by Chris Bunch
"Right," Broda said. "Here's your posts. Two on, two off. You're listenin' for the diggin' to stop. Like I told you afore, which you likely forgot, when they stop diggin' is when they'll be gettin' ready, pullin' back an' firin' their pit props an' whatever other flam'bles packed in to collapse th' tunnel an' let th' wall cave in atop.
"You're to wait for that silence, an' when it comes, haul ass outa here and find me. Don't hang about, bein' cute and waitin' for th' smell of smoke or like that.
"'Nobody gets to play a godsdamned hero," he grated, and Hal thought his eyes glowed in the darkness. "If you go and do something dumb like get killed, you'll answer to me. Understand?"
For some reason, none of the four soldiers thought what Broda had said either absurd or stupid.
They waited for another day and a half. Hal swore that if he made it through this, he'd live in a tree or under a bush, and never go under a roof again, let alone this far underground, with the rats and people who wanted to kill him, deadly moles, digging ever closer.
He could have stayed in his village, become a miner, and died when a shaft collapsed around him if he wanted a fate like this, he thought.
He wasn't meant for this. He was… well, he would be, a dragon flier. Let him live through this, let him at least die in the light of day. He thought of praying, couldn't think of any particular god he believed in.
But his fellow listener evidently did, mumbling supplications to many gods, more than Hal thought a priest could honor.
Irritated, driven out of his own funk by the other, he kicked him and told him to shut up.
The other soldier, even younger than Hal, obeyed.
Hal was wondering how long it was until the end of their shift, when they could go up those stairs for a bowl of what everyone had started calling siege stew.
Some said it was made of rats, that all the real meat in Paestum was being hoarded by the rich. Hal didn't believe that, although he'd noticed very few dogs about the last few days.
Quite suddenly, there was silence.
The two soldiers looked at each other, eyes wide against their smoke-darkened faces. His partner started for the stairs.
"Wait," Hal hissed. "Maybe they're only changing diggers."
But the sound of picks and shovels didn't come.
"The hells with you," the other soldier snarled, and was gone.
Hal thought the other right, and went up the stairs behind him, into the spitting rain and dawn light, exulting that he had lived, would live, as long as he made it through the attack that would come.
They found Broda, who grunted, told them to wait, and went down the steps they'd boiled up.
A long time passed, and Broda came back into sight, trying to look as if he wasn't in a hurry.
"'At's right," he said. "They're comin'. You, boy. Go wake up th' other so'jers and tell 'em to get ready."
Two hours later, Hal was smelling smoke as the underground fire built, and then he heard a grinding sound, stones moving against each other.
The drawn-up soldiers moaned, without realizing it.
But Hal saw no sign of movement.
The smell grew stronger and the grinding came now and again.
"Look," someone shouted, and everyone stared up, seeing the wall sway slightly.
"Awright," Broda shouted. "It'll be comin' in a tit. Get y'selfs ready!"
The wall moved more, teetering inward, then with a grinding roar, toppled outward in a boil of dust and ricocheting stones. The wall was down, stones taller than a man bouncing away, sliding.
"Here they come!" someone shouted unnecessarily, and, stumbling over the high-piled rubble, coming toward them, was a wave of Roche infantrymen.
First were spearmen, archers behind.
Deraine bows twanged, and the archers dropped, fell back, but there were grim rows of men with swords behind them.
"Now!" Broda shouted, and Hal was moving forward, when his brain told him to run, that the points of those spears was death. One lunged at him, and he took the strike on his shield, pushed it out of the way as he numbly remembered someone telling him to do, and drove his sword into the Roche's chest.
Then there was another man with a sword, and he parried, ducked, and kicked the man in the kneecap. The man screeched, bent, and Hal booted him out of the way, into another man's spear.
There was a man pushing against him, chest against Hal's shield, and he smelt foul breath, drove his knee up into the man's crotch, killed him as he fell back.
Hal had his back against a high stone, and two men were coming at him, and then they were both down with arrows in their chests.
Hal didn't know who to thank, saw Broda standing in a circle of bodies, hammer dripping blood.
Chanting came, high-pitched, and something grew out of nothing, a green-skinned demon, dripping slime, crouching, claws scraping the ground.
Someone screamed in terror, and Hal realized he was the one screaming. The demon looked about, pupilless eyes finding a victim, and it leapt toward Sancreed Broda.
The old man moved surprisingly fast, rolled aside, and struck up at the nightmare. It brushed his hammer aside, and claws ripped.
Broda howled in pain, chest torn open, tried for another smash, fell back, dead.
Hal Kailas felt that hard, cold rage build within him.
The demon looked for another target, saw Hal, just as Hal saw, beyond the fiend, a very young man with very long, very blond hair. He had no weapon but a wand, and his lips were moving as the wand moved, pointing at Kailas.
Just before the demon leapt, Hal, having all the time in the world, scooped up a fist-sized rock, and threw it at the magician's head.
The man howled, clawed at the ruins of his face, wand flying away as the demon disappeared.
Hal jumped over a waist-high boulder, and drove his sword into the young wizard's body.
A Roche warrior with a long, two-handed sword was rushing him, and Hal braced. Before the man reached him an eerie wail began, and other apparitions, taller than a man, completely red, body a terrible parody of humanity, with scythe-like claws at the ends of their arms and legs appeared, leaping on to Roche soldiers and tearing at them.
The Roche soldiers paused, confused, terrified, and things that looked like hawks but weren't dove out of nowhere, claws ripping.
The Roche soldiery broke, turned and ran, even as their wizards' counterspell disappeared the red demons and hawks.
But panic had full hold on the Roche, and they didn't stop or look back.
Charging past Hal came wave after wave of Derainian infantry, counterattacking, and he was pulled along with their attack, beyond the shattered walls, and cavalry galloped out of a city gate after the enemy.
Roche magic couldn't recover the advantage, and the attackers were in full flight, through the ruined suburbs back toward their camps, and the siege was broken.
Hal stopped, letting the others run on, killing, pillaging the corpses.
It was not for him.
He turned back, to find Sancreed Broda's body, and get someone to make a pyre. Somehow he knew there'd be no family, no friends to provide the last rites for the terrible old man who'd saved his and many other lives.
Above him, above Paestum's shattered wall, a dragon screamed once, circling in the clean morning sky.
Chapter Seven
The ten horsemen rode at a walk into the glade below a forested hill. Hal made a swooping motion with his hand, then at the ground. Obediently, the other nine dismounted.
He pointed to two men, then to his right, two more to his left. They moved off to provide security for his flanks.
He chose one more, his normal second in command, a prematurely wizened city boy named Jarth Ordinay, and, taking a long ship's glass from his saddlebag, crept up the hill toward the hill crest, hoping for no surprises.
There were no ambushers or wizards waiting.
He went on his hands and knees, and crawled into the heart of a clump of brush, through to the ot
her side, Ordinay, well-trained, about five feet behind him. He had an arrow and a strung bow ready.
The hill rolled down, past a nearly dry stream to open fields that had been well tilled once, but were now choked with brambles.
The morning was hot, still, and the loudest thing the buzzing of a swarm of bees nearby.
Half a mile from Hal was the Roche army.
Its tents were struck, rolled into the baggage wagons, and men were forming up across its front. Behind the infantry, massed cavalry were trotting out toward the flanks.
Hal swept the breaking camp with his glass, found a handful of still-standing tents. There were banners in front of them. Hal read them easily. A year and a half in the cavalry had made him an expert at heraldry.
Duke this, Baron that, Lords the other and his brother, no surprise, seen them before during the campaign, then he started a bit, at one banner he'd never seen before.
It was, he was fairly sure, that of the queen of Roche herself. He couldn't believe she'd decided to take the field, then saw, below the main banner, a longer pennant.
No. Not the queen, but some lord of her household.
That would be, assuming Deraine victory, almost as good.
That also meant that Roche had great hopes for the forthcoming battle.
He slithered back, out of the brush, motioned to Jarth, and they went back to the horses. The flank guards saw his return and, unordered, came back in.
"They're just where the wizard said they'd be," Hal whispered, reporting in the event he didn't make it back to the main Deraine lines. "I'd guess ten, maybe fifteen thousand. Armored infantry, heavy cavalry, maybe a regiment of light cavalry.
"They're getting ready for the march, headed west, again, like we expected.
"They've got flankers out, heavy cavalry, so we'd best skitter back home, for fear of getting pinchered."
The men mounted. Their horses, as well trained as the men, had stayed still, rein-tethered.
Hal led them out of the glade, through the trees, into the open. Fifty yards distant was the ruins of a road.
"At the walk," he said in a low voice, and the horses moved slowly toward the ruined byway.
In unknown territory, using any road, no matter how shattered, could be suicidal. But Hal had taken his patrol nearby less than an hour before, and thought it unlikely there'd been a trap laid in the interim.
He was more worried about being between the two armies—the Deraine army was only half a dozen miles distant.
One reason he'd survived since the siege of Paestum was staying as far away from famous battles as possible. That was why he'd been promoted Serjeant, and his troops called him Lucky behind his back.
When he took a patrol out, it was very seldom he didn't bring everyone back, generally without serious wounds.
That was an uncommon boast for these times—after the siege, King Asir had brought a great army across the Chicor Straits, made alliance with Sagene's Council of Barons, and gone after Queen Norcia's army.
They found it, and the two forces smashed each other until they were both tottering, each unable to land the death blow.
They'd broken apart, brought in replacements during their winter quarters, and began skirmishing, each looking for the advantage rather than going toe-to-toe again.
There'd been half a dozen major battles, ten times that in minor brushes that produced no grander results than adding to the casualty lists in the eighteen months since Hal had been dragooned into the army.
One side would move south, the other after it, then the other way around.
Caught in the smash were the Sagene civilians, their villages and farms. A great swathe was cut along the Roche-Sagene border. Here, all was desolation, save the occasionally staunchly garrisoned castle. What trade there was, what merchants there were, stayed close to the army, doing business as they could, when they could.
But the lands weren't empty. There were wanderers, deserters from both sides, and—most to be feared—those who'd turned renegade.
They knew all men's hands were turned against them, so gave and asked no mercy from any group of soldiers they encountered.
That was one of the jobs of the light cavalry, tracking and destroying the bandits, one reason that Hal Kailas' face showed hard lines, and his smile came but seldom these days.
But it was better, in terms of surviving, than his present task, scouting for the main force as they closed once more for battle.
Everyone knew this encounter was unlikely to be decisive, was not likely to end the war.
Everyone except the high commands on both sides.
Victory would only be won by one army breaking through and laying waste to the other's homeland, yet maintaining its own supply lines.
Sagene and Deraine had more men, more horses. Roche's soldiers were better trained, generally better led. Plus they had more dragons, more magicians.
Just recently, the Roche dragons had changed their tactics. They still scouted overhead, but, just as they'd done in the siege of Paestum, had begun attacking riders and patrols who ventured beyond the safety of the Deraine catapults.
The few Deraine dragons were only used for observation, and what they reported was frequently wrong, and even more frequently disregarded.
Hal sometimes wondered if the end would be all three countries hammered back into barbarism.
All he could hope for, and it was a measure of his strength that he still could hope, was to survive until the war ended. All too many soldiers had given up, dully realized their doom was to be killed, wounded or captured, nothing more.
But an end to this war seemed far in the future.
Hal broke his thoughts, not only because they were veering into gloom, but because anyone who thought of anything other than the minute he was living in was likely to add to the butcher's bill.
He turned in his saddle, looking back at his patrol, scanning the hillsides for movement, then the skies.
As he did, a flight of four dragons, in vee-formation, broke out of the clouds and dove on the patrol.
Hal swore—some Roche magician must have sensed them, and sent out the fliers.
"Dragons!" he shouted. "Spread out, and ride hard for our lines!"
The green-brown dragons swept past above them, then banked back, and dove toward the ground. They flared their wings no more than fifteen feet above the ground, and, almost wingtip to wingtip, beat toward Hal's onrushing patrol, hoping to panic horses and horsemen. But this was not the first, nor the fifth, time Hal had been attacked by dragons.
"Jink!" Kailas shouted, and, obediently, the riders kicked their mounts one way, then another. The dragons tried to turn with them, couldn't, and the ten men rode safely under their attackers. One man—Hal didn't see who—had courage enough to fire an arrow at a dragon.
"Full gallop," and the riders kicked their horses hard, bending low in the saddle, trying to keep from looking back at the closing doom.
It was hard, especially when a scream came. Hal chanced a look, saw a horse pinwheeling through the air, gouting blood from deep talon-wounds in its back, saddle torn away.
Its rider… Its rider was tumbling in the dust, getting to his feet, stumbling into a run, knowing no one would turn back for him, following the strictest orders.
Hal wheeled his mount into a curvet, came back at his afoot soldier, saw, out of the corner of his eye, a swooping dragon. He leaned out, arm hooked, and the man had it, was neatly flipped up behind him, and the dragon whipped past, close enough for Hal to have touched its right talon as it missed him.
Again he turned, and his horse was gasping, flanks lathered. Two dragons were coming at him, each not seeing the other, then avoiding collision at the last minute as Hal rode under a torn-apart tree.
A dragon smashed through branches above his head, climbed for height for another attack, and on the other side of the hill were the Deraine lines. Hal's patrol was strung out in front of him, riding for safety.
Two dragons c
ame in for another attack, but the patrol was too close to the lines, and half a dozen catapults sent six-foot darts whipping through the air at them.
All missed, and the Roche dragons were climbing away.
One screamed in rage and disappointment, and Jarth Ordinay blatted an imitation up at him, one of his major talents.
They galloped past the outlying pickets, were in the forward lines, and now they could sit straight, breathe, and even show a cavalryman's panache, laughing at the past danger, easy in the saddle, safe for one more day.
"It has been in my mind for some time," Lord Canista, commander of the Third Deraine Light Cavalry, "that our king might be well served by your being promoted lieutenant and knighted, Serjeant."
Hal gaped. Being made an officer was impressive enough, the Deraine army having three ranks: lieutenant, generally knighted; captain, always knighted, and commander, who'd be a lord, duke or even prince.
Outside Canista's tent, all was a bustle as the army got ready once more for battle.
"First, that pennant you spotted belongs to one Duke Garcao Yasin, who's Lord Commander of Queen Norcia. The two, I was told, are close." Canista coughed suggestively. "Very, very close. So obviously this upcoming battle will be of great import to Roche." He noticed Hal's expression.
"You know of him?"
"Uh… nossir." Hal thought back, remembered the Yasin with the flying dragons back in Bedarisi had a first name of Bayle or something like it. "But I may've encountered a relative of his before the war. A dragon flier. Do you know if he's got a brother?"
"Of course not," Canista said, a bit impatiently. "And let us return to more important matters, such as your knighthood. You fight well. But more important… Well, did you know your troopers call you Lucky?"
"Uh… yessir." Hal was still considering this Baron Yasin. Assuming a relationship, and he had no way of knowing whether Yasin was a common name in Roche, that would certainly indicate the Roche fliers were, indeed, spies. He brought himself back, listened to Canista.
"That's more important… for a leader," the lord went on. "Any damned fool with no survival sense can become a great warrior… until he's cut down by some lucky sod from the rear.