Stormy scowled. Woman, if you could read me right now, you’d run screaming. Of course we say we’re doing this and then that and then this other thing and it’s all so perfect and so logical. We know it’s all a joke. We know that once the battle is engaged, it all turns into Hood’s hoary picnic basket.
Me and Ges, we’re just amateurs. Dujek was damned good at this, but Dassem Ultor, ah, he was the best of them all. He could stand there in front of ten thousand soldiers, and he’d take ’em all through every sword-stroke in the battle to come. By the end of all that wheeling here, driving there, breaking through there, we’d all be nodding half bored and ready to get on with it. It was a done deal to us, and the First Sword, why, he’d just take us all in with his eyes and give back one single nod.
Then the day went out and mayhem was a field of flowers and by dusk the enemy was dead or on the run.
Aye, Gesler, I hear you echoing him. I see you taking on his matter-of-fact tone and that face of sun-warmed iron that we all knew would turn to ice when the time came. I’ll give you this, friend, you’re stealing from the best of ’em all, and doing good.
He clawed through his beard. ‘Anyone got a cask of ale? I can’t remember the last time I went into a battle not belching sour brew.’ He studied Kalyth for a moment, and then sighed. ‘Never mind. Go on, Ges, go hide your K’ell, I got it here.’
‘See you when it’s done, Shield Anvil.’
‘Aye, Mortal Sword.’
Heat was building beneath Kalyth. Sag’Churok was flooded with flavours of violence. But she sat hunched, chilled, her very bones feeling like sticks trapped in lakeshore ice. These two soldiers appalled her. Their confidence was insane. The ease with which they took command—and the mockery with which they exchanged their titles moments before separating—left her reeling.
Her people had met with traders from Kolanse. She had seen armoured caravan guards, looking bored as the merchants haggled with the Elan elders. Children had drawn close to them, eyes shining, but none drew close enough to touch, as much as they might have wanted to. Killers were lodestones. Their silence and their flat eyes fed something in the young boys and girls, and Kalyth could see their childlike longing, the whispering romance of the horizons these warriors had seen. Such scenes had frightened her, and she had prayed to the spirits for the strangers to leave, to take their dangerous temptations with them.
Looking into Gesler’s eyes moments ago, she had seen the same terrible promise. The world was ever too small for him. The horizon chained him and that chain’s pull was relentless. He didn’t care what he left in his wake. His kind never did.
Yet I knew. Gu’Rull saw true. These were the ones I was seeking. These two men are the answer to Gunth’an Acyl’s vision. A future alive with hope.
But they don’t care. They will lead us in this battle, and if we all die they will either flee at the last moment, or they will fall—it’s no matter to them. They are no different from Redmask.
Those caravan guards still squatting in her memory, they were dead and they knew it. This knowledge was the one lover every warrior and every soldier shared, a whore of monstrous proportions. Paid in blood, pimped by kings and generals and fanatic prophets. And it’s all twisted round. It’s the whore who does the raping.
You couldn’t catch her in a thousand years.
One time, two young braves had vanished after a caravan’s departure. The elders and parents met to discuss whether or not to set out after them, to drag them back to the village. In the end, the elders wandered off, and the mothers wept softly with their husbands looking on.
They put chains on and called it freedom. The whore stole them.
She wanted Gesler and Stormy to die. She wanted it with all her heart. There was no reason for it. They’d done nothing wrong. In fact, they were about to do precisely what they were meant to do. And they would not shrink from their destiny. They are not to blame for my hate and my fear.
But I want a world without soldiers. I want to see them all kill each other. I want to see kings and generals standing alone—not a single soul within reach of their grasping claws. No weapon to back their will, no blade to sing their threats. I want to see them revealed for the weak, miserable creatures they truly are.
What can bring this about? How do I make such a world?
Spirits bless my ancestors, I wish I knew.
She’d lost her Mahybe, her clay vessel awaiting her soul. For her, death was a nightmare she knew was coming. She had no reason to dream of any future. In this, was she not like those caravan guards? Was she not the same as Gesler and Stormy? What did they see in her eyes?
I am Destriant. And yet I dream of betrayal. When she looked upon the Ve’Gath, the echoes of their agony of birth returned to her, the terrors of the Womb. They did not deserve what was coming, and yet they longed for it. Could she steal them away from this day of dying, she would. She’d lead them, instead, against her own kind. A holy war against the soldiers of the world and their masters.
Leaving only herders and farmers and fisherfolk. Artists and tanners and potters. Story-tellers and poets and musicians. A world for them and them alone. A world of peace.
The Nah’ruk Furies seemed to devour the broken plain as they advanced. The east was bright with the sun’s birth, but the sky above the enemy legions was a vast stain, a bruise, a maw from which wind howled.
Stormy drew his sword. He could see the front ranks of the foe preparing clubs—weapons of sorcery: the visions or stolen memories flashed scenes of devastating magic through his mind. Ready your shields, and pray the iron holds.
He glared over a shoulder to Ampelas Uprooted. A veil of white smoke enwreathed the sky keep. Clouds? Scowling, Stormy turned his attention to his Ve’Gath. They were arrayed upon the ridge as if painted from his own mind—they knew his thoughts now that he’d knocked down his mental walls. They knew what he wanted, what he needed. And they will never break. Never flee—unless panic takes me, and Hood knows, for all the shit I been through, it ain’t happened yet. And it won’t today neither.
‘So, we stand, lizards. We stand.’
A sudden rustling through the ranks as heads lifted.
Stormy swung round.
From the gaping hole in the morning sky shapes were emerging. Towering, black, pushing out from the maelstrom foaming out from the warren.
Sky keeps. None as huge as the one behind him, massing perhaps two-thirds, and none were carved beyond angled plains of black stone. And yet …
Three … five … eight—
‘Beru fend!’
Ampelas Uprooted ignited like a star behind him.
The deafening, blinding salvo of sorcery ripped across the sky. Enormous chunks of gouged, burning stone erupted from the nearest three Nah’ruk sky keeps. Streaming churning smoke and rubble, shattered fragments the size of tenement blocks plunged earthward, slamming into the ground in the midst of the rearmost ranks of the Nah’ruk.
Ears numbed by the concussion, Gesler rose high on his stirrups—Ampelas Uprooted had drawn closer, looming almost directly overhead. ‘Hood’s breath! Ke’ll Hunters—flee the shadow! Get out from under it! East and west—run!’
He charged forward on his Ve’Gath. Stormy! Fuck the stand—charge ’em! You hear? Charge and close!
He’d heard the stories of the Siege of Pale. Moon’s Spawn’s rain of wreckage into the city had broken the backs of the defenders. This deadly rain of rubble could shatter his entire army.
More Nah’ruk sky keeps emerged from the wound.
Lightning crackled, arced savagely out from a half-dozen sky keeps, converging on Ampelas Uprooted.
The detonations thundered. And the rain of slaughter began.
The huge wagons and their scrambling drones vanished beneath an avalanche that lifted nearby K’ell Hunters into the air, tails lashing for balance as they flailed about. Dust rolled out thick as a tidal wave to swallow the spreading horror as massive chunks of stone descended from the battered U
prooted.
Through the torrential, billowing smoke and rubble, Ampelas lashed back.
The sawtooth line of Ve’Gath lifted as if heaved forward by the ridge itself, and all at once the huge warriors were pouring down the slope, straight for the lines of Nah’ruk.
Sorcery arced out from the wired clubs, crashed into a shield-locked wall of iron. The Ve’Gath staggered, but not one fell.
There was no time for a second salvo.
The Ve’Gath toothed line hammered into the Nah’ruk. The impact of the charge flattened two, then three ranks of the Short-Tails. Weapons lashed down as the Ve’Gath trampled the fallen enemy, closing with the deeper lines still reeling from the impact.
Stormy was at the very heart of the attack. He’d swung his sword twice, and both times his blade had bitten deep into armour—but his targets were in the act of dying anyway, for they had come within reach of his mount. He couldn’t close with anything worth hacking apart. He roared in frustration.
The Nah’ruk warriors were outmatched. They bore no shields. The Ve’Gath simply chewed through them.
Lightning ripped down from the sky, ploughed a bloody, burning swath through the rearmost Ve’Gath ranks, slaying hundreds in an instant.
Stormy snarled, battered by those sudden, terrible deaths. Break formation! Close with the enemy!
Another lash of sorcery scythed down hundreds more.
Close!
Ampelas Rooted burned from a dozen gaping fissures. Massive pieces had shorn clear, revealing exposed innards from which poured black smoke. The sky keep shuddered as attack after attack pounded into it. The edifice’s forward progress had halted, and now it was being buffeted backward. Still it spat its own fury, and Gesler could see one of the Nah’ruk keeps leaning far to one side, billowing flames and smoke, and from this one no lightning winged out.
But there were too many of the damned things. Three had drifted out to the east, and were now angling to draw up behind Ampelas Rooted—where the thick iron plates armouring that side of its flank had been removed to fashion shields for the Ve’Gath. In moments, they would strike a soft target.
And that’ll kill her. Like a knife to the back.
When she’s finished, those keeps will turn on us here below. If they can.
But I won’t let them.
‘K’ell Hunters! Flanking charge from both sides. Cut in behind the contact—hollow out those engaged legions! Don’t piss around, damn you all! Charge!’
The three Nah’ruk sky keeps loosed raging arcs of lightning. Kalyth stared in horror as the lower half of Ampelas Rooted seemed to bulge, limed in red glow. The concussion of the detonation threw Sag’Churok and Gunth Mach down. Kalyth tumbled clear of the thrashing beasts, rocks lacerating her shoulder and face. She rolled on to her back. The sky was burning, and flaming stones rained down.
She cried out, covering her eyes.
______
At the rush of hot wind, Stormy twisted round. The lower third of Ampelas Rooted was simply gone, and what remained was spilling its guts, everything burning as the wreckage plunged earthward. The impact was driving the keep on to its side—or back—exposing the destroyed maw of its base.
He swore as Ampelas Rooted somehow managed to return fire, two serpents of lightning writhing out behind it.
They must have struck, though he could not see past the Che’Malle keep, but the thunder of impacts trembled the earth—and then he saw one of the Nah’ruk keeps rising behind Ampelas Rooted, climbing on streamers of smoke.
His eyes widened to see the huge thing gaining speed as it shot still higher. With smoke swarming down its flanks, damaged beyond hope of control, the keep seemed to lunge as it shot into the sky—and kept going.
The remaining two ignited in another sorcerous strike.
Light engulfed Ampelas Uprooted—
The K’ell Hunters plunged into the buckling flanks of the Nah’ruk Furies that were locked jaw to jaw with the Ve’Gath. Their massive blades hacked bloody paths into the press. The Nah’ruk could not match their speed, their reach, and they seemed to melt before the attack.
In his mind, Gesler was shouting the same words over and over, a mantra of desperation. Close close close in—close—they won’t fire if—
Two sky keeps, hovering directly above the battle, sent down writhing spears. Nah’ruk, Ve’Gath and K’ell bodies lifted into the air, blackened, iron shattering.
You pieces of shit!
It was lost. All of it. He realized that in this instant.
The keeps would sterilize the plain below them, if that was what it took—
Off to the west, two more sky keeps were swinging round to approach the battle.
Gesler glared at them.
And then both exploded.
My flesh is stone. My blood rages hot as molten iron. I have a thousand eyes. A thousand swords. And one mind.
I have heard the deathcry. Was she kin? She said as much, when first she touched me. We were upon the ground. Far from each other, and yet of a kind.
I heard her die.
And so I came to mourn her, I came to find her body, her silent tomb.
But she dies still. I do not understand. She dies still—and there are strangers. Cruel strangers. I knew them once. I know them now. I know, too, that they will not yield.
Who am I?
What am I?
But I know the answers to these questions. I believe, at last, that I do.
Strangers, you bring pain. You bring suffering. You bring to so many dreams the dust of death.
But, strangers, I am Icarium.
And I bring far worse.
Kalyth’s eyes flickered open, on a scene jostled and chaotic with smoke. She was in Gunth Mach’s clutches, gripped as would be a child. The One Daughter was flanked on the right by Sag’Churok and by Bre’nigan on the left, the three of them running at a steady trot across the valley floor.
The battle raged just beyond the J’an Sentinel. The K’ell Hunters had cut through to the foremost ranks of the Ve’Gath, but now the enemy had begun an encirclement.
Lightning lashed down from the keeps directly above the field, tearing ragged paths of destruction through the press.
Huge drums were pounding the air to her right and she twisted round to look in that direction. Two Nah’ruk keeps were breaking apart, the fires in their cores burning so hot she saw stone melting like wax, falling away from iron bones. The one to the north was descending earthward as if sinking through water. Multiple explosions racked them both.
Rising from behind them, shouldering through thick pillars of black smoke, another Uprooted.
What? Who? Sag’Churok—
‘Kalse Uprooted, Destriant. But there is no Matron within it. The one who commands … it has been a long time since he last walked among the K’Chain Che’Malle and Nah’ruk.’
Sorcery swarmed round Kalse, green, blue and white—a kind she had never before seen—and then suddenly pulsed out in a seething wave. The magic cut through the two dying keeps and Kalyth gasped to see ice explode out from fissures in the ravaged black stone. As the wave burst through the struck keeps, the one to the south simply split in half, the lower section dropping like a mountain, the upper end lifting and spinning inside swirling streams of smoke, rubble and shards of ice. The other one’s upper third disintegrated in a white cloud moments before it struck the ground.
The concussions of the two impacts shook the earth. The hills to the west were crushed flat. The remnants of the keeps blew apart in vast clouds of dust and rock.
At this same moment the wave passed directly over Kalyth and the three K’Chain Che’Malle, carrying with it air so cold it stunned her lungs. Gasping, agony convulsing her chest, she did not see the wave strike the three sky keeps above the battlefield. The explosions deafened her—darkness rushed in, even as Gunth Mach staggered.
______
The arrival of a second Che’Malle keep filled the sky with a storm of violence. Above them, Ges
ler could see nothing but churning clouds and deathly flashes—even the bulks of the keeps had vanished. It seemed as if the sky itself burned, raining white-hot stones that snapped as they shot down through bitterly cold air. Impossibly, snow swirled down amidst ashes and rubble.
Nah’ruk keeps crowded the warren’s gate, as if seeking to break through to bring succour to those dying before the stranger’s onslaught, but wave after wave slammed into them, and the unknown Uprooted was bulling ever closer, as if to drive down the very throat of the warren. Lightning lashed into it, tore huge gashes in its flanks. Death poured down from the sky.
Gesler’s mount towered amidst the K’ell Hunters crowded in on all sides—he knew the K’ell were providing a cordon around them—though nothing could defend any of them against the deadly deluge from above. He could see the rear Nah’ruk Furies committing to the battle—they had been and were still being decimated by falling wreckage. Even so, sheer numbers alone were beginning to tell. Stormy’s Ve’Gath had ceased their advance, but Gesler could see his friend, the battle lust upon him, his face red as his hair, his eyes blazing with madness.
‘Stormy! Stormy! Androjan Redarr, you brainless bastard!’
The head swung round. The man smiled.
Gods below, Stormy. ‘We’re encircled!’
‘And we’re cutting ’em to pieces!’
‘We need to break out—the sky’s killing us!’
‘Withdraw your K’ell! Regroup and set up a charge!’
‘Which side?’
‘Whatever’s behind Kalse!’
Kalse. I ain’t been paying attention. ‘And you?’
‘Back-to-back wedges—we’re driving out to the fucking sides! You watch ’em pour into the gap and then you charge ’em! We about face and close the vice!’
Stormy, you Hood-damned genius. ‘Agreed!’
The pain was overwhelming. He bled from wounds sheathing his body. Blow after blow hammered into him. Blind, deafened, he struck back, not even knowing if his sorcery found the enemy. He felt himself tearing loose, moments from being ripped from his flesh of cracked stone, his bones of tortured iron.
Dust of Dreams Page 118
