The Silent Army by James A. Moore Page B

obsidian axe into a guard position even as he tossed the girl away and prepared for a proper fight.
    In an instant Delil was next to him, standing at his side and watching the gathered people.
    The mounts looked on, aware, standing close, but not joining the fight yet. They had not been invited.
    “Leave. Now.” Andover’s voice was not loud. It did not need to be.
    “We have nowhere to go!” the woman screamed from where he’d thrown her. She did not attempt to rise. Instead she sobbed, her body shaking with her misery, and lowered her face toward the ground.
    Andover felt no pity, only disgust.
    Delil looked his way for only a moment. “Let the mounts feast. They are hungry.”
    He nodded and Delil called to them to have their meals.
    The two armed ones tried to defend themselves against the great beasts and failed. While they were dying Andover stared at the woman on the ground. She reminded him a little of Tega, but without the strength he had always sensed in his first love. Love? No. Infatuation. But it had felt like love, once upon a time.
    “You are alive. That is my last mercy.” He spoke to the remaining seven who had not been slaughtered. He looked at the woman on the ground as he spoke. “Leave. They are still hungry. They’ll eat all of you if we let them.”
    That did the trick. Even those who’d been staring on in horrified fascination as the mounts started their grisly feasts got the hint at that point and started moving. Supplies no longer mattered.
    “Where will we go?” the woman tried one last time as she rose to her feet.
    “I don’t care.”
    Delil reached past him and slapped the woman hard enough to knock her back to the dirt. “Leave before I forget Andover’s mercy!”
    She took two steps after the woman, who scrambled to her feet and staggered toward the west as quickly as she could, wiping the blood from her mouth as she ran.
    As she started her third step, the arrow took her precisely at the base of her skull. Delil fell forward and landed hard on her face.
    There was no thought in the action; that had been trained out of him. Andover spun, even as his hand grabbed at a short spear from the quiver at his hip and he spotted the archer and threw his weapon.
    The archer tried to turn away and dodge. The spear’s tip punched deep into the muscle of the young man’s shoulder, until it broke skin on the other side. The man might have thought of running, but the pain was too large for him to ignore and he staggered, then screamed, eyes locked on the weapon in his bloodied joint.
    Andover called out, “Kill them all!” and charged the young archer.
    Young and desperate and hungry to survive, the archer swept his bow around despite the wound in his shoulder, and tried to draw a fresh arrow. The notch did not match up with the bow’s line before Andover cut him down.
    Another step and he was reaching for the closest of the natives and grabbing at her hair with his iron fingers. She slipped past and screamed and he cut her down just the same.
    It was not a battle. It was a massacre. The mounts did their work and Andover did his and none of it changed the fact that Delil was down and dead. He had tried for mercy and been rewarded with the death of his closest friend.
    Had there been any doubt in the desire to follow the Daxar Taalor, it was removed in that moment.

FOUR
    Nachia seemed remarkably calm on her seat. She was not on the throne. Unlike her cousin and generations before him, she seemed perfectly content to hold off sitting in her seat of power until she absolutely had to.
    Also, she knew about the enchantments layered into the very wood and stone of the vast structure. It offered protection and made sure that the person sitting there was never too comfortable. She would never say so to the old man but she agreed with Desh Krohan’s agenda when it came to the throne: no one should ever sit there long enough to be comfortable.
    As she looked over the maps of the area around and