Burned Book Prologue

Every once in a while, I like to unlock the occasional piece of insider material to give readers who aren’t yet Neopatrons a taste of what they’re missing.

Without further ado, please enjoy your delcassified preview of the prologue to my upcoming dark fantasy epic The Burned Book.

Nameless Pass in the Haranbasa

The ice slide that came surging through the frozen gully swept away most of the other conscripts before Hirei could give warning. Nor did he cry out to those who’d remained below, for the thunderous rumbling of house-sized blocks shooting down the rocky channel would have swallowed his voice along with his last hope of revenge.

Only when the Great Bull had ceased shaking the world’s pillars did Hirei call out. He clung to the frigid blue-black stone, willing his heart’s pounding to slow that he might hear some answer.

“Here!” a voice cried into the bitter wind that hid its distance. The thickening snowfall likewise obscured any sight of the survivor.

A moment after, a second man shouted “Here!”

My leadership has not led the whole village militia to red or white deaths. The thought gave Hirei small comfort. That only three of the fifty men who’d set out from their quiet village remained spoke volumes about the menace they were up against.

And the Kathgar officers’ overconfidence.

Hirei chastised himself for heaping blame on the soldiers who’d ridden down from the northern fort city to raise the militia. They’d had no way of foreseeing the slaughter they’d marched the villagers into. And they’d paid with their lives besides.

No, it was Hirei who bore the greater responsibility—as a veteran of the latest Shianese war with Sokek, and as one who’d met the enemy in battle. He’d been as shocked as the haughty young officers in their shiny splint armor at the prior night’s attack. Unlike them, he’d lived to retain a shadowed impression of their foe’s true nature.

All the more reason to press on, he thought. Again, the demon on his shoulder whispered that he should follow the ten who’d deserted that morning. He hovered on the edge of giving heed to it when another voice called out.

“I am here!”

The sound of his blood brother’s cry banished Hirei’s doubts. “Yan!” he called back.

“Hangano the Lucky One!” their two fellow conscripts cheered, invoking the nickname Yan had earned the night before when he’d been the sole survivor from his squad.

“That’s enough,” Hirei snapped despite his rising spirits. “Only foolish hunters announce themselves to the prey.” Indeed, that was his aim: to track down and slay the predator that had preyed on them. “Climb up to the ledge and regroup.”

When Hirei’s three men—the last of a hunting party of eleven who’d set out after the enemy leader—crawled onto the icy stone step he’d reached minutes before them, he frowned at the sight. The trio had been untrained and under-equipped farmers when they’d set out from home, as their thin felt wraps attested. Slumped before him in the snow, they looked like dead men dragged from their graves.

Jian Li, Hirei recited internally, memorializing the men forever entombed in ice. Khel Odad, Eloum Sar, Gadar Sahn, Maku Edeyo, Pasar Anjhys, Gahnjiit.

“I can’t feel my toes,” chattered Buru, his wispy beard prematurely greyed with frost.

“At least you’ve still got all ten, Narudo” said Kongan, using his fellow conscript’s given name to add sting to the rebuke.

“Go easy, Kon,” said Yan, the black topknot behind his mostly bald scalp askew. “Buru there is worth two of you—as a pack animal, at least.

Hirei had to give his oldest friend the point. Buru had proved an able climber—a pleasant surprise considering his stockiness. Yet the time to laugh off a close brush with death was a luxury the four of them lacked.

“The storm is gaining strength,” Hirei said as fat flakes of falling snow multiplied into a gauzy descending curtain. “It will conceal our approach. We resume the hunt in four minutes.”

Leaning on the spear he’d fashioned from a hay fork, Kon rose to his feet. “When you chose this path, I said only a madman would climb it. I was wrong. You’re not just mad, you’re demon-ridden!”

Buru stood up like a boulder roused from slumber, clutching the grain flail whose head he’d studded with iron nubs.

Hirei’s hand brushed the blood-red tassel dangling from the pommel of his longsword—an heirloom from the first war he’d fought, and the last he’d wished to. The space between him and the two farmers seemed to crackle with unseen lightning.

Yan leapt into the midst of it. “Fools! You disgrace the kinsmen whose bodies lie below.”

“That they do,” said Kon, “dead, and gnawed by the teeth of a foe neither man nor beast, but something worse!”

“Your fear-addled mind takes the work of scavengers for the ravages of demons,” Yan accused.

“None saw the enemies’ faces in the dark,” said Buru, his eyes widening. “At least, none who lived.”

“Exactly,” Kon agreed, his voice trembling. “Who can say they aren’t demons?”

Yan did draw his tarnished saber. “You insubordinate—”

“This isn’t the militia,” said Buru. “Not anymore. Even Hirei said that any who joined him did so of their own volition. That consent can be revoked.”

Hirei strode to his old friend’s side and gently lowered Yan’s arm with a firm hand. “They are right, Hangano. We cannot compel their service.”

Yan gave him a crestfallen look. “But our families back home …”

“Will be left to fend off the enemy—be he man, beast, or demon—when he pours over the mountains, runs down the deserters, and traces their route back to our village.” Hirei cast a gaze over Kon and Buru colder than the winter storm. “Come, let us find the wolf and cut off his head, that he may not track the stench of their fear.”

Hirei turned on his heel and marched toward the foot of the rugged path leading over the hill. But a moment’s pause brought Yan tromping after him.

Buru and Kon came trudging behind.

The climb from the conscripts’ ravaged camp up the icefall had been arduous—and for seven men, deadly. Scaling the biting cold steps of dagger-sharp rock in a howling blizzard struck even Hirei as hellish. He lost track of his companions in the blinding snow, which confined his focus to only the next frozen handhold.

After a brutal ordeal that should, if the gods had any justice, merit instant reincarnation as kings, all four men hauled themselves onto a narrow saddle in the ridge. Hirei thrust the silver tip of his sword’s ebon sheath into the snow for support and fell panting to one knee. The rest lay on their backs and groaned.

We cannot rest long. A heedful foe will have heard our shouts.

Hirei surveyed the pass. Tall peaks reared their craggy heads above both sides of the narrow path. His cleared vision told him they had climbed above the devilish weather. But his numbing fingers counted the price in even more horrid cold.

Yet he judged the cost acceptable. This is the crest of the pass I spotted from our camp. Not far ahead, the path would begin its steep southwestern descent to the barbarian lands beyond.

From whence our cursed adversary came! The purple cord wrapping the upper fifth of Hirei’s scabbard creaked as his grip tightened. Putting his weight on the sheathed sword, he stood.

“Well done,” he told his comrades. “We have climbed the harder path parallel to the main pass and so outflanked our enemy. Our counterattack on his camp will enjoy the advantages of stealth and mobility. We shall avenge our losses on their commander.”

Buru rolled onto his haunches. “If we can enter undetected.”

“And get past his bodyguard,” added Kon, still lying in the snow.

Yan rose to stand between them. “Let us hear no more of this grumbling! Do you think fate would spare you just to slay you on the cusp of success?”

“Who knows what fate thinks?” said Kon.

Hirei rounded on them. “I know what duty commands—as do you all. Having come this far, we are honor-bound to slay our foe or meet death in the attempt.”

“Even if we manage the former,” said Buru, “his outraged subordinates are sure to deal us the latter.”

Kon’s perpetual squint widened with dawning realization. “You don’t expect us to make it out of that camp,” he told Hirei in accusation and resignation.

Hirei turned and advanced a stone’s throw toward the narrow pass. The chill wind picked up, spinning pennants of snow from the looming summits and whipping his loose black hair.

He knew the shivering hand on his shoulder was Yan’s before his blood brother spoke. “You have given thought to our escape and return home?”

“My thought concerns those who will be slaughtered like lambs should we fail,” said Hirei, “as it must.”

“The man I fought beside in the Hengshu was bold, but never desperate.”

“That man had no wife and children waiting back home.”

“Are you certain that difference has not made you rash?”

Hirei looked over his shoulder at his dearest friend’s worry-lined face. “I bear our cause on my back. All depends on maintaining supreme confidence. If it is shaken, even for a moment, we and our loved ones are lost.”

Yan held his gaze. At length he released Hirei’s shoulder and called to the other men. “Quickly! Rouse yourselves and stand. We march at once.”

Hirei led the small band into the high pass. The sheer slopes that rose on either side of a hundred-foot span soon closed and steepened to black cliffs six shoulder widths apart. Their once-straight course twisted in a series of blind curves.

When the cliff walls open, we will have a commanding view of the enemy camp below. I will spy out the leader’s tent and plot a way in. The outcome will be decided before a single blade is drawn.

Six brutish figures leapt snarling from a hidden ledge above. Four set upon the conscripts while one lurked at the south turn and another at the north bend of the chasm, cutting off escape. Amid the flurry of ragged furs and the flash of steel, Hirei gleaned fleeting new impressions of the enemy’s nature.

They come not from Gadahar, he thought as he drew his gleaming blade and blocked a hooked polearm thrust at his face. Not from their beginnings. Their armor, though mismatched, bore the more alien look of the far West. And the bestial grunts that issued from beneath their long-beaked helms suggested yet remoter origins.

Kon was the first to fall, with a shrill scream choked by the curved blade embedded in his throat. His savage victor fell upon him, staining the snow crimson as he fed.

“Buru, no!” Yan cried.

The stout farmer had turned and raised his flail to strike the demon feeding on his friend. But Yan’s barbarous foe kept him too busy fending off ferocious blows to intervene. The fiend Buru had turned his back on grabbed his felt cloak and pulled with inhuman strength, sending Buru crashing down. The armored beast dropped its spiked mace, bent down, and tore out his victim’s throat. Buru lay twitching beside Kon’s corpse as the devils gnawed them both.

Kongan Ang, Hirei recited like a silent mantra as he parried a fierce glaive swing. Buru Narudo. He lunged close enough to smell his opponent’s carrion breath. Yellow eyes shone through its visor. He thrust his slender blade between two of the steel strips banding the fiend’s torso. Hirei drove his sword into gristly flesh to the hilt and levered down. With a wet crunch, his foe collapsed in a dark pool of thick blood. Hirei pivoted, flicking the rank slime from his blade.

Yan cursed as his opponent’s hatchet gouged his shoulder. He answered by stabbing his sword through its visor slit, felling a second beast. By unspoken accord, the blood brothers descended on the ghouls desecrating their friends’ corpses. Hirei slew the fiend that had eaten most of Buru’s face with one thrust to its lungs and heart. But Yan kept stabbing Kon’s slayer with rising fury not ceasing when the beast lay dead under its blood-soaked rags.

The man-beast at the north exit bolted from its post to charge Yan with a cleaver-shaped sword. Hirei darted between them and flew off his feet as the rushing fiend slammed into him. He landed in the snow, the wind forced from his lungs, as the enemy pounced upon him. Together they rolled in the snow, Hirei’s left hand straining to keep the foe’s gnashing teeth from his throat as his sword hand struggled for leverage.

As Heaven and Earth revolved around him, Hirei spotted a grey glint to the left. He dropped his sword and focused all his strength on steering the mad tumble. A mace’s spiked head lay one revolution away from his back, but with a final effort, he pulled the foe over him to land on its dead pack mate’s weapon.

The beast wailed as it lay scrabbling futilely at its pierced back. Hirei leapt up and stomped the fiend’s chest, ending its unholy howls.

Hirei caught frenzied motion out of the corner of his eye. He darted a glance southward, where the last fiend had almost finished stripping the bones of the first one Hirei had slain. The grisly truth behind why they had recovered no enemy bodies bore down on his mind like a red deluge.

Frantic screams from behind pulled Hirei out of his grim trance. The scarlet wave receded from his eyes, revealing three more brutes in a loping advance around their cannibal brother.

“Yan!” Hirei said, “We must—”

The horror in Yan’s eyes presaged his disgrace before he yanked his blade from the pierced beast at his feet and fled to the north.

Hirei stood alone in foul bloody slush. The four devils stalked closer, drool dripping from their muzzled helms in ropy strands.

Yan’s retreating cries echoed off the chasm walls. The perilous climb, the first vicious battle, and the loss of his comrades took their delayed toll with interest. Hirei’s body shook beneath his gore-smeared armor. Despair probed the wall of discipline around his heart.

So I die, and my kith and kin soon after.

The creeping beasts broke into a charge. They waved their cruel blades and whooped as they rushed upon him.

Images of Hirei’s life passed before his eyes: his childhood in a lost hill village on the great desert’s west edge, his trial by fire battling Sokeki marines on the deck of a burning Shianese warship; Yan at his side. Lead filled his limbs.

The lead beast bounded at him from twenty feet away. It gripped a spade-shaped sword in both gauntleted hands to prepare for a killing blow upon descent.

His wife’s heart-shaped face flashed across Hirei’s mind. Her kind chestnut eyes lowered to their three children, gathered around her linen-robed knees.

Hirei rolled under the beast’s leaping chop. He picked up his sword, rose to a crouch, and spun on frozen blood. His slashing blade severed the tendons behind his attacker’s knees as it recovered from its jump, toppling the shrieking beast face-first into the snow.

Sharp, dirty pain shot through Hirei’s left shoulder blade. He wheeled around and back rolled to gain distance and came up to find another foe menacing him with a spear. Fresh red blood coated its flat, dual-edged head.

Hirei gained his feet and backpedaled. The spearman and its two mobile pack mates gave chase until the path narrowed. Hirei backed deep into a bottleneck just wide enough for a full swing of his sword. There he stopped, adopted a practiced defensive stance, and pushed the burning in his shoulder from his thoughts.

“You filth will not sully my home,” he vowed. “I alone will return!”

The spearman’s two companions dashed past it into the bottleneck. One swung an iron war pick at Hirei’s head, but he ducked and tapped the haft with the flat of his blade, burying the pick’s point deep in the rock wall to his right. The other man-beast raised its bearded axe for a furious chop. Hirei slid his swordpoint into the axeman’s inner thigh, opening the artery. Putrid blood blackened its wool pant leg, and the fiend staggered back, clutching its wound.

A flicker of movement beyond his hemorrhaging foe’s shoulder gave Hirei his only warning. The reflexive fanning of his blade turned the thrown spear from his heart but sent it flying hard by his face. His every nerve erupted in agony as the spear’s blade sliced his left eye.

Darkness closed around Hirei’s vision. The rasp of metal pulled from stone and a wicked laugh told him the beast on his right had freed its pick from the wall. Hirei stabbed at his last image of the foe, and the fiendish laughter became a choked gurgle. A heavy thud and a tremor in the ground before him attested to Hirei’s memory.

Concentrate.

Hirei tore a woolen strip from his robe and fashioned a hasty bandage for his eye. He scooped up a handful of snow and washed the blood from his right eye with the stinging meltwater. He made out a dark blur kneeling before him on the left, reeking of black blood. With a slash across its throat, he ended its fading grunts.

Behind a haze of pain and blood, the unarmed devil stood facing Hirei across forty feet of carnage. The half-blind swordsman took a forward step, and the monster turned and ran.

Hirei stepped over the two corpses in his path. Striding down the path, he came upon the hamstrung demon. It struggled to crawl away, but without changing his pace Hirei overtook the lame beast and ended its misery with a quick stab through its spine. Then he continued on, seeking the fleeing devil.

He had not far to follow.

Less than a mile from the site of the battle, the narrow chasm opened into a gulch perhaps sixty feet wide. Hirei smelled the reek of his quarry’s dark blood before his dimmed vision perceived the fiend’s headless corpse splayed at the small valley’s center.

Easier to discern was the dread figure towering over the body. A hood made from the top of a monstrous wolf’s head trailed a grey-black pelt that draped the giant’s broad shoulders. Iron plate with the dead cast of crucifixion nails armored a body that already seemed to be carved from stone. Hands clad in segmented iron grasped the head of a double-bladed axe planted between clawed sabatons.

“You are lost,” a guttural voice rumbled from behind the iron helm’s grill. “Home lies behind you.”

Hirei continued his advance. “It will not lie before me until I have your head.”

“Or heart.” the wolf-mantled giant said.

Hirei broke into a sprint, leading with his sword. Only at the last instant did the wolf-giant heft his axe and swing from Hire’s left. The blurring motion aimed at his blind side took the swordsman by surprise. He bent backwards, and the massive axe head swept over his face like a whirlwind, shearing off three black hairs.

Righting himself, Hirei jabbed at his foe. But the heavy axe somehow came back around, batting his thrust aside. The shock coursed up Hirei’s blade and into his arms, wrenching fresh pain from his pierced shoulder. He redoubled his attack, stabbing with ever-greater speed, but the axe kept pace, forming a wall of whirring steel in constant motion around the wolf-giant.

Fatigue leeched the strength from Hirei’s aching muscles. He began to flag, his lightning thrusts slowing.

But the wolf-giant’s mocking words echoed in Hirei’s mind. It knows of my home. If I fall here, it will send its demons upon my family.

“No!” With a burst of rage, Hirei leapt, aiming at the giant’s grilled visor. He never saw the axe move before it clashed against his blade, tearing it from his hand to go spinning through the air to his right. The hateful weapon’s haft slammed into his midsection, and he crashed backwards into snow-dusted rocks.

The wolf-giant tromped toward him. “Your friend was right. Attachment has made you rash.”

Hirei opened his mouth to retort, but only a gob of hot blood spewed out. Bones ground as he tried to move. His back burned, and redness rimmed his sight.

The wolf-giant pressed his axe’s dull spiked pommel into Hirei’s gut. The swordsman grabbed its wrist-thick haft in both hands, desperate to relieve the awful pressure. But he may as well have tried to move the pillars of the underworld.

Eyes hidden behind iron slits looked down on the struggling victim. It dawned on Hirei that his foe sought not to pin him in place, or even to torture him. No, he was merely prodding to test for any fight left in the swordsman. And to Hirei’s shame, there was none.

As if sensing his thoughts in a manner eerily like his blood brother once had, the wolf-giant removed the tormenting spike from Hirei’s stomach. He cocked the axe behind his shoulder for a final swing that Hirei surmised would cleave him and the rocks on which he lay.

Nichiobi Hirei, he thought, concluding the litany of shame.

“Hirei!” his lost brother-in-arms’ voice resounded from the icy slopes.

An arcing silver gleam drew his eye upward. Unquestioning he stretched forth his arm, and his sword’s hilt smacked into his palm. Hirei grasped the oval handle, and with new strength born of hope, he sprang up and put his full weight behind a straight thrust. The wolf-giant swung, but Hirei’s blade found his armored chest, and its tip plunged through the iron plate.

The axe thumped to the ground like a fallen obelisk. Hirei stood in the giant’s shadow, his blade lodged in his demonic foe’s breast.

“Home lies before me,” said Hirei.

The giant’s gauntleted fists closed around Hirei’s hands—not to pry his sword free, but to hold him in place. Coal-black blood flowed from the demon’s wound, staining Hirei’s silver blade grey. A presence pulsed down the tainted steel from the wolf-giant’s heart into Hirei’s, and uncleanness made its abode within him.

“Go, then.” The armored abomination in human shape released Hirei from its iron grip. It no longer had any need to hold him—the spirit festering in his heart sufficed. The giant reclaimed its axe and returned southward with ground-shaking strides.

“Hirei!” Rapid footsteps crunching down the right slope accompanied Yan’s cry.

Stay back! Hire longed to shout, but a crimson cloud streaked with black filled his mind and stayed his tongue.

Yan skidded to a stop at Hirei’s right. “Hirei,” he said between heaving breaths. “You caught the sword. I had less than a hope you would when I threw it. The gods must favor you!”

The abiding affliction turned Hirei’s head to stare at Yan.

No! Run!

Yan’s haggard face fell. He bowed deeply. “I am sorry for deserting you, Nichiobi. By that act, I have sundered our bond. I can only beg that you re-admit me to service at the lowest rank.”

The unclean spirit clenched Hirei’s sword tighter.

But Yan did not see. Instead he groveled on the frozen ground. “Please, permit me to live out my life in your service as atonement for my sin.”

Brother, run. You must!

Yan rose to a kneeling position. The hungry ghost ran Hirei’s grey blade through his blood brother’s heart. A shocked expression passed over Yan’s face but gave way to acceptance before the light left his eyes. Hirei’s hand withdrew the cursed blade, gorged on heart’s blood—and something more.

Hangano Yan, Hirei appended to the litany as the ravening spirit drove him back down the pass to the north. A second presence stirred within the sword—a shade frozen in grey steel.

Hirei had been half-right.

He would return home.

But he would not be alone.

 

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