Darkness and Steel

by Martin Parece

  The army had closed within a stone’s throw of the wall, and Thom ordered the flanking catapults to begin their assault. They rained small showers of relatively light but deadly stones into the sides of the host, and the Loszian advance began to slow from the constant onslaught from the front and now their flanks. It took only a few minutes of this before commanders below barked orders, and columns began to split from the army to climb the long, rocky slopes. Arrows came down upon them from the men defending the catapults. The charging Loszians paid dearly for every foot of ground. Those who climbed toward the flanks looked like waves breaking upon a shore, coming ever higher and then falling backward. Those coming for the wall stumbled, stepped or sometimes even climbed over their fallen, and already a great open graveyard lay under their feet. Yet, they came, driven by the chariots behind them.

  The walking dead, dropped steadily by arrows like tall grasses sheared by a scythe, reached the wall first, and they pressed up against the gates. Finding the gates solid and unmoving, the continued to walk forward, eventually tripping over each other in their attempts to come forward. The gates were barred and braced with heavy pieces of lumber inside, but they still creaked against the great weight that came to bear upon them. Some of the defenders shouldered their bows and instead began to throw heavy stones down upon the animated corpses.

  “There’s just too many,” Cor said to Thom, who nodded his agreement. “Thyss said kill the sorcerers.”

  “I’ve never seen one. Is that them out there on the chariots? They’re too far out of range, easily five hundred yards.”

  “Not fo’ meh, sah.”

  Cor turned to see Prad looking out over the horde. He asked the ranger, “You can hit them?”

  Prad notched an arrow on his bow and pulled the string back past his ear. Cor was no archer, but he hadn’t seen many weapons like this one, especially among the Westerners. It was of Tigolean craftsmanship, bent at hard angles in several places as opposed to the tall, sweeping arcs of Western bows. Prad held the pose for what seemed like hours, studying the distance intently. He did not breathe, and Cor was certain that the man did not aim high enough for the arrow to carry.

  When loosed, the missile flew through the air faster than Cor’s eyes could follow, and it seemed as if it trailed gossamer. He lost the arrow half way through its journey, but then a lone, silk clad form crumpled off a gilded chariot and fell limply to the ground. A large number of the writhing forms directly below and elsewhere in the host also ceased their movement. Prad beamed pridefully at the two men.

  “You can do that again?” Cor asked him.

  “Yes, lawd. I’s can,” Prad said, and he drew another arrow.

  Prad had managed to take down another necromancer, and he pulled his string back a third time. He fired, but he had no idea of the outcome as a dark cloud had risen from the center of the army. It rose into the air and grew ever larger as it approached the wall, and the men began to grow fearful of it even as they continued firing arrows into the forces below. It came very close, obscuring the defenders’ vision.

  “What is it, Lord Dahken?” Thom asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  A tendril emerged from the cloud, small at first, and then growing larger and longer. The men all but stopped as it seemed to reach out, almost gingerly, and then suddenly wrap itself around the form of Prad. His eyes rolled back into his head as he screamed horrifically, never stopping as his veins turned a frightful blue and strained and bulged out of his flesh. His flesh began to rot and fall off his bones in sickening chunks, and his remaining skin writhed as if maggots crawled underneath it. His momentary shock worn off, Cor cut a swathe clean through the pestilence and accomplished absolutely nothing. Another tentacle broke off from the first and attempted to constrict Cor in the same way, but it found his flesh not to its liking. Other men screamed as they too came under attack.

  “Get the men down!” screamed Thyss as she took the steps up two at a time. “It can only hurt what the necromancer sees!”

  Thom shouted for the men to drop behind the granite curtain as he did the same. Some delayed just a moment too long, and they found themselves rotting alive. Thyss reached the top, and Cor immediately moved to shield her from the cloud. Just before he reached her, Thyss held her hands before her in a way Cor well recognized. What could only be described as a wave of flame came into being out of nothing and swept its way toward the cloud of death. It was very much the same effect as a hot summer sun burning off thick gray fog left over from the night, and within seconds, the black pestilence had completely disappeared. Thyss breathed out hard and sat down with her back against the wall, the enemy army behind her.

  Cor knelt beside her and said, “I was wondering how long you were going to wait before getting in the fight. Are you well?”

  “Our child has been blessed by Hykan, but I find that I tire easily,” she said.

  “Thank the gods that I had you here, that you knew what to do,” he said as he leaned in to kiss her. The stare she returned made him stop. “You didn’t know that would work, did you? Gods damn it Thyss, if that thing had taken you –“

  “Then,” she interrupted, “either Hykan or my Lord Dahken would have saved me.”

  “Lord Dahken,” Thom called, “if I might interrupt, the battle still rages! Look.”

  Cor stood and peered over the granite to find a dire situation. Regardless of the men it had killed, the dark spell had allowed the army to advance without fear of the Westerners’ piercing arrows. Several huge ladders had been brought to the forefront; the defenders knocked these down, only to have them again lifted against the wall. A boom echoed from below, and Cor could feel it vibrate through the soles of his boots. He looked straight down to see a battering ram rearing back to again crash into the gates. Dozens of men, slaves and soldiers, hefted the thing, and steel tower shields had been placed to provide them some protection from above.

  A pair of giant siege towers had been assembled, and they lumbered forward. They were monstrosities of wooden engineering – huge platforms on wheels, pushed from behind by dozens of strong men. Inside were dozens of wooden steps that led upwards, protected by thick paneling, armor against Western arrows. Some archers wrapped their steel arrowheads in linen and set them aflame, but the towers would not catch fire for a sudden coldness, abnormal to summer even in the mountains, would extinguish the flames.

  “If those things make the wall, we are lost!” Thom shouted. “Turn the catapults on them!”

  Thyss pulled herself up and breathed deeply, as she attempted to steel her will and find strength. She raised her arms to the sky above, the late afternoon sun behind her in the west, as she silently called a prayer to Hykan. Over the cacophony of a great battle, only those closest to one of the towers would have heard the slight hissing and pop of wood burning. It suddenly became engulfed in flames as a blazing pillar of infernal fire burst suddenly from the wood paneling. Those closest to it were immediately consumed, and all of the other Loszians, slave and soldier alike, ran from the inferno in all directions.

  Muttering her thanks to her god, Thyss’ eyes closed and she slumped forward to be caught by Cor. He looped her arm around his neck, supporting her with his shoulder and, thanking the gods that she was still conscious just enough to barely walk, took her down the stairs away from the wall. Marya and Keth ran to the bottom and awaited their Lord Dahken as he reached the ground, and they each took one of her arms.

  “Take her someplace safe,” Cor commanded them. “Marya, I entrust her safety to you. If something happens to her, you had better share her fate. Keth, I need you back here immediately.”

  As Cor bounded back up the steps to rejoin Thom, he saw the rope ladder from the northern cliff face as it tumbled down to fall draped over the backside of the wall. It meant one thing only – the northern flank was about to fall, and Cor hoped it had been an expensive victory for the Loszians. He knew that the southern flank could not be far behind. The men up there had a le
ss clear view of the pass, and therefore they were more difficult to approach. Unfortunately, it also meant that they could not fill their attackers with arrows until the latter were halfway up the ridge.

  The thudding of the battering ram had subsided, and Cor felt great waves of heat coming up over the wall. Following Thom’s motion, he saw that the Loszians had abandoned the battering ram for a time, and the outside of the wall’s great gates burned. The only good news seemed to be that the catapults had disabled the other siege tower in its approach. It was bent and dented and men worked under the rain of arrows to somehow attach a wheel to its broken front axle.

  “We already grow short of arrows, Lord Dahken,” Thom said grimly. “We scavenge from the dead, and I’ve told the men to make every arrow count.”

  “Already? How many did we start with?”

  “About forty thousand total.”

  “Forty thousand?” Cor asked absently, and he looked out over the pass.

  It grew hard to see, as the sun was low in the sky behind them, and the granite wall created a long shadow on the ground below. Squinting in the gloom, Cor could barely make out forms lying still below, hundreds even thousands. He even thought he saw blood flowing through the pass in streams, pooling at low points, and for just a brief moment, Cor felt the oddest of sensations. It was similar to the pulls he’d felt in his blood to find his weapons and armor but without the tugging strings. It gave him pause, but only for a moment as he returned his mind to the task at hand.

  The Loszian host had been reduced greatly, perhaps even by half, but it meant little if his men were almost out of arrows. Even with a small opening through which to pass, the press of twenty thousand or more would crush two thousand in personal combat. The Loszians seemed to have quieted temporarily, regrouping and waiting.

  “Tell the men to cease fire,” Cor said, and he paused while Thom spread the order. “We must save every arrow possible. I want the archers below to give their quivers to those on the wall. They will join the soldiers.

  “What have they done down there?” he asked, motioning toward the burning gate.

  “I don’t quite understand it, Lord Dahken,” Thom said as he looked down confusedly. “Those doors are easily three feet thick of solid oak and banded with heavy iron. They doused them with some type of oil and set it ablaze. I’m not sure how long, but I think it will be a long time before they burn down enough for their battering ram to break through. And even then, they’ll have to charge through a burning wreck.”

  Cor nodded and flinched as a Loszian crossbow bolt dinked right off his helm. “Perhaps we should keep our heads down a bit. I don’t know what they’re up to, but if they want our gates on fire, we don’t. Perhaps we could throw water down onto the flames? Set up some runners to bring buckets of water, throw it down upon the wall. Have more douse the inside of the gate. Maybe we can slow whatever the Loszians are trying to do.”

  Thom busied himself with carrying out the orders, meanwhile archers ran here and there collecting any ammunition they could find. A few enterprising Loszians peered over the edge of the north face and fired crossbows or threw other missiles at the defenders. True to Thom’s word, they were largely ineffective and easily repulsed by just a few well placed shots from longbows. Cor saw Keth and Marya with the infantry below and waved them up the steps.

  “Dahken Marya, I left Thyss in your care,” he said quietly, angrily.

  “She would have none of it, Lord Dahken,” Marya said with a subservient nod of her head.

  “It’s true, Lord Dahken,” chimed in Keth. “We took her back to your quarters, and she seemed well enough, just tired. She told us to tell you that she needed no nurse. She would be back in the fray shortly.”

  Cor smiled, though no one saw it through his black helm. “Of course. Return to your posts and stay ready.”

  “What is that?” Marya gasped, pointing past Cor’s right shoulder.

  Cor turned to see a small, black cloud approaching from the Loszian horde, which parted wide to allow its passage. No, cloud was not the correct word; the thing that had killed Prad and some others was a cloud. This was more of a dark force, completely transparent, yet somehow hard to see through. As it came close to the wall, all nearby felt an extreme unnatural cold, quite unlike the chills of the deepest winter. It enveloped the blazing doors that made Fort Haldon’s gate, extinguishing the flames almost immediately. Sick realization stuck in Cor’s stomach.

  “Marya, Keth, prepare the men to fight,” he shouted. “Thom, the men must hold their arrows, hold until we have no choice but to fire lest we be overrun.”

  “What is it?” Thom shouted as Cor made his way down the steps.

  “Have you ever seen ice, how hard it is?” Cor asked, receiving a nod in answer. “Then you also know how easy it is to shatter with a hammer!”

  By the time Cor reached the men on the ground, the great doors had already frozen. The oak, wet from the Westerners’ buckets, had begun to expand as the water froze in its cracks. At the same time, the iron bands shrank ever so slightly from the cold of the spell, and Cor could hear it complain as it strained against the expanding ice. Rivets holding the bands in place began to pop, and then came the great boom of the battering ram. On the first impact, the entirety of the great oak doors creaked. On the second, boards that were frozen solid, once immensely strong and now brittle, cracked and broke inward, and the metal bands began to break free.

  Cor drew his steel, and he heard all the rest of the men behind him do so as well. He stood at the front of his fighting men, with his Dahken at his sides. Soulmourn and Ebonwing began to sing, a great song of war that crescendoed to drown out the sounds of the anxious men around him. Cor had killed many men in the short few years since the murder of his parents, yet rarely did battle come without a sense of fear. It was with him now, a slight nervousness in his limbs and a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Naran had once told him that it was fear that allowed men to be brave. It seemed odd, but Cor hoped all those behind him felt the same thing in their stomachs.

  He had lost count of how many times the battering ram struck the doors, but it seemed only to be a matter of minutes before the shattered inward with a great cracking sound like the felling of a tree. The great timbers used to brace the gate’s doors fell uselessly to the ground as they had no more doors to support. The forms that rushed through ragged opening were not the black armored soldiers that Cor expected, but the lumbering forms of corpses, pushed onward by Loszian magic. They poured through the open portal in scores with no end of them in sight.

  The Westerners hesitated, having never faced the walking dead before today, but they shook off their fright quickly as the four Dahken at their head waded into the army of the dead, cutting them down like blades of grass.

  9.

  Geoff itched to charge into the fight, and he had very nearly done so several times. As he watched the dead clamber through the gate by the hundreds, he wanted nothing more than to dismount and charge his ghast into the fray. He knew that Cor would be there, defending that very point, and he ached to drive the Dahken to his knees.

  “Patience,” Nadav had said many times. “There is order to the apparent chaos. You will get your chance, I promise you.”

  But now Nadav was frowning, and he called the other necromancers to him. The congregation of robed figures spoke to one another hurriedly, and Geoff heard bits of the discussion. He didn’t really care what they talked about, but it sounded as if the corpses had been unable to move the stalwart defenders at all. Several armored Loszians were called over, infantry commanders, and within moments the soldiers marched for the wall.

  Geoff inserted himself into the ring of sorcerers. “I should be leading that charge,” he said indignantly.

  “Not yet, my Dahken,” Nadav disagreed, and he waived off the other Loszians. Seeing that Geoff’s impatience had turned to open anger, he explained. “I want you to sweep down upon your former comrades like a nightmare. Allow them to be
come fully engaged with our soldiers, and then you shall break their spirits as well as their defense.”

  * * *

  Cor had to admit that despite Thyss’ assurance that they would, it surprised him how easily the corpses enslaved by Loszian magic fell. He learned within seconds that he needed not deal a blow that would slay a man, that he truly only needed to wound for the spell to be broken. They were slower to react than a living foe, though dangerous in a large mass just for the pure weight of them. Even still, the Dahken and soldiers of Fort Haldon set them to rest en masse, and Cor actually had to hold the men back lest they push the fight outside the now shattered gates.

  The wisdom of this became clear as the walking dead suddenly turned and filed back through from whence they came. Some rushed to pursue, but were held back by the sight of a great armored mass marching steadily toward them. Small mountains of corpses that stank in the hot summer air surrounded the defenders, and Cor thought there must be a thousand of them. The now unmoving corpses would make combat against live foes difficult, as one must be careful to avoid stumbling. He suddenly sheathed Soulmourn, belted Ebonwing and began to drag the corpses into the open gap in the wall where the gates once stood.

  “Quickly,” he shouted, “throw the corpses into opening. It will make it hard for them to pass through!”

  He hadn’t even finished before his soldiers grasped his intent, and five hundred soldiers and archers set to the task. They used only the bodies that were once animated, avoiding their fallen compatriots, of which there were many due to Loszian catapults, sorcery and those who had been overwhelmed by the dead. Within minutes the Loszian troops arrived the wall, but a barricade of rotting flesh the height of an average Westerner blocked their passage into Fort Haldon. While their enemies puzzled over this new complication, Cor’s soldiers regrouped into their units with weapons at the ready.