The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (76 page)

North of Dorling—Ser Hartmut

T
he army of the Wild came out of the woods behind the Ings of the Wolf like dark water pooling in low ground, and saw the Emperor’s army drawn up on the high ground opposite them, above the Inn itself, covering their camp.

Ser Hartmut gathered a dozen of his best lances and Ser Kevin and rode out along the edge of the long grass to reconnoitre. Minutes later, they retreated into the shadows of the woods with two men and six horses dead, and the screams of the Emperor’s Vardariotes pursued them like laughter.

Ser Hartmut had a brief conference with Thorn and then filled the grass with boglins and other creatures as they came up. The Vardariotes and their psiloi conceded the ground slowly at first, but when one end of the psiloi line was over-run by boglins and eaten, the whole line gave way and the lower fields were quickly cleared.

Ser Hartmut’s sailors and Guerlain Capot’s brigans began to dig a fortified camp on the first good rise, as close to the Emperor’s lines as they dared.

Ser Louis came up, red in the face from a hard pursuit against the elusive Vardariotes. He’d lost no men, but caught no easterners.

“Your face would curdle milk, cousin,” he said, as his squire took his great helm.

“The Emperor beat us here, for all that our dark allies promised us his horses would be dead and his men forced to walk,” Ser Hartmut said. While he was talking a pair of his brigans dragged a Morean—swarthy,
middle-aged, a tough man with a long beard—in. His hands were bound, and his legs ran with blood.

“Got him off the bugs,” one man said. “Milord. That is, we killed the bugs and took him, because you said you wanted prisoners.”

Ser Hartmut nodded. He snapped his fingers, and Cree-ah, his latest squire, a Huran boy, came at a run.

“Pay them—a silver soldus each.” He nodded.

Cree-ah bowed, reached into his master’s purse and paid both men. He was a northern Huran, and he seemed to feel it was a great honour to serve the famous knight.

Ser Hartmut looked at the bleeding Morean. “Tell me about your army,” he said.

The man frowned.

“Find someone who speaks Archaic, have him question the man, and if that’s not enough, torture him. Threaten to give him back to the boglins.” Ser Hartmut laughed grimly. “That ought to be enough threat for any man.”

He was brought a cup of water and he sat on his stool and watched the imperial army at the top of the ridge. “He beat us here,” he said, to no one in particular. “But now he’s waiting. Can he be fool enough to fight?”

There was a rapid displacement of air, and then Thorn was there.

Ser Hartmut made a moue of distaste. “Did you hear me, and come?”

Thorn grunted. “No. I cannot hear you from a mile away. Not yet. I came for my own reasons. Tell me what you propose.”

Hartmut looked around. “Where is your master?”

Thorn grunted again. “Close. We are on the ground that is claimed by one of his peers. He is very tense.”

Ser Hartmut pointed up the hill, where men were digging rapidly, deepening the ditch in front of ramparts already eight feet of packed earth and logs high.

“It will not get any better. Unless we wait here for the siege train, in which case this is our whole summer.” Hartmut shrugged.

“I am, if needs be, a siege train,” Thorn said. He gestured with his staff and spoke some slow, old, dark word.

Nothing happened.

Ser Hartmut raised an eyebrow. “Be that as it may,” he said, “we may as well attack before they are reinforced. Right now we have heavy odds—four or five to one, at least.”

“My skywatchers tell me that there is another force behind them on the road—all afoot. My master killed their horses.” He bent slightly at the waist. “We could send your humans further east, moving quickly—cut off this force and destroy it.”

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “No. Send something else. These are soldiers, Lord Sorcerer. If you leave them alone, they’ll get you, one way or
another. They are cunning and they have thousands of years of experience behind them. I am your only tool against them—your boglins won’t even take up time dying.”

“So you insist,” Thorn said.

“I do. And so much for your vaunted siege train.” Ser Hartmut finished his water and rose.

He was knocked flat by the concussion, and suddenly the world seemed to swim before his eyes.

Men boiled out of the enemy camp like bees from an overturned apiary, and smoke rose, and dust so thick that they could see nothing.

As the dust began to clear, it was obvious that the enemy had formed all his cavalry at the head of his camp and the infantry was busy—on something. There was fire.

“A small token of my efficacy,” Thorn said. “Five hundred weight of rock hurled farther than a man can ride in fifty days.” He shrugged.

“You threw a huge rock into their camp?” Ser Hartmut asked. “Well—look at them now. All formed for an attack. They know their business. Never fought imperials, but one hears things.” He nodded. He motioned to his own men, and Capot appeared in an old arming jacket, smoking a Huran pipe.

“Double the guard. And keep a double watch at all times, with cranequins spanned and ready. Are my orders clear?” Ser Hartmut was warming to the situation. A dire challenge.

He looked up the hill again. “Tomorrow, I’d like to try their works,” he said.

“With your soldiers?” Thorn asked.

“With your bugs,” Ser Hartmut said.

In the morning, Ser Hartmut marshalled the northern army as best he could, in three thick lines that covered the first slope of the green grass of the hills. The first line, according to his notions, was composed of fodder—boglins and sprites and the little rat-like things with enormous teeth that seemed like lightning-fast dogs. In the second line he put all the men except his knights—willing or unwilling—the Huran and the tame Sossag and the other Outwallers who had come for loot, for fame, or for fear. In the third line, he placed all of Orley’s warband, and the great black stone trolls. His own lances were nowhere to be seen.

Despite which, it was a truly fearsome host.

Thorn reached into the
aethereal
and produced not one, but two great stones that fell amongst the defenders’ works, shattering two days’ work and collapsing one whole front wall of the earthwork that held the right flank of the imperial army closest to the road.

Ser Hartmut released his first line and they went up the great ridge,
flowing over the uneven ground like brown oil, the light of the first truly sunny day in a week reflecting from their rigid heads and wing cases.

Near the top, they were caught and flayed by archery and deadly small war machines—springals on carts and small mangonels throwing buckets of gravel. Closer in and sorcery began to play a part as the Empire’s sorcerers loosed their powers point blank into the boglins.

As soon as they commenced, Thorn began to kill them. The first was a pretty second-year university student with a solid knowledge of fire—her fire wind laid waste to hundreds of boglins and no few irks before he reached out for her and subsumed her without even bothering to use his powers. She screamed as her soul was destroyed—the utter despair of the young choked off without hope.

Then he struck again, and again. And again. In the time it took a thousand boglins to die, a generation of imperial mages was swept away, and he took their powers and their knowledge for his own.

Too late, the survivors shielded themselves, having never experienced anything like Thorn. Too late they attempted to find him and isolate him.

He began to rain fire on the forward walls.

Ser Hartmut watched it—and for a moment he thought the boglins were going to carry the earthworks. But they could not—they had enough feeling to experience dread, and their losses were hideous.

At a nod from Thorn—a better ally than he’d expected—Ser Hartmut sent the second line into motion. The top of the hill was a smoking ruin—no grass grew, and eldritch fire had swept the summit of the earthworks and the grass in front of it, defining the killing ground so well that some of the Outwallers flinched on getting to the edge of the charred ground.

But Hartmut’s sailors went forward, and the brigans. A sheet of black fire passed over the crest and into the earthworks, the only sign of its passing a slight disturbance in the ground—and the screams began. This time, few of the springals and the mangonels managed to get off a rock or a bucket of gravel—but most of their crews were messily dead, sliced in half by Thorn’s latest effort.

Now the enemy released their cavalry, and there was a sudden sortie. The earthworks were cunningly built, with careful angles and many hidden passages, and armoured men came from the front even as light horse poured into the flanks at both ends, riding recklessly through the high grass and loosing arrows as they came. The Outwallers at the far left took the brunt of the charge of the Vardariotes, and they died, cut down like ripe wheat.

Hartmut smiled. He had put the least reliable there, the useless mouths, and they served to cushion the blow of the Emperor’s finest light horse. They took time to run and die.

Out of the woods at their backs appeared the flash of metal, and then
his own lances under de Badefol were forming and charging. And from the third line, Kevin Orley’s men ran forward like the Outwallers they were, heedless of the archery in their superior armour.

The Vardariotes didn’t hesitate, but turned, cut their way through the Outwaller line, and ran, but the desperate flight saved only half, and the rest were ground to bloody paste between Orley’s armoured warband and the knights.

Ser Hartmut hadn’t even begun to sweat inside his armour.

He saw a dozen sailors and a pair of brigans vanish over the top of the centre earthwork. And then he saw another man unfurl his personal banner—it flew atop the wall.

He turned to Thorn. “Now we go up the hill,” he said. “I’ll need your trolls for the Nordikaan guard.”

Thorn was black, and no shadow fell from him or on him. “Let us go up the hill,” he said.

But the Moreans had other ideas.

Out on his far right, a column of cavalry in bright silver and scarlet appeared. They had taken their time to work around his right flank, and now they charged—uphill into the unshielded flank of his long assault line of men and monsters.

Hartmut sent his squire to collect Orley and de Badefol and rode himself towards the fighting. Thorn threw a massive working into the front of the bold riders, killing forty of them in a single sweep of his stone talons and as many of his own Outwallers, but the Scholae—for so they were—came on. The right flank of Outwallers—reliable men, southern Huran with good armour and crossbows—was suddenly swept back sharply, and threatened to collapse.

As Ser Hartmut had expected, the Nordikaans, of whom he had so often heard, came over the top of the central redoubt.

With them came a tall man on a magnificent horse. Even a long bowshot away, Ser Hartmut could see the magnificence of his clothes and armour and the dignity of his posture.

The Nordikaans went into his brigans and collapsed them. They tried to stand—their armour was as good or better, but the blond, axe-bearing guard towered over them, and the axes were like scythes for reaping men.

And they had the weight of the hill behind them.

“Thorn!” Ser Hartmut bellowed.

The deadly magus motioned to the ranks of stone trolls—forty of them—who stood like statues at the base of the ridge. “Go,” he said. “Kill them all.”

The lead troll opened his grey basalt lips and roared his challenge, and then they were away, running as fast as a man might charge on a horse, the earth protesting their weight and their stride.

From the woods behind them burst two of the great
hastenoch
and an
even rarer creature—a great brown thing as big as four war horses, with tusks stained by a hundred years of prey and a great transverse mouth with two rows of teeth the size of rondel daggers, and four great feet like those of an oliphaunt’s. Between them, like a wall of horror, was a loose line of Rukh, towering against the afternoon sun.

They flung themselves into the Scholae.

Harald Derkensun watched disaster unfold slowly, as it usually did, and wrap itself around the imperial army like some sort of malign lover.

One of the problems of being in the guard was that you generally knew everything the Emperor knew. So all the sword bearers—the inner guard—knew the Emperor was not supposed to have waited for the sorcerer alone at Dorling, and they knew that repeated messenger birds had begged him not to engage directly without support.

And they knew that the army was weak on healing and magistry because the Emperor had sent all the strongest talents back to help the Immortals, as he insisted on calling them, to struggle over the last of the open passes into the Green Hills, because their horses were dead.

The Emperor sat, perfectly calm, his handsome face serene, his scarlet cloak and boots spotless. He over-rode each of his senior officers, and sent the Scholae to make a flank attack to relieve the pressure on his centre—an admirable tactic, but not one, Derkensun suspected, suited to the current day, terrain, or numbers.

The Scholae obeyed.

In fact, everyone obeyed. Regiment by regiment, the Emperor flung in his army.

Derkensun could do nothing but stand silently and prepare to die. It had become obvious by mid-afternoon that unless the whole army broke, they would be drowned in a sea of monsters.

The Emperor remained serene, showing his military erudition from time to time—commenting on how very like Varo’s arrangements at Caesarae were the enemy’s three lines, and how like Chaluns it was, especially as the enemy was trying to break his centre.

The acting Count of the Vardariotes was an easterner with insufficient command of the language to argue, and too much stubbornness to refuse an order. He led his people out.

Derkensun saw them defeated. The great axe twitched on his shoulder, and then he was still.

Behind the rump of the Emperor’s horse, he chanced a glance no longer than a single heartbeat with Grossbeak. In that one glance, both men knew that there was nothing to be done. Save the arrival of Ser Milus, or the Red Knight, or some other man of authority.