The Echoes of Sin (The Kinless Trilogy Book 3)

by Philbrook, Chris

  Reinforcements had arrived.

  Hundreds of yards away, out of the reach of the fiery touch of the floating ship in the sky, Dalibor Hubik ran. The moment he saw the first explosion he knew it was the mark of Waymancy, and he knew the scope of the battle had changed. Killing Marcus Gray no longer mattered. His survival and the destruction of the vessel and the deaths of those onboard were paramount.

  He sprinted. With each step and twist of his body the arrow lodged a hand’s length deep in his neck prickled and stabbed at his lungs. It was becoming harder to breathe. He could feel the arrow head scratching and piercing deeper and deeper fractions of an inch with each step, and he thought only of reaching a necromancer of suitable power for his resurrection before his death.

  Dying was acceptable. Not returning after wasn’t.

  Dalibor felt his fury grow as he watched rank after rank of his best archers standing slack jawed, watching the shock and awe moment of the waymancers wreaking destruction from the suddenly appeared ship. To a man they all stood immobile, watching as hundreds and thousands of their undead legion were evaporated, disintegrated, and fried by powerful spells that shook the earth, and made the air hot. So hot it ate at his lungs.

  “Fire! Fire at the ship you lazy, worthless pieces of dung!” Dalibor punctuated his order by swinging his two handed sword with a backhanded swing at one of the archers. His head cleaved off and flew away, hitting another archer in the chest and breaking the trance he was in. The archers slowly responded as Dalibor grunted and screamed more commands at them, swinging his sword as menacingly as he could with the arrow inside his chest. “DO IT NOW!” A spittle-laced wad of blood leapt from his mouth and clung to his chin and a spike of pain pierced him where the arrow sat in his chest.

  They fired. Over and over and over they set arrows into the sky at the galleon that floated impossibly in the sky. Some of their arrows soared high into the sails, poking tiny holes in the tough white fabric but doing no more harm than that. Some of their arrows hit the side of the ship, piercing the hull above and below the still-visible water lines on the wood. Each arrow stuck firm to the side of the wood, but did nothing. The tiniest percentage of all the arrows hit a living person standing at the edge of the ship, killing or maiming them, ending their personal magical onslaught. Dalibor pumped his fist in approval but quickly saw that his archer’s efforts were almost entirely in vain.

  He looked from the raging inferno that was his army of the dead down at a coal filled brazier. Fire. Fire would deliver him. “Light your arrows! Set the ship afire!”

  The archers weren’t prepared for that, but the sergeants abided his demands and scrambled with fumbling hands to get the braziers churning with fresh flame. It took precious minutes for them to get tinder to the bowls and strike their flint with steel as the strange boat with its even stranger passengers continued to annihilate swathes of Dalibor’s now broken and fleeing army. Over the roaring explosions he could hear the isolated screams of his living soldiers, some of which were robed necromancers.

  He coughed wetly and spat more blood up in the tiny spot of green grass at his feet. It seemed to be the only spot not trodden down, totally covered in blood, or set on fire. But that wouldn’t last. Each fallen death mage would free a whole platoon’s worth of undead to turn on anything in their midst. Without the caster dominating their mind and following his will they would be set free to roam with murder on their minds until another death mage with suitable mental power took over their feeble thoughts.

  It would be chaos if Yefim’s underlings didn’t get the battle under control quickly. His archers had to do their job, and do it fast.

  “SHOOT!” he bellowed, and the first wave of flaming arrows leapt into the air.

  On the deck of the Bridgette Marie there existed a chaos not too unlike the chaos below, though this was the gleeful chaos of children at play. Children set free in their sandbox and told to use every toy they had ever wanted to play with, and there were no rules.

  Spell after spell flew from the hands of the House Kulare mages. Warding spells built walls of force and from behind those, fire and flame, acid and lighting all sprung forth from fingers that had practiced the rote arts without completion for years and in some instances decades. But here, now, they had been set free, and it was joyous to them.

  As the most powerful of all the casters aboard the vessel, Samrale felt it to be his duty to serve up as much destruction as he could. Dragon breath shot from his mouth with searing delight and was followed up by the hair raising crackle of static lightning. Samrale did not relish the gore, but he watched carefully as the Varrlanders who had so bravely charged directly into the center of the Empire army were given the gift of time. Time they used to regroup, and begin their escape.

  Behind him, Samrale could hear the hooting and hollering of Captain Sarkett. Samrale could hear his elation as he too joined the fight with a bow, launching arrows into the sky below his sails towards the ranks of Empire archers who fired their own arrows now into the side of the ship.

  “Bring it, you daft fuckahs!” the captain screamed as he launched an arrow anonymously into their midst. The sound of return arrows banging into the wood of the vessel told him their aim was better than his, but he kept firing with little thought to his own safety.

  Samrale paused the preparation of his next spell and watched as a massive man wearing purple armor directed the archers on the distant field. Suddenly, braziers blazed to life in their area, and a hundred arrow tips sparked, taking on a breath of flame.

  “Captain!” Samrale yelled. The captain didn’t hear him, and the archers raised their bows. “Captain, we must move now! Waymancers, prepare to fly higher!”

  “What for? We’re where we need to be!” Sarkett hollered.

  The line of burning arrows jumped from the Empire bows like the simultaneous crack of a flaming whip. They soared high into the air in a dancing parabola until they reached their zenith. They then plummeted down towards the ship.

  Sarkett saw the doom coming, and began to spin his wheel and bark out commands to his crew to adjust the sails. A score of arrows went into the sails, most just tearing holes and passing through. Some, however, hit the masts, and more than a few caught in the thick fabric, setting the material aflame. A hundred arrows or more smashed into the hull and stuck, splashing their fire onto the wood, and beginning what would be an inferno if they couldn’t control the fire. The waymancers stepped away from the ship’s railing, seeing what the elder mage had, and knowing too what he knew.

  Samrale knew there was not enough water aboard to do what was needed. Bridgette Marie had seen her maiden voyage in the sky come to a fiery end. All that remained was to land before they all died. He turned to the meditating Waymancers who powered his spell. “Set us down. We are on fire and must leave the ship. Please be careful, but if you can crush a few hundred undead on the way down we’ll be the better for it.”

  Samrale wrapped the fingers of one of his bony hands around the railing and began to pray. Oddly, thoughts of Dram Sorber came to mind, and he found the memories of that face peaceful.

  Marcus watched as the hundreds of arrows set the hull and sails of the floating ship on fire just thirty feet above where he and his men gathered. The ship seemed to ignore the plight that had been thrust upon it for a time, but very quickly the sails erupted into a raging column of flame, and the ship descended towards the ground, directly at Marcus and his remaining thirty men.

  “Run! Get out from under it!” he screamed, pointing to the north where they had first charged into the fray. He had no idea if that was the right direction to go, but he knew sitting still would be a death sentence.

  His men on horses galloped, some led their wounded mounts, and the rest ran on foot as he did. Those that could not run or ride were carried. Marcus spun in circles watching the ship with his limp, destroyed arm flinging around like a tentacle instead of a proper limb. His mind had started to shut out the agony it gave him mercifully,
but somewhere distantly he knew his suffering was intense. If he survived the battle and the crashing of the flying ship above, he was sure the pain would return, and he would suffer.

  Marcus ran faster as the ship descended further. His arm screamed in dismay from the pain. The men on horseback were almost able to reach up and touch the great rudder at its stern, it had sunk so low, and soon they would be pushed off their mounts if they didn’t flee faster. The Knight Major saw against the great wooden wall he and his men had built the cast shadow of the ship and laughed. He had never seen the shadow of a vessel cast on the ground before. It looked comical. Impossible.

  The ship’s descent halted for a second, buying his men precious time to escape from under its leviathan mass. It faltered to the side towards the village and the wall its shadow was cast upon and then abruptly dropped to the earth. It smashed into the portable bridge the Empire undead had assembled, and crushed the hundreds of zombies underneath it and around it. Unfortunately, the spectacle of the bridge’s fate was overmatched by the tremendous implosion suffered by the ship.

  It had never been designed to fly, let alone land on a solid surface, and the shipwrights who crafted the beautiful boat had certainly put zero thought and preparation into it crashing back to the surface of Elmoryn from flight above it. The noise of it screeching and breaking apart scratched at his ears and rumbled his insides. It terrified. The hull split into a dozen giant pieces and the masts snapped in half, already weakened from the fire that had eaten at it. The crew and casters on the deck were tossed about like dry sticks in a heaved basket. Some flew through the air as their ship had and came down with spectacularly bad results onto debris, dropped weapons and discarded armor. Marcus couldn’t hear their bones break, but he knew just the same they were broken men and women.

  Then came the screams of pain.

  Marcus stopped running and surveyed the world. His body ached and his lungs burnt. The air was hot, and it took effort to force his lungs to fill with the miasma of smoke and stench. The nearby battlefield was an unmitigated victory for Varrland on every account, though the cost appeared to be high. Fire consumed the very soil in every direction, destroying the remnants of the undead bodies the Purple Queen had sent to kill them. The only people standing within two hundred yards of Ockham’s Fringe were his men, and the few strangers from the ship who were crawling out from the wreckage. He saw young and old alike appear, and had to smile. Survivors.

  Far away to the east, straight into the rising sun, he knew the Empire still had a hundred archers putting arrow to string, and they had seconds before those arrows would descend. He eyed the blue sky above and saw a dark cloud of arrows. It was like a cloud of biting insects on its way to draw blood. Within a few strides Marcus saw several of the massive wooden shields the necromancers had hidden under. The shields were damaged, but would provide enough hardened protection to buy them some lives.

  “Men, quick, grab the empire shields, use them for cover! Help me with the fallen from the ship!” Marcus couldn’t pick up one of the massive wooden planks on his own. His damaged arm made him weak so he instead grabbed up a small steel shield one of his men or women had lost in the fight. He held it high to protect his head and chest, then ran to the split hull of the ship. As he arrived at the side of the smoldering crash, a beaten and broken old man with blood-crusted white hair emerged. He led several much younger, frail bodied men and women to the light.

  “Ah, a Varrlander. How fortunate,” he said in a voice that had strength and wisdom. If he was hurt badly, he certainly didn’t let on.

  “Who are you?” Marcus asked as he provided meager cover with his small shield. A hail of arrows began to fall into them, and Marcus made himself small against the ground and the debris. His small shield pinged and shook as the arrows deflected off. The old man and his trail of survivors ducked inside the cover of the crashed ship until the volley of murderous arrows paused.

  The old man poked his head around the corner of an arrow ravaged piece of the hull. “Samrale Overfist, Second Seat of House Kulare, though this is an unofficial visit. I am here on my own behalf,” he said with a smirk before ducking behind the wood as another arrow hit it. The shaft pierced the plank and split it in half, almost killing the new arrival to town.

  “Yours and a dozen of your students, it would appear,” Marcus said with a painful laugh.

  “Well. Some of us couldn’t sit by with an invasion happening down the road. First Varrland, then the Protectorate.”

  “Aye,” Marcus said as an arrow banged off his shield. “We must get inside the village quickly before their archers saturate us. I thank you for your assistance. I think you might’ve bought us time enough to survive this.”

  “Let us hope,” the old man said.

  Somehow the archers Dalibor Hubik brought to Ockham’s Fringe had discovered a way to fire twice as many missiles in the time that elapsed after Marcus and the crashed ship’s occupant’s escape. From the inside of Howard’s tavern turned headquarters, Marcus could hear arrows falling with a rapidity that bordered on the insane. It sounded as if the clouds above had changed their minds about the idea of rain and were instead raining small stones on the roofs of Ockham’s Fringe. At the rate the projectiles fell, the town would be buried in rocks within an hour.

  Most of the arrows that fell were afire as they had been the night before, which complicated everything. His fire crews had their work cut out for them this day, but at least they had the daylight to see with.

  Inside the tavern several younger apostles worked feverishly to repair broken and damaged soldiers. They had lost all their powerful priests to Peiron’s treachery and the endless nights of falling arrows, and all that they had left with the skill to mend were children in Marcus’ eyes. The eldest of the priests couldn’t be older than twenty-five. It took them five healing spells to achieve what one experienced battle priest could do with one, and all that casting left them drained. Marcus took a single restorative spell to fix his bones. He would accept no more. They begged to give him relief from his pain, but he sent them off to mend his soldiers. He would suffer so they didn’t have to.

  Samrale Overfist, the diminutive waymancer with the white hair that had emerged from the fallen ship in the sky had received his healing already, and seemed almost energized in the chaos. His bright eyes roamed and assessed, learning the secrets of how the war for the village was going. Marcus could see the man’s cunning in the way he dwelled on certain sights in the room. The number of plate armored men versus leather. The amount of full versus empty quivers piled in the corner. The stains of old and new blood on Howard’s tables.

  “What do you have left?” Marcus asked the old man.

  Samrale snapped his attention to the Knight Major and gathered his thoughts as he smacked his lips in displeasure. “I’ve eight casters. The good captain and his son survived as well, though Jonah broke both his legs in the fall. Hopefully one of your apostles can attend to him soon. He’s a good young man. Taken after his father in that regard.”

  “Eight casters is a more than welcome addition to our forces, if they can still fight with us. It should help the rest of my men hold until our reinforcements arrive,” Marcus said. “We’ve given the Empire something to chew on for a day, haven’t we? I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done. For coming here.”

  Samrale tilted his head, accepting the thank you. “Reinforcements eh? When are they due?” Samrale asked quietly. He knew the news of reinforcements could be a morale builder or breaker for the men gathered around.

  Marcus’ face drained of enthusiasm and Samrale saw it. The Knight pulled his chair over with his good arm and sat close to the tiny mage. “We had a traitor. An apostle who served the Purple Queen. He turned on us—well, was always against us—and never followed through with the sending. I trusted him and that trust cost us dearly. Still does. After that he managed to kill the other apostles who could cast the spell, leaving us with no way to reach south with The Way.
I sent two riders at night days ago to try and make contact but no word yet. I had hoped we’d receive a message from the south that the trains with our reinforcements were on the way but...”

  “Your riders have died or are ailing in their journey,” Samrale offered.

  Marcus nodded. “And now, the Empire knows our exits through the wall, and there’s little chance more riders could escape at either midnight or high noon.”

  “Hm. Well, fortunate for you, I and at least two of my friends from Davisville who survived our sad attempt at a landing are able to do a sending on your behalf. I merely need the identity of a person and a full description of their general whereabouts to attempt it. I could also send a message to an associate of mine who could pass the message along more easily and reliably, though it might take a bit longer for the final orders to reach the proper general’s ears. A few extra hours likely. Half a day at most.”

  “Give me reliable every day. I can ill afford any risks to my mission or my soldiers at this point in the battle.”

  “What is your message?” Samrale asked, his bright eyes boring into the knight.

  Marcus already knew the words he needed to say. From memory, he told Samrale. “Ockham’s Fringe is under full siege. Send reinforcements immediately. We request a full regiment at minimum.” He paused, and then added the instructions of, “The message should go to General Augustus LaFleur.”

  “Ah. I have heard that name. A man of notable reputation. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll find a quiet place to do my spell,” Samrale said as he stood up from the creaky wooden bar chair.

  Marcus’ good hand shot out and snapped shut around the wrist of the old man. “If it’s all the same to you Mr. Overfist, I’d much prefer you did it right in front of me. I have trust issues when it comes to people saying they’re sending a message on my behalf, of late.”