Page 2 of Traitor Son

“Load!” Remin shouted, the command echoed and carried westward along the hilltops overlooking Ellingen. A dozen massive trebuchets rode the ridges, their heavy counterweights dragged backward, upward, in preparation for the next volley. They had already broken the main gates of the city and reduced much of the south wall to rubble, in preparation for the attack. And still the trebuchets pounded onward, hammering the city apart.

The same way he had broken so many other cities, over the lastseven years.

He could hear them shouting his name in the distance.Remin. Lore-Master.Knight-General of the Empire of Argence. He kept always a little apart from his men, armored and massive on his warhorse, making sure the enemy could see him. He had waged a perfect war upon them. In seven years, he had not lost a single battle. They could not defeat him, only delay him.

Standing on the hill above Ellingen, he looked upon crumbling walls and the vulnerable lands beyond, a country that was ready to fall at his feet.

“Archers!” he called. There was a stirring among the knights massed behind him. That order meant their turn was coming.

Many soldiers of Valleth still wore scaled armor, better protection than mail against the bardiches and spears that were their preferred weapons. It was vastly insufficient against Imperial longbows. Remin lifted a hand, and at his signal, hundreds of arrows flew, humming toward the Vallethi ranks massing before the city.

“Trebuchets! On the towers!” he shouted, and there was grinding and creaking as those massive machines adjusted aim, targeting the remaining forward towers of the city. Valleth would have no covering fire. Remin had spent all the previous day maneuvering, breaking their defensive machines. Now the trebuchet to his left launched another load of heavy stones, and the black mirrors atop the gatehouse shattered.

Before the gates, the Vallethi warlord bellowed his defiance. As if Remin’s men hadn’t spared him deliberately.

Valleth had learned to use war machines from the Empire, but they still had no respect for them. Those killed by a trebuchet or even a crossbow were not counted by the Lord of Tales, and Remin would not allow his enemy to tell themselves that he had cheated, using mechanical means to kill their warlord. He must kill that man with his own hands.

That would be his task, when they charged at last for the city.

“Cavalry, forward!” he called, to a rumbling of drums and then the excited shuffling of horses, dancing with eagerness. He could feel the tension in his men, drawn taut as bowstrings, breathing the hot summer air.“Charge!”

A hundred mounted knights swept down the hill, pounding the earth flat with the terrible thunder of their approach. The knights of theEmpire carried heavy steel lances in the charge, metal monsters more terrible than any magic. But that magic still held sway outside the borders of the Empire, and so Remin set heels to his own horse and raced to the front, making himself the target of the surviving sorcerers.

The Vallethi thought him proof against magic, but that wasn’t true. He could feel the stinging slices of their sorcery, Ludovin’s pain that had been harvested from him over days, sharpened and husbanded. Remin let the magic wash over him, twanging like lightning up his nerves, singing to the roots of his teeth. It hurt. Stars, it hurt. But he had been learning all his life how to hurt, and every time he endured it, it increased the fear of his enemies.

They fled from his path as he arrowed toward the gates, where the First Warlord of Valleth was waiting.

He was a monster. Ten feet tall, dwarfing even Remin’s vast height. His ice-blond hair had been shaved and black static crackled up his long, bristling beard, sizzling on the scales of his armor. That was the magic of Valleth, the summoning of the Inside to the Outside. Every life this man had taken, every drop of blood he spilled, every scream he had extracted became part of the story he told himself: the truth of his innermost self. He was the killer. The First Warlord of Valleth. He had cultivated a monster in his own flesh.

“Lore-Master,” he said in Vallethi as Remin swung down from his horse and sent the animal away. “I will feed you to the Lord of Tales.”

“I will send you to make your apologies to them,” Remin retorted in the same tongue, more or less. The warlord bared his teeth, showing bloody gums.

It was rare that Remin fought an opponent larger than himself. His stomach clutched at the prospect of facing that hated magic, but he shook out his shoulders and drew a breath all the way to his toes. He had his sword. He had his shield. His plate armor would withstand a few knocks from the warlord’s massive, spiked mace, and that should be enough time to get his rhythm.

All around them, the battle continued, and Remin heard the voices of his knights, shouting orders as they moved into the massed ranks of the Vallethi defenders, hunting for the magicians. They knew their business. They trusted Remin to handle this.

He charged.

He had always been faster than his enemies expected. He went straight in, shield first, twisting aside as the warlord threw up his own shield and slammed the mace down like a hammer. Fast. At close quarters the magic stung, the lightning fire of nettle spines, and Remin gritted his teeth, stabbing at his enemy’s arm with the tip of his sword. The blade grated, as if he had struck the side of a mountain.

“You come with only steel?” The warlord sneered, and it seemed the ground should shake underfoot as he pursued, his heavy boots thudding.

So many warlords cultivated themselves this way. They reaped for size and power, chanting those words as they lapped at the blood of their victims.Hamsa. Eska. Hamsa. Eska.Stronger. Bigger. Stronger. Bigger.

So few of them saidfaster.

Remin lunged aside as that huge mace swung out again, a sweep that would’ve cleared a small patch of forest, trailing that loathsome magic like a cloud. Remin couldn’t see it or hear it, but he could taste it on his tongue like acid, a stinging like wasps in the sinuses of his cheeks. He felt that pain and bulled right into it.

There was an opening. When the warlord’s arm drew back for another swing, he left a gap between his arm and his shield and Remin was already in it, slamming his sword into his exposed side. The other man twisted aside with a snarl and black blood spurted from his ribs, smoking on the ground.

“Steel seems sufficient,” Remin observed, sliding clear of the mace.

“You dance like a painted whore,” the Vallethi grunted, swinging his mace and shield like two hammers.

“The better to teach you how,” Remin countered, and made the warlord howl as he slammed his sword through one massive boot.

The duel brought the entire battlefield to a standstill. The sorcerers dead, the Eagle Knights staring, weapons falling from their nerveless fingers. Watching as Remin’s sword sliced upward, a perfect arc that took off the warlord’s fingers and sent that dread mace flying. Watching as he spun and slammed the edge of his shield behind the giant’s knees, severing tendons. And a low moan rolled over the battlefield as the warlord fell with a bellowing cry, and Remin moved to finish him.

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