Angelslayer: The Winnowing War (85 page)

Daathan javelins soared, quilling the white, morning sky. They struck with a scream of death, and the front of the Unchurian horsemen for a moment buckled, then spilled over and continued rolling forward, crushing the fallen.

“Release the first signal,” Eryian said to Tillantus.

Rhywder paced, riding the shallows, at times glancing over his shoulder to the south where from a high ridge, tree shadows flirted with him. Bobbing on the water, lashed to ropes in a line stretching between the catapults, were wooden kegs, their planking sealed with wax.

“Captain!” a voice called from the north ridge of the dam. Looking up, he saw the Ishmian shipwright waving frantically. “There! My God! There, in the sky! It is the first signal, Captain!”

Rhywder turned. He caught the last moment's breath of a far, fiery dart, launched upward, into the white clouds, streaming a line of smoke. Rhywder unlatched his killing axe from the rear saddle tassels, then spurred his horse forward, galloping for the barrels.

Rhywder began to shear open the casks with strong swipes of the axe, shattering the planking. They bled. Oil oozed, then swirled upon the waters. He was careful to space the cuts until the river was swathed with a long, glittering stretch of naphtha film. It would have, in ordinary times, been a bane to smother fish and choke birds caught in it. But now it would be a cloak and in fifteen degrees' movement of the sun, this cloak would flow far enough downstream to reach the battle, which from here was a far, distant roar, a blunt and terrifying sound, caught in low clouds and amplified by the still air. The oil was so thick it seemed to tumble in long streamers.

Eryian lowered his sword and the command launched catapults that flung huge, wobbling bladders of naphtha, sown together so taut, they burst only on impact. Arrows dogged their flights, fired, and the effect was strafing explosions of flame that melted skin and left black smoke.

“More of your sons,” Eryian whispered. He knew the demon heard each word, though silence was the only answer. “Before this day, even you must feel their loss.”

But even fire seemed not to slow the Unchurians; it seemed they absorbed the rivers of fire and multiplied in the thick smoke.

Eryian ordered runners down the side of the butte where thick, aged logs of dried oak had been lashed in heaps and coated with pitch. Once lit, they burnt their ties quickly and rolled free, flames spinning. The Unchurians literally threw themselves into the face of the avalanche of fiery thunder, until the logs pummeled their way through, leaving blood and blackened flesh scattered in wide swaths. For a moment they had been stopped, staggered, but then, like insects, they began to scurry, trampling their wounded, until they surged forth with new energy. Eryian let them come.

“Elyon's breath, Eryian,” Tillantus whispered beside him, “this has no pity; this is madness. He throws these men at death as if there were no thought of its cost.”

“There is none, Tillantus.”

The ropes of the boulders were then cut. Huge rocks with sharp-edged corners had been bored and caulked with black pitch and came like tumbling comets. The collage of horses and men on the slope became a circus carnage into which Eryian poured arsenals of arrows and javelins. When they struck, many of the boulders burst in explosion. The Unchurian advance was once more halted, halfway up. The ground below the butte was littered with a sheer mountain of dead and dying. The winnowing wars had been brutal, but never had Eryian seen this many die so quickly, so without ceremony. The Unchurian front had been decimated. Bodies coated the hillside, burning.

But more were coming, a new front fast morphing from the dead. They climbed and threw themselves over the rubble of their brothers' bodies. Horses struggled through the course of deep swamp.

Tillantus, beside his captain, watched from beneath the silver visor of his helm. “This is useless. We have slain more than our own number and yet they still come. Is there an end to them?”

“All things must have an end; it is a decree of heaven,” Eryian said, watching without emotion.

Those coming up the hill now were savage, some half-naked, with painted skins and crude weapons. Eryian had destroyed an entire legion of the high-blood horsemen. Before, his old enemy had fed the sons of Righel fodder to weaken the circle of shields, but this time he had had chosen to send in high-blood firstborn in hopes of quickly breaching defenses. But they had died. There were still more, waiting beyond, but these had died hard. Had they been his own sons, Eryian's heart would be breaking.

Now the demon offered up jungle tribes—untrained savages. His first attempt to shatter Eryian's front had failed, but now he was simply filling in the void to keep forces coming as he prepared his next calculated assault. This was chaff to fill the gap. They were being fed to the dark arrows and spears of the Shadow Warriors of the Daath, and the dead were merely growing on the ridge where the legions of Eryian waited.

“Light the second pylons,” Eryian said calmly. Tillantus echoed his order. More logs came from the ridge of the butte, crashing downward, spiraling flame as they gathered speed. Unchurians were crushed and skin was left burning with death screams. Eryian wondered—if he continued to slay, if he could slay for weeks, for a season of the moon, would that even matter? Azazel reveled in death with nightmare, with pomp and blood and fury.

Winds had begun to build, and the snowfall was being whipped into blizzards of wind and stinging snow. Eryian could no longer see the far shore, or the forests of Hericlon's vale, but he could still see the river where it came from the hills, and now it was streaked with a film of oil from Rhywder' casks. The naphtha would reach flesh. He let it thicken.

“Release the third barrier,” Eryian said calmly.

The Unchurians had fought their way up nearly two-thirds of the butte; they came with savage screams, furious, struggling, but it was more difficult now—their angle was steeper, and the going more unsteady. This time, heavy-tipped lances were launched from buried torsion wires. They pummeled into the Unchurians with a sound of iron and sundered bone. Then came a second wave of javelins—then a third.

For a breath, the Unchurians were again stopped. Bodies rolled back down to the river. The carnage there was unfathomable. How many spirits left their flesh this day, the mounds and mounds of dead, now falling, rolling back on each other until they were heaped below like felled timber.

“Fire the river,” Eryian said quietly.

Tillantus turned in the saddle and screamed at the archers. A new shower of fired arrows soared overhead, this time in a high arch, leaving a shadowy streak of smoke across the ground to mark their flight. The top of the butte was still white in snow; it left the Unchurian lines below stark and black and bloodstained. The arrows soared over them, then burrowed in, leaving thick streamers of smoke. The murky film of the river was waiting like dark pus.

The Ithen roared to life, becoming a surging wall of flame, and it spread, growing, fevered. It spread outward, and when it reached the shores, it did not stop. The night before, on the far side of the river to the south, Eryian's men had dug trenches into the forest marshes. With the Unchurian attack, the entire vale had become a heavy froth of oil and gas. The flames spread through it quickly, with the fury of a woman, upward, inhaling flesh in a wind of searing white and orange, spreading outward. Sparks began to soar, spitting at the falling snow.

In little time, the entire valley was awash in flame, bodies squirming, screams far and long. The land was like burning skin, rippling, heaving.

Tillantus stared, aghast. “If I were not as hardened as I am, I would be puking now, Captain, heaving out my guts. Never seen such as this. Those men, I even feel for them, what it must be like to burn with nowhere to run. I swear, in all war there has been no sight like this, nothing to compare with these pitiful souls being swallowed like ants.”

The Unchurians on the Daathan's side of the Ithen, just below the Shadow Warriors on the butte, were stunned. The river had now cut them off from the main armies. Most had turned to the screams of their brothers. The attack had stilled in shock. Eryian lifted his sword high, then motioned forward.

The Shadow Warriors came over the crest of the butte with thunder, with a trembling of the Earth. The Unchurians before them were thrown into hopeless panic.

By mid-sun, the Daath returned to high ground, weary and laden with slaughter. Stretched before them, from the butte to the forests beyond the river, hundreds of thousands of Unchurians lay crushed and charred, sundered by catapult and landslides, then hewn down by the sword. It was thick and dark, but for patches of white where the snow managed to take hold.

Eryian was stained in sweat, blood was splattered across his breastplate, and his sword had been returned to lie across his thighs. Its silver was stained with a dark sheen of blood.

“Perhaps this is what it feels like to be damned,” Tillantus said quietly to the commander, staring over the valley. “This much death wrought of your own hand.”

“No,” Eryian answered. “Damned is worse.”

Rhywder waded his horse through the waters toward the far east bank, feeling more uncomfortable as he did. He kept watching south, where the rocky shores of the river met the trees. His skin was bristling. He stationed himself next to the first catapult. He expected company. When the Unchurians downstream began to burn, they would send riders east to search.

On the top edge of the dam, the ramparts the engineers had thrown up to block the overflow of the spillway were beginning to slip. Once in a while a sandbag would slide over the spillway to plunk into the waters below. The river was slowly rising, the current getting stronger. Rhywder leaned forward in the saddle to check the tension of a sinew. It was winched tight and seemed solid. When he drew his hand back, an arrow whunked through the center bones in whispering breath, nearly passing through, catching at the bristled feathers where it wobbled a moment. Blood spilled free, and the pain seemed to come as a dull afterthought. Rhywder cried out, jerking back. “Ahhhggg! You sons of whores!”

Taking the reins in his teeth, he tore a buckler from his shoulder, sliding his forearm through the strap. He then took the reins and turned the horse hard against the side of the catapult. Arrows whunked into the wood bracing. He ducked as one whistled over his shoulder, nicking the edge of his cloak, and he caught a second in the face of the buckler.

“Unchurians!” the engineer screamed from above. “Unchurians! They are shooting at you!”

“Lord, but that man has an eagle eye,” Rhywder hissed through clenched teeth as he slid from the saddle.

The arrows had come from above, from the ridge above the dam, and now, five riders were coming up the riverbank, their hooves splashing. Rhywder squeezed himself back against the catapult's beam.

“Take out those damned archers!” Rhywder shouted to the engineers above.

“Fire across the canyon!” the engineer commanded. Arrows began to interchange.