Cormyr c-1, page 30
part #1 of Cormyr Series
“We will not fail tomorrow,” said Aosinin quickly, unsure of what else to say.
“We have been on campaign for three months,” said the king, “three months of living in our saddles and sleeping in our armor. If we fail tomorrow, would I rather have spent those three months with my family, with my wife, with little Rhigaerd and Tanalar and Kathla? And will it matter in the long run who truly rules Cormyr?”
Aosinin was silent. Thanderahast was obviously not the only one shaken by the elf lord’s appearance. “We will not fail, my lord,” he repeated at last. “You know you have the loyalty of every Cormyrean on that battle plain tomorrow. They look to you for support, for leadership. If you are sure of yourself, they’ll follow you into the Pits of the Abyss itself!”
“And if I am myself unsure?” asked the king. “If I feel tired and unwilling to go another step? What then, Cousin?”
“Then I will stand by your side, Cousin,” Aosinin replied, “and remind you of our duty to protect the land of Cormyr. If we fail, no amount of time will eradicate the curse of the Witch Lords. And I will remind you that I am sure you know what you are doing.”
They passed the last of the sentries. The sentry was little more than a boy, but he snapped to attention at the king’s approach and saluted crisply. Aosinin saw the lad’s eyes in his small watch fire. They glowed with pride and respect.
Aosinin looked at his king. Galaghard’s features were lit by the flames. His jaw was firm, and his eyes sparkled. He managed a small fatherly smile.
The men would follow him, and that was important, Aosinin thought. After the battle, the king could retire to his home and hearth and family, and his worries would be laid to rest. And if they failed in the morning, they’d all be beyond such worries in any event.
That morning came all too soon for Aosinin and the others. With the first touch of redness in the eastern sky, the squires were up and about and soon roused their masters as the troops, most of them sleeping little themselves, donned their shirts of mail and leather and saw to their weapons one last time. For some of them, it would in truth be the last time.
The squires brought Aosinin and the rest of the nobles their great suits of platemail and slowly ratcheted the bolts home, encasing the valor of Cormyr in steel. Metal covered their outer legs, their waists, and torsos, and a combination of plate and chain wreathed their upper limbs. Aosinin chose his open-faced helm, as would Galaghard. Despite the risk of arrows, the king needed to be seen, and Aosinin and the rest of the royal nobles would not let their cousin take a risk they were unwilling to engage themselves.
Across the vale, there was the sound of drums and horns. The enemy was preparing, too.
The sun’s disk was just breaking the horizon when the troops of Cormyr formed their battle lines. Patriarchs of Helm the Watchful strutted along the line, each with an attendant acolyte and a bucket of holy water. The patriarch would dip a hollow mace, its head pierced with a hundred tiny holes, into the barrel, then fling the water over the waiting troops, blessing them en masse with the Tears of Helm.
Aosinin was on his brown gelding by this time, a huge, heavy beast barded with interleaved plates heavier than his own. His squire secured the last of the bolts and latches, then retreated to ready himself. The squire, one of the young Dauntinghorns, would march with the infantry, providing some backbone to the Arabellan troops.
The men of Arabel looked nervous but resolute, Aosinin thought, eager to prove their worth and banish the last vestiges of the term “rebel Arabel.” Yet a mantle of fear hung on them that even the blessing of watchful Helm did nothing to dissipate.
The troops from Marsember were descendants of the original smugglers and pirates who had founded and refounded that swampy, independent city. They looked fully capable of taking on the Witch Lords by themselves. Indeed, if the king hesitated any longer, they would do exactly that.
The mages signaled that their preparatory spells were complete, and Thanderahast rode to join the king. The wizard’s mount was a light pony, a dappled veteran of many battles. It had been trained to retreat if Thanderahast left the saddle, and it had survived a number of nasty frays as a result.
The king was mounted on his black charger, a magnificent mount clad in ivory-shaded barding. The charger’s armored headpiece had been fitted with a unicorn’s horn, no doubt further enchanted by the Royal Wizard to protect the rider. Galaghard’s own armor was polished to a luster that caught the sun’s rays and threw them back like a mirror. On his chest was the painted symbol of Cormyr, the Purple Dragon, adopted officially since the years of pirate exile.
Across the shallow vale, the horns grew louder and the drums began to roll, a long, ominous sound that would end in a charge. The Witch Lords’ troops would not wait for the sun to fill the vale, their inhuman troops preferred to fight in the shadows. They would move soon.
There was one last, lingering blare of horns, and the drums fell silent. The armies of the Witch Lords roared in unison and surged forward down the gentle slope. Goblins and orcs trotted on the flanks, their ranks sprinkled with the hulking forms of ogre captains. In the center ran the human troops, bolstered by a few knots of loping trolls. There was no visible sign of the Witch Lords themselves, but then there hadn’t been at any of the previous battles, either.
The Marsembians started to advance in response, only to be hauled back by the shouted curses of their noble leaders. Marliir was the name, Aosinin thought.
The king held up one hand, his eyes locked on the advancing line of nonhumans and traitors. If he had any doubt in his heart, it did not show on his face. The opposing forces had reached the bottom of a shallow delve and were now slowly working their way up the other side.
King Galaghard lowered his hand, and the silver horns of the Cormyrean army roared out in response. Like one vast, amorphous creature spread out over the hilltop, the Glory of Cormyr spilled into the valley. Aosinin rode in the main vanguard, alongside the High Wizard on his pony. An eager-looking young Skatterhawk rode on Thanderahast’s other side, paired with an older, grimmer Thundersword. As they rode, both nobles waggled the blades of their swords to flash reflected sun into the eyes of their foes.
They had closed about half the distance to the enemy line when the bats appeared. The ungainly creatures lofted up from the back of the enemy lines, great fur-covered giants with twisted faces and dead-white skin, shadowing the morning light with their numbers. Humans rode the backs of the daunting beasts-humans wearing dark helms bedecked with stag antlers. The lieutenants of the Witch Lords.
They swooped over the Marsembian troops, and light-fling bolts laced down. The bolts were erratic, gouging the soft, peaty earth more than the troops, but for every two Marsembians who fell, only one rose again.
On his left, Aosinin heard Thanderahast let out a shout of anger, then call out Luthax’s name. His personal enemy was among the bat riders, though how the mage knew, Aosinin could not guess. Thanderahast began to bark the ancient phrases of a spell. Aosinin realized what the mage was doing and reached out to stop him, but his armor did not allow him such swift, stretching overbalancing, and the mage finished the spell and lofted himself out of his saddle, flying upward to meet the bat riders. The pony, as trained, immediately halted and started to trot back up the hill.
Aosinin bellowed at his cousin, and the king nodded grimly. From other wings, Thanderahast’s pupils were rising as well, abandoning their troops in order to join in the airborne carnage.
Ahead, the Witch Lords’ troops halted on the near slope of the valley. Ogres were bellowing orders, and orcs and goblins were desperately trying to form a line, spear-points out, to break the Cormyrean charge. Most would not complete the maneuver before they were struck down.
Above their heads, the bat riders and flying mages wheeled and dodged. Lightning cracked across the clear sky, and the Royal Wizard’s pupils replied with gouts of fire. Here a human form would plummet to the earth, and there a flaming bat wing would flutter downward, trailing ink-black smoke down to its death. Thanderahast had removed the danger of any unopposed, concerted attack from above, but at the cost of any protection of the line troops on the ground if the Witch Lords had any other tricks up their sleeves.
The next horror of the necromancers was apparent when the two armies fully closed. At first Aosinin thought he faced humans-traitors, rebels, and mercenaries. They might have been once, for he recognized some badges on the armor they wore. But now they were marching dead things, the remains of their eyes hanging bloody in their sockets, and their flesh drained of all blood. To a man, they had deep slashes across their exposed throats.
The walking dead! Zombies, Aosinin realized with a groan, magical creations under the control of a powerful necromancer. And unlike the animated skeletons they had fought in previous battles, these were recently made and still had some of the power they held in life. The noble thought of the fires and the drums of the previous evening and realized that it had not been a rallying celebration, but a grisiy enchantment. The Witch Lords had consumed their own living troops to provide fodder of the utmost loyalty for this crucial battle.
The Arabellans in the front line quailed when they saw what they faced, and several began to retreat. Galaghard rode among them to the front of the line, raising his arm and sounding the attack. The Arabellans stiffened at the sight of the king and, with a shout, pressed forward into the undead.
Aosinin spurred his horse forward to follow his king, and all around him, the battle lines disintegrated into the usual chaos of hacking and thrusting and dying as the ranks of soldiers broke into a swirl of smaller conflicts-man against goblin, against ogre, and against undead abomination. The Truesilver wasted no breath on battle cries but set his teeth and hacked at the butchered humans, seeking to carve a path to the king, who wheeled and slashed again and again against the Undead horde.
At the king’s flanks rode two priests of Helm the Watchful. Golden lights danced from their palms as they drove the animating essences from the fighting corpses. As Aosinin watched, one of the priests was overwhelmed by a wave of clutching undead and dragged from his mount. Aosinin did not see him again. Instead, the Truesilver found himself beset on all sides by swarming goblins, who were spilling into the heart of the Cormyrean host in the wake of the undead, slashing at zombie and Cormyrean with equal abandon.
The world became a small, blood-red, frantic place of wheeling and cutting and slashing, Aosinin’s horse bucking under him like a mad thing. He trampled foes who sought to gut his mount and drag him down. He made little charges to nowhere, wheeling as his mount lashed out in all directions with steel-shod hooves, then surging back along the line of destruction he’d already cut, to reap more goblin lives. Twice he was nearly torn from the saddle, and once his gauntlet was ripped clear from his hand. A goblin tried to climb up on his mount, its clawlike fingers scrabbling against the horse’s barding, clawing at Aosinin’s face. The Truesilver cursed and ran the small creature through. As the goblin fell away, Aosinin saw young Skatterhawk, transfixed by three black goblin blades, topple from his horse, knocking over three zombies. There were yet more of the undead to swarm over the fallen noble’s body, and more orcs and more goblins. Aosinin’s world was reduced to the length of his sword.
When Truesilver did have time and breath to look up again, he was wet with blood clear up to his gorget, and half the nobles of the Glory of Cormyr were down. Cormaerils, Dauntinghorns, and Crownsilvers had vanished from their saddles and now lay dead and trampled beneath feet and hooves in the battle. The king was farther away now, driven apart from his cousin by the weight of the advancing undead.
As Aosinin cursed and fought to bring his mount around, he saw a huge shape rise up from among the heaped dead. A monstrous troll, larger than any Aosinin had seen, cunningly hidden among the undead troops and goblins, surged into battle with the king. Galaghard’s mount reared, whinnying in fear, and the king fought to keep it under control.
Another horseman spurred into the space between the king and the troll. One of the Bleth boys, by his markings. To the troll, one human was as good a victim as another. One swipe of its huge claws unhorsed the impulsive Bleth, and another ripped his armor open from neck to waist. Blood fountained, and the young noble threw back his head in a cry of agony that Aosinin could not hear. He fell out of view, lost in the press of staggering zombies and desperately thrusting Arabellan billmen.
Bleth’s sacrifice bought the time the king needed. Aosinin realized that, besides himself, Galaghard was now nearly the only mounted knight left. The king wheeled his charger and brought his sweeping blade around nearly level with the troll’s neck. As the horse plunged forward, the monster’s head was cut from its shoulders and bounced into the throng of advancing goblins.
That would not kill the creature, thought Aosinin, but the loss would keep it busy for a while. Indeed, the troll had already abandoned its attack on the king and was now throwing goblins about like handfuls of straw, searching in the confusion for its lost head.
The king wheeled again, this time facing Aosinin. Seeing his cousin, he raised his sword in salute, and the Truesilver returned it, seeing Galaghard give him a bloody smile. There were no doubts in his liege’s mind this day. No hollowness in the king of Cormyr.
The king used his uplifted blade to point to the left flank, where the Marsembians were slowly being driven back by a wedge of orcs and goblins. Were that wing to fail, the Witch Lords could drive around behind the Cormyrean lines, surrounding them, and force the Glory of Cormyr into a knot of men too tightly packed to fight. Then the outermost could be slain at leisure, while those on the inside were crushed or trampled to death.
Aosinin rallied a small band of Arabellans with hoarse shouts and windmilling waves of his sword-by the gods, was his arm going to fall off?-and led them in a charge across the field of heaped and broken bodies, seeking to reinforce the Marsembian foot soldiers.
The Arabellans took heart for the first time that day and began to shout as they came down on the orcs from one side.
Their cries were drowned out by the sound of horns, shrieking like great hunting hawks. Aosinin had heard only one horn sound like that-a trophy horn carved all of one piece of crystal, as smooth as glass, that resided on a cushion in a room deep in the palace. An elven horn!
Heart rising in sudden hope, he stood in his stirrups as his faithful steed raced along, and he looked beyond units of snarling, hurrying ogres in time to see the elves arrive on the battlefield. Some were flying, and these joined the wizards in their airborne struggle with the bat riders. The remainder rode great stags, giant elk whose heads were heavy with iron-tipped antlers.
This was the true Glory of Cormyr, Aosinin realized. The armor of the elves glowed, as their tent had the night before, in a scintillating pattern of green and gold. They were few in number, but to an elf, they were heavily armed and armored.
The Witch Lord line disintegrated as they struck it full force, the ogres falling like crops at harvesttime under the wicked, slender blades of the elves. In mere moments they were slain, and the elves were through to the heart of the wedge of orcs.
Without their leaders, the goblins and orcs dropped their weapons and tried to flee, only to be cut down as they ran. Aosinin heard exultant singing and realized that it came from the elves. More of the goblin troops fled at the sound.
The glowing wave of death caught up with Aosinin’s band and passed on by, and the Truesilver urged his Arabellans to join the flank of the stag riders. One entire wing of the Witch Lords’ army was in flight before them, and individual elves were breaking away to chase down stragglers.
Now the charging elves struck the zombies at the heart of the Witch Lords’ host, troops too mindless to run. Bright blades flashed, and graceful bodies leaned and slashed and rose to slash again in a deadly dance that separated limbs from bodies and forced the dead to fall. In less time than Aosinin would have believed possible, the undead had also fallen beneath the hooves of the rushing stags. The Cormyrean infantry could clearly see what was happening now and raised a great cheer as they hacked at orcs and goblins with renewed heart.
The elven riders swept up to the king of Cormyr, whose mount was picking its way gingerly over a mound of undead and goblin bodies that the royal sword had slain. Galaghard raised his bloody blade in greeting and bellowed, “We appreciate your aid!”
“Aid?” Othorion Keove grinned down from his high saddle. “I said I came here to do some hunting, and when I awoke this morning, I decided I had a taste for orc, goblin, ogre, and undead. Care to ride with me?”
The king spurred his own mount alongside the elf lord’s stag, and together they swept down on the surviving wing of the Witch Lords’ army. It was mired in combat with the Suzail militia, but it shattered like ice as the elves and men bore down on it. Weary Cormyreans from all over the field trotted over to be in at the kill. Few foes of Cormyr would be slipping away from this last stand.
Overhead, the surviving bat riders wheeled and fled into the Vast Swamp. Two were immolated as they flew, but another half-dozen outran the mages and elves and disappeared into the misty bogs beyond, flapping frantically.
Their mounts exhausted from the charge, Aosinin, Galaghard, and the elf lord rode slowly to a low hillock overlooking the battle. Below, the priests of Helm were tending to the human wounded and dispatching dying orcs. Several smoldering piles marked where trolls had fallen, they would have to be immolated later to make their deaths final. Thanderahast landed nearby, his robes bloodied and scorched. He nodded to the king, and Galaghard saluted him formally. Words would be exchanged later, Aosinin knew, about the High Wizard abandoning the knights of the court to pursue his own personal vendetta.
The elf lord turned to the king and said, “A good day’s hunt.”
Galaghard shrugged his heavily mailed shoulders. “It is good to see that Cormyr still offers something suitable to your tastes.”
