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

by Sean Rodden

  But their prowess and progress were such that they soon outpaced their cortege of children and the hard-handed women who warded it. The gap between Caelle’s company and those struggling in their wake widened, and into this voracious void poured Dwarks by the dozens, scores, hundreds. The train’s advance faltered and stalled, and the women formed a curved bow of lethal northern steel about the children, both ends braced against the base of the cold limestone cliff. There they raised their brave banners, locked their shields and shouldered their spears. Mothers and sisters, sons and daughters. There they stood. There they fought. And from there they went one by one into the all-too-eager embrace of the chill damp darkness that awaits each and all.

  Caelle heard them dying. Women. Children. Lifelong friends. She heard, and heeded them not. She shed no tears, her throat did not tighten, no shivers of dread pimpled her skin. The beat of her heart neither quickened nor slowed. She seemed impervious, inaccessible. Like a goddess who recked little of life, less of death, and nothing of sorrows save those of her worshippers when her whims were so inclined.

  Indeed, most mortal beings ever attach superfluous sentiment and sorrow to the losses they suffer – one might imagine that those who are doomed to die would better prepare for and be more receptive to the limitations and inevitabilities of their impermanence. Alas, such is seldom, if ever, the case for Mankind. But the Fiannar were a people apart. More introspective, more aware. They respected death, though they did not mark it with monuments and mausoleums, and never did they mourn it. They answered death with fire and silence. They neither sought it nor fled from it, and they would not weep for it. Grief was considered a spiritual scourge, intensely private and privational, never to be expressed, never to be shared, even should it shred the soul.

  And the Shield Maiden’s own soul was so dreadfully scored and scarred.

  Unbind me, sister.

  Caelle growled aloud. Partly at the imagined voice in her mind, partly for the stalling of her company’s courageous sortie. Her party had penetrated deep into the Dwarkash horde, and were come to the place where the flow of molten stone had been stopped by the Singers’ songs. There, they too were arrested by power ancient and arcane. Blocks of dwar-Durka made abominable with urthvennim whelmed against Mundar and the Fiannian foreguard, checking the charge, and all swiftly devolved into standing and static warfare.

  Release me now!

  Very well! Begone, madness! And haunt me no more!

  The heat there was intense, rushing off the hardened lava in clouds of pink steam. The air itself was a torrid thing, and reeked of rot and wrongness. Perhaps that sweltering stench was why the Shield Maiden did not notice a certain cooling beneath her shield. Severe enervation or anguish or wrath – or a combination thereof – might have caused that uncharacteristic chink in her cognizance. Or mayhap the warmth had never been there at all.

  The Dwarks blasted Mundar with bursts of earthblight, burning barrages of polluted puissance, but the sturdy Warder held firm, and the Maiden in him refused the Hag at every turn. Caelle’s guard fought ferociously, some remaining mounted, others choosing to battle with their boots set surely upon the ground. The mirarra reared and kicked at hate-frenzied faces of the dwar-Durka. The power in those heavy hooves was devastating. Crude helms imploded, skulls exploded, brain matter scattered and splashed like so much viscera tossed from the buckets of butchers.

  But then the first brave warrior of the Shield Maiden’s guard was pulled from her saddle and viciously hewn apart, and her splendid steed was chopped down, decapitated and disemboweled. More unfortunate Fiannar and mirarra followed. Some warriors were slain where they stood, others were pulled violently away into the mass of frenzied fiends and just… disappeared. And then Mundar himself vanished into the tumult, and the Dwarks roared and crashed with revitalized fury against the wavering wall of Deathward defenders.

  The struggle, the Shield Maiden realized, would soon become a slaughter.

  Caelle leaned low to whisper one last impossible instruction into her mirarran’s ear. But as she did so, the infant Aranion stirred, looked up toward her, and his eyes gleamed with a bright silver light, and his cherubic face veritably shone. The Shield Maiden gasped aloud, straightened, staring at the child. And when his gaze did not follow her, she realized the Lordling was not looking at her, but past her.

  Above her.

  Caelle turned and peered upward.

  And saw there a falling of angels.

  It is said that the dead tell no tales. But occasionally they have a decisive influence on one. For it was not the swing of a cruel khurl that brought the hulking kulg-Kor down. Neither was it a misjudged strike of his own war-axe, nor a missed block by his vambraces. Rather it was the weighty form of a dead Dwark impacting the side of his knee and knocking his left leg from under him. The Captain crashed hard upon the stone ground, miraculously managing to evade one descendent enemy blow while Dandar batted aside another. But the gruesome grey aspect of a grinning dwar-Durk loomed near, and a third khurl came screaming down on him, and before he could raise his axe or his arm to thwart it –

  Three blurs of blackness whirred over him, simultaneously striking the fiend in the face. The force of the tripartite blow snapped the Dwark’s head back, causing his crude blade to swing wide and clang against the rock less than inch from Jadun’s head. The metal snapped amid a shower of sparks, and the haft slipped harmlessly from the dwar-Durk’s clasp. He tumbled backward, the shivering shaft of a long ebony arrow protruding from his mouth, and another from each of his eyes. The Dwark was dead before his body hit the ground.

  Jadun rolled and rose, and as he did so one, two, three thrown spears sailed past him in swift succession, each unfailingly finding a fault in the armour of a dwar-Durk as though guided by the hand of an unseen god of war. Three brutes died. The Captain glanced at Dandar, but the urthron only shrugged as he burst asunder an adversary’s head with his hammer. And then a nebulous shape somersaulted overhead, unnumbered knives flying along as many trajectories, plunging with lethal accuracy into exposed Dwarkash throats and eyes and ears. Jadun glimpsed twin flashes of silvery-blue steel as a pair of curved swords leapt from their harness, but the figure – a man, evidently, small and wiry and clad completely in black – landed in the midst of the dwar-Durka massed in the crevasse, and the Captain lost sight of him. But he heard him. More precisely, he heard the noise of Dwarks dying. And nothing in the kulg-Kor’s memory had ever sounded so superb.

  And then he heard another thing. A thing like thunder, but not. A roar of war that would reverberate across the battlefields of Second Earth for decades to come.

  “Eccuron! Eccuron! Pur gallir echi Minar Eccuron!”

  And Arumarron, Heir to the House of Eccuron, strode across the stone and waded unmolested into the fray. The lad’s gigantic greatsword tore gaping gashes in the Dwarkash ranks, cleaving into the fiends as ferociously as would any Stone Lord’s war-axe, save the mightiest only. He fought like the fabled founder of his House, ruthless and wild, his leonine mane whipping about him in a rage of brazen flame. None there were in that place of carnage and cruor who could stay him. And ever was the shade of his murdered mother in the haven of his heart, and with every fatal slash of his blade he bellowed her name.

  “Sarrane!” And again, “Sarrane! Sarrane!” And again and again, “Sarrane! Sarrane! SARRANE! MOTHER!”

  Terrified dwar-Durka shoved one another aside to avoid the rampaging giant with the gore-smeared sword. Some even came to blows with one another in their furibund frenzy to evade him. The fiends fled in all directions that were away. And the disorganized bedlam of battle rapidly degenerated into total terror-stricken pandemonium.

  Some escaped the Heir to the House of Eccoron only to find another horror in the form of the man called the Harbinger. The last of the legendary saburau danced like darkness in a hard night rain, elusive and ephemeral, ever there and never there. His swords were loosed lightning, flashes of fulgurant fury, striking every
where at once. And about him dwar-Durka died en masse.

  Arumarron was thunder incarnate. Zalkan was living lightning.

  And the Ten Axes of the Fifth Army were a storm on the stone.

  Most of the Dwarks who fled the horrors assailing them drove toward the war-ravaged canyon before Allaura. But some, in their mindless panic, rushed right at the line of mighty Daradur strung across the passage which led back the way they had come. These dwar-Durka were even more belligerent in their terror than they had been in their battle-frenzy, and they brawled furiously, desperately, to breach the steel-and-flesh wall of slashing axes and pummeling hammers. And when they were refused, they howled and bawled. They sobbed and wailed and cried for their Queen. And died weeping.

  But a few of the fiends – somehow, someway – pushed past the kill-crazed kulgord and onto the undefended path that lay beyond.

  Undefended, that was, save by three horses, a scrawny boy, and a girl with a sword.

  The Drone stood amid the salacious havoc of slaughter, leaning upon the butt of his blood-sopped khurl, detached yet intent. He breathed in the sweet rich reeks of fear and death and fleshly fluids, absently lapped his lips, then exhaled with an ecstatic shudder. The cries of dying Deathward bitches and the whimpers of their doomed whelps whispered at him in the sultry tones of a sated lover. He almost moaned aloud.

  Recovering himself, the Drone’s laval eyes flickered and flared as he watched his bodyguard of Red Dwarks assail the lone Darad. At whiles, the Solemate of the Queen found himself grinning and grunting in approval, even giggling with glee; at other times, he scowled and growled and bit bitterly down on a festering frustration.

  The urthvennim-imbued warriors of the Ward had dragged the solitary Stone Lord away from the small company of Fiannar he had been leading, away from all aid, from all hope for salvation. At their leader’s behest, the Red Dwarks had completely encircled and surrounded the Darad. And then, in unholy unison, they had blasted him with an enfilade of earthblight, pouring the beautiful filth upon him from all directions, relentlessly, mercilessly. But with his twin axes crossed before him, and his massive arms hugging his chest, the Stone Lord endured and resisted. And though they forced him down upon one knee, they could not compel him to two, regardless of the strength they expended in the effort.

  Incredibly, the Darad rose, threw his beard back and laughed. The urthvennim melted away from him like red rats scurrying from a roaring fire. And then came the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of war-axes whirling in the warator’s hands, hard Daradun steel calling for the kill.

  The Stone Lord met the Solemate’s stare, black on red.

  “Have you come to play, Hag-slave?”

  The Drone sneered, waved a hand and barked a command, and a Red Dwark rushed the insolent Warder of the Wandering Guard. Despite the grey fiend’s urthvennim-enhanced metier and dexterity, the Darad disposed of him with intimidating and unmitigated ease. The dwar-Durk’s hairless head sailed from his shoulders, thudded ignobly upon the stone, and rolled to a stop at his leader’s feet.

  The Solemate looked down, looked up again, glared.

  The Darad winked.

  Another snapped order, and a pair of Dwarks charged the Stone Lord from opposite directions at the same time. The Darad leapt in the death-stained air, landed, ducked. All the while war-axes whirred and reeled. And both dwar-Durka staggered away, dismembered and exenterated, having never even swung their khurlur in anything akin to aggression. They toppled in sloppy heaps.

  Past a sanguine smile, the Darad blew the Drone a kiss.

  The Solemate of the Queen howled with hateful fury and set his entire bodyguard on the Stone Lord like a pack of wild curs on a wounded hart.

  But this Stone Lord was no stag. And he was yet uninjured.

  The Drone watched in disbelief – uncaring, unfeeling, indifferent disbelief, but disbelief nevertheless – as the Ward was systematically torn to bloody ribbons.

  The Darad was incredibly swift and impossibly strong, and his battle-skill was unmatched by any foe the fiends had yet encountered. The Ward struck at him from all sides, but the Stone Lord’s axe-blades and vambraces were always there, absorbing, deflecting, and whenever he decided to counter, at least one Dwark died.

  The Solemate gestured.

  The few remaining warriors of the Ward then stood back and bombarded their victim with urthvennim again, only to see him shrug the red rot aside and laugh in their malformed faces. Nonetheless, the torrents of earthblight did seem to slow him. The Drone motioned once more, and the Red Dwarks simultaneously assailed the exasperating enemy with both khurlur and corruption, and only then did their blows defy his defences.

  The dwar-Durka hacked and hewed at the lone Darad from all directions, all at once, all the while barraging him with a deluge of urthvennim. The assault was constant, continuous, and the Stone Lord suffered several horrific blows about the head and body. But he did not go down. He did not stop fighting. And a ring of dead Dwarks rose about him, a macabre monument of muscle and metal raised in honour of one warrior’s invincible valour.

  However, even if his valour was invincible, the Darad himself was not. He was mortal, in the manner of his kind, and when he was cut, he bled. And all things that bleed can be killed. By the time the Stone Lord slew the last of the Ward, he was half-blinded by blood, haemorrhaging profusely from an assortment of dreadful wounds, and could barely stand.

  The Drone grinned. His fiery eyes blazed with the vile venin of the Hag. Pustules popped on his pocked cheeks, and putrid fluid oozed into his moustaches. He licked his moist lips. And then it was he who laughed.

  In the soft white light of a bizarrely brightening morn, Mundar of the mara-Waratur hunched wearily on his war-axes, hung his head, watching blood drizzle from his beard.

  Oblivious to the odd illumining of the air, the Solemate of the Queen kicked aside a slew of the slain, and hefted his enormous khurl.

  “Time to play.”

  She is dead.

  She is dead, and she knows she is dead.

  She is dead, and she knows she is dead, yet she still seeks something that was hers when she lived.

  She suspects the dwar-Durka cannot see her, though those infused with the earthblight seem to sense her when she passes near them – they grumble and curse and gesticulate wildly, and some of them cast crude signs of warding in her general direction. And those times when the press of battle is overclose and she is forced to step right through their bodies – blood and bone and breastplates notwithstanding – they shiver and shudder and shake their whiskered jowls. She would hurt them if she could. She would kill them all. But she remains uncertain of her powers, unsure of her strengths and weaknesses in this new form – in this old form renewed, rather – so she moves carefully, cautiously, eschewing the enemy whenever she can, seldom looking them in their fiery eyes.

  And she avoids the gazes of her own folk altogether.

  Some among the women can sense her. A few – the surviving Singers, certainly, and those gifted with the Sight – can see her. They glance toward her and gasp, whispering at her even as they fight and fall, invoking the names of ancient heroes and half-forgotten Hiathir and the Teller himself. Not wishing her away, necessarily, but soliciting deliverance from things little known and less understood.

  And the children, of course, can see her. Especially the younger ones. Most simply stare, but some of them point and wave, a few even call her name.

  She glides past them all and does not respond. She cannot respond, even should she desire it, so ravaged is she by guilt, and savaged by shame. For she believes she has failed them, has floundered and foundered in her duty to them. Ever had they looked to her to be their eyes, their shrewd and sagacious guide, but now they are being massacred because she was so woefully blind. Her incompetence, her terrible ineptitude, has doomed them all.

  Find them, her visions had insisted. Find them, the First Axe of the Fifth Army had so imperatively implored. Find them. But all she had found
was death for herself, a tragic last stand for her Lady, and indiscriminate annihilation for her people.

  So now she searches for something else entirely.

  Spotting the sought thing at last, she stops moving and kneels. The ground feels hard and real, and her incorporeal form does not phase through the rock as it had done when she first left the shelter of her sister’s shield. She is learning. She is understanding this strange and subtle body. She is adapting, acclimating to what it is to be dead.

  Reaching for the weapon at her knee, her hand simply passes through the metal-shod shaft. The violet eddies in her eyes churn in ire. She pauses, pushes her anger aside, assembles her thoughts. She focuses upon the bloodstained shaft, and reaches again. And again, her fingers elapse right through both metal sheath and wooden core – nevertheless, the shaft moves. Infinitesimally. Minutely. But it moves.

  She stares, concentrates. She holds breath she does not need in lungs she does not have. She steadies the beat of a heart that no longer exists. Somewhere in the distance, a voice is shouting her name, but so fixated is she that she does not hear it. Calm, quieted, she reaches one more time. Something cool and hard and very tangible presses against the phantasmal flesh of her palm. Ghostly fingers grasp, tighten.

  And the dead Seer rises, spear in hand.

  They fell like stars from Heaven.

  Ablaze with brilliant Light, twenty Knights of the Sul Athaifain rode the ghost of the dead god down from the ramparts of the Glass Gate. They were angels of war from another world, shimmering, shining, gliding in glory, volplaning through the vanishing mists of morning. Their beautiful bows sang as they descended, and the song was one of wrath and retribution, a roar of divine thunder reverberating deep within the rock walls of the gorge. Great shards of stone shattered loose and showered down, guided by a godly will away from the sons and daughters of Defurien, crashing upon the swarm of Shadow’s slaves. A storm of Athain arrows streaked through the whitened air, seeking and without fail finding the foes of the Light. To those with wickedness in their souls – rather, with no souls whatsoever – it seemed the very sky of morn was falling. And perhaps, in a way more profound than most might fathom, it was.