A Magic of Nightfall

Aubri cu’Ulcai

Commandant Aubri cu’UlcaI looked backward and shook his head, wondering how the battle had come to this. It should never have happened. It wasn’t possible.

He wondered how the new Kraljica would receive the news, and expected he knew the answer. And the only excuse he had was that the Westlanders refused to fight honorably, as they should.

It had begun only three short days before…

Several chevarittai-as was common-rode out on their destriers to call for individual challenge as the Westlander forces approached Villembouchure. No Westlander warriors rode out to meet their challenge; the front ranks of the army marched forward, unbroken and unfazed even as the chevarittai mocked their honor and their courage. They were ignored or, worse, attacked with cowardly arrows and fire from the Westlander spellcasters. Three chevarittai were killed before Aubri had the horns call “return” and the chevarittai turned their warhorses and galloped back behind the lines of waiting infantry and war-teni.

Aubri and his offiziers huddled; they expected the attack to start as soon as the Westlander army crested the last hill before Villembouchure. After all, it was just before Second Call, and there were still hours of daylight. The Westlanders had come within a double bowshot of the front lines of the Holdings force and halted… and remained stopped. The chevarittai and his offiziers had pleaded with Aubri to allow them to advance and engage. He’d refused, regretfully-to do so would mean to abandon the earthworks and bunkers they’d erected in the past few days. The Holdings army was arrayed in a perfect defensive position, and Aubri was loath to move from that.

That had been the first day. He’d gone to sleep that night convinced of eventual victory-the Westlander advance would break against their hardened lines. The Westlander force, as his scouts and all the reports from the field had verified, was substantially smaller than their own: no army of that size, not even the Firenzcians at their best, would have been able to overrun the defenses Aubri had erected. The ships of the Tehuantin fleet clogged the A’Sele, but were too far from the field of battle to affect the issue; in any case, Aubri knew that a Nessantican naval force was on its way to deal with the enemy ships. At worst, the walls of Villembouchure would hold them if for some unforeseen reason Aubri could not contain them in the fields outside the city. The Westlander forces were far too small for an effective siege, and Villembouchure was well-provisioned and could withstand a siege from an even larger army for at least a month.

Yes, Aubri was confident. Despite the fact that his army had been hastily mustered and most of the infantry was poorly trained, his offiziers and the chevarittai with them were battle-tested by the many skirmishes over the last few decades with Firenzcia and the Coalition nations.

They would prevail here.

The battle began on the second day, but not-as in all of Aubri’s experience and the experience of the offiziers who had trained him-at the advent of dawn. No… the attack came well before the sun clawed its way into the sky. And it came strangely. The lookouts posted in the foremost bunkers had sent urgent messengers running to the commandant’s tent behind the lines, the uproar waking Aubri from a light, dream-troubled sleep.

“A storm walking toward us on legs of lightning,” they clamored. “A wall of cloud…”

Alarm horns were sounding over the encampment and soldiers were hastily donning armor and grabbing weapons as offiziers screamed orders. In the distance, blue light flickered and danced and thunder boomed, yet above them the sky was clear, pricked with the crowded and familiar constellations. Aubri mounted the horse his attendants hurriedly brought to him. He galloped quickly toward the front, joined on the way by A’Teni Vallis ca’Ostheim of Villembouchure, who was in charge of the war-teni. “What in the name of Cenzi is going on?” ca’Ostheim roared. His shock of thick white hair seemed to spark in the light of the storm ahead; his belly sagged over the pommel of his horse’s saddle. The lashes of his eyes were still clotted with sleep rime. A thick gold necklace with a broken globe hanging from it bounced on his chest as they rode. “I thought you said the attack would come at dawn, Commandant.”

“I said that, yes,” Aubri replied calmly. “It appears that the Westlanders weren’t listening.”

At the first line of bunkers, the two men stopped, gazing out over the space between the two armies. The Westlander encampment, which when Aubri had gone to bed had been twinkling on the far hillside like yellow stars fallen to earth, was no longer visible. Instead, an apparition of nature confronted them: a wall of black, roiling cloud perhaps twelve men high and floating two men above the ground. Like some ominous, supernatural monster, the cloud-creature crawled toward them on hundreds of legs of flickering lightning. The flashes stabbed at the ground below, seeming to pull the clouds forward a few feet with each stroke. Aubri could see the ground tearing wherever the lightning struck, leaving a trail of storm-footprints ripped from the ground. A constant din of thunder and a high, crackling snarl accompanied the vision. All around them, the army of the Holdings stared at the creature with faces illuminated by erratic white-blue. Aubri could feel the panic moving through the ranks, the men falling involuntarily backward a few steps, away from the mounds of low earthworks and fortifications they’d raised. “Hold!” Aubri cried out to them. The horns took up the call along the line: “Hold!”, and the men shook themselves as if awakening from a nightmare. They clutched useless spears, gazing at the monster that confronted them. It was nearly across the open ground now and Aubri could glimpse nothing beyond its ferocious border.

“A’Teni ca’Ostheim, this is magic-it’s your domain.” Aubri had to nearly shout over the increasing din of the storm-creature to ca’Ostheim, the leader of the war-teni. “Can you stop this?”

“I’ll try,” he answered, dismounting. He began to chant; his hands moved in strange patterns in front of him. Aubri could feel the hair on his arms standing up as ca’Ostheim continued to chant and as the lightning began to touch the edges of the ramparts-he didn’t know which it was that caused the reaction. Aubri’s steed, though accustomed to the clamor, noise, and sights of war, was stamping worriedly at the ground, half-rearing away from the apparition. Aubri had to lean down and pat the horse’s neck to calm it. “A’Teni! Soon, please.”

Ca’Ostheim raised his hands; the chanting came to a halt. He gestured toward the storm. A wind shrieked outward from the war-teni, and where it touched the storm-creature, the clouds were torn apart. Soldiers cheered, but to either side, the storm still crawled forward, unabated, and now lighting bolts tore at the ramparts themselves, the forked legs reaching out to where the soldiers of the Holdings stood. Screams rose from either side as the bolts seared and shattered the ranks, sliding inexorably forward. And now the sundered halves of the clouds were coming back together; eager tongues of lightning were beginning to flash in front of Aubri. Ca’Ostheim had sunk to his knees. He shook his head up to Aubri. “Commandant, I can’t… Not alone. I need to gather the other war-teni…”

“To your horse, then,” Aubri told him. He looked to his banner bearers and the messenger horns as the screams of the wounded and dying vied with the thundering. “Retreat!” he shouted. “Back to the next line!”

The banners signaled retreat; the horns sounded the call. The ranks of soldiers broke instantly, those who still could turning to flee the storm. Faintly, in the space beyond the storm, he could hear new voices: the battle cries of the Westlanders.

Aubri yanked hard on the reins of his mount and followed his men.

That was the morning of the second day. The rest of the day went no better. The war-teni were able to disperse the spell-storm, but the task exhausted them and they had little energy left for other spells. Behind the storm, the ranks of the Westlanders-warriors with scarred and painted faces-surged forward. The hand-to-hand combat was fierce, but the chevarittai and infantry could match sword for sword. However, for the Westlander spellcasters, wielding sticks from which they cast spells, Aubri had no answer-the war-teni were largely depleted from their earlier efforts, and by late afternoon, Aubri called for the army to return to Villembouchure, behind the walls and stout gates. He was convinced that he could have held the outer defenses, but the price in lives would have been enormous. He did what any Commandant in his position would have done: he had the horns blow “disengage.”

By evening, they were inside and the portcullises were lowered and locked.

That ended the second day.

In any normal battle, that would have signaled the beginning of a siege that might have lasted weeks or months before being broken, and Aubri knew that the Westlanders didn’t have weeks or months-not in a strange land where they were surrounded by enemies. This was why Aubri had found it easy to call for disengagement as soon as it was apparent that victory on the fields before the city would only come at huge cost. Being inside the walls of Villembouchure must lead to eventual victory. Inevitably. And he could wait.

But the siege would last only one day.

Aubri was on the city walls, staring down at the smoldering fires of the main Westlander encampment in the dawn. That was when the arcing balls of smoke rose suddenly, arrowing toward them: a dozen or more of them, all seeming to target the great Western Gate of the city. The war-teni stationed along the walls reacted instantly, as they should, and-trained in the art of holding their spells in their minds for a time (which none of them would have admitted was a Numetodo trait forced on the war-teni by Archigos Ana)-the response of their dispersal spells was swift. But the fireballs continued on their flight. The closest war-teni looked at Aubri with wide, stricken eyes. “Commandant, those aren’t spells -”

He got no further. The thick walls of the city shook impossibly as the fireballs slammed into the gate and the surrounding stones. Where they touched, impossible explosions tore into the stones and steel and wood. Aubri, holding onto the battlement to keep his footing, witnessed huge chunks of granite flying away as if they were pebbles tossed by a child. Fire erupted from directly below him, as white-hot as a smithy’s blaze; he could feel it washing over his skin. He heard screams and cries from below.

“The gate is broken! The walls are sundered!”

The Westlanders were already rushing toward the breach, as archers belatedly cast a rain of arrows down on them. Some of the warriors went down, but many-too many-were still coming, and now Aubri saw more fireballs arcing from the north and south toward those gates.

He ran down from the battlements into bloody, savage chaos.

That was the third day. The day the city was lost. Impossibly.

Now Aubri stared back at Villembouchure from a hilltop along the Avi A’Sele. He gazed at the greasy smoke smearing the sky above the broken walls with the remnants of his army gathered around him and A’Teni ca’Ostheim at his side. Inside the town… Inside were the Westlanders.

“This isn’t possible,” he muttered.

But it was. And now the defense of Nessantico herself must be prepared. Aubri shook his head again at the sight.

He turned his horse and gestured, and he and the army began their limping retreat back toward the capital.