Blush of Dawn

By Don Liddick

The people of the Scaur live under the strict rule of King Zandelkar or face punishment at the hands of the King’s enforcers, the ululaku. When the mother of twins, Adera and Kif, disobeys the King’s Law, justice comes swiftly, leaving the young twins alone in an unkind world. They grow up navigating injustice while having to fight the wrongness that robbed Adera and Kif of their family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laurel Highlands Publishing
• Release date: Dec 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781941087428

Don Liddick

Don Liddick has been an associate professor of criminal justice for many years. He has written numerous articles and seven non-fiction books, mostly concerned with organized crime. Dr. Liddick’s real love, however, is good stories and the art of story-telling. He lives near his sons and grandson in the Laurel Highlands of western Pennsylvania.

Book preview

Blush of Dawn

Don Liddick

Blush of Dawn

Copyright © 2018 Don Liddick

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-941087-42-8

Laurel Highlands Publishing

Mount Pleasant, PA

USA

LaurelHighlandsPublishing.com

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is dedicated to Carol Ann Liddick.

Thanks for the encouragement, Mom!

Table of Contents

Prologue

Part I — Adera and Kif

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part II — The Return of Mog-Tak

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

The carrion-fowl gather.

Aye, ever has it been—the blood of men, even ere it be shed, acts as portent for beasts and discerning wizards.

Two stood on the escarpment, the light of stars a glint on the broad cuirass of the one, the greater; the other, a slender but eager shadow, child of the mighty man of war, nervously playing the string of his yew bow like a musician composing a tune: Father and son, side by side, awaiting the first blush of dawn.

There were no moons, and a mist dimmed the stars so that the gloom became a palpable thing to breathe in and belabor lungs. Though they could see no more than a few yards, a sub-audible murmur—a subtle tremor of the earth beneath their booted feet—bespoke of a vast host encamped on the plain below.

Endekal, the boy of fifteen winters, passed these last anxious moments before battle by reviewing in his mind the previous night’s march, from familiar mead and vale, across the river at Raven Ford, and through the Glowing Wood, where none of the People of the Scaur had ever dared linger. The previous night the roots of the trees had illuminated the forest road on either side like phosphorescent pythons squirming out of the dark earth. Beneath the occasional clink of buckler and muffled thud of hoof there had been a murmur and a whisper that passed along mould and canopy. Frightening as that passage had been, the army of Endekal’s people, led by his father, Baralud, traversed the Wood unhindered, debouched, and formed two great lines along the rim of a low, treeless ridge.

Rumor of their coming had traveled far in advance of the ravening horde. All through the spring and summer, foreign travelers from the West Reaches trickled over Raven Ford, but would not stay long, pausing only for a night at the public hostel to whisper of a black sorcerer who led an inhuman army. Here, in the East Reaches, people tended to their own affairs, and the advanced nations to the west and the ports that led to still more distant continents concerned the People of the Scaur not at all. But soon, the trickle of strangers grew to a steady stream, and while the increased trade was most welcome, the news was less so.

By the harvest, amorphous rumor congealed into imminent threat as the ravagers entered lands some of the People had visited in their own lifetimes. Long disused foundries were activated. Young men who had known only peace eagerly attended the instruction of stern-countenanced elders. Even among the stoutest warriors ran a sobering current—not doubt, no, and never fear—but a mature awareness that what approached was unlike any enemy grizzled veteran or historical tradition could tell. When the God of Winds painted the leaves before their fall, panicked westerners as rugged as Baralud himself hurried through with haunted eyes, families in tow, telling stories of dark magic and inhuman warriors who fed off the flesh and blood of the fallen.

Village Councils ordered the marshaling of their forces—every male of fifteen to seventy winters—and appointed Baralud as supreme Battle Weird. With Endekal’s father placed in command of the defense, the courage of the Scaur was roused to a level that displaced fear. Only one doubt worried at the minds of some weaker folk; the people had no wizards or shamans of their own, having dismissed them for exploiting the fears of women and stealing from village treasuries. But Baralud and his warriors hearkened not to the whispers of old wives, feared no deviltry, trusted the Spirits of Wind, Water, Fire, and Stone, and yearned for mortal flesh to hew—be it human, sub-human, or demonic.

Just as the last of the harvest was gathered, a single survivor of a battle not twenty leagues distant heralded the approach of a large army. The mood in the Scaur became grim and tempered by a sense of urgency. The order was given: old men, children, and women fled to the caves far up in the face of the cliffs. They hauled hundred-foot ladders up after them and hunkered down to await the outcome. If the battle was lost, the non-combatants could hold out in the network of narrow tunnels behind the caves for a long time and perhaps escape by secret ways into the highlands.

Baralud did not intend for the battle to go ill.

Two days after the last of the women and those males constrained by age had fled to the relative safety of the caves, the Scaur’s forces advanced through the Glowing Wood to face the invaders.



The thunder of a rider broke the subdued, anxious waiting. Endekal raised his bow, but his father stepped in front of him. Chain mail clinked as someone dismounted. A great, black-bearded man emerged from the fog and strode up to Baralud with a joyful salutation: Mendakron the Stone-Fist marches down the vale followed by a thousand men with hammers thirsting for skulls to crush!

Glad tidings, replied Baralud. But our scouts report some twelve thousand spears forest the plain where yesterday there was only grass for cattle. Ere dawn birth a red day, the bowels of men will grease the heels of those left standing. Even with Mendakron’s numbers, the enemy outnumbers us four to one.

Wynfaldor answered with a smile and hefted his fifty-pound stone hammer.

Shrouds of grey ghosts whispered coldly through the ranks of silent warriors—wisps of mist on a freshening breeze that heralded the approaching dawn and mighty deeds. No target was yet visible, but the presence of the enemy in the vale below was unmistakable. The threat loomed like a sentient storm cloud imbued with a dark, insidious glee. Endekal fitted an iron-tipped arrow to the string. Baralud rested a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

The mist lifted. The stars in the west faded and a silver thread lined the horizon. Everything seemed to stop. A profound and disturbing hush fell across the pre-dawn field. Heaviness in Endekal’s chest warned him that he must soon resume breathing. His father’s hand tightened on his shoulder, and two thousand souls in the Army of the Scaur froze, muscles taut, as they intuited some great beast was about to spring.

A loud sound, the engines of war, broke the uncanny quiet. The sudden ruckus startled hundreds of geese along a small stream in the vale into flight. A single voice echoed along the ridge and through the shallow valley. Shields up! bellowed Baralud.

Endekal raised his oaken shield above his head and crouched down. A rain of heavy shot from the enemy’s catapults pummeled the lines of the Scaur a second later. The projectiles were not comprised of stone, but they landed heavily with a wet-sounding splat. An overpowering stench arose. Endekal recalled a dead calf he’d stumbled on the previous summer.

In the midst of the tumult and pre-dawn dark, no man could at once discover the true nature of the projectiles. One object struck Endekal’s shield with a moist, heavy thud, and the thought flashed though his mind that the invaders were bombarding them with rotten melons gleaned from the fields. The last wet smack of a projectile hit the grass nearby. One second of horrendous silence seemed to stretch out to infinity, and then Baralud emitted a deep-throated cry of anguish. The lament of two thousand Scaur-men rose to meld in the firmament with the baleful croak of buzzards.

Decaying body parts lay all about the lines of the Scaur-men. Human feet, hands, heads, and entrails had done little physical damage, but the defending army was momentarily paralyzed with horror and revulsion. Endekal’s rapid scan of the nightmare field settled on the tiny body of a dead infant entwined in its desiccated umbilicus. The world reeled.

In that moment of doubt for the Scaur, the enemy attacked. Foul unshod feet splashed across the shallow stream. The only sound the invaders made was a mockery of human laughter—a low, insane tittering that conjured visions of squirming maggots busy in some carcass.

The paralysis and horror the defenders felt was quickly replaced by a primal force above hate, beyond rage. Endekal felt it too, but fear for his father overrode all else. Baralud—raving, tearing his beard, tossing away his armor—charged fey and reckless in front of the advancing Scaur infantry. Only his truncheon did he keep, waving the club above his head rapidly so that the heavy iron ball fused to the end of it whistled a deadly tune. Endekal tried to keep up, but soon his father had melted into the gloom that blinded both heart and mind.

Across the vale a quarter of a league to the west, safely ensconced in a spherical black cloud that levitated above the field, the dark wizard Mog-Tak afforded grudging admiration to Baralud’s host. Their consuming hatred was most impressive. In the darkest recesses of Mog-Tak’s mind, where the worm dieth not, the wizard thought that perhaps a few of these men could be spared so that he might twist their hate into new incarnations of evil.

The armies met with a clash and cry of men and monsters. Endekal ran in search of his father, arrow fitted and ready. The din of battle rose to a crescendo: the ring of metal striking metal, the crack of bone, the screams of the dying. Most prominent was the other-worldly shrieks of the enemy, which sounded to the Scaur-folk like the death throes of rabid curs. All was chaotic motion and frenzied sound, muddled turmoil in a sea of raging death.

A humanoid leaped at Endekal from out of the darkness. Its face was a nightmare, but the boy’s attention was quickly drawn to the glint of a curved steel poniard. Time seemed to slow. Endekal released an arrow at the same time he raised the bow, not bothering to aim. The steel blade passed in front of his nose. The arrow pierced the thing’s throat—luck—and it fell dead with a gurgle.

There it lay—the enemy. Even in the midst of swirling Death incarnate, Endekal was unable to avert his eyes from the alien countenance: Its single yellow eye, the skin pale and mottled like that of a corpse, and a fanged maw that overflowed with dozens of grey tentacles. The tentacles still squirmed in its mouth. Endekal retched.

A displacement of air behind his head portended the descent of some weapon. He ducked, but an iron club glanced off his light helm, spinning him around. Stunned, Endekal collapsed to his knees. A thing from the Pit stood over him, its club raised high for the kill.

The creature’s head exploded with a wet crack of its skull. Baralud swept his truncheon back in one swift motion. Another enemy lost its lower jaw in a spray of fangs and tentacles. Careful boy, growled Baralud, and hauled Endekal to his feet.

The warriors of the Scaur pressed forward around father and son, striking aside spears and felling squealing creatures with sword, mace, and halberd. Endekal remained close to Baralud and stowed his bow in favor of a short sword. Many Scaur-men fell—never to rise—but the flame of their anger drove them deep into the enemy ranks.

Despite the onslaught, the maleficent will that impelled the monstrous army did not falter. Mog-Tak insinuated his desire into the festering minds of his humanoid soldiers; they came to understand that their center should yield ground. The tactic worked: The center of the Scaur infantry penetrated too far, and the line became an arc. A mass of enemies enveloped Baralud’s forces on both flanks. The doom of the Scaur approached.

Baralud thundered, Form a ring! as the press of the horde hemmed them in. Now the end of the Scaur-men would surely come, outnumbered and weary as they were; and the remnant of the People would have to withstand a long siege in the cliffs.

Through the red haze of battle lust, Baralud paused to savor his last few breaths. Endekal looked at his father. A stream of blood ran down the great man’s face and dripped from his tattered beard. Baralud smiled at his son.

A cry of hope rose above the din of battle: Mendakron! Mendakron comes at last!

Up and down the serried ranks the call was taken up, and the obscenities they fought with doubted. From the south they came—Mendakron’s grim thousand and their death-dealing hammers. Soon, the cacophony of granite hammer-heads obliterating iron helms and bone skulls rose to the sky to challenge the spiteful croak of the carrion fowl.

Baralud ordered a signal be given. A flaming arrow shot up, and three hundred heavily armored horse drove in from the north, creating a pincer that threw the enemy into frenzied confusion. Now the tide of battle turned again—this time in favor of the Scaur. The two pincers—Mendakron with his hammers and Wynfaldor driving foes with his cavalry—broke through and met Baralud’s ring of infantry.

The inhuman brood, caught between hammer and anvil, fell by the hundreds and the thousands, and would have faltered and fled had it not been for the sustaining will of the Power that held them. Suspended a furlong above the ground in his shadow-sphere, Mog-Tak had foreseen much. Even now he bode his time, enjoying his sport as the spider with the fly. But the time had come, the opportune moment when beyond all hope the fly thought it might miraculously escape the web—when the spider would sting to kill with its most noxious venom.

The wizard muttered words in an arcane language. A portal to a pocket universe opened—a rectangle of utter void that blotted out a section of the dark sky. Through the gate poured a brood of winged demons from the nether reaches of the blackest nightmare realm. Hundreds of them materialized in a dense cloud, eager to fulfill the summons and drain the life from any and all prey.

The approach of doom did not sound like footsteps, but the rush of a prodigious wind. To Endekal, it was the sound a flock of birds made when they took flight all at once on a crisp pre-winter dawn—but these were not the wings of birds. Looking up, he saw them, a dark blot of growing movement that appeared to materialize from nowhere. Demons soon filled the entire sky. Both armies, mesmerized, looked skyward, and the ichtzierari descended in a whirring cloud of death.

A demon dove at Endekal’s head. He fell flat to the turf as if struck by a bolt of lightning. Sharp talons tore off his helm and a tuft of hair. The creature swooped back up, trailing a reptilian tail and flapping leathery wings a dozen feet across.

A few yards from his son, Baralud stooped and picked up a spear. The winged nightmare wheeled and dove back at Endekal. Baralud thrust up and through the torso of the descending monstrosity. Stuck on the spear, it wriggled violently and jerked Baralud’s arms in its death throes. Endekal got a good look at the thing’s head, immediately wishing he had not—it had a dozen bulbous eyes, a weeping orifice in the midst of its misshapen head, and a mouthful of razor-edged oblivion. A long crimson tongue slithered down four feet of spear to wrap around Baralud’s wrist. He heaved spear and demon off to the side, where the creature splashed