“Blays!” he cried. His sword had buried itself in the ground a couple feet away and he yanked it up and beat back the first thrust of a swordsman. Most of the soldiers around him were occupied with their own troubles, be they plunking arrows at the men in the open road or rushing to the side of their friends just cut down by the screaming horde of Rettinger’s charge, but he was there, alone, with too many alien faces to make it out alive. He parried another blow and riposted, as Robert Hobble had shown him an eternity ago on their long march, a wild swing that nonetheless slashed across his opponent’s chest and felled him. He heard the shifting of the carpet of needles and spun to meet a sword meant for his spine. His senses felt like living things. The scent of blood and sap. The power of the weight of the blade in his hand. The mixed anger and fear of this new swordsman bringing his weapon back around. Dante punched out his left hand and the nether knocked a hole in the man’s neck. His eyes bugged and he too went down, painting the forest floor with his blood. An arrow ripped past Dante’s ear and he felt a stinging numbness where it clipped his cartilage. Blood trickled down his forehead and cheeks where he’d slammed into the dirt. Two more swordsmen popped up from tending the wounded to meet this new threat and Dante backpedaled, resisting every urge to throw down his weapon and run till his legs gave out. He swept his free hand through the blood at his ear and face. When the two men stood shoulder to shoulder in front of him he sprung forward, arm held straight as the arrows hissing through the woods, and white fire belched from a foot in front of his hand to sear past the two soldiers. Its pure heat wrenched the screams from their throats.
Others fell back, shielding their faces with their forearms. The flash of flame and the whump of igniting air drew a glance from a dozen other men. Dante had slung the nether like a limb of his own body, trusting blank terror to keep him safe, but from the depths of his fugue he knew if he stayed here he might take a few more with him out to Arawn’s indifferent arms, but it would end with his unblinking eyes staring up through the wind-shook needles of the pines.
He turned and ran what he thought was north—away from the loudest sounds of fighting, at least; the sun was down too far to judge by it in the middle of all those trees—zigzagging through trunks, meaning to confuse any archers drawing a bead, to string out any pursuing swordsmen. He risked a glance. A half dozen giving chase, maybe more. They’d seen one of the riders unhorsed and wanted to cut out a nobleman’s heart and see it bleed the same as theirs. Maybe work up the courage to join the main fray. He knocked down the lead man with a bolt of shadow. Shouts to his immediate north. They were cutting him off. Time nearly at a stop. Watching the shadow-struck man’s feet slide up in front of him as he slipped in the needles. Blood wobbling away from the wound on the man’s forehead. The world was nightmare, choked gasps and blood gurgling in punctured throats, blind rage in the eyes of all the men who were about to kill him as the agent of a woman he hated here near the ends of the world.
“Blays!” he screamed. Chill fingers wrapped around his spine as he reached out again to the dead man’s corpse now slamming to a final rest. Would it be no different than with the rats? Would the effort tear Dante apart like a storm-swollen stream? His body shuddered as the nether left him and darted over to the body. The next swordsmen rushed by, a couple seconds away. He turned his gaze to them and from the corner of his vision saw the dead man stand and raise his sword. Dante tasted bile. Just like the rats. He imagined the dead man’s sword splitting the neck of the man running past him and the corpse swiped out and removed a head from a set of shoulders. Then the closest pair was on him.
His back bumped into a trunk and he rolled alongside it. The sword of a man with a black beard and dirty buckskin clothes whacked into the trunk, spitting bark over Dante’s face. Dante leaned forward to stab his guts while his sword was stuck but his partner cut a quick downward stroke and Dante had to lean back and twist his body just to get his sword up enough to escape with a gashed shoulder rather than a severed arm. He wanted to scream. He grimaced and punched the man in the jaw with the pommel of his sword, knocking him back a couple steps to spit gobs of blood and teeth. The other dislodged his blade from the tree and, being right-handed, stabbed around it. Dante jumped to put the full trunk between them and beat down with his sword, pinning the attacker’s against the tree. He ripped up the point of his blade, just a quick flip of the wrists, but it cut across the man’s chest, sending him sprawling, guts open to the air.
To his left, toward where the other men had been chasing him, the animated corpse was laying into three swordsmen. Three other bodies sprawled at its feet where it had caught them unaware. There was no grace in the swings of its sword, just a tireless, painless strength, a stroke as ponderous and inevitable as the turning of the stars. It didn’t try to dodge or block when one of the men stepped in and hacked through its left arm. Instead it raised its blade and buried it in the man’s ribs. The other two fell on it, chopping wildly, knocking it to its knees.
The man he’d punched had recovered and circled around the tree. The man was young, his beard patchy and his hair stringy, blood dribbling past his lips to catch in the hairs of his chin, and as they exchanged strikes and parries Dante found he could hold his own. A one-man cheer came up from the left and the sliver of second awareness he’d felt since returning the corpse to its feet blanked out. They’d be on him in a second. He reached out for the shadows, expecting hesitation after all his exertions, resistance, but found them ready. In his surprise he nearly lost hold of his simple intentions but maintained his grasp and formed a ball of black around the man’s head. The man gasped and Dante had to duck his blind swing. The sword whooshed over his head. He poked the man in the ribs, then the gut, and at the sight of two more men running toward him he took off like a jackrabbit, straight west toward the road and all the clamor of a full battle. He weaved through trees, boots slipping on the pine needles. He held his sword with both hands and chopped the back of an archer taking sight through the thinning trees. His cut shoulder flared with pain. Bootsteps thudded behind him. He ran straight through a line of archers at the edge of the woods and then he was clear and saw the raging anarchy of the fight along the open ground around the road.
Swordsmen lashed at each other, the fine black cloaks of Samarand’s men mingling with the tanned leather dress and time-thinned furs of the rebels. Pikes waved over their heads, descending in awkward slashes through the crush of men. Men died on their blades and were held on their feet by the pressure of the surging troops. Others tripped on corpses, then lunged to meet the enemy’s swords. Shrieks of wrath and pain and steel deafened him to everything but the pulse in his ears. Six hundred soldiers or more all told, he guessed, the men of Arawn outnumbered and with more ready to meet them in the woods—how would real war look if it came to Mallon, tens of thousands clashing in a single battle? Wounded men retreated back to the cover of the treeline, soaked in the blood of their own mangled flesh, pointing and shouting when they saw the flap of Dante’s black cloak. He struck one down with a spear of nether. Archers behind him, a war to his front and to his left. The field to the right was mostly empty but if he went that way the archers could fire on him without worry of hitting their comrades. He clenched his teeth. Everything was ruin. He’d die here. He’d fall in the field and become lost to the dirt. Another man closed on him, right arm dangling useless, blood dripping from the torn sleeve around his elbow, sword held in his left. The man swung with strength but no precision and Dante deflected it from his body and swung a forehand counter that took the man’s throat.
A keening bloom of fire flared from the middle of the battle around the carriages, followed in the same instant by a second and a third. Screams dominated the crash of weapons. Dante started forward to make use of the confusion, meaning to lose himself to any watching archers in the mixed-up outskirts of the fight, but before he’d crossed the open ground the tide of men began to turn back toward him, driven by the tongues of flame and the terror of t
he men at the front. Dante backed up toward the woods, readying the shadows. The first of the enemy reached him as he heard the pounding of hooves approaching from his right.
The cavalry smashed into the scattered lines. Hands and swords and strings of blood flew into the air. The enemy men stopped short to meet this new threat, caught between the anvil of the council priests laying waste at their front and the hammer of mounted men cutting them apart at their rear. Dante stumbled backwards, seeing the faces of the riders whip past, their expressions fusions of glee and rage.
“Blays!” he called out. “Blays!”
A handful of rebel footmen had been cut off from the lines by the swift strike of the cavalry. Their eyes turned to Dante’s shouts, saw him alone and unhorsed. He sobbed, then tightened his throat and shook his sword and made white fire slither around its length. He held his left hand aloft and swathed it in a hazy sphere of darkness, bellowing for all his worth. His voice cracked. The men hesitated, a couple actually stepping back in the face of his demonry, then saw they were many and he was one and continued toward him. He could run back toward the woods, but that would just delay this fight to put him into an even more lopsided match. He tensed his arms, heart rebelling against what the next moments would bring.
Two riders peeled from the rear of the cavalry while the others, too few to risk getting mired down in the throngs of men, continued the charge to Dante’s left. One of the riders stomped down a footman and cut across the back of a second. The other leaned down in the saddle and with a smooth stroke sent a man’s head tumbling. The first horseman swung away to hurry after the rest of the cavalry, leaving Dante and Blays—for it was Blays, his blond head bobbing with the motion of his horse, blood splashed on his sword arm and face so his eyes stood out bright as beacons—alone to face the remaining men who hadn’t turned back to the main fight at the departure of the cavalry. They stood alone, detached in the open ground between woods and the full-out battle at the carriages.
Blays tried to turn his horse for another pass, but saw the men would be on Dante before he could complete the maneuver. He drew up his legs in a crouch and hurled himself into the mass of men as they converged on their target. Two fell beneath his tackle and only one got back up with him. Dante whirled his fiery blade in front of him, drawing no blood but lending his own discord to all the violent babel. He swept his shadowed hand in a broader arc and the nether cut a line across the veins of the lead man’s neck. Blood jetted away from him and he fell to his knees, clutching his mortal wound. Still the warriors didn’t break. Blays had freed his sword from the man he’d plunged it in during his leaping dismount and was fighting in a way Dante had never seen him do before: fists held steady at a point just above his waist, he twisted his wrists and elbows to swing the sword’s tip in front of his body with little strength but great precision and speed. In no time at all he opened a hole in his opponent’s defense and lashed the blade back and forth across his body.
Dante sidled to his left as they fell in around him, hacking out at one man, forcing him back enough to keep the ones on his right out of arm’s reach. He flat-out charged then, the bright lance of his sword held out before him. His target sidestepped and Dante spun right to block his strike. Blays came at him from his flank and the man pivoted to prevent being skewered. Blays had already moved on to the next man coming their way as Dante sunk his sword to the hilt in the man’s side. He thought he could feel the steel sliding through the separate organs of the man’s gut.
Their foes fanned out around them. Blays and Dante fought shoulder to shoulder, a two-man line against the number and determination of the enemy. The soldiers’ eyes swirled with hate for Dante and the uniform he wore, oblivious to the true nature of his presence, how he would land the blow at Samarand’s neck the rebels would fail at here. Sick laughter bubbled in his throat. None of them had to die, but they’d be killed in this battle by the score. Whose justice was that? Surely not the gods’. This was no reflection of the heavens. This was the law of the soiled earth, a place of angry confusion and mewling deaths. This was the edifice of man, this blood-watered field, where they fought and fell cold for a joke of fate.
He snapped his head away from a whistling sword. Blays was fighting two men at once, wrists flicking so fast his blade blurred in the afterglow of the sunset. Dante kept his own, and for half a minute of ringing swords he was too busy keeping himself alive to reach out to the nether. He landed a deep cut to a man’s thigh and the attacker fell back to be replaced by another. In the open moment Dante took a clumsy grasp on the shadows and rather than a stab of force released it in a blunt wave that knocked away the next man’s breath. He pressed his advantage, battering away the man’s sword and gutting him. He glanced at a grunt to his side and saw Blays lean into a killing strike and immediately pull back to parry his other foe’s reach. He turned back. The sword of the man whose leg he’d cut was sweeping in a level plane toward his ribs. Dante tossed up a half-strength block and sucked air through his teeth as he felt the steel parting his skin. He skipped back a step, stomach soured with nausea. The shadows swept through him—too much this time, an itchy tingle beneath his skin that flared into a burst of pain before he went numb. His assailant fell, but his vision grayed, his sword arm lowered to his side. The shouts and screams and pounding of steel met his ears as if he were underwater. He blinked, turned to watch Blays hack it out with one last man. Everyone else around them appeared to have either retreated into the woods, rejoined the fighting around the carriages and priests or further down the road where footmen battled footmen, or been struck down in the field. Amazingly—though in his lightheaded state everything seemed at least mildly surprising—Blays’ horse stood a few yards off, tossing its head at the noise and the scents of blood and bile and scorched air, but there it was, standing its ground.
“Your horse is good,” he said to Blays, who offered no reply. Down to a single opponent, Blays’ swings had become less defensive, wider arcs meant to take advantage of the strength his arms had gained these last few months. “Hey. I said your horse is good.”
“I heard,” Blays said through his teeth. He countered a few blows then leaned into an offensive of his own. He struck successively higher, and on the fourth swing he twisted his wrist, giving it an upstroke, knocking his opponent’s sword up over his head. The man regained enough balance to start a cut aimed at Blays’ neck, but by then Blays’ own blade had passed back down and opened his throat. The man dropped away. Blays spun in a quick circle and saw the only men near them were corpses. He ran past Dante to the horse and wriggled his way up into the saddle. Dante gazed dumbly at the blood that covered his hands and sword. He wiped his weapon on the coat of a dead man, then brushed his hands in the wet grass.
“Come on!” Blays shouted.
“What, both of us?” Dante said, wandering up beside the beast. It smelled like sweat and dust and hair.
“Now, you god damn dunce!”
“Right.” Dante got a foot in the stirrup and swung himself up behind Blays. “Sorry. I’m a little—” He tapped the side of his head.
“What’s new,” he heard Blays mutter. Blays wheeled the horse around and spurred it north along the right-hand side of the road. A couple arrows whisked past their head. Dante twisted around and gave the forest the finger. They swung around the top edge of the battle, giving it wide berth, working their way toward the rear. After a few moments the cold air filling his lungs and rushing over his skin began to clear his head.
“You’re pretty good,” he said.
“Shut up,” Blays said, glancing quickly between the ground ahead and the slaughter at the carriages. As they curved around the lines of combat Dante saw streaks of fire lancing out from the hands of council men who’d looked too old to walk without a staff. He laughed, then fell silent at the scent of scorched flesh. Samarand’s men had repelled another surge and were slowly driving the rebels back. Blays cut across the road and through a makeshift camp of wounded men. As they
approached the rear of the caravan two horsemen rode out and hailed them.
“It’s Blays! I’ve got Dante Galand with me!”
“Alive?” one of them asked with professional interest. Blays reined in the horse and dropped down to the ground.
“Takes more than that rabble to kill me,” Dante said. He hopped down and staggered to one side, arms wheeling. “I’m all right.”
“What’s been going on?” Blays said to one of the riders, a man whose thick black hair was clipped short.
“Looked bad until the priests come into it,” the man said in halting Mallish.
“And now?”
“Not so bad.”
“We need to go help them,” Dante said. He took a step forward. Blays planted a hand on his chest, unbalancing him again.
“No we don’t. Look at you, you’re like a drunk two-year-old.” He glanced over at the sounds of battle, then at the rider, then finally back to Dante. His mouth worked over itself. “What if..?”
Dante frowned, confused. Then he caught the glint in Blays’ eyes and shook his head.
“Not until the Tree!” he whispered loudly.
“But it’s so mixed up right now. No one could tell.”
“I don’t even know what’s going on,” Dante said. He walked around the caravan to get a view of the fight, letting his hand trail along the side of one of the wagons. Blays’ feet crunched through leaves and dirt behind him. Dante turned a corner and gazed out at the swarms of men, swords and pikes flashing in the dim light. He wondered vaguely if Larrimore were still alive. He could make out Samarand, her thick black braid swinging behind her head as she called out orders and weaved her hands to form the nether before unleashing it in a booming flare amongst the enemy ranks, and after a moment he’d counted all six priests of the council on their feet and lobbing death before them, but he didn’t see Samarand’s Hand.
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