Orb ,Sceptre ,Throne

fellow squad-members, anxious for the signal. Eventually, the sergeant, a giant of a man with skin so black Bendan had thought it paint, gave the sign.

As one the squad slithered down the rear of the crest then jogged for the narrow streambed the raiders had been using. Here, under cover of the scraggy brittle brush, they readied crossbows and javelins. Somewhere in the dark across the steep-sided cut waited the 33rd. Once his squad, the 23rd, opened fire and engaged the raiders, they’d charge in from the rear. Meanwhile, the 4th was perhaps even now coming up the shore, ready to cut off retreat to the ships.

‘Like herding sheep,’ the corporal, Little, had told him, winking. ‘Just keep them from breaking out.’

‘More like wolves,’ the oldest of the squad had warned, a hairy and very dirty fellow in tattered leathers everyone called Bone. ‘These Confederation boys are pirates and slavers. Been raiding this coast for generations. Think it’s their gods-given right. This’ll be right sharp.’

‘I’m not afraid of no fight,’ he’d said.

‘Right, Butcher,’ Bone had answered.

He’d given that name when asked. And surprisingly, they used it. Only when they said it they used the same tone they used for arse, or idiot. And somehow there was no way he could call them on it. So he’d shrunk back, glowering, determined to show them what fighting was all about. After all, it was the one thing he’d had to do every day of his life, and since he wasn’t dead yet he was obviously good at it.

‘Let none escape,’ had been bald Sergeant Hektar’s last rumbled instruction. ‘This is our warning stroke. Our last chance before we go.’

Before they left. Marching out! Bendan had seen everyone’s reaction to that stunning news. Crazy as one of them Tenescowri! Abandoning the fortress before it’s even finished. Who was this ambassador to order them out? Couldn’t Steppen have just sent ten or twenty for that marionette to inspect?

Everyone in his squad was disgusted at this typical army stupidity. All except Bone, who’d muttered through a mouthful of the leaves he chewed, ‘The ways of officers is a mystery to regular people.’

Bendan thought it an improvement — he was damned sick of hammering rocks and humping dirt. He’d take a bit of marching over that backbreaking work any time.

Now, it seemed, was their last chance for any real action and everyone was eager to make it count. Beneath them, tracing the bed of the dry cut, came the Confederacy raiders jogging along to their target, another defenceless farming hamlet. He struggled with his crossbow in the disorienting light of the silvery bright reborn moon, and the greenish glow of the swelling arc of light in the sky that some named the Sword of God — though just which god varied.

The mechanism of the crossbow defeated him once again. He couldn’t seem to master the damned foreign thing. He set it down and readied one of the wicked barbed javelins he’d brought against just such a possibility. And just in time as well, as the whistled signal came to fire.

Everyone straightened, letting loose. Crossbows thumped, soldiers shouted, tossing javelins. Bendan hurled his, then, without waiting to see whether he’d struck anyone or not, he started down the slope readying his shortsword and shield. What he glimpsed below worried him. Instead of the milling chaos he’d been told to expect the line of warriors had simply knelt behind large shields, taken the initial barrage, and even now was counter- charging up through the rock and brush.

And damn his dead and gone ancestors but there were a lot of them.

No more time to think as his headlong run brought him smack into the first of the raiders. He shield-bashed the man and knocked him backwards off his feet. That shock absorbed almost all his inertia and now he traded blows with two others. His squad was ridiculously outnumbered. Bendan released all the ferocity he’d learned in life or death fights before he’d even grown hair on his chin. He gave himself into the blazing rage completely, whirling, screaming, attacking without let-up. Raiders backpedalled before him, overborne. Blades struck his hauberk of leather hardened with mail and iron lozenges but he ignored the blows in a determination to carry on until dead. Only this complete abandon had seen him walk away from all his fights — bloodied and punished, but upright.

Then in what seemed like an instant all that stood before him wore the black of Malaz and he lowered his arm, weaving, sucking in great ragged breaths, near to vomiting. The other squad had pushed through from the other side. The column of raiders had broken and men were running for their ships. Bendan and his squad mates left them for the others.

Someone offered him a skin of water and he sucked in a small mouthful and splashed one spray over his face. The blows he’d taken were agony and he knew he’d be hardly able to move tomorrow but he’d been lucky: none was serious enough to take him down.

Sergeant Hektar came by and cuffed his shoulder. ‘Damn, Butcher,’ he rumbled. ‘I can see we’re gonna have to rein you in some.’

Nearby Bone had a cloth pressed to his blood-smeared face, still grinning. ‘Lookin’ forward to a full day’s march tomorrow, lad?’ He laughed.

Bendan waved that off.

‘What about these wounded, Hek?’ someone called.

The massive Dal Hon ran a hand over his gleaming nut-brown scalp. ‘These are slavers … give them a taste of it. We sell them.’

‘Can’t do that,’ Bone shouted from where he was rifling the bodies, one-handed. ‘Empire don’t sell slaves.’

‘Indentureship is so much better, is it?’ the Dal Hon muttered, and shrugged. ‘So we give them away to the Coral merchants.’

Bone’s answering laugh was genuine, but it wasn’t pleasant.

Later that night as he was walking back to camp it occurred to Bendan that when Hektar had called him ‘Butcher’ he hadn’t used that tone. The sergeant had seemed to mean it. He felt grateful, but also a little embarrassed. Because for the entire fight he’d been so terrified he’d pissed himself.

Awareness came to Ebbin in brief disconnected instants. Like startling flashes of lightning in an otherwise terrifying pitch-black landscape of lashing, spinning winds. Each illuminated an instant tableau frozen in stark contrast of light and shadow: he huddled among the bones of a hilltop sepulchre, its stone door shattered; he was chiselling layers of barnacles and sea-growths from a stone revealing it white and pure as mountain snow; he was being kicked aside by Aman while the girl Taya danced frenziedly before a cloaked figure with the face of the sun; his hands held before his face cracked and bloodied, sleeves in tatters.

At other times, the worst times, he was called to writhe in abject terror before that cloaked figure. During these times, lost in the eternal storm that now raged in his mind, the being’s face shone silver like the moon. At other times he raged insane against this monster, shook his fists, swore himself hoarse.

All his tormentor ever gave in return was lofty mocking amusement. As if not only his life and ambitions were meaningless, puerile, but the hopes, struggles and dreams of everyone in the city and beyond were nothing more than puffery and self-important vacuousness. This god-like overview of the entire sweep of human civilization on the continent sent Ebbin once more into the eternal raging storm within his mind.

Yet the stones are important. He is worried about the stones. Will there be enough to complete the base?

At other times they shook him from his tortured nightmare trance to perform tasks for them. The girl — though hardly a girl, Taya — always accompanied him. He helped oversee the salvaging of these very stone blocks being taken from the city mole. He hired craftsmen, answered queries. In short, he was the human face before the operations these fiends wished to complete.

And all the while he was powerless to speak of any of it. He tried — gods, how he fought to utter a word of objection or defiance! But the moment he contemplated such rebellion his mouth and throat constricted as if throttled. Not even his hands would cooperate to scrawl a plea for help. And so, like a prisoner within his own skull, he could only watch and speculate.

Whatever these fiends planned, it reached back all the way to their internment. A resurrection of their rule as one of the legendary Tyrants. Yet why the elaborate charade? Why wait to declare their return? Why the mask? Ebbin was frustrated beyond measure by the mystery. He felt that he had almost all the pieces, yet arranging a meaningful pattern defied him.