Mobius

by Garon Whited

  Did the wizard have protection against my tendrils? Turns out, yes, he did. It wasn’t specific to me, but a general magical defense. I could break it, but he would know the instant I did. I left his wagon alone for the moment and turned my attention to the guards. They were asleep already, but now they grew tired. Then exhausted. Then comatose. They didn’t die—that takes focus and effort on my part—but they slept like the dead. It was time for the supply wagons.

  My cloak can spread at roughly one square meter per second, at least at night. After several seconds, I flung it like a blanket over the nearest supply wagon. It settled over the thing—and all the way down to the ground. I whisked it away like a magic trick and poof! The wagon was gone!

  The warriors sleeping underneath it did not go with it. I dragged them aside beforehand.

  One by one, the wagons simply disappeared, softly and silently vanishing away, never to be met with again.

  With the supplies dealt with, I led the horses away. They didn’t need to be nearby for this.

  Wizards, as a rule, seem to enchant their wagons with a variety of convenience and security spells. The ones I’ve seen tend to be warmer in winter and cooler in summer. They often self-repair. Doors and windows are dangerous to open if you don’t have the proper key or the password. Dirt and mud have a hard time passing inward through the openings. Little things like that.

  I shorted out the enchantment on the door, broke through it, and put my fist in the face of the rudely-awakened wizard. My fist was fine. His face was not. He lay down suddenly while bleeding from his nose. He didn’t resist as I searched him, removing various bits of magical jewelry. A protective amulet prevented my tendrils from touching him, but nothing completely prevented me from laying hands on him. Did it sting? Yes. But I’m sort of used to doing things that hurt. Knowing I’ll get better in a minute means I don’t mind as much. Besides, removing it with a Saber of Sharpness didn’t sting a bit.

  Later, when he woke, he was naked and bound. He also had bits of rag stuffed up his nose, but that was for his benefit, not mine.

  “Here’s the thing,” I told him, propping him up so he could see his wagon. “You and your employers have a misconception. Your gods are nice and all, but you’re not worshiping all of us. You’re not giving the rest of us our due credit as deities worthy of respect. Now, if you want to go on worshipping your ancestors, we have no objection, but you can’t go on discriminating against us.”

  “I’m not. I mean, I don’t care. It’s a job! It’s just a job!”

  “Good. Maybe you can persuade the rest of these people to go back to the Temple and quit. In the meantime, you get to see an avatar at work. Ever heard of the Lord of Shadows, God of Flame, and Master of the Sacred Mysteries?”

  “Uh… no.”

  “Can you see magical objects?”

  “Of course.”

  “See my cloak?”

  “Uh… no?”

  “Weird, isn’t it?” I asked. He agreed. “It’s a relic, made manifest in the world by the power of the god whose avatar I am.”

  “The avatar?”

  Damn. They don’t have a word for a physical manifestation of a deity. I defined the term for him and gave him a second to grasp the notion.

  “Here. Watch. You’ll get the idea.”

  I repeated my disappearing wagon trick, this time on his wagon. He darn near swallowed his tongue. I think the miraculous effect disturbed him even more than the actual loss of his wagon. He didn’t see magic in play, so it had to be a miracle. I didn’t correct him.

  “Either the priests of the Temple are going to need a lot more priests to offer respects to all of us gods,” I told him, “or there will be a lot fewer priests.”

  I drained the last of his vital energies and left them all there to wake in the morning.

  The little person was fine. I left Kania—that was the warrior’s name—to continue babysitting duty while Bronze and I headed out to Bridgefort. I was torn between keeping the image of a half-demon or trying to be as friendly and nonthreatening as possible. I went with smiling and friendly on the basis people already had a mild fear of me and didn’t need it ramped up to terror.

  We loaded up a hundred warriors—including Velina, to my surprise, and Tessera, whom I expected—in the trailer, along with Bronze. Bronze, of course, merely parked her statue in the trailer, legs splayed wide to provide a stable platform when she wasn’t in it. She wore the truck.

  What did I say to Berenor of Istvan? “If you try to invade my valley, I’ll kill every single one of you.” Yes, that was it. Technically, I might not keep my word, but close enough is good enough.

  Bronze’s engine thundered to life, hitting closer to a seven-point-two, bellowing fire from her stacks for a moment. It sounded as though she’d enlarged the engine. Maybe she had. We surged forward, rolling out like an angry Autobot, charging the raised drawbridge. I’m familiar with the stabilization delay on gates, so I fastened my seat belt and concentrated on the spell. The gate activated a moment before we hit it, settling down almost exactly as we passed through. It snapped shut behind us and we were on a moonlit piece of road outside Spogeyzer, headed west again, without so much as a sudden bump.

  We cruised west for quite a bit before we pulled up to a stop in the foothills and offloaded our troops. I gave them their orders and they all saluted with that palm-down-rotating-up-and-forward gesture. I found a spare moment to wonder where the gesture came from. How did it originate and why? Things I’ll never know…

  Bronze shifted into as close to silent running as she could. The semi turned darker, the engine dropped from a rumble to a purr—even the tires on the road hissed instead of crunched. There’s only so much she can do with an entire truck, though. We accelerated slowly, building speed quietly for our run.

  We rolled up the road, sneaking up on the camp, and I kept a sharp lookout, tendrils already fully extended and ready to tentacle-whip somebody. The first sentry got the brunt of it, dropping dead before he could warn anyone. We rounded the curve into the camp and I killed another sentry in similar fashion.

  Bronze veered slightly from the plan and the road. We were supposed to keep closing on the camp as much as possible. As long as I dropped sentries without a warning, fine. Then we would sweep through, tendrils out and clawing at everyone, exhausting the majority of the camp. It would work mostly because they were pretty spread out due to the terrain. They were in tents alongside the road, mostly on our right, about three deep.

  Her idea, however, also had some merit. She shifted gears and vented an exhaust port, causing her flames to belch to the sides, rather than out the top of the stacks. It also unmuffled her engine roar like turning a kitten into a tiger. Engine thunder roared as her lights blazed like orange-gold fire, bright as sunrise ahead of us. We swung to one side, off the road, to plow through a rank of tents. She weaved slightly, sending the empty trailer back and forth like a dragon’s tail, smashing anything it touched while she steamrollered everything in front.

  I just sat there and sucked up vitality from anything we were about to run over. I thought we could be more subtle, but she had a point. There comes a time to screw subtle and just go for it. Go big or go home, something like that. And I had to admit it was much more fun than sneaking around through the camp. Riskier, perhaps, but maybe she picked up a sense of fun from Mary. She sure as hell doesn’t get it from me.

  We blasted through the camp at fifty miles an hour, engine roaring as she poured on the power, blue-green sparks dancing around the drive wheels. Despite this, we rammed, slammed, squashed, squished, and generally pulped enough stuff to slow us to twenty by the time we hit the far curve and headed for the bridge.

  Nobody was following at that moment. The confusion and carnage were enough to keep them busy all night, I figured.

  I called ahead and Leisel ordered the drawbridge lowered. The crusaders’ timbers either broke away, burned, or were hauled up by hooks, so the drop zone was clear. Bronze rum
bled over the bridge, through the Bridgefort entrance, and down to her parking spot.

  She threw open the trailer doors, changed bodies, and leaped out. I mounted up and activated a deflection spell. The enemy wasn’t well-supplied with missile weapons, but we were. And no fire is friendly fire when you’re in the line of it.

  We headed back across the bridge, Firebrand out and blazing, while I shouted to carry out their part of the plan—a firing advance. Ranks and files of crossbowmen—each led by a melee fighter with a big shield—marched across the bridge in our wake, somewhat more slowly than Bronze.

  Bronze and I came around the bend and into sight of the camp. A thousand men were up and moving, putting out fires, sorting out wounded, recovering and salvaging. Another thousand were armed and prepared for trouble—prepared in the sense they weren’t doing anything else, I mean. They were not prepared for a fire-breathing giant horse, a lunatic monster in magic armor, and a flaming sword of dragons to come around the bend, followed by half the night sky billowing like the wings of the angel of death.

  If they were an army, they might have responded as a group. They were not an army. Some ran, some charged, a few grabbed friends and tried to form defensive positions, some took shelter behind wagons, others headed for horses. The ones heading for horses had their hands full. Every horse in sight was already spooked by Bronze’s initial, thundering charge, but now Bronze told them to fight. As a result, they were in no mood to be touched by anything or anyone. It’s disheartening to grab for a mount and find it’s willing to bite and kick.

  The ones who faced me were cut down, stomped down, or simply died on the approach. We kept pushing forward, killing anything in reach, cutting a swathe of destruction and death while setting fire to more things. Firebrand encouraged the new and pre-existing fires as we passed. Wagons burned. Tents went up. So did people who tried to fight fires instead of us. Even so, there wasn’t a lot they could do to us.

  We passed through with no more than some scratches and dings, made it another hundred yards down the road, and turned. I held up Firebrand so it had a better view and could keep the fires growing while we waited. It wasn’t long before the shouting and horn-blowing and swearing turned into more organized bedlam. They formed up as infantry, those who were both healthy and brave enough. Bronze and I advanced toward them at a slow walk and they started out at a march to meet us. Their shields were out, side-by-side, flats of their swords resting on the upper edges of the shields.

  This was a fight they could understand. This was something they could deal with. A thousand men in a series of shield-walls against a single cavalry rider? We can take him. We will take him. We got this.

  They did not got this.

  The columns of archers rounded the bend, marched another twenty or thirty paces, and started firing into the rest of the crusaders. They didn’t have much in the way of a reserve back there, but they did have walking wounded as quasi-combatants. They shouted and sounded the alarm, of course, and promptly died. Others took up the cry and died. A bunch of men grabbed shields and died. Withering, punishing fire poured out of the archer ranks as they advanced one step for every shot.

  Bronze and I stopped and waited, letting the confusion build. Horns and drums sounded, drawing off some of the force facing me, so we advanced again.

  The trouble with people who rely mostly on one particular sort of weapon is the rest of us don’t. Firebrand stopped encouraging the fires in the crusader camp. The archers had plenty of illumination. Instead, it focused on being a flamethrower. Bronze breathed fire at the front rank, from beyond their reach, and Firebrand helped.

  Synergy, that’s the word. When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

  Fire swept the enemy lines like… well, like dragon breath. The front rank mostly collapsed. A few screamed first. The second and third ranks broke, turning—on fire—to run screaming through their own allies, breaking their lines, ruining their morale, and making it easy for us to advance. The cloud of my psychic tendrils surrounded us, draining vitality, leaving frightened warriors with a chill feeling, a sensation of weakness and uncertainty. Anyone with a protective amulet or other device was immune, of course, since I was only spreading tendrils, not focusing on anyone in particular. Those warriors had their own troubles. Bronze crushed anything foolish enough to come within range up front. Firebrand cut through most things with its plasma edge. I kept my cloak draped behind us and along my left. No one could strike at us from there and a few even disappeared, screaming, into the open darkness when they misjudged their strike. A few lucky or skilled warriors managed to time their attacks exactly right to get past the fire breath, Firebrand, and land a blow precisely as we blew past at forty miles an hour. Bronze took the hits like a metal statue. I took hits as though I were a dead man wearing enchanted armor.

  We went through the warriors again, headed generally back through them toward Bridgefort. We meandered somewhat, sweeping through knots of semi-organized resistance, or at least close enough for me to hit them with a profound feeling of exhaustion. I don’t know how many we killed, but it was a lot.

  Someone in scale armor shouted orders amid a tight knot of warriors. They’d broken out the spears. The Empire’s cavalry wasn’t usually the heavy, armored cavalry, since the First tended to be captains, not grouped combatants. Still, lighter cavalry was quick and dangerous, so having spears was a good idea. They thought the spears would do some good against Bronze.

  It was a good thought. In point of fact, Bronze took several spears to the neck, chest, and belly as we went through them. I felt one score low against my right side and another on my shoulder. And, if I’m going to be fair, the guy in the scale armor shouting at his comrades was surprisingly good. I’d guess he was either a First on hard times or rapidly fighting his way up the ladder. All he needed was the fancy armor and he’d easily qualify. He leaped in, a blade in either hand, under the spear-thrusts as we pounded through his men. One sword shattered on Bronze’s right foreleg. The other whacked my armored shin.

  Then we were through them to trample a surprised-looking fellow, turn, and charge again. This time, I paid attention to the man trying to cut Bronze’s leg out from under her. I almost got him, too, but Bronze veered at the last instant to set him on fire and stomp him out.

  A priest appeared out of nowhere, arms spread wide, shouting at me in a high chant. The glow of his faith was a palpable thing and it hurt to look at him. On the other hand, as we circled him, I spotted another priest doing the same thing, but there was no corresponding glow. Interesting. One is a believer and the other is simply mouthing the words? Possibly.

  It hurt to reach toward the light, but Bronze was moving to the side, so I had a good angle. I lashed out with my left hand, whipping a thick-braided cable of tendrils forward, slapping it through the flesh and blood and soul of the faithless priest. He fell as though I’d split his physical form in two. This distracted the chanter, who gaped in surprise and terror at the death of his companion. Good. Later, I might be able to discuss with him the nature of the gods and send him back to explain—

  A crossbow bolt sailed through the night and took him in the back of the head. Damn. Well, maybe some other priest…

  We paused near the middle of the burning camp. The organized resistance was clustered in knots of warriors. Whatever command and control they had over the army as a whole was currently shot to hell, but no doubt they would get a grip again if we left them alone. I raised Firebrand and it shot a jet of flame into the sky. Minutes later, a hundred warriors waded in from the east—a hundred fresh and eager warriors, facing terrified and exhausted warriors.

  I let the troops carry the assault and did my best to break up organization or anything resembling a fair fight. Bronze and Firebrand and I deliberately sought out the heaviest resistance and, in general, Bronze and Firebrand did their best impression of a dragon. What organization the enemy troops had went up in smoke and screams.

  Finally, I spotte
d Berenor of Istvan. He had given up on the use of banners, since they kept catching fire for some strange reason, and was directing men on the horns and drums, presumably trying to rally troops. He had a nice grouping of a hundred or more gathered around him and the remaining priests. I left them where they were and diverted any of my own people headed their way. Let them sit in their circle of shields and steel as long as they didn’t bother the rest of us. I made a point of telling Leisel to relay orders to the archers about leaving them alone.

  Bronze and I sat about thirty feet from the edge of their perimeter while the carnage continued everywhere else. Since I wasn’t using my human illusions for this fight, Berenor, maybe sixty feet away, met my lack of eyes with an equal lack of pleasure. He remembered I offered to let them surrender. I didn’t need Firebrand to relay it. I met his eyes and knew he remembered. I’m a little bit psychic.

  He didn’t ask to surrender, though. He watched the slaughter for several minutes before he realized he and his men were being saved for last. I saw him say a naughty word when he caught on.

  His trumpeters sounded. Since his men didn’t break their ring and charge, I assumed it was a call for retreat. Moments later, those few survivors who were still trying to fight or flee decided to try giving up. Archers covered them while infantry captured them. The badly wounded were laid out and treated while the more able-bodied were divested of weapons and armor and bound, typically to each other, back-to-back.

  I sat and waited while things settled down. Berenor and his troops also sat tight. I met his gaze again and raised an eyebrow. If it’s a surrender, shouldn’t everyone surrender?

  Berenor watched the proceedings, first. We were stripping, sorting, and stacking for about an hour before he was satisfied we weren’t killing everyone out of hand, but actually accepting them as prisoners. I guess there are drawbacks to trying to impress on the enemy my willingness to slaughter them all. He worked his way through the ranks of his men and approached me. He drew his sword and held it out on the palms of his hands.