Servant of the Dragon (58 page)

"My friend and I are strangers here," Sharina said. She found she had to raise her voice to be heard clearly over the hum. "Can you tell us what—"

She grimaced, because she didn't want to speak directly about the sound or the light closing the sky of Klestis.

"—is happening here today?"

The citizen's eyes brushed over Dalar. He didn't have enough energy to look surprised at a man-sized bird. The whole sky flashed scarlet, then dimmed to its usual sullen hue.

The man winced, but he said, "This is the work of Ansalem the Wise, our leader. The kingdom is about to fall into chaos. Ansalem and his disciples are working to preserve us from that—"

The citizen's dry throat choked on the next word. He swallowed, closing his eyes as though he were squeezing back tears. His whole family stared past him toward the strangers, but none of them spoke.

"Ansalem is preserving us from that
end
," the man said. "That's all that's happening. Ansalem is our protector!"

"They're on the roof of the palace," the nurse said in a voice with a Sandrakkan burr. "Ansalem and the other wizards. That's where they're going to save us."

Despite the crowd in the square, nothing moved behind the windows of the palace. The door facing the plaza was open and unguarded.

"Has Ansalem told you this, sir?" said Dalar. The bird moved only his head, but his body was as tense as a sapling bent into a snare.

"We know it!" the man shouted. "Ansalem has always protected us! He's protecting us now!"

From the roof of the palace an unseen man screamed, "My son! Not my son!"

Sharina felt her guts knot. She looked at Dalar.

The man screamed inarticulately; only the fact the timbre was familiar indicated that the sound came from a human being. The sky flashed like sunlit blood.

The man and his wife were holding hands. The nurse sank to her knees, whimpering, "Ansalem will save us! Ansalem will save us all!"

Sharina drew the Pewle knife as she ran for the palace entrance. Dalar, his weights spinning close to his hands, sprang past her to lead.

* * *

CHAPTER TWENTY

"They've got heavy cavalry!" cried the commander of the first section of Blood Eagles to step from the bridge of light into Klestis. Instants later a trumpet signalled
Enemy in Sight
.

"And a lot of good cavalry is going to do them!"
King Carus sneered.
"Trust a wizard to think horses on stone pavements are any more use than they'd be on ice."

The Blood Eagles formed a skirmish line, screening the bridgehead. The first sections of the phalanx were swinging into position in a cacophony of horns, shouted orders, and the ring of boots on stone. Garric jogged to the right flank, sheathing his sword now that he was a commander again instead of a guide and cheerleader.

Lord Waldron and the army staff of aides, standard-bearers, signallers, couriers—and the personal guard detachment—came with Garric perforce. Normally they'd have been mounted for visibility, but Garric hadn't wanted to risk having horses panic in the face of wizardry. The men were nervous enough.

The right flank was as good a place as any for the command group. It was the point from which King Carus had usually directed his battles.

"Your majesty, keep back!" Attaper snarled when he saw Garric beside him. As the phalanx deployed, the Blood Eagles shifted from an open array in front to tight masses of swordsmen on either flank. Attaper had gone with the right-hand platoons.

The sixteen-rank phalanx was a terrifying, almost irresistible force to its front, but it was next to impossible to swing the pikes quickly to meet attacks from the flanks or rear. Until the four battalions of heavy infantry made it across the bridge, the Blood Eagles—the best trained soldiers in the Isles—would fill the need for flank guards just as they'd acted as skirmishers because the light troops were also still somewhere in the rear.

"I'm not here as a fighter, Attaper," Garric said. "But I need to view the situation to command... and I
am
in command, milord!"

The snap in Garric's voice came from his ancient ancestor—but Garric meant the words, and they were the right thing to say. Attaper, Waldron, and the other the royal officers were used to acting for themselves because King Valence had been no more than a figurehead even when he was younger. Prince Garric of Haft, with the help of King Carus, would
rule
the Isles.

Or die trying, of course.

Klestis was the same glittering ruin that Garric had seen in his dreams. Beneath a sun muted by a dome of wizardlight was a landscape of rank grass, tilted pavement blocks, and buildings from which the metal sheathing had begun to slip. Garric's eyes picked out the alabaster filigree around the audience chamber on the palace roof.

To reach the palace, he'd have to get through the mass of armored horsemen marshalling in the plaza. Besides the cavalry there were eight shaggy mammoths with armored breastplates; the platforms on their backs held soldiers with javelins and long pikes.

The mammoths' hair was falling away in patches. Fish or crabs had eaten half of one's trunk. The cavalrymen's armor was rusty, and where their visors were open Garric saw empty eyesockets and ravaged flesh. Yet they moved....

Attaper and Waldron were expressionless. The trumpeter at Waldron's side began to tremble. Though he clutched his instrument to his chest, it still rattled on his bronze breastplate.

Garric put his arm around the trumpeter's shoulders; the soldier was younger even than Garric himself, and he didn't have the benefit of King Carus to steady him.

"They died once, lad," Garric said in a cheerful voice, loud enough for everyone in sight to hear despite the noise of troops rushing into position. "They'll die again—and by Duzi, they'll start doing it soon!"

Three wizards stood around a brazier placed on a decorative arch at the western side of the plaza. Two were in black, one in white. Their sex was uncertain at Garric's distance from them, and inconsequential besides. As their hands moved, smoke from the brazier twisted and the cavalry below them charged.

Waldron gave a crisp command; the trumpeter echoed it. The phalanx shuddered forward, opening ranks as it did so. Though the pikemen had never been in battle before, they'd drilled thoroughly with oars and their weapons. Their execution of the present complicated maneuver made Garric cheer. Carus smiled with grim approval.

Several hundred javelin men slipped through the opened phalanx, jogging forward to meet the oncoming cavalry. If there'd been time to deploy properly, the skirmishers would already have been in position....

"Welcome to war, lad,"
Carus said.
"The only thing that ought to surprise you is when everything goes the way you planned."

Garric had imagined a cavalry charge would resemble a horse race, but the squadrons advancing behind the crab banner of Yole started at a walk and built speed slowly. The weight of an armored man was a burden even for a powerful horse. The necromancers could bring armies back from the dead, but they apparently couldn't change the nature of the men and beasts they revivified.

The heavy infantry was the last to cross the bridge and take their position on the ends of the phalanx. The men rushing past Garric and the command group wheezed with the weight of their weapons and armor. Their officers gasped their orders; signallers paused and breathed quickly several times before they put their horns to their mouths.

"The last man in a march line always has to run,"
King Carus explained.
"The lead battalion'll have pitched its tents and eaten by the time the last one straggles in.
I don't know why any more than I know why the sky's blue, but both things are the truth."

The phalanx tightened files again as it crashed forward, now that the skirmishers had passed through. The command group was a knot on the phalanx's right edge, and a regular battalion with body armor, swords, and short spears closed the flank to the right of the officers and Blood Eagles.

Even Lord Waldron seemed to approve of the formation. Valence III and his forefathers had stood in the center of the royal line, but Waldron could accept that the phalanx needed to display an unbroken array of pike points to the enemy.

Carus grinned with fierce anticipation. His hand was closed on the hilt of a sword that existed only in Garric's mind.

Garric wore a silvered breastplate and helmet, though he didn't carry a shield. His task wasn't to fight, but a commander can't predict how a battle will develop—

"Or even what he'll do in the middle of the fight,"
Carus murmured.
"Try to guess what they'll do and try to control yourself... but be ready just in case you have to cut your way through a shield wall!"

The king didn't sound as though the prospect displeased him. Right now, as emotions raced through Garric's blood like a spring tide, Garric himself felt a thrill of delight to imagine leaping into the oncoming line.

The javelin men screening the Royal Army wore leather caps and carried wicker shields. One of them gave a shout and hurled the first of his three javelins toward the Yole cavalry. As if that were the signal, the whole skirmish line began casting their javelins as they continued to jog forward.

The missiles were short-shafted with slender iron heads. Thrown for the most part in high arcs, they slanted down on the mass of cavalry like windblown rain. Though the spikes might find their way through the joints of a rider's armor, their targets today were the horses which already stumbled over the broken pavement. Javelins plunged deep into the necks and withers of the cavalry mounts. Horses fell, throwing their riders and tripping those in the next rank.

The wounded animals didn't kick high in pain and wheel violently, though, transforming injuries into chaos. Those that hadn't been hit continued forward at a trot building into a canter. They didn't smell blood, nor did they panic because of the screams of their fellows.

One gelding ran with a loop of intestine wrapped around a hind leg; every stride pulled more gut through the rent in its own belly. It managed twenty strides before it finally collapsed.

"Recall them!" Garric shouted as he understood what was about to happen. "Get'em back or they'll be overrun!"

Waldron opened his mouth to pass the order to his trumpeter. The skirmishers had realized the danger themselves and scampered toward the safety of the armored line.

For many of them it was already too late. The Yole cavalry swept on like a torrent through a canyon. Though many had fallen, the remaining riders and mounts alike were fearless in the face of death and pain. Lances caught fleeing skirmishers and flung the bodies aside with quick twists to clear the point.

Death and revival hadn't robbed the horsemen of their skill. Only rarely did a mis-directed lancehead spark on the pavement, breaking the shaft or lifting the rider out of his saddle.

The surviving skirmishers dived beneath the shields of the phalanx and heavy infantry like voles reaching safety in the rocks. Attaper shouted an order. Eight ranks of Blood Eagles pushed their way in front of the command group, shield-rim to shield-rim.

Garric saw the Yole horsemen loom above the infantry the way the surf curls when it reaches the shore. The lines crashed together: metal on metal, metal on stone; metal on crunching bone. The sound and the stench were like nothing that belonged in the world of men.

"Horses wouldn't charge home!"
Carus shouted.
"But these stopped being horses when they died. May the Sister eat the hearts of all wizards!
"

The mounts and armored men weighed tons; they hit the royal army at a full canter. Men shouted, pikeshafts snapped like crackling lightning. The front rank of the phalanx recoiled into the shields and breastplates of the rank behind them, and that rank sagged back as well.

But the phalanx was sixteen ranks deep. All the horses accomplished by their speed and fearlessness was to ram themselves and their riders hard enough to pierce even plate armor on a hedge of pikepoints.

The Yole charge splashed like a mudball on stone. The rearmost horsemen were as mindlessly brave as the front; they rode into the pile-up, raising their lances to clear the windrow of twice-dead men and beasts. Some even managed to climb their mounts over the carnage. They met pikes and died again in turn. Even broken pikestaves pointed long ashwood splinters toward the face of the enemy.

Cheering, cursing—pressed on by their officers and their own fierce determination—the men of the phalanx resumed their advance. Their hobnails bit in rotting flesh or skidded on slimy paving stones, but when a man stumbled the comrades close behind and to either side braced him till he found his feet again. Horsemen continued to ride into the wrack of their fallen fellows, and the phalanx continued to spike down those not already felled by their own side.

"No more generalship than a wheatfield has,"
said Carus.
"And we are the scythe!"

The wizards had formed their troops in the plaza, but the Royal Army had deployed on a wider front on the outskirts of the city. Because the leaders
were
wizards and not soldiers, even bad soldiers, they'd sent their army of the dead straight ahead so that the pikes of the phalanx in the center caught almost the entire charge.

'Almost' was a score of armored horsemen riding into Garric's guards. Four of the shaggy mammoths followed close behind.

The pikemen slung light oval shields from neckstraps so that they had both hands for their weapons. The Blood Eagles instead wore heavy shields on their left forearms. They raised them now to guard their faces against the oncoming lances while their own shorter spears thrust for the chests and throats of the horses.

Some of the horsemen broke through the front rank, though their mounts were already dying again. Soldiers who'd lost their spears drew swords and stooped to hock and gut the horses, then to hack through the riders falling from their backs. Soldiers from the rear ranks thrust back the riders they could reach with their spears, and the regular infantry on the flank started forward to encircle enemy.

Garric saw a Yole champion trying to swing his long sword despite the spear protruding from the gorget around his throat. He went over backward with a clang that could be heard over the general din.

The mammoths, so dead that they sloughed patches of skin as they moved, walked into the royal line. Their strides were slow, but each one covered more ground than a man lying full-length.

The commander of the flank battalion bellowed an order. His troops hurled their spears, puncturing the shaggy monsters scores of times. The rain of heavy missiles killed the drivers seated on each animal's neck and swept away all but two of the sixteen soldiers in the fighting platforms on their backs.

The mammoths, walking dead before they received their first wound from the Royal Army, continued to pace forward. Their concentrated mass carried them into the ranks dented by the cavalry charge, then on into the raised shields of the men behind.

"Cut the tendons!" Garric shouted. No man on Ornifal today had fought mammoths, but King Carus had met them as he crushed the rebellions flaring all across his kingdom. "Hamstring them!"

Garric eased backward, along with Waldron and his staff. Lord Attaper was at the front of the line, but that was his place as commander of the guards. Garric had drawn his sword, but he wasn't here to—