Tales of the Three Kingdoms: Silver Falcon Falls

As the moon reached its zenith and my column of eleven hundred horse moved forward in silence, save for the crunch of gravel beneath their hooves and the jingle of harness rebounding from the walls of the gorge around us, there wasn't really a climactic end to the chase. More than once on the long, dreary march, I had envisioned catching up to the column just as Dreadwolf was within sight of the City of Tombs, ending with a flat-out race to catch him before he gained the relative safety of its old, crumbling walls. But that was not to be.

One moment there was nothing but more track in front of us, the next step promising more of the same, and the next…

There was the Demon, silent and still in our way.

Of course, his Red Hare's mane blazed in the darkness and we saw that first. Then we could make out the towering shadow of his beast's black scales along with the rider's shimmering black armor, looking like one great, seamless monster of lore. He was alone no longer, but had a line of elite cavalry arrayed behind him, perhaps three thousand, though I could not say for sure in the confined space of the hills. Most wore heavy plate, a strange sort of armor that I had only ever seen among Dreadwolf's men. Most looked almost as dangerous as the Demon himself.

Almost.

This was it then. Dreadwolf's rearguard and the last thing protecting him from utter annihilation. His best officer, wounded. His best cavalry, tired out by the weight of their armor and their spoils.

I surveyed the land around us as Windshear slowed. One day, this place would be known as Blood-Offering Bowl, and the people would shun it for a generation.

The track was wider here, but only just. I silently reined in and my cavalry fanned out beside me. Twenty horse to either side, a stoney depression between hills before us. The steep, stoney faces rose up around us, like one of the great arenas they had built far to the west at the other end of the Silk Road.

I imagined what it might look like to have concentric circles of people screaming for your blood, or the blood of your challenger. But, now, there were none to witness what might become the most decisive clash in the war, save for wisps of mist and shadow.

I looked to River, and she nodded. She could feel her lost souls, her abyssal demons, even now, waiting to be called.

The Demon looked left and right to make sure his lines were set. I did the same. No speeches, no cheers. Just two tired armies facing one another. This one would be decided by will as much as weight of iron and muscle.

The Demon's mount took two steps forward.

"Who wants him?" I asked.

"Me!" Flashammer surged ahead of us and every horseman in that tight valley launched into motion all at once. Flashammer became the tip of our spear, the Demon the tip of theirs.

An exhilaration mounted within me that I had never felt before, not even with the Tiger's Bloodlust or Stallion's Courage. This was no Mandate. This was what it felt like to be locked in a death struggle. There was nowhere to go. No thinking around it. Were we strong enough to choke the life from our enemy? Or would they flip us on our back and do the same to us? This would be the worst battle I would ever be a part of, and most likely my last.

I didn't have much time to dwell on it.

The line of heavy horses in front of us went from smudges in the darkness to a wall of hair and armor in the span of a few heartbeats. One moment I could barely make out wide, white eyes and bared teeth jostling up ahead, and the next I could count the bristles on the chin of the man who was about to crash into me.

There was a moment where I could feel the Demon's Mandate rearing back, ready to crack like a whip of fear and freeze us all in place, then there was a different crack, a crack like thunder, and in my periphery I could tell that Flashammer had flashed forward just in time to thrust his spear at the Demon's heart and interrupt his call for his Mandate.

I had only a moment to register that fact before I crashed into the charging horse in front of me and I was lost to the blackness of war.

***

I found myself swinging my sword back and forth like a madman. Someone was screaming and I realized it was me. I don't know how I got here, pressed in on all sides by horses, Windshear unable to move beneath me but biting and tossing his head even as other gray-armored horses did the same.

All I knew was that those men were enemies and these ones were allies. My horse wanted to move forward and their horses didn't want us to.

The Son-of-Heaven Saber rose and fell, and there was nothing holy about it. It might as well have been a meat-cleaver the way I used it. Blood sprayed black in the moonlight. The deafening clang of metal on metal reverberated from the hilltops.

At some point the adrenaline became too much for my empty stomach and I vomited, some enemy cavalryman taking advantage of my convulsion to swing for my head. His halberd clanged from my helmet and I couldn't even see what happened to him. All I knew was that there was no second swing and that now I could feel the air on my sweating brow.

From that point forward my saber never stopped moving. Windshear never stopped bucking.

I locked eyes with some man in gray-iron as I twisted my saber in his armpit. He reached empty, gauntleted hands for my armor but I slapped them away as he died and shoved him downward, before he could pull me down with him.

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Downward.

The darkness was too complete beneath us, and I could not even see him get trampled. The sounds of battle around me were too loud and I couldn't even hear his bones crack. Down there was only darkness and death, like a chasm in the deep. Up here was flashing steel and the struggle for life and this was where I wanted to stay – at least as long as there was no third option beside struggle and death.

A blade swung for me and I got my saber up in time, gasping for air as I did so. But another came from another direction and it was all I could do to throw my forearm up before myself. The blade bit through armor and into bone, but what did I care given the alternative? My own blade thrust back in the general direction of the blow and suddenly I could feel my own blood spray as the foreign object came suddenly and violently loose from my flesh.

I screamed and slumped in my saddle as the edges of my vision closed in, but I felt no pain. Too much adrenaline for that. Wouldn't last long if a halberd fell on my head now. I pushed myself up, my saber in a guard.

River was beside me, her mount jostling my own, her straight sword stabbing through the faceplate of the nearest mounted enemy. It snagged and the falling body pulled it from her grip. She drew a long dagger-of-war from her waist.

I had a moment to see the Demon, still locked in mortal combat with Flashammer…

By Heaven how long had we been fighting? Moments? Eons?

Suddenly the Demon swung his halberd in a wide, powerful arc above his head. Flashammer made to parry with his spearpoint but misjudged it. The Demon's halberd took off the head of his spear and Flashammer only just threw himself backward in the saddle to keep his own head.

The delay bought the Demon enough time to kick his mount and barrel through the nearest horse – I couldn't tell which side it belonged to – and launch itself up the nearest hillside. Flashammer followed in the gap made by Red Hare, flashing to keep up.

The Demon crested the hill and turned, silhouetting himself against the moon and I felt his whip crack. Red lightning streaked behind him, but not even a heartbeat later, Flashammer's horse streaked forward to engage again. As my officer's warhammer swung for the Demon, fueled by his own Flash Forward Mandate, blue lightning cracked the sky, crossing the Demon's red.

Hammer and halberd clashed a dozen more times until Red Hare asserted its authority. Flashammer's horse sidestepped and blinked backward and then the two… just stopped. Both men looked down the far side of the hill, which I could not see from my vantage, and simply sat panting atop motionless horses, dumbstruck.

The Demon looked at Flashammer and said something. Flashammer snarled something in reply, then Red Hare launched, full speed, along the crest of the hills, not toward Flashammer or toward the fighting down here in the bowl, but toward empty hills.

The Demon running! Why?

Flashammer kicked his own mount in pursuit and the two disappeared at the next dip in the ridge.

Windshear stumbled, throwing its head and forcing my attention back to my surroundings. I was ensconced within white horses, my own crack troops, River's Screaming Cavalry, as I clutched my wounded arm to my chest, holding both reins and saber in the same hand. Even as I glanced around, the silver-white blades of the Screaming Cavalry fell, breaking through the last shell of gray-black iron. The last of the Demon's elites fell to River's own dagger in his eye.

My father's – and now my wife's – elites were the only reason I had been able to watch Flashammer's bout without a sword splitting my forehead. The last true Silver Falcon clan warriors were the only reason some enterprising young wolf hadn't followed up on my wounded arm and taken my head.

Now our mounts were cantering clear of the blood and bodies on the far side of the mountain bowl. And there were very few left of us alive.

Behind us, there were a few gray cavalry who had survived, and even now the lingering men beneath my father's banner ganged up on them to cut them down.

None surrendered. I don't know that they would have been allowed to if they had.

I counted twelve white horses around me. Another twenty or so motley colored ones cleaning up behind. This was as near to complete and mutual annihilation as any battle of such numbers could possibly come.

"Sparrow."

Something about River's tone – halfway between sadness and awe – snapped my attention around to follow her gaze.

Ahead of us, just within the choke point at the far end of the bowl, a gray banner flew, trimmed in black. Gold had been added to it, once he had become Prime Minister. It was the personal standard of Dreadwolf himself and it flew atop his flag chariot, which was more a hulking, monstrous wagon of spiked iron and black wood, pulled by four armor-clad oxen. A dozen standard carts flanked it, heaped high with gold and grain.

There were not even five soldiers left in front of this last mobile bastion of Dreadwolf and even as I watched, two of them threw down their swords and fled.

I drew breath to give the order for the final charge, and River had even shifted forward in her saddle when a new sound stopped us cold. It was a horrible sound that echoed throughout the entire hillside, all around us.

I ignored it, again about to give the final order. But a thought struck me, as they often did, and I gave voice to it without really understanding its implications.

"Where… are the people?"

River looked at me, confused. She shook her head, thinking I had lost it and I could tell she was about to go finish this, no matter what I said. But my question was immediately answered in the most nightmarish way imaginable.

From behind us, a single man's black horse had crested the hill. He wore the heavy gray breastplate, gauntlets and sabatons of an elite horseman beneath the Demon, but his face was masked in worked iron like a well-off leper, and a hooded, overlarge cloak was draped across his shoulders. His beast's head hung as if sick or dead-tired, and its mouth foamed, dripping pink saliva on the stone in front of it. Sores puckered its body and blood ringed its hooves.

"Witness," rasped the man, "my Rabid Dog Mandate."

No. River had warned me of this. She had told me that Dreadwolf would have at least one more great Mandate waiting in the wings. But we were so close now I had hoped she would be wrong. I had almost believed she was wrong.

The newcomer threw something high in the air, and I was too caught off guard to try to do anything other than recoil and flinch away. But when it landed, I realized that it was only a rotten, stinking, bag of festering meat. It smelled horrendous as it thwacked to the ground around us, right amongst the steaming corpses of the battle just past.

The horrible, gurgling sound echoing from the hills around us transformed into a million monstrous screams, throaty and… feral.

With that change in pitch, the sound grew deafening and furious, even more overwhelming than three thousand armored horse meeting at full speed in an amphitheater.

The entire citizenry of the City of Lanterns came pouring down the edges of the bowl from all sides, like termites coursing out of a split and rotten log.

Their eyes bled. Their mouths foamed. Their faces were twisted up into a horrendous look of animal frenzy as they poured over one another, heedlessly trampling each other, bodies heaping up in places as the mass of humanity seethed toward us like rabid dogs snapping their jaws for flesh.

Now I saw the purpose of the stinking, rotten bag of meat. Unfortunately, what little remained of my forces was standing on a field of stinking, fresh meat. Unfortunately… me, River, and my Screaming Cavalry were also made of stinking meat.

The mass of feral humanity seething down from the hills all around us took no time in making that realization. Their feverish eyes locked onto us and our mounts as a million rabid animals that had once been the City of Lanterns screamed toward us.