Transcendent (Ascendant Book 2)

by Craig Alanson

  Kyre spurred his horse and charged forward, as the enemy who had knocked Armistead off her horse saw the opportunity to stab her in the back while she staggered back onto her feet, using her own sword to support herself. She was too dazed to see the danger of the sword plunging down between her shoulder blades. Kyre swung his own sword underhanded to force the enemy’s blow aside; he was successful but the shocking impact sent Kyre’s sword spinning through the air and he was momentarily defenseless.

  The enemy, enraged that Kyre had blocked him from the glory of killing the Demarche army commander, turned his attention to the unarmed heir to the duchy of Burwyck. The enemy did not know who he faced as an opponent, but it was clear Kyre was some sort of Taradoran royalty from the fine clothes he wore.

  Kyre’s right arm was cramped and numb from the ringing blow of losing his sword. He had no time to reach for a dagger with his left hand; his only remaining dagger was on the left side of his belt and awkward to reach with his left hand. In a panic, he realized the enemy’s long sword meant the enemy could cut him from farther away that Kyre could reach, so he wheeled his trusted horse closer to the enemy. As the enemy drew back his long sword for a killing blow, Kyre in a panic ripped off his helmet and used it as a club to batter the enemy’s face. The man rocked back in the saddle from the unexpected attack. Again Kyre punched the man with the helmet, then the man pulled his horse back and Kyre’s horse stumbled on a rock. The enemy’s sword came arcing threw the air at Kyre’s unprotected right side; the Falco heir knew he could not swing his helmet around in time to block the sword cut.

  Then the enemy jerked upright as the tip of a sword stuck out of his chest. Kyre’s guard Carter withdrew his sword from behind the man, using a leg to kick the dying enemy aside. “Sire! We must go!”

  “Falzon!” Kyre shouted to his other personal guard as he jammed the helmet back on his head. “Get General Armistead!” Kyre knew he had not the strength, with his right arm still numb, to assist the Demarche commander onto a horse. As Carter and Falzon awkwardly got Armistead on the back of Falzon’s horse, Kyre reached out for the reins of Armistead’s horse, and galloped off up the hill.

  During the short battle, more soldiers of Demarche and Burwyck had come to the rescue; they now outnumbered the enemy, who pulled back to the treeline. Dead and injured on both sides littered the field, there was no time to help them, as more and more of the enemy arrived by the second. As soon as they had ridden a safe mere hundred yards away, they halted briefly for Armistead to transfer to her own horse, then the entire party turned up toward the Kaltzen pass, as quickly as the weary legs of their horses could carry them.

  Kyre looked back to the meadow, to where the enemy cavalry now ranged freely, killing the wounded soldiers who Kyre had been forced to leave behind. Above the meadow, the civilian stragglers who had been the reason for the brief battle scrambled up the steep hill toward the treeline, using hands and knees when needed. The civilians, Kyre thought, would escape safely, at least they would not be pursued by the enemy horsemen.

  Was it worth the cost? A handful of civilian lives saved, against the cost of a dozen lost from the armies of Demarche and Burwyck. And almost the loss of the commander of the Demarche army and the heir to the duchy of Burwyck. Worse, the action had delayed their reinforcing the defense of the Gates of the Mountains.

  Kyre thought, as his tired horse slowed to a trot, that in the future, he needed to weigh the cost before he rode into action. Harsh as it may seem, Tarador would have been better served if Kyre and Armistead had kept to their mission, rather than following all-too-human instincts to protect the defenseless. To his right, Armistead was wrapping a bandage around the injury to her arm. Falzon rode up to Kyre’s left, holding out a sword. “It is not your fine blade, Sire, but it will have to do. You cannot fight all your battles with a helmet.”

  Despite everything that had happened, everyone around Kyre laughed, Armistead especially so. “Your Grace,” she said through a grimace of pain, “you will need to teach your helmet-fighting technique to my army. It was, unique?”

  “That will be easy,” Kyre grinned through his own pain, feeling hot fire from the wrist to shoulder of his sword arm. “All it takes is the right mixture of clumsiness and desperation. Carter, Falzon,” he addressed his two personal guards, “thank you for saving my life.”

  “Thank you for saving my life, Your Grace.” General Armistead said, as she used her teeth to pull tight the bandage on her arm.

  “You are welcome, General,” Kyre replied. “I think my Captain Jaques would not be pleased that I-”

  “General!” A Demarche soldier called out as he rode swiftly toward them. “I have your helmet!” The man proudly held up the now-battered gold-plated helmet.

  “Ah, yes, my helmet,” Armistead observed with disgust. The heavy, gaudy, conspicuous helmet that she had never liked to wear in the field. “It is too bad,” she said, “that it was lost during the battle.”

  “But,” said the soldier, confused.

  “Yes,” Kyre agreed, “it is too bad that your helmet was lost in the battle, and that we had no opportunity to recover it.”

  “Oh, yes,” the soldier caught onto their meaning. “Perhaps the enemy will fight over it,” he said as he threw it down the road. It bounced and rolled, coming to a stop in a ditch.

  Armistead tested the range of motion she had in her bandaged arm. With the damage to her forearm, she could not grip a sword, but she could hold a shield. She contemplated the dent in her former helmet, a dent that could have been in her skull. “If it delays the enemy even a moment, my helmet will have served us well.”

  The Gates of the Mountains loomed above them in plain view, when the ride up the pass became a desperate race. With all of their horses exhausted from racing about the countryside, they could manage no more than a brisk walk up the mountain. In stretches of the road that were particularly steep, Kyre hopped down and ran alongside. General Armistead was about to follow his example, but Kyre and the general’s guards urged her to stay on her horse. The blow to her head, although blocked by the gaudy helmet, was causing her an intense headache. At times, she had difficulty looking straight at a person she was speaking with; her eyes tended to wander to the side and lose focus. Kyre exchanged worried looks with the general’s guards, they feared she had a concussion but there was nothing to be done but to push on up the road to the Gates. Hopefully there, Armistead could rest and receive medical attention. Even with what little Kyre knew of the commander of Demarche’s army, he doubted the woman would allow herself rest at all, until the Gates of the Mountains were securely held against the oncoming enemy.

  The road flattened a bit, and Kyre climbed back into the saddle, urging his horse to a trot. Ahead and above, the Gates towered to each side; sheer cliffs of whitish-gray granite. From Kyre’s location, the road through the Gates was unseen, only the cliffs created a gap in the mountain ridge. Kyre had only been through the Gates once, when he was so little that he had ridden with his father on the front of his saddle. Back then, he remembered thinking that the Gates soared up into the heavens, especially at the point where the road squeezed through the narrow gap. Kyre had not measured the Gates back then, he had only held onto the saddle and gawked in awe at the cliffs. According to the map provided by General Armistead’s headquarters team, the width of the Gates at the road was roughly one hundred yards. Actually, it was more narrow, because rocks crumbling off the cliffs had created a debris field on both sides; the road had to be constantly be kept cleared of boulders that flaked away from the granite cliffs and tumbled down. Most of the boulders crashed to the ground and rolled down the road to the west, bouncing and rolling, dangerous to anyone on the road going up to the Gates. But enough rock stayed at the bottom of the cliffs that the road would have become completely blocked, without the tireless efforts of Demarche to keep the precious road open for traffic.

  It was the narrow size of the Gates that made them the perfect spot to defend
the Kaltzen pass. The gates were not the actual highest point of the pass; that lay more than a mile farther of the road. Beyond the Gates was a broad, bowl-shaped shallow valley; a mountain meadow the residents of Demarche called a ‘park’. On the east side of the park, the ridge of the mountain crest was an escarpment ranging far north and south, with the escarpment looming above the valley. The road went through a gap in the escarpment, a gap much wider and more gently sloped than the Gates.

  Kyre stood in the saddle, as much to give his sore backside a rest as to get a better look at the Gates. He still could not see the base of the Gates, where the road cut through the narrow gap, because there was a hump in the road before the Gates. That was something Kyre remembered from going up the road as a little boy; how frustrating it was that you could not actually see the road through the Gates until you were almost upon them. As he stood, a soldier behind him shouted a warning, and Kyre looked back down the road. No enemy riders were in sight directly behind them, for the road curved and dropped off. Where the road went around a spur of the mountain perhaps a mile away, Kyre was surprised to see the road fairly clogged with enemy cavalry. He pulled out his spyglass.

  The enemy was approaching rapidly, on horses much fresher than the tired mounts ridden by Kyre and the soldiers accompanying him. Armistead had pulled her horse to a halt, to steady her own spyglass. She lowered the glass and looked at Kyre. “They have wizards with them.”

  Kyre again studied the enemy cavalry, he had not seen any wizards among- Yes, now he saw them. “Two wizards, at least!” Kyre cried out. As he watched through the shaking image of the spyglass, one of the wizards looked up. Directly at him, it seemed, and for a moment, Kyre felt sheer terror. From a mile away, Kyre thought it not possible the wizard could have singled him out, but the wizard was clearly shaking his fist at the group from Demarche and Burwyck.

  “We ride!” Armistead ordered. “Your Grace, we must go!”

  Kyre tucked his spyglass away spurred his horse, but the animal could not manage more than a trot on trembling legs. The enemy’s galloping pace was gaining on them; Kyre looked to the Gates to judge whether they would pass through before the enemy caught up with them. “How far to the Gates?” He asked breathlessly.

  A Demarche soldier answered with a worried glance behind. His horse was also soaked with sweat and laboring, glassy-eyed. “Three miles, slightly less, Your Grace.”

  With the road through the Gates still just beyond sight, perhaps half a mile away, wizard fire shattered a rock on the side of the road, and the company turned as one in the saddle to see the imminent danger. Two wizards were in the lead, with black-clad cavalry close behind, shouting war cries and brandishing spears and swords. Their onrushing horses kicked up clouds of choking dust from the road, and a few arrows flew from their midst, falling short of any target. Even for wizard fire, the distance was still too great for accuracy. No matter, the enemy wizards did not care to hit any particular person, merely to sow terror among the defenders. Another ball of magical fire was flung and this one splashed in the road, panicking several horses. All the horses, even those trained for war, flared their nostrils at the acrid stench of wizard fire, and their fear gave them fresh legs.

  Wizards! The thought sent fear coursing along Kyre’s spine. He had been trained to fight with a bow, a sword, a dagger, a spear, and axe and all manner of other odd weapons he may use or be faced with. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of each weapon, how to use them, how to defend against them. He knew how to use a stronger opponent’s strength against them, and how to use his own strength and speed. What he did not know was any practical way to fight a wizard. Advice from weapons masters was to run when faced with magical power. A shield may provide temporary protection against the crudest form of power; wizard fire. Against more arcane arts, an ordinary soldier had no protection, and wizard fire could eat through the strongest shield if hit more than once.

  The only tactic taught in the Burwyck army, if forced to fight a wizard, was to use the advantage of numbers. Even the most powerful wizard could fight only a certain number of opponents. Massed soldiers, brave to the point of suicidal, could overwhelm a wizard, if any of them survived to get close enough. A wizard could block an arrow, or two or three, but a full volley of arrows could get through a magical defense. When faced with a wizard, Kyre’s weapons instructor had told him, the only thing to do was accept that you would die, and do your best to strike a blow, futile gesture though that may be.

  All that ran through Kyre’s mind as he raced toward the Gates. Surely the Gates were well defended, and surely that defense included wizards, many wizards.

  So Kyre was utterly shocked when he came over the crest of the road, to find less than a hundred soldiers defending the Gates, and most of them were people Kyre and Armistead had sent ahead of them. Where was the Demarche army?

  Where was the Royal Army?!

  Their horses stumbled the final hundred yards to the ragged line of soldiers milling about between the towering Gates. A brisk wind blew right in their faces from the east, snatching the breath from Kyre’s mouth, forcing to shout and even then, soldiers cupped hands to their ears in order to hear him. “We must hold the Gates!” Kyre demanded. “Where are your fellows?”

  “Begging your pardon, Your Grace,” said one Demarche sergeant with a pained expression, “we have orders to pull back. There’s not enough of us here to hold the Gates, and the Royal Army is still climbing the other side of the pass.”

  “What! No!” The gap at the true summit of the pass was ten times, more than ten times as wide as the Gates. If the Gates could not be held with the soldiers on hand, how could the summit of the pass?

  The sergeant took off his helmet. “Your Grace, with all respect, I am a soldier of Demarche,” he looked at General Armistead, who was slumped in the saddle of her horse, supported by guards on either side. The valiant woman was barely awake, mumbling something to herself.

  “Get the general to safety,” one of her captains ordered. “Who gave you these orders?” The captain demanded to the sergeant.

  “General Magrane himself,” the sergeant said defensively, drawing himself up on his toes and squaring his soldiers. “He told me there is not time to set up proper defenses here before the enemy arrives,” the soldier pointed down the road, where the enemy was no more than half a mile away, their panting horses struggling to maintain a gallop up the road.

  “The defenses should have already been here!” Kyre exploded.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” the sergeant was now less deferential, having absorbed scathing criticism from too many officers over the past hour. “Seeing as they were not when I arrived, I am following orders. We might hold for a time against that cavalry,” he held up his spear, “but not against wizards.”

  “Your Grace,” the Demarche captain said in a defeated tone, “he is right. The Gates are lost. We must pull back on General Magrane’s orders, and-”

  “No!” Kyre’s youthful emotions shown through. “We will not lose our nation, just because our new Regent is a spoiled, petulant little girl! She may surrender Demarche to spite your duchess, but the army of Burwyck will stand firm! Burwyck! To me!” He wheeled his exhausted horse, feeling the beast slow to respond. So too were his guard and soldiers, he noticed. The prospect of fighting a desperate battle against endless numbers of enemy cavalry was not what caused his soldiers to hesitate.

  It was the prospect of fighting wizards.

  Kyre snatched a spear from the Demarche sergeant’s hand and took the lead, riding back west to the absolute most narrow point of the Gates. When his soldiers, no more than thirty, formed up with him, Kyre tried to think of inspiring words. This is where his father would truly command his army; but to Kyre, no words came. He wheeled his horse back and forth, trying not to admit to his own terror at the onrushing enemy.

  Indulging himself, he looked up at the Gates, the powerful mountain wind ricking him in the saddle. The sky, which in the valley below had been
pleasantly sunny, was now clouded over, promising a storm. The wind was chilly, making him shiver in his sweat-soaked shirt under the chainmail.

  This, he thought, is where I will die? Far from home. Not to save his nation or to ensure victory, but in a futile gesture.

  Kyre considered that he should regret, for Ariana’s sake, that if Tarador survived the princess would have to marry his younger brother Talen.

  And he found himself thinking that spoiled Ariana deserved his bully of a brother.

  How could he, Kyre asked himself, have ever been so stupid and gullible as to pledge featly to an untested princess he barely knew?

  The enemy neared, letting out a blood-curdling battle cry, and Kyre opened his mouth to shout a defiant reply.

  His shout was cut short by a fireball smashing into the rock face of the Gate beside him, throwing him off his horse, and then all was darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The enemy poured through the Gates, marching across the broad, shallow mountain valley meadow before the Kaltzen Gap, as the actual summit of the pas was known in Demarche. The ranks of the enemy swelled, concentrating in the center but so many of them were there, they were forced to spread out to fill the valley. In the Gap, more and more Royal Army soldiers were arriving, to reinforce the meager ranks of Demarche soldiers. The defenders formed a line across the wide Gap, only four deep. Pikes were set into the ground to menace the enemy cavalry, swords made ready in the first two ranks, with archers behind them. There was no point of archers climbing the escarpment, for the top of those cliffs were so high above the valley below that no arrow could aimed, and the swirling mountains winds would blow even the most carefully aimed arrow wildly off course.

  The enemy cavalry tried an initial charge of the Gap to test the defenses there, and found those defenses too stout for comfort. The army commanders of Acedor had no qualms about ordering their entire cavalry to their deaths, merely to wear down the numbers of defenders, but with thousands of infantry marching through the Gates, there was no need for wasteful slaughter. Better to wait until Acedor had overwhelming numbers, then let infantry march on the Gap and crush the defenders by sheer numbers. Cavalry would be held in reserve to exploit the opening forced by their infantry and race down the other side of the pass, into the heart of Tarador below. Already, the enemy commanders judged they had a four to one advantage in soldiers at the Kaltzen pass. In wizards, their advantage was even greater, for only three were seen in the ranks of Tarador while Acedor could boast of seven wielders of magical fire.