More smoothly and uniformly than they had mere days before, all the lancers canted their lances at the proper angle. On Medrash’s command, they walked their horses forward. Then trotted. Then cantered. Their weapons dropped to threaten the onrushing saurians, and then they broke into a gallop.
But Medrash’s brown gelding only ran for a couple of strides. Then the animal balked, nearly pitching its startled rider out of the saddle. The horse tossed its head and whinnied.
Shields overlapping, all but marching in stride, the spearmen advanced in good order. Khouryn gave a slight nod of satisfaction, then saw disaster strike Medrash’s charging lancers.
Almost every horse spooked at the same instant. Despite the long weapons in the lancers’ hands, and the way they were riding nearly shoulder to shoulder, some of the steeds managed to halt, turn, and bolt toward the rest of the vanquisher’s army. Their masters were the lucky ones. Other animals slammed into their fellow steeds and knocked them stumbling, or off their feet entirely. Dragonborn yelled, hauled on the reins, and dug in their spurs, fighting to regain control. Meanwhile the first wave of conjured creatures swept over them. A glider ripped a warrior from the saddle. A lizard-bear seized a horse in its fangs and wrenched it down onto the ground, breaking both its front legs in the process. The steed screamed and thrashed. Vapor billowed from around the reptile’s jaws as its corrosive spittle ate its way into the animal’s flesh.
“Rock of Battle!” Khouryn cursed. “Charge! Charge!”
“That will break the formation,” said a sergeant who’d apparently learned the lessons of drill a little too well.
“To the Abyss with the formation!” Khouryn roared. “Run up there and kill something!” Before the enemy killed every one of the riders.
Medrash’s horse bucked and reared. He decided he had to get off before the animal threw him. He dropped his lance and kicked his feet out of the stirrups, which made his bouncing perch even more precarious than before. Clinging to his saddle with his one free hand-his shield prevented the use of the other-he swung his leg over the gelding’s back and jumped.
He landed with a jolt, staggered a step, then caught his balance. All around him, gray and green reptile things lunged and pounced, rending dragonborn who were virtually unable to defend themselves. Posing nearly as much of a danger as the saurians, horses with bloody wounds and fuming burns surged one way and another.
At least, since he was no longer fighting his own terrified mount, Medrash could more easily focus his will. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then reached out to Torm.
The god’s Power rushed into him like a flash flood surging down a gorge. He shook his steel-gauntleted fist above his head.
The sun was shining. A lesser light should have gone unnoticed. But somehow brightness, or a sense of it, pulsed from his hand. With it came a suggestion of quiet that was just as paradoxical amid the roars, shrieks, and crashes of blows on armor. For some distance around him, saurians hesitated in midattack. Horses stopped resisting the dictates of spur and rein.
Unfortunately, the artificial tranquility would only last for a few heartbeats. “Dismount!” Medrash bellowed. “Fight on foot, but like Khouryn taught you!”
Riders swung themselves down from their mounts. Shaking off passivity, one of the gray saurians charged a dragonborn who had one foot still in the stirrup and one on the ground.
Medrash couldn’t intercept the threat in time, but his breath could. As he snatched for the hilt of his sword, he spat lightning. The crackling flare seared the lizard thing’s body, bursting some of the tumorlike growths bulging from its flank. It stumbled and jerked for the moment the punishment lasted, then whirled toward the one who’d hurt it.
Medrash let it come to him, then sidestepped just as it rushed into striking distance. Its snapping jaws still bashed his shield and jolted his arm, but at least its momentum didn’t knock him off his feet. He cut into the creature’s hide and shouted “Torm!” The god’s Power manifested as a thunderclap. Though Medrash perceived just how supremely loud it was, he heard it without distress. But, unprotected by the Loyal Fury’s grace, the lizard thing lurched and roared like it had suffered a second and even more damaging sword stroke.
But that didn’t finish it either. It spun in Medrash’s direction, tearing his blade from its body and splashing him with a droplet or two of blistering fluid. It struck at him, and he interposed his shield. The attack slammed into the obstruction, and then the saurian twisted its neck and caught the edge of the shield in its fangs. It gnawed as it lashed its head back and forth. Bits of smoking, dissolving oak and hide fell away from the shield. Medrash’s arm throbbed like it was coming out of its socket. He staggered in a frantic effort to keep his foe from yanking him off his feet.
He cut at the lizard-bear, only to find that off balance as he was, he could do no more than scratch its hide. He tried to pull his arm free of the straps securing it to the crumbling shield but, perhaps because of the attitude into which his adversary had twisted it, he couldn’t.
He pushed aside incipient panic and drew down Torm’s glory once again. He willed the saurian to recognize the Power burning inside him, and to fear it.
Which, from a mundane perspective, was absurd. At that moment, the lizard thing was like some enormous hound at furious play, while he resembled its helpless bone. Yet the brute faltered, its eyes widening.
Medrash recovered his balance, stepped, and thrust with all his strength. His sword punched deep into the creature’s skull, and its legs buckled beneath it. But even in death it clung to the shield, and so dragged him down to the ground along with it. Finally, on one knee, he managed to slip his aching arm from the loops.
A shadow fell over him.
Instinct made him raise his shield arm as he turned. The slashing wing claws that might otherwise have shattered his skull or broken his neck clattered against his armored limb instead. Still, the multiple impacts stabbed pain through the already-tortured arm and flung him backward, away from the dead lizard-bear and the sword still embedded in its head.
The glider landed on its short, thick legs, then pivoted. Medrash scrambled toward his weapon. The saurian’s head snapped forward. Its jaws opened wide and spewed greenish vapor over him.
Medrash’s skin burned, and his eyes filled with blinding tears. He started coughing and couldn’t stop. He needed to use Torm’s Power to cleanse him of poison, inside and out, but he knew his foe wasn’t going to give him the chance.
Then a spear jabbed through one of the creature’s batlike wings. It snarled, turned, and found itself facing three more such weapons, two aimed high, the other low. It whirled a wing back to slash with the bony fingertips protruding from the scalloped edge, and its foes backpedaled. More spears jabbed it from behind, as warriors assaulted it with the same tactics they’d employed against the hovering wooden Beast.
Despite the handicap posed by his burning nose, mouth, throat, and lungs, Medrash wheezed a prayer. All his pains eased, including the fierce one in his shield arm. He flexed it and found that even if had been broken a moment before, it wasn’t anymore.
Tears still streaming from his eyes, he scrambled onward to the lizard thing’s carcass and jerked his sword out of it. Then he drew himself to his feet and looked around.
On every side, dragonborn fought saurians and the ash giants who’d advanced behind the conjured horrors. Some of the warriors were the surviving members of Medrash’s dismounted cavalry, often using lances as spears for the sake of the reach they provided. Others were actual spearmen, who must have rushed forward to support their embattled comrades. Medrash recognized the hammer and axe emblem of the company Khouryn was commanding personally, although amid all the howling, crashing frenzy, he failed to spot the dwarf himself.