Livran slowed his horse to let her come alongside his stallion. “The rearguard say they spotted the same two scouts from before, still on our trail. Yesterday, they kept to half a mile behind us. Now, they’re just outside of bowshot. They’re getting more confident.”
“We could run them down, sir,” Davin, one of the Livran’s men-at-arms pointed out. He was an older man, a veteran who had fought with Timon in the Autumn Rebellion. Hard by any measure. Kareen guessed he would have to be to have stood with Livran’s father and five-hundred other mercenaries against an enemy numbering over forty-thousand.
Livran raised a hand. “Not yet. They’re probably just scouts, but if they’re not…” He set his jaw, perhaps reconsidering his earlier dismissal of an ambush. “They could be trying to draw us into a trap. The Cutarans don’t have horses. Kill you and Jax, and they’ve taken away our only advantage if it comes to a battle.”
Kareen saw a flash out of the corner of her eye. It had come from the forest. “What was-” Her question was cut off by a scream… and then cries of pain. Something wet hit her face and she looked down to find a spear sticking from the unarmored chest of the groom that until a moment ago had walked at her side. No, not a spear. It was the same size, but feathered like an arrow.
“Ambush!” Livran yelled, taking his helmet from one of his armorers. “Form up!” he ordered, raising his visor, a brave move with arrows as thick as Kareen’s wrists flying through the air. “Circle! Around the baggage train!”
He turned to Kareen. “Get off your horse!” She nodded, trying to react rationally despite the panic flooding her body. “Now!’ The order made sense. She was up higher than the rest of the soldiers, and unarmored. A perfect target for the Cutaran archers.
She gave one last glance around herself. The barbarians had hidden themselves well. She couldn’t see a single one of the massive men. But every few heartbeats, sure as a clock, an arrow would come flying out of the tree line to land somewhere amongst Livran’s soldiers. Men died screaming, spraying blood across the uniforms of their comrades, their armor providing precious little protection against such heavy projectiles.
Kareen realized with dread where the wetness on her face had come from and nearly retched. She tried desperately to scrub the groom’s blood from her face, but motion only made things worse, smearing the slick red liquid across her cheeks and forehead. The cold hands of shock and fear began to close in around her like the jaws of a vice. She was going to die…
Something tugged at her leg. It was a young soldier, one hand on the hem of her dress, the other clutching his crossbow in a white-knuckled grip. He was shouting for her to get down. She hardly registered his words through the terror that now gripped her. Finally, legs shaking, she lowered herself from Ranger’s saddle to stand behind the meager protection of Livran’s soldiers. Their force seemed so small now, so vulnerable standing alone on these plains, miles from help.
Wounded were being dragged to the center of the circle Livran had had formed around the baggage train. A pikeman’s arm had been completely torn off by a projectile, while another had taken an arrow in the chest, crumpling his breastplate like paper. A blow like that should have been lethal, but somehow he still clung to the tenuous thread of life. Kareen doubted either man would survive the hour. The question was, would any of them?
Livran’s band of soldiers had tightened under the onslaught, heavy infantry in front, pikes behind, creating a formation that reminded Kareen of a porcupine. The crossbowmen took positions near the baggage train, shooting over the heads of their comrades at the front. But what good was a crossbow, Kareen wondered, against a creature that could launch arrows the size of spears? What good was any weapon, for that matter?
“Davin! Jax!” Livran yelled, wheeling his horse around and barely avoiding an arrow.
The two men cantered up, visors lowered and lances in hand. “Yes, sir!” the youthful Davin said, face concealed, voice muffled by his helmet.
“Go out into the scrub and circle around. They’ll try and soften us up for a while longer before they commit to a charge. When they do, I want both of you ready to hit them in the back.” Their voices were drowned out by the grating crash of a pikeman’s helmet being split in two, spraying bits of skull and brains across his horrified comrades.
What was the Emperor thinking when he came here? Kareen wondered. How could anyone survive this madness? Livran answered her unvoiced question with a wordless shout. He drew his longsword, holding the weapon aloft.
“I know you bastards like a challenge!” he yelled, his voice cutting through the cries of fear and pain. “COME AND FIGHT ME!” He cantered up and down behind his soldiers, swinging his sword around his head like a madman. She’d heard that the leaders of Kelil tribes of northern Toashan performed similarly before a battle. They normally ended up dead, skewered by Corrossan bolts.
You idiot! Kareen thought. It was only by the grace of Tirrak that he hadn’t taken an arrow while he was ranting from the back of Firestar.
But the projectiles ceased flying, as if Livran’s challenge had been a command. Kareen dared to let her spirits rise, if only for a heartbeat. Had Livran scared them off? She had read that the Cutarans knew nothing of forging steel. Perhaps, in his armor, they thought Livran was some kind of monster or spirit.
But any hopes of a quick victory were crushed by the blaring of a horn. It came from the same place as the arrows, deep within the trees to the right of the road, echoing and reverberating like a baritone in the chamber of an opera house. No, not a horn, she quickly realized. There were words in that call, sung in a language she didn’t understand.
“Battle Speech,” the man next to her growled to his comrades. He smelled of urine. Most of the men around her did.
“Here they come!” Livran shouted. A roar rose through the forest, followed by the driving footfalls of bodies too heavy to be human. Livran’s soldiers replied with a battle cry of their own. That cry was cut short as the first Cutarans hit the head of their formation. Metal crashed against metal, the grating drowning out hearing, thought, and reason. For Kareen, it left only fear.
Blood and organs and bodies fell to the ground, mixing together in the dirt to create a dark, churning slurry at the front of their formation. Kareen wanted to vomit, but even her stomach refused to obey under the pressure of the violence before her.
The heavy infantry fought on valiantly, holding the line for what must have been an eternity, before eventually succumbing to the sheer weight of the Cutaran advance. In response, the pikemen rushed forward, filling in the gaps in the formation, but were soon also overwhelmed, dragged into the meat grinder and torn to shreds. The gaps in the line quickly became too many and too large to be covered. Crossbowmen went for their swords, rushing in to help their comrades. Livran had trained his men well, and they didn’t collapse even with the odds stacked so heavily against them. But it didn’t take a genius to see how badly they were losing. This fight was over, even if the young knight couldn’t see the signs of his own defeat.
A pair of crossbowmen directly in front of Kareen were tossed aside even as they advanced, opening a gap in the line and providing her with her first unadulterated picture of a Cutaran. She gasped…
He—only a man could bear so much muscle—made the human soldiers at his feet look like children. He swung around himself with a bronze sword, cutting down the crossbowmen that stood in his path with a skill that Kareen wouldn’t have expected from the fearsome barbarian. He parried a pike to the side with his hide shield and chopped down onto the hand of the man who held it, sending him reeling back with severed fingers.
None of Livran’s soldiers could stand against him, and he finished off the rest in a matter of seconds. With the soldiers around him dead, the Cutaran finally rose to his full height, flexing his bare chest and legs, partially hidden behind a brightly colored skirt. He bore a dozen wounds, but they did little t
o slow him as he advanced on Kareen, sheathing his sword and reaching out with his free hand.
Kareen had heard stories of what soldiers did to the women of the cities they captured. Rape and murder were common things in the aftermath of a battle. Would the Cutarans do the same? She backed away, pulling her epée from its sheath and holding it wardingly in front of her. It was a pathetic weapon for fighting this mountain of a creature. Some mad part of her wanted to laugh as she tried to imagine any way she could kill this thing with the thin blade. She failed.
A smile crossed the Cutaran’s tanned, knife-edge face, revealing a row of uniformly flat teeth. He reached for her with a long, heavily muscled arm, fingers brushing her dress. She backed away further, nearly tripping over the moaning form of a wounded soldier, his organs spilled on the ground before him. Trying to ignore the sight, she stuck the Cutaran’s arm with the point of her epée. He shied back for a moment, gritting his teeth as blood welled from the tiny hole just above his wrist and fell in rivulets to his clawed fingers.
The battle was nearly over. Cutarans slaughtered the remaining soldiers and moved through the baggage train, grabbing up anyone they could find hiding amongst the horses, and carrying them screaming into the forest.
Kareen felt something warm bump against her back. She gave a quick glance over her shoulder. She was backed against one of the packhorses. Its glassy eyes were full of fear, but it didn’t run.
“Move!” she growled, pushing her off-hand against the creature’s flank. “Dammit! Move!” The beast wouldn’t budge. It was as if it was planted in the earth, paralyzed by the same terror that was closing its grip on Kareen’s own mind.
Kareen took several deep breaths, trying to regain some control over her pounding heart. The Cutaran was advancing again, the wound she had dealt him ignored for the time being. There was no one left between her and the monster now. Kareen took one last gulp of air and let out a cry. She might die, might be taken, but in that moment, knew she wouldn’t go without a fight.
She leveled her epée towards the Cutaran, positioning the length of steel so that, with a clean thrust, it would pierce his heart. Even this mighty warrior would die from such a wound. That was the idea, at least. She charged forward and lunged, somehow managing to get under the monster’s outstretched arm.
A flash of steel split the darkness, and for a moment, Kareen thought she had struck home. She looked up, hopeful, only to find her sword imbedded deep in the Cutaran’s upraised shield. Yet he was still, a blank expression plastered on his face. Where the counterattack, the grasping hands? She looked on with horror as he twisted into a fall, revealing a disc shaped chunk taken out of his skull.
He fell in a heap, wrenching Kareen’s epée from her hands. She let the weapon go, shying back from the freshly made corpse like a child who had just knocked over her mother’s favorite piece of crockery. Her mind raced, and it took her a moment to realize that she was free of the creature. Turning, she surveying the carnage around her. A small group of pikemen had formed a circle around one of the packhorses, defending the creature in some mad last stand. A warhorse galloped by, Jax’s, it’s rider absent.
She had no time to think of who had killed the Cutaran. She had to get away. The plains were to her back. With halflight still darkening the sky above, she could hide amongst the brush until the war party finished its work. It would be a three day walk back to Kwell, fording streams, dodging the great predators that stalked the savannas, and avoiding Cutaran scouting parties. But at the moment it was her only real option, excluding capture.
Kareen turned and ran, managing to reach the scrub along the road before any of the Cutarans could spot her. They showed little care for their surrounding and instead, busied themselves with looting and the taking of prisoners. She could see them clearly from her prone position. They were all near as large as the one who had tried to capture her, rippling with muscles. There were even women amongst them, slightly shorter than the men and wearing the same brightly colored skirts, clearly unashamed that their breasts were left bare. They carried great bows across their backs, and had quivers full of arrows strapped at their waists. The same arrows that had killed so many of Livran’s soldiers…
Livran! In her haste to escape she had almost forgotten. She scanned the baggage train, half-expecting to see Firestar there, dead along with its rider. But the horse was nowhere to be found. She tried to find Ranger next, but the horse—untrained for war—had likely fled during the fighting.
She cursed under her breath. The beast would have made her escape that much easier. All she could do now was try to crawl away while the Cutarans were busy looting.
She waited for the moment to run, a moment when the Cutarans would have their backs turned. That moment came as a shout went through the scattered war party. They raised their heads just as a rider came barreling into the group looting the packhorses. He knocked them aside with the sheer weight of his mount, and struck down with his longsword, leaving a bloody scar as he cantered through their line. The Cutarans hadn’t been prepared for a counterattack. Nearly a dozen lay motionless on the ground, either killed by the rider’s sword, or crushed by his horse’s hooves. They lowered bronze tipped spears to block his path, but he weaved in between them, lashing out, leaving death in his wake.
Kareen realized with a start who was riding the horse. Livran. She had never seen such skill with a mount or with a blade, even from her brothers, who were competent warriors in their own right. In full armor, he was nearly invulnerable to any attack the Cutarans could throw against him, and he exploited the advantage to its fullest, letting the tips of spears and edges of swords glance harmlessly off the steel.
A few of the smarter Cutarans dropped their weapons and reached out to pull Livran from his saddle, but the knight was always a few inches outside the reach of their grasping hands. He walked Firestar backwards, slashing with his sword, amputating the fingers of several of his opponents.
But despite his skill and despite his armor, Kareen knew that Livran would eventually be overwhelmed. There were simply too many Cutarans left, and he was only one man. No matter how good his conditioning or his training, he could never kill them all.
Livran seemingly realized that simple fact at the same time as Kareen. He turned suddenly and galloped towards the trees, presumably to rest and reanalyze the situation. Something struck the back of his head with a sound like the ringing of a bell, just as he reached the first of the gnarled boughs, sending him reeling forward in his saddle. Firestar carried its rider for several more paces before the reigns slipped from Livran’s grasp and he fell to the ground. He hit with a metallic thud, his sword falling from his grasp and skidding across the dirt and gravel to rest in the center of the road.
Kareen wanted to scream, wanted to run to his side. Was he dead? Simply incapacitated? It was impossible to tell. She looked to her left, saw one of the Cutaran women lower her greatbow. She had a confused expression on her thin face, probably wondering why her arrow hadn’t split apart Livran’s armor and the man beneath.
One of the male warriors ran to the downed knight, sword raised. He used his foot to flip Livran onto his back, looking him up and down for several long moments. Kareen thought the man might try to shove his sword into a gap in Livran’s armor, but instead, he stopped. Sheathing his weapon, the Cutaran threw Livran over his shoulder, armor and all, and returned to the other members of the raiding party as if the fully laden knight weighed no more than a child.
This whole situation… it made no sense. The Cutarans never took prisoners, at least not as far as she knew. They executed those they captured on the spot and left their bodies for the vultures. Something had changed. If only she had read more about these people before coming here. Dammit girl! she told herself. You never planned on getting this close. If you had-
She heard footsteps behind her. Before she could turn, a pair of hands had wrapped around her waist and Ka
reen found herself being hoisted into the air. She tried to fight back, tried to find some way to get free, but the Cutaran who had grabbed her was too strong. She screamed as she was carried helplessly towards the baggage train where the other prisoners were being gathered, their fates, every one, unknown.
Seven:
Grith
“That’s the city,” said the man to Grith’s left, pointing to the shadowed silhouette of the settlement in the distance. He’d been marching next to the pock-marked youth for close to three weeks now and had still never bothered to learn his name. This time spent on the road, marching and training with the pikemen, was a blur in between sessions of practice with Tain, nothing more than a dream between moments of wakefulness.
“Galthegan?” Grith asked. His knowledge of this part of the Empire was spotty at best, but Spirits, after so many days of marching they had to be close.
The youth nodded. “We’ll be in Toashan soon and from there, it’s not far to Saleno.”
Grith had heard stories of Toashan, the smaller neighboring continent to Hadalkir. Famous for its wine, cotton, and culture, his mother had described it as warm and dry, the arid river valleys giving way to desert in the north. Saleno was its largest port, and the second largest city in the Empire. Only Akiv could best it in size and wealth.
Tribest trotted by their formation, the back of his horse allowing him a commanding view of his squad of pikemen. “When we arrive in Galthegan, we’ll be taking ferries across one at a time!” he called to his men. “We drew the short straw, meaning we go across last! A shame,” the captain said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “That we can’t be the High Lord’s honorable vanguard! No, we will be left the rest of the day to sit on our asses and get properly pissed!”
Even Grith let out a cheer at the news. Some rest and a cup of cold beer would do him good. He couldn’t even imagine how the other men must have felt. Grith was a Delver, and even he was starting to feel the strain of endless hours spent on the hard dirt roads, half sharp stones, half churned mud.
The Argument of Empires (The Corrossan Trilogy Book 1) Page 11
