Blood and Sand Trilogy Box Set

by Jon Kiln

  “Cover!” one of the scouts was shouting, as one of the siege engines released its internal trebuchet, launching a masonry boulder the size of a horse high across the river. Suriyen tried to track its progress, but it vanished against the night. It had been going fast and low; the towers had recalibrated their distances. Where in the city was it going to hit?

  This time the wall really did shake, as further north of where Suriyen stood there was a sound like the world ending, followed by a dreadful silence. Rock dust billowed out from behind the wall, and Suriyen saw that the thrown boulder had scored what was, for them, the perfect hit. The two battlements of that part of the wall had been pulverized, and the walkway behind it cracked and broken. Although the wall still stood, it would never be repaired before the siege was won or broken, and that meant that it would be easier for the enemy to keep on chipping away at the wall.

  The Menaali were cheering, as Suriyen wavered. What was she supposed to do? What could she do?

  “Captain,” one of the scouts behind her was calling out.

  “What now?” She turned, to see him pointing down below them to where the siege cart had stopped pounding on the walls and was instead pulling away from the walls. Are they stopping? Is this the end of tonight’s battle? She knew that at some point, if no significant headway had been made then the enemy would pull back from the walls to regroup and get what little rest that they could. But it made no sense for them to do that now. It was too dark to see what was going on, so she said to the scout, “Get some light down there.”

  At her command the scout threw one of the flaming torches over the wall, to see it fall with a thud on the near-ruined bridge below, illuminating a bloody and cracked boat-bridge, and long chains extending from the bottom of the gate to underneath the siege cart itself. That was what those masons were doing. They had been installing their own hooks and metal levers to pull the gate open rather than push. As she watched in horror, the metal turtle made of a hundred shields atop a wheeled frame was rolled by still a hundred soldiers more, dragging the thick chains behind them until they started to raised off the floor, getting tighter and tighter with every moment.

  Ruyiman called out to her imploringly.

  Suriyen snarled. Maaritz had failed her, he hadn’t come up with a rescue plan or a distraction. She had no choice. “But at least I will be the one to do it.” She picked up the first basket of pots and threw them as far as she could down to the boat bridge below. It tumbled heavily, looking no more dangerous than a picnic hamper before it crashed against the top of the siege cart, spilling thick, gloopy liquid everywhere.

  Following her lead, Ruyiman signaled to his teams to do the same, launching their ‘hampers’ of clay pots over the edge, careful to fling them as far from their side of the wall as they could, onto the siege cart and into the water. There weren’t many, but there were enough to send the faint smell of chemical pitch and tar up from the river below.

  “On my order!” Suriyen raised her longsword, as three archers stepped forward, lighting the wicks on their arrows from the torches atop the walls.

  Suriyen of the north had once seen the dangerous concoction known as fire-pots used before, at sea between warring armadas of some northern client kings. The smell of burning flesh, sulfur, and acrid smoke had been terrible, as had the screams. It was a substance that wouldn’t usually light easily, unless it was mixed with the right amounts of chemicals produced by the candle and tallow makers, tanners and dyers. Small shreds of cloth were soaked and suspended in the emulsions to help the combustion process. When the thick mixture finally did take flame though, the results were devastating.

  “Fire!” Suriyen commanded through gritted teeth. When she had first seen the substance used she had thought it barbaric, and many of the northern generals refused to use it even in battle, for the hideous waste of life that it caused. It didn’t just kill, it maimed, it tortured, it turned healthy warriors into crippled travesties of their former selves. It was also indiscriminate, and would eat away at any flesh, wood or cloth that it touched—whether friend or foe.

  The three arrows shot down into the night like falling stars. One hit the oil on the water, and two hit the bridge. There was a dull, muffled thump and the night was transfigured into a nightmarish vision of hell. For a moment, it seemed as though the Menaali didn’t quite know what was happening. The fighting stopped as the arrow shot passed, but as the flames took hold and grew fiercer and stronger and hotter, soon the screams began.

  The fire wasn’t the yellow of a healthy wood fire, Suriyen noted, forcing herself to watch. It was the deep ugly red of a chemical fire, and the smoke that it produced was thick, dark, and greasy. It stuck to the tops of the interlocked metal shields, and gobbets of the flame stuck to the cart wheels, the floor, dripping down as the emulsion turned into an almost liquid fire. The stones and wooden beams of the boat bridge itself started to burn, and where the oil lay on the water—even that as well.

  Next came the screams from inside the siege cart, and the waves of chemical heat that shimmered the air below. Suriyen wanted to look away, and she saw other of her defenders looking appalled as warriors broke free from their engine of war, their heads, shoulders, arms and backs covered in gobbets of this liquid fire and threw themselves, screaming into the river. But the river too, was burning and foul with a chemical stench. Suriyen saw that the fire did not go out easily, even when immersed in water it still glowed red as the chemicals interacted with each other. The soldiers on the bridge were as good as doomed.

  The siege cart came to a shuddering halt as more of the structure was kicked apart by those within, or pulled apart by the brave souls who raced forward to try and free their fellows. The screams from inside, echoing and amplifying, became terrible as men crawled out, the flame crawling up their legs. No matter how many times they were wrapped in blankets or had water bottles thrown over them, it still burned.

  You have to cut the liquid out, Suriyen remembered, but it took the Menaali a good time longer before they realized that too. The river itself burned, and those Menaali who had been wading or swimming beside the bridge started to panic as the sheets of flame caught up with them. Soon, Suriyen saw that the entire middle section of the boat bridge was afire, and there were waves and gobbets of flame stretching far down river, dwindling as they carried their terrible payload of fire, charcoal, and bodies, out to the Inner Sea.

  12

  The sound came again, a sort of tapping against the cool stones. The Fuldoonian guard who was on duty down here, a man by the name of Chevers, narrowed his eyes. It could be anything, of course. A bit of driftwood bashing against the inner water gate, a few rats seeking to flee the noise and bloodshed, or just another of the many vagaries of the water tunnels that run underneath the city of Fuldoon.

  But Chevers was a man who had been chosen for this task because he was not the sort to be complacent. He was naturally skeptical, and had a cynical streak in him a league wide. He grimaced, clutching his torch in one hand tighter and his crossbow in the other as he set off in the direction of the sound.

  Chevers had been doing this job a long time, and he had seen his share of strange sights in the sewers beneath the city. Most of the time the trouble he ran into were the caches of looted or smuggled goods from one of the criminals up top, wishing to trade with the pirates of the Inner Sea. He’d had his share of scrapes, and spilt his share of blood in the quiet dark under Fuldoon.

  The water tunnels were made up of a complex network of systems and cisterns. Half of them were sewage tunnels, designed to take the waste of the city far away, and some were flood tunnels, designed to allow the grand old river to flood its banks as it did every spring and not flood the city. It was a good system, with a few cross-over access tunnels from one to the other. Currently, Chevers was in one of those cross-overs, heading from the sewage tunnels towards the flood tunnels that sat towards the besieged western gates of the city. If he strained his ears, the man wondered if he could jus
t about hear the dull boom and shake of the war above him.

  Chevers himself felt strangely stoic about the war. He had lived in Fuldoon his whole life, and he had performed this job for so long that the city had become just another fact of reality. He couldn’t really envisage his own experience changing even if it ever fell.

  He was safe down here, in the dark places that he knew so well. He knew a hundred ways in and out of the city if he had to flee, taking what few items and money he had stashed and saved and a narrow boat perhaps. But Chevers had enough various bolt holes down here to stay alive for months if he had to. As he thought, he wasn’t particularly worried.

  But he was suspicious, and that was why he walked a little quieter as he stepped over the painted stone arch that indicated the flood tunnels proper, and slid his feet forward. He thought for a moment, and then blew out his torch, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

  The flood tunnels were more than wide but not very tall, with a small stone ledge on one side that ran up under the foundations of the walls and to the river, sloped so that they were completely submerged under water by the time that they got there. Metal gates with grills the size of prison bars sat out there, letting the river water in but keeping any undesirables out.

  Or so Chevers thought. The tapping sound resumed, but not. This much closer it wasn’t so much a tapping as a sort of slapping of wet feet on stone, and it was coming closer.

  No, it couldn’t be, Chevers thought, raising his crossbow. Who would be down here at this time of night? Who but him was supposed to scout out this most redundant part of their defenses?

  There was also no light coming forward to him, and that meant whomever was walking up, out of the river and seemingly through the metal bars themselves, was doing so blind. It was pitch black down here, almost impossible to see.

  Slap. Slap. Slap. The steps got closer and closer, so loud now that Chevers thought he must be able to see the figure if there was but light.

  Dammit, the scout thought, easing himself off the side of the wall as silently as possible and raising his crossbow straight out ahead of him. With his one hand he fumbled into his pocket and produced a flint: a copper and brass box with a small cog wheel he could flick with his thumb to produce a spark that might, just hopefully, light the cotton clod of material.

  Slap. Slap. Slap. The walking was getting closer, but he heard no breathing, nor any voices or any other sign of humanity.

  “Halt,” he commanded, striking his flint. A tiny spark of burning light, revealed the narrow passageway, the dark water on Chever’s side, the close-fit stone all around. The cotton wad caught, and the spark grew into a flame, revealing a figure so broad as to almost fill the entire tunnel walking towards him. It was a Menaali warrior, dressed in what appeared to be ring mail over leather jerkin, leather gloves, breeches, and leather boots.

  And he was soaked. Every inch of him was gleaming with water, and his bald head appeared almost slimy with river-stuff.

  Chevers pulled the release on the crossbow, and with a loud thock the bolt shot forward and embossed itself into the top of the man’s thigh. The man grunted but did not scream nor make any other sound as he looked at the embedded quarrel, and then looked at his adversary.

  “Sweet mother of us all,” Chevers swore.

  The man’s eyes were almost midnight black, and glittered with a strange, unholy fixation. Without even registering the wound, the Menaali figure carried on walking, raising empty hands to Chevers as a voice like the buzz of a thousand plague flies filled the tunnel.

  “You’ll need more than that to stop me, human.”

  Chevers scream was cut short almost before it began, and his flint light was extinguished when it fell into the dark river water at his lifeless feet.

  13

  The screams of the burning Menaali on the boat bridge pierced the city like a knife, a terrible howling that men, women, and children would remember until the day their end came. The cries traveled across the stilled battlefield as defender and attacker watched in horror as hundreds of men and women burnt alive, and they reached even to the Councilor’s Tower, a thin column of stone that sat on the docks to the north, where Councilor Maaritz was currently working feverishly.

  As soon as he first heard the sounds, the Councilor knew what was happening. “She’s done it. I asked her to give me until morning, and still, she’s gone and done it.” The Councilor cursed, standing up from his desk with such speed that he knocked over the vial of deep ink across the missives weighted there with stones.

  The Councilor was a thin and tall man, handsome by most standards. The room he was in flickered with the light of the candles and lanterns about this high laboratory. That is what he liked to think of this place as: a laboratory of the city itself. His elements that he smashed and mixed and pounded together here were not sulfur or gold or mercury. Instead, it was words that he used to create new and purer refinements of people.

  The Councilor’s Tower stood at the northern edge of the same defensible wall that Suriyen worked on, but right over the docks and wide river where it became an estuary out into the Inner Seas. Here he had windows with shutters that looked out into every direction, along with instruments such as weathercocks and chemical barometers, as well as telescopes of different sizes and gauges to measure winds, storms, and the spread of civilization.

  The tower also housed one other vital component that aided his research. They cooed and whistled at him from their cages, ruffling their feathers in anxiety at the distant scent of smoke and fire on the southern winds.

  “Easy, my friends, easy.” Maaritz selected which he knew was the fastest little gull of his collection, having raised them from egg to chick to bird, and teaching them to travel across the Inner Seas to his contacts in the north. He looked down at the ruined letters on the table that he had been perusing. All of them were refusals so far. The Kingdom of Thrane had turned his request for help down, as had the city-state of Vitillo, and now there was only one other group left which he could ask.

  “What dreadful times it is, huh?” he asked the gull, who twitched in his hand as he set it on its stand, and turned to a small wooden cabinet. The bird sat patiently as he manipulated the secret indentations and levers that released the drawer that he needed, and pulled out a string of scratched and tarnished silver coins. “May the gods help us us all.”

  He turned back to the messenger gull, who had been trained to fly to one location—not in the far north but instead to the east, inside the Inner Sea Coast. No one knew that Maaritz had so far made connection with these dangerous potential allies, and, in any normal circumstances he would probably be ousted from his position or outright lynched if the people of the city ever knew.

  “But we must call on strange saviors in these dark times,” Maaritz muttered, taking the coin and tying it expertly with a piece of cord to a tiny stoppered bottle, into which he slipped a roll of parchment.

  ‘Fuldoon needs your aid. Come quick. It will profit both of us—M,’ the missive read, and he took the gull with its silver coin to the window, and opened it wider to let in the sound of screaming and a city at war.

  “Fly fast, little friend.” He prayed, flinging the small gull into the night sky, and with a flash of white it streaked across the docks to the east, and up the coast.

  “And now it is time to see what tragedy that girl has wrought.” Maaritz turned to hastily dress in light mail and strap a thin sword to his waist, before descending the steps of the tower to the streets below. He had little time to wonder whether his missive would even be read, let alone heeded as he started to jog through the narrow cobbled streets that ran near the wall.

  I had promised Suriyen that I would find a solution to our problem, and it seems that all I have found are foreign kings who wish to take no hand in a southern war. He was almost furious. Almost, because a part of him could kind of understand why the north stayed out of the turmoil of the hot southlands. The Menaali were deemed one of the world�
�s biggest threats, and any city or lord that stood in their way or made a stand so far had been crushed by the warlord Dal Grehb.

  The only thing that saved most of them was the sheer distance that lay between them, and the capriciousness of the warlord. He swept his horde across regions and territories with a seemingly random impulse. No one could tell where he might get it into his mad old head to attack next, and every one stood in fear of the day that he chose them as his prize target.

  But no, he chose Fuldoon. He chose us. Maaritz paced himself as he saw shutters of windows open and then slam closed. Some of the few citizens who had chosen to stay this close were curious as to who was charging through the streets when a curfew should be in place. When they saw that it was their Councilor Maaritz himself, they quickly turned away.

  No one wishes to disturb the actions of the Council, he thought. Or cross paths with me. He knew his reputation. A conniver and a bureaucrat. Someone who thought much and acted strangely. It was best for the average person never to cross paths with Maaritz the strange.

  Which suited him just fine, as it left him free to make good time as he raced down long empty streets towards the front gate, and past fields of destruction and ruin where the Menaali siege towers had thrown their rocks into Fuldoonian houses and streets. The sight of so much horror and waste in the city of traders appalled the Councilor.

  Fuldoon was by no means an ancient city, and nor was it deemed powerful by world standards. It had no great armies or navies, it held no great territories by force or by coercion. But it was important, and rich. It was the gateway to the south. The place where traders from all over the Inner Seas came to buy and sell their wares. It was the place where fortunes could be made or lost by the ambitious guilds.

  Maaritz couldn’t even begin to count the amount of plucky expeditions that had started out from Fuldoon to head into the deep south or the far east, hoping to uncover some rare mineral or herb that would make them rich. If Fuldoon fell, then Maaritz knew that it would be an important blow to the entire world’s culture and economy, and not just to the fate of many thousands of citizens here.