by Sean Rodden
Women.
A short distance away, but far enough as to remain unremarkable among the ranks of Deathward refugees, Arumarron of the House of Eccuron watched his mother and the Shield Maiden stride side by side away from the stony shoreline of the lake. Neither woman appeared to take notice of the tall Heir as they passed him, perhaps for the sheer size of the grand mirarran behind which he had positioned himself, perhaps due to dire distractions of their own.
When the women had gone, Arumarron looked past the hulking Darad with the reeling axes, across the still waters of the Tear, to the minute figure of the distant stranger in black. The dark stars in the young Heir’s eyes blossomed, expanding blooms of sidereal fire in stormy grey skies.
The man is not a threat, the Lady of the Fiannar had asserted, had insisted. He is not to be molested.
Arumarron shrugged his broad shoulders, shifting the weight of the greatsword strapped across his back. His lips curled into the grimmest of his father’s grins.
Indeed.
The last dappling of dusk fell across Tielle’s smooth features, the fluttering shadows of oak leaves playing over her skin like a bevy of black butterflies. She stood just within the eaves of Galledine, perfectly still, her breath soft and shallow, the beat of her heart impossibly slow and silent. Beyond the march of the Gardens, the waters of the Dragon’s Tear were stirred by a wayward evening wind, lashing in earnest the rocks of the Reach they had only recently lapped so lazily. The column of Fiannar had long departed and were half a day’s march to the south, making camp somewhere beneath the stony regard of the Grey Ladies.
“Do you think he knows we are here?” the Heiress to the House of Mirmaddon whispered warily into deep green gloaming of the Gardens.
Into her mind came the reply, Well, he will if you keep speaking aloud, Tee-tee.
Tielle frowned, her eyes gleaming in the gloom. Teller of the Tale, but you can be obnoxious, little brother!
Silence within silence, and then a pleasant shiver shook the daughter of Teillerian as she felt a smile that was not her own slide soothingly across her soul.
Nevertheless, How long must we remain here? she asked somewhat glumly.
As long as it takes, Tee.
The young Heiress scowled, watching wordlessly as dusk swiftly devolved into the more deeply defined darkness of new night. She settled back into herself, willing a waxing weariness away from her mind and muscles. Reluctantly, and with more than a little resentment, she resigned herself to her vigil once more.
Hours passed. The moon rose and rode the road of eons. Stars sailed across the skies of eternity.
And Tielle waited, waited, waited.
For as long as it took.
The beast cleaved through the benighted depths of the Dragon’s Tear like a wide-winged raptor soaring across northern night skies. Powerful flattened forelimbs propelled the creature through the algid blackness of the lake with a primal grace, scaled flippers and wicked scimitar-like claws relentlessly ripping the water, compelled by a single-minded urgency that only a cold reptilian brain could conceive and sustain.
As the shore drew near, the lakebed rose, and the creature slowed its approach. The beast found purchase on the stone-strewn bottom and scrambled upwards, its flat plastron scraping, disturbing the deposition, stirring up clouds of sediment, huge claws raking and rending, dislodging great chunks of rock and sending them hurtling into the dark water behind. Up it rose, up and out, extending its long serpentine neck until its tremendous triangular head broke the surface, cataracts of lakewater cascading from its vast beak-like jaws.
Chelydra. Dragon turtle.
Tiny round eyes rolled forward and focused myopically upon the man crouched mere inches before the beast’s slitted nostrils.
The man withdrew his hand from the water, settled back on his haunches. His fingers, shriveled like long thin prunes from prolonged immersion, ached for the day’s effort.
You were long in coming, Ha-Kame, very long, thought the man in black. Beads of water dripped from his fingertips. It is fortuitous that I, like you, am long-lived, and as such possess the patience to suffer such a delay.
The dragon turtle, of course, said nothing.
The man in black rose smoothly to his feet, pulled a snugly-fitting glove over his chilled appendage, then placed the flat of his palm upon the broad scaly plane between the chelydra’s eyes and nostrils.
I will forgive your tardiness, Ha-Kame. I have seen the bones of your mate scattered on the eastern shore of the Horn, and I know that you are the last of your kind. You have earned my understanding. You deserve my indulgence. You will bear us, no?
The dragon turtle snorted a lungful of bitterly cold damp air into the darkness as its huge ridged carapace emerged from the Tear. Terrible serrated jaws fell open slowly, then crashed together more swiftly than the eye could follow. The sound was as sudden and as strident as a thunderclap.
The man in black did not so much as flinch.
I will consider that an answer in the affirmative.
Somewhere in the blackness of the night at the man’s back, a mor-marran mare whinnied and stamped her doubt.
The man removed his hand from the chelydra’s head, sighed a billowing stream of silvery breathmist through his scarf into the star-studded night over the Dragon’s Tear.
Whenever you are ready, Ha-Kame, last of the great dragon turtles.
Unhurriedly, cumbersomely, the gigantic reptile lumbered about, gradually presenting its great grooved carapace to the man.
“Come now, Kuroma,” the man in black called aloud to the utter darkness behind him, his voice muffled only slightly by his head-wrapping. “It is time, no?”
The mor-marran did not immediately respond.
The man’s hands flitted deftly over his arsenal of weaponry, reflexively inspecting the intricate ties and straps and clasps. He patiently awaited another dubious nicker from the deeps of the night, then leapt lithely, gracefully upon the back of the leviathan’s massive shell. There he crouched, a blackness in the black, a blotch in the darkness, narrowed eyes staring out across the wind-warped mirror of the Dragon’s Tear.
Toward the Reach.
Scratching, scratching, scratching. Repeatedly, relentlessly. Striving in utter darkness, tiny claws scrabbling the supple concave walls of an ovoid prison, driven by instinct, by dogged desire, by natural need.
Escape.
Escape and live. Or remain and die.
Elongated neck stretching in the cloying, humid heat. Snout pressed hard to the curved wall, muscles bunching beneath scaled skin. Broad head pushing outward, grinding, grating, bony cranial protuberance boring in the black. Persistently, unremittingly. Ripping a tiny rent in the wall.
Rest now. Recuperate. Recover.
Persevere!
Head thrusting through the ruined wall, flattened forelimbs following. Cool silica falling, flowing, filling the broken prison even as short hind limbs push free. Struggling upwards, determined, desperately clawing and clambering through the loose sand, striving for the surface.
Rest again. Breathe. Tiny air pockets feeding little lungs.
Persist!
Bursting into the star-silvered night. Limbs stinging for the exertion. The air cold, shocking the system, body temperature dropping, adjusting, adapting quickly. Blinking sand from both sets of eyelids. Sensing more than seeing brothers and sisters before and behind and to both sides. Dozens of them. All liberated, all free.
Knowing innately what must be done: Follow the light.
Follow the light to the water.
The piercing screech of a nighthawk as it plummets down, promising death.
Run now! Run to the light! Run fast! Fast, fast, fast! Run, run, run!
Madly scrambling over the sandy strand, clambering around clumps of thorny reeds, charging across the star-polished rock. Death shrieking as nighthawks plunge and plunder and pillage the kin. The light brightening, whitening. Blessed moonsheen dancing on water. So near now, s
o very near!
Tumbling into the welcoming waters of the lake a mere instant before the lethal clasp of cruel accipitrine talons can close.
Survive!
Tossed by wind-whipped waves, flattened forelimbs flapping like wild wings in the water, catching a current, swimming alongside seventeen other surviving sons and daughters of ancient Ha-kame, diving down, down into the sanctum of the deep, down into the dark.
An entire species spared extinction.
Because a boy with a stick had stirred the sand.
3
DOOMFALL
“How do we fight this thing, Master?
This thing we cannot even see?”
“We simply close our eyes.”
Taken from Dialogues of the Dragon Sword, as recorded by Rekishiya, Imperial Historian of Tur
“This is not good ground, Gren,” proclaimed Ev lin Dar.
Gren del Mor scowled, his scaly saurian tattoo bunching belligerently in his brows. Well-worn reins crunched in his bony fists.
“Shit, Ev…I can’t even see the ground.”
The two Black Shields of the Bloodspawn sat astride horrific mar rendera atop a stone-littered hummock some distance south of the great gash in the earth called Doomfall. The sun had risen red and rotten, sending sour scarlet shadows to swirl over the warriors’ polished armour even as slicks of oily blood might swim on shining black water. Above them, limp and flaccid, the silver-and-copper cross of the Killer Krux dangled in the dawn like a dead thing.
“Even the wind flees this place.”
“The wind is smarter than we are, Ev,” grumbled Gren del Mor, one hand reaching up to examine the impressive conical structure of his hair. He painstakingly pressed a wayward strand back into place. “Smarter and far more discriminating about where it does and does not go.”
“You speak as though we have a choice, Gren.”
Gren del Mor grinned, his lips peeling back to reveal brilliant white teeth that had long before been fastidiously filed, buffed, sharpened to needle-points.
“You are beginning to sound like me, my delectable friend.”
“Regrettably so, Gren,” frowned Ev lin Dar, her tattooed tigress whiskers prickling. The darkened expression did nothing to diminish her beauty. “I am spending entirely too much time in your scintillating company. I must remedy that.”
Gren del Mor cast his white gaze down upon the wretched place called Doomfall. Fog churned in the crevasse, a whorling morass of mist, tenebrous tendrils slinking snakily up the sheer terminus of the Westwall and the hoary horror of the Dragon’s Head. Serpents of smoke floated on wings of ash. Vapours hissed from the guts of the earth.
“This…this Doomfall and its denizens could very well remedy it for you, Ev.”
Ev lin Dar sniffed. However accustomed she may have been to the perpetually pessimistic nature of her companion, his wary words still sent a sudden shiver soubresauting along her spine. The Black Shield had not consciously considered that her friend could be killed in the coming conflict. Nor had she speculated that she might herself be slain. But then, ’Spawn warriors never contemplated such things, save a handful of unnaturally cynical souls among their number – and Gren del Mor was their crowned king of doom and gloom.
“The ground well favours the Daradur, Gren, I will give you that,” acknowledged Ev lin Dar, reluctant to ponder any deaths but those of the Bloodspawn’s foes. “Assuming they can see in that stuff.”
“I would definitely advise against wagering otherwise, Ev,” Gren del Mor grumbled. His render coughed in seeming concurrence, tore at the stony earth with its talons. “But I don’t think those damnable rock trolls give much thought to good ground and bad. I doubt they care one whit where they engage their enemies. They only awaited us here because it was brain-dead obvious that here was where we were headed.”
“But Doomfall was not the Bloodspawn’s original destination.”
Gren del Mor grimaced, a squamous scrunching of his already pinched features.
“I meant the royal ‘us’, Ev. The Blood King’s army. This part of it, anyway. Try to keep up, woman.” But before his friend could raise a clenched fist or spit spite in his general direction, he furthered, “And just as those awful little trolls down there don’t care where they fight us – the royal ‘us’, remember – likewise they don’t give two fat black render shits who they fight.”
Ev lin Dar appeared not to have heard him. Her long-fingered hands remained flat upon her sleekly muscled thighs, and no virtual venom leaked from her lovely lips. The beautiful Black Shield of the Bloodspawn peered down upon Doomfall, upon that dark divide between the cloven cliff of the Westwall and the monstrous mist-blurred apparition of the Dragon’s Head. The fogs in that vacuous void seethed and rolled in wayward waves of black and graduations of grey, milling and moiling, instilling in her a perception of nothingness, nihility, of… not being.
Of death.
Ev lin Dar shuddered away a sudden assault of vertigo. Her nails dug deep rows of half-moons into the supple skin of her thighs.
Within a stone’s throw of the most easterly reach of the roil’s anguine tentacles were formed the unenviable front lines of the Blood King’s army. Unmen for the most part, tribes and clans from the Hebbingore and Mroch Durva, loosely assembled, lightly armed, poorly armoured. Sacrificial skirmishers. Expendables. They moved slowly, listlessly, mechanically, substantiating the oft-expressed notion among the Bloodspawn that there is little to differentiate between the living dead and dead men living.
But behind these were the finest of the Blood King’s forces. Squares upon squares of highly trained and well-equipped Unmannish mercenaries from Waldard, great wedges of armoured Urkroks, masses of abominable half-Urks, row after row of towering Graniants. Elite units, all. And behind them, aback champing mar rendera, six long lines of Bloodspawn gleaming like great black serpents basking in the shrunken sun.
In the wake of the brief bout of vertigo came a clammy cold to Ev lin Dar’s mind. Blood welled beneath the nails pressing into her thighs.
And she involuntarily whispered: “Why?”
Hearing her, Gren del Mor barked a comradely contemptuous laugh. The mar render beneath him answered in kind.
“No, I don’t think the trolls give much thought to why they fight, either, Ev.”
But that was not at all what she meant.
“Why?”
The Halflord’s voice was soft and susurrant, more the murmur of a hushed mistral than the mutter of a man.
“I cannot say, Kor ben Dor,” replied Umbar’hal, the witchdoctor’s own voice cracked and broken by age and fatigue. The skull fetishes woven into the Graniant’s greenish hair clacked hollowly as he shook his head. “Who can understand the motives of such a creature?”
The air in the tent was warm and cloying, in sharp contrast to the distinct chalky chill of the dawn beyond the sealed hide flaps. A single lamp burned oil that had been drawn from the blubber of some anonymous abominable beast, discharging greasy yellow light, greasier black smoke, and a pungent unsavory scent that was only barely bearable.
“I was not seeking an answer to the question, shaman.”
“And I did not provide one, Halflord.”
“Noted.”
The Prince of the Bloodspawn sat clad in full battledress upon his cot, his shoulders hunched, corded thighs glistening with sweat, his steely-muscled forearms upon his knees, massive hands hanging loosely. His impressive black hair-wings were folded closed upon their intricate hinges, but a few errant strands of hair dangled before his bright white eyes like gleaming filaments of midnight.
“The blutsauger will see them all destroyed, shaman,” the Halflord said softly, genuine sorrow underscoring his words. “The creature recks little of life and less of death.”
“Nothing of either, I would venture, Kor ben Dor.”
The Prince grunted, rolled one shoulder, then the other. “A safe venture, that, Umbar’hal.”
“The old take what c
omfort they can in safety, Halflord.”
“The old should risk more, then, for they have already lived. But they do not. Instead, they enlist, enslave, enchant the young do their killing and dying for them. And unfortunately, in the estimation of the blutsauger, we are all of us young.”
A strange expression, part grin, part grimace, distorted the Graniantish witchdoctor’s wan and wizened features. One withered hand reached for the desiccated dragon’s heart at his sunken chest. His voice rasped from him like the breath of a dying man.
“Combatants kill in war, Kor ben Dor. Combatants die in war. Friend and foe, both. This is what war is all about. It has always been so. And so it shall ever be.”
The Prince of the Bloodspawn rose to his feet. Latent power swelled in the greasy halflight of the tent, painting the shadows with purpose as potent as passion. He hefted his monstrous mace, resting the haft on one wide shoulder.
“War is not about killing and dying, Umbar’hal.”
“No?”
“No.”
The witchdoctor met the Halflord’s gaze for a moment, white on white, snow on ivory. He is different. He has not been the same since the night of the Fiannian attack upon the bivouac. And he has not requested more… therapy. Something has changed. Something… happened… that night. A sigh rattled from the Graniant’s breast, and he looked away.
“Your experience in the matter far surpasses mine, Kor ben Dor, as does your understanding.”
“Do not mewl, Umbar’hal.” The beast-oil lamp cast an ochre cloud across the Halflord’s faceted features through which his eyes glowed like two wide white moons. “It does not become you.”
Despite his superior height, the witchdoctor visibly shrank before the imposing presence of the Prince. He clasped his dragon’s heart as a crippled man might clutch a crutch.
“I was not aware I was doing so, Halflord. Long did I toil in the service of Arn’badt, King of the Giants, and he was a most cruel master. Forgive me if I retain some unseemly habits from those darkest of years. You have released me from the tyrant, but the legacy of his malice remains in my soul.”