Read The Queen of Thieves: The Line of Kings Trilogy Book Three Online
Authors: Craig R. Saunders,Craig Saunders
At
first, the cries of the dying were lost on the wind before the reached the centre
of the camp. The attackers slaughtered maybe a hundred soldiers before the remainder
of the Protocrats and the Hierarch mages knew anything about it.
Then
a great light hit the sky - the magic of the Hierarchs - and their attackers
were thrown into relief in the sudden brightness of fiery light.
All
around the camp, and through the outskirts, towering white beasts, their entire
bodies covered with thick white fur, rampaged against the Protocrats.
Tenthers
were emerging from their tents. The first few to the battle were torn to pieces
as though their armour was nothing but cloth. Then, with the light in the sky,
the Hierophant emerged from his tent to see the mayhem the strange white beasts
had wrought.
He
clapped, once only, and a deafening peal of sound rent the night sky. Alert as
they had not been before, the Protocrats came in force to answer the alarm. The
battle was joined.
*
At
first it seemed as though the Hierophant's spell caused the fell weather to
cease. The terrible wind quit in an instant and the snow stopped in moments.
Yet
when the great peal of the Hierophant's thunderclap was gone, the wind rose
again. The Protectorate soldiers were fighting virtually blind in a blizzard
once again, with periodic flashes of bright mage light. Though there were mages
among the army, fire burned from their eyes and hit friend and foe alike so
that they were of little use in the battle. The strange white beasts burned
like anything else would have. The protocrats, too, caught some of the fire, so
that the battle was a collision of light, followed by darkness, filled with the
clamour of arms and the cries of the dying. Some were immolated, some torn
apart by blade or claw or tooth.
The
Hierophant was a stranger to battle, but he was no fool. A sadist, yes, a cold
creature of torture that took pleasure in the pain of others, yes, but no fool.
He saw the weather for what it was - it was created by the white beasts
themselves, a blind for the true power of their forces.
He
saw, too, the way the battle was going.
He
smiled at the pain, but that cold heart of him knew he would be forced to act,
to show his true power. Soon, the tide of battle would turn, but he was
enjoying the diversion.
The
white wastes had been so boring.
But
he could not afford to lose his entire force in one skirmish against these fey
creatures. He did not have the gift of prophecy, but he knew as long as his
soldiers were blind, the white beasts could attack at will. They seemed to have
no difficulty in finding their mark in the white-out.
Time
to counter, he knew. He shrugged his shoulders and cracked his long neck, still
smiling and feeding, yes, on the terrible pain that was being inflicted on both
sides. Magic like he was about to unleash took pain to feed it, and he was near
full.
This
magic the creatures wrought was like no magic he understood, but a Hierarch's
greatest talent was with fire. His own soldiers would burn, too, though, and he
was already loosing enough men from the screams he could hear.
No,
burning the entirety of the battleground was not the way. He could not through
his inferno into the wheeling masses fighting all around him.
The
Hierophant stood thoughtfully, everything peaceful around him despite the
carnage.
He
nodded, his eyes closed. Sighed. Then he opened his eyes and let out the magic.
*
The
Hierophant shuddered from the suddenly release of energy. His body shook. Then
a great gout of fire burst forth from his eyes, burning up the sky, in an inferno
that raged high into the air. The fire reached as high as the clouds, then
spread across the bottom of the cloud like flames running across a ceiling.
In
an instant the snow turned to boiling rain.
His
soldiers screamed as the boiling rain hit their bodies. Assailed by the pain
from the scalding rain they still fought on. They would live. Maybe they would
be disfigured, but a Protocrat was not bred to be pretty.
The
effective on the white furred beasts was entirely different.
Suddenly,
what had been a fearsome force became laughable. Bedraggled, the beasts were
nowhere near as large. Powerful, yes, but not unbeatable. And now they could be
seen. The entire sky was alight with the Hierophant's terrible fire.
In
the space of a few minutes of frenetic fighting, the rain ceased and the
Protectorate Tenthers had retaken the perimeter. Bodies littered the ground,
torn and burned, sizzling from the heat of the rain, or from the preternatural
fires being extinguished so suddenly.
The
air stank with burned flesh.
Screams
no longer rent the night air, but strange, somehow intelligent and mournful
cries...the Hierophant realised it was the beasts that were making the pitiful
din as they died.
He
toyed with the idea of calling for one of them to be brought before him, so he
could invade its mind and get a sense of its intelligence, were there any.
He
shrugged.
'No
matter,' he said.
Satisfied,
he turned on his heel, trudging barefoot through sludge where once there had
been thick snow over ice, and entered his tent to sleep. The cries of pain
wouldn't keep him from his rest, and after such energies were loosed, a mage
was always tired, even one as powerful as the Hierophant.
No,
the cries of pain did not bother him. Far from it. He welcomed the sound. As he
lay down, the cries of the attackers being slaughtered tapered away until there
was no sound but a gentle wind, but by then the Hierophant was fast asleep. He
wore a slight smile on his face as he drifted into dreamless slumber.
*
The
Hierophant and his subordinates took toll of the dead when the first sun,
Carious, broke the horizon. They had lost, by the final tally, nearly one tenth
of their entire force - close on to a thousand well-trained soldiers, torn
apart in a battle that had lasted perhaps a mere ten minutes. Many more were
injured, either maimed by the powerful beasts or burned by fire and burning
rain.
The
Hierophant did not care. The Protocrats did not feel pain as keenly as
humankind, but it was pain, mild, perhaps, but pain, nonetheless. And the
Hierophant fed on pain.
The
Protocrats loss did not matter much to the Hierophant, but he was angered to
find some invaluable mages had been lost during the course of the battle.
Not
a single attacker remained alive. Any that had escaped would not return.
'Skin
them. Salt them. We will need provisions,' he said, to a waiting Protocrat. The
Protocrat's head was bowed, as though the night's failures rested on his
shoulders. The Hierophant, however, was not sure he counted it a failure. He
was feeling lenient.
'Leave
me. Carry on,' he said. The Protocrat turned and left. The Hierophant thought
maybe he was a captain or some such, but he did not trouble himself to learn
the Protectorate ranks. It was unimportant.
Alone
again, as he liked it.
Ahead,
the mountains known in the south as Thaxamalan's Saw loomed.
By
evening, they were many miles closer still, a great swathe of dark garbed
soldiers swarming toward the only pass within hundreds of miles. Closer and
closer still to Sturma, and the end of an age...for the Hierophant, or for
Sturma.
And
the Hierophant was sure which it would be.
Sturma
would not stand longer than a week. He was sure of it. He needed no Kun Grass
nor seer to tell him as much.
*
While
battle raged in the frozen wastelands north of Sturma, the oceans between
Sturma and Lianthre were roiling as unnatural winds blew a great fleet of
Hierarch and Protocrat ships westward toward landfall and the waiting might of
the Sturman armies.
But
in between those two lands, battle waited.
The
seas of Lianthre were vast, and largely uncharted by land-faring peoples.
The
seas were the domain of the Feewar, the people known as the Seafarers. The
captain of one of their greatest ships was Lowan Haggard, and he was about to
die.
*
The
ships mustered at dawn, the great living ships of the Feewar all amassed across
the sea. Even though the flotilla was beyond sight of land, it was obviously
enough a blockade of sorts. And the assembled might of the Seafarers was enough
to cause a serious obstacle.
They
waited, large enough to appear an island from even a short distance. The living
ships of the Feewar were grown from trees that thrived on the brine. Trees grew
tall and proud, with great sails mounted between the trunks. Denied landfall
since the curse that had befallen the Feewar, they were masters of all that the
seas had to offer. The Seafarers lived and loved their entire lives at sea.
Their ships, their magic, their appearance, even, was different to the
land-faring people.
They
were a fey breed.
Lowan
Haggard stood on the bow of the greatest ship in the fleet, the Yargar.
Terithan, the ship's eldest and wisest man, stood beside him.
The
Yargar sailed fast, not because its keel cut the water fine. It had no keel. It
sailed and was steered by the magic of the Feewar. Forever denied the land,
their magic was the pinnacle of water magic. The Feewar people's eyes were
uniformly blue, just like the mages of Hierarch had reddish or orange eyes -
the colour of fire.
'When
we meet, we will lose,' said Terithan. 'We cannot stand against their magic. We
are on the wane. Those creatures of the Hierarchy are on the rise. They have
mastered the seas like no others on Rythe. They are dangerous to our people.'
'Then
it is a pointless battle,' said Lowan.
'Never
pointless...no more pointless than the tides or the mountains under the blessed
seas that will one day rise again. It may seem as though there is no purpose at
times, but we will survive and thrive yet.'
'I
don't see how, if we are to die fighting this new enemy.'
'Who
said anything about dying?' said the old man with a grin.
Lowan
thought hard as he stared out to sea. Thought about their chances, and the
losses that they must inevitably suffer. But he was no man's fool. And his
magic was strong.
Not
strong enough to withstand, but strong enough, perhaps, to swing the tide of
the battle for the Sturmen, their lost kin.
'Hathra,'
he called out to his friend and confident and his second, should he fall in the
coming battle. 'You see it? On the horizon?'
'I
do. Have seen it for some time. The gathering of the black.'
'They
come.'
'Then
we will be ready to do what we must,' he said.
Lowan
stared out at the fleet of ships. Their homes. The living ships. They could not
bear the cost of the loss. Their people were too few.
But
new ships could be grown...
New
people could be born...
Compared
to the might of the armada sailing toward them, they were nothing.
But
they would have to be enough.
*
One man can always make a
difference. One man can change the tides of Rythe, though the size of the task
may seem impossible. That one man was Lowan Haggard, and he knew he would die
in the battle, for it needed to be so. To the north, three of their home ships
wallowed in the sea, ungainly when not supported by their magic. To the south
their remaining kin waited, their ships low in the water.
Lowan, too, waited.
The black cloud was
upon them, and at last he could see the terrible ships of the Hierarchs, their
hated enemy of old.
Then Lowan's eyes
gave forth a bright blue light that perfectly matched the colour of the sea.
Yargar began to move. Slow, at first, then faster and faster, directly toward
the leading ships of the enemy armada.
Lowan's energy did
not flag, as a mage would tire. Lowan's power came from the seas themselves,
and the seas were boundless. He did not falter, the ship sped on, because he
had the entirety of the Feewar's power vested in him and the seas upon which to
feed his magic.
He felt fear, yes,
but elation, too, and the sheer power coursing through him. At his back his
people sent him their strength.
Then, at full speed,
Lowan was left nothing but his fear. Yet he was resolved in this course of
action.
To the north and
south behind the Yargar, his people fled, using their magic to escape the
coming onslaught and unwinnable battle.
The Yargar was an
immense ship. As large, even, as an island. It dwarfed the approaching ships as
it skimmed, now, across the sea. Parts of the living ship broke off in the mad
rush toward the enemy.
But those fleeing
ships were low in the water because the Yargar was now three home ships in one.
With the Feewar's song they had bonded the great ships together, until the
Yargar covered the sea, completely encompassing the route of the Hierarchy's
ships. The Hierarchy had no way around the Yargar and those two other bonded
ships, not at the speed at which the Hierarch's fleet travelled.
Lowan's magic was
strong. The ship barrelled across the ocean toward the coming darkness of the
Hierarch's magic. Lowan found that he could laugh, and he did. He let out great
bellows. This was what it meant to be Feewar...fearless in the sea.
At the bow of the
Yargar his hair flew back from his face and his strange blue light retreated
into his eyes. He hit the darkness that covered the approaching ships.
The Hierarchs tried
to manoeuvre, but could not avoid the collision.
In moments, Lowan
Haggard was thrown to his knees as the three ships under his power hit the
first of the oncoming ships. There was a terrible shrieking from the tearing
wood of the Hierarch's ships, and from the trees of the Yargar.
Haggard pushed
himself up again, in time to see fireballs flying through the darkness toward
his ship, but he and she, for all ships were women at heart, were unstoppable.
The Yargar took
flame, but it ploughed on through the waves, tearing Hierarch ships to pieces
and plunging them and their cargoes to the floor of the ocean.
Then a ball of
magical flame landed beside Lowan and exploded, sending him crashing from the
helm of the ship to the sea. He was pulled under. He saw the sky above the
surface suddenly aflame and their mages tried to burn, halt, and destroy the
onrushing island.
Then the ship was
above Lowan. He kicked down, and down, because the sea above was all fire.
The Feewar could not
bear land, nor fire.
They could hold their
breath under the water for a long time, but Lowan knew he could not surface,
knew he would drown, because his own ship prevented him from surfacing.
He died beneath the
ocean, along with the Hierarchs that were scuppered. A good death, he thought,
his mind becoming clouded as he ran out of air. A good death.
The Seafarers, too,
believed in Madal, the Lord of Death. Perhaps, thought Lowan with finality, he
would meet the fabled king there. Perhaps he would see a future when his people
made landfall, and the rise of the mountains beneath the sea. Perhaps the tide
of Rythe would change once more.
But by then his body
drifted down, and down, to the deep places where no living man had ever been.
*