The Citadel of Hate

Aranthir III

When at last the sandstorm settled, they were well and truly lost. Aranthir looked around at the few companions still left to him and saw that they were few in number. To every side of him, the Dry Wastes stretched off toward the horizon, featureless and utterly barren.

"Well damn it all," Lutharis roared, rising from where he had sheltered against his horse and disturbing a layer of sand and dust as he did. "Where has the army gone?"

Shading his eyes, the black-haired man studied the horizon as he brushed sand from his beard. Aranthir cleaned himself off more calmly and checked his horse. Behind him, the rest of their little company was stirring from their shelter.

"They kept riding through the storm," Rora sneered as she shook sand from her boots. "They will be scattered to the four winds by now. Easy prey for the raiders."

"Should we turn back?" asked Aigon, the group's youngest member. He was peering at the horizon through his spyglass, though with no more luck than the others.

"Which way even is back?" Lutharis grumbled.

"The storm was enough to obliterate the tracks of the army," Aranthir mused, studying the ground all around them. "We will have to follow the setting sun until we reach the green lands again."

"Hold on," said Pairas, sliding off his horse to plant his armored feet in the sand. "Deserting the army means we forfeit our pay. The paymaster owes me three weeks' pay already and I won't let him discharge his debt to me so easily."

"You're welcome to take up his debt with him as soon as you find him." Aranthir waved a hand at the empty desert that surrounded them. "Until then, we should return to the town where we mustered and wait for word of the army."

"If it still exists," Rora groused. "The Sardmen won't give them much time to regroup. That's why they wouldn't give battle, they knew it was only a matter of time before a storm destroyed the army for them."

Pairas scowled and kicked the dirt. His other riders looked around uncertainly. At last, Pairas ground his teeth and spat. "Very well. We will return to the town." He looked around him. "Which way is it?"

Aranthir pointed his finger skyward. "Follow the setting sun. With luck, we will soon enough reach the settled lands where someone can give us instructions."

None of them presented a better idea, so soon enough they fell in behind Aranthir. The day was long and hot, but the desert was devoid of shade and so they struggled on. As they crawled west, the desert began to change. It grew rockier and they began to see the occasional bit of brush. Twice they spotted rabbits darting from rock to rock. But everywhere they looked, it was flat, dusty, and barren.

As the sun dropped ever lower, they began to lose pace. The cooling night air was a welcome change from the murderous heat, but they were tired, hungry, and thirsty. Rora called a halt.

"We should rest here," she said, panting with exhaustion. "We can make some attempt at erecting shelter and wait out the day, then continue tomorrow night."

"We're running low on water," Aranthir objected. "We won't last another day and night."

"We won't last much longer anyway," Rora replied.

"Where are we going to find water?" Cuthas, one of her sharpshooters, demanded. "This whole damned place is drier than a blacksmith's forge."

Aranthir scanned the horizon and smiled.

"There," he pointed to a distant spot on the horizon, dimly visible in the waning light of the sun. "An oasis," he declared.

"It's a mirage," complain Pairas. "Just another cruel trick of the desert."

Aranthir merely smiled and spurred his horse in the direction of the oasis. "Come on, it's not too much further." The others stared after him in a combination of confusion and exhausted frustration. Lutharis simply nodded and followed Aranthir without question.

"He's never led us wrong before," Aigon said as he followed Lutharis. "If we had listened to him, we would be in Cimbra instead of lost in the desert."

Grudgingly, Rora and Pairas led their respective contingents forward. The ground grew rockier and harder, leading up a slight incline. They wound their way over harder ground as the night wore on. Pairas' grumbling grew louder and louder until at last Aranthir stopped. Pairas angrily made his way up to where the half-elf stood and harrumphed loudly behind him. Aranthir casually picked up a stone from the ground.

"And how much further are you going to lead us tonight, elf?" Pairas demanded.

"Just a stone's throw," Aranthir replied and flung the stone from his hand. Before Pairas could reply, they all heard the splash.

Quarrels forgotten, they rushed forward. Falling their knees at the edge of the oasis, they drank its cold, clear water from their hands.

"Erchasos be praised!" Rora cried as she thrust her head into the water in relief. The party drank their fill and refilled their waterskins. Date palms growing over the water provided them much needed succor, and Lutharis even conspired to catch a pair of nesting birds taken unaware.

They tiredly assembled a makeshift camp in the shadow of a tall rock and soon enough were fast asleep.

Aranthir awoke in the mid-morning and made a circuit of the oasis. The pool of water was narrow and crooked, winding its way through the tall, red rocks for perhaps four hundred paces. All along its edge grew palms, berry bushes, and strange flowers with small, bitter seeds that could easily be plucked and eaten. No fish made their home in the pool, but Aranthir glimpsed frogs hopping along the edge and birds nesting in the rocks above.

Climbing the rocks, he looked around. To the south, the barren and featureless desert stretched far away toward the horizon, while the rocky plains continued in the other directions. In the distant northern sky, he thought he could make out rain clouds. That would be where the green settled lands lay, he knew. He sat for a time, trying to spy a clear path through the maze of boulders, until he grew thirsty again.

He clambered down the rocks to the pool's edge again and dipped his waterskin into the pool. The water near the edge had been disturbed by so many feet and was thick with sand and silt. Aranthir dumped out the fouled water and, mounting a boulder that jutted out into the water, dipped his waterskin again.

As he retracted it, something caught his eye. Something stirred in the pool's depths, which ran far deeper than he would have ever expected from an oasis. Far below the surface, he spied a powerful eddy in the dark waters. Rising to his feet, Aranthir regarded it cautiously, one hand on his belted blade. The water flickered with strange, eldritch motion and he took a cautious step back.

But it was a voice from above that startled him.

"Riders from the north!" Pairas stood atop the oasis's rocky walls, arquebus in hand, pointing along the pool's edge. Following his outstretched hand, Aranthir spotted five men on horseback making their way down the rocky incline to the water's edge. Aranthir retreated from the water's edge and made for the camp. There he found Rora's sharpshooters asleep in the hot morning sun. Lutharis was cleaning his boots of sand, while Aigon was nowhere to be seen.

"Get up," Aranthir commanded, "we have company."

"More of the king's army?" Lutharis asked as he lit the matchcord on his musket.

"No. They look like Sardmen."

Pairas came scrambling down the rock wall behind the camp.

"There's so many of them," he gasped as he reached the camp. "Hundreds, if not more."

"Damn," Rora said as she rose. "Where is Aigon?"

"He went hunting," Lutharis said. Pairas' men were scrambling to their weapons.

"The Sardmen are hunting us down. They must have already destroyed the army," Pairas rambled. "They've spotted us for sure, and we can't outrun them."

"There's nowhere to hide in the desert anyway," Cuthas whined.

"We can't fight them," Rora said even as she loaded her musket. "What is the life of a Sardic slave like?"

"Not good," Aranthir said, "but likely preferable to death. Perhaps we can negotiate, or even defect."

"The quartermaster was never timely with our pay anyway," one of Pairas' men growled. Aranthir could now see the riders approaching along the edge of the oasis. There were more of them now, the original five had been joined by ten more. All rode nimble desert horses and carried bows of horn and Sardic cavalry sabers. Most wore only desert robes, but the leader of the group was armored in fine lamellar and mail, with a spiked cap wrapped in green silk. A mailed veil covered his face. A man at his side carried an unfamiliar banner, a black tower on red.

Behind him, a band of knights approached. They all wore black armor that completely encased their bodies, leaving no sight of their mortal parts anywhere. The horses they rode were monstrous black stallions, standing two hands taller than any other destrier Aranthir had seen before. At their head was a figure whose eyes burned like coals beneath his towering helm. The knights rode ahead of the first band of riders and closed in on Aranthir and his companions.

The rider pulled up his horse in front of them. Fixing his burning eyes on them, he raised a black gauntleted hand.

"Surrender or die," he boomed, his powerful voice sounding as if it rattled up to them from the depths of his armor. Behind him, the other knights looked on impassively, while the Sardmen watched with arrows nocked to their bows and lances resting on their shoulders.

Aranthir turned to his companions.

"I see no way out. Do as he says and we will find a way out later." With that, he dropped his beloved jeweled longsword into the dirt. Lutharis and Aigon followed immediately. Rora hesitated, exchanging looks with Pairas and her men. Pairas sullenly cast his weapons down and his men followed suit. Rora and her sharpshooters were the last to surrender, and the Sardmen came forward. Their things were taken from them while the riders bound their hands and then tied them into their saddles. The packhorses were taken away to join their captors' baggage train and soon enough the whole column departed the oasis.

They rode south at a hard pace, so hard that Aranthir feared his companions would erase all gains from their rest from the night before. They forged across the trackless, featureless desert in a straight line, the strange minds at the head of the column leading them with utter certainty. The strange knights and their mortal followers rode on throughout the blazing heat of the day and then through the biting cold of the night without stopping. Aranthir was parched, hungry, and exhausted. His legs burned from so many hours in the saddle and the rough bindings rubbed his wrists raw. All attempts to speak with his captors failed. The strange men in armor rode in absolute silence, while the Sardmen spoke only among themselves, ignoring Aranthir and his companions' questions.

When dawn came again, Aranthir could see mountains on the southern horizon. As the sun rose and further seared the earth with its face, the mountains grew nearer. The column of riders did not break its pace, the horses driven on past their breaking point by some malign presence at their backs. Some time after midday, Aranthir could see a tower ahead of them.

A narrow spire of black rock, not unlike in color to the strange knights' armor, rose from a series of bastions, curtain walls, and low towers near the foot of the mountains. As the column neared, the walls loomed higher over them and Aranthir spied more knights looking down from the parapets. Tall gates of strange, white wood bound with black iron swung open and the column of horses passed beneath. Looking up, Aranthir saw inhuman eyes staring down at him from the murder holes as stone gargoyles leered at him from the wall.

After the long ride, the column at last ground to a halt in a wide, dusty bailey beneath the central spire. The Sardmen dismounted and dispersed which their armored companions sat still atop their steeds. A contingent of soldiers emerged from the blockhouses along the outer wall. Their dress was that of the desert nomads, but their features were clearly those of the settled men of the river valleys. They bore muskets and ranseurs on their shoulders, while the man at the fore of the ground carried a bullhide whip.

Aranthir and his companions were unbound and ushered down from the saddle and assembled before the men. A few of the Sardmen had returned to watch.

"You are now slaves of the Black Lord," the whipbearer rumbled to his captives. "You will toil in the mines until you can work no longer. Disobedience and sloth will not be tolerated. I am now the master of your fates. Do not waste your breath on prayers, the gods cannot hear you here."

He cracked the whip, a sharp snap in the dry air of the bailey. "To the barracks!" he shouted, and his guards began shoving and pushing the prisoners toward a low bunkhouse of mudbrick and stone.

All the while, the strange knights in their black armor stood still and silent.

They were rousted the following morning in the pre-dawn hours, fed a meager meal of gruel and old cheese, then marched down into the mines. One of Pairas' men fell in the steep tunnel and, after a vicious bout of whipping failed to persuade him to rise, the overseer stabbed him to death and continued on. The mine's tunnels were narrow, low, and dimly lit by weak torches. Twice, Aranthir passed the bones of an unfortunate miner lying in the corners. The air was foul, sometimes suffocating, while stones and clods of dirt often came tumbling down from above. Driven by the overseers' lash, they plunged further into the mine's depths until at last they came to undelved tunnels and set about with their picks.

Soon enough, they were joined by more slaves. They were a wretched lot, having endured their abuse for weeks longer than Aranthir and his companions. They wore rags, if anything at all, and bore the scars of both the lash and the mines on their backs and arms. The whips of the overseers kept their heads down and their tongues stilled, so Aranthir bided his time.

After many hours of toil, at what he assumed must be midday, the overseers retreated a bit up the tunnels to eat. Aranthir stole his way over to the slave who looked least about to die. The man was hale enough despite his condition and sported a thinning salt-and-pepper beard.

"Hail, friend," Aranthir said quietly to him as they each swung their picks into the hard earth. "How long have you been below?"

The man made no immediate response, his eyes fixed dully ahead. Aranthir tried again in a different tongue.

"When did they capture you?"

"The overseers don't like us talking," the man replied quietly, his eyes ahead.

"They are distracted with their meal now. How long have you been down here?"

The man blinked, as if waking from a sleep. "I'm not sure. Three weeks? Maybe more. The days all start to blend together. Sometimes they send us down before dawn and bring us up after sunset. Might be we spend more than a day down there. I can't tell."

"I'm looking to get out of here. What do you know about that?"

"I know you don't get out of here except when they dump your corpse. They've got old mineshafts where they pile up the dead. You'd stay away from them if you're smart. All the carrion attracts ghouls."

"Where do the ghouls come from?"

"Only the Black Lord knows. He's a necromancer of some sort, a sorcerer who traffics with fel powers and has mastery over the dead. There is no escape."

"There's always an escape. Sorcerer or not, he's just a man like any other. I've killed plenty of men like him."

The man simply shook his head and returned to his work. Aranthir moved away down the line. He studied the overseers as well as he could without attracting suspicion, studying their movements, their arms and armor, the relationships between them. He wanted to know which ones were outcasts, which ones were leaders, which ones were attentive or lazy.

Lutharis sidled up to him as they dug.

"I know you're already working on an escape plan," he whispered. "We're going to have to move quickly, I can feel the others losing hope already."

"These other slaves have already fallen to despair. I fear we will have to leave them behind. Have you heard of our captor before?"

"Only rumors," Lutharis admitted, "peasants talk of a dark lord who raised a citadel in the desert. They say he was once a lord of Lenadar who quarreled with the old king and fled to the desert to avoid his wrath."

"Have you any idea where we are? How far is it back to the green lands?"

"At least a hundred miles. We look to be close to the western spur of the mountains, but to the west is nothing but two hundred miles of empty desert before the coast. If we escape, we should head north."

"Before we escape, we will need supplies and weapons."

"And horses. I fear that ride killed ours."

"If this Black Lord is a sorcerer, he will have spice. If I can find some fuel for sorcery, I can mask our tracks as we escape."

"The stables are near to the blockhouse where they keep us. I could smell the horses at night. But we will need to break into their armory to get powder and shot."

"And my sword," Aranthir added. His pick struck something in the dirt, and further digging revealed a small vein of ore. Aranthir had seen iron ore before, but while this was unmistakably iron, it was not any iron he was familiar with. The ore itself was a deep, glossy black in color, very clearly the same material as the metal that made up the great tower. But his pick of mundane iron broke off the ore easily enough, allowing them to fill up wicker baskets with their prizes.

The sound of picks striking iron echoed up the dirt tunnels and soon, the other slaves began to crowd around them, tearing into the earth with eager aplomb. They began uncovering the rest of the vein as they broke off chunks to fill their baskets. Alerted by the sounds, a gaggle of overseers descended into the tunnel. With shouts and whips, they urged on their slaves.

"Get that ore in there! Harder, or you're on half rations tonight! Put your backs into it!"

Aranthir's shoulders were stung by three strikes of the whip, but he never stopped filling the baskets. The vein began to diminish now, and the baskets were nearly full. One of the overseers, a big Zahiri man with a gold nose ring, pointed his whip at Aranthir.

"You, haul these back up to the surface and give them to the crushers. Now!"

Aranthir roped the baskets together and threw the ropes over his shoulder. Straining against the weight, he made his way slowly up the sloped tunnels toward the surface. It was a hard climb and only after much toil did he reach the surface. The midday sun shone down on him in all its terrible glory. The dusty ground was hot, burning his feet as he walked.

Three men waiting in the shadow of a forge stood up from their dice game as he appeared.

"Hand them over," one man barked, shading his eyes from the sun. He seized the ropes from Aranthir and handed them to his companions. Without sparing the half-elf any further notice, they set off in the direction of the crushing ground.

Instead of turning back to the mines right away, Aranthir stole a moment from his work detail to rest in the forge's shadow and look up at the tower of black iron. In its highest chambers, a dull red light shone from the windows. From time to time, a figure stood hazily silhouetted in the window; a malevolent shadow looking out from the fortress. He felt the figure's eyes on him clearly, as if he could see the shadow's face. Shielding his eyes from the blazing sun, he turned and went down into the mines again.

Free of his heavy burden, Aranthir descended into the earth carefully. The torches were burning low and while his elfsight allowed him to see better than most, the exposure to the harsh desert sun left him dazzled. He twice turned down the wrong tunnel until eventually he found his way to the overseers' camp. Four of the overseers crouched around a candle atop a barrel, playing cards. The big Zahiri man was among them and when he spotted Aranthir, he threw a waterskin at him.