Queen Yavara: Chapter 58

Chapter Fifty-Eight

CERTIOK

The city was in chaos. People ran to and froe, shouting and screaming. No longer did the wide boulevards of Alkandra feel like a beast utopia, but like the walls of a cage. Windows were frantically boarded, men and women sprinted toward the castle in various stages of undress, watchmen handed out spears and swords without a care for who grabbed them. Everyone was a soldier now, and no one was.

“Go to you posts!” I yelled, and began thrusting my finger toward the docks, “Remember which group you belong to! Group A goes with Commander Faltia, Group B goes with Magistrate Furia, Group C goes with Director Eva, Group D goes with Scribe Soraya, Group E goes with Liaison Kiera, Group F goes with Director Brianna, and Group G goes with the queen!”

“Which fucking queen?!” an old Ardeni orc yelled at me.

“What do you mean which queen? Queen Yav—” I stopped myself, and looked toward the dock. Yavara was supposed to command five-thousand swords, but who would follow her now? Then again, seasoned battle commanders were in short supply, and Yavara was at least that. Leveria probably hadn’t even been in a fistfight her whole life.

“Certiok?” the orc asked.

“Uh… Group G goes with Yavara! Wait, scratch that!” I fumbled through my clipboard for a second, cursing Yavara with every breath for putting me in charge of this shit. Goddamn it we could use you right about now, Adrianna, I thought with gritted teeth as I paged through list after list of census data Brianna had compiled. “OK, Group G is now under my direct command. All members of my battlegroup marshal before the castle!”

The Ardeni orc nodded, and raced up the castle steps.

“You, boy!” I snapped at a passing incubus child, “Find the queen—I mean Yavara—and tell her that her battlegroup has been reassigned. Tell her that she will now act as independent support as she sees fit.”

“Oi, you think a wee shit like me is gonna get anywhere near royalty?”

“Just get close enough to yell it to her, now go!”

I rounded up dozens of orcs at a time and sent them racing toward their respective groups. Faltia was the most seasoned tactical commander, so she would be the general of the battle; not Leveria, Yavara nor Zander could supersede her. The two-thousand members of the city watch were the only paramilitary group available, and so Faltia put them at the center of the dock’s walls, ready to take on the brunt of the Lowland navy, and man the ballistae. She ***********ed ten-thousand more of the best available fighters to fill in the tiered walls that loomed over the docks, as well as the courtyards preceding the castle. These were the male orcs of fighting age—mostly Ardeni construction workers—as well as the trolls, centaurs and ogres. Furia and Eva commanded the battlegroups at Faltia’s flanks. Eva’s nine-thousand melee troops were primarily composed of young tribal she-orcs, and would hold the beach to Faltia’s left, while Furia and her one-thousand missile troops—mostly goblins—held the cliffs to Faltia’s right, just above the docks.

After the first three battlegroups had been filled, teenagers were the best available fighters, and they made up Soraya’s force of seven-thousand. They would be stationed at the city’s perimeter on the southern side in case the Lowlanders opted for a beach landing. Kiera’s battlegroup consisted of those not yet too old to be geriatric. The three-thousand wizened men and women would be positioned throughout the city to fortify chokepoints when the inevitable fallback occurred. Brianna’s battlegroup consisted of four-thousand non-tribal women, mostly Ardeni immigrants. They would hold the central rendezvous point—the arena—and reinforce any battlegroup that fell back to that position. There were several independent subgroups that would act as support for battlegroups A through F; these were the succubi, the incubi, and the vampires, who would be more effective hunting alone than fighting in ranks. The last battlegroup, Battlegroup G, consisted of the five-thousand citizens who were disabled or elderly. They would be the last line of defense in case of an all-out retreat into the castle, where ten-thousand children were currently housed. It was terribly callous, but someone had to hold the enemy off for long enough to bar the doors and lift the drawbridge, and the members of Group G were expendable. And I was their commander. Holy shit, where had I gone wrong to end up here?

“Hey!” I shouted at a passing centaur, “Hey, Group A is that way!”

“I’m supposed to be in Group D!” He shouted back.

“Centaurs go with Faltia!”

“Males between the ages of fifty and sixty-five go with Kiera!”

“Wait!” I growled, and rifled through the pages on my clipboard, “I thought race superseded age… or is it… hmmm…”

I didn’t notice the change right away. It was subtle. The city faded sonically, dimming as though I were walking away from it. The frantic squeaking of carts and the patter of feet had ceased. The shouts and calls of the criers had all dwindled. The bells rang cleanly from their towers, clanging off the canyons of stone and wood that made up the many boroughs of Alkandra, now all deathly silent. I turned around.

A great cloud of fog obscured the bay. It consumed the bay’s mouth, and moved steadily closer, devouring the buoys and islands that speckled the waters. I couldn’t make out any shapes in the mass of grey, but the breadth of it foretold the greatness of the foe it concealed. The sun dimmed. The shadows grew dull. The bells in the city clanged out, but the sound was somehow muted. A chill crawled slowly up my spine, and carried its cold terror into my skull.

“Certiok?” the centaur asked, his voice hushed as though fearing the enemy would hear him.

“Group A.” I muttered, and wondered if I’d just condemned him to die. Likely, all I’d done was hastened the inevitable.

FALTIA

The battleplan was rather simple. The docks were a heavily-fortified tiered-wall system that stood only a hundred yards before the base of the castle. It was the shortest path to victory for the enemy, and so they would hit us here the hardest. The docks were lined with a hundred ballistae aimed toward the sea, each of which were capable of punching a hole in any vessel’s hull. I expected that the famed Lowland mages would have something to mitigate that. Still, just one of our missiles could do more damage to them than scores of theirs could do to us, so I expected the enemy wouldn’t dally too long exchanging salvos. They would blast us with a rapid succession of missiles and catapults, shock us into inaction, then hit us with the invasion underneath the cover of the siege. Our goal was to hold them at the docks, rain on them with our skirmishes on the cliffs, force them back into their boats, and make them try their luck at the beaches. If all went well (which it wouldn’t), the Lowlanders would have a disorganized landing on the beach, and Eva’s battlegroup would massacre the assault. It was far more likely that Battlegroup A would be forced backward toward the castle, and Eva’s group would have to attempt a haphazard flanking maneuver to keep the enemy bogged down. Worst case scenario for us would be if the Lowlanders didn’t attempt an amphibious assault at all, and simply dropped anchor out of range of our missiles and waited until the superior Highland army arrived. If they did that, we were doomed, however there was no reason to think the Lowlanders yet knew of the Highlanders. The Jonian spire had been destroyed, and though the Lowland mages possessed great vision, it was mostly limited to the sea and coast, and not too far inland. Still, by now they would know that the horde had not arrived, and if they looked closely, they might notice that the Dark Queen looked just a little different. I hoped they didn’t look too closely. Fear was our greatest weapon now.

I never felt fear before a battle. I didn’t feel any thrill at all, actually. A strange calm always preceded the terror for me. The terror would come, it always did, but it would not consume me with panic. Now, as I watched the fog filter toward me in the bay, I only felt a heightened sense of awareness.

“Ten clicks.” I said to the ballistae commander, and the order was telephoned down the line. The great iron crossbows that lined the tiered walls above the docks all ticked back as their gears were cranked. I eyed the grey mass, judging its distance by the markers set out in the water. How far ahead would the concealing spell precede the actual enemy? We wouldn’t get a proper range until we saw the silhouettes.

“Eleven clicks.” I ordered, and a single resounding note responded from the mechanical symphony. Could I hear the sound of water against wooden hulls, or was that simply the waves crashing upon the shoreline? The bells in the city clanged and droned, creating an ambient echo that died in the muted grey before me.

“Fifteen clicks.” I said.

“Ma’am?” the ballistae commander asked.

“The strings will hold.” I answered, “Fifteen clicks.”

She gave the order, and five more clicks were added to the great bows, maxing the tension. I could hear the groans of the iron bolts grinding in their places, and the dangerous whine of the strings stretching to their limit.

I narrowed my eyes at the fog, and muttered, “Ballista One, loose.”

The ballistae commander looked back at me, then nodded to her personal crew. The men at the levers stepped to the side, and the commander kicked the release. The wrought iron bolt shot into the fog with such speed that its only movement was discernable by a line that bisected the world on either side of it. The fog swallowed the bolt with a puff, and then… nothing. Not the sounds of wood cracking, nor screams of alarm, nor the thud of a mast. There wasn’t even the sound of a splash.

The ballistae commander looked back at me. “Commander?” She asked, her voice high and tight in her throat. And then, she was gone. Or rather, she was everywhere. I was misted by pink and red, and staring at the wrought-iron eleven-foot shaft of a ballista bolt that had been returned to its sender. It quivered with energy into the wood it was planted in, and shined with the gore it was now fertilized with. Panic rippled through the line, but I silenced it with a raise of my hand.

“Hold.” I said, and stepped atop the wall, “Hold!”

The fog moved ponderously towards us, inch by inch, foot by foot. It swallowed the last of my markers, then the last of the buoys. It swallowed the rocks before the docks, the ropes floating in the surf, and the planks riding the tide. Then it swallowed me. The world was grey and opaque. I could only see the silhouettes of the soldiers at my sides, but not their features. The world was muted and dull. The clang of weapons was stifled, the toll of the buoys was silenced, and the pervading chatter of fear was snuffed out. Soon, there was only the faint whistle of wind, and the distant sound of the waves that crashed right before me. Though I peered with my keen elven eyes, I could see nothing in the vast grey. It was a monochromatic matte painting, a wash of intimate blank nothing. And then, there was something. A single line painted a different shade of grey than the rest. It was so subtle that I wondered if it was there, but it became darker with every passing second until it formed the shape of a masthead. Then, there were dozens. Scores. Hundreds. The fog disappeared, and the full breadth of the Lowland navy was revealed.

One hundred man-o-wars towered over the approaching invasion force, their masts reaching seventy feet, their hulls stretching three-hundred feet from bow to stern. The three lower decks of the great ships were festooned with ballistae, and the main decks were lined with catapults. They were facing us with a full broadside.

“Take cover!” I screamed, and the entire weight of the Lowland fleet was launched at once. Thousands of ballistae missiles lined the air as hundreds of blazing boulders were sent arcing above. I was only allowed a moment to marvel at the shear magnificence of the destruction barreling toward me before it was there. The iron missiles thudded into the wall, pierced through a foot of rock, and blasted out the other side. The bars twisted and contorted violently with the impact, spinning like iron cords to smash through barriers, armor and bone. A thousand successive impacts cratered the front wall, sending debris blasting backward, filling the air with dust. I was hurled into the wall, my helm smacked the stones, and a concussive bell rang through my skull. The dust cleared enough just in time for me to see the blazing boulders rain down on us. They exploded atop the wall, punched great holes in the lines, and sprayed blazing pitch like splashing water. Sparks flew into the air, great red gouts of flame enveloped trenches of men, and smoke billowed out from behind the walls. When the last great booms of the salvo had ended, the front wall was nothing but rubble. Wrought-iron poles stuck from the stone like rebar in cement, mortared by the blood and awful of my screaming soldiers. Limbs were torn cleanly from the bodies, great puncture wounds were shaped jaggedly through the flesh, and pink entrails and brains were splattered across red pools.

“Commander!” a she-orc yelled, and hauled me to my feet. She was missing her arm below the elbow, but she did an admirable job of pretending otherwise. “Commander, what are the orders?”

“What do you mean, what are the orders? Return salvo!”

“With what?!” She screamed, and motioned behind her with her stumped arm. I hadn’t even noticed the ballistae. I guess that was because there wasn’t much to notice. Our entire arsenal had been turned into twisted metal and splinted wood.

“Do we fall back?” She yelled.

“And give them the docks?! Our only chance of stopping their landing is to stop it here!” I pushed past her, and ran down the line, “Hold your positions!” I roared to the tiers above, “Hold your positions, and take cover! Get as low as you can! The enemy will try to break us here!”

I tripped over a man holding his intestines in, and stumbled into a man who had failed to do so. My hand squished into his guts, and he shrieked. I jolted myself upright, and continued racing down the line. “Hold!” I yelled, “Hold and take cover! The next salvo is—”

FURIA

A line of debris exploded from one end of the docks, to the other as the missiles smashed into the stone, and the flaming boulders cascaded downward. In all my life, I’d never seen so much mass move so quickly. The ballistae missiles were so numerous and so fast that they seemed to form a momentary plane between the ships and the docks, and the arcing boulders created an infernal rainbow. I watched the fire splash all along the docks. I watched the smoke billow from the craters, and the dust rise overhead. The sea-winds propelled the toxic cloud inland and into the city, revealing the full destruction they’d left in their wake. There were no docks anymore. The tiered walls were so pocked with puncture holes that they were nothing but jagged columns holding up crumbling battlements. Where there wasn’t rubble, there were bodies. Hundreds of them were splayed out and mangled, and hundreds more were writhing. Even from so high up, I could see the red. My eyes searched the ruined docks for Faltia’s black helm. I scanned the waterline five times before I finally found it. Thankfully, it was still atop her head, and better yet, her head was still attached.

She raced down the line, helping the wounded and ordering soldiers into position, constantly reinforcing the many gaps in the wall. The front wall had taken the brunt of the assault, and the thousands of orcs in the secondary and tertiary complexes were mostly alive. And though almost all of our ballistae had been destroyed in the first salvo, the enemy couldn’t see the damage they’d caused, for Zander Fredeon stood just behind the last wall, weaving his perception spells to show towering trebuchets and catapults were there were none, enticing the enemy’s amphibious assault.

Hundreds of boats were rowing toward the docks, each of them filled to the brim with the silver and sapphire helms of the Lowland marines. An Ardeni mage could be seen at the stern of each boat, robed and ominous. All the swords, spears and axes on those boats were just window dressing for the real threat that sat broodingly in the back.

“Aim for the mages,” I said to my troops, and drew back my bow, “shoot high and to the south; the wind will carry it.”

The sound of a thousand bows being pulled taut carried down my line. I set my eye on my target, exhaled through my nose, and waited for the space between heartbeats. I loosed. The arrow gleamed for a moment in the dull sunlight, then disappeared to a dot. It reached the peak of its arc, and became a descending line that moved down, down, down toward its target seventy yards away. It was a perfect shot, and it bounced off the mage’s arcane shield like I’d merely thrown a pebble.

“Shit!” I growled, “Just fucking kill the others then!”

A great whoosh sounded from our line, and the sky was filled with lethal hafts. For a moment, it almost looked like an elven skirmishing salvo, but the continuity fell to pieces at the precipice of the arc, and arrows rained into the bay without any sense of aim. Some lucky shots struck the boats, and even fewer struck flesh, but the vast majority splashed uselessly into the water.

“Hold!” I yelled, flinging up my hand, “Wait until they begin to land! Concentrate on those in front! Make them trip over their own dead!”

Another salvo from the man-o-wars was loosed. Another plane of pure velocity formed between the ships and the docks, and another explosion of dust and rubble came from the front lines. Another great shower of meteors was sent from the decks of the ships to bombard the defenders, and this time, the tiers above were not spared. Massive holes were punched into the packed-in divisions of orcs, sending limbs and heads toppling backward into the streets below. Great bursts of flame engulfed whole sections of the wall, turning the defenders there into crisped silhouettes. Their screams carried from the walls in a discordant chorus, and their black figures flailed and danced in their infernal prisons, unable to escape the scalding heat. I watched them drop one by one, not yet dead, just unable to carry on, doomed to spend their last minutes in helpless blind agony.

I tore my gaze away from the burning men, and searched for Faltia once more. She was easy to spot now; she was one of the few people on the front wall who still moved. She collected the remaining defenders as fast as she could, and positioned them into clustered squads behind what little cover still remained. Then she shouted orders to the commanders on the upper walls, and the orders were carried down the lines. A disordered surge of soldiers pressed themselves to the battlements, and began loading their crossbows. The boats were nearly here.

“Get ready!” I yelled down my line, “Aim higher than you think you should! On my command…” I watched the first wave of boats approach the docks, only twenty yards from landing, “ready…” the first boats smacked into the dock, and the men inside grappled onto wooden structures, “…nock…” twenty boats docked, then thirty, then forty. They lashed themselves in, and the first men jumped to shore, “loose!” I roared, and a great twang of release shot from my line. This time, our salvo was not wasted. The arrows descended in a straight path to the docks below, and laid waste to the invaders. Scores of men fell at once, spinning and splashing into the water, screaming and writhing on the docks. I aimed quickly, and put one arrow through a man’s eye, sending him careening into the bay. The defenders on the walls below aimed their hundreds of crossbows over the battlements, and loosed at once. The humans were shot backward in droves, not even getting a chance to get out of their boats before they were sent tumbling back into them.

“Keep shooting! Don’t stop until your quivers are empty!” I shouted, and a spirited cheer rose up from our ranks. A constant stream of arrows were shot from the cliffside, raining ceaselessly upon the breaching marines. When the Lowlanders began putting their shields up, the crossbows on the wall shot beneath them, sticking the poor bastards in a quagmire of death from every angle. Half of them were killed before they got off their boats, and of the half that did survive, only one in five made it across the docks. The long piers offered no cover at all, and so they died in rows, falling like crashing waves until only a trickle made it to the wall. There, they met their ends. The battered and vengeful troops atop the front wall poured hot tar onto the shiny bastards below, prompting pure shrieks of agony. All the while, the mages remained on the boats, watching their comrades die by the hundreds, hiding behind their arcane shields, not daring to get up. By the time the last boat emptied onto the docks, the piers were surfaced with more bodies than wood. The second invasion wave stalled in the surf, and then the boats turned around. The lone mages in their boats unlashed the ropes on the docks, and magically propelled their vessels back out to sea, leaving their dying and wounded to writhe upon the docks.

A cheer swelled from the ranks of beasts, and I cheered with them.

“Run, you fuckers!” I laughed, and shot a defiant arrow at the retreating boats. The mage didn’t have his shield up. It struck him between the shoulders, and his arms flailed outward comically. We all laughed as he fell off the side of his boat, and we cheered when his unmanned vessel steered itself into another retreating boat, cause them to splinter like cordwood. The mage in the other boat leapt off the side, and began to frantically swim towards his navy. Everyone was laughing, except Faltia. Faltia was running down the ranks of soldiers, screaming and gesticulating like a madwoman. My laughter faltered. I looked from her, to what she was pointing at. It took me a moment to see it. There were rows upon rows of dead bodies on the docks, but one row was fading. Twenty corpses became as transparent as silk, then disappeared. I looked out at the mage swimming towards his navy, then back at the empty space where the bodies had been. But there had never been any bodies. There had never been any soldiers at all. There had only been empty boats piloted by mages. The only casualty the Lowlands had suffered was the poor fool who I’d shot in the back. Even as the realization dawned on me, all the other bodies began to disappear. One by one, the retreating mages disengaged their perception spells, and our great victory at the docks literally vanished into smoke, leaving only thousands of spent arrows and bolts.

I looked down at Faltia. Faltia looked up at me. We turned our gazes south toward the beach, where the fog had never cleared.

EVA

I’d chewed my nails down to the pink watching the assault on the docks. Salvo after salvo battered the walls with deadly accuracy, destroying most of our ballistae turrets in one fell swoop. I could hardly see anything through the fog that blanketed the beach, but half a mile across the peninsula, I could make out the shapes of hundreds of boats being rowed under the cover of the siege. It was then that I ordered my entire force into a flanking position. We ran out from cover, and charged across the beach toward the docks. Our journey was bogged down by the snow and sand, making every step excruciatingly long. There was no way we’d make it in time. Faltia’s defense would shatter, the castle would be taken, and all would be lost. We were only halfway there when the boats arrived at the docks. A hundred steps later, and the assault was already over. It was a massacre. Despite having the full weight of the Lowland navy behind them, the marines decided to charge the wall without the cover of a salvo. I couldn’t believe our luck. All the intellectual and magical might of the Lowland academy was here, and the invasion had been defeated by mistiming and stupidity.

As the boats retreated from the docks, a great cheer rose up from the battered defenders, and our voice joined them on the beach.

“Goodbye, you dumb fuckers!” I yelled gleefully, waving at the retreating boats, “It was a real fun time! Next time let’s do this at your place, m’kay?”

“Commander!” one of my generals yelled.

I looked back at her with a smile on my face. “Wha… oh.”

From across the expanse of water, the low groan of a hundred thousand tons of timber being moved reached my ears. The man-o-wars pivoted on their anchors, and turned ten degrees southward. I blinked. The full broadside of the Lowland navy was staring right at me, and I was in the middle of a fucking beach.

“RUN!” I screamed, and the thousands of ballistae loosed at once. For a moment, a line of iron was drawn horizontally across the world. Then it arrived. Fffft! That was the sound it made when a missile shot past me. Fffft! The woman next to me was blown in half. Fffft! The ogre beside me had his front blown out of his back. Fffft! The dawn-elf to my right was kabobbed to three orcs behind her. Fffft! My general was split cleanly in two. Fffft! An orc’s head was shot right off. Fffft! A teenage girl exploded into mist. Fffft! I blasted backward.

The air was ripped from my chest, I was sent spinning into the air, and I crashed into the wet snow. A moment later, someone’s severed left arm landed next to my face. My severed left arm. The bone below the shoulder was blown to splinters, the bicep and triceps had been ruptured, and the sinew hung in strings. Strangely, I didn’t feel the pain; only a dull ache, and a numbness where there should’ve been feeling. I was succumbing to shock. Realizing that, I dumbly picked up my arm, and began crawling up the beach. I had to keep moving. Lying still meant death.

I stumbled over bodies and body parts, crawling through fields of shrieking wounded clutching at their opened flesh. They called for me like I could save them, reaching out with blood-stained hands, begging me with bulging eyes. A foot struck me in the back, and I was flattened. Another foot struck my wounded shoulder, and a spear of pain twisted into me. I screamed into the snow as foot after foot came down atop me and around me, the stampede of my own soldiers trying to escape the onslaught. The wounded around me were trampled, crushed into the sand and snow, their mangled bodies compacted. An iron sole smashed the bones of my severed hand.