The enemy broke. Against that furious onslaught, they had no defence at all and their pristine ranks dissolved into a panicked disorder.
“Vengeance!” bellowed Rathien, watching with relish as his troops ripped apart the Ellyrian footsoldiers. “Slay them all! Let none live to mourn this day!”
The infantry began to run, sprinting back across the plain and ceding the ground they’d occupied. All thoughts of honour forgotten, they dropped their weapons and fled, pursued through the drifting dust by the murderous, wheeling Dragon Princes.
The momentum of the charge didn’t let up. The Caledorian cavalry surged after them, cutting down the hindmost without mercy and riding over the ones who stumbled.
Rathien maintained the punishing speed of the attack. As he forged through the dust-clouds ahead, he could imagine the whole army unravelling before him, breaking open like an egg. Once the hard shell of defenders was smashed aside, the lightly armed core of archers awaited, packed in tight rank order and unable to flee quickly. When his Dragon Princes came amongst them, the slaughter would be memorable indeed.
“Run them down!” he cried, feeling his voice hoarsen from shouting. His body was bathed in sweat, and his heart thudded with the deep, strong rhythm of combat. His whole body was suffused with a profound feeling of invincibility.
“Lord!” came the first cry of alarm.
The plumes of dust parted for a moment, exposing the battlefield ahead of them.
There were no defenders left. There were no ranks of archers cowering before the charge of the cavalry. Ahead of him was nothing but empty dust, baked hard by the sun, broken only by the remnants of the spearman battalions they’d ridden through, still running hard.
The line of spearmen had been a screen. The entire army of Tor Elyr had parted in two, all to allow the cavalry to overshoot and outrun their supporting infantry battalions. With astonishing discipline, thousands of defending soldiers had withdrawn under the cover of the roiling dust, drawing the assault on.
“Come round!” yelled Rathien, suddenly seeing the danger.
He could scarcely believe it. An entire rank of foot-soldiers had been sacrificed in order to get the Dragon Princes out of position. All about him, his knights arrested their charge, tugging on the reins and hauling their mighty steeds to a skidding, whinnying halt.
Rathien cast a look back at the way they’d come. His Caledorian footsoldiers had been left far behind. They were running fast to come to the aid of the cavalry, but he saw clearly that they’d arrive too late.
“Withdraw!” roared Rathien, knowing he had precious seconds to avert disaster.
He was too late. From either flank, like flocks of dark insects descending on to exposed crops, the arrows began to fly.
Valaris rode hard, escorted by his Reavers. He had taken his finest mounted detachments out of the main conflict and run them swiftly south of the battlefield, skirting the margins of the fighting and bringing them up parallel with the Caledorians’ rearguard.
If his opponent had been a cautious general, he would have established significant reserves towards the rear of his army to prevent such an attack. Valaris himself had done so with his own forces, knowing full well that such a deployment left the main body of infantry in the front lines weakened.
But that didn’t matter now. Valaris could see for himself that Rathien had taken the bait and ridden his elite Dragon Princes right through the centre of battlefield. That had been a blunt manoeuvre, and one that a more experienced commander would never have undertaken until the risk of flank attack had been neutralised. Valaris had trusted to his opponent’s recklessness, and the gamble had paid off. He could already hear the screams as the storm of arrows from his concealed archers found their marks.
“Come about!” he cried, leading his Reavers back up towards the southern flank of the Caledorian rearguard.
As the line of Ellyrian horsemen came into range of their target, Valaris saw with satisfaction that the enemy defences were minimal. Rathien had committed everything to the central attack, and as a result every other element of his army was exposed. As Valaris drew into charge range, he saw the enemy footsoldiers stationed around the baggage caravans and repeater batteries struggling to form up in defence.
“Charge!” roared Valaris.
Giving them no time to get into position, the cavalry of Tor Elyr plunged straight into the Caledorian infantry, crashing through the disorganised defences just as ruthlessly as the Dragon Princes had destroyed the false wall of spearmen. The Reavers were more lightly armoured than their Caledorian counterparts, but were swifter on the charge and their spears were as deadly as heavy lances in a loose melee.
“Strike fast!” cried Valaris, crouching in the saddle and feeling Rhyleas propel him deep into the heart of the fighting. “Break them, then withdraw! Do not get drawn on!”
The Reavers did as they were ordered, tearing through the ragged Caledorian rearguard, striking down any stragglers and torching rows of hawk-shaped bolt throwers as they swept past. The shouts of alarm from the defenders turned to screams of pain and terror.
Valaris remained at the forefront, swinging his longsword with almost casual abandon. Everything had unfolded as he had foreseen and even amid the slaughter he could take a grim kind of pleasure from that.
Then he noticed that the adjutant, the blond Reaver captain he’d been speaking to earlier, was riding alongside him, close at hand even in the charge. The youth’s face was fierce with bloodlust, and he handled his steed with ferocious mastery.
“Did I not say it?” shouted Valaris, dispatching a fleeing swordsman with a downward plunge of his blade. The adjutant heard him, and grinned in reply.
“Black with their bloodied dreams,” he replied, wielding his own sword with dreadful relish.
* * *
By the time Haerwal fought his way to Rathien’s side, the field was already lost. The Caledorians had been badly outmanoeuvred. Their heavy cavalry had been drawn into a ruinous encounter with massed volleys from the Ellyrian archers. Once the momentum of the charge had been lost and the arrows had taken their toll, the enemy footsoldiers had been free to close in on the beleaguered Dragon Princes. For all their peerless power in the sudden assault, the elite horseriders were weak when their speed had been taken from them.
The Caledorian infantry had been hampered in coming to their aid by a sudden attack by the Ellyrians’ fast-moving cavalry on the rearguard. Caught between such well-orchestrated assaults, Rathien’s army had folded in on itself. The Dragon Princes remained defiant to the end, hurling contemptuous insults at the mass of troops that swarmed up to attack them. The same could not be said for the Caledorian infantry, many of whom fled the field as the tide of battle swung against them.
From horseback, Haerwal cast a weary eye across the carnage. All those long months of preparation, all that gold spent on an army worthy of Caledor’s proud past, had been for nothing. The lone horse that trailed behind him, led by a long rope and slathered in sweat, was riderless. Its owner lay, like so many others, crushed and lifeless on the soil of Ulthuan.
Haerwal rode up to Rathien. The prince still fought on foot and his armour was blotched and mottled with blood. All around him lay corpses, the remnants of his once-proud honour guard.
“Lord!” Haerwal cried. “We must withdraw!”
Haerwal’s surviving riders rode on past, driving the nearest Ellyrians back and creating a momentary bulwark against the surging onslaught around them. Beyond that fragile line, the battle still raged unabated, though in truth, it was now little more than a massacre.
Rathien looked up at Haerwal, and there was desperation in his face.
“Rally them!” he spat, wiping his blade on his cloak and striding back towards the Ellyrians. “This day is not yet done!”
Haerwal drew up the riderless horse he’d led across the battlefield. Merely getting it there had been perilous. To die now would be only the greatest of the many irritations he’d endured
in Rathien’s service.
“I have never defied you,” said Haerwal, keeping his voice level. “But look around you. There is no one else left.”
The ever-present dust, driven up by the endless movements of men and horses, still drifted across the plain. As the filmy curtains ripped away in the breeze, Rathien suddenly stopped. A broad image of the battlefield opened up before him.
The sun had passed into the west, and its light was weak. The Ellyrians were running rampant. All semblance of rank order had disintegrated on the Caledorian side, and isolated knots of fighters were being taken apart by disciplined assaults from mounted troops.
Even as Rathien watched, an isolated Dragon Prince was dragged from his mount by a group of warriors in the white robes of Ellyrion. The knight fought desperately, taking down two or three before his sword was ripped from his gauntlet. His assailants hacked at his body long after he was dead and motionless. Their movements were animated with real hatred.
“If we do not leave now, we will die,” said Haerwal, calmly articulating the obvious.
He did his best to remain calm. Remonstrating with Rathien was always difficult, and getting impatient never helped. Even as Haerwal waited for a response, he could hear the approach of more soldiers from every direction. The fighting was not yet over, whatever decision was made.
At last, Rathien turned away from the scene of butchery. The fire of anger in his eyes had gone, to be replaced by a strange kind of darkness. He mounted his horse slowly, as if all vitality had been drained from him.
Haerwal waited for the order. Despite all that had happened between them, it broke his heart to see his lord so stricken.
“Sound the retreat,” said Rathien, his voice barely above a whisper. “You are right. All is lost.”
CHAPTER TWO
The chamber was sunk in shadow, lit only by four bobbing lyr candles. They drifted around the circular space, throwing soft beams of varicoloured light against the dark stone.
Anlia barely noticed them. The object on the table before her absorbed all her attention. A small crystal sphere hovered a hand’s breath above the copper surface, rotating slowly and reflecting the light of the candles. Shapes moved within the sphere, ghostly remnants of faces, or snow-streaked mountainsides, or the heavy swell of unbroken waves. Each vision lingered for a moment before fading out to be replaced by another. The procession was dizzying and hard to interpret, even for Anlia’s experienced eyes.
But there was always a pattern in the end, some underlying unity. The sphere was a hirameth, a speaker of future truths, one of the many arcane products of the loremasters of Hoeth. It never lied, though it sometimes told the truth in such an opaque way that the result was much the same. The trick, Anlia had been told, was to treat it like a child, and a wayward one at that.
She screwed her eyes up, peering into the candlelit depths. She’d been working for hours already and her strength was waning. She could feel her eyelids getting heavier, and forced herself to keep them open.
Two messages emerged, swimming up from the dark depths of the hirameth. The first was confirmation of something many scryers across Ulthuan had long been predicting. The Winds of Magic, those capricious eddies of aethyric matter that washed across the world and gave power to those with the gift to control them, were gaining in strength. Like the gathering of thunderheads far out at sea, they were churning and boiling, ready to spill out across the lands of mortals and blur the tenuous barrier between the Realm of Chaos and the physical world.
Anlia pushed back her fringe of long copper-brown hair and leaned forward, screwing her vision tighter and wringing out the last drop of prophecy from the crystal before it faded. She was good at such work, better than most people gave her credit for. She could see things that most others, even the mightiest sages of the Tower, would miss.
And so she saw the second message there, another fragment hidden within the shadows of false visions, the reflections of reflections.
She saw the sea, curving away towards the western horizon. She saw the coast of distant Lustria, steaming in perpetual heat. She saw an island, one that didn’t yet exist, but whose potential was scored across time like the slip of a stonemason’s chisel.
And there were other things: echoes of something from the far past, a fusillade of desperate cries and fire in the skies…
“Do you like what you see?” asked her companion, speaking amiably from the shadows.
Anlia didn’t look up at him, but a flicker of annoyance crossed her alabaster features.
“Do not speak to me,” she muttered. “Not now.”
There was an avuncular chuckle from the margins of the chamber, though from exactly where, it was hard to tell. The floating candles didn’t illuminate much beyond the sphere on the table, and the walls were hidden in shadow.
“Don’t forget who taught you how to do this, girl. There are others I could spend my time tutoring.”
Anlia exhaled sharply with irritation. The visions were sinking into a fog at the centre of the orb. Her concentration was breaking. She knew from experience that once that happened, she’d never get it back.
She ran her hands across her face, then through her hair. She sat up, rolling her tense shoulders. It was only then that she realised how long she’d been hunched over the orb, and how cramped and painful her muscles had become.
“There aren’t many who would put up with you,” she said.
The lyr candles floated higher, towards the conical roof of the chamber. The sphere descended back towards the copper tabletop. It touched the metal with a gentle clink before rolling across it towards Anlia.
“I’ll ask you again. Did you like what you saw?”
Anlia collected the sphere into her hand and placed it within a sandalwood box at her feet. Her movements were as protective as a mother’s with her child.
“I didn’t have a chance to finish,” she replied, locking the box closed and rising stiffly from her chair. Her deep red robes were crumpled and there were lines of fatigue under her eyes. “Perhaps you prevented me from doing so deliberately.”
This time there was no laugh.
“That’s an unworthy thought.”
“Is it?”
“It is. But I forgive you. So what’s next for us?”
Anlia rocked her head from side to side, trying to loosen vice-tight sinews. “We travel to Lothern. He’ll want to see this.”
“Lothern is dangerous for you. You should stay here. In secret.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. My shoulders are killing me.”
“Then do not downplay the danger. Would you like me to massage them for you?”
“I never downplay the danger. And yes, I would. You always know what I need.”
From out of the darkness came a pair of asur hands, smooth-fleshed and pale. Anlia sat back in the chair and let them knead her weary, knotted flesh. Her eyes closed, and she felt her body relax at last.
“He’ll want something good though,” she said drowsily. “Right now, I have no idea how to sell this.”
“You’ll find a way,” came the comforting reply. “You always do.”
From the plains north of Lothern to the borders of Caledor was a punishing ride of six days that should have taken eight. The horses were driven hard to keep them moving up the steep mountain paths, and many went lame and were left behind. That was a criminal waste, a pointless loss of precious stock, but Rathien found himself unable to care.
He still burned with anger, and the ever-growing distance from the battlefield fuelled his gnawing sense of shame. He barely noticed the scenery around him, the plunging mountain shoulders, striated with foliage as they fell away towards the glittering disc of the Inner Sea. He spoke to none of his retainers, and none of them dared speak to him. His surviving retinue, nineteen household cavalry in battered Caledorian livery, travelled with none of the high-stepping swagger they’d adopted on the journey east. They filed through the narrow mountain passes like thieves,
going quickly and with sullen, hunted looks. The remainder of the army, those few that had escaped death or capture, trailed along behind, a ragged train of wounded and dispirited warriors that extended far down the crumbling mountain trails.
Rathien found conflicting emotions raging within him. On the one hand, now the worst of the battle fury had faded, feelings of profound remorse preyed on his mind—there had been no glory in that sordid fight and good warriors had died pointlessly for a goal that would now never be realised.
On the other, the need for vengeance still nagged away at him. He had been humiliated. That required a response.
Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t let it go. With every pace taken away from Vanamar, the turmoil in his soul intensified. He despised the bloodshed, but could not turn aside from it.
Why do I feel this? Why now?
It was as if the entire world had intensified the warlike emotions of his people and driven them to the surface. Discipline, the one trait that separated the sons of Ulthuan from their decadent kin in Naggaroth, the one thing that tempered the hot blood of Aenarion and prevented it from spilling over into endless conflict, seemed harder than ever to summon up.
Something was changing. Something was stirring.
Still locked in his thoughts, Rathien brought his steed to a halt before the Marble Gate, the dividing ridge between the soft country of Eataine and the rugged highlands of Caledor. To his left, the huge mass of the Annulii rose up, curving into the north-west and dazzling with sun-flashed snow. To his right, the terrain fell steeply in a series of uneven terraces, tumbling away to the narrow strip of coast below. Ahead of him, the road plunged straight through the crest of the ridge. The dark earth of Caledor was visible on the far side of the opening, glowering under the hot sun.
A hundred miles further on, and the crumbling towers of Tor Morven were waiting for him, perched on the side of the mountain Kaerel over the dry valley of the Liledh. His ancestral home, stuffed with riches but home to barely half the inhabitants needed to keep it in repair.
[Storm of Magic 02] - Dragonmage Page 2