The Briar King

Prelude The Born Queen

The sky cracked and lightning fell through its crooked seams. With it came a black sleet tasting of smoke, copper, and brimstone. With it came a howling like a gale from hell.

Carsek drew himself up, clutching his bloody bandages, hoping they would keep his guts in until he saw the end of this, one way or another.

“She must order the charge soon,” he grunted, pushing himself to his feet with the butt of his spear.

A hand jerked at Carsek’s ankle. “Get back down, you fool, if you want to live until the charge.”

Carsek spared a glance at his companion, a man in torn chain mail and no helm, blue eyes pleading through the dark mat of his wet hair.

“You crouch, Thaniel,” Carsek muttered. “I’ve done enough crouching. Fourteen days we’ve been squatting in these pig holes, sleeping in our own shit and blood. Can’t you hear? They’re fighting up front, and I’ll see it, I will.” He peered through the driving rain, trying to make out what was happening.

“You’ll see death waving hello,” Thaniel said. “That’s what you’ll see. Our time will come soon enough.”

“I’m sick of crawling on my belly in this filth. I was trained to fight on my feet. I want an opponent, one with blood I can spill, with bones I can break. I’m a warrior, by Taranos! I was promised a war, not this slaughter, not wounds given by specters we never see, by ghost-needles and winds of iron.”

“Wish you may and might. I wish for a plump girl named Alis or Favor or How-May-I-Please-You to sit on my lap and feed me plums. I wish for ten pints of ale. I wish for a bed stuffed with swandown. Yet here I am still stuck in the mud, with you. What’s your wishing getting you? Do you see your enemy?”

“I see fields smoking to the horizon, even in this pissing rain. I see these trench graves we dug for ourselves. I see the damned keep, as big as a mountain. I see—” He saw a wall of black, growing larger with impossible speed.

“Slitwind!” he shouted, hurling himself back into the trench. In his haste he landed face first in mud that reeked of ammonia and gangrene.

“What?” Thaniel said, but then even the smoke-gray sun above them was gone, and a sound like a thousand thousand swords on a thousand thousand whetstones scraped at the insides of their skulls. Two men who hadn’t ducked swiftly enough flopped into the mud, headless, blood jetting from their necks.

“Another damned Skasloi magick,” Thaniel said. “I told you.”

Carsek howled in rage and frustration, and the rain fell even harder. Thaniel gripped his arm. “Hold on, Carsek. Wait. It won’t be long, now. When she comes, the magicks of the Skasloi will be as nothing.”

“So you say. I’ve seen nothing to prove it.”

“She has the power.”

Carsek brushed Thaniel’s hand from his shoulder. “You’re one of her own, a Bornman. She’s your queen, your witch. Of course you believe in her.”

“Oh, of course,” Thaniel said. “We believe whatever we’re told, we Bornmen. We’re stupid like that. But you believe in her, too, Carsek, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“She had all the right words. But where is the steel? Your Born Queen has talked us all right into death.”

“Wouldn’t death be better than slavery?”

Carsek tasted blood in his mouth. He spit, and saw that his spittle was black. “Seven sevens of the generations of my fathers have lived and died slaved to the Skasloi lords,” he sneered. “I don’t even know all of their names. You Bornmen have been here for only twenty years. Most of you were whelped otherwhere, without the whip, without the masters. What do you know of slavery? You or your redheaded witch?”

Thaniel didn’t answer for a moment, and when he did, it was without his usual bantering tone. “Carsek, I’ve not known you long, but together we slaughtered the Vhomar giants at the Ford of Silence. We killed so many we made a bridge of their bodies. You and I, we marched across the Gorgon plain, where a quarter of our company fell to dust. I’ve seen you fight. I know your passion. You can’t fool me. Your people have been slaves longer, yes, but it’s all the same. A slave is a slave. And we will win, Carsek, you bloody-handed monster. So drink this, and count your blessings we got this far.”

He passed Carsek a flask. It had something in it that tasted like fire, but it dulled the pain.

“Thanks,” Carsek grunted, handing it back. He paused, then went on. “I’m sorry. It’s just the damned waiting. It’s like being in my cage, before the master sent me out to fight.”

Thaniel nodded, took a swig from the flask himself, then stoppered it. Nearby, Findos the Half-Handed, deep in a fever, shrieked at some memory or nightmare.

“I’ve always wondered, but never asked,”Thaniel said pensively. “Why do you Vhiri Croatani call us the Bornmen, anyway?”

Carsek wiped the rain from his eyes with the back of his hand. “That’s a strange question. It’s what you call yourselves, isn’t it? Vhiri Genian, yes? And your queen, the firstborn of your people in this place, isn’t she named Genia, ‘the Born’?”

Thaniel blinked at him, then threw back his head and laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

Thaniel shook his head. “I see now. In your language that’s how it sounds. But really—” He stopped, for a sudden exclamation had gone up among the men, a mass cry of fear and horror that moved down from the front.

Carsek put his hand down to push himself up, and found the mud strangely warm. A viscous, sweet-smelling fluid was flowing down the trench, two fingers deep.

“By all that’s holy,” Thaniel swore.

It was blood, a river of it.

With an inarticulate cry, Carsek came back to his feet.

“No more of this. No more!”

He started to clamber out of the trench.

“Stop, warrior,” a voice commanded.

A woman’s voice, and it halted him as certainly as the spectral whip of a master.

He turned and saw her.

She wore black mail, and her face above it was whiter than bone. Her long auburn hair hung lank, soaked by the pestilent rain, but she was beautiful as no earthly woman could be. Her eyes sparked like lightning in the heart of a black cloud.

Behind her stood her champions, clad much as she, bared feyswords gleaming like hot brass. Tall and unafraid, they stood. They looked like gods.

“Great queen!” Carsek stammered.

“You are ready to fight, warrior?” she asked.

“I am, Majesty. By Taranos, I am!”

“Pick fifty men and follow me.”

The forward trenches were filled with milled meat, with few pieces still recognizable as human. Carsek tried to ignore the sucking his feet made, somehow different from walking in ordinary mud. He had less success ignoring the stench of opened bowels and fresh offal. What had killed them? A demon? A spell? He didn’t care. They were gone, but he was going to fight, by the Twin and the Bull.

When they halted in the foremost trench, which was half again as deep as Carsek was tall, he could see the black walls of the fortress looming above. This was what nearly a month and two thousand or more sacrifices had gained them—a hole at the foot of the fortress.

“Now it’s just a brisk walk to the wall that can’t be broken and the gate that can’t be breached,” Thaniel said. “The bat-tle’s nearly won!”

“Now who’s the skeptic? Here’s a chance for glory, and to die on my feet,” Carsek said. “It’s all I ask.”

“Hah,” Thaniel said. “Myself, I intend not only to cover myself in glory, but to have a drink when it’s all done.” He held out his palm. “Take my hand, Carsek. Let’s agree—we’ll meet for a drink when it’s over. Overlooking the arena where once you fought. And there we shall account who has more glory. And it shall be me!”

Carsek took his hand. “In the very seat of the master.” The two men clenched a mutual fist.

“It’s done, then,” Thaniel said. “You won’t break a promise, and I won’t, so surely we’ll both live.”

“Surely,” Carsek said.

Planks were brought and laid so they might scale their own trench. Then Genia Dare, the queen, gave them all a fierce smile.

“When this sun sets we shall all be free or all dead,” she said. “I do not intend to die.” With that, she drew her fey-sword and turned to Carsek. “I must reach the gate. Do you understand? Until the gate falls, five thousand is no better than fifty, for I can protect no greater number than two score and ten from Skasloi slaughter-spelling if they have us ’neath their fatal eyes, and if we can do naught but stand in their gaze. Once the gate is sundered, we can sweep through too quickly for them to strike down. This will be a hard charge, my heroes—but no spell will touch you, that I swear. It’s only sword and shaft, flesh and bone you must fight.”

“Flesh and bone are grass, and I am a sickle,” Carsek said. “I will get you to the gate, Majesty.”

“Then go and do it.”

Carsek hardly felt his wounds anymore. His belly was light and his head full of fire. He was the first up the plank, first to set his feet on the black soil.

Lightning wrenched at him, and slitwinds, but this time they parted, passed to left and right of him, Thaniel, and all his men. He heard Thaniel hoot with joy as the deadly magicks passed them by, impotent as a eunuch’s ghost.

They charged across the smoking earth, howling, and Carsek saw, through rage-reddened vision, that he at last had a real enemy in front of his spear.

“It’s Vhomar, lads!” he shouted. “Nothing but Vhomar!”

Thaniel laughed. “And just a few of them!” he added.

A few, indeed. A few hundred, ranged six ranks deep before the gate. Each stood head and shoulders taller than the tallest man in Carsek’s band. Carsek had fought many a Vhomar in the arena, and respected them there, as much as any worthy foe deserved. Now he hated them as he hated nothing mortal. Of all of the slaves of the Skasloi, only the Vhomar had chosen to remain slaves, to fight those who rose against the masters.

A hundred Vhomar bows thrummed together, and black-winged shafts hummed and thudded amongst his men, so that every third one of them fell.

A second flight melted in the rain and did not touch them at all, and then Carsek was at the front rank of the enemy, facing a wall of giants in iron cuirasses, shouting up at their brutish, unhuman faces.

The moment stretched out, slow and silent in Carsek’s mind. Plenty of time to notice details, the spears and shields bossed with spikes, the very grain of the wood, black rain dripping from the brows of the creature looming in front of him, the scar on its cheek, its one blue eye and one black eye, the mole above the black one …

Then sound came back, a hammer strike as Carsek feinted. He made as if to thrust his spear into the giant’s face but dropped instead, coming up beneath the huge shield as it lifted, driving his manslayer under the overlapping plates of the armor, skirling at the top of his lungs as leather and fabric and flesh parted. He wrenched at his weapon as the warrior toppled, but the haft snapped.

Carsek drew his ax. The press of bodies closed as the Vhomar surged forward, and Carsek’s own men, eager for killing, slammed into him from behind. He found himself suffocating in the sweaty stench, caught between shield and armored belly, and no room to swing his ax. Something hit his helm so hard it rang, and then the steel cap was torn from his head. Thick fingers knotted in Carsek’s hair, and suddenly his feet were no longer on the ground.

He kicked in the air as the monster drew him up by the scalp, dangled him so it was staring into his eyes. The Vhomar drew back the massive sword it gripped in its other hand, bent on decapitating him.

“You damned fool!” Carsek shouted at it, shattering the gi-ant’s teeth with the edge of his ax, then savaged its neck with his second blow. Bellowing, the Vhomar dropped him, trying to staunch its lifeblood with its own hands. Carsek hamstrung it and went on.

The work stayed close and bloody, he knew not for how long. For each Vhomar Carsek killed, there was always another, if not two or three. He had actually forgotten his goal was the gate, when there it was before him. Through the press he saw feyswords glittering, glimpsed auburn hair and sparks of pale viridian. Then he was pushed back, until the gate receded from view and thought.

The rain stopped, but the sky grew darker. All Carsek could hear was his own wheezing breath; all he could see was blood and the rise and fall of iron, like the lips of sea waves breaking above him. His arm could hardly hold itself up for more killing, and of his fifty men he now stood in a circle with the eight who remained, Thaniel among them. And still the giants came on, wave on wave of them.

But then there was a sound like all the gods screaming. A new tide swept up from behind him, a wall of shouting men, hundreds pouring out of the trenches, crushing into the ranks of their enemies, and for the first time Carsek looked up from death and witnessed the impossible.

The massive steel portals of the citadel hung from their hinges, twisted almost beyond recognizing, and below them, white light blazed.

The battle swept past them, and as Carsek’s legs gave way, Thaniel caught him.

“She’s done it,” Carsek said. “Your Born Witch has done it!”

“I told you she would,” Thaniel said. “I told you.”

Carsek wasn’t there when the inner keep fell. His wounds had reopened and had to be bound again. But as the clouds broke, and the dying sun hemorrhaged across the horizon, Thaniel came for him.

“She wants you there,” Thaniel said. “You deserve it.”

“We all do,” Carsek managed.

With Thaniel under one shoulder, he climbed the bloody steps of the massive central tower, remembering when he trod it last, in chains, on his way to fight in the arena, how the gilded balustrades and strange statues had glimmered in Skasloi witch-light. It had been beautiful and terrible.

Even now, shattered, blackened, it still brought fear. Fear from childhood and beyond, of the master’s power, of the lash that could not be seen but that burned to the soul.

Even now it seemed it must all be a trick, another elaborate game, another way for the masters to extract pleasure from the pain and hopelessness of their slaves.

But when they came to the great hall, and Carsek saw Genia Dare standing with her boot on the master’s throat, he knew in his heart they had won.

The Skasloi lord still wore shadow. Carsek had never seen his face, and did not now. But he knew the sound of the mas-ter’s laughter as it rose up from beneath the queen’s heel. For as long as he lived, Carsek would not forget that mocking, spectral, dying laugh.

Genia Dare’s voice rang above that laughter. “We have torn open your keep, scattered your powers and armies, and now you will die,” she said. “If this amuses you, you could have obtained your amusement much more easily. We would have been happy to kill you long ago.”

The master broke off his cackling. He spoke words like spiders crawling from the mouth of a corpse, delicate, deadly. The sound that catches you unaware and wrenches your heart into your throat.

“I am amused,” he said, “because you think you have won something. You have won nothing but decay. You have used the sedos power, foolish children.

“Did you think we knew nothing of the sedos? Fools. We had good reasons for avoiding the paths of its fell might. You have cursed yourselves. You have cursed your generations to come. In the final days, the end of my world will have been cleaner than the end of yours. You have no idea what you have done.”

The Born Queen spat down upon him. “That for your curse,” she snapped.

“It is not my curse, slave,” the master said. “It is your own.”

“We are not your slaves.”

“You were born slaves. You will die slaves. You have merely summoned a new master. The daughters of your seed will face what you have wrought, and it will obliterate them.”

Between one blink and the other, a flash like heat lightning erupted behind Carsek’s eyes, then vision. He saw green forests rot into putrid heaths, a poison sun sinking into a bleak, sterile sea. He walked through castles and cities carpeted in human bones, felt them crack beneath his heels. And he saw, standing over it all, the Born Queen, Genia Dare, laughing as if it brought her joy.

Then it was over, and he was on the floor, as was almost everyone else in the room, clutching their heads, moaning, weeping. Only the queen still stood, white fire dripping from her hands. The master was silent.

“We do not fear your curse!” Genia said. “We are no longer your slaves. There is no fear in us. Your world, your curses, your power are all now gone. It is our world now, a human one.”

The master only twitched in response. He did not speak again.

“A slow death for him,” Carsek heard the queen say, in a lower voice. “A very, very slow death.”

And for Carsek, that was the end of it. They took the master away, and he never saw him again.

The Born Queen, chin held high, turned to regard them all, and Carsek felt her gaze touch his for just an instant. Again he felt a flash, like fire, and for a moment he almost fell to his knees before her.

But he was never going down on his knees again, not for anyone.

“Today, we start counting the days and seasons again,” she said. “Today is the Day of the Valiant; it is the Vhasris Slanon! From this instant, day, month, season, and year, we reckon our own time!”

Despite their wounds and fatigue, the shouts that filled the hall were almost deafening.

Carsek and Thaniel went back down, to where the celebrations were beginning. Carsek, for his part, wanted only to sleep, to forget, and to never dream again. But Thaniel reminded him of their oath.

And so it was, as his wounds stiffened, they drank Thaniel’s brandy, and Carsek sat on a throne of chalcedony and looked down upon the arena where he had fought and killed so many fellow slaves.

“I killed a hundred, before the gate,” Thaniel asserted.

“I killed a hundred and five,” Carsek replied.

“You can’t count to a hundred and five,” Thaniel retorted.

“Aye, I can. It’s how many times I’ve had your sister.”

“Well,” Thaniel mused, “then my sister had to have been counting for you. I know that after two hands and two feet, I had to start counting for your mother.”

At that, both men paused.

“We are very funny men, aren’t we?” Carsek grunted.

“We are men,” Thaniel said, more soberly. “And alive, and free. And that is enough.” He scratched his head. “I didn’t understand that last thing she said. The name we’re to reckon our years by?”

“She does us a great honor,” Carsek said. “It is the old tongue of the Vhiri Croatani, the language of my fathers. Vhasris means dawn. Slanon means … Hmm, I don’t think I know your word for that.”

“Use several, then.”

“It means beautiful, and whole, and healthy. Like a newborn baby, perfect, with no blemishes.”

“You sound like a poet, Carsek.”

Carsek felt his face redden. To change the subject, he pointed at the arena. “I’ve never seen it from up here,” he murmured.

“Does it look different?”

“Very. Smaller. I think I like it.”

“We made it, Carsek.” Thaniel sighed. “As the queen said, the world is ours now. What shall we do with it?”

“The gods know. I’ve never even thought about it.” He winced at a sudden pain in his belly.

“Carsek?” Thaniel asked, concerned.

“I’ll heal.” Carsek downed another swallow of the liquid fire. “Tell me,” he said. “As long as we’re giving lessons in language. What were you saying back there, in the trench? About you people not being the Bornmen?”

Thaniel chuckled again. “I always thought you called us that because we are so recent to this land, because we were the last that the Skasloi captured to be their slaves. But it’s just that you misheard us.”

“You aren’t being clear,” Carsek told him. “I might be dying. Shouldn’t you be clear?”

“You aren’t dying, you rancid beast, but I’ll try to be clear anyway. When my people first came here, we thought we were in a place called Virginia. It was named for a queen, I think, in the old country; I don’t know, I was born here. But our queen is named after her, too—Virginia Elizabeth Dare— that’s her real name. When we said Virginia you dumb Croatani thought we were speaking your language, calling ourselves Vhiri Genian—Born Men. It was a confusion of tongues, you see.”

“Oh,” Carsek said, and then he collapsed.

When he woke, four days later, he was pleased that at least he hadn’t dreamed.

That was the fourth day of the epoch known as Eberon Vhasris Slanon.