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

by Sean Rodden

They were the Singers. Those who retained and commanded the eldritch energies of olde through string of bow and song of soul. The wizards of the Fiannar. Few yet formidable, and wholly fearless in the face of the foul magics they opposed. Chief among them, the wizened Trimmanon of the House of Serra-Collean, dark Alysse of the Grey Watch – and Sandarre of the Host of Arrenhoth.

  Sandarre selected and nocked a long cedar arrow to the string, the wood of the shaft as red as the rip in the sky before her. Her lips moved but the song was yet silent, save within the symphony of her soul.

  A long lateral line of abominable fire crept above the distant mass of the Blood King’s army, slowly moving over the deserted field between the main body of the enemy and the contingent that had been sent to surrender to the Fiannar. Midway between the two forces it stopped, suspended in the morning like a spear frozen in flight, a conjuration so potent that the grass beneath it withered into a dark sludge, reeking and rotten.

  Sandarre knew that she only saw the conjuration from the side, that from above it would have the look of a great round vat of boiling black broth and scarlet flame about to bubble over – a disc without depth, but impossibly deep nevertheless. Unfathomable power.

  Fire and blood.

  Hellstorm.

  The fogs are fading fast now, and still he defers, still he delays. The little finger of one hand taps soundlessly at the pommel of his sword. Flared nostrils twitch reflexively against the foul flavours of copper and sulphur. His moon-silver eyes shine. He could – and perhaps should – signal the charge. The massacre of the Mages would be achieved readily enough.

  But in doing so he would dispense the deaths of five thousand foes to fall upon Alvarion’s hands and sword and conscience. And the formidable figure on the powerful charger will not abide that. No, the deaths of those miserable five thousands must be the responsibility of the Leech and the Vein. Their fault. Their culpability.

  And, of course, his own.

  The Black Prince slides his ice-white sword from its sheath.

  He can live with that.

  The Vein chanted as one, dozens of voices intoning, invoking the same dark powers, the same empowered darkness. Blood magic and urthvennim combined into a foulness far greater, far more terrible than the sum of its halves. The Cauldron had never before boiled and fumed with that specific solution, that particular compounded puissance, had never held the illimitable and inimitable fury of the Illincarnadine.

  The Blood Mage considered that the power might very well burn right through the Earth itself.

  And the thought was pleasing.

  “Ready.”

  Yes.

  Sandarre drew back her bowstring and called for her soul-song.

  Yes, Lord Alvarion. I am ready.

  To die.

  The invocative vociferations of the Vein grew louder, more insistent, a repetitive mantra of misery and desolation, droning on and on and on. Some in the circle of Blood Mages raised their joined hands whilst others lowered them, those Mages at the back beginning to levitate above the ground, those at the front kneeling upon the grass.

  And the vast red-black disc of the Cauldron tilted.

  Forth came fire. Forth came fury. Out poured the howling atrocity of the Illincarnadine, splashing to the screaming earth, rushing upon Eryn Ruil as a terrible tidal wave of foul fire and burning blood.

  The woeful legions of the lost were incinerated in an instant.

  And onward came the infernal rage of the Cauldron.

  On came the Hellstorm.

  “Sing!”

  And thirty-six bowstrings sang.

  Sandarre and her fellow Singers lifted their souls in song. High and clear they descanted, their voices rising in unison, a single glorious cry of incredible valour and courage. Eldritch, arcane, an ancient litany of Light and hope, of unflinching defiance in the face of abominable evil. Three dozen arrows sailed into the blistering maelstrom of burning blood, each slender missile shrilling with stark white fire and plunging into the hot heart of the Hellstorm.

  Only to be snuffed out.

  Nevertheless, the Hellstorm staggered, reeled, wavering on the Plains, momentarily rooted in its ruinous path of destruction.

  “Again!”

  A second volley flew, sleek shafts streaking like lightning, and the song of the Singers soared through the morning, clarion and terrible, a chorus of thunder crashing into the rampage of the Hellstorm. But the inferno absorbed and annihilated both shaft and song, and pitched into motion once more, pressing forward, ever onward, blasting and burning and ripping from existence all in its path.

  We are not enough, my Lord Alvarion!

  The Singer Sandarre quailed, and desperately she railed, her voice cracking past the extremities of mortal exertion. Her throat bled with need and pain.

  The Fiannar are not enough!

  Nor were they alone.

  Fifty hulking warriors of the Wandering Guard rumbled to the fore to stand with the beset Singers of the Deathward. They loosed no arrows. They did not sing. The Daradur simply stood there, mighty arms folded across steel-plated chests, and stared – and the Hellstorm slowed and shuddered, as would a belligerent bully before an angry big brother.

  “Again!!”

  Thirty-seven arrows flew this time, and the last to loose was the first to strike. And another voice ascended to join those of the Singers, strident and strong, and at its edges and in its core was a melody of bells, ringing, tolling, pealing with power and Light. And as Thrannien, Sun Lord of the Neverborn, nocked another arrow to his string, brilliant white fire blazed from his eyes and a brighter thunder roared from the stretched hollow of his mouth.

  “Again!!!” called Alvarion.

  And as the fourth volley flew, the Lord of the Fiannar followed, he and his steed but a streak of grey and green and gold over fields stained dark with the filth and corporal detritus of war. In his upraised hand Findroth the Gifted burned, and in that blazing brand’s wake a trail of whooshing flame, like the tail of a comet hurtling through halflit heavens.

  “Defyrine! Defyrine!”

  The mirarran reared, long neck extended in anger, the mouth open as it squealed against the sorcery it opposed, fore-hooves lashing at the scorched air. Alvarion slashed the morning with his sword, and a great bow of golden fire arced before the thwarted onslaught of the Hellstorm. The tempest shrieked and recoiled as flares of glorious flame lashed into its malevolent mass, driving inwards, righteous and relentless, slicing it apart.

  Fire with fire.

  “AGAIN!”

  Arrows sailed and screamed and struck one last time. The Lord of the Fiannar roared bestride his mirarran rampant. The morning burned. And amid a coruscating chorus of eldritch wrath the blade of Defurien came down like a meteor striking the earth.

  And the Hellstorm whimpered and was gone.

  The Blood Mage neither saw nor heard them coming. So rapt was the thing’s attention upon the progress of the Cauldron, on the blood and the fire and the pain on the plain, that it registered little if anything beyond the vast scope of that sweet sorcery. Nonetheless, some persistent instinct for life – for existence, rather – had survived the fiend’s death so many centuries before, some innate mechanism of survival that automatically heightened its acuity in moments of otherwise unperceived peril. Thus did the Mage sense a situation seriously amiss, and at the very instant that the first spears of the Prince’s Own pierced the scarlet silks of the Vein, the foul creature spun about.

  And in doing so did not die a second and final time.

  The fog withdraws, a thousand pale phantoms slinking back into the damp vault of the dead dawn. And in the absence of mist and the ascent of morning, the line of heavy cavalry is revealed. Tall knights clad in white-enameled armour upon yet taller white destriers similarly outfitted. The shafts of the spears and lances leveled at the ready are also white, and the steel of their tips is the cold hard silver of a winter sun. Above them flies the Ice Gryphon, the battle standard of the Princ
e’s Own, and at their fore and centre is the Black Prince himself, all the darker for the gleaming whiteness of the formation’s wings.

  He does not sound the attack. No horn blows. No command does he give. Neither to his mount nor to the men and women of the Prince’s Own. With but the subtlest of movements he impels the great black charger forward, and in the fraction of an instant one hundred white knights follow, as though they are all but one entity of one mind.

  And of one terrible purpose.

  The Mages of the Vein do not mark the peril at their backs. The thunder of the horses’ hooves and the rumbling of the earth are muffled by ancient magics, but the ignorance of the Vein is more a thing of pride. Their confidence, their sureness in their shared strength, blinds them. The fiends might be forgiven their hubris, however, for what cause have they for humility? Though their souls are lost to death their egos survive and thrive, and they for good reason believe themselves beyond the covetous reach of any real and irrevocable doom. Have they not already conquered death? What cause for fear? Thus they have conjured no buttress of blood magic, neither glyph of forbidding nor ward of warning, to guard their exposed and vulnerable rear.

  Ah, the undying vainglory of the inglorious undead.

  Pride kills.

  The white riders of the Prince’s Own obliterated the Vein of dead Mages on the initial charge. Ensorcelled points of silver-sheathed steel, subtle sureties against the unnatural defenses of the dead, plunged into the creatures’ backs: Sailing spears struck scarlet skywalkers down from their lofty perches astride the autumn air; long lances impaled the stooped forms of fiends kneeling upon the ground. The enchanted plating of the pikes erupted into hot white fire as the weapons of the Own drove home. Mages shrieked in surprise, in sudden shock, in the sole and only agony they did not love – their own. Shriveled hearts burst and burned. Blood-bloated bodies exploded like ignited casks of oil. And in little more than a string of ephemeral instants, the Mages of the Vein were utterly vanquished.

  All save one.

  The Blood Mage comprehended the circumstance immediately. As the Vein ruptured all about the creature and the Cauldron shattered into unnumbered fragments of red-black futility, the Mage surged into motion. It lunged along the length of the lance that had so nearly skewered it, one pale hand cleaving through the field plate of the weapon’s white wielder, cold fingers wrapping about the woman’s heart and ripping the warm wet meat from her chest, yet beating, yet pumping precious luscious lifeblood. The Mage instantaneously fed on the recondite energies of the sodden muscle, and its power swelled, a rancid blast of bloodfire blazing from an upraised palm. Three nearby knights and their steeds disintegrated into strips of scorched steel and chunks of smoking flesh, and a fourth had his splendidly helmed head blown right off.

  And there the Blood Mage’s rampage ended, for the warrior it then faced was clad not in white, but in black.

  The gush of bloodfire struck, broke and died upon a large circular shield emblazoned with the Three Lions of Ithramis. A shrug of the shield and the black-armoured warrior threw the last residual waves of the blast back at the Mage, abjectly knocking the fiend from its feet. Despite its unnatural speed and dexterity, the Blood Mage only just managed to roll away from the lightning-quick descent of a shrieking white blade. The thing’s puffy pink lips peeled back in a sharp-toothed snarl, and it rose and leapt into the sky.

  And the Black Prince followed.

  The creature’s cancroid eyes widened in shock and dark wonder, too surprised to summon a defense swiftly enough to avoid the second slash of that glittering blade, and it sensed a polar cold sink into its side. The fiend screamed even as it saw the lower half of its body plummet uselessly to the ground. The sword howled like a winter storm as it struck again, and in novel horror the Mage watched its torso detach and fall away. Its existence reduced to nothing more than a hapless head hanging in the air, the thing stared into the silver eyes of its slayer, stared and saw the esoteric essence of the energies therein, saw and understood. And as the tapered tip of the icy blade plunged through its skull, the Blood Mage came to know despair, sheer and utter desolation, if only for the merest fraction of an instant.

  But that merest fraction of an instant would last forever, and in that extraordinary eternity was the place that men called Hell.

  This is not happening.

  Waif glowered in the extravagant manner which only the most churlish of children can achieve, her lower lip protruding petulantly, her wide blue eyes indignant stars of sapphire. The little girl’s fingers clasped the burned thing to her breast with the fervour of a toddler clutching a favoured blanket. She stared at the shining silver line on the eastern horizon and the voluminous cloud of black and oily smoke that rose so ominously behind it. The camp had been taken and put to the torch, its token defenders unceremoniously slaughtered. There was nothing to which the Blood King’s army could go back, could retire. Not that Waif actually cared. She had no intention of ever retreating again. But still –

  This sucks. Seriously.

  The Cauldron had been shattered. The Vein had been opened and drained dry. Waif herself had only narrowly evaded eternal oblivion when the Sun Lord’s arrow had taken the pretty Unmannish princess through the brain. And now a troop of enemy knights relentlessly harried the rearguard of Blood King’s army, and the din of that nearby battle rang in the fundament of the little girl’s being like a horde of old hags keening and clanging pots at a dead peasant’s wake. Such a primitive ritual might not in sooth discourage the presence of demons, but it sure did piss them off.

  “Where is the Norian?” Waif barked to no one in particular.

  The wizened warlord, Malal ach Ammut, kicked his horse forward. “I am here, Brightest Star of the Universe. Command me, and I – ”

  “Must you always talk, Norian?” snapped the little girl, glaring down from atop Arn’badt’s headless shoulders upon the sun-browned desert tribesman. “You talk and you talk, but you say nothing and achieve less. A waste of life, you are. Worse, a waste of coin. Monumental. Now take your filthy horde of horse-hole fornicators and crush those bothersome little knights.” She flitted her fingers irritably toward the sound of fighting. “They are far fewer than you, and much slower. Cut them all down. But bring their leader to me alive. Harm him as you wish and will, but do not kill him. I want to look into his eyes as he goes screaming to his death.”

  Malal ach Ammut bowed low upon his mount, his small dark eyes glittering in his weathered face like grains of quartz wedged in cracks of dried clay.

  “Your desire is the meaning of my existence, Most Brilliant of Diamonds, White Light of the Sun.”

  Oh, just fuck me with a notched sword!

  Waif closed her eyes, heaved a weighty and very human sigh. She miraculously resisted the urge to strangle the repulsive little man with his own turban. When the desert dog had finally departed, she called and gathered her petty kings and captains, issued several orders in rapid succession, delaying only long enough afterward to watch a significant portion of the Blood King’s army detach and march eastward against the shield wall that shone like silver fire on the Plains.

  She then turned her complete and undivided attention to the death-darkened blood-soaked killing fields before the Seven Hills.

  And shrieked.

  “The Southman has the right of it again, Lord Alvarion,” said the Marshal of the Grey Watch, a trace of true appreciation, perhaps even wonder, accenting his tone. “Not only did the Leech delay the Vein’s sorcerous assault until the second morning of battle, like the Southman predicted, but Prince Arbamas has successfully destroyed the Blood Mages precisely as the Southman orchestrated. Thoroughly and with ease. I must say I am – ”

  “Surprised, Marshal?”

  “I was about to say impressed, Lord.”

  “Ah, yes…impressed.” Alvarion’s aspect was grim and stern as he adjusted the set of Defurien’s Helm. His face seemed strangely cool in the chill of morning, and his hand st
roked his cheek as though to confirm that the teeming legions of imaginary ants were truly gone. “As am I, Varonin. Nevertheless, the Southman did not foresee this morning’s capitulation of defeated foes. The Leech makes a mockery of honour, purposely souring the rubrics of war in its determination to stain and break our spirits.”

  “Perhaps the Southman saw little significance in the deaths of those five thousands.”

  Alvarion grimaced. “All life is important, Marshal. All death has meaning. Be thankful that it was neither your hand nor mine that struck down those hapless creatures – we would not have emerged from the far side of the deed the same men. Even as it happened, we are not unchanged, not entirely unblemished by our… refusal.”

  The Marshal looked upon his Lord, and there was a shadow akin to skepticism in his eyes, but he said nothing. Such philosophical speculation was the province of more sophisticated souls.

  And then a high-pitched cry of rage and frustration rose and shredded the sulphur-scented air, scoring the sky, furiously clawing at the ears and courage of Eryn Ruil’s defenders. The morning was bitter with the taste of blood and death and burning things, a flavour most foul that made the acerbic bite of bile seem a favourable alternative. The Plains trembled.

  “They come again, Lord.”

  Alvarion nodded. “As they must.”

  And the Lord of the Fiannar raised the War Horn of Defurien to his lips, and a single soaring blast erased all memory of the Leech’s screech from the sky.

  Malal ach Ammut rode low in the saddle, his lean Bhaskareesh stallion streaking over the grasses like a fabulous shooting star, the peak of his magnificent turban (the man’s, not the horse’s) cutting the wind like a… well, like the nose of a big purple python coiled upon his head.

  Malal had ever been a master of beautiful metaphors.

  The notorious Norian cavalry was swiftly gaining on the white-armoured knights, the desert riders eager and intent upon avenging their recent humiliation by the Fiannar at the Battle of the Blown Up Wagons. Hundreds of tribesmen had died there. But in all fairness – and Malal ach Ammut was nothing if not fair, especially when devising excuses for himself – it had been night, and they had been taken by surprise, there had been a whole lot of giant man-eating wolves, and things had been burning and exploding and all il-Hooresh had broken loose… or so Malal kept telling himself.