Just beyond the wagon is the back side of the log barricade, and outside of spots where the wood has charred, it appears fairly solid. There are still some stick figures on poles that appear almost untouched.
Lerial can see the rearguard of the Meroweyans ahead. Should you charge them? That doesn’t seem right, not after all his men have been through, and they cannot reduce the number of Meroweyans from a distance because they have no arrows left, not to speak of.
You’ll have to use order and lightnings … But that is something he doesn’t want to do along the narrow road in the forest, not with the risk of setting yet another fire, and with no elders and no clouds in sight for rain that might damp it. He’d hoped to catch them in one of the clearings or meadows. Now …
“Ser?” asks Bhurl.
“We follow until they’re out of the Verd.”
“Begging your pardon, ser, but…”
“I didn’t say we’d do nothing. We just can’t do it here.”
“Yes, ser.”
Lerial can tell the squad leader isn’t totally happy, but he doesn’t want to explain, especially if what he has in mind doesn’t work. It should. You’ve done it once. At the same time, Bhurl should know why. After several moments, he adds, “If we attack now, they’ll use chaos, and we’ll be caught in the middle of a fire, and they might escape … or both.”
“Hadn’t thought of that, ser. Makes sense.”
It does, even if it’s only a partial truth. He still worries as he finishes guiding the company around the depressions that had been firepits and back onto the road. When they reach the more southern area where the very first skirmish in the Verd had taken place, and where the companies had bivouacked awaiting the Meroweyan assault on the Verd itself, he again guides his men around the low pits that he can sense and back onto the road.
Ahead of them, the Meroweyans are riding through the road gates that they must have opened once they had poured through the gaps they had burned in the tree-wall of the Verd. The riders move in measured steps. Lerial lets them, although he increases the pace slightly, not wanting the Meroweyans to be too far away when second company leaves the Verd.
Once all of second company clears the road gates, Lerial orders the squads to form up on the still-matted grass late in the afternoon on a warm spring day. The Meroweyans have also formed up, but make no move to attack. The Meroweyan force is composed of riders bearing different arms, some with spears, others with small bucklers and long blades, and still others with light armor and curved sabrelike blades, clearly a mixed group of survivors, but a group that numbers more than two companies, while what remains of second company, without fourth squad and with all the casualties suffered since the first attacks, is little more than half a company.
For all the differential in force size, Lerial doubts that the Meroweyans will attack, but he waits to see what they will do.
The two forces face each other, one in dull golden brown and one in forest brown. After some time, perhaps as long as a tenth of a glass, a horn sounds. The first two ranks of the Meroweyans hold fast, but all the other riders begin to turn their mounts.
Are you just going to let them go? For a moment, Lerial is tempted, until he recalls all the burned hamlets, the thousands who are dead and the thousands more homeless … and the thought of letting the Meroweyan survivors ride away, as if they had done nothing wrong, is not something he can accept. Nor will it send the right message to Casseon.
He order-reaches out to the ground beneath the middle of the Meroweyan force, seeking a piece of something, something small from which he can more easily separate order and chaos. Almost, immediately separated flows of silvered black and golden red shoot skyward, unseen except by Lerial, followed by brilliant pinpoints of light that all cannot fail to see.
A chaos shield flares in the middle of the Meroweyan force.
In less than a moment, lightning flashes everywhere, crisscrossing and turning Meroweyan riders and their mounts into pillars of flame and then instant columns of ash-except for the small area protected by the wizard’s shields.
Lerial creates more order-chaos separation, focusing it on the wizard’s shields and simultaneously creating stronger protective order coils before second company.
Lightning rages against the chaos shield, focused chaos against disordered but latticelike chaos … and Lerial can feel a tension, as if every hair on his head and body is standing erect, while everything and everyone around him is fixed in place, unable to move.
Then … then, a brilliant flash of light sears across Lerial’s eyes, momentarily blinding him, as the chaos shield disintegrates, revealing to his senses, but for a moment, a woman in brilliant white, with red hair that is the essence of fire.
The brilliance vanishes. Everything is cloaked in a darkness so profound that Lerial can see nothing, nothing at all. The blackness fades slowly into dark gray, and progressively lighter gray until Lerial is looking southward over what once had been a sweep of tall grass, taking in the yards and yards of smoldering grass, the charred remains of what had been men and mounts … and a circle of fine gray ash, and nothing else, that had held a chaos wizard, one lone woman.
How could you have known? Yet he understands that, woman or not, in the end, he could do no different. For all that, he feels like he should somehow mourn, not even knowing what he might be mourning.
Amid that devastation he can make out the three Meroweyan wagons, of which little remains but the iron wheel rims, the iron axle bearing rings, other iron parts he cannot identify with charred wooden remnants that might have been anything. He can feel, through his recurrent pounding headache, that Bhurl and Fhentaar have reined up several yards away, but not approached nearer, whether out of deference or fear, he cannot tell.
“Angel-flamed … never see anything like that…”
“Might give Duke Casseon something to think about…”
“Might. Too bad Moraris couldn’t see this,” Fhentaar continues in a low voice to Bhurl.
“He’d have asked the captain to spare the wagons so he could trade them,” returns the other squad leader.
Moraris would have said something about capturing them, that they would have been worth something … After that vagrant thought, Lerial just sits in the saddle and looks across the charred ground. His eyes burn, and his head still throbs.
He feels tired … and like sowshit.
What else could you do? You could have lost half the company if you’d charged them with sabres. And yet … to strike them down with lightning … But they used chaos-fire against both the Verdyn Lancers and the Verd itself.
None of that makes him feel any better.
LXXVII
On sixday evening, second company stays in some of the houses in Ironwood that have not yet been reoccupied. Lerial does not bother with detailing Lancers to bury the remnants of the Meroweyans. There are likely no remnants to speak of, and after all his men have done, that is something that the locals can do-or not-as they wish. He sleeps, if not well, with troubling dreams that he cannot recall once he is fully awake. While the throbbing in his head has eased, it has not eased that much, but at least his eyesight is not blurred.
After eating a mixture whose ingredients he does not wish to know for what passes as breakfast, Lerial meets with the squad leaders, and then effectively acting as squad leader for first squad, with those rankers. Then he begins to groom the gelding, under skies that are largely clear, except to the southwest. He also notices a faint acrid smoky odor, the same one that, he realizes, he has smelled ever since he loosed the lightning the afternoon before. Yet the air is clear, without a sign of haze or smoke. Immediately after he grooms and then saddles his mount, a thin man in a faded brown shirt and worn brown trousers approaches … just before Lerial is about to order the company to mount up and begin the return to Escadya.