by David Drake
“Hold up!” he shouted to his informal bodyguards. Prester and Pont obediently halted, facing back with their shields out-thrust to fend away the troops pouring into the rotunda at a dead run. If the noncoms had an opinion about what Garric was doing, they kept it to themselves.
Glittering figures marched toward the rotunda down the second corridor to the left of Garric’s column. They were too distant for him to see details beyond the fact that the walls’ blue glow sparkled on scores of sharp points.
“Well, you didn’t think they were going to send dancing girls to greet us, did you?” laughed Carus. “Mind, I remember places where I lost more troops to what they caught from the women than I did to the spears of the men.”
A junior officer was running past. He was armed in Blaise fashion and affected flaring mustachios which he had to fill out with a fall because he was too young to grow proper ones himself.
“Ensign!” Garric said. He pointed to the startled youth, then the approaching enemy. “Yes, you! Take a hundred men and block that blue corridor. Don’t go any distance down it, just far enough that you’ve got a little room to retreat without letting them into this rotunda.”
“Sir?” said the ensign, gaping like a cod at a fishmonger’s.
Swearing silently, Garric looked around for another officer in the rush of troops. Prester shouted, “Suter! Get your ass over here to his highness!”
A husky warrant officer trotting past—he must have been fifty if not older—turned in mid stride. “Who do you think you are giving me orders, Prester?” he said.
“Prince Garric here wants you to help the young gentleman—” Prester nodded to the blinking ensign “—organize a company to block that tunnel there.”
“Sister take me!” Suter said. He slapped his spear against his shield boss in salute to Garric. “Yes sir, your highness!”
Turning to the stream of troops, Suter stretched out his spear as a baffle and bellowed, “All right, soldiers! We got a job to do! Vedres, start’em down that corridor. I’ll be up with you quick as I can. Sir—” to the ensign “—you just follow Vedres there and he’ll put you right.”
The ensign turned and jogged off with the file closer who was presumably named Vedres. The youth looked immeasurably relieved to be getting out of Prince Garric’s presence.
“Silly twit,” muttered Pont, eyeing the ensign’s back. Suter was shunting the incoming stream of soldiers toward the corridor where Vedres formed them in ranks about a hundred feet down from the rotunda. The ensign—whatever his name was—struck a pose in the front rank, which was actually quite a useful thing to do. A young officer like that had no real purpose except to be brave and thereby to provide a spiritual anchor to the line soldiers who’d be doing the fighting.
“Yeah, but he’ll serve to stop a spear,” said Prester with a complacent smile. “And if that bunion Suter stops another one, well, that’s cream with my strawberries.”
Garric tried to swallow his smile. Then deciding that this was as good a place for humor as any in the world, he let his grin spread. When the noncoms grinned back at him, he laughed out loud while in his mind Carus laughed just as merrily.
Lord Escot and his troops met the centipede a short spear-cast before the creature reached the rotunda. “Loose!” called the Blood Eagle in the front rank, his voice echoing over the crash of boots and the centipede’s pincered feet.
The spears flew in a ragged volley, wobbling because they were thrown by running men. Even so most struck their target because the centipede’s armored body nearly filled the tunnel. Some glanced off, but half a dozen missiles cracked the monster’s headplate and penetrated deeply enough to dangle.
The centipede continued forward with the relentless certainty of water gushing through a pipe. The creature towered over the men as they charged home with drawn swords.
“We’ll need to—” Garric said, his stomach suddenly knotting.
They’d have to meet the centipede in the rotunda and attack it from all sides, because it was obvious that no number of men could stop the creature in a head-on encounter. The casualties from that—the men torn to pieces by the pincers and flung across the rotunda—would be in the hundreds.
“Garric!” Liane called from behind him.
Garric spun, his face going coldly blank to hide the horror in his heart. He’d known that one of those bodies the centipede mangled might be his, but that was part of his job. Liane would be back where she and Tenoctris could return through the portal if things went disastrously wrong. She’d be safe.
But instead here she was, running toward him at the head of a forest of pikes. “I brought a company of the phalanx!” she explained, gasping for breath as she clasped arms with him. “The s-soldiers made an aisle for me so that I could get them through. I thought you might need them!”
“By the Shepherd! we do,” Garric said. He glanced over exactly what Liane had brought him.
Master Ortron, commander of half the phalanx, stood facing the other way as he formed his men into ranks in the rotunda. Ortron was a commoner who knew that the officers and men of the older regiments looked down on his men. The pikemen doubled as oarsmen in the fleet, and they’d been recruited from farm laborers and the urban poor instead of the yeoman farmers who made up the heavy infantry.
Ortron and the men under him were convinced that their phalanx could cut the heart out of any army in the Isles; and on the proper terrain, they were right. This might be an even better opportunity to test the effectiveness of their twenty-foot pikes than against human enemies.
“Ortron,” Garric shouted, “form them by sections—” blocks of nominally a hundred men, eight ranks deep “—and take over from the infantry that’s fighting the centipede, the bug over there!”
The passages of this ice maze were higher than those of any palace Garric had seen in his own world, but even so the pikes must’ve been a close fit when troops jogged down the corridors carrying them upright. Just moving with the long weapons took a great deal of training and coordination; using them effectively in battle was even more difficult. But a fully-trained phalanx was as deadly a weapon as anything under the sun—and perhaps as deadly as anything in this icy hellworld as well.
Garric gestured toward the target he’d set Ortron. As he did so he saw his aide Lord Lerdain burst from the crowd of soldiers. The boy was flushed and his cuirass wasn’t properly buckled; he must have been in his quarters asleep when all this broke open.
“Your highness!” Lerdain cried. “I got here as—”
“Yes,” interrupted Garric. He pointed to the corridor where swords flashed in the wizardlight as men hacked at the centipede. “Tell Lord Escot or whoever’s in charge now—”
Whoever’s still alive now.
“—to clear out of the way and give the phalanx their chance.”
Lerdain turned without replying and shoved into the crowd battling the centipede. “Prince Garric’s orders!” he bawled. “Make way for the pikes! Make way or die like fools with pike-points in your backs!”
Lerdain’s father was the autocrat of one of the two—with Sandrakkan—most powerful islands in the kingdom. Another fifteen-year-old might’ve lacked the self-confidence to deliver Garric’s message in a fashion that battling soldiers might listen to, but not Lord Lerdain.
Ortron shouted an order; his men lowered their pikes. The weapons of the first three ranks were horizontal, a hedge of points. The shafts of the remaining five ranks slanted up at the increasing angles necessitated by the tight formation. If the men in front fell or their pikes were broken, those in the rear would step forward to replace them.
“Advance!” Ortron ordered, stepping to the side to watch the dress of the ranks as his men stepped off on their left feet. He walked along, frowning critically as they advanced.
To look at him, Ortron was completely oblivious of the huge monster rippling in his direction... and the impression was probably true: the centipede was the business of Ortron’s men; his
business was with the men themselves.
“What about Tenoctris?” Garric asked Liane, trying to hide his frown. The line of light they were following shone thin but strong as it vanished into the centipede’s armored head, but if the old wizard was left to her own devices as hundreds of armored men rushed past in tight quarters, an accident was almost inevitable.
“A squad leader from the Blood Eagles wrenched his knee fighting the Hunters when we arrived,” Liane said, having gotten her breath back in the past moments. “He’s helping Tenoctris. He’s not afraid of what she does because his grandmother worked spells. And I had to lead the pikemen—the troops in the corridor would’ve have made way for another soldier.”
Garric grinned and gave her shoulder a squeeze. Liane was right. Of course.
For the most part, the regular infantry battling the centipede ignored Lerdain’s orders; they were focused on the monster whose advance was slowed more by the time it took to devour the men it killed than anything the survivors were able to do with their swords. They’d have ignored Garric himself if he’d thrown himself among them. He couldn’t have done that unless he’d been willing to let the rest of the chaos take care of itself... which it would surely have done, and taken care of all hope for the Kingdom besides.
Ortron barked an order. “Ho!” bellowed the men of the phalanx as they struck home, their points rising slightly to clear the struggling infantry. The shout wasn’t as effective from only a hundred or so men as it would’ve been with the whole eight thousand, but the rotunda’s echoing dome gave it a respectable presence.
The centipede might’ve been deaf for all Garric knew, but it wasn’t immune to the crunching impact of a dozen pike points. The giant creature lurched upward, raising its head and several body segments in the air. “Ho!” shouted the phalanx as the section’s right feet stamped forward in perfect unison, driving the pikes deeper.
The breastplates of the men in each rank slammed against the backplates of the men directly ahead. Instead of fighting as a hundred soldiers, the phalanx was a single unit with sharp steel fangs. Their combined weight and the thrust of all their powerful legs together stabbed the pike points into the centipede.
The pikes were of close-grained ash or hickory. Even so the strain bowed, then snapped, several of them. The men whose shafts had broken continued to jab the splintered ends at the monster. The ragged wood couldn’t penetrate undamaged armor, but when it lodged in the thinner, flexible fabric covering the joints it sometimes gouged their way into the flesh beneath.
The infantry who’d been trapped between the centipede and the multiple bulk of the phalanx had to duck or be thrown to the floor when the two collided. Now that the centipede’s forequarters had lifted, they either stood or scuttled forward under the long body to hack at its leg-joints.
Lord Escot had lost his helmet. His long red hair swirled with the violence of the strokes as his long sword hacked forehand and backhand. “Escomann and Ornifal!” he cried in a high tenor voice. “Escomann over all!”
Something between a smile and a grimace quirked Garric’s lips. It wasn’t the most satisfactory battle cry from the kingdom’s viewpoint, but under the circumstances he guessed he’d allow the Ornifal noble his whims.
Pont and Prester must’ve thought much the same thing. “Huh!” said Prester, his eyes narrowing as he watched Lord Escot. “He’s still a silly twit, but....”
“Yeah,” agreed his mate. “If I had him for two weeks in my section, I might be able to make something out of him regardless.”
Despite the size of the rotunda, it’d begun filling with troops when the men in the lead couldn’t advance any farther because the centipede blocked the way. Garric no longer had unobstructed vision down the other corridors. If the route wasn’t cleared quickly—and he didn’t see how it could be, since even dead the centipede’s corpse would fill half the corridor—the crush of men would become dangerous.
If only there were something he could stand on to—
“Prester!” he said aloud. “Can you lift me onto your shoulders? I’ll yell to the men at the entrance corridor to halt in place. Maybe they’ll obey if they can see me.”
“I’ll lift you, Garric,” said a familiar voice. There, pushing through the soldiers as though they were blades of oats in a field, was the massive form of Cashel or-Kenset.
And never more welcome!
***
Cashel didn’t mind the press of men the way he had when he’d first entered a big city, though that hadn’t been so very long ago. He’d found if he just pretended all the people were sheep, it was the same as shearing time in the spring. He’d always liked shearing time. Of course sheep didn’t wave swords and spears as they milled about.
“Cashel!” Garric cried. From a distance you’d never take this nobleman in gilt and silvered armor for the boy Cashel’d grown up with in Barca’s Hamlet, but when he smiled—Cashel smiled in response—that was Garric. “Right, I’ll stand on your shoulders. Just like old times!”
Cashel laid his staff crosswise in front of him, his arms slanting down. There wasn’t room for him to do that without bumping people out of the way, so he bumped them out of the way.
A glittering officer pitched forward when the staff whacked him in the small of the back; he bleated angrily and turned. One of the pair of old soldiers standing with Garric poked a spearbutt at the fellow’s face and said, “Mind what you say to the Prince here, cap’n!”
The officer looked like he still might’ve argued the matter, but Liane stepped in front of him. “Do you dare jostle his highness, my man?” she said in a voice as cold as the floor underfoot. That seemed to take care of the problem.
Garric set his right boot on the staff like it was a fence rail. As he pushed off with his left leg Cashel lifted his arms, bringing his friend’s weight up so that Garric just stepped over, one foot on either of Cashel’s shoulders.
Holding firm as a statue, Cashel turned his staff vertical and clashed the ferrule down on the ice. With three points to brace him, he figured he could stand here even if he had to support the ceiling instead of just Garric. The thought made him smile.
One of the old soldiers rubbed his chin with the knuckles of the hand gripping his spear. “They grow many more your size back where you come from, lad?” he asked.
“They grow better than that,” Cashel said, letting his smile spread in pride. “They grew Garric in Barca’s Hamlet too!”
“Lord Menzis!” Garric shouted. Through a megaphone of his hands, Cashel supposed, though standing underneath his friend and facing the other way there wasn’t any way he could tell for sure. “Halt the flow for the moment! Send word back to hold in place!”
Herding sheep gave you good lungs, not that sheep were much more likely to heed you than trees were. Shouting at least made you feel like you were doing something as you pounded across the meadow hoping to reach the ewe that’d mire herself sure if she took one more step into the marsh....
Cashel had a pretty good view of what was happening down the tunnel where a huge centipede was trying to bull through a solid mass of pikemen. Had been trying, rather than was, because by now the monster writhed like a worm on a hook. Any number of hooks, in fact, because there were more pikes punched through its yellow armor than Cashel could count on both hands.
The men kept shoving forward. By now the folks in the front rank, those whose pikes hadn’t broken anyhow, must’ve had their points halfway into the creature’s vitals. It was either trying to escape or else it was just curling up to die the way centipedes of the usual size did.
“Cashel, turn left!” Garric said, sharply but not in a bellow meant to be heard across the huge domed room. “I’m going to shift some men down the other corridors to give us some room in here.”
Cashel obediently shuffled partway around, careful to keep his shoulders level. He was pretty sure that Garric could balance even if the fellow under him broke into a dead run, but that wasn’t a reason for Cashel to
do his own job badly.
The adjustment put Cashel looking down one of the blue tunnels while Garric shouted to an officer on the other side of the room. There was fighting going on in that tunnel, too, and—Cashel frowned—it didn’t look like it was going very well. Plenty of soldiers were trying to crowd in, but the sounds coming out of the tunnel were screams, not battlecries. Cashel couldn’t see what they were fighting because it didn’t tower over the soldiers the way the centipede did, but besides the screams he could hear an off-key clinking/clattering. It wasn’t quite right for either metal or stone but seemed a bit of both.
“Garric?” he said, making sure his friend was going to hear him. He’d herded far more sheep than Garric had. “You’d better look at this on my—”
He felt Garric’s weight shift as he twisted to look over his shoulder.
“—side,” Cashel went on. “I’m turning some more.”
A fellow squeezed out of the crowd at the tunnel mouth and staggered toward Garric. He was an officer—a nobleman, anyway, and that meant an officer—because his breastplate was molded with a design of people and gods. The metal, bronze under the gilding, had been slashed in strips, deep enough that blood dribbled out of the cuts. The officer, just a boy really, had lost his sword and his helmet besides.
“Steady!” called Garric. He jumped down, landing squarely. Cashel put out the hand that wasn’t on his quarterstaff to brace his friend, but Garric didn’t need the help.
“Your highness!” the boy bleated. “We can’t stop them! They’re not alive, they’re just ice, and our swords only chip them without doing any harm! They’ll kill us all if we don’t get away!”
“Do we have hammers?” Garric said. “Maybe the men can use their shields for clubs. We can’t cut ice, but if we break it up—”
“I’ll see what I can do, Garric,” Cashel said. He lifted his staff overhead and gave it a trial spin, the only way he could do that without knocking down any number of people in these cramped quarters. The hall was a lot like a sheep byre on a winter night.
