The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  Despite which, it was a truly fearsome host.

  Thorn reached into the aethereal and produced not one, but two great stones that fell amongst the defenders’ works, shattering two days’ work and collapsing one whole front wall of the earthwork that held the right flank of the imperial army closest to the road.

  Ser Hartmut released his first line and they went up the great ridge, flowing over the uneven ground like brown oil, the light of the first truly sunny day in a week reflecting from their rigid heads and wing cases.

  Near the top, they were caught and flayed by archery and deadly small war machines—springals on carts and small mangonels throwing buckets of gravel. Closer in and sorcery began to play a part as the Empire’s sorcerers loosed their powers point blank into the boglins.

  As soon as they commenced, Thorn began to kill them. The first was a pretty second-year university student with a solid knowledge of fire—her fire wind laid waste to hundreds of boglins and no few irks before he reached out for her and subsumed her without even bothering to use his powers. She screamed as her soul was destroyed—the utter despair of the young choked off without hope.

  Then he struck again, and again. And again. In the time it took a thousand boglins to die, a generation of imperial mages was swept away, and he took their powers and their knowledge for his own.

  Too late, the survivors shielded themselves, having never experienced anything like Thorn. Too late they attempted to find him and isolate him.

  He began to rain fire on the forward walls.

  Ser Hartmut watched it—and for a moment he thought the boglins were going to carry the earthworks. But they could not—they had enough feeling to experience dread, and their losses were hideous.

  At a nod from Thorn—a better ally than he’d expected—Ser Hartmut sent the second line into motion. The top of the hill was a smoking ruin—no grass grew, and eldritch fire had swept the summit of the earthworks and the grass in front of it, defining the killing ground so well that some of the Outwallers flinched on getting to the edge of the charred ground.

  But Hartmut’s sailors went forward, and the brigans. A sheet of black fire passed over the crest and into the earthworks, the only sign of its passing a slight disturbance in the ground—and the screams began. This time, few of the springals and the mangonels managed to get off a rock or a bucket of gravel—but most of their crews were messily dead, sliced in half by Thorn’s latest effort.

  Now the enemy released their cavalry, and there was a sudden sortie. The earthworks were cunningly built, with careful angles and many hidden passages, and armoured men came from the front even as light horse poured into the flanks at both ends, riding recklessly through the high grass and loosing arrows as they came. The Outwallers at the far left took the brunt of the charge of the Vardariotes, and they died, cut down like ripe wheat.

  Hartmut smiled. He had put the least reliable there, the useless mouths, and they served to cushion the blow of the Emperor’s finest light horse. They took time to run and die.

  Out of the woods at their backs appeared the flash of metal, and then his own lances under de Badefol were forming and charging. And from the third line, Kevin Orley’s men ran forward like the Outwallers they were, heedless of the archery in their superior armour.

  The Vardariotes didn’t hesitate, but turned, cut their way through the Outwaller line, and ran, but the desperate flight saved only half, and the rest were ground to bloody paste between Orley’s armoured warband and the knights.

  Ser Hartmut hadn’t even begun to sweat inside his armour.

  He saw a dozen sailors and a pair of brigans vanish over the top of the centre earthwork. And then he saw another man unfurl his personal banner—it flew atop the wall.

  He turned to Thorn. “Now we go up the hill,” he said. “I’ll need your trolls for the Nordikaan guard.”

  Thorn was black, and no shadow fell from him or on him. “Let us go up the hill,” he said.

  But the Moreans had other ideas.

  Out on his far right, a column of cavalry in bright silver and scarlet appeared. They had taken their time to work around his right flank, and now they charged—uphill into the unshielded flank of his long assault line of men and monsters.

  Hartmut sent his squire to collect Orley and de Badefol and rode himself towards the fighting. Thorn threw a massive working into the front of the bold riders, killing forty of them in a single sweep of his stone talons and as many of his own Outwallers, but the Scholae—for so they were—came on. The right flank of Outwallers—reliable men, southern Huran with good armour and crossbows—was suddenly swept back sharply, and threatened to collapse.

  As Ser Hartmut had expected, the Nordikaans, of whom he had so often heard, came over the top of the central redoubt.

  With them came a tall man on a magnificent horse. Even a long bowshot away, Ser Hartmut could see the magnificence of his clothes and armour and the dignity of his posture.

  The Nordikaans went into his brigans and collapsed them. They tried to stand—their armour was as good or better, but the blond, axe-bearing guard towered over them, and the axes were like scythes for reaping men.

  And they had the weight of the hill behind them.

  “Thorn!” Ser Hartmut bellowed.

  The deadly magus motioned to the ranks of stone trolls—forty of them—who stood like statues at the base of the ridge. “Go,” he said. “Kill them all.”

  The lead troll opened his grey basalt lips and roared his challenge, and then they were away, running as fast as a man might charge on a horse, the earth protesting their weight and their stride.

  From the woods behind them burst two of the great hastenoch and an even rarer creature—a great brown thing as big as four war horses, with tusks stained by a hundred years of prey and a great transverse mouth with two rows of teeth the size of rondel daggers, and four great feet like those of an oliphaunt’s. Between them, like a wall of horror, was a loose line of Rukh, towering against the afternoon sun.

  They flung themselves into the Scholae.

  Harald Derkensun watched disaster unfold slowly, as it usually did, and wrap itself around the imperial army like some sort of malign lover.

  One of the problems of being in the guard was that you generally knew everything the Emperor knew. So all the sword bearers—the inner guard—knew the Emperor was not supposed to have waited for the sorcerer alone at Dorling, and they knew that repeated messenger birds had begged him not to engage directly without support.

  And they knew that the army was weak on healing and magistry because the Emperor had sent all the strongest talents back to help the Immortals, as he insisted on calling them, to struggle over the last of the open passes into the Green Hills, because their horses were dead.

  The Emperor sat, perfectly calm, his handsome face serene, his scarlet cloak and boots spotless. He over-rode each of his senior officers, and sent the Scholae to make a flank attack to relieve the pressure on his centre—an admirable tactic, but not one, Derkensun suspected, suited to the current day, terrain, or numbers.

  The Scholae obeyed.

  In fact, everyone obeyed. Regiment by regiment, the Emperor flung in his army.

  Derkensun could do nothing but stand silently and prepare to die. It had become obvious by mid-afternoon that unless the whole army broke, they would be drowned in a sea of monsters.

  The Emperor remained serene, showing his military erudition from time to time—commenting on how very like Varo’s arrangements at Caesarae were the enemy’s three lines, and how like Chaluns it was, especially as the enemy was trying to break his centre.

  The acting Count of the Vardariotes was an easterner with insufficient command of the language to argue, and too much stubbornness to refuse an order. He led his people out.

  Derkensun saw them defeated. The great axe twitched on his shoulder, and then he was still.

  Behind the rump of the Emperor’s horse, he chanced a glance no longer than a single heartbeat wi
th Grossbeak. In that one glance, both men knew that there was nothing to be done. Save the arrival of Ser Milus, or the Red Knight, or some other man of authority.

  The afternoon failed, the Scholae charged, and for a moment, the whole battle hung on them.

  And then a line of monsters came out of the woods and crushed them.

  The two regiments waiting to the right and left—good steady stradiotes from the countryside around the city—began to shift uneasily. Now the line of earthworks was going to be outflanked on both sides. On their right, the Inn itself stood like a fortress, its towers full of archers—big men with long yew bows that they would use to effect.

  On the left, the grass ran down and down to a distant stream below, and back behind to a series of sheep and cattle folds for the drovers on a set of otherwise bare hillsides that ran into the east, and the road threaded in among them, heading south to Albinkirk.

  As the Scholae died in the field before them, the men on the left of the line—the mountaineers—began to flinch away.

  The Emperor rode his horse into one of the gaps in the earthworks, heedless of his foes, and gazed out on the field while two Nordikaans held their round aspides up to protect him from darts.

  “Tisk, tisk,” the Emperor said, his first words in half an hour. He was unmoved by the death of his personal guard, manned by the younger sons of his friends and closest supporters in the capital. But he was clearly concerned when the mountaineers began to shuffle back.

  “Go and tell the mountaineers to hold their positions,” he said, as if speaking to an unreasonable child.

  “And then keep riding south,” muttered a Nordikaan guard.

  The Emperor looked around, his face mild. “Friends, I fear the only way to restore this day is through our own endeavours.” He looked down into the chaos. “A stout blow now—and the day is ours.”

  Derkensun exchanged another look with Grossbeak.

  But then they were moving. The Emperor never even favoured them with an order, but simply rode out of one of the sortie gates without a further word, leaving his sword bearers and his Nordikaans to follow as best they could.

  “Oh, Christ,” intoned Grossbeak, to his right. “We’re all about to die. Let’s kill a lot of them first. Amen.”

  “Amen,” called the guard.

  There were many men missing—men who’d fallen in the early spring, in the north, against the Traitor. But the Nordikaans still had two hundred axes, and when they went into the front of the Galles, the Galles staggered and gave way.

  For a few glorious minutes, the Nordikaans and the Emperor’s inner circle—his Hetaeroi—cleared the ridge in front of the entrenchments. The mountaineers returned to their duty. The line held.

  And then the great stone trolls started up the ridge. They were fast—fast enough to catch the eye—and huge, each as big as two men.

  “What the fuck is that?” asked Grossbeak.

  No one answered. The great black stone things rolled up the hill and the earth shook under the pounding of their feet.

  Grossbeak—the Emperor’s spatharios and technically one of his senior officers—took the Emperor’s bridle. “What the fuck are they, sire?” he demanded.

  The ground shook.

  The Emperor sagged slightly. “We must meet them—and hold.”

  “Don’t you worry, Lord.” Grossbeak was shouting. “If they can die, we’ll kill them. You get out of here. Now.”

  The Emperor drew his sword. “I will not—” he began.

  A slingstone, buzzing like a wasp, caught the Emperor in the side of the head. His head snapped back, and he gave a cry—lost his stirrups, and fell.

  A moan went up from the imperial lines.

  Grossbeak didn’t even pause. “GUARD!” he roared. “BACKSTEP!”

  The trolls struck.

  No line of men, however gifted, however strong, armed with any weapons, could stop that charge.

  Many of the Nordikaans were knocked flat, and some never rose again. Others were merely batted aside—Derkensun was smashed back, as if a boulder had struck his shield, but the runes on his helmet held and he swung his axe with both hands, letting go the shield boss, and the weapon bounced painfully off raw rock.

  At his side, Erik Lodder swung and his axe broke off a sizeable chunk of the thing that then caved in his chest.

  Derkensun reversed his axe in the air and swung it low, into the thing’s heavy legs. It was exactly like cutting at rock, except that every blow did some little damage and the great stone things roared and screamed and their stone fists were like flails crushing men.

  The guard began to die. Their beautiful cloaks could not save them, nor their rune-encrusted armour.

  Derkensun took a piece of a blow. It knocked him flat and when he rose, he had no helmet.

  He was dazed. He was almost under one of the things, and he raised his axe and cut—into the back of the knee as it took a long stride, bent on reaping Grossbeak.

  To his shock, the blow went in—and stuck, more like an axe into wood than flesh, and black blood spurted. The thing whirled, the axe was torn from his grasp, and then its leg failed it and it fell.

  “Backs of the knees!” Derkensun shrieked. Other men were calling other things—that their faces were weak, that their groins were like wood.

  The guard was dying.

  Now the stone trolls were dying, too.

  The Emperor fought well. Good breeding and the best training were not wasted on him, and he used a spear with miraculous properties until it broke, and then he drew his sword and was knocked from his horse.

  Grossbeak got his arms under the Emperor and pulled him away from the trolls, and backed away, step by step, and the survivors of the guard closed around him. They made a shield wall, as best they could, and fell back, step by step, every step paid for with another veteran dead.

  In the sortie gate they made a stand. A pair of brave wagoners had crewed a springal, and they managed to put a great bolt into a troll, breaking him in half so his oily juices sprayed across the parapet, and then they dropped another, a bolt that took the head clean off a second. But by then there were fewer than a hundred guardsmen left.

  Most of the Emperor’s officers and friends were dead in the bloody gate or on the grass in front.

  Grossbeak had the Emperor over his shoulder. He turned to Derkensun. “We need to get out of here.”

  “Is he alive?” Derkensun asked.

  “Yes,” Grossbeak said. “Go for the horses.”

  The Nordikaans wore too much armour to march, and they rode everywhere. The horses were just behind the Emperor’s position, a hundred paces away.

  “No,” Derkensun said.

  “Yes,” Grossbeak said. “Go.”

  Derkensun turned and ran. He ran back over the packed earth where the working soldiers had dug the day before—back over the first trench line they’d thrown up when they’d arrived, a whole day early, to find that they’d won the race to the Inn of Dorling. Back to the horse lines.

  The pages were standing, as if they, too, were guardsmen.

  “Follow me,” Derkensun said. “The Emperor is down. We must save him.”

  He ran back, his leg armour winding him, his maille too heavy, dragging him down to the dirt, his notched axe accusatory that he was not fighting and dying with his brothers.

  He got back before they lost the gate to the monsters outside. He managed a look to the left—and saw that the mountaineers were running. The officers looked at him.

  “Retreat!” he roared. “Get your horses!”

  The horses were picketed all along the back of the earthworks, and the city regiments didn’t need a second invitation.

  Grossbeak grinned at him even as two more of their brothers died under the stone fists.

  “Best day’s work you’ve ever done,” he said. He threw the Emperor over Derkensun’s horse. “Go, boy. Go live. That’s an order. My fucking last.” Grossbeak took his axe, and flung himself on the troll who
’d just burst through the gate.

  For ten heartbeats of a terrified man, his axe was everywhere.

  And then the grey troll fell.

  He stood on its chest and roared his battle cry, and three of them went for him—the last of the guard in the gate, alone against them all. His axe went back.

  “Save the Emperor,” he cried.

  Derkensun had his leg over his saddle, his weight already forward, and the Emperor’s chest in front of him. He got his horse’s head around to see the chaos of a rout—twelve hundred men of the city regiments running for their horses, or pulling pins from the loose soil or simply cutting their reins. All around him, men were fleeing, and suddenly there were boglins and other creatures among the horses.

  At some point, Derkensun had determined he was not going to die there. He threw his axe at the trolls, backed his mount three steps and turned her.

  “Follow me!” he roared. And ran for the road to Albinkirk.

  As night fell, Ser Hartmut sat in his camp, on his stool, and listened to his army feed on the defeated. There were no prisoners. Even their single captive from the morning had been taken and stripped to his bones when the enemy broke and the battle collapsed.

  He sat and wished he had wine. After a time, Thorn came.

  “I wish you the joy of your victory,” Ser Hartmut said.

  “Your victory, surely,” Thorn said in his deep, a-harmonic voice.

  “Where is your master?” Hartmut asked.

  “Away,” Thorn answered.

  Ser Hartmut cleared his throat. “Now what? The enemy is beaten. Was the Emperor killed?”

  Thorn spread his stone claws. “I fear, given our army’s propensities, that it is difficult to ever ascertain who was killed. I saw him fall before I could turn my workings upon him. It’s as well—he must be mightily protected.”

  Ser Hartmut shook his head. “If he went down, we can have the whole thing,” he said. “There’s no one to hold it but a slip of a girl and their militia. Not a knight amongst them.”