Forged In Flame (In Her Name: The First Empress, Book 2) (30 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Invasion

Keel-Tath stood on the ramparts of the city wall that overlooked the sea, her companions on either side of her. The sun had not yet risen, and the sky was filled with stars. The Great Moon, waxing now, hung nearly overhead. 

The harbor was empty, every ship having sailed out to greet the enemy. The huge vessels alongside the piers had to be towed out by longboats crewed by dozens of oarsmen, but once in open water their massive sails billowed forth on the night wind. The behemoths formed into nine single-file battle lines. The other ships formed up around each group before they all sailed to the east to take the battle to the enemy. Li’an-Salir herself was on one of the great ships, having left her First in charge of the kingdom’s land campaign and, should it come to that, final defense. While Keel-Tath was still full of anger at the great mistress’s words the evening before, she wished her no ill will. Without her kindness, Keel-Tath and her companions would be dead, or worse.

Smaller, fleeter ships sailed on ahead, and Keel-Tath saw one that she thought must surely be Wan-Kuta’i’s command. Sher-Ai’an, released from her service, had pledged his honor to Wan-Kuta’i and had sailed with her into battle. She hoped for their good fortune, and wished deep in her heart that she had something, someone, greater to whom she could beg for their welfare. But the old gods were no more, so she could only wish her comrades a silent farewell as the wind bore them onward to their fate. She knew that a warrior’s true destiny was to die in battle, but she would much rather see them live.

A few bright orange and red flashes lit up the horizon, and the sound of thunder rolled across the sea some seconds later.

“The battle has been joined,” Ka’i-Lohr whispered beside her.

There were more flashes, then a long pause before the entire horizon, as far as she could see, lit up. Dozens, hundreds of flashes bloomed where the sky met the sea, followed by low cracks of thunder that did not stop.

“So many,” she breathed, unable to imagine how many ships must be out there, fighting in the darkness.

“This will be the greatest naval battle in the last hundred generations,” Tara-Khan said. “The fleet sailing under Li’an-Salir boasts over a thousand warships, and more protect the western coast.”

Keel-Tath looked at him. “Do you wish you were with her?”

He shook his head slowly. “I have found my place.”

“As have I.” Ka’i-Lohr put his hand on hers for a moment before taking it away. The touch made her shiver in an unexpected but pleasant way.

The horizon to the north was lit by an enormous flash that left her blinking away the afterimage from her vision. A few moments later a deafening boom echoed across the water.

She turned to Tara-Khan. “What was that?”

His face looked grim. “A ship, a big one, blew up.”

“One of ours?”

“I do not know for certain, but very likely,” he told her.

“The great ships of our fleet carry stores of what we call gunpowder for their cannons and other weapons they use to protect against the larger predators of the Great Deep,” Ka’i-Lohr added. “But gunpowder is very dangerous, and if a large amount is set alight…”

“It explodes like that,” she finished for him. “Why do they not just fight with weapons such as we use on the land?”

“They do,” Dara-Kol broke the silence of the two younger warriors as they pondered an answer, “when the ships close to boarding range. Every weapon, so long as a warrior stands behind it, is accepted in war. We crave battle by sword and claw, for that is in our blood. But with each rise out of chaos from the previous fall, the technology used to wage war rises, as well. Ever larger and more powerful weapons are built until the next fall comes, and those weapons are destroyed by the priesthoods as civilization descends back into chaos. You studied the Books of Time, I know. You saw such things.”

Keel-Tath nodded, remembering. None of what she had studied then had any context, any true meaning. But here, watching from afar as hundreds of thousands of warriors fought and died at sea, the truth of the ancient Books of Time was plain. It was then that she realized that the true purpose for the Books of Time was not to learn the mistakes of the past, but to ensure they were repeated. As Ayan-Dar had told her many times, their people should be reaching for the stars, evolving into something greater. Instead, they were doomed by the Way and the priesthoods to endless cycles of savagery, and the Books of Time were the blueprints used by the priesthoods to keep things as they had been…forever.

The fighting went on through the night as they stood watch on the walls with the city’s defenders. More titanic flashes had lit up the night sky, and many smaller ones. The time between the flashes and the thunder had grown shorter as sunrise neared, signaling that the battle was drawing closer to the coast. That could only mean one thing: the Dark Queen’s fleet was stronger, and was driving Li’an-Salir’s ships back.

By morning, smoke was thick on the horizon, carried aloft by the wind from blazing ships and the endless gunfire. Keel-Tath wondered that no damaged ships returned to seek repairs.

“In other times, they would,” Dara-Kol told her, “for those were purely battles of honor where surrender after a battle well fought was acceptable. But this is different. Li’an-Salir said that she would not yield her honor to the Dark Queen. Her warriors will fight to the death until she herself is killed. Then they have a choice of what they would do.”

“Yield and surrender your honor to Syr-Nagath, or die,” Keel-Tath whispered.

As the morning wore on, masts and sails, then entire ships, became visible on the horizon. The number soon became too many to count as the Dark Queen’s fleet forced its way toward Ku’ar-Amir. While the defenders were more skilled in handling their ships, the Dark Queen’s warships were faster and more powerfully armed.

Dara-Kol pointed at a group of enemy ships that had no sails and were shaped differently than the others. “Their hulls are made of iron,” Dara-Kol told her.

“How can that be?” Keel-Tath asked, puzzled. “Iron does not float!”

“Nor does the wood of the
a’in-ka
tree. But the iron hulls are stronger, and their engines can drive them through the water at great speed. Look.” She pointed to a garishly painted vessel, its hull a glossy black with runes in deep red, as it raced between a pair of sail-bound warships. Cannons mounted on the deck of the iron ship fired, blasting holes through the hulls of the Ku’ar-Amir ships.

While the enemy ship boasted an iron hull, the crews of the stricken sailing ships had iron spirits. As one, they heeled over toward their attacker, pinning it between them as they fired a broadside with their cannons. Even so far away, Keel-Tath heard the deep crunch as the three ships collided before the tiny dark shapes of warriors swarmed across the rigging and fallen masts from the sailing ships to bring their swords to the enemy. The cannons of all three ships continued to fire at point blank range, with the cannonballs of the sailing ship blasting through the iron hull of their enemy.

Then the three ships disappeared in a triple fireball as a stray shot found a powder magazine. One ship exploded, setting off the magazines of the other two. The blast destroyed two more ships sailing close by, and set another half dozen alight. When the smoke began to clear, there was nothing left of the original three but debris in the water.

Keel-Tath shook her head, trying to come to grips with the scale of carnage she was seeing. She was used to individual combat, of course, and what she had seen in the time since she had left the temple had given her a small appreciation for battle. But this, this was something far beyond. This was her first taste of war. Part of her was thrilled by it, and she could feel her heart quickening at the thought of grappling with the enemy. But another part shied away from the prospect of being wiped away in the blink of an eye by an explosion. She had felt the souls of some of the enemy warriors, descended from the line of the Desh-Ka, in her blood, sensed their fury and their bloodlust. Shared their terror as they were swept into the sea. But the worst were the songs in her veins that simply stopped as they died, all too often many at a time. She had known that war could be this way, for she had read in the Books of Time accounts of many wars fought in the past. But, like the sea monsters she had thought were only legends and tall tales, she had been unprepared for the reality of it. And this was only the beginning.

What frightened her was not that she might die in the coming maelstrom, but that she might survive it to face the future as foretold in the prophecy. If Anuir-Ruhal’te had truly foreseen her destiny, Keel-Tath must unite all her people. To do that, she would have to lead them through a war, first against the Dark Queen, and then against the Settlements, such as had not been seen since the Final Annihilation. 

I am not ready, she told herself as the horizon burned. I can never be ready for such a burden.

She felt a gentle touch on her shoulder and looked back with frightened eyes to see Dara-Kol, standing close behind her. 

“Have faith,” Dara-Kol said, her words barely audible above the booms and cracks of the battle. 

Keel-Tath, feeling tiny against the storm sweeping in upon them, nodded and tried to smile her thanks. But inside she felt as brittle as a thin sheet of glass.

That was when she heard something, a deep hum that grew against the background of the battle at sea.

“Look!” Drakh-Nur pointed to the sky.

Keel-Tath looked up and gasped in both fear and awe.

Approaching from the north were enormous ships, easily as big as the largest of the vessels Keel-Tath had seen in the harbor. But these flew in the air. They were powered not by sails, but by some sort of engines driving propellers, in principle the same as those used on the Dark Queen’s ships. These aerial leviathans had streamlined shapes much like giant fish and were painted to match, with gaping maws and leering eyes. Down their flanks were emblazoned the runes of the Dark Queen, leaving little question of their origin or intent. She counted them as they swept over the maze of rocky spires that thrust upward from the thick rainforest toward the sky, and stopped after she reached a hundred. But there were many more, at least twice that number, sailing with regal malevolence in close formation toward the city.

The lead ships slowed and dropped lower as they neared the northern approaches, and the formation blotted out the sun as they passed overhead. Not wasting any time, the city’s defenders opened fire. Harpoons and lances, along with weapons like the one on Wan-Kuta’i’s ship that had cut down the warriors on the beach, arced skyward. Almost every one hit home, but caused no visible damage: they simply disappeared through the skin of their targets. 

Then the enterprising crew of one of the catapults arrayed along the walls managed to turn it just enough to bear on the parade of airships. They flung a stone that Keel-Tath judged to be about the size of Drakh-Nur and hit one of the bulbous gondolas that stood out from the bottom of the ships like fat ventral fins. The stone smashed through the gondola and passed through the inside of the ship, emerging on the far side to take out one of the pods, each with a whirling propeller, that protruded from the airship’s sides. The pod exploded in a cloud of fiery debris. 

The defenders gave a cheer that turned to a cry of disbelief as the ship caught fire from the destroyed propulsion pod. In seconds, the entire vessel had been transformed into a gigantic torch that collapsed to the ground. Small black objects, warriors, Keel-Tath knew, leapt from the doomed ship in an effort to save themselves. But their escape was short-lived, for the ship settled on top of them, burning them alive.

The handful of other catapults along the wall that could be brought to bear began to fire. Some flung stones, but others hurled clay pots filled with a volatile substance that burned with wild abandon. More airships exploded and crashed to the ground, setting parts of the city on fire. Keel-Tath shied from the thought of how many innocent robed ones must have been caught in the conflagrations, and her mind flashed back to the sight of the tens of thousands who had burned and died in Keel-A’ar. And somewhere in there, she knew, was Han-Ukha’i, and she was in peril. Keel-Tath could feel her fear and pain, but she had to force aside her fears. There was nothing she could do for the healer now.

As the lead ships neared the southern wall, dozens of ropes uncoiled from the gondolas of every ship and warriors, hundreds from each vessel, began slithering down. Some landed on the walls, where they were set upon by the defending warriors, while others landed inside the city proper. The enemy swarmed through the heart of the city, where there were precious few warriors to oppose them, most of the defenders having been concentrated along the fortifications within and atop the walls. 

It was Tara-Khan who recognized the danger first. “We must get off the walls!” 

The great walls, which had always been the city’s first line of defense behind the fleet itself, had suddenly become a death trap. If the enemy warriors gained control of the entrances to the wall’s fortifications, they could simply bottle up the defenders. It would be nearly impossible to fight their way out, for only a few warriors could fight together in the space of the entrances, and there was no way to scale down the outside of the walls.

“Do as he says!” Dara-Kol bellowed. “Warriors! Abandon the walls! The fight is within the city!”

The warriors around her instantly obeyed, turning toward the nearest entrances to the stairs inside the walls that led down to the city. 

Dara-Kol turned to follow them, but she felt a restraining hand on her shoulder. 

“Wait,” Tara-Khan told her. “We must not go that way.”

“Why?” She asked.

“Look at them.” He nodded toward the line of warriors pressing their way into the stairway entrance. “If we go with them we will find ourselves trapped in the wall.” Pointing down to the city below, where hundreds of enemy warriors were already approaching the wall near their position, he said, “We must find another way.”