The air screamed again and another salvo struck the gate. The wood and iron barrier exploded into a hail of splinters and the stone of the gatehouse above it collapsed onto the remains. The barrage continued, interspersed with short pauses, as salvo after salvo pounded the fortifications around the gates.
Mar backtracked the sounds to the harbor; the projectiles were too quick to be seen as more than blurs which roiled the smoke curtain as they passed. It was clear that some type of catapult of fantastic power was firing at the Citadel from the gray ships. This seemed evidence enough that the strange vessels were indeed magical. No natural mechanism could hurl a bolt or stone that distance.
One question had been answered but one very important one remained -- who commanded the gray ships?
As far as Mar knew, the entire world was ignorant of magic, save for the few of his own acquaintance: Marihe, Waleck and Telriy wherever they might be, himself now, and the Brotherhood of Phaelle. That there were others who knew of and used magic seemed certain. But it also seemed certain that these others kept themselves well hidden and were few in number, for no secret of such magnitude would have been able to survive a multitude of tongues.
He did not doubt that the Brotherhood would attack Mhajhkaei, or that they were capable of such a venture, but he felt a raw need to have that surmise confirmed.
Reasoning that the invaders’ attention should be fixed to the north, at the Citadel, Mar brought the raft in from the east at speed, low to the rooftops, hoping that the buildings would shield him from view. He shot across an angled street two blocks east of the boulevard, passing barely a dozen manheight above a crew erecting a siege engine. When the buildings on the opposite side of the way flashed beneath, he immediately hurled the raft skyward, the force of the assent crushing him flat to the deck. He got only a single glance at the men below, but this fleeting view was sufficient. Amidst the crowd of maroon and gray laborers had been a score or more cowled in brown.
So, it was true. He had found the Brotherhood, far sooner than he had expected and in far greater strength than he had ever imagined.
Now what?
As he gazed down through the smoke and ash of a great city brought low, he began to perceive something other than crushing defeat. Here, arrayed before him, was his enemy. He had not been compelled, as even his most hopeful imaginings had insisted, to scour the entire world to locate them. Nor had he been made to pursue them for year after frustrating year. Against all odds, they had delivered themselves into his hands. Here, not at last but at first, was his chance to revenge himself.
He felt no especial love or compassion for the Mhajhkaeirii, none of whom had ever done him any kindness or ever even crossed his path as far as he knew, but he hated the Brotherhood. His anger burned as he thought of them now. He intended to hurt them. Again and again and yet again. He would bring them low, break their here so clearly demonstrated power, both over magic and over men. He would send them slithering, crushed and bleeding, back into whatever pit they had emerged from. He had vowed these things to himself. Not in the name of any of Khalar's ridiculous pantheon, but through the sum total of all the strangled anger of his entire life.
This was as good a time as any to begin his revenge.
While flying south, he had found himself burdened with hour after idle hour. The raft did not require his constant, or even frequent, attention. It would continue in whatever direction he had last set for it and the utter emptiness of the sky permitted him to fly for leagues without the need to adjust his course. With no activity to occupy him but dully staring at the horizon, he had fallen naturally into bouts of speculation. He had brooded sadly of Telriy and Waleck, wrapped his mind around the question of the true power of the Phaelle’n, and studied his own abilities to use magic. These thoughts had funneled together to bring him with simple progression into a search for weapons, magical weapons powerful enough to combat the Brotherhood, and he believed that he had discovered at least one means to make war.
The raft itself was certainly a weapon, for it gave him unchallenged control of the high ground. Or, rather, he was fairly certain that this was so. The Brotherhood had thus far revealed no flying craft of their own; surely if they had such they would be employing them now to subdue the city. In any event, his surprise appearance would gain him an advantage in any aerial duel. The forces on the ground, in the absence of windborne opposition, would be at his non-existent mercy.
He had speculated that had he arrows or spears or, better, heavy stones, he could rain them down upon the monks from a great height, hopefully with terrible effect. Though he had had no way to obtain any of these, he believed that he had discovered a substitute ammunition that would serve just as well. His plan would involve the sacrifice of a portion of his raft, but he was convinced that he would have no trouble fashioning other spheres later.
Mar steered eastward, climbing till Mhajhkaei's streets became mere lines, and then let his raft coast with the prevailing north wind. Bending down, he grasped one of the sand spheres at the edge of his raft. The vibrant tones and singing colors trapped within it came immediately to his mind. By now that regular chorus/palette was all too familiar. He erased first the almost green lifting notes, and then, gripping the globe firmly, the oddly snakelike trilling rainbow of attraction. His arm bobbed slightly as the bond relaxed, and he drew the sphere up to eye level, delving the undulating flow of the ether.
It might just work.
TWENTY-SIX
Mar dove down directly out of the freshly afternoon sun, with the bow of the raft tipped nearly vertical. He had hooked his feet through new cleats fastened at the bow edge and slipped his arms up to the elbows through the enlarged original ones, but still felt the earth below reach for him with a frightening strength. Determinedly, he accelerated toward the street. Scarcely ten manheight above the pavement, he released his spheres and wrenched the raft skyward, counting.
One.
Two.
Th…
The blast wave tossed the raft like driftwood on a boisterous sea, flinging it wildly and tearing the breath from Mar’s lungs. Careening, his craft lost balance and flipped, then tumbled. The raft’s gyrations tore one of his feet free and then the other, whipping them out away from the raft. The sand cleats exerted bruising force on his upper arms as he locked his hands together in a desperate attempt to remain attached to the raft. His concentration slipped as he struggled with his physical peril and then failed completely as the raft finally decided to sling through the sky in a corkscrew motion that spun his view in dizzying circles. Uncontrolled and unpowered, the sand raft began to descend rapidly.
Mar closed his eyes to the erratically alternating view of city and sky and focused on the sound-colors that sailed his raft. Immediately he sensed that the raft’s irregular motions had generated a discordantly bass-mauve wave that stymied his own magics. He focused on dampening this wave while strengthening the raft’s normal syncopated baritone yellows. After several tense seconds, the raft yawed left for an instant and then straightened into normal flight. When he snapped his eyes open, he found the onrushing multi-tiered spire of a temple filling his sight. For a single petrified moment, he stared blankly into the jade eyes and ruby fangs of Ptem-ko-ah, God of the Outerworld and steward of all things evil. Banking sharply, he yanked the raft onto its side to dodge the reaching claws of a pack of carved daemon sorcerers, frozen in eternal flight from bas-relief damnation. The underside of the raft sheared several talon-tipped fingers from the frightful denizens and sent the pieces flying into the void. He winced as the fractured stone grated across the sand spheres, but the raft did not appear to take any harm from the collision. Rolling the raft back to level flight, he circled and climbed, gathering his breath and allowing his racing heart to calm. After gaining his bearing on the Citadel, he accelerated back toward the site of his attack.
Mar’s first target had been a just completed trebuchet of apparently mundane nature and the crew of men drawing down its thro
w arm. Erected in a small square west of the Citadel, the trebuchet was clearly within range of the inner wall. Low buildings in the typical Mhajhkaeirii style edged the square, most of them apparently houses. A ransacked inn had occupied one corner, its tables scattered, and next to it a nondescript apartment building. There had been upwards of a full troop of the invading legionaries occupying the area. None recognizable as Mhajhkaeirii had been visible.
Mar expected significant damage, but was unprepared for the extent of the devastation that his missiles had wrought. The inn and many of the houses were severely damaged, with windows and doors blown in and roofs ripped away, and the inn itself was on fire. The apartment had collapsed, the front and sides pealing away to leave denuded floor timbers jutting from the orphaned rear wall. A crater as wide as the square and nearly that deep had been blasted where the trebuchet had sat. Of the invaders, not even a tattered cloak could be discerned.
Mar nodded to himself. As he had suspected, Waleck’s warning to the innkeepers had proven to be more than simple stage dressing. He had needed only to weaken the integrity of the sphere and infuse the raw red screaming energy of the sun into the heart of the sand to make a weapon of terrible power. On impact, as he had guessed, the weakened containment of the spheres ruptured, releasing the stored power catastrophically.
A tardy concern that Mhajhkaeirii civilians might have hidden in the buildings around the square pricked his conscience, tempering his satisfaction, but he callously shrugged it away. Magic made a new manner of war that made no distinction between friend and foe. Grimly, he swept the raft higher to begin selecting his next target.
His immediate priority was the southern side of the Citadel. The bombardment from the gray ships had ceased, but the invading legions had already begun to muster for the final assault. Troops in open square were assembling into three lines along the divided boulevard. The forwardmost had already begun to advance toward the rubble field where the southern gate had previously stood. Each line appeared to be a full legion, a thousand men, broken into close ranks of swordsmen, pikemen, and bowmen, in that order. The boulevard was two hundred paces from curb to median to curb and Mar guessed that there were better than one hundred and fifty legionnaires in each rank. A thin line of Mhajhkaeirii defenders faced them, perhaps no more than five hundred, their flanks anchored on the remains of the outer wall.
Having learned from the near catastrophe of his first attack, Mar cruised across the boulevard at an altitude of fifteen manheight, releasing single spheres from the rear section of his raft at intervals of five breaths. He chose a route of attack that placed him scarcely fifty paces in advance of the front ranks of the Phaelle’n legion. Even with his moderate speed, he only managed to jettison four missiles before he had passed on to the east, and at that the last struck between the ornamental tree row of the pedestrian walk and the buildings on that side. This time, he was sufficiently far away to fully appreciate, rather than merely be overcome by, the tremendous concussion and brilliant flash as each sphere exploded. With the worse than thunder sounds echoing still over the city, he rushed back to survey the damage.
His errant last missile had brought down many of the buildings along the eastern side of the boulevard and had set several adjacent structures ablaze. For a good fifty paces beyond the central area of total destruction, the carefully pruned trees of the ornamental row had been reduced to feathered stumps. His other missiles had gouged huge craters deep into the ground in a linked chain across the boulevard, spraying rubble and yellow earth for a hundred paces and effectively digging a huge trench. From the lip of the craters south to the second legion’s line, bodies lay strewn, many stirring, some not.
Incongruously, the legion’s standard remained upright, its shaft somehow driven into the pavement. Its banners were ripped away, but the shinning brass symbol at its apex, the old Imperial twelve, survived.
Admirably, but unfortunately for Mar’s purpose and in denial of his projections, the other legions remained in their positions, though there appeared to be some agitation among the officers and rankers. Frowning, he considered this. If the discipline of the legionnaires of the Phaelle’n Brotherhood was great enough to hold them in the face of his attacks, unexpected and horrendous as they were, it seemed unlikely that he would achieve the quick victory he hoped for.
Realistically, he had to admit to himself that he did not have the resources required to destroy the entire army besieging Mhajhkaei. He had originally produced only enough sand spheres to form a deck large enough for him to lie prone, and only that because he had thought of the need to rest or sleep on the raft. At the time, there had seemed no pressing need for a larger craft. With no cargo (no weapons, no food, and no boots!) such extravagance had seemed an unjustifiable waste of effort and time. An earlier count had shown that if he preserved half of the raft for an aerial platform and used the remainder for missiles, his maximum possible ammunition had numbered forty-eight. Having already expended six, he now had only forty-two available. Not nearly enough, he was sure, to clear the streets, drive the raiders from the docks, and attack the gray ships. And he dared not retreat to the river or the sea to find suitable sand to form more spheres; the hour or more that that would require would be all that the Brotherhood needed to complete their conquest.
Even had he the resources, the destruction necessary to eliminate the Phaelle’n army, from the experience of his first two attacks, would likely also level a good portion of the city. As much as he hated the Phaelle’n, this would simply make him an accomplice to their plan of destruction. Somehow, he must devise a strategy that would both compel the Brotherhood to retreat from the city and preserve as much of Mhajhkaei as possible.
His first task, though, was to relieve the Citadel. He was certain that he would be able to destroy the two remaining Phaelle’n legions, but that might burn up to a third of his remaining ammunition. A far better course, he thought, would be to apply only enough force to cause them to withdraw.
From histories he had read, he knew that numerically inferior forces had often routed entire opposing armies on bygone battlefields. As he recalled, many of the incidents described had resulted from similar causes: ill-timed failures, prominent displays of outright cowardice, extravagantly superior enemy tactics, or strokes of just plain bad luck. The common element of these martial disasters, at least as far as the common soldiery were concerned, seemed to be fear: fear of the enemy in the rear ranks, fear of incompetent leadership, fear of defeat, or a simple selfish fear of imminent doom. This fear had often been described as a contagion, a gut spinning panic that spread from man to man to whole troop to entire legion. Many of those armies had reportedly been as well trained as the Phaelle’n legions appeared to be, but fear had broken discipline then and he was convinced that sufficient fear would break these legions today. He simply needed to find some way to make them afraid.
Distracted, Mar set the raft to circle above the Citadel and allowed it to descend as he studied the boulevard and the array of the Phaelle’n legions. Presently hearing an odd sound, he glanced over the side to discover that he had inadvertently settled to but a few manheight above the Mhajhkaeirii defenders screening the breach. Incredibly, he realized that the ragged and weary men, many with cloaks in the colors of Mhajhkaei but some in common dress, were cheering. Feeling foolish, he silently cursed his inattention, but it was much too late to attempt to hide now. On a whim, he brought the raft to a stop, leaned over its side, and waved at the dusty faces below. Another cheer greeted his gesture, even louder than the first. Some clambered atop heaps of jumbled stone to wave swords or bang shields at him. Smiling oddly, Mar waved again and coasted southward away from the Mhajhkaeirii.
Perhaps he could simply charge the Phaelle’n line to drive them back?
For lack of better, he seized upon the idea, swinging about to lay his course down the throat of the boulevard. He dropped lower as he crossed the rubble field, until he was barely a double manheight above the broken ston
es. Accelerating, he flashed over the craters, passed above the scattered heads of the surviving legionnaires from the first line, and aimed directly for the center of the Phaelle’n position. He was less than a hundred paces from the second line when he saw a cloud of arrows leap upward from the rear ranks. Heart beating madly in his chest, he desperately pulled the raft into a sharp climb.
As the raft raced for the clouds, he threw a look over his shoulder. The swarm of black dots rose after him, seemed to be gaining for an instant, then slowly fell away, dropping back to the earth.
None of the arrows had come close the raft, but this near disaster struck and rang Mar’s confidence like a bell. The speed and height advantage of his raft seemed to make it practically invulnerable to the normal weapons an earth bound army might bring to bear, but if he foolishly discarded those advantages then he also foolishly discarded that safety. As he should have expected, the Brotherhood was already devising means to combat his aerial attacks. He might have added a new element to warfare, but that did not mean that his enemies would not quickly adapt.
Once again, he lined up on the boulevard, facing south. Another frontal assault was out of the question, but he could still dive straight down at them as he had the first time, much as a hawk or other bird of prey might. If he could discover no other strategy, he would be compelled to barrage the legions below until none survived to menace the Citadel. Regardless of the cost, that would buy him sufficient time to formulate other options.
But as he prepared to make another run over the Phaelle’n lines, the mental picture of a diving hawk gave him pause. He had often perched atop some gable or window ledge in Khalar and watched the fisher hawks swoop screeching at rats and mice fleeing across the rooftops. Most of the rodents, having survived previous encounters, had learned to ignore the piercing scream and never hesitated as they sprinted for their holes, but on occasion a young mouse or inexperienced rat would be startled into a leap that brought it right into the fisher’s talons.
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