Red Sky at Dawn

D.A. Adams

Copyright © 2011 by D.A. Adams

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without express written consent of the publisher or author.

Cover art and illustrations: Bonnie Wasson

Cover art and illustrations in this book copyright © 2011 Bonnie Wasson & Seventh Star Press, LLC.

Editor: Sherrie Shuler

Published by Seventh Star Press, LLC.

ISBN Number 978-1-937929-94-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011941722

Seventh Star Press

www.seventhstarpress.com

[email protected]

Publisher’s Note:

The Fall of Dorkhun is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are the product of the author’s imagination, used in fictitious manner.

Any resemblances to actual persons, places, locales, events, etc.

are purely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

Second Edition

For Carl and David, the two best papaws a boy could hope for…

…and for Collin and Finn,the two best sons.

A Different Perspective

Suvene had just finished a full night’s watch along the southern perimeter when the alarm sounded. At first, he stayed in bed, figuring the disturbance a minor nuisance that would be quelled quickly, but as the alarm continued to ring from atop the barracks, he and the other soldiers got out of bed and fumbled for their armor and weapons. There was much grumbling and cursing while they dressed, and several didn’t bother to lace up their chest plates. As Suvene strapped his scabbard to his belt, a handful of frantic sergeants charged into the barracks and grabbed pikes from the wall.

“Move your backsides,” one barked at the night watch.

“What is it?” a young soldier asked.

“Nothing compared to my wrath if you don’t move it,” another answered.

Now armed with their pikes, the sergeants filed back out the door. Suvene followed them but watched in horror as an arrow struck the leader dead. The shot had come from the water tower, but he didn’t have time to find the archer, for another arrow whistled into the neck of the sergeant in front of him. The sergeant gasped and gurgled for air and stumbled backwards into Suvene, knocking the young orc off his feet.

Suvene crawled to the far corner of the barracks, away from the archer, and gathered his wits. The plantation was a blizzard of chaos, with soldiers running in every direction. As he lay on the dead grass, he spotted two from his unit trotting towards the masters’ home. He got to his feet and sprinted along the back of the barracks to reach his friends, but as he cleared the building, he froze at the sight before him.

Scores of dead and dying bodies lay strewn at the steps and on the porch of the masters’ home, and blood stood in pools like remnants of a summer storm. For a moment, he thought about fleeing from whatever had caused such carnage, but his sense of duty held him fast. He called to his friends who had just reached the porch, and they stopped to wait for him.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Some kind of phantom,” Sortesh, who was also regular infantry, said. “It’s on that side of the porch.”

“Phantoms don’t fire arrows,” Suvene returned, thumbing towards the water tower.

“I saw it. It was ten feet tall and gray like fog.”

“Both of you hush,” Sonjiegn, who was a corporal on his way to sergeant, barked. “Let’s find whatever it is and avenge this.”

With that, they followed the corpses around the house and onto the fallow sugarcane field. Suvene saw the phantom a hundred yards away. It had human form and stood six and a half feet tall. Everything about it seemed gray, including its hair, which flowed down its shoulders and onto its back and reminded the young orc of a lion. It stopped running and turned to face them, so the three gave chase, sprinting across the freshly turned ground. Behind them, the rest of their platoon had come around the other side of the masters’ home and were gathering into formation. Suvene thought about stopping his friends and waiting for the others, but as they neared the monster, Sonjiegn drew his blade, crouched into middle guard, and called out:

“Surrender and we make it quick.”

Suvene drew his weapon, preparing for a fight, but the phantom pulled a dagger from its vambrace and threw the blade in a lightning fast motion. Sonjiegn staggered backwards, the blade in his throat, and squealed in agony as he collapsed. Without thinking, Suvene and Sortesh charged with their swords raised above their heads. Sortesh reached the phantom first and swung down with a powerful blow, but the monster blocked the attack with its left arm and slashed open Sortesh’s stomach with its sword from the right. Suvene saw an opening and brought down his own blow, but the phantom parried the attack with an upstroke of its blade.

Suvene’s father had been a front-line corporal against the Tredjards for nearly twenty years and had been, by all accounts, an excellent swordsman and a dutiful soldier. His lack of ascent through the ranks was the result of his lowly social beginnings, but none of that had mattered to him. He had sent home every copper and silver piece he came across so that Suvene could have sword fighting lessons with the best teachers and entry into tournaments against the finest warriors in the civilized world.

Suvene had proven himself a worthy student and competitor. While he wasn’t allowed to win any tournaments – only the children of masters were given that opportunity – his unofficial record had been as good as all of his peers. He had not yet seen actual combat, but he had trained for it as well as any. As he dueled with the phantom, he focused on the skills he had mastered from many hours of sweat and pain but struggled to suppress the terror that had seized him. He couldn’t let himself get killed by a silly blunder from fear.

The phantom was by far the most talented and most polished opponent Suvene had ever faced. Each offensive cut or thrust contained some element of a parry, and every defensive block or deflective blow ended with an aggressive draw or rake. The phantom was equally adroit at timing its counter-attack to outreach Suvene. Each time the young orc attacked, the phantom would either move into the action or slide away, then strike at the Suvene’s exposed arms and sides. Several times, Suvene had barely recovered in time to defend himself.

Despite its tremendous skill, the phantom was growing weary, and Suvene sensed that it was only a matter of time before he would strike down the beast. As long as he could keep his wits, he could match the phantom blow for blow. The gray figure before him seemed to sense this too, for it increased the intensity of its attacks, trying to overwhelm Suvene with the brute strength of several thunderous blows. Suvene absorbed the strikes with his sword, his hands and arms tingling from the impacts, and watched for an opening.

Behind him, he could hear a handful of troops advancing, and he was seized by a deep sense of relief and a surge of territorial instinct to finish his own fight. He had this battle under control, and reinforcements would only disrupt him. The phantom glanced over Suvene’s shoulder, noting the approach, and the orc saw his opening. He began an upward thrust, aimed at the phantom’s exposed armpit, but as his blade neared the mark, a figure flashed into his peripheral vision and slammed into his left arm, knocking him off-balance. Then, the clumsy fool stumbled in front of him and tripped him before he could react. As he fell, a dull thud on top of his head sent him into darkness.

***

He awoke with the bodies of orcs, dwarves, and elves pinning him to the ground. His mind swirled with fog, and he tried to make sense of what had happened, but his thoughts were disjointed and jumbled. He attempted to crawl from beneath the mass of dead, dying, and wounded, but the weight was too much, so he resigned himself to lying still until his head cleared.

After a time, the bodies near him were cleared away, and he found himself with several dwarves, rock-brains that they were, standing over him. They were grunting and shouting at each other in their barbaric tongues, and he couldn’t understand any of what he heard. Several pairs of hands grabbed his arms and legs and lifted him from the pile, and still unable to make sense of the situation, he didn’t resist.

He was half-carried, half-dragged to the masters’ home, where he was laid on the ground and tied to a rail by leather straps. To his right were the masters themselves, and to his left were other soldiers, none of whom seemed terribly injured. They were guarded by several rock-brains armed with pikes and halberds from the barracks. He leaned to his left and whispered to the orc beside him:

“What’s happened?”

“The end of the world,” the soldier returned. “The slaves have taken the plantation.”

“We’ll all be killed, for sure,” the master nearest Suvene said. “These beasts have no regard for life.”

A leisure slave came over and barked at them, waving a pike in their faces, and they instantly fell silent. Suvene’s head throbbed where the phantom had struck him with the pommel of its sword, but he had no other injuries. He wanted terribly to sleep, partially from having been up all night but mostly from the desperate fogginess, yet every time he would almost drift off, a rock-brain would poke at him and growl.

Throughout the day, the slaves cleared dead bodies from the lawn and ransacked the masters’ home. The masters sobbed and murmured as their possessions were carried from the house and piled on the ground in great heaps. By late night, the barracks were raided, and Suvene was sick with hatred as he watched them plunder weapons and armor. As afternoon stretched into evening, the phantom appeared again. Assisted by two wood-brain elves, it hobbled into view, its left ankle bound in a crude splint. It spoke to the slaves that were emptying the house. His voice was low but stern, and the sound of it made Suvene shudder. Then, the phantom approached the prisoners.

“The people you held in bondage are now free,” it spoke in excellent orcish. “We will take weapons to arm ourselves and treasure to compensate for the years and lives you stole. When we march away, those of you too old or too wounded to travel will be left here. The soldiers able to fight will travel with us as prisoners.”

“You won’t get far,” one of the masters taunted. “Our armies will find and crush you.”

“We’ll see.”

With that, the phantom turned to the guards and spoke to them in the barbaric tongue and hobbled off. Several guards retrieved bread and water for the captive orcs, and the food was welcome to their empty stomachs. Suvene, who had not eaten since the previous evening, relished each bite.

While he ate, Suvene was startled when a second monster came into view from the direction of the leisure slave cage. He had heard stories of the ogres of the north, but nothing had prepared him for the enormity of this beast. Its arms were as thick as his waist, and its skin was pale like the cotton of the eastern plantations. Despite its size, it carried a rock-brain with the tenderness of a mother, and Suvene recognized the dwarf as the runaway that had been caught and punished. Stooping low, the ogre carried the rock-brain inside the masters’ home. Suvene wondered at what he had just seen and tried through his fogginess to make sense of it but to no avail.

His legs and back ached from sitting on the cold ground beside the porch, and his arms were sore from being bound to the rail. Regardless of his discomfort and confusion, he desperately wanted to sleep, and the drowsiness washed over him in waves, each one breaking more than the one before. Several times, he closed his eyes to doze for just a few minutes, but each time one of the guards would notice, and he would receive another prodding from a pike. The torture was maddening.

After the sun had dropped below the horizon and several campfires blazed on the grounds, a wood-brain came to check the wounds of the orcs tied to the rail. Most of them had only scratches and bumps, and the wood-brain administered ointments to them accordingly, but when it reached Suvene, it motioned for the guards to untie him. He was taken inside the masters’ home – something strictly forbidden at his rank – and put on a plush sofa. The wood-brain cleaned the wound and applied a thick salve to it. Then, it spoke to him in broken orcish:

“Head wound, not sleep.”

“I have to sleep. I’m too tired.”

“Sleep, not wake.”

Suvene groaned in displeasure, but the wood-brain persisted.

With that, it tied Suvene to the sofa and motioned for another wood-brain to sit beside him. The two elves spoke briefly before the healer left the room. The second didn’t speak the civilized tongue at all, so it sat in silence, only moving to occasionally shake him as he would start to nod off.

In that manner, Suvene passed the night – a miserable, endless night. When sunrise finally came, he was given more bread and water by the wood-brain that had sat with him all night, and the healer stopped to apply more salve to the gash on his head. The fogginess of the previous day had lifted but had been replaced by a headache that came from deep inside his skull. The pain wasn’t sharp or throbbing but steady and somewhat dull and terrible. If he hadn’t been tied down, he would have clawed at his skull to release the pressure.

The healer and watcher untied him from the sofa but bound his hands behind his back and led him outside. He was taken to a wagon that had been loaded with food from the masters’ pantry, and he was tethered to the rear by a leather strap around his waist that gave him just enough slack to sit on the cold earth. About twenty yards away, the phantom and the runaway rock-brain sat in the back of another wagon. In the early light of day, the phantom’s face looked even more menacing and much more arresting. The runaway – which had appeared near death the previous evening – seemed greatly recovered from the beating it had endured. Suvene was astonished that any creature could mend so quickly, even with the help of wood-brain healers and the masters’ ointments, and he suspected some evil between the phantom and the rock-brain.

Throughout the day, the slaves loaded wagons with food from the granary and pantry, weapons and armor from the barracks, and valuables from the masters’ home. The phantom remained in the same place all day, barking orders at the slaves as they scurried about, and Suvene watched it all closely, a deep hatred for the phantom burgeoning in his heart. If that clumsy fool hadn’t stumbled into him, none of this would be happening now. He had bested it one-on-one, and by all that was just in the civilized world, he should have struck down that monster. As he thought these things, Suvene resolved that he would find some way to escape this bondage and finish the job.