As he released, he took his next arrow from his belt. “Two,” he spat.
He meant he had two shafts left.
Both wyverns had chosen to turn in place, gaining altitude and timing their strike so that they could envelop the desperate stand of the knights and archers, splitting the archers’ efforts and the knights’ attention.
But it had cost them. All the archers were hitting at this range.
Gavin stood in coda longa with his war hammer stretched out behind him, prepared to deliver an enormous blow. Di Laternum had his spiked axe up in front of him.
The wyverns finished their turn and their sinuous necks flashed as one as their heads locked on to their shared prey. Both monsters screeched together.
The wave fronts of their conjoined terror struck. Di Laternum fell to one knee. Gavin’s shoulder flared in icy pain and his mind seemed to go blank.
Flarch lost the arrow in his fingers.
Cuddy loosed and missed.
The smaller wyvern was the size of a small ship, its body forty feet long top to tail and its wingspan sixty feet or more. Its underside was oddly flecked with the fletchings of a dozen quarter-pound arrows.
Its mate-if the mighty monster had a mate-was bigger. Its wings seemed to block the sun, and its body was a mottled green and brown and white like old marble. Its wave of terror was far more subtle than its younger partner’s-its terror promised freedom through submission.
The children under the wagon all screamed together.
And then a taloned claw the size of the wagon took the greater of the two wyverns and ripped one of its wings from its still-living body.
Darkness blotted out the sun. Night fell.
The dragon was so huge that no mere human mind could encompass it. Its taloned feet were themselves almost as large as the wyvern’s body. The mortally-stricken wyvern wheeled into a catastrophic crash with a scream of rage and humiliation.
The younger monster turned on a wing tip. It was cunning enough to pass under its titanic adversary, rushing for open sky and rising on a lucky thermal even as the dragon turned in the sky, so close to the ground that the vortices at its sweeping wing tips a thousand feet apart launched small spouts of leaves and the rush of its passage knocked men flat.
The wyvern rose and turned, going north. The thermal lifted it-
Ser Gavin watched with savage satisfaction as the thing was chased down. The dragon-incredible as it was-was faster.
The wyvern made two attempts. Because of the altitude, both were visible. First it dived for speed, and then it tried to fly very low, turning under its mammoth adversary again.
The dragon pivoted in mid-air. It was too far away for its size to register-far enough that the whole of the incredible monster was visible, top to toe, a bowshot or more long, with a neck as long as a road and a noble head with nostrils as big as caves and teeth as tall as a man on a horse.
The great mouth opened, and all the men on the road gave a shout.
Silence fell.
And then all hell was given voice in the woods north of the road.
When the ambush was sprung, Count Zac’s first thought was to envelop the northern arm of the ambush. It was bred in him, not a conscious decision. He gathered every man on every pony, all the pages and his own survivors, and they rode into the deep woods north of the road, sweeping wide around his best guess of where the enemy might lie.
The great wardens were no aliens to the easterners. The lightning-fast carrion dogs were a terrible surprise, but he’d seen them now.
Like the veteran hunters they were, the Vardariotes spread as they rode, casting a net as wide as they could. The pages tended to clump up. Zac ignored them as amateurs.
His own boys and girls trotted-and then when his sweep turned in a neat buttonhook south, and he raised his arm, they reined in.
Every man and woman with him drew their sabre and placed it over their right arm, so that the gentle curve nestled in the archer’s elbow, sword drawn and ready.
In his own language, Zac called, “Ready, my children. Be the wind!”
The pages followed, screeching.
Zac was confident of his location and his array. He cantered back south, his skirmish line flashing red behind him.
And, as he expected, the enemy had forgotten him. They had formed up to converge on another target, perhaps never having noticed his envelopment. His satisfaction was marred by how many of them there were. Twenty daemons were not going to be swept away in a charge.
He had two calm heartbeats to take it in-three great wardens struggling with the branches of a downed tree. Another raising a stone axe and striking-what, the tree?
Perhaps Zac caught a glimpse of red and gold surcoat. Perhaps he did indeed have a spirit to advise him. Perhaps his instincts for war were so finely honed that he guessed.
“Through them!” he called. He loosed his first arrow, leaned over his horse’s mane, and began to kill.
Gabriel lay, trapped in the weight of his armour, pinned to the ground by an oak branch that lay across his torso and had crumpled his left greave and broken the leg inside it.
He tried to use potentia to move the tree. The pain from his leg was so distracting that he hadn’t even managed to open his visor when the first daemon appeared, sprinting in heavy-footed majesty, leaping through the branches.
Gabriel watched it come. He stretched out his right hand for his ghiavarina.
It was too far.
He worked to summon it. He couldn’t even get into his palace. He reached for Prudentia and a wave of pain thrust him back into bloody reality.
The daemon’s stone axe swept up. He saw its open beak, heard its scream of triumph.
He thought quite a few things-about Amicia, and Irene, and Master Smythe.
And then, despite the last efforts of his straining right hand to grab the ghiavarina, the axe fell.
The daemon’s weapon seemed to slide around his head. It missed.
Gabriel didn’t pause to consider the ramifications, although he was fully aware that he should be dead. He got his right hand on his baselard and drew it. Its effect was tonic-he steadied. The baselard itself held power-
The daemon-so close as to be like a lover and smelling of burned soap and flowers and spring hay-cursed. Even in the alien language, his curse was obvious-the great axe flew up again-
Gabriel dived into his place of power. He leaped onto the bronze disc set in the floor and pulled the lever. This simple symbol governed a nested set of pre-prepared workings, each cascading into the next.
Gold and white and green light flared in a set of nested hemispheres over his prone body.
Zac saw the fireworks and drew the correct conclusion-loosed a shaft with the daemon nearly at the point of his arrow, whirled and loosed again over his shoulder even as his magnificent pony leapt the downed tree and then he was turning.
But the wardens were running. One of their number lay with his feet drumming in the final dance and one of his best warriors, Lonox, was down, cut from the saddle for being too daring, but the wardens wanted no more of the fight.
Kriax, a woman with a face so tanned it seemed made of leather, reined up. “We have them!” she shouted and gave a whoop of pure delight.
Zac pursed his lips. “If I set this ambush…” he said, and waved.
She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were slightly mad with unexpressed violence.
“… I’d have a covering force,” he said. “Back to the road and break contact.”
She saluted with her sabre as her left hand flicked her bow back into the case at her hip. She gave a specific scream-an ululating yell.