The Legend of Asahiel: Book 03 - The Divine Talisman (50 page)

Still, Htomah held his tongue, resisting the urge to rush Hreidmar or his counselors to judgment.

“So,” Crag pressed in his stead, “what’s it to be?”

Thromb flashed the Tuthari a look of annoyance, then glanced at Htomah as if fearing a subterfuge between them.

Crag glared. “Attack or reroute—I ain’t caring which. But we’d best be about it,” he insisted. “Don’t need no graybeard to tell us that.”

“No,” Hreidmar agreed, “we don’t.” He turned from the ledge to fix Htomah with a critical eye. “’Tis walls of stone you promised my people, and walls of stone they shall have.”

“Souaris is yet many leagues from here,” Htomah said.

“Unless the enemy gives me no choice, I do not battle until I’ve some assurance they’ll be safe.” His speckled eyes glanced purposefully at the slopes rising to either side.

Htomah shared a long look with Quinlan, until Hreidmar lost patience.

“General Thromb, make ready to divert.”

“Aye, Your Glory.”

Thromb and Thayre turned as one to follow their king back toward the draw. Crag lingered, his expression sour, before finding their heels.

Behind them, Quinlan finally offered a slight nod.

“As Your Glory most surely noticed…” Htomah called out. He then paused, permitting his fellow Entient a moment to reconsider. When Quinlan did not, Htomah rounded slowly to find the pack of dwarves peering back at him. “…if there is one thing these mountains have no lack of, it is stone.”

C
ORATHEL GRIPPED THE SPYGLASS IN
his sweaty fingers, squeezing so hard his knuckles ached. He could see catastrophe unfolding, yet was powerless to prevent it. Wracked with tension, all he could do was grimace in denial from afar.

After more than an hour of slow, steady progress, the tide had turned. For a time, his troops had held it at bay, but that time had passed. No longer able to hold their lines, they had allowed the front to splinter. Little by little, the reaver swarm was digging northward in widening streams. Some of his men could barely lift their weapons against foes that came howling against them with undiminished strength and fury. All reserves had been deployed, but it
did not seem enough to make a difference. A roiling sickness in his stomach hissed and spat the truth.

They were losing this battle.

The east flank was ready to buckle. Reavers along that side had taken to the slopes. With lighter weapons and little to no armor, they were able to scamper much faster than his own troops in a race to gain the higher ground. As a result, they had circumnavigated the deadlocked front and were pouring around to weaken it from behind. The Ninth Cavalry had fought to drive them back, but their steeds were ill suited to the terrain. Corathel had called them off, and redirected a foot battalion to shore up the collapsing wall before it was too late.

The command had fallen upon Dengyn, of the Fifth Division, who was just now reaching the point of conflict. The Fifth General and his current battalion were as fresh as any upon the field…but that did not seem to matter. The reavers hissed and yowled and hurled their stolen bodies into the teeth of Dengyn’s phalanx. Incredible, that they should move as they did, these reavers. They were civilians, after all, untrained, lacking in fitness and discipline.

Like any rabid beast, they did not seem to care.

Dengyn and his soldiers, however, understood the critical nature of their assignment. Though they lacked Corathel’s overview of the battlefield, being pulled from an advance to shore up a flank could scarcely bode well. So they drove onward against that thickening rush as if the lives of all behind them depended on it, unaware of just how true that might be.

Reavers upon the slopes hurled rocks and dislodged boulders, caring not whether it was the enemy or their own kind crushed underneath. Upon the floor of the pass, they wielded bills and scythes and crude polearms against sword and axe and shield. Like foaming waters they poured, against an iron shore determined to throw them back.

Blood gushed, commands echoed, steel hacked and scraped and rang. The shore was winning. Reavers fell to either side like ocean spray, shrieking and flailing. Their maniacal frenzy was no match for the fierce, calculated discipline of the Parthan Legion.

Or so it seemed.

He was about to look away when Dengyn went down. One moment, the Fifth General stood tall and strong, bellowing orders, removing the head from one victim with a single swipe of his broadsword. The next, a reaver found him, plunging a rancher’s pike through the commander’s back. The reaver wielding it was on its knees—assumed dead a moment before. Dengyn gaped at the slash in the creature’s stomach, at its entrails dangling to the ground, before focusing again on the rusted iron tip sprouted from his own chest.

Corathel felt as though the shaft had gone through
him
. It should have. He gritted his teeth as Dengyn did, clenched his spyglass as Dengyn tried feebly to raise his sword, then watched the division commander fall uselessly to the earth.

A pair of soldiers at Dengyn’s back came along with axe and mace and
made pulp of the reaver’s skull. But the damage had been done. Dengyn, a seasoned veteran, done in by a bloody rancher. Up and down the line, similar confrontations were having ill effect, causing the advance to falter. Push past a wounded reaver, and, half the time, the fiend would rise again from behind. Turn to finish the deed, and its bloody kin would pile on from in front. His troops could not seem to form phalanx or schilltron tight enough to keep these reckless animals at bay.

A battle standard went down. And there, another. Like all before, the assault wavered. As it failed, reavers snatched up weapons from the fallen. Some claimed helms and wore them as trophies, squealing in feral triumph. For his own troops, there was only disbelief, fatigue, despair.

What more can be done?

Then came an unexpected surge from the southern front, pushing north. In the moment that it took Corathel to adjust focus, he feared it to be a vein of enemies widening amid his columns. The first vein he spied, though, was a column of horse—Rogun and his riders, retaking the front. Which in turn allowed…Lar, he now saw, to spearhead a shift to the east, a counter meant to stem the gash in the legion’s side.

An undeniable pride began to boil within as Corathel watched the rusty-haired giant of a man rally those around him. He could not hear the Fourth General’s bellows—not at this distance, and not over the intervening din—but knew them well enough by their effect. As Lar’s mouth opened and his barrel chest heaved, soldiers raced to form up at his side, gaining courage with every stride.

What
had
been a flagging jumble of doubt and confusion was once again a fully formed wedge of battle-hardened soldiers. A chill of savage euphoria rippled up Corathel’s spine as Lar practically dove into the enemy swarm, great axe cleaving with every swipe. He was smeared and spattered already with the blood of his victims, and fountains of it were rising around him. Reavers clawed and bashed and jabbed with their blades and clubs and staves, while others rolled and flung their stones. But, in that moment, Lar’s strength and ferocity surpassed their own. All around, soldiers found their faith, reclaimed their spirits, and battled with renewed vigor to push the enemy back, back, among the scrub and scree and gullies of the Gaperon’s eastern wall.

The chief general finally exhaled, and drew fresh breath in relief—until he swung his lens back toward the front. The lines there were not faring so well. Frayed, fragmented, straining or tearing at almost every possible seam. Men and horses were screaming, dying. Some were trying to retreat, to catch their breath, to beg quarter of a merciless foe. He could find neither Jasyn nor Maltyk, of the Second and Third. He glimpsed Sixth General Bannon, but only momentarily, before a wind-driven smoke cloud obscured his view.

Ranchers
, he thought again.
Crofters
,
bakers
,
chandlers
,
butchers…
If he could not trammel and destroy these, what hope had he to resist the savage hordes yet to descend from—

“Sir!”

Corathel spun. Corporal Darros was pointing. The eastern flank, again.
Not Lar
, he prayed. If the Fourth General had fallen…

Then he saw, and he felt his heart in his throat. A new wave bearing down upon them from high amid the hills. Five thousand. Ten. More.

How?
he wanted to scream. From where had these…?

His mind did not complete the thought. “Corporal,” he said instead, “sound the withdraw.”

His tongue felt thick and leathery, his throat raw. It would be Atharvan all over again. They would flee and lose a good share of men in the process. Those left behind would be raised as reavers, while the rest of them sought to regroup elsewhere—with Rogun’s rear guard in Alson, perhaps. When they returned—
if
they returned—he would set about killing friends, compatriots…Dengyn.

The blaring horns drove spikes of torment into his ears, echoing his shame, his folly. He had known better than this. The numbers had seemed even enough, yet numbers were all but meaningless against a foe that would not yield, would not tire, would not—

“Corporal, the east flank, what are they…?”

But he could see it clearly for himself. Across the length and breadth of the field, lines and columns were reversing course, slowly but steadily forming up for the retreat as the order reached them. Lar, however, had delved too deep. He and a string of those who had followed were some thirty paces up the slope, still seeking to drive back the circling reavers, and establishing a defensive wall.

“He means to deflect their rush,” Corathel muttered angrily, clenching his jaw. It was the right decision. It was what
he
would have done in Lar’s stead.

And then he was riding, spurring his mount to a gallop down the rise. Darros and his guard ring followed. He did not have to look to know that Owl would be sprinting after, bounding and weaving through their clouds of dust. He would be sacrificing their lives along with his own, if it came to that. That was their choice to make. His was to ensure that more capable men were not dying in his stead.

“Fall back!” he shouted, as he reached the floor of the pass. “Inverse column! Wheel and cover! Fall back!” On and on, he shouted maneuvers. Here a “steady full,” there a “hook and roll.” The last thing needed was panic and more chaos. He would not tolerate a stampede. But the day was lost, and the time come to salvage what they could.

His pace slowed as he wove and cantered through a clotting press. He had hoped to reach Lar, but realized he would never do so in time. Rumbling and skittering over naked escarpment and steep, snaking trail came an avalanche of bodies. Their movements were not quite human, their blocky forms either hunched or stunted. Whatever their nature, their numbers continued to stream down from the heights, a trickle become a flood. The mushroom of soldiers sprouted up on the east flank would surely crumble beneath its flow.

Corathel cried a useless warning as the forces were set to clash. Only, the
dreaded impact never came. For some reason, the avalanche shifted direction, driving not into Lar’s phalanx, but veering south and west and charging hard into the reaver lines.

Even seeing it for himself, Corathel dared not hope. A ruse it must be, he thought, some trickery meant to forestall their retreat and lure them on again in full.

He let his current orders stand and finished pushing his horse on up the slope to where Lar waited. The Fourth General turned toward him with a bemused expression, looking ever taller beside the squat, bearded figure standing next to him.

“Sir,” Lar greeted in a winded voice. “Dwarves.”

Corathel had never seen a dwarf. Not a true one, anyway. Only the stunted human half-folk who were at times referred to as such. Now and then, he had come across one of these who had taken to the part for show or fair, wearing a jerkin overstuffed with random lumps for that gnarled appearance, and hiding his face behind a shaggy, goat-hair beard of outlandish size and thickness. Not so, here. The figure before him was knotted and growth-ridden, true, and wore a thicket of a beard to put any bramble nest to shame. Yet there was nothing about his presentation intended to be comical; neither did Corathel mistake it as such.

“
Grell graggen hoke
,” the dwarf grunted. His eyes held a grim confidence that matched well his gruff features.

The chief general could only nod. “I don’t suppose we’ve much chance of finding a Gohran translator among us just now,” he mumbled at Lar.

Before his lieutenant could respond, the dwarf answered. “I said, you’re a mite short to be this one’s commander, ain’t ya?”

“I saw you coming, sir,” Lar explained. “He bears greeting and word from the leader of this host.”

“From the king hisself,” the dwarf clarified, as scores of his comrades continued to thunder past. “And your man here’s telling me you’re the leader of this one.”

“I am,” Corathel affirmed. “And you are…”

“Friends, if you’ll have us. Else I’ll be sounding this here horn and we’ll be leaving the lot of you as ya were.” A knobby hand patted a curved horn draped over one shoulder.

“No need for that, I assure you. But how did you…? Where—”

“Later,” the dwarf said, reaching back to unsling his axe. The squares of metal armor riveted upon his brigandine clanked as he moved. When he brought the weapon about, Corathel saw that its head was as big as the one wielded by Lar. “There’s killing to be done, and it seems to me your troops are moving in the wrong direction.”

The chief general glanced at his lieutenant, who merely nodded to where an army of dwarves continued to plow as they pleased through the reaver ranks, digging furrows long and wide. A secondary line had formed up all along the base of the slope, securing the eastern flank for good and all. Corathel found
himself thinking back to the stories he’d heard as a youth. A dwarf’s strength and stamina was fabled. Even the females, it was said, boasted thrice that of an average human male.