Master (Book 5) (27 page)

“That very thought will haunt me into staying alive, I assure you,” Cyrus said. He watched the troll wave and push his way back through the lines, parting warriors of Sanctuary by nearly knocking them aside.

“You failed to mention the real reason you’re doing this,” Vara said, as Cyrus turned back to him. “The cessation spell?” She watched him, and he could see her waiting for his reaction. “You lied to him about why you’re employing it.”

“It would have just upset him,” Cyrus said, and the uneasiness within. “And you know how he gets. Best he’s forgotten, or else I’d never have gotten him off the front line and back to safety.”

“But you didn’t forget,” she said, almost accusation.

Cyrus shook his head. “No, I didn’t forget.” He looked back at the Goliath lines, at the massing formation of soldiers, rangers, and spell casters. They waited in the distance, an army of dark elves behind them in lines as far as Cyrus could see. “I’m not sure Vaste did, either, really.” He sighed, and looked at Vara, who stared back at him. “After all, it’s hard to forget we’re facing a foe who can use his magic to raise the corpses of the dead to fight for him.”

Finally, Cyrus turned to look across the empty gulf between the lines. The Goliath army still stood well back, prepared for a charge but as yet unmoving. They were line after line of foes, and even to his eye, the mix of spell casters with the warriors and rangers signaled a new sort of challenge. His eyes wandered, the spell that Vaste had cast upon him giving his sight additional clarity with which to hone in on the figures in the distance.

Far to the back of the Goliath line, almost fading into the next rank of dark elves from the Sovereign’s army, Cyrus saw him at last. He wore his black cloak and cowl for this occasion, but the cowl was down and his skeletally thin face was visible to Cyrus’s aided eyes. He could just make out the smile as Malpravus stood staring across the battlefield.
He smiles, as though he can see me looking at looking at him.

He probably can
, Cyrus thought, staring at the necromancer. He didn’t look any different than he had when Cyrus had last seen the Guildmaster of Goliath; just as ungainly, just as bony. And the smile—it was ever the same as it had been. The whole appearance of the dark elf sent a warm rage through Cyrus. He fixated on the enemy general, staring, waiting for him to order his army to move.

It took almost a minute of staring for Cyrus to realize that Malpravus was deep in consultation with the man on his left. He was speaking, mouth moving, thin and satisfied, occasionally opening to grin in a manner more fitting for a deeply satisfying conversation than a battlefield where his army was losing.

“Do you see him?” Vara asked, interrupting Cyrus’s reverie.

“Malpravus?” Cyrus asked. “Of course. He’d be hard to miss.”

“No,” Vara said, and her voice held a mournful tone. “Not Malpravus. Who he’s talking to.”

Cyrus blinked and refocused his eyes. The spell gave him great clarity of detail, but it took some getting used to. He squinted his eyes, opening and closing them, at first unsure of what he was seeing.
That is not possible.
He blinked again, trying to clear his vision, but when he opened his eyes, what he saw remained exactly the same.

To Malpravus’s left stood a man in armor of a dark hue. Spikes on his pauldrons made it look as though an accidental turn would impale the necromancer through the head. His face was hidden under a helm that bore protrusions of its own, spiked like a crown. “It can’t be,” Cyrus said, scarcely believing it. “He wouldn’t …”

“He would,” Vara said. “He has.”

Cyrus shook his head, never taking his eyes off the dark elf until the man lifted his helm. As the spiked helmet came up, a shock of blackest hair fell from beneath it, and the face became too obvious for even Cyrus to deny any longer.

Terian
.

The army of Goliath came charging only moments later, finally diverting Cyrus’s attention from Malpravus and Terian. The two of them stood at the back of the lines as the first warriors of Goliath began their charge. Cyrus met the eyes of a yellow-armored troll in the front rank and knew that the beast would be coming for him.

“Yei,” Vara said.

“Verily,” Cyrus said with a smile.

“Are you making a joke?” Vara asked, clearly perturbed.

“Sure, why not?” Cyrus kept his eyes on the troll that was charging directly for him. There were others of his kind down the lines, a handful of troll warriors speckled in among the humans, elves and dark elves of the Goliath charge. Their lines were large, an imbalance obvious in the size differential. Cyrus looked down the Sanctuary line and saw much shorter, smaller figures.

“Because we’re about to engage a front rank that puts us at a disadvantage,” Vara said. “This gallows humor—”

“Is all I have right now,” Cyrus said, taking a deep breath of the rank battlefield air. “Well, that and a godly weapon, a plan, and a few prayers I should throw to the God of War.”

“And quickly,” Odellan said from down the line.

“Vara, Odellan, take a troll each,” Cyrus said. “I’ll get Yei. Pass the word down the line that anyone with a mystical weapon is to take on a troll and have the rangers try and assist them as the Goliath charge gets close.

The first volley of arrows fired from the rangers now on either side of Cyrus’s main line. The warriors at the front had reformed in battle order after the clash with the last dark elven charge. He noticed few gaps, those that had died having been dragged back toward the rear of the lines where they waited to be resurrected by Sanctuary’s corps of healers. The swishing sound of the arrows taking flight made little impact on the furious cries of the Goliath army’s charge.

“I imagine their spell casters will discover that their spells aren’t working right about now,” Cyrus said, settling into a ready stance. “And won’t that be a lovely surprise for them. Ready the counter-charge!” He waited and heard his call taken up down the line, the rattling of metal weapons against armor and scabbards a fearsome sound that drowned out the Goliath battle cry, if only temporarily. “CHARGE!”

He sprang forward, only a hair faster than others down the line. Cyrus felt a note of surprise; by this point in the battle he expected his forces would be wearying, but there seemed to be a fresh enthusiasm driving them forward. Arrows whistled overhead and he saw Goliath’s front line begin to bend, the smaller humans and elves falling from the bombardment of the arrows. No Goliath arrows reached the Sanctuary army; they were simply too far forward of the Goliath line at this point for accuracy.

The clanking of his armor and the pounding of his feet formed a steady drumbeat that pushed him forward. Cyrus took care not to out-advance his army, as Praelior would have given him license to do. He moderated his pace and kept with them, eyeing Vara and realizing she was doing the same.
United in a firm line we pose a much greater threat. Though this doesn’t feel as much like leading from the front
.

He angled toward the troll in yellow even as the troll swerved toward him. Cyrus had known Yei back in the days in which Sanctuary and Goliath had been allies.
He’s no pushover, but neither is he one of the great tacticians of our time. He’s a brawler, and he knows how to use his strength to his advantage
. Cyrus felt the smile come on.
Let’s see what he does against someone with more speed, strength and dexterity than him
.

The troll warrior’s steps thundered against the ground, rattling Cyrus’s teeth. Yei was easily three heads taller than he was, wider than most of the other trolls they had faced, and armored from top to bottom in a way that the trollish soldiers had not been. The yellow paint on the metal plate mail was smeared and cracked from battle, and Cyrus’s eyes scoured the surface for the weakest points as he closed the last ten feet to the troll.

A bellow from Yei split the air, a deafening roar that reminded Cyrus of the time he’d heard an elephant from the south make a trumpeting noise while in the square at Reikonos, but louder. Cyrus focused in on the troll’s eyes, saw a flaring red iris through the slit in the helm, and shot back an icy stare of his own. Then he smiled as he closed the gap between them.

Yei’s sword was massive, taller almost than Cyrus himself, with a blade as wide as Cyrus’s thigh. The troll brought it down in a sloppy, overhand diagonal motion as they approached each other. Cyrus guessed if he stayed on his present trajectory, the blade would cleave him in half the way he’d done to countless enemies over the years. The attack was quicker than Cyrus expected.

But not quick enough.

Cyrus slid into the dirt, back armor skidding as he went low. His strength carried him into the slide, momentum pushing him forward under the troll’s massive slash. The blade missed the top of Cyrus’s helm by less than an inch as he slid between the troll’s legs and jabbed up. He plunged Praelior into the gap at Yei’s knee.

The blade slid into the chainmail beneath the plate armor, and the sound of links breaking reached Cyrus’s ears. Something between a grunt and a scream made its way from between Yei’s lips, and Cyrus saw a mighty leg begin to buckle. Cyrus slashed hard, and dark green blood squirted from the wound he’d made, sliding down Praelior’s slightly glowing edge.

Yei began to fall, tilting to the side as Cyrus watched the lines of Goliath warriors following behind closing in on him. He could see them moving slowly, as though trapped in the slide of tree sap down a trunk. They were moving at normal speed, though, he knew that much from experience. It was only his perception in which they were slowed.

Cyrus tore his blade free from Yei’s knee joint as the troll began to fall. Cyrus had felt his sword cut through the tendons, shredding the troll’s limb. He rolled to his right as Yei fell to his left, and the echoing power of the warrior’s heavy landing reverberated through the ground and into Cyrus’s armor.

Cyrus fended off three warriors in mismatched armor as he saw motion down the line. The Goliath trolls were moving toward him in a stream, eddying the currents of battle like boulders immune to the tide. They swept through the lines of the fight scarcely deigning to notice their own warriors as they pushed through, nor those of their Sanctuary foes as mailed fists and blades of steel were thrown to cast all opposition aside.

They’re coming for me
, Cyrus thought with a little smile.
They must have been told to charge me if Yei failed.
Cyrus thrust his blade into one of the long eyeholes of Yei’s helm, then twisted as a geyser of green blood fountained up for only a second before it fell back down. He stabbed down again into the gap between gorget and helm in the troll’s armor and was rewarded with a lesser spurt this time, blood so dark that Cyrus could tell it was green only thanks to the spell augmenting his vision.

Cyrus pulled free his blade and drew back. Goliath warriors swarmed at him, lesser creatures that stood heads and shoulders shorter than the trolls charging at his position. He quickly counted five of the mammoth beings, their size the only thing that told him what they were. Every square inch of their flesh was covered by the hardened metal that protected them from most—most!—of even Praelior’s blows. He studied them all with a glancing eye as they came. They would arrive one by one, and he would have to face them as such to avoid being overwhelmed by their sheer numbers.

Cyrus raked his sword across the neck of a Goliath warrior charging at him and watched with satisfaction as the head flew from the neck.
Strength of numbers indeed.
The lesser were still coming, warriors numbering more than his ability to count them, and all of them seeming to flow toward him like a flood across a dry riverbed.

His sword moved out of habit, severing limbs and heads as quickly as he could move it. The next troll came at him within seconds by his measure. It felt to him like ten minutes. This one carried an axe and swung low at him in a roar that even Cyrus had to concede was a worthy war cry.

It did not even make him hesitate, however.

Cyrus brought Praelior up with furious strength, catching the axe mid-blade. He had seen the dullness of the thing, the lack of glint in the light, and knew it was mere steel and overwhelming strength that this troll carried into battle.
Probably splits his foes’ skulls and bodies well enough just with the force of his muscle and ability.

Cyrus smiled. In the contest between steel and quartal, there was always a clear winner and a clear loser. And it was never a contest.

The axe blade was split jaggedly down the middle with a sound of tearing metal as loud as the most fearsome scream that had ever reached Cyrus’s ears. Even before he shredded through the last of the axe’s blade, he had used his own strength to push it back. The opposite side of the blade skipped off the troll’s breastplate and up, burying itself just below the troll’s gorget.

There was a gurgling noise and the green, viscous liquid poured down like dark ale spilled over a washboard. The troll hit his knees and his hands fell from the axe’s handle. Cyrus mounted a hard kick, using his superior, Praelior-supplied strength to slam his boot into the edge of the blade that was still bared to him. It caught on the bottom of his foot, his armor held, and all his strength rushed through it and into the axe.

The axe flew free, pushing through the trifling bone and tissue that had kept it lodged in the troll’s neck. Cyrus watched it fly into the rank behind the troll, blade-first, and it wiped out some several poor bastards all in a line before it became lodged in two of them and stopped fast, causing them to keel over. There were screams and more screams. Cyrus could not differentiate the voices of those in whom the axe was stuck from those of every other voice on the battlefield.

Cyrus recovered his fighting stance as a long, faint shadow fell over him from his right. He looked up and saw a darkened face, a darkened body, stretching up and blotting out the bare twilight purple above him. He began to whip his blade around to defend but felt other motion behind him.

Long years of training had taught him to face the threat he knew was there rather than the phantasm of one that only might be. He threw up a blocking motion against the troll only feet from landing a blow on him, and he saw the shadow grow longer and taller, something stretching above it, lengthening the silhouette.