Pasha Ismail’s enemy army was still plugged up between the hills and surrounded on all sides, and this seemed to give Whelan the confidence to bring up Lord Denys’s force from where it had remained throughout the battle protecting the caravan. They numbered several hundred more men, and surely, together with Hoffan, could hold these ravagers at bay. There couldn’t be more than fifty undead knights in total.
But Markal no longer had faith in their ability to stop the ravagers. During the Tothian Wars, a single ravager champion had cut through eleven of the finest warriors in Aristonia to attack and murder Memnet the Great in his gardens. Indeed, as Hoffan struggled valiantly to halt the ravager charge at the castle, he threw everything he had at them, only to see his forces driven back again and again, men and horse bloodied and dying.
The ravager captain shouted something in a deep, guttural voice that carried over the clash of steel. Markal knew the voice. It was Roderick, Whelan’s own brother and former captain of the Knights Temperate, who had fallen in the battle on the Old Road a few weeks ago. A small company of Roderick’s former knights were now mounting horses in the bailey, prepared to ride out and give battle in protection of their king. Did they have any idea who they were about to face?
Under Roderick’s command, ten of the ravagers fell back to give battle to Hoffan’s riders still harassing them from the rear. Soon, every one of them was surrounded by opponents stabbing and jostling, trying to knock them from their horses. Some of them would surely be cut down. Even a ravager could have his limbs severed, his head cut from his shoulders.
But as the ten fell under heavy attack, Roderick and his remaining force broke free for the final time and came charging up the hillside toward the ruined castle gates. Roderick rode at the front, a powerful warrior high in the saddle, his sword outstretched.
The orb turned hot in Markal’s hand. “Motum retardit laboramum et.”
A pulse of magical power surged from the heart of the sphere. It made the air in front of the castle shimmer, thickening like water, and the ravagers slowed, every movement of horse and man a struggle. Coming uphill into that thick mist would have tired a living army, forced them to collapse in exhaustion or fall back in retreat. But the ravagers kept pushing on. They slashed and hacked at the air, trying to cut away whatever was delaying them. Soon, the spell began to fall apart. The enemy forced its way through.
Incredibly, the few ravagers left behind were still carrying on a fight with the mass of horsemen, but Hoffan had at least managed to get some thirty or forty of his men around them, and those were coming up the road in pursuit of Roderick. They might succeed in bottling the enemy within the castle long enough for Whelan’s army to surround the castle and destroy them through sheer force of numbers. But the king would be trapped inside as well.
The ravagers came within the outer range of the bowmen on the walls. Their pace seemed to quicken.
Whelan drew Soultrup and pointed it down at the enemy. “Fire!”
A hail of arrows soared through the air and struck the lead riders. Some fell short or missed, and some deflected off breastplates or helms, but others found chinks in the armor of horse and rider. The force of the blows rocked the men back in the saddles, but none fell.
Calmly, the bowmen fitted new arrows to their bows. They had time for another good shot before the ravagers reached the castle. Whelan ordered a second volley. Bowstrings twanged, and a second wave of arrows launched. When they were airborn, Markal drew another rope of magic from the orb.
As the arrows crossed the distance, they flared with a bright, blue light. Arrows struck the ravagers with much greater accuracy this time, and when they did, they burst into blue flame. It engulfed clothing, armor, horse, and man, and a wave of heat rolled up the outer walls of the castle. The grass and brush along the hillside burst into flames, sending smoke curling in the air.
The effect was brief, but powerful, and would have killed any living man. But moments later, the ravagers came riding through the ball of fire as it fell apart. They were blackened and smelled of charred flesh, even their armor and swords scorched. But as Markal watched in dismay, their flesh was already healing itself.
Whelan had abandoned the wall to his archers and signalers. These latter dropped their flags and trumpets and drew swords to run after the king, who was scrambling down the stone staircase to join his men within the bailey.
“No!” Markal cried. “Stay on the walls.”
Whelan looked up at him. “I must fight my brother.”
“I have a plan. Stay up top. Keep your men from the gates.”
For a moment, the king looked torn, turning toward the twenty or so knights in the bailey and then up to Markal on the wall. It seemed as though he would ignore the command and instead rush down to join his men in a brutal fight to the death against the undead knights. Markal silently begged him to stay out of the fight. Whelan may be the greatest warrior in the land, but his value today was as a king and general. If he died, his army would fall apart, be forced to retreat while the dark wizard gathered his strength. Toth would win the war.
This had been the enemy’s entire motive for starting the battle. As rich a prize as the supply caravans presented, the king himself was a greater prize still. Toth would throw away his greatest general and the bulk of his strongest army simply to murder the warrior king.
And the sword. Roderick comes for Soultrup too.
Markal blanched at the thought of the undead knight in possession of that powerful weapon, the malignant soul of Pasha Malik contained in its heart, giving it strength. Markal must succeed now or all would be lost.
“I beg you!” he cried at Whelan. “Please trust me, my king.”
To his relief, Whelan nodded and came back up the stairs to the castle walls.
Markal turned back to the action outside the castle gates, watching from near the gate tower as the ravagers closed the last few yards to the castle. Roderick was at the lead, and the man looked up at him, his eyes wide behind skin that was burned and oozing pus. His mouth stretched into a grin, and Markal could sense the dark, evil intelligence behind that stare. The man who had once been so righteous in his obedience to the rules of the Brotherhood and the Knights Temperate was gone, replaced by this monster. The champion of King Toth.
The two spells had already sapped a third of the strength from Memnet’s orb. Either one would have halted an army of living men, and if they had been living men, the wizard could have called upon a dozen more spells. A hammer of wind would have thrown them to the ground, or he could have made the ground shake, or caused the underground stream beneath the hill to well up and turn the soil to mud. He could have turned their swords hot with flame until they cast them away, cursing in pain. Any of these would have stopped a normal army and still left Markal with power to draw on.
But none of those ideas would work with the ravagers. He needed something stronger. A spell came to his mind. The only one that would work. It was two spells, really, chained together, and it would draw everything he had left. The orb glowed white in his hand, making his hands disappear in the intensity of it.
“Moenia atque en mortariu cadunt saeclum.”
The ravagers had reached the ruined gates. Several men jumped down from their horses and yanked at the gates to tear them out of the way and clear the path for their horses. Arrows slammed into them, but they didn’t stop even to pluck the shafts from their flesh.
Markal lifted the orb above his head and called out the last words of the spell. The orb flared one final time as a huge, uncoiling snake of pure power blasted out and into the two towers that stood on either side of the gates. The orb went black in his hands. He staggered back a step as a crippling wave of exhaustion rolled over him with the expenditure of so much magic.
The mortar began to crumble out between the stones of the towers. It fell as dust from every joint and seam between the heavy granite blocks until it was like a fine, dry snow sifting onto the heads of the ravagers below, who p
aid it no attention. But then the ground began to shake and rumble as if some great beast were awakening in the bowels of Mithyl. The ravagers looked up. Roderick met Markal’s gaze, and this time it was the wizard who smiled. Roderick bellowed for his ravagers to fall back, but it was too late.
The gate towers were shaking violently, spilling stones from their heights. Markal fled along the battlements, where he ran into Whelan, who had come up to join him, Soultrup in hand.
Markal shoved him. “Get back!”
The right gate tower collapsed, followed seconds later by the other tower. They fell in a heap of stone and dust, with enormous chunks of stone spilling onto the ravagers and their horses, crushing them. The entire castle wall itself shuddered, and parapets collapsed, with huge blocks of stone tumbling down. For a moment it seemed as though the entire castle would give way, killing everyone on top of, within, and outside, but at last the ground stopped shaking.
When the dust cleared, half of the ravagers lay buried beneath the rubble. The rest were blocked from entering the bailey. Hoffan’s men had finally succeeded in destroying the ravagers left behind, but at the terrible cost of perhaps half of his four hundred men dead, wounded, or unhorsed. The rest came riding up the hillside toward the dazed ravagers who had survived the collapse of the gate towers. Hoffan’s men wouldn’t be enough to finish off the twenty or so enemy left, but they could pin the ravagers against the rubble until Lord Denys’s men could arrive on foot. Bring out the Knights Temperate over the rubble to finish the fight. But it wasn’t a sure victory yet.
The precarious nature of the battle didn’t stop the archers on the walls or the knights in the bailey from letting up a great cheer. From the relief on their faces, it was clear that moments earlier each and every man had expected to die this day.
Whelan should have been putting his sword away and going back to give orders to his signalers, but instead he leaned forward with Soultrup in hand, looking for a moment like a hound straining on its leash, anxious to go after a fox it has scented. Markal followed the king’s gaze.
Now that the dust had cleared, Markal could see the remains of the near gate tower. The outer walls had collapsed, leaving only the central column, around which spiraled the staircase rising to the top. The lower part of this was intact, and a ravager came up the stairs where they lay open to the sky. He reached the ruined upper reaches, grabbed hold of the broken outer wall of the castle itself, and scrambled up toward the battlements. Three other ravagers spotted him and began to follow. They were going to gain the castle anyway. In moments, the lead ravager would be at the battlements, and there was nothing that would stop him from rushing around to attack the king. The ravager looked up, and Markal’s courage blanched as he met the gaze of his enemy. It was Captain Roderick.
“Fall back,” Markal ordered the king. “I will hold him.”
Whelan turned, the skepticism deepening in his expression as he saw the wizard leaning against one of the merlons on the parapet. “No, I won’t leave you.”
Markal had almost nothing left. His body was weak and shaking from the sheer effort of calling forth the magic from the orb. Even his thoughts seemed sticky with cobwebs. But he knew that he couldn’t let Whelan face his brother, not with Soultrup slippery in his grasp.
“We can’t lose you. You cannot die.”
“Neither can you.”
“I have magic. I’ll hold him.”
Markal shoved the orb into his robes and lifted his hands. They were still whole and strong, the magic of the Order of the Wounded Hand not yet called forth. But his confidence was shaken, and he had already used his most powerful spells, only to see them fail.
Roderick gained the battlements and stared at the wizard from a few dozen feet away. His face was charred and peeling great chunks of flesh as the undead body struggled to heal itself.
“I killed Memnet the Great,” he said. It was Roderick’s voice, but deeper, and somehow overlaid as if a second man spoke from over his shoulder.
“Turn back,” Markal said. “I will destroy you.”
“So too, shall you fall,” the ravager said, paying Markal’s warning no heed. “Your soul will serve my dark master. Soon, the dead will bend a knee before King Toth.”
Markal lifted his right hand as Roderick strode toward him with his sword outstretched. “The Harvester take you.” Then he cast the spell. “Di nach necram!”
Roderick laughed as he heard the words, even as the spell gathered and cast itself. He must recognize it, via whatever monstrous thing had taken hold of him. The spell, Roderick would know, might break the bones of a living man, but it would not stop a ravager.
Except Markal hadn’t cast it against the ravager, but against the man’s sword. It shattered with an ear-splitting shriek, and shards of metal went flying. Roderick looked at the broken hilt in his hands and cast it aside with a snarl. He sprang toward Markal and slammed into him with a mailed fist. The blow crushed the air from Markal’s lungs. He flew back against the parapet and nearly went over the edge. He slumped to the ground and tried to gain his feet against the burning pain in his chest where Roderick had hit him.
To the wizard’s dismay, Roderick now drew a long dagger from his side to replace the shattered sword. He stood at the ready while Whelan came at him with Soultrup. The king had two or three good swings before the other three ravagers—now atop the battlements—joined the fight.
But as Markal watched in horror, Whelan struggled to control the weapon. Soultrup twisted in his hand as if trying to throw itself free. When the king brought it down, it seemed to curve, like a willow branch bent between two hands. The sword whistled past Roderick’s head. Then it twisted free and clattered to the ground.
“Kill him!” one of the other ravagers cried. He was a tall warrior with his helm split and his blond hair lying in burned clumps. Another dead Knight Temperate, turned against his former companion in the Brotherhood.
Roderick sprang at his unarmed brother with a triumphant cry, his dagger stabbing toward the king’s heart.
Chapter Twenty-four
The nightmare of the last few weeks had reached its conclusion. Roderick came at Whelan with his dagger thrusting, ready to end his brother’s life. For weeks, he had struggled as Pradmort led him through one atrocity after the other. With each twist of his emotions, he fell deeper under the dark wizard’s spell.
Earlier in the battle, Roderick had spied his opportunity to break free from Pasha Ismail’s doomed army and charge the weakened castle on the hill where he sensed his brother waiting. He had roared a command to his men, and they fought clear of the combined army of Balsalomians and Eriscobans pinning Ismail between the two hills. Ismail’s men cried out in fear to see their strongest warriors fleeing and begged Roderick to turn around and defend them against certain destruction. Roderick ignored them and rode hard for the Tothian Way. He had one goal, and one goal only.
There they met a powerful force of enemy riders, who encircled them and came in with a relentless attack of swords and scimitars. But when he feared he might fail to gain the castle, a strengthening breeze of magic came flowing through the ravagers from the direction of Veyre and the Dark Citadel, and Roderick and his men fought with the strength of five men. They hacked and killed and shortly opened a bloody wound in the center of the enemy forces. Then they were free and riding unopposed toward the castle.
For a few glorious moments, Roderick thought they would be able to ride straight through the broken gates and into the bailey where they would slaughter the king and his defenders and leave the enemy army leaderless. But then the cursed wizard attacked, burning and then burying in rubble half of Roderick’s force.
Roderick felt every emotion and the pain from every sword thrust and every burning arrow that slammed into him from the walls above, but at the same time it was as though he were watching everything from a distance. Some other entity seemed to grip his body, controlling his movements down to the commands and taunts that came from his mo
uth. When he came upon Markal standing atop the walls, a terrible rage swept over him that seemed to be drawn from someone else’s mind.
It’s the dark wizard, some small part of his mind insisted. He is controlling you from a distance.
“Kill him!” Pradmort cried with maniacal glee when Soultrup twisted and fell from Whelan’s hands. The former captain and two other ravagers had joined Roderick in climbing the broken castle walls to stand on the battlements.
Roderick’s surviving consciousness recoiled in horror as he thrust at his brother with his dagger, trying to bring it in under the man’s breastplate. Whelan twisted at the last moment, ducking back, and Roderick’s dagger caught in his cloak. Whelan grabbed his wrist and dragged him forward. Roderick fell off-balance and dropped the dagger. Whelan drew his second sword and plunged it into Roderick’s back between the shoulder blades.
Roderick roared in pain. He fought to his feet and reached for the sword sticking out of his back, but couldn’t pull it free. Even still impaled, the pain was fading now, and he felt stronger than ever. Now both men were unarmed. Roderick turned to Pradmort, who was behind him now on the narrow battlements.
“Give me your sword,” Roderick demanded.
He grabbed for the weapon and wrenched it from Pradmort’s hand. It was a long, straight blade, made of Southron steel and forged in Arvada. The weapon of a Knight Temperate, it would now be used to kill the king. Whelan picked up Soultrup, which lay at his feet.
Markal had been bypassed by the three ravagers, who had seen his prone body and assumed he was finished. But while one of the wizard’s hands had blackened into a claw, he now held up the other, as if trying to gather himself for a final spell.
The Warrior King (Book 4) Page 19
