The Lord Of Lightning (Book 3) (20 page)

"Hallo!?" Arnwylf called, and was answered by chilly silence. "Anybody!?" Arnwylf's voice echoed off of abandoned, smashed walls, tilted, shadowed in the moonlight.

"I have a very bad feeling," Boldson softly nickered.

"Me, too, friend," Arnwylf said with a pat. "Let us find my mother's house and then be rid of this empty city."

A loud crash made both turn. Horse and human held very still, but no other sound followed. They continued into the desolate city. As he rode down the streets of New Rogar Li, Arnwylf thought of Old Rogar Li, the magnificent city that had been nestled in the arms of the old, old trees of the Weald. Arnwylf had never seen Old Rogar Li. It had been burned to the ground by the invading garonds last year. New Rogar Li was a flat, graceless city of small halls and houses built of plain, lumbered wood, squatting on the edge of the Weald.

Arnwylf guided Boldson down several streets to the house of Wynnfrith, a humble, small house, painted green, with wood carvings of the great trees of old, carved by the master woodworkers of the Weald, adorning the sidings of the house.

"I will be but a moment," Arnwylf said to Boldson as he slid off the horse's back.

Wynnfrith's house had been untouched by this more recent fire, but doors and windows had been smashed and the whole structure stood leaning as though it would fall with the slightest breeze.

Arnwylf pulled the front door open, and the door came away from its hinges, splintering. The black opening beckoned like the mouth of a dragon. Arnwylf had never lived in this house. When his mother lived here, he was north, sieging Ravensdred in the Ancient Fortress uncovered from the melting Ice Fields of Eann.

All was dust and wreckage inside. It seemed as though his mother had not saved anything when the rest of Rogar Li fled. Everything was as Arnwylf remembered it, the one and only time he visited.

Arnwylf carefully picked his way past shattered, wooden beams to his mother's room. The hallway, tilted from the structural damage to the house, gave him a slight feeling of vertigo. All was ruin and debris inside. Something large had been rooting about in Wynnfrith's old home.

Arnwylf, ignorant of the events of the past three moonths, had hoped to see his family and the rest of the Wealdkin, but now wished to find some token of his father to take away.

Arnwylf knew where to look. His mother had created a shrine to the memory of Kellabald of Bittel, her husband, and Arnwylf's father, treacherously slain at the Battle of the Eastern Meadowlands.

A standing cupboard, simply made, with no adornment, stood in a corner. Kellabald's spear leaned against the cupboard. Arnwylf reached out and touched the spear with the tips of his fingers. He remembered this spear from when he was a little child. He now recognized, but didn't when he was a child, the markings of Reian royalty on the spear. His father was fourth in line to the throne of Reia. Now Arnwylf was heir to the throne, only behind his second cousin, Hetwing.

Arnwylf carefully opened the cupboard. Inside, were clothes, and a shirt of chain mail. Arnwylf pulled the chain mail out of the cupboard. It fastened in the back. This was where the traitor Apghilis had run his sword into his father's back. The chain mail was still caked with dried blood. Arnwylf carefully set the chain mail down. He pulled out the shirt of simple cloth and tanned leather trousers. Both were stained with dried blood. Arnwylf turned the shirt over. In the back of the shirt was a gaping hole where Apghilis' sword had entered his father's body. Arnwylf tenderly touched the hole.

His emotions were a mix of tender sadness and growing rage.

Arnwylf thought back to when he was twelve years old. Haergill, Halldora, and their daughter had been living in Bittel for four years.

Haergill treated Arnwylf as the son he had always desired. But, Arnwylf was constantly wary of the large, muscular man who seemed to be ever looking at the shadows and margins, waiting for something to catch up to him.

The three families had lived happily: Kellabald, Wynnfrith, and Arnwylf; Haergill, Halldora and Frea; and Arnwylf's grandparents, Alrhett and Yulenth. The outside world seemed far away and forgotten in hidden Bittel. They had whatever they needed, fresh water, fish from the stream, vegetables grown in their gardens, and game from the meadowland.

Whatever they needed, that they didn't have in Bittel, they could always find in Alfhich, the large fishing town only half a day's walk away.

Arnwylf remembered, it was Arnwylf's twelfth summer, Frea's eleventh birthday was a fortnight away. Two days before, Haergill and his father had gone to Alfhich to purchase swords with the increasing sighting of garonds on the meadowland.

While they were gone, a strange visitor came to their village. Arnwylf couldn't remember the visitor's name, but Arnwylf knew that the visitor's presence upset Haergill, when he returned from Alfhich with Kellabald. Haergill was surprised and uncharacteristically quiet as he first laid eyes on the stranger.

A palpable tension filled the village as the visitor spoke in sneering hints.

After the visitor left, Arnwylf remembered the strain and silence that filled the village for the next two days. Frea had caught Arnwylf and told him, in the shadows of a willow, that she and her family might have to flee Bittel. And, if they did, Frea made Arnwylf solemnly promise to find her once he was old enough to travel on his own. Arnwylf swore he would.

Then, the rain came. A warm, persistent, heavy, summer rain.

Arnwylf remembered being awoken by the crash of thunder. His father and Haergill stumbled into the small house of his father. Both men were dirty as though they had been digging up beets, or turnips. Arnwylf remembered that both men had wounds that Halldora and Wynnfrith attended to with care.

But as their wounds were bound, Haergill and his father seemed to smile to each other, and then laugh as if a great burden had been lifted from their shoulders. The rest of the summer had been light and merriment. The summer rains passed, and life was good.

Boldson screamed and Arnwylf snapped out of his reverie.

Arnwylf grabbed his father's spear.

Arnwylf burst out of his mother's ruined house, but Boldson was nowhere to be seen. The streets of Rogar Li were silent and cold.

Arnwylf turned, looking for any sign of life or movement. The chilly breeze that had followed him and his horse into town was now dead. All was deathly still.

"Boldson!?" Arnwylf carefully called.

A crashing sound came from inside Wynnfrith's house. Arnwylf turned just as a massive vyreeoten burst from the front door, shattering the frame of the doorway. Vyreeoten were unnatural sea serpents with huge, horse shaped heads; large, black eyes; disgusting, insect-like mouths with two, long, mandible fangs; and long, thin arms ending with vicious, sharp claws. They often came on land, but preferred water.

The vyreeoten squished its long, worm-like body at Arnwylf, mouth agape, shrieking a high pitched, unnerving squeal. As the enormous beast charged at Arnwylf, he instinctively raised his father's spear. The metal head of the spear slid off the animal's head, as the strange, otherworldly animals easily repulsed all metal. Arnwylf was knocked off his feet, but rolled away and up to a ready stance.

Arnwylf heard the crashing of other vyreeoten coming from other parts of the city, converging on his position, responding to the squealing call of their vile brother.

The vyreeoten snapped at Arnwylf with the speed of a serpent, but Arnwylf held the spear up to block the vicious bite. Instead the Vyreeoten clamped down on Arnwylf's spear and shattered it in two. Without hesitating, Arnwylf drove the jagged, wooden end of one half of the spear into the vyreeoten's eye. The wood haft went deep. Arnwylf thrust the other half of the spear, jagged, wood end, deep into the vyreeoten's open mouth and then jerked it up into its brain.

The massive sea creature shuddered, worked its head spasmodically, and then thudded to the dust, dead.

"Boldson!" Arnwylf called.

Another vyreeoten turned a corner at the end of the street, undulating its vomitus body at a furious pace, right at Arnwylf. Another vyreeoten crashed through the wall of a house opposite and followed the other closely.

"Horse!!!" Arnwylf cried. Then, Arnwylf turned and ran down the street. He dared not look back as he knew the two vyreeoten were gaining on him. He could hear the rapid squishing of their bodies closing.

Boldson broke from a side street and ran next to Arnwylf, who grabbed the horse's mane and vaulted himself onto the horse's back.

"Run, Horse, run!" Arnwylf cried as he righted himself on Boldson's back. "Run, or we are dead!"

Boldson broke into an unrestrained gallop. His four legs pumped with all the strength he had left. 

Another vyreeoten burst from the wall of a house just beside Boldson and lunged, just missing the horse.

Arnwylf looked back. As impossible as it seemed, the three vyreeoten were gaining on the horse. Arnwylf looked ahead. Just up the road, at the end of the city, was a barrier someone had constructed by piling up whatever wood they could find in a line across the street. Boldson easily cleared the barrier, but Arnwylf knew the vyreeoten would simply smash through the flimsy structure.

As they cleared the barrier, Arnwylf suddenly noticed a man crouching on the other side. The man cradled a torch that he quickly thrust into the barrier.

"Die, demons!" The man shouted as the barrier, soaked with oil, burst ablaze just as the three vyreeoten hit the wall of stacked debris.

Arnwylf pulled on Boldson's mane to stop him, and turn him around to watch. All three vyreeoten squealed that nauseating, high pitched shriek as their bodies caught fire. The long, snake-like animals thrashed and quivered as the fire quickly consumed their vile, unnatural carcasses.

"Arnwylf?" The man said. Arnwylf squinted at the man.

"Yulenth!" Arnwylf cried and jumped from his horse to embrace his grandfather by marriage.

"Quickly, Arnwylf," Yulenth said, and pulled his own horse from the shadows. "There are many other vyreeoten in New Rogar Li, and I have been sent to take you somewhere important."

Arnwylf and Yulenth mounted their horses and rode, at a full gallop, like a furious wind, to the west.

The Syrenf River was a lazy, meandering river that flowed through the flat, even land between the Madrun Hills and Harvestley. Most of the river had quite steep banks of thick turf with shrubs and scrawny trees trying to make a go of the thin sod that lay just on top of a thick chalk bed that underlay all of the Syrenf Plain. The Syrenf River was a small river, not rushing and insistent like the Bairn River, nor expansive and profound like the  Holmwy River, but deep enough for long boats to row all the way up its winding turns to the citadel of the Dark Lord.

There were very few towns or farms along the river, since the land to the East or West was much more fertile. Only a little digging would reveal the thick chalk beneath the sod of the plain. As a consequence, there were few trees and no woodlands.

The shunned land was the perfect environment for the Evil One's citadel. He brought his bricks from his dismantled citadel in the Far Grasslands, when Byland was still whole. The Dark One, with bricks from the despoiled elvish city of Lanis Rhyl Landemiriam, without notice or hindrance, created his impressive edifice, working surreptitiously until it was too late for any human of Wealdland to make a difference.

A portion of the featureless land near the River Syrenf was perpetually clouded with a thick, white mist generated somehow from the vile castle. Humans, when they first discovered the shrouding miasma, tried to assail Deifol Hroth's citadel, but lost many regiments, and the Weald's greatest Captain, Maginalius, brother to High Judge Summeninquis. The edifice of the Dark Lord was perfectly protected on a land with no seeming nature defenses, a flat, open, featureless plain. The whole citadel was a defiant challenge to the humans of Wealdland. Sometimes the top of the central tower of Deifol Hroth's citadel could be seen through the swirling, white murk.

The human encampment had been purposefully established between the shrouded castle and the River Syrenf. The human leaders knew the Dark Lord received supplies and troops from afar via the river to the Mere of Lanis, the ocean. The remnants of the human nations knew they had to throw down the Evil One and raze his citadel, but all attempts had been deathly futile. The human encampment became a manifestation of impotence and frustration.

Stralain, Captain of the armies of the Weald strode among the masses of humans.

He knocked at a quickly constructed, shaky building meant to imitate the destroyed Great Halls of the Northern Kingdom of Man.

"Stomikother?" Stralain called into the darkened doorway. There were no guards waiting at the doorway, which troubled Stralain. A young warrior passed out of the hall, and Stralain grabbed him by the arm.

"Where are the warriors of Man?" Stralain asked the young man.

"You do not know?" The young warrior sneered. "I suppose the Wealdkin are always the last to act against the enemy."

"What enemy?" Stralain asked, but the young soldier of Man rudely shrugged off the Captain and stalked away with a derisive huff.

Stralain had heard no call to arms and so, with his teeth set on edge, he followed the young warrior.