The Gauntlet and the Broken Chain, page 1
The
Gauntlet
and the
Broken Chain
ALSO BY IAN GREEN
The Gauntlet and the Fist Beneath
The Gauntlet and the Burning Blade
The
Gauntlet
and the
Broken Chain
IAN GREEN
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the United Kingdom in 2023 by Head of Zeus,
part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Ian Green, 2023
The moral right of Ian Green to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781800244122
ISBN (E): 9781800244092
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Contents
Also by Ian Green
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
THE STORY OF THE ROTSTORM
PROLOGUE: THE WAR AND THE WOLF
ACT 1: THE BALANCED BLADE 1. Steel For The Children
2. Forge No Chain
3. The Stone Prince
4. Wood, Water, Wool, and Wine
5. A Spider of Glass and Gold
6. Ice Fishing
INTERLUDES: EYES SHARP The Unnamed Knight
A Private Constellation
Shrinekeeper, Sleeping Fox
ACT 2: THE PATTERN BELOW 7. Fire and Snow
8. Orubor’s Wood
9. Hubris
10. Chickens Eat Scorpions
11. Noose
12. Blood and Brandy
INTERLUDES: BLADE SHARPER The Power of the Sun
The Dragon Above, The Snake Below
Daughter of The Mist
ACT 3: THE GAUNTLET 13. Hidden City, Frozen Sky
14. Dawn
15. Ephemeral Clouds
16. The Rotstorm
17. Deathless
18. The Bear and The Wolf
EPILOGUES: THE BROKEN CHAIN Where Two Forests Meet
The Gauntlet and The Windbound Girl
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Maps
Map of the Undal Protectorate after Ferron invasion, year 312 from Ferron’s Fall (1123 Isken) – Private collection, Knight-Commander Salem Starbeck
Map of the Rotstorm and Ferron ruin, year 307 from Ferron’s Fall (1118 Isken) – Stormcastle XII archive, Commander Benazir Arfallow
Reckoning of the lands of Morost, year 312 from Ferron’s Fall (1123 Isken) – Castrum library, Commissar-Mage Inigo
THE STORY OF THE ROTSTORM
Across the ruins of Ferron the rotstorm ever rages – a nightmare of arcane lightning and acid mists where the spectre of the god-bear Anshuka hunts children, twisting them into monstrous beasts. The crow-man Varratim, corrupted by the rotstorm, found a cache of lost technology deep in the ruins of Ferron – orbs of light that can fly through the sky and shoot fire and force. With these orbs Varratim kidnapped children sensitive to the magic of the world, the skein, to empower an ancient dagger that could kill a god – a dagger he stole from Deathless Tullen One-Eye, the most powerful mage ever to live. Tullen was sentenced by Anshuka to wander the earth forever and watch the ruin of his people and has spent three centuries seeking to escape his chains.
Varratim tried to kill the god-bear Anshuka to free his people, but he was stopped – Floré had left the violence of the rotstorm behind, but when Varratim’s orbs stole her daughter, Marta, and killed her husband, Janos, she hunted him down. Floré saved her daughter and her god, but the skein-mage Tomas took the ancient dagger for his own devices.
With Varratim dead and their scheme for absolution failed, from the nightmarish depths of the rotstorm demons and goblins and rust-folk have struck forth and claimed as their sanctuary the Northern Marches of the Undal Protectorate. To help her people and Marta, who was sickening from the skein-magic inherited from her father, Floré sought out the besieged island of Iskander. She aimed to find the whitestaffs, mages sworn to support the Undal Protectorate who had abandoned their posts when Varratim’s orbs first flew. Instead she found betrayal and a horrifying revelation – the whitestaffs had taken the mage Janos from his deathbed and were using him as a font of power, hoping to realise new extremes of magic. Meanwhile, Varratim’s successor, the brutal war-leader Ceann Brude led the Ferron on a devastating campaign of terror across the protectorate.
Floré and her comrades managed to save Janos, but the folly of Tomas came to fruit – Tullen One-Eye manipulated him into breaking the chains of magic binding him. With his power and his dagger returned, Tullen faced down Janos at last, and the deathless mage was victorious. With the power he harvested from Janos’s magic, he resurrected the god-wolf Lothal, who once led the armies of Ferron to blood and glory.
Through the Undal Protectorate the land is gripped in a Claw Winter, a frozen mirror of the punishment of the rotstorm laid down to the west. Abandoned on the island of Iskander, Floré and her comrades must find their way back to the protectorate. Marta is hidden somewhere in the north, dying from the skein-magic she cannot control.
After centuries of bondage, the immortal mage Tullen One-Eye has been unchained and the great god-wolf Lothal hunts again. And deep in Orubor’s wood, the god-bear Anshuka stirs from her slumber. The last time these Judges warred, an empire fell.
If she is to save her daughter and free her people, Floré will have to defeat the great wolf and kill the man they call Deathless. But how can she kill the unkillable man? And is steel alone enough to take down the gods?
PROLOGUE
THE WAR AND THE WOLF
Ceann Brude watched the village of Garioch burn, spirals of black smoke and dancing flame filling her eyes as thatch and timber caught and blazed. The snow was piled thick in drifts and clumps, but her soldiers had oil and patience and the flames danced out from barns and houses and sheds and sties. Somewhere, a child cried. Somewhere, a horse screamed its death throes. Wooden beams cracked like bones, wet and sudden and bright. Through the streets of the village, gangs of goblins ran amok, small grey bodies clad in rags and armed with rust and malice, black eyes flashing and ragged teeth glinting as they sought any who would resist. Their rust-folk minders chased and corralled them with rough words and quick blows to correct their courses, to pull them off those who surrendered before the villagers were torn apart. She could hear the goblins chittering and screeching, some individual words climbing up beyond the crackle of flame. Brude leaned back against the stone at the top of the shaman tower, hiding from the snow flurries in the lee of the old dark stone.
The tower was perhaps forty feet tall, a simple tight spiral of wooden stairs walled in stone. It stood proud over the village, looming over the stark stone of the temple building underneath. Her hunched back had scraped at the beams of the stairs above as she climbed, but at the peak it was only her and the bronze-coated shaman bells marked with the runes of the Judges: ᚷᛉᚫᛏ, feather, claw, flower, and eye. Nessilitor the Lover, Anshuka the Mother, Berren the Fair, and Lothal the Just. Anshuka’s bell was double the size of the others, and Brude turned to it and watched the reflection of the flames below dancing on the beaten bronze. She shivered and remembered a bear of red mist stalking the rotstorm, hunting her when she was only a child. Changing her. Never again, she thought. I will take the children from the storm.
‘A shame,’ Amon said, emerging from the darkness of the stairwell and smiling up at her. His scar-pocked face was all crags, his smile pulling at one half of his face as he leaned to the edge of the tower top to look down at the flames. Brude sniffed and drew further back into shadow, felt her shoulders hunch lower as she tried reflexively to appear more human – less crow-man, demon, elongated and broken by dark magic. It made no difference. Still she towered over him, and she was as aware as ever of the pains in her joints and bones and sinew and blood.
‘Why a shame?’ Brude asked, her voice smoke-rough, and Amon shrugged and moved closer to her, sheltering from the wind and snow. His proximity made her hands flex, a nervous reaction, her overlong fingers curling back until her fingertips touched the hem of her shirt. Through snow and cloud she thought the sun must be setting – she could barely make out his eyes in the darkness, just two black spaces rimmed in shadow. He is tired, she thought. We are all tired.
‘This is good land,’ he said, pulling his cloak tighter. ‘Rust-folk could farm here, could live here. But examples must be made. I do not question your decision.’
Brude’s eye twitched and she loomed over him and stretched t
‘Examples must be made,’ she said, and Amon reached up and laid his hand on her shoulder and smiled at her placatingly, his face still cast in shadow.
‘They are ready below,’ he said, ‘if you are.’
They descended the tight spiral of stairs, Brude following Amon, her hand reaching down and almost touching the back of his cloak. She held herself back. Emerging into the courtyard below, they stopped at the well and Amon drew up the bucket from deep below, and in turn they drank the cool crisp water of the Northern Marches, untainted by the peat and acid of the rotstorm or the acrid tang of rotvine sap.
‘I’ll not get tired of that water,’ Amon said, and Brude wiped her mouth and grinned at him.
‘You’ll not have to, my friend,’ she said. The water was cold beyond cold, a cold that flooded her throat and spread through her chest and then seemed to dissipate only when her whole body had shivered. Even the aches in her bones seemed to ease, for a moment. It tasted so clean – this wasn’t the fetid water of the rotstorm. She had spent her life drinking water tainted with rotvine sap, water red with whatever hell leached from the sky down into the peat. Water in the rotstorm was a pain to endure, a necessity to survive. You would strain it and boil it and filter it over and over but the taste was always there. Don’t we deserve clean water, clear skies? Brude let the bucket fall to the snowy ground.
Amon led on, his old, oiled cloak of worked leather over his new uniform. The uniform was a simple thing. A thick sash of red from shoulder to hip – they could afford no more, could spare nobody to work loom or dye or needle. Together Brude and Amon walked through slush and snow to the village green and when she saw her rust-folk – spear-wielding, wild and worn – each had the red sash. Some of them wore new strips of cloth, sashes clearly taken from what clothing or fabric they had found in Garioch. It brought a smile to her face. An army needs a uniform, her adviser Jehanne had said, no matter how simple. It is cohesion. It is discipline. Those who wear your colour will answer to your word, or they will be other.
Brude could not fault the Cil-Marie soldier’s teachings. Her rust-folk, men and women scarred by the rotstorm and its acid mists and brutal flora and fauna, hair braided, weapons stolen and broken and worn, looked like an army – not a rabble.
The rust-folk surrounded the few remaining inhabitants of Garioch. Most had fled spans before, fled when rumour of war and a Claw Winter on its heels sent them to the south – to safety. Brude smiled at that thought – she had struck at Undal City itself, had left it ablaze and in turmoil. Let them feel the fear we have lived with all our lives. Brude’s adviser stood at the edge of the village green in the shadow of a wall, hood raised and cloak drawn close against the cold and the eyes of those watching. A few goblins ran to the square and the captives, with their broken blades of stone and jagged iron, but were shooed away quick enough by Brude’s soldiers. The grey-skinned monsters were sent to search the unburnt houses and barns for supplies.
‘There must be an example,’ Brude said again loudly and, in the centre of the green, standing in packed snow and slush, the people of Garioch looked up at her. Brude was a head taller even than the tallest of them: a grizzled heavily built man who stood straight in his grey Stormguard tabard – the only tabard amongst the cowering villagers. He wore no cloak and bled freely from a wound in his head, and stood a step forward of the others, placing himself between them and her. There were perhaps twenty Undal there, a mix of old and young, even their poorest clad better than her rust-folk. Well-fed but with hard lines to their faces. The wounded soldier had blood caked in his beard, grey in his hair and a set to his jaw. He was not afraid of her.
Brude focused her gaze on the man in the tabard as she spoke.
‘The Northern Marches belong to Ferron. You were warned, but now the snow has come and with it your last chance at survival.’
Behind her the shaman temple burned, the tower above it wreathed in guttering flame. Through the flurries of snow the last light of sun fell behind the horizon far to the west. What had been a faint light behind the clouds was gone, and all that remained was the red of flame.
‘Garioch has suffered before,’ the man said, and he spat at her feet. ‘A rotsurge passed the town three decades back. We rebuilt. Before that, raids in the Antian wars. We rebuilt. Before that, half the town dead to the corvus plague. We rebuilt. Three centuries back, this was all slaves minding sheep for Ferron masters. They died, we rebuilt. We will always rebuild, crow-man, no matter what fires you set or chains you forge.’
One of Brude’s soldiers stepped in and slammed the butt of her spear into the man’s stomach, and Brude watched his hand twitch to intercept it, watched the man decide to take the blow. A soldier. He went to one knee but then slowly stood and Brude could see the corded muscle of his shoulder as he tensed.
‘You want to kill me,’ she said, ‘but you cannot. You are City Watch? These people are your responsibility. Why would you not flee when we told you? You were told. You were warned.’
One of the others went to step forward and speak, a young man with thinning hair and a broken nose, blood dried around his mouth in thick rivulets that shone black in the firelight. The City Watch soldier held a hand back and the young man deferred, returned to the old woman he had been standing next to, placing an arm around her shoulders for support. Brude looked at the wrinkles on the old woman’s face – wrinkles of age. She felt a burn in her gut, that familiar cleansing anger – an anger that always reassured her of her course. How many of my people get to grow so old? Not many, she knew. Most rust-folk died in the rotstorm long before they tasted old age, died of pestilence or wound or acid cloud, arcane lightning, the twisted flora and fauna of the rotstorm all hungry for flesh.
‘Some too old to flee,’ the soldier said. ‘Some stubborn. Some foolish. I stayed to watch over them, if I could.’
Out in the bogs and hills beyond the edge of town, a wolf howled and Brude grimaced. I must trust in my reeve. Brude was ceann, war-leader of the rust folk – but the reeve was the one the people turned to, the one who made the true decisions that would determine their fate.
‘You thought to protect them,’ she continued, banishing the thought of the reeve and his plans from her mind. ‘You thought the Stormguard would drive us back, as it ever has, and the great bear Anshuka would watch over you in her sleep, even as her nightmare brings snow and storm and ruin across the land. Penance for your sins, is that right? This is what you Undal believe, what your shamans preach?’
The man just stared at her, so Brude flexed her fingers and reached into the storm within herself. In a moment she could sense the tempest within her and around her, the chaos of connection and disconnection and pattern and influence. Each person was a tangle within that storm, an impossibly complex layering of chance and connection and chaos. Turning her gaze down to the soldier before her she could see him inside and out, from marrow to skin, see the pulse of nerves firing and the intricate dance of thought inside his skull, unfathomable in its complexity. I must trust the reeve. Brude closed her eyes and threw back her head and howled, a long howl – a wolf’s howl. She pushed her power into it, the tempest of pattern – she gave her howl power, the way she had been told.
From the darkness beyond the fires of Garioch, her howl was returned, once, twice, a dozen times over, each howl a different note responding in chorus. The wolves of the Northern Marches, lingering in the darkness at the edge of town. The howls died down, and Brude dropped her senses deeper into the storm below and pushed outward. Is he here? The reeve had promised her that her howl would be enough, but the deathless mage had said so many impossible things to the reeve and the reeve had told Brude only what he deemed necessary.
