Home at Last

by Alex Sapegin

  The royal retinue was covered with quick-moving shadows; loud flaps of wings were heard. Cutting the air with their feathers, hundreds of griffons swept over the army. Lifting clouds of dust and causing the ground to shake a little, an avalanche of dozens of metal golems rolled through the wide spaces between the marching regiments. At a depth of about fifteen feet under the ground, stone “moles” were drilling passageways. Marshal Olmar insisted on a pre-emptive strike, motivating his decision by the fact that with the activated mana absorbers, the fighting golems would be no more terrible than iron or clay cans, and the magic bombs would become as harmless as festive fireworks.

  One of the generals hinted at the rules and military strategy as if to say no one had ever done that sort of thing, but Olmar looked at the smart guy in such a way that he started to hiccup. The enraged marshal tore into the group of generals, Colonels, adjutants, leaders, and strategists for ten minutes, which was out of the ordinary for the calm and businesslike military man. The royal retinue also got it since there was an incident where it had failed to provide His Majesty with a protective canopy in time. The old man, helping himself to strong curse words, corrected their view of war-time rules. Then the marshal paused for a moment, casting a glance from under his frowning brows at the King, and said something to the effect of him wanting to be alive and healthy, rather than dead and cold after the battle “by the rules.”

  Twins forbid they should fight the battle according to the Ariates’ rules. The northern brutes, spitting on the rules and international codes, came to Tantre. So don’t complain when you get an arrow between the shoulder blades or between the eyes, and while the Ariate mages hadn’t had time to install the magic protective domes or activate the absorber, and their army was still in an armed crowd marching to their position, they had to strike, and strike hard. They had to sow fear and horror, knock the ground out from under the enemy’s feet, make the scum doubt their own strength, pierce their rotten souls and force them to wait for death, bathed in a cold sweat. The bombing and the golems had to destroy the ranks of the invaders and leave behind them as many dead and wounded as possible. The wounded on the front lines were weights on an army’s legs and iron chains on its body.

  The king, continuing to indulge in reflections, half-listened to the old man’s obscene rant and looked in the direction where the feathered bombers had flown to and the avalanche of artificial creatures had swept off to. For the first time in the Northern War, the Ariates would get it good. Real good.

  The King ran his gaze over the horizon and shook his head dejectedly. It wasn’t worth getting his hopes up, the dragons would not come. They were busy with other games. Meaning they were going to help someone? The fact that they lifted the siege from Orten could be considered a happy exception. It was a demonstration of force and opportunities—a hint that the others ought not to take it into their heads to meddle in their affairs. That old fool Miduel hoped for the return of the winged creatures and dreamed of restoring the level of the magic field, as in ancient times. What for? Who needed magic when there would be no one to use it? The dragons didn’t care a lick for the squabbles, no matter what caused them. They couldn’t give a shushug’s tail about humans. They had their own problems. He had to admit to himself that in their place, he would have done the same. And so what if the Ariates had moved south for the sake of the return of the Lords of the Sky? Those Lords would probably be pleased with the significant weakening of the northerners. The weak are easier to manage and impose one’s will upon. In fact, Tantre didn’t even fit into the picture at all. Targ, if he could only know the thoughts and future plans of the dragons… that’s it—the dragons! Who came up with the idea of identifying them with people? What fool said they think in the same categories as bipeds?

  Dragons!

  * * *

  Drowning out the old marshal’s voice, the wind brought the rumble of some explosions. The griffon detachments lined up in attacking formations, bringing hundreds of magical bombs down on the Ariates’ heads. Most of the encapsulated spells spent their mana, dissolving harmlessly against the protective domes, but that was what they’d expected. No sooner had the first wave of griffons emptied their tubes and pendants than their place was taken by the second group. A new portion of charges destroyed the shields. People cried out loudly. The blood of hundreds of dead and wounded struck the earth. The first griffons and air riders knocked down by the mages fell to the ground; from the distant hills, a dark cloud of the northerners’ drags and griffons rose to the sky. The two air armies flew to meet one another quickly.

  The battle had begun. Overlapping the roar of the bursting bombs, the stone-iron waves of golems collided in the center of no man’s land. Sharp fragments and severed limbs of the quasi-living magic devices flew in all directions. The Ariates as well as the Tantrians understood the danger of letting combat golems near humans, and so they threw all available golems at the effort to repel the attack. The mages of the opposing sides actively fired combat spells into no man’s land, bringing even more confusion to the grinding metal crowd.

  The dust that rose into the air covered the battlefield from view, and only numerous bright flashes in the middle of the dirty cloud let them know that the battle had not stopped. Gil touched his hass with his heels, directing the animal to a wide glade on which a large-scale illusion of the flaring battle was unfolded. While neither side had yet activated the absorbers, the picture was transmitted through numerous birds. A few dozen operators with silver hoops on their heads lay on special stretchers. Based on Olmar’s advice, it was decided to use the feathery scouts until the very last possible moment. In order to avoid the death of the operators when the absorbers were switched on, which would force a rupture with the birds, a dozen life mages and three medical sorcerers were on duty next to them.

  Sha-ah-ssss, sha-ah-ssss. The harsh hissing sounds made the hass sit down on its hind legs. Long-range fortress chuckers entered the scene, which, under the cover of night and a host of masking spells, were moved to the battlefield and displayed in even rows in the rear of the army. The hundreds of chuckers removed from the walls of Kion came as an unpleasant surprise to the enemy. Even if half the charges went up in “milk” or were absorbed by the magical shields, some of them would find their target…

  “Well, let’s see who outdoes who,” said Gil… and flew from the saddle upside down. Falling to the ground, he managed to tuck into a ball, protect his head and roll away from a large layer of wrecked land. If he weren’t so agile, he would have been covered by several tons of soil.

  Next came the dying scream of the hasses, which were echoed by the frightened neighing of horses and people shouting and wheezing. Black shadows from bright flashes of combat spells fell to the ground. Gil crawled under the shelter of a large boulder and looked out cautiously.

  The glade with the illusion no longer existed. Half the mage operators had been turned into a bloody stuffing. Wounded animals were thrashing on the ground. A heavy smell of intestines and burnt bone hung in the air. In the middle of the bloody chaos, reflecting off magical attacks with mirrored shields and sending fireballs into people, towered a huge metal six-armed golem. The magical monster was almost twenty-five feet tall and combined the features of the most dangerous predators of Alatar—a sul and a furious elephant. The analog to the Tantrian “mole,” reflecting yet another attack, snatched a whip from behind itself and waved its lower right hand. The whip lengthened. Gil dove under the cover of the boulder, but the magician who had attacked it did not have time to react. The whip broke through his defense. There was a crash of instantly discharged amulets and, chopped into two halves, in a spray of blood, the man fell to the ground.

  “Targ, Targ,” the King cursed to himself. “Twins almighty! Why… I don’t want to die… Targ’s tail in a handbasket…”

  He indeed did not want to die. How could they miss an enemy golem? Why hadn’t anyone put a tracking spell on it? They could have assumed that the Ariates too would
attack using underground “moles.” They had repeatedly proved capable of original thinking and making the most unexpected decisions.

  Targ, had our guys just hoped they were smarter? Now, because of someone’s negligence, a sixth or seventh of the senior officers of the army and the King’s personal guard would be knocking at the gates of Hel’s palaces.

  Gil, wiping the blood and dirt off his forehead with his sleeve, looked up at the sky. In the deep blue, far beyond the boundary of the protective dome, he could see a few birds circling in one place. Then a fiery glow appeared around them, and the feathered spies flared up like torches, but not immediately. Apparently, the Ariates mages had cast powerful protective spells on the birds and provided them with several amulets, including those generating a curtain of invisibility. After calculating the location of the command post, they inflicted a precisely calculated strike, which came within a hair of succeeding.

  Suddenly, the King felt that he was in some sort of cocoon. There was a jerk, a sucking emptiness in his stomach, and in the next instant the cocoon disappeared, and he was at the foot of the hill. The surviving operators, guardsmen, and generals “sequestered” by the golem flopped to the ground. The mage-bodyguards from the King’s personal guard conducted a somewhat delayed evacuation. Finally! The former observation post glowed with fireballs. Someone from the artillery commanders managed to give an order to turn the chuckers around. The golems, and there were already three of them, flew into many pieces—their shields were useless against the charges of the chuckers.

  “Throw us to the reserve command post!” Marshal Olmar shouted to the commander of the magicians, spitting out mud. “And tell the army that His Majesty isn’t wounded and was in another spot altogether when the bombs hit!” Despite everything, the old soldier was still on top of his game. The same thing couldn’t be said about the King, though. Looking at his trembling hands, he realized the King couldn’t come to himself. “Are there any more injured?”

  “Yes, the third and fourth false command posts were attacked by the ‘moles;’ there are victims among the magicians. The golems are destroyed. We assume that the locations of the command posts were calculated using the density of superimposed protective spells.”

  Alive, alive, Targ take it, I’m ALIVE! the thought repeated in the monarch’s head. “When will the absorber be ready?” shaking his head, he asked the marshal. Olmar looked significantly at the commander of the mages.

  “In fifteen minutes,” he said cheerfully.

  “Activate when ready,” Gil ordered. The old marshal nodded grimly.

  “Targ take you in the liver, are we going to have to wait long for the transfer?” he was going through the roof.

  “This minute!” The mages started to fuss. A minute later, the silver glow of the portal flooded the air.

  Going to the reserve command post, the marshal, standing for a couple of minutes near the illusion, evaluated the current situation and began to give out instructions. “As soon as the absorber is working, load the griffons’ tubes with capsule iron bombs containing black dwarf powder.”

  “But the dwarf powder flares up from the slightest spark. It can’t be protected from magic,” General Ruvkud, the commander of the griffon wings, tried to protest.

  “Idiot!” Drang, the head of the Secret Chancellery, said quietly, appearing from behind Olmar’s back. “The magic will be blocked by the absorber.”

  “I beg your pardon.” The general bowed, red as a tomato.

  “Hit the strike in the center of the enemy front.” The Marshal took out a pointer and indicated on the illusiogram the place of the bombardment. After sending Ruvkud away, he outlined the specified tasks to his other subordinates for ten minutes, after which he handed each of them an envelope with detailed instructions.

  The King stood quietly all the time and watched Olmar. He did not intend to butt in and try to manage the troops, rightly judging that there was someone much more literate and more experienced than him. The role of figurehead was quite acceptable to Gil. The old man held the reins of power over the army in a good, firm grip, and the generals obeyed him unquestioningly. None of the army officials were willing to test the wrath of a man whom His Majesty trusted unconditionally. If anyone could win, it was this stern old man and no one else. No one, according to most experts, could compare in terms of his knowledge of strategy and tactics, and most importantly—in experience.

  Bowing to His Majesty and giving military greetings to the marshal, the generals left the command post. The tent was empty. Olmar squeezed his pointer until his knuckles went pale and leaned heavily on the table with the maps on it; several young agile adjutants, devouring the King and the commander-in-chief with devoted eyes, awaited orders. For a moment, there was silence, and then came the crackle of crumbling infocrystals, which projected an image.

  “The absorber… is working…” Olmar said in a hoarse voice, throwing the pointer on the table. “Twins almighty, don’t leave us…”

  His Majesty, nodding to the marshal, left the tent. For about ten minutes, Gil stared thoughtlessly at the horizon, which merged with the earth into a gray strip, hiding Orten. No miracle happened; the dragons didn’t come…

  Ilanta. Tantre. The outskirts of Kion. Infantryman Duch…

  “Are you afraid?”

  Duch glanced down at Rad. The old veteran with the stripes of commander of fifty troops encouragingly slapped the young guy on the shoulder. The metal shoulder pads clinked loudly.

  “I’m afraid.” The guy didn’t lie.

  “That’s good. Fear is a normal emotion. Only the dead aren’t afraid of anything. Stay close. Listen to what I say and everything will be fine.”

  Several mustached colleagues from the veterans seconded to the former training regiment were nodding importantly. Duch smiled uncertainly and tightened his grip on his shield. They had to converse loudly—the regiment was moving to the position and the noise was serious. The shields and long spears they carried on their shoulders were pounding against each other; the badly adjusted shoulder pads, bracers, leggings, belts, and other ammunition creaked and rubbed against the mail. Duch’s regiment was formed three months ago and consisted of village guys, “voluntary” (compulsory) recruits, who were collected from all districts. Along with Duch, two dozen guys from the village got into the army, half of which was with a blacksmith as apprentices, and they were together in one regiment; the rest were scattered over other garrisons.

  Duch was lucky. He calmly suffered the monstrous loads of the first month of service. The exhausting training was for the young smith like a reed for a sul. The powerful guy, who was noticeable for his giant stature, did not lack flexibility, though he excelled in sheer muscular strength. His father was a veteran. By the time he was forty, he had reached the rank of unit commander and settled after a serious injury with a young widow who had sheltered him. The young woman subsequently passed into the category of wife and gave him several children, whom he drove crazy for ten years. He didn’t distinguish between his sons and his daughters. The one-legged veteran ran almost faster than the kids on his crutch, and the sword and spear in his hands turned into something terrible and deadly, although he himself said that he was still very far from the level of the nobility, not to mention the masters.

  Starting at the age of five, the children learned to read and write. He taught them himself and regretted that none of them received a magical gift. Duch didn’t regret that he hadn’t been born a mage. Already at the age of ten, he realized that you couldn’t train as a mage on his father’s veteran’s pension. Even though their family was considered to be well-off—an army pensioner received fifteen[JS31] per month from the treasury, which was considered a very good money for peasants and craftsmen. But this was not enough for training in the city, so the boy never advertised his own gift.

  One day, returning after the night watch, the boy dropped in at the dwarf Trolv’s smithy and stayed there for a long time. Duch watched the firefly’s work
with some otherworldly admiration, and Trolv cast a cunning glance at the boy. The dwarf saw in the boy what he hid from his father, and, trusting in his instinct, he invited the boy to help. His father allowed it, but did not release him from his training at home.

  And so it was. From morning till noon, his father taught all the village children in the community hut reading, writing, and counting. After lunch, he spent three hours with them training on wooden swords, forced to knock down bulky shields from rough-hewn boards, after which Duch would go to Trolv’s smithy. The dwarf taught him to work with metal and explained how to release his force at will, how to add this or that product to it. The master never yelled at him; the dwarf was a model of patience. Somehow, he confessed to the father that his offspring could become the best blacksmith among humans. He couldn’t hold a candle to the dwarfs, but…

  When Duch was seventeen years old, Trolv, secretly from his father, initiated him to Gorn. The next day, the royal recruiters came to the village…

  Neither his father nor the dwarf said a word against the pointing gesture made by the imposing visiting officer, but Duch noticed how their eyes were dimmed. Rumors about the war had circulated for a long time in the village. Right before his departure, Trolv went up to the carts on which the recruits were supposed to leave and presented Duch with a long bundle. When the former student unfolded the cloth, he froze like a statue, gazing with reverence at the real sword of bluish metal. The recruiting officer was positively twisted with envy that such wealth was given to a village dolly, not to him. The father gave his son a spear and chain mail which had been stored in a chest. The other armor was left to wait for his youngest son since it was a little too small for the elder brother. Embracing his mother, father, and mentor, Duch jumped on the cart, perfectly aware that the hass harnessed to the vehicle was taking him to the front. Leaving his family home, he never looked back…