by S. M. Stirling, Harry Turtledove, Jody Lynn Nye, John Ringo; Michael Z. Williamson
“Another battle,” Enni Chennitats agreed. “The talonmaster wants us to stifle the Liskash sorcery—but you’ll already know that.”
“I’ve had news that surprised me less,” the senior priestess replied, which left Enni Chennitats nothing to say. Demm Etter gestured to her. “Go on—take your place in the Dance. If you think we face less danger than the males, you’re liable to be badly mistaken.”
“I serve the clan,” Enni Chennitats said. Whatever happened to her would happen to the other priestesses as well. Remembering that made the fight ahead seem a little less lonely. She wondered whether warriors felt the same way. They fought side by side, but one could be horribly maimed while the male next to him stayed safe.
Then Demm Etter raised her hand. They began to Dance, and Enni Chennitats’s worries fell away in the task at hand.
* * *
“Something tricky,” Grumm said. “Sassin will try something tricky. He won’t come straight at us. He can’t come straight at us. It’s not in him. He has to twist things, the way a snake has to coil to move.”
“Yes, yes.” Rantan Taggah heard the escaped slave with only half an ear. He was concentrating on his own dispositions, not Sassin’s. He dipped his head, satisfied he had things the way he wanted. Most important, he’d posted Zhanns Bostofa and the plump male’s retainers as far out of the way as he could. He didn’t want them holding any vital position against the Liskash.
He might have been doing Zhanns Bostofa an injustice. He knew that. But he couldn’t get Enni Chennitats’s image out of his mind. If there was a dark god, a god responsible for the Liskash, and if that god tried to reach out and get his foul fingers on a Mrem…Yes, the result would be much too much like Zhanns Bostofa, wouldn’t it?
If Zhanns Bostofa was looking at this same question, wouldn’t he think the imaginary dark god’s meddling would produce a Mrem too much like Rantan Taggah? The talonmaster bared his fangs. If Zhanns Bostofa thought anything like that, he proved himself no proper Mrem.
Didn’t he?
“What is it?” Grumm asked.
Rantan Taggah made his lips come down over his teeth once more. “Nothing,” he said, lying without hesitation. He set a hand on Grumm’s shoulder. “Aedonniss give you strength, friend. Your hour of revenge is here.”
“Revenge.” The other male tasted the word. “Well, Talonmaster, it would be better than nothing, but not enough. Nothing is enough. Nothing will give me back my other name.”
“I’m sorry,” Rantan Taggah said, which was true, and which did neither him nor Grumm the least bit of good. Weighted down with weapons, the scales of his bronze armor clattering on their leather backing, he hurried to his chariot.
His driver bounded with excitement. “We’ll kill them all!” Munkus Drap exclaimed. “We’ll kill them, and we’ll tan their hides, and we’ll dig up their eggs and have ourselves the biggest fry the world has ever seen!” Not a whisker’s width of doubt clouded his eager mind.
“That would be good,” Rantan Taggah said. And so it would, if it happened. But how long had Mrem and Liskash hated one another? Forever, or maybe a couple of days longer. Had either ever managed to destroy the other despite that perfect hatred? Rantan Taggah knew too well what the answer was.
Let me win, Aedonniss. Let me drive them back, he thought. Let them not hurt my clan too badly. We have far to go, and many more fights to make. We can’t be crippled right at the start.…Please. The sky god might hearken to him. Then again, Aedonniss might not. The god had his own purposes, and put them ahead of his creatures’.
Looking across the arid plain, Rantan Taggah watched the Liskash deploying from marching column to line of battle. The Scaly Ones all looked alike to him. That was almost as alien as their odor. People—people who really were people—had their differences. The only difference he’d ever been able to find among the Liskash was that some of them were stronger than others, and so caused more trouble.
If Sassin was like the other scaly nobles Rantan Taggah had had the displeasure of meeting, there would be no talonmasters’ duel, as there might well have been when two bands of Mrem collided. The Liskash were too cowardly to lead from the front.
He knew how the fight would go if it went the way Sassin wanted it. The Liskash would get within missile range and then pelt the Mrem with arrows and javelins and slingstones. Once they’d thrown their foes into disorder, they would swarm forward and dispose of the warriors their darts hadn’t disabled.
It could work. Plenty of Mrem forces had gone down to defeat at the Scaly Ones’ hands. But Rantan Taggah didn’t plan to play the game Sassin’s way. He’d told Enni Chennitats the Liskash hadn’t come up to play chase-the-string. He aimed to make them play regardless of whether that was what they had in mind.
“Let’s go,” he told his driver. He waved to the cars behind them. Other leaders would be signaling their groups at the same time. The chariot bounced forward, slowly at first but then faster as the krelprep leaned into their work. Rantan Taggah’s body automatically adjusted to every bump and jolt. Was this like travel on the sea? He didn’t know. Truth to tell, he didn’t really want to find out.
The Liskash went on forming their line. They didn’t advance any father, though, not with several squadrons of chariotry bearing down on them. Mrem seized the initiative whether they should have or not. The Liskash were more inclined to yield it and see what happened after that.
They were closer now, much closer. Their archers and slingers went to work to keep the chariots away from their line. They might do a little harm that way, but they wouldn’t do much. Rantan Taggah didn’t intend to slam into them head-on, anyhow. Just because they made war that way didn’t mean he had to.
He tapped Munkus Drap’s right shoulder, hard enough for the other male to feel it through his armor. The driver steered the chariot off to the right, around the Scaly Ones’ left flank. As often as not, a talonmaster worried only about what was in front of him. What would Sassin do with Mrem chariots rampaging in his rear?
What he would do was make it hard for them to get there. Not all of his fighters were on the front line. He had a good force of flank guards. A slung stone hissed malevolently past Rantan Taggah’s right ear. Another one hit a krelprep pulling a different chariot in the head. The beast crumpled, dead, perhaps, before it hit the ground. The chariot slewed sideways and almost turned turtle.
“Nothing’s going to be as easy as we wish it would be, is it?” Munkus Drap asked.
“When is it ever? Wishes are only dreams—they don’t stand up to the light of day,” Rantan Taggah said. He wished Sassin didn’t have the makings of a talonmaster who knew what he was doing. He’d known the Liskash noble was a strong sorcerer. But the two didn’t always go together. Not always, no, but they did here.
Sometimes Mrem, once they got into a position they fancied, would leap down from their cars and fight the Liskash at close quarters. Sword to sword, claw to claw, fang to fang, Rantan Taggah’s folk had the edge on the Scaly Ones. If they could manage that favorable position…
Rantan Taggah wished he hadn’t thought of Sassin’s wizardry a few moments earlier: one more wish that went a-glimmering. A blast of fear made him shake inside his shirt of bronze and leather. He almost pissed himself on the wickerwork floor, which would have been the ultimate indignity for a fastidious Mrem.
The pair of krelprep pulling his chariot felt it, too. They bugled out their alarm call. The one on the right tried to rear despite its harnessing. “No, curse you, you stupid thing!” Munkus Drap shouted. His voice shook, too. All the same, he kept the presence of mind to crack his whip above the krelprep’s back. That, the beast knew, was something to be afraid of in truth. The imaginary panic that filled its mind paled beside the genuine article.
And then, little by little, Rantan Taggah’s unreasoning fear also fell away. The first relief came from the Dancers. Sassin’s spell might have taken them by surprise, but not for long. The herd animals’ response also l
ent him strength, although more slowly. Krelprep and big-horned bundor and hamsticorns had to be able to fight off magic—so many Liskash hunters, both those with Mremlike wits and those without, used it to stun or terrify their prey.
Beasts that had hair and nursed their young were far less adept at making magic than the Scaly Ones. But they had the power to push it off, to keep their own wits unclouded. In the pushing, they also helped liberate Rantan Taggah and the rest of the Mrem warriors.
“Ha!” the talonmaster shouted. “Is that all the famous Liskash noble can do? If it is, now we make him pay for thinking he’s a crocodile when he’s nothing but a skittering little lizard.” The males in his squadron raised a cheer. By Aedonniss, it was wonderful to have his own spirit back!
He looked back and to his left to see how the other bands of charioteers were doing. He didn’t see any of them pounding away from the Liskash. That was the first and most important thing. By the noise and by the dust on the other flank, the Mrem there were already mixing it up with the Scaly Ones.
More dust rose, farther away than he would have expected. Maybe some of the hamsticorns had stampeded in spite of everything the females tending them could do. The big, shaggy beasts had come down from the north with the Mrem. They didn’t care for this hot weather, and they really didn’t care for the Liskash and their magics. Rantan Taggah couldn’t blame them. He was panting and sweating, and just now he too had almost been literally scared out of his mind.
The hamsticorns might want to lumber away. Rantan Taggah wanted to get even. “Let’s go get them,” he told the driver.
“Right you are,” Munkus Drap answered. Rantan Taggah didn’t know whether he was right or wrong. He hardly cared. The chariot was thundering toward the Liskash. The krelprep had their heads down. Anyone or anything that stood in the way of a charging krelprep would get eight holes in the front and hoofprints down the back.
Some of the flank guards carried spears. The Liskash could fight the way the Mrem did. They preferred not to, but sometimes they had to. If they thought they could hold off a chariot charge, they were out of their minds. Rantan Taggah readied his axe. Whatever the krelprep didn’t knock over, he would.
And then a shout echoed in his mind: “Rantan Taggah! It’s gone wrong!” It sounded like Enni Chennitats’s voice. It was her voice. He hadn’t known the Dancing could do that, but it was her, all right.
“What’s gone wrong?” he demanded, even as he chopped at one of Sassin’s scaly followers. Blood sprayed; the Liskash reek filled his nostrils. He chopped again, at another hissing horror. This one ducked away from the blow. One more stroke, and the chariot was through the enemy line. Somewhere up ahead, Sassin would be watching his host come to pieces. Rantan Taggah had never set eyes on his opponent. He had the feeling he would recognize him even so. And he knew he would kill him if he could.
Except Sassin wasn’t the only one discovering all his plans falling to pieces around him. “Everything!” Enni Chennitats said urgently. “There were more Liskash—there are more Liskash. They must have masked their dust—masked themselves—with strong magic, because we didn’t spy it. No one spied it—we were all minding the main swarm. We thought that was everything Sassin had. It seemed like enough.”
An arrow darted past Rantan Taggah, so close that the fletching brushed the fur on his arm. He wished it would have pierced him through the heart. Outthought by a Scaly One…! “Tell me the rest of it.” His voice was harsh. There would be a rest of it. And it wouldn’t be good.
“They hit Zhanns Bostofa’s males,” Enni Chennitats said. “Right when the burst of fear came, they hit them. And Zhanns Bostofa’s warriors…They ran away, Rantan Taggah. Everything’s going to the demons around here.”
He’d known it would be bad, yes. He hadn’t dreamt it would be that bad. If he and his warriors destroyed Sassin’s army—no, Sassin’s main army—while the Liskash scattered the females and kits and slaughtered the herdbeasts…Even if he did kill Sassin, the Liskash still won. Plenty of other nobles and uncounted hordes of ordinary Scaly Ones lived south of the New Water. The Clan of the Claw was alone—so alone!—here.
“Pull back,” he told Munkus Drap. He shouted to the rest of his squadron: “Pull back, curse it!”
“What? Why?” the driver asked in furious amazement.
The expression the talonmaster used to answer that wasn’t even remotely military, which was putting things mildly. Nevertheless, it got the idea across. “They can’t do that!” the junior male yowled.
“I didn’t think they could, either,” Rantan Taggah said bleakly. “Which only goes to show I’m not as smart as I thought I was, eh?” Yes, if everything you were fighting for went to ruin while you were winning your splendid victory, at what price did you buy it? Too high, too high.
A javelin scraped his ear as the driver extricated them from the crush. He wished his bronze helm didn’t have holes to let his ears stick out. Better that, Mrem had always judged, than to muffle such an important sense in battle. As the small wound stung and blood ran warm, he wondered how wise his folk were. But then, he had all too many reasons to wonder about the wisdom of his folk right then.
* * *
Enni Chennitats had never dreamt of such wild disorder. Mrem and Liskash and herdbeasts ran every which way, all making as much noise as they could. Thanks to the Dancers, she’d got through to Rantan Taggah. She knew that much, anyhow. She would have been happier had she known it would do any good.
Demm Etter handed her a javelin. The shaft was the wrong thickness to feel comfortable in her hand. Demm Etter inclined her head. “Yes, it’s a Liskash weapon. Better than no weapon at all.” The senior priestess held one of her own.
“What are we going to do? What can we do?” Enni Chennitats wailed.
“Kill them. Kill as many of them as we can. Try not to get killed ourselves—the clan needs us.” Demm Etter, as usual, was severely practical.
A Liskash wounded a bull hamsticorn with a javelin. The hamsticorn ran toward him, not away. Hamsticorns had no horns. Males rammed heads when they fought in the springtime. Their skulls were thicker than those of any Liskash. Thump! The Scaly One went flying. When he hit the ground again—what seemed half a bowshot away—he thrashed like a broken thing that would never be right again. Which, no doubt, he was.
Another Liskash pointed a skinny finger at Enni Chennitats. He seemed astonished when she didn’t fall over dead. She felt something in the bottom of her mind, but this Scaly One would never make a noble. And she had magic of her own. Hefting the javelin, she stalked toward the dismayed Scaly One.
He would never make a hero, either. He turned and ran. She flung the javelin at him, but missed. Then she trotted over and picked it up again. She was much too likely to need it again. If she happened to see Zhanns Bostofa, for instance, she would gladly let the air out of his bluster.
“Here they come,” Demm Etter said, pointing south.
Sure enough, the Mrem chariotry, or most of it, had shaken free of the enemy and was rolling back toward the rest of the clan. And there was Rantan Taggah, waving frantically as he tried to pull some kind of order out of battlefield madness. Enni Chennitats hadn’t tried to touch his mind since her desperate warning; the Dance had fallen into chaos along with everything else. Something inside her unknotted at finding the talonmaster still lived.
Some of the chariots brought warriors up to fight the Liskash who’d hit the column by surprise. Others, Rantan Taggah’s squadron among them, stayed behind to keep Sassin’s larger force from joining up with the rest. If that happened, everything was ruined.
Then again, everything might well be ruined anyhow.
* * *
So much for the gold leaf on the horns of Rantan Taggah’s krelprep. It was splashed—splattered—with blood, and parts of it were peeling loose. As swank so often did, it had proved more expensive than it was worth.
Rantan Taggah’s spear was gone, too. A Liskash had clutched it as it went in
to his scaly belly, and his dying grasp pulled it out of the talonmaster’s hands as the chariot went past. And he’d broken his axe’s handle. He’d shattered a Scaly One’s shield with the blow, but he still wished he could have it back. A sword was a weapon you used when you had nothing with a longer reach. Rantan Taggah didn’t, not any more. And so—the sword.
He slashed, forehand and backhand, at the Liskash crowding around him. So did the rest of the males in the chariots he’d ordered to stay behind and hold up the swarm of enemies. The Liskash were brave. Though the Mrem had better weapons and better armor for close combat, the Scaly Ones pressed forward as if they didn’t care whether they lived or died. For all Rantan Taggah knew, they didn’t.
Whether or not they valued their own lives, they wanted the Mrem dead. They slew the krelprep, which were not armored, so their foes couldn’t move so fast. That helped them, but perhaps less than they’d hoped. What mattered to Rantan Taggah was keeping the Scaly Ones here from advancing on his vulnerable females and animals. If he had to sell his own life and those of the rest of this rear guard to accomplish that, he would, and he wouldn’t count the cost afterwards. That he might not be in any position to count the cost after the fighting ended was something upon which he carefully did not dwell.
After his krelprep went down, he nodded to Munkus Drap. “It won’t be pretty from here on out, but it’s what we’ve got to do.”
“Oh, yes.” The driver sounded ready. Why not? He carried the big shield. Its leather facing was dented from slingstones. Arrows and the broken shafts of javelins pincushioned it. Munkus Drap had broken the javelins off himself—they made the shield too clumsy to handle.
He had a sword, too. He and Rantan Taggah leaped down from the stalled chariot together. A Liskash ran at Rantan Taggah from the left. The foe was on him before he could slash with his sword. He slashed with his free hand instead. Hissing in anguish, the Scaly One reeled away, clutching at his face. A brief yielding softness under Rantan Taggah’s talons told him he’d torn out an eye.
