The Rite (36 page)

She could feel that the lightning had gathered itself again and awaited her summons. She willed it to strike, and as before, the giant jerked like a marionette at the end of a bright and jagged string. But also as before, when the paralyzing power released it from its grip, the pasty, colossal thing lumbered on toward her.

The giant flicked the club at her. She started to dodge, then discerned too late that the comparatively dainty motion had been a feint. The bludgeon snapped back the other way and bashed her off her feet.

As she sprawled stunned, breathless, hurting from head to toe, she realized that, enchanted armor or no, if the giant had hit her with its full strength, it likely would have killed her. When it bent down and reached for her, she surmised why it had chosen to delay her destruction. At some point, an idea had crept into its skull.

The giant meant to lift her high above the battlefield so everyone could see, then make a spectacle of her annihilation. It hoped the slaughter of Dragonsbane’s queen would inspire the Vaasan horde, and strike terror into the Damaran men-at-arms.

As it might. The common soldiers had rejoiced when their heroic king returned to lead them. Every company had one or more of the Crying God’s paladins among it to help keep it steady. But most of the men-at-arms had no idea Gareth was trying to draw the Vaasans into a trap. Had their monarch entrusted them all with the secret, the cult’s spies would have learned it in short order. Thus, most of the warriors believed the army was simply running from a battle it couldn’t win, and in such circumstances, it might only take butchering the queen to turn a disciplined fighting withdrawal into panicked rout.

Christine scrambled backward, but couldn’t retreat fast enough to escape the giant with its long reach and stride. When its hand came near enough, she struck with her scimitar. The curved sword sliced deep into its fingers, but the injury failed to balk it. It grabbed her and jerked her off the ground. The pressure of its grip made her wooden armor creak, crack, and splinter, and crushed the breath from her lungs.

She couldn’t use the scimitar to do any more damage to the fingers imprisoning her. The angle was wrong. She perceived that once again, a thunderbolt awaited her command and she called it sizzling down.

The giant stumbled and shuddered, and she too convulsed. She’d understood that, with the creature clutching her, the magic would of necessity hurt her, too, but had been willing to risk it to kill her enemy.

That still didn’t happen, though. The giant set its club on the ground and started to lift her high.

Then the colossus lurched forward. The precipitous, unexpected motion confused Christine’s senses for a moment, but afterward, she saw that her captor had fallen to one knee.

Igan had attacked its already wounded leg from behind.

The gangly young warrior wasn’t one of the bodyguards Gareth had assigned to guard his queen, but evidently he’d noticed her peril, ridden to her aid, and struck a telling blow.

The giant wrenched itself around and swiped with the back of its free hand. Armor clanged as the blow swept Igan from his saddle and dashed him to the ground. Tie tried to rise, but apparently stunned, was moving too slowly. The giant made a fist and raised it high.

Christine called the lightning. The pain was excruciating, even worse than before, and she nearly blacked out. But the magic slowed the giant long enough for Igan to clamber to his feet and ready his sword anew.

The giant snarled and reached for Christine with its empty hand. She realized with a surge of terror that, enraged by the ongoing punishment from on high, it had abandoned the idea of making a show of her death. It meant to kill her without further delay, squeezing and crushing her head or wringing her body like a wet rag.

Igan, however, rushed in and slashed it across the belly, recapturing its attention. It roared and hammered its fist down at him, but he jumped back and avoided the blow. Meanwhile, Christine attempted more magic.

She feared to bring down any more lightning. She had the feeling that she herself couldn’t withstand another bolt. Fortunately, she had other spells prepared. Trying to focus past the pain still burning in her tortured flesh, she recited the prayer, and power whispered around her like leaves rustling in the wind. A cloud of white steam billowed into existence, surrounding the giant’s wrist like a bracelet, scalding the brute’s corpse-white skin.

Startled, it jerked its arm out of the blistering vapor. At that instant, Igan leaped in and cut it again. A great gush of arterial blood spurted from the wound.

The giant doubled over, clutched at the gash with its free hand and slowly flopped over onto its side. It trembled, grasped Christine even more tightly than before, then stopped moving.

Igan helped her squirm from her attacker’s death grip, hauled her to her feet, and held her up when her legs buckled beneath her. He turned and whistled, whereupon his warhorse trotted up to them.

“Until I can find Your Majesty another mount,” he said, “we’ll have to ride double.”

He helped her up into the saddle, started to swing himself up behind her, then slipped back and fell on the ground. For a moment, she didn’t understand. Then she saw the stubby goblin arrow with the black fletching. The shaft had found the tiny gap between Igan’s breastplate and gorget.

Attuned like any druid to the ebb and flow of life, she sensed that Igan was dead, but it seemed unbelievable. He was still a youth, yet already a knight, a hero, savior of the king and queen alike, dragon-and giant-slayer. How could such a life end so abruptly? With so little fuss? It was quite possible the goblin archer hadn’t even aimed the shaft specifically at him.

She scowled away her consternation. Thousands of Igans would die that day and in the tendays to come, if she and her comrades didn’t make Gareth’s plan work. She used what remained of her lightning magic to harry the onrushing Vaasans, a sea of stunted goblins, their flat, ugly faces russet or jaundice-yellow, with giants rising from their midst like mountainous islands. When her spell ran out of power, she wheeled her mount and rode toward the center of the beleaguered Darnaran army, where she could concentrate on healing herself with some degree of safety, and steel herself to plunge back into the fray.

Pondering, Malazan prowled through the garden, among yellow roses and Ishenalyr and the copper’s scattered bones. The monastery’s cellars weren’t spacious enough for all the dragons to attack their foes at the same time. That was why the humans had retreated there, to make it impossible for the wyrms to bring the totality of their strength to bear. Which drakes, then, should accompany their leader in the forefront of the final assault?

Her instincts assured her that the attack would indeed be their last. She and her minions had already slaughtered scores of monks, and the wretched crypts and tunnels couldn’t go on forever, could they?

Though, confident as she was, it was mildly troubling that no one had seen the song dragon or the warrior with the iron limbs for the past few days. Maybe someone had struck each of them a mortal blow to which they’d subsequently succumbed, deep inside the mountain where the attackers couldn’t witness their deaths, but Malazan had no way of knowing that for certain.

The gigantic red spat her trepidation away, charring a patch of grass in the process. For inferior creatures, the song drake and her companion had proved themselves worthy adversaries, but whatever had become of them, they couldn’t forestall the destruction of the monks and the archives any longer. Nothing in all Faerűn could do that.

A vermilion, amber-eyed fire drake swooped over the garden, disturbing Malazan’s meditations. She’d given him leave to go hunting through the mountains and over the gleaming whiteness of the glacier, but he’d returned almost immediately.

”Milady!” he cried. “A company of metallic dragons . . flying down from the north.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “The metals have all gone into seclusion to wait out the Rage. It’s what they always do.” A thought struck her. “Unless these are wyrms who failed to do so in time. In which case, they’ve lost their minds, and have united to go on the rampage.”

It amused her to think of her squeamish kindred slaughtering humans, elves, and their ilk with all the ferocious glee of any chromatic. Perhaps it was just as well for them that the frenzy would never release them, for how they’d writhe in anguished guilt if it did!

“I doubt they’ll come anywhere near here,” she said.

“With all respect, Milady,” said the fire drake, “it looks as if they’re headed straight for the stronghold, and if I’m not mistaken, one of them is a song dragon.”

“That can’t be. Show me.”

She spread her wings and leaped into the air. The other reptile led her north, over the river valley and toward the southernmost peak of the Galenas. Soon she saw points of light glittering above the mountains. Most were gold or silver, though not all. One was bronze, one brass, and another blue, at a distance only barely discernible against the clear cerulean sky.

“I don’t understand,” said the fire drake, “how this can be. Did Sammaster warn you the metals might come?”

The witless question triggered a flare of rage, and she nearly succumbed to the urge to smite him with a spell instead, controlling herself, she merely snarled, “Silence, imbecile! I have to think!”

However the song dragon had slipped out of the monastery and assembled her new force, she hadn’t mustered as many wyrms as Malazan had followers. Despite the formidable abilities of silvers and particularly golds—might that even a red had cause to respect—the chromatics could win the coming battle. The question was, where to fight it?

Beneath the monastery? No. It would be more difficult to exploit her numerical advantage there. She and her warriors would meet the metals in the sky. She wheeled and hurtled back toward the fortress as fast as her pounding wings could carry her.

Crouched behind a heap of broken stone, Raryn watched the fang dragon ten yards away. The mottled, gray-brown creature with its bony spurs and forked tail was one of several wyrms stationed throughout the cellars to keep the monks from reclaiming any of the ground they’d lost. For his part, the dwarf was scouting the perimeter of the territory the humans still held in order to determine when the wyrms would launch their next attack.

A long, ululating howl echoed through the vaults. The fang dragon raised its head to listen. Raryn couldn’t speak the Draconic tongue, but assumed he was hearing the command to prepare for another assault. The last one, he suspected. After tendays of dogged resistance, the defense had little left to give.

He told himself he and his comrades had done their best, and that was all the gods required of anyone. It was a belief that had sustained him through every other danger and uncertainty in his life, but he found little comfort in it just then. It was a bitter thing to strive so hard only to lose at the end, thus failing his friends and all the world.

He prepared to slip away from the fang dragon and rejoin the monks. He expected the enormous reptile to remain where it was while it waited for its fellows to descend into the crypts. But instead the wyrm wheeled, the long blades at the end of its tail clattering through rubble, and headed toward the surface.

Raryn realized its departure could only mean one thing: Dorn and Kara had returned with the help they’d gone to find. Malazan had called her followers forth to meet the new threat.

Grinning, no longer feeling the weight of his fatigue or the sting of his scrapes and bruises, Raryn ran to find Cantoule. The defenders might possess only a shadow of their former strength, but whatever remained, they’d commit to the final struggle. The chromatics would find themselves assailed on every side, from the front and rear, and above and below.

Pavel and Will peered over the crest of the hill at the two armies, the littler one retreating, the bigger pursuing, darkening the plain below like enormous swarms of ants.

“That’s a lot of goblins,” the halfling said.

Pavel snorted. “As usual, I find myself in awe of your profound insight into the obvious. Are you wishing we’d gone back to Thentia when we had the chance?”

Actually, Will did. He didn’t fear even the most vicious alley brawl or a hunt for even the fiercest creature. But he’d never marched to war before, and the prospect of hurling himself into the vast and murderous confusion churning and yammering below gave him a pang of unease. But he would have sooner have dipped his nose in tallow and lit it on fire than admit such a thing to Pavel.

“I do wish I’d left,” he said, “but only to escape the fetid stink of your breath. I wonder, though, will Dragonsbane’s company turn and fight when they’re supposed to? Look how hard the Vaasans are pushing them. if they won’t stand, the Vaasans are going to massacre us all.”

“Says the master of military strategy. We’re about to find out if our side can still put up a fight. The goblins have advanced to the proper position.”

A moment later, Celedon whistled, recalling the pickets he’d positioned along the top of the rise, to keep watch and kill any goblin kin or giant who wandered up the hill, before the creature could discover the army hiding on the other side and alert its fellows. Will, Pavel, and the other sentries scurried to rejoin the band of skirmishers to which they’d been assigned. It took the squad a couple minutes to form up, and Drigor didn’t wait on them. Other cohorts stood ready, and the hulking, scar-faced priest ordered them forward. Thus, Will had the leisure to observe the first moments of the new phase of the battle.

Drigor’s command advanced to the top of the rise. With a prodigious thrumming and whistling, archers shot arrows arching across the sky. Wizards hurled blasts of flame, crackling, dazzling thunderbolts, and pale plumes of frost down the slope. Knights couched their lances and cantered toward the foe, and spearmen and swordsmen on foot trotted along behind them. Their faces red, their cheeks puffed out, trumpeters blew their horns.

Down on the plain, other bugles answered. More rapidly than Will would have imagined possible, the ragged, harried mass of Dragonsbane’s company stopped fleeing and regrouped into something even a lad who’d never before been to war could recognize as an army arrayed in formation and ready to fight.