THE BATTLE OF KAWA
Kapitán Aleksandar Mostovoi smoothed a stray length of grimy blond hair from his face, breath hanging white in the bitter cold. He looked around the burning city, the troops pouring off the assault fleet in waves, draped in skins of mighty wolves and bears and snow leopards. The streets around him were awash with red. The falling rain as black as sin.
The slavers had put up a brief defense, paid for in slaughter, and had now retreated into their castle on the hill to prepare for siege. Their flags lay in the dirt amidst their corpses, blue slabs set with a Dragon sigil, now soaked in gore. The Blood-blessed were moving among the smoke—great, towering slabs of men, muscle heaped upon scar-tissue, clad in aprons of skin.
Aleksandar had once seen a Blood-blessed kill an Iron Samurai with his bare hands. The man had been split from belly to rib cage, half a dozen spears sticking from his back like a porcupine’s quills. He’d used his own bloody innards to strangle the samurai leading the charge. Aleksandar recalled seeing four of the madmen roaming the battlefield after the stalemate at Fallow Pass, stooping to gather the blood of fallen slavers in human skulls, raising them in toast toward the surviving Shiman forces. Between them, the four berserks had slain fifty men.
The Morcheban Expeditionary Force that attacked Kawa included a host of two hundred.
Pulling his wolfpelt tight about his shoulders, Aleksandar trudged across the ankle-deep mire of the beachhead, cursing beneath his breath. Everything in this Goddess-forsaken country was filthy. The ground was either black mud, rotting fields or swathes of dead earth no soldier in his right mind would set foot on. The air weighed down their lungs, staining tongue, teeth and skin. No wonder the Shimans wanted to occupy his homeland—Aleksandar had only been here three hours and he already hated this bloody place.
As he pulled up his wolfpelt cloak, the Kapitán noticed it stank of slaver blood; sharp and vaguely rank. There was little to be done about it—the black rain only made it dirtier and clean water in this hellhole was rare as gold. He recalled the day he’d flayed the pelt, the taste of the strength he’d drunk, copperish in his mouth. Hands shaking on the knife hilt. Breeches stained with piss. A boy of thirteen, now a man.
Twenty years ago, next summer.
His father had been killed when Aleksandar was twelve. House Mostovoi had been the first to meet the marauders with their growling armor and swords that cut through men like fog. The Mostovoi coastal defenses were nonexistent; their walls were built to repel attacks from other houses, not strangers crossing the Faceless Sea. Their capital had been razed. His mother and sister taken by Kitsune slavers. He’d only escaped by running; running until his feet bled and his lungs screamed and he couldn’t breathe or think or see. He still dreamed of it. Every night.
But in the dreams, the slavers always caught him.
He’d wanted revenge, of course. His family was a proud line, tracing their lineage back to the first Zryachniye, great Stanislava. But he’d need strength to fight this foe. A strength borne of a darkest heart. And so he’d walked into the Blackwood where the dire packs roamed, a boy with a spear and a knife and a will of cold iron.
And he’d returned a man.
That man now slogged his way across the slaughter to a newly-erected tent bedecked with standards of the Twelve Houses of Morcheba. He ran one hand over the House Mostovoi sigil on his breastplate; a rampant stag with three sickle-bladed horns. And breathing deep, he stepped into the gloom.
It took his eyes a moment to adjust. A long table was arrayed with a map of Kawa city, small disks indicating troop disposition, red for the Shiman dogs, black for the forces of her Imperial Majesty, Kira I of House Ostrovska. The Imperatritsa’s flag hung between the tent poles; a black field arrayed with twelve red stars.
Marshal Sergei Ostrovska surveyed the map with a critical eye, barely looking up as the Kapitán entered. Beside him stood the Majór of the Imperatritsa’s airforces, busy complaining about the damage being done to his rotor-thopters’ engines by the black rain. A pack of six warhounds sat at the Marshal’s feet, wheezing in the freezing, poisoned air.
Two Zryachniye priestesses stood on the other side of the table, swaying like saplings in the spring breeze. Blond as wheat before summer harvest, faces scarified with totemic blessings—lightning bolts torn down Sister Katya’s cheeks, jagged claw patterns marring the features of Mother Natassja. Each right eye aglow.