Wildling (30 page)

Five hundred paces came incredibly quickly, even in this thin air and with the grass trying to ensnare their feet. Fear was overcoming the weaknesses of their flesh. By the time they had covered the distance Dorn was breathing heavily and his heart was beating in his chest far too quickly. When he turned to face the snap dragon it was to see it still coming for them. It was on fire, the flames leaping twenty to thirty feet into the air across the entire length of its body. But it was coming.

“
Stay shifted! No more arrows!” Garren gave the order before Dorn could even think about shifting back to restart the attack. “From now on we simply run and wait for the fire to burn it to ash.” It wasn't what Dorn had expected him to order, but he suddenly realised it was a good plan. Actually it was the only one they had. But Garren was right. Their arrows were doing it no damage. The only hope was that the fire eventually would.

So they stayed where they were, watching the burning snap dragon as it marched toward them, and waited for the order. And when it came just as the dragon moved to within about a hundred paces of them they ran again.

They kept doing that for what seemed like hours. Standing, watching and then running away while the snap dragon gave chase. And little by little the creature seemed to slow down. The flames leapt higher into the cold air. The clouds of black smoke being given off became thicker and darker as the sap burnt. The fire was slowly eating into its wooden heart. Not that it had a heart. Dorn wasn't even sure it felt pain. As it burnt it never cried out. It rustled a little bit, but that could mean anything. And of course it had no face for him to see a grimace on. It didn't even have the ability to roll on the ground and try to put the flames out. The only thing it could do was chase them.

And then finally it couldn't even do that.

At some point, and by then Dorn had no idea at all how long the battle had lasted, it stopped moving. Or at least it stopped moving towards them. Its legs moved, but not in any coordinated fashion. Instead they moved in different directions seemingly at random, and the snap dragon started turning around on the spot. Something important in it he guessed, had caught fire. If it had a brain maybe that was what was burning. Everything else was alight by then and there was a cloud of smoke heading for the sky as large as anything he had ever seen. The snap dragon was a walking forest fire.

Still, at least that gave them the chance to stop running, and they were all bone weary by then. Dorn was exhausted. After hours of running the sweat was pouring off him as it never had before. His breathing was ragged. And though he tried to control it most of his muscles were quivering. He needed to fall down and rest. It was lucky they were shifters, though that was of course why they had chosen to come on this mission. Other people would never have been able to get away from it. Not on foot.

Twenty minutes or so later the snap dragon stopped making even those random movements and Dorn knew it was dead. Or at least that it was no longer a threat to them.

It came as a relief to him. Probably to them all. But at the same time Dorn was thinking that the battle had been a disaster narrowly averted. If he hadn't spotted it they would have all been killed in the middle of the night. And even having won through it had come at a cost. He had no idea at all how many arrows he'd fired at that thing, but he knew it was a lot. And he had only so many with him. As did everyone else. They'd drained their supplies on a single enemy. And there were no enchanters with them. So whatever arrows they could fletch up here would have to be just normal arrows with no magic on them.

But by far the worst thought on his mind was to wonder what else these lands would throw at them. Trolls, rocs, goblins, blood flies and now snap dragons. And they were only two days into the wastes themselves after leaving the ranges. What else was waiting for them?

As he and the others finally found the strength to trudge slowly back to the rise and their proposed camp for the night, he couldn't help but think that they were in trouble. His only hope was that at the other end the Dicans were experiencing exactly the same sort of trouble.

Or worse.

Chapter Forty Three.

A dozen days later the shifters came across the most wonderful sight they'd ever seen. The thirteen peaks that they knew to be the ring that surrounded the mountain lake. They had reached their destination, and they'd done it with no more deaths. That was a miracle and a half in his view. Eldas had favoured them as they'd run.

In fact their numbers had grown. Another fifty or so shifters had joined them, and now he guessed they numbered at least a hundred and twenty. A small army perhaps but at least an army.

Little by little they had overcome the dangers of the wastes. Trolls were being killed by rock glass tipped arrows. Those who could fly were destroying the rocs easily enough. They knew enough to avoid the areas where the blood flies swarmed. And the score of snap dragons they'd encountered had all succumbed to fire one by one. Best of all they had finally started to get used to the air. They were stronger. Not as strong as they normally were but still better than they had been.

But ahead of them lay the toughest part. The battle if there was to be one. And against an enemy that they had no knowledge of. How many soldiers had the Dicans brought with them? How many war machines? How close were they to the lake? None of them had any idea. But as they made camp for the afternoon and their flyers took to the air to search them out they hoped to have some in a few hours.

There was also the other part of their mission. To find the holes in the dry lake bed and fill them if they could. Or to mark them for those who were following. If the lake was to refill, its walls and bed had to be solid.

Dorn looked around and immediately spotted a hole in front of him. It was in the shale hill between the two closest mountains. There was a small fountain of water shooting forth. Those who were following them would have to plug it.

Unexpectedly though the sight brought him some cheer. It meant that the lake was refilling. If it wasn't there could be no water escaping. And that in turn meant that there was hope. That was, if they could block the holes. And if they could stop the Dicans from tearing larger ones in the natural dams.

They set up camp at the foothills of the nearest slope, deciding to rest for what remained of the afternoon and make the final ascent in the morning. Everyone was tired and even if the Dicans were there none of them were fit enough to fight. But in any case they were still a long way apart. The lake was twelve leagues across when it was full, and they were at the northern edge with another league to climb in the morning to reach the edge. The Dicans would be coming from the south. There was a little time, he hoped.

Besides, the real question was how far behind them the Lady’s army was. Had they even made the central wastes? And how large were they? The Lady was still bothering him in his dreams each night, but thankfully not with lessons. Instead she brought him news and listened to his progress reports. So she knew what monsters they'd faced and where, and she had told him when his family had arrived in Balen Rale. But she told him little about the army's progress.

The others when he'd asked also admitted that they were being visited in their dreams, though not all of them by Lady Sylfene. It seemed that dream walking across hundreds of leagues was a talent of all of the eleven and they were all interested in their journey. But they were also all careful with what they said. Perhaps because the high priests of Balen Rale feared that they would be terribly outnumbered, defeated and some perhaps even captured. And if so that they might then be forced to reveal what they knew to the Dican priests. Dorn hadn't mentioned his suspicion to the others. But he suspected that many of them shared it anyway. He could see it in the slightly haunted looks in their eyes. It wasn't exhaustion. Or rather, not just exhaustion. It was fear. They didn't know what they might face.

“Full rations tonight!”

Garren gave the order and it brought a smile to a few faces. They'd been conserving food as they travelled, not knowing how long they might be up here. But now that they had arrived they had to be ready. And shifters needed food to heal and to fight.

Fairly soon they had the fires burning for the night. Big fires that gave out a lot of heat and brightened the world around them. Fires that would also act as beacons for those of their company that flew. After that it was just a matter of laying out his blanket for the night and collapsing on to his pack as he waited for dinner. And for the fliers to return.

Their army would have seemed a strange sight he thought. An army of beasts camped out around a dozen huge fires. Beasts of all types; big cats, bears, wolves, hawks, and just for variety a few humans. Some of those humans dressed, some naked. And yet sitting there, leaning against his pack Dorn knew them for who they were. All of them. In both their beast shapes and as humans he recognised them. In fact, after weeks on the run he could see the beast in the face of the wildling and the wildling in the face of the beast.

He wasn't quite sure how that worked exactly. Maybe it was simply that they'd been together for so long that they were forming a pack. But still, when he looked at any of his companions he knew them. Garren for example was a wolf. He was a wolf when he walked as a man and a man when he walked as a wolf. Somehow when he looked at their leader he looked beyond the flesh he wore. He saw the totality of him. And if they won through whatever lay ahead and the lake refilled and the gods once more returned to the world, he had to wonder what more he might see.

“
Fliers!” Someone gave the call and they all looked up to see their companions returning. The sight of them soaring should have brought them cheer, but instead it made them nervous. Dorn especially when he realised they had been gone less than an hour and had returned so quickly. That surely meant that they'd found something. Something bad and something near. And he'd been secretly hoping that they wouldn't. That he was wrong.

Still, there was nothing to do except wait as they soared through the air toward them and finally alighted on the ground. And then as they shifted.

It was bad. Dorn knew that the moment he saw the expressions on the faces of Nelalas and Brin when they shifted back into their human form, and his heart sank. What they were going to fight he didn't know, but it didn't look good. Still, he like the others hurried to find out.

“
Two hundred thousand men at least.” Brin didn't wait for them to ask. He just gave them the bad news straight away. Everyone’s spirits fell instantly. Two hundred thousand wasn't a number – it was a nightmare. And there was more. “Ten thousand war machines. And every soldier carries either a shovel or a pick as well as his weapons.”

Two hundred thousand soldiers? How could that be? How could they have gathered such an army together? Especially when from everything he knew the accursed church was struggling just to maintain its grip on the southern realms? That had to be every soldier in all of Lampton Heights and the Kingdom of Yed, and every guard and probably everyone else of fighting age they could conscript as well.

And ten thousand war machines? He hadn't known there were that many in the world. In fact he was sure there hadn't been. The Dicans had obviously been building.

But the worst were the shovels and picks. He knew that. The war machines were terrible weapons. They could knock down walls and level cities. But two hundred thousand men with picks and shovels could level mountains. Which was exactly what they'd come to do.

“They're on the second terrace below this one. But in a day or two they'll march up to this terrace and from there it'll be a straight seven or eight league march to the mountains. We have three days at best.”

Three days! It wasn't enough time. Dorn knew that. But he also knew that it was probably more than they'd had any real hope of getting. The Dicans had started marching weeks before they'd even set off. Only their speed had let them gain that much of a lead.

So now they had to slow them. They had to delay them at least two weeks until their own army could arrive. But even when they did, would even they be strong enough to stand against two hundred thousand soldiers? Dorn had no idea. He didn't know how many soldiers the eleven had been able to gather, but his thought was that it would at best be a few thousand. A few thousand wildlings against two hundred thousand. And that when by the time the rest arrived the Dicans would already be in place, their camps set up, their lines strengthened.

Unless they could stop them first. A mere hundred and twenty shifters.

“And we've also found the fault where the bank was broken. A steep narrow gorge running through the western bank. But it looks like there was a slip recently and fresh rock has started filling it raising the lake level behind it.”

Which was exactly as Dorn had expected. That was good news. It meant that he was right, and that in turn meant that there was a way to fix things. But it was bad news as well since it meant that the enemy would know how to destroy the lake.

But the worst news was that first, before they could do anything else with the lake, they had to defeat an army so large that it defied belief.

As Dorn lay there recovering from the day’s travel, for the first time he knew a sense of despair. A feeling that despite everything they'd done, all that they'd achieved, it still wasn't enough. The Dicans were going to beat them. They'd burn him and his companions alive, and then they'd destroy the lake completely and consign the world to ruin. It just wasn't fair.

And as he whispered his prayers to the ancient gods he'd never really cared about, he knew that if there was any hope they would need their help. But he also knew that they were on their side. Eleven of them anyway. Maybe that would help.