Dith felt the familiar rumble through the ground long before he saw the dark shadows crossing over the eastern hills, familiar but unexpected. Ahead of them, more mages shimmered from one beacon to another, porting by hops to stay just ahead of the creatures. This was no illusion, as he’d hoped it might be, a deep terror plucked from the minds of the knights or perhaps from his own by a clever dreamweaver. No, the creatures were real, and they were what they appeared to be: demons. If he was very lucky, they were hunting the other mages.
“Would that it were so, but alas. The mages do not run from them but merely go from beacon to beacon, leading them as they run. They were brought as reinforcements, no doubt to fight against the Wittister mages.”
For a brief moment, the battle slowed to a stop as the reinforcements drew nearer and the army reorganized itself. During the lull, he edged his way westward, closer to the Lacework. He watched a handful of riders emerge from the stone battlements of the Lacework, and he bent the light around them as they rode. So few to fight so many….
Bending the light was almost no effort, not with that much glare. The sun was dropping low behind the Lacework, no doubt blinding the enemy already, at least between the spotty shadows cast by the coral spires. A thought spread the sunlight wide and filled those shadows, helping to hide not only the riders but the archers still in the Lacework besides.
“You should have gone.”
But he had not. “Should have” meant nothing now.
“All the same, you will most likely die here. Even you do not have enough power left to hold off an entire army like this. Mages are one thing. This many demons, however…”
You said the demons were most likely here to fight the Wittister mages. How do you know that?
“I do not know for certain, but…”
But that was your initial thought. Why?
Colaris hissed sharply. Suddenly a barrage of electricity crackled through the air around them, held off by Dith’s protections. They’d seen him. He swore angrily and revisited the attack over the nearest body of mages many fold, disintegrating the bodies of a few outright and leaving many more incapacitated and most likely dead. Then he galloped further north, moving behind physical cover. If they hadn’t marked his path northward, they soon would. But he hoped to be at the Lacework by the time they did.
Suddenly he drew Glasada up short. Behind a hillock stood what could only be a Dhanani, a young warrior. He seemed to have appeared out of the very coral itself as he dropped back the hood of the Bremondine cloak he wore. Gikka’s cloak.
“Dhanani? Here? And that cloak!”
None of this made sense.
The boy simply looked up at him for a moment and looked at his strange eyeless horse. A mixture of fear and admiration filled the boy’s eyes. Then he frowned suddenly.
“Colaris!” he cried, seeing the harrier on the back of Dith’s saddle, and the bird bobbed his head in recognition. “The sheriff will be so glad to see you.” He looked up at Dith. “What happened to him?”
The mage narrowed his eyes. “Who are you?”
He extended his arm to the horsed mage in the warrior’s greeting. “Chul Ka-Dree. Gikka sent me to––”
Another attack came, and the mage’s protections extended instinctively as the boy tumbled to the shaking, liquefying ground. The mages’ strength had multiplied already with the proximity of their reinforcements, a strength that likewise fed his own, but Dith knew that, having expended his power as he had, even his protections could not hold against this assault for long.
He could port, but those within the Lacework were changing position too much to make a port safe, especially with the boy. They were going to have to ride. “Chul, you say? I am Dith.” He gripped the boy’s forearm in the warrior’s greeting. “A pleasure, but we must hurry.” Not releasing the grip, he hefted the boy up onto the horse’s back.
Glasada huffed under the extra weight. In spite of his tolerance for Dith, the power of so many mages around him was threatening his calm, but racing headlong down the hillside toward the entrance to the Lacework labyrinth would let him run off the fear, or so Dith hoped. Behind him, amongst the petty small attacks coming from the nearest few of the Byrandians, Dith could feel the power of several hundred building along the strands, a steady barrage burning toward him, far too much power for what remained of his protections to bear, especially if he would keep Renda’s swordsmen from being seen. He urged Glasada faster, wondering if the boy riding with him knew quite how desperate their position was.
Horse. Two riders. Gold seamless robes…. Gikka marveled only for a moment at the sight of Dith and Chul riding the ugly horse at breakneck speed toward the Lacework. She signaled quickly to the sheriff, who directed all the archers to focus fire to try to protect their approach.
The light was failing, and soon, the advantage they enjoyed of having the light bent around them would be nullified by the darkness.
Renda had felt the unmistakable crackle of magic descend over her as she rode, just as it had during the war with Kadak, and she’d watched the rest of her knights and their mounts vanish into the heightened white gold light of the sunset beside her. At first, for only a moment, she’d feared they were under attack, but no, the energy that fell over them had had a feel about it that was unique and very familiar if substantially more powerful than she remembered.
She’d breathed silent thanks to Dith as she rode, holding the course she had outlined to her knights before they left the shelter of the Lacework, riding toward the northern side of the gap between the attacking mages and their reinforcements who were still more than a mile out. She trusted that her knights were there still beside her and would not run afoul of each other. This was not their first time riding or fighting under concealment.
Her strategy was a dangerous gamble. She was riding into a position where they would not only be flanked but surrounded if the battle continued for long. But if the gods favored them, they could disrupt the two forces and keep them from joining, at least in any but the most chaotic way, which might be enough, not for victory but for a chance at escape, which was all they could really hope for now. She hoped those in the Lacework were watching for their moment. The panic and the disruption would not last long.
The remaining Byrandian mages had spread themselves thin to mind the width of the Lacework, but their attention was directed almost exclusively toward the south side where some other threat held their attention. She assumed it to be Dith or perhaps the archers. Either way, whatever it was vexed them soundly and kept them occupied, for which she was again grateful.
When she came near their thinned line, she slowed and eased herself and the other knights quietly through one of the wider gaps. Beyond them, still more than a mile away, she could see their reinforcements approaching in a dark angry cloud of wispy blackness, and she imagined she could feel the mages’ power building around her. They would not have much time.
She reined Alandro in and gave a short low whistle once they were in the gap between the armies and well out of earshot. In the odd quiet between the armies––odd after the endless barrage of magic that had echoed through the Lacework––she could hear where the other horses stopped around her.
“What, only a few hundred apiece?” Kerrick murmured, and Renda could hear the grin in his voice even if she could not see him. “We shall run out of demons to kill well before daybreak!”
“My Lord Viscount, it were better we should start gently,” Amara chuckled quietly. “We are out of practice, after all.”
“Fewest kills buys the first round,” quipped Vonn, drawing his sword. “Assuming they have ale in Byrandia. They do have ale, yes?”
Renda smiled to herself. She had no illusions that her knights were incapable of fear or of reckoning their odds of survival against such an enemy. Had they been so, she could never have trusted their judgment in battle. But this bravado, this reinforcement of each other’s courage, was another layer of armor for a time when loyalty an
d duty to Syon and the Duke might not be enough.
“We armored the horses for this?” Qorlin’s voice sounded like it was in mid-yawn. “The rest of you can go back, if you like. I can dispatch these, myself.”
Renda said nothing. Her own attention remained focused on the approaching enemy, and as the reinforcements came near enough to make out plainly in the fading sunset, her last hope, that perhaps Gikka had been wrong, disappeared. These were indeed the same sorts of creatures who had plagued Syon for half a millennium, the ones the Syonese had dubbed “demons,” bathed in wispy tendrils of evil to her sight. She was not going to let them into Syon again.
The rumble of their approach deepened, and the knights fell silent, turning their thoughts to prayers, not a few of which were directed toward Verilion as well as toward B’radik and some others. The winds did not favor them, so they could already see some of the nearer demons slowing, sniffing the air and peering out through the failing light looking for them.
Kerrick marked it. “They know we’re here. We have lost our advantage.”
“Not so, Lord Kerrick,” growled Amara softly. “See how they cast about for our scent like hounds? Our scent is only a trace, peeking out now and again from behind the stink of rotting fish and kelp. It teases at their apprehensions and should work to our favor. No, we’ve lost nothing. We’ve simply begun our attack early.”
“The academy teaches that fortune favors the steady mind and the prepared soul.” Renda smiled, and her knights heard around her the unmistakable sound of metal on metal, muted but unmistakable: double stranded battle chain. She secured one end to her pommel.
Alandro snorted in anticipation.
“Qorlin,” she called, and she reached her hand out to touch his leg. He placed his hand over hers and she handed him the other end of the battle chain. His mount, Zati, was the largest of the other knights’ horses and best able to handle the heavy chain with Alandro.
“Aye, so she doth, my Lady,” grinned Qorlin, securing the chain to his pommel, “though I’m none too proud to take any other advantages as present themselves besides.”
She tugged at the chain, testing it. “Remember, we must disrupt and disorganize the demons, drive them to frenzy if we can. Ignore the mages as long as you can. If we do our part, they should be trampled in the panic at once. Do not let the demons slip the flank or we are done. Likewise, do not let them get a sense of our numbers,” she breathed, “or we are done.” She nudged Alandro up, and Qorlin matched pace with her. “May the gods ride with us,” she murmured.
“May they ride with us indeed,” Kerrick replied.
“That one!” The sheriff cried.
Grayson turned his bow, looking out across the mages, searching. While the other mages were throwing their magic at Dith, this one stood terribly still, tense, almost vibrating, building his power for a massive attack. “I see him.” The knight breathed out slowly and loosed the arrow into the mage’s throat.
The Byrandian exploded in a pillar of white flame so powerful that the knights ducked behind the coral for the brightness of it. When Daerwin looked again, the flames had completely incinerated Grayson’s target and three others close by. Several more were injured so that now only a handful remained, their power significantly diminished. Better still, those who were still to the north had moved south to bolster the others’ power, leaving more room for Renda and her knights to work. She and her knights were no longer truly flanked. He grinned. The battle was starting to look manageable.
The knights perched in the Lacework cheered as the horse scrambled over the last rise and through the first pillars marking the outer edge of the Lacework. Dith and the boy were safe. Then without needing orders, the archers turned their attention on the remaining mages. He had charged them with killing all those remaining before their reinforcements arrived.
“My Lord Sheriff,” Laniel said quietly. “We are prepared to move on your order.”
Daerwin clapped a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “Knights, to your mounts. Time is short.”
“Grayson, was that their leader you killed?” asked Liddy, nocking another arrow.
The other knight shook his head. “No. He was powerful, truly, but he seemed not to mind the actions of the others, only his own.”
“Good,” she grinned, looking out over the field. “It means the leader is still out there for me to kill.” She looked back at the horses. She had time for one more shot.
Daerwin turned to her. “Look for the one who does the least and is best defended, most likely at the center and rearward.”
Grayson fired again, but they could not see if he hit or not. The light was nearly gone, and he was relying on the light from the fire the mages threw at the Lacework to place his shots.
“Indeed,” murmured the duke. “Back with the luggage.”
Daerwin looked up at the duke. “I meant only…”
But Trocu was gone.
In the distance, as if someone had dropped a pebble into a still lake, a ripple of chaos erupted at the northwestern corner of the approaching army and spread through its ranks.
Renda.
The sheriff smiled proudly, watching the devastation. In a thin ribbon that serpentined haphazardly through that corner of the demons’ formation, the creatures were falling, and radiating outward from that ribbon, other demons ran in panic or attacked each other. Fear was still their best weapon. He could not see them, of course, but to eyes that had watched countless battles against demons, the results showed her strategy: two knights on the chain to drag through the demon hordes, just as they had on Syon, and the rest to terrorize and kill the panicked stragglers. No better way to set an entire mob of demons into panic and leave them ripe for the killing.
He was about to give the order to ride. Except…
He looked worriedly out at the edge of the ripples of chaos in the demon army’s ranks. The maelstrom’s expansion had stopped abruptly as if it hit a wall and was being forced back. Order was returning at the outer edges and creeping inward toward the knights. While a section of the advancing army turned to face this threat, the rest ignored it and continued on toward the last few mages. He felt the hair on his neck prickle, and he looked back at the tiny corner of chaos Renda had wrought. What had seemed the beginning of their victory now looked to be a tiny island of futility, and worse, a trap closing around his knights––around his daughter. His throat tightened.
“Mages,” said Nestor. “It’s what I feared when first Gikka said they were in league with the demons. The one weakness in them was their fear. But if the mages can calm them…” He shook his head.
“They will be unstoppable.”
“If our knights fall, Syon will fall.” Trocu scowled out over the battlefield.
Daerwin bit back the bitterness that rose in his throat. So much for your damned prophecy, Father. The poetics and the cozy fireside interpretations of pieces here and there. Your prophecy and everything else dies here. With her. With my sole remaining child.
The duke blew out a sharp breath. “I should be out there––”
“That, you should not!” shouted Daerwin, his rage exploding at last. “You’ve done enough already.”
Trocu leveled his gaze at Daerwin.
The sheriff raised his chin. “It is enough loss for the knights of Brannagh to die defending Syon, but we cannot lose her duke as well. An Syon loses you, our deaths mean nothing. Renda’s death…means nothing. Ride back to Syon at all speed. As long as you remain––”
A blast crumbled away one of the coral spires, and they ducked under an overhang as the debris fell around them.
All save Damerien, who had not moved. “As long as I remain, what? Alive? Cowering like a gouty centenarian in my castle? That’s as obscene to me as standing about with the horses whilst your knights fight and die.” He turned on his heel and strode away.
The sheriff shouted over the sounds of battle to him. “It is their place to fight for Syon and to die if necessary!”
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The duke turned a curious look toward him. “Today it should not be necessary.”
Alandro chuffed softly, a sound that would otherwise be lost in the screams and cries of battle, but Qorlin’s horse heard it, and both horses cut hard to the right at full speed, dragging the chain through the demons, pulling down those who were not fast enough to escape like so much grain.
The chain was cutting through fewer of them now that it was clogged with clumps of flesh and was of most use simply knocking the creatures to the ground where the other three knights fought through them or the horses trampled over them. Sometimes the chain dragged one of the demons quite a distance, looking to the horror of the rest of the demons like he was flying unnaturally over the ground, dashing his head and limbs against the rocks and coral until he fell to pieces.
“They run, but not like they should,” breathed Kerrick. “Something is amiss.”
“Aye,” panted Amara, slashing away those that came within her reach and immediately changing her position. Like the others, she knew how to fight from concealment, and this many years in Renda’s company, she’d even quieted her conscience at doing so.
Deceit, as Renda had been at pains to teach her, was how battles were won, from the grandest skirmishes of armies to the clash of peasant swords. The academy’s “dreary knightish rubbish,” as Gikka had called it, was fine for mannered duels but had no place in warfare. Real honor came in protecting those in your charge, however it might be done.
Around them, demons fell readily enough. They fell to the chain, they fell beneath the swordsmen’s blades. They ran screaming. But Kerrick was right. It felt too…perfect, too controlled.
Deceit, indeed.
She looked around her in the darkness. The disorder they had caused was somehow quieting, righting itself as quickly as the terror had spread in the first place. She slowed her mount with the others, her sense of her own terror mounting beneath the impossible quiet and order that settled around them. “Viscount…?”
Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) Page 33
