Swords of Steel Omnibus

by Howie K Bentley et al.

  Swords of Steel Omnibus

  Introduction by D.M. Ritzlin

  Cover Art by Martin Hanford

  Swords of Steel Omnibus copyright © D.M. Ritzlin 2019

  All rights reserved

  Cover design by Michael Greylord

  All stories copyright © their respective authors 2015-2019.

  Want to get an e-book for free? The Infernal Bargain and Other Stories is available exclusively for DMR Books mailing list subscribers. Go to https://dmrbooks.com/ and get your copy now!

  Introduction

  It’s hard to believe it’s been over five years since I first came up with the concept for Swords of Steel. Manowar is responsible for it, of course. One day, while listening to their song “Dark Avenger,” I became fascinated by the lyrics. I was reminded of the sort of sword-and-sorcery stories that appeared in ‘70s anthologies like Andrew Offutt’s Swords Against Darkness, but have long since fallen out of favor with mainstream publishers. I began to wonder if any heavy metal musicians had tried their hands at penning this type of fiction. They write lyrics about this subject matter, so why not short stories or novellas? Then I recalled reading interviews with a few musicians (Byron Roberts and E.C. Hellwell, specifically) who said they had written some stories, but they were never published. Someone should publish them, I thought.

  Why not you? an inner voice asked me. Well, why not? Apparently no one else was going to do it. Sometimes when you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. Once I had the idea, I had to go through with it. It was too good not to. I contacted various band members (a few even contacted me!), and before I knew it, I had enough stories to fill a book.

  Swords of Steel (which was also the first DMR Books release) debuted on February 21, 2015. Two more volumes followed. All three were published in what I call “classic size paperback” format, 6.5” x 4.25”, because I wanted the books to fit on my shelf alongside all my vintage Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock paperbacks. Besides, the contents were a throwback to the good old days of pulp fiction, so I thought the format should reflect that as well. Unfortunately, doing things the old fashioned way (i.e. having a shop print up 500-1000 copies and then wondering how you’re going to move them) isn’t terribly efficient in this day and age. For one thing, with such limited distribution, it’s extremely prohibitive for readers outside the US to acquire copies.

  Hence the need for the Swords of Steel Omnibus Edition. This massive tome contains all twenty-three stories that appeared in the three SOS volumes, and includes three brand new ones as well. I’m pleased to present these fantasy stories (both heroic and horrific) to the wide audience they deserve.

  I’d like to thank the following for their help and support: All the authors and artists who participated in this project, Eva Flora, Deuce Richardson, Michael Greylord, Jon Zaremba, Bob and Shane (Legions of Metal Festival), Doug Ellis (Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention), John O’Neill (Black Gate), Morgan Holmes (Castalia House), P. Alexander (Cirsova Magazine), Marco (Ride Into Glory), Robert M. Price, and David C. Smith. Special thanks to Manowar and Orson Welles for composing and performing “Dark Avenger.”

  Swords of Steel Omnibus Edition is dedicated to the memory of Mark Shelton, mastermind of the legendary epic metal band Manilla Road. Mark tragically passed away in July 2018 after suffering a heart attack while Manilla Road performed a headlining set at the Headbangers Open Air Festival in Germany. Even though Mark was idolized by thousands of fans and musicians around the globe, he was one of the friendliest and most down-to-earth individuals in the scene. He was a big supporter of Swords of Steel and DMR Books from the very beginning. In the last email he sent me, he joked “If you get rich off this, don’t forget about me!” It remains to be seen whether I’ll get rich or not, but one thing is certain: I won’t forget him. No one who met him ever will.

  Up the hammers!

  —D.M. Ritzlin

  In Memoriam

  Mark Shelton

  December 3, 1957-July 27, 2018

  Eldritch Deities

  All Will Be Righted on Samhain

  By Howie K. Bentley and David C. Smith

  Prologue:

  Revenge Against Rome

  By 60 CE, the Roman Empire stretches from the deep, black forests of Germany in the north to the rocky deserts of Galilee in the east, from broad fields of wheat and spelt in the south, in North Africa, to the flowery meadows of Britain in the west. In Britain, an uneasy peace exists between the Romans and the Kelts. The Romans have built towns and encampments of stone and wood in the east of Britain, along the English Channel—Camulodunum, a settlement for retired soldiers, and, farther south, Londinium, a commercial center that sits in the marshland of the Thames River. Near Camulodunum lives the tribe of Kelts whom the Romans call the Iceni. Prasutagus, the king of the Iceni Kelts, accepted Roman rule, but upon his death, Nero, the young emperor in Rome, eager to expand the empire he has inherited from the emperor Claudius, his uncle, breaks his agreement with the Iceni and orders all their lands and property to be seized by his governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, who resides in Londonium.

  The Iceni Kelts rebel. With their king dead, their complaints are voiced by Queen Boadicea, Prasutagus’ proud, fiery-tempered wife. Roman response is swift and unconditional. Suetonius’s procurator, Catus Decanius, and his officials strip Boadicea of her throne and governing rights. They rape her daughters, Bunduica and Voadica, in front of her; then Helga, Decanius’ amazonian German torturer, publicly whips the former queen, naked, before her people and before the Roman officials and soldiers who have intruded on the village of the Iceni.

  Voadica, ill, dies within the year. Boadicea patiently waits until the proper moment to strike back at Rome. At last, Andraste, the great Keltic goddess of victory, promises the queen many bloody sacrifices in her victory over the Roman invaders. Boadicea sends her surviving daughter, Bunduica, to hide in safety with the druids under their leader, Balor, in a secret sanctuary deep in the forest. Then the Iceni, led by the proud queen, join other local tribes of Britons to move against the Roman occupants.

  Camulodunum falls first beneath the swords and knives of the angry Briton tribes of Iceni and Trinovantes. The terrified inhabitants of Camulodunum gather in the temple erected in honor of Claudius to make a stand until help arrives from the IXth Legion. They do not know that Boadicea’s army has already ambushed the IXth on the road to Camulodunum and slaughtered the centurions nearly to a man. The Romans in the Claudian temple are also butchered, although Boadicea is disappointed to discover that Catus Decanius and his perverted, whip-wielding German amazon are not among the corpses. The proud Roman and his company have already fled for safety to Gaul. The fearful Governor Suetonius has left, as well; no longer in Londinium, he stays on the move, trying to build a force sufficiently large to confront the inflamed Kelts.

  Emboldened by their victory at Londinium, the combined tribes under Boadicea now comb the countryside for Roman and pro-Roman settlements and savage them in bloodbaths, one after another. The Britons are particularly brutal in their revenge at the settlement of Verulamum, home of the traitorous Catavelaunii. Of all the Briton tribes, none was more accommodating to the Romans or more hated by their neighbors than the Catavelaunii. Boadicea’s army heaps the carnage high, and the kites and scavengers feast.

  Governor Suetonius at last raises an army sufficiently large to withstand the onslaught of the Kelts and makes his stand against Boadicea and the allied Britons southeast of the settlement of Atherstone. The battlefield is not to Boadicea’s advantage: she must attack from a wide, open field, whereas the Romans have an entire forest at their backs for protection. But the queen of the Kelts has an army of 200,000; G
overnor Suetonius’s combined Legions II, XIV, and XX comprise only 13,000 men.

  Yet Boadicea is confronted by a bad omen. Before each prior attack on her enemy, from Londinium to this field, the queen had released a hare from under her cloak. The hare is a familiar sent from the goddess Andraste. Boadicea had once told Bunduica that Andraste had come to her in a dream and whispered into her ear the secret of divining the outcome of a battle: when the rabbit returns, the Kelts will be victorious. This morning, however, when Boadicea releases the hare, it does not return.

  Has Andraste abandoned her?

  Those closest to Boadicea hear the queen say, under her breath, “...and if she won’t help me, I will destroy them without her.” She then mounts the step of her chariot and shakes her spear in the direction of the Romans. Her wild, waist-length red hair beats in the wind like a mighty flame. Her muscular frame taut, she calls out to her tribes: “See them on the hill with the trees to their backs! Cowards who whip and rape defenseless women! Grown men who sleep with little boys! Let them run to the trees and hide! Have I not shown you the Goddess is on our side? She has sated her thirst on our crimson-stained altars! We have reveled in her name! Let the men of Briton go home even. The women can finish this battle on their own!” In response to her exhortation, the Kelts raise their voices as one and thrust their weapons in the air.

  Confronting this display, Suetonius turns his horse and shouts to his men, “Keep close order. When you have thrown your javelins, push forward with the bosses of your shields and swords. Let the dead pile up. Forget about plunder. Win the victory, and it’s all yours.”

  With awful shouts from both sides that rock the sky, the Kelts advance. The Romans hurl javelins, and many Britons drop. The Romans charge in a wedge formation, like a mighty battering ram, crowding in the tribes and going to work on them with short swords and spears designed for fighting in close quarters. The Britons, wielding their otherwise effective long swords, are caught. Before their families, whom the tribes had invited to watch this spectacle, the Britons go down in defeat. Hemmed in by their own wagons at their backs, the tribes are unable to retreat. The Roman cavalry has them flanked on both sides. By the end of the day, the dead lie in tall piles.

  Boadicea, having survived the slaughter and aware that her daughter is safe, takes poison that the old druid Balor had given her should she and the tribes confront defeat at last. Forsaken by Andraste just when she most needed the Goddess’s strength, the flame-haired queen now is dead and her revolt at an end.

  This last battle, however, has driven Suetonius out of his mind. He has become almost more animal than man, drunk with power, enraged at the Kelts, as bloodthirsty as a wolf. His desire is to continue killing and torturing Britons endlessly. Learning of this, Nero sends Julius Classicanius to Britain to replace the rapist Catus Decanius as procurator, and Classicanius sends Governor Suetonious back to Rome so that he will cause no more trouble in Britain.

  There has been enough already.

  Chapter I

  The Sacrifice

  A slow wind moaned through the endless forest of tall, great trees. Bending strongly, heavy branches beat together and knocked out an unaccompanied nighttime dirge. The argent moon frowned on the Briton forest, watching like an eye as Bunduica weaved her way among the dark, gnarled boles. In her right hand she carried a torch; under her left arm was a wiggling bundle; slung over her back was a sack that contained fresh water and some few provisions.

  Trees began to change, and before the young woman’s eyes, as she hurried, the very light of the moon came alive around her. The old druid’s mistletoe concoction, which the girl had drunk before entering this heavy forest, was taking effect. Immediately, everything around her burst alive—and Bunduica was walking in two worlds at once.

  Here was the forest, ripe with fearful things and the expectancy of the evil to come, and here was the world alongside it, the sinister prelude of the forest and her immediate surroundings—the original world. Here lakes of blood ran in red waterfalls, and men and women took the forms of written characters—ancient runes—and shape-shifted into horse- and boar-headed chimeras. As Bunduica hurried on, one of these boar-headed men, standing now not far away, looked at her and, lifting his right arm, showed her the decapitated head of a man. He threw back his head, exposing freshly blooded fangs, laughed—and vanished, turned into fog.

  The inhabitants of this damned world moved like ghosts free to pass through or pass over time. They shifted and dissolved as scenes of aeons came and went instantly, like the dreams of stars, all around the dazed Bunduica. A flaxen-haired woman, bare-chested, with a well-muscled abdomen but only half-human, slithered through the trees, her head and breasts and arms swaying atop her lower body, which was that of a large serpent. Curling and uncurling, the snake woman moved past a long row of impaled torture victims, some of whom yet lived, writhing and sweating, in the starlit mists. Her head swiveled completely around as she examined these bloody trophies; the back of her head, revealed only briefly as it revolved, was the face of a beast that Bunduica could not identify.

  The young woman tried to keep her attention focused on her mission. This other world, she understood, was the result of the druidic potion, and she must not allow it to stand in her way or distract her from her purpose. She had suffered much already, but she was strong. Indeed, she looked like a younger version of her mother, the great Boadicea, with her flaming red hair, taut but feminine physique, alabaster skin, and piercing green eyes—eyes full of haunted memories. But Bunduica had her mother’s iron will, too, so she walked on through the grim forest with complete determination, as if in a trance.

  A crunch of autumn leaves beneath a booted foot not far away reminded her that she was not alone. The two boys, one tow-headed and the other red-haired with freckles and a perpetually sour look on his face, watched her through the trees from a distance. They had been following her for some time. Bunduica was aware of them, but they did not know that. Since ingesting Balor’s mistletoe concoction, Bunduica felt as if all of her senses had become heightened to a nearly agonizing level. The boys were undoubtedly following her to spy on her and report back to the Roman officials. Most likely they were of pro-Roman families. It didn’t matter. She knew that tonight there would be a reckoning.

  She walked past a tree with a leering skull-like face that had been carved by no human hand. The jaw moved as the face tried to whisper to her. As she went by the skullface, Bunduica began to wonder just how far into the forest she would have to travel before she found the place. Suddenly a sharp voice inside her head said, “Look! There it is. To your left!”

  Balor’s voice, or her mother’s? Or her own from deep within her? Bunduica saw a copse of four thick, gnarled old oaks, their tops leaning into each other as if they had grown together in a knot to make a roof. Balor had told Bunduica that when she saw this sign, she would have found the very place where the ritual must be performed.

  Now she entered the grove and laid her torch and the writhing bundle on the altar of black stone that sat far beneath the knotted roof. On the sides of this carven block of onyx, strange characters had been chiseled, much like those she had seen in Balor’s book. Had this slab of stone really been brought from another world, as old Balor had said? Bunduica shrugged the pack from her back, removed a flask of spring water, and set about quenching her thirst.

  She then closed her eyes and made sure that she could recall the rune sounds and words Balor had taught her from his old tome. He called it the Book of Dead Runes. This grimoire, written on leaves of strange parchment and bound in skin with clasps of iron and bone, had been ancient even when fabled Valusia, the great kingdom, was young, its first trees green, its skies bright. Balor had given Bunduica the book when he decided at last that the child had nothing to live for but the vengeance she craved. She had spent months begging the blind old man for the occult knowledge she needed to take her revenge.

  Balor had said to her, as he made his fateful decision, �
��You will be working in magick and summoning forces the druids have shunned since before the great cataclysms of old.” The powerful magicks within the book were like trickster spirits, he told her; they would likely destroy the user as well as those against whom they were used. He recited the history of the Dead Runes. The fierce grimoire had first been in the possession of the race of Serpent Men, the unhuman creatures that had tried to topple the line of the ancient Great Kings who had reigned before the oceans engulfed Atlantis. It was this race of Serpent Men, some said, that had bound the book in the age-grayed human flesh that now covered it. Much later, it had been held by a sect of sorcerers in a land far to the east, Stygia. The sorcerers of Stygia had used the book to rule that dusky kingdom; with it, they brought down death and terror on all who opposed them. Even these workers of darkness, however, feared to utter spells contained on certain of the book’s leaves. “Stygia long ago collapsed into dust,” Balor told Bunduica, “and the book came to be held by two ancient enemy tribes called the Aesir and the Vanir. Through them, it reached my hands. I can tell you that there is a race to the north of the Briton Isles that will one day wash this land in blood, but not in your lifetime. They use written characters similar to those in this book to divine the future, but their runes are a very mild corruption of the dead runes. Some wise person knew what he was doing when he disarmed such knowledge. This will be the last that men will know of the book.”

  Balor had concluded with a dark warning. “This tome may not even have been born on this earth. Some say that it was brought down from the stars or from another world. What we know, Bunduica, is this: our world sits on top of, or passes through, the world as it truly is, not as it appears to be. For there surely are such other worlds beside ours. Bunduica—when you summon the rune forces, it isn’t known whether the dark entities evoked will appear to the human eye, or are invisible demonic entities, or are forces of nature. I myself have not spoken these passages aloud. What I do know, myself, is from the undisputed testimony passed down through druidic tradition since before Atlantis sank. The rune forces are most potent—and utterly dangerous.”