The Rawn Chronicles Book Four: The Dragon and the Daemon (The Rawn Chronicles Series 4)

by P D Ceanneir

  The fence stopped the Raiders, but only for a moment. They used their Foygions to hack and rip the barricade down, and then charged the enemy once more.

  Sir Furran, and about a dozen of his men, was the first over the fence and chasing the first line of crossbowmen as they fled deeper into the grove. However, they found another line of the enemy who fired a relentless stream of arrows. Furran wondered how many more of the black bolts they could possibly have left.

  His men fell around him as bolts found gaps through their shield. One of his men took one in his eye, walked three paces, and then fell to the ground. Spaces of intermittent firing from the enemy meant that they were winding the bow cords back, ready to load and shoot again. The crossbowmen pushed the Raiders back, Furran ploughed doggedly onwards with his few remaining men, he saw a big Vallkyte heft his spear and throw it at him. It clanged off his shield and Furran felt his left arm go numb.

  ‘Spit Guns, I want that bastard dead!’ he shouted to the soldiers beside him.

  His men fired their guns, the big soldier fell, so did several others; Furran yelled, brought his shield to his side and charged. The Paladin’s momentum brought him quickly to the line of enemy and he rammed his shield into two Vallkytes, and then shot his Spit Gun into a crossbow man’s face at close range, the top of his head exploded into fragments of bone and brain.

  He rammed the sharp base of his shield into a soldier’s foot and shoved the shield off his arm, then transferred the Spit Gun to his left hand while unsheathing his short sword.

  Just then a Vallkyte Knight rounded on him with a small battle-axe. Furran only had time to fire one bolt from the gun. It took the knight in the gut, but his axe bit into the Paladin-knight’s left wrist, cutting through the armour and mail to split bone. Furran yelled in shock, dropped his gun and fell to his knees. His hand hung loose from his arm, held on by a scrap of flesh. He roared in anger and thrust his sword towards the knight, found the gap between his groin plates and castrated him with a flick of the blade. The knight screamed like a tortured gull.

  The enemy were everywhere, his men were all dead, and they surrounded him. He tried to stand but only stumbled against the base of an old chestnut tree. He felt the thrum of energy all around him, but in his pain, he did not recognise it as coming from the Nicbetha witch.

  Suddenly, Little Kith came out of nowhere and hacked the two closest Vallkyte soldiers down with his huge axe. Furran watched as the axe swung in a horizontal arc, gutted a crossbowman wearing mail, and exited with an arc of blood following the blade. Eternal arrows quickly took out the rest of the crossbowmen as they moved in behind him.

  Kith quickly turned, gripped Furran around the waist and half-dragged, half carried his friend from danger.

  ‘Bastard took my hand,’ was all Furran could say.

  ‘Yeah, but you got his balls,’ said Little Kith.

  Powyss deliberately delayed his men from attacking the grove. He was one of the first to recognise the energy flux that now surrounded him. He instinctively turned to the battle’s centre near the mounds edge, and flinched when he saw the fields of dead move.

  Vallkytes, Roguns, Dutrisi, and Nithi all stood, lurched and jerked, then shambled towards them. Some stopped to pick up weapons, others staggered onwards until they were among the living and started to kill with hands and teeth. Even the corpses charred by the Demigod’s fire stood up and staggered forwards, unsticking themselves from their melted residue on the ground. Most had fused together in their last dying embrace and could barely walk, so they crawled through the blood and filth of the battlefield.

  And they fell upon the Brethac soldiers.

  Powyss recalled his men and ordered them to move away from the dead. Thousands of corpses pushed themselves through the temporary defences of the grove and the screams of the living ended with their slaughter as the dead swarmed over them. With each fresh kill, the power of the Nicbetha infused their flesh and reanimated their bodies to join with the horde and attack the Brethac Army now trapped in the grove.

  Over by the Rogun right flank, Duke Rett could not understand what was going on. The men of the Third Battle were on their feet, mortal wounds covered their bodies. They did not attack his men even when they were cut down for a second time. The Red Duke ordered his fatigued cavalry to pull back and reform ranks. They watched the reanimated corpses ignore them and stumble off in their thousands to attack the Vallkyte men-at-arms that the Nithi were having trouble with over by the base of the Howe.

  On the far left, the Dutrisi were dying in the centre of the Legions ring of steel. Eternal arrows punched through helmets and mail. The living screamed, the dead did not complain as they rose from the blood-soaked ground to take their comrades into their embrace.

  Havoc felt a new lease of energy as the dead swarmed into the Brethac camp.

  ‘Looks like it is all over for the Brethac Ziggurat,’ he said to his uncle.

  Kasan tore his eyes from the carnage below and scowled at his nephew. Havoc sensed the anger in him and was ready when his uncle yelled in rage and charged him again.

  The attack made Havoc defend frantically; Sin took a hard downward cut from the broadsword, fell from his left hand, and went hurtling over the edge of the step. Havoc stepped forward and gripped the Vallkyte king’s arm which held the broadsword and deftly flicked Dex upward so it cut through the armoured plates, or cuisses, that covered Kasan’s left side. Blood gushed over the white armour and the king winced at the pain. Kasan head butted Havoc who reeled backwards. The edge of the Vallkyte king’s axe raked across Havoc’s chest plate, denting the armour and bruising a rib. Havoc sagged in pain and fatigue. He sensed his uncle was closing so he lunged forward blindly and felt Dex enter flesh.

  King Kasan staggered backwards, Dex’s blade had entered his left bicep. Havoc pulled the blade out but Kasan delivered a swinging uppercut from an armoured fist that rocked the younger man’s head backward and sent him flat on his back, losing his grip on Dex as he fell.

  Kasan swapped his axe to his right hand. He was weak from healing and could barely stand as he lifted his axe high and approached his unarmed nephew.

  ‘Now you will die the same way your weakling father did,’ he said through a dry mouth.

  Havoc saw the axe descend. He also saw, in his mind eye, the face of Mia smiling down at him, saw Verna with that knowing look of approval that always made him smile, he heard Uncle Hagan’s booming laugh that he missed so much and he knew that after all of the hardship he was going to fail. Death was on the edge of that axe. He heard the whoosh as it swung down towards his head.

  Creed’s sword made the same sound just before it took poor Bronwyn’s life so early.

  Rage flowed through him as the images fuelled his flagging energy in the form of Pyromantic bursts. He quickly rolled so the axe buried deep into the ground. He rammed a fist into his hated uncle’s face and pushed himself up from the ground, while at the same time thumping his shoulder into Kasan’s chest. He then gripped his uncle’s sword belt and lifted him from the ground with his momentum and a newfound strength he never thought he possessed.

  Both of the Cromme kings flew over the edge of the step and plummeted to the ground below.

  His flesh healed around the Spit Gun bolts, but he would have to extract them if he was to stop himself from losing blood. Lord Ness felt weakness and nausea envelop him with every second that ticked by and with every drop of blood that flowed. Cinnibar was leering at him with that maddening smile while Saltyn Ri’s nose was shifting into its original shape as he healed it. He scowled at Lord Ness with hate.

  ‘Finally, the Gredligg Orrinn is in our hands,’ said Cinnibar as she stared at the shifting colours that bloomed inside the Orrinn.

  ‘You will lose, Cinnibar,’ hissed Ness Ri through his agony. ‘The Blacksword will defeat you all, so the prophecy tells us.’ He cringed as the pain and the shock of blood loss made him shiver.

  ‘Oh I have news for you, my friend. The Blackswor
d will fail. It has been foreseen.’ She turned to the main entrance of the Crux Room, and now Ness Ri heard the sound of footsteps for the first time. His heart leapt, was Soneros Ri coming to save him, was he alive?

  The figure that entered the doorway was not Soneros Ri.

  He was tall and wearing a bright vermilion cloak with gold fringed seams and gold buttons. The hood concealed his face and he carried no weapon.

  ‘Lord Sernac, I presume,’ said Lord Ness in a sad voice, finally realising his doom.

  The tall figure walked slowly towards him. His high black riding boots crunched upon the debris that scattered the floor.

  ‘Cinnibar is right, my friend,’ he said, ‘there is a flaw in the prophecy that I will exploit.’

  Ness Ri laughed, but it hurt.

  ‘I don’t think you realise the power that the Blacksword has at his disposal. He will stop you from unleashing the Earth Daemon. Of that I have no doubt.’

  ‘Unleashing?’ said Sernac as he moved closer. ‘Setting free is more like it. The Earth Daemon shall give us all his wisdom and power. That is his promise to me.’ His voice had the sound of finality all lunatics share, ‘Yes, I know about the power of the Bani, but that can be countermanded. I have been manipulating many such creatures all of my long life.’

  ‘You are a fool if...’ began Lord Ness, but Sernac’s raised voice interrupted him.

  ‘NO! You are the fool for not understanding!’ Sernac screeched and gripped Lord Ness’s jaw. ‘I tried to tell you so many times, but you showed indifference.’ Cinnibar had extracted a dagger from the folds of her dress, she and Saltyn now stood over him. Cinnibar, calm and with a feral look in her eyes, and Saltyn breathing heavily was looking from Sernac back to Cinnibar with an expectant glance.

  ‘Your loyalty to the Blacksword is folly. He is doomed and I will show you why,’ said Lord Sernac as he tore back his hood to reveal his face.

  Lord Ness took a second to register the familiar features. He gasped in shock.

  ‘No... Not you...it can’t be…just can’t be,’ he stammered.

  ‘But it is. And this face, you know so well, shall be the last you’ll ever see,’ said Sernac and he turned away as Saltyn Ri and Cinnibar stepped forward and violently stabbed Lord Ness with their weapons.

  Numb with the knowledge of the identity of Lord Sernac burnt into his dying mind, Lord Ness hardly felt the steel enter his body. He crawled through his own slick blood towards the centre of the room and the table that held the Great Orrinn. His white robe was, by this time, saturated with his blood and his hair was plastered to his face with the spray that came from his wounds. Lord Sernac’s receding footsteps echoed around the Crux coupled with Saltyn and Cinnabar’s mad laughter as they stabbed their weapons into Ness Ri’s body.

  The whispers from the Orrinn died to a hush as Lord Ness’s vision faded. His last sight was of the colours inside the Orrinn falling to the bottom and an inky darkness ascending towards the cracked section at the top.

  It was only a short fall of thirty five to forty feet from the high step, but to Havoc it felt like an age. He struggled with his uncle, trying to stay on top of him and use him to soften his landing when they hit the hard ground. However, at some point in the fall, Kasan used his strength to push him away.

  Havoc’s body turned over from the push with his back to the ground and fell parallel with Kasan. In the split second since they fell over the edge, he knew he would not have time to summon the Wind Element and slow his descent; he braced himself for a hard landing.

  Instead, he hit something soft and white. Coarse linen flapped around him and he realised he had landed on the roof of a tent. It folded up under his weight and the central pole snapped. He still hit ground hard and gasped as the landing winded him, but it was not as bad as he thought.

  He was weak and tired, in the last few minutes the burden he carried for many years weighed him down. He rose and used up energy to heal his wounds and climbed out of the collapsed tent. He stumbled to his knees and when he tried to stand he felt strong arms helping him up. He looked into the face of Powyss and felt relief.

  ‘It’s alright, I’ve got you,’ said Powyss. Behind him, Little Kith was supporting a wounded Furran. Beyond the two Paladins, the army of the dead shambled around mindlessly.

  ‘I bloody hate zombies,’ moaned Furran.

  ‘My sword,’ said Havoc looking around him numbly, ‘I must finish Kasan.’

  ‘I think he is already finished, my boy,’ said Powyss, and Havoc noticed that his friends were looking off to the right, at something behind him. He turned and saw that his uncle’s landing had not been as soft as his own.

  Kasan had fallen on one of the spear racks that sat at the side of the tent, which must have belonged to some noble or magnate. The top wooden spar, about six feet long and eight feet wide, had snapped under his weight but the dozen or so spears stopped his fall and impaled him through his legs, arms, and chest. One had slipped into the back of his skull and now protruded through his left eye socket, the eyeball itself pushed out from the trauma and now hung on a thin strand of optic nerve.

  He moved, struggled to free himself from the spears, making the rack creak and twist. He was alive. Then Havoc realised he was not.

  The power of the Daughter of Life was upon him.

  As Havoc moved closer his uncle tried to turn toward him, but the spear point in his head made this difficult, but still he reached out his right hand to him. Havoc was about to take it, tears welled in his eyes, not for his uncle, but because the burden he had felt for so long was now lifting.

  Suddenly there was a flash and a blue haze emerged from the Vallkyte kings chest. The hand flopped, lifeless, as the light lifted and shimmered above the body.

  Around them, the same thing was happening to the dead. The hazy shimmer of blue light rose above their heads and they all collapsed in heaps around the grove.

  Havoc, purely on instinct, took out the Talisman of Mortkraxnoss and let the blue gem dangle from the silver chain as he held it aloft. The light dancing around them, then faded away to bring back the darker daylight of the evening and Havoc then realised that the battle had lasted all day.

  Floating before him inside a white dress, which danced and wafted in an unfelt wind, was the Nicbetha. She glided towards him three feet off the ground, smiling as she approached.

  ‘Have I done the Blacksword proud?’ she asked.

  Havoc tilted his head while not taking his eyes from the beautiful girl in front of him.

  ‘He says Yes, yes you have,’ he said nodding.

  ‘Good. Then my part in the Great Plan is done, for now,’ she said and before Havoc could question her, she disintegrated and was absorbed into the talisman’s gem, like millions of tiny dust particles, and the dull stone at its centre glowed once more.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  The Siege at Sonora

  The Twenty Second of Aprilia 3041 YOA

  T

  he battle was a massacre for the Brethac, not many survived the onslaught of the living corpses. As for those that fled from the left flank, Foxe and Hexor had already organised a contingent of cavalry and chased them down. Havoc looked upon his battle-weary men and, as the meat count of dead got back to him, he was shocked to discover that half his force now lay amongst the field of the fallen. For the first time in his military career as a commander his cavalry now outnumbered his infantry. Later, he would send his scouts out into the prairie for supplies on the morning of the next day. Havoc also sent Gunach and some of his dwarves into the area of land south of the citadel where he left Ciriana. He was concerned for the dragon and worried about her mass of wounds. Gunach returned to report that all he found was a dragon sized patch of flattened grass where she once lay; the king would have been elated to discover she was still alive, but the events of the night numbed his emotions.

  It was Jericho, first among the Paladins, who saw Velnour walking with the dead before they rushed the Vallkyte soldier
s inside the grove of trees and tore them to pieces. He called his old friend several times but stopped when he saw the black bolt protruding from his chest armour. When the power of the Nicbetha receded, he and his militiamen sifted through the many corpses until he found his one-time sergeant in a mound several bodies deep. He took him to an empty cart and laid him down, arms crossed, clutching his sabre.

  Members of the Dark Company had carried Sir Felcon, now very weak and pale from blood loss, from the Whaleback Ridge to the group of Paladins below where they laid him by the other wounded. King Havoc found him propped up against a cherry tree with Mactan at his side and several of the Dark Company officers and senior ranks looked on with sad faces.

  ‘We held the ridge boss,’ said Felcon weakly as Havoc clutched his hand. The Paladin’s face was pale and his voice so faint that the king had to bend down to listen. Havoc took a quick look at his friend’s wounds and groaned inwardly. Even if he could heal him, the loss of blood meant he was too weak to survive the process.

  ‘That you did, and turned the tide of the battle I’ll wager,’ said Havoc with a smile. ‘I couldn’t ask for a better man to do it.’

  Felcon smiled and nodded at his liege lord, took the hand of Mactan, who was his closest friend, and asked him to take his body back to the Paladins Tomb and bury him there in full armour and weapons. The normally stern Mactan said he would, through fast flowing tears.

  Sir Felcon never lived to see the sunset.

  Eternals too helped the wounded Sir Linth off the burial mound’s summit. A physician had managed to strip the armour from his torso so he could sew up the wound on his back. The physician told the Paladin that the axe had badly damaged the muscles in his shoulder and he would never be able to use a bow again.