Servant of the Dragon

by David Drake

  The heavy infantry was the last to cross the bridge and take their position on the ends of the phalanx. The men rushing past Garric and the command group wheezed with the weight of their weapons and armor. Their officers gasped their orders; signallers paused and breathed quickly several times before they put their horns to their mouths.

  "The last man in a march line always has to run," King Carus explained. "The lead battalion'll have pitched its tents and eaten by the time the last one straggles in. I don't know why any more than I know why the sky's blue, but both things are the truth."

  The phalanx tightened files again as it crashed forward, now that the skirmishers had passed through. The command group was a knot on the phalanx's right edge, and a regular battalion with body armor, swords, and short spears closed the flank to the right of the officers and Blood Eagles.

  Even Lord Waldron seemed to approve of the formation. Valence III and his forefathers had stood in the center of the royal line, but Waldron could accept that the phalanx needed to display an unbroken array of pike points to the enemy.

  Carus grinned with fierce anticipation. His hand was closed on the hilt of a sword that existed only in Garric's mind.

  Garric wore a silvered breastplate and helmet, though he didn't carry a shield. His task wasn't to fight, but a commander can't predict how a battle will develop--

  "Or even what he'll do in the middle of the fight," Carus murmured. "Try to guess what they'll do and try to control yourself... but be ready just in case you have to cut your way through a shield wall!"

  The king didn't sound as though the prospect displeased him. Right now, as emotions raced through Garric's blood like a spring tide, Garric himself felt a thrill of delight to imagine leaping into the oncoming line.

  The javelin men screening the Royal Army wore leather caps and carried wicker shields. One of them gave a shout and hurled the first of his three javelins toward the Yole cavalry. As if that were the signal, the whole skirmish line began casting their javelins as they continued to jog forward.

  The missiles were short-shafted with slender iron heads. Thrown for the most part in high arcs, they slanted down on the mass of cavalry like wind-blown rain. Though the spikes might find their way through the joints of a rider's armor, their targets today were the horses which already stumbled over the broken pavement. Javelins plunged deep into the necks and withers of the cavalry mounts. Horses fell, throwing their riders and tripping those in the next rank.

  The wounded animals didn't kick high in pain and wheel violently, though, transforming injuries into chaos. Those that hadn't been hit continued forward at a trot building into a canter. They didn't smell blood, nor did they panic because of the screams of their fellows.

  One gelding ran with a loop of intestine wrapped around a hind leg; every stride pulled more gut through the rent in its own belly. It managed twenty strides before it finally collapsed.

  "Recall them!" Garric shouted as he understood what was about to happen. "Get'em back or they'll be overrun!"

  Waldron opened his mouth to pass the order to his trumpeter. The skirmishers had realized the danger themselves and scampered toward the safety of the armored line.

  For many of them it was already too late. The Yole cavalry swept on like a torrent through a canyon. Though many had fallen, the remaining riders and mounts alike were fearless in the face of death and pain. Lances caught fleeing skirmishers and flung the bodies aside with quick twists to clear the point.

  Death and revival hadn't robbed the horsemen of their skill. Only rarely did a mis-directed lancehead spark on the pavement, breaking the shaft or lifting the rider out of his saddle.

  The surviving skirmishers dived beneath the shields of the phalanx and heavy infantry like voles reaching safety in the rocks. Attaper shouted an order. Eight ranks of Blood Eagles pushed their way in front of the command group, shield-rim to shield-rim.

  Garric saw the Yole horsemen loom above the infantry the way the surf curls when it reaches the shore. The lines crashed together: metal on metal, metal on stone; metal on crunching bone. The sound and the stench were like nothing that belonged in the world of men.

  "Horses wouldn't charge home!" Carus shouted. "But these stopped being horses when they died. May the Sister eat the hearts of all wizards!"

  The mounts and armored men weighed tons; they hit the royal army at a full canter. Men shouted, pikeshafts snapped like crackling lightning. The front rank of the phalanx recoiled into the shields and breastplates of the rank behind them, and that rank sagged back as well.

  But the phalanx was sixteen ranks deep. All the horses accomplished by their speed and fearlessness was to ram themselves and their riders hard enough to pierce even plate armor on a hedge of pikepoints.

  The Yole charge splashed like a mudball on stone. The rearmost horsemen were as mindlessly brave as the front; they rode into the pile-up, raising their lances to clear the windrow of twice-dead men and beasts. Some even managed to climb their mounts over the carnage. They met pikes and died again in turn. Even broken pikestaves pointed long ashwood splinters toward the face of the enemy.

  Cheering, cursing--pressed on by their officers and their own fierce determination--the men of the phalanx resumed their advance. Their hobnails bit in rotting flesh or skidded on slimy paving stones, but when a man stumbled the comrades close behind and to either side braced him till he found his feet again. Horsemen continued to ride into the wrack of their fallen fellows, and the phalanx continued to spike down those not already felled by their own side.

  "No more generalship than a wheatfield has," said Carus. "And we are the scythe!"

  The wizards had formed their troops in the plaza, but the Royal Army had deployed on a wider front on the outskirts of the city. Because the leaders were wizards and not soldiers, even bad soldiers, they'd sent their army of the dead straight ahead so that the pikes of the phalanx in the center caught almost the entire charge.

  'Almost' was a score of armored horsemen riding into Garric's guards. Four of the shaggy mammoths followed close behind.

  The pikemen slung light oval shields from neckstraps so that they had both hands for their weapons. The Blood Eagles instead wore heavy shields on their left forearms. They raised them now to guard their faces against the oncoming lances while their own shorter spears thrust for the chests and throats of the horses.

  Some of the horsemen broke through the front rank, though their mounts were already dying again. Soldiers who'd lost their spears drew swords and stooped to hock and gut the horses, then to hack through the riders falling from their backs. Soldiers from the rear ranks thrust back the riders they could reach with their spears, and the regular infantry on the flank started forward to encircle enemy.

  Garric saw a Yole champion trying to swing his long sword despite the spear protruding from the gorget around his throat. He went over backward with a clang that could be heard over the general din.

  The mammoths, so dead that they sloughed patches of skin as they moved, walked into the royal line. Their strides were slow, but each one covered more ground than a man lying full-length.

  The commander of the flank battalion bellowed an order. His troops hurled their spears, puncturing the shaggy monsters scores of times. The rain of heavy missiles killed the drivers seated on each animal's neck and swept away all but two of the sixteen soldiers in the fighting platforms on their backs.

  The mammoths, walking dead before they received their first wound from the Royal Army, continued to pace forward. Their concentrated mass carried them into the ranks dented by the cavalry charge, then on into the raised shields of the men behind.

  "Cut the tendons!" Garric shouted. No man on Ornifal today had fought mammoths, but King Carus had met them as he crushed the rebellions flaring all across his kingdom. "Hamstring them!"

  Garric eased backward, along with Waldron and his staff. Lord Attaper was at the front of the line, but that was his place as commander of the guards. Garric had drawn his
sword, but he wasn't here to--

  "Colva!" Liane cried in a clear voice. "Come back!"

  Garric tried to glance over his shoulder, but to see past the cheekpiece of his helmet he had to lean back and twist at the waist. Colva slipped by, moving toward the melee.

  Garric grabbed the woman with his left hand. She turned and looked at him with a transfigured expression, then shrugged free. She seemed to have no more skeleton than a stream of water.

  The dying mammoth strode through the shouting, stabbing troops who were no more hindrance to a creature of its size than a thicket of blackberries. A sweep of its curving tusks flung ranks of tight-packed troops sideways. Its trunk was curled high against its forehead.

  Colva stood with her face lifted and her hands spread at her sides. There was now nothing between her and the mammoth.

  Garric stepped forward, shouldering the woman aside. He didn't think about what he was doing: it was the sort of thing you don't do if you think about it.

  The tusks spread to either side of him. He swung his sword in a vertical stroke. The tip of his blade severed the mammoth's trunk and sliced deep into the spongy frontal bone. Noxious black fluid sprayed from the great blood vessels that fed the trunk.

  The mammoth paced onward, shoving Garric back. His heel turned on the arm of a fallen soldier. He stopped trying to free the sword and grabbed the tusks with both arms.

  The mammoth lowered its head to crush him. One of its eyesockets was empty; the other stared at the man between the tusks with no more emotion than a stone. The stub of the trunk twitched; had the appendage been whole, the beast would have shoved Garric to the ground and knelt on him. Now it could only splash him with its last dribble of reliquified blood.

  The eye glazed. The mammoth sagged forward, dead again and finally at peace. Garric shoved himself clear of the toppling ruin. He thought he'd lost his sword--it wouldn't be hard to replace it on this field of carnage--but the beast rolled over on its left side with the hilt sticking out. Garric sawed the blade up and down like a pump handle, then drew it free.

  The battle was over. The Yole squadrons had been slaughtered to a man. Except they hadn't been men any more....

  Liane held Colva from behind, twisting her arms. Liane's face was as blank as a cobblestone--and despite that control, utterly furious.

  "I'm so sorry," Colva said in a liquid voice, as though she were in the throes of passion. "The powers drew me. Such powers are loose here!"

  Garric was drenched in the fluids of a beast dead a thousand years and surrounded by corpses, his men some of them as well as the dead of the ancient past. He looked into Colva's expressive eyes and felt queasy.

  A Blood Eagle officer glanced from the two women to Garric and mimed a question. "Hold her!" Garric said. "Not Liane, the other one. Just...."

  Garric turned away. "Just hold her, keep her out of the way," he added as he almost fell; from reaction to the battle, he supposed. And from what he thought he'd seen in Colva's eyes.

  Liane touched Garric's shoulder. That steadied him even more than the hand he dabbed down to the ground.

  The three necromancers were climbing down a ladder leaned against the arch. They moved as if they themselves were the walking dead. Great wizardry was as draining as great age.

  Garric pointed his sword. "Get them!" he shouted. "Kill them!"

  Because as long as they lived, they were dangerous.

  The empty despair Garric had seen in the mammoth's single eye had eliminated any possibility he'd grant mercy to the wizards responsible. No doubt they were responsible for worse; but that Garric had seen.

  He started forward. At first he had to climb over mounded corpses, but the dead weren't the barrier on the flanks that they presented to the center of the royal army.

  Beyond the line of slaughter, broken pavement made the footing dangerous. Garric ran anyway, bouncing from one tilted block to the next with no more hesitation than a squirrel leaping between trees.

  The trio of necromancers had knocked over their brazier when they fled; a faint haze spread from the top of the arch. A new column of smoke, thick and formed by alternate streams of black and white, twisted skyward from the palace roof.

  Garric knew he'd be a wobbling wreck when he tumbled down from his present emotional heights--but that would be later. For now he had to get to the palace.

  Officers were sorting out the phalanx. Its ranks had been badly disordered by victory--though not nearly as badly as they'd have been by defeat. Those troops couldn't pursue the necromancers anyway unless they flung down their long pikes.

  The Blood Eagles and regular infantry were almost as heavily burdened. Those who heard Garric's order clumped off in pursuit of the wizards, but they weren't likely to catch the trio before it reached the palace.

  The skirmishers, those who'd survived the mindless courage of the Yole charge, sprinted forward through the ranks of their heavy-armed fellows. If Garric sprang like a squirrel, the skirmishers were a nest of hornets flying past him for their revenge.

  The three leading skirmishers reached the wizards while Garric was still twenty yards behind. They'd used up their javelins, but they still had the short hatchets that small-holders in the east of Ornifal used for farm tasks.

  The necromancer in white turned and extended his hands toward the soldiers. The nearest man sank his hatchet to the helve in the wizard's face. The pair wearing black managed another step each before quick strokes severed their spines.

  "Your majesty, wait!" Attaper gasped. "By the Lady, your majesty!"

  Garric glanced sideways. The Blood Eagles' commander had thrown down his shield and helmet; now he was struggling with the side-laces of his gilded breastplate. A score of his men were following closely, one of them even carrying a spear.

  "May the Sister take you, your majesty!" Attaper cried. He flung his elaborate breastplate away with a clang and at last drew level with the far-younger prince.

  "Not the palace door," King Carus warned. During the moments Garric faced the mammoth, Carus had been as much in control of Garric's actions as the youth himself was, but now the ancient king had slipped back to his usual presence in the back of Garric's mind. "Up the outside stairs to the roof!"

  The dead necromancers lay like cast-off clothing. The white-painted hand protruding from one's sleeve was as thin as an articulated skeleton. The power these wizards controlled had worn them away like steel on a grindstone; soon there would've been nothing left. Garric's attack had speeded their doom only slightly.

  But that slight difference might be enough to save the world the wizards would have brought down with them.

  "Take the stair tower!" Garric said, pointing with the sword still bare in his hand. He'd even wiped the blade, though he didn't remember doing it. Some reflex of Carus', he supposed. "The door from the inside'll be barred!"

  The alabaster screen was an effective barrier against citizens who tried to push closer to their ruler. It wouldn't stop soldiers in a hurry.

  Garric wasn't the first to the spiral staircase. The javelin men were ready for further work now that they'd run down the necromancers. More than a score of them raced ahead of Garric's pointing blade. Some had even picked up missiles from the volleys thrown into the beginnings of the Yole charge.

  The reanimated corpses began to decay as soon as life left them again. Carus, glancing over the battlefield through Garric's eyes, wore a puzzled frown. His memory was full of similar scenes, but always the birds had settled by now: vultures and eagles, crows; and especially, since no part of the Isles was far from the sea, the gulls with their great, hooked beaks.

  Klestis was a city of the dead. Only coarse plants and a few insects survived in what the necromancers had made of Ansalem's paradise.

  Garric ran up the stairs, taking three of the low steps with each stride. He couldn't do this forever, but he wouldn't have to. They didn't have forever, Garric or the Isles either one.

  As Garric climbed, he glanced out over Klestis th
rough the serpentine stone pillars. It was just as he'd seen when Ansalem called him here in dreams, except that now the Royal Army was advancing in ordered battalions over the bodies strewn across the plaza. Lord Waldron was doing his job as army commander.

  Prince Garric of Haft was doing his job also, one that he alone of those present knew enough to perform.

  Liane watched from the plaza, waving her white silk scarf. That was a change from Garric's dreams also, one worth any number of soldiers to him now.

  The bridge from Valles touched the curtain of light by which Ansalem had separated Klestis from the rest of the universe. That was familiar--

  But instead of a single bridge, an infinite number of spans overlay one another all around the barrier's circuit. The surviving necromancers were opening other passages to Klestis, and from Klestis to the Isles.

  With Attaper somehow still on his heels and more of the Blood Eagles behind, Garric ran onto the roof garden. The javelin men hadn't bothered to lift a planter for a battering ram. They were hacking at the soft alabaster with their hatchets, eating a hole in the pierced stone big enough for men.

  A brazier carved from dolomite in the shape of a dragon's maw stood in the center of Ansalem's chamber. Smoke spewed from its mouth and filtered through the screen, then reformed into a single strand above.

  Tenoctris lay in frozen silence on the bier where Ansalem rested in the dreamworld. At her head stood a necromancer dressed in white. Beneath the paint Garric recognized a thin, terrified face from the band of acolytes Carus had met in Ansalem's palace. She held a dagger above Tenoctris' throat, ready to slash when the order came.

  The figure at the foot of the bier was Purlio. His left side was black, his right was white.

  In Purlio's hands was the fossilized ammonite. Evil pulsed from the gleaming marcasite shell. The chamber wavered from its place in the cosmos as Purlio mouthed an incantation.

  "Stop them!" Garric shouted. He kicked his right heel into the screen. Weakened stone flew inward, leaving a hole as big as a man's head.

  Blood Eagles shouted, following Garric's lead to hammer the alabaster with their hobnails. Several of the light troops continued chopping at the screen, though by now their hatchets were more danger than benefit.