by Greg Curtis
Swiftly the battle ground turned into a confused nightmare. Men were screaming as their swords flew furiously. The abominations were screeching as well. Meanwhile Saris was growling her head off, torn between the need to obey her master and the urge to rip the enemy apart. Lightning crackled through the air, the sharp tang of its endless strikes burnt at the nostrils and stung the eyes. Fireballs transformed the far end of the battlefield into an inferno and sent a pall of smoke high into the air. And all the while Iros fought to remain calm while he loaded and fired his crossbow as fast as he could into the heads of the abominations.
He only wished he was as capable with the weapon as the others were with their bows. Or even as capable with it as he was with his swords. Every fibre of his being ached to wade into battle with his swords and start beheading the foul things. To fight as he had been trained to, and not to struggle piteously with the awkward weapons from the safety behind the infantry wall.
In front of him he could see many men screaming in fear and pain as they met the teeth and claws of the enemy. Many were falling. The abominations were terrible foes, and in their panic too many soldiers were falling back on their old ways and making the mistake of trying to stab them. Unless you stabbed them through the head that didn’t even slow them down. The soldiers had to take their heads. But as those men fell others seemed to learn from their mistakes, and it became apparent that there were increasingly more of them than there were abominations, so long as the archers kept thinning their numbers. At least three or four of the abominations fell for every man who went down.
At least the enemy didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
And then the most terrible thing happened. Iros ran out of bolts. It wasn’t unexpected; he’d always known that it had to happen. But as he reached into his quiver for the next four bolts and found nothing but empty air his heart nearly stopped beating in horror. He looked down in alarm, and saw the empty quiver. Fifty bolts gone, and only a half a dozen abominations to show for it. It wasn’t enough.
More importantly, how many arrows did the rangers have left? They each had had a hundred or more to begin with, some two hundred but they fired much more rapidly than he did with his crossbows. They had to be running low as well. And the sprites were the same. The next phase of the battle was almost upon them. He dropped his crossbows onto their straps around the horse’s neck and drew his swords, preparing for the charge.
One by one he could see the rangers all around him doing the same as they ran out of arrows. And many of the sprites already had their swords drawn. While in front of him he could see the consequences as the abominations started to reach the front line in ever greater numbers. Soon he knew, they would start pushing the infantry back, no matter how many had fallen.
Before he was ready for it, the horn sounded once more, three mournful cries that echoed across the battlefield, and just as if they had practiced it every day of their lives, the last of the rangers still with arrows slung their longbows over their backs, and drew their close combat arms, a strange assortment of swords, spears and polearms. That was something Iros still found unsettling. Dragoons standardized their weapons, and so he knew that every man among them would be drawing a bastard sword and steel shield close. He would have been too had he been with them. It was the perfect armour for a heavy cavalry charge. But rangers weren’t dragoons, and he could only pray that what they lost by being less conventional they made up for with their natural skill with their weapons.
As for the windriders, they had no shields and only rapiers for swords. Small slightly curved swords that were light and sharp. With so little armour they had to be fast and deadly. Fortunately he had seen them practicing, and he knew they were.
“Strike for their heads!” Iros yelled out the instruction as he waited for the command, and the other captains echoed the call. But they surely already knew it. It had been told them a thousand times a day.
Then he heard the cry of the Commander from the far side of the field, the smash of thousands of heavy steel swords against steel shields, and kicked his horse’s flanks.
The charge had begun.
Of course it was a very short charge, the front line was barely a dozen paces from them by then, and the horse barely made a trot, but that didn’t matter when they reached the line and the first of the abominations.
Unexpectedly one of them broke through the lines of soldiers just in front of him. It streaked toward him, aiming for the only part of his body it could reach, his Iros’ legs, which were clearly in its sight. Iros took its head cleanly. A single swing of his long sword reaching down from above separated half its head from the rest at an angle, and the thing fell down.
But there was no time to congratulate himself on the strike. No time to celebrate his survival. The next was on him mere heartbeats later, and he had to fight.
He did.
It had been a long time since Iros had been in a battle, and then it had never been a battle like this. It had been even longer since he had finished his training. But it didn’t matter. With the fear and rage coursing through his veins, all his training and skills came rushing back to him. The swords felt as light as air in his hands, and every strike was true as he knew just where the blades should go.
Using his knees and his heels he controlled his horse precisely, wheeling her from side to side, so that for each new attack he had his swords in position, and pieces of abomination rained down on both sides of him. And on those rare occasions when his strike wasn’t perfect, Saris was there to take them down as well, the jackal hound leaping on the abominations and bringing them to the ground where the foot soldiers could finish them off quickly.
The wolves were performing the same service, guided it seemed by something more than their natural intuition. They weren’t tearing out throats as they should, but simply bringing them to the ground where soldiers with swords could finish them off quickly.
Step by step the army advanced, slowly pushing the enemy back.
It was a hard fought and bloody battle, but that was true of all of them. Time lost all meaning for him. Seconds dragged by like hours and yet perversely the time also slipped by far too quickly to keep track of as he concentrated on the fight around him. All around he could hear men screaming and dying, he could see other riders being torn down from their horses. Happily though he could also hear many others roar with triumph as they brought another enemy down. He could smell blood, thick and cloying in his nose, and the air was filled with smoke from the cannon as every so often another cannon found a shot and fired over the heads of the combatants and into the temple grounds. In the distance the warspells continued working their magic, with lightning and fireballs crashing down all around, while the priests’ magic worked closer to them, causing some of the enemy to freeze where they stood while others exploded into dust.
The only thing that mattered though, was that they were winning, little by little thinning the enemy’s ranks as they pressed on.
He didn’t know that at first. Not for a long time. It wasn’t until Iros looked up at some point that he realised it. But to suddenly see the enemy’s makeshift fortifications so much closer than they had been, and behind them a sea of bodies, that was victory. He couldn’t have said whether that was two hours into the battle or twenty. But he didn’t care. They were winning.
What he could have said was that their tactics were working. The temple complex was on fire, all the vegetation covering it having ignited. The cavalry were in the thick of it as they were meant to be, and each rider was surrounded by a small cadre of foot soldiers and shield men, all working together to hold the enemy off until they could be guided into the swords of others. And best of all the numbers of the abominations ahead of them were growing fewer. Lines that had stretched hundreds or even thousands across and scores deep, were now little more than fragile spider webs with huge holes in them.
But that was due as much to the enemy striking at its own army from behind, as it was to them. For, the
watchmen, by then down to their last few hundred, were striking with an immortal fury. Many were injured among even those still standing and fighting. Many were even missing limbs. But it didn’t stop them. It didn’t even seem to slow them down. And stranger still they had been joined, by women. Tiny elven women wielding whatever sorts of weapons they could find, and laying into the abominations as though the power of the gods themselves was in their frames. Maybe it was. Whatever they hit it either broke apart as the blade tore through it, or flew through the air. They had no technique, but they had strength beyond that of a dozen large men. And though he didn’t understand it, he knew they were the same as their companions had been at Python Pass.
Iros took another head, his sword slicing cleanly through the foul thing, then wheeled the horse around to take the next one only to find that there wasn’t one. The things were starting to run short in numbers. Finally. And it was then that he knew that they were almost through them. Victory was at hand. He wasn’t quite sure how, in large part it had to be the watchmen turning against the others, in part Y’aris’ bungled strategy, but he didn’t care. They were winning.
He raised his swords in triumph as he waited for the next abomination to break through, and all around him he could see others doing the same. They knew that the battle was nearly won too.
But nearly won wasn’t the same as won, and they still had to carry on. So step by step they continued their slow advance, and the abominations fell before them.
And then in one truly amazing moment, he looked up from his kill looking for the next shambling monstrosity, and couldn’t find him. The only ones in front of him were the few still struggling on the ground as the infantry rammed their swords through their skulls.
All around it was the same. The abominations had been slain. And stranger still the wooden stakes and poles that had sheltered the trenches where the abominations had been hiding, were suddenly only a few paces ahead of him. They had crossed the battlefield.
“Aswa.” He whispered the word as he sat in his saddle and stared. It seemed appropriate somehow to give thanks. The Divines had surely stood with them this day. It was the only explanation he had.
And not only had they won through, but the casualties had been light. He looked across his flank to both sides and saw tens of thousands of windriders and rangers with him. While the infantry that had stood with them through the advance, looked to be covering the ground in heavy numbers.
Behind them when he risked looking back he could see hundreds of riderless horses. But that was hundreds when it should have been thousands. And while there was the steel of the infantry mixed in among the dead, the numbers that had fallen were far less than the numbers of leather skinned monsters. Bits of flotsam in a sea of black blooded bodies.
It wasn’t just a victory, it was a mighty victory.
“Aswa!” Iros screamed his praise out to the heavens, unable to contain himself, and if there truly were any above listening they surely heard him. Others took up the cry as the last of the battles ended, and soon the cry was a thunder upon the air. From one side of the battlefield to the other the soldiers called out, a cry of both triumph and relief that could surely be heard all the way back in Irothia.
“Aswa!”
Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen.
The cries of the wounded were terrible, and Dura did her best to ignore them as she rushed around the makeshift infirmary with buckets of hot water. But it wasn’t easy.
At least five thousand men and women lay on the grass being tended to by far too few healers, and many she knew would not survive. And of those that did, many would be scarred or injured for life. She was one of them. After being unhorsed by an abomination during the battle, she had lost a chunk of her thigh to his teeth, even through leather and canvas, while one shoulder had been heavily raked by his claw like fingers. But still she was lucky. She had survived, plunging her belt knife deep in its eye. Many others hadn’t been so fortunate.
Every so often when she had a chance she cast her eyes over the battle field. Four hundred paces of what had once been a grassy meadow, now piled high with bodies. And too many of those who had passed were their own.
The Black Otters had lost four, and she was ashamed to admit even to herself that she had not seen them fall. She did not know how they had met their ends. And six more were busy fighting for their lives with all the rest. It was they that she was bringing the hot water too, as the healers tended to their wounds. Clean bandages and hot water, that had become her life these past few hours. And not just hers. An army of former soldiers were doing the same.
The euphoria that had been after they had broken through to the temple complex, had quickly vanished. The cheering giving way to the cries of the suffering, and in time, the weeping of the families. So many were dead.
Iros was right in that. Once she had heard him speaking to the captain, and telling him that glory was for bards. And at the time she hadn’t quite believed him. But then she was young and stupid. What had she known? But now she knew. The soldier’s true victory was survival. The Lord of Greenlands was a wise man. The rest of the Otters probably knew the same.
One third of the patrol dead or injured. It was unthinkable. A normal patrol would be unlucky to suffer one death in a year. And yet in that they were probably no better or worse off than any others. Every patrol, every squad, every dragoon had taken heavy losses. And had it not been for their strategy and the foolish tactics of the black blood, it would have been so much worse.
Yet if the captain was right, if Iros and the elders were right, had they not fought and won this battle now, millions more would have died in time. Maybe even everyone. That was a thought to cling too as she witnessed the suffering. Something to give thanks for.
And for her the battle was over. She had work to do and people to help, but she would not be called into battle again. Not today. The same was true for all the rangers. The final battle would be fought in the temple, and in enclosed quarters longbows were useless. They needed heavy armour, swords and infantry, which was exactly what Commander Tyrus was busy assembling as they prepared to storm the temple. And strangely the priests and elders were joining them. Though maybe it wasn’t so strange when they were likely going to be facing other priests.
Iros and the captains were out searching the myriad of ruined buildings for enemies, and every so often they heard the screams as another was found and put to the sword. Priests mainly, they were the only ones that seemed to know how to shriek in terror, though she hoped Y’aris would join their number as well. There was an elf that needed to die.
But for her, with her wounds bandaged and not even a belt knife left to her name, duty consisted of chores. And there was an irony.
She’d taken the cloak to avoid a life of drudgery. Of cleaning up after others and washing floors. Yet suddenly it seemed that even having fought through and survived the most terrible battle she could ever have imagined, her life had turned full circle.
Maybe the Mother had a sense of humour. Cleaning wounds or cleaning floors, maybe her life had always been meant to be one of cleaning. And the worst was that she was sure that when they returned to the chapter house, whichever one they went to, there would be more cleaning to do.
But still that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the last be done, that the demon was driven from the world, and that life could one day return to the way it had been. That her family would be safe. Iros was right in that.
Dura offered a small prayer to the Mother as she continued in her duties. Because the only thing she was certain of was that she never wanted to have to ride into a battle like this one ever again.
Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen.
Tyrus stared at the entrance to the Reaver’s temple with a feeling of dread. He didn’t want to go inside, but he had to. The army had been defeated - he still wasn’t completely sure how - but some of the dark priests and the altar still survived. The priests had to die and the altar had to be destr
oyed, or sooner or later there would be more armies to face.
The battle had been won now they had to win the war.
Still the huge steel doors in front of him gave him pause. In appearance they looked no different to many others. Dull grey iron covered with a delicate sheen of rust, large enough for four men to enter abreast. But there was something about them that screamed unclean at him. That screamed that this was the way to Sandara’s underworld.
Tyrus would much rather have stayed outside and spent his time with the others searching the other buildings looking for Y’aris. The priests - all of them - swore that he was important somehow, and that Y’aris needed to be found. Though typically they wouldn’t tell him why. So he had given that duty to Iros and the riders Though the riders had fought valiantly, entering into a dark temple filled with enemies and likely fortifications, required heavily armoured infantry, not lightly armoured riders.