More human noises began to reach their ears. A retching shriek of pain that visibly knocked some of the advancing Sutherners. Howls of wholly unnatural savagery. Breathing so laboured that it sounded like moaning. Coughing as warriors pressed every breath from their lungs in levels of exertion ordinarily beyond them. The sounds of fighting are infinitely more terrible from the outside, before you have joined them; and they seemed so close. Bellamus was certain they would happen upon the scene with every heartbeat, but the fog was deceptive and they kept advancing into the void. On all sides, there were still upright tents and a steady stream of men retreating from the bank of noise joined with Bellamus’s band, reinforcing them with numbers but bringing with them a creeping nausea. “We’re all there is!” shouted Bellamus over the heads of those around him. “Nobody else is going to save you! Shed your fear, grit your teeth and put the horror of men from the south into the Anakim. Knock them back; do to them what they think they’ve done to us! Shock them! Hold them! And Northwic will be at our backs!”
Finally, they came upon the first evidence of the fighting. Bodies draped half out of the wreckage of their devastated tents and strewn across the valley floor. Light flickered from burning barricades, shaded by the mist. Most of the bodies were still alive, crawling on their hands and knees to the sides of the valley, or beneath the shelter of a wagon bed. The noises of fighting sounded as though they were fading a little and Bellamus wondered whether the Anakim had begun to retreat. “Faster!” he roared. “They’re on the run! Faster!”
The floor of the valley was rising and they strained upwards, Bellamus unable to believe they had yet to happen upon the Anakim. But there was nothing. Just more bodies, more ghostly fire, more of this damned mist. He strained his eyes.
Nothing.
Then three dark smudges appeared in the white before him, and were gone. He quickened his horse a little, pulling out in front of the line, gazing forward and holding his breath. The outlines of three horsemen gathered themselves from the mist, so huge that they were unmistakably the enemy he sought. “There! After them!” He charged, the spear still clutched in his hand, his retainers raking back their spurs beside him and the other riders surging out past the line. If the Anakim were retreating, he could pin them down and make them pay for this attack. They accelerated away from the foot soldiers at their back, galloping after the three shapes that had disappeared into the mist again. The three riders came back into view: Bellamus was gaining on them. Or maybe it was because they were still climbing and beginning to emerge above the haze.
Abruptly, they were out of the suffocating mist. The valley opened up around them, bathed in watery winter sunlight and smothered in fragments of bright frost.
It swarmed with Anakim. Thousands crawled over the hills, every immense warrior gleaming as though coated in dew, polished as bright as steel would allow. They were climbing the side of the valley, heading up towards a chip below the rim: a col slumped between two powerful shoulders of rock.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Bellamus dragged his horse to a halt and those around him did likewise. They stared, every warrior silent and transfixed by the three figures before them. Scarcely fifty yards away, the three horsemen they had pursued were staring back. They were facing them, watching Bellamus’s few hundred horsemen intently, so still that the hooves of their horses looked rooted to the ground.
The central horseman was huge. Even among fellow Anakim, he towered over his companions. Or maybe it was just that he sat atop the largest horse Bellamus had ever seen: a pale grey beast piled with muscle, hooves the circumference of a medium-sized barrel. The man astride it was black-cloaked, with shoulders of steel plate immense and brooding, and a helmet that Bellamus recognised.
The Black Lord. Their enemy stood before them: still, cold and watchful.
He wants to see how we’re responding. Bellamus looked up at the col. It was perhaps two miles across, with a knotted outcrop of rock to each side rearing some two hundred feet over the col. A fearsome defensive position, with a perilously steep approach. There, the first Anakim were arraying themselves, hundreds of banners silhouetted against the sky behind. “This stinks,” said Bellamus. “Every bit of this. They’ve planned it.”
“Planned what?” asked one of his retainers.
Bellamus shook his head. “I don’t know. They’ve got something in mind.” He glanced at the man who had spoken and winked. “Strip your shirt. Let’s go and ask them.” Nobody else was better equipped to discern the Anakim plan, and in any case, there was nobody else on the scene. Whatever was at play, Bellamus needed to uncover it. He turned to another retainer. “Would you head back down the valley and halt our little band? Let’s not show our hand just yet.” The man departed and Bellamus affixed the filthy white shirt presented him by the first retainer onto the head of his spear. He held it up as a dismal banner and, with two companions, rode forward to meet the Black Lord.
They advanced and the three horsemen before them waited for them to close the distance, until Bellamus and his companions had drawn up before them. The central figure—the Black Lord—looked up at Bellamus’s pathetic flag of truce. In Anakim he asked: “Is that supposed to be a white flag, Bellamus?”
“You know it is, my lord. And as I have heard you are an honourable man, I know you will
