by Sean Rodden
Caelle shook her head slowly, sadly.
“Nay, Southman. Eldurion is far beyond shot of ear now.” A poignant pause. “Rather, the laleth of this night was sung for me.”
Axennus started, rose to sit at the Shield Maiden’s side. A terrible foreboding took him, shook him, and his heart trembled as he reached for the Fiann’s hand.
“For you, my friend?” he whispered past the chill of a cold intuition.
Caelle received Axennus’ hand in her own, and there was little to distinguish between the desperation of their grasps. She then turned, faced the man she had come to love so soon and so surely, and there were silver tears ashine in the corners of her wide and wondrous eyes.
“I am to leave Druintir in the morning, Southman. I am to leave and I know not when or whether I might return.”
And in that moment the only thing of which Axennus Teagh was aware was the bitter breaking of his heart within him.
18
FIRST BLOOD
“To stand against a thing that cannot be conquered
Is not stubbornness, nor even dogged determination,
But only sheer stupidity.”
“To insist that there even exists a thing that cannot
Be overcome is the conclusion of fools and cowards –
And is stupider still.”
Gavrayel and Eccuron, The Scullain Dialogues
Strange things happen in the night.
Day dies, dusk bleeds away, darkness falls. The night rises, rules. A black velvet cloak swoops over the world, flutters down and settles, and then is snapped back. Leaving the dark. And things disappear. Hope, faith, courage. Eyes widen, thirsty for light that is not there, drinking in only the bitter black elixir that is the earth’s solar shadow. Fingers claw blankets, teeth grind, bodies curl into balls. Into the void left by vanished things come imposters, interlopers. Imaginations rubbed raw by sleeplessness seep terror into the darkness, fertilizing seeds of doubt, birthing dead men and demons. Fiends prowl the deep pockets of the dark, talons clicking on floorboards, moaning their miseries into ears that cannot close, that must hear, that must listen. Men and women whimper, whine, pray for light. Phantom fingers play over pebbled skin. Hearts shudder and shatter. Death sweeps down.
Indeed, strange things happen in the night. When that conjuror’s cape comes down. But the night is no market-kiosk magician, no practitioner of sleight of hand, and needs neither smoke nor mirrors to effect its power. The night is not illusion, its creatures no clever trick of chicanery. The demons exist. The monsters are real. Children know this. Children and cowards. They are wiser than the rest.
They know.
They just…know.
“I know nothing of this.”
Varonin of the Grey Watch sat mounted upon his smoke-grey mirarran beneath the great curved stone of the Andalorian Arch, his wintry eyes glittering in the blackness of his cowl, diamond chips in the darkness. The white marble of the Arch glowed like a crescent moon, the naked steel of Varonin’s sword gleaming coolly under the rock’s argentine radiance. The warders to either side of him were motionless upon their mounts, mere extensions of the night, shadows in the black.
“Lord Alvarion has only just sent us, Marshal,” explained Tulnarron, his voice a deep rumble of thunder. “Word will not have come to you yet.”
“You have your entire House with you.”
“Hardly, Marshal. Half, at most.”
A nearly imperceptible incline of Varonin’s hooded head indicated Sandarre.
“The woman – is she not to depart come the morrow morn for Allaura?”
“She has been given…special dispensation.”
“Indeed. And this endeavour – it is the Lord’s will?”
Tulnarron nodded.
“You are aware the Blood King’s army moves faster than we first calculated, Marshal Varonin. Our allies require time to prepare. And the Rothmen are not yet here. Lord Alvarion would have the enemy’s advance tardigraded, would see their march slowed. We seek to fulfill that desire.”
“This is Lord Alvarion’s will, Master Tulnarron?” repeated Varonin, emphatically.
The Master of the House of Eccuron glared coldly at the Marshal of the Grey Watch, and the line of his lips was thin and severe.
“It is.”
Varonin stared at Tulnarron in algid silence, his breath misting before his hooded features, cloud and cowl concealing the entirety of his countenance save the crystalline chips that were his eyes. He neither moved nor spoke, but only breathed.
Tulnarron waited. Equally still, equally silent. The roar of the Ruil seemed remote and removed, the cold of the night pressing in upon all sides, reducing the world and all in it to two hard men facing one another beneath the stark white rock of the Andalorian Arch.
“Very well, Master Tulnarron,” breathed the Marshal. His mirarran stepped to the side. The warders with him followed wordlessly.
The night wind sighed.
Tulnarron inclined his head, nudged his own mount forward. The thud of hooves on stone sounded so very like the beat of a burning heart. Through the ancient span of stone, along the marble-paved road, beneath a riot of stars.
With nearly three hundred riders of the Host of Arrenhoth at his back.
Silver-white mists crept out from the muskegs of Coldmire, crawling across the faltering flow of the Ruil to obnubilate their going. Fiannar and mirarra faded into the fog, grey into grey, meagre ghosts in the gasping breath of night. Outriders before them, wary wingmen at their flanks, a rearguard in their wake, they followed a narrow path a mile south of the river, angling north and east, the ground oddly soft and pliant beneath them, cushioning the crush of rushing hooves on earth. They called it the Soft Road, specifically for the strange spongy nature of the soil, soil that remained plush and forgiving even in the deeps of winter. Soundless and unseen, they went, quick, quiet, grey wights in the blackened white, revenants of the night.
Hours passed. Leagues swiftly swallowed in the night. Death racing.
When Tulnarron finally decided to slow the pace, the two nearest riders brought their mounts up to the flanks of his own, one to each side.
“Is it, cousin?” Sandarre asked.
Tulnarron cast a cold glance the Fiann’s way. His eyes were as silver stars, shining, shining. Like a beacon. Or a warning.
“Is it what, exactly, Sandarre?”
The Fiann looked across the neck of the Master’s mirarran to the phantasmal form of Gornannon, but her friend did not meet her eye, only resolutely chewed his unlit cheroot against the compelling urge to smile. She found no ally there.
“Is what we mean to do indeed Lord Alvarion’s will?”
Tulnarron’s face was as inscrutable as stone.
“I said as much, did I not?”
Sandarre nodded, gripped the reins of her mount a little tighter, the supple leather crunching in her fist.
“Yes, you did say as much, cousin. But Lord Alvarion did not fare us well, nor even send a delegate to do so in his stead. You delivered no apopemptic address. Furthermore, I know you. Thus I cannot help but wonder, did the Lord expressly order this strike?”
The Master of the House of Eccuron stared straight ahead. Tendrils of fog snaked about his broad shoulders.
“Something of the sort.”
Sandarre’s brows bunched beneath the brim of her helm. Her breath misted before her eyes, white and wispy.
“Something like it, but not exactly?”
The Master was silent for a heartbeat, two, three.
“Even so.”
They rode in silence for a while, the haze hiding them, the humectant turf of the Soft Road sucking away all sound of their passage.
“What, exactly, did Lord Alvarion say, cousin?”
A heartbeat.
“He told me to find something to do,” replied Tulnarron bluntly.
Gornannon guffawed, losing his precious cheroot in the process.
Sandarre grinned generously, her g
rey eyes gleaming gaily.
“Fair enough, cousin.”
Lord Alvarion did not look up from the map upon the table.
“Thank you for your swift and precise report, Marshal Varonin. You performed admirably. That will be all.”
The Marshal of the Grey Watch brought a gloved fist to his breast, turned upon his heel, vanished.
Alvarion frowned in the brownish-yellow candlelight, his grey eyes glinting out from amidst cracked craters of fatigue. He moved a single horse figurine toward a black mass of miniatures obscuring a large portion of the map depicting the Northern Plains. His frown blackened.
“So it begins.”
“It is precisely as you predicted, husband,” said Cerriste from across the table. She lit a few more tallows to ease the strain on her husband’s weary eyes. “Tell me, how did you know Master Tulnarron would ride tonight?”
From frown to scowl.
“I know the Master well. Better than he knows himself, perhaps. Tulnarron is a man of action, at his best when he is doing something. Something, anything. Inaction makes him restless, irritable. Idle, he can become burdensome, something of a liability, as was evidenced in his reception of the Earl of Invarnoth this evening. Irascibility is oft the familiar of a driven man, and the Master of the House of Eccuron is the very definition of the driven man. Abandoning the Rock of Arren yet eats at him, gnawing his soul, devouring him from the inside out. The ghosts of the red wind’s victims ceaselessly beseech him for vengeance, retribution. He hears them. Even in his sleep, he hears them. I knew he would ride because he is who and what he is – Tulnarron, Master of the House of Eccuron – and because Arrenhoth must answer. I knew he would ride because he must.”
Cerriste flashed a knowing, needling grin.
“So Sarrane spoke to you.”
Alvarion glanced up, straightened, stretched. He managed to keep the smile from his lips, but not from his eyes.
“Well, that, too.”
The Lady laughed. The sound soothed and eased, so very much like a cooling lather upon a soul scraped raw.
“You might have simply ordered Master Tulnarron to strike the enemy camp, husband,” she suggested. “That would have been the straighter road.”
Alvarion shook his head.
“Straighter, perhaps, but hardly as effective.”
“Oh?”
The Lord nodded, grey eyes roving the map on the table.
“Tulnarron is the ultimate scion of Eccuron. A good friend and a great leader, but overly prideful and a decidedly poor, however loyal, follower. Any expression of authority or delivery of restrictive decree demeans him, even debases him, in his own estimation. This sensitivity is founded not in insecurity, but in its extreme opposite – an irrefrangible belief in himself, his abilities, his opinions, in the rightness of his convictions. Combine this inflexibility, this intransigence, with a desperate need to act rather than watch and wait, and our sharpest remaining blade can become a razor at our own throats – this despite all love, loyalty, martial discipline and fair intentions.”
Lady Cerriste reached toward the solitary horse figurine, moving it slightly northward on the map, just beneath the grey marches of Coldmire.
“The Master’s fealty is indeed a complicated thing, husband.”
“Complicated, but fierce and firm, beloved. He is as unyielding in that as he is in all things. But he is no recusant. Never that. Tulnarron is the great hound that gnaws and strains against its chain, growling and snapping at the hand that feeds it. But remove the chain and the beast rests quietly at the master’s side, docile and dutiful, connected, prepared to do the master’s bidding with little or no guidance and direction. Instinct, insight, initiative – these are the hound’s sharpest teeth and claws, but are rendered entirely impotent by collar and chain. Retain the chain and the hound can only howl as the wolves ravage the herd.”
Cerriste’s smile was like a curved blade.
“I understand, husband.”
The Lord of the Fiannar grinned grimly.
“Yes, I thought you might.”
The Lady pushed the lone horse around behind the black mass on the map. Looked up. Her eyes glittered, gleamed above the scarlet scimitar of her lips.
“Unleash the beast.”
Dawn came, dull, drear. A semblance of day followed.
The Host of Arrenhoth rode the Soft Road at a gait approaching a gallop. Never slowing, never faltering. Urgency in their effulgent eyes, in every corded muscle, in each and every stride. Above them, the sky was a dingy and dirty umber, a damp clay sheet suspended low over the earth; about them sullied fog swirled, an eidolon of mist as fell as the folk it enfolded in its miserable embrace; below them the ground oozed grey filth, first sucking at the hooves of the mirarra as they passed, then filling the prints with greasy muck in their immediate wake, rapidly resiling the spongy ground once more, leaving it level, unmarred and unmarked, as though the party had never come, had never passed. Had never even been.
Onward they rode, the great Host of Arrenhoth.
Hours slid, slipped, seeped by.
Dusk descended. The mists thickened to a tangible film, like pale colourless blood congealing over a sopping sore in the world. A fore-rider appeared from the fog, in apparent conversation with the haze to his right. Tulnarron slowed his steed, squinted, and the fog to the outrider’s side solidified, became another mounted Fian, the bare and blackened blade in his hand marking him as a scout of Grey Watch. A ghost in the night. Forerider and Watcher came up, stayed their steeds, brought fists to their breasts. Tulnarron halted his muscled mirarran, received the outrider and the warder with a curt nod and a thump to his heart. His eyes glittered, cold and bright.
“Report, Castadon.”
“Master, I have with me –”
“Gostullian of the Grey Watch,” Tulnarron inserted. “Yes, I see that.”
The Master’s icy gaze swept over the phantasmal form of the Watcher. The Fiannian scout was utterly unlike any other among his fair folk. He was lean and gaunt, his cheeks sunken, his sockets sallow. The skin of his thin face was cracked, creviced and cross-hatched with pale scars, as weathered and worn as the ancient oilskin cloak draped about his narrow shoulders. His prominent nose was crooked and crumpled, his bony chin bristling with irregular patches of uncoloured stubble. He wore his hair long, but it was long past thinning, mere strings hanging from a mottled scalp. One ear was a bulbous cauliflower of ruined cartilage, the other was entirely gone.
“Looking a little haggard, Ghost.”
The Fian called Ghost grinned – a gruesome, near toothless grimace.
“Oh, been a rough few weeks.”
“I can imagine.” The Master moved his gaze back to Castadon. “Continue.”
“The enemy has divided, Master. Three camps. The northmost one is the largest, about one hundred thousand souls strong, and lies a six hour hard ride east and south of here. Unmen of Mroch Durva and the Hebbingore. Urkroks. Norians and Wulfings. Others. Near upon this main encampment lies a smaller one to the south. Twenty thousands or so. Maybe fewer, not more. Unmen of Waldard, Urkroks. A small company of grey-skinned, black-clad, mean-looking giants with whom we are unfamiliar, somewhat less than seven hundred. The third camp lies another day’s march to the east and is composed entirely of Graniants. Some two thousands, I’m told. They serve as a rearguard, marching only every second or third day, most likely due to the substantial length of their stride.”
Tulnarron nodded slowly.
“And the train?”
“The wagon train lies beyond and between the two main camps,” replied the outrider. “Thousands of supply wagons pulled by all manner of beasts of burden. War machines, as well. Catapults and the like. A seven hour ride.”
“Munitions trucks?”
“Twenty-six, at least. At the heart of the wagon train. Precisely as you expected. Covered carts and drays full of incendiary missiles, shatter bombs, stonebreakers, shells of dragon’s breath. Fodder for the m
achines.”
“I see. And the Graniants remain an entire day behind?”
“They do.”
“What can you add, Ghost?”
That ghastly grin. “Oh, a little. This and that.”
“Watcher Gostullian is overly modest, Master,” protested Castadon. “He has been tracking and surveilling the enemy for weeks. His espial is exceptional, without equal. He has intimate knowledge of their crasis, their formations, routines, habits. When they sleep, when they wake, what they eat for breakfast. Their watches and their pickets. Strengths and weaknesses. He may be of some service to you.”
Tulnarron’s smile was thin, sere, arctic in its warmth.
“I suspect he might. Very good. That is all, Castadon.” He then called over his shoulder. “Sandarre. Gornannon. We will rest here for the moment.”
“As you will, cousin.”
The Master of the House of Eccuron looked upon the withered Watcher once more.
“You should have it from me, Ghost – the Rock is lost.”
A liquid blink, the shrug of gaunt, knobby shoulders. “Oh, well. Never felt much like home anyway.”
“Indeed.” Then, “I will hear you, Ghost. Ride with me, if you would.”
That most grisly of smiles.
“Oh, I would. But don’t expect me to call you ‘Master’.”
Tulnarron turned away, north into the night.
“Even so.”
Among a modest people, he had always been described as proud. And he was. He knew this. Not only did pride describe him, it defined him.
Pride was his armour and his shield. Pride was the cutting edge of his sword. It was a true and tangible thing, gripped in the Crimson Fist of his standard, blazing in the rillagh across his breast, towering tall upon the titanic Rock of Arren. Pride in himself, in his family, in the history of his House. Pride in his name, his deeds, his strength, his sword. Pride in his past, his future, his here and now.
But Tulnarron’s pride was not an arrogance. There was no vanity, no suggestion of conceit in him. His pride was not an exaggerated egotism, neither inflated self-importance nor smug superiority. Rather the Master’s pride was a sureness, a certainty. Confidence and conviction. An unshaking trust in himself, in his beliefs and in his abilities. In what he could accomplish. In what he must accomplish.
