Witches of Kregen

Chapter one-1

Chapter one

FrogsThe first frogs fell from the sky on the morning of the day selected for the decisive battle against Layco Jhansi’s army of crazed fanatics. Kov Turko’s Ninth Army, busy preparing the first breakfast, stopped as the sky filled with the tumbling bodies. Frogs fell everywhere, into cooking pots, sizzling in the fires, impaling themselves on spears, stampeding the riding animals, bearing down tents by the sheer weight of their numbers.

Frogs, roklos, toads and lizards blackened the brightness of Zim and Genodras, the twin Suns of Scorpio.

Some squashed as they hit the hard-packed earth here on the border between Vennar and Falinur. Most hopped about, their ribbiting filling the air with clamor. Everywhere the ground appeared an undulating sea of shining green backs.

“That dratted witch!” Seg’s black hair swirled as he batted at the descending swarms.

Nath na Kochwold hoisted his red pikeman’s shield aloft and the crimson flower rang and bucked with the rain of bodies buffeting it.

Turko ran to join me under the hard projecting edge of a fighting gallery of a ship of the air. His powerfully muscled body, that of a master of the arcane wrestler’s arts, as much as his lofty rank of kov, eased him through the press of men sheltering under the gallery. He looked mad clean through.

“That Witch of Loh! That Csitra! This must be another of her Curses.”

“Indubitably.”

He glared at me, for a tiny moment unsure of my tone, and then: “Yes! And she’s successfully spoiled our plans for today.”

“It seems to me,” I said, and I spoke mildly, “she has made a grave mistake.”

“By Morro the Muscle! How?”

“Why, if she’d waited until we were about to come to handstrokes with Layco Jhansi’s poor deluded—”

“I see that. Those screaming idiots would have believed it was the doing of their own sorcerer, and—”

“Precisely,” said Seg, storming up, looking ugly. “But she’s done enough damage as it is. Look at them!”

The Ninth Army had turned into a mob. Frantically the soldiers ran and yelled and flailed away at the falling frogs. The succulent early-morning odors of breakfast were replaced by the stink of roasting and charring amphibians. The uproar was prodigious. Any resemblance to a disciplined army was entirely lost.

“It’ll take all day today and tomorrow just to get the animals back.”

“And,” I said, “if Layco Jhansi attacks we’ll be mincemeat.”

I spoke with deliberate emphasis, expecting to be instantly contradicted.

I was not disappointed.

“If Jhansi dares to attack,” rapped out Turko. “By Vox! We’ll have him. Have him whole and spit out the pips.”

“He’ll certainly break his rotten teeth on my lads,” promised Nath na Kochwold, as hard and intolerant of imperfection as ever, a true fighting leader of the Phalanx.

The uproar overturning the camp racketed on unabated. There seemed no end to the supply of falling toads and roklos. Frogs hopped everywhere, clambering over one another, tumbling off the heaped piles of squirming bodies, and their ribbiting croaked on and on.

“Where’s Khe-Hi?” Seg buffeted a luckless toad who tried to hop into our refuge under the fighting gallery. The men with us pressed close to the wooden curve of the ship’s lower hull. A few feet away the packed bodies were piling up breast high. We’d be drowned under frogs soon if the rain did not cease in a very short time.

“Like any sensible man, he’s with his lady love.” Turko held a sensible respect for Wizards of Loh; but he was still Turko the Shield and therefore his respect was inevitably tinged with a quizzical amusement. “And even though she may be a Witch of Loh, Ling-Li-Lwingling is a remarkably attractive woman.”

No one of my comrades offered to make some cuttingly amusing remark about Turko’s qualifications for making that judgment. The situation here for all its unlikely bizarreness was damned serious. The piles of bodies continued to rise higher out there on the plain and most of the campfires had been unpleasantly extinguished.

“So,” said Seg, “he’s likely to be occupied and not realize what’s going on.”

“Then,” I said, and in that familiar yet empty gesture that indicates determination, I hitched up my sword. “Then we’ll have to bust our way through to him.”

“Through that lot?” yelped Turko.

“Any other ideas?”

“No. But we’ll have to move sharpish.”

“Right. Wenda!”

“Wenda!” said Seg with enormous sarcasm. Wenda means “let’s go!” “We’ll be like men sludging through treacle.”

Seg was right. There was another way, though its employment would give me little pleasure. But when it is a matter of your life versus a trifle of valuable property, there is no conflict of interests. None at all, by Krun!

A creak overhead snatched our attention.

The wooden fighting gallery projecting from the side of the sailing flier of the air groaned again, and a little spurt of wood-dust spouted from a joint. The gallery had been designed to carry archers in aerial combat, with spearmen to back then if boarding was in the offing. It was a slender construction; but it had been built to carry the weight of men in combat.

A plank of the flooring abruptly snapped and snagged downwards, disgorging a flood of green bodies upon our heads. The flopping green hoppers leaped about croaking.

“They must be piled up mast high!” yelled Turko.

“That lot’ll collapse any second,” said Nath na Kochwold.

“It’ll hold for a bit yet,” said Seg. “All the same, that gallery shouldn’t break under the weight of a bunch of frogs—”

“So the confounded witch has increased their weight.”

Seg’s fey blue eyes regarded the gallery above us. Sometimes my blade comrade’s powers startled even him. He said, repeating himself: “It’ll hold for a bit yet,” and we all knew he spoke sooth.

The frogs were now coming down hammering like roundshot. Anyone hit on the head would be killed outright and probably decapitated into the bargain.

Now, on Kregen when you go to breakfast you naturally use cutlery, and some of the men had theirs still with them. But, as this was Kregen, you also take with you what you take just about everywhere you go — your weaponry.

Thus it was I was able to bellow at a couple of Hakkodin to use their axes and halberds on the hull of the ship. I will agree that the pikemen do not usually take their pikes to breakfast, for the brumbytes stack their pikes in a most neat and orderly prescribed fashion; they will have their swords with them. On Kregen you never know when the next emergency will spring on you.

The axemen soon bashed a way through the hull of the ship. This destruction displeased me, as I say; but needs must in this situation. We ripped the planks apart and dodged roklos and frogs toppling from the sagging gallery.

“Hurry! Get inside, all of you!”

We only just made it.

As I felt Seg and Turko grab my arms and haul me in through the hole, the gallery at last collapsed. It broke up with the sound of a twenty-one-gun salute. The lot smashed down onto the ground where we’d been standing scant moments before.

Nath na Kochwold was furiously angry.

“That’s like him,” Seg said. “Stupid clean through.”

“Aye,” amplified Turko. “Daft as they come.”

“But — but—” Nath had known me in good times and bad, as had Seg and Turko. But Nath genuinely felt that things had changed. “You’re the emperor!” he got out. “You should not have been the last man—”

The gloom of the tween decks before our eyes adjusted made it difficult to see the expressions on the hard faces of my comrades. But I knew for a certainty that Seg and Turko were enjoying themselves. Oh, yes, we were a mighty high-up lot these days, kings and kovs, emperors and nobles, yet my blade comrades still remembered the old days, days when we’d been slave, when we’d adventured over the hostile if beautiful face of Kregen, days when we’d not known where the next crust was coming from, although we were damned sure we knew where the next lot of grief was due to arrive.

Comrades in a fellow’s life are precious — precious! — and worth all the tomfoolery of gold and jewels in the fabled Gardens of Hoi Parndole. Nath na Kochwold was a good comrade and had proved it on a score of occasions; yet still he was used to me as the emperor, as the man who had forged the Phalanx that was his pride, as the man to whom he looked as the savior of Vallia. He had not been slave with me.

So I bashed the dust from my face and clothes and bellowed out: “Get this ship aloft, famblys! Bratch!”

Seg and Turko took my meaning.

Men ran to the controls. A couple of Jikai Vuvushis ran past, the girls determined that they should stand at the controls and send the skyship into the air, and damn all onkerish men who got in their way.

The timbers of the ship groaned. The hull heaved beneath us. With the power conferred by the two silver boxes buried deep in her hull, the ship lifted into the air. She was not a voller. She did not have the power, conferred by the two silver boxes, of propelling herself through thin air. She could rise with that mystical power, derived from the mix of minerals in one box and the cayferm in the other; for forward propulsion she must use her magneto-etheric keel and the force of the wind in her sails.

If anyone was foolish enough to venture out on deck to try to set the canvas he’d have his skull driven in by a frog as hard as a cannonball.

The flying ship lifted. The vorlca drifted with the breeze, as we could tell by her movements. Oh, yes, I was the emperor all right. I spoke and men and women acted. But I was growing sick and tired of all the pomp and circumstance surrounding this emperor nonsense. The quicker my lad Drak took over the reins of empire the better I’d like it. I had given my word to be the emperor, and had sworn to liberate the people — my people — of Vallia from the slavers and aragorn, the flutsmen and all those who oppressed them. Once the island was reunited, why, then, you wouldn’t see me for dust.

As for Delia, my Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains, who was the Empress of Vallia, I knew she shared my thoughts, I knew she wished to be free of the burdens of empire and go with me once more aroaming the broad and beckoning lands of Kregen.

The vorlca lifted and moved and the breeze drove her downwind. From a porthole we could see the incredible sight of the frogs and their kindred dropping from heaven.

If Delia and I did take off for a life of adventuring, I was certain that Seg Segutorio would come with us. I had a shrewd suspicion that his new wife, Milsi, who was Queen Mab of Croxdrin, would not be averse to the picaresque life of adventure. And what a life that would be! By Zair, we’d live life to the full, then — although, by all the devils in a Herrelldrin Hell, didn’t we live life to the full right now?

In this tiny breathing space as we waited for the vorlca to drift downwind and clear the rain of frogs, I had time for reflections of different kinds. Yes, we lived life to the full — but whose full? Yes, I wanted to see Vallia once more united and peaceful. Yes, I most certainly wanted to see all the lands of Paz unite in a great league, a grand alliance, against the reiving Shanks who raided our coasts and slew without mercy. Yes, this was true. But, also, sometimes the burdens crowded too close and too heavy. Sometimes I understood with horror that I might yet grow callous and uncaring of anyone else save myself and my friends and family. If the disease of empire took me, I was big-headed enough to guess that not only all Vallia and Paz would suffer; all of Kregen would suffer.

“Almost clear, Dray,” called Seg, peering out through the gash in the hull. “What a sight.”

“That malignant witch.” Turko looked out at Seg’s side. “My Ninth Army—”

I did not think of the frogs and Turko’s fine Ninth Army; I thought that perhaps I might really and truly only care about Delia and my family and my comrades, and to hell with the rest of Kregen. That was how I had behaved and believed in my reckless past on this planet. I had changed. Now I tried to be the enlightened emperor.