David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

He dropped to the mosaic floor, drawing his sword again. He knew what he had to do.

“ Let me handle it, lad ,” said the voice in his mind. The king sounded detached and very certain. “ This is a thing I’ve done before .”

Then go , thought Garric, surrendering his body to his ancient ancestor. He watched like a man whose horse has taken the bit in its teeth. Save them, whatever it costs .

The incoming troops had expanded their hold on the sanctum into an arc wide enough for a dozen men to stand abreast. They fought until they fell and were replaced by fresh troops coming through the passage. The weight of the armored soldiers pushed the Archai back, but the twin forelimbs and suicidal tenacity of the insect warriors made them terrible opponents in a close-quarter fight like this one. The mosaic pavement was slick with blood as well as ichor.

Carus raised his ichor-smeared blade in the air like an oriflamme. “Follow me!” he shouted. He leaped through a space between two Blood Eagles—Garric hadn’t believed there was a space until it was behind them—and into a wall of Archai milling like ants from a dug-up nest.

Even watching like a spectator at a handball match, Garric couldn’t fully understand what happened next. Carus moved like a dancer, using his dagger and the pommel of his sword rather than the blade.

The Archai were quick with their chopping forelimbs; Carus was quicker yet, quicker than thought. He took strokes as he gave them, but even there the king’s instinct to duck or turn put his armor under the living blades.

The hammerblows on Garric’s helmet and breastplate dented the bronze, but chitin swords weren’t dense enough to pierce metal. Some of the strokes were as hard as the one that’d stunned Garric a few minutes before, but Carus operated on a plane in which his whole being was subordinated to the task he’d set himself before beginning.

Like a dancer , Garric thought again; but in Carus’ wake lay a swath of twitching bodies as broad as a man’s two arms could reach. The air about the king was a fog of ichor and blood, slung in droplets from steel blades and saw teeth.

“Blood Eagles to me!” Attaper roared as he followed Carus into the sudden gap. “Guard your prince or be ready to fall on your swords!”

What had been a battle turned into a sporting event of unbelievable savagery. The bodyguards slashed their way forward, no longer protecting themselves. Their only concern was to keep up with the king and their commander—

And they did keep up, more or less, sweeping their blades into the Archai with the same careless abandon that the insects showed. The insect warriors went down with heads, limbs, even their bodies severed. Men went down also; but not as many as in the opening minutes of the battle when instead of merely killing they’d tried also to protect themselves against unfamiliar dangers…and failed in both desires, as often as not.

More troops tramped into the sanctum. Regular infantry and even a few Blaise armsmen mixed with the last of the bodyguard regiment. The king’s advance across the floor had opened space for the human army to use its greater numbers, though Archai continued to clamber out of the central pool. The water was murky with blood.

A section of sidewall crashed inward with a cloud of shattered concrete. Iron cast into tight-curled horns to resemble a ram’s head poked into the sanctum, then withdrew to smash the hole bigger. Lord Waldron had brought one of the battering rams of the siege train up with his leading battalions.

A good man, Waldron, for all his hot temper and stiff-necked pride in his noble lineage. A flawed man but one who had few equals…much like Carus himself.

The king reached the mound of Archai bodies. All Carus saw as he climbed with crunching hobnails were targets and threats, but Garric watching through the same eyes had a better view of the battle than he’d gotten during his brief glimpse from the wall molding.

The troops pouring through the hole they’d battered in the sidewall were dismounted cavalrymen from the regiments of Northern Ornifal; Lord Waldron himself was at their head. There were more men than insect warriors in the sanctum, now.

A huge chunk of the dome fell inward, raggedly doubling the size of the oculus. It carried with it two of the Blaise soldiers who’d chopped it away as a more effective missile than the spears they’d exhausted. Half fell in the bloody pool, crushing several of the Archai who were just climbing out. The creatures still appeared, but in nothing like the numbers they had when the Mistress’s plans were being fed by the one-sided slaughter of the civilians she’d gathered as sacrificial animals.

Carus beheaded an Archa atop the mound of bodies. At the same instant, Chalcus’ curved blade severed both oddly jointed ankles and Cashel smashed its chest. Purple slime smeared the quarterstaff so thickly that its ferrules were indistinguishable from the hickory pole.

“ We’re done, lad! ” King Carus shouted in Garric’s mind. “ But by the Lady, so are the bugs! ”

It was Garric’s body again, but it was slipping away from him. Thalemos —what was Lord Thalemos doing here?— dropped the severed Archa forelimb he’d taken for a weapon. He, Ilna, and another girl braced themselves to catch Garric’s slumping figure.

“Prince Garric and the Isles!” someone shouted over the chaos.

“Prince Garric and the Isles!” bellowed the army. The shout grew louder with every repetition as the troops outside the building took it up also.

It was the last sound Garric heard before he sank into the blackness of total exhaustion.

When Garric sat very still, the sunlight felt good. The sun was well down in the western sky, though, and “very still” meant without swelling his lungs to breathe. None of his wounds was serious, but there wasn’t a palm’s breadth of his legs which hadn’t been covered by his studded leather apron, or of his arms, which didn’t have a slash or a puncture. His chest was bruised front and back, and his face was so battered that he looked out through tunnels in swollen flesh.

“Being around your ancestor…” Sharina said, smiling at Garric as she spoke, “was a lot like leading a leopard on a chain. It’s a very lovely creature with many virtues, but—”

She snuggled against Cashel in a kittenish fashion that Garric had never expected of his sister.

“ You see your sister ,” said Carus, his image grinning as it lounged against a parapet in Garric’s mind. “ Speaking as the man she was close as a shadow to this past week—she’s a woman, lad, and I’d guess enough woman for any man she chooses .”

“—it made me even more pleased to have someone whose strength isn’t quite so…flashy.”

Cashel put his arm around her shoulders. He didn’t look at Sharina or say anything, just smiled a little broader than he’d been doing. Cashel no longer blushed at times like this, but you wouldn’t say he was perfectly comfortable with it either.

Garric had decided it was important for his troops and the populace of Tisamur to see him up and moving, but he didn’t have any intention of tending to real business until he’d recuperated for another day yet. He sat on a terrace of the Citadel, looking down over Donelle to the sea beyond. Cashel, Sharina, and Tenoctris were with him; Ilna was welcome to join them if she cared to; and a line of Blood Eagles kept everybody else at a distance.

All of the bodyguards were battered, and several looked as if they must hurt as much as Garric did. A Donelle aristocrat had been insistent about his need to see Prince Garric. Two Blood Eagles had hurled him twenty feet back, across the terrace. The fellow was lucky they hadn’t tossed him over the railing instead.