The Magelands Origins

by Christopher Mitchell

  ‘I was about to send this runner to you, Captain,’ Chane continued, gesturing towards a young trooper. ‘The enemy has just been sighted.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  Daphne and Jaimes went into the tower after Chane, and followed her up the wooden stairs.

  They reached the open trapdoor and crawled out onto the roof. Daphne cursed as she snagged and ripped her left trouser leg on a large splinter jutting out from the dirty planks.

  ‘Over here,’ Chane beckoned. She was squatting by the wall, keeping her head under the height of the parapet. At her knee was a crossbow slot, two inches high, by six wide.

  Daphne crouched by it and looked out.

  ‘Just at the turn of the treeline, where it curves from south-west to south-east.’ Chane paused to allow Daphne time for her eyes to adjust. At this proximity to her, Daphne sensed a possible reason for the lieutenant’s mood, detecting a faint smell of alcohol on her breath.

  ‘Do you see that stand of tall silvery trees?’ Chane asked. ‘To the right, close to the ground there are some thick, dark brambles. One of my best spotters saw something move just there, about five minutes ago. Said it glinted like metal.’

  Daphne located the spot. It seemed still and deserted. She considered using her vision again, but decided against it. There was nothing to learn, and she was better off saving her strength.

  ‘Alright,’ she nodded. ‘Let’s go.’

  Daphne, Jaimes and Chane crawled back the way they had come and descended the stairs to ground level. Outside, Daphne’s aides were waiting for her. One was holding up her shining breastplate. Wilkom and one of her sergeants stood a pace to the side.

  ‘Chane, Wilkom, with me,’ she said, taking off her dress uniform jacket as she walked over to them. One of her aides took the jacket, while the other two started strapping her into her armour. She looked at her two lieutenants. ‘I want all of your crossbows stationed up on the wall between the corner towers and the gatehouse when the signal is given. Once up there, keep them out of sight until the second signal, then open up with everything you’ve got.’

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ they replied.

  Her aides stepped back. She now stood in polished and shining breastplate, greaves and arm vambraces. Jaimes held out her red-plumed helmet. She took it, and stowed it under her arm.

  ‘Lieutenant Dex will draw them in, and you two will support his position. If anything threatens the long walls, have runners sent to the battlers, who’ll be on the parade ground in front of Mink’s barracks. Understood?’

  They nodded.

  ‘Let’s give them such a bloody nose they’ll think twice before trying again.’

  Wilkom nodded, while Chane smirked, looking more than a little drunk. Perhaps she had the right idea, thought Daphne. She could do with a drink herself.

  Chapter 3

  Into Battle

  River Tritos, Sanang – 15th Day, First Third Summer 503

  Noon came and went. Holdings soldiers lounged in the shade beneath the walls in silence. Many slept, their helmets pushed over their eyes as they stretched out in any dark corner they could find. The quartermaster and her staff regularly made the rounds, handing out food and water while they waited.

  The hours crawled by.

  Daphne kept busy. She toured every inch of the fort, trying to have a word with each of the near two hundred people that were inside. She had talked with the battlers, and visited her lieutenants up in their towers. The hospital held fewer than before, as everyone capable of fighting had been put back onto their feet and sent to their units. Their beds would be needed soon enough, Daphne guessed.

  She returned to the south tower as twilight was descending, and the soldiers were lining up by the walls to receive their dinner. She wondered if the Sanang would wait until morning before attacking.

  ‘Sergeant Goldie,’ she ventured, catching sight of a veteran she had not yet spoken to.

  Before the woman could answer, there was a low blast on a whistle from the upper storey of the gatehouse, and everyone froze. Seemingly in reply, an angry noise erupted from the direction of the forest, building into a roar of voices.

  Daphne nodded at Goldie. The sergeant turned and gestured to her crossbow squad, who put down their bowls and trooped to the parapet.

  Daphne raced up the stairs of the south tower and onto the roof, where she crawled to the edge. Looking down in the dim light of dusk, she could see scores of Sanang warriors running out from the forest, and across the area cleared of trees. They were sprinting for the gate, two hundred at least in this first charge. Behind the walls of the fort the Holdings troopers waited in silence. It was growing darker by the second.

  The Sanang charge funnelled towards the gap in the outer ditch, opposite the open gate. They pulled up as the wooden bridge was hauled back inside the fort and the gate doors were slammed shut. Several Sanang toppled into the deep inner ditch, unable to stop their headlong charge. As the others hesitated, their bodies cramming into the space between the two ditches, Daphne stood and blew her whistle as loudly as she could.

  Torches that had been kept hidden were thrown out from the wall, providing illumination for the teams of crossbows and slingers, who sprung up from behind the parapet and began shooting at the Sanang. Twenty four crossbow bolts were released, and Daphne guessed at least a dozen hit the enemy. She saw them strike thighs, shoulders, chests, but with the exception of one Sanang who received a bolt to his right eye, none fell. Slung stones the size of hens’ eggs whipped into the crowd of Sanang, raining down on the front row, and more warriors were hit. The majority of the attacking Sanang appeared to be merely angered by the wave of projectiles striking them, and they started to jostle each other to get closer to the fort. This was the opposite direction that Daphne had been expecting, but the effect was much the same, as the pushing and shoving caused several more to tumble into the ditch, where they were impaled on the stakes at the bottom. Several Sanang were now screaming abuse and threats at the fort, a few were beating their chests, oblivious to the bolts and stones flying around them. She saw some wrench bolts from their bodies, while remaining on their feet, hurling insults at the Holding soldiers. As waves of stones and bolts peppered them, more started to fall, some with several bolts embedded in their bodies, and some due to the incessant pushing, yet they showed no sign of wanting to retreat.

  What were they doing? she wondered. They were behaving like blood-crazed animals. Daphne almost allowed herself to smile. They might not have many crossbows, but they had plenty of damn bolts.

  Suddenly a harsh, blaring horn was heard from within the forest, and her hopes fell, as hundreds more Sanang emerged from the treeline. This force was moving in ranks at a steady, disciplined pace, each warrior bearing a light shield on his left arm. Their ranks stretched out over a hundred yards, with torches held aloft every twenty paces or so. Behind four lines of soldiers, teams carried several large tree trunks they had cut down. The smaller branches had been hacked off, but the Sanang had left the larger limbs intact. Damn, she thought, this lot knew what they were doing.

  ‘Captain!’ shouted Dex from the upper storey of the gatehouse. He was waving at the new force.

  ‘I see them, Lieutenant,’ Daphne called back. ‘Keep shooting!’

  It soon became obvious that the Sanang between the ditches had also seen the approaching ranks of their compatriots, for the jostling and shouting increased. She watched one of them, a short, bald warrior, whose entire head was covered in tattoos. He was holding a longsword aloft, and was gesticulating wildly towards the inner ditch. In response, several dozen Sanang lowered themselves off the edge of the outer bank, and started scrambling down the slope. With the tattooed man urging them on, more joined in, and soon the inner ditch was filled with Sanang warriors wending their way through the stakes and corpses, while a continual shower of stones and bolts pelted them from above.

  They moved out of sight, shielded by the steep an
gle of the inner ditch. Daphne looked up, squinting into the darkness, and saw that the second force had reached the edge of the outer ditch. The tree trunks were hauled forwards through the ranks, and warriors manhandled them into position over the ditch, their length comfortably reaching the other side. The Sanang then began to file over these improvised bridges, using their large arms as much as their legs, like scampering apes.

  ‘Runner,’ she said to the wide-eyed young soldier to her left.

  ‘Yes, Captain?’

  ‘Send this message to Sergeant Harrian,’ Daphne said. ‘She is to bring the battlers to the gatehouse immediately. Tell her the Sanang are preparing a full assault on this side of the fort.’

  The runner nodded, and sped off down the hatch to the tower’s lower levels.

  ‘Do you think that’s all of them?’ Jaimes asked her.

  ‘I saw six hundred in the forest,’ she said. ‘There are six hundred here, coming straight for us. If there are more out there…’ she almost shrugged as she let the sentence die in the air.

  Jaimes nodded, his expression unreadable in the gloom.

  Damn the dark, she thought, why couldn’t they have attacked in daylight like civilised people, when she would have been able to use her line-vision to full effect?

  ‘Chane,’ she called down to her lieutenant, who stood directing her crossbow team on the wall beneath her. She looked up at Daphne, her face grimy, and her eyes wild.

  ‘Captain?’ she cried.

  ‘I’m going to the gatehouse, that’s where the first assault will land. Keep your eyes on the second force; don’t let them get near the wall.’

  As she said that, the heads of the first wave of Sanang starting appearing over the rim of the inner ditch. Daphne cursed under her breath, and ran to the hatch. She jumped down the stairs of the tower, each flight lit by flickering oil lamps, then out into the fort. Sprinting between the barracks and the wall, she reached the gatehouse, where five troopers were standing, armed with long pikes and short axes. The gate consisted of a double door, each constructed from sturdy upright timbers braced crossways with thick beams. It was positioned halfway along a passageway running through the gatehouse. Slots in the wooden ceiling ensured that anyone entering could also be attacked from above.

  The noise was intense, the screaming from the injured and enraged Sanang beyond the gate drowning out everything else. Her soldiers looked grim and sullen in the torch light, as they saluted her.

  ‘I’ve sent for the battlers,’ she said.

  A wave of relief passed over the troopers’ faces. Any response was cut short as a roar of voices came from the entrance passageway. By the time it had taken for Daphne to draw her sword, there was a great thud as a weight of flesh slammed into the gate, which shook and bulged inwards. There was a small gap between the top of the gate and the ceiling, about a foot in height, and hands began to appear there, grasping the timbers, then heads rose up, and for the first time Daphne locked gazes with a Sanang warrior, and she saw the deep hate in his eyes.

  ‘Cut them down!’ she shouted.

  The half-squad moved into position, slashing and jabbing the barbed steel at the end of their long pikes into the heads, arms and shoulders of the Sanang climbing the gate. As they fell, clasping at their ripped faces, Daphne could see movement behind them, where Sanang had scaled the passageway wall, and were now hacking with axes at the beams and planks above, which led to the first floor. Why was no one up there fighting back? She couldn’t see any activity on the first floor from where she stood, and at this rate the Sanang would be inside in minutes.

  She would risk it. She glanced at Jaimes, who, from the look in his eyes, seemed to understand immediately what she meant.

  Together, they backed up from the gate, to where Daphne could get a good view of the top of the east tower. It had a turret with an overhang that she had used before, and she knew it afforded a good, though tightly angled, view of the front of the gatehouse.

  She looped her left arm around a post holding up the canopy of a barracks block belonging to Dex’s squadron, and leaned into her line-vision. As her sight shot up to the corner turret, a wave of bright white energy exploded within her, and she staggered, dizzy and disoriented.

  Control, control, she breathed.

  Years of practice had taught her how to bring her ability under her control, especially in times of stress, but never had her training come close to replicating the feelings that ripped through her now, with the roar of the enemy battering at her senses.

  She was terrified. She froze, fighting her instinctive panic. Regret and guilt, all the lives of her troopers, her heart shuddered from the responsibility. So many people depended on her. What had her father been thinking?

  Somehow she mastered her breathing, her vision cleared, and she found herself looking down from the vantage point of the turret, the front of the south-east wall on her right, extending down to the gatehouse, which jutted out from the line of the palisade.

  Despair filled her. In a dozen places, the Sanang from the second force were laying their tree trunks against the wall, propping them up at an angle. Even as she watched, they were beginning to climb towards the top of the stockade. Crossbow bolts and slingstones rained down upon them, but they were holding their shields high to cover themselves, and were moving steadily upwards.

  Over at the gatehouse, the situation was worse. Sanang warriors had scaled the front of the building, and were engaging the Holdings troopers within through any available opening. Daphne saw a trooper being flung from the upper storey, his body tumbling through the air to the ground below.

  She absorbed this in an instant, then pulled her vision back to her body. She fought the urge to fall to her knees and vomit, instead settling for scrunching her eyes closed as her world span. She felt Jaimes at her right, supporting her arm.

  ‘The battlers approach, Captain,’ he whispered.

  She needed to steady herself, and knew only one certain way to do so. Her body would pay the inevitable toll of exhaustion and crippling aches afterwards, assuming there was an afterwards, but she could see no other way. It would be so easy to lie down, let sleep overwhelm her as soon as she released her will, and let her vision slip away. She longed for oblivion.

  Instead, she switched to battle-vision, and calmed, energy and clarity rippling through her. She raised herself upright from where she had been hugging the barracks post, and watched as her fifteen battlers jogged down the road towards her. Battle-vision would enable her to carry on for much longer than normal, but there was nothing supernatural about it, she was depleting her body’s reserves, and when they were gone, they were gone. Instructors at the military academy had always been insistent on this point: never switch between visions without a break in between. She had only done it once before, and it had laid her out for days.

  ‘Sergeant Harrian,’ she said, as if she were out for a stroll.

  The veteran battler came to a halt before her. She looked to be in her mid-forties and carried a large double-headed battle-axe. Judging by her scars, she had survived plenty of earlier engagements, and Daphne wondered if they had still been at war with the Rahain when the sergeant had enlisted.

  ‘Captain,’ she said, her gaze flickering upwards and around to take in the scene. Sanang could be seen over the tops of the walls, attacking the troopers on the palisade.

  ‘Split your battlers into three half-squads, one to Wilkom, one to Chane, and one with me.’

  Harrian nodded and turned to her armoured battlers. With a few quick gestures, the group divided. Five ran for Chane’s squadron by the south tower, while five headed the other way, to assist Wilkom. Harrian, Daphne noticed, had chosen to remain with her.

  ‘Sergeant,’ she said, speaking loudly enough for the troopers to hear, ‘the Sanang first wave are scaling the front of the gatehouse, and are getting in over the top.’ She pointed at the door to the building’s ground level, a few paces behind her. ‘We’re going in.’

&
nbsp; Harrian looked up at her and nodded. Daphne watched for a moment as each of the battlers drew upon their vision. The intensity in their eyes changed somehow, in a manner only those who had experienced it themselves could discern. They would have known that Daphne was using battle-vision as soon as they had seen her.

  She set off towards the entrance. As she ran, she looked up to review the situation at the gate. The great doors were holding firm, though the bulge at their centre remained. The five guards posted there were still busy keeping back those attempting to climb the gate. She could see the sweat running down the troopers’ faces, and the grim determination that was sustaining them. Every detail of the scene she comprehended in a fraction of a second, her minding sorting out and understanding what she had seen at a far faster rate than she was capable of in normal life.

  She entered the empty lower floor to the left of the gate. There were wooden steps against the back wall, and she reached them in seconds. At the base of the stairs she paused, conscious of the racket her steel-clad soldiers had made behind her. She motioned for them to stop, and tilted her head to listen. Aside from the constant background roar, she could distinguish nothing coming from above.

  She jogged up the steps, her sword out low, before Jaimes could insist on going first. At the top she came into another room, with a door leading to the large hall containing the murder holes over the gates, where she seen the Sanang trying to enter. As the others joined her on the first floor, she signalled towards it.

  This time both Harrian and Jaimes gently pushed Daphne behind them as they approached the door. A battler took the handle, yanked it open, and Harrian sprinted through, closely followed by Jaimes and the others. Daphne went in last, to the sound of yells and screams from fights across the room, which extended all the way to the front of the gatehouse. A Sanang warrior, armed with a Holdings blade, rushed towards her.