Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (79 page)

“Come, Lord Pietrsen, we have mages to skewer,” Niarmit commanded.

“Immediately, your Majesty.” The Master of Horse raised his arm to wave a signal at the eighteen hundred horsemen drawn up in four loose companies behind him.

The cavalry, a mix of heavy horse from Nordsalve and lighter lancers from Oostalve and Salicia moved off the high point of the hill and trotted north-east working behind the as yet untouched divisions of Vahnce and Torsden to come up towards the hard pressed Salician infantry.

“Do you mean to charge those infernal contraptions,” Eadran hissed in Niarmit’s head.

“I cannot do nothing.”

“That is exactly what you must do. Your young seneschal has the sense to stand firm.   He knows what will happen if he once takes his men forward from behind the defensive positions he has dug.”

“His men are being murdered without the chance to return fire.”

“But you see the archers, you see the enemy wolfriders.” Eadran swung Niarmit’s gaze behind the line of armoured chariots to where the reformed wolf-riders, lurked in columns interspersed with orcish archers.   They were were stationed beyond the reach of Kimbolt’s arrows but close enough to spring to the defence of the tormenting mages should the chariots come under attack. 

“I see them,” Niarmit admitted stiffly, still trotting north with the mounted reserve. 

Eadran clucked in irritation.  “If we move to attack those mages then we will abandon all the advantage of the slope and our dug in defences.  We end up fighting them on almost level ground and we will be overrun.  That is what the enemy wants.  He wants to draw you down.”

“Are you saying that I should pull Kimbolt’s division back, retreat from that position?”

“Of course not, the armoured chariots would follow you up to where the hill gets flatter and again you would have lost all advantage of position.”

“Then what are you saying? Do not advance?  Do not retreat? You mean he should just stand there while his troops are destroyed.”

“Swop your divisions, let that giant Torsden take his people to hold Kimbolt’s position.”

“Fresh meat to be slaughtered by the mages,” Niarmit snapped.   

“To do anything else is to do exactly what the enemy wants, and my first tactic in battle was always to make sure I didn’t do what the enemy wanted me to do.”

“I would say getting to pummel our troops into flaming dust is also what the enemy wants,” Niarmit said.  “Of the three choices you offer, charge, retreat or provide fresh spell fodder, none seems to be particularly to the enemy’s disadvantage.”

“Bravo!” Pietrsen cried from beyond the Helm.

Niarmit swung back to see a trail of smoke rising from one shattered chariot.  “What happened?” she asked as a ragged cheer went up from Kimbolt’s battered troops.

“A mage on our side, must have shot their spell in just as the bastard opened up to fire.  Got a spell to go off inside the thing, blew it to pieces.”

“It must have been a brilliant shot,” Niarmit said.

“More like a very lucky one,” Eadran growled within the Helm.  “We cannot trust in more such strikes of fortunate brilliance.  Look at what ruin is being wrought.”

Bodies lay across the hill side.  There were yawning gaps in Kimbolt’s dispersed troops as blasts of thaumatic energy punched great holes in his dispositions.  There were pockets of protection where the spell casting monarchs had raised shields and flung counter spells, but they were too few.  There were barely a couple of handfuls of sorcerers on Niarmit’s side, and five or ten times that number in the hardened armoured chariots.

“Give the command, girl, swop around the two divisions.”

She scowled within and without the Helm.  “We must strike at them.  We cannot simply offer up more men for the slaughter.  He wants to draw in more and more of our people into this killing zone and bleed us dry.”

“Your Majesty,” Pietrsen cried.  Their brisk trot had carried them as far as the northern tip of Torsden’s division.  Ahead of them lay the hard pressed infantry of Kimbolt’s command; more wounded were being carried to the rear while the dead were left where they had fallen.   But the Master of Horse was looking beyond the troops and the line of armoured chariots to the chateau at the northern tip of the battle, its white walls brightly lit by the early afternoon sun. 

Niarmit followed the direction of Pietrsen’s outstretched arm and saw a flood of figures running at speed from the chateau towards the flank of the baleful row of chariots.

Jay had been only a couple of yards behind of Tordil when they began their mad dash from the shelter of the chateau. But with every stride Jay had fallen further behind with more and more fleet footed elves sweeping by him.

The nearest chariot was turning slowly, the arrow skewered zombies bending their backs to push it round so that its deadly orifice faced the approaching elves.  But the undead were too slow and the elves too swift.  Jay saw the tall elf leap onto the shaft of the chariot. There was a flash of lilac flame which bloomed within the hollow metal cave and then Tordil’s long sword swept at the zombie team, separating heads and limbs and the elf was running after his fellows towards the next armoured chariot and the next.

Jay’s side ached with an incipient stitch before he had even drawn level with the first destroyed chariot.  He glanced inside, two burned bodies lay entangled on the vehicle’s floor one in tattered black robes, the other in red.  A heavy footed thump to his right alerted him to the attack of a zombie whose head had not been quite separated by an elven blow.  The creature held its head steady with one hand, though the half neck width wound at his throat gaped open with every juddering step.  The zombie’s other hand reached out for Jay as it emitted a low keening moan of hunger from one or other of the holes within its throat.

Jay sidestepped the clumsy creature and slashed across the back of its neck with his sword, completing the unfinished decapitation.  For a moment the shambling undead struggled to hold onto its head by the hair, taking a few uncertain steps, but then its decayed scalp gave way and the head dropped to the ground while the body walked on aimlessly with only a  scrap of hair and skin held between its fingers.

There was a hum of bowstrings to his right. Jay glanced round wildly.  A screen of elven archers were strung out in a line loosing a steady stream of arrows at their orcish counterparts who lurked downhill of the infernal chariots.  In open ground, far from the cover of the chateau walls, the elves were proving vulnerable to the orcs’ volleys.  The greater accuracy of the elven archers was off set by their fewer numbers, and Jay saw an elf fall pierced with two black arrows.  Still worse was the lupine howl of the wolfriders forming up behind the orcish archers, making ready to charge the elves down.

Jay swung back to call a warning to the elves that Tordil had assigned in haste to destroy the chariots, but they were far ahead having carved a path through twenty or more of the machines. A pair of chariots faced them now. Flame and lightning belched from the left hand one silhouetting an elf in sizzling fire.

The task was half done but they were out of time.  Jay heard another howl from the wolfriders and the pace of elven archery picked up in desperation.

Gregor, sheltering behind the scintillating shield which Danlak had conjured, heard the crackle as another spell harmlessly discharged.  Along the line of the ridge hundreds of soldiers sought protection behind other conjurations by the returned monarchs.

“It is warm work this,” Danlak grinned at his descendant.  “I fancy the day might have given my brother a little more respect and value for the craft of sorcery.”  He glanced to his left where the Dragonsoul faced down the armoured chariots from behind a shield cast by Bulveld the First.

Gregor smiled back and turned to look at the enemy lines.  Danlak and he were at the southern end of the Salician line.  The elven attack had not reached as far as the chariots facing them, so the concealed mages still launched their murderous blasts.  Their aim and enthusiasm, however, must have been somewhat disturbed by the screams and shouts and blasts of fire to the north where Tordil and his companions were carving a burning scarlet path along the line of armoured chariots.

Gregor scowled.  The elves would get no further.  The wolfriders were closing fast and Tordil would have to retreat or face them in open battle.  The elf it seemed was not for running, well at least not running away.  Another chariot exploded in a lilac blast even as the clash of swords rang out at first contact between elf and mounted orc.

“Bloody fool,” Danlak muttered.

“Captain Tordil is determined to destroy these contraptions,” Gregor replied before he realised that Danlak was not looking at the tall elf’s command.  Instead the lacklustre king was again looking to his right.  Gregor looked to and saw a flood of men flowing off the hillside as the Dragonsoul led the men of Salicia in a charge against the chariots.

“Bloody fool,” he echoed Danlak’s assessment as the Dragonsoul abandoned every advantage of height and position to charge towards an enemy that far outnumbered him.  “Oh crap.”  Thren the Fifth, not to be outdone, had initiated a charge of his own still further up the line. 

There was a blast of a sergeant’s whistle, one short, one long, one short, repeated along the line.   “Seems like the seneschal has decided we should all follow your brother’s example,” Gregor murmured.

Danlak nodded pale faced.  At the whistled command the rest of the men of Salicia, those that remained uninjured by the predations of the mages, began to thunder off the hill down into the valley of destruction.  Gregor clapped the Dragonsoul’s brother on the arm.  “Come on,” he said.  “What’s to fear, we die at sunset anyway!”

Danlak gulped and nodded. Gregor swung his borrowed sword aloft and charged down the slope crying, “for Salicia and the Salved.”

“Shit!” Niarmit exclaimed as the Salicia garrison flooded off the hill.  The ground around the twisted line of broken chariots had become a heaving mass of orcs and elves and wolves and now men too as the Dragonsoul hammered into the fray.  Another tribe of orcs had been despatched towards the fast growing melee, while a full square of the undead converged with slow but relentless progress on the new made nexus of the battle threatening the rash adventures of elf and man with the trump card of overwhelming numbers.

To Niarmit’s left the divisions of Torsden and Vahnce held firm, kept honest by the row of orc tribes waiting patiently for them to abandon their strong position.  “Shit!”  she said again. “We can’t win this in toe to toe hand to hand combat.”

“Then you’d better get your troops out of there,” Eadran drawled in her head.  “Sometime before those zombies arrive would be good.”  

Niarmit scowled at the mixture of re-inforcements which Maelgrum had committed to the unintended melee around the chariots.  He would consider the sacrifice of a few sorcerers well worth the prize of drawing so many of her soldiers to a place where his numerical superiority could be played to advantage.  In this tactical gamble he was relentlessly raising the stakes and she had not the resources to see him out.  She blinked, and looked again. A tiny crevice of opportunity was presenting itself.

“Lord Pietrsen.”

“Your Majesty.”

Niarmit gestured to the open ground between the wolf riders and the reinforcements following them up the hill.  A patch of clear space had opened up partly due to the pace of the wolf riders’ charge, but mostly because the orc tribe and the zombie square had got in each other’s way.  A few zombies had shaken off their masters’ will to charge at their tasty green hided allies.  It was enough to make the two groups had shy away from each other slowing their halting advance.  While their leaders struggled to restore order and direction, the hiatus had created an opening for Niarmit.  “Let’s get ourselves between the enemy and his reinforcements.”  She gestured at the space yawning widely in the wake of the accelerating wolfriders and ahead of their dilatory infantry.

“And then we charge down on the reinforcements?”

“No we charge up,” she said.  “We get down below them and charge up into the back of the wolfriders.”

“Catch them in a salved sandwich,” Pietrsen said approvingly.  “We’ll wipe them out.”

“More important than that, if we can do it fast enough we’ll give them a chance to scrabble back up the hill before the rest of Maelgrum’s army can catch us out of position.”

“Good plan, girl,” Eadran grudgingly admitted.

Jay felt the hot breath of a wolf, flecks of saliva speckled the back of his neck.  He dodged and turned and an orcish blade swept through the air his head had just left.  He fell in desperate evasion pursued by a snapping maw as the wolf bent its head lunging for his throat.  Beyond the beast’s great head, its rider swung a wicked sword at the back of an elf who was hard pressed by another wolf rider.  Jay rolled in the dirt scrabbling away.  A great paw caught his foot, dragging him back. He let himself be swept onto his back, blade jutting skywards as the wolf’s head came down again, fast, vicious, hungry, but incautious. In its greedy bid for Jay’s throat, the animal overlooked the short sword in the boy’s hand.  The wolf’s own momentum drove the blade up through its chin into its brain as it dived in pursuit of its own killing blow.

The dead animal slumped ontop of Jay its mouth spilling blood and spit across his chest.  He tried to pull his sword free as the orc slipped easily from its dead mount’s back and raised a bloodied scimitar to strike at the trapped boy.

A shape flashed across his vision.  The orc dropped its sword clutching at its neck as black blood spurted from between its fingers.  A strong hand reached and pulled him from beneath the wolf’s corpse.  “Thank you,” he mumbled.

“Do you believe I am the Dragonsoul now?” his rescuer cried, eyes twinkling beneath his battle helm.  Jay looked at the tall warrior with the bloodied sword.  He nodded dumbly. The long dead king clapped him on the shoulder.  Then he sped away, stepping over elven and orcish bodies to where the press of battle had grown thickest as the fresh soldiers had pushed the enemy a dozen yards back with the weight of their charge.

Jay knelt to pull his own sword from the dead orc’s throat.  There was a flash and a roar to his left as Tordil worked systematically down the line of stranded chariots.  The tall elf was setting explosive spells within each iron shell, which turned the hard protective armour into splayed petals of twisted metal like a flower blooming long past its prime.  The heavy chariots would provide no protection to any fresh mages who came to use them, assuming always that Maelgrum had more wizards to comit to the cause.

Orcish archers had joined the wolfriders in hand to hand combat at the seething shifting line where the battle raged most fiercely.  It was not a cohesive front, more a rippling sinuous thread that bucked and swayed as a localised weight of numbers pushed back one side to create a salient which then got pinched off breaking up the line of battle into a series of individual group combats.

Jay squelched over sundered zombie body parts and leapt onto the shaft of a broken chariot.  The few feet of height gave him a view over the lines of battle into the heart of the enemy.  A score of yards from the nearest elf an oval window was opening in the air.  His heart quickened.  He knew what that thing was.  More importantly he knew who made them and how he used them.  His hand tightened on the hilt of his sword, he swallowed dry spit and waited for the first sign of Maelgrum’s appearance through a window on a simple forest scene. 

But it was not the Dark Lord.  Instead a dozen red robed wizards flung themselves through the opening, dispensing lethal sorcery left and right. The last to arrive was a tall red bearded man who surveyed the the space his acolytes had cleared with imperious disdain.  Then the gate shrank to a point and disappeared and the anguished cries of flame seared men were added to the grunts and clangs of desperate battle.

A bubble of combat evaporated from the line. Three orcs a man and an elf, circled up the hill as they strove for position in a deadly fight, blind to those around them as they sought an advantage over their immediate foes. The man fell skewered by an orc who leaped round to try to get behind the sorely outnumbered elf.  The move brought him within reach of Jay and the boy thrust his blade into the unwise orc’s neck.  The spray of blood and the grunt provided a fatal eyeblink of distraction to the orc next to him who fell clutching at his belly to withold his insides as a slash of the elf’s sword opened him up. That made it one on one and it was but seconds before the last orc lay dead at the elf’s feet.   The elf gave a curt nod of gratitude, “much obliged, Jay.”

Jay gave a brief smile of recognition and then Elyas was plunging back into the fray. Jay looked over to where the tall figure of the Dragonsoul could be seen swinging his sword so forcefully that none of the enemy could come within two yards of its whirling edge.

A flicker of movement drew his eye. The red bearded sorcerer was also watching the historic champion, victor of Muagmela.  The mage lurked behind his lines unthreatened by any foe, his hands working in some invocation that could bring no good to the Dragonsoul.  Jay turned to call out a warning, knowing it would be too late.