Warrior (The Key to Magic) (34 page)

His gaze fixed on the southwest, Kyamhyn shouted, "More Shrikes!  Fifty or better!"

Mar made the bow of Number One pitch up so that he could combine the lifting and driving spells to propel the skyship upward at a terrific speed, climbing once more for the thin clouds.

A moment later, Kyamhyn warned, "They're on us!"

Black cylinders burst up through the cabin section deck almost directly underneath the second starboard polybolos.  The entire crew of the machine was killed instantly.  The shattered pieces ripped free and careened aft along the sharply sloping deck, dragging the armsmen's bodies and crashing into the next machine in line.  The wreckage lodged for a moment, then flipped free, knocking a crankman and a loader from their holds and sending them flailing and screaming out over the stern passed a rigid Eishtren and a horrified Aelwyrd. The quaestor had his bow drawn and aimed down at the deck in front of him, but was not shooting.

Far too late, Mar tried to produce a static-purple barrier below the main deck to protect as much of the skyship as he could from the black cylinders, only to be thwarted by an unexpected interference from the existing flux modulations of the skyship itself.

"The Shrikes must be under the keel!" Ulor shouted.

More cylinders stitched up through the empty main deck. Mar leveled off Number One and banked sharply to starboard.  Evidently tracking the enemy skyships, Eishtren swung his bow to port and began firing as fast as he could draw and loose.  Explosions washed over the skyship like continuous thunder.

Then, his aim again blocked by his own vessel, Eishtren stopped shooting and his bow swung back to point at the deck of the cabin section between the remaining polybolos. 

An instant later, the spot erupted in a huge blast as a Shrike burst entirely through the vessel, ejecting men, smashed timbers, shredded metal from the body of the Shrike, and polybolos upward.  Number One gave a great wrench as the fragments arced away, writhing along her broken keel. With a terrific racket, the remaining decking, ribs, and bolsters began to split and break.

Ulor cursed, but Kyamhyn and Dhem only stared in utter shock. Mar felt the flux of the lifting and driving spells dissipate as the individual planks and balks disintegrated, and worked to maintain the flux integrity of the forward end of the skyship.

Much of the cabin section, the lower deck beneath it, and the bottom hull had been carried away, including all the men of the polybolos crews and Legate Truhsg, but the far stern, the bulwark there and its two occupants remained.  

At least, it did for the moment.  It was clear to Mar that the ragged skeleton of the aft part of the skyship would quite soon break free.  Wild-eyed, Aelwyrd hung on to the stern post, but the unflappable Eishtren had resumed fire with his bow.  Four Shrikes closing to strafe the bow were blown apart.

Mar flew across the shattered skyship until he was close enough to infuse Eishtren and Aelwyrd's clothing and leather, and then lifted them away from the bulwark.  Hardly had their boots left the shaking scrap of deck than the overstrained keel snapped completely and two-thirds of Number One dropped away. 

His face clenched in a grimace, Mar returned to the bow and deposited the archer and his near panicked bearer on the quaking steerage deck.  Having put off everyone but the topside crew at the eastern head of the bridge before flying to attack, he had no need to search the lower deck for other survivors.

Landing his own boots on the steerage, he turned his attention to gaining speed with what was left of the skyship.

"Quaestor Eishtren, I'm going to swing around.  I want you to fire upon the Shrikes as they present themselves."

A disbelieving Ulor caught his arm.  "My lord king, Number One is destroyed!  You cannot sacrifice your life for nothing!  We must withdraw!"

Dhem, Kyamhyn, and Aelwyrd stared at Mar with expressions of shock, grim resolve, and confusion.  Quaestor Eishtren had already raised his bow to prepare to fire.

 "We didn't stop the column," Mar told Ulor.

"We can't stop the column, my lord king.  There are too many."

Suddenly overwhelmed with anger, Mar stole time and screamed a dozen curses at the nonexistent Gods.

After seething for several more subjective moments, he forced his head to clear, cast his spyglass lozenge, and considered the battlefield,

What was left of Number One was now a third of a league northeast of the Imperial Highway.  A quick count showed forty Shrikes still swarming above the area and a huge number -- he stopped counting at five hundred -- of the steel beetles spread across the fields of violated corn.  Already portions of the column were coalescing to reform.  At best, eighty had been taken out of action.

Three leagues to the east, Lhinstord still burned.  He had not had time to fly over the city, but there seemed little doubt but that the Phaelle'n had leveled large swathes of it.  A league to the west, the rear guard of the survivors of the I Corps straggled toward the Sand River bridge, which was yet another two leagues.

If they were not stopped, the steel beetles would run down the armsmen in minutes.

The enemy's clear objective was the sturdy, Imperial era stone bridge and that suggested that the magic of the machines would not permit them to cross the deep water of the river.

Lord Ghorn and the First Army were ten leagues to the east and could not possibly reach the river for at least a day and a half.  Mar would not be surprised if it took the army two or three days to gain the western bank.  Captain Mhiskva and his skyship-borne reinforcements might arrive a bit sooner, but they could not do so before the monks had overrun the rear guard and flooded across.

Coirneal Relvhm and the Skyship Corps would not even receive his orders for at least another day and might only appear after the battle was well and truly lost.

Even if a miracle occurred and some of the legionnaires or marines arrived in time, he could not see how men armed with swords, shields, and crossbows could stand before the Brotherhood's new magical machines. 

Now that he knew what the Phaelle'n had unleashed, he greatly regretted the order that he had given to Lord Ghorn to advance.  In all likelihood, he had done nothing more than make the First Army additional sheep for the slaughter.

Turning his attention to Number One, Mar saw that Ulor was right; the first skyship was done for.  He would be lucky to keep it flying without any of the magical vessels of the individual lengths of wood suffering a critical failure.  Much as it grated, the only sensible course of action was to abandon the wreck as soon as was they could.  The Brotherhood had indeed destroyed his greatest weapon.

Did he have anything left that could stop their sorcery?

The steel beetles had wooden frames; he had seen that well enough from those that had been ripped open by the sand spheres.  He could try to send individual conveyances flying away with his oldest and strongest spells, but he would have to be rather close to infuse the necessary modulations. The range of his ability to manipulate flux varied depending upon the spell, but was in all cases finite.  He could infuse wood with the lifting and driving sound-colors at a maximum distance of a few dozen paces, but at the extreme extent of his range the process took much greater concentration and much more time -- time that the monks would not cede him.

The other major modulations that he knew, those for air, water, and fire, had lesser ranges.  He had twice called down lightning, but he did not know exactly how he had done so and could not be sure that he could repeat that feat.

He could think of no way to use his spells to entirely block the Brotherhood's advance -- their mobility would allow them to flank him continually -- but thought that he might be able to improvise enough to slow them down, especially if he had Quaestor Eishtren and his bow at his back to discourage the Shrikes.

Letting the droning repetition of
The Knife Fighter's Dirge
fade from his thoughts, he returned time to its normal pace.

Matching Ulor's intense look, he told the marine, "My duty is to defend those that are sworn to me, not to preserve my own life."

Ulor rolled his lips into a tightlipped frown.  "Aye, my lord king, that's true."

"We may not be able to stop the monks," Mar told them all, "but we have to slow them down.  We're going to land in front of the beetles on the Imperial Highway and execute a fighting withdrawal.  Now, everyone hold on!"

He made the wreck climb abruptly in an erratic spiral to give the Shrikes a difficult target and accelerated to the west, speeding ahead of the still disorganized front of the dispersed column, and then plunged downward to land on the pavement of the highway a hundred paces in advance of the leading beetle.  The wreck was still sufficient to block half the roadway.  Floating the four men and the lad with him, he flew off the deck to the pavement

"Everyone head west as fast as you can," he ordered. 

While the five sprinted away, he spent a moment overloading the still solid planks and timbers of the wreck, did the same for several paving stones alongside it, and then flew after Ulor and the rest.  Catching up with them, he gathered them up with magic and accelerated away, spinning around to watch behind.   When he saw the first beetle begin to nose around the wreck, he immediately swept his charges into the shallow drainage ditch to the right of the roadbed.

"Take cover!" he shouted as he dove for the ground.  Ulor, Kyamhyn, and Dhem flattened themselves instantly, but Quaestor Eishtren had to drag a still shocked Aelwyrd down.

When the first beetle passed harmlessly over the primed paving stones, Mar realized that the floating conveyances did not apply enough pressure on the pavement to cause the overloaded stones to detonate.

"Quaestor Eishtren, shoot Number One!"

In one smooth motion, the legionnaire officer rose to a crouch, drew the string on his exquisite bow, and fired.

The fire ball was a hundred paces across and the noise was deafening.  Underneath Mar, the earth shook and rolled for nearly a full minute as rock, earth, flaming wood, and bits of metal rained down.  Deflecting as many of the larger pieces as he could from the six of them, he watched as the smoke and dusk cleared and found with considerable satisfaction that the blast had carved a deep crater all the way across the highway.

A good number of the steel beetles had been overturned and smashed, but the explosion had not deterred the monks in the following vehicles. These began to charge across the drainage ditches into the fields to either side.  Farther out to both the north and south, dressed ranks of the magical war machines were moving forward to bypass the highway altogether.

"Get moving," Mar ordered the others.  Without waiting to see them start moving, he flew back to get within a dozen paces of the nearest of the Phaelle'n war machines, a group of three surging through the corn on the south side of the highway.

The leading beetle slewed sideways and a chorus of buzzing shrieks accompanied a volley of flux lances that spat from ports along the nearer side. 

Instantly, he hummed to slow time and dropped beneath the path of the projectiles, easily overcoming a barely detectable resistance in the background ether.  Clinging to the pavement, he seized the opportunity to catch his breath and began to study both the lances and the steel beetles as each continued to move at a barely perceptible rate.

The flux modulations of the lances were considerably different from those of the ones that he had redirected before, but their essential pattern appeared to be very similar.  Rather than overloaded with flux as were his own sand spheres, these immaterial objects had been drained of magic, so that the natural flux of the air seemed to have been catalyzed by their passage.  Any solid object that they struck would surely suffer catastrophic damage.  Also, no two appeared to be exactly the same, with minor random variations in the individual sand-colors.  He guessed this property to be an intentional countermeasure designed to make them more difficult to deflect, and while he believed that he would be able to turn them aside, he would have to manipulate the sound-colors of each lance on an individual basis and would probably only be able to handle a limited number at the same time.

As he had already suspected, the steel beetles were mundane constructions of metal and wood with no ethereal flux residue to indicate that any sort of magic had been used in their fashioning.  Each did contain a small point of moderately powerful and intricate magic that must provide them with their motive ability.  For several subjective moments, he attacked the bundle in the nearest machine, but could not find a way to disrupt the magic.

That left only the wooden frame.  Using his ethereal sense, he identified a number of the main upright struts inside the beetle that had fired upon him and coated the wood with an adaptation of his sifting-purple spell.  He increased the intensity of the sifting-purple far beyond what was needed to cause ignition.

Before he let
The Knife Fighter's Dirge
die, he looked east to check on Ulor, Dhem, Kyamhyn, Aelwyrd, and Eishtren and found them frozen in running poses in the ditch about fifty paces farther east from where he had left them.

As soon as time resumed its normal pace, raging flames poured out of every port and opening in his target and then a subdued blast blew out the forward end.  Staying low, he flew after the others.

FIFTY-THREE

17th Year of the Phaelle’n Ascension, 348th Day of Glorious Work

Year One of the New Age of Magic

(Tenthday, Waning, 3rd Springmoon, 1645 After the Founding of the Empire)

Imperial Highway, west of Lhinstord

Two-thirds of a league from the river, Brother Zsii announced that a message was incoming from the Archdeacon.  Whorlyr ordered Encourager N'loe to pull off the cratered, wreckage-strewn pavement and park the algar under the overhanging branches of an isolated white oak.  The Apostate's attack of the previous day had demonstrated in a chilling fashion just how vulnerable algars were to aerial attack.  With high casualties, almost a hundred of the war machines had been destroyed or disabled in less than half an hour.