I’m using that pile as a benchmark anyway. Here they go, she reported, and a moment later another flock of bright orange gourds took flight.
Only these were different. They had the same honey-alcohol mixture as the others, but mixed with the viscous brew was an alchemical kick: phosphorus. And other stuff. But mostly phosphorous.
We had bought, borrowed, or stole every speck of the stuff in every alchemist’s shop in Vorone and Tudry, ground it to powder, and mixed it in. That’s not easy to do – you have to work with it under water because it ignites in the presence of oxygen, or work with it in a magical sphere filled with helium, if you’re feeling exotic. We used water, because it was free and easy. But if it breathes gaseous oxygen, it ignites.
Which is precisely why we were using it.
When these pumpkins crashed dead center, about six rows back, into the huge pile of brush the gurvani forward command had employed as a makeshift redoubt, their sticky goo exploded in a shower that covered scores of gurvani. When the lumps of phosphorus started to dry it burst into flame as it came into contact with air. And when the flames began, the alcohol and the sugar began to burn. And so did the dried-out brush, pine logs thick with pitch, and assorted branches and treetops. And then the gurvani pelts began to burn.
Another incendiary wave crashed into them a moment later, and panic was starting to set in. Dozens of tiny fires broke out around their forward command. Now that there was live flame, the showers of sticky alcohol turned into cascades of burning death. One after another the goblins were frantically – and fruitlessly – beating their pelts to put out the fires.
At this point the blazes were mere nuisances, more potentially dangerous than actually harmful. But as the mighty siege engines we’d built flung more combustibles against that pile, the smaller blazes coming together began to ignite the dried wood in earnest. And the dried grass and leaves.
All right, the last wave, I commanded Carmella as the very last rays of the sun faded from the sky to be replaced by a new glow closer at hand. The final volley of hollow vegetables not only had alcohol and honey and phosphorus, it carried what little store of naphtha we were able to create, as well as clay pots full of pitch. The result was spectacular as more accelerants turned the central blaze into an inferno.
I waited until I could feel heat on my face from two hundred yards away before I started.
“All right gentlemen, you can begin,” I informed my fellow warmagi. They immediately put their weapons away and began building large spheres of force, as we had for the Battle of Tudry. Only this time, instead of removing the gasses to create a vacuum, my High Magi were filtering the gasses to permit only oxygen to fill their thaumaturgic envelopes. Well, everyone but Tyndal, who was too inexperienced at it and therefore was tasked with protecting us as they concentrated on their oxygen spheres.
That was going to take a few minutes to fill. In the meantime, I closed my eyes and cast my consciousness into the center of the fire in front of me. Ordinarily such a bold move would have been detected and countered by the shamans, but since they were trying to extinguish a hundred little fires and one increasingly large one, they weren’t paying attention. So I was able to send my focus to the very center of the blaze, the very hottest part, and cast my mind around.
I was looking for a fire elemental. Fire is the easiest element to invoke and the hardest to control, but the best way to control it was to harness the power of an elemental. Problem was, you couldn’t just light a hearth fire and call one forth. Fire elementals require a very complex and sophisticated amount of combustion to arise – after all, Fire is the element of change and transformation.
By its very nature, Fire represents the energy used for matter to transform from one state to another, and then to finally be converted to expressed energy. Therefore you needed a very hot or very large fire to provide the complexity necessary to coax a mere plasma into sentience, to transform a simple chemical reaction into living flame.
A fire, say, fueled by alcohol and sugar and naphtha – and goblin fur – would do. My consciousness descended into the very hottest point in the fire and I started churning the combustion magically. Soon I felt the first stirrings of a pattern that could be convinced to be aware of itself. I took a moment to appreciate it and acknowledge its potential, a natural thing of beauty that only a handful of people in the world have ever witnessed. A deep breath. Then I summoned a tremendous amount of power from my stone and fueled the spark at the heart of the fire, encouraging it into sentience and awareness. Kind of like waking a sleeping child.
But my child was there, and he was strong. The fuel we had planted there was dry, and it burned hot with the added energy from our missiles. The ephemeral entity within the flame organized itself, with a little mental help and direction. I used the classic Vorean Inferno invocation, visualizing the elegantly complex summoning sigil that would give the potential elemental the existential framework it needed to mature and activating it at the proper time.
What happened next dwarfed the other times I’ve used elemental magic. Earth and water elementals, and even air elementals, don’t require a lot of energy once they’re summoned. You can find earth, air and water everywhere, but fire is much different The sigil I used gave the elemental some guidance about how to be, in a far more sophisticated way than the other elementals.
But once I did wrap the potential infernal entity around my sigil, and activated the bond, the results were . . . dramatic.
“Dear Ishi preserve us,” Tyndal whispered in awe behind me. The other magi were either gawking openly or murmuring cautious enthusiasm. The infantry around us were openly cowed, their faces bright in the glow of the pillar of fire in the north.
“I have it,” I said through clenched teeth, as I felt the creature come awakem, surging with power. I raised my right fist, calling on it to rise majestically over the battlefield. I recalled the illusion of the fire demon I’d conjured in Minden Hall, so long ago – at the beginning of the spring. Tonight was the autumnal equinox, and I felt a decade had passed since I’d raised that specter. Compared to that unaided spell, the real thing before us mocked my earlier effort.
Of course the goblins were impressed.
Carmella, I need more, I called psionically. Keep it going steady, as long as you can.
We’ll do what we can, she promised. We have enough for twenty more salvos. The forward batteries have a little less. Say, forty minutes worth? If we manage it carefully?
Just do what you can.
I felt the surge of power as the elemental began to grow, burning hotter with every passing moment. I encouraged it to stretch, to reach out in every direction across the field, where thousands of goblins were writhing in pain or screaming in terror but all were burning, burning, burning. The skies above were turning black with the soot and smoke and stench of combusting wood and singed hair and burnt meat, and the screams and squeals of the foe filled our ears.
“Now, gentleman,” I ordered, quietly. “Pass the word. Just keep it up as long as you can, and remind the infantry to take cover.” I didn’t wait to hear the order acknowledged, but I could feel the massive bubbles of pure oxygen my comrades had built float toward my fiery offspring. In the mean time, I kept the elemental striking out in every direction, slapping one cluster of gurvani with one tendril of living flame while my mind led one on the opposite side toward another.
They were fleeing and screaming and burning, but they were dying, too, and that was the important thing. And as bad as it was, it was about to get a lot worse for them.
“Here comes the defense,” murmured Mavone nearby through clenched teeth. He was right – with magesight I could see a small cluster of what had to be shamans gathering strength to the east of the elemental blaze. Maybe four of them, out of the seven or eight who had gathered in the van before the bombardment. Each of them was trying to counter the furious blaze individually. I commanded the elemental to strike, and a jet of plasma erupted and swept half of
them away, burning them to cinders where they stood. The others managed to survive, but their spellcraft didn’t.
About that time the first of the bubbles arrived near the pillar of fire, and at the mage’s command it ceased to keep its cargo pent up. About half a ton of compressed, pure oxygen was dumped into my elemental’s maw, propelling it outward in every direction as it feasted. Thousands more gurvani were caught in the blaze, their fur bursting into flame and sending them to a painful death.
Worse – from their perspective – was the enormous airless pocket around the fire which robbed their lungs of air or even worse, singed them from the inside. Hundreds of goblins died every second from asphyxiation. And as the globes of air arrived, another ring of fleeing gurvani would be caught up in the blaze.
It was a heady, godlike feeling, being in the “head” of that elemental. I watched as it sought to burn, burn, burn anything it could, and felt the primal hunger to consume that no living being can truly appreciate. Each bubble was like a fresh goad to combust everything in reach. It was intriguing, in a way, to see things from its perspective. To a fire elemental, there is no gurvani, no human, no sides in a war. There isn’t even the living and the dead. There is only fuel and oxygen, the burnt and the un-burnt, until all is consumed.
As anthropomorphic chemical reactions go, it was pretty impressive.
“Dear gods,” Mavone whispered, as the fourth and fifth bubbles burst near the same time, sending a huge wall of flame rolling out over the heads of the fleeing goblins. “You’re killing thousands of them! They’re running toward our lines in terror! They’re on fire, Min! Dear gods, they’re all burning . . .”
I don’t know how long it went after that. I got caught up in the experience and was indulging in as much wanton damage as possible, when Carmella contacted me again to inform me her last salvo of fuel was outgoing.
I sighed, and had the elemental flail about as far as it could reach with the last of its fuel and fury. It was draining – I fought the diminution of intensity as long as I could, but in the end there just wasn’t enough fuel to sustain the spell. I called for the last two air bubbles, and ended the spell with a dramatic and devastating explosion.
“That ought to convince them that we’re not playing around,” muttered Master Cormaran as he witnessed the dying blaze consume a last few victims.
“I think the goblins are quite convinced,” agreed Tyndal.
“It wasn’t the goblins to whom I was referring,” corrected the old warmagi. “A spell like this, regardless of the outcome of the battle, is going to be legendary. You just killed seven or eight thousand goblins and wounded thrice that number, with a little help. What lord in what castle could defend against such mighty sorceries?”
“Hey!” I protested weakly, reluctantly saying goodbye to the elemental and allowing it to slip free of the pattern sigil. I sank to my knees and gazed into the twilight to the north, where the imprint of that tower of flame was still floating behind my eyelids. Now it was just a vast field of perfectly ordinary flame. “That spell was hard as hell!”
“You think Lenguin knows that?” scoffed Mavone. “He doesn’t care how hard it was. It was possible. He knows that thing could have consumed all of Vorone Castle in half an hour. That’s going to make an impression.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I conceded. “Right now, I don’t care.” Tyndal pressed a wineskin to my lips which I thirstily drank down, and then a water skin for which I was even more grateful. I was dazed, the lingering memory of magic still clinging to my brain.
“It’ll teach those gods-damned Censors, too,” muttered Tyndal to himself in a dark tone. I raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment. I was getting more and more eager to hear the tale of their escape from my hometown.
“It suffices that it crippled their best troops,” I declared, after a moment’s rest. “Right now they are unorganized, panicked and terrorized. Their reserves are stranded above where they can only watch helplessly. There’s never going to be a better time to hit them.”
As if by my command, a dozen warhorns sounded around me, and every infantryman came to attention and readied his swords, shields, and spears. The bowmen formed up into ranks and prepared a volley.
“Are you really feeling up to this, Master?” asked Tyndal, concerned, as he helped me to my feet. I stretched my back and arms, making sure my armor wasn’t catching.
“Oh, I’m fine,” I lied to him, as the next horn blew, and everyone prepared to march forward into the shattered lines of the foe. I slapped my helmet on quickly, and my apprentice-cum-squire handed me my new mageblade. “As a matter of fact,” I said, grinning despite myself, “I’m kind of looking forward to it.”
* * *
The infantry marched steadfastly to where the goblin line had once began and paused just long enough for the archers to loose a volley at the survivors. They shouldn’t have wasted the arrows. Those who yet lived in that blackened, smoking field would be dead soon enough. Everyone else had retreated north, toward the escarpment and the ruined causeway. Someone on the other side was beginning to try to organize a defense, but they didn’t seem to be having much luck.
We stomped over smoking corpses and wounded goblins, their black pelts singed away to reveal charred flesh. Our men were pretty good about granting a merciful death, if they weren’t too preoccupied in the gloom. Night was falling, and the bizarre shadows concealed plenty of living foe.
Eventually the vanguard of the center’s infantry hit a hastily-dug shallow trench that proved to be the first organized resistance. About three thousand goblin infantry had tried to dig in, and had done so far back enough to avoid the worst of the incendiary attack. And despite their terror, there was still plenty of fight left in them.
Our front lines halted long enough to allow the middle ranks to catch up, and they put together a shield wall facing the trench. Then to the sound of our war drums we marched forward, archers picking off what goblins they could see in the gloom ahead. A brief spear duel followed, as we came nearer, and then the order to charge was given. The infantry, the Orphans at the vanguard, plowed over the goblin line four ranks deep with a vicious war-cry, carving a bloody furrow we were only too happy to follow through.
Past the trench, the resistance was fleeting – and sometimes fleeing. We encountered pockets of ten or twenty, and a like number of our warriors would square off and finish them while the next rank moved forward to take their place.
“Damn it!” I heard an infantryman curse. “Can’t see a gods-damned thing in this!”
“Magelights!” I ordered, realizing the penalty we were fighting under. Gurvani are nocturnal. A little light would be a distraction to them and light our way. In moments a dozen floating spheres of illumination hovered overhead while the spearmen skillfully took apart the poorly-formed shield walls of the goblins. Oh, it wasn’t all victory – there were plenty of stubborn defenders who took a toll on our ranks. But for fifteen minutes, the field was ours.
Then their reserves got committed. We were on the wrong end of an infantry charge, and suddenly there were little black bodies everywhere trying to kill us. I blooded my new mageblade immediately, and slew two more before the first gurvan hit the ground.
The new sword was lighter and better balanced than Slasher had been. It felt like I could maneuver it as easily as pointing a finger, and for a few frenetic moments I experimented with various strikes, the gurvani obligingly supplying plenty of targets. The edge parted flesh like fresh fallen snow, and went through bone like it wasn’t there. The point sliced with the barest pressure.
I must have been grinning when the second wave hit, because Mavone was in front of me at one point, a warwand in one hand and a dagger in the other, backing away from seven or eight goblins who were advancing.
“A little help?” he asked, dispatching one with a wand and delivering a wicked slash across another’s throat. “Or are you too busy being entertained?”
I chuckled and pointed t
he mageblade at the mass of goblins he faced. A whispered command gave the sword mental permission to loose a spell, and four of the furry little bastards cried and fell to the ground as if every bone in their body had broken at once – which is what the spell did.
“Impressive,” Mavone shrugged. “But inelegant. And you missed one.” He threw his dagger expertly through the air and landed it in the throat of the last goblin, then summoned it back to his hand magically. “See, that was elegant.”
“Asshole,” I said, rolling my eyes. About that time another wave hit, and we got swept apart.
At some point Tyndal and I were fighting back to back with the closest friendly faces at least a dozen paces away. We were piling up bodies pretty quickly, but there always seemed to be more, and they didn’t lack enthusiasm.
“Don’t you wish you’d stayed with Alya and my parents now?” I huffed as I took a little furry hand off at the wrist with a flick of my blade.
“Are you joking?” he gasped back as he impaled not one but two goblins on his blade at once. “I’ve been looking forward to this all summer!”
“Well, Happy Equinox, then,” I muttered, and decapitated my next victim before he got close enough to use his short, jagged blade on me. “Duck!”
I’d seen a shape looming in the shadows over his shoulder, and the lad was smart enough to listen to me. I almost wasn’t, and missed the tree trunk that had lashed out at us.
“Troll!” yelped Tyndal hysterically as he turned to face the beast. He stared up at it in wonder – twelve feet tall, it looked like an overweight gurvan whose face had been stretched out by hooks in all directions. Most of what I knew about trolls fell under the category of legend, but I did know that they could die. I also knew they didn’t do so easily.
The troll’s mighty swing buried the head of his club in the dirt at Tyndal’s feet, but the tree trunk whipped into the air as quickly as if had been a slender willow stave. The brute howled angrily and tossed his weapon from hand to hand while goblins swarmed up in his wake.
The Spellmonger Series: Book 02 - Warmage Page 71