Something changed in the tone of the marauders’ chanting, and all three of them glanced in that direction to make sure they hadn’t begun their final push.
“Nathaliey’s spell won’t last long,” Markal said. “Watch for the gold fire on your blades, Captain, and make the most of it.”
Given the length of the marauders’ hesitation, Markal expected them to approach warily, pushing against the resistance of the stone circle, but they suddenly broke into a charge. If the enemy hadn’t been running uphill, Markal, Nathaliey, and Wolfram might have been caught out, and as it was, they barely had time to fall back to join the paladins before the first three marauders forced their way between two stones and entered the stone circle.
They found the Blackshields braced for combat. Wolfram, Marissa, and three others attacked with swords, while a second group slammed into them with a shield wall to pin them against the stones. More paladins waited, ready to pounce on any who escaped or broke through.
Any other enemy would have crumpled under the ferocious defenses, but the three marauders held their ground. Each man faced multiple attackers, and paladin swords broke through to batter helms and slash arms and shoulders, but the marauders held just long enough for more of their comrades to come pouring between the two stones.
Markal and Nathaliey had withdrawn several paces until they were safely positioned behind the swords and shields of their new allies, but maintained a view of the fighting. Markal was watching for the blue glow and anguished faces of wights.
“Have your spell ready,” he said. “The wights are coming.”
And yet for a moment, he dared hope it wouldn’t be necessary. The stone circle was resisting the intruders, and Wolfram was overwhelming those few who’d broken through. One marauder was down already, two more faltering, and most of the enemy company was blocked outside the circle, unable to force their way in to join the fight.
And then a cloaked figure burst through and gave a shout of triumph. The enemy captain. He raised his sword, and a dark aura surrounded him. Others came streaming in after like a current through a breached dam.
Wolfram shouted for a counterattack, and his reserves hurled themselves into the battle with shouts and clashes of steel on steel. Within seconds, the center of the stone ring became an all-out battle. Markal and Nathaliey fell back to keep from being caught up in it.
“Where are the wights?” she said.
Markal scanned the battlefield. No sign of their ghostly light, but it wouldn’t be long. “Keep ready—they’re out there.”
“Markal, I’m not sure I can . . . you said you had something else? What is it?”
“Follow me,” he said.
He led her to one of the promising stones he’d identified while she searched for the hermit. They put their hands against the cool surface.
“I felt this one before,” she said, “but I don’t know what it is or how to call it.”
“It’s a well of power.”
“Oh,” she said. Then, more fervently, “Oh! Like the master’s orb. But it’s corked up down there. How would you break it free? It’s too strong . . .”
“It had to be strong to keep the power bottled all this time. I can’t free it entirely, but look, there’s a trickle that’s come out already. Do you feel it? If we can get it out, we’ll have more than enough power to finish this fight—fire, shaking earth, a rain of stone—whatever we need.”
She closed her eyes. “A thread, just a . . . I can’t get to it. Grab it and help me pull it out.”
Markal bent his will into the stone and felt for the tip of the thing. He could brush the edge of it, but couldn’t quite get his will so deep into that ancient magic as to seize hold of it, not with the sounds of paladins and marauders fighting and dying only feet away. A man screamed, and Markal looked up and saw four ghostly blue lights flowing into the stone circle.
The wights were old, twisted, decaying souls—a near-formless mass of grasping limbs—who must have been languishing among the ruins of the hill country for generations, hiding to avoid the Harvester and his hounds. Their long, rotting faces were barely human, and their eyes burned with anguish and hatred as a pair of marauders drove them forward with lashes that glowed with a sickly sorcerous green light.
The wights fell on a paladin and dragged him down screaming. The screams continued as they enveloped him in a blue-white light. More light poured into his mouth and nostrils and ears, and he threw aside his sword and shield, writhing and clawing at his face as if trying to tear it off.
“Markal!” Nathaliey cried. “Pull it out. I almost have it—help me!”
He turned his attention back to the standing stone, and reached deep into the rock to tease out the thread of power. But it was too deep; he couldn’t get hold of it. And then Nathaliey caught hold of it and gave a tug, and he lent her his will. The magical power began to emerge, but it resisted, fighting every inch, like a viper being pulled from a hole by its tail.
Meanwhile, more screams as the wights found another victim. Wolfram shouted, tried to regroup his forces to hold their ground, but the enemy was driving the paladins across the circle and pushing some of them out the other side.
Nathaliey had a good hold of the thread now, and gave it a final yank. A flood of magic was there, ready to boil out and correct any deficiencies of the two magic wielders, but just before she had it out, the thread snapped, and the bulk of it recoiled, burying itself deeper than ever. She only had the tip of the thing, and it was weak, tenuous. It would have to be enough.
“The spell,” he said.
“I . . . I can’t remember. I had it, but now it’s gone.”
“Quickly!”
“No, you do it. Markal, for god’s sake!”
The power pulled out of the stone hung in the air, ready to dissolve if they didn’t use it quickly. He drew it to him, and it warmed his hands and forearms as it flooded into him. It was the same warmth he got from drawing blood, but there was no pain with it, no resulting weakness.
He knew the spell, and couldn’t understand why Nathaliey had forgotten it. The words were simple to remember and command, and he’d used it effectively in the past, feeding the spell to acolytes when wights broke through the outer gates and penetrated Memnet’s gardens. Now it was his turn.
Minis mortui incantare arma perdere.
Nathaliey added her power to what they’d drawn from the rock, and it all poured away from him as he turned to face the battle. Marauders had pushed the Blackshields to the far end of the stone circle and squeezed several of them out. Wolfram’s forces had not broken ranks, but were faltering.
It was a conscious assault by the enemy, Markal recognized, to force the paladins from the circle, away from this place of power, and push them into the darkness of the woods beyond, where they could be slaughtered.
Several bodies lay strewn across the center of the circle already, most of them paladins. Another man lay in the campfire, crying in pain as wights held him in the flames. When several of his companions tried to come to his aid, marauders forced them back.
Markal’s spell rolled across the stone circle. He held his breath until it hit, then sagged in relief when a golden light flickered along the blades of the defenders. It would only last moments; the paladins had better make the most of it.
“The wights,” Nathaliey cried. “Attack the wights.”
Wolfram lifted his blade skyward and roared a command to his men. “Shield wall, forward!”
Shields slammed into place until the front ranks formed an armored turtle. The paladins surged as one and drove a punishing wedge into the marauders. They must have been conserving strength, for they drove marauders backward.
Watching the battle play out, Markal recognized that all the marauders had to do was hold their ground long enough for the spell to wither and die, but the enemy commander either didn’t understand or couldn’t resist the powerful shield wall. They parted to let the wights through just as the wights finished off th
eir victim in the fire and came slithering to meet the Blackshields in battle.
Wolfram’s forces fell upon the ghostly figures with their gleaming swords. Wights screamed, light faded and dissolved, and the dead creatures departed the battlefield as wisps of smoke, one after the other until there was only one left, and it was fighting desperately to flee.
“Where is the red sword?” Nathaliey asked.
Somehow, Markal had forgotten about Soultrup in the chaos of battle, and he scanned the circle for the weapon. Wolfram didn’t have it, and it wasn’t lying on the ground, forgotten by the combatants, either. Could a marauder have it already? Not that he could see or feel.
The enemy commander had fallen back as the Blackshields surrounded the final wight. The commander stood apart from his men, weapon in hand, and looked about, searching the shadows. The intent behind that hooded gaze was clear: the marauder captain was hunting for the source of magic that had destroyed the wights.
Markal was suddenly aware that they stood alone, with the enemy between them and the paladins, and he stood perfectly still, willing the shadows to swallow them into the standing stone at their backs, with Nathaliey motionless beside him. It was no good. The marauder turned toward them and pointed with his sword.
“There they are! The wizards.” To Markal’s surprise, it was a woman’s voice behind the snarled command.
Several other marauders disengaged from the main fight and joined their commander in rushing at Markal and Nathaliey.
Chapter Fourteen
Wolfram thrust his sword through the chest of the final wight even as the gold fire on the edge of his weapon began to fade. The wight dissolved with a howl of rage and pain, and a smoky blue light fled from the stone circle. His men shouted and pushed forward to renew their attack on the marauders.
The enemy captain shouted a command in turn, and several marauders tried to fight clear. Wolfram hoped that they’d won, that the enemy was disengaging to abandon the battlefield. Marauders were relentless fighters until they broke from a fight, and then they were vulnerable like any other opponent. If the Blackshields turned the fight into a rout, they’d destroy this company of marauders as a coherent fighting force.
But the enemy captain wasn’t sounding the retreat so much as redirecting the fight. He stood off a pace from his companions, gesturing with his sword at something on the far side of the circle. The shadows were deeper there, and Wolfram wanted to look away, as if his attention were called elsewhere. It was magic telling him not to look, and even without seeing the two wizards, he knew they must have drawn the marauder’s attention and were desperately trying to hide.
Markal and Nathaliey had just saved Wolfram’s life and the lives of all of his men by endowing their weapons with power, and he swore he wouldn’t let the enemy have them. He shouted at Marissa, fighting nearby, and she in turn got Gregory’s attention. Gregory swept his massive sword like a scythe among the wheat, clearing a path to the other two.
Two other paladins followed, and they caught the rear elements of the charging marauders and forced them into battle before they could attack the wizards, now visible with their backs pressed against the stone. He stabbed one marauder in the back, and Marissa brought her sword from over her shoulder and nearly severed the man’s head from his shoulders to finish the task. Gregory leaped into the fray with a roar, and at last the enemy captain himself turned around, forced to fight.
It was five against five, a furious knot of swirling swords, battering shields, thrusts, and parries. Another marauder went down, and Wolfram shouted, thinking they had won. Then Marissa’s sword shattered under a tremendous blow from the enemy captain, and Wolfram and Gregory had to fight to her side to allow her to retreat.
Once Marissa was clear, Wolfram and Gregory brought the captain under their combined assault. They had him now. Another blow or two and the enemy would be dead. But their opponent fought like a possessed demon, unbelievably quick and seemingly tireless. A jab and cut, and Gregory took a slash to his thigh. He staggered and nearly fell, and his opponent came forward with the killing blow.
Wolfram threw himself between Gregory and the marauder captain. He lifted his shield as the enemy sword came crashing down, and it rocked under the blow.
“Get back!” he told Gregory.
The big knight staggered away from the fight, bleeding from his thigh, pursued by another marauder. Wolfram had no chance to see if Gregory had escaped before he was fending off a vicious follow-up swing from the enemy commander. He parried blow after blow, absorbing them with sword and shield, but finally took a glancing strike on the right shoulder. The chain beneath his tunic held, but he rocked on his heels from the strength of it, and his defenses nearly fell at a fatal moment. He got his shield up just in time.
Somehow he fought off the attack and briefly returned to the offensive, but the enemy was too strong; Wolfram couldn’t get past the man’s defenses. He could only hope that Marissa or one of the others joined him in time, but they were locked in their own life-and-death struggles.
“Beast of hell,” he swore between clenched teeth. “The Harvester take you.”
“The Dark Gatherer will not have me,” the enemy commander said. It was a woman, not a man—between the darkness and the hood of her cloak, he had somehow missed it all this time. “And neither will it have you. Because tonight you will join me in service of the dark wizard . . . wolf cub.”
And now he heard it. Heard her voice, heard her old nickname for him like poison on the tongue. Wolfram stared in horror as the enemy threw back her hood to reveal his sister. Or, rather, a cruel mockery of who she had once been.
Bronwyn’s face was gray, her eyes dead. Her mouth turned up in a sneer that made a cruel parody of the strong, proud woman she had been. Yet everything else about her appearance was the same, right down to her brutal fighting style. He had witnessed it a dozen times, but had never faced her devastating skill himself until now.
“The Brothers save me,” he whispered.
“Not tonight, Wolfram. Tonight, nothing will save you.”
All those weeks crossing the mountains, seeing her soul still burning with life every time he closed his eyes. The certainty he’d felt when denying Markal’s assertion that Bronwyn was dead, even though the wizard swore he’d seen her fall.
All of his beliefs now bled away into horror. Here Bronwyn was, facing him, neither dead nor alive, but something else entirely. Something terrible.
Markal hadn’t been lying, and he hadn’t been deceived. The wizard really had seen her go down under the Veyrian attack, and perhaps she had truly died. And then, as the warmth of life was expiring from Bronwyn’s lips, the sorcerer must have taken her body, bound her soul to the dead flesh, and reanimated her. Some terrible sorcery had her leading the enemies she’d once fought. She was trying to kill her former companions, her own brother.
Bronwyn renewed the attack. Paladins cried out that Wolfram was in trouble and attempted to fight their way to his side, but marauders were regrouping as well, and they beat back all attempts to reach his side.
“Where is the sword, Brother? Give it to me. Give it to me now. I will have it, and I will have your soul, too. You will ride beside me, and together we will destroy these lesser beings and press them to the service of my master.”
Wolfram was tiring, and couldn’t answer. One of the standing stones loomed at his back, and Bronwyn pinned him against it, stabbing, thrusting, and battering. His shield shivered under blow after blow. His arms felt like dead weights; he could barely raise his shield one more time as she raised her sword for what was to be a killing blow.
A brilliant white light flared to his left. Another light flared to his right. Voices rose, chanting in some strange tongue. Bronwyn snarled and whirled about, facing first one light, then the other. The wizards had taken up positions, flanking her, and were throwing magic onto the battlefield.
And as the stone circle was illuminated, Wolfram saw his victory materialize. M
en and women lay dead across the battlefield, stretching from one side of the circle to the other. The number of fallen on each side was roughly equal, but at least ten marauders had fallen, which gave him the clear advantage. Only a small knot of enemies remained, and paladins crowded them from every side. And now, the wizards had apparently raised more magic from the stone circle.
The Blackshields were going to win, and Bronwyn knew it, too. Dismay and rage crossed her face, now more pale than gray under the light flaring from the wizards’ hands.
“I will have you,” she snarled, and then she burst past him, leaving the circle and entering the darkness.
The rest of the marauders fell back, cursing and shouting. They swept their cloaks around them as they moved, and a black energy radiated outward as they rushed past, some sort of magic to aid their escape. Some clenched wounds, and one ugly brute held a sword in his right hand while tucking the bloody stump of his left hand against his body. He snarled a curse at Wolfram as he fought his way clear. Others swore they would drink the paladins’ blood as they vanished into the darkness. And then they were gone.
The light flickered and faded, and Wolfram hesitated rather than call for his exhausted, wounded forces to pursue. He was certain that final bit of taunting as the marauders fell back had been to draw his forces out of the protective stone circle. Instead, he raised his black shield and shouted victory. A ragged cheer rose from the survivors.
#
It was a bloody aftermath. Wolfram ordered the fallen marauders beheaded to be sure they wouldn’t rise again later, then set about numbering his wounded and dead. Nine paladins killed out of forty-seven, with two others so close to death they wouldn’t survive the night. Eight others had suffered wounds sufficient to render them helpless.
As for the wizards, Markal collapsed in exhaustion in the center of the circle, looking nearly corpse-like himself, but the woman tracked Wolfram down a few minutes later as he attended to Sir Gregory. The wounded paladin lay on a blanket, arm draped over his face. They’d removed his trousers, leaving him in his braies, and he shivered with cold and shock from the grisly cut across his upper thigh. Wolfram doused the wound with wine, and Gregory grimaced but didn’t cry out.
The Red Sword- The Complete Trilogy Page 41