William King - The Serpent Tower

It was like a dash of ice water in Rik’s face. He wondered if any of his friends were still alive.

Sardec stood atop the wall and surveyed the battlefield. It was not, as he felt it should be, silent. He could hear the bellowing of wyrms, and the frantic neighing of panicked horses, and the screams and cries of the dying alongside the victorious shouts of the Talorean soldiers. But compared to the thunderous roar of battle that had assailed his ears a few minutes ago, it might as well have been silent as the inside of a temple.

Men lay sprawled in the grass, unmoving. They looked as if they were sleeping, but he knew they were not. Dead horses looked like small hummocks. The smoke had started drifting away, to be replaced by clouds of carrion birds. He could see long columns of cavalry approaching from the East, and massive wyrms pulling artillery carriages. It looked like a good part of Azaar’s army had fallen on Esteril’s regiments with the force of a sledgehammer.

An odd sense of futility settled in Sardec. He knew he should have felt triumphant but instead he just felt tired. He had achieved what he set out to do and held the position, but at an awful cost. He told himself those corpses down there were just humans. They would have been dead in a few scant decades anyway, but he could not make himself believe it, not like he once had. He felt an urge to cry, as he had once done as a child, when contemplating the brief lives of butterflies in a poem his mother had read to him. He told himself the feeling was simply trite and cliched sentiment, but he could not even believe that, not in the way he used to.

A bedraggled bunch of Kharadrean officers limped uphill under a white flag. He could see old Esteril leading them, coming in a way to do him honour. He should have been marching to surrender his sword to the chief of the oncoming army. Instead he paused before the walls of the Inn and shouted; “Good sport, youth, bloody good sport. It seems I will not be accepting your surrender after all. Will you accept mine?”

Looking at the old Terrarch’s flushed, smiling face, Sardec felt the urge to shoot him. Instead he forced himself to say; “Of course, sir, it would be an honour.”

Sardec trudged down the hill with the captive officers. He raised his hook to accept the cheers of the soldiers and he could not help but smile at their enthusiasm. For the first time, he started to feel like he had won a victory rather than caused a pointless slaughter.

He could see enemy troops being led away at bayonet point, herded together without their weapons, under the supervision of hard-faced Talorean infantrymen. Cavalrymen, impassive and intimidating with sabres drawn, watched the defeated as they trudged by. Here and there scavengers looted the corpses of the dead, performing the traditional after-battle rituals on friend and foe alike.

Beside him, Lord Esteril kept up a steady flow of pointless chatter, going back and forth over the finer points of the battle with a connoisseur’s relish. Sardec was hard pressed to pay much attention to him. He felt like saying he had followed none of this because he had been too busy fighting for his life, but, of course, he was too polite to do so.

Ahead of him now were a number of enormous bridgeback wyrms. The high command had already dismounted and were clustered around Lord Azaar. Someone had produced a small folding canvas shooting chair for the General and he lounged in it with an appearance of ease and boredom contradicted by the bright intensity of his eyes. The whole scene was mirrored in the silvered surface of his mask.

The crowd parted as Sardec and his companions approached. Some of his fellow Terrarchs bowed to him. Others watched him with steely, calculating gazes. It dawned on Sardec that he was about to enjoy an hour of fame and that some of those glancing at him were measuring him, calculating how much they should flatter him and court his attention and bask in his reflected glory. Others were looking at him with jealousy, as if he had somehow stolen something that should rightfully have been theirs.

It was folly but he could understand it. He had been part of such a pack himself once, looking at other Terrarchs as rivals, particularly his peers. A small puff of pride swelled in his breast. He was important to these people, or at least more important than he had been, now that he was the hero of the hour.

Another part of him watched it all mockingly and with not a little contempt. At dawn he had been making life and death decisions, unsure of whether he would live to see another nightfall. Compared to that, the flattery of fools and the envy of the small-minded was nothing. His smile became a fraction colder. At that moment, he looked like a true Terrarch lord.

Amid the crowd around the General he saw Lady Asea, and the three Foragers he had sent to warn the General. Weasel still looked insolent, the Barbarian looked smug and the half-breed looked at him with barely concealed hate. Sardec guessed he had earned that in the last year, but could not quite find it in himself to regret it. What did he care for the hatred of his inferiors? The thing that surprised him was that he had even noticed it at all.

Asea herself looked at him speculatively. Her expression reminded him of a woman contemplating a candy box being offered by one of her maids. Perhaps she found cripples interesting, he thought sourly. Perhaps, after centuries of consorting with the whole of body, there was something titillating about the maimed. He told himself he was being foolish, but there was something about the Lady Asea, her calm and her self-possession, that had always made him deeply uneasy.

General Azaar rose from his chair and strode to meet Sardec. His limp was barely noticeable, but Sardec was all too aware of it. Here was somebody else who had paid the price that War demanded from her worshippers. As the General came closer, Sardec caught the whiff of the strong scent Azaar always wore to cover the rotting smell of his body. The rot was there too, concealed, and Sardec’s stomach quivered with revulsion. He understood all too well why there were some who considered Azaar’s refusal to gracefully slit his own wrists in the Halls of Forgetting to be obscene.

“It does me good to see you alive and whole, Lieutenant,” said Azaar. There did not seem to be any irony in his words. His voice was thrilling and sincere, and Sardec heard within it some of the subtle compulsions mastered by the elder Terrarchs. He could not help but feel grateful and pleased, but part of him resented being manipulated even as he basked in the glow of praise.

“Your servant, sir. It does me honour to present to you our late foe, the esteemed Lord Esteril of Morven.”

“Lord Esteril and I are old friends,” said Azaar smoothly. “It gladdens my heart to see him again even on such a sorry occasion as this.”

Lord Esteril bowed, visibly swollen by the recognition granted to him by the famous General. He bowed to Azaar and then for the first time seemed to notice Lady Asea and bowed to her too, in the old fashioned courtly way of the elderly. She nodded her head politely in return. She was not about to curtsey in this mud, Sardec guessed.

“I hope you will forgive my surrendering to this young lad, Lord Azaar. I mean no slight. It merely seemed to me that your Lieutenant’s splendid defence of his position warranted the honour.”

Things had taken on a slightly unreal quality. Men had died bleeding in the mud today, and they were all standing here talking politely and in full formal courtly ritual. And yet, he knew that it could not be any other way. The Terrarchs were like that. They were polite and they were honourable. It was one of the things that separated them from beasts and from men.