Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) (25 page)

Hael
looked up from the map table as Lucan reentered the command tent. The smirk on
Lucan’s face indicated that he had been up to mischief. He practically glowed.
It must have been something particularly nasty to have given him such pleasure.

It had been quite a surprise for Hael to
find that Lucan had been one of the officers transferred into the newly formed
Ninety-First. Lucan had skirted the open disobedience so far, but he took every
opportunity to be as unhelpful as possible. He resented Hael’s command and felt
he would have been a much better, much stronger commander.

Hael forgot all about Lucan as the tent
flap opened again and two troopers half dragged and half carried in Bral. He
looked awful. He was filthy, covered in scratches. By the limp way one of his
arms dangled, Hael guessed that it was broken again. He also appeared to have
fresh vomit on his chin, lovely.

Even worse, he was not fully in control of
his mental shields, radiating pain and confusion to all and sundry. The
troopers supporting him grimaced as the discomfort leaked through their
shields.

Then everything changed. Bral saw him
sitting at the table and a flood of relief washed over those in the tent, which
cut off abruptly as he steadied his shields and got himself back under control.
Bral straightened himself and shook off the support of the trooper to stand by
himself, swaying gently to a breeze only he could feel.

Hael looked over to Lucan, stationed beside
the tent flap. The look of innocence on his face and his completely impervious
shields were all the confirmation Hael needed. Lucan had probably implied to
Bral that he was the commanding officer rather than Hael. Lucan really was a
bastard.

Bral commenced his report in a croaking
voice. His voice strengthened as he went and then faded as he reached the end,
his last reserves of energy spent.

Before he collapsed, he requested
accelerated healing so he would be ready for the coming battle.

Hael frowned at the request. Bral would
need to pay the price in pain again as the healers compressed the healing and
pain of months into a few days.

Although he wished he could deny the
request, Hael was proud to grant it. They all needed to repay the Debt in their
own way.

He sent Bral off to the Host Healers to
endure a couple of excruciating days so he would be ready for battle.

Jalal was a veteran — he was a thirty-year
man. He had been deployed to the Campaigns, both Northern and Eastern, for, you
guessed it, thirty years.

He was a good trooper, no, make that a
great
trooper. He followed orders without question. That was all that was required to
be a great trooper; just carry out orders, don’t question them and you would be
a great trooper. The problem was that he was scared. He was getting older and
slower. His cunning and experience kept him alive, but it could only compensate
for reduced reflexes and atrophied muscles for a finite period of time, a
period of time that was running out. If only he could become an officer, he
could get off the front line and be a little safer, but that was not an option.
He had applied for promotion, many times, but he had no aptitude for command.
For thirty years they had been telling him that he had “no aptitude for
command.” He did not really know what “no aptitude for command” meant, except
that they were probably right. He could hardly disagree with them if he did not
know what they were talking about.

His train of thought was broken by a piercing
scream. His own piercing scream.

The pain got the better of him for a minute
there.

He was trying not to scream, as his throat
was raw from screaming and he was way past the point where giving vent to his
agony offered any relief.

He was lying on a rough wooden bench being
tortured. They had been torturing him since the sun set, many hours ago.

The Nightfeeder leaned over and applied
pressure to one of his ribs with his index finger. He heard a crack as the rib
snapped under the unrelenting, yet strangely delicate pressure. The Nightfeeder
straightened to his full height and examined him, trying to figure out how long
he would last.

Jalal coughed and felt another scream start
to build from his diaphragm. The scream was choked off by a gush of blood from
his mouth. That last rib must have punctured his lung.

Not long left now.

He could not find it in him to hate his
tormentor; he had volunteered for this, after all.

They had started with breaking his legs and
his arms and then they had tied his torso to the bench, the bench that he was
now so intimately familiar with. This made it hard, no, make that impossible,
for him to lose his nerve and try to crawl away. For this he was thankful. Had
been able to walk, crawl or slither away, he probably would have done so during
this endless night of agony. 

He was finding it hard to breath.

He gasped twice then his breath stopped.
His mental shield disintegrated as he started to drift away. He was going to
die.

He did not want to die, and that is why he
volunteered for this nightmare. He wanted to live. He wanted to live forever
even if it meant a life of eternal slavery.

The Nightfeeder leant over and tried to
imprint the pattern of the Nightfeeder Curse on Jalal. He drew it deep into his
being, accepting each and every facet of the Curse.

He smiled; he would be strong soon.

Not as strong as his beautiful, magnificent
Nightfeeder creator, but he would no longer be old, he would not be afraid
again and death would something he dealt and did not receive.

Aral was afraid, and he had been afraid
since he had been assigned to this gathering of the True People that the
Messiah called an Army.

He engaged all of his senses in determining
if someone or something unexpected was out there in the night. He was stationed
at the rear of the People’s army and he was responsible for making sure that
another force did not sneak up on them unawares.

He strained his hearing, sight and
mindsense to their limits but could detect nothing.

This army that he was a part of was new — so
much was new. The Messiah had changed everything.

It had been a little over two years ago
that Aral and his small tribe had received the dream, sent from the Messiah
himself. They had been Compelled to leave their home range and march to the
north, where True People were being gathered together. Aral felt proud that his
tribe had been found by the Messiah himself. Most tribes were found by one of
the Messiah’s many shamans tasked with the Gathering.

Though the army was large, it was a small
part of the Gathering. Aral and his brethren, chosen for their strength and
speed, had been commanded to annihilate the Legion of Evil Ones ahead and to
capture the Legion’s commander and bring him north to the Messiah.

Although he knew he was being disloyal for
thinking it, Aral longed for the simpler days prior to the coming of the
Messiah. The Messiah promised to make things better, he promised to reclaim
what had been taken from them, and the Messiah’s force of will made all of the
True People want that too. Aral noticed that, as the distance between the army
and the Messiah increased, the force of his will waned and the more Aral
thought about how little he cared about reclaiming a piece of land that had
been taken from his ancestors.

Aral promised himself that he would run
away as soon as the battle was over. He could not leave his post and endanger
the People, but after the battle when the Legion had been destroyed, he could
run away then. Maybe he would go east and look for the fabled New City of the
True People.

Aral sensed a shadow behind him.

His mindshout cut off as the Nightfeeder
seized him.

The official start of the battle was marked
by the troopers’ roar shattering the cloak of silence that had settled over the
two armies. The valley resounded with the sound of Guest war cries as they
hacked and stabbed and stabbed and hacked at the Ferals with their bronze
swords. The screaming disoriented the Ferals and would have disoriented the
Host — though to a lesser extent — if any had been present. None of the Host
served in a combat capacity in the Ninety-First Legion, or any other Legion,
for that matter. The only Host present were the Healers who were holed up in a
strongly warded tent over the ridge. Other than acting as Healers, the Host
held the most senior positions of authority in the Legions in spite of the fact
that none of them had any recent experience with battle, not since the Legions
had been formed. Battle was the most important way that the Guest repaid the
Debt.

The battle was over within minutes; the
Ninety-First completely subdued the much larger Feral force. Bral’s warning had
been the deciding factor. If the Feral army had come on them unawares, Hael’s
Legion, the now victorious Ninety-First, would be no more. The actual start of
the battle, rather than the official start, was the minute that Bral had
finished his report to Hael.

As soon as Bral had completed describing
the enemy force, Hael had started to issue orders. Marching directly on such a
large Feral force and engaging them would have been suicide. He needed to
choose the field of battle and, more importantly, he needed to wear them down.

Hael had sent four of his five Nightfeeders
to sow fear among the enemy. They started to strike that very night. They
raided the Feral army relentlessly, murdering and killing any that were
vulnerable, women, children, sleeping warriors, warriors who were preparing
food, even warriors who crept out into the darkness to have a piss. The raids
also announced to the Feral army that the Legion was aware of their presence
and that they had lost the element of surprise.

Halfway through that first night the Feral
abandoned their nocturnal march and hunkered down in a defensive position. As
soon as the sky started to lighten they discarded their supplies and commenced
a ground-eating forced march. They had lost the element of surprise and wanted
to minimize the time that the Ninety-First had to prepare a defense.

As his Nightfeeders raided the enemy that
first night, Hael had asked for volunteers. He needed more Nightfeeders. Though
the Legion was new, it had been seeded with seasoned troopers. Among these
seasoned troopers were older troopers, troopers with health problems, troopers
who lost their nerve and troopers who were afraid of dying. It was to these soldiers
that Hael appealed to. He offered them eternal life, health, strength, virtual
immortality, all in exchange for an eternity or servitude. To some, enough, the
deal was appealing.

Hael did not have access to a Temple, so he
used the Nightfeeder he had kept back from the raiding party, to
turn
the volunteers. Applying the curse in a Temple with a team of Adepts created
the most powerful of Nightfeeders; however, a lesser version could be created
in the field, with the right preparation and some effort. Temples and the
rituals performed within them were constructed to circumvent the mind’s natural
resistance to a Curse, a Working or a Gaes. The architecture amplified the
power of the adepts, and the ritual promoted the acceptance of the curse in the
subject’s mind. Without access to a Temple, or adepts for that matter, the
volunteer needed to be brought to the brink of death. Only when Death had the
subject’s spirit in his bony hands could the mind’s aversion to the curse be
overridden, allowing the curse to transfer. The resulting second generation
Nightfeeders were not as powerful as their creator, but they were still useful.
They healed a little slower and were a little easier to kill, but they were
still devastating assassins and skirmishers.

The second night after Bral’s arrival
fifteen Nightfeeders harried the Feral army, while another five scouted the
surrounding area for the battlefield that Hael needed. The Feral army managed
to take down two of his newly minted Nightfeeders, an acceptable loss.

The third day after Ga Bral’s revelation of
the approaching army, Hael had found his battlefield. A shallow-sided canyon a
half day’s march ahead. He split his army, placing two-thirds of his forces on
the slopes above the canyon floor, while the remaining third laid an obvious
trail a mile into the canyon and started to build fortifications.

On the fourth day, the Ferals stumbled into
the canyon, exhausted, demoralized and hungry. When the Ferals reached the
fortifications, Hael’s main forces charged down into the canyon walls, hitting
the Feral column from both sides. Hael’s fresh troopers dodged the clumsy
swings of the Ferals’ stone axes, hammers and spears while stabbing and
slashing with their bronze blades forged in the secret smithies deep within the
Ministry of Havoc.

The Feral skins and furs did little to
protect them. Occasionally a colored shell or other piece of primitive jewelry
would blunt a thrust or turn a slash, protecting the wearer from a killing
stroke, though that was rare. The Feral experienced staggering loss of life in
that first charge. The sight of their relatives and friends being chopped and
skewered in conjunction with the confusion caused by the shouting troopers
plunged the Feral army into despair. It only took a few Ferals to drop their
weapons before a wave of capitulation flowed through the enemy army. The Ferals
dropped to their knees and the battle was over.