###
Tyrcamber had hoped that the city of Sinderost would stand firm, that it would hold fast against the Valedictor’s attack.
In the end, the city lasted until barely before nightfall.
It was clear the death of the Emperor and the Guardian had shaken the remaining defenders. Much of the army had survived the retreat from the New City to the Old City, but no one was in command. Duke Chilmar Rigamond thought himself the senior lord of the Empire and expected the other nobles to defer to him in the absence of the Emperor.
Unfortunately, so did every other Duke in the realm. And the Masters of the five Imperial Orders, for that matter.
Because of that, the defense was ragged, unfocused. The serjeants and men-at-arms held their individual sections of the wall with dogged ferocity, battling to hold the goblins and the muridachs and their siege ladders at bay. But with the reinforcements from across the River Bellex, the Valedictor had more than enough soldiers to spare, and his warriors hammered at every inch of the northern wall of the Old City.
And while the soldiers fought, the dragons struck.
The Valedictor rode Tyrcamber into battle, and without the Guardian’s powerful magic, they approached without fear. A dozen dark and umbral elves rode dragons, and they swooped low over the defenses. The griffins and stormhawks tried to stop them, but the mounts of the Knights of the Griffin were overwhelmed and slain. Blasts of dragon fire destroyed the ballistae and catapults of the wall’s watch towers, clearing the approach to the Old City, and the dragon fire killed hundreds of soldiers in the process. Seven of the dragons perished as they flew low over the city, their chests pierced by ballista bolts, and the dead dragons glowed with golden fire as they fell to the earth and reverted back to their original forms.
Tyrcamber prayed that would be his fate, begging God to let him die, but he was not so fortunate. None of the ballista bolts found him, and the dragon attacks threw the defenders into disarray long enough for Tyrcamber and four other dragons to unleash their burning breath upon the gate.
The massive doors of wood and steel shattered in an explosion, and the Valedictor’s army surged forward.
“Put the city to the sword!” said the Valedictor, magic driving his voice to colossal volume. “Kill every man, woman, and child! Spare none of the humans! Let all see the folly of opposing my armies!”
The host of the Valedictor poured into the city, and the butchery continued well into the night.
###
The next morning, the army of the western Dukes of the Empire attempted to cross the River Nabia to come to the aid of the stricken capital.
They were too late, of course.
Sinderost had already become a city of ruins, ashes, and corpses, and the Valedictor’s soldiers moved from house to house to hunt down the few remaining survivors. But Duke Merovech Valdraxis commanded the western army, and Merovech was not the sort of man to give up easily. His army had been hard at work preparing, and hundreds of crude rafts built of pine logs began to cross the River Nabia, ready to assail the Valedictor’s host.
But the Valedictor was more than ready to face them.
His muridachs fortified the eastern bank of the Nabia, preparing earthwork walls to block the approach of the rafts. And then, a few moments after the rafts launched from the western bank, hundreds of the craft holding thousands of soldiers, the Valedictor unleashed his dragons.
Tyrcamber flew over the river again and again, the Valedictor riding on his back, and breathed fire with the rest of the dragons. He set ablaze dozens of rafts, incinerating hundreds of men and sending the rest to drown in the river beneath the weight of their armor. The attempted river crossing was an utter disaster. Thousands of soldiers died, and Duke Merovech had no choice but to withdraw.
The Valedictor was utterly triumphant.
In the space of two days, he had slain the Emperor, the Guardian, most of the nobles of the eastern Empire, and broken the back of the Empire’s armies. The eastern Empire was his, and only the west and the south remained to subdue.
Tyrcamber had sworn to defend the Empire, and instead, he had helped the Valedictor destroy it, all because he had lost control of himself and let the Malison devour him.
He would have wept, had dragons been able to weep.
###
With Sinderost secured, the Valedictor sent part of his army across the River Nabia to prepare the invasion of the western Empire. The rest he accompanied south in a lightning campaign to seize the duchy of Mourdrech and crush its nobles. The soldiers of Mourdrech were among the best in the Empire, hardened by the constant raids of the xiatami cities to the south. The forces of Duke Faramund had been cut off from the rest of the Empire when the Valedictor seized the lands of Talgothica, and the Duke had been fighting against the Valedictor’s host ever since. With his full attention turned towards Sinderost, the Valedictor had been unable to spare the strength to deal with Faramund Berengar and his vassals.
But with the Imperial capital in ruins and the Empire shattered, the remaining Dukes squabbling with each other, the Valedictor had more than enough strength to deal with the duchy of Mourdrech.
The campaign lasted less than a month. The Valedictor’s troops marched south along the coast, burning and slaughtering everything in their path. They reached the island city of Tamisa and laid siege to it. The jade walls of Tamisa, built by the xiatami, were strong fortifications, the watch towers armed with siege engines.
But the siege engines were no match for dragon fire.
Under cover of night, the Valedictor led his dragons in another attack that destroyed the engines. The goblin and muridach engineers had kept the rafts they used to cross the River Bellex, dragging them south to Mourdrech. They reached the island of Tamisa and stormed the walls, slaughtering the defenders and fighting their way from house to house.
This time, there was no general slaughter of the population as there had been in Sinderost. The Valedictor was rebuilding his former master’s domain, and he needed slaves to work his fields and harvest the crops to feed his soldiers. The soldiers were killed to a man, but the people of the city were put in chains to toil in the fields and mines.
Duke Faramund and his knights made a final stand before the gates of Castle Berengar, fighting until they were slain. The Valedictor’s soldiers stormed into the courtyard, and an old memory flashed through Tyrcamber’s mind. The castle’s great hall was only half-rebuilt. He had fought Sir Dietrich Normand there, a Dragon Cultist who had transformed into a Dragonmaeloch. Unlike Tyrcamber, he had been free from the domination of a dark elf, but he had been utterly insane, and he had sacrificed his own men and gone on a murderous rampage until he had been slain.
Had Tyrcamber possessed the ability, he would have laughed in despair. The Dragon Cult taught that mankind would ascend to become dragon gods, immortal and invincible. Tyrcamber had become a dragon, had become what the Dragon Cult desired, and he craved death since it was the only hope of escape from his nightmarish existence. Tyrcamber supposed he would be damned to hell for all the blood upon his hands since he had transformed, but surely hell could not be any worse than what had already become of him.
He landed in the courtyard, the Valedictor still upon his back. Around him the soldiers battled through the castle, killing the few surviving soldiers. One of the ogres smashed open the doors to the castle’s chapel with a few blows from his axe. The men of the Empire respected the rights of the church to sanctuary, but the Valedictor did not, and a few times he had ordered priests nailed to the wooden crosses in their churches and amused himself by watching them die.
This time, though, it seemed the priests were fighting back.
The ogre had just started to rip aside the wreckage of the door when a volley of five Lance spells caught the creature in the face. The ogre didn’t even have time to bellow before it collapsed to the ground. Tyrcamber looked into the church, and a wave of shock burned through him.
He thought he had been inured to
horrors by now, but a fresh torrent of dread poured through his heart. Women and children crowded the interior of the church, where no doubt they had taken refuge when the castle had begun to fall. Most of the women held Shield spells ready, and Tyrcamber spotted his sister Adalhaid, clad in a sweat-stained gown, her black hair disheveled and her eyes bloodshot. Tyrcamber wondered if she knew that she was a widow. Likely she did. Her sons, his nephews, clung to her legs, hiding behind her, staring at the blood-drenched courtyard with wide, terrified eyes.
Tyrcamber knew that his father and brothers were likely dead. They had all been in Sinderost, and they had either burned in dragon fire or been killed in the fighting. He hadn’t been close to any of them, and in truth had despised some of his brothers, but he had mourned their deaths, nonetheless.
Yet he hadn’t seen them die.
“Take them alive,” said the Valedictor to the goblin and ogre commanders who had rushed to attend him once he landed in the courtyard. “The children are young enough to be trained to obedience, and most of the women will make good breeding stock for future generations of slaves. If…wait.”
The goblin and ogre commanders waited. They would stand there all day if the Valedictor commanded it of them.
Tyrcamber shuddered as the Valedictor’s will sliced into his mind, digging into his thoughts. His dread increased as his mind touched the Valedictor’s mighty will, and he sensed the dark elf’s lust for cruelty. The dark elves shared many of the same vices as humans, the lust for flesh and alcohol and power and wealth. But the dark elves loved cruelty with searing intensity, craved it the way the drunkard yearned for wine. Over the months of his enslavement, Tyrcamber had seen the Valedictor’s love of cruelty firsthand, had seen him stop to torment prisoners simply because it amused him.
“Ah!” said the Valedictor. “That is your sister, is it, slave? And her sons? What a peculiar coincidence. And what an enjoyable one! Fill the church with fire and kill them all.”
Tyrcamber screamed inside his mind, and he rallied every bit of strength he had, every shred of resistance, and tried to resist the command.
But the Valedictor’s will wrapped his mind like a chain, and he had no choice but to obey.
His head turned towards the chapel’s doors, his jaws opening, and fire exploded from him and stabbed into the church. The fire filled the chapel, and dozens of women and children died at once. Adalhaid screamed and tried to hold her Shield spell against the flames, but the dragon fire overwhelmed her, and Tyrcamber saw his sister and his nephews fall, thrashing as the fire consumed their flesh.
He heard their screams, their horrible wrenching screams, along with the wails of the others.
The chapel burned, filled with the dead, and something inside Tyrcamber’s mind snapped.
He screamed inside his head and could not seem to stop himself.
###
It took the Valedictor the better part of five years to mop up the remaining resistance in the western Empire.
With the eastern and southern Empire subdued, the Dukes of the west attempted to elect a new Emperor to lead them in battle. By ancient tradition, only a member of the House of Roland could be elected to the Imperial throne. Alarius’s three sons had all perished in Sinderost, but there were a great many cousins and nieces and nephews, all of whom could be elected to the throne, to say nothing of those nobles whose families had intermarried with the Imperial line over the centuries.
Yet the western Dukes were proud and quarrelsome and could not agree on any one candidate. Some of them actually went to war against one another, an act of utter madness in the face of their foe, and one by one the Valedictor destroyed them, crushing their armies and seizing their castles. The Imperial Free Cities, their packed houses and tenements vulnerable to attacks of dragon fire, submitted without a fight, and the Valedictor appointed satraps to oversee the cities and extort labor and tribute. Duke Merovech Valdraxis, in his desperation, allied with both the Dragon Cult and the outlawed Order of Blood. Merovech transformed into a Dragonmaeloch, and the necromancers of the Fallen Order raised a vast undead host, but the Valedictor smashed the undead army and killed Duke Merovech.
The five Imperial Orders tried to fight on, attempting to rally the nobles. Yet all five Masters had fallen in Sinderost, along with the greater part of the Orders’ strength. The surviving knights and serjeants of the Orders were older, wounded men, those sent to oversee the Orders’ estates and villages. They fought valiantly, but it did little good. The Valedictor’s armies crushed them all. Even the Fallen Order was rooted out of its hidden strongholds and annihilated, its ancient necromancers destroyed.
And Tyrcamber served as his master’s mount for all those campaigns. His mind had shattered, his heart filled with despair, and he obeyed the Valedictor’s commands as he slaughtered his countrymen. Indeed, he could no more have resisted the Valedictor’s commands than water could have stopped itself from flowing downhill.
Five years after the fall of Sinderost, the Valedictor ruled everything from the western sea to the gates of Urd Mythruin in the Goblin Wastes.
Rilmael had said that Tyrcamber would have a chance to alter the fate of the Empire. Oh, but the Guardian had been right, hadn’t he? Tyrcamber had indeed altered the fate of the Empire.
He had helped the Valedictor destroy it. Rilmael hadn’t foreseen that. Nor had he seen his own hideous fate. In the snarling madness of his mind, Tyrcamber cursed his cowardice. He should have told Rilmael to kill him. So much evil would have been averted. Perhaps Sinderost would not have fallen, and the western Dukes might have been able to defy the Valedictor. Or the Imperial Orders could have escaped the ruin of the capital and rallied the rest of the Empire.
But Tyrcamber knew that if he had died in Sinderost as he should have, then his sister and her children would still be alive.
The grief howled in the prison of his mind.
He prayed for death, again and again, but it did not come. It might never come. Dragons could live until something killed them.
And Tyrcamber was too useful for the Valedictor to grant him the mercy of death.
The Valedictor ruled what had once been the Empire, but not all resistance had ended. All the cities, towns, and castles were under the control of his captains and vassals, but there were rebellions from time to time. The Valedictor put those down with extreme brutality, killing all the rebels and raising their corpses as undead.
But the Valedictor soon faced other foes.
The dwarves of Khald Akkar refused to submit, and for all his efforts, the Valedictor was unable to assail their underground fortress. The jotunmiri of the northern mountains waged war against the Valedictor’s forces, as did the muridach cities, and the ratmen betrayed the Valedictor as soon as possible. The Valedictor beat back their attacks, holding onto his conquered lands, but he was unable to take his foes’ strongholds in the mountains, even with the aid of dragons.
But for all their resistance, the dwarves and the jotunmiri and the muridachs were only irritants to the Valedictor.
The xiatami of the Serpent Desert were far more dangerous.
They were organized, and they wielded both powerful mind magic and blood sorcery. And unlike the dark elves, they did not betray each other at every opportunity. More often than not, the rebellions in the Valedictor’s domains were inspired by his dark elven vassals seeking for a chance to overthrow their lord and claim the throne of Urd Mythruin for himself. The cold-blooded xiatami, their minds ruled by icy logic, had no such weakness.
Their first massive attack caught the Valedictor off-guard, and hundreds of thousands of xiatami soldiers and desert goblins swarmed into the lands of the former Empire. The xiatami even seized the ruins of Sinderost itself before the length of their supply trains forced them to stop, and the Valedictor’s counterattack only pushed them back into northern Talgothica. The xiatami held the southern Empire, and soon the Valedictor was locked in a battle for his survival against the mighty Conciliator priests of the
xiatami.
The war remained in a stalemate for centuries.
And Tyrcamber saw it all, flying through endless battles, endless campaigns as the Valedictor’s mount.
He watched as hundreds of thousands of goblins and muridachs and ogres died in the Valedictor’s wars, only to rise again as undead. He watched as the xiatami unleashed legions of desert goblins and other creatures upon the Valedictor’s forces in the name of their god Xophiramus, matching the hordes of the mighty dark elven lord.
And he watched humanity toil as slaves under the Valedictor’s iron fist, little more than beasts of burden. After a few centuries, all memory of the Empire was lost, and men forgot that they had once been knights and soldiers and free men and looked only for their next meal.
On and on it went.
Then, seven hundred and thirty-four years after the fall of Sinderost, the xiatami launched another invasion into the Valedictor’s territory. During the initial battle, a ballista bolt punched through Tyrcamber’s armored scales and found his heart.
The agony filled him, but it was nothing compared to the torment his existence had been for centuries.
The Valedictor levitated to safety, but Tyrcamber crashed into the ground, the impact shattering bones.
He felt the mortal wounds, felt his heart sputtering.
The crash had killed him.
Tyrcamber would have wept with gratitude, had he been capable of it.
Darkness swallowed him, and then Tyrcamber knew no more.
Malison: Dragon War Page 7