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

by Sean Rodden

  All of these contingents had seen some combination of hard marching and fierce fighting over two long punishing nights and equally gruelling days. Despite such rigour and adversity, each force had suffered relatively few casualties and remained essentially intact – weary and battered, but intact.

  The Ithramen, for their part, had been active since the evening of the first day of battle, but if they were particularly fatigued on this, the third morning of hostilities, they did not evince it. The Teagh Brothers and the one hundred Reservists that had come with them to Druintir had managed to catch a few hours of rest following their victory upon Caramel Dark, but they had taken no repose since and seemed no worse for the travail. The greater part of the Ghost Brigade had endured its own harrowing ride in the realm of All and Nothing, but remained energized and eager. Although Colinnan’s fell folk had fought since the very beginning and their blades were well-notched with use, the Raging Bull was ever ready for another charge. And the grim warders of the Grey Watch would not sleep until their land and Lord were secure.

  The fusion of courage and necessity can be an inexhaustible fire.

  Following a series of shrill shrieks, the rearguard of the Blood King’s Army hastened to form a defensive wall of hide and iron.

  Axennus Teagh grinned, wide and white.

  “Oh, look! I think the bad people have finally noticed us.”

  “The Diceman must have been up to his old tricks again, Axo.” Bronnus scowled, rubbing at the blemish on his breastplate, then scratching an itch in his burgeoning beard. “I might never become accustomed to such sorcery. Not truly.”

  “You always were a slow learner, dear brother. But no, it was not the work of our inimitable healer this time – neither he nor his motley crew of adepts.” The Erelian Commander looked off to his left, to where the Prince of Ithramis sat like a statue astride an equally motionless midnight charger. Steam rose from the glistening coat of the steed like smoke from black flame. “Rather, we were able to approach the enemy undetected by the good graces of our new friend, the noble Arbamas of Ithramis.”

  The Iron Captain stifled a groan. “Teller of the Tale, not him too…”

  Axennus chuckled cheerfully. “I think you will find the Black Prince to be a man of many surprises, Bron. We have but scraped the surface of that fine fellow, and have yet to even score the skin. Would you not agree, Left Tenant?”

  Runningwolf did not respond, as no response was actually expected of him. But to the sweet voice in his soul that said, I have been listening to your Commander for some time now, Abbawontandontas, and I am afraid he might be more than a little mad, the Rhelman replied with an invisible inward smile. Perhaps he is, Spirit Horse – but if so, then it is a beautiful madness. Eveningwing lashed his tail and tossed his head, his long mane flaring in flowing waves of golden flame. Agreed, Abbawontandontas.

  “Well, it looks like the Athair have come at last, Axo, and the enemy are faring horribly at their hands. And the Fiannar on the flanks seem to be holding their own.” He swabbed his cuirass again. “Perhaps the miraculous ride of the North March Mounted Reserve was all for naught.”

  “Nothing is for naught, brother.” Axennus pointed southward. “Behold.”

  The Prince of Ithramis had becked his great black charger forward. He stopped a few lengths before his lines of shimmering knights, and gazed with vivid silver eyes at the vast army of the enemy massed to the west, and beyond to the front and war. He saw the gallantry of Evangael and the shining Sul Athaifain, and his heart swelled with Light and love. He witnessed the wild courage of the Rothmen and the graceful brutality of the Host of Arrenhoth, and his esteem for both bloomed like bloodflowers beneath a soft summer sun. He watched in reverence as Varonin and the Grey Watch waged war with the cold impersonal rage of a winter storm. But he reserved his towering pride for the House of Defurien and the august Lord of the Fiannar. And soon, Arbamas decided, he would tell Alvarion so – and he would tell him why.

  The Black Prince raised his sword, the long pearly blade glistering like ice in the glare of the morning sun. He remained thus for five heartbeats, ten, twenty, and his weapon was as a blazing torch of freedom, the radiant light of liberty, and a beacon of hope. And as he brought the blade down again, the Prince’s Own hefted their lances in a single synchronized motion and moved forward as one.

  On the southern flank, under the venerable standards of the Raging Bull and the Grey Doom, the dour Deathward warriors of Colinnan and Harlastian also rode forth.

  “As I said, dear Bronnus,” the Commander drawled, drawing his sword. “Nothing for naught.”

  The Iron Captain grunted.

  “Nothing for naught. Somehow that seems to suit us, Axo. You should make it the Reserve’s motto.”

  Axennus grinned. “I just might.”

  The elder Teagh made a series of sharp gestures. Immediately, Left Tenant Runningwolf and several other officers rode left and right to relay the keenly anticipated orders. Bronnus then took a deep breath, lifted the silver horn to his lips and sent a long lingering blare to ring and sing upon the Seven Hills of Eryn Ruil.

  And the legendary North March Mounted Reserve rode to war once more.

  Waif shrieked and screamed. The air tasted of blood and piss, and all about her were pain and rage and death, the wages of war in their most extreme and explicit incarnations. A veritable hell on earth, chaos unchained and loosed upon the world. Bedlam, anarchy, pandemonium. And the little girl absolutely loved it.

  She sat cross-legged in the hollowed abdomen of long-dead Arn’badt, the self-professed King of the Giants, as headless in death as he had been brainless in life. Only a stride from her dubious seat of honour, a massive Urkrok tumbled to the sopping wet ground, splashing up blood and bile and bits of shattered bone. Half the ogress’ head was gone, and she clutched her eviscerated guts like so many slithering eels in her huge and helpless hands. As the Urkrok belched and barfed her final breaths, she turned her cloven countenance to Waif, and in her one remaining eye was an agony so acute, so excruciating that it made her extraordinarily ugly face gorgeous.

  The little girl felt a rush of heat to her loins. She bit down on her lower lip and grinned, the resultant expression warping her sweet cherubic features into a mask of mindless madness. But she remained completely rational and lucid. Besides, one demon’s insanity is another’s unmitigated genius. And she was truly a genius – the chaos and devastation surrounding her confirmed that. But such wondrous ruin was also intoxicating and inviting, deceptively alluring, and she would need to resist the urge to submerge herself overdeeply. Even now, the warmth in her groin grew rank and damp, and something slimy slithered down her thighs. She dug her nails in the blackened burned thing at her breast, and beamed.

  Isn’t it lovely, brother? Isn’t it wonderful?

  No reply.

  The little girl’s fair brows knotted petulantly. Brother?

  And the air was abruptly sucked from her bosom. For in that instant Waif sensed that Urchin had been destroyed. Annihilated, eradicated, obliterated. She could but hear an echo – no, less than that – a ghost, maybe, of his whining rebarbative voice:

  Must I? Must I? Must, must, mus –

  Must you what, brother? Annoy me to death, even after your own?

  But of course, there came no answer. Because there was no Urchin to proffer one, not any longer. The demon that had been given that name was destroyed, removed from the Tale. Irrevocably and eternally. He was become one of the Evergone, cast into the Untold, and of him no words would either be written or spoken again.

  Waif thought on the matter no more. The battle about her had intensified. Thickened and hardened. The thrust and twist of lethal lengths of hungry steel, the hammering of clubs on shuddering shields, the brutal pound and press of amoral mortal need, the moans and groans and the graceless grunts, the pungent perfume of perspiration, the satisfied sighs of the slayers and the slain. The little girl lost herself momentarily in the wicked wonder of it
all, rocking back and forth in her ghastly stall, cooing softly as the burned thing scraped her nipples through her soiled white shift.

  And then she was rudely torn from her reverie by another unexpected intuition. She grasped and groped telepathically, and her suspicions were almost instantly confirmed. Her psychic tether to the Blood King had been disengaged, disconnected, severed at its source. She reached out with the slippery tendrils of her sentience, but she could not sense him, could not feel him at all. Not so much as a shadow of Suru-luk remained. It was as though the Red Wraith had never been, had never lived and died and risen again, had never even existed at all.

  Waif’s big blue eyes blinked in surprise.

  What the –

  A tapered length of lethal silver-tipped oakwood blasted through Arn’badts back, exploding from the dead Graniant’s hollowed belly, missing Waif’s head by less than a finger’s breadth. The force of the blow staggered the animated carcass, and it stumbled forward, then tumbled, its great weight snapping the lance like a twig as it crashed to the ground. The little girl collided face-first with the battered earth, the burned thing crushed against her chest, And’badt’s mass pressing her body down into a greasy morass of mud and blood and trampled grass.

  Well, isn’t this just splendid, she sneered into the muck, her agile pink tongue dipping to taste. Stuck between a stone giant and a soft place…

  Waif then heard the latent thrum of the ensorcelled silver lance-point a mere inch from her ear, and she realized precisely how close she had come to her own removal from the Tale. Existence, even her own, was ever precarious. All that is, all that exists, including demons, can and will end. Her tiny body trembled at the thought, and something remotely related to humility brushed against her consciousness.

  I think I’ll stay right where I am for now. At least until it’s all over. No safer place in the world at the moment.

  The little girl plunged her tongue deeper into the soiled soil, and for a time all else was forgotten.

  The victory was a hollow one. Hollow and empty. So many had fallen, so many had sacrificed everything – their futures, their legacies, their very lives. Fully half the Fiannar that had fought at Eryn Ruil had departed that wretched and woeful world to seek the Light. They would not be mourned, those lost ones, but nor would they go unremembered. The survivors would tell the tales of the fallen by unnumbered bedsides and campfires, and the names and deeds of the heroic dead would endure until such time as there were none remaining to recount or none left to listen. Two thousand shining Deathward souls. Forever gone.

  The Fires of the Fallen would indeed burn brightly that night.

  A strange suppressive pall descended upon the killing fields of Eryn Ruil as the last of the Blood King’s army was surrounded and slaughtered on the ever-bare blades of the Grey Watch. The resistance was token, feeble, past pathetic, and the slaying was done in absolute silence. Cold northern steel slid through the yielding flesh of the last half-Urks standing, and the blades made no sound, not even a slick wet whisper, neither in entry nor upon withdrawal. Even the dying went into the pallid darkness without complaint, acquiescent and compliant. And afterward there were no shouts of triumph, no ecstatic embrace between comrades-in-arms, not so much as the passing semblance of euphoric celebration.

  The grey-garbed Fiannar simply lowered their weapons and turned away.

  The morning sun was well into its rise, and there was no wisp of cloud in the soft blue sky, but the eerie pall persisted, grey and dank and chill. Mounted upon Arrowwing, Thrannien of the Neverborn stalked among the tangled corpses of man and monster, friend and foe, his golden eyes gleaming, ever alert, ever aware. The Prince intuitively comprehended that the creature he hunted was still there, hiding, concealed among the thousands upon thousands of carcasses that covered the fetid field of battle. He could sense the sumanam, could feel its presence, a barely perceptible stink slinking somewhere beneath of the ashen aura of death and destruction. Arrowwing pricked his ears, then tossed his noble head toward a nearby bevy of bodies upon the ground. The Sun Lord sent an arrow through the eye of a mortally wounded Urkrok – an act not of mercy, but of frustration.

  The elliam stopped. Deliberately, purposefully, the Prince set another arrow to his bowstring. He then shut his eyes, concentrating, extending his perception across the slaughterground, prodding and probing. Initially, he sensed only the frightening stillness of the place, that ghoulish quietude found only in crypts and tombs and grottoes of the dead. But he brushed the gossamer cobwebs from his consciousness, and then he could hear millions of bh’ritsi worms squirming in the festering flesh of the fallen; he could taste the unsavoury flavours that fouled the beaks and filled the crops of vultures; he could feel the feeble fading thuds of a hundred failing hearts as the fatally injured swooned toward oblivion; he could smell the delicate yet resilient scent of autumn grass beneath the grisly gore of war. Nevertheless, he could see nothing, and not because his eyes were closed.

  And then his cognizance was drawn to the colossal corpse of a decapitated Graniant. The carcass reeked of old death, of decomposition and decay measured in weeks rather than hours or days. The pong of rot was far too advanced, too acute, and it burned like a scorching smoke in the Ath’s nostrils and lungs. He scrunched his eyelids tighter, narrowing the focus of his attention, envisioning the dead stone giant through several walls of obscurant sorcery. One by one, the Prince peeled back the layers of arcane obfuscation, following the spoor of putrefaction until he could visualize the precise location of the olfactory anomaly.

  Thrannien opened his eyes, peering across the body-strewn battlefield, toward the centre, near the rear of enemy’s final position, perhaps a little more than half a mile distant. His supernatural sight marked several drab figures of the Grey Watch searching among the dead, and beyond them the carcass of the headless giant, splayed face-down and aswarm with masticating larvae, the broken shaft of an Ithramian lance protruding from its back.

  The Sun Lord smiled.

  At last.

  But as he was about to urge Arrowwing closer, gallant Thunderlight galloped up to them, and the set of Evangael’s countenance was fell and fierce.

  “Welcome, my brother,” Thrannien greeted his fellow Sun Lord. “I have happy tidings to chase that fire of ire from your face. I have found – ”

  “Something is amiss, Thrannien,” Evangael cut in crisply. “I cannot link with First Knight Lalindel, nor any of the Sul Athaifain who awayed to Allaura with him. And though I can sense Ingallin, the Chancellor remains removed and remote. I am convinced that he receives my overtures, but he of choice and for reasons of his own does not respond to them.” There was a certain fury in Evangael’s eyes, the form of fury that is founded in fear. “I am beset with the dread that a horror beyond our darkest dreams unfolds, and it is in my heart that we are grievously betrayed.”

  Thrannien stared. “Have you spoken of your fears to the Lord Alvarion?”

  “No. Lord Alvarion suffers sorrows enough this day, and does not need to be further troubled by my unconfirmed concerns.”

  Thrannien’s bow was hot in his hand, the fletching of the arrow was like fire upon his fingertips. He glanced again to where the Graniant lay rotting, and saw a number of Watchers nearby, walking slowly and with great care among the innumerable dead. Their grave comportment reminded him of his having seen the Lord of the Fiannar during the latter stage of battle, removed from the fray, his chin low upon his chest, his shoulders noticeably bowed as though bearing an impossible weight. The Prince recalled the pang of pity he had felt for Alvarion.

  “There is wisdom in this, Evangael. You will ride now?”

  “Yes. And the Sul Athaifain with me. But we will leave unhurriedly, lest we alert our friends to our misgivings. Once we have passed through Faendomin, we will ride the edge of the Evvanin and give the elliamir their head.” He paused. “We were timely in our coming once this day. I only pray the Teller sees fit that we be so again.”

&n
bsp; And with fear and hope vying in in his heart, Evangael rode.

  “The Athair are departing, Lord,” Marshal Varonin called across a swath of the raveled slain. “All, it appears, save the Sun Lord Thrannien.”

  Alvarion looked up from the broken bodies at his boots, and cast his weary gaze westward. Prince Evangael’s Sul Athaifain were riding away, back the way they had come, and though they moved at a leisurely pace, the Lord sensed a certain urgency in the straight backs of the riders and the stiff tails of the ridden.

  “They likely seek the purifying beauty of Galledine, nephew,” Taresse offered tersely, “or the tranquility of the Miramarch. They will need to cleanse themselves of the blood spilled here this morning. Death is anathematic to the Undying.”

  “And the dealing of it more loathesome still,” the Lord murmured. Whether he was speaking to her of the Athair or to and of himself was unclear.

  “The Daradur are gone as well,” noted Varonin, “presumably to lend their axes and hammers to Drogul at Doomfall.” He turned his cowl to the clear empty sky. “The throkka are… not awing. It does not ease my heart that we have had no word of the southern pass, neither news of victory nor request for aid.”

  “The Stone Lords are ever a reticent folk, Marshal,” declared Taresse. “I find no cause for alarm. The Daradur would have advised us if anything was amiss.”

  “Have riders sent to Doomfall, Marshal,” instructed the Lord of the Deathward as he moved away among the dead. “We will have our answers soon enough.”