City of Scars (The Skullborn Trilogy, Book 1)

  CITY OF SCARS

  BOOK ONE OF

  THE SKULLBORN TRILOGY

  STEVEN MONTANO

  Also by Steven Montano

  BLOOD SKIES

  Blood Skies

  Black Scars

  Soulrazor

  Crown of Ash

  The Witch’s Eye

  Chain of Shadows*

  Vampire Down

  The Ending Dream

  Darker Sunset

  THE SKULLBORN TRILOGY

  City of Scars

  Path of Bones*

  The Black Tower

  HORROR NOVELS

  Something Black…

  Blood Angel Rising*

  SHORT STORIES

  Tales of a Blood Earth

  Tales of a Blood Earth 2

  * 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.

  “Of course.”

  “What happened here?” he asked. “To the Wastes, I mean? Were they always like this? Or was it the Tuscars doing?”

  “The Tuscars didn’t come to the Heartfang Wastes until after the war had already started,” Jonas said, his eyes still shut. His tone was slow and articulate, and everything that came out of his mouth sounded like a reprisal. He sat cross-legged on the ground, his hands to his sides and his eyes closed. Everyone in Silver Company was uneasy around the Den’nari advisor, who easily stood out from the others with his dark skin, the runic tattoos on his face and arms, and his strange weapons, chief among them the raak’ma. Jonas was aloof and haughty at the best of times, and the fact that Jlantria and Den’nar had been bitter enemies for hundreds of years prior to the war certainly didn’t help anyone’s impressions of him. He was the only non-Jlantrian in the Company. “They descended from the Skull of the World at the Blood Queen’s behest. It was the first time they’d ever come this close to humans.” He opened his eyes and looked off to the distance. “No…the Wastes were dead long before the Tuscars came here and claimed them as their home.”

  Corgan chewed on a piece of jerky. It tasted like salt, and little else. “Then what made this place into such a lifeless shitfield?” he asked. “What happened to whatever used to live here, before the Tuscars?”

  “No one knows,” Jonas said. “It has been dead here for a very long time.” He took a sip of water from his flask. “Even before the Blood Queen started the war, her presence was felt in the Wastes. This is where she was born, but her foul presence had touched this land long before that.” He looked at Corgan and Merrick. “The Heartfang anticipated her arrival before she even existed.”

  Corgan licked his dry lips. “And how does that work?” he asked.

  “If I knew that – if anyone knew that – perhaps we wouldn’t be here now,” Jonas said. “But you and I both know the Blood Queen’s war against the Empires was a long time in the making. Maybe longer than any of us realize.” Jonas rose, picked up his weapon, and walked away.

  Merrick looked confused, and frightened. He turned his eyes back to his food.

  Corgan watched Jonas. The Den’nari had different beliefs regarding the Blood Queen’s origins and heritage than the Veilwarden Houses of Jlantria did, and while Corgan found some of Jonas’s views borderline heretical he had to admit that something about the man’s words rang true.

  This was a long time coming. He’d been brought up fearing the Black Dawn, the end of days. Part of him believed that time was now.

  A chill wind carrying the scent of burning pitch whipped out of the west. Corgan heard wolves in the distance. His fingers were chilled to the bone, and cold mud had caked to his face.

  The Company rested as best they could. They conversed and told stories and wrote letters to their loved ones like they’d actually be delivered someday, even though they all knew that wasn’t likely to happen.

  Masks, Corgan thought. Masks we wear to hide us from the cold truth. Because we’re all going to die.

  Corgan still felt the icy touch of the rain long after it stopped. Goddess, I miss home.

  In spite of the Company’s best efforts, several of Corgan’s men had been infected by the Vampire Mist’s blighted touch. Four soldiers were dead by midday, and two more were too weakened from the blood-draining sickness to continue on foot. There was no one to properly care for the dying men since the Company surgeon, Mavalth, had died several days ago, and one of the newly dead was Kraig, the only other soldier among them with medical expertise.

  The Company only had a handful of horses left, but Corgan ordered that two of the mounts be used to carry the dying soldiers, Carak and Turvan, both from the village of Grath. Everyone knew the loss of the mounts would only be temporary.

  The marshy soil gradually gave way to crusted dark earth which flaked and cracked under their boots. The unmoving sun was a stain in the wounded sky. A grimy taste clung to the back of Corgan’s throat, and his hands had gone dry and chalky where the mud stuck to his skin. Muscles ached deep in his legs, and his mind drifted while they marched.

  Four more soldiers are dead, he thought, and two more will follow shortly. That meant they were down to fifty-one men from over four hundred, and they still had an eternity to travel. Goddess, what did we do to deserve this?

  “Sir?” Apart from the monotonous stamping of booted feet and the chink of armor, Merrick’s voice was the first sound Corgan had heard in quite some time. The boy looked pale and haggard. “Sir,” Merrick said again, “I hate to ask this, but…how long till we reach Chul Gaerog?”

  A sensation of dread crept up Corgan’s spine even from hearing the name of that p
lace. The Black Tower. The Blood Queen’s redoubt. The place where the war began, and hopefully where it would end.

  “I’m not sure, lad,” he said. “Maybe another day. You should check with Jonas.”

  “Sir…” Merrick said hesitantly. He was a big man, but he spoke softly, and he often stammered his way through sentences rather than speaking them. “Do we have enough men? We lost so much of the Company back at The Throat …”

  “We’re going to Chul Gaerog,” Corgan said plainly. “Even if you and I are the only ones left, and you have to carry my decrepit old ass over your shoulder. But we’re going to Chul Gaerog.”

  “Sir…yes, Sir.”

  “Enough ‘Sir’, all right? Call me Colonel Bloodwine. Or just Corgan. I hate that ‘Sir’ nonsense.”

  We can’t go back, Corgan told himself. Hell, we wouldn’t make it back. They were several days from the edge of the Wastes no matter which direction they travelled, but hopefully they were less than a day from Chul Gaerog. It came down to a choice of turning back and dying slow or pressing on to die fast.

  “Can I speak frankly, Sir?” Merrick said. Even when he tried to be quiet he had something of a booming voice.

  “Only if you stop calling me ‘Sir’,” Corgan said.

  Merrick laughed nervously. “Colonel…I have to wonder how much good we can do at Chul Gaerog.” He stared at the ground as he marched.

  The boy was right, and Corgan knew it. Still, every available soldier not already engaged with enemy forces was bound for the Black Tower. He only hoped the other Companies hadn’t suffered the same severe casualties his had. His men had been ambushed, cut off and separated from the rest of the White Dragon Army, and now they were all but stranded in the Wastes. They’d tried without any success to locate friendly forces. There just had to be more of them out there in the Heartfang – theirs was just one of a number of Companies organized as part of the offensive against the tower, the last major strike meant to cut the heart from their enemy. But being alone for days on those dismal plains had made them lose hope they’d find anyone else in the skeins of black fog. All they could do now was press forward.