There was a hole between Redmede’s position and Exrech’s-and the foe began to flood it, pushing more and more creatures, boglins and sprites and Rukh and some shambling things Harmodius had never before seen, and they began to push forward even as Redmede’s longbows wreaked havoc across a carefully chosen beaver meadow on a larger force of shambling things and Rukh who tried-four times, with bloody persistence-to cross the sodden open ground until, led by a pair of red-crested wardens, they went around the meadow to the east-and into the Dulwar ambush.
There was suddenly no front and no rear.
Harmodius found himself alone facing a rush on the back of the Jacks, and he spared not, passing an ankle-high sheet of white lightning and following with five massive fire concoctions that exploded into incandescence and left only the smell of cooked meat.
The Dulwar, stung by something from their own left, crowded into a stand of ancient beech trees with the Jacks. The Dulwar war chief was old-his eyes were already haggard.
Redmede called, “Two bows behind every tree!” and the Jacks closed into a ring, covering the Dulwar and then sorting them into the circle.
Boglins struck them some time later, and they fought them off. A Dulwar warrior was carried out of the circle-and three Jacks rose, charged out, and stripped the monsters of their prey. Fitzalan had been first, and his act of reckless daring put heart into them all-the more as it had been done for an ally.
Redmede looked to Harmodius. “Never seen anything like yon,” he said. “But my sense is-if’n we sit here, we ain’t helpin’.”
Harmodius considered that bit of wisdom. “Too true,” he said. “Bill, push off to the right and find Exrech, if he’s still in the fight.”
“Where are you going?” Redmede asked.
“Hunting,” Harmodius said. “I understand this better now. I need to go hunt my own kind. That’s what predators do, in this war.”
Harmodius dismounted, sat cross-legged, and reached out into the aethereal. It only took him a moment to find everything he wanted-there was Exrech, still spraying ops like a damaged cask sprays water, and there was the Faery Knight, cold and closed, waiting for something. And there-north and east, but not very far-two twin suns of green optimism and potential, burning hot.
They were his natural prey. There were other users of potentia and ops scattered for six miles through the woods in a riot of aethereal combat, but none of them were anywhere near his level of puissance except those two.
Harmodius rose to his feet in the real, and began to walk north very cautiously. He could hear the movement of large creatures ahead of him, and he climbed a tree with a little help from an enhancement, and then cursed when in the aethereal, the ripples of his working rolled away towards his enemies.
They froze-slick, green figures, outlined only in their use of the forces beyond natura. He guessed them to be a pair of shamans-linked by some dark ceremony, perhaps, or merely by birth.
Two would be very powerful.
He waited, silent.
Finally they moved. He felt them-felt the heat of their green presence, felt them searching-for him, for the Faery Knight.
To the west, horns sounded, and Exrech’s desperate defence was rewarded when the Dulwar and the Jacks came out of the woods into the flank of the foe and began to kill them.
Nearly at his feet, the wardens froze-and then began to move. They were the centre of a broad line of their own kind, two deep, fully armoured-a battle-winning reserve right in the gap.
Except that Harmodius had learned that in the Wild there were no true lines, nor weak gaps, but merely the fight of the moment, the slash of the claw.
He found the link between them. As they passed him, he reached out in the aethereal -and severed it.
Two twin minds, together since birth, snapped back in agony and bereavement, and he entrapped one, casting a quick working that left the nearest trapped in a wall of its own dark imaginings while Harmodius turned on the other. Suggestion, binding, ward and thrust-he flung them all in carefully selected order, undermining his opponent with the false knowledge of his twin’s humiliating death, binding his legs in a simple and confusing physik that caused the larger caster to collapse, warding the counter attack-powerful, over-slow and grandiose.
Harmodius stepped out of his ward of shadow and plunged a spear of lightning into his prone opponent, so close he could have used a dagger, and his prey spasmed and triggered a cascade of stored workings-
Harmodius turned them on a mirror and let them strike his horrified twin, just a horse-length away, and then stripped aside his working and his suggestion so that each could recognize the other in terror-flinch in horror-
Harmodius finished the nearer with a needle-tight bolt of ops.
The first victim slammed a heavy working that must have come from an artifact-like a fall of rock, it struck Harmodius’s wards and blew through them.
He fell-and only the sheer and wasted rage of his adversary saved him.
It screamed, leapt forward to finish him-
Too slow. Harmodius triggered a fire ball the size of a man’s head. Most of it caught in the creature’s wards, but some went through, and then they were pounding each other with ops -some raw, flung like children will fling water. It was the deadliest kind of hermetical combat-too close to parry effectively-
Harmodius was aware, too, that the woods around him were hostile. But something was happening in the real-and he could only cast, work, drink ops, make potentia and loose again, parry what he could on ever smaller shields and wards as his own workings drew too much-
And then his adversary ran out. One moment, he was a growing tower of puissance, his shields arcing into the trees, and the next he was a burning corpse. He stood for a moment, as if surprised.
Harmodius leapt forward and subsumed his essence like the predator he had become, drinking the alien creature’s soul and all his powers.
The charred corpse collapsed.
Harmodius came back into the real to find the wardens fleeing. In the direction from which he’d come, there were irkish knights on stags-but behind him there was a line of Outwallers, killing wardens and taking trophies. The wardens-daemons-were trapped.
The Outwallers began to shoot them down, calling out to them, mocking them.
Harmodius saw them flinch away and gather for a last charge, and then Mogon, her blue crest towering over their red ones, burst from the underbrush with twenty of her household at her back, and the forest floor shook.
The Outwallers fell back before the great duchess. She made an odd scent as she passed them, and Harmodius went forward with her, safe, or so he felt, at her tail. The red-crested daemons were in a cluster, perhaps as many as fifty-certainly the heart of the enemy force.
They were defiant, until Mogon addressed them. Harmodius had no idea what she said, but they flinched, and then let their weapons drop. One, a young female, said something in response.
Mogon nodded, and the young female came forward out of the knot of beaten wardens-one of her great taloned fists entwined with that of a young male, but at last he let her go. She went, her crest high, and raised her small, strong arms as she knelt to Mogon.