Surrender to the Will of the Night - By Glen Cook Page 0,161

order but had no luck. He began moving his own followers out of the fight, meaning to disengage long enough to re-form.

The Khaurenese militia watched from a slope a few hundred yards distant. They did nothing because no one gave the order.

The Connecten counts did not show, though messengers had gone to their several camps.

Tormond IV, given a powerful draught of medicine, had been led out to inspire his people. But all he could do was remain upright in his saddle.

People on the city wall cried out in anguish, anger, outrage. Who dared send Tormond into battle? They wept. The most devout pacifists among the witnesses agreed: Someone, anyone, had but to give the order and the Arnhanders would be overwhelmed. They were scattered, disorganized, outnumbered. Their King kept falling off his horse. It was a raging, diabolic miracle that the Navayans had not crushed them already.

Arnhander reinforcements were sure to come soon, from the Raffle and Peque ande Sales, then from the numerous scattered small contingents.

* * *

King Jaime and his Castaurigans surprised the Captal du Days. The Arnhanders hunkered down in Raffle were confident that the weather precluded enemy action. Their only warning came moments before the Castaurigan storm, brought by fleeing foragers.

King Jaime was as vicious and aggressive a warrior as he was a lover. And today he was inattentive to doctrine developed through centuries of battlefield experience. He did not take time to assemble and array so his charge would have maximum impact. He just rushed in and started killing.

The slaughter was terrible amongst those who were not knights, the majority in any camp. The knights themselves, once they donned their armor and mounted up, managed well enough.

Just as in the struggle nearer Khaurene, the fighting went on and on. The living on both sides neared that point where they might collapse from exhaustion. King Jaime still drove his followers. So great was the slaughter, and so numerous were those who fled, that the Castaurigans developed an advantage, including one in leadership. The Captal had been killed. So had most of his captains and champions—unless they had run away.

Jaime’s advisers wanted him to leave while his men and animals had strength enough to return to Khaurene. Fresh Arnhanders could arrive anytime.

Thirsts for blood and glory ruled the young King. He refused to go. He meant to spend the night in the camp of the defeated. He thought Haband would be too frightened to come out of Peque ande Sales.

But Haband came. Though hardly fresh after a six-mile forced march, his men were less exhausted than the Castaurigans. Fugitives from the Raffle added weight to Haband’s force, professing eagerness to redeem their earlier cowardice.

Haband’s men were inexperienced. Most were the useless sort of night crawler who concealed natural-born cowardice by hiding inside the Church and Society. They could be terribly fierce with an enemy already caught and disarmed, but with an armed and angry knight, not so much.

For a while it seemed there would be an afternoon of epic slaughter in sequel to the morning’s butchery, with the same result. The faint of heart from earlier had found no additional courage. Most ran away again.

Then a fighting bishop, quite by accident, knocked King Jaime off his exhausted mount. The youngster ended up in the midst of a wild tangle of men on foot.

Responsibility, later, would be claimed by every bishop who survived. Haband himself would lay claim, though scores of witnesses put him miles away already, with companions who believed they were too valuable to die in that cruel valley.

Credit mattered not. It might even have been a stray Castaurigan blade that delivered the first wound, unintentionally.

The Castaurigans lost their stomach. They backed out of the fight. Jaime’s brother Palo, just sixteen, tried to rally them. He wanted to recover Jaime’s body. No one would join the effort. His advisers insisted that he ransom it later. So bullied, he led the survivors south.

In fact, no one had seen the King actually die. But no one expressed any doubt that he was dead.

They did remain professional in retreat. They ambushed those who pursued them, and killed all the Arnhanders they encountered along the way.

* * *

Brother Candle had been shaking his head for hours. It had become a tic. He could not control it. Like every Khaurenese and Direcian still breathing he could not believe that the militia had remained paralyzed all day. Any idiot could see what needed doing. The old man began talking to himself. He