The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Read online

  The Light of Kerrindryr

  Book 1 of the War of Memory Cycle

  by H. Anthe Davis

  To Ali, Asta, Deb, Erica

  and the one who started it all,

  Mom

  Chapter 1 – The Third Army

  Chapter 2 – Off the Leash

  Chapter 3 – The Way of the Hearth

  Chapter 4 – The Penitent

  Chapter 5 – Hunter in the Farmland

  Chapter 6 – Bahlaer

  Chapter 7 – Shadowland

  Chapter 8 – Discord

  Chapter 9 – Under Underground

  Chapter 10 – Reports

  Chapter 11 – Crimson and Shadow

  Chapter 12 – A History Lesson

  Chapter 13 – The Pursuit

  Chapter 14 – The Climb

  Chapter 15 – Scorched Earth

  Chapter 16 – Divergence

  Chapter 17 – The Red and the Black

  Chapter 18 -- The Flight

  Chapter 19 – Homecoming

  Chapter 20 – Poisonous Friends

  Chapter 21 – Crows

  Chapter 22 – Preparations

  Chapter 23 – Influences

  Chapter 24 – The Draining Darkness

  Chapter 25 – Best-Laid Plans

  Chapter 26 – Gate of Earth

  Coda

  Chapter 1 – The Third Army

  A concussive roar woke Cob from dead sleep. He sat up into a faceful of canvas tenting and barely managed not to claw it down. Beside him, his tentmate Horrum lay tense, listening to the ensuing hush.

  "What the--" Cob started.

  A shriek rent the air like tearing steel. He clapped hands to his ears and stared up; even through the thick canvas, the sky had gone noxious green. Fear knotted his guts, and he lurched for the entrance flap, but Horrum shouldered him aside to get out first. Cursing, Cob followed, the arrowhead on its cord tapping coldly against his sternum.

  The air outside was dry, heat boiling up from the parched earth, and from the sea of tents the slaves emerged like a distressed tribe of burrowing owls. Like all his fellows, Cob looked skyward.

  Serpentine green tendrils crawled across the reddish dome of arcane energy that protected the Crimson Army camp, as if seeking entry. A massive crack ran through the dome's south side; even as more men scrambled from their tents, the crack branched northward with a horrific ripping sound. In the northwest corner of the compound, red lightning lanced up from the spire atop the Crimson mages' sanctum, reinforcing the dome and struggling to fight off the green.

  "Pike me, what's that?" swore a man by the fire-pit. Cob looked around quickly, counting heads; it seemed like all twenty-four of the slave-workers who shared this fire now stood in the circle of the tent walls, most only half-dressed, their nervous faces washed by the murky glow. Beyond them--among the camps that held the rest of the Crimson's fifteen thousand slaves--the scene was the same.

  Another explosion came, thunderous but muffled, and though the radiant dome trembled, the cracks failed to advance. A circle of stronger red grew above the lightning-spitting sanctum, fed by the mages who worked within. One man--Maevor of Bahlaer, a local and Cob's team leader--pointed at it with his smoking cheroot.

  "The mages have it," he said, pitching his voice loud but calm. Of all of them, his well-tanned face showed no fear, only the gruff confidence and wit that kept him in control of any group small enough to hear him. His tone sent a ripple of relief through the crowd. "See, they're rallying. No need to worry, just get in your teams in case the officers come by."

  The men muttered uneasily but started splitting into groups. Cob moved to Maevor's side, the rest of their six-man team filling in around them.

  "What do you think those blasts were?" said Jas Fendil as he hustled over as fast as his tentmate would allow. At his shoulder, Erevard of Cantrell just looked grim. They were hip to hip, wrapped in the same blanket in some weak attempt at decency, but no one dared comment. Former grifters and the fire-pit's one couple, they were given a wide berth not due to Fendil--he of the jovial grin and incessant rashi smoking--but for Erevard, a cold-eyed and pox-scarred Wyndish blond far more given to violence than talk. It worried Cob to see him as unsettled as the others.

  "All I see is dust and people's heads," said Maevor. "Cob?"

  With a nod, Cob overturned an empty bucket and stepped up on it to peer that way. Though the youngest of the team at seventeen, he was the tallest at this fire-pit--not difficult, since most of the slaves were short, stocky olive-skinned Illanites. They liked to taunt that he was ogre-blooded, but he knew better; he might have been uglied-up by a few fights, but he was a normal Kerrindrixi dusky-brown, not ogrish red or mottled, and if his build was too tall and lanky for High Country Kerrindryr, he blamed it on being here. The lowlands had apparently given him room to stretch.

  To the south, the palisade wall of the Crimson camp had disappeared behind a massive plume of dust, with green and red energy dueling erratically within it. Cob squinted into the haze, trying hard to tell himself that it was not mist. His skin crawled anyway, remembering.

  "Think the War Gate's down," he said quietly as he glimpsed debris on the assembly field. At the edge of the plume, the palisade timbers drooped backward in their settings like rotted teeth. "Some wall too. With all the dust, maybe the embankments got blasted."

  "What?" squawked Weshker, Maevor's tentmate. A wiry, sunburnt, red-haired Corvishman, he was the furthest slave from home and right now the most agitated; even his rusty little chin-tuft looked ready to leap off and run away. "Yeh can't be serious. If the gate's down, what's stoppin' the snake-folk from marchin' right in?"

  "The camp ward is still up," said Maevor, gesturing at the magical dome. "And Kanrodi's half a candlemark's march away. What do you think they'll do, fly here?"

  "They got dragons, dun they? Everyone says so."

  "If they had real dragons, we would've been dead months ago."

  "I tell yeh, they jes' waitin' fer this kinda--"

  "Shut up, Weshker," said Erevard coldly. "No one wants to hear it."

  Weshker looked defiant but the others nodded. The Crimson Army--formally known as the Imperial Third Army of the Crimson Claw--had been camped at this spot for almost half a year, embroiled in siege against the border fortress of Kanrodi. The city-states of Illane lay surrendered behind it, now vassal to the Phoenix Empire that the Crimson served, but nearly all the provisions and conscripts that the army had drained from the captured lands had been spent against Kanrodi's walls.

  In the interminable wait, the siege camp had become a city in itself. Wooden barracks rose in regimented profusion beyond the slave tents, built to house the freesoldiers and support crew that made up the other half of the population. Taller whitewashed walls marked the infirmaries, coils of oily smoke the freesoldiers' mess-halls, coded banners the warehouses that abutted the Losgannon River, and just east of the mages' sanctum stood the General's cabin on the command post hill, watching over everything within the palisade walls like a sentinel.

  Thirty thousand souls dwelled here, with ten thousand more in each of the satellite camps that bracketed the enemy fortress, and they included cooks, laundry service, merchants, medics, messengers, mages, and--most important to the freesoldiers--prostitutes. As slave-workers, Cob and his comrades had no access to those services, but neither were they required to fight like slave-soldiers; they were non-violent offenders sentenced to physical labor, and as part of the relatively privileged Bridge Company, they cut wood, built barracks, repaired river berms, maintained the palisade and mucked latrines. Hard work
but better than being assigned to repair siege engines on the field or to sap Kanrodi's well-defended walls.

  Framed against their summer of grigs, scorpions, blistering heat and latrine duty, the cracks in the artificial sky were terrifying.

  "Well, how much yeh wanna bet it was jes' a lucky strike by their sorcerers?" said Weshker, visibly wavering between indignation and fear. He drew a dagger and everyone tensed, but he just fiddled with it, one of his irritating habits--like stealing the blade in the first place, since anything larger than a utility knife was forbidden to slaves. Over his tenure in the camp, he had stolen over a dozen from freesoldiers; most were stashed in the tent he shared with Maevor, but he carried a few on his person, under his faded red tunic. "For all we know, they broke the pikin' siege line and everyone there's dead."

  Maevor hooked him around the neck in what would have been a friendly headlock if not for the force with which he dragged the redhead close. Rather than struggle, Weshker winced and hid his dagger away; he knew better. "Keep it low," Maevor hissed. "Don't need a panic right now. Maybe later, if we see an opening..."

  "What d'you mean?" said Cob, moving in to eye the suddenly sly faces of his comrades. He was the newest among them, assigned here after the deaths of his former comrades and his own long stint in the infirmary, and he still did not know what to make of them. They were all criminals except Horrum--Fendil and Erevard grifters and cheats, Weshker a thief, Maevor a smuggler and possible Dark cultist--but so far they were better than the thugs he was used to. Maevor, though, seemed too clever for his own good. An Illanite like Horrum and Fendil, he was the eldest and most-connected, and his black market ties made their life decent here, but they worried Cob almost as much as the cult rumor.

  "Nothing you want to hear," said Maevor, then pointed at him with the cheroot clamped between the two good fingers on his punishment-mangled right hand. He was missing the pinky from both hands, the ring-finger from the right and the top half of both ears, but somehow they did not crimp his appeal; perhaps it was the grin. "You're an Imperialist and your friend is a dick." He indicated Horrum. "Best walk away."

  Cob opened his mouth to object, but Horrum said, "Whatever your plans, I hope you choke on them."

  Alone among them, Horrum had done nothing to earn his enslavement but be in the wrong place at the wrong time--that place and time being his farm when the Crimsons came through Illane to conscript. Horrum had refused the conscription and promptly been enslaved along with his family, and now hated everyone and everything to do with the Army--especially the criminals he was forced to work alongside. Cob, a legacy slave condemned for his father's treason, was the only one Horrum would tolerate enough to bunk with, and even then he made his distaste clear.

  The feeling was mutual, but only because of Horrum's attitude. Cob knew he was supposed to hate them all for being heretics who worshiped false Lights--if not the Dark itself--but after more than a year with his thuggish old team, he could not find much fault with this one. They were not his friends but he tried to keep them out of trouble, and if they disdained him for his faith in the Imperial Light, that was fine. They were not wrong to think that he would turn them in if they acted against it.

  He had already tackled Horrum away from one attempted assault on an officer, getting them both whipped for 'fighting' but sparing Horrum the execution he would have received otherwise. That and the time he punched out his previous team leader had given him a bit of a reputation.

  Not as much as surviving a gut-shot with a wraith arrow, but he preferred this one.

  "If you're thinkin' of tryin' somethin'," he started, suspecting an escape plot and determined to head it off, "y'know they pay even more attention t' the walls when--"

  "Attention, Work Battalions!"

  "Aw crap, it's the officers," said Weshker, still stuck under Maevor's arm, and Cob looked back to see a mass of men in bright crimson jackets and piecemeal armor splitting off to scatter amongst the tents. Whichever of them had spoken must have done it through one of the hand-held voice-casters Cob had only seen from afar, because the magic strained his voice tinny but it was still comprehensible despite the distance. Above, the arcane dome glowed mostly red now, only a few green threads lingering at the dusty edge.

  "First Work Battalion proceed to dock warehouses for supply distribution!" came the magically-projected voice again. "Second through Fourth Work Battalion suit up and proceed in companies to War Gate!"

  "Second Bat, that's us," said Maevor as the call continued. Remembering his cheroot, he flicked ash from its tip and set it between his teeth, then looked over the team. "You heard the piking officer. Get your gear on."

  Weshker squirmed free of Maevor's grip and kicked dirt at him, then dove into their tent. The grifter pair disappeared into theirs. Cob let Horrum go in alone, not relishing an elbow to the face while trying to dress. His nose had been broken enough.

  "You all right there?" said Maevor, and Cob ducked his head automatically.

  "Yeah."

  "You sure?" The smuggler eyed him, one brow arched. Though he was as weathered as the rest of them by the constant Illanic sun, his black goatee and regulation-flouting long hair made him into a parody of a nobleman, especially with the scars. "You're a bit pale around the eyes."

  "It's nothin'," Cob said.

  "Ah. Not mist?" Maevor glanced significantly to Cob's bare side, and Cob put his hand over the scar automatically, hating how it had come to define him. It stood out bluntly on his dusky skin, a silver circle situated midway between navel and right hip that matched the exit wound on his lower back: the marks of the crystalline wraith arrowhead that had nearly killed him five months ago.

  He had been assigned to logging duty at the edge of the Mist Forest alongside his previous team when suddenly that dreaded mist had rolled out from the trees, engulfing them all in impenetrable grey. When the arrows started to fall like stars, he remembered thinking, Run. Run.

  But his legs had refused to work, his whole body paralyzed in fear, and when the arrow froze his insides and the radiant shapes approached him through the haze, he could do nothing but stare--desperately praying to the Imperial Light for rescue.

  And the wraiths had turned away, and he had survived.

  He wore the arrowhead as a charm now, partially for luck and partially for the Light. Surely they were what had pulled him through his two months in the infirmary, pissing ice and blood as the hostile magic washed out of his system.

  The problem was the dream.

  "No mist," he said truthfully, though for a while it had been all he could see. "Jus' shaken like everyone else."

  "Understandable," said Maevor, giving him a companionable clap on the shoulder. "You say something if it comes back, though. I can get you something for that."

  "Sure."

  "He seein' wraiths again?" piped Weshker as he clambered from the tent. "Smack in the middle of the pikin' desert and still scared of the woods, yeh big siss-- Ack!"

  The bucket missed the ducking Corvishman by a hair, and Cob scowled and looked around for something else to throw, especially as the next thing to come from Weshker's mouth was, "Goat-humpin' Imperialist ass-kisser!" A sharp look from Maevor dissuaded him, and he had to be satisfied with the fantasy of pounding Weshker bloody.

  That was Weshker's curse, it seemed: an inability to keep his mouth shut or his hands to himself. A week never passed without someone trying to wring his neck, and though half the time it was just a Wynd going after him because the Wynds and the Corvish had a grudge as old as dirt, the rest was because he could not shut up. Cob had stuck up for him before--he was just a little guy, if mouthy--but was not at all averse to giving him a bruising. They were often assigned together because the officers liked to bust them for their inevitable fights.

  Cob, for his part, knew he had a temper and a certain lack of humor. Back in Kerrindryr, you could never take shit from an equal because that meant you were not equal, whether it was done seriously or in jest. Here, the r
ules were looser, but his previous team had taken shameless advantage of him when he tried to adapt to them. Even now, those dead men colored his view of his new comrades, making it difficult for him to accept jokes or concern at face value.

  It didn't help that they often called him 'Imperialist' like an insult. He hated that. He had been a convert to the Imperial Light since childhood--away from the Dark faith that had claimed his parents--and his devotion was why his tenure as a legacy slave would end when he turned eighteen in a few months' time. With no priests in the army, it was sometimes difficult for him to stay focused on his faith, but he knew the tenets of the Light and tried to live by them.

  Redemption through service; purification through sacrifice.

  An elbow to the shin snapped him from his brooding, and he ducked inside once Horrum finished vacating the tent. Dressing was quick--the slaves' uniform was just a faded red tunic and battered boots in addition to his breeches--then he tucked the arrowhead down his tunic and slithered back out to join his team.

  The fire-pit had been doused with sand, and the ready men stood around yawning or smoking, waiting for their fellows. Everyone in this area was on the evening shift--the so-called 'shit shift' since that was when they handled the latrines--and so had mostly been asleep at the time of the explosions. On the footpaths, the officers paced restlessly.

  "Hoi, Cob," said Weshker.

  Cob looked over just in time to get a wad of cloth to the face. He snatched it away and scowled, but the Corvishman had already tucked behind Maevor, snickering, and Maevor looked disinterested in getting involved. Cob shook the cloth out instead. It was a plain, thin square; at Cob's questioning look, Weshker leaned out to indicate the one tied around his neck. "Bandana, yeh brick-head. It's dusty out there. Plus then we can be bandits together."

  Rolling his eyes, Cob knotted the bandana at his neck. Sometimes it was hard to dislike the playful idiot.

  "Bridge Company, form up!" shouted their officer from somewhere ahead.