by Garon Whited
They were green. Well-trained, yes, and eager to go, yes, but green. They’re not green anymore.
I’m proud of them in another way. They recognize the horrors they are called upon to endure—and to inflict. They recognize the horrors without accepting them. They know this is a slaughter of innocents, innocents being used by an evil power, and they hate it. If we had another way, we would take it, and they know it. They also know we don’t have another way—at least, Seldar hasn’t found one, yet—so they press on, wading through the blood.
They are good men, better men than I, and I am proud of them.
We usually let the first wave start coming for us, building up a few thousand of the mob outside the gates. Once they’re about equal to our numbers, we launch spells at the gates. These barrier spells hold back the rest of the mob, bottling them inside the city. It doesn’t stop them for long, of course. The locals have wizards, too. In the few minutes it takes them to break through, the cavalry takes a dreadful toll on everyone already through the gates. The crazed maniacs chase anything nearby without regard to life, limb, or speed. Knights cut down everything in reach and keep moving, spreading them out, thinning them down into manageable groups before the second wave starts to pour out.
If I ever need a cleanup crew for the zombie apocalypse, I know who to call.
We did have some problems at… Tellaros? I think that was the name. The terrain wasn’t helpful and hampered our mobility—rocky hills and trees, mostly. We had to let them come to us, but the terrain also worked in our favor. The mob couldn’t mass along a broad line. They were funneled into fairly narrow choke points, allowing us to concentrate on a couple of lines twenty men wide or thereabouts. It was a long, long day, that one.
Strangely, they never attack at night anymore.
So far, we haven’t lost any of the knights. We’ve had wounds, of course, and a couple of them have been shipped back to Karvalen-Vios for repairs. The majority of the wounds are from a city’s auxiliary forces. While running around, spreading out the mob and cutting it down, there are occasional magical attacks from the walls. Usually, the Shadows are well-enough protected, but sometimes a spell gets through. If they get lucky, they can drop a man for the mob to swarm, and that could be fatal. It hasn’t been fatal, yet, because the knights never travel in groups smaller than three—a Sword, a Shield, and a Banner, usually—and often are in groups of six or more.
We still had to send some men back for repairs. Growing back an eye or a foot isn’t something we do in the field.
On the other hand, we have lost over a dozen horses. They aren’t as heavily armored, they aren’t as well-protected with spells, and they tend to panic when something painful happens to them. While I’m sure most of the Knights of Shadow are capable of dragging a wounded horse back to the base camp, they can’t do it quickly enough to avoid being mobbed. Grabbing a wounded knight, throwing him on a horse, and running for safety is a more viable option—and another reason we haven’t had a fatality among the knights.
We’re in no danger of being turned into infantry, but we are losing horses. It hurts the guys to lose horses, and I deeply sympathize. They aren’t jeeps you can replace from the motor pool. They’re attached to their mounts.
I’ve taken a call from Bob and he tells me my army of the undermountains is waiting for me in Vathula. While I’m glad they’re available, I’m also hoping not to use them. It’ll be a pain in the keister to transport them all down here, to say nothing of keeping them in line. I’m not looking forward to finding out if they’re disciplined troops or just collection of armed thugs. I’m also not sure if they’ll be useful against a mob. If we have a city that refuses to surrender, maybe we can bring them down here and have them besiege it while the rest of us press on to the next one…
Speaking of mobs, I’m still wondering if the Church has any other surprises for us. Can they really be that… I don’t know. It seems strange to me they would rely so heavily on one tactic.
On the other hand, it’s a good tactic. I don’t know if we can keep doing this to every city under Church control. The crowds are getting bigger and we’re starting to lose some of our effectives. I have the faint hope we can put on enough of a show to make someone in the Church—Direnias, perhaps—consider the idea of a peace treaty. If we can limit the Church to ruling one kingdom, that might be acceptable. At least, until Seldar’s project finds a cure. If it finds a cure.
I say it’s a faint hope. It’s faint the way a dying flashlight under a pillow is faint. Every time we took a town, Master Direnias, prophates of the Lord of Light, had a message for me, warning of divine wrath. They’re always about unimaginable pain, horrible consequences, all that stuff. So far, I haven’t been set on fire, exploded, turned into a pillar of salt, or otherwise inconvenienced. According to my altar ego, the Boojum isn’t even trying. I presume his priests are cooking up something, but they may be having difficulty targeting me. It’s not like I’m easy to spot with scrying spells, and any group of priests chanting and hand-waving while in my line of sight is about to have an amazingly bad day.
Seldar is still leading the research on how to cure the addicts. We’ve had a good look at what withdrawal is like, and it isn’t a pretty sight. The victims are okay for a few days, then they get restless. They don’t seem to suffer any actual ill effects, but our prisoners get unruly. They want their fix, basically. Then they want to escape to get their fix. Then they’re willing to kill to get their fix. Then they’re willing to die to get it.
Along about that point, he’s forced to accommodate them.
It’s not that there’s anything affecting them, forcing them to feel this way. It’s a psychological addiction—a mental need, an overwhelming desire to have that sensation again. Given someplace to lock them up for a year, no doubt they could live normal lives… until they have any opportunity for another hit of bliss. Then they’ll do everything in their power to get it, including running all the way to a temple to the Lord of Light and begging for it.
Seldar is not pleased. Me, either.
This morning we rode up to our first real city, a place called Zhokha. Everything up until now has been small-to-medium sized. This is not. The place has real defenses—smooth, cut-stone walls fifteen or twenty feet high, battlements on top, regularly-spaced towers, a gatehouse around each gate, the works. More disturbing is the population. It has to be at least forty thousand people.
In normal circumstances, that would be about ten thousand able-bodied men, tops, who could fight or be impressed into service to fight. With the Church of Light doing the pushing, it meant there might be forty thousand people trying to run up to us and kill us.
Sometimes, the numbers are difficult to grasp. It’s hard to picture a thousand men. It’s harder to picture a crowd of forty thousand. Imagine people standing in line at the bank, except the line is over fifteen miles long. It’s about the capacity of one of the smaller professional football stadiums.
If they make this personal, I’m okay with it. If they come at me while I’m alone, I think I have a couple of tactics that might keep me alive. Foremost is running. On the other hand, if they have support from wizards or magicians, I’m not so sure. I have some ideas on how to stop a rampaging mob, but dealing with multiple types of threats, all at the same time, is problematic.
Assuming we win here, we should hit the capitol, Zhadivos, two or three days afterward. How we do here will give us a good gauge on how to handle a city ten times as large.
First, though, we’ll have to see how Zhoka plays out.
We delayed on the trail, deliberately arriving after dark. We were all a trifle nervous about facing a city. While the towns along the way had sometimes been troublesome—cavalry does well on wide, clear roads, but we have to turn into infantry when we fight in narrow streets—we weren’t looking forward to such massively superior numbers. We have a respect for massive numbers, having been outnumbered by as much as six to one pretty consistently. It makes a
n impression—it takes a toll—to hack down so many people for so long.
Still, our walking wounded were healed, our gear repaired, and we knew how to build siege engines. First priority, though, was our defensive position.
We rolled up quietly, distributed shovels, and cast our earth-moving spells. Rather than leave it solely to the wizards, I acted as the focus. They built the structure of the spell while everyone else joined in to energize it. The wizards then sat in their circle, maintaining and guiding the spell while the rest of us shoveled. We achieved remarkable results inside an hour.
I’m not going to say the new shovels made much of a difference, but I feel they helped. Everyone seemed to like them, anyway.
I didn’t help much, beyond the initial spellcasting. I sat on Bronze, parked us a hundred yards closer to the city of Zhoka, and kept my eyes and ears in play. No one tried to sneak up on us. While the occasional dot of a scrying sensor popped up, the knights on watch popped them almost as quickly as they appeared. Wizards keeping tabs on us, no doubt. They might know where we were, but they weren’t going to get much of a look.
As for the guards on the wall of Zhoka, it was quite a while before any of them so much as noticed us. There’s the drawback to having lanterns around your gate and along your wall. It ruins night vision. They’re fine for keeping anyone from climbing your walls and sneaking in, not so much for casually glancing beyond them. I don’t think the local wizards had a formal channel for notifying the city guard or the guards would have been more concerned.
Either they noticed some noise or movement, or a wizard was frustrated enough to yell at someone. They finally sent a scout to go see what was going on. The scout slipped out through a side gate and crept toward us by a sliver of moonlight. Bronze and I circled around to come up next to him. She was silent as a wraith while I kept shifting ripples of black and grey flowing over us both. I kept Firebrand low and out of sight on the opposite side.
“Good evening.”
The man nearly panicked. He drew a short blade and twisted in the saddle, staring wide-eyed in my direction for a second or two before he made out our shape. I helped by canceling the play of moving shadows we wore. We must have seemed to materialize out of the darkness.
“I said,” I repeated, “good evening. It’s a greeting. Is the local custom so different that you do not return a greeting?”
“Um, uh… greetings? W-who are you? What are you? Uh, doing here?” he stammered, arm extended, blade pointed up at me. His horse wasn’t large.
“I’m Halar. I’m the nominal leader of the invading force that’s cleansing H’zhad’Eyn of the influence of the Church of Light. May I ask where your allegiance lies?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you a follower of the Church, or is your loyalty to the King of H’zhad’Eyn?”
“I’m… I’m a guard in the pay of the city of Zhoka.”
“That isn’t an answer to my question.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Well, if you’re a loyal soldier in service to the King, you’re going to come to my camp and answer all the questions my captains put to you. You’ll do this to minimize the damage we do to the city and its citizens.”
“And if I’m not?”
“I’ll kill you on the spot,” I told him, and pointed Firebrand at him. Firebrand surrounded itself with a faint halo of blue flame. Bronze’s eyes glowed red in the darkness. A wisp of pale fire escaped her mouth.
“I’m loyal to my king,” he stated, positively.
“I was hoping you’d say that. This way.”
“Yessir.”
I led him into the camp, handed him over to Kammen, and went back out to keep lookout. The camp posted regular sentries, rather than dividing themselves into three shifts. I wanted them to get as much rest as possible.
You’d think they would have a hard time resting with an enemy city so close. Apparently not. I might be able to take some credit for that. The Demon King is watching over you, that sort of thing. Or the Lord of Shadow. Something dark, terrible, and practically invisible in the night, anyway. They had more trouble with each other’s snoring than they did with nerves.
Rethven, Thursday, April 12th, Year 9
The day started off with a roar. Specifically, the roar of a crowd.
Malena sat on the brand-new Royal Crate as the sun came up, waiting for me. Once the sunrise finished, I unbolted the lid and she lifted it, helped me to my feet, and started slapping armor on me. Seldar stuck his head in the tent.
“The scriers tell me the people of Zhoka are gathering in the streets.”
“Have the city gates opened?”
“Not yet.”
“Any idea how long they’ll keep whipping up the crowd?”
“From what we have seen of the towns, I would say we are about to lose this band of the candle.”
What he meant was “a few minutes,” but I still haven’t built a clock for Karvalen. For the world, I mean. Rethven. It’s on my to-do list. I swear it is.
“Numbers?”
“We estimate upward of twenty thousand.”
I winced. It almost certainly meant about half the corpses would be women and children again. But how do I stop it? How do I keep the crowd from going nuts?
“I’ll be ready.”
“Do you still intend to employ the dark fire?”
“Yes. Keep everyone inside the earthworks and make sure they know not to look. Whether it works or not, we can’t hold the camp. Even with the wall of fire, that’s enough to swamp us. We’ll have to go with the cavalry and speed. Hopefully, I’m about to make it easy.”
“We shall continue to hope,” Seldar replied, and withdrew. Malena finished helping me with my armor.
“Will we kill them all?” she asked.
“Until someone finds a better way, yes. And I’ll keep kicking myself for not finding that better way. Still, if anyone can do it, Seldar is the one.”
“You are very different from the Demon King.”
“I hope so.”
“When I saw you place the crown on the Bright Queen, I thought you were still he. I was wrong.”
“Is that good?”
“Yes,” she replied, smiling. “It is good.” She hugged me unexpectedly, quickly, and stepped back.
As with so many moments in my life, I had no idea what to say.
I went out, climbed Mount Bronze, drew Firebrand, and started my spells. Torvil approached but Malena intercepted him. I overheard their conversation. The crowds were seething and the gates would be opening soon. She promised to relay that, but neither of them wanted to interrupt me while I was concentrating.
With the appropriate light-guiding and spectrum-shifting spells in place around Firebrand, Bronze walked us up the inside of the earthworks. She stood on top, sideways, so I had a clear view and field of fire. We waited.
If they had more crops in, or if we were here later in the year, I might have tried burning the fields once the mob entered them. It wouldn’t have stopped them, but the smoke would have at least have slowed and scattered them. Pity.
It took them longer than we thought. Probably a lower priest-to-person ratio. While I waited, I watched the magical activity of the city. They kept lobbing spells at us only to have them intercepted by our own spells. It was a pecking, probing thing, not a full-on magical assault. Maybe they were conserving their energies for defense. We probably had a reputation by now. I hoped it was a reputation to inspire surrender, rather than a last-ditch effort to hold the city.
Eventually, the drums started and gates of the city opened and the mob poured out. They flowed out from behind the walls and flowed through the slums outside. They stopped there, building their numbers as more and more continued to stream from the opened gates.
Their tactic was the same as always. Build up a huge pile of people and have them all hit us at once. It’s called a human wave for a reason. They need an ocean of people to make it work. Its e
ffectiveness lies in the weight of numbers. It’s the difference between one man firing a gun and a whole rank of riflemen firing a volley.
Our tactics, up until now, consisted of defending our earthworks or running far enough away that the wave—if you follow the metaphor—had to spend most of its force to follow us up the beach. The first was not going to work. The flood of the fighting would rise beyond our earthworks no matter what we did. The second might work, but with the numbers involved we would be certain to lose even more horses, possibly even suffer casualties among the knights. We would be at it all day and utterly exhausted afterward, ripe for an attack by actual troops.
Speaking of which, Zhoka does have a formal city guard and, no doubt, some sort of militia. Some of their militia is probably involved with the Church, so I don’t know how much will remain to reinforce the guard. I don’t care to risk my guys—exhausted and hungry—against whatever real military Zhoka might hold in reserve. And they would have a reserve if only to make sure the walls were still defended. Plus any wizards or whatever passes for them in this region.
I just realized the answer to a question that’s been bothering me. Why aren’t there a hundred thousand troops marching toward us from all over the Church-held territories? Because the Church doesn’t have a hundred thousand troops! They have soldiers and guards in various cities, but they’re needed to maintain civil order. Their combat troops aren’t troops. They use citizens for their combatants, and their technique has a limited range. You can’t juice up a shopkeeper and send him on a five-hundred-mile hike to attack someone. You need truly dedicated, fanatical faithful for that, not just someone who needs a religion fix. These aren’t disciplined soldiers. These are holy methamphetamine addicts who are going to need a fix, and need it soon. If they assemble mobs of people to come after us, they’ll have to send along enough priests to maintain their commitment, and that risks an awful lot of priests.