Warlord (52 page)

Trees shook as though mighty things were rattling them at their base. It did not worry Cyrus until he remembered the scale of the trees in this jungle. The line of their disturbance was massive, stretching for miles, and it centered entirely on one direction—the one that led to Amti.

“Here it comes,” Cyrus said, Vara and Longwell easing up behind him. “How long?”

“Half an hour,” Martaina said, “at most. But worse than that,” she said with considerable sourness, “we have to fight at ground level.”

“That’s mad,” Longwell said, shaking his head. “We need Falcon’s Essence.”

“Too few druids,” Cyrus said.

“And not to mention that,” Martaina said, “even if you do use it, if they cast a cessation spell on our defenders while we’re attacking—”

“Splat. Battle over.” Cyrus exchanged a look with Vara. “How many people will we have here in half an hour?”

Her lips went pale, pressed together hard as she allowed a moment to contemplate his answer. “Less than a thousand.”

He looked to the sky and saw the sun beginning to set, then surveyed the jungle before him, with its myriad paths and utter lack of bridges or passes to make defense even marginally easier against the gargantuan titans. “This is either going to be a long night,” Cyrus said, staring into the growing purple dusk, “or a very, very short one.”

The view from the ground was no more encouraging, certainly not with only a few hundred melee fighters spread out around the trunks of the large trees that comprised Amti. Cyrus stood between the tangled roots, wondering if the footing was even a quarter as inhospitable to the titans as it was for his army, and deciding that no, this was exponentially worse for the shorter party.

Gareth slid down the nearest tree trunk, his cloak acting as a sort of sled as he perfectly balanced the angle of the roots as it furled around. He sprang off and landed next to Cyrus, recovering his footing flawlessly as he came to stand next to the warrior.

“Five minutes or less,” the ranger said, pulling his bow off his shoulder casually. “Your glorious battle is coming.”

Cyrus eyed him. “I’m not convinced it’s going to be all that glorious.” The smell of greenery was in the air around them, and the jungle felt close and heavy, not quite steamy but only a few degrees off.

Gareth smiled. “Isn’t your guild founded on these sorts of defenses? All give, no quit, fight to the last?”

“It’s easy to say that, I suppose,” Cyrus said, “and I’ve certainly professed it a time or two myself.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t even mind for my own sake, but … leading these good people into death?” He shook his head. “Not much glory in that.”

Gareth’s face fell. “I convinced them to get as many children and non-combatants out as I could, but … it’s a low number.”

“Every little bit helps,” Cyrus said, pulling Praelior out of its scabbard and kicking at the edge of an exposed root that was almost as tall as he himself was.

“Your help is more than a ‘little bit,’” Gareth said with a faint, fleeting smile. “It gives us a chance.”

Cyrus chewed that one over as thoroughly as the dried meat he’d supped on a few minutes earlier. “I don’t believe it does, not against these numbers.” He nodded to the distance, where the sound of crashing through the underbrush could now be heard easily. “Unless they run right past, these odds are so long that even the most foolish gambler in Reikonos would fail to take them.”

I believe in you
, whispered a familiar voice, faintly, somewhere in the distance.

“What?” Cyrus jolted upright.

“I didn’t say anything,” Gareth said. “Couldn’t think of anything
to
say to that.”

They fell into silence, and once more Cyrus surveyed his impromptu army. Erith lurked by a tree trunk, hiding one of the hollows, barely peeking out. She was the only healer on the field of battle, and so far as he knew, the only one who had not bound herself here in Amti. She watched tentatively as the crescendo of noise approaching out of the west grew ever louder, and the battle lines of the Sanctuary army grew ever more restless. Weapons were clutched in hand, bows were nocked with arrows, and Vara drifted to Cyrus’s side at the last, as he guessed they were no more than a minute from the first of the titans breaking through into sight.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked at a whisper.

He looked at her in surprise. “You’re not?”

She smiled, both impish and sad in one. “It does rather put a halt to that marriage proposal, doesn’t it?”

“I could marry you right here,” he said with a smile of his own, “with battle as the backdrop. It’d be very ‘Warlord of Bellarum,’ really, almost a holy rite—”

“Yet somehow not exactly what I dreamed of in my youth on those exceedingly rare occasions when I contemplated my wedding day.” Her expression softened as the crash of the underbrush grew to a pitch. “How did you imagine it?”

“I didn’t back then,” Cyrus said, staring into the dark of the canopy, no light coming in from above, his eyes only able to see via spellcraft.
Another thing I’ll lose if they cast a cessation spell.
“I never once imagined it—which is probably why I jumped on the possibility so quickly with Imina.” He smiled wanly. “The thought of relying on others … it wasn’t part of who I was back then, so the thought of sharing my life with someone … well …” He lowered his gaze. “It was a little too farfetched for me to believe.” He took her hand. “But now? I can’t imagine my life without you.”

“That’s so precious,” Erith called from her place between the roots. “Kiss her already!”

Cyrus did, but it only lasted a second, perhaps a little less, before the warm, tenderness of her lips was pulled away as the first of the titans broke through the jungle into sight less than a hundred meters away.

There was no exchange of wit when the titans came, no fiery repartee, words thrown and challenges made. The beasts from Kortran carried a branch at their fore with an elf tied upon it, both legs and an arm pinched off, almost limp within its bindings, but his remaining hand pointed out, croaking, “There … there …” directly at the trees of Amti.

The titans charged without hesitation, without pause, without mercy. Cyrus met them, as he always did, on the fore of the battle line, Praelior finding a knee above the metal boots of his first attacker. His attacker faltered at the strike, failing in his counterattack, an unarmed slap of the hand. The titan tumbled down and was stabbed through the face by Longwell.

A blast of force from Vara spit into the face of the next titan coming at Cyrus, slamming him back into a tree and splitting his skull with a mighty crack. He slid down the bark, dropping his prize of the elven hunter on the stake, and the poor man went face down in a root.

The ground was thick with roots, and it made for an uneven charge for the forces of Sanctuary, vaulting the living wood obstacles before them even as the titans walked easily over them. Cyrus found himself battling for breath as he took down his next foe, the titan hordes coming as exactly that—a horde, not lines of an army, led into the fight by a tortured man on a stake, with much cheering, like a hunt with near-wild dogs and men that Cyrus had once had the misfortune to witness.

Even now, the titan jeers filled the air in that peculiar language of theirs, full of glee and rage all at once. The smell of them was in the jungle air now as well, musty and deep, the first few dead adding their own particular scent to the early night air.

Cyrus severed a hand that reached for him, fighting furiously against all threats. Calene lanced an arrow into the face of that titan, sending him flinching back. Menlos Irontooth followed it with his wolves, attacking the exposed ankles of this particular titan.

The line of battle was already chaos, though not somehow as bad as it had been in the Heia Pass. The titans fell at a faster pace here, even without spellcaster magic at Sanctuary’s easy disposal. Cyrus watched three titans turn on their brethren, and knew as a fourth and fifth joined the fray on the Sanctuary side, that J’anda Aimant had entered the battle.

Still, the titans were relentless, flooding into the battlefield as they had into the arena in Kortran, enthusiastic if not skilled, trying with everything in them to overmatch their tiny prey and constantly outmaneuvered by them nonetheless.

“Sure you don’t want to do that wedding now?” Cyrus shouted as he launched himself up and landed on the back of a stooped-over titan’s neck. He plunged Praelior into the sweet spot between vertebrae, and exited with a leap before the titan toppled over.

“I hope you’re not asking one of these dead beasts to marry you,” Vara called back from some fifty feet away. “Because I would expect that from the Guildmaster of Goliath, but we hold you to a somewhat higher standard in Sanctuary.”

“Is that so? Then should I take aim for royalty of some sort, then? Perhaps hold out for a dwarven princess or some elven royal—?”

“It’ll be a frosty day in the Realm of Fire before you get any offers from elven royals, I’d wager, other than a few opportunists who have more issues with their father than even you do,” Vara said, leaping from the shoulders of one titan that she had just struck down to the next. “But I might know a certain elf of some importance that could be interested.”

“Is that so?” Cyrus asked, splitting a leg from a titan to the howls of his victim.

“Don’t be coy,” Vara said, smirking as she vaulted down, “or you might lose your ‘last hope.’”

“Never, shelas’akur,” Cyrus said, not entirely able to cover the anxious feeling that followed his braggadocio, and instead planting his blade in a leaning titan’s skull. “Never leave me.”

The titan numbers were increasing, but Cyrus saw little sign of his own troops growing in number. A trickle of Sanctuary fighters were coming out of the trees of Amti, a few at a time, and then they stopped altogether for some several long moments, during which J’anda, still unseen, seized a never-ending procession of titans and reversed them upon their own, single-handedly holding off any assault from their left.

“This lack of reinforcements is concerning,” Cyrus muttered as he was kicked by a passing titan. He clipped a tree and caught himself on one knee, the wind knocked out of him.

“Perhaps your people thought the better of throwing themselves into this fruitless endeavor,” Gareth said, running past in a flash, yanking Cyrus back to his feet as he went.

“We’re not that smart,” Cyrus replied, straightening up with some effort.

“You’re also not alone!” came the call from above. The armor of Alaric Garaunt came raining down into battle from on high, the axe of its new wearer brandished above. Terian’s blow found the back of a titan’s neck and separated it cleanly as the white knight swept down to Cyrus’s level on the wings of a Falcon’s Essence spell.

“Glad to see you,” Cyrus said with a grin as Terian sped down to him. “Might not want to rely on that for loft when the cessation spells come to call, though.”

“True enough,” Terian said, and with a wave of his hand his boots slapped back to the earth. “Sorry for the tardiness. It took a few minutes for your spellcasters to coordinate and bring mine in, but …” He grinned. “Now we’re here, and more of us are coming all the time.”

“Then maybe we’ve got a little more of a chance,” Cyrus said, with a grin of his own, as the next wave of titans burst through the trees in front of them.

“I wouldn’t call it even just yet,” Terian said, and now he was back to grim. “You got a plan for ending this?”

“I was thinking we’d just fight to the death.”

“Oh, hell.” Terian puckered his lips. “I should have known.” But he swung his axe, delivering death to the next titan, and the one after that, his army falling in behind him, a trickle of spellcasters joining them now in the battle at the trunk of the trees.

The titans came thicker now, and more armored, sweeping in under branches as warriors and rangers of Sanctuary and the Sovereignty fought side by side. They gave against the onslaught, surrendering ground and pressing back, and Cyrus was reminded of the days of Luukessia once more, of the ceaseless drive of the scourge to knock them back.

And that didn’t end so well for us
, Cyrus thought,
with just as implacable a foe, but weaker, and more easily channeled along controllable lines
. He watched Vara blast a titan with her force spell so hard that its neck was snapped back and was broken.
Still, though … we aren’t failing … perhaps we could—

“YAAAAAAAAAAH!” the low, rumbling shout came from somewhere above, and the entire battle seemed to pause as everyone looked skyward. A black blur, a dark shadow in the night came falling down like a stone, crashing into the back of a titan’s neck and hammering him into the ground with fury. Rocky hands rose up and pummeled the already downed titan, shattering skull and drawing blood.

“I AM LORD FORTIN THE RAPACIOUS OF ROCKRIDGE!” the rock giant shouted, voice crackling in fury over the suddenly quiet jungle. “DEFENDER OF THE EMERALD FIELDS AND GRAND KNIGHT OF SANCTUARY!”

“I don’t remembering anyone bestowing him that particular title,” Vara said into the silence.

“I’ll do it later,” Cyrus said, transfixed as everyone else by the rock giant’s entry to the fight. “I like it.”

“IF YOU SEEK BATTLE, GLORY AND DEATH, SEEK ME, COWARDLY TITANS!”

With that, the fray resumed, but in a suddenly unbalanced shift. Titans that had been advancing toward Cyrus and the others, even some who had been in the throes of combat, broke loose and turned toward Fortin, coming at him in a knot, fighting amongst each other for their opportunity at the rock giant’s challenge. Cyrus watched a few breaking into fights with each other, jabbing out eyes, crushing throats, throttling their fellows, and he was hard pressed to say whether J’anda had even had any sway on this particular outbreak of feuding among the titans.

Cyrus fought to the side as well, the rock giant still in the midst of a thrashing ocean of titans. Body parts were being flung, knees were being crushed, and the anguished screams of titans were enough to suggest to Cyrus that the rock giant was in the thick of it, but he hurried along nonetheless, plunging his sword into the backs of exposed knee joints and slitting throats among the fallen in a race to move with the line into place to defend Fortin—