The Cor Chronicles: Volume 02 - Fire and Steel

by Martin V. Parece II

  “Please stand Dahken Keth!” Cor announced.

  As Keth arose, the other Dahken, especially the children applauded in a growing storm by pounding their feet on the ground and their palms on the table. Keth had always been popular for his caring, helpfulness and kind words. Rael and Cor joined in the applause as Keth’s smile turned into an embarrassed, almost stupid, ear to ear grin. Cor grasped his arm warmly.

  “Let us eat!” shouted the Lord Dahken, loud enough for the nearby servants to hear.

  There was much rejoicing amongst good food, good company and lots of wine. Of course, the servants understood the proper place of things, and the children were limited or even disallowed from the wine dependant on their age. Cor noted with satisfaction that Rael drank little compared to what he remembered; perhaps the man’s death and rebirth had cleansed him of some of his demons. Cor for his part, partook a little too much, encouraging Keth to do the same.

  One other Dahken ate little and enjoyed the wine too heavily. After less than an hour, Geoff told Dahken Rael that he felt ill and would retire. He concentrated immensely on his balance so as not to stumble and fall as he walked away from the table.

  Geoff barely made it back to the Dahken barracks and his rooms, stopping once to vomit a little more than halfway there. When he reached his door, he could barely keep his eyes open while he unlocked it and pushed it open. Once inside, he passed out on his bed without even closing the door. We wasn’t out long, maybe a few hours, when he woke up to the sound of someone pulling his door shut from the outside. He stood up to lock the door and found that his legs betrayed him; his world spun. He felt terrible, and it only added to his chagrin and anger.

  It should have been him.

  Keth was nothing compared to him, a stray dog eating from rotten garbage. Geoff’s blood ghast contained strength and power of which Keth couldn’t even dream. Older by a year he may be, but Keth couldn’t hope to defeat him in battle. Geoff knew what he could do with the thing, and even Dahken Rael didn’t have such power. And Lord Dahken Cor had never done anything to prove his strength. What had he done in his life? Killed some decrepit priest and a Loszian necromancer whose sorcery couldn’t even affect a Dahken? He avoided someone’s attempt on his life only because of that slut he was always fucking. Geoff doubted Lord Dahken Cor could defeat the blood ghast. They said that they could teach Keth nothing further, but what could they possibly teach him?

  It should have been him. He should have been at Cor’s right, now called Dahken Geoff. They would soon find out how much they had to learn.

  12.

  Keth noted that Rael hadn’t shaved in a few days; his face was covered in thick stubble a mix of black and white. It was an interesting effect against the older Dahken’s gray skin and the bluish steel of his armor. There was a slight chill in the air this spring morning, one’s breath coming in white puffs, but the sun already worked hard to warm the day. Today Rael began the task of training two more of the Dahken children to learn to fight as Dahken, Marya and Celdon, a girl and a boy who were perhaps a few years younger than Keth.

  Marya was thirteen, still just a young girl, but Keth knew that she budded into womanhood, a fact that her loose fitting clothes hid well. Shortly after they arrived in Fort Haldon, Keth had accidentally walked in on her naked in a bath. He blushed; at least, he felt the heat on his face, though no color showed in his gray cheeks, and she laughed out loud at his embarrassed reaction. Marya was barely five feet in height and extremely thin, a mere slip of a girl. Once the grime of slavery had been washed from her, Keth found her rather pretty with her long, auburn hair that curled slightly at the very end. She walked more like a boy than a girl, and the hazel eyes that both matched and contrasted her hair seemed to be at once playful and angry.

  Standing by her side, Celdon seemed to be Marya’s physical opposite. He was tall for his age, almost as tall as Keth, and at least two stone heavier. When Cor had first liberated them and fled to Aquis, Celdon had been downright fat, but he had lost a fair amount of weight in the past few months. Even still, he had a decidedly pudgy countenance, made more apparent by the short bowl shaped way he kept his hair. Keth really didn’t know much about Celdon or where he was from, but it seemed the boy was a born fighter, having taken quickly to training with Fort Haldon’s men.

  This would be the first time either of them had held live steel. Since coming to Fort Haldon, the Dahken’s access to resources expanded immensely. Thom had assigned several veteran soldiers to the task of teaching the Dahken swordsmanship with wooden practice swords, which got larger and heavier as the user advanced in skill. Cor hoped that all of them could learn to fight before Rael began the harsh task of wounding them over and over. Rael saw the value of the lessons, though he showed disdain for Cor’s concern; the children would learn the way all Dahken had learned.

  Rael started with the boy, Celdon, at first simply parrying the boy’s attacks, allowing him to learn the weight and balance of a real weapon. Rael began inserting his own strikes, attacks that were easy to parry or avoid altogether. They became more dangerous, more precise, and Celdon had an increasingly more difficult time of deflecting them. Then the first wound came, a shallow cut to the boy’s upper right arm, above the small, round buckler shield he carried. Having never been wounded before, Celdon lost focus on what we was supposed to be doing as he cradled the wound. Rael ceased his attacks and sheathed his sword. He spoke to Celdon in the usual way, coldly talking about his blood and how the boy must learn to feel it. He must find the heart of the pain and use it to fuel his own attacks; they would give him strength, and his own blows would heal him. The mock battle continued with Rael landing two more blows, to give Celdon shallow wounds. The boy was unable to return the attacks with any force, and eventually fell to his knees crying.

  Rael sheathed his sword and motioned to one of Thom’s soldiers; several were on hand for these training sessions for multiple reasons. The man, whose name Keth could not recall, gently helped Celdon to his feet and half carried him away to see the garrison’s surgeon. Rael sighed and turned from the group to be alone with his thoughts for a moment. Keth knew that one day this task would be his, and he didn’t think it would be easy to bleed children while telling them to fight back.

  Geoff sauntered up to lean on a post next to Keth.

  “What are we doing now?” Geoff asked, yawning.

  “You know what. Where have you been?”

  “I overslept,” Geoff responded indifferently with a slight shrug of his shoulders.

  As far as Keth could tell, it was true. The rings around Geoff’s eyes looked darker than usual, and he still smelled of wine and maybe something a little less savory. Rael called for Marya and began the same way he had with Celdon.

  “Turning into a bad habit of yours,” Keth said. “Maybe I should talk to Lord Dahken Cor about disallowing us access to the fort’s wine.”

  “It’s my choice Dahken Keth. Isn’t that what Cor is all about? Choice?” This last word he spat with venom.

  “Lord Dahken Cor, Geoff. You would do well to remember that.”

  “As you say, Dahken Keth,” Geoff said, making no attempt to hide his distaste.

  Marya fought Rael with less coordination than Celdon had, but she made up for it with energy and a desire to prove that she was as good as a boy. It was interesting to watch as she was only half Rael’s size, but Keth pulled himself away as he saw the soldier returning with news of Celdon. He watched out of the corner of one eye as he was told that the boy would be fine, news no different than what he expected. Rael in the meantime had wounded the girl once, and as he ceased fighting to talk to her in the same way he had to them all, the girl suddenly and angrily swung her shortsword at his head. Keth smiled and turned his full attention to the man in front of him.

  Rael had wounded the girl a second time, and no doubt prepared to wound her a third, when the soldier stopped talking, his mouth just handing open in mid sentence. It took Keth a moment to realize t
he man stared at something behind him, and he turned quickly, though in his mind it seemed to take hours. Rael for his part caught just a glimpse of something, perhaps reflecting light, at the edge of his field of vision. It likely saved his life as he reflexively blocked the first blow with a crash on his shield, knocking him back several feet.

  His foe stood before him, a full foot taller than he and gleaming red in the morning light. Keth stood, struck dumb in shock as Rael faced a being apparently made of blood. The thing leapt forward to the attack, swinging its six foot blade, each attack at Rael a killing stroke. Rael evaded as best as he could, parrying strikes when necessary, and occasionally taking a blow to his shield that would stagger him. He’d never felt such strength, but he dare not strike the ghast for fear of harming Geoff.

  Keth tore his eyes from the scene that he feared could not end well and found Geoff, his body on the ground and unmoving. He couldn’t even see if Geoff’s chest rose and fell; he appeared dead, as he always did when the blood ghast appeared. His shock broken, Keth made to run to Geoff’s body, perhaps somehow wake him.

  “No!” he heard Rael shout as steel rang. “The ghast will come for you! Get Cor!”

  Keth hesitated for a moment, his first instinct to disobey and wade into the fight against the ghast, against Geoff. Rael’s shield, a large kite shield made of steel that gleamed blue in the light with a large gem set in the middle, was battered and bent. The gem, a blue stone the size of his fist, was cracked and crushed, half of it missing. Keth turned and sprinted to Thom’s quarters, leaving the sounds of the battle and crying children behind him. He was unsure where to find Cor, but Thom would know. If only he could run fast enough.

  Rael continued to fight the onslaught, but he had no idea how long he could keep it up. The thing hit with the strength of a giant, so Rael assumed as he had never fought a giant, and while he grew tired and worn, the ghast did not slow at all. In fact, the more fatigued Rael became, the harder the thing seemed to hit. He hoped the more it attacked, the more exhausted Geoff would become, and eventually it would return to his body. His only other hope was that he could reach Geoff through whatever senses the thing had.

  “Geoff, you must listen,” he shouted as he fought. The blood sword rang against his no different than the hardest steel. “You must come back. You must hear me!”

  The blood ghast quickened its attacks, swinging its sword and recovering for the next blow almost faster than Rael could follow. One came that he could not parry, and he took it against his now battered shield; the thing’s sword bit into it and ripped away most of the top of the shield. Rael let go of it, allowing the shield to slip off his arm as he dodged the next strike.

  “The blood ghast is your essence. You can control it! You can stop it! You must bring it back to you!” Rael pleaded.

  And to his amazement, the manifestation of Geoff’s blood essence stopped its onslaught. It stood in place on the balls of its feet, sword still at the ready, and it appeared to breathe heavily in and out as if from exertion. It reminded Rael of the first time he had seen it back in the palace in Byrverus, but he was wholly unprepared what happened next. He heard one simple word in his mind, as if a hint of a whisper in Geoff’s voice.

  “No.”

  Stunned with horrible realization, Rael barely brought his sword up in time to fend off the next attack. The strike was so powerful, it shattered his longsword and drove him back a few steps as steel splinters glistened in the sunlight. Off balance, Rael could not avoid the sword as it bit into the steel plate on his right shoulder from a massive two handed overhead strike. The cruel weapon drove deeper into his body downward and at an angle, rending steel flesh and bone. It stopped just at his breastbone, having ripped through over eight inches of steel plate across his chest, and rivers of blood ran down the blade, Rael’s chest, stomach and back. Idly, he realized he had lived over a hundred years to die twice since he had first met the boy Cor just a few years ago.

  * * *

  Cor sped, with Keth on his heels, to the grounds Rael used for training the Dahken. He had been sitting with the Chief Architect to determine which and how many rooms in the keep would be allocated to the Dahken when Keth burst into the room. Cor didn’t understand what Keth meant by Geoff’s blood ghast attacked Dahken Rael; he only knew he needed to get there quickly. As they approached, he could see great throngs of garrison soldiers and laborers surrounding something or some scene. Those in the outer rings parted readily for the Lord Dahken, but he had to push his way through those close to the middle who fought for a better view.

  As he finally reached the center, he stopped dead in his tracks, a cold sick feeling running through his gut. Most of the Dahken were gathered here, most of them crying, and on the ground were Geoff and Dahken Rael. A huge gash was rent through Rael’s armor, starting over the right shoulder down through the breastplate. The man’s steel reflected red in the sun, and drying blood covered the ground underneath him. Geoff sat on the ground to Rael’s right, on his knees with his legs tucked underneath him, and he fiercely gripped Dahken Rael’s right hand. As Cor approached dumbly, he cast his shadow over the pair, and Geoff looked up squinting into the sunlight. The young man, boy, was also covered in blood, though none was his, and streaks of tears stained his face.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know how…” Geoff said weakly, his voice trailing off.

  Cor knelt to Rael’s left and quietly placed his hand on the man’s forehead and closed the dead man’s eyes for the second time. He then closed his own eyes and bowed his head silently for several long moments, whether in prayer or thought one could not be certain. Cor then sighed softly and stood, his hands on Ebonwing and Soulmourn who sang softly to him. It was odd as they only did this in time of danger, but that thought would not occur to him until later.

  “Take Dahken Rael to his quarters for now,” he said to some of the nearby soldiers. “Bring Geoff and Dahken Keth to mine. I wish to speak with them, Geoff first.”

  And he stalked off, leaving the crowd to murmur as his commands were carried out. As the men collected Dahken Rael and gently carried him away, Keth stared down at Geoff and the blood soaked dirt. Geoff coolly returned the gaze, tears still running down his face, but Keth saw no sorrow in his eyes. He saw nothing there at all, except a small glint of satisfaction.

  Cor paced his rooms tensely, annoying Thyss to no end. The sorceress had slept late, as usual, and was only just rising when Cor stormed in and told her Rael was dead. She showed surprise, but that was all; Cor knew the two hadn’t ever come together in any way. The polite knock came at his door while she still dressed, and he ignored it. Moments later a second, more forceful at the door drew his ire.

  “Wait outside gods damn you!” he shouted.

  When he was ready, or rather when Thyss was ready, Cor opened the door and admitted the blood and tear stained Geoff, closing the door on Dahken Keth and several soldiers. Still fuming, he pointed to a chair in the corner of the room while he collected his thoughts and calmed himself.

  “What happened?” Cor eventually asked, once he was certain that he would neither shout nor cry.

  “I’m not sure,” Geoff answered sullenly.

  “Start from the beginning, and leave nothing out.”

  “I… I overslept and missed the beginning of training,” Geoff started haltingly. The Lord Dahken had a dark look on his face, but Geoff continued. “I had too much to drink last night. Keth says I probably drink too much. I was talking to him while Dahken Rael started with Marya. It was fine at first; you know, the usual, the same wounding that we all went through from Dahken Rael. The second time he struck her, I wanted to stop him. She’s just a little girl! But then I felt feint and blacked out.

  “I started to realize I was attacking Dahken Rael with a huge sword, and I thought I was dreaming. It was strange. I saw everything, but it was strange and dizzy. I could feel the vibration of my sword in my hands as I fought him.”

  “When did you realize it wasn’t
a dream?” Cor asked, his tone calmer, softer.

  “When I heard Dahken Rael’s voice calling to me, telling me to stop. He said the blood ghast was me; that I could stop it, control it. But I couldn’t! I couldn’t…” Geoff cried, covering his face as tears again welled up in his eyes.

  Cor’s anger dissolved completely, and he looked at Thyss; even she looked concerned, even sympathetic to the young man.

  “I don’t see that you can be blamed for this; it wasn’t your fault,” Cor said as he dropped to one knee. He placed both of his hands on the young man’s shoulders. “I will not lie to you. I am furious at Rael’s death, but I think the blood ghast appeared because you felt the need to protect Marya. And protecting your weaker sister is nothing to be ashamed of.

  “We will honor Dahken Rael. We will entomb him as was the Dahken way before and as will be again. You can most honor him by learning to control the ghast. Geoff, go now to your room and rest.”

  Cor regained his feet and opened the door. Geoff slowly stood and walked outside into the sunlight; he appeared exhausted, slumped and sullen. He absently gazed east as he walked away. Cor motioned for Keth to enter and related to the young Dahken everything Geoff told him. Keth could add nothing to the story but suspicions that he kept to himself.

  “I should have helped Dahken Rael. Together we could have beaten the blood ghast,” Keth said after several minutes of silence between them.

  “How can you be sure? Rael was fully armored and ready for battle, and you had nothing but your sword,” Cor argued. “Geoff could have just as easily killed you both. Even if you are right, you would have killed Geoff. Is that a better outcome?”

  “As opposed to Dahken Rael dead?” Keth questioned incredulously. “Yes, I would rather that. Geoff has never proved himself in our eyes.”

  The statement brought about more fury from Cor than he had ever known. How could Keth, who was essentially a brother to Geoff, say such things? Cor howled his anger, or perhaps it was his grief. He reached down, and in one fluid motion, gripped the underside of the solid oak desk he had learned to keep for administrative issues and upended it, flung against a stone wall. The action and the power of it, shocked Keth into silence, and even the unflappable Thyss leapt to her feet in alarm.