There were more than eighty of them standing outside the inn, the streets otherwise empty, the town’s guards in their bright yellow uniforms nowhere to be seen. Eighty men when they had been told fifty, eighty men at the heart of one of the Empire’s largest and richest cities, standing unopposed and ready to kill the Empire’s men.

If there was any relief to be had it was that there was not a knight among them. Not much relief, when he thought about it. A man-at-arms could kill him just as well, in the right circumstances. And they had a mage somewhere hidden amongst the groups of men, bearing robes and a stave openly. Or, at least, a man pretending to be a mage, at the least, though he wasn’t so hopeful.

“What do we do?” he asked Uhtric, never taking his eyes from the men outside. With the curtains drawn and the inn interior dim, he wasn’t certain they could see him. Still, if there were any time that Gosfrid would wield a shield, it was now. He tightened his grip on it and cursed the Gods.

“We wait until we can’t wait no longer,” Uhtric said. “Without Alden we can’t take’em.”

Gosfrid cursed again. The boy would have made things easy. Why ain’t life ever easy, he wondered.

“Is there easy access to the roof?” he asked.

“If you’re willing to climb out a window. Why?”

“Recon.”

Gosfrid backed from the window, taking a bow and quiver from one of his archers. He inspected their tips and fletching, running his fingers over the lengths of the shafts. Workable, if shoddy. Most of his archers were no more than apprentices, boys still green behind the ears. But they had promise, he liked to think. It’d be a shame if they died.

Ascending to the top floor, Gosfrid gave a quick look out a dormer window near the back of the inn and, content there was no one that would see him, slipped through it and climbed onto the building's steep gable roof. He climbed to the roof's peak, settled himself, then glanced over the edge.

Don’t look up, he thought. Don’t look up.

From his new vantage point he counted the soldiers again, then once more for good measure. The men out front counted over a hundred, split between swordsmen, spearmen, archers, and a dozen or so crossbowmen. And, he saw, three mages wrapped in purple robes. Never a good sign.

The back of the inn was, thankfully, less of a concern–with the streets as narrow as they were, the back was little more than a tight alley, with only enough space for men to walk through single-file. And, as he recalled from his first night's scouting, there was no entrance to the back. Another thing to be thankful for, especially with the number of men he saw.

Peering down, he counted another fifteen men brandishing swords and daggers, each wearing iron skull caps and hauberks over white cloth. In the narrow alley they made little movement, instead almost resting against the walls of the inn and the building behind it. The green ones, he reckoned.

“Damn it all,” he cursed. Too many no matter how you looked at it. He could kill ten of them, maybe, if luck was on his side. At least five if it wasn’t, and no less than three in the worst case.

The same couldn’t be said of his fellows.

With the exception of Uhtric he was the most experienced man of the group, and a damned better fighter, too. The best, even. No comfort in that thought.

Savoring what little life was left to him, Gosfrid slinked his way back inside and walked down the inn’s steps feeling as if he was in a dream, each step so light he feared he would float away. When he reached the bottom floor the others turned to him and stared. Curious, fearful, and a hundred other emotions shone in their eyes like torchlight, then one by one he saw the gleam of recognition, then disappointment.

“That bad?” Uhtric asked.

“Mages,” Gosfrid replied. “Three of them.”

Uhtric pursed his lips, looked out the window, then turned to Elric and Aerin. “How do we kill’em?”

“Depends if they’ve set up a barrier or not. Hard skill to learn, so they might not know how. Gosfrid could take’em out, in that case. But these are battle mages we’re talking about here. Trained in soldiering too, by the look of them. I’d wager they know how and’ve set one up.”

“We’re fucked, then,” Uhtric said.

“Not necessarily,” Elric replied. He whispered something to Aerin, then stood and walked to the front of the inn. “With three mages they could have torched this building to the ground by now and we’d all be cinders. But they haven’t, which likely means they either won’t or can’t.”

“Why’s that?”

Elric shrugged. “Who’s to say? Might be working for the Duke for all we know. They aren’t exactly being discreet at the moment, now are they? And I don’t see any locals abound at the moment, so something is amiss.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Gosfrid sighed, then eased himself into a chair, grabbed a cup of ale that had been left at the table, and took a long drink of it.

“Never mind that,” he said. “Focus on the knife at our throats first. So we say they have a barrier. How do we get past it?”

Elric thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Depends on how big the barrier is and how strong. Brute force is one way, but the smaller they are the tougher they are to break, and theirs isn’t likely to be too big. That said, it takes a lot of concentration to keep a barrier up and running; they lose focus for a moment and all that mana will disperse.”

“Could they make another one?” Uhtric asked.

Elric shook his head. “I doubt it. The barrier itself uses up a lot of mana, and more mana has to be spent to keep it going, so after it’s broken they’ll be no different than common soldiers for at least a few minutes. We’d have to kill them in that time.”

It was possible, then. Unlikely, but possible. Gosfrid took another swig of the ale, draining it dry, and was happy to find that the other cup at the table was still half full. He drained that one as well, then stood.

“I’ll try to get their attention from above,” he said. “See about distracting them.”

By the time he’d reached the top of the stairs he could feel the beginnings of drunkenness rear its ugly head. It was a foolish thing to drink so soon before a fight, especially ale as strong as the inn’s, but he needed the added nerve it would give him. Drunk he wouldn’t care so much about dying, he figured.

On the roof he nocked an arrow and stared down at the gathering of men, silent as nuns during morning prayer. Some had moved; most had stayed put, waiting for something. Gosfrid was not in the particular mood to find out what.

He loosed the first arrow towards the center mage, and just as quickly loosed four more behind it, targeting the mages at either side. Soaring through empty air, the arrows closed in on their targets with the sort of perfected aim that Gosfrid prided himself in. Only they did not land true.

The boy mage was right. Some twenty feet before sharp pointed steel could meet the soft flesh of man they struck something hard, invisible, the shafts splintering to pieces and bouncing off uselessly.

As they looked up at him, most too bewildered to move, he let loose another volley of arrows, each further from the mages than the last. The first two struck the invisible barrier, shattering in a spectacle of slivers and steel. The last three, however, met their marks, killing two men and injuring a third.

Forty feet, he measured.

Nothing in life could have prepared him for what came next. He had seen magic at work a number of times throughout his life, and of that only a few times had he seen it used for the purpose of destruction. Each time had made him sickly afraid, had forced him to understand his own mortality in a way a stabbing never could.

A bolt of white hot lightning came from within the inn, the details of the world disappearing in a sea of white and returning again, all in an instant. The lightning struck their foe’s barrier with the booming roar of thunder and produced rippling waves of light through the air as the magical attack dissipated harmlessly into nothing.

Inside the barrier two of the mages stood fast, their staves held up and out over their heads as they concentrated on keeping the barrier alive.

It was the third mage that concerned Gosfrid.

Shorter than the other two, the third mage bore a chain of gold about his neck that glimmered from beneath a mess of pristine white beard. Even had the man not been a mage, the man gave off the feeling of importance akin to that of a noble. With it was a feeling of danger, a pressure in the air like that of an oncoming storm.

The gold-chained mage held out his hands and closed his eyes. Light emanated from the tips of his fingers, like tiny stars in the night sky, and as they grew Gosfrid felt his body tense against his will.

He didn’t remember what happened after that. One moment he was staring down at the mage, the next he was laying flat on his back as debris rained down upon him. Seconds gone from memory.

The inn groaned beneath him as it shifted, sections of the roof collapsing inward. He stood on unsteady feet feeling entirely sober, the drunkenness frightened out of him, and saw that his bow was gone and his quiver missing half the arrows that were left to him after his little stunt.

With his heart beating in his ears as loud as drums he made his way to the dormer window he’d crawled out of, still intact after the blast.

The inside of the inn was a mess. Silver-framed paintings and bronze chandeliers had fallen to the floor in broken heaps, the tables and bedding had been flipped over and snapped into pieces, and walls and floor alike had split into shards that littered the rooms and hallways and leaving dangerous holes that required careful steps to navigate.

Then there were the bodies.

He counted more than ten in the hallways alone on the way down, their mangled corpses sprawled across the floors with twisted limbs, crushed heads, and more besides. The bottom floor was no better, the leftmost portion having collapsed completely and killing Gods knew how many men. Uhtric was alive, he saw, as well as Aerin and Elric and a handful of his archers. Enough to keep fighting, if it came down to it. A small relief. But not enough to calm him.

“Anyone alive in there?” a voice called from outside. Uhtric raised a hand, motioned Gosfrid forward. Together they approached the front windows, one on either side of the entrance, and looked outside.

The mage with the golden chain stood at the forefront with a smug grin on his face and a bored look in his eyes.

“What do you want?” Uhtric asked. The mage turned towards his voice, his grin deepening.

A pang of annoyance shot through Gosfrid as he looked at the man; he found the mage entirely too self-important and arrogant, even if he had the power to back it up.

“I’m here to offer you our terms for your surrender. You’ve seen the result of your feeble attempts, so surely you understand the inevitable result should hostilities continue?”

Gosfrid looked to Uhtric, waited. Hoped. Uhtric was in command. Always was, depending on who you asked.

In a daze Uhtric searched the inn’s carnage for an answer, eyes darting between the dead, the dying, the daring, and the despairing. They, in turn, searched him for an answer. Would they fight, their pleading faces asked. Would today be the day they died?

“We all have to die someday,” he finally said, barely audible and more to himself than anyone else. “We all have to die someday,” he repeated loudly.

“And you choose today to be that day?” the mage asked. “If you surrender I can promise you your lives, at the least.”

“I’ll choose today,” Uhtric replied. No hesitation.

“So be it,” the mage said. His hands became enveloped in light as before, and the world shook.