Stormriders

SPAM GOES IN THIS PLACE. LOL.
Nikhil
Posts: 15
Joined: Thu Mar 08, 2012 5:57 am

Stormriders

Post by Nikhil »

Malazan wrote:‘The Stormwall is leagues long, on the north coast of Korelri. It stands as the only barricade between the island continent and the Stormriders, those demonic warriors of the seas between Malaz Island and Korelri – you must have heard of them?’
‘Old fishers’ tales.’
‘No, all too real,’ Cuttle said. ‘I seen them myself, plying those waters. Their horses are the waves. They wield lances of ice. We slit the throats of six goats to paint the water in appeasement.’
‘And it worked?’ Bottle asked, surprised.
‘No, but tossing the cabin boy over the side did.’
‘Anyway,’ Koryk said after a moment of silence, ‘only chosen warriors are given the task of standing the Wall. Fighting those eerie hordes. It’s an endless war, or at least it was ...’
Malazan wrote:Riders, Murl and his fellow pilots called them. Sea-demons and Stormriders to others. Beings of sea and ice who claimed this narrow cut as their own and suffered no trespass. Only his Jakatan forbears knew the proper offerings to bribe the swiftest passage south of Malaz Isle. Why then did the Riders pursue? What could entice them this far north?
Waves twice the height of the masts rolled past, foaming with ice and rime. Then Murl saw it, a dazzling sapphire figure breaching the surface: helmed, armoured, a tall lance of jagged ice couched at the hip. Its mount seemed half beast and half roiling wave. He fancied it turned a dark inscrutable gaze his way through cheekguards of frozen scale. Then, just as suddenly, the Rider dived, returning to the churning sea. Murl was reminded of blue gamen whales leaping before the prow. Another broached the surface further out. Then another. They rode the waves abreast of Rheni’s Dream yet seemed oblivious to it. Were they men or the ancient Jaghut race, as some claimed? He watched feeling oddly detached, as if this were all happening to someone else.
A crewman, Larl, steadied himself at the railing and raised a crossbow at the nearest Rider. The quarrel shot wildly astray. Murl shook his head – what was the use? They were dead already. There was nothing they could do. Then, remembering the sternchaser scorpion, he tore himself from the mast and lurched sternward. Lack-eye still stood rigid at the wheel, arms wide, staring ahead. Murl wrapped one numbed arm around the pedestalled weapon and seized the crank. The iron bit at his flesh as if red-hot, tearing patches of skin from his palm as he fought the mechanism.
‘What do they want?’ Murl called to Lack-eye. Tears froze in his eyes, blinding him. The scorpion wouldn’t budge. He pulled his hand free of the searing iron. Blood froze like tatters of red cloth. Lack-eye did not respond; did not even turn. Throwing himself to the wheel, Murl thrust an arm through the spokes.
Lack-eye would never answer again. Standing rigid at the wheel of Rheni’s Dream, the helmsman stared straight ahead into the gathering night, his one remaining eye white with frost. His shirt and trousers clattered in the wind, frozen as hard as sheets of wood.
Horrified, Murl stared, and in Lack-eye’s indifferent gaze, directed ahead to unknown distances, he had his answer. The Riders cared nothing for them. They were here for another reason, answering some inhuman summons, heaving themselves northward, an invading army throwing its might against the one thing that had confined them so long to this narrow passage: the island of Malaz.
The ship groaned like a tortured beast. Its prow heaved, ice-heavy, submerging beneath a wave. The blow shocked Murl from his grip at the wheel. When the spray cleared Lack-eye remained alone to pilot the frozen tomb northwards. Sails fell, stiff, and shattered to the decks. Ice layered the masts and decking, binding the ship like a dark heart within a frozen crag that rushed on groaning and swelling.
Still the storm coursed northward like a horizon-spanning tidal bore. From its gloom emerged a flotilla of emerald mountains etched by deep crevasses, the snow at their peaks gleaming in the last light.
Like unstoppable siege engines constructed to humble continents, they surged onward. At their flanks the Riders lunged forward, lances raised, pointing north.
Malazan wrote:He found the surf had risen almost within reach of his beached skiff. He set the brazier into an iron stand at the middle thwart, put his shoulder to the bow, then jerked away as if stung: scaled ice covered the wood like a second skin. He mouthed a curse and laid a hand against the wood. The ice melted, beading to condensation over the age-polished wood and steaming into vapour the wind snatched away. Singing low under his breath, the fisherman shoved against the prow. The skiff skimmed over the stones and he pushed on, wading into the surf up to his thighs, then clambered in.
While he pulled on the thick wood oars, he chanted a song that was old when men and women first set foot upon the island. The humped, time-worn bedrock hills shrank into the distance as if the raging wind itself had swept the island away.
With one oar he turned the skiff amid the waves, then turned around to face the stern, bow to the south. Between the skiff and Malaz, now a dark distant line at the north horizon, the sea rose in slow heavy swells as smooth as the island’s ancient hills. Hail lashed white-capped waves all around, yet none touched the fisherman’s grey hair as it tossed in the wind. Deep ocean surge, tall as any vessel, bore down on him, ice-webbed, frost and spume-topped. But they rolled under his bow as gently as a meadow slope while he crooned to the wind.
Out of the south the storm-front advanced, thickening into a solid line of churning clouds. Driven snow and sleet melted to rain that dissipated long before reaching the skiff. Lightning crackled amid the clouds while beneath emerald and deepest blue flashed like wave-buoyed gemstones. The fisherman saw none of this; facing north, teeth clamped down on his pipe, he droned his chant while the wind snatched the words away.

The single tiny vessel struggled lost on an ocean of storm. Above, lightning lashed through a solid roof of cloud. The brazier at the boat’s mid-thwart glowed, a single beacon of orange against the night. The fisherman rowed, driving the skiff’s prow into the heaving waves. All around hail and driven rain tore the slate-grey waters, yet no spray touched the boat to hiss in the brazier or flatten the fisherman’s blowing hair. Bronze tores gleamed at his tanned wrists and the bulk of his wool sweater hid the strength of his arms. Overhead, the roiling clouds seemed to shudder with each sweep of his oars, and every flex of his broad back. He chanted louder now, teeth clamped onto the stem of his pipe, keening into the raging wind:

‘Was summer I went a rowin’ with my glowing bride
We laughed and tarried ‘mid the silken pools.
Prettier than the lily blossom is my love,
She moves with grace upon the sheen.
Her eyes are deeper than the sea,
Her heart is warmer than all the cold, cold, sea.’

Out amid the waves, riders broached the surface. Their opalescent armour shone silver and sapphire. They leant back then heaved jagged ice-lances. The gleaming weapons darted across the waves. As they entered the eye of calm surrounding the skiff, they burst into mist.
From the distant south, parting a curtain of driving sleet as it came, reared a crag of deepest aquamarine and hoarfrost silver. It advanced upon the skiff with the irresistible majesty of a glacier, but the fisherman heaved upon his oars. In front of him the brazier glowed like a crimson sun. Pennants of vapour shot from the iceberg’s leading face. Shards calved away, throwing up clouds of spray.
At the iceberg’s skirts the waves churned into a boiling froth as it drove on towards the skiff. But before it came close it sank down, sucked into the depths. The remaining emerald slick of sizzling water disappeared under a slurried web of ice.
New figures now broached the ice-mulched sea. Deepest indigo, their scaled helms revealed only darkness within. Instead of a long lance of barbed ice, each bore short blunt wands of amethyst and olivine. These they levelled at the distant skiff. From their tips cyan lightning leaped, splitting the air, only to dissipate into nothing before the skiff’s prow. One by one the figures dived, wands held high.
For a time the skiff was alone on the waves, rising and falling like a piece of flotsam as the fisherman rowed on. But soon more shapes appeared, pale, opalescent, diving in circles around the skiff. Then, from out of the fog, came another ice mountain. Driving sleet tore into the waves all around, but still the fisherman heaved on the oars, back hunched, pipe jutting from between his teeth. He chanted . . .

‘Her heart is warmer than all the cold, cold sea.’

A lone orange ember flickered dully within a maelstrom at the heart of an icy ocean. It bobbed and surged with each heave of the fisherman’s oars that cracked and clattered off chunks of ice. Circling at a distance, Riders plunged and reared, darting in close then submerging. Javelins of ice hurled at the skiff burst into clouds of mist. The fisherman forced his chant through lips frozen to his teeth.
One Rider dared to lunge within the circle of calm surrounding the fisherman. Wave-borne, it reared close only to howl and beat at its arms as its glittering pearl armour melted, then it plunged beneath the boiling surface. Far off, amid the whitecaps and rafts of ice, five indigo-robed Riders watched, conferring. They cradled amethyst wands at their chests. Cold pulsed from them as an expanding sphere. Kneeing their churning wave-mounts, they dispersed. One raised its wand to the south.
Out of the heaving waters from far under the clouds came yet another crag of ice, this one the smallest of the flotilla. Riders at all sides shepherded its progress. The fisherman rowed on oblivious, back hunched, his whole being focused on the effort of rowing and his song. The berg loomed closer, a dark shape frozen at its heart.
The instant vapour burst from the iceberg’s leading spur the Riders plunged beneath the ice-mulched surface. Water poured in torrents down the crag’s shoulders while the gale tore streamers of frost smoke from its peak. When a shard of glacial emerald calved from its front, it raised a fountain of spray that rolled north to the skiff and disappeared under its bow. Now from the heart of the berg jutted a prow of wood. Water streamed from it, driving wisps of cloud into the wind. Caught in a mountain of ice, it bore down on the tiny skiff.
The fisherman, his back against the thrashing wind, continued rowing as the berg entombing Rheni’s Dream shattered and slid into the waves. He chanted on even as the prow of Rheni’s Dream loomed over him. He was pulling on the oars as the skiff was smashed to shards and the glowing brazier extinguished in an explosion of steam as it was driven beneath the waves. Rheni’s Dream bore on, listing, its planks heaved and warped. Caught broadside by a massive wave, it rolled further, seemed to hesitate, then ploughed into the sea. Amid the wreckage left behind one oar floated. A sheath of ice gleamed over it already. Stormriders surged past the wreck. Some raised their ice-lances high overhead and brought them down, pointing north. At the horizon of cloud and storm-tossed sea, lightning revealed a dark smudge of land.
Steven Erikson wrote:All too often in fantasy fiction we’re stuck with the rulers, the leaders, and we see their machinations in a generalised sense of victory and loss, even good and evil. Until Glen Cook, we rarely saw the brutal consequences of all these toffs vying for dominance. When approaching our own novels, we wanted to emulate Cook’s ground-up approach, covering the entire social strata from the lowly street urchin to the gods and everyone in between.