The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Oh shit."

  "What?" Blays said.

  Dante rushed into the square. Cavalry galloped down the cross street toward the plaza. They'd be on the norren in seconds. Mourn and his men would be slaughtered.

  Dante sprinted straight for the horsemen. He dropped to his knees, skidding across the cobblestones, and slapped his hand against the ground.

  The earth shook. A trench leapt apart just feet in front of the cavalry. With no time to react, the first line of riders fell headlong into the narrow pit. Horses' eyes went white and wild. The second row of riders tried to jump or turn but fell instead, ensnaring those behind them in a tangle of reins and legs. Dante raced back toward the gates. The norren beat him there, funneling through. Horses screamed. Men, too. Down the road, redshirt infantry jogged into view, bound for the Ingate.

  The gates creaked, shuddering as they began to close. Dante hurried through. The portcullis clanked down behind him. The norren stood inside, hands on knees as they caught their breath. Dante found Mourn among them. A bright gash trickled blood down his left arm.

  Mourn jerked his head in the direction of the felled horses. "That was nice of you."

  "You're too useful to lose this early in the day." Dante glanced among the clan warriors. "Lose many?"

  "How many is 'many'? A clan's-worth. Most days, that is many. Today, I think it will be a blade of grass on the plain."

  "That's a poetic way to put it." Up on the walls, bows twanged. Enemy arrows sailed overhead and clattered in the square inside the Ingate. Dante pointed to a tent across the square where men in robes came and went. "Take your wounded to the monks. And thank you, Mourn."

  Mourn nodded and grunted at his troops. They headed for the tent, some leaning on the shoulders of their clan-brothers and sisters. In the shadow of the wall, Blays and Lira hugged briefly. Dante climbed the stairs to the top, keeping his head low, and hunkered behind the safety of a merlon. Around him, men stood, fired, ducked, and repeated.

  Dante risked a look through a crenel. Redshirts busily pushed broad wooden barriers into firing range, setting up beachheads for their archers while the bulk of their troops stayed clear of the no man's land in front of the gates. Dante stilled his mind, wary for the first flicker of ether, but none came. Either the enemy sorcerers were biding their time, or they'd snuck off to find an unmanned section of the wall to attack next. Did the city have enough priests, monks, and minor talents to protect the Ingate against attack? How could they possibly keep watch over every foot of the wall?

  The warmth of morning became the heat of day. Dante drank a full flask of water and wiped his mouth, gasping. The king's men continued to build their makeshift barricades and exchange arrows with the defenders. Their assault was not particularly effective. It struck Dante as more of an effort to keep Narashtovik's soldiers occupied than to pose any serious threat.

  Dante healed the split on the back of his scalp, stopping as soon as he stopped the bleeding—this day, he'd need every scrap of nether he could command. Two cassocked monks tromped up the steps. He assigned them to keep both eyes on the battlefield below, then jogged along the westward curve of the wall in a low crouch.

  After traveling just a couple hundred yards, he could almost forget a battle for the city was raging behind him. Down one street, the bodies of a dozen un-uniformed civilians lay among a handful of dead redshirts. Further along, men jogged down the street at a cant, buckets of well water sploshing their knees as they hurried to a house smoldering down the block. Dante stretched his mind as far as it would go, letting his other senses fade. Away from the arrows of the enemy, he straighted to his full height and strolled past scattered soldiers on watch for sudden attacks.

  Something glimmered as briefly as a wisp of sunlight reflected from a rippling stream. Dante got down on hands and knees and crawled along behind the merlons. The glimmer repeated in his mind with the ethereal glow of the shifting spots he saw whenever he closed his eyes. He stalked on. The lights in his head increased in frequency and intensity. He peeked past the wall. Not fifty feet away, a woman hunkered against the base of the Ingate's wall. She was dressed plainly. No red, no uniform of any kind. But a steady stream of ether pulsed from her to the wall. Pebbles clattered against the ground.

  Dante drew on the nether waiting in his drying blood and fired it toward the center of her head. Engaged in her sabotage, she didn't notice until the last second. Ether flashed wildly. Enough to knock his strike off course. Not enough to make it fizzle away. Instead of piercing her skull, the nether slashed into the side of her ribs.

  She dropped hard to the ground. Blood poured into the cracks between cobbles. She clamped her hands to the wound. Ether glittered. Dante snuffed it out with a wave of his hand. She gasped for breath, blinking back frustrated tears. He watched her die, then waited there another ten minutes, mind open to any sparks of ether. None came.

  A boom rolled across the city from the gates he'd left nearly an hour before. Dante backtracked at a jog. The plaza swung into view. A watermelon-sized stone hung in the air high above the no man's land; an instant later, it smashed into the walls. Stone splintered, vomiting shards across fleeing soldiers.

  "Oh, there you are." Blays pushed away from the merlon he'd been cowering behind, brushing dust from his doublet. "Go off to take a nap?"

  "The usual. Just off saving all our lives."

  "Well, in case you haven't noticed, they have trebuchets."

  "So?" Dante said.

  "So trebuchets are to walls what wild dogs are to unattended children."

  Dante shook his head and edged past a protective merlon. An arrow whisked past his head. He tried again. Far up the street feeding into the square, three trebuchets stood in various postures of readiness. At one, soldiers strained against the long lever holding the sling, raising the counterweight back into position. Dante reached out with the nether and snapped one of the struts connecting the counterweight to the lever. Wood groaned and cracked. The counterweight gave way, booming against the ground. With the weight removed from the other end of the lever, the team of straining men sat down hard.

  Blays laughed through his nose. "You're really not fair, you know that?"

  "I'm going to find some monks to take care of the others," Dante said. "Don't want to wear myself out too soon."

  The two monks he'd seen earlier were just past the hole the trebuchet had smashed through the wall's deck. Dante edge along the wreckage and directed the monks to focus on the two remaining siege engines' most vulnerable parts. Nether winged across the plaza—only to disperse in a sizzle of black and white sparks.

  "I didn't do that," one of the monks said.

  The other rolled his eyes. "They stopped it, you dolt. Haven't you ever fought another sorcerer before?"

  "Have you?"

  "No, but Tobin has, and he told me—"

  "Quiet down and try again," Dante said. "Every spark of ether they use to nullify you is one less spark they have to throw against the walls."

  The monks turned back to the plaza, chagrined. Across the way, a man pulled the pin from a loaded trebuchet. Its firing lever whipped through the air, driven by the massive counterweight, slinging another head-sized rock through the air. The monks destroyed the device's lever while it was still vibrating. The rock landed short, whacking into the cobblestones twenty feet in front of the walls and ricocheting straight into their base with a sickly thwack.

  The monks' next attack on the siege engines was stymied by a sorcerer hidden somewhere in the buildings at the opposite end of the square. So was the one that followed. The remaining trebuchet got off one more shot before the monks knocked it into splinters.

  This back-and-forth continued through the next hour, resulting in little more than a few chunks taken out of the walls, several piles of kindling where trebuchets had once sat, and seven exhausted monks. Archers fired back and forth. Shouts rang out across the city. The bells tolled two o'clock. Dante and a large fraction of the soldiers on the w
all switched places with the reserves below. Along with Lira and Blays, he went to one of the square's public houses coopted by the defenders. It felt good to be out of the sun. He sat, sore in his back and his elbow, and sipped an assortment of water, beer, and tea.

  Blays toweled sweat from his moisture-flattened blond hair. "Does it count as a battle if my sword hasn't got any blood on it yet?"

  Lira patted his hand, making a face at its dampness. "Patience, sweetness."

  "They haven't had to fight rival sorcerers in generations," Dante said. "They'll adapt soon enough."

  He'd no sooner said the words than a messenger burst into the pub, chest heaving. Someone handed him a beer, which he chugged in seconds, sleeving foam from his mouth. To Dante's incredulity, he explained the enemy had killed the few scouts manning an eastern section of the wall, then used the ether to carve a crude set of stairs into the side of the Ingate. Hundreds of redshirts had swamped the wall, overwhelming the light resistance until Olivander rode in with his cavalry, dismounted, and retook it foot by foot. Once the king's men had been beaten back, Olivander blasted out the lowest steps in the makeshift stairs, thwarting them.

  Blays got his own taste of blood not long after. Cries rang out from the west. They rushed to the walls. A half mile from the gates, the attackers had brought in ladders and swarmed up the walls. Three hundred of the enemy had climbed up before Dante and the others joined a charging brigade of defenders. The fighting was close, vicious, angry. Boots splashed on bloody stones. Men fell from both sides of the walls, moaning in the streets, arms and legs and spines shattered. Lira left the fight with a deep slash to her left wrist. Dante retreated with her, sending the nether to mend her parted flesh. They lost nearly as many men as the redshirts before they pushed them back and smashed the ladders.

  Yet they held. Their archers picked off enemy soldiers one by one, slaughtering the group that tried to wheel a battering ram up to the gates. Fires rose around the city. The plaza behind the Ingate smelled of blood and smoke and sweat. Dante heard Kav's lung had been pierced in a duel with another sorcerer. Ulev was tending him personally, but even if he lived, he'd be useless for the rest of the day, perhaps longer.

  The afternoon crawled on. The sun baked the blood to the stones. Soldiers began collapsing without wounds. They were brought to the tents for shade and beer and water. Beyond the gates, the redshirts extended a line of wooden walls toward the Ingate. Narashtovik's archers set their arrows alight and let fly. As if the king's army had run out of ideas, they hung on the fringes of bow range. Their numbers dwindled.

  As the sun's heat finally began to wane, bitter horns piped from the northeast side of the city. Dante's heart sank.

  Blays's mouth hung half open. "That's the signal, isn't it? They're through the walls."

  "It's time to fall back to the Citadel." Dante clutched his sweaty temples. "Why isn't anyone sounding the retreat?"

  "Aren't you the highest-ranking person here?"

  Dante scanned the walls. Archers fired sporadically. A trio of monks in their lightest robes kept an eye on the battlefield. A ways down the wall, Somburr's thin, twitchy form was unmistakable, but there was no sign of Olivander. Kav had been wounded, removed from action. The only others with seniority over him—Hart and Tarkon—were old men who hadn't held up well in the scalding afternoon. They'd been brought to the Citadel to act as reserves. Cally, of course, was long gone.

  He called for the retreat.

  They'd practiced this, too. The subtle spread of orders through simple hand signals. While a skeleton crew remained at the walls to support the illusion nothing had changed, the rest jogged down into the square and gathered into formation. Dante passed word to the Citadel guards commanding the mixed forces of soldiers and citizens. He and a small team would scout the route ahead. The main body of their forces—some 1500 men or more, with more yet having shifted to the battle to the northeast—would follow them to the Sealed Citadel three minutes later, with the crew on the walls descending to follow another three minutes after that. Ideally, they would all be safely behind the Citadel's walls before the redshirts managed to break through the abandoned gate.

  Dante grabbed a monk and two guardsmen dressed in Narashtovik's black. With Blays and Lira, they headed north up the gentle slope towards the colossal spire of the Cathedral of Ivars and the Citadel behind it. The shouts from the plaza at the Ingate faded, replaced by the dull roar of men and arms from somewhere to the north. The streets were otherwise silent. Pale faces stared from third-floor windows. A few thousand citizens remained, unarmed, isolated. What would happen to them as the king's men marched on Narashtovik's last defense?

  The tall rowhouses draped them in soothing shadows. The five o'clock sun came in at yellow angles, dazzling the glass windows of the finer shops. Up the street, a handful of redshirts sprinted across the pavement. Dante flattened against a rowhouse, waiting for their footfalls to fade. He continued on, the pandemonium of battle echoing through the abandoned streets. He crested a small rise. The boulevard was a straight shot into the square between the Cathedral of Ivars and the Sealed Citadel. There, a mass of red-shirted men clamored around the still-open front gates, swords flashing against those of Narashtovik's soldiers.

  "We're too late," Dante said.

  Blays flung out his hands. "Why are the gates still open? What are they thinking?"

  "They're waiting for us."

  "If they wait much longer they'll be waiting on Arawn's doorstep instead." Blays pointed at the sky. "They'll never hear us from here and if we get any closer we'll be chopped into breakfast. Do that thing where you make stuff appear in the sky and tell them to close the damn gates!"

  "We'll be trapped out here!"

  "So what, dummy? Did you dig that tunnel for fun?"

  More redshirts surged into the square every second. Dante exhaled in a frustrated sigh. He sucked the nether from the shadows of the buildings and sent it straight for the sky above the Citadel. In fifty foot letters, purple and twinkling, "CLOSE THE DAMN GATES—LOVE, DANTE" appeared in the air.

  "I dunno," Blays said. "Might be too subtle."

  Dante turned to the monk and two soldiers who'd come with them. "Go back to the others. Tell them not to go to the Citadel. They're to meet us at the carneterium instead."

  "My lord," the monk bowed. The men ran back down the hill.

  Blays gestured in the direction of the other hill on the north end of the city. "Lead on, exalted one."

  "I didn't establish the rules of propriety," Dante grumbled. At the Citadel, the gates squeaked with a mighty grind of metal. The fighting below redoubled. Dante smiled. "I hope you didn't just get us all killed."

  "That depends a lot on the effectiveness of your tunnel, doesn't it?"

  Lira gestured forward. "If you two don't quit jabbering, we're dead either way."

  "Sorry, love." Blays ran down a side street, then cut north to skirt the Citadel from a distance. A cheer went up. Either they'd just lost, or the defenders had finished sealing the doors.

  The hill that bore the cemetery and carneterium swelled above the Ingate. The northern door through the walls was open, deserted. A couple hundred corpses scattered the plaza on both sides. Clearly this hadn't been the site of the main battle. The roads beyond were just as desolate. The houses stopped. Dante slowed as he jogged into the grassy field leading to the carneterium. Something stirred within the tall yellow grass.

  "Get down!" Blays shouted.

  Dante peered ahead, frowning. Blays plowed into his back and tackled him to the ground. Two arrows whooshed overhead. Lira rolled onto the dirt beside Blays. A lone oak stood twenty feet to Dante's left. He crawled for it, hidden beneath the grass. An arrow fired blindly through the stems. Dante flung himself behind the tree trunk. Across the field, three men in nondescript green waited with bows bent in their hands. They loosed their arrows as soon as they saw the whites of Dante's eyes.

  Arrows rapped into the trunk. Blays burst from the grass,
zig-zagging toward the archers. Dante gaped in horror and called out to the nether. It slithered to him from leaves and grass and dirt. One archer took a shot at Blays, firing wide. Lira ran pell-mell behind him, eyes locked on the archers' hands. Dante slung a spike of shadows toward a man taking hurried aim at Blays. The archer fell with a cry.

  Another took a quick shot at Blays. As the man released, Blays dived forward, landing on his shoulder and rolling through the grass. He popped up within sword range and lunged forward. Both his blades plunged into the archer's stomach. Blays pivoted, using his swords as levers to put the dying man's body between himself and the final scout. The man's arrow thunked wetly into the corpse's back. Lira closed on him. He took a whack at her with his bow. She intercepted it with her wheeling left arm, rolling her forearm to absorb the blow, then grabbed the bow and yanked it forward. The man leaned with it. Her sword found his throat.

  "What were you thinking?" Dante called as he ran to them. "They had bows! The long things that fire other long things across long distances!"

  "The tunnel's right around here, isn't it?" Blays said. One of the men groaned. Blays stabbed him without looking down. "What if they'd found it and were running off to tell Cassinder?"

  "Then I'd seal it up."

  "Yeah, after a thousand men boiled out of the basements and clued you in. Come on. Let's make sure this place is clear."

  A cooling sea breeze ruffled the grass. Nothing else stirred the field or the hill. Inside the carneterium, the entry to the tunnel was just as empty. The first of their troops arrived minutes later, led by the two guards and the monk.

  "Get them inside as fast as you can," Dante said. "It's a straight shot from here to the Citadel basements."

  Dante lit one of the torches kept in the entry to the carneterium and dropped into the tunnel. It was cool, moist. His boots echoed with every scrape. He alternated walking and jogging, preserving his sun- and battle-flagged strength.

  Blays frowned in the snapping torchlight. "If this is what it's like down here, remind me to be buried aboveground."