Tales of the Three Kingdoms: Silver Falcon Falls

My plan was simple – obvious, even – because it was an amalgamation of other plans that had worked against the feral horde. Split up. Thin out. Run away.

It had taken some conference between me, River, and Sheriff. And I had protested more than once about River's role in all this. But with my arm bound and useless, my head still splitting, and my vision still double, I didn't exactly have much of a case to play the pivotal role, myself.

Besides, even at my best, I couldn't hold a candle to what River and her Mandate could do.

In the end, I had to yield to sense… and yield to my wife.

We all ate our fill from what little stores the villagers had, cobbled together as much makeshift armor and weaponry as we could, and then began to move the stones that were holding the gates closed.

Within the village, every man, woman, and child capable of holding a sharpened stick waited atop the walls, this time, not looking outward, but inward. Babes were strapped to their mothers' backs covered in teakettles and frying pans for protection. Children were tethered to their fathers like dogs or falcons on thick, braided leads so that they could not be separated. Those that were unattached – like Sheriff – formed the front lines to either side of the gate.

I however, sat atop Windshear right in the center of the gate only a few paces back. A gleaming target. A bloody, stinking, gleaming target of hot-man-and-horse-flesh.

The horde surged against the gate, causing the wood to buckle and creak.

We did nothing about it.

A few more ebbs and flows like driftwood atop a tide of humanity, and with a CRACK the gates gave way, bloody, grotesque faces snarling as they surged through.

I wheeled Windshear and took off in the opposite direction.

There was nowhere to run, of course, within the walls of the village. Had there been a back door, or a secret tunnel we would have used it. No, there were just a few dozen stone houses set into the rock, forming a ring around the Black Altar pavilion. Windshear and I used every span of that circle to our advantage.

The moment me and my horse took off running, two big shiny slabs of meat, most of the feral monsters took off after us. The fastest of them naturally pushed ahead of the others, the slower ones falling behind, taking what had been an impenetrable knot of evil and stretching it out like an entrail. And all the while, the villagers rained down rocks and stabbed spears down at the brainless creatures as they passed.

As soon as I had almost completed my circuit around the opulent government building, leading as many of the monsters behind me into the back of the village loop, River and her Forgotten Empress shot out of the shadows of the pavilion.

With the majority of the horde having followed me around the village loop, the villagers – packed around and above the gate, as they were – succeeded in thinning out enough of the horde's tail end, that River was able to force her stamping Empress through. The portion of the horde that had not managed to get inside the gates turned and followed her out into the open ground around the village. She was the newest shiny object, and even as some were being brained by rocks or stabbed by spears from above, many followed my wife and her mount out into the open space beyond.

This was a microcosm of our larger plan. Split up. Thin out. Run away.

Now that most of the horde was following River, and the rest of it still trailed me, the villagers had a chance to cut their way through the soft middle of the horde – themselves a tight knot of improvised infantry – and force their way out of the gate. Only one man stayed behind.

Saltlick, the young miner, stood atop the stone archway above the gate, pickaxe in hand. The moment Windshear had completed his circuit of the village, the villagers were already outside the gates, heading the opposite direction as River.

Now that River had led most of the swarm down the wrong road, the villagers were headed down the right road – the road that led back east toward the City of Ash and hopefully toward a fortified line of Noble Lion's golden infantry – and I still trailed my portion of the horde that had chased me into the village, veritably filling it as I kept Windshear just out of their reach.

But I couldn't circle the village forever. Even as I found myself back before the gate I had started at, the slowest members of the surviving horde saw that I had lapped them, and turned around to come after me. Only when I was moments away from being pulled down, holding the reins with my nearly useless arm and hacking at feral hands with the Son-of-Heaven Saber, did I allow Windshear his head to bolt through the gate after everyone else.

No plan was perfect – especially when these creatures seemed to randomly choose their quarry from the list of anything-that-moved – and even as the villagers fought their own stragglers, a few had lingered in the gate.

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Windshear shied as we pushed past them.

But we made it through alright. Then with a mighty "clang. clang. clang. CRACK…" Saltlick brought down the stone archway on the heads of those that trailed me.

I looked back to see the very rock beneath his feet give way and consume him in a cloud of dust. After a few more bounds across open space, now blessedly clear of the feral creatures, I looked back again to see that the town walls that had once been our prison, had become the tomb for perhaps a hundred or more living dead.

Now the horde was well and truly split up, half having followed River down the wrong road, the other half caught behind a wall of rubble where I had led them. I only hoped that Saltlick had died quickly in the archway's collapse, rather than face those creatures alone in tight quarters, possibly even immobilized or pinned among the rubble.

The villagers hurried down the correct road toward the east, Sheriff's spear succinctly skewering any odd creature that tumbled out of the hills. All that was left for me to do was to await River's return. With the villagers disappearing behind me, it grew strangely quiet in the open space outside the town of Black Altar, the moaning and hissing of the beasts trapped within muffled by the thick stone walls and subsiding as they apparently forgot what they had been chasing only moments ago.

I looked back toward the villagers where they shuffled off toward the rising sun, then returned my gaze to the deep darkness in the west. I could see nothing of the train that had followed River west, now, but, unless my eyes were playing tricks on me, I thought I could sense the shadows that flitted over the hills, seeming to key in on the source of their summons. Unless my ears where playing tricks on me, I thought I could hear, on the westerly wind, the whispers of the drowned souls, having travelled far from their lakes and mountain creeks and perhaps even from the Yellow River somewhere to the north of us before it bent away into the Lost Province of the Shepherds.

Knowing I could not help her now, knowing I could do nothing but wait, I flinched and cringed every time I heard a feral voice rise up in the west, then relaxed only slightly each time that voice gurgled out.

I turned back toward the rising sun, to find that the villagers had now gone quiet because they had travelled beyond my earshot. They had gone quiet because they had stopped, staring motionlessly into the darkness with me to await the return of my River, our savior.

We had split them, by virtue of my strategy and Saltlick's sacrifice to destroy the gate beneath his own feet. But it was River's job to thin them out. My wife with her Shadow River Mandate was the only one who could make an appreciable dent in the mass of humanity that had, for one reason or another, coagulated in this corner of the hills.

Perhaps I had led them here. Perhaps River had, when she followed my trail. Perhaps it was random chance that attracted the feral creatures that might have once lived in the City of Lanterns, or might have come from any number of the surrounding villages here in the western hills.

In any case, I only hoped that River had not cornered herself when she called upon her Mandate. I could only pray to Heaven that her Mandate was strong enough to keep that many creatures from dragging her from her horse, before she came back to her senses.

It was a paradox of her Mandate that she was at her most helpless as the very moment she was at her most destructive. "There was always a price for power," a room full of conspiratorial seers had told me long ago, when the City of Lanterns had still been the capital of the Land Under Heaven. River's Mandate was more powerful, more deadly, than any I had ever seen in the Land Under Heaven. It also came with the greatest costs that I knew of.

If the monsters didn't slip past her shadows and take her down, her own shadows might drag her soul away to join their ranks.

The dawn warmed our backs and stretched across the dusty clearing in increments until it faltered among the hills packed in around the western road. But still we watched. At length, in the near silence, we heard the tired, unhurried clip-clop of hooves on the stoney road. We saw the hooves first as they stepped into the sun, then the white forelegs of River's horse, then its chest, spattered with blood and grime.

River's horse carried her into the sun, but even in broad daylight, she remained in utter shadow. The abyssal demons, the lost souls of the deep, the phantoms of the drowned swirled around her, whispering, packed so close to her that she may as well have been wearing them as armor. As several of them peeled off of her and fixed dark faceless eyes on me and the villagers behind me, I could see River's eyes, just barely, as if she wore a mask of shadows.

They were still… aware.

Every other time she had called upon her Shadow River Mandate, it had taken over her body, wracking her with convulsions as those she summoned performed their grizzly duties. Now, it might seem, to these villagers, that she had complete control over them.

But I knew otherwise.

The first time I had seen her call upon her Mandate, it had come at the cost of many innocent lives. That was when she had confided in me, in the dark hours of night that followed, that one day she might call upon these creatures and they would take her as well.

As the shadows packed in so tight around her that even in the slanting dawn she was lost in their gloom, River's eyes were clear and wide and fixed, as if a pack of wolves had closed in tight around her, and the only thing keeping the beasts from tearing her apart was her refusal to meet their gaze. She stared straight ahead, exuding utter control over herself and her fear, lest the slightest movement from her trigger their attack.

Her horse, the reins lying slack across its neck, ambled toward us of its own volition.

The shadows looked at me – at the villagers – hatefully. Jealously. But the people of Black Altar knew not the danger that River carried with her.

They saw only a Hero of the Times, returning to them after having single-handedly vanquished hundreds of feral monsters.

And in the light of dawn, they cheered.

Their voices rose to Heaven, calling out to the Lady of the Darkness.

Something changed in her eyes then, at the admiration of mothers and fathers, at the confused stares of the children that she had just saved, and she was no longer afraid of what the shadows might do. It seemed that because of these people and the faith they had in her that she now truly believed that she was in control of the darkness she had lived with all of her life.

She thrust her arms out to the sides and with that the shadows left her, flowing across the surface of the earth and hills to find the dark holes and deep wells they had come from.

The people of Black Altar roared to the sky!