The other creature had gone back to gorging on carcasses. For the moment, the right wing was safe. But Deltan was cautious now, and sent a few riders out on the flanks with orders to watch for the apes. “And watch the trees, fools!” he grunted. “They dropped down on us like ripe fruit in a gale.”
The soldiers made their way back around the clearing, pushing as deep into the forest as they dared while still keeping the meadow in sight as a reference point. In this way they eventually reached the area where Pelekarr’s surviving troopers had retreated to.
The broken cavalry had retreated back into the woods and now stood, dismounted, in a square formation, weapons ready for apes or colossal beasts. The remaining horses had been led further back into the trees, the wounded men lay inside the square.
Two sergeants were in command and Keltos was relieved to see that Bivar was one of them, having apparently survived the initial attack that brought him down. Bivar had formed the square around several large trees, the thick trunks and spreading branches of which would provide a modicum of protection should the colossal things in the meadow attack them. All told, Keltos realized with a sweeping glance, barely fifty men had made it back out of the meadow.
Half strength.
CHAPTER 25: THE WORMS FEED
Loku, the Wolfsbane shaman, lay still atop a low rise nearly a mile from the battle on the seashore. Two of his acolytes were with him, half-buried in sand and obscured by grasses that waved in the breeze.
They had lain there since before the sun rose over the battlefield, anticipating the shedding of blood and eager to make use of it if they could. The loss of the needed sacrificial virgins in the debacle at Black Tur’s camp had set things back, and he had paid a painful price at the hands of his dark masters in the ethereal realm. But here was an opportunity to move his plans forward once again.
Focusing his gaze intensely on the fighting men striving on the open plain, Loku clutched at the grasses around him and used the meager energies from the earth to propel his consciousness farther into the fray.
Such killing on a grand scale excited him. He knew its potential. With enough blood soaking into those shifting sands, dark things might begin to stir. Immense spirits might take notice and bring their unseen forces to bear against the hated Kerathi that had infested the coastal region since before Loku was made an outcast.
“They fight on evil ground,” he confirmed to his two companions in a gleeful mutter. “The pawtoon know not what lurks underfoot. All we need do is supply a little… push…”
His voice trailed away as three sets of blazing eyes focused on the mound of earth on the far side of all the warring soldiers.
Damicos and his men gave voice to a full-throated victory roar as the enemy line suddenly broke, imploding from the center outward, and their opponents in the shoving match turned to flee. The Tooth and Blade hoplites advanced relentlessly, spearing downed men and lunging onward. Nothing could stop them now. The battle fire was upon them, and the remnants of the skirmishers and Vocke’s heavy infantry scrambled to escape.
Damicos himself paused, stepped out of line, and let the phalanx pass him by. He scanned the battlefield, looking for enemy chariots or horse, anything that might swing behind them and hit them from the rear. It was his duty not to let the bloodlust overtake him, so that his men could fight on unhindered.
But even as he did so, he sensed a change in the tone of battle. The cries of dying men become suddenly more panicked and desperate, laden with intense fear. He looked up the shoreline to the only bit of high ground on the battlefield.
The hillock called Argos’ Wart was erupting into pure madness.
Bright red worms boiled out in a writhing, seething mass. They enveloped the men on the hillock and then spilled down the slope and splattered into the phalanxes, eating everything around them. The battle became, within seconds, a slaughter mind-numbing in its scale and ferocity.
The worms varied in size; the smallest was barely a cubit in length, and the width of a man’s two fingers. But the largest was thicker around than a man’s torso, and as long as four or five horses end to end. From the sandy earth they came, wriggling free of the soil and launching themselves toward whatever moved.
From a distance they looked like great scarlet snakes, but as a few of them came closer all semblance to snakes ceased in Damicos’ eyes and they became the stuff of nightmare. They had no scales but instead glistened with red mucosal slime. There was no symmetry to them; they bulged in some places and were narrow in others, like a length of intestine full of half-digested food. They had none of a serpent’s rhythmic sinuousness but thrashed and heaved in blind frenzy, wriggling on and over each other in desperation to reach their meal.
And their meal was meat. They had no eyes, no visible ears or noses, no faces or snouts of any kind, save only a ring of wildly waving scarlet tendrils surrounding a maw of needled teeth—and the maw could open wide when presented with sustenance. Not wide like gaping jaws, for these abominations had no jaws, but wide like a flower opening up in bloom, wide like death. And they stank, a sour reek as of bile.
Just ahead, Damicos spotted Kallida. The Lioness was standing atop an overturned chariot, gazing across the sea of waving, clashing swords and spears. Her armor was covered in blood and dirt, and one of her arms hung limp at her side. In the other, a saber was half-raised and frozen there.
Brushing past a dying enemy sergeant, he climbed the broken chariot and stood next to her. “What are they?” he asked, wiping sweat and blood from his own brow and gazing at the hillock some fifty yards away.
Men were falling away from Argos’ Wart like ants fleeing fire. Friend and foe alike turned and ran for their lives from the place, which had suddenly turned red and seemed to be moving. Kallida’s face was drained of color, her eyes wide and staring, her mouth half open in a snarl of fear and loathing.
“The Red Worms!” she shrieked, pointing with the tip of her saber. Her breath was coming fast and shallow. “The fools, they’ve awoken a nest of worms! We are all of us doomed!”
There seemed to be no end to the eruption, and soon the red mass had spread well beyond the hill and out into the surrounding ranks of embattled soldiers. Where the red worms went, men either sprinted away or dropped their weapons and struggled futilely for their lives, unable to keep the creatures from seeking out the gaps in armor and helmet.
One of Damicos’ own men, cut off from the phalanx, had strayed leftward in the fighting and was now standing back to back with one of the Deep Shields. A tide of red pooled across the sand toward him.
The infantryman’s leg suddenly turned red, and he desperately tried to use his sword to cut the worms from him. In an instant, two more had slithered up his body and disappeared beneath his breastplate. One latched on to his face, and the man began to scream. He dropped his sword and grabbed at the thing, but blood was already dripping down his noseplate from his eyes, and then the thing burrowed inward and the man collapsed backward onto the ground. His Deep Shield comrade soon met a similar fate.
Mishtan have mercy…
Still more of the worms poured out of the ground. More and more of the soldiers had noticed their battlefield being overrun by the mindless third-party belligerents, and even men in the rear ranks were beginning to back away. Damicos could hear the horns of Telros and Vocke alternately blaring their signals, some for charging and some for retreating, and no one could tell which to respond to.
Damicos raised an arm and looked around for his lieutenant. “Leon! To me!”
“Captain, if you want to save the lives of your men, listen to me now,” Kallida told him. She was still staring at Argos’ Wart, unable to tear her gaze away. Tears were forming in her wide eyes, but her voice was steady. “Tell them to get off of the ground—atop a body, a wagon, anything. And then stand where they are and do not move or make a sound!”
Damicos gazed into her eyes and slowly nodded.
It seemed ludicrous, in the midst of a battl
e, to stand still and quiet when so much chaos and noise was shaking the field. But Kallida’s voice, so full of fear and desperate foreboding, rang true and he trusted instinctively. Somehow she knew. He recalled the rumors that she had recently lost many of her people in an engagement to the south, and screamed for his sergeant again.
“Captain!” It was Leon. He approached the wrecked chariot with dripping spear in hand. “The boys are ready for another push toward the center! Just give the—”
“No!” Damicos spat. “No! Stay away from the hill! Recall the men, now. Get them over here, quickly!”
“Captain?”
“Now, sergeant! Rally to me and then tell them to get off the ground and be silent as they can. Bid them stand atop a pile of fallen soldiers, a rider-less horse—”
“Not a horse!” Kallida hissed. “No horses! You’ll never keep the dumb beasts still enough. One hoof pounding the earth, and you’ll be eaten along with the animal.”
Leon glared quizzically at the woman. Damicos pointed toward the hillock, and his lieutenant followed his gaze until he realized what was happening. Then he turned and began waving at the men.
The line sergeants had halted the advance until further orders were given, and thankfully were watching for a signal. It took a few minutes to get the men to rally, and every second wasted drove Damicos nearly wild as he watched the mess that was tearing apart the left flank of the battle and entering the center. But as the worms encountered food aplenty there, they slowed slightly.
At first the infantrymen were confused and slow to respond, but when they saw men begin to fall to the worms they turned pale and leapt atop whatever ground cover was nearest. For most, this was a dead body. Some had a war wagon or slaughtered animal available. One way or another, within seconds most of the men were standing silent and horror-struck, watching the glistening red tide roll toward them.
Everywhere else, men fled. And wherever they ran, boots and sandals pounding the earth, the worms followed. An enemy cavalry officer galloped by, struggling with a band of red wrapped around his chest. His horse’s neck and legs were covered in the things. He did not get far before falling.
Two of the Deep Shields ran past the chariot Kallida and Damicos stood on, and the worms came after them. The things moved incredibly fast, even the small ones, catching at the heels of the soldiers. But then a monstrous worm the size of a tree’s trunk slithered past in a spray of mucus and both men went down. Their legs were gripped tight, then their heads enveloped by the thing’s gaping needle-crusted maw, and the moans of pain and fear were muffled and then quickly silenced as blood showered out onto the ground. Great slurping, sucking sounds accompanied their demise, and Damicos nearly retched in horror at the sight.
None of his own men were being targeted. A worm snaked its way right over the top of the chariot, but as Kallida and Damicos stood stock still and held their breath, the thing dropped off the far side and went after one of Vocke’s archers, already embroiled in a flurry of twisted limbs and biting red worms. Damicos watched one of his men, Fieron, teeter precariously with a foot on each of the corpses nearest him, while worms crawled right between and under his legs without stopping to attack him. The look on his face was terror itself, but he held his silence and did not fall.
As more of the Deep Shields ran past, desperate to get away, Damicos yelled at them. “Stand still, you fools. Be silent!”
Kallida’s body tensed and she risked a sudden movement to grab his arm, pinching fiercely at his gauntlet. “Not a sound, fool!” she breathed. “You’ll have them on us in a moment!”
Damicos watched, tortured, as good men fell to the worms, dying in agony with no one to help them. A few heeded his call and took the example of the Tooth and Blade men, standing atop wreckage or dead bodies and keeping still, and those men lived.
In minutes, the entire battlefield had changed. Where once there raged a glorious back-and-forth struggle between armored men, now a sudden and desperate rout took place. Vocke’s entire army began moving back toward the walls of his town, and the worms followed. The pounding of fleeing horses and the feet of men lured the creatures like flies to honey, and the pursuit looked like a tide of red washing endlessly down the shore after them.
And still, worms boiled from the cursed hill.
Telros and his men also retreated, but they had nowhere to run to, and many of them stayed in place to fight off the worms. Those that noisily hacked at the things were overcome and killed, almost to a man. Those that were farther back from the front and had the good sense to stand still and watch without shouting orders or dashing around, survived.
A few more men were killed, but then the worms that remained began moving in the direction of the hastily retreating army, drawn inescapably by the vibrations of the soldiers’ pounding footsteps.
Finally, the battlefield grew eerily still. Every man on the front line was frozen in place, so many stone statues painted real. All eyes watched the retreating army and the horrible foe that harried it all along the way. Worms still emanated from the mound, but fewer and more slowly now, and there hadn’t been one of the truly huge ones for several minutes.
“They will never outrun the worms,” Kallida whispered, staring at Vocke’s terrified army. “And they cannot hide. They are leading the things into the town!”
With a sickening sense of dread piled on top of a stomach that was closer to disgorging itself than Damicos liked, he saw that she was right. The army, and the worms with it, were now approaching the walled town at the foot of Vocke’s castle. Every man, woman, child, and beast in the place would soon share the fate of the soldiers from the field.
“Is it safe to move now?” he asked Kallida. “Shall we retreat to a further distance?”
She nodded. “Quietly. I’ll tell the remaining Lancers to dismount. Have your men remove their footgear and walk slowly, with none of your usual silly unison marching.”
Led by Kallida and Damicos, the men fighting for Telros gradually abandoned the battlefield. They took the wounded that could be carried with them, but the dead were left where they lay.
They tried to shut their ears against the cries coming from Vocke’s town and fortress, but the noise echoed out over the battlefield on the breeze. The screams were long and loud.
A man next to Damicos began to vomit, then another. Another man sat, hugging himself and shaking while staring at the ground between his feet. These were both strong fighters who had minutes before been standing firm in the phalanx. But Ostora’s fangs sank deep.
Damicos walked slowly over to Telros’ command tent as the sun lowered in the sky. Survivors had been pulled from the field of battle, horses collected, and important equipment collected. No worms remained there amid the dead; they followed only what moved and screamed and beat at them.
Telros was having a hushed but bitter argument with Lorcos and the other surviving mercenary captains.
“We cannot be involved in this any further, my lord,” Lorcos told Telros. The Longhand’s bearded face was pale and he looked ill at ease. “If the tale is told that we set the worms upon them, our honor will be stained throughout the land. The king—”
“The king is blind to us now!” Telros hissed. “We must press our advantage and surround the town. This is a godsend! Don’t you see it? Telion himself upholds our cause!”
“It’s true,” one of Telros’ few surviving cavalrymen said, obviously angling for the approval of his lord after the stupefying defeat of the horsemen early in the battle. “We can move in and take the town easily once those monsters have finished their work and departed. The king—and the rest of Ostora—will see that we nobly intervened, sparing the lives of whoever is left. We shall be heroes! My lord Telros will be given control of the port in accordance with our aims.”
“None of this was in our agreement,” Damicos interjected. “This day’s battle has brought enough blood and horror upon Vocke’s people. My men won’t be part of further slaughter. We came to win a
decisive victory, not to further spoil and waste a ruined, blood-soaked town.”
“Those are the words of a coward,” the cavalryman coolly replied.
Damicos clenched his jaw and his fist reflexively tightened, but before he could deal with the arrogant horseman’s insult the leader of the Red Lancers, Rovos, spoke up.
“Captain Damicos has the right of it, Lord Telros. We engaged to fight a battle, and the battle is ended.”
“Away with you then, fools!” Telros snorted. “You are no longer needed. The worms did your work for you!”
The tent went silent.
“We bled along with all others,” Damicos coldly replied. “We’ll take our pay same as the rest before we leave.”
“Payment? Payment for what? For standing idly by while those hell-spawned worms put the enemy to flight? You’ll see no coin from me unless you finish the job and take the town.”
Kallida stepped forward, having just arrived in the tent to hear Telros’ latest words. “The worms are in a frenzy, Telros. If your men enter that town, they’ll become a meal right along with Vocke’s people. It won’t be the first foolish command you’ve given, but it will be the last.”
Telros glowered.
“She speaks the truth,” Damicos announced. “She knows, and you’d do well to listen to her.”
“How does she know? What does this woman who has lost her command know of anything?”
“I lost my command,” Kallida whispered, “to worms like these, and other creatures I cannot name from the deepness of the Ostoran hills. I could not return to Kerath in shame, and now I have naught but ghosts following me here. But if you choose to learn by experience, at the expense of your men, then so be it. I am leaving.”
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