A Sea of Iron

With dawn a heavy mist rose off the waters, and Shath’s armies moved through it as they followed the ancient road down to the place called the Iron Narrows. Here the land that lay on the north and south banks of the straits grew close to one another, and the crossing was shortest. Here armies had crossed since before the memory of the histories, and here he would move from the western wilderlands of the imperial territory to the heartland itself.

The earth trembled as his riders moved down to the shore and spread out, seeking for any sign of scouts or ambush. In his train came prisoners dragging the war engines he had captured at the pass, and even more behind carried the scraps and pieces his army had brought together for just this purpose. Shath had no ships, no way to ferry his armies across, and his armored warriors could not swim the channel. For weeks now they had gathered every scrap of wood or debris they could seize so that they might build a crossing of their own.

The Narrows were not deep, but the waters were treacherous, for the seabed was still thick with the remnants of another age, and so jagged spines of corroded metal jutted up from the water like teeth or like the fleshless ribs of some vanished creature. When Shath looked upon it, some vision seemed to flicker before his eyes and show him an immense bridge spanning the crossing, rearing higher above him than he would have believed, held up by massive pillars of stone braced with the ageless metal that was stronger than steel.

He shook his vision off and looked to the east, where the waters vanished in the mist-laden distance. This was the only place where an army such as his might cross, and so he knew Kurux would be a fool to allow him to make the transit uncontested. Shath despised the emperor, but he did not make the mistake of thinking him foolish or weak. He would send a strong force to try and turn Shath back, and as he saw no sign of such a force, he was suspicious.

Still, he gave the command, and his men went down to the shore. They began lashing together the rafts of logs and scrap wood that would make the backbone of their bridge. The waters were calm this time of year, and the iron beams thrusting out of the sea would serve as anchor points. They would lash together a bridge made from whatever they had to hand, and with it his entire force could cross in a day, perhaps two.

Once they were on the bridge, he knew his men would be terribly vulnerable – easily spilled off into the waters to be scattered and drowned. Perhaps the emperor waited to attack when they were strung out and at their weakest. That would be the best plan, and so he feared it.

He turned and rode back to the tent where Ellai held her counsel and looked into the tattered scraps of the future she was able to behold. He dropped from the saddle and went inside, feeling huge and brutish as he always did in her delicate presence. She looked at him with her immense dark eyes, the rest of her face hidden by the silks she wrapped it in to keep away the dust.

“What troubles you?” she said. She gestured. “Sit.”

“I do not wish to sit,” he said, pacing as much as he could in the confines of her tent. “I seek the emperor’s stroke, where is he?”

“You know I cannot see him,” she said. “He is guarded by the same power that raised him up and gave him weapons of war such as none have ever seen.”

“I have a weapon he cannot match,” Shath said, flexing his iron fist. He remembered the terrible fire called down from the sky and blinked as though the sight of it still seared his vision. He knew that weapon had to be employed carefully, and if he struck the water it would boil and seethe into steam and be as dangerous to his own men as it was to any others. “But the crossing is dangerous. It makes us vulnerable, and I cannot see a way around it. I know he will be here. I know he will strike.”

“He is not here,” she said. “I would know if he came so close. But you fear he will send something to attack as we cross. I know you wish me to foresee it, but it is difficult. I can see what is, but now the war has begun it is much, much more difficult to see what will come. There are so many possibilities, so many ways the future could twist or turn.” She shook her head. “I can see very little. There is a path where you ride through unopposed, and another where your army lies broken and drowned.”

“You can tell me nothing?” he said, trying not to let his anger loose.

Her eyes unfocused, seeing far away. “Something lurks in the water below, not close, but not far. It is ancient and dangerous, but it slumbers. And there are ships to the. . . to the west of us.” She looked puzzled. “Not very far away. I feel something. . . something plucks at my mind like fingers at the hem of a robe. Something seeks me even as I seek it.”

“West.” Shath shook his head. The emperor’s fleet would come from the east, unless it had passed them and now returned, and his outriders would have sighted any force of great size. “Can you tell me nothing, then?”

Ellai let out a long breath, and her sight focused on him once more. “I can tell you one thing only. You must cross before all others. Your strength will be needed there, where the water is deep. And if you are not the first to set foot upon the far shore, then none other shall be.”

Shath stilled his pacing and took a deep breath. Here was something he understood, and could face. “Thank you,” he said. “That is what I wished to know.”

o0o

The vanguard crossed the bridge as they laid it, carrying materials along the span already built, moving carefully on the lashed-together platforms until they could lay a new one ahead and tie it in place. They built towards the nearest iron pillar that thrust up from below, and they fixed it in place.

Shath bent his back among the rest of them, using the strength of his iron arm to lift and carry immense weights. The Urugan were stronger than men, larger and more inured to privation and labor, and so they worked tirelessly. They feared the water as they feared nothing else, and only their adulation of the warlord-king drove them to cross the Narrows. Shath knew that they were of denser flesh than other men and would sink if they fell into the deeps. So he kept watch and kept his sword at his side as they worked in the heavy mist through the day.

The sun was a bitter, thin copper shining weak through the fog when he felt the first unnatural ripple. Something that was not the natural motion of the slow waves disturbed the bridge, and the Urugan stopped where they stood and clutched for something to hold onto, fear in their black eyes.

Shath cast down the coil of rope and drew his sword. “Go back,” he said. “Go back, this is mine.” Even as he spoke, another ripple passed beneath them, and then something erupted from the waters below. It rose up and up into the air overhead, glistening and mottled in deep violets and crawling red veins. A tentacle as big around as a man, studded with hooked spines and tipped by a three-branched claw that opened as he looked on.

Another burst from the water, and another, and they fell on the iron pylons and gripped them, and by that leverage a great, heaving bulk dragged itself from the deeps and opened six black, blank eyes. In his mind, Shath felt an echo of the power of the emperor, and he knew this was where the blow would fall.

“Get back!” he commanded his men, and even as the thing stretched forth more limbs to grasp him, he leaped forward and dove into the murky waters. The weight of his iron arm dragged him easily downward, and he swam forward until he saw the immense shadow of the thing there ahead of him. It rose from the floor of the Narrows like a misshapen polyp extruding from lightless depths below, tentacles sprouting from it in uneven places, bursting from the twisted, malformed body.

He struck the bottom and his feet sank into the muck. Undeterred, he waded forwards, pushing against the water currents, feeling the turbulence as the thing above him turned and reached downward, seeking him with hungry talons.

Claws scraped across his armor, but he reached the thick body and drove his sword deeply into the unclean flesh, and he twisted the edge, so that when it writhed away from him it tore itself open. He drove the blade in again and again, blackening the waters with burning ichors, until a great claw closed on him and pulled him upward. He stabbed his sword into the body as it blurred past, slicing it open as he was dragged up and into the light.

He burst into the air, the claws digging into him as the thing flung him upwards and seemed, for a moment, about to hurl him away, but instead it dangled him over its vast body and he saw a mouth open below him that was filled with rows of smaller mouths, all chewing the air with rings of dagger teeth. He looked down on it and bared his own teeth, eager for blood. The water around the beast was dark with smoking ichor, and he knew he had wounded it terribly. Only the power of the emperor drove it on.

A volley of arrows smote upon it as the Urugan loosed from the shore, and then the war engines opened fire and burning, iron-headed bolts smashed into the beast, searing the discolored flesh, sending up clouds of steam and smoke. Shath watched for the right moment, and then he struck.

Blue lightning coursed across the surface of his arm and shoulder, and the sudden pain caused the claws to let loose their hold. He fell, but not toward the obscene mouth; rather he fell between the blank eyes and drove his blade in deep, piercing the small, primitive brain. He felt a great shudder go through the mountain of flesh, and then it went slack, the tentacles falling to slap the water as the body subsided beneath the waves.

Shath wrenched his blade free and then hurled himself from the sagging body into the water, the evil humors stinging his eyes. He thrashed to an iron pillar and gripped it, pulled himself from the water and watched as the beast sank out of sight, leaving only a dark stain to show it had been there.

He struck his blade against the iron until the metal rang like a bell, and he lifted his sword as his army shouted for him. Their king, the one who would lead them to paradise. The emperor had struck his blow, and it had not been strong enough. Shath laughed his laugh of death and pointed to the half-made bridge. “Build on!” he shouted. “Conquest awaits to name the brave!”

o0o

Piece by piece they built their bridge over the Narrows, sweating under the dim red sun until night fell, and then they worked by torchlight, until at last, as the dawn rose again and the mist began to lift, they reached the far shore. Shath was the first to set his feet upon the other land, and he stood for a moment and looked eastward. There lay the path that would lead him to the city of the imperium, and there he would strike a blow at the heart of that encompassing power, and he would see it die.

Slowly, with great care, his army began to cross the water, a long line of men and their beasts picking across the zigzag, makeshift bridge. Shath mounted as soon as a steed was brought for him, and he rode to the top of a hillock and looked eastward along the strait, then westward. The mist lay low on the waters, and he could not see very far. He saw Ellai’s litter beginning to cross the bridge and waited, impatient, for he needed her sight again. She had spoken of ships but to the west, and he wondered what she saw now. Now his army was at its weakest, stretched out across the waters on a narrow thread. Now a blow could sever his fate.

He heard a horn, and then another. He turned his eyes eastward, toward the empire, and there the mist lifted, and revealed to him a massed armada of ships. Black prows split the waves, and oars churned the sluggish waters. He saw the banner of the emperor, and he cursed all gods to their final names. The water monster had been only a diversion, meant to make him believe he had overcome the emperor’s stroke. Instead he had allowed the crossing to go on, and now his army was helpless, throat bared to an attack they could not prevent.

An unseen power lashed forth from the ships, and he saw the line of Urugan on the bridge ripple and begin to come apart as the power that unmade minds was directed upon them. It was another dead mind, like the one that had commanded at the pass. It arrayed the ships as they came on in a line, their rams gleaming as they cut through the waters. They would tear the bridge to pieces and untold thousands of his followers would go into the sea and drown.

He clenched his fist and felt the power there, the threads of power ready to reach up into the dark sky and call down the sword of the ancients. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that to call down that power into the waters would obliterate not only the enemy but his own army. An explosion of steam to boil flesh and then a great wave to wash the earth clean in its wake, and nothing would survive – likely not even himself. Shath ground his teeth in fury, knowing that his great blow could come only as a retributive strike against an enemy who had outmaneuvered him.

More horns blew, this time from the west, his outriders calling a warning, and he looked to see the mist tattering there as well. Another fleet materialized from the silvery haze, this one flying a red and gold banner high above the massive flagship. He looked in amazement as ship after ship appeared – as many as the imperial fleet if not more. A great panoply of ships of many kinds, sailing out of the mysterious sea of Azar.

Something went over him like an unseen wind, rippling his men like grass, pushing back the power that arrayed against them, and he felt a presence in his mind that was strange and yet familiar. A sound like waves resolved into a voice that spoke into his head, as though whispering in his ear.

“So you live after all, war-lord. I had wondered if you escaped with my help.” He had not seen Ashari in years, and yet she was as clear as if she stood beside him now. He felt her laugh as though she were inside his very skin. “You have done well for yourself, if perhaps not as well as I.”

Shath snorted, unsure whether he was amused or annoyed. “You arrive at the proper moment, as you did once before,” he said aloud, knowing she would hear him. “You seem sent to aid me again.”

“Indeed, we need each other as we did then, only more.” He saw her ships coming closer, even as the enemy fleet began to mill in confusion. It would give him time. He gestured and gave commands for the men to pull off of the bridge, saw them hurrying for whatever shore was closer.

“Can you hold back that evil mind?” he said, feeling strange to speak to no one.

“I can, though not forever – this one is strong,” Ashari said. “Come and join me, we will meet them together.”

He looked at the golden ship coming nearer and laughed. “We will.” He rode down to the shore as the bridge cleared, and then Ashari’s fleet came cutting through it, pushing aside the floating pieces and rowing through to take a battle front in the fallow sea.

Shath swung down from the saddle and waded into the water, sank down and walked across the muddy bottom until he could climb a rock and then push upward and grasp the side of her warship. He climbed up and over, stood dripping on the polished wood deck as warriors drew back and stared at him, unsure of what to think of this giant from beneath the waves.

He ignored them and went to the shaded silken canopy that shrouded the back of the ship. He flung aside sheer curtains, and there he found Ashari herself clad in armor and silk and draped upon the cushions like a sated hunting beast. She smiled at him, a headdress heavy with beads and plates rearing above on her horns. She gestured. “Lend me your strength, Ironhand,” she said. He came closer until he stood over her, and she touched his arm. “Ironhand in truth.”

“Now,” he said. “You freed me, so that I might escape. I thank you for it.” He remembered that day, the pain of torture and the loss of his arm, the spectre of death hanging over him. He remembered the crawl through the dark places beneath the palace to reach his uncertain freedom. Few indeed had been the days he had not thought of her, and wondered what became of her. He was glad to look on her again, and he found that strange, for he was so rarely glad of anything.

“You can thank me later, for now we will fight.” She winced. “The mind is gathering its strength.”

“Then let us strike,” he said. He shook water from his sword and strode to the prow of the ship, and he felt the deck gather beneath him like the haunches of a beast about to pounce. Oarsmen beat their swift rhythms, and Shath braced himself and watched the enemy fleet come closer. The power of the mind gathered and coiled in the air, and then he felt Ashari engage with it in a battle he could not see, but only feel.

The ships leaped forward, prows cutting the waves, warriors chanting as they beat their spears against their shields, and then Shath braced himself as the two masses of warcraft rushed together and collided with a terrible splintering sound. The roaring of men and the tearing of wood and metal.

Ashari’s ship turned deftly and sheared along the side of the enemy craft, cutting off the three rows of oars, grinding the hulls together. Shath felt the shock of the impact, and then he leaped over the rail and landed on the enemy deck like a thunderbolt. Black-armored legionnaires came forward behind their locked shields, and he laughed and clove their ranks with his steel sword and his iron hand. He broke their shields and split their armored bodies. He chopped them apart and waded through their blood as he cut a path through the battle.

Arrows sang through the sky, burning and hissing, studding the decks like grain, and heavier war-engines fired their flaming bolts and blazing pots. Smoke boiled up and a wave of warriors broke over the gunwale and the ships were locked in deadly battle, the sea filling with burning oil and dying men.

Shath realized he could feel the mind pushing against him, trying to push past the power in his mind that protected him from its full strength. He turned and saw the built-up stern of the warship, and he felt it there like the heat from a fire. He turned that way and began to hack his way through. Blows glanced from his armor, sparked when they glanced from his arm and shoulder, and he cut through them, snapping swords and spears, splitting shields, and leaving a trail of dead behind him.

In fury he cut down the guards at the door and then shattered the heavy wooden planks, stood in the full blast of the enemy mind and staggered under the assault. Inside the room, he saw the thing entire, and spat with revulsion. Here was a creation of his enemy, an unclean thing grown through accursed wizardry, and he loathed the sight of it.

It was a copper and glass tank, longer than a man and half as tall. Inside it there swirled green fluids that bubbled and rippled, and suspended in the vile bath was a mass of brain matter that pulsed and roiled and moved like some half-finished monstrosity of a nightmare sea. It was pallid and shot through with black veins, and it thrashed inside its tank, battering at him with all the power it could gather.

But even as it tried to strike him down, Ashari smote it a terrible blow with her mind, and he saw black hemorrhage spread across the hideous surface. Its power wavered and he struck before it could recover. He smashed the thick glass and spilled the stinking fluids out onto the deck, and then he stabbed again and again into the struggling, folding brain until it was torn apart and lay quiescent and destroyed in its draining bath of unguessable humors.

He stood for a moment, and then the stench drove him out of the chamber. The din of battle was fading, and he looked to see the enemy troops either dead or sitting dazed upon the deck, seemingly bewildered. Beyond, he saw the sea full of burning ships and the waters heavy with burning oil and floating corpses, but through the smoke he saw the enemy fleet retreating, rowing hard for the east where the mist awaited to swallow them.

Wearied, he crossed the deck and leaped back into Ashari’s craft, snapping off arrows embedded in the deck with each step. She emerged to meet him, looking beautiful and savage in the firelight and the light of the red sun filtered through the pillars of smoke. “You struck well,” she said. “I felt the blow go through it, and I felt it die.”

“It was only a minion,” he said. “Mindless, in its way. A vessel for the will of Kurux.”

“He should tremble, for he now faces two armies in place of one.” Ashari touched his arm. “Destiny has brought us together. His armies drove me from my city, and I have gathered all I could find to me to make a new force with which to strike at him. Now, with the horde you command, we will have the power to strike at the heart of the empire.” She stepped back and held forth her hand. “Will you join with me and march for the imperial city? Will you join me to overthrow Zur, and bring the emperor to his knees?”

Shath looked at her, remembering when he had seen her last. She was ambitious, and arrogant, and dangerous, but she was a weapon he would not cast aside. He put out his metal hand, and clasped her delicate fingers with his own. “I will.”