Saul leapt forward through the snow, and the troll lumbered after him. They reached the prostrate body of Grimdir in the snow by the leaning pillars. The wytchlord, who Saul and the Xornians had assumed the leader of the rebellion, had turned out to be at the heart of the rebellion in quite a different way.
The man had been used as a tool by those more powerful around him. His name and his powers had been hijacked by the other warlocks, and he himself was reduced to a near-powerless shell of his former self.
Saul knelt in the snow.
To his surprise, mist rose from the man’s lips, though his every breath was weaker than the last. Saul thought about his Heal spell, but Heal only worked on himself and his allies.
A victim of the warlocks’ machinations Grimdir might be, but he was no ally.
Saul turned him over, and the man’s eyes flickered open. Blood trickled from his mouth as he looked up into Saul’s face.
“Grimdir,” Saul said.
“Aye, that was my name,” the man croaked. “That was me, before the others came to usurp my power. Grimdir the wytchlord, I was. Now, I am nobody, just a dying man.”
“You can still help me to defeat those who tormented you,” Saul said. “Tell me what you know of them, who they are, and where they get their power.”
Grimdir tried to laugh, coughed, then glared up at Saul. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” he croaked. “I will tell you nothing, Xornian. You think I’d betray my people? Even now, even after all they’ve done to me, I still hate Xorn. You may have won this battle, but you’ll not win the war. In the end, the warlocks will rule the northern kingdom, with me or without me. Curse you, Xornian. May you die at the hands of the warlocks…”
With these words, he suddenly gasped. His eyes rolled up, and he fell back into the snow, stiff and lifeless.
Saul felt Grimdir’s soul wither and fade into the void.
“Well, that’s the end of him, at least,” he said to the rock troll. “He may not have been the leader after all, but he was the anchor for all the magic of control that is being used to run the army here. With him dead, the warlock soldiers will not fight on for long. Come on, let’s get back to the village.”
Saul had a quick rifle through the pockets of the dead warlock, but Grimdir had become nothing more than a tool for forces more powerful than himself. He carried nothing in his pockets, and had nothing on his person except a plain silver ring that adorned his left hand. Saul slipped this from Grimdir’s finger and put it in his own pocket, then left the corpse of the warlock where it had fallen.
Getting back was quicker than getting out.
Strange as it seemed to Saul, his rock troll was still active. He climbed onto the creature’s back and gripped the two small handles of stone that protruded conveniently from the monster’s shoulders, while placing his feet in two cracks that appeared in the troll’s back. This, also, was new, and Saul saw once again the strange way that the magic of the System as designed by Sarkur took on a life of its own.
So different to my old life, he thought as he directed the rock troll to lumber off down the track toward the warlock camp, and then on back to the village. In the old days, a spell was a spell. If you wanted a more powerful version or a new iteration, you had to learn it for yourself.
In this new life, the magic of the System was like a steed—it could be trained, worked with, and used, but it would always have some possibility to surprise you.
They lumbered past the busted warlock HQ and stopped briefly so that Saul could collect his Xornian halberd. He glanced around at the dead warlocks who were scattered around the wreck of the tent.
The thralls had disintegrated into piles of dust, leaving only their broken weapons and strange armor lying in the churned snow. The bodies of the warlocks had vanished, and their clothes, dark, ragged robes with now-dulled silver runes, lay in piles on the ground where they’d died.
Saul stopped long enough to establish that there was nothing of value to be gleaned from the campsite. He then walked over to the point where he’d fallen after escaping the burning tent.
He stooped and picked from the ground the Sigilite staff he’d dropped earlier. It weighed heavily in his hand. The metal was cold, and the crystal at the end glowed with a faint radiance. There was power in this item, he could feel it, but he did not at this point know how to access that power.
“I’ll need to work this out at some point,” he said, speaking to the silent rock troll, “but for now, it’s enough to have gained an interesting new item.”
He slipped the staff into his belt and hopped onto the rock troll’s back. The staff clunked awkwardly at his side.
It would be useful if the System came with some ability to store weapons off my person, he mused. Some way of storing things in a space like the Workshop.
The speculation seemed rather strange. He’d not thought anything like that before, and there had never been any suggestion as yet of any such ability on the part of the Workshop. He wondered if it was a premonition…
“Come on,” he said to the rock troll, putting that interesting line of thought to one side for the moment. “Let’s get back to the fight.”
The snow was falling heavily, and the short day was drawing toward evening as they came back to the edge of the cliff. Saul stopped at the top of the cliff and gazed down. He breathed a sigh of relief as he gazed at the scene.
The warlock army had not overrun the village. They had broken through the wall, but they had paid dearly to do so.
Saul could count the cost by the number of bodies that lay motionless in the field in front of the palisade and piled in gruesome stacks around the ditches. The Xornian defenses had held, and Saul guessed that the tide had turned about the time when he’d broken into the warlocks’ HQ tent and disrupted the control spell.
The fires in the ditches had run out. The ditches were filled with the bodies of warlocks, horrific monsters, and thralls. Saul saw very few Xornian bodies.
There were some, of course, especially around the spot where the sortie had happened. Here, also, lay several raptors, with their riders either under them or flung off, broken, to one side.
With the practiced eye of a seasoned battlefield commander, Saul viewed the carnage. To another man, it might have looked like nothing more than a chaotic scene of death and destruction, but Saul could read the field like a scroll.
He saw how close the village had come to being overrun, and he felt a stab of regret in his heart when he realized how terrified his friends must have been. They surely must have thought he’d abandoned them or been killed.
But he also saw how the tide had turned when Grimdir, the warlocks’ anchor, had died.
Here, the raptors had thundered from the gates when the warlocks and their monsters threatened to overrun the palisade wall at the breach. They had charged out in great numbers. Jerryl must have sent the whole force out at once, hoping that the shock of their charge would dismay the besiegers.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
In the scattering of the gleaming raptor bodies, Saul read the progress of the counterattack. He saw where the warlock soldiers had broken, where they had rallied, and where a troop of men riding great green warbeasts that looked like a cross between a lizard and a mutated dog had charged in to flank the flankers.
And then he saw how chaos had suddenly engulfed the enemy.
There was a long line where the raptors had taken advantage of the sudden change in fortune to cut a terrible wedge through the enemy, flinging them aside and killing as many as possible.
Piles of warlock soldiers and their monstrous allies lay in great numbers all over the field here, and Saul could almost hear the charge of the Raptor Riders of Xorn, the roars of the fearsome warbeasts, and the cheers of the soldiers within the walls.
He had done this. Without his breaking of the control spell, the chaos that had allowed the raptor cavalry to cleave through their enemies would not have happened. The tide had turned, at precisely the right moment.
Satisfaction in his success did not aid Saul in his present problem, however. Jerryl, being a prudent commander, had pulled his men back to the village to watch and wait, rather than pursuing the enemy into the field.
The warlocks had not routed completely, but rather they had withdrawn to the base of the cliff and erected a defensive ditch of their own. Looking down at the mass of warriors, warlocks, and monsters who still remained, Saul felt a creeping sense of certainty that somebody with battle experience and an understanding of tactics had taken command of what remained of the force.
Despite suffering great losses, a significant host of enemies remained. More importantly, they had gathered around the path that led down from the cliffside—as far as Saul could tell, the only way down from where he now stood.
The best approach, Saul thought, will be to use Windspeed to pass quickly through the enemy camp. That way I can get back to the village unseen.
“And,” he added, speaking out loud now to the troll, “I think that you might be able to help me with a timely distraction.”
Two spell castings remained for Saul to use. The first would be Silent Step, to get him down the path unseen, and the second would be Windspeed, to dash through the gathered foes and reach the village.
Powerful as he felt, and even with the added bonus of having Grimdir’s control magic out of the picture, Saul wasn’t yet confident on taking on hundred to one odds.
Get back to the village and assess the situation, he told himself.
With Silent Step spell in place, he snuck down the path, constantly on the lookout for enemy scouts. The warlocks, apparently not expecting an attack from the rear, had not set many sentries. At the base of the path just after the last corner, Saul saw two men.
Time for the troll, he thought.
There was a thread of connection running between him and his summoned troll. Saul focused on this and sent a command to the creature.
It had been waiting at the top of the ridge, but suddenly it came lumberning down the path with surprising speed. The scouts turned, raising a shout. Both dashed right past Saul with their spears pointed at the troll.
Saul cast Windspeed and sprinted down into the enemy camp.
Cooldown Timer Active
He ran through the enemy camp, taking in the arrangement of the tents, the well-dug defensive ditch that the warlocks had created, and the many tired and worn faces of the remaining forces. There were still squads of warlocks with thralls, but the overarching control magic that had characterized the army previously was no longer present.
In the heart of the camp, Saul noticed a well-set tent with a large fire in front. The temptation to attack this command post surged in him, but he resisted it.
He only had a short window of time in which to work, and his priority was returning to the village to find out how his friends were doing.
The spell wore off when he was about halfway back across the open ground. The big slabs of stone that the trolls had used to bridge the Xornians’ ditches were mostly still in place, though a few of them had been smashed into pieces which lay scattered around in the chaos of the ditches.
Everywhere there lay scattered piles of the black armor that the zombie warriors used, empty robes with dead runes were the warlocks had fallen, the carcasses of monsters large and small, and the scattered arrows of the Xornians that had taken down so many of the warlocks and their monsters in the course of their advance.
Saul slowed his pace as the spell wore off and turned to look at the mayhem his troll was making back in the warlocks’ camp. He smiled as he saw the huge creature smashing its way through a group of warlocks and heard the panicked shouts of men as the troll ripped into the heart of the camp.
Then, white light flashed, and a distant thunder boomed.
The thread of connection that joined him to the summoned troll snapped abruptly. The troll had been destroyed.
“Hey!” he heard someone shout from the palisade wall. “It’s Saul!”
Saul jogged toward the village, and as he reached the gate a rope was thrown down over the palisade wall. He grabbed it and shimmied quickly up.
As he vaulted over the top of the wall onto the small walkway that ran around the inside, he was greeted by none other than young Brand.
Brand’s head was bound in a bloodstained cloth. His face was pale, but his eyes were bright and his voice was loud as he embraced Saul, thumping him on the back.
“You made it! We thought that some terrible fate had befallen you when you did not come back!” the young man exclaimed. “You saved us! We felt the control spell break, just at the right moment, too. You should have seen the enemy run!”
“Where is Jerryl?” Saul said, interrupting the young man’s talk. “I’m pleased to see you, Brand, but I must talk with the captain, we need to assess the situation and discuss our next steps.”
Brand’s expression darkened. “He’s with Zorea,” he said. “In the barracks.”
Ice in Saul’s veins. “Wounded?”
Brand nodded.
“How badly?”
Brand’s eyes, usually honest and open, flicked from side to side. The message was clear. Jerryl was badly wounded, but Brand did not want to say just how badly in front of the battle-weary soldiers on the parapet.
That was not a good sign.
“I’ll go now,” Saul said. He turned to leave, but Brand grabbed his arm and leaned in to speak close to his ear.
“You’ll need to take command if they attack again,” he said in a low voice. “Jerryl might well make it, but he’ll not be able to command… you’ll see.”
“All right,” Saul said with a nod. “Keep a brave face for the men.”
Snow piled thick on the roofs and churned the paths between huts into mud. Saul strode through the deserted village toward the barracks building. The door sat open, and he shouldered his way through and into the darkened space beyond.
Thirty men lay on beds in the main chamber. Others shuffled from bed to bed, tending to their wounds. A soldier near Saul glanced up as he entered.
“The captain?” Saul said.
The soldier’s eyes flicked toward the stairs that led up to the captain’s command chamber.
Saul nodded once and then headed for the stairwell. His Heal spell might be put to good use down here soon, but first he wanted to see Jerryl.
The command chamber was dim but for the light of a few candles. The window—thoroughly smashed by Saul and his rock troll during the initial skirmish—had been boarded up.
Several figures lay on hastily made up pallet beds on the floor, all of them seriously wounded, though still clinging onto life. All was quiet.
Zorea stood up from beside a bed and glanced around at Saul. Relief surged on her expression at the sight of him, but it did not mask the fear and anxiety that had built up there over the course of the day.
She came to his side without a word, then nodded to one of the pallets, raising a finger to her lips for quiet. They approached the pallet together.
Jerryl lay there under a light cover. Without his usually animated expression and his Xornian officer gear, he was a very different looking man.
Saul frowned. Jerryl looked ill, it was true, but there was no sign of bandage or splint that he could see.
Indeed, there was none of the healing equipment that he would have expected in a room like this at all; no rolls of bandaging or bloodied cloths, no hot water in buckets or blood on the floor, nothing, in fact, that suggested anything other than a room full of people in a very deep sleep.
“Wha…?” Saul began, but Zorea shook her head.
“Not here,” she said quietly. “Follow me.”
She led him to a small side door and led him through. This led into a short, narrow corridor, at the end of which another door opened to lead them out onto a small balcony at the side of the building.
Here, they could look out south over the village, toward the mountain face that reared up close by the village’s southward side, protecting it from attack, and toward the raptor stables and the few small outbuildings that had belonged to the inn before it had been taken over by the soldiers.
“What’s wrong with them?” Saul asked.
“We don’t know,” she replied with a shake of her head. “Some kind of poison, I suspect, but I can’t see the marks of any darts or anything like that. There are plenty of wounded men downstairs, with more normal injuries, but Jerryl and the others up here have only very minor physical injuries, or even no injuries at all.”
The obvious course of action was for Saul to try his ally Heal spell, and he did. They went back to the sick room and tried it immediately. As the spell activated, Saul felt the magic flow over and off Jerryl like cold water off a greasy pot.
The spell did not fully activate. He could not cast it on Jerryl.
Saul frowned. “My spell is not working on him,” he said. “Zorea, I don’t think there’s a great deal I can do right now for them. My magic will work on the men who are more traditionally wounded, those downstairs. Keep an eye on Jerryl and the others up here and let me know if anything changes. For the moment, I must go out to the wall. The remaining warlocks will attack soon, and I will have to be ready to help in the defense.”