“Ser!” yells Terek. “The wizard’s down there, in that little stone fort, and he’s doing something.”
“Well, undo it!” snaps Sillek. “That’s your job.” He glances over his shoulder to see that the last of his forces are clear of the demonish pikes and ready for the assault on the remaining angels.
The trumpet sounds, and the Lornian forces move forward, a trot for the lancers, a quickstep for the foot, ready at last to avenge all the hurts, the wounds, the deaths suffered on this campaign into the cold and unfriendly Westhorns.
Sillek raises his blade and rides forward. So does Viendros.
As they do, the hillside is bathed in red light-a red light that burns faintly, as though the sun had grown hotter, or Sillek had stood too close to the fire. The Lord of Lornth turns in the saddle, not slowing, to see Terek and Jissek, almost frozen in their saddles. Even Sillek can sense the immense forces that surge between the two wizards and the small fort on the flat below.
“Faster!” he yells to Koric.
Koric looks to the wizards, and then jabs the bugler, and the quick advance call rings out over the hillside.
Sillek gallops toward the angels, aiming himself toward the tall black-haired woman.
Another wave of red light flashes across the downslope, and Sillek urges his mount forward, knowing he must reach the angels quickly.
The ground trembles.
Sillek spurs his horse forward. Yet another two hundred cubits separate him from the angel forces, and the ground trembles again.
Then, a single shriek and a dull rumbling sound that lasts forever and yet is instantaneous cross the hillside, and Sillek feels as though a mighty blade of fire and destruction slams toward the hillside, toward him, as the heavens turn brilliant, burning white, as the air sears hotter than noon in the Stone Hills.
“Govern well, Gethen,” whispers Sillek, and, as the incredible flare of whiteness flashes out from that focal point around Terek and Jissek, Sillek feels himself flaming, and he holds, for a moment, the images of Zeldyan and Nesslek, even as his great sword melts in his hand, and he with it.
The hillside shudders, and a dull huge clap echoes off the rocks and the surrounding higher peaks, echoes, and reechoes, like a chain of images trapped in mirrors facing each other, getting fainter and fainter, and stretching farther and farther away. The earth tremors echo each other, and flashes of light, like whole-sky lightning, blaze across the Roof of the World.
Then … ashes fall like snow across the hillside, burning like fire as they touch the dry grass west of the devastation.
CXXVII
CRUUMPPTTT!!!
The building of intertwined chaos and order stretched and stretched through an endless and timeless moment, then …
A miniature sun-a green and gold fireball-flared in the middle of the hillside below the ridge and east of Tower Black, transforming the soldiers and horses around it into statues of gray ash, then flattening those fragile shapes with its shock wave. The incineration and flattening effect flared through those Lornians farther away as the circle of destruction widened almost instantaneously.
For a fraction of an instant two white-clad figures seemed to stand out against the tide of destruction, as if standing on a crumbling cliff before a tsunami of chaos washed over them, before they too flashed into fire and ashes.
Nylan staggered, but continued to concentrate on focusing the laser even as he felt that wave of whiteness and mass death screaming toward him. With eyes already blind, knives stabbing through his skull, he forced the last ergs of power across the hillside, incinerating all that moved toward the road, raising instant funeral pyres-and the shock waves echoed and reechoed across the Roof of the World.
Perhaps a handful of riders pounded downhill toward the laser, toward the smith who wielded its dying hammer against the remnants of the Lornian forces on the hillside.
As Nylan shuddered under the first of the chaos waves that battered him, clinging to the laser, the five lancers charged the small fort.
For a moment, nothing happened, as the new guards stood stunned, eyes wide at the conflagration and shock waves that had roared across the hillside, at the swirls of ashes and flame, at the charred shapes heaped and tossed like burned limbsfrom a wildfire, then swirled into less than ashes. At the outskirts of the destruction, charred bodies tumbled into heaps.
“Fight! Frig it!” yelled Huldran, and her throwing blade cleared the wall and slammed into a lancer’s shoulder.
Then the others, the white-faced guards, reacted, and three arrows flew, one striking another lancer.
Relyn jumped before Nylan, and the short blade he had once scorned flashed. The lancer fell.
The smith-engineer sagged against the burned-out laser, and his body still shook as the waves of unseen whiteness hammered at him, as he twitched in the grip of chaos and terror unseen to those beside him and around him.
On the western fringe of the hillside perhaps half the Westwind guards stirred, but nothing else moved, except the fine ashes that rained across the Roof of the World, except the last dying flames.
The rapidly mushrooming storm cloud that had begun to cover the entire sky, growing blacker by the moment, swallowed the sun, and the dimness of an early twilight covered the Roof of the World.
Then Nylan’s legs collapsed as he slid to the packed clay beside the tripod base of the laser.
The single remaining Lornian lancer spurred his horse northward and up the east side of the ridge. No one pursued, and ashes and rain fell across the Roof of the World.
Soon, so did thunder and rain and hail, the hailstones falling and clumping in piles, white as bleached bones, cold as death.
CXXVIII
“Ryba, the least of the rulers of angels, thus became the last of the rulers, and the angels, having fallen from the stars after the time of the great burning, came unto the Roofof the World, where they had descended on the winds from Heaven.
“There, in the tower called black, builded by the great smith Nylan at the behest of Ryba, there they took shelter and gathered their strength together, and abided until the winter should lift.
“Yet since then, upon the Roof of the World, as a memory of the fall of the angels, winter yet remains.
“When the first great winter had passed, then Nylan the smith builded yet another forge, a forge of men, not of Heaven, and with hammer and anvil, forged yet more of the black blades of death, the twin swords of Westwind, and after that, forged he the bows of winter, small enough to be carried on horse and powerful enough to split plate armor, and Ryba the angel was pleased.
“Then, as prophesied by the demons, then came those men who were the descendants of the ancient demons, and with their fires of chaos, fell they upon the angels, for the descendants of the demons were fair determined to drive the angels from the world, and to ensure that no woman should prevail, nor rule herself nor others.
“The lightnings were cast against the tower called black, yet that tower held fast against the lightnings of chaos, and against legions of armsmen more vast than the flow of the great rivers, more numerous than the locusts.
“When she determined that the men who assaulted Westwind were of the demons, with a great sigh, Ryba reclaimed the fires of winter and with those fires and with the black blades of Nylan that were sharper than the edge of night, she and her angels smote the demons. They destroyed all but one, and drove him into the east, leaving none upon the Roof of the World.
“So after that time, whenever angels departed the Roof of the World, whether unto the southlands or the western ways, they carried forth the message of Ryba: Remember whence you came, and suffer not any man to lead you, for that is how the angels fell …”