Sirus relayed the orders to his company, a three-hundred-strong contingent drawn mostly from the Morsvale survivors. Majack and Katrya had taken on the role of senior lieutenants, though the strictures of military hierarchy were often irrelevant in an army where all soldiers could hear every order instantly. Even so, the chaos of battle often made centralised control impossible and Morradin found it easier to communicate with select individuals once the fighting began in earnest.
Sirus took a moment to ensure the beach had been secured, ordering the badly wounded Islanders littering the sand to be finished off. He left a dozen Spoiled to stand guard over the survivors and the barges, then led the remainder into the jungle at a steady run. As they moved Morradin’s mind conveyed a stream of images showing the island from above. A large group of warriors had organised a barricade around their village and were doing an impressive job of keeping Morradin’s main force at bay. The Islanders’ weapons were a mix of fire-arms, cross-bows and axes, and they were all raised as warriors from birth. A lifetime of ingrained martial skill made them fearsome enemies, but also valued recruits. Consequently, Morradin’s assault force refrained from firing their rifles as they attacked, keen to preserve as many warriors as possible. If the battle wore on for too long, though, Sirus knew the White would convey enough impatience for such restraint to be abandoned and the struggle would quickly descend into a massacre.
On reaching the northern edge of the village, Sirus organised his company into a tight formation and led them in a charge against the point where the Islanders were most thinly concentrated. The defenders they met were all women, mothers guarding their clutches of infants against the onslaught of deformed monsters. The Island women fought with scant regard for their own safety, cutting down a dozen of Sirus’s Spoiled before they were overcome. Most displayed such maternal savagery that capturing them proved impossible and Sirus allowed them to be shot down, leaving the children to fight on alone. They had learned quickly that Island children could be as formidable as their parents, especially if they had sufficient numbers to swarm over their assailants in a biting, scratching mass, as was the case here. Sirus lost another five Spoiled before the last child fell. There was no need for restraint in dealing with the children, the White having no use for them.
Watching his Spoiled bayonet the small twitching bodies, Sirus wondered at his lack of revulsion. He knew on a conscious level that he was now more of a monster than he could have ever imagined being, that whatever soul he might possess was forever stained and beyond hope of redemption. And yet he stood and regarded the massacre of innocents without the faintest stirring of nausea. He knew, or rather hoped, that this was the White’s doing, that somehow the conversion process had eroded his capacity for trauma. Or it could simply be his mind adapting to new conditions. He was, and would remain, a prisoner in his own body, so what use compassion or guilt now?
We’ve broken through, Morradin told him. Runners coming your way.
They caught most of the runners. They numbered only about thirty and were easily overwhelmed and clubbed down. Inevitably, a handful slipped through to escape into the jungle. They would be left for the Reds and Greens to hunt down over the coming days whilst Morradin reorganised his forces for the next assault. Three islands taken in less than five days, but the next would not be so easy. It was time to face the Shaman King of the Northern Isles.
? ? ?
Why do you think about them so much? Katrya’s thoughts were coloured by a faint annoyance as she rifled through the images crowding his head; the piled bodies of the Islanders, old people, warriors they hadn’t managed to capture, and the children. So many children. They had been dumped on the beach in two large mounds, one for the Reds circling above and one for the Greens baying loudly in the barges bringing them to shore. The White was ever keen to reward his drake kin, even when the victory rightly belonged to his Spoiled army.
We were them once, he replied. Or they were us.
Not any more. She snuggled closer to him, rubbing her spines against his, something that always seemed to give her pleasure though Sirus found the sensation somewhat dull. They lay together in one of the village huts, spent in the aftermath of a frenzied coupling. She was like this after a battle, as if the slaughter stirred her lust to greater heights.
We’ll make one of our own one day, she told him, her thoughts betraying a sleepy contentment. I can feel that he wants us to. Not quite yet though. We have so much to do . . .
He felt her mind subside into sleep, a sleep he knew would be free of any nightmares born of what they had done today. His own sleep, however, would not be so untroubled. She would be there, her doll’s face drenched in blood and her eyes bright with scorn. Sometimes she laughed at him. Sometimes she simply stared and ignored his pathetic pleas for forgiveness. But never would she speak to him.
Unwilling to surrender to another night’s torment, Sirus disentangled himself from Katrya and rose from their stolen bed. He dressed in the stevedore’s overalls he had found at the Morsvale docks. The White’s Spoiled soldiers had little use for uniformity and wore whatever scavenged clothing took their fancy. Katrya went about in the uniform of a cavalry colonel; she thought the gold tassels were pretty.
He left the hut and wandered the darkened village for a time, trying to shut out the sounds drifting in from the beach where the Reds and Greens gorged and squabbled over their glut of meat. He often found it strange that, despite his remade body, the drakes aroused just as much fear and repulsion in him now as when he had been fully human. The thoughts seeping from his fellow Spoiled made it clear that such feelings were widely shared. For their part, the drakes regarded the Spoiled with either indifference or wary aggression. The vile Katarias was something of an exception, appearing to delight in feasting on those Spoiled too badly injured to be of further use.
“Shiveh ka.” Sirus turned at the sound of the voice, finding that his wanderings had brought him close to the prisoner pens. There were about sixty of the Islanders lying bound within the confines of a makeshift stockade, awaiting the morning when Sirus knew the White would unveil his crystals and add yet more recruits to his horde.
“Shiveh ka,” the voice came again, Sirus finding the source quickly. The Islander lay on his side close to the fence, staring up at Sirus through a gap in the planking. He was older than the other prisoners, his long blond hair turned silver at the temples and his face bore the scars of old battles. He was also taller and more muscular than his fellow Islanders. A chief perhaps? Sirus wondered as the man repeated the same words, more urgently this time, his eyes shining with desperate entreaty. “Shiveh ka!” Sirus was surprised to find he couldn’t translate the meaning. He had absorbed the language of the other Islanders following their conversion, but they were finding the various tribes to be rich in unfamiliar dialects.