Before him stretched row after row of his own soldiers, progressing down toward the established point of deployment. But beyond them the field was empty. Bare. A pale and dry expanse, dotted only with occasional shrubs and acacia trees. There was no massed army. Aliver yanked his spyglass from his chest pocket. In the distance the enemy camp sat quietly, dense with shapes and shadows he knew to be people. Fires sent plumes of smoke up here and there, straight lines that only gradually angled to the east. They were there, but they showed not the slightest sign that they intended to fight this day. Had there been a misunderstanding? Was the truce meant to last for more than two days?
“What are those?” Mena asked.
The moment she posed the question Aliver saw them. There were a few objects on the field, but at first they barely drew the eye. Compared to the host he had expected to see, these objects required a new focus, so much smaller were they in scale. At least, so they seemed until he studied them more carefully. There were four crates lined across where would have been the front ranks of the enemy army. They were built of wood and reinforced with an outward skeleton of thick metal beams. They stood as tall as two or three men and stretched about a hundred strides in length.
Within a moment or two of study Aliver felt his pulse ramping up toward higher speeds. There were things inside the crates. He could not see what, but he could feel them. He sensed motion inside, felt the bulk of some hidden life-form pressed tight against the cages-yes, they were cages-that held them. He worked his jaw as if in preparation to deliver an order. Nothing came yet.
Dariel said, “How kind of Maeander to leave us presents. A peace offering, perhaps?”
Aliver did not answer.
A half hour later they stood before the front ranks of their army, Oubadal’s Halaly warriors closest to them. They were always the first to muster for battle, proud race that they were. Behind them the entirety of their force stood at the ready. They were all in position now, looking like the same colorful array of diverse persons and garish garments that had presented themselves the first day. The crates stood but a hundred strides away. From this distance Aliver could see that a handful of men clustered around each container. Judging by the look of them they were not warriors. They wore simple leather garments of brown from head to toe, drab uniforms that blended with the sandy landscape. Some of them carried pikes with barbs at the ends. These were long, unwieldy weapons, not the type of thing intended for use on humans. Not one of them looked like a person of authority, nor was there any sign even of a Meinish officer, much less Maeander himself.
“Have we a plan?” Dariel asked.
As ever, there was a twist of ironic mirth in the question. Aliver liked this about his brother, but he did not get a chance to answer him. The near side of the four crates opened at the top corner and tilted forward. The handlers tugged them open with ropes. They jumped away as the sides slammed down to the ground, stirring up clouds of dust that billowed around the openings, hiding whatever shadowed inside. The handlers circled around to the sides of the structures. They snatched up their pikes and held them defensively before them.
Aliver swallowed, waited. He could think of nothing else to do, not until he knew what he faced. The clouds drifted away, and there was nothing but the dark geometry of square openings. He felt the held breath of his entire army.
“There,” Mena said, “the one at the eastern edge!”
Yes. There was movement. Just a highlight back in the shadows at first, but then a muzzle pressed out into the daylight. A flat snout with two flexing nostrils, it had a swinish character to it, with such a crosshatched confusion of barbed tusks that it was hard to say which belonged to the upper or lower jaw, just that these mouth parts hung higher than a man’s head and were longer than an entire boar’s body. It came forward slowly, as did the others, Aliver knew, though his eyes stayed fixed on the first.
The creature was massive. The distance did nothing to hide this fact. Its eyes sat close together above its snout, a hunter’s gaze, telescoping vision. Its forelegs were swinelike, shoulders joints of muscle and bone like nothing he had seen before. Its upper spine jutted up as if to push through its flesh. Ridges ran down its back toward a rear that sat much lower, with short, stout hind legs, bunched with fibrous bulges. They were a sprinter’s legs. It wore a natural armor plated across much of its torso, calloused lumps that looked like enormous warts that been sanded into calcified plates.
Aliver knew what he was looking at. The rumored beast. The weapon a few had named but nobody had reasonably described. An unnatural, garbled form of life, worse, by far, than any laryx. A creature of foul sorcery. He gave orders for the troops to back away. Perhaps there was no need to fight the beasts. They were hundreds of paces away. If the army just backed up and over the rise, quietly, slowly…
One of the creatures, the first to emerge, bellowed. The other three answered him. All four of them raised their heads, scented the air. They focused their eyes on the mass of humanity stacked before them on the slope, row after row. The sight excited them. The dun-colored keepers stood to the side and behind them, their pikes at the ready, but the creatures ignored them.
Aliver reissued the order to back away. Such a maneuver was not easily accomplished, though, not with so many people to coordinate. They had barely moved at all when the creatures-the antoks-began to approach them at a trot. The sight of them was enough to panic the army. Soldiers who had fought bravely the days before turned and ran. Some dropped their weapons and tried to climb over others to get away. All three of the Akarans shouted for calm. Aliver reversed the order to retreat and tried to get them to form up, turn around, and face these things with weapons ready. Some took up his call, but not all.
Thus the antoks arrived amid a grand confusion. They barreled right into and through the tight-packed humanity, their cloven feet beat the earth as if it were a skin drum, vibrating with each staccato impact. They squashed people underfoot, knocked them back, raked their jaws from side to side. They snapped people up from the ground and hurled them, bloody and screaming, into the air. The four each cut a different path of destruction. At times they went to their slaughter with such frenzy that they simply followed their nose on a course that could only be random, looking, strangely, like puppies in their boundless enthusiasm. On other occasions they worked together, with focused cunning, schooling their quarry like swordfish slicing through anchovies. They moved in bursts of speed entirely beyond the soldiers’ capacity to match or escape. They left scarred paths behind them, jumbled with the shattered bodies of the dead. The soldiers brave enough to face them with weapons drawn could do nothing. Arrows and spears skittered off their armor. Swordsmen could scarcely get within striking range without being trampled.
One of them passed so close to Aliver that spit from its muzzle splattered his face. By the time he had wiped the blood-tainted liquid from his eyes the creature was far away, raging. The prince’s gaze fell on a woman just a few strides away from him. She sat upright in a strange, broken-backed position. Her body had been smashed at her pelvis and pressed down into the ground. Tears rimmed her eyes and her lips moved, saying something he could not hear. Her arms tried to make sense of things, the lay of the land and her position in relation to it. The flat of her hands swept across the ground as if smoothing the wrinkles from a sheet. He had seen injuries in the previous days’ fighting, but the complete, pathetic frailty betrayed in her smashed form gripped him.