Free Arts of Dark and Light: Book 01 - A Throne of Bones by Vox Day

presence, and no few wolves were impaled as well.
    Here and there a horse went down, more often brought down by the uneven ground over which they galloped than by the spears or teeth of the enemy. But such falls were seldom fatal to either horse or rider, and overall, their casualties were so light as to be almost nonexistent. Fortex grinned as he saw the red standard of the Second Knights snapping smartly above the heads of a small group of approaching riders. The draconarius held the flag proudly aloft in both hands, defended on one side by a decurion of the third squadron and by his cousin on the other. A riderless wolf standing over the corpse of his rider snarled as they rode past, and Marcus adroitly leaned over as if he were at the tilt and drove his lance right through the wolf’s open jaws. The lance snapped with a loud crack as the wolf collapsed, its skull pierced fore and aft, and Fortex had to laugh as his cousin threw the remains of the now-useless weapon at the dying animal in apparent disgust.
    “You should have saved that for spitting goblins, Marcus! Leave the wolves alone, they don’t have much fight in them without their riders.”
    Marcus shrugged indifferently, but Fortex thought he looked a little greenish. “How far do you want to chase them?”
    “To the ends of the earth!” Fortex laughed again. He felt like a veritable god of war. How glorious it was to ride over a battlefield covered by the broken, bleeding bodies of the foe! “No, we can’t afford to let the men extend themselves much further and risk getting cut off. We’ll give them their head for a little longer, then call them back to reform. You may recall, after all, the entire point of this little exercise was to relieve the center.”
    “With the cavalry screen gone, we can hit their infantry from behind,” Marcus noted. “That should do for them.”
    “Your timing may be impeccable, Marcus, but there is more to winning battles than simply killing the enemy. If we hit their infantry from behind, we’ll trap them between us and our infantry. With no way out, that will put even more pressure on our cohorts in the center, at least until we kill them all.” Fortex laughed at the expression of chagrin on his cousin’s face. “Never corner a rat if you can avoid it. We’ll hit the buggers on the flank and give them room to run. That will trigger the rout and put them in a position where the First Knights can ride them down even easier than we did the wolves on our side.”
    Fortex sighed and reached out to clap Marcus on his armored shoulder. “I won’t say it doesn’t pain me to let Sulpicius and his boys in on the action, but that will make things considerably easier on the infantry, and they’ve had a long morning. And they’ve still got their lances, whereas we don’t. Now, why don’t we see if we can kill ourselves a few more goblins before we sound the recall?”

    Two hours later, the sun was past its zenith and the contested ground belonged to the legion. It had taken longer than Fortex had expected for the decurions to recall their battle-maddened riders and assemble them into a reasonable formation, but nevertheless, the Second Knights still managed arrived in time to take the unsuspecting enemy infantry in the left flank with a devastating charge that was accompanied by a chorus of cheers from the watching Amorran centuries.
    Fortex was deeply grateful to whatever optio was commanding the ballistari, because as soon as his draconarius had sounded the horn to signal the shift from skirmish to a wedge, two groups of twenty onagers unexpectedly hurled their massive missiles into the left side of the goblin line, preventing it from turning in formation to defend against Fortex’s charge.
    The artillery barrage made all the difference. Instead of trying to force their horses into three rows of braced enemy spears, however hastily and haphazardly assembled, his knights found themselves crashing against a broken,