Warlord

by Robert J. Crane

  “I don’t feel that was one of your best,” Curatio said, frowning.

  “See, I think my added commentary keeps him sharp,” Vaste said. “This was all just one big attempt to link the titans to my people, which is truly stupid, because we all know the titans are dumber than the trolls.”

  “Who said you could speak?” Vara asked. “Have I told you about the time that Cyrus—”

  “Aghhhhhh!” Vaste shouted, covering his ears.

  “—with my lady flower—”

  “AIIIIEEEEEEEE!”

  The first spell hit a moment later, a blast of ice so poorly aimed it struck the side of the cliff far to Cyrus’s left. It did, however, have the fortunate effect of stopping the back and forth between Vara and Vaste, and for that, Cyrus found himself supremely grateful. Shards of ice sprayed down upon them before cracking and bringing down chunks of the canyon wall only a few moments later. That side of their line moved quickly, pushing forward as the glacier-sized block crashed to the ground.

  Cyrus spun about after the ice fall, catching a glimpse of the first ranks through the rain. The initial titan line of attack was only a hundred meters ahead, marching through the rain in a disciplined formation. The next spells came harder, and Nyad threw up a cessation spell around them that dissipated their fury against it like water sloshing off a rock barrier.

  “That’s a lovely plan,” Vaste said dryly, “but when they get over here in the next ten seconds or so, I suspect our people will need healing spells.”

  “If I didn’t do this now,” the princess of Pharesia said with an aura of annoyance, “our people would be dying under the impact of fire and ice right this minute, no wait required.” She gave him a haughty look. “And if you don’t like it, perhaps I can share some of my sexual exploits with you.”

  “Please do,” Vaste said, causing Nyad’s cheeks to flush red and a slight smile to appear on her lips. “We can make an evening of it.”

  The first titans came crashing along just then, and Cyrus strained against the ground before remembering that with the cessation spell, there was no Falcon’s Essence to be had. “Nyad!” Cyrus called, and made a slashing motion across his throat.

  “Yes, I’m sure you’ll die in no time against these things,” Vaste said.

  Nyad, for her part, dropped her hands, the spell light disappearing as she did so. Cyrus looked around for a druid but failed to find one, and his time ran out with the arrival of the first titan boots to come stomping out a few feet ahead of him.

  Grimacing in pure irritation, Cyrus moved out to meet them, unwilling to merely stand there and provide a convenient target for the smashing. Now the titans wore plate metal boots, all of them, another development he found annoying. And likely fatal one to many of our number.

  Cyrus dodged a titan kick and slid past one of them to plant his blade under a kneecap. A howl cut through the rainy atmosphere, and he dragged the sword through the middle of the joint with immense effort. The titan swayed, screaming into the night, and then fell over, his leg nearly cut from his body.

  “Plenty more where that came from!” Vaste called. Cyrus spared only a glance back to see Vara performing one of her mighty leaps through the air. She landed on a titan’s chestplate but for a second, plunged her blade into the small indentation where his collarbones met. As he gasped, she thrust a hand right up to his eyeballs and unleashed a force blast spell. He hit the ground back-of-the-head first, his lower body strangely unmoved by the spell magic. He trailed blood as he went, Vara’s sword remaining firmly in her hand as she came in for a landing on his carcass, driving the point into his neck.

  Two titans came at Cyrus and he fought back against both of them in a rolling dodge and stick attack. He avoided one’s strike, stabbing into the thigh of the other as he came up. As that one reacted in pain, Cyrus used his Praelior-charged reflexes to come at the other, driving his blade into its hip with a leap. The titan froze in place with the pain of his thrust, the sword wedged between bones and its muscles all contracted. Cyrus dragged the blade ninety degrees along the same axis, chopping into the joint as much as possible before he got out of the titan’s way and let it fall. Then he returned to his original foe and brought it the rest of the way down from its knees with a leaping attack against the side of its neck.

  “Cyrus!” Curatio’s voice was a magic-aided bellow in the night. Cyrus turned to see that the Sanctuary line was well and truly infiltrated, the titans stepping over the front rank and into the thick of the army. Screams were coming loudly now, all running into one another, the cry of the titans in furious battle rage, and the screams of the wounded as well. Cyrus’s feet lifted off the ground as a Falcon’s Essence spell took hold on him, and he did not bother to look for the caster, instead running back to his own lines with wildest abandon, the last man out in the middle of the titan advance. Even Vara was back now, driving her blade into the legs of titans that were swarming into the camp, tearing down tents and stomping through the latrines.

  Cyrus stabbed through a few necks on his way back to his lines, now high enough to do so with spell aid. This is the view of a bird, truly, he thought as he punched a titan right behind the ear, staggering him with the strength of the blow. His enemy pitched over, landing on at least two warriors below, one of whom struggled out from beneath the breastplate with a look of pain upon his face. Before Cyrus had a chance to call for a healing spell for the man, a titan came along and stomped with a metal boot. A splatter of blood squirted out in two directions on the dusty ground, like wine spilled. When the boot came up again, Cyrus knew there was no healer in Arkaria that could repair what had just been done to the soldier.

  With more than a little anger to spare, Cyrus attacked the titan responsible. The creature wore an expression of angry glee, rumbling his amusement at his small triumph. Cyrus ran by and drove his sword in at the joint of the jaw, ignoring the extra strength it took to push the sword through the knotty titan flesh and cartilage. He yanked forward and ran, cutting half the giant’s jaw off and ripping straight through the lip on one side. It reached up to touch its wound, but failed to restrain its own strength, inadvertently thrusting fingers into the deep cut that Cyrus had just made. The titan fell to its knees, and within a second of its landing there, Vara leapt up to deal a deathblow.

  The camp was a mess now, the first rank of the army completely in disarray. Elven soldiers were fleeing, running back toward the hillside where the second watchtower was mounted. Cyrus frowned, a pained look. This is not going the way I’d hoped …

  He spun and started to re-enter the fray as a titan swatted at him. Cyrus put his sword out, but it was too late. The blade buried itself in the titan’s palm, but Cyrus was flung into a canyon wall, slamming to a stop and falling onto the air. The Falcon’s Essence spell caught him, holding him some twenty feet up, as he tried to gather his wits back around him.

  The titan advanced, malice in its eyes. A warrior who can smell the kill, Cyrus thought. He still had Praelior clutched in his hand, and as he started to get up, the titan raised a hand once more—

  And then howled in pain.

  Cyrus looked down to see Belkan in his thick armor, plunging his blade into the titan’s shin again and again, sliding in the muddy ground as he repositioned to attack the Achilles heel of the beast. Cyrus blinked, and the titan shifted its balance enough to move its foot—

  And it kicked Belkan to the ground.

  The old armorer rolled some ten feet, as dazed as Cyrus had been when the last blow had landed on him. Before Cyrus could get to his feet, he watched the titan warrior go after the newest blood it could find, dealing with the active threat that had just hobbled it, like any good warrior of Bellarum would.

  And as the plated boot smashed Belkan into the ground, the sound of armor crunching under weight sounded like a thunderclap to Cyrus’s ears. When the boot came back up …

  … Cyrus knew that Belkan was dead … and that there was no hope at all of resurrection.


  48.

  “NO!” Cyrus screamed above the chaos. He came at the titan responsible in a raging fury, spearing it through the ear after knocking its helm aside enough to cut through. He rammed his sword into the canal eight times in a row before the titan started to slump, and he followed it to the ground with furious swipes, driving his blade into the temple, over and over, the rain now hammering at him as titans swept by like eddies in a sea.

  When he came back to himself, Cyrus spun around and saw more foes at the gap of the canyon entry than it was meant to hold. The mere sight enraged him, and suddenly he felt the pulsing desire for battle that had not been present before. He wanted to put blade to titan throats and cut away with a will, to slash and hack his way through the beasts at neck level until he was practically drowning in their blood.

  This is how it was meant to be, he thought as he drove forward, kicking a titan in the chestplate hard enough to stagger him back a step. Cyrus did not rest on his laurels, however; he drove up from beneath and slaughtered the titan with three sharp cuts to the jugular.

  I was meant to bathe in the blood of my foes. To fight for empire, to carve a kingdom of my own. Might makes you right, and weakness is nothing to be celebrated. Force of arms will carry you where gentle words will not. The titans … they understand this.

  How have I forgotten it?

  Leaving behind the place where Belkan had died, Cyrus drove forward in his own mad attack. The titans had become used to seeing the smaller people falling back under the pressure of their advance. Cyrus screamed and came at them more quickly than they were used to seeing. Some raised their hands to guard their faces in panic. These he stabbed in the armpit, guiding his blade straight to their hearts. Some scowled, shouted, and came at him. He cut their fingers from their hands and stabbed them in the eyes, ripped open their throats, turned aside their angry blows by dodging and countering, bellowing his own war cry into the night all the while.

  A fire spell blew past him narrowly, spending itself against the ground in an inferno of heat that turned Cyrus’s head around. He swallowed heavily when he saw it land, consuming a titan and three Sanctuary rangers when it landed. Another followed indiscriminately a moment later, this one hitting ineffectually against the side of the canyon.

  Ahead Cyrus could see the titan responsible, hand glowing as he cast magic with no energy remaining. His nobby skin was already showing the signs of the strain, and then he heaved another powerful fireball, once again with poor aim. They must teach that in the Leagues … The fireball hit just below the cliff’s edge, sending two rangers scrambling back.

  Cyrus scanned the edge of the cliff; almost all the rangers were gone now, and none remained at the mouth of the pass. Frowning, he stabbed through a titan coming at him, and cast his look back. The main line, if he could even consider it that, was some several hundred meters behind him, titans swarming all in the midst of the scrambling fighters. The elves had broken, and only a veteran core of Sanctuary fighters was keeping the titan advance even remotely in check—himself included.

  “Dammit,” Cyrus muttered under his breath, turning eyes once more to the pass. I could hold it. Myself, maybe a few others—we could hold it against the titans until—

  With a start, he jerked, remembering exactly what they were meant to hold against—and until. “Sonofa—” He sprinted back toward the Sanctuary front line, running high above the heads of the titans as he did so.

  “Oh, hi there,” Vaste called as Cyrus spiraled down to them, cutting through a titan on the way. It fell sideways, providing them a momentary bulwark against the advance. “Glad you could join us here in the fight for our lives.”

  “Where is the elf in charge?” Cyrus asked, stopping roughly ten feet above the ground.

  “I’m glad you came back to ask,” Curatio said drolly, “because I was about to send Vara to come get you.” He jerked a head back toward the watch hill only a hundred meters behind them. “I think you know where the commanding officer of the elves has gone.”

  Dammit. I was right. “This isn’t going well,” Cyrus said.

  “No, that’s not how you do it,” Vaste said. “When you make these blatantly obvious statements, you either have to do it with a very sarcastic delivery or else append something extremely amusing to it.”

  “Such as?”

  “I …” Vaste paused, then jabbed his staff out to hit a titan in the knee as Thad did the same to the other knee. “Put me on the spot, why don’t you? I do this all the time, you know, you’d think by now you’d have enough to select from without making me create an illustrative example up out of thin air, like I’m some sort of joke-teller by magic alone. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “They’re not stopping!” Vara shouted, coming back within range of them after covering the left flank. “Except, of course, those few that we manage to hit in the groin. They stop rather quickly.” She looked at Vaste. “That’s how you do it.”

  “I bow to the mistress,” Vaste said, not actually bowing.

  “They killed Belkan,” Cyrus said, repelling a titan’s attack with a flurry of blows of his own.

  “They’ve killed a number of us and an even larger number of my father’s soldiers,” Nyad said, lifting her staff into the air as she cast a fire spell straight into the face of three advancing titans. “We only need hold a few more minutes, and then—”

  “And then what?” Vaste asked. Cyrus jerked his head toward the cliff walls ahead of them. “Oh. That.”

  “Yes, that,” Cyrus said, sweeping his sword around. “That, which we are waiting—”

  A heavy explosion ripped through the night, its flash casting the pass in white and then orange light as the mouth of the canyon burst with the fury of Dragon’s Breath. The titans caught between the teeth of the pass disappeared in the fire and then the cloud of debris that followed as a second explosion rocked the night, this one from the opposite side of the pass. Another blew, further up one side, then another, a rolling series of explosions that climbed the face of the mountain where the King of the Elves had placed barrels of the alchemical mixture.

  Before the smoke at the entry had cleared, a deep rumble had started. Cyrus looked up and saw where the barrels of Dragon’s Breath had been planted, deep scars were now gouged out of the rock face and the dust swirled around them. Below, huge chunks of mountain ripped free and fell into the entry to the pass and the canyon.

  Cyrus could not see because of the dust, but he knew that there were at least a hundred titans swallowed under the fall of the rolling detonations and the sheet of rock turned loose from the mountainside. He fought the next titan, and the next, but now they were no longer endless; now there were only a couple hundred.

  The fight went on until dawn, wizards poised to evacuate them at the first sign of reinforcements coming over the top of the debris field where the pass had been closed. They never came, and when the first light broke, Cyrus found himself staring over a field of dead and dying, with the remains of plenty of titans, elves and men to make all sides equally miserable as to the outcome.

  49.

  Cyrus smelled the familiar scent of dinner cooking when the magic of the teleport spell vanished around him. The fires were flickering at the open doors behind him. The light of day shone down and from where he stood, Cyrus could see people moving about on the Sanctuary grounds. They were unhurried, languid in their pace, and he wondered exactly how they could seem so relaxed when he felt anything but.

  “You made it back,” Odellan said with sharp relief, standing in circular guard with other warriors, their spears now lifting into the air, the possibility of threat firmly resolved. “We hadn’t heard anything and were wondering—”

  “The titans came through the pass last night,” Cyrus said, inflection flat. Vara stood at his side, her head bowed. “The King of the Elves ordered the pass sealed if they swarmed, and his officers carried out his orders.” Cyrus tried not to pour any bitterness into it, but it seeped out regardless. The
re was no way to regard their stinging defeat, even after so short a battle, as anything other than what it was. “We had to stick around for a while to make sure they didn’t come over immediately, but …” Cyrus shook his head. “Our army is falling back to the portal at the northern terminus of the pass. We’ll take our turns defending it while we wait for the titans to make their next move.” And they will, he did not say, but the air was heavy the answer anyway.

  “How did we fare … in terms of losses?” Odellan asked, his voice a little lower now.

  “Over a hundred,” Cyrus said roughly even as he caught sight of motion just inside the doors of the Great Hall. “Excuse me.”

  He shouldered past Odellan after the figure he’d seen watching him from just inside the hall. The clink of Vara’s boots followed him as Cyrus entered the hall, the smell of food permeating the air even more heavily here. He cast a look back at Vara, who nodded, and moved to shut the doors to the Great Hall.

  Larana was nearly back to the kitchen, but she halted in place, a small cauldron clutched in her hands, while Vara shut the doors. He had never studied her in great detail, but he noticed her now; bushy brown hair that hung in frizzy lengths, as though she had never once tried to control it with a ponytail as Vara did. Her eyes were downcast and dark, what little he could see of them by the light through the stained glass windows against the far wall. She seemed to huddle there in her light robes, as if she were anticipating death coming toward her, unable to move out of its path.

  “Larana?” Cyrus walked closer to her, hesitating to approach, as though she might strike at him. She did not answer, merely stared, mouselike, at him. “I have to talk to you,” he said, tentative. “There’s something I need to tell you.”