Roars of War: The War for the North: Book Two

by Sean Rodden

  “Nor should the Host of Arrenhoth.”

  They went to war on the wings of a song.

  The great Roths of the North, steadfast men who fought to live and lived to fight, their lungs bursting with song as they flooded over and around Lar Theas to fall upon the foe. Seven thousand voices raised as one. Seven thousand swords under a dying sun. Their song was an ancient one, a battle ballad of triumph and tragedy, but the tale it told was ageless: Blood. Death. Victory. Glory. No bosom-born battle-cry was more horrifying, nor roar of war more terrible, nor thunder of martial drums more demoralizing to an enemy than were the battle-hymns of the doughty Rothmen.

  They sang as they fought.

  They sang as they killed.

  They even sang as they died.

  Ri Niall led them, as lethal a warlord as any of the legendary High Kings of antiquity. Fighting beneath the rippling Emerald Trefoil, flanked by his fierce wolfhounds and a fiercer bodyguard of caelroth, the High King of Rothanar cut broad swaths through the foundering foe with his ponderous claymore – ponderous, that is, in most hands other than his own. In his iron grip, the weapon whirled and wheeled, bitter and buoyant, wreaking havoc and ruin wherever it went.

  Blood flew. Bodies dropped. Enemies died.

  And the High King sang.

  Nearby, beneath the Black Hand banner, Warthane Connar fought furiously at the fore of five squares of courageous caelroth, pressing ever forward. But aside from these cold and calculating professional warriors, the Rothmen surging down and around Lar Theas displayed little in the way of formation and less of tactics. Indeed, it seemed their sole strategy was to throw themselves upon the foe, either afoot or astride shaggy hunters, with rash and reckless and utterly irrational abandon. Lightly armoured and highly mobile, the Roths danced deftly amongst hordes of ironclad Unmen, slashing and hacking; they climbed and clambered over hulking Urkroks like swarms of kilted insects, steel pincers and stingers seeking soft spots. They fought as crazed men, lunatics running amok, countenances contorted beneath garish masks of green war paint, swords and spears maniacally slicing, jabbing, cleaving, thrusting, killing.

  Primitive. Brutal. Beyond bestial.

  And all the while, not a Rothman, neither king nor Caraman nor cold-hearted caelroth, missed a single note of their merry battle-song.

  As descendant dusk darkened toward night, Ri Niall and Warthane Connar fought their way through the bedlam of battle to where Tulnarron of Arrenhoth stood alone atop a gentle rise. Alone, save the pair of bright-eyed Fiannar flanking him, one to a side. The clangour of war seemed to have retreated from that place, its cries and crashes and clatter having peeled away, leaving no lingering sound in its wake but the baleful half-heard hiss of ubiquitous death. As though he was an extension of the hideously soiled greatsword resting upon his broad shoulder, the Master of the House of Eccuron was drenched in mottled muck, the blood and gore and filth of his foes dripping from his elbows, his hands, his chin. The spearman at his left side was slightly less spoiled, not so demonic an apparition, and his face remained somewhat unsullied. The bow-bearing Fiann upon Tulnarron’s right seemed entirely untouched by battle, immaculate and impervious. A vast circular swath of the slain had been cut about these bold Deathward warriors, a sedimentary wasteland of slaughtered Unmen, Urkroks and half-Urks, heaped in their hundreds, maimed and contorted in death, silenced forever – the deceptively serene eye in the raging storm of war’s insanity.

  The Master turned his gore-spattered visage toward the approaching High King of Rothanar.

  “Well met, Ri Niall,” hailed Tulnarron, his voice a low, almost lethargic rumble, like the roll of thunder retreating from a drowned world. “And you, Warthane.”

  “Aye, and isn’t it a grand evening?” grinned the High King, his eyes twinkling, his voice light and lively as though war was his greatest joy.

  Tulnarron’s lips curled. Blood-smeared teeth shone.

  The High King shivered, and not for the cold. He looked away, his glittering green gaze straying toward the Fiannian spearman.

  “Is that you, Gorny? Sure, I could hardly tell you from the big fella over there, and aye, couldn’t the twain of you do well with a bath, but don’t I know you by your wee cheroot? The one between your lips, of course, not the one beneath your kilt – not that I know what’s beneath your kilt, and not that you’d be wearing a kilt, but there’s no accounting for fashion, is there now?”

  Gornannon blinked bemusedly. Chewed at his cheroot. Blinked again.

  The High King then smiled upon the slim Fiann with the bow.

  “Sure, even amidst the darkness of war, doesn’t the light of your beauty just shine, lass? Aye, it shines, so it does, does it not?”

  Sandarre’s face flushed. Her mind whirled for weariness. Incongruously, she muttered only, “I am out of arrows.”

  Ri Niall’s smile brightened.

  “A small matter that matters little and not at all, to be sure, for isn’t the day ours, lass? And a pretty wee thing like you will be having no trouble finding as many arrows in the night as she sees fit, and as fits her, is that not so?”

  Sandarre’s flush darkened. Wordlessly, she reached down, yanked a long slim arrow from the punctured eye of a dead half-Urk, nocking the grisly missile to the string of her bow.

  “Careful, Rothman,” murmured Tulnarron, “that pretty wee thing is a head taller than you. And twice as mean.”

  Sandarre surveyed the sphere of battle about them, marked that the miasma of melee was steadily encroaching upon their position once again – the eye of the storm winking closed. The Fiann drew, tracked a likely target through slits of grey light. Let fly. Something died.

  “You might not like what I do with my arrows in the night, High King,” Sandarre surmised as the clamour of war ascended to earsplitting decibels. “And the day is not yet ours.”

  And as though in terrible concord with her latter assertion, the blasted earth upon which they all stood trembled.

  The High King’s merriment fell away.

  Grey and green gazes rotated eastward.

  The ground shuddered, juddered, pitching perceptibly as violent vibrations rumbled westward, reverberating, resonating in the rootrock, rising through boot and bone to shake the very soul. And a living thunder sent all other sound scattering, as friend, foe, fiend and beast ceased their life-and-death struggles, stepped back and studied the onrushing eventide in the east.

  Reflexively, Gornannon hefted both spear and shield, crunched his cheroot between bared teeth. Sandarre selected another death-tainted arrow, eldritch words of power playing upon her lips. Tulnarron rested on the hilts of his sword.

  The world roared.

  The enemy wailed.

  Unmen, Urkroks, half-Urks turned and fled. Flying northward into the waiting wrath of Lord Alvarion, Marshal Varonin, young Master Sennadan, grief-maddened Accamon. Fleeing from dust to certain death. Willfully. Willingly.

  “This can’t be good, sire,” muttered Warthane Connar.

  “Aye, mo cara,” responded Ri Niall, raising his slaughter-smeared claymore once again. “Not good. Not good at all.”

  Nor was it.

  “What is that?”

  Axennus peered eastward upon the gloaming to where the deepening darkness of dusk had swollen into nascent night and was marching inexorably on Eryn Ruil. A towering wall of dust and debris rose and reeled in the van, whirling, rolling relentlessly westward. Toward besieged Lar Theas.

  “I cannot tell, Bron,” replied the Commander. “All I see is dust and darkness.”

  “Not there, little brother.” The Iron Captain pointed. “There.”

  Axennus followed the line of his brother’s outstretched arm and finger to the slope below them. There, the sheer face of the monocline eased into a gentler grade as the hogback kneeled upon the Northern Plains, vertical surfaces veering to horizontal in the matter of a mere mile. Initially, the Erelian Commander saw nothing save grey rock quickening toward black as night neared, the s
lope sporadically tufted with darker shadows where sparse patches of gorse and coarse grass clung stubbornly to the stone. But then he detected something… other… on the slopes of Caramel Dark. Subtle flutters of movement. Less than flutters – flits. Fleeting evanescence. Indistinct shimmers on the stone.

  Beside him, Harlastian hissed, “You said they would come.”

  Axennus’ eyes narrowed, squinting against the burgeoning darkness. The ears of his lean grey mare twitched, swiveling forward, the animal’s hoofs restlessly tamping the earth. To the left, a deep guttural sound, almost a growl, issued from the broad deep chest of Harlastian’s mirarran. Somewhere behind them, a familiar yet strangely anonymous voice softly remarked, “Dear me.”

  Vast areas of the eastern grade of Caramel Dark wavered ambiguously in the darkness, the sharp well-defined lines of the slope’s surface obfuscating into softer, more nebulous shapes and streaks. The very rock of the rise was become vaguely veiled, its darkened dolostone fluctuating faintly. An uncertain murk clung to the incline, indefinite and obscure, a gauzy greyish haze creeping inexorably upward. Slowly, so very slowly. More slowly than the human eye might detect – yet discernable, however dimly, to the soul.

  “What…what are they?” whispered Axennus Teagh, his eyes narrowed so fiercely that his cheeks ached.

  “Demogorgai.” Harlastian made a brief flurry of gestures with his hand. Several Warders of the Grey Watch dismounted, moved soundlessly forward, long bows raised and ready. “Devils of the netherearth. We call them ‘squids’.”

  “Squids,” muttered the Iron Captain. “Wonderful.”

  “Demonic chameleons,” continued Harlastian of the Grey Watch. “Masters of camouflage. Squid skin can mimic the colour and texture of the geological surroundings with astonishing accuracy, making them nearly impossible to see upon earth and stone, especially when they are immobile. But these…these particular demogorgai…”

  “…are moving,” inserted the Erelian Commander, his eyes but slits in his scrunched face. “They…shimmer. They shimmer when they move.”

  Harlastian nodded, drew his ever-bare blade from a loop at his back, its steel blackened against any unwanted wayward gleam.

  “When they come, strike for the joints. The squid hide is iron-hard, but weaker at the ankles, knees, elbows. If you can get past the tentacles, their throat is soft and vulnerable.”

  Bronnus rolled his eyes. “Tentacles? Seriously?”

  “And tusks.”

  “How many?”

  “Tusks?” Harlastian shrugged. “Two.”

  “Not tusks. Demo…squids. How many?”

  “One.” Harlastian paused, his head pivoting deliberately in his hood as his eyes scanned the eerily iridescent slope of Caramel Dark. “Perhaps two.”

  “Hundred?”

  The Watchcaptain’s hood shook slowly. “Thousand.”

  “Oh.” Bronnus Teagh crushed his mount’s reins in a bunched fist. “Wonderful.”

  “Whatever happens,” Axennus vowed, gripping his brother’s shoulder with one lean strong hand, “we hold this hill.”

  The brothers Teagh slid their swords from their scabbards simultaneously.

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way, little brother.”

  Somewhere behind them, someone smiled.

  The world boomed, boomed, boomed.

  The earth rocked and rolled, recoiling in agony as her surface was struck over and over, again and again, each passing second an eternity of raw brutality to be endured, suffered, survived, while ruthless gods of war ferociously pummeled the prairie a thousand times with a thousand gigantic fists. Fists – or feet. Huge, heavy feet. Running, running. Rushing forward. Upon Lar Theas.

  The defenders waited. Seventy strides behind a haphazard scattering of large irregular boulders, unwavering lines of the bruised, battered, beleaguered yet determined Host of Arrenhoth stood stern and silent beneath a bloodied Crimson Fist. Four essentially intact squares of courageous caelroth congregated under a billowing Black Hand; thousands of battled-crazed, wild-eyed Roths of the North seethed in a sea of Sunbursts and tattered Trefoils; hundreds of huge death-spattered wolfhounds drooled and coughed scarlet froth, blood-bedizened battle-beasts whose only banner was their intangible yet intense loyalty to their Rothic masters.

  Silent Fiannar. Singing Rothmen. Howling hounds.

  All waited.

  All stood their ground.

  The soaring cloud of dust and darkness rumbled unrelentingly onward, swirling, whirling, devouring all lingering light, blacker than the night it dragged behind itself.

  “We will not be able to see in that storm, Tuln,” Gornannon growled, spitting his cheroot from his mouth. “Neither see nor breathe. Regardless of whatever might lie within.”

  “Graniants, Gorn,” replied the Master of the House of Eccuron. Silver fire flared on the icy curvature of his eyes. “You behold a charge of stone giants. I have seen this before. Only not so…extreme.”

  “The Roths – they will…”

  “We will stand with you, lad,” assured High King Ri Niall, wiping red blood and green war paint from his brow. “Aye, a few of us might turn and run like rabbits, but they’d not really be Rothmen, then, now would they be? Bh’ritsi blood in their veins, to be sure, and won’t we be better for the loss?”

  Tulnarron unclasped his sodden cloak, tossed it carelessly to the corpse-strewn earth. Other than his gleaming rillagh, not an inch of him was unsullied by blood and gore. He took his bemired greatsword in a two-fisted grip of fierce unforgiving iron. Blood squished from his leather gloves like soiled water from a wrung washcloth.

  “Sandarre.”

  The Fiann’s bright grey eyes flicked from the onrushing dust storm to the Master of her high House.

  “I need to see, cousin.”

  “The last time you said that, Tuln, the results were not very… encouraging.”

  Tulnarron looked upon Sandarre. Saw her smile. Widely. Her eyes turned up slightly at their outside corners when she smiled like that. Strange that he had never noticed it before.

  The clarity that comes with war. With certain death.

  “Even so.”

  Sandarre raised her bow, drew the string back. Ancient arcane prayers played on her lips. The air crackled.

  “That rock just moved,” muttered Gornannon.

  Tulnarron’s icy gaze snapped to the string of boulders.

  “Where?”

  Gornannon pointed to a massive black boulder in the midst of strewn sarsens.

  “That one, there.”

  “Aye, and didn’t I see it, too?” confirmed Connar, the cogent, clear-eyed Warthane of the caelroth. “But then, isn’t the very earth quaking?”

  Tulnarron stared. An enormous chunk of obsidian. Volcanic rock. At Eryn Ruil. A land of metamorphic marble and limestone. Where there was no volcano for a thousand miles. Where obsidian had never been. Not, at least, within Tulnarron’s memory. And though he was Master of Arrenhoth and Warden of the East, he knew Eryn Ruil well – and well he knew that Eryn Ruil exhibited no rock born of the infernal fury of the earth.

  Yet there it was.

  The Master of the House of Eccuron raised his wintry grey gaze to the hurtling tempest of dust and darkness racing down upon, sweeping over and entirely engulfing the anomalous arrangement of scattered stones.

  “Sandarre.”

  The bow creaked.

  Inexplicably, Tulnarron lowered his sword, entirely oblivious to the small upturning at the corners of his own eyes.

  “I want to see.”

  The string sang, the arrow flew.

  The dust storm detonated instantly, exploding outward, skyward. A thousand shining tendrils arced screeching toward the cloudbound firmament. Light burst forth as it must have done at the beginning of the Teller’s Tale, bright and blooming and beautiful, banishing the night, breaking all darkness asunder. A heavenly shower of sizzling sparks rained down upon Eryn Ruil, luminous filaments falling from the sky, flutteri
ng, floating, striking the earth with soft satisfied sighs.

  Sighs that died unheard by all, crushed beneath the sounds of savage slaughter become manifest on the killing field before Lar Theas.

  For the mighty Daradur were come to war.

  “What is it doing?”

  The fiend had risen from the shimmering slope of Caramel Dark and now stood a short distance away, perhaps fifty yards, gazing up at the eaves of the oakwood with large oval eyes. The flat black surfaces of those eyes flickered and flashed with reflected light as hard lenses altered angles to focus on different facets of the forest’s edge. The sinuous, forward-facing crest encircling the creature’s cephalopodan head curled curiously toward the trees. Four pairs of suckered tentacles projecting from its narrow neck and tusked lower jaw wavered in the thick gloom like submerged sea grass. But other than the insinuated shifting of lenses, the subtle curving of crest, and the more flagrant fluttering of tentacles, the demon remained absolutely still.

  “Watching, Captain Teagh,” replied Harlastian, his voice but a shallow breath of the northern night. “Listening.”

  “Smelling, too, I would guess,” added Axennus. “Touching and tasting the air with those tentacles. Fortunately, what wind there is remains at its back.”

  The Watchcaptain’s hood bowed ever so slightly.

  “The demon knows that I, at least, am here. It will have seen me signal the Warwatch. It reasons there are others with me, but cannot be sure. And so it waits, watches, undecided and uncertain.”

  “Assuming this creature is their leader, it will send scouts,” declared the Erelian Commander.

  “It already has, Southman.”

  Axennus shot the Fian a surprised look. “It has?”

  The hood bowed minutely once more.

  “When…where?”

  “No need for concern, Southman. We are the Grey Watch. We see. And our bowmen do not miss.”

  The demogorg was tall, at least eight feet, but was exceedingly thin. Its four limbs were all of like size and shape, suggesting both bipedal and quadrupedal agility. Elongated and gangly, knobby at the joints, each arm and leg terminated in a strange hand-like appendage with four long multi-knuckled opposable digits, the undersides of which bore razor sharp ridges. The prominent pelvis and shoulders were also similar in appearance to one another, protuberant and bulging. The creature’s iron-hard exoskeleton phased between black and white in an unceasing succession of silver and slate and shades of grey, as chromatophores within the chitin sought to simulate the dolomitic limestone of the slope. This constant mercurial morphing was somewhat disconcerting to the eye, and could cause some unfortunate observers to suffer a certain vertigo, often compounded by slight nausea.