The desert trembled beneath the thunder of a thousand hooves, and not one of them belonged to a horse.
Camels came instead, towering beasts of long pelts and mumbling muses, moving with a grace that gave the lie to their sheer bulk. Every stride sent plumes of dust swirling up behind them,the golden mist rising to herald their coming long before a man could count them.
Upon their backs sat warriors clad in steel and shadow. Their armour gleamed under the merciless sun, worked over with intricate etchings, and from their helms sprouted vivid feathers, splashes of colour against the dull tones of sand and iron. But it was the masks that put the fear into men, shaped into faceless white visages that stripped away everything human a face might otherwise have offered.
Each carried a gleaming lance, two javelins strapped behind the saddle, and a wicked half-moon axe at the hip. They sat tall and unwavering, holding their reins with the ease of men who had learned to ride before they learned to walk.
They were the Juggernauts of the Sultan.
No man could feign ignorance of that name. No army in the world could claim it had never heard whispers of their wrath. The Riding Bane, they were called. The terror of cavalry. The monsters of the dunes.
And now the world would witness their charge once more.
High came the cry.
"ALALALAI!"
"ALALALAI!"
It carried out over the dunes like a haunting song, a chorus of death and dominion both. It was tradition, a war cry older than empires, passed down from the age when the Sand Riders ruled the wastes and the endless Qarzla Desert was still called the Shifting Gold Sea.
For two hundred years they had roamed as raiders, striking out of the sand like phantoms and vanishing again before vengeance could so much as saddle its horse.
That was until Afarah the Tall stood against them and did what no man before him had dared. He conquered the desert itself. Twenty-five years he fought for it, subduing the tribes one by one, slaughtering those who would not bend, taking the sons of chieftains as hostages and scattering them across his empire so that no father knew where his boy was kept.
He believed, at the end of those twenty-five years, that he had tamed the sands.
The desert has never once consented to be chained.
With each passing sultan the riders rose again, turning their camels into instruments of war, striking deep into enemy lands, raiding and vanishing and leaving only fire behind them. They did not know how to till the earth. They knew only how to take from those who did.
Then came Mursma the Fair.
Where every ruler before him had seen an enemy, Mursma saw an opportunity. He did not burn their camps nor spill their blood. He made them an offer instead.
Settle beneath my banner, and ride no longer as raiders but as warriors of the Sultanate.
Of course, the offer arrived only after they had lost the war yet again, which has a way of improving any term or condition.
And so the Sand Riders became something a great deal more dangerous than they had been.
The alliance proved a masterstroke for both parties. The Sultan gained an unshakeable bastion upon his eastern border and warriors who could match and then dismantle the heavy cavalry of his western enemies.During the great conquest beneath Khairo they made the majority of their mounted force beating force after force, once the land however were annexed their eyes settled on Arlania and Romelia both.
In return for protection under the Sultan's law, the Sand Riders were given free rein to raid and plunder any land not flying the Sultan's banner, and on the eastern frontier where the mounted horselords rode, where few men dared plant a flag of any kind, there was never any shortage of victims for slave.
Over the years the pact hardened into something like law. For ninety years it flourished, until at last one Sultan took his trust a step further and handpicked the strongest and most ruthless among them to form the Riding Bane.
What had once been an unruly horde of raiders became a brotherhood of elite warriors. And unlike the mercenaries who sold their swords to whoever raised a hand highest, the Riding Bane had become something rarer still.
Loyal.
But today these riders were not fighting for the Sultan.
Today they rode beneath the banner of the Prince of Arlania.
And just as the prince had predicted, the emperor had swallowed the bait whole. His reserves had surged forward to meet a flanking manoeuvre that was never meant to land, leaving his archers and his cavalry exposed, standing naked before the storm about to break across them. The only thing between the Riding Bane and open slaughter was a thin line of bowmen fumbling arrows onto their strings with hands that had already begun to shake.
Five hundred lances rose into the sky as one.
Then came the cry.
"ALALALAI!"
"ALALALAI!"
The air itself quivered under the weight of it. The ground shuddered as the camels surged, their riders standing tall in the saddle with their eyes fixed upon their prey. The archers panicked and loosed in frantic ragged succession, the sky darkening with volley after desperate volley.
The shafts found their targets. It made no difference whatsoever.
Arrowheads splintered against steel plate and skipped off the thick hides of the camels, harmless as pebbles thrown at a fortress wall. Again and again they loosed, hands trembling, hearts hammering, and they may as well have been flinging twigs at an avalanche and shouting at it to stop.
Then the storm arrived, and the lines met.
It sounded like thunder coming down.
Axes swept through flesh and bone and tore men apart like rotted parchment. Lances struck with unrelenting force, punching through ribs and pinning bodies to the earth as though they were insects on a collector's board. Some riders, savouring the work, hurled their javelins mid charge and grinned behind their masks as they watched them land. Others did not bother with javelins at all and simply cut the archers down from the saddle, their steel faces reflecting nothing back but the dying.
The archers stood no chance and never had. Arrows are worth nothing against heavy armour at close quarters. Had they carried lances of their own they might have made a fight of it, might have unhorsed a rider or two, or put steel into the beasts themselves.
They had no lances, and they paid for that in the only coin available.
The once pristine sand lay stained and littered with the bodies of fallen bowmen. In five short minutes over two hundred archers lay dead or dying on the ground.
Six riders had fallen.
Everywhere they turned, the archers saw their comrades cut down by those towering mounts, and the sight broke whatever resolve they had carried onto the field. They ran.
"Come back, you cowards!" some sergeant or lord would cry, desperate to rally them, striking men across the back with the flat of his blade. "You'll be decimated if you run! Come and fight for your emperor!"
They appealed to greed when honour failed, reminding the fleeing men of the riches and glory waiting on the other side of victory. Some skipped the oratory entirely and used their swords as the argument, cutting down any man not fighting who had the misfortune to pass within reach.
None of it did the slightest good. You cannot shout the sea back up the beach.
—————
"Your Grace, the archers have fled! The enemy is closing fast! We must leave before it is too late! The battle is lost!"
The panicked voice of a noble cut through the chaos, drenched in desperation, as the man knelt before his emperor.
Gratios surveyed the field, his grip tightening on the reins. His infantry was making progress, cutting into the mercenaries and forcing them back step by step. Yet the shadow loomed regardless, for the Sultan's camel riders had finished with the archers and were already swinging about, wheeling clear of the fleeing mass to find something worth their lances.
His jaw clenched.
"Damn that bastard."
He had underestimated Arzalat. To bait him into a reckless advance, to dangle an easy rout in front of him like meat on a string, and then strike the flank with those desert fiends. It was madness.
Or was it brilliance? The two were never so far apart as men liked to pretend.He knew of that well himself.
"A man needs iron balls to attempt such a thing," Gratios mused bitterly. "Either he is a madman, or he has absolute faith in his infantry to hold while being crushed from two sides at once. I am not certain which frightens me more."
And then there was the Sultan behind it all. To think the prince had climbed into bed with that particular snake.
The emperor's mind raced ahead of him. He could flee. Ride south to camp, rally the reserves, regroup and come again in a week with the odds set straight, or maybe next year.
Flight was its own gamble, and one his house had never been good at.
And another voice was already whispering.
Fight.
The camels are spent on archers. A charge that heavy takes time to gather itself again. Strike first with the clibanarii and you turn the whole day over. Fortune favours the bold, Gratios. You know this. You have done it once already, and you were younger then, and had two hands. Raise your lance. Charge. Fight. Win.
His heart thundered in his chest. His blood burned with that old fury his house had bred into itself across generations, that same thing that had taken hold of his heart and his mind all his life, that had walked him through his brothers' chambers and set him on a throne still warm from their corpses.
"Your Grace!" The noble's voice snapped him back. He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. They were closer now.
Gratios answered him not with words but with steel, his sword flashing up into the light, the polished blade throwing back the fires of the field.
"I refuse to flee!"
His voice went out like a war drum across the line.
"Look, my lords! Look at them! Those desert bastards are still busy with archers, scattered and blown and strung out across half a mile. We can break through before they ever gather themselves! No force in all of history has shattered the Sultan's Riding Bane." He let the blade fall level, pointing. "Let us be the first. Let the songs remember which of us rode first into them."
A moment of silence hung over them.
Then the nobles roared back, because no man shames himself with caution when his emperor has just offered him a place in a song.
"GLORY TO THE EMPIRE!"
Lances rose into the sky.
Spurs went into flanks.
And the hooves came thundering forward.