Cinders of Magic

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

Just north of the city of Orailse, the sound of battle boomed, cacophonous. It was a common symphony, one that played after countless hours of silence and muffled conversation, but it always returned in gusto as unexpectedly as it disappeared. The blast of artillery from the Fiorian mortars sounded the percussion and was echoed back by the screams of dying men in the explosion of hellfire and metal that always followed. The peppering of rifle fire added its discordant notes to the everchanging song, undercutting itself with the shouts of the men firing and those being fired upon.

The Sloanish did not add much to the music of the battle. Their weapons were often quieted to the point of not registering with any of the participants. Rarely, but on occasion enough to bring an ever-present dread to the men of Fiorel that battled against them, the Sloanish would unleash a beast into the song to trample it out. They weren"t doing that on this day, however, and were fleeing from what was once called the Orailse Plains. The song followed them: moving as they ran, stopping when they did so, and picking up once more when it was time to make certain all participants were awake. It was glorious chaos to everyone other than the most couched and hardened generals that could watch the proceedings from the high towers of Orailse like a master conductor having seen the same music reiterated upon one too many times.

Smoke clung in loose whisps to the dirt and licked at any movement in the sticky places where the men struggled for every inch of land that they could secure. As the Sloanish ran from their ditches to jump the stone barricades behind them, the Fiorians would race to make the next post, harrying the enemy with gunfire as they retreated. To these men, the stone was like an old friend they had not seen in a long time. It bore the marks of a previous time the Fiorian army had held these same positions to fight in a losing battle. The barricades stood broken in many places, sometimes the result of the successful Sloanish pushes to capture them, but more often a spiteful attempt to hamper the enemy should they need to retreat again like they had been forced to do many times before.

Despite the sabotage, there were many long stretches of the barricades that were still whole. Many of the more veteran Sloanish understood that there was a high chance they would need to retreat from the positions they captured and that maintaining the barricades would cover the retreat. The stone walls that the Fiorians built to protect themselves from Sloanish blades and spikes could be used by their enemy to keep the battle going, and it didn"t take long for bullets to weed out the ones who thought ahead from those that didn"t.

While the Sloanish would retreat from a failed attempt on the city, the Fiorians would work themselves into a lather of ferocity in their charge to send as many of their enemies to meet the Lowlord as they could. The retreat often cost more Sloanish lives than the attack. Those shortsighted enough to have destroyed the walls behind them running for the safer places in the fields would just as often as not find a hot slug of metal in their back. Those that grouped to the safety of the walls would dash as fast as they could from their trenches and run to make the next point as artillery would rain down upon the bunched groups. Still, it was a better route than running the open fields, and many men died as they ran into the metal shrapnel of the Fiorian artillery, fleeing the gunfire behind them; sometimes almost as many in the dirtied white uniform of Fiorel as their scattered enemy.

This day was unusual. The Sloanish had never made their attack. Their retreat was not a frenzied rush but a more methodical and measured maneuver. They pulled their groups one by one, firing back on the Fiorians with flying metal daggers as the retreating forces ran with the cover of the walls. The artillery still caught many, but it was as bloody for the Fiorian side that was so used to a mad scramble for land. The battle raged on, as bloody as it had ever been and twice as desperate.

At the sixth wall, Elias was just being roused to consciousness by one of his squadmates. His once light, wheat-colored hair was long stained with the dirt that he lived in on the Oailse battlefront, and recent blood was pooling onto the back of his head. Rifle fire resounded around him in its usual chaotic beat, and as Elias slowly came once more to his senses, he could see Roan shaking him where he was on his knees.

"Wake up, you burning i***t!" A harsh slap brought Elias back to reality. He tried to stand but found himself held in place. Behind him, pulling and fusing into the back of the jacket he wore, a worn down piece of the standard military issue, a massive block of stone ten feet on all sides sat half in the wall his squad was holding; the other half hung over the trench just below.

Roan, a strong squat man that had been in the six-seventy nearly as long as Elias had, helped him slip the jacket off so that he could clamber down into the trench beneath the wall. Elias found his rifle half-buried in the mud that lined the bottom of the trench and set to cleaning it enough so that it might fire as he studied the situation. Roan had already moved on, grabbing another man that was lying unconscious beneath the precariously hanging stone block above to move him to a safer spot. The blood coating the man"s face and hair made it too difficult for Elias to make out exactly who he was at the moment.

Searching about with cloudy vision, Elias managed to spot Jen, an older man who had nearly lost all of his hair but still clung to the few grey wisps that he had left, worrying over the company"s ranking sergeant. Elias discarded the rifle and hurried to where the old sawbones was working, tending to a weeping wound in the Sergeant’s chest. A long, jagged, metal blade still stuck out of the wound like the head of a spear, and its hooked shape made it impossible to remove cleanly.

"What’s the situation, Jen?” Elias asked.

The old man barely spared Elias a sideways glance as he continued to work. “Hit us with a couple of blocks. Best we can tell Jamen, Glira, and Valley were caught in it. Vira lost her arm inside one of the blasted things; she might not survive the amputation if we don’t get her to a healer soon.”

As Elias’s vision continued to clear, he started to see them now. Several of the stone cubes were suspended above, made into the wall that the squad had just taken, or having broken that, fallen into the trench below. Not far off, someone had been crushed by an incredible mass of stone, but that death was better than those who got caught up with them when they formed. From more than one of the cubes, an errant arm or leg protruded from the seamless face of white marble. The limbs marked where one of their comrades had died but helped little in determining who it was.

“Aye,” Jen continued as he cast his gaze over the stones of death, “more than three for sure, but we don’t quite know who the others that we lost are yet. As soon as the blocks started forming, the razorbacks rained metal down on us. We lost more to that than anything else.” Jen turned back to Sergeant Penigast and continued to delicately try to remove the blade from his chest with his instruments.

“What can I do to help?” Elias asked. He found a relatively clean weapon nearby and started to inspect it. It was in working order and still held several rounds ready and waiting to find Sloanish bodies to bite into.

“Get Vira to drink some water,” Jen replied, “and then invite those Sloan bastards to join the Lowlord’s army, Sergeant.”

Elias nodded and slung the rifle over his shoulder before searching around for Vira. He found her pale and shaking, sitting with her back to the trench wall and wrapped in several jackets. What was left of her right arm was wrapped tightly in bandages, cut roughly away at the elbow where the block had taken the rest of her arm. Elias took the canteen from his side and drew a quick drink before hurrying over to Vira; she barely seemed to notice him. She was far too young to be there--half the recruits that saw the front at Orailse were--she couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Barely old enough to walk about without her face covered.

“Drink,” Elias ordered, mustering all the authority he could as he held the canteen to her lips. Vira responded cautiously, taking the water in slow gulps before finally snatching the canteen from him with a shaking hand. He searched for a moment for something to say to set the girl at ease, found nothing, turned, and made for the nearest ladder out of the trench.

Men were still fighting on the wall, exchanging metal with the other side in quick peaks from the safety that the three-foot-tall wall offered. A lucky infantryman might hit a razorback as they tried to leap the wall ahead of where the rest of their brethren were filing through one of the small holes that they had dug beneath it. An unlucky infantryman would be caught peeking out of his cover to be hit with a flung blade from the enemy’s side that curved unnaturally to strike him while he was still behind the wall. Elias slid into cover behind the wall once he neared the top of the ladder.

To either side, the men of his squad were holding rifles tightly, waiting for a break in the firing to attempt to shoot into the enemy’s back, or trying to help move the wounded down into the trench below. Just above his head, Elias heard the all too familiar sound of Sloanish blades scraping against the top of the wall and could even watch as they whizzed out of sight towards where the rest of the Fiorian army held its lines. Intermittently, he could feel through the stone at his back when blades struck hard into the wall. Some of the wickedly sharp blades would even become lodged in it.

“Someone’s comin’ up,” Biddy said to Elias’s right. The mop-headed youth gestured to beyond the trench where six figures in Fiorian dress were sprinting across the muddy expanse towards the wall that Elias’s squad was currently holding. The Sloanish saw them too, and immediately a cacophony of blades descended upon the group, shining menacingly in the late sunlight of the day.

The blades were thrown away by some unseeable force, however. The two large figures that ran ahead of the group held their hands in front of themselves as they ran. The Sloanish blades bounced away from them, spiraled off into the sky, fell, and stuck into the mud.

“Channelers,” Biddy muttered, eyes widening in awe.

“If you want to kill some razorbacks, now’s the time!” Elias yelled down the line. He swung up to a knee and dropped his rifle into a crook in the wall. The retort of the weapon in his hands was a familiar, welcome sensation. The spent round shot into the air on his right to fall into the mud in time with the faint bloom of crimson Elias could see across the muddy field. A Sloanish blade slinger fell into the trench he was firing from, with a large hole erupting from the back of his skull. Other shots followed up and down the line. The Sloanish ducked back to the safety of their cover with a few less men to smuggle through the hole beneath their wall.