WILDEST DREAMS

by Michael A. Stackpole

THEY CAME FOR their tribute on the night of no moons. They appeared out of the twilight, one minute dim ghosts in the distance, then corporeal nightmares seeping into the vale below. The suraitha spread out to ward both flanks, and the trondukhai hulked along in the center of the horde. The lomai flittered about as was their wont, but the Maeruunne, their masters, came on in a disciplined formation. Their ranks ordered, their footfalls were as thunder, and the precise crack of scabbards on armor came as one crisp sound.

Their advent was as it had always been—the way they assumed it would always be.

They were mistaken.

This time their blood would spill before any tribute would be paid.

The Maeruunne leader, Goronock, marched ahead of his line, and a small retinue followed him. Of the hundred people they had taken two centuries before, fewer than a dozen remained. Less than half of them could walk. Only one kept pace with Goronock.

Even at this distance, in the half-light, I knew him. Danasal, my brother, my twin. Born minutes apart and now separated by centuries.

The Maeruunne’s clawed hand rested on his neck, in a gesture a father might use when encouraging his son. My brother did not shy from it, nor did he warm to it.

The Maeruunne are not so different from us, save being larger and stronger. Their leathery flesh has a greenish hue which becomes gray in the twilight. Their fingers and toes end in talons, their lower jaw sprouts black tusks, and their ears are mounted high on hairless heads. Their red eyes have no pupils and never close, as the Maeruunne never sleep.

I descended to the road to meet Goronock. Neither of us carried a flag of truce, and both of us came armed. I had a buckler bound tightly to the stump of my left arm, and a sword rode in a scabbard over my left hip. He carried a black iron spear in his left hand—it was twice his height and nearly thrice mine in length. As I approached without the tribute trailing in my wake, he contemplated throwing that spear at me, but then a slight grin tugged at the corners of his mouth.

He stopped and squeezed Danasal’s neck. Goronock sniffed once, his slit nostrils pulsing, then he sniffed his charge. His eyes narrowed as his head came up. “Ah, yes, you are the one I did not choose. I see the blood-ties to your twin have preserved your life beyond your normal span. Don’t you wish, Danasal, your brother had grown wiser with his years?”

My twin stared at me. He’d been gone a year by Maeruunne reckoning, but two centuries had passed here. Taken when he was ten, in form he was only eleven. His eyes, however, were older than mine. He could not recognize me, and this was just as well. The greater part of the hell he had lived through had been of my doing.

The Maeruunne leader again sniffed the air, then licked his lips. “You have them waiting for us. Why don’t you bring them and save yourself trouble?”

I slowly shook my head. “You heard my vow when you took him. Never again.”

“I have heard many vows in many places. Your father vowed the same thing, from behind tall palisade walls. They afforded neither him nor his troops protection.” He rose on tiptoe and smiled. “You’ve built a castle of stone, but it will avail you nothing. The bargain between our people still stands, and will endure forever.”

“You are mistaken. Return our people. Repudiate the bargain. Depart this place.” I lifted my chin and gave him as cold a stare as I could muster. “Or is this where you wish to die?”

The Maeruunne looked at me curiously, then threw his head back and laughed. A moment later his people echoed his mirth, then the others took it up. The suraitha barked, their riders hissed, the trondukhai huffed base bursts and the little lomai’s laughter ascended into tones no man could hear.

“You think you can defeat us?” He stroked his chin.

“Why would that be?” “Men are unlike all the other creatures you’ve conquered on the various planes. We dream. You value us for it. You sup on our nightmares.”

“They are far more piquant a vintage than any wine could possibly imagine, manling.”

I ignored the pleasure washing over his features. “To haunt us, you have driven vampyr, lycanthropes and their illnesses, into our world. You plague us with demons and other foul beasts, then through the children you take, you distill our fear and anxiety.”

“You have learned. You’ve not been idle after all.” Again he looked at me, more closely this time, his curiosity become wariness. “Your name is Colerayne.”

“Once it was.”

He nodded slowly, recognition making him grin. “Ah, of course.” He bowed his head to me. “You are the Gray Lord, the Master of War.”

“I am what you forced me to become.”

“And when you destroy us, it will be my fault?”

“All of this is your fault, Prince Goronock.” I shrugged. “Your defeat is just a consequence of it.”

His nostrils closed as he raised his head and peered down at me. “Your legions may have conquered half this world, but that does not mean you can defeat us. I tell you now that if you believe you will, you have wasted your life.” He waved a hand back toward his troops. “You are correct, we savor, we devour your dreams, the more horrible the better. We have driven monsters into this plane to frighten you, but you, the Gray Lord, you have been better at terrifying your people than anything we visited upon you. You have brought war to many lands, and fear of your coming has produced the most exquisite nightmares.

“In fact, I would thank you, nay, honor you, save you are withholding our tribute.” Goronock smiled, revealing uneven ebon teeth. “And yet they wait for us, dreaming, afraid of what will happen when you fail. Potent stuff.”

“You covet spoils of a battle you’ve yet to win, my lord.” I gestured with my half-arm. “From the vampyr and others, we have learned much about you. We have dreamed of defeating you. We shall. I’ve waited for two hundred years. The time has been wisely spent.”

“How can that be true? All you have is your little stone fortress? From the potent taste of your dreams, I thought they were far more grand.”

“Realistic trumps grand when one dreams of battle.” I half-turned away from him. “It’s your tribute. Come. Take it.”

My brother whimpered.

Goronock towered over me. “If you have learned anything about us, you know that no man can defeat my Maeruunne. You may kill some of the others—in fact, some of them need killing—but the trondukhai will destroy your fortress, and the rest will kill your people. After that, I will range farther, kill more people, just so we are not inconvenienced in the future.”

“Leave now, Prince Goronock. The only inconvenience here will be wiping Maeruunne blood from our swords.”

“Arrogance can choke the life out of you.”

“Remember that when you cannot breathe.”

The Maeruunne gave my brother a light cuff on the back of the head. “Go with him, Danasal. You’ve been a good pet. I shall remember you fondly.”

I raised my right hand and a company of bearers came forward. They collected the returnees, then left Goronock and me alone downslope of my fortress. “This is your last chance. Go home. Leave us in peace.”

“You, the Gray Lord, asking for peace.” He laughed again. “If only irony tasted as good as fear. Tell me, was it the hope of seeing your brother again that kept you alive all this time, or the desire to fulfill your childish vow?”

“Both. More.”

“Ah, the wish to see me dead.” His eyes slitted. “No, not just that. It was the desire to kill me yourself.”

“Among other things.” I gave him a curt nod. “You have an hour to withdraw.”

“In an hour, you will be dead.”

“I’ve been dead for far longer than you know. In an hour you will join me.” I turned and left him laughing behind me. I trailed after the bearers and my adjutant met me on the twisty road up to our stoutly-walled fortress. Though Dayris had been with me for two decades, she still had the youthful enthusiasm for war that had first caught my eye.

“All is prepared, my lord. We will destroy them.”

“Make certain the men share your confidence, Dayris.”

“Their confidence is in you, my lord.”

“And you have mine, Dayris. Go, ready the second line.”

“As you order it.” The tall woman turned and ran off, her mail surcoat rustling.

Two centuries to plan the coming battle had once seemed an eternity, but the time needed for certainty had long since run out. The Maeruunne and their allies had a serious advantage in that they came from dark planes. Our night was as day to them, and this benefit was not one they would surrender lightly. Though we had means for making light, and I had trained my troops in night maneuvers, we would never be as good in the night as they were.

Moreover, their troops were well suited to fighting us. Men use tools efficiently, but it is because we must. Lacking fang or claw, in absence of speed or strength or a carapace, tools are all we have. Even the fabled sorceries of Far Nathei and nations beyond the Blood Sea, were they available to us, would be of marginal use. What a sorcerer cannot see, and does not understand, is something immune to his enchantments.

I did recall the battle before my brother was taken. Tall wooden walls had been shattered. Men had been cleaved in two, torn to pieces, and died screaming sounds later echoed in thousands of nightmares. The suraitha and lomai had done the worst once the trondukhai had broken the walls. Yes, the behemoths had dashed men’s brains out and crushed them beneath heavy hooves, but the deaths they caused were mercifully swift.

Not so those wrought by their allies.

And the Maeruunne had never broken their formation. They watched their subordinates savage the men opposing them. They remained there, silent and strong, a brooding presence armored with arrogance. Goronock had stood to the fore, his face implacable throughout, save when his eyes widened and he listened to the symphony of agonies that was our defeat.

I’d made my vow while anointing myself with my father’s blood. Later, tears shed for my lost twin washed stripes through the stains, but my resolve remained. Just because nothing had defeated them before did not mean they could not be beaten, and I would be the one to do it.

What passed as a year for them was lifetimes for me, and I used every one of them to advance my goal. Armies had been raised and slaughtered. Cities sieged and razed. Empires gained, sundered, and recreated. There had been times of peace, brief respites, but then the relentlessness began again because I had seen how the Maeruunne would be.

I strode through the gateway and gave a signal. The massive doors creaked as men turned capstans to close them. Heavy wooden beams dropped into place to bar the doors, and others sank into pits to brace them. Goronock would send his trondukhai to break them, and I meant for it to take them a long time.

Between that outer wall and the inner lay a cobbled street ten yards wide that ringed the fortress. Arched stone bridges connected the outer wall with the inner; broad enough to let men reinforce or retreat, but narrow enough that a few brave souls could hold off besiegers. If the battling got to that point, we would be fighting the Maeruunne, and my people knew forcing them to engage was a victory in and of itself.

Beyond that inner wall, nestled deep within precincts of towers and barracks, hidden in a blocky building filled with narrow twisting corridors, the sleepers rested. A hundred of them, children of every nation under my control, writhed and twitched in thrall to nightmares. Though not a drinker of dreams, I could almost feel the torrents of anxiety pouring off them.

Bait, for our trap. Bait, and more.

I mounted the battlements just east of the gates. Below, in the narrow vale that led up to the mountain pass my fortress warded, the trondukhai lumbered forward on short legs and long arms. Impossibly tall and broad of shoulder, their bodies narrowed to tiny hips, furred hind-quarters and feet with cloven hooves. Two horns curled back from their temples, and not in some grand and regular way. They seemed blasphemies against nature, and were heavy enough that the trondukhai were forced to assume a posture of subservience. A single eye rode beneath a thick brow ridge, beards decorated their chins and their muzzles did protrude. Only their three-fingered hands and the great curving claws seemed at odds with their basic nature.

Huge targets though they were, my finest archers would be useless against them. While their prodigious strength made them engines of destruction, it was their impenetrable flesh that perfected them as warriors. Arrows glanced away, and they shrugged off stones tossed by siege machines as a man might ignore a light rain. I had no idea if burning oil or molten metal could hurt them, but it was something I meant to learn before the night surrendered to dawn.

As they marched up the hill, claws gashing greensward, I drew my sword and raised it. Goronock sent a half dozen at us—keeping two in reserve. Spotters along the walls yelled back to compatriots on the inner wall, and they relayed the information to the men in the courtyard below. Men shifted on the walls, murmurs rose, prayers were offered and black jests wrested short laughs from the terrified.

Closer they came, closer. Behind them, the suraitha began to maneuver. They were to lizards what wolves are to dogs. Ten feet long from nose to tail, with uneven, ragged teeth and patterns of bright dots and stripes over their scaled flesh, they appeared to be nothing more than beasts. Every tenth one of them bore a rider—a sharp-toothed cherub some took to be Maeruunne toddlers—and it was assumed the riders gave orders to the suraitha. I discounted that idea. The riders were pets, and the lizards were intelligent.

Intelligent enough to revel in slaughter. Able to gallop faster than any horse, they would be into the breach as soon as the trondukhai broke the walls down. They would still need them to breach the inner wall, though the possibility they could scale the walls with their claws had not escaped me. We would deal with that when the time came. Regardless, though their flesh could be pierced, from what I recalled they took a lot of killing, and the loss of a pet just seemed to make them fight more savagely.

The trondukhai finally made it into range. My sword fell. Men yelled orders and those orders were echoed below. Snaps and clacks, cracks and thumps fill the inner courtyard as catapults launched their cargoes into the sky. We had practiced for months and years to know where our missiles would fall. Stones had been sown on the slope so the trondukhai would bunch themselves on easier paths.

So they would put themselves where we needed them to be.

The first missiles hissed and rustled as they flew overhead. Vast nets fitted with spring-loaded jaws and hooks unfurled themselves and descended. They draped themselves over the horned giants. The jaws snapped shut, pinching flesh. Hooks caught in nostrils and mouths, tangled in beards. Some nets hung from horns, lashing other trondukhai, catching, linking two of them. Though their flesh could not be torn, the giants bellowed angrily and tore at the chains. Fur came out in clumps, and hooks did tear through flesh from the inside of mouths.

In dealing with the chains, the giants paused long enough for other loads to rise through the air. Wooden casks filled with oil exploded like overripe fruit on heads and shoulders. Showers of burning coals arced through the night like dying stars. Their caresses ignited the trondukhai. One of the giants roared, expelling a great gout of fire, then fell to the ground thrashing with his lungs burning. Others, panicked, battled each other and one ran back down the hill, scattering a suraitha formation.

Two others, however, possessed of intelligence or so devoid of it that even panic could gain no purchase in their minds, came on uphill. Heedless of other missiles flashing past them, they reached the roadway and sprinted at the doors. Both of them, burning but curiously undiminished by it, slammed into the siege doors.

The impact dropped me. I scrambled to my feet again, and men helped me up, but the giants’ continued pounding almost upset me again. One of them raised burning claws overhead, then raked them down into the oak. Flaming splinters fell in curls around him. Raising my sword once again, I made for the nearest bridge and my men came with me.

On the inner wall, Dayris shouted. “Hurry, my lord. Goronock sends the lomai.”

“Make haste, men.” I pointed my sword at my subordinate. “You know what to do. The lomai are yours.”

To be afraid of the lomai almost defied logic. It was akin to being afraid of a starling or a squab. The raven-winged creatures stood no taller than the forearm I’d lost, and though mostly having the form of a man—save for a crow’s head and wings—they were quite light. A stiff breeze could have held them at bay and a crone armed with a broom could have crushed one easily.

The difficulty was that lomai flocked; they did not travel alone. And small though they were, they bore bows and shot small arrows, fashioned from thorns native to their plane. A dart might not go deep, but the poison on it would cause pain and, in sufficient quantity, hideous hallucinations which the Maeruunne would drink with great pleasure.

And now, to sweep us back from the walls, Goronock had released his lomai. Visible only as blurred movement that momentarily eclipsed stars, flocks of them rose. Thousands of them came. Some groups flew high, twisting and curling around to dive down, while others raced in directly. So thickly they filled the air, no one of them could fear death, since the chances of his dying were so small.

Behind me, windows snapped open and bells in towers began to peal. Trumpets blasted loudly enough to wake the dead—though our drugged sleepers would barely register the sounds. Men shouted, defiantly and encouragingly. Though trondukhai pounded mercilessly against the doors, the men tasked with stopping the lomai were not to be cowed.

Black-winged nightmares drove in at us, but rising to meet them came snowy phantasms winging silently through the night. Deadly whispers, great owls slashed through the lomai. Larger, faster, with sharper beaks and razored talons, the owls did as they were trained. Lomai blood spattered us. Black feathers fluttered down. Bodies thumped to the ground, with darts and bows clattering beside them.

Though sending the owls against the lomai was equivalent to setting trondukhai on men, the lomai did outnumber them, and owls were not impenetrable. I had known that from the start, and no matter how valiant my birdmen and their charges, in a war of attrition, the owls would lose. As went their battle, so would go ours.

And we could not lose.

Our second wave rose and attacked the lomai just as they regrouped to deal with the owls. Bats, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, rose in grand tornadoes of leathery wings and piercing shrieks. They poured from hollow towers that extended down to caverns beneath my fortress. Some were tiny, preferring insects to larger prey, while the biggest, the flying foxes, would have gladly made a meal of the owls themselves. The bats fell on the lomai, wrapping them in their wings, sinking fangs into their flesh.

The battle in the air amazed me. White ghosts flashing, lomai rising, freezing to draw a bow, being hit before they could release. A burst of feathers, arrows and bow spinning away. A bat whipping about, shrieking, body stuck with a dart or two, falling from the sky but still managing to capture a lomai in its wings. The melee in three dimensions moved with strong currents that would fragment into eddies of slow murder, that would again speed up, twisting and curling into a torrent that ripped more of the enemy from the sky.

I watched for almost too long, and might have lost myself in the battle, save for a splinter whistling past my face. Goronock had dispatched his last two trondukhai to bring the gate down. Their assault snapped thick planking and twisted metal. The braces bent and bowed, then burst. One of the massive doors cart-wheeled inside to disintegrate against the inner wall. Another trondukhai reached in with both hands and ripped the other door free. It flew and battered a burning giant to the ground.

Even before the trondukhai could enter the fortress’ outer precincts, the suraitha slithered in past them. Leaping and weaving, they flooded roads and raced along over cobblestones. Their claws clicked against them with a rasping cadence. Some came halfway up a wall, more because of velocity than finding any purchase, but archers sent shafts crossing through them. The suraitha did fall back to the ground, but multiple piercings seemed to slow them only slightly.

My archers found a wealth of targets. The bronzed men of Vangxia let fly with powerful recurve horn bows. They shot arrows with wickedly-barbed heads. Not to be outdone, the Garandella crossbowmen shot in volleys. Their heavy arbalests put bolts completely through suraitha. One nailed a lizard’s skull to a wall, while another cored one from cloacae to throat. While all took joy at hitting suraitha, each archer knew the carpet of lizard flesh meant they could not miss. Killing the lizards proved as difficult as hitting them was easy, and this caused no little consternation among my men.

The two trondukhai entered the courtyard and split, one heading east, the other west. They did not scruple at treading on their allies. For the most part the suraitha were nimble enough to dart from beneath the giants’ hooves. Those that were not—ones either stuck solidly with arrows or, in one case, nosing a beheaded pet—became smears on the cobblestones. The trondukhai moved along the road, intent on reaching the offset inner gates that would loose their army on the center of my domain.

The one moving east hit a trap first, though only a heartbeat or two before his companion did likewise. The roadway collapsed beneath his bulk. His hooves punched through the planking buried there, then hit the slanted slab of stone fifteen feet below the surface. The trondukhai’s face smashed against the ground, dazing him, then the creature slide back and down. The hooves entered an open space and the giant sank into the hole past his waist, stuck firmly and fast at the lower edge of his ribs.

He bellowed loudly and long. As he exhaled he slipped a bit farther down. He clawed at the sides of the pit, but only succeeded at pulling loose rubble down on himself. The debris packed in around his chest, further tightening his breathing. He bellowed again, defiantly and yet with a trace of fear. He slipped lower and the bellow ended in a squeak.

Two hundred yards away his compatriot had likewise become fixed in a pit. Impenetrable flesh or not, the trondukhai had to breathe. With their ridiculous physique, fashioning a trap that would slowly suffocate them had taken little thought. Throughout my fortress such traps had been sown. I could have dealt with two dozen of the giants easily.

But I did not want them to die easily. Looking down upon the one, I gave the signal. Below, from within the depths of the walls, men opened murder-ports and molten lead gushed into the pits.

Being unable to breathe meant their pitiful screams fell to silence well before the trondukhai died.

Behind me, the rhythm of the pealing bells changed. Flaming pits of molten lead cut off avenues of suraitha retreat. Not being stupid, the lizards knew we had trapped them. They also knew they were faster than we were, heartier and certainly better suited to war. Many of them bristled with arrows, but they did so defiantly, hissing loudly and displaying teeth sharp enough to saw the limb off a man in a heartbeat.

Yet before any sort of organized resistance arose among them, other ports opened in the interior walls. Through them poured a rustling avalanche of beasts that leaped immediately to the attack. Suraitha hissed and charged, lunged and snapped, but their efforts appeared as slothful as I would have trying to outrun one of them.

I’d thought on the problem of the suraitha longest of all, and it had inspired much of my early career. I knew no man would ever be able to stand against those creatures, but I also knew they were far from invulnerable. It took me fifty years to solve the mystery of their undoing, and I spent a century and a half perfecting the weapon we now employed against them.

Hounds, massive hounds, sheathed in steel mail, with spiked collars, went after the suraitha almost playfully. I’d taken the dragon-hunting dogs of the Baraltai Mountains and bred them with the saber-fanged wolves that had once warded the nobles of the Teyrah Empire. The resulting beast, while gentle in nature, massed more than most men, and were possessed of a loyalty no man could match. Bred for size and speed, silenced by design and trained to hunt, there was no game they could not bring down, and no predator they feared.

In a flash of gray a warhound caught a suraitha by the throat and shook it. The pet flew from its back, smashing its skull on the wall, while the suraitha’s spine snapped. The hound tossed that one aside and went for another, eluding a bite to catch it by a foreleg and tear the limb free.

The suraitha fought hard, but when they went for a throat, they got a mouthful of spikes. Their teeth did penetrate mail, but not deeply. Some of the hounds did die, but more of the lizards perished. A few did try to leap the bubbling pools of lead. One made it, at the cost of its tail, and slithered back to its master. Mostly, though, the lizards retreated into piles against the far wall, mouths pointing in all directions, teeth bared. The hounds isolated them and archers rained missiles down, slowly killing them in layers.

I watched the slaughter, ignoring the rising cheers among my men. For so long I had planned and dreamed. I’d seen this battle fought for ages, for lifetimes. It had gone better in some dreams, but seldom; and worse far more often. Despite nightmares, I had never doubted the outcome of this part of the battle, but it was only a prelude to ending Maeruunne predation.

I looked over at Dayris. “Now comes the hard part.”

“He could listen to reason?”

“Pride won’t let him.”

She smiled. “And it won’t let you either, will it?”

I nodded slowly. “You know how this has to be done. I am counting on you.”

“Yes, my lord.”

I strode boldly and alone over the bridge to the outer wall, side-stepping a feeding owl. I opened my arms and raised my voice to Goronock. “Your army is destroyed.”

He reached down and grabbed the surviving suraitha throat and tail-stub. He raised it up, then placed a knee in its back and snapped its spine. “Now my mercenaries are destroyed. Not so my army.”

Oh, how I longed to fly from those battlements and destroy him as the bats had the lomai. I ached to watch his smugness evaporate. I wanted him dead and I would have him dead, but his death was not my only goal. It would have to wait.

For a moment, at least.

I lowered my arms, but not my voice. “Leave now, Prince Goronock. Are our dreams worth your life?”

The Maeruunne tossed the broken lizard aside. “You have done better than I expected. I should have expected this of the Gray Lord. The dreams you spawned, the empress herself found intoxicating, very much so. Too much.

“She would want me to keep you alive, so she could again and again enjoy them. It will disappoint her for me to kill you, but it will be for the best.”

I laughed. “I’ll not be dying here today.”

“Put no great stock in your minor victory.”

“I don’t. It’s your fear that give me heart.”

“Me? Afraid of you?” Goronock chuckled and shook his head. “The Maeruunne fear nothing, but I understand what you are doing. You style yourself a hero, and you wish for the heroic. An epic battle, you and me, something to inspire dreams that won’t be worth the time to sample? I’ll give you that battle, Colerayne, but not the result you desire.”

I leaned forward on a crenel. “And when I kill you?”

“You want a prize? You do ask much; but since you will never collect it, I will acquiesce to what I know you must desire.” Goronock looked at his troops, all thousand of them, pennants fluttering in the light evening breeze. “If you win, we shall return home.”

“And never to come back. You go home, forever.”

“Return and rob your feat of its heroism? Of course not.” He picked up his spear and spun it over his head, then rested the butt by his left foot. “Come, Colerayne. The dreams my tribute offers are too delicious to be denied me for long.”

Dayris followed me through a small sally-port and placed a round helmet on my head. “You need not do this. The fortress will hold. We will break them.”

“I’m counting on that, but Goronock is the key to their discipline. Without him, they will not fight nearly as well.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Then you don’t believe they will depart when you kill him?”

“No more than you do.” I glanced back through the port, but could see nothing of the building where the dreamers slept. “Everything is ready?”

She nodded. “They will not get through us, but if the unexpected happens, the dreamers will die.”

“Good.” Turned toward the broken gate, but she laid a hand on my forearm. “Yes?”

“Danasal is with them. He went there. He’s dreaming.”

“Don’t let them spare him, just because he is my brother.”

“No, my lord.” Her eyes tightened. “Go. Finish this.”

I nodded once, solemnly, then stalked from the fortress. My mail surcoat wrapped around my legs, lapping like waves against my calves. I checked my buckler and tightened a strap, then drew my sword and marched past the fires of a trondukhai corpse.

From the fortress came a half-dozen handcarts filled with wood, which men took down to the place I’d met Goronock earlier. They stacked the wood in piles equidistant around a circle and lit them. Where we would fight, night became day.

After the fires had been lit, two thousand of my soldiers gathered on the hillside before the fortress. We outnumbered the Maeruunne two to one, but Goronock’s troops showed no signs of fear. They had drunk of our worst nightmares, and many nightmares addressed this day of their return. Those dreams usually ended badly, and the Maeruunne were more than willing to make them come true.

Goronock regarded me coldly as I entered the circle. “You know they will be as nothing before my forces.”

“They serve as a rein on treachery.”

“I’ll not take offense at that.” He raised his spear over his head and pumped into the air. “I do you the honor of meeting you as an equal, one warrior to another, even though you are inferior.”

“You refer to my only having half an arm?” I forced myself to smile. “This is an inequality I can soon remedy.”

“If you are going to grow an arm, do it quickly.” His spear snapped down, pointing at me, quivering. “Are you ready to embrace death?”

“Death holds no fear for me.”

“Good. Better you fear me.” Before the last syllable had trailed from his thin lips, the Maeruunne struck. He came in quickly, unbelievably so. His spearpoint dipped low as if he meant to stab the ground between my feet, then it came up. It shifted slightly to my right, the triangular head meant to stab through the inside of my thigh and open an artery. Before I could move, before I could blink, I’d get to watch my life pulsing out from a dark hole in my leg.

I twisted left, pivoting on my right foot. My thigh pushed his spear wide. My buckler came up caught it, deflecting it from my face as he tried to lash me with it. Then I spun, continuing my pivot, working in toward him.

Before he could retreat, I stabbed with my blade and hit him over the stomach. My point caught in his mail and the sword bent, but he leaped away before all the rings could part enough to let my blade taste his flesh.

Goronock took another step back, and I retreated as well. His right hand probed where I’d hit him and jerked back. A drop of black blood welled up where a split link cut his finger. He sucked at the wound for a moment as a cheer rose from my men.

My bowed my head. “You face the master of half this world.”

The Maeruunne snorted. “You face the master of many worlds.”

He drove at me again, harder and faster, his spear defined by fiery glints and the ringing of iron striking steel. Some blows I parried, and others I blocked. Those I caught on my buckler were heavy enough to knock me aside, but I never lost my footing. He came again and again, relentless and indefatigable, an avatar of war.

And the Gray Lord, as much as he was feared, was but his pale shadow.

Goronock gave me no respite, no chance to rest, and certainly no chance to attack him again. His spear’s point popped rings on my mail and scraped paint from my buckler. The heavier end of his spear battered my shield into a misshapen lump. One stroke would have taken my head off, save that I ducked. Instead, it batted my helmet away, crushing it.

Of the Maeruunne, I had heard many stories. Always they were fearsome and implacable. They’d mastered the trondukhai and, as children, hunted suraitha. They fought on more worlds than could be counted, and while there might be a vampyr here or a demon there who recounted a distant victory, nothing had defied them for long.

Goronock knew no man could stand against him. While I had come to the fight with the hopes that he was wrong, my best efforts at battling him evenly had drawn but one drop of blood. The Maeruunne’s confidence surged when I lost my helmet, and from that moment on I fought only to survive.

Which is to say, as he and I both knew, the fight had ended.

He circled to my left side and poked the spear at my chest. I knocked it away with what was left of the buckler and realized it been too easy. Before I had any chance to leap back, Goronock swept the spear down and around, whipping into my left leg. It caught me fully and hard.

My left leg snapped.

He never even allowed me to fall. With his next thrust the spear’s head punched through my mail just beneath my left breast. The triangular point spread ribs, sliced through heart and lungs, then caught on the way out. Goronock screamed in triumph and lifted me high in the air. I hung there on the point of his spear. My feet dangled. My sword dropped from my hand.

He looked up at me then shook the spear. I felt the point grate along bone, then pop out through my back. Slowly, I slid down the spear until stopped by his hand against my chest.

The Maeruunne growled in a low voice. “You can cry out. It will make me think no less of you.”

I said nothing.

“Fool. You dreamed defeating us. “ Goronock spat in my face. “You should have dreamed of stopping at nothing to destroy us.”

I smiled slowly, his saliva dripping from my chin. “That’s exactly what I did. I stopped at nothing.”

My right hand came up and caught him by the throat. I gave him a second to think before I squeezed. I don’t believe, even in that moment, even as I crushed his throat and spine, he understood what I had embraced to fulfill my vow.

He accepted that the blood my twin and I shared was what had allowed me to live two centuries. It wasn’t. Not that. Not even my vow would have been enough to sustain me for so long.

His troops would come to understand.

As he fell, as I slowly thrust his spear all the way through me, they started forward. Even though mild intoxication broke their straight ranks and loosened their gait—for they had been sampling the dreams that would be theirs once we were undone—they were magnificent. With Goronock at their head, they would have easily destroyed an army of men.

But it was not an army of men they faced. Long ago the Maeruunne had driven vampyrs into our world to terrify us. Men had fought against them, destroying them and their spawn. Vampyrs were hated and feared. Most saw them as unalterably evil, and were glad when they died, but I had an entirely different vision of them.

My troops, those before the fortress, braced for the Maeruunne attack. Two thousand of the best troops mankind had fielded over the last two centuries. Two thousand men and women who had vowed, as I had, that nothing would stop us from destroying the Maeruunne.

Not even the loss of our humanity.

We, the vampyr, did not fight alone. Catapults launched more casts of oil and chains and stones into the Maeruunne formation. Archers and arbalesters peppered them with missiles, cutting great swaths through their ranks. Even my warhounds harried their flanks. And though the Maeruunne did fight well, and more of us fell—man, vampyr, and hound—than had earlier in the night, dawn lit a broken Maeruunne host.

A few of the Maeruunne survived. We blinded them and hitched them to a wagon bearing the heads of their comrades. We sent a message with them.

“Our world is no longer the land of nightmares. We dreamed of a way to defeat you. Do not give us cause to dream of a way to exterminate you.”

I have no idea how that message will be received by the Maeruunne empress. I do not care how she reacts.

But my brother, when he dreams about it, smiles.

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