Even their leader could not explain the compulsion—this rune-carved corpse had not been his body in life, a life forgotten until the urge had inexplicably come upon it. This body was merely an animated shell for its bane spirit to inhabit. Unlike the other bane thralls, the leader felt uncomfortable in its strange body, as if it could almost remember what it had once been. One word kept returning to it. Home.
Just before they reached the road to the village, their leader raised one of its axes, and the thralls halted. They whispered to one another in a harsh, mongrel mix of various human tongues as they fanned out and formed a defensive stance, war axes ready, eyes bright green in anticipation of the slaughter to come. Their undead bones rattled against their armor, but there was no one to hear the hollow sounds of their restlessness. They were yet a good distance from their victims, and none of the villagers had cause to be out in the midnight hour.
The leader stared at the flowerless green bushes that lined the dirt road. They needed pruning, though it did not know how or why it knew this. It did not matter, the entity told itself, as soon no one would be alive to tend to these or any other plants here.
The leader swept its rune-covered axe through the nearest bush, severing it at the trunk.
The leader commanded its squad onto the road, leaving the rose bushes behind. Only once all its thralls were in motion did it hoist one of its axes over its shoulder and follow. But as it moved, it mindlessly traced a symbol on its breastplate: looping scratches with a long line extending below it. Compared to the cryptic sigils and runes inscribed elsewhere on its armor and its bones, this symbol was simple, distinctly of the mortal world, and wholly out of place—a single rose.
The village the leader felt compelled to reach was only three hills away, and the formless, moving cloud of blackness the thralls punched into the moonless night would be nearly invisible to the human eye. Driven by the intent and command of its new leader, the unit marched with exceptional stealth, nothing like the incessant chatter and heavy shuffling of the living.
At the base of the last hill before the village, the unit came upon a sentry—out of training despite being many years a veteran, now just a body meant to sound a horn that would warn the village of danger. The old man started when the unit’s freezing darkness washed over him and his horn was knocked from his hand. Recovering quickly, he lunged for the horn, and the leader of the thralls struck his hand off. A gout of blood sprayed across the cold dirt road, but the man didn’t cry out. Instead, he locked his jaw and snatched up the horn with his remaining hand. Before it could be knocked away from his lips, he blew a single loud note—a dull, colorless sound—and then let the horn fall to the ground beside him.
The bane thralls surged to cut the old man to pieces, but the leader hissed a command and they were momentarily restrained, though it could sense their impatient fury. The leader dipped its skeletal face toward the maimed sentry, but the old man, trembling, cradled his bleeding stump and rolled onto his back. The leader slowly picked up the horn from where it lay in the dirt. It was a delicate golden instrument with a name inscribed in a looping script along the bell.
The bane thrall leader gazed at the horn and traced the symbol on its breastplate. The old man turned his face away, refusing to look into the leader’s dead face.
“We knew your kind would come back to finish what you started,” the old man said.
The leader stared down at him, casting aside the horn and turning one of its axes between its fists.
“Why can’t you leave us alone?” The old man tried to roll onto his side, but his flesh was weak now, and his fading existence pinned him to the cold earth as effectively as if he were bound. After that, he did not struggle. “Isn’t it enough that you killed my boy last time? His wife visits his grave every day, while I can’t even do that. But you only killed his body, not his soul.” He lifted his chin defiantly. “You can’t steal our memories.”
The leader of the thralls raised its axe. As it did, the old man looked up at it for the first time, his final gaze falling to the scratches on its armor. The swirls that formed petals, the sharp line that formed a stem. He blinked, momentarily confused by what he recognized, and then he squinted up at his executioner. The thrall leader hesitated.
“Danelon?” the sentry whispered. “Is that you in there?”
The axe fell, three times.
The old man died staring at the blood-spattered rose symbol of his lost son.
The unit moved up the hill to overlook the village. The thralls whisper-hissed among themselves, impatient eyes turning, burning, toward the leader as if to drive him faster to their victims. They spread out, axes at the ready, a palpable hunger rippling through their darkness. All they needed was their leader’s order to sweep down on the village.
It had lagged behind to loom silently over the decapitated corpse, but now it moved up to where it could see their target. The compulsion that had brought it this far was still strong and awakened a scattershot recollection of the people it knew were sleeping below. Its bony fingertip traced the scratch marks it had carved into its armor—the petals, the stem, the thorns. When it reached the hillcrest and looked down the slope to the village below, a memory of standing in this very place came to it, attached to the echo of an unfamiliar emotion that felt foreign to it now. It brought its war axe down from its shoulder. The old man’s blood painted the weapon black in the moonlight. The leader avoided looking at its stained edge.
As it watched the torchlights moving chaotically in the village below—a disorganized militia gathered in the square with weapons that had no hope of stopping the attackers—the leader sensed the barely restrained rebellion in the bane thralls. It snarled a warning to them, but it knew they felt their own compulsion, one that was growing in him as well—the need to slay the living.
Already the alarms were sounding across the village. The leader’s baleful green eyes narrowed as it saw the windows of one particular home brighten, partly illuminating the garden behind it where it knew a young married couple had raised the flowers they sold. For a moment, a woman’s silhouette appeared in the open doorway, but the leader knew she was not the panicking sort.
Rose, it remembered.
Her name hung there in its mind. On its breastplate. It looked down at the scratch marks. The snarls of those awaiting to be unleashed drowned its memory.
It dragged its ragged fingernails across the scratches and gave the order to attack. As the thralls descended toward the village, the leader saw the woman fleeing into the darkness with the other villagers. Its pace quickened. Soon it was among its victims, and it thought of her no more.
CALL OF THE CABER
By Howard Tayler
Fossamin Sodrok adjusted her grip on her shield and rolled her shoulder to shake off the dull ache she’d developed on the march across the Rimeshaws. Her feet were fine, but the shield was getting heavy. She glanced down the line to her left to see Kollodor marching in perfect step with the kriel’s warriors on either side of him, smiling in spite of the heavy stone caber he carried.
She had no idea how he did it. Sure, he was half a head taller than most of the rest of the kriel, but the caber was almost as tall as he was and more than a foot thick. How much did it weigh? A thousand pounds? Two thousand?
“About sixteen hundred pounds, Fossy,” said Joktun, the shaman who marched behind her and to the left.
“How did you know I was wondering about that?”
“I’ve seen that particular grimace before. You were thinking about the burden it must be.” Joktun stepped up alongside her, and the line of warriors shifted subtly at the change in formation. “And now you’re wondering why our mighty brother carries it on the march instead of hauling it to battle in a cart,” he said with a cocked brow.
“I get tired just watching him.”
“That is the crushing voice of the caber, its stony soul cal
ling to all those around it, demanding obeisance. Kollodor hears that voice and answers with every strand of his soul. From heels to hips, from fingers to teeth, from breath to bones he answers, proves he is stronger, and the caber obeys.”
Fossamin said nothing. It all sounded like mystical farrow-scat, but it wouldn’t do to say so.
“But that doesn’t answer your question, does it?” Joktun continued, a twinkle in his eye. “Why doesn’t Kollodor save his strength for the coming battle? Strength is not saved for the caber, Fossy. Strength is continually reforged, hammered with every step into greater strength. The body is broken and rebuilt, becoming mightier with each mile. Kollodor carries the caber because if he does not, the shout of the stone may be too much for him when the moment comes to throw it.”
More inscrutable mysticism, but it did make a kind of sense. Fossamin’s shoulder hurt under the weight of her shield, but not as badly as yesterday. When she needed to raise the heavy slab of wood and iron to stop the blighted legion’s blades, she was confident she could. They all could, her brothers and sisters of the kriel. These blighted monsters would break against the—
An arrow struck the ground just half a pace in front of her.
“Shields to the sky!” shouted Joktun as a line of blighted Nyss archers cleared the rise. The archers had the high ground, and that was a problem. Another volley of arrows arced silently through the air toward them, and Fossamin swung her shield up for cover. A breath and a half later an arrow slammed into it. The archers had found their range, and that was a bigger problem.
“Charge!” cried Joktun, his voice both a command and a prayer invoking Dhunia’s blessing. Fossamin felt all weariness vanish, and she sprinted toward the top of the hill with the trollkin warriors, ears filled with the heavy pounding of trollkin boots.
Kollodor, sixteen-hundred-pound caber and all, was out in front. The caber tipped forward as he approached the line of archers, and to Fossamin it looked as if he had lost control of it. Then he launched it forward. The archer in his path, a fish-belly pale creature, let out a short scream that ended in a soft crunch. Wicked little creatures, but there just wasn’t much to them.
Fossamin looked to her own target and saw what might have been surprise in the archer’s eyes as she and the rest of the line closed the final three paces in a single, breathless bound. Yes, she thought, we are faster than we look.
The archer hastily drew his sword, but Fossamin easily slapped it aside with her shield and brought down her own, much heavier blade. The ugly creature twisted clear but stepped directly into the path of Joktun’s sword, making no sound at all as the Dhunian shaman thrust the blade through his throat.
Fossamin stepped past the falling corpse and moved toward the left flank, toward Kollodor, who was recovering the caber for another blow. An arrow sizzled past her head from somewhere on the right flank and struck Kollodor squarely in the neck. He gasped and coughed, spitting blood onto the caber, and fell to his knees. Fossamin raised her shield and crouched beside him, covering them both. Surprising her, the caber-bearer knocked the blade from her sword hand, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her hand down to the blood-spattered caber.
“Take . . . it . . . up.”
He coughed blood once more, then slumped sideways to the ground, where he lay curled almost as if settling to sleep next to the great column of stone.
“Ogrun!” shouted Joktun.
Fossamin looked up and saw three huge blighted ogrun rushing up the back side of the hill. The blighted monsters, bigger than any trollkin, brandished their war cleavers, ready to cut the kriel warriors to ribbons.
The roar of battle ran through the caber and up into her hand, and the stone seemed to say, Take me up? You? No, I will lie here while you fight and die. My master is no more. I am free.
“Wurm’s bowels you’re free!” Fossamin said. She lifted one end of the caber and threw her shoulder under it. Remembering how Kollodor had smashed that archer, she thought perhaps the stone could be made to do most of the work. She kept lifting and pushing, tipping the caber up and then forward, toward the onrushing ogrun.
I will fall uselessly, whelp.
The caber would be easy to side-step, she realized as she brought it upright once again. It would not do the work of killing on its own. Setting her jaw, Fossamin reached down to thrust her hands under the base of the caber. She heaved upward, and pain shot through her shoulders and spine to her hips and knees as the caber again asserted its will.
Even now I topple where I can crush no one. Do you think to hurl me, to direct my voice? My master is fallen.
The ogrun at the fore was almost on top of her, and in his eyes Fossamin thought she saw feral amusement at seeing her crouched at the base of a falling stone pillar many times her weight.
“Don’t be fooled,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “I’m stronger than I look,”
With a savage scream she launched the caber forward into the ogrun. Pain wracked her body as if she were the one being crushed by the stone. Joints tore; muscles ripped free of their moorings; bones shuddered and broke. Her vision swam red, but through the haze she saw the ogrun flying backward into a knot of Nyss warriors, trailing black blood and broken tusks.
Fossamin awoke staring up at the sky. She drew in a breath, and hot pain raced from her ribs to her shoulders. She exhaled carefully, and more pain lanced down her spine.
“The caber spoke to you.” The voice was Joktun’s, but Fossamin couldn’t turn her head toward him. Or speak. Or even nod.
“I can tell by the way you lie so still and say nothing,” he continued, laughing kindly. “The caber shouted you right into the ground, just as it shouted back that blighted ogrun.”
Fossamin tried to smile. It only hurt a little, so she smiled some more, and pain spiraled around and down her neck.
“A smile!” Joktun said. “Your kith and I smile as well. Ogrun flat on their backs are just meat to be hacked apart. The Nyss behind them might have rushed us, but the rest of the kriel cleared the hill right about then, and the sickly long-ears ran north instead.”
Fossamin said nothing, and sought ways to breathe without moving a muscle.
“You’ll live, and you’ll heal. Eat something as soon as you can. From now on you’ll have Kollodor’s share of the food in addition to your own.” Joktun patted his belly. “Your body is answering the caber’s call, but it needs more than mere sustenance. All those things you tore and broke are going to grow back a little stronger.”
Joktun crouched beside her and squeezed her shoulder, then whispered, “When next the caber calls to you, you shall surprise the stone by answering in the voice of its master.”
RAIDERS IN THE NIGHT
By William Shick
Ordic Coast, 607 AR
As the pirate landing skiff came within a hundred feet of the shore, captain Terapex turned toward her chosen raiders, the Mortus Kelend. All were garbed in their captain’s chosen colors of deep purple lined with bloody crimson. Golden half-masks hid their feminine features beneath snarling bestial visages. Combined with the horns that jutted from their skulls, the masks gave them the look of nightmares pulled straight from Urcaen itself. Only Terapex remained unmasked, a mark of leadership among the fearsome warriors.
“Remember, nothing remains alive by morning.”
As one her entourage nodded, silent. Terapex knew they would remain so until the first kill was made, at which point they would unleash their voice in a chorus of oblivion. She could see the anticipation, the absolute desire for battle, within each of her sisters’ lean, muscular bodies. She had hand-picked each one, taking the measure of her sister Satyxis in the fires of combat. She had chosen them for their skill as well as their cruelty and determined their worth by their cunning as well as their loyalty. The masks they wore were more than a psychological weapon in combat. Outside of battle they obscured the face so that n
o member was indistinguishable from the other. Among their sisterhood they were all equal, all the right hand of Terapex. It was their privilege to serve within her exalted company.
The skiff ground upon the sandy shore, and Terapex was the first to leap over the side and race toward the sleeping town. Her boat was only the vanguard, containing her and her cadre of twenty Mortus Kelend. Three more skiffs would be landing within minutes, having departed from the Shadow Weald a respectable time after their captain, as was her due. Those boats carried a group of brutal bloodgorgers as well as several bands of human pirates from Blackwater in addition to a small coven of blood witches led by the ancient hag Ezmaraz. Despite its Cryxian origins, the Shadow Weald held none of the Nightmare Empire’s undead minions, which suited Terapex. She far preferred the fiery bloodlust of the living over the predictability of bound thralls.
As she ran, the Satyxis captain uncoiled the barbed lacerator at her hip and drew a bladed pistol from its holster on her thigh. It was impossible to know when the village’s lax sentries would spot their approach, though she wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find them sleeping at their post. She felt an inkling of disappointment creep within her at the possibility of such a simple slaughter. She hoped for at least some sport tonight.
She felt no small measure of satisfaction as she saw movement from the lookout tower at the edge of the village, quickly followed by the dull peal of the town’s alarm bell.
Iron Kingdoms Excursions: Season One Collection Page 5
