The War Of The Black Tower (Book 3) (26 page)

THE WAR OF THE MOONSTONE

(
an
excerpt)

Jack Conner

Copyright
2013

Cover
image used with permission

Chapter
1

Wolves ranged throughout the forest, howling furiously,
sending fear before them like a plague. Their howls shook the stones of the
great fortress that reared from the cliffs of the mountain, the fortress where
the wolf-lord lived. And in his hall, upon his throne, he sat and waited.

Presently a shadow stepped from
behind a pillar, its eyes shining yellow in the dimness of the chamber.

“I am here.”

Vrulug, the wolf-lord, smiled at
his visitor’s stealth, though his guards put their hands to the hilts of their
swords. He waved them away.

“Step forward,” he said.

The shadow obeyed. The low, leaping
red light of the braziers revealed it, an inch at a time. It was a man, or at
least it appeared like one for the moment—tall and dark and wild, broad of
shoulder, deep of chest, unclad. The smell of blood rose from him. Though he
stepped forward, his face remained in shadow, and his eyes glinted from the
darkness.

“I’m yours to command, my lord. What
would you have of me?” Raugst’s voice betrayed only a slight edge. He had been
called away from the hunt and clearly longed to rejoin it.

“Something
important.”
Vrulug dismissed his Borchstog guards, and they left
grumbling, obviously not pleased at the thought of their lord alone with the visitor
,
perhaps even jealous of the intimacy
it shared with him. Smoke from a nearby urn drifted across the room, and from
somewhere the cry of a tortured prisoner echoed off the walls.

“I need for you to infiltrate the
Wesrains,” Vrulug said, without preamble.

Raugst lifted his eyebrows in
appreciation. Then, smoothly, he bowed his head. “It shall be done, my lord.”

“Good.” Vrulug relaxed. Raugst
would do well, as he always did. “Grand times are approaching, my friend.
The
grand times.”
He lowered his voice. “The Master . . . makes His move.” He let the words
stretch out, making each one important.

“Truly?”
There
was genuine surprise in Raugst’s voice. When Vrulug inclined his head, Raugst’s
eyes glittered with a different sort of light than before. “I did not think it
would be so soon.”

“Nor did I, yet
the hour of His victory approaches.
What’s more,
we will make it happen
.” He let the importance of that sink in,
then
clapped his hands. A servant emerged from an alcove
with a platter bearing a bottle and two sparkling glasses. The servant filled
each glass with red fluid, fine wine laced with human blood, and Vrulug and
Raugst both took one.

“To the One,” Vrulug said, and
Raugst echoed the words.

They drank. The howling of the
wolves outside reached a crescendo, and Raugst cocked his head, listening.

“Do you miss the hunt?” Vrulug said.
“I know I drew you away too soon.”

Raugst smiled.
“On
the contrary, my lord.
I have new prey now.”

“Here!
This way!”

Giorn Wesrain spurred his mount,
pushing on through the forest. His brothers followed, close at his heels.
Ahead fled the great boar-like creature that had been terrorizing
nearby villages of late.
Its grunts and squeals sent shivers down his
spine.

He burst out into a clearing. The
massive, wooly beast ran ahead of him, around an outcropping of rock, over a
knoll, then into the forest once more. The behemoth reeked of blood and death. Giorn
followed, head lowered, thighs pressed into his mount’s flanks. His eyes stayed
fixed on the great black shape. It must weigh upwards of a thousand pounds, a
nightmarish abomination that only vaguely resembled a natural boar. Two of
Giorn’s arrows sprouted from its flank, and blood trickled down its hide.

Cypresses loomed ahead, and over
the thumping of his horse’s hooves Giorn heard water. Leaves whipped at his
face. He ducked, his heart pounding fiercely in his chest.
Hurry
, he told himself. He had to kill the thing before it
endangered his brothers. As the Baron’s oldest son, it was Giorn’s
responsibility to end the creature, but it was not theirs.

“There!” cried Meril, the middle
son.

“No, I think I saw it go that way!”
said
Rian
.

They
shouldn’t have come
. They were too proud, and they wanted revenge for the
villagers the creature had slain. Giorn urged his horse on, faster. The boar
plunged through the trees and into the undergrowth, vanishing into the darkness
of the forest. Giorn rode after it, tense and wary. He could no longer see it,
no longer hear it. Where had it gone? One hand strayed toward the lance in its
bracket—

Growls, then
howling.

The hounds! They’d found it.

Steering his horse toward the
sounds, he came upon the great beast, black and tusked, its wooly coat matted
with decaying material; it had literally wallowed in a mound of bodies in the
cavern lair Giorn had flushed it from. It had its back to the stream, which was
too wide and raging for even it to cross. To its fore were three hounds. One
sprawled on the ground, still and lifeless.

Even as Giorn arrived, one of the
remaining hounds leapt at the monster’s side. The boar swung its massive head,
catching the hound on the point of a tusk and flinging it away. Giorn’s heart
wrenched, as he had trained the hounds himself and loved them well.

He snatched at his bow and readied
an arrow.
Fired.
Hit.
Fired again.
Quivering, the shafts stood out from the monster’s head and neck, but the
creature did not even seem to notice.

The last hound lunged for its
throat. The boar-thing swung its head, and the dog’s broken body hurtled to the
ground.

Giorn readied another arrow, fingers
trembling.
Drew back the string to his ear, aimed and loosed.
The arrow flew directly into the beast’s right eye. It squealed but did not go
down. Instead, it lowered its long, broad head, fixing Giorn with its remaining
eye, small and hateful, and charged.

Giorn jerked at his horse’s reins,
hauling it to the side. He just barely dodged the black, furred beast as it
barreled past. Instantly he heard the sounds of heavy flesh striking flesh. A
horse neighed in fear and pain. His brother
Rian
screamed.

Horrified, Giorn wheeled about,
lifting his lance from his bracket.
Rian
was down,
his entrails spilling across the leaf-strewn ground. His horse, a bloody mess,
mewled beside him.

Giorn felt something twist inside
him.
“
Rian
!”

The boar rammed Meril’s horse next.
Its tusks ripped deep into the horse’s side, and, screaming, the animal crashed
to the ground. Meril jumped clear. He hit the ground, rolled, and stayed down.

The boar moved toward him, who had
apparently landed badly, twisting an ankle. Giorn couldn’t reach him in time.
Giorn cocked his lance and flung it as hard as he could. The lance sailed
through the air, straight toward the beast, and blood spurted where it struck.
The creature screamed.

Still
it kept its feet, though it staggered and shook its head. Giorn swore. No
natural being could have resisted such a wound.
A thing of Oslog, it must be
.

He guided his mount around
Rian
as he readied his bow. He needed to distract the
creature. The beast was already nearing Meril, foam fizzling on its snout. Flies
buzzed about its gory tusks.

Meril’s face paled. Shakily, he
reached for his dagger and ripped it free. It glinted in the vague light that
fell through the tall trees, but the weapon seemed a puny thing compared to the
wooly vastness of the boar.

It all happened very fast. One
moment Giorn was approaching the beast even as it descended on Meril, who was
all but helpless against it. Then, suddenly, a wild shape burst from the
undergrowth, hunting knife bared and flashing.

The stranger caught the beast by
surprise. He wrapped one arm around its neck as far as it could go, bracing
himself, and with the other he plunged his blade under the beast’s jaw and
jerked it sideways, slitting the monster’s throat from ear to ear. Blood
sprayed everywhere, drenching Meril. The boar stumbled, collapsed to its knees,
and then, at last, fell to its side, dead.

The stranger, who bore a tusk wound
on his chest, gasped for breath and clung to his kill like a drowning man to a
log. Meril stared at him, too shocked to wipe the blood from his face.

Giorn shook off his surprise and
climbed down from his horse. He knelt beside
Rian
,
who was trying to gather up his guts and stuff them back into his body. Shame
and grief welled up in Giorn as he stroked his brother’s hair and kissed his
forehead.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I failed
you.”

Rian
tried
to smile. Blood came up. “You did the best you could, brother mine.” His voice
came weak and gasping, but even so it carried his usual cavalier tone. “At
least I saw the beast die first. Even now it paves the way to hell for me.”

“You won’t go to the hells,” Giorn
said. He found
Rian’s
hand and gripped it tight.
“You’ll find the Lights of Sifril, and they will guide you to paradise.”

Rian
chuckled, a ghastly sight with the blood coating his teeth, then the luster in
his eyes faded and he sagged. For a long moment, Giorn remained beside him, and
the wind whispered through the trees. Then the elder brother mastered himself
and rose. A quick look showed the stranger bending over Meril, helping him stand.
Both were drenched in blood, not all of it from the beast.

“You’re wounded,” Giorn said,
noting the tusk wound on the stranger’s chest.

The man shrugged. “What is the life
of a woodsman compared to that of a
lordling
?” He was
tall and sturdily-built, Giorn saw, rugged but with
a
keenness
to his dark eyes that spoke of intelligence and character.

Giorn clapped him on the shoulder.
“What may I call you?”

“Raugst.”
And
he smiled.

Shortly Giorn’s retainers arrived, and he aided them in
building a litter for
Rian’s
body. His manservant
Hanslib carried a flask of whiskey, and Giorn shared this generously with Meril
and Raugst as his retainers built a second, larger litter for the beast. Its
head would adorn his mantle back home, of that Giorn would make certain.

“I owe you my life,” Meril told the
woodsman, lifting the flask in a toast.
“To your long health.”

He drank,
then
handed the flask to Raugst, who graciously said, “To yours.”

“What sort of name is Raugst for a
woodsman?” asked Giorn.

“I hail from the border. Names are
different there.”

Giorn could tell from the bitter
tone in his voice which border Raugst meant, and he nodded. Oslog, the empire
of the Dark One, bordered the kingdom
of Felgrad to the south.
It had stood poised on the brink of destroying its northern neighbors for ages,
but so far the united kingdoms of the so-called Crescent Alliance, of which
Felgrad was a part, had held Gilgaroth, the Breaker, the Wolf, Lord of the
Second Hell, at bay.

“The beast must have been a thing
from the South,” Meril said, gesturing to the bloody corpse of the boar. Flies
gathered to it, and it was beginning to stink in the sultry afternoon air.
Rian
will not be far behind
, Giorn thought.
“It was no thing of these parts.”

“Likely enough,” Giorn
said,
who had had similar thoughts. “It could have been sent
by Vrulug himself.”

The Enemy’s chief agent in this quarter,
Vrulug had tried to raze Felgrad for a hundred generations. Some said it was
only the presence of the Moonstone, guarded by the Temple of Illiana
in
Hielsly, that
had stymied him for so long.

“I saw that and worse growing up in
the highlands,” Raugst said, eyes on the behemoth. “The creatures of the
Breaker are ravenous and cruel. They kill for pleasure.
For
sport.
Death to them all!”

“Here
here
!”

Giorn looked Raugst in the eye. “You
must come with us back to Thiersgald. Father will want an account of
Rian’s
death. And he will want to meet the man that saved
Meril.”

Raugst bowed his head.
“As my lord commands.”

With a heavy heart, Giorn led the
way back through the dense autumn forest. Though the many great pines were
still green, the majestic cypresses and elms and ash were skeletal and forlorn.
A cold breeze rustled Giorn’s hair and sent shivers through his body. Meril
broke out in a low dirge, and after some time Giorn joined him. They sang of
fallen warriors being born to the heavens by flights of angels and of the
weeping wives left behind. The retainers sang, also, and not just out of
loyalty; they had loved
Rian
well.

Raugst, likely unfamiliar with the
local songs, remained silent, sitting grim and dark atop the horse Giorn had
provided him.

They passed through the first
villages of Fiarth, and word spread from block to block as the procession
passed through. The villagers donned their blackest garments and lined the
streets to either side of Giorn’s party. Some carried candles. All bowed their
heads respectfully, and many of the men thumped their chests in a warrior’s
salute as
Rian
was dragged by. Giorn had placed his
brother’s body with his arms crossed over his chest and with his
longsword
depending from them. He’d died protecting his
people and deserved the funeral rites of a valiant warrior. Giorn would see to
it that a song was written in his honor.