FLAMESONG
MAR. Barker
DAW BOOKS
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER 1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
1
The hall was cold, damp yet still redolent of the dry, dusty scents,of the desert. Yesterday’s heat had given way to pouring rain, the sort of sudden autumn storm that flooded valleys, caused landslides, cut roads, and drowned anything foolish enough to dwell in the ravines and gulches of this awful land. Today the skies had poured down water from dawn to dusk, and the last assault over the battlements had been conducted in a gray torrent that turned both friend and foe into misty shadows who slipped and skidded, cursed and struggled, and then died, upon the red-washed mud-brick wallwalks.
They had taken Fortress Ninu’ur just after sunset, and the rain stopped miraculously just in time to coincide with their shouts of victory—and with the dying cries of the last Yan Koryani defenders in the snag-toothed keep. The victors, soldiers of the Tsolyani Legion of the Storm of Fire, pushed on into the main hall. It was now empty, save for the bodies of the foe’s nameless dead, and for the ashen rivulets that trickled down through the time-blackened roofbeams to mingle with the scarlet pools upon the flagging.
Trinesh hiKetkolel pulled off his helmet and looked around. The hall was not large: a room perhaps eight man-heights long, six across, and three high. The daises where its builders had sat to dine rose like little terrace-fields out of the water and the mess the foe had left behind. The Yan Koryani had been anything but neat. Scraps of clothing, Dna-grain husks, burnt-out embers from the fire they had lit in the center of the room, and myriad unnameable bits of flotsam littered the floor or floated like foundered boats in the water. There were no tapestries, no floor-mats, nothing to show that civilized folk had made this place a home as well as a fortress. The peeling mud-plaster of the walls displayed only obscene graffiti in the squarish, ugly letters of Yan Kor.
In these first days of autumn, in the month of Pardan of the year 2,361 after the foundation of the Second Imperium of the Seal Emperors of Tsolyanu, the Tsolyani armies lay locked in a seesaw struggle with the troops of Yan Kor and her northeastern ally, Saa Allaqi. The immediate objective was the conquest of this blighted buffer state of Milumanaya. Fortress Ninu’ur was about as good as anything Milumanaya had to offer.
Trinesh set his flame-crested helmet upon a half-empty sack of rotting Dna-grain, but there was no place to hang up his cloak, and he allowed it to slip off to lie in a sopping heap behind him on the floor. A vambrace came off, its padded lining soaked through and sticky, then the upcurving pauldron-collar, the gorget of valuable iron that his folk, the Clan of the Red Mountain, had gifted him, then the other vambrace. The straps of his Chlen-hide breastplate defied him; their leather was now wet and knotted in the buckles, as solid as the God-Emperor in Avanthar!
Trinesh leaned against the wall to spit blood. He had bitten the inside of his cheek when he jumped down from the wallwalk into the courtyard. An heroic wound indeed! He was almost too tired to curse.
Trinesh was a Hereksa, the commander of a Kareng of one hundred men. His Kareng was one of the four in his Cohort, and the latter was one of the twelve currently fielded by the Legion of the Storm of Fire, the Tsolyani Twenty-First Imperial Medium Infantry. They were a new Legion,, not yet a very good one, certainly not as skilled as the Legion of Serqu, “the Sword of the Empire,” for example, but they were solid enough, reliable, and battle-hardened after six months of fighting.
The troops needed no further orders; they fanned out into the keep automatically. The Tirrikamu Horusel, the seniormost of Trinesh’s five subalterns, took his Semetl of twenty and headed for the stair that led up from the far end of the chamber; Chosun and his Semetl would explore this story and any cellars below, while the other three Semetl searched the towers and the walls of the bailey. They had thrown dice, and those outside had lost. There was no joy at all in mopping up an enemy fortress in rainswept darkness.
HoruseFs men finished removing the bodies of the slain. The Yan Koryani had fought well, but the Milumanayani— the tribesmen of the Desert of Sighs—were as useless to the foe as they were to the Tsolyani. As allies they were treacherous; as enemies they were—charitably—utterly craven. Trinesh had seen them scrambling away into the night, their leather desert-cloaks flapping about their scrawny legs, when his men had swept over the walls and down into the filth-strewn bailey. La! It was beyond humor—almost beyond contempt! Who needed friends like those sand-worms? They were as “noble” as timid /Vgz-lizards!
One had to admit that the Milumanayani did have their uses. The Tsolyani had finally taken Sunraya, the old caravan city that was all the civilization eastern Milumanaya could boast. It had been hideously costly, and the war here in the northeast was by no means over. The legions of Tsolyanu should have been in undisputed control by now, but the Milumanayani tribes had delayed them, more so, almost, than the trained and well-equipped soldiers of the Baron Aid, who ruled Yan Kor. The foe—the Yan Koryani and Saa Allaqiyani regulars—could never have held this region by themselves, not with just the troops they could spare from the western front, where Tsolyanu’s second great army advanced to close the trap upon Baron Aid’s forces. The Tsolyani had ignored the tribes of Milumanaya, left them to whatever bribes and threats and bargains the Baron could offer them. A civilized people did not treat with wild creatures, after all.
That had been a mistake of epic proportions.
Many of the tribes had accepted the coin of Yan Kor. Others remained aloof, while some played at Guess-Me-Not with both sides. All of the sand-worms were deceitul, lazy, and ignoble; yet the Yan Koryani had made the most of them. Now the desert folk were always there; in every landscape— ostensibly as empty of life as the pinnacles of Thenu Thendraya Peak—there was always somebody: some damned scout, some desert-cloaked savage, some skinny child stinking of Hma-wool and Hmelu-beast fat, to watch and report. The Tsolyani had had to fortify their camps and guard their supply lines until they were well nigh as impregnable as Avanthar itself. The tribes were no threat in the field; a thousand of the gabbling savages would run before anything bigger than a Semetl of twenty. Yet they came back in the night, they raided, they stole, they spied, they burned supplies, they swore oaths and made truces, and then betrayed them again— and again and again until not even the gods knew who was who.
The Yan Koryani and the Saa Allaqiyani were “noble”; with them, one set the place and time for a battle, fought it, won or lost, and took the consequences. The tribesmen of Milumanaya practiced no such etiquette, nor did the flinty ravines of their sun-baked desert. How did one pacify a country made up of empty wastelands, mountains, sand, rocks, and savages who went around swathed top-knot to toes in stinking leather desert-cloaks? Not only was it impossible to distinguish friend from foe, but one could tell the men from the women only by stripping them sky-naked. Both then usually proved to be equally ugly, and the stench would stun a Sro-dragon!
Why the God-Emperor in Avanthar wanted this dreary wilderness back was clear enough; it had been abandoned— “mislaid” was perhaps a better word for the bureaucratic error in Avanthar—almost four hundred years ago by Emperor Neshkiruma, whose title, “The Cloud-Spinner,” seemed apt indeed for that particular idiot. Now Tsolyanu would correct the oversight. Whatever the Empire lost it eventually regained, like the whore’s virginity in the Epic of Hrugga.
Milumanaya was not the real goal, of course, Sunraya, its capital, might be useful as a staging base for troops and supplies, but the city itself was not worth the blood shed during the siege last spring
. No, this arrow was aimed at Baron Aid of Yan Kor. Once that traitorous barbarian had taken the “high ride” upon the impalers’ stake, the rest of the north—tjie squabbling Yan Koryani city-states, the slyeyed people of Lake Parunal, the nomadic Lorun who lived in the marches of the far north, and even the nonhuman Pygmy Folk who had their underground cities in eastern Yan Kor— all would tumble back into Tsolyani hands as prettily as coins into a money-lender’s purse! Saa Allaqi might be allowed to make a separate peace, but there would be no mercy for Yan Kor.
Difficulties—seen and unforeseen—had been the story of this Flame-accursed war: the Glorious Seal Emperor in Avanthar had given armies to two of his six currently acknowledged sons. Both had the same objective, but Prince Eselne was to advance up through the northwest, take the little buffer state of Pijena, and conquer the Baron’s capital of Ke’er from that direction. Prince Mirusiya’s forces were to do the same thing but by the longer and more arduous northeastern route from Thri’il, through the Pass of Skulls, into eastern Milumanaya, and up around from the east to the Baron’s back gate. Prince Mirusiya’s campaign had a useful secondary goal: a wedge driven up here would cut the Baron off from his Saa Allaqiyani allies in the farther northeast. Had that been all, Prince Mirusiya’s task would at least have been equal to his half-brother’s, but there was more: in order to succeed in his broader political goals, Prince Mirusiya must take Ke’er first, before Prince Eselne got there.
Prince Mirusiya worshipped Lord Vimuhla, the Master of Flame and one of the Tlokiriqaluyal, the Five Gods of Change, as did Trinesh and many of his Legion of the Storm of Fire. Prince Eselne followed Lord Karakan, the Hero of Ever-Glorious War, who belonged to the Tlomitlanyal, the Five Gods of Stability. Thus were two of the most powerful temples of the empire’s ten major gods involved. It was common gossip that whichever of these two princes seized Ke’er first would be the likely winner of the Kolumejalim, the contest that would determine the next Emperor of Tsolyanu.
The stew-pot of political maneuvering had long been boiling, but it would bubble over in earnest once old Hirkane hiTlakotani, the current occupant of the Petal Throne, toddled off to Lord Hnalla’s Paradise of Supernal Light! The other heirs—four more princes and one princess—would stir the fire as well, but, Trinesh thought, there were really only two cooks stirring this stew: Prince Eselne and his own master, Prince Mirusiya.
The eldest of the Imperial heirs, Prince Rereshqala, was said to have withdrawn from the contest to content himself with a villa on the southern coast, a coterie of sycophants, and an endless, meaningless round of ceremony and feasting. Ncft a bad fate, but hardly a glorious one. Prince Mridobu, who was third-eldest just after Prince Eselne, followed a different path to the Petal Throne: a staircase built of bureaucrats, offices, edicts, intrigues, and diplomacy. He was not to Trinesh’s taste—nor to that of the warrior clans-—any more than Rereshqala was. The youngest son, Prince Dhich’une, served as a priest in the Temple of mighty Sarku, the Lord of Worms and Master of the Undead, the least pleasant of the pantheon of Change. Rumor had it that Dhich’une had suffered some sort of mysterious setback last year and now sulked in his Temple’s squat sanctuary in the City of Sarku in northern Tsolyanu. For folk who valued courage and battle, such as Trinesh’ Clan of the Red Mountain, it would be hard to find a less appetizing candidate than Dhich’une, “the Worm Prince.” Still, when one compared him with his sister, Ma’in Kriithai, or with Surundano, the new Prince recently revealed by the Temple of Thumis, God of Wisdom, Dhich’une did take on a certain warm and kingly glow! The Princess was a spoiled wanton, Trinesh’ clan-elders said—and shook their collective heads. Poor Surundano did not even merit that response: he was a vapid nonentity, a minor clerk in the labyrinth of temple administration, before his backers had trotted him forth to make him a black counter upon the Den-den board.
The game might surge this way or that as the other players set out their, pieces and cast the dice; yet all of those lesser blue and green and white counters would be swept away and popped back in the box. There were really only two black pieces on the board: Prince Eselne in the west, and Prince Mirusiya in the east. Barring a thunderbolt from the Ten Gods Themselves, it was one of these two who would next ascend to the Petal Throne in Avanthar. Trinesh hiKetkolel had already laid his wager upon Prince Mirusiya, the candidate of his clan and of his Deity.
And what was he himself in all this? Hardly a morsel of Hmelu-meat in the broth! Trinesh spat blood again and rubbed at the imprint of his helmet-rim across his forehead. He was no more than the very junior officer of a very small contingent in a rather humble Legion, sent to capture a very little enemy stronghold in a very useless land! Fortress Ninu’ur was one chunk of miserable Kao-squash in the stew. The Council of Generals had decided that it could not be allowed to remain as a threat to the southern flank of the Tsolyani line of march, and so he, Hereksa Trinesh hiKetkolel, had been
ordered to go and take it. The first part had been easy—they had surprised the Yan Koryani in the rain—but the second half of the task promised to be harder. Who knew how many squadrons of green-armored Yan Koryani troops still lurked in the hills outside? —And how many ragged tribesmen sat tonight to lay plans for the retaking of this smelly, fly-blown, half-ruined sand-heap?
Privately, Trinesh held little hope of ever seeing his native city of Tumissa again, although he would never have admitted as much. What an officer cannot say to his troops may be whispered in prayer to one’s god, the priests said, but in this case it was different: somehow he felt that ravening, fierce, uncaring Lord Vimuhla, the All-Consuming Flame, He Who Loves Conflagration and Red Ruin, would not understand . . . “All taken, Sire,” Horusel said from behind him.
Startled out of his reverie, Trinesh jumped and reached for his sword. It was not there; he had left it leaning against the wreck they had made of the door to the keep. He covered his embarrassment with sharp, efficient, military questions, the kind a good commander ought to ask.
“The outer enceinte? The upper floors? Any cellars where these sand-worms could stick their heads up their arses and hide?”
“Swept clean, Hereksa.”
“Casualties? Prisoners?”
“Five dead in Fressa’s Semeti, two in mine; two in Vinue’s. Twelve or fourteen hurt bad enough to matter. No one else. —Prisoners?” He counted on his stubby fingers. “No Yan Koryani—they died to a man. A handful of Milumanayani: a half dozen warriors, a few women, some little ones.”
“Tell the men to oil their weapons. Rust—” He stopped. Horusel hailed from the city of Penom in southern Tsolyanu, a place where everything rotted, molded, and corroded away overnight, where the biting insects were said to be as big as £?as«-birds, and where it was said that even gold rusted! No need to give Horusel such advice!
“A few of my Semeti want to offer flame-sacrifice, Sire— tonight. The Milumanayani are poor fare indeed, but they’ll at least serve to show our devotion to the Flame Lord.” Horusel watched his commander carefully, the planes of his seamed, hard cheeks as expressionless as slabs of stone. “Permission?”
Trinesh considered. Horusel was the staunchest supporter of the Temple of Lord Vimuhla in his Kareng he had the special backing of their one assigned priest and a score of the troops. The priest, Chekkuru, belonged to the Vriddi clan of Fasiltum, moreover, and he was trouble: a member of the Incandescent Blaze Society, the inner circle of Temple zealots who took the commands of the God of Conflagrations quite literally.
Trinesh himself was a moderate: his faction held that the heady wine of religion should occasionally be diluted with the cold water of practicality. It was all very well to preach of burnings and, ravagings and the Flame, but were not these events better enjoyed when they fitted in with the needs of this world—as well as the next, of course? Trinesh did not want to surrender too easily to the fanatics among his troops, but if he did not, they would complain that he was denying them the comforts of their faith.
“Have you woo
d for the sacrificial fire?” he asked at length.
The Tirrikamu hesitated. “A—a little, Sire. Some of the followers of the other Gods want it for cooking and to dry their clothes ...”
Horusel knew which way Trinesh would decide; it was another gentle snare to prove that he, Horusel, was the more pious and hence better suited to command troops devoted to Lord Vimuhla and to Lord Chiteng, the lesser deity who served the Flame Lord as His “Cohort.”
General Kutume hiTankolel, who commanded the Legion of the Storm of Fire, followed dread Lord Chiteng, but, people said, his primary deity really consisted of gold and
silver coins. He would say nothing as long as things got done. It was lucky for Trinesh that their previous General, Lord Karin Missum, whose very nickname meant “Red Death,” was no longer in charge. He had been promoted upwards—outwards, or sideways—because of his fanaticism, the rumor ran. Karin Missum would have ordered the Milumanayani captives burned just as soon as Fortress Ninu’ur was secured. Indeed, he would have had the Legion all heroes by now—and probably dead heroes at that! They had lost many good troops at the Battle of the Hill of the Stone Serudla, then more in the fight before the town of Mar, and still more when they swarmed over the walls of Sunraya. Piety might be “noble” in the eyes of the Gods and Their priesthoods, but when the record-scribes totted up their accounts, it was obvious that, like too much hot Hling-seed in the stew, religious zeal hurt more than it helped. No, Lord Kutume was much better for moderates like Trinesh—and for the Empire as well.
Trinesh temporized. “It’s too wet tonight—too late, too much to do before we sleep. Some are wounded, and everyone is hungry. Keep your sacrifice—and the funeral pyre for our own dead—until morning. The sand-worms will bum just as well then. We had best look to ourselves now and leave Lord Vimuhla’s needs till tomorrow.” He raised a hand to cut off Horusel’s protest. “Set Charkha and his Semetl at the gate—they made the lowest throw with the Kevuk-dice, did they not? Vinue’s troops can patrol the walls. Fressa and Chosun will relieve them at half-night. Your people can stay here.”
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