The Harvest Wars - Part 2 - Crusade (Reading Sample)

Prologue - Part 2

Only shortly afterwards, the walls of smoke masking their way parted, torn by a breeze sweeping through the streets and revealing the towering ramparts of Covenport looming up merely a few hundred yards away from them.

"See, Sirius," she whispered, exhausted by the constant drain of her magic spell. "Told you we would make it!" The animal whinnied, nudging her to take off his blindfold.

"Yeah, yeah..." she said weakly, pulling the rag of his brown eyes and together they looked up at the enormous ramparts towering over the city.

In all of Ruuin, few fortifications were as impressive as the walls of Covenport. Impregnable, dark and pitted by the eons, they fully encircled the city and merged with the steep cliffs in the north and west to build one of the most formidable barriers the world had ever seen. Nothing had ever managed to breach these walls; walls that reached up two hundred feet and that were more than fifty feet across at their base. Legend has it that Covenport had been carved from a mountain, something Megan had not believed until she saw the ramparts with her own eyes. Stout towers crowned the wall in regular intervals, standing like grim guardians, each bristling with enormous siege weapons that could hail death and destruction for miles in any direction, be it land or sea. Yet as powerful as these weapons were, they had proven useless against an enemy such as the one they were facing now.

"Alright, looks like it's just down the hill from here on out," Megan said, rubbing Sirius' neck. "The street should lead to the gates and from there it's just out and away."

The large animal huffed, nodding his huge head.

"Come on, let's get out of here... and pray to your horse gods that somebody lifted the city gates by now. Damn quarantine having done more damage than good anyway."

As it turned out, the gods were listening, but in their infinite cruelty chose to twist her wish.

"No..." Megan whispered, her eyes widening in nameless terror as they turned the corner and the Gate Marketplace down the hill became visible. From her elevated point, she saw it choked with hundreds, maybe thousands of refugees, more arriving by the minute, scores of infected and undead on their heels. Barricades sealed off most junctions and were the site of desperate battles, the upturned wagons and market stalls a feeble protection against the growing tide of fiends.

The buzzing sounds of combat and screams filled the air and made the very ground vibrate. She swallowed hard. Never had she seen so many people in one spot. Her eyes wandered over the sea of bodies, following the direction of their flow until they settled on the entry to the Gate Tunnel. The massive iron grate that had sealed the enormous tunnel reaching through the ramparts was open, but escape seemed impossible.

A mountain of corpses blocked the over twenty feet high and thirty feet wide half circle of the tunnel, creating a truly gruesome bottleneck. A wave of nausea and claustrophobia overcame Megan as she stared at the rows of bodies that lay stacked upon one another like so many sacks of grain, some still twitching and squirming, trying to free themselves. She did not know if these poor souls were alive or the resurrected dead, nor did she want to. The sight alone violated her mind and Megan felt herself one step closer towards the abyss that was utter insanity.

Undaunted by the monument of flesh, desperate men and woman were fighting to leave the city by the scores. Climbing the mountain like ants to reach the gap at the top, pushing and shoving to get ahead of their fellow men only to meet their end by what awaited them there.

"Dear gods," Megan whispered. "Who are they?"

Using what little magic Megan had left, she cast a simple spell and the world seemed to jump forward, magnifying the top of the corpse mountain.