Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (40 page)

Doors were missing from most buildings.  No thatch
remained anywhere in Drakesfield.  Only a moderate-sized town, as towns went in
the kingdom’s lower southwest, its buildings were clustered in grape bunches
around a central square.  The plank stands that had held musician performances
and festival shows were splinters ground into the earth.

The Arronaths had set camp in the innermost buildings
closest to the square.  Baxter held no interest in them.  His orders were
unusually plain.

What little was left of these outer structures would
not burn.  Probably that had been a deliberate safety measure on the Arronaths’
part, along with the destruction they seemed to glory in.  Baxter hissed to his
men.  They had come as far into the town as he dared.

Swords glistened under stray light from the moon. 
Also from torches set in the walls, wedged into whatever cracks were handy. 
The swordsmen stood guard while the cask-bearers moved slowly between the
ruined buildings.  At best, they only had enough oil to saturate the ground
thoroughly for four or five of the narrow alleys.

He picked a building still intact enough that the wall
facing the town’s center was seven feet of scorched oak.  Baxter split his
cask’s bottom by thumping it down hard onto a tarnished door handle laying in
the ruins and began spilling oil over the ground two feet out from the alley’s
mouth.

*        *        *        *        *

The Taurs were coming, Lieutenant Eilow noted.  Their
hulking forms blotted out the torches when they moved among the ruins.  It
would have been a dead giveaway even if their fearsome roars had been absent.

Which they were far from.

Interesting how that sound could make his spine feel
limp.  In the countless battles in which he had fought, listening to the
tortured chorus echoing up from all nine hells through a hundred warriors’
dying lips, nothing had ever made him feel his heart hammering inside his chest
the way this did.

“I see two,” he called.

“I make it three,” countered his third sergeant.  “No,
strike that.  Five!”

“Every last one of you had better be cocked in the
next five seconds,” Eilow ordered in a loud tone.  He raised a hand no one
could see through the thick trees or nighttime blanket.  “Look there!  Bainard
and Piccary are pulling apart!”

“Wait for it!” he heard his first sergeant shout after
a quarrel was shot before the order.  “Damn it, if that—”

Eilow blocked out the noise while he strained his
eyes, looking for a tumbling corpse that meant one of their own had fallen from
the untrained shot.

“Sergeant Lockhorn!  I want you to take that man’s
crossbow and use it to break his fool neck!  The rest of you!  Aim at the gap! 
The
gap
!”

The instant he saw the Eleventh and Sixteenth Squads
had separated enough to guarantee a comfortable safety zone, as safe as it
could be with eighty percent of the men completely untrained in crossbow
archery, he hollered, “
Now
you fire the gods damned things!”

A thick flight of quarrels flew like a swarm of angry
hornets between the squads scrambling across the rubble.  Cries of bestial pain
and fury shattered a cacophony that had already seemed deafening.

*        *        *        *        *

“There’s not enough confusion yet,” Marik observed. 
“They’ve split their Taur forces, but only three are coming this direction.”

“That is to be expected.”  Torrance kept his Glasses
to his eye for only a minute at a time before lowering them.  According to him,
eye fatigue set in if the Captain’s Glasses were used too long continuously,
causing phantom shadows to flicker across vision, or for perfectly ordinary
objects to transform, appearing as something completely different.  “Devry’s
contingent is a far smaller threat.”

“They won’t break as long as they have the Taurs to
hide behind.”

Gibbon stayed silent to Marik’s left.  He had not
uttered a single word since the attack begun.

“It would appear they will assault the larger force
first after all.”

“So much for easy pickings,” the younger mercenary
muttered.  It had been his hope they would target the smaller force quickly to
clear their backs.  Then they could concentrate on the larger force without
distraction.  “But we need to do something fast to keep their attention locked
away from Baxter and Skelton.  They’ve almost run into them twice!”

“Don’t,” Torrance quietly ordered.  He placed a hand
firmly on Marik’s wrist.  Gibbon continued ignoring them.  “They might have had
no mages prepared to counter you days ago.  We can’t bet on the same being true
today.”

Marik looked back at the commander through the
moonlight.  “I wasn’t going to do…anything like that.  It would be a dead
giveaway to our positions.”  He pulled free to step around an old oak with low
branches spreading thirty feet out from the trunk.

On the other side he pointed to the first messenger
waiting in the saddle.  “Ride to Kraven and tell him he needs to play his part
after all.”

*        *        *        *        *

Jayran heard the horse clopping toward his position,
defiant against the invisible terrain, as he finished shouting at his fourth
sergeant to figure out why the army soldiers under his command had stopped
shooting.  No doubt the idiots had sat
on top
of their second quivers. 
Even bets said most of their remaining shafts were broken.

Before he could shout out, the rider beat him to the
mark.  “Lieutenant Kraven?  Where is he?”

“Lad!  Behind you!”

A shape melted from the dark to jog the messenger’s
stirrup.  Ten heartbeats passed, followed by the messenger tugging his mount’s
head around to return.

“Pull it together, bucks!” Kraven ordered in a low
yell.  He stepped closer to Jayran to say, in farewell, “Looks like Second
Squad has to earn their pay after all.  Watch your back, Jayran.  Nobody’s
going to do it for you now.”

“If you see any of my men, pull their bacon out of the
fire.”

Kraven offered no reply other than a raised hand
before melting into the night.  Jayran marched over tangled roots to find out
what was taking his fourth sergeant so damned long.  Having command over a
squad formed from both army soldiers and from archers across the entire band
made for unprecedented friction in his experience as a leader.  He wished his
normal fighting men were present instead, especially since Kraven’s squad
wouldn’t be there to provide hand-to-hand support in a crisis.

*        *        *        *        *

“Lock it!  Lock it up!” shouted Lieutenant Piccary to
the Eleventh Squad.  A shattered timber from a wall frame rolled underfoot.  It
nearly dumped the man on the ground when his leg slid sideways painfully.

When he righted himself, he saw a massive form
illuminated by the sputtering torches behind it.  It swiped with an arm so
muscled he could see the impressive bulges despite the poor light.

A man screamed.  Piccary had heard countless death
cries before.  Few had ever matched this one.

“I said lock it up, damn you all!”

Men who had already been hurrying to tighten ranks
over the crumbled debris risked injury by running full out from the sounds
assaulting their backs.  Two of the monsters followed without effort.  A third
loitered where it stood, studying the man kneeling at its feet with interest as
he struggled to keep his innards from spilling out through the slashes in his
stomach.  Chainmail might as well have been paper to these monsters.

Piccary ordered the fallback.  Across the distance he
could hear the same shouts from Lydan’s squad.

Fast glances over his shoulder revealed the ugly
truth.  The beasts were only feet from the last man.  It would be impossible
for Eilow’s crossbows to open fire without taking out half his squad.

Three of his men abruptly whirled to fight the Taurs. 
Piccary shouted for them to run.  They ignored him…or had no chance to comply.

Both men on the right and left of their miniature line
went down before their blades could connect with the bare flesh of their
adversaries.  The central man attacked with deliberation while his friends died
horribly.  He plunged his blade through an oversized eye.

The beast reared back in screaming agony.  It lashed
out with a wild swing as it did so, ripping half the mercenary’s arm away. 
Piccary expected him to fall.

Instead, he loped over roughly-edged stones away from
the squad.  The wounded Taur leapt after, so furious the lieutenant imagined he
could see the rage burning in its remaining eye as a glowing ember.

It landed on its mutilator, repaying the bold act by
tearing the man’s head from his shoulders.  The Taur lofted the skull high. 
Shredded meat dangled from the torn neck in long trailers resembling ivy
growing on a trellis.

Whatever vengeful satisfaction it felt was short
lifted.  The space between Piccary and the hulking Taur blurred when dozens of
crossbow quarrels sought their target.  Multiple hits made the beast jerk
backward in several awkward twists.  It toppled hard.  A feeble attempt to rise
ended in failure, most of its tendons torn by the shafts.

The second pursuing Taur leapt into action.  It
charged not at Piccary’s squad, it relieved him to see, but into the trees. 
Whatever sorcery controlled the beast meant to put an end to the only weapons
at hand that could damage their fearsome creatures.

*        *        *        *        *

“Look sharp!”  Lieutenant Fraser drew his sword. 
“We’ve got a major inconvenience coming our way!”

With no time to reload a new volley, Eilow’s crossbow
archers scrambled behind the defending swords of the Ninth Squad.  Sloan waited
with his single-edged sword resting against the back of his left wrist. 
Dietrik and Talbot waited one tree over.  Churt lurked behind Wyman in his
customary place, the youth’s crossbow ready.  The others were cloaked in
midnight.

The Taur crashed into the trees where Kineta met it
with her dancing scimitar.  She floated back on her heels at its swinging claws
rather than stand her ground.  Her speedy weapon sliced shallow cuts along its
forearms while she kept her body beyond its reach.  After the initial contact,
the men in her unit swarmed around the Taur to add their meager stings to the
overall effort.

Dietrik felt his heart stop when a branch only feet
away snapped with a thunder crack.  Raw sound from another Taur, the one who
had lingered behind at first, pummeled his flesh.  He could see, as if in a
painting innocently hanging on a wall, the slight curve to the fanged teeth
within that horse-like muzzle.  They gleamed wetly in the starlight.

Talbot spun to face the monster, slipped, and vanished
into the dark.

A root caught Dietrik’s foot when he jerked away.  On
the ground he fumbled to draw his rapier…for what good it would do.  The blade
designed for maximum speed had no effect on their thick hides.  Yet he refused
to bow and accept death.  Especially from a bloody animal that blasphemed
against nature by its very existence.

The silver basket-hilt continued to evade his grasp. 
Dietrik could not take his eyes from the tongue sliding over those exposed
ivory points.  He could smell the pungent musk it exuded mixed with the fetid
breath of rotten meat.  Its awesome form transfixed him.

Sloan’s strike surprised Dietrik nearly as much as it
did the beast.  The Fourth Unit’s sergeant attacked with his considerable
skill.  He carved a gashing wound across the thing’s arm.  It lashed at him with
its other hand, fingers splayed.

His sword met the oncoming blow.  The steel edge met
the claws.  Both weapons stopped cold, the Taur surprised, Sloan exerting his
complete strength to force it back.

Before the issue could be decided, Churt’s quarrel penetrated
the Taur’s skull.  It punched through below the creature’s left horn.  Blood
splattered out of its eye sockets around the startled orbs.  The quarrel hit
with force enough to disappear fully into that bullish head.

It toppled as a great tree in a forest, slowly and
with apparent majesty.  Dietrik, still fascinated as a frog caught in the
hypnotic eye of a snake, watched the teeth bite down hard enough to penetrate
its tongue when it hit the ground face-first.

“Any others?” Bindrift shouted into the void.

Sloan stayed silent in his customary manner.  Giles
and Kineta called back that it looked clear.  Eilow assumed control over the
disembodied voices to order all crossbows back to the tree line.  With luck,
they might have clean shots at any remaining Taurs.

Chiksan helped Dietrik to his feet.  “We used to ask
the gods what purpose they had for standing us so close to the edge of death’s
chasm and letting us peer into its depths.”

“Probably to make sure we mortals remember that’s what
we bloody well are,” Dietrik grunted in reply.  He brushed dirt from his
clothing.