Chapter Fifty

“Front row, fall back! Second row, forward!” Cinna ordered just a few minutes after the gates rose.

She couldn’t see the action very well from the middle of the formation, but Cinna knew the flow of battle well. Humans could only engage in active combat for a handful of minutes before tiring out. It didn’t matter how much training one participated in or how good their conditioning might be. Fighting was by its nature exhausting on multiple levels, both physical and mental. It was important to switch the frontline troops out regularly in order to maintain combat effectiveness.

The lack of need to do that was one of the biggest advantages the undead army possessed.

Cinna kept careful track of Lilia’s position as the troops changed positions, making sure to keep the little necromancer firmly behind her at all times. She didn’t want her to get swept up in the shuffling of men and women around her and carried away to gods-knew-where. It wasn’t simply the front-most soldiers cycling their places in the formation; the ones furthest up were moving all the way to the rear while those behind them stepped up to take their places.

After confirming Lilia hadn’t been pushed out of her spot, Cinna peaked out from behind her shield to get a better look ahead. Leaning around the heads of the knights in front of her, Cinna caught a small glimpse of the makeshift bridge the necromancers had constructed.

The abomination, technically an undead being in its own right, looked like a scaffold of bone. Thin bones with narrow ends like ribs were packed together to form a surface to walk over while long, broad-ended bones taken from legs and arms made up the frame. Judging by the fact the bridge had been constructed with two walkable levels and a ramp leading up to the fortress’s ramparts, Cinna guessed that the necromancers’ intentions had been to seize the gatehouse and force the gates open before flooding the fortress with undead from both floors.

While they’d surely been taken by surprise by the defenders sallying through the gate, the necromancers had already been moving draugr into position there in preparation for later. Right now they were likely committing exactly enough of their forces to stopping Cinna’s counterattack to hold them in place, but if they managed to take the gatehouse their efforts would likely increase several fold. There would be little point in overcommitting now, when the defenders could still close the gate anytime they wanted, but they also wouldn’t want any harm to come to their bridge.

Thinking about the necromancers’ plans made Cinna worry for her father’s safety. He’d made his way to the top of the gatehouse as soon as the skeletal bridge began assembling itself. Cinna might have been in the thick of a fight herself, but the fighting up top would likely be far fiercer. For on thing, the necromancers had committed seemingly their entire contingent of liches to that task.

So Cinna had thought, anyway, before being definitely proven wrong.

Three near-concurrent cracks split the air, followed immediately by the sound of metal being struck with incredible force. Beneath the sound of crumpling metal, Cinna heard the distinctly familiar and discomforting sound skulls being caved in. She didn’t need to see what had happened to figure it out, and indeed, she couldn’t. Even so, she responded quickly, cutting through the shouts of alarm and dismay from the front ranks.

“Shield-bearers, up to the front, quickly! Pass your shields to those in front of you if that’s what it takes!” Cinna commanded. Selkarc’s knights didn’t tend to carry shields, as their plate mail sufficed against most hand-portable weapons, but the common soldiery did. “And someone call for magical support. We have liches on the bridge!”

Technically speaking, expertly-wielded slings could have had the same effect. But not on flat ground and in the middle of such a packed formation. Only an earth mage could have launched stones with enough force to dent steel helmets without space to swing a sling. Moreover, Cinna hadn’t heard the projectiles shatter on impact. That could have meant metal bullets, but she found it far more likely that they were up against a lich that could harden stone until it reached the hardness of steel.

Shields were hardly a perfect defense against magic like that, but they would provide an additional buffer that could slow down projectiles before they struck the target. They would make it harder to pinpoint the bearer’s head and might knock penetrating projectiles off course as well. That wouldn’t typically be enough to stop a mage of this caliber on its own, but the lich that cast those bullets had likely been ordered to scale its attacks back so as not to collapse the gate or damage the bridge.

Whichever of Selkarc’s generals had trained the soldiers and knights accompanying Cinna right now had done an excellent job of it. They responded quickly and readily to the sudden change in plans. The knights, forgoing their noble pride, surrendered their positions in the vanguard to the commoners backing them up, who themselves took little time to process the fact Cinna had abandoned the tactics they were used to.

Before the enemy lich could prepare another volley Cinna’s escort had already managed to adjust their formation and bring the soldiers with shields to the front. They wouldn’t be able to muster as much strength into their blows wielding their weapons in one hand, but the knights wielding two-handed weapons had already claimed enough ground that it didn’t matter. Now the only objective was holding position until Lilia completed her task.

Another set of cracks echoed through the tunnel beneath the gate and Cinna instinctively braced her shield before she even realized it had already been struck. A moment later the impact registered, as did the feeling of splinters bouncing off her armor. Far from stopping the bullet that struck it, her shield had actually given way. A chunk was missing from the upper right corner. Even the steel rim had been torn away.

“Tch. Shields aren’t enough. Where are our mages!?” Cinna demanded, shifting her shield so that the ruined corner didn’t overlap any part of her body. No one answered her question; she doubted anyone in earshot knew the answer. “Lilia, are much longer?”

“Um…more than half?” Lilia replied absent-mindedly, barely audible above the sounds of metal weapons crashing into metal and wood. She’d hardly finished answering when three more booms shook the tunnel, and this time one of the soldiers up front wasn’t so lucky. They dropped to the ground with a spray of blood from their head, visible through the crush of bodies as their fellows awkwardly stepped around the newly-made corpse to fill their space.

“We should have brought at least one mage from the start, but I couldn’t justify pulling any from the walls when the battle up there might have been keeping the liches occupied anyway,” Cinna muttered to herself. Every few seconds the undead earth mage loosed another volley, and although the casualties were fewer compared to that first attack against unshielded heads, soldiers were still dropping at an alarming rate.

“General!” a young woman yelled as she pushed her way back against the formation. “The draugr—they’ve stopped attacking! They’re just pulling at our shields now!”

“Damn it!” Cinna turned her head to the read, careful not to shift her position too much and expose herself beyond the protection of her shield. “Send another runner to the walls! We need mage support, now!”

More magically-launched projectiles split the helmets of her soldiers even as Cinna spoke. She wished she could have had a farspeaker relay the request directly, but those were far too precious to risk this close to the fighting. It would have been difficult for a support mage like that to focus in such conditions, anyway.

“Something not...someone’s trying to revive the dead soldiers!” Lilia warned. “I’m stopping them, but…it’s hard to do this and deal with the bridge at the same time!”

“I didn’t think they could do it from that far away,” Cinna replied. “Wait—there must be a necromancer leading them directly. No wonder they’re adapting so quickly. Lilia, can you identify them?”

“There’s too many souls. They’re too bright,” Lilia answered. Cinna couldn’t decipher the necromancer’s response, exactly, but she gathered that the meaning had been no. She wanted to ask more questions and see if she could find some bit of information Lilia hadn’t understood the significance of, but the more she distracted the necromancer the longer it would take her to finish her designated job.

“I need to find some way of drawing them out. But how…?” Cinna wondered aloud, though the words were lost beneath the crashing of steel.

Unfortunately, her plan from Saltrvatrmarr clearly wouldn’t work here. For one thing, she herself was in no condition to fight. While she could take up a weapon if it came down to it, she knew she wouldn’t be fighting at her peak. At the time she’d had a unit of hand-picked knights backing her up, as well. It wasn’t just a matter of skill. She’d fought alongside those men and women before. Trusted them implicitly, and vice versa. The knights selected by Tryggve were doubtlessly skilled, but Cinna didn’t know them on a personal level.

More dangerously, though, Cinna didn’t have a counter to the enemy mage. Attempting to carve a path to the necromancer leading the undead on the bridge would only result in being cut down by the lich supporting them. With Lilia busy dismantling the bridge bone by bone, she couldn’t do much about the necromancer either. Even if they succeeded in eliminating the necromancer they couldn’t guarantee another wouldn’t show up immediately.

“Where’s a Hero when you need one?” Cinna whispered, though she couldn’t fault Leo when she’d set in motion the events leading to his absence in the first place. Sadly, reality wasn’t so gracious as to respond to her musing with his immediate arrival. Instead, she could only listen as more of her soldiers fell defending Lilia.

And if her count was accurate, the enemy lich was speeding up.

The sweat on Cinna’s skin felt cold as a second projectile smashed into her shield, this time glancing off her pauldron for good measure. Her shield arm tingled from the force of the blow. Much as she racked her brain for solutions, she just couldn’t see a way to survive this without an allied mage.

“Hold steady, soldiers of Selkarc! You need only hold the line until we’re reinforced!” Cinna exhorted, though the words rang hollow in her own ears. She saw a knight stoop down to pry the shield from a dead soldier and step in take their place at the front and glanced around, realizing they weren’t the first.

“Someone do something about that damn mage!”

“Judith’s down—cover me while I grab her shield!”

“Sven, are you alright?”

“I’m alive, but…fuck, I can’t lift my arm…”

“I’ve got you, come on!”

“Pass me a new shield, I can barely even hold what’s left of this one…!”

Cinna gritted her teeth and shook her head. Her soldiers hadn’t lost hope yet, so she couldn’t either. There had to be a solution here. Something she could do to hold back the draugr until Lilia finished. A way to eliminate the both liches. The necromancer and the earth mage.

Then the scent of burning flesh washed through the tunnel. Accompanying it was a flash of light that illuminated the dim space as if the noon sun had found a way to shine into it directly. Most importantly of all, though, was the direction the light came from. Ahead—from the bridge itself.