Called to Battle: Volume Two

by Steve Diamond, Matt Forbeck, Chris A. Jackson

  Gorman smirked and spurred his horse out of town into the early morning darkness.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Matt Forbeck has been a full-time creator of award-winning games and fiction since 1989. He has twenty-seven novels published to date, including the award-nominated Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon and the critically acclaimed Amortals and Vegas Knights. His latest work includes the Magic: The Gathering comic book, The Marvel Encyclopedia, the MMOs Marvel Heroes and Ghost Recon Phantoms, the Leverage novel The Con Job, the Dangerous Games trilogy of thriller novels set at Gen Con, and the Monster Academy YA fantasy novels. For more about him and his work, visit Forbeck.com.

  CONVICTION

  BY STEVE DIAMOND

  Two Days after the

  Cleansing of the Orgoth Temple

  The Harbinger was dead.

  In my arms she felt conspicuously light and frail—a collection of twigs held together by nothing but faith. The wound through her chest no longer bled. I hadn’t dared look to see how much of her holy blood had stained my clothing and armor.

  I still struggled to comprehend all that had occurred deep in the Thornwood Forest. At the core, it had come down to the sacrifice the Harbinger had been willing to make to stop the undead abomination Asphyxious from fulfilling his blasphemous plans. In the process she had also saved the souls of thousands of Menites trapped for centuries in a soul prison below the Orgoth temple.

  The Harbinger had succeeded, yet here she was, pale and limp, more like a broken girl than the blessed voice of the Creator. Her blindfold still covered her eyes. I wasn’t sure if I should remove it or if that would be considered a breach of her faith and trust. I shifted her weight to one arm and reached for the edge of my cloak with the other. I brought it up to wipe away the trickle of dried blood that had stained the corner of her mouth.

  “Paladin Vilmon, sir,” a voice behind me said, filled with urgency and a trace of fear.

  I fought down the emotions that rose again, threatening to overwhelm me. The soldiers of the faith would not see weakness in me. Not ever. I was their example, as the Harbinger had been to me.

  “Are they coming again, Paladin Raye?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Paladin Henri Raye was like one of the shields each soldier in the Order of the Wall carried: massive, solid, steady. A bulwark of Menoth’s eternal resolve. I’d chosen him personally for this mission along with his brother in the order, Paladin Borin Saryev. They’d already proven themselves invaluable against the Cryxian forces. Raye was the senior of the two and served now as my second, seeing to the rest of the small group who remained to help me protect the holy remains. The confidence I placed in him made the fear in his voice that much more troubling.

  “How much time do we have?” I asked, keeping my voice even.

  As if in answer, the mechanical howls of our undead pursuers began to wash over us. Hurrying toward the edge of the great forest, we hadn’t had time to cover our tracks properly. We were fleeing for our lives. We were fleeing for our souls. And in my arms, utterly lifeless, was the most important figure in the faith of Menoth after the Creator himself. The Harbinger was our charge and our responsibility. No, she was my responsibility.

  Seemingly drawn by my thoughts—and perhaps he had been—the Testament drew close beside me. He turned his head to regard me in silence. Not that I expected any words of encouragement from the silent warcaster. In battle, I was well accustomed to the screams and battle cries that go hand-in-hand with slaughter; that the Testament did even the bloody work of war without uttering a sound was still unnerving to me.

  He said nothing, but his stance indicated a hint of impatience. Had I not spent a good deal of time fighting alongside him, I never would have understood. The Testament’s eyes went quickly from me to the body I held as if to say, “She is more important than any of us.”

  “Paladin Raye, check my armor before we move,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.” He immediately moved behind me, appearing relieved to be doing something. My shield was strapped to my back, its weight a comfort to me. I felt Raye tug on the straps and clasps that held my armor in place. They were all in order, but absolute attention to detail had kept me alive this long, and it was more important now than ever.

  I finally managed to ask Raye the question I’d dreaded: “How many do we have left?”

  After a pause, he replied, “Seventeen Exemplar knights, five bastions, four errants, a single hand of Daughters, ourselves, the Testament, and the Avatar.”

  Did he notice the flash of disbelief that must have crossed my face? Though not all the survivors of the battle at the temple had joined us—I did not know where Amon Ad-Raza had gone, for one, or if he had even survived—we’d arrived in the Thornwood with three phalanxes’ worth of Protectorate faithful accompanied by multiple heavy and light warjacks. Now we had less than a third of our original force.

  The Cryxian howling renewed, louder and closer. We couldn’t wait any longer. I locked eyes with Raye and said, “Keep close to the Testament if you can. The faithful of the Protectorate will not go down easily, but if they do fall, their passing will give the Testament the strength to see this through.”

  It was time for us to run. We had to see that the Harbinger’s body was brought home. It was all we could do, since I’d failed to keep her alive. Perhaps my superiors would ask for my life as punishment. I deserved such a judgment; indeed, it would be welcome. But not yet. I refused to fail her again. I would sooner have had the Creator strike me down himself than prevent the Harbinger from the burial and honors she deserved.

  The Knights Exemplar and the Daughters took the lead, with the bastions at the rear. To my side walked my paladins and the hulking mass of the Avatar of Menoth, the Creator’s own warjack. The holy machine turned its head to gaze at me with a strangely reassuring calm. It shifted slightly to look at the woman in my arms, then back to my face. I knew what that meant: the Avatar and I had the same mission. Its mere presence affirmed the importance of the task we undertook.

  My arms were already burning with strain, but I would not set the Harbinger down. In life, her feet had not touched the unclean ground since the Creator chose her to be his voice on Caen. I would not allow her body to be profaned in death. That she had died was tragedy enough.

  I calculated distances in my mind. Our flight to Imer would take months. It had been only two days since we fled the Orgoth temple, and already we faced an unknown Cryxian force. For a moment despair threatened to overwhelm me. I choked it down. I would not succumb. Menoth would be my strength. As the Canon of the True Law reminded us, “There is no pain unbearable in the name of Menoth.” The Harbinger had given her life to send all those trapped Menite souls to Urcaen, and now it was up to me to return her body home for a proper burial.

  I picked up my pace and urged my brothers to do likewise. Most of our remaining soldiers weren’t built for speed, and two days of pushing hard toward the Protectorate with the body of the Harbinger in our care had exhausted us all both physically and emotionally. Soon, Cryxian soulhunters—necromantic abominations resembling a blend of undead horse and human—approached on our flanks, and behind us several Ripjaws skittered among the trees. We would have to stop running and face them. We needed to destroy these enemies quickly so we could stay ahead of the slower helljacks and the banes I knew would be behind them.

  “Turn and ready weapons!” I bellowed. To the Harbinger I said quietly, “Forgive me,” and then slung her over my shoulder to free my right hand. I had Saryev pull Censure free of its scabbard and hand it to me. The two paladins took up guard positions to my left and right.

  Facing our rear, the bastions formed a line. Even with only five of them, the formation looked impressive. Their hulking forms reminded me of the walls of Sul, tall and proud. The knights split into two groups to cover our flanks with the crossbow-wielding errants keeping to the middle. I gave orders for the Daughters to use their speed for feints and flanking when possible. Th
e Avatar stood motionless nearby along with the Testament, who firmly gripped his axe.

  The Cryxians attacked at once, hard and terrible, with the nightmarish intensity that made them so feared by Cygnaran and Khadoran soldiers alike. But we were of the Protectorate. Our faith put us beyond fear, or at least that was the ideal we strove to uphold.

  Six Ripjaws plowed into the bastion line in a horrific mechanikal wave. The solid forms of the bastions should have held without giving up an inch; in unison they should have struck brutally with their massive glaives to cut into and through the bonejacks. Instead the Ripjaws broke through the line with ease. Two bastions went to their knees under the onslaught. Where the men did manage to connect with their glaives, green fluid sprayed from the bonejacks, staining the ground and the white-enameled armor of my men.

  The soulhunters came in heavy from the sides. The knights slashed at them with swords while the errants loosed blessed quarrels from their weapons. Through it all the Daughters of the Flame darted in and out, slicing and piercing wherever they could do the most damage.

  The skirmish should have been a slaughter in our favor. Six bonejacks and a handful of soulhunters should have been crushed within moments. The simple fact that they were attacking in such small numbers showed they weren’t afraid of us. Instead it was we who were afraid, still in shock from losing the one most crucial to our faith.

  A duo of Ripjaws had maneuvered past the bastions, but the Avatar moved at once to meet their charge. They didn’t stand a chance, and I had a moment of satisfaction as a swipe from the Avatar’s sanctified sword cut a bonejack in half and a blow from its huge shield reduced another to bits of bone and black iron.

  To the sides, just as they were trained to do when facing conventional cavalry, some of the Knights Exemplar went low to cut the legs out from under the soulhunters while others provided cover. The tactic felled many of the undead monsters, and the Daughters quickly moved in to thrust their short swords through the skulls of the Cryxian horrors.

  To my right, a soulhunter’s scythe suddenly sheared through a knight’s neck, decapitating him in a spray of blood that splattered his nearby brothers. As another soulhunter was brought down to my left, its scythe found the flesh of a Daughter who couldn’t move in time, severing her arm below the shoulder. A third soulhunter galloped past, reaching out to disembowel one of the Exemplar errants before veering too close to Saryev and falling to the paladin’s bloody blade. With the help of the Avatar and the Testament, the remaining Ripjaws were destroyed, along with those soulhunters that did not flee. But the enemy had taken two of our small force, and each loss would be deeply felt. Each death in the wake of the Harbinger’s would hurt that much more.

  Sudden quiet overtook us. The entire battle had taken no more than five minutes. My men had been slow, and I had seen the shock and despair on their faces even as they fought valiantly. They had gone through the motions of battle devoid of their accustomed vigor, relying mainly on training and reflex. Thank Menoth it had been enough, but only barely.

  The Daughters called to Paladin Raye to help Caylan, their fallen sister. He knelt beside her and cauterized the bleeding stump of her arm with his firebrand. We quickly arranged the bodies of the slain in a line with as much respect as we could provide in this awful circumstance, and I spoke a brief prayer over them. Then Henna, the tallest and strongest of the Daughters, slung Caylan over her shoulder and took up a position in the middle of our small formation, and we resumed our flight.

  As the Testament trudged past our fallen, I could only hope his presence might help speed their souls to the City of Man in Urcaen. I knew the battle just fought had been but the beginning of our trials.

  Two Weeks since the Harbinger’s Death

  We lost another knight, Varil Lartimer, as we neared the edge of the Thornwood. I wish I could say it was in the glorious defense of the Harbinger’s body, but it wasn’t. There was no greater purpose at all. Varil had simply removed his helmet for a brief respite, and a snake that had been curled around a tree branch bit him. He died within minutes.

  It was the kind of seemingly pointless death that could erode the resolve of even the most faithful and stalwart warrior. I could almost feel the collective will of my small band snap under the strain of our recent losses. I have been in countless battles all across the land, and I have seen death in all its shame and glory. There was no glory in this young man’s death. It was a chance snakebite, nothing more. He’d survived horrific encounters with Cryxian atrocities only to die from standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. In most circumstances, this would have been a trial of faith easily overcome by my devout brothers and sisters. As it was, I knew I needed to offer as much encouragement and hope as I could to help them keep going.

  “We cannot let Exemplar Lartimer’s death distract us from our holy mission,” I began in a quiet voice, after we’d given his body what honors we could spare time for. I mustered an appropriate expression of calm acceptance even as I stood with the dead body of the Harbinger still in my arms. It was not how I felt, of course; I wasn’t ready to accept any of this. But my men couldn’t know that my internal struggle mirrored the hopelessness I saw on their faces. They were exhausted, as was I, and I knew that if I gave in to despair they would break, and we would never get the Harbinger’s body back to Imer.

  “He must have been desperately needed in Urcaen to have been taken so suddenly,” I continued, hoping the Creator would forgive my attributing divine agency to such a clearly accidental event. “He is where he must be, just as we are. We will not be swayed from our holy duty. We will show no weakness. We will show no fear. And if the Cryxians come upon us again, we will show no mercy.”

  I could see my words had impact, though there was little outward reaction among those listening. A few nodded in acceptance, and it was enough. I had to bring as many of them as I could safely back to Imer. I looked to the knights and was moved to see how much care they took in checking their armor and sharpening and oiling their weapons. Disheartened as they were, they knew their duty. Some paladins took a dim view of the Knights Exemplar, whose vows were so dissimilar to our own, but I knew the exemplars were possessed of tremendous dedication. Stalwart warriors of the faith, each was fully committed to his code. Each felt the deaths of their fallen brothers keenly, and the loss of the Harbinger was a blow to us all.

  The Testament caught my eye and offered the subtlest of nods.

  For the moment, these people were my charge, and we had to lead by example. With the Harbinger gone, the Testament and I were all they had left to guide them home.

  Week Four

  “Sir. Please. Let me carry the Harbinger for a time.”

  I blinked, for a moment unsure where exactly I was or who was addressing me. The face in front of me resolved into that of Paladin Saryev. It struck me for the first time just how young he was. Had I ever looked that young?

  The image of my mentor, Blaine Rocamber, floated into my mind. I saw him staring at me in the practice yard of the temple, so very long ago. I had come to the order at the age of fifteen, two years after initiates were usually accepted. I’d had to prove my mettle to be granted acceptance. Rocamber had been doubtful I could match those who had been training for years. Expecting to demonstrate the folly of my ambition, he had set me against an older initiate, one skilled and well seasoned. After I’d bested him, Rocamber had expressed his amazement.

  “Vilmon, I was wrong,” the senior paladin had said. “As long as you can wield a sword like that, Menoth won’t care how old you are or how long you waited to join us. You are where you should be.”

  The memory brought a smile to my face—the first since the Harbinger’s death. It also reminded me that Saryev had to be here for a reason. The Creator’s hand had guided him to this place at this time.

  “No, Paladin Saryev,” I said. “She is my responsibility.”

  “She is the responsibility of all of us, sir,” he replied.

  I smiled
again, proud of him. Young Saryev seemed to be coping with the situation as well as any, yet even he was showing considerable strain. I saw the way his eyes changed and his face tightened whenever his glance fell upon the body of Menoth’s prophet. Saryev was a good man. For so long the Order of the Wall had languished. It was easy to overlook how impressive each man or woman was who qualified to join our ranks. They heard Menoth’s call and they answered. It was an honor to stand by them in battle. Yet I wondered how recent events would affect the Order, and the faithful in general. I knew the people of the Protectorate. With the Harbinger’s death, I feared many would lose faith, wondering if Menoth had abandoned them. As much as her appearance had reinvigorated them, her fall might well sow despair. Even I wondered what Menoth expected from us. I had to believe this was just another test, but if so, I wasn’t sure I could pass it.

  “Paladin Saryev,” I said, pitching my voice so only he could hear me. “Ever since the Harbinger chose me to escort her, I have made it my solitary focus to guard her and keep her safe. By protecting her, I knew I was helping the faith. My role was clear. And yet here she is, cold in my arms.”

  Saryev lowered his head. There it was, plain on his face: the fraying edges of hope. I couldn’t let him travel too far down that path. I couldn’t travel too far down that path. Maybe I could alleviate some of his sorrow and in turn dispel some of my own.

  I continued, “I want you to look carefully at the woman I hold and tell me what you see. Look well and speak truly.”

  Saryev’s eyes drifted up to gaze at the Harbinger, and I saw a hint of guilt in them. “She is beautiful, Paladin Vilmon. She seems so . . . young. So fragile.”

  “Indeed,” I said, realizing she had been perhaps the same age as Saryev himself. “She is young, and she looks even younger than her age. But fragile she has never been. Her bravery was an inspiration to all. She foresaw her end in the Thornwood. I did not recognize it at the time, but I saw the sadness in her eyes, and I understand it now. She knew what was to come but did not turn away.” I looked down at her pale, unblemished face; it was all too easy to imagine she was simply sleeping. “And yes, she is beautiful. For a full month now, her body has remained perfect. Through heat and dust and hard travel, there is not the slightest hint of decay. Cold she may be, but the Creator preserves her. This is itself a miracle. We will return her to Imer for burial as pristine as when she was first struck down. Menoth has put us on this path to test us, and we will not fail. But it is not your duty to carry her. It is mine.”