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

by Sean Rodden

  “Send for your Lady, Fiann.”

  “That will not be necessary, Warder Mundar,” the warrior answered in an austere voice, her tone as level and as chill as the breath of midwinter. “But mayhap our dependable Chelyse should retrieve for us the Shield Maiden.” And to the young woman, “Posthaste, if you would, Watcher. You will find her with the rearguard.”

  Chelyse hurriedly fisted her rillagh, commandeered a nearby mirarran, and sped away.

  The Darad turned to watch the young woman go, then belatedly looked to his left and grimaced behind his beard.

  “I didn’t mean to mistake you, Lady Cerriste. I was…”

  “Preoccupied?”

  “You could say that.”

  The Lady paused, peering about the canyon in much the same manner as Mundar and Chelyse had just done. But her own gaze was tundral, harsh and hard, and her words when they came again remained as ice; cold, bitter, yet flawlessly smooth.

  “And for good reason, Stone Lord. Valid, rather – there is nothing good in this thing which distracts you so.” Bright eyes glistered. Her face, though slightly flushed with the night’s run, was a mask of graven stone. “Come. We have but little time. And I would have you walk with me.”

  And the Lady of the Fiannar strode forth across the pitted petrous ground, her whitewood staff in one hand, the shining spear of the fallen Seer clasped in the other. Her gait was long and lissome, her steps sure, certain. Her hunting cloak billowed at her back, a sombre grey sail beneath a banner of sweat-darkened hair.

  Mundar trudged at the Lady’s side, compelled to jog now and again to match her rapid pace. A war-axe clenched in each massive fist, the Darad was unusually grim, his jocular nature dimmed by the loathsome shadow of the thing he did not see. And the beat of his heart was become a riot of rage in his breast.

  The twain did not speak. They did not look upon one another. But they moved together. Not in unison, but together nevertheless. Two very different and disparate souls sharing a diffident and desperate silence.

  And there are so many strains of silence. There is the silence of loss in the widow’s wet eyes. There is the silence of regret in the heart of the admirer who has left his love overly long unspoken. There is the silence of guilt as the executioner’s blade comes down. The silence of reflection, when the sun sinks into the sea and a thousand golden memories rise to shine upon the surface. The silence of barely hushed expectancy writ upon the face of a child sitting cross-legged beneath the Giving Tree. The joy, unspoken but shouted, in the jubilant souls of new parents. And the everlasting soundless scream in the stretched maw of a dead man.

  That which was shared between Mundar of Dul-darad and the Lady of the Fiannar was a very specific silence. One quite particular and unique. The silence of knowing.

  Or, more precisely, of knowing too little too late.

  They halted immediately beneath the dense shadow of the bulwark of buffed stone, their heads tilted back on craned necks, their grey breath steaming and streaming into the dawn. The wall soared in excess of half a mile high and was equally wide, and no seam, no joint, neither crack nor crevice, was visible at all. Indeed, the façade was as flat as a pane of glass, a panel of pale silk, and was so immaculate, so unblemished, that they could determine their own images, however ambiguous and ghostly, reflected in the rock. At each side of the flawless wall the limestone cliffs had been worked into a colossal gauntlet clasping a correspondingly titanic torch. But no flash of fire, no leap of flame issued from the bowls of the torches to gleam in the staring eyes of apprehensive faces, no spectre of smoke was seen rising into the gloam. And there came no infernal roar, no sizzle and crackle of burning wood, nor even the hesitant hiss of ignition to ears so anxious to hear.

  The Lady and the Darad saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing.

  For the silences of sound be deafness and dumbness.

  And the silence of light is darkness.

  Lady Cerriste stepped forward and rapped the head of her staff upon the polished stone. Once, twice, thrice. The noise of the knocking seemed severe and crude, intrusive, and the subsequent echoes rebounded throughout the canyon like peals of mirthless laughter. She waited for the mocking resonance to diminish, to dissipate, before raising her staff again. But a strong hand upon her shoulder dissuaded her. She turned and gazed upon Mundar’s face. The Darad slowly shook his head, and the thing she saw in his eyes summoned tears to her own.

  We should have known, you and I. Cerriste placed a palm upon the Stone Lord’s bearded cheek. In Hollin Tharric, at the Stone of Scullain – Mundar, we should have known.

  The pair lowered their hands and raised their heads as the Shield Maiden of the Fiannar reined her racing stallion to a stop.

  Caelle punched her chest, pulled a wayward tress of dust-bedraggled hair from her face. Her armour was blackened by blood and grime, and her small silver shield was dented, scratched and gouged, perhaps even chewed. But her eyes were bright and clear, and her rillagh burned across her breast like a streak of golden fire. The cold fury etched upon her countenance effectively communicated her comprehension of the situation, of its utter gravity and the terrible truth at the heart of it. And as though to underscore that very same horror, in the reverberant wake of her mirarran’s hooffalls an ominous thunder thrummed through the bedrock of the gorge.

  “Your orders, my Lady,” was all the Shield Maiden said.

  “Aranion,” answered the Lady of the Fiannar as a single silvery tear slid from the corner of her eye. “My son is the future of the Fiannar, and your sole and sacred charge. See that he survives this, Shield Maiden.”

  Caelle nodded brusquely and spoke no more.

  And the three then turned away from the soaring wall of silence, from the asylum so cruelly denied them, from the empty promises of shelter and sanctuary. There was to be no haven in that brutal world, no safe harbour in the raging storm of war. Neither refuge nor retreat. But only bitter betrayal, the scattered ashes of scorched hope and the dusts of broken dreams. And death, much death, so much death.

  For the Lamps of Welcome were not lit.

  And the Glass Gate was shut.

  16

  THE GODS OF WAR

  “There is no line finer nor more blurred

  than that which lies betwixt love and hate.”

  Kor ben Dor, Book of the Bloodspawn

  The Halflord stood atop the stone tor, his pearly gaze cast eastward, intent yet remote. There was no wind, and the air was viscid with the memory of the night’s hard rain. A brumal harshness nipped in his nostrils and bit his lungs, causing his breath to flood from him in great curling plumes. His thoughts wandered, as was their wont, and he wondered that his breathmist was a great pale dragon, woken from a sleep of ages, clawing groggily at the dawn. Strange, he considered, that he should envisage such a thing at such a time. Stranger still that he then pondered whether dragons practiced similar pareidolia when they watched their breath purl into cold northern mornings.

  Beyond the mistborn dragon rampant, a ruddy sun slowly emerged from the horizon, swathed in steam like a raw babe pulled from the womb into the stiff chill of winter. There was a distinct dichotomy to the blurred light splashed across the world: The land to the north was warmed by a bashful golden glow that slowly but steadily chased the grey frost from the grasses and drank the rain from the saturated earth; the fields to the south were beset by pervasive crimson shadow, and the cold there was that of dead flesh, sour and clammy.

  The contrast was not lost on Kor ben Dor. He was keenly aware of powerful delineations in the universe, in both nature and magic, and in the mortal soul. True extremes in polar opposition, apogees and nadirs ever at odds, competing, clashing. Black and white, with no greys bleeding haphazardly between the two. Fire and ice, war and peace, life and death. Triumph versus tragedy, ecstasy set against agony. And, of course, good and evil. There was no such thing as neutrality, no veracity to the concept of ambivalence. Such uncertainty was but a craven excuse to not c
hoose, to not commit to one course or the other. A deed was either right or it was wrong. A thought was either pure or it was tainted. Each choice made was wise or foolish; each word spoken, each ardent belief was either true or false. Without conviction, there could be no purpose, and without purpose, no reason to exist.

  The Halflord closed his eyes, inhaled deeply.

  “Judge a man not by the good deeds he does,” said the sad-faced, steel-eyed man to the young Kor ben Dor in the time before the pain, “for a man is supposed to do good deeds. And judge the same man not by the bad things he does not do, for a man is expected to not do bad things. Judge a man solely and only by the evil he commits, for evil has no place in this world, nor in any other.”

  “What about the good things a man does not do, Father?”

  “Ah, but there is no difference, my sweet son, between the perpetration of an evil deed and the failure to do a good one.”

  The Prince of the Bloodspawn opened his eyes.

  Conviction. Purpose. Reason. Weighty words, all. And he knew each of them so well.

  The Halflord turned away from the conflicted dawn, and looked upon his elongated shadow as it stretched toward the haze-wreathed crack of Doomfall. There, in that colourless refraction of the soul, the raven’s pinions in his shining black hair could just as easily have been eagle’s wings on a glittering helm. He sighed heavily, watched another misty dragon fly away. He then lowered his eyes, descended the granite embankment, and swung astride his froth-mawed mar-render.

  A mounted Black Shield immediately moved to each flank.

  “You are decided, Prince Kor?”

  “Am I ever not, Gren del Mor?”

  A short uneasy silence, marked by quick glances, marred by the huffs of the beasts and the creaking of their harnesses.

  “Gren only asks because this course of action you have chosen is most...”

  “Unorthodox, Shield? I am aware.”

  Ev lin Dar frowned, her tigress tattoo threatening a snarl that never quite took form. Gren del Mor looked elsewhere, everywhere, nowhere. The Halflord sat still and straight upon his steed, quiet of both mind and muscle, his ribboned cloak fluttering behind him on stray thermals of his power. Moments passed. Hearts thudded. Souls settled. And then, with their backs to the broken aurora, and with no further exchange of words or glimpses, the Prince and the pair of Black Shields moved forward.

  Forward and down.

  Down. Toward Doomfall.

  And a warrior called the Mighty One.

  “Here he fuckin’ comes.”

  Drogul the kirun-tar nodded, an affirmation more intuited than observed. About him, smoke and steam gushed from gashes in the rock, spectral asps and adders slithering, hissing. Ash floated in the dead air like desiccated leaves, grey and writhen. Peculiar gurgling noises emanated from the earth as though the stone had consumed something with which it strongly disagreed. Noxious gases stained the morning, invisible but acrid and ghastly.

  “You be fuckin’ careful out there,” Dulgar growled at his Chieftain’s shoulder. “Fuckin’ mudfucker doesn’t fight fuckin’ fair.”

  The Lord of Doomfall leaned upon the butt of his great black war-axe, unperturbed, his obsidian eyes distant and lightless, but keen.

  “The Prince of the Bloodspawn fights well, brother. Very well.” A thoughtful pause. “Not that it will matter.”

  “He fuckin’ cheats! The fuckbeard uses some kind of mud-fuckin’ magic that makes him super fast and crazy strong. Fuck.”

  “I saw.”

  “Magic shouldn’t fuckin’ work here any fuckin’ way. Not here at fuckin’ Doomfall, not with Ora Undar to one fuckin’ side and Raku Ulrun on the other. No fuckin’ way.” The Wild One spat, and madness gleamed in his solitary eye. “The Maiden should fuckin’ repel or negate that shit, or whatever the fuck she does.”

  “The Halflord’s power is innate, brother. It comes from within him.”

  “Don’t give a fuck. Still shouldn’t fuckin’ work. Not here. Not against… us. We’re Daradur, for fuck’s sake.” Dulgar savagely punched the massive variegated blotch upon his naked chest. “I can’t think of one good fuckin’ reason why this mudfucker’s magic works here – not fuckin’ one!”

  Drogul casually checked the mechanisms in his studded steel vambraces, then hefted his shining black war-axe, resting the thick handle on one wolfskin-mantled shoulder. He lowered his grotesque battle-mask, adjusting the deformed steel until it fit the broad bones of his face. He then gestured for his fierce Captain to remain where he was, ignored the subsequent burst of profanity, and started down.

  ‘I can’t think of one good fuckin’ reason why this mudfucker’s magic works here,’ he heard again as he trudged through flexuous clouds of smoke and ash and vermiculating vapour toward the death-smeared killing ground before Doomfall. ‘Not fuckin’ one!’

  The Mighty One’s free hand bunched into a steel-clad battering ram.

  I can.

  The Prince of the Bloodspawn rode with the dawn at his back and darkness in his eyes. Flanking him, Ev lin Dar and Gren del Mor proceeded in pressed-lipped silence, sitting stiffly in their saddles, leather reins crunched tightly in their hands. A dozen lengths behind them came three units of Black Shields leading five flawless lines of ’Spawn warriors over ground strewn with the corpses of erstwhile allies. Slaughtered Unmen and Urkroks, half-Urks hacked and pounded beyond recognition, the butchered carcasses of Graniants. Blood and viscera. Urine, feces, vomit. The tepid stench of rot, of putrefaction, of decay and corruption. And woven through it all, like a web of steel wire, the thin stretched reek of violent death.

  The mar-rendera snorted and huffed as they clambered over a crude bulwark of dead flesh and shattered iron that had been erected in the night by the implacable defenders of Doomfall. The Daradur’s flagrant disdain for the dead was intended to instill fear and rage in their foes, to inculcate instability, irrationality. But the Bloodspawn could not be lured into such madness, and their own contempt for the slain easily matched that of the Stone Lords. They approached the wall of wasted mortality as they would any natural obstacle in the terrain – a hill to be climbed, crested, and left behind. Disturbed by the callous scrambling and clawing of the renders, vast black clouds of bh’ritsi swirled upward, churning, roiling, obscuring the dawn. The befouled air verily buzzed with anger. But neither the monstrous steeds nor their ice-eyed riders paid any heed.

  The Halflord and his companions alighted at the forward foot of the wall of the fallen. Their mounts slavered, talons tearing at the terrain beneath them, scraping, clattering. Before the trio lay an empty expanse of roughly level stone, hard unforgiving ground that had been so fiercely contested the previous day, but was become void of motion and sign of life, save the stray snaking tendrils of earthborn haze and dark blotches of blood on the rock.

  After forty render-lengths or so, the Halflord halted. He tilted his head, cracked a crick from his neck, once, twice, then stared silently upon the great befogged gash between the Haunted Mountains and the Dragon’s Head. A horrid wound in the world, bleak and inert. Doomfall offered nothing but mist and smoke and whispering ash. And a chill that would shiver the souls of gods.

  “Remain here, Shields,” the Prince commanded quietly. “The corps of Black Shields are to assemble twenty yards back, with the regular ’Spawn lines in formation another fifteen yards behind them.”

  “That would place us on this side of the wall, Prince Kor.”

  “Yes, Gren del Mor.”

  “All of us.”

  “Yes. We must be prepared to act swiftly and with absolute certainty. We will spill blood this day. Much blood. Some of it might well be our own.”

  The two Black Shields exchanged pale glances.

  Kor ben Dor’s eyes narrowed slightly. Something was moving in the mist. Drawing nearer. Something sure of its strength, confident in its power. No, not something… someone. A being without fear. Who knew no pain. None save that of his foes.

 
“Soon, Ev lin Dar,” the Halflord said softly, withdrawing his monstrous mace from its harness and placing the weapon across his muscular thighs, “we shall know the quality of my guess.”

  The beautiful Black Shield looked upon her Prince, frowned, then nodded.

  “Should you do this thing, Prince Kor,” she said quietly but emphatically, the whiskers of her tigress tattoo seeming to twitch for the chained fervour in her voice, “you shall never be forgotten. Your name will rise in song for a thousand generations. You will be loved by all. You will become a legend. A hero.”

  The terrible figure in the fog halted and leaned on the haft of a great black war-axe.

  Kor ben Dor rolled one shoulder, then the other, chasing the last lingering ache of the night’s cold rain from his bones – or perhaps he was simply shrugging.

  “How very mythopoeic, Shield. Yet most unfortunate.”

  The Black Shield peered at her Prince, her wide white eyes glowing like wet ivory.

  “Unfortunate, Prince Kor? How so?”

  The Halflord smiled faintly. But it was a smile sublime with sorrow, one that would rend the heart and wring tears from the most arid of eyes.

  “Because love is illusory, Shield,” he replied softly, so very softly. “Legends are lies. And all heroes die.”

  And in the breathless hush that followed, Kor ben Dor, Prince of the Bloodspawn, rode forth. Alone. So all alone. More alone than any soul in the world. The raven’s wings of his hair were as great black arms spread wide, welcoming darkness, espousing death. The streamers of his cloak floated from his shoulders like so many long slim fingers waving a solemn farewell. And it has since been said that in that moment, in those few heartbeats of time that his mar-render took to cross the killing ground, the Halflord mastered more fear than a brave man might conquer in a lifetime of terrors.

  But a thing being spoken does not necessarily mean that one should believe.

  Nor even listen.

  No further, giant.

  The voice was the sound of smoke on the stone, of hot steel cooling, seemingly born of a simmering within the heart of the earth. Ubiquitous and evanescent, a whisper at the edge of the Prince’s consciousness, but a whisper swollen with power, with command.