The dawn cast stark shadows upon the rude breastworks the last remaining Iskans were even now reinforcing with turf cut from the prairie behind them. The black, oily surface of the Tonkitaeʹ river glinted orange-gold and ruddy with the newly risen sun’s reflected light, throwing fractured shards of it back onto the shore like driftwood.
The old ferry station had become a sad little fortress in the night. Sprouting crude walls and cruder towers from which half-dead Iskan soldiers stared hopelessly across the roiling water at their doom. Not a one of them doubted this fact as they watched the Turaleeans form up just outside of arrow range— as though there were more than a handful of arrows left south of the river. Rank upon rank of Turaleean infantry, troop upon troop of mounted lancers, swarm after swarm of longbows and crossbowmen. The artillery hadn’t even moved into view, but already the conclusion of today’s battle was foregone.
Few of the Iskans remained unwounded. To a manjack, they were exhausted and starving. The artillery had been left behind three days hard run northwest where the Turaleeans had last overrun them. Just three of the mages yet lived, and one of them a gibbering idiot who should have died from the sorcerous attack that had felled him.
One of the squad leaders had set up a small temple in the old ferry station’s stable; the chaplain having fallen in the retreat. Turn and turn about, the soldiers quit the walls to say their farewells to this life and beg their gods for access into the next. They would fight to the last man, not because they were especially dedicated or brave, but simply because the Turaleeans would allow them no other choice.
The wall climbed another layer of sod higher as the sun fully cleared the horizon.
Shelador the First surveyed the field with no particular emotion. Iskans weren’t important except insofar as they were in his way. Nor could he leave them alive to trouble him after he’d passed. They were, therefor, dead men. But dead men who stood between his army and the Iskan Republics.
The sun cleared the horizon fully, throwing the roiling river into a band of white-yellow fire just as his ears detected the first sounds of the approaching artillery to his rear. He smiled a grim, emotionless smile and turned from the open grave that the ferry station would be by day’s end, motioning the various toadies and hangers-on who claimed to be his general staff to follow. There would be no finesse, no elaborate plan...he outnumbered the Iskans fifty to one before one even took the mages or fell creatures under his command into account.
“When the artillery arrives,” he told his field commander as he passed, “give the walls ten span of bombardment and then simply grind them underfoot.”
The field commander grimaced angrily at the king’s retreating back, turning an even grimmer scowl upon the rude breastworks across the river. Well and good for ‘His Arrogance’ to order several thousands to pointless deaths, but who was it would have to look the sub commanders in the eye and give the orders?
The dew had yet to burn from the long grass when the first boulder hit the stable, smashing through the wall and prophetically crushing the Iskan alter and the squad leader still hunched before it. For ten full span, boulders carried thousands of stad from their original resting places and launched from trundling trebauchets or catapults hurtled through the air to pummel the hapless defenders of the Iskan Republics. Balls of flaming pitch ignited the sun-dried boards of the stable and sent the grass growing upon the collapsed roof of the station itself to smoldering.
The Iskans hunkered within tiny holes they’d dug behind the walls, trying to ignore the rain of crushing death which crashed around them. They neither roused nor attempted return fire. Ten full span as men died by the scores, crushed if they were lucky, buried alive else. The wall took on a gap-toothed demeanor, the stable burned like a torch, the ferry station collapsed into a mound of sod.
The bombardment stopped. For a hundred breaths it stopped, then was replaced by a howl tearing free of five thousand throats as the Turaleean lines surged forward. The Iskans climbed silently from their holes, those who yet lived, taking resigned positions behind the remnants of wall and the strewn boulders of the barrage. From a bunker behind the rubble of the station, the three mages emerged, the two lucid wizards dragging the idiot behind.
The tall woman in midnight purple robes began an incantation, her back to the onrushing horde, her voice rising to the limits of human perception and beyond. Her short, almost dwarven companion muttered into his beard as his hands wove patterns into the air before him, creating a channel for what was to come. He neither noticed nor gave thought to the approaching army. There was no concentration for anything but the spell. They were outnumbered and they were dead. In all probability, the Republics were dead. All that remained was the spell. But it was one helluva spell.
The woman’s eyes shone white, with no trace of pupil or iris. Her lips moved frenetically, but no discernable sound issued forth. Her left hand came up and a shimmering blade of raw energy formed within the palm. In a single, sweeping motion, the blade swept forth, laying open the chest of the idiot like a butcher opening a pig before continuing in a wide arc to bury itself in the skull of the squat, bearded mage. Even as the knife was sinking into his brain, her right hand dived within the chest of the idiot and closed round his still beating heart. The woman exploded into blinding radiance, blossoming like some impossible flower, her transformation engulfing both companions in the instant, throbbing outward and up. A lance of rainbow energy flashed along the path of the squat mage’s outstretched arms.
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The first wave of Turaleean infantry was nearly across the river, the second splashing noisily though the north shallows, their battle cries still hot upon their lips. For an imperceptible instant, time itself seemed to pause, and then the Tonkitaeʹ was a wall of multihued flame and scalding steam! The roar of the transformation drowned the cries of two thousand tortured deaths. It ended far too quickly to drown those of the thousands who didn’t instantly die.
The lancers faltered, hauling up rearing horses in disbelief. A roaring wall of rainbow flames towered two hundred feet above the river bed, waves of heat washing at the Turaleean line like a heavy surf. The very stone of the riverbed was burning for nearly a stad in either direction. Far above the flaming wall, an umbrella of coruscating power competed with the morning sun for dominance.
The Turaleean field commander rubbed at his face, shoulders sagging. That was that, then. The attack had been foolish on its face, considering who they’d been chasing, but there would be no telling that to Shelador the Worst. He sighed heavily, feeling the power of so many deaths hard upon one another hammering at him like a foul wind. Those deaths would fuel the spell, he knew— make it stronger.
He called to a sub-commander and ordered sizeable forces around either end of the wall of flame. It would do little good, he feared. They’d obviously missed something. Shelador’s mages had missed something. There were two or three wizards on the whole of the second world capable of that sort of power, and there shouldn’t be any of them behind that wall. The sub-commander raced away to gather up such of the knighthood as could be found. The field commander sighed again, turning from the burning wall.
Shadra it would have been. He remembered her from the days of the old king. A regal woman, always polite, always soft-spoken, in the way only the truly, blindingly powerful could afford to be. Yes, he thought as he neared his tent; the days of the old king. The Iskans had been friends then. Allies. Powerful trade partners. A resolute buffer against the foul pressures of the southern wastes. He’d laughed each of the several times he’d been assured of Shadra’s demise. Next time he’d believe it. Except there wouldn’t be a next time, would there?
A final sigh as he poured himself a strong dollup of Jaseeie cognac, savoring it as though it were his last. Thirty-eight years and it came to this. Thirty eight years in the army, first as a private soldier, then a sergeant, and finally an officer. More than three quarters of his life under arms in the service of Turalee, and to what end? Fully a tenth of his command parboiled because a spoiled brat couldn’t be bothered to take a day or two to do things sensibly, followed by an eternity as a marble perch, suspended forever in mortal agony.
On the other hand, he posed to himself as he poured another drink. Chances were good that ‘the Worst’ wouldn’t resurrect him for it.
The pistol shot was hardly noticeable amid the screaming and roaring that dominated the field.
“You told me she was dead!” Shelador hissed.
Chauncilius shrugged shallowly. “If it helps, Sire, she is now. Yon is death magic. You can feel it sucking at the soul without paying attention.”
“Dead now doesn’t clear the road,” the mad boy king grated. “I’ll have that road cleared by mid afternoon or you’ll be sharing my atrium with the other statues.”
Chauncilius Majorus,now probably the greatest sorcerer left alive between the eastern ocean and the western, shivered at the conviction in the mad king’s voice. He bowed low and backed away, turning swiftly away at the minimum distance propriety allowed. Racing toward his own tent, he found time to marvel that he couldn’t doubt the king’s ability to achieve his threat.
Less than five span later, the first spell smashed into the rainbow umbrella covering the Iskan camp, sending up a pillar of neon blue smoke. Almost on its heels, two more spells smashed into the powerful shield, sending up yellow smoke and maroon tinged with black. Still, the shield held. Chauncilius had a dozen mages within his command, three of them of sufficient power to be accorded master’s status. He allowed them to hold nothing back, striking at the limits of their abilities. The shield wavered, pulsed, but held. As it would for many span yet.
A thunderous clapping of wings announced the arrival of Shelador’s pets. Not even the mages had yet identified what the things were, nor where they hailed from, but all knew their sound and their stench. Chauncilius sent a pair of journeymen to the beasts with orders to give over to them explosive potions and corrosives. Shadra wasn’t the sort to have leeched her own people to power the shield, and every attack, no matter how meager, would hasten its collapse.
Mid-afternoon had merged into early evening when the shield pulsed one final time and collapsed in a breaking glass cascade. The wall of fire, having been shrinking the day long, tumbled into itself and vanished, the plume of rising steam drowning beneath the returning torrents. Within the Iskan camp, two twisted, mummified forms tumbled bonelessly to earth, raising small clouds of dust at their impacts. A third figure, a wizened, impossibly frail shadow of the regal woman who’d wielded the blade of energy scant span prior, collapsed atop them.
Corwyn Tedrikkson the Third, governor general of the Iskan Republics, ordered his personal bodyguard to remove the frail form— carefully now!— to such safety as they could afford it. That done, he turned north to behold his doom, only slightly delayed.
The Turaleean first royal army, under a newly appointed field commander, charged across the corpse strewn field and into the newly returned river with bloody vengeance foremost on their minds. Quietly, with businesslike efficiency and without fanfare, the Iskans stood the charge. Then they stood the second. The third charge broke through the right flank, but the governor general charged into the gap with his personal bodyguard, and that charge, too failed.
Night had long ago fallen, but the Turaleean mages had cast the battlefield in fairie lights, granting the spectacle an awful, surreal quality where distance and depth were difficult to judge, and men and animals careered drunkenly through combat with enemies who appeared to waver in and out of existence.
The Iskans, the last surviving remnants of a grand expedition to maintain the Republic’s northern borders, now numbered some two hundred odd. No longer enough to man the pathetic remains of the wall. They gathered within the crumbled mounds of the collapsed station and waited in the same silence they’d spent the day in. The fourth and final charge, when it arrived, swept over them like a wind.