Westhaven by Rowan Erlking (best sci fi novels of all time TXT) 📕

collecting their weapons and taking them captive to dig the graves for their own kind. Hospital tents pitched on the skirts of the battle were filled with volunteer herbalists, nurses, and medicine men, with the occasional wizard to heal up gaping wounds. All of them worked to the bone, some having not slept for days.

Stumbling over the pocked landscape to where volunteers carried the wounded into the medical tent by all means possible, two equally dirt-covered and bloody men walked together. One carried the other. His friend’s arm draped over his shoulder.

“Come on, Tiler. Just a little bit further.” Panting, with a black, dust-covered scarf tied over his head, Key staggered to keep on his feet. “Then you can rest. I’ll get a doctor to see to you.”

“I’m just weighing you down…just weighing you down,” Tiler mumbled. His face was white. He had a difficult time holding his head up.

“Come on. Stay focused,” Key said to him, pulling him along. “You can’t leave me yet. You’re supposed to be watching my back. Remember?”

Tiler weakly chuckled.

Throwing aside the flap to the hospital tent with his other arm, Key dragged his friend inside and called out. “I need a doctor! My friend has lost a lot of blood!”

One of the medics attending to the wounded turned, shoving Key back with his free hand. “You can’t just storm in here. Set him outside and we’ll get to him as soon as we can.”

Key pushed the man’s hand off of him, lowering Tiler to sit near the doorway. “My friend is dying. I don’t care what you think I can or can’t do! He needs help.”

“And I said—”

But Key shoved past the medic. He weaved in and out of the cots to search for someone else who would help him. “I heard you have witches here. Do you have a balm or a salve that I can use to at least stop the blood?”

“You can’t come in here, I said!” The medic chased after him.

Tiler painfully chuckled where he lay. His breathing was already labored. The sweat all over his filthy face trickled down. “It’s pointless to say that to him. He does it anyway.”

The attending medic reached out to grab hold of Key, but Key threw him off, searching through the women to ask the same question. He would take even a minor witch. He marched to the end of that section of the tent and threw aside the door flap into the other section where the worst cases were. People with gaping flesh wounds lay on their backs, gasping. Witches were chanting over them, drawing marks around the wounds in their own blood mixed with numerous herbs. Key saw the wound of one man near him seal up. He started towards them with determination to claim one for Tiler.

“Who do you think you are storming in here like this?” The medic followed him inside. “No one takes precedence over another here. We treat everyone as they come. Your friend has to wait.”

“He’ll be dead by then!” Key rounded on him with a fist raised.

“Key!” A woman’s voice called out.

He turned and blinked. He let go of the man’s coat.

“Lanona.”

Key rushed to her and grabbed her wrist. Pulling on it he dragged her back through the tent. “You have got to help me. Tiler’s been shot.”

“You can’t…!” The medic shouted after him again—but he stared as their wizard hastily rushed with Key back though the tent flaps.

They went straight back to where Tiler lay ashen on the ground. He was fallen over, though still breathing.

“Oh my….” Lanona crouched next to him and felt Tiler’s face. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Can you save him?” Key looked desperately from Lanona to his best friend and back again.

She nodded, though when she pulled off the hasty wrapping Key had set on the wound, she clenched her teeth to hold in a gasp. Pressing her already blood-stained hands on the wound, Lanona felt inside. In seconds she drew out the bullet, sealing up each broken and severed muscle and organ until all that was left was a slight scar in his skin.

She looked up to Key. “He needs to rest now. Get him something to drink. I’ll find some meat for him so he can start producing more blood. If you could find him some fruit, that would be good. The juicer the better.”

“Where…where should I…should I leave him?” Key looked from Lanona to Tiler again. “This place looks full.”

Her eyes lifting towards at the cranky man who ran the tent hospital, Lanona cringed. “Yes. I’m sorry. You will have to leave him outside. You could set up a tent or something.”

“I don’t suppose you could make a tunnel for me?” Key clenched his head, chuckling with a wince. He fought tears of relief.

“She has work to do,” the headman snapped, looming over them.

Lanona rose, casting the medic a glare. “He is a friend of mine.”

“We don’t play favorites. Even as favors for friends,” the medic said.

As Key heaved Tiler up to carry him out again, he heard Lanona say, “I was referring to the dying man—though you ought to know whom you were talking to. That was Key. Someone you owe much to. Our army would not stand without him.”

Several heads had turned now. They stared at Key who was carefully helping Tiler through the door flap. Some followed him. They had expected the famous Key to walk about with airs of some kind of mad boldness, as his reputation had spread across the entire nation. But Key looked like one of a million soldiers to them. Though, as he went out, several admitted that there was something uncommon in his gaze when he looked at the scene of death, like he was mourning all the dead and not just his friend.

Lanona soon came out after him. “Hey, I have a few more people in there to see to. When I’m done I’ll be right out. You get him some water like I said, and I’ll make sure Tiler will have some shelter.”

“I was joking about that,” Key said, turning with weak expression that showed exactly how exhausted he was.

She smiled. “I know.”

Nodding, he let her go back inside the tent. In the meantime, he found a bare spot of ground that was sufficiently dry where he could lay Tiler in a comfortable position to rest. Tiler’s breathing had evened out. It was much smoother than before. He took that as a good sign as he stood up, now in search of a full canteen or water bladder. He had used up his when he wrapped the wound.

“Stay right here. I’ll go for water,” Key said.

Tiler weakly opened his eyes, chuckling as he whispered, “I won’t run off.”

With an exhausted tired smile, Key nodded and went back into the battlefield.

He jogged from one dead Sky Child body to another, feeling over their packs for any container of water or food. Mostly they were bare, already scavenged by others. Soon he trotted to where he noticed the land dipped down and reeds stood taller than the higher ground. It was an irrigation ditch, but the waters already looked sullied from the dead. Several bodies had been dumped into it, humans mostly. Dragging each one up to the top of the ridge, he then peered over the landscape where others were still bringing in the wounded and counting the dead. They had not gotten to digging the graves yet.

The fields in the north and west where they had already driven out the Sky Children were covered in graves. They had called them mourner’s fields. Locals there were already erecting stone monuments for the beloved dead. The mourner’s field for Calcumum had yet to be made. The ferocity of the Sky Children in keeping that city and land was worse than in most places. Perhaps it would match the mourner’s field near Kalsworth before long, marked with the dead of many humans who wanted nothing more than their freedom.

Key noticed a couple men walking nearby with a cart to carry the wounded.

“I found more dead here.” He called to them.

They nodded, still passing by. “We’re not after the dead, but the living.”

He watched them and frowned. “But the dead need to be remembered too.”

They didn’t hear him though.

Staggering down the hill, Key dragged up the rest of the dead he found. He was sure there would be many further up in the ditch. Unfortunately, he had no time to go for them all. He still needed to find clean water. The best place was the source.

He followed the flow of the water to where he hoped was a river or clean canal. It led a long way through the fields with a dead body floating inside every so often in it. He dragged the bodies out as he went, though he grew more tired with each step thinking about Tiler who had to be parched.

As he went along, he saw two men in the distance tossing a body into the ditch. Running at them, he shouted, “Hey! Don’t that! It spoils the water!”

“That’s the idea,” one of the men called back. Then Key saw his face. A blue-eyed Sky Child working with a brown-eyed one.

Key drew his pistol and shot the blue-eye straight in the chest.

The demon froze up, falling in with the body he was trying to unload. His companion open fire on Key, ducking low along the grass. But Key did not run straight as he charged at him. He zigzagged. When upon the brown-eye, Key lifted his sword, slicing the hand with the gun nearly open.

Panting, he stood with the sword point to the demon’s neck. The brown-eyed Sky Child clenched his arm, howling out curses on the entire human race.

“Shut up! And help me get your friend out of that water! You disgust me!” Key jabbed him with the sword point, allowing for a little trickle of blood. “Get up!”

The brown-eye rose from off the earth, glaring daggers at Key. “I’m not going to be your slave.”

“Oh, you’d rather die?” Key then lifted his sword to run it through the demon if he needed to. “That’s fine by me.”

“Savage!” The brown-eyes hissed through his teeth.

Key tilted his head and snorted. “Call me what you like. I’ve heard it all before. Now get down there and get those two out of the water.”

The soldier climbed down into the irrigation ditch, casting glares back at Key with all the intent to escape in his eyes as soon as he saw opportunity to.

“And don’t think I can’t lop off your head if I want to,” Key added, watching from above. “And you know I’m a good aim. I could have killed you as easily as your pal, here.”

“Why didn’t you?” the brown eye said through his teeth, heaving up his dead companion first.

Key smirked. “No point in killing someone weaker than me.”

The Sky Child cringed, clenching his teeth even tighter. “What makes you think we are weaker than you?”

Key gave a mocking laugh, knowing it would infuriate the brown-eye. “Not all of you, just you brown-eyes.”

“How dare you!” The demon shouted at Key, flopping his dead comrade barely onto the bank. “We are of the divine race, and you are nothing more than—”

“You are nothing more than the dregs of dying race,” Key said with bite. “Invaders into our world from some unknown out there, mixed with demons. You don’t even have their passed-on memory of that fact. You are worse off than humans.”

Key dug out from his pocket a thin gold chain. It had bells on the end where there was a noose and one on the other end. He held it up. “Do you know what this is?”

But the brown-eye backed off towards the other bank.

“I see you do.”

Key made a running jump, landing next to the brown-eye with his sword blade resting on the demon’s shoulder near his neck. The brown-eye froze, waiting for the deathblow.

Breathing hard, Key said, “You either do as I