This is where education was often a limiting factor on power. A young practioner who has been shown how to create coal oil is far more dangerous than one who has only learned to create beeswax.
A young practioner who has linked to Harmodius has access to a world of substances beyond the ken of most magisters. Rarefied alchemical creations. After all, an hermeticist who knew alchemy need only make a substance in real once.
Mortirmir’s fireball burned so hot as it ignited six feet in front of him that he flinched away, almost lost his hermetic shield, and lost control of the fire. It drifted away. Then it vanished with a pop as he lost the fine control of his source.
Forty close-packed spearmen were incinerated. The left front corner of the enemy phalanx collapsed.
Ser Michael, who commanded the rightmost battle in the company, pointed his pole-axe – one-handed – at the charred ruin. ‘At them!’ he roared.
Aeskepiles had ridden his horse closer and closer to the point of impact – so that as the spearmen slowed, aimed and thrust with their spear points and the sound of their impact on the armour of his enemies exploded, he arrived at a point just fifty paces from the combat. He was secure behind the centre.
The closer two magisters were, the less able either was to deflect the castings of the other. At fifty paces—
An enormous ball of white-hot fire appeared to his left. He hadn’t felt it cast and hadn’t seen the caster.
As fast as the flash of terror that rippled through his system – making his horse shy as his spurred heels bit into her sides – he spat five words in the aether.
The Red Knight felt the old man leave him as the breaking of a fever and the loss of an unwelcome memory. He wanted to say something. If only to know the man was gone for good.
But the enemy spearmen were two spear lengths away. Cully and Wilful Murder tossed their bows aside and slid back through the ranks – Toby, who fought with a heavy spear, slid it over his head. He raised his ghiavarina. He’d never used it in combat.
He was alone, and the headache was gone.
He took a deep breath. Rotated his hips back. He had the spear, head up, in the spear guard called dente di cinghiaro. As his opponent’s spear came at him – a long, committed thrust – he cut down into it. His blow should have batted the heavy spear down and safely away. Instead, his magnificent, dragon-gifted weapon cut through his opponent’s spearhead. The truncated, blunt iron end slammed into his helmet, knocking him backward. The force of his cut, which should have been dissipated on his adversary’s shaft, sent the head of the ghiavarina deep in the ground at his feet.
He ripped it free, stepped forward, and slammed it into his opponent’s head before he was even over the shock of its effect. But it didn’t slam into his opponent’s helmet. It sheared through it, severing the helmet’s top four fingers and one finger of the man’s skull so cleanly that for a half a heartbeat, brains, skull, arming hood, mail and helmet were a series of concentric circles like some wild nomadic art.
Another spear struck his left pauldron and bounced up and over his shoulder, and a third slammed into his breastplate, but Toby’s shoulder in his back kept him on his feet and he struggled to recover from his surprise.
Toby saved his life as an enemy second ranker got a hand on the haft of his weapon – the haft didn’t seem to have any special properties – and reached for him with a wicked dagger. It flashed past the bottom of his vision, limited behind his visor, and he felt the blow only as pressure.
Toby rammed his short spear into the man’s head. His skull went backwards, Toby passed his knight, stepped long, rotated the spear end for end and pushed the iron at the base of the shaft into the man’s aventail and crushed his throat.
The two sides were stable – pushing at each other. Here and there, men fought, but this was what older veterans called the press. A deadly shoving match, where the cost of failure was rout and death. The spearmen were deeper. The company had better armour.
There was a titanic flash of yellow-white light in the Red Knight’s right peripheral vision.
He tapped Toby with his right gauntlet – not trusting his weapon – and the squire pivoted on his hips, parried a last thrust from their new opponent, and passed back. The Red Knight got his body low and set his feet wide. And cut – small passes. All as precise as dagger flicks. He severed the spear shaft pressing at him, and severed a man’s hand at the wrist with the kind of motion that a man might use when fishing.
Then, as his next adversary stumbled back, hand severed and cauterised, the Red Knight stepped forward and swung.
Spears were severed. Men fell forward as they lost the support of their weapons pinned against opponents in the press.
He cut again, as if his sword-like long spearhead was a huge axe, carried by a giant Nordikan.
Everything the spearhead touched was cut – armour, leather, wood, and flesh.
A hole, the width of his swing, opened in the enemy phalanx.
He stepped forward again, and swung at five cringing men. Two died.
The weapon lodged deep in the body of the third. He pulled – and a spear shaft struck him in the back. Desperate, he wrenched at the thing and it slid out like any weapon, shimmering blue red in the spring sunlight.
Whatever properties it had had were used up. And he was six steps deep in the enemy phalanx.
Blows began to fall on him like hail, and he was driven to his knees by a crashing, two-handed blow by a desperate man wielding a spear shaft like a two-handed flail.
The press closed around him.
Another man stripped his weapon from his hands – they were all around him, too close – but he got his right hand on his new dagger hilt and flicked it out.
And then it was just the fighting.
In full plate, he was lighter and more mobile then his adversaries in calf-length chain and scale. They had heavy shields and long spears – some were discarding them and others were not – and as they pressed him down, he burst into the frenzied routines his father’s master-at-arms had taught him since boyhood. He caught the right arm of the man who had stripped his spear, rolled him, broke his arm and stabbed him in his unarmoured neck below his ear. Grabbed the next man, slamming his steel fist into the unprotected face, caught his shoulders and used the point of his beaked visor to smash the man’s teeth even while his steel sabatons mangled the man’s feet and shins. Blows fell on his back – on his right shoulder, exposed in the melee – two blows so hard they moved his whole body and struck his helmet. He was dazed.
His hands and feet kept killing. He kicked a spearman between the legs, the steel point of his sabaton crushing the man’s testicles even as he held the man’s spear – his right arm shot out, and the hardened steel flange of his own elbow joint ripped the nose from the face of another spearman who was trying to climb his back.
His left leg was caught in something. It threatened his balance, and he was fighting so many men he had no time to spare to free it.
He knew, with awful clarity, that he was going down. The loss of balance was incremental. He got his dagger, point down, into a man’s scale-protected back – and the triangular point punched through like an awl through hardened leather.
He tried to use the dagger as a sort of climbing iron to hold himself erect.
Then something gave in his left knee.
Damn it. I tried, he thought, and down he went.
The mercenary cavalry watched the madmen come at them. It was a well-known fact that infantry cannot charge cavalry – that it was suicide to do so.
They came on anyway.
The lead knight – a Southerner from distant Occitan – pointed his lance. ‘Sweet friends,’ he said, in the language of romance. ‘These are brave men and worthy foes. If they want a contest—’ He smiled. ‘Let us give them their wish.’
He reached up and closed his visor – tossed his head to make sure his great helm was firmly seated in his steel cap. Lowered his lance into his rest. ‘For Sa
int James!’ he roared.
The mercenaries were not all from Occitan, and a polyphony of war cries emerged. The knights lowered their lances and rumbled towards the axe-wielding madmen.
The moment of impact was like an explosion of flesh. Axes severed the front legs of warhorses even as lances punched through layered byranies. A generation of Nordikans died in the front rank – a fifth of their number reaped by death in a single instant.
The survivors didn’t flinch. The great axe heads swept up again. The horses fought – hooves flashed – and in the centre four friends stood together, the axes had hewn two horses to the ground and the other horses couldn’t get past them. That firm point in the centre of the Nordikan line became like the prow of a ship in a storm.
As the knights slowed, their horses became more vulnerable. Lances were dropped, swords swept out.
No shield on earth can stop an axe wielded by a man as tall as your horse. And even when your hardened plate stops the cut of the weapon, the force of the blow can still rip you from your saddle.
But while the murderous giant shifts his weight and sweeps the axe up for another crushing blow, he is very vulnerable.
Great men died. Knights and warriors, veterans of a dozen wounds, died in heartbeats, without even knowing their killers.
The horses pressed on. And the Nordikans stumbled back.
The Thrakian peasants broke.
They’d lasted longer than anyone had a right to expect, their bravest men running at a full sprint after the laughing Vardariotes, and dying with carefully aimed arrows in their bodies. The best were killed, and the hesitant and the slow were left. In the end, like scavengers beaten off a corpse, they turned and ran.
The Vardariotes – old hands at this kind of fight – had allowed themselves to retreat all the way back to the stone outbuildings of the isolated farm. They rallied, and changed quivers, and let the remaining Thrakian peasants live.
Count Zac counted the horses. He had lost one man.
‘Where’s Khengiz?’ he called.
‘Girth snapped!’ an avildahr called out. Men laughed.
Opposite them, they could see the enemy’s main cavalry force forming. They had to open the centre of their line to let the peasants through, and that wasn’t going well. It was a missed opportunity, but following the peasants too closely could have been a disaster.
Zac shrugged. ‘Ready, my loves?’
Their shouts rang in the air.
He glanced left. The Nordikans were in it – they’d die where they stood. The centre of the line seemed to be winning. He frowned.
Ser Giorgios rode over from the head of the magnificent Scholae. ‘That was like a textbook exercise.’ He shrugged. ‘The skirmishing. The—’
Count Zac beamed with pleasure. ‘High praise indeed from the Count of the Scholae.’
The enemy was still having trouble with the terrified peasants clumped up in front of their cavalry. Alas, thought Count Zac.
‘But now,’ Giorgios said.
‘Bah!’ Count Zac laughed. ‘Two thousand country cavalry? We have five hundred between us. We can handle them.’ He grinned. ‘Until their Easterners sweep around these buildings in an hour, and then we all die.’ He shrugged. ‘I am true to my salt. You?’
Ser Giorgios smiled. ‘How shall we begin?’ he asked.
‘Ah, you grant me the command?’ Count Zac was a small man, but he sat up straighter at these words.
‘I do.’
‘Then we will start with a dramatic failure, I think. Yes?’ He laughed.
Ser Giorgios tried to match his laugh.
‘Here they come!’ shouted Dmitry, Ser Christos’s hypaspist.
Ser Christos watched the Vardariotes and the Scholae – men he’d commanded on other fields – come at him. The crispness of their lines and the neat precision with which they drew their bows from their bow cases contrasted sharply with his own rural tagmas, still struggling with their own peasants. In many cases, their friends and neighbours. A landowner would bend down from the saddle to hear a weeping man tell how his brother had died screaming, gut shot by the red-clad barbarians.
It was all very Morean, and he loved them for loving their men. But he could also see how all this was about to go wrong.
‘Look alive, there!’ he roared. ‘Clear my front! This will be a false charge – see their bows? They will come in, loose arrows, and then run. We will not respond – Hear me, Hetaeroi? Stand your ground!’
The enemy line came forward at a fast trot. Two hundred paces away, as the Latin mercenaries slammed into the distant Nordikans with a sound like their own Ragnarok, the two regiments of the guard broke into a canter.
‘Shields up!’ Christos roared.
The peasants huddled in front of the cavalry raised what shields they had.
The flight of arrows came in. Some of the Vardariotes loosed arrows with whistles and they screamed.
Those of his own stradiotes who were practised bowmen loosed back.
Men and horses fell on both sides.
The Guard turned together and cantered away, leaving a handful of dead horses and men in their wake. Over the backs of their saddles, they loosed again. Again, the whistles shrieked. It took real courage to stand straight as the whistles came closer – the longest heartbeat of your life. And maybe the last.
There were screams. And grunts.
Ser Christos looked at the sun, which hadn’t moved by a quarter of an hour.
Ser Christos thought, What am I doing here? Why am I fighting these men? This has all gone terribly awry. We were supposed to save the Morea.
Men were looking to him. His battle plan was simple – to wait for the Easterners to come in on the enemy flank, and only then to charge. With sheer weight of numbers his two thousand horse might break the Guard, but the casualties would break a generation and farms – hundreds of farms – would go back to the Wild. The Guard would not die easily.
Whereas, if they were outflanked, they would retire like the professionals they were. And live to fight for a new Emperor. And his men could vent their rage on the foreigners in the centre.
‘Stand fast!’ he called again.
Demetrius was winning, he could feel it, and he hadn’t even bloodied his sword. He suspected that his pater would have been in the centre with the infantry. Or leading one of the flanks in person.
Dariusz – in many ways, his best man, but an irritating, over-focused man who did not take enough care about how he phrased his criticisms – rose in his stirrups. ‘The Thrakians are beaten. Why does Ser Christos not charge through them?’ He shook his head.
Demetrius rose in his stirrups and watched for a long time – as long as a priest might take to consecrate the host. ‘Go and tell the old man to charge. Now.’ He looked at his own right and saw the knights – his best purchase – closing their visors and preparing to charge the Nordikans, whom he feared like other men feared disease and death. The foreigners were too ignorant to know what they were facing, and they were recklessly brave – let them take some time dying, and he’d have the whole battle.
The centres were locked. As he expected. Men died. And other men stepped on their corpses – whether they were alive or dead – and pressed on.
Fifty paces to his front, Aeskepiles sat alone on his pale horse and no light seemed to fall on him, nor did he leave a shadow. He was facing just slightly to the left. He had four shields – one round, one square, two shaped like knight’s shields – all a deep black. They moved as he moved.
Whatever he was doing was far, far more spectacular than anything in the previous battle. Lightning of every colour and no colour sparkled among his shields and struck well off to the left of the enemy centre – at the very end of the foreigners, the so-called company.
Detonation after detonation rolled against the distant mountains and came back as thunder, and men died every time. Blown to pieces by forces they could not comprehend.
Aeskepiles’ shoulders slumped and the
n rose, as if the man was wielding a great smith’s hammer, and he struck again, this time with both hands.
And men died.
Aeskepiles was lost in the great fugue of his borrowed sorcery – aware, at one panicked level, that he was spending his reserves too profligately. Shocked that the young practitioner to his left had such power. Wary that the old one to his right had fallen silent.
But it didn’t matter, because his working – his new, unsubtle working – was building to its climax. It built without him, sorcery multiplying upon itself the way living creatures bred and multiplied.
Like a watched pot—
But he didn’t need to watch.
The student – he had the boy fixed as a senior Academy student, based on the manner of his casting – produced a very respectable blade of light. Aeskepiles lost two shields, and was aware, in the corner of his mind that was aware of the battle, that the centre was not quite as it should be,
If I do this just right, they will all die – on both sides.
But first, the two who could threaten him. The young one, and then the old one.
Aeskepiles was close – so close that Mortirmir had no chance to parry the attack. The blow from the green-black axe, when it came, collapsed all four of Mortirmir’s carefully wrought shields.
John le Bailli died, burned to ash in his armor. Bent died, his lungs on fire inside his body. Ser Jehan died. The company lost a generation of leaders and twenty men in the blink of any eye.
But the main force of the blow fell on Mortirmir.
And it was deflected.
He didn’t have time or thought to be shocked.