Call Your Steel

by G. D. Penman

  Metharia smiled up at her, “You are beautiful.”

  Lucia twisted her neck around to look along her new form, and then snapped back to Metharia, “Not to be too vain, but I think that I believe that for the first time.”

  Lucia roared and Metharia threw herself back into the room covering her ears. Then Lucia bellowed out across the land, “Look at your Eater now. Look at what Lucia has become and know. You are mine and I will protect you.”

  Chapter 21- The Story of the Stone

  The lower mines were flooded, and they had been for days. It blocked access to deepest cavern and while a brave few Chosen had struggled and swum through the pitch-black waters to receive their orders it had been pointless. Vulkas was not interested in them. Its mind was sent far away looking through the eyes of it's Beloved. The man's simplicity made things like that so much easier. He had a name before, and a reputation, but now he was a puppet. Vulkas rode and spoke through him constantly. It was so easy to line up the soldiers when it could all be seen in person. With its mind half a world away, the ripples in the water all around it appeared to be random.

  Vulkas was not crippled like Negrath, nor mindless like Ochress but even so, it was not unharmed by the war before history began. It had charred cracks over its stone hide and from within them sharp spurts of transparent crystals had grown. Vulkas still had some mobility despite its injuries. It walked on all fours and while it bore some resemblance to the bulls used in its people’s traditional decoration, there was a distinct reptilian pattern to the shape of its head. Huge horns grew from the grey stone of its head. They jutted straight up and shimmered in the dim light that filtered down from the tunnels beyond the water. It did not pace the chamber now, it had wedged itself into the corner, feeling the familiar comfort of the stone soothed its temper.

  Even before the change Vulkas had been full of rage. Only time had tempered it and refined it into the soft simmer that could be more easily directed. Kaius rose silently from the water. Today he looked human and he gave the heaving form of Vulkas a friendly smile. Vulkas lifted its face clear of the water and with a rumble it spoke, “You did well little assassin. You shall be rewarded well.”

  Kaius called up a little bubble of air and settled down onto it cross-legged, “Then pay me Vulkas.”

  The grating slate sounds were Vulkas' attempt at laughter, “More stories? So cheap a price to do what a thousand cycles of war could not. Where did we leave off?”

  Kaius’ smile never slipped, “You had just slain the blacksmith god.”

  Vulkas’ hide dug rivulets in the wall as it shuffled around and got comfortable. After a few grunts and groans it warmed to the telling, “Together we took the god to ground. It had become as tall as the mountains but together we felled it. Together we had to put an end to its power. Walpurgan told us the way but only Haspreth had the courage, young as she was.”

  Kaius came closer and settled down on his haunches to listen. So much history had been wiped away, this was his chance to preserve some fragment when this age passed.

  Vulkas rumbled on, “She bit into the god, she swallowed it down and I swear to you that she would have eaten it all if we had not been there to share with her. We all ate of the blacksmith god. So it could die. That was when we learned of the Steel. That was when the rest of our campaign took form. With the steel we could cut them down, we could protect ourselves against all but the Serpent of Storms. That was why it was such a blessing when darling Negrath slew it. We did not share after that first meal, we were all devoted to the cause but there was a terrible greed in our hearts once we tasted that god flesh.”

  Vulkas rambled on in their little bubble in the tunnels. It was a literal bubble. The tunnels outside had filled entirely with water and only a sly thread of Kaius' will held it back. Vulkas kept on shuffling its position, unable to find any place of comfort from its injuries.

  Its mind was split in three. One part focussing on the endless pain. One part thrown across the land to where its carefully constructed formations were marching. The rest was cast so far back into the past that the memories pre-dated history. It was the only living thing old enough to know these these tales. It had the only mind that held all of these secrets. Kaius wanted them all. The ocean filled the tunnels above their heads, and on the plains before the Ivory City, the armies lined up. Vulkas told its stories.

  Metharia had held back her soldiers behind the city gates but they were baying to get out, spurred on again by their noble paymasters. The villages of ghuls that Lucia could not bring herself to run off her lands were not held back by walls or gates. For all of the adoration that Lucia had accrued within the city, it was nothing compared to the blind fervour of the ghuls. Many Chosen told tales of the encampments of ghuls they found far out in the dark lands and of the primitively hewn idols of the Eaters. They whispered of the complex rituals that surrounded the eating of flesh and, most curiously of all, the way that so many of the ghuls would just kneel in supplication when the Chosen came to kill them.

  The ghuls of the plains outside the Ivory City did not act so passively. They charged mindlessly out of their huts. The trained soldiers of Vulkas, catching them head on, slaughtered them all without remorse. There were children in those villages, and elders too weak and shaky to hold a weapon. Those pitiful ghuls flung themselves at the city gates weeping and begging for entrance.

  Lucia coiled around the top of her tower, staring down at the tight ranks laid out against her. She thought of how easily they would burn. This could all be over without any of her people dying, if she could bring herself to kill. She spread her wings and let out a bellowing roar. It swept over the city. Even the disciplined soldiers of Vulkas army flinched, before their Beloved's barking put them back in line. All eyes were on her, and once more she did not know what to do.

  She heard Metharia downstairs. Her voice vibrating up through the bones of the walls, issuing commands in Lucia’s name that she would never have even considered on her own. The city was in a frenzy of activity, so different from the last siege when everything was already laying in wait. In each unit of a dozen enemy men Lucia saw the tell-tale glint of a Chosen's armour. She saw the robust twists of energy flowing into them from over the horizon. Her eyes, her new eyes, were adjusting. The information from the real world and this other world of spirits and spells was finally blending together as one.

  It was starting to make sense. All that she had needed was more eyes to see with. The cords of power running from her seemed to hum and thrum. They were starting to sound musical, and music was the one thing she was sure she could understand. Here in the city it was a cacophony but when she focussed on the fields outside, it was a simpler tune. Each of the Chosen was a tremulous murmur, and the Beloved was like the bass note tying them all together.

  Lucia let go of her grip on the tower and spread her wings. There had been little time for experimentation before the army rolled over the horizon but she had learned to make little weaves of heat to give her wings more lift.

  She swept down over the city in a gentle arc. Rising up over the city walls with another roar, hoping against hope that fear would be enough one last time. She hung there above the wall for a terrible moment of indecision, then it was too late and she was falling towards the enemy. Vulkas’ Beloved was screaming out commands as Lucia plummeted and in her fugue she barely remembered to beat her wings. She hung above the soldiers, close enough that she could see their eyes widening in fear and close enough that she could smell the dried meat of their rations on their breath. She weighed them in that moment, against all of the lives of the people inside the city. She breathed in air and breathed out death.

  She had to flap frantically as the flames reflected back up at her from the massive concave shields that Vulkas' Chosen had called over their soldiers. The shield dissolved just as quickly as it had appeared, before it had the chance to fall back onto the soldiers.

  Vulkas' Beloved roared with laughter and launched a silver lance
at her with a casual overhand throw. Lucia snatched it out of the air with her front leg and then hissed as it exploded into a chain of spikes that tried to ensnare her. She puffed out another torrent of flame, using the concussion to knock the weapon away. She made a slow backwards loop in the air, trying to regain her composure, and landed heavily on the road to the Ivory City, splay legged.

  Vulkas’ soldiers marched on towards her, not even breaking rank in the face of so fearsome a beast. She shuffled on her unfamiliar legs away from them. She unleashed her fire but when the smoke ,cleared every one of them was still standing. Fear found its place in her chest. She had seen Eaters die. It had been in flame and not by steel, but she did not want to try her scales against their weapons. The Beloved shouted out to her, “Flee little snake. Back into your hole.”

  Anger swept the fear away as it always had and she drew in a deep breath. This time the fire did not cease. She went on pouring it out over the whole army in waves. When she stopped, it was not because she was out of breath. She did not need to breathe. She was realising new things even now. She stopped because the air was growing so hot that it was making her fear for the earth beneath her feet. The smoke cleared slowly and she saw the molten shields, still held up.

  She turned and ran until she remembered her wings and then she managed to get enough lift to hit the top of the city walls and scramble over. Metharia, watching from Lucia's place in the tower, started screaming commands that were carried down the stairs and out into the streets. The gates swung open and the army marched out while Lucia was still trying to find her footing.

  This was the Beloved of Vulkas’ time. This was his joy. His blood-lust and fervour boiled over as he ordered his units forward. With Vulkas in his head he saw the whole of the battlefield. Every one of his soldiers had lost friends on this field just a year ago. Some of them had even felt the stinging shame of retreat. Not a one of them faltered as Lucia's ragtag assortment of militia, regiments and mercenaries tumbled out towards them. At a word from their Beloved the centre ranks slowed in their advance.

  There were noblemen amongst Lucia's troops. Nominal leaders of the armies and desperate to make a name for themselves. It was them that urged their soldiers into a charge before the formations had even reformed. They saw the supposed weakness in the enemy line and wanted to take their chances.

  Vulkas' army was small. Despite the charge for the centre, many of Lucia's warriors still found themselves clashing with the enemy lapping around their flanks. It was like hitting a solid wall. The tension on Vulkas' shield wall kept on building and building as the tail ends of the army left the Ivory City and added their weight to the press.

  The Beloved held back behind the walls of flesh and steel, eyes locked on Lucia as she scrabbled around. He waited until his soldiers were being driven back step by step. He waited until Lucia looked his way before he spoke the command. The Chosen burst from between the shields with great cleavers in each hand, spinning like dervishes and shrugging off the weak blows that the soldiers could muster against them in that tight press.

  Lucia managed to keep her grip on the ramparts as she cast her gaze across the field. She threw out a dozen threads of will to strangle the strength Vulkas was feeding to its Chosen, but this time there was resistance. It was like trying to crush a rod of steel in her hand. She had been learning since the day she emerged from the glass, but it had not occurred to her that her enemies were doing the same.

  Guilt churned in her chest. Her people were down there, exploding in showers of gore and bone fragments as Vulkas' Chosen swept through them. And she was relieved that she wasn't down there with them. Her lofty principles, the solid platform on which she had built her rule, meant nothing here. She would not kill or, more honestly, could not kill. It was costing her soldiers their lives. If the battle continued its symphony of loss, it would mean the end of both her city, and the first seeds of hope for the future that she had been planting.

  Death was not so frightening compared to what her imagination could conjure. She knew of the things that could happen to a creature that would not die. She puffed out smoke and took off again. Vulkas’ Chosen and soldiers were embroiled too tightly in the fighting for her to have any effect on them without burning up her own people along with them. The Beloved stood further back on an incline above the field, barking out his commands. That was something that she could affect.

  She gained height until she was looking down, as though from her tower. A bedraggled owl fluttered away from her, still lost after a year and circling the battlefield, waiting for carrion. Kaius smiled to himself at the sight of her, so close to his eyes on the battlefield. He had not realised how much he had missed her, or how much her change had improved her. Lucia pulled her wings in tight and plummeted towards the Beloved with flames trickling from her gaping jaws. The Beloved laughed and called another lance, he braced himself and waited. Lucia fell like a shooting star with a trail of sparks behind her. The Beloved held himself ready for that flinching moment when she would stop to rake at him or unleash her flame, but it never came.

  Lucia hit the ground in an explosion so fierce that it knocked the rear ranks of Vulkas' army off their feet. Before the cloud of flames had even cleared she burst up out of it, one wing bent and the other pierced through by the Beloved's lance. Her perfect silver scales were sooty and scraped. She limped away a short distance and let out another torrent of flames into the crater behind her. The soldiers that somehow survived, the ones who were hiding on the periphery of Vulkas army, swore in the years that followed that they heard her sobbing as she did it. She poured more and more fire into the indentation and it burst upwards in every direction, killing any that tried to approach. When the fire-storm ended, there was no body on the cracked black earth, not even bones. All that remained were ashes and a smear of silver.

  Lucia wailed and roared. The two sounds blended into a deafening blast that made every soldier pause. She charged, lopsided and injured, into the mass of soldiers. She used nothing more sophisticated than her mass to break their careful formations into chaos. The Chosen broke free from the melee behind the defender’s ranks and charged back into their own. At first, they clambered over their allies and eventually just knocked them aside with casual strikes. Their weapons shifted from the heavy slabs of steel to slender pins. Perfect for slipping between tough scales. They swarmed over Lucia, jabbing at her with their weapons, tearing at her wings. Her roar was a shriek of rage, pain and overwhelming despair.

  “That was when Walpurgan turned on Haspreth, when she rent her childish flesh and feasted on her innards. That was the true beginning of the war between us. When we realised that we could take the power from each other now. That was when all of our alliances fell to dust.”

  Vulkas’ head snapped from side to side as it tried to see through a dozen Chosen's eyes instead of the simple single vision it had enjoyed until now. It grunted and turned to Kaius, “Where was I?”

  Kaius shrugged, “Walpurgan had slain Haspreth?”

  Vulkas rumbled back onto its topic, “Yes. Yes. That was when Astarian truly drew our ire. The last tenuous alliance and the blotting of the sun. It was Walpurgan's greatest invention. For all of the...”

  Kaius held up a hand and spoke a simple command, “Be silent.”

  Vulkas spoke on oblivious, “...cleverness she had stolen, it still nearly killed us when we first made the attempt, all of our might bound together in her witchcraft. You see, she took the entire sun from the sky, not just the light. We almost froze to death before it could be undone.”

  Kaius raised his voice, “I said enough, you old fool.”

  Vulkas stopped dead and roared, “What did you say to me?”

  Kaius rolled his eyes and snapped, “You have gone on for too long and we are both out of time. Let us just get this done.”

  The bubble of air popped. Water flooded in over them and while Kaius just drifted in it gently, Vulkas thrashed around in a cloud of bubbles until it found itse
lf floating near the centre of the room, far from the soothing touch of the stone. It went berserk flailing around and snapping its tusked jaws at Kaius, who swam gracefully out of reach. Instincts resurfaced and panic kicked in. Vulkas started flailing towards the tunnel entrance, seeking out air but finding none. Kaius swam along, maintaining his distance. Vulkas saw the shimmering mirror surface of the water ahead and knew then how bloody its vengeance on this boy would be. Rage fuelled it as it paddled forward, only to wedge in a narrow point of the tunnel, just as Kaius had planned. It tried to push its way through, to bend the rock to its will, but it had no traction to press against the stone. It could not concentrate well enough to command it to move aside. From beneath craggy brows it fixed all twelve of its beady eyes on Kaius. The man floated still in the water ahead. He breathed it in easily and pulled together contours of power into some weaving of a complexity well beyond Vulkas understanding. Still churning the water and twisting, Vulkas managed to back its way out of the tight part of the tunnel only to find itself in another pinch point further back. The pressure built up until the stone of its hide cracked. That fresh pain along with the rest of its suffering made it gasp out its last lung-fuls of air. The burning of its lungs was nothing to the crushing pressure as the water around it tightened and squeezed.

  There was a crack and a pop then Vulkas was cut neatly in two. The water darkened with its blood. The top half was still alive when Kaius dragged it to the surface, bound in cords of razor sharp air. It was still alive when Kaius started eating it. His teeth lengthened inside its flesh, his fingers curved into claws and hooked into the meat below. Vulkas felt itself sliding down his throat and in desperation whispered, “We saved you all. We were your heroes.”