Riposte (Purgatory Wars Book 2)

by Cobolt, Dragon

  Riposte

  Purgatory Wars: Book Two

  Dragon Cobolt

  Uruk Press

  Uruk Press

  Great Britain

  Website | Twitter | Tumblr

  © Dragon Cobolt 2017

  All rights reserved.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Cover by Remy Malara.

  Also from Dragon Cobolt

  Purgatory Wars

  The Murder Stroke

  Riposte

  The Cross Guard (forthcoming)

  Other works

  A Fetch Job

  "The Last Mage" in Sex & Sorcery 3

  Also from Dragon Cobolt

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Sneak Preview: The Cross Guard

  Introducing Uruk Press

  Uruk Novellas

  Uruk Press - Fantasy

  Uruk Press - Science Fiction

  Introducing Biggest Blade Books

  One

  Vulkas Shieldbreaker took a moment to simply admire the city of Faiyum Falls as his ship nestled into dock. Even with an Aesir's born confidence and love for his homeland, he had to admit that Coptics knew what they were doing when it came to building cities. Monuments might have made them famous, but the same skills it took to erect the pyramids could be seen here. Cranes the size of buildings, with counterweights that were as elaborately decorated as their mundane purpose could allow, lifted entire ship's stores from their decks and set them down in storage yards. Men and women and beasts of burden carted the supplies away – and a bustling crowd surged back and forth throughout the wide streets. From them rose a melange of language – Coptic, Latin, Greek, Celtic – and coins of dozens of different cities were passed back and forth.

  But through it all, Vulkas saw no sign of grain.

  He elbowed Thu'chan with one broad arm, almost jostling the ship's scribe over the railing. “Told you,” Vulkas said, pride brimming in his voice. “Told you.”

  Thu sniffed – the sound turned into an almost musical whistle by his long, narrow, curved beak. His feathers ruffled up and he hunched his shoulders forward. If someone had decided to paint Thu at this moment, the result could have been entitled: A portrait of sour grapes. Thu shook his head, sighed explosively, and then – with the air of someone having their kneecaps drawn from their broken leg – said: “Fine. You were right, Captain.”

  Vulkas laughed and slapped his back.

  The rumors had been that a great war was brewing between Sobek – the Pesdjeti God of Crocodiles and Ameliorated Evil – and a pair of the Dodekatheon: Aries and Athena. Apollo was officially neutral, but everyone in the mead-halls of distant Thorheilm had agreed he was going to be aiding his fellow gods. But the terrain favored Sobek. Again, everyone had agreed on that. So, while the debates had been running around and around as to who would seek peace first, Vulkas had simply gone to the landowners and purchased as much grain as he could, then set sail.

  It had been a harrowing trip around the Platonic Sea. Pirates and lizardfolk raiders alike still plagued the straits not patrolled by the Tuatha mistcraft, and the lizardfolk sometimes had access to queer magic. Two of his crew had died from unnervingly accurate lightning bolts, brought down out of a clear sky by some scrawny lizardthing that had seemed more hunched muscle and robes than proper barbarian raider. It had been one of Vulkas' throwing axes that had split the thing's head – it had taken his ax to the bottom of the ocean before they had a chance to take the robes off and see how it had controlled lightning like the crystalbacks of the jungle.

  But through it all, the grain had been kept safe and unnibbled by studious attention from the ship's cats and some simple runic enchantments laid down by a priestess of Sif.

  And now, here, they were poised to make a profit – a profit worth all the danger, all the dire risk.

  Vulkas nodded. “Find the master of the granaries in this city – tell them they won't need to rely on fish and meat and whatever gods be damned lean pickings they've had to deal with.”

  Thu nodded. “I will, sir. What will you be doing?”

  Vulkas rubbed his chin and beamed beatifically – but his eyes didn't move from a Coptic woman who was standing on a spar and tying down a ship that was coming in to dock. The woman was bronze skinned and slender, her hair shaved off leaving her utterly bald, her eyes marked by dark khol lining similar to what the Aesir had been forced to adopt since they had been banished to Purgatory. The combination was quite striking, but Vulkas was more admiring the way her bared breasts gleamed with sweat in the morning sunlight, her modesty only protected by a thin cotton skirt around her hips.

  “Ah, Coptics,” he sighed, then kissed his bunched fingers.

  “Ugh.” Thu didn't try to hide his disgust.

  “Come now!” Vulkas looked down at his friend, scribe, and second in command.

  “I prefer to not put my attentions in anything as mercurial and untrustworthy as women,” Thu said, primly.

  “So, who was it who broke your heart? A pretty lad, aye, not a woman,” Vulkas said, wagging his finger underneath Thu's beak. Thu shot a glare at him as the ship finally finished tying down and Vulkas laughed as he stepped off the gangplank and into the thronging streets of Faiyum Falls. He turned back to his crew – the men and women a motley mixture of races and creeds, all of them looking at him.

  “Thu is in charge until I get back,” he said, his voice pitched to carry. “But once the grain is off the ship, you are free to enjoy your coppers. Remember – any who don't get back within the day, you may be left behind.” He grinned. “And none of us want to be trapped here, in such a dreary land, eh?”

  His crew laughed and he already saw that several were considering staying. This bothered Vulkas not at all.

  Crew came. Crew went. So long as the soul of the ship remained – so long as his hardest hands and best warriors stuck around to carry that soul – he could happily bid farewell to most of the deckhands. With that thought in his head, he turned and started to stride through the docks. Vulkas had been a huscral – a shield bearing warrior – in the arid lands that the Norse had landed when they were banished. There, the Norse peoples had met a similarly banished tribe known as the Zapandi. They had fled a terrible god, Tchernobog, who sought to corrupt all of Purgatory with his shadow. Thor had struck him down and the two tribes had intermarried to an extent that none could say who was Norse and who was Zapandi anymore. The new folk – the Aesir – had learned to tame the arid lands. Water had been found and irrigated, and vast fields of grain now spread across the steppe.

  But the ancient Norse had sailed ships of hard wood and iron shod men. The iron might be gone, and the islands of the Norse a distant, foggy memory, but there were still seas to sail.

  Still a profit to be made.

  And selling the grain was only half of Vulkas' aims. He walked past a stall selling charms blessed by one of the Pesdjeti pantheon and shook his head. He hadn't come so far to buy charms that his gods could have made. He walked past a warehouse that seemed to be filled with jars of tar and pitch. Again, he turned up his nose and came to a side-street that bled into the docks district. He frowned as something stuck out to him as being odd. After a moment, he saw it.

  There was a giant walking up the street, heading towards the center of the city.

  Vulkas started to follow the giant and took a moment to gauge him. He was definitely not Coptic – too pale by half, with hair as blond as a Aesir nobleman. But he didn't have the same facial hair of mos
t of Vulkas' kin, nor did he bear the scars that one might expect from a huscral. And, again, he was a giant. Vulkas guessed his height to be nearly six feet – though, he did note that the man's muscles were more lean than bulky. He had a youthful face, filled with frustration and was dressed in naught but a kilt, a pair of sandals, and looped baldric that held a sword that must have been more for show than anything else.

  Who'd make a sword so long with bronze? Though, Vulkis admitted, he rather liked the name engraved on the scabbard in the Hellenic alphabet: Delenn. It sounded feminine, but unfamiliar. An old girlfriend? Still, no matter how impressive the name, the sword would be useless: It'd have to be three times as thick and five times as heavy as it looked to not simply bend in half – and by the time the giant swung it, he would have been disemboweled.

  Maybe, Vulkas thought. He prefers to simply negate fights by being intimidating?

  Then the giant opened his mouth and spoke – and Vulkas realized that the giant was walking with someone. In the captain's defense, the giant's companion was easily missed. She was as short as he was tall, her emerald green skin and long ears marked her as a gobliness. She was holding a clay tablet in one hand, gesturing to it as she spoke in quick Coptic: “I don't think anyone's going to be willing to sail no matter how much gold we offer – not with the tales of the pirates, not with the lizardfolk-””

  The giant responded, sounding irritated.

  Vulkas' brow furrowed.

  The giant spoke no tongue he had ever heard. He caught a hint of Latin, slurred and mashed in with other words that sounded like they should make sense but did not. It was a fast tongue, and from the way that the gobliness laughed, one that lent itself to humor.

  The two turned around a corner, ducking into an alleyway with the casual confidence of people used to a city.

  And then, detaching from shadowed nooks and emerging from behind closed, ratty doors came five hooded forms. They were clad in black linen and had crude wooden masks over their faces. They held bronze knives and clubs and one even had a lead-weighted plumbata that he tossed from palm to palm with nervous tension. They darted into the alleyway and Vulkas felt his blood chill. He had been party to many a battle – and more than a few muggings – but he had never seen an assassination before. His first instinct won out. He sprang forward, drawing his only weapon – a dagger more for cutting fruit and sharpening a stylus than anything else – and shouted: “Ware! Ware!”

  The giant might not have spoken Norse, but he heard the noise. He spun around and shoved the gobliness behind him with the same smooth motion. The assassin with the plumbata hefted it and readied to loose it. Vulkas had fought Hellenes in battle and sneered. Those battle-hardened mercenaries had underhanded their murderous darts, making the throwing harder to spot and harder to defend against.

  The assassin's lack of skill gave the Aesir captain time enough to hurl his dagger. The blade plunged into the man's palm and he shrieked – but not for long. A moment later, his arm hit the ground and his head followed shortly after.

  The giant stood tall and proud, holding his blade in both hands. It had moved with amazing speed and it shone with a silvery light as it caught the sun. Blood stained the edge, dripping to the floor as the giant glared at the four remaining men as if daring them to make another move. Vulkas could do no more than stare in shock, his mind reeling.

  That blade!

  The giant stepped forward. He beat aside a dagger – and a good chunk of a man's arm – then counter-stroked upwards, sending the assassin falling backwards in a spray of blood. The assassins weren't unarmored – they wore woven cloth tunics that were tougher and harder to cut than they seemed – but they still fell as if wearing nothing at all. The giant parried a knife stroke – blocking the attacker's blade in such a way that left three severed fingers on the ground – then punched out with his own sword-hilt. Weighted and sturdy, the curious hand-guard on the blade caught the assassin in the jaw. His head jerked back in a spray of blood and teeth.

  The last assassin turned to flee – but by now, the gobliness had emerged from hiding. Her palms slapped together and she spoke a word in a tongue that Vulkas didn't recognize. Her hands spread, and then she made a tossing motion. From the space between her hands came a glowing ball of fibrous tendrils that were as tightly compacted as spider silk. They exploded outwards with a crackle, then wrapped around the fleeing man. He was trussed up in an instant and toppled forward to skid along the ground for a few feet before coming to a stop.

  The violence had taken less than five seconds.

  The giant wiped his blade down with a cloth he drew from a belt pouch, shaking his head as he said something that sounded like: Mudder fakker.

  “Thank you, sir,” the gobliness said, adjusting her shift with one hand as she looked up at Vulkas.

  Vulkas blinked a few times.

  Then beamed.

  “I hear you need to hire a ship?” he said, cheerily.

  * * *

  It had all started off so simply for Liam Vanderbilt – though, to be absolutely fair, his idea of what was strange or complicated had forever more been shattered by the fact that he had been jammed through a portal by an ancient artifact and dumped into a world of elves and goblins and winged women and magic and ancient gods who strode the world like giants. But even back on Earth, the idea of getting ready for a trip had seemed simple. He had gone on a road trip or two in his life. This trip wouldn’t be that much more complex, right? Just take his iPod down to a city owned by Brigid, the Tuatha goddess of scribes and wisdom, and get the physics, chemistry and history textbooks within turned into hard-copies that could be read without running out of batteries.

  But there was an incredibly complex web of invisible supports that had spread through and around Liam's life – supports he hadn't known he had relied on until suddenly they were gone. For instance, the assurance that he would have enough to eat on every step of the journey – vague ideas of purchasing food on the way at every village and town they stopped at – all of it were smashed to pieces by a laughing Megara, his lover.

  “Liam, honey,” she had said, her fingers splayed across his still sweating chest after a bout of lovemaking. “You're traveling along the inner Platonic sea – to the lands of the Tuatha. There have been pirates infesting the route ever since the War of the Fey. And even if there weren't, there are still simple truths: You can't eat gold.”

  Liam had looked confused. Clucking, his lover had explained: “No farmer will sell their stock to a traveler during lean times – they can't eat it, and they can't get to where they will spend it.”

  So, there had gone one support, kicked down casually.

  Still, he had figured it wouldn't be hard, gathering supplies for this trip.

  After all, he had been on road trips!

  A single human being needed three square meals, including nutrients to prevent illnesses like scurvy. Meals tended to go bad, unless they were preserved. Preserved food cost extra. And that didn't even go into the fact that Megara, who would be coming with, required almost a quarter more food than the rest of them thanks to her superhuman metabolism and mystical abilities. A crew would need to be paid. Clothes needed to be purchased – clothes that would suit him for both the colder weather in the inner sea region and would do if he had to deal with any important dignitaries. Add to that the weapons and armor that would doubtlessly be needed, just for the additional headache. Armor and weapons needed cleaning oils to prevent damage from the elements, they needed to be packed and transported - as a heavy bronze cuirass was not something that could just be dragged around in a rolling suitcase. Ammunition for any number of battles had to be procured for those who used ranged weapons.

  Then, of course, the ship itself had to be found and chartered.

  All of it made the money vanish with alarming speed, and ate up hours, then days, then weeks – weeks that left him increasingly nervous. Nervous about his iPod - even shut down, he knew that it could be damaged or ruined i
n a dozen different ways. Nervous about Megara and Livianna - his lover and his personal slave, won in open combat a few days after he arrived in Purgatory. That was a whole pile of uncomfortable, awkward and confusing that he had no idea how to handle. But now, looking at the rapidly cooling bodies that were splayed out in the alleyway, he thought: Maybe I was nervous for entirely the wrong reasons.

  “I hear you need to hire a ship?”

  The voice drew Liam's eyes up from the corpses and to the man who had saved him and Tethis' life. The man looked like everyone's stereotype of a viking warrior with a single glaring exception. He had long flowing blond hair tied into several tight bundles, with a thick beard that had been combed carefully. He was broad shouldered and muscular. But unlike the stereotype, he was dressed in, well, a business suit. The comparison wasn't entirely perfect, and on a second glance, Liam saw that the two sets of clothes had almost nothing to do with one another. But the overall look of his ensemble still screamed 'well to do merchant' not 'bloodthirsty warrior.'

  And his smile was entirely too disarming and cheery.

  “Yes, we do,” Liam said, panting quietly as the adrenaline from the short battle ebbed from him. “One moment, though.”

  He stepped over to the man that Tethis had captured with one her magical nets, nodding to her as he did so. “Good work, Tethis.”

  Tethis - Liam’s personal scribe, accountant, wizard and close friend (and crush) ever since they had met - shook her head. She had been staring at the viking dude with confusion and uncertainty for the past few moments. She blushed a dark green. “Thanks, Liam.”

  “I notice that I can understand your language now,” the viking said, curiously, as Liam kicked the last surviving assassin onto his back. Liam didn't look up from the masked man but he did smile as he angled the sword to tap against the mask's nose.