The Trials of Empire, page 40
Sir Radomir – the real Sir Radomir – stood next to me, rubbing the back of his head.
“Did you hear something?” he asked.
“Ramayah!” I shouted, my whole body trembling. “I know you are here!”
Both Sir Radomir and I whirled around as someone appeared in the main entranceway, picking his way over the charred beams. It was Kunagas Ulrich.
“He is here,” the shaman said hurriedly and in thickly accented Saxan. “You must be quick. I have spare horses, come.”
Broken from our inaction, Sir Radomir and I rushed over to the brazier where the Eternal Fire burned. The heat from it was intense. The sheriff cast about the place, and quickly darted off to snatch a pair of unlit torches from their brackets nearby. He returned and we thrust them into the bonfire.
“Flame of Savare,” I said as I withdrew the torch.
“Benita flamo de Irox purigu ĉi tiun landon de la Princo de Sango kaj lia ŝaŭmo,” Ulrich intoned quietly. The moment he stopped, a sudden curtain of darkness fell over the temple. It was immediate, as though the sun had been extinguished. Not even the bonfire produced any light. The darkness was thick, like oily smoke, but entirely without substance.
“Sir Radomir?” I whimpered. But he had gone.
A low chanting filled the space. It sounded like Kunagas Ulrich, but I could not be sure. Gripping the torch tightly in my hand, I started feeling my way towards the exit.
The chanting grew louder and more intense. It was in that same pagan language I had heard Ulrich use. And then suddenly there was a brief, violent choking sound, and the chanting stopped abruptly.
Shortly after I collided with something – something soft.
Then all at once the light returned.
In front of me was Kunagas Ulrich. He was suspended three feet off the ground, and completely naked. A great incision had been made from the top of his breastbone down to his pubis, and a vast quantity of blood was sloshing out of him in an impromptu waterfall. His eyes were wide in horror.
Behind him stood the statue of the black demon.
“Give me your fucking NAME!” it roared, and leapt at me.
I shrieked, ducked, sprinted, legs weak with terror, I couldn’t move fast enough, the muscles of my legs were not strong enough, I ran, blind with fear, willing my legs to move faster damn it—!
I burst out of the temple and into the street.
Sir Radomir was sitting atop his horse, torch in hand.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he muttered, pulling the reins around. “Come on. We don’t have time for this.”
Sir Radomir seemed to have no idea about what had taken place in the Temple of Savare. There was no sign of Ulrich, either, nor the fresh horses he had supposedly brought. Indeed, we nearly killed ours getting back to the Nastjan Fields. They were too disciplined not to respond to our constant urgings, but I could tell we were squeezing the life out of them.
I did not have time to dwell on the visions. As we cantered down the Aleksandra the Valiant High-Way, I saw that the Victory Gate had finally been forced open, wide enough to admit four men walking abreast, and a brutal, chaotic melee had engulfed the gatehouse.
“Come on!” Sir Radomir roared; but his horse, exhausted, collapsed. The sheriff was thrown clear and tumbled across the flagstones with a grating screech of armour. His torch smacked into the ground and broke apart, the flame extinguishing.
I blinked away a brief flash of a shadowy figure, and the kicking, writhing, spectral form of a horse.
I pulled my own horse to a stop and dismounted as quickly as I dared. I ran over to Sir Radomir, cupping the flame with my left hand to protect it from the wind.
“Gods, please tell me you are alive,” I groaned at his prostrate form.
He pressed himself up off the floor, spitting blood from where he had bitten his tongue. “Fuck me,” he said, wincing and stretching. His armour had taken a great deal of the sting out of the impact, but that same armour had jolted and pinched and bruised him as he had fallen.
He saw the broken dead torch and let out a roar of frustration.
“Never mind that, just help me with this one!” I shouted.
Sir Radomir recovered his shield, and we began forcing our way through dozens of ranks of soldiers and city watchmen. The air was filled with the smell of shit and the sound of rattling, grinding teeth. The men and women of the volunteer companies did not look as though they would stand their ground.
Sir Radomir and I pushed and shoved and shouted, until we were spotted by Count Maier and his retinue, and then they were pushing and shoving and shouting, too, clearing a path for us.
The pagans damming the Victory Gate were overwhelmed as we were about one hundred feet from the Estran Wall. I could see thralls throwing themselves at the defenders, teeth gnashing, claws ripping. They keened like banshees, scratching and tearing and ripping at faces and throats and hands. Each was coated in blood.
“The torch! The torch!” I shouted madly, desperately holding it aloft as we pressed into the pagan rearguard. Moments later, Count Maier and a half-dozen knights in heavy armour appeared around us. They shoved the pagan soldiers roughly out of the way, encasing me and Sir Radomir in a protective bubble.
“Where is Sir Konrad?” I shouted.
“Who knows?” Count Maier grunted, shoving a Brigalander in the back to prevent a collision. The man snarled something in his rough, Northern tongue.
“I need to get to the top of the wall!” I shouted above the din.
Something suddenly cleared this impromptu life guard of Hauners and landed in the middle of us. It was a feral human, a good third of its head missing, its brain roughly excavated by some instrument of war. It gave me a ghastly grin, brandishing its iron claws, and lurched forwards to open me chin to groin.
“Nema fuck!” I grunted, jerking backwards as a claw raked my breastplate. The ring of knights moved quickly to butcher the creature with their short swords, stabbing with relentless, ruthless efficiency. The thrall jerked and spasmed and screeched, but even so it raged at me, its eyes never leaving mine. Eventually, Sir Radomir tackled it to the ground, and the knights cut its hands off at the wrist, and then its head, and it still took a good few moments to expire.
I was sitting on my arse, still gripping the torch handle with all my might, when something shifted in the air. I became aware of an… attention, as though a collective consciousness had shifted its focus.
To me.
If the thralls had been crazed before, now they were utterly berserk. Count Maier and his knights began to shout themselves hoarse to bring men up around them; not just other Hauners, but watchmen and members of the volunteer companies, too. We were perilously close to the gates, but there was no way to avoid that if I wanted to get atop the wall.
The thralls smashed their way through the gap as effectively as any detonation of blackpowder. Frenzied, they carved a brutal, bloody channel through Captain Llyr’s Brigalanders until the centre of the pagan force folded entirely. And who could blame them? They were a hardy bunch, and better acquainted with the Draedist arcana than most, but they were still human beings. Even their store of courage had its limits.
I wondered how long it had taken Claver and his priests to create so many of these puppets, how much energy it had taken, and how tenuous their grip on this hellish reality was. But I was not given long to dwell on it. The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes and waited for my evisceration was Count Maier’s life guard as they jammed up against one another, their sohle shields overlapping, their sabatons braced against the flagstones, fighting for their lives.
I gritted my teeth so hard it felt as though they were about to buckle. I fancied I could feel the scrabbling, grasping fingers of the thralls at my throat already, raking away the meat of my neck, pulling out the veins and cutting them open, letting me drain away—
“Prince of Hell, Helena, get the fuck up!” Sir Radomir shouted, grabbing me by the arm and roughly pulling me to my feet. I saw, incredibly, that the Hauner knights had held, along with a motley collection of individuals – Captain Llyr, several large pagan brutes, Sir Gerold, and a random collection of Saxanhilde Templars including Valter Lončar himself. They formed a crescent, the bow of a ship against a raging ocean of thralls, and with an enormous, superhuman feat of courage and martial skill, held them back.
Sir Radomir and I made our way to the Estran wall, pushing through several ranks of Guardsmen who had formed a human barricade there. Out of nowhere Heinrich rejoined me, his muzzle red with the blood of thralls, and together the three of us surmounted the steps and achieved the wall. I saw Captain Rainer was here, alongside several other armoured lords. The battlements were strewn with corpses; far below and beyond, Claver and his Templar host waited for the thralls to complete their ghastly business. They were in no rush to squander their lives in the melee.
“I need to set fire to the pitch with this flame!” I shouted at her, though the noise was not particularly great up here.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” she snapped.
“We don’t have time to explain,” Sir Radomir snapped back, taking a step forward and jabbing his finger into her breastplate. She looked at the offending digit with great fury, but did not slap it away. “It will mean the difference between saving the city and losing it.”
The captain, who had already had her fill of this exchange, and who had been briefed by Vonvalt to expect all manner of bizarre requests, signalled a Guardsman from nearby.
“Take these two to the pitch vats,” she ordered. She caught my expression and then eyed the flickering torch in my hand uneasily, as though it exuded some strange, tangible energy. She pointed to it. “Make sure it is that flame which sets it alight.”
The Guardsman, who had no problem in following these odd instructions, led us into the Victory Gatehouse. Here the stink of battle was strong; blood and shit and vomit in great quantities. Freshly spilled viscera has a peculiar smell which I find impossible to describe, though a trip to the butchers will remind me of it quite quickly. In the close, low and dark confines of the chambers of the gatehouse, corpses lay in abundance, blood pattering and dribbling through the boards.
The mark of the Trickster on my chest began to pulse painfully as we approached the pitch vats. I scratched at it, my fingers finding nothing but intervening steel. Heinrich whined next to me. Dark whispers filled my ears, urging me to turn back.
“Here,” the Guardsman said as we reached the long, broad chamber that sat directly above the gate itself. Several floors beneath us, I heard screams and thumps and the muted ring of steel against steel as men and thralls hacked each other apart for the prize of the gate winches.
We had to surmount a ladder and achieve a stout wooden mezzanine to where the vats themselves were. Here huge metal tanks of scalding hot pitch were being kept heated by small braziers. A lever was next to each one, which, when pulled, would tilt the vats down and channel the pitch directly on to the attackers beneath.
“How do we do this?” I asked. My first instinct had simply been to tip the torch into the vat, though that would have been catastrophically stupid, since the gatehouse would have gone up in flames.
“Tip the vats first, let the pitch catch as it goes down the channel. But we must be careful not to let the torch be overwhelm—”
The lights were extinguished. The tattoo on my chest flared with pain. Heinrich began to bark madly.
Something clattered into me from the side. I flailed madly to keep the torch from going out. It was Sir Radomir. The Guardsman who had led us here had pounced on him. By the light of the Flame of Savare which I carried, I saw the guard savagely biting Sir Radomir’s face just below his right eye. His arm was crushing the sheriff’s windpipe. All semblance of rational consciousness was gone.
I scrabbled madly for my sword, but it was Heinrich who leapt first. As the Guardsman bit off Sir Radomir’s cheek, so in turn did Heinrich crush the man’s skull. Trapped between those muscular jaws, I saw his face bulge in the firelight, and then collapse outwards. Something warm and wet with the consistency of a boiled egg bounced off my cheek – an eyeball.
Whilst Heinrich continued to savage the Guardsman, Sir Radomir heaved in deep lungfuls of breath through his crushed windpipe. Blood dribbled from his ruined cheek; the Guardsman had ripped it away so completely that I could see the sheriff’s bare teeth.
“Just do the fucking fire!” he screamed, rolling around on the floorboards and swearing over and over and over again.
I snatched up the torch and yanked the first lever, and held the flame to the pitch as it cascaded out. I realised – too late – what Sir Radomir had been trying to tell me before. Yes, the pitch was flammable, but a great waterfall of the stuff would still overwhelm the flame. The torch was extinguished as though I had stuffed it into a bucket full of soil.
“Fuck!” I shrieked in rage and frustration—
—and then I was blasted backwards. I hit the floor, my face scorched, the acrid smell of burning hair in my nostrils.
The pitch burned with incredible radiance as it roared down the channel and splattered on to the thralls still jammed up beneath the gatehouse. An enormous, mind-rattling screech went up as the demons there had their souls sluiced away with holy fire.
I shrieked with fright as Ulrich suddenly appeared before me, floating in the air. He regarded me with an expression of abject contempt. The front of his body hung open like a pair of curtains, and rivers of blood, more blood than any human body could ever hope to contain, gushed out of him.
“You are going to regret that, you Neman whore,” he snarled, and then there was a brief flash of golden light, and he disappeared.
Shaking and nauseous, I ran over to Sir Radomir. He was propped up against the wall, pushing Heinrich’s face away where the hound kept trying to lick his ghastly wound. Rags of flesh hung from the sheriff’s face, and blood mixed with saliva kept leaking out the side of his missing cheek.
“Are you all right?” I asked stupidly. Heinrich whined, pawing at Sir Radomir’s chest.
“Fine,” he replied from behind his hand. He waved a hand at me irritably. “No talk.”
I helped him to his feet. We made sure we had our weapons, and then Sir Radomir walked up to the second vat of pitch and pulled the lever for that one too. Then together we made our way back out of the gatehouse and looked over the battlements of the Estran wall.
“Fuck me,” Sir Radomir said. The holy fire had left hundreds of the thralls a charred ruin beneath the Victory Gate, but the heat and horror of it had also driven back the last of the pagan vanguard, allowing the remaining few hundred thralls to cut through their centre. They had smashed through the ranks of everyone behind until they had reached the volunteer companies, who had broken and fled. Now, the surviving thralls were dispersing into Sova to wreak bloody havoc there.
And finally, with the gates open and unguarded, Claver was moving in.
XXIX
Nema Has Left Us
“The intelligent man learns from his own failures; the wise man learns from the failures of others.”
SIR WILLIAM THE HONEST
The Nastjan Fields were in a state of chaos as we descended the steps. Sir Radomir looked pale, and in other circumstances he would have retired from the field to a surgeon’s tent in the rear. But now there was no choice. If we did not hold them here, if we did not defeat Claver that morning, then we never would.
The pagan vanguard was in disarray. Here at the southern end of the Nastjan Fields, well to the west of the Aleksandra the Valiant High-Way, I saw Lady Frost standing there, armoured and – to my great surprise – bloodied. Around her was a collection of enormous Brigalanders wielding an array of weapons. There was nary a short sword in sight; these were brutal instruments of war, axes, spiked hammers, clubs. Captain Llyr was there as well, her face sheened with perspiration, her hair lank, her ornate armour rent in a dozen places. A few dozen Draedists, their warpaint smeared and their faces blanched, as well as a couple of shamans, stood around too. Whilst the Sovan volunteer companies, almost five thousand men and women, fled back into the city, and the Imperial Guard regrouped under the directions of Captain Rainer – abandoning their attempt to secure the Victory Gatehouse entirely – it fell to Duke Hofmann and Count Maier’s collection of Legionaries and retainers, plus a few dozen Saxanhilde Templars and the balance of the city watch, to hold the line against at least ten thousand Savarans. Forces were desperately rallied at a natural chokepoint that ran parallel to the southern face of the guard barracks, several hundred yards into the city.
We limped our way over to Lady Frost, my spirit broken. The whole point of having the Imperial Guard in the vanguard was because they were immune to the Emperor’s Voice. Now they were strung out, their corpses filling the gatehouse or lining the battlements. A few hundred exhausted souls remained, but they were scattered to the four winds; and besides, what could a few hundred do against ten times that number?
“Now we shall have our reckoning,” Lady Frost said as I reached her. Next to her, Captain Llyr spat roughly on the floor, and wiped someone else’s blood from her cheek.
“The fire was well done,” she said in her rough Brigalander accent. She took in Sir Radomir’s ruined face. “Made a good go of you, Hauner, eh?”
The sheriff grunted his displeasure.
“I know not how the hand of Fate bends,” Lady Frost continued. “But we are on the right path.” She pointed to my chest. “Did it hurt?”
I nodded. “We have not the strength to resist them,” I said, still breathing heavily. “Please: do you have something for Sir Radomir’s cheek? He was bitten by a thrall.”
Lady Frost sneered as she directed one of the shamans to the sheriff. “Oh yes, our enemies are hard at work here. They claimed Ulrich some time ago. Dropped dead before me, without warning. That is a sore loss, I’ll not deny it.”
“I have seen him,” I said, enduring a brief spasm of dread. “He appears to me, floating and eviscerated.”
