by Jon Kiln
All around them was chaos. It was impossible for the defenders to form any cohesive group against these sorts of attacks. They had to turn, and swing, and duck, and lunge, and punch, and snarl their way through every second. Already, Suriyen could feel her sleep-starved body aching, but she also knew that it was the ache of muscles that were cold and tired, not the deep, bone-weary ache of a body that was about to collapse.
I haven’t even got into my stride yet, she thought, standing up to neatly sever another berserker in two who had driven Ruyiman to the ground with his ferocious, repeated blows on his shield. Ruyiman didn’t spare a thanks, and the wall-captain didn’t wait to hear them, as they were saving each others’ lives with almost every minute of fighting.
The fighting was almost becoming a blur, but not a blur like sleep or rest. Instead, it was a blur of pinpoint, exactly present moments. A detached, cold part of Suriyen’s mind wondered if this is what life is like for a hawk, or a cat. Never thinking, just acting, just responding, just attacking, never worrying. Had she any other time to consider it, she might even have imagined it a sort of peace, if ‘peace’ could ever be talked about in the same breath as violence, bloodshed, and mayhem.
There is just now. Just how I dodge this thrust, block that blow, return that strike.
Suriyen had two berserkers on either side of her. She used her longsword almost like a whirling baton, parrying one sword thrust, dodging the next. She felt a rough thud of pain as the fighter on the other side of her kicked her side, before twirling and pirouetting, punching out with the tip of her sword once, twice, and the two bodies fell.
I’ve been injured. That small, distracted part of her thought, but she had been injured before. She had been injured many times. She had once walked across the Iron Stone Rocks with a broken leg—she hadn’t known it was broken at the time—and so any injury that didn’t have her body seizing up in white-hot agony on the floor below wasn’t going to bother her.
It’s only pain. Pain is a sensation. The same as wind or hunger or sleep, her brain was saying, as Suriyen the person floated above the fighting, leaving Suriyen the body, Suriyen the warrior, fighting below.
“Duck!” She heard a shout, and dropped to her knees as something large flew across the space she had been occupying. It was a burnt log, so large that she knew that she couldn’t ever lift it, thrown by one of the berserkers. Into the space she had vacated this weapon-less bear of a man now lunged, allowing Ruyiman’s sword to pierce his side with a laugh, as he seized the blade and dragged himself along it, towards Ruyiman’s horrified stare.
Suriyen watched, caught between terror and sick fascination as the unarmed, pierced and punctured Menaali man seized Ruyiman by the neck and proceeded to bite the man’s ear off.
“Get him off me!” Ruyiman was shaking his embedded sword, but the man apparently didn’t even feel it, as Suriyen raised her own massive blade, and rammed the pommel as hard as she could against the back of the berserker’s head. There was a wet, crushing sound, and the man slid backwards off Ruyiman’s blade, still chewing half of his ear.
Ruyiman was screaming and cursing, and the blood was pouring profusely from the side of his head. Suriyen didn’t know if you could die from losing an ear, but it looked like the horror of it had been enough to end Ruyiman’s short time at the front line.
“Get him out of here,” she barked at the next defenders, who were even now dragging him backwards to the gate, where there was a singular one-person only gap, just like she had specified.
They’ll have to seal that up, Suriyen was thinking, turning with raised sword to see that the onslaught of berserkers had seemingly stopped. Most of the river fog had lifted, leaving only the smokes and steams of the still charring wood and city beyond to haze the air. She could see clear to at least halfway on Fuldoon’s boat bridge, and the far shore was now a dark line of anonymous, and ominous, shapes.
The Menaali still might not be able to cross the bridge in numbers, but as soon as they realized that only twenty or so souls defended the gate, they could sit back and shoot arrows or throw rocks at them until nothing stood in their way.
“How’s the gate’s coming?” Suriyen bellowed back, not caring if any scouts from the other side heard her.
“A little longer, captain. A little longer,” the muffled voice of the master mason rose through the gloom. Someone passed Suriyen a flagon of water, and she sipped it gratefully. She had about sixteen fighters now left of the just over twenty she had started with. How could she ever hold the gate?
There’s only one way left. She turned to the rest of the fighters. “Any that want to go back, go back. I’m going to tell the mason to seal the gates,” she said, picking up one of the berserker’s axes as she shouted, “Seal the gates!”
“Captain?” the muffled voice of the master mason questioned, a second later.
“You heard me. Let any of my soldiers through that want, then seal the gates.” Suriyen took the axe in one hand and started walking across the bridge, to almost halfway, where the beams were at their weakest.
The wall-captain had put her longsword down to one side, and then threw her back into the swing of the axe, biting the charred wood beneath the layers of gravel, dirt, and soil easily. Normally she would never have dreamed of this tactic. It would mean that the only escape from the city would be the docks, if they weren’t all burned down by now.
The largest hole that she had chosen to work at was starting to widen just a bit, as she attacked the ground again, and again. She could even hear the sloshing water far below, and the smell of greasy soot coming up through the planks.
Her attacks were joined by others. She looked up to see that her fighters were using the berserkers’ stolen hand axes or their own weapons to widen the holes and aggravate the splintered wood of the boat bridge. A wave of gratitude filled her as she realized that all of them, all sixteen, had stayed to help her. “Have at it, men,” she shouted, imitating fairly well what Ruyiman might have said, she thought, as a forest of blows hit the already damaged surface.
The famous boat-bridge of Fuldoon had three sunken ‘ships’ acting as stanchions and supports for the superstructure. The boats were old galleons, painted with tar and sunk into the bed of the old river many generations past, and Suriyen knew that nothing would dislodge them easily. So she chose to attack the stretches of wooden planks, held and bounded with metal, and reinforced with slate keystones, and layers of earth and gravel to top it.
This road way was usually sturdy enough to carry horses and carts, two abreast, but the chemical fire and the thousands of feet marching over it had already split some of those planks, or in a few places dropped them out completely. It was at these holes and gaps that Suriyen directed the sixteen, four or five men gouging out rock and metal bars with their weapons to every gap, kicking and chopping at the hardened heartwood beneath.
Their artillery of blows didn’t match the din of the war drums heading towards them, but they were causing a stir along the front ranks of the Menaali. Their short, ugly little arrows started to skip and hiss in the air around them, as another plank in the lower supports gave way under Suriyen’s assault.
The soldiers ducked when they could, but most worked feverishly, seeking to bring down the bridge that had stood for centuries. There was a crack as another plank splintered downwards, and hung from a bent piece of metal brace.
One of the sixteen fell, his back holding two arrows, but still none of them fled, and still Suriyen chopped on.
Another fell to the floor, an arrow embedded in his leg. Still, he gritted his teeth and raised his axe to act as a pick against the metal braces.
More of the defenders fell, but the bridge was starting to lose its continuity. The gaps that had been little more than cracks between the planks were now three ragged tears. Until they rebuilt it, the Menaali would never be able to get their siege machines across it again.
“Good enough, boys, good enough,” Suriyen was shouting, as yet t
wo more of her fighters fell into the dirty water below, pin-cushioned with arrows. She watched as the handful left started staggering back, as wall defenders let down ropes from the high walls, meaning to haul them to safety.
Good. Suriyen stayed, and hacked away at one of the planks until it started to give way.
“Captain?” One of the fighters had noticed that she hadn’t retreated with them. “Captain, come on, they’re coming!” He gestured to where, behind the straggling archers, another team of fighters had been told to race across the bridge to where she was, and stop them.
Arrows reigned all around her as Suriyen waved the fighter back, kicking savagely at the plank to watch it break free and bounce into the water.
Every blow weakens it. Every blow might halt another Menaali from getting their filthy hands on another slave… Suriyen ran to the next and last plank joining the two sections of bridge together. It was wider than she was, and clearly made out of some ancient tree that had been as hard as stone itself.
“By the hells!” she swore, hitting the plank with her borrowed axe, and only causing the barest dent in its surface.
“Captain!” The last of her defenders were starting to be hauled to safety amidst the clatter of arrows against the walls, and still Suriyen tried to sever the last link between Fuldoon and Dal Grehb. The warriors were nearly at the other end of the plank as she struck it again, causing a tiny tear in the hardened wooden fibers.
Suriyen swore, raising the axe once more, as something as cold as ice entered her side, and knocked her to her feet. All sound immediately became muffled, and she found that she was looking up at the sky itself, a patch of blue between the smoke, where there flashed, for but an instant, the purest white desert crow, far from home.
Maybe that priest was right about his crow-headed god, Suriyen thought to herself dazedly, as she looked down to see that there was another shape across her vision. One of the black arrows, sticking out from just under her ribs, and spreading a feeling of numbing cold right through her body.
No. Please, no… The thought of becoming a slave again, under the same Menaali war leader was too much to bear. She lifted her head to look at the other direction, towards the enemy, where the heavily furred and armored legs of the Menaali warriors were milling around the one plank that joined the bridge. No one was eager to step on it, in case it gave way. Suddenly, their legs were pushed aside as a man the size of a bull, with a helmet of curving horns stamped his way forward, to the very edge of the plank-bridge.
Dal Grehb. Suriyen was looking, face to face with her enemy, and she knew what she had to do, what she had seemingly been made to do. She raised a hand uselessly towards the war chief, as if she could pluck his image from the distance and crush it between her hands…
And then all went cold, numb, and black.
22
The Sin Eater and the Abomination had been walking through the wilds for a couple of days when they came across the ruins. The wilds of the Shattering Coasts were a mixture of deep ravines and tangled, wind-swept woods, whose forest floors were as much made of moss-covered boulders as they were leaf-litter and dark earth. For the most part of their journey, the devil inside of Vekal was silent, as if caught contemplating its own imminent fate—just as the priest himself was.
It was a curiously peaceful time, walking along cliff-tops and over wild heaths, through the cramped woods and by the rush of cold streams. Vekal even felt a little different, and he didn’t think that it was all—as the devil had insisted—to do with their joining. He rather thought that it had something to do with the herbalist and her strange daughter, whom had left to travel northwards, away from the insanities of the south.
“Is my little priest having second thoughts?” the devil said, as they emerged from the latest stretch of the wilds.
“I am now,” Vekal muttered, as he looked down at what lay before them.
Telset was nothing like Ikrit had shown him in the dreams. It was much, much larger. Vekal was looking down not on what he had thought might be a few abandoned buildings and streets, but an entire abandoned city. It wasn’t as large as what little he had seen of Fuldoon, but easily bigger than Tir’an’fal by many times. It occupied the entire headland of a promontory, and Vekal could see glints of the distant grey sea in the far distance, hanging like a haze in the air, through some trick of optical illusion.
The city itself was made of a whitish and grey stone, and organized with a mathematical precision that was staggering. Not even the Tower of Records could boast such fine masonry, and the Sin Eater was impressed even from this far distance. Most of Telset appeared to be in the process of being slowly reclaimed by the woods and wilds all around, with its outermost squares, plazas, fountains and streets completely choked by vines, brambles, and saplings, but its heart was still gleaming pale where the forest hadn’t managed to encroach. It made Vekal think of a pile of picked over and half hidden bones, lying in plain sight. With a start, he realized that the very forest around him and beyond was also organized into paradoxically concentric circles, with denser, taller, and lusher growth occupying rings around younger and sparser trees.
“Yes, priest, you guessed it. All of this used to be Telset, but even cities fade, and even curses fail,” Ikrit said, in a tone that Vekal thought might even count as sad. “It took many centuries for the forest to break the charms laid by the god-emperors of this place, but break them they did, and now the city is being eaten alive by the green things. Almost fitting, don’t you think? Life conquering death, and all of that?”
“You seem to be almost moralizing, devil.” Vekal struck the earth ahead to find his staff thump solidly on the ground. An instant of scraping longer, and he realized that underneath lay a stone paving slab, that had once been white, and once carved with some sort of circular design.
“This place is a little humbling, that is all. Even for a devil.” Ikrit remained just as stubborn-lipped as before, but with the now closer union of their souls, the priest could sense a little of what Ikrit was keeping back. There was a sense of shame, of resentment, almost tragedy.
Vekal was about to ask the devil just what it was hiding, what it knew about this place that it wasn’t telling him, when something crackled in the forest up ahead. He froze, his grip tightening on the sword at his side that he had liberated from the witch-hunting peasants just a few days ago.
“What was that?” Vekal hissed, his heart hammering in his chest.
“How by the Nine Everlasting Sins am I supposed to know? I’m inside you,” Ikrit said.
Well, at least the imp is returning to normal, Vekal thought a little unkindly. He wasn’t so sure how he could put up with it if the devil became as sanctimonious as he himself was supposed to be.
“Can’t you, you know…” Vekal hissed at his spiritual lodger. “Use your devilish senses, or something?”
“Infuse your senses with my power, you mean? Why didn’t you just ask?”
The Sin Eater felt the devil make what would be a disgusted snort if it had a body of flesh and blood of its own. A second later, the priest felt a shiver of electric power run up through his damaged spine, and his head filled with the sights, sounds, and scents of the forest around him. Every smallest sound was amplified, so that even the swaying of the trees became a deep, rhythmic groaning, and the hiss and fall of the leaves became a loud sigh.
There was a sudden thunder off to his right, and Vekal turned his head to catch sight of a family of forest birds furiously beating their wings in retreat as they escaped through the ruins. There was the constant tapping of water falling from dew, the snuffles and scratches of other small woodland animals in the leaf litter and in their dens. If the priest strained his ears really hard, he thought that he could even hear the soft whispers of wind against rocks, perhaps of distant sea.
There came a loud noise and Vekal jumped. His senses immediately shrunk in size, back down to just a little over his normal own.
“Best not overload you. You know
how human spirits are so weak,” Ikrit was saying, as Vekal thought about what he had heard. It had been a sound like a growl, a fierce, grunting growl, but almost human.
“There’s someone out there,” Vekal said quietly, nodding in the direction which they were about to walk. “I heard it. I heard a growl.”
“You’re in a forest. The wilds. There’s probably a hundred things nearby that snuffle, grunt, or otherwise growl,” the devil reprimanded him. “Or, are you saying that you are too scared to continue with our sacred mission?”
“I am scared,” Vekal admitted. “But it wasn’t a beast, I swear it.”
“And how would you, oh wise one, know that? Many bears out there in the desert? How about cougars? Wild boars? Tigers?”
“We have desert lions…” Vekal tried to say, but he knew that the devil was right. I am probably just spooked by the ruined city, that is all. He shook his head as he stepped onwards through the murk, towards the abandoned and accursed city of Telset.
***
The pair came across the gates at what must have been near midday, and even the sight of them seemed designed to inspire awe and terror. Two massive stone heads sat, their foundation stones and lower part of their faces slowly being reclaimed by brambles, looking out into the woods. These two heads were so vast as to be six or seven times the height of Vekal alone, and atop their stone conical crowns they supported an arch, joining in the middle to form the gate’s top. The apex of the arch was a large circular sculpture that reminded the priest of the circular designs on the unearthed paving slabs. It was something that had been weathered by millennia of rain, hail, and wind, but suggested something with many tresses, like the coils of a maiden’s hair.
“A bit outdated, really, far too showy,” Ikrit announced, as Vekal walked up to the first ‘head-pillar’. It was a man, of a person undoubtedly human, with a full beard and clear, unseeing eyes. Fine cracks traced their way across the white stone and chips had been gouged out over the years, but his high, rounded cheekbones and pronounced lips seemed to suggest a king of uncommon good looks.
