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Jun 30 The Black Wall

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Fantasy

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The Black Wall - book excerpt

Chapter One

The Invasion: Six Months Before the Verdict

Bodies lay strewn, pale against the rich brown ground. Blood muddied the soil between the trunks of massive trees, churned until its hue matched the broad, fern-like leaves grasping the sky. Long-beaked scavenger birds, red breasted with gleaming black wings, hunched in the lower branches, silent and waiting. I watched Cardinal Vimr lean down to pluck one of the long, black, wooden daggers from the hand of a corpse, the plates of his elaborate, ill-fitting leather armor sliding against each other like a film of cracked wax floating on water.

The karakh shifted beneath me. I wondered if the creature found the corpse-littered glade as terrible as I did, or if it just shared my hatred of the Cardinal. Or its attitude to our situation was as alien as its form, and its thoughts unknowable to anyone but its human companion.

Gre’pa, or as close to that as I could pronounce, was shaggy white with grey streaks, and over twenty hands tall at the shoulder. Dakar had unsheathed its tusks when we arrived in the valley. They were studded with bronze bolts, sharpened edges now dripping with gore. The shepherd sat motionless in front of me on the karakh’s shoulders, and the back of his head revealed nothing about what the chieftain’s husband was thinking.

I pulled my thoughts from the monstrous scavenger and forced them back to the clearing. Corpses of my soldiers. How many of them had been added this time to the ranks that would never return home from this wretched mission? How many of their lives had I spent? I tried to feel something; tried to recall my horror and shame at the first loss of life we’d suffered on this mad journey when the burning wreckage of the Salamander sank into the Sea of N’narad. But my grief since then had been replaced with a void, and now, even when recalling the Salamander, I could feel nothing.

“General Mann.” The low sound of Vimr’s voice made the hair on my arms stand on end, but I kept my expression even when I turned to face the Arch Bishop’s adviser harnessed behind me on Gre’pa’s back.

“What is it, Vimr?” I spat the words more than I’d intended.

Vimr cast a meaningful look at the bloody meadow. “I maintain that this requires a purge.” Vimr’s voice was smooth.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing the answer but needing Vimr to say it. Needed him to say it, so it would not be my responsibility. To tell myself that I was only following orders. I felt sick.

Vimr sighed, reading my thoughts on my face. “Genocide is an ugly term, and shouldn’t apply to these constructs. Nevertheless, as I have said on more than one occasion, our passage the rest of the way through this valley will only be achieved with the extermination of the guardians.”

I looked again at the scattering of bodies that weren’t my soldiers. The karakh had mangled most into bloody strips and bone. Still, I could see enough. Shorter on average than those from outside the Black Wall, clad in soft, dark leather. Both men and women. Weapons of strange, black wood, harder than iron or ceramic. “They seem human enough to me.”

Vimr shrugged. “Regardless, the histories are consistent. Whatever guardians the Ancients left in this valley were created by them. Produced, not born. Not, at least, in any normal sense of the term.”

I felt my jaw clench, but I was facing away from Vimr, and I doubt he noticed. “I will not condone the annihilation of a people who are only defending their land. Whatever your ‘histories’ tell you.”

Vimr sighed. “They are not my histories. They are, as you well know, the records of the Church—of Heaven itself. Anyway, General, I’ve broached the subject with the remainder of your men. They all agree that their survival and the completion of our mission surpasses any cultural needs. We—you—lead a quest passed from Heaven itself, and the locals, whether machines or men, are killing themselves in their attempt to stop you. The only difference between staying the course and bringing the fight to them is how many more of your own people you lose.”

The remainder of your men. The words echoed in my head, drowning out the rest of Vimr’s tirade, threatening my numbness with the only thing that would be worse: regret. Memories flooded back.

The descent into the valley strapped to the back of Gre’pa had been only a little less terrifying for me than it had been for the five hundred soldiers I’d chosen to come with, rappelling over six hundred hands to the jagged, black scree that ran to the edge of the forest. Maybe. To be fair, I’ve never been a fan of high places. At least the soldiers had had ropes. The eleven karakh had plunged from the grotto head first, creeping down the obsidian cliff like spiders, their massive claws gripping the cracked, black glass.

And yet the other half, who stayed in the grotto, like the thousand still waiting in the foothills of the Black Wall, had complained at being left behind. Good men. Better than me. Better than I deserved.

The first attack came while we camped at the base of the cliff that first night, whipped by wind blowing up from the south. They flooded out of the darkness like demons, slaughtering a quarter of us before vanishing among the trunks of the enormous, blood-hued trees. The canopy was so thick that even the great lens of the gibbous Eye couldn’t penetrate it enough for any organized pursuit. If not for the eleven karakh, we all would have died then.

I wondered at the time—still wonder now—if those in the tunnel, so disappointed at being left behind, felt the same way as they watched our burning tents far below them and listened to the distant screams. Probably, they’d only grown more bitter as they’d looked on, helpless. In all the months since that first night, I was too much a coward to ask them.

For five days, we pushed south, circumventing the few settlements we’d found, over Vimr’s protests. The villages had, at least from a distance, seemed abandoned in any case. I argued that we’d only come for the contents of a library, not to exterminate the hapless guardians who had been imprisoned in that valley since the Age of Ashes. My soldiers, for their part, followed me into the valley because they were faithful. Destined to a better Heaven should they be lucky enough to give their lives in service to the Church of N’narad.

Now more than half of them lay in a trail of corpses from the grotto to the glade where we now stood.

I studied the faces of the survivors, scattered around the edge of the clearing, standing or crouching. That meadow had become sacred. Even the karakh were reluctant to enter. Hard, tired eyes. Leather armor, some of it hanging in tatters, all now spattered with blood, their own or someone else’s.

Vimr was right about one thing: These soldiers no longer served me. They no longer even served the promise of Heaven. They only wanted to survive long enough to go home.

I ground my teeth and turned, craning my neck until I could look Vimr in the eye. “I will not allow my army to commit genocide,” I whispered. Then I spat. “But it is obvious that this army is no longer mine.”

“Was it ever, General?”

I didn’t have an answer, and Dakar, if he’d heard the exchange, didn’t react.

We continued south. The terrain became rocky and uneven, but there was still no end to the massive, red trees. Twice in two days, we came across large, square patches of thin-leafed brambles covered in barbed, finger-long, thorns and tiny white flowers. The blackvine, you called it. Not even the karakh could find a path through them, and we were forced to make our way around. Both times we stumbled upon villages of small, obsidian buildings, their roofs thatched with the broad, dried leaves of the trees. Well maintained. Abandoned. Vimr ordered the buildings doused in naphtha, and their roofs burned. I watched, silent and ashamed.

The sun set early behind the western Black Wall, plunging the valley into a twilight that would last for hours. I called for a halt, anxious to finish setting up camp before the wind that had raged every night made such a task impossible. I half-expected my order to be overridden by Vimr, but the squat man only nodded like a sage from his perch behind me on the shoulders of Gre’pa.

It took two hours to set up the tents and a few hasty pickets on the uneven, root-knotted ground, but twilight still seeped, speckling the haggard remnants of my soldiers in blood-hued shadows.

I walked among my men, though in truth, it was only to get away from Vimr; there was no need for orders. From somewhere nearby but out of sight, I could hear his voice chattering and laughing with a few officers.

No, no orders were necessary. Not from me.

They set up my tent first, despite my objections, and I wandered back to sit alone at the end of my cot, listening to the sounds of my army through the canvas walls.

I wouldn’t have realized I’d fallen asleep if it weren’t for the scream that woke me.

An orange light flickered through the heavy cloth of my tent. Fire, I remember thinking, groggy through half-remembered dreams. The scream was sustained, inhuman, shrill. It pierced the air from every side. The tent shuddered and flapped. Wind, I realized. The screaming was the sound of the wind.

I bolted upright, and my right hip creaked in protest, reminding me I was too old for this. For all of it.

I staggered to the flap, which had become untied, now snapping in the burning gale. I forced myself to stand straight and gave my right leg one final shake, as if that would help.

Heat roiled from the south, and smoke churned between the tents on violent, stray currents. Above the scream of wind skittered other sounds—soldiers yelling in confusion, uprooted tents snapping where they fluttered, ensnared in trees, the creak and snap branches, the panicked whistles and clicks of the karakh. A black and gold Sun-and-Eye pennant of Tyrsh tumbled past, writhing like some mad spirit.

The smoke burned my eyes. A few soldiers ran this way and that between the tents, or knelt by fallen comrades. I hesitated, feeling lost, before making my way to the west side of the camp. Most of my soldiers had already moved to the perimeter to man the pickets, despite the lack of orders and the flames.

Captain Rohm was there, crouched in a shallow trench. He glanced at me and nodded a greeting as I limped down to hunker at his side, trying and failing to suppress a wince as pain growled from my hip.

“They’re trying to drive off the karakh with fire.” Rohm had to yell over the din. “Or just kill us.”

I grimaced, remembering the Salamander. “Guess they’ve never seen a karakh before.”

Rohm shook his head, but before he could respond, the wind surged. A wall of heat rolled over us. The livid glow to the south became a liquid avalanche of flame stampeding through a tunnel of air clear of smoke, leaping from tree to tree, devouring the whipping red leaves like locusts.

I coughed and grasped at my chest, unable to catch my breath in the boiling fumes. The air shimmered and writhed like water. Through the sheet of darkness collapsing over me, I could see Rohm on his knees, clawing at the ground.

I guess this is how it will end for us. The thought was calm. I could feel the oxygen-starved air singe my lips and tear at my lungs, smell burning hair, but it was far away. I sucked in another desperate, pointless breath.

My last breath, I thought, with a vague sense of disappointment.

A shadow passed across the wall of light. Huge eyes of gold, pupils shrunk to tiny black marbles against the glow of fire. Massive tusks bolted with bronze curved up from a flat, dog-like nose, which in turn jutted from the white face of some immense, demonic goat.

Gre’pa, smoke curling in reeking tendrils from his fur, scooped us up, each in a massive, clawed hand, and tossed us behind Dakar, who straddled the creature’s neck, clinging to the brass chains pierced through its cheeks.

Without bothering to check if we’d gotten a grip on the smoldering fur, Dakar let go of the chains, leaned forward into his mount’s neck, and let the creature carry us away.

I’d trained riding a karakh before the mission. Since our descent into the valley an endless week before, I’d spent every long day strapped into a harness behind Dakar, but I’d never, until that moment, imagined needing to ride as the shepherds do, without a harness, or even the benefit of the chains.

Fire and light filled my senses, and burning wind, and now over everything the acrid stench of smoking fur. My palms burned where they clung to the thick, white hair, and my legs felt like rubber. Pain screamed from my hip.

The creature leapt from tree to tree, and even through its panic it kept itself between us and the ground. I had no idea if Rohm still clung behind me, or lay dying on the forest floor somewhere behind. I could only press myself into Gre’pa, feeling the rhythm of surging muscles, while I waited to fall and be consumed by the fire that raged on every side.

Maybe, I thought, using fire to drive off the karakh worked, after all.

Our flight, panicked though it was, faded to monotony. I clung to the smoldering fur, choking against the rancid stench of burning hair, which was so strong that the banshee wind of the valley couldn’t tear it away.

After what seemed like hours, I felt the karakh slow. The grasping fingers of branches were gone. Leaping from tree to tree was replaced with an even, crab-like amble. The wind still screamed.

I peeled my face from where I’d buried it in the burnt hair of Gre’pa an eternity ago.

Smoky, orange light oozed over the eastern peaks, which now reached almost to the zenith. Gre’pa had carried us due east to the treeless, boulder-strewn slopes at the base of the Wall. Rough chunks of obsidian ranging in size from pebbles to towns scattered to our left and right. Behind and below, grey smoke shrouded the forest of red, fern-like trees, rolling off to the north in the dissipating tendrils of wind. Beneath it, the fire throbbed orange and red and yellow.

My numb limbs failed at last, and I released Gre’pa to slide onto the lichen-encrusted rocks. There I lay, looking at the grey light of the sky with burning eyes. The karakh stepped away.

The blurry image of Rohm’s face peered down at me, silhouetted against a smoggy blue sky. A light, cool breeze brushed around us.

“Rohm. I didn’t know you made it.” The words burned my throat.

“Right behind you, clinging to Gre’pa’s ass, General. I’m as surprised as you.” Rohm’s voice was no better off than mine. “And I take back everything I’ve ever said about that glorious beast.”

I tried to sit up, but the effort made my head swim, so I settled back down onto the jagged shale. My fingers felt like claws. I could still feel flames dancing along my limbs and face.

I coughed. The sound was soft and dry and sent flames into my lungs. “Who made it?”

Rohm hesitated, but I couldn’t make out the captain’s expression through the shadows. “Us. And Dakar and Gre’pa, obviously. Six other karakh and their shepherds. Dassik, the new Artificer, but he’s burned bad. Five men in pretty good shape, and another eleven not so good. Was fifteen when we got up here a few hours ago. Now eleven, if that tells you anything. Not good at all. We’ll probably be down to eight by tomorrow morning, though it looks like anyone who lives through the night will survive long enough to be killed by something else. If you want to consider that good news, go ahead. It isn’t going to get any better.” He ended with a shrug that might have been apologetic. “And Vimr.”

I closed my eyes again. Twenty-two of my soldiers were still alive and uninjured enough to carry on. Twenty-two out of the five hundred who’d descended into the valley. Twenty-two and Vimr.

“What about the powder?” It was a question I didn’t want to ask. If we’d lost the powder kegs to the fire, there wouldn’t be any point in going on. I had heard no explosions, but I doubted I would have noticed them over the wind.

Rohm nodded as if he’d expected the question. “Not as bad as it could be. Eleven kegs can’t be accounted for. Might still find a few where we camped, but I wouldn’t count on it. Dersh and his karakh—Zha’an or something—grabbed the other half and got up here before the fire rolled through. Don’t ask me how they did it.”

It was the best news yet. I hoped eleven kegs would be enough to get through whatever door we’d been sent here to find. Only one way to find out.

“What do we do now, General?” I heard the question he was asking. Can we go home now?

I said nothing for a long time, eyes closed. Rohm probably thought I was planning some grand course of action, but my mind was blank. “Where are the others?” I asked at last, voice rasping, peeling my eyes open to look at the silhouette of my captain.

Rohm nodded past my shoulder, and I sat up enough to crane my head in that direction, wincing at pain even that slight motion shot through my head. The rocky slope we sat on fell into a crevasse fifty paces to the south.

“They fell in?” I asked, realizing how stupid the question was as I asked it.

“No, General.” Rohm’s forced chuckle turned into a cough. “There’s water down there. Fast running stream. Fish, too, I guess, though I didn’t get close enough to see any, myself. We lost everything in the fire, and we don’t have enough provisions left to get back to the grotto the way it—”

“We’re not going back to the grotto,” I said, hating how much sense he was making. “Two, maybe three days more at the most. Faster now.” Now that there’s so few of us, but I couldn’t finish the thought out loud. My voice caught in my throat, and I despised myself for it.

My army had been annihilated by its own existence. Had we just come with the karakh, we would have traveled faster. Maybe fast enough to avoid conflict. Fast enough to flee the fire. The deaths of four hundred and eighty-four men were—are—my fault. I could blame the Arch Bishop and Vimr for the others if I were the type of man to set my responsibility at someone else’s feet. They had been the ones who forced me to bring that absurd army across the continent. But it had been my call to bring them into the valley.

Now they were dead. And because they were dead, the survivors could complete their mission.

I thought back to the Salamander, and the specter of death that had continued to chase me like my shadow since then. And now this. The grand finale.

Rohm’s eyes flickered, but he only gave a quick nod. “Yes, General. I’ll inform the others.”

In the end, it wasn’t that simple, because nothing is ever that simple. Of the five that included Rohm’s “not so wounded,” three included broken bones, and the next morning five of the burned could walk, and four others needed to be carried on litters but would survive.

For all my words to Rohm, I would not push them any further. Not for a Heaven I’d lost my faith in years before, not for the Arch Bishop of N’narad and his schemes, nor the Grace of Fom and hers.

I would go on along with the remaining officers, mounted on five of the karakh because we had a job to do. I released the rest to go back to the five hundred still waiting in the grotto, and the more than nine hundred who waited in the foothills outside the Wall. I gave the remaining provisions to those returning with the wounded, and the fish they’d caught that afternoon. I sent two of the karakh back, too, in case they ran into any more trouble. Vimr objected. I continued with my orders as if he hadn’t spoken, and he fell into fuming silence.

Those that were to go back watched with blank stares as we plunged into the smoldering forest, and returned my parting salute with empty, mechanical precision. I had time to wonder if I would see any of them again, but then they were gone, behind the ethereal barrier of curling smoke and blackened pillars of the giant trees, and I was clinging to Gre’pa, thankful now to have the luxury of the harness. Vimr muttered something behind me, lost in the crack of brittle underbrush.

We traveled until the trunks looming out of the void in front of us were nothing more than shafts of shadow in the glossy haze cast by the starlight that glinted through bare branches. I intended to call a halt during the long twilight, but Vimr had beaten me too it, so I had them press on into the night, out of spite, like a seventy year old toddler.

Within an hour of setting camp, the watch reported we weren’t alone. They’d heard low voices in the darkness to the south, over the pops and snaps of falling, burnt branches. The first watch had reported to Rohm, who had reported to me out of ear-shot from Vimr.

I called them over—Isam, tall, balding, and hunched, and a burly, bearded thug everyone called Keg.

“Sound like another ambush?” I asked, glancing where Vimr had waddled to relieve himself.

“Nah,” Keg answered, picking at his short, ruddy beard with a thumb and index finger. “Women. Not that that means anything, I guess, but children, too. Like a town.”

“A town?” I looked around at the blackened trunks. Little gusts of wind curled fingers of ash from the ground, visible in the Eyelight glaring up from somewhere beyond the eastern peaks of the Wall.

“Well, a settlement or something, anyway,” Isam answered. “I heard it, too.”

“They survived the fire, then?” I realized the idiocy of my question after it left my mouth.

Keg grunted.

“Who survived?” Whined Vimr’s voice from where the little man lurched out of the darkness behind the two scouts.

Isam turned to face him. “A settlement or something, I guess.”

“It should be purged, then.” Vimr’s voice was bored.

I ground my teeth. “Children and their mothers? I don’t think so.” I turned to the two scouts. “Keep an ear to it. Tell the next pair on watch to do the same. We’ll move on before dawn. Take the long way around. With the karakh, we’ll be gone before they know we’re here. You hear anything—anything—that sounds like more than a few surviving kids and their mothers, let me know.”

Nobody moved. Isam studied me a long time before he spoke. “We’re with Cardinal Vimr on this one. We’ve had enough of these bastards, and I’m pretty sure the other men feel the same way.”

“I gave you an order—”

“You can bring me up on insubordination charges if we ever get back to civilization,” Isam stated. “But Cardinal trumps General, anyway, so good luck with that. I’d rather get out of here alive and let the courts decide, how about you, Keg?”

The stocky shadow of Keg dipped his head in agreement.

The silhouette of Vimr nodded as if a difficult but apt decision had been reached. Rohm watched, expressionless. I couldn’t blame him. Had he argued, he’d only be tossed out with me. The men had made up their minds. The mutiny was complete.

Vimr coughed and called out into the darkness. “Dakar, is Gre’pa harnessed?”

There was some rustling from somewhere a little way to the north and a slow answer. “Er, not yet, but he can be in twenty minutes. Why? We going somewhere?” Dakar emerged from the darkness just as the tip of the gibbous Eye crested the top of the Black Wall. His grey eyes were on me, not Vimr. “General?”

I said nothing at first, trying to think of a way out. I thought about saying nothing, pretending I could wash my hands of the coming massacre with inaction.

Complacency. The evil of cowards. I could order Dakar to stand down, wait for morning and go around. And then what? If Dakar stayed loyal to me, which was likely, the five karakh would make easy work of the few soldiers and Vimr, but that… I thought of the Salamander and shut my eyes. No, I couldn’t do that. Whatever happened, whomever they took orders from, they would be my soldiers. Until the end. What action was left to me? To take responsibility for the actions of an army that wasn’t mine.

That was the moment I realized that was what my job had always boiled down to. Embarrassing it took so many decades to figure out something so obvious to everyone else.

“As the Cardinal said, Shepherd Dakar.” My voice was quiet, sapped of will. “Harness the karakh. We move when the Eye breaks free of the Wall.”

When we mounted, it was Vimr who took the place behind Dakar. The shepherd shot me a questioning look. I kept my face blank.

The village squatted on a low mesa. It was walled on two sides by fields of the black, thorny brambles, now stripped of their leaves and little white flowers, made harder than steel by the fire. South of the small collection of sunken longhouses, the ground dropped a short way before rising again into the foothills that groped the base of the Wall. To the north of the settlement, between the five remaining karakh and the base of the mesa, a circular lake burbled, edged by reeds. In the Eyelight, the south peaks glowed purple. The wind blew in sharp gusts hard enough that a chorus of cracking branches and swirling ash clogged the air and helped mask the karakh’s approach. The soldiers had tied cloths around their mouths, dampened in the lake, to help filter out the ash and still-hot embers, but the karakh all coughed and sneezed, and the shepherds bore the pain along with them.

I’d harbored faint hope that any survivors would have gone into hiding, if not into their homes, then perhaps into the ash-filled forest. As we edged around the lake, my hope winked out. A line of figures appeared on the ridge above before scattering again.

“They’re up there!” Vimr shouted above the din of branches and gusting wind. “Their last line of defense!”

I said nothing as we charged up the slope into the village.