by Kari Cordis
The minutes flew by in the frantic atmosphere, drifting into hours. When the word came that the 17th were in panic, Androssan couldn’t stand still any longer. He galloped at breakneck speed to the west, flanked by the aides that had caught up with him. Steeling himself, he turned his horse across the bridge lying so vulnerably in line with the retreating battalion, and right into their midst. It was a nightmare. Screaming, fleeing men were heading over the bridge, many of them burned and terrified with fear and pain. Some checked when they saw him, obeying his thundered commands, but some were out of their minds, far beyond the reach of discipline. The southern field in front of him was glowing luridly with the presence of the Enemy, smoke drifting in a choking, obscuring haze through the still air, which did nothing to help clarify the rampant confusion.
He finally found Estev’s command—the commander had moved right up into the lines when he’d realized they’d broken, and his presence had prevented it from becoming a full rout. He was barely holding it, though, and Androssan could see the dread deep in his sunken eyes as he shouted his report out. He was down by over a quarter strength, lost mostly to dead and wounded, but not helped any by those who’d fled. They’d lost the ground at their center almost to the Daroe…the river gleamed darkly barely a hundred yards to their rear. It went without saying that the need for reinforcements was dire.
“Do you have any Drae?” Androssan asked him, though he didn’t know how he was going to contact any if he didn’t. They had nothing even approaching a centralized command. Estev said hoarsely, “There must be hundreds of them out there—came in like hawks on the hunt when we started having trouble.”
Someone was screaming, “Sir, Sir!” and he looked out of habit, knowing it was probably for the battalion’s commander. But it was Waylan and his heart leaped in his chest. He sprang forward, grabbing the reins of the lieutenant’s horse as he galloped up. He slipped off and hastily saluted.
“Where are the Sentinels?” Androssan shouted anxiously, hardly daring to believe they could have such luck. He was right. Waylan shook his head, squinting his eyes against the gritty smoke. “There are more on the way, Sir! A unit of Stagriders came with me, but they were forced to divert to fill the ranks of the Ram!”
“They’re needed here!” Androssan almost screamed.
“Sir,” Waylan said desperately, “there is no line at all to your right!”
“Where are the Ram?” Androssan demanded. “They were ordered to fall back with the 17th!” Curse these independent units!
“They couldn’t! The Tarq hit them with everything they had when they realized the line was breaking—the far right has it much worse than here, Sir! The way the terrain lies, if the Ram hadn’t stood, the Enemy would’ve been able to both get around behind the Cyrrhideans and get to the 17th!”
And there would have been a gaping hole rent into the Empire. The men stared at each other for a second, pausing at the enormity of it, reflected firelight illuminating their tortured faces. “I found a survivor, Sir. He told me.”
“Bring him to me,” Androssan almost snarled.
Waylan shook his head. “He died, Sir.”
“Bring me one of them!” Androssan yelled. “I don’t care which one—I want to hear this!”
Waylan had a strange look on his face and was just...standing there. “Sir,” his face twisted. “There aren’t any.”
Androssan stared at him, furious. “There’s got to be…” his voice trailed off, then stopped at the look on his lieutenant’s face. “All of them?” he said heavily.
“To the man,” Waylan said, his voice coming out rough.
Mind numb, the General gave him orders to await the coming Sentinels, and turned back to help Estev. Three hundred men. Gone. Completely wiped out. What a monstrous waste of courage.
As the minutes passed, more bad news seemed to loom, pessimism coloring the air with its murky miasma. It was an additive thing, Androssan had found, especially in the middle of the night, after a hard day’s action, with no sleep in sight. Men hungry and parched and exhausted, often wounded, carrying the knowledge of one past break in the line and no expectation of relief, can subconsciously talk themselves into defeat. Androssan saw it, even in the leaders’ faces, and counteracted it quickly, bellowing encouragement and bracing orders, striding around as if the situation were in complete control. They could not fail. They could not. The Enemy would stream through a hole this size in an unstoppable waterfall. If only the Sentinels would come!
But reality was tearing holes in his optimism. Flexible as the Cyrrhidean forces were, fast as they moved, they were not going to get there in time—the men were almost finished. The burning logs were gone, left behind when the Sheelmen advanced, but the pressure of the Enemy itself on the front line had doubled. Androssan was close enough to see the furious flying of blades, the seething activity that was the hallmark of desperation.
One of his aides grabbed his arm. “Sir, you have to get out of here,” he shouted in his ear. “When this line folds, you cannot be here!”
Androssan shook him off, enraged and helpless behind his stony General’s face. He couldn’t admit it, couldn’t give up.
Suddenly a man screamed behind them, then another, and Androssan whirled in horror. Had they gotten behind them? Had they broken through the Sentinels? But it was not men that had come in behind them, and his eyes widened, throat closing as instinctive terror swelled through him.
There, streaming wet from the banks of the Daroe, came wolves. Enormous, panting, loping creatures out of nightmares as old as mankind. They ran like fleet, soundless shadows in the night, ignoring everyone in their line of flight—most of whom were too terrified to move out of the way in time anyway. The angry red light of war reflected in their golden eyes, their massive heads held low like they were swooping in for the kill. And they were running straight past the men of the 17th…to the front.
Warwolves. Hundreds of them, many more than could be accounted for from what the Ram had brought. They were moving so quickly that they reached the front line within seconds, and a whole new set of sounds filtered through the battlefield. The roars of combatants and cries of the wounded changed abruptly to terrified screams, punctuated by the sudden silence of troops taken by surprise, and then the horrible growls and snarls of beasts on the hunt.
“Sir!” Androssan spun—it was Waylan again, this time looking victorious, and escorting a wild-looking man whose cloak and grey hair were billowing restlessly in the sudden, stiff breeze.
It was Melkin. He recognized him from the Kingsmeet and knew him from reputation. What in Sheelfire was he doing here? The General stared up at him in the darkness, eyes wide in surprise.
“Lord General,” the man snarled at him like it was a curse. “Request formal permission to apply for the position of Wolfmaster.”
It all connected. Androssan’s face lighted up. “You are hereby reinstated! How did you know to come here?” he demanded, relief flooding through him in a wave so powerful his knees almost buckled.
“I didn’t,” he said ferociously. “It was the way we happened to come—and once they caught the scent of the Tarq, well, it was out of anyone’s hands.” An untamed light was in his eyes and he glanced hungrily towards the front. “And now, Sir, if you’ll excuse me…?”
“By all means,” the General said, face splitting into a grit-creased grin.
How long had they held the Enemy off? Androssan wondered as he wearily made his way back to the Bluff. Messengers with a steady stream of reports had been finding him as he traveled the muddy ruts of what had once been the Great Southern Road, but so far there’d been nothing as pulse-pounding as what he’d just lived through. The Warwolves had brought a wind with them right out of the arctic, and he pulled his cloak tighter around him, more than happy to fight the chill for the benefit of a wind blowing all those Enemy fires back south.
Back at his headquarters at the Bluff, he forced himself to take the jerky he was handed, stuffing
it uninterestedly into his belly. The tent was full of men, Kyr irrepressibly at its heart, and they briefed each other succinctly. The left flank was as hard-pressed as the right, apparently, the Knights holding but taking heavy casualties. They would be in deep trouble by morning. Androssan was of the private opinion that that was going to apply to all of them.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Spere complained harshly. He’d gotten a bad burn and his head and neck were swathed like a woman in mourning. “It’s the center that’s weakest—why are they pounding the flanks?”
“Their own center was weakened, throwing itself against the Wings,” Kyr said absently, without a trace of pride. “The main reason we withdrew was because their force had started to spread out around us…”
Just then a Fox, looking like he’d been rolling around in the cold leftovers of a fire, came panting into the tent. His news was surreal; Androssan was sure he’d misheard. Kyr’s face was a picture of startled disbelief for a fraction of a second, then he raced out of the tent, consumed by the desire to see for himself what the Fox was reporting. Androssan was a spare second behind him, but he had to wait for a horse (again) to join him. He wasn’t about to race up the Bluffs on foot.
From their height, they could see that the battlefield was eerily quiet, the muted cries of the wounded from the hospital tents and the crackle of a few stubborn blazes the only sound. Where the line of contact had once been instantly obvious, full of frenzied movement and sound and the torchings of the Enemy, now there was only black stillness.
“Tarq never do this,” Kyr said quietly next to him.
“‘Tis a trick, no doubt,” Khrieg commented lugubriously from the other side of the Rach.
They had withdrawn. The Enemy, infamous through all the Ages of the eons of war for their unshakeable tenacity to overrun, to absorb unfeasible cost to their force, to never falter until their objective was taken (and preferably on fire)…had paused.
“How do you read this?” Androssan asked Kyr quietly. “Do they shift all to the flanks?”
The Rach had his face tilted, nostrils flaring off that hawkish nose like he was sniffing the air. His voice, when it finally came, was slow and surprised. “They rest.”
Which seemed doubtful, but as the night wore on, it increasingly appeared that he was right. They waited in the command tent, emptied, as Androssan had sent everyone to catch as many hours of sleep as they could. And there, in the dark hours of the morning, when weariness and quietude effaced the walls of the command façade, Androssan found himself saying what was on his mind.
Kyr had just finished outlying his elaborate plan for an Aerach foray come morning. Silence had settled momentarily and into it Androssan said quietly, “We cannot win this war.”
Kyr glanced up at him in surprise. “I don’t think we dare lose it.”
Androssan looked at him steadily across the table, regretting his words but curious that the Rach would not face reality even now. His tanned face made him look healthy and vibrant, eyes snapping even though he’d only had an hour or so of sleep in the last three days. They were fierce now. “It is not ours to despair,” he said with that characteristic boldness, eyeing Androssan’s tired face. “It is ours to fight.”
“And when is it ours to make plans to survive?” Androssan asked in weary irony. It was like dealing with children. Blood-thirsty, man-killing children, but nevertheless… “There’s only so far blades and prayers will take you.”
Kyr’s face animated with the challenge. Without a trace of anger, he leaned across the table, eyes flashing. “Ever the North has disparaged Il as a crutch for the weak and the weak-minded, a self-made source of comfort for those who cannot face the world without a dream to hide behind...But I tell you, He is the strength of the strong, and His Will shapes the world. The Light, in the end, will never be defeated by the Darkness.”
CHAPTER 43
The Wings attacked the quiet camp of the Tarq several hours before dawn, swooping in like shrieking bloodhawks out of the night. It was enormously successful, if you could believe the flushed, ecstatic Rach when they rode back through cheering Imperial Foot. They repeated it several times as the cold day dawned, frigid in the strengthening wind from the North. The raids were focused in the west, attacking the Enemy massed in front of the weakened 17th and the hard-hit Cyrrhidean forces.
Androssan, more tired after catching an hour nap than he’d been before it, had shifted his command temporarily to the West, finding Traive in the dim, cold hours just after dawn. Cyrrh’s Regent had his own vantage point, a high, cleared hill in among the dead brush and thin trees of the Saphilles just west of Crossing. The place hummed with hushed activity in rather offensive contrast to the screaming bedlam of the Imperial command.
Traive greeted his monarch gravely (ignoring Androssan’s truculent attempts at dissuasion, Khrieg had insisted on accompanying him), but didn’t bother him with any of the confusing details of war. The war leaders talked in low tones for a few moments, Fox hovering patiently in a growing mass to report to Traive.
“Launchers all destroyed,” the first one of them said when the Regent turned to them. Androssan gave a snort of grim pleasure. Teams of Fox had been busy all night, making forays out into that seething mass of Enemy to get axes on the launchers, which had unfortunately been fire-resistant.
A Sentinel came running suddenly into the cleared area of command, a big, gorgeous panther bounding along by his side. The horses went mad nearby—the Imperial horse herd was never going to be the same—and most of the Northerners backed up several steps. His news was worse on morale than his cat: the dragons had been spotted.
Androssan stared bleakly out over the view to the south, the rumpled hills that were full of men battling for their lives and the life of the Realms, while the Jagscout rolled his report out. He sounded like a fairytale herald, giving Androssan the disassociated feeling of having fallen asleep on his feet, dreaming he was reading his kids to sleep like he had when they were little.
“Just two visible, ground-bound, air-borne potential questionable,” he was saying. “Moving very slowly, but small flame bursts definitely seen.”
“Location?” Traive asked musingly, as if he was getting updates on supply wagons rolling in.
“Working their way up on the eastern Dragonspine; they’d just turned out towards the flatlands when I left…angling towards us. I estimate a matter of hours.”
“Alert the Talons,” Traive said quietly, still undisturbed. “Have ’em on standby.”
He turned to Androssan. “Care to have a look?” he asked cheerfully, as if this would be quite the treat. The General looked at him darkly. This was the end of the world they were talking about here; it seemed like a little more gravity should be in evidence. But he nodded stoically.
“Perhaps a stag…?” The Regent suggested. Androssan turned around, seeing nothing but empty field behind him. On top of everything else, he couldn’t keep a flaming horse in sight for more than a minute.
His aides shrugged their shoulders helplessly at his black scowl. “Spread the word to commands that the dragons have been spotted. Ready the water teams. And get…me…a…horse!” he ground out.
Waylan’s face, puffy from lack of sleep, brightened. “I’ll bring the Sheel-bred, Si—”
“WHATEVER!” He wasn’t about to get on one of those rickety, twitchy deer.
As his various aides scurried off, he turned back to Traive. “How do they fight?” he asked grimly. In the war council, the Regent had only mentioned them briefly…everyone else had seemed quite cognizant and comfortable with military dragonlore.
“They often approach from the ground, using their weight to crush what’s under foot. They’re about 25-30 yards tall, and from that height they spray flames to destroy what’s in their path.”
Thirty yards? That was the size of a full-grown elm tree.
“They’ll head in a straight path for us—they have a particular hatred for Cyrrhideans,” Traive sounded
rueful.
“How do you suggest we defend against that?” Androssan ground out.
“Run,” Traive smiled. “That’s what the gryphons are for. The Enemy will be scrambling out of the way, too, trust me. Dragons are indiscriminate about who they toast.” Androssan looked at him grumpily, not amused at all by this tongue-in-cheek levity.
“As soon as I get a mount,” he began grudgingly.
“Here, Sir,” Waylan said behind him.
The General turned and did a double-take at the creature on the other end of the reins Waylan held. He’d hardly call it a dun. It was so light a tan it was cream, with dark, smoky brown stockings that came up over its knees and wreathed up from its muzzle. A long mane and tail of the same rich brown stirred in the freezing morning air. Big, lustrous eyes looked at him intelligently from a face so fine-chiseled it looked like a painting. He moved up to it, gathering the reins and mounting, and the horse moved out without being urged, a smooth, light gait full of liquid energy.
Even from a higher vantage point further south, not much could be seen of the dragons—just enough to convince Androssan the dream was over and it was wakey-time. His adrenaline spiked just watching them move through the filter of the intervening trees. They were slow and majestic, and if the distorted view through glass and distance could be believed, very large. His horse moved restlessly underneath him, catching their scent.