by Ari Marmell
“Don’t even know your own leader’s whereabouts? Tsk, tsk, Davro. You used to be a lot better than—” Valescienn yelped as Davro lurched forward, and once more twisted wildly aside to avoid gaining an extra orifice.
Even as the shaft thrust past him, he brought his flail spinning up and around. The weighted length of chain wrapped tightly around the spear in a lustful suitor’s embrace, the barbs digging furrows in the dark wood.
Valescienn yanked before the far stronger ogre could react, every muscle in his body straining. The spear tilted sideways, and Valescienn lifted a foot and dropped it down in a devastating kick. The haft of the spear, thick as it was, gave way with a deafening snap. Davro pulled back, grimacing in consternation at the splintered wood in his hand.
Valescienn grinned nastily. “I’d say that makes this fight a little more even, wouldn’t you?”
Davro’s shoulders slumped. “My father gave me that spear at my coming-of-age ceremony,” he said, almost whimpering. Valescienn’s grin grew larger still.
And then, without the slightest change in expression, Davro drove the broken end of the shaft straight through that mocking leer.
For a moment, the ogre held the broken weapon and its gruesome burden aloft, until his single eye settled on the thick trunk of a nearby tree. He lowered the broken spear—allowing Valescienn’s feet, still kicking feebly, to once more touch the ground—and then charged, setting the staff under his arm like a lance. The impact rocked the earth around him and torrents of snow shook down from the leaves. When the dust settled, the staff was embedded in the wood and Valescienn’s body hung lifeless from the trunk, a large rivulet of blood coursing down his chin.
“That was completely uncalled for,” Davro told the corpse seriously, actually waving a finger at it. “I liked that spear.” Then, drawing his sword with a resigned sigh, the ogre tromped back toward the battle. Valescienn’s pale eyes followed his killer in an eternal, empty stare.
“SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT.”
Mithraem’s head rose from the now bloodless body of another defender: a teenage boy whose primary duty had been to carry arrows to the bowmen on the ramparts. His eyes were tinged red with his victim’s stolen life, and a thin trickle ran red from the corner of his lips, but his clothes were spotless as ever, and not a strand of his slick black hair was out of place. He looked like a nobleman dressed for a semi-formal event, not a participant in a brief and bloody siege.
Or at least, one that was supposed to be brief. But while the gnomes and his own Legions were doing their usual magnificent job of slaughtering the mortal fools who held the city, Valescienn’s soldiers weren’t following the plan. The defenders were distracted; the wall should have been swarmed under by now. And yet, after the initial wave of attackers, there was no sign of the invading force.
And now that he listened—truly listened, with senses only vaguely comparable to what humans thought of as hearing—Mithraem could detect the sounds of a pitched battle on the far side of the wall.
Something had changed, and he needed to know what it was. The lower half of his body already dissolving into a pink-tinged mist, Mithraem’s disembodied head spoke to another of his kind.
“The gnomes can handle this from here,” he said, fog pouring from his mouth as he continued his transformation. “Something’s happening outside. Gather as many of the others as you can find, and follow.”
And then there was nothing human left at all, merely a serpentine haze swiftly whipping its way through the streets toward the main gate and whatever lay beyond.
“FOG! Fog from the walls!”
With a bitter curse in his native tongue, Losalis smashed his enemy’s blade aside with his saber and drove the razored edge of his shield into the soldier’s throat. Then, ignoring the muffled thud of another body dropping to the thick snow, he looked toward Pelapheron with growing trepidation.
Losalis knew, thanks to Corvis’s warnings, exactly what sort of inhuman creatures he might be facing that day, and he’d posted lookouts, men specifically ordered to watch for just this troubling sign. The problem, of course, was this: Now that he had his forewarning, what the bloody hell was he supposed to do with it?
“Fall back and form up!” he ordered in a bellow audible even over the din of battle. Inwardly, he winced. Letting up now would allow the Serpent’s army to recover from the initial assault, and he begrudged every second his own men weren’t pressing the enemy. But he knew, too, that what was coming was beyond the experience, even the comprehension, of most warriors. If they hoped to survive, let alone salvage a victory, they had to fight as a unit, even if it meant giving the enemy opportunity to do the same.
“Defensive lines!” Losalis shouted, squelching his own doubts the better to deal with theirs. “Shield walls where terrain allows! Archers to the rear!” He stabbed an imperious finger at the ogres’ commander. “Davro! Form up your people by the archers! You’re floating backup!” Davro nodded and roared his own orders in the sharp, guttural tongue of the ogres.
Men dashed across open ground and crunching snow, hearts pumping, sweating despite the blue nip in the air, shivering with more than cold as voluminous clouds of mist, advancing against the prevailing wind, poured from the palisade. It frothed as it came, the leading edge splitting and tearing and bubbling in agitation, curling at the corners. A wave of malice swept ahead of it, unholy herald of its master’s deathly advance. Here and there, not quite masked by eddies in the swirling fog, appeared blood-gleaming eyes or pale grasping hands. Several of Losalis’s slower men vanished with a terrifying abruptness as the mists rolled over them, their fear-filled, earsplitting shrieks dragging on and on and on …
They began to emerge, then, humanoid shapes coalescing from the mists. Pale-skinned with reddened eyes, trailing streamers of fog as they walked, leaving infinite ranks of bloody footprints behind them in the snow. Mist took on the shape of shadow, shadow the substance of man, as they appeared, each after each, from the thinning mists, the ones in back stepping over the rent and bloodless bodies of the men they’d slaughtered. Tall and short, gaunt and stout—all manner of men and women, but all dark of hair and pale of skin.
In the ranks behind Losalis, someone whimpered, someone gasped. Even the general himself had to grit his teeth, clench his fist tight about the hilt of his saber, and command his feet with muscles of stone and will of iron that they would not run.
When Corvis, Davro, and Seilloah had battled one of Mithraem’s minions previously, they were fortunate indeed to face it alone. Here, the Legion was massed. Massed, their power was dominant. The terror they rode into battle, bucking and lashing out in rage, was no mere emotion but a physical thing, a foe no less real than the undead themselves. The men who stood, trembling as they held their ground, could no more have shrugged off that fear than could a young deer simply choose to ignore the instinct for flight at the sudden baying of the wolf.
He was aware, suddenly, of Seilloah beside him, her own face twisted in fear, though she, too, held her ground. Her fingers twitched, her lips moving silently. When the first of the enemy was a mere handful of yards away, she stepped forward and allowed a dull powder to sprinkle from a clenched fist, dusting the snow with a light coat of black.
Instantly the fear lessened. Oh, certainly the men still gazed at the implacable foe with no small amount of consternation, but the mind-numbing crush of terror was gone, allowing Rebaine’s army to think clearly once more. A protracted howl—heard not in the ears or even the mind but as a flutter of the heart and a chill of the blood—arose from the advancing horde. It was a call of fury, not despair, for if the vanguard of fear was indeed their first weapon, it was far from their last.
“Can you do anything else?” Losalis hissed anxiously.
“Not really.” Seilloah’s voice, rock-steady when she cast the spell, now shook with the fear they all repressed. “I might manage one or two, but there’s just so many …”
And then the Endless Legion was upon
them.
They were fewer than they first appeared. As all but a few residual tatters of haze melted away, Losalis saw that these “Endless” soldiers numbered, in fact, only a few hundred. It gave him a brief, flickering hope that his men might stand a chance.
And then the first appeared before him, and there was no more time for thought or hope or anything but battle. She was a bone-thin woman in thick furs, with blood-reddened lips and a thin-bladed short sword clasped before her. Though not unclean, she reeked of blood and rot and things long gone and forgotten from the world of man.
The she-thing hissed, an angered beast, and Losalis blinked in surprise—apparently, the precise reaction she’d wished. With a gleeful cackle at the gullibility of mortal foes, she stepped forward in a perfect lunge, her thrusting blade seeking the fleshy vitals of the fool before her.
But Losalis, too, could feint and switch, and where the creature expected a startled opponent and an easy kill, a heavy downward chop with his shield sent her short sword careering into the snow. A sharp cry of defiance, a stab upward and outward, and the tip of his saber slid neatly through furs and flesh, prying ribs apart with a wishbone crack and plunging deep into desiccated organs.
Screeching wildly in agonized fury, she thrashed about on the end of the sword, claws reaching hungrily for the man who’d dared do this to her. Blood—black, viscous, and thick with congealed and clotted chunks—belched from the wound to fall, steaming, to the frozen ground.
Nor was Losalis finished. With a grunt he pivoted on a single foot. The snow slowed him, threatened to trip him up, yet he muscled his way through. The saber, yanked free, whistled around again as he completed his spin and cleaved cleanly through the monster’s neck. Her head, jaw sputtering silent imprecations, landed crookedly at his feet.
Even before the rest of the body hit the ground, it was putrefying into black, hideous sludge. Despite himself, Losalis retreated a pace as the thing he’d just slain decayed into a thick morass that refused to mingle with the surrounding snows.
A tendril of fog flowed from the rotting form, skimming low over the white-shrouded earth, and then shot arrow-swift to the nearest corpse, the bloodless husk of one of Losalis’s own men. He watched, pulse racing, as the mist slammed hard into the body, sending the corpse tumbling and rolling. Another instant, and it ceased thrashing, rolling smoothly to its feet, eyes open, mouth quirked in a malevolent grin. Haze hovered beneath its feet as it slowly, deliberately, advanced toward Losalis, a familiar spark of hell in its eyes. Losalis saw the skin tightening across its bones, growing pale as the remaining blood in the corpse was consumed by the thing that rode it.
The Endless Legion. Finally, Losalis understood.
With no shame in his heart, Losalis called for a full retreat.
IT WAS NOT ENTIRELY A ROUT, though. At least one advantage came from their first encounter with Mithraem’s people.
Far from Losalis, fighting madly to hold the flank, Ellowaine’s hatchets were a wall of razors, her hands blurring in complex and ornate patterns that delivered dismemberment and death to anyone within reach. Already two of the foul monstrosities had fallen to her whirling blades, only to rise again in the nearest corpses. Her assault did not falter, her axes did not slow, but a shroud of futility fell upon the golden-haired mercenary. Already to her right, the line was broken. The archers, unable to loose even a single volley of arrows before the Legion was upon them, would have been slaughtered to a man had Davro’s ogres not charged in to fill the gap in the lines.
The creature she battled now was one of the most hideous of the lot. A twisted hunchback of a man, it stood but five feet tall, but it must have weighed upward of 250 pounds. The morningstar clenched in its gnarled fists bristled with heavy spikes, and its pale skin stood out markedly against the thick black cloaks that wrapped it.
Slowly, step by step, Ellowaine fell back. Despite her opponent’s twisted form—or, perhaps, because of it—it possessed an iron strength that even its fellows could not match. Its hideous club smashed aside anything in its path. Still, she couldn’t just keep retreating. Many more steps, and she’d open a hole in the defensive line through which anyone could simply saunter. If she-She yelped despite herself as her heel snagged on a root concealed beneath the snow. Her arms pinwheeled in a wild attempt to maintain balance, until she sensed her foe’s sudden charge. With a grace more feline than human, she shifted her weight, allowing herself to tumble backward after all. Her back and shoulders smacked into the snow, and Ellowaine kicked both legs up as she rolled, going completely over and landing in a crouch. Though a simple tumble, it was, under the circumstances, an impressive feat that few on the battlefield could have duplicated.
It was barely enough. Any human warrior would have been thrown by the move, left a few feet behind, allowing Ellowaine opportunity to regain her feet, her poise, her balance. The hunchback, however, never hesitated. Even as she gathered her bearings, Ellowaine saw her misshapen enemy closing fast. As Valescienn had done against Davro, she raised her weapons in a parry she knew could not suffice.
The wicked morningstar crashed into her hastily raised weapons with a resounding clang. Her arms thrummed in agony, and her left hand bled freely where one of the weapon’s spikes proved long enough to punch through flesh despite the intercepting hatchets. And again echoing Valescienn’s duel with Davro, one of the parrying weapons simply wasn’t up to the task. Ellowaine glanced unhappily at the foot-long handle that was all that remained of one of her favorite weapons.
The hunchback spun, its feet churning up the snow like a digging dog, its weapon already raised for another strike. Ellowaine, out of options and growing ever more frantic, fell back on the last refuge of the hopeless:
Superstition.
Mithraem’s Endless Legion weren’t precisely what folklore made them out to be. The mists, the blood, the inhuman strength and speed—these were certainly all too real. But Ellowaine hadn’t once seen them shapeshift into some animal; nor did the daylight appear to cause them much difficulty. So inaccurate had it proved thus far, she balked at trusting to folklore now. But she had no other way to turn.
With a sudden, piercing shriek, Ellowaine lunged forward, but not with her remaining hatchet. As she’d previously echoed the actions of the doomed Valescienn, so now did she unknowingly mimic the ogre who’d slain him. With every bit of strength in her battered and tired body, she thrust with the broken shaft clasped in her other fist.
Whether Ellowaine was the first on the field to remember her folklore and attack the Endless Legion with wood rather than steel, none could say. But it was she who first reported to Losalis, after the battle, that the tactic was as effective as myth proclaimed.
A high-pitched keening, scarcely audible, burst from the hunchback’s parted and gasping lips. Now it was her opponent who retreated, morningstar held loosely in one hand, the other feebly plucking at the broken shaft protruding from its chest as though he was afraid to actually touch it.
Ellowaine might not have understood exactly why the tables suddenly turned—she’d assumed that either her stroke would slay the monster or else have no effect at all—but she recognized the fear in its eyes when she saw it. She lunged again, this time with her remaining hatchet, smashing the beast’s collarbone and carving down into its torso with a series of snaps like a crackling campfire.
That same black, viscous, oily blood pumped forth, and the creature putrefied into a puddle of corruption. But things changed when the liquefying corpse, the wooden shaft still protruding from its sodden flesh, hit the ground. The mist began to emerge, as it always did, but something was clearly wrong. Tendrils of haze stretched out, anxious to be on their way to a new body, but the bulk of the mist clung stubbornly to the wood as though held by some magnetic attraction it couldn’t understand. Over the span of several infinite seconds, the mist seeped into the shaft, which darkened from a deep, rich brown to a sickly black. And then, with a faint wail that reverberated forlornly in the back of t
he warrior’s mind, the rotted stake crumbled to black dust. The creature did not rise again.
Only then, as she stood panting heavily in an island of relative calm, did she realize that one of the sounds she’d heard moments before, during the height of her deadly struggle, was the call of the herald’s horn.
Sucking in her breath, sliding her remaining hatchet into its ring at her belt, Ellowaine ran to catch up with her retreating companions.
“WELL,” Losalis said thoughtfully as the flap once more closed behind the departing backs of Ellowaine, Teagan, and Ulfgai. “That’s certainly—ouch!—interesting. It’ll be useful if we have to face those things again, although that’s still—ow!—not a prospect I’m looking forward to. And it might—damn it!—explain why they didn’t chase us back to camp.”
Seilloah snorted as she worked on a crooked but shallow gash on the large warrior’s arm. “It wouldn’t hurt now if you’d let me numb it first,” she reminded him mercilessly.
“Sorry,” the general muttered, though his tone was unrepentant. “I don’t like it when I can’t feel what people are doing to me.”
“Losalis, you’re looking right at me.” She pulled the sutures tight, the wound twisting so that it appeared to be grinning sardonically up at her, and once more worked the curved needle through flaps of flesh. “You’d have to be blind, deaf, and possibly dead not to know what I was doing to you.”
“But I wouldn’t feel it. It wouldn’t be the same.”
The witch sighed. “It’s your pain.”
“Thank you.”
“I wish I had the strength left to do this magically,” Seilloah told him more softly. “This will hurt for a while, and it’s certainly going to scar.”
Losalis shrugged, drawing a mild curse from the witch as the needle was nearly tugged from her hand. “I can live with a few more scars, Seilloah, and there were those who needed your magics far more than I.”