by Dragon Lance
“He wants you here to save him,” Chancellor Titus joked with Luccia as she mounted her steed next to him.
“If I know Vinas,” she returned, “he wants me here so he can save me.”
“Or, perhaps, kiss you,” the priest replied.
It was just then that Vinas rode up. Courage shifted nervously beneath him. The commander’s eyes were sharp, staring into the distance, checking his troops. Something caught his eye. Just before he charged away, he said, “If we reach the other side today, Titus, I’d kiss even you.”
Then with a rumble of hooves, he and Courage sped away. In a breath, the horse was kicking up dust along a distant line of infantry, and Vinas was barking orders.
“He does love you,” Titus murmured.
“What?” asked Luccia irritably.
“He does love you,” the priest repeated. “He’s just become too much of a warrior to know how to show it.”
She breathed deeply, untangling the reins from Terraton’s mane. “He’ll have to learn,” she replied, then nudged the griffon’s side with her heels. There was a great surge of wings, and they lifted away.
The swirling dust had not yet settled when Vinas, all clanking armor, halted Courage next to Titus. Through gritted teeth, the commander asked, “Where’s Luce? I ordered her to stay close.”
“Ah,” said Titus, gently mocking, “so that’s the problem.”
Vinas glared at his longtime friend and said, “The road has certainly loosened your tongue, Priest.”
“Yes,” agreed Titus. “Strange that it has tightened yours.”
Instead of responding, Vinas tilted his head back and shaded his eyes from the robin’s egg sky. He glimpsed Luccia, a darting flame of orange in the distance.
“She’ll be back. I’ve no time to wait.”
Under his breath, Titus said, “That seems to be the problem in a nutshell.”
“Forward!” commanded Vinas.
“Forward!” cried Gaias, his voice ragged.
“Forward!” The shout rang down the lines. The wide and anxious eyes of the men then drew into determined slits as they took their first steps into the chasm.
*
Luccia had not returned. She had not reported in. She had sent other griffon riders periodically down to tell Vinas what they had encountered – nothing – but she had not bothered to come herself.
It riled Vinas. Perhaps she was fulfilling the letter of his order – to provide him with updates from the ridge – but he had meant that she do it personally, not send lackeys. Already, the division had marched three miles into the chasm. No attacks had come in that nail-biting hour, but every soldier was on edge, especially the commander.
“Another five miles to go, Commander,” said the latest lad dispatched by Luccia. He looked no older than fourteen as he sat astride his flapping steed. “I’m pleased to report we have sighted none of the enemy.”
“Thank you,” said Vinas distractedly.
The lad kept his griffon hovering beside a fidgeting Courage.
Vinas barked, “Well, away with you!”
No sooner had the messenger arrowed steeply away than Vinas rounded a comer to see an army.
The army of Vingaard.
They were a mile ahead, a slowly marching rabble in mismatched and filthy armor. Their war-horses were little more than plow pullers, but they were there, and by the thousands.
“You see them, don’t you?” Vinas hissed to Gaias and Titus as he signaled a halt.
The soundless signal passed back among the ranks, and the war worm slowly compressed to a stop.
Gaias said, “Preserve me, but I do.”
Titus shook his head in disbelief. “Why didn’t the scouts see them?”
“Enemy war wizards,” Gaias offered, “I suspect.”
“What are they doing here in such force? On the march? Why aren’t they dug in?” Vinas wondered aloud.
“They’re invading,” Gaias answered quietly.
Vinas was dumbfounded. “Invading? They have the gall to break away from Ergoth and then send an invasion force across the border?”
“So it would seem,” Gaias commented.
“Heavy horses – bring them,” Vinas ordered a young colonel beside him. “Bring a company of them. I will lead them myself.”
The colonel spurred his steed to rush back among the lines.
“Let the colonel lead,” Titus said. “We’re still weeks out of Vingaard Keep. There’ll be more important charges.”
“No, friend,” Vinas responded. “This time you are wrong. If we lose this battle, we lose the war. If we lose, they will march straight to Daltigoth. Besides, I’ve a feeling a determined corps of lancers could smash through them as though they were made of paper.”
“Remember our straw man attack at the Crossing?” Titus asked. “This could be the same trap.”
Vinas laughed. “You give them too much credit. Ah, here are my lancers now.”
He rode Courage out to meet the heavy horse company that thundered up between the main army and the river. Vinas reined in, staring at them with excitement in his eyes.
“There they are, men,” he said. “The warriors of Vingaard. I’d not thought we’d ever get a true charge of heavy horse. I thought they’d be hiding in caves or in the keep itself, but here they are and here we are.
“A lance!” he called. One of the riders handed his over. Vinas tested its heft, looked at it admiringly, and set its butt against his hip. “I myself will lead you in this charge. We’ll rip the belly out of that division with the first blow. Drive in with lances and continue on with swords. The infantry will follow at a run. We’ll not stop until we tear through their ranks.”
A cheer went up. Vinas wheeled Courage about and gave a bloodcurdling whoop. Courage leapt into the charge and the other mounts responded in kind. Dust rose thick behind the company. The horses formed into a V-shaped line of attack. At the apex of that wedge, Commander Solamnus drove Courage.
The cavalry crossed beds of packed earth, clattered over shelves of shale scree, splashed through little black pools, and vaulted the brush that clung here and there to the shadowed stones. Hooves sparking, the horses dropped down again onto an embankment of packed ground that was flat between the sheer wall and the tumbling Vingaard River.
An enemy charge was lumbering out to meet them. Shoeless horses thumped beneath toothless bumpkins. Half of them wielded flails and rakes instead of spears or lances.
They will splinter and drift away on the wind, these scarecrow soldiers, thought Vinas, his heart drumming in his chest.
He lowered his lance. The other riders followed suit.
Genocide. Quick, not cruel. That was the kindest way to describe it.
An orange comet roared by overhead. Vinas looked up just in time to see Luccia and Terraton dive to attack the infantry. Good. Her cavalry would harass them from the skies, too.
No more time for watching. One heartbeat, two... The ranks closed.
Impact. Vinas’s lance caught a man in the chest, ripped through him, and flung him backward atop a farmer. Vinas loosed the cracked wood, won free, and drew steel.
Before his sword cleared its scabbard, more lances struck home. One impaled a man’s head like a plump melon. Another slid beneath a horse’s barding and cut a wide, messy hole through its shoulder and into its flank. With every lance, there came a scream from man or beast, a splintering crack from the lance, and the inevitable throes of death.
All Vinas’s men were still mounted. All had forsaken lances for swords. All waded in, hacking and hewing. Limbs and heads flew, bodies fountained, torsos flopped to the ground. The shouts of the Ergothians and screams of their foes mixed in a high, haunting skirl, like the devil song of pipes.
Vinas had downed three already – yokels, these. His sword sliced through the haft of an axe meant for him. The axe head spun past like a taloned bird. He split the man down the middle. Giving no quarter, Vinas drove Courage into the man’s brown plow hor
se, shouldered past the panicked beast, and knocked a dying farmer to the ground.
Beyond were more potential victims. The whole swale was packed with them, from the dispassionate cliffs to the turbid Vin. They had come to die. They had come, these amateurs, against overwhelming forces and weapons, and why? Why? Because Vinas was invading their home.
He brought his sword clattering down. It met a blade. The notch-toothed warrior who wielded the weapon had muscle to him, bulk and power. Vinas parried a well-aimed attack, the first time he had needed to exert himself in this battle. Sword met sword and ground together like troubled teeth. Three more blows and blocks. Vinas saw the tide of rebel footmen – the treasonous vermin – sweeping in behind the thinning line of cavalry. He glanced in the other direction and saw his own troops arriving at perhaps twice the pace.
He felt a sting at his neck and with it the warmth of blood. Vinas whirled in a fury and lopped the warrior’s bearded head from his shoulders.
Gaias will be here in moments, he thought, and waded into the crimson fray.
*
Gaias cantered his mount, leading the infantry toward the fight. They came down a slope of shattered shale, heading for the hoof-marked flats where the two sides clashed. Soon, the foot soldiers would meet, too, and the fighting would be man-to-man.
It seemed strange to the old soldier to ride into battle rather than walk. Stranger still – to ride so slowly.
He led the charge because Vinas was already lost in the fighting. The commander was forever placing himself in the greatest danger, and leaving his colonels and lieutenants to make sure of the troops. It was bad leadership, Gaias would have said, except that it had always worked. Vinas was the greatest leader he had ever known.
They came upon a portion of packed ground and jogged on toward the hoof-torn soil of the cavalry fight.
“Charge!” shouted Gaias, raising his sword in the air.
Those men who had not yet drawn steel did so now. The six thousand upraised swords gleamed like cold, blue stars fallen from heaven. The charge neared the battle line. Gaias wished he was standing on his own feet. Too late for regrets.
With a racket like the blows of a thousand hammers on a thousand anvils, the warriors converged.
Gaias and his mount lunged among the trampled dead and the similarly trampled living. At first, the only work to be done was pushing past the milling remnants of cavalry battle. Gaias charged among the thin crop of whirling Ergothian swords, ducked beneath a broken lance wedged in a fallen horse, vaulted the central midden and shattered bone and blood where the first and most had fallen. Then he was among the rabble soldiers.
The horse struck ground atop a mob, killing two with hooves alone. But those two had their revenge. A crack came, like splitting wood. The horse shrieked and toppled over its broken leg, bearing Gaias atop it.
He was flung from the saddle and bowled into the putrid mob. He landed, and slew two beneath him as he levered himself to his feet. He had enough presence of mind to clamber over his foundering, rolling horse. His blade swept a silver arc, and the beast stilled atop crushed warriors.
Gaias whirled. He chopped a wedge from one blond-haired wretch. As his sword pulled free of the falling form and he set his feet to repel another foe, Gaias thought, I should not be given a third horse.
*
Griffons shrieked through the skies. They flew down to engage the aerial squads of Vingaard.
Vingaard’s armored, black-swathed villains sat astride red, flying fiends. The fiend bodies were the size of a man’s, but their arms were spread in wings of skin that could easily shadow a dozen horses. The heads of the creatures were birdlike, with scaly craniums that reached back in long spikes toward their riders. Their attenuated, toothy beaks released the most otherworldly and bone-chilling cries the riders had ever heard.
“Pteradons” was the name one man had muttered.
Bodies rained down from the sky battle – tawny eagle-lions, black-robed pteradon-riders, reeling Ergothians, and the unholy red flesh of the monstrosities, too. And when bodies fell, they landed on more bodies, dead or otherwise.
The canyon was quickly becoming a slaughterhouse. It seemed not a soul would survive.
*
“Come over here,” insisted Jerome, a young, red-robed apprentice. “The ground over here sounds hollow.” He stamped his foot again on the rocky escarpment.
“You ever heard of hollow granite?” chided one of his companions, a mage with at least six month’s seniority. He stood a stone’s throw away. He and the other war wizards avidly showered the enemy with lightning bolts, magic missiles, and whatever else they could conjure. “There’s a full-scale battle going on down there, and you’re worried about hollow rocks.”
Jerome waited until his companion had turned around before sneering. He was worried about the battle. Granite wasn’t hollow, but this ground was. So, this ground obviously wasn’t granite. If it wasn’t granite, what was it?
Jerome had very few spells but he knew one that could dispel magic and might just do the trick. Cracking his knuckles, Jerome made the requisite gestures, directed his casting toward the hollow-seeming ground, and spoke a word of power. In a flash, the cloaking spell vanished. Granite disappeared beneath him. A chasm opened up in its place – a deep chasm that intersected the one where the battle was taking place. Its bottom was lined with white-robed mages.
Mages!
That was all Jerome had time to see before he tumbled, head over heels. He let out a scream. His featherfall spell kicked in, and he went from plummeting to wafting. A very nice spell. As well as saving his life, it gave him a chance to see what the white-robed wizards were doing.
They were linked together in a long chain, their arms intertwined. Mouths moved in a rhythmic chant, and something that looked like quicksilver sweated from their pores. The liquid flowed over their bodies, streaming toward the main chasm. Halfway down the line, the wizards were completely covered in the liquid so that they looked like polished statues instead of men. Three quarters of the way down the line, the mercuric magic streamed up from the mages, forming into a wall that cut across the canyon.
“A mirror,” Jerome realized suddenly. “Some kind of magic mirror.” He wasn’t sure what the mirror had to do with the battle, but he knew what he ought to do to get rid of it: break the mages’ concentration. He began the gestures of a spell.
They’d not laugh at Jerome when they found out he single-handedly won the battle of the chasm by his clever use of a stinking cloud. Oh, the ribbing he’d received for learning that one!
*
Vinas had just driven his sword into the heart of a pitchfork-swinging farmer when the man transformed before his eyes. Where once there had been ratty, befouled sackcloth, now there was a tabard bearing the insignia of Ergoth. Where once there had been a bloated, stubbled face, now there was a young, beardless visage with dead eyes so blue they seemed to be white.
Vinas stared in surprise and drew back. Courage trampled bodies beneath. Those bodies, too, wore the livery of Ergoth’s army. He spun in the saddle, eyes sweeping across the battlefield. Not a Solanthian was in sight. Ergothian fought Ergothian, each swinging blindly, savagely, at the other.
Then, in an all-too-slow wave, the fighting faltered and stopped. The survivors stood, still and silent. They gaped at the ruin of their comrades, at the piled bodies of Ergoth’s dead. Pteradons had transformed into griffons, Solanthian colors into the red and black of Ergoth, slain foes into murdered friends.
As though slain himself, Vinas slumped from Courage and fell among the dead.
Meus Pater
I know her hand was in this – Phrygia’s hand. I know somehow she contrived, between the royal mage of Ergoth and some rebel sorcerer, to make my army destroy itself. Even so, the blame is not hers. The blame is all ours, all mine.
We battled only ourselves. How apt.
Whom do I fight for? The people of Ergoth? Certainly not. They are starving. They are s
uffocating beneath the boot on their necks, my boot. All the people of Ergoth wish for is the deliverance that Vingaard has claimed for itself, a deliverance I will be taking away from them.
I do not fight for the people of Ergoth, but for the Quisling Imperial Dynasty. No, not even that. The empress herself fights against me.
So, all that is left is Emann Quisling himself. That is who I fight for. Once I fought against him, in the bread troubles of Solanthus. Once I saved him from assassins. Had I only been slower that day, there would have been no battle today.
Two thousand men died today. Another two thousand are wounded, and why? Because they fight for Emann, one man against the people of Ansalon.
How strange that we war and die in a dispute that could be ended by one quick, sharp blade....
I do not pray to any god. Still, this night, as we survivors camp just beyond the rift, I have found myself over and over imploring Chemosh that those assassins might return and finish what they failed to do so many years ago. Such things would be so easy for the gods.
Still, while Emann lives, I serve him.
We will remain here as long as the scouts call it safe. We will repair and heal and muster. Then, it will be time to advance to the walls of Vingaard – not just this division of four thousand, but II Redroth’s six thousand and III Caergoth’s six thousand.
We will take Vingaard however it proves necessary – whole, if it surrenders, or in fragments of soot and bone and dust if it does not.
Father, I trust myself now to the pragmatism that served you so well. I only hope that at the end of this road of skulls, I will find one tenth the wisdom you had.
XI
Two Weeks Hence, 23 Hiddumont, 1199. Age of Light
The healing was done, and Vinas’s army marched north toward Vingaard Keep. No enemies had been sighted since the mirror battle. The scouts espied only farmers and millers, priests and children. For a land under attack by three separate armies from the most powerful empire in the world, Vingaard looked strangely oblivious. Bucolic, even.