The Legend of Asahiel: Book 03 - The Divine Talisman (62 page)

Finding no more challengers, Torin turned back toward his unit. As he climbed, he peered down the length of the ridge along which their phalanx had been settled. Morgan’s Harrow, Rogun had called it. Heavily pressed at the lower, western elevations. Yet here he stood, just below the Thornspur, a towering, broad-faced bluff serving as an unbreakable anchor upon the eastern heights.

“We should be down there, Commander,” Torin growled, as he shoved his way back through the narrow opening some of his wide-eyed comrades helped clear for him in the stake line.

“We all have our assignments,” Zain argued from his saddle. “And yours is not to go leaping ahead of this regiment.”

“Would you have waited for that beast to tear down our entire barricade?”

“You’re fortunate you weren’t feathered in the back. You’re hardly fitted to take an arrow.”

That much was true. He’d chosen to suit up in only bits of armor: lightweight shoulder plates, vambraces to protect his arms, cuisses and greaves upon his legs, and a studded leather brigandine over his torso. Others might think him mad, but the Sword kept him safer than any heavy armor, which he knew would weigh him down and impede his motions. This cobbled array of metal plates—a stripped-down version of the Parthan style—allowed him the mobility he expected to need.

Of course, that was when he’d thought himself assigned to the thick of the battle line, not set upon some shelf. Below, Rogun and others were engaged in all manner of strikes and counters, seeking to disrupt the enemy flow. Torin should have been down there among them, leading such maneuvers, not standing here in occasional defense of one of the coalition’s most secure positions.

“I might as well be carrying an arrow or two in my gut, for all the good I’m doing atop this ridge.”

Zain regarded him with blunt appraisal. “It does no good to hold the outer lines if you mean to let the inner fall. The general knows what he’s doing.”

And I’m his king
, Torin wanted to blurt. But he wasn’t, of course. Not in any meaningful way. He glanced around at his fellow soldiers, Alsonians all. Most were giving him a wide berth. They were certainly wary of him, but he did not yet have their respect. And he wasn’t likely to win it by usurping their command.

Alone, there was only so much he could do—ready as he was to find out.

“Have a look,” Zain said, beckoning westward. Torin, the Sword still aglow in his hand, stepped near. “There, just above the second cut. If the line
breaks where the general expects, we’ll be the first to close upon the gash.”

“If he knows where it will break, why not reinforce it now?”

“You have to grant them their small gains here and there,” Zain said.

“Channels their focus and helps to funnel their advances. Otherwise, they press the whole line at once, and there’s no telling where it snaps.”

Torin frowned. He saw the sense in the strategy. He did
not
understand why he wasn’t a more direct part of it.

“We hold a position of strategic importance,” Zain insisted, “in more ways than one. I need you fresh, not wasting yourself over every minor challenge.”

“I’m beyond weariness,” Torin boasted, hefting the Sword.

Zain smirked. “I hope so. The battle will find its way to us. Wait and see.”

There was little left but to clench his jaw in frustration. If Zain had the right of it, then Torin owed it to his comrades to play his assigned part. But that wasn’t how it felt. He feared that if they wanted him here, it was because they thought it an area in which he could do the least harm should he turn against them, or fail in some way. Had he not just shown them how wrong they were to shackle him so?

He left the commander astride his horse and turned back to the barricade. From far below, scores of elven Illychar were bounding up the escarpment. He was at first surprised by their thickening numbers, then recalled those who had scampered away moments ago. Evidently, his actions had captured the enemy’s interest.

Zain trotted up behind him. “Perhaps you would be good enough to sheathe that beacon of yours for now,” the commander suggested. “Before you manage to redirect the entire battle’s flow.”

Let them come
, Torin thought. He hadn’t considered that the Sword might prove a lure, as it had against the dragonspawn. Perhaps that was something they could use to their advantage.

Nevertheless, he sheathed the blade as asked, conceding for now that it was best not to unbalance whatever strategies were in place. He had waited this long. If necessary, he could wait a while longer.

He took up one of the surplus bows instead. The barricade was well stocked. Here, near the Thornspur, weapons and ammunition were plentiful, largely because men were scarce. A single soldier could do the work of many from such an elevated vantage, so long as his stores held out.

There wasn’t much use in aiming, Torin soon discovered, for a singular elf often proved too lithe and quick. He and his comrades settled instead for maintaining a general rain through which few danced unscathed. Those who did were eventually slowed by the schilltrons, and felled at the stake line.

A Kuurian reserve unit poured down from the bluff to lend aid against the sudden press. Catapults turned upon the heights, and helped to trigger rockslides that further set the enemy back or kept them pinned. Dust and screams filled the air. Little by little, the rising flood lessened to a trickle.

Whenever the action waned, Torin would turn eye to the greater conflict raging in the valley below. There, close-quartered combatants chewed back and forth. Like the waves of any rising tide, the enemy’s forays ebbed and flowed, but were deliberate in their progress. Torin’s muscles soon ached, grown taut with bitter anticipation. He could not help but chafe at being restrained. Here at last was his chance to prove himself, yet how could he do so while watching from afar?

And then it happened. A series of horn blasts drew Zain’s attention. “Riders!” he shouted. “Double wedge! Flank drive! On my command!”

A nervous chill bloomed in the pit of Torin’s stomach. The line along Morgan’s Harrow had broken, almost precisely where Zain had shown him. Illychar were ripping through, unchecked. Coalition reserves were racing up from the south to blunt the charge, but such a flow, unstanched, would spread. Enemies would sprout up among their regiments like weeds among cobblestones, weakening the entire defense until it crumbled from within.

As promised, their time had come.

Torin raced for the horse picket. The animals were barded and prepped. They seemed fresh and eager. He wondered if they were as ready to die as he.

Within moments, the cavalry line had formed. Torin reined in beside Zain, who studied him before lowering the visor on his helm and raising his sword. “We stay together,” the commander’s faceless voice echoed privately. His sword fell, and he shouted to all, “Charge!”

Down the ridge they thundered, into a black river of shrieking forms. A pair of elves awaited him with bladed halberds. He tried to turn his steed’s head, but did so amid a fountain of blood. The beast whinnied, its dying weight crumpling beneath him and crushing at least one of its killers. Torin kicked free of the stirrups, tumbling into the depths of the press.

He hit hard, legs kicking against a startled enemy, damaged shoulder wrenching partly from its socket. His mouth filled with mud and gore. For a fleeting moment, he felt he must surely drown.

Then the Sword flared in his hand. Its fire coursed through him. He yanked his arm into place and came to his feet swinging. A tempest surrounded him, shrieking with hurricane winds. But he was the eye in the midst of that storm, a perfect center of raging calm.

He lashed out with arcs and sweeps and lunges, given over to a dreadful euphoria. It no longer amazed him. He no longer questioned his ability. Hack, duck, spin, parry, dodge, slice—an instinctual dance without wasted motion. Blades, shafts, armor, bone, limbs—none so much as slowed the Sword’s slashing edge. Crimson flames spurted from the blade with every stroke, shielding the weapon against damage, stain, or blemish. They flashed so rapidly that it seemed the blade and all around it might catch permanent fire.

The same fire had already engulfed him within. He was both lost and perfectly attuned. He knew precisely where he stood. He felt every motion around him. Their charge had cut deep. Already, the enemy drive was faltering. It no
longer seemed to matter. All he cared about was the unbridled surge of power rushing through him, controlling and yet obeying him. All that mattered was knowing none could withstand the divine energies he had unleashed.

The surrounding press thickened. His focus cored inward. Enemies assailed him with hate and lust and madness, yet those same emotions welled up from within. Unbidden memories fueled his feral cravings, of those who had used or manipulated or offended him in some unforgivable manner. Chief among them: Itz lar Thrakkon. He wanted to howl, recalling the helplessness he had felt while in the clutches of his Illysp self.

He was helpless no longer.

With each kill, Torin felt ever more alive. A goblin came at him, and went away shrieking. An ogre waded in from the side, only to end up grasping at the severed stumps of its legs. In their eyes, he continued to see the ghosts of former enemies. There had been others before Thrakkon. The wizard Soric, the renegade Darinor, the bandit Traver…

This last caused a shift in his thoughts and a wringing in his heart. All of a sudden, his focus was on those he had lost, friends and companions he had failed. Their faces flashed in his vision. Some, he had barely known. Others had meant more to him than he could fully comprehend. If only he could bring back those who had given their lives. If only he could return to those left behind.

They came and went, all but Dyanne. The Fenwa Hunter stood beside each of them. No matter where he turned, he met with another image, another memory of their time together. He might have laughed. He did not even know why he felt for her as he did. There was her stunning beauty, her confident bearing, her infectious smile…yet these but scratched the surface of how she made him feel, about himself and the world around him—a trove of emotions he could scarcely look at, let alone examine, given the intensity of their luster.

Whatever their source, he’d been a fool to guard them so. An oyster hoarding its pearl, he’d left it to her to pry open his unspectacular shell. She hadn’t. And what might have been a treasure, if revealed, would forever now be his to choke on.

Illychar encircled him in a grinding crush. He slew one, then another, and another—hacking, hewing, dismembering in cold, remorseless fury. How hard would it have been, he wondered, to open his mouth and reveal his heart? What could that have cost him? What was he left with now that he’d been so afraid to lose?

He felt as if perched upon a precipice, and realized abruptly that he must check his emotions. He could not afford to be carried off by them as he had before. Already, he was drifting northward into the heart of the Gaperon, leaving the defensive lines behind. Part of him wanted nothing more than to continue on, scouring the earth of any who rose against him. But striking out alone had led only to defeat and capture in battles past. Not this time.
This time, he would remain with his companions. He would be their anchor, helping them to hold their lines. He would carry all—not just himself—to victory.

Behind him lay a bloody swath of mutilated corpses, swept under already by a trampling rush from all sides. Grimacing in lustful defiance, he began making his way back along that path. Coalition soldiers rallied to his side, faces awash with courage and awe.

He heard Rogun’s voice. “Zain! Hold the breach! Torin, with me!”

Torin turned his head and spied the Alsonian general, still mounted atop his rearing stallion. The horse was dangerously lathered, and bleeding from a dozen wounds. A wonder it hadn’t yet been killed. Grooms and stable boys back at Krynwall had claimed it an immortal hell-beast. Perhaps their superstitions were true.

He recognized, then, the source of Rogun’s alarm. While the line had pinched in upon itself to defend its wound, another had opened farther west, at the anchor point of Tonner’s Fang. The troops there had been flanked and surrounded upon their squat plateau by a brigade of giants, who must have made their incursion while the coalition’s focus lay elsewhere. Lose the Fang, and the line here would become like a sail without a mast.

Rogun wasn’t waiting, but charging ahead, shouting at his troops to clear a path while relying heavily upon his armor to deflect any blades that raked at him. Torin gave chase afoot, making his way west along the front, strafing the enemy as he went. A slick tangle of severed limbs and bloodied trunks lay strewn upon the ground—already sodden and treacherous from the previous day’s rain. Upon the heights, the earth had at least had
some
opportunity to dry. Here, daylight scarcely touched a slough of mud and blood through the constant, writhing stampede. At times, it was like fighting in quicksand; at others, like dancing across a mound of wet stones. For many, a single false placement of toe or heel proved fatal.

None of that could slow Torin’s pace. He leapt and slid and spun, but with a flawless balance born of his preternatural awareness. So long as he held his focus, no earthly obstacle could come between him and his goal.

Rogun, however, was already climbing the plateau, his steed’s hooves digging their way up the rise. For a moment, Torin regretted the arcing path he had taken along the face of the battle line. For all the damage he had inflicted, the swarm continued its press, unabated. He might have done better to follow the general through the parting ranks of their own men, and thus reach the Fang more quickly.

He growled and sliced and continued on, refusing to bemoan another decision made. He’d already wasted half his life, it seemed, wondering vainly where a path not taken might have led.

Reaching the Fang’s jutting face, he finally turned south, seeking the nearest trail to its heights. He chose a narrow, crooked track upon the eastern flank swarmed over with Illychar. Some fell back against him, dodging missiles hurled from defenders above. But those defenders, it seemed, were
quickly overwhelmed, for the line of assailants soon pushed steadily up the knifing switchback. Torin went with them, carving through those that turned to confront him, reducing their weapons and bodies to scraps of raining deadwood.