The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2) by Michael John Grist

Author:Michael John Grist [Grist, Michael John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-07T18:30:00+00:00

BATTLE I

Battle lasted for longer than usual that day, through the Grammaton's drunkenly tolled chimes for All Forth, Second Coming, Heeding Wake and All Rally. The Drazi came at them without rest, hauling their haphazard bodies over the grindstone battlements and into the defenders' forest of blades, buckshot, and pikes.

Once they may have had a master, a Painman the likes of the Bunnyman King who had designed and marshaled them in long disciplined lines, but not any more. Now their master was gone and they were a stupid, diseased tide that washed over the land, sucking the life and marrow from villages, woodlands and croplands whole, living only to consume.

Quill had slain many thousands of them.

At the start they had been easy to kill. Their throats were soft and their underbellies brittle; built out of weak young children, built out of grizzled old man's bones, built out of mudworms and fresh tree sap and grass. They stuttered and moaned, those that had mouths. Some had no features at all, some had three heads, some scuttled like spiders on a bed of men's arms, some had thorny front carapaces and nothing but jellied blood and bone in back.

At the start killing them had been as comedic as it was horrific. When their lumbering bodies had first come over the churned Sump fields, they were met by the King's Halberdiers, by Lord Quill's Decatate, and even by the citizenry at large. Ignifer's forces had eviscerated them with ease, tearing their bodies to pieces and leaving them in huge quivering piles. That first day had been an orgy of disgust and violence. The towering piles of corrupted Drazi flesh that scattered the landscape were obscene.

They were also fuel. The remnant Drazi dug vats into the earth and filled them with their own dead, from which they mogrified a second batch.

These new breed Drazi were different. Gone were the most horrific mogrifications, the most inept, the most easily butchered, and in their place came something more like the Malakite caste; ape-like creatures with thick knurls of muscle. Yet they still boasted random dangling limbs, with fangs and claws where they shouldn't be, with useless eyes embedded in their elbows and their innards garlanded like a crown about their heads, and that led the King's troops into believing they hadn't really changed.

The forces of Ignifer's city rode out once more to the slaughter, and were in turn slaughtered. Citizens who'd emerged wielding nothing more than raking hoes and kitchen knifes were mauled to death. Neophyte Halberdiers who broke formation in the glee of anticipated butchery were torn from their saddles and ripped to pieces. Older Molemen streamed out in their red tubing suits with blatting clubs wielded high and were run down by creatures that fanged them in the back and dragged them under. Hundreds died before the retreat was sounded.

From the safety of the wall Lord Quill watched the bodies of his fallen forces dragged back to the vats, where they were steeped in glowing light, and stewed, and by the dawn reanimated as the latest incarnation of the Drazi.

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