Several of the other knights yelled frantically for the medical squad. Irrim hugged his friend to his breast and pressed his hand to the wound, trying to stop the flow of blood, staring in shock at the red tide gushing out between his fingers and onto his legs.
Then in an instant the tragedy was laid aside as a new cry went up from the men who were further from the pit.
“Ambush!”
“The Sem!”
A hail of black Sem poison arrows descended suddenly upon the knights from both sides, sending some for cover and knocking others down into the pit to die with their comrades.
“Fiends!” Irrim grit his teeth and roared. “Foul Sem! You will rue the day you stood against the Mongauli black!”
“Attack! Attack!”
In these close quarters, with no room to charge, the knights’ horses were of little use; nor of any help were the crossbowmen who had just come hurrying up from behind. Pinned down by the rain of arrows, the knights used their horses as shields, or lowered their faceplates and lashed out blindly at the throng of oncoming Sem.
Arriving with her guard at the top of the dune, Amnelis gazed down on the hellhole below, her ears assailed by screams and sobbing moans. Not wishing to leave the wounded as they were, the lady general sent out orders for a squad of white knights to aid in the rescue of the fallen, but the area around the pit, where the casualties were worst, had already become a milling chaos of Sem and black knights, with horses galloping wildly and footsoldiers darting back and forth. Going in there meant meeting the poison arrows and stone axes of the Sem head-on.
Amnelis went pale with rage, gripping her baton with hands that trembled in anger. In the hollow below, the shifting white sand continued to sift down, burying the living and the dead alike, while into its gaping maw more bodies fell one after the other.
Meanwhile, unaware of the fearsome death they had narrowly avoided, Marus Corps galloped onward. Having gone wide around the dune and the trap it hid, they had left Tangard Corps far behind as they pursued the fleeing Sem. Marus, with his lieutenant Garanth directly to his rear, galloped midway along the advancing columns of horsemen.
Suddenly the blue knights heard a commotion far behind them and the whooshing sound of sand. This was followed an instant later by a cacophony of screams.
“The Sem!”
“An ambush!”
“Lord Captain!” Garanth urged his horse alongside that of Marus. “Lord Captain!”
“I heard.” The count turned in his saddle and looked back.
The smooth white face of the nearest dune blocked their view, but the sounds of clanging metal and the high-pitched war cries that they could hear now coming from the other side were unmistakably those of battle. These were sounds with which they were by now all too familiar.
“There must have been a unit waiting in ambush,” Marus said. He kept his horse galloping at a steady pace. “Those Sem are crafty, but I smell the leopard-man’s hand in this. He is too clever, that one.”
“Well,” said Garanth, sounding worried. “What will we do, Lord Captain?”
“What will we do?” Marus shot him a disparaging look. “There are eight thousand men in our main force, and the Sem, without those—” Marus jutted his jaw forward, indicating the Sem that still ran ahead of them towards the mountains, “they surely don’t have ten thousand warriors to spare for an ambush. There is no cause for concern.”
“Then we continue our pursuit?”
“Of course.” Marus glared after the retreating Sem. “Leave the ambushers to the rest of our men. They’ve got Tangard, Irrim, and young Astrias back there. Those Sem won’t even slow them down. We will do as we have been ordered and run these Sem into the sand!”
Garanth grinned.
“Yes,” Marus continued, “we’ve come too far to let them get away into the hills where they can hide and ambush to their heart’s desire. I’m sure they wouldn’t lead us straight to their villages, but if we keep chasing, and keep chasing, they’ll eventually run out of places to hide. Then we will crush them. I’m sure the rest of our army will have joined us by then.”
“Understood!” Garanth’s sunburnt face smiled. Then he dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and pulled ahead, shouting as he rode up the line, “Keep chasing! Do not fall behind! We’ll take their nest this time!”
Marus glanced back once more, looking for some sign of the rest of the army, but it seemed that the fight was still going on, as none of Tangard’s men had yet cleared the dune.
The hills ahead were nearer now, and seemed larger. The galloping knights could see a path leading into a narrow valley that curved around the skirts of the nearest crags and then plunged between them. The foremost of the retreating Sem had just reached the entrance to the valley.
“Don’t let them escape!” Garanth raised his voice over the pounding of the horses’ hooves. “Don’t let them into the mountains! We’re on rocky ground, watch where you ride!”
The Mongauli knights whooped in response. They were elated. The ground had gotten harder and their horses no longer sank into the sand. At last, they were picking up speed. They raised their whips, trying to urge the last bit of strength out of their frothing, exhausted mounts.
“Chase them! Chase them!”
“Run them down!”
“For Mongaul!”
The lead knights quickly closed the distance between them and the Sem stragglers.
“Hraah!”
From atop his horse, one of the knights swung down his sword in a great arc that terminated at the bobbing head of a fleeing Sem. The wildling’s skull split down the middle, sending up a fountain of blood.