Dragons of War (64 page)

Two very dissimilar men were standing toe-to-toe while they yelled at each other with the cords standing up in their necks. One was tall and eloquent, the other short and powerful. The short one had the voice of a bull, although he seemed to be restraining himself from full bellow.

From their glossy black uniforms Relkin knew at once that they were important officers of the enemy army. One wore tunic and breeches, the other a cloak and expensive boots.

This man, the taller of the pair, suddenly stood back with a loud oath and gestured with both hands in the air. Relkin saw his face clearly and felt a dull shock of recognition. It was a face he could never forget: the man that had tried to kill him in Marneri, the man he had pursued all the way to Tummuz Orgmeen. It was Thrembode the Magician.

For the first time he actually listened to what they were shouting.

"Whatever plan was agreed with the M'kred Vapul, it doesn't matter now. Conditions have changed." Thrembode spoke with his habitual impatient arrogance.

"I am in command here, not you, Magician!" The short man emphasized this with a jerk of his thumb.

"And I am here to advise you, General, and on occasion to overrule you."

"You damned fop! What do you know of controlling an army of imps?"

"General Lukash, use your wits, you have been warned by the Baguti. You must act at once."

"I am not to deviate from the plan of attack. Vapul has spoken, and Vapul is right."

Thrembode raised his hands in the air again.

"The wise M'kred Vapul would change the plan in an instant if he knew what we know now. The enemy's main army is now on your right flank."

"I will not deviate. We will go on at once. The imps have tasted victory. They will be impossible to control for hours."

"Give the orders to face right and form up to receive the enemy."

"No! We have a skirmishing line on our right, and that will be enough. We push on directly for Waldrach. There I will hold the bridges."

"You idiot." Thrembode brought out a little whistle on a chain around his neck.

The general suddenly became animated and struck at Thrembode, knocking the whistle from his hand. It bounced on the paved walk with a little ringing sound.

"You dare to raise your hand to me?" shrieked the magician.

The general dared, indeed. He pulled a short sword from his scabbard and drove at Thrembode. The magician uttered a wild shriek and darted backward while drawing his own blade. They engaged, steel rang in the garden, and Lukash stamped forward with a will and the technique of a saber fighter with whirling overhands intermingled with side cuts to the throat. Thrembode was forced to the wall and barely escaped. Again he was brought up close and forced back, step by step, and this time wedged into a corner from which there would be no escape.

"This time, Magician, I will split you like a chicken!" brayed the general.

He spoke too soon. Thrembode had worked a hand into a pouch carried within his robe. Now he flicked a handful of glittering dust into the general's face.

Lukash screamed, staggered, and put a hand up to his eyes. Thrembode ran him through the chest, whipped out his crimson sword, and watched the stumpy general collapse to the ground. Then the magician planted his boot on Lukash's chest and looked down into the defeated man's eyes.

"Lukash, you are lucky to die so easily. Believe me, I had other plans for you."

Thrembode pressed his sword to Lukash's throat and then carefully rocked it back and forth to sever windpipe and jugular.

Relkin stepped into the garden, left leg still tingly. He felt a strange sense of awe overcome him. This moment had been foretold. Stacked atop all the other moments of his existence lay this one, in which he had one thing to do before he died.

He took another step, floating along as if in a dream. The sword came up in his hands.

At the last moment Thrembode sensed him and swung around.

The magician's mouth fell open in shock.

"You?" was all he said, recognition blooming wild in his eyes.

Then Relkin's sword struck home, and Thrembode gave a gasp and doubled up. Relkin hewed down again, and the magician fell. The enemy army was now without leadership.

Overcome by the effort, Relkin went down on one knee. He took several deep breaths, pushed himself up again, and staggered back into the ruined parlor. He leaned by the broken window and gasped for air. Imps were marching past outside. He heard cornets shrilling not far away and beneath their cry, the roar of battle.

The dragons were out there somewhere, fighting to the end. His dragon would be among them. He wanted to join them but found that he simply could not move his feet. There was an uncomfortable flush rising up his face. The dizziness increased. He felt the sword slip from his hand and clatter to the floor. Then darkness fell across his eyes, and he knew no more.

Outside the guild hall of Lennink the survivors of Eads's force, perhaps two thousand men and twenty dragons, stood at bay in the dawn's swelling light.

Surrounded, they fought in the midst of a thicket of spears and swords. Men of the Fird lay heaped in front of them, and trolls and ogres were struggling to reach in and strike. There was little room for maneuver now, and the hammers of the ogres were hard for even dragon shields to deflect.

Eads himself had been stabbed in the chest and lay with his back against the stone of the guild hall, his eyes glazing.

Now it was the fight to the death, and the dragons reached deep for their last reserves of energy and one more time took up their swords and slew their enemies.

Mighty Burthong took down an ogre with a tremendous slice that cut off a giant leg at the knee. He finished the brute with an overhand that clove the monster's skull in a flash of sparks.

Bazil Broketail slew two ax trolls in quick succession and then confronted a towering ogre. Its foul breath washed over him as it roared and swung its huge hammer. For a moment he thought of his wild dragoness and his young ones, far away in the land of caribou. Would they remember him?

He deflected the hammer blow and felt his shield shiver. It was breaking up along the seam of the damage done at the fight at the Lion's Roar. He snapped his tail mace into the monster's face and ducked an ax swinging in from the right. The ogre struck him with its shield and thrust him backward onto his bad leg. There was no room behind him.

With an oath he shifted, ignoring the pain from his thigh, bobbed his head to avoid the second blow of the hammer, and ducked inside the thing's shield where he brought Ecator up in a powerful blow to the ogre's shield arm.

The shield fell from its nerveless grasp, and now Ecator swung in again and decapitated the monster, sending the enormous, grinning head spinning off into the mass of imps behind it.

With black fluids fountaining, the monster collapsed on him, and Baz was shoved back on his heels for a moment until he pushed it aside. Behind it came more trolls. Behind them came another ogre. There seemed no end to them. Bazil thought to himself that he had had quite a day. Unfortunately, he sensed he would not see its end.

The Purple Green, Vlok, and several other dragons were heaped up against the wall of the guild hall along with dozens of dazed and unconscious men. Bazil had heard that the Purple Green was badly wounded.

On his left fought Carath and Burthong. Carath was limping. As he spun away from an ax troll so he ran right into an ogre's hammer blow. The brasshide dragon's head was knocked sideways in a violent splash of blood. Carath staggered, and though Burthong engaged the ogre, Carath was easy meat for a sword troll who cut his head from his body in the next moment. The dragon fell, crushing his dragonboy as he went.

Bazil could do nothing but get his shield up in time to hold off the next ax troll.

He glimpsed a slender figure appear in the line beside him. Eilsa Ranardaughter had come to take her place at the last. She fought through tears, wielding a man's sword. Her father was dead, as was her friend Silva, spitted on a troll's sword. And now they faced the end, and with her would die the very line of Ranard.

Alsebra unveiled a lovely feint and spun and slew a troll with a shriek of metal as Undaunt cleft its helmet. Its body toppled back over those behind it as she pulled free her blade.

"Nice work, Alsebra," said Bazil.

"You honor me, Broketail. We die together, I think."

Bazil chopped down to break the haft of a troll's great ax. "Long may they sing of Alsebra the Green." The troll hit him with its shield.

"By the breath, I like that thought!" She deflected a sword troll's blow and thrust home with Undaunt.

Ogres heaved through the mass toward them, hammers on high. The legionary on Bazil's right died on an imp's spear. A clansmen fell to his left. He no longer saw Eilsa Ranardaughter. A spear thudded home into his ruined shield. The ogres came on. The end could not be far off now.

And then, from the south, they heard the cornets, dozens of them, and then more than dozens, hundreds, a great swelling silver cry.

The legions! The legions were coming!

At the sound Captain Eads came awake. Gritting his teeth he forced himself back onto his feet, seized a cornet, and blew a response, again and again. He fell after the fourth, but already someone else had taken it up.

The survivors gave a great cheer, and renewed their battle with a terrible light in their eyes and a grim song in their throats. The army of the Argonath was come at last, in the very nick of time.

Now a spearhead of Talionese heavy cavalry drove into the flank of the enemy mass below the village. While more ancient vineyards were crushed beneath their hooves, they drove the enemy columns into chaos.

Behind them came seven full legions at the trot, moving in the disciplined, open formation they favored for attack.

As the legions came to grips, so the great enemy army convulsed. Most of the trolls and all the ogres were concentrated in a mass, surrounding the surviving defenders of Lennink.

But now seven hundred battledragons fell upon the men and imps marching for Waldrach. The marching columns had already been convulsed by the cavalry charge. Now they disintegrated.

At the command center of the giant army, frantic staff majors squabbled among themselves. The general was dead, the dreaded Mesomaster was absent, and the Magician Thrembode was unconscious, possibly dying. There was nobody in command!

Belatedly, the enemy formations tried to turn to face the oncoming assault. The effort was slow, too slow, and there were not enough ogres to check the dragons. The legions cut into the masses of imps like red hot nails driven into wax.

The disintegration grew. Whole sections flew away in rout toward the Alno, struggling back through the forest of Rundel. Less organized fugitives streamed steadily west and north toward the mountains.

Captain Eads's band of survivors were left standing amid the ruin and the dead while the cheering men of the Kadein legions went past all around them.

The first officer to reach the encircled band of survivors was Captain Hollein Kesepton. With him came three dragon squadrons, and they smashed aside the remaining trolls and hurled themselves against the ogres.

The ogres fell back before this fury. With fresh arms, the battledragons swung with a will; ogre shields were clipped to pieces and ogres were felled. The remaining ogres turned and tried to flee, moving at a shambling run. In pursuit followed the dragons, assisted by Talion cavalry.

And at last the battle had become a rout, and the field belonged to the Argonath.

Relkin awoke to find himself lying on a bed in an unfamiliar room. There was a greenish light and the smell of disinfectant. The smell informed him that he was not in heaven.

He gave a hoarse croak as he cleared his throat. A big shape moved in the dark.

"Boy awake now," said a familiar voice.

Relkin put a hand up to his head. The hand was lost inside a ball of bandages. His head was similarly swathed. He was alive. He felt a distinct sense of surprise at this discovery.

"What happened?" he said.

"Ha, that is a good one. What has not happened would be better to ask."

"Are you wounded?"

"Not badly, Manuel took care of it."

"Does the Purple Green live?"

"Yes, but he is still in danger."

"Who else is hurt?"

"Anther dead, you know. Also Cham, with Tomas Black Eye. Chut and Greger in the 66th."

"The Legions came?"

"Just in time, they broke the enemy and swept them away."

Relkin let out a sigh. Victory then, the victory foretold by the Sinni, but victory bought at great cost.

Another figure entered his field of vision, and then Eilsa Ranardaughter was sitting beside his bed. Relkin felt the shadows lift from his heart at the sight of her face. Then he saw the bandage on her arm.

"You were hurt?"

"A slight thing," she smiled. "I was blessed. So many are gone."

"Your father?"

She shook her head. "Imps slew him where he lay."

"Captain Eads is gone," said the dragon.

Relkin felt his throat harden. So many had fallen.

"The emperor came," said Eilsa to change the subject. "With the little bird and the mouse. He sat beside you. I watched from the doorway. There was a crowd."

Relkin's eyes widened. "And I missed it all."

"They found thee lying beside the body of the enemy commander. They wanted to ask you questions."

"Yes, of course. I was there. I struck down the magician, you remember, Baz, Thrembode. The man we chased to Tummuz Orgmeen."

Bazil hissed quietly.

"They fought each other in the rose garden, while I watched. Thrembode killed the general, and I killed Thrembode."

Eilsa put a hand to his cheek. At her touch he felt a tingling warmth.

"The medicine witch detected a pulse when they brought you in, so they stitched you up and put you with the ones they thought would die. We found you there."

"I thank thee."