The Awl’dan, in the last days of King Dishonor
Preda Bivatt, a captain in the Drene Garrison, was far from home. Twenty-one days by wagon, commanding an expedition of two hundred soldiers of the Tattered Banner Army, a troop of thirty Bluerose light cavalry, and four hundred support staff, including civilians, she had, after delivering orders for the setting of camp, slid down from the back of her horse to walk the fifty-odd paces to the edge of the bluff.
When she reached the rise the wind struck her a hammer blow to her chest, as if eager to fling her back, to scrape her from this battered lip of land. The ocean beyond the ridge was a vision from an artist’s nightmare, a seascape torn, churning, with heavy twisting clouds shredding apart overhead. The water was more white than blue-green, foam boiling, spume flying out from between rocks as the waves pounded the shore.
Yet, she saw with a chill rushing in to bludgeon her bones, this was the place.
A fisher boat, blown well off course, into the deadly maelstrom that was this stretch of ocean, a stretch that no trader ship, no matter how large, would willingly venture into. A stretch that had, eighty years ago, caught a Meckros City and had torn it to pieces, pulling into the depths twenty thousand or more dwellers of that floating settlement.
The fisher crew had survived, long enough to draw their beleaguered craft safely aground in hip-deep water thirty or so paces from the bedrock strand. Catch lost, their boat punched into kindling by relentless waves, the four Letherii managed to reach dry land.
To find… this.
Tightening the strap of her helm, lest the wind tear it and her head from her shoulders, Preda Bivatt continued scanning the wreckage lining this shoreline. The promontory she stood on was undercut, dropping away three man-heights to a bank of white sand heaped with elongated rows of dead kelp, uprooted trees, and remnants of eighty-year-old Meckros City. And something else. Something more unexpected.
— War canoes. The seagoing kind, each as long as a coral-face whale, high-prowed, longer and broader of beam than Tiste Edur craft. Not flung ashore as wreckage-no, not one she could see displayed anything like damage. They were drawn up in rows high along the beach, although it was clear that that had happened some time past-months at least, perhaps years.
A presence at her side. The merchant from Drene who had been contracted to supply this expedition. Pale- skinned, his hair pallid blond, so fair as to be nearly white. The wind was blasting red the man’s round face, but she could see his light blue eyes fixed on the array of war canoes, tracking, first westward along the beach, then eastward. ‘I have some talent,’ he said to her, loudly so as to be heard over the gale.
Bivatt said nothing. The merchant no doubt had skill with numbers-his claim to talent. And she was an officer in the Letherii Army, and could well gauge the likely complement of each enormous craft without his help. A hundred, give or take twenty.
‘Preda?’
‘What?’
The merchant gestured helplessly. ‘These canoes.’ He waved up the beach, then down. ‘There must be…’ And t hen he was at a loss for words.
She well understood him.
Yes. Rows upon rows, all drawn up to this forbidding shore. Drene, the nearest city of the kingdom, was three weeks away, to the southwest. Directly south of here was the land of the Awl’dan, and of the tribes’ seasonal rounds with their huge herds virtually all was known. The Letherii were in the process of conquering them, after all. There had been no report of anything like this.
Thus. Not long ago, a fleet arrived upon this shore. Whereupon everyone had disembarked, taking all they had with them, and then, presumably, set off inland.
There should have been signs, rumours, a reverberation among the Awl at the very least. We should have heard about it.
But they hadn’t. The foreign invaders had simply… disappeared.
Not possible. How can it be? She scanned the rows once again, as if hoping that some fundamental detail would reveal itself, would ease the hammering of her heart and the leaden chill of her limbs.
‘Preda…’
Yes. One hundred per craft. And here before us… stacked four, five deep-what? Four, maybe five thousand?
The north shoreline was a mass of grey-wooded war canoes, for almost as far as she could see to the west and to the east. Drawn up. Abandoned. Filling the shore like a toppled forest.
‘Upwards of a half-million,’ the merchant said. ‘That is my estimate. Preda, where in the Errant’s name did they all go?’
She scowled. ‘Kick that mage nest of yours, Letur Anict. Make them earn their exorbitant fees. The king needs to know. Every detail. Everything.’
‘At once,’ the man said.
While she would do the same with the Ceda’s squad of acolytes. The redundancy was necessary. Without the presence of Kuru Qan’s chosen students, she would never learn all that Letur Anict held back on his final report, would never be able to distil the truths from the half-truths, the outright lies. A perennial problem with hiring private contractors-they had their own interests, after all, and loyalty to the crown was, for creatures like Letur Anict, the new Factor of Drene, always secondary.
She began looking for a way down onto the beach. Bivatt wanted a closer look at these canoes, especially since it seemed that sections of their prows had been dismantled. Which is an odd thing to do. Yet, a manageable mystery, one I can deal with and so not think about all the rest.
‘Upwards of a half’million.’
Errant’s blessing, who is now among us?
The Awl’dan, following the Edur conquest
The wolves had come, then gone, and where corpses had been dragged out from the solid press atop the hilltop-where the unknown soldiers had made their last stand-the signs of their feeding were evident, and this detail remained with the lone rider as he walked his horse amidst the motionless, sprawled bodies. Such pillaging of the dead was… unusual. The dun-furred wolves of this plain were as opportunistic as any other predator on the Awl’dan, of course. Even so, long experience with humans should have sent the beasts fleeing at the first sour scent, even if it was commingled with that of spilled blood. What, then, had drawn them to this silent battlefield?
The lone rider, face hidden behind a crimson scaled mask, drew rein near the base of the low hill. His horse was dying, racked with shivers; before the day’s end the man would be walking. As he was breaking camp this dawn, a horn-nosed snake had nipped the horse as it fed on a tuft of sliver-stem grasses at the edge of a gully. The poison was slow but inevitable, and could not be neutralized by any of the herbs and medicines the man carried. The loss was regrettable but not disastrous, since he had not been travelling in haste.
Ravens circled overhead, yet none descended-nor had his arrival stirred them from this feast; indeed, it had been the sight of them, wheeling above this hill, that had guided him to this place. Their cries were infrequent, strangely muted, almost plaintive.
The Drene legions had taken away their dead, leaving naught but their victims to feed the grasses of the plain. The morning’s frost still mapped glistening patterns on death-dark skin, but the melt had already begun, and it seemed to him that these dead soldiers now wept, from stilled faces, from open eyes, from mortal wounds.
Rising on his stirrups, he scanned the horizon-as much of it as he could see-seeking sight of his two companions, but the dread creatures had yet to return from their hunt, and he wondered if they had found a new, more inviting trail somewhere to the west-the Letherii soldiers of Drene, marching triumphant and glutted back to their city. If so, then there would be slaughter on this day. The notion of vengeance, however, was incidental. His companions were indifferent to such sentiments. They killed for pleasure, as far as he could tell. Thus, the annihilation of the Drene, and any vengeance that could be ascribed to the deed existed only in his own mind. The distinction was important.
Even so, a satisfying conceit.
Yet, these victims here were strangers, these soldiers in their grey and black uniforms. Stripped now of weapons and armour, standards taken as trophies, their presence here in the Awl’dan-in the heart of the rider’s
