The Curse in the Gift (The Last Whisper of the Gods Book 2) (51 page)

Azarak read the conflict in her features. He understood her inner struggle and absolved her of the responsibility of making a decision. “Your Magus, this isn’t a request. It’s a command. Your primary goal must now be to restore Sorial. He’s Vantok’s principal wizard and, whether the city stands or falls, he must be returned. You have your orders.”

No more than ten minutes later, Alicia was stripping off her clothing and diving into the river. She would ride it all the way to the sea then head up the coast. Few saw her departure and, among those who did, none marked it as significant except one.

Justin allowed himself a thin smile as he watched Alicia’s departure. Now, Vantok was truly defenseless. His patience had paid dividends. He could move forward without fear of magical opposition or interference - the way he had planned it at the beginning before circumstances had muddied his strategies.

Justin had felt a similar shockwave to the one that had disoriented Alicia, although its impact was not as dramatic when filtered through fire. He had no idea what it meant beyond reflecting the acute pain of a wizard. Sorial might still be alive. In fact, Justin doubted Alicia would have departed so hastily if he was incontrovertibly dead. But he was unlikely to be much of a factor in the Battle of Vantok. And what of the efreet? Justin didn’t know. He could summon the creature and it would have no choice but to answer, but what if the struggle with Sorial wasn’t yet finished? Recalling the djinn now, if the task was incomplete, could result in The Lord of Earth’s escape. Justin had no intention of allowing that. The
efreet had its orders. It would return to him once the mission was accomplished with both Sorial and Alicia dispatched. The specifics were unimportant except as a matter of satisfying curiosity.

Time to move forward here, to end this charade of a battle that had arguably gone on too long. At this point, based on the number of casualties, the men of Vantok might have formed the mistaken belief they were winning. He wondered if anyone had considered how foolhardy his seemingly unsophisticated battle plan was. Did any of the rival commanders suspect there was something backing up the ten-thousand soldiers? Were they celebrating their apparent battlefield superiority or waiting in a vise of uncertainty for the trap to close? If the former, they were about to experience a shock. If the latter, they were about to see their grim expectations realized.

From Justin’s perspective, the Battle of Vantok was won. His total number of dead and critically wounded would exceed three thousand, leaving him with sixty-five hundred able bodies for the next phase of his campaign. Perhaps he could pick up new recruits. Nomads all across the South would flock to his banner when the news about Vantok’s defeat became common knowledge. Maybe some who had defended the city, eager to join in the spoils, would turn their allegiance. For those, Justin might be willing to offer amnesty even though his policy was that enemy soldiers should be hunted to extermination.

Justin let out a high pitched whistle, a prearranged signal that he wanted to confer with General Gerthak. After a brief delay, the big man entered and bowed low to The Lord of Fire.

Justin regarded him through the veil of flames separating them. There were aspects of the battle strategy the general had opposed. He had been reluctant to sell the lives of some of his men so cheaply, favoring instead a more “traditional” attack plan. But Gerthak’s was the strategy of a conventional war, and there was nothing conventional about what Justin planned next. Now, the general was about to learn a thing or two about how magical wars were fought.

“General, the time has come for us to engage the enemy more aggressively.”

“Beggin’ Yer Lordship’s pardon, we’re losin’ far more men than we should by throwin’ ourselves at the strength of their line rather’n punching through a weakness. I’ve lost at least three whole regiments up front that shouldn’ta seen action yet.”

“That’s why there are reinforcements, General.”

“Reinforcements?  We ain’t got no reinforcements! You told me ta throw everythin’ at ’em an that’s what I did!”

“Not
your
reinforcements,” said Justin, his tone sharp as well-honed knife. “
Mine
. The time has come for me to call in my reinforcements so we can end this little drama and take the city.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: REINFORCEMENTS

At first, Azarak wasn’t sure what he was seeing. With his attention focused primarily on the immediate battle area, he had paid little attention to what was happening further back behind enemy lines. After all, it was the front that mattered and it was encouraging to see the stand his troops were making. With every passing moment, the possibility of driving back the invaders was looking more realistic. For every two defenders that fell in the melee below, three attackers went down. But Vikon’s eloquent “What the fuck?” caused him to look up and behold something odd to the north. The moment he saw it, he was convinced that his decision to preemptively evacuate the city had been correct. He didn’t know what it was at first but it augured a grim turn of events: one way or another, The Lord of Fire was no longer a bystander.

From this distance, it appeared that eleven tiny pinpricks of fire were approaching, all elevated some fifteen to twenty feet above the battlefield. Their movement was slow, almost leisurely. It didn’t appear that any of the soldiers on either side were aware of this phenomenon. There was something else as well - something much larger and more distant.  It couldn’t possibly be...

As they grew closer, the eleven floating fires resolved into parodies of human shapes. They were remarkably similar in appearance: larger than men with deep red hides, bald heads, and muscular bodies. Fire emanated from their skin, making them glow. Azarak swallowed hard. He recognized these creatures from stories of ages past: djinn, elemental creatures that could be summoned and bound only by a fire-wizard of enormous power. Legends told of twelve djinn, the mightiest of which was their king, the efreet. That most powerful entity was not among those moving toward the battle, but the other eleven were there, doing the bidding of their master. Their participation portended a grim turning point in the Battle of Vantok. In her weakened state, Alicia never would have been able to stand against Justin’s reinforcements; he was glad he had sent her away. At least she would see another dawn.

Then there was the other creature, still too distant to be seen clearly even in the bright light of the summer afternoon. Even this far away, Azarak could observe that it was large and winged - a crimson monstrosity approaching from the sky; unlike the djinn, it was moving rapidly. If The Lord of Fire could resurrect one legend, why not another? In another circumstance, Azarak might have felt awe. In this one, he felt only terror and despair.

Justin’s plan was no longer obscure. In fact, it was deceptively simple; from a purely tactical perspective, Azarak couldn’t help but admire its straightforwardness. The efreet had been used to draw first Sorial then Alicia away from Vantok. Once the city’s magical support was gone, The Lord of Fire had unleashed the creatures capable of delivering the most damage. The human enemy - the group currently fighting against his army - had been a distraction. They would be used for clean-up duty once the djinn and dragon had devastated the defenders.

“Elven djinn and one dragon,” said Azarak, his voice surprisingly calm. Once one had come to terms with the reality of wizards, accepting other mythological creatures wasn’t hard. The men fighting below wouldn’t be as composed when they saw what was entering the combat zone. But the king’s perspective was one of detached objectivity and that point-of-view revealed one indisputable fact: the battle was lost. Vantok’s fall was as certain as tomorrow’s sunrise.

Vikon looked thunderstruck. His eyes, wide as saucers, stared in frank disbelief at monsters out of children’s stories come to life. “It canna be! It’s gotta be some wizard’s trick!” His voice held no conviction, however.

“It’s no trick,” said Azarak. Below, the battle continued as it had for hours, with the defenders slowly but surely winning the hand-to-hand struggle with their less skilled and more poorly equipped opponents. To those on the ground, it probably seemed only a matter of time before things were settled. Had anyone looked skyward to the north yet?

“Should we retreat?” asked the king, deferring to Vikon’s experience in tactical matters. Continuing the battle seemed pointless; an exercise in mass suicide. This wasn’t about saving Vantok anymore; this was about preventing the wholesale annihilation of the city’s militia. In the old legends, the twelve djinn had wiped out armies larger than the one being fielded by Azarak. And dragons had been known to incinerate acres upon acres with their fiery breath and rip apart enemies with their sword-like talons and impossibly sharp teeth.

“Nay,” said the Overcommander in a defeated voice.  Like Azarak, he knew this was no longer about winning. It was about minimizing casualties. But he saw no way out of the carefully prepared trap. “If we show ’em our backs, they’ll run us down from behind. Plus, I don’t think there’s anywhere we can go to get away from those…things. The best we can do is stand our ground… maybe drop back slowly… and buy time for those who evacuated.”

The majority of those on the field would die. Some stragglers might escape, especially toward the end when order broke down and no one was giving commands any more, but the concept of the army regrouping to the south or west was no longer a realistic expectation.

“I havta get word to the men. Let them know what they’ll be facing. Let them…” He never finished the sentence. Almost as one, the djinn attacked, each hurling a ball of fire bigger than an inn’s large cook-pot directly into the front line of the defenders. The burning spheres exploded on impact, expelling blazing debris in all directions. Screams of pain and panic filled the air. Men on both sides were killed and injured - the djinns’ attack was indiscriminate - but the impact on morale was one-sided.

Then the dragon soared in.

Azarak couldn’t help but stare. The creature, which resembled an impossibly large, winged lizard, was a magnificent beast, its flight smooth and controlled. From blackened nostrils to prehensile tail, the sleek, muscled body was the size of eight horses placed head-to-hindquarters, with a wingspan more than twice its length. The beast’s scales, glinting brilliantly in the sunlight, were variegated reds, oranges, yellows, and colors in between with deepest hues on its back and sides and the brightest ones on its belly. Its teeth - two rows of dagger-length incisors on both top and bottom - were stained a dark brown, residue from the soot that accompanied belches of fire. Its snout was flattened and elongated, broadening at the rear into a formidable skull that held deep orange eyes with large, ebony pupils. Beyond the head, its smooth back, free of any bony protrusions, tapered to become the long, powerful tail that, in addition to helping the dragon maneuver in flight, could be a formidable weapon in combat.

The dragon’s flight took it high above the field of battle, almost as high as the top of Mount Vantok.  For a moment, Azarak thought the creature was headed directly for him, but it banked several hundred feet short of the mountain and went into a deep dive. It pulled up sharply before hitting the ground, let out a roar to shake the ground and cause men’s hearts to quail, then disgorged a jet of flame that roasted a group of fifty tightly packed men like pigs on a spit. In thirty seconds, across the entirety of the battlefield, Azarak lost three hundred men to creatures of fire.

The king had never felt so utterly, completely powerless. There was nothing he could do to save these men. He was their ruler; they looked to him for leadership and inspiration. And the only thing he could do now was watch them burn under the relentless assault of eleven djinn and a dragon. And somewhere, presiding over the carnage, was The Lord of Fire.

* * *

Awareness came to Carannan when the concussion from an explosion knocked him off his feet. Ten feet from where he had been standing only moments before, ready to deliver a death blow to a hairy mercenary in a too-small suit of armor, was a blackened crater. Scattered around were bodies and body parts of men from both sides, some unmoving and some twitching. The sounds of screaming and moaning filled the air, although the duke’s ears were ringing so loudly that he could hear little. The smell of burning flesh and hair was overpowering.

Once he regained his footing and his bearings, he mimicked the actions of the many soldiers on both sides and lowered his weapon to look up. There, hovering ten feet above the ground and thirty feet behind the enemy’s front line, was a djinn. Between its palms, it was rolling what appeared to be a huge ball of dough, although it was like no dough Carannan had seen, with flames licking its surface. The djinn was unconcerned about the panic seizing the troops beneath it. It went about its business and, when it deemed the ball to be done, lobbed it carelessly into a concentration of the defenders. The concussion was greater than the first one and Carannan, who didn’t look away, was left half-blind.

The fighting had stopped with the arrival of the djinn and anything resembling order fled. Men on both sides were trying to get away, each running as far and as fast from the previous point of engagement as they could. Evidently, The Lord of Fire’s troops were no more prepared for this than Azarak’s.

Carannan had no idea what was expected of him. Was he supposed to pursue the retreating enemy troops? Should he stand his ground and await their return - something that would surely happen once they realized the djinn were on their side? Or should he turn tail and flee, an option seized on by the majority of his compatriots? He scanned the chaos, looking for someone who might be in charge and found no one. In fact, men were looking to him as the most senior officer in the area.

“Fall back!” He shouted, unsure whether it was the wisest approach or not. Another fireball exploded nearby, killing a score of men. Some of the bodies were tossed twenty feet into the air, broken rag dolls for the djinn’s pleasure. “Back to the river!”

Carannan was swept up by the wave of men, pushed along like flotsam in a rush of whitewater. He was dimly aware that Rotgut was keeping pace with him. And just when he thought the chaos had reached its apex, he heard the roar of a great beast and the thunder of its wings. It passed not far behind him, close enough for him to fall under its shadow. Heat seared the back of his neck as a gout of flames blasted a knot of men gathered nearby. Those wearing iron armor baked to death inside of it; those without it died more quickly, their exposed bodies reduced to ashes. Carannan survived because someone pushed him to the ground. After, had it not been for Rotgut’s helping hand yanking him to his feet, he would have been trampled.

The duke felt as if he was in the midst of a nightmare with monsters from his childhood emerging from under his bed to attack him. He hadn’t gotten a good look at it, but the creature breathing flames indiscriminately across Vantok’s troops could only be a dragon.

The well-ordered formations of Vantok’s defenders had disintegrated under the relentless attacks of Justin’s minions. The Lord of Fire’s men, having retreated from the killing zone, were regrouping. The djinn and dragon were doing massive damage up and down the line, burning people and countryside alike. Lacking weapons that could injure their enemies, the men died by the hundreds. The surface of the river separating Vantok from the surrounding wilderness was aflame; huge clouds of steam billowed from it. It had become impassible to humans; the few who tried to cross it by diving deep never reached the other side.

Carannan was moving with a group headed west, traveling parallel to the river. Most of the surviving pieces of the left flank were going in this direction; no one seemed to be in direct pursuit. The djinn and dragon were concentrating on ripping apart the army’s core. The duke tried on several occasions to look back, but the only thing he could see beyond the frantic faces of the men around him were huge billowing clouds of grayish-black smoke, the wreckage of a battle that had gone far worse than anyone had imagined possible. They had planned for so many contingencies, but never anything like this. The Lord of Fire’s victory would soon be complete. Vantok was irretrievably lost.

Meanwhile, atop Mount Vantok, Azarak watched the rout with increasing anguish. Even the last option of brave men, silent prayer, was a foolish and pointless indulgence now that there were no gods to hear the plea. Next to him, Vikon was tight-lipped, his gauntlets clenched into impotent fists. There was nothing either of them could do except watch and despair. The trebuchets, potentially the only weapons that might be effective against the djinn or the dragon, had been disabled in the first assault, their wooden frames set ablaze. Archers launched missiles at one of the djinn but the arrows burst into fire and burned up before they could strike the creature. The dragon’s scales, tougher than the most skillfully made plate mail, were impervious to arrow heads. None of Justin’s creatures got close enough to the ground to be vulnerable to an attack by sword, pike, or mace. One intrepid soldier launched a lance at a djinn; it suffered the same fate as the arrows.

For the moment, the king and those with him atop the mountain were insulated from the disaster being visited upon the army, which had broken and scattered in all directions. Justin’s forces had reformed several hundred feet behind the original line. They were awaiting instructions to move forward. For now, there was no need for them to be involved. Fires began to spring up in the city as several buildings were set ablaze by one or more of the djinn. As the oily smoke billowing upon from the smoldering bodies of Azarak’s soldiers grew thicker, the king found it increasingly difficult to discern much outside his immediate surroundings. Soon, he was isolated. Beyond the mountain, the level of noise was diminishing, evidence that the slaughter was drawing to a close. Azarak wondered how many had gotten away; he fervently hoped the women and children of Vantok had heeded his call for evacuation. Those who remained could expect no mercy.