Ascendant's Rite (The Moontide Quartet) (32 page)

‘Si. Pater Sol guide you too.’ Ramon winked. ‘And the Bullhead too – Hel, let’s invoke them all!’ He smirked crookedly and turned away, leaving Seth grinning foolishly.

Are my best friends truly a Keshi impersonator and a Silacian familioso?

He looked around him to find the men of his personal cohort watching with stiff faces and amused eyes. He clapped his hands and shouted, ‘Get your heads down, you lunkers! Here they come!’

*

Nothing moved in the cloudless powder-blue skies above the earthworks at the northern end of the perimeter. Ramon wondered whether three feet of dirt and rock stiffened with wards and Earth-gnosis was going to be enough, then his eyes went to the Keshi archers forming up beyond the ramparts, just two hundred yards away – in easy range. The Lost Legions had a few Estellan archers – and everyone knew they were the best – but they didn’t deploy them en masse, for fear they would be swamped. Instead they were dotted here and there with orders to snipe at the enemy and make every arrow count.

By now, every man was in place and Ramon took up his own position among Pilus Lukaz’s cohort, wedged between the two serjants, Vidran and Manius, whose solidity always steadied him. The cohort were standing, watching the enemy, waiting for the signal to take cover. The air reeked as eleven thousand men sweated and farted and sucked down air. It was the hottest part of the day, no doubt chosen by the Keshi especially to weaken their cold-climate enemies. Behind them the baggage train had gone silent. The women and children were cowering beneath the wagons, knowing they would be shown no mercy if the men protecting them fell. Severine was with them, still too weak to fight, or so she said.
Too scared
was Lanna Jureigh’s sneering assessment. Ramon sent up a prayer for her anyway, and little Julietta.

He distracted himself by wondering where the enemy magi were. There were only five skiffs in the skies above, and none of the flying Dokken. Was Baltus right? Were the rest up to something sneaky?

What if they’ve got Water-magi in the river?

He peered at the shimmering strip of water flooding past. ‘Tell the men on the left to watch the river,’ he told Lukaz.

‘You reckon they’ll come in from there, boss?’ Vidran chuckled. ‘They do that, they’ll drown in shit.’

Manius snickered. ‘We all left a big dump in there ’specially, Magister. Raised the river level three feet.’

Ramon laughed, slapped Manius on the shoulder and returned his attention to the enemy. The cohort would be keeping their heads down, but someone needed to watch in case the Keshi attempted a rush under the cover of the arrows. That was his job.

‘Be ready!’ he called. Keshi archers had a rhythm, a routine to planting their feet, nocking and drawing their bows. ‘They’ll fire in twenty seconds!’

All down the line the more nervous rankers hunkered down immediately, while the rest altered their stance, ready to drop into cover, but unwilling to miss seeing the final few seconds before that moment. Through the haze they all saw Keshi officers walk to the front of the serried ranks of archers then, like a breaking wave, the men bent, straightened, drew their bows and pointed them skywards.

They all heard the thunderous commands – ‘
BIR! ICHI! USH!
’ – and then, ‘
SUR!
’

Thousands of bows
thrummmmed
, and discharged their arrows into the air, rank after rank of them. Ramon gulped down air, swallowed bile and prepared to drop.

‘DOWN! DOWN!’ the cohort commanders screamed, taking cover themselves as the air filled with shafts, flooding across the sky in a dark wave. Ramon was awestruck at the sheer volume of wood and steel in the air, reducing the sun to a blurred after-image. The day darkened momentarily as he dropped behind the earthworks along with the rest, pressing against the forward wall of the ditch. Everyone held their shields over their heads as they tried to melt into the earth, their defiant cries merging with the hiss of falling missiles.

Then the arrows came.

They fell as one, lancing into the earth, each impact blending into one massive
crack
as they struck the earthworks. Many dropped behind their position, slamming into the earth and sticking there, a forest that grew and thickened as the seconds crawled past.

‘Fuckers know how to shoot!’ Vidran shouted in his ear. ‘Right on target, first volley!’ Even he looked a little tense. All around them were shafts impaling the earth or breaking on stone and pinging in every direction.

Ramon forced a grin. ‘Nice bit of shade though, si?’

Vidran snorted, then an arrow glanced off his shield and slashed past Ramon’s face. They both flinched.

The volleys blurred into one until not a moment didn’t contain arrows slicing through their world. Finally Ramon plucked up his courage, strengthened his gnostic shields and put his eye to the viewing slot he’d left in the wall. The Keshi archers were still at it: one rank firing while the next was reloading in a magnificently precise motion: aim and loose; bend and nock; aim and lose, rhythmic and practised, drilled to perfection.

Through the hiss and crack came other sounds: a wailing shriek as a lucky shaft struck flesh; the cry of someone teetering at the edge of panic; the stentorian bellow of an officer offering reassurance. Women beneath the wagons called fearfully to their men, separated from them by a curtain of death. A howl of terror caught his ears and off to his right a panicked ranker broke cover and ran for the wagons. The first arrow took him in the back, the second in the thigh as he fell, and inside a minute four more had pierced him. Another ten paces and he might have broken through, but the air was so thick with these deadly shafts that making that dash was inconceivable. Gradually the man’s body became a hedgehog, then a scrap of debris.

For unending minutes, each one lasting longer than the last, the volleys went on, and had Ramon not been watching, he’d never have spotted the enemy movements – but he’d expected something like this. More men were trotting through the lines of Keshi archers: ragged Lakh spearmen with no armour at all, wearing only cotton tunics and brightly coloured turbans. They were pouring to the front while the archers fired over their heads.

‘Spearmen! Two hundred yards!’ Ramon called, then broadcast to the other magi,

Gerdhart sent from the centre, confirming Ramon’s suspicion: it was happening all along the front, a massed assault to try and break them quickly. The rankers grasped their javelins and snarled encouragement at each other.

‘Stay down ’til the last!’ Ramon shouted to his cohort. ‘They’ll try and go right over us while we’re hiding.’ He peered through his viewing hole. ‘One hundred yards . . . Seventy . . . Fifty! They’re running! They’re at the base!’

The arrows never stopped and the Lakh spearmen didn’t flinch as they came storming up the small slope, screaming their battle-cries. Perhaps they’d been told the barrage would cease when they reached the enemy, but it didn’t. Dozens and dozens went down, shot in the back by their own archers.

Then Ramon shouted: ‘
UP! NOW!!!
’ and moving as one, the men of his cohort and the rest of his line leaped up and hurled their javelins over the lip of their earthworks into the faces of the Lakh attackers. Ramon fired mage-bolts as fast as he dared and on either side of him the Lakh went down in swathes, clutching the javelin shafts that spitted their chests, bellies and thighs. And still the Keshi arrows rained down, punching through their backs and erupting from their chests. The charge disintegrated and those behind wavered until Keshi officers with whips roared them on again.

The rain of arrows was starting to take a toll on the Rondians as well. One of Lukaz’s flankmen, Neubeau, sprawled on his back with an arrow through his right eye. To his left, Ilwyn was clutching a broken shaft in his left shoulder, and Gannoval, the stolid Hollenian, was sitting in the sand contemplating the thick Lakh spear that went in his stomach and came out his back, before toppling sideways.

The Lakh gathered at the foot of the mound, then flooded forward again, ignoring the incessant arrows to leap at the barricades. Thrown spears hammered into Rondian shields, and then the attackers were on them, trying to pull the shields aside so others could thrust spears through the gaps, while the rankers met them with straight-arm sword-thrusts. Ramon’s sight was filled with the wide-open eyes and mouths of the Lakh trying to reach him, as he shielded blows and blasted with mage-fire, or shoved with kinesis, dispersing a dozen men at once, until finally the charge was broken – and he suddenly realised that the arrows had stopped, though he couldn’t have said when. One Lakh tried to leap past Vidran, who took the man’s left leg off with a roundhouse slash, and the rest of the man hit the barrier and slid down it.

Lukaz darted in to stab a Lakh spearman in the throat as he bore Trefeld over backwards, then pushed the young ranker back into line. The Vereloni officer was calmness itself as he told Ramon, ‘We’re holding, sir. Go and check on the Nambies next door.’

Ramon ran to join the Nambies, a Rondian cohort from the Namborne district, and found them embroiled in hand-to-hand fighting along the earthworks. As he arrived a cluster of Lakh punched through, so he slammed mage-bolts into them until they wilted and were driven back. Then suddenly the attack was over and the Lakh pulled back, like an ebbing tide.

All along the line, the Estellan archers Seth had stationed at intervals broke cover to shoot at the retreating men. Someone whooped, and then there was a thunderous cacophony as every unit shouted in defiance and relief.

‘See to the hurt!’ he heard Lukaz shout. ‘See to the fallen! Then take cover!’

Good idea
, Ramon thought, dashing back to his place. He made it just before the cries came up from the enemy lines again: ‘
BIR! ICHI! USH!
SUR!
’

*

Sultan Salim Kabarakhi I of Kesh walked to the edge of the carpet that had been laid for him at the highest point in the centre of his lines so that his slippers wouldn’t get dusty as he surveyed the battle three hundred yards away. Around him his Hadishah magi kept watch, lest the Rondian magi try something. Behind him, in the huge royal pavilion, three of his impersonators were playing dice. His Godspeakers trailed behind him, denouncing the lack of faith among the Lakh and Gatioch conscripts they’d thrown at the enemy lines that afternoon and blaming that for their failure.

They didn’t lack faith . . . just armour, weapons and training.

‘Leave me,’ he interrupted curtly, then gestured Pashil, the Hadishah captain, forward. He was a half-blood mage, and Salim considered him his most reliably honest courtier. Right now he needed to hear some truths. ‘Your assessment, Pashil?’

‘It went as expected,’ Pashil replied flatly. ‘They are dug in, and well-drilled.’

‘What were our losses?

‘Final tallies are not complete, but I estimate five thousand dead or wounded.’

So many? Dear Ahm!
‘And the enemy?’

‘At best a few hundred.’

Salim winced. ‘Then what have we gained?’

‘Today? Nothing. Unless you count reducing pressure on our food stores.’ Pashil glared towards the Rondian lines. ‘The disappointment was our southern flank, where there is no natural defence, but they’ve stationed the Argundians there, and the Necromancer-woman.’

‘Jelaska Lyndrethuse,’ Salim said. ‘How are our men?’

‘The Lakh and Gatti are dispirited. They claim you give them the impossible tasks and protect your Keshi.’ Their eyes met; both knew the accusation to be true.

What ruler does not protect his own?

‘And my Keshi?’

‘Our morale remains high. The archers have plenty of arrows, the lancers are chaffing to ride out, and the young lords are clamouring for their chance.’ Pashil lifted an eyebrow. ‘Not that any of them want to go in first tomorrow.’

Salim half-smiled. ‘And what of tomorrow?’

‘The same, over and over. It is tiredness that will break the Rondians, exhaustion from constant alertness, constant combat, constantly being under fire. In the meantime, we have plenty of conscripts, and plenty of whips to drive them on.’

They shared a long minute of silence, watching the sun set and picturing the slaughter tomorrow would bring.

‘What can your magi do to help us?’ Salim asked finally.

‘Not so much, without exposing ourselves.’ His eyes were disapproving.

Yes, I know. I let Alyssa Dulayne butcher the Dokken, then leave with most of our magi.

‘We both know the why, Pashil. If what she learned is true, then the opportunity could not be passed up. I only wish I could have given her more men.’

In that one bloody night he’d had more than eighty Dokken warriors, women and children slain, then released the best of the Hadishah, twenty-seven of Pashil’s finest warrior-magi, to follow Alyssa on this almost unbelievable mission to claim the Scytale of Corineus. That left Pashil with only thirty mostly young Hadishah. The decision had crippled his own army and the required reorganisation had cost them two whole weeks: time that Seth Korion had used well in digging in. Thousands had died for that choice already, and thousands more would follow.

But surely we have enough men to win here?

‘Attrition will win the day,’ Pashil reassured him. ‘It is inevitable. Keep a few archers firing right through the night, so that the Rondians cannot rest. Keep them on edge and they will break sooner.’

‘A good suggestion. Let it be so.’

*

‘Attrition,’ Jelaska said, as Seth’s magi gathered to review the second day of battle. ‘That’s their strategy.’

Seth yawned, wondering how many of them had managed any sleep since the attack began; he certainly hadn’t. There had been five major assaults through the day, and sporadic arrow-fire all night. But the attacks today had been half-hearted, just ill-armed rabble who had broken quickly. ‘We’re already exhausted.’