Sarkiades: The Echoes of Resolution
Part 4: The Night Ride
The glorious peace purchased by Sevetria's rush on the bridge was short lived. Whether the Ukni were somehow able to salvage enough of the molten stone to get their riders across or if they'd simply scouted the area well enough to find some secondary route through the gully Sarkiades couldn't say. What he could say was that they hadn't even finished congratulating themselves before the first of the outriders appeared. After that, time collapsed back down into waves of desperation and tense relief. Every time they found themselves in a long straightaway, the enemy would open fire, compensating for their blindness by loosing volley after volley into the night. His world contracted around each of the hundreds of arrows raining down on them, turning his stream of consciousness into a succession of self-contained worlds whose rise and fall mimicked the course of lives and empires. Then they would hit a stretch of switchbacks, and his mind would expand out, taking in the broader world of distances, times, endurance, and tactics as the enemy waited for their next chance.
Of the two, Sarkiades almost preferred the danger of actual combat to the aching uncertainty that came whenever his thoughts began to move towards the big picture. Their stolen Ukni armor did quite a bit to protect them from the arrows, so it was only their horses that they had to worry about. Falviun had had the good sense to steal more than they needed before their breakout, but already Sevetria and Quistos were riding double, and that meant the enemy would soon outpace them.
The only source of hope in his heart was the very desperation that moved his adversaries. Everything from the slope of the terrain to the frantic cries of their pursuers screamed out that they were entering mountain country. And with mountain country came mountain fortresses and pissed off mountain men just praying for the chance to bring this fight to the enemy.
Relics from the days before Piristrus' regional hegemony, the fortresses of the Lianin Mountains had been nothing more than symbols of Fostrii's former glory before the Ukni invasion. They hadn't even been manned in centuries. But Sarkiades had grown up around the Fostrians, and he knew the pride that they held for their city's former glory. He was as certain that those outposts would be stuffed to bursting with soldiers as he was of the coming sunrise, though the question of whether he'd be there to witness either was still very much an open one.
A screeching neigh rose up to his left, and Sarkiades turned his head just in time to see Falviun roll off his courser as it came crashing down.
“I'll funnel 'em right!” Sevetria shouted as she leapt off her horse, a whirlwind of dirt rising around her.
The dust wasn't much on it's own, but a few moments of blindness could buy Falviun the time he needed to get up onto Targan's horse, and that was enough to merit the effort. At least, that's what the riders at their back must have been thinking as one more ashen storm swirled up around them. They had no idea that the only reason Sevetria hadn't been doing more was because she had to focus the majority of her attention on making sure that Quistos didn't run their horse into a ditch. It was only as she leapt off her steed and turned to face them, and stone stakes tore loose from a ruptured boulder to impale the frontrunners of their formation, that the Kulnarn began to rear back their mounts in confusion and terror.
Sevetria had left less than a man's length between the stalagmites and a nearby Outlaw’s Respite Tree. Just enough to give the riders the sense that it was a passable exit but not enough to prevent them from clumping together as their commander screamed out accusations of cowardice and drove them through the gap. Of course, one couldn't ask for a better killing zone than a dozen confused and enraged riders fighting each other over a narrow opening, and he and Galtus took advantage of the confusion to fire as many shots as they could into the gap. Trapped and desperate, blind terror drove the Kulnarn to press their horses even harder, trampling the bodies of their own comrades into the muck as each new wave was met by their arrows until the passage was so clogged with the dead that even their commander had the sense to have his men bring their horses around the embankment.
They had managed to buy their comrades some time, but not nearly enough. No matter how cunning or dangerous you were, there was no avoiding the fact that horses carrying two people could not move at the pace of a single rider. Within moments of taking off down the trail, they had already caught up with the rest of the company.
“She won't hold out much longer at this rate.” Targan said.
“She won't have to.” Sarkiades replied. “I might not be able to tell you exactly where we are, but I've spent my life on the other end of those straits, and I give you my word as both a soldier and a child of the mountains that it's not much further.”
They pushed on. All eyes pinned to the eastern horizon. All ears pricked to the irregular footfalls of Targan's courser and the enraged shouts closing in from behind. Each time the gasps and whinnies crossed some unspoken threshold, Sevetria would slow her destrier down, toppling a strand of trees or raising a dirt embankment as Targan and Falviun jumped off their horse and sprinted ahead with the reigns while he and Galtus laid down more covering fire. Eventually even the struggle for life itself became a thing of cold monotony. Sarkiades' mind grew so numb to the stupefying terror that he barely noticed the flash of green light at the peak of a distant mountain.
The first lights of dawn rolled over the peaks of the Lianin like the host of some ancient saga. Great lances of sunlight smote the veils of darkness within and without, illuminating the specters of terror and grief as the pitiful, malformed things they were in truth; laying bare the fear and desperation in the eyes of their Ukni pursuers. A moment before, it had felt as if he was traversing a land of shadow: some vague approximation of the place of his birth bound more to the phantasmal logic of delirium and nightmare than to any concrete reality. Now, however, every hill and valley echoed with the memories of his youth. He was home, and it took but a glance to the west to see the fog clad parapets of Novatus jutting out from the Lianin like a vein of gold in solid granite. The furthest of Fostrii's mountain strongholds. The final threshold of their arduous journey.
“This is it!” he screamed. “One last push and we're free!”
Sarkiades could hear the Kulnarn as they kicked their horses into a final, grueling charge. Arrows still rained down on them, but they were no longer the well-timed barrages of an army confident of it's own invincibility. When the wolf pack hunt, they move in silence and tight coordination, but when the herd of deer flee, they do so as individuals, each concerned only for their own survival. It was as if, somewhere deep down, the Ukni riders knew they had crossed over that invisible line between predator and prey, and no matter how hard they tried to keep that truth away with hard orders and savage cries, it could not help but show in their panicked jostling and sloppy aim.
“Look! Riders, at the gates!” Galtus shouted
A deep thrum came echoing down the valley as the heavy portcullis creaked open and a great host of armored cavalry tore down the switchbacks. Their pursuers raged behind them, but nothing the Nulaikulj said or did could move the great scale that measured the decisions of all Ukni soldiers: whether they were more afraid of the enemy in front of them or the commander at their back.
“Our armor!” Quistos cried. “How are they gonna recognize us in our stolen Ukni gear?”
As the crew of the Liviarus set about arguing with each other, Sarkiades began to rummage through his bag. One by one, his companions fell silent as their eyes touched upon the object cradled in his lap. All of them save Quistos, who was so immersed in stripping off his gear that he hadn't bothered to turn around.
“Don't shoot! We're Piristrans!” he shouted. “And we're with an envoy from Lyst.”
Quistos continued tearing off his Nashragha uniform piece by piece as the rest of the crew stared on with bemused looks. Sarkiades waited until he was sure that company of grim faced Fostrians could make out every detail of the nude figure frantically gesturing towards them before he put his signaling horn, the sigil of his office, up to his lips, letting its deep cry carry through the valley. He watched as the Fostrians, still wary about whatever it was that they were seeing, struggled to keep the grins from their faces. Then his eyes locked upon a man at the head of the column, Cascava, whose family had long ties of guest-friendship with his own, and the tension dissolved into a chorus of laughter. Sarkiades smiled as he put the horn away. If there was anyone in all of Aios who needed a good laugh, then they would surely have been found in that strange company gathered together at the foothills of the Lianin.
As soon as Sarkiades told Cascava about the invasion plans and the surprise attack on Lyst, he was rushed into the audience room of the garrison commander, at which point the company were given new horses and an entire regiment of cavalry to accompany them the rest of the way. At first, Sarkiades had thought this a well meaning but unnecessary gesture. As soon as it was obvious that the numbers were not in the Ukni's favor, they'd turned back towards the interior nearly as quickly as they'd pursued them. However, he soon realized that it was not the Ukni who the commander was worried about.
In the course of that brief trip through Novatus, the news of the attack had spread like a cookfire in a distillery. The accounts being whispered between the refugees invariably glossed over the fact that the Ukni were pursuing a specific individual, replacing those details with stories of a mighty host ten times its actual size with a dedicated siege train that would soon level the fortress to rubble. By the time they began to near Fostrii, terrified refugees were rushing up to them, convinced that the entire Ukni cavalry was riding their heels. At every village they passed, mobs of people rushed them, desperate to know how long they had to gather their possessions and flee, while the roads were lined with ghostly faces devoid of hope and humanity, dragging their exhausted, sobbing children towards the promise of safety. Everywhere he looked, Sarkiades saw mounds of discarded family heirlooms; treasures passed tenderly from generation to generation only to be discarded in a roadside ditch in the mad rush to beat the phantom army to Fostrii. None of it, however, prepared him for what he saw in the city.
It was true that Lyst was a Navarid city-state in every sense of the word. It was located on the isle of Iores, they spoke true Navirz rather the dialect of Peris used on the Velian Plains, and they were more bound up in the endless feuding that characterized political life on the islands than Piristrus' struggle for regional dominance. However, the Gates of Menneas, that long pass through the Pythikas Mountains whose terminus was the city itself, meant that they had much closer contact with Fostrii than any of the cities on the Eunesian Plains. Their closest ally, Boronea, was all the way on the western shores of the island, while a short ferry ride was all that separated them from Fostrii. Sarkiades had spent a fair amount of time there in his youth, which made the sight of her ruin all the more heartbreaking.
One of his earliest memories had been the day his father first carried him up the titanic walls that were Lyst's great claim to fame. Even in the prime of his youth, serving in the Lystian army, he had dreaded those daily climbs, but to the eyes of a child it had seemed as though his father had ascended the tower of Dissak itself. He remembered how his dad lifted him up onto his shoulders so that he could see past the ledge to the twin mountain ranges ensconcing the Aedonae. He could still remember how that distant collection of walls and towers, forums and market squares had looked that day. The shock of realizing that those hazy battlements belonged to a city completely distinct from Lyst, and that the world was filled with thousands of such settlements, each with a culture and architecture and way of life entirely it's own.
Now too, Sarkiades felt his legs quake from the shock of what he witnessed, but it could not have been more different from the awe and joy that emanated from the memories of his childhood. Replaced by a sickening cocktail of pity, revulsion, rage, and despair that nearly compelled him to empty his stomach onto the muddy streets. The excited shouts that echoed out from the forum like a beacon on the day his mother first brought him to see their harvest festival had been exchanged for a cacophony of sobs and lamentations. The great peals of laughter that had risen up in waves as actors played out the lives of bumbling halfwits enmeshed in the schemes of the spirits of the Silipian Forest were replaced by the low thrum of ten thousand sighs from men and women whose tragedies were far too real for stage catharsis to be of any use. Great throngs of people still lined the city's avenues, but they were not jostling for the best place to view the sacred relics as they were paraded through the streets, but for the tiny scraps of rations that were being divvied out by soldiers who looked nearly as broken as the refugees themselves.
Sarkiades watched this same war of duty and pity playing out in the faces of his own guards. How the harsh shouts they used to drive back the desperate crowds pushing and crying and begging to learn the fate of loved ones were in truth flimsy masks that did little to conceal their terror at the thought of turning their weapons against their own people. He watched it all, for there was nothing else he could do in the face of such abject horror.
Things only degenerated further as they wound their way down to the harbor. While Lyst had been built from the ground up to withstand a protracted siege, having more than enough space to support the entire population of the countryside back when the city was still a major power, she no longer had the large fleet that would be necessary to actually bring these refugees into her embrace. Even with every merchant ship for miles being conscripted into a vast flotilla that operated night and day, the influx of survivors from across the Velian Plain far outpaced their efforts. The well-ordered port facilities he remembered had collapsed into a sprawling, open air encampment without the slightest capacity to meet the dietary or hygienic needs of the frightened, raging thousands who'd come to reside there.
While, on paper at least, there were still ships bearing the Lystian flag used for official communications, even these vessels left Fostrii's harbor packed to bursting with refugees. This, of course, undid all of the benefits of such a system. The crowds, knowing that these messenger ships were just as likely to be the instrument of their salvation as the merchant vessels that were supposed to be boarding, rushed the Lystian ships with the same fervor as any other.
Sarkiades lost count of how many sobbing children were held up before him as if he were in some nightmarish market where pity and desperation were all that was left to barter with. How many broken husbands held their eyes to filthy streets as their wives begged him to make use of the one treasure still remaining to them. How many times he heard that sickening crack of the quarterstaff as the crowd grew unruly. Then they were being rushed up the gangway, the helpless cries echoing in their hearts even as Fostrii faded into the distance and the walls of Lyst loomed overhead.
"Sarkiades: The Echoes of Resolution" has been published freely online in order to introduce readers to the world of the "Under the Burning Tower" series. Because of this, hiring an editor for the project simply isn't feasible. If you happen across any typographical or grammatical errors while reading, especially if you see something that looks like a missing paragraph, please feel free to reach out and let me know.
