Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series) (60 page)

Loki followed. Tyrfing trailed behind. Just as he set his foot on the gangplank, Hel called after him. ‘Remember our agreement, Tyrfing,’ she reminded him.

‘How could I forget?’ he muttered, over his shoulder. She waved as he disappeared over the side of the ship.

‘How could you, indeed?’ she asked the silence.

“Written Mages! We value our sanity and our health. Towels, tunics, or shirts to be worn at all times please, even in private!”

Old rule of the Spire, found gouged into a beam

I
n battle, seconds stretch to minutes. Anything can happen in them. All it took to start this battle was three.

One
.

Samara raised her hands to the jaundiced sky, fingers bent and twisted like the gnarled branches of a lightning-struck tree.

Two
.

The ledge of rock under her feet cracked. Then came a deep boom, one that almost matched the volcanos and their fury. The daemons and wolves jumped clear as it sagged into a crater of splintered rock, Samara standing shaking in its epicentre.

Three
.

A shockwave burst outwards from the girl. A rolling wave of dust and ice, throwing all but the strongest to the ground. It made the earth shake and the ice crack as it bubbled outwards, flying faster than the eye could blink.

‘Oof!’ Modren gasped as he was tossed to the ground like a sack of meat. He gasped, the breath driven out of him. There was a great whooshing sound as the air rushed back in to fill the vacuum the shockwave had left in its wake. Modren felt his ears pop, half deafening him. Dizziness swamped him, and he floundered in the snow, listening to the dull, muted sounds of panic around him. He watched as a group of snowmads tried to keep a sled from overturning. It was cracking under its own weight. There was a distant crash, and the sled crumpled. Nearby, a mage was hauling an unconscious Siren back to the battle lines. He was yelling at others with every step, the faint echoes lost on Modren’s ears. He looked north. He saw one of the two daemons striding across the landscape, unhinging his jaw to roar at the sky. Nothing more than a moan reached his ears, like a tired wind.

Fingers grabbed him and hauled him upright. Inwick was there, frantically probing his body for wounds. Eyrum was shaking him, saying something, Modren couldn’t tell. His voice was a dullish rumble. Durnus was abruptly amongst them. He grabbed Modren by the skull, with both hands, and the Undermage felt something sharp run down his spine.

The world came back to him in a roar.

‘By the gods!’ Modren gasped as his ears popped again, painfully. ‘What was that?!’

‘Now is not the time to be discussing spells, Modren!’ Durnus was yelling. ‘We need to get everybody back to the sleds, now! It has begun!’

‘Yes, your Mage!’ Modren shouted in reply. The sound of the wind and the volcano was deafening. Ice whipped their legs and faces. Modren beat his sword against his chest. ‘Written! To me!’

The sound of the earth cracking was the least of Samara’s worries. Her bones were more her concern. She could hear them cracking too.

Samara’s spell was winding up to its fierce crescendo. Far quicker than before. Too quick, for her liking. She had barely enough strength to keep herself from crumpling like a burnt twig.

She didn’t dare spare a glance as she heard another boom beneath her feet. The hill lurched as she took a tighter grip on the sky. Her eyes were fixed on a cluster of stars, right above her. She reached toward them with her nails and slowly pulled her arms back.

Fire began to lick at her boots. Their leather had already been ground to dust under the pressure. Now the stone around her was being flattened and knuckled like wet clay. Veins of red popped out of its black skin as it crunched and whined, hot red veins full of molten stone. The fire leapt higher.

Inch by terrible inch her arms slid back to her sides. Samara could feel her knees buckling. She spared a desperate moment to push a spell into her legs, hardening her bones to keep them from cracking. It was not a moment too soon. She hauled her arms back and the weight of the spell drove her to her knees. She cried out as the hot stone cut her flesh. The spell was in full swing now. The fire howled around. Splinters of stone spun about her. The wind roared.

In her mind, all Samara kept seeing was the sharp teeth of her daemon kin, smiling and congratulating her for what she had done. She could feel their arms lifting her up above the crowds of daemons and their worshippers. She could hear her name like the crashing of a waterfall.
Samara! Samara! Samara!
They would shout it until the sun went down.

As the first stars flashed in the tawny sky, despite all the pain, she began to smile.

‘They’re coming!’ It was a useless shout. A young soldier or sailor no doubt, too terrified to keep quiet. Too excited to realise everyone else was pointing and gawping.

There was a collective crunch of ice and steel as everyone tensed. The whole line of sleds and soldiers, curved like a sour smile, clenched. A thousand pairs of eyes turned to the sky.

At first, the stars just twinkled and flashed, as innocuous and circumspect as any other bright stars on any other morning. Then they began to spit and flare. As each one punched through the atmosphere of the world, they grew from twinkling little gems to roaring, plummeting furnaces, flame and smoke streaming from their sides as they fell. Dull thunder echoed across the wastes below, each a star hitting the cold air.

It took them a full minute to fall to the ice. A full minute of gawping. A full minute of stern faces and wide eyes. A full minute of sore fingers strangling sword handles. Then they struck.

One, two, three, four, five… they hit the ice in devastating sequence, puncturing five smoking holes in a wide arc between the hill and the line of brave fighters. Clouds of steam flew like geysers as their inhabitants came to a shuddering, bone-shaking rest. A terrible moment followed, silent save for the roars of the wind, Samara, and the Spine. Then, one by one, claws and foreheads appeared over their blackened rims. Eyes of all shapes and colours. Hides of black, grey, ashen white, yellow, and red glistened in the light of the fire. Some were small, others as large as Valefor and Hokus. Some had bodies like that of men, others like that of nightmares. They looked hungrily at the line of men and women spread before them, barely half a mile away.

‘Hold your ground!’ ordered Modren, from the centre of the line. He could hear a nervous muttering running through the crowds, rustling like autumn leaves. ‘Hold your damn ground!’

‘More,’ spat Eyrum, eyeing the sky. He pointed with his axe, and Modren followed it up to another section of the sky, where another dozen stars had begun to glow brightly.

‘We’ll lose them if we’re not careful,’ Modren hissed, looking about at the anxious faces dotted around them. ‘They’re only now realising what we’re up against.’

‘Bah,’ Eyrum snorted. ‘They should have seen the hydra.’

‘And you killed that, didn’t you?’

‘Indeed we did.’

‘Then by that logic, we’ll be fine,’ Modren said. He stepped out of the line and turned to face their army. He had his shield in his hand, his sword in the other. Men dragged their eyes from the skies to look at him. More whispers ran through the crowd.

‘A speech?’

‘Are we retreating?’

‘He’s going to barter for our lives!’

Modren was doing none of that. He looked up and down the line, noting the heads craning to see him. He raised his sword high above his head, and brought the flat of it crashing down on his shield with a loud clang. He did it again and again, beating out a solid rhythm, and all the while he looked up and down, looking, praying even, for people to join in. It was Eyrum who stepped forward first. Trusty Eyrum. He had a grin on his battered face. Modren matched it as the big Siren began to hammer his own shield with the head of his axe.

Inwick was next, beating hers with the pommel of her sword. The three drummed their rhythm proudly. Then it began to spread. The Written took up the beat, and then the Arka soldiers. The sailors, mostly without shields, began to shout and stamp their feet. Man to man and woman to woman the rhythm spread, like summer fire through ranks of dry trees. Fists punched breastplates. Shields met swords. Clubs and boots battered the ice.

Modren began to increase the speed of the rhythm. What had begun as a slow, plodding drumming now became a fierce thundering. Faster and faster they went, and as they drummed, shouts ripped from throats. War cries filled the air. The snowmads screamed strange songs. Roars from the dragons deafened any who stood near. Beasts snarled and screeched. The wildmen bellowed and grunted from the rear.

They were a storm, daring anyone to come near, and they knew it. They felt it now, every single one. The fear had melted away, if only temporarily.

Even when the next dozen stars fell, disturbingly close this time, the army kept on singing and drumming. The stars shook the ice from under their feet, but still they kept at it. It was only when one solitary star fell, later than the rest, did the thunder and noise die away a little.

The star fell in the very centre of the battlefield. Like a suicidal mountain it threw itself into the ice. It was bigger than the rest, it was easy to see that from the size of the hole it left. There was a deep rumbling in the seconds that followed. They could feel the ice cracking deep below them. Modren stepped back into line as the drumming died away.

A grey finger inched over the edge of the hole. No, not a finger, a claw. It fell back into the hole, leaving an oily smear behind. Then came a whip-like tail, waving like a flag in the gloom. Then a glow to rival Samara and the volcanoes, a hot red glow from inside the hole. A great gush of steam came up, and then the daemon lifted itself from the hole, stepping out onto the ice.

‘And what about that?’ Modren muttered into Eyrum’s notched ear. ‘How does that compare to the hydra.’

Eyrum sniffed. ‘Still not as big.’

It was monstrous even so. A giant welt of a creature, a grey lump of flesh with cracks of red running through its skin like magma under stone. Its mouth was a blacksmith’s forge, only with teeth, broken shards of teeth that looked more used to gnawing on granite than bone. It had a crown of twisted horns, and two that framed its face, pointing down into his mouth, as if any prey needed directions. If that wasn’t fearsome enough, it had two pairs of arms, each knotted with muscle and sinew like ripcord, and claws that would have made a scythe weep with embarrassment.

‘Count yourself lucky that you can’t see this, Durnus,’ whispered Modren.

Durnus shook his head. ‘Oh, I can.’ He could see the fiery outline of it in the dark. That was enough. ‘It is time,’ he said.

‘That it is,’ Modren replied. He raised his sword. ‘Mages! Written! Spells at the ready!’

There was a desperate shuffling as the mages moved forward. Fire, smoke, sparks, ice, water, and light began to trail around their wrists and fingers. Modren felt his ears pop one more time as the magick swelled. It was their turn to make the ground shake. ‘Archers!’ Durnus yelled. The creaking of several hundred bows added to the crackle and hiss of the spells.

‘Fire!’

Perhaps it was an accident that everybody aimed for the giant daemon. Perhaps it was the fact that he was closer, or bigger. Perhaps it terrified them to their very cores.

Maybe it was all of these.

The daemon was turned into a flaming pincushion within seconds. Once again, time slowed as the army made the first strike. Arrows flitted past ears and helmets, like a swarm of angry, bladed hornets eager for blood. They soon found it. The daemon snarled and held up his hands as the arrows flew in. He was marching forward when the spells struck him. Fireballs struck him in the face and midriff. Lightning burnt the flesh from his black bones. Ice pierced him. He belched and bled smoke, filling the battlefield.

In moments, he was down, claws raking at the ground in frustration and pain. There was a whine as the last few spells struck home, and then the creature sagged into the snow, dead. The first blood had been drawn.