Blaine vowed that once he and his men had eliminated the gryps, he would happily slaughter the Tingur without a bit of remorse, just for having driven the vicious creatures at him and his troops.
He and Niklas had agreed before the battle that Niklas would lead one-half of the army against Rostivan and Quintrel, trying to shield Blaine from the worst of the effects of magic. Traher Voss’s soldiers added much-needed reinforcements. Blaine led the other half of his army, backed up by the armies of the Solveigs and Birgen Verner. So here they were, arrayed on a wide-open plain halfway between Glenreith and the Solveigs’ holdings, facing down the largest army since King Merrill’s soldiers went to Meroven.
“Watch out for the claws—they’re poisoned!” Piran called out to the soldiers around them. Behind the front line, archers were readying their arrows. Thanks to Verran’s spying, Blaine had known in advance that the Tingur had managed to collect and use the creatures in their attacks. And because of Blaine’s previous run-ins with the beasts from the magic storms, he and his troops knew how to fight the things.
True to her word, Kestel rode with them. Since she was wearing the same dun-colored tunic and trews as the other soldiers, with her red hair bound up beneath a helm and her figure flattened by a hard leather cuirass, no one would be likely to give her a second look among the thousands of soldiers. That would be a mistake. Two bandoliers crossed her chest, each arrayed with dozens of dirks, throwing knives, and wicked circular blades. She wore two swords, and both a staff and a bow were lashed to her saddle along with a quiver filled with arrows and a covered bucket filled with pitch.
“We need those flaming arrows now!” Blaine shouted, fighting back the assault. Blaine could only guess how the Tingur managed to trap the gryps or tie heavy stone weights to their taloned feet, but he figured magic played a role. The weights were light enough that the gryps could still fly, and heavy enough to keep them near the ground where they could be ‘herded’ toward an enemy. From the bright glow coming from the Tingur line, Blaine bet the beasts had been prodded toward their objective with fire.
“Well then, we’re about to start prodding back,” he muttered.
One of the gryps dove at Blaine, grabbing for his shoulder with its sharp talons. He barely evaded a nasty slice, and slashed with his sword, scoring a deep cut on the leathery talons. Foul-smelling ichor dripped from the wound. Steel glinted in the air, and one of Kestel’s knives buried itself hilt-deep in the gryp’s side, forcing the creature to draw back and limiting the use of one wing.
Blaine and Piran each carried lances with torch-like tips soaked in resin and burning brightly. They spurred their frightened horses onward, charging at the gryps with their flaming pikes. Normally, the gryps would have arced high into the sky to evade them, but slowed and anchored by the heavy stone weights, the winged predators had limited mobility.
“I guess the Tingur found a disposable front line of their own,” Piran muttered. Hobbled as the gryps were by the weights, killing them was easier than in the wild, though hardly without danger. But Piran was right: The only purpose for using the magicked beasts in battle was to wear down the enemy before the Tingur advanced, just as Lysander used the Tingur to protect his ‘real’ soldiers.
Blaine stabbed at the gryp with his lance, taking grim satisfaction at the way the beast screeched at the flames. The gryp flapped its wings madly. One of the foot soldiers dove for the heavy stone, anchoring the gryp further with his own weight.
“Get him, sir! I’ll hold him!” the soldier shouted, ducking to avoid the thing’s talons.
Lance in his left hand, anchored against his body, Blaine charged again, sword ready. Unable to fly, terrorized by the flames, the gryp tried and failed to snatch at the lance. Kestel sank two blades deep into the gryp’s body, one at the joint of its left wing and another in its belly.
Blaine stabbed the lance deep into the gryp’s gut, following through with a sword strike that tore its wing from top to bottom like a ruined sail. Pushed backward by the momentum of Blaine’s horse, the gryp flailed, and the soldier beneath it threw the rope-wrapped stone, managing to tangle the gryp’s talons in its own ballast. The creature fell heavily to the ground as the lance’s fire burned it inside. The thing gave one last, earsplitting shriek and collapsed. Blaine made sure of its death by bringing his horse’s hooves down on its body, crunching bone.
“One down,” he muttered, though at least a half dozen more still filled the sky.
A foot soldier to the left of Blaine screamed as a gryp raked him with its talons, opening bloody gashes from shoulder to thigh. Another of the soldiers battled back one gryp only to have a second snatch him up with its razor-sharp claws, tearing into him with its beak.
Down the line, gryps flew at the soldiers with talons out and beaks jabbing. The heavy stone weights added to the gryps’ deadly arsenal, since the panicked beasts gyred and swooped awkwardly, trailing the swinging stones as they went. The weight-stones toppled two hapless soldiers who could not scramble out of the way quickly enough, sending them sprawling in a spray of blood as the heavy stones connected with skull and bone.
“We’re losing men, and the real fighting hasn’t even started yet,” Blaine grumbled.
“I think that’s the point,” Piran responded.
Three flaming arrows soared into the air, over the injured soldier’s head. Two of the arrows ripped through the skin of the gryp’s wings, but the beast managed to twist enough to evade the third arrow. Volley after volley of flaming arrows filled the sky as the gryps beat their wings furiously to get away.
Crowing a victory cry, Piran copied what Blaine had done, charging at the gryp with his lance while a soldier secured the anchor. The battle cry echoed down the line as horsemen leveled their flaming lances and rode for the gryps as foot soldiers in twos and threes ran to tackle the stone weights. The gryps shrieked and screamed, beating the air with their wings, but between the fiery pikes and the flaming arrows, the battle had turned. Blaine shook the ichor and soot from his vambraces and turned to survey the fighting. Kestel had slipped down from her horse, and was calmly retrieving as many of her blades from the fallen gryps as she could find, cleaning off the ichor on the dry grass.
“What in the name of Torven are those things?” a soldier near Blaine shouted in alarm. Beetle-like creatures the size of wild pigs skittered across the dry grass. Some of the beasts stopped long enough to rip flesh from the dying gryps, but the others, alerted to the presence of fresh prey by the soldiers’ movements, swarmed toward the advancing line. There were too many to count, but Blaine guessed that there had to be at least fifty of the things, and untrammeled by stone weights, the creatures moved much faster than the gryps had done.
“They’re mestids,” Blaine shouted. “And they hate fire as much as the gryps.”
“We’ve got more coming,” Piran yelled, pointing to the strip of land between their forces and the Tingur. “And there’s something else—are those ranin?”
“That’s sure what they look like,” Blaine said, refreshing the pitch and batting on his torch and lighting it afire. Kestel had swung up onto her horse once more, and was readying her bow with pitch-tipped arrows.
Pale, crab-like creatures scuttled among the mestids. If the mestids were the size of wild hogs, then the ranin were mastiff-sized, with oval bodies and bone-like carapaces. Six jointed legs clicked with every movement, tipped in sharp claws that looked as lethal as the gryps’ talons. The ranin clattered their way toward the soldiers nearly as fast as a trotting horse, slashing at the slower mestids with their jointed legs.
“There are too many of them, coming too fast,” one of the soldiers near Blaine shouted. Blaine looked down the line at the soldiers grimly braced for the onslaught, and a desperate idea formed.
“Light the grass!” Blaine shouted. “We want a line of fire! Do it!” Blaine used his flaming lance to catch the dry grass of the battlefield on fire, then he braced his lance like a pike behind the flames. Smoke r
ose in the cold air as the burning line spread down the front lines, and the archers shot one volley after another to rain fire down on the beasts. The clicking of the ranin’s carapaces and the clatter of the mestids’ snapping claws and jointed legs filled the air.
The winter grasses caught quickly, and the fire spread rapidly. Confronted with a wall of flame, the mestids and ranin clattered to a halt, squawking and hissing. A gust of wind angled the flames toward them, and the creatures retreated, only to come into better range of the archers.
Piran sheathed his sword and grabbed the crossbow from his saddle. Down the line, Blaine spotted Borya and Desya doing the same, standing in their stirrups, taking aim.
The crossbow thudded, and a burning quarrel streaked through the air, catching one of the mestids at the jointed place where its front leg met its body. The arrow went deep, engulfing the mestid in fire. The insect-like creature screeched and scuttled backward, causing the other mestids and ranin to draw back from the flames. Already, its body was beginning to split with the heat, and an awful smell filled the air as the mestid exploded.
Another quarrel struck a ranin. The razor-sharp tip split the carapace and embedded itself deeply. Six legs flailed in vain as flames hissed, engulfing it in fire. Crossbows were able to pierce the heavy exoskeletons, and for every mestid or ranin that was felled by the quarrels, two or three abandoned their attack to gorge themselves on the smoking remains of the creatures as soon as the flames were extinguished.
Scrambling up the dead bodies of its comrades, one of the ranin launched itself at Blaine, managing to get its body briefly airborne to avoid the flames. Kestel lobbed one of her circular knives, a blade with sharp teeth like a saw blade, and it ripped easily through the ranin’s shell, spraying the ground with ichor as the beast fell, its legs clawing and spasming.
The bowmen quickly realized that regular arrows could not penetrate the beasts’ natural armor, so they shot wave after wave of flaming arrows into the dry grass among the attackers, until the swath of land was engulfed in fire and the bitter, acrid smell of their burning flesh and shells filled the air with a choking haze of smoke.
Halted by the fire, panicked by the stench, the mestids and ranin ran. Flaming arrows pursued them until they were beyond archers’ range, sending the creatures back in a deadly wave toward the Tingur who had loosed them.
Blaine took grim satisfaction in hearing the screams and shouts of the Tingur as the tide of enraged creatures swarmed toward them. To the left, Blaine could see that the Solveig army had begun to hem in the Tingur, while Verner’s forces flanked them on the other side. As the fire burned out near Blaine’s front line, his troops advanced, and his archers continued shooting their fire-tipped arrows just behind the mestids and ranin, forcing them to overrun the Tingur. With nowhere to run, the Tingur had no choice except to battle their own monsters, aware that once the beasts had taken their toll, soldiers awaited to finish the job. Unprepared, without ready access to fiery arrows or flaming pikes, the panic-stricken beasts caught up with the front line of Tingur as the rest fled for their lives.
“Lysander’s biding his time,” Blaine said as Piran rode up beside him. Piran’s clothing was torn and soot-streaked, and Blaine guessed he looked much the same.
Piran nodded. “This was just the warm-up. Too bad we can’t use the same tactic and have the Tingur turn on Lysander’s troops.”
“Something’s happening. Look,” Blaine said and pointed.
Pursued by the stampeding creatures, the Tingur fled toward Lysander’s main army line. Yet even from here, Blaine could see that if the Tingur expected protection, their hopes were in vain. Lysander’s soldiers blocked the Tingur’s escape at sword’s point, giving them the choice between fighting the creatures and being cut down by their own side.
“I guess Lysander doesn’t want to dirty his hands dealing with the beasts,” Blaine said, glad that the Tingur’s folly gave his own side a chance to catch their breath. Blackened grass and the charred carapaces of dead monsters covered the open stretch between the opposing armies. A glance down his own line assured Blaine that although his vanguard had taken some damage in the fight, few of his soldiers had been seriously injured or killed.
“Hang on,” Blaine said. “Here it comes.”
Bellowing a war cry, Lysander’s main forces charged toward the defenders’ line. Horsemen led the way, with infantry not far behind. They rode through the battle between the Tingur and the beasts, trampling those who got in their way.
With an answering shout of their own, Blaine led their charge. The Solveigs and Verner followed a moment later.
Lysander’s army bore no resemblance to the motley Tingur. Well armed and well armored, the attacking army moved with the skill of practiced fighters. And unlike the hapless Tingur, who had been carried into battle on raw emotion, it was obvious from the first sword’s strike that Lysander’s soldiers had a plan.
Warhorses thundered down the plain. Foot soldiers ran between the big horses, swords at the ready to engage. On horseback, Blaine had the advantage, and he used it to cut his way through the onslaught. Four men fell in quick succession, spattering Blaine’s legs and his horse with blood.
Faces blurred as they rushed past him, but Blaine realized that many of Lysander’s soldiers did not have the look of Donderan men. With a jolt, he realized that the warlord’s army included recruits—or mercenaries—from the enemy kingdom whose mages had brought down the Great Fire and the Cataclysm on them all.
Piran came to the same conclusion, and rage colored his features. “Bloody Meroven mercs!” Piran shouted, following up with a string of obscenities. Piran was fighting a large man who was armed with a war ax, and it was taking all of Piran’s skills to stay out of the way of the heavy ax long enough to get in a few strikes of his own.
Blaine faced down his own opponent, a seasoned warrior on a massive warhorse whose barrage of sword blows gave Blaine little time to worry about Piran. Blaine fended off the strikes, but he could feel the fatigue from the fight with the magicked beasts already taking its toll. He was mindful of the agate amulet at his throat, a talisman that deflected and minimized the drain of magic but did not remove it altogether. Remembering Carr’s savaged features and tortured body ignited Blaine’s anger, dispelling any tiredness, and he let that rage warm his body and drive him onward.
Strike. Parry. Strike. Block. Blaine and his opponent circled each other warily, each sizing up the other’s strength, speed, and skill. Blaine saw cunning and dead-cold ruthlessness in the soldier’s eyes, and he wondered what the other man made of him. Out of the corner of his eye, Blaine could see two other soldiers heading for him, but he dared not take his attention away from the man he battled.
His opponent landed a strike that got inside Blaine’s guard, slashing down on his vambrace, but it was blocked by the heavy leather before it could damage skin and bone. Blaine swung, slicing into his attacker’s arm, deep enough that the man drew back, but not far enough.
Blaine dug his heels into his horse’s sides, and his mount jolted forward. Blaine angled his sword, and the horse’s motion drove it into the gap above his attacker’s cuirass, deep into the man’s throat. Blood bubbled and gurgled as the soldier shuddered, alive enough to know he was dying quickly.
The soldier’s horse panicked and bolted, nearly tearing Blaine’s sword from his hand. His opponent clung to the saddle for a few strides, then toppled from his mount as the terrified horse galloped away.
Kestel had loosed her horse, and on foot she was deadly with her throwing knives, moving nimbly enough to evade the horses and ducking in and out of the action. Down the line, Blaine could spot Borya and Desya standing in their saddles, firing their bows with lethal aim. The twins galloped toward the enemy in a two-man offensive that took Lysander’s soldiers completely by surprise for its boldness. Too late, as the astonished soldiers began to drop to the ground, arrows in their chests, did their companions realize that the twins posed a true threat.
Some of Piran’s cursing was in Merovenian, the native tongue of the mercs, which seemed to rattle his opponent. To Blaine’s knowledge, Piran’s fluency was limited to obscenities, but he could hold his own in at least half a dozen dialects. He switched between languages, keeping up a steady stream of curses.
“It’s not enough for your mages to burn down the Continent!” Piran shouted as he landed a crazed series of sword strikes. “Now you’ve got to sell your swords to muck up what’s left!” The speed of his blows, coupled with the unpredictability of his strikes as rage fueled his fighting, managed to get Piran inside his enemy’s guard, and with a triumphant slash, he opened the soldier’s belly.
“Take your guts and your stinking Meroven shit back across the border!” Piran screamed.
By now, the forefront of the battle had passed them by, and both Blaine and Piran slipped from their mounts, preferring the maneuverability of being on foot. They sent their horses running for the rear lines. Kestel joined them, and Blaine looked across the battlefield, taking advantage of a momentary lull.
Far to one side, he glimpsed the Solveigs’ forces, which appeared to be holding their own. To the other side, where Verner’s son, Birgen, led his father’s troops, it was harder to tell which side was currently winning. One thing Blaine was sure of was that the wind had picked up.
“Temperature’s dropping,” Piran noted.
“Sky isn’t looking good,” Kestel added with a glance upward. Dark-gray clouds had massed, promising snow. “Zaryae said there would be storms.”
One more thing that anchoring the magic might fix, Blaine thought.
“I could do without this,” Piran grumbled. “It’s not like I was homesick for Edgeland.”
Blaine heartily agreed, eyeing the storm clouds warily. The battle was far from over, and an incoming storm would make it all the more miserable—and unpredictable.
“Trouble!” Kestel said, and Blaine turned to see three of Lysander’s soldiers running toward them. The battle had shifted once more, coming back over the same few feet of ground it had just yielded, and Blaine knew they could take and lose the same thin stretch many more times before the day was over, at the cost of many lives.
War of Shadows: Book Three of the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga Page 45