Oathbreaker: The Knight's Tale Read Free Page B

that old King Fannon III offered them nothing but a golden servitude. They had their pride. They answered him.
    The Siullans laid explosives throughout the city of Amchester that fall. Ten thousand died, among them the ambassador to the Siullans. Their senators denied responsibility, but both they and we knew it was their answer to our proposition. King Fannon called upon General Hawkins to speak to their answer.
    The general mustered two of the Empire’s seven armies, and led the First and Third east in the heavy autumn rains, creating two massive, curved pincer arms that measured over fifty miles long from end to end. (The Second and the Fourth were both armies whose ranks brimmed with soldiers from our eastern provinces, and we did not want their loyalty tested—we always send warriors who have little connection to the land they'll conquer so that they do not falter at the sight of a friend's face.) The First Army was to the north, the Third to the south. We had nearly one hundred thousand men in the field. The Siullans had perhaps sixty thousand. We had six military dirigibles, twenty scouting dirigibles, artillery, and the knights—both Elite and the lesser orders—and our troops were simply better trained. It would be, in truth, no contest. We couldn’t understand why the Siullans didn’t surrender and save themselves.
    We should have put ourselves in their place. The destruction that happened later was a failure of our empathy and a failure of our intelligence.
    Our scouts ranged out ahead of us as we crossed the hilly border into Siull. They rode the silver steeds of the Knights Elite, the metal-armored, unliving creatures created by the Archmagus and his apprentices. These were smaller, slimmer mounts, faster than the coursers of the knights, but not nearly as durable; I have seen them explode in gouts of flame and flying shrapnel from a single well-placed arrow. Still, they traveled far faster than any ordinary horse, such as the rest of us were compelled to ride, and a smart scout would rather throw a leg in front of an arrow than let it strike her mount—if she were foolish enough to travel within bowshot in the first place. The scouting steeds were nearly as valuable as the scouting dirigibles we had above us, and certainly stealthier. We did not have the flight troops we have now, those unsavory creatures of the magi.
    The Siullans gave way steadily before us, and our lines extended as we struggled to encircle them. They burned the farms and villages behind them as they went, of course, to keep us from their bounty, and because they knew the Siullan Republic was doomed. They wished us to have no profit from their death. We’d have done the same thing.
    The scouts reported that the Siullan numbers dwindled daily. Some of the Siullans rode ahead of their main army, and the tiny bands disappeared in the hills through which we marched. Sometimes, scouts who sought these bands disappeared. Hawkins was not especially suspicious, for many of these deserters had reemerged as guerrillas to harass our lines, and we found enough of our dead scouts near the shattered, smoking remains of their coursers. We lost two scouting dirigibles, brought down by lucky shots from their rolling guns. The troops bled away from their army until at last they reached the Gaurin Plains and held their ground. They had perhaps forty thousand men then, a third of them gone. We presumed them ragged and desperate with fear. We holed up in the hills rather than engage them immediately. The First Army was in position to strike and was moving rapidly to close the pincer. On the next day, we’d draw the trap closed and crush them between us. Our camp was impregnable from any attack they might launch, and they could go no farther without injudiciously exposing their rear flank. They were trapped, exactly where Hawkins wanted them.
    Students of military history will know that we were exactly where they wanted us.
    I will not recount here the