The Jewel of the Sea

Ashari rose before the dawn, and she went through the rituals of awakening. She bathed and allowed her slaves to oil her copper skin, she polished her horns and her hooves until they shone. She ate a meal of raw meats and sliced fruits, drank deep of honeyed wine, and then she decked herself for battle. Servants brought her golden armor and adorned her with steel and polished bronze. She donned a helm fitted to her rising horns and she buckled on her slender, curved sword.

The sun climbed over the mountains in the east and sent red fire lancing across the sky to touch the towers of Irdru with fire and the color of blood. Ashari left her chambers and went out into the clean air, smelling smoke and the bright taste of the salt sea. She looked out to the north and saw the endless waves rolling and falling in on themselves. There lay horizons no one had transgressed, and unknown lands far from the threat of war.

Then she turned south and looked out over the beautiful city she had found and taken and polished until it gleamed like a jewel on the edge of the waters. Over the gleaming black streets and the slender, delicate towers. She looked over temples and domes and the brilliant white walls to the shadows of the savannah beyond, and on that golden grassland there spread a black shadow growing ever closer. She gave a sign and horns pealed through the dawn quiet, calling out over the city, summoning all to defend their home.

The harbor was strangely still, as every merchant who could travel had loaded their goods aboard whatever ship there was to hand and sailed away. Ashari herself had provided ship after ship to carry away the people and whatever they could carry with them. Part of this was mercy, but part was also her wish to have as few mouths to feed as was possible, in case they were besieged.

And there was a part of her, even in the fires of her defiance, that did not believe they could win this battle. Word had come from her riders and her scouts that the enemy had gathered more strength to him, and now perhaps a hundred thousand marched for Irdru beneath a banner of death, dragging a train of prisoners and engines of destruction. It was an army forged by hatred and the will to dominate, and it came to extinguish the city like a candle flame.

Ashari came down from her tower and passed through the palace, her guard falling into step, forming an escort of almost a thousand men. They marched in her wake, armor and spears gleaming bright, and the people who remained in the city thronged the avenue and cheered for her as she passed. On this day she had no fear of any uprising, nor any assassin; on this day they worshiped her, and she vowed she would prove worthy of it.

More of her forces gathered as she proceeded through the city. Banners unfurled on the walls, and she saw the glimmer of men atop the battlements, all helmed and armed and with their shields gleaming in the red sun. They shouted when she came near, and the clangor of sword and spear-haft upon their shield-rims echoed over the towers and the hollow streets.

She climbed the stairs to the tower beside the gate, silken cape billowing crimson behind her, and she looked upon the plain beyond the walls. Here she would watch the battle, and here she would be close enough to turn the powers of her mind against the enemy. She did not deceive herself to believe that would be enough to stop them, and she remembered Ulthos – had things been different, he would be here with her today.

The horns blew again, and the men rushed to their places on the walls. Fires were lit, oil and arrows readied, and the catapults and ballistae were checked and loaded. Ashari looked to see that her other defense was in place, and she hoped it would work as she had intended. All along the high crest of the walls she had caused to be raised iron posts taller than a man. Chains made of iron likewise led down from the posts to the ground below, to spikes driven through the stone into the soil underneath. This was her safeguard against the lances of the Skylords, and she had to hope it would be enough.

The wind rose, and she smelled the stench of blood and fire. From the south, the enemy army came onward, and she watched them spread across her land like an infection – many more than she had faced at the Red Pass – and legions marched upon the earth in dark formations. Among them moved the clusters of giants with their iron hammers, bellowing their mindless cries, and above them flew the Skylords, their winged beasts screaming as they circled higher.

The invaders did not rush, moving with terrible deliberation to enclose the city on three sides, forming ranks a hundred men deep, spears bristling like the spines of a thorn-tree. There were gaps, and into those the giants were driven with cries and the goad of unseen power. Ashari sensed it, like the mind at the pass but more powerful. A strength ready but not yet turned upon her. She gripped the stone of the battlements and tried to prepare herself, and she wondered if she would be able to prevail this time.

Now the siege weapons moved into position, and the defenders had to watch as prisoners were forced to drag the massive engines into place beneath the lash of the whip. Ashari saw immense catapults and deadly bolt throwers, but there were other devices she could not divine the purpose of, and that worried her, for they could not counter what they could not anticipate.

Her own artillery had orders not to fire, for she did not want the enemy to pinpoint their locations until their own forces were committed. She watched as the enemy arranged their forces, and she drew in deep breaths, feeling the electricity in the air like a gathering storm. The Skylords formed into a wave and came toward the city all as one, and the war began.

Lighting scythed down like daggers from the sky, crimson and violet and cracking with strokes of thunder, and Ashari felt the power of the driving mind lash out and seek to crush the resistance of the men on the walls. They wavered, and animals screamed in terror, but she lowered her head and met that power with her own, striking a vicious blow, and the power recoiled, gathering like a storm before it came again.

The bolts from the lances of the Skylords lashed down to the walls, and they caught on the iron poles and the power was drawn down and vanished into the earth. Iron glowed crimson from the heat, and more than one of the guarding pillars shattered with the force of too much power pouring into it. But the men on the walls were spared, and they sent a cloud or arrows reaching upward. The ballistae fired their dark bolts, and a half-dozen beasts were struck and came hurtling down. One smashed upon the wall and then tumbled over to the ground below, dragging screaming men with it.

The war engines without began to fire, and a hail of bolts and stones battered against the shining walls of the city, tearing pieces loose, ripping shards of stone from the masonry. The city catapults answered, and the air filled with the hum of stones and arrows. Burning vessels fell on the enemy machines and set them ablaze, but not enough of them to stem the hail of death.

The Skylords flew overhead and then out over the city, their lances of fire tearing downward, setting fires and shattering buildings. Ashari had places bolt throwers on rooftops, and as the beasts swooped low to rake the earth they fired and brought more of them down, bleeding monsters crashing into the city, breaking towers and smashing through domes.

The foot began to move forward, marching with heavy tread with a sound like doom, and the archers on the walls poured arrows into the ranks. Men fell in windrows, leaving tide-marks of dead upon the ground, but they did not slow their march. They came in range and loosed their own arrows, filling the air with the terrible thrum of thousands of shafts.

Ashari knew the enemy mind had paused to order its army, and she would not allow it to choose the moment. She ground her teeth together and reached out for it, found it like a coiling shape in dark waters, and she struck at it with all the power she possessed, sparing nothing. Her stroke was keened to a point like a spear, and it lanced deep into the enemy. She saw a ripple pass through the foot soldiers, as if they felt the pain.

Then the power rallied and gathered itself, and she found herself caught in a grip so strong she was all but pulled from her body. Red force crushed upon her, seeking to extinguish her life in a single instant, and she fought desperately to get free. She heard the rattle of arrows upon the parapet as if from far away; she dimly felt her guards move to protect her with bodies and upraised shields. The power gave her no way to escape, and she gasped as though she would suffocate.

Horns blew outside the city, and the mind was momentarily distracted. The hills west of the city darkened with riders, and the motive power that controlled the army had to turn some of its attention to reorder its forces. That moment gave Ashari enough of an opening to tear herself free. She seemed to slam back into an awareness of her body, staggered and would have fallen if her guards had not caught her.

In the foothills the riders of the Horane were gathering, and then a dark wave of them rushed forward even as the enemy forces tried to reorganize to face the new threat. They could not move swiftly enough, and the horde of riders smashed into the enemy formations while they were still coalescing.

Ashari heard the terrible impact from where she stood, and she saw the riders cut deeply into the enemy, leaving a wake of the slain in their path. She had sent the Horane away to conceal themselves in the hills, to ride forth and strike when it would tell most heavily. No power in the world could truly force them to ride in ranks or strike as a true army, but no force could keep them from battle, either. Loosed upon an enemy they hated, they struck with sword and arrow and gleaming glassine lance.

She sensed the great mind in control gather itself to strike the riders down, and she took the moment of its distraction. Ashari took a heavy breath and then hurled herself back into her own unseen battle, striking at the enemy presence that brooded over the battlefield like a thundercloud, and she slashed at the dark tendrils that reached out to every mind in the legion, directing their bodies and mastering their wills.

This was the moment when the battle subsumed everything, becoming a world made of blood and death and screams. Arrows fell like rain, stones fell from the sky, and lightning scrawled destruction across the city. Giants battered at the great gate, smashing at it with iron-headed hammers, and the foot soldiers hurled themselves against the walls, trying to climb to the top over the bodies of their fellows. The Horane rushed in, withdrew, and then charged again. Ashari saw it all in flashes through the mind of the creature she fought unseen, battling in a shadow world made of shadow and light beneath the glare of the crimson sun.

She and the unseen mind battled like invisible giants, towering over a field of war they only dimly perceived. Again, she found the mind of her enemy overwhelmingly strong but slow to move, slow to adapt to new maneuvers or situations. In command of vastly superior force it was a relentless commander, able to coordinate all its forces with a single will. But it was like an unliving mind, cold and slow-moving.

It gave her an opening, and she rent it through, feeling it scream and convulse. She pressed in for the fatal blow, and then a cloud of darkness roiled ahead of her, and a face appeared in her mind. A smooth, impassive, pale face that looked on her with a cold wrath, and she recognized the features of the emperor himself. Kurux, the heir of a thousand years, the Black Emperor. He subsumed the alien mind and took direct control of it, and she felt his power echo there, refracted through a lesser vessel.

“You,” he intoned, his voice shivering and distorted in her mind. “Now I know what opposes me. You cannot win. I will destroy you, and all you have built, all who follow you.”

He struck at her and she parried his attack, feeling his strength weaken as the savaged node he worked through bled and died. She struck back at him and he shunted her aside, and then something else came. A shadow fell across all she perceived. Something rose up behind Kurux, and she felt a mind-shattering power reach out for her in fury.

In desperation she flung herself back, returning to awareness of her body. She cried out and hurled herself away as a bolt of unseen power smote where she had been and cracked the stone. She threw out a barrier of her power to protect her, and still pain lashed through her mind like fire. The men around her screamed and clutched their heads, and then fifteen of them fell dead. She felt an echo of an inner cry as the stroke snuffed out the mind it had passed through like a spear lancing a boil.

She staggered to her feet, shaking and weakened, feeling her strength spent and wavering. The power behind the emperor had reached out to touch her for a moment with the merest flicker of its might, and it had almost destroyed her. She swallowed and turned to look over the battlefield, which had become a storm of arrow and stone and flame that darkened the sun.

The invaders had erected something at the rearmost rank of their forces – a tower of some kind, with a flashing light at the apex. As she looked, a blaze of light flared out and focused into a beam that roared as it burned through the air and struck the gate a terrific blow. The stone underfoot heaved as the great gate was incinerated, hurling burning wood and glowing metal high into the air. The rightmost gate tower slumped down and collapsed, partially blocking the gateway, but dragging a hundred men down with it in a screaming mass.

The enemy came on, undeterred, and she sensed lesser powers directing them – weaker minds. She was too spent to think of battling them, and she looked over the city, smoke rising from a hundred places where the Skylords had struck, and she nodded. She turned to her messengers where they cowered against the stone, and she gave her orders. “Abandon the wall, begin the evacuation of the city. Get every fighting man and every scrap of supply onto the ships.” She looked outward to the enemy ranks beginning to press forward, forcing their way to the shattered gate. “Take me to my dragon.”

#

And so, astride her great beast of war, Ashari took to the gleaming streets of her city to fight to the last. Her bodyguard arrayed themselves in her wake, a thousand men strong in steel armor and fired with the will to die in her service, and she waited behind the ruined gate for the coming tide.

The enemy foot soldiers came on in a great wave of steel, and her beast vomited forth a river of fire that consumed them and sent smoke rising up in a great pillar that stood over the city among the lesser clouds of smoke. Driven on, they trod over their fellows, walked into the flames and immolated themselves, and they came onward until the heaped bodies smothered the fire.

Steel met steel in a terrible clash, and Ashari rode at the heart of it, her dragon scything side to side with his gilded tusks, ripping men apart and treading them beneath his claws. She struck down side to side with her glittering spear, exhausted but unwilling to bend, refusing to give ground. Her guards fought to the last drop of blood, but they could do no more than delay the oncoming horde. Ashari could make them pay a terrible price for her city, but she could not stop them.

The war-engine fired again, blasting down another part of the wall, and more of the enemy began to flood in through the gaping wound. Now she could not even slow them, now she had to escape. She gave commands and the war-horns blew, and she led her men away. Her dragon breathed forth the last of his fire, filling the street with blazing death, and it made a barrier to stop the enemy advance so she could break free and escape.

Skylords dove and wheeled through the heavy smoke that lay over the city, striking down at her men, blasting them into pieces, and she lost more and more as they struggled through the burning city toward the harbor. Ashari had to check her dragon’s speed, lest he leave her guards behind, and that she would not allow. She would save every last man she could.

Another wing of Skylords swooped upon them as they reached the waterfront, and a barrage of heavy bolts from the ships at anchor struck some down and scattered the rest. Her men raced for the gangplanks, crowding onto the ships as quickly as they could, until Ashari herself was the last one on the shore. She looked upon her city, remembering it as she had made it – as she had raised new towers and gilded those that already stood. She had made Irdru into a jewel gleaming beside the blue waters of the sea, and now she saw it in ruins and it grieved her like a wound.

She drove her bloodied spear into the stone of the jetty and swore, then, that she would return. She would make Kurux pay for what he had done, and she would cast down his new empire in fire and ruin. And she would return to this very place, and she would build Irdru to be even grander than it had been before.

The greatest warship was reserved for her, with a place for her dragon to lair upon the plated deck. She dismounted and led him across, and then the ship cast off and left the city behind. The last of the warships joined her fleet already out to sea, all the soldiers and civilians and supplies she had been able to rescue from the destruction. She called for her banners to be raised, and then she stood upon the prow of her warship and caused every prow to turn toward the north. Across the sea were other lands, and there she would find time and room to gather and renew, and make ready for the next battle in this bitter war.