The Destiny of the Dead (The Song of the Tears Book 3) (4 page)

Fortunately, most of his militia were too far away to have
seen what had happened. The archers fired, but Nish did not see many enemy
fall. The real soldiers laboured across the boggy soil, churning it to mud.

Nish caught his breath. Ten seconds until they struck.
‘Fire!’ He rubbed his eyes, for his vision kept going in and out of focus and
the headache was worse.

‘Fire! Archers, fall back.’ They could do no more.
Effectively, half his militia was now useless.

The illusory soldiers disappeared; the real ones kept on and
struck, driving through the lancers’ spears with ruthless efficiency, catching
the spearheads on their shields and hacking through the shafts with their
swords.

Before his lancers could recover, the enemy were attacking
the front line, smashing a lancer’s shield aside with one blow, taking him in
the belly or throat with the next, then shouldering the sagging body out of the
way to attack the next man, and the next.

Even with only half their expected numbers it was terrible,
bloody slaughter, as sickening as anything Nish had ever seen in war. In ten
more minutes, the Imperial forces would butcher the lot of them, and it could
not be borne. Neither could he do anything to stop it.

Three soldiers were converging on Gi and Tulitine, grinning.
Nish came out from behind them, sprang forwards and thrust his sabre through
the ribcage of the nearest man, who died with an astonished look on his swarthy
face.

He had not seen Nish coming. The Imperial troops were well
trained but there had been no war in ten years and they were not battle
hardened the way Nish had been. He whirled, struck upwards and slew the second
man with a slash that took his head off, then turned for the third.

The soldier was out of reach, and Gi was defending furiously
with the heavy sword that had been her grandfather’s, but even had she been
trained in sword fighting she could never match this man. He was toying with
her, feasting on her terror, delivering a minor cut to the shoulder, another to
the thigh. Nish tried desperately to reach him but the soldier saw him coming
and laughed as he thrust his blade into her heart.

Loyal, gentle Gi, who had been Nish’s closest ally since
he’d arrived in Gendrigore, fell on her back into the mud. Her eyes met his,
she looked puzzled, then their light faded and she was dead.

No time to grieve; no time for anything. Nish ran and, with
a wild swipe, hacked through the soldier’s side. He screamed and fell on top of
Gi’s body, thrashing. Nish heaved him off and put him out of his agony with one
swift thrust. After a last look at her compact, bloody form and her pretty,
bewildered face, he shook his head and turned to survey the battlefield, which
had descended into the chaos of hundreds of individual melees.

‘The cause is lost,’ bellowed Flydd from not far away.
‘Yggur, if you’re going to do anything, do it now! Nish, this way.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Nish. He had led his faithful
militia here and nothing could induce him to run out on them now.

On the circling air-sled, Klarm was peering around the
steamy clearing, searching for him, and Nish felt an urgent need to hide. He
slid in behind Tulitine but Klarm touched Reaper and Nish’s head felt as though
it were bursting – as if the dwarf had used the same spell on him as he
had on the red-haired archer.

Every nerve fibre sang and his scarred hand shrieked with
pain. The scars took on a bright, silvery glow, like a reflection of the
mercuric shimmer of the tears, and even when he slipped the hand inside his
shirt, its glow could still be seen. He’d never hide now.

He raised a fallen spear in his shining hand; the caduceus
shrilled, his headache faded and his vision cleared suddenly, as if he were
seeing the world through a diamond lens – his clearsight had switched on,
as it sometimes did when things were desperate.

From the corner of his eye he made out an aura swirling
around the caduceus; high above them, the Profane Tears roiled menacingly. And,
to his surprise, something pulsed within the blade of the sabre –
Vivimord’s enchantment?

It was no use to him; he had no idea how to use it. Catching
a movement from the corner of his eye, Nish whirled; a giant of a warrior was
heading for him. Over his back was strapped a span-long sword, and he carried a
weighted net whose cords had a faint aura, no doubt linked to the tears. On
seeing Nish’s shining scars, the giant raised the net. Once he threw it, it
would be impossible to evade.

 
THREE

Nish had no time to think – clearsight suggested
that the giant would toss the net to the left, so he hurled himself to the
right and prayed that he was not mistaken. He wasn’t; the net missed save for
its weighted edge, which settled over his calves, burning like the touch of the
tears, and he began to lose feeling from the knees down.

Biting back a gasp, he tried to squirm free, no longer able
to feel his feet. He heaved his right leg to one side but the edge of the net
felt as though it was searing through his left ankle.

The giant flicked the net into the air to envelop Nish
completely and, unable to escape, he transferred the sabre to his glowing left
hand and hacked at the soldier’s knees.

He missed; the tip caught in the net and he braced himself
for another jolt of agony. Instead, his hand brightened, the enchanted sabre
sang and sheared through the net as if it were cotton.

From on high, over the fighting, Nish heard Klarm’s
anguished cry. Had the spell he’d used to light up Nish’s scar backfired on
him? Could the enchanted sword have something to do with it? Nish didn’t
understand what he’d done, but he planned to keep doing it. Hacking the net to
pieces, he lunged for the giant, who snatched at the sword on his back. Before
he could bring it over his head, Nish had opened his belly with the sabre.

The giant clutched at his entrails with both hands, trying
to stop them from sliding out, but they spilled through his fingers and he
fell. Nish ducked behind him to survey the scene.

Dozens of his militia lay dead and more were dying by the
second. As he stood up, tall, dapper Forzel, who had somehow contrived to look
immaculate even in this mud bath, was beheaded, his head landing face-down in
the muck. Forzel the joker would laugh no more.

The air-sled, which had been wobbling through the air not
far above, recovered and shot upwards. A signal horn rang out.

‘What’s the dwarf doing?’ said Beyl, a short, darkly tanned
woodsman who was better than most with staff or sword.

At forty-three, he was one of the oldest of the Gendrigorean
militia. His frizzy grey hair, hacked short with a knife, covered his head like
a grey carpet and he wore an earring shaped like an ear of corn.

‘He’s calling down the troops he left guarding the ridges,’
said Stibble, a burly blacksmith covered in black hair. He did not carry a
sword, but wielded his long-handled hammer with deadly efficiency. ‘We’re
beating him.’

‘Nah,’ said Gens, a little gnome-like shoemaker whose
fingers were stained brown from leather dressing. He wasn’t much of a swordsman
but he was hard to hit, being so small and nimble, and his knife work was accomplished.
‘He’s just making sure of us.’

Zana, a stocky cutler with cropped hair and a flat nose,
said nothing at all. She carried the biggest sword of anyone in the militia,
and used it with a surgeon’s precision.

Two soldiers came at Nish, one from the left swinging a
cudgel, the man on the right raising a mallet. They had to take him alive but
they weren’t bothered about breaking bones, and he couldn’t fight them both at
once – or could he? With clearsight singing along his nerve fibres, maybe
he could … if he were game to trust it.

Nish ran between them – normally a suicidal move
– then turned away from the tall soldier with the mallet and slashed at
the more dangerous opponent, the thickset fellow with the cudgel. He swung a
horizontal blow at Nish, who ducked: he’d
known
what his opponent was going to do.

Sensing that the man behind him was about to strike, Nish
swung the sabre up and over his left shoulder and felt it hit something hard,
the soldier’s forehead. He fell away and, as the man with the cudgel took a
second swipe, Nish leaned backwards and, striking up at an angle, took him
down.

‘I think I’ve got something,’ cried Yggur over the clamour.

Nish wove back through the fighting, towards the caduceus.
Yggur carried a jag-sword but had not drawn it, for none of the enemy had dared
go that close to him. He was not only a tall, powerful man and a fine
swordsman, but also a mancer of mystery who had lived for more than a thousand
years. No one knew where he came from, and few people understood his Art, which
had stayed with him even when the destruction of the nodes had robbed most
other mancers of their Art.

He stood with his back to the caduceus, long legs spread,
arms held in a vase shape above his head, chanting.

‘What is it?’ Nish panted. More soldiers were converging on
him, and even with the benefit of clearsight he could not hold them all off.

‘I don’t know …’ Yggur turned towards Nish but did not
appear to see him. ‘I’ll have to try it.’

‘Make it snappy!’ bellowed Flydd.

Yggur strained until the hairs on his upraised arms began to
smoke and a tenuous mist formed around him. People cried out; Nish recognised
Klarm’s voice among them. He felt waves of heat and the caduceus brightened
until it resembled a rod of molten lava welded to the earth, so bright that it
burned.

The pouring rain turned to steam clouds which were whipped
into a spiral around the caduceus, spinning ever faster until they formed a
miniature tornado that was plucking grass and mud up with it. The grass
flash-flamed to char and was whirled up the funnel of the ever-growing tornado,
out of sight. The clash of sword on sword stopped as friend and foe stood side
by side, staring.

Yggur sagged, his eyes wide and fearful, and he was not a
man given to exposing his emotions. ‘It feels as though the caduceus is feeding
on me,’ he rasped. ‘Drawing the very essence out of me.’

‘Get on with it,’ said Flydd, pushing through, jag-sword in
hand. Shreds of bloody uniform were caught between the jags, and what looked
like a man’s thumb. ‘We need that mist.’

He glanced towards the air-sled, which was drifting sideways
across the battlefield. Klarm clung to the pole flying the God-Emperor’s
standard as if he could barely stand up.

‘The runt isn’t looking so bold now,’ sneered Flydd. Again
his yearning eyes lingered upon the tears.

‘The caduceus hurt him through Gatherer, but he’ll soon
recover,’ said Yggur.

‘Try again.’

Yggur put up his arms, gave Nish another of those blank
stares, then set his jaw and forced hard. Nish’s scarred hand burned anew, but
its silvery glow faded a little. As he took the sabre in his left hand, which
sometimes helped to ease the pain, a mist sprang up, thickened and whirled in
towards the caduceus.

There came a sound like thunder, save that the echoing boom
was at the beginning and the whip crack at the end; spectral figures wisped into
being above the caduceus, but vanished again; allies and enemies cried out, all
at once. The air-sled wobbled and this time almost fell out of the sky.

‘Yggur has no idea what he’s doing, has he?’ said Nish to
Flydd.

‘Not a clue,’ said Flydd. ‘Yet if he can gain us a breathing
space –’

The sky turned yellow, darkened to the purple of a bruise
and slowly went black. Had it not been for the uncanny red radiance coming from
the caduceus, Nish would not have been able to see at all. The whirling wind
was chilly now and blowing right through his sodden clothing, but it suddenly
died and the moisture in the saturated air condensed into fog so thick that he
could not see his silver-scarred hand on the hilt of the sabre.

The clash of weapons stopped again, for no one could see to
fight. The groans of the wounded rose in pitch. A woman was crying, ‘Don’t
leave me,’ over and over; a man sobbed, ‘Please, please, put me out of my
misery.’

As Nish groped through the dark, he could not help
remembering other battlefields littered with the dead, and the maimed comrades
who, too badly injured to walk, had been left to die because nothing could be
done for them. One war ended and another began. Would there ever be peace? And
what was the point of fighting when there was no hope of victory?

His sodden shirt flapped as the whirlwind picked up again,
and momentarily the bright caduceus pierced the fog like a lighthouse beacon
– but was it offering shelter, or luring them to destruction?

The fog had thinned fractionally; he could just make out his
feet now. Time to retreat. ‘Chief Signaller?’ he yelled. ‘Midge?’

She did not reply, and he was cursing her for not staying
close, as he’d ordered, when he trod on her shoulder. Midge lay face up in the
mud with a broken spear through her chest. She was not yet eighteen.

Shaking his head at the waste, Nish heaved the signal horn
out from under her, shook the bloodstained mud from it and blew three ringing
blasts followed by two short ones – the signal to retreat to the lowest
point of the clearing.

Was there really any chance? Wherever he led them, the enemy
would follow once the fog cleared. And yet, while they lived, while they were
free, a tiny hope remained, and Nish had fanned the embers of such meagre hopes
into flame before today.

Another clap of inverted thunder echoed forth and he heard
the air-sled whistling across the sky.

‘Come down, you treacherous little flea!’ Yggur roared.

The air-sled made a grinding sound; Nish heard a monstrous
splat
, the sound of mud spattering in
all directions and steam belching up. The dwarf cried out, ‘The tears, the
tears!’