Warhost of Vastmark
The booming concussion of shocked elements hammered earth and air like a physical blow, then recoiled off the walls of the peaks.
For an instant, the mountains seemed to quiver in echoed, resonant response.
Caught in a flickering, flaring, tainted wash of daylight, Dakar followed with mage-sight the wrenching scream of force as the unstable faults in the shale slopes below surrendered their last ties to gravity.
A tortured rumble rocked bass echoes down the vale. The grumble built, compounded into a grinding, full-throated roar as the shoulders of the mountains front and centre buckled and let go, followed like unravelled crochet work by the slopes on either side. Soil and vegetation sliced away from the scarp. Half-glimpsed through torn thickets of shadow, lit lurid by the unnatural tangle of sheared light kinked like sword cuts through absolute dark, the slow-motion crumple of boulders and torn soil gained frenetic speed in a race to meet the exposed valley. As if ploughed to rolling chaos by the impact of a giant’s fist, the mass surged in a wave down the steep rims of the vale.
The vanguard of Lord Diegan’s troops glimpsed their doom through the sickly yellow twilight, their panicked screams battered under and lost in the roaring complaint of outraged earth. Horses reared on shaking ground. Pennons dipped, cast out of nerveless fingers. Ranks of pike-men compressed in raw terror, their weapons juddered into recoil like a tailor’s pins in crushed cloth.
Then the caroming breaker of rock and soil smashed down from the middle, and on both flanks. The companies in the vanguard were sprayed aside, then harrowed under like shell soldiers abandoned to the muddied teeth of flood tide.
The rearguard array became chewed, then engulfed, mashed under the surge in the moment they wheeled in hopeless flight. If any screamed, their cries were drowned out. If any prayed, none were answered. Where an army had marched like steel-studded velvet over grass, within a heartbeat and a breath, of living soldiers, there were none.
The peaks channelled between them a racked furrow of turned stone and puffed dirt. The titanic, roiling thunder of debris milled on in a mindless torrent that dwarfed human works and consumed all things in its path.
Minutes passed, while the mountains shook to their roots from raw noise.
Then, in slowed force, the barrage dragged thin and slackened, spent into a last, dying tumble of stray boulders. Fanned like a rucked, brown train in its wake, a flayed span of ground wide enough to stun reason was left to settle into dust and racked stillness. Stabbed through by the distress of displaced birds, the thinner wails of human survivors offered up ragged refrain: those few set by luck on the unfaulted rise where the hills were too mild to slide, and one isolate group in the swale, protected where the shoulder of the knoll had parted the riven marrow of the earth.
Separate from the advance, the company of the prince’s personal guard was also untouched. Spared only by distance, the men in their immaculate surcoats stared in dumb shock at the site where their comrades had marched. The demarcation was a cruel one. Like a ripped edge in cloth, the scar ended and whole grass flicked in breezes silted with grit churned up by the mass of downed stone.
Strewn at Lysaer’s very feet, in disembowelled earth and crushed hope, a mass grave site: ploughed into irretrievable oblivion the pulped bits of tissue, wood and dented steel of what once had been twenty-eight thousand dedicated men.
The howl of the Prince of the West clove the morning, shrill with grief and wild pain. The light of his gift left his fist. A flashfire bolt of distilled energy shrieked across distance and slammed against the summit of the knoll. Impact carved up a flying gout of rocks, an eruption of dead matter that yielded his rage no balm of satisfaction.
Lysaer wept for his impotent strength. The Shadow Master’s spelled decoy of banners and empty helmets flamed and melted under impact of his grief, leaving the site razed bare.
Thrown off his berserk mount when the slide boomed past, then knocked flat a second time by the light bolt’s raw thud into the hillcrest above, Diegan, Lord Commander of the royal warhost, struggled up from his knees. Around him, spent thunder cracked and slammed in flat echoes against the changed face of Dier Kenton. His hip and one shoulder flamed protest, the joints wrenched and bruised from his falls. Since the knoll had blocked his view as the cataclysm struck, he cast a dazed glance at his surroundings. On all sides, he saw harrowed earth. The day hung dimmed with dust, the sky itself stained grey-brown. Limned in murk, the headwall of the vale on three sides lay cloven into a barrier of raw cliffs, floored over in acres of rubble. Where scant minutes before his brave army had marched under order and flocking standards, there remained only knife-point shards of splintered shale, struck and jumbled and stirred by mad forces across a valley dismembered into waste.
The vista was one to numb the mind.
Diegan heaved in a strangled breath, half-mad from shock and disbelief. He felt delirious; light-headed. As if through the ordinary course of an eye-blink, firm rock had exploded and rearranged itself into some diabolical landscape out of Sithaer.
Sick white, shaking, he scrubbed grit from a skinned forearm, then resettled the rucked weight of his mail and adjusted his sword from blind habit. Through air hazed with pulverized rock, he sensed other movement and belatedly found he was not alone.
The handful of survivors sheltered by the knoll were regaining their feet, coughing dust. Some, crazed beyond reason, had drawn swords. A few were unmanned by fear. One lay moaning in misery, trampled or kicked by someone’s panicked horse. The blue-purple pulp of his gutted abdomen established at a glance that he would not be rising, nor would another, apparently thrown onto the impaling point of a pole weapon. Nearby, someone’s squire crawled on his hands and knees, sobbing the name of his mother.
The first flame of rage licked through Diegan’s horror. His throat was too dry to swallow, and his tongue, too thick to curse the name of s’Ffalenn. Avenor’s Lord Commander choked on the tainted taste of soil and shrank in guilt for the warning a band of condemned men had entrusted to his hearing one dismal night in falling rain.
‘Dharkaron avenge!’ he strangled through a seizure that hooked like a sob in his throat. For the gut-wrenching horror of his straits all but felled him. The diabolical threat sent by Arithon, that he had brushed aside from expediency, had been, every word, meant in earnest.
Unknowing, the Prince of the West had marched his forty thousand into jeopardy.
Thrown headlong into wholesale ruin, Lord Diegan beheld the Master of Shadow’s promised vengeance. The scope of the disaster saw every justification to silence the testimony of twenty-five men remade into a fool’s play. A brother’s self-serving passion for retribution for his sister had cost Lysaer’s allies tens upon thousands of lives.
The full toll remained yet to tally. Diegan forced himself to think beyond blinding self-pity. Twelve thousand men in the flanking divisions dispatched by Lysaer’s signal to spearhead the assault beyond the ridges might already suffer as dire a peril. Fear spurred his nerve to face downslope, to see whether his sovereign prince’s company had been spared at the mouth of the vale. His first sweeping search caught the flash of moving metal. Faint through the haze, the last company under Lysaer’s direct command could be seen, still standing, and engaged in a steady advance.
Some trap would be waiting. That ripping, stark certainty shocked back Diegan’s stumbling wits.
He took swift stock, did his best to confront the inconceivable extent of his losses: scarcely a handful from the centre ranks of his company were alive. Forty-two solid veterans, one of them a wiry, tough sergeant bent already on what he could salvage. When his frustrated effort to unclog the turf lodged in the mouthpiece of his horn met with failure, he snapped off a curse, then raised a gritted shout to rally. Bruised, dirtied, a scarecrow pack of men responded. More stragglers picked themselves up off the grade of the only unscoured hillside about, the remains of the foray dispatched at the whim of black rage to quarter the knoll for hidden enemies.
&nb
sp; Those left unhurt showed the mettle of their training as they stumbled to rejoin the truncated remnant of their company.
Lord Diegan spat out small bits of gravel, flicked grass chaff off his surcoat, then limped in hurried steps down the rise to reassert his authority.
He had but one purpose, now, and that to reach Lysaer in time to reverse what damage he might. Another light bolt could be fired to signal swift retreat. If the warning was timely, the flanking companies across the ridgetops might still have a chance to seek safety.
The beleaguered little sergeant caught sight of his Lord Commander. ‘Ath bless!’ He mopped his sweating lip with the back of a bleeding wrist, squared his shoulders, and awaited fresh orders.
‘Retreat,’ Diegan said, his voice split with urgency. ‘Now! The prince is behind, left one company to defend him. Dharkaron’s truth, I don’t think we’ve seen the end to the Shadow Master’s offensive.’
‘What of the wounded?’ The sergeant gestured to a scattered few figures still prone. ‘We’ve got no wood to make litters.’
Lord Diegan shut his eyes, every scuff and bruise and wrenched tendon combined to one screaming ache. Upslope, the decoy of pole weapons left by the enemy had been razed to charred carbon by Lysaer’s light bolt. Even had alternate materials been at hand, a fast review showed what the sergeant already knew: the loosened footing and turned rock in the scar of the slide would be lethal enough without burdens. A man might break his legs on a misstep, or tumble through loose dirt into cracks and crannies where the churned-up debris had mounded over air pockets.
‘Whoever can’t help themselves, leave them,’ Diegan said. ‘Our prince is riding into unspeakable danger and his need must outweigh all else.’
Under the dust-smeared face of the sun, the men mustered. One dragged the sobbing squire away from the casualty with his innards torn out. Over the intermittent crack and rumble as unstable rock gave and settled, or loose boulders tore away from the knife-edged wall of sheared cliffs, his weeping appeal rang shrill. ‘I won’t leave him! I can’t.’ On a fresh note of torture, ‘He’s my brother!’
‘Force him,’ cracked the sergeant to the man-at-arms who importuned the boy. ‘If he doesn’t straighten up in a hundred paces, leave him behind for carrion. Our prince’s safety comes first.’
In a saddle between summits on the north spur of the vale, Caolle squinted through silting layers of dust to assess the moves of the enemies left standing since the landslide had razed Lysaer’s first wave advance. Isolated men clustered on the fringes, battling now to regroup their ranks on firm ground. Scattered across the heights, Caolle had archers to prevent them from gaining a defensible foothold. His tight squads of clan scouts and tribesmen had the simplest of orders: shoot to kill where possible, and give ground in retreat the instant their positions became threatened.
At this critical juncture, while Arithon and the Mad Prophet abandoned their vantage overlooking Dier Kenton and shifted the thrust of the assault against the flanking enemies beyond the ridges, Caolle remained. His assignment was to track the movements of Lysaer. He must stand as his prince’s rear guard and act to forestall any unforeseen event. No chance could be left to swing the odds in favour of rousing the uncontained drive of Desh-thiere’s curse.
Having survived the decimation of his frontal assault, the Prince of the West would be dry tinder for rage.
If Arithon s’Ffalenn became cornered, if he lost grip on his constrained set of tactics, the plan he had formulated through augury to halt the war in Vastmark could all too easily come to naught. Enough townborn enemies remained still at large to outnumber their disparate bands of archers by a factor of eight to one.
If Lysaer was kept pinned in Dier Kenton, the other companies from Jaelot and Alestron could be hazed off their course; once they learned their main force had been laid waste in the vale, their desire to fight could be harassed and worn away into debilitating frustration and despair.
At present, Caolle concerned himself with the ragged remains of the centre division, a struggling, determined knot of survivors picking a reckless, hurried path across the field of rubble. Like Lysaer’s élite company, advancing, these men had discovered the perils of the footing the hard way. Two of their number lay screaming behind them, pinned by a shifted mass of boulders. The scar from the slide was unstable enough that even a stray tap could dislodge the loose fill and trip off a grinding, settling thunder of crumbled shale. One mishap convinced even the most brave to make for the broken seam beneath the cliff face, where the march could be made with greater safety.
The plan was sound enough, had shepherd archers better versed in the perils that arose after rockfalls not dogged their progress from concealment.
Keen of vision from his years leading raids, Caolle assessed each tiny figure in turn, then paused, cut back, and singled out one whose muddied surcoat bore the gold star on white of Avenor’s élite garrison.
A low whistle hissed through his teeth. ‘Fiends alive. That’s Lord Commander Diegan himself.’
A rustle of rapacious movement swept through a team of archers downslope. Some were tribesfolk, content to bide time and wait. The others were clanborn, their young officer one of Jieret’s Companions, scarred since his boyhood with the undying grief left by the family slain in the debacle at Tal Quorin. He would not miss who approached their embankment; the enemy officer who had led Etarra’s divisions into Strakewood would be sighted and marked for easy prey.
Moved by sharp instinct, Caolle swore. He carried no shepherd’s horn. Any shouted order could not carry against the wind. Stabbed by keen urgency, he scrambled up from the rocks, sprang out of cover in a sliding, futile dash to intercept.
For the Lord Commander’s straggling refugees, the moment could not have been worse for a barrage of enemy arrows. Exposed amid perilous terrain, left unable to run for fear of a misstep upon uncompacted ground dangerous as dropped knives with silvered shale, they were hedged in by boulders tilted at hair-trigger angles that had already proven as lethal. Lord Diegan shouted. Around him, the men sought to fling themselves behind whatever screening cover they could find.
He knew as a shaft bit the gravel by his foot that Lysaer was too distant to know he had allies under attack. There would be no screen of light cast to spare them.
Diegan sought for inspiration to save his last men when the shaft thudded into his side. Its broad-bladed head pierced his surcoat and mail, ripped through the gambeson beneath and drove the last air from his lungs in a wordless, half-vocal gasp. He stumbled forward, clawing at rock to stay upright.
The message of desperate urgency he carried must at all costs reach his prince.
Dull, tearing pain turned him dizzy. Diegan swayed, kept his grip on broken stone until his fingers split with the effort. Weeping tears for the punishment, he managed to stay on his feet.
The wasp whine of the second shaft grazed through the beat of his agony. Its splintering strike caught him to the right of his breastbone, ripped him backward until the world fell away into a shimmering view of a Vastmark sky bleached with haze.
Shock and pain winnowed him into sick dizziness. He strove to roll over, to find his knees and try to rise. If he failed, twelve thousand men stood at risk, most beloved of them all the life of Lysaer s’Ilessid.
‘Daelion preserve,’ he moaned through locked teeth, though he had never been one for praying.
Nearby, a gruff voice was shouting. ‘Ath save us all, let him not be dead!’
The accent was barbarian, Diegan noted in self-mocking surprise. An odd twist, he thought, that his foot soldiers should affect a clan dialect.
‘That was the Lord Commander!’ returned a younger man in ringing protest. ‘It’s he, I say. The townborn who raised Etarra’s garrison for the massacre that undid us all at Tal Quorin.’
Damned, Diegan muddled in thick confusion; he was condemned for the carnage, but not for Tal Quorin, never a deed so straightforward as that. Daelion Fatemaster would see him in
Sithaer for the dead killed untimely at Dier Kenton. Ironic, if he passed the Wheel in their company.
He struggled again to rise, felt the saw of the arrows bite deeper. His breathing came laboured. Through a fearful, sucking rush of faintness, he realized the strength had bled out of him.
Then a blurred face shadowed the blank vista of sky. Someone grey-haired and gruff shoved a supporting arm beneath his shoulder. He heard the chink of steel studs from the man’s wrist bracer grind against the links of his mail. Through dust and blood, he caught the martial smells of sweat and oil, and decided his saviour had to be the sergeant who had survived the shale slide beneath the knoll.
‘Merciful Ath, you came back,’ gasped Diegan. Tor my spirit, for my prince, tell them all to retreat.’
‘Don’t talk,’ the other replied, his consonants still stubbornly bitten. ‘You’ve already lost too much blood.’
Diegan resigned himself. The barbarian accents were surely cruel dream or delirium. He coughed through a hot rush of fluid. ‘There was a warning,’ he pressed, laboured now, desperate to get his words out. Sight came and went in tides of blackness, and the pain was spoiling thought. ‘Twenty-five men brought me word from the Shadow Master. I ordered them dead lest they tell. But my prince … he must hear … there’s grave danger. Tell him. The light signal … retreat, before it’s too late.’
‘Ath forfend!’ cried the man who held him, anguished. ‘That accursed misdeed was your doing! Had those twenty-five survivors from the Havens reached Lysaer, you must know. By my liege lord’s clear augury and Dakar’s prophecy, not a man would have marched on Dier Kenton to die.’
Diegan gasped, unable to command fading vision to bring the face above him into focus. ‘Who are you?’
‘The very last man in Athera your prince would allow a live audience.’ A bitter cough of laughter presaged answer. ‘I’m war captain to your sworn enemy, his Grace the Prince of Rathain.’