Chapter 395 — The Northern Rout
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The catastrophe that had fallen from the sky still showed no sign of ending.
No one could see where the enemy stood, nor fathom what this attack actually was. Even the wisest mages in the allied army — had they still possessed the capacity to think — could not have named any spell that could strike so far, with such force, and that gave off not the slightest ripple of magical power before impact. It simply defied every commonplace of magic.
In fact, even as the unending shells fell on their heads and the whole open ground was burned to scorched earth, only a very few understood that they were being "attacked"; most still did not grasp that the battle had already begun, or even that it was Cecil's power that was killing them.
They were bombarded in blank bewilderment, pulverized, vaporized; in the last few fleeting moments of their lives, their minds could not even connect this heaven-sent disaster with the "Cecil Expedition" they were embarked upon.
Only when nearly all the foremost soldiers had been annihilated, and the knights had died seven or eight in ten, did the surviving mages, knights, and priests react — or rather, guess — at what had brought this inconceivable hell before them. Someone howled madly: "The Cecil men! The Cecil men are attacking!"
But that howl was as faint as a mosquito's whine amid the ceaseless explosions, and soon its owner vanished along with his voice into a fresh crater, while more men were killed outright by the shockwaves of the bursting shells.
Those who had lagged behind because they moved slowly were the lucky ones. Left to the rear by their own lack of discipline, they witnessed from the mountain road of Brokenstone Ridge that nightmare scene upon the plain: knights and mages once mighty beyond compare tumbling in the "blasts of heavenly fire," crawling on the ground clutching shattered limbs, a vanguard of thousands wiped from existence in the space of a few breaths. Those who survived by chance were stricken to the marrow — but they soon met a threat just as deadly.
The warhorses bolted.
The knights' warhorses were trained to keep a measure of composure in the face of magical explosions wrought by mages, but such training clearly had its limits. A dense artillery bombardment and the occasional fireball were plainly not the same thing; the explosions on the battlefield exceeded what the horses could bear, and so a deadlier chaos erupted within the allied army.
The terrified, uncontrollable warhorses began to career wildly through the ranks with their masters on their backs; the noble retainers, scared witless, at once lost the restraining hand of their knightly lords and, screaming in panic, began to fall back and flee. The handful of nobles who still had some courage shouted amid the chaos, trying to restore order with their authority, but soon they too were flung to the ground by their own mounts; at least a third of them were trampled to pulp in the next few minutes beneath madly galloping hooves and iron boots, while the rest were swept along by the fleeing soldiers and pelted headlong down the mountain road.
But behind them still more troops, knowing nothing of the truth, kept surging forward.
The allied line was drawn out far too long. When the vanguard was annihilated under the shellfire, the soldiers in the middle and rear were still on the roads of Brokenstone Ridge; hearing the loud explosions far off, they took them for the thunder that so often echoed in the mountains in spring. Most of the superstitious Southern Frontier soldiers held to one belief: that spring thunder was an ill omen, and above all that when the spring thunder sounded a man must not linger in the mountains, or he would be turned to stone upon the peaks. So the follow-up units quickened their pace — and collided with the troops ahead who were struggling to retreat.