Knightfall: Book Four of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  The Temple of the Grey Lady was quiet. All her priests were up near the wall. They were dragging the seriously wounded away from the fighting and turning them over to healers—probably priests of some specific deity, but possibly regular people who were good with healing spells. Maybe even wizards with a specialty. There were other priests present in the battle, I noticed, but I didn’t immediately recognize their sigils. Is there a temple to a war god? Maybe. Who else would be involved? I ought to ask… someday. The priests of the Grey Lady also dragged corpses out of the way. These were stacked unceremoniously on a cart or wagon, presumably for transport to the temple and proper rites.

  Weird. They don’t have much respect for the corpse. Then again, they know the corpse isn’t really the person. It makes me wonder again what the various religions do with the bodies around here. Bury them? Burn them? Dry them out, grind them up, and spread them on the fields?

  If I get killed, I have no idea what they’ll do with my remains. I don’t deal with funerals all that much. All my stuff happens before the funeral, not what to do with a body once it’s empty. Maybe I should ask.

  “Sire?” came a voice from my communications mirror.

  “Go ahead, Seldar.”

  “I have several people hammering on arrowheads, but the spells won’t hold enough to seriously threaten a ship. I also have volunteers.”

  “I understand. Get up here and keep an eye on the battle. I’ll do some helping with the arrows—where are they?”

  “Kavel’s smithy, Sire. I am on my way to you now.”

  “I’ll wait until you get here.”

  Seldar arrived and I headed for the smithy.

  The magic to hold momentum is really an elvish invention; I just reverse-engineered it into a reproducible spell. The initial version held energy from impacts—hammer blows, punches, being dropped on the floor, whatever—and released it into the object at a later time. The effect on the object was similar to being hit with all those blows at once. Usually, this resulted in turning it molten or into shrapnel. I have what I think is a somewhat safer version that stores the energy inside the material itself, rather than in the spell. The original spell acts like a spring being wound; if you over-wind it, it breaks, with predictable results. My version (he said, with a superior air) stores energy based on the size of the thing you’re pounding on and warns you when it’s near capacity.

  I’m a physicist. We can do that. Well, physicist wizards can.

  While regarding the preparations, I picked up an arrow shaft and considered it. It was wood. Earlier, I was thinking about how to disintegrate wood, to rip it apart and sink a ship. But… wood contains energy. It burns. There’s a stored energy potential inside it. If I put a spell on an arrow shaft, I could turn it into powder. Mixed with air, it could burn suddenly, even explosively.

  Why not put a larger spell on an arrowhead? One to affect all the wood around it? If it stuck into a wooden ship, it could powder a hole in the ship and set all that aerosolized powder ablaze.

  And, since I was standing in Kavel’s forge, I remembered the air-filtering spell on the blower. It was a simple magical barrier to keep out nitrogen. It wasn’t meant to keep out all the nitrogen, just some of it, which increased the oxygen concentration going into the forge and made the fire burn faster, hotter.

  There was also a time when I put solidified oxygen on pieces of steel and used them as explosives…

  Click. Click. Click.

  The arrow flies into the wooden target. The first spell expands a field around the arrowhead, pushing all the nitrogen away. Pressure equalizes as oxygen fills the lower-pressure area, filtering in through the spell. In this pure-oxygen atmosphere, a quantity of oak surrounding the arrowhead—including the arrow shaft, but mostly a big bite of the ship’s structure—turns into a finely-divided powder, suspended in the oxygen environment. The arrowhead explodes, igniting the mixture.

  “Someone give me a box of arrowheads. No, the pointy ones, not the broadheads. Something for sticking deep into a target. Thank you. Anybody here a wizard? Or someone who can push power at me while I do some experimental work?”

  The volunteers for the mission stopped hammering on warheads and crowded around me. I keep forgetting everyone has some magical training around here. They formed a circle around me, holding hands, and focused. I did the actual spellcasting; they contributed magical force. Seventeen arrowheads took a while, but the hammered-heads would take longer to fill. I had some time, anyway.

  Once we had the arrowheads ready, they mounted them on shafts—handling them with great respect; they weren’t sure what the spells did—while I checked my mirror.

  “Seldar?”

  “Yes, Sire?”

  “What’s the word?”

  “The battle continues. The attackers have regrouped and deployed some sort of mechanical device—it has unfolded to form a bridge between one of the access ramps and its gate. They are assaulting the gate with magic and with a medium ram.”

  “They gave up on the wall?”

  “Torvil was most persuasive, Sire, and as the understanding of how to counter their mind-stunning spells spread, more and more of our troops became less subject to sudden paralysis. With their help, the oil prepared for the defenses has been poured out. The outer face of the wall and a goodly portion of the beach are on fire. Their wizards have not yet dealt with the flames.”

  “Is it really so much trouble to put it out? I mean, how much oil are we talking about?”

  “Several barrels, Sire. They have used several spells in attempts to quench the flames, but the fires simply refuse to die.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “Your granddaughter is standing by the seawall with her hands spread and fingertips resting on the wall. She appears to be concentrating.”

  “That would do it,” I agreed, recalling a small river flowing into a wall of fire and disappearing into steam. I wondered if any of the oil was still there. It might be like a burning bush without the bush.

  “What of your progress, Sire?”

  “We’re about to deploy archers to distract them. Can you let people know? I want them to take maximum advantage of any lapses in concentration.”

  “Yes. I will do so now.”

  “Good man.” I put my pocket mirror back in the pocket and we all jogged to the gate room. I got the mirror there on-line and took a look at the seawall around the harbor. The top of the harbor wall was still visible above the water.

  “See that? You’re going to run through the gate as though through a door, straight out onto the pathway. Get through the gate as quickly as you can, because the other end doesn’t have anything for me to latch on to.”

  A hand went up. I nodded at him.

  “Majesty?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I can’t hold this door open for more than a few seconds,” I translated. “If it closes on you, you’re dead. So as soon as you see water through the arch, you sprint like hell for the obelisk. Once everyone is through—I hope—the gate will close. You launch your missiles together—a unified volley.

  “Oh, wait. Pair off. I want you in groups of two. The leftover guy helps make a group of three. Got it? Good. Now that we have that sorted out, each group fires at a different ship—try to get them inside, somehow, through a port or a window or something. Fire your initial volley together, then fire the second shot at your ship as fast as you can, then run. You will be in an exposed position in order to get good shots. That means you have to get off the seawall and get away from the harbor before they do something brutal and nasty to you.”

  “Now I understand,” he said, faintly.

  “Anyone not want to go? It’s extremely dangerous.”

  They assured me, each in their own way, they were going. I nodded.

  “String bows. Get your magic arrows in your other hand. If you want to raise magical defenses, do it now.”

  They formed a circle like a footb
all team going into a huddle and started chanting—some sort of group work to put a spell on everyone. I hadn’t seen that before. Something new they developed, perhaps? Come to think of it, it might be more efficient to do it that way, as well as a team-building exercise.

  Okay, forget about them. Time to put my own game face on.

  I took several deep breaths and checked the charge on the gate. It had charged somewhat on its own, but not enough to handle a one-sided gateway. Short of interdimensional travel, this was one of the worst scenarios for gate use. And I was already starting to feel tired from the warhead spells.

  Yeah, this wasn’t going to be easy.

  Center the thoughts. Gather power. Inhale the energy of the world. Breathe in power. Keep it. Concentrate it. Focus it. Direct it.

  The scrying mirror drew a line, point to point, and the archway followed it. The depth of the archway seemed to increase, like a hallway. It lengthened in that strange direction, sliding past space and time to a place where it wasn’t, landing there, latching on, existing in two places and making them the same.

  Visually, the view through the arch did its usual flush, open, and snap routine. People sprinted for the far side the moment I gestured.

  It was a good thing, too. I held it for several seconds, until the last man was through. This drained the partial charge in the gems much more quickly than I liked. I had to shoulder the whole load at the end or risk shredding the last three or four men. I held it, though, kept it open, even though it expended my gate spell and left me too weak to stand.

  The image through the archway tore apart and dissolved. I sank to my knees and leaned forward on my hands. Doing this sort of thing as a mortal spellcaster is more than exhausting; it’s draining.

  I decided to lie down for a minute. Just until the mountain settled down and stopped tilting the floor. Maybe my pet rock is a prankster.

  I wish I knew if all this effort was worth it.

  I woke up in bed. There was a nasty moment when I wondered if this was some weird, surrealistic dream sequence starting with the mundane before moving into metaphysical-psychological-symbolic imagery.

  Nope. Everything seemed pretty stable.

  Nice of you to wake up, Firebrand told me. Things are going badly.

  “Badly?” I looked around without sitting up. Nobody was trying to kill me. Either things were going badly elsewhere, or the badness was more subtle. I swung my legs off the platform serving as a bed and sat up. When the dizziness hit, I lay back down and breathed deeply until it passed. I sat up more slowly and reached for Firebrand.

  “Explain this going badly thing. Did they take Mochara?”

  No, Mochara seems okay. Last I heard, their biggest concern was the burning wreckage in the harbor. Remember how they parked all the fishing boats in the bay to make maneuvering and whatnot difficult for the invaders?

  “I saw it. They had to keep it slow to avoid damaging their own ships on the way to the piers.”

  The fires from their ships spread to a lot of the others. It was weird, almost like the flames had a mind of their own and determination to spread. It’s gonna be a while before they have much of a fishing fleet again.

  “I bet they did,” I agreed, unsurprised. Two fire-witches in town. Yeah, things were destined to burn. “We’ll mass-produce some lumber,” I continued. “Bob can cut a row of trees from the edge of the forests along the Eastrange and float them down the canal. A tumbler arrangement can de-bark the things, then we put the logs through a sawmill—hold it. I’m not all the way awake, yet, and I’m getting distracted. Start from the gate deployment and fill me in.”

  Okay. From what I hear, your archers did their thing and a fine thing it was. The ships they hit didn’t cast new shields, just extended their existing ones while fighting the fires on board. The city launched a lot of breaking spells when the shields got spread thin, broke them, and then started shooting fire from all the launcher-things your buddy Flim has been working on. Wizards in Mochara got a pyrotechnic boost from Tianna or Amber—maybe both—and encouraged everything.

  With half their fleet on fire or sinking, things started to come apart for the invaders. The Mocharan wizards regrouped and reorganized, countering the remaining enemy wizards while concentrating their attacks on one ship at a time. Archers picked off wizards in the water as they abandoned ship. Some of them never came up again; they may have escaped by breathing water and swimming away. Most of them didn’t.

  “Sounds like things went according to plan, then.”

  There was a minor bobble when the big raft—the funny-looking ship? —lined itself up in the harbor entry.

  “Oh?”

  There was a boom. It was a huge boom, I understand. It made a horrible bang and one of the seawall gates came apart. There was damage to the wall, too, as well as a lot of damage inside the city. They found a few iron spheres, probably launched by the barge-thing. The barge-thing didn’t enjoy it, though. Something went wrong, they think, because a big, bronze pillar rolled out the back of it and sank just outside the harbor. Then people on the barge started diving into the water to get away from their flaming ship, and then there was an even bigger boom. Smoke, steam, fire—all the good stuff. The ship disappeared in a fireball and sent bits and pieces all over the harbor. It also damaged the two nearer ships and stripped most of their canvas off.

  “Sounds to me like someone’s been working on gunpowder and cannon,” I mused. “I wish I could have seen it. I wonder if they screwed up the mounting on the cannon or if the archers I sent damaged it, somehow.”

  I couldn’t tell you, Boss. I didn’t get to see, since I’m stuck here.

  “How do you know all this, then?”

  Seldar came up to report, but you were asleep.

  “Fair enough. I don’t suppose you know why we don’t have cannon of our own mounted on the walls?”

  Actually, I do. The Demon King didn’t like them. Said they were too unwieldy, too expensive, and required too much magic to be worth it. After the battle with Byrne, nobody seemed inclined to argue the point. You did kind of make them look useless.

  “Huh. I suppose so. Not much point in lugging several tons of metal around just to knock down three or four knights. I guess that’s a good thing, since I never got around to telling the mountain to adopt a star fort configuration. Maybe I should do tell it anyway… I’ll think about it some more. What happened next in the Mochara assault?”

  Without the magical backing from their ships, the troops on the docks and beach realized they didn’t have a good way to escape. They broke and ran, east and west, streaming along the beach at the base of the cliffs and getting shot at the whole way. A lot of them hit the harbor edges, splashed out and over the harbor wall, splashed back to the beach on the far side, and kept running. Our guys are doing cleanup around there—cavalry is rounding them up and taking them prisoner wherever possible, the wimps.

  “Okay, aside from the one cannon shot, I’m not seeing how that’s going badly.”

  That’s going fine. You wanted to hear about Mochara.

  “So I did. Continue.” I stood up, stretched, and ran a quick cleaning spell over myself. I had a sticky, sweaty feeling behind my ears and on the inside of my elbows. Sometimes a nap does that. I think it’s a humidity thing. It’s nowhere near as bad as my transformations, but it’s still icky and unpleasant.

  While you were busy with Mochara, people in Karvalen have been busy, too. Remember those guys T’yl was talking about, way back when we had to leave in a hurry?

  “The time Tort tricked the Demon King and T’yl persuaded me to flee through the gate. I remember.”

  That’s right.

  “The religions involved were…. The glowboys and the temple of justice?”

  Yep, that’s them. Technically, the Temple of Justice was after the Demon King on their own, over Seldar’s objections—he’s not in charge, just another priest. The Church of Light went after your evil alter ego at the same time because it was
a good opportunity, not because they coordinated it.

  “That would follow, I suppose. The bright boys aren’t too fond of other religions.”

  I know. But it looked as though they were working together at the time. This time, I don’t think the justice worshippers are involved, but a lot of not-too-religious types—mostly knights of the Demon King—

  “You mean the professional killers with no sense of honor?”

  That’s them.

  “Let’s not call them knights.”

  Okay by me. What do you want me to call them, Boss?

  “Huh. Armored killers, or A-K’s, maybe? Are there forty-seven of them?”

  I’m sure you’re trying to be funny, but I don’t get it.

  “You’re right. Maybe it’s a bad idea.”

  Whatever. A lot of them are in town and they’re working for the Temple of Light. All those months ago, the Temple of Light had enough guys on hand to storm the mountain, at least while the palace areas were unoccupied. Months later—today—they’re going solo and they’ve got even more troops, but they’re not going after your palace. They’re after the city. They’ve got the southeastern city gate and have surrounded the Baron’s palace—the city guard is still defending it. They’ve taken one of the granaries for sure, and four guard houses. They’re within a street or two of the Hall of Justice, as well as—

  “The Hall of Justice?”

  Yes. They’re close to taking it, if they want to push another street or two that way. Is it vital in some way?

  “Only if they have some super friends. Tell me about this Hall of Justice.”

  It’s… a big building next to the Temple of Justice? With a great hall? People go there when they can’t settle disputes on their own. An official from the city and a couple of priests hear the complaints and sort it out to do that thing—you know, justice. So, they do justice in a hall… or it’s a hall you go to for justice…?

  “When you put it that way,” I admitted, “it does seem like a logical name for it. Okay, I’ll try to contain my mirth. Go on.”