by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chris’s horse leapt an artillery crater. He couldn’t believe he was doing this. What lamebrain had come up with this plan? Oh, yeah, right, him.
The field was a churned-up mess of shell craters, burning grass, and bodies. Everywhere bodies. He forced the air in and out of his lungs. So this was war. That was the only thought his brain could seem to summon, and it ran circles inside his head. So this is war.
He’d seen a lot since crossing over. He’d seen people die. He’d held a sword in his hand and fought to survive. But not like this. This was destruction on a scale he had only heard about through the anesthetized fog of the evening news.
The smoke shut out sight for all but a few yards in front of him. The twisted bodies with their caverns of ruptured flesh appeared through the haze like breakers in the sea. Then, just as quickly, before he could look again and verify to his brain that what he was seeing was right, they were gone again.
The smoke couldn’t block the sounds. Even the crash of his heart and the smashing of hoofbeats couldn’t shut out the thunder of the artillery, the shouts of the living, and the screams of the dying. Blood slicked the ground, the smell of it sweet and sticky in the back of his nostrils. Every few steps, the horse slipped and staggered in its headlong run.
He’d signed on for a war. He’d known that’s what this all was likely to lead to. But this wasn’t what he’d expected.
Was war ever what people expected?
Quinnon had caught up to within half a length, but they’d come too far to turn back now. Ahead, through the smoke, the two armies’ colors swarmed and clashed as Lael’s green strained to stave off the red of Koraud’s charge. Twice, someone had rushed to the standard and attempted to raise it. Twice, they had fallen.
A flaming padar bomb scored a path through the sky, and Chris ducked instinctively. The shell hit somewhere behind, and the impact chattered up through his teeth. Sparks and sod scattered against his back.
When he straightened, Quinnon had drawn up alongside him. “Are you out of your rotted mind?” His face held anger, but not panic like Allara’s. An old fighter like Quinnon would know exactly what to expect from a war.
Chris couldn’t say he liked Crea Quinnon. And he had little doubt about Quinnon’s dislike for him. But, suddenly, he wanted the man’s respect. This field, right here, right now, was probably the only place to earn it.
He breathed out hard and dragged in every ounce of composure he had in him. “You going to cover me or not?”
He caught only a glance of Quinnon’s expression. It didn’t change.
Twenty feet from the standard, a blood-encrusted Koraudian threw himself into Chris’s path and planted his pike in the ground behind him. The spearhead caught Chris’s horse full in the chest. The animal tumbled over the top of the Koraudian and hurled Chris from the saddle. The Koraudian squirmed from beneath the horse’s legs, and Chris rose to one knee and extended the Glock 35 he’d picked up at a pawnshop back in Chicago.
With a roar, the Koraudian charged, his pike lofted in both hands. Chris fired once. The pistol jumped against his palm, and the bullet ripped through the Koraudian’s arm. The soldier hit his knees, screaming, and Chris finished him with another shot to the head.
Then he was moving, swiveling, just as his father had taught him so long ago. Half a dozen shrieking Koraudians converged on him. As far as they were concerned, he’d fired his one shot and was done with the pistol.
He didn’t even wait for them to look surprised. He hit another target and another and another until the hammer clicked against the empty magazine. He clicked it twice more, just for good measure, then rammed the pistol in his waistband.
Keeping his head down, he scrambled to where the standard was buried in a barricade of the dead who had tried to rescue it. Almost prone behind the pile of bodies, he dragged his chewser from his bandoleer holster, flicked on the hydraulics, and rolled over to fire again.
“You crazy fool.” Quinnon stood over him, a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other. “Where in the rotted Four Kingdoms did you get that pistol?”
“You haven’t seen anything yet. Remind me to bring you guys a schematic for an M16.” He pried another slug from its slot on his bandoleer, and flipped open the chewser’s breech to reload. “Now what?”
Quinnon scoffed. “This is your grand plan, bucko.”
“Where’s the king? Shouldn’t he be around here someplace?”
“If he’s alive.”
Pistol in one hand, Chris used the other to claw bodies away from the flagstaff. The pole was fully ten feet long and top-heavy. He holstered the pistol, gritted his teeth, and levered it into the air. The flag caught the wind, and he twisted the pole to untangle it.
All around him, Laeler soldiers fled. He hoisted the flag in front of him and waved it furiously. “Stop running! Where’s the king? Find the king and turn and fight!”
The pommel of Quinnon’s sword hammered into one retreating soldier’s temple and felled him in his tracks. “Fight or you’ll fall where you bloody stand!”
A few of the men wavered; most didn’t even notice. Koraudian cavalry galloped across the field and thundered past their footmen.
Quinnon growled. “Och. There he is.”
Tireus fought beside the floundering body of a gutted horse. Half his adjutants were already dead on the ground, and the other half fought madly beside their king. One leapt from his horse and thrust the reins at Tireus. The king vaulted into the saddle and spun to face his fleeing troops. The distance obliterated his expression, but his shoulders suddenly straightened.
“Rally to your king!” Quinnon shouted.
The troops faltered in their retreat, even as the Koraudians poured into them.
Chris lofted the pennon against his shoulder. He stiff-armed a Koraudian and shoved aside a confused Laeler. “Rally!”
Together, he and Quinnon ran. Quinnon plied his blades with the carelessness of skill. Chris drew and emptied his pistol into a hulking Koraudian and used it to club another in the face.
Ahead, Tireus spun his horse in a circle, sword lofted above his head. His screams of encouragement melted into a wordless blare.
Men surged up from behind and nearly knocked Chris over. Quinnon grabbed at his elbow and shoved him upright. He looked back. Hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers had re-crossed the field. Few, if any, remained in the rearguard. Far away, in the shadow of the Wall, the artillery had moved up. The cannons hurled their volleys overhead. Fire and destruction spread among the Koraudians.
Chris’s heart tangled somewhere in between his thrashing lungs. Somehow, impossibly, the retreat had reversed.
His shoulders straightened. He bellowed wordless roars from deep in his chest. He ran, caught in the sweep of the charge. He could hear their frenzied battle cries:
“The Gifted, The Gifted, The Gifted!”
Even through the heat of blood and fire and sweat, a chill dragged gooseflesh up his back. They were fighting for him.
Chewser still in one hand, he drew his sword and kept going. The frontrunners of Lael’s army reached Tireus at the same moment as the Koraudian charge. The foremost lines crumpled like paper dolls, cast aside by the men who ran behind so they, in turn, might be crumpled.
Above them all, Tireus led his army. He should be in the rear, protected, but he fought like a warrior and never looked back. He hacked at the Koraudians, cut them off his horse, and flung them back into the maelstrom.
Then Chris reached the fight, and the fight reached him. Shoulder to shoulder with Quinnon on one side and a stranger on the other, he braced for the collision. Quinnon broke from the line and angled in front of Chris, his blades keeping back the worst of the fight.
Chris didn’t have time to wonder if he resented or appreciated it. He dropped the chewser and gripped his sword with both hands. For a second, his nerves nearly choked him. What was he doing? He had no idea what he was doing. Unlike all the rest in this
world, he hadn’t grown up with a sword in his hand.
And yet the blade that had been a stranger to him only a month before suddenly became the most familiar thing in the world. His conscious mind shut down. His brain churned through the whirl of images too fast for thought. His body fell into instinctual rhythms, and his muscles remembered what his mind could not.
Pike and axe handles splintered. Iron clashed against iron. Bones cracked and blood slimed the ground. The battle cries faded into the crackle of adrenaline. Time disappeared. Even the memory of time ceased. Only the ebb and flow of battle remained. The pounding of blade against blade, flesh against flesh, feet against sod. The chill of the wind, the heat of his blood.
So this was war.
He fought. He lunged and parried, hacked and slashed. His sword clashed against other swords. He swept them aside. He severed limbs. He opened chasms of blood. Men fell before him, staggering to their knees, some screaming, some silent as death. He ran on, fighting, shoving, roaring.
And then the moment of timelessness stretched and disintegrated.
“Hold fast!”
He blinked. How long since he had last remembered to draw a breath?
Quinnon yanked one of his blades from the belly of a Koraudian and bellowed an echo to Tireus’s cry. “Hold fast in the lines!”
Now it was the Koraudians who fled to regroup their battered forces. A fireball rumbled into their midst, a trail of smoke scarring the sky. It struck hard and the padar—an oily substance supposed to burn through anything and be almost impossible to put out—sheeted the ground with flames.
An officer galloped along the lines. “Carabineers to the front! We must hold this ground until the army can retreat to a defensible position!”
The riflemen unslung their weapons and ran to the front.
Another officer shouted to the troops: “Fall back! Fall back to the river in orderly fashion. One battalion at a time!”
Chris looked down at himself. Blood and offal spattered his leather jerkin, his trousers, and his boots. It stuck to his face and stiffened as it dried. He would have wiped it away, but his clothes offered not a single clean spot. Even now, he could smell the stink of death and sweat upon him. Some of it was his; most of it wasn’t.
“Let’s move.” Quinnon pushed his shoulder to turn him around.
He staggered with his first step and nearly went down. Adrenaline shook through him so hard he could barely stand.
“Well, now.” Quinnon marched beside him. “Now you’re a Guardsman.”
_________
Half an hour later, Chris and Quinnon reached the trees at the river and found Tireus, on horseback, dictating messages in a voice that still roared despite its hoarseness.
“Well.” Tireus propped a hand on his hip. “What are you doing out here?”
“Sightseeing.” The word cracked in the desert of Chris’s throat.
“I called you out here to inspire the troops, not to get yourself killed alongside them.”
Chris managed a shrug. “Sometimes it’s all the same thing, don’t you think?”
A smile tugged at Tireus’s mouth, then bloomed into a gaping grin. He threw his head back and shouted with laughter. He was still drunk on the adrenaline.
“You may have some distance to go before you’re a master tactician,” he said, “but no one can critique your panache!”
Chris sheathed his sword and shook circulation back into his fingers. “Figured I didn’t have anything to lose.”
Quinnon harrumphed.
Tireus laughed again. “It’s possible I may decide to like you after all. What do you say to that?”
“Don’t go to too much trouble.” He tried to keep the sarcasm from the words.
“Not a’tall. I’ve you to thank for what happened today.” Tireus’s grin softened a bit. “You’ll find I give credit where credit’s due. So hail the Gifted!” He gave his clenched fist a shake.
Chris nodded an acknowledgement.
Tireus snapped his fingers at an adjutant. “Find mounts for Captain Quinnon and the Gifted.”
In a few minutes, when the soldier returned with a pair of horses, Chris and Quinnon mounted and followed Tireus to the river. Violet dusk had begun to fall, hastened by the smoke and the heavy cloud cover. Chris took a last look over his shoulder. The blood and the bodies were fading into the shadows, with only the wail of the wounded to mark their places. The two armies, five hundred yards of churned-up ground between them, were digging for the night. Artillery continued to hammer on both sides, even though all but the occasional volley fell well short.
He turned back to the river. Giant trees—hesperas they were called—stretched overhead. The thick trunks rose six feet from the mossy ground, then split into dozens of smaller trunks, all of which shot up to a towering height, from which a canopy of leaf-vines fell halfway back to the earth. The foliage’s rustling muted the rumble of water over rocks, but his body still tightened at the sound. His thirst threatened to burn away even his drying sweat.
His horse clopped nearer, and whispers spread through the troops. The soldiers who crammed the riverbank turned, like dominoes, to look at his approach. All the way to the water, bloodstained, glassy-eyed survivors parted ranks before him. When he dismounted on the bank and knelt to drink, a burly axeman offered him a leather cup. He accepted it with a nod, and the man backed away with a knuckle against his forehead.
Was this how Gifted were treated in normal times? He wasn’t sure if he liked it or not. These men were watching him as if he were their leader. And he wasn’t. Even if Tireus decided he wanted to play it that way, that wasn’t a role he would willingly take. He was a cog in the wheels here, and what he did to help, he would have to do outside the spotlight. Today had just been a fluke.
Tireus and Quinnon led their horses up on either side of him and crouched.
“Ever fought in a battle before?” Tireus asked.
Chris shook his head. He filled the cup and threw his head back to pour the freshness of the river down his throat. He filled it twice more and gulped the water. Then he filled it again and doused his head. For a moment, he knelt there, head hanging, and just breathed.
Beside him, Quinnon splashed water against a cut on his cheekbone. “You’re as courageous as you are cocky, I’ll give you that. But you’re also bloody lucky. Battles are fickle creatures. You could have gotten yourself killed out here for nothing. A Gifted’s not a common foot soldier to be used as cannon fodder, no matter how much panache he’s got.”
Tireus looked back at the troops. “How do we win if we don’t risk?” He gripped Chris’s shoulder. “Whether they saw you out there today or not, they see you now, stained with battle. They know you fought with them. They know you’re the reason for the rally. I’d say you’ve done a ruddy splendid job inspiring them. I’ve underestimated you, and for that I’ll apologize. You’ve just become a hero to these men, and for that I’ll congratulate you.”
Chris shook his head. “I’m just trying to put things right.”
All around, the men went on staring, like children waiting for a magician to begin his act.
Tireus stood. “You may not have brought victory today, but at least you staved off defeat. And that’s all that matters.” He slapped Chris’s shoulder and led his horse away.
The ranks opened to let him pass, but the men never took their eyes from the spot on the bank of the Aiden where Chris knelt.
