Thorn, who had never relished being any man’s servant, balked. “My master,” he said with unconcealed bitterness, “wants us to have options.”
Hartmut shook his head. “That is very like wanting to be in a state of indecision, Lord Sorcerer. In this case, we cut the road at Dorling or we reap the consequence of facing a united foe.”
Thorn’s inscrutably stone face remained immobile.
“May I strongly suggest we turn back east and march as quickly as we may to Dorling?” he said. “And where in all the names of hell is your master?”
Thorn could not shrug, but the stone sticks of his limbs rattled and the helixes that powered his great arms and legs slipped and clicked. “He has other concerns besides us,” he said.
Hartmut’s eyes narrowed. “Pass this message on, Lord Sorcerer. I am here on a mission for my prince. For all the vast numbers of things that slither and hop and fly, I’ll note that my knights and my sailors seem to bear the brunt of the actual fighting, and from this I deduce that my services remain vital. Unless you and your master wish to continue without us, I strongly recommend we have a council, choose an objective, march east and defeat the Emperor before he joins with all the other forces gathering out there, according to your own intelligence, sir.” Hartmut’s voice rose as he went on-iron filled it. “Do I make myself clear?”
Thorn’s eyes were not stone. They held no anger-only what appeared to be immense weariness. “I will pass your message when my master returns,” he allowed. “As to your services-this is now the mightiest host of the Wild gathered in many years-indeed, in centuries, here, or so all my arts tell me. Perhaps my master will feel he can be rid of you. Perhaps he will choose to be rid of you himself.”
Hartmut snorted. “Yes, all your creepers and slithers will hold up so well against a charge of knights. And which of you has the experience to make a plan of campaign-aye, or alter one?” He snorted again. He bowed sketchily, and walked back to his own camp, where two of his pages had slung a sort of hammock between two dry trees over the bog.
Gilles, one of the more senior sailors, bowed and handed him wine silently.
Hartmut sipped the wine. “I think our captains are fools,” he said.
Gilles’s shock showed in his face.
Hartmut laughed, a sour laugh. “I have to talk to someone, Gilles.”
Later, in the rainy dark, Ash manifested very fitfully and agreed to allow Hartmut and Thorn to turn east against Dorling.
“I can’t even find the bitch,” Ash shouted into the darkness. “Who is she?” But then he seemed to make a full recovery and became an attractive young woman with a strange concavity-a horrible one-in her back.
“If we go to Dorling, perhaps I can force my recalcitrant kin into the light. If he fights to protect his own, I’m justified in eating him, and if he won’t…” Ash made an odd sound.
Then the manifestation was over, leaving only a struggling knot of white maggots to show the great dragon’s passage. Thorn played with the notion that his master was deliberately lowering their morale, or was perhaps quite mad. But he crossed a few hundred paces of beaver swamp effortlessly and the insects didn’t trouble him, not even the new wyvernflies as big as hummingbirds.
He found Ser Hartmut and wakened him.
“I spoke to the master,” he said, tasting the word master and hating it. “He agrees. Dorling.”
Chapter Fifteen
North of Lissen Carak-Harmodius
The forces pursuing the Black Mountain Pond Bears were not really an army, but more of a wave front. The Faery Knight’s army moved to engage them, and everything Harmodius knew of war was turned on its ear. War of the Wild was not like the war of men.
The Faery Knight didn’t hold a command council, or issue orders. He merely informed Mogon and the other captains where the enemy could be found-and what he intended to do. Before the sun rose shining above the tree canopy, Lissen Carak’s plains were empty, and the forces that had marched from N’gara had formed their own weather front, almost two miles long, the ends trailing away in ever thinner spreads of beings that might have stretched for two more miles into the trackless wilderness. In the centre, the boglin warriors moved with precision, holding to routes as though they were marked on the ground-but then suddenly dropping to all sixes to swarm around an obstacle in a way that made a human’s stomach churn. On the left, Redmede’s humans and their Outwaller allies moved together in a long, thin skirmish line-the Outwaller war parties kept reserves of tried warriors in their brightest paint hidden, but the Jacks put all their men and fighting women in a single line, two deep, two yards between files.
Harmodius chose to ride behind the Jacks. The boglins were too alien, and Harmodius found it difficult, almost painful, even to converse with Exrech. The irks, once they put on their war faces, became hideous creatures out of nightmare and with behaviours to match.
“You regret what we become,” Tapio said from behind him.
“I do. You give up so much beauty to be monsters,” Harmodius said.
“War hasss that effect on all the sssentient peoplesss,” Tapio said. “We merely wear it openly.”
“You do not,” Harmodius said.
“My gift. Perhaps my curse.” The Faery Knight was the very image of glory in bronze and red and bucksin and green.
In front, Fitzalan came trotting back from the direction of the enemy with a bear cub in his arms. He put the Golden Bear on the ground and suddenly the woods to their immediate front were full of bears-upright like men or on all fours, some with bags, or axes, or bits of armour. They were muddy, emaciated, and exhausted-but as they passed through the gap between the western boglins and Redmede’s Jacks, they let out a growl that might have been a cheer. An old bear galumphed to Redmede’s side and swatted him with a heavy paw-another, even older, with fur so grey he seemed to have come from snow, rose before Harmodius.
“By the Maker,” he said. “There is good even in men.”
Tapio made his stag rear. He waved to Bill Redmede, who nodded and raised his horn.
A dozen other men and women raised theirs, and, to the left, the Dulwar war chief raised his. To the right, Exrech was lost amid the sun-dappled leaves.
The Faery Knight raised his great green ivory oliphaunt horn and blew, and two hundred horns made their dreadful music.
The line sprang forward. But it did not move like a line of men. It moved with an organic fluidity that would have led to disintegration in an army of men, but an army of the Wild lived by a different code.
And so, too, when they sighted the enemy.
Horns blew. And then, suddenly, every creature seemed to leap at every other.
War in the Wild, Harmodius realized, was not about winning, but about being the most successful predator.
Redmede stood off the first rush-some doglike running thing that lost him three Jacks before Harmodius cleared the woods with fire and bought them the minutes they needed to find better ground, fleeing to the left until they put a muddy-ditched beaver meadow between them and their pursuers.
The northerners were overjoyed at their initial success and pushed forward. In the centre, where boglin legion slammed into boglin legion and the vicious tides of death ran together, the western boglins lost fifty yards in the first scrum and left a hundred corpses as food for their enemies. But though the northerners were bigger, heavier, and had eaten better, they also tired faster. Exrech was everywhere, and eldritch fire licked at his mandibles as he stemmed the first rout. He steadied his horde on the south bank of a small stream and the height advantage was, for a moment, enough to stop the northerners in the water below and turn it black with their blood and ichor.