Shadows and Crows (The Lost Book 2)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  The Lost Book 2

  by

  Peter Nealen

  An imprint of Galaxy’s Edge Press

  PO BOX 534

  Puyallup, Washington 98371

  Copyright © 2021 by Galaxy’s Edge, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  www.forgottenruin.com

  www.wargatebooks.com

  Chapter 1

  Smoke rose over the green hills, shrouding the white stone houses around the tall watchtower and the blood red sails that dotted the dark, choppy seas beyond in a veil of gray. Thick, boiling plumes billowed from burning roofs, and figures darted between the white walls of the coastal village, while cries of alarm and war rose over the crackle of the flames.

  I glanced to my right and left as Rodeffer, Farrar, and Santos moved up through the trees to either side. Gunny Taylor was just past Santos, falling in at roughly the center of our loose skirmish line, and he stepped up to an ancient, wind-twisted oak, laid his M110 in the fork of a low limb, and took a moment to survey the situation through his scope.

  I followed suit, getting behind a mossy rock and laying my own M110 in a slight trough in the stone. The rest of the platoon, along with Mathghaman’s small warband, got down and scanned the fishing village.

  We’d ridden as fast as some of us could ride horses from the city of Aith an Rih as soon as the smoke had begun to rise from the headland and the bells had sounded the alarm. There hadn’t been time to brief the situation in detail, even if the Tuacha da Riamog had had all the details.

  They might have. They’re a perilous people, and they know things that seem impossible to us mere Recon Marines. But there still hadn’t been time.

  Now I got a sight picture full of a large man, pale and brown haired, with a spade of a beard and shaved upper lip, wearing quilted armor and a bronze helmet with black wings rising from its rim. The sword in his hand tapered to a wicked point, and his hexagonal shield was faced with hide, painted in a dragon design with a long, twisted tongue.

  I watched as he pointed toward the tall, white limestone guard tower that doubled as a lighthouse for the headland, guarding the entrance to the great bay where Aith an Rih sat. Arrows rained down from the tower where most of the fishermen and their families had fled as the corsairs landed, but a knot of fully two dozen men, their shields interlocked above their heads, were moving toward the base of the tower. They were all dressed and armed similarly to the giant with the black wings on his helmet, though to varying degrees of richness.

  These weren’t the savage Dovos we’d fought up north. They wore more than skins, and they carried considerably finer weapons and equipment. I’d doubted that the Dovos could make the passage across that vast sea between the Land of Ice and Monsters and the Isle of Riamog, anyway.

  There were a lot of them, though. And while an army of Tuacha was behind us, in glittering armor and carrying swords that could probably cleave through any one of these men from shoulder to crotch without slowing down, we were twenty-one men, counting Mathghaman and his five companions, against probably two hundred reavers who were either besieging the tower or running amok through the village, burning and pillaging.

  Gunny’s first shot was the signal to open the ball. I watched his bullet tear through the big man’s quilted gambeson, and the man staggered, looking down uncomprehendingly at the growing red stain in his side. I followed up Gunny’s shot with one of my own, slightly higher and more to the centerline. Gunny had hit him, but the bullet hadn’t dropped him. Mine blasted through his sternum, and he dropped.

  My rifle wasn’t really an M110, not technically. It was the closest thing that King Caedmon’s Coira Ansec, an artifact that looked like a gigantic golden cauldron, had produced from my mental image of one. It was balanced a little differently, and the forearm was something closer to MLOK than the Picatinny rail mine had had on it. It probably functioned a bit better than an actual M110, too.

  My original M110 had been left behind on the USS Makin Island when we’d inserted, heading to Norway but ultimately bound for this strange, spooky world where we’d found ourselves fighting for our lives with nothing but M4s, knives, and guts against monsters, savages, and sorcery.

  I transitioned to another raider, even as an arrow as long as my arm smashed through his shield and into his teeth from above. Those Tuacha bows were nothing to sniff at.

  A horn sounded, loud and braying over the roar of the fires, the clash of arrows hammering into shields, and the yells of battle. The raiders reacted quickly, turning to present their shields toward us and falling back down the bank toward the sea and their beached ships.

  We paused, and I glanced over at Gunny and Mathghaman again. Both men were studying the situation with narrowed eyes. Mathghaman, a man of some importance among the Tuacha, or so I’d gathered, had a lot more experience with these corsairs, from what he’d said on the way here. But I didn’t think even he’d expected such a quick and disciplined response to the opening fusillade of gunfire that had laid nearly two dozen raiders in the dirt, their lifeblood leaking out into the sand and the turf.

  Mathghaman had a rifle of his own, though he was a swordsman by training and tradition. It looked more like an old Hawken than one of our M110s, never mind the Mk 48s that Farrar, Applegate, and Franks were carrying now. It was every bit as deadly as an M110, fired every bit as quickly, and he could use its iron sights every bit as effectively as we used our magnified optics. It just looked more…elegant.

  Gunny waved at me, and I jogged over to join him, along with Bailey and Gurke, the other two team leaders who’d escaped the tunnels beneath Taramas’s citadel.

  Mathghaman was still watching the fishing village, where the fighting and pillaging had momentarily stilled as the corsairs retreated and reformed, his gray eyes narrowed but unblinking.

  “I take it this isn’t normal for them?” Gunny was watching Mathghaman more than he was the enemy at the moment. Shorter than me by half a head, he barely came to Mathghaman’s chin, but Gunny Taylor was as hard as they came, and he was the man that we’d all look to for leadership first, no matter how much we might respect Mathghaman.

  “No, it is not.” Mathghaman wasn’t speaking English, but thanks to a gift of the Tuacha they called the “mind speech,” we could understand him perfectly anyway. “They must suspect some Tuacha sorcery.” His tone turned wry at that. I could easily understand why. I’d seen the Tuacha do some prodigious things, but “sorcery” wouldn’t be the term I’d use. More like “miracle.”

  Gunny scanned the terrain around us. The corsairs’ retreat had put them into the low ground, just above the beach. A line of trees stretched up the headland toward the tower, where the corsairs still hadn’t penetrated. He pointed. “Conor, Ross, take your teams and move up to that headland. We’ll hold here and establish a base of fire.” He grinned wolfishly. “Let’s add to the legends about what happens when these bastards raid the Isle of Riamog, shall we?”

  Gurke and I nodded, and I turned and hurried back to where Santos, a big, shaved ape of a man, Farrar, lean and hungry, and Rodeffer, wiry and long-limbed, waited in the trees, up on their weapons and looking for targets. The corsairs weren’t obliging though. Only the occasional potshot sounded across the coast, and that felt more like probing fire than kill shots.

  We had resupply thanks to King Caedmon now, though it had seemed to me that there were limits to what the Coira Ansec could or would do. At least it hadn’t been stingy with ammo so far. So, we weren’t nearly as worried about conserving ammunition as we had been up north.

  Still, it was weird. These guys were acting like they’d seen guns before and had some sort of plan to counteract our fire. That wasn’t good. Had they heard stories from the Dovos and the Fohorimans in the north? Mathghaman had said these were a different enemy, but I wondered.

  I wondered even more when something flew up from the shore, dark and somehow blurry even when I tracked in on it with my scope. That wasn’t good. We’d seen things like that in the north, even if only out of the corner of the eye. The Dovos’ shamans and the Fohorimans, the twisted, deformed monstrosities that had once been men and women but had long since sold their souls, had apparently used them the way we’d used drones back in The World. I didn’t know what they were, but they
were a threat, if only because they appeared to serve as the enemy’s eyes and ears.

  The thing skimmed through the air toward us. I didn’t hear the leathery flapping sound that something similar had made in the north, but a hissing croak echoed over the burning fishing village, strangely loud given the other noise of battle and the fires.

  As we hustled past Mathghaman and Gunny, heading for the forested flank on the headland, I saw Mathghaman tracking the dark, blurry thing in the air, his eyes narrowed. He whispered something as he lifted his rifle.

  The boom of the shot silenced the croak. I glanced up in time to see the vaguely corvine silhouette dissolve into oily black smoke and vanish. I nodded with some satisfaction. The Tuacha were not defenseless on the preternatural battlefield. We kept going, moving quickly through the trees and up toward the tower on the headland.

  But though Mathghaman had killed or banished their spying creature, the damage was done. Their sorcerer was doing something new. I could feel it as we slipped through the forest, a growing thunderstorm tension in the air. Despite the sea breeze, it felt like the air under the treetops was getting thick and stuffy. It was getting faintly hard to breathe, and I could smell something raw and metallic on the air.

  It wasn’t far to the tower, barely a thousand yards, and we were moving light. Our uniforms and equipment had changed a bit since we’d inserted off the USS Makin Island, somewhere far away in time and space. We all wore knee-length hauberks of green-enameled mail now, light and supple but proof against a lot of arrows and blades. They had mail hoods we could pull up over our heads, under light metal helms that we’d fitted with NVG mounts. But the armor weighed very little, and we hadn’t brought our rucks to fight corsairs on what was friendly territory.

  So, it was only a few minutes before we’d reached the edge of the woods on the headland and spread out among the rocks and the oaks, looking for a shot at the mob of corsairs down by the beach. But by then, things had already started happening.

  Weird, sonorous chanting rose from the beach. As I got behind a massive, ancient oak and got on my rifle, I saw that the corsairs had formed a shield wall in a great crescent around the largest of the beached ships. The ships themselves were high-prowed, black-painted and carved with snarling beasts. They looked a bit more Mediterranean to my admittedly unpracticed eye than Viking. But neither name had any meaning here, anyway.

  The shield wall surrounded a knot of raiders, kneeling and swaying around an emaciated, hunchbacked figure draped in black rags. I couldn’t make out his face, as it was hidden beneath a deep, black cowl. But pale, crooked arms reached out from the rags wrapped around the figure’s shoulders, fingers like claws grasping at the sky as the figure twitched and spasmed, as it continued that droning, buzzing chant.

  I might not have been the best-versed in the magic and monsters stuff, but I knew a threat when I saw one. And we’d all seen enough in the north to know that sorcery was a very real threat. I put my crosshairs on the twitching figure in rags and took up the slack on the trigger.

  Two things happened in the next fraction of a second. As my trigger broke, one of the raiders in the circle sprang to his feet. Actually, it looked more like he was yanked to his feet by some irresistible, invisible force. And he stood up, right in front of the shot I’d meant for the sorcerer. I saw him get hit, saw the puff of blood and debris as my bullet punched through his lamellar armor and into his back. It was only about a four-hundred-yard shot.

  A 7.62x51 round hits pretty damn hard at four hundred yards. Especially when it goes through a man’s heart and lungs, never mind his spine, which I’m pretty sure I’d just severed. And yet he stayed on his feet.

  Then the sorcerer let out a ragged shout that buzzed and fritzed like a badly tuned radio, reached far over his head, and pulled down.

  And the storm clouds above us suddenly dropped.

  Chapter 2

  In an eyeblink, we were engulfed in cloud, rain, hail, and howling wind. It didn’t faze us that much—Recon likes bad weather—but it dropped visibility to zero.

  Which was probably the point.

  “Bring it in! On me!” I had to bellow over the roar of the storm, even as the oak groaned and its branches lashed at me, leaves torn loose by the wind and the hail and sent whirling around us, adding more obscurant to the swirling clouds, rain, and hail.

  They were coming, I knew it, and the storm was going to not only keep them out of sight, but it was also going to cover any noise they made. I squinted against the battering, peering over my sights and looking for the enemy.

  With a roar, the first one was on me a second later, even as Rodeffer reached my tree, struggling against the wind. A small man, clad in scale armor and wearing a helmet crowned with a circular horsehair crest, came out of the storm, his hexagonal shield held out in front of him, his eyes slightly vacant as he launched a javelin at my head.

  He missed. I didn’t. I snapped my M110 up, put my offset red dot on his chest, and shot him through the shield. He was moving too fast for anything but a center-mass shot, but the bullet smashed straight through his shield and his breastplate. He crashed onto his face as the life went out of him.

  Another, similarly armed and armored but with an axe raised behind his head to take a swipe at my neck, loomed out of the clouds a moment later, and I put a bullet between his eyes before the next two were on top of me.

  I shot one, double-tapping 7.62 rounds through his chest and throat, and he dropped as blood sprayed from a shredded carotid artery. I ducked the swipe of the second’s axe, buttstroked him in the guts, then flipped the muzzle over and shot him through the skull at contact distance. Blood spurted out of the hole in his helmet as he fell, and brain matter oozed from his shattered crown.

  Then I was just dumping rounds into bodies as fast as I could get a blurry sight picture and squeeze the trigger. The corsairs had gotten spread out in the storm as they’d rushed us, which was a good thing. If they’d come at us in a coherent formation, we might have killed a dozen of them before they swept us under.

  As it was, Rodeffer, Santos, and I kept shooting them down as they came out of the swirling, howling gray, until one after another our bolts locked back on empty mags.

  There wasn’t time to reload, and since we were well inside fifteen yards when the next one, a towering giant of a man with the same ISIS beard as the first one I’d shot, swinging a massive, spiked club with both hands, came out of the storm, I slung my rifle to my back and drew my sword.

  I’d taken that blade off a dead Dovo in the gatehouse of an ancient, abandoned castle carved into the solid rock of a solitary tor, far in the north. He’d had the quillons, grip, and pommel wrapped because the runes set into the blessed blade and its hilts must have made his eyes itch. Gunny had cut the wrappings off, and Mathghaman himself had told me to continue to bear the weapon. It was the only one we’d had that could carve up some of the unnatural things we’d encountered up there.

  Now I got it behind the round, bronze-faced shield I’d gotten from the Tuacha, and waded in.

  I’d learned a lot from Mathghaman and Bearrac over the weeks since we’d sailed away from Teac Mor Farragah. I smoothly deflected the swing of the axe, then whipped my sword into the opening that the deflected blow had left.

  He was fast, though, and danced back as two more corsairs came up to either side of him. I still nicked him, and blood began to flow down his arm as he snatched his axe back to cover his front, standing shoulder to shoulder with the growing rank of corsairs hunched behind their shields.

  Then a bullet tore through his eye and splashed blood, brains, bone, and hair into the next man’s face. Rodeffer had taken advantage of that momentary pause as I’d stepped forward to reload.

  I backed up as Rodeffer continued dumping rounds into the advancing ranks of corsairs. I’ll be honest, a part of me just wanted to wade in there and come to grips with them, sword cleaving flesh and bone, hand to hand like nature and Robert E. Howard intended. But when you’ve got an advantage in a fight, especially when you’re outnumbered, you use it. So, I backed up, let the sword dangle from its loop around my wrist, slung my shield to my back again, snatched up my rifle, and reloaded.