For some reason, or perhaps by some strange chance, the terror of old dreams had returned.
She’d visited that house again tonight. That dirty hot hovel of which the memories had only just started to fade. Subconsciously she traced the spot at her side where strong fingers had gripped her, pinning her hands down with a thick arm. The faces of the men she’d finally started to forget returned in vivid detail, leering at her from the dark corners of the hall.
Syrah stopped. Putting her back against the stone, she slid down to sit on the floor, wrapping her arms around her knees. For a long time she stared at the narrow table of lit candles across from her, wishing the faces gone, wishing their wicked smiles and hungry eyes away. Slowly they faded, chased away by the soft light.
The one that took their place, though, most would have called more terrible and frightening.
Syrah had long since removed the black stain of blood from Raz i’Syul’s face in her memories. She could picture him, cleansed, amber eyes burning with the same glow of the candles. His strange reptilian features did not seem so harsh these years later. On the contrary, they were comforting, tangible details that were the only things she wanted to remember from that day. For so long she’d prayed to the Lifegiver that she wouldn’t forget…
His face was the only thing that ever made the nightmares stay away.
Book II: The Warring Son
PROLOGUE
861 v.S.
“The mountain men of the Northern Ranges are, like any people, a diverse sort. While most hold their ways and traditions in generally high regard, there are always outliers, extreme opinions on either side of a political spectrum not unlike our own. On one hand, those of an emerging school of thought, one that drifts away from ritual in favor of peace, prosperity, and the development of civil exchange between the tribes and the scattered valley towns below. On the other, though, the battered side of the same coin. Those harder men of the tribes who hold tight to the old ways, refusing to bend even the slightest towards what they deem to be a weakening of their people, a conscious sacrifice of culture and will. It is these men we must fear. It is these men who will bloody every snowy hill of the North before they see the fall of their Stone Gods to the warmer embrace of the Lifegiver and all his mercy.”
—Studying the Lifegiver, by Carro al’Dor
Gûlraht Baoill stood tall upon the precipice of Crone’s Hook, toeing the edge of the narrow cliff even as the wind buffeted his heavy frame in all directions. Dark blue eyes took in the first light of dawn as the sun crested the snowy caps of the Vietalis Ranges, washing the mountainsides in yellows and golds. The colors were harsh against the gray and black of stone and early-morning shadows, but Gûlraht knew the edge of that contrast would fade as the day grew older. He knew many things, in fact, about these cliffs. As vast as they were, as endless and angry as the mountains seemed to many, to Gûlraht they spoke only of the warmth of home, the strength of honor.
And the power of ritual, tradition, and death.
Taking a final moment to absorb the morning glow, Gûlraht reached down for the haft of the double-headed great-ax he’d been resting both palms on. The weapon, a massive thing of dark wood, decorative leather thongs, and honed steel, felt comfortingly heavy in his hand as he turned his back on the morning, making his way down the Hook towards the group waiting for him below. His fur-lined boots, thick leather layered with darkened wolf pelts, kept good footing despite the several inches of snow that hid the treacherous ground from sight. The wind refused to let up as well, kicking flakes of white into Gûlraht’s thick brown hair and beard, already heavy with bone beads and iron rings. It ruffled the tufts of matted fur that comprised the rest of his armor: gauntlets, bracers, and iron-studded breastplate. Only the upper halves of his arms were bare to the elements, as was tradition, the skin there dark and hardened to near leather itself, stretching harshly against the mass of muscle and sinew beneath as Gûlraht picked his way carefully down the ice and uneven earth.
Reaching flat ground at last, he looked down on the four men standing there in wait, each at least two heads shorter than he.
“Speak.”
To his right, Erek Rathst started up at once.
“The hounds tracked down the last of the Amreht runaways early this morning. They await your judgment in the center of camp, as per your instruction. Once we’ve dealt with them, I expect the rest of the tribe to abandon these tedious mutinies for good.”
Gûlraht nodded once, then turned to the man to Erek’s right.
“And of the Kregoan?” he asked. “What news?”
“More came in the night to join our ranks,” Kareth Grahst, Gûlraht’s cousin, responded as the wind whipped between them all, throwing beaded hair about. “With the fall of the Amreht, and our march on the Goatmen of Gähs, they seem to think it prudent to enter the fold willingly, without bloodshed.”
“Wise of them.” Gûlraht nodded again, watching the twitching of their shadows against the snow as the sun continued to rise behind them. “Not to mention fortunate. Between the battle and these rebellions, we’ve lost half the numbers the Amreht might have provided us with.”
“You are cruel with them, my Kayle,” one of the other men, an older figure who stood furthest to Gûlraht’s left, said testily. “This sort of cancer festers under the weight of a boot, but not in the palm of an extended hand. Emhret would never have condoned such—”
“Do not presume to voice the late Kayle’s opinion in my presence, Rako,” Gûlraht growled, staring down the older man. “You may be my uncle by marriage, but Emhret Grahst was so by blood. It didn’t stop me from taking his head when I saw fit. He grew weak, seduced by the White Witch, and you should know well I do not abide weakness in my people.”
To his right, Kareth twitched involuntarily.
Gûlraht frowned. “Do my words trouble you, Cousin?” he asked pointedly, looking down upon the smaller man.
Kareth shook his head at once.
“My father bent knee to the towns, to the Witch, and to their soft god,” he spat with every ounce as much venom as was painted across his weathered face. “He claimed necessity due to the freeze, but we are men of the mountains. We face the storms and endure. We do not turn our backs to the wind and cringe our way through the winter.”
“Well enough said,” the last man, Agor Vareks, agreed with a nod before looking to Rako. “There may be a time for mercy, old friend, but that time is not now. This cancer may have festered beneath the weight of a boot, as you say, but it is that boot which will crush it.”
He turned back to Gûlraht.
“The same boot, I dare presume, that will eventually stomp out the larger sickness plaguing these lands of ours.”
In response, Gûlraht looked over his shoulder, down the cliff edge this time. There, tucked between the mountainside and the evergreen sweeps of the glen below, stood the valley town. Like a scar on the world, its great circular stone wall cut a swath around thousands of buildings and homes, grayish smoke furling from twice as many chimneys as day broke for the city-folk, too. Like the ants they were they crawled from the timber houses, milling about and over each other, a wash of vermin all packed together, feeling safe behind their wall.
Metcaf, the town was called by its inhabitants. They gave a name to each such place, attempting in vain to distinguish them from one another.
The mountain men had a single name for all of them in the language of the tribes, but no word of equal vulgarity existed in the Common tongue.
“We will continue to leave the tamed men to their comforts for the time being,” Gûlraht said, his eyes not leaving the walls of Metcaf. “The treaties Emhret established give them a sense of security. There will be a day we can use that to our advantage.”
“And when will that day be, exactly?”
It was Agor who asked. The man was not as aged as Rako, but he was old enough to be forgiven some limited patience.
Unlike Rako, though, he bore no weak sympa
thies.
Gûlraht turned again, but looked beyond his advisors now to the camp behind them. In scattered rows of cloth and pelt tents, twenty thousand tribesmen awaited his command. They spotted the flattened mountaintop to its edge and beyond, claiming whatever patch of snowless earth they’d been able to find. Muddy trenches cut paths at random every which way, churned to muck by booted feet and the hooves of the long-haired oxen the tribes had used as beasts of burden for as long as anyone could recall. With the new day came the rousing of the slumbering beast that was the army, and even as he listened Gûlraht could make out the growing roar of awakening as men and their camp slaves started to stir, shouting to one another and prepping to move.
A word was all it would take. A single command, and Gûlraht could swarm the cliffs with the army at his back, descending like some great dark bird of prey on Metcaf far below.
For a moment, the temptation was there.
But no. Now was not the time.
“Soon, Agor,” Gûlraht finally responded. “The townsmen will have their turn, I swear it to you all, but the Goatmen come first. They are seven thousand we could use.”
Hefting the great-ax in one hand, Gûlraht pushed between the men, making for camp.
“Take me to the runaways, Uncle,” he commanded Rako over his shoulder. “It’s time this cruel boot of mine crushed your ‘Amreht cancer’ once and for all.”
CHAPTER 1
“There were once no marked borders separating the North and South. For the better part of the near-thousand v.S years, in fact, there lacked any distinct boundaries between the two realms. Instead, a width of fifty or so miles above the sandy plains of the South and just below the thick evergreen groves of the North was recognized as neutral territory, a sort of buffer land. In the years of 734 and 737, however, disputes involving taxation and ownership rights broke out amongst a number of small settlements along this narrow strip. To avoid an inter-border incident, it was agreed that distinct markers would be placed along every major road and trade route, designating the exact spot in which a traveler crossed from one land into the next.”
—The Development of Trade of the 700’s, by Vâl Shrune
Raz watched the cart pull away, heading south once more, back in the direction they’d come. For a long time he stood at the edge of the woodland road, waiting until the old man and his horse were long gone, disappearing around a bend in the trees.
Then he turned northward, looking around with shameless awe.
It was like nothing he’d ever seen.
Everything was so green. For the last two days of their weeklong journey, Raz had seen hints of things his father had described to him years before. Patches of long, thick grass mixing with the sandy Southern soil. Scattered examples of monolithic trees that dwarfed the palms he remembered from the summer months his family had spent along the banks of the Garin. He’d seen the signs, known that the world was changing around him, shifting into something magnificent. The land was coming alive, reshaping itself into something so far come from the arid dryness of the Cienbal.
And yet, despite all those warnings, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw now.
Behind and before him, lining the road for as far as the eye could see, a forest seemed to have sprouted overnight. Trees like nothing he could have ever dreamed of, their sharp, needlelike leaves ranging in color from dark green to twilight blue, towered upwards to hang staggered overhead. The ground around Raz’s clawed feet was a kaleidoscope of shadows and tumbling patches of light. The wind here was still dry, but it didn’t drain the body with oppressive heat. Instead it bit playfully, a cool, crisp whisper that snuck into the folds of his clothes.
Apart from the grass and twin dirt wheel-paths of the cleared road, the ground was covered in a webbed foliage of earthy moss. Overlaying this was a thin blanket of spiny leaves, a rust-colored coat that seemed to have fallen right from the trees. Every few feet were odd, almost-oval objects, smooth and scaly in appearance, some old and dry, others green and heavy. Stepping off the path, Raz stooped to pick one up, rolling it in his hand.
Pine cone, he remembered, and he looked up at the great expanse of woods around him. Pine trees.
His father had told him stories of the North, and with every second Raz’s eyes took in the sights around him he could recall more and more of what the man had said.
“I fall asleep for a few hours, and this is where I wake up,” he chuckled, pulling the hood of his patchwork fur cloak over his head. The old man who’d smuggled him out of the Miropa had prepared the skins for him, mostly small rodents and the like, and Raz had spent the week putting old merchant skills to use. He’d fashioned himself a decent set of warm clothes, complete with a—if poorly done—fur-lined mantel and long britches. Winter was coming, and while Raz didn’t know exactly what to expect, he did know that he didn’t do well in the cold. He doubted the hasty work would do much when the freeze took full hold, but he hoped it would be enough to last until he could find somewhere to weather the next few months, or at least procure more suitable apparel.
The fact that winter, a strange idea in and of itself to him, was nearing didn’t much bother Raz. On the contrary, he felt strangely elated, glancing over his shoulder southward. He was leaving behind everything, cutting all ties he might have had. On one hand, he really had little choice. By now runners would have been sent out to every fringe city by some of the Mahsadën’s lesser officers, pleading for help. If he’d given it a week, Miropa would have been overrun by assassins and sarydâ out for blood. Within the month a new Mahsadën might already be in place, probably just as powerful as the previous one, and the šef would stop at nothing until Raz’s head was on a spear strung atop the Cages.
It was another reason the change in season was less inconvenience than advantage. Even before Raz had managed to escape the city, dispatch riders were thundering constantly through Miropa’s gates, gathering information from every direction. It was only a matter of time before someone realized he’d fled the fringe cities altogether, and from there he had only three options: catch sea passage to the West Imperial Isles from the ports of Acrosia, make his way south for Perce or the Seven Cities, or flee northward. Trouble was, the first two options generally involved crossing the Cienbal, an impossible feat on one’s own, even for Raz. In the end, the reality was that he’d been left with only one option:
The North.
The coming winter would hopefully buy him enough time to find shelter as he figured out what his next step would be. In a few weeks or so the roads would hopefully become too icy and snowed-in to travel by, and for the next eight to nine months the North and South would be almost entirely cut off from each other.
For a time, Raz might be safe.
“At least somewhat, huh, Ahna?” He smirked, shifting the dviassegai so that she sat more comfortably over his shoulder. A heavy traveling bag, containing his armor, some spare clothes, flint, and enough food and water for a week, hung from the top of her haft. Her twin blades, wicked things not to be kept in the open in unfamiliar land, were covered by the same old leather pouch Raz had been using since the day Allihmad Jerr forged him the weapon. He felt a pang as he thought of the old blacksmith, but pushed it aside.
The few friends he’d had would be better off without him.
Taking a deep breath, Raz began walking, marveling at the sights and sounds around him as he followed the road. Songbirds chirped from the hidden nooks in the trees, sometimes flitting above the road in flashes of red and blue wings. More than once Raz’s sharp eyes caught slim, four-legged creatures with small white tails and horselike ears leaping away through the forest, frightened off by his appearance. High above, through the spaces in the entwined branches, a clear sky smattered with clouds hung like a tent over the world. Every so often one passed over the Sun, and the pattern of light that swept the ground with every gust of cold wind would fade in and out of sight.
Raz couldn’t help but smile. This place was so differen
t, so far gone from the arid lands a week’s hard ride to the south. Even the Cienbal couldn’t bring to life the land in the way this new place could. Though the chill still bit him through his furs, and the hard-packed ground hurt his clawed feet, Raz took in every detail, marveling.
If the rest of the North was anything like the forest around him, he thought he might like this realm very much.
After a half hour on foot, something caught Raz’s eye along the road ahead. Two small obelisks, carved from old, dark granite about knee high, stood on each side of the wide path. Reaching the closest one, Raz bent down to get a closer look at it. On one side, facing the direction he’d come from, was engraved a single large S. On the other, in the direction he was going, was the letter N.
Straightening up again, Raz stood over the border marker for a long moment, staring at the S, following its curving form. It reminded him of the sand dunes and the waves of the Garin when its waters were caught by the desert wind. In his mind’s eye he could see the infinite, beautiful, empty vastness of the Cienbal stretching out to the horizon in every direction, an entire world cut in two by red sand and blue sky.
The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1 Page 35