Crusade

by Daniel M Ford

  Symod frowned, then, thinking on the Eldest’s words. Must hold some of them back, he thought. Most of them. No sense in wasting their lives, after all.

  “Jorn,” Symod called out, letting the scrying contact break, “they are atop three hills to the east. Send a hundred of your brothers to disperse amongst the Islandmen. Tell them to march forward. Take the hills. Leave none alive. When that is done we’ll return to your pathetic prize of a keep, and then south to fatter lands. All the banners that dared to rise against the Sea Dragon must be brought to their knees.”

  Jorn, who was already standing at his side, didn’t answer with words, just an angry growl, then dashed off. Symod looked up into the hills, where he could make out the weak panoply of men standing and banners rippling in the wind his priests had called up.

  “Arm yourselves, servants of Braech,” he bellowed to the hundred or more priests who gathered at the center of their hasty camp, breaking their fast with the food they’d plundered from all the surrounding villages.

  By the time he turned away from the distant hilltops and stopped scrying, Symod hadn’t noticed that the man standing atop them weren’t moving, that the banners rippled the same way regardless of how the breeze changed, that no songs or shouts, no clatter of weapon or armor, could be heard from the top of those hills.

  * * *

  Symod was not a subtle general. Even Gideon could see that, from above the battlefield, where he had so much to manage. He was weary from projecting Torvul’s power through a mountain all night, but the dwarf had set to his second task with renewed vigor and almost childlike glee when they’d returned before dawn with Idgen Marte, Garth, and two hundred weary riders in tow.

  And now there was his other projection to prepare, but now that he knew the principle was sound it was easy to make it ready.

  Roughly equal companies of Islandmen charged up the hill roaring out prayers to Braech, each disorganized mob of them waving weapons and numbering nearly the entire force Allystaire had brought to the battle a few days past. No longer did the Dragon Scales drive them from behind. Now Braech’s Holy Berzerkers, beating and scratching deep bloody lines in their own tattooed chests with their scaled gauntlets, led them, ranging ahead, leaping and howling their eardrum-shattering challenges, their fearful taunts and bloody litanies.

  Brave men, Gideon thought, but stupid.

  It was a matter of moments, thought it felt like turns of the glass, before they reached the top, and halted in confusion as the illusory armies they raced after disappeared into the wind.

  Then the three hills they stood upon began to collapse into mud, and their victorious shouts and booming songs of victory died into cries of horror.

  * * *

  Gideon sat bolt upright in his saddle. “Now,” he said, then reached out one arm to lay it on the shoulder of the warrior riding next to him.

  Idgen Marte took a deep breath as the boy’s hand settled on her, and reached out to grasp the lay of the shadows before them.

  She felt Gideon seize on her Gift and expand it, throwing it open for all of the men arrayed behind her and Allystaire. She had carried people with her before as she passed from shadow to shadow, slipping between light and darkness in a world of shrouds. But only ever one or two, never hundreds.

  “You heard him,” Allystaire said, raising his voice to a roar and standing in his stirrups at the head of the wide front rank of lancers, with Tibult, Armel, and Harrys beside him.

  “CHARGE.”

  He kicked into Ardent’s flanks and to no one’s surprise the huge grey pulled far ahead, almost so far that Idgen Marte feared losing him from the Will’s projection.

  But then she felt the unknowably vast power of the quiet boy riding expertly beside her, and almost laughed at herself.

  They hopped from shadow to shadow in the lee of the hills while they heard the sounds of men yelling in fear and shock as the hills they were trying to take turned into mudslides. She turned her head to watch as she rode, briefly. Some of the men, especially in the front ranks, were simply buried. She saw more than one scaled, bronzed gauntlet raised futilely above the earth as the berzerker wearing it was dragged under.

  She had but a brief glimpse, for then the veil of shadow dropped and a hundred knights and lancers emerged from the shadow of the hill only forty paces from the mass of Dragon Scales Symod had reserved, riding under the wind-whipped banner of the Golden Sunburst. Behind them came another line, and another, and then Harlachan axemen beneath their own White Paw, but led by Johnn, Miklas, Mattar, and Gaston, the four knights of the Order outstripping the mountain men in their haste to reach the enemy.

  Idgen Marte freed her sword and slid from her saddle. Her gift was her own to use once again.

  Dragon Scales learned to fear shadows that day. Shadows that cut out their legs, and slit their throats, shadows that took their arms off and watched them pour their lifesblood into the ground.

  Shadows that promised each man, before he died, that his body would never see the water, that his soul would never find its way to his god.

  * * *

  Symod stood utterly dumbfounded as he saw his men buried by waves of earth and mud. Not all dead, surely, his panicking mind said, and there are still the Dragon Scales, but.

  He didn’t finish the thought, because then, out of a fold of air, the armies that should have been dying on the hill beneath the Braechsworn onslaught were charging at his berzerkers from open ground, not a hundred paces away from where he sat.

  “Jorn,” he yelled, scrambling to his feet from the camp chair he’d been reclining on, “JORN! Tell your brothers to retreat, we’ll retreat south over the river!”

  The berzerker headman bristled at the order, and shook his head. Energy and anger vibrated visibly through his muscled arms. Though he and a few of his choicest brethren stood near Symod as his guard, amusing themselves by tossing stones onto the beam that prisoner still wore like a yoke, on his knees and grunting with the effort of it, most of the bulk of them had rushed forward to do battle with the Barony army.

  But it was no use ordering berzerkers away from a battle that had come to them, Symod quickly realized. The other priests, arrayed for battle with maces and swords and scale armor, all looked to him. “We will retreat south and salvage what we can,” he said suddenly. “Jorn! You and my guard will come with me.”

  Inwardly, Symod reasserted his control, gradually forced it outward. “We will not run in panic,” he shouted, as a few priests had begun to do just that. “We will retire in good order.”

  Behind him he heard the half-dozen Dragon Scales haul their prisoner to his feet. Priests ran to their tents to fetch the thralls they’d taken as they had their men raid the countryside.

  After all, the Choiron Symod told himself, as he fled before the wrath of the Arm of the Mother, claiming a seat on one of the few horses his army possessed, this only gives the Eldest his chance. And Braech all the glory.

  * * *

  Allystaire had broken his lance inside the first Dragon Scale to die in the morning’s butchery. Some men, he saw in his peripheral vision, broke their lances against the hardened skin of a berzerker; such unlucky lancers generally didn’t live to draw a second weapon.

  Still, the impact was devastating. Man to man on an even field, Allystaire reasoned that a Dragon Scale was as fearsome a warrior as inhabited the world.

  But warriors met knights that day, and soldiers, who had chosen to spend their strength in defense of people who would not know for days, if ever, of the battle that was fought here.

  Strength is greatest when it is being spent for others, instead of marshaled to ourselves, the Goddess had told him in the Temple. And he saw the evidence of it today, as his hammer raised and fell. Saw it as Harrys and Tibult laid about themselves with sword and axe, maneuvering their mounts expertly with just their knees.

  He
even saw it as a berzerker leapt from the ground and carried Armel out of his saddle, saw the second of his knights to fall, the berzerker crushing Armel’s throat even as Armel’s dagger opened his.

  Allystaire would mourn for Armel in his time. Today there was merely the rise and fall of his hammer.

  Beneath every stroke another Dragon Scale fell. Their strength was no match for his. Around him, other men, good men, brave men were falling to that strength.

  But in the end they would fall to his.

  He felt and heard the shock of the second line of lancers hitting before his own had broken well clear.

  When he did, he saw lines of blue-clad priests running at speed, or riding from the battlefield.

  “SYMOD,” he screamed, raising his hammer and standing in his stirrups. Rain lashed against his armor and thunder rumbled overhead, and his rage tore at his throat. “COWARD. FACE ME.” He settled back to his saddle and prepared to bolt after the priests when he heard Gideon’s voice in his mind.

  Allystaire, I am reaching for the power the berzerkers release when they die, and I cannot grasp it. Something is taking it from me. Something is snatching it from my hands and gathering it.

  The boy’s fear was palpable. Allystaire cursed and turned his mount back to the fray, laying about him with his hammer. Behind him he felt two riders fall into place in his wake. Tibult and Harrys. He didn’t even have to turn and look.

  Is it the Eldest? Has he shown himself?

  His knights didn’t even question him as he fought free of the battle and rode back towards the shadows of the hill where their small reserve waited, Gideon and Torvul, Keegan’s men, Teague.

  No. Gideon’s voice was panicked, and Allystaire left Tibult and Harrys behind him as Ardent took long and powerful strides.

  When Allystaire found him, the boy was pale and shaking; even Torvul looked fearful.

  Gideon turned wide drawn eyes to the paladin and said, “Allystaire. I think it is Braech Himself.”

  Almost at the moment the boy spoke the words, a long stroke of lightning forked out of the clouds above them and down into the battle.

  Allystaire felt dismay rising in him, but then he saw that it had struck among the berzerkers, not his own forces. Then another struck, and another, and thunder rolled deafeningly over the scent of charred flesh, as the storm scoured the Dragon Scales who were still fighting.

  CHAPTER 53

  The Ocean’s Rage

  Even the Eldest had to admit surprise at the speed and power with which the event began to happen once he set it in motion.

  With so much power floating around the world, flowing freely into him, it had been no great task to stretch his Will across hundreds of miles and begin plucking up the bits of power the berzerkers had released back into the void as they died. Small pieces on their own, but growing larger and larger as the paladin devastated them in his wake.

  The Eldest wanted very much to taste the power of the paladin for himself. It would come.

  For now he simply harvest power and served as a conduit, pouring it into the artifact in the temple. None of the dying men escaped his touch.

  It had taken surprisingly few for the power to be yanked from his hands. But he could feel it, sense it, taste it still happening. The strength, the rage, the howling, leaping, yawping power gathered from nearly three hundred terrifying men now all poured into one place. One thing. One being.

  Something vastly more powerful than the Eldest himself had taken over and now the power gathering around—gathering in—the statue was even more than he had expected.

  “Perhaps,” he said to no one, “there are gods.”

  Then there was a great crack, and the statue disappeared in a mist that suddenly rose from the water beneath his feet.

  * * *

  Walking the walls of the Dunes every day was beginning to irritate Chaddin. The great battle of their age was being fought, or had been fought, or would be, a hundred leagues or so to the north and east, and he was playing at being a lord in residence, settling disputes, trying to buy from the local armor and swordsmiths in bulk without raising suspicions.

  On the whole, the soldier in him would rather have been at war.

  On the walls there was solitude, at least. There was the illusion of the security of his old life. Spear in hand, walking the wall, watching the city below. Winter quarters.

  It didn’t feel at all like winter, of course. The spring afternoon was showing the first promise of summer heat, and the day was clear and bright.

  So as he circled the curtain wall of the keep and looked out over Londray Bay, he was utterly baffled when a mist as thick as any he’d ever seen came boiling out over the city.

  It rose so fast and so far that something in it terrified him. Unnatural and too warm by half, it caused both a chill on his back and sweat upon his brow, and before he knew it, he could not see over the wall to the bay below him.

  In the harbor a few masts still poked above it, but even they were quickly swallowed.

  “Oh gods,” he muttered, thinking of the bodies of Braech’s priests still mouldering on the walls of the keep, and of the looted temple. “What have we done? What have we—”

  Chaddin’s breath was stolen as an enormous animal roar blasted throughout the city. There was no beast he knew that could make that sound, no bear, no leviathan, nothing. It was deafening, it was a punch to an unarmored chest, it was a hammering blow at his ears.

  The sound was the breaking of the world and it sent his heart into his stomach. Shutting his eyes, Chaddin lowered himself against the wall in a ball, covering his face with his arms, and he did not know why.

  Then the roar came again and tears sprang to his eyes. He forced them open and looked up into the mist, and in it. Something huge, something twice the size of the biggest ship that had ever harbored in Londray coasted through that mist, and Chaddin feared it more than he had ever feared anything. It was a long and sinuous shape but for the shadows of two vast wings on its sides.

  Chaddin knew only one word that even that brief impression could answer to, and he bit at his arm to keep from crying out when he thought of it, lest the Dragon that overflew the Dunes should hear him.

  * * *

  The storm struck down the Dragon Scales, singly and in pairs until the Baronial army was left facing nothing but their own panicked horses and the driving rain.

  Allystaire was watching Gideon, who was a miserable sight, huddled and shivering in the stinging of the rain. In all the times he had seen the boy lie insensate while projecting his Will elsewhere, he had never seen him quake in fear as he did now.

  Arontis came riding for him, the other Barons riding in his wake, while men were milling around on the field that had become a charnel house, horses shying away from the smell of lightning-scalded flesh.

  “Sir Stillbright,” the Baron Innadan yelled, exultant as he put up his visor, “has the Will called this lightning?”

  The smile faded from Arontis’s face as Allystaire turned grimly to him and shook his head.

  Come back to us, Gideon. We must know what it is we might face.

  * * *

  Gideon no longer even thought about the power he might expend as he took to the air, speeding formlessly towards Londray as pure will. He was following the track of the power that was being gathered and redirected on the battlefield, and while he knew that he traveled towards the Eldest, it was not the centuries-old sorcerer that gave him pause.

  Londray was nearly invisible to the naked senses; it was one vast formless fog, a huge and unnatural cloud of mist, as if the entire bay had boiled off at once.

  And in it Gideon sensed the most vast and malevolent collection of power he had ever seen, could ever imagine. The Eldest was a sickly green presence in the city below, but Gideon paid him hardly any notice. The hoary old sorcerer would do well to flee
from him, much less this thing.

  This Dragon.

  Gideon realized this was the only word for it, that it flew through the mist it had raised over the city on huge wings. That it was a dragon, the Sea Dragon, in the flesh, an avatar of Braech somehow called into being by the Choiron and the Eldest, and by the deaths of hundreds of Braechsworn and berzerkers.

  The mist surrounding it parted enough for him to get a glimpse of its long tail, gleaming scales, blue along the top of its length over bronze on its underside, the huge length of it ending in heavy club of bone.

  Reaching his senses towards it he found only rage and insatiable hunger, and then it saw him and roared, beating its massive wings and making straight for him.

  Gideon fled from it, back to his body in terror.

  * * *

  Gideon sat up with a start and a loud cry of fear.

  “It’s a dragon, Allystaire,” he blurted, as rain streamed down his face. “A dragon. They have called a dragon somehow, in Londray. Braech’s avatar, in the flesh.”

  All around him Allystaire heard gasps of breath, saw fear overtaking faces that had been flush with victory.

  In himself, he felt only purposeful calm.

  “Arontis,” he said, “gather all the men together and make for Pinesward. Brazcek should welcome you in his walls. Take everyone in and hole up there, waiting for word. Symod is still alive, and so is a sorcerer in Londray.”

  “Everyone except the four of us,” Idgen Marte suddenly put in, as she stepped out of Shadow behind Allystaire.

  The paladin did not answer her. He turned to Gideon, whose eyes were large with a refusal only Allystaire could read.

  “Go and round them up,” Allystaire said, his voice still icily calm. He dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Harrys. Tibult. Go with them. Round up the Order and be watchful.”

  “Should we gather the wounded for you?” Tibult, as always, was checking over his horse’s limbs, seeing how it had fared in the battle, more concerned for it than for himself. “You should treat them as best you can,” Allystaire said, “but I cannot take the time to heal them. I have another battle yet to fight.” He waved his hands, dismissing the Barons and their knights.