City of Scars (The Skullborn Trilogy, Book 1)
Read City of Scars (The Skullborn Trilogy, Book 1) Online
Authors: Steven Montano
CITY OF SCARS
BOOK ONE OF
THE SKULLBORN TRILOGY
STEVEN MONTANO
Also by Steven Montano
BLOOD SKIES
Chain of Shadows*
Vampire Down
The Ending Dream
Darker Sunset
THE SKULLBORN TRILOGY
City of Scars
Path of Bones*
The Black Tower
HORROR NOVELS
Blood Angel Rising*
SHORT STORIES
* Coming Soon
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2013 Steven Montano
All rights reserved.
Cover by Barry Currey
Map by Liberty Montano
Released by Darker Sunset Press
DEDICATION
To Liberty.
I Love You, Goober.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Jen, Bruce, Candice, Alan, Mike, Rob, Matt, Danielle, Mihir, the Author Posse and the folks at Guild of Dreams for helping me, supporting me, and having my back.
Thanks to Barry for producing kick-ass covers based on my vague ramblings and Lib for producing a kick-ass map based on my manic scribbles.
And thanks to the guys at MonkeyGod Enterprises, Paizo Publishing, Bastion Press and Necromancer Games for first publishing my work back in the day and giving me the confidence to keep making stuff up.
Prologue
(Year 10 of the Rift War)
Corgan stirred from his dreams and woke to the taste of blood. Distant voices clawed at the edge of his thoughts, forgotten songs from his childhood.
It wasn’t quite dawn. Charcoal clouds stained the crimson sky. The canyon wall marking the northern edge of the Heartfang Wastes was just a jagged line on the horizon. Low vapors curled across the ground, a blend of mist from the Moon Sea and smoke from Jlantrian border towns put to the torch.
The dying campfires cast flickering light on his men’s faces. They camped on an island of dry land in the muddy fields, in the shadow of a looming hillside covered with blade grass and red soil. Several Silver Company soldiers had woken as Corgan had, pulled from uneasy slumber by a disturbance at the edge of camp. Corgan followed their gazes.
A filthy wall of smoke loomed over them, dripping blood like rain. Rot stench emanated from the brume. The gory mist washed over Corgan’s face and soaked his beard with the sickening touch of something wet and freshly dead.
“Colonel Bloodwine!” someone called, but it was difficult for him to tell who. There were only fifty-seven soldiers left in Silver Company.
The camp came alive with the sounds of clanking armor and cries of alarm. The fog loomed over them as if it were ready to pounce.
“Get moving!” Corgan shouted. “Now!”
Corgan grabbed his long-hafted sword, clenched his teeth and stood up. His hauberk shifted painfully against his undershirt. As unwise as it was to sleep in chain-and-plate there was little choice in the Heartfang Wastes, where you rested in armor if you hoped to ever wake again.
The men hastily packed their belongings, rounded the few remaining horses and fled from the devilish fog. The roiling mist seemed to extend for miles. Ambient light from within the smoke cast a sickly red glow upon the ground.
“Use the mist’s light!” Corgan shouted. “Save the torches! Let’s go!” Corgan was about to call for Sergeant Joth before he remembered Joth was dead, along with the rest of his sergeants.
“We shouldn’t have camped for so long,” Jonas said. He had a way of making every word seem scornful. The dark-skinned Den’nari ranger was Corgan’s advisor in matters of the Veil and the Company’s only reliable source of information on the denizens of the Heartfang Wastes, so while few of the other soldiers liked him they all heeded what he said. “The Vampire Mists seek blood. They were bound to find us eventually.”
“Well there wasn’t much we could do then, was there?” Corgan said with more of a snarl than he’d intended. “The men needed rest.” He gathered his bedroll. “If we move fast enough we shouldn’t lose anyone.”
Corgan waited near the smoldering fires as his men cleared the camp. The earth darkened beneath the presence of the baleful Mists. A few tendrils of blood fog slithered across the ground like snakes. Animalistic growls churned deep inside the fumes.
He hollered at his men to forget the tents. The roiling blood smoke steadily gained ground as the Company moved out, and Corgan watched, tensed, ready for the vapors to suddenly spring forward like a hunter cat done toying with its prey.
“Colonel!” Jonas called out. The Den’nari stood at the edge of the hill. “We’re clear!”
Corgan nodded. He was alone in the campsite, a hundred paces away from the edge of the seething red mass. It swirled and broke like a storm of blood and milk. He heard whispers, the same razor voices from his dream.
You’re not getting me today
, he thought. He left the camp behind and stayed just ahead of the fog as it rolled forward like a diseased and deliberate tide. Corgan rounded the hill and fell in with his men.
The new day broke. Silver Company kept a good pace, and within the hour the unholy mists faded into the distance behind them. Corgan’s heart never stopped racing. He kept looking back over his shoulder.
The rendezvous point was still miles away. The Company pushed deeper into the dismal plains known as the Heartfang Wastes. Boots slapped in the mud. It started to rain, and the dank water flowed through their dirty and mottled hair and into the chinks in their cold armor. Pallid faces and blank eyes stared straight ahead.
Corgan looked at Jonas. The Den’nari’s green and black leather armor lent his gaunt frame the illusion of bulk. His dark hair was long and unbound, and his angular face looked like it had been chiseled from stone. His
raak’ma
, a twin-bladed scimitar used almost exclusively by the Den’nari, was strapped across his back with its central hilt bound in leather. When Jonas looked back at Corgan his green eyes were cold and determined. Neither of them had any misconceptions about where they were going, or what waited for them there.
The soldiers moved like metal ants. They marched through the steady drizzle of freezing rain. Corgan’s thinning hair was pasted to his scalp, and his body shook from the cold even though he sweated like a stuck sow under his armor.
He looked around at his men. The soldiers of Silver Company were of every age. Locke, the youngest, was barely sixteen, while Abras was the oldest at over fifty. Their once proud faces had lost all color and life, and their skin looked as trod upon as the dead earth. Once gleaming armor had been beaten, muddied and stained with rust. The waters of war had saturated them through to the bone and corroded their souls with fear.
He was so tired. His bones felt frozen and brittle, but he carried on, just like his men, cold and aching and barely alive.
Corgan remembered telling one of his soldiers – he couldn’t remember who – that no place was closer to hell than the once-proud city of Savon Karesh. It had once been an architectural beauty, a place of significance in the western Jlantrian Empire, but the war had made it a broken shell. Months of siege by the Blood Queen’s hordes – ravenous armies of Tuscars, Arkan and Voss – had devastated the city, and by the time the attack had been lifted Savon Karesh’s water channels were filled with blood and filth, many of its gleaming white walls had fallen, and its once pristine streets were paved with the dead.
But there in the Heartfang Wastes, with its stark and bloody ground and the cold dead rain, Corgan wished he could find whoever he’d talked to about Savon Karesh and take it all back. Any city, even a ruined one, was paradise compared to the Wastes.
Corgan sat on a low stone and greedily ate the last of his rock-hard jerky. They’d been marching all day, and he’d ordered the Company to rest. When the air was clear the vast plains stretched on for as far as the eye could see, but most of the time the Company wandered through a world of fog. Dark soil bled brackish water like ooze from a cracked pore, and the silver sun hovered low behind inky clouds.
The soldiers ate jerky and dried sausages and drank from waterskins. Some of them paced back and forth, their weary eyes on the horizon.
The air always smelled gruesome in the Heartfang Wastes, like rot. Freezing wind pushed hazy vapors across the festering landscape. Though not dangerous like the Vampire Mists the Heartfang’s pervasive smoke made it difficult to navigate the alien environment. Even when the air was clear Corgan and his soldiers faced the inherently difficult task of traveling an uncharted region with few physical markers aside from mud and bones.
It had been several months since Corgan first stepped foot in the Heartfang Wastes, and after his first tour he’d hoped never to come back. And yet there he was, trapped with the remains of Silver Company, men he’d only served with for barely two months before they’d been deployed to help launch the assault on Chul Gaerog.
How can the Tuscars survive here?
he wondered. The creatures were legion, a barbaric and savage species without subtlety or guile. They also weren’t alone. Three evil races served the Blood Queen: the Tuscars, the horrific Arkan, and the black giants called the Voss. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Vlagoth had also secured aid from the northern Empire of Gallador, pressuring the central lands of Jlantria and Den’nar with a two-fronted assault. The Heartfang’s mists helped obscure her forces between their brutal attacks on Jlantria’s southern borders, and the dark magic of the Arkan and Voss lent her armies near unstoppable might.
Merrick and Jonas sat nearby. Merrick was a mountain of a soldier with long dirty-blonde hair and a face like cracked granite, a blacksmith’s son from a tiny home in Ral Tanneth. He’d once had the wide-eyed eagerness of youth, but the war had quickly ground that away and replaced it with exhaustion and fear, like it had with all of them.
“How are you doing, lad?” Corgan asked Merrick. His voice sounded hoarse.
Merrick looked up from the ground. He’d been sitting with his arms folded across his knees and his eyes down. “Sir?”
“How are you doing?” Corgan asked again with a smile.
Merrick’s brow furrowed. “I’m fine, Sir.” He hesitated, perhaps measuring what would be appropriate to say to his commander. “Tired.” He looked as exhausted as everyone else, and the sunlight bleeding through the crimson clouds lent his skin the complexion of uncooked meat.
“You and me both, son,” Corgan smiled. “You and me both.” He looked out at the wastes. “This place wears on you.”
“Sir, can I ask you something?” Merrick said after a moment.