Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (80 page)

The tide of battle had carried Gregor steadily north with every ebb and flow.  He had lost sight of his original companions, as the swelling combat had swept away some allies and gifted others.  Only Danlak stayed with him, pale faced but carving and casting with grim determination.   They broke into a patch of open ground, a trio of orc bodies lay crumpled at the foot of a broken chariot.  A boyish voice was calling shrill above the dull notes of unceasing battle. 

In a glance Gregor took in the swelling scene.  The boy shouting out an alarm. The tall figure of the Dragonsoul laying about him with glorious abandon. The red bearded wizard, hand outstretched in the final gesture of conjuration, fingers pointing right at the oblivious warrior king.

A lethal streak of lighting shot from the sorcerer’s hands straight at the heart of the Dragonsoul.  It flashed and then fizzed into nothing as a shimmering shield of many hues appeared just inches from the king’s side, intercepting the cast.  The noise belatedly alerted the Dragonsoul to his danger, he glanced across past Gregor to the pale face of his brother, himself caught in the moment of casting.  Gregor saw his eyes widen in surprise and then a brief twisting nod of acknowledgement and a smile at Danlak.

The redbearded wizard spun another spell and in a blink disappeared from view to reappear a few yards away, peramabulating by stages further west. There were shouts and a clash of arms.  Gregor could see horsemen wading into the rear ranks of the wolf riding orcs.

“We might just get out of this, Lord Danlak,” he said.

“And my brother will have acquired a greater appreciation of my craft,” Danlak replied, wiping distractedly at a thin trail of blood at the corner of his mouth.  He coughed uncomfortably and the trail grew fresher, stronger, spilling over his chin. Gregor caught the low crouching orc as the creature pulled his blade from Danlak’s side.  His foot crashed into the orc’s face and his sword pinned it to the ground. Danlak slipped silently to the earth. 

The cavalry were spreading out along the rear of the orc lines.  Niarmit glanced down the slope to check how quickly the enemy’s infantry and zombie re-inforcements were closing up.  It was swifter than she had hoped.  They had minutes at most to destroy the orcs they had ensnared and then recover their position.  

She turned with renewed vigour, setting about wolf and orc with the gleaming blade of The Father. The ancient sword carved a swift and bloody path through the nearest orc riders, cleaving limbs and necks with scarcely less ease than it sliced through the air. A red robed wizard turned at the orcish shouts of dismay, scarlet beard and eyebrows bristling as he launched a spell at her. It fizzed into impotent nothingness against the Helm’s defences and Niarmit spurred her horse onwards to close with the sorcerer.  She recognised him, he had stood second to Quintala when the half-elven traitor had taunted her with the threat of the dragon.

He recognised her too, fear showing on his face as he flung another useless spell against her. Only this was not aimed at her.  The Helm’s protection did not extend to her horse which stumbled and fell struck by a bolt of lightning that carried it away in an instant. 

Niarmit rolled and rose.  The second blade was in her off hand, she did not recall reaching for it, but she could feel the eager tug of Eadran’s will desparate to work her body in his own manner of combat.  A wall of orcs confronted her and then disappeared in welter of black blood as the blades slashed through armour, flesh and bone in rapid strikes.

There stood the red bearded sorcerer mumbling some spell his arms stretched out towards her.  Eadran had her now, she surrendered to the Vanquisher’s battle lust and her body ducked and rose and the twin blades shot up between the outstretched arms and scissored outwards. 

Surprise hit the wizard’s face before the pain as his severed forearms dropped to he ground.  He did not even turn to run, so shocked by his ruination and then with a sideways swipe of The Father, Eadran trimmed his red beard all the way to the back of his neck.

As the headless corpse fell back, Niarmit saw Gregor her father and the Dragonsoul kneeling on the ground.  The raging battle was nearly done.  The surrounded orcs destroyed, they must escape before the re-inforcements could trap them.

She ran to them.  “Come, we must get back on the ridge before we are caught in the open again.”  She stopped. Danlak lay between the two monarchs his usual pale face was paler still, apart from the red flow from his mouth.

“See brother the value of my craft,” he coughed.

The Dragonsoul squeezed his younger brother’s hand.

Danlak smiled staring blankly at the sky.  “At last, brother, there is something where I will be first and you second.”

“Wait for me, Danny,” the Dragonsoul said.  “I will see you at sunset.”

Danlak’s mouth moved wordlessly.  He blinked, perhaps in acquiescence and then was still. Gregor cradled his fallen ancestor. The body began to sparkle with a bright yellow glow and then crumbled to dust.

“We must get back,” Niarmit repeated.  “Sound the retreat.” 

The Dragonsoul straightened up, brisk and authoritative.  “You’ll not make it,” he said waving towards the advancing orcs.  “They are too close.” He flung his arm back towards the ridge.  “And that is too far away.”

“We must try.”

He smiled at her.   “You must try.”  And then he was away calling for men of the Salved and waving his sword. Thren the Fifth came to his side sending blasts of fire towards the approaching enemy and then there was the other Chirard.  The Chirard who was neither Kinslayer nor Dragonsoul, overlooked by history yet now he stood with his more illustrious peers and dared the enemy to approach, and they dared not.

Gregor pulled at Niarmit’s arm.  “Come on my girl,” he said.  “Retreat you ordered and retreat you must.”  Yet Niarmit could not take her eyes from the three monarchs and the knot of a hundred or so veterans who flocked to their call and then flooded down the hill at five thousand orcs, and the orcs stepped back.

Her father pulled harder on her arm and at last she looked away just as the desperate charge flung itself into the orcish lines and was swallowed by them.

Jay leapt from the shattered chariot and turned to run.  Tordil was urging the elves north back towards the chateau where they had left nearly a third of their number to hold the position.  The garrison of Salicia were scrambling eastwards back towards the defences they had so laboriously created the night before. Jay ran with the elves until a severed zombie arm chanced to grab his ankle.  He maintained his pace for a couple of strides but then tripped over the elbow of the flailing limb.  The peeled shell of an armoured chariot lay ahead of him, strips of jagged iron splayed out horizontally.  His helmet caught the edge of the iron, the impact driving the nose piece hard into his face.  His eyes were watering, blood was pouring from his broken nose, the sharp dent in the nose guard was digging into the shattered cartilage beneath his brow.  He shook his head and spat blood and tried to get some focus to his swimming eyes.

Light hands scooped him up by his armpits.  He was tossed with careless ease over an elven shoulder and carried with speed if not dignity across the raging battle field.  The pain and the discomfort obscured any clear vision.  He had a vague sense of elven heels kicking beneath his swaying head as his rescuer accelerated despite the burden he carried.  There was a roar to his right and a fetid smell of death.  The orcs and the undead were on the move. 

A noise that he had mistaken for just a change in the note ringing in his ears, revealed itself to be the hum of arrows in the air as he was carried within the covering bowshot of the comrades left in the chateau. 

And then they were vaulting over a low garden wall and charging through the ornate doorway to the chateau with a handful of other elves flitting in past them.  There was a thump as the door was flung to and barred and then a shuddering thwack as something crashed into the other side of it.

He was laid gently on the polished oak floor, its surface now dusty with dirt from the hillside.  “Are you all right, Jay?” his rescuer asked, it was Elyas.

“I dink so,” Jay spluttered.  “By dose is broke dough.”  He had to break off to breathe for not one scrap of air would get through his blood caked nostrils.

Elyas laughed and eased the helmet off his head.  “Well, we have no priests with us, Jay, so you’ll have to trust to my healing prowess.”

Jay blinked and in that blink Elyas gripped his shattered nose between his knuckles and gave a sharp sideways jerk to straighten it.  Jay screamed and then found breath was coming a little easier.

“What are you doing, Elyas,” Tordil strode over.  “First you pick up and carry a boy too clumsy to keep on his own two feet and then you start ministering to his wounds.”  He scowled.  “That last orc was barely feet behind you.”

Jay blinked a little.  Tordil was looking reprovingly at Elyas.  Jay was discomforted at the idea that, in the tall elf’s mind at least, rescuing Jay was a risk Elyas should not have attempted.

“I was returning a favour,” Elyas said.  “He saved me from some orcs when I was outnumbered three to one.”

Tordil sniffed.  “You mean the orcs were outnumbered one to three,” he said.  But he still gave Jay a curt nod of gratitude and cast no more aspersions on the wisdom of Elyas in rescuing the boy.

“How is it out dere,” Jay asked.  “Are the edemy close?”

There was a thump of heavy on the door, and the bar laid across it bowed alarmingly.  Tordil nodded.  “Quite close, Jay, quite close.”

“Your Majesty.”

Niarmit looked up as the Master of Horse rode up with a spare mount for her. 

“Here,” he handed her the reins. “You should not be afoot, quick you must regain the heights.”

Niarmit swung herself into the saddle but shook her head when Pietrsen tried to urge her to ride further uphill.  From the horse’s back she could see over the heads of the battered remnants of the garrison of Salicia as they picked a way through their own traps and defences.

The enemy were streaming up the hill, recovering the momentum that the Dragonsoul’s charge had stolen from them.  The men of Salicia were falling into line, raising their spears again to restore the formidable porcupine formation which had repulsed the wolfriders.  But there were too few of them, the line too thin. It was virtually non-existent to the north where the orcs who had escaped the impact of the Dragonsoul’s sacrificial charge, were moving faster and more freely.

Orcs and undead milled around the chateau despite a withering loosing of arrows from its diminished defenders, while a huge mass of zombies was stumbling into the yawning gap between Niarmit and her elven allies.

“Guard the flank,” Eadran hissed in her head.  “Guard the flank. If they once get on the flat end of the ridge then the advantage of our position is more than halved.”

Niarmit looked up the slope. “Lord Torsden is alert to our danger it seems,” she snapped.  She had espied the Northern Lord’s towering figure atop the ridge leading a third of his division to head off the orcs who even now were working round the denuded northern end of the Salician line.

Eadran sniffed.  “It will do,” he said.  “For now.  But this is a battle of attrition.  Well as we have done we cannot continue to trade at this rate of exchange for we will run out of soldiers before he does.”

Niarmit swung back.  “What of the elves, Captain Tordil is cut off.”

“He must fend for himself, girl.  Half the enemy’s army lies between us and him.  Do not get any silly ideas of charging to his relief in your head.”

“I cannot abandon him.”

“You cannot help him.”

“Stay with the elves,” that had been the seneschal’s advice.  His order even.  Sitting with a few hundred of them in a broken chateau surrounded by undead and orcs Jay was beginning to question Kimbolt’s wisdom.  By malice or misfortune the elves had drawn a quite disproportionate weight of the enemy’s aggression.

Still they weren’t dead yet. With the late afternoon sun creeping towards the horizon, that was an achievement of some note. 

“Sitting down, Jay? That’s the trouble with you humans, no stamina,” Elyas chided striding into the long first floor receiving room.  The elf was speckled with blood of various hues, none of it his own, and there was the grime and dust of battle.  However, that apart he looked as rested as if he had just risen from his bed, rather than spent three quarters of a long summer’s day in continuous battle.

“I was going to count the arrows again,” Jay invented an excuse for his recumbent position.

“That won’t take long,” Elyas said.  “They’re all gone.”

“All?”

“Every last one.” He smiled.  “Don’t worry though, burying them in necromancers has been a very cost effective use of each arrow.”

Jay nodded.  He had seen the impact. Kill one necromancer and a score of zombies would turn on the nearest warm flesh, which was more likely to be orc than elf.  One arrow could cost the enemy forty of his footsoldiers.

But the enemy had grown wise to the tactic and had withdrawn the orcs, while the necromancers lurked beyond bowshot and despatched the zombies to home in on the scent of live elves driven purely by instinct. 

The undead lurked now on the chateau’s ground floor emitting the low keening sound of hunger.  It was not that they breathed or spoke.  It was the shambling movement of their agitated corpses which put a mechanical pressure to force air over dead vocal chords.  Jay had heard the same sound when his father had lifted his grandmother’s body from the bed she had died in.  That had been the first body he had ever seen, and the sound had scared him witless. The last few months he had seen more dead than he cared to count and heard the keening sound of unbreathing corpses a hundred or more at a time.

“What are they doing down there?” he asked.

Elyas shrugged.  “Mostly wondering where the stairs have gone.” 

When the flood of zombies had forced the elves to seek refuge on the first floor it had been the work of a few spells and some judicious sword and axe swinging to sunder the elegant oak staircases.  The undead, those not crushed by the falling timber, now stood forlornly arms raised towards the upper level. The gesture was reminiscent of a toddler desperate for the comfort of its mother’s arms, disconcertingly re-enacted by a rotting body with a ravenous hunger for live flesh.

“They’ve been wondering that for a long time.” 

The elf shrugged.  “We’re in a stalemate.  The zombies down below are as much a blockade to stop fresh attackers coming in as they are a barrier to stop us racing out.

“So even though we’ve got no arrows left, we’re safe.”

Elyas frowned. “I wouldn’t ever say that, Jay.”  He stepped lightly across to the eastern window.  The early evening sun was casting long shadows of the sculpted window frames.  “No,” the elf’s frown deepened as he took a cautious glance through the opening.  “Definitely not safe.”

The dry keening cry of the zombies below them grew louder as the undead moaned to a faster beat.  Jay scrabbled to his knees peeping over the windowsill in his anxiety to see what had alarmed the elf and roused their beseiging zombies.

“What is it, Elyas?” Tordil strode into the room.  “What do you see?”

“There’s something coming, something or someone,” Jay answered for the elf lieutenant, who was shaking his head.

“The Dark Lord has been husbanding his resources carefully,” Elyas said when Tordil joined him at the window.  “And now he sees fit to commit his reserve.”

“Himself included!” Tordil exclaimed.

A column of troops was approaching the chateau.   Men, many of them outlanders by the ragged variety of their weaponary, but some too were of a more regular infantry.  People of Morsalve who had willingly taken arms in the service of Maelgrum.   Jay had seen a few such in his father’s town, but never imagined so many would take the Dark Lord’s tainted rewards.  On either side of the column rode a squadron of cavalry the uncouth outlanders to the left, showy traitors to the right.

But it was not the mounted warriors or the fresh infantry that drew a tremor of nervousness from the tall elf’s mouth.  It was the tall dark shape walking steadily at the column’s head pursued by a trail of mist that cascaded from his arms and shoulders. Maelgrum himself was come.

Jay gripped the handle of his knife more tightly.  His nostrils were filled again with the stench of death that Maelgrum exuded, an olfactory echo of the day his brother and his mother, his sisters and his father had all died and Maelgrum laughing as he tormented them all and made Jay the cruellest sharpest implement in his armoury of torture.  A bare fifty yards separated him from the creature he had vowed to slay. 

Spells showered down from the upper stores of the chateau as elven mages flung all their craft at the undead wizard.  Yet all the bolts and blasts of fire and lightning fizzled into nothingness before they got within twenty foot of their target. 

Maelgrum beckoned and a score of zombies shuffled eagerly across the chateau’s garden, strewn with dead orcs and sundered undead.  The Dark Lord raised his hands like a priest bestowing a blessing and the zombies turned and lurched back to the elves’ strong point.

“What is that smell?”Jay spluttered, for there was a new reeking odour that quite masked the stench of rotting corpses with something finer and more volatile.

Tordil shot a jet of lilac flame at one of the zombies and it erupted in a blazing column of fire whose flames leapt as high as the towers of the chateau. It was a blaze so fierce and brief that the zombie took barely another step before it was consumed all to ash crumbling to the ground.

“Get the others,” Elyas shouted. ”Do not let them get back inside.”

Another zombie was destroyed the same way and then a third but so close that the flames shot past Jay’s window momentarily blinding him with the immediacy of their brightness.

“Fire starters!” Elyas cried.

“He means to burn us out,” Tordil said.  “Everyone to the east wing, we must take our chances in the open.”

Even the soft footed fast moving elves made the polished floor tremble with their haste.  Elyas dragged Jay by the hand far faster than the boy could run.  They had reached the door of the receiving room when the first zombie went off, a pillar of flame erupting through the wooden floor and kindling everything that might burn into instant incandescence.  

Jay drew a breath and wished he hadn’t as the hot air scorched his throat and then they were out racing across the gallery high above the great hall with its crowd of expectant undead.  Still the fools lunged after the scent of fleeing flesh, oblivious to the destruction that walked amongst them as another of Maelgrum’s incendiary zombies shuffled towards an oak pillar and immediately self-immolated. 

Even the zombies that he had not blessed with his explosive spell were catching fire and doing the Dark Lord’s work blundering as unstable mobile torches against drapes and furniture.