The Price of Valor (The Shadow Campaigns, Band 3) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Django Wexler is the author of the Shadow Campaigns novels, including The Infernal Battalion, The Guns of Empire, The Price of Valor, The Shadow Throne, and The Thousand Names. His forthcoming novel, Dungeons & Dragons: Spelljammer: Memory's Wake, will release in June 2024. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. When not planning Shadow Campaigns, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts. He is also the author of the middle-grade and YA fantasy novels.

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PROLOGUE

IGNAHTA SEMPRIA

Such pretty country, to be soaked in blood.

South of the city of Desland, the valley of the river Velt flattened out into a rolling carpet of fields, gridded by neat hedgerows and punctuated by tiny orderly hamlets, each with its tall-spired church tipped by a golden double circle. The river itself traced out a series of lazy curves, as though exhausted by its frantic descent from the highlands, and it flashed like molten silver in the warm autumn sun. Here and there, lone hills rose from the endless flat farmland like islands jutting out of the sea, crowned with gnarled, ancient trees, the last remaining strongholds of the great forests that had covered this land before the arrival of men.

Atop one of those hills, at the edge of one of those primeval woods, a man sat cross-legged on a boulder and stared down at the plain below. He was a young man, barely out of boyhood, with nut-brown hair and a wispy mustache. Dressed in leathers and homespun, he could have been mistaken for a native, the son of a peasant farmer come to trap or gather wood in the old forest.

In fact, he was a very long way from home, and he had no interest in firewood or game. His name was Wren. In his saddlebags, carefully folded and secured inside a lockbox, he carried a velvet mask sewn with a layer of glittering, clicking obsidian. It marked him as a servant of an order out of legend, one that was supposedly a hundred years dead: the Priests of the Black, fell agents of the Elysian Church, its spies and inquisitors.

Even within the hidden fraternity who carried out the will of the Black Priests, Wren was of a special breed. He had spoken the true name of a demon, and would play host to the creature until the end of his days. When his death came, he would be condemned to eternal torment for daring to traffic with the supernatural. He had accepted this burden, and the certainty of this ultimate fate, to serve the Church and save others from suffering similar punishment. He was one of the Ignahta Sempria, the Penitent Damned.

*   *   *

Wren stared down at the plain, across the miles, to a place where many campfires had lately burned like fireflies. At that distance, most men would have seen nothing but the fields and the rivers, but Wren’s demon was with him. He could feel it in his eyes, a tight feeling like someone twisting knotted cords around his skull, and it sharpened his vision to excruciating precision. Tiny men in blue milled and marched and formed ranks, teams of horses were harnessed to cannon, and cavalrymen checked their saddles and mounted. An army, preparing for battle.

The brush beside him rustled. With his demon’s strength wholly poured into his eyes, Wren’s hearing was no better than a normal man’s, and only the discipline of long training kept him from starting at the sound. Instead he let out a long breath and forced himself to relax, letting his demon return to its resting state. Between blinks, the clarity of his vision faded, though it still would have put any hawk to shame. Sound rushed back in, every tiny rustle and animal noise of the forest now as obvious as a fanfare. He could hear the heartbeats of the two men who now stood beside him, and their breathing was as loud as the rasp of a bellows.

“The Vordanai are breaking camp,” he said. He spoke in Murnskai, the native tongue of those raised in the fortress-temple of Elysium. “But not to retreat. Vhalnich will offer battle to di Pfalen.”

“Bold,” said the man on his left.

He was much older than Wren, well into middle age, with a bald dome of skull sticking up from a ring of black and gray. His name, the only one that Wren had ever heard anyone use, was the Liar. Like Wren, he was dressed in simple peasant garb, but his hands might have invited comment: his nails were each at least an inch long, and painted with gleaming white resin.

“Di Pfalen has the numbers,” Wren said. “He has broken his force into three columns to attempt to cut off Vhalnich’s escape.”

The Liar snorted. “I might not be so confident in his place, given Vhalnich’s reputation.”

Wren shrugged. The Liar liked to pass himself off as an expert in military matters, as in everything else, but the basic situation was simple enough. The revolution that had broken out after the death of King Farus VIII had shocked the civilized world, placing a sacred monarch in thrall to a mere elected parliament. With due encouragement from Elysium, the great powers of the west—Borel, Murnsk, and the Free Cities League—had gone to war to restore the rightful order. But declaration of war was one thing, and action another. Seafaring Borel preferred the slow weapons of blockade and economic warfare, while vast, backward Imperial Murnsk could take months to assemble her armies.

The League, on the other hand, was not a nation but a bickering, fractious collection of semi-independent polities. Vheed, Norel, and the more distant cities had sent only token contingents or empty promises to the supposedly common cause. Only Hamvelt and its close allies had leapt at the chance to defeat their longtime rival. So it was here, to familiar plains between Essyle and Desland, where the ever-shifting border between Vordan and the League ran, that the Vordanai had sent their newly minted hero. Janus bet Vhalnich. Conqueror of Khandar, vanquisher of the Last Duke, savior of Vordan. Heretic. Sorcerer.

“We will observe the result,” the Liar said. “If Vhalnich falls, or is taken, our task is simplified. If not . . .”

The third man grunted. He stood with his arms crossed over his massive chest, more than a head taller than either of his companions. His craggy face was made ferocious by a thick, unkempt black beard like wild thornbush, and his small dark eyes glared out ferociously from deep, sunken sockets. While he was dressed like the other two, no one would ever take him for a simple laborer. Quite aside from his enormous frame, the air of menace he projected was unmistakable. His name was Twist. Wren had rarely heard him speak more than a single word at a time, and often he was not even that voluble.

“Either way,” Wren said, “we’ll need to get closer.” They were still a solid day’s ride from the place that would soon become a battlefield.

The Liar nodded. “We will seek another vantage. Ready the horses.”

Wren got to his feet, legs aching from too long spent absolutely still, and suppressed a frown. The Penitent Damned had no formal hierarchy among themselves, no ranks or chain of command apart from their shared obedience to the Pontifex of the Black. On the rare occasions when they did not work alone, their orders made it explicit who was to lead. The Liar was an agent of many years’ standing, and this was Wren’s first mission outside Murnsk, so it made sense that the older man was in charge. But Wren occasionally suspected the Liar of harboring a taste for idleness and worldly pleasures that was inappropriate for his position, and it led him to treat Wren like a servant instead of an equal. It was something to raise with the pontifex on their return.

They had six horses, enough to carry their gear and provide remounts if they needed a burst of speed. Wren went through the familiar ritual of preparing saddles and tack, loading the camp supplies, and fixing each animal with his supernatural senses for a few moments, listening to their breathing and heartbeats. Satisfied that nothing was amiss, he led them one by one to the edge of the woods. Last in line was Twist’s mount, a huge, stocky gelding matched to the big man’s...