by Jeff Seymour
The soldiers milled in quiet expectation. Hundreds of black-robed men and women stood atop the wall of Death’s Head opposite them. From so far away they looked like ants, crawling along the fortification’s stony crown.
Is Rhan there? he wondered. Are the other Taers?
And more quietly, in the back of his mind: How many of them will survive the day?
A trumpet sounded, thin and wailing in the misty morning air.
In response, the Eldanian soldiers formed up, and their banners were unfurled.
It was somewhat awe-inspiring to see them. The colors of the Seven Houses—red, black, green, silver, violet, white, yellow—all in one place at the same time. Then the colors of the minor houses. There were more than a hundred banners in all.
It was customary, at this point, for the besiegers and the besieged to meet and discuss potential terms of surrender.
But the Eldanians weren’t interested in negotiation.
The trumpets sounded again, and the mass of humanity below him charged.
It was a bizarre, quiet sight at first. The ordered lines of the throng split and stretched into an ocean that poured downhill, a thousand tiny specks with weapons. They looked like toys, like dolls, until they began to howl. The shout was a tenuous, wordless, uluating thing that grew louder as the surge approached the walls.
The soldiers began to die.
Leramis felt it coming before he saw it. The River surged toward the walls and crashed back with the force of a hundred weavings. Explosions racked the ground. Lightning crackled from soldier to soldier. Earth and stone shot high into the air, dragging bodies with them. The soulweavers of the Temple were nowhere to be found. Not one weaving was bent, not one deflected. When Leramis opened his eyes to the River, he couldn’t find the templars in the chaos of its flows.
They weren’t even trying.
“What are they doing, Charles?” he grated.
Steelhill was watching the battle with his jaw clenched. Soldiers continued to die.
“Charles?” said Leramis, but the young lord gave no reply.
The soldiers reached the bottom of the walls, and the bombardment picked up strength. Some of the charging mass carried hundred-foot ladders and struggled to put them up against the stones. A second wave rushed forward, and more explosions tore through them, more lightning, more fire. The earth cracked and buckled. Leramis saw a man go down under the legs of his comrades and not get back up. He saw another fly like a ragdoll in the wind and crash sickeningly onto one of the ladders, bringing down the two dozen people who were carrying it.
His throat closed up. Still the Eldanians massed. Still the Eldanians charged.
Why? he wondered, watching Steelhill’s angry face. What do they see at the bottom of that hill but their own deaths, and what possesses them to rush to it so heedless—
He found the Temple soulweavers.
The River rushed to the gate. Its huge stones went from dull to blinding white in half a second, and then a loud, terrible crack rent the air. The skullish doors of Death’s Head snapped under the pressure of thousands of souls, broke in half, and fell from their hinges. A thunderous crash rolled up the hill. The River hung precariously still, then flew apart into a miasma of flying souls as the city’s defenders shifted focus. The mass of soulweavers at the gate lit up like a crystal chandelier.
The force of the soulweaving was tremendous. Shockwaves rippled over the battlefield. The wind sliced in a hundred directions. The shouts of soldiers mingled with the crack of breaking stone, the moans of the injured, the sh-rack of lightning and the whoosh of flames. A section of the wall walk ignited in fire and light.
But most of the defenders would no longer be on the walls.
Leramis breathed and stared. Behind the first gate lay a courtyard and another gate. In that courtyard the battle would be decided. Its drains would run with blood. Hundreds would die.
He could feel it, and it felt wrong.
“Stop them,” he hissed. “Steelhill, stop them!”
When Charles turned to face him, there was no power in the young lord’s eyes. There was only the nauseous, sagging gloom of a man who would have difficulty forgiving himself for what he had become a part of.
“I tried,” Steelhill whispered.
Leramis looked for the green-and-gray banners of Steelhill’s soldiers. He found none in the reserves, none among the masses before the gate, none among the teeming crowds still trying to scale the wall by ladder.
But there were many lying broken and abandoned on the rocks.
Steelhill’s teeth ground together. His big, gauntleted hands squeezed his reins.
Tears shone in his eyes, and he whispered again, “I tried.”
THIRTY-THREE
Six hours before the sack of Death’s Head
The struggle for the city went on for ages.
And Rhan the Eye stood in the center of it.
The smoking remains of the Skull Gate lay shattered in their grave. His brothers and sisters held the walls and the ground around the still-closed Death Gate behind them. The earth echoed the footfalls and screams of thousands.
The Eldanians came on like the tide—endless, mindless, surging forward and back in waves, but pressing a little farther with each advance.
Rhan, last of the Taers left alive in Death’s Head, held a long black sword in each hand, and he fought for the survival of his order. He killed pikemen, spearmen, swordsmen, Twelfthmen, women wearing the Temple’s white robe, boys barely old enough to have left home. They came before him and the blackrobes around him and they died, because they had to.
Meanwhile, he waited.
For what exactly, he didn’t know, but he was certain he would see it when it happened. There would come a moment when Eldan grew too confident or began to falter, when its soldiers moved too swiftly or hesitated to throw themselves into the abattoir before the Death Gate. In that moment the necromancers would strike and pray their best would be enough.
Time passed. The sun peeked through the mist and lit the sky in a brief pulse of warmth refracted by a thousand thousand droplets of water.
Rhan pulled a blade from the chest of a dying man, looked toward the entrance to the abattoir, and spotted what he was waiting for.
The sun glinted off the lances of a troop of heavy horse galloping toward the gate. The footsoldiers threw themselves to the side or stood stock still, hoping the horses would pass around them. Those fighting in the abattoir melted away or perished.
Rhan’s eyes flicked over those around him. The battered, wearied blackrobes under his command were already beginning to weave, preparing to level the horsemen’s charge.
But this was their chance to do far more damage.
“Wait!” shouted Rhan at the top of his lungs. Then again, “Wait!”
His brothers and sisters heard him. They held their weavings in check while the horsemen thundered forward and leveled their lances. The earth shook.
Be calm, Rhan told himself. He felt detached, as though he were watching the battle unfold before another man from far away. He laid one of his swords on the blood-soaked ground, grasped a horn of bone that hung around his neck, and blew it.
Its call was quiet and simple, a breathy vibrato that was all but lost in the growing thunder of the Eldanian charge. He blew it a second time, and a third, let his lungs heave between blows. After the third sounding, the call was picked up and repeated.
The riders had almost reached the gate. Rhan let the horn fall back against his chest, picked up his swords, and began to weave.
The Eldanians had made their mistake—halted their momentum, called upon their treasured cavalry to save them. The cavalry would fail. The horsemen weren’t suited to fighting in an environment as confined as the abattoir. While the horsemen were being slaughtered, the foot would falter, and when the foot faltered—
Patience, Rhan told himself as he forced his exhausted body to move. Patience.
***
Leram
is watched the charge of the Foltiri horse with a heavy heart. It was beautiful, in a way. So much metal and human and animal moving together at such speed, in such formation. But—
“They’re going to die,” he whispered.
“They know,” grunted Steelhill. The young lord shook his head and turned from the battle for the first time all morning. “Your friends still haven’t bared their teeth. So our beloved commanders are going to bait them into it.”
Leramis turned and looked into the shadow behind the hill’s crest, where what remained of the Eldanian reserves crouched in waiting. A few hundred foot. A few dozen horse.
And eighty gray-robed Twelfthmen.
Leramis shivered, turned back to face the city, and saw what he was dreading and what Eldan had been waiting for.
The dead were rising.
They crawled from beneath the wall in a seething torrent of bone and sword and soul, pouring from trapdoors at the fortification’s base. Leramis had been to see the bonehouses once. They were massive caverns beneath the city, each equipped with a ramp that led to the trap doors. The supply of corpses there was nearly limitless.
The strength of those animating them, however, wasn’t.
His heart pounded. In the center of the Eldanian line, at the crest of the hill, a wide pavilion flapped amid the banners of the King of Eldan, the Seven, and the Temple. The sun glinted from polished armor around that banner. The royal guards were still unused. So too the Twelfthguard and the personal units of the Seven.
But the rest of Eldan’s army had been decimated. The heavy horse were half-dead, trying desperately to extricate themselves from the slaughterhouse before the gates. The footmen behind them were being overrun by the necromancers’ skeletons, and more of the undead were on their way. They swarmed over the soldiers and raced uphill.
Toward the crest.
Toward Leramis.
And toward the pavilion.
The foot soldiers fled screaming toward the safety of the ridge. The heavy horse cut their way out of the abattoir and thundered uphill among the corpses, bloody and battered.
Steelhill crossed his arms. Leramis looked into the shade behind the ridge.
The Eldanian reserves sprang to life.
To the credit of those animating them, the undead nearly reached the king’s pavilion. Their first grasping ranks got as far as the guards—forced them to draw their gleaming weapons and engage for the first time in the day.
And then the reserves struck.
The counterattack was quick and ferocious. The reserves crested the hill, and shockwaves raked over the undead like raindrops. Bone shattered and spilled across the hill in a million tiny shards, as if an enormous porcupine had shaken itself free of its quills. New corpses crawled out of the wall to replace those that were lost, but they came more slowly every moment, and the tide of the battle turned. Where moments before it had been necromancers tearing the attacking Eldanians to pieces, it became Eldanians smashing the attacking undead to bits.
The undead offensive slowed, then halted entirely.
Leramis heard the call of horns from the walls of Death’s Head. Two long blasts, then a short one, then a fourth as long as the other three combined. The sounds repeated.
The necromancers wanted to negotiate.
A moment passed, then stretched into several. The call from the necromancers came again.
And then, from the king’s pavilion, it was answered.
The shockwaves stopped.
Leramis let out a long, relieved breath. He curled his hands around the horn of his saddle. His body threatened to slump to the side and spill him into the dirt.
He doubted the talks would go well, but still—there was always a chance.
The fighting lurched to a halt. The undead stood motionless before the wall. Those necromancers left standing flitted along the top of their fortification or pulled their wounded from the abattoir like tiny black ghosts. Eldanian stretcher bearers, going no farther down the hill than they had to, began to retrieve their casualties.
The wind whipped the banners of the king, the Temple, the Seven, the Black Order. Compared to the cacophony of battle, the yells and shouts of the stretcher bearers and wounded sounded small and insignificant.
“What will he offer?” asked Leramis. There was a wasp’s nest of activity around the king’s pavilion. He thought he could see the Seven gathered around their monarch, along with several soulweavers he assumed were members of the Twelve.
“Little,” growled Steelhill. “At least little your people are likely to accept.”
A man in shining armor rode out of the pavilion bearing a white flag. He moved his horse at a walk.
The abattoir bustled with activity as well, and then a lone figure strode out to meet the rider. One man, his black robe torn and flapping.
Leramis squinted to see who it was. When the rider and the man met, the blackrobe began to gesture with his hands as he spoke, and Leramis recognized him.
Rhan, he thought. What are you doing?
***
The horse in front of Rhan the Eye was huge. It stood six feet tall at least, and it was as wide as two men. Shining sheets of steel encased its head, its chest, its neck, its flanks. A thick caparison of stitched blue flowers on a white background hung to its knees beneath the armor.
The champion atop the horse was no less garishly bedecked. His plate was shining silver. A jewel sat in the pommel of the long sword that hung from his waist, and he carried an ornately carved helmet in the crook of his arm. He was tall, blond, young, blue-eyed, and his nose twitched disdainfully as Rhan stood before him bloody and exhausted.
They think they have us, he thought.
Looking at the Eldanians on the ridge atop Death’s Hill, he found it difficult to disagree with that assessment.
He estimated he’d taken forty-five percent casualties, and his remaining men and women were exhausted. His reserves had all been deployed.
He wasn’t sure whether the Eldanians had additional reserves of their own. Scouts had given mixed reports on the size of their host, but only the smallest estimates had numbered it around the size he’d seen so far.
The sun glinted off the sparkling steel of Eldan’s weapons and bathed the gray robes of the Twelfthmen in soft light. The cold, dreary morning had turned into a beautiful afternoon—a respite of warmth and gentleness between the early autumn storms. Motes of dust winked gold, floating lazily above the hill.
The Eldanian envoy said something.
Rhan sighed and returned his eyes to the young man in front of him.
The silver-plated idiot spoke again. “I asked to whom I had the hon—”
“My name is Rhan the Eye, and I speak for my order.”
The man’s blue eyes narrowed. His nose drifted higher into the air.
“His Grace the merciful King Molte II of Eldan offers the following terms of surrender. All within the city of Death’s Head will lay down what arms they carry and pledge fealty to him and faith to the Temple of Yenor. Members of the Order of Necromancy shall submit to the judgment of the Temple for crimes against Yenor and the world. Those who have shown no part in the business of the order will be allowed to remain in Death’s Head, but shall be pledged to the new Lord of Menatar, whomsoever it may please His Grace to so anoint.”
The terms went on. The man spoke for nearly two minutes, while Rhan watched the top of the hill and learned all that he could. Wounded soldiers retreated behind the crest. Horsemen switched mounts, took food and drink and new weapons. Rhan watched, and Rhan saw. There were no additional reserves.
But there were still enough soldiers that Rhan couldn’t predict the battle’s results. The veil of a thousand thousand individual decisions hung between him and the future. Its gossamer threads would unravel in heartbeats and decide the fate of his city, his order, his life.
They would begin with his choice, there beneath the sun and the walls, where the stench of blood and shit and death filled his nostr
ils.
He took a deep breath. The blond man in the polished armor finally stopped speaking.
“Tell your king,” Rhan said, “that he is fighting the wrong enemy.”
The king knew that, Rhan was nearly certain. But the young man in front of him might not, and while some young men ignored everything their elders told them, others remembered and puzzled for years over words given in good faith. “Tell him he owes his people an apology for their losses. And tell him that until he learns to see where danger lies, we cannot and we will not yield.”
The envoy looked down his nose with the simple, arrogant smile of a powerful person who has not and will not fight a battle in his life. He sniffed one final time, and then he turned his horse back up the hill.
Rhan began the long limp back to the abattoir and the city he had sworn to die defending. His left leg had taken a vicious knock in some sally so far back in the day he’d forgotten its details. It was swollen and painful to walk upon. He took only a few steps before he was out of breath.
A blackrobe met him halfway to the walls and pressed a skin of water into his hands. He drank from it greedily. The water was cool and sweet and simple. It was an odd thing to taste, there in the sun beneath the battered walls and the dead.
“Well?” the blackrobe asked.
Rhan looked up. The woman had passed beyond fear. She was watching the hill with an emotion more like curiosity.
With a person like that, Rhan could be honest.
“It’s going to be difficult,” he said.
As he spoke, he felt a terrible rumble in the River of Souls.
A series of loud cracking sounds struck the wall and bounced from it like boulders. Rhan looked back at the hill. Man-shaped figures of stone were tearing themselves from the rocks.
Nearly two hundred of them arose, some as small as Aleani, others a third the height of the wall itself, with every size between represented. Rhan opened his eyes to the River and examined the tendrils linking the golems to the soulweavers who had created them. They were strong. The Temple hadn’t overextended itself.