Crusader

“A sober healer,” she said. “I’d like one competent enough to perform a spell.”

“Oh, so that’s how it is,” Andren said mildly, sticking his fingers out and waving them in the general direction of a human a half dozen paces away who was screaming with an arrow sticking out of his palm. “I’m quite competent.”

“I said competent and sober.”

“Meh,” Andren said with some indifference. “I’ll pass on that last one; highly overrated, especially when you’re being bombarded with arrows, projectiles, and some fairly wounding insults, in the case of you.”

“Thad,” Alaric said, cutting off any response Vara might have made, “it would appear they’ve begun the assault on our gate.”

Thad smiled weakly. The younger warrior was human and clad in crimson armor, the steel bearing chipped paint that revealed the metal beneath. He had always reminded Vara of a younger, less adept and perhaps less handsome version of Cyrus. And for that, especially now, I hate him. “I guess you could say that. They started moving toward us with intent about fifteen minutes ago. Before that, they seemed quite comfortable to maintain their distance and keep us blockaded.”

“They’ve clearly changed to a war footing,” Vara said, watching one of the siege towers drawing close to the edge of the ramparts, “and I’d be fascinated to discuss how exactly that happened, but I’d rather do it after we’ve put these bastards to rest and repelled them.”

“Indeed,” Alaric said, and gestured behind himself. Vara turned to see a line of spellcasters-druids, wizards and a few enchanters making their way across the wall, taking positions of their own next to the bowmen at the ramparts. Larana was among them and truthfully the only one among them whose name Vara knew; all the rest were new people who had been recruited in the last few years. New people that I have to get to know and remember the names of. Is there any more annoying bane anywhere in my existence? The thought of the black-armored warrior flashed through her mind. Oh yes. Well, in the scale of things, he’s still rather new, I suppose.

“Let us dispense with this bombardment, shall we?” Alaric stood in the gap between the crenellations as Vara exchanged a look with Thad. “When I signal, spellcasters, unleash hell upon those towers.”

“What’s the signal?” Thad asked then flushed under his helm as Vara sent him a searing look.

“I think this will do,” Alaric said and extended his hand in the direction of the tower, which was creeping toward the wall only fifteen feet or so away from deploying its bridge to allow the troops within to storm the Sanctuary battlements.

Vara let out a scream of pure fury and stood in the gap next to Alaric. Bombard my home from afar, will you? Send your mindless foot soldiers to knock down our wall and drag us out? I shall show you, oh Sovereign, you bastard of bastards, you terrible and daft ruler of mine enemies. She threw out her hand and began to cast a spell of her own, just as Alaric’s went off, an incantation leaving his palm that shook the ramparts and blasted the stray strands of hair out of Vara’s face as it flew.

She watched the wave of force fly, distorting the air in a line following from Alaric’s palm to the siege tower, where it impacted a third of the way up the structure. The impact was immediate and obvious; the wooden tower splintered, chips exploding outward and showering the army below with splinters as a fearsome groan of breaking logs preceded the awful listing of the whole structure, which began to tilt forward. Cries from behind the rectangular creation’s wooden facade told her that the occupants of the thing knew what was coming and were perhaps powerless to stop it.

The whole contraption came crashing to the ground, the upper two-thirds tilting down, falling upon the army stacked up beneath it. Vara saw a wave of movement as the soldiers beneath it tried to flee, but it seemed unlikely that any of them made it through the panicked crowd; the crash of the tower splattered a hundred or more men beneath its shadow and pulped countless more who had been inside it.

With Alaric’s blast, a wave of spells leapt forward from the Sanctuary battlements-fireballs and bolts of lightning seemed the most popular choices. Vara saw the pale flash of a few charms fly from the enchanter ranks and watched as they took possession of the biggest and strongest warriors below them in the field, turning them against their own allies, the swords and daggers of the Sovereign’s own turning against their fellows. Vara saw Larana loose a particularly large blast of fire at a catapult that was several hundred feet back from the wall and it hit with the same force as Alaric’s burst, if not more; an explosion seemed to follow, launching the operators of the contraption away in flames and turning the whole thing into a pyre that blazed thirty feet high.

Vara’s own spell hit a bevy of soldiers below the wall, pushing them to the ground. She looked over to see Alaric had moved farther down the wall. His hand pointed at another tower as it burst, showering the army below with fragments of wooden refuse as it tilted and cracked, falling apart onto the dark elves in its shadow. She saw her Guildmaster begin his run down the wall, heading toward his next target, another siege tower.

“Has this been going on the entire time we’ve been gone?” Vara looked up to see Ryin Ayend, who had asked the question. He slid in beside her, behind the crenellation, as he loosed a fireball at a distant trebuchet, setting fire to the launch mechanism and sending its crew scurrying away. “You haven’t been under siege the whole time, have you?” he asked.

“No,” she said and fired another stunning blast at a thick cluster of archers, sending five of them to the ground, unconscious. “This army only showed up in the last few days, malingering at the edge of the horizon, interdicting travelers that came our way.” She pointed at a tent in the distance. “They’ve been interrupting the flow of our applicants, however, and we were debating what to do about it.”

“It’s an army,” Ryin said, shooting another fireball at the same trebuchet he had disabled a moment earlier. The flames from his burst began to lick at the contraption, and it caught fire after a moment’s hesitation, causing the druid to smile. “They don’t tend to spring forth out of nowhere, especially when the dark elves are already at war with the Human Confederation and the Elven Kingdom. What happened?”

“What indeed?” Vara muttered, so low she doubted he would have heard her. “The army comes from Aloakna, on the coast. The dark elves sacked the town a fortnight ago with a host of fifty thousand.”

“What?” Ryin’s eyes grew large; the human’s face was almost innocent, awestruck. “Aloakna is a neutral city! Why would they destroy it? They were a major trading partner to the dark elves.”

“And the elves, and the humans,” Vara said. “They didn’t have much of a standing army, relying on being neutral to protect them. By the accounts we heard, whatever mercenaries and guards they had on hand put up a spirited defense, but to little avail. The city was sacked inside of a week of siege, and the dark elves showed little mercy to the occupants, killing and raping in mass number, conscripting some of the surviving dark elven men into their army.” She felt her expression harden. “Then they came here.”

“But why here?” Ryin asked. “They have armies stalled in their advances against the elves in Termina and the humans in Reikonos still?” He waited for her to nod assent. “Why waste time on us now?”

A crashing sound interrupted her answer; in the distance, a catapult exploded as a result of Larana’s attack and another siege tower crashed to pieces down the wall. Below them, the dark elven army was in chaos as their own soldiers randomly turned against them, guided by Sanctuary’s enchanters. Vara watched as a hulking dark elf in heavy armor swung a mace through the heads of three of his comrades, splintering them, before he was brought down by a swarming attack of swords by several of his fellows.

“I daresay the Sovereign didn’t think he was wasting time,” Vara said with a slight smile. “After all, when you send a host of fifty thousand to attack something so small as Sanctuary, you likely think that your target will disappear from the map without difficulty.”

“But he knows we have the power of magic,” Ryin scoffed. “He’s not stupid, is he?”

A bolt of lightning arced down from one of Sanctuary’s wizards into the crowd below, crackling as it jumped from the metal armor of a whole platoon of men-at-arms, causing them all to fall, if not dead then at least unconscious. “I doubt it,” Vara said. “He’s been making some exceedingly shrewd moves thus far in the war, and they’ve been incredibly audacious ones at times, but we keep hoping he’ll overreach.” She let a grim smile come across her features. “Perhaps he finally has.” She let the smile fade. “And you lot? You’ve been gone six months, longer than you had any right to be without letting us know anything. What the blazes happened to you?”

Ryin’s expression turned pained, and for a moment they were both distracted by the explosion of another catapult in the distance. The armies at the foot of the wall were beginning to recede now, slowly pulling back, the lines breaking as the more fearful among them started to retreat. “They’re leaving,” Ryin said, watching, almost spellbound, as fire and lightning chased them away, a flurry of arrows felling whole lines of dark elves as they retreated in no formation at all while a few of their brethren remained behind, standing near the wall, motionless,