Chapter-4-3

⁠—⁠—⁠— III ⁠—⁠—⁠—

“Chase them! Chase them!”

“Beat them into the sand!”

“Leave none alive!”

“Mongaul! Mongaul!”

The wildlings ran so fast that they became furry streaks across the sand, fleeing from the Mongauli army, racing away from the surging multicolored mass of the Gohran cavalry like prey taking flight before a swarm of yidoh. The horses spat foam through bared teeth, their manes and tails flying in the wind. The knights, eager to prove themselves in battle, set in with their whips to urge their steeds to even greater speed, quickly pulling ahead of the charging footmen.

The horses’ hooves dug into the sand, kicking up a spray of dust hard on the heels of the fleeing Sem. Seeing their foes in full retreat, both the knights and their mounts were consumed with the wild fervor of the victorious. Their bloodshot eyes flickered with eagerness and they shouted and howled sounds that were not words. One thought drove the ten thousand-strong Mongauli army after their enemies: that today, here on the desert sands, all accounts would be settled. Their burning bloodlust drove away all fatigue and all fear of the cursed desert and the monsters that lay hidden beneath its surface.

“Aii! Aiiie!”

“Alphetto!”

The Sem ran as fast as their legs would carry them, their haphazard ranks dissolving even further in their mad rush to escape the unexpected Mongauli onslaught. Whether or not they had noticed the lift in the Mongauli’s morale after their attack began, it would have been too late then for them to change their strategy, and now they could do nothing but run for their lives. But their feet were swift—they were said to be among the quickest runners of all the desert’s creatures—and they soon put distance between themselves and the heavily armored pursuers, whose horses’ hooves sank deep into the sand.

Seeing their quarry pull away, the Mongauli became desperate.

“Orders! Orders!”

Their white shoulder tassels flowing, Amnelis’ messengers sped until their mounts were nearly spent, catching up to the hindmost riders of the blue knights at the front of the formation . “From the General of the Right to Captain Marus, orders! Orders! Marus Corps is to pursue the Sem!”

“Surely she did not expect us to do otherwise?” Garanth shouted, his voice hoarse with desert grit. “Blue knights, onward! To victory and glory!”

Like a gleaming blue wave the knights of Marus Corps rose high in their saddles, their courage a visible swell, their whips and swords held firmly in their hands. Count Marus glanced quickly backwards. Trailing off behind his formation were the two thousand black knights of Tangard; they were already a considerable distance behind his own riders. And yet the Sem were pulling away from Marus’ men.

Charging over the crest of a dune, the pursuers were surprised to see that not far ahead, the flatness of Nospherus was marred by a series of low rocky hills. The dark crags thrust up through the sand so abruptly that they seemed like an after-thought added out of mischief by some creator-god. Here and there between the dunes over which they now rode and the hills that lay ahead, the knights could see rocks half-buried in the desert, some round like boulders and others flat and dark like sheets of frozen sand.

The gentle yet deceivingly high roll of the dunes had hidden the rocks and the jagged hills until now. It was clear that the hills were the destination for which the Sem were making.

Marus drew back on his reins and shouted out loudly above the drumming hooves.“Men! They intend to run for those crags. We must not allow them to reach them, or they will be able to ambush us at will. Don’t let the Sem get into the hills!”

The knights under Marus’ command gave a shout and once more lay on with their whips and dug in with their spurs, urging on their exhausted mounts. They rode so hard they nearly flew out of their saddles, leaning so far forward that they were close to falling over the necks of their horses. They gripped their swords so tightly with their mail gauntlets that it seemed their fingers would cut through the very leather of the hilts.

Neither Marus nor his followers paused to wonder why they had not seen the leopard-headed Guin today—he who had ridden with the Sem on every raid until now. They had little time to consider anything in the midst of their pursuit, as they moved with the force of a tidal wave across the desert; and, unlike the unfortunate Astrias, none of Marus Corps had ever crossed swords with Guin personally, nor had they exchanged words with the warrior or felt his incredible presence make their skin crawl and the hairs at the backs of their necks stand on end; and so, they lacked the young captain’s obsession with their mightiest enemy. Moreover, had they taken note of Guin’s absence, it would soon have slipped from their minds again, its oddness disregarded, so preoccupied were they with the fury of the chase.

The obvious danger posed by the leopard-man’s absence was that he might be leading another strike force around to attack the Gohrans from the rear. But that could be left to the rearguard Astrias, or to Irrim should the young Lion of Gohra fail. The main concern of the blue knights now was to keep the Sem from reaching the hills that lay ahead. With hardly a glance to either side, they charged on after their foes.

The front of the Sem line disappeared around another, lower dune, heading straight for the rocky hills that seemed somehow much closer now. The hills were the kind of rocky wasteland crags that could only be found in Nospherus, gray and bare, without a single tree or blade of grass to color their slopes. Although they were not tall, they were divided into many layered strata, with numerous canyons running into their depths. If the Sem took refuge there, it would surely take the Mongauli a long time to root them out.

In hot pursuit, the blue knights of Count Marus rounded the dune not far behind the wildlings. Tangard Corps, well behind, chose a different route, trying to save time by racing up and over the dune face. The black knights pounded over the ridge of sand, giving a cheer when they saw that they had gained on their quarry. But as they galloped down into the hollow on the far side, the ground shook—and split beneath them!

“Aaah!”

Men screamed as their horses’ hooves trod air.

“Stop! It’s a trap! A pit!”

Within moments the sandy hollow was echoing with the cries of knights and horses as they struggled wildly in the bottom of an enormous pit that had opened up suddenly underneath the foremost riders.

Unnoticed in the shadow of the dunes, two small groups of Sem now took cover, discarding the severed ends of bristly vine ropes that they had carried from the oasis. The ropes had served their purpose, for they had allowed the Sem to rig a concealing layer of flat stones over the recently abandoned pit of a mouth-of-the-desert. When cut, the ropes had in an instant released the stones and the sand that hid them, sending the knights and their mounts crashing down into the pit.

Trying to stay upright atop their flailing horses, the leading black knights dropped down with them into the gaping hole. Even at the edges of the pit, the sand was far too soft to give the charging horses any traction, and many of those who stopped before they fell in ended up sliding down nonetheless.

“Halt! All halt!”

The warnings and shouts shot back toward the oncoming remainder of Tangard’s men, punctuated by the panicked whinnying of the horses, the yells of the latest riders to tumble into the trap, and the death-cries of the first to fall, now being crushed by those who had followed them.

“Help!”

“The pain! I can’t move!”

“Agh! My leg… My leg!”

The pit trap filled quickly with an impossibly tangled mass of desperate men and horses weighed down by their splendid but brutally heavy armor. As they struggled, the white sand flowed in around them with a dreadful rush of sound. In moments, those lowest down were completely buried, their screams and cries for help abruptly silenced.

“Halt! All halt, it’s a trap! A Sem trap!”

Finally, Irrim’s shouting got through to his men, and the remainder of the black halted their charge.

Irrim’s messengers relayed the orders back down the line. Confusion reigned among the rearmost soldiers, who did not realize what had happened. They milled about angrily, unwilling to miss their chance to carry out the long awaited final slaughter of the Sem.

“What? Why stop? We’ve gotten no such orders!”

“Marus Corps has already gone ahead! What’s the matter? Why do we have to stop?”

“Were we not commanded to pursue them to the end?”

“What’s going on? What happened up at the front? More yidoh?”

“What? What is it? I can’t see anything!”

“Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Nearer the pit, in the bustling hornet’s nest of men and horses, Irrim shouted for his friend and fellow captain from atop his horse. “Tangard! Tangard! Are you okay?” He grabbed one of the men who had stopped just in time to avoid being dragged in with the rest. “Has Tangard fallen into the pit?”

The man shook his head uncertainly. “I do not know, sir…”

“Captain! Captain!”

The black knights from Talos Keep circled around the pit, desperately trying to save the screaming wounded and their horses from the sandy morass. It was a race against time. Like a fire spreading through dry brush, the Doal-sent sand flowed ceaselessly in from all sides, threatening to bury every horse and man alive and leave the hollow as flat and featureless as it had seemed moments before. Numerous troops were already lost beneath the smothering cascade.

“Captain Tangard!”

“Captain!”

The men around the pit called out desperately for their leader. Then a dying horse rolled away from the center of the pit, and they saw him. Tangard had been right in the middle of the formation and had fallen toward the top of the deep pile. But when the knights spotted their captain, half buried in the tangled bodies, his bearded face was pale and his eyes were shut. He did not seem to be trying to push his way out, nor did he reach for the outstretched hands of his men.

“Lord Captain! Lord Captain! Here, my hand!”

“Tangard! Are you wounded? Tangard!”

Irrim, his closest friend, with whom he had led the black at Talos Keep for many years, leapt down from his horse, pushing through the men who stood at the edge of the pit. Quickly he and several others grabbed the unconscious Tangard’s hands and pulled him from the mass of bodies, freeing him from the weight of a horse that had fallen against him. But when they lifted him up towards the edge of the pit…

“Tangard!” Irrim shouted.

Several of the men around him exclaimed in horror. When the fallen horse had crashed into the captain, one of its iron stirrups had pushed through a chink in his black armor, its sharp tip cutting deep into his abdomen. Pulling him away from the horse had tugged the stirrup loose, but at the same time it had torn open a bloody wound in his side. His guts were spilling out and steaming in the dry air.

“By Janos! What ill fortune is this?” Irrim wailed, pale as Tangard himself. Some of the men around him choked back vomit.

Tangard moaned weakly, and Irrim turned to shout to the riders atop the dune. “He’s still breathing. Medicine! Bring bandages!”

Several of the other knights yelled frantically for the medical squad. Irrim hugged his friend to his breast and pressed his hand to the wound, trying to stop the flow of blood, staring in shock at the red tide gushing out between his fingers and onto his legs.

Then in an instant the tragedy was laid aside as a new cry went up from the men who were further from the pit.

“Ambush!”

“The Sem!”

A hail of black Sem poison arrows descended suddenly upon the knights from both sides, sending some for cover and knocking others down into the pit to die with their comrades.

“Fiends!” Irrim grit his teeth and roared. “Foul Sem! You will rue the day you stood against the Mongauli black!”

“Attack! Attack!”

In these close quarters, with no room to charge, the knights’ horses were of little use; nor of any help were the crossbowmen who had just come hurrying up from behind. Pinned down by the rain of arrows, the knights used their horses as shields, or lowered their faceplates and lashed out blindly at the throng of oncoming Sem.

Arriving with her guard at the top of the dune, Amnelis gazed down on the hellhole below, her ears assailed by screams and sobbing moans. Not wishing to leave the wounded as they were, the lady general sent out orders for a squad of white knights to aid in the rescue of the fallen, but the area around the pit, where the casualties were worst, had already become a milling chaos of Sem and black knights, with horses galloping wildly and footsoldiers darting back and forth. Going in there meant meeting the poison arrows and stone axes of the Sem head-on.

Amnelis went pale with rage, gripping her baton with hands that trembled in anger. In the hollow below, the shifting white sand continued to sift down, burying the living and the dead alike, while into its gaping maw more bodies fell one after the other.

Meanwhile, unaware of the fearsome death they had narrowly avoided, Marus Corps galloped onward. Having gone wide around the dune and the trap it hid, they had left Tangard Corps far behind as they pursued the fleeing Sem. Marus, with his lieutenant Garanth directly to his rear, galloped midway along the advancing columns of horsemen.

Suddenly the blue knights heard a commotion far behind them and the whooshing sound of sand. This was followed an instant later by a cacophony of screams.

“The Sem!”

“An ambush!”

“Lord Captain!” Garanth urged his horse alongside that of Marus. “Lord Captain!”

“I heard.” The count turned in his saddle and looked back.

The smooth white face of the nearest dune blocked their view, but the sounds of clanging metal and the high-pitched war cries that they could hear now coming from the other side were unmistakably those of battle. These were sounds with which they were by now all too familiar.

“There must have been a unit waiting in ambush,” Marus said. He kept his horse galloping at a steady pace. “Those Sem are crafty, but I smell the leopard-man’s hand in this. He is too clever, that one.”

“Well,” said Garanth, sounding worried. “What will we do, Lord Captain?”

“What will we do?” Marus shot him a disparaging look. “There are eight thousand men in our main force, and the Sem, without those—” Marus jutted his jaw forward, indicating the Sem that still ran ahead of them towards the mountains, “they surely don’t have ten thousand warriors to spare for an ambush. There is no cause for concern.”

“Then we continue our pursuit?”

“Of course.” Marus glared after the retreating Sem. “Leave the ambushers to the rest of our men. They’ve got Tangard, Irrim, and young Astrias back there. Those Sem won’t even slow them down. We will do as we have been ordered and run these Sem into the sand!”

Garanth grinned.

“Yes,” Marus continued, “we’ve come too far to let them get away into the hills where they can hide and ambush to their heart’s desire. I’m sure they wouldn’t lead us straight to their villages, but if we keep chasing, and keep chasing, they’ll eventually run out of places to hide. Then we will crush them. I’m sure the rest of our army will have joined us by then.”

“Understood!” Garanth’s sunburnt face smiled. Then he dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and pulled ahead, shouting as he rode up the line, “Keep chasing! Do not fall behind! We’ll take their nest this time!”

Marus glanced back once more, looking for some sign of the rest of the army, but it seemed that the fight was still going on, as none of Tangard’s men had yet cleared the dune.

The hills ahead were nearer now, and seemed larger. The galloping knights could see a path leading into a narrow valley that curved around the skirts of the nearest crags and then plunged between them. The foremost of the retreating Sem had just reached the entrance to the valley.

“Don’t let them escape!” Garanth raised his voice over the pounding of the horses’ hooves. “Don’t let them into the mountains! We’re on rocky ground, watch where you ride!”

The Mongauli knights whooped in response. They were elated. The ground had gotten harder and their horses no longer sank into the sand. At last, they were picking up speed. They raised their whips, trying to urge the last bit of strength out of their frothing, exhausted mounts.

“Chase them! Chase them!”

“Run them down!”

“For Mongaul!”

The lead knights quickly closed the distance between them and the Sem stragglers.

“Hraah!”

From atop his horse, one of the knights swung down his sword in a great arc that terminated at the bobbing head of a fleeing Sem. The wildling’s skull split down the middle, sending up a fountain of blood.

Talented as the Sem were at running across the desert, on hard ground their speed could not compare to that of the horses. On the rocky slope below the hills, the blue knights gained rapidly on their quarry. Within moments they were among the fleeing Sem, and they slashed out to right and left with their swords, cutting down wildlings with each stroke.

Some of the Sem stopped and fought back, swinging their axes wildly, or leaping past the knights’ swords to grab onto their legs, trying to pull the Mongauli off their horses. But this scattered resistance did little to slow the swift cavalry. One after another the struggling wildlings were flung into the air by the charging horses, and most of those who survived the impact were cut in two before they could pick up their weapons and defend themselves.

A few of the Sem were able to leap high enough to evade the oncoming chargers, but the knights beat them down with blade, hilt and pommel, quickly dislodging the few who managed to gain a hold on the horses’ backs. Flailing to regain their balance, the repulsed Sem tumbled down the horses’ sides, and were cruelly slashed by the knights’ spurs as they went. The chargers galloped on, trailing crimson lines across the white rocks behind them. The bodies of the wildlings fell to the ground and were trampled by succeeding knights.

“Aiiii!”

“Alphetto!”

The screams of the wildlings were filled with fear. The entrance to the dry valley had become the scene of a massacre.

The Sem have no strong leader, other than that leopard-man. They’re primitives, a race of monkeys. Before they can even think to regroup and strike back they have already fled onward in fear.

Marus paid little attention to the Sem who were running on both sides of him. He kept his gaze firmly forward, and kept his horse moving. Garanth had left his side to race further ahead, and held his sword raised, brandishing it at the fleeing Sem. This was no contest of strength between proud wildling warriors and the sturdy knights of Mongaul. This was a monkey hunt, a scouring of screeching animals by men that were now killing partly for the fun of it.

Unease had been growing for a long time in the old count’s heart, and now it spread and wrapped around him like angel hair blowing softly in the wind. But when he tried to divine its source, the unease melted just like angel hair, leaving no trace. Behind his faceplate, Marus furrowed his white brows, and sighed. How dark my mind has become! But what use is this worry, this baseless gloom? He shook his head and spurred on his horse.

“Don’t become preoccupied with hunting down your quarry!” he shouted to his knights. “Leave the difficult ones be, we are here to find their villages and strike at their very root! We will wipe the Sem from Nospherus soon. This need not be the final battle. Save your strength!” Despite his age his voice betrayed no frailty as he rode through the midst of the harrowing scene.

The white valley was stained red with blood. Furry limbs and severed heads were scattered across the stony ground, intermixed with dismembered torsos and looping strings of guts. Moans, screams, and death rattles mixed together, and the cheers of the victorious Mongauli knights rose above all. More and more small furred bodies were pummeled under the horses’ hooves, or cut in two by the Mongauli swords; wildling heads, their eyes white and staring and their teeth locked in fierce final grimaces, flew high in the air, trailing blood under them and landing with wet thumps on the valley floor.

The sight did little to stir the old, battle-weary count. Taking care that his horse did not slide on the blood, Marus rode through the hell, his tassel flowing behind his blue cloak and helm.

“Lord Captain! Lord Captain!”

A knight, gasping for breath, rode toward him from up ahead.

“What is it?”

“Lord Captain, you are here!” said the knight, short of breath. “We’ve won! We’ve won! The Sem village—”

“What?” Marus stood up straight in his saddle. “What of the Sem village?”

“I’ve found it! It lies just ahead!” The knight raised his hand and pointed back in the direction from which he had come. His mailed hand was trembling with excitement.

“What?! Are you sure?” Marus exclaimed.

“Yes, I am certain. They were trying to run into their village. It’s at the bottom of this valley.”

Marus half-turned as if to shout back to the rest of his force, then paused and looked at the knight again. “Who are you? Raise your faceplate. If what you say is true, you’re in for a major distinction.”

“It is true, by the green fields of Mos, I swear it!”

The knight’s voice was full of fervor. He raised his hand and lifted his faceplate. Marus smiled a broad smile.

“Eru of Argon!”

“M’lord!”

The youth’s eyes shone like fiery opals. His face was taut and his breathing hard as he smiled victoriously at the count.

“You have done well!” Marus was on the verge of appointing him head of his guard right then and there. After a moment’s consideration, he decided that this was better done later; there was no time to lose now. “Down that valley, you say?”

“Yes, m’lord.”

“Excellent. Garanth! Garanth!”

A few moments later Garanth was riding rapidly among the troops, giving hurried orders. The blue knights promptly ceased their slaying of the few Sem in the valley who remained to oppose them. “We ride on the Sem village! Leave no one alive! Spare no woman or child!”

The other officers took up the call. “Take no captives! Kill them all!”

“For Mongaul! Mongaul!”

The shouts of the knights echoed through the valley, followed by the sound of their horses’ hooves, pounding like an earthquake.

“Mongaul! Mongaul!”

Marus swung back his cloak.

“Eru! Lead us!”

“As you command.”

“To the Sem village!”

Like a blue tidal wave of death, the two thousand knights galloped through the hills, shaking the ground of Nospherus.