by Sean Rodden
“The time has come, my friends, for us to part ways.”
Eldurion said nothing.
Rundul frowned. “The time – what? Now?”
Yllufarr nodded gravely. “Mine was never to be with you at the end of this noble endeavour, but only to ensure that you be provided the opportunity to perform your worthy deeds.” He lowered his head. “I have yet to accomplish this.”
“You mean to – ”
“Stand here, yes. A Blood Mage comes, one most ancient and powerful, and with him two Dead Swords and scores of Blades.” The Sun Lord’s eyes wandered over the asperous stone of the opening. “But you need give them no further thought. I will hold them here. None shall pass.”
“I could collapse this tunnel behind us, and – ”
“That would not even slow this foe, friend Rundul.”
“Prince – ”
“It is decided, Stone Lord. I will entertain no objection. We must let this be the Teller’s tale to tell. That is all. I fare you both well.”
And with neither further word nor gesture, the Prince of the Neverborn brushed past his two companions, drawing forth gold-black Canneas as he went. He strode back out onto the bridge, Coldwhisper in one hand and Nightsong in the other. Both weapons hissed sinisterly, serpentine suggestions of smoke seeping from their steel. And about their weilder was the peal of bells, discordant and dissonant, the blood-crusted chimes of doom beckoning the dead to die once more.
Eldurion touched the Darad’s arm. Said nothing. There was nothing to be said.
Growling, Rundul of Axar turned away from the Fian’s hand and the black back of the Ath, and led on.
The Blood Mage paused in the opening of the tunnel. Pursing its salacious lips, it gazed out upon the vast span of stone. Its slightly slanted eyes flashed and flared, mirroring the red radiance cast upward by the river of fire. The heel of its scepter tapped rhythmically upon the rock floor, keeping time with a melody that only Master General Dijin Amora could hear.
“I did not expect to see you here,” it said to the figure on the bridge. “But then, I have forgotten how it feels to anticipate things. That being so, you would think I exist in a state of perpetual surprise, would you not?”
Its audient did not respond.
“Nonetheless, I am never surprised.” Dijin Amora skated onto the span. “Perhaps I am overly bored. Immortality will do that to a fellow. Or to a lady. Whichever. When one subsists without stimulation long enough everything becomes exceedingly dull and ordinary, and the mundane simply does not entertain. Tell me, how does one such as yourself suffer it so?”
The figure on the bridge remained silent, as still as a statue, impassive, indifferent, yet spectacular nevertheless. Black and gold silks streamed about his tall strapping frame, like so many battle banners awash on waves of heaving heat. His star-white armour shone. The septenary suns upon his breastplate burned. A great antlered helm rested upon his head, splendid and regal, and from within its visor shone the eeriest eyes, pools of pale power, diamonds formed of liquescent moonlight. In his hands, eldritch weapons crackled with dark energy.
Dijin Amore glided like scarlet smoke along the stone causeway, stopping within a few strides of the striking figure. Behind the Blood Mage, the pair of Dead Swords appeared in the mouth of the tunnel, two Scabbards of Blades assembled at their backs.
“I suppose,” the creature smiled, its golden fangs glinting, “this is where you tell me that I shall not pass.”
The Sun Lord’s lips curled beneath the faceplate of his helm. Canneas and Sibryddir hummed in his hands. With subtle flicks of his mind, he sent one final missive to each of his flying friends. And then, in an obscure encomium for a fallen but most fearsome foe, he addressed the Master General –
“The only words I offer thee, thou most ignoble of undead, are a whisper and a song.”
Eldurion heard a whisper as he sprinted down the passage.
Forgive.
It was only a single word, so very soft, partway between a suggestion and a plea, but it carried the force of a thousand imperatives. And the Fian knew whom he must forgive, knew the man’s name, knew him better than he did all others, living, dead or otherwise. But forgiveness was so hard, so very hard, and the man in question so very undeserving.
Nevertheless, refusing the behest of a Sun Lord was a thing more difficult still.
Tossing aside his naked sword, the grim grey Fian reached for the golden blade bundled at his back. And in that moment, as his callused hand curled about the haft of that legendary brand, Eldurion, son of Alvarion the First and brother to Amarien the Lost, found the long-forbidden permission to finally forgive himself.
Run!
The command battered the back of Rundul’s brain like the spiked ball of a flail, adamant and insistent, sending fire to his legs and red hot fury to his heart.
Urth ru Glir! Not this again!
He was not running from battle, but to it. Why, then, the nagging vociferation of guilt and shame? Why the –
But the Darad then comprehended that the voice was not his own, not this time, and that it came not from within but from without. And there was a certain savage sneer to its tone, a dark and biting humour, twisted, almost malicious in nature, the kind that only comrades in arms can truly know and appreciate.
A jest, then. And, he grudgingly admitted, quite a good one.
But no self-respecting Captain of the mara Waratur would ever grant a pompous Ath the laurel of the last laugh.
And so roaring with mirth, Rundul ran on.
14
BLOOD AND RAIN
“I embrace this sweet noble death – free unto the last!
Ever slave to nothing, save the cause of Liberty.”
Defurien, First Lord of the Fiannar
The Horse Masters of Rheln had at least thirty different words for rain. The fat globules that fell in summer, the windborne blades that sliced autumn to shreds, the life-bringing kiss of spring showers – each had its own name, its own nature, its own sentient spirit. But the Rhelmen had no term for the rain that fell on that night of woe and war – none, at least, that had aught to do with precipitation. They would, however, mutter a phrase beneath their breaths, more a prayer than anything else, when such rain crashed so cruelly from the sky.
Ommu! Ommu thog’otta, tohonta shrakkas!
Away! Away with you, world slayer!
But Left Tenant Runningwolf stowed all supplications and did not waste his words, for he knew that no entreaty would save the land from the rain that fell that night. All the Sorrows of the Brave were become manifest, screaming upon the bucking backs of the Four Winds, assailing Lindannan with millions upon millions of shivering spears. Peril, Rage, War, Death – blustering, brawling, colliding in a tumult of roaring fury, a whirling maelstrom of doom and destruction. The black firmament pressed low upon the earth, pushing down, its distended belly ripped open, gutted, and the cataracts that poured forth were as those reserved for the making or breaking of worlds.
Nevertheless, not a single sliver of rain reached the Rhelman. Indeed, the tempest did not even know he was there.
Runningwolf rode the edge of the Evvanin, the very fringe of the halfworld between the Three Earths and the Light, flying along the ambiguous border that separated being from not being, the Tale from the Untold. Beneath him the equine wonder of Eveningwind plunged like a comet through a cosmos of vague shapes and kaleidoscopic colour. And in her white wake an army of ghosts, a tidal surge of spectral revenants, a blur of blue and bronze come to storm the abandoned beaches of Never and Evermore.
We approach, Abbawontandontas, came the ethereal voice of the Spirit Horse into the hollows of the Rhelman’s soul. I am awake to the World, awake and aware, alert to things beyond the veil of Eilla Evvanin. I can smell the rain. I can taste the terror. And the blood of thousands splashes into my eyes.
Runningwolf blinked slowly, dispassionately, and returned his recurved bow to one shoulder, then reached for the object s
lung across the other – a silver war horn, silent and shining, the bellows of battle awaiting wind.
The glorious elliam shouted thunder, and like a bolt of white lightning she and her rider burst from the Evvanin onto the deluged grasses of the Northern Plains.
And the Ghost Brigade of deathless legend followed.
War is a vile thing.
A war fought in the black heart of night is worse.
And a night war in the cold driving rain is sheer hell.
The Seven Hills were beleaguered by darkness, besieged by storming heavens, beset by iron and fury and manic bloodlust. The wind whipped, the rain lashed, the twain flailing at one and all with an impartial zeal for pain. But even beneath this terrible tumult the army of the Blood King was relentless. And the defenders of Eryn Ruil remained staunch and unyielding. Rain and steel stabbed and sliced. Throats and thunder roared. Sorcery flared, lightning shredded the sky and impaled the wounded earth. The grasses were trodden into a sludge of mud and blood and crushed corpses.
And the world wailed with anguish, in agony, but none heard, none heeded.
And no one seemed to care.
The tribes of Unmen fought with a primal rage, as though their very instinct for survival had been taken and tormented, battered and broken and remade into a corrupted compulsion to kill. Kill or die! Kill or die! And, as it happened, that crazed conviction was not at all erroneous. Some killed. More died. But in the unending bedlam of battle, their numbers never seemed to diminish.
Bands of Urkroks quickly found that the preservation of their wedge-shaped formations in the rain-pummeled night upon blood-trammeled mud against the ceaseless slash and flash of cold northern steel was an impossible thing. Frustrated and infuriated beyond the last remnant of reason, they abandoned all attempts at order in favour of absolute chaos, the all for one mantra swiftly deteriorating to one for none save his or her self. And this was a terrifying return to their true primeval power, for the greatest peril of the rock ogres was in their mindless froth-mawed ferocity, in the frenzied hammering of their viciously spiked clubs, the eardrum-bursting bawls of rage, the armour-crunching brutality of their unbound brawn.
Graniants as tall as trees waded through the mayhem of battle, bellowing into the hammering rain, eyes steaming with white fire. Purposefully avoiding the lines of stalwart Deathward warriors, they wandered amok, wreaking havoc and bringing slaughter. Clad in crude yet effective granite armour, and wielding sword-like weapons fashioned of great stone shards, they marauded unopposed, battering rank after rank of Rothmen into ruin, mercilessly smashing knots of Nothirings. Eventually they stumbled upon isolated pockets of fierce Fiannar or were brought to bay by Daradur with brutal wrath in their hearts – and only then were the stone giants taken down, one by one, augmenting with their own corpses the corporeal wreckage they had so ruthlessly wrought.
Legions of half-Urks concentrated their assault upon the most northerly of the three grassy rises and on the maple-crowned hill that reared over the River Ruil. These were savage yet clever creatures, for the greater part, bred through ill means for increased strength, courage, agility, intellect and pure unadulterated evil. The very best among them were a match for most individual fighters of the Fiannar, though none of their number could so much as cast a shadow upon the Deathward elite. But it was neither warders the Grey Watch nor warriors of the Host of Arrenhoth that confronted the half-Urks on the storm-pounded muck before the slopes of Lar Thurrad. And a different opponent entirely awaited the fiends in nightbound heart of the torrent-ravaged Maples.
The rains rapped against the hood of Varonin’s oilskin like a thousand little fists followed by a thousand more and a thousand more again. The veteran warrior could hear naught beyond the clamour of battle and pealing rage of the storm. His ears, it seemed, were so drowned in sound that they were become saturated, numb to the noise, essentially deafened. He leaned in toward the tall warrior to his immediate left and shouted against the din, barely able to discern his own voice.
“Spedamon sends word that the enemy now moves upon the Maples!” Water cascaded from the rim of the Marshal’s cowl in unbroken streams. “How the Signaller sees this, I cannot say, but I have no cause to doubt him! Half-Urks, he says! Six, perhaps seven bands! My Lord, they are overmany!”
The Lord of the Fiannar looked to the north, but of course saw only vague blurs of battle rendered of flesh and rain and painted in differing pitches of black. Sporadic lashes of lightning blasted both the heavens and the earth, casting evanescent crests of blinding flame over the canopy of the Maples – but nothing of what transpired within those woods was at all visible, and any telltale sound that may have emanated was claimed and consumed by the ravenous clangour of war.
“We can do nothing for that now, Marshal,” came Alvarion’s calm reply, his voice easily perceived though not even raised, a shard of steel spearing both din and dark. “Nothing but place our faith in the Lord of Galledine.”
“Nay, nephew,” called Taresse from her position at the Lord’s other shoulder. “Not faith. Confidence. Teraras and the warokka are well rested and eager, and in them disparate hungers howl for satiation. Though the price may be dear, the war wolves of the North will glut themselves this night.”
Lord Alvarion peered through the slashing rain upon his uncle’s wife. The woman was desperately drenched, her hair plastered to her head, stray strands pasted across her brow and cheeks like slim black snakes clinging to soaked stone. Her eyes were slits of cold silver, the press of her lips thin and grim. The savage attentions of the storm washed blood from a dozen wounds, some old, others new, and the mud about her boots was tinged crimson when remote bursts of sorcery or fulguration touched there. War and rain pounded and sliced at her, and her chest heaved with fatigue, yet Taresse stood like a monolith, upright and unyielding, harder than the nastily notched steel of the sword in her hand. This, the Lord recognized, was the defining image of the woman with whom stern Eldurion had fallen in love – and she had never looked more beautiful.
“As you say, uncle-wife.” Findroth burned low and cold as would a rage restrained and eager to erupt; rain hissed and steamed away from the flame, casting Lord Alvarion in a ghostly golden fog. A group of Graniants lumbered near. “The fray seems to have found us again, my friends. Raise your eyes and uplift your hearts. There is little rest for the weary but overmuch for the dead, and I have never been more delighted to be so tired.”
Thousands of indistinct figures danced in the black rain before Lar Theas. There was no rhythm or cadence to the dance, neither grace nor elegance, but only the macabre rise and fall of rain-slicked steel and the slumping of the slain to the drowned earth. Unmen from Ugharo and the Hebbingore, hulking Urkroks from the Blackbones, towering stone giants from under Earthfall. And opposing them, the great Roths of the North and the mighty Host of Arrenhoth. Large clusters of combatants clashed here, smaller groups struggled there, all horridly harried and bedraggled, wights of war flailing away in the wet and the dark, and little to distinguish the fair from the foul.
Gornannon spat his sodden cheroot against the rain and reached with his right hand into a pocket of his oilskin for a reasonably dry replacement. His spear twirled in his left hand, the metal-wrapped butt upending an Unman a shorn heartbeat before the long leaf-shaped head drove into the stretched maw of a raging Urkrok. Placing the fresh cheroot between clenched teeth, Gornannon casually ducked a wildly swung maul as an arrow sailed a mere finger’s breadth above his head to skewer the skull of the weapon’s wielder. As the half-Urk fell, the Fian tore the arrow from the fiend’s eye, tossed it behind him to where Sandarre stood, then immediately dropped again as his comrade’s bow sang another song of death.
“You could have brought more arrows, woman!” Gornannon shouted into the storm. “I failed to see where that one went!”
“It’s in that Unman!” Sandarre called back. “Over there! No, not that one, the dead one!”
Muttering to himself and to any battlefi
eld phantom that might have attended, the determined Fian slashed and splashed his way through foes and pools of gory mud to another Unmannish corpse, leaned down, turned the blood-sopped form over.
No arrow.
“Not that dead one, the other dead one!”
Gornannon groaned. Teller’s Tongue, it was going to be a long, long night.
Tulnarron’s greatsword hewed through rain and armour and flesh with equal ease, eerily ashine in the drenched darkness, a gleaming streak of reddened steel ripping the night to tatters. He stood stalwart and steadfast, holding his ground against each and every foe that came against him, and heaps of the hapless slain rose in a ring about him like the rounded walls of castle ruins. And then the enemy ceased to come. So Tulnarron wandered the sodden killing field, hewing a path of ruin, destroying all opponents who lacked sufficient fear or wisdom to fly before his wrath, until he found another adequate patch of wretched earth upon which to raise a tower of the dead. But whether he stood or strode, the Master of the House of Eccuron remained a solitary titan of war, and none could resist him.
Solitary, yes. For Tulnarron was alone.
And he had been so since the moment he had understood that the Mistress of his House was dead.
The Master did not possess his wife’s sight, nor her intuition, nor even her keen and active intellect. But there did dwell a certain sensitivity, a bestial instinct, deep and dormant within him. Sometime after midday, when the lightest blotch of dark grey sky had rolled away westward, this latent insight had unfolded like an assassin’s rose, blossoming bleak and black. Tulnarron had stumbled as though he been physically struck. His breath fled his lungs, and his heart thundered to a sudden stop. A coldness carved a hole in his breast, a void wherein abided only absence, the drear and dread desolation of extreme loss; his very soul was hollowed and left utterly empty.
Sarrane?
The Master and Mistress of the House of Eccuron had never been particularly close, not after the fashion of Alvarion and Cerriste, nor even of hard-hearted Taresse and dour Eldurion. And during the last several years the couple had become estranged. Not for lack of love or respect, nor even for insufficient desire. Their lives, their duties as Warden of the East and Seer to the Lord of the Fiannar, were simply too far removed. Too… remote. Nevertheless, this did not diminish Tulnarron’s devastating sense of loss. A loss which he had shared with no one – not Sandarre, not cheroot-chewing Gornannon, not even his magnificent Lord – for the killing fields were already teeming with the husks of hollow men.