In the Trenches, Iron is King

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Once, the fates of countries and kingdoms had been decided by blood, steel, and the wills of common men. Now, battlefields of blasted earth churned under the grinding lockstep of iron beasts and their hellfire. The dragons of legend were given new life in black iron shells, while men scurried around them like rats.

The mud of the trench seeped in through the soles of Bryal’s boots. His back ached from crouching behind compacted dirt and barbed wire for hours. He reached into the pocket of his blue monarchist greatcoat, fingers brushing against the hammered steel of his cheap flask, before remembering that it was empty. It’d been empty since the day an Imperial bullet had pierced it.

“When are you going to replace that thing, old man?” A second lieutenant had called out to him days ago, when they’d huddled together under the awning of a command bunker to share a strip of bacon out of the rain.

“When we are resupplied,” Bryal had answered, his voice hoarse from tobacco.

The second lieutenant had laughed heartily.

Down in the trenches, “resupplied” meant the same as “between now and the end of days.”

Silence reigned in the trenches this morning, punctuated by the squelching of mud as men ran from end to end, carrying messages one way and bodies the other. A volley of artillery and machine-gun fire had ended just an hour ago. In this kind of war, both sides tested the other for days on end, hoping some officer with a slow mind might poke their head over and catch a sniper’s bullet.

Bryal resisted the urge to look over the edge, to see the men who were trying to kill him. It was always there, speaking in low tones at the back of his mind. Telling him that he’d be fine as long as it was just a peek. Even though he’d seen more than a few men die that way.

“Ready down the line!” a voice bellowed from further up the trench. It belonged to a whip of a man, pale as a bone, with a hook nose that looked sharp enough to cut leather.

Jehemy was a man without rank, but one whose voice always made a soldier’s taint pucker up. He was a master of dark arts. A King’s Wizard. A man who could show you your skull’s backside with a twitch of his fingers.

There were only a few of them in the trenches, making them less common than officers. Yet there always seemed to be one nearby, watching, ensuring you didn’t fail in your duty. And it always seemed as though this particular Wizard had his eye on Bryal.

Bryal averted his gaze as the Wizard approached, checking his rifle for the 15th time this hour. It was a crude thing, compared to the craftsmanship he was used to. He’d inspected each round individually before loading them, looking for pockmarks, faulty primers, and other signs they might misfire.

“Is there a problem with your rifle, soldier?” Jehemy asked, leaning in over Bryal’s shoulder.

“No problehm,” Bryal replied.

“Problem,” Jehemy repeated. “The emphasis is on the ‘o’, not the ‘em.’” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Affix your bayonet and prepare yourself for the charge,” the Wizard said before turning away, the tails of his blue greatcoat flapping behind him.

Bryal rolled his eyes. As though being the only dark-skinned man in a line of pales wasn’t enough, officers and Wizards alike constantly corrected his pronunciation.

I’ll start talking in the Imperial tongue, he thought. See how well they handle that.

A whistle blew, and men all down the line prepared themselves to go up over the edge of the trench. They cradled their rifles, tightened the straps around their boots, checked their helmets, all these little rituals meant to still a trembling hand.

“Onward,” Jehemy roared as his sabre cleared its sheath. “For the King!”

“For the King!” the shout went up along the line.

Men burst over the top of the trench, swarming over the mud like so many ants, scurrying among burnt trees, barbed wire, and craters deep enough to snap your neck in. Bryal’s heart pounded in his ears as he joined them in the mad dash across no-man’s-land.

Bullets whistled past him. Clumps of mud shot into the air as artillery shells punched deep into the earth. Men screamed as they were raked by machine-gun fire, falling just a few steps into their last charge.

But all of it paled before the dragons.

They towered over even the tallest men, with a bulk that could have knocked a locomotive off its rails. They were covered in sheets of black iron, hammered like breastplates of old and layered like the scales of a lizard. They walked with great, thundering steps, their whole structure shuddering as they moved, as though they might come apart. Heads of sharp, iron angles on short, stubby necks were the only resemblance they bore to the beasts of legend.

Well, not quite the only one.

Two of these iron monsters tangled on the battlefield, the charging monarchists giving them a wide berth. The two constructs maneuvered around each other, their jaws snapping for some vulnerable spot in the other’s armour.

One opened those jaws, letting out a roar halfway between a wolf’s howl and a ship’s horn. A great jet of flame unfurled from its throat and streamed over its opponent, turning the scales red-hot. The other dragon drunkenly lashed out with a clawed leg, catching the flaming head and knocking it aside. The flames sprayed out over the battlefield, catching a dozen unfortunate men and turning them to ash and bone.

Bryal’s legs kept pumping, mashing mud and dirt under him, as he watched the dragons struggle. Not yet, he reminded himself. Not yet. He brought his eyes forward, trying to find a hole in the tangle of barbed wire, craters, and other defences that lay between the two trenches. Some path to worm his way through and reach the enemy.

A glint of light. The kind you either recognized or it killed you.

Bryal dove as the sniper’s bullet screamed through the air. It took a chunk out of his helmet, sending him reeling. He stumbled into a crater, rolling in the mud until he splashed into the puddle at the bottom.

His ears rang. His skull rang, the bullet like a clapper to a bell.

He found his feet just in time to see a man standing at the lip of the crater, skidding to a halt. Raising a rifle.

No time to aim.

Bryal fired his own weapon. The shot went wide, but the sound of it made the man flinch. A flinch was all he needed.

With no time to pull back the rifle’s bolt, Bryal threw the weapon. It smashed into the soldier’s face. In a few long strides, Bryal reached him and pulled on an ankle. The soldier slipped, falling into the crater.

The two struggled in the mud. Bryal knocked the soldier’s rifle away, only to be flipped onto his back. Dirty water pushed into his nose as strong fingers found his throat. The soldier’s pale eyes were wide, forming creases in his dark skin, and for a moment Bryal thought they were the last thing he’d ever see.

“Brother?”

The word slipped from the soldier’s lips, spoken in the Imperial tongue. There was a loosening in the man’s grip. Slight, for only a few seconds.

But it was enough.

Bryal shoved his knee into the soldier’s chest and pushed, throwing him off. He scrambled on hands and knees until he reached the soldier. Bryal pulled a knife from his belt and sheathed it into the soldier’s gut.

“No longer,” he said, the words like poison on his tongue.

The confusion in the soldier’s eyes lasted only for two more thrusts, then the body went limp.

Bryal stood, recovering his rifle. He pulled back the bolt, and it ground through mud with a shuddering clunk, sending a spent cartridge tumbling to the mud. He doubted the rifle would ever fire again after being submerged in mud and filth. “Monarchist engineering” was an oxymoron, common in the Imperial lines.

He looked to the top of the crater, beyond which the battle still raged. Part of him, that small, wretched part in every man’s heart, told him to crouch down in his hole and hide, waiting for the battle to end. If the battle went against the monarchists, he could have taken the grey coat from the dead man, snuck his way back across the Imperial lines.

Bryal spat a wad of blood and cleared his mind. There was still so much ground to cross.

***

Joining the charge once more, Bryal dove for cover every other step, twisted both ankles in separate craters, and was sliced by razor wire from hip to toes. But after a mad dash, he finally stumbled over the edge of the Imperial trenches, looking like some monster spat out of the hells.

The Imperial soldier who saw him drop onto the rotten, soaked planks of the trench floor hesitated for a second before raising his rifle. That hesitation killed him as much as the bayonet that Bryal drove under his ribs.

There were more monarchists behind him, men and women in blues, struggling in the hand-to-hand brutality of trench warfare. Vicious clubs of sharp, hammered iron smashed skulls to pieces. Blades pierced eyes and lungs. In the rare occasion where rifles went off, the rounds ricocheted off of iron barricades or buried themselves in the dirt.

Lead ruled the open battlefield of no-man’s-land. But in the trenches, iron was king.

The monarchists told tales of ancient heroes, from a time nearly forgotten, and the battle-rages that made them fearsome conquerors. They were warriors that doubled in size when confronted by the enemy, or whose skin turned even the strongest steel.

There was no such thing as battle-rages. And yet as he worked his way through the trenches, his limbs hacking and piercing through Imperial soldiers with the same mechanical rigor of the dragons that battled in the valley, Bryal seemed a warrior from a lost time.

He finally stood before the Imperial command bunker, the door crumped before him, with no memory of anything between dropping into the trench and finding the bunker. His monarchist blues were soaked with blood, turning them just as grey as the Imperial uniform.

Bryal knew that someone with enough rank to tell him what he needed to know cowered somewhere in this bunker.

There were no guards within; all who could swing a club or fire a rifle were out in the trench, bleeding and dying as the monarchist advance churned through them. The chaos of blood, death, and artillery dimmed as Bryal entered the bunker. He could almost hear the sound of his footsteps on the stone.

All these Imperial bunkers were built almost identically, a strange manifestation of the rigid structures of the Empire’s bureaucracy. Bryal had been in them enough that he could have walked through one blindfolded, despite the hard corners and winding tunnels that kept them safe from all but the largest artillery shells.

Eventually, he found the officer’s quarters, complete with the officer herself, cowering under the remains of an oaken table. The thing had shattered — likely from the shock of an artillery bombardment. She lay under it, completely still, as though a passing soldier might truly think she’d been killed by a few splinters.

Bryal shouldered his rifle, only to find that half the barrel was missing. He couldn’t have guessed when that happened. He reached for the pistol that should have been at his waist, only to find an empty holster.

No matter, he thought as he tossed the rifle aside. My hands will do.

“Get up,” he said in the Imperial tongue.

The officer said nothing. She hardly moved, save for the almost imperceptible rise and fall of a chest trying desperately to stay still.

He stomped over to her and kicked her in the ribs.

She groaned and cursed at him, trembling fingers going for her belt. Bryal grabbed her wrist and twisted. She yelped as a pistol fell out of her grip. He pulled her from the shattered remains of her table and pressed her against the bunker wall.

“Where is the Eunuch Emperor?”

The officer’s brow furrowed. “You speak our tongue,” he said, eyeing him up and down. “Yet you wear their colours.”

Bryal slammed his fist into the wall. “Where!”

“In the capital, monarchist dog,” she spat. “You’ll never reach him.”

“Liar,” Bryal said, releasing her. He plucked her pistol from the floor and pulled back the hammer. “He is on the front, sheathed in steel that walks for him. I have seen it.”

“No, we would never risk his life in the trenches,” she babbled.

Bryal pulled the trigger. A bullet skipped off the bunker wall, inches from the officer’s head. He pulled a crumpled, soggy map from his coat and tossed it on the floor. “Show me where it is.”

The officer’s eyes glanced down to it. “Take me to your commander,” she said. “I surrender. Monarchists don’t kill officers. I’ll speak to your commander, tell him of the automaton.” She clasped her hands together. “You’ve won, the day is yours.”

Bryal frowned. He lowered the pistol and fired again. The round punched through the officer’s leg, snapping bone. She fell to her side, screaming.

He crouched next to her, holding the still smoking barrel to her chest. “I was raised in the Imperial fashion,” he said. “You do not take officers prisoner; you torture them. And there are enough rounds in this weapon to make for a very long session.”

The officer didn’t even hesitate. “It isn’t on the front!” she screamed. She propped herself up on her elbows. “It was damaged by an artillery strike. It’s being repaired!

Bryal’s heart fluttered. After more than a year languishing in the monarchist trenches, it seemed he’d finally found what he was after. “Show me where,” he said.

She pointed to an empty space on the map, nestled in a horseshoe of steep cliffs.

It looked to be a natural bulwark against an invasion. Or a trap for a cornered rat. He dreamed of a roiling mass of men in blue coats, swarming over the cliffs to reach the Eunuch Emperor’s secret retreat, leaving him with no place to flee.

Finally, after so much treachery, after leaving so many of his brothers dead in his wake, Bryal had a chance to find the man who’d set him on this path and rip the heart out of his stinking chest.

“Die knowing you have doomed your Emperor,” Bryal said. He fired before the officer could reply, putting a hole between her eyes and tossing the pistol aside.

The less he thought of the things he did, the less he looked into people’s eyes as they bled and died, the easier it was to keep moving forward. Towards the Emperor’s doom, and the collapse of the bloated carcass that was his Empire.

As he was leaving the officer’s quarters, Bryal spied a cabinet in the corner of the officer’s quarters. It had been smashed to pieces as well, its contents reduced to shards of glass and wet spills, save for one aluminum case, still sealed in wax. Likely it’d been saved for the success of some dramatic offensive, or perhaps the end of the campaign itself. He plucked the case from the wreckage of glass and wood and carried it out of the bunker, cradled in his coat like a small child.

Outside, the offensive was winding down. More blue coats streamed into the trenches, forcing back the few Imperials who still lived. With their commanding officer dead, the defenders who didn’t surrender would be routed, forced to flee for miles towards the next trench while machine guns fired into their backs.

A waste. This whole fucking war.

Bryal climbed to the top of the bunker, conscious that some hidden sniper might very well get a clear look at his back and put a bullet in his liver. But at that moment, all he could think about were those horseshoe cliffs, just a few hundred miles from this very trench, where the Eunuch Emperor cowered as his war machine was being repaired.

In the distance, the great duel between dragons had ended. One stood victorious, its jaws snapping shut around its rival’s throat, ripping it out in a shower of oil and smoke. Bryal didn’t know if men sat in the hearts of the great beasts, directing them as they slaughtered armies, or if they had been given a sort of machine mind of their own. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

Bryal popped the wax seal on the aluminum case and extracted his prize. A glass bottle, filled with an amber liquid that might as well have been gold. He pulled the cork with his teeth and groaned as the whiskey burned the back of his throat.

Today, he’d survived another assault. Tomorrow, he would take his first steps toward the Eunuch Emperor’s hidden retreat. And his revenge.