A Warrior's Path (The Castes and the OutCastes) (7 page)

It was a sound to chill the soul.

“Form the Triad on me,” Rukh ordered. 

“It’s not as effective,” Keemo
reminded him.

“
And it doesn’t matter,” Rukh said.  “We’re facing seven thousand Chims.  It won’t make a difference if we have a Quad.”

“Weren’t you the one saying we aren’t dead yet?” Keemo asked.  “Now you’re all fatalistic.”

Rukh shrugged and smiled.  “Consider it wishful thinking,” he replied.

“Here they come!” someone from the gap shouted.

“Make those arrows count.  Strike at the Balants if you can.  Otherwise, hit the Baels,” Pume ordered.  “And if any of you see an opening, take it.  Especially the Rahails or Murans.  Blend.  Not now, but during the height of the battle.  With all the confusion going on, one of you might be able to get clear.  Ashoka must know what’s coming.  That is your mission.  All of you.”

“Yes sir!” the
nearly seventy men of B Company shouted back.

Rukh conducted
Jivatma
, thick and rich, from his Well.  As always, it filled him with a heady sense of invincibility.  He stretched his inner senses and found Keemo and Farn even as they reached for him.  They Annexed.  A languid peace stole over Rukh.  His thoughts drifted and were distant.  They felt like they were covered with a thin film of icy water.  His mind soon stilled.

The Triad was born.  It held
all the knowledge of its hosts – all their memories, likes, dislikes, strengths, and weaknesses – but was itself simply a construct, an ephemeral being.  It had been tasked with a simple directive: fight and survive.  It would do so by any means necessary.

The Triad looked through the eyes of its hosts.  The enemy was va
st, but the Triad knew no fear.

*****

B
rand looked at the three men in confusion.  Nothing had changed as far as he could tell.  “Rukh…?” he began, hesitantly, unsure if he was interrupting something important.

All three men
pivoted their heads as one.  It was eerie.  Rukh spoke, but it sounded nothing like the corporal.
“Rukh is not here,”
something
answered. 
“We are the Triad.”

Brand was startled.  He had seen Quads, Triads, and even Duos, but he had never spoken to one before.  The voice was emotionless and strange; not like
his friend at all.  “What about Rukh and the others?  Do they know what’s happening?”

“They watch.  They are aware.  They wait.”

Brand gave Rukh…the Triad…whatever it was…a brief, uncertain glance before turning away, unnerved by the way they stared at him in unblinking unison.  He looked to the trailhead where the men of C and D Companies had bows drawn or were holding Fireballs.

It was time.  The enemy was in range.

Brand set an arrow, ready to draw.  He had a moment’s startled awareness as Keemo, Farn, and Rukh lifted their bows in perfect unison.  Other Kummas along the ridge, also in Quads or Triads or Duos, had similar dulled features, and they too moved with uncanny precision.  The Rahails and Murans along the ridge wore looks of grim determination.

At that moment, with death soon to come, the words of his proctors from the Shir’Fen, one of the three Rahail schools in Ashoka, came to him.  They taught that futility was a rescindable state of mind, but duty was one’s everlasting master.  Brand finally understood what his teachers meant. 
Right now, their actions were essentially pointless, but duty impelled them.  Futility was a choice, and if he so chose, he could surrender to its hollow embrace.  It was a cold comfort he would not allow for himself.

“Devesh guide my arrows,” Brand breathed, before coherent thought was lost.  The Chims were in range.

C and D Companies had already engaged the enemy.  Fireballs and arrows blew forth, hissing or roaring through the air, ending with the scream of an injured and dying Chim.  It was a beautiful sound.

But
Suwraith’s beasts pressed the warriors.  The sheer mass of the Chims made it impossible to hold them back.  Soon, close-in fighting with swords raged along the edge of the summit.

Brand fired his arrows as rapidly as he could, aiming for the Chims emerging from the trailhead.  The ones who had already gained the top of the hill were mingled in amongst the Ashokans and sending arrows their way would risk the lives of his brothers.  C and D would have to fight them on their own while A and B worked to keep the Fractures of Chims off the summit.  His heart pounded with adrenaline.  Beside him, the Triad aimed and released with metronomic precision, killing with almost every shot.  The arrows were spent, and the Kummas unleashed a withering wall of fire, straight into the maw on the onrushing Chims.  Suwraith’s servants incinerated with screams of anguish, and the smell of burning flesh hung over the ridge.

“Frag them!” Brand yelled.  He was stupid enough to stand and pump his fist, but quickly ducked low when a flight of arrows came his way.  Nests of Ur-Fels, Suwraith’s best archers, had reached the top of the hill and were clustered behind a wall of hooting Balants.  Some of the dog-like Chims had laid down a flight of arrows in answer to A and B Companies withering attack.  But most aimed fire directly into the mingled mass of their fellow Chimeras even as they battled bloody combat with the Ashokans. The damn dogs were killing as many of their own as they were the warriors of C and D.

Another flight of arrows came their way, and Brand hastily threw up his shield.

Just then, the ground trembled like an earthquake, and the Chims were thrown from their feet and off the cliff.  But it wasn’t a temblor.  It was something better.  Brand smiled.  It was the Murans.  The farmers had a Talent to move earth.

The captain roared a command, and the booming scream of over one hundred Fireballs followed, incinerating the Balants
and the Ur-Fel archers crouching behind them.

For a brief moment– a painfully brief moment – it seemed the Ashokans of C and D Companies might be able to hold the line and push the Chims back. 
But they never had a chance. The sheer numbers of the Chimera horde carried the day.  They surged forward like a misshapen tide, howling, hissing, roaring, and baying for blood as they rolled over the warriors of C and D Companies.

“Swords!” Lieutenant Pume called out.  “Fill the breach!”

With the hiss of a thrown, rusty gate, the Ashokans of A and B Companies drew their matte-black spidergrass swords.

The Chims charged forward, led, as usual, by the Tigons.  Close on their heels were Braids, their
shiny, sinuous, snake-like forms seeming to change color as they raced forward.  Ur-Fels, small, fast, and cunning, hid behind and amongst the shambling, massive forms of the hooting Balants.  Scattered amongst their brethren strode the commanders: the Baels.  Their eyes glowed as red as their chained whips as they spurred the Fractures onward.

The men of C and D Companies battled desperately, but so many of them were already down.  Some lay unmoving,
frozen in death, while others moaned in agony and anguish before the hordes of Chimeras trampled them into the blood-soaked ground.

The warriors of A and B Company rushed forward and br
iefly threw the Chims back, giving their brothers in C and D a chance to regroup.  It was a small pause in the carnage.  For a moment, sound seemed to mute to a dim and dull cacophony before the violence took hold once more.  A Bael loomed large, urging his Chimeras forward.  A cool breeze carried the smell of blood, burnt flesh, and feces.  The moment was gone and sound returned with thunderous roar.  The battle was joined once more.

Such fleeting impressions impinged on Brand’s mind, but he gave them no thought.  He wielded his sword instinc
tively, letting the repetition of ten thousand lessons form his movements.  At his side, the Triad of Rukh, Keemo, and Farn fought in eerie silence.

*****

T
he Triad leapt forward, into the midst of the enemy.  Tertiary threw Fireballs.  An injury-crazed Balant allowed Secondary to press forward.  Primary, the most skilled, wasted no movement and danced death amongst the Ur-Fels, Braids, and Tigons.  Blows glanced against the Shields of the hosts, but none penetrated.  A Bael stepped forward.  The bull-like beast pounded the friend of Primary into the ground with his glowing, chained whip.  It could not be allowed.  Primary was unleashed.
 
The Bael died.

Rukh awoke, an
esthetizing the link.  “Brand, you alright?” he asked.

“Liver shot.  Hurts like hell,” Brand said, getting shakily to his feet.  “Thanks for saving me.”

“You’re not saved yet,” Rukh reminded him.

The bulk of the Bael provided some cover, and Rukh took the momentary reprieve to reassess their situation.  The Chims were swarming over the defenders.  Scores of Suwraith’s servants had died but, little by little, they were whittling away at the Ashokans.  Pockets of Kummas fought on, but even as he watched, Rukh saw three warriors rolled over by the sheer weight of the creatures they were facing.  Few, if any
, Murans and Rahails were left.  Rukh hoped some of them had Blended and were simply waiting for the opportunity to slip away.  Rukh doubted it was true, but he mumbled a prayer anyway.  There were too many Ur-Fels and Braids about.  The Chims could scent out fear through a Blend.

Hopeless.  It was over.  Resigned to death, Rukh prepared to re-form the Triad’s link.  Kummas didn’t die meekly.

His gaze snapped north.  Someone was out there.  Watching.  He was certain of it.  From one of the further hills.  He looked for the telltale signs of movement, but nothing.  He frowned.  The feeling was gone.  His gaze drifted back to the closer hills, and his eyes narrowed.  A deep chasm, over forty feet wide, separated their ridge from the nearest hill: a smaller, rocky prominence.  He glanced about.  The Chims still hadn’t noticed them.

“Can you make that leap?” he asked Brand, pointing out the rise in question.

“Only if I rode a catapult,” Brand answered.

Rukh took a deep breath.  “Then we’ll just have to throw you,” he said with a grin.

“Absolutely not,” Brand protested.

“Absolutely yes,” Rukh said.  “Blend us and follow.  We can do this.”

Brand nodded, unsure of Rukh’s plan, but he did as directed.  He had no chance for questions, though.  The Triad was back.  It dashed toward the cliff’s edge, and Brand followed, running flat out, pushing past his exhaustion.  The liver shot from the Bael that Rukh had put down had him gasping in pain.  It was like a knife digging into his side.  Just then, eight Baels swarmed the Triad.

*****

“
L
ooks like we missed it,” Jessira Viola Grey observed, as she scanned the battlefield with her spyglass.  She was Blended, as were all the members of her squad, the Silversuns, and they lay hidden and unobserved within the shelter of a cave in a nearby peak.  There were only four of them: Jessira, her younger brother Lure, cousin Court, and Cedar, her older brother and the commander of the Silversuns.

What had been a routine scouting patrol had turned into something else when they
had run across several Chimera Fractures.  So many of Suwraith’s beasts in one place hadn’t been reported in quite some time.  Cedar had ordered them to trail the Chims.  He, along with the rest of the unit, had wondered what the Sorrow Bringer’s creatures were doing gathered in such numbers.

Later in the day, from the south, they
had heard the hissing cries of Braids on peaks all along the foothills of the Privations.  And then, carrying on the wind, had come the basso roar of a Bael.  The Silversuns had shared looks of confusion and worry.  There were even more Chims out in the mountains than the Fractures the Silversuns had been following. Something important was happening.

It turned out the Chims had been hunting a caravan,
maybe out of Ashoka and were in the process of decimating it.

The
Silversuns had hunkered down a half mile away and watched.  There was not much else they could do.  By the time they’d arrived, the battle was all but finished with only a few scattered pockets of fighting still raging.  What little they
could
see had been an indistinct and confusing series of images, made more so by distance and dim light.  The large pillar rising from the summit of the flat-topped hill hadn’t helped matters either.

“It looks like some might be trying to escape,”
Cedar said, pointing out four fleeing figures.

Lure
brought a spyglass to his eye.  “One of them might have sensed us,” he said.  “He looked right at me.”

“No way,” growled a stocky man, their cousin Court.  “Not when we’re Blended.”

“I’m telling you: they saw us,” Lure replied.

Court snorted in disbelief.

Jessira watched a moment longer, before setting her spyglass aside with a sigh.  “Well, whether he knew we were here or not, it doesn’t matter.  They didn’t make it,” she said.  “They just got cut off by eight Baels.”