by K. J. Coble
Strayden didn’t exactly enter the much-feared berserk frenzy of Vothan—in fact, he knew true berserks were as dangerous to friend as foe. But battle joy sang in his veins, a weird fearlessness, when the waiting was done and the shock had passed and there was only his blade and some bastard on the other side. Life shrank to a hard, steel point, all talk and illusion blazing away in slow moments that would mean glory or a screaming fall to the Corpse Cave.
A lance had wedged in Durrak’s shield. Strayden hacked at it, split the shaft at its midpoint. The savran wielding it wobbled for a moment, released it, and went for a hand axe tucked into his belt. Howling, Strayden shouldered into the man’s horse, caused the beast to rear and half-wheel, exposed the rider’s armored thigh. Strayden launched into a two-handed chop that blasted into the leg with a crackle of shattering bone, even as the edge, itself, couldn’t pierce the thigh guard. The savran slid, screaming from the saddle and Strayden fell upon him with howls, hacking through upraised hands and metal.
Something crashed into Strayden’s shoulder, caught, and twisted him halfway around. The motion brought him nearly face-to-face with a blue-black bearded face and maniac eyes blazing out from a silver-chased helm. This savran had been unhorsed and come at Strayden on foot, thrusting the short spear that had snared in his chainmail.
That handsome face exploded in blood and flecks of shattered teeth as Durrak’s axe crunched into it. The savran dropped to his knees only to have Aelren’s sword streak in from his flank and slice under a steel plate into his spine. A twitch ended the Xyxian’s struggle and the pair yanked their weapons free simultaneously, let the ruined man drop lifelessly to the gore-drenched dust.
Suddenly, everything was clearing out around them, horses peeling away, cheers rising as the Vothans taunted retreating savran.
Breathing till his lungs heart, Strayden yanked the broken-off spear point from the rent links of his mail, cast it aside. Voice still uncertain, he offered his comrades a nod of thanks. The shoulder hurt more than where the lance had parted the armor on his left arm and actually cut flesh. But he couldn’t worry about that now. A mystified glance around at the seemingly-broken cavalry charged soured quickly in his mind.
Beyond the heaps of dead horse and shattered knight, something moved in the fumes of battle, something glittering with steel, disciplined and huge.
“Back...” Strayden croaked. He gagged once on a fear-scathed throat, hawked and cleared it. “Back into line!” he roared. “Fifth Cohort—by Gruzh’s balls, men—reform the shield wall! They’re coming!”
“IT DIDN’T WORK!” CLOVER exclaimed from her perch below Asyra on the Spire.
It seemed the strangest and most precarious way to watch a fight—or, really, anything—that Asyra could have imagined. But the view was impeccable, even with the dust stirred by collision and struggle. And from that vantage, she could already tell Clover was wrong in her assessment.
The savran had struck in several spots, the most heavily in the center where—Asyra knew with a gut-twist—Strayden and his Vothans would stand and die. The heavy cavalry had torn terrible chunks from the Scintallan line, even rent a few holes. But the flower of Xyxian chivalry didn’t stay for long, began peeling away once the damage was done, fleeing behind the chariot screen of the Sons of Arr.
And Asyra couldn’t help a sneer of disdain. Just as in her Ybbasid homeland, the nobles atop their finely-bred horses were only good for the show, the quick fight. They left the deadly drudgery of real war to others.
And those others were coming on now.
“By whatever senile deities there are...” Asyra whispered to herself.
The mass of conscript infantry that boiled out of the wastes and into the waiting arms of Zadam and the escarpments stunned with its sheer volume. Asyra could honestly say she’d never seen so much humanity packed into one place, miles of moving forms—shivering the ground with their feet, the air with the rising storm of their voices. The savran withdrawing to either side of the horde practically had to battle their way clear, leaving their own countrymen slain in the dust.
The Sons of Arr, riding haughtily atop their chariots, slowed their approach, allowed their inferiors to avalanche by. Each of the nobles was knocking their massive, recurved bows, waiting as the commoners plunged ahead through the dust, over the carnage of the earlier fighting. The Sons weren’t fools, had already seen the bloodying the savran had received, and weren’t about to risk their chariots and skins on certain calamity.
That was for the commoners.
With the sorcerous haze lifted from the field, and only mundane dust to cloud their view, the Scintallan archers were pouring it on in earnest. The air over the rapidly-closing lines darkened with the passages of their arrows, falling numerous as raindrops into the horde’s midst. Asyra cringed as the howl of the Xyxian footmen became a scream. Men crumpled by the hundreds, scythed down, hit again and again, and trampled as their comrades pressed on, driven by fear or drink that had very likely been dispersed, and in large amounts. The edge of the horde faltered, like a wave seems to as it crests near the beach.
And then the horde crashed home, the living and wounded lifting their voices together with a final bellow and surging forth. They left piles of slain and suffering in their wake, in places so high those following on had to lap around them. But come they did, at a maniac, suicidal sprint that ended in a crash that repeated ten-thousandfold all along the line as shields and steel met them.
Dust and sheer anarchy stole the details from Asyra. She could see only the broad strokes now. But from those she knew, already, the Xyxians could not break the Scintallans, not even with these endless numbers.
The Sons of Arr seemed to know it, too. A few dismounted from the chariots, following on with the tide, obvious in the gleam of their armor and towering over their hardship-shrunken followers. But most held back, began firing shafts over the heads of the infantry into the Scintallan shield wall. Each of those arrows, nearly two feet long and requiring hideous strength at the string just to propel, would punch clean through a man downrange, and wound the one behind him.
And none required their wielder to get within a hundred yards of the melee—because only death would meet them there.
“They’re doing it!” Clover called from below. “They’re going to hold them!”
“The battle was over when the savran couldn’t force a breakthrough,” Asyra replied to her companion. “As long as the line holds, the Scintallans will grind the Xyxians up.”
“Oh, yes, and I suppose you’d know how things are in the shield wall?” Clover sneered back at her.
As a matter of fact, Asyra did, after accompanying Strayden and his dogs and finding themselves trapped in situations even more desperate than what raged below. And it wasn’t even that Clover didn’t know that, or that she doubted Ayra’s courage; she didn’t—no coward became an Eye of the Emperor.
She just hated her, for whatever reason.
Not my damned problem, Asyra thought, not bothering to address the snipe, settling her gaze beyond the battle and things that were actually her job.
The Immortals stood back from the advance, still arrayed in their blocks in reserve, barring the way to the Royals. Their immobility confirmed Asyra’s suspicion that the Xyxians already sensed failure. Their commitment, if it came, would come at a moment of greatest opportunity, or greatest desperation.
But movement and a weird flutter of light confirmed the Xyxians were at least committing something. A single chariot, tearing vortices of dust up in its wake, sliced across the plain behind the horde, lit by a single purple flame so bright it could not be missed—or mistaken as anything natural. As Asyra watched, it slowed upon reaching the approximate center and wheeled to one side to let its passenger step down. Distance hid detail, but the otherworldly flame clearly blazed from something in the man’s hand. He held his arm high and a black cloak fluttered out behind him, gave him the look of a bat startled from its cave.
As
yra swallowed as she realized the purple burned from his hand. Wizard, she thought. Lyssa had warned her the Xyxians had a kind of sorcerer-priest order like the White Guard, though of a significantly more depraved character. Knowing the depravities of the Guard, Asyra could only shudder at that. They’re cowards, Lyssa had said. They’ll only make an appearance if they absolutely can’t avoid it.
“Looks like we’ve reached that moment,” Asyra thought out loud.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” she told Clover and smiled a little at herself. Maybe I need to spend less time around wizards, myself. I’m becoming as eccentric as Lyssa. Her smile twisted a little. No chance of that...
“Looks like ‘nothing’ is what we’re accomplishing up here!” the other spy growled.
The purple flame of the Xyxian’s fist flared to eye-biting brightness. Asyra’s skin prickled, as though in the moment before a lightning strike. Something was happening. She angled the mirror once more, caught the sun’s rays and starting blinking out the patterns she’d been taught.
And a sudden, sick feeling soured her guts as she wondered if she’d realized the danger too slowly, wondered that Clover was right.
ASYRA’S WARNING WINKED down from the Spire at the corner of Lyssa’s eye, confirmed what her senses were already telling her: Xyxian magic drew near—not just trickery of the elements, now; a mage bent on engaging directly.
They had to be getting desperate.
Not that Lyssa could see any of it with her eyes. The battle was noise and dust and the hiss of arrows arching out and away. She caught flashes of steel all along the front, saw an occasionally horse, riderless and out of control, heard the flutter of an arrow ricocheting off upraised shield to tumble back over the lines. Mostly it was just the dust and the screams. But it all laid upon her Other senses, a choking miasma of fear and pain.
That, too, served the Xyxian mage, shrouded his approach. But with Asyra’s warning, she knew he was there.
“The wards hold?” she asked Olvan.
The young man sat stiffly in his saddle, face drawn and greased with sweat. He managed a wordless nod in reply. All his enthusiasm and energy had drained from him and he looked like a man staring straight into horror.
Just that, in fact.
“Hold them,” Lyssa said. “They’re about to be tested.”
She reached into her robes with her free hand, fished into one of the hidden pockets, and pulled out a fragment of specially-prepared sulfur. At the same time, she worked the coin in her other hand, flipping it over and over again between her fingers, faster and faster. She could feel the energies of the Outer Dark pawing at her, like claws seeking a grip on flesh. The impression wasn’t wrong; the Dark hungered for souls. The coin served as talisman, holding their appetites at bay, while the sulfur would serve as trigger for their energies, seized by her and about to be flung into the material world.
“My...lady...” Olvan groaned.
“Hold,” she snapped. He could not falter now! She could manage the peril of becoming a conduit for the Dark powers, keep the focus needed to turn it into a weapon in their universe. But she’d be exposed to attack, distracted by her efforts. Olvan had to hold!
“Yes,” the Acolyte gasped.
The air on Lyssa’s skin changed, pressed in. The roots of her hair tingled. At the same time, she had a moment of memory, saw her old mentor—and betrayer—Durothan, late Bishop of the White Guard. He grimaced from some unknowable distance, swallowed by his awful schemes, dragged down by the very Dark he wielded. Such could be the fat of any who tread the shadowy paths of knowledge of the Outer Dark.
Such it could be for her.
“Yavaas neffurtah—” Lyssa crushed the sulfur in her fist “—tarvuu!”
The power rushed through her, like a dam broken and the terrible current blasting all that was her away. She lost herself in a moment of release that could be pain or ecstasy, both escaping her in a hiss through gritting teeth. She wobbled, caught herself. The sulfur was gone, fluttering away in a sluggish breeze, and she reached out with the now-free hand for the reins of her twitching horse. But her fingers fumbled with the leather strap, numbed.
The sky screamed.
She didn’t look up, knew it would be as big a mistake as staring straight at the sun. The spear of fire that slashed down from the cloudless heavens seemed like it came, summoned from solar depths to smite its enemies. With a twist of cleverness, the wizard-priests of the Guard had fused their religious zeal with their decidedly non-religious craft in naming the spell Scintallos’ Sun Bolt.
The Bolt struck right in the middle of the Xyxian horde, a splinter of pure yellow flame. And, true to its name, anything—anyone—too close was as an insect drawn to a lantern. Heat beyond the ken of mortals seared men clean out of the air, left momentary shadows of dust. Less fortunate Xyxians, further from the blast, screeched as fire seared the armor, leather, and flesh from their backs and swept them like debris off their feet. Super-heated air punched through bodies, knocked men flat, toppled horses, filled the air with a terrible crash that seemed to go on and on.
The explosion bloomed two hundred yards from the Scintallan front, closer to the rear of the Xyxian press. But Lyssa knew retreats often start at the rear, which was why she’d aimed it there. Still, she wondered if she’d misjudged as her roan reared and squealed in fear. The slap of the blast tore her tightly-bound hair loose, starred her eyes with stinging tears, and prickled her flesh. Scintallans went down all around her, some pushed back into their comrades by the hot gust, others dropping and squalling in fear.
The fires left by the Sun Bolt frothed skyward, lifted an inky cloud of smoke above them. The hideous cacophony of agony and panic continued as the blaze, rather than going out, spread, carried by men scattering from its touch, carried by her will. Xyxians to the rear were already crumbling away from the conflagration. As she pressed upon the inferno with her mind, let it spread wall-like to either side, retreat became rout. Hundreds broke, streaming back past the chariot-riding nobles and their own whip-wielding officers
Beside her, Olvan struggled to control his mount. The beasts were from the Guard’s stables, conditioned to the weird practices of their riders. But this was elemental, sound and fury like a storm, and the horse foamed at the bridle, resisted his efforts.
And, Lyssa realized with a surge of fear, the Acolyte couldn’t possibly be concentrating on the Wards of Protection if he was fighting to stay in the saddle.
The horse bucked and threw the Acolyte. He struck the ground with a clear snap of bone breaking and didn’t move.
“Olvan!”
Lyssa let her hands fall and half-turned, torn between the sorcerous task in front of her and the comrade stricken beside her. And she could feel the weight of magic shift. The wall of flames guttered down with shocking suddenness, reduced to a seething pall of oily fumes. The spell sputtered in her mind; the concentration required to sustain it slipping. And the note of the battle changed, men caught between the doom of fire and the flash of steel given hope again—a desperate hope, to be sure—and flinging themselves once more against the latter.
Modyn was riding back through a lane between blocks of archers, the Church Militant’s cloak flapping behind him with the speed of his passage. Lyssa knew he’d be bringing orders from the Emperor’s cabal. Get the fires going again, would be the command. Drive the Xyxians back. The other Militant—Kah, she remembered—had dismounted and knelt beside Olvan with surprising tenderness, reaching out with a gauntleted hand.
The flames of the Sun Bolt bloomed anew with a growl and a cyan flicker to their color that had nothing to do with Scintallos or Lyssa’s spell. She felt a pressure at the base of her skull, shivered as cold entered her nerves and another presence entered the fight.
The Xyxian wizard of Asyra’s warnings was taking the field directly against her, trying to wrestle control of her spell. She could almost see the devil, a skinny, painted lunatic in flapping red cloaks,
crowing his mad spells from the back of his chariot—a zezperak of the Xyxian death cult that worshipped the old ways of necromancy.
That those ways had doomed the very civilization in whose shadows they fought always seemed to allude these fools.
And a fool, this one was. He made no attempt at subtly, mentally grappled right at her for control. Out on the field the blazes fluttered wildly, flames of yellow-red against the eldritch cyan as soldiers battled amongst them and wizards dueled. Lyssa felt her talisman coin go hot in her grasp, nearly unbearable, but she kept it upraised, began intoning words of protection that would sound like a madwoman’s gibbering to the uninitiated. The zezperak’s attack pressed in, harder. The magical inferno blew back towards the Scintallan line and cries of alarm rose.
Lyssa raised her free hand, the one that’d crumbled the sulfur and brought the Sun Bolt. She sensed from the other’s fury, felt like the punishment of a beast smashing against a barred door, that he’d given his entirety to this attack. Lyssa had not, had endured attacks the simpleton could not imagine and fought back. Which she did now, whispering a single phrase and twitching her index finger.
A sputter of sparks shot free of it, wheeled in the air before her like an insect of living energy. Uninspiring. But with a hiss, it shot out over the wreck of battle, over the smoke and flame. And as it arched higher, it grew, lengthened into a comet-like streak. The hiss became a scream of burning air. The streak became a spear—the Mind Spear, as the spell was called in the Guard grimoires—and shafted back down, towards the Xyxian sorcerer.
Lyssa didn’t see it strike. But she felt it.
The wall of fire whoofed and died down to flames as though doused in an unseen torrent. The pressure on Lyssa’s nerves, her bones, her skin released. And, vaguely, she heard in a way only one attuned to the work of the Outer Dark could the screech of the zezperak’s pain and frustration.