Discipline made the legions a terrible machine of war. It did not make them unstoppable—though it came close. A legion almost never lost a battle.
There were three legions down there, close on fifteen thousand men. Euan would reckon the massed horde of the tribes at half again that, maybe more. His people were not much for lining up men or numbers, any more than they were fond of fighting in ranks and squares, all straight lines and sharp corners. Their world was one of circles and curves.
The first swarm of tribesmen was nearly over the river. The legions were waiting. They were drawn up in ranks behind a wall of shields. Archers and cavalry flanked them and waited in reserve behind. It was all neat and orderly like game pieces on a table.
The emperor stood on a low hill behind the central legion. The banner of sun and moon snapped in the wind over his head. His golden helmet flamed in the morning light.
At first Euan thought it was the sun in his eyes, or else a bird—hawk or vulture—hovering in the sky. A speck of darkness hovered above that dazzling helmet. The longer Euan looked at it, the clearer it became. It was growing larger.
The Ard Ri set foot on the farther bank. His men shrieked and yowled, swarming over and past him. The clans still in the water picked up speed, splashing headlong to shore.
A gap was opening between the Calletani and the last of the leaders. Euan loped down the hill with his men behind him.
With each step, his broad view of the battle shrank. By the time he came to the river, he was part of the flood that fell on the legions. He could see the men on either side and in front and hear the ones behind. The rest was feel and instinct.
The first wave of tribesmen crashed against the shieldwall. Arrows flew and men fell, but further waves roared behind them. They battered the wall of shields, hewing at it with axes and great swords.
The imperial ranks held. The tribes had no ranks to hold. They ran past the shieldwall, aiming at the cavalry and the archers. Few of them cared that arrows rained down on them and hooves trampled them. They were lost in a trance of battle.
When the mages began their work, the result brought them up short. Spells lost strength halfway to their target or slipped aside or, if the mages were very unlucky, rebounded on those who cast them.
Euan laughed as a mage-bolt turned sand to glass just in front of him. Call it priestwork, get one of Gothard’s boys to lay a blessing on it, and even the most suspicious clansman would take an amulet against the pollution of magic.
It was mostly the Calletani wearing river pebbles in pouches around their necks, but they were numerous enough to keep the imperial mages both busy and frustrated. Battle magic was not much use if the worst damage it did was to one’s own side.
The battle was clean because it had to be. Clean sweat and clean steel. At least Euan had found a use for magic—to negate itself. The One ought to be pleased with that.
Euan took his axe to the shieldwall of the Valeria as if it had been a thicket of trees. Spears thrust at him. He hacked off their heads.
The shield in front of him splintered. The man behind it stabbed with his short sword, aiming for Euan’s gut. Euan’s axe split him in two.
Another little dark man in armor tried to close up the wall. Euan thrust his bigger, heavier body against the smaller man, pressed in so close that even the short stabbing sword was useless. Euan’s belt dagger opened the legionary’s throat between the cuirass and the helmet strap.
The whole world had narrowed to this tiny piece of it. Inch by inch, stroke by stroke, Euan’s Calletani broke down the wall of shields.
The enemy gave as good as he got. The ground was a mire of blood and entrails. Bodies rolled underfoot.
Not all of them were dead. Few of them were intact. Axes and great swords took a terrible toll on limbs and extremities.
So did spears and short stabbing swords, arrows and lances and charges of cavalry. The Aurelians contested every step and held off every charge against them. Every time their ranks broke, they re-formed, as straight if not quite as numerous as before.
The only way to win that the people had ever found was to wear them down—keep on coming until the last legionary fell to wounds or exhaustion. There was a high price on victory, but the glory that went with it was worth dying for.
Euan broke through the ranks and found himself face to face with the cavalry—the cataphracts in their heavy armor on their massive horses. They were powerful but they were slow, and they needed room to build up the momentum of a charge. There was no such room here.
His Calletani swarmed over them like ants over a carcass. Their long lances were useless at close quarters, and their horses floundered. One by one, horse by horse, they went down.
Euan laughed. After a while he began to sing. This was a beautiful day, a glorious day, a grand day to die.
Forty-Five
Kerrec advanced through a maelstrom of warring magics. The master stone protected him somewhat. So did his sense of the patterns that composed the world. Something was trying to rise from beneath and destroy them, but for the moment they were holding.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, he could see and hear and feel and even smell the battle by the river. The barbarians were still swarming across, an endless horde of them. The whole north must be stripped of its fighting men.
They were falling on the legions like a storm surge against a bastion of rock. Battle magic did not touch them—they had something, some power or warding, that protected them against it. But that was not what nearly flung Kerrec out of the working.
The emperor’s command post stood on a hill just beyond the limit of the fighting. A triple wall guarded it—cataphracts on their great horses, picked footmen of the imperial guard, and a battalion of mages. Nothing on that field could come near him.
None of them had thought to protect against the sky. It had been clear at sunrise, but clouds were gathering now, tall white flotillas that would breed thunder later.
One cloud had taken shape directly over the emperor’s head. It looked like a natural cloud—unless one could see it with eyes of the spirit. Those eyes saw a core of nothingness within the billows of white and grey and silver.
It hung like a sword above the emperor. The thread on which it hung grew thinner with each moment that passed.
Just as Kerrec began to understand how great the danger was, Valeria collapsed. He nearly lost the vision and all the power that went with it. Valeria—he had to—but his father—the empire—
That paralyzing confusion was an attack of its own. He beat it back. Focus, above all he must focus.
The master stone throbbed. He raised it in his hand. The starstone shrieked.
Kerrec reached for any power that would come to his call. He no longer cared what it was or where it came from, if only it did his bidding. He would have welcomed the Unmaking itself, if it won him this battle.
White power flung the thought aside. White magic wrenched him back into focus. Petra and Sabata thundered toward him through the madness of magics.
The priests could not move. The circle of mages was locked fast.
The working bound them. That was the weakness of their art—that it needed so many and held them so helpless.
Gothard was stronger than they, or else the ruler of that dark dance could keep his wits about him when the rest had given up every scrap of will and volition that they had. He struggled to draw the sword at his side, but he moved with dreamlike slowness.
Kerrec had taken him completely by surprise. If he had expected any attack, it had been from the imperial mages. He had never expected his brother, poor broken thing, to come hunting him.
Gothard always had been prone to underestimate his enemies. Kerrec reached in, ah, so easily, and caught him by the throat.
Never trust anything that comes easily.
Kerrec had forgotten who first told him that. His father? One of his instructors on the Mountain?
Gothard smiled. Whether he had planned this or
whether it was a gift of the One, he was in a kind of bliss. One devastating stroke, and both his father and brother would fall. And he could watch them do it.
The starstone’s shriek had soared beyond the threshold of hearing. All the patterns were unraveling.
Kerrec met his brother’s eyes. There was no kinship there, no memory of the blood they shared. There was only death. It opened a mouth as vast as the sky.
Kerrec hovered between life with all its pain, and the sweetness of oblivion. All he had to do was let go.
So easy. So very, very easy.
There was only one thing left for him to do. Everything else he could forget, but that, no. Never.
He brought the master stone down upon the starstone.
There was no fear in him at all. He did not care if he died. It did not matter if his soul vanished like mist in the sun. All he cared for was that the stone should break, and Gothard with it.
Stone struck stone. The roar was soundless. The flash was dark—all light swallowed in void. The stones shattered.
They had Unmade one another. There was nothing left of either, not even a puff of dust.
Gothard sprawled at Kerrec’s feet. His face was stark with shock.
Kerrec read his thoughts as easily as if they had been written on a page. He had been absolutely certain that he had the victory. He had felt it in his hand, as sharply potent as the stone. All that stood in the way was his weakling of a brother.
Not so much a weakling, Kerrec thought. His fingers were numb with the force of the stones’ breaking, but they obeyed his will. There was a scabbard at Gothard’s belt. The knife hissed as Kerrec drew it.
The traitor’s breast was bare. Kerrec heard the heart beating hard beneath the breastbone. If he shifted his sight just so, he could see it, clenching and unclenching like a fist. He knew exactly where to thrust the knife, up beneath the ribs, hard.
Petra’s large and breathing warmth loomed behind him. His focus wavered. In Gothard’s staring eyes, he saw the battle on the field, blood and slaughter and a living darkness stooping like a hawk upon the emperor.
Come, the stallion said.
Never in all their years together had Petra condescended to offer a human word. It froze Kerrec where he knelt. Gothard was helpless, with the knife pressed against his ribs.
Kerrec could not make himself thrust it home. Not, he told himself, because after all he loved his brother. Gods, no. His hate was as strong as ever.
Even to destroy his worst enemy, he could not commit murder in cold blood. If that made him a coward, so be it.
Kerrec left Gothard where he lay. He was nothing now. He no longer mattered, even to put out of his misery.
Kerrec turned slowly. They were all down, priests and mages. Most of them were dead. If anyone survived, he was a husk, empty of will or understanding.
There was nothing left here—and yet that, like Gothard, did not matter at all. Kerrec’s great working and the victory he had thought so complete had failed to do what he meant them to do. Without Gothard and his circle of mages, the powers that they had raised had not fallen. If anything, they were stronger.
Gothard had laid traps within traps. Each one that Kerrec uncovered only concealed the one beneath. Here maybe was the real trap, the reason for all the rest.
Gothard’s working had opened a gate. The powers he had summoned were swarming through it.
Mortal will had no power over them. They were free, and they had their target. They roared down upon it.
The cloud of dissolution was nearly upon the emperor. There was no way Kerrec could stop it. The battlefield was an hour’s hard ride away. He could not—
Sabata stamped. There was something lying at his feet, perilously close to that furious hoof.
Valeria.
She was alive. She sat up, hand to head, then staggered to her feet. Sabata offered his shoulder. She pulled herself onto his back.
Kerrec should not have succumbed to temptation. He cast one last, burning glance at Gothard.
His brother bared teeth at him. “You always were weak,” Gothard said.
Kerrec’s sight turned briefly bloody. But the cold part of him, the part that saw patterns and foresaw futures, recognized this latest of so many traps. If he gave way to provocation, Gothard might die—but so would Artorius.
After all his maunderings about Gothard’s insignificance, it was bitter to let go. His stomach heaved. It was well for Gothard it was empty, or he would have had a faceful of the consequences.
Kerrec stabbed the knife hilt-deep into the earth beside Gothard’s staring eye and flung himself onto Petra’s back.
The stallion was already in motion. Sabata ran ahead of him, mane and tail streaming. Valeria clung to his neck.
They sped away from the dregs of Kerrec’s obsession. Trees flashed past. Kerrec could not begin to guess how fast they were going. Faster than a mortal horse could gallop—faster than the wind.
He set his teeth and held on. Whatever he was going to do when he came to the battle, he had no master stone to feed his power. All he had was himself.
And Petra. And Valeria. And Sabata. No rider was ever alone. She had said that. She was often right—as little as he liked to admit it.
The battle was in full spate. Kerrec had no time to make sense of the surge and flow of forces across the field, except to note that all of the enemy had crossed the river. The farther bank was empty of any but a scattering of corpses, all barbarians.
The ford was full of them, lying side by side with men in imperial armor. Some were still moving. The stallions surged through them. Bloodied water sprayed high, but it never stained those moon-white coats.
Kerrec heard the hiss of Valeria’s breath behind him, a gasp sharply cut off. His heart twinged. She was as strong as any man he knew, but she was terribly young. She had never seen so much blood or so much death all in one place.
He had, years ago, but he was long out of practice. He could only bear it by closing off his heart and focusing on what he had come to do.
The emperor’s mages were holding off the assault, but they were weakening fast. Already some of them had fallen. Artorius was wielding sword and spear against tribesmen who had broken through the ring of his guards, fending off lances and arrows with a shield that bristled with them, and sustaining wards against the constant barrage of hostile magic.
There were two armies locked in combat between the river and the emperor. Petra slowed as he reached the bank, bucking slightly, tossing his head with uncharacteristic ill humor.
Sabata, whose fits of temper were notorious, half reared and loosed a bellow. It was barely to be heard above the battle’s clamor.
Away on his hill, the emperor swayed and his banner nearly fell. A bolt of pure destruction hurtled down.
Artorius flung up his shield. Wards blazed blue-white.
The bolt struck them and shattered. Shards flew wide. Mages fell—maimed or dead.
There was nothing human or mortal or even comprehensible in the thing that hovered above the emperor. It could have been a cloud or a pall of smoke or a memory of terror. It existed to devour him whole.
It was as blank and empty of mortal malice as the storm that had kept Kerrec from crossing the river. There was no use in raging at it. It merely was.
Kerrec shook his head, tossing it like one of the stallions. This was raw formlessness, power without conscious will—but it had a purpose. That purpose was to destroy everything that Kerrec lived for.
He called on power of his own. Up from the earth, down from the sky, through the bodies and the immortal spirits of the stallions, he summoned it into his hand. He shaped it into a weapon—a spear, for choice—and cast it into the center of the cloud.
The cloud howled. He had wounded it, but it was not destroyed. It was growing as he watched, sucking warmth from the air and light from the sun, swallowing lives and souls of imperials and barbarians alike.
His father was still on his feet. His war
ds were holding—though barely. His legions were overrun. Here and there, the victory chants had already begun.
Kerrec gathered himself for a new muster of magic. He was losing strength. He could feel the raw edges and mended places more keenly than he had in days.
He was still strong. He could strike another blow—and another if he must, and another after that.
“Wait.” Valeria’s voice was quiet. He should not have been able to hear it through the tumult of the battle.
She rode up beside him. The bay Lady was with her—and Rodry on the Lady’s back, greenish pale and wide-eyed but remarkably steady.
Rodry’s magic was clear and strong. Though it was not horse magic, it fit well with the Lady’s deep and singing power. She was using it to anchor herself to the mortal world, drawing strength through it and giving strength in return.
The last few stragglers of the melee had moved away from them. They stood alone in a broad expanse of trampled grass and mud and stony earth, littered with yet more of the fallen.
The emperor’s wards were fading fast. The enemy poised to swarm up over his hill. Nearly all of his guards, as well as his mages were down. The few who remained fought desperately against a rising tide of barbarians.
Valeria looked Kerrec in the face. “Dance,” she said.
He opened his mouth. “What—”
Petra turned his head and bit Kerrec’s foot. The pain focused his mind wonderfully. He had no reins to gather and no saddle to settle deeper in, but was he not supposedly a master of riders?
He drew a breath and sat a fraction more erect. Petra came into balance beneath him. The purity and subtle beauty of it made his eyes fill with tears.
Rodry got a grip on the Lady’s mane and held on. “Just stay with her,” Valeria said to him. Her glance at Kerrec said a great deal more, but none of it needed words.
Sabata pawed once, sharply impatient. Valeria freed him to flow into the first movement of the Dance.
Song of Unmaking Page 28
