The Neck

Their route wasn't quite a straight line between Bitter Spring and Pashtuk. There were obstacles hidden in the flat terrain, sudden ravines, pits hiding giant spiders, and other hazards. His last decent scouts marked a path around most of them, and the army followed. By the end of the first day men were shedding anything they could to make the march easier. The usual banter was missing. Their reddened skin and chapped lips begged silently for moisture. Their weapons dragged behind them, but they didn't stop moving.

Zaid took his men over a formation called the Moguls, a place where the land dipped and rose repeatedly, as if giants had stuck their fingers into the ground and made thousands of dimples as deep as a man is tall. Most of the dips hid deep pockets of fine sand and dust. The men had to either march a twisted path around the dips, or wade through the troughs of fine powder, climb the short rise to the next crest, then control their descent down to the next one. Occasionally they would discover bloodvine sheltering in the dimples. They weren't monstrous specimens like those of Bitter Spring, but men were inevitably poisoned at each encounter. The soldiers cut the vines and marched on, but the poisoned men would lag until they were marching with the injured at the very tail of the column. There were several kilometers of that terrain. A trail of exhausted men dotted his path.

Zaid kept his men walking, night and day, in close formation. The enemy continued to harass them, but his troops had learned what sling stones sounded like and were quick to double up their shields. A thousand pikers would form up in seconds and push out in the direction of the attacks, and the rebels would run off. Sometimes they could be seen for a moment when their overlook prayer slipped, but mostly the pikers chased clouds of dust where the attackers had been. Zaid never let them wander very far, but kept the army moving towards its goal. There was an air of desperation to the attacks now. They came more frequently, and there were more stones thrown. That, more than anything, told Zaid they were scared. The enemy wanted him to slow down, so that's precisely what Zaid refused to do. Overall, the army was losing more men to the environment than they were to harassment, so it was imperative they keep moving.

As bothersome as the Moguls were, they were easy compared to the Cobbles, an expanse of head-sized rocks that seemed to grow out of the ground. Nobody understood why they didn't fill in with blowing dust and sand or how they ended up there, packed together as if they'd been carefully placed over many generations. But anyone who tried to walk on them would not forget. Even gurantors would be careful when stepping on them, and men would turn ankles at nearly every step. The phenomenon extended several kilometers south, farther than Zaid could see while mounted. If he were attacking Sand Castle, he'd turn and skirt the western edge of the Cobbles and avoid them that way. But his true path lay to the southeast.

To the right of the Cobbles was Scavenger Lake, that mysterious spread of black liquid. A descending moon showed him signs of black slimes here and there, their globulous wet bodies reflecting stars in distorted constellations. The slimes wandered, idle and random, searching for anything dead they could drag back to their bleak black home.

Between the Cobbles and Scavenger Lake was a path of clear ground nearly a kilometer wide, which his mapmaker had dubbed the Neck. Zaid marched his remaining army, fourteen and a half thousand men, into the neck and let them rest behind rows of braced shields. In normal times, he wouldn't let his army be crammed into a narrow corridor because it nullified their numerical advantage. Against rebel hit-and-run tactics, the space worked to their advantage by protecting their flanks. The desert people couldn't walk on Cobbles or the sticky black water any better than Kashmari could, and the Neck didn't leave them room enough to maneuver.

The army rested for two hours unmolested by rebel harassment. He would have given them longer, but every hour of rest was an hour without water. Zaid would march these men to Pashtuk mostly unopposed, join up with Hyskos and the remnants of the Riverlands groups, and sack the town. If rebels had the mass to oppose him directly they would have done so already. A battle at Pashtuk was sure to draw the Pasha out into the open.

Once, he'd tried to send another message to the Hyskos commander asking for confirmation of his orders, but the box had used up whatever power it contained. It could be days before the next exchange could happen. For now, the Princeps had to assume the hoped-for reinforcements wouldn't arrive. He had to fight with what he had.

When it was time, the army raised itself with much groaning and marched forward in three columns abreast to keep the flanks protected. They walked by cold starlight, keeping the shivers at bay by painful exertion. Some of the men dropped from thirst or exhaustion, but none of them fell by the wayside for lack of shoes, which pleased Zaid enormously. He had been the one to advocate for decent footwear for every soldier, no matter how lowly nor how much the expense made Prince Baltazar (twenty-first in the rankings) hyperventilate. His army dragged their spears, but they were moving. They were still an army, and they would arrive at their destination with weapons in their hands.

By Zaid's estimation, he was an hour from clearing the Neck when sling stones came from the left flank. The men's shields went up, a thousand tired pikemen rushed out to drive off the slingers … and stumbled on the rocks. From the arc of the stones, the throwers were at least a hundred meters into the cobbles. They would have all the time in the world to finish off anyone who mired themselves on the Cobbles.

If the enemy was trying to get him into a fight, then Zaid was going to press forward. He ordered his drummer to sound forward and double-time and urged his center column on. The bannermen hosted their flags and marched, leaving the thousand to soak up damage while the rest of the army moved through the trap. It seemed be going well until the front of the line fell into a wide trench. The edge near them was gentle enough to climb in and out with ease, but the opposite side was a steep wall. It had escaped their notice in the dark, and now the army was bottled up in it, their front ranks unable to retreat because of the insistent marching of the ranks behind them.

Zaid started giving new orders, but even by starlight he could see the chaos on all sides of him. The regimental banners had fallen, which meant the commanders themselves were likely dead. Somewhere, there was a sniper platform hidden by Overlook.

"Back off to give the font room to get out of the trench, then double up shields to protect the formation," he told his new aide, a man he'd drawn from a devastated piker regiment. He called for scouts but none arrived, so he called for mounted skirmishers. He was pleasantly surprised to get young Tishk, hollow-eyed yet determined to serve his prince. He wore a sergeant's pips, and was smart enough not to greet Zaid like he was a prince: it would only make them both bigger targets.

"Take a company and find out how far this trench goes!"

"Yes, Princeps!"

The fighting continued between the thousand spearmen and the slingers, distant since the army had moved past them, and it gave Zaid reasons to hope. Whatever path the rebels had carved into the Cobbles didn't extend far enough to let them reach his current position. He recalled the response battalion, and the air quieted as the army settled itself into a defensive formation, with enough room to let the fallen out of the trench. Obviously, Phillip wanted Zaid to charge over the Cobbles in force and get bogged down while he aimed endless rocks at his army. Zaid wasn't going to do that, but he wasn't going to stay where he was, either.

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He rode up and down the three columns, ensuring each regiment had a new commander, and each commander had a new sub-commander to take over when they died. Most of the princes were dead now, shot by ballistae. Somewhere nearby was a hidden sniper platform, probably on the other side of the trench. Once, a commander took a bolt through the gut right after his promotion: the new sub-commander took his place and immediately appointed a new sub-commander. Zaid was running out of princes, but the soldiers weren't giving up.

Tishk still hadn't returned after ten minutes, and Zaid knew he had to move if he didn't want his entire army picked off one at a time. If he dallied long enough, the slingers would take up new positions and resume their long-range assault, killing and incapacitating two or three men with every throw. Time was against him.

If Zaid refused to retreat then he had to brave one of the barriers: the Cobbles, Scavenger Lake, or the Trench. But what he wanted, what he needed more than anything, was to engage the enemy at close range. Smiling, Zaid gave new orders, and had the drummers sound a right flank. He marched his men toward the lake. If the slingers wanted to stay within range they'd have to follow him onto open ground. The drums sounded, and Zaid sent riders with more specific instructions.

The enemy didn't fall for it, but neither did they bother his formations. There were too few of them to take on his army, even with enhanced fighters. Tishk finally returned, alone, slumped over his bloody appalon with a javelin through his hip.

"There's no gap, my prince, just a thin wall between the lake and the trench. It's protected."

"Healer! Save this man's life." As the called-for healer approached, Zaid spoke to the young sergeant. "Not bad, Tishk. Try to stay alive."

He called up a messenger, but all the messengers were missing. A nearby volunteer sprang to his feet, a veteran spearman from Second Regiment. "Can you find the skirmishers of Third Regiment?"

"Yes, Princeps!"

"Tell him to fill a section of the trench with appalons and slaughter them there. Get a few hundred men to shore them up with dirt. We'll build a bridge that lets us march over. Anyone who falls becomes part of the bridge. We must cross now!"

The longer Phillip left him alone, the more Zaid's urgency grew. The tribes were buying time so they could assemble. Possibly, they had instant communications through something like the sounding boards but even so, moving men still took time. The anxious minutes ticked by while the smell of animal blood soaked the air. A runner told him the bridge would be ready in less than half an hour. It would have gone faster, but the steep side of the trench was hardened rock.

There was some commotion near the trench, where hundreds of people either shoveled, slaughtered appalons, or waited to cross. Another runner appeared, lanky and parched, to let him know the trench was filling with the stinking liquid of Scavenger Lake. The appalon-and-dirt bridge had become a dam, and it was holding for now. Zaid smiled. Phillip hoped he'd simply rush the trench and climb up the steep side with ropes, then flood the trench and drown his people.

He gave new orders: climb into the trench downstream from the dam and help each other over the steep side. Anyone who still carried rope and stakes was to go first, to make a path for others. The orders took a two whole minutes to circulate, a symptom of their increasing disarray, but they were carried out. Hundreds of men rushed down the slope and started helping each other climb, building human ladders for the stake-and-rope carriers. But the far side wasn't undefended: Calique hunters appeared and started spearing the climbers. Zaid's heart raced to see his enemies' faces.

Kashmari bowmen (they never had that many but there were even fewer now) loosed arrows into the defenders. Chargers tried to get their mounts across the improvised dam, but their mounts hesitated to step on dead appalons. A few started the crossing, seemingly unopposed, and Zaid's excitement grew.

Then the fire started. It didn't burn the way it was supposed to, the way Zaid had read about, the low scattered flame of something that didn't like burning. This was a conflagration that started somewhere in the flooded trench and ran like a raid of angry franango down the line to the lake shore, which went up in a curtain of flesh-melting heat. The black substance didn't just burn: It boiled; It roared; It towered over them; It blackened the air in moments. Fat gobs sprayed the nearby soldiers and ignited. The cries of wounded panic was the noise of his army breaking.

That was when the Calique attacked in force. They came from behind, pinning the army against the defended trench wall, the Cobbles, and the lake of fire. They opened with slings and javelins, but this time there were fighters, too. Each one of them seemed able to shrug off any blow, cut men in half with a single stroke, and rush from one fight to another with abandon.

Numerically, it should have been impossible. Every disciple needed to enhance scores of men to put so many on the field, but somehow the Pasha had done it. Zaid ordered the drums to sound attack to the rear, but the drummer died before he could finish the first bar. A second bolt nearly killed him, but struck his new aide instead. He shouted until he was hoarse and pushed his appalon to the new front line intending to rally the men there, but a huge gray skinned man was there in bulwark brigandine, clubbing men with batons. Even more surprising, there was a woman with him cut from much the same mold. They were only a part of the Calique line, but they crushed the wave of soldiers who went after them. Spears were nothing against their armor. Kashmari muscle was childish compared to their reach and strength.

"We found him!" shouted the gray-skinned man, and threw a rock at Zaid's mount, hitting it square in the head. He didn't even use a sling but chucked the ten-kilo ball of rock like a child playing a game of pins. The appalon stumbled, lost control of its hind legs, then collapsed. Zaid threw himself off in a hurry, to land with his sword in hand. He stood up, directly into a gray fist. Half the Princeps' world was lost to sight and sound, while the other half swam sickeningly.

He was still trying to give orders. Run the Hadith. Line your pockets. Bleed the sad clerics. Nobody seemed to hear him from his place on the ground, but it didn't matter. He didn't know what he was saying, anyway. His thoughts didn't make sense. Other people were in the dirt around him, some with heads and hearts pierced by arrows, others with helmets caved in by baton strikes.

Zaid struggled to prop himself up on his one working arm, but he couldn't see through all the men who packed themselves around him to make a shield wall. Sling stones were coming from the rocks again. Someone with a loud voice had taken charge, but Zaid heard the now-familiar sound of a miniature ballista bolt cracking layers of metal and leather and bone. The next man to take charge died even more quickly. The army couldn't get itself organized and Zaid couldn't do anything except bleed from his broken mouth into the dry ground. That, and not vomit. He was doing pretty well at not vomiting.

From the sound of the battle, the whole column had decided to charge the Cobbles. It wasn't the worst thing they could have done, and it got them away from the lake of fire, but their slow progress on the rocks made them easy targets for slingers and archers. Smoke drifted low onto the battlefield to choke everyone, even disciples, and coat their eyes in a stinging film that blurred their vision.

The enemy Zaid could see were rounding up appalons and preparing to leave. Some arrows flew their way, but glanced off their upraised shields like dull sticks thrown by children. The volleys ceased when a rebel pulled out a sling and hurled one of their ten-kilo balls at the source of the arrows. Bulwarks were fearsome creatures.

Zaid heard someone approach him with quiet steps in the midst of mayhem. He tried to draw his dagger with his good hand only to find his wrist pinned to the ground by the butt of a spear. He looked up to find it was Phillip's bodyguard, the veteran woman. Beside her was the Pasha himself, marked by purple lenses on his goggles, crouching down to look at him.

Phillip raised his goggles to the top of his head and examined Zaid with uncanny silver eyes. At that moment, he would have sworn the boy could see through flesh and bone. There was nothing hidden in him the Pasha could not find.

"You're not dead yet," said Phillip, putting a hand on top of Zaid's exhausted head. "Rest now."

Sleep was as easy as sliding on ice, downhill into the dark.