Before they were all gone, four thousand throats roared, and fires went up all along Kip’s lines. Narrow trenches filled with pyrejelly had been cut between each of the widely spaced lines and they lit with a satisfying whoosh in long deep streaks as if a dragon had clawed the forest itself with talons of fire.
Then each man and woman dipped their torches—two for each—into the flames. Eight thousand torches to make it look as if they had eight thousand soldiers, for Kip had ordered that even the camp followers should march behind the army to appear to be part of it. Everyone could carry a couple of torches.
The Blood Robes’ officers would know the numbers were wrong, were impossible—but the men would see those supposedly impossible numbers with their own eyes.
Once a man is convinced to believe the impossible, it’s impossible to make him disbelieve it.
The pagan army was spread red and black across the floodplain to Kip’s sub-red vision. Only its commanders held torches. General Amrit Kamal, the Lord of the Air who led the enemy, had lined up his people in what had become a standard battle formation for the Blood Robes: centuries—each literally one hundred men—arrayed in lines. Battalions comprised of six centuries were deployed one hundred men wide and six lines deep. Between each two battalions was a century of drafters.
These, being so much more rare, were deployed in four lines of twenty-four men each. But only half of each drafting platoon was made up of drafters. Each drafter was paired with a shield bearer whose main duty was defending his drafter with a massive tower shield that took both hands to hold. Each shield bearer also carried a pistol, a knife, and a bich’hwa or a punch dagger that could be mounted on the wrist without interfering with their grip. The tower shields had a spiked bottom so they could be stabbed into the ground to provide cover.
Sometimes wights led the drafter centuries, blues or superviolets or yellows predominantly. Like the greens, orange and red and sub-red wights were generally uncontrollable and were instead unleashed to fight alone where they willed.
Kip’s army was facing Kamal’s six battalions and six drafter centuries. Probably an elite battalion was being held in reserve back at the camp where the blurriness of sub-red vision couldn’t even make it out against the darkness. So, just as reported, Kamal had more than four thousand men.
Against Kip’s two thousand. But Kip had the Ghosts.
Tallach came out of the woods behind Kip, wearing his special howdah harness. Cruxer floated up into his place with that infuriating grace of his. He’d decided Kip didn’t get to ride into battle alone ever again. Tallach didn’t seem to even notice the additional weight.
Putting on spectacles, Kip looked a question at Tallach—‘You ready?’—and the giant grizzly woofed. He was. Kip mounted the howdah beside Cruxer, and motioned for the bonfires behind him to be lit. Then Tallach stood on his hind legs, lifting Kip and Cruxer high in the air. The bonfire behind them made a huge silhouette for the enemy to see. Then Kip threw fire into the air from his own hands, and his forces advanced.
Kip and Tallach advanced more slowly than the rest. No need to put himself at risk too early. They were supposed to be a distraction. He didn’t want to arrive in musket or bow range before the battle was joined. That was the problem with arriving in battle on the back of a huge-ass bear: you made a huge-ass target.
His own soldiers were deployed in Kip’s modification of General Danavis’s model. The modifications had not been made because Kip thought he was an equal of the legend, but because he had an embarrassment of riches in having so many drafters. Danavis’s armies had maybe one warrior-drafter for every fifty soldiers. Kip had one for every ten, and that wasn’t counting the night mares.
A trumpet blew amid the enemy lines, and Kip saw the back two lines of each of Kamal’s battalions peel off to march to either side of the Blood Robes’ already-wide lines. They meant their wider lines to curl around Kip’s lines and crush them from the sides.
It was a pretty standard maneuver when you had twice as many men as your enemy did.
So the officers hadn’t been fooled. It meant the Blood Robes were sticking with their own battle plan, despite Kip’s gambit with the torches.
If Kip wanted his lines to be as wide as theirs, he’d have to literally stretch his men thin and meet Kamal’s four-man-deep lines with his own lines only two men deep. Their going only four deep was risky. His going two deep would be insanity.
It was a trap, but not the obvious one. No sane commander in his position would try to fight only two men deep.
Instead, a sane commander would try to punch through the Blood Robe lines, hoping to break through the four lines in a sharp move.
What else could he do? He couldn’t match the width of their lines, and couldn’t allow them to turn his flank, so instead he would draw his men in to hit their center hard and try to break their lines fast before the encircling maneuver killed them all.
Not today.
When his Nightbringers reached the appointed places, their commanders bellowed, and they stopped dead, as they’d planned.
Except that not all of Kip’s men stopped as they’d been commanded. Because glory is to young idiots as a mountain of poppy is to the lotus eater.
Ignoring the screams of their commanders, several dozen men tore away from Kip’s lines and ran forward, screaming.
Because war is a fat whore who rolls over on her babies in the night.
“What the hell are those idiots doing?” Cruxer asked.
“Weeding themselves out of my army,” Kip said, furious.
The Turtle-Bear tattoo on his arm lighting up in angry red, Kip hurled out his signals, but now in fire: HOLD. HOLD!
The men who’d broken away ran, heedless, and all Kip could do was pray that they died quickly so that their friends didn’t follow them, trying to save them.
He could sense others on the verge of breaking. Everyone knew that if they didn’t follow those young fools, the fools would die.
Kip’s commanders were screaming, even firing their muskets in the air to try to draw their men’s eyes to them, lest they break.
Then an explosion rocked the field, and one of the charging idiots simply disappeared in fire as if he’d stood on the barrel of a musket aimed at the heavens. An instant later, another hit another of the buried charges and was flung skyward. Only half of him landed.
Not even the war dogs had smelled the charges; the Cwn y Wawr’s dogs were bred to fight, and while they could smell more acutely than any man by far, their abilities were wan compared to those of the two scent hounds the will-casters had brought.
It was two hounds who would save Kip’s entire army.
The charges had been buried weeks before, the smell of their luxin covered so well that they had been noticed only when the hounds’ human partners reported that a certain area of ground had no scent of human passage at all. That had led their commanders—Kip hadn’t even known about it until the deed was done—to scour the ground three nights in a row, dodging patrols and (unknowing at the time) the buried charges in order to discern the trap.
Kip watched the twenty men die with cold command. He had no pity for men who were willing to trade their friends’ deaths and their commanders’ plans for their own glory. He watched them die in blood and fire, men screaming with blown-off feet and partial faces. Mostly he noted which charges had been exploded. He had a partial map of them, not a full one, so it was probably wasted effort, but you never knew.
One fool panicked as he saw his compatriots die. He turned and tried to run back in his own footprints. Another improbably made it through the mines and within twenty paces of the enemy lines. Somehow every shot in the first volley of at least twenty muskets had missed the man.
But two miracles was as many as a man could ask in one minute. The next volley, guns and magic both, leveled the man as he came within ten paces.
It had happened soon enough that none of their friends followed them. Thank Orholam.
Th
e killing ground in the middle of the battlefield was limited, and the Blood Robes naturally knew exactly how far it extended. It had been their trap, hoping Kip would race into the minefield as he tried to break their lines.
Kamal’s Blood Robes stopped their advance in the middle so as not to trample on their own charges, but their broad flanks extended around each side. Those continued their enveloping tactics.
Kip’s drafters didn’t waste any time. Those at the center of his line, knowing they were against a minefield and not soldiers, hadn’t been carrying many weapons. Instead they’d been lugging slabs of luxin in pairs, green over yellow, three feet wide and five feet tall. Another crazy invention Ben-hadad’s corps of engineers had come up with, a portable wall. Under musket fire, the men now stabbed the sections of the portable wall into the soil in rapid succession, from left to right, each section fitting perfectly into the next.
Meanwhile Kip’s reds threw out long streams of pyrejelly, which a moment later sub-reds set fire to. The killing field was now visibly delineated for Kip’s men: ‘Don’t go in here.’
But now the Nightbringers’ flanks, which had stopped, too, faced enemy lines deeper than their own, and far wider.
They collapsed before they even came in contact with the Blood Robes.
As the Blood Robe cavalry advanced, completing its flanking maneuver, the Nightbringers’ torch-carrying camp followers were revealed to be civilians, betrayed by the swelling light of the rising sun as the cavalry came nearer.
The men and women fled toward the forest, many dropping their torches.
There was now nothing between Kip’s camp in the woods and the Blood Robe cavalry except fleeing civilians. The sight of those fleeing did to the cavalry what fleeing prey does to any predator. Hundreds surged forward, eager for killing and plunder. Their commanders didn’t even try to stop them.
“Hold!” Kip shouted. That was the signal. With the sun nearing dawn, he’d caught sight of a broad form pulling itself out of the river behind the Blood Robes.
Tallach tossed his head and Kip sawed at the reins they’d tied to his jaws. The reins were purely for show. Kip never used reins. The immediacy of command would have actually been nice, but the bear wouldn’t stand for it.
Kip shot superviolet signals out, and his men started screaming, collapsing back farther. The infantry lines were closing in on the sides, and Tallach seemed unnerved by the charging men.
“Hold, Tallach! Hold!” Kip shouted.
And the bear bolted.
Kip dropped his sword and Cruxer his spear, and they simply held on. Tallach bounded away from his army, fleeing into the forest.
He heard a cheer from the Blood Robes as they saw Kip’s army lose its commander.
In between surprisingly fluid bounds, Kip saw his gambit unfolding in the forest.
They’d put the fleetest of foot at the front of the line—making the young men and women the last people to get to flee from the cavalry. They’d also armed them with grenadoes. The civilians had followed orders better than the hotheads in Kip’s lines, and had run all the way to the cover of the forest before turning and throwing the grenadoes.
Some ran too slow, though, and were run down. Some panicked and didn’t stop at all, forgetting their weapons and their orders, but Kip had figured that would happen. He’d armed them with grenadoes mostly to bolster the courage of those who were the bait for the trap.
Nonetheless, Kip saw a number of them turn and hurl the hand-size bombs at their pursuers. One hit a tree not two paces away from herself, and she was shredded by shrapnel. Another hit a horse and blew off its leg. Its careening body planted its rider headfirst into another tree, crunching him down to half his original height. Others missed and turned to run again.
Not far into the woods, which were significantly darker in the dawning light than the treeless floodplain, the night mares sprang their trap. First came the smoke. Charges went off with dull thuds, disorienting the charging cavalry and blocking the view of what was happening to them from their army. Wolves and panthers and mountain lions pounced from rocks and tree limbs and hidden hollows.
The civilians had their own traps, deeper, in case any of the cavalry got that far.
But Kip saw none of those. Tallach’s path cut back into the forest, and then along its front edge, hopefully just out of sight of the Blood Robes on the plain.
One straggler from the cavalry was slow enough to be in their path, and Tallach elongated his bounds and slashed one huge paw as they went behind the horse. His blade-lined claws caught only the head and shoulders of the rider. Conn Arthur hated killing horses.
The horse staggered for one step, and then stood. The rider slumped and tumbled out of the saddle, his head and one arm torn completely off. Tallach had barely even broken stride.
They emerged from the woods, hundreds of paces west of where they’d entered.
The disposition of the battlefield had changed utterly in the minute or three Kip and Cruxer had been gone. As ordered, the Nightbringers had collapsed into a tight-packed square. They were surrounded on all sides by the Blood Robes, and held only because of the luxin walls they’d so hurriedly assembled.
Men deeper in the formation were reloading muskets and passing them forward again. It was perhaps the first time in military history that muskets were being used to good effect after the first shock of an infantry charge.
But the numbers were still too lopsided. They’d held out this long only because the cavalry had been drawn away.
And now the Blood Robes’ reinforcement battalion was coming in. Their cavalry was lowering their lances and charging.
A signal flare went up from a wight near the killing field.
The wight had disarmed the Blood Robes’ explosives. Dammit.
Kip’s timing was off by just that much. Lorcan had needed to hit them thirty seconds ago.
But then he saw Lorcan. Somehow, in the screaming and their tunnel vision toward the enemies in front of them, the Blood Robes hadn’t seen him yet.
The huge bear plunged into the back ranks of the infantry reinforcements running across the plain. He sank deep, deep into the heart of the infantry formation before they even saw him. They were jogging forward, the front lines already breaking into a run, so in moments it became utter chaos.
Men shrieking in fear, Lorcan roaring, and metal rending with every swipe of his big paws. Men were hurled bodily into the air. Commanders shouted unheard over the melee.
Meanwhile the charging cavalry hurtled across the killing ground. Not a single charge went off. But that side of the square was ready for them. A cloud of black smoke was vomited out into the air, streaked with green and golden lights and lit from within by streams of liquid fire.
The first rank of the cavalry didn’t even make it to the Nightbringers’ line, obliterated by hot lead and magic, and the second rank was appreciably thinned. The third rank hurtled past them and the fourth and fifth had to leap over the fallen.
But many made it through. They crashed into the luxin wall, lances extended.
They’d expected a shield wall, though, not an actual wall. Each section was not only physically linked to the others on each side, but also braced against the force of their charge with long diagonal supports.
Some few sections buckled, but most held.
Men flipped off horses brought to a dead halt, and toppled into the square, where the Nightbringers waited with axes and daggers.
Three red wights riding in the fourth rank of the cavalry leapt off their horses as they crashed into the mass of their friends and foes. Tumbling through the air, they blasted through the petty attempts to swat them aside—Kip had set the fastest drafters to knock grenadoes out of the air.
When the wights landed, they hurled death in every direction. But each wight was quickly brought down.
The last ranks of cavalry broke off the charge, seeing they’d only cripple and kill their own.
But that was when Kip and Tallach en
tered the fray.
They hit the cavalry from the rear quarter.
The men turned to see that their own infantry, which was supposed to support them, had melted behind them instead—and two giant grizzlies were tearing them apart. The other battalions’ cavalry had gone into the woods and not reappeared.
It was too many shocks at once for men trapped between a wall and a giant grizzly ridden by a man throwing fire down on their heads. Panic spread faster than the flames.
They broke in every direction.
Tallach gave a few more swipes at those nearest him, then halted at Kip’s signal, and, as quickly as it had begun, Kip’s fight was over. Now he was a general again. He began throwing flaming signals at once.
The tight square unfolded, pursuing the Blood Robes. Most of them headed toward the forest, where the night mares awaited. A few were headed too far east or west, but Kip’s men drove them as sheepdogs drive sheep: a little barking here, a little nipping at the heels there, and they turned back to where Kip wanted them, like mindless animals.
The other Blood Robes ran toward their own camp and the walls. Kip sent more than half his forces after those, under Derwyn Aleph. He knew what to do.
Lorcan was deep in their camp. It wasn’t where Kip wanted him, but he was beyond orders now.
Kip only hoped that in its rage, the great bear wouldn’t kill any Nightbringers.
He started toward the city walls himself, and the actual horses and ponies of the night mares fell in with him.
A rout had started from the Blood Robes’ camp. General Kamal’s staff, his bodyguards, their servants and families—these were the people who could see the noose dropping over their necks. They knew that if they got trapped against the river, they’d not stand a chance.
So they ran the other way. If they could make it past the hulking form of Greenwall and its archers, they could escape.