"CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!"
When ten thousand men shouted in unison it was less a sound than a blow, something that thudded into your face and made your chest sound like a drum. And it struck below that too, and made Rudi's lips curl back from his teeth.
He understood what it was to look into a man's eyes over a blade and know that one of them would die; that was how the Lord and Lady had made the world, as much as the leap of a tiger on a deer, or two buck elk locking horns in the spring. That was strength and speed, skill and luck and nerve against the same. Having a small city coming towards you with nothing but murder in its heart was something else again, and as impersonal as being caught in a mudslide… or lying strapped to the latest log in a sawmill.
Thurston shouted to someone, loud enough to be heard above the stunning roar: "I don't care what they're doing; get the reserve up here now. All of them, and on the double!"
The catapults of the field batteries cut loose in unison with a multiple crashing of throwing arms against rubber shod steel. Javelins arched out, twirling as their curved fins took the air, seeming to slow as they went, and the steel balls of the round shot. Men fell, their mounts fell-sometimes an entire file of three, where a six-pound steel ball traveling at four hundred feet a second hit the ground and bounced and broke legs like brittle sticks as it spun whirling forward.
The Sword of the Prophet came on at a steady hand gallop, opening out around bodies thrashing and screaming and bodies lying still, closing again like a flood around a rock in a display of horsemanship that would have been beautiful if it hadn't been so frightening. The companions turned their mounts towards the front and raised their shields, barding and the kite shaped lengths of plywood protecting them and the horses against the bale wind of arrowheads whose farthest spray began to fall around them.
Ground and center, ground and center, Rudi thought; not trying to calm himself, but instead channeling the building fear and fury, until they opened doors in his soul.
When you did that Someone was always likely to answer. The world flashed for an instant into black outlines veined across with red, like the feather of a skeletal raven dipped in blood drawn across the surface of existence. Coolness ran across his skin, turning muscle and nerve to silk and fire, balanced and pure, moving to the beating heart of Earth that was his own pulse. Talons gripped all creation, and wings beat a wind whose dust was stars.
Doubt flickered out of him, like a candle flame's in stant death in a gale. This is right, it is, he thought. This is just where They wanted me to be.
Arrows whickered up from the rear ranks of the Cutters, black against the tired fading blue of the afternoon sky, snapping down faster and faster as they arched over the huge blunt wedge. Rudi's mind saw their course through the air, the weft of a single great loom, each etched like a thread of diamond through the world.
The lancers seemed like men without shadows as they charged into the setting sun, the heads of their horses driving up and down above the dust mist that half hid them. The catapults switched to the canister rounds, the bundles of darts sweeping forward, spreading out like the claws of leaping cats as the bands that bound them snapped.
They crossed the arrows in flight, warp to their weft, and the world shook to the thump of the loom's hed dle; the Weaver's face hung over it, ancient, terrible, sooty and single-eyed, scored with grief and anger huge enough for the death of suns. The massed grunt of the Boise footmen as they launched their spears made an undertone to it, part of the song the worlds sang. So was the endless flicker of their swords as they drew and crouched behind their big shields, shoulders tucked into the inner surfaces and strong muscled legs braced.
And the lances struck.
The sound went through him, thud, as if the massive impact had been in his own belly, snapping his teeth together in reflex. A crash, but the crash went on and on. Lances with a ton of galloping horse behind them struck through thick shields and steel-hoop armor, or broke and went pinwheeling up into the sky in a blur ring flicker. Men were bowled over by sheer impact, fall ing and sprawling stunned or curling under their shields against the stamping hooves; the whole front line vanished. Wedges of horsemen drilled in threes thrust into the gaps the lances and arrows had left; men stepped up from the second and third ranks, smashing with their shields, stooping for the hocking strike against the hamstring of a horse, stabbing, stabbing.
"They're breaking through!"Odard shouted, his voice crackling with excitement.
He snatched a lance from his servant Alex's hand and used it to lever himself into the saddle. Rudi put a hand on the cantle of Epona's saddle and vaulted into it. The Prophet's men had broken through, or at least chunks of them had. The Boise line kept stubbornly re forming behind them, and then the Corwinite infantry charged again. All the neat formations were gone, and it turned into a churning chaos of men who hit and stabbed and staggered forward and back, locked more closely together than lovers, sometimes stopping for a second by unspoken mutual consent to wheeze hatred at one another until they got back breath enough to fight.
Patterns, Rudi thought. It's all patterns.
So easy to see, with eyes that could see. Three or four hundred of the Sword of the Prophet were loose in the rear; they regrouped, like beads of water sliding together on a waxed board, and spurred their horses straight for the command group where the eagle standard of the Republic stood.
"Follow me!" Rudi shouted. Then a shriek: "Morrigu!"
They had just enough room to build up momentum as their lances dipped. The seven of them crashed into the side of the Cutter wedge as it hit the line of the presiden tial guard detachment. Rudi left his lance in a man's side and swept out his longsword; the motion ended in a cut across a wrist and the hand leaped free…
Seconds passed. A catapult lay on its side, one wheel spinning and its crew gaping dead about the tumbled metal. A horse beat its head against the ground and thrashed as it tried to stand, but both its forelegs were smashed, splinters showing through torn skin. A man crawled away from it, his face a mask of blood, pat ting the ground before him as he called, "Thumper! Thumper, boy!"
The roar of combat died away abruptly; a long trot ting line came up from the westward, threw their pila, snapped out swords and charged in a bristling unison like the hairs rising on an enraged boar's back. The combat swept past Rudi, swept the others away from him, all but Edain standing at his stirrup and glaring, his last arrow on the string. The eagle standard stood canted to one side, the red and white and blue of the flag hanging limp. Dust blew about them again, and the sun had touched the horizon to the west, starting its slide below the plain.
Heat held him like a vise, and the hand of something more. The sword fell slowly to his side.
Rudi could see. And hear, as if the scene before him were only at arm's length. Martin Thurston was on his knees beside his father, hand just touching the broken Cutter lance driven up beneath his ribs. Men stood around him, men with a numeral 6 above the crossed thunderbolts on their eagle faced shields; those same shields kept what happened from view.
"You're late, " the president whispered, in a last attempt at gallantry. Then a gasp, and: "Medic!"
With that he saw something in his son's face; his own went slack with surprise.
"Why?" he said, the tone almost normal, despite the blood on his lips.
"I had to," the younger man said. "You'd take my inheritance and my son's-your grandson's-and give it to strangers. I can't let you do that. Not even you, Father."