Zac’s other horsemen were already raining arrows on the pack, and it took hits.
“Hold!” called the captain. “On me,” he said to the knights. “Squires-charge.”
Behind him, Toby led the squires in a charge at the rest of the pack. The war horses were a different proposition from the riding horses, and whatever the things were, they died under the big steel-shod hooves. Bone cracked and chipped.
Shrill eerie screams ripped across the road to echo off the far trees.
Cully had all the archers together around the wagon. Francis Atcourt’s young page, Bobby, had all the archers’ horses in his fist and looked ready to cry.
The horses began to panic, and the boy lost them, the reins ripped from his hands.
“Wyvern!” Cully said.
In fact, there were two wyverns-or even three. One scooped up a horse-Count Zac’s much beloved spare pony-and with one enormous beat of its sixty-foot wingspan was gone.
The other went for the wagon. It took Cully’s horse-dropper in the neck and flinched, but a flailing fore-talon ripped a small boy in two, covering his siblings with his gore. Ricard Lantorn put a needlepoint bodkin deep into the thing’s left haunch and Cuddy’s horse-dropper, released from a range of twelve feet, went in high on the thing’s sinuous neck just below its skull.
The wagon was an organ playing a discordant wail of terror. Its team bolted down the road.
The wyvern baulked, turned on the archers.
Father Arnaud’s heavy lance struck it under its great, taloned left arm and went in almost as far as his hand and the great thing reared back, took two more arrows and failed to land a claw before Chris Foliak’s lance spitted it.
Ser Francis Atcourt’s lance was the coup de grâce, striking it in the head as its neck began to sink and its eyes filmed. It fell.
The archers whooped.
Atcourt put up his visor. “Well,” he said to Father Arnaud, “I-”
A gout of blue-white fire struck Father Arnaud. It lifted him from the saddle and slammed him to the ground.
Atcourt pulled his visor down.
Ser Gavin galloped by. “Save the children,” he roared. The first wyvern was coasting along, skimming the trees above the runaway wagon.
The captain rose in his stirrups and pointed a gauntleted fist. A beam of red light travelled an arrow’s flight into the woods and something there was briefly outlined in red.
“Damn,” the captain said.
His attack and the counter-spell were almost simultaneous. There was a detonation in front of him and his horse shied-and subsided.
He backed the horse. He had a great many tricks since the last time he’d been in a fight like this, and he cast, and cast, and cast.
A bowshot away, his opponent was silhouetted against the foliage by a matt-black wall. The creature itself-a daemon-was lit from beneath by a simple light spell cast at the ground before it and thus not susceptible to a counter.
The tree beside it exploded, wicked shards of oak as sharp as spears whipping through the air.
The adversary struck him with a gout of white fire and then another. He took both on his shields and lost both shields in the process.
“Fiat lux,” he said aloud, and loosed his own bolt of lightning.
But the adversary was gone, skipping across reality.
Down the road, the second wyvern stooped, trading altitude for airspeed and calculating nicely with the ease born of long and predatory success, passing just over the last overhanging tree branches before a long stretch with no cover on either side of the road for half a bowshot-a short causeway over a marsh. It plucked one of the goodwife’s children from the wagon, decapitated one of her daughters with a talon flick, took a raking blow from the oldest daughter with a scythe and banked hard, skimming low over the reeds and the beaver house and rising neatly over the trees on the north side of the road.
The panicked horses took the wagon off the causeway, and the wagon stopped, the horse team mired immediately and screaming and neighing their panic as the wave-front of the wyvern’s terror passed over them again.
Ser Gavin and young Angelo di Laternum cantered up. The run along the road was already tiring their war horses.
The wyvern consumed its prey-a simple flip of the child into the air and a spray of blood visible two hundred yards away. Cully’s long shot from the end of the causeway fell away short.
“Under the wagon!” Gavin shouted at the goodwife and her brood. “Into the water. Under the wagon!”
The goodwife understood, or had the same notion herself. Grabbing her youngest, she leaped into the icy water. It was only thigh deep.
“Dismount,” Gavin snapped at the young Etruscan man-at-arms. Both of them swung heavily to the ground and pulled heavy poleaxes off the cruppers of their saddles. Angelo had a long axe with a fine blade. Ser Gavin had a war hammer-a single piece of steel that was deceptively small.
Cuddy and Flarch ran along the causeway like athletes in a race. Flarch-one of the company’s handsomest men-never took his eyes off the banking wyvern.
Cully loosed another light arrow and scored against the wyvern, who was too low and slow to manoeuvre.
“Ware!” Cully called. He’d picked up another wyvern coming in from the setting sun in the west, right down the road. Four of them, now.
The squires’ charge was more successful than any of them would have hoped.
The daemon’s ambush-it certainly appeared to be an ambush-had been sprung from too close. There were three daemon warriors behind the first creatures, but they were so close behind that Toby’s charge first trampled the imps-Toby’s immediate name for the toothy monsters which had attacked the mare-but then crashed into the first of the adversaries. The beaked creature was as shocked as Toby, but his axe was faster than the daemon’s and he landed a hasty blow on the thing’s brow-ridge, cutting away a section of its engorged crest. Blood-red, too red-erupted as if under enormous pressure.
By sheer good fortune, Toby’s mate, Adrian Goldsmith, was right behind Toby, his horse on exactly the same line, and Adrian’s unbroken lance took the stunned daemon squarely in the mouth-entered, tore a furrow along its tongue and severed its spine. The lance broke under the weight of Goldsmith’s charge.
Marcus, once Ser Jehan’s page, an older man and not the best jouster, missed his strike and died, as a great stone-headed axe caved in his helmet and pulled him from his horse, but the horse, forced to turn, put both metal-shod forefeet into its master’s killer. Neither blow was mortal for a daemon, but the two knocked the big saurian back a yard or more and cost it its balance as it fell over its dead kin. It never got to rise, as Toby pulled his horse around. The horse did the work and Toby rode out its panicked rage.
The third daemon warrior broke to the left, its heavy haunches powering it as fast as a war horse through the undergrowth. It ran for its life.
And its allies.
Gabriel Muriens slipped off his horse neatly and quickly, freeing his feet from the big iron stirrups, getting his left leg over the high war saddle and putting his breastplate against the saddle’s padded seat as he slid to the ground.
Nell-scared beyond rational thought and yet ready-took the great horse’s reins. She’d just seen more power at closer range than she’d ever seen in her life-six exchanges of levin and fire, whirling shields of pure ops and a sword of light.
Without comment she handed her master his ghiavarina. He began to walk into the woods. Nell thought he looked like a predator stalking prey.
He spared one thought for the fights further down the road, turning his entire armoured body to look into the distance, but he didn’t raise his visor, and then the point of his heavy spear and the beak of his visor rotated back into the deep woods and he went forward.