River of Spears (Kingdom's Forge Book 0)

River of Spears

Copyright © 2015 by Kade Derricks. All rights reserved.

First Edition: August 2015

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Cover and Formatting:
Streetlight Graphics

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

CHAPTER ONE

D
ain Gladstone swore under his breath.

Nothing had gone according to plan. Just days ago another patrol had checked this exact area and found nothing. There shouldn’t have been any Tyberons within fifty miles, but here they were, screaming defiance and slinging their bone-tipped spears into his command.

He had to do something. Too many men were lost already. In minutes the rest would be down, bleeding and dying alongside them.

A spear drove through the leather-covered chest of the rider to his left. The man fell from his horse, grimacing and clutching at the weapon’s shaft. A gurgling sound escaped him, and Dain saw the disbelieving terror in his eyes. Frothy blood burst from his mouth.

Punctured lung
, Dain thought with a wince
. Poor damn luck
.

He nudged Boon with his heel and the warhorse sidestepped to avoid the fallen man. For a moment he considered drawing the Light to attempt a healing, but Dain knew the unlucky rider was beyond help already.

“Form up! Get into your ranks,” he ordered, voice booming.

Strictly speaking, the order wasn’t his to give. He wasn’t in command of the patrol—a young Esterian officer, Major Tindall, was. Dain threw a quick glance in his direction. The boy was frozen, paralyzed by fear, while all around them the savages cut down the very men he’d been trained to lead.

Protocol be damned
, Dain thought. He
had to act.

“Form up! Damn you all to hell…MOVE!”

Like the lifting of a spell, his barked orders broke though the troops’ fear. Training took over. They snapped into two clusters and raised their shields to offer a degree of overlapped protection from the hurled projectiles. Dain swung Boon around behind the footmen. He pulled up and pivoted the warhorse outside of spear range. Then he tallied their losses. A third of the patrol was already down. Two dozen footmen, four mounted knights, himself, and one ineffective Esterian officer remained. Tindall’s mouth remained gaping open, his eyes wide. A half-spoken command died on his lips before he froze up again, fear and indecision writ clear on his face.

If we stay at range, they’ll punch through the rest of us like arrows through a scroll.

Dain pointed his sword toward the other mounted knights.

“You four. Flank me. We’ll charge the bastards.” He turned to the nearest footman. “The rest of you will stay with the supply wagon. Lose it and we’ll never make it back to the fort.”

The knights were professionals—mercenaries, like himself. Grim-faced, they formed up into a tight wedge and, with Dain as their point, spurred their mounts toward the horseless Tyberons.

The savages weren’t fools. They knew well the danger of cavalry; this wasn’t a new game to them, but rather one that had played out countless times throughout the war. They switched targets swiftly. Whistling spears rained all around the charging riders.

Boon’s hooves thundered. The gap started to narrow. Dain took the space between two breaths to study the nearest Tyberon warrior.

A brown leather loincloth was the man’s only clothing, and a yellow-breasted lark had been tattooed into his bare chest; his hair, close-cropped, stood in spikes like that of a bristly hedgehog. Sewn into his skin, hundreds of feathers decorated his arms, the edges of his chest, and the sides of his face.

The gap closed.

Dain gripped his sword tighter. He sent a silent prayer to a Creator who surely despised him, drew on a portion of Light; he felt its warm embrace, and then charged his sword with its white-hot power. The blade’s edge glowed with it. Offering up less of a target, he ducked low on Boon’s neck then dug his heels in to urge the buckskin faster. Lower meant a more difficult target, faster meant fewer spears flying his way. He tugged the reins left, aiming the racing horse for the nearest savage.

The landsliding charge crashed into the Tyberons. Over a thousand pounds of metal, muscle, and bone collided in an instant. Dain’s sword swept out and took the lark’s breast dead center.

Light exploded outward and blew the lark back into his comrades, knocking aside a pair of spearmen. Boon leaped ahead, and Dain swung the sword around. Again the Light flashed. Another lark died. To his flanks the other mercenaries hacked and chopped and plunged among the enemy.

Tyberons, exceptional ranged fighters, couldn’t manage close-quarter combat with an armored man. Face-to-face, their spears were awkward—too long to strike quickly and too short to hold enemies at a distance. They could still wound and kill with them, but armed with swords or axes, the advantage shifted quickly to the mercs. Dain could feel the shift in the air. He turned to face a new attacker with renewed ferocity.

His armor turned aside an ivory speartip. He swung a deep, diagonal cut across the naked shoulder of his attacker, slicing tendon and bone. The Light he’d drawn had been consumed now, and he had neither time nor focus to replenish it.

Boon’s weight shifted beneath him. The warhorse kicked out with a back hoof, cratering the skull of a lurking Tyberon. Boon was the perfect partner for this sort of fighting. As he’d been trained, the buckskin struck quickly and without mercy. Iron-shod hooves and powerful muscles made short work of any enemy within his reach.

Dain’s sword had found its fifth victim before the Tyberons fled. The broken survivors faded into the tall, swaying grasses like feathered ghosts.

Neither he nor the other mounted mercenaries were foolish enough to pursue. Anyone who survived a month on the patrols learned not to chase the wily fighters into the tall grass. In there even an armored man on horseback was fair game.

The risk of getting lost was just as dangerous as the savages’ spears. The stalky grass grew progressively higher away from the Tyber, and this far from the river it towered over men on horseback. Dain doubted all those who had followed the enemy died to their spears. Many surely fell to thirst or starvation, unable to find their way in an endless green ocean of stalk and leaf.

Dain stopped and wiped the blood from his sword. He glanced down at one of the dead savages. Dead or alive, they remained both fierce and foreign. Tyberons seemed to have more in common with birds than with other men. Not for the first time, he wondered how a man could allow someone to sew feathers into his skin.

If the intent is to drive their enemies mad with fear, it succeeds
. Dain had seen many a merc and Esterian alike freeze when faced with their first lark warrior.

The rest of the patrol stood in silence while he and the mounted knights returned. Like Major Tindall, the footmen were all Esterians, and the majority of them stared, unblinking, at the bodies of their dead comrades. A few vomited. Most would never have seen a dead man before—certainly not one with a four-foot spear driven through him.

Dain knew what they were thinking. He’d been in their place once. Young men the world over wanted to be proud soldiers; to march in proud soldier parades and kiss the girl of their dreams wearing proud soldier uniforms. Only now they’d seen their first skirmish. Their first brush with death. Reality was sinking in.

Yes, the enemy is real, and they want to kill us as much as we want to kill them. Probably more.
He wondered if their nightmares would be as dark as his own.

Dain reined Boon to a stop in front of the Major’s horse.

“We need to get downriver before they gather more fighters and return,” he said, trying not to let his frustration with the young man show in his tone.

“We…we must bury the dead first,” Tindall said. His eyes still held a glassy terror. They refused to meet Dain’s own.

“Sir, with all due respect, gather the bodies if you wish, but just toss them into the wagon. If we linger here to bury anyone we might as well dig extra graves for ourselves. The birdmen will return.”

The words seemed to break through Tindall’s trance. A faint trace of anger crossed the major’s face before his features relaxed. Esterians were a proud people. This was their war, bought and paid for, and they didn’t like having their orders called into question. He started to speak, then paused.

“Yes, a good suggestion, paladin. We will load them into the wagon and return to the command post.” The major looked at the footmen. “Get to work, then.”

Fresh from the capital, Tindall had only been in the grasslands a week, and Dain wasn’t sure if the man even knew how to shave yet. It wasn’t that Dain held anything against youth. He’d known many a fine young soldier, and at twenty-three considered himself young still. But he’d also known men like Tindall before. Proud fools who, by their nobility or wealth, thought themselves great leaders. Tindall had gone to the Esterian Monastery and been educated on how to lead men and how to fight the savage Tyberons. But more important than his education or abilities, his people paid and so he held command.

Dain and the other mercenaries sat their horses and watched the swaying grass for signs of movement while the ground troops labored with the bodies. Tindall was new, but even he knew not to ask for their help. Mercs fought. Mercs died. Mercs did not collect bodies.

Dain frowned and ran a hand over the new puncture hole in the leather that covered his chest. He felt the reassuring texture of the underlying chainmail. The woven links were tight, expertly crafted.
Odd, that such modest bands of metal could save a life
, he mused
.
But even mail had its limits. If a bony spearpoint hit a link directly and with enough force, it would burst the link apart and stab into the soft flesh beneath.

It didn’t take much to end a man’s life; a short piece of sharpened wood, something any farmer could carve, and a bit of hard bone, filed down into a point.

An impatient Boon stomped and snorted, and Dain glanced once more at his new commander. Unlike the long-limbed Tyberons, Tindall was short. Most Esterians were. From helmet to boot the man shone—or rather, he had. His blue coat was immaculate even after their days in the field, but a pair of dull, green stains covered his pants from both knees down. At first, Tindall had tried to wipe them away, and he’d soon learned that the effort was wasted. Here, everything eventually ended up the same grass-stained color.

Until today a fierce light had blazed in the major’s eyes. Now, after his first encounter with the enemy, the light seemed muted now.

Yes, the enemy is real,
a voice inside Dain’s head repeated
, and they want to kill us as much as we want to kill them.
That sentiment had kept him alive thus far. That, and a good measure of plain luck.

Paladin…that’s what Tindall called him. That’s what they all called him, Esterians and mercs alike. He smiled to himself, though there was no joy in it.

I am no Paladin. No holy warrior for the Light. Haven’t been for some time now and perhaps I never truly was.
Though it meant more developed skills than most of his fellow mercs and thus earned him a higher wage, he didn’t want the title. Too much shame trailed in its wake.

He’d failed the Order, been stripped of rank, and was then exiled. With no other skills, he sold his sword to the highest bidder, waging an endless war of his own making. He had traveled most of the lower continent, fighting to survive, moving from war to war. When he signed with the Esterians, the recruiter had asked him what his skills were, and he named himself a paladin. A foolish mistake, one that he should have learned to avoid by then. One of his fellows had overheard him, word had spread, and there had been no stopping it.

Paladin. How far from the truth. I’ve broken every covenant the order holds dear.
Paladins never fought for money. They fought for their king and his justice, or for the Creator and his Light. Never for wealth.

The Esterians’ pay was good—certainly not enough to make him wealthy, but enough for a comfortable living and, if he was smart about it, a chance at something more. In six months of service he’d already saved aside three-dozen gold coins. It was double what he normally charged, and triple what he’d earned in service with the paladins during his homeland’s war with the grey elves.

He was still a long way from his goal, but if he saved enough he could stop selling his sword and build a place of his own. A place long-distant from war and battle. He closed his eyes for a moment and remembered the sleepy little village at the edge of the Spine Mountains. He could almost smell the majestic pines and hear the soothing wind as it swept down from the heights to caress the plains below. There was water there, and a man with a few acres could do well with horses and some skill with farming.

He thought about all the battles he’d fought, all the men he’d killed. Men who had carried their own hopes, their own plans.

Can a dream so pure, so peaceful, be bought with blood and death?

The footmen were loading up the last few bodies now. Tindall had ridden to the fallen Tyberons. He leaned over and poked at one with his sword, lifting the man’s feathers and scraping his blade over the lark tattoo.

The Tyberon fighters were almost exclusively larks, usually with a crane leader. They were always male. No one had ever seen a female Tyberon. The joke among the mercs was that the females were actually horse-sized birds, and that spearmen were hatched rather than born.

Dain glanced at his sword’s thick pommel. Swords weren’t fit for farming or foaling horses, but he’d likely wear one the rest of his days. All those men he’d faced had nephews, brothers, sons, and they would want vengeance.

Even dead enemies can strike a man down,
he thought.

The last body loaded, the remnants of the patrol started back to their post. Tindall led, the footmen and creaking supply cart followed, and Dain brought up the rear with the other mercs. It had been eight days since they’d been home last, and until today they had gone without incident. Just this morning the major called it “boring.”