Arts of Dark and Light: Book 01 - A Throne of Bones Read online

“Castita merda!” Saturnius swore. He sounded genuinely distressed. “Oh, you stupid, stupid, sopio!”

  Corvus had to step sideways to see around the crest of Aulus Crescentius’s helm, which was blocking his view. What he saw filled him with horror.

  At the base of the hill, alone and facing the entire goblin left flank, was a mounted tribune, resplendent in a blue captain’s cloak. He held his sword, or perhaps it was a mace, aloft, and behind him lay sprawled the dead bodies of a large, dark-furred wolf and its rider. The Amorran cavalry he commanded was chanting his name.

  “Fortex! Fortex! Fortex!”

  By all the gods, Gaius Valerius, what have you done?

  He exchanged a look with Saturnius. The legate’s face was nearly as ashen as it had been suffused with scarlet before. Around them, the officers of the legion’s command staff fell entirely silent. They too had seen the tribune’s triumph.

  “I’m sorry, Sextus Valerius,” Saturnius said. His old friend came closer to him and placed a hand upon his shoulder. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  Corvus nodded, maintaining his composure even though the urge to ride down the hill himself and throttle his vainglorious fool of a nephew was so strong it made his hands shake. As a horn sounded from his right flank and the knights of the Second began to advance down the hill, he deliberately turned his back on them and returned his attention to the infantry still fighting hard below.

  What would happen would happen. It was all in God’s hands. There was simply nothing he could do about it now.

  FORTEX

  The exultation of the kill faded, and Fortex knew a moment’s stark terror after he raised aloft the wolfrider’s severed head.

  Only a bare handful of knights responded to his signal. No trumpet sounded, no advance ensued, all he could hear were the bestial shrieks of the goblins and the howls of the wolves not fifty paces behind him.

  It was his helm, he realized too late. With the silvered steel covering most of his mouth, no one could possibly have heard his cry from the summit of the hill! And if the damned gobbos charged now, he’d have no hope of escape. Even a horse as fast and powerful as Incitatus would not be able to climb a hill that steep without being pulled down from behind.

  “Dammit, Marcus!” he cursed his cousin’s cowardice. Then he remembered he had ordered Marcus to hold his ground until the goblins broke. Did they look like running?

  He wheeled Incitatus around to face the enemy and was deeply disappointed to see that they did not. If anything, they were howling and shrieking even louder than before. This close, the sound was almost deafening, a palpable wave that washed over him like a river smashing against a solitary rock.

  He was, he knew, a dead man. At this range, their bloody archers could hardly miss, and even their pathetic little wooden bows could generate enough force to punch a shaft right through his breastplate. He glanced at the severed head weighing down his sword, which was now streaked with dark green ichor. The dead goblin didn’t have any answers for him, and the gaping mouth gaping loosely open made it look about as stupid as Fortex was feeling. It was also making his sword feel distressingly heavy.

  Well, if nothing else, he’d killed the big bastard. For a moment there, when the monster wolf had turned on him with such unexpected speed, he’d thought it was going to chew off his arse! With no time to think, he’d simply reacted. So there was that. If Fortex had to die in battle, then at least they would say he did it in bloody style! Anyhow, a warrior’s death was better than an ambusher’s arrow through the throat or shitting your life out in the latrines.

  He slipped his useless shield off his left arm and slung it on the saddle, switched hands, then grabbed the goblin’s hair and tugged it off the end of his sword. Or rather, he tried to tug it off. Bloody hells, it was really stuck on there! He gritted his teeth and pulled again. Finally it came off with a grotesquely unappetizing sucking sound.

  “Do you want this?” he shouted at the shrieking, unhearing goblins. “Do you want it back? Then take it and be damned, you swamp-stinking, frog-humping, demon-spawned buggers!”

  He rose in his stirrups and hurled their dead commander’s head at them as if it was a firepot.

  To his surprise, the wolfriders in its path cringed as if it terrified them. They shied away from the grotesque missile as it struck the ground before them and bounced harmlessly through their lines. Fortex returned his sword to his right hand and kicked Incitatus forward, hoping to kill at least two or three more of the little monsters before they brought him down. And then, from behind him, he heard the most beautiful sound he had ever heard in his life. First one horn, then a second, and finally the third, each sounding the advance!

  Why, Marcus Valerius, you magnificent disobedient puppy! Perhaps, he considered happily, his cousin wasn’t entirely the bloodless ninny as he seemed.

  Glancing back, he saw the entire cavalry wing was beginning to descend the hill and the first small group of knights, led by the second decurion of the fourth squadron, Gavrus, had already reached the bottom and was galloping madly toward him with their lances lowered.

  “What took you so long?” he shouted at the decurion as he came within earshot.

  “You didn’t say you wanted company, Tribune!” Gavrus pulled up his horse and raised his lance when he reached Fortex’s side. “We thought you was going to beat them all by your own self!”

  “I’m a generous man, Gavrus. I wouldn’t deny you your share.”

  He looked past his small half-squadron of reinforcements at the majestic sight of the entire cavalry wing picking up speed as they approached the level plain. The thunder of eight hundred hooves made the ground shake, and he wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to turn and see the goblins in the front line beginning to back away. The twelve knights with him looked far more wolfish than the beasts on which the enemy rode.

  “Well, men,” Fortex said, “there are at least twelve of us against, what, seven hundred? I like those odds, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for a response, but instead raised his sword and urged Incitatus forward. Behind him, the decurion shouted “Fortex!” and the cry was echoed by the others.

  Three wolfriders leaped toward him, their beasts snarling. But they were the brave exceptions as the goblin cavalry crumbled before the black wave of the approaching Amorran onslaught.

  Incitatus reared up and smashed the skull of the wolf on his left with an iron-shod hoof, and Fortex slashed the head off a spear that jabbed up at him on his right. Incitatus leaped forward again as Fortex brought his sword up and around in time to sever the left arm of the third wolfrider, and then he was past the combatants and in hot pursuit of their companions.

  While the wolves were fleet of foot and their riders were less than half the weight of an armored human knight, they couldn’t hope to outrun an Amorran battle steed, much less one the size and breeding of Incitatus. Fortex cut down one, two, three goblins before any of them had even realized he was upon them, and Incitatus simply galloped right over a fourth, trampling wolf and rider alike. The wolf yelped like a beaten puppy as it rolled to its feet and fled, but its rider was silent, reduced to little more than a battered mass of shapeless green gore. The big horse stumbled momentarily but soon regained his stride, allowing Fortex to kill two more goblins in quick succession.

  After a few more minutes of effortless slaughter, he pulled Incitatus up and saw that the fastest-riding knights were already flying past him. Their lances were expertly spearing goblins by the dozens as they rode down the shorter-legged wolves from behind. As their lances splintered or were lodged in the bodies of their foes, they dropped them and switched to the sword. A few of the riderless wolves caught up in the chaos of battle snapped and slashed at the horses’ legs, but the knights were alert to their presence, and no few wolves were impaled as well.

  Here and there a horse went down, more often brought down by the uneven ground over which they galloped than by the spears or teeth of the enemy. But such falls were seldom
fatal to either horse or rider, and overall, their casualties were so light as to be almost nonexistent. Fortex grinned as he saw the red standard of the Second Knights snapping smartly above the heads of a small group of approaching riders. The draconarius held the flag proudly aloft in both hands, defended on one side by a decurion of the third squadron and by his cousin on the other. A riderless wolf standing over the corpse of his rider snarled as they rode past, and Marcus adroitly leaned over as if he were at the tilt and drove his lance right through the wolf’s open jaws. The lance snapped with a loud crack as the wolf collapsed, its skull pierced fore and aft, and Fortex had to laugh as his cousin threw the remains of the now-useless weapon at the dying animal in apparent disgust.

  “You should have saved that for spitting goblins, Marcus! Leave the wolves alone, they don’t have much fight in them without their riders.”

  Marcus shrugged indifferently, but Fortex thought he looked a little greenish. “How far do you want to chase them?”

  “To the ends of the earth!” Fortex laughed again. He felt like a veritable god of war. How glorious it was to ride over a battlefield covered by the broken, bleeding bodies of the foe! “No, we can’t afford to let the men extend themselves much further and risk getting cut off. We’ll give them their head for a little longer, then call them back to reform. You may recall, after all, the entire point of this little exercise was to relieve the center.”

  “With the cavalry screen gone, we can hit their infantry from behind,” Marcus noted. “That should do for them.”

  “Your timing may be impeccable, Marcus, but there is more to winning battles than simply killing the enemy. If we hit their infantry from behind, we’ll trap them between us and our infantry. With no way out, that will put even more pressure on our cohorts in the center, at least until we kill them all.” Fortex laughed at the expression of chagrin on his cousin’s face. “Never corner a rat if you can avoid it. We’ll hit the buggers on the flank and give them room to run. That will trigger the rout and put them in a position where the First Knights can ride them down even easier than we did the wolves on our side.”

  Fortex sighed and reached out to clap Marcus on his armored shoulder. “I won’t say it doesn’t pain me to let Sulpicius and his boys in on the action, but that will make things considerably easier on the infantry, and they’ve had a long morning. And they’ve still got their lances, whereas we don’t. Now, why don’t we see if we can kill ourselves a few more goblins before we sound the recall?”

  Two hours later, the sun was past its zenith and the contested ground belonged to the legion. It had taken longer than Fortex had expected for the decurions to recall their battle-maddened riders and assemble them into a reasonable formation, but nevertheless, the Second Knights still managed arrived in time to take the unsuspecting enemy infantry in the left flank with a devastating charge that was accompanied by a chorus of cheers from the watching Amorran centuries.

  Fortex was deeply grateful to whatever optio was commanding the ballistari, because as soon as his draconarius had sounded the horn to signal the shift from skirmish to a wedge, two groups of twenty onagers unexpectedly hurled their massive missiles into the left side of the goblin line, preventing it from turning in formation to defend against Fortex’s charge.

  The artillery barrage made all the difference. Instead of trying to force their horses into three rows of braced enemy spears, however hastily and haphazardly assembled, his knights found themselves crashing against a broken, bleeding line, with huge gaps torn in it. The goblin infantry hadn’t run before contact like their cavalry had, but stunned and in disarray, they were even more helpless than the fleeing wolfriders against the shock of the Amorran cavalry charge.

  A centurion approached him. It was Caius Proculus, the senior centurion of the second cohort. “Well met, Tribune.”

  Fortex grinned and extended his hand, but the centurion gripped his forearm as if he were a fellow legionary, not an officer. “Most kind of you to leave us a few goblins, Centurion,” Fortex replied, well-pleased by the implicit compliment. “I thought surely you’d have eaten them all by the time we got here.

  “They say you knights all have arses like plums and livers like sheep, but I say you can stand with the hastati any time, Tribune.”

  Fortex was delighted, but he hid it with a contemptuous snort. “Proculus, the fact that I’m foolish enough to do your bloody work for you doesn’t mean I’m dumb enough to walk when I can ride. Tell you what, though, you buy yourself a mule when we get back to Berdicum, and I’ll make you a decurion.”

  The centurion barked with laughter and saluted. “By the bones, Tribune, don’t tempt me! I just may take you up on that! God and Amorr, sir!”

  Fortex returned the centurion’s salute with his own, then urged Incitatus to follow the rest of the Second Knights, who were trotting leisurely toward what looked to be general direction of the camp. He was desperately hungry, and now that the rush of battle fury had faded, the disgusting smell of the goblin blood in which he had all but bathed was beginning to make him feel faint.

  He mused upon the centurion’s salute as they rode. God and Amorr? He didn’t see that the Immaculate had had much to do with the charnel house of this battlefield. When he looked down at the stinking blood and gore splattered across his arm, chest, and leg, it was, in fact, hard to imagine anything less immaculate.

  He wasn’t even sure what Amorr had to do with it either, come to think of it. Had there ever been a goblin tribe known to march on the great city? Marcus would know, he supposed. But, to be honest, he couldn’t care less. Victory in battle was its own reward, and a man no more needed to justify war than he needed to justify wine.

  The camp was in sight when he saw a tribune and a centurion riding toward him. It was Crescentius, the laticlavius, easily recognizable by the broad white strip at the bottom of his red tribune’s cape. He didn’t know the centurion’s name, although he seemed to recall the man was with the seventh cohort.

  They were probably coming to fetch him on behalf of the legate, Fortex concluded. He wasn’t surprised that Saturnius would want to honor him in some way, although the infantry hadn’t been in nearly enough danger to justify anything like the grass crown. Wouldn’t that have been something, though! Magnus would have been fair to burst with pride.

  Caught up in his idle daydreaming, Fortex nearly fell off Incitatus at the first words out of Crescentius’s mouth. They were, in fact, very close to the last thing he could have possibly imagined under the circumstances.

  Gaius Valerius Fortex, you will accompany us now. Give the centurion your sword. I have orders in the name of Marcus Saturnius, legate of the legion, to place you under arrest.”

  SEVERA

  The autumn sun was unseasonably hot as it beat down on the forty thousand people sitting or standing on the stone rows of the great arena. Fortunately, the slaves had brought some thick white cloth with them and, with the use of some wooden posts, had arranged it to provide shade for Severa and the others seated in the box. Below them, a pair of female fighters in leather armor were jabbing their spears at a nearly naked male goblin armed with only a dagger, but the uneven battle held little interest for her. She was thinking about one of the attractions to come later in the day, and her stomach was tight with dread and anticipation.

  Her father and three brothers were seated in front of her, to her left. As one of the women nearly managed to skewer the green-skinned inhuman with a clumsy jab, her father leaned over and said something to her oldest brother, Regulus, who threw back his head and laughed. Her mother, being more than a little squeamish, wasn’t there. She was at home with Severa’s younger sister, Severina, who was too young for the bloody violence on display.

  But not Severa. What was more, she had been permitted to bring her friends Caera and Falconilla with her, both of whom were tremendously excited to be seen by everyone sitting in the princep’s box.

  “Those creatures are so disgusting,” Falconilla comme
nted, staring at the goblin with an incredulous expression on her face. “Can you imagine how they must smell? Where do they find them anyway?”

  Her brother Tertius, only a year older than Severa, leaned back to reply. “Considering that House Valerius has three legions marching through their lands right now, I imagine there will soon be a surfeit of them in the markets. Would you like one, my lady Falconius?”

  Falconilla didn’t deign to provide Tertius with a verbal response but merely turned up her nose at him. Tertius laughed and turned his attention back to the amateurish battle.

  The goblin was nearly as tall as the shorter woman but much skinnier, and its legs and arms were disproportionately long by human standards. Its skin was a light green color with hints of yellow here and there, and a faint dusting of dark green hair covered its chest and lower belly. Whatever passed for its goblinhood was mercifully concealed by a dirty cloth that may have once been white. The goblin’s face was a mask of bestial desperation. It bared sharp and yellowed teeth at the women as it once again managed to duck a spear thrust at its chest. The women seemed to be a little slower than the goblin, and their failure to coordinate their attacks made it easy for the greenskin to evade them. But despite its long arms and greater speed, the short length of the crude dagger with which it had been provided made it difficult for the goblin to get past the iron spearheads without taking a high risk of being impaled.

  “Whatever did those poor women do to find themselves thrown in the arena?” Caera asked Severa.

  “Who knows,” she answered. “Maybe they’re slaves no one wanted.”

  “Do you think so?” Caera sounded surprised. “The taller one is pretty enough to be a bodyslave.”

  “What of it?” Falconilla asked dismissively. “That filthy goblin is pretty enough to be an Andronican lady-in-waiting.”

  “Or the wife of a Valerian,” Severa said, laughing. “Maybe that’s why House Valerius sent their legions north—it’s the only way they can find anyone to marry their sons and daughters!”