“With the servants?”
“Don’t argue. When you prove your manners, I’ll present you to the emperor.”
Patara nodded while Nalan said, “I understand.”
Rassan saw the Hadoram trait the other lords complained about. Nalan switched to meek and dejected so quickly, and with such great acting, that Rassan wanted to believe him, but he saw the wrinkles in the corners of the boy’s eyes. The boy swallowed a smile, proud of his performance. Rassan could remember being that age and lying to his sister.
Lilith, one way or another, I will avenge you.
Azmon’s anger rose. Rassan was the only lord who thought to keep his family away from the throne. The others thought him an easy target. If Arlo was the decoy, that meant Olwen would strike. Doubt stilled Azmon’s hand because the true attack might come from Rassan, but Azmon’s attention kept returning to Olwen. He appeared calm, but something wasn’t right. Olwen should have interjected to keep Arlo from embarrassing himself. Olwen made no other mistakes.
Arlo said, “The great houses of Rosh demand an apology, your excellency, for those nobles who have fallen victim to your beasts during the siege. None here made the new beasts, and none here have moved against the other houses. Only House Pathros has such power. We demand an explanation for these attacks.”
Azmon thought through their argument and counterarguments. They wanted to provoke him, and he decided to avoid the stupid game. He answered with silence, and it made Arlo stammer. He asked several questions, but Azmon sat and watched. One of them would strike soon. His instincts screamed at him to strike first, but he had to indulge the little show. A few nobles appeared genuinely confused. Despite his anger, he reminded himself to kill the right lords. The others had value.
“Excellency? Did you hear me?”
Azmon let the mask answer. Let them think him deaf. He loved that new tool of statecraft. The inanimate object hid his emotions better than any of the tricks he had learned from his father. The costume made him an other, an aloof immortal.
“Excellency, this is a serious issue—”
Azmon said, “We all know the time for apologies is long past.”
Olwen stepped forward. “The great houses demand the return of our dead, so that they can be cremated and given real peace in death.”
The room chilled as several sorcerers reached for power, but Azmon beat them to it. He had contacted the other world the moment Olwen opened his mouth.
When Olwen stepped forward, Rassan braced for battle, but a dark shadow rushed his side. He flinched, saving himself from a cracked skull. A cane crashed into his shoulder and head. Yellowish starbursts clouded his vision. He collapsed and rolled while, all around him, the throne room filled with explosions and screams.
Rassan cradled his head. Moving made him nauseous. He heard his nephew Nalan screaming and found it equally horrifying and strange that the boy’s voice rose above the others’. In his dazed state, he feared he led his nephews to the slaughter.
Everything confused him. He sensed more lords involved in the attack than they had planned. Azmon had not been caught unaware. His nephews shouldn’t have been attacked. But the one thought that shouted above the rest was that the lords needed him. Without me, they can’t make flyers. However, he realized, they obviously didn’t agree.
Rassan reached for sorcery as he pulled himself into a kneeling position. Smoke and fire filled the courtroom along with a flurry of black robes and angry shouting. Rassan raced to his nephews with a drawn dagger.
Azmon erected a shield of shimmering air before the others could launch their attacks. They tried and failed to break it. Smoke filled the throne room. Scorch marks marred the tan and gold marble. Crackling flames of hellfire made the smoke pulse with orange light. The number of sources surprised Azmon. He guessed that four of the major houses had joined Olwen, and he took a moment behind his shield to find the man.
From within the bowels of Shinar, thousands of giant monsters howled in protest. The noise rose like a tide, making everyone flinch. While others grabbed their ears and ducked, Azmon smiled. His children voiced their fury. The city sounded incensed, as though its millions of dead inhabitants had all picked that moment to scream.
Azmon countered. A lash of flame cut Olwen in half. Arlo managed a shield similar to Azmon’s, but he lacked the strength to withstand Azmon’s fire and was thrown to the ground, his robes smoldering. Azmon struck down two more lords before the sounds of sorcery stopped. With a thought, he obliterated a window and swept the haze away, revealing the broken bodies of a few lords. In the back, Rassan hugged his nephew and stood over the crumpled shapes of two more lords.
Azmon gestured with his good hand, and Arlo was picked up by an invisible force and dragged to the throne, where Azmon disemboweled him with his claws. For a moment, he enjoyed the sensation of flexing his talons in the man’s entrails before a sad thought stilled his attack. I am demon spawn.
Then he threw away the carcass and the last of his humanity.
With perfect timing, several of his beasts picked that moment to arrive, pushing through doorways and scurrying to the dais. Dozens of black shapes rushed in, some using the floor and others climbing the walls.
Azmon stood before his broken enemies and watched his children control the room. Lost in the euphoria of victory, he noticed too late that Lord Ralin had survived and cast a ball of hellfire at him. The flames devoured Azmon’s robes and raced across his flesh. He screamed and used a blast of air to quench the fires. His children savaged Lord Ralin. Azmon staggered, but a large brute caught him up and carried him from the room.
The flames blistered across his infection. The Blight hurt worse. The pain reminded him of his first days with the disease, when he had been lost in the agony and could not stop trembling. One thought powered through the pain—the beasts wanted to kill everyone at court. Azmon fought through tremors to command them. He met resistance. The beasts were ignoring him. He had to seize sorcery and assert himself again to make them obey.
The beast carrying him grunted as though offended.
“We kill when I say so.”
The beast snarled.
“No, damn you. I need the rest to distract the elven sorcerers.”
Azmon reached out again and ordered the beasts from the throne room. He told the monster bearing him to put him down, and on wobbly legs he headed toward his quarters. The beasts loped behind him, and he double-checked to ensure they were leaving the nobles alone. He felt the first tugs on his web, as though the beasts wanted to break free, and he wondered if his wounds had made him too weak to control his own creations.
“Soon, my children. We will destroy Dura and her silly dwarves.”
The beasts purred at the thought.
VII
Under a dark sky, Tyrus stood on a hill and watched the highland gate. With runes, he saw a grayish landscape, made stranger by the two armies flirting with a fight. The horizon filled with demon spawn—a sea of them swelled around the highlands. The Norsil looked like the last remnants of the Avani. The sight reminded Tyrus of old songs about the ending of the world. A few warriors faced off against an army of demon spawn.
A giant wall of thorns circled the highlands. The thorn barriers were twenty feet tall and at least as wide. The Norsil had spent weeks patching holes. The walls were thickest near the main gates, and, at the center, three sections of thorns overlapped each other like a giant chain link.
The outer link blocked direct access to the gate, forcing the purims to split in two to attack. The middle wall had one gap, and the inner wall overlapped that. If the purims made it past the gap, they would split in two again to pass two more choke points. A thousand men could fight in the center, and the choke points helped rotate out the wounded. Inside the compound, trenches and thorns helped control any purims that crashed through. The pits would buy the clans time to reform.
If the walls held,
the Norsil could fight on one small battlefield and deny the purims the advantage of numbers. Tyrus understood the strategy for fending off raids, but applying it to a large-scale siege courted disaster. He wanted battlements and boiling oil to drop on the purims, but the Norsil employed no masons or alchemists.
Olroth stepped up to Tyrus’s shoulder. “Well, it’s a good night to die.”
Tyrus asked, “How do you figure?”
“Clear sky. A nice moon. And everyone I know is here.”
“It’s the little things.”
“It really is.” Olroth let out a long sigh. “Every monster in the north is at our gates. Never have so few fought so many.”
“I’ve never heard of the like.”
“Our children will sing about this day until the ending of the world.”
Tyrus nodded. Olroth’s sons and grandsons might survive the battle. Tyrus knew he would die. Somewhere on the plains, the shedim awaited him.
Clans took positions near the gate. They wore heavy mail and carried giant halberds. The first thousand champions prepared to take the first shift at the center of the wall. Women and children patrolled with bows. They would punish the purims who tried to pull down the walls.
Tyrus watched bulls sniffing the gate. The first trickle of purims trailed after them. Fighting so many monsters one at a time would be like drinking an ocean by the mouthful.
Tyrus pointed. “It’s about to start.”
Breonna approached with a bow. She led the Norsil’s secret weapon. They had far more women than men, and each was a trained archer. The long bows had amazing range, and as long as they had arrows, the purims would take heavy losses.
Tyrus asked, “Are you ready to follow the sortie?”
Breonna nodded. “We’ll cover the withdrawal.”
“Mind the banners, Olroth. If we tangle at the gate, we all die.”
Tyrus shouldered past the Norsil holding the gate. The thanes parted for the Spear of the Warlord more than for the man carrying it. He took the left side between the main wall and the outer wall. Several hundred thanes held the opening, and tens of thousands more waited to take their turns in the killing grounds. Tyrus stood in the front, which reminded him of the old days in Rosh, when the man with the most runes led the charge. The purims seemed leaderless. Large bulls inched closer to the outer gate. Their ears shifted at the slightest sound, and their noses twitched. The Norsil leveled their halberds and waited.
About ten feet away from Tyrus, a bull sniffed at him and hefted its war axe.
Tyrus pounded his chest and shouted, “Dark Walker!”
The bull leapt at him. “Walker!”
The Norsil caught the creature with their halberds, and it hung in the air before Tyrus disemboweled it. The rest of the purims charged. Both sides of the gate were smashed by a sea of large black bodies wearing disc armor. Axes and halberds scraped against each other. Shields slapped one another, and the press of bodies suffocated Tyrus. The fight was all pushing and thrusting with spears. There was little footwork or skill as each side tried to shove the other out of its way. Spears jabbed over Tyrus’s shoulder while he used the spear to stab the purims slamming into him.
He spared a glance at the sky, wondering about the archers. What are they waiting for?
The two armies ground against each other. Men grunted, and monsters growled. Then the bulls began tossing smaller purims over the front line. A dozen shadows flew over Tyrus’s head, and warriors behind him screamed. The lines became a chaotic mob.
More shadows darkened the sky. Tyrus glanced up and reflexively ducked from a terrible sight. Thousands of arrows, tens of thousands, rained down upon the purims. The monsters around the gate wailed, and the pressure on the front line eased. Tyrus dreaded the idea of dying from an arrow because it robbed him of the chance to fight back, but watching them kill purims gave him a perverse joy.
The arrows peppered the ground outside the gates. As the pressure on the front line eased, Tyrus shoved purims away with his spear. Another black cloud passed over the gates, and more purims howled in pain. Mindful of the range of the archers, Tyrus ventured forth from the wall. More purims charged him.
Another volley of arrows hit and broke the purims’ spirit. They turned to run. Tyrus signaled a sortie, and tens of thousands of Norsil thanes charged from the gate. They cut down the purims as they chased them down the hillside.
Halfway down the hill, Tyrus signaled a halt. The plains stretched out before them, from the base of the hill to the horizon, and every inch of them was filled with demon spawn. Tyrus feared overextending his forces. If they left the hill, they would be swarmed. He glanced up the hill and saw thousands of Norsil women reclaiming spent arrows and forming a firing line.
The purims that had not fled shoved aside the ones that ran. They formed a fresh front line and screamed war cries. Tyrus told his men to hold. The purims charged up the hill. Several volleys of arrows met them. Tyrus flinched at each volley, but the women knew their task. They did not hit the Norsil, and a rain of arrows thinned the packs. The few that made it through died on Norsil halberds.
After they broke the second attack, Olroth shouted from the gate. A horn signaled withdrawal, and clans broke from the sortie to hurry home. Half the women returned inside, and the other half covered the retreat. Tyrus and the front line backed up the hill while purims leapt over their dead friends to hound them. More purims charged, but those had shields of rough wooden boards held above their heads.
Tyrus and the men fought as they withdrew up the hill, and that’s when they took the heaviest losses. The lines became confused. They were too far away from the gate when the women launched another volley. The arrows struck Norsil and purim alike, but the Norsil champions—with all their runes—were harder to kill. However, many did fall, distracted by the arrows first and ripped apart by purims second. Retreating back to the gate, the Norsil carried their wounded into the compound, and other clans stepped forward.
Tyrus stayed at the gate, fortunate to have avoided any arrows. He waited for the purims to attack with their own arrows, but they used spears instead. They had shorter hunting spears that they launched with sticks. The spears darted low and deadly into the Norsil ranks. Fortunately, the Norsil long bows had greater range, and they filled the hillside with dead monsters.
They repeated the exchange dozens of times. Either the purims charged the gate, or the Norsil charged the hill. Groups of purims climbed the cliffs to attack the walls, and patrols of archers broke off to counter them.
The action became tediously repetitive. They fought for hours, and Tyrus held the center as long as he could before he withdrew and other clansmen took his place. Returning to the compound, he enjoyed the smell of fresher air and the cool of fewer bodies. The gate became a tangle of sweat and disgusting mud. He saw Olroth on one of the higher hills, signaling with banners, and beside him were several key keepers who used different flags to direct teams of archers along the wall.
Children offered warriors buckets of water, and he realized his throat was burning with dryness. He gulped down mouthfuls and wiped his chin. He jogged up the hill to check the walls. Purims had stacked bundles of dry grass along the base, and despite the best efforts of the archers, many of the bundles had been fired. Olroth seemed right, though, and the thorns didn’t burn well. The women had pinpoint accuracy from a lifetime of defending thorn walls. Beyond the walls, a dust storm covered everything, but if Tyrus squinted he could see the base of it was churned by hundreds of thousands of purims circling the highlands. The horde produced a dizzying volume of snarls, grunts, and barks.
A storm of claws and fangs circled the highlands, and Tyrus stood at its heart.
The sun rose and fell four times while the fight for the highland gate raged. The Norsil charged into the horde of purims several times and were pushed back beyond the main gate as well. The purims cut through the wall in a couple of places, a
nd clans diverted to hold them. Many of the wounded and dead were dragged away, but the gate became an obscene mound of bodies. Tyrus felt it in his calves more than anywhere else, and the uneven ground punished his feet.
As the bodies grew, the purims used them to build a ramp up the sides of the gates. The Norsil sortied to clean off the walls, and the brief action almost cost them the battle. The purims pulled down the outer wall. The gate became the primary choke point, and the women stationed themselves next to the inner wall to launch their volleys. The sections of wall near the gate became ragged, and the opening grew almost too big to defend.
Tyrus made a point of fighting longer and harder than any of the other warriors. The never-ending wounds reminded him of his years on the Proving Grounds. The purims bled him dry, and he would need a few days to fully recover. They taxed his runes to the point of breaking. Other thanes faced a similar fate. Unable to endure the endless assault, several men with more than fifty runes fell.
Tyrus breathed heavily next to Olroth. Children offered him seared purim flesh and a bucket of water. His runes left him so hungry that he savored the oily carrion taste of the meat.
Olroth said, “I’ve never seen them fight so long before.”
“The shedim command them.”
“Nisroch won’t allow them in his lands.”
“They are here for me. And Nisroch knows it.”
Olroth frowned. “I should take my turn in the gate.”
“I need you directing the clans. You’re good at it.”
“I’ve barely fought. Thousands are dead, and I’ve got clean fingernails.”
“When they break through the gate, we will all fight.”
“As you say, warlord.”
Tyrus eyed the man. “Prepare the clans to charge again. We need to draw them away from the gate and pull down their ramps.”
Thankful that the highlands had wells, Tyrus drank from a bucket and stretched his tired frame. The long battle tested his joints, and every scar and old wound ached anew.
Willing to Endure: A Dark Fantasy (The Shedim Rebellion Book 3) Page 32
