A Sea of Skulls (Arts of Dark and Light) by Vox Day

Author:Vox Day [Day, Vox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-12-10T21:00:00+00:00

The Savonner camp was a bewildering array of sights and sounds, to say nothing of a brilliant rainbow of colors. It reminded Marcus more of a fair than a military encampment, let alone a proper castra. Open tents were erected haphazardly as far as the eye could see, small herds of goats grazed and gamboled freely about, while men, women, and even children went about their business as if there were not still thousands of orcs lurking somewhere inside the nearby forest. And there were banners and pennants flapping everywhere in the breeze, as red pigs, white horses, green lions, blue griffins, and nearly every possible combination of color and animal, real or imaginary, were used to mark the owner.

Legio XVII had finally existed the massive, and to Marcus’s mind, misnamed, Elvenwood the previous afternoon. The lines for the march castra were still being laid out when a Savondese detachment arrived consisting of four knights and six mounted men-at-arms bearing an imperious invitation, which amounted to a summons, from the Red Prince. Thus it was that Marcus Gaius Trebonius, Arvandus, and the Second of the Second’s centurion, Cyriacus, were being escorted by an honor guard in the direction of the Savondese army. Vitalis accompanied them as well, to prevent any language-related misunderstandings. In their absence, Proculus and Cassabus had been left in command of the legion. The Savondese knights rode well on their slow, but powerful steeds thanks to the device they called a stirrup, and the burnished plate armor they wore was a considerable improvement over the black steel breastplates worn by the Amorrans as well, but otherwise, their footrests and steel armor were the only martial elements of note that Marcus had observed thus far.

The senior knight, Sieur Damase de Bruissac, had told them nothing about the battle they’d discovered, about the orcs, or the arrival of the legion’s supply train. His round face was bland and his incurious eyes were seemingly innocent as he professed complete ignorance of anything but the prince’s orders to bring the Amorran general and the Viscomte de Lechaire to his pavilion. Judging by the pristine state of his armor, the tightness of the leather thong attaching his sword hilt to its scabbard, and his tendency to prattle on about complete inconsequentialities, Marcus was inclined to believe him.

“So I was telling Sieur Pons, he was the son of the baron at the time, before his father was given the west county by the King hisself, I was telling him that what we needed wasn’t more footmen, what we needed was more wine! Ha! Oh, he laughed, he did! He was allus one for a good jest, Sieur Pons. What do you think o’ that?”

Marcus smiled, a little tightly, and nodded. Other than the king, and what may have been an oblique reference to one of the members of the king’s high council, he had never heard of any of the people that Sieur Damase was describing in such enthusiastic detail.

Fortunately, it was not long before they came within site of the prince’s pavilion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.