The Dread Wyrm by Miles Cameron
Harmodius chose to ride behind the Jacks. The boglins were too alien, and Harmodius found it difficult, almost painful, even to converse with Exrech. The irks, once they put on their war faces, became hideous creatures out of nightmare and with behaviours to match.
“You regret what we become,” Tapio said from behind him.
“I do. You give up so much beauty to be monsters,” Harmodius said.
“War hasss that effect on all the sssentient peoplesss,” Tapio said. “We merely wear it openly.”
“You do not,” Harmodius said.
“My gift. Perhaps my curse.” The Faery Knight was the very image of glory in bronze and red and bucksin and green.
In front, Fitzalan came trotting back from the direction of the enemy with a bear cub in his arms. He put the Golden Bear on the ground and suddenly the woods to their immediate front were full of bears—upright like men or on all fours, some with bags, or axes, or bits of armour. They were muddy, emaciated, and exhausted—but as they passed through the gap between the western boglins and Redmede’s Jacks, they let out a growl that might have been a cheer. An old bear galumphed to Redmede’s side and swatted him with a heavy paw—another, even older, with fur so grey he seemed to have come from snow, rose before Harmodius.
“By the Maker,” he said. “There is good even in men.”
Tapio made his stag rear. He waved to Bill Redmede, who nodded and raised his horn.
A dozen other men and women raised theirs, and, to the left, the Dulwar war chief raised his. To the right, Exrech was lost amid the sun-dappled leaves.
The Faery Knight raised his great green ivory oliphaunt horn and blew, and two hundred horns made their dreadful music.
The line sprang forward. But it did not move like a line of men. It moved with an organic fluidity that would have led to disintegration in an army of men, but an army of the Wild lived by a different code.
And so, too, when they sighted the enemy.
Horns blew. And then, suddenly, every creature seemed to leap at every other.
War in the Wild, Harmodius realized, was not about winning, but about being the most successful predator.
Redmede stood off the first rush—some doglike running thing that lost him three Jacks before Harmodius cleared the woods with fire and bought them the minutes they needed to find better ground, fleeing to the left until they put a muddy-ditched beaver meadow between them and their pursuers.
The northerners were overjoyed at their initial success and pushed forward. In the centre, where boglin legion slammed into boglin legion and the vicious tides of death ran together, the western boglins lost fifty yards in the first scrum and left a hundred corpses as food for their enemies. But though the northerners were bigger, heavier, and had eaten better, they also tired faster. Exrech was everywhere, and eldritch fire licked at his mandibles as he stemmed the first rout. He steadied his horde on the south bank of a small stream and the height advantage was, for a moment, enough to stop the northerners in the water below and turn it black with their blood and ichor.
There was a hole between Redmede’s position and Exrech’s—and the foe began to flood it, pushing more and more creatures, boglins and sprites and Rukh and some shambling things Harmodius had never before seen, and they began to push forward even as Redmede’s longbows wreaked havoc across a carefully chosen beaver meadow on a larger force of shambling things and Rukh who tried—four times, with bloody persistence—to cross the sodden open ground until, led by a pair of red-crested wardens, they went around the meadow to the east—and into the Dulwar ambush.
There was suddenly no front and no rear.
Harmodius found himself alone facing a rush on the back of the Jacks, and he spared not, passing an ankle-high sheet of white lightning and following with five massive fire concoctions that exploded into incandescence and left only the smell of cooked meat.
The Dulwar, stung by something from their own left, crowded into a stand of ancient beech trees with the Jacks. The Dulwar war chief was old—his eyes were already haggard.
Redmede called, “Two bows behind every tree!” and the Jacks closed into a ring, covering the Dulwar and then sorting them into the circle.
Boglins struck them some time later, and they fought them off. A Dulwar warrior was carried out of the circle—and three Jacks rose, charged out, and stripped the monsters of their prey. Fitzalan had been first, and his act of reckless daring put heart into them all—the more as it had been done for an ally.
Redmede looked to Harmodius. “Never seen anything like yon,” he said. “But my sense is—if’n we sit here, we ain’t helpin’.”
Harmodius considered that bit of wisdom. “Too true,” he said. “Bill, push off to the right and find Exrech, if he’s still in the fight.”
“Where are you going?” Redmede asked.
“Hunting,” Harmodius said. “I understand this better now. I need to go hunt my own kind. That’s what predators do, in this war.”
Harmodius dismounted, sat cross-legged, and reached out into the aethereal. It only took him a moment to find everything he wanted—there was Exrech, still spraying ops like a damaged cask sprays water, and there was the Faery Knight, cold and closed, waiting for something. And there—north and east, but not very far—two twin suns of green optimism and potential, burning hot.
They were his natural prey. There were other users of potentia and ops scattered for six miles through the woods in a riot of aethereal combat, but none of them were anywhere near his level of puissance except those two.
Harmodius rose to his feet in the real, and began to walk north very cautiously. He could hear the movement of large creatures ahead of him, and he climbed a tree with a little help from an enhancement, and then cursed when in the aethereal, the ripples of his working rolled away towards his enemies.
They froze—slick, green figures, outlined only in their use of the forces beyond natura. He guessed them to be a pair of shamans—linked by some dark ceremony, perhaps, or merely by birth.
Two would be very powerful.
He waited, silent.
Finally they moved. He felt them—felt the heat of their green presence, felt them searching—for him, for the Faery Knight.
To the west, horns sounded, and Exrech’s desperate defence was rewarded when the Dulwar and the Jacks came out of the woods into the flank of the foe and began to kill them.
Nearly at his feet, the wardens froze—and then began to move. They were the centre of a broad line of their own kind, two deep, fully armoured—a battle-winning reserve right in the gap.
Except that Harmodius had learned that in the Wild there were no true lines, nor weak gaps, but merely the fight of the moment, the slash of the claw.
He found the link between them. As they passed him, he reached out in the aethereal —and severed it.
Two twin minds, together since birth, snapped back in agony and bereavement, and he entrapped one, casting a quick working that left the nearest trapped in a wall of its own dark imaginings while Harmodius turned on the other. Suggestion, binding, ward and thrust—he flung them all in carefully selected order, undermining his opponent with the false knowledge of his twin’s humiliating death, binding his legs in a simple and confusing physik that caused the larger caster to collapse, warding the counter attack—powerful, over-slow and grandiose.
Harmodius stepped out of his ward of shadow and plunged a spear of lightning into his prone opponent, so close he could have used a dagger, and his prey spasmed and triggered a cascade of stored workings—
Harmodius turned them on a mirror and let them strike his horrified twin, just a horse-length away, and then stripped aside his working and his suggestion so that each could recognize the other in terror—flinch in horror—
Harmodius finished the nearer with a needle-tight bolt of ops.
The first victim slammed a heavy working that must have come from an artifact—like a fall of rock, it struck Harmodius’s wards and blew through the
He fell—and only the sheer and wasted rage of his adversary saved him.
It screamed, leapt forward to finish him—
Too slow. Harmodius triggered a fire ball the size of a man’s head. Most of it caught in the creature’s wards, but some went through, and then they were pounding each other with ops —some raw, flung like children will fling water. It was the deadliest kind of hermetical combat—too close to parry effectively—
Harmodius was aware, too, that the woods around him were hostile. But something was happening in the real—and he could only cast, work, drink ops, make potentia and loose again, parry what he could on ever smaller shields and wards as his own workings drew too much—
And then his adversary ran out. One moment, he was a growing tower of puissance, his shields arcing into the trees, and the next he was a burning corpse. He stood for a moment, as if surprised.
Harmodius leapt forward and subsumed his essence like the predator he had become, drinking the alien creature’s soul and all his powers.
The charred corpse collapsed.
Harmodius came back into the real to find the wardens fleeing. In the direction from which he’d come, there were irkish knights on stags—but behind him there was a line of Outwallers, killing wardens and taking trophies. The wardens—daemons—were trapped.
The Outwallers began to shoot them down, calling out to them, mocking them.
Harmodius saw them flinch away and gather for a last charge, and then Mogon, her blue crest towering over their red ones, burst from the underbrush with twenty of her household at her back, and the forest floor shook.
The Outwallers fell back before the great duchess. She made an odd scent as she passed them, and Harmodius went forward with her, safe, or so he felt, at her tail. The red-crested daemons were in a cluster, perhaps as many as fifty—certainly the heart of the enemy force.
They were defiant, until Mogon addressed them. Harmodius had no idea what she said, but they flinched, and then let their weapons drop. One, a young female, said something in response.
Mogon nodded, and the young female came forward out of the knot of beaten wardens—one of her great taloned fists entwined with that of a young male, but at last he let her go. She went, her crest high, and raised her small, strong arms as she knelt to Mogon.
With one casual swipe of her razor-sharp bronze axe, Mogon swept her head off her body so that her inlaid beak bit into the leaf mould almost between Harmodius’s feet. Mogon subsumed her, ripping her essence from her body.
All the red crests flinched.
Mogon turned away. “That is done,” she said. Behind her, the red crests were picking up their weapons and slinking away into the bog.
Mogon made a sign. “Here is seed that has borne a fine fruit,” she said, and waved to the Outwallers who had trapped the wardens. “My Sossag.”
Nita Qwan stepped forward and bent his knee to the great duchess, whose axe still slowly dripped gore.
“I declare you and yours free of my holds forever, owing none but the duty of hearth and home and hospitality,” Mogon intoned. “This is a great deed you have done.”
Ta-se-ho spoke up boldly. “We’ll take our reward in food, Duchess. Ten days we’ve lain cold and followed this band over every lake and mountain.”
Mogon reached to her belt. “Here—eat mine own.” She flung him a deerskin pouch of marvellous work, porcupine quill and gold beads together. Then she turned, and one of her people flung her great cloak of feathers—heron, and bluejay, and eagle—over her shoulders and she motioned to Harmodius.
“Today, we have won a petty victory. Now we see what we see.”
And when they had joined the Faery Knight, his long lance of crystal all besmattered with gore, Harmodius asked, “Where is the enemy? Will we pursue?”
The Faery Knight frowned. “Mogon let a few of her own people live. The ressst,” he said, “are dinner.” Harmodius flinched, and the Faery Knight showed his fangs.
“Thisss isss the Wild,” he said. “The losssersss don’t walk away. They’re food.”
Chapter Sixteen
North of Dorling—Ser Hartmut
The army of the Wild came out of the woods behind the Ings of the Wolf like dark water pooling in low ground, and saw the Emperor’s army drawn up on the high ground opposite them, above the Inn itself, covering their camp.
Ser Hartmut gathered a dozen of his best lances and Ser Kevin and rode out along the edge of the long grass to reconnoitre. Minutes later, they retreated into the shadows of the woods with two men and six horses dead, and the screams of the Emperor’s Vardariotes pursued them like laughter.
Ser Hartmut had a brief conference with Thorn and then filled the grass with boglins and other creatures as they came up. The Vardariotes and their psiloi conceded the ground slowly at first, but when one end of the psiloi line was over-run by boglins and eaten, the whole line gave way and the lower fields were quickly cleared.
Ser Hartmut’s sailors and Guerlain Capot’s brigans began to dig a fortified camp on the first good rise, as close to the Emperor’s lines as they dared.
Ser Louis came up, red in the face from a hard pursuit against the elusive Vardariotes. He’d lost no men, but caught no easterners.
“Your face would curdle milk, cousin,” he said, as his squire took his great helm.
“The Emperor beat us here, for all that our dark allies promised us his horses would be dead and his men forced to walk,” Ser Hartmut said. While he was talking a pair of his brigans dragged a Morean—swarthy, middle-aged, a tough man with a long beard—in. His hands were bound, and his legs ran with blood.
“Got him off the bugs,” one man said. “Milord. That is, we killed the bugs and took him, because you said you wanted prisoners.”
Ser Hartmut nodded. He snapped his fingers, and Cree-ah, his latest squire, a Huran boy, came at a run.
“Pay them—a silver soldus each.” He nodded.
Cree-ah bowed, reached into his master’s purse and paid both men. He was a northern Huran, and he seemed to feel it was a great honour to serve the famous knight.
Ser Hartmut looked at the bleeding Morean. “Tell me about your army,” he said.
The man frowned.
“Find someone who speaks Archaic, have him question the man, and if that’s not enough, torture him. Threaten to give him back to the boglins.” Ser Hartmut laughed grimly. “That ought to be enough threat for any man.”
He was brought a cup of water and he sat on his stool and watched the imperial army at the top of the ridge. “He beat us here,” he said, to no one in particular. “But now he’s waiting. Can he be fool enough to fight?”
There was a rapid displacement of air, and then Thorn was there.
Ser Hartmut made a moue of distaste. “Did you hear me, and come?”
Thorn grunted. “No. I cannot hear you from a mile away. Not yet. I came for my own reasons. Tell me what you propose.”
Hartmut looked around. “Where is your master?”
Thorn grunted again. “Close. We are on the ground that is claimed by one of his peers. He is very tense.”
Ser Hartmut pointed up the hill, where men were digging rapidly, deepening the ditch in front of ramparts already eight feet of packed earth and logs high.
“It will not get any better. Unless we wait here for the siege train, in which case this is our whole summer.” Hartmut shrugged.
“I am, if needs be, a siege train,” Thorn said. He gestured with his staff and spoke some slow, old, dark word.
Nothing happened.
Ser Hartmut raised an eyebrow. “Be that as it may,” he said, “we may as well attack before they are reinforced. Right now we have heavy odds—four or five to one, at least.”
“My skywatchers tell me that there is another force behind them on the road—all afoot. My master killed their horses.” He bent slightly at the waist. “We could send your humans further east, moving quickly—cut off this force and destroy it.”
Ser Hartmut shook his head. “No. Send something else. These are soldiers, Lord Sorcerer. If you leave them alone, they’ll get you, one way or another. They are cunning and they have thousands of years of experience behind them. I am your only tool against them—your boglins won’t even take up time dying.”
“So you insist,” Thorn said.
“I do. And so much for your vaunted siege train.” Ser Hartmut finished his water and rose.
He was knocked flat by the concussion, and suddenly the world seemed to swim before his eyes.
Men boiled out of the enemy camp like bees from an overturned apiary, and smoke rose, and dust so thick that they could see nothing.
As the dust began to clear, it was obvious that the enemy had formed all his cavalry at the head of his camp and the infantry was busy—on something. There was fire.
“A small token of my efficacy,” Thorn said. “Five hundred weight of rock hurled farther than a man can ride in fifty days.” He shrugged.
“You threw a huge rock into their camp?” Ser Hartmut asked. “Well—look at them now. All formed for an attack. They know their business. Never fought imperials, but one hears things.” He nodded. He motioned to his own men, and Capot appeared in an old arming jacket, smoking a Huran pipe.
“Double the guard. And keep a double watch at all times, with cranequins spanned and ready. Are my orders clear?” Ser Hartmut was warming to the situation. A dire challenge.
He looked up the hill again. “Tomorrow, I’d like to try their works,” he said.
“With your soldiers?” Thorn asked.
“With your bugs,” Ser Hartmut said.
In the morning, Ser Hartmut marshalled the northern army as best he could, in three thick lines that covered the first slope of the green grass of the hills. The first line, according to his notions, was composed of fodder—boglins and sprites and the little rat-like things with enormous teeth that seemed like lightning-fast dogs. In the second line he put all the men except his knights—willing or unwilling—the Huran and the tame Sossag and the other Outwallers who had come for loot, for fame, or for fear. In the third line, he placed all of Orley’s warband, and the great black stone trolls. His own lances were nowhere to be seen.