The Best Weapon

by David Pilling

  "I am at a loss to see," Grand Master Sibrand said with a bitter tone in his voice, "what we have achieved."

  The two men were standing on the battlements of the highest tower of the inner ward, allowing them a splendid view in all directions. Directly to the south the land fell away in a sheer drop to the sparkling green waters of the Girdle Sea, where the southern slope of Temple Rock met the cliffs overlooking that broad ocean. In every other direction lay rolling sun-baked desert and parched yellow grasslands, devoid of trees or shelter.

  A barren landscape at most times, but right now there was plenty for the two knights to look at. The land surrounding the castle was a sea of tents, stretching for almost a mile to north, east and west. Among the tents, like a crawling horde of locusts, moved thousands and thousands of Godless Ones. The hypnotic irregular beat of their war-drums, animal skins stretched tight across bowl-shaped shells, thundered day and night. Adding to the constant din was the weird ululating drone of their war-horns, depriving those inside the fortress of sleep and scraping bitterly on their already fragile nerves.

  "The fleet may yet rescue us," replied Malet, flexing the fingers of his remaining hand.

  He didn't sound confident, and for good reason. The fleet that had carried them to the Old Kingdom was supposed to have worked its way around the coast and been waiting for them under the walls of Temple Rock, but when the army had arrived not a ship was to be seen. In the three days since Malet had watched in vain for the blessed sight of white sails on the horizon.

  "Don't be a fool," retorted Sibrand, "though that's a useless admonishment if ever there was one. The fleet is not coming. Captain Dephix, may the gods rub his innards with salt, has failed us. The pirates of the Western Isles probably ate him and all his ships. I would wager my second-best sword that his skull is hanging from a hook in the Raven Queen's hall."

  "Dephix told us that he had a contract with the Raven Queen, and that she would not attack any ships under his command while it lasted."

  Sibrand waved that away. "She is a pirate, Malet. They are generally not to be trusted."

  Their conversation was interrupted by the strains of music drifting up from the enemy camp. Every day, at the same time in the afternoon, the enemy chiefs gathered round a blanket laid on the ground and ate and drank themselves almost sick. The sight of so much food and wine being consumed was meant to dismay the soldiers of the Reconquest, whose own provisions were running out, and so it did.

  "Greedy bastards," remarked Sibrand, and turned angrily back to Malet. "You haven't answered my question. What, precisely, have we achieved, other than pointless death and destruction? What has this farce of a campaign been for?"

  "I wasn't the only Master in favour. of it," Malet replied defensively.

  "No, but you spoke the loudest! And since Sturling and Toeni are dead, and Brandiles can no longer speak since he took an arrow in the throat, only you remain to supply me with an explanation! Why were you so keen to persuade me to agree to the Reconquest, just so we could toil halfway across the world and finally meet our end in this decaying shell of a fortress? What glory or achievement has it led to?"

  Malet was silent, unable to think of an answer that might placate his master. To point out that the Grand Master could have aborted the campaign any time he wished, and bore equal responsibility for its failure, might have led to him being hurled from the battlements.

  "Occido has led us to the house of our ancestors, lord," he said eventually, "I cannot believe that He will abandon us now."

  Sibrand sneered. "You may well fall back on piety, since that's all you have left. I advise you to save your prayers for when the Godless Ones get bored of stuffing their bellies and mount a proper assault."

  * * * *

  The assault that the Grand Master predicted began on the evening of that same day. Creeping forward under cover of darkness, several hundred warriors, young men and women who had volunteered for the task to demonstrate their courage, carried piles of rocks and bales of grass to the edge of the great ditch that surrounded the landward side of the Temple Rock.

  With these they hoped to fill in the ditch, creating a ramp to clamber up and scale the walls, but the sentries were vigilant. The advance party quickly came under fire from the bowmen on the walls, shooting by the light of torches thrown from the battlements into the ditch.

  From his vantage point on the gatehouse Malet watched anxiously as the attack stumbled to a halt. The Grand Master had entrusted him with the defence of the outer walls, while the old man himself took command of the reserves in the inner ward.

  Malet's men were tired and hungry, but there was no slackening of effort as they poured arrows and bolts down into the struggling mass of the enemy. Dozens of Godless Ones were mown down, dropping their burdens as missiles pierced their bodies, and only a few succeeded in making it as far as the ditch.

  Something wet and warm splashed onto Malet's bald scalp. All his attention was fixed on the enemy and he ignored it, but then another hit him, and another. Reaching up with his remaining hand, he tasted a familiar salt tang on his fingertips.

  Malet had enough knowledge of blood, his own and other people's, to know what it tasted like. He glanced up, frowning, and more of the stuff splashed onto his face.

  There were cries of alarm and confusion from the soldiers on the walls and on the plain below, mingling with the screams of the wounded. The heavens had opened, but the gods had not seen fit to send rain. Instead the dark evening sky was pouring with blood, fat red droplets, in a monsoon of gore.

  Surprised at his own quick thinking, Malet seized the moment. "A sign, a sign from the War God!" he yelled, "he has opened his veins and allowed his own hot blood to pour down on our enemies!"

  A few of the more devout knights took up his cry, chanting the name of their god and washing their faces with blood in a kind of ecstasy, but everyone else cowered in terror and disgust. The Godless Ones broke and ran back to their camp, abandoning their gear and their wounded.

  From the ramparts of the inner ward, the Grand Master held a shield over his head against the downpour and watched the sky. He had thought he was long past the age when anything could fill him with awe, but was speedily revising that opinion.

  Directly above Temple Rock the dark evening clouds were boiling like water in a kettle. Sibrand thought he could make out shapes forming and dissolving in the maelstrom, monstrous faces, horned heads and other such horrid visions, murky and indistinct, like the shadows of a nightmare. And then there was the blood tumbling down from the distorted heaving skies, as if the veins of some unfortunate god had indeed been opened in the heavens.

  "Occido has come to deliver us!" shouted one of Sibrand's bodyguards, a keen priest-knight who had always unnerved the Grand Master with his ferocious piety.

  "Don't say such things," Sibrand snarled, cuffing the man's exultant blood-streaked face. There were no reliable reports of the War God coming into the world of the living, only legends, but those legends indicated that he generally turned up in a vile mood and eager to chastise his human servants.

  Fear clutched at Sibrand. If Occido was coming it must be because the waste and useless slaughter of the Reconquest had enraged him. Sibrand imagined the towering armoured form of his god, red eyes smouldering wrathfully behind the terrible iron mask. In his mind's eye he saw Occido mounting his fabled coal-black stallion and come galloping into the world, huge and terrible, merciless and inexorable. The spectre of Death would ride at the War God's elbow, grinning in the anticipation of souls to harvest.

  The Grand Master knelt in the red rain and prayed with a fervour. he hadn't known for decades.

  Occido did not come, and the following morning was bright and clear and mercifully free of avenging gods. Having endured a sleepless night, the Grand Master wearily trudged down to the outer walls in search of his second-in-command.

  The interior of the fortress looked and stank like a slaughterhouse. His soldiers, themselves pale and holl
ow-eyed from lack of sleep, were caked in blood. To his exhausted imagination they seemed like so many gore-spattered ghosts, the shades of men killed in battle. It was hot, and the air oppressive, with a strange metallic taste to it.

  He found Malet slumped inside the guardroom at the foot of one of the gatehouse towers. Only the gentle rise and fall of his chest beneath his bloodstained cloak gave any sign that life still lingered in him. Taking pity for once, Sibrand refrained from shouting or kicking him awake, but gently knocked on the timber of the open door.

  "They will attack soon, Comrade Master," Malet said without moving or opening his eyes. "And when they do, we are all dead."

  Sibrand entered the room and peered out of the arrow-slit window looking down onto the plains to the north. The Godless Ones were busy, forming into battalions with drums rattling, horns blowing and horsemen galloping to and fro. Encouraged by the Speakers, their chiefs had decided to put aside caution and risk everything on an all-out assault.

  "Noisy bastards, aren't they?" Sibrand sighed, leaning his aged brow against the cool stone of the embrasure. "I had hoped that the storm last night might have driven them off. It damn near gave me a seizure. What do you think it was?"

  "I don't know." Malet opened his eyes and grimaced. "What are they doing outside?"

  "I can see their artillery coming up. And these are mindless savages, apparently."

  Outside the ranks of Godless Ones parted to let the war machines through, dragged by their sweating crews. The engines trundled to a halt just out of bowshot of the walls, and the drums fell silent.

  "To our posts," said Malet, shrugging off his cloak and standing up.

  The two knights faced each other for what they knew would probably be the last time. There wasn't a great deal of mutual respect between them and never had been, but, with death so close, certain forms had to be observed.

  "Fare well then, comrade," said Sibrand, placing his fist over his heart.

  "And you, Comrade Master," replied Malet, returning the salute.

  Moments later the bombardment started.

  * * * *

  The hail of rocks and bolts did little damage to Temple Rock's stout walls, but it wasn't intended to. Instead the barrage of missiles forced the defenders to keep their heads down while the infantry, some ten thousand warriors, surged towards the ditch and the main gate. The few arrows fired by those archers who dared to stick their heads over the parapet did nothing to stem that fearful tide.

  From his position on the rampart above the gate Malet could see that the game was up.

  "My sword," he said quietly to the pallid young knight standing by him. Malet hefted the blade awkwardly in his left hand, while the knight knelt and strapped a shield to the stump of his right arm.

  "Fool that I was, fool that I am, I used to dream of glory in war," Malet said, smiling as he watched a column of Godless Ones, shields held over their heads, come rushing up to the gate with an iron-tipped battering ram.

  The original gates had rotted away centuries ago, and so the garrison had improvised a barricade by piling up loose stones and earth in the entrance. A platoon of picked knights and men-at-arms stood behind the barricade, ready to sell their lives dearly if and when the flimsy barricade fell.

  With a grinding crash the ram ploughed into the barricade, dislodging several rocks in a shower of earth. The impact made the rampart shudder and Malet almost lost his footing as the stones shifted under him.

  Horns, shrill and urgent, sounded behind him. He turned to see a group of mounted Templars trotting out of the inner gate and forming up on the slope. They were led by the Grand Master, wearing his wolf-skin cloak and with the banner of the black sword flying over his head.

  "Too soon, you old fool, too soon," muttered Malet, "hold your reserve until they are right up to the inner gates, not now..."

  The walkway shuddered again beneath him, and a lucky strike by one of the catapults smacked into the crumbling battlements. The cargo of rocks shattered on impact and the splinters flew in all directions. A shard caught Malet in the small of his back and flung him off the rampart.

  His body turned once in the air, bounced off some loose rocks and landed heavily. Malet groaned and tried to rise, but his back was broken.

  The last thing he saw before his eyes dimmed forever was the banner of the black sword advancing, black on white, filling the sky, filling his world until there was nothing else.

  The Grand Master, his vision reduced to a narrow slit inside the stuffy cave of his helmet, saw nothing of Malet's demise. He did see the barricade sag inward and collapse, the iron head of the battering ram break through, and the screaming warriors that came charging through the swirling dust.

  He raised his sword and the knights behind him surged from a trot into a gallop. The platoon waiting behind the barricade scattered to let them through. Sibrand had the satisfaction of seeing a Godless One's eyes widen in terror before his horse galloped over the man and trampled his brains out.

  The Grand Master was free again, free of the responsibilities of command and the corruption of politics. Suddenly the world was a simple place, as it had been in his fiery youth, all its complexities reduced to cutting right and left with his sword, guiding his horse with his knees, killing and avoiding being killed. He rode deep into the hordes of enemy warriors that now came pouring into Temple Rock like water through the cracks in a dam, cracking skulls and chopping through necks and limbs. Sibrand was born to be a killer, and revelled in it.

  Unseen hands pulled him from his horse. Grim-faced warriors, baying for blood, hammered away on his armour like so many smiths, before one had the idea of kneeling and thrusting the point of a thin knife through the slit of his visor. This was the easiest way to kill a fully armoured knight, but the Grand Master wasn't finished yet.

  Sibrand's blade punched up through his would-be killer's vitals, through his lower intestine and into his heart. Blood, the blood of the last of the many men that he had killed, spilled over his glove. His victim's enraged comrades hacked and battered him to the point of oblivion.

  They left him for dead, and with a few seconds of peace to contemplate the world around him before it faded. Sibrand saw the sky filled with an impossible presence, he saw lightning playing on the summit of the highest tower of Temple Rock, and then the War God was standing before him.

  Convulsing in terror, the Grand Master's aged heart gave out.

  High above the battle the blue morning skies were fading, and a shadow had fallen across the sun. Weird phantoms flitted across the wide arch of the sky, misshapen human figures and others, sprites and wraiths from the depths of various hells, pushing and scratching against the barriers that kept them out of the living world.

  Out in the desert, over a mile from Temple Rock, Fulk stood and watched as the fabric of reality bulged and strained at the seams. His weeks of travelling had led him here, bedraggled and half-starved but intact, and now the shadow over the sun fascinated him.

  It was made up of thousands and thousands of crows, flying in an immense circle.

  * * * *

  Naiyar stood on the forecastle of his ship, staring intently into the misty blackness ahead, as though he could see Temple Rock already.

  The night was unnaturally dark, and all he could see were a few wisps of vapour in the light of his torch.

  Kayla stood just behind him, one hand on his shoulder. The night was silent except for the creaking of the ships, the gentle splashing of the water as the bow pushed steadily on, and the flap of invisible sails. To mortal eyes, the ship appeared to be a ruined skeleton, an eerily animated wreck, but Naiyar knew its bones were held together by forces greater than the planks and nails originally used to build it. Had there been sufficient light, the Djanki warriors could have been seen, through the great rents in the hull, sleeping below deck, though Naiyar's magic kept the wind and water out.

  Even Colken and Appiah slept below deck, leaving the two of them alone. Naiyar had insisted they
sleep, though they both wanted to stand guard, as they would need all their strength when they reached their destination.

  Everyone agreed the Djanki would travel at the front of the fleet, as they were eager to scale the cliff at Temple Rock, and Husan al Din had been more than happy to bring up the rear. He had seen the Djanki fight at the Tear Drop, and he hoped they would do most of the killing before the Sharib joined in.

  So the fleet travelled in silence through the murky night, driven by invisible sails and manned by a crew of the dead.

  Dawn arrived to find Naiyar and Kayla still at their posts, while everyone else slept on in the bellies of the rotting ships.

  Before them was a chill, grey dawn, the sky grew ominously darker toward their destination, which still lay beyond the horizon. The air was tense, as though nature itself looked towards Temple Rock with bated breath, awaiting some cataclysm.

  * * * *

  Fulk's heart lay with the Temple. All the doubts that had plagued him before he came to the Old Kingdom, all the changes he had undergone since, seemed to dissipate like morning mist as he came within sight of the battle for Temple Rock.

  Those were his people fighting and dying, inch by bloody inch, to defend their ancient fortress, men and women he had grown up alongside and been taught to think of as comrades. Though there was little of the Templar about his appearance now, Fulk not ignore their plight.

  He also needed to get through the host of Godless Ones and inside the fortress. Dark clouds were gathering above the roof of the highest tower. Bolts of lightning coursed through them, illuminating the vast murder of crows circling the fortress.. The Lords of Hell were beginning their attempt to manifest in this world.

  He patted the neck of his mare and urged her into a weary canter. Horse and rider rode straight through the sprawling camp of the Godless Ones, startling the few servants and sick troopers who had been left behind. There were shouts, but Fulk ignored them as he steered towards the line of war machines pounding the walls of Temple Rock.