Oathbreaker: The Knight's Tale

by Colin McComb

  I have led men in the Imperial armies for thirty-nine years in one capacity or another. I did not rise up through the ranks. I was born into a powerful family and was placed well when it became apparent that I had an aptitude for leadership. It is a common misconception among the troops that if they work hard enough, they can achieve the rank I hold. This is untrue. The command of the armies is a privilege the rich and the wealthy guard jealously, no matter the qualifications of those below them, and there are still many appointments to the higher ranks made purely the basis of blood. I admit that a number of these noble appointments are gifted, such as House Cronen's Count-General Beremany—but I will speak more of him later.

  I will say that under my command, the upper echelons of the Imperial armies have become far more open to skillful men and women who suffered the accident of low birth, and someday there may yet be a commoner in my position. Not in the waning years of this century, though possibly in the next, if the Empire lasts that long. My aides and those around me are all of noble birth, but of the rank below that holds commoners in its arms, and they serve ably. I pass word of their accomplishments upward when I can. I can only hope that the king will continue to listen to these praises, should he survive what I have recently discovered.

  I understand that I am well loved by those under my command, at least as loved as a general can be. Though I am stern, and though I enforce a severe discipline among my troops, I am fair, and I see to it that those deserving reward are rewarded. I ride among them when I am able, so that they can see I do not despise their sacrifice, though I do not always share their worship—many of my troops are religious, but I have treated with the High Exegetes and the ecclesiastical courts, and they are rotten. While the teachings may be sound, the messengers are not—but I take care to conceal my feelings.

  Morale among my people, male and female alike, is generally good, and I work hard to ensure that it remains as high as possible. I do not take luxuries when my troops suffer hardships. I go without when they must. I will not have them think that they must suffer so that I may live in leisure. They already see that when they look at the courtiers of the king. I have little use for courtiers—they do little honest work in their lives, instead preferring to aggrandize themselves through the sweat of others.

  I toil in the courts of the king when I must, and I do mean toil—I would rather be among the troops, drilling and training and sweating, than passing among the courtiers who are eager to be seen reflected in my sometimes-meager glory. The camps are honest.

  Though politics play a part in the decisions we make in the high councils of the army, I have done my best to make their resolutions as visible as possible, so that those under my command will know the reasons behind the orders that affect them. This does not make me popular with some of my more ambitious subordinates, and I have earned enemies in the king’s court for my plain speaking, but I am close—or was close, at least—in the councils of the king. None at court dared curry my disfavor. They know my disdain for Imperial adventure, and there have been times when my words have turned back declarations of war, especially war that would serve only to benefit interests of certain nobles in the court. I dislike politics because I am at a decided disadvantage among the courtiers who practice that skill even in their sleep. Still, I have served my king with integrity and loyalty since the time he rode to campaign with us as a prince.

  I value my men, and I love the Empire, though it has fallen into decay. I try to hold back the decay as long as I can. I do not know if even I can do this. It might be too late. No, I am certain it is. My time has passed.

  It is now ten of the clock.

  I first distinguished myself around forty years ago, when I was but eighteen. My father had just secured me a place on the general staff of the Third Army. I served as a page to General Jon Hawkins, the infamous Butcher of Greenfield. Mine was an honorable job, I suppose, but it was designed to keep me clear of combat, out of harm’s way, and to show how useful I could be to those in power.

  My father clearly wanted me to stand out from the others, and he raised me as only a baron’s son can be raised. I received instruction in dancing, etiquette, and some of the other arts, but I excelled only in strategy and weapons craft. I would have made an imperfect courtier, but as my father had no other vision for my future, I had no choice but to continue with the course he assigned. I suppose I should thank him for his interest in my future, but he is long dead, felled by an assassin’s blade at the height of the troubles thirty-five years ago, in the Birdsnest Wars sparked by the death of the old king. My father was a bit player in that drama between the powerful Houses, but he aligned himself stupidly when he could have stepped aside with honor. He could have bettered himself by remaining neutral in a clash of giants—neutrality would have put him in good stead no matter who won. Instead, he made just enough partisan fuss that his sentence was sealed. I was lucky they did not kill me as well. I have never investigated his death, though I have a good idea who ordered it. She is dead now, and naming names would serve only to inflame passions better left to heal. And if I were mistaken, why, that would be worse.

  My father’s death showed me that politics is a more dangerous battleground than the fields of war—certainly a good deal more treacherous. By the time of his murder, however, I had ensconced myself firmly in the military, nearly beyond the reach of his particular enemies, and too valuable to the Empire to be punished for his sins.

  I digress again.

  General Hawkins was brilliant, with a knowledge of strategy and tactics so deep it was practically instinctive. When I was permitted to remain in his tent for any length of time, I learned more than I ever had learned in the training schools, and the more level-headed tactics of Hawkins have led me through many a battle safely and well. He earned his nickname, though, for he did not care if he brought suffering and destruction as long as he achieved his goal, and he loved nothing more than to lead his troops personally so that he might taste the blood of his foes. There were many in his staff who felt as he did, declaring that diplomacy and respect are the battleground of the courtier, that we in the armies were simply the muscle behind the words and should commit ourselves fully to the craft of death. That attitude led us nearly to the brink of destruction.

  I entered the army and the general staff during a time of peace, during the old king’s final attempts at negotiations with the Siullans to the east. As the history books tell us, those attempts were doomed to failure, and they failed not long after they began, a year into my service. The people of both sides wanted peace, but our rulers had no heart for it. Outwardly, they called for calm, but between themselves, they understood that the negotiations would ultimately bear no fruit. Furthermore, the Siullan leaders understood that old King Fannon III offered them nothing but a golden servitude. They had their pride. They answered him.

  The Siullans laid explosives throughout the city of Amchester that fall. Ten thousand died, among them the ambassador to the Siullans. Their senators denied responsibility, but both they and we knew it was their answer to our proposition. King Fannon called upon General Hawkins to speak to their answer.

  The general mustered two of the Empire’s seven armies, and led the First and Third east in the heavy autumn rains, creating two massive, curved pincer arms that measured over fifty miles long from end to end. (The Second and the Fourth were both armies whose ranks brimmed with soldiers from our eastern provinces, and we did not want their loyalty tested—we always send warriors who have little connection to the land they'll conquer so that they do not falter at the sight of a friend's face.) The First Army was to the north, the Third to the south. We had nearly one hundred thousand men in the field. The Siullans had perhaps sixty thousand. We had six military dirigibles, twenty scouting dirigibles, artillery, and the knights—both Elite and the lesser orders—and our troops were simply better trained. It would be, in truth, no contest. We couldn’t understand why the Siullans didn’t surrender and save themselves.
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  We should have put ourselves in their place. The destruction that happened later was a failure of our empathy and a failure of our intelligence.

  Our scouts ranged out ahead of us as we crossed the hilly border into Siull. They rode the silver steeds of the Knights Elite, the metal-armored, unliving creatures created by the Archmagus and his apprentices. These were smaller, slimmer mounts, faster than the coursers of the knights, but not nearly as durable; I have seen them explode in gouts of flame and flying shrapnel from a single well-placed arrow. Still, they traveled far faster than any ordinary horse, such as the rest of us were compelled to ride, and a smart scout would rather throw a leg in front of an arrow than let it strike her mount—if she were foolish enough to travel within bowshot in the first place. The scouting steeds were nearly as valuable as the scouting dirigibles we had above us, and certainly stealthier. We did not have the flight troops we have now, those unsavory creatures of the magi.

  The Siullans gave way steadily before us, and our lines extended as we struggled to encircle them. They burned the farms and villages behind them as they went, of course, to keep us from their bounty, and because they knew the Siullan Republic was doomed. They wished us to have no profit from their death. We’d have done the same thing.

  The scouts reported that the Siullan numbers dwindled daily. Some of the Siullans rode ahead of their main army, and the tiny bands disappeared in the hills through which we marched. Sometimes, scouts who sought these bands disappeared. Hawkins was not especially suspicious, for many of these deserters had reemerged as guerrillas to harass our lines, and we found enough of our dead scouts near the shattered, smoking remains of their coursers. We lost two scouting dirigibles, brought down by lucky shots from their rolling guns. The troops bled away from their army until at last they reached the Gaurin Plains and held their ground. They had perhaps forty thousand men then, a third of them gone. We presumed them ragged and desperate with fear. We holed up in the hills rather than engage them immediately. The First Army was in position to strike and was moving rapidly to close the pincer. On the next day, we’d draw the trap closed and crush them between us. Our camp was impregnable from any attack they might launch, and they could go no farther without injudiciously exposing their rear flank. They were trapped, exactly where Hawkins wanted them.

  Students of military history will know that we were exactly where they wanted us.

  I will not recount here the full particulars of what happened next. Let us say that the Siullans had lured us into precisely the kind of ambush to which our massive armies were so vulnerable. They had laced the ground in the hills surrounding the Gaurin Plains with a network of caverns and tunnels over the years in preparation for an eventuality such as this. Explosive charges awaited detonation under our feet, with iron bulwarks between blast areas to protect the men and women lurking in wait for the signal to attack from below. It was deadly in its ingenuity and astonishing in its foresight.

  The Siullans struck at night. I suspect their first move was to send an assassin to climb the lines into one of our heavy dirigibles. The sudden fiery crash of the airship into the heart of our army was the signal for the detonation of the explosives in the caves, and that detonation was the signal for the ten thousand in the caves to rise up and murder us in the tents where we plotted the next day’s action. Our guards were wary, but many of them were taken completely by surprise. The screaming slaughter was the final signal for their army to rush the lines of the Third Army. It seemed they had no intention of survival. They wanted us to suffer as much as possible before their republic went the way of all who opposed our Empire.

  The dirigible crash was frighteningly close to Hawkins’s tent, close enough that the great flaming struts of the flying machine set the tents afire with their shrapnel, close enough that the shock waves knocked the supports out from under the pavilions. Those inside the tents of the staff were trapped under the material, and many of them roasted or suffocated in the choking smoke within the canvas folds. I had had enough presence of mind to equip myself with a wrist knife, which I carried and still carry at all times, and it saved my life.

  When I had cut a hole through the canvas, I looked upon a scene from the first of Hell’s blasted plains. Twisted, blackened struts skewed at crazy angles. A rolling, roaring landscape of fire and smoke lit the air from all sides, and shadows cast from the flames cut like knives through the soot and ash that billowed from the ground. Screams rose from the tents all around me as the canvas took fire and turned the tents’ interiors into ovens, waxy fat running liquid from the seams of the blazes. Figures silhouetted against the light raised dripping swords and plunged them into their victims with unimaginable ferocity, howling their vengeance upon us.

  I dug my sword from the smoldering canvas and sought to save the people I could save. Those in the midst of flames were clearly too far gone. I sought first those who were still struggling in the fallen tents that were near combustion, and those whose tents were flickering with the beginnings of inferno. Around me, other quick-thinking soldiers did the same. I must have saved a good twenty of the staff, junior officers and attachés, before I came on Hawkins’s tent. I suppose if I had been more ambitious, I would have run there first, but I cut the doomed free as I went instead—a bad strategy on my part, but one for which I cannot blame myself.

  Hawkins’s tent was aflame, and there was but one figure in it who still struggled, faintly. The stench of seared human flesh had filled my nose for several minutes, so I was spared the smell of those roasting inside. I slashed the canvas, and black smoke billowed out into my face. I thrust my arm into the rent, seized the trapped man inside, pulled him to safety, and came face to face with General Hawkins. He was badly burnt, his face seared and blistered. He was missing his eyebrows and a fair-sized patch of hair, and he vomited on me as the fresh air hit his lungs. Two raiders came our way then, and as the general struggled to breathe, I beat their weapons aside and skewered them.

  When Hawkins pulled himself together—surprisingly quickly—he armed himself with a raider’s sword and began to bark commands to the surviving officers of his staff. Inside a few moments, we had the beginning of an actual resistance to the attack.

  We had a functioning command structure from top down within half an hour of the disaster, despite being hit in our most vulnerable spot; it was a mark of the discipline Hawkins had drilled into his troops. Ten minutes after the commands flew again, we had resistance to the Siullan guerillas. The ten thousand enemies in our camp tried to prevent us from organizing a response to the forty thousand Siullans rushing our lines, but failed. Our training was too complete to allow us to fall into disarray. The outlying troops were, in the main, unaffected by the explosions, but they had to deal immediately with the full force of the Siullans and could not return to aid the rest of the army. Neither could they expect reinforcements or leadership from us, and they were being slaughtered even as we got ourselves back on our feet.

  Our remaining dirigibles fired explosives and shot glass vials of poisonous gas into the Siullan encampment, annihilating any who had not rushed the front lines, eliminating their artillery positions in choking, coughing death. We lost three of our strong dirigibles before their guns were made useless.

  Nearly two thousand of our men had perished immediately in the explosions and campsite slaughter, and several thousand more fell before they rallied against the Siullan army. As our foes hadn’t had the shock of seeing their command post obliterated in a cloud of flame and dust, they pressed us mercilessly, determined to inflict as much damage as possible before our other army wiped them out. Even with our swift response, it seems that we would have been defeated had it not been for the incredible speed of the Knights Elite of the First Army racing to our assistance. The infantry and cavalry followed as close behind as possible.

  When the 4,000 knights (a mixture of Elite, Faithful, and Lesser) hit the Siullans from the rear, we thought at first that the sky had opened and delivered the ang
els of Kattriya to save us. Our knights laid into the Siullans with a bloody will, avenging our losses and pain with a fanatic fervor. Although their defeat was inevitable, the Siullans fought to their last breath, determined not to surrender to our dubious mercies. Of course, we were in no mood to show mercy. We slaughtered them wherever we found them. It was a grim night’s work.

  By morning, we had established hospitals for the soldiers wounded in the terror attack, and the knights had volunteered for the dangerous work of clearing the tunnels. Bloodlust was in their eyes, and Hawkins was wise enough to allow them free rein in exorcising it. The Knights Elite of the Third had taken heavy losses in the attack, more so than any other unit; they had set up their command camp directly over a lode of underground explosives, and the limbs of a good portion of them were strewn over the landscape when the attack began. The knights were also the quickest to recover, and if it were not for the fast thinking of their commander, I’d have had to face down a good number more of the Siullans at Hawkins’s tent. The outcome of the battle might have been decidedly different.

  I thought that my performance the night of the battle had gone unnoticed, but I should have known better. Hawkins called me into his tent, and he personally promoted me, giving me a squadron of my own troops to command with the promise that he’d keep an eye on me. He guaranteed me a medal when we returned to Terona. I had left the capital as a messenger. I returned a hero. My father was disappointed, though he struggled to hide it, and I knew that I had left the path he had chosen for me.