Michael Stackpole: Chartomancy

The adults stood, some frightened, some resigned, staring up at him. As lightning strobed they changed. They shed years as a snake sheds skin. Twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty years sloughed off, returning them to their prime, when they were hale and hearty, brimming with courage, determination, and confident in their immortality. Hair darkened, bodies thickened and shrank, straightened, and gap-toothed smiles became whole again.

As they held their arms out, mail sheathed them. Gauntlets materialized, and breastplates and helmets. Fierce battle masks covered their faces, armor covered their legs. Spears and swords filled hands. Bows appeared, as did quivers of arrows.

And then the children rose. They pulled on the years their elders had discarded. As if wearing adult raiment, they looked odd for a moment, then they began to grow into those years. They sprouted up and muscles thickened. Childish softness hardened into angular adulthood. Armor wrapped them and implements of war came to hand.

They followed their elders to the walls, and awaited the Eyeless Ones.

The invaders came undaunted. Perhaps they imagined they were a wave that would wash over a lowly sand castle. No dismay registered as they began their descent into the moat or had to scramble up the other side. Mindless as well as blind, they crawled over each other, rising higher and higher to find the top of the wall.

Arrows slashed down at them, twisting them around with the force of impact. Following commands that Jasai shouted above the wind, the archers drew as one and shot. Whole ranks of dead and dying Eyeless Ones wilted and thrashed.

Still their companions tromped over them, climbing ever higher, only to be met with spear thrusts that toppled them down into the pit.

Yet other Eyeless Ones pressed on and their line wrapped the fortress’ perimeter. They came at it from all sides, and here and there they reached the top of the wall. A sword cut would spin a warrior away, making room for another blind and another.

Tyressa whirled into the battle, a blur of black and silver. She spun her spear over her head, slashing down through one blind, then shattering another’s skull with the weapon’s butt end. That blind arced back over the wall into the darkness. She swept two others from the edge, then stood there defiantly, challenging blinds to attack.

Rekarafi proved no less magnificent. He leaped from his tower and scattered five blinds that had gained the wall below him. His claws flashed, shredding their flesh. Keles winced as sympathetic pain rippled up the scars on his back. Rekarafi grabbed one of the blinds at hip and throat and raised it above his head. He bowed the creature’s spine, then touched its shoulders to hips with a sharp crack.

Still, it is not enough. Keles spat down into the courtyard. Tsatol Pelyn is not yet complete.

Yet uncertain as to what was happening, Keles stalked around to the western side of the tower and gazed at the dug-out canal. It had once been eighteen feet across and half that deep, but the digging had only produced a shallow, three-foot-wide track. He’d seen deeper wheel ruts on a road.

He closed his eyes, picturing the canal as it must have been. He saw it on the day the workers cleared the last bit of dirt. Water from the river pushed at the thin wall. The earth darkened, then crumbled, dissolving into a thick mud that the rush of water carried into the moat. He watched the water pour into the moat in a torrent, a fast-moving torrent that filled it quickly, washing away the Eyeless Ones, collapsing their pyramids of bodies.

He pictured it in his mind and merged that image with reality. His body tingled as he forced reality to surrender to the image. As the fortress had been made whole, as the people had become the garrison, so the ditch would become the canal and it would be enough.

And so it was.

The water roared, leaping and foaming. It pushed a wall of mud with it that swept through the moat. Tumbling rocks shattered legs. Eyeless Ones pitched from the walls and disappeared in the roiling black water. Almost as if they had been made of mud themselves, the Eyeless Ones melted as they bobbed to the surface.

Yet even this did not wholly stop them. One of the four-armed creatures leaped the moat and scrambled to the top of the wall. He scattered warriors with flicks of his hands, then rushed at Rekarafi. He roared furiously, and the Viruk matched his battle cry. People between them leaped to the courtyard below.

As strong as the invader was, he lacked the Viruk’s speed. The two upper arms slashed harmlessly above Rekarafi’s head. The Viruk caught the creature’s lower arms by the wrists, then yanked. Ligaments popped as the arms tore free. The creature, stricken, looked down, then the Viruk battered it to death with its own arms.

The battle for Tsatol Pelyn raged long into the night, and only broke when the storm slackened. The moat had become a swamp of dead blinds. Some human corpses bobbed there, but remarkably few given the ferocity of the fighting. As the clouds parted and the first faint dawn glow painted the eastern horizon gold, the blinds had withdrawn toward Felarati and every defender of Tsatol Pelyn knew they would not return.

3rd day, Month of the Hawk, Year of the Rat

Last Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court

163rd Year of the Komyr Dynasty

737th year since the Cataclysm

Wentokikun, Moriande

Nalenyr

The gnawing of the maggots in his arm kept Cyron awake. He had never wanted them sewn into his flesh, but the infection had gotten worse. He’d been feverish, and the Viruk ambassador had said that if he did not do something, he could lose the arm. Afraid and weak, delirious, he’d let Geselkir, under the Viruk’s watchful eye, plant the squirming white worms in his arm and sew the wound closed.

And now he could hear them chewing and devouring him. He’d taken to naming them. Pyrust, Vniel, Turcol, invaders, Vroan. The last had been voracious and would not stop. Vroan was eating his way through Cyron’s system, to his heart, then to his brain. The Prince knew this as certainly as he knew it was night and that both he and his realm would likely be dead in the morning.

He had done all he could, he knew that, but he had been pulled in so many directions. As much as he had expected and feared invasion from the north, the destruction of Erumvirine had just not been something he anticipated. Had the Virine ever cast lustful eyes north, he would have had time to react and to crush their ambitions. He might not have been a military man, but the Virine believed themselves invincible because of their Imperial heritage.

Cold comfort in the grave now, I imagine, Prince Jekusmirwyn. The Telanyn Dynasty surely had to be dead. Even if the Prince had gotten any of his children out of Kelewan, no one who forced the invaders from Erumvirine would ever put a Telanyn back on the throne. I would not have.

As he had done many times in his fever, Cyron ran over the events of the past months and years, seeking that point where he went wrong. There had to be one, just a simple one, a little mistake that just began to compound in ways he could not have anticipated. But he couldn’t see one. He had hoped to rebuild the Empire peacefully through exploration and trade. He hoped others would be persuaded to reunite the Empire without bloodshed. True, he did want it reunited under a Komyr Emperor, but wanted it for the benefit of all.

That ate at him the most. Had he been coldhearted, he could have let the people of Deseirion starve. Had he done that, Pyrust would have been forced to launch an invasion, but his army would have marched on an empty belly. They would have been broken against the Helos Mountains. Naleni forces could have liberated Helosunde, then taken Deseirion. He would have come with food for all, would have shared the wealth of his nation. He would have made life better for them.