The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1

by Bryce O'Connor

  It seemed such a peaceful world. So tranquil in the stillness that followed every storm. It seemed that nothing could shatter the quiet, the utter silence broken only by the occasional lazy gust of late wind, or the distant shriek of a cliff hawk somewhere in the ranges below.

  Syrah, though, knew better. The fragile parchment in her hand crunched and crumpled in her clenched fist as she looked out over the false calmness of the North.

  The letter had come as she was breaking her fast, presented to her by Priest Jofrey so calmly she’d known right away something was wrong. Her thoughts had immediately gone to Talo and his foolish haste southward, but as she’d opened the letter a whole different set of fears came rushing forth.

  She knew that handwriting. She’d seen it scrawled many a time on little notes she had found the mornings after their relations, each one charming and clever. The young captain of Harond’s night- watch had certainly not been her only lover in her years out in the world, but he’d been her favorite and—Syrah liked to think—she his. That had been nearly a year ago now, though, and in truth she hadn’t thought of the man much since coming home. On the one hand she’d had duties to return to, more than ever since Talo had run off to patch the mess up in Azbar, leaving Jofrey in his place. On the other, she and Reyn had become closer and closer of late, spending more and more nights in each other’s beds than their own individually. Syrah had rarely given in to fanciful thoughts of settling down, always knowing she would leave and move on when Laor called her again. When she did, though, she’d even chanced to think of what Reyn would be like as more than a simple bedmate…

  It was odd, therefore, with such things weighing on her mind, to be handed a letter, scrawled in the distinct hand of a former lover, bearing such grave news.

  Metcaf was burning.

  Abruptly, fury rose up in Syrah like hot water brought suddenly to boil. It raged through her unchecked, the kind of fiery wrath that can only be brought on by the loss of something so meaningful it becomes a part of the soul.

  Like one’s greatest accomplishments, and the peace between two peoples.

  The feeling reached full measure, and Syrah sucked in a breath of icy mountain air. She released it in a keening scream of anger that rang out, echoing over the mountains. There was a flash and whoosh of flames, and the letter in Syrah’s hands turned to ash in a glister of white fire. In the same moment the snow around Syrah’s feet vaporized in a blink, vanishing into eruptive mist in the brief onslaught of heat she released with all her fury.

  “FOOLS!” Syrah yelled to the sky. “BASTARDS! ALL OF YOU! BASTARDS!”

  Breathing hard, she listened until those echoes faded away. Then, at last, she took another deep breath, and calmed herself.

  Fools, she thought again, though privately. Idiots. What do they have to gain? What is there possibly to gain?

  The letter had been obviously rushed, but it had given Syrah all the information she needed. Three years she’d spent hammering out treaties for mutual peace and prosperity between the Sigûrth tribe and valley towns of Metcaf and Harond. For three years she had toiled on both sides of the line—often at great risk—to end the age-old war between the raiding mountain men, who knew no other way of life, and the retaliating towns, who had found only fire could fight fire.

  And in the space of a few months, she thought, turning her palm up to look at the grayish soot that clung to the wool of her gloves, it all turns to ash.

  Emhret Grahst, the old Kayle of the tribe whom Syrah had dealt with extensively, was dead. Killed in ritual combat, he’d been succeeded by his murderer and nephew, Gûlraht Baoill. Syrah had only seen the man a few times, but each experience had left her with a distinct understanding: had Baoill had his way, she would have been as a victim of “the old ways”—impaled alive outside the burning walls of her home, or kept as a slave to be used and raped as was seen fit.

  Grahst had had his own respect for the customs and traditions of his people, but he’d also been no fool. With the onslaught of the last freeze, more brutal than any recorded in a hundred years, he’d known he’d had the choice to bow to a new way, or risk the doom of his people altogether. The old Kayle had made peace with the towns, returning captives and slaves, trading pelts and mined gems, and signing guarantees that the raids would end and that the Sigûrth would find another means to survive in their mountains. In exchange, Metcaf and Harond had provided the tribe with the firewood, wool, food, clothing, and tools they’d needed to make it through the winters. It hadn’t been easy, and there had been obstacle after obstacle right up until the signing, but the alliances had come to fruition in the end.

  Now… those same treaties probably burned with the valley town.

  Twenty-five thousand.

  The number was staggering to Syrah. That Baoill had amassed himself an army was unsurprising. If he were indeed intent on returning his tribe to the old ways, he would need a force to match his ambition. But the new Kayle had descended on Metcaf with a force of twenty-five thousand hardened mountain warriors. To amass such a group, Baoill would have had to have spent the entirety of the summer and early winter challenging the other tribes and conquering them. He’d allowed the treaties to hold, at least for a time. The towns hadn’t even been told that Emhret Grahst had been deposed, to keep the ruse intact.

  Bastard, Syrah thought again, turning her back to the battlement wall and sliding down to seat herself on stone, now cleared of offending snow. Clever, evil bastard.

  But clever he was. There was no denying it. And it concerned Syrah more than she was willing to admit. Gûlraht Baoill had never seemed overtly stupid, to be fair, but neither had he demonstrated any overarching inclination towards intellect. Apart from a blatant outrage as his uncle had shifted away from tradition, in fact, Syrah had always had the impression that Baoill had little to offer in the form of opinion or advice, preferring to sit quietly while the others discussed and argued.

  Now, though… Now Syrah realized that saying nothing and having nothing to say were—while presenting similarly—two very different concepts.

  He’s thought it through. He’s planned and plotted in detail. Months of preparation, of bolstering his troops with the warriors of other tribes. He was so ardently opposed to bending knee to the treaties, yet he didn’t attack right away…

  It showed patience, above all things, something Syrah had not come to expect from the mountain tribe in more than small quantities. Patience and cunning.

  Syrah tilted her head back to rest it against the stone, looking up into the endless blue of the sky. The moon was visible, as it was on occasion during the day, a mere shadow of itself, so brightly outshined by the sun it shared the heavens with.

  What would he do next? What was Baoill’s plan? It didn’t seem plausible that the burning of Metcaf was his ultimate goal. The letter had spoken of atrocities the likes of which the mountain tribes hadn’t partaken in years. Slaves driven away in droves into the ranges with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The elderly burned at the stake, deemed infirm and unworthy of keeping. The children too young to survive the journey ripped from their parents’ arms and left to the elements and fires.

  Worst of all, the bodies of the city guard and any citizen who had raised arms against the Sigûrth, quartered and strung from chains over Metcaf’s walls, or else impaled as gruesome keepers around each of the city’s gates.

  Such tactics were meant to send a warning, and what sort of general sent warnings if his campaign was already over?

  No. Baoill had only begun, and Syrah had been relieved to read in the letter that Harond was in a fury fortifying itself in preparation for assault. With the freeze now at their door, Syrah didn’t know what Baoill would do or when he might do it. Would he press immediately east for Harond? Maybe south in an attempt to reach fairer weather, making for the smaller towns of Stullens and Drangstek along the Fissûr Ranges? Maybe he would even make camp for the season, holing himself and his army up to wait out the winter?<
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  Whatever his decision was in the end, the only thing Syrah was convinced of was that Gûlraht Baoill had raised an army for a reason.

  Gûlraht Baoill had raised an army for war.

  CHAPTER 16

  “I have long admired the council of Azbar for their choice of scribes. Quite apart from a detailed and accurate—if often fraudulent—account of tax revenue, trade, and lawmaking of the period, the men and women selected to attend and record the battles of the Arena during its brief reopening in the 860’s have in particular my deepest admiration for the license and creativity they took in the work. Their descriptions paint well the picture of the time, place, and people. I can almost feel myself there when reading their stories, standing tall in the stands, fists in the air, screaming my encouragements into the pit.”

  —The North: Ancient Tradition and Culture, by Agor Kehn

  Talo had heard it said before that smell was the most potent of methods for drawing up old memories. To inhale the familiar wafts of a person or place, they so told, could bring to mind things one had thought beyond recollection, or simply didn’t know one remembered.

  Standing outside the great arched mouth of the Arena entrance, Talo was realizing some things were best left forgotten…

  Even beyond the walls he could make out the iron stench in the air. He doubted anyone else in the crowd thronging by on either side of him and Kal noticed it, but to Talo it was as familiar—if not as fond—a memory as the earthen scents of the halls of Cyurgi’ Di. Bits of scattered recollections flashed across his mind with every breath he took, like parts of some great painting shredded and left to the winds. Faces, feelings, sights, sounds. The image of a quivering young man, watching the shifting light of the outside sky through the wooden crossbars of the portcullis as it opened for him for the first time. The same man, older and taller, reddened blades thrust above his head in a twin salute to the roar of the crowd as he turned a slow circle in the mud. The same man again, head bowed and face hidden behind long straight hair, kneeling over the still form of a woman whose life was slipping away like the blood from the great wound across her face.

  This time there were no swords. They’d been thrown into the crowd in an attempt to deafen the hateful cheer of victory.

  “Talo?”

  Talo came to abruptly. The harsh rumbling of the crowd they divided returned in a rush, the memories slinking back into the dark place they’d been hiding. He turned to look at Kal, who was eyeing him in concern.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” the man asked for what had to be the tenth time that day.

  “I’m sure,” Talo answered yet again and, leaning heavily on Kal’s offered arm, he took the first step upward, into the maw of the Arena.

  They’d been in Azbar for five days now, collecting themselves and gathering what information the Laorin hadn’t been able to provide already. Talo had been more than a little relieved to be proven right in giving Raz i’Syul the benefit of the doubt, but it wasn’t until he heard it from the town itself that the truth sunk in. The atherian seemed to have been in Azbar for some time, yet still the streets were abuzz with little else. Tales of his fights in the pit. Stories of his battles against the Southern criminal rings. Even rumors that he had come to the city to rid it of the Chairman and his council. Talo and Carro had had trouble getting much else out of anyone, in fact, as no one seemed inclined to speak of anything but the Southern legend who had come from nowhere to grace their Arena. Eventually, though, some people opened up, pointing them in the direction of what the Priests were looking for.

  What they found was beyond any description Kal or the other residents of the Azbar temple had been able to put into words.

  Along the markets they found groups of begging orphans the locals had dubbed “the Arena’s children.” Dirty, shivering wretches, they huddled together against the cold, their parents long dragged off and never returned. Around one of the wells in the eastern parts of the city, a man had approached them, trying to sell off any of a dozen empty properties in the area whose families weren’t alive to need them anymore. He’d been desperate, unable to shake the fearful waver in his voice as he followed them around the square, dropping price again and again in what became clear was a hard-fought effort to keep himself—and perhaps his own family—afloat. Along the western edge of the outer wall, the burned frames of a half-dozen homes still stood, swallowed up in a blaze set by a crazed and desperate woman who had preferred to end her family’s lives on her own terms than that of the Arena’s.

  Trinkets and coins littered these ruins, leaving the wooden skeletons glittering in the sun, one for every other within Azbar’s walls who had preferred to take their own life than lose it at the end of a stranger’s sword.

  “Is this what it was like, then?” Carro had asked in quiet shock when they’d found out what the tributes were for, standing in the road along the morbid remains of the buildings. “Is this how it was, when it was open before?”

  Talo hadn’t had the heart to answer him truthfully, to tell him that, in so many ways, it had been far, far worse.

  And now, climbing the last steps into the Hall of Heroes, he faced the proof that he had played his fair part in creating that broken world.

  Both he and Kal were dressed in common clothes today, not wanting to draw more attention than was necessary. Patched cloth tunics with thick overcoats were covered with heavy brown mantles, wide hoods lined with fur to beat the snow that hadn’t seen fit to fall just yet. The winds were brutal, though, ripping through the Hall so that everyone bowed their heads against it, yelling to be heard by their companions. No one seemed much bothered to pause and take in the life-sized statues that flanked the long chamber on either side, warriors frozen in metal, their names engraved in plates below their figures. There were some Talo would have liked to pay his respects to but—in the interest of staying inconspicuous—he and Kal moved with the crowd, if a little slower. It didn’t seem word had reached Tern of his and Carro’s stealing into the city, and giving the Chairman any cause to find out just didn’t seem like a good idea.

  Despite this, though, Talo couldn’t help but stop when he reached the final pedestal, the only new addition to the Hall since he’d last seen it nearly thirty years prior.

  The base was of unadorned marble, like all the rest, but the nameplate had been torn away. The hollow iron molds of paired feet mounting a pile of human skulls were all that remained of the statue itself. Even had he not seen the title illicitly carved into the top of the stone, Talo knew whom it meant to represent.

  Lifetaker.

  “They tore it down nearly as quick as it went up,” Kal said with a frown, looking down at what remained of the statue. “Markus Tern had it put in a few years after you left, once it became clear you weren’t coming back. Six months later word reached Azbar that you were trying to ban the fights across the North.” The man laughed unexpectedly. “The mob was so mad, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ripped it apart with nothing but their bare hands.”

  “A shame,” Talo said quietly, reaching out with the hand that wasn’t wrapped around Kal’s arm to trace the carved name with a finger. “I may have deflated my ego somewhat since my youth, but I admit I would have liked to see it.”

  “I doubt it,” Kal said with a snort, smiling slyly. “It was naked.”

  At that, Talo straightened bolt upright.

  “It was what?”

  “Naked,” Kal repeated, chuckling now at the look of abject horror on Talo’s face. “Stark, stripped, and stitchless. Raz i’Syul may be a living and breathing Southern myth, but we have some of our own. There were tales that said the Lifetaker could take on an army of fighters with nothing but his swords. The sculptor”—Kal waved at what remained of the statue—“apparently took the stories a little literally.”

  Talo mouthed at the air like a fish, lacking any fitting response to this unpleasant imagery.

  “Naked,” he finally managed to gulp, looking back at the desec
rated pedestal. “For years all I dreamed of was a place in this Hall, and when I finally get it, I’m naked.”

  “There’s a lesson in there , I’m sure,” Kal said with a smile, turning to start leading Talo back towards the stadium stairs, “but for now we’d best find seats. We don’t want to be among the unfortunate left to stand.”

  Talo allowed himself to be guided away, but kept his eyes on the statue for another few moments even as he walked. He would have liked a minute to reminisce, but Kal spoke true enough. His knee wouldn’t do well to stand for through the fight they had come to see.

  As they managed the last of the final stairs, stepping out from under the arching ceiling into the Arena proper, Talo’s first impression was that not a thing had changed about the place. The great stadium looped ahead of them in either direction, ancient stone worn by time and weather, but no less impressive in the meticulous deliberation with which it was carved and placed. The stands stretched upwards for five full floors of seats, capping along a flat ring where the unfortunate latecomers could stand for as long as the fights would last. Thick decorative arches crowned this topmost level, some standing tall despite their years, others crumbling into various states of ruin. Worn gray banners depicting the crossed antlers and swords of Azbar hung from these stone loops, like cloth doors to the sky. If one was brave—or inebriated—enough, they had only to step over a narrow chain barrier and push the banners aside to witness the city in all its splendor from one of the highest vantages in town.