Jarik bore more than one wound. None would lay him low, much less cripple. His worst debility was that in exertion and armor-trapped heat he had lost pounds and pounds, and sweat enough to fill a goodly jug. He could hardly breathe for panting. Only when the last foreigner had fallen did Jarik Blacksword realize that his sword had taken on the weight of a log at the end of an arm that must surely belong to a seventy-year-old.
Jilain Kerosyris was unscathed, for iron would not pierce the armor of Snowmist, though she had taken many blows and would be stiff on the morrow with, everyone assumed, a rainbow of touch-sore bruises. She and Jarik sank down side by side, surrounded by corpses. Their only aim was to draw breath and not move their arms.
Beside them appeared the child. On Her was the mask of the Lady of the Snowmist.
“My … daughter,” Jilain gasped out cleverly. But she was hardly godlike now. Moveless she lay, exhausted, already stiffening in every strained muscle.
“Ah, Jilain,” the girl said softly. “Ah, Jarik. Heroes.”
The Child of the Snowmist went purposefully onto all three ships. She left them to examine dead men along the beach; piled and limb-entangled on the beach. She went then to Jarik. There too stood Kirrensark and a blood-splashed youth with strange dark markings in his eye sockets.
“The War has begun in earnest,” She told Jarik quietly. “These men came from afar indeed. They are of lands called Taris and Barador, domain of the Lord Cerulean and his puppet lords. This attack, and the hawks and Iron Lord with them, means that Cerulean and the Lords of Iron are in contact, and know of us here.”
“Lord of Iron,” Jarik gasped fleetingly even as exhaustion claimed him. For he knew that their own mighty weapons, designed to be superior to those of the Forces of Man, to everything on the earth, had claimed now two Iron Lords.
Not many yards away the sea made a gulping noise and the gryphon disappeared beneath the water. It would come in with the tide, most likely tomorrow night’s.
“A battle is won,” She said in her voice carefully controlled not to sound childish, “a great battle and heroic. Yet the War only begins. We must — ”
But Jarik Blacksword, sprawled with an arm across her most supposed to be their goddess, had never fought so mightily or been so wearied, and he lay asleep on that beach strewn with corpses and those wounded men that Kirrensark’s people, not slavers, were now turning into corpses. And the words of the child-god must wait for another day.
“It will be as he said,” Kirrensark One-arm muttered to his old battle-companion Delath Berserker. “Hereafter this wark shall bear the name of the one we stole from Jarik: Oceanside.”
Delath nodded, and squatted beside Jarik of the Black Sword. He would carry him up the hill to the wark — up to Oceanside — and a proper bed, or cease calling himself a man.
This was the third of the chronicles of Jarik and Jilain in War Among the Gods on the Earth
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The Lady of the Snowmist (War of the Gods on Earth Book 3) Page 24
