The Magelands Origins Read online

  The Magelands Origins

  Christopher Mitchell is the author of the epic fantasy series The Magelands. He studied in Edinburgh before living for several years in the Middle East and Greece, where he taught English. He returned to study classics and Greek tragedy and lives in Fife, Scotland with his wife and their four children.

  By Christopher Mitchell

  The Magelands Epic

  From the Ashes

  The Queen’s Executioner

  The Severed City

  Needs of the Empire

  Sacrifice

  The Magelands Origins

  (The Trials of Daphne Holdfast

  & Retreat of the Kell)

  Copyright © Christopher Mitchell 2019

  Cover Illustration by Irina French

  Cover Typography by Deranged Doctor Design

  Cover Copyright © Brigdomin Books Ltd 2019

  Christopher Mitchell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems (except for the use of brief quotations in a book review), if you would like permission to use material from the book please contact [email protected]

  Brigdomin Books Ltd

  First Edition, September 2019

  ISBN 978-1-912879-20-5

  For Kara bear

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following for all their support during the writing of the Magelands - my wife, Lisa Mitchell, who read every chapter as soon as it was drafted and kept me going in the right direction; Graeme Innes for reading the manuscripts and sharing many discussions over whisky; my parents for their unstinting support; Amy Tavendale, Sandra and Donna Wheat and Vicky Williams for reading the books in their early stages; James Aitken for his encouragement; and the Film Club and Stef Karpa for their support.

  Special thanks goes to Irina French, whose incredible artwork for the maps and covers brought my characters and world so beautifully to life.

  Thanks also to my Magelanders ARC team, for all your help during the last few weeks before publication.

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  The Peoples of the Star Continent

  There are five distinct peoples inhabiting the Star Continent. Three are descended from apes, one from reptiles, and one from amphibians. Their evolutionary trajectories have converged, and all five are clearly ‘humanoid’, though physical differences remain.

  1.The Holdings – the closest to our own world’s Homo sapiens. Excepting the one in ten of the population with mage powers, they are completely human. The Holdings sub-continent drifted south from the equator, and the people that inhabit the Realm are dark-skinned as a consequence. They are shorter than the Kellach Brigdomin, but taller than the Rakanese.

  2.The Rakanese – descended from amphibians, but appear human, except for the fact that they have slightly larger eyes, and are generally shorter than Holdings people. They are descendants of a far larger population that once covered a vast area, and consequently their skin-colour ranges from pale to dark. Mothers gestate their young for only four months, before giving birth in warm spawn-pools, where the infants swim and feed for a further five months. A dozen are born in an average spawning.

  3.The Rahain – descended from reptiles. Appear human, except for two differences. Firstly, their eyes have vertical pupils, and are often coloured yellow or green, and, secondly, their tongues have a vestigial fork or cleft at their tip. Their heights are comparable to the Holdings and the Sanang. Skin-colour tends to be pale, as the majority are cavern-dwellers. Their skin retains a slight appearance of scales, and they have no fingerprints. They are the furthest from our world’s humans.

  4.The Kellach Brigdomin – descended from apes, and very similar to the Holdings, they are the second closest to our world’s humans. Their distinguishing traits are height (they are the tallest of the five peoples), pale skin (their sub-continent drifted north from a much colder region), and immunity to most diseases, toxins and illnesses. They are also marked by the fact that mothers give birth to twins in the majority of cases.

  5.The Sanang – descended from apes, but evolved in the forest, rather than on the open plains that produced the Holdings. As a consequence, their upper arms and shoulders are wider and stronger than those of people from the Holdings or Rahain. They are pale-skinned, their sub-continent having arrived from colder climates in the south, and they occupy the same range of heights as the Holdings and Rahain. The males bear some traits of earlier Homo sapiens, such as a sloping forehead and a strong jaw-line, but the brains of the Sanang are as advanced as those of the other four peoples of the continent.

  Dramatis Personae

  Holdings

  Daphne Holdfast, Cavalry Captain

  Jaimes, Sergeant and aide to Daphne

  Chane, Lieutenant

  Mink, Lieutenant

  Dex, Lieutenant

  Wilkom, Lieutenant

  Manahan, Chief Doctor

  Delia, Junior Doctor

  Jonnas, Junior Doctor

  Garrick, Junior Doctor

  Dreff, Chief Engineer

  Rijon, Priest

  Billock, Quartermaster

  Harrian, Sergeant of Company Battlers

  Weir, Sergeant

  Goldie, Sergeant

  Ethan, Sugar Merchant

  Jorge, Daphne's boyfriend

  Holder Fast, Daphne’s father

  Sandy, scavenger

  Mabel, scavenger

  Howie, Holdings Field Marshal

  Bruit, Archdeacon - Capital

  Barker, Chief Justice - Capital

  Lessing, Deacon - Capital

  Summel, Captain of Household Cavalry

  Ariel, Daphne's sister

  Sanang

  Agang Garo, Chief of the Beechwoods

  B'Dang D'Bang, Tattooed Warlord

  Badalecht Nang, Beechwoods Hedgewitch

  Echtang Gabo, Agang's nephew

  Gadang Gabo, Agang's nephew

  Rahain

  Douanna, Rahain Trader

  Jaioun, Douanna's Butler

  The Trials of Daphne Holdfast

  Christopher Mitchell

  Contents

  1. The Mask

  2. The Sighting

  3. Into Battle

  4. Bloody-Minded

  5. Fractured

  6. Trauma

  7. Beechwoods

  8. With the Enemy

  9. The Turn

  10. Into the Forest

  11. On the Edge

  12. Douanna

  13. Arraignment

  14. Appeal

  15. In Her Head

  16. Confession

  17. Holders Square

  Retreat of the Kell

  18. Green Leathers

  19. Between the Lines

  20. Minding the Dead

  21. Unmade

  22. Crash Site

  23. Kalayne

  24. The Broken Swing

  25. Meadowhall

  26. Hit and Run

  27. Marchside (Battle of)

  28. Withdrawal

  29. Bittersweet

  30. Boiling Over

  31. The Sleeping God

&nbs
p; 32. Falling Apart

  33. Blackened Bones

  34. Fire Mountain

  Epilogue

  Author’s Notes

  The Magelands Series

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  Chapter 1

  The Mask

  River Tritos, Sanang – 15th Day, First Third Summer 503

  Daphne vomited into her bedside basin.

  Kneeling by the campbed, she wiped her lips, and shuddered. Her shoulder length brown hair fell in morning tangles about her face, sticking to her clammy forehead. She closed her eyes, struggling to keep her nausea at bay. She tried to clear her mind, but was unable to ignore the rank odour of the stale sheets or stop the assault upon her ears by the alien sounds coming from the Sanang forest that surrounded the garrison. She gagged again, her face an inch from the mattress, but nothing came.

  She tried to think of the wide open plains of home, but voices kept asking if this was the day she would be found out, if this was the day the garrison finally concluded she was unsuited to command. Her officers knew she was inexperienced, and the more some whispered that she had only obtained her commission through her father’s influence, the more she was starting to believe it might be true. Her hands shook as she gripped the twisted, sweat-dampened sheets, a morning chill having removed all traces of the previous night’s humidity, and raising goosebumps on her dark skin.

  It was taking longer each morning for her normal self, as she contrived to call it, to reappear. Her confident, smart young officer-self, who she would probably like if she hadn’t been so painfully aware it was an act, a mask she had learned to put on at will.

  She raised her eyes. The dirty grey canvas walls of her personal quarters hung sullenly in the dawn air. Patches of lighter grey spread up from the eastern side, dappling the room in patterns of mottled gloom.

  She clenched and unclenched her fists, waiting for her stomach to settle. She knew the source of the debilitating nausea that she felt every morning, and understood the reason it was worsening: the expected orders from command to commence the withdrawal were late. Fifteen days had passed since Summer’s Day, the date most had predicted they would begin dismantling the fort in preparation for the long march home.

  This year’s invasion of Sanang had gone smoothly, and the villages, farms and settlements they had swept through had been abandoned and derelict, left un-repaired from the previous year’s attack. Of the enemy, she and her company of troopers had seen no sign, not a single Sanang had shown themselves on the route to their current position just south of a bend in the River Tritos, deep within the forest tribes’ land. None had approached as her soldiers had felled trees and built their palisaded fort on a steep three sided rise twenty paces from the southern bank of the river. It didn’t seem possible to invade a land for an entire season and not see a single inhabitant. They had occupied the fort for over a third and a half, how much longer would the Sanang remain out of sight?

  She grimaced. Knowing the source of her anxiety did nothing to alleviate it. She felt herself slip on her mask, that of an unflappable Holdings cavalry captain, a look she hoped oozed the confidence she rarely felt. Looking back, she wondered at the comparative ease with which she had carried out her command before Summer’s Day, when her dawn anxiety attacks had started. Now with her mask on, she could hide her fears, foremost of which was that her officers would realise she had no idea how to answer the question – what would they do if the orders never came? It was a question that devoured her every thought if she let it, if she didn’t concentrate on what was going on around her. She was exhausted.

  She retched painfully, but knew that morning’s bout of nausea was starting to pass. Her breathing was back under control, and she smiled. She told herself there was nothing to worry about. This, her first proper command posting in Sanang, was as routine as could be. The previous year, the advanced fort companies had suffered barely one in forty casualties from any actual contact with the enemy. Three times as many had perished from disease or had been lost to accidents. Garrisoning had been boringly uneventful, and the retreat elegantly coordinated, with the entire army back behind the frontier wall a third and a half after the phased withdrawal had begun. She knew this to be true, because she had been there – posted to the southern fort directly adjoining the frontier wall as a lieutenant in the army staff, organising traffic through the great gates. Carts and wagons had passed through day after day, creating road jams miles long. Those heading west into Sanang were crammed with soldiers and army supplies, while the ones trundling east on their way back to the Holdings were laden with as much Sanang booty as could be hauled away as quickly as possible. And what was possible, Daphne learnt, had turned out to be quite a lot. Timber, coffee, chocolate, swine and a multitude of other treasures were being stripped from the forest in what the Holdings referred to in polite company as ‘tribute’, but which was in fact organised pillage on an unbelievable scale. Well, she thought, if the Sanang hadn’t gone and massacred that Holdings trade delegation, then the two peoples could be happily rubbing along by now. Trading peacefully instead of, instead of this.

  She rose to her feet, rubbing the knees of her tunic where the fraying cotton had picked up dirt from the packed soil floor. Her quarters were small, three paces by four, and she knew every detail from the many sleepless nights spent there. She stepped over to her dressing table, and washed in the clean water her aide Jaimes had brought when he had awoken her that dawn. Brushing her teeth, she turned to face her clothes stand. Dress uniform again today, she thought, glancing at her armour, fully wrapped in waterproof hides to keep it from rusting in the humid forest. She had worn it a total of five times during her command of the fort, for ceremonial or religious occasions. The troopers liked their officers to look smart on the Holy Days.

  Pulling her uniform on, she gazed into the shimmering silvered mirror on her dressing table. She straightened her captain’s shoulder insignia: a crown, and a star embossed with a rearing horse. Her dark grey dress jacket had once fitted her perfectly, having been made to size by the best tailors in Holdings City, a present from her father. That this was no longer the case, she could see in the mirror, her mother’s gift. The jacket hung loose around her frame now, the weightloss caused by a continual niggle of petty ailments, no doubt due to the strange forest air, and the bites from the swarms of blood drinking insects that drove them all into their tents each dusk. Their field infirmary usually held upwards of twenty soldiers, groaning and retching and leaking from both ends, some fevered, and others who had succumbed to extreme fatigue following bites from the nasty little bloodflies.

  While none had yet died of illness, she had lost two troopers. One, a recruit called Jek, barely out of boyhood, had fallen into the river and drowned. Swimming was not a common ability on the immense plains and grasslands where Daphne and her cavalry company had grown up. It was with an almost overwhelming sense of helplessness with which the soldiers on the riverside had watched Jek drown, his ankle caught in a fallen branch, which was preventing him from getting his head out of the water. Orders had been given for rope and poles to hook and pull him free, but by the time they had rigged it together he was already dead, and they dragged a corpse back to the bank. The priest said a few words at his burial, under a mound of soil to the south east, fifty paces from the fort. He told stories about how Jek had shown himself as brave, honourable, pious and loyal, all the things the dead are wise to be, while a couple of his squad, a male and female the same age as Jek, had sobbed, earning disapproving looks from the veterans.

  The other fatality had been caused by a savage goring from a Sanang forest beast, a boar that had stood waist high, with nine inch horns and heavily muscled shoulders covered in thick black bristles. The soldiers had hunted them for the first third after their arrival at the river, until they had driven the beasts from the vicinity, but this time the hunt had gone wrong. A corporal called Sadie had slipped and been gored and trampled, before the animal had been bro
ught down by spears. The woman’s battered body had been carried back, and the company had buried her next to Jek.

  Daphne strapped on her sword belt and picked up her hairbrush, tugging the tangles into a semblance of order. Once smoothed, she pulled her hair back and tied it with a band. She noticed a few new worry lines marking her chestnut brown skin, especially around her dark green eyes, but her mask was on, and her face looked as calm as she wished she felt.

  Smiling at her reflection, she unpegged the thick draw rope that secured the door, and stepped through into another canvas-enclosed space, several times larger than her own quarters. The meeting room was empty, excepting the presence of Sergeant Jaimes, who snapped to attention as she entered. He slept on a cot outside her door each night, and shadowed her during the day, always a pace behind her left shoulder, walking with a gait that told of a life spent more on horseback than on the ground. She nodded to him as she passed. He tipped his head in reply, and clapped his hands twice. Moments later two aproned aides entered from the opposite corner, and began to set pewter cups and plates onto the long table stretching along the back wall of the room. A large urn was carried in, along with silver spoons and bowls of sugar, and the scent of brewed leaves filled the air as tea was poured.