The False Martyr

by H. Nathan Wilcox

  “I will escort you personally,” the captain answered. “Can that pony keep up?”

  “Try us.” Cary spurred the pony to a run. He did not stop until he reached the line of soldiers who had closed ranks with spears lowered to defend the camp. As it was, he reigned in just before them and leapt from the saddle. “I am a Liandrin royal courier with a message for the prince,” he declared. “Let me pass.”

  “Allow him through,” the captain ordered breathlessly from behind as his horse finally caught up.

  “Sir,” the nearest soldier said in way of acknowledgement and lowered his spear.

  Cary ran through the gap, between the waiting wagons that were just now being hitched to the great oxen that would pull them, and on to what had to be the prince sitting at a small table eating his breakfast as his tent was lowered behind him. Unaccustomed to a life on the march, the prince looked haggard though he had certainly not suffered over much on the trip – he remained as soft and doughy as Cary remembered from their last meeting. He wore the rich suit of a banker rather than the uniform of a soldier, was not armed that Cary could see, and seemed to have no regard for the bustle of activity around him as he spoke pointedly between mouthfuls to a sextet of nobles seated with him. Like their lord, they wore fine suits, conical hats, and vibrant silk scarves. These were the ambassadors, negotiators, and bankers that had come along to secure the deal in the Fells. Not a one of them seemed to feel the slightest urgency for what must be accomplished.

  Slowing to a fast walk, Cary approached the table with his head bowed and fell to a knee well out of range of the prince. A half-dozen knights had intercepted him and kept him from getting any closer.

  “What is this?” the prince asked between bites.

  “Your Royal Highness,” Cary said to the ground, “I come from Torswauk Lodge with a message from Ambassador Chulters.”

  “Approach,” the prince ordered. “What is it? We are almost there. Can’t he wait a couple more days?”

  Cary did not answer. He rose, reached into his satchel, and retrieved a single piece of heavy paper that had been rolled into a tube and sealed. He presented it with outstretched hands, eyes never leaving the ground, then took a step back and returned to a knee. A furtive glance showed the prince reading the short note.

  “Seems we are needed in Tourswak,” the prince told the men at his table. “Our ambassador says that we are on the verge of securing the aid of the Morgs but our presence is the final piece. He urges us to make haste lest the negotiations falter.” He sounded satisfied and pounded his fist on the table. “Excellent news!” he told Cary. “I must finish my discussion with these men. The sergeant will get you some food. When I am done, we will discuss what has been happening in Torswauk. The letter says that I am to receive a full briefing from you.”

  “As you wish, Your Highness,” Cary answered. He kept his hand on his chest, body down over his knee, face to the ground.

  “Very well then. You are dismissed. Captain Dowsing will let you know when we are ready.”

  Cary rose, keeping his eyes down, turned, and walked away. A minute later, he was handed a bowl of tepid mush and a hardtack biscuit. He’d hoped from the meat and cheese and bread that had been on the prince’s plate, but then his father had always said, you can hope or you can eat. Cary ate.

  Chapter 51

  The 43nd Day of Summer

  Why in the Order’s holy name are we doing this? Jaret wanted to yell. “For the glory of the Empire!” came out instead.

  A hundred legionnaires sprinted the final steps down the slope of the hill that had concealed them. They echoed their commander with a roar that would have shocked the twins themselves. The ill-trained and poorly equipped boys before them very nearly pissed themselves as the battle cry pulled their attention from the already terrifying vision of armored knights charging toward them from the opposite direction. As Jaret had hoped and expected, they had been so focused on the knights that not a one of them had noticed the legionnaires until they were upon them.

  Jaret wanted to retch as he planted his dirk in the chest of a boy. Shorter even than him, he was a child with fuzz and pimples where there should have been whiskers and weather. His arms were sticks jutting from a uniform that fit him like a sack. Without a scrap of armor, he held his broad-bladed spear like a hoe and wooden shield like a basket. Jaret was staring at himself forty years ago, all wide eyes and disbelief. Like Jaret all those years before, this boy had probably thought himself lucky to be at the back of the line as his first battle loomed. With the optimism of youth, he had probably even thought he would survive. And that was where the similarity ended. Jaret had survived; this boy would be death’s first claim of the day.

  Sword running off a spear, Jaret retrieved his dirk and slashed it through the arm of another boy. Blood sprayed. The boy collapsed, clutched his arm, stared at the blood pumping past his fingers, and screamed. His cries, far more like the wails of a child than the curse of a man, filled the morning all the way to the heavens above. He was done, but Jaret was not. He reversed the course of his knife, slid past, and slammed the point into the back of the boy’s skull. Jaret did not see him crumble. He was already slashing his sword across the stomach of another boy, was already thrusting his dirk into the throat of yet another.

  Those boys joined their fellows, dying in the hundreds. The legionnaires cut through them with the ease of threshers. Parry, slash, thrust. Death, death, death. On every side, the boys died and did it poorly. Fear ruled them so that they could do nothing more than wail and beg and cry. It emptied them so that the smell of their defecation rose even over that of their blood. It paralyzed them, delivering them all that more willingly to the possibility that had spawned it.

  And just as these children turned to see the horrors behind, the one at their front landed. Yatier’s knights hit the regiment like a millstone grinding wheat. The first lines were buried by the sheer force of the charge, enveloped, returned to the soil by armored flanks and iron-shod hooves. The spears that might have saved them a few moments before when they were set and ready had failed when, at the decisive moment, their owners had turned to see what demons were swarming up behind.

  It had all been perfectly timed, the outcome written into the Order weeks, months, years ago. The strategy was solid – focus your opponent in one direction with a long charge, then hit them from the back with a different, hidden force – but it could have gone wrong in any number of ways. The legionnaires had barely been concealed behind the hill, had made their way to that hill across two miles of open plain where any number of patrols might have seen them. And if they had been discovered, had been delayed, turned back, or killed, Yatier and his knights would have been charging into a wall of planted spears, held by a force ten times their size. Even the poor weapons held by these boys would go through a horse’s barding if squared, and even boys can pull riders from their saddles when they have them stopped and surrounded. This could have been every bit the disaster for Jaret that it now was for these boys -- more so given the limited forces at Jaret’s command. He had essentially risked everything to kill a regiment of boys that Emperor Nabim would neither miss nor mourn, but it had not been his decision. This had been dictated by the Order, was prescribed by that maniacal, mystical power. It controlled his mind and mouth as he gave the order just as it controlled his arms as they stabbed and slashed and killed. And no matter of begging would change it now or then.

  In a matter of minutes, the regiment had been transformed from a band of frightened boys to a field of crumpled bodies, crooked limbs, staring eyes, and gurgled prayers. It was over so fast that the boys did not even have time to surrender. They’d held their weapons pointlessly before them as they died, had found the wherewithal to neither use them nor throw them down. Even so, there would have been no surrender. There would be no survivors this time to carry the story. It was the Order’s will that these boys die, that not a single one live, that their massacre on this road be the story.
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  It was a very different story from the one that the Order had been forcing Jaret to tell for nearly two weeks. This was a story about the rebels taking the fight to the army that contained them, about rebels who could strike outside of their established kingdom, about a war that was just beginning. The story was changing just as Emperor Nabim’s tactics were changing. Ten days ago, the Emperor had sent an entire division into the Great Northern Forest. They had emerged a week later in disarray, broken, on the verge of desertion, and missing a thousand of their number. The story then had been of arrows flying out of nowhere, of magical mists, sudden traps, night raids, and repeated ambushes, of units seemingly lost to the very trees and rocks, of constant fear that no superiority of numbers could possibly assuage.

  The Emperor’s generals had taken that story’s moral to heart, had learned that this badger would not be rooted from its home, that to try was to be brutalized. So now they waited. By some estimates, nearly ten thousand men were now positioned around the Great Northern Forest. And these boys were the only ones to have come within five miles of the trees. Jaret could only imagine that they were hoping to draw the rebels out, that they planned to wait, to isolate them, contain them, and make them desperate. As Jaret slashed through the last of the boys, he wondered if they had succeeded.

  “That was a bloody mess,” Yatier called above the final stuttering cries of the dying boys. His horse reared slightly as it came face to face with Jaret. He could not blame the creature in the slightest. He had both blades bared, was covered in blood, teeth clenched, face a mask. The fact that the creatures did not panic in the presence of all this death was still a miracle that Jaret would never understand. Yatier quickly brought his mount under control and looked out over the carnage as he dropped his bloody mace into a strap on his saddle. “Obviously it worked, but this was a foul business. These were practically children.” He pulled up the guard of his helm to reveal a face marred by disgust.

  “And the next set of boys will see this and lose all stomach to fight.” Jaret tried to rationalize the massacre, but it rang hollow even to his own ears.

  “These barely had any fight to start with,” Yatier returned as he eased himself from the saddle, armor clanking and creaking. “Kill the sergeants holding them, and they’d run to their mothers as fast as their legs would carry them.” He looked down at a pile of bodies where the boys had clumped together in their fear and shook his head. These boys, like almost all their fellows, had not even tried to fight. It was all the proof Yatier needed. These boys had no side, wanted no part of this, could probably not have even said who or what they were fighting for. Their only crime had been to not hide well enough the day the recruiter came.

  “War’s an ugly business,” Jaret said, though he longed to agree whole-heartedly with Commander an’ Pmalatir. “It rare that the ones responsible for it pay its price. We’ll have to kill a lot more of these before we get a chance at the man who sent them to die.”

  Yatier looked at his commander sideways then back across the trampled boys behind him. He took a deep breath pulled a long sword from the scabbard mounted along the side of his horse and walked away. He drove the sword into a dying boy a moment later, but his eyes were on Jaret. The look was not kind.

  Over the previous week, Yatier had proven himself to be an effective commander but also a surprisingly naïve and sensitive one. Jaret had never met a noble who cared about the lives of those outside the palace, but Yatier was almost too much the exception. He seemed to have a glamorized view of command, of nobility, and most of all of war. He seemed to think that war should be like gentlemen in a duel, swinging at one another until one has been sufficiently humiliated to surrender, that it should in no way affect those outside the combatants, that it should be fair and honorable and – the Order forbid – merciful. The past week had gone a long way to showing him the folly of such thinking, but Jaret still feared that he did not have the stomach for what needed to be done, that he would fail when the days got darkest, that what they had done today would end him.

  With that thought, Jaret watched the big man walk through the bodies, searching for those still living, giving them the mercy that death had now become. Jaret wanted desperately to say something to him, to provide him some wisdom or comfort even here where wisdom and comfort were so very far away.

  A shadow covered Jaret. Seeking its source, all attempts to rationalize were lost. He stared at the black shape above, trying to understand it even as the sun behind burned its image into his eyes. Even when it fell finally below the early morning sun, it was no more recognizable. As long as a galleon, it was enormous. Nothing that big should be able to fly, but it slithered through the air like a snake through water. Not a snake, Jaret realized, a centipede. The thing was composed of segments, at least thirty, that seemed to move of their own volition. As long as a man, the segments were topped by the transparent wings of a dragonfly. Slender legs were curved back toward the body below, holding balls nearly as big as the body segment above. It had no head or tail that Jaret could see, simply the same segments, the same wings, the same balls, repeated across the length of its body.

  As it drew closer, the buzz of its wings like a swarm of angry bees pulled every eye to the sky. Knights – universally dismounted now – and legionnaires alike stood and stared at the thing as it squirmed through the sky growing closer with every second. Lulled by their victory all the more for its appalling ease, they had expended their violence and felt now the guilt of its release. So it was that they simply gawked – as stunned as the boys they’d just massacred – as this thing from a nightmares descended upon them with the increasing speed of a falcon diving to break a rabbit’s back.

  And for the first time since before his rescue, Jaret did not know what to do. He felt nothing compelling him, no force guiding, no compulsion or coercion. There was only emotionless awe as even the Order seemed to abandon him. He froze, paralyzed as much by the loss of the force that controlled him as by the sight of the creature above. Untethered, his mind struggled to do anything at all as the seconds ticked and the creature drew closer.

  It was in its final descent before Jaret could find words. “To the horses,” he yelled. “Retreat to the forest.” But it was too late. The creature was on top of them. The force of its wings, of its massive body cutting through the air, buffeted them, staggered them long enough for the thing to cover the final distance and pull up into the sky, but not before each of its sixty legs released the ball it was holding.

  The balls uncurled as they fell. Long, slender legs spread. A head rose. Shining black eyes opened. The things hit the ground running. Seeming to not even feel the force of the fall, they sprinted on six legs toward whatever man was closest. The luckiest of those were ready, had overcome their shock and prepared themselves. They dodged as the creatures tried to bowl them over, then parried as the things rose and struck with the barbed talons at the ends of their legs. A few of the men moved quickly enough to strike at the creatures, but their swords slid off of hard exoskeletons with hardly a scratch as the creatures rose to two legs and turned the other four on the men before them.

  In an area of relative calm, Jaret scanned the field. His men were scattered across it, surrounded by bodies that made it difficult to move. As big as the men they faced, the creatures were fast and sure, switching effortlessly between two and four legs as required to navigate the field, but they seemed not to use the advantage their mobility provided. They remained in front of the men they fought, did not try to get around them or gang up on them. There were more men than creatures, but the men were isolated and could not move easily to assist one another. The best strategy for the creatures would be to gang up on stranded individuals and quickly kill as many as possible before the advantage of numbers could come into play. Instead, the creatures each chose a single man and sought to fight him face-to-face.

  A cry of frustration from behind showed Jaret why. He spun in time to see a knight lose his balance as his foot tang
led with the limp arm of a boy. The creature struck. It rose to two legs and lunged with all four of its others at once. Yet the long, barbed spikes on the end of those legs did not go for the knight’s heart or head or guts. Two went high, finding his wrists, punching easily through his armor. The other two dove to his feet. The knight screamed, yelling curses as the spikes impaled him. The screams only rose as the creature planted its back legs, lowered itself to the ground and lifted the armored man from the ground. The legs spread the man out as if he were on the rack until he was wailing with pain, begging the thing to stop. And it did stop. It simply held him in place, stretched out, unable to move, unable to do anything but scream.

  And Jaret flashed back to his time with Thagas’kuila. He remembered how that creature had reveled in his pain and fear, how it had wanted only to torture him, how it had been perfectly designed to deliver that torture day-after-day. These were no different. They struck only at wrists, hands, feet, lower legs. Often they caught only one limb at a time, but they did not stop until they had secured all four and used them to lift their victims screaming into the air. Only then did a double-set of mandibles seem to grow from where the creatures’ mouths should be. Those cruel, snapping jaws lunged toward the men every time their screams seemed to ease. The men could not help but howl in fear of this new torture, but the jaws always came up short.

  They have no intention of killing, Jaret realized. They are just like Thagas’kuila. They want pain and fear. They will leave my men hanging there for days, will torture them until they die of thirst then move to another. Rage pounded against the barrier in his mind. He ground his teeth and acted.

  Holding his blade with two hands, dirk tucked in his belt, he leapt off the back of a boy and hit the thin, black arm of the closest creature with all the force he could muster. The sword nearly rattled from his hand as it slid off the black surface leaving little more than a scratch. The wailing of the man held by the creature only seemed to intensify as Jaret tumbled between him and the creature. A glimpse of his face showed the fear and pain that Jaret knew far too well. He would not, could not allow his men to experience that.