by Sean Rodden
Yes.
This.
The army of dwar-Durka rumbled through the limestone labyrinth, an overwhelming juggernaut of destruction, an ironbound onslaught of utter devastation. The salty scent of fleeing Fiannar teased their flared nostrils, tantalizing, tugging at their instinct for ruination even as the thin brisk reek of death would beckon bh’ritsi. Dwarkash warriors grunted and groaned in near carnal ecstasy as they ran, drooling into their beards, lapping their gobs with fat globular tongues. Urthvennim pulsed throughout the rushing mass, flowing from various focal points of vast and unspeakable power, centres of corruption, so many monstrous hearts pounding, pumping poisonous blood into the black veins of the night.
Blood. Death. Doom.
The Drone grinned.
Ah, yes.
This.
The Lady of the Fiannar stood in full battledress upon a spar of stone where the ravine was narrowest. To either side of her, the limestone walls wept a thousand rivulets of dark water, the tears of so many sea nymphs long lost, long forgotten, long gone. The endless trickling tickled the edges of her ears like little fingertips constantly tapping – soft indistinct noise that would have usually gone unremarked, if not altogether unnoticed, but in Cerriste’s state of heightened awareness was as the roar of a cataract. She clenched her teeth, consciously dampening the power that reflexively welled from deep within her. She had yet to master the wilding wrath in her heart, and until she did so she would not risk giving voice to the perilous puissance surging through her soul. Gripping her staff tightly, she felt the smooth whitewood hum against her palm.
The Lady said nothing as she watched the Shield Maiden and her companions approach along the defile – fewer than had set out, surely – a dozen gaunt ghosts in the night, haunting empty halls.
Caelle leapt lithely from boulder to boulder until she came to stand at her Lady’s side. She noted the armour, the demeanour, the restrained ardour of the older woman. The white knuckles of the hand that grasped the staff; the bloodlessness of those taut lips; the cold rage in those grey, grey eyes.
“Dwarks, Lady,” the Shield Maiden reported matter-of-factly, as the warders of the Green Watch formed a ragged line across the sarcen-strewn gully. “Thousands of them.”
“How many thousands?” Cerriste’s voice was chillingly calm – like that of a condemned woman who had made peace with her fate.
“Eight, perhaps nine. It is difficult to determine in this maze, in this darkness.”
“Who leads them?”
But Caelle only shook her head.
“I cannot be sure, Lady. However, there are many among them that glow red with the power of the earthblight. Several dozen, at the least. One of them may be the leader.” Pause. A sidelong look at her Lady. “What does it matter who leads them?”
The rumble in the rock steadily rose, the stone shivering, quivering. The spar of stone upon which the women stood settled uncertainly. The ground groaned.
“It matters,” Cerriste stated tersely.
The Shield Maiden peered closely, openly, at her cousin, but soon understood that nothing more was to be forthcoming. She looked away, watching the darkness, hearing and feeling the continuous quake in the stone, in her boots, in the bones of her feet. A vague heat or heaviness – a pressure of a sort – seemed to push against her face; she envisioned it dimpling her cheeks like the probing fingertips of a blind man trying to ‘see’ her. Something slick and wet slithered over her soul. She grimaced, shook it away.
“We can outrun them, Lady.”
Cerriste glared at the night. “Can we?”
Caelle did not reply as she intuited that no reply was truly expected.
Then – “Withdraw, cousin,” the Lady of the Fiannar commanded quietly. “Take this Eye and return to the column, and away to Allaura, to the Glass Gate, where burn the Lamps of Welcome in our honour. There is no more you can do here.”
“Lady, my place – ”
“ – is where I say it is, Shield Maiden.” Cerriste’s words were harder than her voice; nevertheless, ice and steel were swiftly sliding in. “I… we have already lost overmuch. Hyrre and Giserre. Our dear sister Sarra. I refuse to lose anyone else.” Her darkened grey eyes met Caelle’s sapphire-speckled gaze. “Go now, cousin. I risk nothing, and will be with you momentarily. Upon these things you have my word. Go now. Away to Allaura. Go, and do not look back.”
Caelle hesitated only long enough to make clear her emphatic dislike for the order. She then turned, wordlessly gestured to the waiting warders of the Green Watch, bounded from the stone spar and jogged westward into the night.
She did not look back. Not yet.
The Lady of the Fiannar let the lids of her eyes fall shut, and she concentrated, focusing all her faculties upon her environs – the rock underfoot, the weeping walls, the hard cold of night. Darkness comes. She chased a shiver from her skin, sighed forth silvery steam. Darkness comes, and I can do nothing but close my eyes and watch. She waited until she could no longer sense the Shield Maiden’s displeased presence in the night behind her, then relaxed her grip about the shaft of her staff and loosened the fetters of her chained fury. Or I can the bring the righteous rage of Light down upon it.
The rock rumbled. The earthen thunder of thousands of booted feet shook the soul of the world. A blind man’s hands reached for her throat.
The Lady of the Fiannar crunched her lids more tightly closed, searching, seeking, seeing farther and more clearly than mere eyes might ever do.
And then he was there. No more than one hundred yards away. Standing like a hulking gargoyle before his host of misshapen mutants, grinning grotesquely through a wiry black beard. He stared at her, his rufescent eyes aglow with wicked glee, with savage hunger. His essence, his very being was a hideous thing, poxed and putrid, the most malignant manifestation Lady Cerriste had ever perceived. Abomination made more foul by the pall of urthvennim. She had never seen him before that moment, and had heard little of him – and the greater part of that had been obscure and imprecise, for in sooth not much of him was known. Nonetheless, she knew him.
The Drone.
And most curiously, inexplicably, she heard him hiss –
“This.”
The Lady of Fiannar opened her eyes. And behold! Light blazed from those hot angry orbs, silver-white and shining. Her gold-gilt chestnut hair flew about her like wildfire in a scorching wind. Tongues of luminescent flame licked along the shaft as she raised her whitewood staff.
Involuntarily, the Solemate took a step back.
“Oh, yes,” the Lady Cerriste replied, her voice a quiet roar, argentine fire filling and spilling from the hollow of her mouth. “This!”
And then she brought the steel heel of her staff down on the stone. Hard. And to the resultant concussion of sound and fury a peal of summer thunder would have seemed little more than a hushed whisper in a dream. Waves of translucent power radiated outward, pummeling the Drone and his Dwarkash vanguard, colliding with the cliffs. Concentrated vibrations drove violently, deeply into the ancient stone. And the walls of the gorge cracked, crumbled, fell apart. Great jagged shards and slabs of rock broke loose and crashed down. Vast fasciae of pitted limestone were brutally pulverized and slid like viscous liquid into the gully, coughing up caliginous clouds of grit. The roar of the cascade resounded throughout the ravine, a single continuous howl of unpent rage and pain that went on and on and on, and just when it seemed it would last forever, it stuttered, shuddered, stifled itself into silence, and was gone.
Leaving nothing but dust and darkness.
Some distance away and to the west, the Shield Maiden of the Fiannar squinted against that dust, that darkness. The haze generated by the rockslides gusted toward her, a blooming and billowing blackness, but only the weakest dwindling wisps reached her. Still, the inspissated air scratched at her eyes like thousands of tiny ticks crawling on sore skin. She huffed against the parched pasty sensation in her nostrils and throat. Her chest tightened, but
not for the dust, not for the darkness.
And a cold iron fist closed about Caelle’s heart. And clenched.
Lady…
But then Cerriste emerged from the slowly settling cloud, walking calmly, almost casually, her back straight, her shoulders square, her head held high. The Lady’s eyes shone like stars as she strode toward the Shield Maiden, the heel of her staff knocking a steady rhythm on the stone. No mark there was upon her, neither on her vestment nor her skin, and her armour glittered as though it had been newly and immaculately polished. Not a speck of dust had touched her. She moved as would of a queen of Athair through an autumnal evening rain, pure and pristine, unassailable, immune to the vicious vagaries and callous caprices of nature.
The cold iron fist unclenched, pulled away, vanished.
“You looked back, cousin,” the Lady of the Fiannar accused quietly. She did not slow as she paced past the Shield Maiden.
Caelle fell smoothly in step, the curve of her lips more evocative of a sneer than a smile. Behind them, the sentient shadows that were the Eye of the Green Watch slipped through the night, warding their backs.
“You knew I would, Lady.”
Cerriste said nothing for several strides, and in that silence reared a thing both menacing and malefic – a monster horribly poxed and scarred.
At length, “The Drone leads them,” she announced ominously.
The Shield Maiden absorbed the information, her face bereft of all expression, her chin dropping in a single silent nod. But her hand fell to the pommel of her sword, and the reverse side of her shield was warm against her forearm.
The Drone leads them. More was implied, much more was imparted in those four little words. So much more. The Drone slew our sister, cousin. The fiend took her from us. And we, in turn, shall take him.
Caelle bit down on a wave of anger.
“The dwar-Durka will not be delayed long, Shield Maiden. And we are only as swift as our slowest party. We are left with no choice but to run through the night, and pray to the Teller that our slowest party is swift enough.”
The sapphire speckles in Caelle’s eyes flashed but briefly, and she lengthened her stride to keep pace with the Lady.
Behind them, where settling clouds of descendent dust draped over a wall of crumbled stone, the night boomed.
What blacker darkness than the death of a mother? What colder breath on the nape? What vessel more void, more empty? This young heart so bereaved, this fledgling soul scarred so deeply and so soon. One beautiful life taken. Another precious yet precarious existence battered by tragedy, lashed by loss, pounded pitilessly and made into something other than that which it should have been. Shaped into something ugly. Something… less. A rathe and ripening spirit destroyed, laid to waste. There is no mourning this. Not this. There is no grief great enough, no song sad enough. No ode, no encomium, no heart-rending threnody. Throw a thousand words to the wind, and none will prove sufficiently poignant.
And so there shall be no tears. Neither lamentation nor sorrow. But only rage.
For any world that would permit this thing deserves to burn.
Nevertheless, Arumarron would not incinerate Second Earth in a storm of fire. No, he would not bring flame and ruin to the world. But we would bring wrath. He would bring retribution. To the night. To the Hard Hills. To those responsible for his mother’s murder. And when the storm came, it would be wrought of cold Deathward steel.
The young Heir to the House of Eccuron flew through the night, scrambling afoot over tumbled scarp and heaps of talus, giving his gigantic mirarran its head where the lay of the labyrinth allowed. Behind him charged Tielle and Chadh, the boy’s thin arms clinched tightly about his sister’s waist as they rode, his cheek pressed against her back, his eyes clamped shut. And contented, for the time being at least, to ward the rear, the man called the Harbinger and his muscular mor-marran were but a gust of cool midnight wind, black and swift and silent.
Arumarron’s mount slowed to a shy and halting walk as they entered the White Warren. Despite the depths of night, the basin glowed a ghostly shade of pale, the stone shimmering eerily by benefit of neither moon nor star. The titanic walls wept glittering tears, and the air carried motes of stonedust that sparkled like specks of silver. Followed at a distance by his companions, the Heir moved toward the heart of the gorge, his steed’s hooves rapping hollowly upon the rock as would tentative fists knocking on the barred doors of night. Knocking, knocking, and dreading that those doors should actually swing open.
For death lingered there, in the spectral glimmerings of the White Warren. Lingered and malingered. Death and loss and grief beyond words.
Arumarron stayed his steed and dismounted. His darkened gaze swept over the walls of the Warren, the waterfalls, the boulder-littered basin, before falling and focussing upon a patch of burned rock floor a mere stride from his hard leather boots. Blackness swirled in his eyes as he crouched and reached toward the scorch mark – reached but did not touch, looked but said naught. Whitish mist slowly streamed from his nostrils, and his long hair dangled limply, lifelessly, lending the huge young warrior an aspect of abject dejection, an air of profound melancholy that even the most gifted sculptor of marble might toil for decades to capture and never truly achieve.
Mother.
Sarrane had fallen there, and there had blazed her Pyre, her very own Fire of the Fallen. And there also had her ashes been left, peacefully settled and still, until something had disturbed them. No, not something – someone. Broad booted feet had kicked and scattered the sanctified dusts of the Seer’s death, then had stomped and trod upon them with reckless disregard, with sheer unqualified spite. The brute malice of that deed stirred the white hot coals of Arumarron’s anger, and he rose, tall and terrible, one great fist grasping the grip of his greatsword. His hair spilled over his strong shoulders like the mane of a giant lion, and his breath was become hot smoke cast from a wild and burning heart. And there he stood, saying nothing, thinking nothing, simply allowing his rage to wash over him, to immerse him completely, an ablution of abstruse and absolute fury.
And one there was who sat astride a great equine at Arumarron’s back, one who had known the first Master of the youthful Heir’s glorious House. Had known that hero of olde and had loved him, had revered him.
Eccuron lives in this one. An ancient and invisible smile. So now we have a chance.
They ran through the night. Women, children, mirarra. Running as swiftly as the terrain permitted, following the broad back of the hulking Darad who led them. The smallest boys and girls were carried by older ones astride the great grey steeds from the Miramarch. The less swift among the women and those few who were heavy with child also rode, leaving only the fleetest Deathward to run on foot beside the rushing mounts. The going was difficult and fraught with hazards: Heaped mounds of shattered stone; bottomless black fissures in the rock floor; wide pools of stillwater, cold and dark and deep. All served to thwart the flying Fiannar, to slow them, but no barrier could stay them, no barricade could stop them. They were driven forth by a thing both profound and primal, propelled forward by a catalyst natural and necessary and more intrinsic than instinct –
Fear.
But not the fear of death. Nor even the fear of pain. Death and pain were things the Fiannar knew well, and accepted, and from these they would neither shy nor fly. No, the fear that impelled the fleeing Deathward women and children came from a place at the core of them, and was a primordial edict written into their very souls, an indisputable directive encoded in their blood and bone and marrow. One that could not be intuited, could not even be recognized, let alone refused. The fear that rules every mortal folk, that compels them to band together, to live by codes and laws, to protect their offspring, to share knowledge, to feed and rut and propagate. Yes, that dank dark dread that their family, their line, their entire race will one day be obliterated.
For this is the basest and most basic off all terrors – that all we are, all we do, all we
ever accomplish will eventually, inevitably, come to nothing.
And mean even less.
Mundar of Dul-darad did not know this fear, nor any other. No vague notions of inexorable futility plagued him. Not in the least. Rather he was possessed of purpose, real and immediate. Powerful arms pumping, thick legs thumping, the Warder dutifully led the Fiannar in their flight, determined to guide that bright and brave folk through the maze of the Hard Hills to sanctuary behind the unbreachable walls of Allaura. But there would be no such asylum for him. Neither haven nor refuge. No, he would turn away from those grand gates and the Lamps of Welcome, and he would meet the enemy on the stone killing field before the walls of Allaura, his axes in his hands and wilding wrath in his heart.
There, he would stand. There, he would fight. And there, he would perish.
For Mundar was a Darad. And the Daradur did not run.
The young Watcher Chelyse raced at the Stone Lord’s side. Her mane of unruly red hair was a trail of fire as her long legs tirelessly consumed mile after mile of nightbound rock. She did not speak to her companion, and the normally affable Darad said nothing to her. The only sound about the pair was the thudding of Mundar’s heavy steelshod boots, like two sledgehammers slamming relentlessly and rhythmically against a locked stone door. Nonetheless, there was communication in the couple’s muteness. There was comradeship, attentiveness, even affection. The Fiann knew, intuitively, that the Darad intended to stand against the horde of dwar-Durka after he delivered the Deathward refugees to Allaura. So much was obvious, and she allowed him to feel her growing grief for that specific decision. But she did not permit him to apprehend that she was resolved to stand with him.
At the heart of the column, the infant Aranion slept in blissfully oblivious peace against the steel-braced bosom of a wary Watcher. His breathing was deep and even, and he clutched a tress of the warrior’s long light hair in one tiny fist. The pair was vigilantly guarded by an entire Eye of the Green Watch, hard capable women in the prime of their lives, all of whom were sworn to defend the little Lordling to their deaths. If such sacrifice was required.