Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
Then he became aware that he did not feel the numbing cold which Ronin had struggled against in his two battles with the Makkon. He recalled Bonneduce the Last’s words to Ronin in Khiyan just before he set sail in the
Kioku
in search of Ama-no-mori:
You cannot yet defeat the Makkon.
But Ronin was no more. His Hart cried out again, bellowing, and with this came the knowledge that at last he was on equal terms with the Makkon.
He yelled, batting away the reaching talons, stiffening his fingers inside his Makkon-hide gauntlets, and slammed them into the creature’s unprotected throat.
The Makkon howled, an ululation, and he ducked a powerful strike from its talons.
With an enormous blow, he smashed the Makkon to the earth beside him.
He pounded at its face, the memory of Matsu filling him like a perfume, a mist in his eyes. He paid not the slightest attention to the snaking of its arms as the powerful claws reached up and closed about his throat.
He continued to pummel the Makkon, staring into the wicked eyes with their slit pupils of ebon and with great satisfaction heard the sharp crack as its beak split.
He smashed his gauntleted fists down again and the beak shattered, splintering fragments of keratin into his face. Matsu’s hot blood and flesh in a nauseating spatter across Ronin’s eyes. The hideous head whipped from side to side.
But now the thing’s talons had gripped his throat, gaining control, squeezing all at once. His lungs were filled with air and he lifted his fists again, smashing them into the pulpy wound. He ripped off the last remaining shard of beak, the black blood flying, cold and wet, and drew the jagged edge across the Makkon’s eyes. The serrations ripped into the eyeballs.
Briefly, he felt the sting of the points of the talons as they sank into his flesh, trying to rip out his throat, but he bent his body lower, bringing pressure to bear, maintaining his leverage.
He dug in deeper with the beak, slashing through hide and viscera. Flesh came away in long, raw strips. The talons were digging deeper and the Makkon began a series of jerking motions with its arms.
With one last titanic effort, even as he felt the fierce pull at the flesh of his throat, he rammed the jagged shard deep behind the Makkon’s right eye up into the brain, pounding it home as if it were a spike.
The huge body jerked under him and blood and bits of pink and dusky yellow spurted upward. He choked and wiped at his face with his corded arms, leaning the weight of his whole frame behind the strike.
Beneath him, the Makkon shuddered, a brown liquid gurgled from the thing’s mouth and the talons fell away from him.
On his knees, straddling the Makkon’s corpse, he slammed his fist one more time into the ruined face of the Makkon. Then he stood, strode to where his sword rose like a grave marker above the body of the second Makkon. He ripped it from its flesh, sheathed it, turned away, loping to the river, feeling the chill water cleansing him of the caked filth which covered him. He ducked his head, came up snorting.
On the point of returning to the far bank, he heard, over the din of the battle, screaming from upriver. The sleet had lessened momentarily and the sounds came to him clearly, funneled along the acoustic channel of the river.
Across the water, the enemy had broken through the lines of defense. He squinted into the afternoon gloom, saw the whipping banners as the forefront of the enormous wedge of warriors breaking out from their foothold on the bank, sweeping upward onto the field before Kamado’s towering walls.
Crimson lizard on an ebon field and, his heart pounding, he struck out across the river with long, powerful strokes.
Whatever is happening downriver where the Bujun fight, we are losing the battle here, thought Rikkagin Aerent. He wheeled his horse about. The glistening hide was flecked with foam, blood, and gore. It trampled several wounded men as he drove it up a short rise.
He surveyed the scene, sickened by the monumental devastation. So many deaths and the day is but half done.
The plain was a vast noisome sea of flailing flesh and ground bone, gouting gray dust and spurting blood. The field itself seemed to have undergone basic geological changes since the morning. Where once it had been a softly undulating expanse, it had now metamorphosed into a series of humpbacked hillocks by the carnage of the day’s fighting. Immense mounds of the dead and wounded rolled away from him for as far as he could see. The constant sleet, pouring down from the angry skies, melting in the bloodheat, turned the whole into a grisly morass as it mingled with the spilled fluids of the fallen combatants.
He hacked at a squat warrior who ran at him, taking off the weapon arm at its socket. He pulled on the reins of his mount and it stamped on the falling body, its hard hoofs cracking the skull above the eyes.
Not for the first time, he thought about sending one of his men back up the field for the Bujun. He had witnessed their brilliant, fierce pincer attack, saw how it had wiped out the attacking deathshead warriors. Now they fought downriver and he turned to take in the extent of his remaining forces. They were so depleted that he could not afford to send a courier. Besides, the chances of one man surviving the long passage across the field were quite slim. He would just have to hold on here until help arrived.
Curse that rikkagin, whoever he was! thought Rikkagin Aerent. The lizard banners had haunted his cavalry all the day, matching him strategy for strategy, and all the while the sheer force of the enemy’s numbers was slowly overpowering his line of defense.
He felt angry and helpless, as if caught in an immense and unmoving vise from which he seemed unable to extricate himself and his men.
Rikkagin Aerent knew his duty and now he felt that he was failing to perform it. He had had but one thought as he rode out onto the plain at the dawning of this unnatural day: to win. Now he felt that goal slipping away from him as the unseen sun dragged itself like a wounded dragon across the unquiet heavens.
Abruptly the tide of the battle brought Moeru close to him. She was mounted on some dead soldier’s horse. Through the slime and muck of the jammed field she came toward him.
‘I have been pinned for too long by that bastard lizard rikkagin!’ he shouted to her. ‘Moeru, can you take command of the cavalry? I must penetrate to the rikkagin’s standards and destroy him before his forces totally overrun this position.’
Moeru nodded and spurred her blood-soaked steed toward the last beleaguered remnants of Rikkagin Aerent’s cavalry. No officers were left alive.
She called to the riders and peeled off with ten of them, wheeling them in a tight arc, spinning them into a flank attack on the squat pikemen. They used their mounts’ hoofs as battering rams.
Satisfied that he had made the correct decision, Rikkagin Aerent jerked on his reins. His horse’s head came about, snorting, and it reared into the air.
Now we go, he said to himself.
With a leap he rushed across the field of battle, up steep ridges of cracked armor and pink, flecked bones, toward a high picket line of pikes formed by fallen warriors. Onward, avoiding forests of pikes, hacking at marauding bands of plumed warriors, ducking the hissing, deadly globes of the deathshead warriors.
He plunged forward in a furious burst of killing, breaking through the enemy guard line, the way black with their beetling bodies. Ahead lay the pike line and beyond the billowing banners of the rampant ebon lizard. Down a tunnel bristling with pikes and brandished swords he galloped, over rise after rise of mounded bodies, squirming and dank, splashing through puddles of blood, bogs of entrails, crunching skulls and spines, always the black banners flapping in the wind like expectant vultures, above him, just over the next rise of bodies, and he plunged onward with iron determination as the squat warriors screamed and seized at him with torn and bloody fingers, long nails twisted and peeling painfully away as they scraped along his mount’s flanks and withers, grasping greasily at his boots, flailing their short swords, slipping in the mire that was the remnants of their fallen comrades.
His sword arm lifted and fell, over and over, endlessly, replicating death and destruction as he plowed through the quicksand of the battle, the sleet in his eyes, riming his beard and eyebrows with pink frost. Blood and spittle flew at him. Limbs and heads were sheared away, fingers split, weapons spinning slowly in the thick, frosted air, the grim meatgrinder of his passage. And still the ebon and crimson banners flew triumphantly before him, seeming to mock his efforts, just ahead now, past another ten score warriors. Almost there.
And at length a rent opened up in the line and Rikkagin Aerent galloped madly through.
Bonneduce the Last, fighting quite near the lizard banners, saw the rikkagin hit the enemy position and squirt through. He spurred his luma forward, leaning low in the saddle and striking along his left flank, making considerable headway toward the black banners.
Now he saw Rikkagin Aerent nearing the huge figure riding atop the strange black beast and, as Bonneduce too broke through the line in a ferocious attack, his gaze swung toward the Salamander.
He gasped, uttering a name borne away on the tidal noise of the battle.
Now he whispered to his luma, urging it forward, through the twisting bodies, and as he topped a rise he found himself quite close to the lizard banners and he stared at the proud face, the cold, obsidian eyes, the wing-swept hair, the layers of fat added to disguise the characteristic shape of the high cheekbones and thought, So this is what has happened. Oh, I am happy that he is not here to witness this ultimate shame.
Now Bonneduce the Last turned once again to the mundane, numbing business of killing, using his luma to do some of the work, guiding it so that it plunged ahead, kicking out with its forelegs, battering helm and breastplate, cracking pike haft, as he slashed to left and right.
Over the slimy ridge and into the last dell.
Above his head the twin lizards crawled in their beds of flame.
He saw the Salamander’s head come up and swing around as shouts from his guard presaged Rikkagin Aerent’s swift approach. Staying the pike of one of his guards, he drew forth from the folds of his ebon robes two stubby sticks made of polished wood linked by a short length of black metal chain. Almost casually he gripped the sticks.
Rikkagin Aerent thrust his sword high in the air, screaming his battle cry, decapitating a squat warrior.
Bonneduce the Last spurred his luma forward, calling out a warning to the charging rikkagin. But even if his words had not been lost in the din of the conflagration, it would have been too late.
The Salamander had wheeled his mount, and with a deceptive flick of his left wrist, he tossed the weapon.
Rikkagin Aerent saw only a whirling blur. He tried to duck but he was too close and the thing was upon him almost before reflexive action could occur. The heavy, weighted wood slammed into his collar-bone, the doubled iron chain whipping at him an instant later. The force of the dual blow threw him from his saddle. He was knocked sideways, twisting, and as he fell one boot was trapped in his stirrup.
Panicked, his mount leapt forward, dragging the rikkagin across the lumped ground. His body fetched up against the line of pikes over which the lizard banners flew and a bone splintered in his leg. His boot flew from the stirrup and he lay as if dead atop a mass of bleeding corpses over which clouds of flies had begun to settle.
The Salamander had already turned away from him, directing his foot soldiers into a small breach in the defenses of the army of man. The squat warriors leapt to do his bidding.
Bonneduce the Last urged his luma across the shallow valley, passing the twisted form of Rikkagin Aerent.
He made directly for the Salamander.
The thunder of his steed’s hoofs echoed in his ears. He thought of Hynd, pacing restlessly, safe behind the walls of Kamado, reluctant to leave his side but knowing his duty nonetheless. Too, he thought of the Rhyalann ticking within the folds of his worn leather bags in the barracks house in Kamado. He had left it there on purpose, knowing full well the consequences of his action. At last he understood completely the meaning of his long miserable quest over the eons, beyond Time itself.
He brandished his nicked sword, black with blood, shards of white bone clinging to its long length.
‘Tokagé!’ he called. ‘Here I am! Is it not I for whom you have sought all this morning?’
With infinite slowness, the immense head, the pads of thick fat guarding his features, turned in his direction. The onyx eyes, lusterless as granite, glared at him, and the thick-lipped, pouting mouth curved gently upward.
‘Fool to have come to me,’ said the Salamander, his voice rolling sonorously over the confused din of the raging conflict. ‘But I knew you would.’
Bonneduce reined in his luma. It pranced nervously upon the insecure footing, disliking the tight rein. Eager to run again, it danced over the cracked skulls of the dead.
‘How you escaped death I cannot imagine,’ said the little man.
The Salamander’s face registered neither anger nor surprise.
‘Did you expect me to submit to death? I would have thought that you knew me better than that.’ He chuckled with real humor, a sound as rich as brocaded silk. He paused as if delighting in a sound long unused and quite remarkable to him.
His guards called nervously to him.
‘Take the perimeter,’ he told them softly. ‘Guard it well. Let none interfere.’ They fanned out surrounding the pair atop their mounts. Only the two standard-bearers with the enormous banners fluttering above their heads, the wings of a giant nocturnal bird of prey, stayed behind with their master.
‘No, no,’ he said to Bonneduce the Last. ‘How unclever you are not to have guessed. Only we survived. And how? Think! Like you I made a pact.’
‘With that thing. And with its power you flew across the ages like an animal, for that is all you really are. How many lives—’
‘Candles snuffed out by an ungentle wind. They were all unimportant.’ He pulled on his reins, fighting for control of his ebon monster, the stench of blood a constant thing in its nostrils. ‘No, let me say rather,
less
important than myself, for I value this person above all others—’