by Doug Niles
Why, then, did he feel such unease and disquiet?
Still restless, the veteran captain moved from the gatehouse through the lower courtyards, where all was quiet. He climbed the towers on the curtain wall, finding the sentries awake, bored but watchful. He considered going all the way up to the High Lookout—the loftiest spot in the whole tower, except for the tiny enclosure known as the Nest of the Kingfisher, atop a narrow spire—but he knew there were trustworthy guards up there, and it would take him until dawn just to climb the hundreds of steps.
Instead, he made his way to the northern walls of his great fortress. They looked down into vast canyons, utterly dark and silent, and up on frowning cliffs and jagged peaks. There were places in view that were higher than the fortress walls, but they were too far away for archers, or even catapults, to come to bear. The night was motionless, dark with shadows.
“Eh?” croaked one of the knight guards from the outer parapet. “What kind of bird—?”
The sound died out in a gurgle of air and blood. Markus had been a soldier all his life; he knew the sound of a throat being cut.
“Alarm!” he cried. “Raise the alarm. Light torches, by Kiri!”
Immediately fires flared into being, a dozen brands igniting across the many ramparts. For a horrified instant, the captain could only gape in disbelief. His lofty parapet, nearly a thousand feet above the canyon bed, was swarming with attackers clad in black leather armor. They came not just over the walls, but also from the base of the interior wall and tower—and many were dropping right out of the sky!
The defenders never had a chance. Markus’s knights, the men who so adored and trusted him, fought bravely, but there were only twelve men posted on the remote platform, and they were swarmed by at least ten times their number. Each knight faced two, three, even four attackers at once. Steel slashed at them from every direction. And the enemy were skilled attackers.
Markus saw the last of his men die—within seconds after the battle had started—before managing to retreat into the tower’s interior, pulling the heavy iron-banded door shut behind himself. He dropped the bar and braced it with his hands.
The alarm was ringing across the pass. Torches flared all over, as men sought targets and shouted questions and challenges.
A sergeant pounded by the steps below Markus, carrying a torch and holding his sword at the ready.
“General! What’s going on?” he cried.
“Up here!” Markus cried. “Two hundred men, maybe more, have gained the north parapet—right outside this door! Get reinforcements up here on the double!”
“Yes, sir!” The veteran soldier sheathed his sword and sprang down the stairs, his torch flaring. Markus still had his hands on the locking bar, but he grew more and more unsettled when there came no attempt made to force the barrier.
A moment later the general heard dozens of boot steps pounding up the stairs. He went to an arrow slit and looked out, wondering why none of the attackers had started to pound on the door. Markus could only hope that fresh troops arrived in time to help him make a desperate stand.
But when he looked out the arrow slit, he saw why the attackers weren’t pressing the attack there. The reason was clear and astonishing: they weren’t trying to batter down the door because they were simply flying away, soaring through the air to attack another position.
Hoarst and his flying company struck three different parapets, all positions high up on the north wall. In each place they killed the posted guards and created such commotion that additional troops from the tower’s limited garrison were dispatched to the critical juncture. And by the time the reinforcements reached each scene, the attackers were gone. Soon the whole tower was ablaze with torches and littered with dead bodies.
The High Lookout bristled with archers, and arrows were launched against bats, clouds, and imaginary targets in the sky. Hoarst would send his men against the lookout soon—they had about an hour of time before the potion of flying wore off—but first he had an even more important objective.
The Gray Robe’s advance company swept downward, off of the high wall, toward the north gate. Only about a dozen of his men had been lost in those initial skirmishes, and Hoarst took the rest in a long, sweeping descent from the lookouts and into the courtyard that was just within the fortress’s northern gate.
There they found several dozen guards, and there the flying soldiers of the Black Army attacked ruthlessly. Half the defenders fell even as the attackers were dropping to the ground, swords extended and chopping. For a few moments, a melee swirled in the courtyard, blades clashing and men shouting, screaming, and dying.
Hoarst saw a knight rushing toward the massive rolled chain of the portcullis. He knew that if the man released the chain, the heavy barred gate would come crashing down, and it would take at least an hour for his men to hoist it up again.
The wizard pointed his finger and spat a word of magic. Arrows of light and energy, deceptively beautiful yet terribly lethal, shot from Hoarst’s fingertip. Two, four, six of the magical arrows seared into the back of the running knight, dropping him to the ground, his body blistered and bleeding. The stricken man reached out a desperate hand toward the chain release, but another attacker was there. The Black Army man crushed the knight’s hand with his heel of his boot then stabbed him through the neck with his sword.
The Thorn Knight was pleased. As the last of the defenders were dispatched, he looked up at the massive gates, studied the mechanisms, and spotted the great capstans that would pull the portals open.
“Go there, men!” he cried, highlighting the machinery with a ghostly spell of brightness. “Turn the winches!”
“Charge! Double time, men—to the gates!”
Captain Blackgaard was leading the attack on foot—the steep and rocky slopes were not fit for horses—and the bulk of the Black Army surged after him in a long file. The nine companies on the ground swept around the base of the great fortress, which was protected by the cloaking shadows in spite of the torches flaring all along the high parapets.
As the alarms spread above them, they emerged from the shadows and raced toward the great barrier of the north gate.
Finally they came around the last corner of the bastion to see the great gates looming before them. Blackgaard felt a momentary panic when he saw the impassable barrier still blocking them. There came a creak of sound followed by a first tentative movement—and then he thanked his gods and all those who would make him rich, as the mighty portals began to swing open.
Hoarst had done his work well.
Markus looked down to see thousands of men, all clad in black, pouring through the open gate. The advance guard of flying soldiers, meanwhile, had claimed the gateway into the central part of the tower, forced an opening, and slain the few defenders who blocked their path.
The general took a look across the courtyard toward the redoubt known as the Knights’ Spur. It was a side tower separated from the bulk of the fortress by a deep channel, which was crossed by a single bridge. If the defenders could get across there …
The thought died as he saw fifty black-dressed soldiers already patrolling that rampart. The small bridge was being raised; the Knights’ Spur was soon closed to the defenders.
Clashes raged throughout the great fortress. Outnumbered and surprised, most of them awakened from a sound sleep, the Knights of Solamnia nevertheless gave a good account of themselves. They fought in twos or threes, each man watching his comrade’s back. The attackers were cut down by the score. More by instinct than anything else, however, the knights were gradually retreating toward the southern end of the fortress.
Already the attackers, with so many gates opened by the flying advance guard, were pouring around every wall, tower, and courtyard on the north side. They swarmed through the central courtyard. The great tower in the center of the fortress had fallen, and enemy archers had replaced the knights on the High Lookout, raining their deadly missiles down on the defenders.
Here and there a sergeant organized a counterattack, or a dozen men burst through an encircling line of black-clad attackers. The Solamnics fought bravely and died, falling back steadily. The fortress was too big, had been breached in too many places for them to try to hold more than a small corner of it against the overwhelming numbers.
“Rally to me, knights!” cried Markus to his surviving men. “We’ll hold them at the south gatehouse!”
His men arrived in pairs and trios, a pathetically small number, all of them fighting their way to the general, many dying in the attempt. Dressed in silver mail shirts or even silken pajamas, they stood back to back when they could find companions, dueling—and dying.
Still, the Solamnics took a terrible toll on the attackers. They knew every nook and cranny of their great fortress and had the advantage of lethal traps that had been carefully laid over the years. More than two hundred of the attackers perished under a crushing rockslide, triggered when a sergeant released a trapdoor over a constricted corridor. Dozens of black-clad soldiers fell as they pressed through darkened hallways defended by unseen knights. A whole company of the Black Army—three hundred men—died horribly when they were trapped in a courtyard that was flooded with oil and subsequently ignited into a cauldron of screaming men and stinking, burned flesh.
But in the end, the overwhelming number of attackers simply had to prevail. When a hundred men were slain charging across an exposed courtyard, two hundred survived the charge to sweep the beleaguered defenders from their positions. When a corridor floor dropped away, spilling two hundred Black Army soldiers into a subterranean aqueduct and certain death by drowning, four hundred replacements took a new route and massacred the knights who had sprung the trap. Wherever the defenders met with a momentary success, the attackers changed tactics, came around from a new direction, and carried the fight.
Finally Markus had fewer than a hundred men left, huddled together on several sections of the outer parapet. They formed two lines, facing west and east, blocking the ramparts on top of the walls as the attackers swarmed into them. For a few moments, the Solamnics stood, steel clashing against the attackers, killing two or three of the black soldiers for every one of their own casualties.
Markus looked to the sky, which was paling with dawn. The flying soldiers had disappeared. Knowing they must have used magic to take to the air, he realized the foul enchantment had worn off, that the enemy was once again grounded, like his own men.
“Fall back to the south gatehouse!” he ordered. “We make our stand there.”
The men retreated with the discipline one would expect of Solamnic Knights. There was no panic, not even when a new rush of the black attackers surged through a side door and took the skirmish line in the right flank. Two or three men fell, but the rest wheeled back toward the great metal door that led to the massive gatehouse.
But then the doors to that gatehouse burst open, disgorging a fresh company of the enemy, three hundred strong or more emerging to form a phalanx. The defenders were trapped in a vise. Enemy archers began to open up on them from higher platforms, and it broke Markus’s heart to see brave men fall without even being able to strike a blow at their distant attackers.
It was not far from this place, General Markus remembered grimly, that Sturm Brightblade had died. The Blue Lady, Kitiara, had killed him here, and in that courageous moment the Orders of the Solamnic Knights had sprung back to life. The Oath and the Measure had been redeemed, the honor of Vinas Solamnus restored.
“Hold, there!” he called as two more knights fell. A young apprentice, not yet bearded, rushed into the breach, hewing and hacking at the black-clad attackers, and the new line held—for a moment, until the lad was felled by an arrow plunging from high above.
Markus was down to only a dozen men, and they were beset by hundreds of attackers on all sides. His bloody sword was a heavy weight in his hand, but that was nothing compared to the burden dragging down his heart.
Another knight fell, so close to him that his blood spilled across Markus’s boots. The general tried to step forward and avenge the man, but the killer backed away from him, and five or six of the attackers rushed in to take his place.
Markus never saw the one who killed him, the keen blade lancing in from the left, stabbing under his rib cage, driving up to pierce his great heart.
“Est Sularus oth Mithas,” he groaned. My honor is my life.
And on that day, it was his death as well.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PERIL
The latest reports still have Ankhar closing in on Solanthus,” reported Captain Franz. The Crown officer sat astride his lathered charger. The young man’s face was lined with sweat, caked with dust. But he had ridden up to the emperor and his staff at a gallop, and his voice displayed only calm assurance, no fear.
The leader of the White Riders had been out on patrol for more than a week and had just located the marching column of the Palanthian Legion and his father’s Crown Army. Dismounting, Franz saluted his father, General Dayr, and turned to address Jaymes. “But I have to tell you, Excellency, that those reports are four days old. My outriders have not been able to penetrate the screen of warg cavalry, so we don’t have concrete information on the whereabouts of his main body.”
“Well, let’s start with some facts,” Jaymes said, thinking aloud. He had maps in his saddlebags and a whole library of them in one of the command wagons, but his memory had etched every detail of those plains into his mind; he didn’t need to consult any documents to lay out the situation on the plains.
“He hasn’t come within fifty miles of the city—that much we know.”
“Correct, my lord,” the knight captain reported. His gaze was steady on the emperor, and he spoke levelly, without emotion, though resentment simmered behind his eyes. “The screen of his riders extends that close to the city, but they haven’t pressed my outposts.”
Jaymes turned to another nobleman, a high lord of Solanthus who had joined his force the previous day. Lord Martin had been a stalwart commander in the city’s defense, and he had led a brave company during the Battle of the Foothills. The emperor couldn’t help but think Martin merely looked old and tired. His hair had thinned, and what remained of it had turned white. His pale blue eyes were watery and didn’t seem to focus clearly.
But Lord Martin had always been a reliable man, and he was his best bet there and then. Jaymes spoke bluntly.
“Your garrison is at full strength. Would it help to send a few regiments of infantry to reinforce?”
“I don’t think so, Excellency,” Martin replied. His voice was as strong as ever, Jaymes was pleased to note. He recalled, too, Martin had lost a son in the battle that broke the siege. In the immediate aftermath, the nobleman had been fully engaged and his help was vital in winning the conclusive actions of the war. But afterward, surely the personal tragedy had taken its toll on him.
“We have enough to man the city walls with the complement of troops already in Solanthus,” the lord reported. “And those walls are as high and as strong as ever. The breach at the Westgate has been fully repaired—in fact, the gate is taller and thicker than it was before Ankhar’s monster smashed it down. There’s plenty of food in the granaries. Even so, I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by bringing more hungry mouths behind the walls.”
“I agree,” Jaymes said. He glanced at Franz again and was startled to see the naked hostility there. The emperor’s eyes narrowed. “Captain?” he said curtly.
“Yes, Excellency?” A mask fell across the young officer’s face. But Jaymes made a note to remember his hidden feelings.
“Is there any chance Ankhar has moved farther east, into Throtl, or the Gap?”
“No, Excellency. I’ve sent three platoons of lancers all the way to the northern edge of the Darkwoods, and there has been no sign of anything that way.”
“So he’s back there somewhere, behind Solanthus?” General Dayr speculated. “I suggest we find him and attac
k, Excellency. We have the Crown Army here, with your legion, and the Sword Army gathered at Solanthus. United we’d have more than enough strength to collapse his pickets, and destroy him once and for all.”
“We could do that, if indeed he’s over there,” the emperor replied. “But I’m not ready to take the chance.”
“What chance?” Captain Franz blurted out, his face flushing. He blinked in the face of Jaymes’s glare but didn’t back down. “We know where he isn’t, just like you said! So he has to be down there, east of the city.”
“No, there’s one more possibility,” the emperor replied. “What if he took his army into the mountains?”
“But why?” Franz objected. “He’d be trapped in some box canyon or dead-end valley. There’s no place an army could cross over the crest of the range!”
“Not an army of knights, perhaps,” Jaymes replied. The young man’s outburst forgotten, he spoke thoughtfully. “But Ankhar doesn’t march with wagons and war machines. He doesn’t even have horses. And he knows those mountains well—they’re his home, after all.”
“Do you think he’d go there now?” General Dayr asked. “Because if he did …”
“He could outflank us all and make for any part of the southern plains. He’d be far ahead of us and we couldn’t do a damned thing about it,” Jaymes concluded. “And the more I think about it, the more I’m certain he’s not anywhere on these plains at all.”
“If that’s true, what can we do about it?”
“I’ll leave the Sword Army near Solanthus for the time being; General Rankin can keep an eye on things around here. General Dayr, you will march eastward with the Crowns for thirty miles and set up a temporary camp. I want you to be ready to move in either direction at a moment’s notice.”
