Forged In Flame (In Her Name: The First Empress, Book 2)

by Hicks, Michael R.

  “She will attack the north first,” the first warrior said, tapping the center of the island continent with his sword. “Once she has their allegiance, even our entire army may not be able to hold the Swords. And then she will have their fleets, as well. We will hammer many of their ships to the bottom, but weight of numbers, especially in the builders at her beck and call, will eventually turn the battle against us.” He shrugged, as if the final outcome was inevitable.

  The others nodded, and Li’an-Salir looked as if she had swallowed a mug full of bile.

  “No.” Keel-Tath gave a start, as if the word that had slipped from her lips had burned her. Li’an-Salir and the great warriors around the table turned to stare at her. “She will come here first, mistress,” she said to Li’an-Salir, trying to ignore the bemused looks on the faces of the others.

  “And why is that?” Li’an-Salir inclined her head for Keel-Tath to continue.

  “Because I am here.”

  Several of the senior warriors began to murmur and cast disbelieving glances at her, but Li’an-Salir waved them to silence. “Syr-Nagath cannot know you are here, child.”

  “My respects, mistress.” Tara-Khan bowed his head before he went on, “Warriors of the queen saw her board our ship on the western shores of T’lar-Gol, so Syr-Nagath knows we offered her sanctuary.”

  “But she must think that your ship sank with her own,” the warrior who had been noisily chewing his dinner said. “And by all accounts yours would have, save for the young mistress here.” He nodded at Keel-Tath, not unkindly. “But to build her conquest of our continent around the mere possibility that you survived to come here, child, seems most unlikely.”

  “She will know.” She looked at the faces around her, her gaze lingering on Dara-Kol, Drakh-Nur, and Han-Ukha’i, who nodded, as if knowing what she was about to say. Their expressions were dark with memories of the disaster in the Great Wastelands. “Syr-Nagath has learned how to bind others to her will using some sort of dark magic upon the braids of their hair, and it cannot be discovered until the one so bound is dead.” Han-Ukha’i nodded her agreement. “One of our companions was bound to her in this way, and he betrayed us to her warriors and killed two of our number before his treachery was discovered.”

  “But he was an honorless one, was he not?” One of the others of the council asked, his eyes on Dara-Kol and Drakh-Nur. “What can be expected of one fallen from the Way?”

  Keel-Tath could feel the song in Drakh-Nur’s blood turn cold as ice, and Dara-Kol laid her hand on his arm to stay him from drawing his sword. Dara-Kol’s anger was no less intense, but was far better controlled. “No,” Keel-Tath said. “He was not without honor. He came to me honorless, but pledged himself to me as did many others. His honor was mine when he tried to kill us. He never would have done so were he not under the queen’s control.”

  Even Li’an-Salir regarded her with a pained expression. “Keel-Tath,” she said softly, “there is no redemption for one who has fallen from grace.”

  “As did I from the Desh-Ka?” Keel-Tath stood, clenching her hands into fists as anger surged through her blood. Drakh-Nur and Dara-Kol rose beside her, hands on their swords. On either side of her, Ka’i-Lohr and Tara-Khan simply gaped as she went on. “I was dishonored, cast out for speaking the truth and sent naked to the Dark Queen’s host to be chained like an animal, yet you would seat me and my companions at your table.” She looked every warrior in the eyes before returning her gaze to Li’an-Salir. “I thank you for your hospitality, mistress, but I would not be mocked. Think what you may, but the hundreds of tortured souls who pledged their honor to me, who died in my name, deserve their honored place in the Afterlife just as much as any who sit around this table.”

  She bowed her head and saluted before whirling around and storming out of the great hall. Neither Dara-Kol nor Drakh-Nur bothered to salute before they followed her out.

  Han-Ukha’i paused just long enough to say, “She speaks the truth about the Dark Queen’s magic, mistress. Ignore her words at your peril.” With a bow of her head and a salute, she, too, turned and left the hall, her white robes billowing behind her.

  ***

  Keel-Tath looked up from the fire at the knock on the door.

  Li’an-Salir had given them quarters in her keep, but after the insult they had suffered in the great hall, they had taken a room in the city, not far from the docks. She had not even bothered returning to the keep, for they had nothing but their weapons, armor, and clothing they wore. Come morning, she intended to try and find a ship to take them away, but to where she had no idea. The only places left for her to go were the great ice caps at the poles of the world, and she doubted any ship flying Ku’ar-Amir’s banner would take her anywhere. All of them were awaiting word on where the Dark Queen would strike so they could sortie to meet her fleet in battle.

  They had managed to find Sher-Ai’an among the thousands of warriors preparing for the coming battle, and he had been shocked when she released him from her service.

  “I would not have you live in dishonor among the people here,” she had told him, silencing his arguments to remain hers. “Besides, those who defend the city have greater need of your warriors than do I. When the Dark Queen comes, my life is forfeit in any case.”

  She had wanted to tear her eyes out as he and his warriors knelt before her and saluted as she turned away.

  Drakh-Nur and Dara-Kol drew their swords and moved to either side of the door. Dara-Kol wrenched it open to reveal the forms of Ka’i-Lohr and Tara-Khan, shadows against the dark of night outside.

  “Leave before I cut you in half, younglings.” Drakh-Nur rumbled, his tone as threatening as his words.

  “Forgive us.” Ka’i-Lohr bowed his head, and even Tara-Khan, an uncomfortable expression on his face, managed a nod of respect. “Mistress,” he called to her, “may we enter?”

  Keel-Tath was in a foul, dark mood, but there was no harm in accepting their company. “Let them in.”

  Dara-Kol and Drakh-Nur sheathed their swords as they ushered the young warriors inside. Drakh-Nur took a quick look around outside before he closed the door behind them.

  Gesturing to some cushions on the floor, Keel-Tath bade them sit. The room had a table and chairs, but Drakh-Nur had piled them all in a corner. They reclined now on cushions and rugs instead of animal hides, as was their custom in T’lar-Gol.

  Unaccustomed to such arrangements, Ka’i-Lohr and Tara-Khan seated themselves.

  An awkward silence stretched on as Keel-Tath and her fellow outcasts regarded the two young warriors.

  “It took us some time to find you,” Ka’i-Lohr finally said.

  “We did not care to be easily found,” Dara-Kol told him.

  Silence again.

  Drawing a deep breath, Tara-Khan looked up at her and spoke. “We came to pledge our honor to you.”

  Keel-Tath blinked. “How can you? You are bound to Wan-Kuta’i.”

  “We asked to be released from her service,” Ka’i-Lohr told her. “She was greatly upset by what happened in the war council meeting, and gave us leave to pledge ourselves to you as a balm to the insult you suffered.”

  “You realize,” she told him, “that there is likely only one ending for me and those bound to me, and it will not be pleasant.”

  Ka’i-Lohr shrugged. “We will all die someday. Some are able to choose the manner of their death, some are not. I choose to die in your company.”

  She nodded. Ka’i-Lohr’s motivation was simple enough. She was also aware of how he looked at her, and could feel his attraction toward her in the song of his blood. She was of age now, and could not deny a certain attraction toward him, as well. She set the emotions aside. There might be time to explore such feelings later, assuming any of them survived the coming days. “I accept your honor, Ka’i-Lohr.”

  Then she turned to Tara-Khan, who looked at her, perplexed.

  “Am I unfit for your service, mistress?”

  She had to sup
press a smile at the bewildered hurt in his voice. “I will accept your honor, if you will explain why you pledge it.” At his blank look, she went on. “From when first we met you have treated me with disdain bordering on contempt. I believe you are a capable warrior, perhaps even better than me.” She smiled, to let him know she meant no insult. But the smile faded as she went on. “But why would I have one such as you serving in my name?”

  “Because, mistress,” he told her, “I believe.”

  “You believe what?”

  He looked at her as if she was a dullard. “In the prophecy of Anuir-Ruhal’te, mistress, and that it is your destiny to fulfill it.”

  Keel-Tath stared at him, knowing he was telling the truth, but unable to believe what she was hearing.

  “He has believed since he first set eyes on you,” Ka’i-Lohr said. “On the voyage over, when our ships were sent to try and find you after you escaped from the Dark Queen, you were all he thought about, all he would speak of. And when we saw you at the river’s edge…” He shrugged. “You owned his soul.”

  Holding her gaze, Tara-Khan nodded. “It is as he says.”

  While Tara-Khan had an uncanny ability to irritate her, she was touched by his words. “I accept your honor, warrior.”

  He bowed his head, deeply this time, and saluted.

  As she returned the honor, horns, deep and melancholy, began blowing somewhere outside. The signal was followed by shouts and footsteps as warriors, thousands of them, burst from their lodgings and raced toward the docks and the ships waiting there.

  “What is it?” Keel-Tath asked as Drakh-Nur and Dara-Kol again rose to stand by the door, on guard.

  “The horns call the ships to battle,” Ka’i-Lohr told her, his voice grave. “The Dark Queen’s fleet approaches.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Invasion

  Keel-Tath stood on the ramparts of the city wall that overlooked the sea, her companions on either side of her. The sun had not yet risen, and the sky was filled with stars. The Great Moon, waxing now, hung nearly overhead.

  The harbor was empty, every ship having sailed out to greet the enemy. The huge vessels alongside the piers had to be towed out by longboats crewed by dozens of oarsmen, but once in open water their massive sails billowed forth on the night wind. The behemoths formed into nine single-file battle lines. The other ships formed up around each group before they all sailed to the east to take the battle to the enemy. Li’an-Salir herself was on one of the great ships, having left her First in charge of the kingdom’s land campaign and, should it come to that, final defense. While Keel-Tath was still full of anger at the great mistress’s words the evening before, she wished her no ill will. Without her kindness, Keel-Tath and her companions would be dead, or worse.

  Smaller, fleeter ships sailed on ahead, and Keel-Tath saw one that she thought must surely be Wan-Kuta’i’s command. Sher-Ai’an, released from her service, had pledged his honor to Wan-Kuta’i and had sailed with her into battle. She hoped for their good fortune, and wished deep in her heart that she had something, someone, greater to whom she could beg for their welfare. But the old gods were no more, so she could only wish her comrades a silent farewell as the wind bore them onward to their fate. She knew that a warrior’s true destiny was to die in battle, but she would much rather see them live.

  A few bright orange and red flashes lit up the horizon, and the sound of thunder rolled across the sea some seconds later.

  “The battle has been joined,” Ka’i-Lohr whispered beside her.

  There were more flashes, then a long pause before the entire horizon, as far as she could see, lit up. Dozens, hundreds of flashes bloomed where the sky met the sea, followed by low cracks of thunder that did not stop.

  “So many,” she breathed, unable to imagine how many ships must be out there, fighting in the darkness.

  “This will be the greatest naval battle in the last hundred generations,” Tara-Khan said. “The fleet sailing under Li’an-Salir boasts over a thousand warships, and more protect the western coast.”

  Keel-Tath looked at him. “Do you wish you were with her?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I have found my place.”

  “As have I.” Ka’i-Lohr put his hand on hers for a moment before taking it away. The touch made her shiver in an unexpected but pleasant way.

  The horizon to the north was lit by an enormous flash that left her blinking away the afterimage from her vision. A few moments later a deafening boom echoed across the water.

  She turned to Tara-Khan. “What was that?”

  His face looked grim. “A ship, a big one, blew up.”

  “One of ours?”

  “I do not know for certain, but very likely,” he told her.

  “The great ships of our fleet carry stores of what we call gunpowder for their cannons and other weapons they use to protect against the larger predators of the Great Deep,” Ka’i-Lohr added. “But gunpowder is very dangerous, and if a large amount is set alight…”

  “It explodes like that,” she finished for him. “Why do they not just fight with weapons such as we use on the land?”

  “They do,” Dara-Kol broke the silence of the two younger warriors as they pondered an answer, “when the ships close to boarding range. Every weapon, so long as a warrior stands behind it, is accepted in war. We crave battle by sword and claw, for that is in our blood. But with each rise out of chaos from the previous fall, the technology used to wage war rises, as well. Ever larger and more powerful weapons are built until the next fall comes, and those weapons are destroyed by the priesthoods as civilization descends back into chaos. You studied the Books of Time, I know. You saw such things.”

  Keel-Tath nodded, remembering. None of what she had studied then had any context, any true meaning. But here, watching from afar as hundreds of thousands of warriors fought and died at sea, the truth of the ancient Books of Time was plain. It was then that she realized that the true purpose for the Books of Time was not to learn the mistakes of the past, but to ensure they were repeated. As Ayan-Dar had told her many times, their people should be reaching for the stars, evolving into something greater. Instead, they were doomed by the Way and the priesthoods to endless cycles of savagery, and the Books of Time were the blueprints used by the priesthoods to keep things as they had been…forever.

  The fighting went on through the night as they stood watch on the walls with the city’s defenders. More titanic flashes had lit up the night sky, and many smaller ones. The time between the flashes and the thunder had grown shorter as sunrise neared, signaling that the battle was drawing closer to the coast. That could only mean one thing: the Dark Queen’s fleet was stronger, and was driving Li’an-Salir’s ships back.

  By morning, smoke was thick on the horizon, carried aloft by the wind from blazing ships and the endless gunfire. Keel-Tath wondered that no damaged ships returned to seek repairs.

  “In other times, they would,” Dara-Kol told her, “for those were purely battles of honor where surrender after a battle well fought was acceptable. But this is different. Li’an-Salir said that she would not yield her honor to the Dark Queen. Her warriors will fight to the death until she herself is killed. Then they have a choice of what they would do.”

  “Yield and surrender your honor to Syr-Nagath, or die,” Keel-Tath whispered.

  As the morning wore on, masts and sails, then entire ships, became visible on the horizon. The number soon became too many to count as the Dark Queen’s fleet forced its way toward Ku’ar-Amir. While the defenders were more skilled in handling their ships, the Dark Queen’s warships were faster and more powerfully armed.

  Dara-Kol pointed at a group of enemy ships that had no sails and were shaped differently than the others. “Their hulls are made of iron,” Dara-Kol told her.

  “How can that be?” Keel-Tath asked, puzzled. “Iron does not float!”

  “Nor does the wood of the a’in-ka tree. But the iron hulls are stronger, and their engines c
an drive them through the water at great speed. Look.” She pointed to a garishly painted vessel, its hull a glossy black with runes in deep red, as it raced between a pair of sail-bound warships. Cannons mounted on the deck of the iron ship fired, blasting holes through the hulls of the Ku’ar-Amir ships.

  While the enemy ship boasted an iron hull, the crews of the stricken sailing ships had iron spirits. As one, they heeled over toward their attacker, pinning it between them as they fired a broadside with their cannons. Even so far away, Keel-Tath heard the deep crunch as the three ships collided before the tiny dark shapes of warriors swarmed across the rigging and fallen masts from the sailing ships to bring their swords to the enemy. The cannons of all three ships continued to fire at point blank range, with the cannonballs of the sailing ship blasting through the iron hull of their enemy.

  Then the three ships disappeared in a triple fireball as a stray shot found a powder magazine. One ship exploded, setting off the magazines of the other two. The blast destroyed two more ships sailing close by, and set another half dozen alight. When the smoke began to clear, there was nothing left of the original three but debris in the water.

  Keel-Tath shook her head, trying to come to grips with the scale of carnage she was seeing. She was used to individual combat, of course, and what she had seen in the time since she had left the temple had given her a small appreciation for battle. But this, this was something far beyond. This was her first taste of war. Part of her was thrilled by it, and she could feel her heart quickening at the thought of grappling with the enemy. But another part shied away from the prospect of being wiped away in the blink of an eye by an explosion. She had felt the souls of some of the enemy warriors, descended from the line of the Desh-Ka, in her blood, sensed their fury and their bloodlust. Shared their terror as they were swept into the sea. But the worst were the songs in her veins that simply stopped as they died, all too often many at a time. She had known that war could be this way, for she had read in the Books of Time accounts of many wars fought in the past. But, like the sea monsters she had thought were only legends and tall tales, she had been unprepared for the reality of it. And this was only the beginning.