Brightly Burning (59 page)

Then, as the push from behind forced the front ranks onward, Lan changed his tactics.

He brought up the curtain again, farther in toward the Valdemaran lines, but this time it was for a very different purpose.

He caught a full line of a hundred Karsites or more square in his fire-line, and
he held the flames on them.
Even over the din of battle, Pol heard the dying screams of those men as they tried to escape the inferno and failed, and his stomach lurched as the smell of burned flesh came to his nose.

“Oh, dear gods—” Pol breathed. Lan had not deliberately called fire down on Karsites and burned them until this moment.
What had made him do it now?

The wall of flame died, leaving behind not only a blackened strip of land, but charred and twisted corpses lining it. The fire-curtain was gone, but this time the Karsites held back, despite the threats of their priests. They seemed to have figured out that if they were within the stretch where the curtain had already burned, they were safe.

For a moment, it looked as if the Karsites were at an impasse. They couldn't retreat, but they were not going to charge, either. Then a trumpet sounded an unfamiliar call, the priests screamed an order, and they started coming on again. But now, they charged forward in small groups of twenty or thirty, too many groups and too widely separated for Lan to stop with his flame-wall.

Lan wasn't going to give in. He sent up fire-fountains again, intercepting as many of the little groups as he could, and once again shrill and terrified screams rang out above the general mayhem. No one but Pol seemed disturbed by this change in Lan's tactics; in fact, from the Lord Marshal's muttered comments, and the shouts of encouragement out on the field, there were plenty who were cheering him on.

Satiran, prompted by Pol's unease, looked up to the place where Lan and Kalira perched. It was only the sense that something was wrong with
Lan
that prompted him to look up there, nothing more.

But he saw—or thought he saw—something.

He wasn't certain what it was—a movement among the rocks where nothing should have been, perhaps, a man-shaped shadow behind them. He might not have seen anything—he
did
have a touch of ForeSight along with everything else, and it might only have been that ForeSight that warned him.

All he knew was that suddenly his unease turned to horror, he
knew
that tragedy was a heartbeat away. Terror closed his throat, tasting bitter, and he tried, desperately, to project a warning into Lan's impervious mind.

LAN was the dragon.

Driven by hunger that only increased with every new victim, he hunted the battlefield, pouncing on target after target, reveling in the screams of the hurt and dying, then going on to new prey. Flame filled his mind and soul, burning with unholy joy, insatiable rage. He had but one thought now—he would burn the world, if that was what it took, until the last of the enemy was ashes.

ALTHOUGH Satiran's eyes were fixed on the pair above, Pol wasn't the only Herald to
know,
suddenly, that catastrophe was about to strike.

The battlefield was disordered; now relative disorder became absolute chaos.

“The
hell!
” the Lord Marshal exclaimed.

All over the field, Valdemaran trumpeters called retreat, though no orders had been given for retreat. A dozen Mindspeakers bombarded Pol with panic-stricken calls to flee, then broadcast their warnings at full strength to anyone who could hear. Valdemaran fighters across the battlefield broke off their engagements and fled in no order at all, while beside Pol the Lord Marshal sputtered.

Pol stretched out his arm to Lan and Kalira, in a futile effort to stop what was coming.

A dark speck flitted across the distance from a shadow that might have been man-shaped, to the young Herald. Only a speck, insignificant—

Something grabbed Lan and
shook
him. Distracted he glanced aside—

Just as a heavy crossbow bolt thudded into Kalira's chest.

All breath driven out of her, she could only gasp and throw up her head in pain, but her mind screamed.

Too late.

She flung her head around to stare at him as he scrambled to reach her.

Her eyes clouded with agony as she collapsed; but her gaze caught and held his. He reached frantically for her, but he couldn't hold her. A greater power than his wrenched her away from him.

He only heard her, fainter with each word, as her eyes closed for the last time.

Then she was gone.

UP on the mountainside, the tiny figure of the Companion crumpled, and fell with a single, heart-rending cry that Pol heard only in his mind, a cry cut off with the finality of death.

Up on the mountainside, Lan crumpled beside his lifeless Companion.

It was not Mindspeech as such, that cut across the brains of every living creature in and around the battlefield. It was a mental howl of anguish, of grief, of terror—it drove tears into unwilling eyes and sent some to their knees in the snow. It triggered the worst memories of every person on the field—Valdemaran and Karsite alike.

Pol clasped both hands to his head as the cry cut into his very soul. It went on, and on, a grief like a sword cutting him in a million pieces. —and it was not sane.

Then—Fire, elemental, unstoppable, came to earth.

It exploded down out of the sky and drove down on the Karsites like the very hammer of the gods. It spewed up out of the snow to meet the down-rushing flames of the sky-fires. In a single moment, it transformed the entire side of the mountain to a furnace, an inferno, and it spread from there faster than a man could run.

Now Pol knew why Heralds had seized trumpets to sound retreat, and mind-voices had sent the Valdemaran forces scattering for their lives. ForeSight had given them the warning that something apocalyptic was about to happen, but not what, nor in time to prevent it.

FIRE exploded down the mountain, an avalanche of flames.

Lan lay over Kalira's body, the dragon unleashed, unfettered, and free to ravage as it willed. All of his grief, rage, and hatred filled it and gave it a power beyond anyone's direst nightmare.

So long as it consumed him, he was beyond caring.

He closed his eyes, gave himself over to the dragon, and set the world, and himself with it, aflame.

KALIRA!:
Satiran, lost in his own grief, shuddered once, then lifted his head to the sky and keened out his loss to the heavens.

Pol wanted to howl with him. Kalira was dead, struck down by a Karsite assassin's arrow. Lavan Firestorm had nothing to help him control his powers—and with the death of his lifebonded Companion, no reason to want to—no reason to live.

He needed no fuel for his fires now; he could burn the rock of the mountains if he chose, burn the very air itself.

The fire had a voice—it howled like millions of damned souls. It had a mind, and the mind was mad. Karsite and Valdemaran alike scrambled to escape the battlefield before the fires caught them. From the ground to the mountaintop, there was nothing but flame. Fire churned and roiled, fire roared and shrieked, fire filled the sky. Vortices of flame twisted, hellish dancers with the grace of a streamer in the wind and the appetite of a demon—

Even as Pol watched through his Companion's eyes, Satiran's voice keening on and on in his mind and ears, those nearest the flames were suddenly sucked up by a wind or the firestorm itself inhaling, pulled off their feet, into the air, and then, screaming, into the maelstrom.