From Across the Clouded Range (93 page)

“
What now?” Teth panted at
his side. Her head bounced between the two forces, but they both
knew there was no escape this time.

Dasen was just about to run to the men
with hand up in surrender – better to be captured by men than
monsters – when someone yelled, “Hey, you two! Get behind the
lines! Those things’re going to be ‘ere any second!”

That was all the invitation they
needed – the soldier had spoken in the Imperial tongue. They
sprinted toward the ragged lines without trying to explain the
idiocy that could have brought the Thoren garrison from the
perfectly good walls of the city to stand on an unfortified plain
just outside.

The muted thunder of the creatures
closing on the defenders pushed them on. The things had to be close
given the incredible roar of their approach, and as they closed on
the spears, the area behind that line erupted with arrows. Dasen
did not bother to look back to see where the arrows landed. The
creatures were within bow’s range, literally on his
heels.

He hurdled toward the spears and was
happy to see shafts lift from their defensive posture. They passed
through a phalanx four men deep, holding spears in a stack from
high to low. The first line held tall wooden shields and the others
braced them, creating a low wall permeated with steel points. Dasen
and Teth sprinted through that line, oblivious of the men that
allowed them to pass. Beyond the wall was an empty space twenty
paces long then another shield wall. Standing before that wall,
were two rows of archers. They tore through the space, and ducked
as the archers released another volley. Teth broke through the
archers without a thought. Dasen followed.

They were so consumed with fear that
they did not notice the faces of the men around them begin to
waver. Their panic was a disease, and they were on the verge of
infecting the entire army. Men who could only imagine what was
coming, who had only stories and their imaginations to inform them,
began to fear the worst, began to draw on the terror of two
mud-soaked youths and spread it to their fellows. The line began to
waver. Dasen and Teth were on the verge of panicking the entire
force.

They were eyeing the gap to the next
line, threatening to spread their fear further, when a man grabbed
Teth by the shoulders and another blocked Dasen, held him in his
burly arms. Dasen struggled to break away, but the man was too
strong. “There’ll be no runnin’ lessin’ yir told ta run!” the man
holding Teth yelled. “Do ya understand? It’s the lives of our
families we’re fightin’ fir ‘ere. You’ll stand yir ground, or I’ll
cut ya down!” Dasen looked at the man in shock, but the gruff old
soldier just continued berating them. “Where are yir weapons? We
can’t afford ta lose any. I should make ya go back an’ git ‘em.”
Finally, he released Teth, looked at her, and shook his head. “So
young,” he murmured to himself, “by the Holy Order, so
young.”

The sound of the creatures crashing
into the first line of defenders cut the comment short. It was most
terrible sound Dasen had ever heard. The howls, curses, and threats
of the creatures were overlaid with the screams of the men who were
dying at their hands. The archers in front of them released a
volley of arrows with a collective twang. That was followed by the
hiss of hundreds of arrows sailing toward their chosen targets. The
arrows struck home with a collective thud, which only increased the
timbre of the creatures’ howls.

The sight of the creatures ripping
through the defenders blanched the man holding Dasen. His fellow
cursed under his breath. “Go,” the first man said absently as he
watched the horror unfold. “Join the next line, an’ be ready ta
grab a spear off’n one of yir countrymen.” That was all the
prompting Dasen needed. He did not look back to see the creatures
shredding the wall of defenders. He ran the twenty paces that
separated him from the next line with Teth at his side.

When they came to that line, an old
man with steel-silver hair and a crumpled face that looked like it
had been baked in the sun for years grabbed him and pulled him in
at his side. Another only slightly younger man did the same to
Teth. The old man reached to the side of his belt, pulled out a
long knife that looked like it should have been in a kitchen, and
handed it to Dasen. He studied Dasen as he took the knife. “I know
ya be ‘fraid, son. The Order only knows I’m a quiverin’ where I
stand, but this thing ‘ere’s biggerin’ both of us, so ya jist stand
yir ground right ‘ere by me. I’ll watch out fir ya.” The old man
spit on the ground and tightened his grip on the rusty spear he
held – the line here was only two men deep, and they did not carry
shields. “I did some time in the army in me youth, an’ I still
‘member how ta use this thing. Just ‘member, ‘old yir ground long
as ya can then fall back two lines. Ya’ll do fine. I can tell the
Order’s lookin’ out fir ya.” The man fell silent and turned his
eyes to the line in front of them.

Dasen studied the man and his fellows,
trying to grasp this insanity. The old man wore a cooking pot on
his head and had a wooden cutting board strapped to his chest. He
should have been at home living out his dotage, but here he was
inexplicably standing on this field, holding the line against
insurmountable odds. Dasen was emboldened by the display. He
clenching the long knife and turned to face the pending onslaught.
At his side, Teth gripped a weapon similar to his own. She looked
up at him with fear and determination battling for control of her
features. He tried to give her an encouraging smile, but it was
interrupted by the site of men racing toward him. The archers from
the second rank came to a stop in front of them and took up a
position with arrows notched.

The man in front of Dasen was not
overly tall, so he had a clear view of the wave of creatures that
slammed into the row of spearmen they had just left. The men in
that line accepted the creatures with super-human courage, and
Dasen could not help but wince as several of the creatures ran
headlong into the spears and were impaled on the sturdy shafts. But
those spears did not slow the creatures for long. Many of the
things dealt deathblows to their assailants even with spears
jutting from their chests. Others trailing behind used any of a
thousand hideous adaptations to slash their way through the
defenders. Men fell to razor-sharp claws, spiked tails, barbed
hooks, serrated blades, crushing jaws. The deaths were so varied
and horrific that Dasen could not accept them as real. He felt
detached from what was happening, dazed by the brutality of it,
like a terrible dream that would not end.

At the same time, the archers in front
of him fired volley after volley into the creatures. They looked
for openings in the lines and feathered anything that might break
through or simply fired into the sky, knowing that their arrows
would fall somewhere among the legions of invaders. But even with
that success, the monsters kept coming. It would only be a matter
of time before they finished that line and charged toward the next,
charged toward where Dasen and Teth waited with nothing more than
knives to fend off an army of chaos-sent demons.

Dasen scanned the length of the lines
around him, searching for an escape. Everywhere along those lines
men were engaged with the creatures. In some places, the first line
still held; in others, the creatures had penetrated farther. The
rows were not that long, stretching maybe three hundred men
shoulder to shoulder, but continued behind them all the way to the
river. On the sides, horsemen fought a frantic battle to keep the
monsters from flanking the formation as they encircled the
defenders.

A gurgling scream rose over the timbre
of battle and brought Dasen back to the battle before him. He
turned and saw the archers who had been standing in front of them
fall to the ground, their bodies riddled with steel darts. The
source of those darts, a creature the size of a small house, loomed
before them. The thing had the head of a hawk but no wings. Its
body was built like a bull with powerful hooves that tore at the
rain-soaked ground and a long tail that ended in a ball of
glistening spikes. The creature swung its tail and spikes flew from
it, riddling the defenders. Ten or more arrows stabbed into the
creature’s body, but the thing just responded with a blood-curdling
scream that made Dasen want to crumble to the ground.

He was roused from his horror by the
sensation of the old man shaking his arm. “Son, pick up that bow
an’ git out of ‘ere. Leave fightin’ that thing ta those of us ain’t
got nothin’ ta live fir.”

At the man’s prodding, Dasen grabbed
the bow from the still warm grasp of the archer in front of him. As
he pulled the quiver over the boy’s head, a spike hummed by his
head. The man at his side gasped and clutched his chest where the
spike had punched through his cutting board breastplate. Dasen felt
a pang but did not pause to mourn the old man’s passing. He ran to
the next line in the echo of the creature’s terrible cry as it tore
into the line he had just abandoned.

Teth was waiting for him. He pulled up
beside her as she released an arrow from the bow she had acquired
from another of the fallen archers. The arrow struck home in one of
the creature’s tiny eyes. It rose to its hind legs with an
ear-splitting scream. When it came back down, the ground rumbled
beneath them, but it did not slow its assault.

The beast already had countless arrows
and several spears protruding from its body, but none of them
seemed to affect it. Its tail came around again, but rather than
releasing the spikes, it used them to slash through ten men and at
least as many of the creatures that fought beside it. In the same
motion, it snatched two men in its beak and snapped them in half as
the maw slammed shut.

Dasen realized that he was just
watching, so he pulled an arrow from the quiver that hung over his
shoulder, notched it, and prepared to fire. He took aim at the
creature then saw several other man-sized things breaking through
the gap the larger creature had created in its wake. He changed his
mark and fired at the first of the creatures. To his surprise, the
arrow hit the insect-like thing squarely in the chest, pierced its
exoskeleton, and dropped it to the ground. He pulled another arrow
from his quiver. That arrow ended in the throat of a thing with six
muscular arms and a snake-like body with which it slithered over
the ground at an incredible speed.

Another arrow was flying to his bow,
when he felt a tugging at his arm. Teth was yelling at him. “Fall
back, you idiot! They’re almost here. All the other archers are
gone.”

Dasen did not argue. He bolted through
the opening that had appeared between the spearmen behind him. The
sound of a spiked tail ripping through the men he had just left
propelled him to the next line.

When they arrived, they turned to face
the creatures, but only the one thing remained. At other places
along the line there were still hundreds of the monsters engaging
the defenders, but the creature before them had probably killed as
many of its own kind as it had defenders, and the other creatures
seemed to be avoiding it. Dasen could not blame them as he watched
the thing shred another line of spearmen as if they were made of
paper. Countless arrows bit into it, making its entire body
resemble the tail it swung so freely, but they did not slow it in
the slightest.

Unwilling to give up, Dasen pulled an
arrow back and sent it into the creature’s side where innumerable
others already protruded. The creature did not even
flinch.

The futility of the effort sent a wave
of desperation through him. It was echoed by the men around him.
They were all thinking the same thing. Eventually, they would be
out of places to run. Eventually, they would have to kill this
thing. But that was looking more and more like an impossible
task.

Dasen surveyed the battlefield for
answers and found bedlam on every side of him. Men fought the
creatures and killed them only to die at the hands of that same
creature or the next. Bodies were torn apart by cruel weapons.
Screams so defined the field that he could not tell one from the
next. Fear raced through everything. Doubt, anguish, hatred, pain.
Dasen could almost feel those emotions emanating from the battle
like heat from a fire, could feel their energy like the power of a
maelstrom raging around him.

“
It’s real,” Dasen heard
himself saying. He was not imagining that power. It was there, it
was real. With that stunning revelation, he forgot about the battle
before him and accepted that power. It filled him, coursed through
him like a drug, twisted around his mind so that he had to
concentrate to remember who he was and why he stood on that field.
Still, he took in more, until he thought he would burst, until it
felt like he had a tornado caged in his mind. His thoughts spun
around that tornado and were scattered by it. The only things he
could concentrate on were fear, hate, pain, sorrow, doubt, a
thousand all-consuming emotions.

He looked at the creature now looming
before him, saw its tail crashing toward him. He felt Teth
somewhere far away pulling at his sleeve and yelling in his ear.
She was filled with fear. He drew in that fear, used it to power
himself further. Finally, he felt his own fear, his own hatred, his
own pain. He used those emotions to focus the energy that had built
inside him and wished, no demanded, that the creature causing them
be destroyed.