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

by Sean Rodden

  “There are two ways of being lost, priest. Not knowing where you are, and not knowing where you’re going.”

  Dandar grunted. “There is a third way, kulg-Kor.”

  “A third way?”

  “Not knowing when to shut up and let your urthron read the rock.”

  The Captain growled.

  Stifling a satisfied smile, Dandar focused his attention on the eldritch idiosyncrasies within the stone. He was soon rewarded. Puissance slowly trickled back into his fingertips, pricking at his palm, carrying with it indications, information, glimpses of other niches in the netherearth.

  And the faint yet vulgar spoor of urthvennim.

  “The trail continues down, kulg-Kor. Down and…north. But then…something strange…”

  “Strange? What kind of strange?”

  Dander rose. Scowled. “The trail splits, kulg-Kor. I sense several separate spoors in the stone ahead.”

  Jadun gritted his teeth. His black eyes flashed without benefit of light.

  “How far ahead, priest?”

  “I think you know.”

  The Axe-captain groaned. “Muggor Rutzar. The Ten Thousand Tunnels.”

  “Complete with its very own unhappy hive of urthwurmur.” Dandar’s hand fell upon the head of his hammer.

  “The worms granted the Dwarks passage?”

  “The Drone leads an army of more than ten thousand, kulg-Kor. The urthwurmur may not have attacked such a formidable force. Or they may have, and the dwar-Durka scattered. Which would explain the six distinct spoors in the stone.”

  “Six?”

  “At least.”

  Jadun glanced over his shoulder to the solitary kulgord of hulking Daradun warriors assembled behind him.

  “There are only ten of us, priest.”

  The urthron shrugged. “That is what a kulgord is, Captain. Ten Axes.”

  Jadun jabbed Dandar’s breastplate with one thick finger. “Watch your place, priest.”

  The urthron probed him back. “Consider it watched.”

  “Good. Now give me something to smile about.”

  Dandar stared intently down the dark passage ahead. His keen black eyes shone, bright and buoyant.

  “There was only one Darad beneath the Bloodshards, kulg-Kor – and he fared well enough.”

  A garish white gash split the Axe-captain’s braided beard. His heavy hand clapped the urthron’s shoulder hard.

  “Consider me smiling, priest.”

  Fly! Fly! Fly to the Fend!

  Sarrane’s eyes raced beneath lids oiled with glistening night-sweat, twin spheres pitching side to side, up and down, rushing round and round and round. Long fingers flexed into steely claws and cleaved the mossy earth of Galledine. Her lips peeled back, her teeth bared and clenched in a grimace of agony, the Seer of the Fiannar strove to squeeze the vision from her soul like blood from a healer’s sponge.

  Only to discover another:

  Find them.

  The agitated saccade of Sarrane’s eyes intensified under thin shutters of greasy skin, shutters clamped closed in anguish, the nocturnal nystagmus escalating with each twitch, with every twist of those frantic orbs in their sockets. Her back arched against the bole of a massive oak, she writhed and thrashed, the ancient tree’s deeply furrowed bark catching and tugging at her splayed hair.

  Stand! All ye Deathward souls! Good Men of the North! Stand! Stand and die well!

  The taut tendons in her neck bulged to either side of her throat. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and streamed across her stricken countenance like little rivers of pale colourless blood.

  Find them!

  The Seer whimpered in the night. A feeble sound, futile and fruitless – for there were none there to hear her.

  And know at your doom that the Teller’s Tale does not end here!

  Sarrane’s tormented eyes flicked open.

  And she whispered –

  “Or maybe it does.”

  The Lady of the Fiannar peered into the wide round eyes of her son. Such a clear and gleaming grey, steel without grain polished to a shine. The infant Aranion made no sound as he suckled, but only stared up into his mother’s eyes, so intent, so aware. And Cerriste could not help but wonder if he saw in her gaze that which she saw in his own.

  A soft rustle of canvas, a subtle clink of chain, and the Lady knew that the Shield Maiden was there.

  “He came into the world like this, cousin,” Cerriste said without looking up. “Quickly and quietly, with nary a wail. His eyes were open, watchful, and he was so very peaceful. He looked about with neither alarm nor excitation, but rather an expression of…recognition. As though he had been here before and was simply assuring himself that all was as he had left it.”

  “An old soul, Lady,” commented Caelle.

  “Precisely.”

  “I remember. I was there.”

  The Lady smiled, placed Aranion in his blankets, tenderly tucked the soft cottons under his square little chin. The Lordling sighed once, seemed to smile, and fell instantly asleep. Cerriste stood then, pulled her supple grey gown closed, turned. The light within the tent was a dusky yellow nigh upon umber, cast by a number of squat candles burning within open-topped glass globes. Such ochre halflight, she knew, did not flatter her. She was mindful that it made it her look older, frailer. Mindful, yes. But she did not care.

  “As I was there when you entered this world, Caelle.” The Lady tilted her head slightly, almost demurely. “Your own coming, however, was not so…tranquil.”

  “I do not recall that specific incident, Lady,” the Shield Maiden smiled blandly. “But I have been told I roused such a ruckus that my mother and father argued heatedly over the honour of slapping me.”

  The Lady of the Fiannar scowled. “Now what insensitive soul would tell you such a terrible thing?”

  “My mother, Lady,” Caelle replied banally. “And my father.”

  Cerriste raised one hand to her mouth. “Cousin! I refuse to consider that such wicked words passed the lips of Marshal Eldurion and good Taresse!”

  “And your husband.”

  The Lady started, then laughed aloud. “Now that I believe.”

  Caelle smiled, but her lips soon tightened once more, and her sapphire-speckled eyes flicked furtively about the tent, looking upon the Lady’s neatly folded blankets, upon the plate of cold untouched food, the bare blades and whitewood staff near to hand. Her gaze came to rest upon the sleeping Lordling once again, and from that fair elfin face and those dark curls it did not stray until –

  “You are troubled, cousin.”

  The Shield Maiden looked up, met the Lady’s piercing grey stare.

  “No, Lady,” she replied. “Not troubled. Concerned.”

  “You need not be, cousin.” Cerriste slipped her gleaming rillagh over her head and across her heart. “I will eat when I am hungry. I will rest when I am tired.”

  Caelle nodded curtly. “I am sure you will, Lady.” She regarded the Lady of the Fiannar with admiration, appreciation. Cerriste verily glowed in the halflight cast by the candles, her sun-kissed skin smooth and shining with health, her chestnut tresses streaked with strings of gold, her eyes wide round pools of clear northern rain. The Shield Maiden wondered whether the woman would ever age.

  Cerriste strapped her weapons belt about her narrow waist, cinched it tight. She grimaced inwardly as she felt the younger woman’s eyes on her. You, too, will grow old one day, my dear cousin. She flung her riding cloak about her shoulders with a flourish, adjusted the Flaming Sword brooch.

  “What is it that causes you concern, cousin, if not my well-being?”

  “I am a Shield Maiden of the Fiannar. Your well-being shall always be my concern. But you ever leave me little and less to worry over. Rather, my concern is for…others.”

  The Lady slid her blades into their scabbards. “Speak plainly, cousin.”

  “Our sister Sarrane took her rest in the Gardens this night, but there she found no repose. Sh
e woke wild-eyed and weary, with the gouged flesh of Galledine under her nails. Visions haunt her, hound her, and I fear she will fall to fever and fiendish formications should she not find solace soon.”

  The Lady Cerriste frowned, nodded. “You are right to share this with me. I fear for our sister, also. I will speak to her.”

  “She is sorely beset, Lady. She may not listen.”

  “She will not have a choice.” The Lady took up her glistening white staff. “There is more, is there not?”

  Caelle nodded stiffly. “Only one thing more.”

  The Lady Cerriste waited, silent, still, her manner both severe and austere.

  “The man in black was accosted, Lady.”

  Something changed in Cerriste’s countenance. Had she paled slightly? A trick of candlelight only, certainly.

  “I specifically forbade you from doing precisely that, Shield Maiden,” remonstrated the Lady of the Fiannar.

  Caelle straightened. “It is in neither my nature nor my blood to flout instructions, Lady.” An expressive pause. “The Heir to the House of Eccuron, however…”

  “Arumarron.”

  “And he was not alone.”

  The Lady glared. “Explain.”

  “Watcher Chelyse – yes, she of the boundless enthusiasm – noticed Arumarron lingering at the rearguard the column when we left the Reach. She sensed something odd in his demeanour and resolved to surveil the Heir. A brave, if possibly unwise, resolution. However, Watcher Chelyse does not fear much.”

  “Evidently.”

  “Two others remained behind as well. The young Heiress to the House of Mirmaddon and her nephew, the little boy from Maple Creek. The pair took great care to keep their presence concealed from Arumarron, concealing themselves within the eaves of the Gardens even as he had done, though at some distance from him.”

  “Brother,” Cerriste muttered softly. As one distracted. Or worried.

  “Lady?”

  “The boy Chadh is Tielle’s brother now, according to our custom.”

  The Shield Maiden nodded slowly, a bit bemusedly. “Of course, Lady.” And sensing silence was necessitous, she waited.

  The knuckles of the Lady’s hand about her staff were as white as sun-dried bone. She looked upon the slumbering bundle of her infant son with wide bright eyes.

  And she breathed, “Surely the Harbin – the man in black went north?”

  “Lady, I am a Shield Maiden of the Fiannar. I am also my father’s daughter. I am blessed – and cursed – with both accountability and curiosity, and the twain are oft at odds. Consequently, my appreciable appetite for knowledge embraces some which is forbidden and much that is forgotten.” Sapphire eye-fire flashed. “Lady, I know the man in black is the one the histories call the Harbinger.”

  Cerriste closed her eyes. Sighed.

  “I was only trying – ”

  “ – to protect me. Yes. I know this, Lady. And I understand your motivation. But yours is not to protect me. Rather, mine is to protect you.”

  “So it is.” The Lady looked up. “Your father has spoken to you of the Harbinger?”

  Caelle shook her head. “My mother.”

  “Of course. What do you know of him?”

  “Little enough. More legend than aught else. That he appears before great calamities and disasters; that he attempts to thwart these tragedies, but his efforts are ever futile, ever in vain; that despite his formidable powers he is forever doomed to fail.”

  “An accurate assessment.” Cerriste’s knuckles looked ready to burst from their skin. “Terribly so.”

  “The man is real enough, Lady,” shrugged the Shield Maiden. “And legends are just that – legends.”

  “Not all legends are lies, cousin.”

  Caelle inclined her brow. Though the vulture be winged, Master Ambassador, he is not forever aflight. Her own words, once. Not so long ago.

  A grave expression darkened the Lady’s countenance. “I had concluded that the battle for Eryn Ruil had drawn the Harbinger forth. It was a reasonable assumption. Logical, even. He has attended many conflicts, ever at our side, and all war is catastrophe in and of itself. Indeed, the battlefield is the only place where his curse is said to be neither here nor there. That he should appear at this time did not alarm me overmuch. And surely my husband could use his swords.” A suspension of speech swollen with the swallowing of a thing most bitter. “But the Harbinger did not go north.”

  The Shield Maiden shook her head.

  “No, Lady. He did not.” She met Cerriste’s glassy gaze squarely, directly. “The Harbinger and the mor-marran rode across the waters of the Tear on the back of a dragon turtle. They achieved the Reach under a sky blessed by neither moon nor stars, when the night was at its blackest.”

  The darkness departed the Lady’s cheeks as blood fled the flesh of her face.

  Caelle continued. “The Heir to the House of Eccuron then challenged the man in black on the rocks of the Reach.”

  “Challenged?”

  “Confronted, Lady.”

  The Lady of the Fiannar nodded. Peered long upon the sweet face of her sleeping son. Then she closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, held that breath within, exhaled, opened her eyes. Colour returned to her countenance. And also to her knuckles as she consciously, deliberately loosened her grasp of her staff.

  “Tell me, Shield Maiden,” she commanded in a cool clear voice. “Tell me all.”

  The Dragon’s Tear was as a facet of a great black diamond shining in the night. Flat and smooth, flawless. Cloud flooded the firmament with the ink of eons, masking the moon, drowning the stars, but the lake remained mildly radiant as though a light of its own burned within its fathomless depths. Its waters sighed at the shore like a satiated lover, a soft smile on the stones, wet fingers fluttering over the skin of the Reach.

  The Heir to the House of Eccuron stood upon the bank, his greatsword upright before him, tip down upon the rock. His muscled forearms rested upon the wide quillions of the weapon, his huge hands hanging, fingers loosely interlaced. A lacustrine breeze tugged at his tawny tresses, the breath of northern night coming cool and damp across his glistening eyes, fanning the dark fire of the little stars that flared therein.

  Fewer than twenty strides away, the man in black regarded the youth from the back of his midnight mor-marran.

  There is something in the silence shared by two strangers as each suffers the other’s protracted scrutiny. A thing of extreme expression, of profundity approaching pansophy. The widened eyes and the narrowed. The pressed lips and the pursed. The tilted head, the caught breath, the swelling of the chest – all accentuate, all contribute to the magnitude of the moment. A certain balance is achieved, a balance as tender as scorched skin. Where the unspoken is wise beyond the scope of words, and the intercourse of subtlety articulates an acuity, an astuteness of near divine proportions.

  Yes. That silence.

  And when that silence is shared by giants, all the world stills to listen.

  “Why have you come?”

  The man in black appeared to ponder the question for a heartbeat, then two, and half of a third before responding –

  “You are taller than your father, no?”

  The voice was mild, the accent refined, somewhere between the slow clipped speech of the Rhelmen and the quick staccato inflection of the Toshi people.

  Arumarron peered at the man in black. Nearly smiled.

  “Should you know my father, stranger, then you have me at a distinct disadvantage.”

  “I cannot comprehend how that can be so, young sir.” Narrow silvery-brown lights glowed in the ocular opening of the man’s silk scarf. “Surely you must know your father more intimately than do I.”

  The Heir of Arrenhoth stared. His head was at a level with that of the mercury-maned mount. The rider was but a shadow upon the beautiful beast’s back. A shadow with shining eyes.

  “I have seen too few summers to applaud clever wordplay, stranger.”

  Th
e shadow seemed to shrug. “Better too few years than too many, no?”

  Arumarron managed to maintain the placid facade he had adopted. But he felt the stranger’s prodigious power upon the smooth skin of his face like heat from a furnace, and the muscles of his cheeks bunched uneasily beneath the perpetual threat of twitching. Two swords, three bows, half a dozen long weapons, numberless knives – the man in black was an anthropomorphic arsenal. And beyond the array of arms and palpable power of the man, his way with words – eloquence, elocution, erudition – were weapons against which Arumarron had limited and little defense.

  “I know you, stranger.”

  The Heir was sure he saw some something move beneath the black head-wrapping. Epicanthal folds made mere slits of the stranger’s glittering gaze. Some smiles can never be completely concealed.

  “To know something that is strange to you is a difficult thing, no? Some might even say impossible.”

  Arumarron bristled, but only at the nuque, a raising of small hairs adequately hidden by his bundled hood.

  “I know you,” the Heir repeated obstinately. “And while it is true that my father has spoken of you, he did not do so in a manner that would have me believe the two of you are in any way… familiar.”

  “Oh? You presume to know me because your father has mentioned me? A mighty leap, young sir, and a mightier feat. Knowing another, truly knowing, is a thing forbidden even the most entwined and sagacious souls.”

  “I know your name.”

  “Then the handicap is mine, son of Tulnarron. For I know your parentage only by your sword and your stance, and by the bones of your face. Despite these markers, my conclusion was a precarious thing, as I have never actually acquainted myself with your father. But I have seen him. Twice. From afar.”

  Arumarron grunted. “As I suspected. My father would not have kept the tale of his meeting you from me.”

  That unseen smile again.

  “No, but your mother would – and evidently has.”

  The Heir’s countenance betrayed him at last. His teeth clenched themselves of their own accord, grinded, hardening the planes and facets of his youthful face. The blue-black stars within his eyes flared and burned. And his melodious voice withered to a whisper –