The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  Zac’s other horsemen were already raining arrows on the pack, and it took hits.

  “Hold!” called the captain. “On me,” he said to the knights. “Squires—charge.”

  Behind him, Toby led the squires in a charge at the rest of the pack. The war horses were a different proposition from the riding horses, and whatever the things were, they died under the big steel-shod hooves. Bone cracked and chipped.

  Shrill eerie screams ripped across the road to echo off the far trees.

  Cully had all the archers together around the wagon. Francis Atcourt’s young page, Bobby, had all the archers’ horses in his fist and looked ready to cry.

  The horses began to panic, and the boy lost them, the reins ripped from his hands.

  “Wyvern!” Cully said.

  In fact, there were two wyverns—or even three. One scooped up a horse—Count Zac’s much beloved spare pony—and with one enormous beat of its sixty-foot wingspan was gone.

  The other went for the wagon. It took Cully’s horse-dropper in the neck and flinched, but a flailing fore-talon ripped a small boy in two, covering his siblings with his gore. Ricard Lantorn put a needlepoint bodkin deep into the thing’s left haunch and Cuddy’s horse-dropper, released from a range of twelve feet, went in high on the thing’s sinuous neck just below its skull.

  The wagon was an organ playing a discordant wail of terror. Its team bolted down the road.

  The wyvern baulked, turned on the archers.

  Father Arnaud’s heavy lance struck it under its great, taloned left arm and went in almost as far as his hand and the great thing reared back, took two more arrows and failed to land a claw before Chris Foliak’s lance spitted it.

  Ser Francis Atcourt’s lance was the coup de grâce, striking it in the head as its neck began to sink and its eyes filmed. It fell.

  The archers whooped.

  Atcourt put up his visor. “Well,” he said to Father Arnaud, “I—”

  A gout of blue-white fire struck Father Arnaud. It lifted him from the saddle and slammed him to the ground.

  Atcourt pulled his visor down.

  Ser Gavin galloped by. “Save the children,” he roared. The first wyvern was coasting along, skimming the trees above the runaway wagon.

  The captain rose in his stirrups and pointed a gauntleted fist. A beam of red light travelled an arrow’s flight into the woods and something there was briefly outlined in red.

  “Damn,” the captain said.

  His attack and the counter-spell were almost simultaneous. There was a detonation in front of him and his horse shied—and subsided.

  He backed the horse. He had a great many tricks since the last time he’d been in a fight like this, and he cast, and cast, and cast.

  A bowshot away, his opponent was silhouetted against the foliage by a matt-black wall. The creature itself—a daemon—was lit from beneath by a simple light spell cast at the ground before it and thus not susceptible to a counter.

  The tree beside it exploded, wicked shards of oak as sharp as spears whipping through the air.

  The adversary struck him with a gout of white fire and then another. He took both on his shields and lost both shields in the process.

  “Fiat lux,” he said aloud, and loosed his own bolt of lightning.

  But the adversary was gone, skipping across reality.

  Down the road, the second wyvern stooped, trading altitude for airspeed and calculating nicely with the ease born of long and predatory success, passing just over the last overhanging tree branches before a long stretch with no cover on either side of the road for half a bowshot—a short causeway over a marsh. It plucked one of the goodwife’s children from the wagon, decapitated one of her daughters with a talon flick, took a raking blow from the oldest daughter with a scythe and banked hard, skimming low over the reeds and the beaver house and rising neatly over the trees on the north side of the road.

  The panicked horses took the wagon off the causeway, and the wagon stopped, the horse team mired immediately and screaming and neighing their panic as the wave-front of the wyvern’s terror passed over them again.

  Ser Gavin and young Angelo di Laternum cantered up. The run along the road was already tiring their war horses.

  The wyvern consumed its prey—a simple flip of the child into the air and a spray of blood visible two hundred yards away. Cully’s long shot from the end of the causeway fell away short.

  “Under the wagon!” Gavin shouted at the goodwife and her brood. “Into the water. Under the wagon!”

  The goodwife understood, or had the same notion herself. Grabbing her youngest, she leaped into the icy water. It was only thigh deep.

  “Dismount,” Gavin snapped at the young Etruscan man-at-arms. Both of them swung heavily to the ground and pulled heavy poleaxes off the cruppers of their saddles. Angelo had a long axe with a fine blade. Ser Gavin had a war hammer—a single piece of steel that was deceptively small.

  Cuddy and Flarch ran along the causeway like athletes in a race. Flarch—one of the company’s handsomest men—never took his eyes off the banking wyvern.

  Cully loosed another light arrow and scored against the wyvern, who was too low and slow to manoeuvre.

  “Ware!” Cully called. He’d picked up another wyvern coming in from the setting sun in the west, right down the road. Four of them, now.

  The squires’ charge was more successful than any of them would have hoped.

  The daemon’s ambush—it certainly appeared to be an ambush—had been sprung from too close. There were three daemon warriors behind the first creatures, but they were so close behind that Toby’s charge first trampled the imps—Toby’s immediate name for the toothy monsters which had attacked the mare—but then crashed into the first of the adversaries. The beaked creature was as shocked as Toby, but his axe was faster than the daemon’s and he landed a hasty blow on the thing’s brow-ridge, cutting away a section of its engorged crest. Blood—red, too red—erupted as if under enormous pressure.

  By sheer good fortune, Toby’s mate, Adrian Goldsmith, was right behind Toby, his horse on exactly the same line, and Adrian’s unbroken lance took the stunned daemon squarely in the mouth—entered, tore a furrow along its tongue and severed its spine. The lance broke under the weight of Goldsmith’s charge.

  Marcus, once Ser Jehan’s page, an older man and not the best jouster, missed his strike and died, as a great stone-headed axe caved in his helmet and pulled him from his horse, but the horse, forced to turn, put both metal-shod forefeet into its master’s killer. Neither blow was mortal for a daemon, but the two knocked the big saurian back a yard or more and cost it its balance as it fell over its dead kin. It never got to rise, as Toby pulled his horse around. The horse did the work and Toby rode out its panicked rage.

  The third daemon warrior broke to the left, its heavy haunches powering it as fast as a war horse through the undergrowth. It ran for its life.

  And its allies.

  Gabriel Muriens slipped off his horse neatly and quickly, freeing his feet from the big iron stirrups, getting his left leg over the high war saddle and putting his breastplate against the saddle’s padded seat as he slid to the ground.

  Nell—scared beyond rational thought and yet ready—took the great horse’s reins. She’d just seen more power at closer range than she’d ever seen in her life—six exchanges of levin and fire, whirling shields of pure ops and a sword of light.

  Without comment she handed her master his ghiavarina. He began to walk into the woods. Nell thought he looked like a predator stalking prey.

  He spared one thought for the fights further down the road, turning his entire armoured body to look into the distance, but he didn’t raise his visor, and then the point of his heavy spear and the beak of his visor rotated back into the deep woods and he went forward.

  Nell took the war horse and led it back down the road towards the archers. There was fighting in the woods to the north—the squires. And the archers had all followed t
he wagon, while the pages had followed Count Zac somewhere.

  Nell was all by herself. And there were things moving in the woods south of the road.

  After a moment of panicked lèse-majesté, she vaulted into Ataelus’s war saddle. The great horse tolerated her, even sidled to allow her to settle her weight. Horses liked her, and Ataelus knew her well enough.

  She moved her weight to bring him to a trot.

  The thing—she had no words for it—exploded out of the brush to her left, but she had a heartbeat of warning and Ataelus was ready, weight on his rear haunches, and he sent the thing flying with a right-left hoof combination. The dead thing lay like a sack full of raw meat and teeth.

  “Good boy. Pretty boy.” Nell soothed the horse, showing as little fear as she could. Ataelus was quivering and Nell quivered with him. A few yards away, Lord Wimarc stood over the prone priest, and farther along the road, two of the knights were spurring their mounts back—towards Wimarc and the captain.

  There was a flash behind her. For an instant, her shadow and that of the horse were cast, black as pitch, on the trees to the south of the road. Even at the edge of her vision, the sheer whiteness left spots.

  Without volition, she turned her head after flinching.

  Fifty paces away, the captain stood between two great trees. Five paces away was a daemon, his red crest fully erect, his grey-green skin glowing with power, his beak a magnificent mosaic of inlays—gold and silver, bronze and bone. He was taller than a war horse and wore a loose cloak of feathers that sparkled with fire—and which seemed to have been torn.

  He also had a large splinter of wood through one shoulder and bright red blood leaked around it.

  He had an axe of bronze and lapis. He pointed the haft at the Red Knight and a gout of raw power, unformed ops, crossed the space.

  The Red Knight stood in a guard as if facing a more prosaic opponent. His spearhead was down on his left side, and the haft passed across his hip—dente di cinghiare. His spear rose and he seemed—as far as Nell could tell—to catch the unseemly gout of raw power and toss it aside. He stepped forward with a double pass.

  The daemon cast again—the same gout of power, this time tinged with green.

  The captain didn’t falter. He caught the attack high and flung it down where it burst in a shower of burned leaves and exploding frozen ground.

  The lapis axe whirled and a great green shield appeared, heart shaped, traced magnificently in the air by the bronze shaft of the monstrous axe.

  The captain closed another pace, spearhead low and haft now high, and as the third attack—three spheres of green-white fire at pin-point intervals—left the axe shaft, the captain’s spear turned a half circle on his forward hand, and the spearhead, glowing a magnificent blue, collected all three spheres in its sweep, and they hurtled into the woods. One blew a head-sized fragment out of an ancient oak tree, one passed all the way through the grove and crossed the road within a few feet of Nell’s head to explode in the thicket behind her, and the third vanished into the sky.

  Nell watched her captain close the last pace into engagement range and saw his spear lick out. It passed effortlessly through the daemon’s glowing shield, which vanished with the shriek of an iron gate torn from its hinges. The great saurian, driven to extremes, used his bronze axe-haft to parry the blow.

  The ghiavarina passed through the axe haft like a cold knife through water. An incredible amount of hoarded ops exploded into non-aethereal reality.

  The storm of power seemed to consume the daemon. It passed the captain the way the sea passes the prow of a ship, and even as the shaman slumped, the captain—subsumed him. The great creature began to unmake from the head down, his very essence leached and his corporeal form un-knitting even as the storm of his own power made his skin boil and explode outward in superheated destruction.

  Nell retched.

  The nearby oak tree, already damaged by the sorcerous overspill, gave a desperate crack.

  The tree fell.

  Toby watched the last daemon warrior run. He’d seen enough fights to know a healthy fear—what if he has friends?

  He reined in. “Hold hard,” he called.

  Adrian was still trying to draw his sword, which, in the hurry of combat, had rotated too far on his hips and was now almost lost behind him.

  “Marcus is dead,” he said. “Father Arnaud’s still down on the road. Lord Wimarc’s standing over him.”

  Toby got his horse around and reached behind his friend and drew his sword. He put it in Goldsmith’s hand. The artist was shaking like a beech tree in a wind.

  “You got it, Adrian,” Toby said. “That was a preux stroke.”

  Adrian gave him an uneven smile. “It was, wasn’t it? Christ—all the saints. Thanks.”

  There was a flash of light so bright that both squires were stunned for a moment.

  “Captain’s doing something,” Toby said, turning his horse to face the empty woods.

  Adrian was looking at the ground. “Daemons, Toby.”

  “I know!” The older boy looked around, completely at a loss. To the east, the captain was in some sort of sorcerous duel—there were pulses of power so rapid he couldn’t follow them.

  To the north there was a flash of red, and then another.

  “More daemons?” Adrian said. His voice was high and wild, but his sword was steady enough.

  “Back to the road,” Toby decided.

  “What about Marcus?” Adrian asked.

  “He’s dead and we aren’t,” Toby said. “We’ll come back for him.”

  He backed his horse to get clear of the brush and turned. Adrian followed him.

  There was an explosion to the north, not far away. It was so great that both men and their horses were covered in gravel and sticks and a hurricane of leaf mould. The horses bolted.

  Neither man was thrown. The company stressed riding skills for its squires, and they’d spent almost a year training with the steppe nomads of the Vardariotes.

  Toby’s masterless horse burst onto the road a few horse-lengths from Nell, mounted on Ataelus. She was paper white. The horse half-reared then neighed at the familiar horses, who both slowed to see their herd leader so calm.

  Something horrible was a tangled mass of blood and broken teeth between the huge war horse’s feet.

  “There he is,” Toby said. Lord Wimarc was ten horse-lengths away, standing with a spear over the prone form of Father Arnaud. There was blood dripping from his spear. He was watching the ground south of the road. Francis Atcourt was just dismounting by his side and Phillipe de Beause was still mounted, watching the sky. Two hundred paces to the west, the sun was setting in splendour and a knot of archers could be seen, all drawing and loosing as fast as if repelling the charge of a thousand Morean knights. They had Ser Danved and Ser Bertran covering them. Both had swords well-bloodied.

  Something passed overhead and darkened the sun. The shadow went on forever, and Toby raised his head in despair—

  The great oak tree fell. Gravity was faster than the captain’s best reactions and stronger than all the daemons in the Wild and the oak tree’s top smashed him to the ground and he thought—

  Cuddy drew and loosed, grunting as his shaft leapt into the air, and without pausing or following its flight he bent, took his next shaft, sliding the bow down over it and lifting it already nocked.

  Needlepoint bodkin.

  Needlepoint bodkin.

  Broadhead.

  Broadhead.

  Beside him, Flarch’s elbow shot up in his exaggerated draw posture—he was a thin man and he pulled a heavy bow and his body contorted with every full draw, his back curved like a dancer’s.

  As he released, he took his next arrow from his belt. “Two,” he spat.

  He meant he had two shafts left.

  Both wyverns had chosen to turn in place, gaining altitude and timing their strike so that they could envelop the desperate stand of the knights and archers, splitting the archers’ eff
orts and the knights’ attention.

  But it had cost them. All the archers were hitting at this range.

  Gavin stood in coda longa with his war hammer stretched out behind him, prepared to deliver an enormous blow. Di Laternum had his spiked axe up in front of him.

  The wyverns finished their turn and their sinuous necks flashed as one as their heads locked on to their shared prey. Both monsters screeched together.

  The wave fronts of their conjoined terror struck. Di Laternum fell to one knee. Gavin’s shoulder flared in icy pain and his mind seemed to go blank.

  Flarch lost the arrow in his fingers.

  Cuddy loosed and missed.

  The smaller wyvern was the size of a small ship, its body forty feet long top to tail and its wingspan sixty feet or more. Its underside was oddly flecked with the fletchings of a dozen quarter-pound arrows.

  Its mate—if the mighty monster had a mate—was bigger. Its wings seemed to block the sun, and its body was a mottled green and brown and white like old marble. Its wave of terror was far more subtle than its younger partner’s—its terror promised freedom through submission.

  The children under the wagon all screamed together.

  And then a taloned claw the size of the wagon took the greater of the two wyverns and ripped one of its wings from its still-living body.

  Darkness blotted out the sun. Night fell.

  The dragon was so huge that no mere human mind could encompass it. Its taloned feet were themselves almost as large as the wyvern’s body. The mortally-stricken wyvern wheeled into a catastrophic crash with a scream of rage and humiliation.

  The younger monster turned on a wing tip. It was cunning enough to pass under its titanic adversary, rushing for open sky and rising on a lucky thermal even as the dragon turned in the sky, so close to the ground that the vortices at its sweeping wing tips a thousand feet apart launched small spouts of leaves and the rush of its passage knocked men flat.