Empress of Dorsa (The Chronicles of Dorsa)

53

~ JOSLYN ~

“We have to get back to the city,” Joslyn told Colonel Ollea as they surveyed what remained of two brigades following the mountain men’s devastating ambush. They’d won the battle, but only just, and out of the five thousand men they’d left Pellon with, Joslyn estimated only about three thousand remained. If that.

Colonel Ollea nodded. “It will be slow going,” she said. “We’ll have to use some of the horses to drag stretchers.”

As they watched, soldiers piled bodies on the supply wagons that had come with them.

“Tell them to leave the dead,” Joslyn said curtly, drawing a surprised double-take from the colonel. “And leave the injured who can’t travel. Give them enough supplies to last them for two days.”

“Leave them?” asked the colonel. “Why?”

“Because,” Joslyn said, already swinging up onto her mare, “what just happened to us happened to General Alric in the south. And if a siege on Pellon hasn’t already begun, it will soon.”

“How do you know?” asked Colonel Ollea, surprise and confusion lining her face.

“I just do.” Joslyn had no better explanation so she didn’t bother saying more.

She kicked the horse’s sides, walking the beast past the corpses of mountain men and Imperial soldiers in search of any officers she could still find to spread the word.

Inwardly, she cursed herself. She should have known. The deathless king had been haunting her dreams again, ever since they’d moved the army into Pellon. He alternated between taunting her and trying to convince her to change sides and join him, forcing her to remember what it felt like when she’d used the power of the Shadowlands to do things she’d never believed possible, from healing Tasia from a mortal wound to using the q’isson like a force field or a weapon.

She hadn’t told Tasia about the dreams. There was no point in worrying her, and Joslyn wasn’t eager to admit aloud that the deathless king had grown strong enough to invade her dreams nearly every night anyway. Evrart had said the undatai wouldn’t have the strength to infect any new human hosts or command legions of shadow-infected like it had before, but clearly the one human host it still infected, the deathless king, was rapidly regaining power. How much longer did they have before the undatai was at full strength again?

Looking over what remained of the two brigades, Joslyn realized she should have taken the king’s taunting more seriously. The Cult of Culo had betrayed them, used the shadow arts to hide mountain men right out in the open, to fill open fields with thousands of tribesmen, so that Joslyn didn’t know her troops were completely encircled until the attack began and the illusion finally broke.

How long had the Cult of Culo been working with the mountain men – months? Years?

It wasn’t all of the Brothers, that much she knew for sure. Some of them had died during the ambush right alongside the soldiers, and the Brother-healers who had survived were even now rushing about the battlefield trying to help the men and women who could still be saved. But she’d also seen Brothers she recognized fighting alongside the mountain men, Brothers who’d come over with them on the ships from Port Lorsin but who had then died in previous battles. Apparently they were not so dead after all.

Joslyn got all who could still fight turned back towards Pellon, and they covered the distance between the site of their ambush and the city as rapidly as they could. Cavalry led the way, ranging ahead of the foot soldiers, and Joslyn rode at the tip of the spear. When smoke appeared on the horizon, her heart leapt into her throat.

Tasia,was all Joslyn thought, and leaned low onto the mare’s neck, kicking the horse from a canter into a gallop.

The closer they got to the river, the more dire the situation appeared. Joslyn thought mountain men might be inside the villages spread out at the foot of Pellon’s walls, fighting to enter the city proper. But the villages were empty, and entire sections of the city wall were missing, like a mouth whose teeth had been knocked out.

How?

Joslyn wracked her mind for an explanation, searching her memories for some particularly powerful shadow art capable of punching holes in stone walls. But then they were crossing the bridge over the river, slowing their pace just enough to prevent the horses from slipping on its icy surface, and as they crossed, Joslyn saw the disabled trebuchet outside the wall.

Of course. Shadow arts hadn’t broken the city’s walls, the House of Wisdom’s engineers had.

Joslyn cursed softly under her breath. As she neared the city’s main gate, she reined her mare to a stop, signaling for the column behind her to do the same. A cavalry officer pulled up alongside her as she glanced back.

Out of the battalion of cavalry she had when she left Pellon, she now had perhaps three hundred mounted men. They were a mixture of Terintan desert riders, who rode nearly armorless and threw javelins or shot short bows with deadly accuracy from horseback in battle, along with heavily armored Imperial knights equipped with lances and longswords.

Neither type of horseman would be particularly effective in the narrow, burning city streets of Pellon. But at least mounted they would reach their destination faster.

“They’ll take whatever siege machines they have left uphill, towards the castle,” Joslyn said to the officer. She paused, pushing the range of her hearing to its outer limit. At first, all she could hear were the groans of dying men, but then, distantly, the sound of wheels clicking against cobblestone. “They’re still on the move, but they’ll get there soon. We concentrate our firepower on those,” she told the officer, who nodded his understanding. “The only streets broad enough for trebuchets are Emperor, Merchant, and Hallon. So we split into musters and send groups up each.” Joslyn gestured at the city’s main gates as she spoke. Disturbingly, the gates stood wide open and had no signs of damage, as though the mountain men had simply been invited inside. “Once we enter, brown and black musters head straight up Emperor’s Avenue with me; green muster takes the right flank along Merchant Way and red muster on the left up Hallon Street. Orange muster guards our rear and waits for the foot soldiers.”

The officer looked uncomfortable. “Commander, only one squad remains from green muster. Red muster has two or three squads left.”

“Orange muster?”

The officer pursed his lips, thinking a moment. “They were guarding our flanks when we were attacked, so I’d guess they have seven or eight squads left.”

“Alright,” said Joslyn. “What’s left of green muster stays behind and guards the rear. Orange muster takes the right flank, but send two of their squads with red muster up the left. You go with orange muster.”

“Aye, Commander.”

“Tell them not to let themselves get caught in a bottleneck. If it feels like an ambush, it probably will be.”

Joslyn sent for the captain of the green muster. He was an arrogant Western lordling, but he was a good fighter and competent commander. The arrogance was gone when he finally reached her, and his eyes had the hollow look of an officer who’d just watched far too many of his men die. Joslyn knew the look well. She repeated to the lordling captain the same instructions she’d just given to the cavalry battalion’s commandant, then added orders for him to pass on to Colonel Ollea when she arrived with the remaining foot soldiers. Once the captain repeated the orders back to her with no errors, Joslyn nodded her approval, wheeled the mare around, and began the charge up Emperor’s Avenue.

She could only pray she would reach Tasia in time.

Brown and black musters didn’t make it very far up the avenue before they were forced to slow their horses to a walk. Fires still burned the already damaged buildings to their left and right, and so much rubble lay in the street that pushing the horses to go any faster would have been dangerous for both beasts and men. Not long after they slowed their horses, they came across the first of the corpses, mixed in amongst the rubble. Most were Imperial soldiers. Strewn in amongst them were mountain men and the occasional Brother.

Two blocks later, they were forced to dismount altogether and leave their horses behind. The rubble, corpses, and hastily made makeshift barricades clogging Emperor’s Avenue had grown so thick that the mounts would slow their advance down rather than speed them up.

Once on foot, Joslyn stayed in the point position. She kept to a crouch, running from one pile of rubble to the next to keep herself and the soldiers behind her as covered as possible. If they could come upon the mountain men from behind, they might just destroy the remaining trebuchets before they did too much damage to the castle.

Emperor’s Avenue narrowed from two wagon widths to one as the street became the dry moat’s bridge. And there, right in the middle of the bridge, was the trebuchet. Nearly the moment it came into sight, it launched a burning missile into the conical top of one of the gatehouse towers. An unfortunate archer positioned at the top of the tower was knocked over the edge of the battlement by flying timber and plunged, screaming, to his death. Valiantly, other archers along the outer keep’s battlements continued firing volley after volley of arrows, even as groups of mountain men carrying long siege ladders charged down the slope of the dry moat. Despite the best efforts of the archers, one of the ladders reached the top of the wall, and tribesmen began pouring onto the battlement.

Faintly, Joslyn heard the double blast of a bugle inside the castle: tuh-boo, tuh-boo! The call to retreat to the safety of the inner keep.

Would the trebuchets have the range to reach the inner keep, where Tasia was? Joslyn didn’t want to find out.

Glancing behind her, she relayed her plan to brown muster’s captain with a series of hand signals. He nodded and fell back a few paces, repeating the hand signals to the cavalrymen behind him.

A sound to the left caught Joslyn’s attention. Red muster had begun their attack on the trebuchet perched at the end of Hallon street. Ahead of them, the mountain men on the bridge also glanced left.

The unintended distraction was perfect timing.

“Now!” Joslyn shouted. “Don’t let them reload the trebuchet!”

With that, her troops fell upon the mountain men remaining on the stone bridge with a pure, bloodthirsty fury. There was no time for the grace or finesse of the dance of the Seven Cities here; no, this was the ugly and brutish reality of war, the messiness of killing without mercy. Joslyn swung the great curved sword that had once been Ku-sai’s like it was a scythe cutting through wheat, cutting down the unprepared mountain men before they even had time to draw their weapons. They took the trebuchet in a matter of seconds.

“Burn it!” Joslyn yelled in Terintan to two desert riders just behind her. She hardly needed to say anything. The men had already found the pitch-filled logs that the tribesmen had been setting aflame and flinging at the castle. With a sudden whoosh, one of the logs burst into flames, then another, forcing an Imperial knight who’d been sawing at the trebuchet’s canvas sling with his sword to jump back with a loud curse. Another whoosh, and a second log was on fire.

This trebuchet would never throw another missile.

“Advance!” Joslyn yelled, pointing her sword in the direction of the castle’s shattered gates and burning towers. Brown and black musters followed her across the bridge, hacking their way through mountain men from behind. At last they forced their way inside the narrow gate passage and into the main courtyard of the outer keep beyond.

Within the outer keep, more roofs burned. An extraordinary number of bodies covered the courtyard – mountain men with arrows through their necks and chests, Imperial soldiers who’d met their fate at the wrong end of a spear or axe. The melted slush of snow and ice mingled with blood, and the cobblestones were slick and red.

A few hundred yards ahead of them, mountain men with a battering ram pounded upon the inner keep’s gate, while two more groups worked to lift siege ladders into place. Arrows from the inner keep’s walls rained down on the tribesmen with the ladders, but the group with the battering ram were protected from arrows by a triangular wooden roof above the ram. The ram was a hut on wheels, with mountain men crowded beneath the protection of the roof, and the ram itself suspended from the roof by a series of ropes. More House of Wisdom engineering turned against the Empire, Joslyn realized grimly.

She didn’t hesitate, and neither did her troops. They left the tribesmen with ladders to the archers above and instead fell upon the mountain men with the battering ram with the ferocity of desert hyenas falling upon a herd of unsuspecting apa-apa. Joslyn became a sandstorm of blades, Ku-sai’s blade in one hand and an Imperial short sword in the other. With brutal efficiency, she slew every tribesman who came within range of her weapons, utterly unfazed by their blue warpaint, the bones they wore braided into their hair and beards, or the battle axes they wielded, which were easily twice the size of any equivalent weapon in the Imperial Army. None of her opponents so much as skimmed their weapons across her black armor.

Cheers rose from the walls above as the mountain men fell the Imperial knights’ longswords and desert riders’ javelins. Within the span of two or three minutes, the tribesmen beneath the battering ram’s roof had fallen, and so had the ram itself. Joslyn’s soldiers had tipped the entire wheeled structure over, and once it crashed against the cobblestones, knights began to saw at the ropes so that it could not be used again.

The mountain men with the siege ladders gave up on trying to scale the walls and instead turned on the cavalrymen. The tide of battle turned once more, with the sheer numbers of tribesmen threatening to overwhelm Joslyn’s smaller force. Even as she remained untouched, knights and riders fell around her. Just as she began to fear she’d led brown and black musters into a slaughter, a bugle sounded, echoing strangely from inside the outer keep’s gatehouse. To her relief, orange and red musters charged into the castle, flanking the tribesmen.

Ten minutes later, it was over. The inner keep was secure, the outer keep had been retaken, and the tribesmen who hadn’t managed to escape in their retreat all lay dead at Joslyn’s feet. Another ten minutes after that, Colonel Ollea arrived with the foot soldiers who’d survived the ambush.

Joslyn left the task of extinguishing the outer keep’s fires and counting the dead in the hands of Ollea and the Western lordling who commanded green muster.

It was time to find Tasia.