The Bloodstained God (Book 2) by Tim Stead

and Sheyani was leaning over him, a small worry on her face, a question in her eyes. He rubbed his shoulder.
     
    “Nothing,” he said. “I’m fine.” He got back to his feet.
     
    She laughed. “I didn’t think to see you dancing with a pig,” she said.
     
    “It was a fine animal,” he quipped back. “Strong, and what lovely ears!” He kicked lightly at the baskets with a boot. Solid as a rock. The seller had stacked them three quarters full, five deep, three wide. He kicked them harder.
     
    “Do you mind, sir?” the seller demanded. “Those baskets cost money.”
     
    “I’m sorry,” he said. But he continued to stand there, staring at the baskets. There was an idea in his head, but it was no good. He’d thought of palisades, lines of tree trunks buried a third in the ground, sharpened at the top, but it was no good, Wood burned. Baskets would burn, too, but there was another idea trying to force its way to the front of his mind, pushing like the desperate pig past a host of other idlers.
     
    He shook his head.
     
    “Sheshay?”
     
    He held up his hand, tried to let the idea come. It was like trying to go to sleep. Trying did no good at all.
     
    “Something,” he said. “I nearly had something.” Then it came, and he smiled. It was simple, stupidly simple, and he had no idea if it would work. “Where’s the nearest blacksmith?” he asked.

7. A Dream
     
    He dreamed. Again he knew that he dreamed, and this time it was as though he did not dream at all. He was alert, expecting something, willing to learn.
     
    It was dark, but not dark. He stood in a chamber filled with lich-light. It was a long, low cave; long enough that he could have mistaken it for a passageway had he not stood close to the entrance, had he not known .
     
    It was the same sensation in the previous dream. He knew things that he should not. They were just present in his mind, as though they had always been there. In the same way he knew what filled the room.
     
    The darkness glittered. Rank upon rank of Bren Morain stood still and silent, waiting for a command. The room was filled with the threat of unthinking slaughter. He began to count them, but quickly gave up. Beyond the first twenty or so they merged into a seam of gleaming black. There was simply not enough light to make them out.
     
    The body through whose eyes he saw turned and walked from the room. The corridor was no brighter, cut from the same reddish stone, lit by the same luminous lichen, but it seemed brighter. Just smaller, he supposed.
     
    It turned into another room, and he saw the same as before. Rank upon rank, Lines that vanished into the distance. He counted the columns this time. There were fifteen. He tried to estimate the size of the cavern. Half a mile? More? The Bren Moraine stood close to each other, but not that close. Two yards each, perhaps, so four hundred in each column, which meant six thousand in each cavern.
     
    He left the cavern, walked again in the corridor, entered a third, and saw the same thing. Six thousand Bren Morain. It was a guess, but could not be so far from the truth, so eighteen thousand in the three caverns.
     
    He was being shown this. There was something deliberate in the way that he stood in each cavern long enough to be certain what it was he saw, and then moved on to another.
     
    His eyes walked to a fourth cavern, then a fifth. Thirty thousand Bren Morain, all waiting, all gathered. It was already an army that the kingdoms would have to fear. Yet it was more than a year until the Bren had said they would act, twelve months and more before they had claimed they would be ready.
     
    The show did not stop. There were more caverns full of Morain, but Narak was beginning to be distracted again. Already this army was large enough to sweep Seth Yarra from Terras; easily large enough. Acting in conjunction with the men of the kingdoms it would be a one sided affair. Now he was becoming aware of shadows again, and this