Doom's Break (38 page)

Then the first light of dawn broke through the clouds in the east, and with it came new terror. Thru caught sight of a strange chilly gleam on the ground and turned to look eastward.

Where the warm, pink blush of dawn should have been, there was instead a silver-etched blackness that grew in intensity with each moment. Thru, and indeed the multitude of men and mots standing on the plain of Shelly Fields, gazed at this phenomenon with awe.

With the cold, dark light came a chill wind. Thru felt it stir the fur on his face, and he shivered. He turned, with an effort, and continued across to Toshak's position. The strange light from the east limned every blade of grass and every hummock with silver while casting the rest into shades of dark grey to black.

The whistling from the far side of the river had become a maniacal shrieking, and the drumming had increased in power until it seemed to throb inside Thru's head.

His legs felt weak. His hands were chilled as if it were midwinter. Then the first edge of the sun rose above the eastern hills.

Instantly, all who looked in that direction were blinded.

A great moan of mingled fear and horror rose from the ranks of mots and men on Shelly Fields. Accompanying it came a new sound, bugles and whistles in the ranks of the enemy. They had been warned not to look eastward and to screen the deadly light of dawn with their shields.

With a roar of "He Who Eats!" the army of the Old One thrust forward in attack. Thru had missed the deadly flash of dawn's light, but he saw its effect on those around him. The mots in Toshak's post were crying out and falling to the ground, unable to see.

Thru hurried forward and found Toshak shaking his head, grimacing, and rubbing his eyes.

"General. Thru Gillo reporting."

"Gillo? Can you see?"

"Yes, sir."

"I can only see with my left eye, and that in part only. It's as if my vision were blanked out with black ink."

Thru had put two and two together. A handful of others were still sighted, like him. "It is deadly to look at the sun—it blinds."

"Though I was not looking directly at it, the eye closest to the sun is most affected."

"That confirms it," said Thru.

"And now?"

"He attacks."

Below, on Shelly Fields, the enemy host crunched into the front ranks of Toshak's and Aeswiren's armies. Blinded, many mots and men were hardly able to either defend themselves or flee. They were cut down by the hundreds.

From the forest on the right flank came another dreadful sound, the hissing roar of five thousand pyluk bulls. Out from the trees they came, a great mass of charging lizards, their spears waving above them.

The front of the allied position collapsed. The blind staggered about until they were cut down. On the right flank, where Thru had spoken with the confident regimental commanders only half an hour before, there were even fewer with sight remaining. The pyluk fell on the flank regiments and broke them up in a matter of minutes.

Here and there on the main front there were nodes of resistance. After a few minutes, the worst effects of the blinding light passed, and many mots and some men regained their sight. The fighting turned from an all-out rout to a bitterly fought retreat across Shelly Fields. The Grys Norvory and a company of survivors from the Third, Ninth, and Thirteenth Regiments fought a desperate battle to slow the pyluk onrush.

All of this was plainly visible to Thru, standing on the hillside above, who observed the Grys's personal pennon still flying there.

"Are there any regiments asleep?" he asked Toshak.

"Yes, I sent the Tenth and the Fourteenth to sleep just an hour ago."

"Where are they?"

"Back on the crest of the hill."

"Then I will bring them here. We must stop them on this hill." Thru set off at a run.

Toshak, able to see with one eye, had found two messengers who retained their sight. In moments, they were on their way to Norvory and whoever they found in command of the main force, now trying to hold a line about a hundred yards from the base of the hill.

Thru quickly came to Aeswiren's command post. He found much the same situation as at Toshak's. Aeswiren was less affected, however, as were his personal staff.

"I knew it was some evil weirding from the first gleam, and I told everyone not to look."

"The right flank is almost lost. The pyluk came on the heels of this evil light."

"Those cavalry will be up to something soon as well. This is a well-planned assault."

"Two regiments were sent to sleep in the hour before dawn. I'm going to fetch them. We hope to hold a line on the hill."

"We will join you there. It will take all our remaining strength to hold such a position. And I expect those horsemen will make it that much more difficult, too."

Thru went on. He found the Tenth and Fourteenth awake and forming up in a marching column. Colonels Gevery and Besh were aware of the peril and busy kicking life into their regiments.

The throng of wounded and stretcher bearers had pulled off the track to let the regiments through. As Thru charged by, he called out to the bearers to turn back and follow the regiments.

"Every mot, every man will be needed. March to the sound of the fighting. Pick up weapons where you can find them."

When he returned to the hill, he found the battle had progressed to the very lip of tragedy.

Mots and men mixed together were fighting in a rough line about halfway up the slope of the hill. The hillock that Toshak had used as a command post was now in the midst of the fighting. To the left side were the main masses of Aeswiren's men, still fairly well organized in regiments and holding quite well. On the right, besieged by a vast flood of pyluk, were the mots, who had suffered badly from the blinding light and then the flank assault. Regimental organization had broken down almost completely. They formed an irregular line, in places only a single soldier deep.

In their favor was the equal degree of disorganization among the pyluk. The struggle between mots armed with sword, shield, spear, and pike and pyluk armed with club and wooden spear was usually settled in favor of the mots.

Thus the line held. Thru could see Norvory's pennon still flying on the right end of the line. But the situation was dire.

The Tenth and then the Fourteenth Regiments were coming, and, as they crested the hill and saw the situation, they broke into a run and closed up quickly on the thin line of defenders.

Behind them came another group, perhaps three hundred stretcher bearers and even some of the walking wounded, who understood that if the fight was lost here, then they would die come what may. Their enemy intended nothing but annihilation for them. So they had dragged themselves back to face death with weapon in hand.

Thru ran over to greet this group. "Any officers among you?"

A few mots emerged. Thru bade them take charge.

"Form into a company, three lines. Take what weapons you can find. We're going to use you as a reserve force."

Thru left them and hunted for Toshak. He found the general's standard flying from a position under a ledge, about a hundred yards back from the front line.

"Look upslope, Colonel," said Toshak as Thru arrived.

Thru saw three of Toshak's catapult engines being wound.

"We will show the enemy that he's not the only one with deadly surprises up his sleeve, eh?"

At a shouted command, the catapults were loosed. They flung their spears, each seven feet long and tipped with a heavy stone point, over the heads of the mot line and into the approaching masses of the enemy.

Thru applauded, but the scale of this assault was so small compared to that of the enemy's sorcery that it merely accentuated the gap between their powers. Still, it worked as Toshak expected, sowing seeds of concern among the Old One's men down below them.

The fighting stabilized. Reinforced and with the slope of the ground favoring them, the battered remnants of Toshak's army were no longer retreating. They held their ground and fought the attack to a standstill.

The pyluk had by then withdrawn. They were of little use in regular fighting, and against the mots they had taken terrible casualties once the impetus of their charge had failed.

When the enemy made one final effort, a concerted attack right along the front, there came a threat of a breach in the gap between Toshak's line and Aeswiren's. A dip in the ground there became a void in the line, and the enemy pressed through and began to peel back Toshak's left flank.

The reserve company was hurled into this fight. It managed to stem the enemy tide and then turn it with the fury of their counterattack.

At the same time, Aeswiren threw in his own reserve force, a motley crew from the Blitz Regiment mixed up with the Third Regiment. They drove a wedge into the enemy's line and brought his renewed attack to a halt. After a quarter hour of fierce combat, the enemy was called away from the line and stood back fifty yards. Mot archers flooded the lines with arrows. This barrage proved too expensive for the enemy again, and they withdrew another hundred yards, putting them at the extreme edge of the archers' range.

Now the battle wound down from exhaustion on both sides.

Thru looked to the sky. The sun's light was slowly changing from the deathly dark energy of the first hour and resuming its warmth. The battle was less than two hours old, and their situation had changed drastically for the worse. Thru estimated that Toshak's army had lost a third, even half its strength. Aeswiren's men were badly hurt, too, reduced by perhaps a quarter in the catastrophe.

The enemy also had taken casualties, particularly among the pyluk horde, which had lingered too long in combat with the mots. But, all in all, the enemy's losses were not half those of Toshak's alone. Barely enough men and mots remained to hold a defensive line against the enemy.

Some good news came from the rear. The enemy's horsemen had emerged from the forest and made an attack on the hospital. The company of guards there had been unscathed by the dawn light, and they had engaged the horsemen, forming a line with grounded pikes. The horsemen had tried to panic the defenders, then fired off arrows from a distance, and finally wheeled away and made another attempt to get in among the tents. After being frustrated five times, the cavalry pulled back and retreated into the forest once more, leaving half a dozen dead behind.

Thru would have liked to go back and reassure himself that Nuza was safe, but he was kept busy working with the Grys Norvory on reshaping the right wing of the army, digging in and setting out a screen of pickets.

Toshak and his staff worked like demons to pull the army into some sort of shape and improve positions with a trench and sharpened stakes.

The catapults were firing as fast as they could be wound up and released, and their long spears were capable of killing well beyond the range of the archers. The enemy was unhappy with standing there being shot at with the huge spears. Their lines wavered and had to be ordered to stand still. Toshak increased the pressure when another set of catapults were finally brought into operation. They had been trapped on the crowded trail from Dronned during the fighting. Now there were six of the things in action, and that meant a near constant rain of long spears into the enemy ranks.

Eventually, the enemy gave in and shifted even farther back, although the catapults were still taking a toll. By late morning, they were seen digging their own trenches and erecting protective fasciae.

The battle had ended, if only for the time being. Both sides were worn out from the exertions of the dawn hours. Slowly, as the day wore on, those who had been blinded began to recover their sight. At first they saw in fits and starts, and many were cursed with dark flecks and spots in their vision, but hour by hour things improved. By early afternoon, only those who had stared full into the rising sun at that deadly moment were still affected. Alas, many of these victims had been slain in the first fury of the battle.

By then Thru Gillo had received some of that breakfast that Meu had promised long before. Afterward he promptly fell asleep, wrapped in his cloak, behind Toshak's command post.

Sergeant Rukkh rested the butt of his spear on the ground and let his shield lean against his thigh. Like the rest of the men in the line, he was bone-tired but too wound up to sleep. The day had been a strange one.

"All this hocus-pocus gives my belly the gripes," said Ladwaller, a big man from Grezack.

"Gives us all the gripes," said Rukkh.

Worse than that, of course, because it had made about twenty men in the company stone-blind that morning when they had bad luck to be awake and looking eastward when the sun first broke over the hills. In that, the company had done better than most: in some outfits on the far right of the line, as many as half the men had been blinded.

"Goddamned lizard-men, bad dreams, and this blindness. It's a bad situation," continued Ladwaller.

"Shut up, Ladwaller," said Belzec. "We're all in this together."

"Don't I know it," said the big man.

Rukkh kept quiet. Letting the men grumble was part of being a good sergeant. Especially a sergeant who was now running the whole company since the officers had been killed. The lads were a solid lot. They'd been in the Blitz Regiment since the beginning of the war and represented the best they had left in this army.

"Least the blind are getting their sight back now."

"No thanks to He Who Eats for that!" said another soldier. Rukkh grunted to himself. The religion of the Great God had really taken a nosedive in the Blitz Regiment over the past year. Once they'd been given the chance to take out the Red Tops, all interest in Orbazt Subuus had dried up. Rukkh made a mental note to inform the Emperor about that the next time he was summoned to report on the mood in the army.

"Sergeant," called Chimikin, a youngster drafted into the Blitzers from the Ninth Regiment, "something's happening over there."

Rukkh sighed and shifted position to look down into the valley. His company was holding a section of the army's line, set halfway up the hillside. Their former position, all nicely dug in, could be seen clearly about three hundred yards downslope. They'd worked hard the previous day to fortify it, but all their efforts came to naught when the monkeys had been overwhelmed in the dawn attack and the whole army had been forced to shift back up the hill.