Defenders of Ulthuan

by Graham McNeill

  Beside him, Rhianna fought with talents of her own. While she could wield a blade with no little ability, it was in the magical arts where her true skills lay. She conjured blazing walls of blue fire within the shambling ranks of the monsters that consumed them in shrieking waves. And where such flames arose, each creature was utterly destroyed, no residue of its ending creating others in its wake. Streaking tongues of flame leapt from her outstretched hands, but Eldain could see that she could not sustain such a tremendous expenditure of power for long.

  Even as he despaired of winning this fight, a cascade of magical fire rained down upon the monsters. Explosions of white light exploded with retina-searing brightness as the mages within the tower finally unleashed their own powers in defence of their home.

  Eldain cried in exultation as he saw that the tide of battle had turned.

  The skill and sacrifices of the Sword Masters had bought the mages time to wrestle the rampaging energies of the tower back under control and now the full might of Sapherian magic was brought to bear.

  He dropped his sword and turned towards Rhianna as she sagged against the tower, drained beyond endurance by the might of the magic she had unleashed.

  ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘The battle’s over.’

  She smiled gratefully, her flesh pale and waxen. ‘Thank Isha… I have no more to give.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it was enough.’

  Rhianna shivered and Eldain felt as though the sensation travelled from her and into his own flesh. Eldain looked into her eyes and a shared moment of recognition passed between them, but recognition of what he could not say.

  The noise of battle receded, as though an invisible fog had descended to deaden the senses. He looked back at Rhianna and knew she was experiencing the same thing.

  ‘What…’ he began, but stopped as he saw the look of wide-eyed shock upon her face.

  He followed the direction of her gaze and his heart was seized in a clammy fist.

  Standing amid the dying army of magical creatures was a bewildered looking elf, his features the mirror of Eldain’s own.

  ‘It can’t be…’ he said.

  Caelir.

  Instead of thin air, his foot stepped onto solid ground.

  Caelir felt the same shift in reality he’d experienced when he’d first set foot in the Tower of Hoeth; that same sense of magic changing things because it could. Once again he’d travelled the length of the tower, but this time he had not wished it to. This time he had wished for the rush of air past his falling body as everything ended peacefully.

  But as the magic of Ulthuan rushed in to fill the void so recently gouged in his soul by the outpouring of dark magic hidden within him, all thoughts of oblivion fled from his mind and a wracking sob burst from his chest. He realised how close he had come to an inglorious death and the thought horrified him beyond belief.

  No… if he was to atone for this monstrous debacle, then he would need to live. He would need to survive and finally discover what had been done to him and why.

  Caelir stood, fresh resolve filling him as he took stock of his surroundings. He stood at the base of the Tower of Hoeth, at the edge of the charred remains of the forest he and Kyrielle had ridden through with Anurion…

  Kyrielle!

  He closed his eyes as the image of her terror flashed across his mind, her once perfect features melting down to the bone as the dark magic consumed her. The grief was still raw and bleeding and it took an effort of will to force it down to a level where he could still function. He would mourn her properly later, but for now he had to keep moving.

  A host of armoured Sword Masters fought creatures the magic had summoned, cutting them down with deadly grace and skill. Flashing spears of fire were hurled from the tower and white flames leapt from the ground in rushing walls to burn them.

  The battle for the tower was almost won, and though the shimmering army of monsters was doomed, they fought on with no regard for their ultimate fate. Caelir had little doubt as to his fate should the Sword Masters take him prisoner; their brethren had been killed and the Loremaster wounded almost unto death, so he turned and ran for the forest.

  He heard a shout behind him and saw a figure break from the ranks of the Sword Masters and come running towards him. She wore long, flowing robes and her honey gold hair trailed behind her like the banner of an Ellyrian Reaver. She was beautiful but haunted, and Caelir could not bear the pain he saw there.

  He reached the forest, zigzagging between fire blackened trees that wept sap and leaping fallen bodies. Caelir heard more shouts behind him, but paid them no heed in his desperation to escape. He skidded to a halt in a clearing that remained untouched by the fire, seeing a trio of magnificent steeds standing together by the body of a fallen Sword Master. The ground glistened with blood and the residue of magic like morning dew and Caelir instantly saw that two of the steeds were unmistakably of Ellyrian stock.

  Caelir almost laughed in relief to see such a welcome sight and made his way towards them. They whinnied with pleasure to see him and the Ellyrion mounts came up and nuzzled him affectionately. The familiarity of the steeds was like a touchstone to him and he wept to see such reminders of a homeland he could not recall.

  One of the steeds was jet black, normally considered unlucky to the riders of Ellyrion, but it was a fine and strong beast. Its companion was smaller and less muscled, but no less majestic. The third horse was a silver Sapherian mount and it too sought to welcome him, behaviour not normally expected from such haughty beasts.

  He sensed a strange familiarity to these horses, as though he knew them from an earlier life, but there was no connection, no remembrance of their names or personalities.

  ‘Would you bear me away from this place, friend?’ said Caelir, running his hands down the flanks of the black horse.

  The horse bobbed its head and Caelir said, ‘Thank you.’

  He vaulted onto the horse’s back and gathered up its reins as he heard running footsteps drawing near to him. Through the trees he could see the maiden he had seen earlier and another pang of familiarity stabbed home. Before her ran a warrior with a bared blade, his features partially obscured by the play of shadows through the smoke and trees.

  Like the elf maid there was a familiarity to them, but…

  Then the light shifted and Caelir cried out as he saw that the warrior’s features were his own…

  ‘Wait!’ shouted his doppelganger, but Caelir was not about to obey any such commands.

  He turned the horse with the pressure of his knees and rode off for the northern horizon.

  Like Anurion before him, Teclis had been unable to lift the curse of his forgotten memory, but Caelir remembered that Anurion had spoken of another powerful individual who might help him discover the truth of his life.

  The Everqueen.

  Chapter Eleven

  Landing

  Waves lashed the jagged, rocky coastline, relentless walls of cold black water funnelling between the broken islands that lay west of Ulthuan to hammer the sunken ruins of Tor Anroc. What had once been a glorious fastness was now little more than skeletal remains, its high towers smashed and its walls sundered by an ancient, but still bitterly remembered act of spite.

  The lord of Tor Anroc and his sons were gone, lost to history and the remembrances of ancient taletellers. None now spoke of them, for their destiny was too heartbreaking to hear without one’s thoughts becoming moribund.

  Only broken stubs of lost towers remained, jutting from the storm-lashed waters like the fingers of a drowning victim. With each passing year more succumbed to the erosion of the sea and collapsed below the waves.

  A sullen grey sky pressed down on the tower, the day almost ended and the sun descending to the far horizon as a chill disc of white. Ghostly winds blew over the watchtower of Tor Anroc, a tall spire of dark rock raised upon the ruins of the sunken city.

  From the tallest peak of the watchtower, Coriael Swiftheart looked over the bleak greyness
of the western horizon. A shimmering, misty haze hung over the ocean, but such sights were not uncommon around Ulthuan and did not trouble him.

  His armour caught the last of the sunlight and he shivered as another gust of biting wind whipped around the heights of the tower. Coriael listened to the noise of the ocean, imagining the sound to be the forgotten roars of dragons, and he recalled tales of ages past told to him by his grandsire by the fireside of their home in Tiranoc.

  He had thrilled to stories of skies thick with the sinuous bodies of dragons as the magnificent warriors of Caledor had ridden them into battle. But as the volcanic fire of the mountains had cooled and the magic of the world lessened, the dragons slumbered for longer and longer, no longer rising at the clarion call of the Dragonhorn.

  Coriael wished he could have lived in those days of splendour, when Tor Anroc still stood proud and strong. He longed for the heady glory of fighting in the glittering host of Ulthuan against its many enemies instead of watching the flat emptiness of the western ocean.

  He gripped the haft of his spear, standing a little taller as he imagined himself standing proud in a line of spearmen, their courage unbending and their blades gleaming in the sunlight. Such was not the case, however, and though he understood the necessity of what he and his fellow warriors did here, it did not sit well with his hunger for glory to be stranded on this desolate and forgotten island as a mere watchman.

  Far below him, a hundred other warriors of Tiranoc garrisoned the watchtower, guardians of the magical beacon that would give warning of any hostile force approaching the isle of the Asur. In addition to these citizen soldiers, a group of Shadow Warriors had arrived the previous evening, an occurrence greeted with some trepidation, for only rarely did these cruel guardians of Ulthuan’s coast choose to fraternise with the soldiers of the Phoenix King.

  Right now, Coriael would have preferred it to be even rarer, for his companion upon the ramparts of the watchtower was a cold-eyed Nagarythe named Vaulath.

  The Shadow Warrior wore no woollen tunic, but seemed not to feel the cold despite having only the protection of a thin shirt of dulled mail and a grey cloak that blended with the stonework of the tower. His longbow was fashioned from a wood so dark as to be almost black, the intricate embossing worked in deeply tinted copper.

  ‘Still dreaming of being a great hero?’ said Vaulath and Coriael knew he had read his thoughts in his posture.

  ‘No harm in dreaming is there?’

  ‘I suppose not. So long as you realise that’s all it is, a dream.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Coriael.

  Vaulath shook his head and said, ‘I can’t see the likes of you fighting in a battle line.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too much of a daydreamer. You’ll be killed in the first charge, too busy thinking of the glory you want to win to defend yourself against the first enemy that tries to gut you.’

  ‘How do you know?’ snapped Coriael. ‘You don’t even know me.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I can see it plain as day. You haven’t suffered the way we Nagarythe have. You still think war is about glory and honour.’

  ‘And so it is!’

  Vaulath laughed, though the cruel edge to it robbed it of any humour. ‘You are a young fool if you think that. War has nothing to do with such notions. It is all about killing and death. It is about killing your enemy before he even knows you are there. Striking him down from the shadows as quickly as possible by whatever means necessary. And once he is defeated you hang his body from the gibbet tree by his entrails so that his friends will learn not to come back!’

  Coriael recoiled before Vaulath’s words, shocked at the vitriol if not the sentiment, for the Nagarythe were known to be cruel warriors. But to hear such words from one of the Asur was chilling, more akin to something he would have expected from the mouth of a druchii.

  ‘You are wrong,’ said Coriael. ‘The great heroes of Ulthuan would never stoop to such barbarity.’

  ‘Think you not? Where was the glory when Tethlis the Slayer’s Silver Helms drove the druchii from the cliffs of the Blighted Isle to break on the rocks below? You think Tyrion allowed notions of honour to stay his hand when he slew the Witch King’s assassin on the Finuval Plain? No, the Everqueen’s champion slew his opponent as quickly as he was able.’

  The night closed in as Vaulath’s venomous words spat forth and Coriael dearly wished he could have passed this watch with another of his fellow warriors of Tiranoc instead of this caustic Nagarythe.

  Disgusted, he turned away and leaned on the parapet, seeking to find something in the darkness to distract him from Vaulath’s gloomy pronouncements. The Shadow Warrior said nothing more, apparently content he had made his point and dashed Coriael’s dreams of glory.

  Aside from the booming crash of the water and white patches of surf, he could see little of interest, though that did not surprise him. Dark clouds loomed on the horizon, drawing nearer with every second, and a storm was likely brewing far out to sea.

  A sliver of darkness shifted below him, the light of the rising moon casting long shadows over the rock, and he stared over the edge of the parapet in puzzlement.

  ‘Did you see that?’ said Vaulath, his whispered voice audible even over the crashing waves.

  ‘I saw something,’ nodded Coriael.

  ‘Look again.’

  Coriael leaned further over the parapet, squinting against the darkness in an attempt to spot the shadow once again. He heard the soft creak of Vaulath’s bow being drawn and turned to ask what he saw when he heard a series of soft clicks and excruciating fire exploded in his shoulder.

  He screamed in pain as Vaulath loosed a black-fletched shaft, falling to the stone floor of the tower as he heard an answering cry of pain from the base of the tower. Coriael rolled onto his back and dropped his spear, staring in shock at a pair of iron crossbow bolts jutting from his flesh. Blood streamed down his cream tunic and he felt a nauseous panic swell within him as he imagined that the barbed heads might be poisoned.

  A clang of bolts smacked against the stonework of the tower and he looked up as Vaulath ducked behind a tapered merlon. Anger began to overwhelm his pain as he realised the Shadow Warrior had used him as bait to lure whoever was below into loosing and making himself a target.

  ‘Still alive?’ said Vaulath.

  ‘No thanks to you!’ spat Coriael. ‘I could have been killed!’

  ‘Maybe, but I killed the one that hit you,’ replied Vaulath. ‘Still think there’s honour in war?’

  Coriael didn’t deign to answer that question and pushed himself to his knees, gritting his teeth in pain. He reached up to pluck one of the bolts from his shoulder, but Vaulath shook his head. ‘Leave it. You’ll bleed to death.’

  He glared at the Shadow Warrior, looking over his shoulder as he saw the storm clouds he had noticed earlier drawing closer with unnatural speed.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he said.

  ‘We are under attack, what do you think is happening?’ said Vaulath. ‘Go below and light the beacon. If they have come with numbers then we will need help soon to live through the night.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Druchii. Who else?’

  Coriael nodded, frightened, yet also exhilarated enough that he was now involved in a fight to protect Ulthuan that the pain of his wounds receded for a moment.

  From below he heard shouts and the clash of weapons, but over and above that he heard a dreadful sound like a torn sail in the wind, a leathery ripping that set his soul to thinking of dark caves and mountain lairs filled with gnawed and bloody bones.

  Vaulath heard it too and looked up as a thrashing blanket of living darkness blotted out the sky. But this darkness had little to do with the setting of the sun save that it was the shroud that hid the vile creatures within it from the sight of all that was good and pure.

  With a speed that amazed Coriael, Vaulath loosed arrow after arrow into the seething cloud of flapping w
ings and screeching cries that filled the air.

  ‘Go!’ shouted the Shadow Warrior as he drew and loosed with terrifying speed.

  A flare of purple fire from below lit up the sky and Coriael cried out as he saw thousands of hideous creatures circling in the air above the tower, their bodies a dreadful amalgam of female anatomy and that of a grotesque daemonic bat. In the flickering spears of purple lightning, he saw faces little better than those of wild animals, hunger-driven and horrible to look upon. Their wings were composed of an ugly stretched sinewy fabric, their claws and horns formed from diseased and yellowed bone.

  Fear lent his limbs speed and he scrambled over to the stairs cut into the floor that led to the chamber of the beacon. He heard more piercing shrieks as more of Vaulath’s arrows found homes in unclean flesh.

  The tower shook as though from a mighty blow and Coriael gasped in pain as the impact threw him against the stonework. He dropped into the stairwell as he heard Vaulath’s bow clatter to the floor, and the stink of unclean flesh filled his nostrils. The noise of the creatures’ flapping wings grew as the cloud of monsters descended to the tower and engulfed its top in a flurry of screeching bodies.

  Coriael looked behind him, but could no longer see the Shadow Warrior. He heard the warrior scream in hatred as his sword clove the flesh of the flying beasts. The scent of blood and howls of triumphant bloodlust tore at his senses as he pushed down the stairs that curved towards the beacon chamber. He tried not to imagine the horror of being torn to pieces by these abominable creatures.

  Deafening shrieks echoed behind him, the flickering light of torches throwing the madly jerking shadows of his pursuers against the white inner walls of the stairwell. He stumbled onwards, snatching a torch from its sconce with his good arm as he reached the landing.

  A white timbered door blocked further progress and he staggered against it.