Glen Cook - Shadow Games

The Shadowmaster screamed. Gods, did he scream. He flailed around like a bug impaled on a needle. His weight carried him down the shaft of the lance till he hung up on the crosspiece that supports the standard.

Murgen struggled to keep the lance upright and get out of the press. Our boys were his worst enemies. Everybody with a bow kept sniping away at the Shadowmaster.

I spurred my mount forward, got beside Murgen and helped him carry our trophy away.

That bastard wasn’t spinning off any spells now.

The advancing legions roared their Taglios chant twice as loud.

Otto and Hagpp smashed into the confusion in front of Mogaba’s legion. There wasn’t quite as much confusion as I’d hoped. The enemy soldiers had realized they’d been snookered, though they had not yet gotten into formation again.

They absorbed the elephant charge and the cavalry charge both, taking heavy casualties, but they seemed to have given up the idea of running. Hagop and Otto pulled away before the legions arrived, but the elephants continued to be mixed in with the foe. Just as well. They were beyond control. They had been pricked by enough darts and spearheads and swords to go mad with pain. They no longer cared who they stomped.

I yelled at Murgen, “Let’s get this over on that mound where everybody can see that we got him.” One of the mounds that dot the plain was about a hundred yards away.

We struggled through the oncoming infantry, climbed the mound, faced the fighting. It took both of us to keep the standard upright, what with all the kicking and screaming and carrying on the Shadowmaster was doing.

It was a good move tactically, carrying him up there. His boys could see they’d lost their big weapon at a time when they were getting their asses kicked already, and mine could see they didn’t have to worry about him anymore. They went to work figuring on getting it over with in time for lunch break. Hagop and Otto took the bit in their mouth and circled around the enemy right to get at them from behind.

I cursed them. I did not want them so far away. But the thing was beyond control now.

Strategically, our move was not the best. The boys in the encampment got a whiff of onrushing disaster and decided they’d damned well better do something.

Out they came in a mob, their own gimp Shadow-master floating in front, slipping and sliding around drunkenly but getting off a couple of killer spells that rattled the armed prisoners.

Cletus and his brothers opened fire from the wall and pounded Shadowmaster number two around, cut him a little, and got him so pissed he stopped everything and turned on them with a spell that blew them and all their engines right off the wall. Then he led his mob on out, looking to cause the rest of us just as much grief.

His bunch never did get into a formation, and neither did the prisoners, really, so that turned into a sort of barroom brawl with swords real quick.

The boys at the west gate slid out and hit the camp from behind and got over the wall easily. They went to work on the wounded and camp guards and whoever else got in their way, but their success did not affect the bigger show. The men from the camp just kept after the rest of us.

I had to do something.

“Let’s get this thing planted somehow,” I told Murgen. I looked out across the chaos before I dismounted. I could not see Lady anywhere. My heart crawled into my throat.

The earth of that mound was soft and moist. Grunting and straining, the two of us were able to force the butt of the lance in deep enough that it would stand by itself, rocking whenever the Shadowmaster had a wriggling, screaming fit.

The attack from the flank made progress against the prisoners. Some of the fainthearted ran for the nearest city gate, joining fellows who had not bothered to come out. Ochiba tried to extend and rotate part of his line to face the onslaught, with limited success. Sindawe’s less disciplined outfit had begun to disintegrate in their eagerness to hasten the demise of the enemies they faced. They were unaware of the threat from the right. Only Mogaba had maintained discipline and unit integrity. If I’d had half a brain, I’d have flip-flopped his legion with Ochiba’s before we started this. Out where he was now he wasn’t much use. Killing off the entire enemy right wing, sure, but not keeping everything else from falling apart.

I had a bad feeling it was going sour.

“I don’t know what to do, Murgen.”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do now, Croaker. Except cross your fingers and play it out.”

Fireworks spewed over in Ochiba’s area. For a while they were so ferocious I thought they might halt the coming collapse there. Goblin and One-Eye were on the job. But the crippled Shadowmaster managed to quiet them down.

What could I throw at him? What could I do? Nothing. I didn’t have anything else to send in.

I did not want to watch.

A solitary crow settled onto the writhing Shadow-master impaled on the standard lance. It looked at him, at me, at the fighting, and made a sound like an amused chuckle. Then it began pecking at the Shadowmaster’s mask, trying to get at his eyes.

I ignored the bird.

Men began to scurry past. They were from Sindawe’s legion, mostly prisoners who had been enrolled the past few days. I yelled at them and cursed them and called them cowards and ordered them to turn around and form up. Mostly, they did.

Hagop and Otto attacked the men facing Ochiba, probably hoping to ease the pressure so he could go ahead and deal with the threat from the camp. But the attack from behind impelled the enemy forward. While Otto and Hagop’s bunch were having a great time the men they were butchering cracked Ochiba’s line and ran into the armed prisoners from the side.

Ochiba’s legion tried to hold, even so, but they looked like they were in bad trouble. Sindawe’s men thought they were about to run and decided to beat them in a footrace. Or something. They collapsed.

Mogaba had begun rotating his axis of attack to support Sindawe from the flank. But when he finished there was nothing to support.

In moments his legion was the only island of order in a sea of chaos. The enemy were no more organized than my people were. The thing was a grand mess, the world’s largest brawl.

More of my people ran for the city gates. Some just ran. I stood there under the standard, cussing and yelling and waving my sword and shedding a couple of quarts of tears. And, gods help me, some of the fools heard and listened and started trying to form up with the men I’d organized already, facing around, pushing back into it in tight little detachments.

Guts. From the beginning they had told me those Taglians had guts.

More and more, me and Murgen built us a human wall around the standard. More and more, the enemy concentrated on Mogaba, whose legion refused to break. The Shadowmasters’ men heaped their dead around him. He did not see us, it seemed. Despite all resistance he moved toward the city.

I guess Murgen and I got three thousand men together before fate decided it was time to take another bite.

A big mob of the enemy rushed us. I assumed my pose, with my sword up, beside the standard. I did not have much show left me. If Goblin and One-Eye were alive at all they were too busy covering their own asses.

It looked like we would drive them off easily. Our line was locked together solidly. They were just a howling mob.

Then the arrow came out of nowhere and hit me square in the chest and knocked me right off my horse.

It wasn’t always best to be old and wise in the ways of battlefields, Lady thought. She saw what was coming, clearly, long before anybody else did. Briefly, after Murgen skewered the Shadowmaster, she had hopes it would turn, but the advent of the troops from the encampment caused a shift in momentum that could not be reversed.