Chapter XXIX

With how hard the work was day to day for the common-folk, it was good for them to have their two days off at the end of the week. One day was purely for having fun, and there was usually some sort of party in the town square, with dancing, music, and revelry. The other day was for spiritual reflection, and the commoners attended services at the local temple. But even this was made enjoyable. The priest would tell stories from the Sacred Scriptures, using humor and acting skills to make them even more interesting to listen to, but always making sure to make a strong, solid point at the end. The songs the choir sang, which the people sang along with, were beautiful and powerful. They were moving, and the choirs belted out the songs as if trying to make sure that God heard them in Heaven, through the layers of rock and liquid stone.

Except for the Grand Cathedral in Aius, most Agalmite temples had their sanctuaries below ground level, symbolically closer to God. Still, they did have tall steeples, so that the church could easily be spotted from far away.

On that first day off, the day of revelry, Milo and Sarahi enjoyed a hard-earned rest from their labors in the field. By the final day of each week the work was finally getting to the point where Sarahi wasn't enjoying it much anymore, but that made each weekend so much more enjoyable, and once they'd had their rest they went to work again the next day, enjoying what they could create with the work of their hands once more.

The party was interrupted one particular weekend, though, as a messenger came into the town bearing ill news. “People! Listen! Nihilus has invaded Arx! Their soldiers are in the March of Muri right now!”

“How many?” Isu asked.

“Last I heard? Over a million!”

Most of the villagers gasped in shock, believing this number when they heard it. Milo and Sarahi exchanged knowing looks, surely the numbers were exaggerated. “Muri...” Sarahi said. “Milo, we have to go.”

“I know. The honeymoon's over.” As soon as he'd heard that Nihilus soldiers were in Muri he knew that was where they'd be going. Sarahi wouldn't let her mother face the demon-worshipers alone. The dream they'd been living in was over, it was time to wake up and face reality again.

Both of them packed up their things and tied their belongings to their horses again. Isu asked Milo, “Why in such a hurry?”

“Pa, as a paladin it's my duty to defend Arx against Nihilus. If their soldiers are in Muri, then I have to go.”

“But, you heard the messenger! They have a million soldiers! You can't possibly hope to defeat such an army! Let's go west, to the city-states! We'll be safer there!”

“We will not be driven from our homeland by an army of murderous thugs! Don't worry; this is what I've been training for my whole life. But you should get the villagers somewhere safe. Take them to one of the castles nearby for refuge, and take as many food supplies with you as you can.”

“Wouldn't the capital be the most defensible place? It's a walled city.”

“Defensible, yes, but also a target, and soon it will be far too crowded. Better to go to Caelum Academy, if you can make it.”

“Alright. Good luck, Milo!”

“And to you, pa.”

Milo and Sarahi spurred their horses and rode off, hoping to reach the castle of Marquise Zoe before the Nihilite army could lay siege to it.

They couldn't know that laying siege to the Marquise's castle was never part of the plan. The Nihilus forces moved south, rather than north-west, towards the countryside and the villages there. The people in those villages hadn't thought to evacuate and find safe haven, because they were not between the Nihilites and the castle, they thought they were out of the enemy legions' path. Perhaps if the Arxians had one tenth as many spies in Nihilus as the Nihilites had in Arx they'd have learned something about General Meriel, and her plans to commit atrocities and horrors that would break the spirit of all who witnessed them. An Agalmite prophet from long ago spoke of a time where there would be much weeping and wailing. A time when mothers would bury their babies, horses would mourn their riders, and rivers would run red. For years after Meriel's attacks Arxians would speculate that this was what the prophet was talking about.

The village of Lavinton was the first to suffer Meriel's ire. Normally any assault from an army happened at first light, or at least during the day, but Meriel wanted to make the harshest impression she could with the first attack, and wanted to give the citizens no time to run. She, Lorna, and Cory spread out their forces, creating a wide circle around the village. Once the circle was complete, they slowly began to march in, leaving cavalry forces behind in the event that anything should go wrong. They crept through the grass, slowly, keeping their heads low and their footsteps light. They had no torches or lanterns in hand, nothing to light the way. They simply used the light of the quarter-moon and the stars to watch their path.

One of the sheriff's men, who was on watch that night, spotted the advancing enemy soldiers, but by the time he did it was far too late, there was no chance to escape, and no chance to fight back. “We're under attack!” he cried out and rang the bell in his hand as loudly as he could. One of Lorna's archers silenced him with an arrow to the throat, but the citizens of Lavinton had already awakened.

The peasants came rushing out of their homes, men and women alike, with whatever weapons they could find. Wood-cutting axes, pitch-forks, shovels, cooking knives, meat cleavers, anything, but they soon realized that they could do very little when they saw just how well-equipped their attackers were. No mere kitchen knife could cut through full war-plate armor, and that was assuming they even got close enough to strike.

Lorna's archers had their bows already pulled back, and upon seeing the peasants come out of their homes they released their arrows, wiping out most of the Lavinton villagers in a single volley. Meriel's soldiers ran in, letting out terrible howls that chilled the blood, as they butchered the peasants. On spears and swords they impaled the defenseless commoners. With axes they split their bodies asunder. With maces and hammers they crushed them, until their faces and bodies were unrecognizable. They lit torches, but not for light. The torches were thrown onto the thatch-roofs, catching them on fire. A few young women and elderly were allowed to escape, so that they could spread word of what had been done there, and a few others were taken prisoner, to be made into more daemon thralls. The bodies of the dead were horribly mutilated, their heads put on pikes, their bones hung on strings from trees, their skin sewn together to form a flag that would wave in the wind over the ashes of Lavinton.

Even Meriel found herself disgusted and mortified at what her troops had done by the end, and that was how she knew they'd done it right. She wasn't proud of what she'd done, what she'd convinced these soldiers under her command to do, and yet she felt it was the surest way to secure victory. Fear ruled the world. One of Meriel's mentors once told her that the truth of human nature was that fear was the only true emotion we had, and that every other emotion was merely an aspect of fear. Hate was fear turned aggressive. Sorrow was fear realized. Joy was fear subdued. Even the power to summon daemons from the Void could not compare with the power one had when inspiring others to fear.

It didn't take long for word of the massacre to spread, just a few days, but by the time word reached the ears of Marquise Zoe the Nihilites had already destroyed two other villages in the same fashion and not lost a single soldier in the process.

“Why my people? Those inhuman bastards!” Zoe cried, throwing her circlet on the ground, violently.

“I'm not sure,” Magdiel said. “From what I'm hearing it seems like they may be trying to make an example of those people, maybe convince more of our folk to surrender?”

“What good would it do to have a bunch of commoners surrender? Why not come after me, the real threat in Muri?”

“We have observed in previous battles that they are using demon thralls to bolster their ranks. Perhaps they want commoners to surrender so they can turn them into more thralls, so they have a large enough force to assault the castle.”

“We cannot allow this to continue, they cannot march unopposed!”

“I may know their pattern, Excellency,” Magdiel said. “I can take a force and cut them off.”

“And fail again?”

“Excellency?”

“Twice you fought the Nihilite armies and twice you failed, with inexcusable casualties. One of those times you were even defending Ten-Red pass, one of the most defensible natural places in Arx! I'm losing faith in your competence, Magdiel.”

“Then who would you have lead our soldiers? I'm a paladin! I've fought demons before!”

“And I am the Marquise. It is my responsibility to protect these people. I will lead the army into battle myself, it's time I stopped hiding behind others.”

“Lead the army? Excellency, don't be ridiculous! You're nowhere near the warrior you were when you were younger.”

“No, I'm a much wiser warrior than I used to be. A cleverer strategist with far more cunning and wit.”

“Hold on, let's not be rash. Maybe send a horse-back messenger to the Grand Duke. His forces added to your own would be greatly helpful.”

“I will not wait for his aid while the Nihilites massacre my people,” Marquise Zoe said. “You may come along if you wish, but do not hinder me.”

The knights that Marquise Zoe took with her as she rode out to face the Nihilites were all cavaliers, all of them on the backs of some of the fastest horses in Arx. She left the infantry behind, with her eldest daughter, Estelle, in charge. She needed to get to the battle fast and stop the Nihilites from butchering any more of her people.

The village of Breknot put up much more of a fight than Meriel was expecting. When the people of the village heard the Nihilite army was coming most wanted to abandon their homes and flee, but a young man by the name of Johath suggested a different course of action.

“Certainly those who cannot fight should leave the village immediately, we cannot ask that the crippled, the children, and the elderly stay. But for those of us who are more able-bodied, those of us who could fight, I say that we must! This army is one we cannot hope to defeat, to be sure. Make no mistake, those who stay behind will most likely die, but perhaps we can take a few of these monsters down with us! We have few weapons that would prove effective, so we'll have to improvise. Shepherds, have you heard that the same sling you carry baby lambs in can become a deadly weapon? If used right it can hurdle rocks so fast that they can smash or cut through armor! Hunters, you've shot down enough wild boars and deer in your days, you're probably excellent enough shots by now. With the right strategy we have a chance to take down as many of the bastards with us as we can, to weaken them, and maybe make them fear us for a change! For the good of Arx we must do this!”

Obviously, since they were facing certain death not all of the able-bodied men and women joined Johath in the “Battle of Berknot,” but a surprising number did. Together they came up with as good a strategy as commoners who'd never seen battle can be expected to.

The Nihilite forces had been more concerned with keeping up the pace than with attacking villages at night, and they had still managed to crush village after village in their path. Standard practice when moving an infantry was to have them march all day until they were totally exhausted and then just stop. Meriel had discovered that with a whip at their backs soldiers could march much further and much faster before finally needing to stop, but Lorna had discovered something far more useful. If you march all your soldiers for one hour, then let them stop and rest for ten minutes, and then have them continue marching, and every hour let them rest for ten minutes you could move much further much faster in a day than if you simply drove them to total exhaustion. For this reason Lorna's legions were called “The Foot Cavalry.” This same strategy was then applied to all of the Nihilite soldiers, and they covered greater ground in a short time than anyone in Arx could have expected.

When they reached the village of Berknot it was midday, and they expected nothing to be out of the ordinary. The first hint that something was wrong should have been when they encircled the town and moved in and discovered that there were men and women standing in the village square, holding large hammers that had been made quickly, simply by strapping bricks and cinder-blocks together on the ends of sticks. Others had created tall, make-shift tower-shields, made from the doors of their own houses, which they'd broken off the hinges and added handles and straps to. The rooftops in the village were not thatch-roofs as in other villages, but rather made of stone shingles, and even the huts themselves were made of clay bricks.

Meriel just scoffed at the sight. “Kill them.” She ordered. The peasants would undoubtedly put up a fight, and they would undoubtedly fall. Meriel didn't realize, though, how many of her own she'd lose in the process. Lorna's archers opened fire on the villagers, who in turn raised their door-shields to stop the arrows mid-flight. A clever move on their part, but to Meriel it was still of no consequence. Her infantry rushed in, howling as they always did. The peasants circled up, holding their door-shields in the way and forming something that resembled a tortoise shell made of wood. Meriel's soldiers battered against the door-shields, and hacked at them with their axes, laughing and jeering.

“Only a matter of time!”

“We'll get through!”

“Oh, death's comin' for ye!”

“Gonna make your skin into ma new curtains!”

“Gonna make your skull into a goblet!”

“Gonna...I'm gonna...kill you!”

As Meriel's infantry attacked the peasants holding their ground in the center of town, the shepherds and hunters who had been hiding in the hills over-looking Berknot let loose their wrath on the Nihilite soldiers. The centrifugal force of the whirling slings carried the stones they slung forward at their enemies with such speed that they tore right through the Nihilite's armor. Now this was still an impractical weapon, since it was horribly inaccurate, but with so many soldiers gathered in one place they were bound to hit someone. The hunters let loose their arrows, though there were nowhere near enough of them to fire volleys they still managed to hit several of the soldiers.

From inside crates and barrels, and even inside of the houses, came rushing out more peasants armed with stone hammers, which they smashed against the enemy soldiers' chests and heads. Peasants came out holding old mead bottles and ale jugs, now filled with a mix of alcohol and lamp oil, with rags coming out of the tops which were on fire. They threw the fiery bottles at Lorna's archers, and many of them caught fire. The peasants in the tortoise-shell made of door-shields dropped their guard as this chaos ensued and picked up the weapons their enemy soldiers had dropped, striking back at their foes with actual effective equipment.

Meriel saw the battle turning around and sent in reinforcements to turn the battle back on the insolent peasants. Lorna had her archers focus their fire up on the hills, shooting down the hunters and shepherds there, few of them as there were. Her warlocks conjured daemons into the fray, something she knew the peasants could do nothing against. After that the peasants fell, but not before taking with them a surprising number of Nihilite soldiers.

Johath was among the last three standing, each holding a short sword in one hand and a door-shield on the other. Their shield-arms, by then, had grown so tired that they could barely hold them up any more, usually just dragging the shield on the ground. Meriel pulled her men back. “There's only three of you left. Surrender.”

Johath spat at Meriel, though his saliva didn't quite make it. “The Void with you!”

Meriel knew that Lorna would have preferred to take at least these three prisoners to make more thralls, especially after having actually lost some people in this battle, some of their own people, but Meriel was actually happy that Johath refused to surrender. She wanted them all to die for this outrage. Lorna's archers fired a volley into Johath and the other two, and this time they didn't have the strength to raise their shields in time. They fell, with arrows filling their bodies.

Meriel couldn't burn down the village, since it was mostly made of clay and stone, so she had her soldiers mutilate the bodies as usual, pinning them to the outside walls, so that anyone who approached the village would see the bodies from a distance. Then they left the village, sought out a good place to camp and take care of their wounded.

A few of the Nihilites who had survived the battle at Berknot would still die not long afterward from their wounds. The warlocks of Nihilus had no access to healing magic; there were no daemons they could conjure who could help close wounds. Daemons had taught them great things about medicine, about different herbs that could treat diseases or stop infections, and about sanitary surgical practices, but none of this was even close to the sorts of healing spells the Arxian paladins and priests had access to. It wasn't just those who were slowly bleeding out who would die either, those who lost limbs would never be able to make it. They couldn't fight missing a leg or arm, and they couldn't exactly make it back home like that in the middle of enemy territory. When soldiers were deemed to be beyond saving, Meriel had them quietly put out of their misery, stabbed in the back of the head for the quickest death they could be given. Some knew this execution was coming, though, and elected to drink poison instead. Warlocks said prayers for the deceased, and the bodies were cremated, the smoke intended to help carry their spirits off into the Void. The Nihilites believed that everyone who died on the Agalmite God's world would wander there as a ghost until the world was destroyed, or worse, be caught in his so-called “Heaven,” but there was an old superstition that roughly one out of every one hundred people who were cremated managed to escape the Firmament into the Void, to be with their daemon brethren amongst the stars.

Cory approached Meriel after the deceased had been burned, “What happened?”

“A few casualties. Not that many.”

“And yet you seem upset.”

“Because it was mere peasants who took them. Worthless commoners who should have been nothing to these men.”

“I was a commoner long ago,” Cory said. “And now, I dare say I could kill ALL of your men if I wanted.”

Meriel seriously wanted to slap him for his arrogance, especially at such a sensitive time, but the thought that he might be right stayed her hand. “There something you want?”

“Maybe next time it should be me who massacres the village. They won't stand a chance against me.”

“Oh, sure. Let's reveal to all the Arxians who our savior is. Let's show them the man who commands the most powerful weapon we have, long before we reach the capital. Then they'll be sure to send every assassin they have after you. Whole battles will be fought to kill just you.”

“They won't succeed.”

“They may. They can always have that one archer who gets lucky.”

“I'm not afraid.”

“I am,” Meriel said. “You're far too valuable to risk here, on such a small matter.”

“What if the next village stands up to you?”

“They won't. We're changing the way we go about this. From now on we bombard each village with our trebuchet long before our soldiers move in. We smash and burn every village from a distance, and once its destroyed we move in to wipe out or capture anyone left alive. We'll even send the thralls in for that part. That way we don't risk anyone important.”

“...That's brilliant!”

“It's what we should have been doing all along, Cory. I was just focused too much on trying to help my soldiers enjoy this phase of the war. I hope Lorna can forgive me for endangering hers.”

“Win enough battles and she'll have to.”

Marquise Zoe and her cavaliers approached the village of Berknot, only to see that they were far too late. They'd been tracking the Nihilite army and thought they had finally caught up with them at first. The speed with which even their infantry moved was incredible. Zoe would have thought they were actually cavalry if not for the fact that the footprints were all very obviously boot prints.

“My people! Oh, God, no!” Marquise Zoe dismounted from her horse and ran to the village, staring at the bodies of the dead in a mix of horror, disgust, and ultimate sorrow. She fell to her knees, sobbing.

Magdiel inspected the scene, his heart heavy at the sights of yet another massacre. He pulled an arrow out of the ground, one not as well-made as the ones the Nihilites had. He also found the remains of the peasants' make-shift weaponry, and helmets from Nihilite soldiers, helmets smashed in or with holes going through both sides. “Looks like they put up quite the fight.”

Magdiel felt pride in his countrymen, who even when facing impossible odds fought back with courage and great resolve. He marveled at the ingenuity of turning house doors into shields. But he was also shamed, shamed that these mere peasants had probably killed more Nihilite soldiers than he had.

Magdiel walked over to Marquise Zoe and put a hand on her shoulder, “We're going to find them, your Excellency, and we'll bring them to justice!”