Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (45 page)

He looked down to see the officer’s sword tip jabbed
into his arm.  Dietrik had no clue how the man had pulled off a piece of work
like that.  A tug on the steel sent pain flashing up through his entire arm.

Dietrik fought through the pain.  He refused to allow
it to dull his reactions, to hamper his movement.  When he thrust his rapier
through the officer’s throat, the expression in the eyes behind the helmet was
as surprised as his own must have been.

He slid back into the second line.  The wound to his
arm meant his dagger hand would be ineffective.  It needed to be bound tightly
to ensure it became no worse than it already was.

While he fumbled in his pocket for the bandage roll
experienced fighters always carried, he glanced around, hoping to see Fraser. 
The lieutenant ought to know that the enemy squad’s leader had been felled. 
Lacking a head, they might be vulnerable enough to completely destroy.

When he finally pulled the bandage from his pocket, he
found Fraser a hundred feet away, pointing at the Arronaths and shouting orders. 
Before Dietrik could take a single step, a brown pot fell from the sky.

It landed on a Third Unit man’s head and shattered. 
The mercenary had no time to react.  Pottery shards exploded in every
direction.  Oil spilled in a torrent over his body as he fell, unconscious from
the blow.  Dietrik caught sight of a single glowing ember hovering in the air
before the oil burst into flames.

Dietrik, along with many fellow Crimson Kings, scanned
the skies wildly when dozens of firepots rained on them.  Far up, much too far
to reach by arrow, the oversized dragonflies Marik had warned them of hovered. 
They could see that swarms of them had emerged from the Citadel to add their
strength to the war.

*        *        *        *        *

“Excellent.  Set the squadrons in steady rotation. 
Continue to press the assault.  We have already pushed them against the trees.”

Xenos gazed down on the table, pleased at what he
saw.  The wire rim an inch above the surface had been imbued with power,
enabling a large-scale scrye that reflected the lands beneath the Citadel.

Their fighting strength on the ground increased with
every lift that transited the space between.  Combatants were practically
hurled off the lifts to enable the platforms to return before the Citadel
proceeded too far ahead that the lift attendants were unable to reach the
guiding ropes.

Xenos estimated an approximate one-thousand defenders
had been waiting to greet his arrival.  It was a shame.  Nearly enough to pluck
at his heartstrings.  How Galemar’s strength had weakened since his departure
years ago.

Indeed, it
was
a shame the kingdom had grown so
depleted.  Were its crown army as large as it once had been, he could have sent
down all seven-thousand soldiers, the hundred-eleven Taurs in the holding pens,
unfettered every surviving wyverfly…what a glorious bloodbath a battle such as
that would have been!

He could sense the bereft life energies that soaked
into the earth below.  It was a rich harvest already, though how much sweeter
it would have been to—

A massive shudder shook the room.

Conversation ceased at once.  Even during the worse
tempests over the deep sea, the command room remained steady as the stone from
which the Citadel had been carved.

“What was that?” Xenos demanded harshly.  “Explain!”

“I…I don’t know!”  The reply came in several voices.

“Have we been attacked?” Xenos barked at the defense
officer.  His only duty was to monitor the battle for any attempts at magical
attack against the fortress.  Not that any such attack would succeed.  It had
been attempted many times before, only to fail miserably, the stone repelling
the spells entirely.

The geomancer put his hands to the stone blocks
protruding from the wall.  He closed his eyes, sensing the stone throughout the
Citadel.  “I doubt we’ve been attacked.  None of the protections have reacted
to any such thing.”

“Am I to understand—”

A second shudder, more violent than the first, cut off
his words.  His eyes narrowed and he personally reached deep into the stone,
searching for the cause.  He could sense a tremendous strain.  Only in one
place had he ever felt such incalculable tension; when he had stood upon an
earth fault where the stone miles down ground against itself before a large
tremor was released.

Xenos peered through the window into the central
chamber.  He could see dozens of geomancers scurrying like rats frantic to
escape a sinking merchant vessel.  They were running to alternate posts while
those who were currently on duty stood stock still at their interfaces, their
tight expressions agitated as they dove mentally into the pulsating jewel above
their heads.

He refrained from questions or demands.  None in the
room could gift him with answers that were beyond his god-granted knowledge. 
Earthsense was a talent granted to the high-priests of the Earth God’s
followers along with other specialized geomancy abilities.

The stasis controllers were panicking.  That could
only mean the Citadel was crossing out of its intended frozen stasis without
their explicit manipulations as the cause.

Why?  Or specifically, how?  No coincidence that such
a phenomenon took place at the moment they engaged an enemy in open warfare. 
How could the Galemarans have possibly done anything to effect the Citadel, let
alone redefine the stasis parameters, which could only be altered through the
Elemental Jewel?

Most intriguing.  This bore looking into.

“You,” he ordered the same man as before.  He took his
hands off the square blocks to look at Xenos.  “Run to the stasis controllers
and bring back word of what goes on.  Be quick, man!”

Quick he chose to be, with Xenos’ cold eye on him.  He
ran to the door, reaching a hand for the knob when the door flew open before he
could touch it.  The door hit him hard in the face and broke his nose with a
burst of blood.

“General!”  The woman who entered was pudgy, wheezing
harshly from her upward run.  She wore the earth-brown robes trimmed in yellow
of a geomancer who was a qualified stasis controller.  “I just….we, I mean…we
can’t…”

“Speak,” Xenos ordered her.  A third tremble made the
command room staff wobble on their feet.

The woman clutched at the table to keep her balance. 
Her hands grabbed the wire rim, her fingers plunging through the image of
Colonel Mendell’s strike force being shredded by crossbows.

“General, sir…it’s the Citadel!  It’s trying to rise!”

*        *        *        *        *

“Most…intriguing.  I might reach so distant as to
proclaim ingenuity.”

“What’s so bloody clever?” Rail threw back, annoyance
girding his entire being.  He suffered from a renewed attack.  His hands
supported his upper body as he leaned on his knees in the shadows extending
from a pine copse.  Only the closest scrutiny on an accurate map would tell if
they were still in Tullainia or had crossed into Galemar.

“Witness the power of unfettered thought!  Unfamiliar
with the depredations of the Arronath mobile fortress, unaware of its renown
invincibility, unhampered by preconceptions accepting defeat as inevitable long
prior to the proven outcome, the strategists of your homeland have been left no
recourse other than to study the strength of their enemy from the minutia.”

Rail shook his head, his hair dangling in
sweat-drenched locks.  “One of these days you’ll learn how to speak like a
proper human.”

“My speech is clear.”

“To others of your ilk, perhaps.  It makes as much
sense to the rest of us as hitching a chicken to a plow.”

The Red Man raised one elegant hand.  “In the tongue
of the streetwise man, then.  The defenders, pitted against a threat hitherto
unheard of, have been forced to the meticulous effort of learning all there exists
to comprehend.  In that proper course, they have understood what so many others
have failed to.  That the gift bestowed by Humus is wholly dependant upon air
temperature at specific altitudes.”

“Air…it’s what?”  Rail forced his body to straighten
until he stood erect.  He followed the gesturing gloved finger.  “Is that
supposed to explain a gods damned thing?  You said a jewel or the like was the
heart of these flaming bastards!”

“Indeed.  The crystallized essence of the domain over
which Humus commands control.  It alters the stone properties until portions
are lighter than the surrounding air, whilst others remain heavier.”

“I am not so feeble yet that my memory has rotted. 
What difference does it make how it’s done?  It’s there, and no one has managed
to make it
not
there when the flying cur came calling on their
doorstep!”

“It matters in the planning.  Many truths are
unfamiliar to those men learned on the streets.  Such a truth is the activities
of air undergoing temperature alteration.  The ways through which air expands,
contracts, changes in nature depending on temperature…it is relevant to keeping
the Citadel stationary.”

“Heat rises.  That’s no mystery to anyone who’s been
in charge of tending the campfire for the evening.  But what’s that have to do
with it?”

“Simply that the equations must be rigidly
controlled.  What is to happen when the air upon which rests the base thickens
from the cool, or thins from the warm?”

Rail frowned.  “The air becomes lighter the hotter it
gets, right?  Then I suppose that if the stone is still lighter than air, it
will start rising until it finds a point were it matches the surrounding air
again and can rest easy.”

“That is incorrect.  If the stone were in truth
lighter than air in its normality, then it would commence to sink beneath air
which was lighter still due to its rising temperature.  Yet such a rigid
definition of the weight of the earthen element would leave it at the mercy of
the natural daily cycle.  Rising and falling with the vagaries of the changing
day.  Therefore, the definitions in the stone are set thusly; the parameters in
the foot of the Citadel are to be constantly lighter than whatever air it
touches no matter its density, while the crown is to be always heavy enough to
weight the airborne structure enough to keep it at a constant altitude.”

“You’re saying that the weight throughout that blasted
behemoth is constantly changing on its own?  Correcting itself every time the
weather shifts?”

“You have seen the truth of it.  Now project your mind
into the problem of occurrence wherein a sudden change was not uniform.  Where
only specific portions of the air touching the Citadel underwent alteration.”

Rail mused for a moment.  “The same as using a lever
to pry up a boulder, I would assume.”

“I concur.  The entire object so effected would tilt,
especially if the air above the Citadel, where the stone is set to be heavier
than its surroundings, were chilled further, making it increasingly dense. 
Following natural law, the peak would desire to sink beneath the heavy layers
whilst the base sought to be lighter than the air it touches, and thus rise.”

“You said these Citadels were so heavily drenched in
wards that even you would never succeed in attacking it magically.  Any form of
magic is supposed to rebound.”

“Exactly correct, friend.  Yet these ingenious minds
serving your homeland have circumvented the problem.  Do you not see?  They
direct their magics to the air, never once seeking to touch the stone.  It is
the rapidity with which the environment changes that will doom the almighty
weapon of Arronath.”

“That seems too simple.  Someone in Herrigorn would
have thought of that years ago.  Especially in Tillsar!  They’ve been attacked
by the Citadels as much as the other Herrigorn kingdoms put together.”

“Simple the concept is, yes.  Yet no single
practitioner, however masterful, could accomplish the feat.  A collective
cooperates toward the same goal in this matter, combining their many talents
into one.  Also, the concept is based on a deeper understanding of the Citadel
than Tillsar has garnered.  They persist in their original misconceptions
regarding its nature.  Such an elegant solution to a monumental problem
displays fleetness of thought.”

“Another trait those monkeys with cow dung between
their ears lack,” Rail agreed.  “If they knew the truth about Humus, a
jumped-up ass in their ranks would have thought of using
air
to attack
his creation long ago.  Sounds like a classic Arm strategy.”

“Arm strategy?”  The Red Man turned his gaze from the
battle to rest it on Rail.  “I fail to comprehend your meaning.”

“The Arm of Galemar.  I told you about him before.  Or
them
, if you prefer.”

Or Marik
, he
suddenly thought.  The boy had said the royal council wanted his insights on
the Arronath invasion mess.  Wouldn’t that be a scream?  Yet also strangely
appropriate, in an odd way.

“This may afford an unseen opportunity.  The play may
involve moves to cause our quarry obstacles, in which instance we might find
chance to strike.  It would serve our cause best if we—”