As Adramalik and the speeding cavalry drew closer he began to see more and more legions waiting in the wings. Distant and without any demon’s sigil of possession, they were concealed within summoned smoke, he imagined with some dismay, so as not to alarm the onrushing forces of Moloch. Obscured by clouds in the far gloom, high above Sargatanas’ lines, Adramalik even thought he saw airborne troops, but he could not discern their numbers. And suddenly it seemed to him as if the day might not be won so handily.
* * * * *
With Metaphrax Argastos in command of his Flying Guard, circling overhead, Eligor felt at some ease accompanying Sargatanas to the front. There Eligor’s flyers would stay, concealed in the clouds, ready to pounce if and when needed.
His eyes fell upon the dark shapes of Baron Faraii’s Shock Troopers as they lumbered in a purposeful, ominous wedge ahead, parting the massed legions by their mere presence and making easy transit for his lord, Lord Valefar, and himself. The generals—Demons Major mostly—followed behind, and Eligor examined them in all their occult martial splendor, bedecked in their hardened armor and every manner of physical ornamentation. He paid particular attention to Lords Bifrons and Andromalius and finally to Lord Furcas, who hung closely by Sargatanas, looking concerned and somewhat uncertain. Eligor had not been privy to all of the intricacies of his lord’s plans but had enough of an awareness of the broad strokes to know the importance of the corpulent demon’s role.
Arriving at the front and protected by the Baron’s iron-eyed forces, the general staff saw the growing line of Moloch’s cavalry begin its advance, gathering speed in the distance. Above them tiny sigils flared to life and command-glyphs began to dart from officers to soldiers. As they passed silently along the length of the bordering walls of flame they caught the light in such a way, Eligor noted, as to make them look like a glowing, onrushing flow of lava—an illusion enhanced by the vaporous cloud of steam that trailed off them. It was an amazing spectacle and he decided that if he survived this battle, he would write down his impressions back in his chambers in Adamantinarx. Just to remember the day eons hence.
Eligor’s gaze moved down to the few hundred small figures crouched behind the newly erected wall. None had a weapon in hand, and because of this he imagined that their nervous tension regarding the onrushing cavalry must have been extreme. Yet they held still, each one a soul-centurion, each one awaiting the proper moment when he would be called upon to issue their all-important orders. That moment was not far off, the Captain reflected, as he just began to hear the rumble of footfalls across the plain. His keen eyes, the eyes of a flying demon, picked out the many scarlet-clad figures that he knew, from his trips to Dis, to be Knights of the Fly. And then his eyes fell upon the general at the head of the flowing carpet of cavalry. Reflexively, Eligor tightened his grip upon his lance.
* * * * *
A roar of raw hatred shattered the air, easily audible to all in the front ranks of the charging cavalry. Eager for battle, Moloch gave voice as he slowly drew ahead upon his leaping Melding. Adramalik saw long streamers of flame trailing from his head and saw, too, that his field-baton was no longer in his hand; the commands were already firmly in place. Instead he rode with both arms extended outward at his sides, the two Hooks twirling in his hands; he would welcome his enemy with an embrace of shearing oblivion.
Reluctantly acknowledging the general’s charisma, Adramalik began to feel the battle-ecstasy warm his own body, urging him to put the spurs to his charger. The battlefield around him became a blurred hurricane of sound and movement and fire with only the enemy ahead standing out in the sharpest detail. He focused on the olive-brown wall that now, oddly, appeared taller than he had first thought, but, undaunted, he galloped on.
The soul-steeds were howling wildly, a sound designed to wither the resolve of any enemy foolish enough to stand their ground. With a final rush, the cavalry closed the gap to the wall, and Adramalik saw an unusual and brilliant glyph flash upward from just behind Sargatanas’ front lines and thought, peripherally, that it was issued by either a Lord Bifrons or Furcas. Splitting, its duplicates dropped like stones into the small souls and impacted with a roar atop the wall. To Adramalik’s amazement, the wall rippled, began to geyser wisps of flame, and suddenly hundreds upon hundreds of arms extended from along its length. An instant later the upstretched hands of souls and bricks alike came alive with the glow of some kind of glyph-glove from which then blossomed what looked like fiery javelins. Adramalik could almost feel the collective disbelief of his fellow riders, a momentary wave of hesitation—more imagined than real—to which it was too late to pay attention.
For just the briefest moment, before the front rank of Dis’ heavy cavalry crashed against the wall, the Chancellor General had the impression that he was leaping into the hot-breathed mouth of some enormous prone Abyssal, its awful gums lined with long, fiery teeth. And then he saw that terrible beast’s teeth loose themselves and launch in short, fast arcs directly into the riders, aimed, it seemed, at the soul-beasts they rode. And as soon as the hands had released one incandescent javelin another appeared. Some immediately found their mark, penetrating deep into the breasts of the oncoming souls, disappearing with a brilliant, orange glow within their bodies, and cleaving them from within. Their bubbling screams of pain rose above the sounds of the battlefield as they turned and twisted in agony. The soul-centurions were barking orders incessantly, guiding the blind weapon-wielding hands to their targets. Adramalik clenched his jaws as he wheeled his mount. This was not meant to have happened; we were meant to have breached the wall and streamed into the enemy forces. He felt an uncontrollable mixture of anger and disappointment rising within him and found himself beating his moaning steed upon the head with the hilt of his saber in frustration. Furcas! It has to be Furcas the Pyromancer’s doing!
The heavy cavalry was in complete disarray. With their forward momentum checked there was no chance of them bounding over the wall and into the ranks of troops beyond. Instead their bodies crashed into one another and the buckling wall and made turning extraordinarily difficult. But turn they eventually did, amidst a deadly rain of fiery missiles that took a heavy toll upon them. And from the corner of his eye the Chancellor General saw that even though it had suffered minor damage, the wall still stood firm.
A red command-glyph soared skyward and split into a dozen smaller replicas of itself. The command to retreat and regroup!
Within the tangle of demons and soul-steeds he looked for the order’s source. He found Moloch by his size and brilliant sigil-corona, some distance away and visible in his own maelstrom of pivoting cavalry, spinning away as well, and Adramalik could only imagine the blinding rage that must have been filling the general. That the general, for all his boldness and ferocity, had been brushed so easily aside by a simple subterfuge spoke volumes about both him and Sargatanas. Adramalik’s hatred for Moloch cut so deep that even as the cavalry began to regain a semblance of order he found this inglorious retreat an ironic, bitter pleasure. Favorite or not, Moloch would hear much about it from his Prince.
The javelins were now arcing higher, whistling up over Adramalik’s head and landing among the rearmost mounted demons. Without waiting for orders, they were breaking and heading back toward their camp, forming up into ragged, surging groups, which suddenly found themselves heading directly into their own oncoming legions. Adramalik saw javelins hitting his demons, blasting their heads from their shoulders, sinking deep within their chests, and blowing them asunder, the shattered chunks of their bodies falling all around him. The din of destruction seemed ceaseless, the missiles limitless, until Adramalik had finally drawn out of range. Decimated as the cavalry was, he knew, as he plunged ahead, that those legions marching directly in their path were about to experience the unchecked impact of the panicked battalions. He saw his Knights issue hasty orders and thought he saw the great formations begin to turn. But he knew it would be too late.
A thousand steps back from the wall th
e two forces collided and, just as he had anticipated, the foot soldiers suffered beyond measure. Trying desperately to evade the cavalry, Moloch’s legions’ orderly ranks were torn apart, dragged under the hands and feet of the frantic mounts, and crushed into rubble. Adramalik’s own soul-steed leaped and dodged wildly and he dug his horn-shod heels in to stay atop it. Growling, he shook his head angrily.
The destruction lasted just as long, the Chancellor General guessed, as it took Moloch to realize that a complete disaster would ensue if he did nothing. Adramalik was waiting for the order, and when it did rise into the sky he raised his saber high overhead, pointed it downward at the back of his steed’s head, and plunged its fire-hot length deep into the beast’s skull. As it crumpled to the ground with a whining exhalation of breath, he felt no remorse, no sense of loss. These were souls, skin-sacks; they were meant to be used and destroyed. Let the Abyssals pick at it, he thought as he extricated himself from the saddle and walked away.
Looking across the field, Adramalik saw the other cavalrydemons dismounting from their now largely inert soul-steeds. Some demons were hacking angrily at their twitching bodies in a rage of frustration.
With the destruction of the mounts, the havoc within the beleaguered legions of Dis ended abruptly and for a few moments the only sounds were those of the seriously crushed soldiers crumbling away. Adramalik and the other cavalrydemons found themselves standing among the barely controllable legionaries whose fury had been aroused by the frenzy of annihilation that had swept over them. But so cowed were they by the presence of the scarlet-armored Knights of the Fly that they dared not act on their rage.
Adramalik ordered his Knights to integrate themselves and the remaining dismounted cavalry into the legions and to assume command. Thus bolstered, the legions would come closer to their original strength and under the leadership of his Knights, resented as they were, might regain their confidence. Or so he hoped.
The Chancellor General saw the cohesion of the legions returning and then saw Moloch approaching, baton in hand, striding easily upon his wing-stilts over the rubble and towering above the infantry. The anger was written upon his blood-dark face and his eyes bore something aside from the normal film of resentment. Is it disappointment? Adramalik could barely repress his satisfaction.
“What, Chancellor General? Have you something to say?”
“Not I, Grand General. But our Prince surely will.”
Moloch snorted.
And then, almost to himself, the ex-god said, “Even without the cavalry we have sufficient numbers to absorb casualties. We will overwhelm them and finish this… in the name of the Prince.”
For a moment the two demons’ eyes locked. Would it be so hard, right here and now, to order this legion to destroy him—to send him to the Pit where he belongs? They would obey me… and follow me into battle. But, Adramalik reasoned, there would be too many questions from the Prince regarding his champion, too much suspicion. There were easier ways.
“This does not end here,” Moloch rumbled, thrusting the top of his baton into the Chancellor General’s chest. Adramalik reflexively grasped its end and shoved it aside.
Perhaps not here, General, but soon.
A shrill cry came from high above them and both demons looked up simultaneously. Barely visible against the shadowed clouds was the large silhouette, lit along the sinuous length of its body by tiny glow-spots, of a cinder-fly. They were rare, Adramalik knew, and portended great events. A hissing flight of black arrows reached up from somewhere nearby and a moment later the Abyssal’s winged body disappeared amidst the troops. Adramalik heard a cheer go up—the omens were good—and shook his head when he saw Moloch’s fierce grin.
Pulling his Hooks from his belt, Moloch gave Adramalik one last look—smugness and disdain mixed—and shouldered past him on his way to the front of the legions. The Chancellor General heard him grate out, “Keep your legion close, Knight.”
Moments later the braying of war horns echoed across the field, followed by Moloch’s command-glyphs, and the hundred legions of Dis began to move slowly forward. Beneath them, in response to their relentless tramping, the ground flexed and rippled, making the footing for the marching troops less certain. But even with what was, undoubtedly, this further evidence of the enemy’s battlefield-influencing invocations, the troops pushed forward and soon found themselves at the farthest limits of the range of the fiery javelins.
The wall was gone, dissolved into a broad line of souls, each holding the new weapon.
There simply had not been enough time for the battlefield conjurors to create counterspells for the new weapons; Adramalik saw, once again, the devastating effect the missiles had on relatively unprotected troops. But he also saw Moloch, in quick response, order all the many cohorts of his archers to race ahead, and despite large numbers of their ranks being destroyed, Adramalik saw sappers dig low, protective trenches, enabling the legions’ archers to begin to let fly their arrows. Such was the discipline of the army of Dis!
Much to his surprise, the Chancellor General realized the sheets of arrows were finding their marks and the javelins’ numbers were gradually decreasing. Such a simple solution! The cavalry had been a terrible mistake—a blunder of reconnaissance—but the unclean Pridzarhim had redeemed himself. Tangled piles of souls lay where they fell, pierced—a sight Adramalik thought odd. Souls—resource that they were—were rarely left unheeded when the life went out of them. But there they lay, and he had the strange errant thought that they were being wasted.
Behind them and barely diminished by the arrows stood a long, unwavering line of Sargatanas’ veterans, heavily armored and not nearly as vulnerable as the souls had been. They were the phalangites of Adamantinarx under the collective command, Adramalik knew, of the Demon Minor Aetar Set. In count they numbered a full twenty-six legions, and each of their ranks bore a long pike that was leveled at the oncoming demons.
Moloch commanded the middle of his line—three legions of heavy halberdiers—to form up behind him into a thick wedge. Recognizing that there could never be an effective flanking maneuver with a defensive line as long and deep as Sargatanas’, the general was clearly determined to reach the demon lord by ramming his way through the bristling wall of pikes.
Adramalik felt a sudden wave of envy for the general’s bravery. As he watched the two armies converge, he knew that Moloch was going to do everything possible to shatter the enemy and that that was why he was so favored by the Prince. Moloch’s unhesitating loyalty was at once naive and invaluable. And, Adramalik grudgingly admitted, admirable.
From a short distance the Chancellor General could see Moloch standing within a group of standard-bearing demonifers. Suddenly he rose up, tall upon his flightless wings, encircled in glowing bands of protective glyphs, and all the troops of the surrounding legions could hear him roar, “Legions, for the Prince of Hell!”
Twirling his terrible Hooks, the ex-god leaped fearlessly into the wall of pikes, chopping them down with blindingly fast swipes of his hands. Raised up by his wing-stilts and twisting away from the pike thrusts, he was a whirlwind of movement. His height and agility made him a very difficult target for the stationary phalangites and their awkward pike-hands, and Adramalik, fighting not too far behind, saw that steady progress was being made. The tip of the wedge was now well buried within the deep line of pike demons, and it was forcing a broad and ever-widening gap.
As there was no art to an avalanche, there was no art to Moloch’s unceasing destruction. And wherever he created an opening Adramalik and the legionaries would rush in, exploiting the opportunity. In a last-ditch effort to hold the line, Adramalik saw that the phalangites had been ordered to snap their pikes and use the new shorter weapons’ rough, pointed ends as close-righting spears. But it was to no avail; the gap was too large and their cohesion was diminishing by the moment. Clouds of dust rose where the phalangites were being broken.
The phalangite commander Aetar Set, whom Adramalik found easil
y by his Demon Minor’s sigil, strode forward, impressive with his glyph-lit antlers, a long fire-tipped lance in hand. He raised it in preparation for the combat with the approaching ex-god, but as its white-hot head leveled with Moloch’s chest the grapplelike Hooks came up in a blurred, prismatic flash of diamond that was so fast Adramalik’s jaw opened. Aetar Set dropped the broken lance, a look of shock upon his face. And then his body, ripping apart in six diagonal sections, imploded.
The Chancellor General saw Moloch laugh, snatch up the demon’s disk without breaking stride, and move past the reeling enemy, springing over steaming mounds of their still-crumbling rubble, and on into the body of Sargatanas’ army. While Moloch’s hands moved with a fluid rhythm of their own, wielding the Hooks with an almost casual savagery, it was clear that his focus never strayed from the Seal of Sargatanas that hung some hundreds of yards ahead.
* * * * *
Eligor watched with some uncertainty the advance of the legions of Dis and, in particular, the steady, relentless approach of the Pridzarhim champion amidst the fray. He had recognized the personal sigil from afar and knew its significance. And he watched Aetar Set’s sigil go out abruptly. In single combat Eligor knew of few, if any, under the station of Demon Major who could match Moloch, and even those of high rank would be challenged. Eligor looked down toward the Baron and his hulking Shock Troopers, as yet untested in this battle, and wondered how they might fare. Perhaps collectively they would stop Moloch. But if not, would it only be his lord or Valefar who could finish Moloch, and at what cost? The Guards’ Captain looked up into the clouds toward where he knew his troops to be but saw nothing.
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