Oathbreaker, Book 1: The Knight's Tale - Colin McComb

tent. I suppose if I had been more ambitious, I would have run there first, but I cut the doomed
free as I went instead—a bad strategy on my part, but one for which I cannot blame myself.
Hawkins’s tent was aflame, and there was but one figure in it who still struggled, faintly.
The stench of seared human flesh had filled my nose for several minutes, so I was spared the
smell of those roasting inside. I slashed the canvas, and black smoke billowed out into my face. I
thrust my arm into the rent, seized the trapped man inside, pulled him to safety, and came face to
face with General Hawkins. He was badly burnt, his face seared and blistered. He was missing his
eyebrows and a fair-sized patch of hair, and he vomited on me as the fresh air hit his lungs. Two
raiders came our way then, and as the general struggled to breathe, I beat their weapons aside and
skewered them.
When Hawkins pulled himself together—surprisingly quickly—he armed himself with a
raider’s sword and began to bark commands to the surviving officers of his staff. Inside a few
moments, we had the beginning of an actual resistance to the attack.
We had a functioning command structure from top down within half an hour of the
disaster, despite being hit in our most vulnerable spot; it was a mark of the discipline Hawkins
had drilled into his troops. Ten minutes after the commands flew again, we had resistance to the
Siullan guerillas. The ten thousand enemies in our camp tried to prevent us from organizing a
response to the forty thousand Siullans rushing our lines, but failed. Our training was too
complete to allow us to fall into disarray. The outlying troops were, in the main, unaffected by the
explosions, but they had to deal immediately with the full force of the Siullans and could not
return to aid the rest of the army. Neither could they expect reinforcements or leadership from us,
and they were being slaughtered even as we got ourselves back on our feet.
Our remaining dirigibles fired explosives and shot glass vials of poisonous gas into the
Siullan encampment, annihilating any who had not rushed the front lines, eliminating their
artillery positions in choking, coughing death. We lost three of our strong dirigibles before their
guns were made useless.
Nearly two thousand of our men had perished immediately in the explosions and
campsite slaughter, and several thousand more fell before they rallied against the Siullan army.
As our foes hadn’t had the shock of seeing their command post obliterated in a cloud of flame and
dust, they pressed us mercilessly, determined to inflict as much damage as possible before our
other army wiped them out. Even with our swift response, it seems that we would have been
defeated had it not been for the incredible speed of the Knights Elite of the First Army racing to
our assistance. The infantry and cavalry followed as close behind as possible.
Colin McComb Oathbreaker, Book 1: The Knight's Tale
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