The Warrior King: Book Three of the Seer King Trilogy

by Chris Bunch

  “Come on! After them!” and there was a soldier pulling at me.

  “Sir! The rope’s broken!”

  I almost slumped in defeat, but couldn’t give up. I snarled something at him, ran after my soldiers, into the heart of the enemy. Very well, we were doomed now, but we surely didn’t have to admit it.

  At least the soldiers we were facing weren’t those faceless killers Tenedos had created from innocent civilians. At least, not yet.

  Ahead was a knot of officers and warrants, and they had a moment to realize we were their enemies, and we were on them, killing, and running on, leaving a trail of our own wounded, dead, as we went.

  Then there was no enemy around, and we were in the middle of the peninsula, among burning, deserted buildings. I pelted to the front of the ragged, panting soldiers.

  “To the bridge,” I bellowed, and white eyes glared, understanding seeped through, and they followed me toward the shouting and death.

  We rounded a corner, saw the lines of Tenedos’s men. Barrels, crates, bales of cloth had made barricades here, and others — my soldiers — were across a square.

  Soldiers turned, hearing us, thinking we were reinforcements, had seconds to realize who we were before we were among them, hewing, killing, always moving, for if we stopped for an instant we’d be dead, although we were clearly in Saionji’s palm, her talons closing about us, less than two hundred men against a thousand, maybe more.

  I heard a cheer, and a long ululating call, and men, my men, attacked from behind their hasty ramparts across the square, and all became madness.

  Then there was no one else to kill, and I saw Yonge.

  “Eh, Cimabuan,” he panted. “Your great plan isn’t as impressive here as it was on the other side of the river.”

  “No shit,” I replied. “So what do you want to do?”

  He shrugged. “Leave a dozen men to hold here, and go back to the bridge. I assume these other fools aren’t all there is.”

  “You assume wrong.” I told him of the rafts, and of the line breaking.

  “Not good,” he said. “But I still think we can have some pleasure as we die.”

  “All officers, warrants, forward,” I shouted.

  Three legates, one wounded captain, and a handful of warrants came.

  “Form up,” I shouted. “With your mates if you still have any.” Yonge glowered. “We’re wasting time.”

  “Shut up,” I advised. “This is why bandits like you lose, being sloppy and undisciplined and shit like that. Number off by tens!” The men obeyed, raggedly.

  “All right,” I shouted. “Those are your new squads. The man in front’s in charge. Back the way you came to the bridge! Don’t wait for the order! We’ll charge them as soon as we get there!”

  Somehow, lungs burning, I managed a dogtrot, and we went down a narrow, curving lane.

  “There’s a boulevard one street over,” Yonge said. “Nice and wide and dangerous. This’ll come out in the same place, right at the bridge approach.”

  A shattered shop was ahead, on a corner, and there was water beyond it. We came into the open, saw more improvised barriers around the bridge, with uniformed men, some uniformed as Peace Guardians, some as motley as we were, Tenedos’s men, and we charged.

  Archers rose, and spattered shafts, one whispering down my side, and men spun, died, and we fell back.

  “Again, gods dammit! We’ll break them this time!”

  We ran onto the killing ground, not many of us, maybe 150 all told, and once more they drove us back.

  This time we left a guard, fell farther back into the alley to regroup. I marveled I hadn’t been wounded, then winked at blood trickling down my forehead, and felt a throbbing pain in my thigh. The wound on my head was superficial, the one on my thigh from a blow or perhaps I’d slammed into something. Nothing to worry about.

  “What now?” Yonge asked, sounding amused. He was tying up a slashed arm with a torn shirt and had lacerations down one bare leg. “We do it again,” I said grimly.

  “You should learn a new way of war than charging down someone’s throat,” he said. “A man can die that way.

  “Sendraka got killed doing that, a couple of hours ago,” he added, and heaved a deep breath.

  “Get ready!” he shouted, and we heard other shouts, and hurried back to the end of the alley.

  Men were pouring down the boulevard from behind us toward Tenedos’s position, men by the hundreds, my gods-damned men, coming from nowhere, somehow they’d crossed the river and we shouted with them and charged, and this time we overran the bridgehead.

  “Don’t stop!” I shouted. “Secure the other side,” and officers and warrants recognized me, echoed my command, and we ran onto the bridge, into an arrow storm, men falling on either side, and there was a gray-clad archer in front of me, in middraw, arrow aimed at my chest, eyes widening in panic, and he dropped his weapon as he loosed the string, arrow flipping end over end above me, and my sword was in his throat, letting loose of it as his mate tried to spear me, got Yonge’s wedding dagger in his guts.

  I pulled the sword free and fought on. Svalbard was dueling three men, and I took one of them off him, and he killed one, then the last before I could recover.

  Soldiers streamed past, in a solid wave, and then I saw Kutulu, for the love of Isa, long dagger in each hand, eyes mad as any of us, and I had him by the shoulder.

  “What happened! Where’d you and the others come from? I thought the frigging rope went!”

  “It did,” he said. “But one of the rafts saw it go, and followed it, pulled it on board, and then let themselves be swung toward the other side like a boy on a line! I don’t know if anybody used magic to help it.

  “Now there’s other lines across the river, and the army’s coming across, and nothing can stop us!”

  “Us? What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” I said.

  Kutulu grinned, a wide, happy smile, I think the first time I’d seen him ever look so ecstatic.

  “The time for spies is over. I can finally be a soldier!”

  He ran after the others.

  I saw Linerges limping toward me, flanked by his officers, and then, running toward me, was Cymea. Her wand was in one hand, bloodstained sword in the other.

  We were in each other’s arms for an instant.

  “Gods, but I’m glad you’re alive,” I managed. “I don’t know what I would have done — ”

  “Quiet,” she said hastily. “I don’t either. But I love you.” She pulled away.

  “We’ve broken through,” Linerges said. “Your plan worked.”

  “Badly,” I said. “Bloodily.”

  “What else is war?” he said.

  I looked at the spray of bodies around the bridge’s ramparts, so thickly piled I couldn’t see the cobblestones they lay on, and shuddered.

  Linerges nodded.

  “Bad. But now the real slaughter begins,” he said. “Now it’s time for Tenedos to face the sword.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE FINAL BATTLE

  We didn’t give Tenedos time to recover, but immediately assaulted across the bridge. With a foothold, other attack teams went down the peninsula and captured other bridges and attacked across them.

  The battle became a meat grinder, slow, day by day. I’d send a unit into battle, and hours or days later, a few survivors would shamble out. Now I was no longer Damastes the Fair, or Damastes the Brave, but Damastes the Butcher.

  With this scatter of men, I’d reform the unit, using them as cadre, and fill the ranks with the recruits that streamed to our camp, eager for a taste of war. I doubt if many relished that taste once it was swallowed, nor the emetic dose of blood and horror that followed.

  Tovieti came to us, and I changed my policy, letting them fight together, with only a few veterans to try to teach them enough to stay alive for the first decisive hours.

  A soldier in those terrible days had only two fates: to be killed or wounded. Mostly they wen
t down within their first few hours of combat, but enough survived to become tough veterans who killed without qualms, without mercy, without malice.

  The least happy men in my army were the cavalry, for there was no room to maneuver in the rubble-strewn streets, and so I dismounted them and turned them into infantry, their horses stabled behind the lines.

  Neither side took many prisoners, not after we saw what the former Peace Guardians did to anyone they captured and, later, deeper into the city, to our Tovieti brethren.

  A human soldier of Tenedos might have a very slight chance of survival in our hands. But Tenedos’s magical creations, even though we knew they were men, women, children in reality, never surrendered; nor did we make any attempts to capture them. We let them fight to the death.

  These clockwork warriors were improving in their fighting ability as the battle went on. They still weren’t able to stand up to an experienced soldier, but they were far better than the recruits I shoveled into the front lines. They never seemed to tire, hunger, or need rest.

  Sinait tried to create a spell that would break the magic that created them, but without success.

  As for Nicias’s warders, we saw how they’d kept the city’s peace the first time we smelled the stink coming from Tovieti households. Everyone, not just the fighters, had been killed, no doubt under Tenedos’s direct orders, and the warders had been creative in the way they slew.

  I waited until some warders had surrendered, then turned them over to Tovieti formations and told them to do what they liked. Anyone who believes the enemy is the only one who can torture with imagination has never been in a war. I was disgusted with my allies, with myself for allowing it. But word spread, and after that, we found fewer butchered women and children in houses with the upside-down U symbol.

  I expected Tenedos to attack with Great Spells, for certainly the streets of Nicias were drenched with enough blood for Saionji to be cackling in joy, but nothing came. What spells he and his Corps of Wizards sent were mostly turned aside by our wizards.

  “You see,” Yonge said. “This proves Truth and Right are on our side, and surely Goodness always triumphs. Heh. Heh.”

  Linerges and I stared, all three of us as shabby as any of our soldiers, then, for the first time in days, found raucous laughter.

  The fighting was grim, made worse because each little engagement was much like the previous as we fought from building to building, block to block, street to street. Scouts would dart forward, find an enemy strongpoint. Sometimes … not often, but sometimes … it was possible to use magic to drive the enemy out, but normally they had to be winkled out by men willing to die, knowing their epitaph — “killed while assaulting the four-story white apartment building at the crossing of Ker and Mamin Streets” — would be their only memorial, unlikely ever to become the subject of a ballad.

  My soldiers grew cunning as the battle ground on. Instead of attacking frontally, they’d go to the roofs and rain down spears, arrows, roofbeams, cobbles. Or else they’d go through the walls with battering rams and burst in behind their foes.

  The people of Nicias cowered in their basements, in their rooms, surrendered when they could. But mistakes were made, and sometimes an archer would loose at a sound, and a child would go down screaming, a child who’d been running to him for protection.

  All of us were stumbling, drained, and men began making mistakes, standing up in a position they knew within range of enemy archers, lighting a fire for cooking at night, running into the open for a better shot, the careless errors of the completely exhausted.

  I saw Cymea from time to time, generally when each of us was on the way to another emergency.

  I’d brought my headquarters across the river, moving it as we advanced, staying very close to the lines. I had my tent pitched wherever there was room, every now and again getting a chance for a quick wash or an hour’s rest, and sometimes she’d be there asleep, and I’d try not to disturb her. Twice we met when awake, and both times made fierce, angry love, reaffirming we were alive and there might be something beyond this death-in-life called war.

  We fought by day and night, night combat the most eerie, for Nicias’s famed gas still burnt, but sometimes now through cracks in the pavement or setting unexpected fire to a building no one was near.

  We fought not just with a soldier’s normal weapons, but with fire, putting a building full of stubborn defenders to the torch, filling flasks with cooking oil and stuffing a rag in its mouth, firing the rag and hurling the flaming jar into an enemy position. In low-lying districts the sappers pumped river water into basements still held by the enemy.

  Or we used earth, entombing entire positions without wasting a man’s life entering them.

  We’d had no time to build siege engines, but we found some in a storeyard. That gave us a few mangonels and ballistae that cut down our casualties. Others came from an army museum. These had been chosen as much for their beauty in carving and decoration, but once we replaced the leather ties, the ropes, and rotten wood, they worked as efficiently as their stark, younger relatives.

  Building by building, street by street, block by block, we fought our way toward the heart of the city.

  But by the near-end of the Time of Heat, we still held only a third of Nicias. My army had been decimated, and Tenedos’s men fought as stubbornly as before. We hadn’t been able to surround the city, and so they were still getting supplies from the north and east.

  I needed a master stroke, and remembered a legend.

  • • •

  The troops had been alerted for a general attack and given tiny ensorcelled bits of wood that would become torches when rubbed and three words said over them by anyone. They were warned to expect the unusual, and not panic, not give up hope. I wished I could have put a wizard with each company, to reassure the men, but all magicians would be busy, some casting the counterspell to keep Tenedos from discovering our plan, the rest creating the master spell.

  A day before the spell began, thirty-nine — thirteen times three — magicians had begun chanting, over and over again:

  “Jacini, Varum,

  Listen

  And give forth

  Shahriya, retreat

  Give up

  The domain is lost

  The domain is lost

  For a time Give up

  And ye shall regain

  Give up

  Your domain

  Is not below

  Submit

  Turn away

  Turn away

  Kanaltah hwah doy

  …

  Jacini, Varum,

  Listen …”

  On and on, over and over, in a drone that grew louder, though none of the chanters raised their voices; nor did anyone or anything visible add to their ranks.

  On the ninth hour, braziers were lit around a multicircle, strangely lettered figure drawn in black sand, and acolytes fed tiny amounts of herbs into them, dried aloe, barberry, blue vervain, storksbill, anise, comfrey, quaking aspen, others. The braziers fumed and smoked, as if unwilling to burn.

  Nine hours after that, as it was growing dark, Sinait, flanked by Cymea and another powerful wizard, all three wearing blue robes in honor of Varum, god of water, each with her own brazier, began their own chant:

  “Varum, Jacini

  Take the lesser god

  Take the lesser god

  Take the lesser god

  Give him not his name

  For a time

  For a time

  For a time

  H’lai vatha p’rek

  H’lai

  H’lai

  Hold him close

  Deny his freedom

  Deny his birthright

  R’wen al’ gaf

  For a time

  For a time

  For a debt.”

  The two drones mingled, wove together, almost musical.

  The three wizards’ chant grew louder, burying the others. Acolytes handed each of the three
a bowl of salt, a bowl of water, a tiny bundle of green wood.

  Sinait made measured motions with her twigs, the other two followed with their bowls. At a signal, all three cast water, salt, and green wood onto the braziers. The smoldering fires flared out, and all the other braziers were extinguished at the same moment.

  Total silence, total darkness, an anticlimax.

  Then, from our lines and from the city, a wailing began, a moaning of complete despair.

  The gas fires of Nicias, the fires that had given it the name of City of Lights, were out.

  Then the screams began, for legends said if the gods-given flames of Nicias ever went out, Numantia was doomed.

  Now all was dark, all was terror, all was hopelessness.

  Officers, warrants, most as fearful as any, roared for the torches to be lit, and fire flickered up and down our lines.

  I shouted to a squad of buglers, and brass railed against the night, and my troops went forward. At first they moved slowly, reluctantly, then stronger, faster, as long-held positions fell, their enemies stumbling out, hands high, eyes glaring in panic.

  The first wave swept forward as ordered, bypassing resistance. The second and third waves closed with these strong points, mopping up.

  We moved far and fast, and I had no alternative but to commit my reserves, and still the advance continued. I sent gallopers to pull the dismounted cavalry out of the lines and march them back to their stables. Now we were fighting in clear streets, unruined buildings, and there was room for the horsemen to fight in.

  Suddenly the blackness became gray and I could see, and I sagged, my voice no more than a croak.

  But this was triumph. We held more than half of Nicias, and the defenders had pulled back into a tight circle around the center of the city, the palaces of power, the barracks, and the Imperial Palace itself that Tenedos fought from.

  Then their lines firmed, and we were stopped cold.