Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (58 page)

Laniel had been first to draw blood, fighting his way to the
sheriff’s side.  Daerwin marveled at how quickly his fighting style adapted to
fighting creatures he had never even seen before the battle at the Lacework.

“No matter how hard I hit them or where, they heal almost at
once,” Laniel gasped, continuing to fight.  “Only a devastating single blow
kills them.”

“Aye, or fear,” Daerwin answered.  “Fear lets the blows
land.”

Another deep crack of Laniel’s staff at the back of the
great demon’s neck, and the creature stumbled, blind with pain.  Daerwin saw
his opening and lunged at the beast’s open breast with his sword.  But the
demon had drawn back his meaty fist, just as Kadak had done in his stronghold,
ready to throw a great smear of white-hot liquid fire outward around him,
burning away the fog in a blast of heat, but almost by accident, the sheriff
slashed at its foreleg.  The power of its magic spilled over the wound and
burned it.  The beast bellowed unintelligibly with pain.  Encouraged, the
knights hacked at the creature from all sides.

Not far away, he saw Renda fighting alone against such
another as this one he fought.  Most of his swordsmen had been forced to break
away to fight the other demon generals who had by now converged on their
position, as well, and their line had broken.  Before long, fatigue and
mistakes born of fatigue would claim them, and they would fall, one by one,
until the demons won.

They were overwhelmed.  His calculated attack meant to throw
the demons off balance had worked, but in the end he was sure it would prove a
mistake.    The only reason they yet lived was that the demons’ attack had
become disorganized.  The knights could not hope to defeat the army before the
generals could regain control.  At best, this battle would only delay the
demons while the duke escaped.  At worst, he had sacrificed them all for
nothing.

Renda was cut off from the rest of the knights.  Unable to
get past the great monstrous creature before she was surrounded by demons, she
had instead run straight into the creature and stabbed between the plates of
armor along the creature’s side.  Like the other demons, like those she had
fought on Syon, the wounds closed so quickly that it made no difference.  At
least the pain was real.  Their ability to close their wounds weakened with
fear and fatigue, too, but with their present advantage, she doubted either
would come into play soon enough to matter.  She did not expect to be able to
survive long enough to wear them down, not like this.

A bit longer, and Gikka would have the duke safely away.  If
she could just hold out a bit longer…

“Gikka,” Dith crouched beside her and looked between her and
the duke and the two Keepers.  “Why haven’t you taken him away from here?”

“He refused to go,” she answered simply.

Damerien shifted on his haunches.  “We will stay until I am
certain we can be of no use here.”

Dith spat something in exasperation.  “What possible use? 
The knights cannot hold them back forever.  You must away.”

Trocu shook his head.  “Not until I am certain.”

“I am certain!”  Dith edged closer.  “Look at them!  Just
one of those monsters nearly destroyed you—your father!  Do you think you can
withstand five of them?”

Beyond them, the battle continued.

“Do you think I don’t know how dangerous those things are?” 
Trocu’s eyes flashed gold.  “Brada was badly wounded when the demons captured
him, thanks to a Hadrian sword through his back and other abuses.  The demons
had no idea who he was and threw him in that cell to die.  The demons starved
him and fed him rotting food and made him drink his own urine and probably
their own for water.  And that was before Kadak found him.”  Now his eyes gleamed
with hate.  “I owe these creatures more suffering than they can possibly
comprehend, and I will not be sent away one more time like a scared child!”

An eerie screech rose over the field of battle, a sound half
of predatory bird and half something else. 

Through the failing light, a strange apparition, a ghostly
white horse, rode straight into the battle, dancing between the demons, kicking
at them, and as it passed, the shriek dissolved into words, but words which had
not been heard on Byrandia in eons.

“Tekrei idriana ga beira go traeba!”

It was a throaty growl, a language of power, potent with
magic and blood, and for a raw moment, the sheer sound of it terrified them,
punctuated as it was by the coarse cries of a bird of prey.

Renda’s blade suddenly sank deep into the heart of one of
the demons, its eyes wide with terror before its life ebbed and disappeared. 
She watched Chul’s ghostly white horse racing between the demons, first one
part of it disappearing, then another as the Keeper’s cloak shifted over its
body.

Chul.

She slashed the throat of another of the demons and turned
to face the general.  But already, she saw, his fear had subsided. 

The monster reached out his great claw and slashed into the
horse’s flank as it passed, sending the creature screaming in agony.

”Ro brimina, brimina!”
Chul cried as he turned the
horse back toward the sheriff and the rest of the knights.  In spite of the
horse’s bleeding, it snorted and ran straight into the fray without hesitation,
carrying him into the battle.

The demons near the sheriff and the other knights were
thrown into chaos, and they began to fall under the knights’ swords and
Laniel’s staff.  But not fast enough.  Renda saw the demons recovering from
their fear.  “Go back!  Go back!” she shouted to the Dhanani.  He turned his
weakened horse and ran back through the camp, drawing a couple of the demons
after him.  The demons saw Damerien and stopped.

Suddenly Dith’s eyes grew wide.  So that was what Galorin
meant.  He wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him sooner.  A scared child.  Of
course.  Fear had been their weapon against Kadak’s armies for generations. 
Fear would save them now.

Overhead, the clouds which had obscured the stars swirled
and rammed together violently, and in a great crash of lightning and thunder, a
blast of light and magical energy exploded over the battle, light in a living,
organic shape, the same shape that had flared across Galorin’s memory, the same
that Dith had seen at the Lacework.

In the moment following the explosion, while the demon army
was transfixed with terror at what they saw, Renda had drawn her sword across
the demon general’s eyes, leaving it thrashing in agony and terror. Then when
she believed its terror had crested, she cut through its throat.  The other
demons scattered in chaos and fear as the creature convulsed violently on the
ground, trapped in its own dying body, and then it was still.  Cut down, as it
was, in the height of its terror, it could not heal itself.  Encouraged, she
ran toward where her father and the others fought.

Dew and cold sweat made the sheriff’s sword slick in his
hands.  He was desperately aware that each time he raised his sword, he did not
lift it as high, nor was he able to hold off the axe for as long.  A rational
side of his mind, the voice of his sword master at the academy, reminded him to
conserve his strength and strike only when he had an opening.  That was
wonderful advice in the calm of the practice chamber, but the ax was swinging
down on him, and all he could do was to hold it off before it came down at him
again.  While his sword was locked against the dripping ragged blade of the ax,
it was not doing anything against the creature wielding the ax, and so the
battle would wear on until one or the other of them fell to fatigue. 

That ax would kill him if it so much as nicked him, and the
longer this battle continued, the more likely such a nick became.  At the same
time, he assumed that as long as he kept the creature engaged at such close
range with weapons, it would not throw fire at him or the others, and maybe one
of them could take its life.

Daerwin had taken advantage of the distraction to move
inside the creature’s guard, but then the demon was also inside his, so they
were both unable to bring their long weapons to bear effectively.  Daerwin
would likely not survive this, but just now, he had one chance to end this.

He saw Renda running toward him.  No matter what happened,
she would be able to finish this even if he could not.  She was shouting
something as she ran, something urgent.  He could not hear her over the sounds
of battle; she was still too far away.  She was signaling with her hands, but
he could not afford to turn his attention to her long enough to see.  No
matter.  Once this creature was dispatched, he would talk to her.

“The eyes!” Renda shouted to her knights.  “Blind them first
or they will leap bodies!  Grayson!  Qorlin!  Shoot for their eyes!”

Grayson nodded.  The two knights with bows had been pushed
in by the hordes and had abandoned their bows for swords in the close quarters,
but now, they took up their bows and fired. 

Arrows flew all around the swordsmen, not finding the eyes
of the demon generals.  Amara stepped forward and smashed the demon’s eyes
right into its skull and Kerrick hacked its throat to the spine.

Renda took a precious moment to assess the battlefield.

The creature Shanth and Laniel fought had bled a lot, and
now it was weak, but it fought its fear and pain to try to regain control of
its body and heal itself.  But it was too badly injured.  The glow faded
suddenly from its eyes, and it fell to the ground, all but lifeless.  Suddenly,
from one of the demons behind them, Renda saw the same glow in the eyes and
shouted warning to them.  Without hesitation, Laniel smashed its face with his
staff and sent it reeling backward, and before it could heal itself, Shanth
struck off its head with a great cry of triumph.

Terrorized by the blinding apparition and without their
generals to guide them, many of the demons were panicked and directionless.

Two generals remained, only two, and after that, they could
finish off the stragglers at their will.  The sheriff was fighting one, and
Laniel and Amara went to help him, leaving Renda to join Shanth and Kerrick
against the other.  The knights were exhausted, barely able to lift their
weapons, and worse, the generals’ wounds were starting to close faster and
faster.  They seemed to have recovered from their fear as soon as they realized
the vision was not attacking them.

“The likeness is remarkable,” the duke murmured.  “But if
the demons did not know for certain that I was here, they must now.  It is a
risk.”

“More than you know.  It won’t last much longer,” Dith said,
shaking the sweat from his brow.  Maintaining the vision and strength of what
he had seen at the Lacework took a surprising amount of will, and he was still
fairly depleted.

“It need not last,” whispered Trocu.  He nodded to the
Keepers.

Nestor nodded.  Nestor and Jath slipped forward and reached
out toward the last two demon generals.

The eyeless corpse of a slain demon general rose from the
ground, its limbs jerking awkwardly, and Nestor and Jath jerked back in
surprise.  The knights seemed not to see it at all, whether because they were
so engrossed in their own battles or because it had shielded itself from their
eyes.  But it ignored them and hobbled and shambled straight toward Damerien.

“Do not extend your protections yet.  We do not yet know
what we face here.  Best to save your strength and not let it know too much
just yet.”

“Did you do that?”  Dith asked quietly.

Nestor shook his head.  Jath’s eyes grew wide, and he was
repeating something over and over to himself. 

“He’s saying, ‘It’s dead, it’s dead.’”

“
Wyt’stra
!  I see you!  I see your power!” the dead
monster growled in Brymandyan, awkwardly working its strange split jaw.  It
pointed a bloodied claw toward the center of the camp.  “Show yourself.”

“Wyt’stra
.” 

“It’s dead, it’s dead.”

Dith felt the hair on the back of his neck rise.  He had
seen the strange Wittister energy that held the sea at bay when the Byrandian
mages tried to call it to their will.  The same energy which had drained the
life out of the body he had found…  Who else could have done it?

He looked at the two, and suddenly their eyes shone black
and sinister to him.

Damerien’s Keepers were Wittister mages.

“Yes, of course.  It makes sense, now that I think of
it.  I never understood why he insisted having these Keepers who peopled his
castle as guards rather than soldiers, especially during the wars.”

Dith’s head was spinning.  These two, this good old man and
the dim witted stable boy whom he had known for years, these were the black
beasts of his nightmares as a child?  Damerien kept these evil creatures as his
protectors?  Why?

“
Wyt’stra
,” the creature mewled again, and threw the
blaze of white light over them and bellowed with rage.  “Show yourself!”

Before the light hit them fully, the duke had vanished
against the lean-to behind him in the very act of unsheathing his sword, thanks
to Gikka’s cloak.  Gikka herself stepped in front of him with her sword raised
toward the disgusting creature.

As the dead thing came closer, Dith felt power surging
through him, and he drank it up like a man at a desert spring.  The being
animating the dead demon general had to be a mage, and its proximity amplified
and refreshed Dith’s own power, but the other’s power was likewise enhanced. 
Dith suddenly felt a tremendous heat at his back and dropped the rucksack to
the ground.  The strange stone wobbled out across the grass toward him, glowing
with energy: the same glow he’d seen in his dream.