War Maid's Choice-ARC (88 page)

His counter stroke chopped through his attacker’s knee and the ghoul collapsed with a keening wail. That left Arsham open and unguarded against the other two, however, and his eyes glittered as he saw death coming for him. An obsidian-headed spear thrust straight for his throat with the darting, deadly speed of a striking adder and there was no time to dodge, no way to block.

Four feet of bloody, tempered steel sheared through the spear shaft and continued onward into the ghoul spearman’s chest. The double-edged blade carved its way through the ghoul, then looped back up in a perfectly timed backstroke that took the head completely off the third ghoul.

Arsham’s eyes widened at the brutal efficiency of his rescue, but more attackers were driving into the momentary open space that deadly sword had created. He hurled himself fully to his feet, turning instinctively to put his back to his rescuer’s. The two of them stood, an armored rock throwing back the last, desperate surge of the river of ghouls which had been cut off by the Order’s charge, and even as he fought for his life, a tiny corner of Arsham’s brain reflected on the irony of it.

Who would have dreamed, in the days when he was his father Churnazh’s least trusted but most lethal general, that he would someday owe his life to Sharkah Bahnaksdaughter of Hurgrum?

* * *

Zûrâk recognized the failure of the ghouls’ breakthrough as the hated Order of Tomanāk sealed off the gap. A third of the Order’s infantry might have been killed or wounded in the doing, but they’d done it. The ghouls between him and the enemy continued to fling themselves forward, still more terrified of him than of the relatively clean death of battle, yet they were a spent force, and he knew it.

But he didn’t care. They’d served their purpose, for they’d drawn the Order into the melee where Zûrâk could get at it directly. The banefire eating at his armored hide might send waves of torment sizzling along his unnatural nerves, and fury might fill his brain, but his focus and purpose remained and he waded forward.

The ghouls before him quailed away from his faceless, flaming shape, and his swords and axes swept aside any who were too slow to evade him. They were mere encumbrances, an inconvenient obstruction between him and his true target, and he roared his challenge as he came.

* * *

Vaijon—once of Almerhas, and now of Hurgrum—sat his warhorse behind the center of the wedge formation of the Order he’d spent the last seven years of his life training. He’d made himself sit there, waiting, letting his sword brothers—and his single sword
sister
—face the enemy while he held aloof.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life.

The Hurgrum Chapter was his family, even more than if they had been his own bone and blood. He knew them all. He’d trained with them, led them, watched them come together—Hurgrumese and Navahkan, hradani and Sothōii, forgetting centuries of hatred and bloodshed to become one in the service of the god of battle—and now he’d watched them bleed and die while he waited. Somewhere in the very back of his mind behind the singing silence of discipline and the focused purpose of a champion of Tomanāk, he remembered an arrogant young man who would have felt only contempt for “barbarian” hradani and little more respect for the Sothōii. That young man was far away from this day and place, and even as he felt his sword companions bleed and die about him, he was grateful for every step of the journey which had brought him here in that young man’s place. Here to confront the enemy he’d been born to face.

A pretty toy
, a voice rumbled into the silence within him,
but the steel is sound enough under all the fancy work
.

Despite the carnage about him, despite the fire-wrapped shape striding towards him, despite even the deaths the Order had suffered, Vaijon smiled within his open-faced helmet as the words from a long-ago day flowed through him.

“I’ve tried, at any rate,” he told Tomanāk, and heard a silent, approving flicker of laughter.

Yes, my Sword, you have. Bahzell was right about you, and so was I. Are you ready, Vaijon?

“I am,” he said calmly.

Together, then
.

Vaijon felt a mighty hand rest upon his right shoulder. His mind and heart reached out to that hand in return, and a sheath of glittering blue light swept down his own right arm. It licked out along the shaft of his lance, gathering in a coruscating halo about its leaf-shaped blade, and he drew a deep breath.

“
Now
, Hurthang!” he shouted, his voice cutting through the deafening tumult as cleanly as a sword, shadowed and carried by the echo of the War God’s own voice, and Hurthang Marahgson heard him.

“
Open!
” Hurthang bellowed, and the point of the wedge—the
reason
the Order had charged in a wedge aimed directly at Zûrâk—opened. The armored axemen who had formed it, those who survived, stepped back and to the rear instantly, and the handful of ghouls between them and Zûrâk, found themselves face to face with something even more terrifying than Horse Stealer axes.

“
Tomanāk!
”

Vaijon of Hurgrum’s warcry sounded like a trumpet and his horse bounded forward.

That horse had been Tellian of Balthar’s gift, and any prince would have paid a fortune to possess it. Yet it was no courser, and there was no way even a courser could have reached full speed in so little space. There simply wasn’t enough distance.

It didn’t matter. Somehow, in a way those who saw it happen knew even then they would never be able to describe even to themselves, Vaijon’s warhorse went from a standing start to full gallop in a single bound, and the glittering head of his lance went before him.

The tattered screen of ghouls between him and Zûrâk flung themselves aside, frantic to avoid the azure apparition thundering towards them. A handful were too slow; the halo of blue lightning crackling around Vaijon’s lance head touched them, and they twitched, transfixed, soundless mouths opened in screams they had no time to utter before they exploded into clouds of ash.

Then they were gone, and Zûrâk’s eyes blazed green and crimson through the seething curtain of banefire as he bellowed his hunger and charged to meet his foe.

They met in an eruption of bright, clean blue light and the sickly green of corruption, and dozens of men were bowled off their feet by the silent concussion of that collision. The glaring lance head drove past Zûrâk’s reaching arms. It hammered into him, and he shrieked in a greater agony than he had ever experienced. The cleansing light of Tomanāk ripped outward from it, tearing at him, consuming him. He was tougher and far, far more powerful than the ghouls who’d been destroyed by that halo’s lightest touch, but his glaring eyes bulged incredulously as he felt himself disintegrating—flaring into nothingness—as that devouring incandescence ravened its way through him.

He shrieked again, but even in his torment, his mind was clearer than Kimazh’s would have been. He struck with both swords and both axes—not at Vaijon, but at the shaft of Vaijon’s lance. Livid green fire enveloped all of his weapons as they thundered down, and a fresh boil of light exploded outward as the lance shaft shattered.

The blue volcano demolishing Zûrâk’s very being vanished. He was hurt, more dreadfully wounded than he’d ever imagined he might be, but he howled his triumph as he struck his enemy’s weapon from his hands. He heaved himself back upright, straightening and raising his own weapons once more...ready this time to strike directly at his foe. Without the fire of that horrific lance, no mortal could stand against him, and once this hated champion was gone, he would sweep through the ranks of infantry and cavalry to take Bahzell and Walsharno from behind while Anshakar came at them from the front. And once
that
happened—

Vaijon never hesitated. He dropped his shattered lance and, for the first time ever, he did something he’d seen Bahzell do dozens of times.

“
Come!
” he thundered, and his longsword materialized in his empty hand as he deliberately hurled himself directly into Zûrâk’s embrace.

He ducked under the sweeping swords in the devil’s upper set of hands as his warhorse went down without even a scream under the savage, scissoring blow of Zûrâk’s battle axes. But the blow came too late. Vaijon was already inside Zûrâk’s reach, driving himself up and out of his crumpling horse’s saddle. The devil dropped his weapons, closing his arms, driving his talons through the back of Vaijon’s armor, desperate now to rend and destroy his enemy, but Vaijon of Hurgrum, champion of Tomanāk, had known that was going to happen. He had only one purpose...and he accomplished it.

Zûrâk shrieked as that magnificently bejeweled and glittering blade, caprisoned in a far greater sapphire splendor, drove upward through his unnatural lungs and heart and backbone in a blinding flash of cleansing fury. His spine arched as that same fury erupted back out of his chest, sprayed out between his shoulder blades, and exploded upward through his torso and squat, thick neck. He stood a moment longer, a headless, shredded shape belching the brilliant blue of Tomanāk’s rage and rejection...and then he folded forward over the body of his foe.

Chapter Forty-Two

<
Vaijon!
>

Walsharno’s silent, agonized cry echoed Bahzell Bahnakson’s pain. A golden strand, as much a part of him as his own pulse, snapped, its broken end whipping away even as he grasped vainly after it. It was gone, vanishing between one breath and the next, and he felt the anguish of its passing even through the focus of his Rage.

Yet there was no time to let themselves feel it fully, for even as Vaijon fell, taking one of the remaining focuses of the Dark with him, a screaming battering ram of ghouls smashed into the hard-pressed battleline in front of them. The line bowed, stretched, began to break...and beyond it, striding towards them, wrapped in its own sick green fire, came the last and greatest of their foes.

* * *

Anshakar snarled as Zûrâk was blotted away as thoroughly as Kimazh had been. The wizard had lied to them, he realized. Even as he’d whined and warned them that these were no ordinary champions Tomanāk, he’d never once suggested they were soul-killers. Perhaps he hadn’t realized it himself—not then, at least—but Anshakar knew it now. He’d never seen it before, but he recognized what had happened. It wasn’t the same as the Dark’s soul-killers, for Zûrâk and Kimazh had simply been obliterated, not consumed, but the difference mattered little in the end. In theory, this Bahzell and his courser companion could destroy even Anshakar the Great.

But
only
in theory, for he was more than close enough now for his senses to confirm the way in which destroying Kimazh had drained both Bahzell and the courser. They were recovering quickly—more quickly than he would have believed possible—but it would still be many minutes, probably as much as an hour, before their mortal frames could once again channel and generate enough power to destroy one such as him. Hurt him, yes; they could do that. But actually slaying him would be beyond them, and so he whipped his slaves on before him, eager to grind his way through the defending infantry and reach his prey.

* * *

Bahzell’s brown eyes were bleak as yet another monstrous shape loomed up amid the gradually thinning ranks of the ghouls. He knew as well as Anshakar how killing the first devil had drained both him and Walsharno, and this one was far stronger than the first had been. Its power reached out towards them like a strangler’s hands, battering at them, trying to crush them with the fear of its coming. That same fear reached out to the defenders in front of him, causing even the hardiest hradani to quail, despite the buttress of the Rage. They stood their ground, their Sothōii allies with them, but the ferocity of their defense faltered, and in that moment, Anshakar launched his own final reserve at their throats.

“They’re coming through,” Brandark said at Bahzell’s side.

“Yes, they are,” Sir Kelthys agreed.

The human wind rider tossed his bow aside, something no Sothōii would have done except under the direst of circumstances, to swing his shield into position. Walasfro stamped one forehoof under him, and Kelthys drew his sword.

Bahzell glanced at his two companions, then back at the oncoming Anshakar as one of the huge javelins from the ballistae-armed barges struck him squarely. It drove two feet into the naked devil’s side, but he only plucked it out, licked his own blood from it, and then hurled it back at the barge from whence it had come. It struck the arbalest which had launched it, shattered its windlass, drove through the vessel’s deck and completely back out the other side of its hull below the water line.

“Stay behind us, the pair of you,” he said harshly. “Just you be keeping them off our backs.”

“Are you sure about that?” Brandark asked quietly, without a trace of his usual banter, and Bahzell smiled grimly.

“You’d best be taking my word for it this once, little man,” he said. “You’d not like what would happen if you were to be finding yourself betwixt us and that bastard yonder.”

The Bloody Sword took one look at his friend’s expression and nodded soberly. Then he looked at Kelthys, and the Sothōii nodded back.

“We’ll keep them off your back,” Brandark promised.

* * *

The frenzied assault smashed into the front-line infantry just as the terror radiating from Anshakar struck the defenders. The weight of that double blow was too great, and the decimated battalion holding the front crumbled. It didn’t break, didn’t run, even then; it simply disintegrated into dead bodies and isolated knots of still desperately fighting men as the ghouls drove them back by sheer force of numbers and suicidal ferocity. Fresh bugle calls sounded, sending two thirds of Trianal’s remaining reserve thundering towards the breakthrough under Sir Yarran Battlecrow. But once again, it would take precious minutes for the reinforcements to arrive, and those were minutes Bahzell Bahnakson and Walsharno didn’t have.

“
Stand clear!
”

The sheer, ear-stunning volume of Bahzell’s thundered command roared out through the bedlam of battle. Walsharno’s fierce whistle came with it, and the mounted Sothōii armsmen between them and Anshakar obeyed that double command without even thinking about it. It wouldn’t have mattered if
they’d
wanted to hesitate, not with Walsharno’s will fastened upon their warhorses with all the ruthless authority of a courser herd stallion and a champion of Tomanāk. Those horses scattered to either side, and Walsharno, son of Mathygan and Yorthandro, chosen companion of Bahzell Bahnakson of the Horse Stealer hradani, came through that gap like thunder.