Diamond Warriors

by David Zindell

  'Sire!' the sharp-eyed Joshu Kadar called out to me. 'Look at his emblem! The dragon!'

  I stared across the corpse-strewn sands to gaze at this great knight's shield, emblazoned with a three-quarter sized red dragon.

  'It is King Mansul!' Joshu cried out again. 'Let us slay him!'

  But neither he nor I nor any of my Guardians could get close enough to execute Joshu's exhortation, for at that moment, many knights of King Mansul's Black Guard fell upon us. I had all that I could do to keep their lances from tearing me open. And so I did not witness mos of King Talanu's combat with King Mansul. I learned later that both the Kaashan knights and the Karabukers held back to allow the two kings to fight to the death, one on one. Just after I ducked beneath a lance thrust and buried my silver sword inside the chest of a particularly strong Karabuk knight, I chanced to look over at King Talanu. Somehow, he had gained position on King Mansul. For a moment, King Mansul sat on top of his huge warhorse unbalanced, with his lance thrust too far forward into empty air. My uncle worked inside his reach then. For a blessed moment, he gained the speed of a much younger man, and he whipped his sword at King Mansul's neck. The edge of King Talanu's kalama bit through the steel bevor hanging down from King Mansul's helm, and then through skin, muscle, blood vessels and bone. King Mansul's head went flying though the air and smacked down onto the beach. Then the hoof of a nearby horse chanced to crunch down upon it and so bury it in the soft sand.

  'The King is dead!' one of his Black Guard cried out. 'King Mansul is dead!'

  Upon this shocking sight, most his knights lost heart. Then my knights, those Guardians closest to me and others such as Lord Noldashan, Sar Omaru and Jessu the Lion-Heart, closed in upon them, and we used our lances and long swords to slaughter them down to the last man.

  'King Talanu has slain Mansul the Magnificent!' Lord Zandru shouted out. 'Long live King Talanu!'

  Lord Yarwan and other Kaashans picked up this cry, roaring out, 'Long live King Talanu! Long live King Talanu Solaru!'

  And then, in our time of triumph, as our knights rampaged through the center of the Karabuk and Galdan armies to dispirit our enemy and keep them in disarray, a Galdan archer managed to sneak up close to King Talanu. He loosed his arrow at nearly zero range, right through King Talanu's neck. Lord Yarwan almost immediately cut down this man. He looked on in horror - as did we all - at the bright red blood that spurted from around the arrow lodged in my uncle's flesh.

  'I am killed!' King Talanu choked out to Lord Yarwan. His hand closed about the arrow that had cut his neck artery. Somehow, he kept seated on his horse. 'Prince Viromar is to be king after me. Bury me on the beach, facing the sea. I always wanted to look upon the sea.'

  He gazed out beyond the ships at the ocean's gleaming waters. For a moment, his eyes grew as bright as the sun's golden shimmer. Then he gasped out to Lord Yarwan: 'This is a good death!'

  As his eyes closed and he slumped in his saddle, Lord Yarwan and several other Kaashan knights hurried forward to take up the weight of his body. They eased my uncle's still form over the back of Lord Yarwan's mount so that Lord Yarwan could lock his hand on this brave king and keep him from falling off onto the beach

  With our enemy trying to flee from my knights, I had a moment to survey the battlefield. I turned to look for the Kaashan infantry and Lord Tomavar's men - and those of Lord Tanu. The closer sound of steel swords clanging against steel merged with the rhythmic ringing of thousands of warriors' silver bells on the beach behind me. Upon covering most of the distance to the water's edge, the two halves of our army now joined in a single, glittering diamond line nearly two miles long. The line advanced, spears pointing forward, at a quick pace across the sand.

  'Back!' I shouted to my knights. I did not want my men to be caught here by the water in what was about to occur. 'Back, through our lines!'

  A few of our enemy, who must have thought that we had lost heart, cheered to see my knights and me turn our mounts and gallop back toward the wall of warriors rushing toward them. A dozen archers fired arrows at us, but no one stood in our way to try to stop us. It took only moments for our horses to pound back up the beach. Our lines opened to allow our columns of knights to pass. Lord Yarwan gave King Talanu's body into the keeping of two of his knights. We turned to watch our warriors knit up their lines and come almost within striking distance of the Karabukers and Galdans.

  'Shall we remain in reserve in case our enemy makes a breakthrough?' Lord Yarwan asked me.

  'No one is going to break through our lines today,' I told him. I pointed at the center of our advancing infantry. At its front, Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu marched with their men, and I heard my two grizzled captains barking out commands. I said to Lord Yarwan, 'Let us instead reinforce our cavalry.'

  Lord Yarwan nodded at this. Then he gathered up his Kaashan knights, and they rode off Sound the rear of our army to join with the other Kaashan cavalry and Lord Sharad's knights who had now fallen upon the Karabukers at the far north of the beach. I led my knights south, to throw in with Lord Avijan and his knights, protecting our army's right flank. But even as our lines of diamond-clad warriors finally closed with our enemy, I saw that our encirclement of their two armies was complete, and it would be they who would need protection from us.

  What followed then beneath the blazing, noontime sun was less a battle than a slaughter. With Lord Avijan's cavalry already pushing their lances through the barely-armored Galdans, I led my hundreds of knights into the clumped masses of our enemy attempting to engage them. Most of the Galdans tried to run away, back up the beach or toward the water. But too many of their fellow soldiers blocked their way; they scrambled around the sands trying to bring their weapons to bear in too small a space. A few soldiers reached the water's edge. My knights pushed their mounts splashing through the shallows, and they used their kalamas to cut them down, filling the sea with cleaved bodies and ropes of blood. Meshian archers, called up from the rear, shot down even more of our enemy as they tried to climb into skiffs and escape to the ships floating offshore. So, I imagined, things must have gone to the north, where Prince Viromar and Lord Sharad would be hacking apart the Karabukers.

  With his eye of compassion ...

  Along the gleaming lines which Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar commanded, their warriors worked an even greater horror. The whole art of Valari infantry tactics is in using the spear, shield and razor-sharp thararn to try to open holes in the enemy's line. Then wedges of warriors can work their way through and use their kalamas to cut down their foes from their unprotected flanks or even from behind. Today, however, the Galdans and Karabukers never managed to form up a single line. In places, little walls and blocks of our enemy tried to stand and fight. But part of a wall is no real wall at all and frantic men packed together like cattle can make little use of the weapons they wield - supposing they have been able to arm themselves at all.

  It did not matter that our enemy outnumbered us ten to one. As the Meshian and Kaashan cavalry fell at them from the south and north, as our lines of warriors drove the bellowing mass of men back toward the sea, less than a tenth of them at any moment could actually try to meet my warriors' spear thrusts with their own. Most of the Galdans and Karabukers could do nothing more than to push at their companions from behind and wait for them to fall. And then, at the last, when they stood exposed to the furious Valari warriors protected head to ankle in suits of diamonds and swinging their murderous kalamas, to die. And die they did. Without the proper complement of weapons, shieldless and un-armored, terrified and utterly disorganized, they died by the hundreds and then, the thousands. Their blood soaked into the white beach sands and turned it pink. Their screams drowned out the ringing of my warriors' bells and the crashing of the sea.

  'This is hell!' Maram shouted to me. He rode beside me, pushing his horse forward into the crowds of Galdans before us. Nearly every time his sword whipped out, another of our enemy fell shrieking to the sand. 'Let us take their surrender, as Bemossed
suggested!'

  'No surrender!' a dozen men shouted out in response, 'No surrender!'

  These voices, however came not from my grim warriors, mad for revenge, but from the Galdans themselves- Outmatched and doomed they might be, but they still fought bravely. And they fought to the death.

  'No surrender!' Kane now snarled out from my other side. He swung his sword in a tremendous blow that cleaved through the head of a Galdan standing beneath him and then into the shoulder of another packed in next to him. 'No quarter! Kill them all!'

  Then he unleashed a rain of death upon our enemy so terrible in its fury that even the most battle-hardened of my warriors looked on in awe. I never sensed that Kane liked thrusting his sword through men's flesh or wreaking upon them the most bitter of agonies. But he had been born to fulfill a purpose, and he had a terrible love of his fate. It was both his grace and his curse to find a bit of heaven within the bloodiest of hells. And so he wielded his sword with a savage exaltation, and he killed his enemies without pity or pause.

  At last, no one stood before him - or indeed before the knights around me or any other Valari warrior on the field. A few of our enemy fled across the shallows in frantically-rowed skiffs; we could not prevent their escape into the ships that had brought them here, nor that of the small fraction of their army that had never come ashore. The greatest part of the Karabuk and Galdan armies, however, nearly a hundred and fifty thousand men, lay dead in hacked and twisted heaps upon the beach. The incoming tide lapped over their bodies. The waters of the Terror Bay ran red with their blood. . . . he saw his enemy like unto himself.

  'Valari!' a knight shouted out from nearby me. I turned to see Lord Avijan holding up his bloody sword. 'Victory to the Valari!' Ten thousand warriors picked up his cry:

  'Valari! Valari! Valari!'

  Then Viku Aradam, who had fought the whole battle with an arrow embedded in his shoulder, raised up his sword toward me and called out: 'King Valamesh! victory to King Valamesh!'

  I sat on Altaru at the water's edge as I gasped for breath and tried to keep my huge warhorse from trampling our fallen enemy. Now, across the entire length of the beach, both Meshians and Kaashans pointed their swords toward me. With one voice, the thousands of warriors of both armies called out: 'Valamesh! Valamesh! Victory to King Valamesh!'

  Soon I would learn of the Valari who had fallen that day upon the Seredun Sands: sixty-three killed and slightly more than twice that number wounded. Lord Harsha called this the greatest victory in all Valari history, if not in the criticalness of its result, then in a brilliant defeat of our enemy at little cost. I, however, took little joy from the acclaim that he and many others wished to shower upon me. For even two hundred Valari killed and wounded were too many, and as for our enemy, they had still been men, had they not?

  I thought about this as I gazed across the beach to that vantage point on Magda's wooded slope where Bemossed had stood during the entire course of the battle. From half a mile away, I could not make out the features of his face. I felt, however, the sickness that gripped his belly and devoured his soul. He seemed stricken to his very core. For a long time then, and from different directions, we stared out at the evil thing that my warriors and I had done.

  Chapter 16

  Later that day, we buried King Talanu at the north end of the beach between the black rocks called the Pillars of Heaven. I never learned if King Darrum the Great's bones lay interred there, too. But in consideration of the fallen Valari that we placed beneath the ground nearby and the blood that they had shed, we would always regard the Seredun Sands as Valari soil.

  The Karabukers and the Galdans we did not bury, for there were too many of them and we were too exhausted. My warriors and I watched their ships sail away with the remnants of their army. Perhaps, I thought, once we had marched off, they would return and make proper graves for their countrymen.

  Although I wanted to leave that place of death as soon as possible, I had matters to attend to, and so did the warriors of my army. We kept our encampment behind the three hills, which blocked the sight - and smell - of the beach. Within an hour, I sent envoys riding northeast up the coast toward Delarid to tell King Santoval Marshayk of what had happened here. I sent envoys to the west, as well: to Athar, Lagash and Taron, and all the Nine Kingdoms. I wanted the whole world to know that a handful of brave Valari had utterly destroyed one of the Red Dragon's great armies.

  I spent most of that evening with the wounded in the healing pavilion speaking with them and learning of their deeds. I gritted my teeth as I watched twelve warriors lose their hold on life and make the journey to the stars. The healers stood helpless to keep them from going over. Even Master Juwain could do nothing for them.

  'I dare not use my gelstei,' he said to me much later outside the healing pavilion. He gripped his green crystal as he gazed off to the east. The moonlight showed three peaceful hills covered with bushes and dark trees, but no hint of the beach beyond them. 'With Bemossed fallen ill all of us should keep our crystals quiet.'

  Master Juwain then led the way into Bemossed's tent, lit with candles. Kane, Daj, Estrella, Liljana and Alphanderry all gathered around his still form. Abrasax and the other masters of the Seven stood above them. Bemossed lay on his sleeping furs with his eyes open; he seemed to be staring up at the flickering flame shadows dancing across the tent's ceiling. But I sensed that he stared at nothing,

  'Has he spoken yet?' Master Juwain asked Liljana.

  Liljana shook her head. In her hands she held a cup of soup that she had been unable to get Bemossed to swallow.

  'He won't speak,' Liljana said. 'He won't eat and he won't drink.'

  'He just lies there,' Daj added. 'It's as if something has sucked out his soul.'

  Something has, I thought. Someone has.

  'Some men,' Kane said as he rested his hand on Bemossed's curly hair, 'cannot bear battle.'

  'You mean slaughter,' Liljana snapped at him. She bent down to kiss Bemossed's forehead. 'This man has battled Morjin night and day for months. And for all we know, battles him still, even at this moment.'

  Master Juwain held his gelstei over Bemossed's chest. Then he sighed and said, 'We can only hope that is so. I fear that he might be lost in the gray land between worlds. Until we do know, however, we must assume that Morjin has gained the freedom to use the Lightstone - and therefore that we cannot use our stones.'

  'We cannot not use them,' Kane growled out as he stroked Bemossed's hair. 'At least not for long. And we cannot allow Bemossed to remain half-dead, not unless we are willing to throw our victory away and watch Morjin set fire to the world.'

  Abrasax, his white hair nearly brushing against the top of the tent, held out the clear stone of the seven Great Gelstei entrusted to his keeping. 'That fire might take a while to ignite. We might yet have time.'

  'And we might not!' Kane said. 'How long, when the moment comes, will it take for Morjin to open the gates to Damoom? So, less than a flash of an instant.'

  'But what can we do?' Abrasax asked him. 'Other than that which we are doing?'

  'I don't know!' Kane half-shouted. 'That's the hell of it: not knowing what to do!'

  After that, I went inside my pavilion to write a letter to the grandfather of Sar Dovaru Andar, who had died protecting Lord Avijan from the Galdan pikemen. I knew old Lord Andar well for he had been friends with my grandfather.

  I sat for a long while at my council table, staring at the sheets of white paper laid out before me. A bottle of black ink seemed to wait for me to pick up my quill and dip it down into the dark liquid. But what should I say to the crippled Lord Andru, who had already lost two sons and a daughter in Morjin's invasion of Mesh? That Sar Dovaru had died a good death, fighting his enemy lance to spear and recklessly throwing himself forward against three Galdan pikemen? And that in dying he had been spared becoming the executioner of their nearly unarmed countrymen?

  I should have known better than to immerse myself in the darkness that waited al
ways inside me. For just as I allowed myself a moment of despair at the depravity of man, the Ahrim found me. This greater darkness seemed to come out of nowhere and fall upon me like an ice-fog. It concentrated all its essence in my right hand. I felt my flesh freezing, my fingers curling into my palm in agony. Arrows of ice drove up my arm, through my shoulder and deep into my chest. I gasped for breath. Then there came a tingling and a fierce burning, as of a limb being thawed after suffering frostbite. A terrible fire burned my muscles and blood. The heat of it seared into my nerves and then seized hold of them.

  My hand, of its own will it seemed, gripped the quill and pushed its point down into the ink bottle. And then pressed the quill to the first sheet of paper. My fingers moved, and I began to scratch out words that were not of my making. I knew then whose will it really was that caused me to write a message to myself so full of lies and hate:

  My Dearest Valashu,

  This will be my last letter to you. Time, as you must know, is running out. The world turns, and carries us both toward that moment in time that the diviners have long told of. Soon, all debts will be settled and justice meted out. The Great One, the Marudin, will rule the stars. The golden future will open before us.

  You still must wonder at your part in the new ordering of the world. You have proved yourself many times, a murderer. How few months has it been since you took the life of my son? And then burned my beloved daughter to her death?And now the blood of Karabuk's and Galda's finest soldiers, in all their thousands, stains your hands. What shall be the fate of the one who led his henchmen to murder them?

  Shall I mete out murder in recompense? I shall, I shall: every one of the men you incited to wreak such slaughter upon my dutiful soldiers shall be put to the sword or crucified. The other Valari will not come to your rescue. I have given them diamonds that they might reflect upon my unbreakable word of friendship - and my adamantine resolve to punish my enemies. Do you think King Waray, or even King Mohan or King Hadaru, will risk seeing the children of their lands mounted on crosses? Did you really hope that they paid heed to the desperate dreams of Valashu Elahad?