all about the area. It took Drem a few moments to recognize them as body parts. A hand, half a leg, a shoulder and arm, flesh tattered and torn. A torso and head, the body almost eviscerated, guts strewn about like so much old rope.
‘No,’ Drem whispered, because the head staring lifelessly into nowhere had belonged to someone he knew, someone his da called friend.
It was Calder the smith.
OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
BLEDA
Bleda walked out through the open gates of Drassil. There were a dozen paces of near-darkness as he made his way through the arched tunnel beneath the battlements and gate-tower, and then he was stepping out into the last rays of daylight, the sun a pale glow above the trees of Forn. Before him spread the field of the dead, a road cutting a line through the cairns that filled the plain. Bleda took a deep breath and marched on.
He’d looked down upon these same cairns from the tops of the battlements many times, knew that they sheltered the fallen from that day that the world changed. The day the Kadoshim and Ben-Elim had broken free from the Otherworld and become flesh.
But those same cairns had looked different when viewed from so high above, like pebbles cast upon a cloth of green fabric. Now, though, they rose to either side of Bleda, tall as him, some taller, looming, filling his world, pressing in upon him.
So many dead! Has there ever been such a battle, with so many killed?
They were covered with moss and lichen, earth filling the gaps between stones, grass and weeds growing, snails and slugs and other things scuttling between the slabs of stone. The wind sighed through them, sounding like a thousand voices, whispering.
And what would the dead tell me, of that dread Day of Wrath? Deeds of valour, of courage and honour. Of murder and slaughter?
For a moment he remembered another battle, figures on the ground like ants, the Ben-Elim swooping down upon them, screams drifting up to a young boy on a hillside. He shook his head, scattering the memories like flies, returned to the cairns and their whispers of the Battle of Drassil.
Bleda had heard the tale many times, of how the Ben-Elim’s allies were hard pressed and overwhelmed on the plain by the greater numbers of the Kadoshim’s forces. Led by the black-hearted King Nathair, if Bleda remembered right. A man who rode to battle upon the back of a draig, a fearsome beast that was all but extinct in the Banished Lands now. The Kadoshim had been the first through the portal from the Otherworld, and so had filled the skies, diving down upon the beleaguered allies of the Ben-Elim, a warband from the western realm of Ardan, wherever that was. All Bleda remembered about them was that they were led by a beautiful queen, fair as the sun.
Edana.
The Kadoshim had fallen upon them like a plague, spreading their slaughter. But the Ben-Elim had been close behind, throwing themselves through the portal from the Otherworld, risking all, as Jibril frequently told Bleda and Jin in their lessons, in a desperate bid to save the good people of the Banished Lands. Asroth had been defeated, frozen, the Kadoshim routed, their allies slain or scattered, and so had begun the Age of Lore. The Protectorate of the Ben-Elim.
The reign of the Ben-Elim, whatever they like to call it.
Bleda glanced up at the sky, pale and open now as he moved beyond the reach of the great tree’s canopy, and imagined the Kadoshim and Ben-Elim up above, blotting out the sun, swooping and spiralling in aerial combat. He could almost hear the echo of their battle-cries, their death screams, the explosions of turf as they crashed to the earth in ruin.
It must have been a sight to see.
And then he was through the cairns, the first trees of Forn growing tall either side of the road, thickening as he walked on. The world changed about him in just a few steps, becoming a place of twilight and shadow, of scratching branch, shifting light and rustling leaf. Birds called and insects chittered, wood creaking.
A forest is louder than I ever would have imagined!
He’d rarely set foot outside Drassil. He was allowed to: there were no restrictions upon him as a ward of the Ben-Elim. He was treated as an honoured guest rather than a prisoner, even if Jin said otherwise, so he was at liberty to walk out onto the plains around Drassil, or even into the