Scythian Dawn: Book One of a Barbarian Space Opera Read online

  SCYTHIAN DAWN

  by

  P.K. Lentz

  §

  Copyright © 2018 by P.K. Lentz

  All rights reserved.

  §

  Cover and all art for Scythian Dawn by

  Aituar Manas

  https://www.artstation.com/aituarmanas

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Scythian Dawn

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Prologue

  The galaxy teems with sentient life.

  Five intelligent races became the first to propel themselves through the hidden subverse to other stars and learn this truth.

  The insectoid Kephis.

  The feudal Senekeen.

  The peace-loving Gaboon.

  The secretive Irunen.

  And the Jir, who came to dominate them all.

  Most submitted to Jir hegemony. It was the Irunen who put up the fiercest resistance. Their efforts ended with the Irunen species extinguished, its homeworld annihilated.

  In the generations following its costly total war, the Jir Pentarchy enacted a ban on genocide which could never be repealed except by four of the five ruling pentarchs acting in concert. The Jir might rule and dominate, but they would not extinguish.

  Still, in a galaxy populated by innumerable Lesser Races—the primitive civilizations which had yet to burst free from their homeworlds to witness the galaxy’s wonders and horrors—new challengers were bound to arise.

  To ensure its continued dominance, the Jir adopted a policy of prevention known as Article 18. On regular cycles, ships of the Pentarchy would travel to the home planets of all known Lesser Races to wipe out their largest cities and with them any chance of ever joining the ranks of starfaring civilizations. In keeping with the prohibition on genocide, these Lesser Races would be permitted to exist, but only in permanent Dark Ages, their pre-technological societies forever ignorant of what exists beyond their skies.

  To help defray a small fraction of the high energy cost involved in enforcing Article 18, the Jir decided not simply to eliminate the populations of the cities they razed. Instead, thousands of individuals were carried away to be sold as slaves, specimens, soldiers, test subjects, pets, curiosities, ornaments, organic parts. Food. It was not of particular interest to the Pentarchy what purpose their buyers intended. It only mattered that Jir rule went unchallenged.

  * * *

  One star within this teeming galaxy was known to the Jir as Goros.

  The third planet of the Goros system was home to a Lesser Race.

  Those born on that world did not consider themselves Gorosian, of course. Like most Lesser Races, on account of cycle after cycle of Jir visitation, they barely defined themselves as a single species at all, being much more concerned with their own petty tribal divisions.

  They did not call their world Goros. The planet’s many nations knew it by many names: Ta. Gaia. Mundus. Herros.

  Earth.

  A small expanse of land around a certain sea upon that planet was known to its inhabitants as Scythia.

  Being a nomadic folk, the Scythians had never been hard hit by the alien devastations of the past, which they barely remembered as fragments of legends.

  But unknown to them, a fresh devastation was imminent.

  And the Scythians, in the meantime, had built a city...

  One

  Arixa didn’t know the purpose of the iron object she had unearthed in the ruin. Its creators had known, but they were long gone. Like any Scythian, Arixa only knew that the Parthians, who once had built cities in this land south of the Bleak Sea, had forged harder metals and known more uses for them than the Scythians of today did.

  Long ago, the Parthians had ruled from their distant capital, building forts along the rivers of what now was Scythia.

  And then the Parthians had fallen. Some enemy in the East, it was said, had devastated their capital. If you believed Ishpakian street preachers, then the gods themselves had razed the Parthian cities, as one day they would return to devastate others.

  But Arixa did not believe the Ishpakians. Nor did most Scythians. Were the gods to return, one of the cities struck down must be their own, Roxinaki, the capital of the Scythian empire ruled by Arixa’s father.

  How the Parthians had fallen was a debate for the palace scholars who had tutored Arixa as a child. She had been their favorite student, keen of mind and quick to learn, but that had not been enough to keep her there. The scholars could argue all they wanted about why the Parthians fell, but in the real world, the world of the steppe and forests and mountains, the reason didn’t matter.

  What mattered was that Parthians today were slaves and farmers whose toil provisioned the Scythian war bands that ensured the safety of Roxinaki and its long-winded scholars. War bands such as the one Arixa had founded and named the Dawn.

  She rose with the dirt-encrusted object in hand, returning her knife to its sheath. Having been used to prize the artifact from hard earth, the blade would need cleaning, sharpening and oiling back at camp.

  “Arixa!”

  It was Ivar who called to her. He came into sight around an intact corner of the ancient, crumbling and roofless Parthian fort inside which Arixa knelt.

  “The captain of a war band does not also need to be a scavenger, Arixa,” Ivar scolded in his odd accent of the frozen North. “A princess even less.”

  “I’ll decide what a captain and a princess should be.”

  Arixa brushed caked clods of soil from the bent metal rod she had unearthed. A half-rotted wooden handle clung persistently to one end of whatever it had been. Some sort of tool.

  “This iron makes good weapons,” Arixa said, carrying the scavenged item toward Ivar. “I don’t know about the icehole you crawled out of, but in Scythia, a good warrior cares about good weapons.”

  “A warrior in Svialand cares about raiding. Not digging rusty lumps out of the ground.”

  “I’m trading,” Arixa joked. “I took a piss behind that wall, and the Parthians traded me this good metal. Sviar know about trading right? Until their boats flip over and Goths kill them all, that is.”

  As she met up with Ivar, Arixa saw the midday sun glint on something in the grass. She stooped to investigate.

  “That’s a low blow, Arixa,” Ivar complained, even if he punctuated the complaint with a laugh. “Even for you.”

  Six years ago, the trading boat on which Ivar had voyaged far south from his homeland had sunk on the Dneister, stranding its entire crew. Two days later, a band of Goths had attacked the shipwrecked Sviar, killing most and hunting down the scattered survivors for sport. Arixa had found Ivar alone and feral in the mountains a month later.

  At least, that was the story Ivar had told her once he’d learned to speak some Scythian. He had also claimed that his crewmates had called him by the generous epithet Ivar Shieldbreaker.

  Foreigners were not
uncommon in Scythian war bands, but Ivar stood out more than most with his frost-white skin and hair the color of straw. Amazingly, he still had the weapon with which he’d left Svialand: a hook-headed ax not much larger than the ones used for chopping wood. Ivar had cut down a great many men with it in the last six years—many of them Goths.

  When they’d met, Arixa had been just a spite-filled runaway royal full of vague notions of proving something to her father. Ivar had helped her build her own war band. Their bond ran deep.

  Ivar spat. “Fucking Gotar,” he cursed, using his people’s name for the Goths.

  The Sviar’s phlegm landed not far from the glinting shard that Arixa had spotted in the grass and now picked up.

  In addition to stronger metals, the long-ago Parthians had been able to craft pots and other vessels from a material which one could see straight through. Some vessels were tinted various colors while others were fully transparent. No Scythian potter or craftsman had yet managed to recreate the material, its secret apparently lost with the razing of Parthia’s capital and the collapse of its power.

  What few of these goods remained intact were highly valued. Even the broken shards were used by artisans in decorative applications. Sometimes Arixa collected such shards for trade, but since this piece was tiny and it was to be many days before they reached a trading post, she flicked it back into the ruin.

  She and Ivar walked in the direction of the road leading to the Dawn’s camp.

  “If you don’t want to be insulted,” Arixa said, “then don’t call me a princess.”

  “Bah,” Ivar scoffed. “You’re right. Princesses are much more beautiful, not half a head taller than me, with tattoos from shoulder to wrist and blue hair so tightly braided it couldn’t get clean if you tried. Which you don’t.”

  Ivar was not wrong. Arixa’s looks were plain by Scythian standards, and she was taller and broader of shoulder than many men, including Ivar. Her dozens of blue-tipped braids were only untwined once every six moons or so by another female warrior of the band, usually in the vapors of a cannabis lodge. Each of the designs inked on Arixa’s skin, acquired over the last six years, had a meaning. Many of them were distorted by scars.

  “Magnificent...” Arixa observed mockingly. “What a word-picture you create, O Shieldbreaker! To think that you learned our tongue so late in life, yet already you’ve mastered—”

  Ivar pursed his lips and blew a farting noise. “Enough! Your point is made!”

  “No, I mean it! You should be in the capital composing verse.”

  “Stop! You win. Like always.”

  “Captain!”

  The small figure waving at them from the old stone-paved, weed-strewn Parthian road, was another foreigner of the Dawn, Memnon. His people the Hellenes had once ruled the lands around the warm Southern Sea, a sight which Arixa had never seen.

  As with the Parthians, Hellenic dominance had long ago been smashed—either by men or gods—and today most Hellenes were slaves in foreign lands. Memnon and his sister Andromache had come to Scythia in chains and joined the Dawn a few years back, after winning their freedom. Neither sibling was a champion fighter, but they had enough other skills to make them worth their provisions.

  For one, they looked after the band’s most invaluable resource, its horses, with as much competence as any Scythian breeder, which was to say the best breeders in the world.

  “Did I hear Ivar call you princess again?” Memnon asked. “He never learns!”

  Next to Memnon on the road were two more men of the band. There was Matas, Arixa’s maternal uncle, who had left the city with Arixa those six years ago, partly to protect a favorite niece but just as much for his own reasons. A year later, his son Plin had joined him.

  And there was huge Sandaksatra, whom they called Dak, the only one among the four who was taller than Arixa and the one no one dared to challenge at arm-wrestling unless they had no need to hold a weapon the next day.

  “Can’t a girl take a piss without four men showing up?” Arixa griped.

  She knew why Ivar had come. In fact, his presence shadowing her as bodyguard was expected and appreciated, if rarely required. But Memnon and the others must have had some other reason.

  Matas announced it: “The scouts returned. The Goths are taking the expected route. It should be two, maybe three days before we have them where we want them. There are three farming communities in their path. I have riders awaiting your word to warn the locals to evacuate.”

  Here was the function of all of Scythia’s ranging war bands: to detect incursions and draw the invaders to a place where it was convenient to destroy them. In generations past, there had been no cities or towns to defend at all, and so it hardly mattered where an enemy army marched. Nothing existed for them to threaten.

  Today there was a capital, Roxinaki, on the northern shore of the Bleak Sea, plus a few towns here and there, but the bulk of Scythian territory remained as it had ever been: vast stretches of steppe and plain dotted with seasonal encampments and subject villages. Enemy bands ventured in at their peril, finding little worth raiding. If an invader came in vast numbers then the small war bands of Scythia could coalesce into a horde to meet the threat on a field of its choosing.

  Sadly, such an occasion had not transpired in Arixa’s lifetime and didn’t seem likely to.

  Raiding Goth war bands were larger than their Scythian counterparts, but unlike Scythians, the Goth warriors were not all mounted. A great many marched on foot and thus they were easily outmaneuvered.

  “Send the riders,” Arixa commanded. “Tell them that if any of the threatened farms grow cannabis, return with all of it they can carry. No sense leaving it to be destroyed. Since we won’t be fighting tomorrow, tonight we can throw the last of our supply on the fires.”

  “If I ever were to return to Svialand,” Ivar remarked, “cannabis is the one Scythian tradition I would take with me.”

  “I thought the soil was always frozen there,” Memnon said.

  “Only in winter. The remaining two months are—”

  “Did you see that?” Arixa interrupted, staring into the sky in the direction of the Parthian ruin, away from camp.

  She pointed. The others looked.

  “There!”

  “It’s just a star,” Dak grumbled.

  Arixa smacked his tattooed, iron-hard upper arm. “Is a star green, and does it pulsate and glide about in the daytime sky like a firefly?”

  “It’s a firefly, then,” Dak snorted back.

  The light continued to glide slowly across the sky, growing subtly larger. As they all watched, it halted and changed direction, moving groundward.

  “We all know what it is.” This from Memnon. “I’ve seen its like once before and had the sense to go in the opposite direction. You’ve heard the legends. There is some truth to them.”

  Ivar gave the Hellene a shove. “Are you ready to go join the Ishpakians now?”

  “It’s nothing to do with that!” Memnon insisted. “This is about Hunters and Watchers.”

  Ivar chuckled. “If you’re such an expert on monsters from the heavens, tell us, which variety is this?”

  “How do I know? Any of you with any sense will return with me to camp and forget you saw this sight.”

  Already, Memnon had turned from the descending light and begun the walk back to camp.

  Arixa, on the contrary, watched with intense interest as the green glow touched the horizon in some wooded hills to the east.

  “Matas, Memnon, return to camp and dispatch the riders,” she said. She handed her uncle the scavenged metal bar. “Ivar, Dak, accompany them, then one or both of you return with my horse and bow. I’ll start on foot toward where the light landed. You’re welcome to accompany me, but you need not.”

  “Of course we’ll come,” Ivar answered for them both. “But should we not ride in greater numbers?”

  “Bring ten,” Arixa conceded.

  She didn’t care how many came. It was curio
sity which drove her. There were some ways in which the favorite student of Roxinaki’s royal tutors had not fully died, but instead lived on inside the tattooed body of a war band captain.

  This was an opportunity to learn something. If it also meant danger, then the warrior side of her would welcome that, too.

  “I would come along,” departing Memnon called back over his shoulder, “but you know, there’s my sister to think of. And the horses.”

  “We’re all aware of your famous cowardice,” Ivar taunted. “No need to call attention to it.”

  “Cowardice and common sense are cousins,” Memnon answered plainly. “One is often mistaken for the other.”

  “One of your Hellenic sayings?” Matas asked.

  “Sure, if that improves its credibility.”

  The rest of the conversation between the men on the road was lost to Arixa as she hurried alone through the Parthian ruin toward the hills beyond.

  Less than an hour later, a dozen sets of hoofbeats vibrated the hard earth under her boots, as Ivar and Dak and ten others caught up. They brought her saddled red roan horse, Turagetes, which she mounted. Progress thereafter was much swifter, with Arixa taking the lead and the others trailing at a gallop.

  It wasn’t long before the terrain forced them to rein in their mounts, the open plain giving way to rocky, lightly wooded slopes of the hills into which the green glow had descended. Arixa tried to keep an eye always on the very spot where it had vanished, a task which would have been easier at night with stars to serve as guides.

  It was instinct more than any landmarks which at length caused her to signal a halt and dismount. As the others behind her followed suit, a slight movement up a slope caught Arixa’s eye: the swaying of a low-hanging branch of evergreen. There was no accompanying fluttering of wings, and few large birds would perch so low. A squirrel, perhaps, but Arixa spared no thought for rodents before stringing her bow and setting an arrow to it as she ran up the slope.

  Her comrades followed. First to mount the crest, Arixa looked down with bowstring drawn, and she saw—

  A dog.

  Standing upright.

  Wearing clothing.

  Its wide, dark eyes gave her only the briefest of glances before it sped off behind some rocks.