The Fall of Dragons

From the glowing bubbles emerged streams of light; cascades of stars; balls of lightning. They targeted anything that had previously targeted them, and their calculations were remorseless; in the aethereal the daemons and irks and wights who could harness ops were identified, coded, and passed as targets to the dozen casters who specialized in this.

  The center of the Morean line began to cheer first. They saw as the whole ink-black shield covering their foes burst, lashed with lightning, and collapsed, so that a web of fire fell into the center of the enemy and there was a terrible popping sound and the screams of the wounded and maimed floated in the cold air.

  Then the Brogat Milice, off toward Penrith, who’d stood a whole day of attacks with little or no hermetical cover and then stood their ground all night against not-dead, began to roar their approval as a curtain of rose-gold closed over them, and a cyclone of raw ops burst over their enemies.

  The fastest bogglins were dying on the spears of the Thrakians.

  For the rest, their shields and covers and protections and wards were being stripped away, their casters butchered.

  And off to the left of Penrith, the earth began to shake.

  There was almost a mile of open ground to the east of Penrith. There had been almost no fighting there; Ash’s great effort had almost ignored it. Farther east, Mogon and her people struggled to hold the bridge over Lily Burn.

  Battles have strategies, and times, and places. Mogon had won hers. Orley would force the line of the Lily Burn, but it was too late.

  Because in that mile gap waited Pavalo Payam and five thousand Mamluks, and Lord Gregario and all the chivalry of Alba who could be mustered, and Du Corse and all the knights of Galle. All told, there were twelve thousand armoured men and women, behind four great standards.

  The Mamluks had all dismounted at sunrise, laid their prayer rugs on the snow, knelt, and prayed. And then they stood by their horses while the Christian priests moved along the lines of knights, and the knights and squires took their communion in their mouths and prayed.

  And when Edmund’s gonnes were belching grape, they all mounted, so that it might have appeared that a ripple of light almost a mile long was flickering in the fields of snow.

  Payam’s men, the best horsemen and the best drilled, had the hardest task, the outside of the wheel, the wheel of a line a mile long. It took them long minutes while the gonnes fired, while Thrakians died, and trolls, and irks and bogglins and men and women died, and then they were in place, swinging like a great door against Ash’s mighty center.

  Payam raised his golden lance.

  The Mamluks gave a great shout.

  The Galles answered it.

  A single trumpet sounded, and the whole line began to rumble forward into the flank of Ash’s attack.

  Gavin turned to speak to his brother, and found that he was gone.

  So was Ariosto.

  “So this is the battle,” he said to no one in particular. On the hill, unengaged in all the carnage, there stood 1Exrech’s legions, and some Albin militia, who were delighted by their role as spectators, and a hundred knights kept as his last reserve: Ser Ricar and the royal household.

  Gavin walked over to 1Exrech, his sabatons gathering snow. To the west, the storm line was sweeping over Lissen Carak. A wind was picking up.

  “Let’s attack their center,” Gavin said.

  “Concur,” 1Exrech said. He made the mandible sign of pleasure.

  The spear bogglins lowered their spears.

  “We will cover you,” Gavin said. He waved at the knights. Ser Ricar slapped his visor down, and the household knights gave a cheer.

  “Good,” said the wight.

  Gavin was shocked at how many of them there were. And they kept coming, marching over the hill. He was leaving Albinkirk to its fate. But for once he agreed with his brother. This was the battle.

  This was their last throw.

  Well to the north, safe from harm, Ash circled the highest peaks.

  His slave sorcerers were being smashed flat.

  It was time to exert himself.

  Because if you want something done right, you must do it yourself, Ash said inside one of his many minds.

  Things were dark and muddled in there, and for the first time, he began to really wonder why.

  It took a moment’s attention. He was flying south, and the last of the Adnacrags was passing under his wings. The storm front would have an effect; it was huge, swollen with the dark dust of the western volcanoes by a delicious irony that he savoured even as he sent a ghost of himself dashing through all the corridors of his mind …

  Harmodius. He is here, and he has hurt me.

  And so has Thorn …

  Just south of Helewise’s manor house there were fields full of stubble, the wheat already harvested and gleaned, and beyond them a hill, the tallest hill for a mile or so, which gave the manor its name: Middle Hill.

  The Duchess of Venike had rolled the scarecrows up the hill in the darkness, after finishing the force they found to the north, and then she’d cleared the hill with her marines. Sauce had fed her troops as the morning began to brighten, and she held a frontage almost a mile wide, centered on Middle Hill. On her left, Conte Simone and his Beronese waited under the eaves of the forest with the Almain cavaliers and the other men and women from far off in the north of the Antica Terra. The hill was held by the scarecrows, who were, this morning, living proof that the army’s arsenal and logistics continued to function, as, while they stood in their ranks, wagons pulled in behind them and the front ranks began to don maille collars and breast plates made in Vrescia and Venike and now finally arriving.

  Behind them, around the gate, the company waited. Most of them were lying in ranks, on their packs, asleep, with their military cloaks over them against the snow. The casa waited with the company, and the officers of both gathered in knots, and then, against direct orders from Gabriel, began to drift up the hill to have a view.

  Because Middle Hill stood like a tower on a flat plain, and the view was wonderful and terrible, horrific and awesome.

  Bad Tom stomped up the long hill, already out of sorts because he’d discovered that his emperor was away, aloft on his flying beast, and not with his household, where Tom Lachlan wanted him.

  Ser Alison trudged up the hill, eager to fight.

  Ser Michael trudged up the hill, dejected to find that on the day for which he had helped prepare for so many years, his was such an inglorious role. And trying to ignore that he was secretly delighted to be safe, with Kaitlin safe, and their child safe, on the other side of the gate. And angry at his father’s treason, and saddened by it, too.

  And then the three of them crested the hill.

  Round hills can have several crests; a sort of dividing line at the top is what most people think of as the crest, the top. But to a soldier, the most important crest is the point from which you can see down the far slope; see, shoot, inflict death. Often from the very top, you cannot see more than a few yards, and then some far-off point. But from the military crest, you can see everything.

  The scarecrows had just staved off an uncoordinated attack. They stood, as solid as a wall of steel, and the ground between them and the military crest was littered with dead irks. Many were alive; some screamed out the last of their near immortality; an irk woman in beautiful maille lay curled around her mortal wound, weeping.

  Giselle, the duchess, walked over as the company’s officer cadre crossed the back of her position.

  “Good morning,” she said cheerfully. In her hands was a short, heavy spear with Mortirmir’s mark on the beautiful blade. “We just had a little entertainment.”

  Tom Lachlan was looking down into the beautiful eyes of the dying irk. Then he knelt, cradled her head, and cut her throat with his eating knife, which he kept razor sharp.

  In a moment, the look of pain faded from her eyes.

  “I may yet be sick o’ war,” he said harshly.

  Sauce was walking forward, picki
ng her way among the dead, who lay thick in front of the pikes. “Oh yes, you’re a big softie, you are,” she muttered. She used the needle-sharp butt of her own fighting spear to finish any wounded she passed; she was fastidious about it, but her face registered nothing but the annoyance of a woman who had to clean her spear later.

  Michael followed them. He didn’t even really see the carpet of dead.

  His eyes were on the battlefield.

  All the ground from Middle Hill to the Albin Ridge, almost three miles distant, was covered in battle. Most of it was full of Ash’s great assault; far to the south, the long line of magnificent, glowing hermetical shields glowed and shifted and sparkled in the red, red sun, and up on the Albin Ridge, there was a towering ward of green that glowed as if it was alive and crackled with lightning like a spring storm.

  And almost at his feet, the massed cavalry of the alliance had just started their charge.

  “Fewkin’ hell,” said Tom Lachlan. “He left us out. I want to be there!”

  Michael looked over the battle he had helped plan. “He wanted us here,” he said.

  Sauce shook her head. “Sweet Saviour of man,” she said, and touched the cross on her breastplate. “Payam is going to break their center.”

  Indeed, the alliance cavalry, by good fortune and careful planning, was attacking into a maelstrom of disorganization and hermetical failure; the dark shields were falling all across the three miles of the enemy front, and lashes of fire and ice and lightning and earth and pulses of superheated air wreaked catastrophe among Ash’s creatures. And into this struck the heavy cavalry of seven nations on a front almost a mile wide.

  “I want to be there,” Tom Lachlan said wistfully.

  Michael nodded. “We’re not done, Tom,” he said.

  And behind them, the wall of the storm front had passed Lissen Carak, where the garrison stood, fighting utter exhaustion; where Desiderata stood, looking fifty years old, in her chapel, and defied Ash yet again.

  “Break! Why will you not break!” screamed Ash.

  “You trained me too well,” Desiderata replied.

  And by the gate, No Head shook his head. He was smoking with his mates.

  “Greatest battle in the history o’ the world,” No Head said. “And we’re in fucking reserve. I can’t even see what’s goin’ on.”

  Tippit frowned. “Ha’e you lost yer noggin?” he asked. “Biggest battle in the fuckin’ history of the fuckin’ world, and we ain’t in it. An’ we get paid, any road. So shut yer gob. No one likes to fight.”

  “Tom Lachlan does,” muttered Smoke.

  “True. No one likes to fight ’cept Bad Tom and Sauce.” The pipe was passed. A flask of wine was going around, exceptional wine. Cully had brought it, and everyone knew it was the captain’s.

  “It ain’t right,” No Head insisted. “We fought all the battles. We faced all the fuckin’ foes. This is the end. Win or lose, and I say win.”

  “Do ye now?” Tippit asked, knocking the pipe out casually on the wood of his bow. “Sure we ain’t here to stop a rout?”

  “I can’t see, but I ha’e ears. Cavalry is charging. Deed is done. Haven’t launched a shaft.” No Head shrugged.

  Smoke shook his head. “You know what Wilful would say if he was here?”

  “Pass the fuckin’ pipe? Don’t hog the wine?” Tippit said.

  Smoke waved over the hill. “Nope. He’d say the most powerful warlock in seven worlds spent all his spare power on magicking our steel. An’ not for nothin’. He’d say, it’s not over until it’s over. He’d say, we’re being saved to face the fuckin’ dragon.”

  That brought a moment of silence.

  “Mark my words,” they all said together, but no one laughed.

  To all things, and all plans, there comes a day and a time, and a moment. Some never come to fruition; some plans eventuate in forms that are barely comprehensible to their designers, or bear fruit long after the initiator is cold clay.

  But to the lucky few that see great plans bloom under their own eyes, there is sometimes a moment when all is laid bare; when success is there to be grasped, and for the very most fortunate, there is a moment to savour the eternal moment of victory.

  And so it was given to Gabriel Muriens, high in the air over Lissen Carak. Below him, the storm, and beyond it, the success of the arms of the alliance. And Ash rushed into the maelstrom of defeat, in his last error, desperate to restore the balance of a battle already fatally lost.

  And indeed, to Gabriel, in that moment, came the knowledge of victory; that even if Ash achieved the destruction of every knight, every Mamluk, every militiaman and Thrakian spearman and free bogglin on the field, he would never take the gates. His day was done.

  Ash had failed. And now he intended to take them all with him into failure, and that had to be prevented.

  Gabriel reached into his memory palace, and motioned to Prudentia. “Banish the little working,” he said.

  “It is time,” she said. She smiled.

  In the real, Mortirmir’s disguise vanished, and Gabriel’s golden flesh burned like the fire of the sun.

  Gabriel took as long as a man might pray the paternoster to savour his victory.

  And then Ariosto took them across the line of the snow, and all the high thoughts fled as Gabriel rode a wild beast through the very edge of the storm.

  To Michael and the rest of them on Middle Hill, it was as if night was falling again, the storm front was so dark, and onto the fields of battle, coming from the north and flying very low, came the monstrous presence; the wave front of terror, the real presence of Ash, hundreds of paces long, his head alone the size of a tower, his neck, thin at a distance, still as thick as the height of three men; his body as long as a ship, or even two ships.

  And his terror had no allies; his own slaves ran, and so did many Mamluks and belted knights. Pavalo Payam stood his ground, and the horse under him, but many horses lost their wits and bolted for the woods, and even the Thrakian veterans of twenty battlefields knelt and hid their heads from the Black Drake in the sky.

  To Gavin, the Black Drake looked so vast that it seemed impossible. He did not lower his head; even as the bogglins in front of 1Exrech’s bogglins gave way, and the free bogglins fell on their faces in the snow churned to slush, and all hope fled, Gavin watched the dragon. He was afraid, but he had been afraid ever since he had lost a fight with a Gallish knight in an inn yard, and his humility was finally greater than his pride.

  And so he saw a golden spark against the black wall of the oncoming snowstorm. The light was like a meteor, and it burned like a little sun.

  Even at this distance, it resolved into a golden griffon, and on the back of the griffon was a knight all in gold and red. For a moment he hung like a sigil of chivalry in the dark air over the battlefield, and then the griffon stooped on its dark prey, and the wild screech of its war cry carried over the battlefield.

  On the Lily Burn, Irene shot her last bolt and stood with her back to one great maple and her cheek to another. Orley still raged among the brave Gallish knights and the rangers and Outwallers and bears who tried to hold the ford; a dozen Golden Bears lay dead, and his antlered men were crossing the mucky water on the corpses of their own dead, and behind them the whole host of Lissen Carak’s former besiegers clamoured to follow.

  Irene thought, Not all stories end happily. She wanted to cry.

  But she didn’t. Despite the end of all her hopes, she was a creature of duty, and despair was a waste of time. Instead, she dropped her now-useless latchet and drew the short, heavy sword that Ricar Lantorn had given her.

  Lantorn himself put a hand on her shoulder. “No blade touches yon,” he said. “Don’t waste yersel’.”

  And there, suddenly, was Looks-at-Clouds. “Do not die, Irene, merely because he died,” s/he said. “Let us end this Orley instead.”

  Looks-at-Clouds cast, and cast again, throwing fire and ice into Orley’s creatures. S/he tripped and baffled, rose and
dashed, and bought the rangers another breath, and another.

  And finally, s/he caught Orley’s attention. The huge dark stag-man rose on his hind feet, fire flickering from his human hands, and behind him, a new, dark wind whipped snow at Looks-at-Clouds and into the face of the rangers as the storm broke on them.

  Orley stepped into the edge of the woods, hands weaving blue fire, and he borrowed more of his master’s power. But he was still blinded by Aneas’s blood and Gas-a-ho’s viscous smoke.

  Redmede put a clothyard shaft into the black torso just above where a man’s heart would be. His shaft stuck, and Orley shuddered, but he came on, and Redmede turned and ran deeper into the wood.

  Almost blind, Orley blundered after him …

  Nita Qwan dropped on him from a tree. The Outwaller fell, and got his legs on the massive shoulders, staggering Orley. He took the blue knife from his sash and slammed it into his brother’s neck with all his might, and the blade snapped against Orley’s potency.

  Orley staggered back, slamming Nita Qwan into the trunk of a tree. Ribs broke.

  Fast as the wrestler he was, Nita Qwan threw his prisoner tie over his brother’s head. The rope had been woven by his wife, of her own hair; he’d used it to climb walls, to hang laundry, to drag a dead deer.

  Now he used it as a garrote.

  He slipped his legs off Ota Qwan’s shoulders, if there was indeed any of Ota Qwan left, and he dropped, holding the rope. And then despite the massive pain in his sides and lungs, he kicked out, spinning, so that the rope tightened inexorably.

  Orley, or Ota Qwan, or the Son of Ash, slammed him into another tree. But now other hands were on his; Irene had leapt and caught the strangling rope, and Looks-at-Clouds was raining something on the dark captain’s front, and Redmede hacked at him with his sword, and Lily, the bear, pounded the sorcerer’s body with her talons, and he staggered, and staggered, and Nita Qwan hung on. Around them, the rangers surged forward, covering the fight; to the left, Tapio’s knights flung their exhausted mounts forward, and the Fairy Knight himself put his lance in Orley’s chest. It did not kill Orley, but slowed him.