The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (88 page)

But reality was tearing holes in his optimism.  Flexible as the Cyrrhidean forces were, fast as they moved, they were not going to get
there in time—the men were almost finished.  The burning logs were gone, left behind when the Sheelmen advanced, but the pressure of the Enemy itself on the front line had doubled.  Androssan was close enough to see the furious flying of blades, the seething activity that was the hallmark of desperation.

One of his aides grabbed his arm.  “Sir, you have to get out of here,” he shouted in his ear.  “When this line folds, you
cannot
be here!”

Androssan shook him off, enraged and helpless behind his stony General
’s face.  He couldn’t admit it, couldn’t give up.

Suddenly a man screamed behind them, then another, and Androssan whirled in horror.  Had they gotten behind them?  Had they broke
n through the Sentinels?  But it was not men that had come in behind them, and his eyes widened, throat closing as instinctive terror swelled through him.

There, streaming wet from the banks of the Daroe, came wolves.  Enormous, panting, loping creatures out of nightmares as old as mankind.  They ran
like fleet, soundless shadows in the night, ignoring everyone in their line of flight—most of whom were too terrified to move out of the way in time anyway.  The angry red light of war reflected in their golden eyes, their massive heads held low like they were swooping in for the kill.  And they were running straight past the men of the 17
th
…to the front.

Warwolves.  Hundreds of them, many more than could be accounted for from what the Ram had brought.  They were moving so quickly that they reached the front line within seconds, and a whole new set of sounds filtered through the battlefield.  The roars of combatants and cries of the wounded changed abruptly to terrified screams, punctuated by the sudden silence of troops taken by surprise, and then the horrible growls and snarls of beasts on the hunt.

“Sir!”  Androssan spun—it was Waylan again, this time looking victorious, and escorting a wild-looking man whose cloak and grey hair were billowing restlessly in the sudden, stiff breeze.

It was Melkin.  He recognized him from the Kingsmeet and knew him from reputation.  What in Sheelfire was he doing here?  The General stared up at him in the darkness, eyes wide in surprise.

“Lord General,” the man snarled at him like it was a curse.  “Request formal permission to apply for the position of Wolfmaster.”

It all connected.  Androssan
’s face lighted up.  “You are hereby reinstated!  How did you know to come here?” he demanded, relief flooding through him in a wave so powerful his knees almost buckled.

“I didn
’t,” he said ferociously.  “It was the way we happened to come—and once they caught the scent of the Tarq, well, it was out of anyone’s hands.”  An untamed light was in his eyes and he glanced hungrily towards the front.  “And now, Sir, if you’ll excuse me…?”

“By all means,” the General said, face splitting into a grit-creased grin.

How long had they held the Enemy off? Androssan wondered as he wearily made his way back to the Bluff.  Messengers with a steady stream of reports had been finding him as he  traveled the muddy ruts of what had once been the Great Southern Road, but so far there’d been nothing as pulse-pounding as what he’d just lived through.  The Warwolves had brought a wind with them right out of the arctic, and he pulled his cloak tighter around him, more than happy to fight the chill for the benefit of a wind blowing all those Enemy fires back south.

Back at his headquarters at the Bluff, h
e forced himself to take the jerky he was handed, stuffing it uninterestedly into his belly.  The tent was full of men, Kyr irrepressibly at its heart, and they briefed each other succinctly.  The left flank was as hard-pressed as the right, apparently, the Knights holding but taking heavy casualties.  They would be in deep trouble by morning.  Androssan was of the private opinion that that was going to apply to all of them.

“It doesn
’t make sense,” Spere complained harshly.  He’d gotten a bad burn and his head and neck were swathed like a woman in mourning.  “It’s the center that’s weakest—why are they pounding the flanks?”

“Their own center was weakened, throwing itself against the Wings,” Kyr said absently, without a trace of pride.  “The main reason we withdrew was because their force had started to spread out around us…”

Just then a Fox, looking like he’d been rolling around in the cold leftovers of a fire, came panting into the tent.  His news was surreal; Androssan was sure he’d misheard.  Kyr’s face was a picture of startled disbelief for a fraction of a second, then he raced out of the tent, consumed by the desire to see for himself what the Fox was reporting.  Androssan was a spare second behind him, but he had to wait for a horse (again) to join him.  He wasn’t about to race up the Bluffs on foot.

From
their height, they could see that the battlefield was eerily quiet, the muted cries of the wounded from the hospital tents and the crackle of a few stubborn blazes the only sound.  Where the line of contact had once been instantly obvious, full of frenzied movement and sound and the torchings of the Enemy, now there was only black stillness.

“Tarq never do this,” Kyr said quietly next to him.

“‘Tis a trick, no doubt,” Khrieg commented lugubriously from the other side of the Rach.

They had withdrawn.  The Enemy, infamous through all the Ages of the eons
of war for their unshakeable tenacity to overrun, to absorb unfeasible cost to their force, to never falter until their objective was taken (and preferably on fire)…had paused.

“How do you read this?” Androssan asked Kyr quietly.  “Do they shift all to the flanks?”

The Rach had his face tilted, nostrils flaring off that hawkish nose like he was sniffing the air.  His voice, when it finally came, was slow and surprised.  “They rest.”

Which seemed doubtful, but as the night wore on, it
increasingly appeared that he was right.   They waited in the command tent, emptied, as Androssan had sent everyone to catch as many hours of sleep as they could.  And there, in the dark hours of the morning, when weariness and quietude effaced the walls of the command façade, Androssan found himself saying what was on his mind.

Kyr had just finished outlying his elaborate plan for an Aerach foray come morning.  Silence had settled momentarily and into it Androssan said quietly, “We cannot win this war.”

Kyr glanced up at him in surprise.  “I don’t think we dare lose it.”

Androssan looked at him steadily across the table, regretting his words but curious that the Rach would not face reality even now.  His tanned face made him look healthy and vibrant, eyes snapping even though he
’d only had an hour or so of sleep in the last three days.  They were fierce now.  “It is not ours to despair,” he said with that characteristic boldness, eyeing Androssan’s tired face.  “It is ours to fight.”

“And when is it ours to make plans to survive?” Androssan asked in weary irony.  It was like dealing with children.  Blood-thirsty, man-killing children, but nevertheless…  “There
’s   only so far blades and prayers will take you.”

Kyr
’s face animated with the challenge.  Without a trace of anger, he leaned across the table, eyes flashing.  “Ever the North has disparaged Il as a crutch for the weak and the weak-minded, a self-made source of comfort for those who cannot face the world without a dream to hide behind...But I tell you, He is the strength of the strong, and His Will shapes the world.  The Light, in the end, will
never
be defeated by the Darkness.”

CHAPTER
43

The Wings attacked the quiet camp of the Tarq several hours before dawn, swooping in like shrieking bloodhawks out of the night.  It was enormously successful, if you could believe the flushed, ecstatic Rach when they rode back through cheering Imperial Foot.  They repeated it several times as the cold day dawned, frigid in the strengthening wind from the North.  The raids were focused in the west, attacking the Enemy massed in front of the weakened 17
th
and the hard-hit Cyrrhidean forces.

Androssan, more tired after catching an hour nap than he
’d been before it, had shifted his command temporarily to the West, finding Traive in the dim, cold hours just after dawn.  Cyrrh’s Regent had his own vantage point, a high, cleared hill in among the dead brush and thin trees of the Saphilles just west of Crossing.  The place hummed with hushed activity in rather offensive contrast to the screaming bedlam of the Imperial command.

Traive greeted his monarch gravely (ignoring Androssan
’s truculent attempts at dissuasion, Khrieg had insisted on accompanying him), but didn’t bother him with any of the confusing details of war.  The war leaders talked in low tones for a few moments, Fox hovering patiently in a growing mass to report to Traive. 

“Launchers all destroyed,” the first one of them said when the Regent turned to them.  Androssan gave a snort of grim pleasure.  Teams of Fox had been busy all night, making forays out into that seething mass of Enemy to get axes on the launchers, which had unfortunately been fire-resistant.

A Sentinel came running suddenly into the cleared area of command, a big, gorgeous panther bounding along by his side.  The horses went mad nearby—the Imperial horse herd was never going to be the same—and most of the Northerners backed up several steps.  His news was worse on morale than his cat:  the dragons had been spotted.

Androssan stared bleakly out over the view to the south, the rumpled hills that were full of men battling for their lives and the life of the Realms, while the Jagscout rolled his report out.  He sounded like a fairytale herald, giving Androssan the disassociated feeling of having fallen asleep on his feet, dreaming he was reading his kids to sleep like he had when they were little.

“Just two visible, ground-bound, air-borne potential questionable,” he was saying.  “Moving very slowly, but small flame bursts definitely seen.”

“Location?” Traive asked musingly, as if he was getting updates on supply wagons rolling in.

“Working their way up on the eastern Dragonspine; they’d just turned out towards the flatlands when I left…angling towards us.  I estimate a matter of hours.”

“Alert the Talons,” Traive said quietly, still undisturbed.  “Have
’em on standby.”

He turned to Androssan.  “Care to have a look?” he asked cheerfully, as if this would be
quite
the treat.  The General looked at him darkly.  This was the end of the world they were talking about here; it seemed like a little more gravity should be in evidence.  But he nodded stoically.

“Perhaps a stag…?” The Regent suggested.  Androssan turned around, seeing nothing but empty field behind him.  On top of everything else, he couldn
’t keep a flaming horse in sight for more than a minute.

His aides shrugged their shoulders helplessly at his black scowl.  “Spread the word to commands that the dragons have been spotted.  Ready the water teams.  And
get…me…a…horse
!” he ground out.

Waylan
’s face, puffy from lack of sleep, brightened.  “I’ll bring the Sheel-bred, Si—”
                “WHATEVER!”  He wasn’t about to get on one of those rickety, twitchy deer.

As his various aides scurried off, he turned back to Traive.  “How do they fight?” he asked grimly.  In the war council, the Regent had only mentioned them briefly…everyone else had seemed quite cognizant and comfortable
with military dragonlore.

“
They often approach from the ground, using their weight to crush what’s under foot.  They’re about 25-30 yards tall, and from that height they spray flames to destroy what’s in their path.”

Thirty yards?  That was the size of a
full-grown
elm
tree
. 

“They
’ll head in a straight path for us—they have a particular hatred for Cyrrhideans,” Traive sounded rueful.

“How do you suggest we defend against that?” Androssan ground out.

“Run,” Traive smiled.  “That’s what the gryphons are for.  The Enemy will be scrambling out of the way, too, trust me.  Dragons are indiscriminate about who they toast.”  Androssan looked at him grumpily, not amused at all by this tongue-in-cheek levity.

“As soon as I get a mount,” he began grudgingly.

“Here, Sir,” Waylan said behind him.

The General turned and did a double-take at the creature on the other end of the reins Waylan held.  He
’d hardly call it a dun.  It was so light a tan it was cream, with dark, smoky brown stockings that came up over its knees and wreathed up from its muzzle.  A long mane and tail of the same rich brown stirred in the freezing morning air.  Big, lustrous eyes looked at him intelligently from a face so fine-chiseled it looked like a painting.  He moved up to it, gathering the reins and mounting, and the horse moved out without being urged, a smooth, light gait full of liquid energy. 

Even from a higher vantage point further south, not much could be seen of the dragons—just enough to convince Androssan the dream was over and it was wakey-time.  His adrenaline spiked just watching them move through the filter of the intervening trees.  They were slow and majestic, and if the distorted view through glass and distance could be believed, very large.  His horse moved restlessly underneath him, catching their scent.

He rode unhappily back to Cyrrhidean command, mind swirling with the chaos approaching.  How was he going to get his lines to hold?  If the dragons opened up the western flank, the Enemy was going to pour right through.  He’d known it was coming—known as soon as he’d seen the innumerable swarms of Sheelmen from the Prow that they couldn’t hold them back forever—but he hadn’t thought it would be spear-headed by something that really, logically, shouldn’t even exist. 

They waited in growing trepidation back at the cleared hilltop.  A constant stream of Fox ebbed and flowed, bombarding Traive with data at twice the rate messengers were coming in for Androssan.  Just as the General got the uplifting news that the Knights were in trouble and about to be breached, a shushurrah of excited cries swept through the clearing.  His head snapped around—there was nothing he could do about the left flank anyway—and he saw, far out on the plains yet, the dragons break from the trees.

His heart seemed to shrink.  Here it was, then.  He turned back to the messenger awaiting instructions on Merrani, whose eyes were wide as saucers in his soot-smeared face.  “Hurry that column of relief.”  The 45
th
had been dispatched from the eastern center late last night, but they’d have to double-time it if they were going to reach the Merranics in time.  He wasn’t sure it was going to matter.

The stallion under him pawed the ground restlessly, whether from the dragons or from the currents of excitement sweeping through the command area, it was hard to say.  They were all mounted, Androssan quite certain it was going to be the best way to hold on to your horse in the next few hours.

You didn’t even need the spyglass to see them anymore, their being so advantageously huge, and everyone in the immediate area had their eyes glued on the ponderous, swaying advance.  The dragons had wings, but they were still folded against their greenish-black sides.  The second moved out from behind the first as they approached, and no longer greyed by distance could be seen to be a dull red-orange, like smoldering charcoal.  It was a little smaller, too.  The dark sea of massed Enemy flowed away from the oncoming monsters in a wave, though not fast enough.  From farther away than Androssan would have thought possible (in all the time he spent considering such things), the lead dragon suddenly gave a roar and lowering its massive, wedge-shaped head, spewed a fan of flame out over 100 yards in front of it.  Even from this distance, Androssan could hear the screams as men were roasted alive, leaving a charred, lumpy path of debris for the creatures to walk on.

“Our doom is upon us,” Khrieg whispered beside him.  Androssan
’s covey of aides stirred restlessly behind him…probably agreeing with the assessment.  On his other side, Traive, a-stagback, was putting out a quiet, calm, steady stream of orders.

Closer they came, and closer.  They both roared again, a deep, bass, reptilian kind of roar that froze the blood in your veins and brought the hairs up on the back of your neck.  Horrible suspense filled the air.  It would be better to be running, even running at them, than to be just standing, having to wait with this terrified certainty for the monstrous death walking so purposefully towards them.

Then, abruptly, the air crashed into thundering noise around them, a shrieking, unearthly bedlam of unidentifiable sound that seemed to fill every crevice of his body.  Motion exploded over their heads, and Androssan’s horse went wild, rearing on its legs and screaming its own furious challenge.  For a moment, the very prosaic necessity of having to keep his seat kept Androssan from mind-numbing terror, and it wasn’t until he had a chance to look wildly around that he located the source of all the noise.

There, winging away in front of them in a rapid air-borne wave, gryphons seemed to fill the sky.  Their wings pummeled the air, stroking them into breath-catching speeds straight towards the monsters on the plain.  Androssan
’s eyes widened as he saw the riders, clinging unsupported and unprotected to all that brilliant, colorful, deadly motion leagues and leagues off the ground.

The gryphons screamed again in ear-splitting unison, the sound, now that he thought about it, exactly what one would expect if an eagle screamed in your ear at the same time a lion roared in the other. Again the stallion under him answered, swiveling in nimble agitation under him, and spinning him around in a circle so that he saw—that he was the only one left in the immediate vicinity.  The Stags were being brought under control a short distance away, but his aides could only be seen far up the road to the North, their horses apparently on a dedicated course for Archemounte.

He swung his stallion back around to face front, just in time to see the gryphons closing on the dragons.  The latter were definitely aware of them, acting more alert and engaged in the discord they were causing than Androssan had yet seen them.  The big one up front trumpeted, a blast of noise and sound Androssan was sure he could feel ruffling his hair even almost a league away, and swung his head threateningly.  Sure enough, within seconds he had opened that huge red maw and let loose a great spume of fire.  The gryphons peeled out of its path, graceful and agile as dancers in the air, their great pinions expertly manipulating the invisible medium that held them up.

Androssan fumbled out his spyglass, focusing breathlessly in on the action.  The gryphons snapped into sudden clear view through the glass, plumage bright as jewels, beaks open and claws extended as they broke into two groups.  On their gyrating, shifting backs, Taloners in light-colored leathers seemed to cling in defiance of the laws of physics.  Long, pale blue cloth floated from their arms, streaming through the air like guidons behind them.

Straight for the two dragons’ heads the groups of gryphons flew, their unworldly shrieks mixing in with the steady, irritated roars of their prey.  There!  One had struck!  Folding his wings, he had dive-bombed that scaly head, and Androssan could see the claws catch momentarily before they were flung off.  With a massive heave, the dragon had thrown his head up, and for a second Androssan was staring right into the dark yellow reptile eye.  He shivered, hand shaking slightly with more than adrenaline.   What terrible, dead, evil awareness…

Then the creature moved abruptly, crying out in fury as gryphons en masse attacked the softer scales of its throat.  It threw them off, too, scrunching its neck down as if to crush any that couldn
’t move quick enough…when it raised its head again, there were red rivulets running down the long neck.

Still the dragons were moving forward, relentless, implacable, the huge gryphons that buzzed around their heads looking like hummingbirds around a bear.  They were a hundred times quicker than the dragons, but even Androssan could see that those fearful talons weren
’t going to be able to do much damage to hard, unfeeling scales.  Breathtaking as the action was, he had the sinking feeling they weren’t going to be able to stop them in time. 

Suddenly, the lead dragon threw its head, snout spewing flames and catching one of the Taloners by surprise.  They burst into screams, the man-gryphon pair, crawling with fire as they plummeted towards the earth.

“Ash—!” Traive burst out low and meaningfully next to him.  Androssan didn’t have to look at him to see the angry helplessness.  All commanders knew it.

“Ill we can spare that brave man,” Khrieg added funereally.  Androssan
barely conquered the urge to wallop him with the spyglass.

“They need to team up,” Traive said in his low, strong voice.   Fortunately, given the difficulty of getting a message into mid-air, the same thing seemed to occur to the Talons.  They
could be seen suddenly grouping around the big black in the lead, clustering so thickly that for a moment his head was obscured.  The smaller dragon beside him helpfully shot a modest spurt of flame at his head and more cries could be heard.  Androssan sucked in his breath, but none of the Taloners fell out of the sky.  Through his spyglass he could see several of them flying around looking singed, but the gryphons were all going strong, swooping and darting remorselessly.