by Erik A Otto
Sebastian’s face grew sullen, but he nodded. It was a profoundly interesting revelation, but he wondered why Sebastian would have such a reaction. Was it because his faith was being challenged? Paulo hadn’t heard Sebastian cite the Canons or even mention Matteo since he’d arrived back from the Snail Mountains.
“But what does this have to do with my original question, Sebastian? What does this have to do with the failing systems of our world?”
“Are there any more prophecies forthcoming?” Sebastian asked.
“N-no. Which means what? Our world will collapse, or we…”
“…are about to arrive at our destination,” Sebastian finished his sentence.
Paulo’s head spun, but he managed to ask, “And what is our destination?”
Sebastian frowned and held his chin in thought, fighting some inner battle.
During his musing, several of Paulo’s Fringe men came in carrying the bloodied bodies of three Belidoran military men.
Sebastian stood and pointed. “Right by the door. Put that one—the one with the mortal wound—first. The other dead ones farther from the door—closer to us. Okay, is everyone ready?”
Paulo said, “You didn’t answer my question, Sebastian. What is our destination?”
Sebastian shot him a snarky look. “Look, Purveyor, the only reason I’m doing this is for Nala. I wouldn’t even be here in the keep if it wasn’t where she wanted to be. That’s all I care about. I was willing to discuss this while we wait for your men, but I’m not wasting any more time unless it helps us save the keep. Now, get ready, all of you. If the beast doesn’t take the dead bodies, we’ll have to kill it.”
Paulo was about to object, but Sebastian was right. His question could wait, despite how much it frustrated him.
Sebastian took his canteen and filled the artifact with water through an intake port, then placed it on the floor where there was the maze-like array. Immediately the array lit up so much that Paulo had to shield his eyes for a moment. The artifact descended into the floor.
With a great gasp of breath, the bone-mouth door opened.
The aperture only offered utter darkness at first. One of Paulo’s men moved hesitantly toward it.
Sebastian said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” And the man backed away.
Sure enough, only a moment later, they heard a galloping sound, and the beast emerged. The mosquero flailed about, making high-pitched noises, and then its trunk, if that is what it was, found its way to the nearly dead man in the front. It lashed down and skewered his chest. Paulo watched with fascination as the trunk sucked up the man’s innards in violent, wrenching boluses.
He heard one of the men retching outside the room. Paulo couldn’t blame him. It was one of the most violent acts he’d ever seen.
The mosquero didn’t stop there, doing the same to the two newly dead men. As it finished absorbing the chest cavity of the third man, Paulo’s Fringe men became increasingly nervous. Sebastian said it would be sated after two men, but this one had eaten three. When would it stop? They all backed into the corners of the room, holding their swords with white fists.
The mosquero’s thrashing slowed. It hobbled a few steps, its legs hinged, and it flopped down and blinked its eyes like some sleepy house cat.
While everyone else was glued to the walls, Sebastian walked casually up to the beast with his hand out to touch its head. He walked around the side and mounted it more easily than one would a horse. His hands moved some fin-like protuberances on its back, and the beast raised up to its feet again.
The looks from the Fringe men who lined the room had transformed from fear to astonishment.
Sebastian said, “Purveyor, pick one of your men to ride this beast. I will show him how to direct it up the stairs to the cage your men are building in the courtyard. It’s easier to control than a horse, you’ll see. And once you ride it, it won’t attack you or anyone you don’t direct it toward.”
Paulo looked around, pointed to the least afraid-looking of his men, and motioned for him to join Sebastian. The man didn’t look happy about his assignment.
Meanwhile, Paulo lingered at the threshold of the bone mouth doors while Sebastian explained how to control the beast. Glancing into the cavernous room, he could still see only darkness. “Are you sure it’s safe to enter?” Paulo asked, interrupting Sebastian’s instructions.
Sebastian shrugged. “Mostly sure.” He continued showing the man how to ride the mosquero.
Mostly wasn’t enough reassurance for Paulo, so he didn’t enter. Instead, he stood there trying to see shapes in the darkness. He was only able to see the floor in front of him; a shiny bluish surface made of an unknown Forefather material.
As Paulo hesitated, Sebastian finished his instructions to Paulo’s Fringe subordinate, dismounted the mosquero, and boldly walked past him. “Come,” he said, and he disappeared into the gloom.
Before Paulo could muster the nerve to follow, lights illuminated the inside of the chamber, triggered by something Sebastian had pressed on a wall. Paulo craned his neck and examined the interior. There were a number of vertical pods along the side of the cavern, most of which were full of some kind of creature. These looked to be sleeping or in hibernation. A couple of them looked to be dead, their corpses dried out and flaking away. He recognized eight of the beasts as gargoyles and three of them as mosqueros. There were two others, though, which must have been the ramolons Sebastian had described. These beasts were of greater length, and each one’s head was barely discernible as an extended prominence of hard sinew and musculature that rested like a huge tree trunk on the beast’s back. This trunk hardly looked like a head at all except that its eyes and a few other orifices were barely raised above the trunk. The rest of the body looked much like an oversized, stalky horse. The front legs had huge bony prominences and more musculature in the shoulders and hind legs.
Beyond the pods, the cavern extended quite a ways. It was several hundred feet long, lined with eyeglass displays, silverstone knobs, chairs, and drawers.
Paulo took a breath and followed Sebastian inside, his heart beating with a combination of excitement and fear.
Chapter 21
The Commander
As dawn broke on the first day of the third Internecion, the Great Defender’s army rumbled toward the keep. This wasn’t a squad to scout defenses or a regiment to test their resolve. It was a massive force with the sole objective of taking the keep.
Aisha and her leftenants stood on the battlements with Timothur, the Purveyor, and Hella, watching them come. “We’re square, then?” Timothur asked. His eyes were bleary from a lack of sleep, but they still held Aisha’s gaze.
She nodded. “Yes, General.”
He nodded in turn, then left with Hella and the Purveyor toward their respective stations.
The cavalry led the way for the Great Defender. They fanned out around the keep, just out of range of the keep’s archers. The trail of dust they kicked up in the air obscured much of what was behind them, but they couldn’t completely conceal a force of ten thousand. Nor could they conceal the huge towers they wheeled toward the keep along the promontory.
Two of the large towers stopped ahead of the moat where the drawbridge used to be. Gears could be heard turning as huge gangways plied away from them to splay over the moat. Elsewhere, other towers moved into the bog. One of these stopped near the moat—up from the promontory—and started lowering its gangway. The other got mired in the uneven ground and started to keel over. The men manning it abandoned the structure.
“Flaming arrows—fire at the towers!” Aisha called out.
The projectiles flew out from the battlements. Most missed, and those few that hit stuck and burned, but the towers wouldn’t ignite. Not yet, not without burning fats.
Infantry began streaming across the first gangway that was secured over the moat.
“Fire at will!” Aisha ordered.
“Burning fats, ma’am?” asked Colonel Mah
rtan. She was glad to have Marhtan at her side. His words held weight with the men, and she trusted him completely.
“Not yet,” she said.
The Great Defender’s infantry lifted large wooden shields over their heads, deflecting almost all the arrows from the keep. The shields converged into a square formation in front of the barricade where the front gate used to be. They hovered there, protecting them from arrows, but the phalanx didn’t attempt to break through.
Then came the rams. Huge Albondo blue-oak trunks, pressure treated and tipped with serrated Matar bone, paraded out from behind the siege towers. The square of infantry engulfed the rams until they came through the other side and crashed into the detritus they’d placed where the gate had been. She could hear the barricade splintering away already. Their makeshift barrier wouldn’t last long.
“Alright, the burning fats,” she said.
Mahrtan ran down the battlements and relayed the order.
The men took out their tubs of burning fats and dumped them down the walls. Some missed entirely, but others landed directly on the square of infantry. In short order, flaming arrows hit them, and the lot of them ignited.
The promontory in front of the keep swelled to a hundred burning, screaming, undulating men.
But there were so many. Those who fell from the flame or arrows were replaced quickly from the ranks of thousands behind them. She heard the splintering of wood and bone as the rams crashed into the barricade again.
Some of the Great Defender’s men ran alongside the formation with burning fats of their own, doused the keep barricade, then lit it aflame. Other men circled around the ramming formation with ladders so they could throw them up onto the walls. Her men shot them down, but more came, and more.
Aisha could see halberds ramming out of the lower battlements, skewering men. Men fell from the halberds, from arrows, from the burning fats, but the rams never dropped, and there were always enough to replenish the ranks.
Meanwhile, the barricade splintered, burned, and was pushed back through the corridor under the gatehouse.
It continued this way for some time. The keep lost only a few men—those who didn’t push the ladders down in time or were hit by stray projectiles—while the Great Defender lost hundreds. There must have been three hundred dead on the promontory alone. Yet still the rams worked on the gate, and the Great Defender’s horde easily stepped over their fallen comrades to replenish their ranks.
Away from the promontory, where the third gangway had been put down, hundreds of the Great Defender’s infantry had crossed. They were raising many ladders, too many for the garrison to handle. The tide was shifting against her men.
“Colonel Mahrtan, bring fifty men from the reserves to where those ladders are coming up.”
“Yes, Commander.” And he ran off, yelling orders.
It would be crowded with so many men on the battlements in one location, but it would at least provide a more even match in that area.
“I’m going to give the order,” a voice said from behind her, startling her.
She looked back and saw it was Timothur again. She nodded. “They’ll break through any minute. No qualms here.”
He nodded and ran back down the stairway toward the courtyard.
A few moments later, she heard her men at the gatehouse cry out, “They’re through! They’ve broken through!”
Down below, the Great Defender’s infantry on the promontory cheered, dropped the rams, and brandished swords and spears. They surged toward the keep with enthusiasm, flooding over the litter of sooty corpses.
Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the surge stopped. A lull came over the men on the promontory, and she heard a ghastly shrieking sound from below the gatehouse. Screams of terror came from the infantry where just a moment ago there had been adulation.
A deep thrumming could be heard. Then a great shock wave of force threw a slew of men from under the gatehouse back onto the promontory. Another shock wave ensued and threw more men back. The screams of terror increased. Some of the infantry started to clamber backward over the men behind them. From her vantage point, Aisha couldn’t see what was happening under the gatehouse, but she continued to hear shrieking noises and the thrumming of the ramolons as they pulsed.
More shock waves pushed men back, and more men scurried away. She saw the two ramolons burst out into the open, one on each side of the gate on the promontory. The mosquero thrust forward between them, its trunk gyrating in the air in front of it. The ramolon on the left started to vibrate and, in a pulse of energy, jiggered its head forward, blasting a nearby attacker back at least ten yards.
There was little room for the infantry on the promontory. Some fell into the bog, others fell into the moat and tried to swim away, and some struggled back onto the gangway that covered the moat, trying to push through their comrades. The mosquero lunged ahead and stuck its trunk onto one of these fallen men, then lifted him in the air as the vacuum sucked at his innards.
The terror had reached a fever pitch. No man had the gumption to stay and fight these beasts. Unfortunately for them, there was no easy way to retreat on the crowded promontory. More ended up falling into the bog or the moat. There they faced a torrent of arrows from the battlements as the formation no longer protected them.
The four gargoyles came. One flew near Aisha, close enough that she could feel the draft caused by its broad wings as it went by. These gargoyles came with vats of burning fats in their claws. Three dumped their fats on the tall siege towers that abutted the moat. Another dropped one on a nearby gangway. A few arrows were directed at the gargoyles, but nothing hit. The Great Defender’s soldiers were too stunned, too afraid to do anything but run.
“Light them up!” Aisha yelled. “The towers first and then the gangway.”
The arrows flew, and after several volleys, the three functional towers were all aflame, but the gangways couldn’t be hit because they were covered in retreating men.
The gargoyles circled back and picked up more burning fats from the keep roof. On the next foray, they focused on the gangways over the drawbridge area. By now the ramolons and mosquero had mostly cleared the promontory area before the moat. The bridges became exposed as the remainder fled. Seeing the opening, the gargoyles swooped in to saturate the gangways with fats. In quick succession, Aisha’s archers launched arrows into the vicinity, lighting them up.
The initial shock of the beasts was abating, and defiant arrows from the more distant reaches of the Great Defender’s army were becoming more numerous. One of them hit the rider of one of the gargoyles in the chest. He fell off into the battlements as he returned, sliding down the outer wall into the moat. Another gargoyle took two arrows in one wing, veered, and plummeted down, crushing his rider into the bog. The other two gargoyles made it back safely. Timothur waved with his hand to the men stationed on the keep roof, ordering them to stay grounded.
The ramolons also retreated, sticking close to the keep near the gatehouse, trying to stay out of range of the arrows. The mosquero stayed on the edge of the foray. It had taken several arrows but didn’t seem to be encumbered by them.
For several minutes the arrows rained on both sides. Aisha’s archers picked off fleeing men in the bog and in the moat. There must have been almost a thousand men down. The Great Defender’s arrows were mostly impotent. They were too far away, and the keep too well defended, for them to make a difference.
A distant horn sounded. One of the burning siege towers reversed, then another, then the third one. Men followed them, and they pushed back together the way they’d come. The cavalry that had been circulating the keep came back to the front and also rode away.
The Great Defender’s army had retreated, for now.
Timothur’s pacing echoed in the dining hall. He walked in front of the viewing area, his silhouette a stark contrast against the orange horizon that could be seen through the windows. “They won’t be gone long,” he said, pointing in the direction of the Great De
fender’s army. “They will come to their senses and realize these beasts aren’t invincible. They know this after taking down two of the gargoyles with relative ease.”
“Then we’ll turn them away again,” Aisha said.
Timothur shook his head. “No, they’ll be ready to shoot down the gargoyles next time. They’ll have long spears and halberds for the ramolons and mosqueros. You can only surprise your enemy once. Then they prepare countermeasures. And the rebuilt barricade—I’m sure you can see it’s not as strong as before. They’ll get through even sooner than last time. And do you see that they have many more siege towers out there on the plain? They only launched four against us. What if they cross the moat with eight, or twelve? We can’t withstand a force that large attacking our walls all at once.” Timothur glanced around the room, looking for a challenge to his conclusions.
No one responded. For her part, Aisha could see no flaw in his logic, so she said nothing. The situation was desperate, but she preferred not to impact the morale of the others by agreeing with Timothur.
The Purveyor was at the table with her, frowning in concentration. Hella sat cross-legged, watching Timothur. Darian looked down at the table, whispering mimicries to himself. Nala was there as well, looking at her fingers as if they might reveal the answers to their predicament.
“And where’s Sebastian? Where’s our enigmatic magic man?” Timothur asked. “To find him, I would normally ask my men to look for you, Nala, but here you are. You must know.”
“He said he needed to look at something,” Nala answered. “He was going to try to make it back in time for the meeting,”
“Well, I certainly hope he has more miracles up his sleeve. The lot of us are all out.”
Aisha said, “General, we’ve done what we can. It was a great success today. Perhaps we should send a contingent to negotiate with the Great Defender—to see if he’s willing to discuss terms?”