Crimson Spring Ch4

CRIMSON SPRING

BY JEAN LOWE CARLSON

A KINGSMEN CHRONICLES PREQUEL NOVELLA

CHAPTER FOUR

Elohl wasted no time as the enemy advanced. Leaping from his vantage, his heart thundered with fear and eagerness as he shouldered to the front of his Brigade and clipped in to a line. Elohl found his men ready, giving him steely-eyed gazes as he joined them, weapons out. None here were new to war. The Valenghians were three hundred paces out now and Elohl could see their haughty smiles, cutting cheekbones, and sleek silver hair shining in long braids. They were elegant men and women, tall and lean like polished spears. Elite fighters, the Red Valor took their time, wasting no energy as they moved lithely across the slick snows.

Elohl’s fighters held their ground with death in their eyes. They had to hold off five hundred Red Valor for at least ten minutes to give Ihbram time. Elohl watched the Valenghian commander pause his confident stride, narrowing his white eyes at the lone man with wild red hair trekking fast up the ridge to the north. Superiority was in that gaze. And then haughty dismissal as he turned away from the oddity and faced the hundred Brigadiers with their backs up against cold obsidian.

With a roar and the blaring of a silver horn, the Valenghian commander sounded the charge. The battle-roar was taken up by his five hundred men.

And in a quick dash across the snow, the melee began. 

Elohl had no time to assemble a defense, other than to shout for a hard wedge to form for their foes to break upon. At the tip of the wedge, Elohl was suddenly in motion as the Valenghian force hammered down upon them. Longknife and sword to hand, Elohl fought with an inner fury that burned like molten glass. He was the cut and the slice. He was the thrust and the parry. His sensate sphere tingled and sang, illuminating danger. Throats blossomed open before his blades, sending men down to the spattered snow with their crimson jerkins soaked a darker red. 

Hammered back, the Brigadiers became a defensive circle around the obsidian spar. Men fought in tight formation, not letting Valenghians through. Dancing lithely over their lines, still clipped in, it was the kind of tangled chaos that only veteran Brigadiers could truly face. 

And with them, Elohl was a heron of the strike, a rushing highmountain river in full flood as he cut down his foes.

Crimson fury consumed Elohl’s vision. The stench of hot blood and shit filled his nostrils as the lives of men were spilled across the snow. Time slid into the red, and Elohl’s sensate sphere tingled over and over. Making him catch a blade on his and spin it away, eviscerating the man who held it. Making him leap his line and roll up under a big opponent, slicing the man’s hand off at the wrist before a nearby Brigadier could get his throat slit. Making him stab into the open mouth of a tall Valenghian as the fellow roared for blood.

The Valenghian commander was suddenly at Elohl’s sword-tip. Elohl spun in to engage him, ripping his sword up in a fast arc, but finding his strike deflected. He was about to engage again when a sudden whomp hit his ears, then another, concussing the dry air through the highmountain valley. Reverberating off the cliffs, the sounds were music to Elohl, and his heart roared in victory. Five more came in quick succession, Ihbram’s concussives at the northern edge of the valley exploding under heavy drifts of spring snow.

But any smile Elohl might have had died upon his lips as he saw a moment of confusion in the Valenghian commander’s white eyes.

And then understanding.

“Fall back!!” The Red Valor commander roared, as if demons were after him. He raised his silver horn to his lips, blaring it fast and furious. The Valormen began to stumble backwards, but it was too late. 

With a sick groan and a snapping like bones in a giant’s maw, the avalanche began. Heavy from spring storms, snows began to peel away from the northern ridge with a rumble of thunder. The force of the avalanche sliding into the valley suddenly destabilized the rotten ice beneath Elohl’s feet. The surface they battled upon shifted sharply, and Elohl was dashed to his knees. Like a child’s sledge, the entire glacier was suddenly sliding as the ice broke. 

Men cried out, Valenghian and Menderian alike. The ice screamed, jagged spars thrusting up as the avalanche rushed down, spreading out to consume them. The glacier crumbled into the meltwater river beneath it, dammed up previously but now released as the glacier broke. As the snow from the avalanche consumed them and the ice beneath gave way, every man caught upon the river’s release was swept toward the valley’s outlet. 

It happened in moments. Snow and frigid meltwater hit Elohl like a battering ram. But a hard jerk upon his harness arrested him, concussing the breath from his lungs. Snow and ice and water caught bodies, ripping them away, slamming Elohl into the obsidian spar as the glacier thundered past upon the released river. 

Elohl was dashed against the obsidian, rents sliced in his leather and skin as he prayed to Aeon that his line would hold. Screaming horror assaulted him. He had only a moment to watch before it all went washing off the cliff – five hundred Valenghians and a few Brigadiers whose lines had frayed, rushing out into the blue abyss upon a tide of meltwater and avalanche.

Gone.

Gasping for breath in a sudden silence filled by the thunder of the unleashed river, Elohl lay in the icy meltwater that sluiced the obsidian shale. Five hundred feet in every direction, the crushed stone valley floor had been exposed in the avalanche’s wake – glacial ice cracked in jagged shelves around the liberated meltwater river. Tethered to the outcropping, men of the Brigade groaned all around Elohl – bruised to shit and shivering wet, but alive. As Elohl rolled over and coughed up to his hands and knees, relearning how to think and move, he found Ihbram suddenly at his side, lending him a shaky hand.

Ihbram’s face was sliced at the cheek, running blood, but his bruises only made his clear green eyes shine with a brighter fire. “You crazy shithouse rat, Elohl! Halsos himself would have been proud of that plan.”

“What’s our count?” Elohl groaned, massaging his wrenched shoulder and checking his wet weapons. 

“Seventy-three!” Den’Mhessua strode over on the obsidian shale, unclipping from his line. His bright blue eyes shone as he shook Elohl with a jubilant laugh. “You’ve got some fire in you, boy! Haven’t seen a thing like that since the Raids of Quelsis when Rakhan Urloel den’Alrahel held off a force of three thousand Valenghian Longriders in the Stone Valley! Damn fine fighting! Damn fine planning.”

“And a damn fine man.” Ihbram chimed in. “Did you know that Urloel was Elohl’s father?”

“Was he?” Lugo gave Elohl a steady appraisal, and a wry grin lifted his lips. In the wrath of ice and meltwater, the buckles of Elohl’s worn military jerkin had been sheared off, and the crossover flap hung open, baring his chest to the chill spring air. Lugo’s eyes flicked to Elohl’s stark black Kingsmen Inkings of a mountain and five crowning stars, which could be seen through his wet lambswool shirt. 

Lugo gave a chuckle, then clapped Elohl on the shoulder. “Your father would have been proud, boy.”

A thrill lanced Elohl. He wanted to stop Lugo, to make the man speak about his father – had he seen Urloel? Was he aligned with the Kingsmen? Did he know where they’d gone? But before Elohl could speak a word, Lugo was striding off, barking at all the men to unclip and tend wounds, to light heat-flares, eat, and have a rest before they overnighted up in the valley.

And though the men were jubilant, settling upon the obsidian shale with jokes and bravado, telling their stories of the battle and avalanche, Elohl was silent. A chill had taken him, not a thing of the cold or the wet, but something that went deep into his soul. Stepping to a promontory, Elohl gazed down at the falls, stout ice now crumbling beneath the thundering of the unleashed river. Below, shrouded in gloom from the pines and hammered by falling water, he could see the slag-piles of the glacier in the basin, tinged red and slurried with Valorman gear.

Nothing moved.

Elohl took a deep breath, the single breath of his Kingsman training. One breath, to feel all the emotions of the world. To feel the demise of five hundred lives, all because their nations insisted upon fighting. 

It didn’t matter how many times Elohl did battle – war never sat right with him. 

In that space of short eternity, Elohl felt his Second Hand step quietly to his side. They gazed out over the ruin together for a long moment, curls of their breath sighing out to a brisk night wind from the peaks. 

“Why can’t we ever have peace?” Elohl mused.

“Peace comes at a price, Elohl. All men pay that price in war.” Ihbram spoke softly. 

“I hate this war.” Something rose inside Elohl, from beneath his usual calm. Like a leviathan it flooded him. Sending a shiver through his sinews, as if a beast of fire awoke inside him. He couldn’t say where it came from, only that it was a part of him that abhorred conflict. 

A part of him that raged against being enslaved to this unceasing war.

“You know, Elohl,” Ihbram spoke again, his musical tenor subdued. “My father once spoke to me of conflict. That when a man has conflict in his heart, powerful things change. Sometimes for good, sometimes for ill – but it creates the power to change who you are, to alchemize your nature. The power to change the world, by changing yourself.”

“How can I change what I am, Ihbram?” Elohl gestured to the ruin below. “I am a tool of war. A slave to this kind of destruction.”

Reaching over, Ihbram gripped his wrist. Elohl found the half-Elsthemi’s green eyes burning with intensity as their gazes met in the gloaming. 

“Never forget what you are, Elohl.” Ihbram’s low growl was lupine. “You are a Kingsman. Sworn to uphold truth and justice, no matter what. You took those Blackmarked Inkings for a reason. You did what you had to today. And one day, you’ll feel the power that this conflict has wrought in you. Remember the faces of the dead. Let them show you how to be light.”

“What if all I see is darkness?” Elohl mused, gazing down at the wreckage.

“Then Shaper help us all.”

Ihbram’s strange statement held a weight of ages. Elohl didn’t know why, but it rang a chord within him, like a gong shivering the thin air. As he watched the last light flash out over the western peaks, he suddenly gave a heavy sigh.

“Fuck-all of a day, huh?” Ihbram chuckled sadly. 

“Fuck-all of a day.” Elohl agreed.

“Fuck it. I’m so hungry, I would eat Lugo’s beard. Let’s get some food.”

Ihbram clapped Elohl upon the shoulder. Elohl turned, and his friend jostled him with a grin. Together, they moved back towards the others settling in upon the obsidian shale. The men were singing and joking, ribald in the night with their victory as they lit phosphor heat-flares to warm the obsidian and push back the highmountain chill. Elohl saw their faces as they rose to clap his shoulder, to salute and offer him a pipe, hailing him as a hero. 

And suddenly the darkness didn’t seem so dire.

Elohl let their lust for life wash through him as he clasped wrists, the heat inside him soothed. Spring had claimed her crimson due, but as Elohl settled in to weather the frigid night, he glanced up at the cerulean sky, watching the brilliance of the stars come out.

He was alive tonight, his men were alive, and a new dawn would rise tomorrow.

And someday, a new spring – free of war at last.

Copyright 2018 Dragonlight Publishing LLC. No portion of this text may be copied or distributed without written permission of the author.

CLICK BELOW FOR PREVIOUS CHAPTERS

THE KINGSMEN CHRONICLES

EPIC FANTASY ADVENTURE WITH HEART

Discover the #1 Amazon Bestselling and award-winning epic fantasy series – available in ebook and print.