Empress of Fire and Bone

TW: Swearing and battles.

The Nameless Knights were outnumbered ten to one. Five hundred warriors against five thousand of the dead. Sulphur stink filled the air. Black skeletons ran at them with inhuman head, covered head to toe with orange flame.

            “HOLD THE SPEARS HIGH.” Sir Danielle Longbow’s voice was a hoarse roar as the hordes of flaming infernoste charged into the funnel. Magical trees had been planted in a ring around the camp. The curaduile trees were the army’s only hope against the legions of burning skeletons that wanted to scorch the Nameless Knights to nothing.

            One magic of the curaduile trees was that they grew at supernatural speed in contact with fire. For the first week the trees were mindless, gestating. On the seventh day they awoke.

            Danielle didn’t have time to wait for that. The curaduile rapid growth and resistance to fire was all she required. The press of the burning dead had turned the ring of trees into an impregnable wall of trunks and groping branches.

            “ONLY A STAB TO THE HEAD WILL KILL THEM.” Watching from a platform behind the spearmen, Danielle reloaded her matchlock with the gunners.

            “AIM.” She took aim, not at a particular target but at the line where most heads were bobbing behind the front row of the dead. “FIRE!”

            When every shot had been used the gunners took their turn at the front. Danielle held a spear with the other knights holding spears. Mindless undead ran straight at them, it was madness.

            “They’re just killing themselves,” said Sir Lachlan. “Dafties. This is bloody brilliant.” The long r sounds, and his gravelly voice almost drew Danielle’s eyes from the spearpoint as she aimed it towards another skeleton and stabbed. “I’ve killed fifteen of these lackwit fucks so far.”

            “You were supposed to switch with someone else,” said his commander. Danielle’s voice was a growl, not least because her throat was dry.

            A shorter skeleton, that of a child ran as fast as the rest towards Sir Longbow. She lowered the point of her silver tipped spear and watched the flame inside the blackened skull flicker out. The little flaming warrior dropped as charred bones onto the growing pile.

            “And miss the fun?” He was smiling, his voice told her that. His spear poked the life from another magical monster and withdrew to thrust again.

            “There’s something not right about you Sir Lachlan.” She aimed up again and speared the next infernoste. Having stabbed the monster through the eye, the empty skull slid down the spear shaft towards her hands, already cold. Some of the knights had a few skulls on the handles of their steel spears.

            “That’s not what the ladies say.”

            “As a lady myself, it’s exactly what they say, Sir Donaldson.”

All that had been going well went to hell.

            “They’ve got cavalry!” It was a gasped cry, not a shout.

            Infernoste riders on their skeletal horses. Danielle’s brown eyes grew wide. Clearing a path through the infantry, the riders charged down the middle of the horde.

            “SPEARS INTO THE HORSE’S HEADS,” Sir Longbow yelled. She aimed for the flaming skull of a creature charging straight at her. “HOLD THE LINE!”

            Her spear tip entered mouth of the charging inferno. Before the life had been snuffed from it, Danielle was pushed back, feet sliding in mud. The rider leapt from its mount, over her head and into the ranks of soldiers behind.

            It was wrong, completely at odds with the way the infernoste behaved.

            “SWORDS TO KILL THE RIDERS. SPEARS, HOLD THE FUCKING LINE.”

            Some of the knights at the front had faltered. Flinching cost them their aim. An infernoste slammed through the knights to her right.

            “CLOSE THE DOOR.” The command was specific to archers at the rear. They had curaduile arrows ready to fly. If they heard her. “CLOSE THE DOOR!” She screamed until her throat ached. She coughed from the agony and wished for water, wine, anything to quench her thirst.

            One red arrow sailed over her head. A tree shot up in the middle of the oncoming cavalry, carrying one horse and rider into the air. Trapped in the branches the energy given off by the infernoste fuelled the supernatural growth of the tree. One tree seemed enough as its trunk swelled to the width of a castle tower, reaching for the sky.

            The infernoste split into two streams and flowed around the still growing monolith of wood. Danielle and the other Nameless knights had to step back as deadly low hanging branches snaked towards their faces, hungry. Curaduile hungered for human flesh and had no means to distinguish friend from foe until their seventh day.

            Sir Longbow killed two more skeletons before the flood gate closed. When her duty with the spear was done, she turned. Two knights were dead in melted armour to her right. Another was screaming his last breaths, one of the archers.

            Danielle should have been grateful that it wasn’t worse. Raging grunts escaped her as she flung down her helmet into the mud.

            “HEALERS.” She didn’t need to shout it. They were already elbowing their way through the ranks to get to the wounded. Wiping sweat from her face she grunted again. “Fuck.” She slapped her forehead, admonishment for her failure as a leader.

Out of shots. Out of gunpowder. Now trapped for a week.

            A flaming soldier fell from the sky and landed next to spear wielders who had their backs turned. Pushing her knights out of the way she drew her sword. The mangled bones of the skeleton reformed from dust. She cut its skull in half with her sword. One clean stroke.

            “Please gods, don’t let that horse come down on us as well.” Worried eyes peered at her from the slits of helmets. “Rebuild the shelters. We’re staying here for a week. It’s going to get interesting.”

            Silently, they nodded.

            Danielle looked up at the tree that loomed over them all. It was the tallest thing she had ever seen, possibly the tallest thing anyone had ever seen.

            Branches from the ring of curaduile trees around them were a deadly threat to any human cut by them. If they could get into a cut the trees could turn people into more curaduile. It had been a desperate act to use them as a wall. She hoped it was worth it.

            “He flirts with anyone with tits,” Nettle Longbow told her mother.

            “He’s a man. That’s what most of them do,” Danielle said, stirring her watery soup.

            “I thought it was just me,” the young woman pushed golden hair back out of her eyes and frowned at the broth all the knights had been rationed.

            “First lesson of womanhood. Men will flirt with every woman they can find until they get what they want.” The elder Sir Longbow frowned at the water with bits in it that she was drinking.

            “Most of them don’t stop there,” Sir Anne Hyland said grimly, grimacing as she drank. “Sir Lachlan would flirt with a wall if it didn’t run away fast enough Nettle. It’s his nature. Don’t be hurt by it, but don’t deny it either. If you’re looking for a man to marry, it’s not him. Denying the nature of a man is like trying to keep your feet dry as you piss into the wind.”

            “Ridiculous?” Danielle asked.

            “It never ends well. Listen, the thing is they know they can get a girl pregnant and run off. They don’t carry babies around with them for months. Lucky shits.” Anne rubbed Nettle’s back with a weathered hand.

            “You run around fucking everything that moves,” Danielle said to her best friend. “What’s the difference?” Three pairs of brown eyes glittered with mirth.

            “That I tell the men up front that its only sex. They never seem to mind.” She smiled. Though she had wrinkles and grey hair, Anne was the most youthful in spirit of the three. She winked.

            “What about the men who propose to you?” Nettle asked, smiling with teeth that were still a rare white.

            “Then I sleep with them as a consolation, to ease their pain.” Anne put a hand on her chest and gave a sorrowful face to her friends.

            Danielle shook her head. Nettle sniggered.

            “You won’t tell him, will you?” Asked the daughter.

            “No,” said the mother. Hoping only Anne could see, the mother hugged her girl. Danielle’s short hair rested on Nettle’s flowing locks. The wiry young woman was lost in the mountain of scarred muscle.

On the first day, some of the knights marked the safe border of their camp with the blackened bones of the vanquished infernoste.

            The skulls of the horses were different. They had turned white, unlike the still charred bones of the flaming skeletons there was nothing left of the mounts but their skulls.

Day two was livened up by a fight. Two women Sir Lachlan had been flirting with fought each other with bare knuckles.

            “Break it up,” Danielle told them. One was lost in a haze of adrenaline and rage. The woman took the pause in the other’s attack as a chance to push her to the ground. “HOLD THEM.” She looked at both. A blonde, blue-eyed northerner and a brown skinned woman from the east. Blood dribbled from their lips. The light of hate still burned bright in their eyes.

            “What’s this about?”

            Eyes darted to the side, to the sky, to their feet. Anywhere to avoid looking their commander in the eye.

            “What’s this about?”

            Venom passed between the knights. One short with ropey muscles like Nettle, the other tall with enormous shoulders and black hair down to her shoulders.

            “She was flirting with Sir Lachlan, even though he’s courting me.” Sir Nadia Patel pointed to Sir Minerva Glasg.

            “Lachlan.” Danielle nodded; jaw clenched as she looked down at her boots. “Of course. Wherever he is, bring him here. Now.”

            A minute later the ginger rogue stood before his commander with the face of a scolded child. “Sir Longbow, what can I do?”

            “Swear to me that you’ll stop flirting with other knights. Tell me that you’re going to apologise to every woman in this camp that you’ve batted your eyelids at. Know that if you cause any more problems, I’ll castrate you myself and then task you with recruitment and training.”

            “I’ll do it. No more flirting.” He nodded, orange hair bouncing as he did.

            “You can start with Sir Patel and Sir Glasg.” As it was when she was angry, Danielle’s voice was the growl of a guard dog.

Days three and four were uneventful. Only the singing made them bearable. Singing as if drunk, the knights hollered into the blue sky. By nightfall they all snored with the might of snotty dragons.

            “It’s a wonder any of us sleep,” Anne Hyland winked, head on her folded pack.

            “You sleep through this?” Danielle asked. “Lucky you.”

By day five the rationed soup had five hundred knights grumbling. Sir Longbow’s teeth ground as she fended off calls to up the quota of dried meat and vegetables in the broth. When she suggested they sacrifice Sir Lachlan to use as stock the joke put too many hungry glints in their eyes.

When day seven came, Danielle spoke to the trees in the old tongue of the continent for hours. None of them responded until midday had been and gone. She’d been feeling mad.

            “Thank you,” she said. She bowed to the trees as they parted enough for a knight to peek through at the world beyond.

            A distant, desolate horizon was further away than it felt from memory. A week of staring at trees had warped her perception of the skyline.

The infernoste had gone. The Nameless Knights packed up and marched north again.

            Holyhome had been the capital of the Empire of the Holy Proclamation before dragons had scorched it and the entire province of Gennadius. Even in ruins it was civilisation on a scale most had never seen. Half of the knights were recruits from the broken empire, some had seen the churches and the palaces.

            The city was bigger than the Kingdom of Crann where they’d come from. Though the north was freezing cold, the heat of springs kept the land from glazing over. A volcano to the northeast slumbered quietly.

            Holyhome should have been abandoned, home to nothing but the world’s memories of something mighty that was lost forever. Lights wandered through the streets in the darkness.

            Sir Anne Hyland took command of the knights as Danielle, Nettle and some of the quieter soldiers crept towards the city’s heart. A mighty glow bathed Holyhome in orange warmth from the old palace of the emperor.

            Dogs walked at heel with skeletal soldiers. They were not meandering creatures like the infernoste that roamed the countryside elsewhere in Gennadius. They were synchronised. They marched in rows and columns.

            “An infernoste righ,” Nettle whispered, pointing to a spirit Danielle saw all too clearly.

            Beautiful as any sculpture or painting Sir Longbow had ever seen, the woman of fire rode a horse that in life had probably pulled ships up canals. It had a harness of bone, as the steeds of the riders they fought before had.

            She was carved from white heat, orange fire and bright red flames. A flaming crown of her own creation flickered over her black skull. It was hard to see the bones beneath those flames, blinding bright.

            Living animals, docile and willing, walked to her. Dogs, horses, and deer pressed their heads into her waiting hands. They screamed momentarily as the pain broke whatever hold she had. Fire consumed them, remade them. They rose again as monsters.

            Men and women sleepwalked their way to her. They smiled before she touched them. They cried out in agony as they were burnt away. All she needed was their souls to power the fire and to feed her power.

Danielle did not attack that night. It would have been suicide. The nameless knights withdrew to Crann to rest and recuperate. They armed themselves with silver shot for their guns, red curaduile arrows for their bows. Bombs filled with silver on carts. Supplies to outlast a short siege.

Months later the Nameless Knights returned to Holyhome. The army of the Empress of Fire and Bone had grown to many thousands. There were no more knights.

            They had their training. They had their tricks. They had a catapult.

            Knights planted the walls of their curaduile fortress-to-be as they had before. Each seed was rested on the surface, not planted in the soil. Thick oil marked the line, with each seed a foot apart.

            The Nameless Knights had never fought such a battle. Hundreds of spears had been driven into the ground to point at the only entrance to the camp. Earthwork steps had been thrown up in hours on a hill to the south of Holyhome.

The lit oil turned the seeds to saplings in a heartbeat. Over the saplings, frightened soldiers watched flames in the darkness turn to see foreign fire.

            Legions of the dead ran from all over the city. The camp was attacked from the west, north and east. Curaduile saplings welcomed the fire and shot up into trees. The gaps between them closed.

            Rows of knights with their swords drawn cut down skeletons who made it through the closing walls.

            So far so good.

            Danielle watched from the top of her new hill. The worst had yet to come. Dogs raced through the gate and leapt between the entrenched spears. Swords cut at them, but the lines twisted as dogs clattered between the legs of the knights.

            Sir Hyland had command at the front. Sir Longbow was waiting for the masses to come within range of the catapult.

            Nettle oversaw the gunners. Archers waited to close the gap if everything went to hell.

            A swarm of skeletons raced down into the shallow valley on the edge of Holyhome. Danielle looked at the knights waiting to fire the catapult. She nodded to them. “Fire.”

            Up went a barrel. It soared over the knights, landing in the heart of the oncoming wave. Danielle winced from the bang, then helped load the next barrel. As soon as the crank had turned enough, the next barrel flew. It wasn’t exactly where she wanted them to land but it didn’t matter. Up to a hundred of the undead were destroyed by every barrel.

            There were thousands. Tens of thousands.

            The catapult was devastating the enemy at long range. Gunmen knocked off twenty with every volley at medium range and the static and held spears kept everything out.

For how long? Danielle wondered.

            She itched to be at the front.

            “OPEN UP ONE BARREL AND POUR IN CURADUILE SEEDS.” The noise of the battle even between the explosions of the bombs was deafening. Gun blasts in volleys were enough to deafen anyone. Some of the soldiers were yelling to vent their fear. The dead made ethereal screaming shrieks as they ran full pelt towards the silver of the Nameless Knights. 

            The camp had enough of the barrel bombs to keep throwing them at the enemy for hours. Danielle knew her soldiers would weary before the catapult gave out.

            “IT NEEDS TO FIRE FURTHER,” Sir Longbow roared.

            Knights nodded and made adjustments that cost several throws.

            “READY, SIR.”

            The seed bomb was loaded.

            “FIRE.”

            The barrel flew up through the air and was lost against the black night sky. The explosion was thirty feet further into the endless sea of the dead. The sea became a forest, sparks of orange light rising into the sky.

            “Gods save us,” Sir Longbow whispered to herself as she threw the next barrel into the catapult.

            Unless they died it was going to be a long night.