From Across the Clouded Range

by H. Nathan Wilcox

  #

  Dasen dreamed that he was sleeping in a soft bed covered with a thick feather comforter between sheets of sumptuous silk. Huge pillows were piled about his head. Soft music drifted through the room from a quartet of musicians. A warm fire burned in the hearth. Firm glass and thick velvet curtains covered the windows to shield him from the cold, wind, and rain. A breakfast of sweet breads, soft-boiled eggs, milk, tea, and sausages waited on a table near his bed. And he knew that no matter when he rose, that breakfast would still be hot.

  A baleful note sounded. The dream shook. A brightly colored man with a horn appeared. He blew into the horn and unleashed a string of harsh notes as he danced around the room knocking over the breakfast, throwing open the windows, ripping off the sheets, tearing it all apart with his horrible little horn. Dasen covered his ears with his hands, but it was too late. The beautiful dream was coming apart. The lovely room, the bed, the breakfast all faded until the only thing remaining was the sound of horns in what now seemed the distance.

  Dasen sat up abruptly from what was left of the sod bunker. He rubbed at his eyes and shook from the cold. The day was grey. A misty rain fell. He was covered in mud, grit permeated his every pore, gummed his eyes, filled his ears, and clung to his hair. He spit in a futile attempt to clear the soil from his mouth. Through all that, his body ached in a way that had become sickeningly familiar. His stomach rumbled. And his head throbbed. He yawned and looked toward the sound of the distant horns.

  Miseries were forgotten. He reached for Teth, began shaking her blindly, unable to pull his eyes from the nightmare that his dream had become. Even as he studied the dark shapes surging toward them, his mind struggled to believe what it was seeing. Hundreds of creatures were charging at them, sprinting toward where he sat in the middle of an open field.

  Dasen sprang from the ground. He grabbed Teth at the same time her head rose from the hole. She looked at him groggily. Her clothes were black with mud. They were soaked clean through and clung to her. Huge clumps of grass stood in her hair as if they had grown there.

  “Goodmorn . . .” she began.

  “Run!” Dasen yelled. “Don’t say another word. Just run!” The momentum of his first few steps pulled her from the ground, almost toppled her forward. She looked over her shoulder as she stumbled, gasped, cursed, and ran.

  The fatigue that lingered in his legs forgotten, Dasen hit his full stride and looked up. He very nearly turned back around. Fifty paces in front of him was a row of spears pointed out toward him like a steel-tipped fence. Teth pulled up beside him, and they stared in confusion. This can’t all be for me, he thought. By the Order, the entire army is out here.

  “What now?” Teth panted at his side. Her head bounced between the two forces, but they both knew there was no escape this time.

  Dasen was just about to run to the men with hand up in surrender – better to be captured by men than monsters – when someone yelled, “Hey, you two! Get behind the lines! Those things’re going to be ‘ere any second!”

  That was all the invitation they needed – the soldier had spoken in the Imperial tongue. They sprinted toward the ragged lines without trying to explain the idiocy that could have brought the Thoren garrison from the perfectly good walls of the city to stand on an unfortified plain just outside.

  The muted thunder of the creatures closing on the defenders pushed them on. The things had to be close given the incredible roar of their approach, and as they closed on the spears, the area behind that line erupted with arrows. Dasen did not bother to look back to see where the arrows landed. The creatures were within bow’s range, literally on his heels.

  He hurdled toward the spears and was happy to see shafts lift from their defensive posture. They passed through a phalanx four men deep, holding spears in a stack from high to low. The first line held tall wooden shields and the others braced them, creating a low wall permeated with steel points. Dasen and Teth sprinted through that line, oblivious of the men that allowed them to pass. Beyond the wall was an empty space twenty paces long then another shield wall. Standing before that wall, were two rows of archers. They tore through the space, and ducked as the archers released another volley. Teth broke through the archers without a thought. Dasen followed.

  They were so consumed with fear that they did not notice the faces of the men around them begin to waver. Their panic was a disease, and they were on the verge of infecting the entire army. Men who could only imagine what was coming, who had only stories and their imaginations to inform them, began to fear the worst, began to draw on the terror of two mud-soaked youths and spread it to their fellows. The line began to waver. Dasen and Teth were on the verge of panicking the entire force.

  They were eyeing the gap to the next line, threatening to spread their fear further, when a man grabbed Teth by the shoulders and another blocked Dasen, held him in his burly arms. Dasen struggled to break away, but the man was too strong. “There’ll be no runnin’ lessin’ yir told ta run!” the man holding Teth yelled. “Do ya understand? It’s the lives of our families we’re fightin’ fir ‘ere. You’ll stand yir ground, or I’ll cut ya down!” Dasen looked at the man in shock, but the gruff old soldier just continued berating them. “Where are yir weapons? We can’t afford ta lose any. I should make ya go back an’ git ‘em.” Finally, he released Teth, looked at her, and shook his head. “So young,” he murmured to himself, “by the Holy Order, so young.”

  The sound of the creatures crashing into the first line of defenders cut the comment short. It was most terrible sound Dasen had ever heard. The howls, curses, and threats of the creatures were overlaid with the screams of the men who were dying at their hands. The archers in front of them released a volley of arrows with a collective twang. That was followed by the hiss of hundreds of arrows sailing toward their chosen targets. The arrows struck home with a collective thud, which only increased the timbre of the creatures’ howls.

  The sight of the creatures ripping through the defenders blanched the man holding Dasen. His fellow cursed under his breath. “Go,” the first man said absently as he watched the horror unfold. “Join the next line, an’ be ready ta grab a spear off’n one of yir countrymen.” That was all the prompting Dasen needed. He did not look back to see the creatures shredding the wall of defenders. He ran the twenty paces that separated him from the next line with Teth at his side.

  When they came to that line, an old man with steel-silver hair and a crumpled face that looked like it had been baked in the sun for years grabbed him and pulled him in at his side. Another only slightly younger man did the same to Teth. The old man reached to the side of his belt, pulled out a long knife that looked like it should have been in a kitchen, and handed it to Dasen. He studied Dasen as he took the knife. “I know ya be ‘fraid, son. The Order only knows I’m a quiverin’ where I stand, but this thing ‘ere’s biggerin’ both of us, so ya jist stand yir ground right ‘ere by me. I’ll watch out fir ya.” The old man spit on the ground and tightened his grip on the rusty spear he held – the line here was only two men deep, and they did not carry shields. “I did some time in the army in me youth, an’ I still ‘member how ta use this thing. Just ‘member, ‘old yir ground long as ya can then fall back two lines. Ya’ll do fine. I can tell the Order’s lookin’ out fir ya.” The man fell silent and turned his eyes to the line in front of them.

  Dasen studied the man and his fellows, trying to grasp this insanity. The old man wore a cooking pot on his head and had a wooden cutting board strapped to his chest. He should have been at home living out his dotage, but here he was inexplicably standing on this field, holding the line against insurmountable odds. Dasen was emboldened by the display. He clenching the long knife and turned to face the pending onslaught. At his side, Teth gripped a weapon similar to his own. She looked up at him with fear and determination battling for control of her features. He t
ried to give her an encouraging smile, but it was interrupted by the site of men racing toward him. The archers from the second rank came to a stop in front of them and took up a position with arrows notched.

  The man in front of Dasen was not overly tall, so he had a clear view of the wave of creatures that slammed into the row of spearmen they had just left. The men in that line accepted the creatures with super-human courage, and Dasen could not help but wince as several of the creatures ran headlong into the spears and were impaled on the sturdy shafts. But those spears did not slow the creatures for long. Many of the things dealt deathblows to their assailants even with spears jutting from their chests. Others trailing behind used any of a thousand hideous adaptations to slash their way through the defenders. Men fell to razor-sharp claws, spiked tails, barbed hooks, serrated blades, crushing jaws. The deaths were so varied and horrific that Dasen could not accept them as real. He felt detached from what was happening, dazed by the brutality of it, like a terrible dream that would not end.

  At the same time, the archers in front of him fired volley after volley into the creatures. They looked for openings in the lines and feathered anything that might break through or simply fired into the sky, knowing that their arrows would fall somewhere among the legions of invaders. But even with that success, the monsters kept coming. It would only be a matter of time before they finished that line and charged toward the next, charged toward where Dasen and Teth waited with nothing more than knives to fend off an army of chaos-sent demons.

  Dasen scanned the length of the lines around him, searching for an escape. Everywhere along those lines men were engaged with the creatures. In some places, the first line still held; in others, the creatures had penetrated farther. The rows were not that long, stretching maybe three hundred men shoulder to shoulder, but continued behind them all the way to the river. On the sides, horsemen fought a frantic battle to keep the monsters from flanking the formation as they encircled the defenders.

  A gurgling scream rose over the timbre of battle and brought Dasen back to the battle before him. He turned and saw the archers who had been standing in front of them fall to the ground, their bodies riddled with steel darts. The source of those darts, a creature the size of a small house, loomed before them. The thing had the head of a hawk but no wings. Its body was built like a bull with powerful hooves that tore at the rain-soaked ground and a long tail that ended in a ball of glistening spikes. The creature swung its tail and spikes flew from it, riddling the defenders. Ten or more arrows stabbed into the creature’s body, but the thing just responded with a blood-curdling scream that made Dasen want to crumble to the ground.

  He was roused from his horror by the sensation of the old man shaking his arm. “Son, pick up that bow an’ git out of ‘ere. Leave fightin’ that thing ta those of us ain’t got nothin’ ta live fir.”

  At the man’s prodding, Dasen grabbed the bow from the still warm grasp of the archer in front of him. As he pulled the quiver over the boy’s head, a spike hummed by his head. The man at his side gasped and clutched his chest where the spike had punched through his cutting board breastplate. Dasen felt a pang but did not pause to mourn the old man’s passing. He ran to the next line in the echo of the creature’s terrible cry as it tore into the line he had just abandoned.

  Teth was waiting for him. He pulled up beside her as she released an arrow from the bow she had acquired from another of the fallen archers. The arrow struck home in one of the creature’s tiny eyes. It rose to its hind legs with an ear-splitting scream. When it came back down, the ground rumbled beneath them, but it did not slow its assault.

  The beast already had countless arrows and several spears protruding from its body, but none of them seemed to affect it. Its tail came around again, but rather than releasing the spikes, it used them to slash through ten men and at least as many of the creatures that fought beside it. In the same motion, it snatched two men in its beak and snapped them in half as the maw slammed shut.

  Dasen realized that he was just watching, so he pulled an arrow from the quiver that hung over his shoulder, notched it, and prepared to fire. He took aim at the creature then saw several other man-sized things breaking through the gap the larger creature had created in its wake. He changed his mark and fired at the first of the creatures. To his surprise, the arrow hit the insect-like thing squarely in the chest, pierced its exoskeleton, and dropped it to the ground. He pulled another arrow from his quiver. That arrow ended in the throat of a thing with six muscular arms and a snake-like body with which it slithered over the ground at an incredible speed.

  Another arrow was flying to his bow, when he felt a tugging at his arm. Teth was yelling at him. “Fall back, you idiot! They’re almost here. All the other archers are gone.”

  Dasen did not argue. He bolted through the opening that had appeared between the spearmen behind him. The sound of a spiked tail ripping through the men he had just left propelled him to the next line.

  When they arrived, they turned to face the creatures, but only the one thing remained. At other places along the line there were still hundreds of the monsters engaging the defenders, but the creature before them had probably killed as many of its own kind as it had defenders, and the other creatures seemed to be avoiding it. Dasen could not blame them as he watched the thing shred another line of spearmen as if they were made of paper. Countless arrows bit into it, making its entire body resemble the tail it swung so freely, but they did not slow it in the slightest.

  Unwilling to give up, Dasen pulled an arrow back and sent it into the creature’s side where innumerable others already protruded. The creature did not even flinch.

  The futility of the effort sent a wave of desperation through him. It was echoed by the men around him. They were all thinking the same thing. Eventually, they would be out of places to run. Eventually, they would have to kill this thing. But that was looking more and more like an impossible task.

  Dasen surveyed the battlefield for answers and found bedlam on every side of him. Men fought the creatures and killed them only to die at the hands of that same creature or the next. Bodies were torn apart by cruel weapons. Screams so defined the field that he could not tell one from the next. Fear raced through everything. Doubt, anguish, hatred, pain. Dasen could almost feel those emotions emanating from the battle like heat from a fire, could feel their energy like the power of a maelstrom raging around him.

  “It’s real,” Dasen heard himself saying. He was not imagining that power. It was there, it was real. With that stunning revelation, he forgot about the battle before him and accepted that power. It filled him, coursed through him like a drug, twisted around his mind so that he had to concentrate to remember who he was and why he stood on that field. Still, he took in more, until he thought he would burst, until it felt like he had a tornado caged in his mind. His thoughts spun around that tornado and were scattered by it. The only things he could concentrate on were fear, hate, pain, sorrow, doubt, a thousand all-consuming emotions.

  He looked at the creature now looming before him, saw its tail crashing toward him. He felt Teth somewhere far away pulling at his sleeve and yelling in his ear. She was filled with fear. He drew in that fear, used it to power himself further. Finally, he felt his own fear, his own hatred, his own pain. He used those emotions to focus the energy that had built inside him and wished, no demanded, that the creature causing them be destroyed.

  Ruins flash before his eyes. He did not know them, but he knew what they did. He surrendered to them, and they surged through him. When the last of the symbols faded from his mind like an ember as it is enclosed in ash, there was a blinding flash. It was followed by a massive ball of fire that raced from his outstretched hands and slammed into the creature. The fire struck the creature with such force that it was lifted from the ground, engulfed in flame, and deposited several paces away. It did not move again as it was t
ransformed into a towering conflagration that reached to the sky.