Once A Hero

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Toward that end the Red Tiger's army stood arrayed around the imperial city. Sixteen thousand Centisian warriors made up the core of the army, with three thousand in light cavalry, two thousand archers, and the rest distributed among pikemen, swordsmen, axmen, and irregulars. Despite their name, the latter troops were the best, being huntsmen and errant warriors classed as bandits or heretics by the Reithrese Empire. Sture's Exile Legion added a thousand light cavalry and some well-drilled infantry. The rest of our infantry were farmers, who, despite two summers campaigning, had been more at home harvesting crops for the march north than waiting to lay waste to Jarudin.

  The light cavalry formed the wings of our host, with the infantry and archers in the center. In front of them was the Steel Pack and the newly formed Steel Hunt. With my blessings and support, Drogo had split from the Pack and formed up his own heavy-cavalry company. Being from Centisia himself, he picked more of his countrymen to fill the ranks, and they all pledged their personal fealty to the Red Tiger. While they were not quite as fierce as the Pack, I took pride and pleasure at having the Hunt behind us.

  The fact that we had arrayed ourselves in a classic battle formation must have astounded the Reithrese in the city. They had massive walls between us and them, and enough supplies in the city that they knew they could wait us out. Even if our catapults and ballistae, onagers, and trebuchets were able to cast stones or shoot missiles over the high walls, the damage done would be minimal, and magick could be employed to destroy the most offensive machines. Their troops, who seemed to enjoy standing on the walls and shouting taunts at us, were clearly not of a mind to sally forth and give us some sport.

  Ours was, to their eyes, a halfhearted attempt at sieging an impregnable city. They could easily wait us out and send for troops to lift the siege if we became a nuisance. They grew contemptuous enough of us to let Human traders come out to sell us various wares and intelligence about the city itself. The only chance we had of taking the city would involve a miracle, and both sides knew it.

  The Red Tiger sent a runner to bring Aarundel and me his tent. The miracle was at hand.

  A giant of a man, bigger than either Aarundel or myself, Beltran greeted us warmly and poured each of us a goblet of wine. "Tonight we dine at the emperor's table."

  "I can hardly wait," I lied as I acknowledged Sture's half nod in my direction. I gathered, from the redness on the tips of his ears, he had been again at Beltran about a special mission for his Lightning Elite cavalry or using his coal-mining sappers to bring Jarudin's walls down. "How nice to see you again, my Lord."

  "The pleasure is all mine, Neal." Sture, while not a small man, was shorter than any of the rest of us in the room and used a woolen cap to hide the fact that his black hair had thinned dramatically in the last three years. His brown eyes glittered with intelligence, but there were times I wondered if he was actually able to see beyond the tip of his long, slender nose. "I wish your Steel Pack the best of luck in the coming assault."

  If I could have bottled the tone of his voice, I could have used a drop of it in Jarudin's wells to poison the entire population. Ignoring him, I smiled at the Red Tiger. "Plans have been finalized, then?"

  "I believe everyone understands his part in this." Beltran gulped his wine and swiped the excess from his bushy red beard with the back of his left hand. "Will you be ready to ride in an hour?"

  I nodded. "The Pack will. What is our target?"

  The Red Tiger moved to the table sitting in the middle of his tent and used his goblet to pin down one corner of the map he unrolled. Sture held down the other side and studied the map as if he could change the writing on it by force of will alone. "The Steel Pack will go in at the Dragon's Tower. You will have the Veirtu riders coming after you." He shifted a finger along to point at a separate tower. "The Steel Hunt and I will hit the Griffin's Tower at the same time."

  The plan made sense. The octagonal city, as I could see from the map, had been laid out like a wheel with the Imperial Tower at the hub. Each of eight main roads led out from it to the eight main towers on the walls. Entering the city at the Dragon and Griffin towers, we would pass through the quarter of the city given over to Men. We hoped that our fellow Men would not be as hostile to our attack as their Reithrese masters, which might let us get deep into the city before we met serious resistance.

  I looked up at him. "You expect the Veirtu to draw their sorcerers to us?"

  "I agree with Neal's skepticism on this point." Sture's head came up and he nodded condescendingly toward me.

  "My Lightning Elite is a mounted force that has sorcerers more fully integrated into it. We would be a lightning rod—no pun intended—for any sorcerously inclined defenders."

  Aarundel grabbed the back of my belt, preventing me from stepping forward to throttle Sture. "I believe, Duke Sture, you mistake Neal's question. He was not doubting the Pack's ability to work with the Veirtu, merely wondering what the Red Tiger's intent was in attaching them to our unit."

  The Red Tiger, having ignored Sture's comment and Aarundel's reply to it, nodded grimly. "I know that will make it difficult for you, Neal, but the Veirtu should be able to offer some protection. If the sorcerers cannot raise the walls again, the rest of our host can get through and the battle is won. Both of our forces have to push on through and head straight for the Imperial Tower. The more effective we are in drawing the Reithrese to the heart of Jarudin, the more likely our success."

  Aarundel studied the map, then nodded. "Speed, then, is our armor and spear point."

  "And the Lightning Elite is the swiftest cavalry we have, my Lord."

  Beltran sighed. "I agree, my Lord, which is why I have designated it to consolidate our gains once the Pack and Hunt are through the gaps. If your men fail, we will be trapped with no hope of victory."

  "I understand, my Lord." Sture studied the map a little longer, then looked up wearily as if certain of a coming disaster.

  "Speed is vital, Imperator, as it has been throughout our war." The Red Tiger lifted up his cup, and the map rolled up into a tube, slapping against Sture's fingers.

  "When next we meet, my friends, the Reithrese capital will be ours."

  "Provided the towers come down," Sture muttered. Beltran confidently plucked a small piece of marble from the table, tossed it in the air, then caught it in a fist. "They will fall, Sture, they will fall, and when they do, the empire goes with them."

  The tactical application of magick in combat is very difficult for reasons that are relatively simple to understand. As with sword fighting, for every strike there is a parry. In magick each spell has a counterspell. The efficiency of a sorcerer, or the skill of the swordsman, determines success, but with magick it takes a lot of energy to accomplish a result, so having it countered could be quite debilitating. A wizard capable of throwing a spell only once is akin to an archer with only one arrow. If he misses, he becomes useless.

  The best use of magick in our assault would have been to cause huge upheavals of land at the base of the walls to bring them down. Aside from the fact that none of the wizards on our side, including the whole lot of the Veirtu, had sufficient power to do such a thing, that plan had problems because the Reithrese had already laid counter-wards against that kind of spell. In effect the walls were immune to magickal attack, which accounted in part for the incredible confidence of the defenders.

  The Red Tiger had worked out a way around their wards. Magick considers part of a stone the rough equivalent to the whole stone itself. Mages call this the Law of Holomorphism. It says that a part is considered a model for the whole, and the larger the part, the stronger the link.

  The little stone the Red Tiger had shown me in his tent had been brought out from the city by one of the traders and had come from either the Griffin or Dragon Tower. Had the Reithrese wards not rendered them proof against it, magick could have been used to crush the small stones, thereby crushing the larger ones. Because we had to use other methods, Beltran had dozens of such smal
l stones married to far bigger stones with a little mortar. Those larger rocks were loaded into our trebuchets and made ready to shoot at the walls.

  The spell created by the Red Tiger's wizards was cast upon the smaller piece of stone attached to each missile. To avoid a counterspell working against it as it approached the magically warded walls, the spell itself would function only until the stone had reached the apex of its arc. Until that point the magick would alter the flight of the missile to keep it flying on a course that would reunite it with the piece of the wall from which it had been taken. As it began to fall from the sky, natural forces would guide it into its target, so no magick could cancel the spell and spoil the rock's aim.

  Though not as powerful as an earthquake, I was willing to gamble on it's effectiveness. The spell had been tested while the siege machines were being built and, so I was told, had worked very well. Fursey Nine-finger and Gathelus had watched the tests on behalf of the Pack and agreed to the plans the Red Tiger had laid out at the start of the campaign, so I saw no reason to hold reservations about the magick.

  Then again, I did make double and triply certain that Sture had not managed to secret a rock in my armor as I prepared myself for battle. Assaulting a fortified city is one thing, but tempting fate with magick is another altogether.

  Aarundel came for me just as I finished dripping wax onto a folded parchment and pressed the butt cap of my dagger down to seal the missive. Flipping Wasp around, I returned it to its sheath in my right boot. "I want to entrust this to you. Send it to your sister if things go badly for me out there."

  Aarundel held his hand out for it. "As I have in each battle before, I will hold the message for you and return it when the hostilities are terminated."

  I shook my head. "I appreciate your confidence, but this is far nastier a battle than we have faced before. In the open field the Steel Pack is a force to be reckoned with. Breaching a wall is something else entirely."

  "The nature of the task matters not, Neal." Aarundel slipped the message into a pouch on his swordbelt. "You wield Divisator. You are destined to win an empire. Until then I harbor no trepidation concerning your safety."

  "The sword didn't do much to protect Tashayul."

  "He deluded himself with an ambitious reading of a flawed translation."

  "I hope your translation is better."

  "I have the prophecy in the original."

  I stood in a rustle of mail. Had we been riding into combat against another line of heavy cavalry, I would have donned a full suit of plate armor. In a charge the sheer weight of heavy cavalryman in collision can shock, stun, or even kill an enemy, which is why few troops choose to become the target of the Steel Pack. In addition to the weight, the full plate helps turn Haladin arrows, which, at close range, have an annoying habit of sticking into ring mail.

  If things went as planned, we would be fighting in the city, so I chose to armor myself with my Roclawzi ring mail and supplemented it with a limited amount of plate. The combination would not sacrifice mobility or speed if I had to travel on foot, and yet it would keep me safe. My hauberk covered me from midforearm to midthigh and included a hood that protected the back of my neck and my ears. To that I added bracers, gauntlets, greaves, cuisses, and knee-caps. I decided against armoring my feet because I wanted a good feel for the stirrups in case I had to kick free of the saddle, but I did add a toe spike to my boots in case fighting became far closer than I hoped.

  Cleaveheart rode on my left hip, and I chose to carry a small target shield on my left arm. I planted a steel cap on my head because I had less confidence in the prophecy than Aarundel and because only an idiot would go into battle without a helmet. Even a glancing blow to the skull can put a man down, and being knocked senseless in this fight would mean death.

  I followed Aarundel from the tent to where our horses waited. Once again the nature of the fight we would face had forced a choice when it came to armoring Blackstar. I decided to encase him as completely as practical in metal. The steel chamfron had two ram's horns curling out from just in front of the ear holes and ring-joined plate made up the crinet and cuello armoring his neck and throat respectively. The peytral had a spike in the center, and the wings came back to cover Blackstar's shoulders as far as the saddle. Flanchards hung from the edges of my saddle to protect his ribs, and they joined with the crupper covering his flanks, thighs, and rump. The armor added nearly a hundred and fifty pounds to our weight but guaranteed his safety in case the prophecy did not.

  I pulled myself up into the saddle without assistance. Despite the fact that my armor weighed at least half what Blackstar's did, it was not deadweight and, therefore, did not tax my strength to move. The day men start wearing armor so heavy they cannot get into a saddle without aid is the day I go into battle naked except for a big stick with which to knock them from their mounts and a small dagger to finish them off. In the battle between strong and swift, swift wins every time—provided there is room to run.

  Thrusting aside my misgivings about a city not providing much room to run, I accepted a lance from one of the grooms and reined Blackstar around. In riding over to where the Steel Pack awaited me, I rode past the Veirtu. They recognized me and set to howling and hooting in a way that I might have found mocking if I didn't know who they were. As it was, I just howled like a wolf back at them, and they took that gesture in great humor.

  The Veirtu go into battle all but naked, though they use weapons more powerful than sticks and ltittle daggers. They worship Chavameht and claim to be possessed by one or more of the many animalistic spirits that are that god's servants or avatars in the world. They gravitated to the rebellion against the Reithrese more because I'm known as the Dun Wolf and Beltran is called the Red Tiger than out of any real hatred of the Reithrese. Warrior-priests all, they wear the skins of their particular totem spirit, use bows, and in close combat wield knobby war clubs that are painted up with all sorts of strange and arcane symbols. They also employ strange battle magicks that do not have great range, but tend to leave their targets with gaping and horrible wounds akin to those one would find if the target had been mauled by wild animals.

  Fursey Nine-finger rode up to me as I joined the Pack. "I see we have the screaming idiots following us. It's for real, then?"

  "It is. We're the Dragon Tower. Form up in double file, on me."

  Fursey turned and repeated my orders. Each of the five companies formed up in double ranks forty riders long. With Aarundel at my side and the Dreel loping along on the left, I started us out at a walk on a serpentine course that would parade us at the extreme edge of range for Jarudin's mangonels. We would ride parallel to the walls, as we had done at this time for the past four days, and if we were lucky, we would again attract a crowd of defenders watching and laughing at us.

  Out ahead of us the Steel Hunt performed a similar parade maneuver. From behind, as we drew opposite the Dragon Tower—so named because of the dragon motif used for the gargoyles festooning it—a trumpet sounded from our lines. The sharp snap of axes chopping through cord, and catches being slipped, presaged the mighty groan of wooden catapult and trebuchet arms as they bent to their duty. In a whirring whoosh akin to a quick breeze rising, huge boulders flew skyward and arced up high above our heads.

  Our siege engines, because they were larger than those mounted atop Jarudin's towers and battlements, had both a greater range and a greater capacity than those used by the defenders. The stones they hurled, some spherical and others rectangular quarry blocks, spun lazily, end over end. As the first passed the apex of its flight, another trumpet blast sounded, and the whole of the Steel Pack turned to face the walls. When that first stone hit, we began our advance.

  The initial strike against the Dragon Tower hit low and hard. Though the missile shattered when it struck—pieces rebounding and tumbling back out toward our lines—portions of several foundation blocks crumbled right along with it. Two more boulders pounded into that same area, enlarging the wound. The thunderc
lap of their hammering shuddered through me. Though a growing cloud of dust obscured the base of the tower, screams and shouts from the people in it told me severe damage had been done.

  The next three stones hit higher. One bounced off the top of the wall, reducing an onager to flinders and the men tending it to bloody memories, then fell down to wreak havoc in the city below. The other two did not hit so well or dramatically, but the tower wavered under their blows. More people screamed, and black cracks ran a geometric zigzag through mortar up the front of the tower.

  The last four stones hurled came down on target. One hit the tower near the top, breaking off finials and merlons as if they were teeth. The other three crashed down through the dust at the tower base. Splinters and fragments from them flew back out of the dust. The stones' impact sounded hollow, and I guessed that they'd actually punched through the tower's exterior. That had been the plan, and if it worked, the tower should come down.

  Down it came.

  The cracks running up the front of the tower spread out like plant roots. Dust shot from the windows and arrow slits as the tower's internal structures broke away. Support for them eroded from the ground up, creating stresses that ripped them apart. Through the dust I could see blocks and gargoyles beginning to fall away one by one, then that became a cascade and finally an avalanche of stone. As if the Dragon Tower had been built from glass, it collapsed in a rumbling roar that shook the ground. With a dust cloud billowing out like fog, the tower's stone flesh fluidly spilled out into the field as if it were a stony carpet being rolled out to greet us.

  A great cheer rose from behind us, but the warriors in the Red Tiger's army knew the battle had not been won with the fall of one tower. As we spurred our horses into a trot, one whole unit of archers came running out behind us. Armed with longbows, they sent shaft after shaft over our heads and down into the gap. At that range none of us expected the arrows to have enough force to pierce armor, but soldiers on the other side would take cover sooner than test that idea with their lives. For similar reasons a number of our smaller siege machines had been loaded with stones ranging in size from thumbnails to fists. Our soldiers used them to sweep the walls and gap to force defenders down.