For lack of Lucius’ guidance, the siege had not progressed well. The two legions of wastelanders had sparred. They had pushed and thrust, retreated and counter-thrust. Scores of men and women–for the sand people discriminate little between the sexes–laid dead upon the ground. At times, their bodies were picked over by auxiliary forces, by skirmishers or slingers. The kinds of soldiers that had to be summoned up for good use, rather than kept in line with shields. Where discipline slackened, cannibalism thrived and both sides allowed it.

Not only the mere caloric advantage, but the theft of soul mattered greatly. Unlike the battles in the north, of chivalrous knights or even barbarous trolls, the loss of bodies mattered little to the wastelanders. The spontaneous manifestation of stigmata would more than compensate for the requisite loss of life. Indeed, a winning victory could become an overwhelming victory as the creation of more stigmata users could easily outweigh the loss of menial thralls.

For the legions wild and the army beneath Solhart’s banner, the grand number of bodies had reduced but the effective fighting force had not.

As Lucius emerged with the rallied forces of Giordana, Rackvidd, Ashfall, and his diminished Blanks, allow me to simplify the numbers. Essentially eight hundred thralls followed the orders of Sacerdote. Three hundred men of the north crawled out of the ley mine.

Two thousand wastelanders held between the two forces.

This was by no means a hopeless quantity. Despite nearly outnumbering Lucius’ forces two to one, the critical difference was in the encirclement, and of course in the valor and quality of the men of the north. If the sand dwelling thralls had been just as good as northern levies, they would have surged north long ago. Thus, we can conclude that the infantry forces were nearly equal.

Therefore, the advantage lay with Lucius.

He was not satisfied with this in the least. After years of tutelage in the art of war, not just the direct act of fighting but in their, tactics, strategy, management, and so on, for him to be forced into a reckless assault seemed like a waste of effort. It almost eroded his spirits as he marched at the front of the army. If any of the northmen had been able to see his expression, discontent would have spread through the men, but at his back were his trained thralls. The Giordanans saw only the leather armor he had requested, and the wooden club he gripped in his hand.

While his army formed up, he intentionally waited so that Sacerdote would be able to see and to surmise his intentions. When Nikolai rode over atop a camel, Lucius said, “We have a problem.” The mass of enemies had taken a peculiar shape, akin to a hollow teardrop. The greatest mass of them were arrayed to Lucius’ right, to the region Nikolai would have to push back.

“They’re just a rabble,” the Skaldheimer said.

“We’re just a rabble. We have no cavalry, our archers have no range, and the two pieces of siege equipment are on the wrong side of the battlefield. We don’t even have good stigmata to use, except our own while I have every reason to believe they will be slinging lightning at us.”

“But we have to win,” Nikolai said, drawing his blade. He still kept his northman weapon, a heavy, single-edged blade designed for breaking the limbs of trolls. It was ill-suited for unarmored men, but it fit his hand as he would say.

Lucius sighed. “Worse. We have to win quickly. You’ve got a horn, don’t you?”

Nikolai tossed him a hollowed out goat horn and he put it to his lips. Lucius blasted out a tuneless bellow of short and long notes(1) and tossed it back to Nikolai. “You taught them a code?”

“No, but it sounded like one, didn’t it? It sounded like I had a grand plan, right? Now, I’m going to go do something reckless,” he declared before signaling his bannermen. Shields locked behind him in perfect formation as Nikolai snapped the reins on his camel. A chorus of shouting, both of orders and of warcries began to fill the desert. Lucius kept his actual orders short. “Hammer them!”

His hundred men(2) started forward at a sprint, not one of them lagging the others. When the charge began, the other wastelanders returned the charge with a bellow. At thirty yards, slingers on both sides fell back to lob their missiles. At ten yards, short spears were thrown into shields, their narrow tips ripping through the meager hides. Wherever tip ripped flesh, howls escaped but Lucius’ formation did not falter for the action had been written to their souls.

The shields crashed against one another and spiked clubs began to pummel down across the divide. Missiles continued to fly overhead and beyond the wastelanders came Sacerdote’s march. He brought his eight hundred down as one, refusing the charge and in so doing drew the wastelanders to them and widened the teardrop gap.

This was as much as Lucius could observe before he took his action. Abandoning his duties as commander, he sprinted at the shield wall and leapt upon the backs of his own men, using them to launch himself into the midst of the enemy. He landed between confused spearmen and crushed their skulls before they could bring their polearms to bear. Then began his gambit of slaughter.

While his fight was less bloody with a club in hand, it was in no way less lethal. He broke arms. He shouldered over and trampled men. Skulls were cracked and ribs shattered. As grappling permitted, he took hold of spears and ran them through other men while dancing across bodies.

Of course, one man can only kill so fast, and his effect was mostly the confusion among the ranks. He stirred up those that should have been slinging, lobbing missiles, and plucking bows like deadly harps. A marginal diminishment of their lethality to be sure. Soon he drew out the proper target of his escapade.

When bodies covered the floor like a tapestry of blood, lightning arced toward him. It cracked the air and burnt the hair off all around. Lethal energy surged from the outstretched arm of the wastelander leader, leaping from him to Lucius. But it did not meet my pupil. It twisted in the air, it’s crackling chirp drawn inexorably to the conductive blades all about him. The lightning was summoned into the metal weapons and through them to the thralls and down to the firmament.

To kill a few thralls meant nothing to the wastelander, and he stood grinning as he pulled new reserves of energy into his body. “What a rotten fool!” he bellowed.

“Are we talking now? Or killing?” Lucius asked as he checked the downed men around him, but none had the life left to threaten him.

The wastelander scowled. “How are you fine? That was the might of a god!”

“Only a godling,” Lucius corrected, crouching low and approaching the stigmata user through a rift in the vile army.

“I am Marcus Pontius! The twin-blessed! I shall slay you here, northman!” the wastelander bellowed as he held up both hands. Lightning sparked in one and fire licked off the fingers of his other.

Lucius sighed as he came to realize the quality of the men he now fought. Hardly better than children, they were a magically empowered rabble.

Lightning again shot toward him, lancing instead to the fallen swords. Molten sand exploded across him, searing his armor and burning his skin, but the pain was mild. Lucius sprinted and leaped at the confused wastelander Marcus Pontius. When fire blasted at him, he interposed a stolen shield before cracking down with his club. A forearm bone shattered and Marcus howled. Slamming the burning shield into his foe, he abandoned it then took the club with both hands. Twisting his body, he slammed it across the enemy’s head, breaking a warding hand in the same swing.

Marcus Pontius fell, but Lucius knew enough of the old languages he could only sigh because if that man was Pontius, then four more hid in the masses around him.

“Surround him!” came the order, and it was echoed twice more.

Two young men and a half-dressed woman emerged at the front of hastily aligned spear walls. They penned him in in a crude triangle, turning the center of their army formation into a fighting arena.

The woman clapped her hands, the sound empowered with thunder. Her stigmata had imprinted upon her throat, reaching up over her chin like demonic flames. “It’s him!”

“The chosen of demons,” one of the male commanders said, his skin bronze and his blonde hair standing on end

The third snickered. “Come to us all by himself.”

Lucius straightened up and peered over the churning heads of the melee, not to his own battalion but to those under the command of Sacerdote. No chaos had erupted and sufficient time had elapsed. Rather than speak with the newborn savages, he lifted his bloody club overhead as though challenging them.

It enraged the enemy, but they did not charge at him, for he stood upon the corpse of one of their equals. They spent their last moments insulting him, jibbing and goading. They puffed up their own egos and braced themselves to fight against the unkillable northman.

Not one of them considered that he was not the true threat. Even when Sacerdote bellowed, “Down!” and a hundred warriors threw themselves to the sands, they did not conceive of another threat.

Lucius dove, throwing himself behind the corpse of Marcus Pontius just before hammers were struck. Firing pins collided with accelerating pins and those chained through one another into the sabot of grapeshot his two meager ley cannons contained. Balls of lead belched out of the rusty iron mouths like dragon’s breath.

The salvo punched through shields, through flesh and bone. It turned warriors to sausage filling and continued on. The balls broke and shattered, they ricocheted as shrapnel and tore rending lacerations through the inner lines. One of the male commanders took a round through the throat that ripped his larynx from his body and left him drowning in blood. The bronzed warrior was struck in the head and gut. The thunder woman’s arm was shattered.

The executioner’s blade of chaos fell upon the wastelander army as Sacerdote ordered the cannons be reloaded and in the midst of the carnage, Lucius stood back up. Bloody and grinning, he laughed. “Your lives are mine to have, now!”

Only one person in the desert knew what he said with the horn blast, for he had used a very ancient binary code to spell out ‘cannons’. While the effect was suitably confusing to the enemy, it sent Golden into a frenzy both to oblige the request and to fume at being so ordered around. The hundred men referring to the formation meant to have one hundred men in it, despite the present losses.