Arts of Dark and Light: Book 01 - A Throne of Bones (117 page)

Manlius pulled out his sword from the stricken boy’s torso and laughed at his dying opponent. A simple sidestep, and the lad had all but impaled himself on Manlius’s sword. He didn’t bother to finish the boy off. He had killed enough men and orcs over the years to know a mortal wound when he felt one. Instead, he looked left and right, seeing if he could sneak in a strike to help one of his line mates before he took on his next opponent.

These brats from Legio XVII were greener than an apple in spring, and he could see that two or three more had already fallen to the more experienced swords of the Third. No wonder Magnus had simply flung them forward despite their inferior ground and without care for their lack of numbers. This was like killing kittens.

But even kittens had claws. The centurion—that was just bad luck. He hoped Musius Bauto wasn’t too badly hurt. Manlius hadn’t actually seen Bauto go down, but since it was the voice of Phobus, the optio, bawling out orders and encouragement now, it appeared that the word the centurion had been wounded by an arrow was legitimate.

No opportunities presented themselves, so Manlius took note of the young legionary who came forward to fill the gap in the line left by his idiot predecessor. Manlius doubted he’d be so fortunate as to find his second opponent as readily accommodating as the first, but he again he waited patiently, letting the other man uselessly expend his energy by banging on Manlius’s shield to no avail.

It was almost too easy. He watched as the other’s shield dropped lower by a finger or two with each exchange, and he kept an eye on the sword that came back lower with each futile thrust and jab. Soon enough, the opening for which he’d been waiting appeared. He stepped into a half-hearted thrust and blocked it aggressively with his shield then slashed at the other’s eyes over the man’s lowered shield. His opponent had no choice but to reel backward and to his left to avoid the flashing blade, leaving him off-balance and vulnerable to Manlius’s next move.

Manlius putg his shoulder behind his shield and smashed his full weight into the reeling man, who went down onto his left side as his sword went flying out of reach. Manlius continued charging forward until he was crouching over the prone man, but he held his shield up high to block both the thrusting pilum and the downward stroke of a sword from the ranks behind his fallen foe.

Even as he blocked their attempts to defend their companion, he was stabbing downward, once, twice, three times. Once, his sword met armor and slid off it into the ground, but the other two attempts met with flesh that gave way before it. Without looking to see how badly he’d wounded the man, he leaped back into the lines before the legionaries on his left and right could cut him off from the rest of the Third.

Manlius was breathing hard, but he wasn’t the least bit tired. He felt more alive than ever as he saw four pairs of hands reach out from the ranks behind to drag his wounded foe off toward the rear, leaving a nice, wide trail of blood behind him. Six-to-one that man would die before the end of the day, Manlius thought, satisfied. With that much blood, at least one of his blows must have struck something vital. Two up, two down. He could do this all day. All bloody day!

He stared with no little amusement at his third opponent, who still had his pilum and appeared to be intent upon using it instead of his sword, poking it out in a manner that betrayed his panic. Manlius could see the fear in the young man’s green eyes, and he laughed out loud, which seemed to further frighten the boy.

“Didn’t anyone teach you anything?” he marveled, shaking his head, as the head of the spear licked out at him and back again like a large, black snake’s tongue.

The boy dropped his shield and jabbed the pilum toward him again.

Tiring of the game, Manlius grabbed the spear by the shank and jerked it past his left side. As he expected, the terrified youth instinctively clung to his weapon and was pulled forward by it, thus allowing Manlius to drive his sword right into his face, above his helmet’s cheekpad and through his left eye, killing him instantly. He had to push the dead man off his blade with his foot, which he did before picking up his shield again stepping back into the line.

Three up, three down. Manlius was beginning to think that actual kittens might put up more of a fight than this piss-poor excuse for an Amorran legion.

He flicked his blade at the next man to step forward, sprinkling his face with the blood of his predecessor.

“Do you renounce the devil and all his works, little one?” Manlius mocked his next victim. “Best do so now, since you’ll be seeing him soon enough!”

Then an unseen fist smashed into his throat. Manlius stumbled backward, his eyes bulging in disbelief. He hadn’t even seen his opponent move! What had happened?

He tried to bring up his shield, but his strength was suddenly sapped by some mysterious force, and he couldn’t even seem to move.

What was going on? A fiery hand gripped his throat, burning him even as it mercilessly choked him. He tried to call out to his fellows, but only blood came out of his mouth. His mind screamed the furious curses that his voice could not. He took one last defiant step toward the enemy, then toppled over onto his face.

“Now there was a throw!” Parthender complimented Orodes as they saw the big legionary, his larynx crushed by the perfectly placed stone, crash to the ground like a felled tree. “The damned fool never knew what hit him.”

“Rest in peace.” Orodes lifted a hand in blessing the man he’d just slain. Then he shook a finger at his friend. “Don’t mock the dead. One day, we too will be in their number. And we may hope that he is not damned, but rather is now at peace in the bosom of the Inviolate. It is not for us to judge.”

Parthender sighed as he began slowly whirling his sling behind him. “Can’t you, for once, just be happy killing somebody who needed killing?”

“Never.” Orodes shook his head and withdrew another lead bullet from his pouch. He ran his thumb over the sigil carved in the side, as was his habit. “We diminish ourselves, even as we exalt those we kill.”

There was a soft snap as Parthender released his bullet, which disappeared into the mass of the enemy legion without any noticable effect. “Then I suppose you’re pretty damned diminished by now, Orodes! For someone who says he regrets killing, you’re rather good at it.”

“God would not give us gifts He did not intend for us to use,” Orodes observed, scanning the slope below for a likely target. “If we are to praise Him in all things, how shall I not praise Him even as I slay the children of His Creation? In any event, we should be grateful. Think of how our forefathers would envy us!”

“That one, there, the signifer. He’s a ways off—think you can hit him?”

Orodes put a hand over his eyes against the sun, peered in the direction Parthender was pointing, and continued as if he had not been interrupted. “Our ancestors fought the empire with great bravery and died. And here we find ourselves, after eight generations under the imperial heel, eight generations filled with countless prayers for deliverance, watching Amorrans kill one another and being paid well to kill more of them ourselves. Are we not blessed?”

“I’ve never been able to tell if you’re a philosopher or a lunatic.” Parthender followed the path of the shot as it flew toward the Amorran holding the third century’s banner.

“You can, however, tell that that one is fortunate,” Orodes said, chuckling, as the banner wavered below, its bearer lurching to one side after having been struck, more or less harmlessly, on the side of the helmet. “God has spared him for now, so who am I to object?”

Parthender didn’t reply. His head exploded in an obscene splatter of red mist as a rock significantly larger than the pellets they’d been hurling at the legionaries below sent his headless body flopping to the ground, then crushed Orodes right arm, shoulder, and hip as it bounced.

As rapidly as it had come, the boulder departed, continuing on its bloody path through the crowd of Balerans behind them.

Stunned by the awesome violence of the unexpected assault, Orodes lay on his back, staring up at the lightly clouded sky in mute astonishment. It took him a few moments to realize what had happened, and when he did, he began to laugh at the foolish arrogance of Man, of which he knew he was the first and foremost example.

He raised his head long enough to see the red ruin of his friend lying nearby, then he looked down at his own mangled body. Poor Parthender. At least it had been quick for him. Orodes felt he would not have minded missing out on the pain that now threatened to transform him from a rational being into a mindless, screaming animal. But at least death would come soon, judging by the quantity of blood that was seeping out onto the ground.

More importantly, soon he would finally have all the answers that had so long eluded him. Forgive me, Inviolate Lord, he begged, for I have sinned against You, and to You I commend my tattered, blackened, prideful, blood-stained soul, in the name of Your Most Holy and Immaculate Son.

I praise you in all things, Lord, even this, my final hour.
Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace.

The Baleran died, still staring open-eyed at the sky, with the edges of his mouth turned up in a faintly ironic smile.

Clodius Secundus winced as Fuscus, his optio, put his hands on his hips and shook his head in disgust. The stone his crew had just loosed went bouncing wildly among a group of slingers, a full ten degrees away from where he’d told them to throw it.

“Sordes, Secundus,” Fuscus said. “What in the stinking sulfurous smoke of Satan’s fartbiscuit was that? You do know what ‘cavalry’ means, right? You know, the plummy arses who sits on the little horsies? The bastards that’s riding this way now?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Then throw the damn rocks at them!” Fuscus screamed at him. “Magnus don’t care about no pebble throwers. We got to thin out that horse before they run over our bleeding flank!”

The optio pointed, and Secundus could see that the loyalist horse had engaged their own cavalry and was steadily driving it back. In addition to having the advantage of the slope, they outnumbered the legion’s horse by a significant margin, although the veteran knights of Legio VII seemed to be successfully executing a fighting retreat. Even if they weren’t losing many riders as they withdrew from the battle, they were on the verge of leaving their infantry completely exposed to the enemy cavalry.

“We’ll do better this time, sir. We were, uh, just trying to avoid our own horse.”

Fuscus nodded angrily and stalked away to shout at another onager crew. Secundus turned to his two fellow crew members and shrugged. This particular machine had been a nightmare ever since they’d been assigned to it. But there was nothing to be done, so they put their shoulders to it and muscled it to a position where it was aiming just a little east of where the cavalry battle was most fiercely raging.

“Do you see that decurion?” Secundus pointed to one of the enemy knights who could just barely be distinguished from the others by his plumed helm. “We’ll use him as our reference. If the left beam is warped, that might explain why we’re dropping the rocks so far to the right of where we want them. Maybe we just have to compensate for it.”

Together, they took another rock from the pile of eight remaining ones and loaded the big leather pouch. Fuscus inserted the pin to secure the arm, and the other two ballistarii winched it down, grunting as the twisted ropes were strained by the tremendous tension. Secundus nodded when the arm was down far enough and twirled his hammer. He eyed the decurion again, just to be sure of himself, and was raising his arm to drive the pin out and let the onager kick when the hidden fault in the wooden beam gave way.

The onager didn’t kick so much as erupt. The wood splintered, the ropes snapped, and the rock simply dropped onto the ground with a dull thud.

Secundus screamed and clutched at his abdomen where a thick block of oak had gone all the way through him and poked out his back like a large, bloody wart.

“Am I going to die? Am I going to be all right?” He begged the optio to reassure him. “Please, I don’t want to die! I didn’t do anything wrong! I swear, it just went to pieces!”