Read Shattered Shields - eARC Online
Authors: Jennifer Brozek,Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Shattered Shields - eARC (19 page)
He laid the bowl on the ground and studied the ring. This one was tricky, because the filigree completely encircled the ring, winding around either side of the gem. Fortunately, there were only a few dead-ends in the design. Ambros could draw a single stroke across most of the eitr, losing only the smallest fraction inert.
After plotting the course in his mind, he placed the ring on his thumb and set the athame against the filigree.
“What are you doing?”
So close and unexpected, the woman’s voice startled him. With a silent prayer that Jurgen and Kaspar stood ready to defend him, Ambros continued to draw the tip of the athame across the eitr. He dared not spare the woman even a glance lest he lose the rest of the precious material.
He heard Jurgen stomping nearby. “You stay back,” he said. He sounded so angry that Ambros knew he was frightened. “Go look for your husband somewhere else.”
Ambros couldn’t stand it any longer. He peered to the side, hoping for a glimpse of the woman. What he saw almost made him drop the ring into the bowl.
His first impression was of a famine-thin woman wearing one of the wide skirts he had seen only in puppet shows of noble ladies. But it was not a skirt that hung around her waist. They were bags, all of different colors and materials. One was a burlap sack stained dark red with its bulbous contents. Another looked like silk, and upon its surface grew the blood-red impression of a human face: chin, cheeks, nose, and brows.
All together there were five or six bags hanging from the woman’s waist, each sagging with the weight of a human head, fresh carved from its body.
The woman didn’t look strong enough to carry so much weight. Her limbs were reed thin, although Ambros saw tough sinews beneath her parchment-colored skin. Her hands were dark with blood, her naked feet stained black. Only her hair seemed out of place, long and dark, combed and clean as if just dried from a river bath.
“Go away!” Jurgen insisted.
“Hush,” said the woman. “Let him finish.” Her voice was soft as a summer breeze. Somehow it calmed Ambros even as her appearance horrified him.
He finished his tracing, leaving only a few short curls of eitr remaining in the ring’s shallow trench. The woman stepped closer. Jurgen moved to block her path.
“Let me see,” she said.
“Nnn—” Jurgen began to protest, but he couldn’t finish even such a short word. He stepped aside.
Ambros smelled blood and corruption as the woman moved closer.
He poured the precious eitr into the flask and sealed it. He returned the bowl to the bag but kept the flask in hand.
The woman was much shorter than he’d first thought, the top of her head barely as high as his chin. Her face looked younger, too, except for her sunken eyes and hollow cheeks.
She moved closer still. Jurgen raised a hand to grab her, but he withdrew it as if touching some unseen nettles. He sucked his fingers and stumbled back, eyes wide.
She moved her face close to Ambros’s face, as if to kiss him. He felt dizzy, confused, unable to resist. But she did not touch him with her lips. She sniffed at his neck, then lower, above his heart.
“You have a talent,” she said. “You are worth something more than these other scavengers.”
“What do you want?” said Ambros. “Why are you taking these heads?”
Before she could answer, Kaspar’s knife appeared at her throat. His fingers clutched her hair and jerked her head to the side.
“No!” cried Ambros. For no reason he could understand, he feared for Kaspar, not for the woman he threatened.
“She’s taking them for ransom,” said Kaspar, his lips close to the woman’s ear. “Isn’t that right?”
She smiled, her lips as sharp as Kaspar’s blade. “No,” she said, drawing out the syllable long and slow. “Not exactly.” She looked at Ambros, seeming unconcerned about the knife at her throat. “Do you know what I’m doing?”
Ambros had no idea. His aunts had told him many mad stories, and like everyone he had learned even more tales of witchcraft from the pantomimes of traveling players. Then he remembered another puppet show, one about the necromancer, who lopped off the heads of his foes only to gather them afterward.
The woman’s gaze pierced his thoughts. As her thin smile widened, Ambros felt as though she had somehow seen his crazed suspicion. If she said it aloud, if she proved she could read his mind, he knew he would go insane. To save himself, he said it first.
“You are conscripting soldiers.”
Her smile widened more, impossibly more, and she bit her lower lip like a girl flirting with an older boy. She nodded, despite the tight dark line Kaspar’s knife pressed into her skin.
Ambros raised the flask of eitr. “This is worth many bags of coins.”
“It is worth far more than that,” she said. “It is worth a man’s life. A lord’s life. A thousand lives.”
“Take it. Just take it, and leave us in peace.”
“Don’t be stupid,” snapped Kaspar. He slashed his knife across the woman’s throat and shoved her to the ground.
Ambros gasped. Jurgen hopped and babbled, “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.” Even Kaspar paled as he looked down at the woman, realizing he had done a thing more dreadful than murder.
The woman struggled for a moment, her body rising and falling as she tripped over the wet bags hanging from her waist. Her hand went to her throat, or so it seemed until she finally stood to reveal no blood flowing from her neck. No wound at all. She blew upon a whistle of bone.
Ambros heard no sound, but the hairs on his nape stiffened like pine needles. He felt a sudden warmth nearby and looked up at the closest hillock.
There stood a mastiff as large as a wild boar. Ambros blinked, unable to comprehend the other thing that was wrong about the beast. Before he understood, a man’s head fell away and rolled down the hill toward him. Ambros felt all his muscles spasm at the sight of what lay beneath the place where the head had been.
Where a dog’s neck should be, a great vertical maw ran between the mastiff’s shoulders. Dagger-sized teeth interlaced as the weird mouth closed like a bear trap where it had a moment earlier held a man’s head in place.
“Otto,” said the woman. Ambros turned to see her point at Kaspar. “Fetch.”
The mastiff charged. Kaspar stood fast. Holding his knife before him, he looked not at the beast but at Ambros. “I’m sorr—” he tried to say before the monster struck. Its wide maw opened, engulfing Kaspar’s head.
“No, dog, no, dog, no, dog, no!” Jurgen screamed. He fell to his knees.
The woman pointed again. “Manfred, fetch!”
Jurgen never saw the second mastiff coming.
Ambros stared aghast at his friends’ bodies. The mastiffs lingered near them, their headless bodies grumbling as they struggled with their meals. Instead of swallowing, the mastiffs opened their hideous maws. Kaspar’s head appeared first, wet and bloody as a newborn, rolling until it faced forward before the jaws clamped down to hold it in place.
The man’s eyes blinked twice, then opened wide to look at the woman.
“What is his name?” she asked.
“Kaspar.” A moment later, the second mastiff choked, and Jurgen’s face appeared upon its shoulders. Without waiting for the question, Ambros said, “Jurgen.”
“Kaspar, Jurgen, heel.”
The mastiffs obeyed, their human heads sniffing at the woman’s dirty ankles.
Numb with terror and some nameless other emotion, Ambros turned, expecting to see a third mastiff rushing toward him. Again, the woman looked inside him and found his thoughts.
“You are not for the dogs,” she said. “Come.”
She offered him her bloody hand. Looking down at her, Ambos remembered looking up at his mother as she pulled him across that first battlefield.
“Come,” the woman repeated. She took his warm dry hand in her cold wet hand and drew him away from the headless corpses of his friends. “I shall present you to the earl.”
Bonded Men
James L. Sutter
A single arrow in flight is almost silent. Put a thousand of them in the air at the same time, however, and the whole sky sizzles like bacon fat on a skillet.
Crouched low, Coreo listened to that hiss, the sound of clothyard shafts piercing the very air itself. At last they hit, deadly metal drummers beating their thunderous tattoo on the thin layer of wood protecting the warriors.
“You love this part, don’t you?”
Coreo looked up at Jain. The taller man’s shield overlapped his own, forming a roof over their heads.
“You’re smiling,” Jain said.
Coreo shrugged. “As a child, I’d sit up all night listening to the rain pound the roof. It’s soothing.”
Jain laughed and reached down with his free hand, stroking the back of Coreo’s neck. “Only you, Coreo. Only you.”
Up and down the lines, screams rang out or died in bloody gurgles as the barrage found homes in flesh, yet the area just around the two warriors was a sea of tranquility. Packed tight beneath the canopy of their shields, the two hundred men of the Bonded Legion showed no signs of the panic reigning elsewhere among the troops.
“Hey, Coreo!” A grizzled soldier a few men over from their position stood with his tower shield held casually overhead, as if it were no heavier than a parasol. “When are you going to get Jain to leave off with that oversized butcher’s cleaver? Makes it look like he’s compensating for something.”
It was an old joke. Coreo reached out and pointedly grabbed Jain’s meaty thigh. “Trust me, Barcas, it’s not compensation—it’s an advertisement.”
Barcas laughed. “I’ll believe it when I see it!”
“The hell you will!” That was Barcas’s own partner, a spearman named Hosch. His elbow caught Barcas in the ribs.
“Besides,” Barcas continued, ignoring the blow, “it’s not size, it’s how you use it.” Barcas was a dagger man, who did his fighting up close and personal.
“Just keep telling yourself that,” Jain said.
From the center of the shield wall, Captain Dorson’s voice cut them off. “Infantry’s broken ranks! They’re charging!”
The waiting was almost over. Coreo looked to the other men. Some stood stone-faced. Others bore crazed grins. Coreo felt himself fall into the latter camp.
Jain caught his eye and leaned in, kissing him quick and hard. “Luck.”
Coreo considered grabbing the big man’s blond ponytail and bringing him down for another, but Dorson’s bellow rang out again.
“Shields down!”
With a roar, the men of the Bonded Legion dropped their shields and leapt to the attack.
It was not the first exchange of the day. Already, the bodies of the enemy’s giants—sent in first to soften up Loremar’s lines with their huge spiked flails—lay putrefying in the sun’s heat, their armor-clad forms providing makeshift fortifications. To either side, battle lines stretched across the field of knee-high grass, Loremar’s soldiers a wave of green and black uniforms crashing against Eron the Pike’s black and crimson. Horns and shouts split the air as spears pierced or splintered and both sides got down to the bloody business at hand.
There was no way to tell what was happening in the rest of the battle, but it didn’t matter. If there was one thing the Bonded Legion could count on, it was that wherever the empire sent them would be the hottest part of the fight.
Ahead, a wall of men charged, racing across the last hundred yards of open field like a flash flood. Next to Coreo, Jain unsheathed his huge two-handed sword and lifted it over his head, screaming a wordless battle cry. The sight lit a fire in Coreo’s chest—it was at these times that he loved the big Northman most. Unsheathing his own sword—a short, wide-bladed weapon made for punching through leather and mail—Coreo joined the group’s howl; a wolf pack descending on their prey.
Then the lines met, and the two charging forces became a seething, whirling mass of flesh and steel.
Unfortunately for Eron’s men, chaos was where the men of the Bonded Legion did their best work. Even as the enemy commanders tried to maintain cohesion, the legion disintegrated, each Bonded pair spinning off to follow its own unique tactics.
Jain charged into the fray, massive shoulders swinging more than four feet of blade in a glittering arc, not so much slicing through the advancing footmen as smashing them out of the way. Coreo, sword in his right hand and a round fighting shield strapped to his left arm, slid in easily behind him, guarding the taller man’s unarmored back. A blade came in from the side and he turned it easily, then stepped forward and rammed his blade into the wielder’s stomach. No need to get fancy—a gut wound was almost always fatal. As quickly as he’d moved in, Coreo recovered, resuming his position in Jain’s blind spot, turning with him as the big man continued to reap his bloody crop. He caught a brief glimpse of Barcas and Hosch, the latter using his spear to drag an officer from his horse while Barcas made short work of any who got too close, his twin daggers already dripping red. Then the crowd swirled again, and there was only the red and black of Eron’s men.
Three came at Coreo at once, hoping to overwhelm him with sheer numbers. Coreo sidestepped the first blade, caught the second on his shield, and met the third with the flat of his own, angling so that his opponent’s sword slid safely wide of Jain’s calf. Hooking a foot behind the center soldier’s ankle, he pulled, sending the man toppling into his comrade to the right, then slammed his shield into the face of the remaining soldier. Bone crumpled like eggshell and the soldier collapsed to the ground. One of the other soldiers lashed out in a clumsy overhand chop, and Coreo dodged out of the way, slipping past the man and sliding his sword up into the soldier’s unarmored armpit.
Blood spurted and the man fell, twisting the gore-slick hilt of Coreo’s blade from his grasp. Suddenly weaponless, Coreo turned to find himself face-to-face with the last enemy. The man smiled.
Coreo dropped to the ground. There was the briefest flicker of surprise in the soldier’s eyes, and then his head flew clear as Jain’s sword came around in a flat arc, slicing cleanly through the man’s neck.
Coreo recovered his sword and stood, Jain already turning back into position. Neither man said a word.
That was the part that no one outside the Bonded Legion ever understood. While two-man teams weren’t unknown on battlefields or in gladiatorial pits, a Bonded pair was so much more. By only accepting those warriors who were already committed lovers, the legion moved beyond simple tactics into a realm of perfect communication.
A bearded soldier lunged in beneath Jain’s guard, and Coreo slid around his partner’s side, catching the blade on his shield and stabbing the attacker in the kneecap. Then Jain brought his heavy blade down, and the beard became two. Coreo slid back out of his partner’s way, feeling the heat radiating off the big man’s tattooed chest, sweat mingling where their skin touched.
Men and horses screamed, and Coreo danced with his lover.
Then, suddenly, there were no more blades to block. Across the field, the battle still raged, yet right where Coreo and the other Bonded men stood, the enemy had swirled away, drawing back to seek easier prey. Coreo found himself standing with Jain and the rest of the legion amid a knee-high mire of gore and crimson uniforms.
“Legionaries! To me!” Captain Dorson and his partner, long-legged Raja, raised fists, the signal for the unit to form up. Jain and Coreo fell in alongside Barcas and Hosch, the dagger man with a long flap of skin hanging open on his cheek, but still grinning his manic smile.
Yet not everyone was present. Behind them, a familiar keening rose above the din of the surrounding battle, and the whole unit turned toward its source.
Jesen, a two-swords man, knelt over the body of his partner. Karse, another northern warrior with one eye and an easy laugh, lay sprawled in the mud, a ragged red line carved across his throat. His good eye stared up at nothing.
Jesen’s voice rose again in the high, oscillating tone. Two by two, the other Bonded pairs took it up, moving into a defensive ring around the man. Coreo put a hand on Jain’s back, feeling the vibrations in the man’s chest, a baritone counterpart to Coreo’s own.
Still kneeling, Jesen reached down and touched two fingers to the blood coating Karse’s neck and chest. Fingers spread wide, he then touched his own closed eyelids, drawing his fingers down and painting two bright red lines down his cheeks to his chin. The tears of the
kavapara
.
Dorson’s voice broke through the chorus. “Cavalry incoming! Form up and follow me!”
Coreo glanced back at Jesen. The man stood and met his eyes, nodding. He could wait a few minutes.
“Move!” Dorson yelled.
Then they were all running, charging through the surrounding soldiers, not so much fighting as using their blades to part the sea before them.
The Bonded Legion was a legend: the greatest infantry unit in the Empire of Loremar, in which every man fought in perfect synchronicity with his beloved. Yet every unit has a weakness, and the problem with being a legend is that word tends to get around.
For the legion, that weakness was cavalry. Though they always traveled with long pikes for setting against charges, those had been abandoned with the tower shields in favor of giving the Bonded pairs the chance to use their individual strengths. Now Coreo wondered if that had been Lord Eron’s plan all along—to draw them out with infantry, then trample them with cavalry. Regardless of skill and training, foot soldiers couldn’t stand against a mounted charge without the proper precautions.
Off to Coreo’s left, a low mound appeared, blood-slick steel shining. One of the fallen giants. “Captain!”
Coreo pointed, and Dorson followed the gesture. “Left!” the commander roared. “Take the high ground!”
The unit turned like a flock of birds, sandals biting deep into the gore-watered field. Those few enemy footmen who’d had the same idea fell easily beneath the unit’s blades.
Standing, the giant would have towered higher than most castle walls, and even sprawled in death, its torso still rose nearly ten feet high. Its vaguely humanoid face was hidden behind a thick grille of steel bars, yet the ram-like horns curving out from holes in its helm were actually part of its skull. Crude armor plating covered its body, not so much worn as bolted and cauterized directly onto the beast’s tough flesh. It appeared Eron the Pike was nearly as hard on his own troops as those of his enemies.
“Climb!” Dorson yelled, but the order was unnecessary. Already the first ranks were scrambling up the carcass, Coreo and Jain among them. Coreo reached down and lifted Jesen up as well. The
kavapara
said nothing, his chest heaving in rapid breaths, whites showing wide around the edges of his eyes. Jain squeezed the man’s shoulder. “Just wait until after the cavalry charge, if you can.”
Gaze still distant, Jesen nodded. “Good man,” Jain said.
Any further conversation was cut off by a new thunder: the arrival of the cavalry, felt as much as heard. Those legionaries unable to fit atop the dead giant’s torso turned, placing their backs to the corpse and setting themselves to meet the charge as enemy troops split to let the horsemen through.
Only they weren’t horsemen—or rather, not in the conventional sense. Armored like a mounted knight in full plate, each of the charging warriors’ humanity ended at the waist, flowing seamlessly into the chest and withers of a powerful destrier. The jet-black plate they wore stretched all the way back and down their flanks, jointed and overlapping to turn each heavy equine body into a steel juggernaut. Couched in the crook of each beastman’s arm was a long, barb-headed lance.
Jain swore softly. “Centaurs.”
Coreo agreed. Normal cavalry was bad enough, but at least a knight could be unseated. A centaur
was
his steed, with a precision and grace no human rider could hope to match.
Still, the legion’s tactic was a good one. With the giant at their back, the cavalry couldn’t simply charge over the top of them, trampling or scattering them. They’d have to pull up short rather than charging full-on, or else risk losing or impaling themselves on their own spears as they drove through the legionaries and into the giant behind them.
“Brace!” Dorson yelled.
And then there was chaos. Even checking their momentum, the centaurs still slammed into the legionaries, some spears ending up stuck in the giant, others ramming home into human flesh. The legionaries, for their part, didn’t wait for their attackers to recover, instead leaping forward, ducking low under lances as they cut at unprotected bellies or slashed hamstrings. Deprived of their natural advantage in speed, most of the centaurs dropped their lances and pulled out curved sabers, point-heavy weapons designed for taking off heads at a full canter.
The legionaries still atop the giant prepared to leap down and join the fray, but before they could, Jesen stepped forward and raised his blades. While Coreo had been fixated on the charge, the man had removed his cuirass and used the tip of one of his blades to slice the last of the
kavapara
marks—a rune of two interlocking circles—into the skin just left of his sternum, over his heart. He looked to Dorson.
The captain nodded.
With a scream that was equal parts rage and triumph, Jesen threw himself off the giant, slamming into one of the centaurs and knocking the beast-man sideways. Then he was up again, swords flashing, spinning left and right as he cut with whirlwind speed, heedless of his own safety. Behind him, the rest of the legionaries took up his cry, turning it into the keening ululation from earlier.
Coreo forced himself to watch.
Kavapara
was a beautiful, terrible thing. Deprived of his bondmate, Jesen would fight without rest or retreat until he was slain, joining Karse in the halls of the dead.
Though he knew it was selfish, Coreo hoped that when the time came, he died first—or perhaps that he and Jain could go down together, back-to-back.
But there was no time for sentiment. As Jesen disappeared into the fray, Dorson gave the signal and the rest of the legionaries hurled themselves into battle. Jain hit first, keeping his feet and swinging his sword around in a wide arc that hacked straight through a centaur’s plate and into the flesh where man joined beast. Touching down a second later, Coreo darted right, deflecting the momentum of a heavy saber with his shield, arm going numb from the impact. Before the centaur could circle the awkward weapon back around for another blow, Coreo’s sword carved a bright line across its flank, digging deep. The scream from inside the warrior’s helmet was surprisingly equine.
