The hole it created was enormous, easily wide enough for a half dozen wagons to ride through abreast of each other. The force of the blast, and the debris that it sent flying into the city, left a swathe of chaos and death, deep into the refugee crowded streets. Lord Brach and his winding snake of men came charging in to fill the void, and the battle was under way.
Pael could’ve started blasting away groups of Valleyan soldiers, and large portions of the overcrowded city itself, but he chose not to. Instead, he cast another sort of spell, and he cast it not only on the Valleyans, but on the Westlanders as well. The second spell, an old favorite of the necromancer Priests of Kraw, was the same spell he had recently used, in its singular form, to resurrect Roark. Pael wanted this battle to play out. The more casualties here the better. Spell weary, after casting the long and powerful incantation of reanimation, Pael used the last bit of his energy to transport himself back to his elevated perch. From there, he watched the battle unfold, while he worked out the details of his new idea.
As soon as Lord Brach got the first few hundred of his men into the breach, the Valleyans threw open a nearby gate and charged forth. It made sense. With a massive hole leading into the city not far away, keeping the gates barred was pointless.
Cavalry met cavalry, in a shining clash of armor and steel. The red and yellow checked Valleyan banner whipped proudly in the wind. The dark shield upon it was an ancient and constant reminder to defend the horse herds. The golden lion on its field of green roared and reared back at them as the Westlanders pressed forth intensely.
A troop of cavalry broke free from the middle section of Westland’s procession, thus ruining the snakelike appearance of the army. The group raced away to meet a knot of Valleyans that had come out of some unseen gate around the wall. The Valleyans were charging to attack the Westland flank. The collision of men, animals, and sharpened steel happened at a full gallop, and the sound of it was sickening. Men and horses screamed in protest as they were slashed, pummeled, and crushed in the violent explosion of natural force.
Arrows filled the sky like streaks of windblown rain. The Valleyan archers up on the walls made full use of the advantage they had over those below them. Lord Brach ordered his archers to shoot at them, to make cover for the men trying to get into the city. He sent other troops of archers to fill the open gateways with flying death. The ranks of pikemen, and the untrained slashers, were ordered to crowd the breaches and get through any way they could manage. Before long, the battle was raging on both sides of the wall.
Inside the wall, the Westlanders pushed into the Valleyan crowd, inch by bloody inch. Then, a man went berserk, wildly hacking into the knots of people, felling bodies like wheat before a scythe. From the roof top of a structure, near the breach, a brown robed mage rained streaks of fire down upon the invaders. The men writhed and burned as they fell. They were replaced immediately though, by others pressing into the space.
Outside, the sheer number of Valleyans that had come out from the other open gates, had broken what remained of Westland’s serpent formation into knots and clumps of frenzied battle. A large skirmish was forming, about a thousand yards out from the wall. Valleyan riders, carrying long jousting lances, were charging into the mix of foot soldiers. They were skewering Westlanders and then withdrawing at will. The length of their weapons allowed them to stay out of range of their victims’ blades, and their superior warhorses were quick, well trained, and knew their duty well. Most of Westland’s archers had been ordered to the front, to cover the penetration into the city, but a few squadrons remained, and they were doing their best to slow the assault of the fearless and greedy Valleyan spearmen.
The gateway nearest the breach had become choked with fallen bodies. The Westland archers had done extremely well there. Already, it was next to impossible to get a horse out of the opening, and the clog of Valleyan riders trapped there were falling in droves to the Westland foot soldiers who had stormed the breach.
The brown-robed Valleyan mage had been joined by another, and together they created several bonfire-like piles of smoldering Westland flesh. They had become so effective at charring away the bodies of Lord Brach’s men, that Pael decided to intervene. He didn’t want the bodies of the dead all burnt and ruined. He needed them.
Pael appeared with a crackling pop, right amongst the Valleyan archers along the top of the wall. A cheer erupted from the Westlanders who saw him. Rumors of Pael’s might had followed Lord Brach’s army as it marched through the mountains. Those who had seen, and survived the leveling of Castlemont, had made Pael the hero of that particular battle.
With no regard for the archers firing arrow after arrow at his person, Pael gazed out across the two hundred or so yards of clanging bloody steel and death that separated him from the two brown-robed magi. Arrows exploded into splinters, as they hit the invisible field of energy that surrounded the demon-wizard. Some of the arrows glanced off, and continued into the knot of men on the opposite side of him. Some of the arrows just passed right through. Either way, they were of no concern to Pael, for they could not find his flesh.
With a wave of his hands, and a muttered word, he pointed at each of the magi in turn. Seconds later, green flames erupted at their feet, and licked slowly upward, until each man was consumed in a white-hot inferno. A few heart beats later, when the fire died away, only a whirl of ash and dissipating smoke remained.
As quickly as Pael had come, he was gone again. Without the magi to thwart them, the Westland surge broke loose into the city. A stream, of almost two thousand bloodthirsty men, came riding or charging into the general populace, unhindered. More were on their heels.
After Pael reappeared on the ridge, he studied the battle below. Not the logistics of the formations and the chaos that threatened them, nor the way the soldiers fought. Pael watched the way they died. The idea he had earlier, had just refined itself in a pleasing way.
He cast a ward of protection over himself, sat down, leaned back against a boulder, and dozed as the battle raged into the afternoon.
The spell of mass resurrection he had cast earlier cost him more than he had expected it to. He was drained and needed the rest. As he slept, the demon dreams of Shokin shed even more light on the evolving plan he had conceived. When he woke, feeling sharp and refreshed near sunset, the continuing battle below was of little concern to him. What he needed was a book that was back in his tower library. Before he could go there though, he had to make sure that Lord Brach was fully aware of what he was to do when this battle was finished.
The sudden shock, and fear in the faces of the men Lord Brach was giving orders to, and the smell of hot ozone that reached his nose, told Lord Brach that Pael had just appeared behind him. Without batting an eyelid, or showing the fear and unease that the wizard instilled in him, he dismissed the men, and turned to face his kingdom’s greatest weapon.
Brach was no fool. He knew that Pael was the true force behind King Glendar and the conquest over the eastern kingdoms. He didn’t like it, and he was far too intelligent to oppose it, but it didn’t matter anyway. The teeth jarring jolt of Pael’s touch on his shoulder, killed him instantly.
The wizard caught him as he slumped down, and though there was no need to do so, he spoke the words of a spell into the corpse’s ear.
Pael didn’t have the patience to wait until dawn when the mass resurrection spell he had cast would take effect. Sluggishly at first, then slowly growing into his full strength, Lord Brach regained himself. Where the tiny, white glimmer of life had just been in his eyes, there was now an ember, a little red sparkle of evil instead.
As soon as Pael flashed away, Brach ordered his men, all of them, to storm the breach. It was an alarming order for the captains to swallow, but none questioned their commander. As they formed, and pressed their way in, those waiting to squeeze through, were left exposed. The Valleyan spearmen outside the wall were left to pike them apart at will.
Long after sunset, when the last Westlander had gained entry into the city, the Valleyans found that there was nothing else to do, but follow them in. It was a strange scene they found inside. As battle upon battle played out in the city streets, handfuls of Westlanders, at the command of their leader, were dragging the corpses from both sides back into the buildings and alleyways, as if trying to protect them.
The Valleyan fighters didn’t stop to question this occurrence, as they were still outnumbered considerably. It was all they could do to stay alive and find a way to keep the Westlanders from getting deeper into the city, where most of the innocents, and the horse herds were.
Eventually, the Westlanders found some of the fenced pens where the precious animals were being guarded. Lord Brach ordered that the horses all be killed, and several more groups of his men broke loose from the main body, and started running them through with brutal efficiency.
The surge of anger this action sent through the ranks of the Valleyans, caused a resurgent rally of their
