by Samit Basu
The Avrantic left flank rallied, finding the centaurs otherwise occupied, but their plans came to naught, for Askesis finally gave the signal, and the Durgans and centaurs waiting anxiously in Shantavan rushed out with wild yells behind the rear infantry, peppering the Avrantics with arrows and driving them further inwards. On the right, the neo-Hudlumms entered the fray, cutting down dismounted cavalrymen with great, sweeping axe-strokes.
The Avrantic army was now surrounded. Another Koli legion rushed in to aid the Artaxerxians. On the hills, Rabin’s archers were now shooting slowly, taking careful aim. The circle was closing from the rear, as the Avrantic reserve infantry crumbled under the fury of the Koli left flank, and warlocks dealt death with abandon, and cackling vamans sent a relentless stream of comets of death crashing into their midst. The Durgans and centaurs streaming in from Shantavan shattered the Avrantic left flank, and screaming wood-spirits summoned by the centaur shamans tore into the heavy infantry, breaking any attempt to make a stand. The war-elephants’ charge had almost been halted. At least a hundred elephants lay dead in the field, mostly shattered by the missiles from the vaman ballistae. But some twenty elephants survived, and achieved what the rest of the army could not; they broke the circle. The Artaxerxian lines fell apart as the maddened war-elephants trampled through them and headed for the hills.
But Haroun of the Artaxerxians would not stomach this; he rode in pursuit of the elephants with a few of his bodyguards, sending arrows into their legs, Haroun himself caught hold of a rope that held a platform up, and swung acrobatically up on the elephant’s back. He slew every man on the platform as onlookers cheered, fending off arrows with his sword, his skill and balance unbelievable. He then raced forward on the lumbering beast’s back and stuck two long swords into the base of its skull. As the elephant stumbled and fell, the Artaxerxian hero slid smoothly down its trunk, and landed gently on the field, striking a dashing pose amidst much applause a foot away from the fallen elephant. The applause died a sudden death, though, as the dying elephant fell squarely on the handsome Haroun, ending cruelly the life of Artaxerxia’s brightest star.
Rabin’s archers picked off the men on the elephants’ backs as the beasts reached the bottom of the hills. The archers then watched in amazement as the Kolis broke formation and fled instead of stepping up to fight the elephants, but they were only following orders; the elephants charged on in straight lines between the hills, and the Koli legions still waiting behind the hills, moved aside politely and let them pass, and then surged forward and closed the gap in the circle.
The very centre of the circle belonged to the ravians, who had abandoned any thoughts of mind control and other subtle arts, and were fighting for survival. Here in the battlefield among soldiers, they were at an advantage; they kept moving, killing with every thrust, deflecting arrows and catapult bolds on to their enemies. But as their opponents swelled in number, undeterred by the hills of corpses they felled around them, things became less clear; they were facing opponents fighting on instinct, hacking and stabbing blindly. Technique was no longer a factor, and no ravian danger-sense could predict slipping on freshly liberated intestines, or being hit in the eye by random splinters of bone; even ravians grew tired eventually. Warlocks circled them like vultures, sending blasts of death magic across the circle. The ravians dodged most, but could not dodge all. There were only about a hundred ravians left, trapped in the centre of the field, when Askesis ordered the Durgan war-elephants to enter the killing grounds. The battle was won. In the rear, Durgan cavalry and centaurs raced across the ground, picking off survivors. The Koli infantry and the neo-Hudlumms swept across the field, adding their numbers to pockets of resistance. The defenders around the hills broke ranks, eager for a taste of the battle, and chased down the last of the shattered Avrantic left flank; some horsemen managed to fight their way out of the tightening ring of Koli warriors and break into Shantavan; they were not pursued as they fled from the battlefield.
On the central hill, Askesis watched the great basin of Pataal-e-Gurh, littered with the bodies of innumerable corpses and smiled grimly. He’d not expected a battle of annihilation. All that remained was so snuff out the remaining ravians; this would take a few hours, but they would be done by sundown.
It was then that Arunava the warlock cried out in alarm and pointed to the east, at dark clouds blotting out the sky, travelling against the wind towards the battlefield. Tendrils of smoke streaked across the sky like tentacles, and massive swirling torrents of impenetrable darkness followed them. On the battlefield, the ravians cried out fierce challenges, and made a savage charge; they broke through the circle of attackers, hacking and slashing without mercy, and trod lightly over the carcasses of the fallen as they fled.
Shadows enveloped the battlefield, eating away the sun’s face in the west, bringing near-darkness and confusion in their wake. The ravians dealt death mercilessly, felling muddled, blinking soldiers like wheatstalks. Warlocks lit flares and sent them flying at the ravians, revealing their positions, but they pressed on regardless, in desperate hurry. They seemed unconcerned about the arrows and fireballs that followed them; many died in the process, but others, at least forty in number, found horses and galloped off into the darkness, and after a while they broke through the line of Koli infantry that held the trench, and disappeared into the forest. The clouds moved further westward, until the entire army was in shadow. Light could be seen in every direction, far away across the horizon; but above Gurh there was only darkness, solid, thick and inky. Flares were lit on each hill, and warlocks in every maniple lit torches with enchanted fire. The surviving generals rushed to Askesis, wondering what sorcery they were about to face next; Askesis had no answers. The legions closed their ranks. Their superb training showing as they assembled swiftly and efficiently in the centre of the battlefield and stood poised and ready in the smothering dark, flushed with pride at their recent magnificent victory, waiting for whatever new enemy was about to reveal itself. As the thunder of hooves and the men’s shouting died down, a new sound could be heard – a dull droning, as of distant thunder, yet with a metallic, harsh edge.
And then the darkness melted, the clouds dissolving around them like ink thrown in a river, and within seconds it was as if the ominous clouds had never existed. The droning sound in the sky was louder now, and harsher. Askesis’ armies looked up, and their eyes widened, their jaws dropped. Hardened veterans cried out in wonder like children as their minds slowly absorbed the wonder in the sky.
Six ships of metal, shining silver and gold, floated above the battlefield in a huge hexagon. Huge, smooth, mind-numbing marvels of construction, one shaped like a turtle, others like a swan, a whale, a jellyfish, and the remaining two like strange animals never seen on this world. Each was the size of a palace, and was adorned with strange symbols and scripts. Massive tubes ran across their bellies and their sides were lined with portholes and studded with metallic constructs that shone like rubies and emeralds. The prows of these ships were constructed in the shape of animal heads, looking downwards, coldly surveying the ground below.
Askesis looked up, blinked, and looked again, but the airships were still there; they were very real, floating islands in the sky, trailing smoke and vapour. On the ground, many men kneeled and prayed, for surely the marvels in the sky were the chariots of the gods themselves, come to bless them in their hour of glory. They felt small, insignificant; all they had achieved on this day paled in comparison with magnificence on this scale.
With a strange, clicking, buzzing sound, trap-doors began to open under the ships, and large metal barrels emerged, protruding from the animals’ bellies, and Kol’s troops watched on, fascinated; perhaps these were stairs of some sort, perhaps the gods themselves would walk down and speak to Marshall Askesis, grant him boons to win this war for humanity, crushing ravians and monsters alike. The droning noise of the airships turned to a high-pitched whine, and the air throbbed with anticipation.
Six pillars of
light suddenly appeared on the battlefield, one under each ship, each pillar covering an area the size of a small gladiatorial arena, and cries of amazement echoed all over Gurh and turned a second later into shrieks of horror. In a flash, everything the light touched burned to cinders. Centaurs and men were transformed into frozen, charred corpses in the blink of an eye, and even the Durgan war-elephants were instantly turned to mountains of ash. Concentric circles of fire spread out over the battlefield, burning everything in their path. Hundreds of soldiers died in seconds. The rest stared blindly, unable to comprehend the enormity of what they had just witnessed.
The ships began to move, circling the battlefield slowly, and the pillars moved with them, incinerating everything they touched. Entire legions were decimated in a minute. Most of those who were far enough from the first attack to have enough time to will their limbs into action were consumed by the widening circles of flame. A few managed to leap into the river and were saved. The sound of thunder rolled over the plains. Up in the sky, there were flashes of light stabbing out from rows of cannons that had emerged from the sides of the airships, blue and red and green thrusts of light, and for each flash, on the ground there were thundering explosions, sending fountains of smoke and chunks of bodies spiraling high into the sky. Some soldiers ran blindly from one moving tower of burning light only to be caught under another; some bought themselves a few minutes of life by huddling together helplessly in the very centre of the battlefield, and watched helplessly as walls of flame surrounded them, until one of the ships ended their misery; it rolled slowly across the killing field, its light-beam devouring everything in its path, and the soldiers died instantly under its fiery gaze.
Askesis stood on his hill, unable to move, and watched his army burn. And as he looked in the brilliant light at the corpses of young boys who had died at this command, his thoughts were filled with regret. Where was the glory in their death? What had they died for? How would their families survive? Had they been prepared for the horrors they had seen in their last minutes, the gaping wounds, the dying screams, the befouled earth, the shattered, charred faces of men who might have been their friends? How had he brought them to this accursed place? Askesis was a man of logic; he saw clearly that there could be no victory against the powers he faced now. The order of things had changed, the world where humans held sway had ended. Kol would fall, and so would Imokoi, their colours and shadows succumbing to this all-devouring white light. The vamans would hide in their holes while they could; their fate did not concern him. He would not run back to Kol and wait for the inevitable. He would not struggle like a cockroach on its back while the gods watched and laughed. His only alternative was total surrender. But he would not make his men burn with him. He looked behind the hill, and was touched to find that his reserves troops still maintained perfect discipline as they stood in columns, waiting for death, waiting for orders. He commanded his trumpeters to sound the despairing notes of defeat and dispersal, and watched his troops break ranks and flee, noting with pride how men dragged other men on to their horses before they scattered, fleeing desperately from the great fingers of light and fire that spelled out the world’s doom on the bloodstained fields of Gurh. He looked up; two ships approached, but many of the men would outrun them. His Mortals still stood with him, though the vamans and the warlocks had fled. He ordered his Mortals to ride back to Kol, and save it if they could; they begged him to come with them, but he refused. On the battlefield, horses with flaming manes and whimpering riders on their backs hurdled walls of fire and lanced through clouds of dust and ash. In Shantavan, centaurs and Durgans sped southwards through falling flaming branches. To Askesis’ left, explosions consumed Rabin and his archers as they fled downhill. To his right, burning neo-Hudlumms raced uphill singing death-songs as the light overtook them and their bodies were consumed, and the vaman catapults crackled and splintered. The soul-stirring war-reports of Gymros and Gerilola turned to ashes seconds before their authors. Above Askesis, a ship slowly wove its way towards his hill. He planted his sword in the earth and waited for it, his stern features showing no trace of the storms raging in his mind. He turned and watched his soldiers fleeing homewards, and they looked back at him as their horses sped away, alone on his hill, face brilliantly lit as the blinding light-tower closed in on him, and then he was gone.
* * *
And far above the killing fields of Gurh, around the table that was the map that was the game that was the world, there was much rejoicing, and laughter, and drawing of deep breaths, and derivations of significe and meaning, and bad poetry, and slapping of backs, and stroking of tentacles, and promises of payment of rash private wagers. Zivran’s Game, the Players said, was a masterpiece – how exquisite its design! How quaint its pieces! He was to be congratulated. And he was congratulated, effusively, and he muttered gratefully into his beard and cast shy glances at the radiant Players. They were entranced, and some were already pleasantly drunk. They huddled closer to the game, and looked towards their crystals as new pieces were assigned to them.
* * *
On the akashraths, the ravians moved great wheels with their minds. White-cloaked captains set their courses towards the southwest, towards the magnificent, impudent, doomed human city of Kol.
Chapter Eight
Inside the Pyramid of the First Pharaoh, in lost subterranean halls of heroes, a great humming and chanting filled the air at the Scorpion Man’s bidding. A tapping, rustling sound swelled into a wall-shaking roar as millions of spirit scarabs crawled over ancient, dusty walls, tracing out ever-shifting mandalas, amassing as great swarms to push aside tablets of stone, open caskets, and stir great boiling tanks and cauldrons of slime and brine. The pyramid echoed with creaks and groans as the heroes of the past woke again, freed themselves of their diverse confinements and strode down lost corridors on unsteady feet, their minds abuzz with their pale master’s words, their heads still held high in remembrance of their former glory.
The hanging stairways of the Great Pyramid echoed with the sound of zombies and ooze-dripping ghouls and ghoulehs marching up the step-labyrinth from the bottomless depths below, zigzagging lines of dead soldiers in single file, an ever-moving never-ending ant-farm preparing for the harvest.
The hall of Erkila, queen of the damned, was now occupied by the tailors of the undead, Marichellis from the haunted Volstone hills in Olivya. As the giant cat-woman statues watched with their burning eyes, a line of skeletal warriors dragged barrows full of limbs towards Erkila’s sarcophagus, in front of which the Marichellis sat at their creaking spinning-wheels and stitched and stuffed their grotesque dolls, strange amalgamations of human and animal body parts and materials that had never known life, held together with gut-threads, nails, wires and incantations; crocodile-headed men, human torsos on giant spider bodies, dogs with spiked chariot wheels for legs, lance-horned giant bulls and hundreds of other twisted chimaeric creatures that were then taken to necromancers for reanimation.
In the innermost sanctums of the Great Pyramid, surrounded on every side by labyrinths full of deathly traps and ancient curses, and guarded ceaselessly by nameless monsters that had lain brooding in ravenous hunger since the dawn of time, lay the hearts of Erkila’s generals, the lych-lords. The lych-hearts, keys to their masters’ true deaths, were in many forms; some beating in iron chests, others pouring back and forth through hour-glasses, yet other flitting ceaselessly within their confined rooms in the forms of emerald spiders or bats. The heart of the greatest lych-lord of all, Izogul the Deathless, was placed in the eye of a needle, inside a stone egg, inside a scarab, inside a canoptic jar that lay in the Pharaoh’s chamber. The Pharaoh slept still, but the hieroglyphs on his walls had started moving on their own, farmers and hunters in the pictures changing positions, shifting into new places to tell a new story, the tale of the death of the world.
Around the Pyramid of the First Pharoah, the Ayinhara desert in south Elaken was teeming with lifelessness. Under the pale light of the ri
sing moon, the sand shone white and cold, and in a pale swirling mist the legions of the undead stood, feeling their bodies erode away as they awaited the call to end the world. The dry desert air throbbed with menace and anticipation, despite the fact that many thousands among the whispering host had been waiting for centuries.
On the lower steps of the Pyramid stood necromancers with their curling horn-helms and robes of black and purple, skull-masks stained with ichor spirits they drank from cups of bone, gloating as mounds of corpses were dragged in great carts towards the pyramid. The necromancers’ ram-headed staffs cast forth pale green clouds, summoning spirits from rows of jars embedded in the sand, releasing hungry Avrantic pretas and Elakish moumras who chuckled and gurgled in eerie glee as they sank their fangs into their new bodies, which jerked and twitched awkwardly before standing up, pulled by invisible ropes, dragged into bitter un-life by the puppeteers that danced within them, slavering hungrily at stiffening tissue-strings, pouring cold fingers of venomous spirit through still, sluggish veins.
On great dune-hillocks to the south of the Pyramid danced hungans, voudon priests with entrails tied in their wild dreadlocked hair, commanding cohorts of slowly swaying zombies, whose hulking bodies were in advanced states of decay, flesh and muscle and innards rotting and flapping. Riding loas lurked silently in each zombie’s head, ready to dance their death-dances at the hungans’ command. Jakyinis hummed shrill incantations, damballas hissed with long forked serpent-tongues lolling over their gaping open chests and exposed snake-egg hearts. The armies of the zombies and the skeletal undead stretched as far as the horizon in every direction; and behind their ever-swelling battalions stood the Legions of the Void, unnumbered ranks of roaming warrior spirits, long-dead nations of fierce martial races, now gaps in reality filled in with swirling sand to form the shapes of the human armies they had once been, great kings and proud heroes, chariots, camels, even elephants, each a raging sandstorm trapped in a memory of a shape, bright swords and spears glittering once more in the moonlight.
