Oathbreaker: The Knight's Tale (3 page)
I entered the army and the general staff during a time of peace, during the old king’s final attempts at negotiations with the Siullans to the east. As the history books tell us, those attempts were doomed to failure, and they failed not long after they began, a year into my service. The people of both sides wanted peace, but our rulers had no heart for it. Outwardly, they called for calm, but between themselves, they understood that the negotiations would ultimately bear no fruit. Furthermore, the Siullan leaders understood that old King Fannon III offered them nothing but a golden servitude. They had their pride. They answered him.
The Siullans laid explosives throughout the city of Amchester that fall. Ten thousand died, among them the ambassador to the Siullans. Their senators denied responsibility, but both they and we knew it was their answer to our proposition. King Fannon called upon General Hawkins to speak to their answer.
The general mustered two of the Empire’s seven armies, and led the First and Third east in the heavy autumn rains, creating two massive, curved pincer arms that measured over fifty miles long from end to end. (The Second and the Fourth were both armies whose ranks brimmed with soldiers from our eastern provinces, and we did not want their loyalty tested—we always send warriors who have little connection to the land they'll conquer so that they do not falter at the sight of a friend's face.) The First Army was to the north, the Third to the south. We had nearly one hundred thousand men in the field. The Siullans had perhaps sixty thousand. We had six military dirigibles, twenty scouting dirigibles, artillery, and the knights—both Elite and the lesser orders—and our troops were simply better trained. It would be, in truth, no contest. We couldn’t understand why the Siullans didn’t surrender and save themselves.
We should have put ourselves in their place. The destruction that happened later was a failure of our empathy and a failure of our intelligence.
Our scouts ranged out ahead of us as we crossed the hilly border into Siull. They rode the silver steeds of the Knights Elite, the metal-armored, unliving creatures created by the Archmagus and his apprentices. These were smaller, slimmer mounts, faster than the coursers of the knights, but not nearly as durable; I have seen them explode in gouts of flame and flying shrapnel from a single well-placed arrow. Still, they traveled far faster than any ordinary horse, such as the rest of us were compelled to ride, and a smart scout would rather throw a leg in front of an arrow than let it strike her mount—if she were foolish enough to travel within bowshot in the first place. The scouting steeds were nearly as valuable as the scouting dirigibles we had above us, and certainly stealthier. We did not have the flight troops we have now, those unsavory creatures of the magi.
The Siullans gave way steadily before us, and our lines extended as we struggled to encircle them. They burned the farms and villages behind them as they went, of course, to keep us from their bounty, and because they knew the Siullan Republic was doomed. They wished us to have no profit from their death. We’d have done the same thing.
The scouts reported that the Siullan numbers dwindled daily. Some of the Siullans rode ahead of their main army, and the tiny bands disappeared in the hills through which we marched. Sometimes, scouts who sought these bands disappeared. Hawkins was not especially suspicious, for many of these deserters had reemerged as guerrillas to harass our lines, and we found enough of our dead scouts near the shattered, smoking remains of their coursers. We lost two scouting dirigibles, brought down by lucky shots from their rolling guns. The troops bled away from their army until at last they reached the Gaurin Plains and held their ground. They had perhaps forty thousand men then, a third of them gone. We presumed them ragged and desperate with fear. We holed up in the hills rather than engage them immediately. The First Army was in position to strike and was moving rapidly to close the pincer. On the next day, we’d draw the trap closed and crush them between us. Our camp was impregnable from any attack they might launch, and they could go no farther without injudiciously exposing their rear flank. They were trapped, exactly where Hawkins wanted them.
Students of military history will know that we were exactly where they wanted us.
I will not recount here the full particulars of what happened next. Let us say that the Siullans had lured us into precisely the kind of ambush to which our massive armies were so vulnerable. They had laced the ground in the hills surrounding the Gaurin Plains with a network of caverns and tunnels over the years in preparation for an eventuality such as this. Explosive charges awaited detonation under our feet, with iron bulwarks between blast areas to protect the men and women lurking in wait for the signal to attack from below. It was deadly in its ingenuity and astonishing in its foresight.
The Siullans struck at night. I suspect their first move was to send an assassin to climb the lines into one of our heavy dirigibles. The sudden fiery crash of the airship into the heart of our army was the signal for the detonation of the explosives in the caves, and that detonation was the signal for the ten thousand in the caves to rise up and murder us in the tents where we plotted the next day’s action. Our guards were wary, but many of them were taken completely by surprise. The screaming slaughter was the final signal for their army to rush the lines of the Third Army. It seemed they had no intention of survival. They wanted us to suffer as much as possible before their republic went the way of all who opposed our Empire.
The dirigible crash was frighteningly close to Hawkins’s tent, close enough that the great flaming struts of the flying machine set the tents afire with their shrapnel, close enough that the shock waves knocked the supports out from under the pavilions. Those inside the tents of the staff were trapped under the material, and many of them roasted or suffocated in the choking smoke within the canvas folds. I had had enough presence of mind to equip myself with a wrist knife, which I carried and still carry at all times, and it saved my life.
When I had cut a hole through the canvas, I looked upon a scene from the first of Hell’s blasted plains. Twisted, blackened struts skewed at crazy angles. A rolling, roaring landscape of fire and smoke lit the air from all sides, and shadows cast from the flames cut like knives through the soot and ash that billowed from the ground. Screams rose from the tents all around me as the canvas took fire and turned the tents’ interiors into ovens, waxy fat running liquid from the seams of the blazes. Figures silhouetted against the light raised dripping swords and plunged them into their victims with unimaginable ferocity, howling their vengeance upon us.
I dug my sword from the smoldering canvas and sought to save the people I could save. Those in the midst of flames were clearly too far gone. I sought first those who were still struggling in the fallen tents that were near combustion, and those whose tents were flickering with the beginnings of inferno. Around me, other quick-thinking soldiers did the same. I must have saved a good twenty of the staff, junior officers and attachés, before I came on Hawkins’s tent. I suppose if I had been more ambitious, I would have run there first, but I cut the doomed free as I went instead—a bad strategy on my part, but one for which I cannot blame myself.
Hawkins’s tent was aflame, and there was but one figure in it who still struggled, faintly. The stench of seared human flesh had filled my nose for several minutes, so I was spared the smell of those roasting inside. I slashed the canvas, and black smoke billowed out into my face. I thrust my arm into the rent, seized the trapped man inside, pulled him to safety, and came face to face with General Hawkins. He was badly burnt, his face seared and blistered. He was missing his eyebrows and a fair-sized patch of hair, and he vomited on me as the fresh air hit his lungs. Two raiders came our way then, and as the general struggled to breathe, I beat their weapons aside and skewered them.
When Hawkins pulled himself together—surprisingly quickly—he armed himself with a raider’s sword and began to bark commands to the surviving officers of his staff. Inside a few moments, we had the beginning of an actual resistance to the attack.
We had a functioning command structure from top down within half an hour of the disaster, despite being hit in our most vulnerable spot; it was a mark of the discipline Hawkins had drilled into his troops. Ten minutes after the commands flew again, we had resistance to the Siullan guerillas. The ten thousand enemies in our camp tried to prevent us from organizing a response to the forty thousand Siullans rushing our lines, but failed. Our training was too complete to allow us to fall into disarray. The outlying troops were, in the main, unaffected by the explosions, but they had to deal immediately with the full force of the Siullans and could not return to aid the rest of the army. Neither could they expect reinforcements or leadership from us, and they were being slaughtered even as we got ourselves back on our feet.
Our remaining dirigibles fired explosives and shot glass vials of poisonous gas into the Siullan encampment, annihilating any who had not rushed the front lines, eliminating their artillery positions in choking, coughing death. We lost three of our strong dirigibles before their guns were made useless.
Nearly two thousand of our men had perished immediately in the explosions and campsite slaughter, and several thousand more fell before they rallied against the Siullan army. As our foes hadn’t had the shock of seeing their command post obliterated in a cloud of flame and dust, they pressed us mercilessly, determined to inflict as much damage as possible before our other army wiped them out. Even with our swift response, it seems that we would have been defeated had it not been for the incredible speed of the Knights Elite of the First Army racing to our assistance. The infantry and cavalry followed as close behind as possible.
When the 4,000 knights (a mixture of Elite, Faithful, and Lesser) hit the Siullans from the rear, we thought at first that the sky had opened and delivered the angels of Kattriya to save us. Our knights laid into the Siullans with a bloody will, avenging our losses and pain with a fanatic fervor. Although their defeat was inevitable, the Siullans fought to their last breath, determined not to surrender to our dubious mercies. Of course, we were in no mood to show mercy. We slaughtered them wherever we found them. It was a grim night’s work.
By morning, we had established hospitals for the soldiers wounded in the terror attack, and the knights had volunteered for the dangerous work of clearing the tunnels. Bloodlust was in their eyes, and Hawkins was wise enough to allow them free rein in exorcising it. The Knights Elite of the Third had taken heavy losses in the attack, more so than any other unit; they had set up their command camp directly over a lode of underground explosives, and the limbs of a good portion of them were strewn over the landscape when the attack began. The knights were also the quickest to recover, and if it were not for the fast thinking of their commander, I’d have had to face down a good number more of the Siullans at Hawkins’s tent. The outcome of the battle might have been decidedly different.
I thought that my performance the night of the battle had gone unnoticed, but I should have known better. Hawkins called me into his tent, and he personally promoted me, giving me a squadron of my own troops to command with the promise that he’d keep an eye on me. He guaranteed me a medal when we returned to Terona. I had left the capital as a messenger. I returned a hero. My father was disappointed, though he struggled to hide it, and I knew that I had left the path he had chosen for me.
It is two in the afternoon already, and I cannot believe that I have had this long to write. You might ask why, if my time is limited, have I spent so much of my time writing about the past? It is a good question, and a fair one. My answer is this: we see the events of today being written in the pages of history. Small incidents unfold onto a massive scale. Loyalty in the past becomes the mechanism of betrayal.
The knights saved us then. They could save us now, if they only knew where to strike, and if I trusted their captain enough to tell him of the plot against the king. But the engineer of this rot in Terona plays a subtle game, and deep. The knights see the hand of someone in the diplomatic service, which of course is the polite name for our spies. Yet their commander realizes that if he sees a spy’s work, surely it cannot be a spy—at least, not one of the spies we have trained, for ours are also subtle and deep. The captain has called for the executions of certain high-placed suspects. The king is not yet so addled that he’ll agree to this, and I don’t think the captain expects it to happen. I’m sure he and his second have assassins who are ready to strike at a word but have no idea where. Like all under his command, if he is not involved, I’m sure the captain longs for direct action and chafes when he is denied. The knights are full of powerful emotion, though they deny it to themselves, and that hidden passion drives them to excellence and fierce duty.
I share their frustration. I believe it may be one of the few emotions we do share. The knights are either more than human, or less. They lack something that drives the rest of us. Perhaps it is beaten out of them in their merciless training. Perhaps it is inculcated in them in place of honest human feeling. I know that I have seen innocent boys turned into blank-faced but burning killers, trained to become masters of any weapon I might care to name—though they prefer the humming weapons made by the Archmagus for each individual on the occasion of his knighting, and I do not blame them, for those magical blades are the finest I have seen men or women carry.