Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1)

by J. Edward Neill

  A Sanctuary for Swords

  From the depths of the ocean fog, the Furyon horn groaned. The noise was mournful, the blast echoing through the stale air like a long dead soul calling out across the void. Ten bleats sounded and silence unbearable settled. By the hundred, the Furyon boats slid across the grey water, lurching closer to Mormist’s shore. The beach turned black with their sails, and the decks of every ship teemed with men like locusts. The invasion was at hand.

  On the shore, scores of smoking torchlights sprang to life, held high by faceless folk gathering beyond the fog. The pale, torchlit beach lay beyond two treacherously high cliffs, two bleak towers of stone jutting like broken bones from the water. One by one, the black galleys and frigates of the Furyon fleet found slow passage between the cliffs, following the torchlights until coming to rest upon a vast row of docks. It was nearly twilight by the time the ships were all docked. As the fleet fell into a long, dark line against the shore, the torchlights retreated, taking their eerie lights inland.

  Daćin watched it unfold from his perch upon the prow of the Exemone. The sight of Mormist, its beach blackened by long lines of Furyon knights, made him want to leap into the shallows and wade to the shore in triumph. But this is no victory. He restrained himself. This is only the beginning.

  His vision was obscured by the fog, the enormity of Mormist disguised, but in his mind he saw it well enough. The shore, the mountains, and the forests beyond. We will win this war. As Chakran promised, the lords of Grae will kneel in reverence to Furyon.

  The fleet had made its voyage much faster than he had expected. A mere eleven days had seen it cross the southern sea, whose churning waters had seemed so willing. As he leapt from the Exemone to the dock and from the dock to the pebbly shore below, he reflected on the fortune the fleet had enjoyed. The winds, unnatural but not unwelcome, he remembered. It should‘ve taken us a month, but no. Even the waves themselves had seemed willing to aid Furyon, having somehow sped the oared galleys forward.

  He wondered what strange powers had gathered in the storms behind the fleet, and decided some questions were not meant to be answered.

  Alone amidst many thousands, he walked the sands of Mormist’s shore. Hundreds of knights, their shoulders black and tined with Dageni steel, pushed past him. They carried crates of weapons, barrels of food and water, and great slings filled with hundreds of iron bars. He walked at peace among them, towering above them all. The dusk deepened and the falling sun set fire to the mountaintops. The farther he wandered inland, the more the fog broke apart, torn to tatters by the seaborne wind. When the last of the mist parted, he stood high upon the beach. He saw the torchbearers again, their flames high and smoking, waiting at the top of the shore where the sand ended and the soil began.

  An unexpected greeting. He halted a hundred paces from the torchbearers. Those that stood before him were not Furyon men, but a crowd of Mormist folk. The tall, weathered people were waiting, holding their smoking beacons high, but they neither moved nor spoke. The Furyon knights beside him stopped in their tracks, forming a rank as they did, presenting a bristling row of two-tined spears toward the torchbearers. The Furyons’ masked faces were writ with forbiddance, but the line of Mormist men held firm.

  “Who’re they?” the soldier beside him grunted.

  “Our greeting party,” he answered. “The Emperor mentioned them once, though I’d forgotten.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They await the Emperor. He means to speak to them. They’re allies, so it would seem. The key to the door of Graehelm.”

  A figure in black arose from amidst the Furyons. Emperor Chakran and his elite issued like spirits from the twilight, crossing into the sands between Daćin and the Mormist men. Daćin stood to attention as his master approached, but Chakran marched past him as though he were no more than a pauper. The Emperor came to the Mormist men, a beast of pale flesh and bristling black steel, and they shivered collectively at his approach. The Emperor’s eyes hung like heavy lanterns in their sockets, his beard billowing maniacally from his chin.

  “Greetings, mongrels,” Chakran said in the Furyon tongue, which none of the Mormist folk appeared to understand. “As foretold, your Emperor has arrived. A meeting was promised, and a meeting you shall have. Take me to your lords.”

  The Mormist men parted. Beyond them stood a watchtower of speckled stone, a grey edifice joined at its flank with one of the many colossal slabs of stone marking the beach. Passing through the Mormist men like a wolf through a sea of sheep, Chakran marched to the tower, threw open its iron doors, and stepped into the chamber beyond. Daćin and a few of his knights trailed the Emperor to the door, but went no farther. Inside the tower, a brazier smoldered red, and in the dripping scarlet light a trio of men stood before the Emperor. Each of the men was dressed in noble garb, and each wore the black and silver crest of Mormist. One by one the three men introduced themselves. They spoke the common tongue of Graehelm, which Chakran understood, and Daćin had studied enough of to make some sense of their words.

  “I am Lord Ennoch, master of the mines and the furnaces in the mountainside,” said the first. Lord Ennoch was tallest of the three. His face was cleanly shaven, while his robes were as black as Furyon steel.

  “I am Lord Ivallos, ruler of western Mormist and all those who live in the Velum forest,” said the second. Ivallos was shorter than Ennoch. His belly was plump, and when he spoke his cheeks quivered like jelly.

  “And I am Lord Ruel, overseer of all affairs with our common foe, the Graelords,” said the third. Ruel seemed the most cunning of the three. His shifting eyes were set deep into his skull, while his hawkish nose twitched often, as though sniffing out every secret in the room.

  Each of the three honored Chakran with a nod and a deep bow. The Emperor smirked, savoring their fealty. A moment of silence, cold and uncomfortable, and Chakran withdrew his sword from its resting place upon his back. The Three Lords looked on in awe. His blade captivated them, for they had before never seen such a marvelous weapon. Chakran raised it high. He wants the Lords’ admiration, Daćin knew. He wants them to be afraid.

  Then, in a tongue dark and twisted, the Emperor chanted a phrase unintelligible to the Lords of Mormist. His words boiled from his throat like foul water, such that even Daćin felt afraid. Something wicked stirred in the Emperor’s blade, a sound no living man had heard before. A black wind filled the tower room, a powdered plume of ash and bone, chased by an otherworldly groan. The tower doors were thrown from their hinges. Daćin and his men were nearly blasted off their feet, and the Three Lords of Mormist howled in fear. Too late, they knew their folly in trusting the Emperor, though their screams could not be heard above the wailing of Chakran’s evil blade. In the next breaths, the Emperor stalked forth and slew them without mercy. His elite followed his lead, sweeping to both sides of the room, murdering all the Lords’ servants in their path. In the end, no man of Mormist survived. Their blood stained the walls, and their limbs were scattered like children’s toys.

  Outside, the torchbearers stirred. The murders were hidden from their vantage, but the dreadful sound of Chakran’s blade roused them to suspicion. They flocked toward the tower and the source of the awful noise. Laughing, Chakran emerged with the fell blade in his grasp, raising it above his head while roaring a command to some hundred soldiers waiting below on the beach. Bitter winds, sharp and stinging, erupted from nothing. The twilight grew grim, the clouds turning black. Daćin did not expect any of it. He watched as a storm of Chakran’s bodyguard warriors, clad in shadowy armor, swept up the shore and fell upon the Mormist folk in a wave of death. The Mormist men were not prepared to defend themselves against such cruel odds. Their murder was so swift that most of them barely drew a breath before the Furyons slaughtered them. In a matter of moments, all the torches were extinguished, and all of the bearers slain. The Emperor’s Furyons piled their limbs and heads in grotesque heaps upon the sand. The warm red rain of their butchery trickl
ed down the rocky sand, spilling like dark rubies into the sea.

  Daćin did not move amidst the carnage. The dead men, the sudden storm, and the black drumbeat of Chakran’s blade hung on his senses like clouds. He had supposed Chakran meant to ally with the Mormist Lords, but with the Mormist folk lying lifeless upon the beach, he contemplated the likelihood the Emperor had designed plans not meant to be shared.

  “What now?” his men nervously asked.

  “Now is nothing,” he said. “Forget what you saw. Go back to your tents. Tomorrow will be a hard day.”

  He marched toward his master. He allowed himself no recognition of the butchered Mormist bodies, striding over them as though they were tombstones. Chakran awaited him on the footsteps of the tower, the terrible thrum of his sword only just beginning to wane. As Daćin advanced, he hesitated. The weapon in the Emperor’s hands unnerved him. Have I gone mad? He wondered. Or does his sword draw breath the same as a man? Malog’s work. Not meant for me. He tore his gaze away from the sword as he approached. “Beg pardon, my Emperor.” He gazed at the sand beneath the Emperor’s boots. “I did not expect the usefulness of these men to be so short lived.”

  Chakran slid the terrible sword back into the scabbard on his back. When he did, the wind slowed and the heaviness in the air seemed to shrink. “They sought to exploit us.” The Emperor fanned his fingers like scythes over the dead. “The letters they wrote, the groveling for favors… If we’d let them live, they’d have bartered, begged, and bickered for the scraps of our conquest. They had no desire to see us to glory, nor did they understand the future awaiting Furyon. They were traitors, a disease. I have judged them.”

  “As you say, Sire.” He bowed. “If they were wicked, this was justice.”

  “I retire now.” Chakran grimaced. “Winter comes, and these old bones mislike the cold. I shall rest in the tower while you prepare us for spring. The Three Lords did well in one regard. The mountains sit between us and our conquest, but before their deaths the Lords were so kind as to map the way through. While you’re here massing our strength, our rivals shall wither on their thrones, oblivious to our presence. When we march, they’ll never see us coming.”

  He dared a glance into his master’s eyes. He saw a ghastly blaze, a fire roaming in the black of the Emperor’s pupils. He towered over his master, yet felt so small. “Milord, I beg your leave to begin.”

  “Go then,” said the Emperor. “You are dismissed.”

  Daćin retreated to the bottom of the shore. The sun plunged to its death at his back, and the darkness slid behind his heels like black ink running. At the shore, starlit and thundering, he dismissed his guards, crept into the tent his squire had prepared, and after a meal of wine and bread, fell into shallow sleep. The memories of Chakran’s sword chased him into his dreams, and the scent of the murdered men sat ill in his stomach.

  The days thereafter brought rapid change to the Mormist shore. Like squatters, the clouds settled in, forbidding the sun to shine. The sand dimmed from pale and pristine to blighted and black, the Furyon encampment bristling with thousands of tall black tents, seeming not unlike a second Morellellus. Within three days, the Emperor’s fleet was emptied upon the shore, and a seemingly endless supply of weapons, food, and provisions piled high. Within five, the Furyons began to spread inland. Like ants, they fanned up the shore and struck hundreds of smaller camps all across the coastal hinterland, reaching the footsteps of the Crown Mountains. A week later, the raising of three watchtowers began. Hammers and pickaxes were brought to bear. Skeletons of felled and stripped trees were erected, and heavy stones mortared into place. The Furyons staggered the towers’ construction from the shore to the edge of the mountains, each edifice aligned with the Emperor’s tower at the shore. By the time the last stone was laid, the Furyons saturated the hinterlands. By day the landscape bustled, filled from end to end with soldiers, the lines like black rivers. By night the encampment became a much more fearsome thing, a wending rope of fire many leagues in length, winding like an angry comet’s tail across a wounded landscape.

  Weeks passed. More ships arrived, and Daćin’s legion continued to swell, massing epidemically upon the land. Winter swept down a month after his arrival. Shivering winds knifed inland from the sea, and snows from the Crown Mountains blanketed the Furyon camp. Breaths were frosted, hearts hardened, and thousands of hinterland trees harvested for firewood, but the Furyons did not rest. Every day, even as the frigid winds blasted and the cold claimed fingertips and toes, Daćin led his soldiers into ritual training for the war.

  First to be readied were his spearmen, the foot soldiers of the Furyon army. Their training took him the longest. After weeks of grueling drills and sparring from dawn until dusk, each of them was brought before him, and each of them bestowed with a great, black-bladed spear. The spears were forged of Dageni steel, nigh unbreakable, sharpened by the smiths of Malog. “No Graehelm steel will protect against such weapons,” he promised them, “And no armor will turn them away. This weapon is your bride. Her wants are simple: shattered shields and kneeling Graefolk.”

  Winter deepened. The nights became far longer than the days, and the black Furyon tents turned into white towers whenever the snows decided to fall. Daćin prepared the second part his horde, the crossbowmen, most of whom had seen service beside him during the invasion of Davin Kal. Whether in wind or snow or smoking haze of false battle, he made them practice until their aims were true. “Let no armor concern you,” he declared. “Dageni darts will spear Grae steel the same as our fathers did our mothers. Each shot you take should claim a life. Each miss costs Furyon a fortune.”

  Still the winter worsened. The sun refused to shine, and the cold became a legendary thing, a foe far greater than any the Furyons had faced. Only the knights remained to train. They were Daćin’s elite, warriors that had served in the legion long enough to be honored as heroes. They lacked only one thing, one absence that greatly displeased him. They had no horses. Chakran’s favored lieutenants were the only ones possessing the luxury of a good horse, and so it was that thousands of Daćin’s knights remained on foot. They suffered greatly for the lack, as he bade them train much harder than the rest. “Thrice the sparring, thrice the marching,” he thundered over them as they fought mock battles in the snow. “To earn ten times the kills and a hundred times the glory.”

  Two months after his arrival, now the dead of winter, Daćin called for his host to assemble as if for the greatest of battles. He marched them to the frosted inland, where shallow streams lay locked in ice and frozen grasses dared not sway for fear of breaking. When the Furyon horde gathered, shoulder to shoulder, spear to spear, they looked less like men and more like a sea of black statues, shining in their ebon mail like deities carved of obsidian. They were invincible, unbreakable, unkillable. He brought them together for no other reason than to observe them, to know what the Grae might feel come the day his host stood before them.

  “What army could ever defeat us?” The Emperor rumbled in his ear.

  “No army,” he answered. “None in all the world.”

  Chakran grinned. “You’ve done better than Malog ever imagined.”

  “Beg pardon, Sire. I’ve done nothing yet.”

  Nightfall after the great gathering, and another storm sloughed from the sea and descended upon the camp. It seemed at first no terrifying thing, but later felt like the onset of an apocalypse. It blotted the stars, blacked out the moonlight, and turned the skies as dark as the bottom of the world. An hour in, the snows blinded all sights beyond a spear’s length away, and the winds became fierce and capable of killing. Daćin ordered his men to remain in their tents, towers, and ships until the worst of it passed. He did the same, trapped in the lantern-lit shadows of his own tent with the most trustworthy of his squires, a gaunt lad from Morellellus named Sarik.

  “I expected this day to come.” He broke Sarik’s long vigil of the storm.

  Sarik nearly jumped when spoken to. “Sire?”


  “The wind.” He gestured to the flailing tent-flap. “The clouds like tyrants. The stars we never see. Though I would‘ve expected it to come from the mountains, not the sea.”

  Sarik visibly tightened. “Every day is darker than the one before it, Sire. I reckon it’s the Graeland. It hates that we’re here.”

  He shook his head. “No. Not the Graeland. These winds are the same which sped us across the sea. Have you not looked eastward? Have you not gone to the shore and gazed across the water? The sky is a twisting black whirlpool. The clouds are tortured. In the storm’s heart, the lightning never ceases. Have you seen it? Day after day, night after night, the clouds crawl toward us.”

  “I have, Sire,” Sarik admitted. “But the Emperor bade us not to speak of it.”

  Daćin remembered standing atop the Emperor’s tower in Morellellus. He recalled the storm in the north, the clouds fouler than the pitch of a burning city. “The Emperor’s storm,” he murmured. “Malog’s storm. It follows us.”

  “Sire?” Sarik had not heard him.

  “Never mind,” he answered. “Keep listening to the wind. Go to the ground if it gets much worse.”

  For the next six weeks, there was no escaping the misery the storm delivered unto his camp. Winds ripped like ghostly fingers through tent and tower, shirt and shield. The sun fled from existence, daring not to glimmer through the funereal pall of clouds for fear of freezing and falling to its doom. Cast out from the tempest’s burgeoning tendrils, the stinging rain and frozen sleet lasted far longer than they had any right to. Days were freezing, and nights lethally cold. Losses were in the hundreds.

  It was the slaves who suffered the most.

  Throughout winter, the Furyon encampment required an endless stream of labor, not all of which was supplied by Daćin’s soldiers. To meet the demand, the Emperor’s fleet had delivered several thousand slaves to serve as expendable craftsmen, builders, and sailors. They were the lowest caste in the Furyon scheme, the nameless, the voiceless. They were the last to arrive, the last to be sheltered. Doomed to toil in bondage, they had no rights, no will, and no hope against those who kept them. The men amongst their ranks were the captives of previous wars and the descendants of countless years of slavery. The women were all young, mere playthings for the horde, flesh to be touched but never loved. Of all these poor souls, many did not survive the cruel season, for precious little care was given to their wellbeing. It was the way of Furyon. Daćin loved the practice none, but he had little say in the matter.