by Marc Secchia
Chaos Shifter
A standalone tale on the Shapeshifter Dragons timeline.
By Marc Secchia
Copyright © 2018 Marc Secchia
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
www.marcsecchia.com
Cover art copyright © 2018 Joemel Requeza and Marc Secchia
Cover font design copyright © 2018 Victorine Lieske
www.bluevalleyauthorservices.com
Chapter 1: Assault
THE BATTLEFIELD SHUDDERED at the roaring of a mighty Dragonwing assaulting the fortress wards. Fireballs boomed incessantly against the shimmering dome formed by the magical wards a quarter-mile above the House, before expiring with angry hisses. Dense plumes of acrid grey smoke rolled into the blue-in-blue skies, cut by the searing orange of incoming fireballs and the occasional brilliant flare of a draconic lightning bolt. As the swooping Dragons accelerated to attack speed, the wind sang sibilantly over their gleaming scales and wuthered across their swept-back wings. Each attack was preceded by a high-pitched whine of fire surging from the Dragon’s taut throat under intense pressure, jetting outward and expanding its initially narrow focus, followed a second or two later by a formidable blast.
SKISS-BOOM!
Squinting against the fierce noon suns-glare reflecting in through his periscopic viewer, which protruded four inches above the surface fifteen feet above his armoured cranium, Asturbar pointedly ignored the dull, bone-jarring thudding of the heavier detonations. The usual diversion. Waste of time and energy. His veteran unit did none of the shifting or restless weapons-checking of green recruits. They waited silently in close phalanx behind his shoulders, nineteen giant infantry soldiers almost as heavily armoured as he was – the Heavies – and twenty more lightly armoured, mobile troops, the Lights. Imaginative nicknames.
Good thing infantry were not paid for their imagination. Dared the leader of these clangourous helmet-heads claim otherwise?
A slight grin touched his broad mouth as Asturbar lifted his shade visor. He tilted his massive shoulders, fully a foot wider than any other man or woman amongst his Heavies, to allow him to address his unit from the corner of his mouth. “Eight multi-jointed assault trains. Three singles. Impossible to tell which are feints until we’re closer. You lumbering sacks of rock lizards want to start in the middle, or in the middle?”
“The middle, sah!” Thirty-nine voices answered him in perfect chorus, echoing in the gloomy rock tunnel lit by a single, smokeless mazugi-oil torch.
Beside his left ear, Sub-Commander Bantukor growled, “Roll, split and tickle ’em open?”
“Yes. Watch the back and flanks.”
“Yes sah!”
“Got a feeling we’ll face acid, infantry stoppers and Heripedes at the very least. Maybe a cocktail of more exotic surprises.”
Lifting his huge left hand, Asturbar briefly scratched the thick armour at the base of his neck. Two inches of plate metal girt about his torso and casing his limbs in keenly crafted segments weighed in at just shy of half a tonne, but as a full-blood Azingloriax warrior adopted into his mercenary family – adoption being parlance for building the strength of infantry units so vital to modern warfare – he was a man born and bred for the task. He had an odd feeling about this battle. The soldier’s itch, they called it, fully intending the pun referring to a burning rash or three careless soldiers were likely to contract in brothels. None of that for these men and women. Each was contracted, bonded, a sworn wife or husband. One must bear pure heirs for the future glory of the House.
All except Asturbar.
There had been a girl. His fingers tightened on the handgrip of his massive, double bladed battle-axe. The weapon weighed a mighty four and a half stone, or sixty-three pounds in the old measure. His indelicate answer to those assault trains.
His beloved Rezhine had been assassinated two seasons ago, whilst he was away divesting a merchant House of their ill-gotten spice gains.
His lips parted in an unconscious snarl. “No boon, no quarter, no calamity.”
“No boon, no quarter, no calamity,” hissed his unit.
“Follow me!”
Flipping a lever, Asturbar triggered the doorway hidden deep in one of the fosses that crisscrossed the field outside their fortress. Heat struck him in a palpable wave. A sweaty day’s work ahead. The coppery walls of the metal-dense substrate swam before his eyes. The dust sticking to his teeth had a tang like blood. It penetrated everything and everywhere, this copper dust, so fine that it was even said to cause clogging in the lymphatic systems of those who did not wash regularly. Such a day was typical of a blistering hot season on the Western periphery of Wyldaroon, fierier than a furnace; parched as if all moisture had been sucked away to feed ravenous Dragons’ maws. Already, the charnel-house stench of scorched Dragon hide and charred umber drifted to his nostrils. Why were they throwing expendables at the fortress’ shield? Grounded in the power of a large floating Island, to breach it was no trivial matter, and they knew mercenaries would simply ignore the gesture. The ploy made no sense.
Out here there was one law: the rule of the strongest, be they hand or be they paw. Wyldaroon was one huge wilderness, but the remote Fringe was a largely unmapped Island-quagmire perfectly suited to the proliferation of petty warlords, vengeful Dragonkind, shady merchants and banditry of all kinds. The Fringe was the primary base of operations for House Chanbar, mercenaries without morals at your service, load my hand with your platinum marks, thank you kindly. Sabotage, slave trafficking, assassination, treasure hunting, crushing the odd head like a nut and grinding enemies through the hentioragions beneath their flying Islands before tossing them into the Cloudlands – all in a day’s work for the notorious clan called the Mistral Fires.
Still, it was not every day the House came under this intense an attack.
Commander Asturbar surveyed the deep, dry fosse with a jaundiced grey eye. He knew every inch of the half-mile fronting their deeply entrenched fortress, but today, he disliked all he saw.
Battle was a brutally simple equation. Keep the wards intact, and Dragons could not attack your fortress or House. Let the Dragons in, and everyone was as good as cinders in a firepit. Glowing cinders.
Since a thousand years of ward development coupled with the living strength of Islands had rendered most direct attacks by Dragonship, floating Island or Dragon obsolete, myriad modes of orthodox and unorthodox attack had spawned in their place. The conventional plan was to land non-draconic attackers on an Island’s rim or Dragonship landing pad and walk them through the ward-shield, then breach the fortress and spike the ward constructs once inside. A particularly powerful Spiker could even breach wardstones from fifty feet away. No need even to step foot inside the fortress. Every other potential route of ingress had its strategies and counter-strategies, or was limited by a code of honour enforced by the remarkable pack mentality of Herimor. Ambushing, double-crossing or outright crushing an enemy was perfectly acceptable. Honourable, even. Engage in a dishonourable practice such as divesting the underside of an Island of the gas-producing hentioragions, which kept it afloat in the air – a tricky task in its own right – and every power that existed in all of Wyldaroon or beyond would drop what they were doing and rush to the proverbial scavengers’ feast, rending the offender limb from limb.
Assault trains were conventional. What payload they contained was a question worth a Dragon’s hoard in pure gold.
Which one sheltered their Spiker?
The unit jingled mutedly behind Asturbar as he negotiated the fosse at a swift jog-trot. The boots of these massiv
ely heavy men and women pounded the ground like a drumbeat. Their path would intersect the middle of the staggered advance of the armoured assault trains. After that? Everything depended on how the enemy reacted.
GRAAAABOOM! The ground shook.
Those Dragons were proper heavyweights. Shapeshifters, most likely. Asturbar considered the information he had fed to Marshal Chanbar just last week. Could this attack be recompense for a job the mercenaries had undertaken recently? Their line of business tended to attract enemies like chopper flies to rancid meat. There were rumours of a formidable Sorcerer Dragon building his hegemony amidst the mineral-rich Jamukdkar Archipelago Islands two hundred leagues to the North, a beast called Azhukazi the Iolite Blue; however, a smart Shapeshifter Marshal was unlikely to rile a mercenary House by direct attack. Like a pack of subdraconic scallogazids, the mercenaries tended to band together under duress. Bad for business, mercenary Houses being wiped out. Unnerved the customers.
Thirty feet wide and twenty deep, hewn of solid stone, each fosse was designed to make assault by rolling vehicle much trickier. Those articulated trains would be equipped with rock spikes to allow easy descent or ascent of the walls, or carry temporary bridges to lay across the gaps.
Asturbar focussed his mind deliberately as they closed with the advance. Split-second calculations. Strategies for attack or retreat. Assessments of his troop’s capabilities. In a moment, they reached another hidden checkpoint. Forty hands deployed the protective visors of their helmets, locking them into place.
Ready.
Bantukor hit a hidden switch, before cursing testily. “Pox-blasted sakkix-sucking maintenance!”
Lifting his boot, Asturbar stove in the panel with a vicious kick. Rusty metal rungs sprung into being as if by magic in the side of the fosse. Up they swarmed, four at a time, close-packed, gleaming rivers of soldiers. Overhead, a shadow crawled over Asturbar’s faceplate as the lead assault train nosed over the fosse’s edge. A climbing design, then. The chains shrieked and rattled as the gears bit, taking the strain as they dug in the round, spiked wheels and the lead cabin of each train of five units began to tip forward. Ten feet tall, twelve wide and seventy feet long, the armoured train was an all-purpose, all-terrain assault vehicle that rolled along on relatively narrow, independently driven bands of wheels, twelve to a carriage. The armour would be heavy metal plate, with reinforced crysglass for the narrow windows and weapons hatches.
Asturbar’s team hit them with the wordless co-ordination of a unit which had served together more times than he could count. Not the first segment, which was often a decoy. The second. Axes scythed through the air to cleave the armoured joints asunder, seeking any vulnerability. The Heavies attacked as if nothing else mattered in the world, which it did not, because the Lights had deployed around their backs and flanks, their shields and ranged weapons held at the ready.
“Ten Heripedes seven point four,” noted a male infantryman to the starboard flank. “Correction, twelve.”
“Second train southwest. Infantry stoppers deployed. In five, four, three …” The female Heavy’s countdown was dispassionate.
Asturbar linked hands with Bantukor to propel a Heavy up to the ten-foot roof of the third vehicle, searching for an entry hatch or a place to attach grapnels. He fell back slightly, checking. Gauging. On his left flank, a flurry of half a dozen seven-foot metal bolts fired by crossbows mounted inside the assault vehicle skittered off the oblique shields of his Lights. They must be angled just right, or the bolts would pierce even the heaviest armour. The enemy vehicle struck back with heavy bars driven from inside to knock down the infantry. One man toppled over the fosse’s edge. He was unlikely to survive the fall. Asturbar swivelled aside from a speculative crossbow bolt intended to be driven right through his nose, and then used that instrument to test the air.
“Acid!” he roared.
Dragon acid could be enormously effective if used properly, eating most substances with rather more enthusiasm than Asturbar could bring himself to admire, but the soldiers inside released the acidic splash all at once. His troops knew where the outlets would be. The powerful corrosive splashed aside like gravy thrown uselessly to the ground. Then his nearest soldiers placed levers beneath the train, and the man atop called out sharply as his grapnels finally bit into the purposefully curved surface. Lever from one side. Pull from the other. Six seconds later, the assault train tipped over and the soldiers found the hatches recessed into the undersides of the carriages.
Asturbar leaped forward. “Mine!”
Three men peeled aside as he attacked the hatch mechanism like a demented beast. Armour or none, the sheer weight of his favourite battle-axe wielded by forty-two stone of furious muscle stove in the metal as though it were soft copper piping, twisting it up into the underbelly of the vehicle. Five blows later, he jerked back the axe and a Light inserted the tip of his blowpipe into the rent.
An eager buzzing inside the tube announced the mode of attack. Unnecessarily, the Light called, “Wasps.”
He shivered. The rare killer wasps, nicknamed ‘maimers’ for their necrotic stings, were not a fate most soldiers preferred to face. The poison acted in seconds, turning the skin black before the site swelled to bursting. Meantime, the toxins ate all the soft tissue around the sting in a two-inch radius. Delightful.
He left the disabled train in his wake as he charged toward the second vehicle, a single, making the sign to Bantukor to split, taking the second articulated assault vehicle to the North. Asturbar’s boots pounded up copper dust across the treeless terrain. Everything was designed. Calculated. The potential angles of attack upon a Dragon-sized doorway that led into the inner fortress, protected by blast-doors of solid steel two feet thick and further stone doors behind those. The four rows of major fosses and the complex layout of secret tunnels that allowed infantry to connect between them and strike at the point when assault vehicles were at their most vulnerable. The water, spike and Dragon traps. Exploding boulders. On and on went the list, but he knew that the Mistrals skimped on defence costs. Much more fun beefing up offensive operations.
Asturbar lowered his left shoulder. “With me!”
With finely rehearsed timing, eight Heavies struck the enemy conveyance in rapid succession. First was Asturbar, the heaviest and strongest by a margin. His strike lifted it two inches. The second pair, a husband and wife team of Azingloriaxii, rocked it further, and then successive strikes increased the momentum. Armoured black gauntlets gripped the metal flanges protecting the wheels.
“Heave!” Asturbar roared.
With an eye-popping feat of strength, they topped the vehicle upon her side, and the eight struck a second time in concert, and a third, flipping it end over end. Ten seconds later, a mangled heap of metal lay at the bottom of the fosse.
The Commander dusted his gauntlets grimly. “Next!”
* * * *
Three assault trains later, that uncomfortable feeling returned in full force. Asturbar waded through a knot of Heripedes with his axe flying, carving up the massive armoured insects as if he were sectioning vegetables for the stewpot. Twenty feet of spitting, carnivorous nastiness shaped like a millipede and as venomous as they were ugly, Heripedes were ruthless predators, but those that encountered his men were unable to penetrate their thick armour. One, however, drove a Light beneath an assault train; when he rolled out the other end as though spat from a rapacious maw, he was a bloody, unconscious mess.
At the periphery of his vision, he noted two additional squads of infantry had been deployed to counter the spread of the attack. Five more single vehicles had appeared on the field, and the bombardment of the House wards had only intensified. Sharp flashes of lightning played across the shielded sky; Grey-Green Dragons wheeled overhead, at least four dozen thickset bruisers, raining down roiling fireballs almost at will. Asturbar searched for their leader, and did not find him.
Not right.
Sub-Commander Bantukor appeared at his elbow as though summone
d from the aether. “Commander?”
“What are we missing, Bantukor?”
For a moment, the two soldiers just swivelled on their heels, neither rushing into battle nor chasing the enemy.
“Sah? I’ll be frazzled for a dragonet’s breakfast. I dunno, but something stinks! It stinks like a soldier’s mouldy boots, sah! Where are the Jagok lizards? Where’s the … the intelligence, sah?”
“Intelligence? Aye!” Asturbar roared.
“Sah?”
“It’s textbook, Bantukor.”
“That’s a good attack, isn’t it, sah?”
“If it looks like a slakkid-slug, moves like a slakkid, stinks like a slakkid …”
“Then we gonna crisp ’em fer dinner, sah!”
Laughing, Asturbar clapped the taller man on the shoulder. “Exactly! What, by a billion ragions’ reeking backsides are we missing, Bantukor?”
After a long pause of searching the shimmering copper barrens with their eyes, and observing the developing pattern of the enemy’s troop deployment, now approaching from the landing area out there in a dip framed by endless white-blue skies, and the progress of their leading assault vehicles, Bantukor and Asturbar swore simultaneously.
The Commander said, “There’s no cursed Spiker! It doesn’t make sense. No Spiker, a pointless assault … what the – what are those green and white things their infantry are carrying in?”
“Dunno.”
“Bones!” Astarbar blurted out, a second later. “Suns save me those are … bones!”
Dragon bones?
“Talons take it, you got good eyesight, sah! What shall we –”
“MISTRAL FIRES! TO ME!”
He knew. The whole point of the assault was to keep his troops occupied close to the fortress, which was a standard technique when one wished to build up troop strength inside the wards before attacking with overwhelming force. But there was nothing else in those trains. Nothing special, not even mildly unusual. But the size and colour of those bones – the very fact soldiers would bother to lug such artefacts onto a battlefield – the troops now returning to the landing area for more of the same … and, compounding the issue, Marshal Chanbar had elected to leave substandard fortifications of the landing area unmanned. It was not very defensible at the best of times, and it was foolishness to try to extend wards that far.