a motherfucker. If you miss with the point there’s still a long way to go, staring at your opposite, both of you scared shitless. But it only lasts a few seconds before the inexorable momentum pushes you together, the mad scrum of flesh allowing for little in the way of maneuver.
Everyone around me was holding on to their spears like they were some sort of charm against death, but I figured fuck that and dropped mine, going for the long dirk in my belt. It was an awkward movement, my forehead pushing up against the Dren in front of me, but I managed it, reversing my hold and slipping the weapon into his gut, just above the groin, beneath the protection afforded by his armor.
Unlike most of my comrades, I’d killed before I’d entered the service, knew what it felt like to watch a man stare up at you blankly as whatever force animates him slips out of the hole you’ve made. But I’d always felt something of it afterward, could tell you every man I’d sent to meet She Who Waits Behind All Things, could tell you why I’d thought I had to send them to meet her. Not justify it – I won’t pretend that – but explain it at least, beyond that he was wearing a different colored outfit than I was.
Of course in the thick of things the moment barely registered. The dagger rose a second time, falling into my counterpart as of its own volition. I watched him die with my head tucked against his, close as lovers. After the third blow he slid limply to the ground, and I wish I could say I felt something about it but the truth is at that point my blood was up so high all I saw was the next man in line, and I stepped over the corpse, on it really, and launched myself into the Dren behind him.
He was quick, and he caught the edge of my blade with the shaft of his spear, the weight of the men behind us locking our weapons together. I jerked the ridge of my brow against his nose, snapping the fragile bone and smearing blood against my skull, but he didn’t drop, red leaking down over a rigid sneer. It was my introduction to what would rapidly become, along with the stupidity and gutlessness of the brass, the bane of my existence for the next five years – the legendary Dren grit, a willingness to endure pain and discomfort that seemed almost an inability to feel either, which ensured that every redoubt would be held to the last man, and to the last man’s last breath.
But still, meat ain’t stone, and I managed to hook his eye with my off hand, and he screamed and dropped his pike so as to keep himself from being blinded, and I wiggled my steel into the underside of his throat and moved on to the next one.
Whether because of the hole I’d made or some other factor I could feel their line bending. Not see it, I couldn’t see anything except what was directly in front of me and a few blurred motions from out the corners of my eyes – but sense it somehow, like a change in the wind. ‘We’ve got them!’ someone screamed, and I realized that it was me. ‘One more fucking push!’
I might have been right about that, or I might have been wrong, I never had the chance to find out. Because in the scant second after I had spoken, as the long, snaking line of Dren began to buckle and turn, as victory seemed just at the limit of our grasp, the world ended.
So it seemed, at least. Practically speaking, the results of a well-formed battle hex are indistinguishable from a black-powder barrage. They both result in the destruction of wide sums of flesh, the scattering of bone and brain – but one peculiarity that accompanies the use of sorcery, or more accurately fails to accompany it, is sound of any kind. In contrast to the ear-shattering boom of cannon, a hex is utterly silent. From out of the corner of my eye I saw a light so bright it nearly blinded me. But there was no noise connected to it, nothing to alert one aurally to the holocaust that was taking place.
The vacuum was quickly filled with the shrieks of my dying countrymen, those lucky or unlucky enough to have found themselves on the outskirts of the explosion. Having avoided outright death they now found their limbs atomized away to nothing. Their cries were picked up a second later by the surrounding infantry, to whom the spell had done no direct damage but who were quick to realize that our ranks had been irreparably shattered, and our flanks were bare of support.
Prepared for this sudden attack, the Dren redoubled their efforts, straightening their formation against ours. The sudden disappearance of a substantial portion of our unit had opened up a little room in my peripherals, but I didn’t have time to take notice, not with an approaching infantryman keen to square accounts for his two comrades. The end of my knife had broken off against the spine of the last Dren, and I discarded the remainder and dove shoulder first at his back-up, hoping to get within grappling range before he planted something sharp in my chest.
I had him on the ground, my hands squeezing the blood into his face and the life out of his body, when it occurred to me that the back ranks had been awful slow to come to my aid. As a last gasp escaped past his lolling tongue I took a quick look up and discovered with a sinking horror that the lack of attention came by virtue of there being no one around to provide it. Our line had broken, utterly, and apart from Adolphus there were none of us left standing. It seemed that while I had been caught up in strangling a man to death the remainder of our division had assessed the situation and decided that the course of greatest wisdom lay in vacating the area with all possible speed.
Warfare is based on a sort of mass hysteria by which the individual mistakes his own well-being for that of the collective, but as solid as the mania may seem on march, it punctures mighty quick in the heat of battle. One moment you’re walking in lockstep, no more cognizant of your own particular existence than is a drop of blood filtering through the heart. Then some unfortunate setback occurs, entirely disabusing you of the absurd fiction that anything could possibly matter more than forestalling your own death, and you throw down your weapon and sprint for the back, willing to trample your fellow soldiers into the ground should they prove an impediment to your escape.
It’s then that the rock-bottom of a man’s character comes out, when you get to learn who it is you’ve been bunking and eating and shitting with. Though the battle was lost and our cause vanquished, you couldn’t have figured it from Adolphus, for whom the defeat of our army had been forgotten in the sheer joy of combat. He let out a roar that would have done credit to a lion, shoved back the Dren who opposed him and laid out left and right with his pole, snapping the neck of one man and notching the brain-pan of another, cowing the surrounding infantry and earning us a brief moment of respite.
He was continuing forward even then, but I got a hand on the back of his armor, not enough to check his progress but sufficient to focus his attention on me. ‘Adolphus!’ I screamed, trying to make myself heard over the fray. ‘We’re done! Let’s go!’
He gave a mournful look back at the enemy, a handful of whom had neglected to fall upon our fleeing comrades and were instead showing disturbing signs of renewed hostility.
‘Now, Adolphus!’ I said again, in what I would later come to think of as my ‘command voice.’ He gave a quick nod, and together we began to fall back.
The nature of a rout is that it sends the victors into nearly as much confusion as the vanquished, as if you threw yourself against a locked door only to find it giving way at your touch. Though our side had ceased even the semblance of being an organized body, the Dren seemed but little more ordered. Some were hot on the heels of our retreating fellows, hoping to down their quota. Some had already started on the grim but lucrative business of looting the corpses. And a great many, an astonishing percentage really, milled about in aimless confusion.
If you can maintain some sense of direction in such bedlam you’ve got an advantage, and between the two of us we managed a capable fighting withdrawal. I picked up a stray pike and held it parallel with Adolphus’s, edging it warily at anyone who came too close, falling backwards gradually and with purpose. Mostly those Dren pursuing our shattered rear didn’t bother with us, not when there were easier targets swarming all around.
The march in had only taken us ten minutes, but going back took us twice as long, three times, hell, five, I don’t know. It seemed an eternity, dead and dying everywhere you looked, the population of a fair-sized town made into mounds of rotting flesh. And the screaming, by the Firstborn, the screaming. It was like a strong wind, thousands of men hurling their misery at you, their terror and hatred.
At one point I tripped over a corpse and added to the song, certain that Adolphus would prioritize his own survival over our newly minted friendship. But he didn’t – he stood over me steady as a statue, and the enemy stayed clear.
Things eased off once we got back to the baggage train. The Dren quickly lost interest in murder, turned to scooping up anything that could be eaten, drunk, sold or fucked. By nightfall we were five miles back from the front, trying to find our unit amongst the mass of broken men, the wounded dying unattended, the officers no more capable of offering succor than they had been of saving us from the catastrophe of the day.
And that was that – twenty minutes on a bright autumn afternoon sounding the death knell on set-piece
