath well. Better than well. Intimately. She had frolicked there frequently as a child, skinning her elbows and knees countless times, scraping the heels of her hands twice as often, even chafing her chin to the bone on one unlucky occasion. Her father had called her ‘moss-face’ due to that particular misfortune, soon shortened to ‘Mossy’ in her adolescence – and at her mother’s insistence – before the epithet was finally discarded during womanhood in favour of her true name once again.

  Cerriste let slip a small smile for the memory.

  In shattered halls and beneath toppled walls, atop broken battlements and below battered bastions, Mossy had undertaken countless bold adventures and noble quests, had slain a dozen ice dragons, had routed armies of phantom fiends, had held the high ground against the most impossible of odds. Mossy, that wild and willful woman-child, had blossomed amidst the remnant rock of Riam Liath; the gangly, almost boyish form of girlhood all-too-swiftly transforming into the tall statuesque figure that would turn heads and widen eyes, set hearts and souls afire, and command with ease the loyalty of all who knew her. And, once upon a time, Mossy had walked there hand in hand with her charming prince, had been courted, wooed and won, had fallen in love. And had become the woman who was the Lady of the Fiannar.

  Ah, Mossy. Rambunctious little Mossy. Your dragons and armies of fiends are all too real now. Perhaps they always were.

  Cerriste paused before the impressive arch that had in antiquity held the grand Green Gates of Riam Liath. The Gates were gone now, long gone, and the walls they had once graced had been
stormed by relentless centuries and cast down, but the ancient arch remained. As did the green. Curtains of moss hung from both haunches of the arch and cascaded from its crown like vast verdant beards. Moisture from these matted masses dribbled to the fissured marble beneath, glistening globules patiently pounding rounded bowls into the rock of the road, pocking the path. Drip-drip-dripping. Keeping time. The other side of Second Earth was nearer than it seemed.

  The Lady of the Fiannar sighed softly. She could hear the encampment stirring below. The rattling of pots and pans, the hiss and crackle of cookfires, the stropping of blades. The quiet nickers of mirarra greeting one another. And underscoring all, the fettered expectancy of hundreds of hushed voices, and the heavy hollow silence of a thousand more.

  Oh, how I miss you, Mossy.

  Pushing a sheet of moss aside with the end of her staff, Lady Cerriste raised her faintly scarred chin, squared her shoulders, and stepped through the Green Gates of Riam Liath one last time.

  The air below the ruins was cooler, crisper, cutting the lungs as would knives fashioned of ice. Shore birds hid in the hollows between tumbled stone slabs and boulders, feathers puffed protectively, wings tucked tightly, fearing to fly. Small animals secreted themselves in the sylvan shadows of Galledine, skittish and nervous, mewling at everything and nothing. The lake lapped its stony lips like a lame mongrel licking the wounds of its deceased master – tentatively, timidly, as though that which it tasted there was bitter, sour, befouled with death.

  Most children would not have sensed these things. But young Tielle was of the Fiannar, a scion of the House of Mirmaddon. She did not miss much. Indeed, Tielle had become intimately aware of the changes that had come with looming war during the four days of travel from deserted Druintir. She had sensed these alterations, these variances, in Galledine’s ancient soul. She and the two thousand Fiannar who had gone with her.

  Changes had eased into the essence of the Gardens. Had slowly, surreptitiously established in every aspect of Galledine’s existence. Changes beyond the frost of dawn crystallizing the escarpment’s abundant mosses; more substantial yet less conspicuous than the closing of colourful summer flowers and the awakening of hardier autumnal flora; more significant if subtler than the seasonal shallowing of creeks and streams. Changes, manifold and manifest. In the root and rock, in bough and branch, in the whispered dance of wind-kissed leaves. The entirety of Galledine’s being was…different.

  Because war was coming.

  For four days the long column of Deathward souls had ridden and stridden the Spine of Galledine, the broad flat ribbon of limestone which bisected the greenery of the Gardens, a continuous sinuous serpent of smooth rock slowly sidewinding southward to the Grey Ladies. The Spine was a natural alvar of raised rock upon which no vegetation throve save several sturdy mosses and a strange species of lichen called lanternweed, though the odd cluster of butter daisy and stubborn lady’s slipper clung at the Spine’s extreme eastern and western edges.

  Galledine had not been alone in being different. Once the initial bouts of brave laughter and spirited spells of tale-telling had passed, conversations among the women of the column had been short, few and far between. They had traveled the Spine grave of mien and mood, their eyes dark, their hearts darker, their spirits staid and sobre. They were become mere shadows of themselves. So much had been left behind. So much had been abandoned. The Lady of the Fiannar had moved along and among the column, quick of smile and reassuring touch, and generous with her strength. Nevertheless, Cerriste was but one woman among a thousand, and even she had been unable to deter her Deathward sisters from being so…different.

  The children had fared better, as children are wont to do. But following the first full day of steady flight, their resilience and natural optimism began to erode in a night illumined more by lanternweed than by moon or star. They passed the ensuing three days under a pall of clipped conversation and forced smiles. By the time the party had left the Spine and struck westward through the trees for Riam Liath and the bony banks of the Tear, a damper had settled upon the entire company like a death shroud, smothering all in anemic aphony.

  Because everyone knew.

  Tielle squinted northward, beyond the Fiannian encampment, to the high place where the ruins of Riam Liath hunched over the most easterly of the five wedges of water that formed the vast lacustrine pentalpha called the Dragon’s Tear. Swords of sunlight began to slash apart the bloodied silk of the sky, casting ribbons of orange and yellow shadow upon the star-shaped lake. Peering at Riam Liath, the girl perceived a time-tortured old titan, limned in green, at once muscled and emaciated, kneeling to drink. Perhaps the poor giant had forgotten himself, his purpose, his reason for being when he had stooped to quench his thirst so very long ago; his mind had wandered and had not returned, and the wretched fellow had simply died in his sleep.

  “No one should die alone,” she muttered aloud.

  Her companion did not look up from where he squatted on his haunches to examine a patch of sand some distance from the shore.

  “We all die alone, Tee-tee,” the lad said softly. “Dying is a lonely thing.”

  Tielle glanced down upon the boy as he poked at the sand with a stick.

  “Where do you come up with this stuff, Chadh?”

  Without looking up, “Same place you come up with dead giants drinking, Tee.”

  “Stop doing that.”

  “I will if you will.”

  Tielle grimaced. “I don’t go into your head, so stay out of mine.”

  “I wasn’t in your head.” Poke, poke, poke. “Doesn’t take a genius, Tee-tee. If you squint just right, like you’ve been doing, the place looks like a really big giant drinking. You aren’t the first to think so.”

  The girl folded her arms across her gleaming rillagh. “Well, stop doing the other thing, then.”

  “What other thing?”

  “Stop talking about death and dying and stuff.”

  “You started it.”

  Tielle actually harrumphed, such a strange sound from a child. “Twelve summers is too young to be so… bleak.”

  “And thirteen is old enough?” the boy murmured as he prodded the sand.

  Chadh had a certain way of speaking softly, gently, with neither inflection nor an inkling of emotion, that Tielle frequently found infuriating. Sometimes it left her speechless, her white teeth biting down hard on words that did not come. Other times she could, and often did, just scream. This time she opened her mouth to reply, only to clap it closed once more as she noticed a familiar form, tall and regal, pass through the moss-gated arch at the foot of the forsaken fortress.

  “The Lady returns,” she said quietly. “The Seer remains.”

  The boy stirred the sand. Said nothing.

  “The Lady brings tidings.” Something flared in the girl’s grey gaze. “The battle has begun. I know it. I can tell.” A succinct pause. “I can feel it.”

  Stir, stir, poke, stir. But no words.

  “The Seer stays to watch,” Tielle deduced with the specific certitude reserved for children alone. “I wish I could see what she sees.”

  Chadh whispered, “No, Tee…no, you don’t.”

  The girl gritted her teeth, sucked in her breath, but before she could blaspheme or scream at the lad, a shadow fell over them.

  “And what have we here?” came a voice not quite past the porous pitchiness of adolescence. “Ah, the honourable Heirs to the House of Mirmaddon.” A little laugh, and entirely fake, bereft of anything remotely related to humour. “But then, that’s not quite true, now, is it? Just the one Heir – fostered Roths can’t inherit a House, unless the laws have been changed in the last few days and no one told me.”

  Tielle sighed, cast a beseeching gaze skyward, turned around. Glowered. A group of Fiannian youth, mostly teen-aged boys, had emerged from Galledine in stealth and silence and formed a small semi-circle about Tielle and Chadh. The girl faced the gathering, indignance etched into every facet of her
flushed face. She unfolded her arms, her hands falling to her narrow waist, mere inches from the sword and dagger scabbarded at her hips.

  “What do you want, Noll?” The exasperation in her tone was far from feigned. “Haven’t you got some puppies to kill or bh’ritsi wings to pull off or something?”

  Noldarion crossed well-muscled arms over the intricately woven gold of his rillagh. Somehow the tall, inarguably handsome youth managed to scowl and grin at the same time and not look completely ridiculous. Not completely.

  “You’re being unkind, Tielle.”

  “Babies to torture?”

  “Now that’s not very courteous of you, Tielle. Surely unbecoming of the Heir to the Mastery of your House. You’ve been spending entirely too much time with this little haffian here. As you know, the Roths have always been a bad influence.”

  Tielle rolled her eyes. “Heiress, Noll. When it’s a girl, it’s an heiress.”

  The older youth shrugged. “Salamanders.”

  Tielle’s face fell slack with incomprehension or incredulity. Perhaps both.

  “Sala-whaa…huh?”

  “Salamanders,” repeated Noldarion, a little more frown than smile now. “You know, unnecessary details.”

  Tielle simply shook her head.

  “Semantics, Tee,” muttered Chadh from where he still squatted, stirring the sand. “He means semantics.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you, haffian.” A snarl took Noldarion’s tone, transforming the silly, relatively harmless machismo that had been there into something harsher, uglier. “What are you doing, anyway?”

  Chadh did not reply. Simply stirred the sand.

  Noldarion took a step forward. Growled, “I asked you a question, haffian.”

  “But I thought you weren’t talking to me, Noll,” Chadh replied quietly, oh so quietly. Eyes downcast, focused on the sand. Stir, stir, stir.