War Maid's Choice
Page 65
“Should I assume they’re following along behind you?” Trianal went on, and the sergeant nodded back to him.
“Aye, Milord. I’d say they’re not in all that tearing a hurry—given how fast the buggers can run, you’d’ve seen ’em already if they were. But they’ll be along. And, Milord, they’re using drum signals.”
“I see.” Trianal glanced around his command group’s faces for a moment, then turned back to the scouts.
“You’ve done well, Sergeant. Now get your men back behind the supply element and rest your horses.” He smiled again, more thinly. “I think it’s time for the rest of us to do our jobs.”
“Aye, Milord. Thank you!”
The sergeant beckoned to his section, and the five of them splattered off across the muddy grass while Trianal, Bahzell, and the rest of the command group looked at one another.
“Drum signals,” Trianal repeated, as if the two words were an obscenity, and Bahzell snorted.
“Well, we’d signs enough already as how these aren’t your ordinary ghouls, lad,” he pointed out, and shrugged. “I’ve no doubt at all, at all, as how these bastards are going to prove a right handful, and that’s a fact. Still and all, it’s in my mind the tactical situation’s simple enough to be going on with. It’s not so very likely all the drum signals in the world are to matter all that much.”
“I’m afraid Prince Bahzell’s got that right, Milord,” Yurgazh said sourly. He looked out in the direction from which the scouts had come for a moment, then grimaced and looked back at Trianal. “I think it’s time I was joining my infantry, Milord.”
“Agreed.” Trianal nodded at him and gave Sir Yarran a glance.
“I’m off, I’m off!” the older Sothōii said, raising one hand in a mock defensive gesture. “Just you be remembering what bugles, staff officers, and couriers are for, young man!”
“I’m not planning on leading any desperate charges,” Trianal said dryly.
“What I really want to hear is that you’re planning on not leading any desperate charges,” Yarran said even more dryly. “Under the circumstances, though, I suppose I’d better settle for the best I can get, hadn’t I?”
“Not much point hoping for anything else, any road, Sir Yarran,” Yurgazh said even more sourly, and glanced at Vaijon. “I don’t suppose you could convince my idiot prince to get his unmarried arse back aboard one of those barges, could you?”
“Not unless you want me to have him physically dragged,” Vaijon replied with a tight grin. “Hurthang and a couple of the other lads are probably big enough to do it, but I can’t guarantee he wouldn’t get banged up around the edges in the process if he took offense. Which he probably would.”
“And then there’s Prince Yurokhas.” Trianal’s tone was even more sour than Yurgazh’s had been as he glanced over his shoulder at the wind tube gryphon standard in the colors of the royal house floating above the compact, neatly formed block of the Order of Tomanāk.
“I might be able to order him onto a barge,” Vaijon admitted, following the direction of Trianal’s gaze. “He is a member of the Order, if not our chapter, and I am a champion. Although, now that I think about it, Bahzell’s senior to me. If anyone’s going to do any ordering, I think it ought to be him, since he’s at least older than Yurokhas on top of everything else.”
“And because you’ve got a pretty damned good idea how he’d react to the ‘order,’ too, I imagine,” Trianal said darkly.
“And because of that,” Vaijon acknowledged with a fleeting smile. Then the smile faded. “The truth is that in cold-blooded political and dynastic terms, he’s actually more expendable just at the moment than Arsham, Trianal. And he’s a member of the Order, too. Whatever’s coming this way, it’s exactly what the Order is pledged to fight.” He shook his head. “I can’t justify ordering him to safety without some overriding reason—like his place in the succession—and as a member of the Order, he has a right to be here.”
“I know,” Trianal sighed. “I know. Just...try to keep him in one piece if you can, all right? The King would be upset if anything happened to him. And more to the point, he’s my prince and Uncle Tellian loves him. Tomanāk, I love him, come to that!”
“We’ll do what we can,” Vaijon promised, and chuckled harshly. “Besides, if our masterful battle plan works, what could possibly go wrong?”
“The enemy, lad,” Bahzell said with a grim smile. “That’s why we’ve the habit of calling him ‘the enemy.’”
Chapter Forty
The ground trembled as the devil named Anshakar followed the howling ghouls towards their prey. The massive drums—sawn sections of hollow log, the drum heads made of the tanned hide of ghoul tribal chiefs and so massive that carrying them required four ghouls to bear each of them, slung between them on poles—throbbed and bellowed, beaten by the ghouls’ new shamans to the glory of their new gods. He tasted the mingled terror, hunger, and rage swelling about him, and if most of that terror and much of that rage were directed against him and his two fellows, Anshakar could not have cared less. Terror was terror, and rage was rage; both were chained by desperate obedience, and when the moment came to unleash it, it wouldn’t matter in the least who had spawned it. Besides, it was always useful for sword fodder to be more frightened of its commanders than of the swords it faced.
He bared his fangs, nostrils flared as he raised his head, sucking in air, seeking that first delicious scent of the prey he’d been brought here to take. Eagerness tingled, burning in his blood like fire, and the hideous light of his eyes rippled and glared. The ghouls who’d learned to worship him meant nothing. Nothing! They were only a means to an end, and this—this—was what his Lord and Master had created him to be and do! It had been far too long since last he’d tasted the blood of a foe worthy of his hatred. Perhaps this new champion, this Bahzell Bloody Hand, would slake the need for destruction and slaughter that fumed at his core like a furnace.
His gaping, bare-fanged grin spread wider, lips wrinkling with contempt as he remembered the puny wizard’s warnings. Warnings! Warnings for Anshakar the Great! What did he care for a wizard’s repeated failures to rid this puling world of its so-called champions?! For the incompetence of creatures who followed that bitch Krahana, or the gutless pygmies who served Sharnā the Timid? This world—this universe—was ripe for the taking. He could smell it, feel it, already taste the blood and destruction. His kind were even more sensitive to such things than those contemptible wizards. If the cusp point wasn’t here yet, it was coming, in no more than a few of the mortals’ little decades. That was the true reason his Lord had sent him and Zûrâk and Kimazh here, whatever the wizard or his mistress thought—to seize that point, to twist it out of the other Dark Gods’ grasp and give it over solely to Krashnark, where it belonged. And if this Bahzell was powerful, what did it matter? Anshakar was powerful, too, and far more ancient and experienced than any mortal champion of Tomanāk could ever hope to be. His very name—Anshakar—meant “World Breaker” in the tongue of his own folk, and he’d earned it well. He—he!—had led the final assaults which had given no less than two universes to the Dark. Now he would give it a third, and feast on the flesh of any feeble champion who’d dared to stand in his path!
* * *
Nausea clenched and roiled in Bahzell Bahnakson’s belly. It wasn’t terror, though he was no more a stranger to fear than the next man. No, this was more than that. It was a sickness, a revulsion. He’d felt its like before, but never this strongly. The demons he’d faced and defeated, Krahana’s shardohns and servants—they’d carried the same reek, the same taint of corruption and vileness he felt spinning its way towards him like a tornado. Yet for all their power and foulness, they’d been but a shadow of the darkness and despair that loomed above the Ghoul Moor like a mountain range of desolation, ribbed with agony and soaked in hopelessness and unending misery. He could feel three of them, now; three separate pustules burning their way across the land like acid, searing a deep woun
d filled with snail-slime poison in their wakes.
“Aye, that it does,” Bahzell agreed grimly. He, too, could feel the focus in the heart of the darkness, feel it reaching for him, seeking him. And it wouldn’t be the first time a servant of the Dark had done that, either. “It’s half-tempted I am to go out and meet it where none of these lads would be caught betwixt us.”
“No, you’ve the right of it there.”
Bahzell’s jaw muscles tightened and he fitted an arrow to the mighty composite horse bow he’d finally learned to use. He wasn’t the most accurate archer in the world yet—indeed, he was far from it—but no lesser arm could have drawn that recurve bow, and he could fire it far more rapidly than even he could span an arbalest. Walsharno moved under him, striding slowly and steadily southeast, towards the short section of line facing directly towards the Graywillow. They moved up into the ranks of horse archers behind the hradani infantry, followed by Brandark as they took their place beside Sir Kelthys Lancebearer and his courser brother Walasfro. The two coursers loomed above the normal warhorses around them, and Sir Kelthys smiled grimly.
“Kind of them to bring music to the dance,” he remarked, and Bahzell snorted a mirthless laugh. The army had continued its advance towards the Graywillow until Trianal had ordered it to form for battle. Now the land before them rose to the southeast, climbing gently but steadily to the ridgeline Bahzell had watched the scouts cross, still perhaps five hundred yards in front of them, where it broke sharply downward once more towards the Graywillow’s marshy floodplain. The ghouls were not yet in sight beyond that ridge, but the monstrous thudding of their drums was clearly audible and Bahzell’s hradani ears heard the howling shriek of ghoulish warcries on the wind.
“From the sound of things, there’s Fiendark’s own horde of them,” Sir Kelthys remarked in that same conversational tone.
“Not so much Fiendark’s as his brother’s, I’m thinking,” Bahzell replied, and somehow, as that avalanche of evil drew closer, he knew it was true. He couldn’t have said how he knew, but there was no doubt in his mind. “This is after being Krashnark’s work.”
“Krashnark?” Sir Kelthys looked at him, one eyebrow arched. “You’re certain?”
“That I am,” Bahzell said harshly.
“Then I suppose we should feel honored.” The human wind rider’s smile turned crooked. “I don’t believe there’s been a single devil sighting since the Fall. In fact, there’s never been one in Norfressa at all, if memory serves.”
“And it’s in my mind to wonder just what it is makes us so all-fired important to be changing that,” Bahzell rumbled.
“Oh, I think I can probably hazard a guess,” Brandark said from his other side. “I mean, ever since you and I left Navahk, someone on the other side’s been trying to kill you, after all. Well, and me, I suppose. Much as it irks me to admit it, however, I think they’ve seen me more as a case of collateral damage.”
“Brandark has a point,” Sir Kelthys observed reasonably. “It’s not as if they haven’t been trying progressively harder to stop you and your father—and Baron Tellian, come to that—for years now. And before you start feeling all responsible for what’s going to happen here, Milord Champion, you might consider that anything that pisses the Dark off badly enough for them to send devils after you—for the first time in twelve hundred years, mind you!—has to be worth doing in its own right.”
“Not that we’d object to facing some weak, contemptible, easily vanquished, merely mortal foe just once, you understand,” Brandark assured him. “A platoon of halflings, perhaps, or even a regiment of crazed gerbils, hell bent on world conquest.” Then his smile faded. “Which doesn’t change the fact that Sir Kelthys is right. No one ever told us there wouldn’t be risks, Bahzell. And the last time I looked, most of us thought it was a good idea when we agreed to come along.”
Bahzell shot him a sharp glance, but the Bloody Sword only looked back steadily until, finally, the Horse Stealer was forced to nod. Then he returned his attention to that empty, sloping rise before them. From the sound of things, it wouldn’t be empty very much longer.
* * *
“Get ready!” Tharanalalknarthas zoi’Harkanath bellowed.
He knew it wasn’t technically the right order—the pained look from his second in command, an experienced artillerist, was proof enough of that—but he had a good voice for bellowing, rolling up out of the thick, powerful chest of his people, and his eyes glittered. Although he’d served his required time in Silver Cavern’s standing army, Tharanal himself had been an axeman in the ranks and then a combat engineer, not an artillerist, and as a general rule, he left the arcana of catapults and ballistae to those who knew how to use them without killing themselves instead of their intended targets. For that matter, the man who was Dwarvenhame’s senior liaison to Prince Bhanak and the Northern Conferderation had no business in the impending battle at all. It wasn’t his task, and all false modesty aside, he knew Kilthan and the other Silver Cavern elders were going to peel a long, painful strip off of his hide for risking such a valuable asset coming even this close to the fighting.
None of which meant very much to him at the moment or changed the fact that he’d put himself in command of all the barges, which made him responsible for the men who crewed them. Even if that hadn’t been true, many of the men in that formation along the riverbank had become friends of his, and this project had long since become vastly more than simply the most challenging assignment of his entire life. It was important—it mattered—in even more ways and to more people than he’d imagined when he first set out. And even if it hadn’t, he, too, could sense the darkness sweeping towards the army of hradani and Sothōii who awaited it. He was a follower of Torframos, not Tomanāk, and no champion of any god, but Stone Beard’s hatred for the Dark burned just as deep and just as hot as his older brother’s, and so did Tharanalalknarthas zoi’Harkanath’s. He could no more have avoided this clash than he could have flown.
The deck under him vibrated as the crew of the anchored barge dumped more heaps of the ballistae’s huge, javelinlike darts beside their weapons, ready to hand. He watched one ballista crew as the humans assigned to crank the windlass spat on their palms while the dwarven gunner bent slightly and squinted to peer through his ring-and-post sight at the shore, eighty yards away. There were six of the dart-throwers mounted along the barge’s centerline, and a thick, head-high wooden bulwark had been raised along the clumsy vessel’s side. There were firing slits in that bulwark for arbalesteers, and a fighting step to allow infantry to defend the barge against boarders. Eighty yards of riverwater might have seemed sufficient protection to someone who’d never fought ghouls, but the creatures swam entirely too well for anyone who had fought them to make that comfortable assumption. That, after all, was the reason they’d brought so many barges in the first place, to cover the army’s back, and no one had suggested that was going to be a simple task. Even the barges with catapults, substantially farther out in the river, were far from safe havens, and Tharanal checked the baldric of his own battleaxe, making certain the weapon would be ready to hand if—when—he needed it.
The dart-thrower’s gunner grimaced and straightened, then lifted the dart already in the firing tray and bent a thunderous scowl upon it.
“This thing’s got a broken vane,” he growled, waving it under his loader’s nose. “The damned thing’s hanging by a thread! How in Torframos’ name d’you expect it to fly true? We’re going to be firing too damned close to their line for that kind of crap!”
“Sorry,” the loader—another dwarf—said, tossing the offending dart over the side. “Didn’t see it. I’ll keep a closer eye on the others.”
“Damn right you will,
” the gunner told him with a ferocious glower, and Tharanal smiled faintly, then looked back towards the shore once more.
* * *
Darnas Warshoe felt no temptation at all to smile. Indeed, it was all he could do not to curse out loud.
He’d never counted on the transport barges being incorporated into Trianal’s battle plans. He’d chosen his role as a crewman who wasn’t exactly a stranger to warfare as a way to insert himself into the Ghoul Moor in a fashion which would draw no attention to him yet make him valuable as a shore-based longshoreman who could be expected to look after himself in a fight. He should have been able to slip away from the field force’s shore-based freight handlers and attach himself to the mule trains hauling the cavalry’s extra arrows without drawing too much attention. That would have put him right in the heart of the upcoming battle’s confusion and chaos, ideally placed to take his designated targets with an arrow of two of his own. Instead, he’d been drafted as one of the infantry defending the catapult barges. There’d been no way to refuse without drawing entirely too much attention to himself, which was how he came to be stuck in the middle of a Phrobus-damned river instead of close enough to carry out his assignment for Baron Cassan.
He wasn’t concerned about the baron’s reaction to his failure once he’d explained what had happened. Well, that wasn’t quite true. He wasn’t concerned that the baron would hold that failure against him, under the circumstances, but he was a man who prided himself on accomplishing his tasks. And, perhaps even more importantly, he’d been told it was just as important—even more important—that Yurokhas die as it was for him to kill Trianal. If it came to a choice between them, if only one target could be taken, then he was to choose the prince over Tellian’s heir, despite all the enmity and hatred between Cassan and his despised rival, and that told Warshoe all he needed to know. There could be only one reason for an attack on the royal succession, whether his patron had seen fit to explain that to him or not, and if King Markhos died and Yurokhas didn’t...