Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter 33

~33~

Six hours before the sack of Death's Head

The struggle for the city went on for ages.

And Rhan the Eye stood in the center of it.

The smoking remains of the Skull Gate lay shattered in their grave. His brothers and sisters held the walls and the ground around the still-closed Death Gate behind them. The earth echoed the footfalls and screams of thousands.

The Eldanians came on like the tide—endless, mindless, surging forward and back in waves, but pressing a little farther with each advance.

Rhan, last of the Taers left alive in Death's Head, held a long black sword in each hand, and he fought for the survival of his order. He killed pikemen, spearmen, swordsmen, Twelfthmen, women wearing the Temple's white robe, boys barely old enough to have left home. They came before him and the blackrobes around him and they died, because they had to.

Meanwhile, he waited.

For what exactly, he didn't know, but he was certain he would see it when it happened. There would come a moment when Eldan grew too confident or began to falter, when its soldiers moved too swiftly or hesitated to throw themselves into the abattoir before the Death Gate. In that moment the necromancers would strike and pray their best would be enough.

Time passed. The sun peeked through the mist and lit the sky in a brief pulse of warmth refracted by a thousand thousand droplets of water.

Rhan pulled a blade from the chest of a dying man, looked toward the entrance to the abattoir, and spotted what he was waiting for.

The sun glinted off the lances of a troop of heavy horse galloping toward the gate. The footsoldiers threw themselves to the side or stood stock still, hoping the horses would pass around them. Those fighting in the abattoir melted away or perished.

Rhan's eyes flicked over those around him. The battered, wearied blackrobes under his command were already beginning to weave, preparing to level the horsemen's charge.

But this was their chance to do far more damage.

"Wait!" shouted Rhan at the top of his lungs. Then again, "Wait!"

His brothers and sisters heard him. They held their weavings in check while the horsemen thundered forward and leveled their lances. The earth shook.

Be calm, Rhan told himself. He felt detached, as though he were watching the battle unfold before another man from far away. He laid one of his swords on the blood-soaked ground, grasped a horn of bone that hung around his neck, and blew it.

Its call was quiet and simple, a breathy vibrato that was all but lost in the growing thunder of the Eldanian charge. He blew it a second time, and a third, let his lungs heave between blows. After the third sounding, the call was picked up and repeated.

The riders had almost reached the gate. Rhan let the horn fall back against his chest, picked up his swords, and began to weave.

The Eldanians had made their mistake—halted their momentum, called upon their treasured cavalry to save them. The cavalry would fail. The horsemen weren't suited to fighting in an environment as confined as the abattoir. While the horsemen were being slaughtered, the foot would falter, and when the foot faltered—

Patience, Rhan told himself as he forced his exhausted body to move. Patience.

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