Lost and alone, disheartened by failure and wanting only to go home, Thomas Gown and his companions face the darkest hour of their lives when they stumble across a remnant of the once mighty Agglemonian Empire. There they make a stunning discovery t...
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Tatria was in a bad way.
The siege was only a few days old, but already every building within a hundred yards of the outer wall had suffered some damage. Some were in ruins, and fire had swept through the largest slum districts, although many people living in nearby more respectable districts considered that to be no bad thing. The city’s central regions had largely escaped so far, due mainly to the sheer size of the city which, before the evacuation, had been home to at least half a million people, but even so Resalintas, standing on the parapet of one of the towers that stood at intervals along the wall and looking out over the battle raging below, had a depressing sense of deja vu as he remembered the fate of Fort Battleaxe.
Every effort to persuade the High Prefect of the folly of trying to defend the giant capital city had failed, and the old priest, who normally only had to fix someone with his steel grey eyes and speak with his devastatingly compulsive voice to bring him around to his way of thinking, was suffering from an unaccustomed sense of failure. The High Prefect was easily the most stubborn man he’d ever met, probably the reason he’d managed to rise to his present esteemed position, and he stood in the path of common sense and reason like a colossal boulder. Skulnya and Resalintas had tried every argument they could think of to change his mind, pointing out the extent to which the enemy outnumbered them, the tactics they would use, the difficulty in trying to defend all thirty miles of the city walls and the moral responsibility they had to cause as much harm to the enemy as possible, even at the expense of the city itself. Milus Rona had simply refused to listen, though, eventually growing so angry that he’d shut himself up in the palace, opening the doors only to his own Generals and advisors. The very next day the enemy had arrived and surrounded the city, putting an end to the argument. They now had no choice but to defend the city as best they could.
The soldiers in the tower with him sensed his anger and quaked in fear, wishing that he'd go back out and vent it all on the enemy. Resalintas refused to waste his strength on the skeletons and zombies attacking the city, though, and slipped out a couple of times a day with a small group of picked men to attack the living Shadowsoldiers camped a couple of miles away, searching out their wizards in particular and fighting as long as they could before being forced to return to the city in fatigue. The use of so much holy power meant that he had to spend a large part of the day resting, though, staring moodily out across the city and the lands surrounding it while he regained his strength, and while he was doing this he made miserable company for those soldiers unlucky enough to be in the same area.
He was only able to salvage a few crumbs of comfort when the shayen birds of paradise went out over the enemy camp, flanked by the city’s aerial cavalry, to meet the enemy’s wyvern cavalry in battle over the fertile farmlands of the grain belt, and he muttered a few words of prayer to Samnos to lend them strength and courage. Every time they went out, the fabulous flying ships had been able to spare a few moments to attack the Shadowsoldiers camped below, causing additional mayhem to that caused by Resalintas and his cohorts, keeping their living enemies stirred up, on edge, unable to rest. It wasn't much, though, and the old priest tried not to think about how little they were really accomplishing compared to the total size of the enemy army. The attacks were more to boost the city’s morale than for any real military effect.
