Shattered Lands 3 Demon Wars

by Darren Pillsbury

  Lotan looked up. Harpoon after harpoon was being fired from giant crossbows set into the city walls – the same weapons that had taken down his pegasus.

  Confronted with imminent death from above, the sailors decided discretion was the better part of valor. They raced down the piers towards the last ship along the dock – a massive frigate with several masts and dozens of smaller sails.

  Lotan reached the ship before they did. The young droths had positioned themselves underwater, bracing their shoulders against the wooden hull.

  “Good – hold on for a second!” Lotan said, then went back up to the surface and yelled at a man who was dressed like a captain. “Can you get everybody on the one ship?”

  “Possibly, if there’s no cargo in the hold!”

  “Throw down ropes tied to the railings so we can use those, too!”

  The captain nodded and raced aboard. Under his direction, the sailors began lashing ropes to the ship railings and tossing the free ends into the harbor.

  Lotan dove beneath the water. Seconds later, ropes slapped down onto the water’s surface.

  “Grab those and pull!” Lotan directed a group of twenty droths just treading water nearby. “Everybody in the back, get ready to PUSH!”

  They pushed and heaved, trying as hard as they could. For almost a minute, there was no discernible progress – and then Lotan saw that the ship was moving relative to the dock. Just an inch or two, but it kept moving. Three inches, four inches –

  “IT’S WORKING!” he yelled happily. “Keep going, keep pushing, keep pulling!”

  The ship picked up speed. A foot, two feet – five, ten –

  “Aim it for the mouth of the harbor!” Lotan yelled. “Get it out to sea – ”

  Suddenly a massive explosion rocked the wooden hull, and he could hear muffled screams through the water.

  “What the hell was that?!” Lotan yelled.

  He stuck his head above water to see the boat on fire. Then he turned back to the city to see several flaming projectiles flying through the air.

  The Hell army was catapulting some kind of explosives towards the ship.

  “GET IN THE WATER!” Lotan screamed at the sailors up above. “WE’LL SAVE YOU!”

  They didn’t have to be told twice. They jumped in the water by the dozens as another two explosions blasted apart the upper decks.

  Lotan ducked back down underwater. “Grab a human, swim for the open ocean, and get them to safety!” he yelled at the young droths, then turned back towards the harbor.

  “Where are you going?” one of the droths shouted.

  “To make sure they don’t get their navy!”

  40

  It was surprisingly easy to destroy a fleet of ships when no one was guarding them.

  Lotan headed for the largest ship closest to shore. He swam across the surface of the water – mostly because the Hell army was marching along the bottom of the harbor just fifteen feet beneath him. They tried throwing their spears at him, but the water slowed their movements, and he was easily able to dodge their weapons. After all, he was made for the water; they were not.

  He grabbed onto a rope mooring the biggest ship to the dock and shimmied up it expertly. Once onboard, he looked around – but the decks were deserted.

  After bashing open a few doors with his sword, he found what he was looking for: lanterns filled with oil. There were flints nearby, and it only took him a few seconds to light all three of the lanterns.

  He threw two of them onto the deck. The glass shattered, and liquid fire raced across the wooden planks.

  There was another ship docked nearby – smaller but probably faster. He lobbed another lantern underhanded through the air.

  It burst like a Molotov cocktail against the mast and spilled burning oil everywhere.

  Good enough.

  He dove into the water and raced onwards to the next ship.

  Three minutes later and another five frigates were on fire.

  On and on he went, aiming only for the most valuable ships in the harbor.

  The bastards up in the ramparts began aiming their harpoons at him – but he was too small and fast a target, and they never even got close.

  Once he’d set ten ships ablaze, the Hell Army switched to explosives. While it was counterintuitive for them to destroy ships he was on, they must have figured it was worthwhile to sacrifice a couple of ships if only they could take him out of commission.

  Unfortunately for the skullheads, they didn’t know they were dealing with a player with a ten-second time-out every time he died.

  Twice they got him: once when an explosive landed ten feet away and blew him to smithereens, and a second time when a projectile exploded in the water and sent a shockwave through his body that turned his internal organs to pulp.

  In the first case it was light and sound and searing pain, followed by darkness. The second time, it felt like a car had slammed into him at full speed.

  But in both cases he merely respawned a few feet away, health at top levels, rarin’ to go.

  Plus the explosives just made his job easier. Lotan could climb onto to a ship, wait thirty seconds, and suddenly a massive explosion would set the ship on fire. Then he would move on to the next one.

  Once they got wise to the damage they were causing, the skullheads stopped lobbing explosives – but that just let him go on his merry way looking for more lanterns.

  By the time he was finished, more than half the ships were on fire – all the biggest and most valuable ones. He looked back with satisfaction to see dozens of fires raging on the water, like a flotilla of Viking funeral pyres.

  Then he dove into the water and swam for the mouth of the harbor.

  Hell’s army was far beneath him, but they weren’t stopping. Thousands of black-armored figures and rotting horses struggling through the sand and muck.

  Once they hit Peralso, it would be a nightmare.

  He raced to the entrance of the harbor. Two young droths were hanging there in the water, watching and waiting. As soon as they saw him, they waved excitedly and beckoned him over.

  “Where is everybody?” Lotan asked.

  “They’re taking the humans to a nearby shore,” one answered. “What should we do now?”

  Lotan turned back to the harbor. The Hell army was little more than dark shapes in the distance, but they were legion.

  “Take me to the elders – NOW.”

  41

  It was the same as the first time he’d entered Peralso: the horn, the thousands of droths swimming towards the coliseum, the tribunal on their dais – but this time it all happened in fast forward.

  And all the young droths who had crowded the floor of the coliseum last time were noticeably absent.

  The leaders barely had time to speak when Lotan shouted, “The army I told you about? They’re marching here, RIGHT NOW – and they’re literally twenty minutes away from your gates!”

  “Impossible!” the female tribunal scoffed. “Surface dwellers cannot breathe underwater, everyone knows this.”

  “These aren’t regular surface dwellers – THEY DON’T BREATHE. And they’ll slaughter all of us unless you fight them, NOW!”

  The entire crowd murmured in panic. The tribunals motioned towards some official general-looking fellow, who came up and conferred with them. The female and two male tribunals looked alarmed, and then they stared hatefully at Lotan.

  “YOU have brought the war to us!” the female shouted.

  “No, the war came here on its own, and it would have even if I never set foot in Peralso!”

  “YOU antagonized the army in the harbor! There are witnesses!”

  “Uh, YEAH – all your sons and daughters, because they helped me!” Lotan yelled.

  There was a gasp from the balconies. Lotan turned to them and tried to persuade them: “They were brave – they didn’t want to see a bunch of innocent people get massacred!”

  “The affairs of surface dwellers are no concern of o
urs!” one of the male tribunals roared.

  “They are now, because whether you like it or not, thousands of killers are going to be here in fifteen minutes.”

  The leaders glowered at him angrily – but they must have believed him, because after a few seconds of looking at each other, they turned to the balconies and shouted, “To battle!”

  The entire audience shouted, “To battle!”

  And then everything was a flurry of chaos as the droths swam out to war.

  42

  Lotan stood in the front ranks of the droth army and watched with dread as the Hell soldiers advanced across the ocean floor.

  Thousands of droths stood on either side of Lotan – even the three tribunals from the coliseum – armed with tridents and wavy-bladed swords. Most of the young droths had joined them, and after an acid-tongued scolding from the elders, they fell into line with their own weapons.

  Now the entire city waited intently as the black-armored skeletons and rotting horses lurched across the sand and coral.

  “Don’t you want to attack them from above or something?” Lotan whispered to the female tribunal.

  “Quiet,” she said authoritatively, then began to chant in the droth tongue:

  “Great Storath come, and bring thy children in thy wake,

  “Showing evildoers your rage,

  “And fill the waters with the blood of our enemies

  “Enough to make the seas run red.”

  The entire droth army began to chant the same strange canticle.

  “What the hell are you people doing?” Lotan asked, bewildered.

  “Watch,” one of the young ones whispered to him.

  Suddenly, from the crevices of every rock and coral beneath the feet of the Hell army, squid and octopi spilled out and coiled their tentacles around the limbs of the invaders. Massive sharks swam in from deeper waters and raced towards the army. Eels as long and thick as tree trunks appeared from deep caves. And from the depths of one of the drop-offs near the city, a gigantic thing appeared – a hundred-foot-tall, Kraken-like monster, all claws and multiple limbs and crustacean appendages.

  It wasn’t exactly a supernatural appearance like the things Eric had summoned, but it was terrifying all the same.

  One of the droths blew a horn, and every citizen of Peralso launched themselves into battle as the sea creatures swarmed in.

  The fight was a massacre – of the Hell Army. They were heavily armored and slow. The power behind their thrusts and jabs was cut in half by the water. They were fighting two wars: one against their attackers, and another against the physics of fluids.

  On the other hand, the droths and their undersea allies were made for the water. Sharks ripped through the ranks, beheading the soldiers in droves. Eels coiled amongst them, using their massive jaws to crush skulls and armor alike. The squid held them fast so they couldn’t move, and the droths rushed in and speared the skeletons through their eye sockets left and right. And of course there was the Kraken, which flattened dozens of soldiers at a time.

  The battle lasted perhaps twenty minutes. At the end, nearly every single droth was still standing – and the seafloor was littered with the unmoving corpses of armored skeletons, not a single dancing black flame among them.

  “Thanks be to great Storath,” the entire tribe of droths chanted, “for granting us victory this day.”

  The squid and octopi sank back into the crevices between coral, the eels returned to their caves, the sharks swam off into the ocean, and the Kraken slunk off to the depths from which it came.

  “Well… that’s one way to do it,” Lotan muttered under his breath.

  43

  The discussion after the battle was not pleasant.

  The tribunals and elders railed against Lotan and accused him of setting everything up to force their hand.

  “I didn’t bring that army here!” he argued. “I didn’t make them invade Beraldia!”

  In the end, the youths stood up to the elders. They had already decided: they would journey with Lotan up the Great River, through the heart of the surface lands, to fight the Sorcerer King.

  The elders threatened banishment, but there were too many who were going with Lotan. If they banished them all, they were destroying the city’s future.

  In the end, the elders grumbled but acceded. They would go with Lotan, too, if for no other reason than to insure the Sorcerer King was defeated as quickly as possible.

  Lotan was grateful, but he didn’t have the heart to tell them that it wasn’t going to be as easy next time.

  They don’t exactly have Krakens in mountain streams.

  44

  Ladriel, Regent of Aravall

  The forest was quiet the morning of the attack.

  Ladriel, female regent of the elven city of Aravall, had risen early. She walked up the spiraling stairs to the lookout atop her home, which peeked out from the branches of one of the tallest trees in the forest. There she gazed on the labyrinth of hanging wooden walkways that formed Aravall, an elven city a hundred feet above the forest floor.

  The morning air was still. The lanterns of the night watch still burned along the wooden bridges, and the last will o’ the wisps were visible in the depths of the forest before the rising sun.

  She sipped a goblet of cold water and watched the sun come up over the horizon. Avarvall was quiet, and the realm was at peace. It was the dawn of another day in paradise.

  Then something unexpected happened.

  In the far distance, she heard the mournful strains of an elven war trumpet, no louder than a whisper at this distance –

  And then it abruptly cut short.

  Ladriel frowned.

  First, the war trumpet was supposed to be used for just that: war. An alarm that invaders had breached the periphery, or a warning of imminent attack, or the signal to start a military advance.

  The war trumpet had not been sounded for years, not since the end of the Beraldian Wars.

  Second, the trumpet had stopped. Not dwindled out – it had ceased as quickly and abruptly as though someone had slashed a taut string with a sword.

  As many cultures did, elves used trumpets to communicate over long distances. There were different horns for different threats: storms, tornados, rampaging creatures. The trumpet that picked up the threat was usually the farthest out on the periphery, and the next closest trumpeter – usually miles away from the first – would pick up the refrain, sound his horn, and relay it to the next trumpeter, until every elf over the entire land was aware of what the threat was.

  But the first trumpet, probably ten miles out on the edge of the Great Forest, hadn’t sounded the ‘All Clear’ song to indicate a mistake.

  The second trumpeter, a watchman miles closer to the city, hadn’t picked up the refrain yet, either. Perhaps he was confused (as Ladriel was) as to why the first trumpeter had ended so abruptly. Perhaps he was waiting for confirmation of the threat, or for the ‘All Clear’ sign.

  Neither came.

  And then, suddenly, a closer war trumpet sounded –

  And again, was abruptly cut short.

  Now Ladriel was beginning to grow afraid. This had never happened in any of the tales of the folk, not that she could remember.

  If someone had taken out the first trumpeter, and the second less than a minute later, then the enemy was moving at a ferocious speed. Either that, or there had been a coordinated attack of two forces moving by stealth, with perhaps more to come.

  Either option was disastrous.

  Suddenly, miles away over the treetops, she saw something. At first she thought it was an optical illusion, the result of the sunlight glancing off leaves – or perhaps some sort of mirage.

  It was an uneven glow shimmering off the tops of the trees.

  That was when the third war trumpet sounded, a mere six miles away.

  And was abruptly cut short as orange and yellow flames bloomed in the treetops.

  She saw it rush through the fire: a black
shape like a bat, swooping low over the forest, silhouetted against the inferno it had just created.

  A dragon.

  Her heart froze in her chest – but only for a moment. Then the leader in her sprang to life.

  “NIGHT WATCH!” she shouted. “Invaders are coming – a dragon over the trees! Sound the trumpets, get the archers to their places!”

  The soldiers beneath her on the wooden walkway began to run. Seconds later, war trumpets roared all around her, deafening and ominous.

  She knew there was not much time. She ran down the spiral walkway and quickly pulled on breeches and boots. Then she hastily slung her quiver over her head and grabbed her bow.

  Seconds after she stepped out her front door onto the wooden walkway, the dragon arrived.

  She could not see much, since the walkways were obscured by dense thickets of limbs. In fact, she saw almost nothing of the dragon itself, other than a dark shadow that passed through the treetops.

  But she saw the fire.

  A river of flame cut through the city just a hundred feet from where she stood. She saw it rip straight through the treetops, and felt overwhelming heat hit her body like a physical wall.

  She watched in terror and grief as a dozen elven archers screamed and disappeared in the furnace-like blaze, only to reappear seconds later as writhing, flailing masses of fire. Several of them jumped off the bridge to their deaths. She could not blame them: the fall would end their agony quicker than the fire would.

  She expected the inferno to subside after the creature passed. After all, the treetops were alive and verdant. The dragonfire would scorch and wither everything in its path, but it should have quickly subsided: green wood does not burn one tenth as quickly as dry timber.

  Instead, the inferno lingered – and dripped off the branches in droplets of flame.

  The dragon was spewing liquid rather than gaseous flame.

  A Tirelian.

  Her heart froze again.