Beyond the Bulwarks Read online

  Beyond the Bulwarks

  K.J. Coble

  Published by K.J. Coble, 2021.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  BEYOND THE BULWARKS

  First edition. July 23, 2021.

  Copyright © 2021 K.J. Coble.

  ISBN: 979-8201118495

  Written by K.J. Coble.

  Also by K.J. Coble

  Hell's Jesters

  Hell's Jesters

  Cry Havoc

  Rebel Hell

  Heroes of the Valley

  Defenders of the Valley

  Blood in the Valley (Coming Soon)

  Stand in the Valley (Coming Soon)

  The Quintorius Chronicles

  Lord of Exiles

  Legion of Exiles

  Republic of Exiles

  The Vothan Guard

  The Tome of Flesh

  Standalone

  Magic Fire - Metal Storm

  The Shadows of Maunathyrr

  Ashes of Freedom

  Beyond the Bulwarks

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By K.J. Coble

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Book I | The Barbaricum | Chapter One | Anzo Severnus

  Chapter Two | The Salient

  Chapter Three | Across the Lydirian

  Chapter Four | Caves of the Dying

  Chapter Five | Siege of the Stone Folk

  Chapter Six | The Harpy’s Feast

  Chapter Seven | Outcast’s Quest

  Chapter Eight | Tomb of the Elder Tyrant

  Book II | Tide of Darkness | Chapter Nine | Chieftains and Kings

  Chapter Ten | Council of the Free Cantons

  Chapter Eleven | The Dead of Night

  Chapter Twelve | Midwinter

  Chapter Thirteen | Battle of the Bulwarks

  Chapter Fourteen | Aftermath

  Chapter Fifteen | The Darkest Season

  Chapter Sixteen | Invitation of Darkness

  Chapter Seventeen | The Face of Darkness

  Chapter Eighteen | Initiation

  Chapter Nineteen | Flight from the Dark

  Book III | Stand Against Darkness | Chapter Twenty | Fort Terminus

  Chapter Twenty-One | Watch on the Lydirian

  Chapter Twenty-Two | Gathering Storm

  Chapter Twenty-Three | The Battle of the Salient

  Chapter Twenty-Four | The Breaking Point

  Chapter Twenty-Five | The Last Hand Dealt

  Chapter Twenty-Six | Open Roads

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  Further Reading: Lord of Exiles

  About the Author

  For Seigrid -- mother-in-law, proofreader, and tour guide where the Rhine and Moselle meet, and where barbarians once crossed.

  Prologue

  An hour before dawn, the men on the parapet heard the sound again—a tortured cry nearly lost in the spectral dance of fog across the Lydirian River.

  Dargos, Optio of the Fifth Cohort, Ala Secundus Kharzulius, had the watch when one of the young fools from the river wall roused him. With a curse, he pulled himself from the warmth of the brazier near the southeastern tower and drew a rain-weighted cloak about him. The kid led the way, pale-faced under an ill-fitted helm and sick-eyed with the fear of a child plucked too soon from his mother’s breast. They all had that look, these auxiliaries thrown out in a thin screen on this most forsaken outpost of the Aurridian Empire, and Dargos’ forty years ached more than the bulk of chain mail on his shoulders.

  “Where?” the Optio rumbled.

  “Here,” a gravelly voice answered from the crenels ahead.

  Dargos hastened past the boy to the figure at the wall. Symian, the scarred archer from the old days on the Kharzul frontier was testing the string of his recurved bow. The sight of the veteran and the creasing about eyes that never left the river set Dargos’ pulse to a faster cadence.

  “What is it?”

  Symian didn’t answer immediately. Dargos waited, had trusted the man’s senses across a thousand miles, from sun-swept home to this bleak, rain-lashed hell the Aurids had forgotten. He chanced a look over the wall, himself, saw the first graying of the sky and the mournful humps of the Bulwark Mountains in the gloom beyond the Lydirian. Fitful rain rattled against helmets, pattered and hissed on charcoal in braziers.

  “Maybe it’s nothing.” Symian turned from the wall, the half-moon of scar tissue along the left side of his face obvious even in the dark. “The nights are so long here and the lads think they hear ghosts when the fog thickens.”

  Dargos nodded. This was the way of life on the Salient, the sharp bend of the Lydirian jutting eastward into the lands of the Barbaricum. Their Tribune had a joke that it was like the thumb of the Empire jabbed squarely into the eye of the Eternal Dark. But such defiance came at a price to those whose job it was to do the jabbing.

  “You look tired.” Dargos touched the other man’s shoulder. “Join me at my post. I had the fortune to hoard a bottle away from the Legate’s last visit.”

  Symian grinned. “A little warmth would be—”

  The cry warbled again from the waters below.

  Dargos sprang against the crenel, Symian at his side with an arrow knocked. Around them, the auxiliaries tensed, whispers dancing along the wall. Rain intensified, pattered across stone and earth and the Lydirian in a susurrus that at once gave doubt to any sound. Thunder grumbled to the north.

  The voice broke through, high and pained. Dargos thought he heard words.

  “Aeydon protect us...” The lad who’d first summoned Dargos pressed close.

  “Shut up, boy.” Dargos stepped back, gave Symian room and forced calm even as cool sweat prickled under his helm.

  “They say the spirits lure men into the river with—”

  Dargos cuffed the youth, ridged knuckles ringing off the cheek piece of his helmet. “I said shut up!” He squared his shoulders before the auxiliary, though the boy was half a head taller. “Now, if you can manage it without pissing yourself, go and get the Decurion.”

  The youth rattled away. Dargos shook his head. In Kharzul, the legions had stomped berber warlords with contemptuous ease. Here, the Empire left adolescents to play at a man’s deadly game.

  “Optio.” Symian’s bow groaned with tension.

  Dargos pivoted to the crenel again. The air lightened to a glimmering haze as the sun fought its way over the tops of the Bulwarks. Amongst writhing whorls of mist, the river stirred and a shape coalesced. A boat, if it could be called that—a hollow scraped in a tree trunk in the way of the Vhurrian barbarians—wobbled as though struggling to stay afloat. A figure worked an oar frantically and Dargos thought he caught a flash of blonde locks.

  “Just one?”

  “Only one that I see,” Symian replied. “But they’ve tried this kind of thing before.”

  “And they’ve been cut down while still dripping wet on the bank.” Dargos glanced over his shoulder. “By the gods, where is the Decurion?”

  “Probably drunk and enjoying one of the local girls—” Dargos could hear the smile in the archer’s voice “—or boys.”

  “Quiet. Here he comes.”

  Antonus, Decurion of the Fifth, staggered onto the wall, still straightening his corselet, the boy trailing behind with the officer’s helmet. “Ho, Optio!” he called too loudly, smiling from wine. “What has the turn of Aya’ Wheel brought us at so wretched an hour?”

  Dargos suppressed a grimace. “The Lady of Fortune has conjured a boat, sir, Vhurrian-built.”

  Antonus leaned out the crenel, care
lessly fouling Symian’s aim. “I see.” He listened and the wail sounded again, a woman’s voice, it became clear. “What’s she saying?”

  “She’s asking for help,” Symian answered savagely, waiting for the officer to pull back.

  Begging, was more like it, her tones ragged, desperate. Dargos wiped perspiration from his eyebrows. “She’s asking to land on our side.”

  Antonus stood back from the crenel and looked at him. “What do you think?”

  “I think, Decurion, we should muster the men—” he glanced across the river, to the brightening Bulwarks whose shadowed faces could still hold a savage host “—quietly. I think we should light the watch fire and I think we should have a rider ready to make a dash for Fort Terminus, should this prove to be more.”

  “You think it’s more?” The younger man, barely older than the conscripts he commanded, swiped curled, black locks from his face and took up his helmet. He was handsome and irritatingly likeable in the way of an Aurridian aristocrat’s son—though certainly one in disfavor to have landed him this assignment rather than a slot with a parade unit in a district capitol.

  Dargos put a hand up to the crenel and rapped his fingers across it thoughtfully. “I think, sir that the Vhurrians would send their mothers out to die first if they thought it’d bring advantage.”

  “Very well.” Antonus sent the orders and they waited.

  And waited.

  The cries grew more piercing, more pitiful. Symian’s bow never wavered as the improvised craft crossed under the walls of the fort and was caught in a rising current. The girl’s oar slapped the water. Her labored breathing, interspersed with sobs, gained clarity as the mists unraveled. Blonde hair tossed and another form became obvious, sprawled in the boat with her.

  “Father...my father...”

  Dargos understood the hard gutturals of North Branch Vhurrian quite clearly. A number of the auxiliaries were descended from earlier barbarian migrations and still kept up their forefathers’ tongue alongside their badly-degraded Aurridian. Glancing along the wall, he noted the uneasy shift of the lads, the darting glances and faces creasing in sympathy.

  “What do you think?” Antonus repeated, hardening impatience and a hint of uncertainty in the untried officer’s voice.

  Dargos folded his arms. Nerves would spark at the kindling of the auxiliaries’ fear and once lit that fire would be difficult to control. “I’ll go,” he said at last.

  “And I with you.” Symian loosened his bow but did not unstring the arrow.

  Antonus nodded with relief obvious enough to draw a poorly-concealed scowl from Symian. The archer led the way down the ladder from the wall and into the drill yard. Dargos followed, noting a detachment formed up and signaling for two pairs to accompany them. Men drew the postern gate near the northeastern tower open for them and the six Imperials sallied forth into the dark.

  “Watch yourself,” Dargos murmured to Symian as they trudged down to the river bank, half-frozen muck clinging to hobnailed boots.

  “I’ll watch for the pair of us,” the archer replied.

  “I meant the Decurion.” He touched the veteran’s shoulder. “We old soldiers aren’t tolerated well by this New Breed.”

  Symian snorted and edged out ahead of the Optio.

  The fog hung in pallid drapes at the foot of the walls, bunching lifelike at the Lydirian’s edge. A call in poorly-managed Vhurrian, the forced tones of Antonus, warbled from the battlements above. Dargos tensed at the clap of an oar on water and the scrutch of the boat’s keel on the river’s murky bottom. Symian’s shape blurred though he stood only just below Dargos. The air tugged at his body, clammy on the skin like a dying man’s breath.

  The girl materialized before them, the Lyrdirian foaming about her ankles as she dragged her craft in. Her grip faltered and she fell into the muck sobbing. Symian still holding back, Dargos dashed forward, the others following with the hiss of drawn blades.

  “Check the boat,” Dargos barked as he knelt and took the girl into his arms.

  “My father...my father...” She twisted in Dargos’ arms, a frail, shivering thing barely sheathed in the tatters of what might have once been barbarian finery. Her face turned to his, sodden blonde tendrils matted to features that might have once seemed young and fair, now yellowed with fatigue and illness he could smell, a cloying vomit-feces reek.

  “It’s all right.” Dargos tried to help her to her feet. Her legs wobbled at the effort and weakness dragged them both back to the mud. “It’s all right.” It felt stupid to say but Dargos could think of little else.

  “No...” She shook her head, the motion becoming a wild thrash. “No! He’s coming...” She babbled words—names—Dargos didn’t have.

  “Who are you?” Patience worn thin by the cold and wet, he gave her a shake. “Pull yourself together, girl. Do you understand me?”

  Her tossing eased slowly, reverberated into shudders that seemed to have little to do with the climate. She looked at him again, pale blue eyes aquiver. “I am Tanaes, daughter to Errong, High Chieftain of the Marovians. My father...” Frantic light seized her gaze as she wrenched in his arms to see the boat.

  “Look at me.” Dargos gave her another shake, more gently. “Are the Marovians on the move? What is happening? Why are you here?”

  “They killed them all. Only my father and I...” Words died on cracked lips and she sagged into his chest.

  Symian appeared over them with his bow to one side but still at the ready. “The boat?” Dargos asked him.

  The archer shrugged. “See for yourself.”

  “Stay with her.”

  Dargos left the girl and strode to the water’s edge, each footfall heavy with more than clinging filth. The other men hung in a semicircle about the craft, one with a boot up on the improvised vessel’s crude gunwale. The soldier gestured with his blade at the form within.

  The man sprawled inside had been a beast, tall and massive-chested in the way of the Vhurrians, with a filthy mane of red-blonde hair and a plaited beard caked with gore the crusty bluish of coughed-up lung matter. A golden torque glimmered at his throat, the mark of royalty or high status. A slashed tunic had fallen away from his chest and the strangely puckering lips of a wound under the ribs on his left torso told the tale of a sword thrust.

  Dargos leaned into the craft, nose wrinkling at an oily stink more of fish and the sea bottom than of festering injuries. “Dead?”

  “It’s strange, Optio,” the soldier propping his foot on the craft whispered. “There’s no breath, no pulse, but he’s warm.”

  Dargos straightened with skin quivering under leather and chainmail. “She says they’re Marovian royals.” He had seen plenty of the tribe, the most prominent along the east bank of the Lydirian, friendly to the Empire in their back-biting barbarian fashion and frequent trading partners. “She says this is their chieftain.” He shook his head and turned away, inexplicable repulsed, the unusual stench clawing the back of his throat and finding purchase somewhere in his chest. “Get him out of there.”

  A breath rasped, grating in the ruin of splintered bone and pulped chest. Dargos began to turn, instinct already driving him to one side as his hand found sword grip and drew.

  The chieftain erupted from the boat with a wheeze and a crackle of popping joints. A hammer-sized fist took the solider poised there in the jaw with enough force to fold his head backwards over his shoulders. Dargos pivoted on his left heel and let the motion bring his sword around in a wide, singing arch. But the edge found only air as the thing that had been a dead man lurched past.

  “Symian!”

  The archer sprang from the girl’s side, her screams drowning out the thrum of his first shot. The body of Errong jerked and stumbled, the head of Symian’s arrow driven out through a shoulder, but continued its charge. Symian’s arm flashed to his quiver, knocked, drew, and loosed again at barely ten feet. Errong clambered on, mindless of the fletching in his neck. Sledge hammer fists flew. Symian’s bow me
t them, thrown up reflexively, splintered as the punches fell home and the archer crumpled.

  Dargos launched after the abomination, plunging his long cavalry sword into its kidneys. He felt the beast stiffen. A thrashing turn ripped the sword from Dargos’ grasp and brought a backhanded blow around to crumple the cheek piece of his helm, dashing vision away in a shower of sparks. Dargos hardly felt the ground strike him.

  Boots thundered by and steel screeched on bone. But the girl’s screams were louder—until they cut out with the finality of a hose cinched. Something tore like canvass and Dargos felt showered in warm wetness as he struggled to regain his feet. Vision wobbled, shot through with afterimages of pain-lightning and the tossing figures of his men stabbing, hacking frantically. Dargos managed to stand, saw his sword in the muck and scooped it up.

  Shocked silence chased back the haze. Dargos’ men stood or knelt around Errong’s cleaved body, sobbing for breath. Daughter lay under father, wrapped in a grisly embrace of twisted limbs and pooling gore. As Dargos staggered to their side he saw her neck torn—bitten—down to the cartilage and knew with a jolt of nausea whose blood had spattered him.

  Symian moaned nearby, was fighting to rise. Dargos nodded to one of the lads to assist the archer. The others hovered over the hellish pile, eyes aflame in expectation of another attack. When Errong’s corpse again stirred, they flinched with weapons ready.

  “Hold.” Dargos hardly recognized the voice as his own. Calls sounded from the fort above and the groan of the postern gate promised help that was already too late coming. He prodded the dead chieftain’s body with his sword point.

  Errong twitched limply as though something underneath were working its way to freedom. Spurred by irrational hope, Dargos wedged his weapon under the dead man’s torso and levered him over. But Tanaes remained locked in the gruesome, final agonies of her short life. What had been her father twitched and pulsed below the ribs. The lips of the wound that mortal men had supposed killed him parted with a bubbly hiss.