As Iron Falls

by Bryce O'Connor

  “Oh, don’t look so glum,” she said with a titter that set Adrion’s hair on end. “If they’d agreed to our terms, then they’d still have some value. As is, they’ll just try to sow discord among the other cities.”

  Adrion nodded absently, not really seeing her. Indeed, his mind was elsewhere, wondering silently how much longer it would be before he was suddenly the one who lost all value.

  And so it begins, a tired sort of voice mumble in the back of his mind.

  SNEAK PEEK: CHAPTER 1

  “It is in dreams that we find ourselves closest to the gods. For a moment we are gifted with the chance to touch Their world, a place of infinite and impossibility.

  The trouble, of course, lies in the price we occasionally pay for these ventures, for it is a fool who does not consider that the home of the gods should not also be that of the demons and devils of lesser—but crueler—powers…”

  — The Grandmother

  There had been a time, in Abir Fahaji’s youth, when he recalled being unencumbered by the dreams. It was a period in years long past, a short breath of freedom memory allowed him to revisit, before he grew from boy to man and the sight began dominating his nights. Of late, the visions had been less frequent. He didn’t know if the Twins had begun to take pity on him in his old age, or perhaps if it was merely owed to the loss of faculties that were a natural part of the passage of time. More likely, Abir couldn’t help but think that the recent reprieve was due to the thrum of activity that surrounded him in the war camp, the buzz of busyness that rose up at all hours of the day and well after the setting of the Sun around the little tent he shared with Karan, near the northern head of the march. He was, after all, still accustomed to nights spent in the cramped coolness of a locked room, surrounded by half a hundred other slaves, not a one among them brave enough to so much as whimper out in cold and hunger for fear of bringing the guards of Karesh Syl down on their heads.

  The shouts of men and women, the growled calls of the atherian, even the sound of steel ringing against steel in the distance as some of the Dragon’s officers put their brigades through evening drills… It all served as a soothing lullaby to Abir, reminding him that he was, in fact, still free.

  Despite this, however, there were yet some nights where the dreams simply refused to be kept at bay.

  This time, Abir found himself wandering along the shores of a lake he didn’t know. All about him, men and women and children were moving through rings of covered and hard-topped wagons, smiling and laughing as they set about making their camps and building their cooking fires. Most had grey eyes, and their long hair was dreaded about their shoulders, bleached by extended exposure to the Sun that blazed, alone and omnipotent, in the sky to the east. They wore simple traveler’s clothes, loose and comfortable so as to fend off the oppressive desert heat, and what skin wasn’t covered in silk and thin fabrics was bronzed a golden tan. Abir didn’t know where he’d been taken, in the stupors of the dream, but he couldn’t help but feel that the energy in the air—the happiness and joy of the families settling in for what looked like an extended stay along the borders of the lake—was the sort of merriment that only existed in world of the past.

  Ignoring all, Abir kept walking, pulled through the running groups of little ones and their working parents, the cheer and gayety of the rings dimming to his ears as something pulled him onward.

  For several minutes he walked, the sand beneath his bare feet shifting pleasantly, the flat sheen of the water’s surface to his right only occasionally shifting and rippling as a hot breeze whisked down from the high dunes that surrounded the place on all sides. Here and there, pockets of narrow palm trees rose along the edges of the shore, their tops bent as they grew too tall for their own weight, their broad green leaves shifting in the wind. It was towards such a grove that Abir found himself moving, a large grouping of trees tucked into the nook of the southern crescent of the lake. As he approached, the festive sounds of the families began to die away in truth, fading with every step he took even as he continued to move through the running and shouting and laughing people. By the time he was free of them, stepping beyond the larger collective of wagons and carts, the dream had gone all-but-silent around Abir, leaving nothing but the sound of the water lapping ever so gently up and down the sand as he kept walking.

  Approaching the palms, Abir felt a thrill of fear as he took in the scene nestled between the shore and the edge of the trees.

  The caravan must once have been a grand thing, he thought. Nine wagons in all, the circled they’d once formed would have left a spacious expanse between the carts, with ample room to accommodate whatever families had once comprised its residents. Stepping towards it, for a half a moment Abir caught a flicker of something, a distortion, like an echo from some distance place. The wagons standing tall, a pen of some score of horses looped along its west edge, and a glimpse of dozens of men, women, and children crowded around a massive, multi-colored fire in the very center of the ring.

  Then the echo was gone, leaving nothing but the truth for Abir to take in.

  What little remained of the timber and iron that had made up most of the wagons was blackened and smoking, and here and their fire still clung to the wood or ate at the shifting canvas cloth that had roofed some of the carts. Not a few among them were overturned, flipped onto their sides as their wheels spun uselessly in the silence that still clung to the world. To his left, the horses that had been proudly strutting about lay dead, scattered and still in their wide pen, fallen into the bloody sand with throats cut open in jagged wounds. Seeing this, Abir began to shake, fearing now what he would find if he kept on, praying to the Moon that She would stop him, that She would keep him from approaching.

  Abir’s feet, though, kept on of their own accord.

  He passed between the nearest pair of smoldering wagons, into the emptiness of the ring. No bodies lay broken around him, as he had feared, but the smell of burning hair and flesh told Abir not to look too closely into the charred husks of the carts. The sand sifting through his bare toes was streaked with red, churned up and filthy by what must have been near a hundred sets of scrambling boots, and here and their bloody swords and axes and other such weapons had fallen or been abandoned, their wet blades glistening in the Sun.

  Without pause, Abir continued to move across the ring. He still felt the pull, still felt the need to press forward, approaching the place he knew he was meant to end his dream. Across the ring, a single wagon still stood intact, apparently untouched by the fires that had consumed others. It was—as the rest might once have been—a plain thing, lacking ornamentation or flamboyance. A simple bench ridged its leading wall, where a driver might have sat, and its surfaces had been layered with pelts and tanned skins, likely to keep away the dust and sand as the wagons made their treks across the dunes. Stepping over a child’s straw doll, Abir neared the wagon cautiously, his skin prickling with every inch he got closer.

  Still, in spite of his trepidation, his hands moved without thought once he reached it, pulling aside the hide hangings that formed a door in the wagon’s side before taking the frame of floor and entrance to heave himself up into the covered space.

  As Abir stood tall in the little room formed by the cart’s hard top, he knew at once that he was in the right place. There was a resonation, within the wagon, a mystical sort of power that flexed its will all about him. Over his head, crystals and gleaming stones hung off bits of cord and copper wire from the ribbed ceiling, reflecting and refracting the limited light that slipped through seams of the plank-and-hide walls. Shelves lined either side of the space, themselves heavy with an eerie collection of objects and oddities. Animal skulls, gnarled plants, vials of what looked like earth and alcohol and a dozen other solutions and materials he didn’t recognize. To his right, a makeshift bed of the oddest proportions took up much of the room, a narrow cot with an additional section added to its right side, forming an L-shaped corner. Leather and cloth straps hung loose over th
e ruffle sheets, as though someone had been held firm upon it not so long ago.

  And there, in the very center of the space, a woman sat waiting for him, cross-legged on the floor on the far side of a low, flat table, her face turned up towards him.

  Abir shivered as he took in the figure, for her figure was truly all he had to take in. She reminded him, in a way, of the White Witch, the Dragon’s companion and confident. Both women exuded a sort of quiet power—though Syrah Brahnt’s had recently been in frequent flux—and this woman had her face covered, much like the Priestess had been keeping hers since the army had crossed the border out of Perce and into the Southern realms two weeks prior. Whereas Brahnt’s face was covered out of necessity, though, this woman’s shawl was more of a death mask. The fabric was rough and dirty, hanging over her features and clinging to every dip of her cheeks and mouth and eyes until she seemed more dead than alive. It was longer, as well, falling about her torso until it covered her entirely, like a funeral gown.

  All-in-all, Abir’s only impression—as he moved to sit down unbidden on the other side of the table—was that he was in the company of the corpse.

  Then, though, the woman spoke, and at once he recognized her calm, warm voice.

  “The time approaches, Abir Fahaji,” the woman said gently, though her mouth didn’t move beneath the cloth. “But it has not come yet. You must tell them so.”

  Abir nodded slowly. In some distant part of his mind, he knew that he should ask who it was he was supposed to tell, and why, but he had long since learned not to question the mysteries of his sight.

  Instead, Abir smiled.

  “Your grandson does well,” he said quietly. “He grieved for you, when I told him you had passed.”

  Still the woman’s face didn’t so much as flinch beneath the shawl.

  “He will see me again,” she said with a brief dip of her head. “But no yet. And not like this. You must tell them. The time approaches.”

  “I will,” he said, not voicing his apprehensions.

  The waver in his words, though, seemed to give his concerns away, because there was a dark, mirthless chuckle from beneath the cloth.

  “You fear you will not find them,” the woman said, stating the fact. “Do not. I’ve little doubt that will be the case. Their ranks grow restless, impatient. They wish for their prince to rise now, but it is not time. Tell them it approaches, but not yet.”

  Abir swallowed nervously, but nodded once more. “How will I convince them? How will I show them that what I say is true? I am a mad man, to most. Even those I call my friends often do not know if my tellings are fortune or folly.”

  “Tell them she who is blind sees all,” the woman’s said. “Tell them those beneath the mountains watch, and wait.”

  Abir frowned. “Will they understand it? Will they know what I mean?”

  The figure inclined her head, as though confident her words would carry the message she intended.

  “What if they don’t?”

  The question slipped out of Abir before he could stop himself. It was one thing to bow to the mysterious of powers beyond his comprehension, but another entirely to lean against a man’s own fears. Abir was happy. For the first time in fifty years, since he’d been thrown into chains for delivering a prophecy to the leaders of Karesh Nan that the Tash hadn't appreciated, he was happy. But he was worried, too. He was afraid. The Dragon and his generals held him in high enough regard, but the common soldiers whispered about him, the kindest of them calling him senile or touched, the cruelest claiming his sight was an affliction, an unnatural thing. He was not so easily convinced his words would ring true.

  “They must believe.”

  The figure’s words were not cold, but they were hard. Abir watched, apprehension crawling up his spine, as one of the woman’s hands reached up, pulling at the cloth about her face. It began to slide off, slowly dragged away in the grasp of her skeletal fingers.

  “They must believe,” the woman repeated, and as the fabric slipped inch by inch over her head, her voice changed. Second by second it grew rough, as though her throat were becoming parched, or her lungs were falling to work. “She waits for you, to the north of the great sands. She will patient, will seek the right moment to bring all her strength to bear. She is the larger darkness holding the strings that make the shadows dance, and she cannot be underestimated.” The edge of the cloth neared the crested her scalp and shoulders. “What must you tell them, Abir Fahaji?”

  “That the time approaches, but it is not now,” Abir said at once, something like terror lancing through his chest as he watched, unable to look away. “That she who is blind sees all, and that they beneath the mountains watch and… and…”

  The cloth fell away, then, tumbling free from the woman’s body, and for a moment Abir could only stare in horror at the wasted figure, taking in what had been done to the corpse.

  Then he screamed.

  He screamed and screamed, his body frozen in place, his eyes fixated and as though by some cruel magic. Even as the woman stood, the dream shifting around her, he screamed. Even as she moved around the table towards him, he screamed. His voice broke as he shrieked in fear, sensation returning to him as the vision began to fall apart around them. The cart shimmered and vanished, the wooded floor beneath him becoming reed matting. She reached him just as he began to rise from the depths of the sight, her dead hands grabbing him by the shoulders as she leaned in, her terrible leer inches away.

  “She who devoured me waits for you,” the vision rasped into his face. “Sand and snow cannot meet flame unprepared! They must believe! Repeat the words!”

  She began to fade, then, falling away like sand in the wind. Still, though, he could feel her skeletal grip about his arms, and in the desperate hope to be free of her Abir did as she commanded, howling as loudly as he could.

  “SHE WATCHES! SHE WHO IS BLIND SEES ALL! IT IS NOT TIME! IT IS NOT TIME! THEM BENEATH THE MOUNTAINS WAIT! IT IS NOT TIME!”

  And with that, the horrid image of the ravaged figure drifted to dust before his eyes, tumbling to nothing, her nightmarish features replaced by a shocked face of very different proportions. The sensation of her hands around the wasted muscles of his shoulders, too, changed. The sharp boniness of the grasp was replaced by a stronger grip, claws digging into his skin as they held him firm. His mind reeled to catch up to the falling away of the vision, and Abir began to tremble as his eyes took in his strange surroundings.

  He was no longer in his cloth hammock, where he’d fallen asleep to the crack of the flames in the center of he and Karan’s tent. Instead, he was in a much larger enclosure, with a broader fire illuminating the angled leather and cloth ceiling, the smoke carried upwards and away through a large hole in the top of the space. In the shadows all around him, no less than a dozen figures were staring at him, some half-sitting up from the reeds where they looked to have been sleeping, others already on their feet. The fear the dream had instill in Abir lingered as he took in their serpentine features, reptilian eyes gleaming in the light, their clawed hands and thick tails reflected in bouncing shadows against the walls of the tent.

  That fear, though, seemed reflected right back at him in those eyes, every shade of gold wide, gaping at him in some mixture of awe and terror.

  “Old man. Look at me.”

  Abir’s shivering redoubling as the accented words whispered in a hot breath across his cheek and neck. Slowly, he looked around, staring into the face of the atherian who had hold of him. He recognized her at once, though this did nothing to stop tensing instinctively as he took in her maw of yellowed, broken teeth, so close to his own face.

  For a moment, he almost gave a shrill laugh, recalling how the ghastly specter had so casually cast aside his fear that he would not find those his words were meant to.

  Sure enough, the female’s clawed fingers tightened about his arms as she spoke, her voice almost pleading in its desperation.

  “Old man,” Za’len hissed implorin
gly. “‘Them beneath the mountains.’ Tell us! Tell us what it is you know of the Undercaves!”

  SNEAK PEEK: CHAPTER 2

  He comes, he comes,

  The Monster wakes,

  Beware a beast’s sharp fury.

  He comes, he comes,

  The Dragon roars,

  So rise, brave soldiers, hurry.

  —A Call to Arms, first draft, by Ha’sin Amlir

  When the war finally reached them, it came as a plume of dust and sand against the night.

  From his place atop the highest dune his scouts had been able to find in the area, Raz i’Syul Arro watched the riders approach with narrowed eyes, following the trail that blotted out a patch of Her Stars along the western horizon. He wore a heavy pelt cloak over his armor, partially to ward off the chill of the desert evening, and partially to keep the steel from gleaming and giving their position away in the light of the Moon that hung, bright and cool, in the sky before him. The claws of his left hand, encased in the heavy metal gauntlet, drummed impatiently again the head of the sagaris—a war-axe with a curved spike to counterbalance its narrow head—hanging at his hip. His right, clad in the same gauntlet, was wrapped about the bleached wood shaft of Ahna, resting in her habitual place over his shoulder. Her twin blades, elegantly curved like antlers, where covered in an old rucksack, and he kept her heavy bottom point low to keep it, too, from catching the light.