by Tom Lloyd
When Styrax turned away sharply he nearly sagged with relief. His shoulders jerked as he tried to hold back another hiccough, and he flinched as the ugly old sergeant appeared beside him.
Sergeant Deebek clapped him on the shoulder and grinned toothily, about to lead him away, when Lord Styrax spoke again. ‘Engineer, estimate the range of their fire-throwers.’ He pointed to the nearest of Aroth’s two high bastions.
Though no rival to Tor Salan’s defences, the fire-throwers of Aroth were still formidable, if their intelligence was to be believed. From what they knew, when it was fired, it released a curious horizontal main beam that whipped around the entire tower, then disengaged from the powering mechanism and pivoted back to its starting point, leaving the hanging bowl ready to be refilled while the mechanism was swiftly reset.
‘I — That is difficult, my Lord,’ the engineer stammered, ‘the mechanism has magically enhanced sections and we have yet to see it in action.’
‘I understand that. My concern is whether it could be employed against anyone attacking the causeway.’
Aroth was built on the shores of two lakes - a larger one, three miles across, that comprised nearly a quarter of the city’s perimeter, and a smaller body of water that had been artificially created; it was less than a mile wide. Between the two was a narrow belt of land no more than a hundred yards wide that served as the main entrance to the city. This was considered Aroth’s strongest point, and it was heavily defended with artillery-barges, positioned on both lakes, to turn the causeway into a killing ground. Naturally, that was where Lord Styrax had chosen to attack.
‘Would it have the range? Aye, I’d expect so,’ he said after a long while. ‘Whether it could be brought to bear, that’s more the question. They must have a way to tilt and turn it, because it’s covering that entire flank, but it’s one thing to cover half the circle; another entirely to go beyond that.’
‘Especially with that loading system,’ Styrax added, staring at the city. Aroth was set on a slight rise, making the tops of those towers the highest point for fifty miles in either direction, the lakes the lowest. Cultivated fields stretched into the distance on all sides, fertile lands that begged the question of whether King Emin could afford to continue his fighting retreat. Taking Aroth would shore up the Menin Army’s supply-lines and change the complexion of the war — but Styrax had a different plan in mind to change the game here.
‘Most likely they’d need a second reloading station, on the other side,’ the engineer said, swallowing a hiccough.
‘The effort would be worthwhile though,’ Styrax mused, almost to himself. ‘The smaller lake will have far fewer artillery-barges; it’s the weaker flank - unless the fire-thrower can hit its far bank.’
The engineer didn’t argue. He thought it unlikely they would have bothered; the long city wall at the back of Aroth unguarded by water was still the weaker point, and these defences had been designed before King Emin conquered the city. Chances were the builders hadn’t worked through every scenario as the King of Narkang might.
‘Gaur,’ Styrax said over his shoulder, ‘are they all in position?’
‘They are, my Lord. Shall I give the order?’
‘Not yet.’ Styrax set off towards his saddled wyvern. As he put on his whorled black helm the creature snarled and crouched down, hind legs tensing with anticipation as Styrax climbed into the saddle and clipped the silver rings of his dragon-belt to it.
General Gaur advanced towards Styrax, stopping short as the wyvern’s head lifted and its mouth opened hungrily. ‘My Lord, this is not necessary. The Litse white-eyes have already scouted from the air.’
‘Their mages weren’t unduly panicked by the scouts, so another demonstration is in order. It — ’ The white-eye paused and gathered up the wyvern’s long reins. ‘Trust me, my friend.’
With that he tugged hard on the reins and the wyvern unfurled its wings fully, with two half-beats to ready it, then, driving up with its powerful hind legs, it leapt into the air and caught the cool morning air. A longer stroke propelled it higher, and now it was turning in a lazy circle above their heads, climbing all the while.
Gaur watched the creature rise until it was hard to make out the figure on the wyvern’s back, then he stalked over to the engineer, who took a half-pace back.
The engineer couldn’t decipher the beastman’s expression, but he recognised the sense of purpose in his stride.
‘Get back to the baggage-train,’ Gaur growled at the engineer. ‘Your work here is done.’
Beyn peered forward, ignoring the bubble of chatter behind him. The King’s Man was intent on movement several miles away, beyond the Hound Lake.
‘Knew it,’ he whispered to himself, ‘I damned well knew it.’ He turned and looked down the line of frightened soldiers until he found the general, half-hidden by an enormous nobleman and his white-eye bodyguard - one inferior in every way to the vicious ogre who’d inspired that latest Narkang fashion. General Aladorn had withered in his retirement; now he could barely see over the shoulder of a normal man, and whatever he was trying to say was being ignored as the nobleman, one Count Pellisorn of the Arothan Lords’ Chamber, continued to fire demands at him.
‘General, have the mages turn the weather, now!’ Beyn called.
As he expected, Pellisorn just increased his volume, turned his back on Beyn and loomed over the elderly general.
‘Soldier,’ Beyn said quietly to the crossbowman next to him, holding his hand out.
The soldier handed over his weapon with a grin and watched Beyn quickly load it, raise the bow and put it to the bodyguard’s ear. To his credit, the white-eye didn’t flinch or move; he very sensibly stood stock-still.
‘What the — ?’ the count started, but Beyn cut him off.
‘Honour Council Pellisorn,’ Beyn said in a calm voice, ‘the enemy have made their first move. That means your authority is no longer recognised. The task appointed to me - by the king himself - is to ensure General Aladorn is unimpeded in his duties.’
Count Pellisorn leaned back with a look of distaste on his face, as though a favourite pet had just revealed yellow eyes and a forked tongue. Unlike most of the men assembled he was dressed in court-finery, his only armour a ceremonial gorget displaying his position on the Honour Council, the ruling body within the Lords’ Chamber.
He was, however, a consummate politician, and he recovered as soon as he realised it was his bodyguard in danger, not he. ‘I don’t give a damn for the opinions of some low-born thug!’ the count announced, his hand moving to his sword hilt. ‘Unless you think threatening my man will earn you anything but a slow walk to the headsman, you will lower your weapon immediately.’
‘Take your hand away from your sword, Honour Council,’ Beyn advised. ‘You’re as fat as you are past your prime, so don’t embarrass yourself further. I suggest you get out of my sight.’
‘You a King’s Man?’ the white-eye rumbled. He was a block-faced specimen of indeterminate age with a bulbous brow and a nose broken many times - and old enough to have a shred of common sense, Beyn guessed from the look in his white eyes. He had to hope so, at any rate; they didn’t have soldiers to spare in Aroth.
‘I am.’
‘Then ah’m takin’ your orders,’ the white-eye said ponderously, trying to watch the point of the bolt out of the corner of his eye. ‘Is the law, I were told.’
Beyn heaved a sigh of relief that the king’s decree had reached the white-eyes here. He lowered the crossbow and ordered, ‘Step back, and remove your former employer from my sight, soldier. Use as much force as you think necessary.’
The white-eye’s face split in into a grin, and Count Pellisorn’s objections were cut short when his erstwhile bodyguard grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and hauled him towards the door by his jewel-inlaid gorget, leaving Beyn free to approach the general.
‘What was that you said?’ Aladorn demanded, squinting up at Beyn. ‘Are they advancing?’
&nb
sp; ‘I saw the wyvern; you have to get the mages to turn the weather, sir.’
‘He’s not going to attack all by himself,’ Aladorn croaked, waving a liver-spotted claw dismissively. ‘No need to waste their strength.’
‘He can soften us up first,’ Beyn said, ‘we’ve nothing that can fire so high. You need to order the mages now, the only way to stop him is to threaten a storm.’
The general made a contemptuous sound. ‘Afraid of thunder, is he?’
Beyn ground his teeth with frustration. He was used to folk believing him on matters of war. While General Aladorn might have been pretty good during the conquest of the kingdom, magic hadn’t played a great part. Now he was just a stubborn old man, as far as Beyn could see.
‘Lightning is attracted by magic,’ he explained, as calmly as a man facing imminent death could, ‘and he’ll be up there raining the fury of Ghenna down upon us unless we do something to stop him!’
‘And tire our mages in the process.’
‘They can’t stop him head-on, any road,’ Beyn snapped, his patience gone. ‘Magic ain’t going to win this for us, only our bloody artillery.’
General Aladorn scowled at Beyn, his mouth becoming even more pinched and wrinkled as he thought. ‘Very well, lieutenant, give the order,’ he said at last to an aide standing by the door.
The man saluted and turned stiffly about.
‘Run, you fuck!’ roared Beyn after him, startling the man out of his formality and sending him scrabbling through the door.
Once the lieutenant had gone Beyn turned his back on the rest of the assembled command staff and remaining councillors, uncaring of their reproachful faces. He wasn’t there for decorum, after all, and right now he had bigger concerns. Out of those assembled, all of Aroth’s ruling circles, Beyn was the only one showing any genuine concern for the coming siege. The councillors and nobles alike were all claiming they had supplies enough to outlast the enemy, and the soldiers were confident in both their defences and their prowess. But Beyn had seen nothing to give him any confidence at all in either claim.
The king’s order to refuse battle was pronounced cautious prudence, nothing more, conceding unimportant ground. That the kingdom’s second city might actually fall to the Menin didn’t appear to have occurred to any of them, and Beyn knew if he mentioned the possibility he’d be laughed out the room.
Damn fools, Beyn thought, as uncharacteristic doubts marched through his mind. Not one person’s noticed I’m the only King’s Man here. None of the king’s best warriors or mages have been sent to join this defence. His hand clenched as a sense of helplessness unexpectedly washed over him. When the king himself doesn’t believe we can stand against them, what chance do we have?
Styrax pulled back on the wyvern’s reins and brought it around into a thermal to climb higher. The beast resisted his urging for a moment, eager to be at the prey ahead, before tilting its wings in response.
Patience, Styrax thought, as much to himself as the wyvern. Let them see us and react. Let them have the small victory of driving me off.
Every fibre of his body railed at the idea, but he battered it down. He knew the flaws of his kind well enough, and he possessed every one, but there had been one guiding rule to his life: that he would choose his own path - not the Gods, not daemons, not the will of other men. And certainly not my own rage.
Just the thought of Kohrad was enough to produce a spiked knot at the back of his mind, but he gritted his teeth and fought it, letting the wyvern climb and circle above the city.
Without control I am no better than Dervek Grast, Styrax reminded himself, and that I refuse to be.
The words were like a mantra, one oft-repeated of late. Grast, the reviled former Lord of the Menin, had been a monster, made worse by his intellect. The man hadn’t been a savage, the unthinking and deranged killer most preferred to think him; there had been method, and strength of will to support his vicious delusions. For all of his forerunner’s brutality, Styrax believed Grast’s crimes would pale into insignificance next to the devastation he would wreak if he allowed grief to sway him.
If I allow myself to be ruled by grief, he thought firmly, if. There will be crimes enough without that.
He thumped a fist against the side of his helm to wake himself up. The wyvern began to strain beneath him as it continued to climb so he corrected it with a twitch of the reins and it settled immediately, wings outstretched. It could soar like this, many hundreds of feet above the city, for hours, travelling faster than any horse, and in theory a mage as powerful as Styrax could shatter a city’s walls in that time.
It wouldn’t happen, though, there must be more than a dozen mages living inside a city of that size, quite enough to call the clouds above closer. He would cause some damage certainly, but not enough to risk being plucked from the air and smashed on the rocks below. No, he would resist the temptation, just as he would the growling animal in his gut that wanted to attack, to dive screaming onto the enemy and cut them to pieces before the rest of the army even caught up.
From the city below he detected a vibration in the afternoon air: a subtle, gentle stroke of magic, soaring up like the first notes of a symphony. It was joined by others, though most lacking the finesse of the first, a few exceeding it for power, and each a variation on a common theme.
One of their mages knows what he’s about, Styrax thought approvingly, pushing briefly on the wyvern’s neck to send it into a long, shallow dive. You could have taught the Farlan boy a thing or two; the elements are to be cajoled, not compelled. A mortal makes demands at their peril.
He could almost taste the thin streams of magic rising above the city. The air whipped past his face until the wyvern banked of its own accord and the buffeting lessened. A sparkle of energy tingled over his skin, adding renewed vigour to the breeze and sending a familiar frisson down Styrax’s neck.
Styrax peered down at the defences below as a few hopeful archers fired up at him, but their arrows fell hopelessly short. Now the wyvern had carried him down, closer to the city, he could pick out where the enemy mages were located.
I could pluck out your hearts right now, burst them like overripe fruit and leave you dead on the ground as a warning to the rest, he thought grimly. From the lower plain he surveyed the staggered defences of the causeway: earthworks flanking a long stone building that was built around a central archway straddling the road. A pair of guard-towers were set behind the earthworks, but they were small, barely big enough to hold more than two squads, and the Tollkeeper’s Arch itself would prove little more of an inconvenience.
The causeway defences had been built for commerce, not war. Further back, strung between buildings, was a hastily built defensive wall - it was feeble enough to show they didn’t really believe anyone would make it that far. On either side of the road the ground was broken up by angled ditches, and at one point between the wall and arch, a small canal allowed shallow-hulled scows to pass between the lakes. Though the two bridges across the canal had been dismantled, it was small, and anyway, the Menin Army had their own bridges to hand.
It would be a slaughter ground if the artillery barges were allowed free reign, but with a little help from Aroth’s mages, those would be dealt with before the troops arrived.
Didn’t you hear? Styrax asked the distant mages below, I’ve already conquered Ilit’s chosen people. The wind is mine to command now.
He turned in a long circle, following the perimeter wall of the city and noting what he could of the defences. The bulk of their soldiers were mustered in ordered blocks in the southwest of the city, where the ground was most open. From the air Aroth looked kidney-shaped, with a mile-long jetty protruding into Lake Apatorn. From here it was impossible to make out the delineation between the part built on stilts hammered into the lakebed and where the foundations were dry ground. But soon enough that wouldn’t matter.
Guiding the wyvern lower Styrax placed his unarmoured hand against the Crystal Skull in the centre of his
cuirass, the one named Destruction. He’d found the differences between them were small, like the minuscule flaws that made each of a dozen gems unique.
Styrax could name each of his Crystal Skulls solely by the way it caught the light, but from his experiments he believed the only one markedly different was the last; Ruling. That one would be a handful to use in battle, he suspected, but the rest had only slight tendencies towards certain magics - tendencies that made Destruction less effort to use now.
He drew energy into a ball around the Skull and heard the thump of his heart echo through the magic. The bloody stains underneath his fingernails seemed to lighten and come alive as a smooth lattice of red-tinted light formed around the magic-scarred hand. Even as his heartbeat quickened, Styrax felt a calmness descend as the magic washed all emotion from his mind.
Up above the clouds rolled in, coiling like a threatened snake above his head. He felt his ears pop as the pressure started to fall and the wind streaming past turned cool. Styrax looked down to gauge the distance to the yellow mud-brick walls of Aroth below. Still out of bowshot, he reined the wyvern back a little and it arced neatly up, head stretched out and watching the scuttling food beneath.
At the end of the wall was the nearer tower, an enormous construction that, with its mate on the larger lake, dominated the entire city. The tower was round, and two hundred feet high, with wooden platforms attached to the outside and a mess of timber on top that at first glance looked like a collapsed roof.
Styrax leaned out from his saddle, twitching the reins to correct the wyvern’s flight as it adjusted to the shift in weight. The energy around his fist was coalescing and growing hotter with every moment, tiny licks of flame beginning to drift from one strand of the skein to another. Styrax grimaced as the heat stung his more sensitive hand, the ragged swirls of scar becoming dark shadows against the white before it was obscured entirely by the magic.