“You sound so plausible, I almost believe you.”
“I do, don’t I? I’ve been working on that little speech for a while, although I hadn’t planned to use it on you. I wrote it in a letter to my brother Narvell.”
“Your brother?”
“He’s the Warlord of Elasapine. I hoped to appeal to his better nature and use his forces to block any Fardohnyan incursion into southern Medalon.”
“Did he listen to you?”
“Oh yes, he did as I asked. I also hinted in my letter that I would deny him my permission to marry the girl he’s been lusting after since he was fifteen, if he didn’t.”
The darkness had fallen swiftly as they spoke, and the night was lit by cold starlight; their breath frosted as if their words were things of substance. R’shiel opened the corral gate and Wind Dancer trotted through happily to join her companions. She gathered up her bridle as Damin lifted the saddle from the rail and together they headed toward the tent where the tack was stored.
“I think I would rather have you as a friend than an enemy, Damin.”
“I could say the same about you.”
“You’ve nothing to fear from me, I—” R’shiel stopped in her tracks as a prickle of magic washed over her. It was faint, but unmistakable. The feeling was unpleasant, as if someone was channelling magic through a filter of slime and filth.
“What’s the matter?”
Brak reached them at a run. “Call your men out, Damin. The Kariens are getting ready to attack.”
Damin looked puzzled, R’shiel even more so. “Is that what I can feel?”
Brak nodded. “The priests are calling on Xaphista. What you feel is them working a coercion, R’shiel.”
She shuddered, thinking this was what she had planned for the Gathering. She hadn’t known it would feel so unclean.
“When will they attack?” Damin demanded.
“Not for a while yet. But they’d only be doing this if they planned to move soon.”
Damin did not need to be told twice. He dumped the saddle at R’shiel’s feet and ran toward the Keep.
“Can’t we do something, Brak?”
“If you want to reveal your presence to Xaphista, by all means, stop his priests from calling him.”
She glared at him before picking up the saddle, lugging it toward the tent. “What’s the use of having all this power if you can’t do anything with it?”
Brak held back the tent flap for her as she shouldered her way in. She dumped the saddle and bridle on the racks and then pushed past him as she stepped outside, looking toward the crumbling old fort. Distant shouts reached them on the cold air as Damin raised the alarm.
“You can do anything you want, R’shiel,” Brak said, following her gaze. “The trick is knowing when it’s going to cause more harm than good.”
“Like coercing the Gathering?”
He nodded. “You think what you can feel now is unpleasant. Wait until you’re channelling it yourself. The Harshini prohibition on coercion isn’t some altruistic principle. It’s dangerous, R’shiel, and you are still a babe in arms when it comes to magic.”
R’shiel glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. His gaze was fixed on the rousing army.
“Then what should I do?”
He turned to her finally and shook his head. “If I knew that R’shiel, I’d have told you.”
CHAPTER 27
Brak’s timely warning proved its worth and the Defenders were in position long before the Karien army advanced the following morning. As dawn lightened the sky, Tarja rode behind the lines to Lord Jenga’s position on a small knoll overlooking the battlefield, frost crackling under Shadow’s hooves.
Ditches filled with sharpened stakes would force the battle down a v-shaped corridor, pushing the Kariens into an ever-narrowing field of fire. The Jagged Mountains to the east, and the Sanctuary Mountains to the west, formed a natural barricade to any flanking manoeuvres. The mountains were both a blessing and a curse. The Kariens couldn’t get past them, but neither could the Defenders. The only way to flank the enemy was to wait until they had crossed the border and were well into Medalonian territory.
Damin’s mounted archers had been split into two companies: one under the command of the Warlord and one under the command of Captain Almodavar. They were positioned on the arms of the V-shape and would harry the enemy flanks as the Kariens advanced. Their mobility and their astounding accuracy with their short bows meant they would remain relatively safe from counter-attack, as the Kariens would have to break ranks and cross the stake-filled ditches to pursue them.
At the apex of the v-shape waited the longbowmen. They were the only hope of halting the Karien advance. The longbow could out range any weapon the Kariens could bring to bear on the Defenders, and their defence lay in the rain of arrows that should decimate the Kariens before they got close enough to use their own weapons. Behind them stood the infantry, ready to advance if the Kariens got so close that the archers were endangered.
Tarja commanded one of the units of light cavalry. His job was to come at the enemy from behind, once the Kariens were committed to the battle. The deadly trenches had been carefully measured and dug to ensure a cavalry mount could clear them, as it was a safe assumption that a Karien warhorse, weighted down by the knight he carried, would have no hope of achieving the same feat. What worried Tarja was the Fardohnyan cavalry. They had dug the trenches before they learnt they would be facing Fardohnyans as well.
The killing ground was pockmarked with treacherous holes, dug to trap the charging destriers of the mounted knights. Tarja wondered if it was a measure of his character that he felt more sympathy for the horses that would die this day than the men.
He reached the command position and dismounted, as a trooper hurried forward to hold his mount. Jenga waited under the shelter of a wide pavilion, talking to Damin and Nheal Alcarnen, who had command of the reserves. To his surprise, R’shiel and Brak waited with him.
R’shiel looked pale in the dim light. Brak’s expression revealed nothing of what he was thinking.
“It’s stopped,” she told him as he entered the tent, pulling off his leather gauntlets.
“What’s stopped?” Jenga asked, glancing over his shoulder.
“The magic. Whatever the Karien priests were doing, they’re not doing it any more.”
“Is that a good sign?”
Brak shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it. At the very least, it means you won’t have long to wait.”
Jenga frowned, uncomfortable with this talk of magic. Tarja warmed his hands over the brazier for a moment before turning to Brak and R’shiel.
“Just exactly what were they doing?”
“Coercing their troops, Brak thinks,” R’shiel told him.
“What does that mean?’
“It could mean they won’t stop attacking, regardless of what you throw at them,” Brak warned. “A coercion makes men act against their natural instincts. Don’t count on them breaking, even if faced with impossible odds. They’ll just keep on coming until it wears off. That could be hours or days.”
Damin looked across the tent at them and nodded. “We have legends of battles fought by men under a coercion. They didn’t stop attacking until every last man was dead.”
Jenga listened to the discussion with growing alarm. “This is madness! Isn’t there something you can do?”
“Zegarnald will be with us,” Damin said.
Jenga turned on him impatiently. “Bah! Your gods! I need practical solutions, not flights of fancy.”
“Actually, Zegarnald might be more help than you imagine, my Lord,” Brak said. “Coercing men in a battle is sort of breaking the rules. It might be worth appealing to him.”
Before Jenga could answer the faint sound of a horn reached them. The Kariens signalling their advance. Jenga turned toward the sound and frowned.
“You speak to your damned gods, Lord Brakandaran. I have a battle to fight.” He strode
from the pavilion with Nheal close on his heels.
Damin pulled on his gauntlets and turned to them with a grin. “I’ll see you later, my friends. Try not to get yourselves killed.”
“Be careful, Damin,” R’shiel called after him as he strode out of the tent to his waiting mount, held by a black mailed Raider. Raising his hand in salute, he swung into the saddle and rode at a canter towards the coming battle.
Tarja looked at R’shiel curiously. “You and the Warlord seem to be getting on well.”
“Jealous?”
“Should I be?”
“Oh for god’s sake!” Brak muttered impatiently.
Tarja smiled, realising how foolish he sounded. “I have to go. You take care of her, Brak. I don’t want her anywhere near the battle.”
“I can take care of myself, thank you, Captain,” she declared. “But I know what you’re like, Tarja, so just remember this is a battle, not a border skirmish. You stay where you’re supposed to be and don’t go getting heroic on me, or you’ll wish the Kariens had killed you by the time I get through with you.”
She knew him better than he realised. Tarja had never fought in a battle on this scale; nobody had in living memory. He would far rather be in the thick of the fighting than standing back, issuing orders while his troops died at his command. Even harder, it was Jenga directing the battle. Tarja respected the Lord Defender, but he had grown used to being the one in command. In this battle he had his orders and no leave to do anything more.
With R’shiel’s warning ringing in his ears, Tarja walked out to his horse. He could feel the ground trembling faintly as the Kariens advanced. Calm settled over him like a warm cloak. It always did before a fight. Before the bloodlust stirred in him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw her watching him, her expression grim and her arms crossed, and wondered if he would ever see her again.
Inexplicably, the Kariens sent their infantry to lead the attack. Rank on rank of motley peasants marched across the border, armed with short swords and rough wooden shields, which were painted a riot of colours to declare the province of each man. They moved erratically, not disciplined enough to march in unison. Tarja grimaced as he watched them, wondering if they had been given even basic training. He glanced down the line at the wall of Defender infantry—men who held their shields steady with their pikes upright, like a forest of thin bare trees. The cavalry reserves waited behind, near two thousand men, ready to move forward at the first sign of a breach.
But it was the longbowmen who would fight this battle. Each one was surrounded by a wall of steel that would protect him until the last man had fallen. Buckets of arrows sat behind each man, and beside him, a young man, drawn from the ranks of the rebels, whose job it was to ensure the buckets never emptied.
Tarja could feel the tension building around him as the Kariens approached, but Jenga held off giving the order to attack. Markers had been set up on the killing field, and the Defenders waited, discipline overriding their apprehension as the attackers neared. The Lord Defender did not intend to waste a single arrow. Every man knew and understood that. The war cries of the Kariens reached them long before they passed the markers, and still they did not move.
Jenga waited until nearly half of the Kariens were past the markers before he finally gave the signal. The air hissed as five hundred bowmen let their arrows fly. The raw troops advancing on them were either too inexperienced or too blinded by the coercion laid on them by their priests to react. More than half of them made no attempt to raise their shields against the deadly rain. Another hiss and the sky blackened as the next volley was loosed. More Kariens fell. More arrows found their target. The archers kept loosing their arrows, almost at a leisurely pace. There was no need to aim. In the confined area of the killing field, every arrow hit something. Tarja wanted to scream at the hapless Karien horde to do something, anything, to defend themselves. But they simply marched on, stepping over the bodies of their fallen comrades, walking into the arms of death as if it was calling to them.
“Founders!” Nheal swore as he rode up beside Tarja. “Are they brave—or just plain stupid?”
“You heard what Brak said about them being coerced.”
“I’m almost at the point of believing him,” Nheal admitted with a frown. Like Jenga, he had trouble dealing with the concept of magic. “Jenga wants you to move your men to the eastern flank. He fears the Kariens will try to break through there.”
Tarja nodded and turned his attention back to the battlefield as the sound of drums reached them. The infantry were almost completely decimated, but on their heels Karien pikemen marched—five thousand or more men, pikes held before them, moving forward like an implacable spiny hedge. Tarja swore softly. These men were even less well armoured than the first wave had been. Where were the knights? And the Fardohnyans?
“This is going to be ugly,” Nheal remarked as he watched them.
“I can’t understand what they hope to achieve,” Tarja agreed. “We’ve not lost a man, yet still they come. This is insane. Who in the Founders’ name is in charge of the Kariens?”
“Whoever he is, he appears to be on our side.”
It was a poor joke, but Nheal was called away before Tarja could tell him so. He turned back to watching the Karien pikemen as they passed the markers and met the shower of death sent by his archers. They kept moving forward. Nothing could stop them, short of death.
He glanced up at the sky and realised with a start that the battle had been going on for less than an hour, if one could call it a battle. It was more like systematic extermination. He watched as wounded Kariens fell atop the dead and was sickened by the sight. No bloodlust surged through him to take the edge off his sensibilities. No battle frenzy stole away his conscience. As he turned his horse toward his troops to move them into position he was left with nothing but a hollow feeling of disgust.
And still they kept coming.
Tarja was waiting on the eastern flank with his cavalry when the Fardohnyans finally joined the battle. Although Damin had spoken of their prowess, he saw little sign of it as they charged forward, no more careful of the hail of arrows they rode into than the foot soldiers had been.
The sun had climbed high in the sky but shed little warmth over the battlefield. The Fardohnyans neared the treacherous, pot-holed field almost at the same time as the arrows hit them. Tarja had never seen their soldiers in battle and their speed and discipline impressed him, although their tactical stupidity left him speechless. There were half a thousand of them perhaps, keeping to a tight formation as they rode toward the killing ground. Tarja watched them advancing with a frown. They wore boiled leather breastplates and metal helms, but other than that, were unarmoured. Their raised swords caught the rising sun like flashes of starlight in the dim morning. Their captain rode in the van, although Tarja could make nothing of his features, except that he had fair hair and rode well enough to be a Hythrun. They thundered forward past the markers, but Tarja held off a moment longer, watching their advance closely. He did not wish to risk his own mounts on that dangerous terrain. The fair-haired Fardohnyan captain rode through the hail as if protected by an invisible shield, and his men, those that were still ahorse, followed him blindly. The air was filled with the sickening squeals of wounded horses and the cries of dying men. Damin’s Raiders were picking off their flanks with the same careless ease they demonstrated on the practice field shooting at melons.
“Enough of this! Charge!”
Tarja spurred Shadow forward at a gallop and cleared the trench with ease, coming up behind the Fardohnyans. His men followed and ploughed into their rear with swords flashing. The Fardohnyans realised too late that they were being taken from behind. With thrust and parry, Tarja sliced his way though the Fardohnyans, their glazed eyes registering little more that vague surprise as he cut them down.
It took only minutes to slash his way through to their captain. The man turned at Tarja’s cry, his expression confused. He looked as if he wasn’t ce
rtain how he came to find himself in the middle of this battle. But he was better trained than most, and instinct took over. He parried Tarja’s attack with unconscious ease, although he seemed not to have the wits about him to press home his advantage.
Tarja found himself fighting a real opponent for the first time since entering the fray. He countered the Fardohnyan’s strike and let the man counter-attack, turning the blow with a flick of his wrist so that his adversary was forced to over-correct to maintain his balance. Tarja rammed his blade into the man’s side, through the gap in his leather armour as soon as he saw the opening, jerking the sword free as the Fardohnyan cried out in agony.
The young captain let his sword slip from his hand, clutching his side, blood spilling over his fingers as he toppled from his saddle. Glancing around, Tarja was surprised to discover that most of the Fardohnyans were down. Then the sound of a horn reached him: three long, mournful notes calling the Karien retreat. They had given up, he realised, although the decision puzzled him. They had won nothing, lost thousands of men, and had not even tried to throw their knights into the battle.
“Sir!”
Tarja turned at the voice and discovered it was the Fardohnyan captain calling to him. He dismounted and knelt down beside the man. His wound was fatal, as Tarja knew it would be, but there was a light of intelligence in his eyes that had been missing before. Perhaps the shock of impending death had broken through whatever spell the priests had laid on him.
“Captain.”
“A…message,” he panted through the pain, speaking in heavily accented Medalonian. He was already pale from loss of blood. He wouldn’t last much longer. “To…my sister…”
“Of course,” Tarja agreed, although he had no way of knowing who this man was, let alone how to get a message to his sister in Fardohnya. But the man was dying. It wouldn’t hurt to let him die thinking his last words meant something.
“Treachery…” he gasped. “Priests…tricked us…”
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