David Farland - Lords of the Seventh Swarm

He sighed, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his mantle. It kept a record of every battle that its wearers had ever fought, recorded far more than perhaps Orick knew.

Gallen had not worn it since reawakening, for he had not been sure he wanted to know how his last battle had ended.

Now, he donned the mantle, pulled its familiar weight over his head, felt an easy tenseness fill his body, as always happened when the mantle made connection, assuming partial control of his neural system.

Then, he sat beneath the tree and asked Orick, “Will you excuse me for a few minutes. There’s something I must do.”

Beneath the shade of the hawthorns, gazing out over the green valley that had filled with dronon warships only weeks before, he whispered to his mantle, “Show me my death.”

Gallen felt the familiar lurch as his viewpoint shifted, and he saw these fields as they had been, the grass much shorter, less alive, with the dronon circling in their millions.

The sight awed him, the dronon queens beneath their crimson pavilions, the sounds of their cheering, the warships in the background.

He watched the entire battle from Maggie’s eyes, felt her love for him, her burning desire to defend him to the last moment, felt how she craved his kiss and his touch, her horror at watching as the Lord Escort slashed Gallen nearly in two.

He watched her bravely kick one last time, trying to strike a blow against the dronon, felt her surprise as Kintiniklintit sliced her nearly in two. For half a second she had looked down, seen her own gut spilling into the grass, and then fainted.

The mantle fell from her head, disengaged from her consciousness.

In that last moment, Gallen had crawled to her, looked into her face, his own visage a study in sorrow and despair. He was beaten and bruised, blood running free. A frothy red foam boiled from his mouth, and his breath came in shallow pants.

In the distance, lightning flashed and thunder shook the earth as a great storm rolled in. Gallen had glanced toward the storm, whispering “Angels,” and then turned suddenly.

In that last moment, he grasped the mantle that had fallen to the grass. With one hand he pulled it over Maggie’s head and whispered the command: “Save her.”

The recording went blank for several long minutes as the mantle diverted all its energies to downloading Maggie’s memories. It was an odd moment, a tremendous wrench in consciousness, for Gallen suddenly saw the world not as himself, but as the mantle saw it. All external sensors were turned off, and the mantle sent electromagnetic pulses through Maggie’s brain, firing all neurons.

Though she lay dying, the mantle was able to draw out her memories, like wispy fragments of vivid dreams, and shoot them through its programs, reconstruct the pathways and scenery of her mind, manipulate it into a sequential tale, till it formed a coherent whole.

The process should have taken three minutes, but Maggie expired before the second minute finished, and her mantle had to assume some of the autonomic body functions, force her severed lungs to breath, her fibrillating heart to beat, just long enough to finish its download.

When the mantle completed its duty, it turned its external sensors back on, began recording.

Kintiniklintit was in the process of defiling Gallen’s corpse. The Lord of the Seventh Swarm had decapitated Gallen, chopped him into several pieces, and was parading the headless corpse past cheering Vanquishers.

And in that moment, the Qualeewoohs landed in the midst of the battlefield, eyeing the dronon in that stupid looking way that birds have. Lightning flashed from the advancing storm, and its light reflected from the silver in their spirit masks.

Even the dronon recognized that something odd was happening.

Cooharah and Aaw began bobbing their heads, whistling loudly, and Athena was forced to run into Felph’s palace for a bit to fetch a translator. It took nearly half an hour for her to return, for the Qualeewoohs to grasp what was happening, and then to issue their challenge to Lord Kintiniklintit.

By then, the storm had come in full upon them; the towering thunderheads turned morning into a mockery of night. Rain pounded the ground, and thunder shook the skies. Raging winds whipped across the battlefield, blowing the crimson pavilions down.

And in the driving storm, the Qualeewoohs took flight with Lord Kintiniklintit. Across the fields, the dronon jeered the ungainly Qualeewoohs, who were so much smaller than a dronon Lord, so much more slender and less powerful.

Yet when the Qualeewoohs took to the sky, they were a marvel! They swooped and soared through the pounding rain, and while Kintiniklintit began to circle in an effort to get up to battle speed, the Qualeewoohs swooped in from behind, began pecking out his rear eye cluster.

The great Vanquisher redoubled his speed, seeking to escape. The labored sound of his buzzing wings came as a weary drone, and on the fields below, the dronon hosts fell silent, their cheers forgotten.

It was apparent from the opening seconds of battle that Kintiniklintit could not win.

He tried to turn, and maneuvers that had seemed sleek and deadly before now looked ungainly beside the Qualeewoohs. They stooped in behind him, began attacking his wings, ripping off the back edges so that they fell away like scales.

Those wings had been deadly to a human. The reinforced cartilage along their leading edge could chop a man in half. But the Qualeewoohs were attacking from behind, ripping the wings apart at their weakest point.

Kintiniklintit fought madly, trying to slap his wings backward, strike a blow in flight. Twice he smashed Aaw in the face, knocking the little Qualeewooh backward, nearly felling her from the sky. Gallen’s heart went out to her.

But the Vanquisher’s tactics only enraged Cooharah, so that he fought more vehemently.

In a last effort to dodge his opponents, Kintiniklintit veered upward, as if trying to escape in the clouds. Climbing toward a wisp of fog, Gallen thought he’d almost make it. He imagined that the dronon could then swoop down, playing hunt and hide in the mist.

Till lightning struck, a blinding flash that blew the dronon lord from the air, so that he tumbled in flaming ruin.

This astonished Gallen. For the manner of Kintiniklintit’s death was nothing like the story told by Maggie. But then Gallen had to remind himself, Maggie wasn’t really there to witness the battle. She bore false memories.

Afterward, Cooharah and Aaw had swooped low, clawing Cintkin so that she lost her right to rule as Golden Queen.

Then, with some coaching from Hera, the birds realized that they had to perform the same feat over and over again.

Five times they challenged the dronon Lords, and Gallen watched as the Lord Escort of the First Swarm crashed to the ground, just as Maggie had described.

He watched the magnificent Qualeewoohs battle, saw Cooharah get struck down, wounded in his third skirmish, so that Aaw had to fight on alone.

Not all their victories were convincing. Not all the battles pretty. With each victory, the surviving Swarm Lords were forced to fight with greater desperation, greater cunning.

The final Lord Escort did not even leave the ground; he instead opted to fight on land, his great battle arms poised, batting almost blindly at Aaw as she swooped time and again, too fast, too fast for him to react, till she left him blind and crippled. She could not finish him. She didn’t have the strength to pierce his thick chitin. So he lived, in shame, as she went after his Golden Queen.

It was, perhaps, an unprecedented move. Gallen knew from his mantle that Lord Escorts were never spared in battle. If a Lord Escort chose only to wound a Golden Queen, leaving her alive, then he would become her mate. But a living Lord Escort, one horribly wounded and disfigured, could serve no purpose in dronon society. It would only be killed by workers, used to fertilize the fields.