Legend

by Robert J. Crane

  Cyrus looked down at his mother, but she was gone. She’d aged again in the casting of the spell and become a crone in his arms. All life had fled her lips, and her eyes were white and misted over, staring into the dark skies above, lost in the endless distance there. He closed them gently, and handed her body down to the awestruck dwarves, who assembled a detail of six and carried her off wordlessly behind the lines, without any instruction from him.

  The storm of her spell had not yet settled, the surprise obvious among their enemies. Cyrus looked upon them, and his rage had come into full blossom, his fury now looking for a place to loose itself like the bolt his mother had just cast.

  “You wanted a war,” Cyrus said, and he slid both Praelior and Ferocis from their scabbards in the silence that had followed, and he pointed them both toward the gap in the lines, the chance for victory his mother had opened for them. “I’ll give you a war.”

  And he charged, not caring whether the army followed him or not.

  90.

  Alaric

  It took Jena and I some time to make our way to the top of the Citadel. Even after we broke free of the crowd by running over their heads as they branched off and started to fill the rooms in the center of the tower, we still had some considerable distance to ascend, wending our way around and around, through the massive free-form room below the tower, stopping off for a quick check in the cabinet quarters to ensure they were empty, and finally all the way up to Chavoron’s tower room.

  All was exactly as we’d left it, down to Chavoron’s body still lying where he’d fallen in the fight with the Drettanden. Jena ignored it, hurriedly closing all the doors and bolting them shut while I stood there uselessly, staring down at Chavoron’s limp face.

  “It shouldn’t have happened like this,” I said to his dull, unfocused eyes. There was no reply.

  Jena slammed and bolted the last door, and then came right to the middle of the tower quarters. I tore my gaze away from Chavoron as she sat down, her movements slow and ungainly, awkwardly folding her legs under her robes. I watched her blankly, in the back of my mind pondering what to do with Chavoron’s body.

  Jena sat there, eyes closed, and I watched the magic start to flow through her fingers. It twisted and seemed to waft like steam as it flowed toward the walls, where it disappeared into the stone. The threads of her spell grew stronger as she seemed to get going, momentum making the casting more powerful. The light grew, brighter and brighter, turning from faint green to an intense emerald, the color blazing bright and shooting forth like a flood released from a dammed river.

  I stood there and watched as she wove the threads of the magic that was to save our lives. Watched, and held my weapon, and pondered uneasily whether this threat we feared would come, and waited for something to happen.

  I didn’t have to wait long.

  91.

  Cyrus

  Two more gods before Bellarum—and his stupid general, Agora, too, Cyrus thought as he charged into the gap between the lines of the God of War’s army. He flew above the scorched black earth, the scar where his mother had made her final mark upon the fight, and the forces of Bellarum began to pour into the gap. Armored horseman, their faces covered by monstrous triangular masks, rode at him hard. Cyrus kept low, not bothering to evade them. He held the twin swords in his hand and watched them surge in to oppose him. Watched them, and gloried in it.

  The first to come at him found his neck matched against Praelior; the next, coming from the opposite direction, encountered Ferocis at his own, the blade singing into the space between the gorget and breastplate with flawless accuracy. They may have been servants created by the God of War, but they were only marginally faster than a man, and not nearly quick enough to evade a skilled soldier with not one but two godly weapons in hand.

  They came in a crush, horsemen on either side, and the war boars moving in, too, running over their own people to come at him. Armored forms were strapped to either side of the beasts’ mammoth spines, their long spears at the ready to strike at whatever foe came their way.

  Cyrus’s blades moved with stunning alacrity, finding target after target, his accuracy flawless. Armored helms flew through the air, heads occasionally dipping out of the helms as they went airborne. He never caught a look at the faces of the things beneath those helms, nor did he care to. They could have been something guilt-inducing for all he knew, like the faces of children, given the hell that Bellarum had subjected him to thus far.

  The lane cut before him by his mother’s spell was narrowed to almost nothing, the infantry in Bellarum’s army having surged into the gap. He could see a thin line yet unfilled, not even wide enough for a man to squeeze through sideways. He took a hard breath, blowing it out in a snort through his nose as he brought Praelior forward into the neck of a horseman and cast the fire spell through its tip.

  Flames blossomed out of the joints of the horseman’s armor, and Cyrus was rewarded with a shriek that cut off within a second. The horseman slumped and fell from his armored mount, metal rattling as he bounced off another charging animal that was repulsed by the force of the impact. Cyrus watched the chain-reaction of instability follow, too many horses and too many men trying to charge in close quarters, but he only kept his eye on it for a few seconds before turning his attention back to the hard work of removing heads and clearing the road before him.

  “This isn’t quite how you planned it, is it?” Longwell shouted the question from off to his left, and Cyrus glanced over to see the dragoon plant the tip of Amnis into a horseman’s neck and then vault through the air over the man, coming down and then whipping the carcass forward, wiping out three charging horsemen by ripping the horses’ legs from beneath them. He watched them crash to the muddied dirt without care as Longwell stopped the charge of another by stabbing his lance through a horse’s armor and then pushing the beast slightly to the side. It came crashing down and unseated three more riders.

  “I didn’t plan much of anything for this,” Cyrus said, throwing out his hand and loosing a force blast. He concentrated, shaping the spell, letting it bloom wide, fed by his fury, and was rewarded when it spread outward in an arc twenty feet wide and grew, doubling every twenty feet it traveled. By the time it died a hundred feet away, he’d left a wide swath of fallen horsemen writhing in their armor, collapsed and trapped with one another like a pile of refuse.

  A harsh blast of flame landed upon the men Cyrus had just unseated, bursting like a droplet of water to cover those nearby with an inferno of heat. He looked to his side to see Ryin with Torris held aloft, bringing down another flame spell upon the struggling victims. “You may not have planned it, but this is a bloody good improvisation.”

  Cyrus turned, catching sight of a cluster of infantrymen climbing over their fellows toward him, four-legged beasts that had reminded him earlier of centaurs all done up in plate. He readied himself for their attack, but they stopped some twenty feet away, a glare of purple racing through them, their eyes glowing with the spell-magic. They stayed that way for only a moment before turning on one another, burying their swords in each others’ throats and in the gaps near their bellies, a savage burst of betrayal unfolding in the middle of Bellarum’s army.

  Cyrus caught a glimpse of J’anda, with Rasnareke, twisting it a little ways behind him. The enchanter stepped back to allow a horseman to charge past him, but brought the staff around with staggering force and unseated the rider with a blow that made Cyrus cringe from the impact. He could hear bones breaking even across the burgeoning melee. The rider disappeared under the field of chaos Cyrus had sown in his wake, but he knew without doubt that the rider would not rise again.

  A war boar came hurtling toward Cyrus, riders pointing their spears all toward him. He saw them coming some distance away and considered moving to the side, letting them charge past, ripping their spears out of their hands and shoving them back into their faces, but he received no chance to do so. The war boar was slammed by something hard from the
side as it crossed the battle toward Cyrus. It lost balance and toppled, rolling over its riders and coming to rest with its armor askew, hooves sticking straight up in the air, and a bevy of infantry crushed beneath its roll.

  “Boar inferior to savanna cat!” Zarnn shouted, crashing his way through the lines. He smashed into a charging horseman, sending him flying against two horsemen behind him and making a mess of all three, legs broken and flailing as they tried to right themselves in a screaming sea of whinnies. Zarnn kicked another horseman’s mount in the belly as it rode past and sent it flying some twenty feet in the air to smash into a pegasus that was sweeping down toward the fight.

  Terian burst even with Cyrus just then, catching a charging horseman on the edge of his axe and flinging him from his mount with a scream of pain. “You’re getting ahead of the army here, you know.” He sounded mildly annoyed.

  “I lead from the front,” Cyrus said, sweeping his blade around and finding another crack in the armor of an infantryman with four arms that had slipped through to challenge him. He placed the tip of Ferocis in the gap between gauntlet and vambrace, and then cast another flame spell, listening to the sizzle of flesh that emerged before the scream burst out of the helm like boiling water from a kettle.

  “Well, you’ve led us right into the middle of Bellarum’s army and left most of ours behind,” Terian said. “Also, Rotan’s army of rock people is working its way over, as is Virixia’s, and those guests we invited haven’t shown up yet.”

  “Like I didn’t notice,” Cyrus said crossly, kicking a horse in the front shoulder as it charged him. The animal was knocked back onto its hind legs and then collapsed onto its back, still kicking wildly. He heard the rider take the impact but didn’t feel the need to smile, grimly or otherwise.

  “You still think they’re going to show?” Terian asked.

  “One can hope,” Cyrus said, bringing Praelior around and slamming it home into the neck of a fully-armored centaur, finding the base of the gorget and once more separating a head from its body. “But I’m not planning on it.”

  “I thought you didn’t plan any of this!” Terian shouted back as he countered the attack of two horseman by jumping high, relying on his Falcon’s Essence spell to get him above their heads. He made it just in time to counter by ramming his axe into the spine of one of them, sending him toppling into the other, dragging his still-living fellow off his horse in the middle of the melee. Cyrus lost track of them both when another round of riders came sweeping into the chaos.

  “I said I didn’t plan much,” Cyrus said, loosing another force blast at the legs of a war boar charging past him. He watched the beast’s legs break under the power of the spell, and then crash into a bevy of infantrymen, bowling them over and killing at least half. Blood ran slick on his blades, and the sweat was trickling down his back. “Just enough to overcome the specific obstacles I thought we’d be facing.”

  “What was your plan for overcoming that?!” Terian pointed to their left, where Rotan’s golems were making their way through the melee in the middle, crushing Bellarum’s infantry without care as they came for Cyrus. He could see them fixated on him, eyes glowing in rocky sockets. They reminded him slightly of Fortin, a characterization he immediately dismissed.

  “I’m sure we’ll deal with it somehow,” Cyrus said, turning his attention to a four-armed attacker who nearly caught him by surprise. He blocked one, two, then three sword attacks before casting an ice spell right into his attacker’s faceplate, icing it closed. When the creature staggered back, clawing at his sealed facemask, Cyrus planted a kick in his gut that bent him over, then brought Ferocis down on the back of his neck and ended that fight.

  “How?” Terian shouted at him, jockeying for his attention again. Cyrus looked past him and saw Longwell spearing another horse. His lance passed through it, ripping out the other side, and then plunged into the horse next to it. He tore his weapon free and leapt up again, using his own Falcon’s Essence spell to escape the fray for a moment before coming back down again to plunge his spear into the face of a centaur coming at him. The spear caught the creature in the jaw and sent him sliding into a pile of armored bodies that was accumulating nearby.

  Cyrus gave another glance to the advancing golems. They were probably only fifty feet away now, the largest of them half that height, stony and sized like a titan. Others were smaller, more like the height of trolls. None of them looked particularly easy to best, and Cyrus chewed his lip for a second while decapitating a sprite that had wandered too close to him, sending the tiny body rocketing to the ground in pieces, its flight halted permanently.

  A wash of water came rushing down to Cyrus’s left like a wave from the Torrid Sea. Easily twenty feet tall, it issued forth in a howling crescendo of water turned loose, nature’s fury washing away all that stood before it. It rolled across the horsemen and infantry that remained then slammed into the golems, the force of the water winnowing away the dirt and stone. When it had passed, only the tallest golems still remained, and they were atrophied, their limbs pathetically thin. With half their mass washed away by the flood and what remained turned to rocky mud that could not hold its shape, by magic or otherwise, they collapsed in upon themselves.

  “Something like that, I think,” Cyrus said, nodding at Mendicant, who stood some twenty feet above the battle, directing the spell as it rolled forward, unstoppable. The goblin was safely back a ways, protected by the onrushing line of Burnt Offerings, now surging forward into the space that Medicant had cleared.

  “Oh, come on, you couldn’t have predicted he could do that!” Terian shouted, suddenly without a foe now that the ranks on this side of the battle had thinned somewhat. A fae flew at him, wings bright as a rainbow and he speared it on the tip of his axe, flinching at the velocity of the thing as it came at him. “Damn.”

  “Here come the bigger ones!” Longwell shouted, and Cyrus saw he had spoken true. Pegasi and riders were coming through from the right now, and Cyrus braced himself. They were coming in a rush, furious, enormous, and they would sweep down uncontested—

  An earsplitting shriek followed by a roar issued forth from behind Cyrus, but he did not dare turn his head. He had his answer to its origin a moment later as a shadow flew over him, large enough to cover the ground in darkness for a full second as scaled wings flapped above him, the wind they produced causing him to flinch down from the force for a second—

  Ehrgraz the dragon was in the vanguard of his army, and he swept through and struck, eight pegasi dying in a flash of claws and teeth. Cyrus watched the other dragons follow behind, slashing their way through the armies of Virixia as drakes and wyverns clashed with fae and sprites, sending little bodies plummeting to the earth all around like debris from some battle of giants going on overhead.

  “And there’s our latecomers,” Cyrus said, almost to himself, as he swept the head from a centaur who had stopped, stunned, to gape at the dragons sweeping in from above.

  “You invited the dragons?!” Vaste’s shout reached Cyrus from somewhere far behind him. “The dragons, Cyrus? Really?”

  Cyrus plunged Ferocis into the back of a four-armed infantryman’s neck, dropping him instantly. “They had a grudge against the gods, I figured they might want to settle it!” he shouted over his shoulder. He looked back to see Vaste slap a horse with the tip of Letum right in the throat, and the beast died right there, faltering and falling, dropping its rider, whom Vaste dispatched by whipping his staff around and slamming it into the man’s midsection just as he was about to land. It altered his direction radically, sending him flying some thirty feet into the air where he slammed into a passing dragon’s claws.

  Pieces of armor and flesh rained back down as Vaste strode toward Cyrus, ignoring the detritus landing all around him. “You could have said something!” Vaste pointed Letum at Cyrus accusingly.

  “I suspected Bellarum could hear anything said in northern Arkaria,” Cyrus said, shrugging as he threw an elbow and stopped the w
ild charge of an infantryman. He kicked out and broke the man’s leg, sending him to his face in the mud.

  “No wonder you kept so quiet about everything,” Vaste said.

  “Well, that and drama,” Cyrus said with a quicksilver smirk. He threw out the tip of Ferocis and it caught a centaur right in the eyehole. He cast force blast with a quick thought and heard the creature’s skull disintegrate, the spell bottled up in its helm until it launched off his body like a rocket, showering all around it with a geyser of ichor.

  Vaste’s black robes were splattered with wetness, and the troll pointed Letum at him again crossly. “Gross. This is all your fault.”

  “I didn’t start it,” Cyrus said, eyeing the wreckage of the washed-away army to his left. He saw Mendicant advancing across the field, hurling lightning bolts after a golem only a little bigger than a man. They were striking their target furiously, darting from his hammer, his hands, and even the sky above. Cyrus could see the face of his target, and knew by the scar that it was Rotan. Every time a lightning bolt hit, the God of Earth faltered, his flesh turned glassy. He was retreating, legs dragging, barely working, and Mendicant was scurrying after him, peppering him with attacks.

  “Are we about to see—” Vaste started, but a particularly strong bolt came arcing out of the heavens just then, enveloping the retreating deity. It pulsed with light, maintaining its bolt for several seconds, and when it dissipated, the figure of Rotan stood frozen in the middle of the watery field.

  Mendicant reached the immobilized figure just then, halting his advance before the glassy statue of the God of Earth. He spoke loudly, and his words echoed so that Cyrus could hear them. “THIS IS FOR THE NOTHING YOU’VE DONE FOR US!” And he brought down Terrenus, the Hammer of Earth, on his god.

  The strike was true, and Cyrus watched the deity shatter like a dropped crystal goblet. A spray of dusty glass caught the hidden rays of the sun, powder-white, and then fell to the ground with the shattered pieces of the God of Earth.