Called to Battle, Volume 1 Read online

  He rarely ventured this far from the borders of Ios. But after word had arrived that this mage had slain not one but two skilled mage hunters in as many years, Narn had felt honor-bound to take up the trail. His fellow Iosans said he had a gift for appearing when he was most needed, but there was no magic to his movements. He had a wide range of contacts who passed him news on a regular basis: about the Retribution, about suspected arcanists, about coming battles. He went where his instincts and conscience guided him. This hunt was both. This mage had caused enough damage to the Retribution already, and the order was too small to allow humans to kill its members with impunity.

  Narn had waited for his quarry to move on, but the mage seemed to be waiting for something. Narn’s instincts told him the time was now. Darkness approached, and if he wanted to avert it, he would have to strike. And strike boldly.

  He had already located the mage’s supply train, housed in a stable at the edge of the village. She had employed no sentry—a careless mistake—and the lone stable boy had gone to the settlement’s communal hall for his evening meal. Narn had gone in an hour ago, loosed the sled dogs to the wild, and destroyed the supplies. The sabotage would be discovered in the morning, but it was only a contingency to ensure there would be no escape. He did not intend the mage to live to see the sunrise.

  As he set the last of his snares outside the common hall, Narn pressed himself against the outside wall and peered through a broken window on the north side, sheltered from the icy wind. He counted the villagers stuffed around the creaking tables in the cramped, smoke-stained hall. There were around fifty souls, mostly human. A cadre of Rhulic prospectors were working a claim near the outpost, looking to strike it rich at some lost mine. The robust dwarves posed a threat, but he had a plan for dealing with them. The mage had collected a small party of bodyguards that stood out clearly: two foreign-looking mercenaries, an ogrun with a huge axe, and one other Narn had not been able to identify. They were smart, cleaving to the other villagers to take shelter in numbers, and the mage had not drawn unwanted attention by using magic. The humans who settled the remote reaches of Immoren were canny enough to distrust mages, even if they did not loathe them with the same force as the Retribution.

  The mage probably felt safe in the common hall. In truth, though, the hall was to Narn’s advantage. The enclosed space would limit the usefulness of the mercenaries’ firearms and the ogrun’s reach and instead favor Narn’s blades. The trap would work against the mage as well, as magic powerful enough to harm Narn would cause significant collateral damage. He was nimble enough to escape, but if the mage earned the villagers’ ire and suffered in the aftermath, so much the better. Over the years he had incited more than one village mob to rise up and slay an arcanist or sorcerer. He would strike, kill as many of his prey as he could, then fade away and let the terrified commoners do the rest.

  He lit two bundles of green kindling and leaves and pitched them through the window. Smoke hissed into the hall, and he heard the shouts of the people inside. He’d set the grenades near the dwarves’ table, counting on them to react, and so they did. Angry words were exchanged, and he heard steel being drawn. No gunfire, but that was for the best. He did not want irons discharged until he struck.

  The cook stumbled out, fell to her knees, and retched on the cobblestones. Narn slipped through the door before it closed behind her. He stalked through the kitchen with his scarf wrapped around his mouth against the smoke and peered into the common room.

  Half-blind chaos filled the place, with villagers pouring out the doors or arguing loudly, knives and small arms drawn. The dwarves, faces red and eyes watering, roared in Rhulic at the mercenaries, who had drawn their scatterguns and argued back in a blend of Cygnaran and Khadoran. Violence would break out at any instant. The ogrun had left the mage and the cloaked fifth member of their party by the fire and was making her way over to her allies, axe loosed at her belt. Narn slipped his crossbow out of its sling, whispered an invocation to Scyrah and the other lost Iosan gods, and took aim.

  The mage looked straight at him, despite his cover and misdirection. Her bright green eyes glowed in the smoky common hall, recognizing him and his mission.

  Gods of our ancestors.

  She raised a long-barreled pistol, around which green runes of light circled. A gun mage, as the reports had indicated. But how had she sensed him? That was beyond the talents of a mere magelock slinger.

  Narn drew back behind the wall just before the mage’s first bullet shattered the wood above his head. The explosive blast pushed him to the ground, but he rolled with it. He had to keep moving before—

  The ogrun crashed into the kitchen, shattering the door aside with her massive bulk. Narn narrowly dodged a chop that would have taken his head clean off. He heard gunshots and thought the dwarves and mercenaries must be firing upon each other, but he kept his attention on the ogrun. Her mechanikal axe crackled, its edge seeming to vibrate and rip at the air. She loomed over him and pressed her axe against the cracked door frame, and Narn watched as the wood warped and splintered around the sharp steel.

  “Iosan,” the ogrun said, her voice almost a growl, “you will regret—”

  He shot her through the left eye with his crossbow. She stood a moment, hands reaching toward the quarrel, then toppled to the floor.

  Even as she fell, Narn was up, powerful legs projecting him over the ogrun’s corpse into the common hall. His plan had fallen through the instant his quarry had seen him, but he could salvage the kill if he were quick.

  As he burst into the common hall, he saw the gun mage was still reloading, and her green eyes went wide. He slid the crossbow back into its sling and drew his sabers. She’d missed with her first shot, and she might miss again, but he preferred not to let her get another chance. She saw him coming, and her hands started shaking. Good.

  He leaped onto a table between them, sabers crossed, and tensed to spring. Steel flashed to his right, and he fell back in a parry. The mage’s last defender—the cloaked figure he had not been able to identify—pressed a sword against Narn’s sabers, holding him in place.

  “Svyn!” the warrior shouted to the mage. “Run!”

  Narn hesitated, but not because he feared the swordsman. If anything, that attack had been clumsy and too easily deflected to offer him a threat. What gave him pause was the warrior’s Iosan voice. He disengaged from the sword and sidestepped wide enough to launch a slash at the man’s head. The blade rattled off an iron helmet but ripped the cloak aside. A flicker of recognition passed between the two, and Narn did something he never did in battle.

  He spoke.

  “Rylel?” Narn asked.

  The Iosan knight pressed with a horizontal slash, and Narn leaped off the table, turned over Rylel’s head, and came down behind him, blades singing. He caught the knight with two downward slashes that tore his cloak to strips and slid along his armor. One of the sabers bit into the gap between Rylel’s arm plates, and blood dripped. The knight raised his voice in a cry of challenge and wheeled to lash at him, but Narn ducked back on the balls of his feet.

  This made no sense. Scion of a minor house back in Ios, Rylel had been a knight in service of Consulate Court and once a friend to Narn, if such as he could ever have friends. That had been when they were young, before the demands of the Retribution had come between them. Lacking the temperament needed to be a hunter, Rylel had left Ios, swearing himself a Seeker in service of their lost gods. He had gone to the human lands to learn all that he could. Narn knew it to be a vain quest, but it was admirable in its own way. They had much the same goal, they two, but they followed vastly different paths. Why would he be aiding a human mage?

  The knight launched an arcing swing Narn foiled easily. Against a human, the strike would have been excellent, but Narn’s training and talent made Rylel look clumsy by comparison. The hunter swept one saber up and back to deflect the sword harmlessly past, while his other saber skipped along Rylel’s greave plate and bit into t
he soft mail beneath. The Iosan knight staggered back, bleeding now in two places. Rylel fell to one knee, and Narn swept both blades together into an overhead chop that sent Rylel’s helmet skittering across the floor, leaving the knight’s golden hair flying free. Both of them knew that blow could easily have taken Rylel’s head, had Narn wished it.

  “Stand down, Rylel,” Narn said in Shyr, so no one else would understand. “One chance.”

  “I cannot,” Rylel replied in kind. “You do not know what is happening.” His old friend surged to his feet and struck with a rising blow. Narn blocked, but Rylel had put such force behind the blow it knocked one of the sabers from the hunter’s hands. The blade flew through the air and clattered against the back wall. Rylel cried out in Khadoran. “Svyn! Get out!”

  The gun mage was taking aim, Narn realized, and he lunged forward to dance around the wounded Rylel. The knight swung at him, but Narn was inside his reach. The hunter caught his left arm, spoiled his strike, and held Rylel between himself and the gun mage, the edge of his saber at Rylel’s throat. He stared over his old friend’s shoulder at his quarry, who held her magelock pistol wide. Green fire danced around her hands and power arced from her eyes.

  “Let him go,” she said.

  This was her true power. Narn could feel the magic building in the room, making his skin contract and itch. His bones rattled and he could feel every hair on his head. It was unlike any magic he had ever felt before, and that unnerved him.

  Rylel saw it too, but he understood it. “No,” he said. “Do not, Svyn. It is not worth it.”

  Her face could have been chiseled stone. She stared at Narn with surpassing fury.

  Ultimately Narn knew his course. Whatever darkness this gun mage wielded, it could not be allowed to leave this place. He would die before he let her perpetuate such a horror. He would gladly give his life to end it.

  No words were necessary. Rylel knew his mind, as he always had. “Do as you must, old friend.” Rylel was drawing a dagger from his belt. “As must I.”

  Then he turned in Narn’s grasp, or tried to. The motion dragged the saber across his throat, and blood spilled in the smoky tavern. All sound seemed to die away around them.

  “No!” Svyn cried, and her green magic cracked and fell apart.

  Instantly, the strength went out of Rylel’s legs, and Narn let him slump to the floor. Svyn ran toward them. Narn braced for an attack, extending his saber in warning, but she ignored him. She fell to her knees beside Rylel and cradled his head in her arms. To Narn’s surprise, tears ran down her cheeks.

  Around him, the silent tavern had half-emptied, and those who remained watched the two of them with the corpse at their feet. The guttering hearth fire crackled while crimson rays of the setting sun swept through the clearing smoke. The two mercenaries lay unmoving, and the remaining dwarves stared dangerously at Narn, but the grim mage hunter glared at them, and they held back. Efficiently, he sheathed his saber, drew his crossbow, and set a quarrel in its mounting. None questioned him or moved to stop him.

  Svyn looked up at him, her green eyes rimmed red from her tears. “You fool!” she said, and he was shocked to hear the language of Ios, crude though it was on her tongue. “You killed my protectors. Now we both die.”

  Narn said nothing. How dare this creature even speak to him, after he had slain one of his people in her pursuit? Every Iosan was worth a hundred men of Immoren. A thousand. And after such horror, she—a human—spoke the tongue of his people? The deaths of all present seemed a small but fitting answer to Rylel’s passing and the insult of a mongrel human profaning sacred Shyr. But first, he kissed his crossbow and sighted on her face.

  “They’re coming,” Svyn said.

  The rays of light through the smoke turned putrid green.

  Narn’s aim faltered as a mad cackle split the air. It rang in his ears ,and his head felt as though it would split asunder. He drew his saber with his free hand and cast about for the source of the sound that echoed all around them.

  The door to the outside was torn off its hinges and the biggest human Narn had ever seen strode through, clad head to foot in pitted plate armor. It was a woman, to judge by her shape and patches of lank brown hair, but there was little human about her face. One brilliant green eye burned out from her scarred visage, and sickly flames flowed around her armored body.

  He raised his crossbow, sighting on the green eye, but a tremor ran through the earth beneath him, and he had to dance back on his toes to keep from falling. Svyn fell flat to her belly, hands trembling as she reloaded her pistol.

  “What’s this, Flense?” a high-pitched male voice asked. A squat, kettle-bellied man peeked out from behind the woman. He flashed a grin full of broken, yellowing teeth. Green magic flowed up from the broken floor to his hands. “It’s an elf! Iosan or Nyss? I can never tell.”

  Narn discharged his crossbow, but the quarrel reflected off the woman’s chest as off a boulder. It was not magic that shielded her—the blessings of Scyrah would pierce that—but the simple fact that most of her body was metal, not flesh. The broken quarrel burned to ash.

  “Ooh, bad move, sharp ears.” The fat man caressed the woman’s warped face. “Make me look bad in front of my cousin. Tsk, tsk.”

  Magic spun circles around his hand, and he slammed his fist into the floor. The earth groaned and the floorboards cracked and split upward as a tremor raced toward Narn. He flung himself over a table, pulling it over behind him, as the earth tore asunder where he had been standing and molten stone poured into the air. The blast caught one of the hapless dwarves, who shrieked for half a breath before his flaming body flew apart, showering the hall. Narn took cover, choking on the fumes through the cloth wrapping his mouth, and drew another quarrel from the quiver strapped to his thigh, willing his hands to move. Goddess!

  And their magic. He had felt it when Svyn had begun to work her will, but this—by the Vanished, it felt like being ripped apart from the inside with a fork and a white-hot knife.

  A cry of rage caught his attention, and he saw the Rhulfolk charge the mages at the door. The monstrous half-metal woman smashed one’s face in with her fist, and the earth sorcerer was more than capable of handling the others. The Rhulfolk charged valiantly to their deaths. Narn struggled to raise his crossbow to aid them but could not.

  “Don’t act so surprised, Cousin Morte,” came a ragged, filtered voice. “Of course there’s an Iosan.” Narn looked up and saw a third mage, this one clad in an alchemist’s black leathers and gas mask. He casually held a rifle pointed at Narn, and his fingers dripped icy water. “Who else do you think led us to the little bitch? You? You couldn’t find the sun in a cloudless sky.”

  Arm shaking, Narn took aim at the alchemist, but before he could discharge the weapon he sensed an attack coming and threw himself aside. The world vanished into white-hot pain as fire ripped through him, and he sailed across the common room to smash into the back wall. Green lightning danced around him, and he realized the attack had come from yet a fourth sorcerer who was even now floating down through the shattered roof. He had never been struck directly by a lightning bolt, but he knew enough to realize that if he hadn’t dodged and it hadn’t used most of its force on the roof he would have died instantly. Blood trickled over his lips and breathing burned his chest. He could smell roasted flesh and knew it was his own.

  “Enough, uncles!” This newcomer was the youngest of the three, and his dark face was feral in its rage. Lightning coursed around him and encircled his hands. “I’ll kill it. I’ll kill—”

  “Hold, Volus, Revane—all of you.” The last, fifth attacker entered the hall, Narn saw dimly through his shrinking vision. She was tall, with a commanding presence. Unlike the others, she did not look in the least deformed but rather like a hardened soldier. Narn thought he recognized her uniform as that of a Khadoran officer. “The mage hunter is beaten. Stop toying with him and find the girl.”

  “Aye, Saerl,” said the fat Morte. “I’ll d
eal with him.”

  Narn wondered how these mages knew to call him so. His order depended on secrecy and was not widely known outside Ios. What did this Saerl know of him or his talents?

  As the stone sorcerer waddled toward him, putrid green magic swirling around his hands, Narn coughed and fought to rise. Somehow, one saber was still in his hand, and he’d fallen near the second where he’d dropped it. He couldn’t see Svyn—in all likelihood, she had fled the instant these five had appeared. He had never thought he would die this way. He had failed his goddess, his people, himself. He thought of Eiryss and of things left unsaid.

  The four others were gathering close to converse. “But Aunt Saerl, I want to kill something,” the storm sorcerer boy whined. “We don’t need all the villagers, do we?”

  “Amuse yourself,” Saerl replied. “Revane. Find our hapless niece.”

  Narn heard chain lightning sizzle through the air, then dying screams, but he could do nothing about it. His bowels were turning to sludge and his heart beat hundreds of times a minute. He focused on his approaching killer: the fat, pathetic Morte. Narn lay unmoving, mustering his strength for one last push. He grasped his sabers so tightly his fingers felt numb in their leather gloves.

  “Sharp ears, sharp ears.” Morte loomed over him, and Narn’s nostrils filled with the intense stench that lingered about him. Magical stones built up around the man like armor. He wasn’t taking any chances with his prey. “Those ears will make a great addition to my collection.”

  Narn murmured something.

  “Eh? What was that?” Morte bent lower.

  “For the goddess,” Narn said.

  Then he stabbed both sabers up into Morte’s sides. The tempered Iosan steel alloy bit right through his conjured armor as though it did not exist, crossed inside his midsection, and burst out his back. Narn felt the satisfying tremor as his blades severed the man’s spine. Morte’s eyes widened in shock and pain, and he screamed breathlessly. Narn wrenched the blades free, and the stone sorcerer toppled back, mewling and shrieking. Blood poured over him as he struggled.