Laggard's Shaft

The army rested during the day under a pall of smoke and falling ash that helped ward off the day's heat but left them coughing at every turn. They slept and took miserly sips from their canteens. As evening approached the assault force was served double rations to fuel them for the march and fight ahead. Twelve thousand men left before dark, leaving behind half the army and all the gurantors.

When passing overland, scouts were just as important here as they would be in a forest. The desert basin wasn't nearly as flat as it first appeared, and many features couldn't be seen until a traveler stumbled into them. The cracked ground and scattered plant life hid small dells where dangerous wildlife often made its home. Narrow waddis could appear underfoot. It was all too easy to fall into a crack as deep as a man was tall, break a bone, and not be able to escape. Distant rock formations could serve as signposts, but they were hidden at night by darkness, and in mid-day by shimmering heat rising from the ground.

Zaid knew his best chance lay in surprise and sheer mass. He didn't send scouts ahead in case the scouts themselves were spotted by the enemy. The column moved fast, stayed together, and took the shortest viable route to their destination. That night was a cold one, and the men were better off moving than they would be lying still. Pity the ones left behind to shiver in their bedrolls! The twelve thousand reached their destination under the light of two moons: Silenz in the east and Crevist in the west.

The Great River was a corpse of its ancient self, a dry trough with a silt bottom that grew a smattering of clumpy grasses and stunted shrubs. Laggard's Shaft was in one of the small, dusty, crescent-shaped lakebeds that flanked the river, remnants of the ancient body twisting back and forth in its millennial existence, carving loops out of the ground and then closing them up into isolated bodies of water.

Zaid split his forces and sent them in immediately. He kept his elite Chargers near him in reserve on the western convex bank while the main force split in two, each half entering from the gentle slopes at the corners of the crescent lake. From his position on top of the steep cut bank, he could see it was an active site. The sandy bottom was heavily tracked, and several wells were surrounded by workstations where miners broke rich ore away from useless dirt and rock. Two spoil mounds stood as evidence of their efforts. The opposite bank was steeper than normal for the concave side of a crescent lake, and habitats were caved into the rock face. The doorways were strangely narrow, barely wide enough to admit a large man turned sideways. If his enemies were hiding here, that's where they'd be, or else in the mine beneath his feet.

Zaid took all that in while ten thousand men poured into the lake, swarmed the rock-hewn shelters, and probed the first sections of the mine. A commander shouted up to him: the wells were deep and the water sweet. Men filled their empty waterskins, plus the extras they brought with them. The trains would have to pick their way here slowly, but they could take enough water back to Bitter Spring to tide them over for a few days. Another soldier shouted up they found hot coals in the mine. The enemy had just been there! Zaid told the drummer to sound a command assembly: he needed to talk to his commanders. If the enemy was close then he wanted to pursue them.

That was when the soldiers started to notice. A cry of surprise caught Zaid's attention and he looked to his left, at the corner where his regular cavalry had entered the lake: the commander and his staff couldn't get out because the bank was steep. With a sinking feeling, he looked to his right and found the same was true there. Nexus disciples were here, right here, and they were trapping his men for a reason.

"Sound retreat! Put out ropes! Pull them up now, now!" The drums beat, and the signal men in the lake picked up the message and repeated it. Chargers came forward with ropes to help up the first ranks, who then added their own ropes to the effort. The bank was only a few meters tall, but it was enough to bottle men in. For what, Zaid didn't know but it couldn't be good.

A spotter shouted and pointed at the sky. Something white was tumbling in moonlight, arcing high above, aiming for the lakebed. The Princeps felt a familiar shock of fear: a new surprise from Pasha Phillip. He didn't know what it was, or what it would do to his men, but his instincts were screaming at him to take cover. Instincts weren't perfect, but when training and experience failed him they were his best guide.

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"All down! All down!" The call was taken up by his Chargers and then by his men trapped in the lakebed. Anyone with a shield got under it. Cavalry dismounted in a hurry and tried to pull their mounts to the ground. The Chargers and their appalons could lay down right where they were, in a single move that only took a few seconds. That, and the fact they weren't inside the riverbed, was how they not only survived but stayed in fighting shape.

Zaid laid his mount down with the rest of the Chargers, swinging both his legs to the right side while commanding his mount with reins and words to lay down on its left. The beast went down without complaint, and Zaid hit the dirt with the animal between himself and the flying object. He almost didn't make it.

There was a sound, like a giant clay crock shattered into thousands of pieces. An eyeblink later, his entire world was noise, but only for an instant. His ears gave out and rang like they'd been punched. The shockwave behind the noise was even more powerful. He and his mount were pushed away from the lake, scraping their skin against the ground. Heat bloomed over them, and all the air was sucked away from their lungs until he thought they'd suffocate together. He laid down on the struggling mount's head to calm it. He had to check the animal before he let it up, or it might hurt itself.

Then came the second attack.

Then the third.

Then nothing, except the bells in his head.

At the end of it, Zaid stared up at three clouds, each made of flame and smoke, rising like tall-stemmed mushrooms far above and growing taller by the second. He could tell the order of the attacks from the height of the clouds. Phillip hit the corners first, to drive as many soldiers to the center as possible, and hit the center last.

When Zaid checked his mount, he discovered it was dead, possibly from the intense shockwaves or possibly from fear. The charred hide and bloody eyes were evidence the animal had died to protect its rider.

All the Princeps could hear was his ringing head, but when he stumbled to the edge of the lake and looked down, he could easily imagine the cries of thousands of injured voices calling out in yelps and screams and yowls and roars and trumpet calls, merged into a single note of disaster. Ten thousand men were down there, every one of them a casualty. The luckiest ones could walk on their own, thanks to some mysterious chance of cover and position. They were only lightly charred, deaf, and half-blind. The second-luckiest were the dead. Many of those lay like dropped waterskins as if their insides were liquid poured into bags of skin. The unlucky were alive but doomed, so burnt and broken they couldn't survive a march, but too well to die quickly.

He found a drummer, only alive because the young man had run like mad from the edge of the lake, and signed he should play retreat again. The men below might not hear it, but maybe they could feel it on their skin. The noise barely registered under the bells, and it didn't last. A thin spear descended and skewered the signalman through his drum and upper leg. He went down to the ground, but he'd live.

Across the lakebed was the thrower, clothed in white over scarlet armor. Zaid drew his sword and pointed it at the Pasha in challenge, as Phillip accepted a new javelin from his bulwark, lined up his throw, and heaved it a surprising distance across the lake. It was an astonishing feat, but the projectile was too slow. Zaid waited for the weapon to fall to him, lazy at first but more threatening as it closed in, then sidestepped the shaft and cut it in two when it would have struck him. He pointed his sword at the infuriating boy, the monster who sent fire through the sky. No words could pass between them at that distance, certainly not while Zaid was deaf, but what did they need with words? Phillip drew his sword and saluted across the lake.

One of his men got his attention. My unit is intact, signed the Charger's commander, let me chase him down!

The Princeps put his sword away without saluting his counterpart. He turned his back in case the Pasha had sharp eyes. No. He's baiting us. Let's bait him instead.

After that, he thought he could pull all the able-bodied people out of the lake but a new terror appeared, shrouded in darkness. The black zone was big enough to hide a gurantor and went from place to place attacking the nearest object that moved. It would stay with its latest victim for several seconds, then overtake someone else while leaving behind a mound of half-dissolved flesh. It was a child of Darkmaw, a monster scorpion. Spears and arrows did nothing to it. All the men could do was hope it didn't choose them before they could escape.

The monster's presence was proof the wells weren't capped. Why else would Phillip leave a monster there to guard it? He briefly thought of building a ramp and setting it free in the hope it would attack the rebels and let his army access the water, but he had no way to control it.

There was no followup attack from the Pasha, at least not right away. Phillip was going to let the desert do some killing for him. That was Talal.