by P. K. Lentz
Table of Contents
The Moon of Sorrows (Scythian Dawn, #3)
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
THE MOON OF SORROWS
(Scythian Dawn Book 3)
by
P.K. Lentz
§
Copyright © 2019 by P.K. Lentz
All rights reserved.
§
Cover and all art for Scythian Dawn by
Aituar Manas
https://www.artstation.com/aituarmanas
One
The hold of the Mogg-Yidiion shuddered as if the wolf Fenrir had seized the ship in its great black snout and squeezed, tossing its head back and forth. Every few seconds brought a crash like thunder, the beast snapping its jaws in the hope of sinking tooth through hull to devour the flesh and bones of twenty mortals inside.
Only harnesses holding them snugly into cushioned alcoves prevented the twenty from flying all around inside the Mogg, careening into bulkheads and each other. Ivar saw fright on the faces of grown Scythian men and women who rarely showed it. Some were just barely grown, like Leimya, and Matas’s son Plin.
Wide-eyed, tense and vibrating in tune with the ship’s hull, Ivar emitted what amounted to a sustained grunt through teeth clenched to breaking. He could scarcely hear the sound inside his own skull for the cacophony without. Then he could no longer see at all, for light vanished, plunging his world into darkness so deep he was certain for a few seconds he had died.
But signs of life remained. An intense pressure persisted in trying to crack his rib cage. The sonic assault of screeching and whining and booming filled his ears with an undiminished intensity.
Whatever death was like, whether maidens winged him away to a golden hall or he sank into a cold sea to join Hel’s legion, this wasn’t it.
No, he was still strapped into the Mogg-Yidiion hurtling toward the Moon of Sorrows through a gauntlet of alien fire thrown by Jir spacecraft.
At any instant, Ivar knew, blasts might peel back the walls of the Mogg like stormwinds would a felt tent, leaving the twenty survivors of Nemoora exposed to the void of space.
He knew that humans, even augmented ones, couldn’t survive in that void without special suits.
He wondered what he would see if that happened. Maybe nothing at all. The hold was pitch black and so was space. Mostly.
For long seconds after the light was gone, Ivar sat groaning along with the Mogg on its desperation-driven dive toward an inhospitable sanctuary. Then came a clap of thunder far louder than any which had come before, and the darkness before his eyes became the silent kind that might well have been death.
* * *
And then there was light. Silence and darkness became voices and movement in a dim red glow
Fenrir had vomited the Mogg from the darkness of its maw.
Ivar recognized gifts from the gods when they came, and he knew enough to act on them quickly. He slapped the release for his harness and half-fell from his alcove. What had been the floor was floor no longer.
Those around him likewise began to unsecure themselves. His eyes found Leimya helping two Scythians extricate a third. The Dawner two alcoves down from Ivar moaned and moved listlessly, still strapped in. Ivar slapped the man’s harness release and caught him as he slid out.
White light flooded into the red-lit compartment from a circular opening twenty paces away.
A voice cut the chaos. Cinnea’s.
“Move! Move! Get out! They’ll be on us any second!”
“Arms!” Ivar cried. “Bring your arms!”
The Dawn had stored its iron weapons on entering the Mogg. But Ivar, sadly, had left his ax buried in the back of the Jir Commodore on Nemoora.
“Leave them!” Cinnea screamed from nearby the exit. “There’s no time!”
Ivar didn’t contradict her. Maybe she had crashed on an alien moon before with her Eraínn comrades, or maybe she hadn’t. Either way, she probably knew better what to do when it happened.
Never mind that he felt strange pinpricks in his throat which left him less than eager to yell again. His eyes stung, too.
A minute later, Ivar became the last to leave the cabin. Significantly, he saw no corpses harnessed into the alcoves. All who had survived Nemoora had also survived the crash.
Defying Cinnea, who had gone ahead, he paused to open the compartment containing their weapons and grab as many picks, axes and bows as he could carry before leaping out into the light.
The necessity of breaking his fall on smooth, ice-cold rocks below caused him to spill the weapons, which clattered and rebounded off the bent and broken hull of the Mogg and came to rest on the ground.
Landing among them, Ivar scrambled upright and looked all over. Before him spread a vast plain of pinkish rock which was strangely shaped into smooth mounds, almost as if the terrain had dripped into place in liquid form before solidifying. The sky above it was an unbroken expanse of thick, lavender clouds.
Sharp cold seared Ivar’s exposed skin, and even parts that weren’t exposed. He soon realized he was inadvertently holding his breath, and for good reason: when he breathed, his nose and throat felt as though he were swallowing brambles while someone simultaneously jammed needles up his nostrils.
But he had to breathe to live. The result was with a loud, wheezing sound, while the bitingly chill air failed to satisfy the lungs.
The rest of the Dawn clustered on the rocky, pinkish surface visibly suffered the same effects. Half of them were down on all fours.
Ivar got a glimpse of all this before he was forced to shut watering eyes against the acidic air and could see no more.
“...have to move now!” he heard Cinnea saying. Her voice didn’t sound strained; instead it was muted and mechanical.
Ivar rubbed his eyes then cracked them open to learn that she’d donned the black, encompassing helmet which was part of a voidsuit. Llyr had said there might be a few aboard the Mogg.
Then Llyr had died.
Ivar hoped there were more than just a few of the suits aboard.
Squinting through involuntary tears, he saw Cinnea tugging the arms of suffering Dawners on the rocks and shoving them away from the crashed ship. She thrust various unidentifiable burdens into the arms of some.
Having chosen to follow Ivar’s instructions rather than Cinnea’s, Tomiris and Leimya gathered up spilled weapons. Ivar joined them in the task, even if he had no illusion they’d be able to wield them under present conditions.
He had picked up a few when Cinnea slapped a helmet like hers over his head.
“Get your savages on their feet!”
The first filtered breath Ivar drew inside the helmet was still unsatisfying to the lungs, but at least it didn’t scrape his nose and throat raw.
“Move your carcasses, Dawn!” he shouted. Like Cinnea’s, his voice now was clear. “Link hands! Form a chain!” He looked to Cinnea. “Where?”
“The moon is riddled with pockets just under the surface. First one we find.”
“Can we breathe better there?”
“No, but we might not get blasted.”
“Follow Cinnea!” Ivar cried to the Dawn.
Cinnea put herself at the head of the war band, which began to
link arms in a semi-blind human chain. With his free arm, the other clutching several axes and war-picks against his chest, Ivar tore his helmet off and set it over Leimya’s head.
“Go!” he wheezed at her and Tomiris. Like him, they bore as many weapons as they could carry.
The two took off, and Ivar ran after. But within a few paces, Leimya stopped and knelt by Andromache, who crouched on the rocks gasping with water streaming from shut eyes.
“Take my helmet!” Leimya shouted at Andromache. Her arms were full, or she would have removed it herself. “Take it!”
Rather than waste time waiting or disputing a princess’s will, Ivar dropped two war-picks to transfer the helmet onto the less useful, if not fully disposable Andromache.
He was dragging the Hellene to her feet when a third helmeted figure emerged from the wreck of the Mogg at a run.
Judging by his pace, Cernach was intent on putting distance quickly between himself and the crash site. If Ivar could have done so without pain, he might have asked the man why, but as it was, he and the three females just raced after him, the last in line.
When a roaring sound erupted from behind, Ivar twisted his head and cracked his eyes to witness the Mogg soaring away into the pale purple sky.
He hadn’t seen a great many spaceships, but something seemed off about the way this one flew. Of the four discs set at various points on the rear of the hull, only one was lit. The ship itself twisted lazily as it rose up on a course that seemed unlikely to carry it very high.
Ivar screwed bleary eyes shut once more and ran blindly until a new sound made him twist to look behind a second time.
An explosion. In the distance near the horizon, something big had exploded.
The Mogg, he quickly realized. Cernach’s doing, surely. He had set the crippled ship to hop away and crash a second time. If the Jir began hunting for survivors there, they would be hunting in the wrong place.
The Dawn ran for long minutes, or rather it moved as swiftly as it was able to over smooth, rounded rocks while mostly deprived of the abilities to see and breathe freely.
After a while, Cinnea called out from far ahead. “Hurry! Here!”
In Ivar’s stinging eyes, she was a vague dark spot waving on a pink sea. He and those around him could move no faster toward her than they already were. In time, they reached the spot where she had been to find she had gone down into a dark, barely visible crevasse among the bases of the strangely rounded stones.
Only one Dawner could pass through at a time. While waiting his turn at the rear of the line, Ivar squinted back in the direction from which they’d come.
Distant flying shapes circled like buzzards around the plume of smoke marking whatever was left of the Mogg-Yidiion. While Ivar watched, beams of alien weaponry lanced down, creating fiery blasts that appeared to encompass much more of the horizon than just the crash site. The Jir were taking no chances. Sending the Mogg on that final leap had saved them. For now.
After letting the women go down before him, Ivar took his turn descending into the deep hole which the Eraínn seemed to think might keep them alive at least a little longer.
Two
They huddled together like voles in... whatever voles lived in. Some deep, dark vole-hole. Cinnea gave instructions to cling close to one another, but having grown up in Svialand, Ivar already knew plenty about cold and how to stave it off. He helped Cinnea and others plug the entrance crack with what few loose rocks they could find. Eventually, by hunting in the dark with the small hand-held lights she provided, or just by feeling about on hands and knees, they gathered enough material. They piled it far down from the surface, where their modification of the natural landscape would not easily give away their presence to observers.
Keeping their collective heat trapped inside the cavern with such a wall was not only important to their staying warm, Cernach had explained. It would also help to foil Jir scans of the area.
“What now?” Ivar croaked.
“Only one choice,” Cinnea said. “We wait.”
Using as few words as possible, they settled on a plan of passing around the three helmets from the Mogg. Ivar’s initial position had been that the two Eraínn should keep two while the Dawn shared the third among their eighteen. But both Cinnea and Cernach were better people than that, even if the former in particular seemed to have no particular love for her cave-mates.
The helmets staved off the breath-razors but did nothing for the cold. Fortunately, among the burdens Cinnea had handed to members of the Dawn to carry away from the wreckage were the three voidsuits that went with the helmets. These also would be worn in shifts.
It was fortunate that many of the Dawn, Ivar included, had chosen to wear stretchable Jir garments under their linens and leathers and furs. Although they left the arms bare—had they not, most Scythians would have modified them rather than cover their tattoos—they provided the noticeable benefit of warming the torso. Not all wore such garments, however, and these could not be shared given that doing so would require the wearer to fully undress, which ran rather counter to the goal of staying warm. Furs and Earth garments would be passed around instead in order that none might be allowed to die.
Ivar planned to skip his turns for both helmet and suit.
“Spacesuits... are for... the weak,” he joked in a rasp to Cinnea, who didn’t laugh.
He decided it might be worth some raking in his throat to show Cinnea a bit of gratitude next time he got the chance. Her younger brother Cernach had dragged her into this venture. Cernach in turn had been dragged in by Llyr, who had paid with his life.
Arguably, if one gave it thought, the Eraínn’s involvement with the Dawn was Cinnea’s fault. She had been the one to introduce her group to Ivar’s, after Ivar had worn her down.
But really, who could blame her for having had her shield broken by the Shieldbreaker?
Ivar laughed to himself, a snort that sent needles up his nose. He would have to remember that line, if he lived.
Blame didn’t matter now. There was no sense distributing it during what might well be the last hours of their lives. Blame wouldn’t keep them warm or out of the Jir’s gray hands.
When Ivar hunted for some good news to counter the bad, he found it in the simple fact that everyone who’d left Nemoora on the Mogg had made it here.
The thought made Ivar laugh. It hurt like a bastard, but it was worth it.
“Nobody... died!” he said in answer to Cernach’s questioning look. “That hasn’t happened... since we left Earth!”
Celebration could only be fleeting. Death remained likely, from one cause or another. If the cold or the Jir didn’t kill them, they still had no water.
By Cinnea’s estimate, they had a hundred hours, give or take, before the unaugmented among them began to die of thirst. Of the eighteen Dawners closely packed in wheezing piles in the cavern, only Ivar, Tomiris, Leimya and two others were augmented.
They would have the joy of lasting a few days longer.
“My sister... will come for us,” Leimya said with confidence.
“Not... before we’re dead,” Cinnea rasped, for it was currently not her turn to breathe pain-free inside a helmet.
“If the Jir... can’t find us...” Cernach pointed out, “she can’t either.”
“I won’t... die down here,” one among the band pledged. Ivar couldn’t identify the man in the darkness by sound alone. In addition to clawing the throat, the air on this moon imparted a changed tone to their voices.
“We should die fighting... while we... still can,” a second warrior added.
“We won’t die here,” Ivar croaked. “We have... a plan.” Lacking a helmet, he couldn’t waste words explaining it fully to them. “First step is... to wait.”
Since their entrance to the cave, the two Eraínn siblings had worked for hours by glow of flashlight on at least two projects beyond the abilities of any Scythians present. They had already succeeded at modifying Ivar’s wrist comm, makin
g it vastly more sensitive. It was now positioned near the cavern entrance where it acted as a sort of monitor, transmitting sounds from the surface to the Eraínn’s comms. There was a slight chance its signal could give away their location to the Jir, but without it they could only guess when or if it ever became safe to emerge.
The second fruit of the siblings’ efforts came soon after and went far in boosting comfort and morale. They adapted a Senekeen blaster to emit a low, steady beam that could be used to heat rocks, which would then radiate warmth for quite some time. The device was passed around and used on the rock mounds that protruded from the cavern’s uneven floor. The cave was still cold as Ymir’s buttock crevice, but any more heat would increase the risk of detection from the surface, according to Cernach. For that reason, even though the party possessed six blasters among them, the siblings only modified one.
It was something, at least, and it greatly increased Ivar’s sense of indebtedness to the Eraínn.
“We’re... alive...because of you... and Cinnea,” Ivar said to Cernach.
“And Llyr,” Cernach corrected.
“And Llyr,” Ivar agreed. “Tell your sister... I’m forever in her debt.”
“She can hear you,” Cinnea said from the darkness. “She doesn’t want... your gratitude.”
“Would apologies... be more... welcome?”
After a few rasping breaths, she returned, “You and... your battle bunch made me a killer... again.”
“I thought you... were bored on Nemoora.”
“Shooting people isn’t... a cure for boredom. Neither is... seeing friends die.”
“Then I’m... deeply sorry,” Ivar said.
“You’re on the right fucking moon... for that.”
There was no further discussion, and probably would not have been even if not for the acidic air.
* * *
The equivalent of a day dragged by in near-freezing darkness filled only by the strained breaths of twenty men and women who barely moved except to relieve themselves in a deeper section of the cave. Cinnea reported hearing Jir craft fly over on a regular basis, but for now, no audible sign was detected of searchers coming near on foot.
