As Iron Falls

by Bryce O'Connor

  “Aye, I am!” he shouted back, proud of the bravado he managed to inject in his voice and praying to the Sun the men closest to him wouldn’t notice his knees shaking. “Are you going to offer us terms, Dragon? You won’t convince us to betray our city!”

  At that, Arro’s golden eyes narrowed dangerously, and the tip of Bahrek’s scimitar began to tremble as his quivering reached his hands.

  “Convince you here?” the Dragon ask, finally looking away again to sweep his gaze once more over the faces of the other soldiers. “When you’re surrounded by your men? Of course I couldn’t.” His eyes fell once more on Bahrek. “As for your question—”

  Had Bahrek blinked, he would have missed the movement. Quick as the flickering of the shadows around them, Raz i’Syul Arro closed the gap between them. Instead of bearing down on the captain with his spear, though, Bahrek felt the leather and steel edge of the gauntlet of the Dragon’s left hand collide with the bone beneath his ear as Arro dealt him a chopping blow that sent his vision spinning immediately into darkness.

  The last words he heard were the Dragon’s, dull and resigned, like the atherian were muttering to himself.

  “The time for negotiations is long past, I think.”

  And then all Bahrek heard were the screams of men and the sounds of rending flesh and shearing steel before his mind gave in to darkness of unconscious.

  Raz ripped into the surviving soldiers without a moment’s hesitation, lancing forward and cleaving Ahna in a diagonal upwards blow through the gut and chest of two who were standing beside each other nearby. Even as they fell he was moving, though, dashing sideways and using the rearing forms of the panicking horses as cover while the dviassegai lashed back and forth. Ordinarily, he would never had launched himself into an offensive against such staggering odds. As it was, he was sure he would get an earful from Syrah, later. He wasn’t worried, though. He had faith in his generals, watching and waiting atop the dunes above.

  Sure enough, as he knocked a blade free of one unfortunate soldier’s hand and twisted to skewer the poor man through throat with Ahna’s bottom tip, Raz made out a familiar, gravel voice booming out over the renewed battle.

  “CHARGE!”

  Leaping backwards as two more soldiers threw themselves at him, Raz disengaged from the fight just long enough to look up. Akelo Aseni’s kuja bowmen—the dark-skinned Percian plainsmen who had hunted the wild savannahs of Perce before being thrown into chains by the cities—had disappeared from the ridges. In their places, a thousand armored fighters were barreling down into the valley from either side, running or sliding along the smooth sand as they howled defiantly. Together they formed a myriad wash of every race of man: Southern, Northern, Percian, West Isler, and men and women from every other corner of the world. Interspersed among them, some hundred atherian, male and female alike, roared as they leapt into the fray. The group bore a mismatched array of armor, most with pieces of white-and-gold or brown-and-red leather that had once been the uniform of the soldiers of Karesh Syl and Karesh Nan respectively, and their weaponry was equally as scattered. Some fought with swords and shields, others with hammers or axes or short-spears. Among the lizard-kind, not a few among them didn’t bother with steel of any sort, ripping into the Dynec soldiers with tooth and claw and tail. Overseeing them all, one last archer stood still on the ridge of the eastern dune, clad in a full set of white-and-gold dyed leather, firing off arrows with such awesome precision it might have seemed inhuman to anyone who had not witnessed it before. Despite his advanced years, Akelo Aseni stood tall and strong as the last of the army poured down the hill around him, his broad shoulders straining against his armor as he drew his bow to its extent time and time again. Even as he fired into the melee below, the old Percian shouted out encouragements to the men, spurning them forward.

  Unable to keep himself from grinning, Raz dove back into the fight.

  It was a short, brutal battle, lasting no more than ten minutes in its extent. A few times Raz saw Dynec soldiers scrambling up the incline of the dunes in an attempt to escape the slaughter of the ambush, but those that chose the east hill never made it halfway up before tumbling back down with an arrow between the eyes. Those that attempted the west hill were often blasted down again in flashes of magic, while the ones that made it to the top tended to fall back down already dead.

  Raz made a mental note to compliment Karan on her improving skills.

  He himself moved around the battlefield of his own fashion, engage pairs, trios, and even the occasional foursomes as the opportunities presented themselves. Before long Raz had lost himself to the thrum of the violence, burying his conscious mind deep and allowing body and instinct to take over the dance of blood. Eventually Ahna became too unwieldy to use in proximity to his own men as they drowned the Dynec riders in overwhelming numbers, and so he left her skewered through the ribs of one soldiers as he somersaulted under the horizontal blow of another, regaining his feet with the sagaris drawn in one hand as his straight-edged gladius bared in the other. The paired weapons went about their work at once, cutting a precise pattern through the swath of fighters as efficiently as physician might wield a scalpel. The axe hooked and redirected blows while the sword took advantage of the forced opening to do its grisly work. Before long, Raz was surrounded by bodies and pockets of fighting. Some of the soldiers threw down their weapons in surrender, but most shouted out Dynec’s name as they fought to reach him, thinking perhaps to cleave the head of the army from its shoulders. He respected their bravery, in his own way. From the depths of the battlefog, Raz prayed to the Moon that she would carry their souls quickly into Her Stars even as he cut them down one after the other after the other. The sagaris whipped out, dragging a sword down before flashing up again to split the wielder’s skull in two from the jaw up. The gladius hummed and splattered blood as it carved matching gashes into the throats of two men who approached too close together from the same side. Raz’s clawed feet did their own work, ripping through leather, cloth, and flesh alike with savage kicks, and what men didn’t die of their wounds fell silent as his tail lashed out to break necks and cave chests in with matching crunches of shattering bone.

  Eventually, only a straggling few of the two hundred and fifty proud soldiers of the fringe city remained, and before long even this handful fell or threw down their blades. As Raz retracted his gladius from where he’d buried it into the throat of a man who had tried to run him through from behind, he stood the resounding cheers of victory rising up from the fighters under his command, many of them thrusting their weapons into the air in celebration.

  “Gather the horses!” Akelo’s voice shouted out from nearby, and Raz turned to see the old man approaching him through the crowd to his right, bow still in one hand. “See to the wounded and the survivors! Those with serious injuries should be seen by the Witch, but deal mercy where you must!”

  At once, the victorious cheering subdued, replaced with shouts of “Aye, sir!” Raz gave the Percian a crooked smiled as the humans and atherian all around them began moving together, transitioning with almost-professional swiftness into triage groups.

  “I’d say that went smooth enough,” he said as Akelo came to stand before him, dark eyes taking in the dozen-or-so bodies scattered about Raz’s feet. “About as good an outcome as one could expect, at least.”

  The Percian nodded, then lifted his gaze to scan the army going about their duties. Everywhere the horses were being calmed, and cries of the injured and dying were shifting as they were heaved up and rushed eastward, back towards the camp.

  “An easy victory,” Akelo answered finally, frowning as an atherian barreled passed, holding a human woman with a broken spearhead buried in her shoulder in his thick arms. “Nothing to be too proud of, before we get the casualty toll.”

  “It’s a start, though,” Raz said with a shrug, moving aside as a pair of Dynec soldiers were led passed at sword-point, arms raised in concession. “It’s been too long since we took Kare
sh Nan. An early victory will raise moral for the battles to come.”

  “Things don’t look too bad from above, either.”

  The voice, soothing even in its uneasiness, had an instant effect on Raz. His body loosened, and the residual tension he hadn't even known had been lingering in his limbs faded away. Together, he and Akelo turned to see Syrah picking her way towards them through the carnage, Karan right behind her, blades drawn and bloody as the female scanned the bodies of the dead for any sign of trouble. Raz couldn’t help but feel a little relieved as the Priestess came to stand on his other side, opposite Akelo, her face twisted in distaste at the scene before them.

  “Could you give an estimate?” he asked her, and the woman’s brow crinkled as she thought for a moment. She held firm to the wall of arcane fire some thirty feet up the pass from them, willing it on to illuminate the work of the army, but with her back to it and her black silk hood up over her head, the shadows fell heavily against the bags under her eyes. She hadn't been sleeping well, these last months. New nightmares plagued her every night, replacing the old ones that had been terrifying enough. Only when he held her to him until the Sun came up did she ever find some measure of peaceful slumber, but their duties within the camp didn’t always allow that, and on those nights it was Raz who didn’t often sleep well.

  Once more, he hurt, looking at the toll the past was taking on the woman.

  “Ten, maybe fifteen dead?” Syrah guessed, her good eye following the shivering from of a West Isler being hurried eastward on a shield by two other men. “I’ll get you a full report by morning.”

  “Afternoon will be fine,” he told her gently, sliding his sagaris into the loop on his belt and wiping his hands clean of blood on his cloak before brushing her hood gently off her head. Her white skin came alive, then, brighter in the open air. “Try to get some sleep tonight, when you can.”

  Syrah’s turned her face up to him, and the gratefulness in her smile was buried under resigned—almost amused—doubt that crinkled around her rose-colored eye.

  “Something tells me not to hold out much hope for that I,” she said with half-a-laugh.

  At that very moment, there was a shout from up the path.

  “Witch! Someone get the Witch! We need help here!”

  Syrah’s face tensed, and she reached out to take Raz’s hand briefly, giving it a quick squeeze through his gauntlet.

  “Duty calls,” she said in a hurry, and Raz nodded and let her go. The Priestess exchanged a quick look with Karan, then the pair of them took off in a rush, running towards the shout.

  “I won’t get used to it anytime soon, them calling her ‘Witch,’” Akelo muttered in something like annoyance.

  “It’s at her request,” Raz said, though he nodded in understanding. “I think it’s an attempt to come to terms with things…”

  Akelo snorted, then slung his bow over his shoulder and pulled his leather helm off with both hands. His black hair was peppered with grey and white, but the hollowness of his cheeks and the emptiness in his eyes Raz had seen when they’d first met—when the man had been a slave in the oar-galley of a pirate ship—were long gone.

  “Even if that’s true, there must be a better way to go about it,” Akelo mumbled, tucking his helmet under one arm as he continued to watch the direction Syrah and Karan had disappeared into the masses. Eventually, he gave Raz a side-long look. “She still hasn’t picked up her staff, has she?”

  Raz shook his head sadly. “Nor any of her old things.”

  Akelo sighed, reaching up to rub his temples with thumb and forefinger.

  “Well, I suppose we all have our own demons to fight,” he grumbled, turning away and starting back towards the wall of flames that was finally fading as Syrah moved away from it. “And some are more pressing than others, for the time being.”

  Raz snorted in ascension, moving to follow the man the short walk back up the path.

  “Have we heard word if there were any other attacks?” he asked as they moved. It had been a concern since dusk, when the first scouts had reported sighting of the riders. Where there was on assault force, there might be more.

  Akelo shook his head. “None. I’m assuming Dynec didn’t want to spread itself too thin, given our proximity.”

  “Good,” Raz said with a relieved huff, stepping away briefly to jerk Ahna out of the corpse he had left her in. “Though we could have used the horses.”

  “With the numbers we’ve gained tonight, it will bring our cavalry up to over twelve-hundred strong, assuming we can find decent riders,” Akelo said over his shoulder as Raz wiped the dviassegai’s blades clean on the dead soldier’s uniform. “‘You know what they say about looking at gift horses too carefully, I’m sure.”

  “Twelve-hundred,” Raz repeated thoughtfully, ignoring the joke and catching up to the old man in a few quick strides, Ahna back over his shoulder. “More would be better. We can count on the Mahsadën having a greater number, at the very least. Word is Karavyl trades for horses with the Seven Cities on a regular basis.”

  “And if Dynec was willing to risk losing two hundred and fifty in an attempt to distract us, they’re numbers might not be anything to sneeze at either,” Akelo said with a nod.

  “Well,” Raz said with a snort as the two of them came to a final stop five yards from the edge of the shrinking white flames, looking down at their feet, “as for that, there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

  Akelo, for his part, only grunted in agreement, then stuck a foot out to flip the unconscious commander, still sprawled face-first in the sand where Raz had dropped him, onto his back.

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  Note From the Author

  [aka: The Plight of the Writer]

  It seems insane that I find myself yet again at this point, wrapping up As Iron Falls. It is such an incredible feeling to see your characters come to life, and yet the prospect of releasing them out into the world is also terrifying. Release them we must, though, and we do so with the hopes of getting them in front of as many eyes as the world will allow.

  It is with this note that I move on to a more personal plea, a cry for assistance from all of you who got to the end of the book and were even just a little bit sad to have to put it down:

  Please, please, consider rating and reviewing As Iron Falls on Amazon or any of your favorite book sites..

  Many people don’t know that there are thousands of books published every day, most of those in the USA alone. Over the course of a year, a quarter of a million authors will vie for a small place in the massive world of print and publishing. We fight to get even the tiniest traction, fight to climb upward one inch at a time towards the bright light of bestsellers, publishing contracts, and busy book signings.

  Thing is, we need all the help we can get.

  Your positive input into that world, however small you believe your voice may be, makes the climb just a little bit easier. Rating and reviewing books you enjoy gives your favorite authors a boost upward.

  With that all out of the way, thank you so much for picking up As Iron Falls. If you’d like to give me feedback directly, have a question about Raz and his adventures, or just want to chat, drop me a message on Twitter or Facebook, or directly at bryce@bryceoconnorbooks.com.

  As ever, it has been an honor to entertain you, and I vigorously hope you continue to follow The Wings of War series to see what becomes of Raz i’Syul Arro.

  Bryce O’Connor

  https://www.patreon.com/bryceoconnor

 

 

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