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

by Sean Rodden

  Or, perhaps more accurately, when such sacrifice was required.

  The Lady and the Shield Maiden of the Fiannar trailed close upon the tail of the column, weapons in hand. Supported by Emanthe’s small party of Watchers, the two women intercepted, engaged and destroyed the fastest and most daring of the Drone’s foreguard. And twice more did Cerriste pause to bring the high walls of the Hard Hills down upon the defile along which they fled. But these obstacles of great shattered stone did not even appear to hinder, let alone impede, their pursuers. Indeed, if anything, the horde of dwar-Durka was steadily gaining on the flying Fiannar. The ground shook. Small rocks cascaded from the cliffs. And the dissonant clamour of iron-booted feet drubbing the floor of the gorge grew louder and louder as the Dwarkash army drew nearer and nearer.

  “Preserve your strength, Lady,” Caelle suggested as the two women ran side by side. “I fear we shall need all of it before this night is done.”

  “Agreed, cousin,” Cerriste answered, her voice quiet and cold, “though I fear we will need all of it, and then dearly wish for more.”

  The Shield Maiden smiled grimly. “Then more we shall find.”

  The Lady of the Fiannar bared her teeth. Her eyes flashed.

  “Know you no despair, cousin?”

  Caelle remained silent for a moment as she recalled Axennus Teagh’s flippant response to the very same question. And even in the cold shadow cast by Sarrane’s death, the grimness of the Shield Maiden’s smile was submerged beneath the gleam that dwelt betwixt hope and love.

  Despair is the doom of fools.

  “None at all, my Lady.”

  The Lady of the Fiannar said no more, but only stared directly forward, her eyes cool chips of desolate fury, her countenance set of pale unyielding metal. She then lengthened her stride and sped ahead. She soon disappeared into the column of fleeing refugees, running among them, sharing her strength and courage, halvering the steadfastness of her iron will. Young women smiled and laughed. Children cheered. Only the most hardened Deathward veterans remained reserved and unaffected. But these unwavering warriors had strength and courage and will enough of their own, and needed not borrow any from their Lady.

  The Shield Maiden ran with Emanthe’s Eye of the Green Watch in the rearguard. She was essentially alone, left to her ponderings by the sentient shadows flitting about her. True solitude is a function of the spirit, rather than of the body, and one might stand in the company of a thousand comrades and remain more lonesome than the last broken breath of a dying man. Isolation, seclusion, separateness. A trinity of truths. All enter the world alone within themselves. All shall leave it so. And though the epoch between life and death is often copiously coloured with camaraderie and amity, these are but illusions, deceptively intricate and intimate – for every man, every woman, every child persists peerless in their being, alone and unaccompanied, always and forever.

  None at all, my Lady.

  Despite these audacious words, regardless of the small smile curving her lips, the Shield Maiden’s ruminations ran deep, and dark were her reflections. Dark and disturbing. She had lost so much. So very much in such a short time. Her father was gone. Her mother would surely follow. Her dearest friend and sister of her soul was lost, stolen from her, taken. And she had been powerless to prevent their going, their being taken. She, a Shield Maiden of the Fiannar, had been impotent. Worse, inconsequential. Hammers of helplessness and futility flailed at her, assailing her confidence, her sense of self-worth, and the walls of her esteem were shaken to their foundations.

  None at all...

  Oh, such bold, bold words, so rashly spoken. And so terribly untrue.

  The Shield Maiden ran like the wind. From her losses. From her feebleness. Her smile was a mere illusion, a delusion, a daring deception exhibited solely for the benefit of others. To bestow hope where there was none. To share love when it was needed most. But she knew better. Deep within, down in the most private corner of her soul, she knew. Hope was not a blade and could cut no darkness, and love was no shield against shadow – nay, no more than faith could thwart fate. Despair was indeed the doom of fools, and she herself was the greatest fool of –

  Oh hush, sister.

  Caelle gasped, came to a sudden halt. The warders of the Watch ran on to either side of her, accustomed as they were to the erratic stops and starts of the Shield Maiden’s flight. Only Emanthe cast a cursory glance her way before speeding off. And then the Shield Maiden was indeed entirely alone.

  Or was she?

  “Sarrane?”

  But no answer came.

  Whence had the Seer’s voice originated? From the left? The right? Before or behind? Or from somewhere within the Shield Maiden’s self – her mind, her heart, her very soul? Had she truly heard her beloved friend’s voice at all?

  Sarrane?

  Still no reply. Only the terrestrial thunder of thousands of booted feet rushing nearer, gaining ground. Tramping, thudding, thumping. Reverberating in the rock.

  Caelle stood alone, scowling at the darkness, the soaring cliffs of stone, muttering incoherent nothings to the cold indifference of the night. She then adjusted her small silver shield, tested the draw of her longsword. Throwing a single quick hostile glance behind her, she turned away from the rumblings of pursuit. And bereft of her beguiling smile but imbued with restored and reinforced fortitude, she ran on.

  The trail was easily followed. The young Heir to the House of Eccuron did not need to slow and examine the stone floor of the defile, nor even dismount from his tall mirarran, so obvious was it that an army had passed that way. An army that did not care that it might be pursued. An army of ill-famed and uncouth dwar-Durka. Garbage, gob, piss, shit. The rancid taste of wrongness in the night air. No attempt to conceal any of it. Such was the confidence of the crude brutes. The crimson-eyed fiends smelled blood. Blood and violence and death most cruel. Of these horrid things and of the chase the Dwarks were powerfully aware, but of little if anything else.

  Despite the conspicuousness of the trail, Arumarron came to a place where he halted his mirarran and nimbly slid from creature’s broad back. He then knelt to scrutinize a particular patch of stone that had been ignobly marred with Dwark dung. The black stars in the huge youth’s wintry eyes flared and flashed as he leaned close, intent and intrigued. He muttered an obscenity, huffed the ungodly stench from his nostrils, and frowned at an anomalous footprint stamped into the offensive mess.

  His companions drew their steeds up beside the Heir’s own. They did not dismount, but only sat quietly, patiently awaiting Arumarron’s word. They did not wait long.

  “This is strange. Very strange. And disturbing.”

  “What is it, Aru?” Tielle asked past a rising unease, and more than a touch of trepidation – for she had detected a dark edge to her friend’s tone, and she did not like it.

  Zalkan remained silent and still aback his mor-marran.

  “This print,” said Arumarron, “was not made by any Dwark. And not just this print – there have been others. Several, actually. Some the same, some simply similar. Footmarks that could only have been left by the distinctive steel boots of the Daradur.”

  “Daradur run with the Dwarks?” exclaimed the young Heiress. “That cannot be! The Stone Lords would never betray us so!”

  “Yet it appears they have.” Arumarron’s frown darkened. “I would never have believed it myself, Tielle, but I am burdened with something of my mother’s… of a Seer’s sight. I… feel… things. And I have been unable to shirk a profound sense of treachery that settled upon my soul when we entered this Teller-told labyrinth.”

  “Do not believe it, son of Tulnarron,” counselled the black-clad weapons master. Mist plumed through his mask into the night as he spoke. “Appearances deceive, and assumptions can be disastrously erroneous, no? Whatever vile treachery you might perceive, it does not lie beneath the boots of the Stone Lords.” Silence and silvery breath. The wave of a black-gloved hand. “No, these Daradur do not
run with the enemy, young Arumarron – rather, they run after them.”

  The Heir’s scowl was black and dubious.

  “But the Daradur can be no more than a dozen, Master Zalkan. Probably fewer.”

  “Most likely only ten,” agreed the Swordlord, “as that is the standard number for a Daradun army unit, no? A kulgord, they call it. Quite literally, Ten Axes. But why should this small number surprise you, young sir? The mighty Stone Lords fear nothing, and are renowned for their ferocity when facing insurmountable odds. Forsooth, this particular party of Daradur track the very same enemy that we do, and we number only four.”

  “Indeed,” grated the Heir as he leapt astride his mount. “I, at least, have my reasons for doing so.”

  From where he yet sat with one cheek yet pressed to his sister’s back, Chadh quietly offered, “The Daradur need no reason to hunt and destroy evil wherever they might find it.” Softly, ever so softly. “Neither should we.”

  Arumarron did not appear to hear the boy – or if he heard him, he did not acknowledge him. The gigantic young warrior cast a quick glance at the slender gash of night sky in the stone so many hundreds of feet above him.

  “We are close now, my friends. Very close.” He lowered his gaze, staring straight ahead. Stars burst like fireworks in his eyes. “Weapons at the ready now, for we will doubtlessly come upon the enemy rearguard before the morning is old and the grey ghosts of day rise to haunt this place.”

  “As will the Stone Lords,” advised Tielle.

  “Indeed,” Arumarron called over his shoulder as his powerful mirarran surged forward once more. “It only remains to be seen who will get there first!”

  He remained who he had always been. He remained what he had always been. These things were constants. Enduring. Permanent. They would never, could never alter. Only the scenery and the specifics changed.

  Or did they?

  He was Xiao al Khan. Imperial Weapons Master, last of the legendary saburau, and Swordlord of the elite Draconian Guard. He had been born a warrior into a world at war. Part of a world, at least – the Elder East, they called it now, those dwindling few who were aware that it had ever even existed.

  Yes, Xiao al Kahn had been there, more than three thousand years ago, when the Wise Men rebelled against their master and brought devastation and ruin to the Land of Silk and Honey. He had been there, had borne witness to the doom of the Shiroi Dynasty and fall of the Turian Empire, had seen the cloud island of Halevorn fall from the shattered sky, had with his own eyes watched the last Dragon Emperor die. And he had been there, alone without the titanic White Walls of Tur, kneeling in the bloodstained snow, weeping like a little lost child when that fabled Forbidden City was shorn from Second Earth for all eternity.

  And like a little lost child, he had wandered the world ever since.

  Well, not so little. Not so lost. But condemned to wander, nevertheless. To walk twisted paths and broken roads across Second Earth in search of calamities that he could never prevent. To seek forever the glory of heroic intervention, only to be denied over and again by the cruel iron of tragedy and by the tragic crooling of irony. Always left with the bitter-sour essence of dashed hope in his soul and the taste of dust and ashes and cupreous blood on his tongue. And in his heart, darkest guilt and melancholy plummeting toward despair. Such were the terrible wages of his devotion to his Emperor, the wretched return upon his ever-abiding loyalty.

  The fate with which the Un-God had cursed him so long ago.

  Despite his best efforts, his matchless prowess, his determination and deepest desires, Xiao al Khan was doomed to fail.

  And that, he knew, would never change.

  But no curse is everlasting, Master Harbinger, came the whisper of the boy, a sliver of sound and light in the night of the Weapons Master’s mind. Wind and rain and Time’s infinite patience erode stone and corrode steel. Everything ends. The very dust in your mouth is a symbol of hope. Do not spit it out.

  Beneath his silken scarf, the man in black grimaced.

  Three millennia of failure and desolation would seem to defy your optimism, tamashi shifuta. That is long enough to decide the matter, no?

  A mere blink of the eye of eternity, Master Harbinger.

  The dead need not blink, ancient one. And eternity is no friend to the damned.

  Silence for a time, save the relentless percussion of hooves and the howl of the dark wind in their ears. But these things were actual sounds, feeble and futile, and neither could breach the hush of quieted minds.

  Then –

  But you are not dead, Swordlord. A thought like a smile. Nor are you damned.

  The Harbinger did not answer, allowed no thought to rise in response, but only bent lower over the mor-marran’s neck and urged the gallant creature onward. And then a new sound came, reverberating like distant thunder against the Hard Hills’ soaring walls of stone. A familiar refrain of pain and death, of misery and agony. The harsh and angry song of battle, sung by metal and bone and raging hearts, calling to him, beckoning him.

  A nudge of the Harbinger’s knees, and mighty Kuroma surged forth, passing the boy and the girl in a flash, easily overtaking the rushing Heir to the House of Eccuron, then streaking like a bolt of black lightning into the night.

  Striking for Allaura. For battle and death and the sundering of a curse.

  Savour the dust, Weapons Master.

  Zalkan set three arrows to his bowstring.

  I will.

  What despair awaits the aching soul beyond the shards of dashed hope? What abject sorrow arises from the dusts of broken dreams? What pain, what terror widens the eyes and steals the breath when a pledge is proven false? Ah, the anguish that abounds in the tear-sopped ashes of a child’s wasted wish, in a mother’s failure to deliver on a hastily voiced promise, in a father’s ravaged wail over the battered corpses of those he had sworn to protect. Setting a goal does not assure its achievement. Not all dreams are realized. Fate guarantees no specific conclusion to any given struggle, irrespective of how precisely and positively the end is envisioned, of how determined the fighter, of how desperate his or her desire. So much, so very much, can and will go wrong.

  And therein lies the horror.

  Oh yes, the horror, the sheer horror of it all.

  The brutal truth that all sentient beings are mere players in a great game of uncaring chance, blind luck and happenstance, and though they might tug here and push there, they but dance on the strings of a faceless marionette who recks naught of them and less of their derisory wants and needs. In their pride, their arrogance, they at whiles turn to sever the ties that bind, but the ropes are steel chains, and their blades fall back notched. Alas! That which will be, will be. And the only covenant, the only perpetuity is that all things that begin must – eventually, inevitably and without fail – end.

  And the lesson? Discard all dreams and abandon hope.

  Or be bitterly disappointed.

  Mundar of Dul-darad rounded the jutting corner of rock at a run. He then slowed his pace, hiking several strides across the stone floor of a vast canyon before coming to a halt. The great Darad sniffed the air, spat to one side, grumbled quietly into his beard. He sensed Watcher Chelyse sprint up behind him, light and sure, and held out one massive arm to stay her. A hissed curse and the young Fiann skittered to a stop.

  “Here,” announced Mundar. A soft stereophonic whump-whump-whumping sound came as the Warder’s war-axes appeared in his huge hands and began spinning in the darkness. “We’re here.”

  “Here?” responded Chelyse. Immediately aware of her companion’s atypical unease, the red-haired warrior’s own hand found the hilt of her sword. “Where, is here, Stone Lord?”

  Mundar’s sharp gaze pierced the deep pitch of pre-dawn, effortlessly shredding the night’s last veils of defiance, scouring the colossal cliffs to either side of him. He then moved his regard to the towering edifice in the unmarred blackness before him, a perfectly smooth wall of polished marble less
than a mile distant and more than a half a mile high. A low rumble reverberated in the Darad’s massive chest like the growl of a dragon waking after a long and angry dream.

  “Allaura. We’ve come to Allaura.”

  Watcher Chelyse peered upon the bluffs about them, and the darkness seemed to flee from the heat in her shining eyes. Even as her gaze flowed from one stone crag to the next, the mangy dogs of dawn nipped at the heels of night, and a sluggish greyness filled the canyon, chill and viscid, the colour of damp flint. The towering wall in the distance appeared unusually sheer and smooth, curiously so compared to the jagged topography typical of the rest of the Hard Hills, but otherwise the glowering Fiann detected nothing of any real interest.

  “I see nothing, Stone Lord.”

  “That’s exactly what’s bothering me, Fiann.”

  “Nothing is bothering you?”

  “Seeing nothing is bothering me.”

  “Ah. Of course.” Chelyse stared upon the bleak expanse of the basin. A tangled tress tumbled across her eyes, reddening her vision. “I have heard it said that the greater peril arises not from the evil which we can see, but from that which we cannot.”

  Mundar grunted. “You didn’t hear wrong.”

  Behind them, the Fiannian vanguard was advancing in formation across the stone floor. They moved in perfect silence, fleet and fluid, and their eyes glittered beneath their brims of their helms like diamonds afire. As the foremost rank of these bold warriors came abreast of him and his companion, the twin axes in the Darad’s hands ceased their rhythmic whooshing; but within him, his heart thudded, thudded, thudded, sustaining the beat that had been set by the steel. He could feel his pulse pounding at his temples, at the base of his skull, in the veins of his neck and wrists. He bit down on his back teeth. And without looking to the tall warrior-woman who appeared upon his left, he said –