[Heroes 05] - The Red Duke

by C. L. Werner - (ebook by Undead)

  Without preamble or warning, the dark knight drew his sword and charged towards the bridge. The undead cavalry surged after him without hesitation, a galloping horde of grinning skulls and corroded spears. The wights were a mixture of the Red Duke’s black knights, their bones encased in pitted armour and tattered mail, and the ancient horse lords who bore only the fragments of bronze helmets and shields. Whatever they had been in life, the wights were now united in undeath.

  Richemont watched the undead cavalry bear down upon the bridge. The wights vastly outnumbered his own force, but their vampire commander had not spared any thought to forming them into a proper battleline. The undead charged towards the Bretonnians in a disorganized rabble. A rabble Richemont intended to sweep aside as quickly as possible.

  “Men of Aquitaine!” Richemont cried out. “Your hour of glory is at hand! For the Lady and the king!”

  Richemont spurred his powerful destrier towards the enemy, the questing knights forming up around him, their massive swords at the ready. To either side of his small squadron, great wedges of knights errant assumed their flanking positions, their lances lowered.

  With a crash of steel and the thunder of hooves, the two forces collided three hundred yards from the bank of the river. The steel-tipped lances of Richemont’s knights smashed through the corroded shields and brittle armour of the undead, shattering the bony fiends with the sheer impact of the assault. The huge swords of the questing knights crushed those wights unfortunate enough to come against them, cleaving through rider and steed alike in the fury of their attack.

  In a matter of moments, the knights were through the broken ranks of their undead enemies. Richemont gazed in amazement at his men as they emerged from the shattered mass of the enemy. The entire attack had cost him only a dozen men, yet there were hundreds of skeleton horsemen shattered across the battlefield. He felt his heart swell with pride at the bravery of these men who had followed him into battle.

  Richemont’s jubilation quickly turned to horror as he cast his eyes back towards the bridge. Only a handful of knights had been left to guard the crossing, Richemont believing a solid attack being the only way to deal with the undead charge. The countercharge had worked better than he had expected, but Richemont had failed to fully appreciate the kind of foe he faced.

  Any mortal army would have been routed by the havoc Richemont and his knights had visited upon it. The undead, however, had no hearts to fill with fear or minds in which to render doubt. Even as Richemont watched, the survivors from his attack continued to push for the bridge. Even after the toll he had exacted from them, there were still hundreds of the skeletal horsemen. At their head, smoke still rising from his armour, the dark knight raced towards the river.

  “Back! Back into the fray!” Richemont cried out, waving his sword overhead, striving to rally his men for another attack. Most of the knights errant threw aside their splintered lances and drew an assortment of swords, axes and maces from their belts, hurrying to follow their leader back into battle.

  Again, Richemont was due to be surprised by his enemy. Against orcs or Northmen, an attack on the rear would set the enemy into confused panic. These horrors, however, seemed indifferent to their fate, striking back at their attackers when able, but otherwise ignoring them in their reckless drive for the bridge.

  One of the questing knights tore his way to the very front of the battle, spurring his steed towards the vampire in his smoking armour. Many of those who had been killed in the first charge had been claimed by the vampire’s sword. Now this lone knight challenged the fiend’s blade. It was an uneven contest. The knight’s heavy sword was caught by the vampire’s shield while the monster’s own sword stabbed out, piercing the eye of the knight’s steed. As the animal crumpled beneath him, the knight was smashed to the ground. The vampire did not deign to end the contest with a slash of his sword, instead ending the knight’s quest for the grail by crushing his skull beneath the flailing hooves of his skeletal horse.

  Richemont’s heart blazed at the sight of such a dastardly act. Frenziedly, he fought his way through the press of combatants around him, determined to close with the vampire.

  Maraulf noted the impetuous knight’s effort to reach him. He raised his blade in a sardonic salute and prepared to receive Richemont’s charge.

  Duke Gilon’s son drove his warhorse straight at the gruesome dark knight. The animal whinnied in terror, its every sense offended by the vampire’s profane aura, but years of careful training kept it plunging forwards. Richemont’s steed crashed into Maraulf’s bony charger with the impact of a battering ram.

  Richemont had seen such an assault shatter the skeletal steeds of the wights, but the vampire’s mount was barely jostled by the attack. The dark knight drove his spurs against the nightmare’s exposed ribs. The creature reared back, its hooves flashing out. The knight was forced to raise his shield to protect himself from the undead beast’s assault. As he did so, Maraulf brought his monstrous blade slashing downwards.

  It was luck more than skill that enabled Richemont to intercept the vampire’s sword. There was a ghastly crashing sound as Maraulf’s blade smashed into his shield. Wood splintered, metal twisted beneath that superhuman blow. Richemont heard his arm snap an instant before the red rush of pain roared through his body.

  Somehow, the knight found the strength to stay in his saddle, lashing out at Maraulf with his sword. The blade rasped across the vampire’s armour and as the steel edge came into contact with the dark knight it seemed to blaze with a sapphire flame.

  The vampire recoiled from Richemont, a cry of torment echoing from behind the steel mask of his helmet. Maraulf drove his nightmare steed away from the wounded knight, abandoning his injured foe. Richemont could only grind his teeth in helplessness as the vampire fled the field, his remaining wights galloping away with him, back into the forest.

  Richemont stared in surprise at his sword, for it again seemed like any other blade forged for a Bretonnian knight. Then a grim chuckle forced its way through the pain gripping him. When he had visited the Great Chapel of the Lady in Couronne, he had anointed his sword in the font just within the doors of that holy place. The Lady’s grace must have entered the blade, blessing it against unholy vermin like the vampire.

  The ducal heir was still laughing at his miraculous escape from the undead fiend when one of the surviving questing knights rode up to take the reins of his horse and lead the injured lord from the battlefield.

  As he crossed the bridge, a broad smile spread over Richemont’s face. He could see the sappers and their wagons arriving on the far side of the river. With them were a hundred bowmen who lost no time readying their weapons. A few yeomen in the heraldry of Duke Gilon shouted orders to the men, getting them into positions from which they would be able to shoot down any attack from the forest.

  The battle had been won. The dark knight had withdrawn with only a few hundred wights left. His force was too weak to take the bridge now. Within a handful of hours, the sappers would demolish the bridge and the Red Duke would be trapped.

  Richemont rode past the tent where Sir Leuthere and Count Ergon were resting. He smiled down at the two men, pointing to his broken left arm.

  “Between us, we make a full knight,” Richemont told Count Ergon.

  The count gave a half-hearted laugh, caressing his injured right arm. “There’s a certain amount of foolishness getting that close to a vampire,” he agreed. A cold light crept into his eyes. “Just the same, I intend to do it again.”

  “By the time the Red Duke can cross that river, perhaps both our wounds shall have healed,” Richemont said. He turned about in his saddle, stifling a grunt of pain as his arm brushed against the saddle horn. “These sappers will soon have the bridge down,” he observed as the mob of leather-aproned specialists began to attack the bridge with pick and hammer. “They’ll be quick about it too. Nothing like a vampire’s army of the damned to motivate peasants to be speedy in their labours.”

&nbs
p; “I just pray the Red Duke follows the plan,” Leuthere said.

  “If we trust him to come to Ceren Field, then we can trust him to come here,” Richemont stated. He frowned as he looked across the Morceaux. The dark knight had emerged from the trees. With him was one of the wights, a hoary-looking revenant wearing the crumbling tatters of a crown about its skull. Upon the wight’s arm, a grisly creature was perched, the skeletal husk of a falcon.

  While the men watched, the dark knight took a small roll of vellum and tied it about the bird’s leg. Impossibly, despite the absence of feathers or flesh, the skeletal falcon took wing. The carrion bird circled twice over the vampire, then turned eastward.

  “You can stop worrying,” Count Ergon told Richemont and Leuthere. The Red Duke will come here when he receives that message from his creature.

  “The question is, will he stay on the other side of the river?”

  CHAPTER XVII

  The Red Duke gazed across the trudging ranks of his infantry, scowling as he considered the slowness of their march. Far beyond, just where the road lost itself in the forest, he could see the front of the baggage train bringing up the rear. His face pulled back in a snarl of contempt. King Louis the Usurper was wreaking havoc across his domain and he was stuck here, burdened by the weight of his army.

  “We must make greater haste, Earl Maryat,” the vampire hissed in a low voice.

  The knight beside him muttered anxiously under his breath, catching himself before he gave voice to the name of the Lady. Of late, the Red Duke had grown intolerant of such sentiments, adding blasphemy to the long catalogue of his sins. Earl Maryat regretted the oath he had given this creature, the word of honour that bound him to the vampire’s fate. If he could, he would have taken back his loyalty. But such was an impossibility for a knight of Aquitaine. Once given, a nobleman did not betray his word.

  “We cannot drive the men more than we already are,” Earl Maryat said. “They are already about to drop from exhaustion. They’ll be in no condition to fight when we reach the king.”

  The Red Duke was unmoved by his general’s protest. “If the peasant scum cannot do what I need of them, then they are worthless to me.”

  “You ask too much of them, your grace,” the knight objected. “These men are loyal. They will not betray you. They would not dare.”

  The vampire gripped Earl Maryat beneath the chin, forcing the knight’s head to turn. He forced the general to watch the silent ranks of skeletons and zombies filing down the road. “These are the sort of troops who will not betray me. They have none of the failings of flesh. Whatever I demand of them, they do.”

  Earl Maryat’s face became like a graven image as all the colour drained out of it. “But they are just dead things. Unholy…”

  The Red Duke turned away, his cape billowing about him in the wind. “The peasants are slowing us down,” he said. “That I will not allow.”

  The horrified general hurried after his liege. “You cannot mean to…”

  “See that they are disposed of the Red Duke told him. “I shall attend them later and restore them to a state better able to defend my realm! He noted the stunned disbelief in Earl Maryat’s pallid face.

  “Do as I command,” the vampire told his general with a snarl. “You do not want me to begin questioning the loyalty of my noble retainers.”

  Darkness blacker than night fell across the banks of the Morceaux. From the canopy of the forest, a grim procession of ghastly creatures marched. The ancient dead of the barrow mounds, the armoured husks of Bretonnian knights, the decaying wreckage of slaughtered peasants. Overhead, snarling blood bats circled, their leathery wings fanning the corpse-stench of the zombies across the river. Packs of slinking ghouls crawled through the shadows, their ravenous eyes fixed upon the bodies strewn across the battlefield.

  Against the bare bones, rusty armour and decayed flesh of his hideous army, the crimson armour of the Red Duke shone like a beacon blazing in the very pit of hell. The vampire’s skeletal steed marched unhindered through the horde of walking corpses, the undead parting before their master like wheat before the scythe. Regal and terrible, the Red Duke made his way through the ranks of his army, pressing forwards until he stood upon the edge of the battlefield.

  The vampire’s eyes blazed as he studied the havoc visited upon his cavalry by Sir Richemont’s force. His tactical mind could appreciate the disposition of the dead knights, extrapolating from the wreckage of war the strategies of the combatants. His own dark knight would have much to answer for.

  The Red Duke turned his attention to the river itself and the bridge that spanned it. He nodded grimly when he saw the dilapidated condition of the bridge, its destruction wrought by neither time nor element, but by the deliberate hand of man. On the far side of the Morceaux he could see Richemont’s knights, could see the sappers and bowmen watching him with rapt fascination. Even over the stench of his zombies and the musky stink of the swarming bats, the vampire could smell the terror dripping from the Bretonnians.

  Deciding to test the magnitude of the fear gripping his enemy, the Red Duke urged El Morzillo into a canter. With a grace made loathsome by its deathly shape, the warhorse pranced across the battlefield, daring the watching archers to shoot it and the monster in its saddle. Not an arrow flew over the river, not a man dared loose a shaft at this fiend risen from story and legend to make war against their land.

  The Red Duke’s lip curled back in a sneer. He had been prepared to admire the valour of these men after their bold display against his cavalry, but now he found their courage a thing for contempt. Mockingly, he drew his sword in challenge to the watching knights. A fearsome laugh tore through the darkness as the vampire turned his warhorse about and galloped back to his own waiting army.

  “They have torn down the bridge,” the vampire told those of the undead with enough reason and willpower left to them to serve him as generals and commanders. “They think to balk me, to keep me from riding against King Louis.” The Red Duke displayed his gleaming fangs in a scowl of inhuman hate. “They play for time, so the usurper can flee back to the safety of his castle.”

  The Red Duke looked out over his army and his scowl became a cruel smile. “The fools forget our strength and their weakness.” He raised his hand, pointing his finger at several of the wights. “Take your troops. Cross the river. Kill anything stupid enough to still be there when you reach the other side.”

  In a feeble echo of their mortal lives, the wights saluted the Red Duke in the discordant fashion of chivalrous Bretonnian knight and primitive barbarian horse lord. The vampire paid them no notice, already turning his attention to other problems. He glared at the packs of ghouls creeping about the fringes of his army.

  “Earl Maryat,” the Red Duke hissed, addressing his words to the black shape of Sir Maraulf. The dark knight was accustomed to his master’s confused mind, accepting the role of Earl Maryat as easily as he had that of Baron de Gavaudan.

  “The peasants will slow us down,” the Red Duke told his thrall. “See that they are disposed of. I shall attend them later and restore them to a state better able to defend my realm.”

  From the far shore of the river Morceaux, Sir Leuthere and Count Ergon watched with mounting horror as hundreds of skeletal infantry began to march. Where Sir Richemont’s bowmen had shown hesitancy to shoot at the Red Duke, they loosed arrows into the advancing skeletons with frantic abandon. Many of the skeletons fell, their skulls splintered by the impact of an arrow, but for each that fell it seemed there were three others still moving towards the river.

  “They cannot think to use the bridge.” The remark was made by Sir Richemont. His arm bound up in a sling, the young general had joined the two knights to watch the arrival of the Red Duke and his horde. “It would take weeks to repair and I can assure you that my archers will not relent in their persecution of these monsters! The Red Duke will lose thousands before he can span the gap.”

  A cold chill ran down Count Ergon’s s
pine. The nobleman’s voice was heavy with dread when he spoke. “I do not think the fiend means to use the bridge.” He pointed to the edge of the forest. The zombies and wights had turned upon the ghouls, setting on them from every direction, cutting them down with hayforks and bill-hooks. The agonized wails of the betrayed monsters were piteous and horrible to hear.

  “The vampire truly is mad!” Leuthere exclaimed. “He sets his own troops against each other!”

  Count Ergon shook his head. “Insane he may be, but the monster still has a daemon’s cunning.” He gestured again to the river where the march of skeletons had been thinned by relentless bowfire, but was hardly brought to a stop. It was apparent to those watching that the skeletons were making no move towards the bridge, but were intent upon the reaching the river itself.

  “The ghouls were the only part of his army that was truly alive,” Count Ergon explained. “Because of that, they were no longer useful to the Red Duke. Living soldiers would need a bridge to cross the Morceaux.”

  The meaning of the count’s words was quickly apparent. The marching skeletons reached the river. Without hesitation the undead continued their grim procession, plunging full on into the current. They trudged through the water, eventually sinking completely from view.

  “Impossible!” Richemont cried. “They cannot swim against such a current! The Morceaux has never been so violent! The Lady herself fights to keep the vampire at bay! They cannot swim the river!”

  Leuthere shook his head, understanding the terrible truth of what they were witnessing. “The undead aren’t swimming across the Morceaux. They’re walking along the bottom, using their spears and claws to brace themselves against the current. What Count Ergon says has the right of it. The Red Duke doesn’t need the bridge.”

  Richemont stared with disbelief at the marching skeletons vanishing beneath the water. The failure of his plan to stop the Red Duke and buy time for his father’s allies to arrive was a bitter taste in his mouth. Instead of days or weeks, the best he had bought Duke Gilon was a few hours. He told as much to his companions.