Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (76 page)

If the elements were not enough to make them cower, or the mountain of smoke and menace that was Zioch did not cause their legs to quiver, then these men could no longer be broken by fear. King Magnus stayed at the edge with each of his legion masters, forcing them to look ahead with him until he was certain that they were unshakable. When he could feel their obedience, pert and hungry as attack hounds, he turned to his commanders and hammer and inwardly smiled at their dirty, determined countenances.

“I shall save my motivations for those not made of pure steel, as you lot are,” he said. “We must decide how we are to wring victory from this travesty. Your ideas, men! Do not wait your turn, speak!”

The warriors and their king conferred in a tight circle. Magnus had a sword, more for show, though he could use it, and he carved a map of the Summerlands and drew the strategies they presented. Smart men, ruthless men were these, warriors of a thousand battles and scars, and there was no wanting for hard tactics. While they had yet to see the Sun King’s army, confronting it head-to-head on the lands outside Zioch would be foolish. Who knew what traps lay under the hot black earth or how dangerous that terrain
would even be to cross? They would lure Brutus to their encampment, then; bury themselves in the Fangs of Dawn like bandits in a pass, and force their enemies through a narrow gauntlet. Many times, the men of the war council steered themselves from discussing how overwhelmed they would be, or the nature of the foes they would face. For after the incident outside the Fangs of Dawn, there could be no doubt of the fate of all those empty villages and missing villagers—of all the merchants, wanderers, and even spies who had failed to warn the world of what Brutus was conjuring here—tens of thousands of men, women, and children surely made into unwilling conscripts for a colossal mindless army. Such a force had been cultivated for a single purpose: the reaping of Geadhain. But again, this they did not consider beyond a trifle lest it invite doubt and weakness. They could not and would not say aloud the stakes if they failed here and the Sun King’s monstrous army was allowed to swarm the land. Nor did a single head raise issue with the king over the dark power driving Brutus, or its mention of Magnus as its son. None of that mattered on the battlefield anyway, not to these steel souls who spoke only in terms of victory and defeat. That was their role, as soldiers. What came after—punishment and rebuilding, they hoped—was for the king, councils, and sages to debate.

Without chronexes or transparency in the bleak sky, the war council broke around what they estimated to be noon. Each of the legion masters saluted and then hurried to his post; so much needed to be done and they had no idea when Brutus would reveal his hand. The king hailed the last of the legion masters as he left.

“Leonitis, stay a moment.”

The Ninth Legion master and leader of the king’s retinue turned on his step. He was the younger brother to Dorvain, master of the North Watch, and they shared the same apparent mother of a mountain and a cinder block. For he was as broad and stoutly muscled as his brother, with custom-crafted armor that still barely fit his girth. Mayhap his position was less stressful than Dorvain’s, for he had managed to keep a full head of brown hair, woven into braids against his scalp. Certainly, his job was less dangerous, for his wide refined face was not as scarred or beaten as his kin’s was, though he shared the same twinkle of metal to his stare as Dorvain. Brother blades they were, though one a chipped great sword and the other a polished broadsword.
Leonitis’s advice had been exceptionally helpful during their strategizing, but the king had a final set of instructions that were for select ears only.

“How may I serve, Your Majesty?” asked Leonitis, as gruff as the hunting cats for which his parents had named him.

“Keep a hundred horses back behind the lines,” said the king. “The men of your legion will trade lance for sword. We need you on foot. Too much cavalry and we shall do little but clutter the pass.”

“My King—”

Magnus smote the big brute with a glance like lightning. “This is not the time to question. Do as I say.”

“I shall!” said Leonitis.

The king dismissed him with a nod and went back to pondering the shadows and ash of his brother’s kingdom. After he and Erik had been alone for some time, the hammer voiced some of the worries he had been harboring.

“Your order…was it for their escape, my King? The horses?”

“I cannot think only of your safety or of the importance of your duties. If there is a chance for others to avoid certain death, then it must be arranged. Even if those men are too brave to hear of exigencies beforehand. If I fail to stop my brother when he and I finally clash, that should be the push that any sensible soldier would need to see a horse and leap upon it. Leonitis is the most level-headed of my commanders; he thinks of others before himself, and not in a cowardly way. I am sure that he will remember my couched intent in a dark moment of decision.”

“Should it come to that,” contended Erik.

A beat.

“Should it come to that,” replied the king.

Erik knew the king well enough to worry over what the pause meant. What bothered him more than the outcome of this conflict was how ambiguous their enemy was.
What do we fight? Brutus? A bodiless spirit? Both evils united, is what it seems, and if so, to what horrid end?
As he stared over the impossible desolation, the questions that he had for his king were as endless as a deep-water spring, which, if he tapped it, might never run out. Unexpectedly, the king allayed many of these misgivings by simply placing a gauntlet upon Erik’s back.

“Son of the Salt Forests,” he whispered, “no matter what remains after the storm of this battle, I am proud that you have come this far in life with me. I have few centuries that I remember, the memories blend like water on glass, but I see our years together with the brightness that parents speak of, or with the camaraderie that soldiers only feel. You are, and always will be, my
son
. Blood will not change that.”

Erik’s black makeup was cut by a tear. “As you are my father.”

And while the encampment behind them bustled with the clangor of war, and the land ahead of them began to tremble from a second drum, a new rumbling—the march of countless synchronized steps—and the hourglass of death dropped its final sands into the chronex, the hammer and his kingfather had their silence; their calm in the storm, their memory of the other before the knowing of how precious that memory would be.

VII

Brutus had acted according to the king’s prediction; the Sun King was a hunter, and not the patient kind that hid in the bushes, but a predator who bashed down the woods while chasing his prey.
He wants this fight and he will come for it
, the king had advised his legion masters, and not long after the council had disbanded, the smoky, unseen gates of Zioch opened. With their shaking spyglasses, scouts could see what approached, wave after wave of people—part metal and part meat—each as unique as a fleshcrafter’s mistake, with no real conformity to their make. There was no end to the freakishness that churned from Zioch’s factory of horrors: rows of cavalry; the knights like pincushions who rode on ebony-stared horses; firecallers who had been pulled from the flames they conjured, somehow still alive, with charred skin, red coals for eyes, and staves of crimson magik in their hands; persons made into golems covered in sheet metal and golden nails; swordsmen and pike-men whose weapons were fused to their fists so that they might never be dropped, their only purpose to kill. The scouts could not believe what they were seeing, how effectively living beings had been turned into weapons, but they were steady in their flow of reports, if not entirely in their nerves and
trembling voices, as they told the legion masters what was coming.
Blackeyes
and
Redeyes
, one clever scout coined them, for a name had to be found for their enemies, and their unearthly stares were the one aspect they shared.

In a few hourglasses since the meeting on the escarpment, the thunder of the Blackeyes’ march shuddered the valley like a heartbeat, and the scouts were relieved to tend to other matters once all could see the dark wave rolling in. Brave, so brave were the king’s men and so set in their valor that the imminence of war and death set their feet and fingers working faster. Weapons were counted, honed, and checked. The field of battle was cleared and trenches were dug. Tents and bedrolls were shredded to make ladders for access to the bluffs of the Fangs of Dawn; from there the thunderstrike archers and sorcerers would rain ruin upon the Sun King’s horde. An advantage perhaps, for the scouts had spotted no artillery among the Blackeyes except for the deadly crimson conjurers; though a more pragmatic opinion shared by the king’s army was that Brutus had no intention or subtlety to the warfare he proposed, and that it was his intent to pulverize them in a swell of bodies. He certainly had enough men to do so, and as the river of Blackeyes swayed toward the king’s camp, it was apparent that they were outnumbered ten or even twenty to one. Still, none of that was important. Every man knew that a victory through force was unreasonable well before the endless stream of foes appeared. Their role, as explained to them by their legion masters, was to dam the tide long enough to give Magnus an opportunity to defeat his brother. Only then would this battle be ended—if the head was taken from the snake.

The Blackeyes were nearly across the valley when the king summoned his men. He would not leave them without words to inspire them, or thanks for the lives that they would dearly pay today. On the field of battle, he met his army, all nine hundred of his fellows as quiet, stiff, and ready as a crop of swords and gathered in half-circle ranks about him. Beyond their king, the sky darkened with evening, and yet the black dawn of Brutus’s army rose and shimmered at his fore. The army’s thousands of footsteps rumbled the land, and they made a fearsome, unified chant of the mad king’s name:
Broo-tus! Broo-tus!
But none of this frightened Magnus’s army, for they had passed the threshold of terror, and they shared in a silence with their fellows that
shut out any distraction. King Magnus rode along the line, shouting to his warriors.

“Men! We stare into a nightmare! Look at this plague my brother has conjured to ravage Geadhain. Look and feed your anger and pride! For who else has seen this danger? Who else will protect our lands, our children? We are alone; I shall not lie to you. We are the single star in a sky of darkness. Therefore, we must shine ever brighter; we must blind the darkness with our deeds! No matter the cost, our line must not be broken! If a new age is to be born from the blood of our sacrifice, then we shall boldly go into what comes beyond! I shall lead that charge! I do not fear an end to my long years as much as I dread my brother’s madness bleeding into the world. If I die, I die for you! For tomorrow! For Geadhain!”

A roar went up through his army, and the king unleashed his blade, which fumed with green power as he threw it into the soil. Where it landed, there was a
whoosh
of flame that spread as if on oil along the length of the escarpment. In specks, the fiery strip had writhed into a wall, and the wind that flickered the tall emerald flames blew frosty, refreshing air onto the army—while cold, that fire would sear whatever passed through it. Quite literally the line had been drawn. With this signal, the footsoldiers went to their ditches, spearmen clanked their shields into phalanxes, knights raced to their mounts, and thunderstrike archers and sorcerers climbed to their perches. The king ascended with them; after his daring speech, he would not sit this battle out, but he needed a bird’s-eye view to find his brother in the horde if their plan was to work. Brigada was left in the care of Erik, and she behaved under him as if he was the king himself while he trotted to join the other mounted men who would lead the charge.

Then came the waiting, along with the dying of whatever cursed sun was hidden. They chanted their own rallying cry of weapons on metal, and a chorus of
For Geadhain!
that while sung by voices many score less than their enemy, was somehow all the grander and louder from hope.
We are the line between chaos and life
, they all thought in one manner or another. Watchmen said their prayers to the fates, or the more learned ones to the Sisters Three, who wove them. And Erik glanced more than once to his kingfather while pressing the lump under his armor that was the king’s testament. He could
not say how, yet he understood in that moment what the talisman was. Magik, yes, but a specific sort of Will: a condensation of love, the Will of a father wishing his son to safety. He was stung by the beauty of it, and he would have hurried to the king to say one more thing that had yet to be said; however, a horn boomed from above. The war had begun.