The Nations of the Night

Book 0: The Lightbringer Trilogy

by Oliver Johnson

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

In this, the second book of the epic trilogy begun in The Forging of the Shadows, the once-glorious city of Thrull has become a place of death and despair. Seven years before, Lord Faran Groton, High Priest of the God of Darkness, overthrew Thrull and set loose his army of vampires to plague the city, waiting for the day the sun would rise no more...But the God of Light has his champions as well. A motley trio of survivors searches for the three ancient artifacts which can defeat the darkness. Traveling far beyond their own lands, they will encounter nightmares and disasters before facing their most dangerous enemies -- the Dark-born Nations of the Night!

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

It was night. The bloodshed was nearly at an end. The Battle of Thrull was lost. Baron Illgill stood upon the mound on which his tent had been pitched that morning. The slopes on all sides were carpeted two and three deep with the dead and the dying. Only a few of his men remained with him, hemmed in by the massed ranks of the enemy’s crack troops, the Reapers of Sorrow. They stood on the lower slopes of the mound, their ivory horns sounding far and wide over the marshland. Each one wore a skull mask beneath their helmet. Each one stared bonily at the small circle of the Baron’s men. They were about to charge.

The Baron prepared for the end. He threw down his shield. The lead casket in which the Rod of the Shadows was kept was at his feet. He opened it and a dazzling white light stabbed into the air. He saw the enemy’s ranks flinch back at the unexpected light. Reverently, he removed the glowing object and wrapped it in a legion standard. Though it was covered, the Rod glowed through the red and orange thread like a magic lantern, illuminating the corpses that lay like mown sheaves of corn on the slopes. He raised the Rod in his left hand, his sword in his right.

The taking of the Rod had started the war, and now, as it was raised before them, it acted as a goad to Faran’s army. The Reapers of Sorrow threw themselves forward in a tide of copper armour, their cow horns blaring like the voice of death. They struggled up the slope, their feet slipping on the dead, the ranks behind pushing them forward. Swords clashed and sparked. But the forward momentum of the Reapers was inexorable. The Baron was pushed backwards by the mass of bodies until he lost his balance and fell into the side of his tent.

He struggled back to his feet. The skull-masked enemy were milling around him. He struck out to left and right, saw his sword buckle the neck plate of a Reaper of Sorrow. He parried a blow, then pushed his assailant back with the brute muscles that years of training had given him. But now more Reapers came from the right, he fell back, parrying with the Rod. A blow from a copper mace exploded in a coruscating flash of light as it cut through the cloth and struck the enchanted metal. For a moment all he could see was the after-image of the flash. Now the crush of bodies was such he had no control over his movements. He was being carried away to the left, down the slope. He stumbled and fell, rolling over and over. Still he clutched the Rod. He struggled back to his feet, but another surge pushed him back again, towards the depths of the marshes, away from the gates of Thrull. He struggled against the tide of bodies, but it was futile: his feet were lifted from the ground. The press of men was so tight that he felt himself blacking out.

Then his vision cleared as the crush eased. He was miraculously free. He looked towards the top of the mound, but it was now a long way away; a faint eminence silhouetted by the lights of the corpse pyres.

His heartbeat began to slow and with it came rational thought. He was safe. And with that knowledge came guilt. Why had the enemy swords not touched him, when all his men had fallen like butchered steers? Was it because the light of the Rod had blinded them? Or because they were afraid, seeing in its light a man who, having lost everything, was not afraid to die, and not afraid to kill a few of them while doing so? Or was there a divinity in the face of a ruler that shone out, paralysing the hand that would kill him?

A ruler? No, he had lost everything: the city and the kingdom he had once commanded. He was only a mortal: carrion feed like his men. It was fate that had protected him, pushed him away from the slaughter, left him unscathed when the rest had died. A fate that had decreed he would live; live to see what he had set in motion fulfilled. Had he not sent his son Jayal on a quest that very night, a quest that would bring the Worm to its end, even if this battle hadn’t?

However it had happened, he had been spared. Now he must make good his escape. He struggled on through the marshes, the dark peat sucking at his ankles. Men moved in the darkness all around him, but he couldn’t tell whether they were friend or foe. To the east he saw the great walls of Thrull looming upwards into the night beyond the bulk of Marizian’s tomb.

Marizian’s tomb: that was where it had all begun. Marizian, the author it seemed of all this woe, this bloodshed. The Baron knew that what he had discovered there had set him upon a circle of pain; one that he would never escape until his death.

He wondered whether his friend, the High Priest Manichee, had escaped; but he remembered the Elder’s words – Manichee had known he was going to die. He at least would have found final peace in the battle.

The Rod was heavy, weighing down his left hand. Though it was swaddled in the legion’s colours, he felt its power, its heat beginning to burn his hand and the left side of his face even through the visor of his helmet. Its light lit up the surrounding mist in a penumbra of blue-white light. As he trudged on, other fugitives moved in and out of the area of illumination; shambling figures caught in harsh silhouette. He glimpsed their features: his own men, haggard, blood-soaked, their stares a thousand miles in front of them, not caring what they blundered into, or how many times they fell. The exhaustion of a defeated army.

His black and red armour was clearly illuminated in the light of the Rod. If his men recognised him, they didn’t rally to their commander. He remembered an old saw passed on to him by his father: a victorious general has many friends, but a defeated one is always alone. He was left to himself in the circle of light, the blood rage slowly dying from his ears and a deep despair taking its place. He walked alone through the night. He thought of the past and, more and more as the night wore on, of his son.

Eighteen years he had forged him in his mould; uttered harsh words; given him beatings; toughened him to the world. For the Baron had seen the curse, seen what would happen to the city the Illgills had inherited, the city even now being pillaged, its inhabitants being put to the sword.

Others had seen it too. The seeress, Alanda, had spoken to him months before, even before he had dug into Marizian’s tomb, warned him what would come: this night of slaughter, the curse so heavy that his son had had to be returned by magic from the dead. But he had marched his army out in the morning light, sent thousands to their deaths. Why? Fate, the groove of destiny from which no man could escape but plough onwards down it, even into the teeth of destruction.

But, Reh willing, his son would be over the causeway by now, climbing up into the Fire Mountains, an open road before him to the south. And beyond? Surrenland, the Astardian Sea, the deserts of the south. He turned to look behind him, but the night hid the road and mountains. Somewhere out there was hope, a future. The hope was in the sword his son would find in far-off Ormorica. Dragonstooth, a weapon that could change destiny, just as this Rod might have done if Manichee had used it earlier, resurrected the dead and sent them back out on to the field as blood-crazed revenants, as deadly as Faran’s vampires. He must save the Rod: one day he would find a man who could wield it, another pyromancer as skilled as Manichee had been.

His feet had been carrying him in an arc around the northern curtain wall of the city. After hours of wading ankle high through the sucking bog, he found himself miraculously on solid ground. The ancient roadway to the north – its broad flagstones sunk into the marsh, some huge stretches of it swallowed up in the black swamp. In his mind’s eye he could see it running arrow straight to the north. Now there was a distinct route to follow, he set out with renewed strength. Somewhere up ahead, fifty miles or so, were the first foothills of the Palisades. He would carry the Rod over them, into the Northern Lands, past Shandering Plain and the Nations of the Night, all the way to Iskiard.

The records of those who had gone there in ancient times, the survivors of the Legions of Flame who had gone to war with the Nations, had written that the road to the north still survived, even in the mountains.

Now he conjured a mental vision of those as yet invisible passes, glowing in the night. Winter was only just beginning, the snowdrifts wouldn’t be too high yet. A man might pass over them still.

He set off again, wading on through the pools of swamp water, sometimes sinking to his waist. He felt the ooze sucking him down, his armour a dead weight. But the light of the Rod burned in his soul, a voice spoke to him, telling him that it must never be extinguished in the mud. He fought out of the bog’s muddy grip time and time again, his limbs aching. He forced himself to concentrate, to look ahead for danger. He saw bubbling sink-holes, deeper even than the swamps he had survived, sink-holes which could swallow a man in a second. He skirted around them, hacking his way through man-high bulrushes with his sword. In his other hand, the Rod burned, blistering his skin. He squinted against the relentless light.

Only dimly did he become aware that, beyond the blinding glare, the sky had taken on a grey hue and that it was nearly dawn. He looked back to the south. The rock of Thrull thrust up from the marshes some ten miles behind: a dark column of smoke reached up into the heavens. With that smoke went his home and his dreams: the Hall with his ancestors’ paintings he saw in his mind’s eye as an inferno, the study where he had left Jayal his instructions, the demon that guarded them, all consumed by the very fire he worshipped.

He tilted his head back and laughed at the irony of it all. Then he shook his head, trying to clear it. This was not the way: with such thoughts he would go giddy with madness; it would be too easy to slide down into that abyss from which there was no return. Instead, he turned his eyes to the west – now he could see the Fire Mountains clearly, just emerging from the darkness, strong black lines against the satin of the night – had Jayal made it to safety?

He knew the boy would: fate and prophecy could not be denied. Even his survival seemed ordained – somehow he had known he would get away – why else had he constructed this elaborate plan for Jayal to follow him to the north? Given him his own mount, Cloud? When he had written the letters that he’d placed in his horse’s saddlebags on the eve of the battle he had wondered why he had done so; wondered why he had written them even. Now he knew.

And now there seemed providence of another order: in the stark light of dawn, he saw a riderless horse by one of the marsh pools, its reins thrown over its head, cropping at the grass. He waded towards it, sheathing his sword and stripping off one of his metal gauntlets; the horse whickered at the light of the Rod as the Baron approached and flinched away slightly but the Baron made soothing noises and placed a hand on its withers, calming it. He placed his foot in one of the stirrups and hauled himself up, placing the Rod across the pommel of the bloodstained saddle. The gelding tossed its mane, feeling the unwonted heat on its back, but seemed biddable enough.

He looked across the expanse of grey water in front of him. The mere was some hundred yards across. For a moment he contemplated jilting his destiny, taking the Rod and throwing it into the waters. Already the hand that had held it all night long, despite the protection of his metal gauntlet, burned agonisingly. Surely this instrument was as much a curse as a blessing? Let the marsh decide the fate of humankind. Was he not only mortal? Was not the weight of this object, as Manichee had warned, too much for him alone to bear? He felt its power and its terror as he never had before. If he threw it into the waters maybe another generation could take up the quest? He’d heard of long-lost corpses reappearing perfectly preserved in the peat of the swampland. Wouldn’t the Rod resurface too, be found by some wanderer in some indeterminate time from now?

But even as he thought these thoughts, he felt the magic of the Rod: magic that gave power, that was a drug, which promised its wielder access to a hidden world locked from mortal eye; power that would make a man omnipotent. Its power was an addiction, an addiction he’d first experienced when he’d penetrated Marizian’s Maze and seen the Rod glowing in the tomb. An addiction he could no longer quit.

He must have remained thus for an hour or so, as he contended with himself, for when he looked up again the red ball of the sun had risen fully over the Niasseh Range. Silently some fellow survivors had come up and now stood around him by the edge of the mere; they wore the differing colours of the legions that, the previous dawn, had been arrayed against Faran’s army. Now their surcoats were ragged and torn. Many of them were wounded. Their faces were grey, exhausted, yet they all stared at him, and in their looks he saw an accusation.

Why did they haunt him like this, accusing him, blaming him for their defeat? Couldn’t the fools see that it was ordained, just as the sun’s rising was ordained? Even as he watched he saw more men coming like grey wraiths through the mists. One or two were still mounted on battle-weary nags. They trailed the remnants of gay caparisons in the mud, like melancholy creatures who drag the failed dreams of youth behind them.

Not a word was uttered. They stared at him, as if expecting him to speak.

Enough of ghosts! Illgill set his boots to the gelding’s flanks, the horse tossed its head, whickering: it was tired. But another kick set it moving, its head low to the ground. Illgill’s head was bowed as well, low over the pommel. Horse and rider skirted the mere, finding a way through the high bulrushes. Through the haze of exhaustion. Illgill heard the sound of sucking footsteps behind and the rustle of reeds, and he knew some of his men had chosen to follow. He didn’t look back to count them; the Rod filled his mind, its light telling him that if needs be, he alone would cross the mountains and go into the Northern Lands.

He rode all the morning, his eyes never leaving the ground in front of the horse’s mane, knowing only that he followed the line of the old road, for the horse’s hooves occasionally rang on the ancient, mossy stone. The horse at least had a sense of self-preservation, though he no longer did: he would not have cared if it had carried him into the deepest part of the swamps.

Not once did he look behind until, towards the end of the day, he saw the ground begin to rise in a series of low folds at the furthest rim of the marshes. The foothills: the mountains themselves were still nearly invisible, grey outlines reaching up to the sky in the misty air to the north.

It was then he stopped, and wheeled the horse and looked at those that followed. They came through the shreds of fog like ghosts. Stumbling forward without apparent volition, their heads bowed. But when they saw the horse and rider had halted, each in turn came to a stop and raised their weary heads to him. Now, though his brain had been numb all this time, the discipline of the parade ground returned, and he began to count them methodically, as if he were at roll call in the Temple Square. He lost his count once as his head nodded and nearly dropped to his chest in exhaustion, but he caught himself and forced himself to begin the count again.

One hundred and thirteen in all, all that remained of the Hearth Knights and the Legions of Flame: men at arms, lancers, ballistae teams, archers. One hundred and thirteen of the twenty thousand. Yet suddenly the humming was gone from his mind, and his vision cleared. One hundred and thirteen, he thought – enough perhaps for what he had in mind.

He turned his horse once more to the Palisades, knowing that he had an army of sorts. And if the men had come this far, would they not follow him to the land beyond the Palisades; a land where no one had gone in one thousand years?

The battle had taken place at that season where a few last mild autumn days contend with the icy finality of winter. But in the saw-toothed mountains of the Palisades it was always winter, whatever the time of year. Ice crevasses, glaciers, dragon-tailed ridges covered waist deep in snow. The Baron’s men had little climbing gear: a few short lengths of rope salvaged from back packs, some improvised spikes hammered from daggers. It was suicide to make the attempt, but there was no choice: they had marched into the mountains knowing there was no looking back. And they died as they went; uncomplaining.

The avalanches took most of them. The snow had begun to fall in earnest as they passed through the foothills. Ahead, the overhanging snow cornices on the ridges and peaks looked dangerous already, looming precariously over the ancient roadway as it began to switchback upwards.

The first avalanche came the second day in; there was a clear blue sky and the looming peaks were visible. They saw the snow break off from a cornice high above them. The column halted, looking at the fall as it snaked and curled down the slope coming towards them, a thing of strange beauty. Then the roaring came, the roaring that obliterated everything else.

The Baron had heard climbers talk of the claws of an avalanche, the powder reaching forward in front of the snow following behind. After that day, how he came to hate the sight of the powder drifts outracing the thunderous mass of packed snow as it fell down from the snow-gabled peaks like surf upon a storm-swept beach! Then, swifter than the fastest horse, swifter than a jaguar, a white lava, opposite of fire, came roaring over them. A lava which set like cement around its victims.

That first day it took an hour to reach the first body. Many of the rescuers suffered frost-bitten hands – they had no digging tools. Despite their efforts, the man was dead already, suffocated by the packed snow.

Only four others were lost that first time, but, on the next day, another avalanche struck and thirty were taken at a stroke. After that second avalanche the Baron had told the survivors to stop digging: there was no conquering this white sea that reared all around them, a white sea in which all hope was lost, in which their ant-like progress was an insignificance in the numbing chaos of snow and rock. Let the snow swallow them, he prayed, if Reh so willed.

They climbed upwards, the road giving way to a barely visible path. They dug snow holes at night to shelter from the bitter wind. As they neared the highest of the glassy blue peaks the blizzards swept in, lifting men bodily from their handholds and toppling them to their deaths, and in the blizzards came the banshees, screaming spirits placed here by the gods to prevent egress to their hidden world north of the mountains. Their noise was like cloth ripping, but a hundred times louder, accompanied by a ghostly ululation that modulated high and low as they swooped and soared in the bitter winds. Some men went mad with the noise and threw themselves over the precipices.

Yet, it was not the avalanches or the banshees, but thirst that was their greatest enemy. A paradox: in that sea of frozen water, no amount of eaten snow could assuage it. The climb was arduous, and the men sweated more liquid than they could ever take in from handfuls of snow. Many of them became dehydrated, then delirious. They would disappear from their shelters in the night, no doubt led away by feverish mirages of water. No one saw them go, or where they fell. But every morning fewer and fewer men emerged from the snow.

In the Baron’s mind, in that place untouched by the howling of the wind and the thirst, he carried a map of the mountains, imperfectly remembered from a map he had studied in his youth: the legendary names of its summits, once the subject of schoolboy fascination, now of fear. Ever upwards into the sky, peak succeeded peak, but always he looked for one, the one that stood on the very roof of the world. At last it loomed out of the driving snow, white and brittle, spear-shaped in a sudden break in the clouds: Segron Height, the highest of the Palisades. Below it was the only pass over the mountains.

It was then he dared count his men again, for the first time since the marshes. He did it slowly, pedantically, passing a snow-bitten finger over their ranks. But this time the count would not have taken long, however deliberate he had been: only fifteen had survived; ninety-eight had perished.

Men had come to the pass below Segron before. The last had been those in another Legion of Flame a millennium earlier. They had been in a crusade against the dark creatures who lived in the north. But no comfort was to be found in their expedition: no one in that legion had ever returned to Thrull, and they had gone in the summer. Now winter sat perched for ever on the ridges, in the shadows of the dying sun.

Only once after that legion had men attempted the crossing. Furtal, the court singer, had once sung of it on a cold winter’s night in the palace on the Silver Way. He had been the only man to return from the mountains in that later, equally disastrous, expedition. He had never spoken of what had happened apart from in the lines of that cryptic lay:

In halls of glass on Segron side

An army stands in armoured pride.

Ahead the summits of despair,

The Plain of Ghosts and ancient fear.

South – the hearth that never warms

The home of widows, the child who mourns.

As night fell on the day of the counting they approached the col beneath the peak. Another storm threatened. A shadow in the banked snow covering a rock buttress indicated there was a hidden cave in the lee of the mountain. They crossed a frozen tarn and broke down the curtain of ice covering the cave mouth.

Inside, in the blue depths of the cave, they found their predecessors. They seemed to be grey statues, row upon row, huddled at the back of the chamber. Corpses, frozen and perfectly preserved in the ice. Their ancestors dressed for war, a war a thousand years old: antique armour, embossed, sporting wave-shaped shoulder pieces and pointed helmets. The ancient battle standards stood frozen like sheet metal by their sides.

The cave was miraculously warm after the wind chill outside. But the temperature was nevertheless well below freezing. Staying would lead to death in a short time; then they would join these dead ancestors.

Illgill didn’t know where the voice came from, but it was a voice that belonged to another time; when his engineers had at his command dug in Marizian’s tomb, over the protests of the priests of Reh; a time when he had commanded the gates of Thrull to be thrust open and all his armour had poured on to the marshes to face Faran Gaton; a time when his word was the law.

It was a voice that the men heard and obeyed, despite their exhaustion, for all but two followed him as he ordered them to leave the cave and the dead behind. As for the two who remained, they already had the look of dead men. The Baron gave them one last glance and plunged into the blizzard that now raged outside.

In the driving snow they found some cairns leading down the other side of the col. Some of the earlier legion had evidently survived and gone on to the north.

There were so few of his men left that now, at least, there was enough rope for them to tie themselves into a line. They descended an ice slope in the roaring gale, so wind-smoothed it seemed a linen sheet pulled tight over the shoulder of the mountain. A world of peaks and cloud lay right beneath their feet; each step seemed a step into the chasms that called up to them. Above them, the ice cornices hung precariously from the lee of Segron’s north face. They looked up at them, waiting for them to fall. All that could be heard was the howl of the wind, the crunch of their worn boots and the swish of threadbare clothes as they struggled through the knee-high snow. But the avalanche never came, the wind abated, as if the ancient gods had at last conceded: they would live.

Illgill had been in a dream for days, hunger and thirst barely assuaged by the pitiful rations that his men had brought, and from the meat of the horses, his included, slaughtered in the foothills. But thirteen had survived. And he still had the Rod, the Rod that cast a bright light as the clouds descended once more and they struggled through the white-out.

They inched down, tied together by the scrap of rope: sometimes it was as if he pulled the others, other times they pulled him. They were parts of one organism, consciousness obliterated, completely taken over by the battle for survival. Men fell off the razorback ridges; without a word the others hauled them back up again and the men would, without a murmur of thanks, begin their crawl downwards again.

Then, finally, they were off Segron’s highest slopes. They descended a glacier fractured by six-feet-wide crevasses, crossing the blue chasms on fragile snow bridges. Twice a bridge fell with a dull explosion of powder. Both times the fallers were hauled back, the men’s eyes empty of fear, beyond exhaustion.

The end of the glacier. A hanging valley below. They descended through the black and white wasteland of a scree slope, the view hidden by the thick mists that rose around them, curled about as if inspecting them, then soared up to the heights.

As he descended and the danger seemed to lessen, Illgill began to snap out of his torpor; a certain madness which he acknowledged as a strength entered his spirit so that his heart beat quickly again, despite the ice in his soul. His veins felt inspirited: all thirteen had survived the descent from Segron Height. A legion of sorts.

Providence or the Rod, or maybe both together had preserved them: they had scaled the Palisades.

But then the blizzard descended again. They huddled in their snow shelters for two more days. Two more died of frostbite; another walked off into the blizzard while the others slept, never to be seen again. The ten who remained also suffered, but their minds were toughened, for the crossing of the Palisades would have tempered any man to steel.

These are the names of the nine who accompanied the Baron: Endil Sparrowhawk, Gorven Whiteblaze and Andul, Gorven’s brother, three Hearth Knights; Nyrax the Brave; Zar Surkut; Otin, the sergeant-at-arms of the Surkut family; Minivere, a Surren noble who’d joined Illgill’s ranks just before the battle, and Argon and Krastil, the only two enlisted men to have survived. History has forgotten the other names: the frostbite cases; the madmen; the fallers; those who remained in the cave when safety was so near.

The two who died on the last descent were buried in cairns and their swords planted on top. Illgill and the nine others set off again, roped precariously together by the length of frayed hemp, none of them now with the strength to haul up another if they fell. Their food was down to the last few frozen pieces of horse meat left in their pouches. Their thirst was desperate, despite the snow they incessantly crammed into their mouths.

At the close of that day the clouds lifted and they saw the sunset for the first time in a week. The blue and white of the mountains was transformed to purple and rose in its glow. And, through a gap between two snow-covered peaks, they saw something else. A dull triangle of green framed by the mountains; the Plain of Ghosts. To the east they saw a blaze of ruby-red light in the falling sun beams: Shandering Plain, the battleground of the gods, a wilderness of isinglass, reflecting the sun’s fiery plummet into the western ranges. Beyond, like faint traceries on the powder-blue sky, they could see columns of white smoke reaching up to the heavens: the smoke that still rose from the final holocaust, when the gods had fought one another ten thousand years before.

Illgill turned to face his men. He felt alive for the first time in the whole deadly passage and his blistered face shone with a messianic zeal. He told them what they saw was the Land of Lorn, the home of the gods written of in the epics and the Book of Light. The nine looked at one another, not even daring to hope that they would reach it, so far away did it seem from their lonely perch. Then the wind got up again and began to howl, and another storm hurtled in, as if enraged that even so few had escaped the passage. They swiftly dug shelters in the drifts. That night they heard the voice of the ancient god of the mountains, howling and raging over his domain, looking for the survivors who had dared his vengeance, as they clung tightly to each other, seeking a last heartbeat of warmth.

They dug themselves out the next day when the storm had abated; it was the last storm, as if the fair land below them now stretched its influence up to the forbidding peaks and made the winds less fierce. The sky was cerulean blue and, for the first time in two weeks, they saw birds of prey riding the thermals above them. None of the survivors once looked back at the black buttresses of snow and ice behind them that had claimed so many of their number. They followed a gorge between two eroding cliffs; it was steep, but they inched their way down the side of a torrent of black water, carefully negotiating the sides of the waterfalls which plunged downwards to the mythical land below.

And thus the ten came to Lorn. They carried with them few mementoes of their previous glory: Zar had with him the coat of arms of the Surkut family swaddled around his frozen body like a cloak;