Still, even as Amara had said the words, she had known.
From the deep fog, a shape took form just as she feared it would, the shape which had haunted her dreams for years. Lumbering forward on great clawed feet, its tail sweeping behind it for balance, she saw the silhouette resolve through the fog.
The huge creature bore Kadak’s general form, the strange shape of his head, the odd split jaws. But there, the similarity ended. The pattern of his skin, whether its actual color or some sort of battle paint, was different. The shape of his armoring scales was different, and they seemed shinier, almost metallic, compared to Kadak’s, reflecting the light from the camp’s fires. His tail was broader, and where Kadak had been soft from having spent too long lurking in his stronghold, this creature was all of muscle and sinew beneath the thick demon skin.
She felt more than she saw the movement to her left and turned. Such another of the Kadak-like creatures half lumbered and half slithered southwestward, unaware of her. Just past it, she saw another making its way. She unconsciously lowered herself even deeper into the thinning clumps of grass and tried to catch her breath. Beyond this one, she saw another. And beyond that one, she made out the silhouette of yet another. She stopped moving, stopped breathing, dared not lift her eyes to look at them directly.
Kadak, the creature they had so proudly defeated, the ultimate villain of the Five Hundred Years’ War, on whom they had lost half a millennium and millions of lives, had not been, as they had assumed, the father of all demons. She felt a scream of hysteria rising in her throat and fought to quell it.
“By my count, five,” Gikka breathed.
“Aye.”
Only a few yards from her, one of the beasts slowed. Its great head turned to one side and then another, sniffing the air suspiciously. It was so close, and she dared not move.
Had they caught a scent or heard a whisper, she wondered, or were they searching for something in particular?
Then, as she feared they might, as always in the depths of her darkest dreams, the monster stopped, planting its great birdlike talon in the grass beside her. Behind it, the rest also drew to a stop.
Her hand shook where she flexed it around the sword. Knowing what it had been to fight Kadak, she found the idea of fighting such another, to say nothing of the fighting five of them, even more terrifying. She had to focus her mind against the fear. What could they want? What could they be looking for?
“Gikka,” she whispered, easing her second sword clear of its scabbard and handing it to her, “look to the duke’s safety. No matter what happens here, he must survive, or all is lost. Do what you must.”
She felt a hand squeeze her shoulder, and then she was alone.
So far, neither the creature before her nor the others had seen them. She had to hope it would lose patience and continue on its way. Then they would be in position to retreat forward, as it were, into the town ahead and away from the creatures. At least in the town, they could find cover. Out here they were vulnerable.
Renda gripped her sword and backed slowly away from the creature as low in the grass as she could. Soon, seeing nothing, the creatures would lose interest. They had only to wait, she told herself.
Gikka met Damerien as he emerged from the lean-to and unceremoniously threw her cloak over him. “Come along, my Lord Trocu,” she said. “Jath and Chul already have horses waiting, and Nestor awaits your pleasure.”
“I’ll stay.” Damerien looked out through the swirling darkness at his knights. He reached down to pick up his sword belt. “My place is with them,” he said.
“Aye, my Lord,” she replied, taking his sword belt from him and strapping it round his hip, “but not just now.”
“Of course now!” he bellowed, and she felt an electric tingle on her spine. “I am not a child!”
“No, no child are you, and I’ll thank you to keep your voice low for the knights’ sake,” she said quietly, nodding toward the knights, “but my Dith tells me you are the target of their attentions, and my Lady charged me to see you to safety.”
“Impossible. They cannot know I am here.”
“They do.”
“Impossible.”
“Enough!” Gikka stared into his gold eyes, unflinching. “Two years and a lifetime ago, it was your very life, right here in my hands, do you remember it? Do you?” She pinched the Bremondine cloak she’d thrown over him. “This cloak you gave me in remembrance. ‘Trust and gratitude,’ those were your words. Well, your worthy cousin bids you now, trust me just once more and hie you hence under my wing. I’ll brook no argument, if I have to knock you on the head to see it done, so help me.”
“I am still Duke of Syon!”
“Aye, Your Grace, you are still the duke. But I’m still Gikka. And we will away.”
They glared at each other.
“Very well,” he replied at last, “but we need not go at once. We’ve time yet. Fetch Nestor to me. And Jath. Please.”
She cocked her head. “I’m not liking the sound of this.”
“Gikka, sweet,” Trocu said gently, brushing a stray lock of her loose brown hair out of her face just the way Brada had done long ago, before she’d met Dith. She felt the sting of tears in her eyes as she touched his hand, letting herself miss him at last, letting herself remember the secret loss she’d felt when Brada had died that she had not shared with anyone, not even Renda. “You bade me trust you, and rightly so. I ask you now to trust me. I give you my word as Duke of Syon, I will go with you when the time comes.”
“Your word.”
“My word as Damerien, for all who have borne that name.” He looked into her eyes. “Only let me help them.”
She squeezed his hand and went to find the Keepers.
The monster before her flexed its claws and edged its foot forward indecisively. Yes, she thought, as if it would hear her and obey. There is nothing here for you. Go from this place.
Reluctantly, it moved ahead, and behind it, the others followed suit.
She breathed out and let the tension out of her body.
But then, with a sick feeling in her gut, Renda watched the rest of the creatures spread themselves and raise their hands in a gesture she remembered seeing from Kadak in his stronghold, and she ducked into the grass. Then, as if to confirm her deepest fears, an explosion of white hot light flared and burned away the fog from all around them at once.
At the edge of her vision, she saw Dith collapse to his knees. The powerful protections he had set over the camp had negated the deadly white heat of the monsters’ attacks and saved their lives, but that was all, and now those protections were gone. Under the slowly fading blaze of light that remained, the knights, the camp, the horses…everything was suddenly visible and vulnerable to them.
Nothing moved, and time seemed to stop as the handful of knights faced them. Then at the edge of the light, she saw movement. Lots of movement. The demons who had run past them into the night had returned, no doubt summoned by their leaders, these greater demons, these demon generals. The Kadak-like creatures had not been indecisive at all. They had been merely waiting for their armies to return to them before they began their attack.
She saw the creatures peer through the bright light. Then from its strange split mandible, the one nearest her uttered a single word.
“Damerien.”
She breathed out, her blood pumping furiously through her body.
“Damerien!” the creature growled, bringing its huge head down to the ground next to her, studying her.
Slowly, Renda rose from the grass, legs shaking, and raised her sword. “No.”
Dith thought to try to raise his protections over the knights again, to perhaps bend the strange unnatural light around them and try to hide them, but it was futile. The creatures had already seen them and scented them. He would not have enough power to shield the knights under those circumstances, not well enough to protect them from creatures like this. His protections, as powerful as they had been, had been
barely enough to save their lives, and in the process had depleted his strength. He simply hadn’t enough power left to him.
“I thought you were good at this.”
The flare of anger that went through Dith’s mind made Galorin laugh.
“You have the power of a Guardian, boy, but you lack the wisdom. Well, you lack my wisdom, at any rate. Must I spell it out for you? If you cannot bend the probability one way, you must bend it another. You must find their weakness and exploit it, even with your power depleted.”
He shook his head. What probability could he bend, the accuracy of the arrows? He could not do much against the creatures. They lacked the weakness even Kadak had shown.
“I am certain inspiration will come.”
She took care not to look into the demon general’s eye lest it jump bodies as Kadak had done, but she held her ground while the creature moved around her, studying her. Let it study her, let it kill her, but the more time the knights could buy for Gikka to get Damerien away, the safer he would be.
“Damerien,” it murmured in almost bargaining tones, its voice soft but menacing, its abattoir breath blowing over her face. It lifted one of its great claws, and the implication was clear.
She leveled her sword and bared her teeth. “I said no.”
The creature let out a great roar of frustration, followed by the others, a deafening sound that froze her marrow.
Then she heard a human voice let out a furious battle cry that was joined almost at once by several others. She knew that voice. She had known it all her life. It belonged to her father, and to her horror, he was attacking. Then from the knights nearby, she heard the clatter of weapons and running feet. One by one, the knights ran to join the battle.
“No!” she shouted. “Do not engage them!”
The creature beside her laughed.
Then order dissolved into chaos, and the battle was joined.
The main body of the demon army had swept in at once, and the knights had been driven together to fight the front-most of the huge monsters, the demon general that Daerwin had attacked, while holding off the hordes coming in behind them. Focused as they were on this single immediate enemy, the demons were forced to close around them in a bunch, fouling their movement on each other so that they had little room to swing their weapons, which reduced how many the knights had to fight at a time. Arrows flew dangerously close to the embattled knights, most with their broad bladed heads sticking harmlessly in the demons’ armored skin.
Laniel had been first to draw blood, fighting his way to the sheriff’s side. Daerwin marveled at how quickly his fighting style adapted to fighting creatures he had never even seen before the battle at the Lacework.
“No matter how hard I hit them or where, they heal almost at once,” Laniel gasped, continuing to fight. “Only a devastating single blow kills them.”
“Aye, or fear,” Daerwin answered. “Fear lets the blows land.”
Another deep crack of Laniel’s staff at the back of the great demon’s neck, and the creature stumbled, blind with pain. Daerwin saw his opening and lunged at the beast’s open breast with his sword. But the demon had drawn back his meaty fist, just as Kadak had done in his stronghold, ready to throw a great smear of white-hot liquid fire outward around him, burning away the fog in a blast of heat, but almost by accident, the sheriff slashed at its foreleg. The power of its magic spilled over the wound and burned it. The beast bellowed unintelligibly with pain. Encouraged, the knights hacked at the creature from all sides.
Not far away, he saw Renda fighting alone against such another as this one he fought. Most of his swordsmen had been forced to break away to fight the other demon generals who had by now converged on their position, as well, and their line had broken. Before long, fatigue and mistakes born of fatigue would claim them, and they would fall, one by one, until the demons won.
They were overwhelmed. His calculated attack meant to throw the demons off balance had worked, but in the end he was sure it would prove a mistake. The only reason they yet lived was that the demons’ attack had become disorganized. The knights could not hope to defeat the army before the generals could regain control. At best, this battle would only delay the demons while the duke escaped. At worst, he had sacrificed them all for nothing.
Renda was cut off from the rest of the knights. Unable to get past the great monstrous creature before she was surrounded by demons, she had instead run straight into the creature and stabbed between the plates of armor along the creature’s side. Like the other demons, like those she had fought on Syon, the wounds closed so quickly that it made no difference. At least the pain was real. Their ability to close their wounds weakened with fear and fatigue, too, but with their present advantage, she doubted either would come into play soon enough to matter. She did not expect to be able to survive long enough to wear them down, not like this.
A bit longer, and Gikka would have the duke safely away. If she could just hold out a bit longer…
“Gikka,” Dith crouched beside her and looked between her and the duke and the two Keepers. “Why haven’t you taken him away from here?”
“He refused to go,” she answered simply.
Damerien shifted on his haunches. “We will stay until I am certain we can be of no use here.”
Dith spat something in exasperation. “What possible use? The knights cannot hold them back forever. You must away.”
Trocu shook his head. “Not until I am certain.”
“I am certain!” Dith edged closer. “Look at them! Just one of those monsters nearly destroyed you—your father! Do you think you can withstand five of them?”
Beyond them, the battle continued.
“Do you think I don’t know how dangerous those things are?” Trocu’s eyes flashed gold. “Brada was badly wounded when the demons captured him, thanks to a Hadrian sword through his back and other abuses. The demons had no idea who he was and threw him in that cell to die. The demons starved him and fed him rotting food and made him drink his own urine and probably their own for water. And that was before Kadak found him.” Now his eyes gleamed with hate. “I owe these creatures more suffering than they can possibly comprehend, and I will not be sent away one more time like a scared child!”
An eerie screech rose over the field of battle, a sound half of predatory bird and half something else.
Through the failing light, a strange apparition, a ghostly white horse, rode straight into the battle, dancing between the demons, kicking at them, and as it passed, the shriek dissolved into words, but words which had not been heard on Byrandia in eons.
“Tekrei idriana ga beira go traeba!”
It was a throaty growl, a language of power, potent with magic and blood, and for a raw moment, the sheer sound of it terrified them, punctuated as it was by the coarse cries of a bird of prey.
Renda’s blade suddenly sank deep into the heart of one of the demons, its eyes wide with terror before its life ebbed and disappeared. She watched Chul’s ghostly white horse racing between the demons, first one part of it disappearing, then another as the Keeper’s cloak shifted over its body.
Chul.
She slashed the throat of another of the demons and turned to face the general. But already, she saw, his fear had subsided.
The monster reached out his great claw and slashed into the horse’s flank as it passed, sending the creature screaming in agony.
”Ro brimina, brimina!” Chul cried as he turned the horse back toward the sheriff and the rest of the knights. In spite of the horse’s bleeding, it snorted and ran straight into the fray without hesitation, carrying him into the battle.
The demons near the sheriff and the other knights were thrown into chaos, and they began to fall under the knights’ swords and Laniel’s staff. But not fast enough. Renda saw the demons recovering from their fear. “Go back! Go back!” she shouted to the Dhanani. He turned his weakened horse and ran back through the camp, drawing a couple of the demons after him. The demons saw D
amerien and stopped.
Suddenly Dith’s eyes grew wide. So that was what Galorin meant. He wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him sooner. A scared child. Of course. Fear had been their weapon against Kadak’s armies for generations. Fear would save them now.
Overhead, the clouds which had obscured the stars swirled and rammed together violently, and in a great crash of lightning and thunder, a blast of light and magical energy exploded over the battle, light in a living, organic shape, the same shape that had flared across Galorin’s memory, the same that Dith had seen at the Lacework.
In the moment following the explosion, while the demon army was transfixed with terror at what they saw, Renda had drawn her sword across the demon general’s eyes, leaving it thrashing in agony and terror. Then when she believed its terror had crested, she cut through its throat. The other demons scattered in chaos and fear as the creature convulsed violently on the ground, trapped in its own dying body, and then it was still. Cut down, as it was, in the height of its terror, it could not heal itself. Encouraged, she ran toward where her father and the others fought.
Dew and cold sweat made the sheriff’s sword slick in his hands. He was desperately aware that each time he raised his sword, he did not lift it as high, nor was he able to hold off the axe for as long. A rational side of his mind, the voice of his sword master at the academy, reminded him to conserve his strength and strike only when he had an opening. That was wonderful advice in the calm of the practice chamber, but the ax was swinging down on him, and all he could do was to hold it off before it came down at him again. While his sword was locked against the dripping ragged blade of the ax, it was not doing anything against the creature wielding the ax, and so the battle would wear on until one or the other of them fell to fatigue.
Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) Page 43
