The Best of Men - an epic fantasy (Song of Ages Book 1)

by Wilf Jones

  ‘You were saying, Captain Trant.’

  ‘I was… Yes, as I was trying to point out,’ Trant decided to move on. ‘We’d be best to make our next moves in the Huecca rather than travel any further west from here. I’d rather stick to attacking good-sized villages than small towns: they attract too much attention. As we’ve already learned. Last thing I want is to lose any more men – there were twenty killed in Altiparedo before you lot managed a response. I’m not having that again.’

  ‘At least we managed a response,’ huffed Kelsly, ‘Just shows how well you’d do without us, don’t you think?’

  ‘Gentleman! Enough of this.’ Chaldonie gave Kelsly another of those warning looks and the thin man subsided. ‘Captain Trant is right: we must keep wastage to a minimum. I was harsh before, Captain. We each have our roles. Your men play their part in the terror we create and news of them diminished will lessen the effect. Do we know much about the journey through the mountains?’

  Trant was astonished. He looked at the map. ‘By this I’d say it’s fifteen miles to the Blancagua Pass, and then some rough travel for another ten. After that another thirty to get into villages of any significant size. A couple of days. But I’d want to scout ahead before we go anywhere. And besides the men need a break.’

  ‘We all need a break,’ grumbled Kelsly. ‘Whatever anyone says I’m not getting on a horse again for a week at least.’

  Malbur chuckled but the amusement seemed a little forced. ‘So you need a rest? Then you won’t, perhaps, be finding a use for those five children you had locked up earlier?’

  Kelsly smirked. ‘Oh well, you know: a little exercise every day—’

  It wasn’t a loud noise but very clear and Trant recognised it at once.

  He screamed out ‘Get down!’ just as another voice yelled ‘Catarina, NO!’ and a young woman stepped out from behind the tapestry loosing her crossbow as she came. The bolt fizzed over his shoulder and nicked Kelsly’s cheek.

  It was a foolish attempt. There was only ever the chance of hurting one of them and leaving the rest to reply. A grizzled old man emerging after her, short sword in hand, barged the girl aside and sent the crossbow clattering across the floor. Trant launched one of the catapult balls at him and the two inches of steel glancing off the old man’s collar-bone made him falter. Trant drew his own sword intent on putting an end to it but he wasn’t quick enough. With a look of unimaginable terror upon his face the old man, against his will, reversed his sword and slowly pushed the point into his own belly, shuddering horribly at every inch. Trant looked behind him to see Chaldonie mimicking the old man’s actions and then realised that he was in fact directing those actions. The sorcerer made a twisting motion with his hands and the old man turned the blade in his vitals.

  ‘No!’ The young woman screamed in anger at the unnecessary cruelty. ‘How dare you—’ Trant grabbed at her arms, forcing them behind her back where he tied them at the elbow with a buckled leather strap. He wasn’t gentle but she didn’t struggle much. The sight of all the blood pooling around her feet took the fight out of her.

  Chaldonie stooped to pick up the crossbow.

  ‘What a silly girl you are. You should have stayed hidden. What shall we do with her, Trant? Kelsly, I think, will want her to make amends for his wounds.’

  Kelsly, dabbing at his cheek with a handkerchief and examining the bloody cloth with unusual interest, was magnanimous. ‘The old man paid for this. Why don’t you keep her safe for me?’ He turned to leave the armoury but continued as he walked: ‘After all, I will have devotions to make very soon. Of course Azrazal does seem to prefer the pretty ones but I’m sure he’ll forgive me in the circumstances.’

  He went and Chaldonie, without a glance at those remaining, followed him.

  ‘Seems to have recovered his sense of humour,’ said Malbur, the wide grin returning to his features now that Chaldonie had left the room.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Trant, ‘I suppose he has something to look forward to. He’ll be sharpening his razors. I’d better have Hoggy put her in the cellars with the rest of the catch.’

  The girl was too stunned to respond in any way.

  THE EMPIRE OF WHOJIT

  Slaney, Gothery 3057.7.30

  ‘When you are fighting a war, Angren,’ said Seama, impatiently, ‘the greatest advantage is to know the strength of your enemy and how it is deployed. It’s possible then to make a strategy based on certainty rather than guesswork.’

  Angren, slightly drunk, pondered a while before trusting himself to reply. With metal cloth and oil, he had been working on ‘the Mighty Stick of Rust’, as Sigrid had taken to calling his new sword, but now he laid the cloth aside and, out of habit, reached for his jar of ale. Seama cleared his throat. Angren thought the better of it and picked up his tools once more. Seama was not in a good mood so beer would have to wait.

  ‘But I thought we didn’t know anything about them,’ he said finally.

  ‘Oh, we know a little already and we’ll find out more soon enough but actually I was talking about them wanting to know more about us. It seems clear they already know a great deal about Gothery, the politics, the industry and so on. That’s easy enough. But what do they know about the rest of it: Mador’s reaction, Athoff’s warmongering? What about the Council’s plans, what about my mission?’

  Angren guffawed exaggeratedly. ‘Well they couldn’t know much, could they? I mean, let’s face it, you haven’t even told me what we’re up to. I thought we were supposed to be heading out west not piddling around up here.’

  ‘Up here’ was a small room in a second-class public house in a major town of Gothery’s industrial midlands. They had struggled through two solid days of dreary rain and muddy roads to get there and to Angren’s eyes the place didn’t seem to warrant the effort: it was all manufactories and noise. In fact Slaney was not far off the obvious route into Aegarde and so not much of a diversion but to Angren the stop felt like an unwelcome interlude, an interruption he could do without.

  ‘We are here, Angren, because I have more information than you may think and even some clue as to what is actually going on. We need to be here.’

  ‘Fine. So tell me: what is actually going on then?’

  ‘I suppose I should explain.’

  ‘You suppose right.’ Angren was beginning to feel put upon. Normally he would have followed Seama to the ends of the earth and never asked a question but that was when Seama was determined, decisive, invincible. But for now Seama seemed to have lost some of that air of certainty they’d all come to rely on. If he wanted to keep Angren’s support then, at the very least, he’d better start talking. The whole situation was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.

  ‘Very well. Firstly, you have to understand that something of great importance is taking place in this country. It’s what you see all around you: all this industry and imagination. You mightn’t think it but these mills and tool shops and weaving sheds don’t just affect the type of clothes you wear and the goods you buy at market and the roads you travel, but they will inevitably alter the way we protect ourselves and the way we make war.’

  Angren nearly asked what had clothes to do with war but he realised, despite the alcohol, that deeper questions needed answering. Seama wouldn’t wait for him to catch up.

  ‘No you must try to work it out for yourself. Secondly, I have solid information that some unidentified interest has a number of spies infiltrating the region. They’re mostly involved in questioning the people in charge of the manufactories but they’re far too obvious and as a result are more often than not fed the wrong answers. More recently, perhaps because of their lack of success, they’ve adopted a new strategy. Several important people have gone missing—’

  ‘Now hang on,’ Angren had to butt in, ‘If it’s so flamin’ obvious these spies are out kidnapping people, why has
n’t the King’s wonderful bloody Public Guard nabbed ‘em?’ Gothery’s ‘wonderful bloody Public Guard’, a cross-national innovation of Sirl’s reign, had put Angren before the magistrates three times already for certain minor misdeeds usually involving drink and once, in fact, a spot of smuggling. Abduction seemed a little more serious.

  ‘An important question for which I have no answer. Nothing is as normal in this country, Angren. What do you suppose these spies are looking for?’

  Angren had no idea. ‘Looking for someone or something? Lost treasure, secret weapons? What do spies normally look for?’

  ‘Information. But what information? It could be weapons. Some of the people missing are alchemists; some are engineers. On the Isles we do a lot with explosives but in Gothery, what with all the iron and steel workings, who knows what they could produce? What if these spies are looking to steal secrets to help their attack; what if they’re trying to find out how to sabotage our defence? I wonder.’

  ‘What I wonder is who the bloody hell ‘they’ are?’

  ‘If you’re talking about the spies, they’re paid men and women, in this case from ar’Andala and Masachea. But it doesn’t mean that either the ar’Andalan Emperor or the Celebrant of Masachea is involved in what’s going on. In fact I’m sure they’re not. The Council has its own spies: we’re so deeply embedded in Masachea we could monitor the incidence of the Chief Sirdar’s bowel movements. And we do. The Emp Radis, on the other hand has enough troubles in the far West for him to be bothered in the least about Asteranor. His Empire is collapsing and just about all of his armies are engaged. We keep a very good eye on what’s happening on Sullinor, have done these thirty years.’

  ‘So what then? We’re about to be invaded by the Spurlese, are we? Fed up with raising sheep on a couple of rocks, they’ve decided to conquer the world.’

  Seama smiled. ‘You remind me of Tregar, and not because he’s Spurladian. The last time I attempted anything like this conversation he seemed to think I’d lost my wits. And here we are again. There is another Empire, Angren, we must consider. One more ancient and probably much more powerful than ar’Andala, and it’s close enough to pose a deadly threat.’

  Angren’s brow wrinkled as he tried to place any such alternative, presuming that the beer had fatally affected his ability to think.

  ‘I speak of the Empire of Kyzylkum.’

  ‘The Empire of Whojit? Don’t think I’ve heard of that one, Seama.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t. Few people have.’

  ‘So where is it then, this empire thingy? It’s not another fairy tale is it? I didn’t much like the last one.’

  ‘You’ll like this one even less than the tale of the Halfi, I assure you. But no, this Empire is not the sort of place your mother could have told you about. Tell me, Angren, what do you think lies north of the Dedicae?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘Nothing. More mountains; the sea. How should I know?’

  ‘Kyzylkum lies beyond the mountains. A vast country – at least I think it is; an oddity, a strange place that shouldn’t even exist. It is home to an ancient race, parted from the rest of us back in the beginnings of history. And they’re not a nice race, Angren. They worship their ruler, The Face of Darkness, who apparently just happens to be extremely proud and utterly malicious and immensely powerful. Kyzylkum, Angren, is not a happy realm.’

  ‘So, not worth a visit, then?’ Angren’s drunkenness was becoming a thing of the past. A fact he regretted. But he still didn’t quite understand. ‘This something to do with that smelly heap of papers you’ve been reading?’

  ‘You know full well they got a soaking. But that ‘smelly heap of papers’, as you put it, Angren, is the key to everything that’s going on and it’s where I learned what little I know about Kyzylkum, and about the Raising of the Dedicae, and the Empire of the Exiles.’

  Angren shrugged. ‘No offence intended, but you know it really does sound like just a story. I mean what’s this ‘Raising of the Dedicae’ stuff? You don’t raise mountains, Seama, they’re just there, aren’t they?’

  Seama shook his head in that annoying way he had whenever Angren said something stupid. ‘Nothing is ‘just there’ without a reason, Angren and that includes mountains. Did you learn no science when you were young?’

  ‘Couldn’t be bothered with it, Seama. You don’t get to be as good at fighting as I am, messing around with schoolbooks.’

  ‘Didn’t your mother make you go to school?’

  ‘Oh she made me go alright – just couldn’t keep me there. Look, why not just tell me about it, if it’s important.’

  Seama sighed deeply. ‘It’s a good job some of us pay attention to our lessons. Oh, very well. Back in the antiquities section of the Collegium Library there’s a manuscript nearly four thousand years old. It’s well known – they use the text as a primer in Medean Studies; it’s a sort of compendium of what it calls ‘histories.’ Now one of those histories gives a dramatic description of an awful upheaval, deep in the past of the continent, an earthquake that shook Asteranor to its foundations and changed the shape of the land, and piled up the mountains so high the continent was cut in two: divided north and south with no chance of passage between one side and the other. Well, Angren, let me tell you that familiarity really does breed contempt. Most historians and linguists are convinced, like you, that it’s just a story, an entertainment, a parable about life and death and the sundering of souls. So you’re in good company. But my smelly heap of papers, Angren, insists that it is all true. Haslem, the person who wrote the smelly papers, the book itself being The Song of Ages of which I have only a partial copy, he was very sure that that this tale of the past was nothing less than a factual account of a division of mankind. At some point, so long ago it’s impossible to put a date on it, the Dedicae were raised to impassable heights and Kyzylkum was set apart.

  ‘Think of it, Angren: through all the long years since the time of the Wandering, Kyzylkum has been sitting up there, all alone, unknown and unconsidered by the rest of humanity, it’s people quietly getting on with their lives, but hemmed in by the mountains, imprisoned if you will, and, for all that time, wanting to escape. Imagine that!’

  Angren did his best. He dropped his cloth, leaned over to one side, elbow on the arm of the chair, cheek resting on his fist, face in a frown and he thought as hard as he could. Imagination was something of a challenge.

  ‘So who… what was it raised up the mountains, again?’

  ‘Oh yes, I didn’t say. It was Ohr’mazd, to protect us. To banish the others.’

  ‘Ah, I see. And erm… why exactly do these ‘others’ want to escape then? I mean what’s in it for them?’

  ‘Perhaps ‘escape’ is the wrong word.’

  ‘What’s the right one?’

  ‘Well, Haslem more or less says that what they want, more than anything else, and they’ve wanted this from the start, is to claim back all they have lost; to take back everything we’ve denied them. They mean to attack and they want to destroy us, I guess.’

  ‘Bugger me, but what a cheery soul you are, Seama. Many of them, these ‘others’?’

  ‘No idea. But do you see, Angren, to get back to your original question, what I’m doing ‘piddling around up here’ when I could, and maybe should be out in the west taking on this Black Company, is grabbing at a chance to find out the truth behind all this ancient history.’

  ‘And how are you going to do that?’

  ‘I’m going to ask someone.’

  Angren snorted. ‘Ask someone? And they’ll tell you the truth will they? Well good luck. What I don’t understand is how come you don’t know all about the place already. I mean it’s been thousands of years, you say. Surely someone must have discovered the place in all that time.’

 
; Seama took few moments, before he replied. He seemed unnecessarily tense. Angren counted that as a bad sign.

  ‘Have you ever tried to cross the mountains?’

  ‘Well no.’

  ‘You never will. The sierras of the Dedicae are so high the air runs out before you can top them. And you can’t go by sea either – there’s too much ice in the way. And unless, Angren ’I never listened in school’ Nielderson, you’ve secretly invented some machine for flying, or you’ve figured out how to grow wings for yourself, then clearly Kyzylkum is beyond exploration!’

  ‘Well pardon me for being ignorant.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Angren had nearly had enough of this. He eyed his glass of ale longingly. Being drunk just now seemed a much better option than being barked at by Seama. And all of this Kizzil stuff: there didn’t seem any point to it. ‘Tell me,’ he said at last, ‘being as we can’t get over the mountains to look, doesn’t that mean they can’t either? Why don’t we just leave them to it; leave them where they are?’

  ‘Because, Angren, they’re not thinking of staying at home! You haven’t got it have you? The power behind all the trouble here in Gothery and Aegarde, and everywhere else for that matter, is the power of Kyzylkum. They’ve found a way out. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Do you get it now?’

  ‘Alright, alright, keep your hair on. So I asked a stupid question.’ With Seama in this mood, he should have known better than to have asked questions at all. This time instead of looking at his glass, Angren scooped it up and took a long pull. He was getting dangerously close to the bottom before he stopped.