Ashes of a Black Frost

by Chris Evans

  One of the reasons stood a few yards away, watching.

  Konowa risked a glance at Private Alwyn Renwar. The soldier, if that’s what he still was, had not moved since his transformation. Once a meek and trembling lad barely able to hold a musket steady, jumping at his own shadow . . . now in command of the shades of the dead.

  In another time and another place, Private Renwar’s lone battle against a long-dead dragon magically reanimated from the skeletal remains of donor bodies would have earned him the highest medal of valor and a hero’s funeral. No one should have survived the destruction of that monster. But Renwar had, his body a fused bonfire between the competing magics of Rhal’s dragon and the Shadow Monarch’s oath. Perhaps his intent had been to die, but like Konowa, a sense of service had compelled him to make a far more difficult choice.

  I don’t know whether to pity him or hate him.

  “You might try talking to him,” Rallie said. “He’s lost a lot this night. We all have.”

  Konowa shivered and didn’t bother to lie to himself that it was because of the snow. Rallie’s uncanny ability to know, or at least sense, what he was thinking always left him feeling unsettled. He took a steadying breath and turned to face her. “I know, but he made a deal with Her,” he said. “He made a deal with the Shadow Monarch and became Her Emissary. He defeated the dragon because She gave him the power to do so.”

  Rallie shook her head, her frizzy gray hair obscuring her eyes. Her quill remained poised above the paper. Konowa noticed that despite the falling snow, not a single flake fell on the scroll laid out before her. “You’re stating the facts, but not the truth of them. He is Their Emissary, not Hers. He speaks for the dead now.”

  Konowa waved away the distinction with a hand. “Hers, theirs, the difference is moot. He forsook the regiment. He had a duty to fight against Her, not grow stronger by joining Her.”

  “Major, don’t you see, he followed your example,” Rallie said, brushing snow from her hair. “He sacrificed his well-being and that of this regiment for something greater.”

  “The oath remains, Rallie. Those killed still become shades doomed to do Her bidding. Every day Her power over them grows. What is it you think he’s accomplished?”

  Rallie shook her head from within her hood. “You’re wrong, Major. She no longer holds sway over them as She did before. It might seem small, but it is important to note. She might think She’s gained an ally in Private Renwar, but I think She’s miscalculated, and not for the last time.”

  Konowa’s retort stayed behind his teeth. It was easy to convince yourself that your enemy always knew what it was doing, that every setback you encountered was a clever trap laid by design. Konowa grudgingly considered that maybe Rallie was right. Maybe the Shadow Monarch underestimated Alwyn. Twice now She had failed to acquire a newly returned Star, first at the battle of Luuguth Jor in Elfkyna, and now in the Canyon of Bones in the Hasshugeb Expanse. In each case the returning Star, a vessel of natural magic attuned to the land from which it had originated, was free to transform, becoming a towering tree coursing with power. They were guardians in much the same way the Wolf Oaks of his homeland stood watch over the natural order, bridging the gap between the heavens and the earth.

  “Perhaps, but I don’t trust this,” he said, waving his hand vaguely to take in the devastation around them. A gust of wind blew snow in his face. “The Stars of Knowledge and Power are returning, and that appears to be positive, if you don’t take into account the growing likelihood that the Empire will be torn apart from the inside. Every colony and native people see this as their chance to be free. Who will have the power then? The Queen in Celwyn, presiding over an ever-dwindling realm, or the Shadow Monarch on Her mountain? Last time I checked, the ruling monarch of Calahr couldn’t do this.”

  Rallie waved her quill in the air. Snowflakes swirled around it as if deliberately trying to avoid it. “Which begs the question, why are we still here and not moving?”

  The sigh was past Konowa’s lips before he could stop himself. “Prince Tykkin is still searching through what’s left of Rhal’s library.” He wasn’t sorry the library had been destroyed in the fighting. The Prince’s quest to find the fabled lost library and bring back to Calahr all its purported treasure of knowledge accumulated over the ages had seemed more like a boy’s adventure than anything else. Perhaps it was Konowa’s lack of sentimentality, but a dusty tome on ancient mathematics or spells paled in comparison to the pressing needs of the here and now.

  He looked over at her. “I thought you would be there with him.” It wasn’t meant as a slight. Konowa genuinely assumed Rallie would be interested in ancient artifacts. A spark of self-preservation saved him from saying ancient out loud, but as he looked at her pursed lips he suddenly wished he were somewhere, anywhere, else.

  “What I’m looking for isn’t there,” Rallie said, her tone as gruff and kind as ever. She blew the hair from her eyes with a smoky puff from her cigar.

  Konowa held her stare for a moment. “Dare I ask what that is?”

  Rallie shrugged. “I’m not entirely certain myself. It’s more than annoying, I assure you.” Her face brightened and the quill stabbed the air. “But I will know it when I find it.”

  “Won’t we all,” Konowa said, turning again to look north. A wall of churning snow crawled ever closer. He reflexively hunched his shoulders and stamped his boots in the sand. “It’s time we were going.” Steel buttressed his voice. He saw his immediate future and it was crystal clear, despite the darkness.

  “Visyna was—is the one with the knack for weaving the weather. My abilities work along other lines,” she said, chuckling at the pun. “Putting aside the fact that you still have to pry His Highness out of the library, how do you think we’re going to make it through all that?”

  Konowa started to reach for his musket, then instead brought his left hand to rest against his thigh. The fingers of his right hand closed around the pommel of his saber. Black frost sparkled on the hand guard.

  “I’m going to have a little chat with the shades’ new leader,” he said, louder than he’d intended. Soldiers turned to look. The wind piled drifts of snow and sand against his boots as the blue light of the Star tree pulsed faster. He fixed his gaze on Private Renwar and started walking.

  Renwar remained where he stood, his head tilted to one side as his completely gray eyes stared without blinking, and without emotion. Black frost limned his wooden leg, a magically rendered replacement after his real leg was lost in the Battle of Luuguth Jor. The blue light of the Star tree shattered and refracted through the wind-driven snow, strobing the air with images that vanished and reappeared.

  Shades of the dead materialized around Renwar. They didn’t occupy space as much as create a black emptiness in the air, which they temporarily filled while crossing into this world from the one in which they now existed. Looking directly at them was difficult, and not just because of the emotional shock of recognizing the faces of friends and comrades. It physically hurt Konowa to stare at them for any length of time, as if his vision were being drawn into their world, a place where no living being could survive. Pain flowed out from them like a tide, and it was growing stronger.

  Konowa narrowed his focus to Renwar. The soldier’s gray eyes gave nothing away.

  Unbidden, and without orders, the Iron Elves began to form up behind Konowa, falling into step as he marched across the battlefield. They numbered little more than a hundred now, their ranks decimated by claw, fang, arrow, and magics no soldier should ever have to face. Yet they had, and they would again before this was over. Konowa would understand if they loathed him. It was his doing that had bound them to the regiment for eternity. He hated himself for it, but like them, he was a soldier, and together they would see this through to the end. It wasn’t particularly elegant or even noble, but it was what a soldier did. And so they marched with him, stride for stride. They could hate him a thousand times over, but they would follow where he led, and for th
at he loved them all.

  They were the Iron Elves.

  His Iron Elves.

  Konowa kept walking. The knuckles of his right hand lost all color as frost fire sparkled along the entire length of his scabbard. All eyes, living and dead, were on him as he led what was left of the regiment across the sand. With each step, the black acorn against his chest grew colder.

  Behind the regiment, the fine, sharp stitch of quill on paper resumed. A legend was being woven into the fabric of history. The late-evening cries of thousands of celebrating patrons in pubs around the Empire would no doubt repeat with full-throated joy what Rallie Synjyn penned this night.

  Anyone brave enough to look over Rallie’s shoulder, however, would have seen that her quill was not flowing in a smooth left to right path across the page, but instead tracing the same shape repeatedly on one small section of the paper. There, the shape finally clarified and revealed itself as the ink glittered and flickered in the blue light of the Star.

  It was the image of a black acorn wreathed in flame with two words in ancient elvish script emblazoned within it.

  Æri Mekah:

  Into the Fire.

  The new forest of sarka har was starving. The Shadow Monarch’s blood trees drove their roots into the cold sand of the Hasshugeb Expanse and found little to feed on. They flung their branches in ever widening arcs trying to trap anything unlucky enough to stray near. Spawned by the Shadow Monarch’s frost-burnt Silver Wolf Oak, these twisted saplings craved the heavy, bitter ores found deep in the distant mountains of the Hyntaland. Here, however, in this wide-open plain of dunes and disintegrating rock, there was barely enough to keep them alive. They took what they could from anything living, but there were not enough humans in this sparsely populated land to satisfy their hunger. Rakkes and dark elves roamed between their trunks and would have been easy hunting, but Her Emissary had forbidden such feeding, and they had no choice but to obey its order.

  They needed other prey.

  A hint of metal tantalized them to the south. They had no idea it was called Suhundam’s Hill, or that elves from Her land now lived there, only that they sensed the great upthrust of rock in the desert floor through vibrations received in their roots. The rock and what lived there promised them ore and blood and something else. There was a darkness there that spoke to them in a language they understood, but how to get to it? The power of the returned Star, the Jewel of the Desert, kept them at bay, hemming them in along the northern coast of the Expanse.

  As their need grew, so did their frenzy. Again and again, the sarka har flung their roots forward in an effort to seek purchase in the freezing sand and move south. All the while, more sarka har sprang forth from the ground behind the tree line that marked the edge of the Shadow Monarch’s influence and the beginning of the land now under the protection of the returned Star. Black, gnarled roots stabbed again and again like clawing fingers into the crust of snow over the desert floor in an effort to get to the rock. They scrabbled at the ground in desperation. Trunks shattered and roots snapped and sheared off in the growing violence, but no matter how hard they tried, they could go no further south.

  Rakkes and dark elves began to fall to the flailing limbs. A limb skewered a rakke in the chest, the beast’s howl of pain cut short as it was torn apart by others joining the feast. A dark elf tilted its head, staring with unblinking eyes at a sight it knew should not be. It continued to stare even after a branch scythed its head off and sent it tumbling to the frozen earth.

  When no blast of frost fire struck down the trees, more began to search for food. The screaming didn’t last long. When the last of the Shadow Monarch’s creatures had been slaughtered within the forest, the sarka har thrashed the air in search of more. Their appetite was whet; now they needed to sate it.

  Unable to move forward because of the power of the Star, the sarka har did what they knew best. The ground was soft here, not like the mountain of Her realm.

  The digging would be easy.

  Roots burrowed down through the sand, no longer questing for food, but for power. They found fault lines and hairline cracks in the deep bedrock and worked their way in, prying deeper into the darkness. The ground above shook. Cracks opened up in the desert floor, swallowing dozens of sarka har into its black depths. Yet Her forest was relentless, pushing its roots ever deeper. When it seemed that their search would be fruitless, a lone sarka har found disturbed rock in a channel running from the surface. Its roots wormed into the passage and followed it down. Whenever the passage had been dug, it had been filled in again millennia ago. Nothing had been down this far in a very long time.

  Other sarka har followed, and soon the passage was filled with writhing, pulsing roots. Only the Shadow Monarch’s Silver Wolf Oak had plunged its roots this deep before. The sarka har knew only instinct, and instinct told them there was great power down here.

  Sand crackled underfoot as Konowa came to a halt five yards away from Private Renwar. Only then did he realize he hadn’t given the regiment the order to halt. He half-expected to see them march right past him, but they came to a smooth stop two yards behind him. Konowa didn’t need to turn around to see it; he heard it as every right boot slammed down at exactly the same time.

  Konowa forced himself to release his grip on his saber. He casually adjusted the hem of his jacket while taking care to look directly at Private Renwar. I’ll be damned if I’ll speak first, he thought.

  Silence cocooned the tableau. Snow swirled everywhere, piling in drifts a foot high, but in the space around Private Renwar not a single snowflake fell.

  Konowa forced himself to look past Renwar to the shades of the dead. He squinted as if looking into the sun. Their anguish was growing stronger with every passing day. It flowed out from them with an intensity that caught Konowa in its glare and wouldn’t let go.

  He easily recognized Regimental Sergeant Major Lorian sitting astride the warhorse Zwindarra, the pair of them felled at the battle of Luuguth Jor. Konowa hadn’t considered before now that the horse obviously hadn’t taken the oath, but Lorian had talked about the bond between a cavalryman and his horse. Tragically, the bond must have been strong enough to carry over into death, dooming the horse to a fate it had no hope of understanding. And there was one-eyed Private Meri Fwynd, the patch still covering his lost eye. Their forms shimmered as if black flames made up their bodies. Konowa couldn’t shake the feeling that he was peering into the abyss. Each shade appeared darker at its core, as if a bottomless pit now replaced each dead man’s soul. Konowa shuddered at the thought and banished it from his mind. He took a moment to acknowledge each dead face, fearing to see the dwarf among them, but no shade of the salty sergeant appeared. Konowa wished he could feel relieved, but he suspected the white fire of Kaman Rhal had taken Yimt. Private Kester Harkon’s shade never rejoined the regiment, and it seemed Sergeant Arkhorn’s now shared his fate. Maybe, Konowa allowed, it was a blessing. At least those two weren’t condemned to suffer in eternal service.

  Konowa ignored the coursing flood of pent-up energy inside him and pushed the frost fire back down. He wouldn’t be ruled by emotions. He knew that with all eyes on him, he had to keep his composure. He was an officer in the Calahrian Army, and standing before him was a private in his regiment. If they were buried in snow a mile deep, he would wait for Renwar to salute.

  Private Alwyn Renwar continued to stand and stare. His gray eyes appeared depthless and cast his face in a deathly pallor, but the power that resided behind them was unmistakable. Konowa would have shivered if his body had been any warmer.

  Somewhere behind Konowa, a ramrod began to slide out of its brass rings. The sound of metal on metal rang like crystal. A soldier was preparing to load a shot.

  Renwar’s eyes never flickered, but Konowa felt the communication between the private and the shades. Though it didn’t seem possible, the air turned colder and every lungful stung as if filled with tiny razors.

  Movement to Konowa’s left drew both his
and Renwar’s gaze. Rallie stood off to the side, her quill in one hand and a large scroll of paper in the other. At first Konowa thought she was scratching her head, then realized it was a gesture aimed at Renwar. The private looked back to Konowa. Slowly, as if trying to remember something from a very distant past, he stood to attention and raised his right hand in salute. It wasn’t parade ground sharp, but for here and now it was enough.

  More surprisingly and definitely unnerving, the shades followed suit.

  Konowa didn’t fool himself that the dead saw him as their leader anymore, but they were clearly following the lead of Renwar, and he was still a living member of the regiment Konowa commanded—the Prince notwithstanding.

  Konowa waited three beats, enjoying the building tension because now it was his to control, then returned the salute. The air warmed as a collective sigh passed among the soldiers.

  “Right,” Konowa said, taking his time to exude a calm he didn’t feel. “Private Renwar, I’ll need you and the lads there to form up and follow me. We’re heading due north for the coast.” He raised his voice and shifted weight from one boot to another in a studied act of nonchalance. “These Stars are going to keep dropping from here to hell. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t plan on spending the rest of my life, living or dead, tracking them down one by one. It’s time we took this fight to its home, and that’s the Shadow Monarch’s mountain.”

  The cheer that greeted this pronouncement was hardly boisterous, but it had a flinty edge to it that filled Konowa with hope. The regiment was still with him . . . or at least those living were.

  “You ask a lot,” Private Renwar said in his new role as spokesman of the shades. He spoke quietly and carefully, sounding more like the young soldier Konowa knew. Konowa chose to view it as a positive sign even if the response wasn’t. He decided to bull ahead.