Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (35 page)

The elven commander had taken a nasty gut wound, and I couldn’t spare fifteen minutes to properly heal him right now. I stabilized him, and then combined the dryads and elves into a single team and put Corinna in charge.

“Take a break until Elin gets here,” I told her. “Then I want you backing up the eastern side of the garrison’s line. When the enemy breaks through you get out there and kick their teeth in, then hold things together until the human troops regroup. Don’t get drawn into attacking enemy positions, and don’t spend any longer in the fight than you need to. This is going to be a long night, so we need to pace ourselves.”

“I understand, my lord. We won’t fail you.”

Fortunately the force marching in from the Wizard’s Quarter had a lot more firepower than the one I was supporting. An hour later the western end of our line linked up with a squadron of golems, and then a couple of wizards I hadn’t met before made their way around to our command post and joined me in supporting the advance. After that I was no longer worried that the whole line was going to break up and collapse if I stopped fighting for more than five minutes.

Even so, the battle dragged on for hours. For every band of enemy troops we killed another one filtered in through the gaps in the city wall. Their resistance stiffened as we fought our way block by block across the city, and no matter how I wracked my brain I couldn’t think of a way to clear them out faster. Not without blowing a hole in the city and killing thousands of civilians, at any rate. My magic just wasn’t discriminating enough for an environment like this.

Sometime around midnight I ran into High Adept Steelbinder leading a squad of heavy war golems through the streets. He threw a storm of animated steel shards into a troop of ape men blocking his path, and then did a double take when he spotted me descending from the rooftops.

“Daniel!” He called. “I see the rumors that you’ve mastered flight are true. How bad are things on your end?”

He was sitting on the back of a golem, so I went into a hover nearby.

“Bad,” I said. “The garrison has lost at least two thousand men on this front, and they’ve stripped the Harbor District bare to keep the attack going. Cerise and I have been running back and forth all night trying to bolster the line.”

“That’s about what I expected,” he replied. “I’d advise you to keep an eye on your apprentice, though. I’ve lost two adepts to ambushes tonight, and one of those was a suicide attack. They’re pushing hard to thin our ranks.”

“Thanks for the warning. We haven’t seen anything like that on this front yet, but I’ve been wondering if they’d try it. Any new orders?”

“Just push on through, and retake the city wall. I don’t know where we’ll find the men to hold it by the time we’ve paid the butcher’s bill, but Brand doesn’t seem to care about that. It’s all more souls for Valhalla to him. I understand you’ve managed to heal Elin? What would it cost the Conclave to retain her services for a day or two?”

I scowled. “Your Wisdom, I’m not going to tell her she has to heal the people who voted to throw her out in the snow.”

“You’d prefer she go on living in a fortress made of cold iron?” He said mildly. “She seems to be blossoming beyond our walls, Daniel. I hear she’s become quite adept with her glamour.”

Huh. Alright, maybe I should remember I was talking to a wizard. Who was also a politician. There was no telling what he’d been setting up before I got involved in Elin’s life.

I sighed. “I’m not going to charge for healing when we’re fighting for survival. But I can’t spare her for that long. As soon as the situation here looks stable I’ll detail a skimmer to transport the wounded, and you can send them to the island for healing.”

“That will do,” he conceded. “I’ll call in a reserve company immediately to bolster the line, if you can send that transport quickly. I have several critically wounded golem commanders, and an adept who barely survived a mage killing arrow. We can’t afford to lose skilled resources like that.”

So he had extra troops he hadn’t committed to the battle earlier? I had mixed feelings about that. A couple more squads of golems would have saved the garrison hundreds of casualties, but I didn’t know how secure the Iron Citadel was. I couldn’t be too critical when I was keeping most of my own troops in reserve as well.

I made another quick sweep down the line, taking out a group of archers on a rooftop and a cluster of cavalry getting ready for a charge as I went. Cerise was merrily hacking a group of enemy infantry to bits with that dwarven battle axe she’d picked up, but I stopped to warn her about the enemy mage hunters.

“Tell that to the Conclave guys,” she said. “If they see me they’ll just think somebody summoned a demon. We might want to do something about Elin, though.”

“Yeah, I’m sending her back to the island. Stay safe, love.”

Back at the healing station I found a cluster of dark elves and dryads on guard, and Elin crouched over Corinna’s prone form. The voluptuous nymph was covered in blood, and a one-armed dryad was kneeling in the snow next to her. I took in the bloody tourniquet around the stump of the dryad’s arm, the absence of Corinna’s wooden armor, and the huge wound in her side that Elin was struggling to close.

“Hey, m’lord,” Corinna gasped out. “Kept…. y’re elves alive. Did I… do good?”

“Don’t talk, mistress!” The dryad urged. There were frozen tears on her cheeks, but she didn’t seem to care at all about her own injuries.

I knelt next to Corinna, and put my hand on her shoulder. Damn, that was bad. An axe had cut through two ribs and into her lung, and it had been a good ten or fifteen minutes before they got her to Elin. A normal person would have been dead long since.

“You were supposed to keep yourself alive, too,” I told her.

“I’ll be… back,” she replied.

“But mistress, what if spring never comes?” The dryad sobbed. “You might never be reborn.”

“She isn’t going to die,” Elin said tightly. “Daniel, can you assist?”

Elin was pouring healing magic into Corinna’s body, causing it to regenerate at an accelerated rate. With injuries this severe that wasn’t enough to fix everything that was going wrong, though. She could keep Corinna alive on her own, but getting far enough ahead of the damage to stabilize her condition could take hours.

I joined my magic to Elin’s, and added my own healing to the mix. There were things my magic could do a lot more easily than hers. Conjuring fresh blood to replace what she’d lost. Repairing the severed artery that would have leaked it all back out onto the snow in short order, without waiting to fix everything around it at the same time. Reversing the brain damage being caused by low oxygen levels. Although Corina’s metabolism ran on magic as much as chemistry, and the damage there was almost as bad. Her natural magic had depleted itself forcing her body to stay alive, and the strain was causing a slow cascade failure.

There wasn’t time to be gentle. I fed a heavy stream of mana into her system, and reached in to help her absorb it. Metaphysical organs I didn’t have names for flickered, pulsing and swelling unsteadily. I guided the energy where it needed to go, clearing blockages and repairing broken channels along the way.

Corinna gasped, and her muscles locked up. Her body convulsed for a few seconds, before Elin wound a tendril of magic into her spine and paralyzed her. Then she went limp, and laid there panting for several long moments.

“Mistress?” The dryad said uncertainly.

“She’ll be alright,” Elin said. “Daniel had to be a little rough about replenishing her magic.”

“Oh. Thank you, my lord. I couldn’t bear to see my mistress die over my own stupid failure.”

“We’ll have her stable in another minute.” I said. “What happened?”

“It was an ambush, my lord. There was a band of andregi heroes with weapons made of blood, and mages with them. They were lying in wait for us when we came to throw back an attack that had broken through the human soldiers. One minute we were cutting them apart, and the next there were spells everywhere. Corinna ordered a retreat, and took the rearguard position. She was trusting me to protect her, but… that evil magic in their weapons sapped my strength, and I… I couldn’t hold…”

I’d thought it was kind of odd how the nymphs each had a dryad who turned into wooden armor for them to wear. But if that’s how it worked I could understand it. Dryads had a fair amount of magical power, and if they could use that to protect a wearer from blows they could easily provide better armor than steel.

The dryad started crying again. I patted her head with my free hand. “It’s going to be alright, girl. You did everything you could. It’s not your fault they had weapons made for killing wizards.”

She leaned her head against my shoulder. “I know, my lord. It just hurts so much to see my mistress so grievously wounded, when I was charged with her protection. You’ll see her fully healed, won’t you milord? She won’t be scarred, or, or crippled?”

“She’ll be perfectly fine,” I assured her. “We’ll heal her up good as new. But you feel like you’re about to fall over. Let me take a look at that arm.”

“There’s no need to trouble yourself, my lord,” she objected. “I can just return to my tree and reform, once my mistress is safely back in her grove.”

Alanna appeared at my side, and put an arm around the other dryad’s waist. “I’ll see that she’s taken care of, milord. May we have leave to take our fallen mistress home when the healing is done?”

“Yes, but not by yourselves. Elin, how are you holding up?”

“Well enough, Daniel. I’m a bit tired, but the amulet takes the edge off of that. This incident has me concerned, however.”

“Yeah, the Conclave has been having problems like this too. I want you to move back to the island, before the enemy decides to try taking you out.”

“Thank you, Daniel. To be honest, I was beginning to feel a bit exposed here.” She looked around at the little improvised shelter of tarps that the garrison had set up for her, and the injured men lying on pallets everywhere. I noted several elves among them.

“May I call up one of the skimmers to carry the wounded?” She asked.

“Yeah, good idea. I’ll have the elves and the rest of Corinna’s dryads stay with you as an escort. If you like you can have the skimmer make trips between here and the island, so you can treat wounded soldiers without having to leave again. But I’m also going to have one bring in some patients from the Conclave.”

She frowned, and looked away. “The Conclave? Well, if I must.”

I put my hand on her cheek, and gently turned her head to look at me. “Elin, it’s up to you. I’m not going to ask you to heal some asshole who used to beat you for not bowing fast enough. If they bring in someone you don’t want to help you can send them away, and I’ll back you up on that.”

“Y-you will? Thank you, Daniel. I try not to be a vindictive person, but some of the adepts… well, I’d be terribly tempted to make them heal wrong on purpose.”

“I’m sure. I don’t think it’s going to come up, though. They have healing potions for the adepts, after all. It’s mostly their retainers they need help with.”

“Very well,” she said. “But what about you? You aren’t invincible, and I don’t want a repeat of what happened to Corinna.”

“Oh, that shoe is about to be on the other foot. Alanna, if I take you back to the ambush site do you think you can track these guys down?”

“Track them, milord?” A sly look stole over the dryad’s face. “With a foot or more of snow covering the whole city? Yes, I can find them for you.”

“Good. Let me send a few orders out, and then we’re going to team up with Cerise and go hunting. Oh, and Alanna?”

I put my hands on her shoulders, and fed her power. She’d gone through quite a bit of magic during the long night, and I didn’t want her running out in the middle of a fight. Her reserves filled up in a matter of seconds, and then overflowed into some complex mechanism that seemed to feed on the excess power.

She bit her lip. Her dark eyes gleamed in the torchlight, and I felt her tremble faintly. Then her magic shifted, flowing into a different configuration that fed the incoming power into her bones and muscles. She took a deep breath, and her expression firmed.

“Warn a girl before you do that, my lord,” she chided. “A younger dryad would have passed out from such a massive gift of power.”

“I wouldn’t have given a younger dryad so much,” I said. “You looked like you could handle it. Now, let’s go hunting.”

I left the link open as we collected Cerise, curious what her magical metabolism would do with so much energy. By the time I’d explained the situation there were odd flickers of force magic running along Alanna’s skin, and a considerable amount of fire and flesh magic mingled in her muscles.

Cerise scowled when she heard what had happened to Corinna.

“We’re going to kill these fuckers, right Daniel? No one gets to hurt my sexy huntress like that.”

“Yes, we’re going after them. Alanna?”

‘This way.” She turned, and leaped to the top of one of the three-story buildings around us like it was nothing. I blinked. Dryads didn’t have super anime jumping powers, did they?

“Someone’s been boosting her pretty hard,” Cerise chuckled. “Good choice, Alanna’s the smart one of the bunch.”

She spread her wings, and took to the air. I shrugged, and followed. I could figure out the intricacies of dryad magic later. Right now I had ape men to kill.