by David Guymer
He engulfed a towering three-floored stronghouse in flame as he soared over it. Its roof rose on a white pillar of fire, a hard rain of rubble and brick crushing the soldiers that sought belatedly to flee the neighboring buildings or clogged the roads beneath.
Kellar was a place of deep gray and grinding cold. It burned reluctantly, but burn it assuredly would.
This, too, he had vowed, and this too would be done.
He bellowed his triumph to the city below him, shattering windows and bending steel, the human legions directly underneath him clapping their hands to their ears and dropping to their knees in terror.
“I am Archerax the Great. Archerax the Terrible. Kneel, for I am your death. I am your god now.”
The green dragon that flapped on moss-covered wings alongside him gave an eager trumpet of her own. Golden eyes glittered madly from beneath a deep ridge of emerald scales, flecked by silver rheum and as good as blind. Her nostrils trembled as she took in the excitements of the burning city. The feral creature was barely intelligent, another wastrel of Margath’s legacy, like the hybrids that had worshipped and feared her as a god-queen of the wood for the past eight hundred years, abandoned as a hatchling when Shaarina Rex had recalled the Dragonlords to the Heath. Archerax had dubbed her Grievax, for that had been the name of her mother, whom the children of Kell had brought down over the forest and been too fearful to pursue, not even for the runebound shards she had borne with her to ground. It was a name that the dragon appeared to revel in, though what she had called herself in the centuries before, if the need or notion of doing so had ever even arisen, Archerax did not know. Or care.
“Spread devastation,” he commanded. “Draw out the Dragonslayer’s Heir or burn him out.”
Grievax hissed her assent, and with a turbulent wingbeat turned herself away, descending gracelessly on the inner city.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Fredric
Castle Kellar, North Kell
The knightly orders of Kell thundered down the cobbled highway, bannerol fluttering from their lance heads, caparisons flying about their clattering hooves. The bright steel of their armor shone, the emerald, turquoise and gold of a dozen heraldries burnished red by flame.
Fredric did not lead from the tip of the lance as he might have wished. Sir Highgarde would not allow it. He rode two back from the grandmarshal and to the right of the wedge, his sword upraised and shining golden, rallying the men and women that fled in the opposite direction. Soldiers threw themselves to the sides of the road as the knights galloped past. Some came running from the ruins of the lower city, but many more walked as though exhausted, dragging themselves and injured comrades, trudging doggedly towards the keep at the very summit of the hill. To the last however they turned, raised their weapons in salute and cheered as Fredric and the hardy winter flower of Kellar chivalry charged past.
This ward of the city was not yet burning, but the ragged skyline of ramparts and steeply sloped slate roofs was lit a cherry red, an enormous mouth gaping wide to swallow the heart of his city.
It almost broke his heart. Kellar could have withstood the Uthuk Y’llan. At least until the full strength of the Locust Swarm had passed the forest. It could have driven back the dragons.
But was there a fortress in Terrinoth that could have defied both at once?
Perhaps it was his ancestor’s armor, some reckless courage in the runebound shards that were activated only by battle, but he found himself excited to show that Kellar was one.
Trevin Highgarde barked an order.
The grandmarshal’s armor was elaborately gilded, fretted with lattice wings that screamed with the rush of air. A white fur cloak stitched with golden fleurs-de-lis snapped over the cantle of his saddle. His visor was up. His huge moustache pulled in the wind of their charge. His massive sword, Unkindness, was held in two gauntleted hands, while he commanded his muscular destrier with the understanding of close comrades and the occasional instruction of his knees.
Sixty knights couched their lances.
The multitude of wooden shafts rattled like a lowering drawbridge. Steel heads spat like points fresh drawn from the fire. There was an almost imperceptible sense of acceleration. The beat of the warhorse’s hooves became rhythmic.
Fredric roared.
“Charge!” Trevin bellowed.
“For Kellar!” Fredric cried out from the third rank, beating his sword on his Owl-emblazoned heater. “For Terrinoth! And for Daqan!”
The horses leapt.
Or so it felt.
And the knights’ charge hit home.
Armor split. Bone cracked. Flesh tore.
Dragon hybrids croaked and wailed as the knights of Kellar trampled over their lines and on, urging their horses forward as if through a thicket.
No infantry formation in the world could have stood against a charge of Daqan knights. Had it been the deathless legions of Waiqar the Betrayer or the demon-possessed berserkers of the far east that stood before Fredric now, they would have been swept aside just as easily. A well-drilled company of Kellar militia or Dunwarr warriors, perhaps, soldiers of exceptional discipline and courage – they might have managed an orderly disengagement, but the dragon hybrids were a rabble. They were beasts that rune magic and cold-blooded genius had bidden to walk upright and take up arms to wage war like men.
They buckled.
Then they broke.
And then they ran.
A red-scaled hybrid with a proud frill of yellow bone and a coat of dark iron spun away. Its wings were just pulling its heels from the ground as Fredric’s sword came down on its shoulder. A coat of dragon-forged metal could turn a blow that would crush dwarf plate and not show the mark afterwards. It was the dragons’ ancestors, the yrthwrights, who had created the world and their craft was second to none. But Fredric’s family sword boasted dragon magic of its own, a Rune of Fate plundered from the lair of the lesser Dragonlord, Vrarnir, and it clove through the weaker points in the dragon’s armor as though through unwoven mail. The hybrid screamed like a shot goose as Fredric’s sword cut into its shoulder. Blood, darker than that of humans, sprayed from the torn scales and his horse’s hooves trampled it to the cobbles. Another nearby attempted to take off. Fredric swung eagerly for it, but the knight immediately behind skewered it with a solid thrust of his couched lance.
This was the reason why, for eight hundred years, every knighthood of Kell had favored the lance.
The blocks of hybrid warriors slowed the knights slightly, but it was not until they neared the colonnaded Soulstone playhouse at the foot of the road that their charge was halted. Its heavy stone outwalls stood bestride the fork in the highway like a fortress, grand oriel windows looking out over hooting Uthuk raiders rampaging up from the east and the bonfires of the south. Under its decorative cornices the charge turned into butcher’s work. Knights cast aside lances and took up swords. Trevin laid about him like a frenzied bull, the rune magic of Unkindness and its special hatred of dragonkind seeing shields beaten in two and heads stricken from bodies. The greatsword’s long-forgotten maker had quenched their still-hot blade in the blood of dragons before applying its runic charms. Twenty generations of grandmarshals since had sharpened its edge each day with a scale cut from the back of Margath the Unkind.
Fredric turned his horse, using the animal’s armored bulk to knock over a hybrid caught between him and another knight. Another thrust its spear at him. He took the blow on his shield. The runebound shard set into the metal shimmered the painted owl device as though he were viewing the emblem from the bottom of a shallow pool. The dragonkin recoiled and Fredric rammed his sword through the hybrid’s eye socket. He looked up then, looking for more enemies to slay, only to find that the work was done. Most of the hybrids had been slain already or fled, forcing a way into the playhouse where the knights could not follow or been caught by the infantry returnin
g to the fight on the south road.
Fredric wheeled his horse about, soothing its temper as it snorted and stamped.
The soldiers filling both sides of the road cheered.
Fredric saluted them with his blade, the first flush of victory in his chest.
“Fredric!” Trevin roared, his voice hoarse from the exertions of ten men. He took one hand from his sword and pumped the air with his fist. “Dragonslayer! Baron of Kell!”
“Baron of Kell!” the soldiers shouted in return. “Dragonslayer!”
The latter became a battle cry.
A chant as their formations rallied and their spears hewed into dragon flesh.
“Dragonslayer! Dragonslayer! Dragonslayer!”
A rider clattered up the southern road. He was young and unarmored with a tonsured head, clad in baronial heraldry and the livery of Fredric’s own select company of message riders. Soldiers made way as the rider pulled up in a clattering of hooves. The horse panted, wild-eyed and manic. The man was red-faced, his flesh burned and his skin peeling.
“What news?” said Fredric.
“The dragons have levelled the entire quarter,” he said, breathless, but concise. “Nothing stands, be it man or building.”
Fredric bowed his head but held back his grief. “Very good. Ride back to the keep.”
“My lord?”
“You have been burned half to death and your horse is little better. Go back. Eat something. Have your wounds seen to. There will be fighting left for you afterwards.”
“Yes, lord.” The message rider wheeled his horse about, then turned back in the saddle. “There is one other thing, my lord.”
“Speak.”
“The Uthuk Y’llan are no longer keeping pace with the dragons’ advance. I don’t know why. But I have heard rumors from other riders in the city that some other force assails them from the Forest Road.”
Fredric’s masked grief gave way to a treacherous flicker of hope. “Thank you. Now go.”
The rider spurred his horse and galloped off up the hill road.
Fredric turned to Trevin. “Captain Constan and the Southern Army?”
“Too soon, sire. I would caution against hope.”
“A man needs hope, Trevin. A baron needs enough of it to share.” Standing in his stirrups he called out to the soldiers that his charge had rallied to the fight. “Fall back by units. Withdraw to the castle while they are in rout. We have been caught between two mighty foes today, and that would test the mettle of any hero of Terrinoth. But this is Kellar!” He beat his sword’s flat on his shield and the soldiers roared their love for him and their country. His heart swelled big enough for all of them. “We will break them against the walls of our castle. As we have broken everyone fool enough to make themselves our enemy before them. This is Kellar!”
“Kellar!” they roared.
“Dragonslayer!”
“We should go back as well,” Trevin muttered. “We can sally again if we must, but this is infantry work from here on.”
Fredric nodded reluctantly. “I leave it in your hands, grandmarshal.”
Trevin barked instructions
The knights drew back into formation and came about.
Fredric was amongst the last.
He turned in his saddle and looked back at the playhouse. It wrenched him to abandon it. He recalled taking Litiana for the first, and last, time two years before, to see the Orisson Players perform their famous tragedy, Mirror Lake. He smiled, bittersweet, recalling how Anna had entirely failed to understand the point.
He was still watching as it was destroyed.
The roof collapsed as though a castle had been dropped on it. Dust and rubble from its shattered walls blew across the turning knights, bowling over horses and unseating their riders. Trevin Highgarde went down under his flailing horse. The green dragon bulled its head through what was left of the front wall and bellowed.
A fatty spark struck up in the back of its throat.
Fredric spurred his horse without thinking.
He raised his shield, its embedded runestone throwing out an invisible barrier just as the dragon exhaled. The monster’s breath attack struck the runic shield and blasted outwards. Soldiers ducked and cried out as black smoke struck across their heads and savaged the stone fronts of the buildings on both sides of the road. The dragon bellowed its frustration as it clambered out of the ruined playhouse.
A dismounted knight tried to run away.
The dragon crushed him underfoot.
It built towards a charge.
Fredric gasped, astonished to be alive, lowered his aching shield-arm and turned his horse to face the dragon, the charger awing him then with its courage, and struck with his sword. Its fated edge, sharper than any metalcraft of elves or dwarves could fashion a blade, chipped emerald scales and drew brackish blood. The dragon howled at the unwelcome novelty of pain. Sheer bludgeoning mass threw Fredric from his horse. He hit the ground with a crash and a clatter and skidded out from under it. The horse cried out as the dragon trampled it. The monster turned its long, snaking tongue towards Fredric, nostrils flaring as it rediscovered his scent, and roared.
Fredric struggled against the weight of his armor to stand.
He raised his shield over him.
“Bows!” came Trevin’s frantic bark. “Bring me bows!”
In the years before the Dragon Wars bristling squares of spearmen and massed archery had been the best way to deal with the rogue drakes that occasionally menaced Daqan lands. Against the ordered legions that had emerged from the Molten Heath in later centuries, the tactic had proved dangerously flawed, but to fend off a single rampaging beast it was what the military instructors of Kellar and Archaut still taught.
The dragon swung its savage lump of a head as deep blocks of silver-armored and purple-liveried spearmen formed up around it, archers ranking up behind to pepper the beast with arrows. Most snapped against toughened scales, a few sticking like splinters in the gaps between plates, or in the mossy regions around its joints and wings. It roared like a pestered lion and threw out its wings. The stench of grave mold and leaf mulch sent knights reeling. Craning its long neck towards the spearmen, it exhaled.
Black fumes washed over the Kellar soldiers and smashed though the frontage of the building across the way. Men and women screamed as their armor cooked them, turning them into heat-fused skeletons that the dragon then casually dismantled with a beat of its wings. Archers continued to break their arrows against its hide as it lifted off and climbed away, even after Fredric had commanded them to stop.
“Back to the castle,” he said, choking on the poisonous heat, knowing with a sickness in his chest that it was dead men he was breathing in. He waved in the direction of the castle. “Go. Go. I will be following.”
“Never do anything like that again,” said Trevin. His eyes were red and his skin was black. The visor had twisted right off his helmet and one side of his moustache was smoldering
“I hope I never have to,” said Fredric, and meant it.
“I’m serious. Did you think what it would mean for morale if you fell? Do you know what it would do to my honor?”
Fredric smiled as heavy-armed knights struggled to remount without the aid of their squires and turn themselves around. Twenty had fallen. Just forty were left.
“It pains me to leave their bodies to the dragons,” he said. “Or worse, to the Uthuk Y’llan.”
“That is the burden of leadership, lord. And the costs of war.”
Fredric could bear that burden, but he thought the cost far too high.
Trevin made his way to his own horse. His right leg dragged.
“You are hurt!” said Fredric.
Trevin looked down and grunted. “It’s the armor’s joint. My leg is well enough.” He swung the seized limb up into the saddle,
and then turned back, noticing that Fredric was without a mount. He looked around and shouted into the confusion of the retreat. “Is there a horse spare for the baron?”
“Take mine, sire.”
A knight in the purple heraldry and polished steel trim of the Knights Griffon drew his arming sword and dismounted. Fredric saluted him, touching his blade to his brow, and climbed onto the warrior’s horse.
“Back to the keep, lord,” said Trevin.
Fredric nodded. “Back to the keep!”
He spurred the borrowed horse, the lance of knights clattering into a trot and then into a steady canter as they raced back up the hill they had just charged down in glory.
Fredric resisted the desire to go faster.
He would not have the Orders of Kellar be seen as fleeing in rout from his own city.
The gatehouse loomed into view.
It was the most fortified corner of the most fortified site in Terrinoth. It was a mountain of dressed stone wrapped in steel. The gates were of strong, dark oak banded with metal, and set deeply into the walls to expose any would-be assailant to arrow loops and flues for boiling oil. Two colossal towers flanked it, strung with pennons and mounting the great flags of the Barony of Kell and of the Daqan lords, facing defiantly eastward as they had done for two thousand years.
Retreating soldiers streamed through the open gate. Arrows whistled out in all directions, slackening off and then flurrying again like winter showers. Dragon hybrids with javelins and bat-winged creatures of the Ynfernael, demons with the muscular bodies of men and the faces of dogs, harried the walls like gulls.
Fredric was satisfied to see his soldiers’ discipline. Spearmen surrounded the long lines of archers with steel points and round shields. Units of bowmen in turn screened the crews of the castle’s ballistae, the siege masters holding their weapons taut and ready, holding their nerve through every probing attack, patiently waiting their chance at one of the greater dragons.