The army marched on to the outer gates that pierced the thick curtain wall surrounding the city. The hinges on these gates had also been well oiled. Gerard, riding underneath the walls, saw archers crouching down among the shadows of the crenellations to avoid being seen. He trusted the archers would have nothing to do this night. The Solamnic army should be able to wipe out the army of the Dark Knights almost before they knew what hit them. Still, the Lord Knights were wise to take no chances.
Once the foot soldiers and Knights were outside the last gate, and that gate had been shut, barred, and manned, the Lord Knight paused, looked back to see his command solid behind him. He raised another white scarf, let this one fall.
The Knights broke the silence. Lifting their voices in a song that was old when Huma was a boy, they urged their horses into a thundering gallop. The song sent the blood coursing through Gerard’s veins. He found himself singing lustily, shouting whatever came to mind in the parts where he didn’t remember the words. The order to the cavalry had been to split the ranks, to send half the Knights charging to the east, the other half to the west. The plan was to encircle the slumbering camp, drive the inhabitants into the center, where they would be attacked by the foot soldiers, who were to charge straight on down the center.
Gerard kept his eyes fixed on the enemy encampment. He expected, at the sound of thundering hooves, to see the camp roused. He expected torches to flare, sentries to cry out the alarm, officers to shout, and men to race for their weapons.
Strangely, the camp remained quiet. No sentry shouted a warning and, now that Gerard looked, he couldn’t see a picket line. No movement, no sound came from the camp, and it began to look as if the camp had been abandoned in the night. But why would an army of several hundred troops walk off and leave tents and supplies behind?
Had the girl realized she’d bitten off more than she could chew? Had she decided to slink off in the night, save her own skin and that of her men? Thinking back to her, to her supreme faith in the One God, Gerard doubted it.
The Solamnic Knights continued their charge, sweeping around both sides of the camp in a great widening circle. They continued to sing, but the song had lost its charm, could not dispel the uneasiness creeping into their hearts. The silence was uncanny, and they didn’t like it. They smelled a trap.
Lord Tasgall, leading the charge, was presented with a problem. Did he proceed as planned? How was he to react to this new and unexpected situation? A veteran of many campaigns, Lord Tasgall was well aware that the best-laid strategy never survives contact with the enemy. In this instance, however, the problem appeared to be the absence of contact with the enemy. Tasgall figured the girl had simply come to her senses and departed. If so, he and his forces had lost nothing but a few hours sleep. Lord Tasgall could not count on this, however. Quite possibly it was a trap. Better to error on the side of caution. Changing strategies now would only throw everyone into confusion. The Lord Knight would carry out his plan, but he did raise his hand to slow the progression of the cavalry, so that they were not riding heedlessly into whatever might await them.
He might have spared himself the trouble. The Knights were not prepared for what awaited them. They could never have been prepared for it.
Another song lifted into the air, a song that was a minor to their major, a song that ran counterpoint to theirs. One person sang the song, and Gerard, who had heard her voice, recognized Mina.
MARIONETTE
In bygone times and warmer climes
You Marionettes played.
Now restless, silent in a box,
Your scattered limbs are splayed.
Come feel the tug of dancing strings.
Your dust responds on shivering wings.
The Master Puppeteer now sings!
Rise up from where you’re laid.
The Master calls you from the dark.
Your bones respond in haste.
Come act the part of living souls.
Their glory once more taste.
Connect again with warmer days,
And hearken to your former ways.
Out of that darkness you will raise
Up from your place of waste!
Now dance, you spirits gone before
The surging blood of old.
You sundered souls from times of yore
Play at a life once bold!
The Master heaves on strings of woe.
Torn from the dark your bones must go
To act once more that all may know
The Master’s tale is told!
Soldiers on the right flanks began to shout and point. Gerard turned to look to see what was happening.
A thick fog rolled out of the west. The strange fog advanced swiftly, roiling over the grass, obliterating all it touched, blotted out the stars, swallowed the moon. Those watching it could see nothing within the fog, nothing behind it. Reaching the city’s western walls, the fog boiled over them. The towers on the west side of Solanthus vanished from sight as thoroughly as if they had never been built. Faint cries came from that part of the city, but they were muffled, and no one could make out what was going on.
Watching the advance of this strange and unnatural fog, Lord Tasgall halted the charge and, with a wave of his hand, summoned his officers to him. Lord Ulrich and Lord Nigel left the ranks and galloped forward. Gerard edged near enough to overhear what they were saying.
“There is sorcery at work here.” Lord Tasgall’s voice was grim. “We’ve been duped. Lured out of the city. I say we sound the retreat.”
“My lord,” protested Lord Ulrich, chuckling, “it is a heavy dew, nothing more.”
“Heavy dew!” repeated Lord Tasgall, with a snort of disgust. “Herald, sound the retreat!”
The herald lifted his horn to his lips, gave the signal to retreat. The Knights reacted with discipline, did not give way to panic. Rounding their horses, they began to ride in column toward the city. The foot soldiers wheeled about, headed in orderly march back to the walls. The Knights advanced to cover the footmen’s retreat. The archers were now visible on the walls, arrows nocked.
Yet Gerard could see—everyone could see—that no matter how fast they moved, the strange fog would engulf them before the closest soldier could reach the safety of the sheltering walls. The fog slid over the ground with the rapidity of a cavalry charging at full gallop. Gerard stared at the fog as it drew nearer. Stared at it, blinked, rubbed his eyes. He must be seeing things.
This was not fog. This was not a “heavy dew.” These were Mina’s reinforcements.
An army of souls.
An army of conscripts, for the souls of the dead were trapped in the world, unable to depart. As each soul left its body that had bound it to this world, it knew an instant’s elation and exultation and freedom. That feeling was quashed almost immediately. An Immortal Being seized the spirit of the dead and gave it to know an immense hunger, a hunger for magic.
“Bring me the magic, and you will be free,” was the promise. A promise not kept. The hunger could never be satiated. The hunger grew in proportion to what it fed on. Those souls struggling to free themselves found there was nowhere to go.
Nowhere to go until they received the summons.
A voice, a human voice, a mortal voice, Mina’s voice called to them. “Fight for the One God, and you will be rewarded. Serve the One God, and you will be free.”
Desperate, suffering unending torments, the souls obeyed. They formed no ranks for their numbers were too great. The soul of the goblin, its hideous visage recreated from the soul’s memory of its mortal shell, barred teeth of mist, grappled for a sword of gossamer and answered the call. The soul of a Solamnic Knight that had long ago lost all notions of honor and loyalty answered the call. The souls of goblin and Knight walked side by side and knew not what they attacked or what they fought. Their only thought was to please the Voice and, by pleasing, escape.
A fog it seemed at first to the mortals who faced it, but Mina called
upon the One God to open mortal eyes to see what previously had been kept from their sight. The living were constrained to look upon the dead.
The fog had eyes and mouths. Hands reached out from the fog. Voices whispered from the fog that was not fog at all but a myriad souls, each holding a memory of what it had been, a memory traced in the ethers with the magical phosphoresence of moonlight and foxfire. The face of each soul bore the horror of its existence, an existence that knew no rest, knew only endless seeking and the hopeless desolation of not ever finding.
The souls held weapons, but the weapons were mist and moonglow and could not kill or maim. The souls wielded a single weapon, a most horrible weapon. Despair.
At the sight of the army of trapped souls, the foot soldiers threw down their weapons, heedless to the furious shouts of their officers. The knights guarding their flanks looked at the dead and shuddered in horror. Their instinct was to do the same as the soldiers, to give way to the feelings of terror and panic. Discipline held them for the moment, discipline and pride, but when each turned to look at the other, uncertain what to do, each saw his own fear reflected back to him in the faces of his comrades.
The ghostly army entered the enemy camp. The souls flitted restlessly among the tents and the wagons. Gerard heard the panicked neighing of horses and now, at last, sounds of movement from the camp—calls of officers, the clash of steel. Then all sound was swallowed up by the souls, as if jealous of sounds their dead mouths could not make. The enemy camp vanished from sight. The army of souls flowed toward the city of Solanthus.
Thousands of mouths cried out in silent torment, their whispered shouts a chill wind that froze the blood of the living. Thousands and thousands of dead hands reached out to grasp what they could never hold. Thousands upon thousands of dead feet marched across the ground and bent not a single blade of grass.
Officers fell prey to the same terror as their men, gave up trying to keep their men in order. The foot soldiers broke ranks and ran, panic-stricken, for the walls, the faster shoving aside or knocking down the slower in order to reach safety.
The walls afforded no sanctuary. A moat is no deterrent to those who are already dead, they have no fear of drowning. Arrows cannot halt the advance of those who have no flesh to pierce. The ghostly legions slid beneath the wicked points of the portcullis and swarmed over the closed gates, flitted through the murder holes and glided through the arrow slits.
Behind the army of souls came an army of the living. Soldiers of Mina’s command had kept hidden inside their tents, waiting for the army of souls to advance, to terrify the enemy and drive him into panicked chaos. Under cover of this dread army, Mina’s soldiers emerged from their tents and raced to battle. Their orders were to attack the Solamnic Knights when they were out in the open, isolated, cut-off, a prey to horror.
Gerard tried to halt the soldiers’ flight as they trampled each other, fought to escape the ghost army. He rode after the men, yelling for them to stand their ground, but they ignored him, kept running. Everything disappeared. The souls of the dead surrounded him. Their incorporeal forms shimmered with an incandescent whiteness that outlined hands and arms, feet and fingers, clothing and armor, weapons or other objects that had been familiar to them in life. They closed in on him, and his horse screamed in terror. Rearing back on its hind legs, the horse dumped Gerard on the ground and dashed off, vanishing into a swirling fog of grasping, ghostly hands.
Gerard scrambled to his feet. He drew his sword out of instinct, for what was he going to kill? He had never been so terrified. The touch of the souls was like cold mist. He could not count the number of dead that encircled him. One, a hundred, twelve hundred. The souls were intertwined, one with another. Impossible to tell where one ended and another began. They flitted in and out of his vision so that he grew dizzy and confused watching them.
They did not threaten or attack him, not even those who might have done so in life. An enormous hobgoblin reached out hairy hands, which were suddenly the hands of a beautiful young elven woman, who became a fisherman, who shriveled into a frightened, whimpering dwarf child. The faces of the dead filled Gerard with a nameless horror, for he saw in all of them the misery and hopelessness of the prisoner who lies forgotten in the dungeon that is the grave.
The sight was so awful that Gerard feared he might go mad. He tried to remember the direction to take to reach Solanthus, where he could at least feel the touch of a warm hand as opposed to the caress of the dead, but the fall from the horse had disoriented him. He listened for sounds that might give him some indication which way to go. As in a fog, all sound was distorted. He heard steel clash and cries of pain and guessed that somewhere men fought the living, not the dead. But whether the sounds of battle came from in front of him or behind, he could not tell.
Then he heard a voice speaking coldly and dispassionately. “Here’s another one.”
Two soldiers, living men, wearing the emblem of Neraka, rushed at him, the ghostly figures parting like white silken scarves cut through by a cleaver. The soldiers fell on Gerard, attacking without skill, slashing and beating at him with their swords, hoping to overwhelm him with brute force before he could recover from his panicked horror. What they had not counted on was the fact that Gerard was so relieved to see a flesh-and-blood foe, one that could be punched and kicked and bloodied, that he defended himself with spirit.
He disarmed one man, sent his sword flying, and drove his fist into the jaw of the other. The two did not stick around to continue the fight. Finding their foe stronger than they had hoped, they ran off, leaving Gerard to his dread jailers, the souls of the dead.
Gerard’s hand clenched spasmodically around his sword’s hilt. Fearing another ambush, he looked constantly over his shoulder, afraid to stay where he was, more afraid to move. The souls watched him, surrounded him.
A horn call split the air like a scythe. The call came from within the city, sounding the retreat. The call was frantic and short-lived, ending in midnote, but it gave Gerard a sense of where he must go. He had to overcome his instincts, for the last time he’d seen the city walls, they were behind him. The horn call came from in front. He walked forward, slowly, unwilling to touch the souls, though he need not have worried, for though some reached out their hands to him with what seemed pitiful supplication and others reached out their hands in what seemed murderous intent, they were powerless to affect him, other than by the horror and fear they inspired. Still, that was bad enough.
When the sight became too awful for him to bear, he involuntarily shut his eyes, hoping to find some relief, but that proved even more harrowing, for then he could feel the touch of the ghostly fingers and hear the whispers of ghostly voices.
By this time the foot soldiers had reached the enormous iron gate that pierced the curtain wall. The panic-stricken men beat on the gate, shouted for it to open. The gate remained closed and barred against them. Angry and terrified, they cried out for their comrades within the city to open the gate and let them enter. The soldiers began to shove on the gate and shake it, cursing those within.
White light flared. A blast shook the ground, as a section of the wall near the gate exploded. Huge chunks of broken stone rained down on the soldiers massed in front of the closed gate. Hundreds died, crushed to death beneath the rubble. Those who survived lay pinned in the wreckage, begging for help, but no help came. From inside the city, the gates remained locked and barred. The enemy began to pour through the breech.
Hearing the blast, Gerard peered ahead, trying to see what had happened. The souls swirled around him, flitted past him, and he saw only white faces and grasping hands. Desperate, he plunged into the wavering figures, slashing at them wildly with his sword. He might have tried to skewer quicksilver, for the dead slid away from him, only to gather around him ever more thickly.
Realizing what he was doing, Gerard halted, tried to regain control of himself. He was sweating and shivering. The thought of his momentary madness appalled him. Feeling as if
he were being smothered, he removed his helm and drew in several deep breaths. Now that he was calm, he could hear voices—living voices—and the sound of ringing steel. He paused another moment to orient himself and replace his helm, leaving the visor raised in order to hear and see better. As he ran toward the sound, the dead snatched at him with their chill hands. He had the skin-crawling sensation he was running through enormous cobwebs.
He came upon six enemy soldiers, who were very much alive, fighting a knight on horseback. He could not see the knight’s face beneath the helm, but he saw two long black braids whipping around the knight’s shoulders. The soldiers surrounded Odila, tried to drag her from her horse. She struck at them with her sword, kicked at them, fended off their blows with her shield. All the while, she kept the horse under control.
Gerard attacked the enemy from behind, taking them by surprise. He ran his sword through one. Yanking his weapon free of the corpse, Gerard elbowed another in the ribs. Doubling him over, he smashed his nose with a thrust of a knee.
Odila brought her sword down on a man’s skull with such force that it split his helm and cleaved through his skull, splattering Gerard with blood and brains and bits of bone. He wiped the blood from his eyes and turned to a soldier who had hold of the horse’s bridle, was trying to haul the animal down to the ground. Gerard slashed at the man’s hands as Odila bashed another with her shield and struck again with her sword. Another man ducked beneath the horse’s belly, came up behind Gerard. Before Gerard could turn from one foe to defend himself against the new one, the soldier struck Gerard a savage blow to the side of the head.
Gerard’s helm saved him from a killing stroke. The blade glanced off the metal and cut open Gerard’s cheek. He felt no pain and knew he’d been hit only because he could taste the warm blood that flooded his mouth. The man caught hold of Gerard’s sword hand in a clench of iron, began trying to break his fingers to force him to drop his weapon. Gerard struck the man in the face, breaking his nose. Still the man hung on, grappled with Gerard. Flinging the man backward, Gerard kicked him in the gut, sent the man sprawling. Gerard moved to finish him, but the man scrambled to his feet and ran. Gerard was too exhausted to pursue him.
Dragons of a Lost Star Page 42