The Godlost Land (36 page)

It was a mistake and they should have known it. As the soldiers panicked and split and ran in different directions, they became vulnerable. To add to their woes many of those at the front of the charge were already wading through the bog. Unable to run, slow to turn as their legs were trapped by the mud, they became easy prey. The griffins tore them apart quickly.

Of those who had been in the rear and so weren't trapped in the bog most knew only one thought – the need to run for the safety of the city. They knew that their only safety lay behind the walls, and they put everything they had into making it to them.

But it was three hundred paces back to the walls and they were in armour. They simply didn't have the time. The griffins had finished with the others quickly and were on them before they had crossed half the distance.

Soon they were joining their brothers in arms in the afterlife and the only truly organised part of the army was gone.

But just as Erislee was thinking about celebrating at least a minor victory, a new enemy entered the picture. And the first she knew of it was when the smokey sky above the city started filling with clouds. But they weren't clouds. They were harpies. And they were coming for the griffins.

That caught her by surprise. It was a tactic she hadn't expected. Neither had the war masters. But then even as she wondered what to do, she suddenly remembered why the war masters hadn't expected the harpies to come into the attack until the end. They were poor fliers. Good enough to pose a risk to anyone on the ground, especially if they had the advantage of surprise, but not good enough against a griffin.

“Up to the stars!” Erislee gave the command and immediately watched as her beautiful allies began climbing, soaring upwards on their huge white wings, while above the city thousands of harpies were slowly flapping their way to where they had been. And long before the harpies had made the battlefield the griffins were high above them.

Which was as it should be. It gave the griffins a significant advantage.

“Attack from above!” The enemy had perhaps been original in bringing the harpies into the battle. And he had probably saved a thousand soldiers by doing it. She could see many of them scrambling through the gates in the walls having finally reached safety. But he was going to pay a price for that move. Harpies weren't just poor fliers, they had one terrible weakness in the air. They couldn't look up.

They never saw the griffins as they tore through them. They never had a chance to strike back at them. And despite their terrible weapon of disease, they could do nothing. They fell from the skies in their hundreds as the griffins dived and swooped among them. And then they plummeted in their thousands.

The entire battle took less than thirty beats of Erislee's heart, and at the end of it she knew victory had been complete. A few griffins were down, a couple had fallen from the skies, but now she knew, that when they entered the city, one of the greatest dangers they had been expecting to face would no longer be waiting for them.

Erislee let her winged allies withdraw once their work was done. They'd done well, leaving behind a battlefield that resembled a bloodbath, and while a few of the soldiers might have survived the battle, they were no threat. Unfortunately there was little more they could do for the moment. Not while the war machines were still in action. Meanwhile she had to turn her attention to the front lines as the first of the chimera finally came within range of the long bows.

There weren't many at first. Just a scattering that were quickly taken down. But little by little they started coming through in greater numbers, Soon there were hundreds of them making the charge across the last three or four hundred paces between them. But the archers were up to the task, and while the chimera might have covered fifty or a hundred paces, it just wasn't enough. Especially when the war machines were still thinning out the horde behind them.

Erislee added the strength of her own bow to the attack, thinking that every bit helped, and for what seemed like ages the battle raged. The chimera kept charging and their numbers continued to thin. But slowly the chimera were getting closer and closer, the gap between them becoming ever smaller. Again it wasn't tactics or strategy that was helping them. It was sheer numbers.

Erislee's heart began to race a lot more as she could see them getting nearer. Her shoulders were burning with the ache from pulling the string back again and again, and her palms were clammy. But she continued to loose her arrows at them and her aim never faltered. In the end she was a hunter and sometimes your quarry turned and attacked. A good hunter was always ready for that. Besides, even though it seemed to take two or three or even four arrows to bring down each minotaur or leonid, they were nearly four thousand archers strong.

Still, some got through. Only a few, but every so often she heard screams that she knew came from the soldiers – her soldiers. And if she'd looked around she knew she'd see them dying. Being torn apart by the monsters of these false priests. It was a terrible thing. But that was simply the price they had to pay if they were to be free of the tyranny of the false temple. By her too if it came to that.

And then she heard the sound she'd most dreaded hearing – silence as one by one the war machines stopped firing. She knew what that meant. The beasts were too close. The crews had had to defend themselves. She could not blame them. But she knew it was a bad sign. The less that threw their rocks at the enemy, the more chimera survived the long run across the battlefield to attack them.

Then the nearest of the beasts came within twenty feet of her and she knew they were in trouble. They were being overrun simply by numbers. And that seemed bitterly unfair. After all the hard work and planning they'd done to still be outmatched, that was wrong. Still there was nothing to do but fight and hope. She put an arrow in the eye of the leonid and reached for the next as she watched the beast stop in its tracks.

From this moment on it was about survival.

A cerberi leapt for her even as she was notching the arrow, and she very nearly screamed, shocked by the creature's impossible speed. But as fast as it was, others were faster, and a wild man with a pair of axes appeared from out of nowhere to batter it away in a spray of blood. But for him she knew she would have died. She returned the favour a couple of heartbeats later as she put an arrow in the head of a charging minotaur bearing down on them both.

Erislee kept loosing arrows at the beasts as fast as she knew how, her aim somehow never failing her despite her fear. And her speed with the longbow was greater than she'd ever known. But deep inside as she saw the battlefield becoming more and more confused and heard the screaming of men falling, she knew they were in trouble.

Then she discovered a new problem as she went to notch another arrow. There were no more. Her quiver was empty.

For a few terrible heartbeats she was almost undone by that. Her arrows gone, her longbow useless? It was unthinkable. She was a huntress and that was her weapon. And somehow she had never even considered the possibility that it would happen. But then she remembered that others had. So she drew the short sword they had given her and prayed that between it and the armour it would be enough. Then the next cerberi leapt for her and there was no time to pray. She slashed at it and the sword imparted a blast of whiteness into the beast's flesh, sending it flying away.

After that things became completely chaotic. She had no idea how the battle was going. She could hear the screams of men dying all around her and the roars of the beasts. She heard the blasts of the wizards as they took down their enemies with fire and lightning. She saw the flashes of white that were the unicorns charging into the fray, and the gold of the griffins as they waged war from above. She smelled blood. But all she could concentrate on was her own little piece of the battle. On dodging each beast as it attacked and stabbing at it as best she could with the strange little sword she had been given.

For an eternity it seemed, that was her world. Dodge, swing, stab and pray that she didn't get hit. Just as she guessed it was everyone else's world. And somehow she managed not to get hit. But that  was because others were. Men, soldiers, many of them little more than boys kept standing between her and the oncoming hoard, and they kept getting knocked down. Unicorns too were covered in blood as they fought to keep the beasts from her.

Still they held their ground. The beasts came and they fell before them. They fell in greater numbers than them. And nothing killed her. A minotaur came close, its horns very nearly taking out her belly as it charged, but a man with a huge blade cut it in half just in front of her. Just before a leonid dragged him away in the heat of the battle.

So she kept fighting and the chimera kept falling until eventually she looked up and realised that those still attacking her were nowhere near as many as they had been. Less and less were running for her.

What did that mean?

For the longest time Erislee didn't understand that. She didn't understand anything really as she kept looking for beasts to kill. But in time as she kept looking for them and they kept not coming, she understood. They weren't coming. They were dead.

Little by little she began to look around her. To see more of the battlefield than her own little piece of it. And to realise that the fighting was coming to an end. But more than that, it was the end they had worked for. The beasts had been killed.

The bodies of the fallen covered the grass all around her. In places they were actually piled two and three high on it. And as she looked she could see them covering the ground all the way back to the city walls half a league away. And nearly all of them were chimera.

The enemy had been defeated.

Others realised that too. Not immediately. Not when many of them were still fighting. The battle line was four hundred paces wide and peace hadn't come to all of it. But in time she heard them as they started cheering. They knew the battle was won. It was just a matter of time now. The pain in her shoulder from having pulled back on the string was terrible. Her arms ached as never before from having swung the sword. Sweat was running down her face and getting into her eyes. Her heart was racing and her breathing was ragged. But she too was ecstatic. They had almost won. The hunt was going to be successful.

And yet, even as she stood there and thought about screaming her victory to the heavens, she couldn't help but wonder how it had come to this. So close. Though she thought she could see most of her army still standing, she knew that the numbers they had lost didn't truly represent how close it had been. They had prepared. They had used every tactic and strategy they could think of. They had massed the largest army they could. They had created huge defences which had taken out two thirds of the chimera attacking. And yet still they had barely won through. And this was only one city in one kingdom – the smallest of the five. From here on out the battles would only become tougher. And when they had to face Lion's Crest? The gods alone knew how hard that would be.

Finally though, when the last enemy was down and her sword was back in its scabbard, Erislee's thoughts turned in another direction. The coming day. The false temple's army was defeated. However many soldiers they had left in the city couldn't be enough to put up any meaningful resistance. The harpies were gone too. And that left only the wizards to really cause them problems. But there were still walls to level. Enemies to destroy. And somewhere inside that fortress city there was still a Circle wizard lying in wait. A wizard they had to track down and kill.

Soon – in the morning perhaps, once they had buried their dead and tended to their wounded – they would have to go in. And inside the city, the few soldiers and chimera still remaining would be more dangerous. They could strike from seclusion and bring their people down. Each one of the enemy could probably account for three or four of them before he fell if he was clever. The question was; how many were left? Had the enemy committed everyone they had to the charge? Or had they kept a lot back just in case?

As joyous as this victory felt, she realised that this first battle had only been the start.

Chapter Twenty Five

They entered Midland Heights the following day. It was a slow and careful advance following another round of bombardment. It was the only way they could do it. The war masters had said as much and Erislee had agreed with them. They had been too badly weakened the previous day.

Eight hundred of Erislee's men were dead. And just as many were badly injured. That was nearly a quarter of their entire army unable to fight, while many more were walking wounded. And it didn't help to know that they'd killed at least forty thousand chimera according to the war master's best estimates. It didn't make her feel any better about their own losses. Every life was precious. And a million chimera dead for the loss of one man was still not a trade she would have taken had she any choice.

But at least they had won and now they had to push that victory through to the end. They had to send Maynard to Tartarus. So they had begun their painfully slow advance into the city. They had bombarded the first half dozen terraces intensely, breaking down not just the walls but the buildings as well so that they deprived the enemy, however many of them survived, of cover. It also had the effect of forcing them back to the higher terraces and trapping them there while their own numbers were slowly improved by reinforcements.

It was a cold and calculated plan. But Erislee was beginning to realise that war was cold and calculated. At least if you wanted to win. And they had to win.

She disagreed with the war masters on one matter though. They wanted her to stand back and send others in. She was never going to do that though. Despite having come close to death the previous day, she was determined to stand with the others. This was her fight as well as theirs. And their lives were no less valuable to them than her life was to her. They would stand together and if it came to it they would fall together.

So she had entered the city with the soldiers once the bombardment had stopped, and then together they had started hunting down the enemy. There weren't a lot. Not on the first two terraces anyway. The soldiers had obviously retreated once the bombardment had begun. And those that remained were mostly either wounded and seeking medical attention or had had enough of fighting and just wanted to live. They had taken a lot of prisoners on those first couple of terraces. More than she had expected.

The third terrace looked exactly like the two before it she thought as she scoured it with the others. Lots of broken stone walls and buildings, burnt out roofs, debris and rubble everywhere.  There were also a large number of bodies. She hadn't realised until they'd entered the city just how many had been killed by the barrage. But it was a lot. And while many of them were chimera and soldiers, a lot weren't. Many were civilians. The people who ran the city. Who carried the water and cleaned the floors. Who served at the tables and sewed the clothes. And who had died with their oppressors.

Erislee had of course always known that that would be the case and that there had never been anything they could have done about it. Still, seeing so many of them dead was appalling. Knowing that they were responsible – that she had given the order – was worse. And while she could tell herself that if they had not launched the attack and had just waited out the siege, that there would have been no civilians left alive as the beasts would have killed them all – it didn't help. Though she knew the bombardment had saved lives, it seemed a lie when she was staring at the bodies of the fallen.

Similarly she was beginning to realise that there had also been a good reason why the false temple had finally launched their counter attack. They simply couldn't sit and be slowly destroyed by the bombardment. It had been a move born of desperation. The longer they had stayed where they were and taken shelter, the more would have died from the bombardment. Or from the chimera as little by little they would have broken free of their pens and their masters' control. They'd always had to counter attack. All the war masters agreed on that. In fact that had been part of the purpose of the bombardment. To draw them out in to an attack on open ground where thanks to their preparations they'd had the advantage. Even if it hadn't been quite as much of an advantage as they'd hoped for.

But at least not everyone was dead. Though there were hundreds of bodies lying out in the open and many more in the broken buildings covered with rubble, there were also survivors. Most of them were innocents. The soldiers and the chimera had largely been killed in their charge. And as they took each terrace the remaining defenders quickly surrendered or gave up their lives. Thus far there had been nothing of an organised resistance as they had feared.

So what were left with were mainly just the frightened citizens. Those who had been bullied and beaten down by the false priests, frightened into submission, and then forced to do their bidding. They had become little more than slaves. It was the same story as what they had seen in all the towns and villages they had so far freed.

If anything, in Midland Heights it was worse. Maybe they had been beaten down harder, for longer? Whatever had been done to them it had left them with their souls crushed. Their spirits completely broken.

The signs were easy to spot. The people hid. They kept their heads down. They wouldn't look any of Erislee's army in the eye. They didn't raise their voices. In fact if Erislee or one of her fighters raised his voice or made any sort of threatening gesture they grovelled. Some of them event went so far as to fall down to their hands and knees in a heartbeat. And they did exactly what they were told to do immediately.

In all her life Erislee had never seen such examples of human wretchedness. Nor so many of them. And the worst of it was that she doubted these people would ever truly recover from what had been done to them. The damage to their spirits was just too great.

The only good thing about their condition was that it did make it easy to separate them from the false priests hiding among them. And there were a few that tried. Some of the false priests were trying to escape the consequences of their actions any way they could. Perhaps most of them. And they'd decided that the easiest way to do that was to put on the rags of the people they'd enslaved and brutalised for years and pretend to be them. They couldn't get away with it though. Because while they could wear the rags and bow and scrape, there was something about the level of fear and subjugation of the people that they just couldn't imitate. It simply wasn't in them. They were also too well fed. It seemed that not everyone in the city had been starving.

Which was why the false priest being led away by the soldiers in front of her had been caught. He didn't look the part, so they'd checked his wrist, found the marks of his master there beneath the dirt he'd tried to cover them up with, and now he was in chains and looking shocked. It was almost as though he didn't understand why he was being taken away.

It was depressing to see how little understanding the false priest had of what he'd done. Of how his actions had helped create the living hell that was Midland Heights. But at least he would soon learn a little more of it. Already his magic had been taken from him as he had been forced to drink the tea. And without it he was scared – even if he had only been a minor wizard to begin with. His magic couldn't really have helped him, but without it he felt vulnerable. Very vulnerable. In fact he was crying. He was trying to hide it now that his pleas had fallen on deaf ears, but still the tears were rolling down his cheeks as he guessed his fate. He would be taken from here, interrogated, and when he had given up everything he knew, tried. And the outcome of that trial was certain. He would be hung.

The false priest had to know that. He had to know that there was no hope for him. Just as there was no hope for any of the others. He wasn't the first and he wouldn't be the last. Half a dozen more had already been taken away and she suspected hundreds more would follow in due course. They were only on the third terrace after all and there were at least thirty more to go as they climbed through the city.

So what was the point in tears she wondered? Of begging? Those things would not save him. They would do him no good at all. They wouldn't even earn him any sympathy. He had to know that. For he had not yielded to the tears of those he had brutalised. In fact even as she watched the soldiers take him to the waiting prison caravan where he would be manacled to the others and led away, he didn't appear to spare a thought for the others. He didn't so much as look at them. He only cared for himself.

Erislee couldn't help but think that something was very wrong with him. Nyma had told her what Harl had said about these six great answers the Circle wizards had sought and the deal they'd made. The answers that they had sacrificed innocent people without end to obtain. And while these great answers might be valuable things, not one of them in her view was worth the life of another. She was a hunter. When she killed it was for food. It was to feed the hungry. And while there was a challenge involved it was not about sport as some claimed.

But these wizards! They killed for no reason and without a single thought of compassion. It was as though the instant they heard about these six great answers, everything in their lives revolved around them. There was nothing else. They didn't see the suffering they caused. They didn't care about it. Morality was completely forgotten as was simple human decency. The law wasn't so much as a thought in their heads. The only thing they knew was the desire for those six answers. And the one and only time they thought about anything else was when they were caught and soon to die.

There would have to be something done about that. She knew it, as did the others. Especially when it seemed that most wizards were exactly the same. When it looked as though all their lofty ideals and inviolate rules that they had pretended to hold so precious meant nothing to them. When it seemed that they had all been lies, and that what truly beat in their hearts was hunger for power. Hunger for these great answers.

Which made it all the harder to understand their own wizards. They not only didn't seem to have any desire for these six great answers, but were completely mystified as to why the others did. How they could have become as they were. Many of them seemed to believe it was some sort of sickness of the mind that had befallen them. Something that had completely overcome both their simple humanity and their common sense. Every time she spoke with them they said the same thing. These wizards were mad.

And maybe she thought, they were right? Maybe they were mad. It was easier to accept than that most wizards were simply immoral. But maybe they had always been mad. They had just been better at hiding it.

The other thing that troubled her was the number of false priests. Over the previous months they must have killed upwards of two or three thousand of them. Half of them were simple demon thralls who it seemed controlled the beasts through the charms they held. But the rest had been wizards. And this was in the Rainbow Mountains, the smallest of the five kingdoms with the fewest people. She hadn't guessed that there were so many wizards in the world! Not even minor wizards such as these were. She also guessed that before the false temple had risen there hadn't been.

These people would never have been called wizards back then. They were just people who had a small touch of magic. Not enough to be trained. Not enough to go into business or call themselves a wizard. For the most part these were the insignificant ones. But when the false temple had come to power it seemed that they had somehow drawn all of these people to them. Turned them from regular citizens of whichever town or city they lived in, into monsters who would kill without mercy or limitation for a dream of a power they had surely never had a chance of realising. How had they done that? How had they turned so many?

Harl was right. There was something very wrong with these wizards. But was he also wrong? Could it be that they had always been like this? That they had never been righteous or law abiding? That for hundreds of years the Circle and its precious laws for the wizards of the Kingdom of the Lion had always just been a disguise for the dark desires of the wizards? The inquisitors were asking those questions of the prisoners. She had listened to the arcane smith and known that his questions were good ones and asked them to investigate. But she feared that the answers they got would not be the ones that Harl and the others wanted. Having magic might simply corrupt a man's soul. And that would have to be dealt with in time.

The sound of a cat mewling somewhere nearby abruptly took her away from her melancholy. It was a sound that troubled her, though not the creature itself when she saw the tabby peering down at her from the roof of a nearby building. She quite liked cats. They were pointless animals in many respects. They followed no orders and other than hunting vermin were of no use. But they were consummate hunters, and she respected that about them. What she didn't like was the fact that they were the animal that Maynard the Irrepressible was constantly summoning. And so her first thought whenever she spotted one of the creatures was to wonder if he was somewhere nearby.