Shattered Shields - eARC Read online

  Shattered Shields - eARC

  Edited by Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  Baen

  Shattered Shields

  Edited by Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Swords and Shields. Faith and Magic.

  Grab your weapons and prepare, for the enemy is on the move.

  High fantasy and mighty conflicts go hand-in-hand. In great wars, armies rise to fight evil hordes and heroes struggle to push beyond their imperfections to save the day. These stories include more than just epic landscapes and characters…they also feature epic battles.

  Imagine a doctor struggling to identify the spy who has infiltrated his company’s ranks and poisoned his colleagues or a boy suspected of murder by a king yet protected by a princess as he helps her father against his own people. Imagine a butcher discovering that he’s called to lead an uprising, or a First Born knowing that she must betray her own in order to save humanity.

  The possibilities are endless, but at the heart they have this in common: soldiers—ordinary and otherwise–struggling against extraordinary odds to survive the day. They must withstand dark magic, dodge enemy blades, and defy the odds to survive SHATTERED SHIELDS.

  Shattered Shields

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  “Introduction” © 2014 Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt; “Ashes and Starlight” © 2014 David Farlane; “The Fixed Stars” © 2014 Seanan McGuire; “The Keeper of Names” © 2014 Larry Correia; “The Smaller We” © 2014 John Helfers; “Invictus” © 2014 Annie Bellett; “Rising Above” © 2014 Sarah A. Hoyt; “A Cup of Wisdom” © 2014 Joseph Ziega; “Words of Power” © 2014 Wendy N. Wagner; “Lightweaver” © 2014 Gray Rinehart; “Hoofsore and Weary” © 2014 Cat Rambo; “Vengeance” © 2014 Robin Wynne Bailey; “Deadfall” © 2014 Nancy Fulda; “Yael of the Strings” © 2014 John R. Fulz; “The Gleaners” © 2014 Dave Gross; “Bonded Men” © 2014 James L. Sutter; “Bone Candy” © 2014 Glenn Cook; “First Blood” © 2014 Elizabeth Moon

  Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1476-7-3701-0

  Cover art by Todd Lockwood

  First Baen printing, November 2014

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  tk

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  This anthology is dedicated to the men and women across the ages who’ve fought for freedom, safety, and better lives for their families and fellow countrymen. We salute your courage, sacrifice, and honor.

  INTRODUCTION

  Military and fantasy have gone together from the earliest days of fantasy storytelling with tales of soldiers, armies, and battles often intertwining with those of knights, kings, and wizards. In some people’s minds, they are almost inseparable, a key element of tales from the likes of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and so on, in whose tales enormous battles play key roles in the overarching stories and serve as backdrops to the main quest.

  But like military science fiction, a clearly defined and popular genre, military fantasy can be so much more than an element of epic fantasy plots, with tactics, strategies, and battles taking center stage inside Warhammer, for example, or the works of modern fantasists like Glen Cook’s Black Company tales, Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops, and Steven Erikson’s Malazan.

  Some of the most exciting action in fantasy takes place in the context of military engagements, and some of the most memorable characters are warriors, so we decided to bring them together in a collection of such tales here for fans of both military history and tactics and epic fantasy action.

  Included are seventeen new tales from top authors such as Glen Cook, Elizabeth Moon, and David Farland writing in their bestselling Black Company, Paksenarrion and Runelords universes, respectively. Larry Correia, Sarah A. Hoyt, and others are writing in new universes. Seanan McGuire gives us an epic fantasy prequel set thousands of years before in her popular October Daye urban fantasy universe, while Robin Wayne Bailey revisits the setting of his Frost novels. In between, we have tales from exciting newer voices like Wendy N. Wagner, Joe Zieja and Annie Bellet, as well as original tales from popular writers like Dave Gross, James L. Sutter, and Cat Rambo.

  While each tale is unique, all are fast paced, with plenty of action. Some are dark and deep, others light and funny, but together they should satisfy whatever mood strikes you as you read. Our mission as anthologists is to first entertain and second introduce readers and fans to new voices which they might have not yet discovered. We hope you’ll get plenty of both here as well.

  Above all, we hope these tales will inspire you to escape into journeys of the imagination to distant lands where true heroes of courage and honor reside and hope reigns eternal for better days. As Aragorn said at the Black Gate: “A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand!” (Return of The King movie, based on the book of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien.)

  —Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt, November, 2013

  Starlight and Ash

  A Runelords Story

  David Farland

  As the knights of Mystarria rode through the Dunnwoodin evening, all grew quiet. Avahn knew that her guards rode in silence in part because they were weary to the bone and, in part, because they feared the Toth.

  The creatures were still a mystery.

  They’d appeared two days ago, floating in the Carroll Sea on great gray ships that appeared to be carved from stone. The boxlike vessels were like nothing any human would construct.

  What the creatures wanted, no one knew for sure. There was no way to communicate with them; they had not tried to parlay.

  Instead, some of them merely stepped off their ships and walked along the bottom of the sea, and then climbed out along the coasts only to set fields of crops afire.

  Winter would be hard, Avahn knew. Famine was coming.

  * * *

  An animal cry rose in the woods, like the keen of a hound—desolate, bereft.

  A shiver raced up Dval’s spine as his mount leapt forward a pace. He whirled to see King Harrill upon his warhorse, the gray color of cold ash spotted by snow. The king gazed upward, hazel eyes blank, brow crinkled, and merely wailed like a trapped animal.

  The dark pine boughs overhead echoed the cry and diffused it, so that the wail seemed to both rise from the ground and descend from the sky. “Mehrel?” the king called to his dead wife. “Mehrel?” He stretched his hands out, palms outward, begging heaven for succor.

  Eleven-year-old Dval had never seen a man so broken.

  He knew that King Harrill suspected Dval of the queen’s murder, though Dval’s only crime was to have found her dead. That, and to have been born into an enemy clan, to have been born a Woguld.

  Among the Woguld, grief was for children. True men did not wail like thi
s. Dval wondered if such excesses were common among these day-lighters, these Mystarrians.

  From the corner of his eye, he studied King Harrill. The man was hefty, short, and unimposing, with old muscle going to fat. He wore a deep blue riding robe over his breastplate, and no helm, only a simple crown carved from oak, polished smooth and darkened by age over the centuries. Aside from a haughty bearing, nothing suggested that he was a king.

  He began to blubber and sniff, wiped his nose with one sleeve.

  Dval’s own father had been found murdered six months earlier, yet Dval had never wept for him like this. Dval wondered if he should have wept.

  No, Father would not approve. It is not wailing that he would want, but vengeance.

  So far, Dval had not been able to grant his father vengeance, or shed tears on his behalf.

  Dval looked to the king’s retinue to see their reaction to this mad howling.

  Ahead and behind, the king’s knights rode with hunched shoulders, faces forward, as if distressed to hear the king’s outburst. Their mail jangled with each plop of a hoof.

  So, it is not common even for these savages to cry. Dval suppressed a mocking grin. Mystarrians were no better than animals.

  Weariness tugged at Dval like an undertow. The air so close to the sea felt thick and wet in his throat. Even in broad daylight, he rode through a landscape that seemed more shadow than leaf and tree.

  Twisted pines brooded above, keeping the road in perpetual gloom. He could feel the trees all around, as ancient as legend, moldy and rotten, like King Harrill himself. With the dying of the day, linnets had begun to flutter upward, wings of amber flashing in the slanting light, glimmering like garnets. The woods smelled of mold, decay.

  The king noticed Dval’s smile, and whirled. “Warum starren Sie?” the king hissed, flashing his teeth.

  Dval did not understand his uncouth tongue, but guessed at the question. He answered proudly, knowing that it might cost him his life. “I see a king who cries like a girl.” He did not hide the contempt in his voice.

  The king growled and pulled a long dirk from his boot-sheath, waved it threateningly, though he was well out of reach.

  Dval urged his mare forward, ignoring the mad king’s glare.

  * * *

  “Father, stop!” Avahn cried. She rode next to Dval, painfully aware of the older boy’s color as they passed through a crop of sunlight.

  Dval had a Woguld’s skin, white as a swan, with long silver locks and eyes so pale green that they were almost colorless. For two hundred years, his people had warred with Mystarria.

  “Oh, am I to take orders from a child now?” the king demanded.

  “What I ask,” Avahn said softly, in order to appease him, “I ask out of love. Spare him. Dval saved my life. I am in his debt.”

  Dval’s stomach growled, and she realized that no one had offered him food since his capture. Yet he showed no sign of fatigue. He held his back straight, head high—every bit the warrior, from a race of warriors.

  King Harrill’s voice cracked like a whip: “Don’t get too comfortable with that…grosse wurm at your side.” The epithet grosse wurm was a slur used when speaking of the Woguld. Their skin was the sickly color of giant earthworms found in Southwest Mystarria.

  Avahn had just turned nine. She was not used to her father’s unsteady temper. She’d been sheltered at court, raised among nannies, learning the lore that every princess should know.

  “I want to keep him, Father,” she pleaded. “He fought back the wolves again and again.” Her father bit his lip. “Please? I never ask you for anything.”

  “It’s not so simple,” her father grumbled. “He’s not a pony or a bear cub.” He gave Dval a dark look, and the king’s entire demeanor changed. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How do we know that he’s not a spy? If I do as you bid, take him to court, train him as a guard, he’ll learn our deepest secrets. He could kill you in the night.”

  “What more does he need to do?” Avahn asked. “The world is falling into ruin, what with the Toth. Shouldn’t we plan on fighting our real enemies?”

  Her father grimaced, glanced at the boy, with the hood of a green riding cloak pulled protectively low over his eyes, his long tan loincloth and moccasins, and the deep-blue tattoos of a tree winding up his right leg. Dval couldn’t be more than twelve, Avahn felt sure. He wasn’t a warrior, out to learn the kingdom’s secrets. He was hardly more than a child.

  The king stiffened, as if he’d come to a decision. “There is only one way that the boy can prove his loyalty: he must betray his own people. He must lead our troops into the Woguld’s underground strongholds and help us wipe them out.”

  Avahn’s heart hammered. It seemed impossible. He could prove his loyalty only by being disloyal to his own people? “But—”

  Her father cut her off. He said firmly, “His people have rejected him. He owes them nothing.”

  Avahn glanced at Dval to see if he reacted, but he merely stared ahead. He showed no sign that he understood.

  In her mind’s eye, she remembered the archer in the woods, his silver elk’s mask gleaming in the sun, its antlers wide, as he drew an arrow on his crimson bow. She heard the whistle of the arrow as its goose feathers winged through the air.

  Dval’s own people had tried to kill him—simply because he’d saved her life. Perhaps it was true that he no longer owed them anything, but she doubted that he would turn against them.

  “Train him then,” Avahn begged. “Let him learn to love Mystarria, make it his home. In a year or two, perhaps he’ll do what you ask.” She said this last only to appease her father, not because she believed it.

  “I’ll not have that worm in the palace,” King Harrill affirmed.

  “Take him to the House of Understanding then,” Avahn suggested. The House of Understanding was more than a house, of course. It was a great school near the Capitol. In ancient days, it was a school where lords and soldiers trained at an inn, but soon grew in reputation so that one building could not contain it all. Now there were dozens of “rooms” to the house; entire buildings and arenas where one could specialize in various crafts. “He can train in the Room of Arms to develop his fighting skills, and he can learn our language in the Room of Tongues.”

  The king did not answer.

  The forest had begun to thin ahead, and suddenly a war horn blew, deep blats that sounded like three sharp barks.

  Immediately, Sir Adelheim, her father’s captain, pulled his horseman’s battle axe from the sheath on his back and charged ahead. Her father reined in his own mount, which leapt a pace, eager to join the fray.

  “Stay back!” Avahn’s father warned her as he reached for his own battleaxe.

  The horses danced in place, and the troops that had been riding behind charged forward, their faces set like stone, drawing weapons as they streamed into the forest.

  Avahn peered forward, straining every sense. She smelled ash, and realized that they were coming out of the Dunnwood. She smelled smoke—not the smoke of a campfire, but of burning fields.

  She spotted a tree that had been blasted by lightning, stripping it of bark. She remembered this place. Ahead, a small town named Moss End hugged the woods. It had an ivy-covered fortress, quaint but stout, while a beautiful stone bridge arced above the river. A trio of inns hugged the shore near the forest, while on the other side of the bridge squatted rows of ancient cottages, their roofs piled with heavy straw thatch.

  Ahead, warriors’ cries echoed through the wood, and for several moments Avahn listened to the sounds of battle. Soon, Sir Adelheim came cantering back on his black destrier. As the sun dipped behind the mountains, darkness deepened, almost as if he brought the night with him.

  “Milord,” he called. “A few miles ahead—we’ve been attacked!”

  Here? Avahn wondered. Why would anyone attack Moss End?

  * * *

  Dval rode from under the ancient trees after sunset, just as stars had begun to come alive in
the dying day, lanterns swinging in the rafters of heaven. Beneath the shadow of the old forest, they came upon the site of a massacre.

  Cottages lay in ruins beside the road, roofs ripped off as if by a tornado. Stone walls from fine hostels had been shoved inward, and a bit of smoke still wound up from the rubble of hearths.

  Of the fortress, an ancient tower, only a pile of rubble remained.

  In the courtyard lay a woman, her belly ripped open and guts strewn all about. A child was not far away from her, and she reached toward its corpse. Nearby, Dval spotted the head of a knight, still in its helm with visor down, staring blankly from the roadside.

  All had been murdered, as senselessly as his father had been murdered.

  Seven red hens raced from the courtyard at the approach of the troops.

  Dval had never seen such destruction. Last night, he’d witnessed the fires burning from the mountains and had wondered if the folk of Mystarria were at war. But this was like nothing he had ever imagined.

  “Kommen hier!” a soldier shouted at the backside of the ruins, and other soldiers raced toward him across the green, past more bodies. Behind the fortress, Dval came upon one of the king’s champions, the hill giant Bandolan. The giant stared down at a monster.

  “Toth!” the savages whispered in hushed tones, some of them aiming war lances down to a dead creature at their feet. “Toth.”

  Dval stared, amazed. The beast looked to be two times taller than a man, but it was nothing like a man. It had an exoskeleton covered in thick gray hide, much like that of a reaver, but it was thinner than a reaver. It had four legs and two long arms, each of which ended with three talons and a thumb-like claw.