The Mountain of Bones

In the red wastelands on the horizon of empire, two armies stalked one another like beasts by night. The red sun blazed down as Shath drove his army across the stony red desert toward the jagged outline of the black mountains that reared against the deep violet sky. The claws of the war-beasts churned up a great pillar of dust, and so there was no concealing where he marched, but none could predict where he might turn.

Ahead of him the mountains were stark and dagger-sharp, and he knew of at least three passes through them that he might take. He knew, from Ellai’s inner sight, that a great army of the enemy awaited him, but they shifted restlessly, and he did not know if they meant to meet him or to try and slip around and flank him by night. The mountains were the boundary between the desolate regions of the western empire and the settled, fertile lands beyond. Once he crossed them, he would be lodged within the empire’s very heart, and he would mark his path with blood.

They camped through the heat of the day, sheltering among rocks and beneath the stone overhangs of ancient waterways, now long dry. The urugan raised their pavilion for Ellai, and Shath joined her, sat beside her in the cool darkness and took her hand when she offered it. “Tell me what you see,” he said.

Her eyes were closed, and her breath stirred the thin silk of the veil she wore across her pale face. “There is a power that guards them, and I cannot see clearly. There are images and echoes that seem made to deceive me. I see a vast army, footmen, riders, and giants made of flesh and darkness. There is a rider who commands, and something with him – a mind without a body. It. . . it speaks to other minds across the far distances, it speaks to a dark one who walks the horizons.”

“The emperor,” Shath said, his jaw set with lines of anger and pain. He flexed his iron right hand. “He controls his army from afar.”

“I believe he does,” she said. Her eyelids fluttered like moth wings. “There are engines of war with them. Machines that smoke and burn and are tended by men who worship them like gods.” She flinched, recoiling from something unseen, and then she opened her eyes. “They are hidden from me now.” She looked at him. “There are many thousands of them. They have been sent to face and destroy you, and they are more than we are. Three of them for each two of the urugan, and their war machines will kill many upon many.”

He leaned closer. “You know I have a weapon to equal them. But I must know where they are.”

Slowly, Ellai drew back a corner of the rug she sat on and traced forms in the dust with her fingertip. “There are two passes wide and open enough for them to pass. They want to wait until you are crossing and then strike you from behind with riders, pin you in place, and then strike like a hammer. They are here.” She drew a line in the dust. “They await you behind the northernmost pass, with riders detached and ready to move through the southernmost, here.”

Shath nodded, picturing the passes as he knew them. The northernmost pass was wider, best for quick movement of foot troops and engines. There was a plateau near the highest point, beside a black lake and below the shadow of the tallest peak. “Then we will draw them to us. At dawn we will move into the northern pass, and take a position beside the lake. We will wait for them.”

“Defense does not suit your warriors,” Ellai said. “Riders must have room to charge and not stand against one.”

“I shall give them room,” he said. “Let the enemy come against me – they shall learn I possess a sword such as they have never seen.”

o0o

Dawn cut crimson across the far horizons, and Shath led his army into the mountain pass. The rock here was black and bitter, jagged as broken swords. In his black armor he was a figure as cut from volcanic glass, keen and deadly. At his back came the hordes of his misshapen warriors, hungry for blood and battle, eager to taste and deal death. They were an uncomplicated race, forged into harshness by their unforgiving homeland, and he understood them as he did all weapons.

The land rose higher, and the air was clear and clean, blowing in from the purple shadows of the dreaming eastlands. In his mind he saw again the sea, cold and roiling beneath the bright stars. He would see it again, wash blood from his hands in the salted waves. Sword in hand, he rode higher and higher into the pass, until he saw the black waters of the lake still in the morning light; above them reared the shadow of the high peak of the mountain chain, narrow and sharp like a spear. Here, he would carve a mark of terror into his enemy’s heart.

The horde arrayed itself for war, and then he sent forth his scouts to watch for the enemy, and he waited. If they expected him to come through the pass and allow them to spring their trap on him, they would be frustrated. He bade his men gather the scrub brush that grew around the silent lake and set great fires, sending smoke billowing up into the sky as the sun rose crimson over the dead mountain peaks. Beneath smoke and the red sun and the stars of the day he waited, iron hand curling and uncurling, and then the enemy came.

He felt the tread of the foot in the vanguard, rank upon rank of soldiers all in black, skulls formed upon the masks of their helms, spears upright like a grim harvest. The sound of their marching formations was like thunder beneath the earth. Behind them rose the dust of thousands of riders, grim in their tall helms and with lances gleaming dark in the red light. Among them moved the hulking forms of the giants birthed from the unclean depths of Zur. They bellowed with the pain of their cold existence, dragging behind them swords that gouged the earth like plows. Above the beasts of the sky screamed and circled like hungry carrion-feasters, lightning glimmering at their command.

Shath gave a sign, and his warriors began their war-chants, beating sword and axe and spear against their shield-rims, shouting all as one again and again. They chanted words they no longer knew the meaning of, lost in the history that had made them into monsters. Now those words meant death to their enemies, and they set the mountain plateau echoing with them.

He watched the enemy army form, and he saw them drag the war-machines into view. Great towering things that smoked and gouged the earth with their toothed wheels. Slaves pulled with superhuman effort to move them into position, their eyes blank and their wills not their own. A power moved behind the army, a will that Shath felt like a pressure against his mind.

The beasts stirred and the urugan shouted in defiance as that inhuman mind began to push against them. Shath remembered the power of the emperor, and while this was not as strong, he knew the taste of it. An enslaved mind made into an enslaver, radiating a power to master the will and break the minds of others.

The war engines began to belch fire into the air, and they sent a first volley of flaming bolts through the sky to strike the earth where they erupted and shattered the stone. They were finding the range, preparing for a terrible rain that would scatter and weaken the urugan clans before the army pressed forward to crush them. They would be burned and broken, paralyzed by the alien mind, and then slaughtered.

Shath would not allow it. Looking down the slope he measured the distance, and he watched as a heavy wagon was dragged to a high, rocky promontory. He felt the power emanating from it, and he knew that was the sarcophagus that bore the unseen mind. There he would strike with a sword unimagined. As fire began to rain down around him, he raised his iron hand and called upon the power he had carried away with him out of the forest of death.

Blue light danced in his eyes, lancing through his mind like a steel edge. He saw, or seemed to see, the world stretched forth before him, as from a tremendous height. Mountains were little more than shadows, and the clouds in the sky were like mist upon the grass. Blue traceries drew themselves upon the world, making a network of lines and convergences, and he moved one such to lie upon the promontory, and then he called out to the sky.

The sky answered, or something in the sky answered, and he felt a torrent of incomprehensible knowledge flood through him, unstoppable and magnificent, and then on high, among the stars, there was a light. A new light.

A column of azure light lanced down from above, touched the earth and marked it. He felt a confusion, a moment of terror from the reaching power of the slave mind, and then the sky blossomed with blue fire. There was a thunder high above, the air splitting apart and roaring as something burned through it.

There came a moment of terrible silence, and then a lance of brilliant power punched down from the sky and struck the earth like a thunderbolt, and there was a breath when it made no sound. The ground heaved up, pulled into the sky, coiling and rolling over itself, dust and soil and smoke all together. The mind screamed as it was obliterated, and then the shockwave lashed across them all, knocking men and beasts to the ground as half the enemy army was annihilated in moments.

A wall of dust and smoke washed over them all, and the air filled with the glowing embers of their disintegrated enemies. Shath drew his sword and screamed aloud for the charge, spurred his horned steed into the teeth of the storm of destruction. Fearless, the urugan recovered from their awe and rushed after him, a great wave of destruction driven into the towering winds.

The stroke from the sky had torn the heart from the enemy, and now they milled in confusion, stumbling through a sudden wasteland of destruction, the very sky darkened with a towering cloud of ash and smoke. Shath and his warriors crushed over them like a tide, cutting down all in their path. He struck and struck again, cleaving through flesh and bone with the terrible strength of his iron hand. The urugan shouted as they slew, leaving a field of dead and dying behind them, trampled beneath the claws of their beasts.

They shattered the foot and pushed through, drove like a spear into the heart of the riders, and the battle became a lightless hell of chaos and blood. Spears meshed and ground like the teeth of machines, and swords reaped a terrible harvest. Shath drove forward, letting nothing stop him. Ahead of him blazed the towering form of a war machine, fire consuming it, transforming the whole into a pillar of flame. By the light he killed and killed until the slain lay like a bulwark before him and his sword and arm were dyed with blood.

Then something immense moved in the darkness, a storm-torn beast-man towering overhead. One of the inhuman giants bred in darksome pits to become war-engines of flesh and bone. Its footfalls shook the earth, and it howled as it stumbled through the firestorm, driven to madness by pain and battle-lust. It struck at him with a great jagged-toothed mace, and the blow dashed him from the saddle and flung him to the earth beside his shattered steed. He looked up at the monumental shadow of doom, and he gripped his sword and howled forth his battle cry.

It smashed its mace down upon him like a hammer, and he threw himself aside, clawed to his feet and then rushed in to hew at the scaled legs, cutting the armored flesh and shedding black blood. It roared and struck at him again, and again. Each blow drove him back, and he found himself forced up the slope toward the peak that now loomed all but unseen above, like a shadow.

The ground grew steeper, and he clawed his way backward, clinging to the jagged stone with his flesh hand while he held his sword poised in his iron grip to deliver a deathblow. The giant climbed after him, bleeding and bellowing, reaching for him with black talons that scored the stone like chisels. It towered over him, black as the shadow of doom, and jaws filled with misshapen teeth gnashed and dripped venom.

It reached for him and he struck like a war-god out of the ancient days, sword cutting through bone and skein until the great hand hung from a single strip of flesh, blood pouring from it to hiss upon the volcanic stone. The giant howled into the storm and lightning flickered and scored the earth, red lances called down by the swirling dust and burning sky.

Shath hurled himself upon the titan, and he clutched its thorny hide as he hammered terrible sword-strokes upon it. He split its face apart, and then hacked through the side of its armored skull. Sparks sprayed from where his steel bit through the iron scales, and blood flowed like a flood.

It reached for him, and he hewed away its fingers, then he braced himself and cut into the heavy neck, chopping again and again, until it stumbled back and fell from the rocky hillside to crash in ruin upon the stone below. Shath went down atop it, broke his fall with the flesh of the body, and then tumbled away to lie upon the corpse-choked ground.

The wind was beginning to push away the dust and smoke, leaving them all to dwell in the twilight world beneath the towering cloud. Now, as the smoke began to clear away, he saw the full extent of the destruction he had wrought with the power of the sword from the sky.

The place where the blow had come to earth was no longer a promontory, but a crater welded deep into the rock, still glowing red from the heat, boiling with smoke that rose up into the pillar to the heavens. The hillsides were blasted and scarred by fire, and where there had stood a great mass of imperial legions, now there was only blackened bone scattered across the smoking rock. The war machines had been knocked over and still burned, and the remaining giants lay broken and slain.

The horde of the urugan still crashed against the remaining foot soldiers, spears and shields grinding against one another in a hideous tumult. Now, when they could see the fate of their companions, and without the inhuman mind to drive them onward, the will of the legions began to break.

Shath watched as the formations began to splinter and come apart. First it was a few, and then more and more, until the shield walls gave way and the black-armored foot began to flee. Merciless, his riders pursued them, cutting them down as they streamed back down the pass.

He caught a riderless beast and swung into the saddle. He gave a signal and war-horns blew, calling his riders back from their slaughter. Now he looked to the west and began to reform his army into a front that blocked the pass and faced back the way they had come. That way he saw a shadow, and he knew that hither came the force of riders meant to catch him from behind. The red sun shone through the clouds of smoke and glimmered upon thousands of spearpoints.

They did not know what had happened, even the sight of the great cloud and the terrible sound of the sword from the sky could not tell them what had become of their allies, and so they came onward until they were close enough, and then Shath hurled his army down the slope in a headlong charge that shattered them like clay men. Expecting an enemy caught unaware and under pressure from the front, instead they faced superior numbers in full attack, and they gave way.

Shath did not join the charge. He only sat on his steed and watched as his warriors drove the enemy back down the mountain, leaving the dead strewn in their wake. Violet lightning played along the mountain peaks, and the ashes of his enemies swirled around him like glowing embers. The red sun cast his shadow upon the ground, and it stretched long.

o0o

When night came, the extent of his victory was plain. Half the imperial legions had been destroyed with a single blow, and then his men had slaughtered half of what remained. The broken remnants had fled into the hillsides, and with the loss of their supplies and mounts, they would pose no danger at all. The urugan had gathered hundreds of stray steeds, mountains of food and supplies, and looted armor and weapons as they liked. They had made a great harvest of the heads of the dead and dying, and piled them in a heap there beside the black lake, taller than six men standing one upon the other.

They rode down from the pass with the last light, leaving behind the ruin of the battlefield and the still-smoking crater of the destruction Shath had called down. They encamped upon the gentler grasslands on the eastern slopes, and there was water and food in plenty. The urugan howled their victory songs and drank blood mixed with their wine. The stars and the broken moon echoed with their cries, and the creatures of the dark fell silent.

Shath returned to the silken pavilion where Ellai awaited him. As always, he saw no joy in battle in her eyes, and he knew this was what divided them. She could encompass war as a means toward some other end, but she took no pleasure in it whether in victory or in defeat.

“Now you have opened a war you cannot stop,” she said. “The emperor will know you. He will know you have the power to defeat him. When next he comes against you, he will call forth all the power he can.”

“Let him,” Shath said. “I fell before him once, but now I have power of my own. I choose to make war upon an empire, and I would do it alone, if need be.”

“I know,” she said. “But I cannot see beyond the darkening ahead of us. I cannot know what he will do, and I fear that blindness.”

He held up his iron hand and clenched it into a fist. “Do not fear for me,” he said. “I have hungered for this contest. Let him call forth his greatest powers, his armies and machines and unclean arts. I will contend with him, and one of us shall die. That is all I ask.” He looked into the fire. “Let there be a war that will crack the earth in all its fury. Let there be a loosing of wrath, and a breaking of kingdoms.” He put his iron hand into the flames, and he felt the heat grow until his fingers glowed a bloody red, and yet he felt no pain. No pain, nor any fear for anything within the world.