Bragi meant to compel Feng to overcome an endless series of redoubts in close fighting, under a continuous arrowstorm. Attrition was his game.
Marco said there would be twenty-eight legions supported by a hundred thousand auxiliaries from Argon, Throyes, and the steppe tribes. Ragnarson couldn’t hope to turn such a horde. He aimed only to cut them up so badly they would have bitter going after they broke through.
Bragi wasn’t watching the work. He stared eastward, over the peaks, at a pale streamer of smoke.
It was a signal from Maisak. While it persisted the fortress held.
Ragnarson used mirror telegraphy and carrier pigeons too.
Shinsan had learned. The Tervola brought dismantled siege engines. For a week they pounded Maisak. The Marena Dimura reported encounters with battered patrols which had forced the Maisak gauntlet. They finished those patrols.
Those little victories hardly mattered. The patrols were forerunner driblets of the deluge.
“Smoke’s gone!” Liakopulos ejaculated.
The mirror telegraph went wild.
“Damn! Damn-damn-damn! So soon.” Ragnarson turned his back, waited for the telegraphists to interpret.
It was a brief, unhappy message. Maisak betrayed, Tenn Horst.
The last pigeon bore a note almost as terse. Enemy led over mountains into caverns. ims! message. Good luck. Adam TennHorst.
It spoke volumes. Treachery again. Radeachar hadn’t rooted it all out.
“Varthlokkur, have Radeachar check everybody out again. A traitor in the right place here would be worth a legion to them.”
The weather was no ally either. A warm front accelerated the snow melt. Bragi’s patrols reported increasingly savage skirmishes.
Then Ko Feng attacked.
Two things were immediately apparent. Shinsan had indeed noted the lessons of the previous battle. And the Tervola hadn’t understood them.
Cavalry had ruined O Shing. So cavalry came down the Gap, steppe riders who had come for the plunder of the west.
Ragnarson countered with knights. Though grossly outnum-bered, they sent the nomads flying, amazed at the invincibility of western riders.
Three days later it was an infantry assault by the undisciplined hordes of Argon and Throyes, Again the knights carried the day. The slaughter was terrible. Hakes Blittschau, an Altean commanding Ragnarson’s horse, finally broke off the pursuit in sheer exhaustion.
Feng tried again with every horseman he could muster. Then he used his auxiliary infantry again. Neither attack passed Blittschau. The troops in the redoubts grumbled that they would never see the enemy.
When knights fought men untrained and unequipped to meet them, casualty ratios favored the armored men ridiculously. In five actions Blittschau killed more than fifty thousand of the enemy.
Ravens darkened the skies over the Gap. When the wind blew from the east the stench was enough to gag a maggot. After each engagement the Ebeler ran red.
Blittschau lost fewer than a thousand men. Many of those would recover from their wounds. Armor and training made the difference.
“Feng must be cra/y,” Ragnarson mused. “Or wants to rid himself of his allies.”
Liakopulos replied, “He’s just stupid. He hasn’t got one notion how to run an army.”
“A Tervola?”
“Put it this way. He’s not flexible. The pretty woman. Mist. Says they call him The Hammer. Just keeps pounding till something gives. If it doesn’t, he gets a bigger hammer. He’s been holding that back.”
“I know.” Twenty-eight legions. One hundred seventy thousand or more of the best soldiers in the world.
When Feng swung that hammer, things would break.
The legions came.
The drums began long before dawn, beating a cadence which shuddered the mountains, which throbbed like the heartbeat of the world.
The soldiers in the works knew. They would meet the real enemy now, dread fighters who had been defeated but once since the founding of the legions.
Ragnarson gave Blittschau every man and horse available.
The sun rose, and the sun set.
Hakes Blittschau returned to Karak Strabger shortly before midnight, on a stretcher. His condition reflected that of his command.
“Wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it,” Blittschau croaked as Wachtel cleansed his wounds. “They wouldn’t give an inch. Let us hit them, then went after the horses till they got us on the ground.” He rolled his head in a negative. “We must’ve killedtwenty.... No, thirty, maybe even forty thousand. They wouldn’t budge.”
“I know. You can’t panic them. You have to panic the Tervola.” Ragnarson was depressed. Feng had broken his most valuable weapon. Blittschau had salvaged but five hundred men.
The drums throbbed on. The hammer was about to fall again.
It struck at dawn, from one wall of the canyon to the other. Stubbornly, systematically, the soldiers in black neutralized the traps and redoubts, filled the trenches, demolished the barriers, breached the palisades and earthworks. They didn’t finesse it. They simply kept attacking, kept killing.
Ragnarson’s archers kept the skies dark. His swordsmen and spearmen fought till they were ready to drop. Feng allowed them respites only when he rotated fresh legions into the cauldron.
The sun dropped behind the Kapenrungs. Bragi sighed. Though the drums sobbed on, the fighting died. His captains began arriving with damage reports.
Tomorrow, he judged, would be the last day.
The archers had been the stopper. Corpses feathered with shafts littered the canyon floor. But the arrows were nearly gone. The easterners allowed no recovery of spent shafts.
Mist was optimistic, though. “Feng has gone his limit,” she said. “He can’t waste men like this. The Tervola won’t tolerate it. Soldiers are priceless, unlike auxiliaries.”
She was correct. The Tervola rebelled. But when they confronted Feng they found....
He had yielded command to a maskless man named Badalamen. With Badalamen were two old-timers: a bent one in a towering rage, and another with dull eyes. And with them, the Escalonian sorcerer, Magden Norath.
The bent man was more angry with himself than with Feng. His tardiness had given Feng time to decimate Shinsan’s matchless army.
Feng grudgingly yielded to the Pracchia. The transition was smooth. Most Tervola chosen to come west were pledged to the Hidden Kingdom.
At midnight the voice of the drums changed.
Ragnarson exploded from a restless sleep, rushed to his parapet. Shinsan was moving. No precautions could completely squelch the clatter.
Reports arrived. His staff, his wizards, his advisors crowdedonto the parapet. No one could guess why, but Shinsan was abandoning positions they had spent all day taking. Sir Tury Hawkwind and Haaken attacked on their own initiative.
“Mist. Varthlokkur. Give me a hint,” Ragnarson demanded.
“Feng’s been replaced,” Mist said.
“Yeah? Okay. But why back down?”
“Oh!” Varthlokkur said softly.
Mist sighed. “The Power....”
“Oh, Hell!”
It was returning. Ragnarson decided he was done for.
The Unborn streaked across the night. Beneath it dangled Visigodred. After delivering the shaken wizard, it communed with Varthlokkur. “Gather the Circle!” Varthlokkur thundered. “Now! Now! Hurry!”
The monster whipped away too swiftly for the eye to follow.
Visigodred said, “Something is coming down the Gap. Creatures this world has never before seen. The ones Marco said turned Argon’s war around. We can’t stop them.”
“We will!” Varthlokkur snapped. “The Unborn will! We have to.” He, Visigodred, and Mist staggered. “The Power!” they gasped.
“Clear the parapet,” Varthlokkur groaned, handling it more easily than the others. “We need it.”
Kierle the Ancient arrived, followed by the Thingand Stojan Dusan. Radeachar rocketed in wit
h The Egg of God. Ragnarson hustled his people downstairs.
He didn’t want to stay either. There was little he dreaded so much as a wizard’s war. But his pride wouldn’t let him turtle himself.
Screams erupted from the canyon.
“They’re here. The savan dalage” said Visigodred. “Varth-lokkur. Unleash the Unborn before they gut us.” He threw his hands overhead, chanted. A light-spear stabbed from his cupped hands. He moved them as though he were directing a mirror telegrapher. The earth glowed where the light fell. “Too weak,” he gasped.
Here, there, Ragnarson glimpsed the invaders. Some were tall, humanoid, fanged and clawed, like the trolls of Trolledyn-gian legends. Some were squat reptilian things that walked like men. Some slithered and crawled. Among them were a hundred or so tall men who bore ordinary weapons. They reminded him of Badalamen.
And there was something more. Something shapeless, something which avoided light like death itself.
Radeacher swooped and seized one, soared into the night. Ragnarson saw an ill-defined mass wriggling against the stars.
“Savan dalage,” Visigodred repeated. “They can’t be killed.”
Radeachar departed at an incredible speed.
“He’ll haul it so far away it’ll take months to get back,” Varthlokkur said.
“How many?” Ragnarson asked.
“Ten. Fifteen. Be quiet. It begins.”
A golden glow began growing up the Gap.
All the Circle had arrived. They babbled softly, in their extremity even welcoming Mist to their all-male club. This was no time for masculine prerogatives. Their lives and souls were on the gaming table.
Radeachar reappeared, undertook another deportation.
Ragnarson briefly retreated to the floor below, where a half dozen messengers clamored for his attention.
His formations were shambled. His captains wanted orders. The troops were about to panic.
“Stand fast,” he told them. “Just hang on. Our wizards are at work.”
Back on the parapet he found the human sorcerers all imitating Visigodred, using light to herd the savan dalage.
The Egg, Thing, and Zindahjira concentrated on the remaining monsters.
“The men-things,” Zindahjira boomed. “They’re immune to the Power.”
Ragnarson remembered Badalamen’s indifference to Radea-char.
“They’re human,” he observed. “Sword and spear will stop them.”
True. His men were doing so. But, like Badalamen, the creatures were incredible fighters, as far beyond the ordinary soldier of Shinsan as he was beyond most westerners.
“Arrows!” he thundered from the parapet. “Get the bowmen over there!” No one heard. He ducked downstairs to the messengers.
The struggle wore a new face when he returned. The Tervola had unleashed a sorcery of their own.
At first he believed it the monster O Shing had raised during
First Baxendala. The Gosik of Aubuchon. But this became a burning whirlwind with eyes.
Mist responded as she had then. A golden halo formed in the night. Within its confines an emerald sky appeared. From that a vast, hideous face leered. Talons gripped the insides of the circle.
The halo spun, descended. The ugly face opened a gross mouth, began biting.
The screams of the ensuing contest would haunt Bragi’s dreams forever. Yet the struggle soon became a sideshow. Other Tervola-horrors rose. Ragnarson’s sorcerers unleashed terrors in response.
Through it all the Unborn pursued its deportations in a workmanlike manner.
The whirlwind and halo rampaged up and down the Gap, destroying friend and foe. Once they crashed into Seidentop, the mountain opposite Karak Strabger. The face of the mountain slid into the canyon. In moments the defense suffered more than in all the previous fighting.
Shinsan tasted the bitterness of loss too. Stojan Dusan conjured a seven-headed demon bigger than a dozen elephants, with as many legs as a centipede. Each was a weapon.
“It’s the battle for Tatarian all over again,” someone murmured. Ragnarson turned. Valther had come up. He had served Escalon in its ill-fated war with Shinsan.
The mountains burned as forests died. Smoke made breathing difficult.
“Pull out while you can,” Valther advised. “Use this to make your retreat.”
“No.”
“Dead men can’t fight tomorrow. Every death is a brick in his house of victory.” Valther stabbed a finger.
High above, barely discernible, a winged horse drifted on updrafts.
“That damned old man again,” Bragi growled.
Visigodred’s apprentice suddenly struck from even higher. The winged horse slipped aside at the last instant. Marco kept dropping till Bragi was sure he would smash into a flaming mountainside. But the roc whistled along Seidentop’s slope, used its momentum to hurl itslef into the undraft over another fire.
Surprise gone, Marco tried maneuver. And proved he hadpaid attention to his necromantic studies. His sorceries scarred the night air. The winged horse weaved and dodged and fought for altitude.
Ragnarson asked Valther, “Who’s winning? The battle.”
“Us. Mist and Varthlokkur make the difference. Watch them.”
Oh? Then why the admonition to get out?
They were holding the Tervola at bay and still grabbing moments for other work. Varthlokkur developed the Winter-storm construct. Mist opened and guided another, smaller halo. It cruised over the defensive works, snatching the creatures of Magden Norath. It even gobbled one savan dalage. Just one.
“Must have a bad taste,” Ragnarson muttered sardonically.
Radeachar returned from a trip east and was unable to find another unkillable. He joined the assault on the Tervola.
“We’ve got them now,” Valther crowed, and again Bragi wondered at his earlier pessimism.
The Tervola went to the defensive. Above, Marco harried the winged horse from the sky.
But, as Valther had meant, that old man always had another bolt in his quiver.
Fires floated majestically in from the eastern night, from beyond the Kapenrungs, like dozens of ragged-edged little moons.
Mist spied them first. “Dragons!” she gasped.
“So many,” Valther whispered. “Must be all that’re left.”
Most dragons had perished in the forgotten Nawami Crusades.
Straight for the castle they came. The glow of their eyes crossed the night like racing binary stars. One went for Marco. He ran like hell.
The Unborn took over for him.
The leaders of those winged horrors were old and cunning. They remembered the Crusades. They remembered what sorcery had done to them then, when they had served both causes, fighting one another more often than warlocks and men. They remembered how to destroy creatures like those atop the castle.
“Get out of here!” Valther shouted. “You can’t handle this.”
Bragi agreed. But he dallied, watching the saurians spiral in, watching Radeachar drive the winged horse to earth behind Shinsan’s lines.
The Unborn turned on its dragon harrier.
The beast’s head exploded. Its flaming corpse careened down the sky, crashed, thrashing, into a blazing pine grove. Flaming trunks flung about. A terrible stench filled the Gap.
Varthlokkur completed his Winterstorm construct as a dragon reached the tower.
Ragnarson dove downstairs, collecting bruises and a scorching as dragon’s breath pursued him.
“Messengers, Valther,” he gasped. “You were right. It’s time to cut our losses.”
Ragnarson’s army, covered by the witch-war, withdrew in good order. By dawn its entirety had evacuated Baxendala. Shinsan had redeemed its earlier defeat.
The wizard’s war ended at sunrise, in a draw. Kierle the Ancient, Stojan Dusan, and the Egg had perished. The others scarcely retained the strength to drag themselves away.
Radeachar had salvaged them by driving the dragons from the sky.
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The Tervola were hurt too. Though they tried, they hadn’t the strength or will to follow up.
The bent old man ordered Badalamen to catch Ragnarson, but Badalamen couldn’t break Bragi’s rear guard.
Ragnarson had bought time. Yet he had erred in not trying to hold.
As he debouched from the Gap he encountered eastbound allies from Hellin Daimiel, Libiannin, Dunno Scuttari, the Guild, and several of the Lesser Kingdoms. Auric Lauder commanded about thirty thousand men. Ragnarson borrowed Lauder’s knights to screen his retreat.
He didn’t try correcting himself. Baxendala was irrevocably lost. Shinsan still outnumbered him three to one, with better troops.
Lauder followed the example of previous allies and accepted Bragi as commander.
In thought, Ragnarson began laying the groundwork for the next phase, Fabian, accepting battle only in favorable circumstances, playing for time, trying to wear the enemy down.
THIRTY-TWO: Defeat. Defeat. Defeat.
Fahrig. Vorgreberg. Lake Turntine. Staake-Armstead, also called the Battles of the Fords. Trinity Hills, in Altea. The list of battles lost lengthened. Detached legions, supported by Magden Norath’s night things, conquered Volstokin and Anstokin. Badalamen, by slim margins, kept overcoming the stubborn resistance of Ragnarson’s growing army.
He reinforced his northern spearhead. It drove through Ruderin and curved southward into Korhana and Vorhangs. Haaken Blackfang, with a hasty melange of knights, mercenar-ies, and armed peasants, stopped the drive at Aucone. Ragnerson extricated himself from envelopment in Altea. Badalamen ran a spearhead south, through Tamerice, hoping eventually to meet the northern thrust at the River Scarlotti, behind Bragi.
Reskird Kildragon harried the Tamerice thrust but refused battle. Tamerice’s army had been decimated in Ravelin.
Then Badalamen paused to reorganize and refit. He faced Ragnarson across a plain in Cardine just forty miles short of the sea and cutting the west in two.
In the Kapenrungs, Megelin bin Haroun chose to ignore the threat behind him. He launched another campaign against Al Rhemish and El Murid.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” Ragnarson swore when the news arrived. “Don’t he have a lick of sense?” He had counted on Megelin thinking like his father, had anticipated that the Royalists would conduct guerrilla war behind Badalamen’s main force.