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

by Sean Rodden

  “Oh, this will not do!” hissed the scrawny old warrior. “Not do! Not at all!”

  And with an alacrity belying his age and apparent physical condition, the withered Watcher veritably flew over the wall of the slain and vanished into the storm.

  Seeking a song.

  Sennadan plunged his sword between crudely wrought iron scales and into the midriff of an Urkrok, then ripped the sharpened edge of his shield across the fiend’s throat. He twisted his blade, sliding it back and out, and stepped lithely aside as the ogre collapsed. The young Master squinted into the storm, and a look of sheer horror blanched his rain-numbed features. A great gap had opened in the seething mass of the enemy into which hundreds, thousands of kill-crazed Northmen had charged, impulsively following their disturbed little priest.

  “What are the fools doing?” Janne yelled somewhere to Sennadan’s left. “Dragonsbane! Stop them, blast you! They will destroy us all!”

  But Ingvar was either beyond earshot or past hearing, and remained oblivious to the very real and imminent peril posed by his Celebrant’s rashness. The Mad Earl’s sword rose and fell, his battle-axe whirled, and he bellowed and laughed – and more and more Nothirings pitched headlong into the breach, predators drawn by the pathetic whines of wounded prey, fury made feral by the intoxicating scent of hot blood on the wind.

  Sennadan fought his way to Janne’s shoulder. Both Deathward warriors were bloodied, chests heaving, eyes more than a little wild.

  “You seem a little lost, Senn.”

  “I was for a while. The battle dragged me away, but I found my way back. I dropped my dirric, though. Should you happen across it – ”

  “I will be sure to claim it for my own.”

  The son of Berradan grinned, and gestured to the heaving blackness where the Nothirings bawled and brawled like bruins of war.

  “What do you think of your barbarian beauty now, Jay-Jay?”

  “I never claimed to be a good judge of men, Senn,” the Mistress of the House of Serra-Collean growled. Rain sluiced down her cheeks like snakes made of tears. “Probably a boon to our folk that I have remained unwed. But enough of that. We must not permit the enemy to pinch off the hole! The Northmen will be annihilated!”

  “Go to the Earl, Janne! Force him to hear you! I will gather Durhammon and Teillerian, and we will hold the breach open for as long as we are able! Go now!”

  And the Master and Mistress banged their shields together, Silver Star on White Swan, then sprinted away in different directions.

  Neither saw the other again.

  “Where? Where, Gorn? Where did he say to look?”

  “Over here!” called Gornannon as he vaulted the wall of enemy carcasses. And then immediately wailed, “Oh, Teller! No! No! No!”

  Sandarre alighted beside her stricken companion. She brushed him rather roughly aside, then crouched and leaned close over the inert form of the Master. Rain hammered off her hood and hunched back, drumming her down into the soggy ground, hungry mud sucking ravenously at her boots. She slipped off her sodden gloves, her lithe hands exploring the gashes, both greater and lesser, in Tulnarron’s body.

  “Does he live?” yelled Gornannon as the sounds of war surged nearer. There was a bleak whinge at the edge of his voice, a thin harsh sound beyond sorrow, deeper than loss – the muted scream of the futility that comes of a profound inability to intervene. “Does he… Sandarre, is he gone?”

  “He does not live.” Sandarre’s words slid like blades of ice into the defenseless back of forlorn hope. And then smoothly withdrew. “Nor is he entirely gone.”

  Frantic and furious battle erupted all around their position, encroaching, threatening to overrun their precarious station of relative safety behind the bulwark of dead enemies. A solitary Fian, so spare and lean as to be almost skeletal, was combatting a horde of foes, ducking and darting, seeming to entirely disappear at whiles, and beyond the barricade the flooded field was sprouting random mounds of soaked dead. But the Fian fought alone, and desperately, and the sound of the struggle was drawing more and more of the enemy.

  Sandarre looked up, her eyes wide and dark, but improbably dry. “I can… I might.” A lonesome breath, a prayer for air, for life – and an offer of death. “Gorn, I need time. Please. Give me… give me time.”

  Gornannon chomped down on his unlit cheroot. No longer feeling destitute and shorn of hope, of purpose, a rush of wrath and renewed strength fortified his limbs, his warrior heart, his very soul. His spear whirled eagerly in his hard hands.

  “I can do that.”

  And Gornannon of the House of Eccuron sailed over the wall into a thrashing sea of savagery and slaughter.

  Ingvar saw naught save torrents of blood and red rain, and the only thing distinguishing the one from the other was the direction of the deluge. The berserker psychosis had claimed him, taken his soul and lashed it raw with razor-edged whips of flame. His mind was reduced to a mere mechanism of rudimentary instinct, reminding his heart to beat, his lungs to breathe, and compelling the rest of him to do nothing but kill.

  The Mistress of the House of Serra-Collean ducked a wildly swung club and plunged her sword into the unprotected groin of a Graniant, then dodged as the creature fell, the honed edge of her shield coming down in a lethal arc upon the foe’s exposed nuque, nearly severing the head from the body. Janne rolled back and away in the muck to avoid a crude hacking blade, rose and saw the Mad Earl chop her new assailant down under a furious flurry of axe-blows, then watched in open-mouthed horror as the Nothiring impaled the unfortunate Unman on cruel northern steel and tore the fiend’s throat out with his teeth.

  “Ingvar! Hold! Stay this madness!”

  The Mad Earl spat out a chunk of flesh and grinned at Janne. But there was no joy in the expression, nothing rational, no hint of humanity. The Dragonsbane’s countenance was savagely contorted and blemished, almost beyond recognition, and his eyes were wide and white and utterly ferocious. He stormed over toward the mud-covered Mistress, wading through a tide of blood, weapons raised.

  Janne hammered him hard in the face with her fist.

  Ingvar staggered, blinking repeatedly, his nose spouting blood, possibly broken.

  “Stand down, Northman. Come back to us. Your warriors need you.”

  The gigantic warrior shook his head, grunted, banged his skull with the pommel of his sword. For a moment he remained in a seeming noctambulous state, wavering where he stood, removed and unaware. His gaze then settled upon the Mistress, reeled into focus, shedding grades of red in favour of shades of black. Janne pointed with her sword. “Look!”

  Ingvar looked, and an altogether different anger darkened his mien. Nearly all his Nothirings had rushed into the gap as the enemy pulled aside – thousands of men, seeking slaughter and glory on the edge of an axe, confident of the brute animal strength released in them by their blood-blind battle fury.

  “Thyr’s bloated balls of thunder! What is that fool doing?

  “Your priest will see them all dead, Dragonsbane.”

  “Not if I see the bastard dead first, Mistress Thyrkin!”

  Hundreds of harried and weary Deathward warriors appeared in the rain-pummeled dark, grim men and women, grave of intent and purpose. They stood tall and unbowed. Their eyes were cold, their lips deathly pale. Not one among them was without wound. Above them, drenched and tattered banners depicting stars and swans and feathers yet defied the night, the storm, the war.

  “We will hold the gap open as long as we are able, Northman!” Mistress Janne yelled. “Go, Dragonsbane! Go! Bring them back… before all is lost!”

  The Mad Earl of Invarnoth bellowed like an enraged bull and broke into a run.

  But all was already lost.

  Sandarre sat in the mud, woefully dishevelled, assailed from without by the rampant tempest and the din of battle, beset by cold tears and colder fears within. Here was an agony she had never known, could not understand, against which she could not possibly contend. An anguish
she could neither confront nor refuse.

  Was this grief? But the Fiannar do not mourn.

  Despair, then?

  Yes. That… that we have known.

  The Fiann hugged Tulnarron’s flaccid arm to her bosom, pressing it against her glistening rillagh, holding his hand. The Master’s flesh had cast away its warmth, and the fingers intertwined with her own were limp and clammy. His eyes were fastened in a vast and vacant stare, the pupils dreadfully dilated, great black moons bereft of glow and gleam. His mouth was fixed agape, drinking rain.

  Were misery a place in time and space, then surely it was there on that battlefield, in that mire of death that night.

  But Sandarre was a Singer of the Fiannar. And even the most abject of miseries, even the darkest despair, can be confronted with a song.

  And refused.

  Sing, the reedy voice in the rain had begged of her. Sing for him. For you. For me. For all of us.

  Sandarre closed her eyes. Slowly, gracefully, she floated down into the depths of herself, gliding on the supernal wings of dreams, of heroic hope and, yes, undying love. One life for his, the withered voice had promised, and he will rise, if only for a while. And willing to die, to give her life for his, she gathered unto herself sweet power and Light, the essence of her soul, and she wove them into words, and the words into a melody, and the melody into a song. And then she rose again, bright and beautiful, and the song within her caressed her tongue, and her lips formed about it like the very kiss of Life itself.

  And she sang.

  The force of the backhanded slap sent Tilbeder flying through the rain. The emaciated priest landed on his back, splattering mud. He remained there, dazed, his brain aswirl with shadows and leaping lights, his thoughts scattered to the deepest darkest compartments of his inner night. Somewhere, at an atrabilious boundary of consciousness, or perhaps some other vague extremity, he sensed sharp and searing pain. Gradually, he regathered himself, regained himself, and even before his eyes served him rightly he summoned forth the god’s rage and sent it screaming into his chains.

  Toward his chains, rather – or at least toward the places that they should have been.

  The Celebrant’s sight whirled into focus. The long sections of linked steel were yet attached to his shackles, which in turn were still clamped to his scrawny wrists – but both arms had been severed below the elbows and kicked aside, and now twitched and flopped on the trampled grass like a pair of ill-fated fish.

  “Fly, priest,” commanded a voice that rumbled with the sound of Thyr’s own thunder. “I have yet to take your head. Leave this place before I do.”

  Tilbeder stared incredulously at the smoking stumps of his arms, the wounds fused closed, sealed and cauterized by the god’s power, but remaining raw and rare. Several yards away was Earl Ingvar, towering tall and terrible, his battle-axe in one hand, sword in the other, blades dripping blood and rain.

  “What… my jarl, what have you done?”

  “That which I should have done a long time ago, and now do overly late.” Bleeding from a broken nose, the Dragonsbane pointed with his sword toward an anomalous mass of the enemy. “Fly, fool! And take your greasy balls-sack of a god with you!”

  The Mad Earl advanced, and the wretched priest wisely and with appalling agility scurried off into the rain toward the undulant ranks of the Blood King’s army.

  Ingvar Dragonsbane never saw him again.

  Then, and for a time, the rain fell away, and the sounds of battle diminished to a dull and distant din. Upon both flanks and to the fore the Blood King’s army disengaged, pulling further and further from the rampaging Nothirings. A relative hush settled, the still that follows the storm. The mindless euphoria of killing swiftly deserted the Mad Earl’s huskarlar and hird, and the barbarians descended the blood-slicked slope of battle-madness, their eyes red and wild with memories of murder, their muscles quavering as hot wrath fled their hearts. A strange shivering tranquility crept into thousands of heaving chests and savage souls.

  The calm did not last long.

  There came a great flash of lightning and an instantaneous peal of thunder, and for a solitary ephemeral heartbeat the entire battleground was cast in false daylight. Some distance away, the front lines of Unmen and Urkroks had parted and peeled away completely, only to reveal another contingent of the Blood King’s host. Thousands upon thousands of great bearded barbarians, tall and broad, clad in drenched furs and colourfully painted chain mail, wielding axes and swords of much the same design as those of the Nothirings. And at their centre a titanic Prince grinning like a demon under the rain-ragged standard of the Stone Heart.

  “Wulfings!” screeched an anonymous voice. “Wulfings of Var!”

  And soon that single throat was the thunder of thousands.

  “Wulfings! Ustashnir! Wulfings of Var!”

  “Hold, Sons of Noth!” roared Ingvar Dragonsbane. “Hold! We withdraw! Hear me, Clan Kyet! We withdraw now! Now!! Now!!!”

  But the red rage of battle had already returned, and with it a generations-old hatred that knew no limitation and less restraint – and as a dreadfully ill-timed aftershock of tonitruous fury drowned all other sound in the world, the only thing the berserkers of Invarnoth heard was their revered Earl shouting –

  “ – now! Now!! Now!!!”

  And so the Northmen charged.

  Wave upon wave of enemies crashed against the thin lines of determined Deathward men and women that held the field before Lar Fannan. Swords streamed with slaughter, spears shivered, shields shuddered. Warriors roared in rage and elation, in exultation and pain. And time after time the Warders of the Grey Watch and the sons and daughters of the House of Defurien repelled the pounding flood of foes, like great stone cliffs refusing an endless siege of surging breakers.

  Behind this impassable bulwark of sinew and steel, the Lord of the Fiannar whispered the flames of Findroth low as he received a breathless runner from Lar Thurrad.

  The woman stood before her Lord, gathering her breath, serpents of rain sidewinding across the White Swan emblazoned on her dented shield. Her eyes glittering glassily, she willed an improbable calm upon her turbulent spirit. Bubbles of blood oozed from beneath her battered chain dress as she punched her rillagh with a tightly clenched fist.

  Alvarion tapped his chest. “Report, Avondele.”

  “Lord Alvarion,” the aged Fiann said levelly, with neither inflection nor emotion, “my Mistress sends you word of utmost woe, for you to do with what you will.”

  Alvarion stared. His eyes were cold and hard – his voice colder and harder still.

  “What word, Avondele?”

  “My Lord, we are undone. The Nothirings are annihilated. Master Durhammon is fallen, and young Sennadan is lost and presumed slain. My own Mistress is grievously hurt and will soon succumb to her wounds, if she has not already done so. Of our great captains only Teillerian remains whole and hale. The Fiannar of our four Houses number in the hundreds now, certainly less than half a thousand all told. Lord Alvarion, we are determined to hold them as long as we are able, but – ”

  And at last the Fiann’s voice faltered and failed her, and there was more than rain wetting her chiselled cheeks.

  In an act of most profound compassion, the Lord looked away.

  Then, “Permission to return to my company, Lord Alvarion.”

  The Lord of the Fiannar closed his eyes. Nodded. Heard the woman’s fist strike her breast. His own chest felt tight, constricted, on the brink of implosion. He raised his hand to return her salutation, to honour brave Avondele one final time, but he knew that she was already gone. Instead, he lowered his arm, called Findroth aflame in a crackling whoosh of white-gold fire, and reached for the war horn at his hip.

  And when he opened his eyes once more there was nothing in them save death.

  He swims in air, arms churning, legs scissor-kicking behind him. And then, having achieved sufficient momentum, he floats. But no, not in air as he supposed, for there is no a
ir, and he does not breathe. There is no sky above him, nor land below him. Indeed, there exists no above and no below whatsoever. No horizon, nothing before, and nothing behind. Nothing. Nothing at all. But only… him.

  And even he is not wholly there. He can no longer see, feel, sense his body. Pain flees. All wounds, all worries, all sorrows desert him. Peace comes, a strange and alien tranquility, so sweet, so serene. There is darkness here – not the objective darkness of the absence of light, but rather the subjective darkness of being before Light. The Edge of the Untold. Where nearly all souls eventually abide, because they are forgotten. And if one is forgotten, did one truly ever exist?

  His terrible pride should rail against his going unremembered. But it does not. For even pride dies in death. Indeed, pride is the first casualty when the war for survival, for life, is lost. Death is the great arbiter. Worms and bh’ritsi care not for a man’s wealth, a woman’s beauty, a warrior’s strength. So let them chew. For scavengers die too.

  Forget and be forgotten.

  Because nothing matters, and none of it means a damned thing.

  But it does matter, Tulnarron, comes a voice as eurythmic as the blush of dawn on gently rippling waters. There is purpose to all of it. Everything has meaning. Everything matters. You matter. And you can make a difference.

  Tulnarron cannot see the speaker, can not sense him. But he is aware of him. Light surges and swells all about the Master, more than bright, beyond white, and in this shining place a solitary entity blazes. A single Deathward soul, burning like a star, cold and beautiful. Not as he was as a mortal Fiannian warrior, but as he was prior to the Plague, before the bitter Curse of Asrayal. Brilliant. Terrifying. Pure power, purer pride, purest purpose. And Tulnarron knows him, and loves him fiercely, and reaches out in the pristine penumbra of that warrior’s terrible light, impetrating, obsecrating.