In hindsight, Ensharia realised, it had been too good a target. Too obvious, too exposed, too open. Not the sort of thing the famed General Venka would permit to exist within any of his warcamps, even ones so great and expansive as these. Except as a trap.
She was a Paladin, and proud to count herself as one. But Paladins were warriors, not commanders, and though she had studied the tactics of history and learned what she could from memoirs and accounts written by the very greatest geniuses ever to conduct men in war, she was no general herself. Perhaps the Saviour could have foreseen her error, or King Galukar. Perhaps they could have prevented the ruin that followed it.
After his sudden appearance the day before, Swick the Swift had remained by Ensharia’s side. They had not spoken much to one another, and she would have had things no other way. The man had left her, had betrayed her, and returning hero or not that was a hard stain to remove. She’d forgiven him, but her heart did not seem to realise it. Even if it had, there had been more productive things to discuss than their comradery in any case.
It had been a crushing blow to Venka, and a rallying victory to her, that they had managed to kill so many of the general’s orks in their attack. Almost half perished before the rest fled, and some remained. They were quickly taken as prisoners, bloodlust not so strong in victory as it had been in freedom, while the corpses were picked over for arms and armour. The siege tower, of course, was destroyed. They carried the salvaged wood with them as they disappeared across the plains.
Parties followed, large ones, fast ones, but none were able to chase them down. Swick’s translocation proved an invaluable scouting tool, and was almost as useful in misleading the enemy as to their location as it was keeping his own side accurate and informed about their foe’s. Only one of Venka’s numerous chasing hordes actually made contact, a force of some half dozen Elites and two hundred warriors.
There was no contest as to the victor of that conflict, and soon enough yet more equipment was being shared out amongst their men. Bolstered by this, they had grown hungry for yet more victory- and hastened in their hunger by the sight of Kaltan’s outer wall falling. Once the siege was done, Venka would turn his focus on them. All remembered that well, and none so well as Ensharia, so they had turned to the attack.
It might have been clear to her, had she not been blinded by the novelty of freedom and the thrill of revenge, that a man of Venka’s experience would have known their advantages better even than they did. The first easy target they stumbled onto, they attacked, and it was then that the forces came to encircle them.
Among the ambushers were ten thousand warrior-orcs, close to double the numbers Ensharia herself laid claim to, a hundred Elites…And Venka himself. Any hope they might have enjoyed before that point died with the sight of him striding across the battlefield, sabre drawn and eyes cold as icicles. Ensharia readied herself.
Orcs crashed into orcs, and instantly the difference was there. Ensharia’s might well have been the higher quality soldiers, less formally tried and tested but consisting largely of former chiefs and warrior-castes from the tribes, greater in size and strength, and fighting with a ferocity impossible to any but a freed slave. Venka, though, had the numbers, and he used them well. His formations were non-existent, forgotten in favour of simply made columns that struck her forces like bludgeons. The carnage was great, the effectiveness greater. Ensharia grabbed Swick, gave him the signal, and they translocated past it all in one go to come charging at the general.
If any chance was to be found in the battle, it was by taking Venka’s head. Clearly he had known it himself, because he was well guarded by Elites as Ensharia and the pirate drew near. They split apart into twinned attacks, closing from different sides and each contesting two of the lumbering orcs. Ensharia baited a swing from one, then opened its jugular up just as the other grabbed her. Venka was moving behind it, almost skewering her before Swick translocated between them to parry the thrust, then, while the general was stunned in shock, headbutt him hard and savage across the nose.
General Venka stumbled back, and Swick and Ensharia both made short work of the remaining Elite beside her. Of the other two, the ones fought by Swick, only one was able to continue fighting. They came on for Venka like a thunderstorm, and this time the General seemed cautious.
When last they had fought, Ensharia had done it without her armour and with barely even a weapon, Swick half-drunk. Now they were armed, armoured and sombre as a winter chill. The Elite fought well, defending his master, but died quickly, then it was just Ensharia, Swick and the General.
Ensharia’s war-pick was unbalanced, but it served her amply enough as it chased after the general. Swick for his part seemed perfectly comfortable with the daggers he wielded, slashing out in great circles whenever Venka sought to slip within Ensharia’s own strikes. A nick appeared along the general’s wrist, then his cheek. Her pick’s blunt end clipped his shoulder in a stumbling blow, and his wince of pain was doubled as the tip snagged his leg and gashed it just over the knee.
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He was dying a slow death, that of a cliff eaten away by tides, but he was dying nonetheless. If one such scrape could cause a man pain, then fifty might well kill him. Ensharia had only another forty five to land.
Of course, it had always been Venka’s trap, and the man was a Hero in more than just name. He did not make his killing easy, sword emerging to parry nine would-be-wounds for every ten that came at him. Ensharia was faster and stronger than she’d ever believed possible, thanks to the Saviour’s touch, but she was no great threat to an enemy like this. Not when he needed only play for time.
A sling bullet caught Ensharia in the back of her head, and the one after it struck Swick in much the same place. Both projectiles were stone, not iron or steel, and thus fractured on impact with the Vigour-infused skulls they struck. Neither failed to stun their target regardless.
Venka’s sword caught her weapon, not her body, and easily cleaved through the shaft. Before Ensharia’s pick had even lost its head to the dirt, the sabre was back around and thudding its blunt side against Swick’s face. The man dropped like a stone, and orcs fell down upon her before she could surge on to try and best the general with a tackle. Strong arms, numerous arms. Three, eight, a score.
All crushing grips and compressive holds, strength compounding strength until even Ensharia was no match for the sheer weight of musculature and Vigour brought to bear against her. She fell, knees hitting the ground so hard that stones broke beneath them, the rest of her following a moment later.
It was all she could do to raise her head and affix Venka with a glare, and all she could do after that to keep from snarling in her rage as the man refused to so much as glance back at her. Ensharia bucked her body, twisted to give herself more space, then lashed out with both feet and lifted an orc from her. Before the ranks of bodies closed again she was sliding through them and breaking out at a sprint, bowling over a quartet of others trying to pin Swick and hauling him along beside her. Both of them moved quickly.
Ahead, they saw their forces. Or what was left of them. The orcs were encircled by their own kind, ranks thinning as enemies broke through and hacked apart the defenders. There was no saving them, not all. Ensharia took all of a second to make her decision, then turned to Swick for verification.
“We need to take the left flank.” He gasped. “They’re the only ones with a chance to cut and run.”
A chance, perhaps. But not a big one. Ensharia braced herself, cursed herself, then charged on, only pausing to snatch a fallen weapon from the ground.
It really had been too good of a target, in hindsight. And there was no time to do anything about that now.
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The siege was over, Collin could see that much. The people had long since finished their retreat into the keep, and the orcs had long since begun their final assault at it in earnest. For hours the building had been surrounded, and those hours were starting to run out. He watched it all, waiting for the fear, the dread. Instead he felt only a quiet discontent.
I won’t be avenging my father, then.
It was laughably pathetic that a thought like that stuck itself out so far above the others, but Collin couldn’t control his thoughts. He couldn’t control his city anymore, for that matter, either.
From his telescope, he saw Galukar was still fighting. It wasn’t a normal telescope, of course, to be perceiving such a thing through solid stone walls. Some magus had been commissioned to craft it decades ago, as a means of looking through the correspondingly enchanted structure of the keep. Fitting, because it wasn’t a normal fight Collin used it to observe.
Regardless of the verbal trouncing he rather fancied his father had given the man…Galukar still impressed. Collin hadn’t thought of him much, merely sectioning all recollection of the King off to a distant, resentful corner of his thoughts, but he was grateful to see him back again. No doubt, the corridor he held would have long fallen otherwise.
For hours he’d carved his way through undead and orcs alike, until their mangled forms made a bloody carpet at his feet. The walls, the ceiling, were all coated with congealing ichor spurted out by the wreckage left where ancient iron came down on fragile meat.
Collin had heard the stories, everyone had, and he’d seen some measure of them acted out in their joint ambush against Venka’s forces beyond the walls. It was another thing entirely, however, to be exposed to such a distilled, prolonged demonstration of King Galukar’s prowess. How easy to imagine there was some truth to the theocratic propaganda of his sword, seeing it used with such impossible strength. How tempting to actually feel some whisper of hope, witnessing such a potent creature fighting on his own side of the conflict.
But no man could kill forever, and the army feeding itself into Galukar’s corridor would have crushed five or more times its number of conventional attackers. He was a creature, in the end. Not a god.
With each new blow, the King’s fatigue was apparent. Movements made slower, weaker, clumsier all in degrees which would have been fractional and near imperceptible in another man, but proved stark reductions of the near-perfect might he’d been so recently doing battle with. Where before he had slain undead by the dozen with each passing moment, he now killed precious few, ceding ground as their numbers swelled before him, rotting masses climbing over the piled up corpses to force him ever deeper into the tunnel of stone. Others made to dig through the walls, testing their strength against the ancient architecture and creating their own passages with its yielding. The siege was over, and the slaughter was drawing near.