Death Knight

by Vaughn Heppner

  “Hush,” said the Mistress. “Let me think.”

  Cuthred lowered his club and he shifted, clanking and clattering. Even though his feet hurt, he was eager for the battle to begin. He yearned to kill the puny men.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Lady Pavia trembled as she stood atop the castle’s highest tower. The undead marched toward them, a carpet of bobbing heads and rasping weapons, a sea of infernal foes stepping in time to that dreadful doom-doom, doom-doom. Priests, Wisdoms, knights, ladies, cobblers, tanners, washerwomen, bandits, shepherds, the dark horde contained them all: all dead, all driven by the Death Drummer. They spread out before her, a sea of death and coldly hideous eyes and wormy mouths. They wore rotting clothes and tatters of cloaks and shreds of coats and dresses and some bits of mail armor.

  “They’re dreadful!”

  “Steady,” said Welf, who had turned pale beside her.

  She was taller and had wider shoulders than the forester. Nearby lay an axe. If the darkspawn made it into the castle, she would swing and hew until the bitter end.

  “Look,” said Welf, pointing with a trembling hand.

  Pavia squinted until she saw straining groups of clawmen dragging what looked like catapults on sleds. The clawmen stopped as the masses of undead filed past them. The wolf-like beasts furiously cranked levers. Others struggled to load the cupped ends with rounded stones. In a moment ominous thud, thud, thuds sounded as wooden arms struck crossbars. Large stones whistled through the air and cracked against the tower, spraying rock chips and masonry. Those around Lady Pavia cried out in fear.

  On the battlefield, the wicked beat changed tempo. Undead lurched faster at the castle, raising siege ladders high above their cold heads.

  Lady Pavia turned and shouted into the courtyard.

  Down there, twenty men pressed twenty crackling fiery brands against twenty fuses. Lady Pavia counted one heartbeat, two. Twenty huge wooden trebuchet tubs fell earthward. Twenty tree-long poles whipped up, flinging twenty missiles high into the night sky. Up, up toward the stars arched the missiles, higher and higher, until at last the balls reached their apogee. They began to fall. But something most amazing happened. Huge sheets drifted up from the falling balls. The wind whipped into the sheets, inflating them like sails. The cargo drifted now instead of falling, their fuses yet hissing. Then the first fuse touched tar and burst into blazing light. Three, four more balls did likewise. Then all twenty crackled brightly, lighting up the battlefield.

  Welf studied the enemy. He had proved the most adept with siege engines. The rest of the trebuchets were under his direction.

  “Two degrees north!” he shouted.

  Soon the loudest-voiced herald of that loud breed shouted up from the courtyard: “Ready, sir!” Gavin had knighted Welf for this important task.

  Welf eyed the human riders as they trotted onto the battlefield. Gavin in his silvered armor rode in the lead.

  “Now!” shouted Welf.

  ***

  On his huge stallion, Gavin cantered at the very apex of the wedge-shape cavalry formation. Before him were the swarms of undead, a veritable sea of foes who oddly lurched and staggered as if drunk. They were creatures with dead masks for faces. Gavin laughed horribly as cries of “For Hosar!” sounded all around him. Floating firelight gleamed off lances, chainmail and shields. Then boulders rained upon the undead, mercilessly cutting them down. The rocks didn’t just fall straight down. Gavin had made sure Welf understood the plan. The boulders sleeted like hail in a furious storm, flying in at an angle. They hit and rolled, crushing masses of dead men, making rotted limbs fly and creating lanes through the seeming endless horde.

  Gavin’s thighs tightened around his stallion’s barrel belly. In the middle of the dead horde, a woman with burly arms beat an awful and wicked drum.

  “Well?” asked Josserand. “Is it time?”

  Gavin drew Glamore. Buglers sounded the charge.

  Hooves drummed and the battle-stallions gained speed. A forest of lances dipped parallel with the ground, the points aimed at undead torsos. With a shock, the mighty chargers struck the shambling horde. Enemy swords, axes and picks clumsily rose. The animated corpses did nothing in a lively manner. It was their inexorable advance and their numbers that was most terrifying. The living dead also clumsily and often too slowly raised shields to ward off blows. The mailed riders, strong, yelling and splintering their lances against packed throngs, drawing swords or axes and hewing, drove into that milling crowd of zombies. Yet there were thousands of undead, and they neither feared nor cared if they were destroyed. They were already dead. They shambled at the riders, clutching legs, swinging blades, moving at the tall iron men in their heavy wooden saddles. Too many horsemen lost momentum among that horde. Fortunately, twenty heroes, Sir Ullrick the Bear, Baron Aelfric the Duke’s Champion and Sir Josserand among them, stayed with Gavin as he strained toward the Death Drummer. The champions hewed to the right and to the left of them.

  “It’s impossible!” cried Josserand.

  Ullrick chanted, his heavy axe biting left and then to the right. Aelfric foamed at the mouth. Gavin, his arm already weary from the butchery, yet urged his charger at Joanna’s pale form. She peered at him across her ranks of undead. There wasn’t any fear in her, but there was recognition. She grinned hideously as she beat her drum. The sound, like ocean waves, washed upon the knights and set their teeth to aching.

  “There’s too many of them!” shouted Josserand. His sword was notched like a saw blade and blood from a wound trickled down his arm.

  Gavin dug his spurs into his stallion. The huge war-horse snorted with rage, and plowed his massive chest against the nearest undead.

  The champions fought and some died, and the crush and press of the living dead made it a surging sea of motion. Then the Death Drummer was only a few lance-lengths from Gavin. He glanced around. Ten knights still rode with him. The rest of the riders were separated by hundreds of undead. He hadn’t really expected to get this close and so soon. Joanna opened her mouth and brayed evil mockery. Her terrible sticks thudded faster. The undead between her and him moaned, rustling against one another as they tried harder to respond to her bidding.

  Gavin slew a former blacksmith, a hermit and a washerwoman. His stallion shouldered aside three others. He came face to face with the Death Drummer, even as other dead clanked toward him. She peered up, with her face as lifeless as any of theirs. As he shivered, Gavin saw something flicker in her lead-colored eyes, perhaps a haunted knowledge of what she had become or what she had once been.

  “Knight,” she droned, “you are doomed.”

  For a sick instant, he believed her. Then he howled in order to hide his terror, and he stood up in the stirrups and swung down overhand. The Death Drummer screamed as Glamore bit through her skull and down to her teeth. It was the most natural sound she had made for a long time. As Joanna slumped to the cold ground, Gavin slid down into the seething horde of undead.

  “Behind you!” shouted Josserand.

  Gavin spun, throwing up his sword, barely catching an axe from a burly dead man. The attack surprised him, and the force of the blow knocked him down to one knee. The big undead raised its axe for a death-stroke. Behind the living corpse, Josserand on his stallion swung his notched sword, cutting down the dead foe.

  “Once again I’ve saved you!” shouted Josserand.

  Gavin had no time to speak. As the masses of undead turned at him, turned toward Joanna’s drum, he stood and hewed aside an animated corpse and then swung at the wicked instrument of Death. Gavin hoped Swan’s visions were true. Then his sword crackled with blue fire. As Glamore touched the drum, the evil instrument burst apart with a clap of thunder. At that instant, all across the battlefield, clatters and clanks told of thousands of swords dropped upon thousands of shields and axes. Swaying one, two, four thousand or more undead collapsed onto the ground. A few twitched. The rest became an unmoving mass of rotting, stinking flesh.

 
As that occurred, the human infantry toiled out of the castle and onto the battlefield. The mercenary crossbowmen, the best trained of the foot troops, quick-marched across the valley and toward the silent hills. Beside them ran spearmen. Following them were the bandit and forester archers. Lastly, nearest to the castle, straggled the least trained: a mass of spearmen sprinkled with a leavening of men-at-arms. Swan marched with them, the Banner of Tulun held high by Hugo, who marched beside her.

  A large formation of gaunts had loped onto the hillside flank of the undead. At the sudden destruction of the largest darkspawn formation—the undead—the gaunts stopped fearfully. They were the only darkspawn presently on the field facing the humans. They now hesitated, looking back for the rest of the horde.

  The crossbowmen ran at them, and at a shouted command, the trained professionals stopped a hundred yards short of the gaunts. The front rank of marksmen knelt, taking careful aim. Moans of dismay turned into shrieks as the nearest gaunts fell under a blast of whirring bolts. The shambling creatures, those that survived, turned and clawed at one another to flee these horrible foes. The crossbowmen rose and cranked their weapons, reloading. They were unhurried, calm, professionals to the core.

  Sir Philip of Alamut Tower, one of the marcher lords, pointed with his sword at the fleeing gaunts. Although the trumpets blared for all the riders to reform under the cavalry banner, a good fourth of the knights, thegns and squires, those who were on the edges of the fallen undead horde, followed Sir Philip. They followed him as he madly charged after the fleeing gaunts.

  The rest of the cavalry cheered them on.

  “Dismount and walk your horses out of the corpse-field!” roared Gavin. He dreaded the fallen dead laming the mounts, and he dreaded losing control of the striking arm of the army. Fortunately, the majority of the riders had dismounted. They now guided their snorting, snuffing chargers through the carpet of rotting bodies that thankfully no longer moved. Nor would they ever move again.

  ***

  Vivian cringed as the stick-like Mistress shoved Leng toward a conjuring block of carved obsidian. It was bigger than a millstone, with eerie glyphs and symbols etched upon the sides. On the smooth, black-glossy surface the Mistress had long-ago painted lines and runes of power.

  “Why me, my lady?” whined Leng, as he stepped up onto the block. He wore brown robes like a priest, with a wavy dagger belted at his side. His long, lean face with its parchment-like skin wasn’t remote now. It was twisted with fear, with sweat glistening on his tall forehead. “Mistress, no, no, not me,” he pleaded. “Let Vivian have this honor. Let me practice spells to aid the battle.”

  “Silence,” hissed the Mistress. She wore hunting leathers, her ugliness heightened by the retreat of her eyes deeper into their sockets. As the Duke’s daughter, she had been lean, now she was like a stick figure. The amulet shone with its witch-green glow, illuminating her stark features. She strode to the human captives held by huge grinning brutes. With terse commands, she bade the brutes to hold aloft the captives, stretching them out as if upon a bed. Then the former Duke’s daughter went to each squirming captive, hewing with a wavy-bladed dagger similar to Leng’s. She screamed to the Moon Lady as the amulet blazed with its foul light. She chanted as she cut out the beating hearts.

  Vivian moaned, cringing in the background.

  A most unholy thing began to occur as the Mistress pitched the quivering hearts against the conjuring block. A weird white light, like a globe, encircled Leng’s head. He clawed at this throat. The white light misted. The sorcerer swayed drunkenly, his features hidden in what was a perfect likeness of a miniature moon. Then Leng stood very still, like a statue.

  Vivian gasped as a mighty cry arose from the remaining darkspawn. Above them, in the darkness, bright white lines etched themselves into a shape. The lines swirled and moved. And soon an outline of a head appeared high in the night sky. Its eyes were black pits, with pale green motes for pupils. The head had Leng’s features.

  “The Moon Lady is with you!” it said from the sky.

  Clawmen howled with hope and began to beat their scimitars against their shields.

  ***

  Gavin gnashed his teeth. The fools, the fools, why couldn’t these knights hold their bloodlust long enough to win a battle?

  Sir Philip and those following him butchered the fleeing gaunts. The long-limbed creatures fled, their gangly arms swaying like ropes. Behind them knights swung swords, hewing heads as if on a practice field, laughing at the ease of victory. But so intent were the knights upon this delight that they failed to notice in the nearby darkness tuskriders forming on their flank. Now enemy bugles sounded. Huge boars squealed in glee and moon-bright lances were leveled at Sir Philip and his fools. Philip slew useless gaunts—they already fled—and thereby made a quarter of the precious cavalry targets for a darkspawn ambush.

  Gavin groaned at the uselessness of it.

  Then a thegn shouted, “The sky, the sky, milord, look at the sky!”

  Gavin squinted at the strange manifestation. A head! A terrible head loomed in the night sky above the darkspawn. The head seemed familiar.

  “It’s Leng!” shouted the Bear. “How did that bastard do that?”

  Gavin nodded. Yes, it was Leng, and the sorcerer gave the darkspawn directions. Gavin looked around wildly. Most of the remaining horsemen were almost out of the corpse-field. He thus roared, “Mount up!” and he pointed Glamore at the tuskriders battling Sir Philip and his knights. “Charge!” he thundered. “Let us slay more darkspawn!”

  ***

  From the heights of the sky, Leng studied the battlefield. The feeling was god-like. The main enemy horse, led by the knight with the silver sword, smashed into the tuskriders who had flanked other riders. In doing so, the humans opened a wide gap between all their horsemen and the toiling infantry behind. It was a very wide gap indeed.

  Leng grinned, and from his position in the sky, he showed the clawmen commanders his will. “Go!” he told them.

  The clawmen howled in glee as the giants led them into the gap.

  Soon the human infantry halted in confusion, although leaders urged them on. Leng had to avert his gaze. A champion, a standard-bearer, waved a glowing banner. Sight of it hurt Leng’s eyes.

  ***

  Everyone trembled in fear around Swan and Hugo. Towering giants clanked in iron plate toward them. With each stride, the giants covered much ground. Among the legs of the giants ran clawmen waving black curved swords. The panic in the human host leapt from one man to the next. Then a raw and pleading cry of “Hosar!” tore from Hugo’s throat. He barged through the ranks until he stood alone before the spearmen. He faced the approaching darkspawn, the howling masses and the dreadful, clanking giants. By an effort of will, one-eyed Hugo gathered saliva in his dry mouth and he spat on the ground.

  A few men cheered.

  “Attack!” roared Hugo, waving the blue silk banner back and forth. It shone with fiery radiance. “Attack!” he roared again. The enemy came at them. Hugo, however, was the Risen One. Hosar protected him. “Attack!” he roared a third time, running alone at the enemy, with the banner snapping in the breeze. For a stunned moment, both armies watched the lone madman. Then, in a great shout and with a rattle of weapons and armor, the crusaders of Hosar charged after him.

  The two foot-forces neared. Like mighty ships, giants led thousands of clawmen. Then a withering blast of crossbow bolts sleeted into their ranks and arrows arched into the masses. Trebuchet rocks tore wide gaps. None of that, however, really mattered now. Not even corpses tripping warriors mattered. Like an avalanche and vastly outnumbering the humans, the clawmen and giants set upon the enemies of Old Father Night.

  The shock of their impact reached Leng in the heavens. Incredibly, rigidly held spears decimated the front rank of clawmen. Yet other snarling beasts flung themselves forward. Leng grinned. Religious fervor drove his darkspawn as their god watched. And if that wasn’t sufficient, a last reserve of tuskriders sm
ashed into the human flank. The human infantry had marched beyond the castle walls, thus the castle no longer anchored that flank.

  Screaming spearmen died. A few men pitched aside their weapons and fled. Against the main human host that stayed and fought, giants swung massive clubs, a blood-curdling Cuthred doing the greatest damage. He had lost his helmet. He roared, shouted, and snarled as his shoulder muscles bunched. The heavy club swept gaps in the human line. It was like a peasant mowing grass with a scythe. Cuthred’s wide, dull features had been transformed into a mask of hate and howling rage. A crossbow bolt tore a gash in his cheek. He smashed men in return, the spike punching through and pinning men to the ground. He had to step on one man and rip his club free. With a howl and while shaking his gory club toward the night sky, Cuthred exalted in the dreadful savagery. Nothing could stop him. For once, he was doing the stomping. “You’re not going to cut off my hand!” he thundered. “No! Never!” And he swished his club once more, leading the giants into the packed fray.

  “Save us Hosar!” cried the Standard Bearer. Around him, men fought with a religious frenzy exceeding that of the darkspawn. Elsewhere, however, wherever the banner’s blue radiance didn’t reach, the humans fell back before the press of darkspawn. It was only a matter of time before the evil horde bent, broke and then destroyed the crusaders of Erin.

  ***

  With lances, on fresh stallions and during the light of day, the heavy cavalry might have smashed through the brutes. Weighted with chainmail and riding chargers, few things could withstand the devastating shock of the iron knights of Erin. Gavin’s men, however, had already charged twice in the past half-hour. He had just reformed them after breaking the tuskriders. None of the knights now had lances. Few, in fact, were without wounds of some kind. The massive, over-muscled stallions, bred to carry a knight with all his panoply, weren’t bred for long endurance like steppe ponies. Grimly, in the poor light, the horsemen eyed the monsters looming before them. There was no sense going back into the sea of clawmen, only forward to reach Zon Mezzamalech.