Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  Which brings me to a major weakness of the priests’ mob tactic: their lack of command and control. When we entered the city, the priests had already sent the mob to take the baronial residence. They weren’t prepared for us to ride in, swoop along their flanks, and cut down large swaths of maniacs. The ones in close proximity defended themselves, or tried to, but the mob as a whole was after another target. We were wading through them with warhorses, heavy armor, and enchanted swords for several minutes and hundreds of casualties before someone managed to start redirecting their efforts. By then, it was simply too late. When the mob finally turned and headed for us, we were well and truly there to stay.

  Almost none of their priests were killed in the battle. They didn’t go into the fray if they could avoid it. The two who did venture out were wounded, but captured. I had them bound and brought to me, slung them across Bronze’s rump.

  We had no fatalities on our side. The knights were too well-protected. We did have several injured horses, although none were serious.

  Bronze stepped on bodies, squishing them as we approached the baron’s personal citadel. He didn’t come out, just stood on a battlement and watched the carnage while his men continued to fight fires set by the mob. I dumped the bound priests on the ground, or close enough. The bodies were thickly strewn.

  “Can you deal with the rest of their religion?” I called up to him.

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “Then I charge you to crush them wherever you find them and to never let them gain a foothold in your domain. I will leave you in peace, to rule your realm as before, save only for this: If they take power again, I shall return to burn them out.”

  The Baron pursed his lips for a moment before nodding sharply.

  “I understand.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “Very well,” he sighed, not pleased with my insistence. “I accept your terms.”

  Bronze breathed fire on the priests at my signal. Firebrand concentrated on the flames, doing whatever it does with fire. In seconds, their flesh ignited. Within a minute, their screams stopped but the fires continued.

  “I return to you your town,” I shouted up. “Rule it well and wisely.”

  Without waiting for a reply, I headed back to the camp.

  That night, the camp was a sober, quiet place. They usually sing, laugh, tell jokes, all the things happy warriors do when they’re ready to go out to battle.

  Not tonight. They spoke quietly, in small groups, but my ears are very good. They didn’t understand what I tried to tell them, what Torvil and Kammen tried to describe. Men and women—even children—screaming bloody murder and trying to hack them apart with anything that came to hand. Everyone, and I mean everyone they met tried to attack them, and they cut everyone down. It was as simple as that. It was a horrible as that.

  I understood them all too well. It’s one thing to face an armed man and kill him. It’s another thing to face a bunch of lunatics with makeshift weapons. And it’s quite another to have a nine-year-old boy with a knife try to grab your leg and stab you behind the knee… before you put your sword through his head.

  I know.

  Oh, today was a great day. A glorious victory. The town was saved. Cheers and huzzahs. The Church was defeated. More cheering. And the gruesome slaughter of thousands was something we could still smell tonight, even so far away. Magic scrubbed every drop of blood and offal from us, but the stench of slaughter would be with us forever.

  Worst of all—for me—my part wasn’t done. After sunset, Bronze stayed to keep an eye on the camp while I went back into town. I gave it a once-over with vampire eyes and set fire to any structure with a trace of the Lord of Light about it. The people in them were mostly okay, but I found two more amulet-wearers as they came out of burning buildings. The Baron already found the others and their corpses were smoldering in the palace square. Firebrand, of course, was as gleeful as ever to find people I wanted to kill. At least these were bloody. I needed the nourishment after a hard day.

  We went back to camp to help scry the next leg of our route through H’zhad’Eyn.

  Rethven, Thursday, March 29th, Year 9

  Villages aren’t a problem. They don’t usually have a priest in residence. They’re not happy to have ravenous guests for dinner, but they don’t argue, either. We don’t need to, but we’re going to start setting up one of the shift-tents every night, cycling between our three base cities, to bring in more supplies. I’m trying to be nice where possible.

  It makes me wonder about the logistics of the Church of Light. Do they only focus on dominating the cities? What’s the population requirement before they start trying to make everyone a pleasure junkie? Or do they care about the population if there’s no authority figure to try for? They need popular support to own a kingdom, obviously, but how much of the nobility do they need? Is it good to have junkie nobles, or are they avoiding it?

  There’s a lot about religion I’m never going to understand. It’s too much like being a drug dealer or a politician.

  We kept heading south and somewhat east, following the dirt roads of H’zhad’Eyn. My knights are spoiled by the Karvalen roads and keep grumbling about how a real king would have preserved the Imperial roads. I don’t think they like it here. To be fair, there are some stretches of road with paving stones, but they’re usually in the middle of nowhere. It’s also much warmer in these latitudes, a fact I do not appreciate, either.

  Anyway, we’ve passed through half a dozen villages, each larger than the last. The town we first encountered, Heverin, was the northernmost town, according to the locals, and something like the unofficial capitol of the northern marches. Farther north of it were the tribes and barbarians and monsters—again, according to the locals. If we kept going south, we’d find Verlen, a somewhat larger town and more firmly a kingdom town. They said it was also where we would find the next temple.

  And we did.

  Verlen wasn’t a city, quite, but it was a larger town than Heverin. It, too, was surrounded by farmland and was somewhat discomfited to discover our encampment appeared late one afternoon out in the west forty. I was quite pleased. After all our practice, we constructed a campsite with alarming rapidity. The people peering over the walls of Verlen were still gaping at us when we finished the earthworks.

  Overall, I didn’t see much about the town to indicate any significant military presence. The walls were still adobe and rammed earth, but slightly higher and thicker—say, ten or twelve feet tall. If it came right down to it, I bet any of the Knights of Shadow could jump up, grab the top, and haul himself over, assuming the lip of the wall would hold him. The other side of the wall had a series of built-in steps for troops to use. Rather than a battlement, they simply climbed the steps until they could fire a bow or crossbow over the top of the wall. These gates weren’t showpieces, being made of heavy timbers and bound with iron. Someone had the bright idea to cut slits in the doors for arrows or spears, making them somewhat more dangerous to approach.

  Twenty seconds. I figured it would take all of twenty seconds to take down enough wall to invade the place. Five seconds if we went through a gate—Bronze could run straight through any of them and leave a pile of matchwood behind. She wouldn’t enjoy it, but her dent would go away within ten minutes. The door would remain matchwood.

  We didn’t get to parley, however. I heard priests already exhorting the faithful, so we rested while we could, knowing we were about to get into a fight. Seldar discussed tactics with Torvil, Kammen, and Beltar. Instead of cutting down a bunch of distracted enemies, we would defend a fixed position. Most important, we would have to defend our perimeter. If we could hold the line here, it would give us a better idea of what sort of numbers we could realistically expect to defeat. At first, I wanted to go straight to the high-mobility tactic of cavalry constantly falling back and killing the fastest of any remaining enemies. Seldar insisted this was too valuable an opportunity to pass up for gauging our relative strengths
. I relented.

  I retired to my Burrito of Doom for the sunset, hoping the priests wouldn’t finish their exhortations until after sundown.

  While rolled up in my Burrito of Evil, I heard the shouting and the thumping of armored feet as knights, on foot, prepared to defend our earthen walls. The sunset was nearly over, though, so I wasn’t too worried. Malena nudged me with a toe.

  “We’re about to have to defend ourselves, Your Majesty.”

  “Immediately?” I asked, somewhat muffled by the cloth.

  “Almost.”

  “Good. I’m almost done.”

  I went ahead and cast a cleaning spell. I might as well let it run until the sunset finished.

  When I started unrolling, Malena jerked sharply on it. She’s stronger than she looks. I unwrapped much more rapidly and sat up. She was already holding out pieces of armor. I took the hint and the armor.

  Outside, the shouting grew louder and dished up some screaming to go along with it.

  Malena followed me out of Seldar’s tent. I noticed she was carrying a shield along with a drawn sword. Well, being a bodyguard in the middle of a battle calls for different tactics, I suppose. Assuming she was planning on being a bodyguard in the middle of a battle.

  “Are you following me?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  I wondered where Bronze was and instantly knew she was by the horses’ quarter. A number of dusks—almost-knights—were tasked with keeping the horses calm, or at least in order. Bronze was eyeing the horses and they were remarkably well-behaved, saddled and ready to go in case a sudden retreat was called for. A hundred men were already mounted and ready as a reserve force.

  Somewhat more attention-grabbing, however, were the pyrotechnics on the rampart.

  The crowd of attackers came flooding across the field toward us. As they did, a group of professional wizards—under the direction of a Banner—lit the ditch on fire. Flames leaped up, white and bright and brilliant. It would have stopped any normal assault, I’m sure. Nobody wants to jump into a broad ditch full of fire.

  While it didn’t stop them, it did momentarily blind them as they charged through. With the enemy blinking away dazzle as they clawed their way up the embankment, backlit by the leaping flames, it wasn’t at all hard to wave a sword through hands, arms, and heads.

  From the town, a number of counterspells sailed toward us, targeting our wall of flames. At rough count, I’d say they had twenty or thirty wizards trying to douse our defensive wall. They were pretty good, too. Some sections of it flickered out, temporarily. Their problem was a combination of proximity and numbers. True, their efforts cost us energy to counter, but we had more wizards than they did. On the other hand, all they needed to do was cost us enough power to let the spell fail. A quick eyeball estimate told me they probably could—eventually. Then the auxiliary wizards—a group of Shields not engaged in raising a wall of fire—started blocking and countering magical effects aimed at us. The wall stopped taking hits when the town’s wizards were forced to deal with spell defenses.

  As I mounted our wall to wave Firebrand and my saber around, I observed a comforting fact about the wall of fire situation. The mob didn’t have the brains to go around. The whole ditch was on fire, yes, but they could see us over the flames, standing here, waiting for them. They just kept coming straight for us. No wonder the town wizards were being told to take down our wall of fire. The mob came out the town gates, grouped up, and charged. They had all the good sense of water running down a gutter.

  Interesting. Was it a timed thing, perhaps? Did the priests not know how long their ritual would last? Or did they simply not know how to give better instructions? Or could the people involved be incapable of comprehending complex instructions?

  I don’t think they’re capable of complex thought, Firebrand suggested, cleaving a skull. I decapitated another man and kicked his body back across the ditch like a football toward the goalposts.

  “Really?” I asked, bisecting two more slavering fanatics. Blood slithered to me from all directions.

  I’m not hearing anything but “killKILLkill!” in their heads, boss.

  “Blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne?”

  If you like, yes, but with less words and more murder.

  I kept killing, windmilling both blades—a wall of blades, perhaps. I also spread tendrils out before me in a life-drinking net. Everything coming up the embankment within a hundred feet of me did so with a sluggish, tired air—right before getting cut down. It was a lot to take in, but I wasn’t doing the whole door-into-death routine. Their souls weren’t my problem. I’m supposed to be retail, not wholesale. I was only after their vitality. Their blood, of course, was another story. It took care of itself.

  Looking out over the fires, it was hard to tell how many were still out there. The glare of light was a disadvantage to us beyond our defensive position. It was an important question, though. The ditch was full—without affecting the flames, I might add, other than to raise them higher as bodies burned. Good spell, that.—and we were starting to have less of a height advantage. The enemy still approached across uneven footing over the piles of bodies and through the fires, but they didn’t have to claw their way up the earthworks anymore.

  I shouted to my nearest neighbors. The line redistributed itself along the top of the embankment as I fell back and whipped out a mirror. Looking down over the battlefield, it seemed we had taken the worst of it already. As a rough estimate, we had another thousand or so still scrambling to get to us, but now we outnumbered them. I didn’t consider them a threat.

  I scanned around elsewhere. Saboteurs sneaking into the camp? Nope. A cavalry troop circling for a hit-and-run? Nope. Some suicidal lunatic on a flying carpet about to bomb us? Nope.

  Not content with the scrying—scrying spells can be fooled—I dashed toward Bronze. She met me halfway and I leaped into the saddle. She turned without a sound to head toward the opposite side of the camp. We galloped up the inside of our earthworks and leaped over, clearing earthworks, flames, and ditch in one easy arc. We took a bare-eyeball look around the three sides of our perimeter not presently being assaulted. Still nothing.

  It bothered me to think there was nothing but a massed wave of people sent against us. Maybe it’s silly of me to expect something sneaky, underhanded, or just plain subtle. But as soon as I stop worrying about it, it’ll come back to bite me.

  The defensive fires winked out, leaving bodies to smolder and clothing to burn. Thick palls of black smoke curled up almost immediately and I realized the magical flames hadn’t given off any sort of smoke.

  The remainder of the mob finally caught up to the front line, trampled their way over the bodies, and disintegrated into chops and offal. It was brief and entirely one-sided. During the course of the battle, there were some good, solid hits on my knights, but nothing that wouldn’t buff out by morning. They weren’t harmed, but they were tired. Tired in body and spirit, to be frank. Hacking apart a few dozen people takes work. Worse, it takes a sort of inner fortitude to do it not only to enemy soldiers, but to everyone, of any age or gender.

  On the other hand, I will say one good thing about sending fanatical screamers into the fray. If you have to kill them to stop them, when it’s all over, there’s no moaning or screaming wounded. That’s nice.

  Seldar suggested I take the night off. He had two reasons. The political reason was that nobody will be comfortable discussing a surrender at night, least of all the baron of the local town we’ve darn near depopulated. If there’s a Demon King out there, darkness isn’t reassuring.

  The other reason… well…

  I’ve done some awful things. I know it. I try not to remember the snarling faces, the screaming, the subdivided bodies clawing their way toward me. Grown men are one thing. Half-grown children are another.

  Seldar has the wrong idea. He thinks I might need some time to myself to get a grip on things. He couldn’t be
more wrong. I need something to keep me occupied until my recent memories can cool down enough to be handled without telepathic asbestos.

  I found the wizards in charge of the wall of fire spell. There were forty of them—eight actual wizards and thirty-two dusks—all unconscious, resting from their labors. It was only to be expected, I suppose. I noticed Heydyl was among them. I’ve been wondering where he’d gotten off to. At least he wasn’t standing on a wall and hacking people to bits.

  Is it better to sit in the back and roast people with magic or look them in the eyes as you cut them apart? Better for who? I don’t know the answers.

  Maybe I’m too sensitive.

  I spent the rest of the night with Bronze and Firebrand, working out some new spells. Variants on existing spells, really, but new applications. I wanted options for crowd control. Crowd control for crowds loaded up with methamphetamines and angel dust.

  As we got farther and farther into H’zhad’Eyn, the towns would get larger, the numbers higher, and the influence of the priests that much more powerful. The latest flood of human bodies was impressive and, had it built up a bit more before the assault, it could have swamped our defensive line. Then it would have been a grisly free-for-all. I’m pretty sure we would have won, even so, but three or four thousand more bodies might have been able to pin most of us down by sheer weight of numbers. Once you get a knight down—if you have enough bodies to hold him down—it’s possible to unlatch his armor and shell him like a lobster. Important safety tip for dealing with wrestlers and similar hand-to-hand fighters.

  We patched up our wounded, rested, and looked forward to tomorrow.