Or Passing

Isbanir, the capital of the Second Haxamanid Empire, sat on the Purratu River, one of the Three Great Rivers of the East. Another of the three, the Jurtow in Kamut, had such a vast and fertile floodplain that there was hardly a loaf of bread or bowl of porridge in the Empire not made with the grain it irrigated.

Rufio had never seen the Jurtow, but he could hardly imagine that any river was mightier than the Purratu. From where he rode southwest of Isbanir, looking across to the opposite bank carried much the same impression as looking across the Strait of Aureliopolis from the waterfront to the Hattusan Peninsula: a flat expanse of water with only the faint impression of a coastline, at the edge of sight. When the road climbed a little, the elevation let him see the south half of the Hojuzite siege camp.

As the army of Emperor Alexios approached the once-great city of the Haxamanids, they found it in a sorry state. Carrion-birds circled its high ziggurats, and a breach in its mighty walls had been hastily filled with rubble, sharpened stakes, and corpses.

Rufio had psychically heard of events in Lyria from Valens, how the Imperial force had found an opportunity to take the Aleani by surprise, and how their flight, in turn, had thrown the Bolthoi into confusion. Though the Western Rhatian Emperor had lost contact with Hadrian before he had found the Shadow-shrouded place in the lands of the Bolthoi, only to feel the pang of his death days later, the intellect and will to fight of the Shadow’s monsters among the ranks of the Bolthoi seemed oddly diminished, by the time he arrived to Dionysia. They could only assume that their friend had made a bold sacrifice, which had not been in vain.

They would have neither of these advantages today, on this dusty plain before the walls of Isbanir. The Hojuzite scouts had seen them coming, and most of their army was now arrayed between Alexios’ army and the city. Though they did not have a menagerie of monsters arrayed among their swarming masses of light cavalry, an Imperial advance would, they could safely assume, be met with a much stronger torrent of battlefield magic than normal. The most devout servants of Nabi’s sect would be empowered beyond their natural abilities by what they believed to be mastery over the Shadow, even as their false prophet gave them over to it.

The Imperial army fanned out to face the Hojuzites, and for a long time the two armies stood, considering each other, their commanders watching for any weak point. Rufio and Atia waited, mounted and arrayed in borrowed mail armor, as Alexios pondered the battlefield.

“My lord,” Antoninos the historian eventually said, “we are about even-matched in numbers; they have at worst twenty thousand, to our fifteen thousand. On other ground, I would not be against an engagement, but this open, flat plain favors the mobility of the Hojuzite cavalry, and provides their sorcerers vast lines of sight over which to weave sweeping spells. The only saving grace of this position is that the river protects our right flank. I advise an ordered retreat along its course, only turning to engage should we come to more constricting terrain, where armor and well-ordered formations will count for more than speed or magic. Otherwise, we leave troops to reinforce the border forts, return to Aureliopolis, and allow the Hojuzites to finish their business with the Haxamanids before we concern ourselves with them again.”

Even as he spoke, a string of boats launched from the city’s docks, into the river. They moved away from Alexios’ army, downriver towards a sharp northward bend.

“See?” The willowy academic scoffed. “Even the Haxamanids know their position is hopeless. We gain nothing by giving ourselves up to slaughter before their walls.”

Rufio traced the course of the river. It went north a great distance, and even swung a little westward, coming level with the Imperial front line less than a mile off its left flank, before it turned and resumed its general eastward course. “If nothing else, if we shift our position northward, we can pick up those refugees. Whatever remains of the Haxamanid political leadership is likely to be on those boats; they might make useful figureheads, in a future conflict with the Hojuzites over former Haxamanid lands.”

For the first time since Rufio had laid eyes on the man, Antoninos seemed impressed. “You are becoming a political animal, artisan. There is some sense to that proposal, I think, but not enough to warrant the risk. Maintaining a decent fighting formation while moving to that bend will be a slow and tricky business, and will give the Hojuzites more angles to flank us than our own cavalry can cover.”

Atia’s eyes were fixed on the Hojuzite line. She leaned into Rufio, speaking softly. “See that?”

From their rear, a unit of cavalrymen rode along the Hojuzite right flank, northward towards the bend. The riders were more heavily armored than the bulk of their forces, and the horses were… well, still in the shape of horses, but all had some hideous disproportion of their legs or elongation of their mouths that suggested they were halfway through a metamorphosis into monsters.

“Is that the bodyguard… of…”

“It’s him. Nabi. That thing wearing Cornelius’ face.”

“He could probably obliterate those boats with a single Water Sign, then. Your Majesty, Antoninos, we need to intercept those horsemen. We can decapitate this whole movement right now.”

Alexios froze up, his knuckles turning white on his horse’s reigns.

“My emperor,” Antoninos hissed, “leave them to their fates. The best direction for us to go is back, so we can engage them on our own terms. The second best direction is forward, to strike while their leader’s attention is elsewhere. A lateral move is a distant third, and King forbid we split our forces.”

Still, Alexios hesitated, and Nabi’s guard rode closer to the river.

Antoninos glared at Atia, then at Rufio. Both the men could see the muscles tighten in each other’s throats, and then both barked out orders at once.

“All units!” Antoninos shouted, “Prepare a fighting withdrawal! Second line, form gaps and hold position! First line, retreat!”

“Horsemen!” Rufio belted over him, “Form up on me! Pursue and encircle those outriders!”

Many of the officers tasked with relaying the orders only heard one set of them, or the other. Those close enough to the emperor to understand what has happening picked and chose who to obey as they saw tactically prudent, or honorable, or most likely to save their own hides.

Even as the infantry line spread itself out, only half-committing to a retreat, Alexios said nothing. Even as those of his own guard skilled at fighting on horseback saddled up and followed Rufio and Atia, the emperor held his tongue.

Many of the northmen were not skilled horsemen, and that fact may have saved Alexios’ life, and those of much of his army. As the Imperial infantry fell into chaos, opening up enormous gaps in their line, a few Hojuzite officers seized the initiative and charged. With their leader elsewhere, however, the resulting attack was hardly more organized than the defense, and when the fierce barbarians countercharged, axes whirling, they caused a momentary rout in the Hojuzite center. These horsemen regrouped as soon as a reserve rode forward to support them, but the momentary respite was a double blessing for the Imperial side.

First, it allowed the infantry to finally fall into the rhythm of an ordered, fighting retreat. They took slow, synchronized steps backward, and forced the Hojuzites to choose, every time their horsemen circled back after a charge, whether it was worthwhile to remain under a withering hail of arrows and javelins from the Imperial back line, for the sake of cutting down more infantrymen. One by one, each band of warriors decided it was not, and allowed Alexios’ army to give all the ground it pleased.

Second, because their reserve riders were occupied with shoring up a weak point in their attack and containing a countercharge, their attention was not on trying to flank the main army, nor on intercepting the large contingent of mixed cavalry, light lancers and horse archers and mounted northmen and cataphracts, that galloped full tilt after Nabi’s honor guard.

Rufio incanted the Lunar spell which gave him insight into the relations between things. Slowly, deliberately, Nabi was preparing a spell. He and much of his guard had dismounted, and more than one of the twisted horse-things they rode withered and died as he drew on their vital essences.

The Imperial horsemen cut through a countercharge from the still-mounted portion of the guard, though many of them fell under the Hojuzite warriors’ skillful sword-strokes, or lost control of their steeds when the animals panicked in the face of their deformed, unnatural counterparts that leapt like rabbits or bit and held like dogs.

Still, Nabi and his men were greatly outnumbered, when Rufio and Atia bore down on him.

He held his ground, finished his incantation. He raised not a Water Sign, as Rufio had expected, but a Fire Sign. Staring at Atia with his gray, dead eyes, he paused before allowing the spell to take hold.

“I remember you, now. You belonged to Cornelius. What was his, is mine.”

A massive ribbon of flames sprang from his hand. He waved it at the river, in the direction of the boats full of escaping Haxamanids.

There was only one spell Rufio could think to cast, the spell he knew best. He made a Fire Sign of his own, and, as his passion and fury rose to a crescendo, he exerted an influence of his own on Nabi’s conjured flames.

His spell did not put the flames out, nor change anything about their location. It merely drew them to a focal point, taking their supernatural intensity and concentrating the better part of it in one, infinitesimal spot.

The end of the massive flame-scourge swept over the boats and their passengers largely harmlessly, maybe starting some smouldering on a sleeve here or the edge of a sail there. The origin of the flame, however, where it emerged from the corpse-man’s hand…

Nabi screamed; as with many creatures of the Shadow, his expression of guttural pain was more metallic than animal. His hand was fixed permanently into that Fire Sign, the tips of fingers fused where they touched the palm. The blaze spread up his sleeve and consumed the wrappings beneath his armor.

As Nabi died, and their troops cut down his honor guard, Rufio and Atia cast a glance back at the Hojuzite army. In those few spots where it yet harried the withdrawing Imperial infantry, it broke off, and a change came over its movements. He cast his spell of understanding connections again, and sure enough, a signal announcing his death was coursing into the heads of all his most trusted underlings. They were commanded to select a successor, from among themselves.

But first, they were commanded to avenge him.

The northmen arrayed themselves. “All of you,” one bellowed, “onto those boats, now! We shall keep them back while you embark!”

An officer of cataphracts, though his helmet had a full-faced mask, managed to express quizzicality enough with a turn of his head. “There are two dozen of you heathens left! You won’t hold them off long on your own!” He brought his horse alongside the barbarian’s, and a hundred of the best and bravest of those men who had been swept up in Rufio’s mad attack joined him, urgently waving for Rufio, Atia and the rest to join the Haxamanids on the river.

Those who had chosen– or been chosen by their comrades– to escape numbered over a hundred and fifty, with a hundred horses still alive and of sound enough mind to be led from the shore to the deck of a ship. Several of the Haxamanid vessels, blessedly, were wide river-barges for carrying enormous cargoes, and had been loaded with noncombatants fleeing the city more with a mind to departing quickly than using space as efficiently as possible. Room enough could still be found.

Non-combatants these people were, in a narrow sense: small children, pregnant women, wounded soldiers barely clinging to life. All were half-starved and gaunt, and some boats kept a great distance from the others on the river, as they were full of those diseased.

“Is your ruler aboard?” Rufio asked the captain of the vessel he and Atia boarded.

“The King of Kings,” he said in thickly-accented Aponephilic, “has resolved not to outlive his realm. He will defend the city, to the bitter end. We have his young children, and those of his councilors not fit to fight. We carry them to the lands of the Madai, a mountainous, defensible frontier region of our empire which has some hope yet of escaping Hojuzite conquest.”

As they sailed away, shouts went up from the shore, the courageous one hundred charging into their delaying action. Cries of “Valholl!” mingled with “Rhatia! Rhatia until Judgement!”

After crashing into the writhing mass of lightly-armored Hojuzite riders, they lasted for twenty minutes, before the last surviving Imperial cataphract had his armor caved in by a hundred blows. Counts of casualties on both sides of this battle were only poor approximations, after the fact, but these hundred alone were said for generations to come to have felled two thousand warriors of Hojuz in their final moments. Because of them, Atia, Rufio, a handful of Rhatian soldiers, and a goodly many Haxamanid survivors were able to cleanly escape down the river. Alexios’ army, too, was able to withdraw at this turn of events. Eyewitnesses claimed that the Eastern Rhatian Empire quit the field with two-thirds or more of its army intact, though their headlong, harried retreat over long leagues of desert would claim many more. The number reported most confidently by the histories was the count of men Alexios crossed the border back into Rhatian lands with: four thousand, six hundred and ninety-two, about one-third of what he set out with.

The city of Isbanir, in time, did fall to the Hojuzites. By that siege’s end, hardly anyone within was left alive to be taken as a slave. Hojuzite expansion continued, but at a slower pace, after the losses they took here; this marked the start of a gradual shift in priorities, to consolidating their gains. Isbanir was abandoned, though many of the city’s stones were shipped along the river to where Nabi’s successor had a new capital built, for his new empire.