by Damien Lake
The two Summer Suns women began bringing the rest into the larger working one by one. Marik could see their energies shifting in odd ways he had never before witnessed. Their auras seemed to be reaching out for each other. Truda had mentioned it would be easiest for them, as the leaders, to stand in the center. He could see why. After several minutes they resembled a wagon wheel, a central hub with numerous spokes branching away.
Marik watched the battle below while the women entered into the next phase. He sensed their efforts although he was unable to see them. Geomancy worked in planes outside the etheric as much as magecraft worked outside the physical realm. At times he could see the energies that geomancy awakened in their sources, but Felda and Truda already possessed the power they required. Together they put it to use, and Marik could do nothing except watch the results.
Watch…and hope. Too many lives rested on him being as clever as Raymond expected him to be.
* * * * *
Dietrik pulled back between Chiksan and Cork. Several Taurs had hit their section of the front line. His rapier was less than useless. He pushed through the rear into the clear and sprinted several dozen feet until he reached Kineta’s unit.
Her men faced the black soldiers, including First Unit’s two archers. He pushed his way to the front until he stood beside her, his light sword lashing out to join the fight.
“If you can spare your bowmen,” he shouted over the din, “our unit has run afoul of the beasts.”
Kineta’s scimitar glanced twice off the elbow-guards on the man she fought before she penetrated the unnaturally tough leather vest. Her sword was unable to score deeper than two inches, far from a certain kill, or even a crippling injury. Still, it forced the man to yell, to clutch the wound and retreat.
She used the brief moment to jerk her head around and scan the frontline. “Wilks, Rivvenge, over there,” she shouted. The two archers followed the direction she pointed with her bloody scimitar, which immediately swung sideways to parry an attack from a new opponent.
Dietrik fought with rapier and dagger both. His position in the frontline constantly shifted when fellows at his shoulder ducked back, nursing injuries, or needed a momentary breather from the nonstop effort. By the third time he rested, regaining his ordinary breathing patterns, he had claimed two sure kills, four others wounded to various degrees.
Through the gory melee, Fraser continuously bellowed commands to move back, to move sideways, to duck low or to leap forward. A traditional battle line would see them overrun within a candlemark despite their superior fighting abilities. They could not afford to be caught in a fight that set sword against sword for longer than a few strokes. Instead they were forced to keep moving nonstop to prevent the Arronaths from pinning them down.
Commander Torrance oversaw the overall battle. When the fighting grew too thick against a certain squad, he sent an order to its lieutenant to move his men accordingly. This would lure the enemy into following to areas where squads with less opposition could contribute aid.
The problem was that with additional Arronaths joining the fight from above, most of the Galemaran squads were quickly taking on more than they could easily handle. Squads were spreading further away from each other. Orders were flying for the fringe units to curve back on the main body lest they become cut off by the enemy. But tightening the ranks also meant the bloody Arronaths were gaining position on their flanks.
After a half-mark Dietrik discovered he had rejoined the Fourth Unit through the constant reshuffling. Chiksan’s spear kept the enemy at bay while Churt reloaded his crossbow behind the Tullainian’s back. Dietrik noted that for the first time. Where had Wyman skulked off to? The lad Churt never chose a partner other than the silent lone wolf. Perhaps Wyman had fallen in the attack…though Dietrik failed to remember seeing him earlier during the pre-battle wait either.
Churt had exhausted his quarrel supply. Only two still protruded from his hip quiver. When he expended those, the boy would be useless. A non-combatant in need of protection.
“Forward,” came Fraser’s shout. “And to the right! Swarm the enemy!”
Dietrik could see what Fraser wanted. Sixth Squad had reeled in a massive catch. Easily a hundred Arronaths with five Taurs causing the most damage. Ninth Squad faced only light opposition at the moment, being a dozen or so black soldiers remaining from a large force the Tenth Squad had helped dismember.
Trees in his peripheral vision made Dietrik twist his head to the right in startlement. The tactic of avoiding fatal blows, of allowing themselves to be pushed aside rather than standing fast, had driven them back over a mile in only a half-mark. Their backs were suddenly to the forest. There could be no further retreat without the trees breaking their lines.
Dietrik gritted his teeth when, looking over the heads of their enemy’s forces, he could see no end in sight. There must be close to two-thousand Arronaths on the plains. A small army twice their number.
Ninth Squad crashed into the enemy force’s southern flanks. Sixteenth Squad hit them at the same time from their north. Dietrik waited in the second line until a spot opened on the front.
He was uncomfortably aware of his five senses while he stood bobbing from one foot to the other. Sweat made his skin itch, his undershirt scratchy where the mail pressed it hard to his flesh. Charnel odors assaulted his nose from the offal underfoot. Breathing through his mouth was worse, tasting the iron taint of carnage across his tongue.
Worst of all was what his ears collected. He had never rhapsodized on battle din as a soothing counterpart to the nature of his soul, as other chaps did both within the Fourth Unit and without. Dietrik always considered it a glimpse of what awaited a sinner in the hells. No words had he ever found to describe it to civilians, no mental picture could he paint to make them understand what it was to stand in the midst of a deathbattle.
Dietrik cast a glance over his shoulder while he waited. Marik’s mountain. He could not see the overlook where the mages worked their mysterious magics.
All I know is mate had better keep his back to a wall. No one is there to watch it for him.
Yes, Marik had a nasty habit of keeping his eyes locked forward. Dietrik had been forced to rescue him several times before this. It made him uneasy that his friend was off on his own, without him there holding the lad’s reins. Because if anyone was ever likely to hare off without proper support, it was Marik Railson. Torrance had been there to keep his eye on Marik during the previous skirmishes. What would happen here, in the first major battle since the Rovasii?
A hole opened. Dietrik stepped into it. Talbot and Sergeant Bindrift fought at his sides.
Dietrik’s opponent shouted nonstop while he lashed at Dietrik with his sword. The alien tongue was far from directed at him, he recognized. This Arronath’s leather vest was gray instead of black, his shoulder displaying odd insignia that must be rank indicators. On the opposite shoulder on which a Galemaran officer would wear them.
So, he had found himself an officer to battle. An enemy leader. Perhaps only of this small squad, or perhaps higher up the ladder than that.
Dietrik attacked with his full speed. Here lay a marvelous opportunity.
The man was distracted because he wanted to yell orders at the same time. He caught Dietrik’s first blow with his sword. When Dietrik swung from the left with his dagger, the Arronath used his protruding elbow guard to keep the weapon from reaching his neck, which was unprotected by the iron collar most black soldiers wore.
Four times in quick succession, Dietrik lashed at his foe. It worked the way he wanted. The last strike made the man lower his sword hastily to protect his legs. Dietrik rounded fast, whipping his rapier up in an arc to rip out the man’s throat while his sword and elbow were held low.
Except Talbot stumbled into his arm before the blow could make contact. Talbot cursed, hardly noticing Dietrik, whom he forced sideways two steps. He returned to fighting his own enemy while Dietrik narrowly deflected a retaliatory strike from t
he officer.
Dietrik gritted his teeth and set to his fastest series of attacks. His rapier flew with a hummingbird’s darting speed, striking armor often as not. The officer stopped his calling in order to concentrate.
After a moment, Dietrik thought he had the man. He had pushed the officer back several paces. His enemy’s sword, held in both hands, pointed away at an awkward angle. Dietrik moved in for the kill.
Fiery pain burned through his left arm. Flesh being sliced apart.
He looked down to see the officer’s sword tip jabbed into his arm. Dietrik had no clue how the man had pulled off a piece of work like that. A tug on the steel sent pain flashing up through his entire arm.
Dietrik fought through the pain. He refused to allow it to dull his reactions, to hamper his movement. When he thrust his rapier through the officer’s throat, the expression in the eyes behind the helmet was as surprised as his own must have been.
He slid back into the second line. The wound to his arm meant his dagger hand would be ineffective. It needed to be bound tightly to ensure it became no worse than it already was.
While he fumbled in his pocket for the bandage roll experienced fighters always carried, he glanced around, hoping to see Fraser. The lieutenant ought to know that the enemy squad’s leader had been felled. Lacking a head, they might be vulnerable enough to completely destroy.
When he finally pulled the bandage from his pocket, he found Fraser a hundred feet away, pointing at the Arronaths and shouting orders. Before Dietrik could take a single step, a brown pot fell from the sky.
It landed on a Third Unit man’s head and shattered. The mercenary had no time to react. Pottery shards exploded in every direction. Oil spilled in a torrent over his body as he fell, unconscious from the blow. Dietrik caught sight of a single glowing ember hovering in the air before the oil burst into flames.
Dietrik, along with many fellow Crimson Kings, scanned the skies wildly when dozens of firepots rained on them. Far up, much too far to reach by arrow, the oversized dragonflies Marik had warned them of hovered. They could see that swarms of them had emerged from the Citadel to add their strength to the war.
* * * * *
“Excellent. Set the squadrons in steady rotation. Continue to press the assault. We have already pushed them against the trees.”
Xenos gazed down on the table, pleased at what he saw. The wire rim an inch above the surface had been imbued with power, enabling a large-scale scrye that reflected the lands beneath the Citadel.
Their fighting strength on the ground increased with every lift that transited the space between. Combatants were practically hurled off the lifts to enable the platforms to return before the Citadel proceeded too far ahead that the lift attendants were unable to reach the guiding ropes.
Xenos estimated an approximate one-thousand defenders had been waiting to greet his arrival. It was a shame. Nearly enough to pluck at his heartstrings. How Galemar’s strength had weakened since his departure years ago.
Indeed, it was a shame the kingdom had grown so depleted. Were its crown army as large as it once had been, he could have sent down all seven-thousand soldiers, the hundred-eleven Taurs in the holding pens, unfettered every surviving wyverfly…what a glorious bloodbath a battle such as that would have been!
He could sense the bereft life energies that soaked into the earth below. It was a rich harvest already, though how much sweeter it would have been to—
A massive shudder shook the room.
Conversation ceased at once. Even during the worse tempests over the deep sea, the command room remained steady as the stone from which the Citadel had been carved.
“What was that?” Xenos demanded harshly. “Explain!”
“I…I don’t know!” The reply came in several voices.
“Have we been attacked?” Xenos barked at the defense officer. His only duty was to monitor the battle for any attempts at magical attack against the fortress. Not that any such attack would succeed. It had been attempted many times before, only to fail miserably, the stone repelling the spells entirely.
The geomancer put his hands to the stone blocks protruding from the wall. He closed his eyes, sensing the stone throughout the Citadel. “I doubt we’ve been attacked. None of the protections have reacted to any such thing.”
“Am I to understand—”
A second shudder, more violent than the first, cut off his words. His eyes narrowed and he personally reached deep into the stone, searching for the cause. He could sense a tremendous strain. Only in one place had he ever felt such incalculable tension; when he had stood upon an earth fault where the stone miles down ground against itself before a large tremor was released.
Xenos peered through the window into the central chamber. He could see dozens of geomancers scurrying like rats frantic to escape a sinking merchant vessel. They were running to alternate posts while those who were currently on duty stood stock still at their interfaces, their tight expressions agitated as they dove mentally into the pulsating jewel above their heads.
He refrained from questions or demands. None in the room could gift him with answers that were beyond his god-granted knowledge. Earthsense was a talent granted to the high-priests of the Earth God’s followers along with other specialized geomancy abilities.
The stasis controllers were panicking. That could only mean the Citadel was crossing out of its intended frozen stasis without their explicit manipulations as the cause.
Why? Or specifically, how? No coincidence that such a phenomenon took place at the moment they engaged an enemy in open warfare. How could the Galemarans have possibly done anything to effect the Citadel, let alone redefine the stasis parameters, which could only be altered through the Elemental Jewel?
Most intriguing. This bore looking into.
“You,” he ordered the same man as before. He took his hands off the square blocks to look at Xenos. “Run to the stasis controllers and bring back word of what goes on. Be quick, man!”
Quick he chose to be, with Xenos’ cold eye on him. He ran to the door, reaching a hand for the knob when the door flew open before he could touch it. The door hit him hard in the face and broke his nose with a burst of blood.
“General!” The woman who entered was pudgy, wheezing harshly from her upward run. She wore the earth-brown robes trimmed in yellow of a geomancer who was a qualified stasis controller. “I just….we, I mean…we can’t…”
“Speak,” Xenos ordered her. A third tremble made the command room staff wobble on their feet.
The woman clutched at the table to keep her balance. Her hands grabbed the wire rim, her fingers plunging through the image of Colonel Mendell’s strike force being shredded by crossbows.
“General, sir…it’s the Citadel! It’s trying to rise!”
* * * * *
“Most…intriguing. I might reach so distant as to proclaim ingenuity.”
“What’s so bloody clever?” Rail threw back, annoyance girding his entire being. He suffered from a renewed attack. His hands supported his upper body as he leaned on his knees in the shadows extending from a pine copse. Only the closest scrutiny on an accurate map would tell if they were still in Tullainia or had crossed into Galemar.
“Witness the power of unfettered thought! Unfamiliar with the depredations of the Arronath mobile fortress, unaware of its renown invincibility, unhampered by preconceptions accepting defeat as inevitable long prior to the proven outcome, the strategists of your homeland have been left no recourse other than to study the strength of their enemy from the minutia.”
Rail shook his head, his hair dangling in sweat-drenched locks. “One of these days you’ll learn how to speak like a proper human.”
“My speech is clear.”
“To others of your ilk, perhaps. It makes as much sense to the rest of us as hitching a chicken to a plow.”
The Red Man raised one elegant hand. “In the tongue of the streetwise man, then. The defenders, pitted against a threat hithert
o unheard of, have been forced to the meticulous effort of learning all there exists to comprehend. In that proper course, they have understood what so many others have failed to. That the gift bestowed by Humus is wholly dependant upon air temperature at specific altitudes.”
“Air…it’s what?” Rail forced his body to straighten until he stood erect. He followed the gesturing gloved finger. “Is that supposed to explain a gods damned thing? You said a jewel or the like was the heart of these flaming bastards!”
“Indeed. The crystallized essence of the domain over which Humus commands control. It alters the stone properties until portions are lighter than the surrounding air, whilst others remain heavier.”
“I am not so feeble yet that my memory has rotted. What difference does it make how it’s done? It’s there, and no one has managed to make it not there when the flying cur came calling on their doorstep!”
“It matters in the planning. Many truths are unfamiliar to those men learned on the streets. Such a truth is the activities of air undergoing temperature alteration. The ways through which air expands, contracts, changes in nature depending on temperature…it is relevant to keeping the Citadel stationary.”
“Heat rises. That’s no mystery to anyone who’s been in charge of tending the campfire for the evening. But what’s that have to do with it?”
“Simply that the equations must be rigidly controlled. What is to happen when the air upon which rests the base thickens from the cool, or thins from the warm?”
Rail frowned. “The air becomes lighter the hotter it gets, right? Then I suppose that if the stone is still lighter than air, it will start rising until it finds a point were it matches the surrounding air again and can rest easy.”
“That is incorrect. If the stone were in truth lighter than air in its normality, then it would commence to sink beneath air which was lighter still due to its rising temperature. Yet such a rigid definition of the weight of the earthen element would leave it at the mercy of the natural daily cycle. Rising and falling with the vagaries of the changing day. Therefore, the definitions in the stone are set thusly; the parameters in the foot of the Citadel are to be constantly lighter than whatever air it touches no matter its density, while the crown is to be always heavy enough to weight the airborne structure enough to keep it at a constant altitude.”