He targeted, connecting shaft and stone head.
The line bent immediately. "I need help, gentlemen. Targeting on the idol's head."
Slowly, slowly, the foot of the line crawled back toward the great beast's head...
The shaft arrived too soon. Shih-ka'i could not bring it down where he wanted. It hit the beast's shoulder. Tons of molten rock blew away, showering the soldiers swarming below.
"I think you did more damage that way than you would have with a direct shot," Meng Chiao observed. "Look at the swath that cut."
Shih-ka'i did not respond. He was watching the minute dots scamper down the monster's back. Too late to get them now. "Meng Chiao. Pass the word. After we bring the next shaft down, everyone who can should call up a demon and turn it loose."
"The thing controlling them is crazy-angry, Lord," Meng Chiao observed. "It's not doing well at all. Minds me of a spiteful child breaking its toys."
"Uhm. Keep it angry."
"Shaft, Lord."
"Aye." Shih-ka'i glanced at Hsu Shen. He would make it with less dramatic help. "Help me, gentlemen. I'm going to bring this one down across its snout."
He imagined a hard, iron arc. His companions added their wills to his. This time there was less resistance. The enemy mind remained distracted by anger.
An instant after the last shaft struck, the desert again reverberated to a great angry roar. "That one hit a nerve," Pan ku remarked.
"So it seems. Get those demons up, gentlemen. Centurion! Can't you move those men into the portal faster?"
"No, Lord."
"Very well. Don't slack off." Shih-ka'i turned to watch Hsu Shen finish his last hundred yards.
Hsu Shen's men ran lightly and well, in good order, as befit soldiers of Shinsan. They did not cast fearful glances over their shoulders. The only gear they had abandoned was that which their commander had told them to drop. They retained their shields and weapons. "Good men," Shih-ka'i observed.
Meng Chiao responded, "This is the Seventeenth, Lord. This was Lord Wu's legion."
Shih-ka'i smiled within his mask. "I see." The man spoke as if his remark explained everything there was to know about the legion.
Lord Wu, in his time, had been one of the great Tervola, but he had been one of those unfortunates seduced by recent politics. He had died mysteriously in Lioantung when that city had been the seat of Eastern Army.
A demon appeared. It howled grotesquely. It stood fourteen feet tall and had a half-dozen arms. It pranced around cursing the man who had summoned it. After receiving orders, it whirled, estimated the enemy force, changed shape.
Shih-ka'i watched it become a copper rhinoceros of epic proportions. It galloped toward the enemy. He loosed a sigh of disgust. "Someone isn't taking this seriously."
The shiny rhino trundled past Hsu Shen. It bellowed heartily and charged the nearest horsemen. It rumbled around in circles, flipping its nose horns this way and that. It overwhelmed opponents by virtue of sheer mass.
"A clown thing with a certain effectiveness," Shih-ka'i admitted grudgingly. He did not feel a demon of that temper befit the dignity of a Tervola.
The demon shifted shape again, became octopod. It armed six tentacles with swords seized from its victims.
A dragon rider came out of the sun. It put a spear-bolt through the demon. The thing did not approve. It yelped like an injured puppy, faded away.
A dozen more Outside monsters joined the fray. They stopped the riders briefly. Hsu Shen and his men came puffing up the dune.
"Centurion, put these men through first. They're exhausted."
"Yes, Lord."
Shih-ka'i examined the progress of the evacuation. It looked too slow. Too damned slow.
The riders pushed forward despite heavy casualties. They surrounded Shih-ka'i's dune-walled position, then waited at a respectful distance. Lord Ssu-ma laughed. "You've got us now, don't you? No chance for us to get away, eh? All you have to do is bring up the infantry and finish us, eh?" He directed his Tervola to concentrate on the nearest foot soldiers.
He stared at the stone thing. Was it stupid? If it kept on this way, its entire army would be destroyed before it broke out of the desert. Not many of the fallen remained in condition for reanimation.
That pleased Shih-ka'i.
Sure as he lived, he knew the master of the dead meant to march across the world. And once his armies broke out of the wasteland they would begin to swell. That explained why the thing was squandering manpower now. It anticipated no difficulty acquiring replacements.
The enemy infantry came on in such numbers that the demons, under constant attack from above, were swamped.
Shih-ka'i glanced back. The evacuation was going well. A man every ten seconds. Six a minute. Sixty every ten minutes. Three quarters of the force had gone. The others had formed round the portal. The maneuver was a tactical success already.
Give me a little luck, he thought. Let the portals remain useful a few minutes more. Let the stone thing persist in its profligate stupidity.
He did gloom about his minor exploratory thrust having become an embattled retreat which threatened to embroil the entire Eastern Army in an unexpected war. A big war. At a critical juncture in Shinsan's history. He guessed there were fifty thousand enemy soldiers scattered around the desert. They seemed to have stopped coming from their place of hiding.
They did him a favor, did the foe's infantry. They followed the example of the cavalry. They elected to surround him before making their attack. Shih-ka'i stepped into the portal just before their charge began. There was but one man behind him, his faithful Pan ku. They came over the dunes and found a whole lot of nothing. The Tervola had pulled their bolt hole in after them.
"What are they waiting for, Lord?" Tasi-feng asked. Four days had passed. The foe had not come west. Recon reports painted a portrait of confusion on a Brobdingnagian scale.
"I don't know. Maybe we got our bluff in on them. Maybe they won't come at all."
"Do you think so, Lord?"
"Not really. But a daydream doesn't hurt if you don't put much faith in it. Anyway, let's not be ungrateful for the gift of time." Shih-ka'i had not expected to have time to move people into the mountains and get them dug in. He would not have given an opponent that edge.
He had gotten what he needed and more. The Seventeenth's two field brigades were in place and waiting. Elements of the rest of Eastern Army were assembling at the fortress. If he were given another week, he thought, transfers would bring in enough people and thaumaturgic equipment to destroy thrice the number of zombies he had seen near the lonely mountain.
He had stripped his army of Tervola. The troops were coming overland under the command of their noncommissioned officers, with some units transferring in as opportunity arose. He was drawing Tervola and equipment from Northern Army, too, pushing his writ from Lord Kuo to its limit. He had ignored the predictable outrage of the Commander, Northern Army.
Northern Army was also on the march, but there was no way it could contribute troops here. Shih-ka'i had directed its three legions to assume a defensive posture along the west bank of the Tusghus, a broad river lying roughly midway between the Seventeenth's old headquarters at Lioantung and the fortress on the edge of the desert.
The transfer streams were being pushed to their limits within Eastern Army's territories. Too many miles lay between the fortress and even the closest of the legionary main forces.
"Hsu Shen," Shih-ka'i called. "Evacuation report."
The Tervola scuttled over. He had developed an obsequious manner since his rescue. "Finally getting some cooperation, Lord Ssu-ma. They believe our activity more than our word." He was speaking of the native tribes. Shih-ka'i had ordered them evacuated beyond his third defensive line, the Tusghus. In the absence of orders to the contrary, he meant to make the foe pay for every mile of advance, and to deny him any opportunity to strengthen himself with local bodies.