Nylan was blotting his forehead, and even Relyn had opened his jacket by the time a single rider cantered downthe road from the ridge. Nylan didn’t know her name, though he had seen her in training, and she rode well.
“Ser! The enemy is about a third of the way up the ridge. The marshal said that she won’t be able to send any more reports.”
“Fine. Tell her to make sure the field is clear when the enemy comes down. Do you understand that?”
The guard’s face crinkled. “The field must be clear when the enemy comes down?”
“The field must be clear of guards when the enemy comes down.” Nylan corrected himself. “Do you have it?”
She repeated the words, and Nylan nodded. Then she turned her mount and started back up toward the ridge.
Relyn looked at Nylan’s face. “You plan some terrible magic.”
“It’s not magic. Not mostly,” Nylan added as his head throbbed as if to remind him not to lie, “but, if it works, it will be terrible.” He muttered under his breath afterward, “And if it doesn’t work, it’s going to be terrible in a different way.”
“What do you want us to do?” asked one of the new guards.
“When the engineer works his magic,” answered Huldran, “his body will be here, but his thoughts will not. Our job is to protect him from anyone who would attack.”
Nylan hoped no one got that near, but somehow nothing worked quite the way it was planned in any battle. Or in anything, he added mentally.
As the faint and distant sounds of the tumult mounted and purple-clad riders finally crested the ridge, Nylan powered up the firin cell assembly-seventy-seven point five percent. Could he smooth the flows for the fiery weapons head, the way he had for the industrial laser heads?
Another wave of purple riders reached the ridge top, and the Westwind guards began falling back, drawing back across the ridge top, sliding westward toward the road to the tower.
The Lornian forces slowed where the pikes should havetriggered, but Nylan could not see what exactly had occurred, except for the unseen whiteness that signified death and more death.
Nylan sent out his perceptions, his eyes still on the hillside above. He could almost sense the Lornian commander, the arrows falling around him as the man gestured with the big blade. Idly, Nylan thought that he could have shot the man. Then he nodded, and his stomach chilled into ice. Ryba had ordered her guards not to kill him. She was not aiming for the defeat of the Lornians. She wanted to keep the Lornian army whole and moving into the laser’s range, and she was gambling on the laser and Nylan to destroy them totally.
“Damn you! Damn you …” he muttered.
Suddenly, as the Lornian forces began to move again, to flow around the east end of the pike defenses, the remaining visible guards seemed to peel off the hillside behind the pike lines and ride westward toward the tower. The flow of arrows dropped to a few intermittent shafts.
Ryba reined up on the lower hillside, just above Nylan’s bridge, and the remainder of the guards did also-not much more than half a score. Even if some guards remained in the rocks and in the ridge trees, casualties had been high-as usual.
Nylan hadn’t seen Ayrlyn, not since breakfast. Why did he keep thinking about her-because she was one of the few that seemed to care about more than force? Because he had come to care for her? He shook his head. The only thing he could do now was use the laser. His thoughts traced the power lines, and slowly smoothed out the fluxes and the swirls within the cells.
Slowly, slowly, the black and purple mass on the hillside continued to move, mostly westward, holding to the high part of the ridge slope, although a lobe of forces seemed to swing downhill.
Nylan let his senses settle into the laser, let himself feel the equipment again, as his eyes and senses also measured the hillside, and he took a deep breath. More than a third of the attackers remained shielded by the curve of the hill.
“Why is he waiting?” whispered a voice.
“Leave him alone. He’s got to get them all at once. Too many are hidden by the slope of the hill,” hissed Huldran.
As the sweat dripped from his forehead, and he absently brushed it away from his eyes, Nylan continued to watch, to sense. As the dark forces swelled and surged across the hillside toward the thin line of guards, he waited.
Finally, as he tasted salt and blood, he triggered the laser, and the beam flared, and spread into a cast of light that did nothing, just sprayed reddish light across the advancing Lornians.
“What’s with the laser?” snapped Huldran. “We’ve got power.”
“The wizards. They’ve got shields.” Nylan extended his senses toward the focal point of the shields, stepping toward Huldran as he did. “Ease it right, more, more. Hold it there!”
White-faced, Huldran helped him ease the laser eastward.
The focal change failed to help, and another flare of light lit the hillside, even as the Lornian forces reached a point less than two hundred cubits from Ryba and the guards.
“Shit!” He could sense the interlocked shields of the two wizards on the hillside, and his mind and fingers tried to tighten the focus of the beam, to swing it right against those red-white shields.
The energy in the firin cells seemed to build, and Nylan could sense the surging power, surges with far more energy than those cells could have possibly contained, as well as the invisible hands of the white wizard, probing, jabbing.
The engineer concentrated, ignoring the nearing hoofbeats, ignoring the raging chaos in the power cells behind him, trying to focus his energy and order into the thinnest, sharpest needle of order and power.
The white shields pulsed, and the needle halted.
Nylan concentrated harder, and the black needle probed at the reddish-white shields, narrowing, narrowing. Nylan squeezed all the firin cell energy into that needle, driving it, hammering like a smith might hammer a needle-thin chisel against the joints in armor, relentlessly probing.
His eyes burned; his head felt like an anvil he was using, as though each thrust of the laser and the chaos somehow added by the white wizards rebounded back through him. His fingers were locked on the laser, as though held there by an electric current that flayed his nerves.
Still, Nylan hammered the needle against the white-red shields, forcing more and more power into that thrust, more and more chaos, more and more disruption, fighting the chaos backlash, and the lines of fire that felt as if they streamed from the white wizards and fell like lashes across his mind and body.
The shields of the white wizards wavered, and Nylan eased every erg of energy, chaotic and nonchaotic, smoothing it into an overwhelming tide of massed energy that cascaded against the pulsing white shields of the struggling Lornian wizards.
Something has to give … has to … has to, thought Nylan as he strained against the barriers that protected the Lornians.
CRRUMMMMMPTTT!
Energy flared across the Roof of the World, and the sky shivered and the ground shook, and all three wizards were clothed in flame and chaos. At that moment, Tower Black, rearing mounts, guards, armsmen, and wizards were suspended in a timeless instant-bathed in fire, bathed in chaos, bathed in order.
CXXVI
“LEAVE THE SIEGE engines at the bottom there,” Sillek orders Viendros.
Viendros nods, as does Koric from beyond the Gallosian commander. If they can clear the field, then there will be time for the engines. If not, they will never get close enoughto use them. The Gallosian rides back toward the lagging equipment.
Arrows continue to fly from the trees on the left, and from the rocky jumble on the right. Sillek occasionally glimpses a slim figure retreating uphill as the Lornian force, under the two differently shaded purple banners, continues forward. The lancers advance almost in circles, keeping the horses moving at angles and turning abruptly to cut down on the ability of the angel archers to predict where the horsemen will be.