Upon a Burning Throne

by Ashok K. Banker

  The scout died with a final exhalation of breath through the blood bubbling up in his mouth. Prishata shut the soldier’s eyes gently and rose to his feet.

  Karnaki was approaching, looking harried.

  “Captain?”

  “Sir, it is very bad!”

  Prishata was expecting that.

  “The northern scout says it’s not two thousand, it’s three thousand riders. The vajra.” Karnaki swallowed. “The western scout says something similar. Fifteen hundred—not nine hundred—horses, five hundred chariots, three hundred longnecks.”

  Prishata gestured at the riderless horse, which was now munching on grass, unconcerned by all the two-legged beings in a flurry around him. “I don’t think we’re going to get any corroboration from the southern scout, but let’s assume the same, considerably higher enemy numbers than we initially expected.”

  Karnaki nodded, looking troubled. “Sir, there’s more bad news. The western scout saw the courier riders en route to the backup regiment. She says that a section of enemy horse broke away from the main force and went after the couriers.”

  Prishata took the news in grimly. “So to sum up, our couriers will probably not get through to the backup, which means we have to contend with an attacking force at least twice our numbers, perhaps thrice.”

  “That’s right, sir.” Karnaki glanced around the clearing, swallowed hard. “General, what are our orders?”

  Prishata didn’t need to think about it for more than an instant. When the enemy is strong, be stronger, he always told his trainee officers. It was time to put his own advice into action, and not for the first time. He had been in tougher quandaries before, some much worse than this.

  But never with the emperor of Hastinaga’s life at stake.

  “Captain,” he said, “our Krushan law is to protect our emperor. That means Prince Adri. We follow our plan, execute the strategy as rehearsed, and whatever happens today, no matter what happens, we protect Adri with everything we have. Send the word out: Stand to the last.”

  Captain Karnaki saluted him smartly. “Sir, yes sir!”

  Karnaki turned and mounted his horse. Prishata heard her call out to the other soldiers within hearing as he rode away: “Stand to the last! Stand to the last!”

  They took the order and passed it on down the lines in all directions: “Stand to the last! Stand to the last!”

  Prishata heard it echoing into the distance, then fading out even as the rumbling of the approaching attack force grew and grew until it filled the clearing from all sides.

  Vessa

  Vessa was deep in meditation when he received word. The jungle itself whispered to him in his transcendental trance.

  “Adri . . .” she said.

  At the mention of his biological son’s name, Vessa pulled himself partially from the trance, moving a part of his consciousness sideways. The bulk of his attention remained on his primary quest, which was to search all possible worlds and dimensions for a clue to Jarsun’s whereabouts. The search was an ongoing one and had already been on for well over a year. No matter what Vessa did in his day-to-day existence, that part of his mind continued searching and would continue to do so endlessly until it found its quarry. A master of deep meditation, he was able to compartmentalize parts of his conscious and unconscious mind to focus on different tasks, different functions in parallel. He would not let that part of his mind rest until he found Jarsun, but there were other key phrases he was monitoring that set off alerts if required. Two of those were “Adri” and “Shvate.” He was aware of Shvate’s near escape from death by suicide, but had not gone to the young man’s aid because he had anticipated the situation and known that Karni and Mayla would handle the problem. Karni in particular was competent enough to handle far greater challenges, and in time, he knew, she would rise to the task of managing those as well.

  Adri was another matter. His karma was foggy of late. His fate could go in a number of different directions, not all of his own choosing. So he was a topic of concern. That was why, when the jungle alerted Vessa, he turned his attention to Adri at once.

  He sent his consciousness out, moving through the cellulose of the leaves, the trees, the water, the moss and the undergrowths, rippling through the body of the Great Mother Forest that was home to all life on Arthaloka, all the way to the banks of the Jeel outside Hastinaga, to the idyllic spot called Riverdell. There, he switched to the viewpoint of a flock of cranes flying overhead to get a better assessment of the situation.

  Looking down through a bird’s eyes, he saw the grove of shady trees by the Jeel, a patch of green alongside the great river. Within the shade of the thickest trees, he spied the colorful pavilions flying the krtha-dvaj of the House of Krushan: those would be the tents where Adri and his party were enjoying their picnic. He leaped out of the bird’s consciousness and into an ant crawling on the inner wall of the largest tent and, inside, saw Adri and Sauvali. She was seated, watching him, while he paced in a circle, clearly agitated. They were safe for now; that was the main thing.

  He leaped out of the ant’s mind and up to the cranes again. He saw that the pavilion was heavily guarded by strong-willed, well-armed men and women. He saw also the configurations that General Prishata had set up for the defense of the crown prince. It looked adequate for now. He saw Prishata himself riding fast, shouting orders as he went, his captain Karnaki passing on orders to her subordinates in turn, the chain of command carrying down the instructions with quick, practiced efficiency. These were Krushan’s best, and that meant they were the world’s best. Vessa felt reassured. Whatever the threat, there was no immediate danger to Adri’s life.

  Then he saw the dust clouds.

  He urged the bird to fly higher, flapping his wings to rise and catch a wind current that lifted it high enough. This gave him a much wider overview of the region, reducing the riverside grove to a hand-sized patch.

  There were attackers coming in from all sides.

  He didn’t bother with estimates of numbers or the different cadres. Such things had never concerned him much. He was able to see even at a glance that the attacking forces outnumbered the defenders by a considerable margin. Twice or thrice as many. And the aggressive speed with which they were attacking suggested a well-planned assault. There was a battle ferocity to the charge of those riders and chariots: these villains meant business. That told him they were no mere brigands or bandits looking for a quick profit. They were enemies of Krushan, and any enemy of the House of Krushan was an enemy to Vessa.

  He bid thanks and goodbye to the cranes and leaped a few hundred yards down, falling into the mind of a crow flying over the attacking forces. The crow protested by cawing harshly, its cry lost in the thundering of the hooves and wheels of the attackers below. Vessa flapped his wings harder to match their frenetic pace, swooping overhead. He could see just enough to know that they were all hardened soldiers of varying ages, sexes, and ethnicities, with a jumbled assortment of weapons, armor, horses, and chariots of different construction and design. It was an odd mélange for any kingdom and most Houses of the Burnt Empire would not stand for such an admixture. That itself told him that these were not warriors of any specific loyalty; they were mercenaries for hire, sellswords available to anyone who paid well and wanted dirty work done without concern for cost or consequences. Such bands of mercenaries were cobbled together from every manner of lowlife, criminal, bandit, thug, disavowed soldiers from various kingdoms, even foreigners who were exiled from or fed up with their own nations and offered their services for hire. The worst of the worst or the best of the worst, depending on how you viewed it. This was troubling: whoever had cobbled together this force had money to waste and intimate knowledge of the House of Krushan. Even catching and torturing such mercenaries would yield no fruits: very likely they had been hired by a series of intermediaries who themselves did not know the identity of the client.

  It also told him that this was not Jarsun’s doing: the Reygistani took too muc
h pride in claiming credit to resort to such anonymity.

  This was no mere enemy; it was an enemy from within. Someone within the House of Krushan itself, or close enough to it to know many significant private details, such as when Adri would be at Riverdell, what defenses would be present, the lay of the land, the deployment of the defense troops and cadres, and enough military knowledge to know the most effective way to break those defenses and get to the target: Adri himself.

  The crow cawed again, wings tiring from the strain of keeping up such a pace. Vessa spied a sparrow flitting about thirty or forty yards closer to the ground and leaped down to her mind. The little bird was startled, then awed, then delighted. She chirped merrily and fluttered her little wings rapidly, happy to do whatever he pleased. He brought her down, close enough to the charging mercenaries to see the sweat on their beards, the stains on their bared teeth, moments before they clashed with the defenders.

  Karnaki

  Karnaki was at the flanks of the southern defense when she saw the attackers clash with her soldiers.

  In a charge, the attacking cavalry always had the advantage of speed and impact: the sheer force of their charge often broke the spine of any defensive formation, driving them through the lines and into the heart of their target. In a pitched battle, that might not matter as much, since the whole field was filled with battling soldiers of both sides, but in a situation like this, it made a huge difference. The attackers were seeking to get past the defenses and into the grove of Riverdell, where they could achieve their main intent of killing the crown prince. That made the task of the defenders doubly hard: they had to not only stop the attackers from getting past them, they had to drive them back, as hard and as quickly as possible.

  General Prishata’s solution was brilliant yet controversial. He had trained his defenders to attack the attackers. This was why the scouts and the positions mattered so much. Armed with that forewarning, the southern company of defenders had been instructed to begin their charge when their enemy was within a certain distance. They had begun racing at the approaching enemy, matching their approach with their own full-frontal assault.

  Now, as Karnaki watched from the sidelines, staying well away from the main body of the defensive forces, she saw the attackers clash with the defenders. For some odd reason, a small bird was flitting over the heads of the attackers, wheeling about and tweeting as if alarmed by the madness of the humans below.

  She forgot the sparrow in the next instant as the two forces clashed.

  Both attackers and defenders, riding flat out toward each other, met in a deafening clash of armor and weapons, horses and leather, shields and swords, flesh and bones, and all the rest of the vulnerable, breakable things that armies are made up of.

  The sound was as awful as anyone might expect. It made Karnaki’s hair curl and her spine crawl. She saw weapons and body parts flying through the air—saw soldiers and horses ramming full tilt into one another, smashing skulls, shattering bones, breaking bodies apart like ripe fruit. Animals screamed, people howled, and the air where they met was saturated with blood and dust and pain.

  It took several more minutes of what looked like utter chaos and insanity before anything made sense again. It was only Karnaki’s practiced, battle-experienced eyes that could tell, even in those minutes, that the charge was going favorably for one particular side, and favorably only for them.

  The attackers were prevailing.

  The charge had smashed the brave southern defenders into pulp. Several hundred remained alive, but there were many more attackers still living, and they were already hacking and chopping and skewering the defenders with wild purpose. The defenders fought back bravely, sacrificing their limbs and their lives to defend their crown prince, but the weight of sheer numbers was telling. They could hold out for a while longer, keeping the occasional attacker from getting past them, but it was only a matter of time before they broke and were rubbed into the dust, into oblivion.

  Karnaki rode westward, moving into a full gallop to get to the second point of intrusion. Due to the natural declivity and curvature of the landscape, these were the three most approachable points near Riverdell for any large-scale attack to be made. General Prishata’s deployment was perfect, in Karnaki’s opinion, and his tactics brilliant—but even the most acute knowledge of one’s theater of battle and the most astute use of one’s resources could not overcome the most basic advantage of war: numbers.

  Vessa

  Vessa had seen enough of the clash on the southern side to know that the enemy were going to be victorious. He leaped out of the poor sparrow’s little brain and to the mind of a bat hanging upside down from a tree on the western side of Riverdell, about a mile away from the grove itself. The tree was tall and set upon a hillside, which gave it shade enough to attract the bats. From here, he had a good vantage point to view the second clash of the day.

  The poor sparrow’s close view of the gore and carnage of the first encounter had given him his fill of close-up bloodshed. Now, he only wished to gauge the progress of the overall assault without seeing the individual suffering of the soldiers. Whoever they may be, villains or Krushan, defenders or attackers, they were all men and women, living breathing beings, and the damage that war inflicted on the human body and mind was not something to be viewed with glamor or glory. It was a sickening, brutal act of human insanity, the culmination of all the worst, most violent, cruel tendencies of human beings and if he had possessed power enough, he would have banished it forever from existence. Banish all violence too, he thought grimly, as he hung upside down from the shaded branch, bracing himself for the next clash.

  This was somehow more brutal and yet different from the first: there were camels and elephants in the frontlines here, deployed because of the hilly terrain, and the ungainly longnecked beasts as well as the affectionate lumbering giants were not natural enemies, or even meant to live together. That was what made it seem so perverse, so unnecessarily cruel to see them both used and abused by their human riders, for the sole purpose of gaining a tactical advantage over their opponents.

  He watched as a camel screamed and tried to break away from the elephant it was charging against, trapped by its rider’s merciless grip on the reins as well as the tight formation that hemmed it into the larger attacking force. The poor beast, colliding head-on with the oncoming elephant, smashed its brains out and broke its neck and most of the bones in its body, even as the elephant itself suffered grievous wounds to the trunk, eyes, head, and forelegs. Both animals collapsed together in a jumble of mangled limbs, their blood mingling, faces lying beside one another. Vessa saw with a breaking heart how the camel’s tongue reached out of its shattered jaw to lick at a deep cut on the dying elephant’s head and heard the mournful last cry of the elephant as it breathed its last. The camel died a moment later, both beasts victims of a cruel human sport called war, in a game called battle, where all players lost.

  The fighting continued, the screams of elephants and camels vying with the yells and shouts of men and women, the shrieking of horses, the rumbling of chariots, the sound of arrows plunging into flesh, bone, metal, leather.

  Vessa watched grimly for a few more moments. This clash was more chaotic and difficult to predict than the first: while the camels provided height for the enemy bowmen to attack the defending elephant mahouts as well as other defenders, it was the enemy chariots that were doing the most damage. The attackers were shrewdly using the chariots as battering rams to shatter the cavalry charge of the defenders, deliberately taking their own cavalry around the defenders’ flanks to push past and into Riverdell. He saw General Prishata’s second in command on his horse, shouting orders, and saw a fresh company of defending cavalry riding to thwart the intrusion of the attackers who had slipped past so cleverly. Horseback fighting broke out, sword striking sword and different languages and dialects shouting curses while the Krushan defenders silently performed their duty. Again, the weight of numbers was stacked against the
defenders and it was only a question of how long it would take the attackers to break through.

  The situation on the northern front was just as troubling. Brave Krushan defenders died by the scores as the enemy rammed and battered at their defenses, sacrificing animals and humans without mercy in a desperate bid to shatter the defensive lines.

  Already, Vessa could see, General Prishata was being forced to thin his own inner circle of defense by sending more soldiers out to bolster the crumbling lines on all three sides. Fortunately, there was one side he did not have to worry about: the Jeel provided a natural barrier to attack, making it impossible for any enemy force to invade from that direction. The river was wide and fast here, and even an armada of boats or barges would not cross easily; even still, Vessa was relieved to see that none were visible. That was one thing less to worry about.

  The sight of the Jeel reminded him of something else. Something that had been gnawing at the back of his mind since he had arrived here at Riverdell—arrived in spirit, if not in body.

  He took flight, forgetting for an instant that he was in the body of a night-dweller. The sunlight blinded his senses, and the heat of the late afternoon sun seared his sensitive black hide, as he heard the poor bat shriek its silent call of protest.

  Apologies, little one, he said, returning the bat to its roost on the tree branch. It trembled with alarm, and he took an instant to calm it down, breathing a soothing Auma into its mind. There was always time for kindness. Auma, it repeated silently, calming. In an instant, it had retreated back into its deep dreamless sleep. He leaped out of its tiny brain and threw himself into the nearest available form at hand: a dolphin leaping through the waves of the river.

  Jeel, he called out as his snout broke the water’s skin and caught the light of the sun. Why do you not alert your son Vrath? His half brother Adri is in desperate need of him. Go, summon him at once, or must I do it myself?