Wrath of a Mad God (32 page)

Alenburga said, “Good. They’re retreating.” He turned to Zane. “Ride to the front and remind our eager Tsurani captains that they are not to enter the last valley at the river’s head—if they get that far.” As Zane saluted and turned to run to his horse, the old general added, “And try not to get killed.”

“Sir!” Zane snapped a salute as he left the makeshift command post.

Erik said, “That went well.”

“Yes,” said Kaspar. “But it was just one battle.”

“And unless the Dasati are total idiots,” added Alenburga, “they won’t let themselves be drawn into a cluster like that again. I won’t guess how they think, but if I was their commander, I’d
be plotting how to get my own cavalry into the fight.” He let out a sigh. “It’s been a long day.” As the sun lowered in the west, he asked, “Do we know if they fight at night?”

“We have no intelligence on that,” answered Kaspar.

“Your young Jommy is right. We cannot make assumptions about how these creatures think and act.” Alenburga turned to those officers waiting behind the three senior leaders of the Empire’s army and said, “I want the field cleared of the wounded as quickly as possible, and I want defensive positions erected even faster. We will act as if we know another attack is coming after sundown.”

Another attack came after sundown.

In the vast tunnel, Pug held up his hand and they waited, listening. He had given himself the responsibility of moving ahead of the vanguard as an advance scout, because he was, except for Magnus, the most powerful single being in this invasion force. Magnus had been stationed next to Valko and told to protect him at all costs.

There had been a constant background sound as they entered the tunnel, and it had got increasingly loud as they passed near tunnels that Martuch said led from the palace complex to the Black Temple, in a rough latticework fashion. It was hard to put a name to the sound, but it caused Pug’s skin to crawl.

Pug motioned for the force behind him to move along, and over a thousand Deathknights loyal to the White came forward, moving with deliberate haste. No one knew for certain exactly how long the palace guards would be occupied with the slaughter of the city’s vast population, but this attack had to be conducted before any significant number of them returned from this mission of death.

Pug detected movement ahead, and felt his pulse race as he anticipated, at long last, a direct confrontation with the Deathpriests who protected the TeKarana. While preparing for this raid, Pug had asked Valko and the others for as much information as they could provide about what they might encounter. It proved to be sketchy at best. Little was known beyond this old, abandoned subbasement complex attached to the closest access to the TeKarana’s private complex within the Great Palace. The TeKarana was served by a thousand dedicated Talnoy—Pug
didn’t feel the need to share his knowledge of the real Talnoy still hidden on Midkemia, or that these were merely men in armor that looked like the ancient captured gods of the Dasati. He lived in a community almost completely isolated from the rest of the beings on this planet. He had his own staff who were separate from the larger palace staff of Effectors, Facilitators, Interlocutors, and other minor Lessers, and a harem of females chosen from the better houses in the Empire. There had never been any record of his acknowledging a son. Moreover, it was unclear when this TeKarana had taken over from his predecessor and how. Rumors abounded, but no one knew the truth of it. It was suspected that one of the planetary Karanas would be selected to replace the ultimate leader when it was time, but no one outside the innermost society of rulers on this world knew exactly how the system worked.

Pug reached what appeared to be a dead end, a blank wall of the ubiquitous black-grey stone used as the primary building material in the Empire. He motioned for Valko to approach and said, “Is there a way in or do I have to break it down?”

Valko seemed impressed, for the first time since meeting Pug. “You can break this down?”

“Not quietly.”

Valko actually smiled, the first time Pug had seen him do so.

“No, there is a way.”

Martuch and Hirea came forward and the three of them spread out and placed their hands on the wall, feeling for something that Pug could not see, no matter what aspect of his magic-enhanced sight he used. After a few minutes, Hirea reached low and triggered a mechanism. There was a deep but surprisingly soft rumble and the massive wall rolled into a pocket on the right, revealing another passage leading up.

“This way,” Valko said, and Pug and Magnus entered the passageway, toward the palace.

Nakor held Bek back. Bek was dressed in the strangely disturbing armor of the Talnoy, a look very familiar to Nakor from the time he had examined ten thousand of the things hidden in a vast
cavern on Midkemia, an experience bordering on the mystical. But there was nothing remotely mystic about these Talnoy, for each was simply a fanatic, loyal to the TeKarana, wearing ancient armor. The red-trimmed black armor of the palace guards was far less ornate than the gold-trimmed monstrosity now worn by Bek, and both were far gaudier than the real Talnoy armor Nakor had seen. It was as if the Dark One’s servants had felt the need to be more impressive in appearance than those they had replaced.

Nakor had heard the summons to the palace before Bek could respond, and had simply ushered his young companion into an alcove off a storage room, as hundreds of Talnoy guards hurried to answer the call. Bek had not questioned Nakor’s instructions, but Nakor could tell he was getting restless after sitting silently in this tiny room for hours. Softly Nakor said, “Soon. They’ll be here soon.”

“Who will be here, Nakor?” asked the hulking young man.

“Pug and the others.”

“Then what will we do, Nakor? I want to do something.”

“You will be able to do something soon, my friend,” whispered Nakor. “It will be something you like a lot.”

Miranda could feel the fatigue threatening to overwhelm her, yet she forced herself to cast one more spell of scrying. Then her eyes opened wide and her head jerked back as if someone had slapped her.

“What is it?” asked General Alenburga. His eyes narrowed in his sunburned face as he studied her.

“That hurt.”

“What hurt?” asked Kaspar of Olasko.

“They’ve erected some sort of…barrier against scrying inside that thing.”

Two dozen additional magicians had gathered since the end of the first phase of the battle, just before sunset, and they were a welcome sight when the Dasati started their second assault an hour after sundown. The Tsurani had used a different tactic this time, convinced that the Dasati would not err again
and try to charge a fixed position where the Tsurani could surround them.

Alenburga had ordered a company of Tsurani engineers who had arrived toward the end of the battle to erect as many barriers as they could across the opening where the river trail emptied into the plain. The Dasati could still come through, but not in numbers unless they first stopped to remove the barriers, or tried to swim downriver.

Then a dozen heavy ballista and a pair of trebuchets were unloaded from the wagons and erected, just as the Dasati again advanced down the trail. As their vanguard reached the end of the trail, Tsurani archers high in the hills overhead fired down on them, every fifth arrow being aflame, while those operating the trebuchets hurled huge barrels of flammable oil into the pass. The barrels each held fifty gallons of oil, and they were designed to disintegrate on impact, spreading the oil in every direction. It took a few minutes for the fire to begin in earnest, but after it caught hold, it quickly erupted into an inferno that forced many Deathknights into the river where they were pulled under the fast-moving water by the weight of their own armor, or helped to their death by Tsurani spearmen who used their long pole-arms to hold the Dasati underwater as they attempted to reach either riverbank.

After an hour of this, the Dasati beat a hasty retreat up the path.

Now they were attempting to anticipate the Dasati’s next move, hence Miranda’s attempted scrying. “I was never very good at that sort of thing, anyway,” she said.

The four young captains were waiting nearby, all of them showing evidence of fatigue. Zane was nearly asleep on his feet and Tad had to nudge him a few times to keep him alert. General Alenburga noticed and said, “Pass the word to stand down. Set pickets at the edge of the hills, a mile in each direction, and we’ll wait. Find whatever comfort you may and get some rest.”

The four young officers hurried off to discharge their duty and take a break.

Alenburga said to Miranda, “I don’t have any idea how you do what it is you do, but you look as if you could sleep for a month.
Go. I have a tent set up a mile or so to the rear. There’s food and a sleeping pallet there.” He detailed a soldier to escort her, and added, “My thanks to you and the other magicians. I doubt we’d be standing here if it wasn’t for your amazing skills.”

Miranda gave him a wan smile. “Thank you. If you send for me, I can be here in minutes.”

Alenburga cast his gaze in the direction of the Black Mount. “I doubt we’ll be hearing from our new friends before dawn. They may see in the dark like cats, but we’ve given them a lot to think about.” As he watched Miranda departing with the escort, Alenburga said to Erik and Kaspar, “That’s what I’m the most worried about.”

“What they’re thinking?”

“Yes,” said the General.

Erik said, “Something occurred to me during this last struggle.”

“Out with it then,” said Alenburga. “You don’t strike me as the shy type.”

Erik smiled. “I didn’t want to speculate until I saw if they were going to come at us a third time.”

“What is it?” asked Kaspar.

“Why make the second attack? All they have to do is hold us outside the river pass, keep us some distance back, and eventually that sphere is going to encompass this area and they can strike out in any direction. More to the point, why go to the trouble of creating all that slaughter in the first place? Why not just keep expanding the sphere?’

Alenburga ran his hand over his face. “My eyes feel like I’ve got a desert’s worth of grit in them.” He looked at Erik first, then Kaspar. “There are a lot of questions I have no answers to.” He paused, then said, “How did the Kingdom defeat the Tsurani in the first place, is one.”

Erik said, “I’ve studied every record of that war, and the best answer I can come up with is, because the Tsurani weren’t serious about it.”

“A twelve-year war and they weren’t serious?”

“Seems it was merely a side ploy in some big political game they were playing here.”

“I’d hate to see what would have happened if they had been serious,” said Kaspar.

“We’d all be speaking Tsurani from birth, I think,” observed Alenburga. He took a deep breath. “But none of the descendants of the Tsurani will be left to speak Dasati if we don’t prevail.”

“What next?” asked Kaspar.

“We wait.” The General looked around for a likely place to sit and found a large rock where he could lean back. He sat down and said, “The really bad thing is that I have no idea what to expect next from those monsters in the dome. The good thing is that come early morning tomorrow, we’ll have three times the soldiers to throw at them.”

“Something tells me,” said Erik, sitting down nearby, “we’ll need them.”

Kaspar remained standing and looked toward the sphere as if he could somehow see it in the dark. Softly he asked, “But will that be enough?”

Joachim of Ran was nervous. He was nervous every time it was his turn to watch the ten thousand motionless Talnoy. He was also nervous because the only other magician from Sorcerer’s Isle who was on duty was no older than he was—barely twenty-six years of age—and he had even less experience as a magician, and was sound asleep outside.

The Conclave had been taking care of these…things, for some time now, Joachim assumed. He didn’t really know much beyond his instructions, which were to watch them in shifts with other magicians who came and went from Sorcerer’s Isle, do nothing, but make sure someone knew if anything untoward occurred in this vast cavern.

Joachim was not entirely sure what exactly “untoward,” meant, but he was entirely sure he wouldn’t like it if he knew. He couldn’t help how he felt; these motionless things in the vast cavern below were unnerving, standing row upon row like monstrous toy warriors, each in identical armor, each as unmoving as the rocks surrounding—

He blinked. Did one of them move? He felt his heart pound
and his skin puckered with gooseflesh. He looked hard, but he could see no sign. It must have been some trick of the night, a game of the mind, he decided, yet still his heart raced.

Should he call Milton, the other magician? Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Joachim thought he would only be mocked if he did. He applied himself to needlessly adjusting the single torch stuck in the makeshift sconce above him, and decided it was the flickering of the light that had caused the illusion. No wonder the mind played tricks. He was once more astonished at how far the illumination carried in this otherwise pitch-black hole in the ground. He took another deep, calming breath, and turned his attention back to the tome in his lap. After his first stint of guard duty here he had decided to at least keep current on his studies. He was not the finest scholar in the Conclave and needed to refresh his memory on the more convoluted cantrips, and he had particular trouble with the ones written in Keshian, as he was not a very good student of languages.

He turned his attention to the page and after a while became lost in trying to master an especially odd phrasing. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw another flicker of movement and his head jerked up. In the front row of the long line of Talnoy…

He had to get hold of his imagination. Everything was exactly as it had been moments before…or was it? Heart thumping, unsure of what to do, Joachim waited, watching for any other movement.

The first of the TeKarana’s guards to spot Valko’s forces died before his mind could register what it was he saw. Pug had decided against subtlety at this point and simply used a very basic spell of physical control to throw the man as hard as he could against a distant stone wall. It had the same impact as if he had fallen five hundred feet onto hard rock. The sound of it, certainly, was bound to alert others down the hallway to the fact that something was amiss. The splatter of orange blood covered yards in every direction.