by Marc Secchia
Windrocs were not squabbling over his rotting entrails? Ridiculous. Utterly beyond the Island.
He pictured his encounter with the deadly-as-poison Warlord, smiling at the memory of their kiss. That thought would have to warm him through a great deal of slave labour to come–the chains made that much clear. For a warrior, chains represented the ultimate humiliation. Only slaves were chained in the Western Isles. Whatever fey spirit had possessed him that day, it had preserved his life. He only hoped it would not be to meet a fate worse than death.
Kylara’s blade had shattered on his head.
Ardan recalled the strange sound he had heard just before collapsing; a shattering blow to the crown of his skull, a shard of metal spinning past his eyes. Right. That settled it. This was a dream. Nobody lived through such a blow to the skull, especially not one from the victorious Warlord.
So … what was he doing chained to a bed?
Ardan’s head jerked as the door banged open. Ouch. Rotten idea.
“Time ya rise with the birds,” rapped a voice. He scowled. If he wasn’t mistaken, it belonged to the warrior who had almost decapitated him from behind, on Kylara’s order. “We’re moving out.”
He waggled an eyebrow at her. “And you are?”
“Try ya fancy words on me, boy, and I won’t hang about to cross swords with ya,” she growled. “I’m Rocia, named after the windroc. Ya remember that. Nobody bests Rocia, least of all a wretched slave from Naphtha. Lucky the Chief wants ya alive. Says death’s too good for ya.”
Rocia spared him no kindness as she manacled Ardan’s hands behind his back and hauled him out of the bed. He stumbled against the low table. “Islands’ sakes!”
Lumbering like a dazed ralti sheep, Ardan followed Rocia out of the hut. He surveyed his new surroundings, but the pre-dawn gloom did not help him draw any conclusions. Kylara’s command was mounted on the small, tough ponies beloved by the Islanders. Rocia tossed a noose around his neck and ordered him to march.
Perhaps they had forgotten he was wounded?
No, they wanted to break his spirit. Knowing this and experiencing it were two vastly different Islands. Ardan had three days of dawn-to-dusk forced marching to appreciate this, trudging along on torn and bloodied feet. Every step jolted his wounded leg. His head pounded so severely that he fainted five times during that first afternoon. They dumped him on a pony’s back for the balance of the day and gave him six lashes for his trouble. Kylara did not speak to him once. He decided that being alive had its drawbacks. There were burning skies and pain. Nothing else.
But he healed quickly. During the fourth day’s march, as they entered a region of torn-up ravines choked with dense vegetation, Ardan’s alertness returned, as did his thirst for vengeance. Nothing else could satisfy a warrior’s honour.
He gazed about, hard-eyed. This was leopard country, or he missed his mark–the cats for which Kylara’s forces were named, night hunters of legendary skill. There. Sallow, slit eyes peering at him from a branch, quickly vanishing into the undergrowth.
Kylara’s force had just crested a small rise, preparatory to diving into another thicket which these warriors all navigated effortlessly, when his keen eyes spotted a small fleet of Sylakian Dragonships skulking past a peninsula to the south. He liked the Sylakians less than these Yangan warriors, even if they intended to have him digging latrines for the rest of his days.
Raising his voice, he called, “Dragonships!”
That was a way of dropping the proverbial windroc among the ralti sheep, as the Islands saying went. Ralti sheep stood six to eight feet tall at the shoulder. But windrocs could boast wingspans of up to twenty feet. With their hooked beaks and vicious talons, and tempers even shorter than Kylara’s, they were awe-inspiring predators. Ardan remembered once seeing three windrocs taking on a wounded rajal. He remembered? Perhaps his memory was returning.
Kylara galloped back along the line to where he stood, eating the column’s dust toward the rear. “Slave,” she glowered. “Had to be you trying a stupid joke. No-one in my command calls ‘Dragonship’ without cause. A dozen lashes, Rocia.”
“They’re coming along the cliff from the south,” he replied evenly. “I count five Dragonships. I’d point them out for you, my lady, if I had the use of–”
He gasped as Rocia punched him abruptly in the gut. “Not ‘my lady’, slave. Not ‘less ya made the ten promises of troth.” Silently, he added her to his ‘revenge later’ list. Ardan champed his jaw, saying nothing.
“Lost your tongue, boy?” Kylara ridiculed him.
He narrowed his eyes against the suns’ glare to follow those tiny dots–tiny only because of the great distance. The dirigible balloons were one hundred and fifty feet in length, sleek and ominous, their multiple turbines bulging like clusters of poisonous tarak-gourds sprouting from a branch. Each vessel carried a cargo of up to fifty Sylakian Hammers, the dreaded crimson-robed warriors of Sylakia–suddenly, an image froze in his mind. He saw a boy-child pierced through the torso by a burning six-foot crossbow quarrel, a Sylakian warrior laughing as he kicked the child aside. Dragonships flying overhead … cold sweat beaded his brow. He could not breathe. He had to …
“Ardan!” With a shudder, he flipped back from that cold place to the noon heat. A flicker in the Warlord’s eyes told him she had missed not a beat of his response. She said, “Speak, or be whipped.”
“Run your eyes along the cliff-top across the inlet, Chief,” he said, bleakly. “A league beyond that there’s a stand of flara-fruit trees, you can tell by the silvery leaves. Now, move to the cliff edge where you see a clump of boulders shaped like an upraised fist. Below that … I make it five hundred feet below, just off the cliff, you will see five Dragonships.”
Everyone squinted, shading their eyes. “Burn him in a Cloudlands volcano,” grunted Rocia, “I do see something. Dots, aye. Ya see Dragonships, slave?”
“Headed for that village,” he added, pointing with his chin.
Rocia swore coarsely; Kylara gave him a searching look. “You’ve a windroc’s eyes.”
Ardan said, “I see what I see.”
Every eye turned to the village. They knew the Sylakian Dragonships had set a course along the cliff calculated to conceal their approach until the last moment. There was no way, unless Kylara’s Leopards could fly like windrocs over the inlet, which sliced deeply across their path ahead if they continued southward, that they could reach the village in time.
But the far side of the inlet was a towering cliff, sheer and unrelieved, daubed with white guano from the numerous windrocs roosting there. And the chasm before it, impassable to any beast lacking wings.
Rocia spat, “Cowards’ tactics!”
“We have to try,” said Kylara.
* * * *
Smoke belched into the evening air.
Kylara and her command rode hollow-eyed into the village. Every hut was gutted. Bodies lay strewn where they had fallen–young and old, warriors and invalids alike. Black flies already buzzed about in their thousands, so sated they barely bothered to rise at the warriors’ approach. The Sylakians had even torched the great basket-weave granary, ensuring that anyone who did survive would find no food. Every pony and ralti sheep had been put to the sword. Ardan wondered if a single Sylakian had died in this uneven battle, their forces striking from the air with arrows, crossbow quarrels and burning oil. Five Dragonships against one village. These people had been trapped and slaughtered like animals.
Once more, a cold, soul-lost feeling assaulted him. Dark tongues of fire lapped across Ardan’s eyes, a second scene imposed upon his vision. He saw Islanders screaming and a hut ablaze and arrows plopping into flesh like frogs leaping into a pond, him shouting as he sprinted through an endless place, slamming his blade into red-robed Sylakian Hammers, the dull roar of battle battering his ears, the piteous cries of the wounded and the scorched, the burning and killing … he vomited.
Rocia threw him a disgusted look. “Oh, roaring raj
als, would ya look at this weakling?”
Whatever was the matter with him? Ardan was a warrior. If he had not known from the fight against Kylara, he knew it now. He could not even wipe his mouth.
Ardan spat, “This head wound, Rocia. I need rest.”
“Well, you’re not getting it,” said Kylara. “Move out. We march through the night. They’re headed for the next village. We’ll set a trap; give those Sylakians a taste of their own fire.”
“How do you plan to fight Dragonships?” he blurted out.
“Shut your trap and march, slave,” said Kylara.
“Watch and learn,” said Rocia.
Kylara’s Leopards, who numbered ninety-three fighting-fit women, marched until the early hours to reach the next village. Either the Sylakian Dragonships had vanished, or they were hiding in a ravine somewhere. Ardan sensed the latter. They had tracked down just one survivor from the previous village–a girl of thirteen summers. She had agreed to join the Leopards and would be sent to their secret base for training. Kylara looked after her with an expression on her proud face that he could not place. Had this been her story, once, he wondered?
The Sylakians were softening up the far Western Isles. Ardan wondered if they would bother to invade. Perhaps this was just population subjugation, or entertainment for the troops. The Isles had gold mines, which might interest the Sylakians. But they had little meriatite, the expensive rock which was burned inside the meriatite furnace engines to produce the hydrogen which both floated and propelled their Dragonships.
Compounding his humiliation, Kylara had him chained to a tree outside the village while her troops evacuated the villagers. He watched Kylara gently boosting an elderly woman onto a pony, before taking three mischievous children in hand and leading the small procession out of the village. So, the Warlord was not half as heartless as she pretended.
Ardan sat with his back against the prekki tree and considered how exactly Kylara had not succeeded in halving his stupid skull. Right now, windrocs and vultures should have finished picking his bones clean, beneath the cliff-edge tree. Something was wrong. Only a fool would think otherwise, for hers had been a killing stroke.
To his surprise, his eyelids drooped shut. Ardan dreamed.
* * * *
Slit eyes glowered at him from a pit of darkness. They spit titian flames at him, bathing his body in flame. He ran. And though he lifted his knees and sprinted until the wind whipped past his ears, there was no escaping the flames, which pursued him with the resolve of an animate, rational being. But he did not burn up. The everlasting combustion played across his ebony skin, cracking it in crazy patterns like clay baked beneath the dry season suns. Ardan opened his mouth and breathed in the flames. The sizzling of fire filled his ears.
At some dim, subconscious level, Ardan realised that the sound was real.
He leaped to his feet, ready to fight. The chain binding him to the gnarled prekki-fruit tree jerked him up short.
Panting, he stared down at the village from his vantage-point on a small, mossy hillock crowned by the tree. Five Dragonships surrounded the cluster of two or three dozen wood-frame huts which comprised the village. The sound he had heard was burning oil being dumped on the first few rooftops down at the lower end, furthest from his position, multiple bonfires roaring into life as the bundled rushes ignited like torches. He saw the red-plumed helmets of Sylakian ground troops storming between the huts, flinging burning brands this way and that. The heads of their war hammers gleamed in the early suns-shine. They kicked down doors and bellowed their war-cries. But this time, there were no villagers left for them to slay.
Kylara whirled out of a doorway, swinging her scimitar in a flat, vicious arc. Blood sprayed into the air as a man’s body and head parted ways. Bizarrely, his legs and torso kept running for several steps before the inevitable collapse.
Ardan’s eyes jumped. Three Leopards, one with a short metal tube on her back, crouched between the huts. As he watched, the warrior with the tube–Rocia–held up a piece of thick elastic cord. She locked her arms at full stretch, about two feet apart. The warriors behind her loaded a crossbow quarrel into the tube, and then stretched the cord until they formed a Human catapult. They aimed carefully, adjusting Rocia’s position. A spark-stone clipped sparks onto the quarrel, which must have been primed beforehand, because it caught fire instantly. The quarrel shot upward.
KAARAABOOM!
The explosion echoed off the nearby hills as the Dragonship vaporised in a massive ball of flame.
For the first time in days, Ardan smiled.
A second quarrel from the far side of the village narrowly missed its target, pinging into the cabin slung on thick hawsers beneath the dirigible’s multi-segmented hydrogen sack. Men rushed along the gantries to put out the blaze, while a Sylakian trumpet sounded the alarm, carrying with clarion sweetness up to his position.
He never wanted to fly in a Dragonship. That much highly volatile hydrogen right above his head? It required a special type of madness. One spark in the wrong place, even a touch of static … better to jump into a Cloudlands volcano.
The Dragonships rose at once, turbines whining as they spread out. Additional Sylakian troops boiled out of concealed positions east and west of the village. Now Kylara’s troops would face a true test, he saw–the Sylakian War-Hammer in charge knew what he was doing. The ambushers had just been ambushed.
The Dragonship nearest his position imploded, the sound ripping through an otherwise tranquil dawn. Ardan winced at the concussion. But the remaining three vessels rose out of range. A violent, running fight developed between the huts. The Sylakian dirigibles patrolled either end of the village, ensuring that any enemy warrior who stood still for more than a few seconds received the gift of a swift quarrel between the shoulders from the Dragonships’ massive war catapults, set on gantries fore and aft of their cabins. The Sylakian troops were first-rate. Crimson Hammers–the name leaped into his mind as though it were a bloody flag waving a warning. Sylakia’s crack troops. Killers.
The Sylakians favoured stout, two-handed war hammers over the scimitars wielded by Kylara’s warriors. They worked in groups of four, protecting each other’s backs. Kylara and her women faced them with round shields and their deadly scimitars, supported by archers hidden among the village huts. Corpses piled up faster than he could count. Ardan jerked his chains one more time, hating being left out, hating to watch the Sylakians pick off Kylara’s troops, penning them in steadily from all sides. With a high-pitched whine of its meriatite turbines, a Dragonship pressed forward, angling for a position overhead of a knot of Kylara’s warriors, including the matchless Warlord herself.
Burning oil would follow.
Kylara was even deadlier seen from afar than when she was beating his head in, Ardan decided. But fear seared his throat. She led a charge to try to break free of the Sylakian troops, but they held firm and pressed the women back–outnumbering them two to one on the ground, working with the taut discipline of veteran troops. Kylara struck out ferociously, slicing off a Sylakian’s arm and catching her blade in the ironwood haft of another warrior’s war-hammer. No mind. She grasped the hammer in both hands and swung a high-kick up beneath it, breaking the man’s neck with the heel of her boot.
“Roaring rajals,” he breathed.
The terrible hammers beat back Kylara and her troops. The women gathered amidst the huts, darting quick glances at the Dragonship menacing them from above.
Another memory seized him. Ardan remembered watching Dragonships from beneath the eaves of his hut, the world burning, sobbing over a fallen woman, screaming and shaking his fist at the sky as the cowardly Sylakians continued their assault from out of range of the warriors trapped on the ground while huge, winged shadows soared over his Island. Vengeful fires filled him up to his throat. He tore at the chains.
Ardan screamed, “Burn these manacles in a Cloudlands volcano!”
The metal slipped off his wrists. He barely noticed
. All he knew was the sweet savour of freedom. Ardan sprinted down toward the village on the wings of his inner blaze, listening only to the song of wailing madness in his mind, not even hearing the cries of the warriors as he slammed, weaponless, into the back of a squad of Sylakian Hammers. He smashed two helmeted heads together. Ardan kneed a warrior in the gut and stole his hammer. Spinning from a blow to his shoulder, he struck out, crushing a hapless Sylakian’s skull.
Ardan snatched up a second war hammer. One for each hand. Fiery laughter roared out of his madness. Spinning the hammers about his head, Ardan waded into the fray. Twenty, thirty Sylakians? Who cared? They would fall. He smashed a warrior through the wall of the nearest house. He took a direct hammer-blow to his chest and guffawed at the surprised warrior as he head-butted him sharply, breaking his nose. Ardan lashed out with both hammers at once, staving in the warrior’s helmet so that it crushed his skull. A hammer ricocheted off his head. Ardan spun smoothly on his heel, using the force generated by his turn to unleash a mighty blow that launched the unfortunate Sylakian over the nearest hut.
By the Islands, he could do that? Ardan ignored the warning gongs sounding in his head. No time to think. He jabbed backward with the haft of his right-hand hammer. A breastplate crunched four inches inward. Ignoring the strangled cry behind him, he waded through a knot of Crimson Hammers, crushing them as though he were a dark boulder hurtling down a cliff.
Suddenly, there were no more Sylakians left standing in his path.
Kylara caught his arm. “What’re you doing here?”
“Saving you, my beauty.” Ardan panted, before thumping her on the shoulder. “Don’t leave me in the cold when there are Sylakians to be killed.”
“You’re mad.” She shook her head as though she had a wasp in her ear. When his gaze lingered on her eyes to puzzle over their unreadable expression, her palm impacted his cheek. Whack! “Mind on the battle, man. What’s wrong with you?”
