The Mortal Tally by Sam Sykes

Author:Sam Sykes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction / Fantasy / Epic, Fiction / Action & Adventure
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2016-03-29T07:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

A MOON PAINTED BLACK

They were called scraws. And they had turned a conquest into a war.

From what Gariath had gathered—from human sources and from sources that couldn’t afford to be ignorant of human problems—it had begun with the Empire of Karneria. The dark-skinned, fine-boned humans had armed themselves with spear and shield, golem and siege weapon, and a holy mandate to use them all in their conquest to make the world ready for their god, the Conqueror.

With weapons superior and legions innumerable, they had almost done it. Their march north had consumed many nations with names Gariath couldn’t be bothered to remember—how important could they be if they had been conquered? From their red-mountained homes, across the plains and forests of the world, the Karnerians were stopped only when they attempted to cross a river called Pike’s Ford into the recently unified realm of Saine.

There they had met the pale-skinned, burly Sainites.

And the Sainites had introduced them to the scraws.

They had emerged from their mountain aeries in such numbers as to darken the skies: winged beasts that came shrieking out of the clouds, each one bearing blue-coated soldiers armed with fireflasks and crossbows. They had swept over the legions, who could only stare up agog, and their superior mobility had turned the invincible Karnerian infantry into soft, slow-moving sacks of flesh to be filled with arrows and skewered on lances and incinerated by flame.

The Karnerian march was reversed immediately, and the next decade was spent with the legions retreating south, harried by the scraws, before the Karnerians could figure out how to combat this new menace with bigger bows and new tactics.

But the damage was done. The hitherto undefeated Karnerian legions had met their match. And the scraws had proven themselves a weapon that changed the world and struck fear into the hearts of the Sainites’ enemies, be they Karnerian or from the territories previously conquered by Karnerians that now found themselves under Sainite rule.

If one paid attention, the scraws had begun the longest, bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen.

And yet, Gariath thought, from up here they look like a bunch of stupid pigeons.

Gariath stared down from the ridge to the convoy below. Stretching miles long, ten humans abreast, until they numbered hundreds, the Sainites trudged across the desert in a line of blue coats and tricorne hats. Their sabers rattled at their hips, their spears were slung across the kits that bent their backs, they sipped from flasks and complained about the heat and the sand and the road.

But Gariath’s eyes were on the scraws.

Between each two lines of soldiers, a great wheeled platform drawn by horses stood. On beds of straw, the scraws snoozed as their humans pulled them through the desert.

From so high up, they looked not particularly impressive. Strange, certainly: Their heads were those of sharp-beaked birds, topped with sloping horns, wings sprouted from their backs, their forelegs ended in talons and their hindquarters looked like those of goats.

From here they looked fragile: delicate birds attached to delicate fauns, hollow bones waiting to be broken.

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