Eric Flint: Much Fall Of Blood

"Your Majesty, I would recommend-"

"Do something!" Emeric looked to his immediate bodyguards and pointed a finger at Mindaug. "If he doesn't do something-quickly!-then kill him!"

Mindaug was sorely tempted to produce a harmless but dazzling display of magicry. That would, after all, constitute "doing something"-and it was obvious from the confused expressions on the faces of Emeric's guards that they had no real idea exactly what the king wanted. Which was hardly surprising, of course, since the king himself had no clear idea.

Just something.

The problem, of course, was simple. Someone as familiar with the black arts as Emeric should have known perfectly well that battlefields were terrible places to wield magic. There was far too much iron present, more than you would encounter almost anywhere else.

Iron and magic did not mix well. Only the strongest magics would work at all, and the end result was always uncertain.

"Do something!" the king screeched again.

Mindaug shrugged. So be it. He began chanting the necessary phrases.

If this magic went badly, it was likely to go very badly indeed-and there was a simple counter-measure against it. Hopefully, the enemy would overlook that counter-measure, because of its very simplicity.

And if they didn't… Well, Mindaug had long since prepared his escape. Too bad for the king of Hungary, then. But he was a loathsome fellow anyway.

Kaltegg Shaman was not happy about the dispersal of the magical protections at his disposal. He had wanted, and very badly, to station the knights with their curiously spiked armor at each of the mobile forts to help disperse magic, but it seemed that was out of the question. The knights stayed together, in a group. And the shaman had not had enough time to direct the cobbling together of iron and steel junk into dispersal-rods for all the forts, either.

The tengeri were uneasy. The air-horses were unhappy. The shaman could only wait for whatever the foe might throw at them, and hope that he could think of something to deflect it.

When the attack finally came, it was not the raging storm of magic on the spirit plane he had expected. Instead it came subtly, so subtly that at first he did not recognize it as an attack. It came as a lowering of the spirits, of energy. A dimming of the senses. It crept over him slowly, so slowly that he did not even realize what was happening until a wounded man he was tending began to weep and say a word that Shaman recognized as meaning "mother." Yet that man was not about to die, was an old and experienced campaigner, and should not be acting like a boy in his first combat.

And that was when the shaman knew, with a start, that the enemy had a truly skilled magic-user. A subtle one! He was doing his work in such a way that the knights had not been alerted. This was no Elizabeth Bartholdy, to bombard with demonic energies. This was a thing of long patience, indirection; the mind of an ambusher at work.

Just as the shaman realized that, there came a sound that he did not recognize from the farthest fort on the line. An explosion that seemed far too loud and somehow wrong. And then, another.

From the Sky-Runners came the word, whispered magically into his ear.

The cannons are exploding.

Frantically, the shaman began his drumming. And the Sky-Runners began to cloud-dance in time with his rhythms. They could not disperse the cannon-killing magic with iron and steel-but perhaps they could with air and fire and music.

He sensed, rather than saw, the farthest fort fall, its cannons turned deadly to the occupants, their bodies riddled with bronze shrapnel.

He redoubled his efforts, sweating.

It is not enough, came the strained word from above. We need more help.

The shaman rarely prayed as such. The spirits with which he dealt could be bargained with, or coaxed, or rarely, coerced. The gods, on the whole, preferred mortals to help themselves, which was right and good, if harsh. But the steppes were harsh, and had grown strong warriors-and a child never becomes a man if he is protected every step of his journey through life. The shaman agreed with that in principle.

But at this moment, he prayed. A little help, Powers. Just a little, or the enemy will engulf us.

And that was when it started, beside him.

The singing.

Not the knights; that, he might have expected. And not a battle-hymn such as the one they had sung to confound the evil woman. This was the horse-boy, David, his voice still on the high side of tenor, high enough to pierce the battle-noise and carry over it, even though you could hear the faint tremolo of fear in it. And it was a simple song, a simple melody by the knights' standards, and what sounded like simple words.

The men around him took it up. Quickly, the Shaman altered his drum-pattern to follow the beat of the words. There was power in this song, as there had been in the knights' battle-hymn. There was magic, too. And, it seemed, a greater magic than he guessed because soon all the men in their fort were singing it, and in three different tongues! The song carried out to the next fort, which took it up, and the next, and the next, and then the knights themselves sang it in their deep, thundering voices. Even his own people, the Mongols, seemed to sense the meaning of words none of them understood much of, and chanted nonsense syllables to the same tune. The Sky-Runners altered their dance to match it, and pulled the power of the song up to the sky, and power descended from the sky to match it.

The song somehow formed a protective shelter over the forts and the men in them. No more cannon exploded.

The shaman gave himself up to his drumming.

Luckily, the Hungarian king was too enthusiastic about the initial success of Mindaug's spells to notice that the count was now murmuring very different words.

As Mindaug had feared, the enemy either knew or had discovered by accident the counter-measure. And this counter-measure was building rapidly. Whoever that tenor was in the enemy ranks, he had enormous power. Mindaug wanted to be nowhere in sight when the enemy's counter-magic swept the field. The soldiers would panic; the horses, panic even worse.

Emeric must have realized, finally, that something was amiss. He turned toward Mindaug, his mouth open. To question, perhaps; more likely, to shriek more threats.

But Mindaug was gone. Where he and his mule had stood, there was now nothing but a cloud of smoke. And, bizarrely, a small mirror suspended in mid-air. Emeric could see his own reflection in that mirror, gaping. He clamped his mouth shut.

And then, suddenly, it was over. The Hungarian army simply disintegrated. The Mongols harried the edges of the fleeing mob. Vlad rode forward with his Szekelers to accept the surrender of those who were sensible enough not to try to escape-or simply too stunned. The backlash of the spell unleashed by the Hungarians seemed to have struck the Magyar soldiers like a club.

Vlad's peasant soldiers found King Emeric, as they engaged in the looting of the corpses of their former attackers. Emeric was pretending to be dead himself.

That was a foolish ploy, given the finery of his apparel. One of the soldiers recognized him and moments later he was surrounded. The soldiers kept their distance-the Hungarian king had a reputation of his own for black magic-but they called out to their commander.

Prince Vlad rode over to see what all the shouting was about.

"I give you my surrender," said Emeric, sulkily. "As one lord to another. Keep these peasant carrion away from me."

One of the soldiers laid hands on Emeric. He reacted, foolishly, by using his pain touch. The soldier screamed and backed away. Now in a rage, Vlad got off his horse and strode over to the king of Emeric.