The Warrior King (Book 4) Page 8

Chapter Ten

  Roderick and the other ravagers rested at the heart of an encampment of Veyrian and Chalfean soldiers from Pasha Ismail’s army. The Veyrians were superstitious and afraid of both the undead knights in their midst and the horn and baying hounds of the Harvester without, but Ismail had several torturers and other conjurers in his army, and they had encircled the camp in protective wards.

  Roderick accompanied Pradmort to Ismail’s tent and remained silently in the corner while the two men discussed strategy and tactics. Ismail was a tall, lean man with the sharp features of a Veyrian lord. He had a penetrating gaze and, alone of the men Roderick had seen in the dark wizard’s army, did not seem cowed by the presence of the undead knights. Nevertheless, he deferred to the ravager captain and answered all of Pradmort’s questions about the state of the war in the east.

  King Whelan had sent raiders to harass the supply lines of the approaching armies, but had not yet marched in force, even though Ismail and the other pashas of the dark wizard were threatening to encircle his army. Ismail suspected that the enemy king was afraid to commit his forces to open battle so far from his base of power in Balsalom and Eriscoba.

  Roderick tried to control his tongue, but found himself volunteering information. “My brother is no craven. If Whelan is withdrawing from confrontation, it is either so as to choose the field of battle or to draw you into a trap.”

  “This is the brother of the barbarian king?” Ismail asked Pradmort, incredulous.

  “Yes. The captain of the Knights Temperate. But he is ours now.”

  The pasha pulled at the ends of his oiled mustache. “You are certain? How can you be sure he is not a spy?”

  “The man is dead. I cut him down on the road myself.”

  “He doesn’t look dead, he looks alert.”

  “That is because we are still turning him. But if he makes you uncomfortable, I will send him away.”

  “No,” Ismail said after a moment of hesitation. “He carries insights into the enemy’s mind. I want to hear them. How he positions his forces, how he guards his supplies—everything.”

  Roderick inclined his head. “I will tell you everything, my lord.”

  #

  Pasha Ismail roused the Veyrian camp before dawn, and by first light, the bulk of the army and its slaves were marching east again. Roderick and Pradmort remained behind with a dozen ravagers, twenty Veyrian archers with longbows, three giants, and the biggest mammoth in the army, together with two men to drive it. They rushed the road toward Yoth, almost gaining the gates before the sentry’s shouted warning brought defenders to the walls.

  Pradmort’s archers set up position thirty feet from the walls and drove full-sized shields into the dirt to crouch behind. They launched a hail of arrows at the defenders scrambling along the battlements while Ismail’s giants trotted toward the gates. Two of them carried an uprooted tree trunk, while the third held aloft a huge shield to block attack from above. Any arrows or spears that got past the shield would then have to penetrate the giants’ heavy armor.

  The defense was disorganized. Several Yothian archers returned fire at the Veyrian bowmen behind their shields, while others tried to bring down the giants. Arrows bounced off the shield or against the helms and breastplates of the giants. The giants drove the log against the gates with a booming echo. They pulled it back and crashed it into the gates a second time. An arrow slipped through the defenses and struck one of the giants in the thigh. He bellowed in rage, but didn’t stop his attack.

  Roderick glanced back at the mammoth, still down the road a hundred yards, where it stamped and trumpeted in a state of agitation. Pradmort seemed content to keep it in reserve, perhaps simply to frighten the defenders.

  The giants continued to batter the gates for nearly ten minutes. First the gates bulged, then they buckled and strained at the groaning iron hinges. One of the hinges snapped. The whole thing was ready to collapse. Pradmort shouted at the mounted ravagers to prepare a charge.

  Movement atop the wall caught Roderick’s eye. A dozen defenders were struggling with a heavy cauldron. They heaved it up to the edge of the wall, and Roderick caught a whiff of sulfur and molten lead. He shouted a warning, but the Veyrian archers had already spotted the threat and were trying to drive the defenders off.

  Lead poured from the cauldron. It hit the giants’ shield with a hiss of steam and the smell of burning leather bindings. Most of the lead flowed off the back and front of the shields to land harmlessly in the dirt, but some of it also spilled over the sides, and some of this hit one of the giants on the neck. He screamed and pitched backwards, knocking away the protective shield.

  The giants’ concentrated attack turned to panic. They stumbled over themselves to get out of the way. One giant clutched at his face, his flesh smoking from the lead that clung to his skin. Another bellowed in rage as he tried to scrape the molten metal from his hands.

  Pradmort watched their hasty retreat with an impassive face and ignored the jeers and taunts from the town walls.

  “Good enough. They’ve softened the gates nicely.” He snapped his fingers at the mammoth drivers.

  The two men goaded the great beast forward with iron hooks. It wore a metal helm that protected its head and tusks, with boiled leather armor encasing its back and legs. Trumpeting in irritation at the spikes jabbing it in the haunches, the mammoth picked up speed as it charged the gates. Soon, it had left the men behind. The ravagers and bowmen scrambled out of its way.

  The mammoth came thundering at the gates, but the way it was swinging its head from side to side, a single arrow or bit of hot lead would send it fleeing the battlefield like the giants before. But even though the defenders must have seen the huge beast lurking, its charge seemed to catch them unaware. No more lead was forthcoming, and the few arrows launched at it bounced harmlessly off its armor.

  The mammoth crashed into the weakened gates with a terrific boom. They exploded inward in a shower of wood splinters and iron hinges. The mammoth barreled into the town, knocking spearmen out of its way.

  “Go!” the captain shouted.

  The ravagers charged the gates. Snarls rippled through them, and Roderick found himself growling too, his sword in hand. They rode into the keep and found themselves surrounded by as many as seventy men on the ground armed with spears and swords, while another twenty stood on the walls and shot at them with arrows.

  Arrayed against this force were a dozen mounted ravagers and one agitated mammoth. The Veyrian bowmen ran toward the gates to join the battle, but Roderick feared they would arrive too late. He cut down one man and attacked another, but his horse took a spear in the neck that drove it to its knees. A second spear slammed into his shoulder. The mammoth almost crushed him as it trumpeted past with a dozen spears and arrows prickling from its haunches. But its stampede confused the battlefield long enough to let Roderick slip away from the spear wielder.

  He rolled to one side and sprang to his feet even while wrenching the spear from his shoulder with his good hand. The pain was terrible, but it didn’t cripple him as it would have had he been alive. His sword caught the surprised owner of the spear across the neck and sent him sprawling with blood gushing from the wound.

  Roderick felt another threat at his back, and he turned instinctively to face it. He traded blows with a tall, powerfully built man with a scimitar, but the man was no match, and Roderick quickly overwhelmed him. Two more men attacked him, but he killed one and drove the other away with a savage cut across the thigh.

  “Enough!” a voice cried. The emir of Yoth stood on the walls with his hands outstretched. “Stop this slaughter. I beg you.”

  Pradmort shouted his own command, and the fighting stopped.

  Roderick stood panting while the blood lust faded. Ravagers rose to their feet, pulling spears and arrows from their bodies or those of their horses. Half a dozen Veyrian archers lay wounded or dead at the gates. The mammoth and the giants had fled and would need to be tracked down. But their
losses paled in comparison to Yoth’s dead.

  The battle had lasted no more than twenty minutes from the moment the giants first pounded their ram against the gates, but as many as sixty Yothians lay dead or mortally wounded inside the town walls. The captain himself had cut down six men who lay dead and dying around his horse.

  “You will surrender?” he called up to the emir.

  “Promise me you will spare my people’s lives, and I will surrender unconditionally.”

  “Of course I will spare them,” the captain said. “We will kill no more and leave your people in peace. But first I will have your pledge of fealty.” The captain sent a ravager up the wall to seize the man.

  The emir cast a nervous glance at the ravager clanking up the stone staircase. “Who are you?” he asked Pradmort.

  The captain said, “The dark lord’s emissaries. Nothing more.”

  “I’m also Toth’s servant,” the emir said hastily. “I just didn’t trust you. I wanted to be cautious, that is all.”

  “We shall see. Bring him here.”

  #

  They brought the emir past the bathhouse and into his chambers. Yoth was a simple, poor town, but the inside of the man’s apartments were decorated finer than any manor house in Arvada, and perhaps even as beautifully as the king of Arvada’s chambers, albeit on a smaller scale. Carved stone columns supported the roof, and finely polished wooden furniture filled every corner. The emir’s bed was a sumptuous pile of pillows and silks.

  Pradmort shoved him into a chair and said, “Now, great emir of Yoth. Where are your children?”

  “Children? I am unmarried.”

  The captain struck him across the face so hard Roderick thought it would break the man’s neck. He fell careening out of the chair to land face down in the pillows of his bed, his turban spilling loose and revealing a balding pate. When he raised himself again, blood trickled from his mouth. His eyes glittered with violence.

  “I know everything,” Pradmort said. His voice sounded reasonable. “Now, you promised to surrender unconditionally. I promised not to kill your people, and I will not, but only if you cooperate. If you do not cooperate, my men will slaughter every man, woman, and child within Yoth. I assume your children are hidden in your manor somewhere. We will burn it to the ground with them inside.”

  “How can I trust your word?” the emir asked, a whine creeping into his voice.

  “You have no choice. Disobey me, and they all die. Obey me, and you have only my word.”

  The man nodded slowly. A vein pulsed at his temple, and Roderick could smell his fear. “My sons are not here. They rode west two days ago with my wife to visit her brother. My daughter,” he began, and here he swallowed hard, “My daughter is three doors down the hall from my apartments, with her door locked and instructions not to let anyone in.”

  The captain gestured to two of his men, and they hurried from the room.

  “But please,” the emir cried in sudden panic. “She is only nine years old. She is a child and completely innocent. Please, if you will only—”

  “Quiet!” the captain snarled. He lifted his hand to strike again, and the emir flinched. Pradmort dropped his hand and turned to Roderick. The two ravagers pounded on the door down the hall to break it down. “Roderick, this is your final training. Are you ready?”

  Roderick’s heart pounded like a hammer in his chest. His head felt light, and he reached out a hand to steady himself against the wall. “What do I do?”

  Moments later, the two ravagers dragged the girl, crying and begging for her father, into the room. The emir started to his feet, but another ravager gripped him by the throat and shoved him back to the pillows. The girl still wore her night paijams and shivered in the early morning air.

  “Please, you said you wouldn’t hurt her,” the emir said.

  “I said I wouldn’t kill her,” Pradmort corrected. “Indeed, none of my men will kill anyone in Yoth. Roderick?”

  “Yes, captain?” His voice trembled. The girl stared at him with wide eyes, her lips trembling and her chest heaving.

  The small voice whispered, A girl, Roderick. The age of your own daughter.

  But Roderick scarcely heard it over the wind that blasted through his mind. Emotions, churning in a great, uncontrollable tempest. This was how his will was broken: violence and extreme emotion. Every time the emotions swept over him, he lost more of his ability to fight back.

  Pradmort looked at the girl’s father. “What do you think, Emir? Should my ravager cut out her eyes? Shove a dagger into her ears, then hack out her tongue? Would that be fitting punishment for a traitor, to see his daughter turned into a blind, deaf mute?”

  “I beg of you,” the emir whispered. “Please spare her.”

  Rage flared in the captain’s eyes, a rage mirrored through his men and Roderick as well. “I will not spare her! She is mine to do with as I see fit.”

  He grabbed the girl by the arm and threw her to the ground. Putting a boot in her back he shouted for one of his men to draw her arms in front of her. The girl was screaming, but Roderick could scarcely hear it.

  “No, Emir, because your lord and master is merciful. And if King Toth can forgive, so can I. But a demonstration must be made, to remind an emir to obey his khalif. Roderick, cut off her hand.”

  A great tremor rippled through Roderick’s muscles. He gripped his sword tightly, his emotions boiling over, alternating between disgust, rage, and fear.

  “No,” he whispered. It took every bit of his self-control. “No, I won’t do it.”

  Pradmort grabbed him by the throat and lifted him from the ground. He wrenched the sword away and let it drop. Roderick struggled and grabbed at the man’s hands, but couldn’t free himself. His neck felt as though it would break. The captain threw him against the wall. A bright light and pain flashed through his head, and he lay against the wall while the captain drew his own sword and weighed it in his hands. The girl kept wailing, held down now by one of the other ravagers. Two others held the emir in place.

  “You resist, Roderick,” Pradmort said, dragging him to his feet. “Perhaps your soul is only fit to join the pitiful army of wights who whine and grovel at Toth’s feet.” He put his free hand on Roderick’s skull and squeezed. A terrific pain exploded in his head. Spots blinked behind his eyes.

  And then, just when he thought that Pradmort meant to crush his body and send his wight fleeing in terror, the captain threw him to the floor once again. Roderick lay gasping.

  Pradmort lifted Roderick’s sword and held it out. “Finish your training. Do it now!”

  Roderick couldn’t control his limbs. They forced him to his feet and made him take the sword. He looked down at the girl, whose screams had become whimpers. Sweat stood out on Roderick’s forehead and ran into his eyes.

  “By the Brothers,” the emir said to Roderick. His eyes looked wildly around the room, searching for some escape that did not exist. He struggled against the undead men holding him. “You don’t have to do it. Please, I beg of you.”

  Roderick was powerless to keep his arm from lifting his sword. The girl squirmed in a vain effort to free herself. Roderick brought down the weapon. It hit with a crunch and the girl screamed like a wild animal. The emir wailed. He broke free momentarily before the ravager wrestled him to the bed again.

  Roderick’s sword stuck in the bone. He put his foot on her arm to wrench it free. Blood squirted from the wound. When he lifted the sword, he saw that the deed was left undone and knew the torture of his mind and body would not end until he had finished. He brought the sword down again. This time, the blade cut all the way through. Her hand twitched to one side, momentarily possessed of a life of its own. Roderick stared at it with horrified fascination.

  He dropped his sword and staggered back against the wall.

  Pradmort lifted a torch from the wall and jerked the girl to her feet by her other arm. He touched the stump of her wrist to the flame to cauterize the wound. The smell of cooking
flesh filled the air, covering the metallic tang of blood and the smell of loosened bowels. When he finished, he shoved her toward her father, then turned to the ravagers.

  “Search the town. Bring me forty children. We have more hands to cut.”

  “No,” the emir sobbed. “Have mercy.”

  The captain ignored him. “Take the emir. Let him watch, but do not harm him in any way. If anyone resists, kill them, but otherwise, we will leave Yoth be.” He fixed the emir with a hard look. “As loyal and honored subjects of our dark lord.”

  The ravagers dragged away the girl and her father, leaving Roderick and Pradmort alone.

  Roderick stared at the blood and the small, delicate hand lying on the stone floor. He looked back up at the captain. The dark film hung heavier over his eyes. But a second sight came to him, and he could see below the man’s flesh, at the bright chains that bound the man’s soul to his dead body.

  Pradmort studied Roderick’s face. “Well done, Captain Roderick. You are now chief among Toth’s ravagers.”

  “What now?” Roderick’s voice came out flat.

  “Now we ride to Veyre where you will learn your true purpose.” Pradmort bared his teeth in a feral grin. “You will hear it from the lips of King Toth himself.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Sofiana found her hiding place in one of the onion domes that overlooked the palace. After she’d cut open one guard’s belly and gone racing through the palace eluding the others, she had avoided people, stayed out of the open when possible, and searched out small entries and narrow passageways. She opened an aged, cracked door on the side of a stone wall that was barely wider than her shoulders and found herself at the base of a staircase. Light came through fist-sized openings in the outer wall. Dust covered the stairs, which she took as a good sign. She pulled the door shut and went up.

  The stone staircase curved to the left as she climbed, and she soon guessed she’d entered some sort of tower. It finally ended at a narrow balcony that overlooked Marrabat. It was late afternoon, and the red city stretched below her on the desert plain, its towers ringing bells to announce the closing of the gates ahead of sunset. The smoke of a hundred cookfires snaked into the air near a vast open bazaar. When the breeze shifted, it brought the smell of grilling meat, which made her empty stomach growl in protest. Narrow alleys snaked off the bazaar on every side, a jumble of roads without any seeming organization. In the distance, a mountain range of brown and gray broke the surface of the plain like the spiny backbone of an immense lizard.