Tales of the Three Kingdoms: Silver Falcon Falls

Automatically I lashed out at the first body that imposed itself upon us, but most of the soldiers we passed now had their backs to us, fleeing for their lives. Still, I must admit that a few retreating men had not kept their wits about them, and more than one found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. That place was "beneath Windshear's hooves," and that time was "as he was sprinting."

I sawed hard on the reins, Windshear protesting the tight turn now that we had finally found our way onto flat land. We began wheeling far to the right, checking our speed as we did so.

I glanced behind again, and with savage glee saw that my own forces – the first through the gap – had followed my lead, and that the Tiger's – perpetually second in tests of speed against the Silver Falcons – was doing the opposite. One silver wing on the right, one red one on the left and suddenly our cavalry had fanned out into a true battle-charge.

It was the type of maneuver that fledgling cavalry officers practiced, ad nauseum, the most important one and one of the most difficult maneuvers to organize on the fly. Here, two separate forces flying beneath different literal and proverbial banners had managed it without any prior coordination or training on the same field, simply because our troops were veterans, our officers experienced.

They knew what the Tiger and I were ordering and why. They knew what it was meant to look like. Training and instinct took care of the rest.

There was another army flying the Gray Wolf banner at the far end of the pass, marked by an old fortified gate, now little more than a ruin. These men far outnumber our combined horse, but they were roughly assembled, sitting in clumps as if they had grown tired of waiting in rank. Many had taken their helms off, or even breastplates. None held their weapons.

They looked bored up until the moment our charge slashed into them.

They might have figured they had more time. They might have thought the ice-wall would last longer. They might have had an inexperienced commander, or maybe that commander had grown bored or tired himself. Whatever the reason, they paid the price with their lives as the falcon and the tiger slammed into their flanks like they were prey and clawed a bloody swath inward. As I reached the center, still in the lead, arm numb with shock and fatigue, legs quivering with protracted exertion, I felt a shoulder crash into mine, even as a bloodbay jostled my dapple gray.

I raised my sword, ready to fend off an impossibly unexpected cavalry counter, when I looked over to see that it was the Tiger, having caught back up and smiling like a madman. Our horses formed a tight wedge splitting the enemy forces like seasoned tinder and quickly breaking this unit that was meant to serve as rearguard of the pass.

He spared no one before him.

By heaven, he really does love this stuff!

Suffused by his Bloodlust Mandate, I couldn't help but return his savage grin, swinging my saber into and through anyone in gray who hadn't gotten the message.

Until a whip cracked in my core. The adrenaline of a victorious route – the joy of it, when suffused with the Tiger's aura – was instantly overwhelmed by something more acrid, more sinister, taking my frenzy and turning it into fear and loathing, on the verge of outright panic.

Windshear felt it too, screaming and rearing, while the horses behind me were only slightly more disciplined in the face of such an overwhelming aura of power.

The combined effect on the battlefield was… unearthly.

***

Greenshoe had no idea how he had ended up here. "Here," in the figurative sense, was Rank 10: Chief of the Masses on the Flank. "Here" was also the ass-end of Wolf Cage Pass, in the literal sense, crumbling ruin of a gate behind him, accursed wall of ice before him, and fifty thousand men arrayed around him in Wolf Clan gray.

One moment he had been enjoying a warm dinner with his whole family, happily reminding his brother Redshoe that he outranked him and therefore deserved the first cut of the roast. And the next moment, a man came to the village demanding to know who its chief was.

Before Greenshoe could even properly explain how he had come by his rank of Village Chief, the men of the village had been rounded up, Greenshoe had been assigned to be the leader of some of them – though he had never done any real leading in his life, much less on a battlefield – and then they had put a spear in his hand.

At least this time, they had given him a helmet and armor too.

Damned heavy armor. And a damned uncomfortable helmet.

He had made a passing attempt at keeping "his men" in line, but when his second-in-command, a former Rank 3: City Guard, had given up on trying to adjust the make-shift lining of his helmet and had just sat down on the scree and stone to completely rework it, Greenshoe felt like that looked a whole lot more comfortable than standing in place for another watch and keeping his spear straight and…

Before he had really tried to exercise his new power, all of "his men" were lounging in place, sitting in rough circles, or using their breastplates for pillows.

Greenshoe had decided to join them.

Before Greenshoe really knew what was going on, the soldiers in front were shouting, then screaming and then Greenshoe felt the reverberation of hooves on the stone beneath him. He levered himself to his feet but couldn't make out what had gotten the ones up front so excited. He looked at his men, who looked at him.

Greenshoe shrugged and figured he might as well have his armor on for this – whatever "this" was.

So he bent to pick it up and pulled it over his head, only to have something slam into him just as the lining and thick iron bands passed over his face.

He found himself on the ground struggling to disentangle himself from what was left of his breastplate. When he finally got free, he pushed himself onto his knees to see the ass-end of a cavalry charge.

Only he must have really gotten his bell rung, because two of the men he saw, at the heart of that charge, were glowing.

He had seen someone glow before but that had been the Emperor and his brother, the heir. That had been two little boys, one of which had a Mandate from Heaven to summon lightning bugs to guide him. The bugs had – for some reason – guided the Emperor and the future Emperor to his house with a glowing yellow-green aura, and Greenshoe had given them eggs and rice and blankets while he waited for the important people in the capital to come find their missing ruler.

But these men, one riding a sleek silver-gray and the other a big crimson-brown… they glowed differently.

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It looked like the one on the silver horse, the younger one, had a small black flame at his core, so small it appeared almost latent. That black flame jostled and bounced and flickered with his cuts and coutercuts, and the bounding of his horse. The older one, more powerfully built and more ferocious, burned a brilliant red, heart-of-fire flaring with his roars and battlecries, but each time it burned brighter – almost blindingly at times – it receded just as rapidly, threatening to gutter out.

He couldn't see anyone else who was glowing. Or burning. Or shining with an ethereal light. Or whatever in the name of Heaven he was seeing. But then again, he didn't have a very good view of the battlefield from the ground, tangled up in his ruined armor. Everything in the wake of the cavalry was chaos. Before he could really look around and have a think on it, the sky turned black and shattered.

It happened all at once, as if this dark world had always been around him and all it took was one crack of a whip to peel away all hope, all light, all human decency. Now all that was left was fear and pain and blackness shot through with hellish red.

Greenshoe didn't remember his name. And he didn't remember falling back to the ground, but there he was, a nameless creature clutching fistfuls of dark scree trying to convince himself that none of this was real. But the chips of stone in his hands, that had been gray a moment ago, were now as black as obsidian to his eyes.

He battled to convince his tortured, fear-clutched spine to allow his head to raise just the barest amount. The sky that had been white with the type of clouds that presaged snow now looked as if they could rain ash. Where the veins of distant blue had shone through now there were only jagged crimson scars, like red lightning. But no. That lightning did not flash. It pulsed.

Bloody veins snaked across the sky growing stronger with each beat of his fear-stricken heart.

Boots crunched nearby and the pitiful worm of a man who had forgotten his own name realized that his heart was beating only by virtue of the thing that allowed it to do so.

And that thing was a man with the face of a demon. Souls streamed from his halberd. His armor glistened black with the blood of a thousand livers that no water could cleanse and no sand could scour. His horse of hellfire and obsidian scales gnashed its carnivorous teeth, demanding the flesh of its enemies. Barring that, any flesh would do.

The gaze of the Demon swung his way and he scrambled backwards in a wave of other men that he hadn't even realized were around him. They were, one and all, ensnared in the claws and jaws and snaking tendrils of pure, unmitigated terror.

Minds broke. Hearts gave way. And those that survived were rendered worms.

***

Sparrow fought to bring Windshear under control, and only once the threat of falling from horseback had passed did he look around at the battlefield that had so instantly changed.

Where once there had been a combination of men in iron-gray, some valiantly brandishing their weapons to meet the unexpected assault, others less valiantly tripping over themselves to flee toward that ruined gate, now they had all stopped. Some had kept their feet but dropped their weapons to curl in on themselves, cringing and shivering in place. Others had fallen fully to the ground, whimpering in fear as if they were being kicked and beaten and tortured by invisible hands.

Where once there had been a full-speed cavalry-charge, a victorious alliance of red and silver, like the blood-drenched blade of justice, now those horses stood stock still, heads lowered, eyes rolling. Their riders fared little better, wincing in the saddle at things that weren't there or pressing their faces into their horses' manes like so many children woken up from a nightmare and hiding beneath their sheets.

The overall result was an entire battle halted in a heartbeat. There were no longer two armies here in the far side of the pass. Now there were only thousands of cowards, each in their own individual struggle against their own minds.

Into this hellscape the Demon strode.

He hadn't even bothered to ride his infernal mount, known as Red Hare, but led the black-scaled, fire-maned, lizard-creature by its reins, strolling through the fear-suffused field of worms. His halberd dragged behind him, the rasp of metal on stone louder than anything else in the once-chaotic battlefield gone eerily quiet, save for the odd intermittent whimper or cry.

Where the Demon walked, full grown men – burly and bearded and armed for battle – gasped and scurried like rats. There was a hundred span radius that no man could tolerate, tripping over their comrades to escape it.

By simply walking into battle, the Demon split an army more effectively than any cavalry charge could hope to do. And where a single man – either too overcome with fear to move or perhaps dead on his knees by the overwhelming emotion – failed to quit the Demon's eyeline, the halberd flicked up and around, cleaving the torso in two and spilling hot blood and entrails upon the scree.

A wave of renewed shock and terror rippled through all those assembled at the lifting of that weapon. Upon its falling, soldiers fell outward in terror, before resuming their postures of personal, internal torture.

I wished I could say I was stouter of heart. I wished I could say I was somehow immune to the Demon's Flaying Mandate. But the truth was, I knew that the horrendous warrior's control was far greater than any in the Land Under Heaven gave him credit for. After all, in a room full of other lords, I had felt that power reach across a banquet table and grip only me by the spine. In the Imperial bedchamber I had felt the many flavors of fear that could cripple, spur, or gnaw at the back of one's mind with a subtle sense of ill-ease. Terror, panic, anxiety. He directed none of these at myself, at the Tiger, nor at our officers behind us, beyond the single moment it took to halt us in our place.

As he stopped almost exactly a hundred span before us, his own cowering forces neatly parted to either side, he whipped his halberd around to a ready stance, sending ripples of fear through all those who witnessed.

The message from the Demon was clear: face me… if you dare.

The Tiger of the Southlands, for his part, had recovered from the natural and understandable shock of seeing one man so casually transform an entire battlefield consisting of tens of thousands.

He eyed the Demon sidelong, then turned his gaze to me. "You want 'im?"

"The Demon? Not a chance! You?"

"I'm not an idiot." We looked at each other, two warlords admitting their mundane cowardice to one another.

I grimaced.

The Tiger shrugged. "Let's leave him for that tall fellow in green."

"Good idea."

I turned my horse and almost crashed into River, disguised in layers of padded armor and plate, eyes shadowed within my father's helm. "By Heaven! You startled me."

River said nothing. She wouldn't speak in front of anyone other than my five officers or her executive officer, lest her voice give her away. But, even silent, I could tell what she wanted.

She wanted us to fall back so she could walk before the Demon – alone – and call upon her own Mandate. She wanted to get close enough to take him down and make damned sure about it. She was willing to risk her soul to do so.

I hadn't exactly expected… this. But I had known there was a chance that the Demon could be here, lurking behind the ice-wall. And I had recalled the look River had given me when I pulled her back from facing the Frost Giant. More than that, I remembered that it was this man who had killed the Gray Dowager, while we had watched, helpless to stop her clan's slaughter. The Gray Dowager had been like a mother to River, and the Demon had taken her.

I shook my head.

"Maybe if Windstopper were here." I thought for another minute, looking over the still-cringing Gray Wolf forces. "Maybe five Mandates to one."

Her dark eyes bored holes into me for another moment, then she snapped her horse into a tight circle and forced her men back.

As if it had all been a dream, movement in the far end of the pass resumed. The Gray Wolf soldiers, released from the hold of their Demon commander, fell back to the ruined gate as if they had never been stopped. Our own cavalry wheeled and separated to regroup at the Weeping Wall where Noble Lion now set up camp.

The Demon walked his Hou Dou mount back to the ruined gate, handed it off to a terrified groom, and sat cross-legged upon the ground to await a worthy challenger.

***COALITION MISSION REPORT: BATTLE FOR THE WEEPING WALL***

SUCCEEDED Primary Objective: Gain the far side of the Weeping Wall.

SUCCEEDED Secondary Objective: Break the army defending it.

FAILED Bonus Objective: Push the Gray Wolf forces all the way out of Wolf Cage Pass.

Enemy Slain: 3,452 | Enemy Captured: 0 | Losses: 58

Overall Grade: B (Moderate Success)