Called to Battle, Volume 1

by Larry Correia

  Her voice faded in his ears, and he found himself staring at Svyn, who lay shivering and smoking in the snow not far away. Her green eyes snapped open, and he knew she yet lived, at least as much as he did. Her hands fumbled to load her magelock. A single shot.

  She nodded to him, and he understood what she meant to do. He gripped the hilts of his sabers and dug deep within himself for one last ounce of strength.

  Saerl had noticed her niece too, and stayed her blade. Fire brewed into a ball in her free hand. “You are true to my blood, Svyn,” she said. “You simply don’t know when to surrender.”

  As she drew back her arm to throw, Svyn put the barrel under her own chin and fired.

  Narn’s heart skipped.

  The swell of green magic burst in the air with the sound of a thunderclap, driving the swirling blizzard in all directions, the snowflakes burning like bits of paper. In a heartbeat, the village square was clear and Saerl stood alone, sword aloft. Dawn rose around her, but the light was green: that of the magic that rushed into her. It was the power of a hundred lost generations, a thousand. She gasped in ecstasy.

  “At last!” she cried, weeping tears of green fire. “At last!”

  Narn rose like an avenging god and drove his sabers through Saerl’s body—his left blade just above and to the left of her heart, his right blade through the bottom of her liver. The sorceress’ triumphant cries became choked gasps, and she looked down at him in confusion.

  He almost smiled. Then he wrenched the blades apart.

  The last settlers bundled up their few belongings on the two creaking wagons that had survived the destruction of the outpost. They were a ragged bunch: half a dozen vital frontier explorers broken down and aged beyond their years in the span of a night. They kept their eyes on the road east for the most part; any who did look back spat and made warding gestures against evil. This place would haunt their dreams for the rest of their lives.

  Narn thought he should have killed them for what they had seen, but he knew none of them would speak of it. He would not, either.

  He knelt beside Svyn’s body where it lay half-buried in the snow. Fire had ruined her garb and singed her hair. Blood leaked from the hole under her chin and gore stained the snow at her head, but she looked remarkably peaceful. She stared up at the clear blue sky with satisfaction, not fear or pain. Perhaps the Vanished had bestowed some bit of grace upon this human who had sacrificed herself for them.

  Narn thought of a mage hunter’s first precept: judgment. In Svyn, he had judged well.

  He closed her eyes. Then he rose, collected his sabers, and tossed the last of the incendiary grenades into the kindling he had prepared in the common hall.

  He left the smoking ruin behind.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Erik Scott de Bie is a speculative fiction writer and game designer, probably best known for his work in the Forgotten Realms setting, including his signature Shadowbane series. He is the author of the forthcoming Shadow of the Winter King, first in the epic World of Ruin fantasy series from Dragon Moon Press (Spring 2014). Erik lives in Seattle where he is married with pets. Find him at erikscottdebie.com, facebook.com/erik.s.debie, and twitter.com/erikscottdebie.

  UNDER THE SHADOW

  BY ORRIN GREY

  Near Highgate, Trineus 8th, 606 AR

  Though he had spent most of his life surrounded by the living dead, Gerlak Slaughterborn had never given much thought to what returning from death must feel like. He’d seen it happen a hundred times: revenants dragging themselves up from the ground like puppets pulled on invisible strings, wraiths and bane thralls stirring from shadowed places, the mechanikal abominations of the necrotechs being stitched together and fired with new vitality. He’d spoken with the walking dead, bent knee before them, and led them into battle, but never once had he thought to ask one what it felt like to have the spark of life blown out and then rekindled.

  He’d had his own brushes with death over the years, more than his share. He remembered a beach in the Scharde Isles, years ago. The surf red with blood, the sand a gory sponge beneath his feet. There he had tasted the blood of a warcaster, one of the mighty leaders of the Cygnaran invaders. Gerlak had slain dozens that day, but that was the one he remembered. The kill had cost him a chest full of fire and steel from the explosive shell of a Defender’s heavy barrel, a wound the men around him had assumed meant his death, but he had been able to chop his axe through the warcaster’s head before he fell, had tasted the spray of the human’s life on his lips.

  Gerlak had lain in the sand and felt his own lifeblood ebb as the other humans clustered around their fallen champion. He’d felt consciousness fading in and out with the beating of his heart, but he hadn’t died. Even for a blighted trollkin of the Scharde Isles, he wouldn’t die easily. He held onto life with the tenacity of a dire troll, and when the battle was over and the enemy’s attention was elsewhere, he had slipped away beneath the waves, dragging a body or two with him to feast upon, and he’d fed and grown stronger, as he had always done before.

  No matter how closely he’d brushed against death in his many years on Caen, however, he’d never felt the cold touch of its hand. Not until now.

  Now he lay broken in the dark with nothing but pain and hunger and the familiar charnel stench of ruined flesh and pooling blood to let him know he yet lived. He was blind. Even when he opened his eyes as much as he could with swollen flesh and gummed blood, all that surrounded him were the corpses of his bloodgorgers, pressed into a pile, and he buried among them, left for dead again, closer than ever this time.

  When he tried to move the agony came, a distant echo that broke over him in red waves like the bloody surf on that long-ago beach. Even the pain, though, was nothing compared to the hunger, a hunger unlike any he had ever felt in his long and voracious life, as if there were a void in him larger than himself, an aching pit that no amount of blood and feasting could ever fill. So very little was left of him. His legs and arms were gone, though he could still feel their phantom aches and twitches. It seemed all that remained of him was hunger—and an unwillingness to die.

  This had kept him alive a hundred times in the past, when others would have stayed down. It’s what had let him rise to the head of his kriel, what had made him a general in the armies of Cryx. If ever he were asked his secret, he would not have revealed it. Likely he could not have found the words to make it understood had he wanted to. He had always seen life as a struggle. The secret to living while others perished was to be the one doing the killing. Nothing lived except by glutting itself on the carcasses of the vanquished. The world was not a place for new life. It was a place for decay, a place where the role of the strong was to feast upon the weak. In the shadowy places between life and death Gerlak had heard the secret music of the world, and it was the sound of a million rending maws.

  On that field near Highgate, at the bottom of that pile of his kin, ruined and broken, he was as close to death as he had ever been. Closer than he’d been on that beach, when he’d thought his last memory might be the taste of a warcaster’s blood. So near that he could feel death’s chill, hear the whisper of the void waiting to consume him. To die would have required nothing of him. All he had to do was allow it, and it would take him. He would sink down into the dark. The hunger would be gone. It would all be over.

  He would never admit how tempting it was, how near he came. But it was not for him. In the dark, amid the dead, he tried to move. Every attempt brought new waves of pain as ruptured organs ground against splintered bones. Behind Gerlak Slaughterborn’s eyes, strobes of light burst, and in each flash he saw an image of his recent struggles.

  The ships are leaving the ports in Blackwater. He stands at the prow of The Withering, and behind him stand dozens of bloodgorgers, the same ones whose corpses will later be piled above him. Around them humans scurry, heads down, like great pale rats trying to avoid the gazes of their betters, seeing to the masts and the ropes and all the tiny things that make a g
reat ship sail. They themselves are hardly more than tiny things, fleas on an enormous wolf. And that wolf part of a greater pack, a fleet of ships gathered together under his banner, and that pack the reaching claw of something greater yet.

  He turns his eyes toward Highgate, still hundreds of miles distant. In his mind’s eye there is a flash, and suddenly he’s in the waters around the great Cygnaran city. The sky burns and fills with ash and smoke; the air reverberates with cannon fire like the beating of a heart; the screams of the dying fill the air; the sea is red with blood. He looks up at the unbreachable walls and cliffs of that city, and then he is back on the beaches of Cryx, surrounded by trollkin and ogrun standing in one silent, knotted mass around him, waiting for his orders to board the ships in his Slaughter Fleet. They are quiet, still. Their natural ferocity, their hungers, and their tempers are still, and he knows it is because they fear and respect him. Because they know he is their master.

  He stands before them ready to send them to their deaths, as he is ready to go to his, if that is what must happen. He has been told as much himself. His own masters do not expect him to return from where he and his soldiers are going. He and his kin are being spent. They are ammunition, shells prepared and fired with a special purpose. Theirs is not to be the victors this day. They are not to bring down the great city. They are a diversion, meant to batter themselves to death against an immovable object so that another object may be obtained. Their sacrifice is deemed strategic.

  He knows all this and accepts it, but it isn’t what he tells the bloodgorgers and other blighted soldiers around him. To them, he says they will chew up Highgate; they will tear it down and crack it open like a turtle to feast on the soft, succulent meat inside. He tells them how they will do it, and he sees their belief, and the bloodgorgers send up a roar so loud it seems it will crack the sky.

  And then the sky does crack open, and from that crack a shadow passes over his memory, a shadow darker than the pall of smoke that hangs over the bay at Highgate, a shadow darker than the void that waits on the other side of death. He is no longer on the beach, no longer surrounded by his troops. He is a stripling again, hunting in the wilds of the Schardes. He is running, loping across the rocky ground atop a spire of rock, and an enormous black shadow spreads across the ground before him, expanding like a pool of blood to swallow him, swallow everything in darkness as far as he can see. He looks up and the sun is gone, blotted out. There is only the shadow, and it covers all.

  Later he will be told it couldn’t have been the dragon Toruk, who hardly ever ventures forth, but in that moment, he knows it is. It’s the first time he’s ever seen the Dragonfather, and he knows immediately he is in the presence of a god.

  He’d always known that the biggest and the fiercest were the ones who ruled, that the fruits of life went to the victors, but until that moment his knowledge had always been a petty thing rooted in the violent squabbling between trollkin children and the bloody fights between the kriels. Looking up at that shadow, he realized for the first time how big something could truly be. He vowed then and there to follow in that shadow until his own was at least as big.

  As the shadow blotted out his memory, his mind returned once more to its present darkness, to his predicament, to the stench and the weight of the bodies piled around him. To someone else, those bodies would have represented defeat, but he was a Cryxian. Bodies are fuel in Cryx. Furthermore, he was a bloodgorger. He was Gerlak Slaughterborn, and to him, the deaths of others were grist. He was not in a grave; he was at a feasting table. Though his limbs were gone, though death was but a thought away, he turned his head, willing himself to move in spite of his weakness—his every nerve shredded, his every muscle withered—until he could get his teeth into one of the corpses piled atop him. Then he began to eat.

  With each bite came strength, and with each bit of strength the next bite came more easily. The hunger burned inside him, pushing him on, and he gorged himself on his fellows and felt his wounds closing, his limbs reforming.

  When he had the protean stump of an arm again, he used it to move himself, to pull food to his jaws. When he had hands again they were claws for tearing meat. Eventually he was himself again, and he stood amid the remains of his feast, the remains of his kin and his soldiers, and he looked around. Where he stood there were only corpses, piled high for the carrion birds. But in the distance the humans were doing what humans did: trying to rebuild, to recover, to pretend once more that their walls could protect them. He saw ships, and one was near enough that it might serve his purpose.

  The Meredius, Trineus 9th, 606 AR

  The schooner Demetrius was almost a day out of Highgate, bound north to Ceryl with a load of wartime necessities and a handful of soldiers from the Cygnaran Third Army on board. They kept to themselves or dined with the captain, and they wore patches over their army insignias, but their bearing and their army-issued weapons were both unmistakable. They were the chief article of gossip in the bunks and around the games of cards and dice the other men played on overturned barrels during their off-duty hours. Coming in a close second was the news of the battle at Highgate.

  No one on board had seen the battle firsthand, but everyone had witnessed the aftermath as they pulled into the newly reopened port. The gulf had been thick with wreckage and the bodies of the uncollected dead. Here and there a flock of gulls and other scavenger birds had been clustered so thick on a corpse that none of the body was visible, just a restless island of wings and beaks and sparkling black eyes. Fires still burned aboard vessels half-submerged farther out, and a cloud of black smoke that even the winds off the sea couldn’t dissipate covered the whole place like a funeral shroud.

  That wasn’t the worst of it, though, as bad as that was. The docks were shivered, scorched, and in places completely ruined where Cryxian ships had smashed into them to disgorge monsters. The damage could be seen high up the walls, and one of the cranes hung shattered and useless, like the broken wing of a giant bird. The men who loaded the Demetrius spoke of the battle in hushed whispers, saying that it was as close as Highgate had ever come to falling, that the attackers had come with the biggest navy Cryx had ever sent out. They told tales of the monstrous general who had led the army, a giant beast who refused to die. Tales of how his forces had somehow managed to reach one of the lifts as it tried to pull Cygnaran ships to safety and how those forces had swarmed up that lift without regard for their own lives and overtaken it. How they had set their abhorrent feet in the impenetrable city itself.

  Corley thought it was almost worse to see the wreckage than it would have been to see the battle. He’d seen battles before, though only from a distance, and he could imagine that in the heat of combat, in all that chaos and shouting, it would be easy for it to become small. To focus on the next sword, the next soldier, the next cannonade. To not see how big it had become. Sailing through the gulf at Highgate, staring as people tried to repair the damage, all he could see was the scope of what had happened. All he could do was imagine the size of the enemy fleet, the scores of black ships unloading their cargoes of abominations. Standing on the deck, watching Highgate go by, he clutched his Radiance of Morrow pendant so tightly it left marks in his palm.

  The Radiance had been a gift from his grandmother. She had once traveled to the Archcourt Cathedral, where the Primarch himself had blessed the pendant. She’d brought it back to Finn’s Court, the little town near Mercir where Corley was born and raised, and she gave it to him when he went off to sea. Holding it always made him feel protected, watched over, no matter how bad the storm became.

  “What it means to follow Morrow,” she used to say, “is to believe that man can do more than endure the hardships of this life. He can overcome them.”

  Corley tried to think of that as he watched the wreckage drift by the side of the Demetrius.

  The presence of the soldiers and the memory of the state of Highgate had everyone on the ship on edge, but there was something else, something worse. Duggan,
a big, superstitious seaman whose parents had been Khadoran expatriates, kept talking rot about something being on board the ship.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he growled whenever the other crewmen asked him for specifics. “It’s just something wrong.” He described sounds in the lower berths at night and an odd smell, “nasty as a gorax.”

  At first he just took some ribbing from the rest of the crew, but after he persisted even in the face of their taunts, the other men started to grow nervous, too. Nobody felt very safe after seeing what had happened at Highgate, and it wasn’t long before men were whispering of grymkin, and worse. Finally the bosun went to the captain and asked him to have the ship searched from top to bottom, just to keep the men from talking. The captain must have said no, because the bosun came back with a dark look, shaking his head, and when the crew asked him about what had happened, he snapped at them to put some iron in their spines and get back to work.

  That first night out from Highgate, a fog came in thick and fast toward the end of the day. As the sun was sinking, the cloud lay off the bow of the ship, silhouetting the distant islands at the edges of the Broken Coast so they looked like black spears jutting up out of it, but as the sun disappeared over the horizon the fog swept in and engulfed the ship. The wind dropped to almost nothing, and the ship’s bells rang out in the dark. The captain’s cabin was only twenty paces from the wheel Corley steered, and still he couldn’t see the light of the lantern that hung outside the door.

  The captain came out and told him to keep to the wheel, no matter what. “There are reefs and Morrow-knows-what all through these waters and we can’t see a stone’s throw ahead,” he said, “so you put your shoulder to it and listen for the lookouts.”

  Corley was holding the wheel in sweating hands and feeling glad the black islands were mostly hidden from view when the sounds started below.