by K. J. Coble
“Hold the gods-damned line!” Strayden repeated hoarsely as the berbers drew near the point when they’d wheel and fire again.
“Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you?” Durrak whispered from behind his shield rim, clenched close on Strayden’s left.
The brute stood half a head taller than the tallest Vothan but, unlike his comrades, he shared not their pale, sunburnt features or beards of chestnut or red. He was a Nuburran, ebon-skinned and craggy with scars from a hundred campaigns, a joyful slayer who’d drifted into the Vothan Guard at a time when the rolls were rather more sparse. In truth, a lot of the Guard was like that, anymore, many nationalities not of the Guard’s Vothan name filling in as constant campaigning thinned the ranks of the Emperor’s favorite killers.
Not that Strayden cared. Durrak was also one of his oldest comrades, one of the few that remembered better times.
“We’ve got a lot of recruits standing in, this time,” Strayden growled back at the dark giant.
“Aye, that we do,” he replied, “newbies like young Aelren, over there, fresh off his mother’s teat.”
“Didn’t know my mother,” the younger Vothan crowding in to Strayden’s right replied. “Had to make due with yours, Durrak.”
Nervous laughter percolated through the packed, waiting ranks. The banter between Durrak and Aelren had become legendary in a short time. Despite the jibe, the latter was not so young that he hadn’t seen his share of action. Strayden had long-mocked the kid for his blue-eyed, blonde-haired good looks. But a vague menace had hardened them in the last year, which had seen all three of them enlisted in a foul scheme to retrieve an even fouler magical leftover. The scars of that still sometimes pestered Strayden’s sleep.
Of course, with these berber bastards riding down on them, he would almost prefer a similar task.
“Here we go,” Durrak snarled and hunched low behind his shield.
The horse archers were slowing, turning individually, not as any unit, motion that made it look like the whole mass of them churned in disorder. But that churn spewed an uneven, yet heavy storm of arrows. The air buzzed with their passage, glinted with wicked steel heads, slashed in upon the Vothans at nearly flat trajectories, so powerful was the force behind them.
Wood, mail, and flesh thocked with impact.
Strayden grunted as an arrowhead dimpled the elmwood of his inner shield, right next to the arm strap, grunted a second time as another punched clean through, blunted steel point protruding an inch from his eye. Someone screeched to his left and he felt the jolt as a body bounced off him. A Vothan curse drew his glance momentarily to the right, where a pitifully young Guardsman was staring dumbly at the arrow gone cleanly through his forearm.
Everywhere he looked, Vothans cringed or crumpled and the clatter of arrow strikes spread. But their wall, which formed the center of the quickly-building Imperial line, held steady. No wasteland dogs were going to cut through here!
The rapid fluttering-out of the arrow rain confirmed that. A great cry rose from out beyond the shield wall, the unearthly voices of the berbers taunting, cackling as they loosed their last and began to withdraw. Strayden chanced a look over his shield rim, was rewarded with the streak of a berber’s parting shot, the arrow glancing off the side off his helm with a ring and jerking his head back hard enough that the chin strap bit skin.
“Gruzh’s balls!”
“You’re all right?” Durrak demanded, not risking his own head to look back. “Strayden?”
“Fine, ack!” Strayden spat bloody, salty taste from a bitten tongue. “Just got my braincase rattled, is all!”
“There was something in there to rattle?” Aelren quipped.
Hard laughter echoed now, from men happy to have anything to cut their fear.
“You’ve got your bow with you?” Strayden asked the youth.
“Aye.” The kid was unusual among Vothans, in that he excelled as much with a missile weapon as a sword.
“Then maybe you could do something about this” Strayden fingered the dent left on crest of his helmet “rather than flapping your gums!”
A thrum in the air told him there was no need. A quick glance skyward caught the rippling shadows of hundreds of arrows darkening the air. Squalling, the berbers hastened their retreat as Imperial archery arched over the Vothan’s lines to fall in their midst. Fear went shrill with pain as arrowheads found marks, scything riders from the saddle, cutting their scrawny desert mounts down in the dirt. The rest crumbled away.
The Vothan Guard urged them along with a deep-throated roar.
The Scintallan army was started to get its thumbs out of its ass. What had begun as a scouts’ skirmish amongst dust devils on the plains, and had swelled to a near-rout as the Vothan Guard formed desperately to stem the raiders’ slashing attack, was now concentrating into what looked like would be a real fight. Archers behind them meant the regular infantry was up, would be sliding in on their flanks. And though he could not see it, Strayden knew that would mean Imperial cavalry even further out on the wings.
But in front of him, he could see even less. The dust continued its twine, almost lifelike in its phantom dance and unbroken by a sluggish breeze that barely cooled the face. The dead littered the sand. The living had receded into that miasma, were barely shadows, writhing beyond a gritty brown curtain. Distant flutters of steel suggested more.
Strayden let his gaze rise over the false mist, to the escarpments rising battlement-like on their left and the toothy outlines of a wall, half-collapsed down rocky slopes into the valley below. Fragments of domes, like bits of eggshells stomped upon, huddle beyond those, joined by the crooked points of sagging obelisks and, looming above it all, the scrawling heights of pyramids.
Zadam. The Dead Capitol of Old Xyxia.
They’d all heard the stories—and Strayden had heard more from Lyssa, the dark-skinned sorceress knowledgeable of the aged and eldritch as all Adepts of the White Guard were. Curses and dark, bloody history haunted those ruined crags. Just looking at them sent a thrill of fear through Strayden that even the clawing of berber arrows hadn’t birthed. But his teeth didn’t just grit in apprehension; they bore into a smile of avarice. Necromancy and mummery there were, aye, but legendary wealth, too!
“Bastards are coming again!” Durrak snarled.
Vothans hunched once more behind their shields, but Strayden didn’t see anything in the haze. The Scintallan army had debouched into the wastes from the long, winding valley of the Khayaz River, a feeble tributary of the Great Neelax. Rumor was, the combined Xyxian armies had mustered at the Oasis of Shamir and were crossing the plain to meet them. With the ruins of Zadam on their left and another, lesser escarpment clawing to the wastes on their right, the Scintallan flanks were covered and their view of the approaches clear.
Should have been—but this hell-sent fog choked all sight, lingering even as the morning sun rose withering and yellow above it. And Strayden was beginning to suspect, with that instinctive worming of the flesh common to all his superstitious, magic-loathing kind, if the haze wasn’t literally hell-sent.
“I don’t see them,” Aelren began to growl.
The berbers erupted from the haze again, and their proximity to the battle line jolted Strayden with both its nearness and the fact that the fumes were, in fact, creeping closer. He had little time to ponder that further, as the waste dogs were already right on them, some already loosing their shafts and lunging into their turns. One wheeled so close his mount’s hooves kicked debris into the Vothan faces.
A warrior three files to Strayden’s left jerked back with a meaty smack, staggered, and dropped with arrow fletching in his eye socket. The break in the shield wall allowed a flutter of follow-up shafts to slice through before the next Vothan in rank got his into place. A kid in poorly-matched mail dropped, squealing with an arrow in his thigh.
To Strayden’s left, old Gerbrecht, a towering, pot-bellied Vothan, bawled a challenge and lurched from the line as a rider whipped
especially close. Gaze flared with green mania through the eye-guards of his helm. Teeth showed yellow-white against foaming lips. The berserker fury had gripped the man, a frenzy of rage and anguish that he couldn’t get to grips. His charge a brought him no closer, the desert-bred pony skipping its rider just out of the berserker’s frantic axe swing.
Gerbrecht stumbled backwards. Black fletching vibrated in his chest as he looked down dumbly. He started reach for it with his left hand. A second arrow slapped into him, pinning the hand to his breast. Shrieking with more outrage than pain, the berserker dropped his axe to fumble with his right, but a half dozen more missiles punched into him in the space of a second. He fell like a sawn-down tree, struck the sand with the weight of the instantly dead.
The desert raiders cackled and yowled like hyenas as they peeled away from their kill, shaking their terrible short bows into the faces of the seething, utterly helpless Vothans. Another man started forward after then, screaming a challenge.
“Back into line!” Strayden bawled. Now he stalked forth, half-turned, and glared until the challenger recoiled between overlapping shields. Strayden turned the other way, snarling. “I’ll kill the next jackass who leaves the line, myself!”
“Watch out!”
Strayden realized the voice was Durrak’s in the same instant he turned to see a berber wheel back with bow bent. He heard the twang of its chord, saw the slashing blur of the missile. Somehow, he’d turned with his shield up and the arrow cracked into it, bounced off the iron boss. Impact jolted feeling from his arm, but the motion gave the appearance of him slapping the shot aside, as though in contempt.
Behind him, the Vothan Guardsmen roared their approval.
But the desert raider was knocking another arrow and, this time, Strayden didn’t see how he’d get lucky again; the berbers had proved too accurate with their weapons. Rather than fall back and risk taking an arrow in the spine, he drew his sword and clacked it against the rim of his shield. If this was his moment to face Gruzh in the Hall of Heroes, Strayden would do it, blade at hand!
“Come and get some!”
Instead, the raider again wheeled his mount with a violent sawing of the reins and started back for the obscuring haze. The Vothans cheered again, but it cut out in cries of alarm and the insect flutter filling the sky above. Strayden hissed a curse and didn’t need to look up at the descending cloud. He bolted back for the line with his shield held over him.
Imperial arrows rained into the wastes and cries both human and animal rent the air as they slashed through fleeing desert riders. Men flopped from the saddle, pin-cushioned with shafts. Horses writhed with agony, kicked, fell, rolled over their masters. Horse archers fallen to the dust were hit again, again, some of them pinned to the ground with a dozen missiles.
But the Imperial archers had altered their angle at some inexplicable order, perhaps to cover the closeness of the weird mist, and the projectiles slashed down into the front of the Guard. Strayden felt the crash of one off his upheld shield, the moment before he crossed through a gap in the shield wall. But others clanged off his comrades’. Someone screeched in pain—he hoped it wasn’t from the misguided volley. He jostled amongst the mass of his fellows, tried to secure a spot, but still keep the shield up.
A blow to the shoulder felt like a boulder and knocked him as assuredly to the ground. Down on his side, pain like lighting, with Vothan shins and boots writhing and kicking all around him, a wave of disorientation overwhelmed him. A wave of nausea followed, from the blow, from the jugs of wine the previous night, rising in a green wave with the shock of his injury.
Strayden rolled onto all fours and vomited.
Cries of annoyance and outrage sounded from above him. Someone kicked dust in his face. The shoulder still throbbed, but a glance showed him only chainmail—the arrow must have struck indirectly, a ricochet. He spat once and started to get up. The kid with the arrow through his forearm was on his backside, clutching his wound, but watching Strayden with impossibly wide eyes.
A hand grabbed Strayden’s shoulder, hoisted him back to his feet.
“Wouldn’t be the start of a fight without our glorious Captain emptying his guts!” Durrak said with a laugh.
“Did he get any on himself?” Aelren asked from the other side.
Durrak brushed off Strayden’s chest. “Not this time.”
“Damn. The wager goes to you.”
“You’re both hilarious!” Strayden snarled pushing Durrak back. His guts still quivered and he wasn’t sure if another convulsion wasn’t coming. If it did, Durrak was going to get it in the face.
His surroundings wobbled and settled. The Imperial volley had ebbed out quickly, left curses of rage from the Vothan front, as well as the cries of the wounded. Strayden turned to the youth, stricken and down behind them. “Your lucky day, kid! Get back to the rear and tell those primped Scintallan bastards to check their fire!” He swallowed back bile taste. “And find yourself a surgeon.”
To his credit, the youth didn’t protest in some eruption of wounded pride. Cradling his arm, he scampered back through the ranks.
“Speaking of lucky days,” Durrak said, pointing out beyond the lines, “look at this devil.”
Out on the arrow-studded waste, the rider who’d menaced Strayden was down, half-pinned by the mass of his horse. With an agonized babble, he was attempting to drag a leg free. Shafts in his back added to his woes. The task looked more than hopeless, and his screams rose to a pitiful warble.
“Gods,” Aelren cursed. “Listen to that.”
“Not going to do the lads any good,” Durrak agreed.
Strayden ground his teeth. Pathetic cries sounded from around and behind as their own wounded were dragged from the line, but they faded—and could hope for some succor. The pinned bastard was doomed, broken and trapped, bleeding and baking to death on that frying pan flat of waste. For all that he was a desert-dog and a godless bastard, he’d been a brave one.
And Gruzh loved the Brave.
“Looks like unfinished business,” Strayden growled and scooped up his sword from where he’d dropped it, shouldered his way clear of the shield wall once more.
Stepping out in the open, the sounds of the fully-gathered Scintallan host echoed around him. Glances to either side showed the glitter of the full battle line, with the Vothan Guard a block at the center. But the racket had a weird, disembodied tone to it, dulled by the waste fumes. Strayden’s nostrils caught the infernal stink of them, now, an almost charnel bite that unmistakably hinted at sorcery. They bunched barely fifty yards away, purling with what almost looked like eagerness, but held at bay by some unseen force.
The desert dog was pulling frantically at his pinned, ruined leg, teeth snapping in a mouth foamed pinkish-white. That the devil wanted to reach the sanctuary of the mist seemed clear. His eyes flared at seeing Strayden’s approach, terror and hate mixing. His struggle changed, no longer seeking escape, stretching out first for his dropped bow—well out of reach—then becoming a fumble to draw a long, curved knife.
Better that way, Strayden thought, nodding in salute of grit and giving his sword a testing swing. Throat-cutting the helpless is better left to Scintallan fops...
A shout split the mist from behind the fallen man. Gold, bronze, and steel caught the sun and flared as fumes peeled away from them and a new rider emerged. More armor than man, the cavalryman bore a knobbed-headed mace in a gauntleted fist and hissed with the movement of lovingly-crafted lamellar plates, each the size of a gold-chased thumb. Eyes glared out from holes fashioned with false, bunching eyebrows and mail hid the newcomer’s face.
That he was some Xyxian noble seemed clear from his glittering kit. The haughty notes of his challenge to Strayden confirmed it, full of the arrogance of a class trained to the horse, raised to rule, and bred to generations of casual cruelty. The rider led his destrier past the fallen berber without acknowledgement and pointed the mace, shouted again, mockingly now.
Strayden gr
inned and spread his feet, gave his sword another slash and shook his shoulders to adjust the weight of his mail and the grip on his shield.
“Now that’s more like it!”
THE MASSIVE OBELISKS that flanked the entrance to the ruins of Zadam had once been called the Spires of Zet, raised late in the reign of Thyss-Mallik when he ostensibly renounced all Xyxia’s deities, save the Serpentine God of Lies. One of the pair had collapsed into the valley across which the Scintallan army now arrayed. The other clung to the escarpment by mere feet of stone, held there only so long as fickle erosion or angry wind didn’t eat its support further.
Asyra et Mathala et Fahldan tried to keep that last part out of mind as she climbed the remaining Spire.
Unlike the obelisks that festooned the dead city across the crags of the escarpment, the Spire had a weird corkscrew shape winding all the way up its length and bulging at the top. The feature had made her climb far easier than it might have otherwise been, but each leg up had revealed details the ages hadn’t gnawed away—scales carved into the stone, each loop a snake’s coil. The obelisk of Xyxian might had been strangled in the lengths of the Dark God that’d come to dominate the land and its ruler.
Her skin would’ve crawled, were not the rest of her straining every sinew to do the same up the time-eaten stone.
Because the Spire was the highest point in a hundred miles, stabbing higher even than the pyramids that crowned the Dead City, atop its reddish cliff face. From its vantage, the whole valley carved by the shrunken Khayaz River could be seen. So, too, could the still-present outline of that river’s once-mighty flow, emptying into a sea that had dried down into the wastes stretching yellowy into the distance.
All dried up, wasted away, eaten by desolation and—if she believed Lyssa’s fearful story-telling—the contempt of the Gods.