Dark Crusade

by Vaughn Heppner

  The Neetivian trebuchet or mangonel was a marvelous machine of great ingenuity that he had recalled from Godomar. If they won tonight, these siege engines would be instrumental in the gaining of it. Regular catapults and ballista relied upon torsion or tension for firing power. Geared winches twisted a thick skein of cords. A latch released the strain, hurling the missile. The trebuchet, on the other hand, used the power of dropping weights. The huge machine was simple in construction: heavily built uprights held a pivot, upon which balanced a tree-long pole. It was like a giant sea-saw, only instead of pivoted in the middle, it was pivoted almost near the end of one length. On the short end had been built a wooden tub filled with boulders. The long end was pulled to the ground by gears and winches and then a missile put in the leather sling on the tip. When the catch was released, the heavy wooden tub of boulders sank fast, whipping up the longer end and hurling the missile with terrific velocity. The trebuchet had much greater range than any catapult or ballista.

  A scout galloped through one of the castle’s open gates. He rode a lathered stallion and came to a neighing halt before Gavin. “Captain General!” he shouted, his eyes wild.

  “Well?” asked Gavin.

  “The undead approach us, Captain General! Oh milord, they’re endless. Endless!”

  Gavin nodded calmly and pointed to a squire. The lad grabbed hold of the bridle of the scout’s horse and led the raving man away.

  “Endless undead?” asked a nervous baron. “Ar-are you certain open field battle is wise, Captain General?”

  Gavin smiled to show the baron his confidence. Certain? Who could ever be certain in a battle? “Of course I’m certain,” he said.

  Ullrick smiled grimly. So did Baron Aelfric.

  Soon another scout lashed his mount into the courtyard. He also reined in front of Gavin, his face pale, his lips trembling. “Milord, th-the undead…we must flee to the hills!”

  “Flee?” asked a knight, who wore a panther pelt around his neck.

  “We’re doomed!” shouted the scout.

  “Enough,” Gavin said.

  The knight-commanders shot him worried looks, while the same squire as before led away this scout, too.

  “Did you hear him?” asked the knight with the panther pelt. “What chance do we have if a man like Danner thinks we’re doomed?”

  For an answer, Gavin accepted his helmet. Like his armor, it had been silvered. He wanted everyone to know who he was during the battle so they would follow wherever he led.

  “Remember the oaths you took on the Banner of Tulun,” he said. “And think too on this: You have the finest mounts, the best armor and the sharpest swords. Trust them and trust your war-skills.”

  Gavin peered at the spearmen. They waited grimly, the bulk of the field army. He hoped the past weeks of training had given them enough spine. He needed them to stick around. Mercenary crossbowmen with bandit and forester archers made up the missile troops and thus completed the host. This was all he had to defeat thousands of—

  “Darkspawn!” cried a lookout. “I see the darkspawn!”

  “Can we really win?” asked Josserand.

  “Let’s find out,” Gavin said, and he waved Glamore.

  ***

  Cuthred hefted his iron-banded club. Gird in heavy iron plates and iron shoes, he clanked whenever he moved. Around him, other giants clanked similarly. He stood near the Mistress and near her brute guard. He saw over the massed ranks. Thousands upon thousands of darkspawn carpeted the narrow valley. The clawmen in their hordes snarled and snapped, the band captains waving black iron scimitars. Gaunts moved in their long-loping manner. They swiveled their heads on necks that seemed spongy and rubbery. Tuskriders trotted upon great boars. Their lances glittered in the moonlight. Thousands upon thousands of darkspawn shuffled, strode, trotted and shambled toward the same goal. Far in the distance was the triangular-shaped human fortress: Bosham Castle by the Sea.

  The Death Drummer’s doom-doom drumming made Cuthred shiver. The vast array of undead marched in the van. Like an army of gigantic ants, they moved en masse. Thousands of rotting corpses clutched swords, knives, clubs and axes. They marched mechanically upon the doomed castle by the seaside cliffs. There was so many, countless, shuffling and all to the beat of that dreadful drum. She, the Death Drummer, marched amidst her dead minions. Her sticks and that vile talisman animated the unknowing, unthinking army. It was awful, gruesome and utterly unbeatable.

  Cuthred groaned and he ground his massive molars together. He hated his fear. He loathed it. He hated the frightened knot in his gut. His teeth made a grinding sound like millstones rubbing together. Fear, hate and rage boiled in him. Rage masked the fear. It drove it away. Ah! Now he remembered why he was here. All his life knights and their squires had mocked him. Tonight, just like before at Glendover Port, he would get to kill and slaughter his blood foes. A touch of shame bit him, but he shook his huge head and the iron helm that protected his skull. Forget shame and forget worry and fear of the sun. Tonight red ruin, slaughter and the crunch of enemy bones…ah, the pulping of knightly flesh…it was hard to wait. So he lifted his arms. He shouted, bellowed and roared foul curses. The other giants followed suit. He was their captain.

  “Hush,” said the Mistress. “Let me think.”

  Cuthred lowered his club and he shifted, clanking and clattering. Even though his feet hurt, he was eager for the battle to begin. He yearned to kill the puny men.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Lady Pavia trembled as she stood atop the castle’s highest tower. The undead marched toward them, a carpet of bobbing heads and rasping weapons, a sea of infernal foes stepping in time to that dreadful doom-doom, doom-doom. Priests, Wisdoms, knights, ladies, cobblers, tanners, washerwomen, bandits, shepherds, the dark horde contained them all: all dead, all driven by the Death Drummer. They spread out before her, a sea of death and coldly hideous eyes and wormy mouths. They wore rotting clothes and tatters of cloaks and shreds of coats and dresses and some bits of mail armor.

  “They’re dreadful!”

  “Steady,” said Welf, who had turned pale beside her.

  She was taller and had wider shoulders than the forester. Nearby lay an axe. If the darkspawn made it into the castle, she would swing and hew until the bitter end.

  “Look,” said Welf, pointing with a trembling hand.

  Pavia squinted until she saw straining groups of clawmen dragging what looked like catapults on sleds. The clawmen stopped as the masses of undead filed past them. The wolf-like beasts furiously cranked levers. Others struggled to load the cupped ends with rounded stones. In a moment ominous thud, thud, thuds sounded as wooden arms struck crossbars. Large stones whistled through the air and cracked against the tower, spraying rock chips and masonry. Those around Lady Pavia cried out in fear.

  On the battlefield, the wicked beat changed tempo. Undead lurched faster at the castle, raising siege ladders high above their cold heads.

  Lady Pavia turned and shouted into the courtyard.

  Down there, twenty men pressed twenty crackling fiery brands against twenty fuses. Lady Pavia counted one heartbeat, two. Twenty huge wooden trebuchet tubs fell earthward. Twenty tree-long poles whipped up, flinging twenty missiles high into the night sky. Up, up toward the stars arched the missiles, higher and higher, until at last the balls reached their apogee. They began to fall. But something most amazing happened. Huge sheets drifted up from the falling balls. The wind whipped into the sheets, inflating them like sails. The cargo drifted now instead of falling, their fuses yet hissing. Then the first fuse touched tar and burst into blazing light. Three, four more balls did likewise. Then all twenty crackled brightly, lighting up the battlefield.

  Welf studied the enemy. He had proved the most adept with siege engines. The rest of the trebuchets were under his direction.

  “Two degrees north!” he shouted.

  Soon the loudest-voiced herald of that loud breed shouted up from the courtyard: “Ready, sir!” Gavin h
ad knighted Welf for this important task.

  Welf eyed the human riders as they trotted onto the battlefield. Gavin in his silvered armor rode in the lead.

  “Now!” shouted Welf.

  ***

  On his huge stallion, Gavin cantered at the very apex of the wedge-shape cavalry formation. Before him were the swarms of undead, a veritable sea of foes who oddly lurched and staggered as if drunk. They were creatures with dead masks for faces. Gavin laughed horribly as cries of “For Hosar!” sounded all around him. Floating firelight gleamed off lances, chainmail and shields. Then boulders rained upon the undead, mercilessly cutting them down. The rocks didn’t just fall straight down. Gavin had made sure Welf understood the plan. The boulders sleeted like hail in a furious storm, flying in at an angle. They hit and rolled, crushing masses of dead men, making rotted limbs fly and creating lanes through the seeming endless horde.

  Gavin’s thighs tightened around his stallion’s barrel belly. In the middle of the dead horde, a woman with burly arms beat an awful and wicked drum.

  “Well?” asked Josserand. “Is it time?”

  Gavin drew Glamore. Buglers sounded the charge.

  Hooves drummed and the battle-stallions gained speed. A forest of lances dipped parallel with the ground, the points aimed at undead torsos. With a shock, the mighty chargers struck the shambling horde. Enemy swords, axes and picks clumsily rose. The animated corpses did nothing in a lively manner. It was their inexorable advance and their numbers that was most terrifying. The living dead also clumsily and often too slowly raised shields to ward off blows. The mailed riders, strong, yelling and splintering their lances against packed throngs, drawing swords or axes and hewing, drove into that milling crowd of zombies. Yet there were thousands of undead, and they neither feared nor cared if they were destroyed. They were already dead. They shambled at the riders, clutching legs, swinging blades, moving at the tall iron men in their heavy wooden saddles. Too many horsemen lost momentum among that horde. Fortunately, twenty heroes, Sir Ullrick the Bear, Baron Aelfric the Duke’s Champion and Sir Josserand among them, stayed with Gavin as he strained toward the Death Drummer. The champions hewed to the right and to the left of them.

  “It’s impossible!” cried Josserand.

  Ullrick chanted, his heavy axe biting left and then to the right. Aelfric foamed at the mouth. Gavin, his arm already weary from the butchery, yet urged his charger at Joanna’s pale form. She peered at him across her ranks of undead. There wasn’t any fear in her, but there was recognition. She grinned hideously as she beat her drum. The sound, like ocean waves, washed upon the knights and set their teeth to aching.

  “There’s too many of them!” shouted Josserand. His sword was notched like a saw blade and blood from a wound trickled down his arm.

  Gavin dug his spurs into his stallion. The huge war-horse snorted with rage, and plowed his massive chest against the nearest undead.

  The champions fought and some died, and the crush and press of the living dead made it a surging sea of motion. Then the Death Drummer was only a few lance-lengths from Gavin. He glanced around. Ten knights still rode with him. The rest of the riders were separated by hundreds of undead. He hadn’t really expected to get this close and so soon. Joanna opened her mouth and brayed evil mockery. Her terrible sticks thudded faster. The undead between her and him moaned, rustling against one another as they tried harder to respond to her bidding.

  Gavin slew a former blacksmith, a hermit and a washerwoman. His stallion shouldered aside three others. He came face to face with the Death Drummer, even as other dead clanked toward him. She peered up, with her face as lifeless as any of theirs. As he shivered, Gavin saw something flicker in her lead-colored eyes, perhaps a haunted knowledge of what she had become or what she had once been.

  “Knight,” she droned, “you are doomed.”

  For a sick instant, he believed her. Then he howled in order to hide his terror, and he stood up in the stirrups and swung down overhand. The Death Drummer screamed as Glamore bit through her skull and down to her teeth. It was the most natural sound she had made for a long time. As Joanna slumped to the cold ground, Gavin slid down into the seething horde of undead.

  “Behind you!” shouted Josserand.

  Gavin spun, throwing up his sword, barely catching an axe from a burly dead man. The attack surprised him, and the force of the blow knocked him down to one knee. The big undead raised its axe for a death-stroke. Behind the living corpse, Josserand on his stallion swung his notched sword, cutting down the dead foe.

  “Once again I’ve saved you!” shouted Josserand.

  Gavin had no time to speak. As the masses of undead turned at him, turned toward Joanna’s drum, he stood and hewed aside an animated corpse and then swung at the wicked instrument of Death. Gavin hoped Swan’s visions were true. Then his sword crackled with blue fire. As Glamore touched the drum, the evil instrument burst apart with a clap of thunder. At that instant, all across the battlefield, clatters and clanks told of thousands of swords dropped upon thousands of shields and axes. Swaying one, two, four thousand or more undead collapsed onto the ground. A few twitched. The rest became an unmoving mass of rotting, stinking flesh.

  As that occurred, the human infantry toiled out of the castle and onto the battlefield. The mercenary crossbowmen, the best trained of the foot troops, quick-marched across the valley and toward the silent hills. Beside them ran spearmen. Following them were the bandit and forester archers. Lastly, nearest to the castle, straggled the least trained: a mass of spearmen sprinkled with a leavening of men-at-arms. Swan marched with them, the Banner of Tulun held high by Hugo, who marched beside her.

  A large formation of gaunts had loped onto the hillside flank of the undead. At the sudden destruction of the largest darkspawn formation—the undead—the gaunts stopped fearfully. They were the only darkspawn presently on the field facing the humans. They now hesitated, looking back for the rest of the horde.

  The crossbowmen ran at them, and at a shouted command, the trained professionals stopped a hundred yards short of the gaunts. The front rank of marksmen knelt, taking careful aim. Moans of dismay turned into shrieks as the nearest gaunts fell under a blast of whirring bolts. The shambling creatures, those that survived, turned and clawed at one another to flee these horrible foes. The crossbowmen rose and cranked their weapons, reloading. They were unhurried, calm, professionals to the core.

  Sir Philip of Alamut Tower, one of the marcher lords, pointed with his sword at the fleeing gaunts. Although the trumpets blared for all the riders to reform under the cavalry banner, a good fourth of the knights, thegns and squires, those who were on the edges of the fallen undead horde, followed Sir Philip. They followed him as he madly charged after the fleeing gaunts.

  The rest of the cavalry cheered them on.

  “Dismount and walk your horses out of the corpse-field!” roared Gavin. He dreaded the fallen dead laming the mounts, and he dreaded losing control of the striking arm of the army. Fortunately, the majority of the riders had dismounted. They now guided their snorting, snuffing chargers through the carpet of rotting bodies that thankfully no longer moved. Nor would they ever move again.

  ***

  Vivian cringed as the stick-like Mistress shoved Leng toward a conjuring block of carved obsidian. It was bigger than a millstone, with eerie glyphs and symbols etched upon the sides. On the smooth, black-glossy surface the Mistress had long-ago painted lines and runes of power.

  “Why me, my lady?” whined Leng, as he stepped up onto the block. He wore brown robes like a priest, with a wavy dagger belted at his side. His long, lean face with its parchment-like skin wasn’t remote now. It was twisted with fear, with sweat glistening on his tall forehead. “Mistress, no, no, not me,” he pleaded. “Let Vivian have this honor. Let me practice spells to aid the battle.”

  “Silence,” hissed the Mistress. She wore hunting leathers, her ugliness heightened by the retreat of her eyes deeper into their sockets. As the
Duke’s daughter, she had been lean, now she was like a stick figure. The amulet shone with its witch-green glow, illuminating her stark features. She strode to the human captives held by huge grinning brutes. With terse commands, she bade the brutes to hold aloft the captives, stretching them out as if upon a bed. Then the former Duke’s daughter went to each squirming captive, hewing with a wavy-bladed dagger similar to Leng’s. She screamed to the Moon Lady as the amulet blazed with its foul light. She chanted as she cut out the beating hearts.

  Vivian moaned, cringing in the background.

  A most unholy thing began to occur as the Mistress pitched the quivering hearts against the conjuring block. A weird white light, like a globe, encircled Leng’s head. He clawed at this throat. The white light misted. The sorcerer swayed drunkenly, his features hidden in what was a perfect likeness of a miniature moon. Then Leng stood very still, like a statue.

  Vivian gasped as a mighty cry arose from the remaining darkspawn. Above them, in the darkness, bright white lines etched themselves into a shape. The lines swirled and moved. And soon an outline of a head appeared high in the night sky. Its eyes were black pits, with pale green motes for pupils. The head had Leng’s features.

  “The Moon Lady is with you!” it said from the sky.

  Clawmen howled with hope and began to beat their scimitars against their shields.

  ***

  Gavin gnashed his teeth. The fools, the fools, why couldn’t these knights hold their bloodlust long enough to win a battle?

  Sir Philip and those following him butchered the fleeing gaunts. The long-limbed creatures fled, their gangly arms swaying like ropes. Behind them knights swung swords, hewing heads as if on a practice field, laughing at the ease of victory. But so intent were the knights upon this delight that they failed to notice in the nearby darkness tuskriders forming on their flank. Now enemy bugles sounded. Huge boars squealed in glee and moon-bright lances were leveled at Sir Philip and his fools. Philip slew useless gaunts—they already fled—and thereby made a quarter of the precious cavalry targets for a darkspawn ambush.