The Fate of the Fallen (The Song of the Tears Book 1) (45 page)

There had been no word of his father. No spies had been taken
in the camp nor been seen watching it, and Monkshart’s growing network of
informers had heard nothing of any army on the march. The garrison at Guffeons,
a force large enough to annihilate the Defiance, remained in its barracks. No
flappeter had flown over the camp in all this time. Why not? The whole world
must know he was here by now, so why was Jal-Nish holding back?

His crack troops would carve through the Defiance like a
knife through cheese, and Nish pointed this out to Monkshart daily, but the
zealot brushed aside his criticisms. Monkshart wasn’t concerned about
casualties; indeed, he seemed to welcome them for their use in his increasingly
well-oiled propaganda machine.

Nish wanted to take charge of his forces and train them
properly, but Monkshart had other work for the Deliverer and Nish couldn’t sway
him. He’d lost that dominance he’d had after coming up from the Pit of
Possibilities, couldn’t get it back, and felt the failure keenly. If he
couldn’t even assert control over the zealot, how could he hope to succeed when
the Deliverer faced a real challenge?

The one issue on which Monkshart had given way was in the
selection of the camp each evening. Nish chose each site to be as defendable as
possible, though successful defence required discipline above all else, and he
had an untrained rabble.

Every morning at five, when it was still dark and pleasantly
cool, Monkshart took Nish to a guarded tent pitched well apart from the others
and tutored him in oratory. First off, Nish had to improvise an address on a
minute’s notice. As soon as he finished, Monkshart tore it to shreds then
demanded another, on a different topic, which he dealt with just as cruelly,
followed by a third and a fourth. An hour of such toil left Nish wrung out, but
Monkshart had barely begun.

He handed Nish a scroll, closely written on both sides.
‘What’s this?’ Nish said sourly, ‘One of yours?’

‘It’s Rulke’s famous speech to the assembled Aachim after he
single-handedly took their world from them. Read it once, remember it then
deliver it as he would have done. It’ll be a nice contrast to the rambling
orations you’ve been tormenting me with.’

Nish did his best with Rulke’s hauntingly lyrical words, but
muddled the beginning, left out the middle and trailed off at the end without
ever making Rulke’s most important point. He didn’t need to see Monkshart’s
barely controlled rage to know that he’d been embarrassingly bad.

Next he was given one great speech from the Histories after
another, each of which he had to remember and deliver, perfectly, after a
single reading. The zealot savaged each of these performances as well, and so
the morning went on until Nish was hoarse and his mind numb. Monkshart never
pronounced himself satisfied; the highest praise Nish gained, and that was
seldom, was that his oratory had been almost adequate … for a beginner.

After a short break in mid-morning, Nish wrote the oration
he would give to the assembled Defiance that afternoon, though it generally
took a dozen drafts before Monkshart expressed a modicum of satisfaction. Nish
found this labour even more trying, being unaccustomed to writing his thoughts
down.

In the early afternoon he held court in a sweltering tent,
meeting delegations and pleaders for favours, sorting out disputes and, where required,
dispensing justice. He hated this most of all. He felt like a pretender to his
father’s throne, and nothing could have been more calculated to bring the
God-Emperor’s wrath down on the Defiance. Why was he holding back?

Once the day began to cool, Nish addressed the multitudes
after Monkshart had whipped them into a fervour with his brilliant oratory.
Nish didn’t try to compete – if he’d practised every day for a decade he
would not have had half of Monkshart’s skill. He kept his words simple and his
message direct – he’d given his promise and he was here to deliver it.
Together they would cast down the God-Emperor and create a better world.

It seemed enough, and afterwards he walked among the
Defiance, despite Monkshart’s objections that it was now better to remain
aloof. Monkshart wanted to control him, but equally wanted to control who met
him. As Nish moved through the camp he could see Phrune and his marshals
forming barriers between him and those undesirables Monkshart didn’t want him
to meet, and Nish didn’t have the strength to fight that battle as well.

Afterwards he returned to the tent with Monkshart and Phrune
to continue work on their strategies and tactics for the campaign.

Finally, generally after midnight, Nish went gratefully to his
guarded tent, where every night he had to eject a comely young woman from his
bed, and once a brace of them. He sent them away as politely as he could,
though they, or others, often reappeared in the night. He ordered the guards to
keep them out; they nodded, winked, slyly tapped the sides of their noses and
did nothing. Apparently Monkshart personally interviewed and selected each
young woman according to what he knew of Nish’s tastes.

Each time it was harder to send them away; he could feel his
resolve weakening daily, and damned Monkshart for manipulating him in yet
another way. Nish took a surly pride in not having succumbed. Yet.

Nish shot upright in his bed, heart pounding. The
ululating shrieks seemed to be plunging right at him, rising in pitch as they
came.

He had taken to sleeping in his clothes as an extra barrier
against the night intruders. He thrust his feet into his boots, laced them up
and ran outside. The camp was dimly lit by the night’s dying fires, which gave
enough light to show a flappeter hurtling down towards his tent. How had it
known where to find him? There must be a spy in the camp.

It rocked in the air, levelled out and raced towards him,
its pairs of legs extending like a black spider’s. Nish, slow to realise its
intentions, threw himself to the ground as the flappeter shot overhead. A foot
hook snagged in the back of his shirt, jerking him into the air and carrying
him along, swinging wildly.

Its rider was leaning over the side, grinning in triumph.
Taking Nish had been easier than he could have dreamed. The other pairs of legs
were reaching towards Nish and he had to get free now, before they took an
unbreakable grip. He thrashed his arms, kicked his legs, and felt the thin
fabric of his shirt tear.

It slipped along the hook but unfortunately snagged on a
seam, which held. Nish threw his arms up, wriggled violently, and the shirt,
which was large and loose, began to slip free. Another foot hook caught it.
Nish punched it out of the way. A third came at his face; he wove to one side,
gave a mighty thrash like a fish trying to escape from a hook, tore free and
fell onto a nearby tent, collapsing it onto the people inside. A woman’s voice
cried out in terror; another joined it, and another.

Rolling off the heaving canvas, Nish came to his feet. He
couldn’t see the flappeter that had attacked him but another was sweeping down
on the row of tents. Catching a set of tent ropes in its hooks, it tore the
pegs out of the ground, dropped the tent on the one next door and continued down
the line, ripping up more tents and dropping them on others, on the panicked
people milling in the dim light, and onto the camp fires. Nish saw people
carried high into the air and flung away like missiles before the flappeter,
its momentum spent, feather-rotored away.

The other beasts had done much the same. Fires sprang up all
over the camp. People, many naked from their bedrolls, were screaming and
running in all directions. Now arrows and crossbow bolts began to fall out of
the sky as the unseen riders fired down at them. In the densely packed throngs,
many missiles struck.

‘Spread out!’ Nish shouted. ‘Take what cover you can,’ but
in the din no one heard him.

Was the attack just meant to unsettle them, or was it cover
for something larger? There had been no news of an army on the march, though
even as far back as the war some battle mancers had been able to
cloak
a large force of soldiers. He wove
his way to the edge of the camp and looked over the steep side of the hill. He
couldn’t see anything, not even with the clearsight which was still holding
back on him since leaving the maze.

He moved down the slope, torn shirt flapping, until the
racket from the camp faded. The wet ground squelched beneath his feet. Nish
scanned the darkness. What was that? It sounded like a faint, rhythmic murmur.
He turned his head this way and that, trying to make it out above the distant
clam-our from the camp. He continued down; the murmur was fractionally clearer
here, and suddenly he knew what it was.

It was the massed tread of a marching army and they couldn’t
be far away. He scrambled up the slope to find the chaos unabated. Monkshart
was bellowing orders but for the first time in his life no one was taking any
notice. If someone didn’t take command the Defiance would die here today, and
he, Nish, was the only one who could do it. But first he had to have a battle
plan.

He ran down the long ramp of the hill. They had one single
advantage – he had chosen the camp site carefully, overriding Monkshart
who had wanted to stop by a stream in a location that was almost undefendable.

The camp lay at the top of a flat hill with a curve of
steep, rocky country at its back, and no army would choose to attack up those
difficult slopes, though a squad of climbers might. Forwards, the hill ramped
towards the plain in a narrow neck on either side of which were sharp slopes
with marshland at their bases.

The army would have to attack up the neck. He was a third of
the way along it now, crossing into a shallow dip. His boots sank to the ankles
in sodden earth and his plan crystallised. The army would be attacking uphill
on wet soil which would become muddy as they tramped through it, then through
this boggy dip. Above here the neck narrowed before flaring out at the top of
the hill.

He pulled his boots out of the sticky mud with an effort,
and backed up onto solid ground. The enemy’s formation, compressed at the
narrows, would not be able to attack
en
masse
, so if he could get his ragtag forces into position in time they
would have another small advantage.

The flappeters had only made one pass and Nish didn’t think
they would be risked in the coming battle. They were too scarce and valuable,
while men’s lives meant nothing to Jal-Nish. Nish judged that the army was
close to the bottom of the hill and could be here in ten minutes.

He wasn’t sure he could even restore order in that time; the
Defiance sounded close to panic and if he couldn’t gain control right away it
would be too late. Once they got wind of the army they would abandon their
weapons and flee. Could he do it? He had to try; and after all, he’d led his
men in equally hopeless battles during the war.

Nish ran back to the camp and snatched sword and shield from
a guard who lay groaning on the grass with an arrow in his belly.

‘To me!’ he roared, leaping onto one of the dinner trestles
and banging his sword against his shield. ‘Now is the hour of our greatest
need. Your Deliverer needs you. To me!’

Their sweating faces reflected the firelight as they turned
his way, just a few at first, then more and more as he continued to bang sword
on shield. It wasn’t light enough to read their faces, though he sensed that he
hadn’t got through to them. Another aerial attack could see them panic and
bolt; news of the enemy certainly would. They were at the point where the
actions of a few hotheads or cowards would decide the fate of all. He had to
get to them first.

‘Quiet!’ he roared, and this time they stopped talking. They
were used to listening to him in silence, thankfully. ‘Any man or woman who
speaks while I’m addressing you will be banished from the Defiance.’ He eyed
them, his glance sweeping over the crowd. ‘Are you with me?’

‘Yes,’ they said unconvincingly.

‘I said,
are you with
me
?’

‘Yes, Deliverer!’ the crowd roared.

He took a deep breath. ‘The enemy army is at the foot of the
hill.’ He pointed with his sword. ‘They think we’ll run like dogs, but they
don’t realise we’ve lured them into a trap!’

A shiver passed across the face of the crowd. He’d hit on
the right approach by accident, but he still had to convince them.

‘That’s right,
a trap
!
I chose this battlefield carefully. To beat us here, the enemy would need three
soldiers to our one and they don’t have the numbers. I, your Deliverer, will
captain you against them. Follow my lead and we’ll drive the God-Emperor’s army
into the swamps to drown. Once people hear of the Defiance’s great victory, the
whole world will rise up against the tyrant.

‘Follow your Deliverer! Defiance, this way!’

Nish leapt off the trestle and ran towards the neck, not
looking to see if they were following. He couldn’t afford to show any
uncertainty. After an agonising silence he heard the first feet behind him, and
then the rest of them. But five minutes had passed, and they had to reach the
narrow part of the neck well in advance of the enemy. It would take time to
order his raw troops into defensive formation. More time than he had.

The fires cast a faint illumination down the slope; enough,
as Nish reached the narrows, to show the dark mass of the army moving up the
base of the neck. He continued to the centre of the dip, feeling the saturated
ground sinking under his boots, then went backwards onto the slope above it,
which had shed the rain and remained solid underfoot. It was the best defensive
position he could hope to find.

‘Spearmen,’ he called, ‘come forwards; form a triple line
here.’ He swept his sword back and forth across the neck. ‘Swordsmen, form
ranks behind the spears. Whatever happens, don’t move until I give the order.’