God of Broken Things

Chapter 19

From our safe vantage point, we watched the Skallgrim scouts moving through the narrowest point of the entire valley – a mere ten paces wide and fifty long – their keen eyes scouring the way ahead through a thin morning mist that coiled around them like a living thing. They paused to listen at every scuff of foot on stone, bird cry and crack of ice and rock, as if they too had heard chilling tales of entire armies disappearing into the misty depths of the Clanholds. Although knowing what I did about the Scarrabus they undoubtedly feared failing their masters more than fighting us. It would be wise to learn exactly what they knew and it occurred to me that I should probably see about capturing one alive without burning out their mind and memory.

“Knowledge is power,” Eva whispered to me with eerie synchronicity. “And knowledge of terrain has won many a battle against superior forces.”

She glanced to Granville, his eyes closed and fingers sunk deep into solid rock. “We have knowledge, terrain, and magic all on our side. This will be a slaughter.” She waited until the Skallgrim scouts had passed and the armoured vanguard were halfway through before flashing another signal towards the far side of the valley.

Down on the valley floor one of the Skallgrim noticed the blinking light and pointed up, but it was far too late to do anything about what was coming.

Never fight a geomancer in the mountains, and always, always flee from two. The ground thumped like a giant had punched it, and I watched in awe as Granville, and Cormac over on the far side of the valley, caused the entire rock face on either side to shatter and slide down in an inexorable mass towards the Skallgrim advance. The enemy found themselves trapped between two oncoming waves of rumbling rock, ice and snow. Their terror was a sharp knife twisting in my gut as they fought and climbed over each other in desperation to escape forward or back. Only a few made it out before the avalanches hit, their relief a fluttering thing with heavy wings of guilt.

It crashed down on the heads of the enemy, killing the lucky ones outright. Others were buried alive, broken and bleeding and gasping for breath as rock squeezed hard on cracked ribs. I shuddered and looked away, remembering my own entombment beneath the earth only too well. Unlike me, I doubted anybody would spend the time to dig them out – they would probably perish of thirst or frostbite after a long and drawn-out ordeal. It was a horrific way to die.

Back in the city I used to think that water and fire were the two deadliest elemental affinities a Gift could boast, one swift and deadly, the other capable of massive destruction and fear. I was now reassessing that opinion.

Eva shoved me back from the icy ridge. Fire bloomed across rock with an angry hiss. “Halrúna,” Eva stated. “Two-no, three, coming up to examine the rockfall.”

My breath rasped loud inside the helmet. I grinned and patted my axe. She shook her head. “Not here, not now. We are to delay them and bleed them dry from many cuts. A pitched battle would be…” She trailed off, then cursed. “Bloody idiots!”

Clansfolk were descending the opposite side of the valley, nimble as mountain goats, while others perched on the very edge and began loosing arrows and screaming about revenge for Dun Bhailiol. The Skallgrim that had made it through before we blocked the pass bunched together and linked shields, arrows tinging off helms, only a few finding flesh.

Before Eva could stop them the Clansfolk on our side leapt to their feet and charged, not willing to be shown up as cowards by their kin.

“At the craven blood-drinkers!” the woman next to me cried as she launched herself down the slope, sailing downwards on a wave of snow and loose rock. Glory called to them and they answered eagerly.

Eva and Granville exchanged glances. “This blockage will not delay their army long,” he said. “Not with shaman and daemons to call on. The Clansfolk here will not withstand them.”

The Setharii wardens shifted nervously, awaiting the command to fling themselves into battle. “We stick to our plan and retreat to the previous position,” Eva ordered. “Walker, you stay and help these bloodthirsty fools – every sword you save here may prove vital later. It’s not like you will be in any real danger down there after all.”

I groaned and for a moment Granville looked bewildered. I wasn’t here as far as he knew.

I slapped a fist over my borrowed heart. “As you command, lord knight.”

Granville’s cheeks bulged and his face paled at the realisation of what I was doing. He knew I was incapacitated and had also known this body was a witless thrall of my magic’s making. His cheeks reddened and his bushy eyebrows shook with fury.

“This is an abomination!” he roared. “How dare you treat the lives of others so cheaply. By the gods, are you even human anymore?”

“Fuck off, Granville,” I said. “This body is a casualty of war so I might as well make use of it. And watch your tongue from now on. I am done with your derision and stuck-up attitude. If I have to hollow you out and wear you like a cheap tunic then that’s fine with me. I don’t really need you intact to use your Gift.”

Eva hauled me up and over the ridge like I weighed no more than a sick puppy. “Fight the enemy, not each other.” Then she let go and I was sliding downhill on loose stone and pebbles, heart pounding, screaming, arms flailing for balance.

It was a terrifyingly swift descent before I thumped into snow drifts in the crevice between cliff and valley floor. I rose bruised and scraped but with my axe in my hand and ready to fight. The air was dusty and earthy, seasoned with the metallic tang of spilt blood.

I surveyed the blocked pass and the boulders already rolling free of the rockfall – the magic of the halrúna would not allow us much time to play with the enemy on this side and a pack of dog-ike daemons were already clambering over it.

The Skallgrim were in a tight and disciplined defensive circle, mailed axemen at the front with shields raised and a few spearmen in the centre thrusting out and over at the raging Clansfolk thundering into the shield wall in waves, swords up and stabbing down trying to pierce Skallgrim eyes and hands or slashing down to sever toes. Screams of rage and pain echoed through the valley.

Their battle-blood was up and infecting me, making me want to fling myself into the fray. I waded through deep snow towards the circled warriors and drew deep on my Gift. The linkage back to my real body was an imperfect thing and it felt weak and strained by the distance. The Gift-bond to my old friend Lynas had also thinned with distance on my travels through Kaladon so this came as no great surprise. Still, it would prove more than enough to deal with these crude heathens.

The battle ahead was frantic and fragmented, confused and split into moments of panic and pain. The conscious mind closed down in such times, making it easy for me to slip in and wreak havoc.

I infiltrated a Skallgrim spearman’s mind first: in the fog of battle he noticed a Clansman break through the shield wall so he stabbed him through the belly. His Skallgrim friend fell with a spear through the kidney, skewered from behind.

The warrior next to the fallen man turned and saw a plaid-clad warrior with a spear behind him, the one that had killed his friend. He swung his axe and the spearman went down clutching a ruined face. It was a joy to take them apart from within, a glorious song composed of notes of misdirection and sleight of eye. Lost in the moment they were mere actors in a play of my devising, and they would all die when the curtain closed.

The defensive circle collapsed as Skallgrim butchered each other, allowing the Clansfolk to cut them to pieces.

I picked a man in finer mail clutching an expensive rune-etched axe and called him to me. “This one is my prisoner,” I said to the Clansfolk. “Harm him and die. He is magically bound to obey me now.” His eyes were wide and terrified as I slithered in and out of his mind, nailing orders and restrictions of behaviour in place. He dropped his axe and shield and stepped close to me.

“You a druí?” the woman I’d met atop the ridge asked, the blood of her enemies spattered all over her face. She eyed my clean axe and the warrior I’d taken, and kept well clear of me.

“Something like that,” I said. “Next time I’d prefer to beat them myself without yer help,” she chided.

I shrugged. “Kill faster then.”

That earned a chuckle.

However, all of a sudden I didn’t feel quite as jolly. Something was coming towards us from the north side of the avalanche, beyond the pack of daemons and the halrúna trying to remove the mess we’d landed on them. Whatever it was, it made my stomach churn, the sort of might that reminded me of the time I’d stood waiting for the god Nathair, the Thief of Life to come and kill me. My Gift screamed for me to leave and if it was one thing I was good at it was knowing when to run away.

“We had best get the fuck out of here,” I said. “Death will be on us shortly.” I didn’t wait for them, I took to my heels with my prisoner jogging along behind me. After a confused moment of watching the druí fleeing as fast as his legs could carry him, the Clansfolk followed, casting fearful glances back as boulders began exploding from the blockage.

They whooped and hollered and screamed prayers to their spirits, glutted on the blood of their enemies and exalting in victory. It was infectious and I felt my lips twist into a grin and my body flush with the joy that only people who have kicked death in the face and then legged it can know. Humans were bred to fight and win, to take joy in proving themselves better than others, and to strive for ever-greater knowledge, skill and power. I wondered if the magic present in our race had gifted us this basic human drive to succeed. It certainly heightened that desire in us magi when we used it. It felt so damned good to wield power.

We didn’t try to climb back up the steep side of the valley via secret paths and hidden tracks – that would be slow going and make our exposed backs prime targets for Skallgrim archers once they broke through. Even a city-boy like me knew not to try that. Instead we sprinted past abandoned farmsteads and still hamlets and puffed and panted along the cart-rutted slushy track leading south towards Kil Noth. I hoped Eva and the wardens would be at the next position ready for the next ambush.

A series of booms echoed down the valley, shaking stones and ice loose from the cliff walls. I glanced back to see the pass opened once more and the army squeezing through the narrows. A halrúna was rising into the air accompanied by a dozen bone vultures and one of those large, scaly lizards.

I stopped to catch my breath. Even with my power weakened by distance from my real body, if I could see that halrúna then I had every confidence I could kill him. I reached out for his mind.

Oh shit. I flinched back before touching him, barely avoiding the notice of whatever great power was back there. The Scarrabus were inside that halrúna and he thrummed with power both human and of their making. Something with immense magic was currently looking through his eyes.

Two hulking serpentine forms shoved the Skallgrim aside and squeezed through the pass, each creature twelve foot tall and at least thirty feet long, with six golden slitted eyes burning below jagged crowns of black iron. All along their bodies small claws opened and closed, and in their two main limbs they held huge, black saw-toothed blades capable of cutting through almost anything. A ravak daemon was almost a match for an elder magus, and here were two of the fucking things.

The massive daemons flanked a silk-covered palanquin carried on the back of some great iridescent armoured beetle inlaid with gold and jewels. Once through the pass the creature lay down and folded its legs away out of sight. Their leader wore ornate robes of the most ancient design, voluminous enough to hide any physical sign of male or female and dyed the rare blue of lapis lazuli from the desert of Escharr. On their brow, above a bald scalp, sat an ornate crown of twisted red gold and rubies. To me they appeared like a dark abbot of a perverse heathen religion. The ravak bowed before them as they waited for the army to filter through the narrow pass and form up in front.

I felt queasy as the flush of previous victory dropped away like the onset of a bad case of dysentery. Whoever or whatever that was, they were the great power I had sensed within the halrúna aeromancer and I wanted nothing to do with it. Fortunately their attention was still fixated on the halrúna in the sky, studying the lay of the land.

A howl was taken up by throats that belonged to no hound ever born on this world. A pack of scaled canine daemons with blood-red eyes erupted from the enemy lines and ploughed lines in the snow towards us. They would probably catch up with us in a worrying short space of time.

“Run for your lives,” I shouted. The chances of any of us surviving this, never mind holding them for long, had dwindled to almost nothing.