by Paul Collins
Jelindel, Daretor, Zimak and the other commanders patrolled the walls, helping on the various battle fronts.
‘Isn’t it time for your special gift from the afterlife to be used?’ asked Zimak as they stood assessing the resting enemy army.
‘I’m saving it for when it’s needed,’ said Jelindel dismissively.
‘Gah, I’d have thought it was needed yesterday.’
‘The Wardragon wishes to remake the legend of the mailshirts, I think,’ said Jelindel, changing the subject.
Daretor nodded. ‘My thoughts also. It sends the army against us, which is pushed back again and again. The Wardragon then comes forth and breaches our walls, lays waste to our buildings. A personal glorious victory. The Wardragon’s people then know that it can defeat armies and cities that they cannot.’
‘Won’t you at least consider using this gift, whatever it is?’ asked Zimak, undeterred.
‘Who said it’s a gift, Zimak? Who said that? Is a sword a gift? A sword has two edges. It can cut both ways.’ Jelindel glared at him, then her look softened. ‘I … fear what I have at my command,’ she admitted finally.
‘But the spirit globes brought you back,’ Zimak pointed out. ‘Would they have done that if you weren’t meant to use this – whatever it is?’
Jelindel remained stubbornly silent and did not meet his eyes.
Daretor put his arm around Jelindel’s shoulders. The gesture was awkward but well meant, and Jelindel took some comfort in it. He said, ‘The Wardragon’s spy network is undoubtedly thorough, but with luck it will think Jelindel is dead. Perhaps it is best she hold off as long as possible. The element of surprise is always the best hand to play, after all.’
‘Hie, Daretor, I hate it when you make sense,’ Zimak grumbled but Jelindel shot him a grateful look.
So far, the losses were few in D’loom, the walls had withstood the initial charges. Because the invaders had moved so fast they had not brought any siege engines to bear, so none of the city’s defences could be battered down. Jelindel had no sooner voiced this thought than the bells tolled a new warning, ringing dolefully throughout the city. Peering into the distance, the three could just make out dark specks in the sky.
A ragged cheer erupted from the invading army.
‘They come.’ All at once Jelindel felt tired.
Soon a score of the flying vessels could be clearly discerned. For a moment Daretor hoped it was Taggar coming to their rescue, but then the vessels began firing their thundercasts at the city. A dozen buildings erupted in flame with the first salvo, as if their intention was to demoralise the defenders – in which they were largely successful – before the weapons were turned upon the walls. Several ragged breaches were blasted in the ancient stone. The attacking army surged forward again. Daretor squeezed Jelindel’s shoulder and took his leave to rejoin the cavalry.
Despair, and anger, spread through the city. Jelindel bit her lip. What should she do? Was this the last extremity, when all should be gambled, or merely the first round?
She hurried along the battlements to the nearest breach. Already attackers were merged in a blanket of hand-to-hand fighting with the city’s warriors, while within the walls a great force of cavalry was being readied, with Daretor among the officers. They would soon ride out and harry the attackers from the outside, trying to take the pressure off the breaches.
‘Are things bad enough yet?’ cried Zimak, who was suddenly beside Jelindel.
‘No,’ said Jelindel, pointing to a dark cloud that was approaching. ‘They are worse.’
‘Farvenu,’ spat Zimak, though like everyone else he had been expecting them.
Two hundred Farvenu flew towards the city, yet still Jelindel was undecided. ‘Your fate is to save magic, or destroy it. The future lies on a knife’s edge …’
Damn Cimone and her warning. And damn those who dwelt in the Place of the Dead! Why was this her job? Why did she have to save magic?
As dangerous as the Farvenu were, Jelindel knew their greatest weapon was fear. The fear they would instil in the defenders. Farvenu were daemons, straight out of the nightmares of childhood.
‘Move well back from me, Zimak,’ Jelindel ordered.
She fell to her knees, closed her eyes, and concentrated, chanting, gesturing, marshalling her powers to assemble what she had never used before: the Spell of Rupture. It was ordinary, if powerful, magic – and a way to avoid the knife’s edge, which she feared. Maybe they could win this day without her being forced to do what she loathed.
As the dark cloud of daemons neared and the noise of bat-like wings beating the air was heard above the sounds of battle, Jelindel carefully wove the spell – then just as the Farvenu folded their wings and dropped out of the sky like hideous birds of prey, she opened her arms wide and spoke the final word of command.
A great ball of blue lightning erupted from her fingertips and hurtled up towards the Farvenu. Some, but not many, were lucky enough to be out of its path. The ball of light engulfed the cloud of horrors, leaping from body to body, causing their wings to stay locked together, so that they fell out of the sky, smashing into the ground. Some few, low to begin with, survived the impact, but these were quickly cut down by the defenders, though they took many with them.
A horde of near-invincible horrors is liable to make any army run, but the Farvenu that remained did not inspire the same fear, though the few survivors descended and fought fiercely. Soon these too were isolated and overwhelmed, and a significant part of the Wardragon’s effort was decimated.
Jelindel slumped on the battlement, momentarily spent. Like a vulture, a surviving Farvenu closed in on her. She saw the grinning daemon face and knew that it realised she was defenceless. It swooped with a cry of triumph just as two women miraculously loomed over Jelindel, two women who looked very much like Lady Forturian and Madame Dion. The two witches from Jelindel’s past were mere images, as insubstantial as smoke, but they confused the Farvenu as it came in for the kill. Its claws slashed at them, but met no more than air.
It turned to swoop again.
Suddenly two far more substantial legs straddled Jelindel’s slumped form, and a real sword swung to meet the Farvenu’s face as it flew down. The sheer impact snapped the blade, but cleaved the nightmare’s head almost in two, and it flew on to crash heavily inside the walls.
Lukor offered his hand to Jelindel.
‘Who were those women?’ he asked.
‘Pardon?’ panted Jelindel.
‘Wraith-like they were, with no substance. They swirled around me and cried out that you were in danger. They led me here in the nick of time.’
‘Old friends who did not forget,’ she said.
‘Well, that’s the end of my favourite sword,’ Lukor said, holding up the broken blade.
‘Take one from the dead,’ said Jelindel. ‘They have no need of theirs.’
‘Come with me, Countess. This place is too exposed.’ With that Lukor helped her to shelter, snatching a sword from a dead hand as he walked. He stood by her as she drank thirstily from his water skin.
‘I must get back to the battle,’ she said presently.
‘So soon, m’lady? Will you not rest?’ She looked frail and tired to him, but he did not say so directly.
‘Spells are like sprinting, Lukor. They take it out of you, but you recover quickly enough when you need to.’
‘As you wish, m’lady.’
Lukor led her back to the battlement, but to a spot less vulnerable and with an overhang that should protect her from aerial attack. The sight that greeted them as they emerged onto the wall was one of spreading devastation. Entire sections of D’loom lay in ruin and the wall had been breached in so many places that attackers were now fighting inside the city. At least the flying vessels were no longer firing their thundercasts, since too many of their own force were now intermingled with the allies. The weapons were good for large scale destruction, but useless for fine-tuned killing.
‘More of th
e blasted things come!’ shouted Lukor, pointing into the distance.
Jelindel stared, shading her eyes. She felt her despair deepen. Each new attack forced her closer to the moment when she must decide. It was as if she stood on the edge of a chasm with a pack of snarling wolves bounding toward her.
The ominous specks were still high in the sky. ‘Why do they want more flying craft when the city is already breached?’ Lukor groaned.
But Jelindel’s heart lurched. ‘Those are not more ships, Lukor, they are dragons!’ And she threw her arms about the captain and hugged him, much to his red-faced discomfort.
It would be fair to say that few of those fighting in and around the city saw the dragons, and if they had their response might have been more ambivalent than Jelindel’s. Dragons were still, after all, dragons, and hardly predictable.
On the other hand, it was quickly clear that the enemy was not pleased by this sudden turn of events. The aerial ships broke off from their attack of the city, bringing a ragged cheer of relief from the defenders, and wheeled to meet the dragons. Thundercasts were energy weapons. They fired no bolt, arrow, spear, or leaded slug, but sought to undo the atomic structure of whatever they hit. Unlike the mailshirt itself, they employed nothing but cold science, and cold science alone was no real match for the ancient and inexplicable magic of the dragons, as Chiron the God-king had discovered five thousand years before.
As the dragons swooped to attack, the searing energies of the thundercasts smote them head on, flaring into fireballs, and the cheers of the few defenders turned to a lament. Yet one after the other, the dragons punched through the fiery maelstroms and fell upon the airships, ripping them apart with their claws, or blasting them with their dragon’s breath. Several airships exploded in midair and fell in smoking pieces into the midst of their own forces, killing many.
A great roar of triumph, of defiance, blasted out from D’loom and its battlements, and many of those who attacked felt the tide of battle had turned against them.
Clearly, the flying wagons were in trouble. Half the fleet had been destroyed by the first attack of the dragons. The others moved cannily now, and kept their distance. Then, inexplicably, the dragons’ fiery breath, liquid jets of fire, failed.
‘Fa’red!’ Jelindel’s heart pounded. ‘Impossible of course, but he’s somehow behind this.’ She knew, however, that to hinder the dragons even temporarily would have extended Fa’red’s power.
Far away on the plateau, an ally of the dragons was approaching that even the dragons could never have imagined. The holy hermit was sitting on a creaking cart pulled by a very nervous mule. While the mule kept looking up in trepidation at the terrible shapes in the sky that whirled and swooped, and cast torrents of fire at each other, the hermit seemed quite unperturbed. The mule attempted to run back the way it had come, but the hermit guided the animal with a firm hand on the reins, and a stout stick in the other hand.
‘Oh no you don’t, our destiny is not in that direction,’ the hermit monk told the mule.
The words meant nothing to the mule, but the smack of the stick across its rump gave it some incentive to keep going. A huge dragon, mortally wounded, spiralled out of the sky and slammed into the ground ahead in a cloud of dust, smoke, and dispersing magical energies. The mule reared in terror, and repeated whacks from the stick could not persuade it to go any further.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the monk. ‘Do you want to live forever?’
Had the mule understood the question and been able to reply, it might well have replied, ‘No, but another twenty years would go down quite well.’
‘Oh very well, this is probably close enough.’ The monk sighed, then he alighted from the cart and cut the mule from its harnesses.
The mule tried to bolt for the mountains, but the monk tethered it to the stump of a long-dead tree. Then he uncovered from the wagon a large box of gleaming metal about the size of a household trunk. He pressed a bright green stud, and lights began to gleam and wink. He began typing over four rows of a keyboard.
‘I may have designed those infernal spacecraft, but I still have a conscience,’ he told the mule. ‘They call it a kill switch, and that’s what this thing is – well, a jamming signal, really. A special switch to shut down the weapons that the designer – that’s me – knows about, but the owner does not. Oh yes, I have spent years in the wilderness, trying to atone for my sins.’
The mule gazed at him balefully. Finally, it nudged the man.
‘What sins are those, you ask?’ the monk asked, steadying himself. ‘Designing weapons and spacecraft. Well, I have finally decided that I cannot allow my creations to be used for injustice any longer.’
The monk pressed a red stud. Nothing seemed to happen as far as the mule was concerned, but those in the spacecraft soon noticed that in the middle of their battle with the dragons their thundercasts had ceased to function.
Some fled, while others were ravaged by the dragons and erupted in spectacular explosions. With that, the threat to the city from the skies faltered.
Almost mesmerised, Jelindel watched as a flying machine spiralled toward the ground.
Aboard that crippled spacecraft a desperate captain noticed that the jamming effect on his craft was coming from the ground. All that the scanner could detect was a cart, an elderly man, and a frantically struggling mule, but it was what the captain needed to make the last decision of his life. He had just enough response in the steering to aim his plummeting craft at the cart.
‘Well they were bound to be a bit cross about this,’ said the hermit to the mule as the burning mass of metal and machine plunged out of the sky at them.
The hermit, Hawtarnas by name, spared a brief moment to unleash the mule and watch it run for its life before the spacecraft obliterated him and everything within a three-hundred-yard radius.
Seconds later, as the fireball rose into the sky, the handful of surviving spacecraft suddenly had the use of their thundercasts restored. They began to fight back again, but by now their numbers were too few. At the very end, it became a matter of which side was losing its airborne warriors at a greater rate, and once it became clear that the dragons were having far fewer losses, the resolve of the crews in the spacecraft cracked. They broke ranks and scattered, making themselves even more vulnerable to the dragons. No longer easy targets to numerous machines, the dragons turned their deadly anger on the enemy below.
Below, on the battlefield, the two sides seemed equally matched.
Daretor spurred his horse forward and cut down an attacker to either side of him. Slashing backwards as he caught a hostile movement from the corner of his eye, he was rewarded with an agonised cry from another who had tried to sneak up behind him. Turning, he saw that he had cut down one of Fa’red’s men. He forced his horse into the thickest part of the melee, and continued to stab, slash, and sometimes just kick.
Daretor had assigned his cavalry regiment to protect one of the larger breaches in the walls, so they were fighting alone, outside the city. He ducked as a spear hurtled towards him, then wheeled his horse and trampled a green-skinned creature he had never seen before. As he did so a shadow passed over him and he glanced up just in time to see a dragon swoop down on an escaping airship, crumpling it on impact. The craft plunged into the ranks of the besieging army, while the dragon flapped away, apparently uninjured. Daretor roared his war-cry.
But something caught Daretor behind the ear with a terrific impact and sent him tumbling from his mount. He rolled on hitting the ground and even before he could see his attacker he had scrambled to his feet and whirled about to face whatever was coming after him. A Farvenu flung two of Fa’red’s men aside and strode towards him. Daretor smiled grimly as he confronted the creature. It stared back in surprise. Rarely had it come upon an enemy who did not cringe at the sight of it. Then it came on.
Daretor’s earlier encounters with the creatures had taught him something of their approach to fighting. The Farvenu attacked with blurr
ing speed, slashing for the throat while its wings battered at its target in an instinctive effort to distract it. If speed and cunning were all that was needed, Daretor would have fallen dead at the daemon’s feet. Instead, expecting just such an attack, he had dived in under the slashing arms, rolled to his feet and thrust his sword into the creature’s gut, then snap-rolled aside, all in one fluid lightning movement. As the creature crashed to the ground, Daretor drove his blade into its heart. It gasped and went still, though the eyes fixed on Daretor in a red glare of disbelief.
‘Who are you?’ it croaked.
‘I am called Daretor.’
The Farvenu gave a series of croaks that may have been laughter.
‘You are a worthy fighter. May you live out this day,’ the Farvenu said. ‘I shall speak for you in the House of Reckoning.’
Daretor slew four more attackers before he managed to find and mount another horse. He then rejoined his men at the breach. As they watched, a dragon swooped low, raking the ranks of the enemy. Faced with odds like these, the attackers outside the city turned and fled, trampling those commanders who stood in their way.
‘Daretor!’ cried a voice from the sky. Daretor looked up and saw a waving figure astride the neck of the mightiest of all the dragons. It was Osric riding S’cressling. Daretor waved back.
‘I will see you later,’ yelled Osric. ‘Work to do!’
Daretor signalled that he understood.
Mopping up the enemy still within the city walls took some hours of intensive fighting, but by sunset the city was again secure and at rest. The dragons annihilated the fleet of blockading enemy ships by clawing and ramming them while the citizens of D’loom cheered them on.