Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter 24

~24~

Thirty-six days before the sack of Death's Head

The sky roiled, and the invasion of Menatar began.

It was the 22nd of Rainmonth, 7983, a little more than a month after Leramis had left Ryse and Quay to return to the Black Isle. The wind whistled sharp and damp out of the northwest, sweeping from the sea over the Lonely Shore and cresting atop the rocky black spine of the island. Fine mist covered everything in a spidery layer of dampness.

Empty huts of thatch and straw hunched around Leramis. He stood on a slippery and uneven excuse for a road with his legs stained with mud. A maze of sharpened stakes blocked the way to the north.

To the northeast, smoke and fire faded in and out of the mist like the breath of a hundred chimneys.

On Leramis's left, a squat man in a black robe pulled a few dozen souls to himself and lit a pipe within the recesses of his hood. The vanilla smell of tobacco filled the air for a few sweet seconds, and then the wind ripped it away over the hills to the east.

"That'll be Marshton, I reckon," the man said. He was a middle-aged, crusty old blackrobe whom Leramis had met a few days earlier. He'd been an Eldanian soldier, serving on Ilthien's wall, before the Order found him. He had a name, but Leramis had already forgotten it. Their unit hadn't been built to stay together long. "And Eastshore too, unless I miss my guess."

Leramis guessed the same.

The struggle for Menatar had started before sunrise at the north end of the isle. Cloud and smoke obscured the Eldanians, but Leramis knew they were there. Soldiers in burnished silver armor. Horses taller than him by a head. Gargantuan soulwoven golems ripped from the rock of the island. He shivered.

Against all that, he stood with a dozen of his brothers and sisters. By the time he'd arrived at Death's Head with his warning, the necromancers had already heard about the dragon's release. They had sent a number of blackrobes away from the island to prepare for its arrival.

Everyone else, including Leramis, was going to fight.

It was nearing midday, but the memory of the sun felt far, far away. He squatted in the mud and warmed his hands before a fire they'd built in the center of the road.

The island of Menatar was shaped like an elongated turtle's back, with a high ridge down the center and satellite ridges and gullies running down to the sea. The Eldanians would have to take and traverse the road that ran down the central ridge to reach the low-lying city of Death's Head in the south. Striking from the gullies, the necromancers would harry them along the way, then melt back into the flatlands along the shores, the marshes, the island's many caves. At a few chokepoints, they'd skirmish with the Eldanians on the road.

Halfway Home, where Leramis squatted in the mud warming his hands, was one such point.

Leramis stood and wiped his nose. Early that morning, before the fog moved in, he'd caught sight of a white sail off the north end of the island. He'd hoped it might be just one ship, coming to offer terms.

But that sail had been followed by another, then another and another, and then the fog had closed back in and swallowed them all again.

The Eldanians had marshaled their forces offshore for three days before striking.

They hadn't sought to negotiate once.

The mist filled Leramis's eyes, his ears, his lungs. Menatar had never been a hospitable place. It was a hard land of cold black rock and briny seafood. The only edible things that grew on the island were roots and a variety of marsh grain called Hob's Weed that made bitter, mealy flour. The misery of the place was one reason Fayyid the Black had chosen it for his order's stronghold so long ago.