Songs of the Dark: Short Fiction from the World of Raven’s Shadow

A Duel of Evils-2

An additional point of particular odium to the Volarians was the Kethian practice of child sacrifice. As already noted, these cultures were evenly matched in their barbarity but this facet of Kethian society does make it difficult to express much sympathy for their eventual fate. That such a practice took place, and is not a figment of Volarian prejudice, is confirmed by Karvalev and several other contemporary sources. It appears sacrifices occurred only on the ascension of a new king, Karvalev’s account of one ceremony conveying a chilling sense of normalcy:

As the king took his throne he reached into a great glass bowl filled with wooden pegs onto which the name of every child in Kethia had been inscribed. No child was excluded, regardless of station, for what parent could forgo such an honour? Having chosen, the king stood and called out the name of the blessed child. On this occasion it was a boy of perhaps eight years, the son of a shipwright who proudly carried him forward, the boy bouncing on his father’s shoulders, laughing happily. The king greeted the boy with a kiss to the forehead before leading him, knife in hand, to the font from which the gods would drink come the moon-rise. The gods have ever blessed us, but they are also ever hungry.

It was the ascension of this particular king that provided the spark to war, for this king was a warrior, known to history as Tavurek and described by Karvalev as the apex of Kethia. His stature and prowess in battle matched by a mind keener than the sharpest blade. It seemed as if the gods saw our need and sent Tavurek from a prior age, for he was not made as other men. The Volarians were very thorough in destroying all images and statues of Tavurek, so the accuracy of Karvalev’s description cannot be judged, although Entril’s portrait of the doomed warrior king is in broad agreement with most Volarian sources:

He towered over his men as they advanced on us, unhelmed and arms bared, wielding a great two-bladed axe as if it weighed no more than a twig. A fury of muscle and steel, inspiring those that followed him to unhesitant sacrifice.

We know little of Tavurek’s early life, though Karvalev intimates he was born to a wealthy trading family and spent much of his boyhood at sea. There are various garish and frankly absurd legends surrounding Tavurek’s seafaring days, from abduction and seduction at the hands of exotic island queens, to savage battles with pirates where it’s said he learned his deadly skills. Surely the most outlandish of these fables is the future king’s epic battle with a giant, many-tentacled monstrosity from the ocean depths. Naturally, he emerged the victor but with wounds so severe he lay near death for several days. Whatever the truth of these tales, it is clear that by the time Tavurek rose to prominence he was both widely travelled and physically formidable. To the Kethians, however, his most important virtue was not his martial prowess but his passionate hatred of the Volarians.

Karvalev has left us a record of Tavurek’s first public address to the Kethian populace. Allowing for some poetic phrasing which can almost certainly be ascribed to the scholar’s hand, the speech provides an unambiguous insight into Tavurek’s virulent anti-Volarian stance:

Can they even be called men? These beasts, these curs, these wretches? Where is their honour, I ask you? Where is their courage? Where is their religion? They call us blasphemers. They say we dishonour the gods whilst their every act is an abomination. There is more religion in my dog!

References to the gods abound in Tavurek’s speeches. A Kethian ambassador to Alpira named him as the most devout man ever to sit on the throne, and we can say with some certainty that the new king considered his mission to be a divine one. They have called to me, my friend, Karvalev has him saying one evening as they shared a sparse meal of berries and water, it being the custom for Kethian kings to live frugally. The gods . . . I have heard their voice, and they name me their instrument on earth. The Volarian filth must be wiped away.

This does, of course, raise the possibility that Tavurek may have been insane, or at least partly delusional. If so, it was a shared delusion, for his people never wavered in their support, even unto death.

The first serious clash came barely two months after Tavurek’s ascension to the throne when he led a fleet of warships directly into the Cut of Lokar. The king’s express intention was to choke off Volarian commerce, weakening the city in advance of an invasion. This proved a wildly ambitious notion. It appears the Volarians may have had some forewarning of Tavurek’s intentions, for his fleet soon found itself attacked in front and rear. A Verehlan sailor was witness to the subsequent debacle and gave the following account to an Alpiran associate several months later:

It all happened at night and at first I thought the gods had set both sky and sea afire. I saw many men tumbling from burning ships, alight and screaming as the Volarian mangonels did their work, the fireballs falling like a fiery rain. The Cut is rich in white-nosed sharks, small but vicious buggers they are, like to swarm on you in packs. There was so much for them to feed on it seemed the sea was boiling. By morning the shore was thick with wrecks, some Volarian but mostly Kethian, and the sharks were still busy feeding.

Tavurek somehow managed to survive the calamity and return to Kethia with the remnants of his fleet. Oddly, for a king who had authored such a calamity he was greeted with universal acclaim and there is no record of any dissent among the Kethian populace. He has a way about him, Karvalev said of Tavurek in the aftermath of the disaster. A means of capturing the souls of all men. I have never truly understood it, but even I find no room for doubt in my heart. I have never been more certain; this man is meant to lead us.

After such naked aggression it was inevitable that the Volarian counterblow would be swift. Kethia was soon blockaded, the Volarian fleet forcing all ships to seek harbour elsewhere regardless of flag, even sinking a dozen neutral vessels when their captains proved deaf to intimidation. However, the main blow would be delivered by land rather than sea. There are various estimates of the size of the Volarian army that marched into Kethian territory barely three months later, from Karvalev’s surely exaggerated half a million to Entril’s more restrained but still barely credible two hundred thousand. However, it was surely a formidable force, possibly the largest army to take the field during the Forging Age, and certainly the most experienced.

The vile practice of employing slaves in Volarian armies would not take root for another four centuries, so their soldiers of this period were all free men. The basic Volarian military unit consisted of the infantry battalion with an official complement of one thousand men, though many would remain under strength in the field as battle and sickness inevitably took a toll. Most soldiers were conscripts aged between sixteen and twenty-five, their numbers swelled for the Kethian campaign by reservists called back to the army by emergency Council decree. Most battalions were a mix of youthful conscripts and veterans who had chosen a career in the army in preference to the often dire uncertainties of Volarian civilian life; the practice of enslaving impoverished debtors had been enshrined in law by this point, and life for those without wealthy family connections could be highly unpleasant. At the very least the army offered some measure of security. Three meals a day, a w***e twice a week and a battle every now and then to sate the belly and fill the purse with loot, Entril records his senior sergeant saying. The recipe for a happy soldier, Honoured Commander.

Although life in the army may have been preferable to poverty, standards of discipline were so rigid as to border on sadism. The most lenient punishment prescribed by the Volarian military code consisted of ten strokes of a barbed whip, usually meted out for such crimes as an unpolished breastplate or tarnished belt buckle. Unauthorised drunkenness earned fifteen strokes, and disrespect to an officer twenty, which may well have been fatal for many recipients. The harshest punishment was reserved for deserters, who could expect to have their hands and feet cut off and the stumps coated in pitch before being set upon by a pack of slave-hounds. A particularly cruel, but undoubtedly effective disciplinary measure took the form of collective punishment for battalions deemed to have acted in a cowardly fashion. One hundred men would be chosen by lot and obliged to lead the charge in the next engagement, completely naked and armed only with a single sword. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that those who fought the Volarians often spoke of their unmatched bravery.

In addition to the standard battalions the Volarians also maintained a number of elite, all-veteran formations, each with a long list of battle honours and bearing a name rather than the bland number afforded other units. These names were mostly derived from the heroes of legend, ‘Livella’s Blades’ and ‘The Sons of Korsev’ being perhaps the most celebrated, having fought in every major engagement of the Forging Age without ever tasting defeat. In the struggle that followed, however, even such formidable soldiers would come to learn that invincibility in war is a myth.

Whilst the bulk of the Volarian army consisted of infantry, they did maintain strong cavalry contingents, mostly drawn from the sons of the wealthy merchant class, and a highly effective, perhaps crucial corps of military engineers. Via a remarkably swift series of bridging operations, it was these engineers that enabled the Volarians to cover more than one hundred miles of Kethian territory within the first five days of the campaign, all without meeting serious opposition or word of the invasion reaching Tavurek, now licking his wounds in Kethia. Once word arrived, however, the king lost no time in responding.

Kethia had a small standing army of perhaps twenty thousand men, though its strength had been severely denuded by the Battle of the Cut. To augment this meagre force Kethia had instituted a long-standing tradition of hiring mercenaries from far and wide, a practice that had increased tenfold with the advent of war. So it is unsurprising that the picture Karvalev paints of the force that marched out to confront the Volarians is a cosmopolitan one, as well as shedding more light on Tavurek’s uncanny ability to inspire loyalty in even the most hardened heart:

Archers from the shores of the Jarven Sea took their place alongside dark-skinned slingers from Vehrel. Lancers from Atethia called ‘brother’ to savage pale-skinned axe-men from the northern mountains. And all bowed low to mighty Tavurek, giving solemn oath to follow him to the fire pit and fight the Dermos themselves should he so ask. That this oath was truly spoken, none can doubt, for these men no longer received pay. They came to us as mercenaries but stayed as loyal Kethians, and as such they died.

As ever, sources vary in estimating the size of the Kethian force, but it was almost certainly outnumbered by at least two to one. Despite the disparity in strength, the clash that followed four days later was anything but one-sided. The two armies met at a point some thirty miles from Kethia and barely a mile inland from the southern bank of the Cut of Lokar. The Volarians had wisely opted to keep close to the shore in order to enable constant resupply by their fleet, another factor in the swiftness of their march. Entril describes the battlefield as: