Gold Throne in Shadow

by M. C. Planck

  Gregor was as impatient as the warhorse, although he didn’t nudge Christopher with his head. He just twiddled his thumbs.

  “Nervous?” Christopher asked, before realizing that was not a very complimentary question.

  “Bored,” Gregor answered. “When are you going to let me start shooting ulvenmen? The cheeky bastards are sleeping less than three hundred feet from the walls.”

  That was about the limit of effective range for a recurve bow. Even if you could hit something that far out, the shaft would have lost so much energy it wouldn’t do much damage. D’Kan’s long bow and the heavy crossbows that were popular back in the civilized world had twice that range, so either the ulvenmen had forgotten how humans fought, or their bird-spies had told them there were no bows in the fort.

  Christopher’s rifles had a killing range of a thousand feet. But the ulvenmen had no way of knowing that yet. He wasn’t going to let them know, until it was too late.

  “How are the troops holding up?” he asked, trying to pretend he had not just questioned Gregor’s courage.

  “Better than our stalwart Ranger,” Gregor said, but he wasn’t smiling. “Honestly, I would think them enspelled if I did not know otherwise. Even high-rank lords would look at that ocean of fangs and quake. But your boys seem to think you’ll pull a dragon out of your pocket and kill everything. They’re more concerned with whose turn it is to cook dinner than they are with the coming battle. If it is possible for an army to be overconfident, yours wins the prize.”

  “Is it?” Christopher asked. “Is it possible for an army to be overconfident?”

  “An over-tempered blade may hold a fine edge, but in the face of setbacks it can shatter where a less keen blade would only be notched.”

  Remembering the battle against the goblins, Christopher shook his head.

  “They won’t break and run. We don’t have anywhere to run to, anyway.”

  “I noticed that,” Gregor said. “Most high-ranks leave themselves an escape route, in case something unexpected happens. That’s how they live long enough to become high-rank. Did you at least prepare your flight spell?”

  “No,” Christopher admitted. He’d chosen different spells, intended to counter the effects of enemy magic.

  Gregor sighed. “Don’t tell D’Kan. He is under the illusion that after everything falls apart, you will cut a finger from his body before you flee, and he will at least have a second chance at life. Truly, Christopher, you mystify me. You chose actions that increase the morale of your unranked at the expense of the morale of your ranks.”

  “Don’t they have as much right to life as we do?”

  “You could fit a lot of fingers into one sack.”

  Christopher hadn’t thought of that. He felt his face flush.

  “I wasn’t serious. You couldn’t possibly afford to revive everyone. Nor do you have need to apologize. Both D’Kan and I understood our place when we joined you. You have treated us like ordinary men at every turn. We cannot expect different now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Christopher said, because he was. He knew he had taken advantage of both men, accepting their service without paying the usual price.

  “I confess,” Gregor said with surprise in his voice, “that I find it refreshing.”

  The two men stood together for a moment, sharing a feeling that had no place in the iron hierarchy of rank and privilege. Indeed, it might never have been felt before in this world. Gregor was discomfited by its strangeness at last and went off to find Disa, saying that he’d best mend his fences with her before the battle.

  “I don’t want her remembering our theological arguments when she’s deciding where to put her last healing spell,” he said. His smile showed he was not serious. She would do what was right.

  They all would.

  13

  A SHOCKING EXPERIENCE

  The night passed fitfully, but peacefully. Even though the sky was heavily overcast, screening out the starlight and leaving the world in deep darkness, the enemy did not attack. D’Kan suggested it was too dark. Their foes were not magical, only flesh and blood, and they needed some light to aim their bows by.

  Another unhappy sunrise told the truth, however. The ulvenmen had simply been waiting for the rest of their army.

  D’Kan stood open-mouthed, gaping at the plain beyond their wall. Christopher found his confidence equally shaken. He had never seen anything like this. Worse, none of the veteran soldiers around him had ever seen anything like it.

  “The King needs to know about this,” D’Kan hissed. “You must select one of us as a messenger. Already we could have saved one man yesterday.”

  “I don’t think so,” Karl answered him. “They had already invested the woods as of then. And the hawks would have led them to you. Once the spell failed, they would be waiting underneath you with sharpened knives.”

  “It’s true,” Christopher told him sadly. “My flight spell won’t get you all the way to the town. And anything less would be certain death.”

  The ulvenmen did not have cavalry. They had worse—or better, depending on whose side you were on. Two dozen Megaraptors, bred for size and overstuffed. Their armored riders glinted with metal, coats of overlapping scale that would still turn a blade or bounce an arrow, if not quite as swaddling as the fancy plate-mail of knights. The creatures moved in bursts of speed out on the plain, their long legs eating up the ground. Christopher wasn’t sure his horse could outrun them. He knew his magic could not.

  Instead of supply wagons, the ulvenman army had more dinosaurs. Eight massive Triceratops, the size of houses, with baggage piled twenty feet high on their backs. And one carried a howdah that glinted gold even from a mile away. The enemy commander rode to battle in considerably more style than Christopher’s warhorse.

  “He must feel pretty safe to reveal his position so openly,” Gregor said. Another joke from the blue knight. The enemy commander was perfectly safe, since he was sitting in the middle of approximately two thousand warriors.

  And not lightly armed, like the hide-wearing scouts. Most of the new troops clanked with metal coats that looked just as effective, if not quite as shiny, as the dinosaur riders’ armor.

  “They will destroy the town.” D’Kan was not giving up. “They will sweep over us tonight, like a child stepping over a stone, and they will devour the entire county in hardly less time. The King must be warned, not for the sake of Carrhill, but for the sake of the entire realm.”

  “Warned by who?” Gregor asked. “They wouldn’t even need to wait for the spell to fail; those hawks would tear you apart. The only person who has a chance of surviving the trip is Christopher.”

  “Then why won’t he go?” D’Kan asked.

  It was a good question, and Christopher didn’t have a good answer.

  “You can start over,” Karl told him. “Sacrificing this regiment is worth saving the next two.”

  “No,” Christopher said. “I can’t start again. I don’t have the energy. The smiths will keep the factories running. The sergeants will train the next regiment. Sooner or later the lords will see the value of guns, and everything will take care of itself. I am no more important to this process than anyone else, now. If I run, it’s only to save myself, not for the cause.”

  “Why will you not save yourself?” D’Kan asked, genuinely curious. “There is no shame in fleeing from certain death.”

  Because retreat meant exile from his wife. Forever. He would never have guessed it, had he been asked in his old life, but now that he was faced with it, the prospect seemed indistinguishable from dying. He couldn’t tell the difference, except that one would be long and miserable, and the other would be miserable and short.

  He did not want to live out the rest of his life a broken and useless old man, robbed of even dreams. Better to die here, with men he called friends.

  And women or, rather, woman. Disa joined them on the wall, under Gregor’s protective arm, her eyes red from weeping.

 
“If I could save one of you, I would,” Christopher told them. “But I do not think I can. And I cannot abandon you.”

  “You could save Gregor,” Disa said urgently. “His strength will defeat the hawks, his word will move the King. Send him, now, while there is still time.”

  Christopher didn’t understand her change in attitude. Not that it mattered. Gregor shook his head with a snort.

  “Not a chance. I left you once, and you had way too much fun without me. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “Then we are all doomed?” D’Kan said, and the young man’s face trembled.

  “Every ulvenman we slay is one less to harry the Kingdom.” Karl spoke matter-of-factly. “We will do our duty. If we die, it is so others might live.”

  D’Kan breathed heavily, and Christopher felt sorry for him. It was one thing for the hard-bitten Karl, the professional Gregor, or the old and worn-out Christopher to face death. It was something else for a handsome young nobleman with a life of glory still ahead of him.

  “I will not fail my honor,” D’Kan resolved, stiffening his shoulders through an act of will.

  “I know you won’t,” Gregor told him gently. “We will make an end worthy of heroes.”

  Torme joined them, eating a bowl of porridge. The ordinariness of the act was insulting, but he shrugged off their stares.

  “I have earned my death many times over,” he said. “If the gods come to collect it now, I have no room to complain.”

  In the fort below them, the young men went about their business with only an edge of tension. Still protected by their absolute faith in Christopher, they seemed unaware of the hopelessness of the situation. Christopher decided it would be the better part of mercy and wisdom not to tell them.

  People should talk more, Christopher thought. Specifically, the ulvenmen should have talked to the goblins. If they had, they wouldn’t be making the same mistake.

  Out on the marsh, several hundred armored ulvenmen were advancing, carrying crude ladders—a reassuring sight, since it suggested that ulvenmen could not in fact leap fifteen-foot walls in a single bound. The army behind them was picking itself up, getting ready to march on, sunset the signal that had roused them. Distant figures were repacking the supply dinosaurs. Obviously, the ulvenmen expected their advancing regiments to take the fort by frontal assault inside the next hour.

  If Christopher’s men had pikes, swords, and bows, they probably would. An ulvenman was worth two men in strength, hardiness, and ferocity. In the close press of combat, where density mattered, that translated into certain victory.

  Another two hundred of the light troops fanned out before the assault, armed with bows. The fact that they weren’t firing flaming arrows meant they wanted to capture the fort largely intact, the better to loot it. They were attacking only one wall, the south one, and had been so obvious about their plans that Christopher’s men had time to redistribute the cannons, putting fully half of them on the front line. In every aspect, the assault was hurried and overconfident.

  Just the way Christopher liked it.

  At one hundred yards the ulvenmen broke into a trot while their archers loosed a shower of arrows. The arrows fell harmlessly on the fort, the men safely ensconced in their firing ports. Even the horses were protected by wooden slatting over their stalls.

  At fifty yards the ulvenmen began to yelp and howl. With any other army, Christopher would have had to give the order to fire or watch his men dissolve into mindless fear. Staring at the advancing creatures, knowing that in seconds they would be swarming at the foot of the walls and over the ladders, was nerve-wracking. But these men had complete faith in their commander. They waited, calmly sighting down the barrels of their rifles like it was just another drill.

  When the ulvenmen were twenty yards from the wall, Christopher gave the signal, and Charles fired a rocket out over the marsh. It burst into a very pretty green and yellow star, and while the ulvenmen paused to look at it in confusion, mystified by an attack that did no damage, the riflemen began to fire.

  The ulvenmen were not cowards. Seeing their fellows fall like dominoes sparked them to rage, not fear. Rushing forward and slamming the ladders in place, they scampered up them at a full run.

  But as fast as they came over the top and into view, the cavalrymen shot them down with their carbines and threw grenades after the falling bodies.

  Many of the ulvenmen futilely tried to protect themselves from the hail of bullets by holding up shields. After a few minutes the survivors threw them down in frustration, and the ulvenmen fell into retreat, snarling and barking in hatred.

  Much to their surprise, the bullets didn’t stop coming when they were more than twenty yards out. Or thirty. Or even fifty. At one hundred yards, the guns fell silent, only because there was nothing left to shoot at.

  Inside the fort there was still gunfire, however. On the north wall several ulvenmen had appeared from nowhere, stabbing at shocked young men. The ulvenmen were equally shocked when other young men shot them at point-blank range, knocking them down with blasts of fire and smoke.

  “Invisibility,” Gregor growled, and ran to protect Disa while she healed the wounded. How the ulvenmen had gotten over the wall was unclear, but their lack of armor suggested they had been boosted up by other invisible ulvenmen in a canine pyramid. Or maybe they just had invisible ladders.

  “How many invisible ulvenmen can dance on a wall?” Christopher asked no one in particular.

  Returning to the south wall, Christopher looked out at the enemy army. They were staring with perplexity at the complete failure of their frontal assault. Hundreds of bodies littered the ground, mostly within a few yards of the fort.

  “We need to harvest those,” Gregor said. “Or they will, and be the stronger for it. Yet the ground is not safe.” He pointed out onto the plain, where a head was detaching itself into thin air and then disappearing, presumably into an invisible bag.

  Christopher sighed, because he knew what that meant. Time for heroics. With Gregor, it was always time for heroics.

  “The question is whether we want to spend our magic now or save it.”

  Gregor was practically salivating over the fortune in tael the corpses represented. “There is a fourth-rank lying at your feet, if only you would bend to pick it up. Give it to Disa, and within four days she will be able to out-heal you and Torme put together.”

  Put in those terms, Christopher saw the attraction of the idea. If this turned into a siege, which he certainly hoped it would, then all of that healing power would be invaluable.

  The only alternative to a siege was immediate defeat, in which case whatever decision he made here would be irrelevant.

  “Get ropes,” he told Gregor, and the blue knight ran off grinning fiendishly to organize their insanely dangerous adventure.

  Karl approved, only because they still had some surprises for the ulvenmen. They hadn’t fired any cannons yet. “As long as we have tricks up our sleeves, we can act as they would expect. Any ordinary lord would have already jumped from the walls to collect that booty.”

  Moments later, twenty men with axes and bags stood on the edge of the wall. Another ten with carbines were going along with the party, mostly for the sake of morale. The real protection was the hundred riflemen watching over the edge.

  And Christopher and Gregor, of course. Going outside the wall was a ludicrous risk, but if it tempted the ulvenmen into another impetuous charge, it was worth it.

  He did not cast the blessing spell; it only lasted a few minutes, and the ulvenmen might not attack right away. But mindful of his previous experience, he cast a new spell and felt strength quicken in his arms and legs. Springing to the top of the wall, despite the immense weight of the plate-mail he wore, he finally felt like a hero. For the next few hours, at least. It appeared simple strength was not without its use, after all.

  “Down!” he shouted, and he and Gregor went over the edge, rappelling the fifteen feet to the ground. The rest of
the men followed, setting to their grisly harvest as soon as their feet hit the ground, while Christopher and Gregor stalked about, looking for trouble.

  The men worked fast, unhindered by opposition or armor. One man would yank on a monster’s head while the other struck at the neck with an ax. Then into the bag and on to the next. They were halfway through the mess before the first guard fell silently, an ulvenman popping into view above him with a bloody blade.

  Christopher shouted the words of his revealing spell as he sprinted toward the trouble. The visible ulvenman was already dead, cut down by rifle fire from the wall. The men on the ground stared wildly in random directions, fearing the next unforeseeable assault. As Christopher came up to the area, ulvenmen started appearing from nowhere, howling in outrage that their invisibility had been compromised.

  Quite intelligently, they recognized Christopher as the source of the problem. Not so intelligently, they charged him as a body, hoping to destroy his effect. As they entered the radius of his spell, they became visible, prompting fire from the walls. Christopher stood still in one spot and tried not to flinch as the rain of bullets fell around him, splattering ulvenmen and spraying blood everywhere.

  Something smashed into his leg, knocking him to one knee. As he looked down to see the cause, his thigh extruded a bullet and closed up the wound. If not for tael, he would have been a friendly-fire casualty. The damage would have shattered his leg and severed an artery.

  Instead, he cast a healing spell, restoring his tael to its full strength. Around him, the rest of the men stood up from where they had cowered and began harvesting the new bodies.

  “Your failure to die has revealed you as a principal,” Gregor shouted gleefully. “The ranks are interested.” He pointed out to the marsh, where a dozen of the Megaraptors were thundering toward them.