Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (42 page)

And well I should have by now, he growled to himself.  But
circumstance, it seemed, had conspired to keep him here.  It had thrown
everything at him, even an army of mages, now Colaris and Gikka.

“But that you are a mage, I should think you an
Anatayan.  Do not blame circumstance or fate or even the gods for the choices
you make.  You are above that.”

“Why, because I have magic?” he growled aloud.  “Because I
have you in my head and an ugly rock compelling me to go to Byrandia for no
reason of my own?  Tell me, how should I not blame circumstance?”

“You are human.  The choice to stay or not to stay is
still yours.  It is always yours.”

“How can I leave?  Gikka is somewhere on this monstrosity of
my creation looking for me, caught between two groups of hostile mages, and
without me––“

“Without you!”

“Yes, without me, the only way she might survive it is that
the mages are more hostile toward each other than anyone else.  And Colaris…he
is injured and cannot fly, much less ride.”

“He is a bird.”

“He is a war hero!  That bird has saved as many lives as you
have, and he nearly died to get this message to me!”

“But can you not see that you still have choices?  You
could ride away at once and abandon both the bird and Gikka.”

“I could no more abandon them than I could––”

“Don’t be ridiculous.  Of course you could, and you’ve
done worse things in your time!  You and I both know it.  But in this case, you
choose not to.  You are making the choice yourself.  Perhaps it makes you a
better person that you so choose, perhaps it makes you a fool, but never
believe for a moment that you remain here by anything but your own choice.”

His own choice.  He turned that idea over in his mind.

Suddenly the valley beneath him erupted in chaos.

Magical shields and protections fizzled and sparked, and the
first arrows fell harmless at the mages’ feet, some still burning or blasted to
pieces from having touched their protections, but most merely broke as if
they’d hit stone.  The Byrandians looked at each other in confusion, uncertain
what they should do.  This was not what they had been expecting, not at all. 
But once the first of the arrows broke through their magical protections and
tasted blood, once the first of the mages fell, their paralysis broke, and the
battle was joined in earnest.  They took physical cover and began their siege.

Almost at once, a bewildering dance of the most powerful
explosions and corrosive energies the knights had ever seen lit the coral
around them where they crouched behind cover, compromising the integrity of the
spires and crumbling some of them.

The enemy army had not caught sight of the knights as they
moved into position since, thanks to Gikka and Nestor, Brannagh’s men had
avoided setting off the hidden beacons and other magical protections that
rimmed the coral lip of the Lacework, but the mages had scouted the edge of the
Lacework well and had positioned themselves to guard the only likely exits from
the coral labyrinth, so even their vaguely directed attacks were dangerous. 

The only advantage the knights had at all was that the sun
would set behind them, rendering the enemy all but blind for a very brief time––a
fleeting advantage to be sure, and one that, while it might matter against any
other army, would avail them little here.  Still, it was an advantage and one
they might be able to press should they survive that long.

The enemy had organized themselves into loose clusters
spread across the nearly open plain that broke away from the Lacework in a
strategy Renda found interesting, if a bit blind.  At first, they seemed to
have paid almost no mind at all to physical cover, minding only their spacing
and their line of sight to the labyrinth, the expected strategy of mages who
think to fight mages.  They stayed close enough to each other to augment their
power but still separate enough to avoid all being killed by a single blow,
most likely a magical one.  Had the enemy thought they would only be fighting
Dith?  She could hardly believe they were that lucky, but on the off chance they
were, she wondered how she could press that advantage.  At the very least, the
Byrandians would be disorganized for a time while they reevaluated their enemy.

The more distant of the mages predictably fired tightly
focused, intense bursts of energy meant to bring the fragile reefs down upon
their heads or heat the stone beneath their feet to move them from cover.  The
nearer groups watched for the knights themselves, attacking only when they
caught a glimpse of them rising from cover to fire arrows.  The Byrandians did
not take long to discover they could move the knights about like pieces on a
game board by placing their magic carefully.

“No!” the sheriff called to his knights as they ran just
ahead of a barrage. “Do not let them herd you like cattle!  They move you
south, but move southeastward instead and spread yourselves back to the north
behind cover as you can.  We must not be squeezed into a small area or all is
lost!”

Beneath them, they could hear the ocean roiling and crashing
menacingly against the coral and stone underpinnings of the Lacework, but so
far, that was all it had done.  Perhaps, Renda hoped, it had not yet occurred
to the mages that they could use the sea to wash the knights away at a sweep. 
With how many of them there were and with what Nestor had said of their
strength being amplified by numbers, such a thing would be devastating.  With
any luck, they would not have time to think of it.

Behind them as they fought, a brace of enemy mages shimmered
into ghostlike existence behind the knights, one here, one there.  They took
two of the knights by surprise, killing one knight outright and severely
wounding another.  They were fast and not terribly powerful nuisance attacks,
but they had caught the two knights unawares and had blasted through them, vanishing
before they could react.

Dame Mida was dead as she fell, with half her head and
helmet gone.  As was their way in battle, they let her lie as she fell, to be
looked after once the day was won or lost.  Not far away, Laniel set about
stripping away Sir Benn’s armor to try to stop the bleeding, but the look on
the priest’s face was quite grave.  The man was losing too much blood.  He
would not survive. 

Coldly in the chaos, as she had a hundred times before in
battle, Amara took up the dead knights’ weapons to carry them forward to the
line.  Someone else would make more use of the bow and makeshift bundle of
arrows now than the dead.  A quick look of appraisal at Benn, and she took his
up as well.

“So free they are with their porting,” Nestor pointed out,
“and not the slightest misstep.  They know right where we are, down to where we
stand and where we do not.”  He looked about him in the rocks above, wondering
if they’d left one there to scout for them, but he saw no one.

Trocu frowned.  “They also gain a new sense of our numbers
and our position each time they come among us.”

Under protest, Trocu had been sent well back from the battle
so the mages would not know he was there.  The likelihood that any among the
enemy would know the duke on sight was extremely low, but they could not afford
the risk.  But when the mages began appearing behind the knights, Jath and
Nestor had insisted that the exasperated duke move even further back into the Lacework,
and Renda had concurred.

“Among the horses?”  Trocu had glowered at them.  “I should
be leading the charge, and you would have me stay back with the luggage?”

“Aye, and I’d have you see the sense of it without I have to
dress it in ribbons,” Nestor had growled right back.  “Among the horses is the
one place we know they will not go!  You know right well there’s reason to it,
my prince.”

The duke’s eyes blazed gold, but he said nothing more and
retreated deeper into the Lacework, muttering angrily with Nestor and Jath
beside him.  Renda blew out a sigh of relief.  Indeed he understood what was at
stake, above and beyond the lives of fewer than a score of warriors who trusted
him enough to follow him into Byrandia, for all his protests.  The enemy could
not know he was here.

More of these strange infiltrations followed, small, fast
attacks meant to cause chaos and panic and to snipe them one or two at a time
rather than to bring the walls down spectacularly.  Had the knights been any
less disciplined or had the mages been any less cautious about retreating
before the knights could attack them, it might well have worked to disrupt the
knights’ offensive.

Already after the first wave of these infiltrating attacks,
the knights had split their ranks.  While Phen, Grayson, Liddy, Peringale and
Kerrick fired at the distant mages with their bows under Lord Daerwin’s
command, those who were strongest with their swords held back behind the great
coral pillars with Renda, watching for mages to port in behind.

Aloft, Gikka and Chul perched hidden in the coral spires
watching the battle and signaling to the knights as the enemy changed
position.  Gikka had taken her cloak along, as always, but having seen how the
mages responded to it, she had wisely chosen not to wake it, at least not yet. 
Since Renda could still see her, she assumed Gikka wore it dormant against the
chill air.

A few feet behind the archers, she kept her focus soft as
she scanned the coral walls around her.  Most of her mind was seeking out any
slight shimmer, any change in the light reflections around her.  But some part
of her mind was watching from outside the battle, amused in a strange way at
the ironic twist of having swordsmen behind, providing cover for the archers on
the front lines.  Yet this was how the battle was playing out.

“Hah!” barked Qorlin in a strange mix of triumph and
surprise.  Among the swordsmen, he had taken the first kill almost by
accident.  He had swept his sword through a shimmer of a port, not waiting for
the body to appear fully, steeling himself as he cut against the protections. 
To both his and the mage’s surprise, the protections did nothing.  The
Byrandian’s eyes went dull as he materialized in pieces, with the last vestiges
of his dying protection formed around him to spit impotent fire over his corpse
as it fell. 

Amara and Vonn both swung on the next shimmer they saw. 
While their strikes did not result in dead mages falling dead to the ground out
of the port, but they were both certain they had struck true:  the mages they’d
hit would not survive long after their return. 

Arrows.  Dith smiled darkly.  From his hillock just
southeast of the edge of the Lacework, he had watched several archers, the
brilliant blue of their Brannagh mantles unmistakable to him in the afternoon
light when they peeked out from cover here and there to fire on the army.  So
Gikka had brought at least five of the sheriff’s knights with her.  Well, it
was not much of an army, to be sure, but it was something.  At least he knew
now that he did not have both this force below and the Wittisters between
them.  He backed away from the edge of the hill and walked purposefully back to
Glasada.

“Your thought is to go to them…to go to her.  That would
be a terrible mistake.”

No, he thought angrily, it would be a terrible mistake to
leave her there fighting one army while something worse comes in behind her. 

“To do so would put you in the worst possible position,
holed up in those rocks between two sets of mages who want to kill you! 
Think!  This could not be a better trap for you if they’d planned it!”

Dith swore, loudly enough that Colaris hissed at him in
alarm from his perch on the bedroll.  The mage rubbed his eyes.  Yes, of
course.  His instinct was to run to her, to protect her, but the instinct was
wrong.  Here, he had the army flanked––an army that was still probably sixty or
seventy strong.  He swallowed hard.  Not to mention the others, the Wittister
mages, coming in behind.  He wondered if even he had sufficient power to defeat
them.  Or just to survive.

“I see you are engaged and nothing I say will stop you. 
Very well.  Defeat these quickly, and it is quite possible you and she can
outrun the Wittisters to Byrandia.”

The moment he attacked, they would turn on him.  Well,
better him than the knights.  Dith swung himself up into his saddle and rode to
a new vantage point a bit further east.

“They can’t have much power in reserve, not after all this,”
Kerrick called from where he half crouched in cover behind a blasted chunk of
coral.  He looked doubtfully at what remained of the pile of arrows beside
him.  “Can they?”

Amara shook her head from where she stood at his back, not
in denial but in uncertainty.  She had never faced an army of mages before,
either.  “Take heart,” she called to him.  “My sword has tasted blood for the
first time since the war, even if the blood was only half-formed.  Call it
superstitious if you like,” she grinned, “but I believe the day will be ours.”

“Do you?”

“Oh aye, I’ve never been wrong yet.”

“Their power weakens as their numbers fall,” snarled Daerwin
through a lull in their attacks.  He squinted up at Gikka.  The Bremondine
woman gave him a slight nod, and he peered out through the haze of smoke that
had risen from the many blasts against the coral, looking over one then another
of the clusters of mages tucked behind the rises and clumps of rock, then
ducking back behind the coral before they spotted him.

He closed his eyes, letting the impression of what he saw
linger in his mind.  None of those he had seen were surrounded by the telltale
wisps and tendrils of evil, but then he hadn’t seen their faces.  Besides, he
had no idea if B’radik’s gift to his bloodline meant the same in Byrandia as it
did on Syon.  For now, he would cautiously assume that it did.  Would that he
had a priest of B’radik with him, that he might ask.  He sighed heavily.  Would
that any had survived.