Ydrik and Tapio went forward almost a mile, and withdrew only when they were hard against a shield wall of irks. That was an ugly surprise; Tapio had not imagined that all the irks were under his own banner, but the sight of them in their close array, their bronze mail gleaming in the light rain, oppressed him. He called out to him, and they named him traitor, and Man Friend.
A tall irk in gold maille stepped out of the line, axe in hand. “Come and fight me, Man Friend,” he said. “You have betrayed the trust of the Free People.”
Tapio reined in. “If Asssh winsss, there will be no Free People.”
“If your men win, there will be no Free People,” rejoined the other. “I am Hukas Helli! We are the Free People!”
Tapio shook his head slowly. “I will not fight you, cousssin. Let usss agree that no irk will fight another irk.”
“I will kill you, and I will have your woman for my own,” Hukas roared. “I will take your slaves and your castles and I will keep the people free. You have forgotten what it is to be an irk. Dismount, and let me teach you.”
“You are a fool, and ‘my’ woman would devour you,” Tapio said. “I leave you to find death without me.”
He rode away to the jeers of the enemy irks, which fell on him like blows.
Tapio’s charge bought the rear guard an hour; by the time that Ash’s horde was fully in motion, the lower slopes were defended; Mogon’s wardens held the center, with most of the Long Dam Clan bears standing with her; the Morean mountaineers had a small redoubt of felled trees just above them, and the Albin militia were dropping more trees in a crisscross abatis to cover the bears. The irk knights went up the hill into reserve.
A very small creek ran across the western slope of the mountain, which the Outwallers called Loomsack, and ran into the swelling Cohocton. Before the first bogglin reached the creek, Magister Nikos spoke a single word, fotia. His controlling structure was perfect, despite the rain, and every tree on the whole front on the far side of the tree and extending west almost a hundred paces burst into flame.
The east wind whipped the flames west.
“And now he comes,” Nikos intoned.
In the west, Ash rose into the air. Men with no hermetical skill whatsoever could feel him on the air; his presence was oppressive, like the stench of a corpse. Before he was fully visible in the clouds, he extinguished the fire; in time to save it from imperiling his attack, but not before the fire and the hermetical force behind it had created a cleared zone of almost two hundred paces in depth.
Golden globes of power rose over the mountainside.
Off to the east, Gavin and Tamsin and Ser Gregario rode back and forth, soaked to the skin, forcing men and irks and soaking wet Golden Bears and desperate wagoners across the fords. And as the last wagon came up the south bank, Gavin ordered his ballistas assembled, and then waved at Ser Gregario.
“All the chivalry,” he said. “Ready at the water’s edge.”
Gregario snapped an armoured fist to his visor. “Yes, my lord earl,” he said.
Loomsack Mountain—Ash
Ash’s troubles only seemed to multiply. Everything annoyed him; he was delighted to have an enemy under his claws. But days of conflict, herding his retreating foes before him, had also taught him a respect for their magisters, and as soon as the golden globes snapped into the real, Ash turned in the air and considered his options.
As always, it was a matter of balancing his flow of potentia. Far to the east, his monsters had destroyed the human fleet in Havre; yet his spies told him that far off in the Middle Sea, there were more and more of the great wooden round ships gathering. Ash could not leave hold of his serpents yet, the more so as, when the ancient things took losses, the survivors were even less willing to take risks. Ash had time to wish he had made alliance with the deep kraken, who now seemed to have made common cause with Lot instead. And the outright destruction of one of his Antica Terra rivals was a mixed blessing; the rebel was dead, and what that suggested about the power of these upstart humans only underlined why he had begun by promising their extermination to his fence-sitting relatives. And perhaps most disturbingly, Lot’s fall had not broken the alliance of Man and Wild. Ash, who seldom doubted, wondered if Lot was truly dead; his foe was wily and some of his workings seemed to still have teeth.
Worst of all, Ash had begun to wonder if dismissing Mortirmir and the human mages in Antica Terra had been entirely wise.
And the will was rising.
It was chaos; it was war. It was like all the other gate openings, and so Ash, like the great predator he was, used his powers sparingly, gnashed his great teeth at being a hampered god, took as few risks as he could, and waited his time. This was not the moment for wild abandon. This was the moment to use weight of numbers and just enough power to win the day.
There followed a rattle of workings and counterworkings; light and darkness, lightning and shield, boilings, wood snaps, metal fatigues, and a titanic struggle over the wind that, to Ash’s horror, resulted in a draw and a dozen small whirlwinds moving like crazed tornadoes over the battlefield.
If allegory can be held to describe, then the battle between Ash and Nikos was like an encounter between a bull and a wasp; Ash was infinitely more powerful, but the grammarian’s focus of will and structure of linguistic reality were so much more precise that, as long as the argument rested on structure, Magister Nikos could keep Ash at bay.
In the real, the sky pulsed with power and flashed, and flashed again. Even in the hell of the N’gara battlefield, the flow of ops had not been this heavy; the shields flickered, the colours played; blasts rocked them, or threw dirt and trees into the air; flames rained across the battlefront, and the air pressure changed constantly, causing the eardrums of every sentient creature to rattle.
But the shields held.
For the first time in nine engagements, the bogglins hesitated at the edge of the burned ground and would not cross, and Ash had to expend will to push them across. There were many bogglins, and in the hurry of battle, even Ash’s great compartmented mind could not pick and choose. The outpouring of his will was immense.
It had a cost.
And then the bogglins died.
But this time, Ash had chosen to use his wits and not a bludgeon, and while his bogglins died, he moved his irks and wardens and trolls to the east; a whole clan of his Qwethnethogs swam the Cohocton and started west on the south bank, determined to close the ford. His terrible cavalry of wardens mounted on hastenoch swung north, crossed an undefended beaver meadow, and came into the flank of the mountain defences.
The irk knights met them and stopped them high on the hillside, in a tangle of glacial boulders, and Syr Ydrik was wounded there and Tapio assumed direct command, ordering Syr Srylot and Syr Rinir to envelop the pain-maddened trolls. And the Jacks, waiting in ambush for just such an attack, shot into the flanks of the hastenoch and then charged to complete their destruction. It saved the flank, but distracted Tapio.
Down in the vale of the Cohocton, the first Ser Gavin knew of approaching disaster was that Ser Gregario’s knights were all dismounting on the south side. He was just wishing that he had a reserve under his hand when the first stone troll appeared downstream.
Gavin saw it all in a single beat of his heart. He didn’t need to watch more to know that Gregario was fighting for his life against a rising tide of wardens on the south side. Nor to guess that the trolls were intended to cut his rear guard off from the ford.
“Tamsin!” he roared. He could not wait to see if she would come. He had no reserve but his own household knights, but he led them against the trolls at once. Despite the uneven footing of the rocks around the ford, he got his lance from his squire, got it in the rest, and put it dead center in the stone face of a huge cave troll, and the thing went down even as his lance splintered.
But the trolls outnumbered his knights, and the ford was terrible for horses, although not much better for stone trolls; men and horses went down in the
water, and so did monsters; slippery stone feet on slippery rock. But the charge of the knights was blunted, and with every beat of Gavin’s heart, there was another horse down.
Just east of the ford, 1Exrech inhaled the scents on the wind and knew his enemy was close.
A thousand hardened bogglin warriors rose. They were tired, but they were the spear bogglins; they were the alliessss. Ten days of watching their kindred die had not changed their minds; for bogglins, inhaling the revealed false scent of the enemy revealed his evil even to the simplest bogglin mind.
1Exrech formed his people very close, as was his wont; close so that he could protect them with his sorcery, and close because their wall of spear points made them far more dangerous to man and monster alike.
“Come,” he exhaled.
But 1Exrech had another tool, another weapon; subtle and weak. Under his vestigial wingcases, he set himself to exude the true scent of command; of nobility of intent, of nests defended and wrongs set to right.
He loosed a perfume called Justice.
Bill Redmede’s Jacks couldn’t hold the front and flank at the same time; their charge saved the irk knights, but left the Albin militia naked.
The enemy bogglins were flooding forward, and with them were irks and wardens and thousands of imps, fixing the line of the Allies. They shot and shot; the foresters ran out of arrows and stood with their swords and bucklers against the tide, and then, step by step, they began to retreat up the ridge, bleeding men who, when they fell, were stripped and eaten.
The Morean mountaineers pelted the horde with rocks and then charged through the great wardens with their axes, clearing the front of Mogon’s clan and giving them a moment to breathe.
Mogon looked left and right from atop a huge rock, and ordered a retreat. The Long Dam bears, freed of opponents, turned left and slammed into the sharp-toothed imps that were destroying the Albin militia, and for a moment, the line was saved.
But Ash had deep pockets, and the Allies had none. Another wave came forward at Loomsack, and the whole alliance line ran.
Mogon, however, had always intended to survive their retreat. She led her warriors to the left, uphill and then down over the shoulder of Loomsack and down toward the fords. Jacks and militia and bears followed her.
The foresters fought on as the rest of the rear guard passed behind them. They had the best position, chosen by Harald Redmede and resting on the place where the little creek had high banks. Even when they retreated, the foresters had a deep swamp on one side and a boulder field behind them.
Harald Redmede was watching his foresters repel another attack, cutting down the handful of long-toothed imps who managed to scramble up the bank, but he turned and trotted to Mogon as she led her clan past him.
“The whole flank is going,” she called.
“Where’s my brother?” he asked.
She shook her head.
Harald held the stream bank as long as he could, waiting for his brother. But eventually he had to go, or lose all his people. They filed off along the edge of the deep swampy ground to his left and then turned, breaking contact with a sprint that ate their remaining energy. In a few minutes they had caught up with Mogon’s people.
But the head of Mogon’s retreat had just discovered that the fords were contested.
Off to the alliance right, Bill Redmede’s Jacks had slaughtered the hastenoch cavalry but lost the right flank. Redmede was out of options, and he chose to save the irk knights.
By the time they’d wrecked their immediate opponents, they were high on the flanks of Loomsack. Redmede found himself with Tapio, looking west. From their height, they could not see the fords, but the flow of their enemies around the mountain was obvious. His people were exhausted—if that word still had meaning—and most of them were out of shafts.
The irk knights were also done. Most of them were dismounted; some of the great elk had lain down and would never rise, tired unto death.
Together, Redmede and Tapio moved a little farther east, to a rocky outcrop that allowed them to look down into the chaos of the ford. Even as they watched, the ballistae that Ser Gavin had ordered began to search out the trolls in the water; the wardens on the west bank, easily picked out by their engorged purple crests, were beaten, and the enemy bogglins on the far bank were behaving oddly, milling in confusion just beyond the spearpoints of 1Exrech’s phalanx.
But closer in, the tide of Ash’s flank attack was endless, and the fords were all but lost.
Master Nikos came up, still mounted on his mule, still looking more like a schoolmaster than a great mage. With him were two Morean magisters and half a dozen wardens who moved as if in a trance, all in step.
Tapio watched their doom in the valley below.
“He has beaten us,” Redmede said.
The grammarian frowned as if dealing with a student guilty of plagiarism. “That’s too bad,” he said. “Because he hasn’t beaten me. Or I should say, us. And that is a very important thing.”
As if to emphasize his words, a torrent of red-brown fire fell on the shield above them and made no impression.
Tapio looked up. “I am tired of rain,” he said. “I want to fight in the sun.”
Tapio had his own powers; he was the Faery Knight. So he reached into the heavens, and he rolled back the clouds as if they were a carpet.
And the sun broke across Loomsack Mountain.
The sun fell on his shoulders and made his armour glow; it fell on the elk, and they raised their heads; it fell on the Jacks and made their cotes seem white again. It fell on Mogon’s people and made their red crests burn like fire, and it was so bright that it made the stone trolls, trapped between Mogon and the ballistae, quail, and then ponderously turn and look for easier prey.
It fell on the enemy bogglins across the Cohocton, making their eyes light like jewels; a wight, in white chiton and bearing a pair of heavy swords, seemed to glow like an angel. But she wasn’t fighting; she was inhaling, over and over, her four-jawed mouth hinged slightly open. Her horde hesitated.
Under Tapio’s eyes, Mogon’s column burst across the ford to safety, covered by the constant fire of the great crossbows, and covered by a flood of Tamsin’s workings; a mix of illusion and terror and subtle enhancement and a tidal wave of confusing scents thrown into the wave front of the bogglins.
“We will never make it across,” Redmede said.
Tapio nodded. “You are a good ally,” he said, “and never did I do a better thing than to make you my friend. I sssay we go north, and eassst. One fight, to smash through Asssh’s people. They will be thin right there … they all pool together for the fight at the ford.”
Redmede followed the gesture the irk made with the haft of his long axe.
“If’n you’re wrong …” he said.
“If I am wrong, William Redmede, we will die like heroesss and Tamsssin will mourn for a thousssand yearsss,” Tapio said.
“Bess, too.” Redmede shrugged. “Not a thousand, though. Maybe five.”
Tapio’s high voice shrieked with real laughter. “Come, friend,” he said. “Let usss sssave what can be sssaved.”
Down in the ford, Gavin Muriens was on foot, his horse dead; his squires mostly dead. They had failed to hold the ford against the trolls and Gavin had gone down; had taken too long to rise out of the icy water and found his banner down. He was perhaps ten paces from the north bank, at the very edge of the ford, with his back against a boulder as big as a house.
Gareth, his charger, was dead in the water before him, the rising river washing over his high-backed green saddle. But his axe was still hanging from the cantle, and Gavin leaned forward and fetched it, and the feel of it in his hand reassured him. He still had his shield; he settled it, tugged at straps, and prepared to die.
There were more than a dozen cave trolls in the ford, killing his people; mostly stragglers and camp followers.
Gavin watched while his thoughts came together. He’d been unconscious; had taken a
blow to the head.
But on the south bank, he saw the ballista loose a bolt, and saw it strike a cave troll squarely, breaking the thing’s outer shell of stone and unmaking it. The ballista told him many things: that the south bank was still secure; that Gregario had won his fight; that the chaos in the fords was not all disaster.
His spine straightened.
Behind him, there were horns. He knew them for Mogon’s horns.
The cave trolls had noticed him. Slowly, like ships turning into the wind, two of them came for him, their heads swinging almost in unison, and Gavin wondered if Ash was concentrating on him.
Cavalry axe versus cave troll. First lesson. Don’t even try it.
It was only ten paces to the bank, but Gavin wasn’t sure of the footing and he wasn’t too sure of his legs, either.
But when the first troll came on, he decided he had to make a fight of it and not just wait to be crushed against the rock, tempting as that seemed in his current state.
His intention was to pass forward like lightning, and throw a crushing blow to his adversary’s ankle before the second cave troll emerged from behind the first to pulp him.
What really happened was that his first step forward snagged on Gareth’s reins, rippling under the water, and he fell face forward in the bloody water. But the water was shallow, and the cave troll’s blow went too far and thudded into Gareth’s corpse, and Gavin slammed his iron-bound shield’s point into the arch of the troll’s foot, chipping stone and costing the thing its balance on the slippery rocks.
It fell with a choked roar.
Gavin got his left knee up and chopped with his axe, down into a flailing arm. He powered forward onto the thing’s chest, and buried his axe in its brow ridge, and the red glare of its eyes went out forever.