The creature was struck, and struck again; its backbone and pelvis broken, and it fell and writhed until Duke severed its head. The worm erupted and Duke cut it on the back stroke.
Nothing else came out of the smoke.
“Load,” Edmund said. He was amazed at the sound of his voice. He sounded so sure of himself.
A dog came out of the smoke, already short a leg, hobbling. It was struck down, its skull pulped. No worms emerged.
The smoke began to clear. A wind came up, blowing from behind them, and tore the smoke away in gouts, and there were the ancient not-dead mastodons towering over them, or so it seemed, although in fact they were two hundred paces away at the most distant red flags planted only that morning by the guild and the master archers.
A wave of hopelessness, of sheer, unwavering despair, the end of all joy, the extinguishing of the fires of intention, swept over the casa. But no one ran.
No one believed that there was anywhere to run.
It was the end of the world. The end of plans, the end of victory, the end of saving the world.
Edmund’s heart skipped a beat. Or perhaps it beat too fast for him to comprehend. They were an embodiment of terror, and they came on, hundreds of them. They stretched across the field, as far as his eye could see, and the stench was terrible.
Sorcery played in the air in front of him; a rolling barrage of fireballs struck a black shield like a translucent storm front and either vanished or burst without apparent effect.
“Sweet Christ,” Duke, former apprentice and now veteran, said.
The hand gonners froze.
Smoke’s voice rose over the evil silence. “And that’s just another crowd of fewkin’ monsters,” he said.
Mark my words, said a voice.
Duke found his hands moving of their own accord even as his mind failed to really accept or comprehend all the horror he was seeing.
A dark sleet and a horrible lavender mist rose from the phalanx of mammoths and came back. Duke was praying; Tom dropped his round lead ball into the sand and had to find it. Sam got his load down and his face was white.
“Load!” Edmund roared. “There’s nothing out there we can’t crush with alchemy and muscle and craft. Five! Four!”
Most of the gonnes were upright, their poles set in the sand, the sign a man or woman was loaded. A few were still struggling. Tom had his ball on the soft leather patch and was pressing it in with his thumb, his eyes on the terrible line of monsters.
Off to his right, a falconet fired. It was a gonner’s triumph; the round iron ball struck an Umroth full on. There was a flair of violet lightning, and the thing unmade.
The guild cheered. It was thin, and unplanned, but the strike heartened them tremendously.
“Three!” Edmund roared. “Two! Make ready!”
The second falconet spat. Its ball missed.
“Present!”
Two hundred gonnes went from vertical to horizontal. Abby Crom, all five foot ten of her, put her cheek down on the shaft of her weapon and put the muzzle ring just under the center of a monster’s forehead, just as if she were practicing in the fields of Berona. Then she put her tongue between her teeth and raised the muzzle the width of two fingers for the range.
“Fire!” Edmund called.
This time, he made the word into one sound, and all the gonnes crashed out together. The smoke billowed.
A hermetical breeze came up from behind them and swept the smoke away, and there were two of the monsters unmaking in a brilliant display of blacklit fireworks.
Gabriel was almost out of ops, and all he’d done was defend himself. Morgon had landed one major blow; a rippling plane of dissolution that had broken the back of the assault of the animals.
The line of Umroth came out of the woods when Gabriel threw a simple wind working to give his people a line of sight.
And then he threw a leg over Ariosto’s back. The griffon launched them in two strides.
A levin bolt rose out of the Umroth; he deflected it easily enough, and it was followed immediately by a hundred levin bolts. They came from a broad field and cleverly eliminated his favourite tactic learned from Harmodius: the use of small, light shields far distant to block emanations at the caster’s end of the aethereal. The wide volley forced Gabriel to expend energy at a prodigious rate.
A second volley rose from the Umroth even as they rolled forward against his line. But in the real, the falconets and the guildsmen were hurting them, and Gabriel had enough entanglement with his enemy to understand that every Umroth down was a little of its self lost.
But the travel time in the air was very short—less than a hundred paces separated them now—and Gabriel was committed. He moved all his shields to the front, and charged. In the real. He didn’t have the ops to make a long fight in the aethereal and he sensed that Morgon couldn’t hold for long enough to convert potentia.
The second volley from the Umroth was like a blizzard of black light on his visor and then he was through, still alive, and he bore the full brunt of all the coercion that the Necromancer could summon.
His plans were in shreds, his people defeated. Bad Tom died, pointlessly, of plague; Sauce crucified by triumphant monsters, Michael eaten alive, Blanche was torn asunder, Kaitlin’s baby ripped from her womb, Petrarcha, his old grey hair brown with his blood, thrown from a cliff to ravening hordes as tides of monsters rippled over the world in the utter defeat of the last attempt of the alliance …
… and Ariosto came through the Umroth’s wave front of fear and resistance, his wings beating at the ragged holes he tore in their hermetical shields. Talon and blade slashed at the hermetical reality; and Gabriel remembered the power of his metal hand and, dropping his reins and trusting his mount, rained white fire into the Umroth from above. Ariosto’s talons ripped the stinking, rotting hide from the back of one as the light from a second’s fiery death backlit its end, and a third towered over all, trying for mount and rider with its saber tusks and finding only sky.
Down he stabbed, down and down, his mount steady between his knees as if Ariosto trod on earth and not on air, moving with his every twist, rising when the tusks came up. The two of them were deep in the herd, under their shields; and there was a line of fallen Umroth behind them. A golden light seemed to suffuse them both.
Their adversary stopped trying to face Mortirmir in the aethereal and threw everything at the man on the griffon. It went for the other threat. The one in the real. The one that could fly.
It was afraid.
The left-hand falconet fired.
The ball struck an Umroth in the middle of its skull. Black ichor sprayed, and the massive thing slumped like an ox struck by a butcher’s mallet. The bronze machine rolled back, belching smoke, and the sponge went in; the ballet of loading began, uninterrupted by the tusks of impending doom.
“One more!” Duke yelled. “One more and run!”
The rammers spun their implements; the round shot went down the long bronze throat.
“Jesus Christ Almighty. Jesus Christ Almighty. Jesus Christ Almighty,” muttered one of the loaders over and over.
Twenty strong men rolled the two machines back up. The Umroth were forty paces away; close enough to see the damage a thousand years had wrought; close enough to see the gleam of the hermetical bones and smell the unsealie stench of corruption.
They weren’t fast.
They bristled with arrows that didn’t seem to harm them.
“Fire!” called Edmund, and his hand gonners vanished in another ripple of fire and smoke.
The left-hand falconet had its target; the porte-fire came down and the piece leapt back with a sharp crack.
The right-hand piece was covered in powder smoke.
The gonner stood his ground and waited, duty at war with terror. And a sinuous and ancient trunk took him and tore him, screaming, to shreds. But another journeyman picked up the fallen porte-fire and slapped it on the touch hole, scattering the powder in the quill, but
after a delay that cost the brave journeyman his life, too, the falconet barked, and the ball smacked home in the same heartbeat, its impact inaudible in the roar and the screams.
Forty paces behind the gonnes, Bad Tom stood in his stirrups.
“Steady!” he roared.
All along the front of the valley, the monsters were against the trench and the stockade; all along the wall, brave men and women slammed heavy axes and long swords and spears into the towering, stinking things, and died. Or stood their ground. The monsters had real trouble with the trench and more with the stakes. The bravest of the archers emulated the Nordikaans, and went in under the things, cutting their legs.
Edmund’s guildsmen held their last volley until the monsters were at the very lip of the trench, and fired.
The creatures bunched up at the center, and went in over the dead gonners, right at the banner and Morgon Mortirmir. They were silent. Their stench panicked horses and rendered men uneasy.
The household knights were mounted on the best destriers in the whole of the Antica Terra, and none of them wanted to face the stinking monsters.
Morgon Mortirmir, ten paces to Bad Tom’s left under the household banner, spared a single instant of concentration from the labyrinth he was balancing to toss a calm on the horses. Then the monsters burst through, and Mortirmir had no working to strike them with. He was fighting on another plane, and he watched his doom approach.
“Ready!” Tom bellowed.
Forty knights held their lances upright in one hand, like jousters ready for the lists.
Tom used his knees and his left hand to keep his horse in check. The black behemoth between his knees had no more fear than the man on its back.
The Umroth were clear of the gonnes. To their left and right, they were still having trouble with the stakes and the ditch. They were stalled, as if something had sapped their will, but in the center they came on and still Tom held his counterstroke. Francis Atcourt’s charger pranced forward, out of the line, and Tom turned his head. “Wait for it!” he called.
Atcourt reined in hard, his lance tip bobbing, his face white with fear under the visor of his heavy helm.
The smoke around the gonne position was clearing. There were a dozen of the great hulks down, and the ones behind shambled over them.
And then they gathered speed, a rumbling charge, and the earth shook, the dust rose, and the horrid stench of corruption filled the air …
“Aim fer the head!” Tom called.
Four of the monsters came through the dust and smoke, their eyes burning black in their black and glistening heads. Then, in a leap as fast as a lion’s, they were all headed for Mortirmir and the casa banner.
Bad Tom felt he could almost see the will come upon them.
“Charge! Lachlan for Aa!” Bad Tom exploded forward like any skilled jouster, and his destrier crossed the ground like black lightning. Tom’s lance swept down, steadied with his weight change as he leaned forward, and struck the lead not-dead beast dead center of its skull as the solid lance exploded, the pressure of the strength of man and horse too much for twelve feet of oak, but the steel point, a hand-span long and widening from a needle tip to a breadth of four fingers, cracked open the ancient skull even as man and horse crossed to the target’s right and danced off beneath the tusks. The great beast plunged forward, fell to its knees, and then the whole edifice of bones began to unknit.
Tom leaned as far as armour and saddle allowed him to the right, plucking his war hammer from his saddle bow without conscious thought as Francis Atcourt followed him. Tom’s destrier jumped the left-hand carcass, armour, man, and all, and they brushed past the wheel of the left-hand gonne …
Atcourt’s lance tracked the second Umroth; his horse stumbled, or shied in terror, but Atcourt’s jousting skill was beyond terror; his point dipped, came up, and went in an empty eye socket; the shaft levering front and rear of the skull for a moment; the bone and the lance shattered together; and Atcourt’s terrified horse ran full tilt into the behemoth, even as its unmaking came upon it. Falling bone struck Atcourt a massive blow, but he kept his seat and was suddenly through and into the choking, stinking dust beyond the gonnes.
Phillip de Beause flinched at the thought of death and then leaned forward the fraction that told his destrier to go and he passed the first two beasts unopposed and followed Lachlan through the dust, his lance still held high. He saw Lachlan smash another beast with his hammer and ride on, and in a flick of his arm and hand, his lance came down, stooping like a falcon to strike the thing. His lance shivered; the skull cracked, but his horse was brought up at a stand, and one of the great ivory tusks slammed into his horse’s breast and threw them down.
De Beause went down hard, falling on his side, but his armour and its padding held and his horse, terrified but still game, rolled away without crushing him. Another not-dead mastodon impaled the horse on its tusk; there was an explosion of deadly amber light and the horse rained blood and gristle across the field, but de Beause was up again, on foot in a horde of giants, and there was no place for the terror he felt. His sword was gone, and he plucked out his dagger from habit, ran under the next creature and stabbed up into its dangling rotting guts with no effect, gagged on the stench, and struck again.
And then he was struck down. Something was broken in his chest, and a worm head was coming for him.
Tom Lachlan appeared in the dust and threw blows with his war hammer so fast that de Beause couldn’t count them, and then Lachlan’s mount stood up on its hind feet and its steel-clad forefeet struck like a boxer’s fists. De Beause watched in distant admiration; the pain from his broken body left him above the fray, an observer, as Tom’s superb warhorse pivoted on its back feet, standing like an angry cat, to slam one more blow into the Umroth’s head as Tom rolled his hammer through a long arc and leaned between the tusks so that his blow had all the weight of his arm and the gliding step of his heavy mount as well.
This blow smashed through the heavy bone. And even as the thing shifted weight, trying to put a foot down on de Beause, it unmade. The pain increased, and de Beause went away.
And then he was back, buried in a fortune of Umroth ivory.
And alive.
The Umroth’s worms came for him a few terrified heartbeats later. They were old, and huge, like malevolent pythons, but their very size saved him for a moment. They battered against his armour, their snake-sized jaws trying to get through his steel visor.
Every man and woman of the company had been exhaustively briefed on the worms, but de Beause, wounded and pinned to the ground, could do nothing but lie still and scream while the things sought unguarded flesh and battered at his armour.
But Ser Berengar and Ser Angelo, their own lances shivered, saw the worms and came to his aid, dismounting with poleaxes in a melee of mammoths and warhorses.
Philip de Beause saw a worm turned to an aethereal mist before his very visor.
Ser Angelo started heaving Umroth bones off de Beause while Ser Berengar covered him, and de Beause began to breathe again.
“Buried in Umroth ivory,” Ser Danved shouted down from atop his warhorse. “What a way to go!”
De Beause managed to get his visor open before he vomited.
Ser Danved laughed. “Lucky you have friends,” he said, and rode back into the melee.
Gabriel had gone forward to buy Mortirmir time to cast, but at some point he realized that he had passed from deception to main attack; he’d lost count of the great beasts he’d sent to dissolution, or that Ariosto had; the griffon’s talons had a strength as great as any monster in the wild, and Gabriel had a shard of memory of an ancient mastodon, its backbone severed, falling away beneath them.
And then, in one instant in the aethereal, the conglomerate being known as the Necromancer gave a cry of despair and pain and loss, agony, sorrow, even regret.
And Mortirmir’s voice slapped through the fog of possibility, ops, potentia, and violence.
Got him.<
br />
In the real, every remaining Umroth unmade and the huge worms that knitted the beasts together began to writhe, screaming in thin voices until a horde of terrified men and women pounded them to mush and mist.
The dust swirled. Wounded men continued to scream.
Gabriel rose above the battlefield, watching under his mount’s flashing wings. In three places, the titans had penetrated his wall; the Nordikaans had let them cross, and four of the beasts were there, battered to undeath by the axes of the northerners. They’d made it into the gonnes and killed a dozen men and women. And they’d passed the line of stakes where the Vardariotes had stood, but the Vardariotes had never planned to stand their ground; they simply mounted and rode back, flaying the great beasts from a few horse lengths away.
They still had a butcher’s bill.
So did the casa, and the guildsmen.
And there stood Morgon Mortirmir, beneath the banner. The nearest Umroth had fallen so that its long, curved tusks almost seemed to touch him. The light hadn’t changed; the whole fight had lasted mere minutes.
Gabriel looked down with a sinking heart.
I hate killing stuff I can’t eat, Ariosto said.
“It had no hope,” Mortirmir said. “It never thought it would win.”
“Morgon,” Gabriel said gently. “I’m not really of a mind to have this discussion just now.”
“And yet,” Mortirmir said. “It defeated my working. That was bad.” He shrugged. “I found the way it linked together and I broke that link.”
Gabriel took a breath. And then another. And then, almost against his will, he looked at the young magister. “What link?” he asked.
“The Odine aren’t one creature,” Morgon began.
“I know,” Gabriel said, a little more testily than he had intended.
Gabriel glanced at Tom Lachlan, who was himself watching archers stack the precious Umroth ivory while fully armoured men-at-arms saw to the burning of the worm-infested mounds of bone.
Morgon shrugged. “Of course, my lord. It is only that … the passive shield. Nothing went through. And he was striking me over and over; not very hard, but very expertly.”