Douglas Niles - Lord of the Rose

The goblins surged toward the low walls of Thelgaard. Archers filled the sky with arrows that rained down upon the few men who dared to defend the city. Ogres marched forward to the beat of heavy drums that echoed through the ground and the city walls. Teams of humans rushed to the walls, scrambling up crude ladders. Brandishing swords, they swept along the battlements and dropped down the inside walls to spread out through the tangled slums.

The brigade of ogres from Lemish carried a heavy trunk as a ram and battered down the weakly manned city gates. Thousands of attackers followed them, swarming into the main avenues. Draconians scrambled up the walls and launched themselves from the heights, gliding on their wings to outflank the small bands of defenders who tried to make valiant stands.

Hoarst and the other two Thorn Knight spellcasters concentrated on the army barracks and armory, igniting the wooden structures with fireballs, blasting with lightning and ice the panicked soldiers who stampeded for safety. The killing would have been greater except Thelgaard’s army was so depleted that the strongholds were already largely abandoned.

Gobs and hobs and all the other invaders rushed through the streets of Thelgaard, right up to the great keep, the castle that had stood for more than a thousand years. Its walls were high, but flying draconians seized key towers, quickly dropping ropes to their comrades swarming through the moats. Within an hour the curtain wall had been cleared, and the attack swept through the courtyards, penetrating into each barracks and stable, every corner.

The army of Ankhar was an unstoppable tide. They plundered and killed, burned and looted. Pockets of knights fought to the death, while those citizens who had lingered tried to escape and mostly died. Fierce battles raged here and there, while other parts of the city, bereft of defenders, were, gleefully looted.

Finally the attackers arrived at the great hall of Thelgaard Keep. Here the mass halted, parting ranks so that the commander could have the honor of the ultimate moment. Ankhar strode forward, stopping before the stout entry to the keep.

“Est Sudanus oth Nikkas!” he roared.

The half-giant bashed open the doors to the hall with one mighty blow of his own fist. He charged in with his gleaming green spearhead poised, ready to drive death through the heart of the lord.

The Duke of Thelgaard was already dead, the blood still draining from the cuts he had made on his own wrists.

Captain Dayr looked back at Thelgaard Keep. The invaders had claimed the entire city in a few hours of savage assualt. Dayr and two score men had held out in the west gatehouse for a full day, watching as the rest of the city was overrun. The attackers had taunted them with word of the duke’s suicide, but the forty men in the gatehouse-all knights-had inflicted grievous losses at the cost of only two dead.

Finally, as night had fallen, Dayr led the group on a bold escape. They seized horses from a corral outside the walls and rode bareback onto the plains. Some of the worgs and riders gave chase, but they were exhausted from the day of battle while the knights’ horses were fresh. The knights had soon left their pursuers behind.

“Est Sularus oth Mithas,” Dayr murmured, seeing the banner of the Crown torn down from the castle’s highest tower.

His honor was his life, but that honor did not require him to die, not in the service of a lord who lacked even the spirit to wield a weapon in his own defense. Dayr thought bitterly of all the men who had died in the Battle of the Crossings and here because of the ignobility of the Duke of Thelgaard. The captain himself had ordered men to their death based on his master’s foolish commands. It was a mistake that Dayr vowed never to repeat.

Sometimes honor required that a fighting man retreat so that he could live to fight another day.

Early on a cool autumn morning the whole city of Caergoth was astir. Although most of the duke’s great army remained in the field, camped just south of the Garnet River, Duke Crawford had kept his personal guard, nearly a thousand knights, with him in the city. For a week those knights, and every courtier, noble, and priest had been involved with the pageantry attending the Duchess Martha’s funeral.

The duke, in fact, was rather taken aback at the evidence of his late wife’s popularity. For all her simplicity and faults, she apparently had struck a chord with the common people of Caergoth, who demonstrated their genuine grief. Patriarch Issel had delivered a stirring eulogy, and six of his stout clerics had borne her casket to the royal vaults, in the catacombs of Temple of Shinare below the city.

Now, at last, the funeral was over. Knights and squires bustled to prepare for an expedition. Wagons filled with freight lumbered through the streets, starting for the camp of the army some thirty miles away. Great herds of fresh horses to replace battlefield losses and cattle to feed the hungry troops were driven eastward through the city gates and out across the plains.

Finally, after an interval for one last civilized breakfast, it was time for the duke himself to depart. The thousand knights of his personal guard would escort him into the field, where he would take command of the larger force. The companies of the Ducal Guard were organized by the colors of their mounts. First came the blacks, then the chestnuts, followed by the grays, and finally the whites. Each rider was clad in gleaming armor, the silver outline of the rose visible upon every breastplate. The horses trotted in formation, as precisely as if they were leading a coronation parade. They proceeded out of the gates of Caergoth in ranks of four, proudly leading down the long, swept pavement of the King’s Road.

The duke himself rode in a carriage, with Sir Marckus and Sir Reynaud on their chargers beside the open vehicle. The lord accepted the cheers of his adoring populace as he rode through the streets and out the gates, enjoying the accolades so much that it seemed considerably dull once they left the city and were left merely trundling along the road-good, paved highway though it was.

Because of that road they made very good time, and in two days they rode all the way to the crossing of the Garnet River. Here the army was camped beside one of the engineering wonders of the Solamnic Realm: the King’s Bridge. The span of white marble had stood for hundreds of years, since long before the Cataclysm. Indeed, it had been erected by dwarven masons under the auspices of Istar’s Kingpriest and had once been called the Kingpriest’s Bridge. After the fall of that great city and the convulsions of the Age of Despair, the people of Solamnia had chosen the shorter appellation.

Lord Lorimar had erected his manor in the shadow of this bridge on the north bank of the great river, and the ruins of that once-splendid house could be glimpsed from the crossing. The duke felt his eyes drawn to the charred site, even as he shuddered in horror. Dara Lorimar had been such a beautiful woman… what a shame she had to die that way.

More relevant to Crawford’s immediate future-and a relief to his distracted mind-was the spectacle of the great army, more than ten thousand men encamped along the south bank. The men exploded with cheers as their lord rolled through the vast tent city.

The next day the duke led his entire army across the bridge, which was nearly a quarter mile long. At the north end, where the road started across the vast plain, he climbed one of the two watchtowers, and relished the sight of his great army flowing over the gleaming span, and forming into neatly organized columns on the north side of the river.

The Garnet River was not as great a waterway as the mighty Vingaard, which lay to the north and drained the vast swath of the plains through the port of Kalaman into the northern ocean. But the Garnet was still deep and fast-moving and bore snowmelt and rainwater from the mountains of the same name through the fertile bottomlands of Caergoth into the Strait of Ergoth. Marshy banks kept the troops away from the river’s edge. Like the road itself, the bridge was paved in granite slabs, and stood as proof of the greatness of the Solamnics.