David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

The blended wizardlight had an oppressive weight. The huge room seemed dimmer than the corridors feeding it, though that was an illusion: Garric could see the men around him more clearly than he had before.

He could also see deep into the ice walls. The vast pillars supporting the dome were hollow. Within them were plants whose roots grew through the ice floor in broad nets to reach the sea beneath. Their twisted stems and the leaves spreading against the inner walls of their enclosures struck Garric with a pathos that he couldn't understand until he caught a glimpse of a flower that wasn't hidden by the foliage. It was shaped like the red mouth of a woman screaming, and the petals moved as he looked at them.

The center of the rotunda allowed Garric to look down all eight corridors. He had his sword out, but as much as he wanted to kill something to wipe the image of the plants from his mind he knew he needed to act as commander rather than swordsman for the time being. His men depended on him, and so did the kingdom.

"Hold up!" he shouted to his informal bodyguards. Prester and Pont obediently halted, facing back with their shields out-thrust to fend away the troops pouring into the rotunda at a dead run. If the noncoms had an opinion about what Garric was doing, they kept it to themselves.

Glittering figures marched toward the rotunda down the second corridor to the left of Garric's column. They were too distant for him to see details beyond the fact that the walls' blue glow sparkled on scores of sharp points.

"Well, you didn't think they were going to send dancing girls to greet us, did you?" laughed Carus. "Mind, I remember places where I lost more troops to what they caught from the women than I did to the spears of the men."

A junior officer was running past. He was armed in Blaise fashion and affected flaring mustachios which he had to fill out with a fall because he was too young to grow proper ones himself.

"Ensign!" Garric said. He pointed to the startled youth, then the approaching enemy. "Yes, you! Take a hundred men and block that blue corridor. Don't go any distance down it, just far enough that you've got a little room to retreat without letting them into this rotunda."

"Sir?" said the ensign, gaping like a cod at a fishmonger's.

Swearing silently, Garric looked around for another officer in the rush of troops. Prester shouted, "Suter! Get your ass over here to his highness!"

A husky warrant officer trotting past-he must have been fifty if not older-turned in mid stride. "Who do you thinkyou are giving me orders, Prester?" he said.

"Prince Garric here wants you to help the young gentleman-" Prester nodded to the blinking ensign "-organize a company to block that tunnel there."

"Sister take me!" Suter said. He slapped his spear against his shield boss in salute to Garric. "Yessir, your highness!"

Turning to the stream of troops, Suter stretched out his spear as a baffle and bellowed, "All right, soldiers! We got a job to do! Vedres, start'em down that corridor. I'll be up with you quick as I can. Sir-" to the ensign "-you just follow Vedres there and he'll put you right."

The ensign turned and jogged off with the file closer who was presumably named Vedres. The youth looked immeasurably relieved to be getting out of Prince Garric's presence.

"Silly twit," muttered Pont, eyeing the ensign's back. Suter was shunting the incoming stream of soldiers toward the corridor where Vedres formed them in ranks about a hundred feet down from the rotunda. The ensign-whatever his name was-struck a pose in the front rank, which was actually quite a useful thing to do. A young officer like that had no real purpose except to be brave and thereby to provide a spiritual anchor to the line soldiers who'd be doing the fighting.

"Yeah, but he'll serve to stop a spear," said Prester with a complacent smile. "And if that bunion Suter stops another one, well, that's cream with my strawberries."

Garric tried to swallow his smile. Then deciding that this was as good a place for humor as any in the world, he let his grin spread. When the noncoms grinned back at him, he laughed out loud while in his mind Carus laughed just as merrily.

Lord Escot and his troops met the centipede a short spear-cast before the creature reached the rotunda. "Loose!" called the Blood Eagle in the front rank, his voice echoing over the crash of boots and the centipede's pincered feet.

The spears flew in a ragged volley, wobbling because they were thrown by running men. Even so most struck their target because the centipede's armored body nearly filled the tunnel. Some glanced off, but half a dozen missiles cracked the monster's headplate and penetrated deeply enough to dangle.

The centipede continued forward with the relentless certainty of water gushing through a pipe. The creature towered over the men as they charged home with drawn swords.

"We'll need to-" Garric said, his stomach suddenly knotting.

They'd have to meet the centipede in the rotunda and attack it from all sides, because it was obvious that no number of men could stop the creature in a head-on encounter. The casualties from that-the men torn to pieces by the pincers and flung across the rotunda-would be in the hundreds.

"Garric!" Liane called from behind him.

Garric spun, his face going coldly blank to hide the horror in his heart. He'd known that one of those bodies the centipede mangled might be his, but that was part of his job. Liane would be back where she and Tenoctris could return through the portal if things went disastrously wrong. She'd besafe.

But instead here she was, running toward him at the head of a forest of pikes. "I brought a company of the phalanx!" she explained, gasping for breath as she clasped arms with him. "The s-soldiers made an aisle for me so that I could get them through. I thought you might need them!"

"By the Shepherd! we do," Garric said. He glanced over exactly what Liane had brought him.

Master Ortron, commander of half the phalanx, stood facing the other way as he formed his men into ranks in the rotunda. Ortron was a commoner who knew that the officers and men of the older regiments looked down on his men. The pikemen doubled as oarsmen in the fleet, and they'd been recruited from farm laborers and the urban poor instead of the yeoman farmers who made up the heavy infantry.

Ortron and the men under him were convinced that their phalanx could cut the heart out of any army in the Isles; and on the proper terrain, they were right. This might be an even better opportunity to test the effectiveness of their twenty-foot pikes than against human enemies.

"Ortron," Garric shouted, "form them by sections-" blocks of nominally a hundred men, eight ranks deep "-and take over from the infantry that's fighting the centipede, the bug over there!"

The passages of this ice maze were higher than those of any palace Garric had seen in his own world, but even so the pikes must've been a close fit when troops jogged down the corridors carrying them upright. Just moving with the long weapons took a great deal of training and coordination; using them effectively in battle was even more difficult. But a fully-trained phalanx was as deadly a weapon as anything under the sun-and perhaps as deadly as anything in this icy hellworld as well.

Garric gestured toward the target he'd set Ortron. As he did so he saw his aide Lord Lerdain burst from the crowd of soldiers. The boy was flushed and his cuirass wasn't properly buckled; he must have been in his quarters asleep when all this broke open.

"Your highness!" Lerdain cried. "I got here as-"

"Yes," interrupted Garric. He pointed to the corridor where swords flashed in the wizardlight as men hacked at the centipede. "Tell Lord Escot or whoever's in charge now-"

Whoever's still alive now.