Sagant must have seen the same from where he waited with the lancers. In actual numbers, the Barghast almost matched the foot-soldiers, and their ferocity was appalling. Darkness was swallowing the day, and the flashes of lightning from the west provided moments of frozen clarity as the battle was joined now on all sides—arrows lashing into the Barghast flanks in wave after wave. The plunging descent of Sagant and his lancers closed fast on the rearmost enemy warriors—who seemed indifferent to the threat at their backs as they pushed their comrades in front of them, clawing forward in a frenzy.
But that made sense—carve apart the Akryn legion and a way would be suddenly open before the Barghast, and in the ensuing chaos of the breakout the lancers would end up snarled with the foot-soldiers, and the archers would hunt uselessly in the gloom to make out foe from friend. All order, and with it command, would be lost.
She stared, still half-disbelieving, as the legion buckled. The Barghast had now formed a wedge, and it drove ever deeper.
Should the enemy push through and come clear, momentarily uncontested, they could wheel round and set weapons—they could even counter-attack, slaughtering disordered foot-soldiers and tangled lancers.
Inthalas turned to her thirty-odd scouts. ‘Ride with me!’ And she led them down the back slope of the ridge, cantering and then galloping, to bring her troop round opposite the likely fissure in the legion.
‘When the Barghast fight clear—we charge, do you understand? Arrows and then sabres—into the tip of the wedge. We tumble them, we slow them, we bind them—if with our own dead horses and our own dying bodies, we bind them!’
She could see a third of a wing of horse-archers pulling clear to the east—they were responding to the threat, but they might not be ready in time.
Damn these barbarians!
Inthalas, third daughter of the Sceptre, rose on her stirrups, gaze fixed on the writhing ranks of the legion. My children, your mother will not be returning home. Never again to see your faces. Never—
A sudden impact sent the horses staggering. The ground erupted—and she saw figures wheeling through the air, flung to one side as the storm struck the flank of the hills to the west, struck and tumbled over those hills, swallowing them whole. Inthalas, struggling to stay on her mount, stared in horror as a seething crest of enormous boulders and jagged rocks lifted over the nearest ridge—
Something huge and solid loomed within the nearest cloud—towering to fill half the sky. And its base was carving a bow-wave before it, as if tearing up the earth itself. The avalanche poured over the crest and down the slope of the basin in a roaring wave.
An entire wing of horse-archers was simply engulfed beneath the onslaught, and then the first of the broken boulders—many bigger than a trader’s wagon—crashed into the milling mass of Barghast and Akryn. As the rocks rolled and bounced through the press, pieces of crushed, smeared bodies spun into the air.
At that moment the lightning struck. Lashing, actinic blades ripping out from the dark, heaving cloud, cutting blackened paths through Sagant’s lancers and the clumps of reeling foot-soldiers. The air was filled with burning fragments—bodies lit like torches—men, women, horses—lightning danced from iron to iron in a crazed, terrifying web of charred destruction. Flesh burst in explosions of boiling fluid. Hair ignited like rushes—
Someone was shrieking in her ear. Inthalas turned, and then gestured—they had to get away. Away from the storm, away from the slaughter—they had to—
Deafening white light. Agony, and then—
As if a god’s sword had slashed across the hills on the other side of the valley, not a single ridge remained. Something vast and inexorable had pushed those summits down into the valley, burying the Snakehunter camp in a mass of deadly rubble. Here and there, Tool could see, remnants were visible among the shattered boulders—torn sections of canvas and hide, snarled shreds of clothing, guy-rope fetishes and feather-bundles, splintered shafts of ridge-poles—and there had been mangled flesh once, too, although now only bleached bones remained, broken, crushed, jutting—yet worse, to Tool’s mind, was the black hair, torn loose from flaps of scalp by the beaks of crows, and now wind-blown over the entire slope before them.
Riggis had shouldered aside a speechless Bakal and now glared down into that nightmarish scene. After a moment he shook his huge frame and spat. ‘This is our enemy, Warleader? Bah! An earthquake! Shall we war against the rocks and soil, then? Stab the hills? Bleed the rivers? You have led us to this? Hoping for what? That we beg you to take us away from an angry earth?’ He drew his tulwar. ‘Enough wasting our time. Face me, Onos T’oolan—I challenge your right to lead the White Face Barghast!’
Tool sighed. ‘Use your eyes, Riggis. What shifting of the earth leaves no cracks? Pushes to one side hilltops without touching their roots? Drives three—possibly more—furrows across the plain, each one converging on this valley, each one striking for the heart of the Snakehunter camp?’ He pointed to the north channel of the valley. ‘What earthquake cuts down fleeing Barghast in the hundreds? See them, Riggis—that road of bones?’
‘Akryn raiders, taking advantage of the broken state of the survivors. Answer my challenge, coward!’
Tool studied the enormous warrior. Not yet thirty, his belt crowded with trophies. He turned to the others and raised his voice, ‘Do any of you challenge Riggis and his desire to be Warleader of the White Face Barghast?’
‘He is not yet Warleader,’ growled Bakal.
Tool nodded. ‘And should I kill Riggis here, now, will you draw your weapon and voice your challenge to me, Bakal?’ He scanned the others. ‘How many of you will seek the same? Shall we stand here over the broken graveyard of the Snakehunter clan and spill yet more Barghast blood? Is this how you will honour your fallen White Faces?’
‘They will not follow you,’ Riggis said, his eyes bright. ‘Unless you answer my challenge.’
‘Ah, and so, if I do answer you, Riggis, they will then follow me?’
The Senan warrior’s laugh was derisive. ‘I am not yet ready to speak for them—’
‘You just did.’
‘Spar no more with empty words, Onos Toolan.’ He widened his stance and readied his heavy-bladed weapon, teeth gleaming amidst his braided beard.
‘Were you Warleader, Riggis,’ Tool said, still standing relaxed, hands at his sides, ‘would you slay your best warriors simply to prove your right to rule?’
‘Any who dared oppose me, yes!’
‘Then, you would command out of a lust for power, not out of a duty to your people.’
‘My finest warriors,’ Riggis replied, ‘would find no cause to challenge me in the first place.’
‘They would, as soon as they decided to disagree with you, Riggis. And this would haunt you, in the back of your mind. With every decision you made, you would find yourself weighing the risks, and before long you would gather to yourself an entourage of cohorts—the ones whose loyalty you have purchased with favours—and you would sit like a spider in the centre of your web, starting at every tremble of the silk. How well can you trust your friends, knowing how you yourself bought them? How soon before you find yourself swaying to every gust of desire among your people? Suddenly, that power you so hungered for proves to be a prison. You seek to please everyone and so please no one. You search the eyes of those closest to you, wondering if you can trust them, wondering if their smiles are but lying masks, wondering what they say behind your back—’
‘Enough!’ Riggis roared, and then charged.
The flint sword appeared as if conjured in Tool’s hands. It seemed to flicker.
Riggis staggered to one side, down on to one knee. His broken tulwar thumped to the ground four paces away, the warrior’s hand still wrapped tight about the grip. He blinked down at his own chest, as if looking for something, and blood ran from the stump of his wrist—ran, but the flow was ebbing. With his remaining hand he reached up to touch an elongated slit in his boiled-leather hauberk, from whic
h the faint glisten of blood slowly welled. A slit directly above his heart.
He looked up at Tool, perplexed, and then sat back.
A moment later, Riggis fell on to his side, and no further movement came from him.
Tool faced Bakal. ‘Do you seek to be Warleader, Bakal? If so, you can have it. I yield command of the White Face Barghast. To you’—he turned to the others—‘to any of you. I will be the coward you want me to be. For what now comes, someone else shall be responsible—not me, not any more. In my last words as Warleader, I say this: gather the White Face Barghast, gather all the clans, and march to the Lether Empire. Seek sanctuary. A deadly enemy has returned to these plains, an ancient enemy. You are in a war you cannot win. Leave this land and save your people. Or remain, and the White Faces shall all die.’ He ran the tip of his sword through a tuft of grass, and then slung it back into the sheath beneath his left arm. ‘A worthy warrior lies dead. The Senan has suffered a loss this day. The fault is mine. Now, Bakal, you and the others can squabble over the prize, and those who fall shall not have me to blame.’
‘I do not challenge you, Onos Toolan,’ said Bakal, licking dry lips.
Tool flinched.
In the silence following that, not one of the other warriors spoke.
Damn you, Bakal. I was almost . . . free.
Bakal spoke again, ‘Warleader, I suggest we examine the dead at the end of the valley, to determine what manner of weapon cut them down.’
‘I will lead the Barghast from this plain,’ Tool said.
‘Clans will break away, Warleader.’
‘They already are doing so.’
‘You will have only the Senan.’
‘I will?’
Bakal shrugged. ‘There is no value in you killing a thousand Senan warriors. There is no value in challenging you—I have never seen a blade sing so fast. We shall be furious with you, but we shall follow.’
‘Even if I am a leader with no favours to grant, Bakal, no loyalty I would purchase from any of you?’
‘Perhaps that has been true, Onos Toolan. In that, you have been . . . fair. But it need not remain so . . . empty. Please, you must tell us what you know of this enemy—who slays with rocks and dirt. We are not fools who will blindly oppose what we cannot hope to defeat—’
‘What of the prophecies, Bakal?’ Tool then smiled wryly at the warrior’s scowl.
‘Ever open to interpretation, Warleader. Will you speak to us now?’
Tool gestured at the valley below. ‘Is this not eloquent enough?’
‘Buy our loyalty with the truth, Onos Toolan. Gift us all with an even measure.’ Yes, this is how one leads. Anything else is suspect. Every other road proves a maze of deceit and cynicism. After a moment, he nodded. ‘Let us look upon the fallen Snakehunters.’
The sun was low on the horizon when the two scouts were brought into Maral Eb’s presence where he sat beside a dung fire over which skewers of horse meat sizzled. The scouts were both young and he did not know their names, but the excitement he observed in their faces awakened his attention. He pointed to one. ‘You shall speak, and quickly now—I am about to eat.’
‘A Senan war-party,’ the scout said.
‘Where?’
‘We were the ones backtracking the Snakehunters’ trail, Warchief. They are camped in a hollow not a league from here.’
‘How many?’
‘A hundred, no more than that. But, Warchief, there is something else—’
‘Out with it!’
‘Onos Toolan is with them.’
Maral Eb straightened. ‘Are you certain? Escorted by a mere hundred? The fool!’
His two younger brothers came running at his words and Maral Eb grinned at them. ‘Stir the warriors—we eat on the march.’
‘Are you sure of this, Maral?’ his youngest brother asked.
‘We strike,’ the warchief snarled. ‘In darkness. We kill them all. But be certain every warrior understands—no one is to slay Tool. Wound him, yes, but not unto death—if anyone gets careless I will have him or her skinned alive and roasted over a fire. Now, quickly—the gods smile down upon us!’
The Barahn warchief led his four thousand warriors across the rolling plains at a ground-devouring trot. One of the two scouts padded twenty paces directly ahead, keeping them to the trail, whilst others ranged further out on the flanks. The moon had yet to rise, and even when it did, it would be weak, shrouded in perpetual haze—these nights, the brightest illumination came from the jade streaks to the south, and that was barely enough to cast shadows.
The perfect setting for an ambush. None of the other tribes would ever know the truth—after all, with Tool and a hundred no doubt elite warriors dead the Senan would be crippled, and the Barahn Clan would achieve swift ascendancy once Maral Eb attained the status of Warleader over all the White Face Barghast. And was it not in every Barahn warrior’s interest to hide the truth? The situation was ideal.
Weapons and armour were bound, muffled against inadvertent noise, and the army moved in near silence. Before long, the lead scout hurried back to the main column. Maral Eb gestured and his warriors halted behind him.
‘The hollow is two hundred paces ahead, Warchief. Fires are lit. There will be pickets—’
‘Don’t tell me my business,’ Maral Eb growled. He drew his brothers closer. ‘Sagal, take your Skullsplitters north. Kashat, you lead your thousand south. Stay a hundred paces back from the pickets, low to the ground, and form into a six-deep crescent. There is no way we can kill those sentinels silently, so the surprise will not be absolute, but we have overwhelming numbers, so that will not matter. I will lead my two thousand straight in. When you hear my war-cry, brothers, rise and close. No one must escape, so leave a half hundred spread wide in your wake. It may be we will drive them west for a time, so be sure to be ready to wheel your crescents to close that route.’ He paused. ‘Listen well to this. Tonight, we break the most sacred law of the White Faces—but necessity forces our hand. Onos Toolan has betrayed the Barghast. He dishonours us. I hereby pledge to reunite the clans, to lead us to glory.’
The faces arrayed before him were sober, but he could see the gleam in their eyes. They were with him. ‘This night shall stain our souls black, my brothers, but we will spend the rest of our lives cleansing them. Now, go!’
Onos Toolan sat beside the dying fire. The camp was quiet, as his words of truth now sank into hearts like the flames, flaring and winking out.
The stretch of ages could humble the greatest of peoples, once all the self-delusions were stripped away. Pride had its place, but not at the expense of sober truth. Even back on Genabackis, the White Faces had strutted about as if unaware that their culture was drawing to an end; that they had been pushed into inhospitable lands; that farms and then cities rose upon ground they once held to be sacred, or rightly theirs as hunting grounds or pasture lands. All around them, the future showed faces ghastlier and more deadly than anything white paint could achieve—when Humbrall Taur had led them here, to this continent, he had done so in fullest comprehension of the extinction awaiting his Barghast should they remain on Genabackis, besieged by progress.
Prophecies never touched on such matters. By nature, they were proclamations of egotism, rife with pride and bold fates. Humbrall Taur had, however, managed a clever twist or two in making use of them.
Too bad he is gone—I would rather have stood at his side than in his place. I would rather—
Tool’s breath caught and he lifted his head. He reached out and settled one hand down on the packed earth, and then slowly closed his eyes. Ah, Hetan . . . my children . . . forgive me.
The Imass rose, turned to the nearest other fire. ‘Bakal.’
The warrior looked over. ‘Warleader?’
‘Draw your dagger, Bakal, and come to me.’
The warrior did not move for a moment, and then he rose, sliding the gutting knife from its scabbard. He walked over, cautious, uncertain.
My warri
ors . . . enough blood has been shed. ‘Drive the knife deep, directly under my heart. When I fall, begin shouting these words—as loud as you can. Shout “Tool is dead! Onos Toolan lies slain! Our Warleader lies dead!” Do you understand me, Bakal?’
The warrior, eyes wide, slowly backed away. Others had caught the words and were now rising, converging.
Tool closed on Bakal once again. ‘Be quick, Bakal—if you value your life and the lives of every one of your kin here. You must slay me—now!’
‘Warleader! I will not—’
Tool’s hands snapped out, closed on Bakal’s right hand and wrist.
The warrior gasped, struggled to tug free, but against Tool’s strength, he was helpless. The Imass pulled him close. ‘Remember—shout out my death, it is your only hope—’
Bakal sought to loosen his grip on his knife, but Tool’s huge, spatulate hand wrapped his own as would an adult’s a child’s. The other, closed round his wrist, dragged him inexorably forward.
The blade’s tip touched Tool’s leather armour.
Whimpering, Bakal sought to throw himself backward—but the imprisoned arm did not move. He tried to drop to his knees, and his elbow dislocated with a pop. He howled in pain.
The other warriors—who had stood frozen—suddenly rushed in.
But Tool gave them no time. He drove the dagger into his chest.
Sudden, blinding pain. Releasing Bakal’s wrist, he staggered back, stared down at the knife buried to its hilt in his chest.
Hetan, my love, forgive me.
There was shouting all round him now—horror, terrible confusion, and then, on his knees, Bakal lifted his head and met Tool’s gaze.
The Imass had lost his voice, but he sought to implore the man with his eyes. Shout out my death! Spirits take me—shout it out loud! He stumbled, lost his footing, and fell heavily on to his back.