Tales of the Three Kingdoms: Silver Falcon Falls

Noble Lion's men were expecting us upon our return, but even so, they seemed surprised at what they saw. Just over a thousand of my horsemen had ridden past the Tiger of the Southlands and his men, fighting the fire that had turned the City of Lanterns into the City of Ash. Another thousand of Tongs' archers had marched out into the hills behind us, supported in their own battle to get to me by only by a few hundred trappers beneath Castellan, and one oxcart driven by Windstopper.

Now, only a hundred or so of my archers and trappers remained, plus the thirty two survivors of Black Altar. The only ones left of my cavalry were River, Flashammer, and myself. My forces had been decimated by my overreach. It had cost us nearly everything to chase Dreadwolf into the hills alone. And in the end, we hadn't even succeeded in catching him.

All I had managed was to get close enough to give him some strong words. He had probably had a laugh at that, atop his high watchtower with his sycophants and his wine and his prostitutes. He had probably fallen out of his chair when I had been overwhelmed by the creatures and thrown from my horse in the middle of my swearing.

Now, west of the City of Ash, high stone walls rose up in the passes where once there had been nothing but a nearly forgotten road to the City of Tombs. Thousands of feral bodies were pressed up against the walls where they had been smashed or skewered to uselessness and even more of them burned in sporadic pyres, while workers threw more into the flames. The gold-clad infantry of Noble Lion looked down at us, soot-stained and grim-faced as we passed. It was daytime, but the sky behind them was the nearly uniform gray of soot and cinder.

Somewhere along the way, that mystical system of virtue decided the Black Altar villagers were safe enough because, as I had tallied up the results of the days behind enemy lines, a paper I hadn't put there appeared in my stack of reports.

***WHAT AN ACHIEVEMENT!***

TITLE: BUT THEY MIGHT HAVE HAD IT COMING…

DESCRIPTION: You saved innocents from slaughter. No, threatening to slaughter innocents and then deciding not to go through with it does not count. You actually saved them. Good job, I guess. Unless of course they deserved it… No. Nevermind. Good job.

VIRTUE: +10

Plus ten, plus some smarmy comments. Great. Thanks. I'm the only leader willing to try to actually stop Dreadwolf when he flees with the Emperor. I'm the only "warlord" actually trying to stop the war. I'm the only one who saved any of the people west of the pass from what Dreadwolf and his rabid dog unleashed upon them, and all I get for it is plus ten 'Virtue?'

But it shouldn't have come as a surprise, because I had long since reasoned out that this system didn't care for good intentions and noble ideals. It cared about impact. And despite everything, it wasn't wrong in surmising that the net gain from my actions had been the lives of exactly one village, give or take a few villagers. I had sighed and shuffled past it to move on with the tallies of dead and injured. Ten nonsense points was certainly poor compensation for the decimation of my army and my own injuries besides.

I was too weak even to sit a horse, and River had to lead Windshear behind her own mount, while I lay in the back of Windstopper's cart beneath a layer of furs like an old grandfather. Injured and useless for who knows how long, I had counted myself among the losses of the Battle of Burning Lake.

Noble Lion himself called upon his Mandate to open a sliver in the solid stone that was the last bastion before the valley of the City of Ash. Upon seeing him, I had to get back on my feet. All I managed was to sit up and prop my back against one side of the cart while he stood at the back of it.

"Dreadwolf?" asked Noble Lion, hopefully. There had been a stream of messengers between us while my remaining forces had worked their way back through the "Hills of the Dead" as the soldiers were calling them. Perhaps Noble Lion hoped those messages had been wrong or poorly conveyed. Perhaps he was hoping that I would report something different, now that we were face-to-face.

I shook my head.

"The creatures?" Lion asked.

"The Mandate of someone called the Feral King. He's dead now," I confirmed looking at Flashammer and the mask that dangled from his saddle, "But the hills are still crawling with the dead."

Tongs and Castellan and Windstopper had fought their own battle just to get into and out of the Hills of the Dead. In that battle, nine hundred lives from among Tongs' archers had purchased my rescue, and a hundred more trappers. To bemoan an uneven trade would be to sound ungrateful for their sacrifice.

Noble Lion nodded, the messages confirmed. "There was a change in them a few days back. The creatures, I mean. We thought that might be the end of it, but…"

I looked at the nearest pyre. Some of the bodies within the flames still moved feebly as the flesh blackened and melted away.

I looked back to Lion, who seemed lost in thought. I knew what I was supposed to say. I was meant to ask after the state of the Coalition. I was meant to ask for my next orders from our Grand General. I was meant to promise that I'd be back on my feet and ready to serve again shortly.

But after what I had been through… I just couldn't do it.

After a long silence, Noble Lion looked up and saw me weighing him.

He waved his personal guard away. Windstopper looked at me, I nodded, and he too fell back an appropriate distance. River lingered, once again disguised by my father's winged helmet. I nodded again, and she couldn't argue without making me look weak – weaker than I already looked.

At length, Noble Lion climbed into the back of the oxcart and sat down beside me, the two of us alone as we had once been, back in a meeting room in an Imperial Palace, and as we had been many times in the teahouses and distilleries of the capital, since Dreadwolf seized power.

Those places no longer existed. Now we had an oxcart surrounded by walls and pyres. And the wolf still held what was left of the Empire in his teeth.

"The Coalition is in shambles," said Noble Lion without prompting. "Stallion went north to recover and the horse-lords went in just about every direction when they heard she couldn't continue the fight. Most of the southerners decided that this was good enough." He gestured around us to the still-smoking cinders of the City of Ash and the passes surrounding it plugged by stone. "Dreadwolf might still have the Emperor in custody over in the City of Tombs but without the real capital, his influence is weak. The southerners now figure they can do whatever they want down in their own provinces."

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"The Tiger?" I asked.

Noble Lion snorted a laugh. "Punched my brother in the nose on his way out. Goat was so upset that I wouldn't chase him down and 'impose martial law' that he left too."

I was about to ask, but Lion preempted me.

"Where? I have no idea. Not back to Lion's Reach surely. The bastards who took it from my father went back to squatting on my lands the first opportunity they got, which was, as it turns out, the moment they heard the City of Lanterns was no more. No, my brother took most of the Coalition's wealth and provisions somewhere he could call his own, I'm sure."

I grimaced. Goat might have needed the gold. But with his Bottomless Cup Mandate, the only reason he would have taken the provisions was to keep his half-brother from having them. It was a betrayal, and it meant Golden Goat was now treating Noble Lion as a competitor – as the worse half of a half-brother – rather than a blood-relative and an ally.

"I'm sorry, Lion," was all I could manage.

Noble Lion shrugged. "No lover. No brother. No lands, no allies. I even lost one of my best messengers in the scramble. I still have one hell of an army but no one to lead them except for myself. I can't do it alone, Sparrow."

"Don't ask me."

"Please, Sparrow. A hundred thousand men. If you were my best officer with only two thousand, think of what you could do with so many beneath your command. With your mind and my might we can finish this. We could-"

"I'm done, Lion. Look at me. My army is destroyed. I've got a hole right through the middle. The morale of my officers is wrecked and I'm only able to stay sitting upright by sheer will."

"Lead an army from a cartbed then, for all I care. By Heaven, you could probably stay in bed with that tablet and still beat half of the best generals in the Land Under Heaven. Come on, Sparrow. Six more months and then we'll have everything we ever wanted. I'll be Prime Minister and you can be Imperial Protector of the Falcon Plains, just as you were meant to be… or Grand Commandant if you want! Think of that! The same rank as your father was when he was at his peak."

I was shaking my head. A younger Sparrow would have risen to it. Two years ago, I would have believed every word, and I might have even made it come true. Now…

"I should have seen it months ago." I said, sighing. "We were never going to win with so many different banners. Dreadwolf fought like his life depended upon it, because it did. His men didn't fight for him, but because he allowed them no retreat. Frost Giant's wall, the lash of the Demon, the Rabid Dog Mandate. Again and again he's proven that he would give anything to win this fight. These lords…" I gestured to the dozen or so flagpoles looming over Lion's high command tent. Most of them were now bare, their banners having been taken down and taken home. "They only know how to fight for themselves. They only care about their own little kingdoms."

"That's not true. When we swore that oath before the altar-"

At the mention of the oath, I lost it. "Why didn't you follow me in!?" I snapped.

He seemed taken aback. In fact, he physically recoiled, the wagon bed beneath him creaking as he shifted away from my gaze. It was a credit to Noble Lion that he didn't stutter. "I told you. The army was exhausted. We needed to regroup or we wouldn't-"

"You mean you were exhausted. Your Mandate was spent. Your army was in need of regrouping. We had a chance at victory it just wouldn't be a victory by your own hand. We could have won. But Noble Lion wouldn't have been the hero."

"That's not true. Any good leader-"

"I'm a good leader. And I went in there with tired troops, no supporting infantry, no supply lines," I teetered on the edge of saying that I had no Mandate, but something about these last few months stopped me. Instead I continued on, in spite of the pause and the omission. "Dreadwolf had to leave himself basically alone in a crumbling little watchtower in order to beat me. I was only a few hundred troops short of breaking through and taking him. They wouldn't have been your troops but you could have ordered Ghostcaller, Old Head, or Swaying Willow forward. By Heaven, it could have been Orchid Mantis or Golden Goat! I would have preferred the Tiger but he was the only one doing anything else of value, while everyone else pretended at war. A few hundred troops under anyone would have been enough to secure our victory. But instead, every one of those banners secretly hoped to be the one to stumble upon the Emperor and whisk him away to 'safety' as Dreadwolf had. Or maybe to be the only fresh army left after all the losses were tallied so they could close their own armored fist on the capital. You want oaths? You swore to beat him, first and foremost, but when the opportunity presented itself, you started thinking about what comes after."

It had been as if every word had dug deeper and deeper into Lion's core – and I couldn't tell if it was because it meant he had failed as the leader of the Coalition East of the Pass, or if his own secret ambitions had been dragged into the light – but he was recovering now. He was always so quick when it came to diplomacy. "I don't agree with you but fine. This time we try it your way. Serve as one of my generals for three more months and I swear that I will always heed your council above even my own."

I was shaking my head throughout this latest desperate pitch. "It's too late. What we sought to prevent back when we first met… Back when the capital teetered on the edge of succession war and Grand Marshal Oxblood was the only one holding it together… That's already come to pass. The bricks have tumbled. The Land Under Heaven is shattered. The Emperor rules nothing anymore. Even if we were to reclaim his majesty and build him a new throne here in the City of Ash, we would have to pacify the nation province by province, commandery by commandery starting with this one. There's no Land Under Heaven left for us to fight for anymore. No, Lion. I'm going back to Iron Tower to rule my own corner of a broken kingdom. I'm taking my family back to my father's house before there's nothing left for me to fight for. I suggest you do the same."

"You'll leave me here alone, holding off the hordes? If I go, they'll spill over into the east, and then what? Your Iron Tower surrounded? The Falcon Plains overrun? An entire empire of the dead?"

I waved a hand in the air. "Leave your walls up. They wont come this way if there's nothing tempting them. And without their Feral King to make more of them, they'll dwindle."

That was it, Noble Lion searched for words. For as long as I had known him, I had never seen him speechless. He always had another point. He always had another pitch to get you back on board. He would always wear you down before he got to his final fall-back point.

Not this time.

This time, I had met every one of his points and refuted them. And now, without any more words to weigh against me, Noble Lion was simply an overtired warlord sitting behind a wall. He was just another man under siege, from within and without.

I looked up at that wall. It was impressive, no matter what it represented between us, or what side I had been on when it went up.

"Walls, passes," I mused, "and an army of living dead between us and Dreadwolf. One corner of the kingdom clings to its past and the rest of it fights over its future. Maybe that's the best we can hope for... Maybe that's the way it was meant to be from the start."

Another moment or two of silence passed between us, and then at length, Noble Lion rose and began to leave, the oxcart jostling me painfully with his retreating weight.

Once more he stopped, as he walked away but did not turn.

With his back to me, he said, "You're a good man, Sparrow. Better than most give you credit for. But if you can't support me in this, then I'll do it alone, if I have to. I am, after all, fated for greatness."

Then he strode off. It was the last I saw of Noble Lion for many years.

A distance away, River had watched the whole exchange. Something in Noble Lion's posture had caused her to straighten up. She knew I had rebuffed him.

Even now, when I look back on that moment, I still wonder if I made the right decision.