by Paul Kidd
Lightning slashed into packed blocks of pikes, lifting men up from the grass like the blast of a volcano; fireballs flickered, wreathing magical domes of force; spirits whirled and snarled into the Sumbrian lines. Their damage done, the Colletran skirmishers frantically whirled and tried to ride away only to disintegrate as their own heavy cavalry trampled home.
"Colletro!"
Screaming horses overturned; lightning whipped through the air, and suddenly the Colletran nobles struck into their prey. With a shock front that rebounded from the mountaintops, the lancers slammed home into the Sumbrian left wing.
Infantry sprayed back from the deadly hooves like ocean foam; the horses rammed full tilt into armored men, smashing them wildly aside. Lances blasted into armored backs, ripped through helms, and shattered like glass. Pushing forward like men riding into a storm, the cavalry drove onward through a churning mass of enemies.
The dense pike formations boiled like frenzied nests of ants. Spears tangled, unable to press the attack as horsemen hacked down into the mob with axe and sword. Here and there an infantry spear lunged home; soldiers grunted as they pushed the points through horses' breasts into the guts beyond. Animals screamed, blood flew, and still the metal giants carved their swords into the shrieking mob.
Horses were crushed by the tremendous pressure of surging infantry; surrounded by the hard-packed mob, Prince Ricardo howled in frenzy as he hacked downward with a flaming sword. Here was the battle joy he had never known! The thrill of bloodshed and victory. The prince chopped down through the helm of a helpless, fleeing man; he whipped high his sword, screamed out his city's name, and thanked Tchazzar for his horse, his blade, and his beaten, shrieking enemy.
The attack had slammed home on the Sumbrian left, where Cappa Mannicci's most loyal Blade Captains had been given the vital flank command. Swept back by the storm, Orlando Toporello urged his gigantic black-bronze horse forward through the flood of his own retreating men, roaring like a maddened troll as the crush bore him relentlessly away. Finally he struggled through into the fight, smashed a Colletran noble from his saddle with a single hammer blow, and tried to fling his units back into the melee.
High above, the hippogriffs dipped and whirled as though disdainful of the muck and mess so far below. The air cavalry fought in loose, wheeling formations, exchanging arrow fire and ever ready to plunge down upon careless combatants below. From time to time a body fell- sometimes buoyed by a feather fall spell, and sometimes simply tumbling to bloody destruction through the churning fog of war.
One formation broke away from the wild airborne melee. Toporello-desperately rallying a stand of pikes to fend off another death blow from the Colletran cavalry-heard a bellowed warning and tugged his horse aside. The enemy hippogriffs slashed mere inches overhead, jerking banners with the numbing speed of their passage, then whirred low across the Colletran cavalry.
The hippogriff riders opened fire, wheeling one after another to shower arrows at a single golden figure riding amongst a press of infantry. The rider reeled as arrows scored sparks across his breast, cursed as one shaft pierced his shoulder plates to wound him, then ignored the injury and spurred his charger deep into the fray.
"My lord! My lord, the Colletran infantry advances!" One of Toporello's officers, his armor torn, blood staining his jaw, gripped his commander's reins. "They will strike us from behind!"
Prince Mannicci had ridden hard to reach the site of the disaster; he paused to let his fellow Blade Captains plunge into the midst of their own men, trying to beat fugitives back into the battle lines with the flats of their swords. Swirled and surrounded by terrified, fleeing soldiers, he ripped open his visor and somehow spied Toporello's standard. The prince raked back his spurs, sent his golden horse ramming a path through the retreating troops, and somehow shouldered the beast through to Toporello's side. Old Toporello, sheathed in blood from head to foot and brandishing a dripping hammer, never once paused in his labors as he spoke to his lord.
"We're outflanked, and the infantry are done for! They'll break within another minute, then run straight for the pass."
"Damn! How did it happen?" Cappa Mannicci's face shone white with rage under his visor's brim. "Ilego's scouts should have seen them before they even crossed the valley floor!"
"Then they used some sort of spell to attack us with surprise!" Toporello saw his center unit break, and readied his tiny stand of rescued infantry to plug the gap. "Do we fight it out, or withdraw?"
"Withdraw!" Prince Mannicci stood in his stirrups, careless of the crossbow bolts and spellfire still blurring through the smoke and dust. "My own ground troops will make a stand before the mouth of the pass. Flee back behind us-we'll cover the retreat!"
"Yes, my lord!"
Toporello had already turned to go on about the business of saving his men as his prince rode away to gather up Sumbria's cavalry. The old general spared a glance at the central melee, frowned as he saw no sign of the Colletran rider clad in gold, then set his heralds trumpeting the signal for retreat.
"Message for the prince! I bear a message for the prince!"
The Colletran herald rode in agitation back and forth through returning swarms of cavalry. The armored knights, their lances broken, horses blown, and still soaring with elation from the slaughterfest of a cavalryman's dreams, rode past toward the rear. They had broken the enemy's left wing. The loss of their own light cavalry was scarcely even remembered; now other troops could pursue Sumbria's fleeing rabble back into the pass. They had done all that Svarezi could desire, knowing that approving eyes watched them from above.
Mounted on a nervous horse-a beast of pixie breed with feathery antennae jutting up from its brow-the herald searched returning faces for a sign of his prince. His mount pranced and skittered back from the overwhelming stench of blood, shying from the brutal laughter on the air.
"A message for the prince! A message for Prince Ricardo!"
A thick, choking mist of fireball smoke and spell-fog rolled across the ground. Silent within the gloom, a knot of riders materialized: three men leading a team of pages who carried a litter made of broken spears. Lolling lifeless on the stretcher was a figure armored all in gold with a helm topped off with purple plumes.
"My lord!"
The herald surged forward in alarm; he dismounted all in a rush and flung himself at his dead prince's feet.
"My liege!"
Above him, the leading cavalryman made a face of scorn.
"You'll have to speak louder than that. He's shot his bolt and gone."
"But how?" The herald laid an astonished hand upon his prince's lifeless breast. "Who could possibly have bested such a man in battle?"
Many possibilities sprang to mind. The Sumbrian boys chorus? The guild of circus clowns? The armored horseman almost made a contemptuous reply, then thought better of it and helped himself to some of the herald's stock of wine.
"One minute he was fighting, and the next… he was down. He must have taken a concussion on the helm." The rider sounded too tired to make much of his prince's death. "He slowed down, missed a parry or three, and got torn to pieces like a lamb thrown to the wolves." The cavalryman nudged at the herald with a broken, filthy sword. "You'll have to go and find a real man's employment for yourself from this day on."
"You will regret this!" The herald shot to his feet, puffing up his breast in wounded pride. "His spirit can be welded back into his body! It will cost a kingdom's ransom, but it can be done! You have delivered us his body whole-so I advise you to repent your hasty words!"
The cavalryman gazed with one cocked eyebrow at the herald's face. He then slid heavily down from his horse, leaned across the golden armor, and wrenched open the helm.
Inside the armored suit, there lay nothing but empty air.
"Like a lamb thrown to the wolves. We brought this back for his widow; the rest is out there in the mess. Perhaps you're better at identifying anatomy than I." The horseman shoved the herald so that the boy fell b
ackward into the mud. "We'll have a new prince by tomorrow dawn. One who knows what to do with his army."
The soldiers spared a glance at the sky above, where a jet-black hippogriff could be seen wheeling through the wild melee. Hoisting up the empty golden armor, the stretcher bearers trudged on into a field littered black with nameless carrion.
"Victory, my lords! Victory!" A Colletran Blade Captain, his voice hoarse from screaming in triumph with his men, rode a limping horse toward his colleagues as they stood their mounts under a sheltering tree. All across the battlefield, the crackle of spellfire and the ring of steel still filled the air, magnified by the close-pressing mountains into a deafening, blurring roar.
The newcomer sheathed his sword and swept his open helmet from his brow.
"The valley is ours! We need only make a pike assault on the pass, and we can spill down into Sumbria by nightfall!"
A disdainful, indolent air met the man's announcement; Colletro's inner circle of Blade Captains had little time for Svarezi's clique of coarse young men.
"There is no need for an assault." An elegant courtier who looked very much like a long-faced sheep decked out in a metal skin made a studied gesture of one hand. "Sumbria has blown the signal for a truce; they will capitulate upon our terms, surrender the valley, and a ransom. I believe the day is ours."
"No!" The newcomer, the commander of scarcely a hundred men, furiously slammed his saddle pommel with his sword. "Destroy their field army, and we can have it all! Sumbria is at the mercy of our blades!"
"Is that what Svarezi tells you?" A polite spatter of laughter tinkled out from the courtiers. "Sumbria has walls, boy! Walls and catapults, moats and sorcerers. What point in battering ourselves to death against their stones?"
High above, the black hippogriff circled. The young Blade Captain tried to will Svarezi to intervene before his victory could be frittered clean away.
Far across the battlefield, the sounds of conflict stilled. Heralds met-terms were discussed. The Sumbrian prince threw in his baton and impotently accepted fate. Pleased with the results of a well-fought day, the Colletran high command ordered itself bottles of chilled wine, watched by the disbelieving eyes of their own soldiery.
The Sumbrian troops abandoned their positions, winding off into the narrow mountain pass. Soon, only the prince of Sumbria's men remained, taking the place of honor as the last division off the battlefield. Prince Mannicci gave his opponents a heavy, stiff salute, spurred down the pass, and swiftly disappeared. Behind him, his pikemen, crossbowmen, and footmen shuffled slowly backward until they crammed the narrow passageway, watching the opposing Colletrans for betrayal.
With their general once more snubbed by his peers, the Colletran troops were in no mood to attack mere Sumbrians; the entire army converged on the hillock that held their high command. The roar of battle cries seemed dim compared to the anger of the enraged soldiery.
A battered, seething mass of bloodstained men crammed itself in a vast ring about the golden nobility. Within the ranks were the weaker Blade Captains, common soldiers, and mercenaries, all joined in shouting their generals down with a roar. Men fought through to the inner circle and gave an edge to the savage screaming of the crowd.
"Victory! We want our victory!"
One courtier rose in his stirrups, drawing a deep breath to address the crowd in an actor's studied, flawless tones.
"Good soldiers, you have your victory! Sumbria has left us in possession of the field!" The man gave an authoritarian sweep of his armored hand. "Now go! Disperse! The task of employees is to obey, and not to howl like beasts for blood!"
The answer came as a vicious, angry snarl; one of the crossbow regiments produced a gangly camp lawyer who balanced himself upon a war-horse's flyblown corpse.
"Then we abandon your employ. The contract is dissolved!" The soldier adjusted his grimy breastplate, whipping out a stained old parchment and waving it in the air. "The Articles of Association allow us to recontract once per year! We'll hire ourselves to Svarezi or to none at all!"
"Rabble!" A Blade Captain gazed at the filthy soldier with undisguised hatred. "Do as you're ordered, or I'll have one man in ten dragged off and flogged!"
A stone whipped out from the crowd and rebounded from the Blade Captain's helm. The noble swore and then ripped out his unbloodied sword, lunging his horse forward at a suspected enemy.
The action instantly sparked off a storm. Soldiers dragged at the courtier's stirrups; he flailed at them with his sword, then screamed as a billhook snaked out to hook behind his neck. The sharp metal blade worried furiously back and forth under the gilded gorget, tearing flesh and bone until it jerked the man free from his saddle with a scream of fear. He disappeared beneath a tidal wave of stabbing dagger blades. Led on by Svarezi's carefully prepared provocateurs, the troops stormed forward, up and over the remaining Blade Captains, and simply tore the men apart.
On a ridgeline to one side, Ugo Svarezi watched the bloody death of his erstwhile peers. Black armor sheathed with velvet seemed to absorb every last speck of sunlight; not a ripple nor a highlight sheened the man's silhouette.
The city of Colletro had spilled into his hands. Unmoved by the fruition of his plans, Svarezi turned his back on the distant carnage and consulted his sorcerers.
"Well?"
"Prince Mannicci confers with his Blade Captains at the far side of the pass."
"And his men?"
"They now march beneath the first overhang, my lord." A magician bent above a crystal ball, making gliding motions about the swirling images. "There is insufficient snow for us to do as you command."
"I have no need for your spells here. You will go to Sumbria and follow the instructions written here." Svarezi passed a scrap of parchment to his chief sorcerer without sparing the man a glance. "You depart at once. Take a hippogriff."
"And the enemy, lord?"
"Leave the Sumbrian army to me."
Svarezi gazed coldly toward the open pass, where the dense-packed mass of Prince Mannicci's personal troops had finally disappeared from view. He raised a hand without even once looking behind his back.
"Fire!"
On a hill to the rear, a hissing contraption mounted on a vast armored wagon sputtered into life. Twenty feet high, and so massive it had to be drawn by thirty stallions, the machine leaked a palpable cloud of cherry-scented death. Titanic vats of glass protected by adamantine shields spurted steam as pressure valves were wrenched open by technicians clad in armor plate. The chief gunner sighted through a spyglass, pumped his fist, then slammed a sealed black visor shut across his eyes as his assistants briskly ducked aside.
Air pressure shot the contents of the glass tanks into a sealed combustion chamber; the machine seemed to bulge, and brilliant white light leaked through tiny rivet holes in the armored housing. With a dazzle that left purple streamers drifting through the skies, a bolt of light blasted from the muzzle of the great machine and speared off into the pass.
The light gouged into the mountain crest-instantly turning packed ice into vapor and rock into a liquid stream. The superheated rock face exploded like a bomb. An entire mountaintop came slamming down into the narrow pass-untold tons of rubble, ice, and snow. The avalanche thundered on and on, shuddering the entire valley beneath a violent storm of noise.
Finally the rockslide began to slow; the last secondary avalanche on distant peaks drew to a close. The soldiers of Colletro stood gaping up into the pass, then turned to stare in awe at Ugo Svarezi standing at their side.
A long silence reigned; coming faintly from the rear of Colletro's battered army, there suddenly came a single tiny cheer. The first voice was joined by a second, and then a third. The noise rippled forward, then surged into fantastic life as men began to run toward the Sun Cannon-Svarezi's death machine.
The cheers turned to adulation. Svarezi, mounted on his brooding black hippogriff, reached out to allow the touch of eager soldiers' hands. The troops screamed out Svarezi's name u
ntil it became a formless, soaring litany that shuddered the very rooftops of the world.
While the cheers roared on, the technicians went swiftly back to servicing their monstrous machine. At the front of the giant Sun Cannon, the Sun Gem slowly cooled; while in the pass, three thousand Sumbrian troops lay buried under steaming lava.
11
The council chambers of Sumbria echoed to the roar of outraged voices. What had started as a postmortem of the lost campaign had turned into a maelstrom of invective and blame-passing. Blade Captains accused one another of everything from cowardice and incompetence, to outright treachery. The Sumbrian army-the finest, most expensively equipped forces in the Blade Kingdoms-had been utterly overturned. Scouts should have been sent out; cavalry should have intercepted the Colletran horse. Tactics, magic, science, or sorcery should have somehow obliterated the enemy and won the day. Battle mages and unit commanders fought to make their voices heard as they furiously tried to clear their own good names.
Everyone had another man to blame; some old enemy who had long been a secret traitor; some rival whose true colors at last were flown. The snarling madhouse shook papers, pens, and blades at one another around the table-top, while Prince Mannicci simply sat with his head bowed in his hands.
For the prince, the battle had been more than just a military disaster. The contingents of Mannicci's closest allies had been in the path of the Colletran charge. Worse still, the Mannicci regiments had held the pass as it inexplicably collapsed above them. The Mannicci family's forces now scarcely numbered a hundred men, not enough to qualify the prince for a vote in his own council. He sat there upon the sufferance of the Blade Captains, if he sat there at all.
Above the chaos, a single voice rose into a deep, commanding tone.
"Gentlemen! Colleagues… be still! We have only a few hours to stop a disaster from turning into a catastrophe!"
Heads turned; the motion caused more men to lose track of their arguments. The speaker stepped forward into the lessening din with consummate timing and skill. Sweeping open his arms, Gilberto Ilego stood like a pristine figurehead bursting through a storm.
