And again.
The peasants were flayed. Twenty of them died with every volley, and the shafts were rolling off the Vardariotes’ fingers like coins from a mountebank’s trick.
Nine.
Ten.
The spearmen were going to close. They were too brave, too confident to break, or to lie down and die out there on the frozen ground. They’d been shocked at Liviapolis, at the intensity of the archery and the power of the great yew bows, but they’d had six months to chew on their rage and boast of their glory. They took their losses and stepped over them – and over men they’d known for twenty years.
Bent raised his war bow with his eleventh arrow. Experience told him he wasn’t getting in his twelfth. He leaned out over Ser Jehan’s shoulder in a rhythm that the two of them knew as well as old lovers know the rhythm of their lovemaking – his bow arm well past the knight’s right shoulder, his hip against the knight’s hip – and shot a veteran of twenty battles just below the bridge of his nose, where the nasal of his helmet stopped.
Bent tossed his bow up and back, over his right shoulder. It would land on the frozen, untilled earth about fifteen feet behind him and he’d find it again if he lived. He passed back a rank, leaving the squire in front of him and the spear of the page passing over his shoulder.
He drew a hand and a half sword from his belt – forty days’ pay – and took the buckler off the hilt. And braced his left shoulder against the squire’s.
Ser Jehan raised the head of his pole-axe by a distance of about a foot.
Morgan Mortirmir stood in the front rank, terrified. His armour weighed like lead on his limbs, and the spearmen looked like evil gods of war, carrying his doom.
The Red Knight had ordered him to maintain a shield over the whole of the front, and he did so. Well warned, he let the illusions crash among them, although he himself didn’t always see the workings as genuine until they were too late.
Stop this one.
Mortirmir threw effort into the pale gold of his shield. Fire roared all along the front of his corner of the battle, and licked both over and under his working. Frozen grass caught fire. He let it burn. The spearmen were closer, the noise was alien and suffocating, and he was desperate to escape the confines of his helmet. He couldn’t see anything beyond the hard eyes of the killers opposite him – almost close enough to touch.
His squire – a hard-eyed bastard provided him by Ser Michael – put his shoulder against Mortirmir’s back. ‘Get ready, ser!’
Mortirmir had decided to fight with sword and buckler. He set his feet.
‘Close yer fucking visor, ser,’ his squire said. A gauntleted hand slammed his visor down so hard he almost fell.
He looked through the slits and saw-
The spearhead came for him, trying reap his life, and caught on his chain aventail. He did nothing to parry it – it cut through the aventail, popping rings at their rivets. But the aventail was too big for the fifteen-year-old ‘man-at-arms’ anyway and the spearhead punched past him, over his shoulder, creasing his round shoulder pauldron and wrenching his shoulder in a way he’d remember in a hundred nightmares.
Mortirmir’s training took hold. His buckler flicked out and the steel boss slipped along the spearshaft. He nudged the point of the blade into line.
Phontia! he said.
The spearman burst into flame inside his scale shirt, so that for a moment his face appeared to be that of a daemon from hell.
The old man had told him to remain on the defence. That was, he could see, a recipe for disaster. He pushed into the dead man’s place, the smell of burning meat strong in his nostrils even through his visor, and pointed the sword again. He put a quarter of his potentia into a single simple working.
Well, not so very simple.
A ball of fire has to emerge from somewhere. Fire, as an element, was parasitic – fire never exists without a source. The source is the hard part – creating the source of a ball of fire requires time and patience and practice. It is much easier if the caster works the source close to himself and much harder if he attempts to do it at a distance – hence, most battlefield casters worked up a heavy shield and then made the ball of fire, fuelled by wood or various gases, appear at arm’s length, and then, when they had a satisfactory pyrotechnic, they would move it as they might throw a heavy object. Except worked in the aethereal, of course.
This is where education was often a limiting factor on power. A young practioner who has been shown how to create coal oil is far more dangerous than one who has only learned to create beeswax.
A young practioner who has linked to Harmodius has access to a world of substances beyond the ken of most magisters. Rarefied alchemical creations. After all, an hermeticist who knew alchemy need only make a substance in real once.
Mortirmir’s fireball burned so hot as it ignited six feet in front of him that he flinched away, almost lost his hermetic shield, and lost control of the fire. It drifted away. Then it vanished with a pop as he lost the fine control of his source.
Forty close-packed spearmen were incinerated. The left front corner of the enemy phalanx collapsed.
Ser Michael, who commanded the rightmost battle in the company, pointed his pole-axe – one-handed – at the charred ruin. ‘At them!’ he roared.
Aeskepiles had ridden his horse closer and closer to the point of impact – so that as the spearmen slowed, aimed and thrust with their spear points and the sound of their impact on the armour of his enemies exploded, he arrived at a point just fifty paces from the combat. He was secure behind the centre.
The closer two magisters were, the less able either was to deflect the castings of the other. At fifty paces-
An enormous ball of white-hot fire appeared to his left. He hadn’t felt it cast and hadn’t seen the caster.
As fast as the flash of terror that rippled through his system – making his horse shy as his spurred heels bit into her sides – he spat five words in the aether.
The Red Knight felt the old man leave him as the breaking of a fever and the loss of an unwelcome memory. He wanted to say something. If only to know the man was gone for good.
But the enemy spearmen were two spear lengths away. Cully and Wilful Murder tossed their bows aside and slid back through the ranks – Toby, who fought with a heavy spear, slid it over his head. He raised his ghiavarina. He’d never used it in combat.
He was alone, and the headache was gone.
He took a deep breath. Rotated his hips back. He had the spear, head up, in the spear guard called dente di cinghiaro. As his opponent’s spear came at him – a long, committed thrust – he cut down into it. His blow should have batted the heavy spear down and safely away. Instead, his magnificent, dragon-gifted weapon cut through his opponent’s spearhead. The truncated, blunt iron end slammed into his helmet, knocking him backward. The force of his cut, which should have been dissipated on his adversary’s shaft, sent the head of the ghiavarina deep in the ground at his feet.
He ripped it free, stepped forward, and slammed it into his opponent’s head before he was even over the shock of its effect. But it didn’t slam into his opponent’s helmet. It sheared through it, severing the helmet’s top four fingers and one finger of the man’s skull so cleanly that for a half a heartbeat, brains, skull, arming hood, mail and helmet were a series of concentric circles like some wild nomadic art.
Another spear struck his left pauldron and bounced up and over his shoulder, and a third slammed into his breastplate, but Toby’s shoulder in his back kept him on his feet and he struggled to recover from his surprise.