David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

But the citizens went on and fought-or anyway hacked at their enemies. Some of the strokes were so wild that Cashel suspected the fellows were swinging their swords with their eyes shut, but they weren't running away.

They weren't advancing much either. By now enough of them had come out of the gates, this one and the ones to either side, that there was a solid line of citizens chopping at the King's cavorting monsters. More humans came from the city, but many more Made Men swarmed out of the distant hills. Cashel thought of soldiers facing the sea with their swords-and the tide sweeping on regardless, as the tide always will…

Three lances of red wizardlight stabbed from the King toward Mab, as quickly as heartbeats. Two exploded midway, a blast and a blast, pushing the fighters away from each other for a moment. Cashel rode the shocks the way he'd have ridden gusts of wind at the start of a storm.

Instead of exploding, the third bolt vanished a hand's breadth from Mab's forehead, then lashed back at the King. A fireball lit the walls of Ronn and the slopes of the barren hills. The bone litter flew apart. The creatures carrying it flattened, and the King dropped out of sight behind the wall of his minions.

For a moment Cashel thought Mab had killed her city's enemy, but nearby Made Men threw down their weapons and lifted the King again on their bare shoulders. He'd been scotched but not finished. Well, that'd been a lot to hope; and anyway, the sky seemed brighter than it'd been before the exchange of bolts.

Because Cashel stood two double-paces above the battle, he had a good view. The whole width of Ronn was lined with men in polished armor, with the Heroes each advanced slightly beyond the ordinary citizens.

Virdin had laid an arc of bodies before him and was building it into a wall with every further stroke or jab with his shield. Cashel was impressed by his skill, all the more remarkable for the clumsy butchery going on to his right and left. Virdin worked like an expert shearer stripping the wool from a sheep without wasting a motion.

Mab's face was raised. Her hands wove patterns and her lips moved, but Cashel couldn't hear what she was saying. The shouts and crash of battle were deafeningly loud, but Cashel had the feeling that she wasn't really talking with her mouth.

The sky grew steadily brighter. The Made Men were giving way, not quickly but being pushed back nonetheless. Men were down-many men were down, when you looked both ways along the line of battle-but the King's creatures had fallen the way wheat does before the scythe.

Darkness swelled together in the sky like fog beading on cold glass, then dived at Mab on black wings. Cashel moved without thinking, bringing his quarterstaff up and around. His ferrule smashed into the attacker where its neck met the wings.

The blue flash more than the impact flung the creature up and back; it vanished as suddenly as it'd appeared. It'd been a crow the size of an ox, literally a thing of night whose destruction made the sky lighter.

Another image formed and sprang, a cat this time with its claws spread and its fanged mouth open wide enough to swallow Mab's head and shoulders. Cashel shifted, stepping across Mab's front to meet the attack with the other butt of his staff. Iron crunched beneath the cat's eyesocket. Blue wizardlight flashed across the whole huge form, lighting the sky and devouring the cat as though it'd never existed.

Cashel's hands were numb. He flexed them on his staff, knowing he might need them again shortly.

The sky continued to brighten. A spot appeared in the high sky, a white blur like the sun showing through overcast. Darkness ripped back like fabric tearing, turning the whole sky bright. It wasn't daytime any more than the shadow the King cast was true night; this was the opposite of black.

The Made Men seemed to shrivel individually as they broke and tried to run. They'd come in like the tide and now like the tide they were washing back. They left behind only blood-soaked ground and a wrack of bodies.

The citizens of Ronn surged after them. The men who'd fought in the front line stumbled, too exhausted to follow their routed enemies for more than a few steps. Other men poured through their lines, though-and women as well, come down from the parapet and balconies, wielding kitchen implements and hurling stones wrenched from the ornamental walkways meandering across the terraces.

The King squatted in a dome of ruby light, hunched like the pale, wizened pupa of a grasshopper which the plowshare turns up into daylight. He was mouthing words of power as he beat the air with his athame. His minions had fled or died, but the citizens of Ronn avoided him they way they'd have gone around a glowing oven.

Cashel glanced at Mab, expecting to see her looking triumphant. Mab's hands were the only part of her moving. Her body was as rigid as a statue's, and her face was twisted into a grimace of agony.

This is the real fight. Not the bumbling slaughter of men and not-men now finishing in an equally bumbling race.

Cashel shrugged to loosen his tunic again, then strode down the slope onto the second terrace. There'd been a fountain here; fed by pipes coming out of Ronn, he supposed, but that must've ended when the King's influence oozed back into the rock-cut levels of the city. Now it was a coping whose tiled roof had filled the basin when the four stone maidens supporting it fell.

Cashel felt a twinge of sadness for the statues. They'd never been alive, of course, but it still bothered him that pretty things meant to make people happy lay broken and covered by corpses. Well, maybe they'd be raised and repaired rather than replaced. It wasn't their fault what'd happened to them, after all.

At the place where the two lines had stood and fought the longest, there were enough bodies to make Cashel choose his footing with care. The Made Men's corpses squished underfoot and turned like bladders full of wet mud. Cashel tried not to step on real men, but sometimes he had to. He figured they didn't care any more, or anyway that they understood that there's things that happen even when you'd rather they didn't.

Cashel approached from the side of the King in his shimmering dome. He didn't know what'd happen if he put himself between Mab and the King, but the best result of that was nothing. The worst… well, Cashel had seen enough of wizards that being blasted to bits wasn't at the bottom of what he thoughtmight happen.

The King watched with tiny eyes as Cashel approached, but his athame kept stroking the air toward Mab on the higher terrace. Cashel thought he felt hatred through the protective red glow, but he guessed the King was one of those people who hated whatever it was they saw. It didn't make Cashel special, and itsure wasn't just wizards who acted that way.

Citizens were watching Cashel too. An overweight fellow who must be sixty knelt on the ground in front of his helmet. Sweat gleamed on his bald scalp. He looked so tired that he couldn't move, even to sit down properly, but there was blood on the blade of the sword he still held. His eyes tracked Cashel.

So did those of the woman cross-legged on the ground not far away. She was probably as old as the exhausted man, but she was tall and slender and looked every inch a queen. Her robes were white, but whites of several different shades that swirled together into a pattern that Cashel knew would've impressed his sister.

Blood stained the garments and continued to drip from the open mouth of the young man whose head she cradled in her lap. Cashel guessed the fellow must've bitten his tongue in half when a Made Man thrust his barbed bronze sword through the human's visor. The wound itself wasn't bleeding. The woman looked like she'd cry when she'd had time for what'd happened to sink in. Mothers did that, even mothers who looked like queens.