Gold Throne in Shadow

by M. C. Planck

  A hundred yards, and Christopher could begin to see the details of his foes. Larger than a man, oddly bent. The dozen showed no inclination to flee. Several of them began unlimbering curved bows.

  “Cursed archers,” Gregor growled. “Let Christopher and I take the fore.” He spurred Balance out ahead, and Royal matched the other horse pace for pace. Behind them D’Kan drew his own bow. With an undulating yell, he loosed an arrow. It flew high through the air, dropping with deadly precision. At the last minute, the targeted ulvenman stepped aside, and the arrow sank into the grass behind him.

  “Magic and archery from horseback,” Gregor exclaimed in pride. “If they have no ranks, may the gods have mercy on them.” Men said the strangest things before combat.

  The ulvenmen responded to D’Kan with a flight of half a dozen shafts. Gregor leaned forward and batted one down with his shield, saving Balance from taking a hit. Another arrow struck Christopher in the shoulder, glancing off his thick armor without effect. The rest fell around them and disappeared into the sea of grass.

  Seventy yards, and he could see them bending their huge bows, guess which ones were aiming at him. As the arrows sang through the air, he dropped the visor on his helm, and held his left arm over Royal’s head, trying to protect the horse as much as he could. The arrows slithered through the air around him, absurdly accurate, and one sank into Royal’s shoulder.

  The warhorse snorted in disdain and did not break stride. Though Christopher flinched in sympathy with every jarring step, he could see the wound was only painful, not fatal.

  “Go ahead,” Gregor told him. “We’ll need the horse.”

  Relieved, Christopher leaned forward and pulled the arrow from his horse’s body. It was barbed, and ripped flesh and blood followed it out. The horse grunted in pain but would not allow himself to fall behind Balance. A second later Christopher touched the wound, spoke a word in Celestial, and the wound closed itself, not even leaving a scar.

  Fifty yards, and the arrows came again, two clattering off his armor, one sticking in Gregor’s shield, and another impaling itself in the joint of Gregor’s right arm. His half-plate was not as complete as Christopher’s.

  Gregor pulled the shaft out with his teeth, gnawing clumsily at his arm through the open visor of his helmet. He spat it on the ground, the only blood on its barbed tip. His tael was sufficient to deal with such a minor wound.

  Thirty yards, and Christopher could make out the shape of their bodies. Dog-legged, with hunched backs almost as high as their heavy heads stuck out on short necks. Massive shoulders, draped in some kind of hide armor, leather straps and bits of metal wrapped around them. The arrows flew straight from the bows now, no longer dropping in lazy arcs from the sky. He felt their impacts, felt one pierce his shoulder, then fall out. His tael closed the wound, but he could feel the insubstantial hollowness of its absence. Only a fraction of the tael he could draw upon today, yet a reminder that he was not immortal. Enough damage, and he would bleed and die like any man.

  The last salvo fired, Gregor shouted his battle cry and spurred his horse. Royal took the call and burst into a charge. Behind him the men shouted, their horses pounding the turf like rolling thunder. The ulvenmen answered with their own howls, long and savage, and rushed forward to meet them, drawing axes, swords, and maces from sheaths and belt-loops, an entire armory carried on their backs.

  Ten yards, and Christopher could see their faces. Like wolves, long snouts and huge fangs, snarling and flicking spittle. Black noses under yellow eyes, gleaming hatred and fury. Their long jaws snapped in eagerness for the coming fight. Christopher remembered that these creatures thought of humans as food.

  Fear now, in earnest, in Christopher’s stomach, but the blessing still held and it calmed his momentary dizziness. Behind him the shouts of the men reminded him of why he had come. He raised his katana to high guard and let Royal bear down on one of the monsters, a yelping horror with eyes that rolled in wild frenzy, a long straight sword in one hand and a spiked ball on a chain in the other.

  They clashed like titans, the ulvenman stabbing and flailing in one smooth motion, Christopher sweeping his blade down at the same time. Plate armor turned the point of the ulvenman’s sword, but the iron ball bounced from Christopher’s chest to his faceplate, rattling him like a can of peanuts. He wasn’t sure he’d even hit the creature, and then he was past and Royal was already angling to charge the next target. Leaning forward in the saddle, he ran an ulvenman through from behind, the body sliding off his sword, still moving. Some skill on either the part of the horses or Gregor narrowly prevented a collision between their mounts, and then Christopher was out in the open again, Royal thundering in a tight circle.

  An arrow sank into his back, between the plates on his shoulder. Again his tael closed the wound, although the barbed head remained stuck in him. Knowing he would not bleed to death allowed him to ignore the pain.

  The ulvenman in front of him dodged left, then right, then left again, playing a guessing game. But a cavalry mount blew past him from behind. Avoiding that put him in Royal’s path, and the warhorse rammed into him like a snowplow.

  The ulvenman was twice as heavy as a man but still a fraction of Royal’s size. Its body disappeared under the flashing hooves while Christopher clutched at the pommel with his left hand.

  The loss of momentum was not inconsequential. Royal came to a stuttering halt and seemed to be catching his breath. An ulvenman took this opportunity to run up and chop at Christopher with an ugly crescent-shaped ax. Parry, thrust, and strike followed while Christopher wondered why his damn horse was just standing there. The ulvenman ducked under his attack and sidled up next to the horse, reaching out with one hand to grab at the reins. Christopher reversed his grip and stabbed down. With all of his weight on top of it, the sword sank into the ulvenman’s shoulder, pushing it to the ground, where it howled and beat at the steel blade with knobby claws.

  Royal reared on his front legs, lashing out with his rear hooves. The ulvenman he had trampled had gotten up and come running after him. Christopher felt the force of Royal’s kick though the rising saddle.

  As the horse came back to earth, Christopher leaned over and stabbed at the ulvenman below him again and again until he found a chink in its armor, and its ridiculous vitality finally failed it. Sitting up, he kicked his heels at Royal, trying to get the horse in motion again. Too late he realized that grabbing the pommel for support had signaled the horse to stop for a dismount.

  From the other side came a staggering blow. A massive ulvenman clobbered Christopher with a two-handed ax. Metal squealed and his shoulder twinged in fire. As the ax blade withdrew, his flesh closed up again. If not for tael, he would have lost the arm.

  Christopher put his hand to his chest and cast a healing spell, replenishing his tael’s effectiveness. Perhaps selfish, since he was not completely drained, and some other man might need that magic not to die. On the other hand, it would be false economy to let himself fall.

  The ulvenman, outraged at being cheated of any effect, dropped its axe and sprung on Christopher. Together they fell off the opposite side of the horse.

  He had thought of himself as a reasonably strong man, at least according to ordinary civilian standards. Karl had worked him into a leaner strength with a year of constant training, and his height and weight normally gave him an advantage. But this creature knocked him around like a rottweiler with a rag doll. It simply ignored his fumbling, clawing his arms out of the way with savage force, and biting down on his throat.

  His armor saved him, the gorget squealing under the pressure of fangs. The ulvenman worried at him, yanking him around by his head, trying to break his neck. Its hot, foul breath choked him more than the clamp of its teeth. The slobber of a hungry animal dripping onto his face, the sense of utter impotence as it mauled him, the primal terror of being devoured battered his mind as savagely as the creature battered his body. He curled up in a ball, clinging to the beast, supporting h
is fragile neck from its own bulk. Once he got his legs tangled around it, he started punching it in the head with one gauntleted fist.

  Finally hatred instead of fear. His tael still absorbed the ulvenman’s brutal thrashing, while he beat on its skull, trying to dislodge it. He felt its jaws move a fraction of an inch, and punched harder.

  Suddenly, it released him, threw back its head, and howled. A terrible sound, evoking pity and dread in equal measures. Christopher punched at it in a blind panic, making contact only with air. Nonetheless it flopped over and stopped moving, pinning him under its dead weight.

  Gregor stood above him, bloody blade in both hands, the blue glow eerily illuminating the red.

  “Clear!” Gregor yelled, and answering shouts came.

  “Casualty report,” Karl called, while Gregor pulled Christopher to his feet.

  Men and ulvenmen lay in bloody heaps. A few moments later, the men stood, mostly healed. Torme and Christopher had exhausted their spells, but they had turned fatal injuries into minor scrapes. All the ulvenmen were dead, with swords, lances, and D’Kan’s arrows sticking out of them. With some dismay, Christopher noted that the pattern of bodies showed no attempt at retreat.

  Gregor was lopping off heads with an ax. They didn’t have magic to waste harvesting them, so their future lay in a kettle.

  “The expected showing,” Karl said with satisfaction. “Save for your poor horsemanship. The ulvenmen won’t know what to make of that.”

  “How could they have learned anything from this?” Christopher could see nothing else on the plain.

  D’Kan could. He snapped off a shot from his bow. Christopher happened to be looking in the right direction, so he saw the arrow impossibly strike a hawk fluttering up from the grass twenty yards away.

  More impossibly, the arrow bounced off the bird like a straw blown at a stone.

  The hawk was sixty yards out and moving fast before D’Kan got off a second shot. This was apparently the limit of possibility: the arrow was wide by at least six inches. D’Kan lowered his bow.

  “That’s how,” he said.

  The count of the tael confirmed what they had already suspected. Most of the creatures they had fought were not ranked, despite the incredible fight they had put up. Only their leader, the one that had unseated Christopher, had been first-ranked. Christopher found it deeply unfair that the ulvenmen should have such a natural advantage in size and strength over his men.

  “It’s a good thing you invented rifles, then,” Gregor laughed at him. “You can imagine how facing those horrors down on foot would be a daunting task, no matter how long your pike.”

  It explained why the last army had hid in the city, letting them devastate the countryside.

  “From their armor, they were merely scouts.” D’Kan was dissatisfied, the pieces of the puzzle not fitting into place. “Such a large scouting party is unusual. And they were lightly provisioned, yet well-fed. They could not have traveled far from their supply lines.”

  “What do we do tomorrow?” Christopher asked. There wasn’t enough left of the afternoon to accomplish anything more today. And Christopher was not about to blunder around in the dark with those things. D’Kan swore they saw as well in the dark as they did in the day.

  “See who blinks first.” Gregor grinned wolfishly. “They’ll send out another scouting party. It will either be backed up by their principals, or it won’t. If it is, then us riding out there alone will be fatal. If it’s not, then us taking a platoon out there will give away all our secrets.”

  “They saw me heal. They must know I am a priest.”

  “Good point,” Gregor said. “They know they won’t be able to wear us down with repeated low-scale attacks. So I predict their next move will be to deploy their real ranks, in a contest of strength.”

  Gregor turned out to be right, in a way no one could have expected.

  “My lord Curate, wake up.” Torme’s voice was graver than usual. But the tone of his voice was less important than the fact that he had used Christopher’s full title.

  It had to be bad news.

  He rolled out of bed and washed his face in the bowl Torme had brought him.

  “What time is it?” It was still dark out.

  “Dawn is but a few minutes away, Brother.”

  They had woken him early. He hated that, and they knew it.

  It had to be really bad news.

  Torme led him out of his cabin and up on the south wall, where Gregor and Karl stood looking out over the plain.

  Gregor didn’t crack any jokes.

  It was still dark, and Christopher’s night vision hadn’t adapted from the light-stones in the fort. He couldn’t see anything.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Another call for a miracle,” Karl said.

  The rising sun tinged the gloom a lighter shade. Christopher could sense movement, hear growls and the distant clatter of metal.

  “D’Kan is over there, trying to avoid the torchlight. He might have a better estimate.” Karl pointed down the wall.

  The sunrise promised to render all estimates moot in only a few moments. It also promised to reveal a terrifyingly large crowd of monsters. Christopher was beginning to hate sunrises.

  D’Kan came over and joined them. The Ranger seemed unfocused and disoriented. Christopher finally recognized the symptoms as fear, an emotion he had not seen on D’Kan’s face before.

  “There are at least five hundred ulvenmen out there,” D’Kan reported, “not counting a smaller but indeterminate number that have flanked us in the swamp. We are surrounded, cut off, and severely outnumbered.”

  Gregor whistled through his teeth. “Five regiments of ulvenmen would make even the good Captain of Carrhill knock his knees. And that’s with a wizard at his back. If you really are protected by some secret entity, Christopher, now would be the time to call upon it.”

  “It’s just us and the men,” Christopher said. “But this time we have a stone fort, not a wooden one. I’m not worried yet.”

  D’Kan looked at him as if he had lost his senses, but Gregor’s face was restored to the grin that normally lay there. “You are a cool one, priest. I’d think you mad if I hadn’t seen what you did to those dinosaurs.”

  “I did see, and I still think you are mad,” D’Kan said. “One of us can probably escape with your flight spell and carry warning to the town.”

  Christopher had a cage of pigeons for that duty. He had to use a minor spell on them to get them to fly to the right place, though. “Let me pray and I’ll send a message. But I don’t think they will come out here to rescue us. At least, not in less than a week.”

  “Speaking of magic,” Karl said, “what can we expect from the ulvenmen?”

  D’Kan shook his head dismissively. “Normally, very little. They rely on strength more than craft.”

  That was excellent news. No amount of strength could make up for guns.

  “But,” D’Kan continued, “you saw the hawk deflect my arrow. That is magic. So I can only tell you to expect anything.”

  Reflexively, they all looked at the brightening sky.

  “I’m no woodsman,” Gregor said, “but I’m pretty sure that a dozen hawks hanging over our heads is unnatural.”

  “Put our best sniper on it,” Christopher said. “One rifle won’t give anything away. They’ll just think it’s magic.” Then he went back to his cabin to prepare what little real magic they had.

  An hour later he stood at the pigeon cote, with a pinch of biscuit in his hand. One of the pigeons finally decided it was better than scratching in the straw at the bottom of their crate and came over to peck half-heartedly at the offering.

  “A pox on picky birds,” Christopher muttered, and then said something rather different in Celestial. Now the bird tamely let him tie a scrap of paper around its leg. The message was short and sour: “500 ulvenmen. Send help.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

  A half-dozen rifle shots ha
d cleared the sky of hawks. Their best shot turned out to be Gregor. The blue knight had taken his lessons from Karl in earnest, and his tael-enhanced accuracy gave him an edge over the ordinary men. He’d only killed one hawk, but after that the rest had retreated out of sight.

  Christopher threw open the lid of the crate and chased all the pigeons into the air. Watching the dozen birds flutter up, he felt the burden of responsibility settle on his shoulders. If he felt this bad about dispatching a dozen pigeons as decoys, knowing most of them would die to the hawks, how would he feel about sending men to their deaths to save others?

  As long as they were in the fort, trapped in a siege, he might not have to make a hard decision like that.

  Karl came to give him an update.

  “No change. As best we can tell, they are sleeping. On the bright side, all of them are in merely hide armor. They are poorly equipped, and that usually means poorly disciplined as well. Even D’Kan is beginning to think we have a chance.”

  Christopher would have asked why they hadn’t attacked yet, except he already knew the answer. As usual, they were waiting for the cover of darkness. Just once, Christopher wanted to fight monsters that weren’t bigger, meaner, and able to see in the dark.

  “Then I’m going back to bed,” he told Karl.

  He woke with a start, not knowing how much time had passed. Groggy and stiff, he forced himself to do a dozen deep knee bends and a few lunges with his sword before he went out of the cabin.

  It was late afternoon, and the fort was quiet. Karl wanted the men sleeping, and to facilitate that he had ordered complete silence. Even Torme whispered when talking to Christopher, asking his advice on what magic he should prepare.

  “The weapon blessing,” Christopher told him, “as many as you can. And remember it works on cannons as well as swords.” The spell had already saved his army once. Ordinary guns weren’t much use against creatures that could only be harmed by magic.

  Royal wanted to go for a ride, pushing at Christopher’s shoulder with his huge head. Apparently the warhorse had enjoyed yesterday’s excursion. The coming siege would not be fun, however. The inside of his fortress was the size of a football field, but it was cluttered with buildings and supplies. Hardly enough room for the big horse to break into a gallop before he had to slow down.