EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (348 page)

“You look jolly enough,” Larrimore remarked, gazing out at the battle between city and forest taking place at its forgotten fringes.

“I’ve been cooped up too long. It’s good to be back in the open air.”

“Well, eyes sharp. We’re expecting attack.”

“From who?”

“Who can keep up?” Larrimore shrugged. “Regional rebels. You heard a little about them at the council. No doubt they know Samarand herself is leading this troop.”

“Why do they care?” Dante said, eyes darting among the wreckage of buildings.

“They think Samarand’s ignoring the will of the king and dragging all of Gask to war. Which is sort of true. But the palace leaving Narashtovik didn’t mean they took all its power with them.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The priesthood stayed put. With the kingdom’s power scattered hither and yon, everything got all swapped up. These days it’s almost more like a score of baronies than a kingdom. About the only thing they all agree on is they don’t like Mallon telling them what to do and the norren should shut up and do as they’re told.” He scratched his cheek, regarding Dante. “You should ask Nak about these things, he doesn’t have anything better to do than read about why things happened. Point is, they’re out there, they’ll take their chance, and they’ll die for it.”

Dante nodded. “You’re so certain they’ll fail?”

“Those old men are an army unto themselves,” he said, glancing toward the carriages bearing Samarand and the six other men of the council, one of whom was Jackson. Dante had been surprised to see he’d talked his way on the mission. Samarand’s will had seemed made of iron.

“I suppose the soldiers are no slouch, either,” Dante said. Larrimore grunted agreement. “Well, good. Glad to know we’re not on a suicide mission.”

Most of the soldiers were on foot and after they’d left the Pridegate it was the better part of half an hour before they’d crossed the bridge over the river and left the last mossy vestiges of the city behind. The lead riders took them down a road that ran north-northeast, roughly parallel to the coastline a couple miles distant. The land between them and ocean was spotty with scrubby pines, as if the thick forest to their right couldn’t make the hop across the rutted dirt trail. Ten or fifteen miles deep into those woods the land cranked up into a range of tall hills or short mountains. Either way, they were heavily snowcapped. It had snowed again in the city and its surroundings a couple days previously, but that had melted in the not-quite-freezing breeze that blew in off the seas each evening. Riders came and went to Larrimore and the carriages that traveled in the caravan’s center. Dante caught fragments of intelligence about the state of the road and the signs of enemy scouts in the mud of the woods. Larrimore murmured orders and rode on, uncharacteristically subdued. Dante kept his eyes roving. Sweat built up beneath his arms.

“Quiet enough out there,” he said to Blays after a time.

“Yep.”

“What’s wrong with them? Are they scared?”

Blays drew back his chin. “You almost sound like you want to be ambushed.”

“I just don’t like waiting.” Dante lowered his hand to the haft of his sword. He remembered how it had felt to wield it in battle, the sense of oneness that came from the timing of a perfect parry, as if his body were in tune with a deep note of the song of the world. The silent potency that took him when he drove the blade home in another man’s ribs. The rush of the nether thrumming in his heart and through his arms to spill the blood of those who’d see him dead. “So what if I am? You’re not?”

“A little, maybe.” Blays sniffed, rubbed his nose. “With all the drilling I’ve been doing it would almost be a waste not to use it.”

The attack came at dusk, when they were some twenty miles from the dead city, too far to be reinforced before the battle was decided. One of their mounted scouts galloped from the woods, wide-eyed and panting, and pulled up before Larrimore.

“They’re coming,” he said, clutching his chest. “Just a few minutes out.”

“That’s all the warning you’ve brought me?”

The rider tossed his head back at the woods. “They concealed themselves well. I could have stepped on them and never known it.”

Larrimore swore thoughtfully. He glanced at Dante, who’d already loosened his sword in its scabbard.

“Stay with the cavalry. Prepare yourselves.”

The column of soldiers had grown irregular with the passage of miles and Larrimore pounded down its length, calling out formations and orders to his captains. Their force made a general shift off the left side of the road, opening perhaps forty yards of clear ground between them and the woods. The carriages were drawn in tight and buffered by a thicket of pikemen. To the pikemen’s front, forming a chevron back along the flanks of the carriage, the swordsmen formed a loose line, letting the two score archers mingle at their front. The cavalry were but a score in number, captained by a dark-bearded man named Rettinger who barked orders in Gaskan to his men.

“We’re to hold at the top of the column,” Dante translated to Blays, “then sweep across their second line once they rush the archers.”

“Not many men for a charge.”

“No time for more complicated maneuvers,” Dante said, and the roar of men’s voices pitched up through the pines to their east. His skin prickled from ears to toes. Larrimore’s voice piped out and the chevron begin to swing so its point faced the bulk of the battle cry. A husky voice rang out and the archers let fly. Dante still couldn’t see anything but shadows of movement among the trees and the first volley provoked no more than a handful of screams. A couple dozen points of light flashed from the edges of the wood, catching the harsh slant of the last rays of the sun, and he saw arrows lancing almost without arc into the front lines of Samarand’s soldiers.

“Can’t let that hold up, we’ve got no cover,” Rettinger said, glancing toward Larrimore. He growled. “Cut across.”

His horsemen followed him across the road and they lingered just before the pines began. The woods weren’t overly dense so close to the road, but it was a forest nonetheless, full of shrubs and cut trunks and rocks half-buried in leaves. More than enough to negate the speed of their horses. Another volley swished from both sides and again the screaming was louder from their own force. Dante gripped his blade. How long would Rettinger let the footmen get shot to pieces?

“Hell with it,” Rettinger said, as if reading the boy’s thoughts, and he whipped out his sword and pointed it forward as he brought his mount to a trot. “In and out. Cut down any man with a bow and get the hell out.”

His men drew arms and fell into a ragged skirmish line. Hooves thunked hard earth. A battle cry ripped up from the bottom point of the column and through the screen of trees Dante saw a mass of footmen charging the force concealed in the wood. Arrows swished over their heads from the archers by the carriages and then more pelted them from the safety of the pines. Men spun in their tracks and thumped against the ground. Then the footmen filtered into the woods and as Rettinger’s men burst upon the front line of archers the music of meeting steel exploded from the southern edge of the battle.

Dante set his eyes on one man as he’d been taught and cocked his arm. An arrow thrummed past his ear and hot rage burned between his eyes. He gasped, nostrils flaring, then the man was before him and he wheeled his blade and screamed and lashed the archer across the face. He glanced toward Blays a couple lengths ahead and saw him knock aside the blade of a pike. To Blays’ left, at their outer flank, an arrow hammered into a rider’s chest and he flopped in the saddle, horse veering left into the lines of enemy footmen. Dante compensated right without thinking and turned in time to duck beneath a pike being jammed at his face. He made a quick stab at an archer diving behind a tree and then bore right to follow Rettinger’s curve back into the open. Swordsmen exchanged blows and shouts. Rettinger called out as the cavalry passed. They broke back into the field and cut back toward the caravan.

Rettinger pulled up and counted off his men. They were missing two. Dante breathed heavily, relishing the air in his lungs, the air that dozens of men had suddenly ceased to taste.

“We’re in reserve for the moment.” Rettinger nodded toward the battle in the woods. “Be ready for another pass if they don’t bring them into the open.”

“Why wait?” said a man with sweat-streaked blond hair.

“Need them in the open so the priests can do their thing.”

Calls of “Retreat!” hued up from the forest. Over the next minute Samarand’s footmen fell back in a scattered mass, backs turned to their pursuers.

“That’s organized,” Dante said to Blays, pointing at the lines visible in their retreating ranks.

“See if they bite,” Blays nodded. The footmen reassembled to the far side of the road. The enemy gushed from the woods and took another volley to their face. Arrows flew irregularly from the cover of the trees. Some of the riders grumbled, pointing to the other flank of footmen holding around the carriages. They were holding fast to the fire of the enemy archers, dragging the dead and wounded behind cover of the coaches and the handful of trees. The retreating forces regrouped and turned to meet their pursuers. Shouts and clanging metal filled the field. Swordsmen continued to rush from the woods. Already the numbers of the two armies looked equal and still the enemy emerged from the wilds.

“Get your men out there!” Larrimore shouted toward Rettinger.

“Let’s cause some chaos,” Rettinger said, lifting his sword, and Dante aped him. He took them wide around the fury of the melee and back into the woods. Long shadows striped the ground. The trees were of decent age and few had branches low enough to interfere with their immediate lines of sight. Rettinger whooped and shouted taunts. The other men bellowed along a split second later, Dante’s young voice mingling with those of the men. They trampled through a loose fringe of stragglers, slowing enough to aim their blows for the softness of the neck. Dante cocked his arm, laughing at the panicked face of an unmounted soldier before he split it in half with his sword. He understood now they weren’t meant to ride down the entire enemy troop. They were the dogs of the hunt, meant to bay, meant to hound, meant to cause panic in the larger animal. He put those thoughts away and cleaved someone’s skull.

Up ahead a wedge of pikemen scrambled to intercept their course. The riders veered right, deeper into the woods, away from all that hard steel. Blays had raced ahead and Dante spurred his horse to catch pace. He threaded through the trees, keeping one eye on the mass of men rushing off to lay waste to each other, running through the woods, shadows banding their bodies, then emerging for a brief moment to be speared with the glittering dust in an unbroken beam of sunlight. The drumbeat of their hooves drowned out the jangle of swords. They’d been riding for some seconds in a recently-abandoned stretch of wood, circumscribing a wide arc around the battle, and Rettinger made a sharp turn, driving them to the northeast. Dante was so close on Blays’ heels the churned turf of his horse dashed against his face. Within moments they were skimming along the rear guard, lashing out with their simple straight cavalry blades into the dispersed ranks of the rebels, cutting raised arms between elbow and wrist, the sweat and thunder and howls forcing back the dirty-faced men of the opposition. They rode as an ancient law of the world, as destruction on horseback, as the right arm of an angry god. Like that they were in the midst of a sizable troop, up near the front of the forest, slashing archers in their turned backs. Cries rang out and arrows creased the air around their heads. At the head of the charge, Rettinger broke right, straight north away from arrows and swords and pikes. Dante’s horse jerked and uttered a choked whinny. Then his level, speeding world of half-glimpsed faces and whipping branches was replaced by a sudden rush of earth and fallen tree limbs and he felt his legs part from the horse as it went down and his momentum went on. He skidded facefirst through dry pine needles and wet dirt. Some small part of his mind was happy he’d been thrown clear of the wounded horse. Then he rolled to his feet and found himself alone, surrounded by archers and men with hostile swords, the rear of the cavalry hurtling away into the safety of the woods, the drum of their hoofs already obscured by the shouts of men.

“Blays!” he cried. His sword had buried itself in the ground a couple feet away and he yanked it up and beat back the first thrust of a swordsman. Most of the soldiers around him were occupied with their own troubles, be they plunking arrows at the men in the open road or rushing to the side of their friends just cut down by the screaming horde of Rettinger’s charge, but he was there, alone, with too many alien faces to make it out alive. He parried another blow and riposted, as Robert Hobble had shown him an eternity ago on their long march, a wild swing that nonetheless slashed across his opponent’s chest and felled him. He heard the shifting of the carpet of needles and spun to meet a sword meant for his spine. His senses felt like living things. The scent of blood and sap. The power of the weight of the blade in his hand. The mixed anger and fear of this new swordsman bringing his weapon back around. Dante punched out his left hand and the nether knocked a hole in the man’s neck. His eyes bugged and he too went down, painting the forest floor with his blood. An arrow ripped past Dante’s ear and he felt a stinging numbness where it clipped his cartilage. Blood trickled down his forehead and cheeks where he’d slammed into the dirt. Two more swordsmen popped up from tending the wounded to meet this new threat and Dante backpedaled, resisting every urge to throw down his weapon and run till his legs gave out. He swept his free hand through the blood at his ear and face. When the two men stood shoulder to shoulder in front of him he sprung forward, arm held straight as the arrows hissing through the woods, and white fire belched from a foot in front of his hand to sear past the two soldiers. Its pure heat wrenched the screams from their throats.

Others fell back, shielding their faces with their forearms. The flash of flame and the whump of igniting air drew a glance from a dozen other men. Dante had slung the nether like a limb of his own body, trusting blank terror to keep him safe, but from the depths of his fugue he knew if he stayed here he might take a few more with him out to Arawn’s indifferent arms, but it would end with his unblinking eyes staring up through the wind-shook needles of the pines.