Lonen's War (2 page)

Thus it remained the sorceresses’ job to
stay within the protective circle of Bára while the men went forth
to battle the Destrye with their powerful grien, fueled by
sgath.

“
This system has worked for
centuries,”
Chuffta told her.
“In this way the cities have
survived many onslaughts.”

“Like you’ve been around for any more of
them than I have,” Oria retorted in a dry tone, but scratched
Chuffta’s wing joints where he couldn’t easily reach them. He
arched his neck, purring as she relieved an itch.

Her mother had no trouble following that
thought. “Chuffta may be young, as you are, but the derkesthai have
stood by and advised many a queen and princess of our line while
our armies fought in the distance. I know you’d fret less if you
could be directing your energy to feeding power to our sorcerers,
but your time will come. The women in our family are like—”

“Like the fruit that ripens in the dry
season, long after the rains have passed,” Oria chimed along with
the familiar adage. “I know, I know. Unless they don’t bloom at
all.” Like her various aunts, exiled to live in other walled
cities, far from the temple and the source of all magic.

Queen Rhianna tilted her face up, as if
looking at her daughter, though she wouldn’t be literally. The
smooth golden mask of the sorceress gazed at her with eyeless
serenity. “Or all the more powerful for the slow ripening. I would
not have made the journey to invite Chuffta to be your Familiar and
guide for when you take your mask unless I believed you would find
your magic. Nor would you be able to hear him if you were
mind-dead.”

“
Nor would I have agreed to put up with
you for any other reason,”
Chuffta teased in his dry
mind-voice.

“I know you love me. You think I’m charming,
brilliant—and funny.” She stroked the winged lizard’s softly scaled
hide, always soothing with its sueded texture. Of all her fears,
the possibility of losing Chuffta worried her most. They’d been
together since her seventh birthday. He was the greatest gift she’d
ever received. If she failed to take her mask, he’d have no reason
to stay with her. She could deal with a life without being a
sorceress, even with a mind-dead half-marriage without magical
completion—though what an unhappy life that would be—but living
without the rustle of Chuffta’s thoughts in her head? A desolate
prospect, indeed.

“
What people believe becomes real.”
Chuffta echoed her mother’s advice.

If only it were that easy. Like a jewelbird
going to the wrong blossoms, Oria’s thoughts seemed to forever
return to the worst-case scenario. The dreadful potential outcomes
of any situation filled her head far more readily than any other.
Unbidden, they sprang to life in her mind. So much so that she
diligently hid the extent of them from Chuffta, her teachers, and
especially her mother. A woman’s sgath magic could turn toxic,
undermining as easily as it nurtured. If they knew how poisonous
her thoughts could be, they’d stop training her altogether. The
techniques they taught were far too potent to chance in
irresponsible hands.

Another warning repeated far too often for
comfort.

It all came down to this: She must learn to
calm and quiet her mind. To be like her mother and live serenely
behind the mask of a priestess, with no desire to pace in restless
agitation, only happy thoughts running through her mind, not dread
of the future.

Focusing on positive images, she
determinedly rehearsed them in her head. The Destrye would go back
to their sterile and magicless land. The battle would be won,
perhaps so soundly that the fierce warrior people would never come
after hers again. Bára would be safe and her father would
peacefully hold his throne for many joyful years to come. Her
brothers would continue the elaborate courtship and testing rituals
to find their ideal wives among the priestesses of the temple,
which she wanted for them with all her heart. (Never mind that
little corner blackened with jealousy—she’d excise it.)
Focus on
the result you want.
And she, herself, a paragon of peaceful
maturity with vast powers of concentration, would find her
hwil
and receive her mask. Somewhere out there, her perfect
match awaited, too. Perhaps she already knew him, and he only
needed her to grow just a bit more so they could join in a
blissful, eternal union.

A fine hope. Though more unlikely with every
passing day. Especially with the Destrye attacking.

“When will they send news?” she muttered at
the horizon.

This time, no one answered her.

L
onen swung his iron axe
with grim determination, ignoring the sweat dripping from his
soaked hair into his eyes. This land of burning sun roasted a man
as surely as a slow fire tenderized a haunch of meat. The golem
dropped, halved by his axe, and three more took its place while
Alby, Lonen’s first lieutenant, followed to chop apart the fallen
one. Emotionless, thoughtless, the monster creatures advanced in
relentless, silent waves, tearing with long, saber-sharp claws,
rending Destrye flesh with crystalline-fanged mouths if they got
near enough.

For too many years his people had
superstitiously feared engaging the golems in battle, terrified by
the things that felt no weapon, that kept coming with implacable
strength, shredding every living creature between them and their
goal. Until Ayden the Great had discovered by happenstance—and via
the dire necessity of being trapped and alone when golems attacked
his camp—that iron affected the creatures as nothing else did. The
legend of Ayden, all on his own, killing a squad of the invincible
golems with only the iron pick he used to clean his horse’s hooves
was told and retold among all the Destrye.

The epic tale replaced despair with hope—and
had been the turning point in the war, just as Lonen had been old
enough to shoulder his iron axe and help with his peoples’
defense.

With the discovery that iron could take out
the lifeless puppets the Bárans employed, King Archimago had
implemented new strategies. But despite their early exultation at
being able to fight back, the end of the conflict remained a
distant dream and, unfortunately, plenty of despair remained. The
hope wore thin quickly enough under the grind of what turned out to
be the beginning of actual war, with the Destrye fighting back
instead of hiding from the golems’ raids and eerily quiet
rampages.

They’d reduced the incursions for a time,
but the enemy rallied, sending more golems until there seemed to be
two for every one that fell. And forcing the Destrye to abandon
Dru’s lakes, one after another to be drained by the golems’
unquenchable thirst and the endless chain of wagons taking the
water away in barrels that held far more than seemed possible.

Finally, it became clear that all of Dru
would wither and die, and the Destrye people would erode to nothing
under the relentless onslaught. For every step they took forward,
the enemy set them back two. So the king had sent his best trackers
to follow the supply chains and find the source of the monsters. By
dint of years of effort and many lives lost, they’d located the
puppet masters, those who stole the Destrye’s most precious and
lamentably finite resource. The scouts had brought back the first
descriptions of the crimson-robed men who wore smooth metal masks
and commanded tremendous—and impossible—magics.

Getting within reach of them had taken more
months of slow effort.

Alby cut apart two of the golems Lonen had
cleaved with his axe, while Lonen hacked up the other. No more
immediately surged into the space, not with the way his men had
moved their perimeter. Lonen took advantage of the momentary lull
to study the flow of the battle, beyond the center section under
his command.

They’d come farther than the Destrye ever
had before, reaching the apparently placid shallow brackish bay
where a once mighty river had once emptied to the sea. The sudden
treacherous bore tides had drowned a number of Destrye and their
mounts, too entrenched in the silt to escape the onrushing surf
that arrived with a roar like thunder. Finally, though, they’d
learned to time their crossing to the moons, then found this
strangely hot and barren land on the other side.

The plain of battle might be teeming with
the featureless, waxy, pale golems as always, but for the first
time their troops had cleaved through enough of them to come within
sight of the golden-masked sorcerers who directed the monsters, and
the towers of the walled city of Bára beyond.

King Archimago had thrown everything into
this conflict, and the battlefield showed it, teeming with bold
Destrye warriors. He’d even committed his sons, Lonen fighting
shoulder-to-shoulder with his three brothers. After all, of what
use were a king’s heirs if all their people died?

They’d done well, pressing the enemy ever
back, drawing within sight of the distant walled city that spawned
the foul magic users. But then they stalled against the bulwark of
those cursed sorcerers, who’d turned out to wield even more
devastating magics than the scouts had reported.

To the right, a legion of Destrye surged,
making swift inroads. Too swift, it turned out, as they drew the
attention of one of the sorcerers. A tall man in a golden mask
raised his hands and fire flew from them, forming a blazing ball
that shot into the merciless blue sky, then rained down on the
Destrye troops. The men screamed, hair and clothing catching fire,
then disappeared from view as they fell.

The battle mages only seemed able to send
the fireballs within a certain distance, not unlike an archer’s
range. They also avoided singeing their golems, which had a
distressing tendency to melt into a viscous substance that clung
and singed Destrye flesh if a fighter remained too close. It became
a tricky proposition as more golems fell before the Destrye’s iron,
opening a gap between the front line of assault and the long
phalanx of golden-masked men on their platforms—and creating a
clear path for the fireballs.

Taking heed of the lesson, Lonen gave orders
to draw his men back. “Keep it tight and steady!” he shouted.

Under Lonen’s feet, the earth rumbled and
shifted, making him stumble to catch his balance. Relieved of the
incessant need to hack through the golems, Lonen observed what he
could as they withdrew. He scanned the Báran mages and, sure
enough, another had his arms upraised, his faceless mask pointed
off to the left, where Lonen’s older brother Nolan led his forces.
Another rumble, like thunder from below, and the ground cracked
open, a jagged black lightning bolt of doom. Destrye and golems
alike spilled over the crumbling edges like precious water through
the bottom of a broken bucket, plunging into the great
crevasse.

The despairing cries of falling Destrye
added to the screams of those burning, though the golems remained,
as ever, eerily silent. Lonen fought a similar plunge of his heart.
Not Nolan, his laughing dreamer of a brother. Surely he’d stayed
well back and remained safe.

His older brother Ion forged his way through
Lonen’s line of sight from the other direction, a line of blood
dripping from a score down his temple and cheek. Lonen set his own
men against the wedge of Ion’s battalion to hold a perimeter
against the golems surging from the fore, and to cleave a larger
path for Ion’s men. Lonen himself took down five more of the
things, chopping them with his axe like so much firewood, ignoring
how the pieces feebly plucked at his boots as he stepped on
them.

Spiking the warriors’ boots with iron nails
to further decimate the golems had been another of King Archimago’s
strokes of genius.

“We have to take out the mages or we’ll be
entirely lost,” Ion gritted once he got close enough. “Father says
pull back. The closer we get, the more easily they employ those
greater magics.”

Lonen bit down on an argument. To come so
near and withdraw felt very much like defeat. But of course they
were right. It made no sense to destroy the golem army only to dash
themselves against the implacable forces the battle mages
wielded.

Nodding, he set his men to creating a new
perimeter, fitting them against the forces on his other flank,
directed by his brother Arnon. Ion moved on with his battalion,
taking over those between Lonen and the great crack in the earth,
all that remained of Nolan’s section of the battlefield.

Was Nolan even now clinging to a crumbling
lip—or writhing broken at the bottom of the chasm? He couldn’t bear
to contemplate it.

Fortunately, the press of battle, of staging
their retreat while holding a firm line at their backs, required
all Lonen’s attention. If his brother had indeed died, there would
be time enough later to mourn.

If Lonen even survived that long.