Assail

by Ian C. Esslemont

  ‘Aye. Your Stormriders. The ignorant speak of the winters of the Stormriders and the Jaghut as if they are the same thing. But that is not so. The Riders are alien. Not of this world. Indeed, some argue that in their original form they were of the frigid black gaps between the worlds – but that cannot be decided. No, this cold is more familiar, is it not? We’ve faced it before, or at least our ancestors have.’ She drew on the pipe in a loud hiss and popping of whatever strange leaf she burned. ‘This crew is of Falar, and south of our lands are mountains capped by a great ice-field. The Fenn range, we call it. It, too, is a place where the old races yet hold out. Giants and Jaghut – the Fenn and the Thelomen-kind. We both know this cold, yes? It is the breath of the Jaghut winter blowing down our necks.’

  Reuth shivered again. ‘But it’s spring.’

  The old woman’s snow-white orbs gleamed in the yellow glow of the pipe-embers. ‘It was. I fear spring’s been cancelled. As has summer.’

  ‘That’s impossible!’

  ‘Not at all. It’s happened before. Many times. In many regions.’

  ‘Greetings, Silver Dawn!’ a gruff voice called from the dock. ‘Permission to come aboard?’

  Reuth glanced to Ieleen then shook himself, remembering her blindness. ‘What should I do?’ he whispered.

  She waved him onward. ‘Give him permission, lad!’

  He hurried to the side. It was that barrel-shaped Genabackan captain. ‘Granted,’ he answered.

  The big fellow came puffing up the gangplank. He was all smiles behind his greying beard. ‘Morning! Morning. And a damned frosty one too! Cold enough to freeze the tits from a—’ He caught sight of Ieleen and clamped his lips shut. ‘Sorry, ma’am.’

  But she just smiled indulgently as she drew on the pipe then exhaled a great gout of blue smoke. ‘Look at us three,’ she murmured, choosing to ignore her own handicap. ‘A Falaran pilot, a Genabackan mariner, and a Mare navigator. We three smell it. Us with the knack of sensing the currents of sea and air. Yes, Enguf?’

  The Genabackan was nodding as he stroked his beard. ‘Aye. The wind’s changed. It’s strong out of the north now. Not a good sign for us.’

  ‘I agree,’ Ieleen said around the stem of the pipe. ‘We must be ready. We may have to slip anchor in a rush.’

  The Genabackan pirate cocked a brow. ‘Think you so? Unsettling news. The lads and lasses won’t like that.’

  ‘They sound miserable already.’

  Enguf winced and dragged his fingers through his beard. ‘Aye. This whole venture’s been nothing but one disaster after another. I’ve had to put down three, ah … spirited debates regarding my leadership.’

  Ieleen laughed with the pipe stem clamped between her teeth. ‘Look at it this way. You might be the only ship to return to the Confederacy. You can tell whatever stories all you damned well please, then.’

  Enguf laughed uproariously and slapped Reuth’s shoulder. The fellow rather reminded him of his uncle. ‘And I shall!’ he promised. ‘You can be damned certain of that!’ He straightened. ‘I’ll keep your words in mind. Always prudent to weigh the words of a Falaran sea-witch. Until later, then.’ He clomped off to the gangway.

  Reuth’s eyes had grown large at the man’s words. A sea-witch! Growing up in Mare, he’d heard nothing but ghastly stories of such sorceresses. Human sacrifices, eating babies, drinking blood! Every wicked practice imaginable! Swallowing to wet his throat, he ventured, ‘He called you a sea-witch.’

  The old woman’s blind hoarfrost-white orbs swung to directly meet his own. Her wrinkled lips rose in a slow smile that seemed to promise she knew all he was thinking.

  ‘It’s just a term of affection,’ she said.

  * * *

  Mist sensed the approach of yet more newcomers. She was pacing before her throne, hands clasped behind her back, wondering on the mystery of this untimely chill flowing down from the north like an unwelcome breath. Had these pathetic invaders caused more trouble than she’d imagined?

  Who, she wondered, would dare approach now in the mid-day? None of the horns had sounded announcing landing vessels; and she was certain none of her people would neglect that. Still, in the past, some parties had arrived overland, harrowing though the passage might be. She turned to the rear of the great meeting hall, calling: ‘Anger! Wrath! Rouse yourselves, you sodden wineskins! We have unannounced guests.’ Deep basso grumblings answered her from the dark.

  She sat on the wooden seat, arranged the long trailing tag-ends of her gown, and summoned her sorcery. It was a melding she had crafted over the centuries of her innate access to Omtose Phellack and such lesser portals to power as were available in these southern lands.

  Shadows moved in the light streaming in through the open way, out beyond the entrance hall. The flickering light pulled her gaze and she paused, bemused by what she sensed there. Something unfamiliar, yet also teasingly recognizable; like something she had sensed recently. Something she hadn’t liked.

  Her magery now swirled about her in gossamer filaments and ribbons, spreading out to enmesh the entire hall in readiness. She turned her attention to the figures now entering the hall and the twitching tag-ends of coalesced fog, together with the scarves of vapour, all flinched as one.

  Creatures out of legend. The threat so long predicted she’d long since laughed it away. The unrelenting, undying hunters. The Army of Dust and Bone.

  The lead figure wore a cloak of stiff hide on which only a few sad patches of what was once perhaps white fur still remained. The eyeless head of the beast rode atop a mummified mien hardly any better preserved. A forest of bear claws rattled and clattered at his hollow chest. Ragged tattered pelts and skins wrapped a torso of flesh hard to differentiate from the leathers. A blade of pale brown flint, its grip wrapped in a leather strip, rode at a belt of woven leather.

  The next one was in even worse shape, could that be possible. She, for Mist intuited that the dried cadaver had been female, had obviously been driven through by many savage blows. The cured leather of her hides hung in shreds. Wide tannin-stained cheekbones seemed to elongate the empty orbits of the eyes. Upper canines glinted copper-sheathed.

  Behind these two leaders more of the undying entered, spreading out across the hall. Bony feet slid and clacked on the stone flags of the floor, dry hides brushed and rubbed. Mist imagined she could almost hear their joints creak and grate as the hoary ancients swung their heads to regard her.

  She found that a sea of dark empty sockets casts a heavy weight.

  She remembered who she was – her lineage – and loosed her grip on the armrests of her throne. She raised her chin, defiant even in the face of these foretold avengers, and worked to force the usual disdain into her voice. ‘What is it you wish, accursed ones?’

  ‘You know what we have come for,’ the lead undying answered – its voice was as the desiccated brushing of dead twigs across stone.

  ‘Then you have travelled far for nothing, as you shall not leave this hall.’

  ‘We shall see.’ He lifted a gnarled mangled hand of sinew and ligament-wound bone to his fellows.

  ‘A moment,’ Mist called, ‘if you would.’

  At a small gesture from the foremost the female undying paused. ‘What is it?’ she answered, utterly uninflected.

  ‘May I know the names of those who would presume to level their ages-old judgement upon me?’

  The lead one fractionally inclined its ravaged head. ‘I am Ut’el Anag of the Kerluhm T’lan Imass.’ He indicated the one next to him. ‘And this is Lanas Tog of my clan.’

  Mist bowed her head a touch. ‘Greetings, ancients. I am Mist. And, with your permission, won’t you allow me to introduce my two sons?’ She raised her hand, beckoning, and to her hidden relief, heavy thumping steps sounded from the rear.

  Unlike all her previous audiences, however, these visitors did not flinch nor back away as her sons emerged. She spared a glance upwards and saw that they, too, were not acting as usual: instead of their con
fident laughing grins they now wore hardened expressions. Their eyes were slit and lips compressed. Only the tips of their blunt yellowed tusks showed. They held their weapons readied.

  ‘This is Anger,’ she indicated, ‘and Wrath.’

  Ut’el Anag regarded each in turn. ‘Such guards will not help you escape us.’

  ‘You misjudge me, Ut’el. I have no intention of escaping.’ And she swept her arms forward, unleashing her sorceries.

  The closest ancients made straight for her throne; sweeps from Wrath’s man-tall sword and Anger’s great broad-axe knocked them all flying backwards to crash into the stone walls in a clatter of bone and fallen stone weapons.

  Mist clenched her fists, enmeshing all within the tangling coils of her scarves of fog. Without thinking, she wasted precious seconds squeezing their throats, then remembered just who, and what, these were, and cursed herself.

  Her sons waded in, roaring their war-bellows. Great blows from Wrath’s sword hacked mummified corpses right and left. Yet those not scattered into tangles of broken bone regained their feet, weapons of flint and obsidian readied.

  A quick slice from one of the undying severed the rear of Anger’s ankle, bringing him falling to one knee and hand. His bellow of pain shook the stone ceiling and brought dust sifting down. Mist sought to wrap the undying in her coils of vapour, immobilizing them. But their stone weapons cut the ribbons and scarves just as one might rend rotten cloth. They closed upon Anger, severing his hand from its wrist. In powerful two-handed blows they chopped his head from its neck. Hot blood gushed across the flags as the giant’s oxen heart laboured yet.

  Mist shrieked her horror and gripped the throne’s armrests – the mists curled away, dispersing as she gaped at the fallen corpse of her son.

  Wrath swept all aside with a great wide swing of his axe. And that would have been the end but for the fact that these were undying, and so those that could stood again, re-gripped weapons, and advanced. A thrown blade of flint took him in the throat and he reared up tall, gurgling, searching for the shard at his neck. The other leader of the band, Lanas Tog, lunged in and severed the back of his knee. He tottered, swung the axe wildly to smash shards and pulverized dust from the wall, and fell. Others closed in, swinging. Before Mist’s stunned gaze they dismembered her other son.

  The tip of a stone sword raised her chin. She unwillingly pulled her eyes from her fallen sons and lifted her face to the desiccated flat mien of Ut’el Anag.

  ‘You were … overconfident,’ he said.

  Yes. She had been. Yet could she be blamed? She had faced nothing like this. And yes, the myths warned of this Army of Dust and Bone – but those were just stories, after all, weren’t they? She nodded, and said: ‘No one expects the past to reach out and destroy the present – or the future.’

  The ancient’s face bore hardly any flesh that could move, yet Mist thought she caught a sort of startled flinch before furious rejection crimped the dried ligaments of the jaws and the arm drew back then thrust forward. Cold stone penetrated her chest, slid through her heart, and exited into the soft wood of the seat-back behind. She felt her muscles relaxing yet the blade supported her upright, for the moment. Her breath eased from her and in that last moment she felt no panic, no denial. She would go now to that bridge across worlds leading to where, none of her kind knew.

  She, at least, had a destination.

  Staring hard into the empty orbs of her murderer, she saw that he did not. These undying had abandoned everything – even their hope for a future for themselves. They had sacrificed everything before the implacable pursuit of their goal. In that moment, as her life fled from her, she saw deeper into the essence of these undying and saw that he was mistaken – that there was something. A possibility. ‘Do not despair,’ she spoke with that last breath, ‘there is yet hope for you …’

  Ut’el Anag retreated from the half-breed corpse. He turned to Lanas Tog. His dust-dry words carried wariness: ‘What could she mean … “there is hope”?’

  Lanas Tog’s desiccated features, the lips pulled back from her yellowed grinning teeth, the cheeks sunken to the barest strips of leather, remained immobile. The teeth and shell fragments woven into her hanging white hair rattled as she turned away. Her hands creaked clenching into fists of bone. ‘She knows nothing of us. Come, we must go. The Summoner is close. I feel her presence.’

  ‘We could yet deal with her.’

  Lanas glanced back. ‘As I have said – there is no need. Once we have dealt with all these, the argument will have resolved itself.’

  Ut’el’s voice still held its wariness: ‘So you say, Lanas. So you say.’

  CHAPTER XIII

  ORMAN, THE REDDIN brothers, Bernal and the Sayer household servants Leal and Ham had three days to prepare before Keth jogged up from the lower valley to report that the outlander army was approaching and would arrive before nightfall.

  These last three days it had been alternately raining, sleeting, and snowing. It was as if the weather could not make up its mind. Orman was glad for the damp chill. It would work against the invaders, or so he told himself. He worked piling the last of the equipment and furniture on the barricade of logs and hastily cut down trees they had raised surrounding the Greathall. All bolstered by lashed barrels, heaped sod, and any tangled bric-a-brac they could pull from the outbuildings before they fired them.

  And what of his resolve? he wondered as he tied down a great heavy table of solid logs turned onto its side. Has the weather dampened it? He straightened and pressed a hand to the patch over his eye. Hard to know it was still there when he couldn’t see it. Was he an utter fool not to have run off one of these past nights? Bernal said to have faith in Jaochim – easy for him, as he’d known the Iceblood for decades.

  No, faith in the Icebloods wasn’t keeping him here. It was, rather, the faith they had shown in him. They had simply taken his word that he would see this through and that trust was what kept him steadfast. That, and the answer to the question what would he do if it were Jass who stood now beside him? Could he abandon him?

  The absurdity of the idea of his ever deserting Jass made Orman laugh aloud. The carefree barking chuckle startled him and raised Kasson’s head from where he worked mounding the earthworks.

  ‘There is something of Old Bear in you, I think,’ Jaochim said behind Orman and he turned, feeling a hot embarrassment for his outburst.

  ‘I have been watching you these last few days,’ the lean Iceblood said, peering down at him. ‘I have seen you struggle with your resolve to remain despite not knowing what was to come.’ He gestured for Orman to follow him back to the Greathall. ‘Come – I have something for you.’

  Within, the Iceblood elder dug about in a remaining large wooden chest and pulled out a cloak of thick black bear fur. ‘Here. Wear this. It is going to get cold.’ He helped Orman slip it on then pinned it at one shoulder with a wide bronze brooch. He seemed to study Orman for a time, then nodded to himself. ‘Good. Now, do not interrupt me as I speak. Yrain and I have no intention of allowing these outlanders to take us and luckily – though …’ and here he paced, thinking, ‘perhaps luck had nothing to do with it … In any case, we have had time to fully sense Buri’s plan. And we support it. Therefore, when the time comes, you will take everyone and find him once more—’ Orman drew breath to object, but Jaochim carried on: ‘You will take him this message: that he is to use all that we have given him. Yes? You will do this?’

  At first Orman would not answer. He kept his jaws clenched only to mutter, low, ‘I will not abandon you.’

  ‘You are not abandoning us. You are fulfilling a last obligation.’

  Orman felt hot tears come once more to his eyes and this embarrassed him yet again. ‘Do not send me away.’

  Jaochim nodded his understanding. ‘Yrain and I have spoken, and we will not have you fall in our defence. That would be selfish of us. You and the brothers have many years before you. You shall carry our legacy into the future. For tha
t possibility alone, Yrain and I are glad to send you like a spear thrown onward into the years to come.’ He clasped Orman’s shoulders in both hands. ‘Will you do this thing? For our sacrifice? And for Vala and Jass’s sacrifice?’ Unable to speak, his throat and chest choked with emotion, Orman gave a curt jerked nod. Jaochim squeezed his shoulders. ‘My thanks.’

  Bernal appeared in the sunlight streaming in the entrance. ‘They are here.’

  Jaochim released him. He turned to Bernal. ‘When the time comes – go with Orman here, yes?’

  Bernal bowed from the waist. ‘Very well.’

  ‘You will know when,’ he told Orman. He gestured to the far end of the Greathall where the thrones stood on their raised wooden dais. ‘Yrain and I will wait here. No others should be present.’ Seeing Orman hesitating, unwilling to go, he gently motioned to the front. ‘Bernal – please greet our guests.’

  Bernal thumped the butt of his spear to the packed dirt of the hall floor and lowered himself to one knee. ‘As you order, m’lord.’ Straightening, he urged Orman out. ‘Come. There’s more than enough for all of us.’

  Though it was a grey overcast day, Orman still had to blink as he stepped outside. Once his vision cleared, he saw that Bernal was right. There were a damned lot of them. Far too many, in fact. The ranks were parting as they approached, no doubt meaning to encircle the Greathall. It was not a ragtag mob of marauders and raiding fortune-hunters. This was an army. Someone had come with more in mind than scavenging gold. He quickly descended the steps and jogged to where he’d left Svalthbrul leaning up against the barricade.

  The soldiers formed up two ranks deep encircling them. They wore plain leather armour and carried medium-sized triangular shields, with shortswords at their sides. Behind them ranged the skirmishers: remnants of the force they had routed days earlier. These carried a mishmash of weaponry; some bore no armour at all – it looked as if all those better equipped had been taken up into the ranks.