Chaos Shifter

by Marc Secchia

  The Marshal was about to receive the shock of his life.

  The silver-armoured infantry gathered within earshot in seconds. Each trooper wore complete plate metal armour emblazoned with the blue lightning bolt of the House; heavy hinged breastplates, a gorget for the neck, a heavy smooth helm with its characteristic crysglass visor, and heavy plate pieces all the way down to the personally shaped greaves. Every inch of skin was protected by hardened metal or the fabulously costly, almost impenetrable argentonium-thread gambesons beneath. Every piece of armour served its function and had a particular name. Like their Commander, every last man and woman of his infantry troop had trained in full armour since childhood. They were built like Dragons, bulky in the shoulder, thickset through the torso and waist, and massively powerful in the hips and legs.

  Asturbar said, “The assault trains are empty. Our new target is those troops and whatever they’re carrying.”

  One of the women growled, “Blight of the gloaming! Is that a Dragon’s jawbone?”

  “Exactly.”

  There was much shaking of heads and superstitious muttering, but when Asturbar called the advance, they obeyed without reservation. The troop poured over the coverless yards to the second fosse, which they scaled in the same manner as the first, and when they popped out atop again, there were flags waving frantically on the fortress behind, and an answering drawing together of the troops ahead.

  Bantukor crowed, “Right you were, sah!”

  Aye, the enemy was hiding something, but time, terrain and troop numbers stood against. Down into the third fosse, and they would face a fight on the way up. Bones! Why bones? Asturbar racked his brain as he ran, and could think of nothing. The mass of his armour moved about him like his own skin, the plates moving with oiled precision over the pumping of his powerful limbs. With every pounding step the scene came closer into focus. Thousands of Human bones. Heaps of Dragon bones, as green as moss. The enemy soldiers scattered them seemingly without purpose upon the ground before rushing back for more. A ragged defensive line formed between his troop and the piles of bones. Huge curved ribs. Vertebrae. Skull spikes seven feet long, and now a skull segment that took twenty men to shift.

  Asturbar understood the need to carry equipment through the House wards on foot. He just did not understand the need for skeletons. Curse it to a Cloudlands hell and back, their troops weren’t even prepared to mount a disciplined defence! What was this?

  His itch was becoming desperate.

  The Commander almost fell into the final fosse as he skidded to a halt. He roared an execration as he realised it was half-full of water. Some fool must have hit the release, or forgotten to repair pipe and valve … that distance may as well have been a mile. He could not cross water in full armour. He’d sink.

  Precisely.

  As Asturbar stared across at that bizarre scene, the long, sleek Dragon’s skull approaching with its empty, staring eye sockets, a chill passed through his soul. That was the only way he could describe the sensation. He was a practical soldier who gave short shrift to matters religious – although he respected the tenets of faith – and far less shrift to the credulous or gullible nonsense that oftentimes seemed to accompany otherwise sensible belief systems. What he needed was the armour upon his back and a comforting weight in his right hand.

  For the first time in his life, Asturbar knew a visceral fear. He reacted sharply.

  “Follow me!”

  “What’s the command, sah?”

  “Take a running leap, Bantukor!”

  “Swim?” To his credit, the experienced soldier hardly blinked. “Loosen yer upper taces clips, you sons of skanky murgalizards! Move, you putrescent furuncles on a Baxutik slug’s underparts!”

  Smart. Asturbar appreciated the idea that should his armour fill with water, it should be allowed to drain out quickly. His Sub-Commander roared and the unit leaped into their teams. Men and women to look after each other’s backs, usually, but now they must ensure each member forged across and climbed out safely. He hoped they could find the trigger on the far side. How deep was that water? At least halfway to the top.

  “Teams, grapnels ready!” roared Bantukor.

  Unimaginative? That grizzled old codger would receive a commendation today!

  They backed up a dozen paces.

  “No quarter!” Asturbar thundered, and broke into a run.

  * * * *

  Thirty-eight plummeted into the water, as far as they could leap. His boots struck the bottom harder than he had expected. Immediately, Asturbar steadied the two Lights on his team and forged ahead, his powerful frame cleaving the murky waters. He heard a muffled scream. Two. Then a long, sinuous body whipped past him in the semidarkness. What?

  Some kind of eel?

  So much for a dearth of exotic surprises.

  Cursing in his head, Asturbar fumbled at his belt. Dagger ready. Yah! There went another, coiling about one of his team of four, pulsing brightly – he stabbed hard, instinctively, and felt a potent shock charge up his arm, numbing it right to the shoulder. Beneath his visor the Light’s eyes were huge with fright. That electrical charge would have stopped a smaller man’s heart, the Commander realised. The wall! Up! He searched rapidly, on his knees, sensing another flurry in the water nearby. Switch! He punched it. Nothing. Asturbar broke his dagger in the frame holding the casing, wrenched the mechanism open, and jabbed the broken reserve lever with the blunt, inch-long remaining stub of his weapon. The saboteur had been lazy. Rungs squealed sharply.

  “Up! Up!” Bubbles gurgled in his helm; his hands swirled languidly underwater.

  Hard rungs beneath his gauntleted grip. Asturbar linked arms with his team, the two Lights and one Heavy, and hauled them upward rung by rung. He heard at least two further outcries before his helm broke the surface; he checked left and right, seeing the comforting sight of his infantry unit heaving themselves free of that nasty little death trap.

  Rage fuelled his climb. A second scan suggested his squad, good soldiers all, had been reduced by half a dozen. No, there came Trazz, his armoured shoulders convulsing as he breached the murky waters with one of those luminous purple eel things clinging to his arm. He tore it free with a shout.

  “THE MISTRALS!” he bellowed.

  The teams climbed rapidly, the thick metal rungs taking their weight with only one tearing free under Asturbar’s weight. Understandable. He was no stripling.

  As his head neared the top, he turned and snarled across at Bantukor, “Well, soldier, your weapons are clean of Heripede ichor. What say you we find fresh blood to douse your blades?”

  “Yes sah!” laughed his friend. They had soldiered together for over a decade, through swamp and Dragon-fire hells and back again.

  Raising their helms above the fosse’s rim, they surveyed the scene ahead. Asturbar pursed his lips. Pfft. Pathetic defence. Only rookie soldiers formed such ragged lines during battle, too far apart, glancing nervously … over their shoulders. At the hoto’utax-freaking bone piles!

  The men acted terrified.

  Bantukor wondered, “What idjut-flatbrain sends troops against us armoured like that?”

  Plain brown leather jerkins and black trousers was all they wore. Short double-bladed Garagu swords. Light tan samituhide boots. Nothing suitable for infantry work. He measured the distances with his eyes; the rabble stood equidistant between the first of the bone piles and the fosse hiding his infantry unit, about forty yards away.

  “Fodder,” spat the Commander.

  His unit was ready, hanging from the rungs as water poured out of their armour. Below, Fankay broached with a low roar of effort, the limp form of her husband slung over her brawny left shoulder. Bantukor shouted for her to bring him up; a comrade hung on one-handed and slapped the unconscious man, Cha’atu, firmly between the shoulders. A click of the helm, and green bile mixed with water shot out. He heaved a ragged breath, and vomited a second time.

  “Dangurit eels!” growled Fankay. “Those boys are
n’t local. Who the hells –”

  “The Iolite Blue,” said Hachiki, their intelligence liaison, leaning away from the wall so that he could address Asturbar around a Heavy’s back. “Those eels come from his Archipelago, anyways.”

  “What’s his power?” snapped Asturbar.

  “Usual rumours. Mind powers, dominant Marshal status, sycophant Lesser Dragons bound to his cause. But it’s said he’s been consuming slaves – Dragon and Human – by the Dragonship-load.”

  “Consuming?”

  “Sucking them dry of blood and magic,” Hachiki clarified.

  “Ugh. Cannibal?”

  “Worse if he likes arranging bones like that, sah.”

  Asturbar’s eyes flicked to the heaped-up Dragon bones, before he stared pointedly at the man. “Speak your mind and be quick about it!”

  “Necromancy.”

  The instant the man spoke the forbidden word, Asturbar heard a very strange sound pass across the battlefield, like wind rustling through leaf-fall – only, there were no leaves out there.

  Just bones.

  Chapter 2: Destruction

  THE BONE PILES rustled again, as if a chill wind riffled through the desiccated leaves of an ancient tome. Asturbar knew his eyes must be bigger than his palms as he gaped – stupidly – at the enemy lines. A soldier must do something. Act. Attack or defend. Indecision froze him in his boots.

  A second later, a breeze brought the searing bite of frost to his nostrils, and the unmistakable cinnamon-vanilla tang of Dragon magic, although this magic also smelled as if it had spent the last dozen centuries lurking about the ghastly underbelly of a gravesite. That was when the very few hairs remaining upon his body decided to congeal in an upright stance, and his left hand clamped so hard on its rung, he actually felt the metal bend. A sickly avocado green glow emanated from within the hollow sockets of that huge skull. The bones quivered, visibly this time.

  What abominable power was this?

  Nothing he had faced in his twenty-eight years of warrior training could have prepared him for what he witnessed. Asturbar had but one word left in his head, and it was a resounding expletive.

  “Sah?” Bantukor reached over to slap his shoulder in a comradely fashion. “Orders?”

  “The bones,” he croaked. The Commander tried to wet his lips. “Crush the bones to powder. Our primary target is that Dragon skull.”

  “Sah! You crusty pawful of warts, you heard the Commander! We smash that skull. Axes ready!”

  Asturbar wrenched himself into motion. “Follow me.”

  Boots pounded a distant drumbeat. The closeness of his unit; their exacting charge which started slowly so that the last climbers could catch up, then increased in pace as they fanned out, the Lights flanking their team-lead Heavies, slighter shadows flitting in the lee of armoured behemoths. In full plate, Asturbar weighed a whisker under one hundred and twenty stone, or three-quarters of a tonne. This was an important detail for an infantry soldier – bragging rights, he supposed. He stood six feet two in his boots and the thick shoulder pauldrons broadened his densely muscled upper body to an even four feet in width. The men he struck were barely a tenth of his combined weight. Asturbar waved his axe only because it made the swathe he cut wider still; the rabble went down like stalks of mohili wheat feeling a scythe biting through their knees. He barely felt the bumps as he bludgeoned his way toward the gruesome skull.

  This carnage was not soldiering. Hateful!

  Thrusting his feelings aside – knowing he would face nightmares later – Asturbar angled his charge for the skull. How the wind moaned! The bones rattled so violently they shifted across the ground, rasping like an approaching storm slinging linked Islands about as they bobbed three to four miles above the deathly Cloudlands. The Commander swiped a gobbet of pink brain matter off his visor.

  Suddenly the breeze picked up its skirts and bustled about like a busy matron marshalling her kitchen staff. Glowing green bones skittered toward him, clattering off his armour. Asturbar swung his axe instinctively in a wide arc, slicing through a rising whirlwind of green. Bits stuck to him. Finger bones gripping. A shinbone dangling a foot. With a demented shriek like a squall striking an Isle, the charnel field came alive. It was as if every bone of thousands sought to rejoin its original companions – at the same time. They fought. Clashed. Clacked together and dropped and smacked each other spinning. He saw Hachiki and Fankay felled by a flurry of heavy grey Dragon bones concealed amidst the thousands of whiter, smaller Human bones, but the disembodied, glowing paws that snaffled up his soldiers seconds later were real enough, assuming recognisable skeletal structure before his horrified eyes.

  Asturbar roared, “Mistrals! To me!”

  He rallied his unit despite the blinding flurry; he hacked a paw back into its component pieces, discovering in a flash that if he damaged the bones enough, they seemed to lose the power to meld together by whatever perverse magic ruled this battlefield.

  “SPLIT THE BONES!” he thundered. “BREAK THEM!”

  His infantry clumped together intuitively, but three Heavies had already been whisked away by the ethereal paws. They disappeared into the fosse – to be drowned, Asturbar assumed. Whatever intelligence or power was guiding this attack, it was sharp and focussed; utterly inimical. Draconic without a doubt. His axe whirled in a silvery blur before his narrowed eyes. Precision blows freed Bantukor from a Dragon’s paw clamped over his helm. Asturbar hacked at the bones until they stopped moving. His Sub-Commander stood back-to-back with Cha’atu, who had lost his helm but not one whit of his courage. White-faced, he determinedly bludgeoned half a ribcage and an arm flailing at him out of the green-tinged mayhem.

  A horrific stench assaulted Asturbar’s nostrils as he swivelled, checking his unit. The rabble! Those crushed soldiers were jerking back to life, but only momentarily, for the dusky green radiance that tugged them into bizarre marionette-like positions suddenly flared and recoiled toward that Dragon skull lying apparently becalmed in the midst of the mayhem. Its eyes came alight with swirling khaki fires, while the briefly resurrected bodies collapsed in a wide swathe, once again lifeless – if life that had been.

  For his part, the Commander saw crimson.

  “WITH ME!”

  Their charge was crazed, courageous, unstoppable. They crushed skeletons beneath their heavy boots as they plowed through the flying debris toward that mighty skull. Asturbar saw the form of a Dragon coalescing behind it, splinter by splinter. Bone by bone. A ribcage reordering itself into a fourteen-foot tall jailhouse. Spine vertebrae linking together with sharp, orderly clacks of sound. Protective phalanges supplementing joints. The long wing bones and lighter struts linking together like a leaf-rot that left only the tracery of veins showing.

  Despite his weight, Asturbar had a power advantage in a flat-out sprint through increasingly heavy debris. He outstripped the others by several paces. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he thought he saw a flicker of surprise in those baleful eyes as he bulled through the thick of the flying fragments. Sparks flew from his soles as the giant infantryman skidded into his attack, channelling the momentum. Hefting his axe, Asturbar struck with a wild yell, splintering the cheekbone of that mighty skull. A second strike wounded the eye-socket, spilling green light upon his axe head. It was strangely fluid. Animate.

  He swung again, but the skull shifted. The impetus of his glancing blow threw him to his knees. Just in time. A partially formed paw whooshed through the air above his helmet. Its five-foot talons would have beheaded him without a second thought.

  “For the Mistrals!” His uppercut smashed the limb into the beast’s chin. Whirling a full four hundred degrees of the compass, Asturbar instinctively struck the rebound with every ounce of his strength, severing two of what he had taken for spectral talons, but they were very real and their weight staggered him as the digits slammed into his chest. No blood. Just a spray of flesh that eerily changed course before the tracking swivel of his gaze, and returned to their
parent’s … flesh. Was it flesh?

  The Dragon swelled before his eyes, brimming with monstrous power. Bones clamped into position. Sinews wound along its frame like demented onyx vines, binding the beast together. He could not imagine power of this ilk. Insanity! With a cry that rose into a despairing wail, Asturbar buried his axe in the Dragon’s foreleg as it settled four-square into its stance. The unearthly beast seemed to feel no pain. Flesh and hide materialised by magic as the deep green mist continued to rush into its body, and the man realised that it was stripping the life force – or death force, more aptly – from this bone pile and using it to rebirth its own form. Inside the House wards. Scales of his characteristic colour, that purple-blue termed iolite, shimmered into being first beside the jutting array of skull spikes, before running backward along his flanks and up to clothe his brutish skull in full draconic magnificence.

  Bantukor howled, “The Mistrals!”

  Reactions took over. Hacking. Yelling orders. Taking the mighty Dragon down. His unit attacked the beast with everything they had, trying to carve flesh away faster than the Dragon could embody itself, and the stench they raised from its putrefying, semisolid remains was enough to make seasoned soldiers retch. He realised at some point that the Dragon was reversing a decaying process. Rotten globules of flesh returned to wholeness. Flayed wings drew together in new, smooth membranes.

  They damaged it repeatedly, but the rents grew back together faster than they could hew flesh from bone. Even the severed talons tried to re-knit themselves, wriggling through the dust like ghastly, animate caterpillars.

  Then, the beast raised its paw.