In the fields below them, on the line of the road to Lissen Carak, there stood the imperial veterans; all the Thrakian spearmen, leaning on their spears, and beside them, the tagmatic cavalry, all dismounted; the other Moreans were off to the west, covering their flank along the Lily Burn, but all of the Albin militia had been put under Ser Alcaeus’s command as well, and he had most of the available infantry; almost sixteen thousand men and women on a one-mile front, stiffened by wedges of knights who waited behind the embankment of the ancient road.
“I don’t know if this is really their main effort,” Gabriel said to his magisters. “But I’m pretty sure that if we break it, he’ll have to come.”
Edmund was chewing a sausage when the trumpets sounded. There was cavalry moving off to the west, in the fields beyond the ruins of Penrith. He had to assume they were friendly, although there was a steady combat sound from the line of the Lily Burn beyond them.
“They all know to cover their ears?” Duke asked for the third time.
“They know,” Tom said.
The phalanxes of Thrakians covered the front of the gonnes. There were forty gonnes, almost hub to hub, along the line of the raised road. Pioneers had built up dirt and snow platforms behind the great gonnes, the six cannon in the center of the line, so that they had room to recoil fully without rolling off the road.
The crews were standing about; a few played dice or cards. Some jumped up and down, or blew on their hands.
The dark stain spread across the distant fields by the tiny and now extinct hamlet of Woodhull. The stain covered the whole front of open ground while, behind them, more and more creatures seemed to move west, aimed at the place marked on Edmund’s map as Helewise’s Manor.
Duke looked at him, a nervous smile on his face. “Here they come.”
Edmund was finishing his sausage. Since the Umroth, he was less impressed with monsters. He watched them for a while. They had great booming drums, audible already, and they were coming right at him.
“To your gonnes,” he called between his cupped hands. Forty gonnes covered almost a quarter mile of frontage. Each gonne had a stack of shot for the right tube, and bags of appropriate grape shot. Each gonne had a single round marked with the letter M created by the infamous Mortirmir.
Edmund’s mind was much given to calculation, and he wondered how fast a bogglin walked. Four miles an hour? So they’ll be here, one way or another, in fifteen minutes. In range in seven minutes. Point blank in fourteen minutes. One minute in the beaten zone of the grapeshot; time for most of the gonnes to fire twice; a few to fire three times. Say one hundred and twenty rounds of grape, with twenty-four pellets in each. Roughly twenty-five hundred iron balls, five to the pound. But some much more.
Edmund shrugged at the uselessness of calculation. Now in range in six minutes, he thought.
The pressure on the Lily Burn increased with every minute, and now there were forty thousand creatures trying to cross. When they hesitated, Orley reached out and took power from his master and forced them into the icy black water, where they drowned, and the creatures behind them followed them in, and they died, too.
Aneas watched them come in waves, but he left the arrow on his bow unshot.
“Wait,” he called. “Wait until they stop drowning. Don’t waste your arrows.”
Nothing could make it alive across the Flow, and the enemy’s main effort channeled toward the southern ford until Orley flung in his cave trolls and took it.
Then Tapio charged out of the woods. He had, not just his own knights, but hundreds of bears, and irks on foot, and wardens; his name had attracted some of the finest warriors of the Wild, and their wedges burst into the cave trolls and knocked them down in the shallow water and drowned them in the wretched cold mud, or pounded them to splinters with their steel-clad hooves, or simply burst their chests asunder with their lances. A hundred bears died, but the trolls were destroyed or forced back across the river.
Then barghasts came, and wyverns. But the power that mastered them had not troubled itself to coordinate closely, and the weary bears under Blizzard and their kin under Lily stood their ground, clan by clan.
Then it was Bill Redemede’s hour, and the hour of the Jacks. Where the bears and irks could only endure the torment of their aerial foes, the archers could clear the air in a single volley. Even in heavy snow, the massed archery of the rangers and the Jacks flayed the barghasts, who had no armour. Wyverns dropped wing loads of gravel and did damage, but the archers made them pay, made it too dangerous for them, and many dropped their stones into the mere or farther north in the Flow and did no harm beyond smashing the ice.
The woodlands veterans took cover in the trees, right at the edge—two bows behind each, so that every ranger was covered. And for an hour they disputed the fords below the Flow, and the banks of the Lily Burn against five times their number.
The line was restored.
In the south, at the bridge, there were daemons on both sides, and Mogon taunted her enemies, but they could not respond, so heavy was the compulsion on them, and they came on. Mogon was sickened of slaughter, and hated killing her own, but her spells were in vain. She reached into the aethereal and begged for aid.
She had expected the Red Knight, but she found young Mortirmir.
“I need sorcerous aid,” she said.
Mortirmir heard her out.
“We are trying to stretch Ash as thin as we can,” Mortirmir said.
“These are my people,” the duchess spat.
Mortirmir nodded, “On the way,” he said crisply.
A surge of almost incredible power ran through Mogon.
She raised her axe and the power of the choir behind her crushed the net of workings that covered the other Qwethnethogs.
Orley, or Ash, or some other potency struck back, directly at her.
Shields covered her; shields she had never made. She stood a moment, surprised that she was not dead, and struck back. And again. Not with power, but with nuance. Not with lies, but with truth.
The hordes assaulted Albinkirk for the third time that day. Already Ser Shawn could barely stand, and the Prince of Occitan was pale when he opened his visor, and there was blood leaking down his right cuisse. But his squire brought wine, and he and the other Occitan knights sang as the assault came forward.
But this one was different. This time, tongues of fire leapt from the enemy—fifty of them or more—and they smashed into the protections and wards of the ancient town.
And took them down.
The new Bishop of Lorica lay bleeding on the floor of his cathedral of Albinkirk.
Then the men defending the breeches began to die. The fire fell on them, and rolled forward, and the bogglins came in right behind it.
Prince Tancred died there with his household knights, fighting to the last in a shield wall. Ser Shawn was pushed back and back again, and each time he rallied the militia and the chivalry and struck back, until he found that he was standing at the base of the town wall itself.
And that was the second hour of battle.
In the center of a battle that spread over ten miles of front, time was elastic.
Six minutes can be very quick, or very slow. Time to give a wonderful pre-battle speech and drink a little wine, or to pray, or to just stare off into space.
Edmund did all of those things. People cheered his speech, based on the emperor’s: victory, a little loot, all the best things.
Very little came to him when he prayed.
In the end, he stood watching the distant monsters as they came closer to his little line of red flags, and he wondered about it all. The work, and the killing.
All the gonnes were long since loaded. Every gonner was in his place. The porte-fires burned in the still air; forty threads of smoke wound into the freezing air, tiny tendrils that marked each gonne.
Far out on the fields, a little under a thousand paces away, a line of bogglins passed the red flags.
Edmund didn’
t think he had to give an order. All the captains were watching the flags. Every type of gonne had a different range.
The waiting lasted so long that Edmund wondered if they really were waiting for his word.
And then the captain of one of the great cannons put her porte-fire down.
The gonne roared.
Nine hundred and seventy paces downrange, the ball slapped through two bogglins, shattered the mandibles of a third, disemboweled the fourth and fifth, and then fell toward earth, removing double-jointed legs on its way. It skipped on the frozen ground and ploughed through two more creatures, took off three or four legs, and then skipped again and began to roll, removing limbs. The ball weighed thirty-six pounds, and it left a furrow of death and dismemberment and pitiful sound behind it as it rolled and rolled through the packed creatures. They had no way to stop it except with their bodies.
Even as it killed, the next cannon fired, and then the next.
Gabriel saw the flashes and then heard the thunder as the great gonnes fired along the road. The damage they wreaked was like the attack of wyverns, visible from a mile.
As if summoned by his thoughts, wyverns rose from behind the vale of the Lily Burn and began to converge on something. Sythenhag’s brood rose into the air from the Lily Burn bridge, followed by three more Adnacrag clans. Yet, as if by agreement, the wheeling predators didn’t meet; instead, each attacked the other’s infantry.
Gabriel sighed.
The firing of the gonne line had become general.
From the left end of the enemy horde in the center, a flash of violet light. One of the falconets was hit; twenty men and women died by fire.
Gabriel raised his baton.
Now, he said in the aethereal.
Across the battlefield, from the Lily Burn to Albinkirk, the alliance magisters dropped their cloaks and cast. From Gabriel’s vantage, great bubbles of translucent light, like glass Christmas ornaments, sprang up all along the line; mostly gold in various hues, but one red, where the Patriarch cast his own strange style, and many green, especially on the Lily Burn.
The gonnes were firing steadily now, a constant rumble and roar. Their firing lit the main battle with an arcane glow from within, pulses of light like fireflies.
At the ford below the Flow, Orley grew impatient. He summoned his surviving trolls and the best of his daemons; he called his wyverns and his hastenoch. And as they closed at the ford, already choked with dead, with the steel-tipped shafts of his enemies falling like snow, he unleashed his borrowed powers, cutting a swathe through the bears and Tapio’s ancient irks. Tapio slashed back, as did Aneas, and Gas-a-ho and Looks-at-Clouds and a dozen other, lesser shamans.
Looks-at-Clouds began to unleash clouds of terror amid the waiting monsters, frightening them into fighting each other.
Into the chaos and death, the cold and icy mud, Orley led his monsters.
Aneas, casting, went to meet him. He had layers of protections, and he used the golden buckler on his arm to cover anything that leaked through his shields, and then he threw everything he could think of: deception, manipulations of nature, a bolt of lightning conjured from the approaching storm front.
Orley parried them or ignored them. He was on the banks of the stream, and then his cloven feet were in the inky water.
Their shields met in a shower of sparks. Irene shot over his shoulder, and her shaft bounced off Orley’s hide, the shaft of the bolt shattering, and then Orley’s axe swung, and Aneas leaped clear.
Aneas threw his last major offensive preparation—three bolts of white levin—as he slipped under the antlered monster’s guard, so that his fingers were all but touching Orley’s breast.
The Son of Ash was not even singed.
Aneas rolled; not fast enough, and he took a wound. He took his pipe tomahawk from his belt as he came to his feet and threw …
And hit. The blow staggered his enemy, but then Orley had his balance. He cut back as if balance was nothing to him.
Aneas twisted, caught it on his golden buckler.
Blizzard came up, axe back.
Nita Qwan shot at Orley from very close by; the flint-headed arrow pounded home in Orley’s flesh, but had no immediate effect, although there was a trickle of very red blood.
Blizzard struck, rocking the dark captain. But Orley turned and smashed a fist into the bear’s jaw, breaking it and knocking the bear into the mud.
Aneas had two wounds: one in his thigh, and a heavy cut in his left arm that showed fat and muscle whenever there was a pause in the blood flow. But he was damned if he was letting Blizzard die, and he stepped close, short sword in his hand, turned his enemy’s axe, and cut into his calf. The blow was clean, and well powered, and it bounced off Orley’s flesh as if Orley were made of oak. Then Aneas moved off line, to his strong side, covered by the buckler of light, but the blood was flowing from his arm, too fast, and he was scared, and the axe cut back; he was off balance, and the axe severed his buckler arm above his hand and his blood fountained. He raised his spurting arm and splashed blood across his enemy’s face.
He cast then, covering the wound, but he had no buckler, and he could only stumble back on his increasingly weak legs. Irene shot again, from his right, and bought him a breath. Blizzard tried to rise on a broken leg and failed.
Gas-a-ho tossed a handful of smoke, and the smoke gathered around Orley like a swarm of bees and went for his eyes, but Orley’s lance of fire licked out, catching Gas-a-ho virtually undefended. The shaman dropped.
Looks-at-Clouds was coming from farther downstream, a line of lightning connecting hir to Orley, and hir shield of intertwined vines of green and gold fell between Orley and his prey.
Orley batted hir shield aside and raised his axe.
Irene was spanning her crossbow. She couldn’t tear her eyes away as the malevolent thing’s axe went back.
Nothing could save him.
The axe fell like a bolt from the darkness, and Aneas’s head parted from his shoulders and his blood soaked the ice at the edge of the stream, and Orley roared, still trying to wipe his enemy’s blood from his eyes.
Gabriel felt his brother fall out of the choir, and Gas-a-ho, too. And on the other flank, he felt the weight of the assault on Albinkirk.
Gavin looked at him.
“It’s a race now,” Gabriel said. “Whether they can collapse our flanks, or we can eat their center. A contest of wills.” He blinked. “Aneas is dead.”
“Jesus,” Gavin said.
“Steady,” said the emperor.
At his feet, the vast and terrible legions flowed over the fields of Albinkirk, and the workings of a century of dark sorceries played over the gilt and green and red baubles of the alliance shields.
The gonnes roared on, ripping the dark cloth of the enemy and leaving eddies and ripples of death and blood. Irks older than the oldest maples were struck dead by a weapon that flew so fast as to seem like hermeticism or sorcery, except that it left no trace in the aethereal and no enemy could raise a shield fast enough to respond.
The wave front of the bogglins came to the irrigation ditch, once a tiny stream, that ran across the fields north of the road. It was lined in dark grasses and sunk five feet below the level of the fields, and it was invisible to those who did not know it was there.
The bogglins began to fill it with corpses.
They keened in despair, and the gonnes ripped away their lives.
But Ash had prepared for this. Trolls came forward from the reserve and threw bridges across, slabs of slate, and the irks and bogglins flooded forward.
“Grape!” called Edmund. His first command.
Ultima Ratio was a great gonne. She took a thirty-pound load of half-pound iron balls and, in addition, a six-pound load of lead balls, ten to the pound. Her gonne captain saw her loaded with love, and then depressed the muzzle so that the load of grape would strike just at the leading edge of the now charging mass of bogglins.
Ultima Ratio fired. Less than a thi
rd of a second later, sixty half-pound balls struck, all together, spread about eight inches each from the other over an ellipse fifteen feet long and seven feet wide. Everything in that ellipse died, and then everything behind it to a depth of forty feet, and then the balls began to bounce off the hard ground.
Off to the left, Duke, captaining his favorite gonne, put his sights on a cave troll three hundred paces away and slapped his porte-fire down.
The cave troll dropped like a sack of wheat, its torso penetrated in the front and exploded out the back from the pressure, spraying the stone troll behind him with a lethal hail of shattered stone.
Another discharge from the second cannon, and a dozen more cave trolls became sticky gravel.
In front of him, the Taxiarchoi were ordering their spearmen to stand up. They took their great round shields on their shoulders and began to lock up, eight deep, so close that an imp could not run through their legs.
The enemy was one hundred paces away.
The gonnes were four feet above them, and their sound was deafening.
The firing roared on, and on, and the enemy, driven by the will of their dark master, ran forward into the hail of shot. They died, and died; they fell over the entrails of their mates and they crawled through the mud of their own juices in the deep soil, and they slipped in the snow, but every heartbeat brought them closer to the unflinching line of the Morean spears.
The spears came down, all together and the wall of spear points faced the oncoming warbands.
Ash’s attack was spread across the fields of Penrith; his slaves, the subjects of his will, filled almost a square mile with desperate, terrible creatures. The gonnes had killed a little fewer than one in twenty of them.
But they had no formation, and the rips and tears inflicted by the great iron balls were irreparable; the creatures who survived the bombardment were more interested in closing with their enemies than in any formation.
And then the choir of alliance magisters began to cast.