Mortirmir’s hands shot up.
Gabriel found himself lying on his back. Anne Woodstock was lying across him, and MacGilly was kneeling on the ground, holding his head.
Gabriel got a knee under himself and got to his feet. Mortirmir helped Woodstock off him.
There was a long gash running across the center of the battlefield, burned black; the edges glowed red, and there were fires even in the green, green ferns. Thick, choking smoke rose.
All along the emperor’s ridge, men were getting to their feet.
Morgon was still standing with his hands spread. “I could use some help,” he muttered.
Gabriel went into his palace, feeling the odd, dry air of the local aethereal. Viewed from here, Mortirmir was standing on a plain with a huge shield over his head, holding back a titanic working like a wave coming to overwhelm them all. He spent his store of ops like water, reinforcing Mortirmir and then rolling a gossamer shield back over them, over the whole of the army. And then, like two woodsmen rolling a log off their shoulders, the two of them let the enemy working roll on, past their barriers, over them to crash down into the low ground behind the ridge, just clear of the rapidly forming wagon park.
Gabriel looked behind, and there was a line of fire two miles long.
Mortirmir was already striking back. Each of his hands was a weapon, and fireballs flew; ten of them, and then, almost instantly, another ten. And another.
The gonnes fired again. This time Gabriel was watching; the balls struck right among the snakelike monsters at the point of the left horn and ploughed deep furrows in their formation.
Mortirmir was shaking his head. “They have a lot more ops than we do,” he said. “They just tried to drain us.”
The center of the enemy formation was coming on almost as fast as a galloping horse. Their right, opposite Du Corse, was just getting loose from the tangle of ferns and creepers around the road.
Du Corse’s infantry had been closest to the misplaced detonation of the enemy working, and the ranks of halberdiers and crossbowmen were shuffling, their banners moving. They were uneasy, and Gabriel was worried.
Right opposite him …
A forest of red-pink lightning bolts reached for his pikemen.
He swatted them to earth with a sweeping parry of ops and managed to turn three of them back on the salamanders. The bolt moved with near instantaneous speed, and his return was too fast to cover, or too unexpected, and it burst two hundred paces away and there was consternation in the rapidly advancing enemy wave; the wave developed a flaw, and an eddy.
The Duchess of Venike, in excellent armour, stepped out of the ranks of the scarecrows. “They’re coming on like rabid dogs!” she roared. “Do not flinch!”
Morgon’s fireballs had moved with the deliberate pace of lofted arrows; Gabriel knew that the first wave of them had been low-energy illusions, and their opponents were undeceived, but curiously incompetent at turning the second wave, fielding only four of ten. The rest burst and added to the pall of thick, sticky smoke that had the scent of burning bitumen and charred nutmeg. But the fireballs didn’t seem to have had much effect beyond the evil smoke.
“Virtually immune to fire,” Mortirmir said. “Damn.”
Down in the low ground between the ridges, Comnena’s Scholae rolled forward against the disordered far-left of the enemy, opposite and even outflanking the casa on Gabriel’s right.
Red lightning emptied a dozen saddles, and then the first flight of arrows went in, and the second, the Scholae loosing by caracole. The salamanders were caught at a stand, and disorganized. Individuals launched themselves as a harassing cavalry; a man was pulled from his horse and killed, but in several places the mounts themselves trampled the monsters.
A trumpet sounded, and the Scholae wheeled away and shot again.
In the center, the enemy halted perhaps two hundred paces from the scarecrows, well below them on the hillside.
“You have already died, and you have already been in hell,” the duchess shouted. “There is nothing you can fear.”
Gabriel found a great deal to fear. The salamanders took their casualties and closed up. They had shields, and spears or swords, and they waved them in the odd pink light. A low moaning rolled from the left of their line to the right, perfectly timed, a wave of unseelie sound.
Men and women crossed themselves.
Gabriel had time to note that many of the salamanders had white or grey armour of some kind, despite the reports.
A creature stood forth from the enemy center with a great white shell. It raised the shell and blew a raucous call, and a thousand red bolts emerged from the enemy center, a near-perfect volley intended to overwhelm their shields, and it did. Mortirmir’s great shield went down, torn to ribbons, and Gabriel’s smaller shield had a hole the size of a knight’s pavilion torn in it.
At least two hundred scarecrows died in that single torrent of sorcery.
The phalanx didn’t flinch. One-eyed men and women stepped forward into the gaps left by the messily charred dead. File leaders called, “Lock up, lock up,” and their pike heads remained steady.
The raucous horn sounded again.
Gabriel poured his horded potentia into his shields; the gossamer projection of the first encounter stiffened into a new working, as if a carpet of protection were being woven in real time. But this time he worked with Mortirmir, and with both astrologers and every other caster along the ridge top.
The volley was, again, beautifully coordinated.
The shields held, for the most part. But Gabriel was spending his stored ops with both hands, and the rate of consumption was shocking, especially as he couldn’t convert potentia to replace his used ops.
Comnena’s Scholae loosed another flight of arrows and cantered back, exposing the right of the casa. But there were hundreds of dead or dying salamanders, and the gonnes fired again; again they used round shot, and this time, the salamanders could be seen to flinch, visibly, at the casualties …
… and Comnena’s cavalry were back like flies on a corpse, riding in close and loosing arrows.
Gabriel heard his own voice give the order, “Advance the casa.”
He himself was just having his arm harnesses put on his arms. And he was in his palace, casting.
The whole mass of the enemy center came forward at a signal, their order almost perfect, with a haunting cheer like the call of an owl.
Morgon threw a dozen bolts of white fire and two gouts of oddly prismatic lightning. The lightning went through unturned, and seemed to grow and spread in one patch, and to have almost no effect in the other.
Suddenly Mortirmir was in his palace.
Layer like this. Like this … like leaves on trees. There, there, brothers, Mortirmir ordered. All with me. There! there … They have much more ops than we have. Gabriel! We cannot continue this exchange! You must win in the real!
In the real, a new shield rose from the ground in front of the center, like a sparkling forest of faery trees.
The salamanders halted less than a hundred paces away. The creature with the great opaline conch strode out and blew.
A thousand bolts of fire struck the glittering forest.
A hundred scarecrows fell. Widows stepped forward over dead husbands; a man stepped past his dead wife, her head split with red fire; a child raised his pike so that the butt spike would not trail in the charred remnants of his father.
“Close up!” came the call, like a battle cry, and they closed forward.
Giselle turned to Gabriel. “We should charge them,” she said. “If the monsters are flesh and blood, we are better going into them than awaiting them.”
Gabriel’s left arm harness was being laced. “Ghiavarina,” he said. “Helmet. Yes, Giselle. We take one more volley and go.” In the aethereal, he said to all the casters in the link: We will go forward into them. Be ready. This is not the end.
“Derkensun!” he called.
“Nordikaans!” roared Harald
Derkensun. The Nordikaans had been lying down, a few paces back from the scarecrows. Now they rose and, like the killers they were, shed their magnificent cloaks, dropping them onto the ground like discarded trash. A few swung their axes; most laughed, a few took a long pull from a canteen, and they went forward to gather around their emperor.
Gabriel turned to Francis Atcourt. “I will go with the Nordikaans,” he said. “Wait until we stop the enemy charge, or we break into their line, or we’re desperate, and then charge them.”
Farther down the line, Bad Tom was directing the archers. The whole of the casa advanced down the slope in echelon, led by the gonners.
“Ready,” Woodstock said, slapping his pauldron lightly. MacGilly lowered the helmet over his head and Hamwise did the chin strap, even as the next volley of red bolts crashed into them.
The glittering forest was stripped of leaves.
Mortirmir shook his head. “We are running out of ops,” he said. “I can’t take another volley. I’m sorry.”
Nordikaans were down, burned like roast meat, along with dozens of scarecrows. The boy, Hamwise, was standing, staring at the man dead right next to him.
“Ghiavarina,” snapped Gabriel.
The boy put the spear across his hands, and he took it. Anne slapped his visor down and stepped in behind him with her own sword, shoulder to shoulder with the Duchess of Venike on one side and Harald Derkensun on his right.
The enemy was forty paces away.
The monster with the magnificent shell stepped forward and raised the shell.
“Cully?” Gabriel said.
Cully leaned past his captain, his bow pointed at the sky as his great shoulder muscles took the strain, and then descending, his back contorted, and he released like a harper strumming a magical harp, and Cully’s arrow took the conch blower high, just above the breastplate of white he wore. He stumbled, and then folded forward over the heavy arrow.
A few red bolts came up the hill.
The scarecrows’ trumpeter blew, and the casa’s, and they went forward in echelon, the casa slightly advanced. The archers of the casa were now loosing continuously, and Edmund’s gonners halted and fired a volley only twenty paces out from the enemy’s skeleton standard.
But Gabriel saw none of that. As a blizzard of uncoordinated red lightnings shot up the hill at him, he moved out with the scarecrows, and the hill added enormously to their impetus as they rolled down the hill.
The horn blower in front of the enemy tried to get to his feet and Cully feathered him again.
Ten paces from the line of the enemy, Gabriel realized that their armour was made of marble. It didn’t matter a damn, except to add to the exotic and terrifying nature of the alien enemy.
He wanted to run forward, to charge, to use the whole power of the hill, to free his legs and get it over with, and even while he thought a torrent of thoughts, he was trying to keep his part of the hermetical shield steady, as there was a constant trickle of red lightning attacks.
Five paces out he lost the ability to hold his hermetical working against the torrents of fear and the immanence of combat. The salamander opposite him had flat black eyes and red-brown skin and raised a bone flute …
Too far from his hermetical palace, Gabriel used the ghiavarina to parry the bolt. But at point blank, hundreds of scarecrows died in the last, hurried burst of red fire, despite shields and a clear lack of coordination among their enemies. Those struck fell, incinerated.
Another rank of pikes came down, filling the space.
Gabriel’s ghiavarina came down, and his first opponent fell away, cut in half at the shoulders, his juices black and brown and hot as melted pitch.
The pikes struck home—ten to fifteen ranks, five pike heads in every square foot of space to their front—so that the salamanders foolish enough to stand and attempt to block the pike heads were hit as if by steel sparks blown by a human fire. Hundreds of the monsters were skewered, and their superior speed was utterly negated by lack of space; smaller of stature than men, and downhill, they gave ground, and then suddenly, being mortal, they broke; Gabriel was just cutting up from dente di ciangare, cutting his opponent’s stone axe, its haft, its marble breastplate, and its head with one mighty and unstoppable sottano; he looked to the left through the narrow slit in his visor and the scarecrows were moving forward at an even walking pace.
He ran to Giselle’s side. “Halt!” he called.
She frowned. “Why?”
“Halt and get back to the ridge top,” he shouted into her face, then he ran along the front to where the Nordikaans had already closed up. Their axes had decimated the salamanders.
Francis Atcourt flashed past the Nordikaans to the right, leading the knights of the casa, and they crashed into the fleeing salamanders a hundred paces farther downslope. Tom Lachlan had already halted the archers and gonners. Their right flank was absolutely hanging in air, with half the enemy left wing well behind them, but themselves badly threatened by the Scholae. Still, they began to fling their red fire into the hand gonners, who wheeled as if on parade and poured fire back into them.
“I hate this,” Bad Tom roared. “I want to kill something.”
“Kill their wounded,” Ser Michael snapped. He beheaded a salamander on the ground; the creature had taken a pike wound and it was visibly closing.
“Back up the hill,” Gabriel shouted in his face, so their spittle flecked each other’s faces. He couldn’t remember opening his visor; but he had to get this done.
“No!” Tom bellowed. “Pursue!”
“OBEY,” Gabriel roared like a wounded bear. He cracked his voice, but Tom flinched.
He turned to Woodstock, at his shoulder. “Ataelus,” he shouted.
Hamwise ran.
“Where’s MacGilly?” he asked.
Woodstock shrugged. “Dead,” she said, her voice flat. “My lord.”
It was all taking far too long. Women and men paused to behead a salamander, to drink water, to stare blankly. The scarecrows had taken heavy casualties in their front ranks, where the leaders and trained soldiers were, and many of the rest of them were rail-thin peasants with ten days of training.
Gabriel closed his eyes for a moment. He could not bear to watch.
Giselle’s voice rose over the battlefield. “Back! Back, mes enfants! We are not done yet.”
Gabriel opened his eyes, and the scarecrows had turned about and began to labour up the hill. The casa flowed, with better parade ground order, except that the hand gonners disintegrated into huddles of men and began to run back where Edmund stood with a banner waving.
Gabriel saw the boy coming with his warhorse and ran to meet them, his sabatons tearing at the turf, his mind searching the near-empty aethereal for attacks. He was almost drained; he dreaded a big working like the one with which the enemy had begun the combat.
One foot in a steel stirrup, a sense of foreboding, of a stitch dropped, or impending peril. Ataelus grunted happily as his weight came on; he turned the horse, sparing a smile for his youngest page and then cantering away to the high ground to the left, and looking …
It was a trap, and he’d read it correctly—either too late, or just in time. The enemy center was running, but all together; and the flanks were turning inward to catch his center and eat it.
But the scarecrows were pulling his head from the noose. Their order was far from perfect, but they were getting up the hill faster than the jaws of the enemy flanks could close on them.
Off to his left, a whole separate battle had been fought. The Sieur Du Corse’s banner was gone, the crossbowmen had held, but there were huge gaps in the Gallish line .…
It shouldn’t matter immediately; the crossbowmen and the halberdiers had held.
With heavy losses. They’d been driven back two hundred paces, or more, exposing the flanks of the hill. It was possible they hadn’t held; it was possible his adversaries had accomplished exactly what they had wanted and were being cautious.
Gabriel took a heartbeat to admire the skill of his adversaries.
He turned his horse and rode back across the face of the hill to where Bad Tom had the casa in line with the scarecrows. Gabriel rode along their front, saluting them with his heavy spear, and they began to call out, cheering.
The enemy center had stopped running and was re-forming. Francis Atcourt came up the hill; it looked as if he had not lost a man or a woman, and his knights were still in formation.
But the whole face of the hill was covered in dead salamanders.
“They are very good,” Gabriel said, matter of fact, to Tom. “They expected to break us with the red fire; but the rout of the center was a second intention, like a deep deception in a sword fight.”
“Oh aye,” Bad Tom said, disgusted. “We could just fuckin’ fight them. Get into ’em and keep killin’.”
“I’m guessing that when they decide that they failed to outflank the hill or break our center, we’ll have some very serious fighting indeed,” Gabriel said. “Where is Zac? Where is Ser Pavalo?”
Lachlan shrugged. “So we just hold?”
Off to the right, Comnena was still inflicting terrible damage on his adversaries, and their supply of whatever powered the red fire seemed to have dwindled, or perhaps been expended in the center.
But in the center, the skeleton banner went up, and terrible low moaning sounds came from the rallied enemy, and a working rolled at them like a wind.
Gabriel gave what he had, saving only his reserve; he gave with a dozen mages and he saw Mortirmir fling a gout of ops into the maelstrom, trying to steady the forest of light against a gale of chaos …
All along the crest of the hill, men and women died. Flarch died with a dozen household archers; Sidenhir, an irk, far from her home and trees, fell by him as the malevolent wind licked under Morgon’s fluttering fractal leaves of light. Ser Giovanni Gentile fell dead with his horse, and Lord Robin, Michael’s squire, and Angelo di Laternum lay in the ferny grass, screaming their lungs out as a deadly stuff poured in on them. The whole line at the top of the hill shook as if the wind blew against them.