Pyrebound - 3.3
Author: theredsheep

Chapter 3.3 – Pyrebound

The enemy struck two days later—a white day. They were all expecting it, had planned for it; it was the only time a bazu force could hope to have the advantage. Ram was already dressed to fight when he woke to the warning cries of trumpets on high. He had only to pick up his hammer and march, stiff-legged and bleary-eyed, a few hundred paces to clear ground.

The militia wore no armor, beyond a long cloth coat and cowl to keep the white sun from making direct skin contact. As a first-bloom recruit, Ram’s was drab brown, as were most of the others’. One in five had a red, orange, or yellow coat, for two to four blooms’ service, and a few had the white coats for doing five or more. It was an empty honor, either way; none of those pretty colors would even slow down a killing blow from the servants of the bazuu.

Their best—and only—defenses were the crowhammers. Ram took his place in the rear of the Dul Karagi section, resting the butt of his weapon against the ground. Seven feet of heavy polished wood, topped with one tempered steel spike pointing straight up and two more curving out to the sides. The bastard child of a pickaxe and a spear, meant for work as ugly as itself.

They were given plenty of space to swing, almost five thousand identically armed men spread out to cover a long, deep front. The enemy would be before them, the desert all around. Behind were the flamekeepers in full kit, with visored helmets and large shields. And behind them, in the safest space of all, were the handmaidens of four pyres, and the skybarques floating overhead to watch. They’d seen the enemy coming early; craning his neck, Ram saw nothing but the far shadow of the mountains. Even the rookery they’d come to attack was hidden.

He couldn’t say how long they stood there, fidgeting and straining their eyes. The guardian flames were already burning, a row of twenty little suns a hundred feet above their heads, countering the white star in the east. They cast long, black shadows on the sand and stunted grass underfoot. It would be a lonesome place to die.

Another horn sounded, this time from the front ranks. The enemy had been sighted. A low sheet of dark cloud had been drifting in from the horizon for some time, invisible against the mountains in the giddy light. Now its edge grew close enough to catch the glow from the handmaidens’ fires, and thicker blots of blackness condensed, like hailstones, within its dull grey mass, falling to the earth with a sound like rolling thunder.

It was only when they struck that Ram realized just how quickly the cloud had been moving; the black blots hit with a bounce, skipping forward like stones on water, tearing up clods of dirt and clay. They slowed as they landed, spreading out into skittering spidery shapes, bunching into a boiling mass of spawn that crawled over itself to reach them, then spreading out again as they gathered speed on their new legs. Shabti.

Ram jumped at a sudden crashing noise from behind him—two thousand flamekeepers’ swords slapping against their shield-bosses. The first blow was ragged, uncoordinated. The second was better. By the fourth, they were beating in unison, a rapid percussion. Then, as the shabti rushed across the field, two thousand male voices chanted:

O you demons of corruption, why do you struggle in vain? The golden sun shall rise again regardless. Haranduluz shall reign, prince of splendors, lord of light, and with the breaking of the day you shall surely be damned.

The shabti kept advancing, their bodies shifting with every step, abandoning their spidery scuttle for a taller, long-limbed shape that loped like wild cats on the hunt. Shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank they charged, without a trace of hesitation or fear. They were shabti; however much they hated the golden light, their yearning for death was stronger.

Ten thousand generations of men shall rise and fall, and sacred Ki herself forget their names, but the seed of man endures, and its strength, by the grace of the Father of Fires.

The men in the front ranks shifted nervously, their weapons shaking in the air. The shabti were close enough to make out individual shapes, headless beasts of prey, matte black like cast iron with a single blue-white “eye” shining from their chests. They had hit the ground running, so close together that they could easily trample the whole human host. Each was at least twice the height of a horse, and more were still falling to the earth behind them.

The handmaidens sang out, in flawless high harmony: Now let the golden sun arise!

From the score of little suns above their heads a rain of fire came pouring slantwise across the battlefield, landing a few feet from the first shabti with explosive flashes bright as the sun. It did nothing to stop their momentum. Nothing would have. But only one shab in five emerged from the inferno on its feet, and not a single one was undamaged. The phalanx of monsters had turned into a torrent of broken black scrap filled with crippled brutes, most destroyed, some hopping on two or three legs, some simply rolling end over end. They recovered as they ran, sucking fresh black matter from the flood around them to heal their scars, but they could not stop, and there was no space or time to reform completely. They met the first line of men as staggering wrecks.

The flamekeepers were singing again, but Ram could not make out a word over the hellish chorus of screams, shrieks, and crashes as hundreds of men along the line either swung their hammers down or were run down themselves. Not fifty feet away, the battered remnants of a shab rolled right over a luckless soldier, crushing him like a grape and spattering a dozen men around him with his blood. They didn’t seem to notice. They were too busy trying to avoid the same fate.

The fiery rain kept lancing down; the handmaidens had the timing perfect, sending a fresh wave as soon as the last landed. Four pyres, and all their hearths, would be going dim now from the sheer amount of heat and light being poured out on the field. But it was none too much. The shabti were still coming, as fast and hard as ever, rushing through the burning wall to die.

One of them, by sheer luck, got through the flames intact, shrouded by the floating scrap of its predecessors. It scrambled over a little hill of the fallen and sprang into the air, shifting in midleap to a mass of bladed limbs. Too high; it caught the lower edge of the firestorm, and was flung back like a meteor to detonate on the ground.

Now let the golden sun arise!

Dead ahead, another came through half-intact, two front limbs dragging its torn back end. The two men in its way made a timid effort at stopping it; one swung wide and hit the dirt, the other was knocked flying by one swat from its right hand. Another man stepped forward, holding his hammer out with the end point-forward and the butt braced against the ground. The shab’s momentum pushed the weapon back along the ground for five feet until it bit into the dirt and threw the thing up into the air. But only halfway; it was so heavy, and so frail after passing through the flames, that the pronged head tore clean through it, and it crashed down on top of the hammer’s owner.

It was still moving. Ram was too overwhelmed to think clearly; fortunately, no complex thought was needed. If it got back up, it would kill him. He ran forward and swung his hammer down on what remained of its torso. The prong tore right through, exposing the blue-white light of its core—the locus, it was called. The place where whatever tortured spirit moved it was bound to its body. As long as the locus was intact, it would keep reforming. Ram thrust forward with the point; he’d expected a glassy shatter, but it gave like a pillow, and broke apart into a powdery blue haze that evaporated a moment later. The rest of the body began decaying more slowly. It would be black dust, if that, in an hour.

Behind him, the flamekeepers continued singing. Of course they were singing. Keeping time with their shields, too. Every now and then, one of them would have to step forward and cut down the remains of a shab that got through all the militia. Indwelt swords would slice shab-flesh, whatever it was, like new cheese. They only needed little people like Ram to absorb the terrible impact of the charge.

But the things were still coming, as eager as ever to be torn apart and not have to suffer existence any longer. There was an impressive mass of dead shabti all along the front, fresh corpses piling up more quickly than the ones on the bottom could disappear, and the new arrivals were forced to either batter through or crawl over. They had enough mass behind them to do either.

Now let the golden sun arise!

One tunneled its way through the heap, shredding off half its mass against the wreckage. That only made it more agile when it broke free. Two men swung at it, too late; its arms swung out to either side as it darted past them, knocking them flat. A third man, wearing a coat with veteran’s colors in the middle rank, stepped forward and drove his hammer clean through it, smashing the locus in one blow. But another shab had climbed to the top of the heap in the meantime, and leaped down in a swirl of black dust, shifting as it fell. It hit the ground on two feet, swinging long bladed arms like scythes. The veteran was sent flying with a slash across his torso; the other two only escaped by crawling. The shab ignored them.

Behind it, two more paused at the top of the pile, breathing in fresh matter from the dead to patch their wounds. There was no real limit to how big or heavy they could get. The gangling scythe-shab, too, was drawing more to it even as it cut down militiamen. Its body was growing thicker as Ram watched. It wasn’t thirty feet away. He’d never make it past those long arms, but if he backed up any farther a flamekeeper would cut him down from behind—

One of the crawling men swung a hammer at its feet, and it came crashing down. Ram was one of three men who ran forward to batter it to bits before it could rise again.

Now let the golden sun arise!

The two from the heap came down as enormous spinning wheels with bladed axles. There was no hope of stopping them. Ram dropped his hammer and rolled out of their way; the blades of the right one passed over his head. Behind him, the chanting and thumping of the flamekeepers was turned to screams and roars. Not Ram’s problem. His weapon had been crushed under one of the wheels, but there were plenty of others to choose from.

There’d been nothing like this during drill. How could they hope to prepare for this? Probably it was better not to try. The quick and the clever among them would live, and as for the rest, there would be fresh men to replace them next bloom. Ram couldn’t even feel bitter about it. Nobody would volunteer to face these horrible things, if he had any choice. He knew he wouldn’t, because he hadn’t.

It was still pleasant to think that Kamenrag might have been in the crowd behind him.

The wall of the dead was tall and deep enough to make a proper obstacle, now. Every shab that climbed it had to take care not to be caught by the falling fires, and the bodies shifted and settled underfoot as they decayed. On the far side, the shabti would be trapped between the wall and the burn-zone, bunching up and rolling backward into the danger they’d just escaped.

But a few still made it. One, small and lithe, came running up the far slope and down with a single spring, very nearly tearing a man in half with the impact. There was something unreal about the sight of his death; it was as if the shapeless enemy lent their dreamlike state to everything they touched. At some point, Ram had drifted into a bizarre nightmare, a twilight war against murderous abstractions under mingled white and golden light. Fighting the resh had been terrible, but the shabti weren’t even that human. It set him free.

The little shab paused, catlike, atop its kill. It swiveled on its legs, searching for fresh prey with that pale blue eye. Ram was the only militiaman standing with a hammer in jumping distance. He was ready. It sprang for him—fast, but far slower than the resh. Too slow. Ram felt a brutal satisfaction as the crowhammer slammed into its shoulder, knocking it sideways. Its body twisted and struck Ram across the flank, knocking him flat. He skidded in the bloody dust.

He’d still won. The crowhammer was embedded in the shab’s side now, one arm torn free as it struggled to pull itself off the straight spike. Ram limped over, grasped the handle, and kicked the thing loose. The blue of the locus shone out of the open wound. Somewhere, deep inside in that queasy light, a captive human soul was screaming. Ram turned the hammer back around and swung down, again and again, until the body was torn wide open and the light went out.

Now let the golden sun arise!

He turned and looked up. The wall of dead shabti was too tall to surmount, now. It shuddered, very slightly, as still-living shabti struggled up its far slope anyway. The fires were still falling past it. He couldn’t see how much of the dark cloud was left to fall, but the shabti were either drifting around the sides or staying in place to burn. Ram didn’t care. The danger was largely passed, in one terrible half-hour. All that remained was cleanup.

Seven men in ten, it was said, survived the campaign, on a good bloom. Ram hadn’t realized that the figure included the flamekeepers, who took far lower casualties. And this, it seemed, had not been a good bloom. When the last wisps of dark cloud were gone and the fires stopped falling, more than half the militiamen who’d marched out with Ram were dead. The dead men’s remaining pay for their bloom’s service would go to their next of kin, assuming they had any and they had bothered to set it up beforehand. Ram had, but he thought he was in the minority.

Injuries were few. Shabti tended to kill at once, if they touched you at all. Ram, like most of the other survivors, was ordered to roam the battlefield to salvage usable gear. They won a quarter-copper bonus for every recovered hammer-head, a half for an intact weapon; good wood and steel couldn’t be left behind to waste. Ram earned a couple of silvers, though he’d honestly have preferred to sit on the ground and shiver.

The black mass of dead shabti slowly moldered to dust as they worked, and the dust to nothing at all, revealing a long stripe of bubbly glass in the sand. There were a lot of glass lines out here in the desert, Ram was sure. It would take many blooms before drifting sand covered them over, or the scouring of the weather wore them all away.

He could hear a few cheerful voices around as he sifted through crusted red sand; the veterans were already planning a party when they got back to the pyre, cashing in their hazard pay for a splendid debauch. At that moment, Ram would have liked nothing better than to go back to camp. He could have eaten a bit of dreary food from the stores in his pack, and fallen asleep until the sun rose properly in the morning. Or possibly just cried in the privacy of the tent. He didn’t know if Beshi had made it through the day, but suspected not. He didn’t care to look.

Only a few flamekeepers had remained behind to supervise, plus a pair of handmaidens from each pyre. When they couldn’t find any more weapons or parts, there would be a perfunctory rite, and everything left on the field would be burnt to ash. No need to take them back to the pyres they’d died for; they weren’t valuable, like sticks of wood or hunks of metal. Which was why they’d all died while their betters were singing.

And none of these corpse-pickers seemed to care. Ram wouldn’t have minded himself, if he hadn’t been Father’s child. He’d had fifteen blooms to learn the brutal economy that ran the Dominion. There were always too many people, and not enough of anything else. Should he be thankful to Father, or resentful, that he couldn’t simply accept this? He might have been happy like the rest of them, planning to wager his life over and over for the next bloom’s campaign until he ran out of luck or out of blooms.

No, he suddenly recalled. He wouldn’t. Because he’d made other arrangements, starting that very evening, in return for countenance. The danger of the day had driven the arrangement right out of his mind until that moment. He was still tired, still wanted to sleep or cry or scream. And he had no idea what Ushna wanted him to do tonight—something underhanded, no doubt, to prepare for tomorrow’s strike on the rookery. But he could see past all that, because he had a guarantee that he’d never be stuck digging through carcasses for half-coppers again.

He went back to work with fresh vigor, and a smile hidden under his hood.

Nobody watched to make sure he went back to camp when the job was done; now that the battle was over, he could have vanished from Ki for all they cared. He was free to linger after, watching the white sun set in the distance and thinking how happy he would be to do something, anything, that the masters of the pyre would disapprove of.

Just as the white sun vanished, two men came strolling into view; one was merely tall, the other enormous. Bal was as heavily armed as ever; Ushna had a moonchild-style sickle-sword strapped to one hip, and a quiver of spurs for throwing at the other. It seemed ominous, but Ushna called out, cheerfully bombastic as ever, “Rammash! Delighted to see you made it. I had a feeling you would, of course. I said to myself, there’s a man who’s destined for bigger things.”

“Ushna, Bal,” Ram said with a nod. “Where are we headed?”

“The rookery, of course. You ready?”