The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (77 page)

The afternoon failed, the Scholae charged, and for a moment, the whole battle hung on them.

And then a line of monsters came out of the woods and crushed them.

The two regiments waiting to the right and left—good steady stradiotes from the countryside around the city—began to shift uneasily. Now the line of earthworks was going to be outflanked on both sides. On their right, the Inn itself stood like a fortress, its towers full of archers—big men with long yew bows that they would use to effect.

On the left, the grass ran down and down to a distant stream below, and back behind to a series of sheep and cattle folds for the drovers on a set of otherwise bare hillsides that ran into the east, and the road threaded in among them, heading south to Albinkirk.

As the Scholae died in the field before them, the men on the left of the line—the mountaineers—began to flinch away.

The Emperor rode his horse into one of the gaps in the earthworks, heedless of his foes, and gazed out on the field while two Nordikaans held their round aspides up to protect him from darts.

“Tisk, tisk,” the Emperor said, his first words in half an hour. He was unmoved by the death of his personal guard, manned by the younger sons of his friends and closest supporters in the capital. But he was clearly concerned when the mountaineers began to shuffle back.

“Go and tell the mountaineers to hold their positions,” he said, as if speaking to an unreasonable child.

“And then keep riding south,” muttered a Nordikaan guard.

The Emperor looked around, his face mild. “Friends, I fear the only way to restore this day is through our own endeavours.” He looked down into the chaos. “A stout blow now—and the day is ours.”

Derkensun exchanged another look with Grossbeak.

But then they were moving. The Emperor never even favoured them with an order, but simply rode out of one of the sortie gates without a further word, leaving his sword bearers and his Nordikaans to follow as best they could.

“Oh, Christ,” intoned Grossbeak, to his right. “We’re all about to die. Let’s kill a lot of them first. Amen.”

“Amen,” called the guard.

There were many men missing—men who’d fallen in the early spring, in the north, against the Traitor. But the Nordikaans still had two hundred axes, and when they went into the front of the Galles, the Galles staggered and gave way.

For a few glorious minutes, the Nordikaans and the Emperor’s inner circle—his Hetaeroi—cleared the ridge in front of the entrenchments. The mountaineers returned to their duty. The line held.

And then the great stone trolls started up the ridge. They were fast—fast enough to catch the eye—and huge, each as big as two men.

“What the fuck is that?” asked Grossbeak.

No one answered. The great black stone things rolled up the hill and the earth shook under the pounding of their feet.

Grossbeak—the Emperor’s spatharios and technically one of his senior officers—took the Emperor’s bridle. “What the fuck are they, sire?” he demanded.

The ground shook.

The Emperor sagged slightly. “We must meet them—and hold.”

“Don’t you worry, Lord.” Grossbeak was shouting. “If they can die, we’ll kill them. You get out of here. Now.”

The Emperor drew his sword. “I will not—” he began.

A slingstone, buzzing like a wasp, caught the Emperor in the side of the head. His head snapped back, and he gave a cry—lost his stirrups, and fell.

A moan went up from the imperial lines.

Grossbeak didn’t even pause. “GUARD!” he roared. “BACKSTEP!”

The trolls struck.

No line of men, however gifted, however strong, armed with any weapons, could stop that charge.

Many of the Nordikaans were knocked flat, and some never rose again. Others were merely batted aside—Derkensun was smashed back, as if a boulder had struck his shield, but the runes on his helmet held and he swung his axe with both hands, letting go the shield boss, and the weapon bounced painfully off raw rock.

At his side, Erik Lodder swung and his axe broke off a sizeable chunk of the thing that then caved in his chest.

Derkensun reversed his axe in the air and swung it low, into the thing’s heavy legs. It was exactly like cutting at rock, except that every blow did some little damage and the great stone things roared and screamed and their stone fists were like flails crushing men.

The guard began to die. Their beautiful cloaks could not save them, nor their rune-encrusted armour.

Derkensun took a piece of a blow. It knocked him flat and when he rose, he had no helmet.

He was dazed. He was almost under one of the things, and he raised his axe and cut—into the back of the knee as it took a long stride, bent on reaping Grossbeak.

To his shock, the blow went in—and stuck, more like an axe into wood than flesh, and black blood spurted. The thing whirled, the axe was torn from his grasp, and then its leg failed it and it fell.

“Backs of the knees!” Derkensun shrieked. Other men were calling other things—that their faces were weak, that their groins were like wood.

The guard was dying.

Now the stone trolls were dying, too.

The Emperor fought well. Good breeding and the best training were
not wasted on him, and he used a spear with miraculous properties until it broke, and then he drew his sword and was knocked from his horse.

Grossbeak got his arms under the Emperor and pulled him away from the trolls, and backed away, step by step, and the survivors of the guard closed around him. They made a shield wall, as best they could, and fell back, step by step, every step paid for with another veteran dead.

In the sortie gate they made a stand. A pair of brave wagoners had crewed a springal, and they managed to put a great bolt into a troll, breaking him in half so his oily juices sprayed across the parapet, and then they dropped another, a bolt that took the head clean off a second. But by then there were fewer than a hundred guardsmen left.

Most of the Emperor’s officers and friends were dead in the bloody gate or on the grass in front.

Grossbeak had the Emperor over his shoulder. He turned to Derkensun. “We need to get out of here.”

“Is he alive?” Derkensun asked.

“Yes,” Grossbeak said. “Go for the horses.”

The Nordikaans wore too much armour to march, and they rode everywhere. The horses were just behind the Emperor’s position, a hundred paces away.

“No,” Derkensun said.

“Yes,” Grossbeak said. “Go.”

Derkensun turned and ran. He ran back over the packed earth where the working soldiers had dug the day before—back over the first trench line they’d thrown up when they’d arrived, a whole day early, to find that they’d won the race to the Inn of Dorling. Back to the horse lines.

The pages were standing, as if they, too, were guardsmen.

“Follow me,” Derkensun said. “The Emperor is down. We must save him.”

He ran back, his leg armour winding him, his maille too heavy, dragging him down to the dirt, his notched axe accusatory that he was not fighting and dying with his brothers.

He got back before they lost the gate to the monsters outside. He managed a look to the left—and saw that the mountaineers were running. The officers looked at him.

“Retreat!” he roared. “Get your horses!”

The horses were picketed all along the back of the earthworks, and the city regiments didn’t need a second invitation.

Grossbeak grinned at him even as two more of their brothers died under the stone fists.

“Best day’s work you’ve ever done,” he said. He threw the Emperor over Derkensun’s horse. “Go, boy. Go live. That’s an order. My fucking last.” Grossbeak took his axe, and flung himself on the troll who’d just burst through the gate.

For ten heartbeats of a terrified man, his axe was everywhere.

And then the grey troll fell.

He stood on its chest and roared his battle cry, and three of them went for him—the last of the guard in the gate, alone against them all. His axe went back.

“Save the Emperor,” he cried.

Derkensun had his leg over his saddle, his weight already forward, and the Emperor’s chest in front of him. He got his horse’s head around to see the chaos of a rout—twelve hundred men of the city regiments running for their horses, or pulling pins from the loose soil or simply cutting their reins. All around him, men were fleeing, and suddenly there were boglins and other creatures among the horses.

At some point, Derkensun had determined he was not going to die there. He threw his axe at the trolls, backed his mount three steps and turned her.

“Follow me!” he roared. And ran for the road to Albinkirk.

As night fell, Ser Hartmut sat in his camp, on his stool, and listened to his army feed on the defeated. There were no prisoners. Even their single captive from the morning had been taken and stripped to his bones when the enemy broke and the battle collapsed.

He sat and wished he had wine. After a time, Thorn came.

“I wish you the joy of your victory,” Ser Hartmut said.

“Your victory, surely,” Thorn said in his deep, a-harmonic voice.

“Where is your master?” Hartmut asked.

“Away,” Thorn answered.

Ser Hartmut cleared his throat. “Now what? The enemy is beaten. Was the Emperor killed?”

Thorn spread his stone claws. “I fear, given our army’s propensities, that it is difficult to ever ascertain who was killed. I saw him fall before I could turn my workings upon him. It’s as well—he must be mightily protected.”

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “If he went down, we can have the whole thing,” he said. “There’s no one to hold it but a slip of a girl and their militia. Not a knight amongst them.”

“That is your dream, not mine,” Thorn said. “Yours and Ser Kevin’s. I gather he won his spurs today?”

“Most men fight well, when the enemy has broken and shows his back,” Ser Hartmut said.

“You mean he did not fight well?” Thorn asked.

Ser Hartmut shrugged. “He killed men as they ran. He had no opportunity to show his metal.” He leaned back. “I ask again—now what?”

Thorn shook his great horned head. “We smash the Inn of Dorling into the earth as a message,” he said. “And then we turn on Albinkirk.”

“Albinkirk and not the Empire?” Ser Hartmut asked. “Must we? The Empire is ours for the plucking.”

“Do you think your compatriot, de Vrailly, will face us?” Thorn shrugged
again. “It matters not. Tomorrow, every beast and creature that hears the call of my power in the Hills—aye, and all the way north to the ice—will come to my bidding. The greatest victory won by the Wild in a century.” Thorn straightened, and his stone fists shot up. “Now we will be masters in our own house.”

As if conjured, Ash came. This time, he came like a tail of black cloud—the ash of his name—and he twined about them for a moment before manifesting. He came as a naked man.

Half of him was jet black, and the other half ivory white.

“Oh, the Wyrm will dance to my tune tonight,” he said. “A mighty victory, as men reckon such things. Utterly unimportant in the great turning of the spheres, but what is? Eh? Is anything worth all this striving and dying?” He laughed. “It’s worth it if you win. Not so worth it if you get digested while you’re even a little alive.” He laughed again. “I have waited in this pivot moment for almost an eternity, and never the Wyrm faces me! Storm the Inn and kill all his people.”

“Then Albinkirk?” Thorn asked, gravely.

“Then Lissen Carak, boy. Then we see some real
fun.
” Ash cackled. “Then I open the gates and let in my allies, and we feast for eternity!” Then, soberly, “You did very well. I like to win. It is so much nicer than losing. Thank you both.”

He vanished.

Farther to the south and west, night was falling on the rout, and tired men gave way to despair, lagged, and were eaten.

Janos Turkos was not yet one of the victims. His Huran warriors had not fought at all, but simply watched the disaster unfold with wary eyes. When the stradiotes began to mount their horses, Big Pine trotted back to the slight rise where the imperial riding officer sat on his small horse and smoked.

“We go,” he said. “You, too, unless you want to be food.” The Imperial Standard had gone down, and there were boglins above them in the great earthworks.

Turkos sighed, barely resisting tears. He knocked the dottle out of his pipe. He hadn’t even drawn his sword, but he knew his duty—to both his Emperor and to his people.

The Huran psiloi were in among the sheepfolds at the leftmost end of the imperial line. Despite hours of effort by boglins and stone trolls and now by the antlered
hasternoch
, not one Wild creature had flanked the Emperor’s line to find the ambush he had laid for anyone foolish enough to believe that the flank was open.

Long experience of war in the woods had also caused him to secure his retreat. He raised a hunting horn and blew it once.

Two hundred Huran rose from their places—many had lain without moving all day—and ran. They did it with no fuss and no discussion.

Six miles to the south the Huran rallied. It was the place they had chosen, and they ran to it and lay down behind a long stone wall, flanked on one side by a marsh and on the other by a stand of trees—a reaching tendril of the Wild woods that were just in sight across the last miles of downs and green hills.

They had run the six miles in a little less than two hours, without stopping, and now they lay down, drank water, and ate pemmican.

Turkos climbed a tree. When he came down, Big Tree was waiting with crossed arms.

“Going the wrong way,” Big Tree said.

“We are not done yet,” Turkos said. “There’s another army out there—the army our Lord Emperor was supposed to have waited for.” The light was failing, but there were men coming over the green fields. Men, and other things.

“Why do we wait?” Big Tree asked.

“Now we gather survivors, if we can,” he said.

Big Tree looked into the distance and spat on the ground. “Like a busted ambush?” he asked.

Turkos nodded.

The first men to reach them were cavalrymen. Most were survivors of the Scholae. There was a full troop in good order on exhausted horses.