The Stranger. The man with just one arm had taken his father’s place. There was a whole sea of them. Thousands of Strangers as if there were nothing else in the world.
“CARRY ON! DON’T STOP!” he shouted to his companions. Around him, his group was still intact. Anyone attempting to climb within his reach inevitably perished. It was bedlam elsewhere. The foe had succeeded in reaching the top of the Rampart in various points. The ranks were collapsing.
“WITH ME! ONE!”
Mordraud lopped off a head flush with the Rampart edge, as if scything an ear of wheat in a cornfield. Roused by his cries, Benno copied him.
“TWO!” Others joined them in the rhythm of their slashing.
“THREE!” Ten swords fell in unison on the same number of enemy necks.
“FOUR!” Yet more took part in the counting.
“FIVE!” All along the front, weapons were raised and fell at the same precise moment.
“SIX!”
***
Dunwich changed track together with his group of Lances and headed towards the woods west of the Rampart. There was no break in the wall, as it snaked seamlessly next to the trees. Weighted down by their armour, it was even harder for their foot-soldiers to make their way amongst the tangle of vegetation. Asaeld’s order had been clear: “Break through at the sides. Use your best chanting. Clear the way for the infantry.”
“PREPARE THE STORM!”
Fifty men began a military chant in unison. The basses provided the platform for the assault, creating the impetus for the solos. A couple of unarmed boys hauled up a huge pan of red-hot coals and left it in front of the choir. They fled swiftly, while blazing red spots began swelling at a dazzling speed, driven by the violence of the Lance choir. The flashes changed colour, and condensed around them, until an explosion of yellow light shook the trees, bending them and uprooting dozens. A pelt of forked flames swirled opposite the chanters, gained momentum riding their perfect resonances, and swept away the woods beneath the Rampart. When the fire had died down, the rebels hidden behind the trees lay on the ground, reduced to smoking embers.
“CAVALRY! DEFEND THE CIRCLE!”
The Lances were surrounded by the Imperial cavalry and withstood the impact of the rebel charge sent to stop them. Another chant was intoned straight away. Unexpectedly, the ground on the slopes around the Rampart opened up into countless gaping dark mouths. Like wells suddenly plunging down. The shadows danced, melding everything. Eldain’s men fell without even realising, into the bowels of the Earth, and were left crushed there when the Lances’ resonances were shifted elsewhere.
“There aren’t many of them! They don’t have cavalry!”
“CONCENTRATE ON THE CHANTING! DON’T GET DISTRACTED!” Dunwich bellowed angrily. A careless lightness, a hazy passage, and the choir’s complex interweave could turn against them. Such a powerful resonance could wipe them all away in an instant. Dunwich began marking tempo for his men, moving his hands rhythmically, spreading them, pointing out the harmony changes the various rows should respect. The Lances adapted swiftly, shifting their voices with refined precision.
He was conducting a death symphony. Dunwich shuddered in ecstasy.
The music traced out deep dark arabesques. The syllables pronounced by the Lances crackled and glided, perfectly in tune with one another. The wood was shaken by an earth-tremor in pace with their voices. The trees swayed, and many fell. The first foot-soldiers managed to take possession of a few spans of the Rampart. They seemed like explorers who’d just reached a long-forgotten ruin in an unknown land. They looked around, puzzled and apprehensive, waiting for the Lances to finish clearing the battleground.
It was then the arrows started hailing down from all sides. An avalanche of sharp steel. Two of his companions slumped down without even a cry. A horse was struck right in the forehead and collapsed, crushing its rider.
“WHERE ARE THEY?! WHY WEREN’T THEY FLATTENED BY OUR CHANTING?!”
Dunwich was certain the Imperial archers had already disgorged arrows all over the wood before their arrival. And besides, less than half the trees were left standing after that harmonic onslaught. The enemy ranks were invisible. Dunwich couldn’t see them hiding behind tree trunks or among the roots. And those weren’t the usual clouds of arrows fired randomly at no specific target. Somebody was aiming them at the Lances alone.
“IN THE TREES, SIR! THEY’RE IN THE...” The sentence was left hovering, like the shaft protruding from the horseman’s neck.
“RETREAT! RETREAT! Aim at the foliage!” Dunwich yelled, raising his arm at the right moment, instinctively. A metal tip skimmed his armour and whizzed past, ricocheting off a trunk. “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?! CHANT, I SAID! CURSE IT ALL!”
He himself had to lead the chant, as he also marked out the rhythm with his hands in parallel. The other Lances had lost the resonance and were grappling for it again. Those archers were maddeningly good. Eldain’s horsemen noticed the head-on clash and took advantage of the moment to hinder the Imperial cavalry’s flight. The Lances withdrew alone. The choir’s chant managed to climax at the last instant, by a whisker. Another two Lances fell as soon as they ended the last note. The skies thickened with blue flashes, which ravished the trees’ leaves, setting them alight arbitrarily. It wasn’t a perfect resonance. The tongues of destruction stretched up to the Empire’s men who’d succeeded in scaling the Rampart, and swept them away together with the rebels they were struggling against. The arrows merely slowed. The night was the rebels’ ally. The blazing crowns of the trees were red billows wafting out in an undulating and bloody sky.
“Sir! Sir!”
A Lance approached his group, galloping through the trees. It was one of Asaeld’s retinue who, according the Dunwich’s calculations, should have been on the opposite side of the battlefield.
“We’ve got a problem on the eastern front!”
“Tell Asaeld, then! Can’t you see...” An arrow darted right between the two, stabbing into the ground just a few inches from the horse’s hooves “...that we’ve got our own troubles?!”
“The commander himself sent me! The rebels are breaking through the central front!”
“IMPOSSIBLE! The entire infantry is damming the Rampart!”
“A group of rebels has descended from the Rampart and is heading for Asaeld!”
“What?!” he yelled in bewilderment. “Who could be such a lunatic as to attempt something of the kind?!”
***
Panic reigned on the Rampart. The enemy’s infantry had slowed its thrust, and in its place hundreds of planks had been passed up from the back lines. “What are they trying to do?!” Mordraud bellowed in Benno’s ear. “I don’t know!” he replied. Any rift between them seemed to have vanished into thin air. There wasn’t time to hate each other.
“It doesn’t matter! Bring them down!” somebody shouted behind them. It was Berg, their captain, in person.
“It’s dangerous to stay here, sir!” Mordraud emphasised his words by tearing open the face of an overly brave Imperial foot-soldier. The tip got stuck on a cheekbone and he had to shake his sword violently to free it.
“Go screw yourself, boy! You think about your job and leave me to do mine! Keep beating them back, for love of the wretched Gods in the skies! GET RID OF THOSE GANGPLANKS!”
The first had only just been laid on the Rampart when at once they slid beneath, squashing the men hauling them up. They were wide, studded and extremely heavy. Perfect for... “The cavalry! They want to jump onto the Rampart!”
An ocean of infantry began to open up.
“CURSE THEM! PUSH THEM DOWN!”
Too late.
The first horsemen galloped onto the gangplanks and shot onto the Rampart, mowing down rebels in swarms. They landed right in Eldain’s back ranks, stirring up chaos. They moved out of the way and grouped, to give their comrades time and space to copy them.
Mordraud drew in a deep breath, hunched his shoulders, and stormed forward, h
ead bent.
One of the planks was nearby. Around were soldiers hurled to the ground by the blows, or already dead. Mordraud took a firm foothold, brandished his sword and traced an arc upwards as soon as he saw a horse silhouetted against the sky. A mass of entrails fell from the slashed stomach. The beast couldn’t endure the landing, and roughly threw its rider off. Another was already coming from behind. Mordraud took position on the gangplank, sword high above his head. Behind him, Berg was butchering the fallen cavalryman, as he angrily barked out orders as well as insults to the Empire.
The other beast shied when it saw Mordraud standing in the way of its leap. It reared and kicked, closely missing the soldier. Mordraud grabbed its rider’s leg and unsaddled him, tossing him down off the plank. Below him a sea of blades and piercing tips thrashed. With one hand on the reins, he stuck a foot in the stirrup and bounded onto the horse. The Rampart was a narrow passage, and all around him bloody carnage raged.
Without thinking twice, Mordraud tossed the pair of them downwards. The horse landed awkwardly and he found himself amidst the foe at the foot of the Rampart.
“BERG! GET SOME MEN AND FOLLOW ME!”
Nobody was expecting a similar move. Mordraud began thrashing the sword around with brute force. Every attack he made seemed casual, driven by instinct. Yet his blade unfailingly chopped heads, ears or hands off of ill-fated Imperial soldiers. The mass of infantry lost control and closed in on itself, obstructing the arrival path for fresh cavalry. The first rebels were coming down the gangplank, helmed by Berg.
“YOU’RE MAD!” the captain bawled in disbelief. “WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING?!”
“Look at the wood!” Mordraud exhorted, pointing to the eastern front. Spates of blinding flashes were exploding among the trees. The flames were already high in many places. Those frigging chanting bastards, he thought, floundering from the heat. Their terrifying voices dominated, with the power of a death sentence, over the din of the struggle at the foot of the Rampart.
“LET’S TAKE THEM FROM THE REAR!”
His left arm rose and fell without a moment’s rest. He was merely spoilt for choice. When he saw a sword come too close to his horse, Mordraud slashed. It was like chopping wood in the middle of a dense dry forest.
“It’s a ridiculous idea!” Berg yelled, but without much conviction. It was clear he liked the plan, thought Mordraud, exultant “We’ll have to swathe through the front to get down there!”
Mordraud began, alone, to push into the enemy army. Even though he didn’t have the faintest hope of holding out. He trusted in Berg following him, like a lunatic behind an even crazier lunatic. In fact, to his immense delight, his captain did so: he followed him. He loved that man. Berg had banded together a group of hardened fighters and joined him from behind, splitting further open the wound in the wall of Imperial infantry. His friends Hammer and Mercy were there too. Good, Mordraud thought, triumphantly.
They’d all die together at least.
What happened from that moment on was a blurred descent in a maelstrom of death. The horse advanced slowly among the enemy troops, who were slain to the ground, leaving it barely the space for a step forward. Hooves trod on a bed of armoured backs. He had wounds on both legs, which were poorly shielded by the light leather protections the army had provided him with. The suffering beast trudged and whinnied, defeated by the cuts that enemy swords had inflicted on its sides. Yet amazingly, to himself and anybody else contemplating the scene, Mordraud was out of the fray. He and Berg’s group had sliced through the entire front, emerging near the east wood. This act was like a small stone rolling before a landslide. The infantry barricaded beneath the Rampart lost its thrust, pierced to the heart by their passage. Other rebels were taking control of the base to the wall.
“If we can stop the Lances, the side’s safe!”
“Grab all the horses you can, and we’ll attack from the rear,” Berg commanded. “And you, boy. Never again dare do things your own way! I give the orders around here!”
His words melted away in the wind. Mordraud had already galloped off towards the depths of the forest. The Rampart’s external slopes ran between the trees like the mighty ruins of a forgotten city.
“Just look what an animal...”
***
“Where are the Lances?! Why’s the central front uncovered? WHO GAVE ORDERS TO FOCUS EVERYTHING ON THE CENTRE?!” an outraged Dunwich yelled. They’d had to go right round their whole army to get to the other side of the battlefield. Something was going wrong. The plan made by Loralon’s strategists was supposed to be quite different. At least on paper.
“We’re just hurling people at the Rampart! Who on earth came up with this sodding idea?!”
“I don’t know, sir. The group of Lances supposed to attack the Rampart turned around and divided up, to bolster out your platoon and the commander’s...”
“But it’s no good like this, curse it all! They should have backed up the infantry! This way, our men are not covered by the choirs!” Dunwich thumped his leg with his fist so hard he dented the armour. “Look down there. They’re flooding out of the Rampart. Our ranks on the west are crumbling! If we’d stayed in our positions, at least that area might have been able to hold out! I WANT THE HEAD OF THE MAN WHO ORDERED ALL THIS!”
Dunwich and his men reached the woods. Eldain’s cavalry was fighting the Empire’s forces, while Asaeld’s Lances were further away, and were churning out harmony upon harmony against the Rampart among the trees. The assistants had planted a row of torches in the ground, and it was from these meagre fires that the Lances’ voices were conjuring up lethal waves of flames, which flailed down on the wall, without particularly impairing Eldain’s defences.
As if they were getting the target wrong, or the harmony.
“What’s the emergency?! Why has Asaeld summoned me?” he said in a whisper of a voice. It was all too absurd, he mused in puzzlement.
Dunwich plunged into the enemy lines, sword in hand. The battle was raging wildly. It was difficult to tell who were on their side and who were rebels. Without losing his concentration, reasoning carefully, Dunwich struck only those he was certain were adversaries. A single well-aimed blow at the joints in the combat protections, as was his style. He wanted to reach Asaeld as quickly as possible and get to the bottom of that ludicrous situation. A stray flash almost hit him full in the face, and the wake of the burst cracked the hinges on his helmet. A resonance out of control, he thought in anger. A Lance who’d lost command of his voice. “Aim ahead, you stupid brutes!” he cried. His visor suddenly snapped shut. Dunwich cursed and endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to free his view – the mechanism was broken.
It was then he saw a solitary horseman emerge from the trees right in the midst of the Lances in the distance.
***
A greenish flash whizzed past beside him. Instinctively, Mordraud pulled his visor down in all haste. He’d fitted the helmet on his head once he’d pushed through the mêlée on the Rampart front, but he’d kept the visor up until then so he could see better. ‘Gwern will protact your life...’ he smiled.
‘Let’s hope so!’
He didn’t particularly like the sensation of metal on his cheeks, but he was more afraid of the enemy’s chanting. He felt less reactive like this. Another lightning bolt hit one of Eldain’s cavalrymen riding at his side, square in the chest. Mordraud saw his cladding fizzle and smoke. The warrior spewed up blood and tumbled to the ground.
‘The chanting... is terrifying...’ he thought frantically, as he endeavoured to dodge the flashes that sliced the air around. They darted out from a small sun of light hovering before the horse-mounted choir of Lances. One of the bolts grazed his arm. The pain was sudden and searing. The Lances were near now. Mordraud lifted his sword and yelled incisively. To dispel those stinging and atrociously effective harmonies. Another flash skimmed his leg, but the target was now within range. He didn’t slow down. His blade slashed the glistening black and gold armour, a
nd he thrust it into the Lance’s shoulder. He smashed the iron jaw with a single punch and the stunned man thudded to the ground, dropping his sword.
“DEATH TO THE LANCES! DEATH TO THE LANCES!” he shouted to the crimson skies. Other comrades were coming out of the forest. The ranks near the woods had crumbled, leaving space for the rebels crowding the Rampart. Hammer was advancing with small measured steps, slaying with his large sword anything that dared move around him. He didn’t slow, didn’t lose his rhythm. It seemed as if he was shaping something on his anvil, making the same repetitive and vicious movements. Instead, Mercy was submerged in the throng, and was fighting just the way he liked it – using the son-of-a-bitch technique. Stabbing in the back, or slitting tendons and throats. Swift little jabs that only too well gave away what Mercy’s job had been before he became one of Eldain’s men. Sooner or later he’d have to come clean about his past, thought Mordraud with a shudder.
The battle was becoming a single large jumbled mass. Something had gone wrong with the Imperial strategy, he thought. Otherwise he couldn’t explain the haphazard and short-sighted way they’d carried out an assault that should have been a sure bet at the outset.
The Lances, the Empire’s most prized players, were very hard nuts to crack. Mordraud fought without rules, using only brute force and stamina. Everything became so much harder. The Lances wouldn’t give an inch to the rebel response.
“BEHIND YOU!”
Mordraud barely heard the cry from Berg, who was busy in the scrum much further behind him. He was managing to fend off alone a cluster that was surrounding him. He gritted his teeth and howled, out of his mind. Each time he succeeded in laying someone out flat, Berg found the time to laugh, as if the situation was downright amusing. Hammer freed him from the Imperial grip by bulldozing the circle, and promptly took up position alongside him. Mercy was dispatching the foe’s rear ranks. Mordraud had to shift his gaze from what was happening to his friends. He swivelled just in time to see a Lance ploughing into him at a gallop. He raised his weapon in desperation, and just by a hair’s breadth managed to avoid the swipe. Through the slit in the black helmet glistened two fuming blue eyes.
Mordraud, Book One Page 31