‘The lost can still not be felt,’ signalled Ayl, a brother who had been detailed to search the souls of the six for signs of re-awakening.
‘Yet they still live,’ came a response. ‘When you return to stand ready, think of them no more in the battle.’
Aeb let his eyes rove over the massing ranks of the enemy. Sampling the thoughts of others, he estimated there were around ten and a half thousand of them, all hardened fighters and men who had been victorious over magic and soldier alike. They would believe in their strength and their ability to sweep the small force facing them away.
The Protectors could not allow that to happen. Their Given relied upon them. As did the One who knew them but was no longer among them. Aeb let his thoughts for the man, Sol, drift out to his brothers and felt a strong urge to protect form around him.
There would be no failure.
Chapter 30
Lord Senedai ordered the halt to make camp and give his men a rest after three days’ hard march. A rest and a chance to align the spirits for the battle to come. There was no rush to attack the men surrounding the ruins of the house that had become an icon for all the evils of magic in the minds of all Wesmen. Many of the warriors now sitting around their standards and fires would never have believed they would arrive here. The Spirits had brought them and the Spirits would have to give them the strength to win. The Shamen, though disarmed of their destructive magic, found themselves the centre of respect and attention for every tribe.
Senedai should have been supremely confident. Those defending the mansion were surrounded. They had nowhere to go and they were outnumbered by about twenty to one. Dawn would herald a slaughter and, following it, the chase to catch The Raven, wherever it took them. They would be caught, so ending The Raven’s desperate attempt to bring mythical aid and, as a bonus, remove them from the war.
That was what he had told his Captains and any of his warriors as he swaggered past, his smile the brutal expression of a Tribal Lord in complete command.
But now, standing alone, the doubts began to assail him in a way they never had when he stood before the gates of the College. And he found himself wondering whether the eight thousand he had left to marshal Julatsa, guard its prisoners and tend its wounded, weren’t the lucky ones. They saw themselves as denied the chance of more glory, almost of being dishonoured. Senedai half-wished he had stayed with them as was his right as a victorious Lord. Julatsa was his city for all time.
He stood at the edge of the Wesmen encampment, beyond his furthest guards, and looked towards the ruins. There, one of his doubts was manifest. There were four hundred and seventy-six of them. He had ordered a tracking scout to count them the day before. All in identical armour and carrying identical weaponry. All powerful and all in those dread masks. And now all standing.
Silent, unmoving.
Senedai shuddered and glanced behind him to make sure nobody had seen him. There was something deeply disturbing about their stillness, their ramrod straight stance and their hands clasped in front of them. Only their heads betrayed any movement at all as they watched the massing of the Wesmen forces. They would be formidable opponents and Senedai was absolutely sure that they wouldn’t stand and wait when he ordered his archers to fire. That was his best chance of forcing a weakness in their formation yet the thought of them running towards him, despite their light numbers, worried him. Still, like everything else, it would wait until dawn tomorrow.
He turned his back on the mansion and in the dying red glow cast by the setting sun, imagined the mark over Parve. The Hole in the Sky. The young mage had blabbered endlessly about dragons pouring through it to consume them all and Senedai wasn’t confident enough in their non-existence to disbelieve him. That was, after all, why he was here and why Lord Tessaya had ordered him, at all costs, to destroy the manse ruin through to its foundations and chase The Raven to their deaths. Tessaya understood there was a gateway there. To another place. He had been quite specific about Senedai’s responsibilities.
Another shudder and Senedai walked toward his tent. The whole place smacked of magic and evil. It made his skin crawl. Perhaps Tessaya would arrive before he had to attack alone.
The Barons Blackthorne and Gresse, with General Darrick, rode slowly through the wreckage of Understone with a close guard of thirty cavalry, though all three men knew instantly that no guard was necessary. The army had continued its march east towards Korina, giving Understone Pass itself a wide berth but expecting and encountering no resistance as it joined the main trail. The men they were chasing had not headed west to their homeland.
Trotting through the burned gates of the freshly built and burned stockade, under the empty gaze of a pair of torched watch-towers, Darrick had seen the first splash of red and had turned to his men, saying:
‘Keep what you see here to yourselves. It will not be pretty.’
And now, pulling to a stop in the centre of the town, or what they guessed to be the centre, his words rang so hollow. Not pretty. The magnitude of his understatement would have made him laugh but laughter would have been the ultimate insult.
Darrick thought he had seen everything during his years of soldiering. Warfare was an ugly business. He had witnessed horses’ hooves crushing men’s skulls as they lay crying for help. He had seen young men clutching at their stomachs, entrails spilling between their fingers as their wide eyes sought hope in the faces of their friends. He had seen limbs struck from healthy bodies, jaws hacked away, eyes pierced by arrows and axes jutting from the heads of men who still walked, too shocked even to register they were dead.
He had seen the horrific burns from fire and cold that magic could bring at the whisper of a word and, more recently, he had seen the terrible devastation of water flooding Understone Pass, leaving torn and beaten bodies folded into cracks in the rock.
But always there had been a certain justification. War was an engagement both sides entered into in the knowledge of its likely outcome in terms of suffering.
Here in Understone, though, it was quite, quite different.
Blackthorne Town had been destroyed but its natives had long since fled to the countryside or joined the Baron’s army. The same choice had not been granted the inhabitants of Understone and their slaughter had been utterly deliberate.
Darrick shook his head. It didn’t add up. He knew Tessaya’s mind and this wasn’t his way. The Wesmen had fortified Understone considerably, if the scorched ruins were anything to go by. A stockade had all but encircled the town, studded with armoured watch-towers. Pits and trenches had been dug outside the wooden walls and strong points had been placed in tactically perfect defensive positions throughout the town itself. Tessaya had been planning for a long occupation.
But something had radically and appallingly changed his thinking. Every building had been burned to its foundations, stone had been knocked from stone and all that the Wesmen themselves had built lay in splinters and ashen piles. And everywhere, everywhere were strewn the bodies. It had been a ritual massacre, each man taken to a particular place in the town after it had been burned, and murdered, throat cut, eyes put out and stomach split, the corpse spread-eagled towards the rising sun.
There had to be more than three hundred of them. Understone garrison soldiers and those of the four-College force. Some, Darrick recognised, others he counted among respected colleagues. They had been dead for a day and the clouds of flies filled the air with an evil hum while the carrion birds and animals waited for the riders to leave them to their unexpected feast. The stench of putrefaction was rising.