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

by Sean Rodden

  Hundreds, thousands of barking demons. And but thirty – nay, twenty-nine – Deathward defenders. Too many against too few.

  And, perhaps, too soon.

  “The Leech sends them all, little brother. All of them, all at once. Precisely as you predicted.”

  The Commander stared into the northern night. “Not precisely, Bron.”

  No, not precisely at all, big brother. The Leech has sent them earlier than I had hoped. Earlier than I had…planned.

  Axennus closed his eyes, his mind wandering briefly, an unsummoned sojourn conjuring a drifting image of mist and men, of rafts on a river.

  The Iron Captain’s hand fell heavily upon Axennus’ right shoulder, jarring him, bringing him back.

  “Harlastian will hold them, Axo.” There was a softness to the elder Teagh’s tone that belied the hard mettle of his nature. “For as long as necessary. Harlastian will do this. He will hold them.”

  Axennus’ eyes opened, gleamed like water on glass.

  “Yes, Bron. Of that I have no doubt. Harlastian will hold them.”

  As the last of the demogorgai plunged into the assaulted heart of Caramel Dark, a gust of wind whipped through the eye-slits of the March Fox’s helm.

  Harlastian will hold them.

  The wet warmth of a solitary tear streaked his chilled cheek.

  Mayhem. Mayhem and madness.

  Or so it seemed.

  The demons were legion. Charging through the trees, racing over the mulch-softened ground, kicking up great divots of moss and peat. All pretense of stealth and caution abandoned, the squids spread through the oaks like a sentient cancer, metastatic and aggressive. Loping on all four limbs; running fleetly on but two; climbing the deeply grooved boles with simian ease to hunt their quarry in the boughs. Hissing, clacking, barking. Razor-lined digits ripped the night, acidic spray assailed the air.

  The demogorgai were ubiquitous. Omnipresent.

  Everywhere.

  And the Fiannar were nowhere.

  Ghosts in the gloom, the warders of the Grey Watch effectively phased in and out of existence, there then not. They dodged left and right, darted back and forth, retreated, attacked, fled, fought. Stood their ground and gave it. And all about them demons died. There was no apparent logic, no obvious rationale to the Fiannar’s tactics. Indeed, strategy seemed abandoned, methodology become a forsaken thing, redundant, without meaning. Nothing mattered, nothing signified, save two things only. To kill. And to avoid being killed. For as long as the Teller deemed it true to his Tale. But in war, as in night and in the wild woods and in the throes of moonborn madness, things are seldom as they seem.

  Harlastian led his small company of Grey Watch in a long-drawn fighting retreat. Every feint, every stand, every breach and break in formation had been planned with the utmost care, consideration, cold calculation. The dozens of indirect paths which the valiant Fiannar beat southward through the oaks, each zig and every zag, the numerous sites of ambush – all had been decided beforehand. Each Deathward warrior had his determined duty, her predicated purpose, his obligation, her responsibility. All was intentional, deliberate. Carefully contrived.

  Even unto who died. When. And where.

  A running battle of attrition fought solely for the sake of fighting – to delay rather than prevent defeat. A battle Harlastian neither expected nor intended to win. But one which he was sworn to linger long in the losing.

  For the Watchcaptain had promised the Southman time.

  And time he would deliver.

  He cannot hear see them. He cannot hear them. But he can feel their dying.

  Deathward souls. Fiannar. The gallant Grey Watch of Carn a Mil Darach.

  His blood brethren.

  Must it ever be so?

  Swirling mists conceal his presence, mask his going, but pose no barrier to his bright argentine eyes. From the deck of his floating flatboat, the last of hundreds, he peers through fog and darkness to the fields south of the water. He marks the sea of lights upon the trampled grasses, thousands of wavering yellow-orange dots, like so many failing stars fallen to earth. The sprawling encampment of the enemy, the fires of the foe, of those unnumbered multitudes come to destroy them all.

  And he realizes that if he can see them, then the possibility exists that –

  He sighs, his breath a pale prayer in the night, purling in his beard.

  His black-gauntleted hand is essentially calm about the long grip of his sword, save the tiniest twitch of his little finger. Beneath him, the great black charger flicks its tail, but only once, a single perfunctory swat in seeming sympathy with its master’s own demeanour. Outwardly, both man and mount are deathly quiet. Inwardly, even more so. Exceptionally rapt and focused. Alert and aware. Watching, listening.

  And half-expecting that dreaded cry of discovery.

  But the cry does not come. Only the gurgle of water, the steady thudding of his heart, and the shy whisper of fog.

  The adversary is engrossed elsewhere. For now.

  His little finger twitches. The horse flicks its tail. Another sigh, another breath marries the mist, a dance of white ghosts, entwined in eternity.

  Then the formidable figure senses the one named Harlastian. He feels that noble Fian’s determination – and his desperation. He knows that death has come for the Watchcaptain of the Grey Watch of Carn a Mil Darach.

  Harlastian.

  His blood brethren.

  Because it must ever be so.

  Ferraron had been the first to fall. His death scream yet bled within Harlastian’s ears. Young Rovanian followed soon thereafter, his smooth and shining face ripped from his skull by the savage suckers of demonic tentacles. Then were slain fair Albannon and his gaunt uncle-wife Ethline as they battled back to back – so entwined in grisly death were they that it was impossible to determine where his entrails ended and hers began. And then was lost immense Dragodurn, a gentle giant if ever the Teller had told of one. But Dragodurn certainly did not go gently to his doom. The torn and broken corpses of more than forty squids marked the place of that great Watcher’s violent passing from Second Earth.

  Five.

  Five Fiannar had fallen. Five mortal coils become mortal coins. A quintet of tarnished silvers tossed to the earth to purchase precious time. The corporal cost of mere minutes. Fleeting yet priceless seconds secured through the ultimate sacrifice. Five times over.

  True altruism spares no expense.

  But those five noble deaths were in peril of being reaved of their glory, of being rendered irrelevant, meaningless. For too few minutes had been procured at the cost of overmany invaluable lives. And Harlastian had not forecast any further Fiannian deaths. Nor was he willing to offer up others.

  Save one only.

  Three warders of the Grey Watch had turned to engage a throng of thirty squids between two particularly huge and hoary oaks. Vastly outnumbered and horrifically hard-pressed, the two men and one woman were negotiating a gradual retreat when their Watchcaptain crashed unlooked for into the fray. The swarming demons shrieked and hissed as Harlastian immediately took the battle to them, his sword a blur of shining steel in the sylvan night. Flashing, lashing, slashing. Agleam with a familiar and fatal radiance, the very lustre that is oftmost seen by those shedding the restrictive shackles of mortality – the cold white light of dying.

  The three Watchers each withdrew a step, then another, trading quick anxious glances. This development, this interference was unanticipated. This was not part of the plan.

  Harlastian fought with a mute fury. Even his sword slew silently. His was a cool rage, expressionless, emotionless. Chillingly calm. The exquisitely composed wrath of one inviting, awaiting, expecting death.

  Ah, what more poignant peace than one so absolute and final?

  Their valiant Watchcaptain’s gaze swept briefly over them, and the three Watchers glimpsed a thing of both tragedy and beauty in those hard glittering eyes. The unshakeable resolve of a warrior willing to be slain. To die
so that others might live.

  Harlastian said nothing.

  But they heard him nevertheless.

  Go.

  They did not linger. For they were warders of the Grey Watch. And he was their Watchcaptain.

  They went.

  And twenty-one other Watchers went with them.

  A silver sliver in the northern night sky widened as a wedge of moonlight breached the congealed cloud cover. Insipid light leaked through the crack in the black like the blood of ghosts. A strange bluish whiteness descended, wafting over the ground. The haunting halo of foreshadowed doom.

  Commander Axennus Teagh fought down a rising uneasiness. All about him, the night was brightening. An argentine aura frosted the forested crown of Caramel Dark. The bare limestone that led there glowed with a sublunary luminescence, pale and ill-defined, as though more a thing of the ether than of the earth. At the Commander’s side, the Iron Captain’s profile was cast in uncanny caricature, a complex fusion of planes and facets virtually ashimmer in moonshadow. And behind, in the ambience emanant of the broken sky, the Ghost Brigade could not have been more aptly named.

  “The moon betrays us, Axo.” Bronnus Teagh’s voice was the sound of a frown. “Not a good thing.”

  Axennus turned his gaze toward the River Ruil. He leaned forward, pressing his face against the ghostly glass of night, his eyes pinched at their corners, straining to see. But the river was too distant and the night too deep, and nothing was visible of the Ruil save a vague phosphorescent shadow snaking into the east – and even that was likely more a device of the Erelian’s own apprehension than a true and tangible thing.

  “I see nothing,” the Commander replied.

  “Is that so?” A grim smile. “I wonder, who is the ketterk now, dear brother?”

  “You said that we are betrayed, Bron.”

  “These lovely blankets aside, we might as well be a hundred giant bronze lizards basking in the sun. Should your Leech be inclined to look this way, we would most certainly be exposed.”

  Axennus looked away from the spectral serpent of the river.

  “Better us than our friend Arba – ”

  And in that moment, the mount beneath him nickered quietly, tossed her handsome head. The animal’s ears swiveled forward. Her wide round eyes followed, fixing upon the besilvered eaves of the oakwood. Axennus stroked the mare’s neck gently, reassuringly. Nevertheless, she shuddered.

  “The horses – they are afraid, Axo.”

  A tremor shivered through the capstone of the cuesta as the clouds contracted toward closing.

  The Commander shook his head, patted his steed’s shaking shoulder. “No, Bronnus. Not afraid. Excited. Even…eager.”

  The Iron Captain’s stallion stamped at the dolostone. “Eager? For what? What could possibly excite them so?”

  Axennus raised one arm, pointing to the black oaks.

  “The mirarra.”

  And nearly thirty of the splendid creatures burst at a gallop from the edge of the trees. They streaked southward over the limestone in a single wave, one abreast, nearly invisible in the night as moonlight evanesced into darkness once more. Some bore Deathward warriors bent low over their necks, but it was impossible to determine how many mirarra actually carried riders.

  The Teaghs exchanged dark glances, and each read the same troubled sentiment in the other’s eyes.

  Too soon.

  Reaching over to grasp Axennus’ forearm, Bronnus rasped, “It falls to us now, little brother.”

  The March Fox summoned a crooked smile. “It always does.”

  The Iron Captain released his brother’s arm, raised one clenched fist, and roared above the gathering storm of hooves striking stone:

  “Ready!”

  There resounded the single perfectly synchronized crash of a hundred gauntlets striking as many bronze breastplates – the men of the Reserve had been ready for hours.

  Axennus peered beyond the rapidly approaching line of mirarra to the black shape of the forest. He expected to see a horrible horde of tusked demons break from the deeps of the woods in frantic pursuit of the fleeing Fiannar. But none came. He waited, watching. And still the demogorgai did not come.

  A hulking warrior of the Grey Watch drew her mirarran up before the Commander and the Captain of the North March Mounted Reserve. The Fiann’s broad face may have been beautiful but was spoiled by the filth of battle, a vile veneer of gore and gristle and dirt down which narrow white ribbons wandered, thin streaks of clean skin that could only have been the trails of tears.

  The gigantic woman fisted her gore-spattered rillagh.

  “Carn a Mil Darach is lost, Southman.”

  Her voice was quite soft, disarmingly feminine; an audience unfamiliar with great Valerre of the Grey Watch could not have been faulted for presupposing that a deeper timbre might issue from one so tall and generously muscled.

  “As planned, Watchtenant,” commented Axennus, his eyes roaming the grim visages of the Deathward warriors assembled behind the woman. Counting. And seeking.

  “Nay, Southman.” Valerre shook her head only very slightly, but that minute movement conveyed a sense of terrible grief. “Not as planned.”

  “A little earlier than we had originally hoped, perhaps,” the Erelian Commander conceded. He examined each warrior’s face closely, intently. “And the demons do not hound your heels as anticipated.”

  “If it were only those two things, Southman.”

  The Commander slowly returned his glittering regard to the Fiann’s cruor-smeared countenance.

  Twenty-nine mirarra. Twenty-four Fiannar.

  “You have suffered losses, Watchtenant.”

  “We have.”

  “Where is your Watchcaptain?” The Erelian’s question was but the wraith of a whisper. “I see neither the man nor his mount. Where is Harlastian?”

  The Watchtenant closed her darkened eyes, inhaled deeply. Her huge hands tightened about the grip of her greatsword, wringing the sodden leather. Something indescribable oozed between her thick fingers. A long shuddering sigh wracked her bosom. But when she opened her eyes once again they were bright and dry and icily clear.

  “The squids tend to swarm those that they kill, Southman. They tear their victims to shreds. Piece by piece until nothing is left. Nothing at all. And then the fiends fight amongst themselves over the spoils. The greater the value of the victim, the longer the squids squabble over their trophies.”

  The Commander stared at the woman, then lowered his head.

  Harlastian.

  “I understand, Watchtenant.”

  Valerre’s massive fist struck her soiled rillagh once more. Hard. “Should there be nothing more…”

  Axennus nodded woodenly, tapped his chest twice.

  “There is nothing more.”

  “Then this Eye of the Watch will assume its position now.”

  And the company of Grey Watch, a mere twenty-four riders strong, rumbled to the rear of the Erelian formation, and the sound of their going was as a drumsong of mourning.

  “The woman did not answer you, Axo.”

  “She answered me.”

  The Iron Captain scowled. “Then you heard words that I did not.”

  “Is that not always the way?”

  Bronnus brushed the slight aside. “What of Harlastian?”

  “The Watchcaptain makes good on his promise, Bronnus. He buys us time.” A reverent pause. “And his coin is his life.”

  Harlastian fell beneath an entire shoal of screeching squids.

  The combined weight of dozens of demons bore him to the mulch, their combined mass crushing down upon his chest like a wagonload of anvils, voiding his lungs of precious air. He felt a rib give, then two, the thin bones snapping like green twigs inside him. His left knee bent backward at an awkward angle, then twisted hard, tearing the soft tissue to shreds before the joint submitted and shattered completely. Something sharp and hard latched onto his right foot, lacerating leather and skin, and
lightning bolts of pain lanced upward through his leg.

  But despite the pain, despite the pressure of his pinning, regardless of the foregone conclusion to his dilemma, Harlastian resisted.

  Fought back.

  With no further opportunity to swing his sword, Harlastian abandoned the weapon, leaving the long blade embedded in the belly of a beast. Thrashing and stretching, the determined warrior managed to draw his duo of dirrica. Slim lengths of lethal Fiannian steel slashed for seams between plates of phasing chitin, blindly but instinctively exploring, exposing, exploiting flaws in the fiends’ natural armour. Squids squawked and squealed in acute agony of their own as the deadly dirric blades stabbed, sliced, ripped. But even in their demises the demons’ weight drove down upon their victim, the collective mass of their dead a lodestone of lead drawing the Fian to his doom.

  And then Harlastian felt tentacles slither over his face, heard his skin sizzle under a caustic spray of black acid. Bereft of breath, his nostrils were nonetheless assaulted by the rancid reeks of sulphur and rotting fish. The twin dirrica were torn from his grasp, his wrists seized and immobilized at his sides. He tasted something beyond bitter, past sour, as a slick serpentine appendage slid inside his mouth, took his throat, and tore through his torso. Terrible beaks clamped down on his shoulders, arms, abdomen, thighs.

  And through eyes clamped tightly closed, Harlastian of the Grey Watch at long last saw the Light.

  Rather, he saw a light.

  A golden brilliance flared between the two titanic oak trees. An eruption of effulgence and energy. And of something more.

  Power.

  Somewhere at the uttermost edge of his awareness, Harlastian sensed the demons desert him. Beaks, talons, tusks, tentacles released him. But not in a gradual way, not in any manner that could be measured. There was no loosening of beaks and razor-ridged digits, no tearing of tentacles from tortured flesh. No, this relief was instantaneous, immediate. No fraction of time, however infinitesimal, applied.

  The demogorgai were there – and then they were not.

  The initial flash of light soon faded, but did not altogether fail. A soft liquid lustre washed over the killing ground like a cleansing tide, and Harlastian intuitively knew that even the dead demogorgai were gone. Vanished. He knew not where, nor did he care. He experienced an odd floating sensation, as though he was entirely weightless and drifted upon – or was submerged within – an ocean of molten gold. The warm light of those gleaming waters flowed both within and without him, constant, consistent, a strange and fluid shining, one which he was astonished to discover he could actually breathe. Inhale, exhale, in and out, a sweet soothing salve for the soul. A balm of healing, humming through bone and body.