The Legend of Broken

and the subsequent drone of a Davon ram’s horn being blown, every tree, rock, bush, or shadow seemed to disgorge one or more such brave souls. As always, unlike the forces of the Tall, the Bane fighters included women, more than ready and trained to inflict deadly punishment upon their enemies; and their cries, being the higher in pitch, quickly drove the men of Baster-kin’s khotor into a kind of fear that bordered on madness.

And once this confused and unstable (indeed, given the darkness of the Wood, to which the eyes of the Guardsmen were not at all accustomed, this nightmarish) condition had been established, almost anything seemed possible. First, of course, Ashkatar’s constant emphasis on vicious war cries from both his male and female warriors made it impossible for units of Broken soldiers to relay orders or to take any accurate measure of how many enemy forces were actually involved in the fight. In truth, the Bane were badly outnumbered; but terror is a mighty method of nullifying such imbalances of power. This effect was only increased by the fact that any attempt by a soldier of the Tall to call for aid instantly marked both the man in distress and those who dared raise their voices in response for death. Fear, again, is whipped into panic if a soldier fighting for his life on foreign ground feels that he cannot even communicate with his fellows without immediately being confronted with the image of an enemy whose body is painted to match the leaves and bark of the surrounding wild plants and trees, or, worse yet, the fur and teeth, feathers and beaks of the deadliest night creatures, and whose immediate attack, therefore, quite aside from being incomprehensibly loud and savagely noisy, is wild and almost bestial in its appearance as well as its violence. Such terrifying methods, if carried off with the skill of which the Bane were masters, could go a very long way toward counteracting differences in numbers, if those differences were not utterly overwhelming.

And then, of course, there was always the bloodshed itself, simple yet supremely effective gore, which Lord Baster-kin’s Guard liked to think they understood, as a weapon, but which they had never truly seen demonstrated until that night. The sights, smells, and sounds of comrades being torn open and apart, dismembered and otherwise disfigured and dispatched, sapped the Guardsmen of what little real understanding they had of combat. When the forest floor became wet with blood in the middle of the night, as well as when the curiously horrifying colors and visions of human guts laid open to Moon- and torchlight were encountered, and a soldier was almost certain that the gore was that of his fellows, the man’s usefulness in combat (especially if he was unfamiliar with the sight, as was nearly every Guardsman) was quickly cut down to almost nothing, and his primary concern shifted from inflicting punishment to somehow trying to make sure that his own blood, guts, and limbs were not added to the heaps and rivulets that had been loosed by swords, gutting blades, spearheads, crude iron halberds and axes, and daggers.

One can often hear it said, among posturing fools such as those young men who have long spent the better part of their lives in the Stadium in Broken, that some peacetime activity is “like a war,” or even “is war”; but such only serves to demonstrate how far they have ever lived in remove from any true battlefield or other place of large- scale violence: for war, like all human activities related to the creation or termination of life, is unique, unique in its pain and fearfulness, of course, but unique, perhaps most of all, in its loneliness, as well as in each participant’s terrible lack of certainty — unimaginable until the moment has arrived — of whether or not she or he will survive.

In this case, the sudden realization, felt as a group, that the Guard were in fact not more than a match for the Bane, and that their allotted time on this Earth and in this Life had abruptly expired, added an additional note of horror to the shrieks that increasingly escaped the men of Lord Baster-kin’s creatures that night; and it was a type of cry that made even Stasi, who had seen so much terrible death in her comparatively short time upon the Earth, draw closer to Caliphestros, Keera, and even Veloc, as much to comfort her own soul as to make sure that her friends did not leave their positions and attempt to enter the fray that was taking place in the darkness of the woodland beneath the rocks that sheltered them all.

Finally, the Guardsmen’s religion, their all-important faith in Kafra, failed them at the last. The soldiers of Lord Baster-kin’s Guard had received special sanction from the God-King and the Grand Layzin of Broken before this particular undertaking — sanction not only represented by the beaten bronze bands that they wore clamped to their upper arms, but manifested in their grossly overconfident behavior as they marched into the Wood. Kafra, the priests had already assured the men of the Guard, would provide them special protection and special power. And yet here they were, now, themselves, with death striking at them from out of the darkness at every turn and along every path — including and especially from above. The Bane tactic of dropping down to slash at the throats and other essential parts their enemies’ bodies in an even more sudden and shocking manner than could be managed from their very effective hiding places on the ground was wholly new and especially frightening, for Baster-kin’s men; yet no matter how the latter called out to the god whose smiling countenance was depicted on the bands that encircled their arms, Kafra remained deaf to their pleas. The number of deaths among them — either from wounds or from being hurled over the cliffs above the Cat’s Paw, below which their skulls and bodies would be shattered and mangled upon and overwhelmed by the deadly rocks and rushing waters of Hafften Falls or the Ayerzess-werten—mounted with astonishing speed, and this one relatively confined area of Davon Wood grew ever more littered by and soaked with the bodies, entrails, and blood of soldiers of the Tall.

In short, the encounter proceeded far more successfully than any member of the Bane tribe had dared wish for. For Caliphestros himself, along with Keera and Veloc, nothing demonstrated the triumph and even joy of the Bane troops more than did the heightening, almost mad laughter of Heldo-Bah, who quickly turned from simply keeping watch around the edges of the rock formation upon which his friends and the white panther lay hidden to merrily falling upon any passing Guardsman, whose weapons he delighted in overmatching or even cutting and breaking into pieces — just as Caliphestros had done to him when first they entered the old man’s cave. Never was the file-toothed Bane’s lust for revenge against the servants of Lord Baster-kin, the man he saw as the embodiment of all that was evil in Broken, that city that had used him so ill during his childhood, more amply displayed than during the night of the battle by the Cat’s Paw, when his rage mounted to ever more reckless and gleeful heights. After each quick attack, Heldo-Bah would disappear back into the crevices in the great stone formation that sheltered the others, his lustful merriment almost impossible to contain.

It was hardly likely, given their complete and increasingly triumphant concentration on their slaughter of the Guardsmen, that any Bane would have noticed a lone pair of eyes and ears watching and listening to what was taking place on the woodland side of the river: but the young Guardsman to whom those eyes belonged, a member of the regular watch that patrolled the richest portion of the great Plain, who was as well an inexperienced youth who had been left behind by the larger column because he dared question the wisdom of marching all the other soldiers of the Guard into the Wood for a night attack, soon made his way back north through the grazing ground; and without knowing it, toward Sentek Arnem and the oncoming Talons …

3:{viii:}

Sixt Arnem, having gleaned all that he can from the terrified young member

of Lord Baster-kin’s Guard, receives a bewildering array of visitors …

It had been Sixt Arnem’s firm intention, upon riding to and then beyond the eastern perimeter of the central camp that his Talons were continuing to establish on Lord Baster-kin’s Plain, to take a very stern attitude while interviewing the only surviving member of the First Khotor of Lord Baster-kin’s Guard; but when the commander of the army of Broken sees the condition of the youth he cannot help but relent from this posture. The Guardsman was but a few years older than Arnem’s own son, Dagobert, and although he must ordinarily have been larger in stature than the sentek’s boy, what the lad had seen and heard had made him draw into himself in every manner. Thus vividly reminded not only of his only son, but of his wife and the strange peril he has been told that both she and Dagobert face in the Fifth District of Broken, Arnem crouches down to look the terrified youth full in the face. “Where is your home, son? Do you wish me to send word of your survival back to Broken along with my next packet of dispatches?”

The fearful youth shakes his head vigorously and fearfully. “I would not have my family know that I was not