Then, like the stoop of a falcon and as swift, the Vardariotes appeared from behind the salamander’s left wing. The change was sudden: One moment, the enemy left outflanked the embattled casa’s right, kept in check only by the relentless, courageous pressure of the Scholae. And then, in the next, the enemy left began to melt, and like lions breaking into a cattle pen, the Scholae reacted immediately, charging with drawn sabers against the enemy as they ran. This time the Scholae were merciless, and so, too, were the Vardariotes; as the foe ran, they were ridden down by flashing hooves and sabers.
“Here they come,” Giselle said from the left. And sure enough, re-formed and flanking the hill, the enemy center and right attacked, their order good, their speed like charging cavalry.
Gabriel ran to the wreck of the casa’s wedge, casting what healing he could with his empty purse of ops. He and a young Alban woman he didn’t know saved Lord Robin’s pierced lungs, but had to leave the young man lying where he had fallen.
The knights steadied their horses. To his right, the archers waved; men he’d known five years were drifting back.
“Cully! Get them shooting!” he called.
Cully ran across the open ground. Three red bolts reached for him from the enemy center, just a hundred paces away.
“Nock!” he roared. His voice was something to fear; he sounded like the angry father of every archer’s youth.
Oak Pew barked. “Nock!”
The ranks stiffened. Short Nose was embarrassed to find that he’d taken two steps back; he pressed forward while Oak Pew glared. He got a shaft on his string, too, and so did the irk Elaran, who looked like he’d had a whiff of the necromancy; his old eyes glittered and his fingers seemed weak, but he got the jaws of his horn nock around the meat of the string.
“Draw!” Cully roared. “And, LOOSE!”
The heavy shafts fell away downslope into the salamanders, who were now very close indeed.
Gabriel rose from Lord Robin’s side, watched as the Alban girl pushed ops into Angelo di Laternum, and looked at the scarecrows, who stood as stolid as cattle despite their losses.
He rose to his feet, looking farther left. He could feel something wrong, or more wrong; a feeling, a lack of sound.
Hamwise still stood holding Ataelus, keeping his head up; the big horse wanted to eat the soft green stuff.
Gabriel remounted, his joints already protesting.
He was sure now that the crisis would come on the left. He looked at Mortirmir; the young master magister looked as if he’d been kicked, but he was working; Gabriel could tell he had ops left.
“Morgon,” he said. “Come with me.”
He rode along the back of the scarecrows. There was a flood of power, cries, and grunts. More scarecrows died.
They shuffled. Viewed from the back, it was as if a breeze stirred their upright pikes.
Michael followed him, and Clarissa, of all people; and Mortirmir, and Anne. Cully had stayed to command the archers. Gabriel wished he had the company, wished he’d had a different order of march, wished he had Harmodius or just Tancreda and Petrarcha, away with the rear guard. He wished a thousand things.
He blinked. More scarecrows died. The enemy seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of ops. And all along the flank of the hill, salamanders were rising to their feet and dragging themselves into the ranks of their great blocks. They were regenerating.
And they were rolling forward like the sea. Gabriel had to assume that they, too, had people marching up from the rear; their right flanks were being reinforced and seemed as big as the whole army he’d faced an hour ago. Or had it been ten minutes ago?
Michael looked ashen.
“Zac or Pavalo,” Gabriel said to his apprentice.
Michael looked back. “They are flaying us with magic!” he shouted at Mortirmir.
Gabriel took Michael’s shoulder. “It’s not his fault!” he said.
Michael looked at the emperor. “He’s always so cocksure,” he spat.
“Like other people I know,” Gabriel said gently. “Save it for the salamanders, Michael.”
Mortirmir looked as if he’d been struck, but he turned his head away. Gabriel saw the moment that the young man passed into his palace, and wondered if he had the ops left to act.
The new tide of monsters rolled up to the Galles, and a single flash showed that the enemy had a volley of fire left in them. Some crossbowmen shot back, but the Galles lost the exchange and did not await the onset; they were losing one man in five. They shuffled back, and the enemy right swung like a door as the Galles fled.
“Michael?” Gabriel said. “Tell Tom to charge. Right now.”
Michael waved a fist and dashed away.
“Clarissa,” Gabriel said. “Duchess of Venike. Charge, keep going.” He waved, she saluted, but he was already beckoning Mortirmir.
He rode along the back of the scarecrows, whose flank was now wide open. “Morgon!” he called. The magister’s face was slack, and his eyes were unfocused, but he turned his warhorse and followed.
From the hilltop he could see the dust on the road to his left rear; his heart beat faster. And he could see Du Corse’s banner waving again; behind the enemy right.
“On me!” he called to the Nordikaans.
Despite the weight of ankle-length maille and heavy axes, they sprinted along with him like hunting hounds, and he led them left, left, ever farther left, around the scarecrows waiting to die. Five hundred long paces to get clear of them. A race.
The salamanders had launched their third-order attack; their right and center were closing like a vise on the salamanders. Fires raged all along the front; in many cases the enemy came forward through fire, the flames licking around them.
He pointed down the hill at the rising tide of unbeaten salamanders coming into the left flank of his phalanx. “Stop them, Harald,” he said. About eight thousand salamanders.
About two hundred Nordikaans.
“Ave, Imperator!” Derkensun responded. He raised his axe.
“Cover the flanks of the Nordikaans for as long as you can,” Gabriel said to his magister.
Mortirmir’s face sharpened. His eyes focused.
“Hmm,” Mortirmir replied. He stood in his stirrups. A cruel smile danced across his face. “Let’s try this, shall we?”
His working came; Gabriel glanced at the mixture of ops, the gold and black. Black.
“Needs must when the devil drives,” Mortirmir said bitterly, and unleashed his working.
It was not fire.
It was ice, and a thousand salamanders screamed in agony as they were desiccated and frozen in a single, horrible emanation. It was an ugly magic, cruel and deadly.
The salamander line shuddered and in some cases halted, fifty paces from the flank of the scarecrows.
Mortirmir’s cruel smile intensified into the full satisfaction of a man who was wrecking havoc.
“Encore,” he said.
It happened again. The desiccations were explosive this time. The enemy moaned in fear … and rage … and came on.
Gabriel considered forbidding him to cast it again.
And he judged himself for it, cursed, and rode on, down the hill, after the Galles. They were not cowards; they had been overmatched, and they were not running, but milling helplessly, bereft of most of their leaders. Du Corse had stripped them of local squires and knights to build up his own chivalry, and now townsmen and musicians and peasants and butchers tried to find it in themselves to form a line in the face of the red fire and the deadly spears of the alien foe.
Gabriel had hoarded a little ops to use as a shield, but now, instead, he used Morgon’s sound enhancement, reaching into himself; draining everything; and even here, on an alien world, he drew a little and little more from the golden chain that still pulsed with life, trailing away into the thin aethereal and full of hope …
Men of Galle! I need you now!
He rode along the edge of their mass, waving a sword he hadn’t realized that he’d
drawn. Off to his left the knights were pouring in; clearly they’d gone through the enemy line and ridden too far, like knights all over the world except the military orders. But now Du Corse was lashing them with his voice, and they struck along the edge of the salamander line, their hooves leaving a trail of black blood, and then began to form with the crossbowmen.
Du Corse swung himself off his mount and knelt, an actor on the stage of chivalry, and Gabriel leaned down and gave him a mock buffet on one shoulder, and then the former sell-sword was up, bellowing for his knights to dismount. The crossbowmen and halberdiers shuffled forward and formed well with a wall of trained muscle and steel between them and the foe; the Gallish line was suddenly formidable.
The scarecrows were invisible, over the shoulder of the great hill; but the Nordikaans and Mortirmir were still there.
“We must go forward!” Gabriel shouted, his visor up. He waved his sword.
Du Corse’s banner was up; it began to advance, and the Galles flowed forward.
Men began to sing. They were singing Te Deum; the red fire lashed out, and the voices went on, and the Galles would not flinch. Harald Derkensun fell, his head cut away by a stone axe.
Morgon Mortirmir went sword to pole hammer with a salamander banner bearer. He waited for his adversary; crossed the heavy blow, left to right, using his lighter weapon to guide the heavier, off line, rotated his hips, and his left hand reached out, a heavy, unnecessary blow; the turning motion he’d been taught, but as soon as his fingers caught the creature, its water was ripped from it, and it fell lightly, its horrified black eyes the last to lose expression at its awful death, but Mortirmir had already passed forward to his next victim.
He could hear the Te Deum.
But the black fire flooded him, and he didn’t want to stop. It was a joy like sexual release; greater, even, than creation, greater than …
Tancreda appeared in his palace.
“Stop!” she screamed.
For the time a mortally wounded being has to scream one last time, the battle balanced on the edge of a Fell Sword.
But that sword was in the hands of Pavalo Payam, and he pointed its gently curving blade across the last low ridge of the fingers and into the flank and rear of the salamander army.
Time had crawled while he marched; while he expanded his magnificently trained horsemen from a thin column to their battle line, while they passed unnoticed through a dozen gullies and a forest for ferns. It had all taken too long.
But now, like the release of healing, they had arrived, and the whole battle was laid out to his right; the scarecrows plunged deep into the enemy ranks like a dagger; the casa, the victorious Vardariotes and Scholae on the right wing; the left, where a tide of mixed militia and Gallish knights tried to force the enemy off the flank of the scarecrows. Red fire fell on the army of men, and they died. But they died with their faces to the enemy, and those who survived went forward. The salamanders were held in place like bugs on a pin.
The Fell Sword descended, cutting only air, but six thousand Mamluks rode forward, sabers on shoulders, lines well dressed, flowing organically around stands of fern trees or piles of stone.
The earth began to shake.
Gabriel was near the spot where the line of Galles met up with the line of Nordikaans. Except that, even in his closed helmet, from the back of Ataelus he could see that the two didn’t meet; that the Nordikaans were a shield-gang, a hundred or fewer in a circle of axes and swords, and that the enemy had begun to turn the flank of the Galles, expertly flowing through the failure of his own line.
A salamander shot him with a red bolt.
His armour turned it, and he cut, his sword shattering on the thing’s stone helmet, and Ataelus punched twice, once with each foot, and the thing’s stone armour cracked and it fell, and Ataelus trampled it.
He threw the hilt, and took his steel mace off his pommel. Ataelus reared; there was a flash of red fire, and he was falling, falling …
He hit hard, and they were on him, and he’d lost the mace. Ataelus thrashed, but luck, or fate, had thrown him clear, and he got his left leg under him, free of the saddle and the stirrups and he got his metal hand up and triggered the working he kept there; the hand went dead, but every salamander around him fell, blind; several went down and never rose, and he stepped back to raise Ataelus, but the horse was spasming, and then there were dozens of the dark red things and he put his dead hand into every incoming blow, as if the magnificent work of a master craftsman were a cheap iron buckler. He covered and punched with his dagger, covered and punched; grappled close against a tall monster with a sucker mouth and turned the thing to the right, holding him into the way of his brother’s bolt of red lighting, throwing the broken corpse into a third, and then the dagger, hot now to the touch; he left it in a bulging-eyed face, kicked with his pointed sabatons, and struck with his gauntleted fists—one, two. He was taller and stronger than any of them; he overrotated arms, and felt the alien musculature tear under his hands, dislocated shoulders, and slammed the dead hand into another, and another, and they pressed closer …
Ataelus was his undoing. Ataelus the loyal, who, dying, dragged himself by three scraping hooves to his master; Ataelus, whose teeth continued to rip salamanders from their feet, until a dozen of the red-brown things carved him with axes, and Gabriel fell backward over the stallion’s outthrust neck.
He’d already used his reserve. He had nothing, even to save himself.
Luckily, he had Anne Woodstock.
Her blade was everywhere for five beats of his heart, and he got one foot on Ataelus’s head and pushed himself away; got the other foot under and turned his own weary body over, so that he was on his hands and knees and a great blow struck him in the back, and he went flat on his face. His left hand was dead; his right was not strong enough for the duty, and he rose a few inches and fell.
He never saw the ten more human heartbeats during which Woodstock covered him and dealt death.
He only knew that he took a breath, and then another, and then another, and in between them, he was not dead. The terror was impenetrable; facedown and unable to see or rise. He had no ops. He considered adventuring the black potentia, but his own panic was too strong for such an endeavour.
He tried to pray, and nothing came.
Perhaps he screamed into his visor.
Perhaps not.
The earth was shaking. Even through terror and fatalism and fatigue and sorrow, he felt the earth shake.
Something fell over him.
“Stay down!” Anne screamed. That made it through; almost, in the place he was, it made him laugh.
As if I have a choice.
And then the line of Mamluks burst over them like water bursting a dam in springtime, and the earthquake was all around him, and then past, like rain on a sparing day, sweeping along the plain. It was almost silent, and then he could hear the singing—very faintly, the Gallish Te Deum.
“Oh God, my lord, he’s … dead …” Woodstock said.
Gabriel lay still for another eternal moment, unable to speak or rise.
And then he admitted that he was not dead. And that he had to complete his task, or die trying.
He flexed his right hand.
“He’s alive!” called a man in Gallish.
They got him up; embarrassed as, aside from abrasions and a deep bruise, he was uninjured. But so was Woodstock, and she flushed at his praise and the praise of others: Tom Lachlan, Ser Michael, Sukey …
Hamwise and Cully got his harness off; it was scorched, and the gilding was ruined, but it had kept him alive. There was a terrible mark in the back plate; a stone axe had bitten deep, but it hadn’t touched his spine. He had a bruise; when he pissed, blood came out, but it wasn’t the first time.
Sukey put a cup of hippocras into his hand. There was still fighting on the next ridge; the scarecrows were passing over the field in a huge long line, killing the wounded. Sukey had a field chair.
The casa kni
ghts and the Nordikaans began to gather around him.
Francis Atcourt threw his arms around his emperor. “God!” he all but sobbed. “If you are going to die, take us with you.”
Then both of them turned to the unusual site of the emperor’s squire with her mouth firmly planted on the mouth of Ser Tobias.
Gabriel raised an eyebrow and began to feel alive.
Michael shook his head. “I’m sorry, Gabriel,” he said. “I’m so fucking sorry. I stayed with the casa.”
Gabriel managed a smile. He was coming out of it; he’d been … somewhere else. “We were fine,” he quipped. “Weren’t we, Anne?”
She surfaced from the longest armoured kiss anyone had seen and flashed a smile.
“Where’s Morgon?” Gabriel asked.
Sukey pointed.
The young master magister stood with his head down, in the midst of his desiccated enemies.
He wasn’t moving.
Gabriel looked at Michael. “Finish it,” he said. “Did Long Paw …”
“He’s holding the gate,” Michael said. “Pavalo is cutting through to him.” He nodded to the far ridge. “If they surrender, do we accept?”
“Fuck, yes,” Gabriel said, exasperated. He was looking over a battlefield with at least ten thousand dead. “Christ, Michael, why would we not accept their surrender?”
Michael quailed. “I’m sorry. Of course we will.”
Gabriel took a deep breath. “Finish this and march for the gate. We have another battle to fight.”
Michael nodded.
Gabriel walked toward Mortirmir.
Michael began to issue orders. The imperial messenger joined him, and the whole command staff moved away, headed for where a great square of salamanders had formed on the far ridge.
Gabriel walked up to the younger man, put a hand on his shoulder, and went to the gate of his palace.
It was shut, a lofty barrier of spiky iron.
Gabriel had no ops with which to play. So he knocked.
“Morgon Mortirmir,” he called.
He called three times.
“Damn it,” he called. “I’m your emperor, and perhaps your only friend.”
The gate opened. It didn’t creak. It didn’t make any noise.